RUSH: If you saw a headline in a newspaper that said: ‘Obama Criticizes Clinton’s Candor,’ how would you interpret that? What would you think that Obama’s criticizing? Candor is honesty, right? ‘Obama Criticizes Clinton’s Candor.’ Who would criticize somebody’s honesty? Well, if you read the first sentence, you find that the headline is incorrect. ‘Democrat Barack Obama questioned Hillary Rodham Clinton’s candor and trustworthiness Wednesday, saying she has indulged in double-talk on bankruptcy laws, trade and other issues.’ Obama is portraying Clinton as an old skrool politician willing to shade the truth. So, he questioned her candor. The headline assumes something exists that is very much in question. Her candor. The first sentence does not.
Did you hear about this in Jacksonville? This was yesterday: ‘A Jacksonville woman is facing charges after police say she sabotaged the business from which she thought she was being fired by erasing some important computer files. With the stroke of a computer key–‘ By the way, who among you stroke a computer key? Nevertheless, ‘with the stroke of a computer key and by pulling some important cables police said 41-year-old Marie Cooley nearly destroyed $2.5 million worth of computer files at a Southside architect company. Investigators said Cooley thought she was being fired, so she deleted expensive drawings in an attempt to incapacitate her boss’ computer system to get revenge. ‘What we consider to be a disgruntled employee saw an ad in the paper, thought the ad was targeting her job, terminating her job. She decided to mess up everything for everybody,’ said Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office spokesman Ken Jefferson. ‘She went into the server. She deleted all the files — about seven years worth of files. She just sabotaged the entire business, thinking she was going to get axed.” I think she’s going to be fired now.
She wasn’t going to be fired. She was wrong. She was not going to be fired. But this needn’t have happened; this needn’t have been a big deal. We have the sponsor Carbonite. You can back up all your files off line, no matter what size, how many you’ve got. You could lose your computer; somebody could steal it. Did you hear what happened to Francis Ford Coppola? He’s got a gazillion houses all over the place, a friend of mine, he was down somewhere in Costa Rica or Uruguay or Paraguay, somewhere down there, and somebody broke in, stole the computer that had everything on it. He had not had it backed up. He had none of it backed up, none of it was copied onto another computer. There’s an outfit out there called Carbonite that does this.
All right, to the audio sound bites, ladies and gentlemen. Bill Clinton loses it. This is this famous clip that you might have heard about, talking to CNN correspondent Jessica Yellin, and she said, ‘Mr. Clinton, Dick Harpootlian,’ who is a big-time Democrat in South Carolina, ‘has called some of the tactics used in the campaign reprehensible and reminiscent of Lee Atwater.’ You have to understand the liberals hate Lee Atwater. ‘Would you comment, sir, Dick Harpootlian, he was referring to some of the efforts he felt to try to appeal to race and gender and charged the Obama campaign with suppressing the vote in Nevada.’
CLINTON: I personally took six Hispanic women who came to me to say, ‘We are so glad to see you and we’ll be there for you in November,’ at one of the hotels. I said, ‘Well, aren’t you going to caucus today?’ She said, ‘No, we can’t.’ And I said, ‘Why?’ She said, ‘Well, you had to sign up by Wednesday, and we didn’t.’ And I said, ‘Why didn’t you?’ And she said, ‘Well, because we’re for Hillary, and we were told if we were for her, our unit told us we couldn’t sign up for her, we could only caucus if we weren’t going to be for her and we were going to be for him, so we couldn’t sign up.’ And, now, that’s six people. We were told that hundreds of times.
RUSH: They won! Obama got the most delegates, but they won. The Clintons won in Nevada. Play the first of this again, because I think Clinton paused. ‘I personally took six Hispanic women.’ I was, oh, ho-ho, what do we have here? See if I remember this right.
CLINTON: I personally took six Hispanic women who came to me to say —
RUSH: I was right. ‘Who came to me to say, ‘We’re so glad to see you.” So he personally took six Hispanic women, not women, six babes in there, well, not babes, but you know what I’m talking about, Limbaugh. No, six Hispanic women. So the question from Jessica Yellin was, ‘Look, Dick Harpootlian says it’s unseemly of you, it’s undignified. You’re acting like Lee Atwater. You’re making all these false charges about the Obama campaign.’ Clinton wasn’t through there. He continued.
