RUSH: I just saw a poll out there. (laughs) I didn’t catch the name of the poll. I’m not sure what poll it was. Forty-three percent of Americans believe that the CIA likely lied to Nancy Pelosi. Forty-one percent believe that she lied. More people think the CIA is lying than Nancy Pelosi is lying, and it’s demonstrably true that Pelosi is lying. The timeline of her statement, she’s been all over the place. But this is the result of eight years of demonization of the Bush administration and the CIA lying about weapons of mass destruction. What’s being missed — and there are many things about this that I think are being missed. Pelosi is just one person here, but is not Nancy Pelosi articulating the entire Democrat Party position?
It will drag it out a lot of years, which is what Pelosi would like, but the argument is the independent counsel law is bad. Use it against ’em! Use it against ’em and that’s how you end it. Then the truth commission is — and that’s why some people saying, ‘Let’s go ahead and do the truth commission.’ The problem with all of this, folks — whatever strategery you come up with, the problem with — is that the Democrats run the politics of this country right now. So whatever independent counsel is named, whatever truth commission is named, whatever they put together to investigate Pelosi is going to end up exonerating her at the end of the day and is gonna again focus blame on the CIA or Cheney or Bush, which is what the left wing radicals in the Democrat Party want the focus to remain on is Bush and Cheney.
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RUSH: To the audio sound bites, ladies and gentlemen. Nancy Pelosi. We talked about this earlier in the program. There are a bunch of people debating what ought to happen to her and some people think we need an independent counsel, a special prosecutor to look into her just the same way we had one look into Valerie Plame. That went on for two years, and they creamed the Bush administration and they creamed Cheney and they creamed Scooter Libby and Rove and everybody that was called up to the grand jury to testify. It made big, big, big news. The difference here is the Democrats run the political process. The advantage to doing an independent counsel is when you use the left’s tactics against them is how you get rid of the tactic. And nobody likes the independent counsel. So use it, get rid of it. That’s one theory.
Another theory says, ‘No, don’t do any of that. Let the politics play out. She’s already being harmed, and we want Nancy Pelosi to be the face of the Democrat Party in congressional elections in November.’ The third option is truth commission. She wants the truth commission to look into Bush and Cheney and to obviously absolve herself. But two of these three kick the problem down the road and do nothing to her any time soon. The third one does nothing to her but leaves her in place — to twist, ostensibly. I want to add a fourth element to this and that’s just it’s not just Pelosi here that’s lying about all this; it’s the whole Democrat Congress. And it’s not just lying about what the CIA said regarding waterboarding and torture and who knew what when. The Democrats lied about Iraq. They all voted for the war in Iraq and then said they were misled by the CIA and misled and lied to by Bush. So Pelosi, she’s just the figurehead for this, but the Drive-Bys desperately want to hold onto Pelosi. They don’t throw their own under the bus. This morning on MSNBC, Morning Joe, Scarborough’s show, the guests were Pat Buchanan and Bob Shrum. And they had a discussion here about Pelosi accusing the CIA of lying to her. Buchanan said, ‘Would you agree that Nancy Pelosi may not be telling us the truth?’
SHRUM: No, I’ve known her for 40 years.
BUCHANAN: Okay! (laughing)
SCARBOROUGH: (guffawing)
SHRUM: I have no doubt whatsoever she’s telling the truth. I know her personally —
BUCHANAN AND SCARBOROUGH: (laughing)
SCARBOROUGH: Well…
SHRUM: — and she’s a person of incredible integrity!
SCARBOROUGH: She’s been caught! You work for John Edwards.
SHRUM: Yeah! I told what I thought about him in a book and got attacked for it. Now, let me tell you something. The CIA lied us into a war that has killed —
SCARBOROUGH: Okay.
SHRUM: — hundreds of thousands of people in Iraq.
SCARBOROUGH: Okay so —
SHRUM: Do they lie? Yes! They sure do.
RUSH: So you see how this is playing out, CIA lied about Iraq, weapons of mass destruction. I’ve known Pelosi 40 years. She doesn’t lie. But the CIA does. Mark Penn, pollster for Hillary Clinton, Democrat, was also a guest on the same show. The cohost Mika Brzezinski said, ‘Mark, first of all what should Pelosi have done? This is a mess. It’s a mess. What could be done now?’
PENN: Well, it is a mess. I think Pelosi would be best off just having a do-over here.
BRZEZINSKI: Mmmph!
PENN: Just saying, ‘Look, it was six, seven years ago. Uh, I don’t want to contest the CIA. I don’t want to divide the country on this issue,’ and just pull back from the whole position.
BRZEZINSKI: So should she apologize?
PENN: You know, I don’t think she should apologize. I think she should pull back.
