RUSH: Operation Chaos continues. Operation Rush the Vote. The Boston Globe has finally discovered it today, the Allentown Morning Call has discovered it today, and even at The Nation magazine, very, very liberal magazine, they’ve discovered it. This morning on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal, the guest is The Nation’s Ari Melber. A caller said, ‘Can you tell me what you think of Republicans crossing over to affect the Democrat primary?’
MELBER: Rush Limbaugh, for example, has been urging his listeners to go and vote actually for Hillary on the theory that she would be easier to beat. I think it’s wrong, and I think that basically you should vote on principle and not go and try to make trouble on the other side. I really don’t think that’s —
RUSH: Stuff it, pal, stuff it.
MELBER: — basically a good, healthy way to exercise our democracy.
RUSH: Come on.
MELBER: In some states, these are state law issues, but in some states it’s illegal. In Ohio, for example, there is actually a good-faith test. If you are saying, ‘I am doing this in bad faith because I’m not really in this party,’ that can be illegal, and so people should know that and people should not break the law, and it depends on the state party rules. For those who are interested, Wired, the website and magazine, had a whole piece about this, about how basically Rush Limbaugh was urging that in Ohio, was effectively urging people, if they did it in bad faith, to break the law, and that’s important.
RUSH: I never urged anybody to break the law. This is so comical. They are so agitated over this. They just can’t stand it when their own tactics are turned back on them, folks. They just can’t stand it. They get to muck up our primaries all they want, they get to cross over, they get to do anything they want, choose our nominee and so forth. We get involved in theirs — and, by the way, this is not just about getting Hillary nominated because she’d be easier to beat. This is about causing chaos; this is about continuing this soap opera for a whole bunch of reasons, and the reasons run from the political, and they are obvious, to the simple fact also that this is fun. This is the party that’s supposed to be so put together, so well wired, so forward thinking, and you can mess ’em up — like I say, folks, I said in the last hour, we may wake up one morning in November and be miserable and unhappy, but we will have the memory of more fun months leading up to it. I’m not predicting anything in November because I have no clue. Nobody else does, either. Norah O’Donnell on Friday afternoon on DNCTV was in a crisis. She was beside herself, freaking out over the Reverend J. Wright’s story and asking, openly asking, ‘How do we get away from this?’
O’DONNELL: I don’t even kind of know where to go from here, quite frankly. I mean it sort of seems like — I don’t even know how these candidates can talk about policy, because it seems like every day someone’s asking them to apologize for the comments of their supporters. I mean, Rush Limbaugh went nuts today on his program about this story. How do we get away from this?
CROWLEY: Well, get this primary over with, for one thing. I think part of the problem is that this thing never ends and the differences between Hillary and Obama are actually quite small on policy grounds.
RUSH: That’s Michael Crowley there, senior editor of The New Republic, he’s right, end the primary, that’s what we are preventing! We are giving Mrs. Clinton enough reasons to hang in there, and of course Obama is, too, because Obama has stepped in it big time here with the Reverend J. Wright stuff. And make no mistake — and John Podhoretz writes about this today in Commentary, their website, Hillary is hanging in there because she’s hoping, and maybe planning on the fact that Obama’s going to have a series of crises, he’s not battle tested, he’s never had negative ads run against him, and to see how he responds to it. She clearly is hoping that he can be damaged enough that superdelegates will say screw the primaries, we need to win. We’ve got an electability problem with Obama. That’s what they’re hoping happens in the Clinton campaign, something like this J. Wright story or something else to head down the pike with that will cause superdelegates to think, ‘My gosh, this guy can’t win. We’re going to have to support Hillary.’
By the way, I wouldn’t doubt that the Clinton team is already trying to put that thought in the heads of many, many superdelegates, which is why I think Ms. Pelosi is out on television Sunday talking about the damage to the party that would happen. The last person Nancy Pelosi wants to see be president is Hillary, because that means that Pelosi’s no longer the Queen Bee in Washington. She wouldn’t be the most powerful woman there, Hillary would. I don’t think they get along that well anyway. I don’t think they’re that close, for a host of reasons that lead largely to female competitiveness. People don’t talk about female competitiveness much, but it’s there.
