RUSH: Late yesterday afternoon I was sitting in the library at home, and I was just swamped. It seemed like every 90 seconds somebody needed something, or somebody had a question or somebody had a comment, requiring my response. It was during the period of time that I generally devote to reading my tech blogs, you know, where I abandon all of this and get away from it and start spending time on, quote, unquote, my hobby.

But it was one of those days. I’m sure you have them. They may happen every day, but if I had been watching a TV show I would have hit the pause button every minute to deal with something. It would have taken me two hours yesterday to watch a 40 minute program. So in the midst of all of this, I hear about Prism. Not the NSA sweep of telephone records. In fact, let me start before I heard about Prism. Even before I heard about Prism, I am hearing from the intelligentsia in Washington that there’s nothing to be really concerned about here with what we had learned, the NSA demanding and getting every phone record from Verizon. And, by the way, we now know T-Mobile and AT&T have been added to it.

But the intelligent people were saying, “Nothing to see here. The reaction is way overblown.” Those of us who think there’s something worrisome here are overreacting and we’re too oriented in politics. And the mature thinkers that weighed in and sound reason and levelheadedness assured us that there was nothing to fear here because this was just metadata, and in fact this is something we should all be thankful that the government is able to do.

I have to tell you when I’m listening to all the smart people tell me this, my mind is about to explode, and I’m saying, “Do these people not realize what we just learned in the last three weeks?” We got the IRS starting in 2010 taking action to suppress the political involvement and ultimately votes of Tea Party people and conservative Republicans. This regime, this government, on the orders of the highest level. In fact, that investigation is ongoing. We have Fast and Furious. We have Obamacare. The evidence of the totalitarian nature or the authoritarian nature of this administration is on display undeniably every day and yet in the midst of this, “Well, don’t go off half cocked on this, Rush. Be very levelheaded. Nothing really to see,” as though there’s no context here.

It made me once again understand, folks, what you and I are up against here. There are just way too many people — and I’m talking about on our side — who do not want to admit what we face, who do not want to engage or admit or whatever what we really face here. It matters. This kind of stuff matters because of who the people doing it happen to be. It’s one thing if Colonel Sanders would be collecting all this data, but it’s not Colonel Sanders. It’s Barack Obama and everybody that works for him, and we know who they are and we know what their goals are. We know what their intentions are.

Folks, here’s the thing, I guess, that gets me. I mentioned Herbert Meyer. We interviewed him for the Limbaugh Letter a few short months ago. Herbert Meyer was in the national security apparatus during the Reagan administration. He was a good friend of Ronald Reagan, and was instrumental in establishing Reagan administration policies that brought down the Soviet Union. The big news to him that’s really noteworthy, we talked about it, is that he thinks that the world’s coming out of poverty. And it is a big story, The Economist in London had a big story on it recently. We mentioned it to you, and it’s a great testament to capitalism.

It’s not socialism, it’s not welfare, it’s not compassion and it’s not the redistribution of wealth. It’s not high taxes that are bringing people out of poverty. It’s capitalism, and none other than a leftist publication in London had to admit it. Well, Herb Meyer was the first to sound this notice some months ago. I also mentioned he wrote a piece that currently is in the American Thinker earlier this week, and it had the potential to be controversial because he used Adolf Hitler and Nazism in it, and it was his way of explaining, he made a point in the piece that nowhere, you know, people looking for a smoking gun to nail Obama on all these scandals, Herb says, “Ain’t gonna be one.”

He said whether you believe it or not, there is not one document linking Adolf Hitler to the holocaust. Adolf Hitler never put it on paper what he intended to do. There is no smoking gun. And yet what happened? We know that the Nazis engaged in the Holocaust. Herb Meyer’s point was that the people Hitler hired didn’t have to be told. They didn’t have to be given instructions. All they had to do was listen to what Hitler was saying. All they had to do was listen to what his objectives were. And he said the same thing’s happening here with this administration. He went to great pains to say: I’m not calling this administration a bunch of Nazis. I’m just using this as an illustration. I know people will get my point if I use something this notorious, the Nazi regime.

It’s a point that I’ve made here about the IRS. They say, “Well, you can’t link it in to Obama.” You don’t need to link Obama to it. He hired these people. Lois Lerner and everybody at the IRS who’s doing this is doing everything they can to please Obama. There’s not gonna be a smoking gun, but you don’t need a smoking gun to know where this administration’s doing what it’s doing.

