RUSH: Bill Clinton. He’s in Iowa on a campaign swing for his wife Hillary. It’s beginning to look more and more like this woman cannot win without him — and, in fact, they’re making that pretty plain. I don’t know if they realize this, but Clinton tagging along everywhere she is has made it obvious she can’t handle this on her own, and our buddy Ron Fournier at the AP has a story today, ”Good Bill’ vs ‘Bad Bill,” and he followed him around in some of these speeches that Clinton’s making. ‘Clinton told 400 Iowans at the start of his three-city swing, ‘I have had a great couple of days out working for Hillary.’ In the next 10 minutes, he used the word ‘I’ a total of 94 times and mentioned ‘Hillary’ just seven times in an address that was as much about his legacy as it was about his wife’s candidacy. He told the crowd where he bought coffee that morning and where he ate breakfast. He detailed his Thanksgiving Day guest list, and menu. He defended his record as president, rewriting history along the way. And he explained why his endorsement of a certain senator from New York should matter to people. ‘I know what it takes to be president,’ he said, ‘and because of the life I’ve led since I’ve left office.’ I, me and my.’ It was about him, and in the context of opposition to ‘Republican-backed tax cuts for the wealthy,’ like himself, which he pointed out again, ‘and how that loss of revenue affected financing for the military,’ Bill Clinton said this:
CLINTON: Even though I approved of Afghanistan and opposed Iraq from the beginning, I still resent that I was not asked or given the opportunity to support those soldiers. So what did we do? We borrowed the money to give Bill Clinton a tax cut and pay for our soldiers.
RUSH: This, folks, is almost undecipherable. But if you can read the stitches on a fastball, then you understand what he’s saying. I think he just said that he couldn’t support the troops because he didn’t get a tax increase! Well, that’s what he wants people to think that he said. (Clinton impression) ‘Even though I approved of Afghanistan and opposed Iraq from the beginning, I still resent that I was not asked or given the opportunity to support those soldiers.’ By the way, he did support the war in Iraq. This is as pathological as I’ve ever heard him. This is as blatant a lie as I’ve ever heard Clinton utter, and there are countless people all day long today trying to figure out, ‘Is he trying to sabotage her candidacy with this, or is he really so pathological that he thinks that whatever he says is the truth?’ If you go to his Library and Massage Parlor website (we did this this morning) his quote from 2003 is still up: ‘I supported the president when he asked the Congress for authority to stand up against weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.’ May 18th, 2003. It’s still on the website, or it was this morning, at the Library and Massage Parlor. Other quotes from Bill Clinton. Let’s go back to 1998 when he was president.
February 17th, speaking to the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Pentagon staff, he said, ‘If Saddam rejects peace and we have to use force, our purpose is clear. We want to seriously diminish the threat posed by Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction program. We have to defend our future from these predators of the Twenty-first Century. They’ll be all the more lethal if we allow them to build arsenals of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons and the missiles to deliver them. We simply cannot allow that to happen. There’s no more clear example of this threat than Saddam Hussein.’ April 16th, 2003, New York Daily News the source: ‘Saddam is gone, and good riddance, former President Clinton said yesterday. Clinton said Bush should not be faulted as banned weapons of mass destruction are not found. ‘I don’t think that you can criticize the president for trying to act on the belief that they have a substantial amount of chemical and biological stock. That’s what I was always told.” Bill Clinton, New York Daily News, April 16th, 2003! May 18th, 2001, at a college commencement: ‘I supported the when he asked the Congress for authority to stand up against weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.’ TIME Magazine, June 28th, 2004, ‘So you’re sitting there as president, you’re reeling in the aftermath of September 11th, so, yeah, you want to go get Bin Laden and do Afghanistan and all that, but you also have to say, ‘Well, my first responsibility now is to try everything possible to make sure that this terrorist network and other terrorist networks can’t reach chemical and biological weapons, or small amounts of fissile material. I’ve gotta do that. That’s why I supported the Iraq thing.” Bill Clinton, June 28th, 2004, TIME Magazine: ‘That’s why I suspected the Iraq thing.’ Ed, grab number seven again. I want to read these last two sentences. (Clinton impression) ‘I gotta do that. That’s why I supported the Iraq thing.’
