RUSH: All right, my friends, (laughing) I confess, I went to bed with Barbara Boxer last night, I woke up with Hillary Clinton. (Laughing.) Yes. Yes, my friends, I tuned in to C-SPAN. I really, really tried to stay awake. I really, really tried. But this — (laughing) — who’s the real woman between Barbara Boxer and Hillary Clinton? I don’t know. (laughing). A-hem. Well, let’s leave that alone. I mean, gentlemen don’t tell. But this political stunt last night, this all-nighter, the Senate sleepover, Harry’s hoax, was nothing more than a fundraiser. My friends, the only people in the world who can depend on Democrats are our enemies. This thing was amazing. It went down to defeat, by the way, 52-47, Senate voted to block the Democrats’ bid to pass an Iraq troop withdrawal amendment legislation. We got news here today. There’s a Zogby poll out, voters unhappy with Bush and Congress. Bush’s popularity is what it is, but Congress’ numbers keep plummeting. They are low and this last night didn’t help, folks. By the way, greetings and welcome, it’s the Rush Limbaugh program. Here’s the phone number if you want to be on the program today: 800-282-2882. And the e-mail address, Rush@eibnet.com.
The Congress numbers just keep plummeting here, 83% said Congress was doing a fair or poor job. Only 14% rated Congress excellent or good. You can talk about Bush all you want, but I have to tell you, I think we need to start talking about Harry Reid as the most incompetent majority leader in modern history. He cannot deliver for his kooks. They talk about Bush being incompetent out there, folks, but Bush beats Reid and Pelosi and Murtha. He beats these people every damn time on this, even with four Republican defectors. Hagel was one of them and Olympia Snowe, but even with that, Bush beats these people on this every time they try it. Harry Reid’s lost control of the Senate. He’s in the majority. He cannot deliver for his kooks. In fact, he’s losing votes every time they pull this. Every time they try one of these things, they get fewer votes. So maybe the thing we need to do is just continue to do all-nighters and expose these people as the incompetent libs that they are while their poll numbers are driven into the dirt.
Harry Reid needs to change its focus. He needs to get back to doing what he does best and that’s sleazy land deals with his kids. It’s time for him to go home to Searchlight, Nevada, wherever he lives. He’s in the big leagues now, but he can’t seem to swing the bat. The bat just stays on his shoulder, and when he does swing, he misses. If I’m a Democrat or liberal, I would demand new leadership. They can sit there all day long and complain and whine about Bush, but I’ll tell you, Harry Reid is proving to be an embarrassment. All-nighter, 24 hours, could not even tire the Senate into voting for cloture. You know what I think the biggest debate was last night? I don’t know how much you watched of this, Mr. Snerdley. I was amazed at how fresh-faced they were after this all-nighter and how fresh they looked and so forth. I think the biggest real debate last night was, ‘How do we appear here? Do we look like Jimmy Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, all drawn and haggard and unshaven, tie undone, collar array, in a state of disarray; or do we bring in the best makeup artists we can, the Beltway look, shaved, made up, hair sprayed, shirt ironed,’ and you can see if you watched this what won the night.
McCain was powerful. We’ve got some audio sound bites coming up from him. You can say what you want about his presidential candidacy imploding, but he gave a floor speech yesterday that just took it to Dingy Harry, and it was really good. Kay Bailey Hutchison was also very succinct. Brevity is the soul of wit, and I made a little note, Kay Bailey Hutchison said, (paraphrasing) ‘What are we doing here? None of these amendments can possibly be passed into law.’ So the Democrats are going to judge this one of two ways, because this was a fundraiser. If they really wanted to get this done, why don’t they try their own nuclear option? Why don’t they try to break this filibuster and say, ‘You know what, this is too important,’ whatever the nuclear option was on filibustering judicial nominees. They’re not serious about this. This was a hoax. It was fundraising, and as I say, folks, it’s crucial to remember that they keep losing votes each time they try this.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Some more data from this latest Zogby poll, not just the information about how poorly Congress is doing, 14%, and last night didn’t help. ‘Despite their dim views of government, majorities of Americans remain upbeat about their personal finances and security, and nearly two-thirds are very or fairly confident their children will have a better life than they do.’ There’s a lot of optimism out there and yet we keep hearing about this angst and the guilt and the unsettledness that has supposedly swept over our population. In the national survey of just over a thousand likely voters, ’66 percent said Bush had done only a fair or poor job as president, with 34 percent ranking his performance as excellent or good.’ He is doing twice as well as Congress is in his approval numbers, even at 34%. This is stunning. I want to tell you people, if you think that the approval rating for Congress is down because they’re not passing massive legislation and getting things done for America, if you think that the disapproval of Congress is related to the fact that they can’t pass a bill to get us out of Iraq, you are missing the boat.
