RUSH: Okay, Donald Trump. Okay, Trumpsters, I need to know what you’re thinking here. Donald Trump said that he had to say it, that 9/11 happened while George W. Bush was president. He wished it didn’t, but it did. And the implication was clear that 9/11, if you’re gonna start blaming politicians for things that happen while they’re in office, then how do you not blame George W. Bush for 9/11? And then Democrats immediately picked that up and applauded Mr. Trump and said, “Exactly right.
“So if the Republicans are not going to acknowledge that George W. Bush was to blame and was responsible for 9/11, well, then how in the world can Hillary Clinton be blamed for what happened in Benghazi? And to show you how effect… I think that’s so bogus. I think that’s so full of holes. I think it’s Swiss cheese. But I ran it by a lot of people over the weekend, and they think it makes sense! Frankly, I have been shocked at how easy it has been. It really is mind blowing.
It has been easy to talk to people who voted for and supported Bush who say, “Well, yeah, you know what? If we’re gonna blame Hillary for Benghazi, I guess to be credible we do have to say that Bush had some role in 9/11.” I’m incredulous. I’m literally incredulous when I hear this. Jake
Tapper, by the way, asked Jeb Bush this very question: “If George W. Bush wasn’t responsible for 9/11, how do you blame Hillary for Benghazi?” That was on State of the Union, the CNN Sunday show. And Jeb’s answer, frankly, was hard to discern.
Let me take a stab at this by asking Jake Tapper and any of you who might think that this is a valid, analogous comparison, because this it’s so clear what’s going on here. This is all part of the setup here for the Thursday hearings, folks. I mean, is it patently ridiculous to suggest that Hillary Clinton should get a pass because we gave George W. Bush a pass on 9/11? And that’s what Jake Tapper’s basically asking Jeb. So let me ask some questions here.
Do you remember all of those times that George W. Bush mocked and made fun of and stonewalled all those 9/11 investigations? Do you remember how he refused to participate with the 9/11 Commission? Do you remember how he went to the media and had them cover for him and made it look like he had nothing to do with it? Do you remember how they blamed a video for inciting the anger in the Muslim community that led to 9/11?
You remember all of that happening, right? No, you don’t remember it happening because none of it did. George Bush did not mock or stonewall the 9/11 investigations. Hillary Clinton still is doing that on Benghazi. Did George W. Bush lie to the families of people who died in 9/11? You remember him doing that, right? I mean, it was well known that Bush was out there as he was getting aid and comfort. He was blaming a video, or the Minnesota FBI, or somebody for the fact that 9/11 has happened.
Remember that, right?
He was blaming everybody else?
No, you don’t remember that because it didn’t happen. Mrs. Clinton and Barack Obama are who did that. They lied to the families of the dead in Benghazi about why this happened. They lied about why they were murdered, and they tried to scapegoat this videographer, this real wacko that made some YouTube video that nobody had seen. Do you remember Bush, at some point during the 9/11 committee and the commission and their public hearings, do you remember Bush being asked about it and him saying, “What difference does it matter now anyway? What difference does it make?”
You don’t remember that, do you? Because George W. Bush never said that. That was Hillary Clinton that said that. It was Hillary Clinton who screeched out (screeching), “At this point what difference does it make?” how her ambassador was killed and three others. Do you remember when the 3,000 Americans who were murdered begged President Bush for protection against terrorist threats? Ah, you don’t? ‘Cause that didn’t happen, either. There’s even more. I tell you, I’m really curious about this comparison and how it’s come up here.
This is akin… You know, Jake Tapper has pulled a George Stephanopoulos and War on Women here, folks, and you’re about to fall for it if you think this has some legitimacy. When 9/11 happened, do you realize that Bush didn’t even have his full administration in office because of the Florida recount aftermath? Do you remember that George W. Bush kept a lot of Bill Clinton people position in a show of bipartisanship after he was inaugurated, to show good faith, trying to smooth over the rough feelings because of the Florida recount?
