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RUSH: Folks, this is the most incredible thing. The Drive-Bys, the State-Controlled Media — predictably — are going bonkers over Sarah Palin and her book, her appearance on Oprah. We’ll be talking to her tomorrow afternoon at one o’clock, the top of the second hour on this program. We did an interview late last week with her for the next issue of the Limbaugh Letter. ‘The Associated Press got an advance copy of Sarah Palin’s book, Going Rogue, and assigned eleven reporters, apparently, to try to find errors in it.’ Did you hear about this?

‘The eleven [reporters] collaborated on an article titled ‘FACT CHECK: Palin’s book goes rogue on some facts.’ In fact, though, the AP’s catalogue of alleged errors — six in total [in a 400-page book] — is thin at best.’ The Power Line Blog people found this. It took eleven people to find six mistakes. That’s not even one mistake per reporter. ‘The AP starts with this one: ‘PALIN: Says she made frugality a point when traveling on state business as Alaska governor, asking ‘only’ for reasonably priced rooms and not ‘often’ going for the ‘high-end, robe-and-slippers’ hotels. THE FACTS: Although she usually opted for less-pricey hotels while governor, Palin and daughter Bristol stayed five days and four nights at the $707.29-per-night Essex House luxury hotel (robes and slippers come standard) for a five-hour women’s leadership conference in New York in October 2007. With air fare, the cost to Alaska was well over $3,000.”

Now, ‘Palin says she didn’t ‘often’ stay at high-end hotels, and the AP counters by saying’ Yes, she did, one time that we could find. She didn’t say ‘I never.’ She said, I didn’t often; I did not often stay in these high priced hotels. So she says she didn’t often stay at a high end hotel and the AP counters by saying, yeah, she did, yes, she did, one time! Yes she did, once. ‘Yes, that’s why she said ‘not often’ rather than ‘never.’ What is indisputable is that Palin sold the Governor’s private jet and flew commercial,’ I even talked to her about that last week in the interview, ‘thereby saving the taxpayers a large amount of money and qualifying her as a frugal traveler. The rest are about as lame. Here is another: ‘PALIN: Rails against taxpayer-financed bailouts, which she attributes to Obama.

”She recounts telling daughter Bristol that to succeed in business, ‘you’ll have to be brave enough to fail.’ THE FACTS: Palin is blurring Obama’s stimulus plan — a $787 billion package of tax cuts, state aid, social programs and government contracts — and the federal bailout that President George W. Bush signed. Palin’s views on bailouts appeared to evolve as John McCain’s vice presidential running mate. In September 2008, she said ‘taxpayers cannot be looked to’ to bail out Wall Street. The next month, she praised McCain for being ‘instrumental in bringing folks together’ to pass the $700 billion bailout. After that, she said ‘it is a time of crisis and government did have to step in.” The AP doesn’t quote Palin, so it’s hard to say whether she ‘blurs’ the bailouts or not. But by the AP’s own account, Palin has consistently opposed bailouts, except that during the Presidential campaign, she loyally supported McCain’s position on the initial TARP program.’

That’s what a Vice-Presidential candidate is supposed to do, and this is not a ‘fact-check.” This is what vice presidents do. That’s why she was frustrated as all hell, if you’ll remember, running around using that word ‘maverick’ all the time because the campaign wanted her to refer to McCain that way. They thought that characterization was putting McCain over the top. He’s a maverick. He’s a Washington outsider. He can reach across the aisle to work with the Democrats. ‘This one,’ the people at Power Line write, ‘I simply don’t believe: ‘PALIN: Welcomes last year’s Supreme Court decision deciding punitive damages for victims of the nation’s largest oil spill tragedy, the Exxon Valdez disaster, stating it had taken 20 years to achieve victory.