Obama puts people in positions that mirror him. Eric Holder, you name it, they’re doing Obama’s bidding. Everybody. Susan Rice and Samantha Power, they are Obama, and there’s a context for what’s happening. Herbert Meyer, if I may quote him again, asserted that essentially what’s taking place in the United States right now is a coup, not a violent coup, and not a million artistic coup, but nevertheless a takeover of a government, and it’s being done by the Obama administration.

He referred to it as a coup. I don’t know if he used the word “peaceful,” but clearly there’s a coup d’etat going. You know it and I know it. This is what animates us. This is why the Tea Party exists. This country was founded on certain concepts, principles, beliefs — and they’re under assault. Chief among them under assault is the right to privacy, and that’s what all this is about. So in the midst of this coup d’etat… I happen to like that formulation.

In seeking ways to persuade, for example, the low-information voters of what’s going on, this happens. These are the people continuing to prop Obama up with high approval numbers. The Limbaugh Theorem. How do we reach ’em? How do we tell them? How do we explain what’s going on when they have, perhaps, almost an idolatrous relationship with the president? Well, maybe you tell ’em there’s a coup going on.

There are people attempting to take over this country and to make it something that it wasn’t founded as; turn it into something that it wasn’t intended to be. That is happening. You know it and I know it. It’s peaceful, nonviolent. The military isn’t involved. But nevertheless it’s a coup. So in the context of that and the realization that’s happening, in the midst of learning that the National Security Agency is literally “Hoovering,” vacuuming every telephone record they can, what do we hear?

“Nothing to see here, Rush. Calm down! Slow down, Rush. This is nothing to get concerned about. There’s nothing illegal here. The Fourth Amendment’s not being violated or breached. This is nothing whatsoever to get concerned about.” How can I…? (sigh) I don’t know how people can look at this in context and say that. The people doing this are what make it a big deal. Their motives and their intentions and their clear assault on the whole notion of privacy make it interesting.

I’m sorry for the long detour there, but in the midst of being told that I need to be more levelheaded — and not just me, but all of us who are a little bit concerned here about this Verizon story. We are all being told, “Back off, back off. Nothing to see here. We’re not really, really concerned.” It was in the midst of that that I heard about Prism. That was a Washington Post story that posted on their website around five or six o’clock yesterday afternoon.

The basic tenet of this story is that somebody in the intelligence community — NSA, somewhere — is so concerned over what he’s seeing take place that he went to the Washington Post and took with him a little PowerPoint slide presentation and gave it to the Post and their reporters, and they wrote a story up and put it on their website. The story is that practically every major tech group and company in this country is participating with the government in allowing the government access to their servers.

E-mails, texts, phone calls, photographs. Virtually any communication that’s taking place via the Apple servers, the Microsoft servers, the Google servers, the NSA is able to look at in real time. This is the story now. The guy that went to the Washington Post said, “It was so scary. They can watch us as we type.” The Washington Post published some of the PowerPoint slides. I’m reading this after being told that the Verizon thing is no big deal. “It’s nothing to get concerned about.

“Nothing to see here. Don’t get too worried about that. Don’t go off half cocked!” Here comes the Prism story, and then shortly after the Prism story hits, all of these tech firms start denying it. Apple says, “I never heard of Prism. We don’t know what this is about. We never let anybody have access to our servers without a warrant, without a court order. We never!” Google said the same thing. Microsoft said the same thing. Facebook said the same thing.

They’re all out there denying it. So I thought, “Did the Washington Post get set up?” I’m asking myself, “Did they get set up by somebody walking in and telling them something that wasn’t true?” But then I saw that Prism reported someplace else by this Glenn Greenwald guy at the UK Guardian. So there were two sources for the Prism story, but the tech firms involved continue to deny it. “Nope, it’s not happening.” Now we’ve got audio sound bites.

These guys from the tech firms like Greenwald and some of these others, are blaming Bush for all of this, still. Today! Still today, all of this is the fault of Bush. Bush is the guy that got this ball rolling. So there must be something to it if the left is circling the wagons around Obama and trying to make all of us think that all of this is the fault of George W. Bush. I just gotta tell you something, folks. Richard Nixon never even dreamed of this kind of stuff, and yet most people in this country think that Nixon did 10 times as bad as what’s happening now.

The fact is, Nixon never dreamed of this.