Remember that? It’s hard to come up with an analogy here that makes any kind of sense whatever. What we have learned about 9/11, most of the mistakes that were made happened during the Bill Clinton administration, which is another reason why this comparison has been brought up. Hillary Clinton is running for president; they’ve gotta clear the decks on 9/11 because she’s got this Benghazi albatross hanging around her neck. So the best way to clear her of Benghazi is to blame Bush for 9/11, out of the blue.
But I’m gonna give you two names that I would put at the top of the any list of people responsible for 9/11. One of them is Bill Clinton. The other one is Jamie Gorelick. Do you remember the name Jamie Gorelick? Jamie Gorelick was a Clinton acolyte, and she served in many different positions, advisory and appointive in the Clinton administration, and one of those was at the Department of Justice. It was Jamie Gorelick who constructed “the wall.” “The wall” was a series of laws and statutes that prevented the FBI from sharing intel with the CIA, and vice-versa.
And they did this because they had decided they wanted to prosecute terrorist threats and incidents. They wanted to prosecute them in courts of law rather than consider them to be acts of war because the Clinton administration was trying to show politically that it had calmed the world down and that there were fewer wars and fewer incidents, that Clinton was a man of peace, and so they were indicting all these people. At the time there was an indictment out for bin Laden, even. So Gorelick constructs this wall which prevents intel from being shared.
So you had an FBI employee in Minnesota who discovered any number of things about some of the hijackers, and she wasn’t allowed to tell the CIA. The CIA wasn’t permitted to know it. Information about the hijackers taking flying lessons but not being interested in learning how to land the airplane. That was unable to be shared. But this effort — and Trump’s in on it. I mean, Trump’s got this whole thing started, blaming Bush for 9/11 so that we can… What? Be intellectually safe when we trying to blame Mrs. Clinton for Benghazi?
Remember, the whole point of this to absolve Mrs. Clinton, particularly with those hearings coming Thursday that everybody is hoping for fireworks. Jamie Gorelick was Bill Clinton’s deputy attorney general, and this wall that she created was called the Gorelick Wall. It was imposed under Bill Clinton, and it prevented the CIA and other intel agencies from sharing their information with the FBI. And then there was the national security director, Richard… What was his name, the white haired guy? (interruption) No, not Armitage.
He’s CIA, or at the Department of State. No, no. This is White House, Richard… Richard Clarke. Richard Clarke is in on this, Clinton administration and continue to advise the Bush administration. But this is really, really — and I’m sorry, Jeb just did not do a good job dealing with it. He tried. It’s just… I don’t know, sometimes Jeb finds himself in a struggle, you know, with… Well, anyway, he tried. And he tried it being a nice guy.
The establishment is convinced they have to be nice. They have to come off as nice, have to look nice. They can’t be confrontational. They can’t even get mad. If they do, they’re gonna scare the independents and we’re never gonna win anything. So they’re shackled by restraint. They can’t even use the language fully because it might tick off whoever these idiot independents are that we think are gonna elect the next Republican president.
But I don’t know. The Benghazi situation has nothing at all to do with 9/11. In fact, because of 9/11, Benghazi should not have had because of what we learned about 9/11. George W. Bush hadn’t been in office long enough to have any of his policies in play, to have been fully briefed, as I say. He hadn’t fully stocked or appointed all the positions in his administration, and he held over some Democrats in the Clinton Regime in a show of good faith.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: On the actual day of 9/11, did the people in the two towers of the World Trade Center call George Bush and ask for help? You remember that, don’t you? You remember the big news, all the people in the towers called Bush begging for help, and he said, “Sorry, I’m not up. Sorry.” Well, that’s what happened at Benghazi. Benghazi, at the annex and CIA station, they were requesting help all over the place within they wanted him from Italy. They wanted help from installations. They called Washington, wanted all kinds of help. It was denied.
Now to be fair, Trump is resting his assertion on 9/11 that it was lax immigration that allowed the 9/11 hijackers into the country. Well, no question that’s probably true. However, Bush was not president when they got into the country. I mean, they made numerous trips in and out of the country. Bush hadn’t been in the White House long enough for there to have been any impact whatsoever. Now, Trump could say, “Well, but he wouldn’t have changed anything because we know he’s for comprehensive reform.”
Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it’s still a stretch. So in Trump’s case, I think it’s a vehicle for spreading his views, for continuing to focus attention on his number one issue, which is immigration — illegal immigration. But this is kind of weird, the whole Benghazi situation. Let me grab a call. This first call here will actually get to the nub of that.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: I want to go back to this Benghazi business and Hillary and this ongoing effort or this new effort here to somehow equate what Hillary did with George Bush. I mean, George Bush gets a pass on 9/11.
That’s what they’re trying to do with Hillary and Benghazi in advance of the hearings that are not gonna amount to anything, but coming up on Thursday. Now, remember I pointed out that Obama’s off the grid for the seven hours that the Benghazi attack is happening, and he leaves Leon Panetta and Hillary in charge, and Panetta — to his credit — has admitted that he knew from the start that it was a terrorist attack, that it had nothing to do with the video, that it was not a reaction to something that had made terrorists mad or made average, ordinary Muslims mad to the point of protesting.
Now, there’s a caveat, however. That is that Panetta did not admit this until after he had left the Regime. He put it in his book. At the time, Panetta did not acknowledge this. It wasn’t until he is out of the Regime that he did, but at least he did. So we have one of the key players admitting later in his book that they all knew this was a terrorist attack from the start. And in fact it was a terrorist attack that there was intel on.
And the efforts of this administration and Mrs. Clinton to portray this as a spontaneous reaction to some silly video has been an insult to everybody’s intelligence from the first moment they tried it — and they continued to for months and months, even into a year or more. Now, there’s one more difference between 9/11 and Benghazi. Hillary Clinton was bragging about it at the debate last week. She was one of the foremost champions for getting rid of Moammar Khadafy, who had become our ally. You know, people forget this. People forget so much.
In fact, I think some people may never really know. But when we went into Iraq, Khadafy did a 180. You want to talk about Bush and being responsible for things, when we invaded Iraq, Colonel Moammar Khadafy got scared to death, and he came back and he announced that he was getting rid of whatever nuclear technology he had. He was downsizing. He didn’t want any part of the United States. He had already had a taste of us when the Reagan administration had bombed his tents and everything way back in the 1980s after the Lockerbie downing, the Pan Am jet that fell out of the sky over Lockerbie, Scotland.
So Khadafy, after we invaded Iraq in 2003, had really tamed himself. He had moderated, he had backed off. He really wasn’t the bad terror leader that he had been. I mean, he still dabbled in it, but he was very public about backing off and backing out. And yet Mrs. Clinton and Obama made it a centerpiece to overthrow the guy. And Hillary was one of the biggest champions for attacking Khadafy, who had become an ally after our attack on Iraq, after our invasion of Iraq.
And it was getting rid of Khadafy that led to the whole terrorist uprising in Libya in the first place, which is where Benghazi is. Now, what did George W. Bush do before 9/11 to correspond to that? You know, this effort to try to compare Hillary Clinton to George W. Bush as a means of defending her or putting a wall around her has to be an effort to cover up her incompetence, which is clearly what she is. On the very day that the Benghazi uprising happened, Obama happened to be giving a speech praising the Arab Spring and the toppling of Khadafy.
So it’s a fascinating thing to watch here, this ongoing effort here to absolve Mrs. Clinton of anything — and you people that are in there and supporting Trump, you have to realize that he’s helping further this (what would you call it?) narrative along, because in his view it allows him to continue to champion his position on immigration. He’s basically saying that open borders permitted the 9/11 hijackers to get into the country in the first place, and he goes on to say if he were president, that would never happened.
These guys wouldn’t have been there. There wouldn’t have been a 9/11 and so forth, which is his approach to this.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Donald Trump continues to double down here on George W. Bush having culpability and responsibility during 9/11, and look at this. It’s fascinating. See how easy this happens? 9/11 was what year? (interruption) Right. How many years ago was that? Fourteen years. We are in the midst of this current president botching everything we’re doing in the Middle East, and what are we talking about? George W. Bush to blame for 9/11. Hee-hee. Look at how easy this is. And what got it started was Trump.
