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RUSH: We return to Atlanta. John, hi. Welcome to the show.

CALLER: Rush, a pleasure speaking to you today.

RUSH: Thank you.

CALLER: I want to take issue with a phrase used in that CNN story that you played a couple segments ago, and it reminds me — well, it’s a phrase that was also used by James Brooks a couple weeks ago in which they put forth that the Republican Party is fractured. In no uncertain terms I want to say that I profoundly disagree with that assertion. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

RUSH: Why? Tell me why?

CALLER: Because this is a party that, as we have said many, many times, the president is not on the ballot, the vice president is not on the ballot. This is a wide open election. So it is the idea that we’re trying to figure out: What is the message? What do we want to emphasize? What is it we think is important? And the way I understand my American civics is that the way you do that is by going through a primary process —

RUSH: Absolutely, congratulations! A gold star for you.

CALLER: Thank you, sir.

RUSH: That’s exactly what primaries are about, to sort out all these ideas. The Democrat Party is at war, too, but the Drive-Bys won’t tell you that. It’s a war over race. We are having a war here. It’s a war over philosophy. It’s exactly the kind of war parties go through. We are not fractured. You know why they say we are fractured?

CALLER: Because they’re a bunch of morons?

RUSH: No. Well, that, but specifically — I’ll give you another chance.

CALLER: Because it makes us look bad, we don’t know what we’re doing.

RUSH: No, it’s because we’re not aligned behind McCain. McCain is their candidate. McCain is their Republican. McCain’s the Democrats favorite Republican, and because we aren’t getting behind him, we are fractured. Would they say we were fractured if McCain was being defeated by — in fact, Romney is ahead on the delegate count and the popular vote so far, which is what this is all about. This is not about winning individual states. It’s about ultimate delegate counts and totals when you get to the convention.

CALLER: The idea of declaring a front-runner, ‘Oh, McCain should be the front-runner of South Carolina, Huckabee is the front-runner now,’ you’re exactly right. Romney has been ahead in the delegate count since Wyoming, I think, correct?

RUSH: That’s right.

CALLER: Who is the front-runner?

RUSH: These clowns don’t like either Romney or Rudy because they don’t like conservatives. And so, of course, McCain, Huckabee, whichever one happens to be doing well at the time is who they’re going to ballyhoo and promote. But they’re just saying we’re fractured because we can’t get behind McCain, and their view is that McCain is a panacea for now, McCain is the savior on a white horse. But maybe I’m making too much of this. Let me ask you, John, you’re an intelligent guy, I can tell.

CALLER: Thank you.

RUSH: You’re probably upscale because you live in Atlanta. It’s not a cheap town.

CALLER: (laughter) I’d like to think so.

RUSH: So when you see the papers like the New York Times and the Palm Beach Post and, you know, they’re very liberal on their editorial pages and are endorsing McCain, what does that say to you? Anything? Does it matter?

CALLER: It’s one more reason why I don’t read them.

RUSH: I know that, we don’t read them anyway. We don’t know this because we read them. We know this because other media reports are telling us that they endorsed McCain. But you have to know now that when you get down to November, the New York Times has a choice, let’s say it is McCain, say McCain gets this nomination, and, of course, Hillary gets the nomination for the Democrats, and the New York Times is going to write an editorial endorsing who?

CALLER: Hillary.

RUSH: Right. So what is the value of their endorsement of any Republican? What is the value of anybody in the mainstream media’s opinion of any Republican? We got all these stories yesterday, day before, criticizing Bill for being too mean to Barack and he’s out there acting undignified and all this horrible stuff, it’s all over the place, Democrat state officials. Gets to November, who are they going to vote for?

CALLER: Well, it tells me when the New York Times, the AJC, the Palm Beach Post, when they endorse somebody like McCain, it’s just a signal that this is not the, quote, unquote, real conservative. This is the guy that we find palatable, the guy will agree with us —

RUSH: Right.

CALLER: — and be, quote, unquote, bipartisan.

RUSH: That we still want to cream; that we still want to wipe out when it gets to November. This is my point. I don’t care. It’s amusing and it’s entertaining to report on all these Drive-Bys and Democrat Party officials getting mad at Clinton for running around out there and being too mean to Barack and acting unpresidential and undignified, it doesn’t mean anything. They’re going to vote en masse for Hillary Clinton in November, so I don’t care what they’re telling us about Senator McCain or Senator Huckabee or Governor Romney, I don’t care. Because I know that nobody in the Drive-Bys is going to vote for anybody on our side, and I know that they’re not going to endorse anybody but McCain on our side, so I don’t care. In fact, it is instructive, but why should we sit here — well, I don’t, but why should anybody get all concerned with what the Drive-Bys think of our side? They’re not voting for us. Even if they chose one of our guys, which they already have, and they’re just slavish in their adoration, and they promote and they love the guy, so what? We know they’re not going to vote for him.

