RUSH: Hillary Clinton was on The View today. By the way, she’s now playing the Woman Card, ladies and gentlemen. The ‘campaign Monday made its most overt bid yet to highlight her historic potential as the possible first US woman president, suggesting female voters could vault her to victory. The front-running Democrat kicked off a week of events highlighting her perceived appeal to women, as her campaign released a memo implying she could best exploit the ‘pivotal’ voting bloc in 2008.’ Let’s go to the audiotape. Here she’s on The View today, and Barbara Walters asked her a question. ‘We were talking about some of the things that are different when you’re a woman.’ (choking back laughter) ‘Even though you’re running with men, and, you know, if you win, you’re the first woman president, there must be differences in the way you run as a woman and the way men do.’
HILLARY: I do think that there still is, you know, probably a tougher standard for women.
RUSH: Oh, of course!
HILLARY: Especially running for president.
RUSH: Oh, yes!
HILLARY: I mean we’ve all been through it in some way or another where you go and you try to break a barrier; you try to do the best you can, and people are saying, ‘Well, I don’t like her clothes or I don’t like her hair,’ or whatever.
VIEW CHICK: Mmmm-hmm. Mmmm-hmm.
HILLARY: But I think that we’re getting beyond that.
RUSH: Yeah? Is that right? Interesting. On The View — by the way, that was this morning on The View. Here’s another one on The View. Let’s go to cut 21. Elisabeth Hasselbeck says, ‘Would you use extreme force to get information? What’s your theory now?’
HILLARY: It’s really important for the United States to make it absolutely clear that, as a matter of policy, we do not condone or conduct torture.
VIEW CHICK: Mmmm-hmm. Mmmm-hmm.
HILLARY: I think that has to be our value, because that gives us —
AUDIENCE: (applause)
HILLARY (shouting over applause): That gives us a lot of moral authority, which we have…lost, unfortunately.
VIEW CHICK: Mmmm-hmm.
HILLARY: We also have to be smarter about how we interrogate. There’s a lot of evidence that you don’t get accurate, good information from extreme measures.
VIEW CHICKS: Mmmm-hmm. Mmmm-hmm.
HILLARY: In fact, you get it by developing some kind of system that can really, you know, get people to feel that, uh, they need to give you that information.
RUSH: You know, the real irony of this is that that’s exactly what was going on at Club Gitmo. What was going on at Club Gitmo is that those guys were being related to, and after awhile they were becoming very cooperative, offering up all kinds of information. Now Mrs. Clinton is speaking to an audience of women, and particular types of women: women who watch The View. It’s the chickification of the country. So she can sit there and just say nothing and sound all full of platitudes, but here’s the real world. ‘U.S. intelligence officials got mired for nearly 10 hours seeking approval to use wiretaps against Al-Qaeda terrorists suspected of kidnapping Queens soldier Alex Jimenez in Iraq earlier this year,’ this according to the New York Post. ‘This week, Congress plans to vote on a bill that leaves in place the legal hurdles in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act — problems that were highlighted during the May search for a group of kidnapped US soldiers. In the early hours of May 12, seven US soldiers — including Spc. Jimenez — were on lookout near a patrol base in the Al-Qaeda-controlled area of Iraq called the ‘Triangle of Death.’
‘Sometime before dawn, heavily armed Al-Qaeda gunmen quietly cut through the tangles of concertina wire surrounding the outpost of two Humvees and made a massive and coordinated surprise attack. Four of the soldiers were killed on the spot and three others were taken hostage. A search to rescue the men was quickly launched. But it soon ground to a halt as lawyers — obeying strict US laws about surveillance — cobbled together the legal grounds for wiretapping the suspected kidnappers.’ We’re talking about things in Iraq, folks! This was not in the United States. Lawyers impeding the search-and-rescue effort for a US soldier from Queens, in Iraq. Ten hours, ladies and gentlemen, to get a warrant to wiretap these people! We are at war with them. This is the kind of thing that Mrs. Clinton wants these women in her audience on The View to believe is the right way to go about it. ‘We have to restore our moral authority.’ That’s code words for, ‘We have to restore our image in the world.’ Our ‘image’ in the world is just fine, folks. All of this is another smear, frankly, of this country.
