RUSH: All right, now, look, I know that everybody was — I don’t know if they still are, probably are, still talking about the exchange on the Fox News Channel last night between, in this corner Mr. Newt, the Newtster, Newt Gingrich, and over here Megyn Kelly of the GQ spread of some years ago and the first Trump debate question last year in Cleveland.  And it was fireworks. 

You know what’s amazing about this, among many other things.  You know, I’m a broadcaster, folks.  Broadcaster first, second, third, fourth, fifth, first and last I’m a broadcaster.  Whatever else I am comes the in the middle.  So I watch broadcasting as a business enterprise inasmuch as I watch it for content and so forth.  I saw something today that interests me.  It may not interest anybody else.  But I got in here at my usual time, sat down and began the routine to begin the concentrated portion of show prep time, which includes glancing at the TV monitors. 

CNN did a full 20 minutes on this.  CNN had a roundtable discussion with videotape of their competitor, a competitor to whom they are losing big time.  They spent 20 minutes essentially promoting Megyn Kelly and Fox News right there on CNN.  There is no way even today would I ever even acknowledge competitors exist, much less give them a half hour on this program.  I don’t care what happened on said competitor’s program, I wouldn’t do it. 

But they did.  And I’m telling you, it is telling, the fact that they did it and had no problem doing it.  They decided that promoting and calling attention to what they greatly approved of, they thought it was great what happened on Fox last night.  CNN airs it and is begging people to leave CNN and go watch Fox now.  That’s the upshot of this.  But they didn’t care.  And the reason they didn’t care is because they thought that Newt Gingrich got his head handed to him last night, and by extension they thought Donald Trump got his head handed to him by extension, and then they thought Rudy got his head handed to him by extension.

So they were more than happy to subordinate their own business instincts and desire to survive and win, they subordinated that to the objective here of creaming and destroying Trump.  I can remember a day, and it’s not that long ago, when this wouldn’t happen, and if it somebody had tried it, whoever runs CNN would have stormed into the control room and said, “What in the name of Sam Hill are you doing?” 

Now, I know it’s a different age, it’s a different media era, and we all can conclude here that maybe everybody involved media-wise is on the same side now, pulling no punches, make no bones about it, particularly when the objective here is to take Trump out, to destroy Trump. It doesn’t matter, the media is one rather than a series of different entities that are competing against each other. That’s obviously the way they look at it.  But, you know, as an old hand at this, I’m 65, as somebody who’s been doing this since I was 15 years old, I was blown away by it. 

As I say, I’m an old schooler.  You don’t acknowledge that anybody else does what you do.  I mean, you know they’re there, but you certainly do not call attention to them, you don’t praise them at your own expense.  But that’s what CNN was doing.  You can draw your own conclusions from it.  I mean, to me, again, I’m not looking at it within the political realm here.  I’m looking at it strictly as a broadcaster and as a media professional and champion. I’m just telling you, it’s odd.  And they’ve been doing it all day.  I mean, it’s not just this one segment.  It was a 20-minute segment I happened to see. They’ve probably been doing it all morning and they’re gonna continue to be doing it all day long because they think it was such a big win for them. 

So we’re gonna get to it later on in the program.  I’m not gonna lead off with it in terms of actually playing the sound bites.  If you haven’t heard it by now, just hang in there, be tough, you will, we’ll get to it.  There are other things that I want to get to.  Plus, I know both people involved here.  I know Megyn, I know Newt.  It makes it tough.  I’ve always said, it’s easier when you do not know these people when it comes time to talk about what they’re doing or analyze what happens.  It’s much easier.  But I know them both, and so it’s tough.  I will admit this, it’s tough. 

And, by the way, I have things about both of them that neither would like known, so I’m safe there.  (laughing) Well, I know them both!  But I’m not one of these bleeders.  You know, I don’t tattle out of school.  I don’t tell people, I don’t give out little tidbits of information.  I am an upstanding guy and I respect confidences and so forth. 