Whatever he wanted to cook up, he never even came up with this. So there is clearly — somewhere, somehow, in some form or another — a coup taking place, and there is an assault on privacy, and there are assaults on people because of their politics and their ideology. It is taking place; it’s undeniable. Yet many of the people we would hope would be pushing back against this and doing their best to join us and warning everybody say, “Nothing to see here! Don’t get all crazy about this. We must be level headed.”

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: So Obama’s in California. Why? Fundraising. He’s also got a meeting with the Chinese communist premier, but it’s fundraising. That’s why they go to California. Anyway, he got out there to speak. There was no prompter, and he didn’t have any notes, and he just stood there. He didn’t know what to do. Honestly, folks. Forty-eight seconds or something. Nothing happened. He finally shouted, “People!” and somebody on his staff brought him his notes. He was clueless.

Now, a lot of people yesterday who were saying, “Rush, Rush, don’t get all upset about this. There’s nothing to see here in this NSA business and Verizon. Nothing’s going on.” Look, one of the accusations was that people are just getting upset because it was Obama and just trusting Obama, and it’s not reasonable enough to get concerned about this. My point is, speaking about you and me, we’re not all stupid out here.

We’re not all stupid about this and this is not simply because we don’t trust Obama. I don’t want my government doing this. I do not want my government preoccupied with paying this close attention to what every citizen is doing every minute of the day. This government’s already too big, it’s too damn powerful, and it’s too unforgiving — and this doesn’t have anything to do with competent intelligence gathering. Throwing wide nets like this is BS. It’s assuming way too much to think that this is not a big deal. Left-wing overreaction, my backside.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: There was a time when the United States government earned the trust of its people. There was a time when most people believed that the United States government was protecting them. There was a time when most people believed that the United States government was spying on the bad guys, that the United States government was in fact earning the trust of the people. But this current data collection, scanning, whatever you want to call it, unfortunately has to be judged in context: the IRS leaks, the now unquestionable, undeniable, admitted-to-it IRS tactic of suppressing the vote of Tea Party conservatives, denying them their First Amendment rights.

The regime and its tricks with the Associated Press and Fox reporter James Rosen, the Benghazi cover-ups, the Fast and Furious operation, suing the state of Arizona for simply endorsing essentially federal immigration law. You can’t just try to be the smartest guy in the room and say, “Well, we must be levelheaded about this and understand that this is just metadata.” We cannot take the motives and intelligence guided by experience watching this administration over the last four-and-a-half, five years, and what their express purpose is.

I was reminded this morning, we had a sound bite of Maxine Waters back on February 3rd of this year. She was on a TV show, some network, TV One. It was a show hosted by Roland Martin, who used to be, may still be, a personality at CNN. He was interviewing Maxine Waters, and every time she speaks, you know, we have a good laugh about it because clearly she’s insane. And we nevertheless will play the sound bites. Her natural existence is such that she gives away the game. She will give away what the administration’s all about. She will give away the fact that they want to nationalize all these companies. And she did it again on this Washington Watch with Roland Martin show back on February 3rd of 2013. He said to her, “The reality is like anything else: You’d better get what you can while he’s there, because, look, come 2016, that’s it.”

WATERS: Well, you know, I don’t know, and I think some people are missing something here. The president has put in place an organization that contains the kind of database that no one has ever seen before in life. That’s going to be very, very powerful. That database will have information about everything on every individual in ways that it’s never been done before.

RUSH: See, she gives it up. Now, I remember playing that sound bite, and we made a big deal about it at the website, Rush 24/7, and we thought, “Well, it’s just Maxine being Maxine.” But in this case now going back, looking at it in hindsight, what in the world was she talking about? At the time we thought she was talking about all of his high-tech campaign advancements. But maybe she wasn’t.

I’ll tell you, the New York Times yesterday, this was kind of funny, too, the New York Times decided it was time to get really mad. They wrote an editorial really ripping into Obama over this. They called it: President Obama’s Dragnet. The editors at the New York Times were hopping mad, or at least they’re pretending to be. And they really got carried away. They had to change their original editorial. They reissued it. The original editorial said: “The administration has now lost all credibility.” They changed that in their second issuance to: “The administration has now lost all credibility on this issue.” But the point is they were right the first time. I don’t know, maybe they don’t want shock their readers with so much truth. But they went so far as to say at the New York Times, “Mr. Obama is proving the truism that the executive branch will use any power it is given and very likely abuse it.”

