RUSH: Here is Scott in Los Angeles. We got him back. He dropped off or he lost his connection. Glad you tried to get back in to us here Scott. How are you?

CALLER: I’m doing great, Rush. Thanks for taking my call.

RUSH: You bet.

CALLER: So with Trump’s response or statement about Bush keeping us safe, the one thing that I’m reminded of is that it was Bush who changed the face of our nation, and the anger towards Bush led to Barack Obama. You know, Bush Sr. made America mad and gave us Bill Clinton. Bush Jr. made America mad and gave us Barack Obama. So Trump in a way is kind of brilliant in saying that Bush didn’t keep us safe because it was Bush’s presidency who led to Barack Obama, and right now I don’t feel safe. And that is kind of Bush’s fault. As opposed to a legacy that led to another Republican, he led to Barack Obama, in a landslide.

RUSH: So you’re going beyond the Trump political objective here, and you’re actually signing on to the specifics. You feel unsafe — by the way, Trump’s point is, I mean, it was like a moth to a flame. Jeb just came right in, “My brother kept us safe.” And Trump, “Really? He kept us safe? The World Trade Center came down when he was president.” I mean, Jeb just walked right into it. So what you’re saying is you still feel unsafe. You still feel at risk?

CALLER: I think that the world is a less safe place today than it was before 9/11 or during Bush’s presidency, as opposed to somebody coming in behind Bush and making the world a better place. If you look at the amount of deaths that we’ve had in Afghanistan, they’ve gone up. Iraq, the deaths went up.

RUSH: Yeah.

CALLER: Terrorism all over the world, the Middle East on fire, the Muslim invasion of the world. I mean, the world is not a safer place. And you could say that Bush’s presidency upset the American electorate so much that they elected Barack Obama and they didn’t care what his background was.

RUSH: You know, this is the thing. I want to play devil’s advocate. And it doesn’t matter. This is just an exercise here in talking. Is it Bush who made people mad, or is it what was said about Bush that he never defended or responded to? I mean, ultimately, yeah, they made their bed and they have to lay in it, but, is it really Bush that made the people mad or did the media succeed in telling everybody they ought to be mad, that Bush lied and all that? In other words, did the campaign against Bush work?

CALLER: Well, let me ask you this question: Was Bush a leader who was able to combat the media’s criticism of him? Was he a good orator? Was he able to stand out on the stage and say, “Look, MSNBC, that’s enough of this crap”?

RUSH: Well —

CALLER: He just sat back and took it. So you’re correct, the media did create a negative narrative, but that’s because Bush didn’t take it. And with all the criticism —

RUSH: Yeah, but according to what they’ve told me, from the horse’s mouth, they had such reverence for the office, they didn’t want to get down in the gutter with the people you talk about, like at MSNBC, and give them the valid credibility by talking about them and sully the office. Hang on, Scott. I want to keep talking to you after the break.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: We are back with the articulate and well-spoken Scott from Los Angeles.

CALLER: Thank you, Rush.

RUSH: You bet. Now, you know, one of the things — and I am as frustrated as anybody by the eight years of the Bush administration with no response or reaction to some of the slander, to the libel, to the lies. The same thing with Romney. He didn’t respond. And I’ll tell you what they told me. They said: “We’re not gonna sully the office. We revere the office. We’re not going to politicize it by responding to all of that garbage. We’re gonna say above it.” Now, Karl Rove has said that it was a mistake, that some of this stuff they should have reacted to because they left their supporters hanging in one sense. Everybody’s clamoring for all of that BS that you referred to on MSNBC to be set straight, and nobody ever did from the top.

Now, one of the things that people like about Trump, Scott is that he quickly, eagerly pushes back against anybody that says one thing he thinks is wrong or incorrect about him. He does not put up with it, and that is, I think, in the top two or three reasons why people love the guy.

CALLER: Let me go back to something you just said there and then I want to respond to something else. If the Bush administration made the mistakes and Rove said that we made mistakes, why didn’t they correct it with McCain or Romney? Okay. If Bush and Rove respected the office so much, and they cared so much about the office, not responding, as you can see, has tarnished the office by putting Barack Obama in for eight years.