But I nevertheless must mention that it’s tough when — (interruption) it was pretty brutal?  Pretty brutal.  Yeah.  Yeah, it was.  I guess it was.  Let me just ask you off the top of your head, that segment last night, you watched it, obviously, thumbs up or thumbs down, net positive, net negative for Trump?  Net negative for Trump, you think that was a negative for Trump?  Did not help Trump last night.  Without exception here, folks, every email I got starting last night — I didn’t see it.  I didn’t have the TV on.  I was watching the World Series.  That’s how bored I was.  Just kidding.  Just kidding.  I was working.  I didn’t have the TV on. 

So I started getting notes from my friends.  It’s fascinating when you get a note and people tell you something you haven’t seen. They create expectations, and what I thought I was gonna see was Newt Gingrich mopping the floor with Megyn Kelly.  Everybody that sent me a note said (shouting), “Oh, my God! This is so great! Newt just took her down. Oh, my God! Oh, my God! It’s great! It’s about time something like this happened. You should see it. You should see it. Newt just cleaned up.”  So I’m expecting that when I watch this, and that’s not what I saw.

From the standpoint thumbs up or thumbs down for Trump, that’s not what I saw.  But here I said (chuckles) I wasn’t gonna get into it and I’m into it. I’m not gonna play the audio sound bites.  There are other things I want to get to first. (interruption) Okay, you want to do it now?  I want to do it later.  I’ve got other things I want to do. (interruption) Everybody else is doing that.  What more…? (interruption)  I mean, I could play it. Everybody else has played it now, what more could I add other than the stuff I know about both of them that I’m not gonna tell you? (interruption) 

It is possibly true that it’s not real until I comment on it.  Absolutely. (sigh) Well, anyway.  It… Look, it’s also unfair to start. You know, you look at these things after they’ve happened. It’s easy to sit here from afar and say, “What Newt should have done there… What Newt should have done,” or, “What Megyn should have done there, what she should have done…” I don’t like to play that game.  It’s why I left TV.  I couldn’t handle everybody telling me what I should have done after they watched me on TV.  I said, “You’re not even watching what I think I’m doing, so I’m out.”

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: All right, look: Still no phone calls, Mr. Snerdley.  Now, see, this is anecdotal evidence.  We don’t take nearly enough phone calls here to make any kind of projection over what audience opinion is.  You know, folks, let me give you a little inside baseball statistical data.  Do you know what the percentage — and this has been documented with phone company research and all.  I will admit it’s research that predates cell phones as a predominant tool.  So it’s probably a ten-year-old rule of thumb, but I’ll bet it hasn’t changed much. 

Do you know what the percentage of any talk show audience is? I don’t care what size the audience. Unless you’re an audience of 10 or you have an audience of 50. But, I mean, significant audience, you know what percentage of that audience even tries to call in?  It’s one-tenth of 1%, try.  Do you know how many people are trying to get into this program right now?  We know those numbers, too.  Like 150,000 people are calling right now.  This is a massive audience, so one-tenth of 1% is a large number. 

Do you know how many people we talk to every day here?  Maybe 10, max. On a good day maybe 15 or 20.  It’s not very many.  That’s why when the Drive-Bys in the old days of this program asked, “What do your callers think?”  I said, “It doesn’t matter.  I don’t talk to enough of them to know.  You can’t extrapolate what people saying on my problem in any kind of public opinion.  What I say here is what counts.”  “No, no!  What are your callers saying?”  So I make it up and tell ’em that they’re saying exactly what I’m saying, just to get the message out. 

So that’s why… There’s a caveat.  Even though Mr. Snerdley hasn’t answered a single call.  We don’t answer 150,000.  No, no, no.  That’s how people are calling getting busy signal. Well, that’s how many busy signals there are.  We don’t know how many actual people there are, but I doubt that people are trying on three different phones at a time.  You never know.  The point is, just because we haven’t answered a call from somebody saying, “You gotta play the Newt-Megyn bites,” doesn’t mean that some of you out there don’t want to hear it.  (sigh)

Everybody else has played it.  You’ve heard it by now.  I can tell you what I think of this without playing a single sound bite. You ready?  If I had found myself in that interview last night, and everything happened exactly as it had happened, and Newt had asked her to say the words “Bill Clinton, sexual predator,” and she came back and said, “Well, he’s not on the ballot, and we’ve covered that story, sir,” I would have said, “The woman who is on the ballot enabled her husband as a sexual predator. And that is much more important that what Bill Clinton did at this moment in time. 

