RUSH: As you know, Wesley Clark yesterday all over television lying through his teeth about me. He was claiming that I have a long history of disrespecting and criticizing uniformed military personnel. So I decided to hit back, call him on the lies, and then ask him again, ‘How are you sleeping at night, General, knowing you could have done something about the genocide of 800,000 Rwandans?’ I’m sleeping very well at night these days, thank you, how are you sleeping? So last night on MSNBC, Tucker Carlson who’s doing his best — along with Scarborough now and then — to hold up the right end on that network, interviewed Wesley Clark. Our pet name for him here is Ashley Wilkes. Tucker says to him, ‘Here’s part of what you wrote in the Huffington Post. You said this: ‘Since Rush Limbaugh won’t listen to us, we’re going directly to Congress, which can prevent him from disrespecting and censoring the voices of our soldiers.’ Now, with all due respect, that’s almost Orwellian, General. You’re accusing him of censorship and, at the same time, attempting to censor him by taking him off the air?’
CLARK: Well, I think he’s crossed the line, Tucker, but the point is you’re dealing with a right-wing guy who contributes to a really bad environment of public dialogue in America. Even the three things you quoted about me aren’t true. I’ve answered many times for Rwanda. It’s in my book. I’ve said it many times. I was never a Republican. I never supported George W. Bush. And, yes, I have attacked him. But Rush doesn’t care about the facts. That’s not the point. The point is the manner of the dialogue.
RUSH: Orwellian is right. You know, people are getting upset with me for calling them Stalinists. Okay, they’re socialists. He wants Congress to shut me up because he doesn’t like the nature of my dialogue. The simple thing for you to do, General, is don’t turn it on. But he says that he never was a Republican. We went to FactCheck.org. Was Wesley Clark a Republican? ‘He registered as an Independent, says he voted for Nixon and Reagan, then for Clinton and Gore, later praised Bush but now criticizes him. A New Hampshire voter e-mails us to ask, ‘I’m considering voting for Clark and I’m still searching his background. I’m concerned about different snippets that I hear about his Republican background. Have you done any articles on this or plan to?” And here’s what FactCheck.org wrote. ‘Clark has never been registered as a Republican. During his Army service he registered to vote as an Independent, as do many career military officers in his home state of Arkansas.’ It says he voted for Republican presidents Nixon and Reagan out of concern for national security, but it says later he found Republicans to be shrill and isolationist. So he says he voted for fellow Arkansas resident Bill Clinton and, most recently, for Algore, both Democrats. ‘Clark changed his voter registration to Democrat only after retiring from the Army in 2000, declaring himself a candidate for his party’s nomination late in September 2003. Clark also spoke approvingly of President Bush on two occasions since 2001 and 2002 that were captured on videotape. You can see these for yourself by clicking on the video box on the right. Clark’s opponents keep attacking him for his late conversion to the Democrat Party. Kerry’s New Hampshire chair Jeanne Shaheen, a former governor of the state, is quoted this week as saying…’ this is from January 2004, ‘–quoted this week as saying, ‘The candidate is not a Democrat,” meaning Wesley Clark.
‘Joe Lieberman said January 4th on ABC’s This Week, ‘I mean this is a man who wasn’t a Democrat four months ago and voted for Nixon, Reagan, and Bush.” I don’t think this clears anything up. I say Clark was a Republican, he says he wasn’t. This is how Media Matters plays it. If the Drive-By Media treated me like they treat Media Matters, I say he’s a Republican, he’s a Republican, and that would be the end of the story, and they’d say, ‘Limbaugh says you are a Republican,’ and start doing a week-long series of shows on how Wesley Clark lies. Next sound bite from MSNBC. Tucker Carlson said, ‘I want to know if you’re going to apply that same standard of censoring Limbaugh to the rest of public broadcasting in this country, and there’s a lot of it. A lot of entities get money from the federal government to put opinions on the air. You think Congress ought to decide what opinions are acceptable and which aren’t and yank the unacceptable ones off the air? That’s what you seem to be saying.’
CLARK: There are standards for propriety in public broadcasting, are there not? I mean there’s X-rated, there’s R-rated in public broadcasting —
CARLSON: This is a political belief!
CLARK: Wait a minute. Wait a minute. We should be talking about the facts; we should be having a good discourse in America. I don’t see why there can’t be standards for political discourse. I’d like to see A-rated, B-rated, and C-rated —
CARLSON: I’ll tell you why. I’ll tell you why.
RUSH: (laughing) I told you, nobody should be allowed to have the kind of fun that I am having today. I doubt this idiot has ever read the Constitution, the First Amendment. I think he’s a Rhodes Scholar. (interruption) Would you calm down! This is funny and you’re sitting there, Snerdley, you are getting so mad you’re turning white. He is livid in there. He wants ratings on political speech and he wants Congress so set up the ratings, just like we have ratings on movies. Political speech, before McCain-Feingold, was the particular speech to be protected in the First Amendment. All speech was, but it was singled out. So he wants ratings. Now, Tucker just rips him apart here in the next bite.
CLARK: He was talking about what Limbaugh said about our soldiers.
CARLSON: No, no. He said Rush Limbaugh is unpatriotic.
CLARK: What we need to do is we need to be rating the whole standard of political discourse in America.
CARLSON: Well, then — will you call out Harry Reid? Okay —
CLARK: So let’s raise it.
CARLSON: I’m asking you to raise it. You say that that was unfair of Reid to say that.
CLARK: Let’s have the Congress get into this issue.
CARLSON: Oh, this is just political nonsense.
CLARK: This is not political nonsense.
CARLSON: Yes, it is.
RUSH: Let’s have the Congress get into it. We’ve played audio of some of these sound bites that I have here for you, ladies and gentlemen, about things that Democrats have said. If we had a political speech rating system, how would we rate this from Harry Reid? ‘Now, I believe myself as secretary of state, the secretary of defense, and you have to make your own decision as to what the president knows. This war is lost, that the surge is not accomplishing anything.’ Dick Durbin. You remember this. ‘If I read this to you and didn’t tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners on their control, you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their Gulags, some mad regime, Pol Pot or others, that had no concern for human beings. Sadly, that’s not the case. This was the action of Americans in the treatment of their prisoners.’ Then you have John Kerry. ‘Education. You make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq.’ So Iraq war veterans are stupid. You’ve heard all these quotes. We have played all of these sound bites. Harry Reid calling me unpatriotic. I replied by calling him a phony patriot. We created a pretty good graphic of that at RushLimbaugh.com. Wesley Clark is upset about the tone. He’s a total moron. He’s a total ignoramus and moron. To suggest something like this — look, he’s carrying somebody’s water out there. Everybody has to get paid these days; everybody has had to do something to earn a living. But, as I say, my fun quotient is way over what I should be allowed each day.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Wesley Clark, what’s really scary is this guy was the general at NATO. He ran NATO. Wesley Clark has had over a week now to get himself properly informed on this issue and has not done so. He’s either unable to, or is unwilling to, or doesn’t care about the truth. When he was running NATO, there was an accident — you people may not remember this, but, of course, my memory extends way, way back. You may remember that in the early days of the mad bomber of Bosnia’s campaign, somebody misaimed, misfired on his orders, probably, and hit the Chinese embassy. It almost became an international incident. Meanwhile, he stands by as 800,000 Rwandans are being slaughtered, his quote, yeah, it happened so fast, it just slipped by, but he ends up misfiring at the Chinese embassy, mistargeting. They said he had an old map.