”As governor, she says, she’d had the state argue in favor of the victims, and she says the court’s ruling went ‘in favor of the people.’ THE FACTS: That response is at odds with her reaction at the time to the ruling, which resolved the case by reducing punitive damages for victims to $500 million from $2.5 billion. Palin said then she was ‘extremely disappointed’ and it was ‘tragic’ so many fishermen and families put their lives on hold waiting for the decision.’ Again,’ in this supposed fact-check, ‘the AP doesn’t quote Palin but rather asks us to take their word for the fact that Palin ‘welcomes’ the Supreme Court’s Exxon Valdez decision in her book as a ‘ruling [that] went ‘in favor of the people.’

‘I would bet that the AP is mischaracterizing what Palin says in her book. She criticized the Supreme Court’s decision at the time, as did most Alaskans, and cited it as a Supreme Court decision with which she disagreed in the Katie Couric interview.’ So this is it, folks. This is the kind of error: 11 AP reporters just like a wave of Democrat lawyers and reporters was sent up to Wasilla and Anchorage and Fairbanks when she was named the vice presidential running mate to McCain, to scour the countryside for any dirt they could find on her. Eleven crackerjack AP reporters assigned to fact-check her book! Do any other authors’ books get fact-checked like this? Not that I can recall. But anyway this is the best they can do? This is the best they could find. We have a brief time-out coming up here, ladies… (interruption) Well, I know liberals took after my book, but I mean does anybody on the other side get fact-checked? Nobody does.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Remember last week after reading Sarah Palin’s book and interviewing her, I said that it was ‘one of the most substantive policy books I’ve read in a long time,’ and I said that the people that read this on the left are going to totally ignore it. They’re gonna focus on the soap opera stuff, the ten pages or so out of 400-plus where she squares the record on the McCain campaign and what happened there. And, lo and behold! I know these people like every square inch of my continually shrinking, glorious naked body.

WILLIE GEIST: Rush Limbaugh calling it ‘one of the most substantive policy books’ he’s ever read.

MIKA BRZEZINSKI: A ‘policy book’?

TAMRON HALL: Rush Limbaugh says that this book is the most substantive policy book that he’s read.

RACHEL MADDOW: Rush Limbaugh calls it one of the truly substantive books I’ve read.

DAVID SHUSTER: Rush Limbaugh today told his millions of listeners this was the most substantive policy book that Rush had ever read. Now, maybe Rush hasn’t read any other books.

STEVE THOMMA: I heard Rush Limbaugh the other day say it was ‘one of the most substantive policy books he’d ever read.’

LAWRENCE O’DONNELL: Rush, I cannot imagine you in full recline on your Gulfstream, Cuban cigar in hand struggling to get through a more substance policy book than Sarah’s index-and-footnote free, score settling campaign memoir. No mind-numbing charts or graphs, no big words, no scholarly Latin phrases like ‘caveat emptor.’ And I’ll bet the pictures are, like, amazing.

RUSH: Now, that’s Lawrence O’Donnell. Where was he? I guess he was on MSNBC, former West Wing writer or consultant on the TV show, when Martin Sheen was the president and liberals in America actually thought they were watching the presidency when they watched that show. Let’s see here. Some of these people actually admit to having heard me say this, which I don’t believe. I think they all read it probably on a website or else a fax or an e-mail was sent around. Why is it that the left doesn’t get this? I think there’s a reason. It may be hard to explain but let me give it a shot. Sarah Palin, in this book — and you have to read somewhat here between the lines to get this, but — she’s not a navel gazer. She doesn’t spend a lot of time in self-analysis in this book.

She doesn’t spend a whole lot of time on her inner life, meaning she doesn’t analyze her own thinking. She’s not preoccupied with her own thinking and how her mind works and explaining why she thinks what she thinks, which is what elites are obsessed with! These elites and intellectuals are obsessed with showing you how smart they are and that they’re the smartest people in the room. And they run around and they analyze themselves! They’re total navel gazers. Obama’s a navel gazer. Their whole objective is to make you think they’re smart and they are probably some of the stupidest ‘smart’ people running around in the country today, as evidenced by their policies. She is foreign to intellectuals of both parties, and people in DC.

