RUSH: I got an interesting note from a friend of mine, friend of mine with whom I used to play touch football Thursday afternoons. When I worked for the Kansas City Royals from 1979 to ’83 at the end of the baseball season, the front office of the Royals would play touch football on Thursday afternoons regardless the weather, with the front office of the Kansas City ‘Cheeps,’ they were the ‘Cheeps’ at the time. And we had sole interlopers that joined the game, people that were not part of the front office. Occasionally some of the players, George Brett and Jamie Quirk would show up, and when they showed up, it showed how pathetic all the rest of us were.
I’ll never forget one afternoon Quirk playing quarterback must have thrown a 100-yard bomb to Brett. It looked like a hundred yards to me, easily 50. You know, we’re just a bunch of duffers out there. But it was a lot of fun, and one of the interlopers that started the game was this little scat-back speed demon who has become a friend, he sent me a note last night, said, ‘Rush, you don’t realize what has happened to you and your show. You’re too close to it. You don’t realize what’s happened. We’ve been told that Barack Obama, not by deed but by the very fact of his being is a candidate that transcends race and politics, and that is pushed as fact, despite Obama’s trouble in unifying his party and groups within the party.’ And this is a good point, by the way. Obama is now back to being the unity candidate. He went to the floor of the House of Representatives yesterday and got a hero’s welcome, the messiah is back, but is the Democrat Party unified right now? In fact, do you know who leads in the superdelegate count right now? You people have any idea? It’s Hillary Clinton, 273.5 superdelegates to Obama, 265. So he’s about eight-and-a-half, seven-and-a-half superdelegates behind. I don’t know who the half is. He’s not ahead in the supers, is the point, despite all of this. Why should Mrs. Clinton get out?
Operation Chaos has not been canceled, by the way. And a dirty little secret: She isn’t going to get out. And another dirty little secret. Obama doesn’t want her to get out. I’ll tell you why Obama doesn’t want — (interruption) no, I’ll tell you why. She’s gonna win West Virginia, Kentucky. If she gets out now, for example, if she were to go on TV and say, ‘You know what, I’m so much in debt, and I want to unify my party, I quit,’ she still wins West Virginia and Kentucky after pulling out, how does that make Obama look? It’s like McCain, you know, Huckabee and Ron Paul still getting all these votes. I mean we’re not talking about it, but how does that make McCain look? Obama does not want that. He wants her to stay in beyond the next two primaries at least, where she is scheduled to win. But there is no unity that Obama is causing to happen even in his inner circle, much less his party. Back to my friend’s note: ‘Obama’s campaign is decidedly about race, elitism, and inexperience. Ninety-two percent of blacks voting in lockstep in several states and an increasingly tough time with the other colors of the rainbow, liberal elites are wild about the former law professor and people under 30, life’s neophytes are swooning at Obama, but blue-collar workers, the AARP crowd, the nonblack women, they are firmly in Hillary’s camp, and they threaten to never vote for Obama, the allegedly transcending public figure. The allegedly transcending public figure, Barack Obama, is no such thing. Polarizing, Rush, might be a better term for Obama than transcending.
‘On the other hand, your radio show has moved beyond simply reporting and analyzing what others say and do. Your program has progressed to reporting on your program. You have to now report on what the Drive-Bys are saying about your program. The media is obsessed with Operation Chaos, so much so that you’re required to report on their reports, which concern what you are saying and doing. Other media reports on others who make the news. Your program is the news, and you have to report on that. I don’t think you realize, Rush, just what your program has become. Your program, through your own efforts, your own brilliance, and your own creativity –‘ and of course I would have never described it that way, which is why I am reading the e-mail from my friend in Kansas City ‘– your program through your own efforts, brilliance, and creativity has been elevated, under your direction. It has assumed a loftier position than others in the media. You are making the news. They are reporting on you. So the question must be asked, who is the transcending figure, you or Barack Obama? Seinfeld broke new ground with a show about nothing. Now you have a show about your show. Have a good weekend. Rich.’ That’s pretty profound.
