RUSH: During my absence, I was nevertheless mentioned. The staff has sent me sound bites mentioning my name when I was gone, and I haven’t heard these. We’re gonna listen to them together. Yesterday on Meet the Press, David Gregory talking to the former Obama campaign manager, David ‘Fluff.’ And Gregory said, ‘Hey, ‘Fluff,’ who’s the leader of the Republican Party right now, who would you say?’
PLOUFFE: Right now — and this is a problem for them, long-term — I do think that Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, they are the leaders of the party. And you see whenever — I was struck by Senator Coburn from Oklahoma, I think it was, at a town hall meeting and he said, ‘I don’t agree with anything the Democrats are doing and I don’t agree with Speaker Pelosi, but she’s a nice person,’ and got attacked for that. There is an intolerance in that party and extremism that I think is where the real energy is, and so I think as you see in ’11 and ’12 the presidential primary, those are the people that will come out to vote.
RUSH: Bottom line is Fluff can run around and say all day long that he thinks I’m a problem for the Republicans, but the Republicans are gonna win. I am a problem for the White House, and Palin is a problem for the White House, and Beck is problem with the White House. We’re winners!
Bernie Sanders, August 29th, Morrisville, Vermont, at a town meeting in the Q&A an audience members said: ‘How do we convince these people that climate change is real and is the greatest challenge of the human race?’ Was this August 29th? Was this before or after this nutcase took hostages at the Discovery Channel? See, this is my point from the previous hour. The real insanity is on the pro-global warming side of this, and here you have a lunatic, Bernie Sanders, a certified lunatic, with a town hall meeting in Vermont. One of his supporters asks, ‘How do we convince these people climate change is real?’ Right. How do we continue the lie? When everybody knows this is a hoax now, everybody knows it’s totally lied and made up. How do we convince people that the lie is real? Here’s what Bernie Sanders said.
SANDERS: On one hand you have virtually every major scientific organization in America and in the world that believes that, A, global warming is real, and, B, in almost all likelihood it is created by human beings through carbon emissions. And then on top of that you have the CIA and the defense department recognizing the reality of global warming, so you got the CIA, the Department of Defense, Department of Agriculture —
RUSH: Get to the point.
SANDERS: — the EPA, virtually every government agency and all of our scientists think global warming is real.
RUSH: Get to the point!
SANDERS: That’s on one side. And on the other side you got Rush Limbo (sic). Let’s see, you got the entire world scientific community here. You got Rush Limbaugh there. It’s a tough one.
RUSH: Ha-ha-ha-ha. This is two days, two or three — and who’s winning the argument, Bernie? Who’s winning the argument? I, El Rushbo, am winning the argument. The polls clearly show a majority of people now think that global warming is not man-made and is not even that big a deal, it may not even be real. By the way, the Discovery siege, the kidnapping happened on September 1st, so this is August 29th, so this happened before the nutcase took the hostages, end up being shot, James Lee at the Discovery Channel.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Let’s skip to number 48. Let’s move now to last week, August 31st, Tuesday night, Rachel Maddow spoke with Newsweek magazine stenographer Jonathan Alter, who takes dictation from David Axelrod about the 2010 midterm elections. She said: ‘Is there less of a downside in a midterm than there is in a presidential election to latching the party under one of these Obama’s a Muslim far right guy?’
ALTER: They have just become a talk show party, you know, Obama asked them, the Republican leadership point-blank in February of 2009 in a private meeting, ‘Do you want to be the party of Rush Limbaugh?’ And they didn’t answer the question, but the answer is apparently yes. They are willing to latch themselves to these extreme folks.
RUSH: You know they tried to say I was a problem in 1994, too. But we won back in 1994. We’re gonna win again this year. The Party of Limbaugh is doing great in the polls. I look at the polls and the Party of Limbaugh is doing fabulous. By the way, Mr. Alter, you got it kind of wrong here. It was February 2009 in a private meeting with congressional leadership, and Obama did not ask them if they wanted to be the party of Rush Limbaugh, he told them you can’t listen to Rush Limbaugh, that’s not how things get done in Washington. Now, this was after I had said I hope he fails. And of course we all know what happened with that. Chris Van Hollen up next at the National Press Club, August 27th, a Friday, during the Q&A somebody — and he’s the Democrat from Maryland who heads the Congressional Campaign Committee. Question: ‘You spoke about the advantages you have: money, being prepared. You didn’t mention, of course, an area where you’re in real deficit, which is the power of talk shows. Unfortunately, apparently, you guys are either not represented or represented in such a fractional way as to be statistically insignificant, especially in these areas we have close races. Talk to us about your concerns in the area of talk radio.’