Trump’s making the case that, “Hey, you know, people weren’t paying attention.” He’s blaming the wall. He’s the blaming lack of intelligence being shared. He’s blaming immigration policy. The fact of the matter is I think 16… You have to double-check me here. I think 16 of the 19 people here on legal visas. They were here legally. They had gone to the trouble and taken the time to get here legally. They had not violated any immigration law in order to get into the United States.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: This is Jim in Corona, California. Glad you waited, sir. Hello.
CALLER: Yeah, hi, Rush. It’s a pleasure to talk to you.
RUSH: Thank you.
CALLER: I think what a lot of people are missing in this whole blame game scenario that’s going on is that before 9/11, it was the airlines that were in charge of security. And I can tell you, I was a senior analyst for a major airline. I won’t mention the name, but we tried to implement through technology to get the agencies, the government agencies to talk to each other, because we were responsible for the security. Depending on how many flights a certain airline had to a certain airport, that was determined who was in charge of the security. And people are missing that. And it’s driving me crazy.
RUSH: Well, I’m kind of confused by it myself. What were you actually responsible for that the government wasn’t?
CALLER: Before 9/11, each airline, depending on who had the most flights into a given airport, was responsible for the security of that airport, including the information on international flights.
RUSH: Wait. The security of the airport, or the flight?
CALLER: Both. They’re virtually one and the same. Security starts at the airport. Right when these people check in, right when the passengers check in, all the way to the gate process, to the time they board the aircraft, it is the airport’s responsibility.
RUSH: Well, no, I get that. I mean, I’ve been through the check-in process for international. “Anybody give you anything before you packed? Did you put your suit on?” I’ve been through all that. I’m not saying the airlines are not and haven’t had a role and been responsible. But you’re making it sound like the government wasn’t involved at all in learning about potential security threats; it was all on you guys.
CALLER: Listen, Rush, I can tell you again firsthand, as a senior analyst in charge of, or responsible for security at the time. I can tell you, the government agencies would not talk to each other, and Trump is right about that, in one of his points. It was so frustrating.
RUSH: Yeah, but why was that? I’ll tell you why at the time you’re talking. But the time Trump is talking about, the reason agencies could not talk to each other was Jamie Gorelick, Clinton’s babe over at the attorney general’s office. She had erected what is known as “the wall.” The CIA was not permitted to talk to the FBI and vice-versa about what either of them had learned because they were prosecuting these cases in court rather than treating them as acts of war, and it was feared that sharing information might compromise it, and so it was an idiotic policy you guys were caught in the middle of, too.
CALLER: Exactly. So what happened is we actually, a year leading up to 9/11 — and our airline didn’t get hit. You know, not to say that we prevented that, but we were actually implementing technology that didn’t even exist yet. So as people would board the aircraft near the gate, we would set up these dummy passport scanners and document scanners.
RUSH: Okay, look, I’ve got 15 seconds. Are you saying that Trump’s right, that somehow this is Bush’s fault or that he’s responsible?
CALLER: No not at all. Not at all. Trump is not blaming Bush. I think Ben White pointed that out on CNBC this morning. It’s the essential —
RUSH: Yeah, he’s threading the needle on it. That’s true.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Bill in Charlotte, North Carolina. You’re next. Great to have you here. Hello.
CALLER: Hey, Rush, thanks for taking my call.
RUSH: You bet!
CALLER: Hey, with, listen, the Democrats really don’t have anybody but themselves to blame for the rise of Donald Trump because the Democrat strategy back in ’07 was to overcome Obama’s community organizer background and experience by promoting him as a celebrity and not a politician. The Democrats knew that celebrities are treated differently than ambitions politicians and they’re always given the benefit of the doubt when trouble comes along, and they usually come out better than before when everything dies down. So Trump’s celebrity status is actually what insulates him from any repercussions from whatever he says and does.
