RUSH: Well, another day, another Republican turncoat. We have more so-called conservatives and Republicans abandoning the cause, seeking approval from the left. It just seems to be an endless tide. Greetings, my friends. Rush Limbaugh, the EIB Network and the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies. Great to be with you. The phone number if you want to join us today, 800-282-2882. The e-mail address, ElRushbo@eibnet.com.
The oil price continues to fall today. It’s 129, yesterday, 127, 128 in some places today. I’ve been monitoring it for you. Totally unexpected. There’s now panic in some Drive-By Media reporting over this, that the price is falling. It’s panic from the standpoint of the oil companies and the oil business, ‘Oh, no, the prices are falling.’
At any rate, ladies and gentlemen, Scott McClellan with a big tell-all book; the guy that never voiced one complaint; never resigned in protest; never told anybody how he felt. What you have here is many things, but among them a classic illusion of what I always say of how Republicans, slash, conservatives end up going to Washington and the Washington political and social culture just swallows ’em up. They’ll throw anybody under the bus, even their own grandmothers, to have a seat of power with the libs, get their approval, not just Scott McClellan. He’s the worst example of it lately, but we’ve got a bunch of quasi pseudo-conservative journalists — I’m going to talk about this at length today — who are writing pieces all over the place now, all over the Web. There’s one, Alex Castellanos, a Republican strategist, who is all over CNN these days.
He had a piece at National Review Online yesterday about how we Republicans have gotta understand something. We have to understand the American people love government, they love the function, so we’ve gotta redefine it and continue to use the term. I’m paraphrasing. And he says, government is at the end of your driveway, government is in your house, government is in your church, the way we govern ourselves. But we can do it better than having the government in Washington do it. But it’s still adopting the terminology of the left, and the terminology of the left is very, very important. It’s persuasive, it’s propagandized, and it’s just another example of how we’re supposed to accept the premise of the left. I’ll get into that in greater detail as the program unfolds. Karl Rove last night was on the Fox News Channel, Hannity & Colmes, and was asked specifically about the McClellan book. We have the first of two sound bites here.
ROVE: He says that following a meeting Scooter and I visited in 2005. Well, Scooter and I visited all the time. I don’t know what the particular meeting in question was about. I know what it wasn’t about, which was it was not about Plame and Wilson. He was the vice president’s chief of staff, and, as a result, we had a lot of business, and I think it’s frankly maybe a sign of irresponsibility for Scott to sort of suggest that because he saw the two of us meet and he didn’t happen to be in the meeting he somehow knows what the meeting was about.
COLMES: What about this specific charge that he’s claiming that you misled him about your level of involvement in the Valerie Plame case?
ROVE: That’s simply not true.
RUSH: Hannity then piped up and said, ‘If he really felt this way, why didn’t he leave earlier?’
ROVE: This doesn’t sound like Scott, it really doesn’t, not the Scott McClellan I’ve known for a long time. Second of all, it sounds like somebody else, sounds like a left-wing blogger. Second of all, you’re right, if he had these moral qualms, he should have spoken up about them, and, frankly, I don’t remember him speaking up about these things. I don’t remember a single word. There were people on the White House staff, colleagues of mine, who had doubts about this or that policy —
COLMES: We’re out of time.
ROVE: — they spoke out, but this doesn’t sound like Scott, frankly.
RUSH: Sounds like a liberal blogger. It really does. Somebody got hold of him. I’ve never met him. I don’t know Scott McClellan. I just know him from his work, which I never thought was anything spectacular. I thought the guy was a little wussy in front of the press, and I remember back when he was the press secretary, a lot of us sitting here, ‘Why don’t these guys fight back? The liberals and the Democrats are out trying to destroy this administration. Why don’t they fight back? Why don’t they just reject some of the premises?’ The idea that McClellan writes the press wasn’t hard enough on Bush? I mean this is absurd! All of this is just absurd. Francis Fragos Townsend, who was the homeland security advisor, now a CNN commentator, was on CNN, Anderson Cooper 180 last night and he asked her this. ‘What’s your reaction to the Scott McClellan book?’