Now, keep in mind this was written by people who are the loudest proponents of the expansion of government. These are people who don’t believe the government can possibly get too big. It’s not possible for it to get too big. It’s not possible for the government to get too powerful. It’s not possible. And yet they are worried at the New York Times about what is happening to it under the guidance of the presidency and Mr. Obama. What everybody knows and nobody wants to really come to grips with is that we are in the midst of a coup taking place.

Now, I know what’s gonna happen. The people on the other side of the glass: “Will you dial that coup talk back?” That’s all the headlines are gonna be. I don’t care. In fact, it’s almost on par with: “I hope he fails.” How does that sound now, by the way: “I hope he fails”? I’m constantly looking for ways here to persuade people of what I passionately believe, and I’m not in it to lie to anybody. There’s nothing to be gained by lying to you about what I really think. There’s nothing to be gained here by lying about facts. There’s nothing to be gained here by gaining ground under false pretense.

So if the Constitution exists as it is, the country was founded as it was, and an administration comes along and doesn’t like that and is doing everything it can to overturn that Constitution without a convention, doing everything it can to change direction of this country, and what’s the word, transform it, what’s wrong with calling this a coup? “Mr. Limbaugh, a coup is when rebels join forces with the military and start launching military attacks and shooting people.” No, no, no. Not always. And that’s my point.

When I was a kid, my dad kept saying, “Son, if things don’t change, the Soviets are gonna take over this country without firing a shot.” What he was talking about was a coup. Anyway, folks, there’s a lot here to be concerned about. And you know it as well as I do. I get a little perplexed when people that I think see the world as I do and are, in my opinion, on my side, want to come along for reasons I can’t fathom to excuse things that need not be excused. Now, Obama went out there today, he’s in Palm Springs, and he addressed this NSA story. He defended the spy programs as legitimate because Congress has been consistently informed about ’em. He didn’t get mad, but he sort of complained about all the hype over the phone data gathering, because it’s approved by the FISA court. It’s approved by the Congress.

He said (paraphrasing), “Nobody’s listening to your phone calls. They’re looking at megadata,” he meant metadata, “and tracking terrorists. Nobody’s listening to content. Modest encroachments on privacy are worth doing. We’re gonna have to make some choices as a society. You can’t have 100% security and have 100% privacy.” This is what he said today out in Palm Springs. This is the guy, don’t forget, who got elected convincing people that this kind of stuff was never gonna happen anywhere. This is the guy who got elected mischaracterizing the kind of intelligence gathering that was ongoing with the Bush administration.

This is the guy who got elected president by telling us that what is happening now was never going to happen when he was president. This is a guy who got elected telling us in 2007, 2008 that what’s going on now was going on then. Bush was doing this, identical stuff, that’s what they’re trying to tell us, even now. He got elected warning us that what’s happening now was happening in 2007, 2008, and promising us, this was not gonna happen. And everything that was happening in 2007 has only grown. There’s only more of it. It’s more sweeping than it’s ever been.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Have we already forgotten what this regime has done to the donors to the Mitt Romney campaign, all of the IRS harassment and audits and attention paid them by the EPA, if necessary? This is clearly an administration that wants to identify its enemies and then take action against them somehow, to intimidate them or what have you. You can’t take that context out. The Wall Street Journal has a story here about PRISM. You know, PRISM is a code name, too.

So when these companies like Microsoft and Google and Apple say, “Oh, well, we never heard of it.” Well, they may not have heard of it. It may be called something else, and they say, “Well, we don’t let anybody have access for our servers without court orders.” Well, maybe there have been court orders. If there is a program like this going on, a part of it would have to be that the companies involved would have to be able to deny it. They could not talk about it.

Put it this way: They were sworn to secrecy. They could not broadcast their involvement in it because it’s taking place under the guise of national security. Do you realize what a vacuum cleaner that is? I mean, they can Hoover up everything they want under the guise of national security. Anyway, the Wall Street Journal: “US Collects Vast Data Trove — NSA monitoring includes three phone companies as well as online activity,” and then there’s this:

“The National Security Agency’s monitoring of Americans includes customer records from the three major phone networks as well as emails and Web searches, and the agency also has cataloged credit-card transactions, said people familiar with the agency’s activities.” Now, would anybody who thought maybe the phone company sweep wasn’t any big deal, maybe want to say that cataloging credit card transactions might be news?

I’m just asking.