She doesn’t spend a whole lot of time and space in the book recounting what she did in Alaska to fight corruption, marshal all the competing bickering forces, and solve her number-one issue: Getting the gas pipeline deal. She just explains how it happened. She’s not into self-praise and a lot of these people are, and so when they don’t see themselves reflected then of course it’s foreign to them and they have to lash out. Here’s David Brooks Sunday morning on This Week during the roundtable. Stephanopoulos. Question is asked of Brooks, ‘A little bit of bluntness there from Sarah Palin. The book is out, 415 pages. David Brooks, looks like it’s a fair amount of score-settling.’ Folks, I told her this in the interview last week, and I mentioned this to you on Friday when I told you what I told her, that people are gonna focus on the score-settling, and the score-settling is not score-settling per se. It’s setting the record straight. And it’s nowhere near anywhere the majority of the book. It’s a few short pages compared to the 415. But Stephanopoulos says to David Brooks, ‘It looks like it’s a fair amount of score settling and the combat with the McCain campaign aides is continued straight through the weekend.’

BROOKS: Yeah, she’s a joke. Uh, I mean —

STEPHANOPOULOS: (snickering)

BROOKS: I just can’t take her seriously. We’ve got serious problems (snorts) in the country. Barack Obama is trying to handle war. We just had a guy elected Virginia governor who’s probably the model for the future of the Republican Party, Bob McDonnell, pretty serious guy pragmatic, calm, kind of boring. The idea that this potential talk show host is considered seriously for the Republican nomination, believe me, it will never happen. Voters — Republican primary voters — are just not going to elect a talk show host.

RUSH: This guy has got me on the brain. I mean, you all think he’s attacking Palin? He’s not. He’s attacking me. And I can take it, folks.


BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: All right, one more sound bite on this. David Brooks just said on This Week with Stephanopoulos, (paraphrasing) ‘She’s stupid, she’s a joke, can’t take her seriously. People in this country aren’t going to elect a talk show host and she’s a talk show host,’ which she’s not a talk show host. So Stephanopoulos said, ‘But David, why don’t you take on David Corn’s question about whether this is taking away from her personality. This whole Palinism that we’ve seen, what impact does that have on the Republican Party going forward?’

BROOKS: There is a populism in both the Democratic and Republican parties which is against Wall Street, against intellectuals, against Washington, against New York, against the coasts. But if you look at the sort of populism that has won in this country, it is not William Jennings Bryan’s, populism which is hostile and negative, which Sarah Palin sometimes is. It is populism that is Ronald Reaganesque, which simply that we’re for small towns, but we’re not angry at the big cities. The anger turns people off. Representing small towns is fine. But what she does, which is turning into a hostility toward intellectualism in general, that just doesn’t work.

RUSH: This guy has got thin skin. He can’t take it. He literally can’t take it. He’s taking everything she’s saying personally, and he is amplifying her meaning and taking it as a personal insult. Hostile and negative towards intellectuals like himself? This is the guy who now says we need to be more Reaganesque. This is also the guy who said the era of Reagan is over. He was one of the many people who said that. And I think, again, you have to understand that people who think of themselves as intellectuals also have a very, very, very high opinion of themselves. I mean they are conceited. They are arrogant. And if anybody sounds angry, I mean I’ve listened to Sarah Palin speak, and I’ve heard these two bites from Brooks and I’ve heard other things that Brooks has said, Brooks is the guy that sounds mad. Brooks is the guy that sounds angry and jealous. I think he’s jealous of the attention that she gets, and me, other so-called opinion makers. Because he doesn’t move the opinion dial one way in any direction, and he’s a static zero.