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RUSH: Audio sound bite time, ladies and gentlemen, Operation Chaos still being discussed. In fact, I just saw a link, US News & World Report has a post on Operation Chaos and how I’m just an egomaniacal blowhard tampering with the precious principles of our democracy, all for my ego, and I love it. The Drive-Bys are so jealous and rabid over this, because my friend from Kansas City is right. Folks, they despise the fact that they have to talk about what happens on this program. And so when they talk about what happens on this program, they do everything they can to denigrate it, besmirch it, impugn it and so forth. But they don’t understand, they cannot destroy this program because they did not make this program; you did. And try as they might, they will never be able to divide you and me. One thing that everybody needs to realize here, you want to talk about unity, I have it. I have forged unity with you, the audience of this program. It is an unbreakable bond because of mutual respect. The Drive-Bys can do all they want to try to tear it down, but they will not succeed because they had nothing to do with it. So Matthews, Chris Matthews, who is obsessed with Operation Chaos, Chris Matthews with 500,000 viewers on a good night, obsessed with Operation Chaos. Last night he had Howard Wolfson on, Mrs. Clinton’s communications director, and they had this exchange.
MATTHEWS: What do you think about Rush Limbaugh? Do you think he helped or hurt your candidate the other day?
WOLFSON: No, I think it had no impact whatsoever.
MATTHEWS: No impact?
WOLFSON: With all due respect.
MATTHEWS: He has no impact at all, Rush Limbaugh?
WOLFSON: I don’t believe that it had any —
MATTHEWS: Howard Wolfson says to Rush Limbaugh: ‘You have no impact.’
RUSH: See how excited Matthews is? What is Wolfson gonna say? He can’t say anything else. If Wolfson says, ‘Oh, yeah we’re thankful Limbaugh put us over the top,’ what is he saying? People that have no intention of voting for Hillary Clinton in November gave us our victory in Indiana. He’s not going to say that, and he makes that point in the next exchange.
WOLFSON: Here’s what I would suggest. People shouldn’t denigrate Senator Clinton’s accomplishments, and they shouldn’t denigrate her voters. That’s a mistake.
MATTHEWS: How’s that done? How they denigrate her voters?
WOLFSON: I think if you’re saying that the people who were voting for her were voting for her for some reason other than the fact —
MATTHEWS: Who said that?
WOLFSON: — they wanted her to win. Isn’t that what Rush Limbaugh is saying?
MATTHEWS: I was worse than you on that. I said anybody who uses their vote in that sick kind of way ought to be ashamed of themselves.
WOLFSON: I agree with you.
MATTHEWS: The Founding Fathers and all the soldiers that fought for this country’s freedom did not think a vote should be a joke or a mischief.
WOLFSON: I completely agree.
MATTHEWS: Howard and I agree.
WOLFSON: Serious business.
MATTHEWS: Howard Wolfson. It is serious business. This guy, this guy, you’re like one of these Japanese soldiers that’s still fighting in 1953.
RUSH: (laughing) They just hate it. They just hate it. And I’m getting blue in the face listening to all this, this pompous arrogance from these fraud and cheats in the Democrat Party who claim that they have never, oh, of course not, what is Cook County, Illinois, for crying out loud, what was West Virginia 1960? What did Algore try to do in 2000 by denying the absentee votes of military personnel serving overseas in the Florida recount? And they tell me that I’m tampering with precious democracy and we ought to be ashamed of ourselves when these people had a pretty large role in choosing our own nominee. CNN continues to misreport Operation Chaos. Last night on CNN’s newsroom, here is a portion of cohost Don Lemon’s report on Operation Chaos.
LEMON: Rush Limbaugh switching sides? Well, the conservative radio talk show host has been calling on Republicans to vote for Clinton in the primaries to keep the Democrats fighting. Now he’s urging Democratic superdelegates to vote for Barack Obama. He says Obama would be the weaker opponent for John McCain.
