RUSH: I want to take you back to an Associated Press story, Thursday, December 27th of 2007, a little less than year ago. AP-Obama: ‘Barack Obama declared today that he is the only candidate who can bring true change in Washington, hoping to persuade Iowa voters to give him the first victory in the Democrat presidential race. Making his case against Hillary Clinton without naming her,’ and this is the money part of the story, Obama said, ‘The real gamble in this election is playing the same Washington game with the same Washington players and expecting a different result.’ So Obama starts his campaign in Iowa by telling people, (paraphrasing) ‘I’m an outsider and I’m not going to bring people into my administration who have already been in Washington, it would be foolish, that wouldn’t change anything whatsoever,’ and yet his first appointment is Rahm Emanuel as his chief of staff.
By the way, let me say something. I don’t care who he picks as chief of staff. It doesn’t matter to me, because nobody that he picked would surprise me. I’m not arguing here with anybody about his pick, so I’m not trying to turn public opinion against Obama because of his pick. We’re just engaged here in pointing out a little hypocrisy. I love this notion that so many people were duped into thinking big change is coming, and there’s no change coming whatsoever except we’re going to move the country far more left. I’ve been looking at Obama, he’s got a new website up: Change.com. He’s elaborating on what he’s going to do on this website, and it’s pretty much what we would expect if you expect him to move far left. And once again, this is important to me for the simple reason that so many people on our side have got these blinders on, thinking that we’re going to get this great centrist government because economic circumstances are such that Obama will do all that he wants to do and all that, and the naivete after all of these years perplexes me.
Okay, Rahm Emanuel. Who is he? Well, big-time enforcer for the Clinton administration. This guy is mean-spirited, he destroys people in his way just like Obama does. He is Obama. Obama gets away with being this great mellifluous, soft-spoken whippet, wispy, harmless little guy, almost messianic, while Emanuel here has this reputation of throwing his weight around and getting enemies out of the way no matter where they are. That’s Obama as well. Obama has chosen his mirror image. Obama has chosen somebody to do the dirty work Obama doesn’t wanna have his fingerprints on. Barack Obama, November 7th, 2008, this is ABC News, Brian Ross: ‘President-Elect Barack Obama’s newly appointed chief of staff Rahm Emanuel served on the board of directors of Freddie Mac at a time when scandal was brewing at Freddie Mac and the board failed to spot red flags, according to government reports reviewed by ABCnews.com. According to a complaint letter filed by the SEC, Freddie Mac misreported profits by billions of dollars in order to deceive investors between the years 2000 and 2002.’ Emanuel was on the board. ‘He was not named in the complaint, but the entire board was later accused by the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight, OFHEO, of having failed in its duty to follow up on matters brought to its attention.’
So we have a mortgage crisis brought about precisely by Democrats running Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, forcing banks to make loans to people that had no prayer of paying them back, forcing banks through thug behavior from the Clinton administration, Janet Reno promising investigations if they didn’t follow through on these new dictates. And right there in the center, this is entirely a Democrat scandal, and I say this not out of partisanship, I mean, folks, if they could have found a Republican to blame this on, that guy would be in jail today, frog-marched up before Henry Waxman’s committee and then sent to jail. They couldn’t find a Republican. This is Chris Dodd. This is Barney Frank. This is Jimmy Carter. This is Bill Clinton. This is Franklin Raines. This is Jim Johnson. And now Rahm Emanuel’s in this, as member of the board, and he’s now on Obama’s team. And don’t forget, Obama says, going into Iowa before the Hawkeye Cauci, ‘The real gamble in this election is playing the same Washington game with the same Washington players and expecting a different result.’ He was telling people in Iowa, ‘I’m not going to have the usual people up there, I’m change, I’m bringing new people in.’ So far, the people he’s talking to are not new. I’ve heard of every one of them and most of them are Democrats.
Let’s listen to the Drive-Bys describe Emanuel. As you listen to this montage we have of the Drive-Bys, keep in mind how they described Karl Rove. Karl Rove was the evil genius, he was manipulative, he engaged in criminal behavior. Karl Rove needed to be frog-marched out of the White House. Karl Rove is the epitome of evil. Here is the Drive-Bys’ assessment of Rahm Emanuel.
CHETRY: Rahm Emanuel, a Washington veteran known for sharp elbows.
REID: A masterful politician with very sharp elbows.
SCARBOROUGH: Sharp political elbows.
CARD: I hope he takes his partisan elbows and keeps them close by to his body.
BROWNSTEIN: He has sharp political instincts and sharp elbows.
BROWN: You mentioned sharp elbows.
YELLIN: A reputation for sharp elbows.