If he were an opinion meter, the thing would never move, just point straight up out into nowhere, which is I guess what he wants, you know, to be considered a good moderate. But in their arrogance and in their conceit, they miss her appeal. They miss her optimism and the things that she’s positive about, and they totally don’t understand why people are drawn to her. And it scares ’em. Now, I have a challenge to the Associated Press. They sent these 11 reporters out there to fact-check her book. Hey, AP, I got an idea for you. Assign those same 11 reporters to Algore’s book and see how many facts you can find, not errors. What is his stupid book, Earth in the Balance? No, no, that was the preview, what’s the book or slide show out there? Don’t look it up. I don’t care. But whatever the current book is on global warming, they made the slide show out of and so forth and that little movie that the kids in school were required to watch, assign the same 11 reporters to that book and find out how many facts you can find. Let’s go to the audiotape again. Morning Joe today, MSNBC, TIME Magazine’s Mark Halperin, and the cohost, Mika Brzezinski. She says, ‘Sarah Palin taps into something, she draws the crowds. The question is what can she do with it?’

HALPERIN: She can sell a lot of books. Think about it compared to Howard Dean in 2004. He was exciting, too —

BRZEZINSKI: Right.

HALPERIN: — and he had these huge crowds, and people said, this guy is going to win the Democrat —

BRZEZINSKI: Not the same. Sorry.

HALPERIN: Well, it’s big crowds, and it’s excitement, but it doesn’t translate —

BRZEZINSKI: Yeah.

SCARBOROUGH: This is going to enrage conservatives but, you know, I —

BRZEZINSKI: Go for it.

SCARBOROUGH: — I know Howard Dean. I’ve spoken to Howard Dean. It is such a disservice — I think Howard’s way left on that — but it is such a disservice to compare Sarah Palin in any aspect to Howard Dean. Yes, because that is an insult to Howard Dean’s intelligence.

RUSH: Now, that was Joe Scarborough. See, we have to define what is intelligent. Because Howard Dean is wrong about almost everything, as a far-left, fanatic, radical Democrat he is wrong about pretty much everything. So here is again the arrogance and the conceit and the contempt, by the way, that is associated with intellectualism, even intellectuals on the right or perceived intellectuals. I love it when people think they’re intellectuals when they’re not, but the template is she’s automatically stupid. It’s just unfair to compare her to Dean because it’s an insult to Dean’s intelligence. It all adds up, folks, human nature is human nature, doesn’t change. They’d never admit this, of course, but for some reason they’re scared of her. For some reason they’re scared to death of her and what she might achieve.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: And let’s remember, folks, Barack Obama’s policy book entitled Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream, that didn’t have any footnotes, there weren’t any footnotes in that book and the liberals are out there thinking he’s the greatest writer since Julius Caesar. AP, if you don’t want to fact-check Gore’s book, how about reading the health care bill? How about reading the House health care bill, AP, and tell us what’s in that, and find any facts or errors you can find there. Or go through one of Obama’s books, why don’t you. Hmm?

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: I wonder what the wizard of smart, David Brooks, would have to say about this? There’s a Rasmussen poll out, 59% of Republican voters say that Sarah Palin shares their values, not that they share hers, but 59% of Republican voters say that Palin shares their views. Now, what would Brooks say about that? And there’s also this, in that same Rasmussen Report poll. There’s an item near the bottom. Among the political class, just 3% have a very favorable opinion of Sarah Palin, while 64% hold a very unfavorable view. The political class meaning people in Washington, for the most part. People in elective office, people that work for people in elective office, much of the commentariat or the punditry out there. But the intellectuals and the elitists and their fear of Sarah Palin is probably equal to the same reasons that they fear me, or don’t like me or whatever. To those who oppose her ideologically, they fear her gaining power and pushing her ideas because they work. They feared Reagan, too. And they said the same things about Reagan too, not quite as vitriolic, but they said Reagan was stupid, an amiable dunce, likable enough guy but they treated Reagan like an idiot.