CLINTON: Even though I approved of Afghanistan and opposed Iraq from the beginning, I still resent that I was not asked or given the opportunity to support soldiers. So what did we do? We borrowed the money to give Bill Clinton a tax cut and pay for our soldiers.
RUSH: The next audio sound bite is President Clinton September 27th, 2002. This is on tape.
CLINTON: This guy is… He’s got a very dangerous program. We need to eliminate it.
RUSH: He’s talking about Saddam Hussein, the weapons of mass destruction. Now, let’s talk about the politics of this. Folks, do we really want four more years or eight more years of this kind of psychobabble? I really do not want it. I don’t want to be forced to have to spend time, after time, after time chronicling all these lies, the pathology behind it. So let’s move on. What is the purpose here? What in the world…? Did he slip up in the context of talking about tax cuts for the rich? And, by the way, revenue poured into the Treasury! This business that they had to borrow money to give Bill Clinton a tax cut? That’s another lie! It’s a lie within a lie. Hell, sometimes I think the whole life these people live is a lie. But is he trying to sabotage Hillary? Everybody’s buzzing about this. Some of the Drive-Bys are circling the wagons and parsing his words.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: So Bill Clinton, ‘Even though I approved of Afghanistan, I opposed Iraq from the beginning, I still resent that I was not asked or given the opportunity to support those soldiers.’ This is in the context of opposition to tax cuts, so he’s actually saying that he couldn’t support the troops because he got a tax cut, or you could say he didn’t support the troops, or couldn’t support the troops, because he didn’t get a tax increase. This is the lamest — I don’t care how you analyze it — it’s the lamest excuse for not supporting the troops. He could also say, ‘I wasn’t given the opportunity to support those soldiers.’ Watch ’em come back and say that what the former president meant was that the White House did not ask him to make troop visits. That’s how they’ll try to spin it. ‘That’s what I was talking about, you’re exactly right, Limbaugh, you understand me, and you got it. I wish you were my spokesman. In fact, if you ever give up that radio thing, I got big plans for you.’
Well, let’s listen to the Drive-Bys and how they are trying to spin for it. What is this, on PMSNBC today, the anchor, Tamron Hall, talking to National Journal contributing Editor Linda Douglass, big Drive-By babe, huge Drive-By babe, used to be at ABC. (interruption) She what? Snerdley, you are warped. You are literally warped. You can’t — no. I’m talking about Linda Douglass. She used to be at ABC. Never mind, folks, you don’t want to know what we’re talking about. Limit the interruptions here. ‘So, Linda, President Clinton has called the invasion a big mistake since 2005, but that has not always been the case. Did President Clinton slip up, as some people are saying, on the campaign trail, is he presenting a different side to his opinions of the war in Iraq?’
DOUGLASS: Well, it all depends on which ones of his public statements you look at. He did make statements early on that appeared to be supportive of President Bush, appeared to be supportive of a fairly muscular approach. He made some statements after that that appeared to question whether or not it was a good idea to go into Iraq. He’s probably been fuming that he’s, from his point of view, been misunderstood in terms of how he reacted initially, and he also is saying through his aides that he certainly wouldn’t want to do anything — he even knows what it’s like to be commander-in-chief — he wouldn’t want to undermine a commander-in-chief.
RUSH: Wouldn’t want to undermine a commander-in-chief? What the hell did he and Gore do, traveling all over the country in 2003 and 2004 ripping the very Iraq war that he said he supported? We’ve got the quotes. (Clinton impression) ‘That’s why I supported the Iraq thing.’ In fact, former Mr. President, let me ask you this: Is it better to oppose the war after the troops are already on the battlefield, because that’s what he did, especially in the 2003-2004 campaign going over to Abu Dhabi and Dubai and accepting 350 grand to make speeches. He rips American foreign policy and he comes back home and tells college audiences a whole different story. Wouldn’t want to undermine a sitting president? Let’s not leave it to just Der Schlick Meister. Let’s go to the candidate herself — that’s Mrs. Clinton — September 15th, 2002, Meet the Press, Tim Russert, this before the war broke out: ‘Do you believe we could have disarmament without regime change?’
HILLARY: I doubt it. I can support the president. I can support an action against Saddam Hussein because I think it’s in the long-term interests of our national security.
