RUSH: The fuss and the hubbub over my Nobel Peace Prize nomination continued to sweep the nation. Last Friday, MSNBC, the Tucker Carlson Show, talking to his producer, Willie Geist, they had this exchange about my Nobel Peace Prize nomination.
GEIST: (music) Rush Limbaugh may not be the first person who comes to mind when you think of the Nobel Peace Prize. But to the people at the conservative public interest law firm Landmark Legal Foundation, Rush is a regular Nelson Mandela. Landmark was — has nominated Limbaugh for the 2007 Nobel Prize, saying, quote, “Rush Limbaugh is the foremost advocate for freedom and democracy in the world today,” wow. End quote. This news, of course, sets up a Nobel smackdown for the ages, between Limbaugh and Al Gore, whose nomination by a pair of Norwegian parliamentarians was announced yesterday. Wow! Look at that. Nose to nose. Tucker, Rush has the weight advantage; Al has the reach. Who do you think takes that smackdown?
TUCKER: Actually, I think Gore has the weight advantage these days.
GEIST: So, you would take Gore over Limbaugh, or are you just still deciding?
TUCKER: That would make Gore even more pompous and ubiquitous.
GEIST: (Laughing.)
TUCKER: So no, probably not. I think I’d go Limbaugh.
STEPHANOPOULOS: You’ve taken a lot of heat from conservatives over your position. Here was Rush Limbaugh this week.
RUSH ARCHIVE: If Chuck Hagel had been around during D-Day with the same kind of media we have today, he would have demanded that the invasion stop after the landing because there had been so many deaths. War is not something you put on a timetable.
STEPHANOPOULOS: He calls you “Senator Betrayus.”
HAGEL: Well, listen, everybody has to be somewhere, everyone has to make a living. Rush has to make a living, and he has a right to say whatever, uh, he wants.
RUSH: But note he doesn’t comment specifically on what I say. “Well, you know, Rush has to be somewhere, he can say whatever he wants,” but didn’t dispute the substance of my point. Then we move over to the Chris Matthews Show, talking to his panel. You’ll also hear TIME Magazine’s Michael Duffy in this exchange.
MATTHEWS: With all these guys angling for the job of Mr. Conservative, the base is under-whelmed. Here’s conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh.
RUSH ARCHIVE: There’s nobody out there that revs me up, so why should I pretend that there is?
MATTHEWS: Limbaugh isn’t impressed by Brownback, by Huckabee, by any of these people.
DUFFY: It makes me nostalgic. It used to be you were a conservative Republican in the primaries, you backed a loser. You got behind the loser. That was part of being a conservative. But ever since 2000 when they backed Bush, now they expect to back someone who can win. But they don’t like McCain; they’re not crazy about, of course, Rudy Giuliani. So, of course, if they nominate Giuliani, they’re going to call him a conservative.
RUSH: Yeah, we’ll figure out a way, Michael! We’ll figure out a way to call our nominee a conservative. Damn right! We don’t expect to win elections. (Laughing.) “To be a conservative was to back a loser.” No, to be Bob Michel was to back a loser. We don’t back losers since Reagan — well, not intentionally. There was one time in ’96 where it was just “Bob Dole’s turn,” and it was thought, Clinton’s second term, riding high; Monica yet to come, a lot of excitement on the horizon, but he may be describing conservatives of the old days, backing losers like Goldwater and expecting to lose. It was a matter of principle. The problem we have now, is that conservatives have had such a taste of victory that they’ve kind of gone full circle and actually want conservatives to lose when they’re not pure enough, thinking that this will teach ’em all a lesson and then we’ve got what we’ve got now, which, frankly, is quite fun and amusing to me, so I’m not bothered by it any more.