“Yeah, Clinton’s not on the ballot.  He’s gonna end up back in the White House if she wins, and therefore the place is going to be subject to the same kind of corruption, except over on the East Wing where the vice president’s office complex happens to be, but that’s not the point.”  If these people in the media want to keep bringing up Trump and sexual predation — if they want to keep bringing up the fact that women are not safe because of Donald Trump — well, then neither are they if Hillary Clinton’s around, because Hillary Clinton enabled her husband. Hillary Clinton defended her husband.

Hillary Clinton then searched and destroyed the women who came forward to accuse her husband.  And the women who were on the verge of coming forward to accuse her husband were threatened and intimidated with all kinds of horrible things awaiting them if they did it.  We even have on tape Stephanopoulos talking to one of them about her “future,” what it would be.  He was talking to her and giving her her choices.  The woman on the ballot for the Democrat side is just as guilty because when her husband was engaged in this kind of predation and disrespectful treatment of women, she enabled it. 

She made it happen. She made it possible for him to continue doing this.  That’s the story here, if you ask me, because Hillary is on the ballot.  The media is not going to change the way it talks about Bill Clinton. It just isn’t gonna happen.  And even if they did, it’s not a game-changer.  It would satisfy some of us who are sick and tired of the Clintons getting away with everything for 25 years, but it’s not gonna change anything.  But what could change something, since women seem to be the focus of this…

I mean, Megyn and all these other females in the media want to try to warn women out there that women in general are not safe if Trump gets to the White House.  On the other hand, Hillary Clinton, because she’s a woman, she can be trusted?  No, she cannot be trusted!  A, Hillary Clinton’s incompetent.  Hillary Clinton does not know what she’s doing on anything.  Hillary Clinton wouldn’t be where she is if her name wasn’t Clinton.  She doesn’t have any stand-alone achievements, stand-out achievements and accomplishments that in any way recommend her to the presidency. 

The only thing she’s got is first lady who was given a bunch of power in exchange for her keeping quiet about her husband’s sexual-predator behavior, and she exacted pounds of flesh after pounds of flesh.  She got control of Hillarycare the first thing out of the box, and she botched it big time and has assured us that she’s gonna go back and try to change and improve Obamacare by adding the Hillarycare concepts that she developed, and they were disastrous. 

They were so disastrous, the American people overwhelming rejected her health care plan and she fronted for it back in ’93 and ’94, or whenever it was.  It might have taken up the whole first four years of the first term.  But she doesn’t have any qualifications or major achievements.  She cares? Children’s Defense Fund? It Takes a Village?  What she is known for is the bimbo eruptions unit.  What she is known for — and the reason that she has been nominated — is that she saved her husband and thus saved the Democrat Party by agreeing to defend her husband and go after the women, and not just the women. 

She went after the entire conservative movement and blamed us for what her husband was doing!  It was “the vast right-wing conspiracy.”  That, to me, is the story.  Now, it’s easy to say after something’s happened and everybody’s watched it, “You know what I would’a done?”  But that’s what I would have done if I had found myself in that circumstance, and I have found myself in that circumstance with people when I talk to ’em out there or with people who’ve called the program. 

You know, equating Donald Trump and Bill Clinton is an exercise in attempting to force the media into reporting and discussing things they don’t want to report, and then claiming victory if you pull that off.  But I don’t know how it helps anything.  But Hillary, and having a bunch of people who do not know the history of the nineties learn it and learn her role in it?  You know, there’s another interesting thing, too.  I saw a story the other day that something like 99% of all money donated this campaign from Silicon Valley has gone to Hillary — 99%!  The total. I’m not talking about PACs and big time fundraisers.

I’m just talking about employees and maybe CEOs, but these are the donations that max out at like $2,700, whatever it is.  The $8 million total from employees at Silicon Valley, like Google and Apple and Microsoft. Well, Microsoft. I guess they got a Silicon Valley office.  But you know, the tech industry.  And then I saw the reason is the H-1B visa program.  They all have bought hook, line, and sinker (laughing) that we need open borders and immigration for high-tech, brilliant high-tech, accomplished engineers to be able to immigrate to the country.  So then I decided I would try to look and see what Hillary’s positions on the H-1B visa are. 

