RUSH: This is Gary in Charleston, South Carolina. You’re next on the EIB Network. Hello.
CALLER: Rush, good afternoon. Second-time caller to you, and you are definitely an American genius.
RUSH: I appreciate that, sir. Thank you so much. And narcissist. Don’t forget narcissist.
CALLER: Well, we’ll hold that in abeyance. I want to get straight to the point. Last night I was surfing through the channels and came across C-SPAN and happened to catch the Senate oversight committee with the Clemens issue, and I am a conservative Republican in the state of South Carolina. I am so conservative, I make Bonnie and Clyde look like Dale Evans and Roy Rogers. I got so infuriated when I’ve seen and sit and listened to Henry Waxman — who reminded me of a woodchuck smiling through a picket fence — going after Clemens with just a travesty, never giving this man an opportunity to defend himself on the whole Democratic side reminded me of an 1800s lynch mob. If this is the best that this government can do in the Democratic oversight committee, and worry about steroid use based on a report by an ex-senator, Mitchell, then we’re in a world of hurt up there in Washington.
RUSH: This was the House committee that Chairman Waxman chairs.
CALLER: I understand. I misrepresented it. I’m sorry.
RUSH: I watched a little bit of this yesterday. You have to understand why this happened. I’m like you. To see a congressional committee go after a private citizen like this, it’s just infuriating.
CALLER: It’s an abomination.
RUSH: These hearings ‘never fed a hungry child.’
CALLER: No, they didn’t.
RUSH: If anybody ought to be going after this it should be the Justice Department. However, Roger Clemens asked for this opportunity. He wanted it. He’s looking at the circumstances, and he’s trying to preserve his reputation here, and he wanted this opportunity. And he got it. What I found fascinating about this — I don’t know if you noticed this, and I mentioned this yesterday. One of the things that fascinated me, is this was partisan. The Republicans were all on Clemens’ side. The Democrats were savaging Clemens.
CALLER: Isn’t that amazing? I watched that last night. I watched the representative from Massachusetts go after Clemens, and then the Republicans go off the trainer. I just looked at this and I’m going, ‘Is this the best that they can do?’ It’s just amazing, absolutely amazing.
RUSH: Your expectations of these people are obviously way too high. This probably is the best they can do, something like this. But I’ve got another theory about this I want to get to in just a second. But let’s talk about the partisanship of this. How in the world does something like this become partisan? How in the world do all the Democrats line up savaging Clemens and basically, you know, almost taking the side of the trainer? What they really said was they believed Andy Pettitte, not the trainer. The Republicans… It was like Clemens was being appointed to the federal judiciary.
CALLER: Mmm-hmm. Yeah.
RUSH: Republicans wanted to defend him and the Democrats didn’t. What in the world is partisan about this? I couldn’t figure this out.
Somebody said to me, ‘No, Rush. You don’t understand.’ Some kook said to me, ‘Who’s in the White House?’
I said, ‘Bush.’
‘Where’s he from?’
‘Texas.’
‘Yeah, so?’
‘Where’s Clemens from?’
‘Texas.’
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: ‘Yeah, so? You don’t think Bush called the Republicans and said, ‘You make sure you protect my fellow Texan, Clemens?”
I said, ‘You think Bush called the Republicans and said, ‘Clemens is getting away with this?” There are people out there thinking that to explain the partisanship. It is hard to explain. Gary, this is the thing. Over the last five decades of my life the liberals in this country have tried their best to destroy much that is good in this country. Boy Scouts, churches, schools, any number of cultural institutions and traditions that are responsible for this nation’s uniqueness and greatness. With multicultural curriculum in school, they have done their best to destroy it. They’ve tried to punish and destroy achievement. Now what in the world are they doing? Even if Clemens wants these hearings, somebody’s gotta say, ‘This is not for us. This is for the Justice Department.’ What they are trying to do, the Democrats, anyway… I can’t prove this, but this is an all-out assault on baseball that they were committing yesterday; another American tradition and institution. That’s one of the things I noticed about it.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Rick in San Bernardino, California, I’m glad you called, sir. It’s great to have you here with us.
CALLER: Hi, Rush!
RUSH: Hi!
CALLER: My idea on why the Democrats are going after Clemens, is Clemens is big money. He represents big business and, you know, Democrats are always for the little guy.
RUSH: You know, that’s a good point. Baseball players today are ‘the rich,’ and what are the rich? They cheat, they steal, they’re schemers, and they’re not paying their fair share! So it’s time to go after Roger Clemens. Plus, he is from Bush’s state, Texas.
CALLER: That’s it.
RUSH: But I have to tell you, Elijah Cummings from Baltimore, was the first after ‘Nostrilitis’ Waxman finished. By the way, Henry Waxman is a guy that would make me turn off my high-definition TV. But when Waxman finished his opening statement, he turned it over to Elijah Cummings, and I think he’s been in Congress since he was seated in 1997, just right up the road in Baltimore, and I have to tell you, he wasn’t attacking Clemens so much like some of these other people on the committee did, but he nailed him. He said, ‘You’re one of my heroes, but I just can’t believe you. In a contest between believing you and Brian McNamee and Andy Pettitte, I believe Pettitte,’ and that just nailed him. It was fascinating, too. I was eager to see what the Drive-By sports media would say about this. So when I got home yesterday afternoon after an arduous interview with the New York Times, I went to the ESPN website, and they had a guy blogging it, and it was just so typical. It was so sycophantic. I forget his name, doesn’t matter. ‘Clemens stole the show today! Roger Clemens owned the testimony. Roger Clemens was this; Roger Clemens was that. Roger Clemens sat up straight, he spoke straight into the microphone and he owned the day.’ This is not what I saw. It wasn’t that he did bad and it wasn’t that the trainer did awesome, but I did not see that.
At least the first hour and a half that I had a chance to listen to it. So then the New York Drive-Bys get in the act today, the tabloids and the Post and the Daily News, and they were more — I hate to say this. But their take was closer to what mine was, and it’s all that Clemens was a disaster. He did not help himself at all yesterday, even though he might have thought he did. Everybody has their biases here in this. The sports media want these guys to go down because these purists, and steroids in baseball… I defy any of these people who are demanding moral purity to show us their medical records. Let’s see what they’ve injected. Let’s see what they’ve done. As though they’ve never made one mistake in their lives demanding perfection and purity from these other people — and integrity, too. Let’s look at their integrity lapses and so forth.