RUSH: Then October 10th, 2002, Senate floor, Senator Clinton said this about Saddam.
HILLARY: In the four years since the inspectors left, intelligence reports show that Saddam Hussein has worked to rebuild his chemical and biological weapons stock, his missile delivery capability, and his nuclear program. It is clear, however, that, if left unchecked, Saddam Hussein will continue to increase his capacity to wage biological and chemical warfare and will keep trying to develop nuclear weapons.
RUSH: Right. And now they’re denying all this. Now he’s back to saying he opposed it, flat out, which he did not. Again, TIME Magazine, June 28th, 2004. (Clinton impression) ‘So, yeah, I mean, you’re sitting there as president, you are a reeling in the aftermath of 9/11, so, yeah, you want to go get Bin Laden and do Afghanistan and all that, but you also have to say, ‘Well, my first responsibility now is to try everything possible to make sure that this terrorist network, other terrorist networks can’t reach chemical and biological weapons, I gotta do that, that’s why I supported this Iraq thing.’ I know that there would be endless material, but I really don’t want four more years. I just can’t handle this, but you know what’s frustrating about it, they get away with this. This was eight years of this stuff, and the American people gave these clowns a 60 approval rating, and that was what was so damn frustrating. We had stories about how lying is good. Now we’ve got a story, deniability is good. Remember I talked about that yesterday? In a personal relationship, your spouse is doing something you know is wrong, deny it, just pretend it’s not there, because to talk about it creates friction. I’m gonna do that story in greater detail. I promised to get to it yesterday, didn’t get a chance to get to it yesterday.
So, anyway, everybody is all over this today talking about it. Here’s ABC’s The Note: ‘Bill Clinton’s off-message again with his odd remarks that he was against the Iraq war from the start, giving Republicans fresh fodder as they seek to become anti-Hillary candidates at tonight’s GOP debate, according to ABC’s senior political reporter Rick Klein. Mitt Romney, leading in the early state polls gets fresh scrutiny on his Mormon faith and still no big speech to answer the question.’ I’m going to have some comments about that. This religion stuff, can I ask you, why do we never ask about the religion of Democrats? Why is Democrats’ religion — the fact that they don’t have any — their liberalism is their religion. Liberalism is an ideology that replaces religion. If you want to understand liberalism, that’s the simplest way to understand it. It is a belief system, it’s an ideology that is rigid, allows no other interpretation of events, and its purpose is to replace religion. And what does religion contain? It contains standards, it contains morality, contains codes of conduct, and that’s what Democrats don’t want to be held to at all. So their ideology replaces religion. That’s why they’re never held accountable for any standards. They can lie, they can cheat, they can have little affairs with pages in the House of Representatives and be honored for it, as breaking new ground. It is a replacement for religion, and yet their religion never, ever comes up, only the religion of Republicans.
Chris in Bernard, Iowa, you’re first as we lead off on the phones today. It’s great to have you here.
CALLER: Hey, thanks, Rush. I was at a second speech that President Clinton made last night in Peosta, Iowa, and his comment about being against the Iraq war wasn’t an aberration in the first speech. He made it again in the second speech. So it wasn’t a blip or it wasn’t a departure from his standard speech.
RUSH: So it wasn’t something he misspoke about?
CALLER: No, no, not at all.
RUSH: You were at the second speech?
CALLER: I was. I was an infiltrator.
RUSH: Infiltrator. Cool.
CALLER: I planned a caucus for Republicans, but it was an opportunity to see a former president.
RUSH: Hey from what I read about Iowa, anybody anywhere can go to a caucus any time.
CALLER: Well, I hear you can show up and vote in New Hampshire even if you don’t live there.
RUSH: Right. Exactly. They can bus you in.
CALLER: Yes, exactly.
RUSH: Question: What did he actually say in the second speech about opposing the war?
CALLER: The war, he said it several times, that he was originally against the Iraq war, he reiterated his support for Afghanistan, and that we shouldn’t be in Iraq now, we should be focusing on catching Bin Laden and, you know, yada, yada and —
RUSH: Was this comment made in the context of criticizing Republican tax cuts?
CALLER: Well, he did say that if we hadn’t cut taxes, that we wouldn’t be having to borrow so much money from foreign governments to finance the war.