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RUSH: Get this: ‘Former Sen. Lincoln Chafee, the lone Republican senator to vote against the Iraq war, calls Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton one of the ‘Democratic Bush enablers’ who failed to stand up to the president. In a new book, Chafee, who is backing … Barack Obama, skewers Clinton and other Democratic White House hopefuls who said they were duped by Bush into voting for the war. ‘Being wrong about sending Americans to kill and be killed, maim and be maimed, is not like making a punctuation mistake in a highway bill,’ Chafee writes. ‘They argue that the president duped them into war, but getting duped does not exactly recommend their leadership. Helping a rogue president start an unnecessary war should be a career-ending lapse of judgment, in my view.” Lincoln Chafee, coming out hard against Mrs. Clinton. Operation Chaos continues! Want more evidence of Operation Chaos? Let me go through the list here. From the Sunday Chicago Tribune: ‘Obama Prepares for Full Assault on Clinton; Contender to Take Aim at Clinton’s Ethics.’
Obama is getting ready for a full assault. So one of the things he’s doing to get ready for the full assault is trying to unload controversies. ‘On Friday [Obama] held extended conversations with the Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times about his longtime relationship with indicted developer and fundraiser Antoin ‘Tony’ Rezko. [Obama] is also expected to make public his tax returns for several years before 2006, documents he previously has provided to the Tribune and other news organizations.’ Now, okay, so it’s a big deal. He comes out. He said that Rezko played a much bigger fundraising role for Obama than anybody knew. He does this on a Friday. That’s a document dump. He does it also in the midst of the Reverend J. Wright controversy, so it was totally overlooked. But he did get it out there. So what he’s trying to do is unload controversies involving him, get it out there, because he is preparing a full frontal assault on Mrs. Clinton on ethics, on her lack of tax returns being released. He’s going to attack the donor list at the Clinton Library and Massage Parlor.
He is going to attack Mrs. Clinton hiding in the National Archives and at the Clinton Library and Massage Parlor, her records when she met with the president when she was first lady and what she was doing. He’s going to start hammering all this. So he thinks to start hammering he’s gotta have his dirty laundry out there. So hell’s bells, folks! It might well be that Obama put this preacher stuff out there himself.
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RUSH: Rush Limbaugh and the Excellence in Broadcasting Network. Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, Bill, you’re next. Great to have you here, sir. Hello.
CALLER: Hi, Rush.
RUSH: Hey.
CALLER: It’s a pleasure to speak with you.
RUSH: Thank you, sir, very much.
CALLER: I just want to give you a little bit of information. Senator Obama has joined the chaos crusade with you. On the morning radio, I heard him advertising today, encouraging Republicans and independents to vote for him in the Democratic primary, and then he informed us how we could go about that.
RUSH: And he told you that you gotta register before March the 24th, right?
CALLER: Right. We needed to change our registration by March 25th. And so I just wanted to let you know that he’s —
RUSH: Well-l-l-l-l.
CALLER: That he’s joining in your program.
RUSH: Well-l-l-l-l-l. Now, let’s go back, grab audio sound bite number one. This clown from The Nation magazine was on C-SPAN’s morning journal today, and he said that what I’m doing constitutes violating the law so I guess now that means that Obama is, too.
MELBER: Rush Limbaugh, for example, has been urging his listeners to go and vote actually for Hillary on the theory that she would be easier to beat. I think it’s wrong, and I think that basically you should vote on principle and not go and try to make trouble on the other side. I really don’t think that’s basically a good, healthy way to exercise our democracy. In some states, these are state law issues, but in some states it’s illegal. In Ohio, for example, there is actually a good-faith test. If you are saying I am doing this in bad faith because I’m not really in this party, that can be illegal, and so people should know that and people should not break the law, and it depends on the state party rules. For those who are interested, Wired, the website and magazine, had a whole piece about this, about how basically Rush Limbaugh was urging that in Ohio, was effectively urging people, if they did it in bad faith, to break the law, and that’s important.
RUSH: All right, so The Nation magazine is now going to have to lump Obama in with me as a lawbreaker. Now, why is Obama doing this? He’s doing this to counter us, folks. He’s doing this because we’re having so much success with Hillary crossovers on the Republican Party, voting for her. So Obama has joined the fray, running ads on radio stations in Pennsylvania urging Republicans to crossover vote for him, and telling them how to do it, how to register, when to do it, the deadline is I think a week from tomorrow, March 25th. Well, I don’t know about redoubling the efforts here, Snerdley. I’m not sure we have to redouble the efforts. I think with Obama out there, I think Obama will redouble the efforts. The Hillary supporters in the Republican Party will hear what Obama is doing — (laughing) — I think they’ll know enough — do you realize every day there are 20 news stories on this. I haven’t even touched that stack. Here, let me start with it now. I mean, there’s no more informing of the voters that needs to take place. They don’t need marching orders. They’re already revved up to do it.