RUSH: And once again, the Drive-By Media in unison, deciding to agree on this descriptive phrase ‘sharp elbows.’ Claire Shipman this morning on Good Morning America.
SHIPMAN: Like all good characters, Emanuel’s got quirks to spare and if you look closely you’ll see he’s missing the middle finger of his right hand. He sliced it off as a teen working at a fast food restaurant but instead of going to the hospital, he went swimming. The wound became so infected he almost died.
RUSH: Wow, what a man, what a man! Claire Shipman, ‘This is how tough, this is how manly Rahm Emanuel is.’ He cut off his middle finger in a fast food restaurant and went swimming. He almost died. That’s how committed he is to — what? I don’t know if he sued McDonald’s or wherever else he was working. He salutes with the other hand, obviously. Here’s David ‘Rodham’ Gergen. Larry King Alive last night, the fill-in host was John King. David ‘Rodham’ Gergen was asked, ‘What is the role of the chief of staff and what does it say about Obama that he picked Rahm Emanuel?’
GERGEN: I think it’s an extremely interesting choice. I think — there’s a couple of other things that I think are interesting about this. His close relationship with David Axelrod. And it’s almost like a Karl Rove kind of position. They’re such good friends that when, as you know, at a Jewish wedding, a long tradition is to have a ketubah, where the bride and the groom each sign and then two of their closest friends sign as witnesses. David Axelrod signed the ketubah at Rahm Emanuel’s wedding. That demonstrates their closeness.
RUSH: Whoa, whoa, man, that means a lot, that is really interesting, David ‘Rodham’ Gergen said so. That is really interesting. David Axelrod signed the ketubah at Emanuel’s wedding. Are we a lucky country, or what, to have Axelrod and Emanuel so close. Here is Former special counsel to President Clinton on trade, Bill Daley of Chicago talking to Joe Scarbourgh, ‘Is Rahm Emanuel somebody who can reach across the aisle? Your thoughts on that.’
DALEY: I’ve known Rahm for 20 years. There’s no question he is extremely able, not only to reach against — across the aisle, but be somebody that can drive the agenda for President-Elect Obama and work with all factions that are involved in the issues. One of the most partisan, tough, smart people in Washington over the last 30 years was Jim Baker. Lots of people talked about Jim Baker as this partisan guy who ran the recount in Florida. Tough, smart, yes, he was, very partisan, very direct, but somebody that was able to reach out and be bipartisan and also show that there sometimes are issues that rise above partisanship. Rahm’s given up a safe seat where he could be forever.
RUSH: He wanted to be speaker of the House, but Obama tricked him. He named him before he even asked him to accept it, and Emanuel knew he couldn’t turn it down. It would not look good for Obama, so he may have a job he doesn’t even want. Now, as far as this bipartisanship, I looked it up. Rahm Emanuel has a 98% voting record in the House of Representatives. This is just flat-out BS that he’s bipartisan. I just laugh at this. There are so many people, there’s a little schadenfreude building in me — so many people, by the way, this has to happen. This will happen. There are so many people who are going to be shocked, surprised, and disappointed at Barack Obama, people who supported him and people who elected him. There’s no way around this. His support group is too varied and disparate. He’s got Jew haters that support him and he’s got a lot of Jews that voted for him. Something’s gotta give there at some point. Either the Jew haters are going to hate him or the Jewish people who voted for him are going to be shocked, one of the two. They both cannot be made happy here once Obama gets going.
Now, CNN has decided to talk about me, ladies and gentlemen, Campbell Brown introducing a story on right-wing rage. Notice no stories on post election stress syndrome. No, no, no, no, it’s right-wing rage. She’s on with Joe Johns, and she said, ‘We all saw the pictures on election night, people all over the world dancing in the streets but some Americans, particularly conservatives, very different feelings about President-Elect Obama. Many of them feeling really, really angry right now, and Joe Johns has been listening to what can only be called right-wing rage. Joe, tell us what these conservatives are saying.’
JOHNS: There is a certain amount of hand-wringing, and there are those who are already comparing this to the early nineties when Bill Clinton won. As everyone remembers, Republicans regrouped, and it wasn’t long before Newt Gingrich and his conservative army swept to victory in the House. And guess who’s already hammering away at the Democrats? Rush Limbaugh, blasting both Rahm Emanuel and Barack Obama hours after the polls close.
RUSH: He is a good old-fashioned Chicago thug just like Obama is a good old-fashioned Chicago thug. On the night of the Clinton election Rahm Emanuel was so angry at the president’s enemies that he stood up at a celebratory dinner with colleagues from the campaign, Rahm Emanuel grabbed a steak knife, and he began rattling off a list of betrayers. And as he listed their names he shouted, ‘Dead! Dead! Dead!’ and he plunged the steak knife into the table after every name. This is not a bunch of people that are going to govern from the center.