BRZEZINSKI: All right!
PENN: She has to do a do-over.
RUSH: (laughing) You just have to laugh. When the Democrats screw up they get a do-over! It’s like when the CBS producer in the 2004 presidential campaign asked John Kerry a question, I forget what it was, but his answer was rambling and nonsensical. And the CBS reporter and producer said, ‘Senator, do you want to try that again?’ and he did a take two on his answer. And now Pelosi gets a do-over, or she needs a do-over. But not all loyal Democrats are supporting her. On This Week with George Stephanopoulos, George Will and James Carville talk about Pelosi. George Will said, ‘The Bush administration’s gone; people addicted to attacking it really have to get over that. Her charges are so shrill, no specifics, and so grave, that they turned something that was arguably advisable — a truth commission — into something that’s becoming mandatory to find out whether or not we can trust the CIA. That’s a very serious charge that she made.’
CARVILLE: You know, seven years ago the CIA says something, she says she and Senator Graham and Senator Rockefeller say something, I just… I don’t think that Democrats really want to be at war with the CIA. We had that, you know, before, and that’s not particularly productive. And I love the Speaker. She’s a great family lady and everything else. I probably wouldn’t have done that. (cackling)
RUSH: Throws her under the bus there. ‘We don’t need to be at war with the CIA.’ Panetta is the guy to keep an eye on here, as I said long ago. He’s loyal to the Clintons, and obviously now loyal to Obama. And he went out last week and said, ‘We didn’t lie,’ and everybody is saying, ‘Well, let’s see the proof here.’ Nobody needs the proof. Everybody knows she’s making it up because she’s changed her story four or five times. John Boehner, Sunday morning on CNN, was asked a question. ‘Where is this going? There’s some who say the Speaker’s been dishonest. The Speaker is accusing the CIA now of lying to Congress. It’s interesting theater here in Washington, but does it serve any policy purpose?’
BOEHNER: Lying to the Congress of the United States is a crime, and if the Speaker is accusing the CIA and other intelligence officials of lying or misleading the Congress, then she should come forward with evidence and turn that over to the Justice Department so they can be prosecuted. And if that’s not the case, I think she ought to apologize to our intelligence professionals around the world.
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RUSH: This whole Nancy Pelosi business, folks, once again everybody’s being diverted into a discussion on Iraq, into a discussion on the CIA, when the focus needs to be on Nancy Pelosi and the Democrat Party. There is no question that she’s lying about this. Back on May the 8th, the Politico ran a story, ‘More Democrats Briefed on Waterboarding,’ and there’s a PDF file that accompanies the story. ‘Apparently members of Congress were briefed about ‘waterboarding’ by the CIA at least forty times since 2002.’ If you look at the PDF file, ‘some of the biggest blowhards in the Democrat party on the list, including John Murtha, John Rockefeller, Jerrold Nadler and even Keith Ellison,’ from Minnesota is on the list. If you click on the PDF file, all kinds of Democrats were informed and briefed by the CIA about waterboarding at least 40 times.
This is not just about Pelosi. It’s about all the Democrats who are out there trying to say the CIA lied to them, just like they’re out trying to say that Bush lied to them about Iraq and the CIA lied and Bush misused intelligence on weapons of mass destruction. It really gets frustrating to see how easily all this can be diverted from what actually is true. Let’s look at Pelosi, for example, and let’s look at the House of Representatives. From 2002 all the way to 2005 — well, to the present — the House of Representatives voted to authorize the CIA’s budget, every year, year after year. Now, 2002 and 2005 is while this interrogation program was underway, supposedly where all these extreme interrogation techniques were being used that Nancy Pelosi didn’t know about and that Murtha didn’t know about and all this horrible torture was going on they didn’t know about. They knew about it, they were told about waterboarding 40 times. They voted for the CIA budget throughout this period.
In other words, they voted to fund the program. They funded the interrogation program. They funded the black site prisons. They funded the rendition programs. They funded the pictures of water that they were using in the interrogation techniques. And even by her own account, Pelosi knew it was going on for years. There was never a day when she couldn’t have called George Bush to threaten to cut off the funding if they didn’t stop all this torture and all this enhanced interrogation. All these Democrats are the same way. They were all briefed on this. The Intelligence Committee in the House got briefed on all this, and I tell you, the Politico story from May 8th with the PDF story here on all of these Democrats that were briefed about waterboarding by the CIA, 40 times, and the Politico, of course, not something sympathetic to George Bush or even the CIA here. So there’s no question she’s lying. The whole Democrat Party is lying about this. The whole thing is a ruse. They wanted to be let off the hook for voting for the Iraq war, Bush lied, people died, they were misled.