RUSH: All right, all right, you know what? I hate having to do this. I hate having to explain things that should be obvious, but I feel confident because of the recent history of Operation Chaos that explaining all this to them will still not matter, they still will not get it. Can we go back, wind the clock back to Wednesday morning. It is after the Indiana primary, the Obama campaign has credited Operation Chaos for Mrs. Clinton’s victory in Indiana. I am now faced with a question, as the commanding officer, as the commanding general of Operation Chaos, what’s next? Operation Chaos is not going away. I’m not canceling it. I’m not calling it off. What’s next? Well, I know that liberal Democrats, wherever they are to be found, Drive-By Media or elsewhere, find me repugnant, find me to be just unpalatable. So for all of these months of Operation Chaos, I have been suggesting that voters go out and keep Hillary Clinton alive for all the obvious reasons, and that’s succeeded, and it worked. But now it’s looking kind of bad because Obama had that big North Carolina victory. I know full well that the instinctive reaction to me among liberal Democrats and the Drive-Bys is do the opposite of what I say.
So I wanted to get out in front of them, I wanted to once again be on the cutting edge. So I thought I’d throw ’em a little bone, maybe confuse ’em a little, urge the supers, ‘Okay, gang, it’s time, go ahead, let Obama have it. You want to lose? Let him have it. Go vote for him. Proclaim your support for Obama right now.’ I said, ‘George McGovern wants you to, and the only reason McGovern wants Obama to get the nomination and win is because Obama is going to lose bigger than McGovern did and McGovern wants to see somebody in the Democrat Party lose by a larger margin than he did in 1972.’ I could not have made it more clear by telling the superdelegates to endorse Obama because it was a guaranteed loser for the Democrat Party. I was trying to tell ’em stop here, wait just a second, think about what you’re doing, knowing full well that when I tell ’em to go for Obama their instinctive reaction is to not go for Obama. And yet these shortsighted, no depth whatsoever in the Drive-Bys are so in the tank with their own action line, Obama, Obama, Obama, that they were throwing up their hands in celebration, ‘Finally Limbaugh joining us and wants the supers to vote for Obama.’ I want chaos. I want this going to the convention. Nothing has changed in the operational battle plan here.
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RUSH: To the phones, Ed in Lansing, Michigan, you’re first today on Open Line Friday. Nice to have you here, sir.
CALLER: Thank you very much. Mega male pattern baldness dittos to you, Rush.
RUSH: Thank you, sir, very much.
CALLER: Do you foresee any chance that Operation Chaos could possibly come to the state of Michigan so I can be part of it?
RUSH: Well, I don’t know what we could do in Michigan, on the ground in Michigan. The Operation Chaos playbook and the manual here shows that the only really relevant aspect of Michigan is in the question of whether or not they’ll be seated, those delegates will be seated along with the Florida delegation, and Democrat Party officials in Michigan have floated an idea that Mrs. Clinton would get 59 of the delegates and Obama would get 49 or some such thing, 69 — whatever the numbers are. She’d get just like a ten-point advantage, they’re hoping to compromise with this. The only way Operation Chaos, I think, could have an impact in Michigan would be to attempt to pressure Democrat Party officials in Michigan. And that would be a tough thing. Operation Chaos involves Republican operatives tampering in, messing around with, having fun in, Democrat elections, just as the Democrats have done for years with ours. I don’t know how we would get to the leaders of the Democrat Party in Michigan to alter their plan with the delegate seating at the convention.
CALLER: Well, whose responsibility was that in the Democrat leadership that even changed our date that caused this to happen?
RUSH: Well, it was the local Michigan Democrat Party that told Howard Dean basically (blowing a raspberry) you. ‘We want our primary early. We want it on January 15th, and that’s when we’re going to do it.’ That’s when the Democrat National Committee said, ‘If you do, then your delegates aren’t going to be seated,’ and Obama, trying to show his virtue, promptly pulled himself off the ballot. Now, I don’t know how you give somebody who wasn’t even on the ballot any delegates.
CALLER: Amen to that. Amen to that. All right, well, thanks, Rush.