I think it’s great news. I love these low approval numbers for Congress and government overall. I think the immigration bill, as I told you, the way it shook out was a great illustration for people who are on the fence about all this, actually see the arrogance and conceit of big government and the inefficiency of bloated bureaucracies and organizations. When I say the arrogance and conceit, I mean the literal unwillingness to listen to the desires of the American people expressed in a vast majority that crossed all kinds of lines of demarcation. The puzzling thing about the poll to me is, ‘Americans remain upbeat about their personal finances and security.’ Well, that has to be threats, terrorism and this kind of thing. Nearly two-thirds are confident their children will have a better life than they do. That’s also interesting, because it indicates maybe the Drive-By Media’s efforts to drive down public attitudes and moods about the economy is not being as successful as some people assume they had been. So there’s reason for optimism out there because numbers of you are optimistic. Now, let’s go audio sound bites from last night. Here’s Dingy Harry yesterday afternoon, actually, as he starts off on this Harry’s hoax, the all-nighter.
REID: I’m speaking today for the American people. Sixty-seven percent of the American people think the surge has been a failure.
RUSH: Really? Well, then how come you’re having so damn much trouble getting us outta there? How come you lose votes each and every time you try this stunt? Make no mistake, this is nothing more than fundraising, and if their kooks ever figure that out, it’s going to really make ’em mad. The people driving, this the MoveOn.orgs, they had candlelight vigils. Do you realize how many people were in the Senate watching this last night? Six! In the Senate gallery there were six people. If this is something that 67% of the American people want to happen, us getting out of Iraq, it would be happening. The Democrats, though, and their kooks are going to finally figure out, ‘You know what, they’re fleecing us!’ All this is fundraising. They had no intention of passing these resolutions. They can’t get it done. They start changing their focus from Bush to Dingy Harry, and I think they will. I don’t think that’s going to be long in coming. Here are a couple of bites from Senator McCain yesterday afternoon, lashing out at Dingy Harry.
MCCAIN: The distinguished majority leader is no longer on the floor, declared the war lost. I was astonished. I was astonished, Madam President, I was astonished, because if we lost the war, then somebody won. Does that mean that Al-Qaeda has won the war?
RUSH: I love that. I mean right to Harry Reid on the floor of the Senate, he did say it a number of times, that the war has been lost. And of course the Drive-Bys, they gave it an initial hour or two of a push when it happened. After that, didn’t hear much about it. So here’s McCain reminding everybody who’s watching this last night and the senators on the floor speaking directly to Dingy Harry. Here’s one more McCain bite.
MCCAIN: No one can be certain whether this new strategy which remains in the early stages can bring about greater stability. We can be sure, should the United States seek to legislate an end to the strategy, as it is just beginning, then we will fail for certain. Mr. President, I read this — earlier this resolution. This rusting incredibly says that we can only — the mission is restricted to only fighting Al-Qaeda. I guess that Al-Qaeda will have to wear T-shirts that says that they are Al-Qaeda, and I guess our troops are expected, if someone’s planting an IED, ‘Excuse me, sir, are you Al-Qaeda, or are you a Shi’ite? If you’re Shi’ite, go ahead and plant it.’ Please.