JOHNS: So if you were thinking the country is now unified, think again.
RUSH: (laughing) Where was the rage? I want to know, where was the rage? They set that bite up as right-wing rage. Where was the rage? I simply told a story about Rahm Emanuel that they will not tell. ‘If you’re thinking the country is now unified, think again.’ Look at the election returns!
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: By the way, Rahm Emanuel used to tell people that he lost his middle finger while fighting with the Israeli Defense Forces. That was the old story. Now it is that he sliced it off working at a fast food joint and was so manly and so fearless, he went swimming — and almost died due to infection. Also, this is somewhat humorous, too. From Obama’s own book, The Audacity of Hope. After paragraph after paragraph castigating the Republicans for being so damn partisan, we get this paragraph:
‘Of course, there are those within the Democrat Party who tend towards similar zealotry [as the Republicans], but those who do have never come close to possessing the power of a Rove or a DeLay, the power to take over the party, fill it with loyalists, and enshrine some of their more radical ideas into law.’ It just happened! (laughing) It just happened, folks. And it happened actually long before Obama came along. Obama is the stamp. He’s the dotted ‘I’; he’s the crossed ‘T’. I just have to laugh. So many people have been fooled! So many people have just been swamped by what has happened here. And I do. I eagerly anticipate the day where the lights of realization go on inside the dimwit skulls of so many of these people who unwittingly and for the stupidest of reasons, voted for Obama. Now, you think it’s bad that I call Obama an Emanuel Chicago thugs. Let’s go to CNBC Squawk Box this morning. Carl Quintanilla and Becky Quick are talking with CNN correspondent Steve Liesman and Mesirow chief financial economist Diane Swonk about the Obama transition.
QUINTANILLA: The few people who have been named to his team — Emanuel, Podesta, Pete Rouse from Daschle’s office — aren’t exactly a post-partisan party. I mean this is hard-core Chicago politics from the Democratic side.
LIESMAN: Why isn’t Bill Ayers at the table?
(crosstalk)
QUICK: Remember what he said …
LIESMAN: Why isn’t Bill Ayers in the administration?
QUINTANILLA: John McCain and Palin…
LIESMAN: Why isn’t Bill Ayers at the table?
LIESMAN: Hey! Time-out. Time-out. No, I don’t want to hear about Bill… All right.
RUSH: (laughing) Why isn’t Bill Ayers….? He is. Bill Ayers is a silent advisor. Don’t think he’s not. So is the Reverend Wright.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Now, I’m going to go back and play an audio sound bite here. This is Campbell Brown introducing a story on ‘right-wing rage’ last night on CNN talking to Joe Johns, the reporter. This is crucial here to understand how it is that the Democrats and the Drive-By Media distort things. ‘Dissent’ when the Democrats are in power is rage. It is derangement, it is unbalanced.
We all know that the real hatred, the real rage in this country for the last eight years (if not longer) has been the exclusive property of insane, lunatic fringe Democrats. As I so brilliantly asked on Wednesday of this week, ‘Where is that rage going to go?’ It has to go someplace. It doesn’t vanish. People who live their lives enraged and angry all the time need to be enraged and angry to feed off of it. People who are pessimistic have to be pessimistic all the time. They’ve got to find something to be unhappy about. There are people like this. People who are happily miserable, the Democrat Party is full of them. And where in the world is that rage and hatred going to go? It may be tamed for the moment. But some of it’s going to go right to Obama when he doesn’t pull out of Iraq, when he doesn’t close Club Gitmo, when he doesn’t do some of the things they want.
He’s going to do some things that will satisfy him, though. I’ve been looking at his Change.com website. Wait ’til you hear the community service he has planned for every damn one of us, so-called volunteer community service. But this notion that right-wing rage is now out there. There is no rage. I’m not mad. I’m laughing! I’ve been laughing since Wednesday. What they call ‘rage’ is nothing more than dissent. Now, remember, one of the ways they’re going to go after talk radio is call it hate radio, rage. They just distort these things, and they call it dissent or disagreement, things that they are not. If you dissent from liberal prescriptions, ‘Why, you must be insane! You must be enraged. You must be hate-filled and so forth.’ This is the Stalinist type of mentality that they have. So here’s Campbell Brown introducing this piece with Joe Johns as the correspondent on right-wing rage. It contains a clip of me from earlier in the week, and I want you to listen to this and tell me: Where is the rage?
