RUSH: Here is Steve in Seattle. Steve, great to have you on the program. Hi.

CALLER: Hi, Rush. Mega dittos.

RUSH: Thank you.

CALLER: Hey, yesterday Jeb Bush, I think, showed why he probably doesn’t have a good chance of winning against Hillary. When he made his comment about $500 million in Planned Parenthood money that may not be enough or may be too much, and then Hillary came out and just ripped him. She was shrill. She was personal. What she said was over the top and largely not true. And Jeb’s reaction to that was to backtrack and correct his misstatement. He did not take the opportunity, which in my view was a golden opportunity for him to stand up and push back and go toe-to-toe with her. And that timidity, that instinct for him to avoid that type of confrontation is exactly why he’s gonna lose.

RUSH: All of that is valid. But you’re leaving out a very important element. It wasn’t just Hillary. He was getting creamed by the trolls that live in the sewers on Twitter. And I have discovered — I know this; do not doubt me — our side is scared to death of that stuff. They think that what’s on Twitter is the general American population. And so Jeb was being creamed. These trolls on Twitter that live in the sewers there, and they’re not Republican voters, start trashing him and how dare he at all insult the idea of women’s health. It didn’t take him two hours and he came out with the clarification you’re talking about. I agree with you that it was a perfect opportunity for him to teach people, to explain to people, to get on record his policy positions on this stuff.

CALLER: Well, also to show a little bit of fortitude and fight-back that I think is part of the reason why Trump has so much appeal to Republicans is that there’s too much avoidance. There’s not enough backbone and not enough standing up. And so Bush, it seemed to me yesterday, showed that he’s not capable.

RUSH: Well, you’re not alone. I will say that you’re not alone. It was a very quick reversal. The point is, he didn’t even say — look, we went into this in great detail yesterday, and I’m not taking the occasion here to bash Jeb on this, folks. It’s not the point. But he wasn’t suggesting that we cut a half billion dollars, even. You know what the real answer is?

The real answer is we don’t have a half a billion dollars to give to Planned Parenthood because we are $18 trillion in debt. What is all this talk about — I mean, if you’re really gonna get bold and if you really want to get it on the table about what needs to be done to fix this sick country. But it didn’t take much, the Twitter trolls got into action, and whatever. We can’t offend them. We gotta mollify them somehow. So you’re not alone out there, Steve, in your thoughts.

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RUSH: Hey, I don’t want to depress people, but do you realize after five videos Planned Parenthood has not lost any approval numbers? It hasn’t mattered. Now, it’s also true that over 60% of the people claim to not know what you’re talking about when you ask them about the videos ’cause the Drive-By Media has not reported the story once.

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RUSH: Now, back, ladies and gentlemen, to this. I gave you a little tease here before the conclusion of the previous hour. The story I have here is from The Federalist, but there are a number of them out there now. This one is by Mollie Hemingway. “YouGov claims a recent poll shows that ‘After video releases, opinion of Planned Parenthood little changed.’ Buried at the end of their press release, however, is the real story. The vast majority of Americans — a whopping 70 percent — have heard little to nothing about videos showing the involvement of Planned Parenthood in the harvesting and trafficking of human fetal organs.”

And that doesn’t even describe what they’re doing. Planned Parenthood is chopping up intact born baby parts and selling them and nobody outside of the conservative media knows it. Seventy percent of the American people say they don’t know anything about it. And, as such, Planned Parenthood’s approval numbers are only down 5%, which is barely margin-of-error territory. So the accurate thing to say is, is that after five videos that have been released and accompanying stories over the past month, public opinion on Planned Parenthood is unchanged, because the Drive-By Media has not reported it.

The Kardashians haven’t talked about it. Harvey Levin at TMZ hasn’t talked about it. The E! Entertainment network hasn’t talked about it, in addition ABC, NBC, CBS, and CNN, they’re just avoiding it, understandably. They don’t want to deal with it. There’s no way they can defend it. The only defense they’ve offered is “the videos were edited.” But they aren’t. You can watch all videos, all five of them in their entirety at the Center for Medical Progress website. The only editing is for time, brevity, and so forth, like everybody that presents video edits it. So it’s not a comeback, it’s not a valid comeback. They’re just ignoring it.

