RUSH: John in Jacksonville, Florida, nice to have you with us, sir. Welcome to the EIB Network.
CALLER: Hello, Rush.
RUSH: Hi.
CALLER: I enjoy listening to you. I look forward to it every day.
RUSH: Appreciate that. Thank you, sir.
CALLER: I would like to tell you that we’re getting — I’m a Jacksonville, Florida, voter, and I got close to a dozen of these recorded phone calls from various candidates, and one I got was very disturbing and made me angry. It turned out to be from the John McCain campaign, and it was almost a minute long, and it just absolutely ripped Governor Romney over the idea of gun control and the Second Amendment. And I knew that wasn’t true, but they made it sound like Governor Romney himself was going to come take my guns away from me.
RUSH: (laughter)
CALLER: And it touts how John McCain is a military leader, and I certainly appreciate his record as a war hero, Navy veteran. I’m a Navy veteran. But so was Jimmy Carter a Navy veteran. That does not qualify him. It does not guarantee that he would be a strong military leader. So it concerns me that he’s leveling these kind of charges —
RUSH: These robocalls that are going around, I guess they work. I try to imagine myself getting one of these things, and if I did, I’d just hang up. When a computer starts talking to me, I hang up. But, you know, we all have to remember that there are a lot of people that don’t live and breathe this stuff each and every day, and they answer the phone and they’re happy somebody’s calling them.
CALLER: Well, I know it’s the political season, and my wife and I would look at the phone ringing, saying, ‘Here comes another one,’ and I just was listening to see who it was from.
RUSH: Tell me about some of the others, because I’ve heard some of the worst examples of these robocalls where McCain making phone calls, his campaign making phone calls accusing Romney, as for abortion, says he’s pro-choice — have you gotten that call?
CALLER: No, I didn’t get that one. I did get an actual human ask me about Huckabee, but I told them that I was a Mitt Romney supporter. Others are just focusing on different issues. There was, gosh, I’m drawing a blank on them now, but —
RUSH: Must not have made much of an impact, except the one on gun control. That one obviously you remember.
CALLER: Absolutely. It was nasty, and it seemed to be way over the top, and it fits well with your assertion that we’re looking at an echo of Hillary Clinton when we see Senator McCain.
RUSH: Wait just a second, that’s not me. I would love to claim credit for that. That’s George Will today.
CALLER: Oh, yes.
RUSH: George Will today says that McCain is an echo of the Clintons.
CALLER: Well, you pointed it out, and George Will is a brilliant man. I enjoy listening to him, too, and reading him. But I just wanted to point that out, that —
RUSH: I’m glad you did, I’m glad you called. Robocalls in Jacksonville, John, I appreciate it.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: We have the audio, ladies and gentlemen. We had a guy call from Jacksonville, said he got a bunch of robocalls, and the one that really burned him was from the McCain camp saying that Romney wanted to take people’s guns away from them, and he knew that wasn’t the case. The one I had heard about was the McCain campaign accusing Romney of being pro-abortion. We have that robocall. We have the audio of it. We found it at the website of our flamethrower affiliate in West Palm Beach, WJNO. It runs about 51 seconds. The quality here is not good, but I told Cookie, I said, ‘Don’t doctor the quality; don’t dress this up. I want people to hear this exactly as they would hear it when they answer the phone.’
(playing of McCain anti-Romney ad)
All right, so that’s the robocall. Were you able to understand? I’ve got the transcript to follow it. Were you able to understand? You want me to read the transcript? All right, let me take the bars down, there we go, sorry about that for your Dittocammers, it was inadvertent, late-arriving show prep, bars are down, camera’s now on. Could you tell it was a woman? All right. Okay. Here’s the transcript. You answer the phone and it’s a McCain robocall: ‘I’m calling with an urgent Mitt Romney voter alert. We care deeply about traditional values and protecting families and we need someone who will not [inaudible] in the White House, ending abortion, preserving the sanctity of marriage, the trash on the airwaves and attempts to ban God from every corner of society. These issues are core to our being. Mitt Romney seems to think he can fool us. He supported abortion on-demand, even wrote a law mandating tax payer funding for abortions. He says he changed his mind but he still hasn’t changed the law. He told gay organizers in Massachusetts he would be a stronger advocate for abortion rights, gay rights, and even Ted Kennedy. Now it’s something different. Unfortunately, on issue after issue, Mitt Romney has treated special issues voters as fools, thinking they won’t catch on. Sorry Mitt, we know you aren’t trust-worthy on the most important issues and you aren’t a conservative. Paid for by John McCain 2008.’
Now, that’s pretty sleazy. The quality is obviously very poor. For all of McCain’s complaining about the dirty tricks against him, if this is genuine, it looks like the McCain campaign is exactly what George Will said that it is today, an echo, a mirror image of the Clintons. So it would be interesting to know if this is McCain authorized campaign activity. I wanted you to hear this because this is what I’ve been hearing is going around, and we found the audio of it.