JOHNS: There is a certain amount of hand-wringing, and there are those who are already comparing this to the early nineties when Bill Clinton won. As everyone remembers, Republicans regrouped, and it wasn’t long before Newt Gingrich and his conservative army swept to victory in the House. And guess who’s already hammering away at the Democrats? Rush Limbaugh, blasting both Rahm Emanuel and Barack Obama, hours after the polls close.
RUSH ARCHIVE: [H]e is a good old-fashioned Chicago thug just like Obama is a good old-fashioned Chicago thug. On the night of the Clinton election, Rahm Emanuel was so angry at the president’s enemies that he stood up at a celebratory dinner with colleagues from the campaign; Rahm Emanuel grabbed a steak knife and he began rattling off a list of betrayers. As he listed their names, he shouted, ‘Dead! Dead! Dead!’ and he plunged the steak knife into the table after every name. This is not a bunch of people that are going to govern from the center.
JOHNS: Soooo, if you were thinking the country is now unified, think again.
RUSH: So where’s the rage? If there’s any rage in that story it’s what you conjure up Rahm Emanuel doing: grabbing a steak knife and plunging it into the dinner table, and each time he plunges it he shouts ‘Dead!’ and then mentions a betrayer’s name. ‘Dead! Dead! Dead!’ The rage in this story is Rahm Emanuel. There is no right-wing rage in this story. I’m smiling now even though I’m talking about it, but this is how they’re going to be mischaracterizing and how they’ve always done it, and have their willing accomplices in the Drive-By Media to help spread the myth. Here’s more from Joe Johns on Obama and me from last night on CNN.
JOHNS: Hours after Barack Obama was elected, Rush Limbaugh — known on his show as the Man Who Runs America — was back on the radio breathing fire, taking Obama and his now-named chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, to the woodshed.
RUSH ARCHIVE: [H]e is a good old-fashioned Chicago thug just like Obama is a good old-fashioned Chicago thug.
JOHNS: So if you were thinking the country is somehow unified, think again. There are still deep divisions. Just because the president-elect says he’s going to listen to conservatives, they say, doesn’t mean he’s going to govern from the middle.
RUSH ARCHIVE: You can listen all day long and do nothing about it, right? There’s no unity with Obama.
RUSH: Now, what they left out of that was, Obama said, ‘I may not have got your vote. You may not have voted for me, but I’m going to listen to you.’ Yeah, Fairness Doctrine. You’re going to listen to us while shutting us down? And that’s what good old Joe Johns did not include in his reports. They’re out ‘breathing fire’ again, hear that? (laughing) Breathing fire. Anderson Cooper could not let this go. He also spoke to Joe Johns, and says, ‘So much for any honeymoon there for Barack Obama.’
JOHNS: It’s sort of all over the place on Obama. You heard Rush Limbaugh, that’s one view; and the RNC chimed in as well. David Keene, the guy in the piece from the American Conservative Union, makes a point that, hey, Barack Obama was elected the very same way Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980. You gotta give a guy a chance, before you go after him, at least — and when he does something you disagree with, you go after him then. The point is, Rahm Emanuel is one of the things conservatives would go after Barack Obama about.
RUSH: Yeah, but why, Joe? There’s a reason for it. We’re not just going after the guy to go after the guy. You guys cut it under the rug. You’re the guys that did not tell anybody about Obama. We know who Obama is. We know who is associates are; we know who his alliances are with, and so forth. You guys didn’t. We’re not trying to… Maybe we are. Maybe we are trying to define Obama since you guys, Joe, didn’t. And now we got Brokaw and Charlie Rose saying, ‘I don’t know anything about him.’ That’s the last sound bite in the list. Let’s play that again. There’s a new tune-in factor, so some of you people may not have heard this. This is a great example of Drive-Bys covering their rear ends now, folks, because if Obama goes way off the deep end on the left, they don’t want to get any blame for it and so… This is illustrative of the kind of thing I’m talking about here with Joe Johns. Of course we’re going to try to define Obama for people, so they have some idea what’s coming. We live in the United States of America; it’s going to be governed by a bunch of far leftists, extremists, and radicals. It’s not like he picked Lieberman as chief of staff, by the way, could have reached across the aisle found a Democrat, found Lieberman, could have made him secretary of defense. He’s thinking of Chuck Hagel, for that, by the way. Chuck Hagel’s name is on the list. Anyway, here’s Tom Brokaw and Charlie Rose from one week ago on Charlie Rose’s show on PBS.
ROSE: I don’t know what Barack Obama’s worldview is.
BROKAW: No, I don’t, either.
ROSE: I don’t know how he really sees where China is.