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RUSH: You know, Mrs. Clinton is amazing. In that bite on The View that we just played for you — play the second bite, Mike, the second of two Hillary bites, number 21, listen to this again here, folks.
HILLARY: It’s really important for the United States to make it absolutely clear that, as a matter of policy, we do not condone or conduct torture. I think that has to be our value because —
RUSH: Yay! Yay!
HILLARY: — that gives us a lot of moral authority which we have lost, unfortunately. We also have to be smarter about how we interrogate. There’s a lot of evidence that you don’t get accurate —
RUSH: That’s it. I’ve had it. I got tired of hearing the word ‘smarter’ when John Kerry, who served in Vietnam, had it practically as his theme word during the 2004 presidential campaign. (Doing Lurch impression) ‘I will do it smarter, and I’d be smarter.’ Here it comes again, we have to be smarter. You Democrats have to have this impression that everybody but you is a bunch of idiots, and only you can do it smarter. We can’t trust the defense of this country to you, Mrs. Clinton. Did you notice that she always says what she will not do to make us safer? She never tells us what she would actually do that would be effective. All she says are things like: ‘I wouldn’t do what the Bush administration’s done. I wouldn’t do it.’ Yay! Yay! And these idiots — pardon me, not a sexist comment here — these idiots in the audience — ‘Yay, yay! We hate torture; we despise torture; we despise Bush; we hate Bush, yay!’ All she ever does is say what she will not do, and what she will not do is whatever Bush has done, other than keep the troops in Iraq through 2013. Yeah, ha-ha.
She also talks about how we have to restore our moral role in the world. A question, ladies and gentlemen: Is it moral to protect a terrorist who has information which she would use to blow up a city? How about the case in Iraq from last May where some Al-Qaeda guys kidnapped some soldiers? The lawyers get involved and prevent wiretaps from being used for ten hours on the suspected kidnappers from Al-Qaeda so we can get a warrant under the FISA law. This is Mrs. Clinton practicing her morality or her desire to have the country restore its own moral role and leadership? Boils down to we were protecting these people for ten hours and giving them a great chance to get away. Now, all’s not well at the Clinton campaign. Albert Hunt, who now writes for Bloomberg, has a somewhat scathing piece today on Mrs. Clinton and her campaign. He opens this way: ‘During the past 15 years, I’ve been to three small dinners with Hillary Clinton. As expected, her substantive command of whatever the topic was impressive.’ Al, come on. You’re just easily impressed. Al is one of these guys that’s been chickified. Al Hunt is one of these Washington, DC, inside-the-Beltway media people that’s been chickified, testicles in the lockbox. Alan Alda is another one. Michael Kinsley is another one. Real men of Washington, you know who they are.
Oh, by the way, did you hear about this? This is funny as hell. Sandy Burglar was driving around Washington the other day when his car conked out. Around the corner, just quite by accident, came the WMAL news van. It has this giant picture of me on it, on one side, Hannity on the other, big, big, huge picture. The guy driving the MAL van gets out and offers Sandy Burglar some help. Burglar said, yeah, glad to take it. Burglar did not know how to pop the hood. He stood around while the MAL guy fixed whatever he needed to fix and then Burglar offered the guy 20 bucks, and MAL guy said, ‘I wasn’t going to take it, but I did in the end because he didn’t offer a finger to help.’ So Burglar gets rescued by the WMAL Rush Limbaugh van. (laughing) Anyway, these are the real men of Washington. Wait for the Rush station van to come fix your car because you don’t even know how to pop the hood.