However, ladies and gentlemen, the members of the Republican Senate know it. Mitch McConnell and every Republican Senator has seen these videos, or has heard about them, and is very, very aware of them. And they’re not talking about it, either. Now, one of the ways to get the Drive-By Media talking about something is for the Republican Party leadership, establishment, and House and Senate leaders to also talk about something, because they are news makers, by definition. And I know even when elected Republicans talk about — pick your topic; sometimes the Drive-Bys ignore that, too, as they probably would this.

But still, the Republican Party, forget public opinion for a second, the Republican Party is ostensibly the party of opposition. If there is a pro-life entity in politics, it would be the conservative wing of the Republican Party. The Republican Party is not interested. Mitch McConnell has made it clear, we had the story first yesterday, we’re coming up on September, and it’s almost become standard operating procedure now that Republican leadership announces preemptively that there will not be a government shutdown. Because the Democrats always accuse the Republicans of wanting to shut down the government over some budget fight or some such thing.

So Mitch McConnell, Republican establishment convinced that the American people love government so much and need government so much that if they ever even allude to the possibility of shutting it down, they will be creamed at the next election.

Now, my point is, Mitch McConnell, Boehner and the Republicans all know what’s going on in these Planned Parenthood videos, and if that’s not worth shutting the government in order to force a debate on whether or not the American people ought to be paying for what these people are doing at Planned Parenthood, which is the question… Nobody’s talking about closing Planned Parenthood and nobody’s talking about putting ’em out of business.

The question is: Should the American people be paying and funding Planned Parenthood when they clearly have other sources of income and revenue? Let ’em go raise their own funds. Let rich Democrats and liberals pay for that crap, if they want it to happen. The American taxpayer ought to not have to pay for it. The Republican Party will not even stand up and make that argument.

Jeb Bush didn’t even want to get close to it when he found himself in the crosshairs of the Twitter sewer over his harmless comment that half a billion dollars spent on “women’s health” wouldn’t be missed if we reallocated it. That caused all kinds of grief. There’s another reason, too, why the American people are unmoved by this, and it’s a sad reality, and it is that even with these videos, we’re not seeing anything.

We are seeing Planned Parenthood people talk about it, and we see them talk about it in gruesome detail. But contrast that with Cecil the lion. Every story on Cecil the lion features either video or still shots of Cecil the lion looking like your family pet. Harmless, lovable, walking around. And then the accompanying stories: “He’s protecting the pride, his cubs, his kids, his harem,” what have you. And every story accompanies “the heartless, the cruel, the devastating way that Cecil died,” and it’s just horrible.

But there’s… I guarantee you this. If there were pictures, if there were videos… It’s sad that it’s necessary, but truth is what it is. If there were videos of these doctors at Planned Parenthood doing their Josef Mengele act — if there were actual videos of the harvesting of these babies and the picking through body parts, the lungs, the livers, to figure out what is going to be sold — I guarantee you there would be a national uproar.

The videos of the Planned Parenthood people alone talking about it? I’m not so sure that even that does it, because that’s gonna require people that listen. And when there’s a picture up there, you don’t listen. You’re overpowered by what you see. That’s why you could do a story… You put a picture of Cecil the lion up there and then do a story on how mean they are and how many human beings they kill, and people wouldn’t hear it.

They just see this cute, cuddly picture of Cecil with the knowledge that somebody killed him and they’d just be outraged at whoever killed him. It’s one of the facts of life in a society where television’s so prominent, pictures are so prominent. And this is not to criticize the people at the Center for Medical Progress. I mean, they’ve done great, great work. This is one of the greatest operations I can recall to expose what they’ve exposed, but we’re dealing here with a bunch of ignorant LIVs.

And they’re not seeing it, and they’re not even hearing about it in the Drive-By Media, which is why, circling back to McConnell, it’s important for the Republican Party to stand up for these people, to stand up for what’s happening here, and to say on behalf of the American people, “We’re not gonna tolerate this. Our country is sick enough without all of this happening.” And because the Republican leadership seeks to stay silent on this, why do you think somebody like Donald Trump rises in prominence?