RUSH: I’m going to tell you one thing. I’m going to make a prediction to you. The Obama campaign is a campaign that centers around his messianic ability to unite disparate groups of people. When we get to Denver, whatever it is, August 25th, I think, when they start their convention, the Florida and the Michigan delegations will be seated. You mark my words. They are not going to go to that convention risking the wrath of unseated delegates from Florida outside protesting, joining up with Recreate ’68 and Tent State, they’re not going to run that risk. Those delegations will be seated somehow. The meeting where this will be discussed, I doubt if it will be solved at this meeting, it will be discussed at the rules and bylaws committee on May 31st. By the way, Bill Hemmer had Congressman Adam Smith, I don’t know where he’s from, doesn’t say here. And of course not even I, El Rushbo, can know where all of these congressmen are from. There are 435 of them. (interruption) Democrat from Washington State? Yeah, because DC only has — okay. Joe says it’s Adam Smith, Democrat, Washington State. Bill Hemmer had him on the show on Fox yesterday afternoon, said, ‘Rush Limbaugh onto something here, when he talks about the rules committee at the end of May? Does Mrs. Clinton call the shots in that?’
SMITH: No, she doesn’t. The rules committee does, and she doesn’t control it any more than Senator Obama does, but critical fact here that everyone is blowing past, even if you count those elections and count those delegates, Senator Obama is still ahead in both popular vote and the delegates count. So even if they do get counted, coordinating that, he still wins, which is a fact that really hasn’t been pointed out very often.
RUSH: Oh, it’s pointed out every day, Adam. Here’s the question I have. Where is this mad dash of superdelegates to Obama? Where is it? After North Carolina and Indiana on Tuesday, that was said to be it, and the news reports since then, we’re back to square one, who’s going to tell Hillary to get out, is it going to be Dianne Feinstein, who’s going to go up to her and say, ‘Mrs. Clinton, get out.’ And now they’re talking about, well, maybe Obama could help her retire some of her campaign debt. That happens, that’s common, but her debt is pretty high plus the $11-and-a-half million that she’s loaned herself. It’s one thing to retire the campaign debt. It’s another thing to make Mrs. Clinton whole, and that’s something that she’s going to be very much interested in. So they’re talking about that. So in light of all these discussions about how Mrs. Clinton can get out of the race, why hasn’t there been a mad dash of superdelegates to Obama? I know the Drive-Bys are reporting that minds are made up but that they don’t want to announce before June the 3rd. AP talked to a number of the superdelegates. I still have the same question: ‘Why don’t they want to announce before June 3rd?’ Why don’t they? It’s ’cause they haven’t decided. And they can make up their minds, they can change their minds, as often as they want before they officially declare.
So these remaining primaries, they’re going to be a factor of some kind, and I guarantee you, the Clintons are out there, and I had a caller yesterday, ‘I can’t understand what’s happened to the Clintons. The old 1990s Clintons would have buried this guy with all kinds of untrue innuendo or who knows what else long ago but they can’t seem to lay a hand on the guy.’ Now, the guy does have an interesting characteristic about him, and he’s getting away with it. This has got to bug the Clintons because this is exactly what they got away with in the nineties. Obama has portrayed himself here as so messianic and so unique, unlike any politician who has ever trod the sacred soil of American politics. Therefore, any criticism is not to be answered. The criticism is to be waved away, dispatched as, ‘How dare you ask that question! Who are you?’ And so the person offering the criticism or asking the question is portrayed as some kind of a mortal kook or flimflam artist. This is the same way the Clintons got away with this back in the 1990s. You know, Bob Dole, poor old guy, in the debate, ‘Where’s the outrage? Where’s the outrage?’ Over the lack of morals and ethics. And Clinton’s out there saying, ‘Hey, Bob, no attack ever fed a hungry child.’ Oh, they swooned, what a brilliant response, and Dole who wanted to know where the hell is the outrage over the lack of morals and ethics and honesty and integrity in these people, was relegated to some kind of old man who is so out of it that he need not be listened to, and that’s what Obama’s benefiting from now.