RUSH: He is right on the money. Just calling these people out. And even after all of this, the Democrats don’t have a plan B. They don’t have a plan B for when we pull out. They don’t have a plan to protect the country. They’ve got nothing. They won’t tell anybody what it is. That’s why at this stage this is all just fundraising. I want to remind you that the dirty little secret is if they wanted to get this passed, they could, they could find a way. I don’t think they really want to. I don’t think Dingy Harry likes losing votes every time he does this. But they’re in the fundraising stage right now. They’re pontificating. I think one of the things that’s happening to these people is the fawning press that they get from the Drive-By Media is giving them the wrong impression of the mood of the country and is giving them the wrong impression of the nation’s opinion of them as members of Congress. They never get tarred and feathered in the press. They’re never ridiculed. Their ideas are always amplified, their personalities are adored, and basically every piece written about these people is a puff piece.
I’ll give you an example. One of the Chicago papers yesterday did a story about a trial lawyer meeting in Philadelphia, and all of the Democrat candidates for president showed up. And they found a staunch Republican trial lawyer from Philadelphia. I don’t remember his name right off the top of my head, but a staunch trial lawyer. He had decided that he’d had enough of the Republicans, and he’s going to donate to the Democrats, and he’s voting Democrat. Another Chicago paper has a blog today where another staunch Republican in Chicago has decided to sign up for Hillary, some big guy that’s apparently been a big Republican fundraiser. So I continued to read the story. Somebody did some research on this Philadelphia trial lawyer and found out — I’ll give you a ballpark of the numbers because I don’t have them right in front of me here — but found out since 2000 he’s given the Democrats $9,000 and the Republicans like $600 or 900. He’s not a staunch Republican at all. He may be a registered Republican. But he’s given money to Kerry. He’s given money to Gore. He’s given money to midterm elections and so forth.
So the Drive-Bys are writing these stories, and this thing in I guess the Chicago Sun-Times did this today about this big former Republican fundraiser signing up with Hillary. So the Democrats read this and I think they get the impression that Republicans are just fed up with any of their presidential candidates. The AP had a poll the other day. The number one poll-getter, vote-getter in this poll of AP was ‘none of the above.’ All of the Republican presidential candidates, ‘none of the above’ won. So the Democrats see all this, and I think they get this notion that Republicans are peeling away from their candidates left and right, big corporate givers and fundraisers are peeling away. You combine that with all of the fawning coverage that they get personally, and I think they’ve got themselves in a situation where they don’t really understand how they look to people. Which is good, by the way. I hope they continue to be so arrogant and conceited about this that they don’t get it. But this thing last night, open a door, smashed right into it with their face before they had a chance to get through the doorway. Here’s Mrs. Clinton.
HILLARY: Many of us believe that it is time for us to move our troops out of harm’s way in the middle of the Iraqi civil war. We believe that is an appropriate military decision that will be made sooner —
RUSH: Come on.
HILLARY: — or later.
RUSH: I got a commercial break coming up.
HILLARY: The recent report was an interim report that did not have very much good news in it. In September, we will get another report which I predict will be also mixed, which will put the best face on whatever the facts are. But the bottom line will remain the same.
RUSH: Yeah, what’s that?
HILLARY: Our troops and their families are paying the price for this administration’s policies.
RUSH: Wow. I wondered if I was going to get through that. I’m sorry, folks, that was 45 seconds of absolute meaningless blather, boilerplate meaningless blather.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: I told you I went to bed with Barbara Boxer and I woke up with Hillary Clinton watching this thing last night. We have one more Hillary and two of Madam Boxer. This was around 4:10 this morning, by the way.
HILLARY: Madam Chairman (pause), I believe our troops (pause), as well as the American people deserve (pause)a vote, yes or no (pause)on this bill.
RUSH: Yeah, right.
HILLARY: If you believe in giving the president the continued power to pursue a failed strategy, without check —
RUSH: Stop a second. This is another stunt these people were pulling all night. One of the tricks was trying to make it look like the Republicans were preventing a vote on this. It was the Democrats preventing the vote. It was the Democrats trying to hustle up votes all night, but they were the ones that were preventing. Republicans were not stopping anything here. This was just rhetorical trickery and this is something I wanted to point out during the middle of the bite here.
HILLARY: — restore balance by this Congress, make your case and cast your vote. If not, then put partisanship aside —
RUSH: Ha!