Why do you think somebody like Ted Cruz rises, outspoken people are willing to talk about this? Because I guarantee you. The vast majority of the American people, when they find out about this, there’s no way they look the other way and ignore it. And the Republican leadership could play a role in helping people who have not seen it discover it. But they haven’t done that because they’re so scared to death of a potential Republican government shutdown over this, that they don’t think that they could survive.

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RUSH: Hey, look at this headline here. This is also Mollie Hemingway at The Federalist, and the headline reads: “Obama: Killing Humans And Harvesting Their Organs Is An Atrocity That Must End.”

Yeah, that’s not about Planned Parenthood, folks. Don’t go getting all jazzed out there. You talk about — is Obama tone deaf? Is he clueless, or is he just mean and insulting as any president we have ever had?

“President Barack Obama told a group of young African leaders on Monday that harvesting organs from humans that are killed as part of an African ritual was ‘craziness’ and a ‘cruel’ tradition that needed to stop. He warned of dehumanizing marginal groups of humans and of the problems that arise when ‘you are not able to see someone else as a human being.’

“In a wide-ranging question and answer session with members of the Young African Leaders Initiative [YALI], a woman from Kenya said ‘Persons with albinism in Africa are being killed and their body parts harvested for ritual purposes. My request to you is to raise this issue with heads of state of African countries to bring these atrocities to an end.’

Obama decried the practice and went on to encourage the young people to do everything in their power to fight on the behalf of vulnerable humans.”

He said: “Young people, you can lead the way and set a good example. But it requires some courage because the old thinking, people will push back at you and if you donÂ’t have convictions and courage to be able stand up for what you think is right, then cruelty will perpetuate itself.” He added, “If thereÂ’s one thing I want YALI leaders,” this is young African leaders, “to come out with, itÂ’s the notion of you are strong by taking care of the people who are vulnerable, by looking after the minority, looking after the disabled, looking after the vulnerable. YouÂ’re not strong by putting people down youÂ’re strong by lifting them up. ThatÂ’s the measure of a leader.”

“Obama also tied the practice of harvesting organs from albinos with racism and discrimination against gay people and urged consistency in how they view the sanctity of human life if they want to complain about human rights abuses.”

This is unreal. So either Obama is totally, completely tone deaf to such blatant hypocrisy, or maybe it is that the news of Planned Parenthood harvesting baby body parts hasn’t been reported on ESPN yet. ‘Cause that’s what he watches. Can it be that he doesn’t know this? CNN didn’t know just a moment ago that Republican donors had put a hit out on Trump. Could it be that he doesn’t know what’s going on? It’s not possible. He knows what goes on in there. He’s the guy that voted for infanticide when he was in the Senate in Illinois. You may not remember this. We reported it over and over again. There was a piece of legislation — you know, he voted “present” most of the time just to not go on record, but on this he was a “yes” vote.

In Illinois they had a piece of legislation that dealt with botched abortions. A woman wants an abortion, doctor performs abortion, screws up, baby is born. Legislation would permit the born baby to be killed because the original intention was to abort it. So it’s born alive. That wasn’t the desire. The legislation allows another doctor to come in, not the abortion — another doctor to come in and finish the baby off. And Obama voted to support it. And that’s why many of us began calling him a supporter of infanticide. Can he not know what’s going on?

I mean, everything he said here about what’s happening to albinos in Africa could be applied to Planned Parenthood and what’s happening in this country. I think he knows. I think he’s taunting. You know what this is? To all of us in conservatism and the pro-life movement, whatever, whoever you are out there, there was a nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah. This is, “You can’t stop us.” I refuse to believe he’s this clueless. I refuse to believe that he doesn’t know what’s going on. I refuse to believe he’s tone deaf. He had to know exactly. The words are too perfect here.

He perfectly describes what is happening in these Planned Parenthood clinics and condemns it in Africa. And I’ll bet when he finishes, he goes backstage or to the car, wherever he goes with his buddies and says, “You know how this is gonna tick ’em off. Oh, man. I can’t wait to hear what Limbaugh says about this. You know it’s gonna get ’em. You know it’s gonna really tick ’em off.” That’s what I think. Wouldn’t be surprised at all.