RUSH: Here is Janet in Shiloh, Illinois, as we hit off on the phones today.  Janet, great to have you.  How you doing?

CALLER: (garbled cell) I’m well.  Merry Christmas, Rush.  I want to focus your attention on that New York Times piece because in it is why Trump got elected.  It wasn’t because of hacking.  It’s a little paragraph way, way down, and it says that Obama knew about the hacks from 2014 but did not let anyone know — did not call out Russia — because he needed Putin with Syria.  2014 comes after 2013 with the red lines when Obama backed down.

Obama was never dealing with from a position of strength after that.  We weren’t winning anymore, as Trump kept repeating.  Trump kept saying, “We’re gonna win again.” Obama didn’t call out the hacks.  Rush? A winner does not let an adversary hack you because you need the adversary.  And Samantha Powers, with the what’s coming out of Aleppo, with the video coming out of Aleppo, the tweets coming out of Aleppo?

The world is gonna see a human tragedy that we have not seen maybe since World War II, okay?  And we didn’t even see that stuff.  And we’re not gonna… The world is not gonna be able to process that the left sat by and let those people suffer, and yesterday Boris Johnson held a two-hour thing in parliamentary and they decided at the end there was nothing they could do to alleviate the suffering.  Samantha Powers has been reduced to what she hated. 

How she got the power, pun intended, was writing a book called Bystander to Genocide.  What has she been doing?  She’s now been reduced to wagging her finger at Syria and Russia and Iran at the U.N.  The U.N. has proven to be a joke to the people of Syria.  And Trump… Trump may actually be able to help them. Not ’til he gets in office, and we just have to hope that the New York Times doesn’t gin things up so badly against Putin, that Obama throws the most soldiers into Raqqah.  I knew they threw in like 300 over the weekend into Raqqah.  Well, that’s Ground Zero for ISIS.  And that’s… (out of breath) I’ll let you talk.

RUSH:  Right.  I didn’t catch all of that because of the quality of the cell phone, but I got most of it.  There’s no question that Obama is hanging out to dry here in Syria and has been.  And everything you said about this Samantha Power and this human crisis, this near-genocide that’s going on over there? We see it. It’s happening. There are people reporting on it.  But I… If you said this… I’m not sure I heard you say this, but if you think that the New York Times is spending all this time on the Russian hackery of the election to avoid coming this to avoid Obama?

That’s not true.  That may be an added benefit, but they believe this hacking stuff.  They’re really trying to delegitimize this Trump victory.  That is front and center.  They’re also trying to protect Obama from the incompetence of his foreign policy by ignoring the story where Syria is concerned because his red line is the beginning of the actual mess that exists there.  Now, hang on here, Janet. I have to take a break here the bottom of the hour. We’ll be back. I just want to wrap this up with you when we get back, so don’t hang up yet.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Janet, I just need to ask you, now, every caller this week, last week, the week before that — we’re in our fourth week now, every caller — gets a brand-new iPhone 7 or iPhone 7 Plus, if you’d like one.  Would you?

CALLER:  Yes.

RUSH:  Which…?

CALLER:  Your generosity is incredible.  It’s just… It’s incredible. From what you do for children who lose a parent in war to giving a caller a phone, thank you.

RUSH:  You’re very kind to say that. I appreciate that.  Which one would you like, the 7 or the 7 Plus?

CALLER:  The big one.

RUSH:  The big one?

CALLER:  Mmm-hmm.

RUSH:  And who’s your carrier?

CALLER:  AT&T.

RUSH:  AT&T.  So pick a color, any color.

CALLER: Wonderful.

RUSH: And, by the way, I know I’ve steered everybody to black.  It’s just that the jet black was, for a time, impossible to get — and I, as a powerful, influential member of the media, had some. 

CALLER: (giggles)

RUSH: But, man, the rose ones, the rose gold, they’re all beautiful.