HILLARY: — and stand with the bipartisan majority —
RUSH: Ha! Ha! Ha!
HILLARY: — working to end this war. A message to the president is clear.
RUSH: Yeah.
HILLARY: It’s time —
RUSH: To lose!
HILLARY: — to start thinking of our troops and our broader position in Iraq and beyond. Not next year, not next month, but today.
RUSH: What a joke. The one guy that is thinking only about that is George W. Bush. It’s you people on the Democrat side that don’t have any kind of a plan, and you’re running for president and you don’t even have a plan. And you won’t have a plan till you get a poll that you can trust based on what the people that you believe represent the country tell you they want, which is not leadership. Put partisanship aside? Don’t make me laugh. It’s time to start thinking of our troops? You’ve got Al-Qaeda watching this last night. I’m telling you, like I said at the top of the program today, folks, the only people in this world who can rely on Democrats are our enemies. They can count on them every time they need assistance. Here’s Barbara Boxer. She’s on CNN this morning with John Roberts, and he said, ‘Did you accomplish anything last night? Is this bill any closer to passage?’
BOXER: I think we accomplished what we wanted to. We wanted to show the people who sent us and really gave us the reins of power in the Senate that we are willing to stay up through the night, work through the night to start bringing this war to a close and changing the mission of our troops. We want to get them out of the civil war, uh, get them back on track, going after Al-Qaeda, and training the Iraqi forces —
RUSH: (Laughing.)
BOXER: — and out of the middle of the civil war, and I think shining the spotlight on this was important for us to do.
RUSH: Let me find something here. The New York Times even has a story today. It’s in the National Intelligence Estimate. Here’s this. ‘We assessed that Al-Qaeda will continue to enhance its capabilities to attack the homeland through greater cooperation with regional terrorist groups. Of note, we assessed that Al-Qaeda will probably seek to leverage the contacts and capabilities of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, its most visible and capable affiliate, and the only one known to have expressed a desire to attack the United States.’ The NIE claim that Al-Qaeda in Iraq is the biggest subsidiary of the whole Al-Qaeda bunch right now holed up in the caves of Pakistan — and here’s Barbara Boxer saying we need to get back to track going after Al-Qaeda. Do they even know what they’re saying? I’m telling you, more than ever I am convinced that what this thing last night specifically was, was a fundraiser. These people, they’re getting heat from their kooks, the fringe lunatic bloggers and so forth, their fervent anti-war crowd. You know they’re getting heat, and this is a response to it. Now, don’t make the mistake of thinking that’s all there is, because if they could saddle this nation with a defeat and then blame it on the incompetence of Bush and the Republicans, they’d do it in a minute.
That’s like also one of the objectives. They’re just losing every time they try. They lose more votes each time they try it. The next question from John Roberts, CNN: ‘Didn’t last night just before midnight, you and a bunch of other senators get around Harry Reid and say, ‘Look, do we really have to have a roll call vote at three o’clock in the morning? Can’t we go home and get some sleep and come back at five a.m.?” So it was the Democrats who went to Dingy Harry and said, ‘Wait a minute. All-nighter, three o’clock quorum call vote?’ Last time they did something like this, the Senate sergeant-at-arms was ordered to go physically get a senator who was not present because they had all been ordered to be present. Bob Packwood of Oregon was dragged in to the Senate chamber by the sergeant-at-arms feet first! So Harry Reid announces this all night, and they get all hupped up about it, and then Democrats go to him and say, ‘A vote at three in the morning? We can’t go home?’ The whole thing was a stunt. Here’s Barbara Boxer’s answer to the question.