TOWNSEND: People need to understand that as an advisor to the president I or Scott have an obligation, a responsibility to voice concerns on policy issues. Scott never did that on any of these issues as best I can remember and as best I know from my White House colleagues.
COOPER: Never spoke out?
TOWNSEND: No. And so for him to do this now frankly strikes me as self-serving, disingenuous, and unprofessional.
RUSH: Pretty good way to summarize this. McClellan also says that he was very upset that the president never really governed, he was just in a permanent campaign. Now, excuse me, but it was the Clintons who exercised the Oval Office as a campaign war room for eight years. The Clinton campaign constantly was in campaign mode, reelection mode. To say this about George W. Bush, man, if this White House was in a constant campaign mode, they were pretty bad at it. They were pretty damn bad at it. Campaign mode means you’re out there trying to persuade people. There was none of that. There was no fighting the left; there was no fighting the Dems; there were no ideological battles. I chronicled here how they had a policy of not doing that because they didn’t want to be confrontational and they didn’t want to be contentious. They were trying to put together this new-tone business where they were working with Democrats. I mean, hell’s bells, here’s Ted Kennedy writing the education bill. What was that, no child’s behind left alone or whatever it is?
Have you seen this UN story? I mean that’s literally what this is, ‘no child’s behind left alone.’ ‘UN peacekeepers and international aid workers from 23 organizations have engaged in sexual exploitation of children, including some as young as 6, in Haiti, Ivory Coast and South Sudan, according to a report by Save the Children, a British-based aid agency. … The 28-page report — based on interviews with 250 children ages 10 to 17 — concluded that it is impossible to know the extent of the problem, since few victims report abuse and few UN agencies or private charities compile data. … UN peacekeepers have been ‘identified as a particular source of abuse,’ especially in Haiti and Ivory Coast, according to the report. … Those cases follow a spate of reports on sexual abuse by UN peacekeepers and aid workers stretching back to Cambodia in the early 1990s.’ What, that’s it? You get a report? Well, I know Ban Ki-moon is going to look into it, whoop-de-do.
Meanwhile, these clowns send somebody from the United Nations to this country to inspect racism because of what’s happening to Obama? Screw these people! They’re out there abusing kids, these little blue helmets, and we know this is not new. They have been doing this for a long time. This is the left’s Abu Ghraib, literally. Abu Ghraib. This is far worse than what went on in Abu Ghraib. This is children! Where’s the trial? Where’s the investigation? Oh, no, no, no, we get a report. We get a report. And we’re supposed to bend over forward and grab the ankles for this bunch and say this bunch cares about the world? It’s just maddening. Maybe Scott McClellan should go work for this bunch. Maybe he can get to the bottom of it. Scott McClellan knows so damn much about what went on in places, and he really had the honor and the integrity to stand up and say, ‘No mas, I’m leaving. I can’t stand to work in such a dishonorable place, Mr. President, I’m getting out.’ The truth is he was fired and that’s why he’s mad about this. He was replaced by Tony Snow because he was not that good. David Gregory gets close to it, MSNBC Live, DNCTV this morning, anchor Tamron Hall talking to Stretch Gregory, said, ‘A lot of people are wondering how much of this book is about payback, and that Scott McClellan believes that he was put out there and encouraged to repeat a lie. You mentioned credibility but the other word payback has been coming up this morning.’
GREGORY: He was very angry about this leak episode, so clearly angry about it, angry about his credibility being hurt, and I think that’s clearly part of what he wants to set straight in this book, what the backstory was for all of that. There appears to me to be a kind of disillusion with the White House and with this president that tended to build over time within the White House, but I just have to say that all the time that I covered McClellan going back to the 2000 campaign, never did he leave the impression that he felt this way at the time, not privately, not publicly, which is why I think this book surprises so many.