RUSH: I can’t dispute that.

CALLER: So their lack of respect for the office has allowed Barack Obama to destroy the office. Now, the media is our number one enemy, Rush. Donald Trump is our warrior. And when he responds right away, he shuts them up. They don’t want it, because you take a look, Donald Trump’s saying don’t watch Megyn Kelly. You know, I didn’t like the way that she acted in the first debate, and I’m not a big fan of her show anyway, so, okay, I’m not watching it. But he’s saying to people, “Look, enough of this crap. Don’t watch this stuff. You want the truth, go find it someplace else. You want unbiased stuff, go someplace else.”

If the media is going to cover for Barack Obama, then they are our enemy ’cause the media could turn on Barack Obama and we could take him down tomorrow. We could take Hillary down tomorrow, but it is the media who is our number one opponent. And Donald Trump — and I liked Newt Gingrich the last go round — attacks the media back and doesn’t take any crap from the media. And that is the only way to get our country back, because right now the media is like when you play your media montage. I wish you had one every single day. The media drives the conversation and the narrative.

RUSH: The daily soap opera narrative, the daily script, exactly right, and that’s why I’ve been telling people to try to resist it each and every day and not fall into it.

CALLER: I love it. If there’s one thing that Bush supporters or Republicans can get out of this, and just to take it back and think of, if Bush Sr. led to eight years of Bill Clinton, and Bush Jr. led to eight years of Barack Obama, do you really want to find out what Jeb Bush would bring?

RUSH: (laughing) Yeah. I think you’re voicing the opinion popularly held by a lot of people, particularly Republicans. It’s patently evident. You mean, Jeb can’t start a fire, much less catch one, and all of this has the Republican establishment inside out, upside down. They do not know what hit them and they have no idea how to deal with it. It’s illustrating that the voters are far more attuned to what’s wrong with this country than Inside Washington is, who don’t think there’s much wrong with it when you get right down to it. They don’t understand this idea that people out in the country think we’re in a crisis. What crisis? Everything’s fine, 5.1% unemployment, the economy’s growing, we run the House, we run the Senate, what’s the problem, they say.

CALLER: And we’re past people like Mitt Romney coming out and speaking for the people, there’s nobody representing the people. I don’t feel that, you know, the candidates running besides Donald Trump, you know, and I like Ben Carson, I like Ted Cruz, and I think the three of them are really, to me, the three that we should listen to, and I think if they teamed up together right now, we need a good Senate leader. I think that Ted Cruz would do a great job as a Senate leader, and I think a Trump-Carson team with a Senate leader of Cruz would really put us back in order, ’cause no one —

RUSH: Speaking of Cruz, let me just go ahead and take the occasion of your call and your willingness to be outspoken here and ask you your thoughts on George W. Bush jumping all over Ted Cruz. I’m sure you’ve heard about this now.

CALLER: Yeah.

RUSH: For those of you who haven’t, it was at a private affair for donors in Denver, and George W. was giving his usual — I’ve been to some of these, and he’s a different guy speaking off the cuff. This is the thing that always — you said Bush was able to articulate, he was, he just didn’t. You should hear this guy when he’s not on a teleprompter, not on a camera. This guy will run rings around anybody. He’s perfectly capable of it, and it was one of the most frustrating things in the world, not just to me. A lot of people know this.

I can’t tell you how many times I wished I could have George Bush on this show the way he talks to donors and the way he talks to people in private when there’s nothing official going on. But, at any rate, he was doing one of these things in Denver and started talking about the latest presidential race and various people. When it came to Ted Cruz, he unloaded like he has never been known to unload on anybody before. And the general take here was that George W. thinks that Cruz is the number one opponent his brother faces.

Obviously W thinks that Trump’s gonna fade and is not gonna be there, that Jeb is gonna be at the top of the heap here once this all settles out and that Cruz is his number one threat. And he just dumped all over him. When I saw this, I said, “George W. Bush has never spoken about Obama this way. He’s never spoken about any Democrat this way, but he launched on Cruz,” which is some of the best publicity Cruz has gotten in the campaign, by the way, based entirely on the theories you have already espoused in your call. But what’s your reaction to this?