CALLER:  The rose gold.  And, Rush, one more thing.  I agree with you completely about the New York Times.  There’s another component:  They want to demonize Putin to blame him for Syria.

RUSH:  Demonize Putin. Yeah.  Of course, it’s all about protecting Obama and his legacy and his reputation.  It’s a tough thing because the guy’s incompetent!

CALLER:  Ugh!

RUSH:  And so everything’s designed to cloud that and obfuscate that.  Now, Janet hang on a minute. (interruption) Yeah.  Yeah.  And a Rush 24/7 subscription, the website and all that.  Now, hang on, Janet, so that Mr. Snerdley get your address and get this to you.  Now, I want to go back to her original call.  I feel duty-bound, folks.  It was a little bit in the weeds, but I want to tell you what’s going on here with the assertion she was making about Syria and Putin and the New York Times and hacking and all of that, because this is…

Well, the opportunity is there, and I just don’t want her call to have many of you scratching your head saying, “What the hell was that?”  So here’s my best attempt at explaining it.  There is a quote in the New York Times.  “Mr. Obama was briefed regularly on all this, but he made a decision that many in the White House now regret: He did not name Russians publicly, or issue sanctions. There was always a reason: fear of escalating a cyberwar, and concern that the United States needed Russia’s cooperation in negotiations over Syria.”

See, Aleppo is blowing up. So it’s another Obama foreign policy disaster.  And with the hacking story being the focal point of the New York Times — because, believe me, folks. Do not doubt me on this. This New York Times story on hacking and the Washington Post story on hacking, it’s not to cover up what’s going on in Aleppo.  If that also happens, that’s a little bonus.

The express purpose here is to delegitimize Trump’s win — and, further, delegitimize his presidency.  If they can, they will impeach Trump!  They’ve already let us know.  Carl Bernstein’s already out telling us that Trump is worse than Nixon.  Do not doubt me on this.  They are fuming.  They are angry.  They feel rejected.  When people don’t vote for them, they blame the voters, and they blame everybody else.  So all of this…

The story on this hacking is all about how Trump cheated with Putin. Putin aided Trump. Hillary didn’t have a chance. The election was rigged. The election was hacked. The Russians hacked! (This was what they want people to believe.)  Now, in the midst of all of this, as we have launched our attack on ISIS, here comes Aleppo just in flames.  Fifty thousand civilians this morning before the program began were trapped after many thousands of others have already been summarily murdered and wiped out. 

So the New York Times is in full Obama protection mode, and this paragraph: “Mr. Obama was briefed regularly on all this, but he made a decision that many in the White House now regret: He did not name Russians publicly, or issue sanctions. There was always a reason: fear of escalating a cyberwar, and concern that the United States needed Russia’s cooperation in negotiations over Syria.”  So translation of this? Hey — the New York Times tells us — Obama knew the Russians were screwing Hillary all the way, way back, and that they were hacking!

This is BS, folks. 

This is absolute… This is just another series of lies.

Obama knew!  He knew all along, and they regret now that Obama didn’t call the Russians out a year and a half ago.  But Obama didn’t do it because he was afraid of an escalating cyber war and we needed Putin in our negotiations with Syria.  Still with the New York Times here: “‘We’d have all these circular meetings,’ one senior State Department official said, ‘in which everyone agreed you had to push back at the Russians and push back hard. But it didn’t happen.'”

And because we knew what we had to do, we should have pushed back. We should have pushed back long before the campaign began.  “So the Russians escalated again — breaking into systems not just for espionage, but to publish or broadcast what they found, known as ‘doxing’ in the cyberworld.” So the White House is in a CYA mode.  We all knew it! We knew what was going on, and we regret we didn’t call the Russians out earlier. 

Meanwhile, none of this happened!  There wasn’t any hacking!  Do you realize WikiLeaks, who is the source for everything in the Podesta emails, is saying the Russians have nothing to do with this?  The Russians are not where we got this.  We got this from an inside source at the Democrat Party. And the New York Times, if you read all 9,000 words, you will find that they don’t have any evidence that the Russians did this.  It’s just a bunch of circumstantial things coupled with bias and prejudice. 