RUSH: I wouldn’t be surprised if some liberal editor or publisher at whatever company published this book got hold of this guy. Rove is right. This is exactly the kind of stuff that you read on the blogs, and I’ve gone and checked out the Democrat blogs today, you know what? They’re not particularly worked up about it because this is not new stuff. ‘We’ve known this since 2000. We don’t care about this. You guys are just figuring this out. We’ve known this all along,’ blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Very angry about the leak episode. That’s one of the things that has been excerpted I guess or that he’s talked about, the Valerie Plame leak episode. He claims that Rove and Libby lied to him. He claims that he saw Rove and Libby go into a meeting by themselves and he never knew what went on in that meeting. He never knew what was said, but he assumes that it was about the leak. The leak didn’t come from the White House. The leak came from Richard Armitage. Here we have one of the most egregious, outrageous abuses of the legal system, this whole trial, based on finding out who leaked the name of Valerie Plame when it was already known by the prosecutor before he started the trial. It was Richard Armitage. Libby gets convicted and so forth. McClellan is out there (crying) and Bush didn’t know. Bush was also fooled by this. My memory, folks, is that McClellan was a little doughboy standing up there.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: There’s another theory going around about Scott McClellan, and this is by Lee Cary from the American Thinker; ‘Scott McClellan’s book is making big waves in the last election for Texas governor. The Republican Texas comptroller, Carole Keeton Strayhorn, who used the slogan ‘One Tough Grandma’ based on her cost-saving reputation as comptroller, ran as an independent Republican,’ a la like a Joe Lieberman, ‘against the incumbent Governor Rick Perry. Rick Perry was Bush’s lieutenant governor and he became governor when Bush moved to Washington. Carole Keeton Strayhorn started her campaign with a flurry, faded fast and got trounced in the election, receiving virtually no support from the GOP.’ Scott McClellan is Carole Keeton Strayhorn’s son, and Mr. Cary here believes that there is payback, that the book is payback from the family for McClellan’s mom being ignored in her campaign for governor of the state of Texas.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Here’s what happened to McClellan. This is what I think happened. I don’t know how, I just know that this is not new; it’s not the first time. What liberals do, they search out people like McClellan so they can trash Republicans and conservatives. I mean, look at John Dean. John Dean, now a huge star on what, MSNBC? David Gergen. David Rodham Gergen used to be a fairly conservative Republican, roots back to Reagan. Now look at him. He’s up there at the Kennedy School and he’s on CNN, and his purpose is to bash Republicans because they, the Republicans, they went too far right, or they went too far south, or they got too extreme or whatever. And all these reasonable wise men decided that they could no longer be part of where the Republican Party was going. Richard Armitage, Colin Powell. This is the DC culture. Liberals seek these people out, and they do it with their newspapers, they try to soften up Supreme Court justices with puff pieces in the style section and so forth. These people, now they’re treated like liberal elites because they see the light.
Folks, if I may be candid, this is what so frustrated me about McCain for all these last six years. McCain was trying to do the same thing. He was trying to be treated as an elite by the liberals, and how did he do it? By trashing his own party; by trashing his own president; by being more critical of his own party than he ever was our enemies; by making deals with them. He almost quit the Republican Party in 2004, whatever it was. It was he who approached John Kerry. People ask me, ‘Why do you have problems with McCain?’ Why do I have problems with Scott McClellan? It’s not quite the same thing, but the liberals seek these people out. Now, if McCain had decided not to run for president, he would be most-favored person status, he would be one of the wisest wise men on all these cable network shows but now they gotta take him out ’cause he’s jumped back. He hasn’t jumped back, they just think he has. This is a clear illustration here of how this all works. McClellan can sit there, ‘Okay, fine, the left’s going to take care of me fine now. George Bush fired me and left me out to dry, replaced me with Tony Snow, but the left is going to take care of me. For the rest of my life I am a credible expert on the Republican Party and the Bush administration. The left will never criticize me anymore.’ Some people will trade their souls for that.