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RUSH: Do you know, ladies and gentlemen, that I am the reason Republicans are going soft on Sonia Sotomayor? John King this morning on CNN Live.

KING: Republicans, though, will tell you — members of the committee will tell you they — privately that they felt hamstrung by the initial reaction: the Rush Limbaugh and the others saying she’s a racist she’s a reverse racist. And they feel if they get all aggressive, with her that it will backfire.

RUSH: So apparently the Republican members of the committee are telling State-Run Media reporters that my initial reaction, calling her a reverse racist and a bigot, is holding them back. They’re afraid if they attack her… I think they’re doing a pretty good job going after her, to tell you the truth. I think they’ve been laying it out really well. I think they’re illustrating the woman is… It’s not my term but somebody suggested she’s committing — oh! I’ve got it in the stack here on some blog. There’s a liberal. Ed Whelan posted this at National Review Online in their blogs. A liberal law professor at Georgetown is just livid at Sotomayor for not being honest about her liberalism, and he says it’s possible she’s committing perjury up there. She’s lying so much about what she has said in the past or what she meant when she said it in the past than how she’s translating it today, that some lib lawyers and scholars and professors are angry as hell that she is lying and hiding her true liberalism. This is actually good news. I pointed out yesterday. What a message for the Republican Party. The left, like Sotomayor, knows she can’t get confirmed if she tells us who she really is and what she really believes.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: This is incredible. This was on Hardball last night, Chris Matthews talking to Roger Simon of The Politico about the Sotomayor hearings. Matthews says, ‘Lindsey Graham loves John McCain, supported him so dutifully and wonderfully, but everybody knows that John can have a hot temper. A lot of people have hot tempers, but to say that he has a hot temper and yet she needs anger management? Sorry, he was tutoring her today. That was condescending. He was telling somebody up at the Supreme Court, ‘Now, you’ve got work on this.”

SIMON: He was doing that because Rush Limbaugh beat him up last night (sic) after he was too nice to Sotomayor —

MATTHEWS: (interrupting) Oh, really?

SIMON: — in his opening comments.

MATTHEWS: (shouting over guest) That’s even the worse about it. (cross-talk)

SIMON: Oh yeah!

MATTHEWS: You mean he cares?

SIMON: You know, Rush Limbaugh is saying i-if Lindsey Graham says —

MATTHEWS: Wow.

SIMON: — y-you’re going to make it unless you have a meltdown, what’s the point of the hearings? He said, ‘C-come on, get some guts. So Lindsey Graham had — yah —

MATTHEWS: (interrupting) You know, that’s the worst condescending thing you’ve ever said on this show, Roger.

SIMON: What?

MATTHEWS: You’re saying that Lindsey Graham takings orders from Rush Limbaugh!

SIMON: Oh, a Republican Senator from South Carolina —

MATTHEWS: (cross-talk) Awwww, gosh.

SIMON: — can afford to tick off Limbaugh?

MATTHEWS: (screaming) Lindsey’s (garbled). I won’t stoop so low as to accuse him of being a Dittohead.

SIMON: (chortling)


RUSH: Let’s go back and play cut 13 to put this in perspective. This is John King and this is this
morning on CNN Live.

KING: Republicans, though, will tell you — members of the committee will tell you they — privately that they felt hamstrung by the initial reaction: the Rush Limbaugh and the others saying she’s a racist she’s a reverse racist. And they feel if they get all aggressive, with her that it will backfire.

RUSH: I, single-handedly, am in charge of the Republicans on the committee and their interrogation techniques. Now, there’s a show on MSNBC named after a horse, The Ed Show. A talking horse. I think they brought the horse out of retirement to host the show. And the horse, Mister Ed, is talking to a former CIA officer, Jack Rice, about the Sotomayor hearings; and Mister Ed, the horse, says to the CIA officer, ‘I think you come from a profession where keeping your cool is pretty important. Did she pass the test today?’

RICE: It’s about scoring political points right now. And if what they’re doing is pandering to Rush Limbaugh, then Sessions may have won.

HORSE: Well…

RICE: But if he’s trying to actually convince the rest of America that he’s actually mainstream, he may have a very serious problem.