You know what they are? 

She doesn’t have one! 

She hasn’t said anything about the H-1B visa program, that I can find.  Trump has a policy statement on it.  He’s got two or three paragraphs about what he will do and deal with and change it, reform it, whatever.  Hillary not a single word.  And these dolts in Silicon Valley are giving their money to her anyway, assuming, because she’s a Democrat, she must have the right answer on these things. She hasn’t said a word about it.  Those are the kinds of things that she’s benefiting from, and those are the kind of people I think could really benefit from knowing exactly who Hillary Clinton is. 

Now, maybe they would look the other way.  Maybe they are these people, maybe a lot of Democrats are of the frame of mind that anything it takes to beat conservatives we will support.  So if Hillary Clinton had to destroy a few women, it was worth the price.  And they may be of that mind-set.  I think many of them actually are.  But I don’t think enough attention has been paid to Hillary Clinton’s role.  If Trump’s so-called sexual predator nature is something the media wants to not let go of, then the way to deal with it is not to bring up Bill Clinton. 

You can bring up Bill Clinton, but you have to bring up Hillary.  You have to let people know her role in this.  If women have become innocent victims, if women running around today are unable to protect themselves, if the picture that we’re painting, if the caricature we are creating is of women that are helpless waifs who are at risk of predator men throughout the busy day, then we have to somehow involve Hillary Clinton in that recipe in truthful and honest ways. That, when it came to defending and protecting women who alleged that they had been abused or even raped by her husband, those women were nothing but scum who had to be dispatched and just swept out of the way.  That’s what I think should be the focus. 

“Rush, it’s been tried, you know, and it just doesn’t stick.”  Well, the media’s not gonna let go of this Trump-women thing.  You guys had just better own up to that.  They think they’re on to something big and they’re not gonna let go of it.  It’s not gonna turn Trump supporters away from him.  This is what they don’t understand.  Well, maybe they do.  Maybe they’re trying to freeze the undecideds.  Maybe they’re trying to freeze people who might be inclined to vote for an outsider just ’cause they’re fed up with how the elites and the insiders have just ruined practically everything or done great damage, so they’re trying to put breaks on that kind of thinking.  I don’t doubt that’s the case.  That’s why Hillary has to be brought into this.  

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Here’s Bob in Scottsdale, Arizona.  I’m glad you waited, sir.  Hi.

CALLER:  Hello, Rush.  What a blessing to talk to you.

RUSH:  Thank you, sir.  Appreciate that.

CALLER:  I have been listening for a long time, and I just wanted to call in because you made a comment about the interaction between Megyn Kelly and Newt. I’ve been listening to Fox for a while and watching The Kelly File because I really thought that she did a good job with journalism and stuff, but I’ve noticed a progressive movement in her tone and stuff, and last night really was it for me.  I’m done listening to her.  Her interaction with Newt specifically, when they were talking about stuff and Newt responded, she made a comment that just sparked me and ticked me off.  She said, “I am a protector of women” in her comment, and I thought, wait a minute, I thought her job was to do the news, not to be an editorialist and protecting women. 

RUSH:  Wait, honest to God, I haven’t seen the whole thing.  She said she was there to protect women from predators like Trump?

CALLER:  Yeah, from predators.  Yeah, she said I’m a protector of women. I’m a protector of women and he’s the one that’s the predator, and —

RUSH:  Oh, and that must be when Newt said, “Well, then would you say Bill Clinton is a sexual predator in the same sense,” she wouldn’t do it?

CALLER:  That’s right.

RUSH:  See, if I were Newt, that’s when I would have said, “So you want to defend women by promoting the woman who enabled her husband in his sexual predator behavior,” that’s what I would have said.

CALLER:  Yeah.

RUSH:  But it’s easy to see that after the fact.  I’m not criticizing Newt. 

CALLER:  No, no.  The issue that just drove a wedge for me with Megyn Kelly was that here she purports to be a news anchor giving us the news, and now she’s communicating — I’ve noticed the people she’s had on, the questions she’s asked.

RUSH:  I appreciate it. I don’t mean to be rude, but I’m out of time. I do have some things to say, but sadly, I don’t have time right now.