This is from the York, Pennsylvania, Daily Record yesterday: ”Voters Switched Parties to Prep for Primary’ — A large number of Republicans have changed affiliation to have a say in the 2008 outcome. Sandra Reed of Gettysburg has been a Republican since she was old enough to vote. But Tuesday, she and her husband, Vernon, went to the Adams County Courthouse and became Democrats. ‘We were registered Republicans, and we will always be Republicans, but we want to help Hillary get the No. 1 position for the Democrats,’ said Reed, 70. ‘So, we are switching for the primary to vote for Hillary, then we will switch back and vote for McCain.’ … That’s what the Reeds did. They got the idea to influence the Democratic race from conservative radio talk-show host Rush Limbaugh, she said. Limbaugh recommended his listeners temporarily switch party affiliation to give Clinton a boost, and vote out Obama. Monica Dutko, Adams County elections director, has seen a steady stream of Republicans switching over to the Democratic Party. While she does not ask why they’re switching, some have told her that they’re switching at the suggestion of Limbaugh.’
You know, this is going to be with me and us, folks, for the rest of our lives. This is in the Nexis database, Operation Chaos, the Rush the Vote effect. Even if — and I’m not saying this is the case — even if what we’re doing is having no effect, the Drive-Bys and Democrats still think it is, and so they’re reporting it as though it is. Now, we know it is. We can probably pull this scam even without it working, because this is what they fear from talk radio in the first place. Yeah, we’re having too much fun while we’re doing this.
A picture of McGreevey, did you hear this little guy come out and say, ‘Hey, I was the third guy in the trio?’ Which means that Mrs. McGreevey had to know that… well, we don’t know whether the guy is being truthful or not. Anyway, these Democrats at the top and their sex lives and proclivities and so forth, sick.
Here is Michael Cohen. More chaos. Wall Street Journal: ”The Divided Democrats’ — While divisions among Democrats today are not as severe, a drawn-out nomination fight could leave the party critically short of the time it will need to build a winning campaign. Recent exit polls show that 20%-30% of Democratic voters will be dissatisfied if their candidate loses the nomination. Those numbers will likely increase if the battle between Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama intensifies, and especially if it ends in a bitter squabble over delegates at the convention.’ The story goes on to talk about how roiled the party is. We are doing this. We are keeping hope alive. We are keeping Hillary alive, and that is keeping the soap opera going. The Democrats deserve this. They believe in a segmented society. They believe in catering to women and catering to blacks and catering to union people and so forth and making each as big a victim group as they can. They deserve this kind of division. They are being devoured.
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RUSH: You know, I was back in Snerdley’s office. We were just chilling out back there. He said, ‘Do you realize what you just heard?’ I said, ‘What do you mean?’ ‘You have forced Barack Obama to counter you in Pennsylvania. He has had to start spending his own money, his campaign resources, on a campaign to get Republicans to register in the Democrat primary to vote for him!’ He’s possibly running these ads on my show, on stations that carry my show. This is profound. This is truly profound. Because you got the Drive-By Media just up in arms that this is happening in the first place, because they think it’s ‘un-American,’ and it’s a violation of the law, and it’s ‘tampering with the sacred, time-honored vote,’ blah, blah, blah. Of course, to them, what we’re supposed to do as Republicans, is we’re just supposed to bend over forward, grab the ankles, and lose.
We’re supposed to sit by and let them do whatever they want to do in terms of political and electoral mischief, and just let it happen. When we get involved and start playing tricks on them using their own tactics, why, they get outraged. So the Drive-Bys, the media people are just livid about this. Now, when they learn — when these cable talkers at night, when they learn — that Obama is now trying to counter me, he’s spending resources on me, folks, not McCain! He’s spending resources on you, not McCain. He is actively urging Pennsylvania Republicans to cross over, and the ad tells them how to do it. You have to go in, you have to register as a Democrat by the 25th of March. If you don’t do it before then, you can’t vote in the primary, at least on the Democrat side. So this is cool. This is profound, and the people this is going to irritate? I may watch a little cable TV tonight, which I don’t normally do anymore. I may do this just to see (laughs) if this actually breaks.