So Jeremiah Wright, if you bring that up, ‘You racist, I don’t have to deal with you.’ ‘What about your angry wife?’ ‘How dare you insult my wife and my marriage. Who are you? You don’t even fit to be in my presence.’ ‘All right, what about your buddy, Bill Ayers, stomping all over the American –‘ ‘I am not going to listen to these distractions to my campaign. We have to unify this country. We’ve gotta move on. We gotta tax the CEOs; we gotta tax the middle class. I’m not listening to it,’ and of course the people that bring this stuff up are ridiculed and belittled. And that’s what Obama is getting away with now. So, what do the Clintons have? What’s left? I guarantee you that they’re staying in — (interruption) that’s right, they have Operation Chaos. It’s the only thing they’ve got; the only thing they’ve got is Operation Chaos. However, you know they’re waiting around for more. They’re waiting for Obama to step in it. They’re waiting for something else to happen. American Thinker has a piece by Ned Barnett called, ‘Hillary Clinton’s Nuclear Option.’ And his theory is that, until the first ballot in Denver in August, Hillary still has a chance here. And she knows it, and the Clintons do not quit. They do not quit.
What constitutes nuclear option? People are asking, ‘What do the Clintons have in their deck of cards left to play?’ Ned Barnett theorizes: ‘Senator Obama’s background will deliver that one ‘deal-killer’ issue that will turn the superdelegates away from their popular favorite, or the weight of unanswered criticism will collectively convince the superdelegates that Senator Obama can’t win, and that the Party needs a win more than it needs Obama.’ Those are long shots, folks, I mean there’s no question they’re long shots, but there may be enough out there with which to criticize Obama to make the nuclear option at least plausible. ‘What are the issues,’ writes Mr. Barnett in the American Thinker, ‘that could be included in a nuclear option?’ Well, here’s a sampling. ‘Comb the archives of Trinity Church for a DVD that shows both Reverend Wright making yet one more of his offensively over-the-top statements … and showing Senator Obama in the congregation, listening to his preacher. … Comb sources for home video of a speech that Senator Obama gave in conjunction with unrepentant Weatherman domestic terrorist Bill Ayers, and in this way, tie Senator Obama more tightly to this radical who’s helped to kill Americans on American soil. … Assuming that Tony Rezko is found guilty in his fraud trial, find some way to pressure prosecutors to offer Tony Rezko a sentencing deal in exchange for offering incriminating testimony that will tie Senator Obama far more closely to this shady political fundraiser.’
Now, all these are long shots, and they’ve all been tried. Various forms of these nuclear options have been tried, but the Clintons are still waiting for something to surface out there, or for him to just step in it. That’s the bottom line here. ‘That is Senator Clinton’s last chance. She has the opportunity, she has the strategy, and she and her advisors have the savvy to see how to raise these (and other) issues without leaving fingerprints. Independently, these individual issues are unlikely to be deal-killers, but taken together, they might give Democratic Party superdelegates reason to reconsider Senator Obama, and favor Senator Clinton. Senator Obama may declare victory on May 20th, but he may not have an easy three months until the Democratic National Convention,’ which is exactly what we want. Chaos. I can’t see it happening, because I can’t see these superdelegates — if nothing else happens between now and — I mean, let’s say something else does happen with Jeremiah Wright, follow me on this. This is hypothetically.
Let’s say something comes out, let’s say they do find a videotape of Wright going off on America and Obama is in there nodding his head. Just say they find that; let’s just say it’s there. Superdelegates then decide, ‘Okay, we can’t have that. We can’t win the election,’ they pull the delegation, the nomination from Obama. Folks. Somebody speculated earlier that to do that would be to destroy the Democrat Party, because the blacks would fissure forever. It’s possible. Blacks have stuck with the Democrats when they’ve done far worse to them than pulling the nomination from Obama, but I’m convinced that a lot of the vote in North Carolina and a lot of the black vote in Indiana went Obama, it was going to anyway, but it was really firm, it was really solid because they’re mad at bringing Jeremiah Wright out and trying to hurt Obama with Jeremiah Wright, and this was sort of a rebuke against everybody that tried to hurt Obama with Jeremiah Wright. So they have to be very, very careful. Leave this to Operation Chaos.