It’s quotes from nameless intelligence officers opining and telling us what they think, but there isn’t any evidence.  There’s no evidence that Podesta was hacked by the Russians, and now not by the Russian government.  Even the Washington Post makes clear that if there was Russian involvement, it can’t be traced back to the actual government.  Well, that’s where Putin is.  This is such a snow job.  This is such a smoke screen.  Everybody now in CYA mode.

The purpose of this aspect of the New York Times story is to say, “Obama knew! He’s so smart, he’s so brilliant, he knew,” and they rolled the dice.  They didn’t want to make the Russians even madder than they were, and they needed Russia in Syria. So they let it go, and it came back and bit them.  Here is the next paragraph in the New York Times… Well, it’s analysis.  “If Obama had said the Russians were hacking the DNC…” Let me just tell you: That wouldn’t have stopped the Russians. 

Even if Obama had gone against his instincts, the Times tell us that Obama knew it, but rolled the dice and White House didn’t say anything. This is how they get themselves off the hook, by the way.  “We knew about it. We just didn’t say anything.”  Well, I’m just here to tell you, if Obama had said the Russians were hacking the DNC, at any stage in the Democrat primary, can you imagine that? (impression) “Well, uh, ladies and gentlemen, I — I’m having a press conference ’cause I just discovered that Vladimir Putin and, uh, the Russians, uh, have been busy hacking the Democrat National Committee and are working with the Trump campaign.”

Can you imagine what would have happened if Obama had gone out and actually admitted that?  Do you realize how incompetent the Democrat National Committee and Obama would have looked if they had publicly accused Russia of successfully hacking them?  So they didn’t.  Everybody would have just laughed at him.  I mean, the media might have been outraged.  People would have laughed at this.  But the Russian government wasn’t involved.  The New York Times says so, the Washington Post says so, and that’s why Obama himself has never said they were.  All Obama has said is that we need to have an investigation. 

Obama has never said Putin was behind this.  Harry Reid can say it, Nancy Pelosi can say it, a bunch of elected Democrats can say it, but Obama’s not saying it.  Just as he said they weren’t involved back in November, on November 16th Obama said there was no evidence the Russians had hacked anything.  People have forgotten that.  The New York Times is saying, the point of their story is that if Obama had just spoken out, the hacking would have stopped, which is laughable, because the hacking wasn’t the Russians. 

Whoever sent Podesta that phishing attack, if Obama goes out there, “The Russians have been discovered to have been hacking the DNC headquarters,” whoever the kid in the basement in the pajamas who actually did this, would have been laughing his pajama-clad butt off and would have ramped up his efforts.  That’s why I opened the program, these people look childish, they look pathetic, they look like losers, whining little children trying to act like one of the greatest offenses against humanity has ever taken place here with the defeat of Hillary Clinton.  

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH:  In that New York Times piece today, that 8,900-word piece, there is a picture of a file cabinet from the Watergate era.  Do not doubt what’s going on.  Here’s Dingy Harry:   “Russian Hacking ‘as big a deal’ as 9/11, Watergate — Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) says Russian hacking during this presidential election cycle is as significant as the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the Watergate scandal and called for a special commission to investigate.”

Now, that’s just deranged, to compare John Podesta’s emails going public with 3,000 Americans being murdered, and to compare it to Watergate.  Make no mistake what they’re doing.  But, folks, I think they’re gonna be left in the dust.  They still don’t know what’s hit ’em.  They’re trying to stop Trump the ways they have always succeeded in stopping other Republicans. 

There’s a big difference in Trump and previous Republicans.  They have a strategy known as surrender. When the media starts coming after ’em and the Democrats come after ’em, the Republicans, “Okay, okay, okay.”  Trump says, “What?  What?”  And just keeping plowing they had and then impugning ’em, laughing at ’em, making fun of ’em with his tweets and so forth. 