CLINTON: I never uttered a word of public complaint when Mr. Obama said Hillary was not truthful or had no character, was poll-driven, when he had more pollsters than she did. When he put out a hit job on me, at the same time he called her a senator from Punjab, I never said a word, and I don’t care about it today. I’m not upset about it. My ultimate answer is this. There are still two people around who marched with Martin Luther King and risked their lives, John Lewis and reverend Andrew Young. They both said that Hillary was right and the people that attacked her were wrong, and that she did not play the race card, but they did.
RUSH: Ah, this is old Slick Willie at his best. We pointed this out yesterday. Don’t forget, Andrew Young, let’s not forget Andrew Young, the former mayor of Atlanta, I mean he was out talking to a black audience, and he said, ‘Hey, look, Bill Clinton, he’s far more qualified to represent us, he’s been with more black women than Obama has,’ and there was applause. There was applause in the room, what a résumé enhancement. John Lewis, look, folks, these old-guard civil rights blacks are powerless without the Democrat Party granting them a seat at the table of power. Obama represents a threat to them. Obama’s not down for the struggle. Obama has no roots to the civil rights movement. And if Obama is nominated and elected, guess what? He’s not going to owe these guys anything. Their whole existence, all of these people’s existence is predicated on the fact that Democrats are obligated to them for delivering X percent of the black vote, backing up the Democrat Party and all the legislation and so forth.
These old-guard civil right black guys have sat around and they’ve watched Democrat policies destroy the black family via welfare state entitlements that ended up taking the place of the father in the black community. And it’s not me saying this. You will find any number of African-American women who have the guts to open up, will tell you this themselves, and so he has to cite Andrew Young and John Lewis here. Clinton still wasn’t through with this one question from Jessica Yellin at the Clinton News Network, ‘What about Dick Harpootlian, says you’re being unseemly out there, raising the specter of race –‘ by the way, how laughable is it that Barack Obama who couldn’t turn up the heat on a kettle of water if he wanted to, is out there doing hit jobs on Bill Clinton? People who literally try hit jobs on Bill Clinton learn very quickly what happens to you when you try that. Barack Obama, hit jobs on Bill Clinton? He wasn’t through. He kept going.
CLINTON: They’re feeding you this because they know this is what you want to cover. This is what you live for. But this hurts the people of South Carolina, because the people of South Carolina are coming to these meetings and asking questions about what they care about, and what they care about is not going to be in the news coverage tonight because you don’t care about it, what you care about is this, and the Obama people know that, so they just spin you up on this, and you happily go along. The people don’t care about this. They never ask about it. And you are determined to take this election away from them. And that’s not right. That is not right.
VOICE: Thanks, everybody, last question, we gotta go. Appreciate it.
CLINTON: One more story. Shame on you.
RUSH: Clinton handler moved in there to try to save date, and Clinton said, ‘One more story. Shame on you,’ he said that to Jessica Yellin at the Clinton News Network. Again, to put all this in perspective, the Clinton southern strategy articulated by me — and, by the way, Lisa Schiffren at National Review, even Dick Morris has pointed this out earlier in the week, the Clinton southern strategy is this. They want to act like they’re really trying to win South Carolina, but they want to lose it, and they want to lose it big, and then the surrogates will whisper, ‘Well, of course we lost South Carolina, there’s a bunch of black voters there.’ Clinton couldn’t wait, he just couldn’t wait, he told CNN, ‘Of course Hillary’s going to lose, it’s unfortunate, it’s a shame, but all black people here,’ from the first black president.
Now, here’s a guy going door-to-door, folks, in South Carolina to the homes of black people, ostensibly begging them to vote for Hillary, and he has a little chat with them, he walks out and says, ‘Hell, that was a waste of time, for crying out loud, I don’t know what I’m doing. These people are going to vote for Obama anyway because they’re black.’ So they’re playing the race card. They’re playing the southern strategy. What’s the purpose of it? I hope you Democrats and liberals are watching this because you’re finding out who these people really are. The whole purpose of their own southern strategy, to go out there and say, ‘Of course Hillary lost, I mean a lot of black people.’ That is to scare white Democrats running to Hillary in droves. On February 5th, Super-Duper Tuesday, that’s what this is really all about. Clinton’s admitted it now. He’s admitted it to a couple news outlets, including USA Today.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: I am waiting for the next shoe to drop from the Clinton campaign, and you know what it’s going to be, listen to me, folks, look at me, look at me now. What it’s going to be, Clinton, Inc., a bunch of surrogates, it won’t be Bill or Hillary, will accuse Obama of supporting the Willie Horton ad run during the Bush-Dukakis campaign in 1988. They might even accuse Obama of supporting parole for Willie Horton, both at the same time, support what the Republicans were saying about Dukakis, accusing him of a sellout against his own party, and then accuse him of being so racially oriented that he, too, would have paroled Willie Horton and will find it somewhere in his legislative record as a Senator in Chicago. They’re going to find a way to link Obama to Willie Horton and Tom Daschle and the rapid response team, including the haughty John Kerry, who vows, ‘Well, it might have happened to me, but it’s not going to happen to anybody else in our party. They’re not going to be Swiftboated.’ Meanwhile, Obama is halfway up the river on the Swift boat already, and Kerry says it’s not going to happen on his watch.
