Scarborough and Todd in a Snit

RUSH: This morning on Joe Scarborough’s show on MSNBC, F. Chuck Todd was a guest, and F. Chuck Todd’s feelings have been hurt by me. Here’s F. Chuck Todd whining about it.

TODD: Hey, Joe, Rush attacks me almost every day as well.

BRZEZINSKI: Oh, but this is a good one.

TODD: It feels good. It is something else. He does it to — he does it from a mansion in Palm Beach.

RUSH: This is something that amazes me. The story that I did my show out of my house first ran in 1997 when I first moved down there. I do not do my show from my house. There is an ordinance in the town of Palm Beach which says no one can conduct business from their home, even though my business is basically a phone call. The ordinance goes back to 1903 and it means lawyers can’t have clients in their houses; it means stockbrokers can’t talk to clients. You can’t do business in your home. It was a 1903 thing, it was about zoning, they didn’t want traffic in residential areas that piles up in commercial areas, and they still enforce it, selectively. But I don’t, and I haven’t done the show from my house. And how many times have I said this over the years? (interruption) I know, NBC was here. They saw the studio. There have been numerous television crews that have televised out of this studio, and believe me, while this is palatial and nice, a mansion it is not. You would never drive by where we are and think it’s a home. Still a secret, I mean a few special people know how to get here.

Just the other day I read that I do the program from West Palm Beach and that’s not true, either. So what got all this going on Scarborough’s show today was Joe’s been on my case for laughing at Obama’s Olympic bomb-out. He said, ‘It’s not helpful when Rush Limbaugh laughs at the president failing in something as noble as the Olympics. That’s not the way for the Republican Party to attract moderates and independents.’ I’ve always been amazed that this whole notion — I don’t know what happened to Joe Scarborough. I don’t know what part of his brain has gone dead, but that business of ‘Republican Party can’t criticize Obama, no, moderates aren’t going to like that.’ Right. So here’s the circumstance. We have these precious moderates sitting out there, a blob of them, and they are the cut above, they are the smartest among us, they’re not partisan, they don’t make up their minds until the last moment after they examined all of the issues. They are model citizens. But the moment they hear any Republican criticize a Democrat candidate, that’s it, and they run full force into the Democrat Party, which is who? A bunch of the meanest, loudest, angriest, rudest bunch of outraged people I have ever seen in politics, people that routinely talked about assassinating George W. Bush.

Do you know that a woman who won the Peace Prize in the last three or four years, I forget her name, actually said she fantasized about killing Bush, and she won the Peace Prize. Now, she’s obviously a liberal. Now, this notion that criticizing Democrats, laughing at Obama, is turning off the moderates, if that’s true, then the Democrat Party has gotta be turning them off 15 times as bad. I have never understood why Republicans fall for this trick that has been hatched by the media and hatched by the Democrats, that they are not to be criticized because moderates don’t like that. Moderates want kumbaya, moderates want everybody to just hug and kiss and get along. It’s all a myth. ‘The Republican Party has to be a big tent,’ but where is the tent? Where’s the tent that only has one entrance? Where are the limits on people getting into this party? Who is telling somebody they can’t become a Republican? And where’s the so-called big tent of the Democrat Party?

They do not tolerate dissent in their party. People fall for this tricks that are designed to shut us up, that are designed to get us to stand down, to be nice and gentle because the Republican Party, you have to understand, Rush, is hated and despised because everybody knows it’s full of racists, sexists, bigots, and homophobes, and that’s a cliche, and it just bothers me that smart people like Scarborough fall for this because he’s allowing himself to be neutered, and that’s what made him upset today, I called him a neutered, chickified moderate. So this is how he reacted to that on his show today after F. Chuck Todd whined about being criticized from a Palm Beach mansion.

SCARBOROUGH: I’ve been accused of many things, but being chickified has never been one of them. I would be careful if I had put my testicles in a blind trust for George W. Bush for eight years. There are a lot of people on the right that in fact did put their testicles in a blind trust for the past eight years and stopped being conservative and started being apologists. That’s about all I’ll say. Other than you remember that scene of George W. Bush carrying Rush Limbaugh’s suitcase into the White House?

BRZEZINSKI: Yeah.

SCARBOROUGH: Now we know what was inside the suitcase.

RUSH: There is no such picture. George W. Bush never carried a suitcase into the White House. What did happen in 1992, I was invited to the residence by George H.W. Bush, getting off the elevator on the second floor residence, I was with a fellow demon, Roger Ailes, and we got off the elevator and the only people up there are staff people and Ailes said, ‘Ah, come on, he’s expecting us, head on in there now,’ and the minute the president heard Ailes voice, ‘Rodge, is that you?’ And he came out of the presidential bedroom or study or wherever he was and I had a little overnight back or garment bag, he picked it up and escorted me down to the Lincoln Bedroom. I’ve told this story. And I said, ‘Mr. President, please, let me.’ ‘No, no, don’t be silly.’ He carried the bag down. That was George H.W. Bush. Nobody’s ever carried a suitcase of mine into the White House. It certainly wasn’t George W. Bush. As far as the testicles, see, he’s even stealing that. I invented the testicle lockbox and it’s Hillary Clinton’s. If anybody’s got a testicle lockbox it’s Hillary. Tom Brokaw’s testicles are in there. Scarborough’s are in there and whole bunch of other guys at NBC’s testicles are in Hillary’s lockbox, or testicle lockbox.

Now, he says that I was carrying Bush’s blind trust. I don’t think George W. Bush counted me as one of his supporters as I was leading the anti-amnesty immigration bill drive, nor do I think the president counted me as an ally when I was dead set against campaign finance reform, nor do I think the president particularly liked me when I was livid over Ted Kennedy writing the education bill and the drug bill. And I was not crazy about the president inviting the Kennedy family for a movie and popcorn in there and the Medicare prescription drug entitlement. I don’t think the president counted me as a supporter of that. In fact, I heard from the White House on several occasions on immigration. I had a visit from the White House to try to get my mind right on immigration. I held firm and fast. It was so bad that my friend Vince Flynn was visiting George W. Bush in the Oval Office one day, it was during the Dubai Ports deal, which, of course, I was all for. And Vince Flynn sends me an e-mail when he finishes his meeting, said, ‘Boy, the president, I don’t know what you did, but he’s really thinking you’re opposing him here on the Dubai Ports deal.’ Because he was so accustomed to me opposing him on things that he assumed in talking to Flynn that I was opposing the Dubai Ports deal. Anyway, Joe doesn’t know what he’s talking about. It’s a sad thing.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: By the way, F. Chuck Todd, I know something about him that he doesn’t know that I know. He does his show prep every morning before going to work at the White House in his underwear at his mother’s house and here he is worried about me! I think he has Drive-By envy. He just can’t stand that I have a mansion (laughing) and that I am in Palm Beach criticizing him.