I don’t want to get too far ahead of myself here, but I think we living here at a time where we have the distinct possibility of many of the tried-and-true Democrat tactics that have been so successfully used to stymie and destroy Republicans being blown up and right back in their faces and exposed as pointless and worthless.  These are techniques and tactics that are explicitly designed to take down politicians and people of that mind-set and mentality, and that is not Trump. 

Trump doesn’t even have a political record that they can focus on and run against.  So they have to focus on this, that somehow the election was cheated and taken from ’em.  You wait.  This has the potential to leave these people so far in the dust that they’re not even gonna be seen.  They clearly do not yet know who Donald Trump is, why he won.  They don’t know why they lost, and they’re not interested in finding out.  They want to focus on this cheat business.  The only thing they can do when they do lose is delegitimize. 

They got away with it with George W. Bush.  Florida recount, Supreme Court stopping the count, go forward, everything about Bush was illegitimate.  After 9/11, one week passed, start in their attacks on Bush as incompetent, the whole Iraq war. It took ’em five years but they got his numbers down to 30% in the approval category.  That’s not gonna work here.  The people that elected Donald Trump did not in any way think this is illegitimate, nor do they think he is.  And there is more of them. 

I don’t care about this popular vote garbage.  There are more people eager to see what happens here with Trump and excited about it than there are, by far, ringing their hands (crying), “What happened, why did we lose?”  It’s going to be exciting.  It’s gonna be fun to watch these people try their 35 and 40-year-old tactics, the only tactics they know, and I think it’s possible they’re all gonna blow up in their face.  I’m hoping so.  We’ll see.  

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Joanne in Wilbraham, Massachusetts.  Great to have you.  How you doing?

CALLER:  I’m delighted, Rush.   

RUSH:  Thank you.

CALLER:  First-time caller and thrilled to speak with you.

RUSH:  Thank you so much.  I appreciate that.

CALLER:  I have a question that has really been bothering me.  I wonder if you could explain why Obama’s relationship with Castro was applauded by the liberals and yet they are so up in arms about Trump’s relationship with Putin.

RUSH:  Well, it is that they and Castro are communists and neo-communists, communists and liberal, and Trump is not.  No matter what Putin is, Trump is not.  The real question is… I don’t think the Trump-Putin thing is even the question. The real question is: What is the source of the admiration they have for Castro?  He’s a mass murderer. He kept political prisoners in dungeons. His people, the people of Cuba, many of them couldn’t… They died trying to leave.

Most live in abject poverty. Yet liberals feel this connection, this admiration.  What explains the liberal admiration and adulation for people like Fidel Castro?  And it wasn’t just Castro.  They felt the same way about Hugo Chavez, but not quite as strong.  Castro was… I mean, he captivated ’em.  And I… You know, it’s… I think they envied his power, and I think they fear Trump’s power.

CALLER: Hmm.

RUSH: I think it’s really no more complicated than that.

CALLER:  Okay.

RUSH:  Now, what kind of iPhone you want?  7 or 7 Plus?  I know you want one.

CALLER: (giggles) 7 Plus would be great.  Thank you.

RUSH:  Who is your carrier?

CALLER:  Cricket.

RUSH:  Cricket!

CALLER:  Yes.

RUSH:  Cricket.  Okay.  AT&T Company.  Okay.  So I’m gonna send you a GSM phone, which works with T-Mobile and AT&T.

CALLER:  Okay.

RUSH:  I’m pretty sure it will work with Cricket.  What color do you want?  You said you wanted a plus?

CALLER:  Yes, please.

RUSH:  What color?

CALLER:  Rose gold.

RUSH:  Rose gold. Oh! Perfect! Perfect.  So hang on so Mr. Snerdley can get your address.  You take it to Cricket, you tell ’em it’s an unlocked GSM phone — they’ll see it on the back — that the phone was a gift, and we’ll give you a subscription to Limbaugh Letter and Rush 24/7.