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The Desperate Smear Against Rudy

by Rush Limbaugh - Oct 3,2016

RUSH: Now, one of the things the Drive-Bys are doing, in one of the most outrageous examples — in public!

I mean, there’s nothing even tricky about this. The media is just daring people to spot how they’re cheating on this. It involves Rudy Giuliani. And here’s the headline. It could be anybody. This is the Associated Press, could be ABC. “Giuliani Says Trump Is Better for the U.S. ‘Than a Woman.'” It’s not what Rudy Giuliani said. It’s not what Rudy Giuliani meant. They know it. They just don’t care. They think they can pull all these tricks and most people will never spot it; most people, if they do spot it, won’t care.

The media thinks most people agree with them anyway. The media thinks that most people hate Rudy and hate Trump just like they do, and so they don’t care. They don’t care if you see them lying through their teeth, misrepresenting, out of context, whatever. They get away with it far more than they’re ever held accountable, so why should they stop? “Did Rudy Giuliani really mean to say Donald Trump would make a better president than Hillary Clinton because he’s a man? …

“When asked about the [New York Times’ Trump tax] report, Giuliani told ABC’s This Week that Trump was a ‘genius’ when it came to tax laws… ‘Don’t you think a man who has this kind of economic genius is a lot better for the United States than a woman, and the only thing she’s ever produced is a lot of work for the FBI checking out her emails?’ he asked.” The AP is really so far in the tank that they would try to turn a simple statement into a sexist attack.

They want you to think that Rudy Giuliani said, “Don’t you think a man who has this kind of economic genius is a lot better for the U.S. than a woman…?” But he didn’t stop there. “[T]han a woman, the only thing she’s ever produced is a lot of work for the FBI?” So here’s Rudy, who at one time was a very respected, moderate Republican, held in high esteem by establishment politicians left and right. But now that he’s thrown in with the Trumpster, now that he’s become a Trumpist, they go out and do what they can to destroy him.

So we’ve got… I’ve got two sound bites on this. Let me see. Okay. Let’s do number 11 first. We’ll do these in order. Both of these are from yesterday morning. The first one’s from Meet the Press, F. Chuck Todd speaking with Rudy, and F. Chuck says, “So this is basically a deduction that benefits wealthy businessmen. He failed at his businesses. Those first three businesses were failures, and then he was able to get a tax break for the failure on the next $1 billion of income. Look, it’s all legal. Should it be?”

GIULIANI: It is, and it was, and we’re talking about 21 years ago, and if he didn’t take advantage of it, he would have been sued. I mean, the reality is he’s a genius. What he did was, he took advantage —

TODD: Okay.

GIULIANI: — of something that could save his enterprise, and he did something we admire in America: He came back. The Art of the Deal is all about that. He talks about it. So did Steve Jobs. So did Winston Churchill. Winston Churchill was —

TODD: Okay.

GIULIANI: — thrown out of politics twice and came back. Great men have big failures —

TODD: All right.

GIULIANI: — and then they take those failures and they turn ’em into great results. I’d rather have a genius like Donald Trump running this country than someone like Hillary Clinton.

RUSH: All right, now, F. Chuck was not happy hearing this. (imitating F. Chuck) “All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. Stop. All right. All right. Okay, okay, okay.” You know, Rudy was making too many points there, and F. Chuck Todd wanted Rudy to stop. You want to go through the points? First off it was The Art of the Comeback.

He wrote a book The Art of the Comeback and it’s in The Art of the Comeback you find a page on Alicia Machado, by the way, which also demonstrates that all this trumped up is a bunch of lies. But it was The Art of the Comeback. And it is true, Winston Churchill was thrown out of office by the people in the U.K. after great achievements. He was seen to have become too old.

During the run-up to World War II, Winston Churchill was the only British politician warning about Hitler and warning about the Nazis. They were laughing at him and they wouldn’t let him get anywhere near an official government position. They had invested everything in Neville Chamberlain back then, and Churchill had been thrown out, he was considered past his prime. He ended up becoming prime minister again and worked through World War II and helped to defeat Hitler and so forth, and even after that he was discarded again. But it was in his retirement.

I had a friend down here, folks, who died shortly after I got here. He was a friend I’d met only after coming to Palm Beach in 1997, and he died three years later. I had known him long enough to get to know a lot about him. And at his funeral, at the memorial, I couldn’t believe the missions he’d flown in World War II, the various things that he had done. He had lost three fortunes in commodities and gained it back each and every time. When I say fortune, the man had lost $500 million, $800 million and a billion and got it back all three times. He wasn’t careless. He just took risks and some of them panned out. He got it back each and every time.

The point is what Rudy is saying here happens to be accurate in many cases. Now, some people never come back from failure. I guess those are the people we’re supposed to praise, those are the people we’re supposed to identify with, yes, because there’s much more failure than there is success. There’s nothing illegal about what Trump did, and nobody’s even alleging that he did anything illegal. But this is the kind of thing — you know, Trump hasn’t released his tax returns, and he says, “Well, it’s because I’m under audit, but I will, at some point I’m gonna release them.” People have been very suspicious of that. Well obviously Trump has known that this is in his tax return.

This doesn’t take a genius to understand this can be twisted one way out of focus, this can be used against you in any number of ways. “You lost nearly a trillion dollars? What an idiot you are, you lost a trillion dollars and then you didn’t pay taxes for another 20? What a scheming, conniving tax cheat you are.” Any number of things could be done with this, ’cause it’s not a politician’s tax return which has annual income of $175,000 paid for by the people of this country in the annual salary. It doesn’t have any of that on it. Nope, it’s got all this esoteric business stuff that nine out of 10 Americans will never see, do or have on their own tax return, which makes it easy to make it appear corrupt or what have you.

As I say, this whole tax return business, I’ve been suspicious of it for a lot of years, folks, ’cause I don’t think it tells us anything about anybody. Somebody’s tax return doesn’t tell us what they think and how they’re gonna act issue to issue to issue. It’s totally irrelevant. It’s nothing more than a disqualifier, as perfected by primarily the Democrats and the Washington establishment.

Okay, here’s Rudy on This Week. He’s being interviewed by George Stephanopoulos of the Clinton war room. Stephanopoulos says, “Okay, here’s what Robby Mook from the Clinton campaign says. He says that this report in the New York Times about your tax return reveals the colossal nature of Donald Trump’s past business failures. He apparently got to avoid paying taxes for nearly 20 years while tens of millions of working families paid theirs.”

GIULIANI: He’s a genius at how to take advantage of legal remedies that can help your company survive and grow. I want a man who’s a genius at figuring out how to take this country that’s moving in the wrong direction, where we’ve had a basically jobless recovery, where we’ve had growth of less than 2% for two years, that’s pathetic. Don’t you think a man who has this kind of economic genius is a lot better for the United States than a woman and the only thing she’s ever produced is a lot of work for the FBI checking out her emails.

RUSH: There it is. That’s the sound bite where they’re saying that Rudy engaged in naked sexism. That’s the bite, that’s what they’re saying, don’t you think Trump’s eminently more qualified than a woman, is what they want you to think he said. All of this — you know, here’s the frustrating thing for me. All of this smacks of desperation, yet it always seems to work. And turning it around on them never seems to work. Mrs. Clinton actually has more questions to answer about corruption and finances than Donald Trump could ever conceive of. But it isn’t gonna happen for all of the obvious reasons.