‘More surprising,’ writes Mr. Hunt, ‘was that each time I came away struck by her ability to charm, and even by her decent sense of humor.’ Al, really? You’re the only person I’ve ever heard talk about her charm and decent sense of humor. In fact, that’s one of the big problems. People think that she has no charm and no sense of humor and no likability, ergo that cackling laugh. ‘So did the others, including a cadre of hack political journalists like myself who attended two of the sessions. It is surprising because this isn’t the Hillary Clinton, the leading presidential candidate for 2008, who most Americans see out on the stump. Her campaign has been brilliant. It is great at small stuff like bracket scheduling — making sure she or a surrogate appears right before and after a major appearance by an opponent. It is equally good on big stuff,’ and goes on and on. Then he says this:
‘The Clinton campaign is efficient, effective, disciplined and tough. It also seems to be joyless, humorless and lacking in heart and soul. A take-no-prisoners, us-versus-them mindset has served her well. She has widened her lead in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination; most polls show her defeating any Republican in the general election. Still, there is unusual hostility from neutral, and even some ostensibly pro-Clinton, people, and especially in the press. The media has its sights on Hillary, and scrutiny during the next month promises to be more vigorous than the relatively easy ride she has gotten so far. That naturally happens to a front-runner. It will be with more vehemence in this case because of greater enmity. … Her campaign is tailored to that approach. There are lots of titles and talk of a diverse set of decision makers. The real impresario is Mark Penn, a brilliant, socially inept disciple of Dick Morris.’
What have I always told you about the Beltway crowd when discussing what happens to Republicans when they get there? What happens to some Republican conservatives? I’ve always maintained it’s not just the pressure brought on by the Drive-By Media to make you grow and to get fawning press coverage or at least some attempt at it. It’s the social structure as well, and the libs run that inside the Beltway. Everybody wants to have some sort of a social life. Nobody wants to be hermits; nobody wants to be ostracized; they want to be part of the action and here’s Al Hunt admitting that this guy running Hillary’s campaign is socially inept. What’s that got to do with anything? Nothing, other than it matters to people like this. So, on the one hand, you’ve got Al Hunt praising her charm and sense of humor, then you get to the campaign and she’s tough as nails, no joy, take no prisoners, just whack everybody that gets in her way, and it’s just a shame that the public doesn’t see the real Hillary. I think we are seeing the real Hillary.
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RUSH: I also think — you know, Mrs. Clinton’s making a big play for the female vote. She’s throwing the female card on the table now. She went on The View today, and one thing, I was in Cookie’s office as she was preparing the sound bites, and I never watch The View. Good Lord, who would? What kind of empty, miserable life must you have to want to watch that show? So, anyway, I walk in. Cookie has all these monitors. She has to have all these shows on so we can get these sound bites, and Whoopi Goldberg’s asking Hillary Clinton a question about China! I don’t know that Whoopi Goldberg could find it on a map. I also don’t know that Whoopi Goldberg gives a rat’s rear end what China is doing. So they have Hillary on there, so they probably went back to a little class and got some questions to ask Mrs. Clinton, ‘Because she’s a presidential candidate, and we girls on The View here must act like we know what we’re doing when we’re talking big policy stuff,’ and when she asked her the question about China, you know, Hillary came out with the usual suff, ‘We’ve gotta be smarter about what we do. China, I’ve been warning people a lot…’ For crying out loud, half your campaign funds come from China. We know you’re not going to do anything about China. Anybody ever heard of Norman Hsu, for crying out loud? Charlie Trie? James Riady? Well, that’s the Lippo Group. That’s not the ChiComs. It’s just laughable, a laughable moment.
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RUSH: Ann in Sarasota, Florida, thank you for calling the EIB Network. Hi.
CALLER: Hi there, Rush, you’re my hero, believe it or not. You really are. I wanted to make a point, that Pelosi, if that’s what a woman does in the House as a leader, look what a woman as a president, such as Hillary Clinton, would do. Maybe the American people, they’ve got to be able to see that.
RUSH: Well, it’s interesting. You know, Mrs. Clinton is playing the female card now, just exactly as Ségolène Royal did in the French race over there for prime minister, president, whatever they call ’em. I think it was a debate between Sarkozy and Ségolène Royal where she made this big play for women and said that she deserved to be elected because she’s a woman — and Sarkozy just listened to her and listened to her and then sliced her and diced her, and she was finished. She didn’t end up getting but 48% of the female vote. Now Mrs. Clinton, for whatever strategical reason, is making a play for women based on the fact that she is a woman — and, of course, by coincidence, I’m certain, there are countless news stories today about how warm and friendly Hillary is and how people are changing their mind on how she is so hard and emotionless. How she’s really warming up now and women are really taking to her. So we’re getting predictable news stories. Hillary is out there saying, in fact, it’s going to be women who decide who is president in ’08, and the dirty little secret is, it’s not. It’s white men. It’s who they vote for, folks, and I still maintain that there are a lot of white males in this country, and certain regions, that are going to look at Mrs. Clinton and not even… You just have to hear one or two sentences, and they’re not going to take the chance of bringing their ex-wife back or their two ex-wives back and making her president. It just isn’t going to happen, and I will lay you 10-to-1 that a majority of women do not vote for Mrs. Clinton — now, I’m going way out on a limb here — in the general election. But I think they’re misreading all of this. They look at women as monolithic. ‘Mrs. Clinton is going to get the female vote because she’s female.’ That’s what Ségolène Royal thought in Paris and in France, and it didn’t happen, and all these female commentators from Mara Liasson to Cokie Roberts, any number of them, were just beside themselves. They couldn’t understand. ‘Why would women not vote for a woman?’ Well, maybe because they don’t think like you! Maybe they’re not liberals as much as you think and don’t engage in group politics. Maybe these women actually cared about ideas in France, as many women in this country do.
