RUSH: Terry in Monticello, Arkansas, welcome to the EIB Network.
CALLER: Well, a pleasure and an honor to speak with you.
RUSH: Thank you.
CALLER: I’m very happy to speak with you. You are the voice of truth in a cacophony of lies and treason, and I appreciate your voice very much.
RUSH: Thank you. I appreciate you saying that. Thanks much.
CALLER: Well, this harks back to Senator Clinton. As you know, there’s always a mad scramble for congressional investigatory committee to be formed for hearings on any perceived Republican or military misstep. I’d like to know where the scramble is to form the same type of committee for Senator Clinton and her political support groups for this questionable money.
RUSH: You know, excellent question. It was tried once. It was tried back in 1998.
CALLER: Ah.
RUSH: The Senate Republicans — you’re going to love this — the Senate Republicans, this is where Fred Thompson is going to get hit during his presidential campaign, just want to warn you, he’s going to get hit on this.
CALLER: Oh, of course.
RUSH: The Republicans wanted to look into this. There were 22 people that fled the country. There was money coming to the Clintons from the Chinese Liberation Army.
CALLER: Absolutely.
RUSH: It was traced. And the Democrats said, ‘You can’t just investigate the Clintons, you gotta investigate Republicans.’ And Fred Thompson said, ‘Okay, we’ll investigate Republicans.’ Of course it died, because that was a tacit deal, ‘Okay, we’ll investigate you, and you’ll investigate us, and we will agree beforehand we won’t find anything.’
CALLER: Yep.
RUSH: And would be tried again. Plus, the Democrats are running the investigatory process right now, and I don’t think they like busted kneecaps.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: I just had a call from a nice woman wanting to know why Mrs. Clinton is not being investigated on the fundraising, and I have two stories here that have been published today. Ah! They were not ‘published,’ however. That, my friends, is the key. I have stories here from ABC News; I have stories here from the Washington Post. But not the newspaper and not the main website. The stories are from their blog sites. Isn’t it fascinating? By the way, these stories are on Clinton fundraisers. The ABC blog headline is: ‘On Heels of 9/11, Clinton Fundraiser Raises Eyebrows.’ The Washington Post blog: ‘For Clintons, an Unwelcome Echo,’ and it’s a picture at Christmastime in the White House of Bill and Hillary with Johnny Chung and a couple of other ChiComs. Now, see this way, the Drive-Bys say, ‘What do you mean we didn’t cover it? We most certainly did! It’s on our website. We put it on our blog sites!’ Well, nothing against blogs. You have to be very careful about this. Be real careful about this. The latest studies I have seen suggest that blogs are still in infancy, and they’re growing, but they’re still in infancy in terms of the reach. They basically talk to each other. Bloggers talk to each other and so forth and their audiences are expanding, but they’re not read as widely as newspapers or even newspaper websites are. So the Drive-Bys can say, ‘Oh, yeah we’re covering it! We put it in the blogs.’
The first one is: ‘Just days after the sixth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, Hillary Clinton and several Democratic lawmakers will be getting uncomfortably cozy with moneyed interests who have stood to reap billions in post-9/11 homeland security spending, watchdog groups say. On the sixth anniversary of the attacks…’ that’s today, by the way, ‘Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton is slated to attend a sober memorial service near Manhattan’s Ground Zero. One week later, the junior New York senator is scheduled to speak at a homeland security-themed, $1,000-a-plate fundraiser for her campaign in the downtown Washington, D.C. offices of a powerful legal firm. ‘Being a week after 9/11, it appears unseemly and politically opportunistic,’ said Steve Ellis, a former Coast Guard officer who is now vice president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, a Washington, D.C. good government group. Clinton’s fundraising audience,’ at this soiree, ‘is expected to include many of the government contractors and lobbyists whose fortunes have soared in the years since the attacks, which triggered a massive government reorganization and billions in new government spending. But that’s not the only objectionable feature of the event, critics say. For the price of a ticket — from a $1,000 personal donation to a $25,000 bundle,’ hello, Norman Hsu! ‘attendees will get a special treat after the luncheon: an opportunity to participate in small, hour-long ‘breakout sessions’ hosted by key Democratic lawmakers, many of whom chair important subcommittees on the Homeland Security committee.’