So they’ll this charge out there that Obama has something to do with Willie Horton, there’s a connection. Daschle and the opposition research team, this rapid response bunch — (laughter) — they’ll start researching him, put out an initial denial, ‘We think this is a specious charge. We’re looking into it very seriously. We’re taking the charge very seriously,’ blah, blah, look into it. About a day later put out a press release that we’ve found no evidence whatsoever that Senator Obama has in any way been linked to Willie Horton, both spiritually or legally or even factually. The Clinton charge is untrue. Meanwhile, about six hours before Daschle gets the response out, Clinton, Inc., will be back with the notion, not only was he selling and using cocaine in Seattle, he got on the plane, went to Venezuela, and made a deal for cheap oil for his family in the slumlord home purchased by the Rezko guy. So then Daschle and the boys will be researching Obama’s travels to Venezuela. Obama himself will then be out there saying, ‘Well, I, you know, really, I just want them to stop the factual inaccuracies. This campaign is supposed to be more than that.’ And the Washington Post and the New York Times and William Greider and Maureen Dowd will write editorials and op-eds complaining about the under-the-table, backhanded, horrible tactics of the Clintons, and then come November vote for them anyway.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: When we last left Bill Clinton, ladies and gentlemen, he was in the middle of sound bites excoriating an infobabe reporterette from CNN by the name of Jessica Yellin basically saying (doing Clinton impression), ‘It’s the Obama people feeding you all this garbage accusing me and doing this race stuff. They know that’s what you want to cover. That’s what you live for. But this hurts the people of South Carolina. I mean, it hurts ’em. They’re not talking about race. They’re not talking about all this stuff. They don’t care about it. It’s you who love this. That’s what you live for. Shame on you!’ So Jessica Yellin on American Morning today, CNN, was asked about this, ‘What about what President Clinton said about your job as a journalist?’
YELLIN: It’s not exactly true. I have to say, voters do ask about race on the campaign trail and the media does cover the issues he talked about. He talked about foreclosure yesterday and the economy. We’ve all heard plenty of that lately on the news. This is just the president trying to distract attention from what his campaign is doing and put it on the media.
RUSH: Stop the tape a minute. Stop the tape. That’s actually not what this is about, ‘the president trying to distract attention from what his campaign is doing and put it on the media.’ That’s true, but what he’s doing goes back to what I said earlier. Mrs. Clinton has blown the most incredible trait a candidate could have: inevitability. What happened? How do you go from ‘inevitability,’ which she had to a coronation, to where now people are saying, ‘Gosh, she may not be inevitable at all. Why did we ever say she was inevitable?’ She lost that the minute she started running. This early campaign primary season was designed to keep her from having to open her mouth very often. The more she talks, the bigger problems she’s got. So the reason, folks… Look at me. The real reason that Clinton is out there doing this is to keep her from having to speak! He’s sucking up the oxygen. He’s the campaigner. He’s the one the Democrats love. This is not to distract attention and throw anything to the media. This is to make sure she doesn’t have to campaign. She’s the one that’s lost the mantle of inevitability, and she lost it by doing what? Running! Campaigning! She can’t handle it by herself. What does it say for you feminazis out there that this woman, who was inevitable at the outset, in fact, is losing ground and needs her husband — a man — to come in and save the day. So he’s sucking up the oxygen for the campaign so she doesn’t say anything. That’s what this is all about. There’s a little element of truth here that he’s trying to distract attention from what the campaign is doing? He’s not trying to distract attention from what the campaign is doing! He’s being very open about what the campaign is doing. The media just doesn’t want to see it. Here’s the rest of Jessica Yellin’s sound bite.
YELLIN: — asked questions, is the nation ready for a black president, was asked, is the nation ready to take on both a woman and an African-American? Another person asked, ‘How do you feel about the fact you’re standing in the way of letting the first black president become a reality?’ a question he batted back quickly. But the fact that this is only something the media is talking about, mmmm, not so much, John.