RUSH: (laughter) All right, so it’s purposeful, then. I appreciate this input, Chris.
CALLER: Hey, thanks Rush, and one other thing, my husband just retired from 20 years of active duty in the Air Force, and —
RUSH: You don’t sound old enough to have a husband, much less one that has just retired.
CALLER: I am. I’m just past 40. But I want to thank you for all you do for the troops. We always really appreciated it through the years.
RUSH: Thank you.
CALLER: Thank you.
RUSH: You’re doing the Lord’s work here today by infiltrating that Clinton speech.
CALLER: They made me put a sticker on my coat before they let me in. They said it was my ticket to come in, and I tried to say no, and I just spent most of the speech kind of wadding it up in my pocket.
RUSH: Yeah, I can relate. I can understand. I wad a lot of things up in my pocket. All right, look, I appreciate the call out there, Chris. So you’ve got two instances of this now, so it’s done purposefully. He is purposely lying about this. And that means a lot of things politically, but one is Hillary is in trouble with the base on the anti-war stuff. Hillary is in trouble. Look, they’re always a week ahead, with their internal polls and so forth, oh, and Zogby has fired back. John Zogby’s fired back at Mark Penn. This is great, too.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: There’s another theory here is that I have evolved to explain Bill Clinton and his rampant lying. By the way, there is a distinction. In the nineties, when Clinton was out there telling whopper after whopper, the press just covered. They covered for him. In fact, they sat back and they did stories; they marveled at what a great liar he was. But now they’re calling him on this, all the Drive-Bys. I mean, he’s got some circling the wagons. You’ve got TIME Magazine. You’ve got ABC. Everybody is calling him on this. AP’s Ron Fournier ripped him to shreds today in the ”Good Bill’ vs. ‘Bad Bill” story. So that’s different. That’s going to come as a surprise. The Clintons are used to getting a pass on this kind of stuff from their buds in the Drive-Bys. But it also could be nothing more complicated than this: Maybe he’s just panicked. If Hillary’s defeated, he is defeated. If Hillary is defeated, his chance of getting back in the White House is fini. So he’s out there stumping around doing all these things. Now, when you’re in a panic state, you sometimes say impolitic things. But now that he’s saying this twice in one day; it does appear to be calculated. (interruption) What, program observer? (interruption) Yes. (interruption) Mmm-hmm. A question is being asked: ‘Why would he want to go back to the White House?’
Snerdley says, ‘You know this guy better than himself. Why would he want to go back to the White House?’ If he wants to go back White House, it’s power, baby. It’s power. He’s a sixties generation anti-war guy. This is their last chance to remake the country. You can’t remake the country in the image you want it to be making speeches in Abu Dhabi. You can’t do that. He’s got a lot of money now so he doesn’t care about that. He doesn’t care about popularity. He cares about popularity, but he thinks he’s going to be more popular than ever if he gets back in the White House. That’s ultimate power. That’s what these people are about. I’m stunned, Mr. Snerdley, that you, of all people, don’t understand the lure of power and what these people want to do with it. Besides, he won’t actually have to be in the White House, which is a bonus. He will have power as though he’s in the White House, but he will be all over the world. Hillary will make sure of that. You see if she loses, none of this happens, and he’s just a former president without a future that involves the presidency or his wife having a future. Look, it’s just a theory. It’s just a theory to explain all this. Another theory is, he doesn’t want to go to the White House; has no desire for any of this, he’s happy catting around right now and the sooner Hillary loses and gets out of this race — the more he can date, the more he can do, whatever, I don’t know — and is trying to sabotage her. Because, look, she’s on the record as supporting the war, too, and he’s out there saying (Clinton impression), ‘I opposed that. I flat-out opposed that from get-go. Everybody, even Limbaugh,lied to you about this today! I opposed the war.’ Here, grab sound bite number 12. We’ve played this bite for you before. This is March 7th, 2003, before the war started. Hillary Clinton had a meeting with Code Pink, which is a bunch of anti-war rabble-rousers. They recorded this on a cheap cell phone, so the audio is not the best.