CALLER: I think that when you see a Republican or RINO attacking another politician, it’s usually they’re attacking another Republican. And they never attack the left with the viciousness that they’ll attack the right. As a matter of fact, like Bush would just sit silent and let NBC, CNN, NBC, ABC, all of them trash him, yet he turns around, he’s got the knives out for a conservative, which tells you that maybe Bush is more Democrat liberal, you know, RINO than we ever gave him credit for, and maybe the only things that made Bush redeeming to us is after 9/11 we looked to somebody and he was standing on top of a fire truck with a fireman.

RUSH: Well, he was more than that.

CALLER: He was.

RUSH: You gotta give him his due after 9/11.

CALLER: He did a great job and he was a good leader after that. But that became the focus of his presidency, and it all became about, you know, maybe we extended into Iraq — I don’t know this. Maybe we extended into Iraq to continue the “I’m the great leader, I’m gonna keep you safe,” but all of these things eventually wore on the American people and then turned the American people to the Democrat Party. I just can’t believe that he would go off on Cruz during the campaign this way, and the RINO’s would want sit together and say, look, what is best for our country —

RUSH: Why not?

CALLER: — what is best for the people?

RUSH: A group of Bush donors is gonna be the epitome of the Republican establishment.

CALLER: Sure.

RUSH: And Cruz is the establishment’s number one enemy, number one elected Republican enemy. They hate him. They literally despise him. And that’s on display every time Cruz opens his mouth about something, be it on the floor of the Senate, about McConnell or — I mean, Chuck Grassley, Chuck Grassley most of the you see him he looks like he’s half asleep. Even Chuck Grassley calm alive to trash Ted Cruz. You just don’t see this.

Now, Cruz can parlay this for the exact reasons that you are talking about here today. But there’s another tiny little aspect of this. Here you’ve got a private off-the-record fundraiser deal. It’s a thing for Jeb, and he’s using W as often as W will go, trying to shore up Jeb’s campaign, and it’s an off-the-record thing. They don’t let any cameras or microphones into these things. I’ve been to a couple of them, folks, and they are really closely guarded. And the donors at this thing came out of there and tattled. That’s why we know this happened. The donors came out and tattled.

So I don’t know what it says about the brains of the donors in that room, but this kind of news coming out of that meeting does not help Jeb at all, and it does, it does help Cruz because it makes it look like the establishment is scared to death of the guy. Your enemies will always tell you who they fear. Leftist enemies, conservative, Republican enemies, enemies will always tell you who or what they fear. Scott, I gotta run but I appreciate the call. Really do. Thanks for your time.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: I just got a couple of e-mails. “Why all of this bashing of George W. Bush all of a sudden? Have you forgotten the name Barack Obama? I don’t believe you, Rush. Look at how you are a being sucked in. What are you doing? What are you falling for?” Folks, you’ve got to put this in context. If you want to know why — and I suspect people are reacting to the last caller as well as other thing.

But the reason this is happening is Donald J. Trump. I mean, if you want to know, Donald J. Trump put it out there that 9/11 happened when George W. Bush was in office, and we were not safe. And he put it out there that Benghazi happened with Hillary Clinton, and you can’t exonerate one of the other, and he also today blamed Bill Clinton. He said you can’t… What Trump is doing is political, but it’s now on the table here. Some things had been protected. No discussion allowed.

Things that have been protected, it’s now the veil has been lifted.

And since Trump has mentioned this, people are weighing in on it, particularly Trump supporters. This last caller, I think, happened to voice the thoughts or opinions of quite a few people. There’s real anger in this country over the fact Barack Obama was elected. There’s real anger that this has happened. And so people are going back and attaching elements of history to try to explain why. This last caller thinks that Barack Obama was set up by the incompetence of the Bush administration in defending itself against all of these scandalous, scurrilous, libelous, slanderous attacks.

Look, I don’t want to repeat what the caller said, but that’s the answer to the question — and I dare say that if Jeb Bush were not in the race, this would have never come up because the real target of this is Jeb Bush, not W. W’s kind of collateral here. As far as Trump is concerned, the real target’s Jeb.