They knew everything going on. They had the same intel that Bush got about weapons of mass destruction. They just succeeded here in politicizing all this stuff ex post facto to make it appear that they’re the innocent guardians of the people’s welfare, and they got lied to by the shifty CIA. I’m telling you, the lying that’s going on about all of this is happening right in the House of Representatives and the Democrat caucus in the Speaker’s office on down to various committees, and the same thing over in the Senate.
By the way, the Wall Street Journal is reporting what the Draconian new CAFE standards are going to be tomorrow. ‘The Obama administration plans to direct the EPA and the Department of Transportation to jointly raise fuel economy standards and reduce greenhouse gas pollution so as to raise the overall fuel economy of cars to 35 miles per gallon by 2016, four years faster than federal law requires. Right now the CAFE standard of 35 miles per gallon per car –‘ well, per fleet is set for 2020. They’re going to move it up to 2016. Now, the way this works, the CAFE standards, you have to average the kind of cars every manufacturer makes. So if you’re going to make some SUVs that get 14 or 12 you gotta have some smart cars that get 40 or 50, and then it has to average 35 miles per gallon a car by 2016. This coincides with the Obama administration taking over the automobile industry, Chrysler and General Motors at least. Ford is going to be subject to it as well.
So if you fashion a big car, if you want an SUV, you better go buy it now and keep it for a while because it would be grandfathered. They can’t make you get rid of it, but they’ll come up with incentive programs, they’ll call it the clunker program, buy you out of your clunker or what have you. But I guarantee you, these people who despise your individual liberty and freedom are going to do everything they can to get you in these dangerous, risky, experimental little environmentally safe cars that are not going to make a bit of difference to the climate or the overall health of the planet in any way, shape, manner or form.
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CONANT: It’s not up to Rush Limbaugh. It’s not up to any Republicans, it’s not up to Newt Gingrich, whether or not Nancy Pelosi’s going to remain Speaker. It’s up to congressional Democrats, whether or not they think she has a credibility problem.
RUSH: You know, you gotta give most of these Republican guys credit. They resist the temptation to throw me and Cheney and others overboard when the Drive-Bys give them the chance to do it.
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RUSH: Barbara, I’m glad you called. You’re on the Rush Limbaugh program. Hello.
CALLER: Hi, Rush. Thank you for taking my call.
RUSH: Yes, madam.
CALLER: I just want to say God bless you. My comment is about Nancy Pelosi. Rush, I grew up — I’m 56 years old — I grew up surrounded by Democrats and liberals, and the only positive thing that came out of that, Rush, was I developed a good gut feeling, really good intuition.
RUSH: Well, but you have that anyway as a woman. I never doubt a woman’s intuition.
CALLER: I did, Rush, but I didn’t realize it. I didn’t realize it. However, watching Nancy Pelosi from the first time she came out publicly speaking about the enhanced interrogation techniques, up until the last minute when she started blaming the Bush administration, I was waiting for that to come, by the way. I was waiting for the Bush administration to come after the CIA thing. And anybody with a little bit of an open mind and a little bit of sense, of common sense, could just listen to her words and watch her expressions, and you know she’s lying. She is outright lying, Rush. And I believe she is a disgrace to the House seat. I believe she is a disgrace to her party. And I also believe she is a disgrace to women in government, and she needs to step down.
RUSH: Well, the Democrats don’t look at her in that way at all, any of them. Nancy Pelosi had a book out called Reigns of Power, whatever the hell it was. It sold, I think, five copies. Nobody cares. To those of us who follow this stuff on a daily basis, we know who she is, but most Americans don’t and they couldn’t care less. You know, the media’s not demonized her over the years the way they did Newt Gingrich or Trent Lott or any of the other Republican congressional leaders, and so people don’t really know who she is.
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: I think the longer she’s there, because of the characteristics that you assign to her, the greater the odds are that we can benefit from her being there as the face of the Democrat Party. It’s going to be up to Republicans to keep her there. It’s going to be up to Republicans to keep her in the media, to keep her story alive here because the Democrats aren’t going to want to. Now, there may be some pockets of Democrats that want to get rid of her because they don’t like her personally, I wouldn’t know. But I don’t think Rahm Emanuel likes her that much. I don’t think Steny Hoyer likes her that much. But I also know the Democrats do not throw their own overboard. I mean, do you realize how rare — I told you at the time, videotape this, DVR it, keep it for your archives, the Blagojevich thing, because you don’t see this. You just don’t see the Democrats getting rid of their own. You see the Democrats blame everybody else when one of them gets in trouble. I don’t see a whole lot of Democrats climbing on board the anti-Pelosi bandwagon here. So all of what you say I think a lot of people probably do agree with, those who know who she is.