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RUSH: Ségolène Royal got 48% of the female vote in the French elections, not the 42. I wanted to offer that correction. Fifty-two percent supported the overall winner, Nicholas Sarkozy.
Newsweek has revamped their website. They’re no longer partnered up with PMSNBC. They’ve got their own website. They’ve changed the appearance of the magazine and so forth. They have their first independent website up today, and there’s a review of a forthcoming book. The review is written by Jonathan Darman, and it’s a book on the Clinton marriage by Sally Bedell Smith. Now, some of the stuff excerpted from this book — by the way, I’m not trying to obsess here on Mrs. Clinton. I’m just telling you there has been a noticeable shift in media coverage and Clinton strategery. Now they’re focusing in on the women, and they’re focusing in on how she’s warming up, how she’s got all these feelings and how people are finally finding that she’s not this stiff mannequin, ‘we really like Hillary,’ people are saying. And, of course, one of those stories happened to be a quote from a vice chair of some Democrat Party committee in New Hampshire, who said he’d been out talking to Democrats. (paraphrasing) ‘Oh, yeah, a lot of people are finding she’s a lot friendlier than she used to be, at least it appears that way.’ Wow, what a source to go ask about Mrs. Clinton.
At any rate, here’s a quote from this story about Sally Bedell Smith’s book. Even this story, by the way, is about the gripping, the grating psychodrama that is the Clintons’ marriage. ‘A new book tries to make sense of the gripping, grating psychodrama…’ is anybody obsessing about this marriage, or do we all know what it is already? We all know nobody’s obsessing about gripping, grating psychodrama. At any rate, here’s a telling quote from the story: ‘Smith’s Hillary Clinton wants only to be a public woman, a wonk, and a warrior for the Clintons’ noble causes. Arriving in the White House, she and her husband make her status clear; staffers call her ‘the Supreme Court,’ mindful that the First Lady had the final say. She strives for cool detachment, but her husband’s coterie sees the cracks. They are ‘wimps,’ she tells them in tirades, men who ‘don’t have balls’ and ‘don’t know how to fight.’ (Neither Clinton talked to Smith.) Quickly, her real target emerges, the president himself. ‘She knew how to push his buttons,’ a senior official tells Smith.’ Makes it sound like Hillary ran that whole show and ran his staff and gave them all kinds of grief for being gutless and testicle-less and all these other things, and makes a big point here about how the key to success in politics is never having emotion and never allowing emotion to compromise your principles.
Don’t compromise goals for the sake of emotion. Don’t discover your feelings, don’t share your feelings, and, of course, this is the Hillary that we know. Now my take on this is, these things don’t happen by coincidence. Nothing that happens with the Clintons is coincidence. There has to be polling data out there, and the polling data, or the focus group data has to show, she’s not likable, the negatives are still pretty high, she seems a little cold and awkward, so here comes the cackle, the cackle’s gone, here came the $5,000 for every baby, that’s gone, it’s been replaced by a 401(k) for everybody with a thousand-dollar seed donation, who knows how long that will last. Now we’ve got the stories about how warm and fuzzy she is, and people are starting to like her, and this is just like the polling data that we got on the Iraq war involving public opinion. Public opinion never was what the polls said it was. They were trying to create that opinion with the polls. Polling data is simply a way to get editorial opinions on the front page or the lead item in a news story, as so-called news.