Now, if I’m David Brooks or any of these elitists and I’m really in tune with what’s going on here, in a contest between Sarah Palin and Barack Obama, for example, or Barack Obama and anybody, Obama should lose. Obama’s destroying the United States. But they love Obama in part because they think he’s one of them: smart, intellectual, elite, dresses well. Brooks even writes about the crease in Obama’s slacks and how he’s impressed by that. I kid you not. He was impressed by the crease in Obama’s slacks, as a sign of refinement. Beltway Republicans, the wizards of smart, the Beltway Republicans have been running things, they have slowly lost Republican political power, so they are afraid of their own jobs and credibility if somebody like Palin, with her conservative viewpoint rises. I have to tell you, the reason why Palin’s being hit here is not because she’s Palin, it’s because she’s conservative. She is the most conservative of the Republican candidates, or I don’t even know if she’s a candidate, but of all the Republican public figures that might be in politics, she is by far the most conservative and everybody’s threatened by that.

The ideas work. Conservatism is the number-one thing which will undermine Obama. Conservatism is the number-one thing that would undermine the Beltway Republicans, the RINO Republicans’ hold on power in the Republican Party. Any conservative would do that, any conservative who sought elective office and might win, threatens everybody else, Republican or Democrat alike. So they fear the rise of a conservative. They fear the success that a conservative would implement if given the chance. As for elites, if you don’t use your brain it doesn’t matter how smart you are. And they’re not using their brains. For intellectuals, the last organ they’re using is their brain. They’re reacting with their heart, or some other orifice that’s getting jealous. But they’re not reacting with their brains. And this is the thing that’s the most amazing to me. These are supposedly the smartest people among us. These are the elites. These are the classically educated. These are the people who have a refined sophistication, and in their reaction to Sarah Palin or anybody else who’s prominently conservative, they don’t use their brains. They use other emotions, primarily fear and jealousy.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Andrea Mitchell, NBC News, Washington this afternoon on Andrea Mitchell Reports.

MITCHELL: Let me just share with you something on page 379 in the book. This is about that weekend in July when I went fishing with Sarah Palin. ‘Secretly I must admit I really wanted to see the likes of Andrea Mitchell on my home turf witnessing how happy and peace of mind my family was. The last time I had seen Andrea,’ and she goes on about having seen me in Washington. So they issued an open invitation to us in the press to go fishing with her. And she says, ‘I wanted to see Andrea and her colleagues sporting fish-slimed waders, banging around in a skiff, stuck in the mud and trying to pull themselves back over the bow. At the very least they’d see there was no diva in me. But,’ she writes, ‘but the weather didn’t cooperate. It was sunny, hot and flat calm, so — dang it — none of them got slimed.’

RUSH: (laughing) Yes indeed but Andrea Mitchell, somebody had to read the book to get to page 379 to find it and tell Andrea about it or Andrea herself had to read, because there’s no index in there. And that’s the point.

All right, Floral City, Florida. Carol, glad you called. You’re next on the EIB Network. Hi.

CALLER: Thank you so much, Rush, for taking my call. We just love you and thank you for everything you do.

RUSH: Thank you. You bet.

CALLER: I’m scared to death of the Sarah Palin phenomena. I’m a huge fan of hers so I don’t want to get on the wrong side of you, I love her. If she’s our only hope for 2012 we’re going to blow a golden opportunity to defeat the most destructive administration we’ve ever had. She’s great, I love what she’s doing, she does not have enough appeal to win. We need voters for her to actually win. We’ve got to win. You mark my words, Rush, the elite media is going to start pushing her as our leading candidate so they can squash her like a bug. It’s about winning and if she’s our only hope I’m scared to death that Obama’s going to win and I don’t think this country could withstand a second–

RUSH: All right. Fair enough. Who else can beat her?

CALLER: I don’t know. I’m still mourning over George Allen. I don’t know. There’s no one out there, that’s the problem. So if we keep pushing her we’re not looking for somebody else, we’re going to have another repeat of Obama.

RUSH: Well, now, you think the elite media is pushing her to be the nominee? I look at it the other way. I think they’re trying to destroy her.