ROBERTS: Certainly those examples would seem to contradict what he said about nobody asking him about this.
RUSH: Oh, certainly, John! It would certainly ‘seem,’ wouldn’t they? They would ‘seem to contradict.’ Amazing! No, they don’t ‘seem to contradict,’ John; they do contradict. At the end of the day, both Jessica Yellin and John Roberts are going to pull a lever for anybody named Clinton. Despite all this criticism, despite all of this analysis of Clinton, despite what they know about this couple, they are still going to vote for him. James Carville. It’s time to bring him into the act. He was on the Today Show today. Matt Lauer said, ‘James, are you comfortable with, are you happy with this campaign on the Democrat side’s gone so far? Do you like the tone, you like the content?’
CARVILLE: What I don’t like is all of the whining. Running for president of the United States is a big job. And, you know what? When we have these debates, sometimes people are gonna contrast themself with each other. I think that’s fine. I think what I don’t like is all this coming out of Washington and this hand-wringing and, ‘Oh, my God, it’s terrible out there. They’re attacking each other.’ I mean this is a big job; we got big economic problems. I was reading in the paper about our friend Ambassador Holbrooke about these warlords, having to deal with the poppy groves are at a all-time high that makes heroin. Well, you can’t take a little attack in a debate, how you going to deal with these warlords in Afghanistan?
RUSH: All right. He’s got a point. Obama’s wussing out on us here. Obama is using out, and Carville is reinforcing that point. I’ve never heard ’em do it with poppies in Afghanistan and the warlords, but… (interruption) Well, absolutely. That’s right! That’s right. That’s to get the drug thing in there. Obama, who smoked cocaine, whatever, admitted in his paper, might have sold it. (whispering) ‘He’s a black guy. That’s what they do!’ That’s the been Clinton campaign. So here’s Carville (laughing). You’re right. Here’s Carville talking about the heroin trade in Afghanistan (laughter) and complaining about Obama whining. He’s also complaining about the news media in Washington, who is saying, ‘This campaign, the Clintons are being untoward here. This is not right.’ Let’s go to audio sound bite 14. We’re going to finish the show with sound bites. But this is an ad, this is an attack ad, the Democrat race war, the Uncivil War. Now, this is a portion of Hillary’s ad that attacks Barry on calling Republicans the party of ideas. They fact-checked Mrs. Clinton’s ad. Even the Washington Post, lead editorial today, excoriates the Clinton campaign for Barack Obama.
PAID HILLARY ANNOUNCER (piano music): Listen to Barack Obama last week talking about Republicans.
OBAMA: The Republicans were the party of ideas for a pretty long chunk of time there over the last 10, 15 years.
PAID HILLARY ANNOUNCER: Really? Aren’t those the ideas that got us into the economic mess we’re he in today? Ideas like special tax breaks for Wall Street. What about the $9 trillion debt, refusing to raise the minimum wage or deal with the housing crisis? Are those the ideas Barack Obama is talking about?
RUSH: No, what everybody is talking about is that Obama never said they were ‘good’ ideas. Now, this one did cut to the quick, though. When Obama said this, Clinton did think it was a hit job; because these two, the Clintons, live in this alternative universe where the nineties were a utopia. The nineties were Camelot — and here came this black guy talking about the Republicans being a party of ideas during that period of time. Huh-huh-huh. So the race card was hatched, the idea to throw it was hatched right then and there. Now, Obama has hit back with this ad.
OBAMA: I’m Barack Obama, candidate for president, and I approved this message.
ANNOUNCER: It’s what’s wrong with politics today. Hillary Clinton will say anything to get elected. Now he’s making false attacks on Barack Obama. The Washington Post says, Clinton isn’t telling the truth. Obama did not say that he liked the ideas of Republicans. In fact, Obama’s led the fight to raise the minimum wage, close corporate tax loopholes, and cut taxes for the middle class. But it was Hillary Clinton, in an interview with Tom Brokaw, who, quote, ‘paid tribute to Ronald Reagan’s economic foreign policy.’ She championed NAFTA, even though it has cost South Carolina thousands of jobs. And, worst of all, it was Hillary Clinton who voted for George Bush’s war in Iraq. Hillary Clinton: She’ll say anything and change nothing. It’s time to turn the page.
RUSH: Okay. Now, I think the last 20 seconds of that ad worked, but the first 40 were a little iffy, because they do come off as whining. She’s not telling the truth about me. She can’t do that! But, man, that is powerful: ‘She’ll say anything and change nothing.’