HILLARY: There is a very easy way to prevent anyone from being, uh, put into harm’s way, and that is for Saddam Hussein to disarm — and I have absolutely no belief that he will. I have to say that this is something I followed for more than a decade. If he were serious about disarming, he would have been much more forthcoming. I ended up voting for the resolution after carefully reviewing the information, intelligence that I had available; talking with people whose opinions I trusted, trying to discount political or other factors that I didn’t believe should be in any way a part of this decision. I would love to agree with you, but you can’t based on my own understanding and assessment of the situation.
RUSH: Now, the important thing about this is that she had signed a resolution authorizing the use of force. Now she’s running around saying, ‘I didn’t mean for the president to use force. I meant for him to take time with weapons inspectors.’ Here she is a few days before the invasion telling Code Pink the only way to get rid of the guy is militarily and with an invasion, and that she wasn’t lied to. She used the intelligence information that she had available, talked to people whose opinions she trusted. So these people are on the hook here. And for Clinton to bring this up is, it still remains a huge curiosity. On his website yesterday, John Zogby: ‘All is fair in love and war, the centuries-old proverb states. Politics is not included, but given the way the game is played in modern-day America, maybe it should be. That’s the sense I had again this morning watching Mark Penn, the chief political strategist for Democrat Hillary Clinton, denigrate our latest Zogby Interactive survey simply because it showed his client in a bad light. Penn made the contention on the MSNBC morning news program hosted by Joe Scarborough.
‘Penn mischaracterized this latest online Zogby poll as our first interactive survey ever — a bizarre contention, since we have been developing and perfecting our Internet polling methodology for nearly a decade, and since Penn’s company has been quietly requesting the results of such polls from Zogby for years.’ Now, remember, Penn went on Scarborough’s show and said (paraphrased), ‘You shouldn’t even be talking about this poll, Joe. It’s an Internet poll. It’s the first time they’ve ever done it. It’s not scientific. It’s not credible. You shouldn’t even be talking about it.’ He’s been asking Zogby for the results! ‘We always comply as part of our pledge to give public Zogby polling results to any and every candidate and campaign that asks for them. What is interesting is that no other campaign has made as many requests for Zogby polling data over the years than [Mark] Penn has made on behalf of [Hillary] Clinton.’ So what he was trying to tell Scarborough is: ‘You don’t put this poll data on here that shows my client losing. You just don’t do that, Joe. This poll doesn’t show anything.’ Mark Penn can’t even tell the truth. Nobody in this campaign can tell the truth! If their life depended on it, I don’t think they could tell the truth.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: We’re also speculating here during the break about Ron Fournier of the Associated Press, who really today… I read you brief portions of his report on Clinton’s lie about what he said about his support or opposition to the war in Iraq, back in 2003. (Clinton impression) ‘I flat-out opposed that war from the get-go.’ Ron Fournier followed Clinton around, and this is not flattering at all, talks about how Clinton’s out there campaigning for his wife, but mentions his own name or pronoun, personal pronoun 97 times while mentioning Hillary’s name seven. He talks about where he went for Thanksgiving, who the guest list was, all these things; where he had coffee that morning. It was ‘I, I, I,’ and ‘me, me, me.’ You know these are the people that covered for Clinton all during the nineties. This is the kind of coverage that Bill Clinton would never get from the Drive-By Media in the nineties. They would marvel instead at how able he was to connect with that crowd and hold them in the palm of his hand. He was able to speak to that crowd for hours, with not a single word written down — and note the power, the literal power of Bill Clinton ‘crackling from his jeans,’ as was once written by a Washington Post reporter when Clinton was out on Catalina Island. So this Ron Fournier piece. This is quite interesting, because this is not covering for him.
So began to wonder, ‘Why? What’s changed here?’ I mean, this is a wild guess — and if I’m right about this, it’s only temporary — but it’s almost like these guys, some of them, might actually feel a little dirty now. They covered up for this guy for eight years, and they know it, and they feel like whores. They feel like sluts, and they’re not going to be used again. It’s a different media climate and playing field out there, now. It’s only temporary. Battered wives, they’ll run away from house but they end up back there, and battered liberals do the same thing. There are so many battered liberals out there, but they never abandon the Democrats. So Fournier and his buddies will eventually be back in the fold. But this, this is unique. You didn’t get this kind of coverage about the Clintons.