BROKAW: We don’t know a lot about Barack Obama and the universe of his thinking about foreign policy.
ROSE: I don’t really know. And do we know anything about the people who are advising him?
BROKAW: Yeah, it’s an interesting question.
ROSE: He is principally known through his autobiography and through very aspirational (sic) speeches.
BROKAW: Two of them! I don’t know what books he’s read.
ROSE: What do we know about the heroes of Barack Obama?
BROKAW: There’s a lot about him we don’t know.
RUSH: ‘What do we know about the heroes of Barack Obama?’ (laughing) Well, Jeremiah Wright. We know a lot about them, and so did these guys. They knew about it all along. And how about that stuff yesterday we had from the Newsweek guys? Evan Thomas and Jon Meacham? That stuff yesterday is priceless. Cookie, you gotta grab that stuff, people need to hear that again, because here’s all this right-wing rage being aimed at people like me and so forth, and the Drive-Bys are trying to act like we’re trying to take Obama down before he has even been inaugurated. We’re not trying to take anybody down here. We’re just trying to define him for people since you people like Joe Johns and others refused to do so. Here. One more bite before we go to the break, also Anderson Cooper 180 last night. He spoke to former Clinton advisor David ‘Rodham’ Gergen, and they had this exchange. They were talking about me.
COOPER: Does Obama need to worry about what conservatives like Rush Limbaugh are saying about Rahm Emanuel right now?
GERGEN: Not very much. I think he’s going to get a good honeymoon from Republicans, unlike the situation that faced George W. Bush and very unlike what faced Bill Clinton. Neither man had a honeymoon. But in this case, you know, with the first African-American going to the White House, this deep reservoir of support from the country. Republicans know it would be suicidal to start attacking him from day one on — on an all-fronts basis.
RUSH: I don’t think it would be suicidal, but we’re not ‘attacking him on an all-fronts basis.’ And, by the way, Mr. Gergen, if I may just make this clear: Barack Obama is my president of the United States. He’s not black. He’s not white. He’s not Asian American. He is not Mexican. He’s not Chavez’s brother. He is not Islamic. He is my president of the United States. It is his ideas I am terrifically, tremendously worried about. I couldn’t care less where he was born. I couldn’t care less what his name is. I couldn’t care less how old he is. I couldn’t care less about the color of his skin. I couldn’t care less about his family. I don’t care where he lives. I don’t care where he plays basketball. I don’t care about any of that. I don’t see Americans the way you do, Mr. Gergen. I don’t see groups of people say, ‘Oh, there’s the women and there are the blacks and there are the Hispanics and there are the poor, and there is the homeless.’ I see Americans. I see human beings. He’s a human being, and now he’s president of the United States. He is attempting to consolidate the most radical, left-wing policy makers and administration in my lifetime. I am going to oppose his ideas. I’m not going to wait until you people in the Drive-By give your approval as to when this can happen.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: By the way, a little side note here to David ‘Rodham’ Gergen of CNN, you better get on the phone and tell some of these left-wing kooks that it’s too soon to criticize Obama. Some of these people out there like the Daily Kos and the Democrat Underground and even that nut cake rabbi up there, Michael Lerner, remember the Politics of Meaning that Hillary glommed onto? They are livid, Mr. Gergen, about the choice of Rahm Emanuel. Now, you better get on the phone tonight or better get on CNN and say, ‘It’s too soon for the left to be criticizing Obama over this as well.’ By the way, we’re digging out of our archives to remind you, Mrs. Clinton literally screeching, this is back in the days when she thought she was going to be president, and she sounds like your first and second ex-wives, yelling and screaming, redefining patriotism. Cookie is digging it out of the archives even as we speak.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: I want to go back to the first hour, not going to play the sound bites, but CNN did a whole story last night on right-wing rage aimed at me for my criticism of Emanuel as choice. There was no rage in the sound bite they played, but this is what the left does. Any dissent is called hate, is called rage. This is how they attempt to discredit it. But let’s remember Mrs. Clinton. A couple years ago she got all mad and upset because she was ripping Bush every day and people were saying it sounded a little bit unseemly, and this was her reaction.
HILLARY: (screeching) I am sick and tired of people who say that if you debate and you disagree with this administration, somehow you’re not patriotic, and we should stand up and say, ‘WE ARE AMERICANS AND WE HAVE A RIGHT TO DEBATE AND DISAGREE WITH ANY ADMINISTRATION!’
RUSH: Okay. So the Hillary definition of patriotism is standing up and screeching and shouting your disagreement with the administration. I think I’m a new patriot here, according to Hillary Clinton and the Democrat Party, I am exhibiting the new patriotism that they have defined.