It sure is! It is damn well is! It’s influence peddling disguised as a fundraiser. But you can do influence peddling under the new ethics bill. It’s not signed into law yet, but you can do this. As long as it’s a fundraiser, you can do anything. You can take a lobbyist to lunch. He can take you to lunch. You can have a lobbyist come by and give 25 grand in bundled contribution, as long as it’s a ‘fundraiser.’ Then you give them a price briefing or policy briefing and so forth. This is Mrs. Clinton. The Democrats said they were going to stop this when they came into office in January, but they are not stopping it. In fact, the ethics bill that’s close to being done… You people got mad at earmarks? Ha! You have no clue what’s coming down the pike in the so-called ethics reform bill. There is no ethics reform! (laughing) John McCain did not ‘take the money out of politics.’ All he did was change the meandering route of the river of the money of politics. Nobody’s going to take the money out of politics. McCain-Feingold certainly didn’t. All it did was like restrict what average citizens could say within 30 or 60 days of an election on television. ”It’s an outrage,’ said Danielle Brian, executive director of the Washington, D.C. good-government group Project on Government Oversight. ‘You never want to see lawmakers trading on their national security credentials…to people making large donations,’ Ellis concurred.’
So, anyway, my point here being, ladies and gentlemen… (interruption) Lobbyists can afford these ticket prices, Mr. Snerdley. Don’t sit in there and play naïve with me. It’s the $25,000 bundle! (laughing) That’s the one that humors me. (laughing) You say it’s being reported. ‘Yes, it’s being reported!’ This was ABC blog. Cookie, I know you’re out there. We’ll do a little study. We’ll find out if this shows up on the ABC television network — what do they call it? — World News Tonight with Charles Gibson. I’ll bet somebody a couple of iPhones that it doesn’t. I’ll bet it doesn’t show up on Good Morning America, and I’ll bet they don’t talk about this on Nightline. (Well, they might do it in Nightline, when everybody but the perverts is in bed.) Who knows? You want to make a bet about this? You put it on the blog. Let’s go to the Washington Post. ‘For Clintons, an Unwelcome Echo — Talk about déjà vu. Pressed by questions about a scandal-tarred fundraiser, a candidate named Clinton decides to return hundreds of thousands of dollars.’ Why don’t we put the figure in there? It’s $850,000. ‘The politician’s operation promises to conduct criminal background checks on big fundraisers in the future. And it leaks its decisions at night after a busy day in hopes of burying the news and minimizing the damage,’ and I would suggest, that by keeping it in the blogs, they succeeded in ‘burying the news and minimizing the damage.’
Unfortunately, I read these blogs. It is my job, man. ‘In 1997, the pol, of course, was Bill Clinton and the tainted money came from folks such as John Huang, Charlie Trie, Johnny Chung and Pauline Kanchanalak. A decade later, it’s Hillary Rodham Clinton’s turn to write refund checks to deflect attention from a bundler named Norman Hsu. … The eerie echoes of the last Clinton campaign finance scandal are what make the Hsu case so problematic for the current Democratic presidential frontrunner. … The Hsu case illustrates the challenges for Hillary Clinton in defining her past.’ Blah, blah, blah, blah. There’s a second page of this in which they describe what went on in 1996. It’s pretty amazing that they know all this stuff. They buried it back then. Now they regurgitate it in their blog on their website. ‘The president used the White House to stroke donors in a more methodical way than any of his predecessors had ever done…'(Laughing.) What a great double entendre that is! Heh, heh, heh! (interruption) Come on, Dawn, it’s just a joke! Don’t sit there and go all Victorian on me when I know it’s not you. He ‘inviting hundreds of top contributors and politically connected people to attend coffees with him in the executive mansion or even to stay in the Lincoln Bedroom.’ Now, okay, this is the Washington Post. Let’s see how long it takes for this story to show up in the newspaper, and let’s see if it does show up in the newspaper, where in the newspaper it shows up. We’ll wait and see. But now, see, they’ve got cover. They put it in their blogs and they can say, ‘Hey, shut up, Limbaugh! We covered it. We’re not hiding the news. We’re not giving Mrs. Clinton a pass.’