RUSH: They’re actually talking about Jeff Sessions there, and Jeff Sessions was pandering to me. (laughing) I have not spoken to these guys about any of this. I’ve not attempted to call ’em. I never do. So (sigh) imagine… I didn’t watch any of this last night. I actually had a fun dinner party last night and I didn’t watch any of this stuff. I don’t watch any of this stuff at night anymore. I can’t handle it. It stopped being informative and educational a long time ago. So, as you know, I pay people to do this, to watch it so we can have the audio sound bites. This is the first I’ve heard of this stuff. It’s getting so routine that I’m responsible for everything Republicans do, I don’t even get e-mail from people telling me about it anymore. So I just hear about it when I have the audio sound bites. Grab a couple phone calls here on the first pitch ’cause I want to broom that we’re going to get into health care here pretty soon

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Speaking of Sonia Sotomayor, I haven’t been paying much attention to hearings this morning because, frankly, the whole thing grates on me. She’s committing… She’s not being honest about who she is and what she thinks, and that’s a personality trait that just drives me batty, drives me nuts. You know, folks, if I were advising these guys like the press thinks I am, you know what they’d be asking? ‘Ms. Sotomayor, do you come before the committee with a chip on your shoulder? Do you think that the United States of America is unfair and unjust? And do you view your role as a judge to level the playing field between the majority and the minority?’ If I were running this show, if I were feeding these guys questions, if they’re trying to keep me happy, that’s what they would ask. Let’s just get to the nub of it, here. Let’s get to the nub of who she is. ‘Are you angry at the current structure of the United States? Do you think it is unfair? When you read the Constitution, do you think it needs to be changed anywhere?’

You know, instead of focusing all these speeches and cases, get to the nub of who she is! Now, the press is saying, ‘Well, they probably woulda done that if Limbaugh hadn’t piped up and made ’em afraid to go after her. They wouldn’t do it. I don’t think they would ask those kind of questions because they would be outside the bounds of propriety.’ But there is one question that they haven’t asked, and that is: What videos does she rent? That’s a standard-operating question. They asked it of Clarence Thomas. Remember that, Long Dong Silver or whatever? They went out there and they asked all these Republican nominees — or they don’t even ask. They’ll just send these liberal activists in there to video shops, Blockbuster and so forth. Now you search on the Internet at Amazon and Barnes & Noble or whatever to find out what videos she has. But they haven’t done that with Sotomayor. Another example of the double standard. And where is it? I want to see the list of DVDs and movies that she rents. And until we know that, we can’t have the vote.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: All right, if the State-Run Media is saying that the Republicans on the committee are conducting themselves in order to pander to me, to not anger me, to not be criticized by me, the Republicans are not being as hard-hitting because they don’t want to be associated with me, yet they are pandering to me. If that’s happening on the Republican side, I have a question. Is the nominee herself, Sonia Sotomayor, changing her positions to win my approval, too? Somebody needs to ask the Drive-Bys and the State-Run Media this. If the Republicans are tailoring their approach in order to pander to me and win my approval, is she changing all of her positions, which she’s doing, to win my approval, too? Is her testimony influenced by me as well? I mean, this woman sounds like an originalist. This woman sounds like Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. She is stepping away from her own words in speeches.

Listen to the Washington Post today: ”Sotomayor Emphasizes Objectivity’ — Nominee Explains ‘Wise Latina’ Remark.’ And get this one: ‘On the second day of her confirmation hearings, she stressed the primacy of legal precedents and distanced herself from her most controversial public remark,’ the wise Latina thing. How do you get away from yourself? She distanced herself from herself. In other words, she’s making it up. She’s lying about it. By the way, I’m going to be praising Lindsey Grahamnesty in mere moments for something he said yesterday. Ed Whelan posted at National Review Online’s The Corner: ”Liberal Law Professors Against Sotomayor’ — At least one liberal law professor was ‘completely disgusted’ by Judge Sotomayor’s testimony. In an online debate on the Federalist Society’s website, Georgetown law professor Mike Seidman writes: ‘I was completely disgusted by Judge Sotomayor’s testimony today.”

By the way, you know what? How did Colin Powell pronounce my name the other day, Limbow? Okay. Limbow. So from now on she’s Sotomayor. See how long it takes them to hit me on that. Colin Powell called me Limbow, and they think Colin Powell is the end of the world, he’s everything great, so from now on she’s not Sotomayor anymore, she’s Sotomayor.

Here we go. This is Mike Seidman, online debate, Georgetown law professor: ‘I was completely disgusted by Judge Sotomayor’s testimony today. If she was not perjuring herself, she is intellectually unqualified to be on the Supreme Court. If she was perjuring herself, she is morally unqualified. How could someone who has been on the bench for seventeen years possibly believe that judging in hard cases involves no more than applying the law to the facts? … Perhaps Justice Sotomayor should be excused because our official ideology about judging is so degraded that she would sacrifice a position on the Supreme Court if she told the truth.’