BOXER: Yeah, we didn’t go home at all. Yes, it is true that Harry was going to have a vote every three hours, and some of the women senators appointed me, of course, to go speak with Harry and beg to have about four and a half or five but I slept in my office right down from here — I’m in the Capitol studio now — curled up on my little couch. So I did get about four hours. So I don’t know the point of the question, but here’s the deal. We were up all night. Why? Because we did want the Republicans to have to stay there with us, which they did. They had to do that. Why? Because every time we asked to have a vote on this amendment, Republicans said no, no, no, you need to get 60 votes — and you know the sad thing is that the Republicans —
RUSH: Stop the tape! Stop the tape! That is another line of utter BS! Now they’re trying to make it look like the cloture rule is something that the Republicans invoked for the first time last night, ever! All those mean, rascally Republicans! How rotten of them to make us have to have 60 votes. How stupid do they think people are? People know the 60 votes for certain now after the immigration bill. I’m talking about people that don’t pay attention to this kind of stuff. You and I do. People know this is… The Republicans said no, no, no, you gotta have 60 votes? That’s right, you do! That’s a senate rule, especially on matters of important national security. You gotta have 60 votes. It’s just a Senate rule. It’s nothing new, and here’s Barbara Boxer, whining and moaning, the Republicans said no, no, no, you gotta have 60 votes. I was shouting and asking for the broadcast engineer to stop the tape so I talked over her a little. There’s probably not much of this left but let’s listen to it anyway.
BOXER: — are blocking us from clear simple majority and I think we’re going to have that majority, and that would be a huge step forward. And yeah, we worked all night.
RUSH: All right, so they think we’re going to have that majority. The sad thing is Republicans are blocking us from a clear simple majority. That takes chutzpah. That just does, to start complaining about the cloture rule. That rule is 40 years old, 30 years, whatever it is. It is constant. It’s required for everything. There are just two exceptions. That’s what the judicial confirmation vote controversy was all about. The ‘nuclear option’ was a tool that the Republicans were going to use in order to stop the Democrats from invoking a filibuster on judicial nominations. It had never been done before and it wasn’t constitutional, and that’s when the Gang of 14 sprung up to head off this horrible, horrible crisis of dissolving the 60-vote rule.’ So the 60-vote rule is etched in concrete. It’s etched in stone, and to listen to her whine and moan about it as though it has never been used before, and the Republicans pulled some trick out of their back pocket, is laughable.
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RUSH: A little confusion out there, ladies and gentlemen, and once again, we find CNN in the midst of the confusion. You know, CNN usually works hand in hand with the Democrat Party to advance the action line and the template of the day, and we just heard Barbara Boxer on CNN American Morning this morning say that, well, we didn’t go home at all, John Roberts. It’s true Harry was going to have a vote every three hours, and some senators appointed me, of course, to go speak with Harry and beg to have four and a half or five hour sleep, but I slept in my office right down the hall. We didn’t go home. She said it. We didn’t go home. But on the same network, CNN, CNN’s newsroom this morning, Tony Harris was talking to congressional correspondent Dana Bash, and he said, ‘Dan-a what happened while most Americans were getting their sleep last night?’ And Bash is showing video of the cots that were brought in for the senators, and then says this.
BASH: You see a little bit of evidence that perhaps somebody was there. Where… We understand that freshman Senator Bob Casey was there, but look at the rest. Not slept in. There’s probably, uh… Part of the reason for that is that most senators, Tony, actually went home. The Senate majority leader had threatened, eh, that he was going to hold roll call votes to keep attendance. Roll call votes at two, three, four in the morning, but he didn’t do that, in part because he was asked not to by, eh, Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer who said, please, just give us a few hours of sleep, and instead what happened is there was a — was a vote at about midnight and then not another one until five in the morning as the sun was coming up. That’s what we saw (laughs) senators start to shuffle their way back into the Senate.
RUSH: Well, well, well, well, well. (sigh) CNN, once again, in the midst of a disagreement. So they did go home. This is a See, I Told You So. I told you yesterday. It’s not just the women that wanted to get some sleep. There’s some old buzzards in this place. This is Jurassic Park. You know, if they’re going to stay in there all night, Pat Leahy is going to need to share his Depends with some of the other senators. Cots aren’t going to get it done. You’re going to need bedpans. You’re going to need Port-A-Potties. We didn’t see any of that. Cots, all that stuff was just for show. The pizza box. Tracy in Pittsburgh, you’re next on the Rush Limbaugh program. Hello.
CALLER: Hi, Rush. How are you doing?