VAN HOLLEN: There was some period of time ago that Rush Limbow (sic) famously said that he hoped the president would fail. There were a number of Republicans in the Congress who said that doesn’t sound right, you know, I don’t think any American would want the president of the United States to fail. Well, within 24 hours after Rush Limbow got on the air denouncing those members, they publicly apologized. So I don’t underestimate the power.
RUSH: Who publicly apologized? What does he say here? ‘Got on the air denouncing those members –‘ oh, oh, oh, oh. I didn’t denounce those members. They denounced me and then their constituents got mad at them and then they apologized to me. That’s what Van Hollen is saying, that’s what he’s talking about. So he doesn’t understand the power of Limbaugh. And then last Monday night, August 30th on Hardball, Chris Matthews talked to the author Richard Wolffe about the Tea Party movement and the Glenn Beck rally, and Matthews said, ‘Is that what this revival is really about, an emulation of the enemy? They could be fundamentalists, but we have to resort to our fundamental beliefs as well to counter those fundamental beliefs –‘ This is incoherent. This is an incoherent question on an incoherent show. I don’t even know why I’m playing this. Well, I’m playing the sound bite because my name is mentioned. Here’s what Richard Wolffe said in answer to this incoherent question.
WOLFFE: What’s curious is why the White House chooses to fight against Rush Limbaugh saying he’s the de facto leader of the party. They don’t do the same with Glenn Beck.
RUSH: They’re trying to figure out, Beck has this giant rally, why do they continue to talk about Limbaugh and not Beck. Richard Wolffe is trying to figure this out, and they don’t have an answer. Now, we mentioned before we went on vacation they’re begging Bush to save Obama on the mosque. And now the liberals who hated Bush claim that he was the only thing that saved the Republicans from Islamophobia. And now he’s gone, and now that I’m the leader, the Republican Party is the Islamophobic party. This is another segment from MSNBC.
KORNACKI: If you look in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, a lot of people tend to focus on what former President George W. Bush said at the time, which was something that was pretty admirable, which he came out and he made a clear distinction between we’re going to go wage a war in Afghanistan and then ultimately in Iraq, but we’re not fighting Islam. If you listen to Rush Limbaugh’s shows for the last seven or eight years, if you listen to very prominent voices on the right, if you listen to many conservative politicians in this country between now and then, the message that was delivered to listeners, to the audience, was very clear, and it was not any distinction drawn between that. The Republican Party and the conservative movement cemented itself, I believe, in response to 9/11 as an Islamophobic movement. Take Bush out of the equation, there’s nothing left except that rhetoric.
RUSH: That was Steve Kornacki. Who is he? Oh. He’s the news editor at Salon.com. Steve Kornacki talking about the Islamophobic GOP to which I’ll just repeat what I said before we left for Hawaii. How in the world can we be an Islamophobic country if we elected somebody whose name is Barack Hussein Obama?
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RUSH: You know, I remember the good old days, folks, when the Democrats and the leftists called us racists. Those were the good old days. Now all of a sudden we are Islamophobes. Islamophobes has replaced racist as the attack word from the left. So my question would be, how can any sane person be afraid of a religion that practices Sharia law; that kills anybody who won’t convert; that holds horrible public executions; cuts off people’s heads in revenge killings with rusty knives and kills their own daughters and wives in honor killings; hates puppies, doesn’t like dogs; invades countries like parasites and refuses to assimilate, and it’s growing by leaps and bounds. But how can any sane person be afraid of that? You got me. I thought racism was the secret word for Democrats to end any and all political debate. Now they’ve come up with Islamophobe. We’re Islamophobes, folks. And we need Bush to bail Obama out on the mosque business.