This guy, this liberal law professor is upset because she won’t be who she is, and he said if she’s not perjuring herself, she’s intellectually unqualified. And if she is perjuring herself, she’s morally unqualified. Now, let me tell you what this really means. Here we have a radical in the mold of Barack Obama, Sonia Sotomayor. This woman does not have the courage or the bravery to tell the committee and the people of America what she really thinks when answering these questions, and in doing so she see hiding her radicalism, she’s hiding her leftist leanings, and liberals are a little bit upset about this. What it tells us, if the Republican Party is paying attention, and we could go back and cite also a recent Gallup poll, 40% of Americans, 41 identify themselves as conservatives. Twenty-five percent, 35% moderate, independent, 21% liberal. There’s no reason we should be losing elections. The only reason we are is because the Republican Party is dominated by people who think like McCain and Colin Powell. But this is a conservative country.

If this country were in the image of Obama and Sotomayor, they would have no problem being honest about what they’re doing. But Obama doesn’t even have the guts to tell people what he’s doing. He’s telling them he’s creating jobs, not destroying them. He’s telling them, well, we gotta go through a little transformation here, yes, we’re going to move to green energy, we’re gonna lose some jobs, like in St. Louis at Boeing, they might lose a thousand jobs out of 16,000 employed there, in the St. Louis area. And Boeing is making high-tech defense systems in St. Louis, and Obama, well, we gotta get rid of that, we’re moving into green technology and of course we’re going to lose jobs here but we’re going to gain two for every one we — it’s the exact opposite. We’re going to lose two jobs for every one we create in the green business and the green business is going to be artificially created because there’s no market for it, so it’s going to be a big loser.

But Obama, he’s not telling people that he’s destroying the economy, he’s not telling people of the pain this is all causing, that it’s intentional. He’s trying to make people think all this is going to work. They don’t have the guts. My point is this is wide open for a true, red-blooded conservative Republican to walk in here and start immediately contrasting conservatism and the founders of this country with what’s happening now, especially with all they’re proposing so fast. It’s a golden opportunity. This is not a time to be depressed. It’s not a time to be down because we don’t have the votes here or the votes there. This is golden. Liberals, they don’t even like to be called ‘liberals.’ Of course ‘progressive’ is the new term.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Abbeville, Louisiana, this is Pam. Nice to have you with us on the EIB Network. Hi.

CALLER: Hi. Can you hear me?

RUSH: Yeah!

CALLER: Okay. My question is what difference does it make what Sotomayor rents, watches? What difference does that make to her character, who she is, why she should be put…?

RUSH: Oh, oh, okay. Well, you are relatively new to the political process or maybe you’re not old enough to have seen or paid attention to previous confirmation hearings of Republican nominees.

CALLER: No, I’m pretty new to it.

RUSH: Okay.

CALLER: After Obama got into office is when I really started getting in it.

RUSH: That’s believable. All right, now —

CALLER: I know.

RUSH: –, in 1986, I believe it was, Ronald Reagan nominated a brilliant man by the name of Robert Bork to sit on the Supreme Court. The liberals immediately went to the video stores in the neighborhood in Washington where he lived trying to get a list of the DVDs he rented, so as to impugn his character. They wanted to see if there was any pornography. They wanted to see if there was any racy stuff, Smokey and the Bandit kind of stuff that he liked to watch. The same thing happened with Clarence Thomas when Anita Hill claimed that he had sexually harassed her. There was talk of pubic hair on a Coke can and that Justice Thomas had rented movies, pornography movies and so forth. It’s a standard Democrat tactic to try to impugn and destroy not just the character, but the lives of Republican nominees. I was simply making the point that these Republican Senators are in no way treating Sonia Sotomayor with the disgrace and the disrespect that Republican nominees are treated by Democrats. I illustrated that by saying, ‘And these hearings aren’t complete ’til we get a list of her DVDs.’ It is irrelevant. You’re exactly right. But the Democrats traditionally try to get that kind of information on Republican nominees to try to destroy them.

CALLER: Okay, I understand them. She’s a lawyer. I mean, she’s crawfishing out of everything that they’re asking her.

RUSH: Have you noticed something else?

CALLER: What?

RUSH: Have you noticed that when she… I think the Democrats sent her their questions, because when she… This observation was made to me just moments ago. I hadn’t noticed it myself, but it rings true now that it’s been put in front of my mind. When the Democrats ask her questions, she’s smooth and clear and right on the spot, and the answer is there. When the Republicans ask her questions it’s hem-haw around, not sure of what she’s saying. That’s where there is lying and crawfishing around. She doesn’t have the Republican questions in advance. She did get rehearsed on what they might ask, but I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if Leahy and the boys sent her their questions in advance.

CALLER: Exactly. That’s what it sounds like to me.

RUSH: All right. Well, I’m glad you called, Pam. I’m happy to help explain this to you.

CALLER: Thank you very much.

RUSH: My pleasure. It’s always a thrill and a delight to be able to inform a relatively new arrival of the political process, and there’s no better place to come than this program for that kind of education and information.

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