RUSH: I’m fine. Never better.
CALLER: Hey, the reason I called is on the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, their headline, major headline on top of the fold is ‘US Fails Against Al-Qaeda.’ I was furious when I saw that. I even called the Post-Gazette. Of course got voice mail. But, you know, there’s nothing like endorsing the enemy, and that’s exactly what they’re doing. There’s nothing that says that we’ve lost against Al-Qaeda. If anything like this had happened in World War II with some of the battles that we had setbacks on —
RUSH: Well, you know —
CALLER: — what would have happened in World War II?
RUSH: That’s an interesting thing. It didn’t happen during the battles. In the aftermath of World War II when we were trying to put Germany back together, some of the magazines back then, Life magazine, the New York Times was writing about our efforts in Germany. People there hated our troops. We were committing atrocities. We were stealing food from Germans and blah, blah, blah. Look, the media is who they are, and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette is what it is, and I’m sure that story was their take on the National Intelligence Estimate, which I told you yesterday what the action line of that’s going to be. It’s boilerplate! The fact that Al-Qaeda is still there, means they can have a straight beeline at Bush and his ‘incompetence,’ and so they can headline it however they want. There’s some little liberal headline writer in there, and he says, ‘A-ha! A-ha! Al-Qaeda is still there! Bush fails. Al-Qaeda won.’ By the way, somebody needs to tell the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that they’re not the first to declare Al-Qaeda the victor. Harry Reid did that on the floor of the Senate some weeks ago.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Let’s go back to April the 19th of this year, and this is Dingy Harry. I don’t know where it was. I don’t think this was on the floor of the Senate. It might have been one of his press conferences.
REID: This war is lost, and that the surge is not accomplishing anything, as indicated by the extreme violence in Iraq yesterday.
RUSH: This is April. The surge didn’t reach full strength until a month ago, and the interim report says just the opposite of what Dingy Harry is trying to convince the American people of. That’s really what’s going on. The American people do not disapprove of this war by anywhere near the poll numbers that people like Reid and the other Democrats want every other American to believe. They are trying to convince the American people that they don’t support the war in such great numbers, by taking these incidental roadside bomb explosions, the obligatory burning car on the Nightly News. I’m just telling you if they had succeeded in doing this they wouldn’t have any trouble passing these resolutions. So how did Dingy Harry feel after his all-nighter, after his hoax and after his failed Senate vote? Well, he followed in the footsteps of Barbara Boxer. This is breathtaking.
REID: We all know what that’s about. It set a deadline for there being a change of direction in Iraq. Again, they wouldn’t allow us to vote on that, although we picked up four Republicans, progress is being made on these Iraq amendments. And finally, with the National Intelligence Estimate, which has just come out, isn’t it a good idea to pass the appropriations bill that deals with homeland security? That, too, is blocked. I want to reassert what I said out there this morning. My friend, Senator McConnell says, everybody knows that 60 votes on controversial issues around here. Well, last November, Iraq wasn’t very controversial because we had simple up-and-down votes. It’s obvious to the American people that the war in Iraq has gone the wrong way. All of a sudden now, seven months later, after the last defense authorization bill, they’re saying, you need 60 votes. That’s a new math developed by the Republicans to protect the president, that’s what it’s all about.
RUSH: (Laughing.) It’s unbelievable. Sixty votes is standard. If they’re not careful with this, they’re going to blow that one sky high. (interruption) What? What is it? Republicans do not have control of the Senate, that’s the whole thing. Snerdley asked me, ‘When did Republicans get control of the Senate back?’ They don’t have control of the Senate. That’s why I said last hour that this is the most incompetent majority leader that I think the Democrats have ever had in the Senate. He keeps losing votes every time he tries one of these resolutions, blaming the Republicans for not wanting to vote, when that wasn’t the case, blaming Republicans for forcing him, the leader, to require 60 votes. That’s why I say this is breathtaking, just breathtaking. He couldn’t even peel off enough Republicans to go along with this, even after trying to fatigue everybody into just voting to get out of there. So the whole thing blew up in their face, and I’ll tell you it’s an embarrassment.