CALLER: Well, they will, but they would love her to run against him because they know she can’t win.

RUSH: No, wait a minute, that doesn’t make sense.

CALLER: Well, nothing makes sense to me.

RUSH: Here’s why it doesn’t make sense.

CALLER: Okay.

RUSH: If they really thought she was a guaranteed loser, they wouldn’t be trying to destroy her. They’d be promoting her. They’d be talking about how she may be the only chance the Republican Party has, they’d be doing whatever they could to put pressure on Republicans to nominate her. What they’re doing is putting pressure on Republicans to abandon her, to leave her alone, and I think that’s because they really — it’s not even her. If there were another Republican in the mix, or was able to articulate conservative values and principles like she does, they’d be attacking that person, too.

CALLER: I realize that, Rush, but you don’t think two years from now they’ll completely turn things around? Because they’re not true to anybody, or themselves, even. I just don’t trust these people, so much so that nothing would surprise me.

RUSH: Well, another problem I have with what you’re saying is that you say we can’t do anything successfully unless we somehow out-trick or woo the media. And that’s simply not true. We defeat the media all the time. Their candidates don’t win every time they run for office.

CALLER: Can you think of anybody out there? I can’t find a soul. I mean I can’t think of a soul.

RUSH: No, but I’m not endorsing her, either.

CALLER: Oh, I know that.

RUSH: It’s way too soon. I’m commenting on things as they are today. I can’t see the future. I don’t even know what she’s going to do. I asked her and she wouldn’t say. I don’t know what her plans are. You have to read between the lines in the book, and the subtitle of her book is a title, and I think this might be telling, the title of her book, the subtitle is An American Life. That just happens to be the title of Ronald Reagan’s biography. I don’t think that’s accidental, that she’s tying into Reagan. So I don’t know specifically what her future is and a lot probably will be learned on this book tour, if she’s able to reconnect with the base out there and how this all goes. She’s going to small towns in the heartland. She’s ignoring big cities like Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco. And I expect certain people on our side to say, ‘Well, hell, she can’t win if she’s going to ignore New York, San Francisco, LA,’ which is going to be a mistake because that’s like saying we can’t win unless we convince enough liberals to vote for us.

She’s going to where the people that make this country work operate. If you want to say that there’s a strategery here that leads into a future political campaign, I think you could conclude that as a guess. But nobody really knows, and nobody knows what the next two years are going to bring, nobody knows what the next two months are going to bring in terms of politics and who else is going to try getting into the race. You might have Mitch Daniels from Indiana try to get into it. Bobby Jindal. There’s a whole lot of names that are not at the top of people’s minds right now, other than the people that ran last time, the Romneys, Huckabees, a couple others, and they put Palin in the mix when they poll it but nobody knows what she’s going to do.

CALLER: I fear a cultlike following as Obama. I just feel that she can do no wrong to the Christian right, of which I’m one of them —

RUSH: Wait a second, wait a second, Carol.

CALLER: What?

RUSH: Now, I must say, I must be honest as host. I’m getting a little suspicious here.

CALLER: No. I’m a fan of hers, I voted for Bush twice.

RUSH: I’m beginning to think you may be a seminar caller out there.

CALLER: Not at all. As God as my witness I am not a seminar caller.

RUSH: Did you witness any of the McCain-Palin campaign?

CALLER: Yes, I did and it was terrible.

RUSH: (laughing) No, no. What was terrible?

CALLER: The way the thing was run. I mean, he acted like he didn’t want to win.

RUSH: Let me be more specific. Did you see any of Palin’s campaign appearances?

CALLER: Yes. I thought they were great. I thought she was great.

RUSH: Did you think there was a cultlike following there?

CALLER: No. I just think there is now. I think since then there’s a — maybe I’m wrong. I hope I am wrong, Rush. God I hope I’m wrong. I want to defeat this man so badly that —

RUSH: Carol, I think I know what’s happening to you because it’s happened to even some of my closest friends.