So you gotta get out of this mode here that our acceptance or our arrival or the fact that we’re making progress can be tracked by whether or not Democrats like some of us. Screw that. Because when it comes to the meat cracking time down there in November at Election Day, they’re not going to vote for any of our guys. So who cares what they say about them ever? The more they praise ’em, the more suspicious you gotta get. Because they do not want our side to win. There is not one of them, from Matthews — I don’t care who it is in the Drive-Bys — not one of them that wants McCain to become president. He’s just, if it happens, and if an accident happens and some hook or by crook Hillary would lose, McCain would be acceptable, and they wouldn’t be afraid of him. But the last thing they want is for him to actually win, any of our people. Who cares what they say, endorsement-wise or otherwise.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Speaking of McCain, Paul Campos, Scripps Howard News Service, about three days ago, had a piece on the media’s love affair with McCain. He said: ‘One of the curiosities of American politics is the media’s ongoing infatuation with John McCain. A bit of this is based on things such as McCain’s opposition to torture (unfortunately, we can no longer treat opposing torture like opposing child molestation, i.e., something one assumes is standard equipment in a presidential candidate rather than a luxury upgrade). Yet most of the journalistic love affair with the Republican senator from Arizona is based on other factors. Consider this typical endorsement from the Orlando Sentinel: While McCain ‘has stuck to his principles at the risk of sinking his campaign,’ Mitt Romney ‘has abandoned positions that would have alienated his party’s conservative base.’ (Indeed, I checked a computer database and discovered that, in the national media, Romney is at least six times more likely to be described as a flip-flopper than McCain.) This does not merely ignore but actually inverts the truth. The fact is that no presidential candidate in either party has flip-flopped as egregiously as McCain on such a wide range of issues. Here’s just a small sample of Sen. Straight Talk’s recent series of remarkable conversions to politically convenient stances: On abortion rights, McCain has done a 180-degree turn, from favoring only the most minor restrictions and opposing the overturning of Roe v. Wade, to supporting an almost total ban, while advocating that the Supreme Court reverse Roe immediately. McCain has transformed himself from a deficit hawk who mocked supply-side economics into someone who sounds like he’s drunk deeply from the wackiest vats of supply-side Kool-Aid, to the point where he now claims raising taxes decreases revenues (a claim so wildly in conflict with the facts — for example, federal tax revenues almost doubled in real terms after the Clinton tax increases — that it’s either a shameless lie or a product of astounding ignorance).’ Raising taxes does decrease revenue, it certainly can.

But anyway, ‘In regard to ethanol subsidies, McCain has gone from treating them as the worst sort of pork to becoming a strong supporter of a program despised by economists, but beloved of Iowa farmers and the good people at Archer Daniels Midland. Six years ago, McCain sternly condemned Jerry Falwell as ‘an agent of intolerance.’ Eighteen months ago, he gave the commencement address at Falwell’s university, while openly embracing one of the most noxious figures of the religious right.’ Now, this is a guy from the Scripps Howard News Service, Paul Campos, from whose piece I’m reading here. ‘These are just a few examples from a far longer list. On topics ranging from immigration, to campaign finance reform, to gay marriage, to accepting support from various sleazy characters he previously shunned, McCain has either completely reversed his views or seriously equivocated regarding what they are this week. Yet the media continue to lavish him with worshipful paeans to his supposedly uncompromising commitment to principled leadership no matter what the political cost etc., etc. Part of this is accounted for by lazy autopilot journalism … But part of it is something worse. When it comes to McCain, many of the sophisticates at the top of the media pyramid are like a masochistic spouse who treats open infidelity as a twisted sort of faithfulness. They love McCain because when he lies to their face he doesn’t even pretend to be doing otherwise. According to the pretzel logic of a certain kind of journalism, that counts as candor.’ When you openly lie to a journalist you’re being honest about your lie, then that’s candor.

‘All this would be merely amusing if McCain were not a genuinely tragic figure. The young man who showed such exemplary courage in the face of his North Vietnamese tormentors has become an old man whose courage abandoned him when subjected to the more subtle tortures of worldly ambition.’ Paul Campos is a law professor at the University of Colorado and this appeared in the Scripps Howard News Service on January 22nd.

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