RUSH: You know, you may be on to something there. Meaning: Celebrity status insulates you from the traditional criticism that political people get. Obama was immune to it, but I never considered that the Democrats put forth Obama as a celebrity. I always had analyzed it that Obama could be whatever you wanted him to be. He was campaigning basically as an empty chart and you could paint or write on that chart whatever you wanted him to be, and some people are doing that with Trump just like they did with Perot. But, see, I always recognized what Obama was.
Obama might have been a celebrity within the confines of politics, but he was a radical leftist chip-on-his-shoulder, angry community organizer, and there wasn’t anything other than that, as far as I saw, and that’s why I was so adamant when I said in January 2009, “I hope he fails.” You know, I was thinking about that when I wrote my essay for National Review. They asked me to write an essay on their 60th anniversary issue and they wanted some personal highlights, and I forgot to put that in. I still have time ’cause they’re gonna send it back the edited version.
I still have — and it’s important. That should be in it. Anyway, it’s still an interesting theory that Trump’s celebrity status insulates him from traditional criticism and the Democrats had… I don’t think the Democrats are actually lamenting Trump being in the race. It’s actually the Republicans who are. It’s the Republicans who are shell-shocked over Trump. The Democrats, I don’t think they’ve yet thought far enough ahead to who they’re gonna be facing. I’ll tell you what’s on the immediate horizon for the Democrats is Biden.
I mean, all the indications are he’s gonna go. I mean, there was a leak today that he’s already made up his mind. Fox News had a leak earlier. They’ve backed off of it. Well, I say “backed off.” I haven’t seen it since. But that it’s all but official and in the next, what, 36 hours we’re gonna find out. And when I saw that little blurb, I happened to send sent it to a friend. “Of course he’s gonna run! What do you mean? There’s no doubt he’s getting in,” which violates every tenet of conventional wisdom.
Remember, the media said after the debate last week, “Well, Hillary scorched the earth on this one. If there was ever a signal to Biden to stay out, this was it. There’s no opening. Hillary owned it. Hillary won the debate going away. There’s no reason for Biden to get in.” Except when you look at the polling data that occurred after the debate, for all the talk about Hillary winning it, it’s Bernie Sanders who showed upward movement, not Hillary. Hillary did not gain any ground after the debate in which she was declared by the Drive-Bys the runaway winner.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: A couple of sound bites on this Trump business. Now, on Friday is when he was on Bloomberg, and it was essentially where he blamed Bush for 9/11 by saying, “Hey, you can’t disguise the fact that George Bush was president when it happened, okay?” That was Trump’s point. And, as usual, here came the criticism. He doubled down on it on Fox News Sunday Chris Wallace. He said, “Jeb responded to your comments with a tweet. He said, ‘How pathetic.’ Do you blame George Bush for 9/11, Mr. Trump?”
TRUMP: Look, look. Jeb said, “We were safe with my brother.” We were safe. Well, the World Trade Center just fell down! Now, am I trying to blame him. I’m not blaming anybody, but the World Trade Center came down. So he said, “We were safe,” that’s not safe. We lost 3,000 people. It was one of the greatest — probably the greatest catastrophe ever in this country, if you think about it.
RUSH: All right, now, Jeb is talking about after that, that there wasn’t another attack, so forth. Wallace then said, “Well, what would you have done if you’d been president?”
TRUMP: I’m extremely tough on people coming into this country. I believe that if I were running things, I doubt those families would have — I doubt that those people would have been in the country. There is a good chance that those people would not have been in our country. With that being said, I’m not blaming George Bush. But I don’t want Jeb Bush to say, “My brother kept us safe,” because September 11th was one of the worst days in the history of this country.
RUSH: Okay, so a semantic battle is raging here. I should point out that I’ve checked it: 16 of the 19 hijackers — maybe all of them, certainly 16 — were here on legal visas. That was one of the problems, that they had gone to the trouble and taken the time and patience to follow our laws in bringing us down. That was one of the things that was very scary about it.
Related Links