CALLER: What?

RUSH: You may have missed the story, but a couple weekends ago I had nine golf buddies in town. These guys are every bit as conservative as I am. These guys send me stuff, e-mail, all this stuff all the time. These guys, I mean they know me left and right. And a couple of them were talking to me about Palin, pretty close to terms like you are, echoing the sentiments of what they hear in the media. I got so angry one night that I started throwing the napkin down on the table at dinner, and I said, ‘Why in the world, you guys hate the media, you know exactly who they are and what they do and how they undermine. Why do you accept what they say about Palin?’ And this business of a cultlike figure, and you think it’s cultlike, let me tell you what’s really happening, Carol. The reason that people are excited about Sarah Palin is not, again, so much about Sarah Palin. They don’t know her that well. What they have learned about her they like.

The people that are getting excited about her are the people the Republican Party has abandoned, the mainstream, conservative base that is the majority in this country, both parties have cast them aside. She represents what they believe. She validates what they believe. It’s the opposite of a cult. Sarah Palin, when she goes out there and talks, she talks specifics. She talks specifics on energy policy. She talks specifics on budget restraints and constraints and responsibility. Obama is who has the cultlike following. Obama was the one, you know, just shouting platitudes, meaningless nothings out there. His supporters had no idea what he stood for. His supporters, all they knew was he sounded smart, he had a good voice, he sounded really good when he talked, and he wasn’t George W. Bush.

To have a cultlike appeal you almost have to have a sycophantic media. She’s got a media and two political parties trying to destroy her, and yet she still has all this support. So I think there’s more to it here than what you’re assessing. I think you are being affected by what you’re seeing on television, ’cause you can’t miss it, it’s everywhere, it’s on every network, even on Fox. There are people out there ripping Palin to shreds. And people, ‘Well, Fox is doing it, oh, it must be true, because Fox is our network and if Fox is doing it,’ blah, blah. So as Pat Buchanan used to say, ‘Keep the powder dry out there,’ there’s a long time to go before 2012. What’s more important than 2012 right now, Carol, is 2010, the midterm congressional elections.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: We go back to audio sound bite number two from today, David Brooks on Stephanopoulos’ show yesterday. Stephanopoulos asked Brooks, ‘Look, 415 pages, David. It looks like it’s a fair amount of score-settling in her book. The combat with the McCain campaign aides has continued straight through the weekend.’

BROOKS: Yeah, she’s a joke. Uh, I mean —

STEPHANOPOULOS: (snickering)

BROOKS: I just can’t take her seriously. We’ve got serious problems (snorts) in the country. Barack Obama is trying to handle war. We just had a guy elected Virginia governor who’s probably the model for the future of the Republican Party, Bob McDonnell, pretty serious guy pragmatic, calm, kind of boring. The idea that this potential talk show host is considered seriously for the Republican nomination, believe me, it will never happen. Voters — Republican primary voters — are just not going to elect a talk show host.

RUSH: Talk show host. Sarah Palin is a talk show host. Barack Obama is trying to handle the war. He’s serious, he’s serious! Barack Obama is also destroying the economy, David. He’s serious. So not long ago on Andrea Mitchell’s show on MSNBC talking to Jonathan Martin of The Politico, Andrea Mitchell says, ‘We know that Rudy and Newt over the weekend both praised her, but do you agree or disagree with David Brooks?’

MARTIN: No Republican officeholder or potential future officeholder wants to offend Sarah Palin and her followers so they are going to do this delicate dance every time the question is raised. David Brooks doesn’t have to do that dance because he only speaks to his readers. Uh, but the fact is he — David Brooks — raises a fascinating question here: Should we in the media treat Sarah Palin like a conventional politician who may run for office someday or a political personality, somebody on par with a Rush Limbaugh or a Sean Hannity? That’s what Brooks is getting at. And that’s going to be, I think, a — a question that we have to wrestle with here in the years ahead.

MITCHELL: And that’s a different test.

RUSH: Ahhhh! So now Brooks puts it out there, and so now the media has to wrestle with this, ‘Oooh, maybe Brooks is right. Maybe she’s just a talk show host. Maybe she’s just a political personality. Maybe she’s not a serious candidate. We’re going to have to really figure this out. We’re going to have to really sit down and talk amongst ourselves and figure out just exactly how we are going to characterize Sarah Palin. Yeah! Brooks has an interesting point there, Andrea! We’re going to have to sit around, we’re going to have to e-mail each other, we’re going to have to talk and we in the media are going to have to decide how she is going to be presented.’ Now, she is a retired governor. Right? She has won elective office. Right? She’s not a talk show host. Right?

Does she have a talk show that I haven’t heard about? (interruption) She doesn’t have one? I mean, everybody else does these days. She doesn’t have a syndicated radio show, right, Snerdley? Does she have a television talk show? Does she have a local access cable show in Wasilla? Does she have a video camera that she records herself sitting on her living room couch speaking and…? (interruption) All right. She goes to Facebook, that’s right. She goes to Facebook, writes some stuff. She’s not a talk show host, yet they’re going to have to really struggle here with whether she is, because Brooks raises a fascinating question here. (interruption) No. Well, ‘the female Rush Limbaugh.’ Know what they’re gonna try to do, they think it will be diminishing to her to put her in the talk show host category, but…

I mean, I’m a talk show host, am I not running the party? I mean they have said, these same guys have said I, a talk show host, am running the party and that everybody is afraid of me, and that they don’t want to offend me — and I’m making all these decisions out there, so? Is it necessarily — in their own world, using their own lexicon. Is it necessarily bad for them to say that she is a talk show host? (interruption) How do you know she’s not a talk show host? How? (laughing) Yeah, well, Snerdley, that’s not a good test. Nobody has a plane but me. You can’t use that as a test. You can’t use that as a test. I mean, they might charter, but they don’t have their own. So you can’t… Just because she doesn’t have her own plane you can’t say that she’s not a talk show host. Where are you getting that from anyway? All right. (laughing) I know, they are jealous of that. ‘See Rush fully reclined there on his Gulfstream with his Cuban cigar reading Palin’s book.’ (sigh) Okay.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Rasmussen had a poll out there: 64% of Republicans said they would consider voting for Sarah Palin, she reflects their values. Gallup just said that 70% would consider voting for Mike Huckabee. Now, Huckabee has a talk show. Huckabee has a Saturday night talk show on the Fox News Channel. Sarah Palin does not have a talk show. So a shout-out here to Jonathan Martin at The Politico, are you and your guys going to get together and wrestle with the fact that you might also have to call Huckabee a talk show host, because he actually is. He actually has one. Now, apparently Oprah asks Sarah Palin on her show today about a talk show, does she want to have one or host one, and she doesn’t answer it. So apparently that’s where all this talk show stuff with Palin got started.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Tom in Houston, welcome to the program, sir. Nice to have you here with us.

CALLER: Tea party dittos, Rush.

RUSH: Thank you.

CALLER: Rush, you were right to disagree with that lady last hour who was fearful of Sarah Palin being the Republican candidate in 2012. I think that the media fears that there are many more women who would vote for a woman candidate than there were the 98% of blacks who voted for a Marxist back in November.

RUSH: What is this? I’ve got to find a story here before you go. I think you have a point there. I’ve gotta find this. I have gotta because it’s a stunning number. Not even I knew it, because I got so caught up in this concept of the gender gap, and I’ve always responded to the gender gap by saying: ‘The dirty little secret is that people that win elections win it with white males,’ but it’s a story that the vast… How many elections in the past have been… Ah! Let’s see. Well, maybe it’s in this. I think it is in the last four or five elections… Here it is. Democrats have not won a majority of white women since 1964. Democrats have not won a majority of the white women since 1964. They go Republican. So the guy here from Houston may have a point.

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