RUSH: It appears, ladies and gentlemen, that the people on our side still haven’t learned a single lesson about how to deal with the Democrat Party and the media, the American left — of course, that’s all the same group of people. It’s patently obvious. It’s really frustrating to me. All of this should have been anticipated. All of this was easily predictable. I think somebody I know pretty well did.
And the way this is all being handled today — and people have the best intentions. The heartfelt desire to defend Jeff Sessions by pointing out the Democrat hypocrisy, when are we gonna learn that Democrat hypocrisy doesn’t exist? There is no such thing as Democrat hypocrisy in the media. You’re never gonna beat these people back by pointing out how they’ve done the same thing that they’re accusing us of doing. It’s never gonna work! This story is not about Jeff Sessions.
By the way, greetings and welcome. Great to have you. Rush Limbaugh, 800-282-2882.
This story is not about Jeff Sessions. This story is not about illegal talks between Trump and his campaign people and the Russians. This story is about Barack Obama and the Democrat Party attempting to sabotage the Trump presidency and do everything they can to either render it meaningless and ineffective or to get him impeached or force him to resign. That’s what the story is. And that is what has to be attacked, not defended.
We have no reason to be on defense all the time. We won the election. These people are barely hanging on. This is all they’ve got. And there’s no evidence, despite a year and a half of allegations of illegal contact between Trump, his campaign, and the Russians. There is no evidence.
Now you know why I have been harping on this almost daily for so long, because this is the only option the Democrats have open is to try to convince as many people as possible that Hillary should have won the election, that Trump is illegitimate, that Trump’s victory was the result of cheating and fakery and maybe foreign espionage. That’s all they’ve got.
Now, if you take a look at what they’re doing, they’re going after all of the people who are the closest advisers to Trump. They took out Rudy Giuliani right after the election with stories about his supposed ties to foreign governments. They took out Michael Flynn. And how did they do that? They decided to harp on the fact that Flynn had lied to Pence about something of tremendous, major import, forcing Trump to get rid of Flynn on the basis he’s not trustworthy, the guy lied to Pence.
How are they going after Sessions? Sessions lied. Sessions lied to Franken. Now Trump has no choice but then to get rid of Sessions. This is what they’re trying to do. Now, do not misunderstand me. I’m not saying Sessions doesn’t deserve to be defended and I’m not saying this shouldn’t be explained, because I’m gonna do that today. I’m talking about tactics and strategy, the immediate knee-jerk reaction when these allegations come is to accept their premise, and once we do that, we’re cooked.
No matter how much brilliance we come up with, no matter how much evidence to refute what they’re saying, if we accept the premise, we’re cooked. We have got to redefine what this is really all about. It is all about Barack Obama and the Democrat Party attempting to unseat President Trump. It’s all about sabotage and a scandal from the highest levels of the Democrat Party. That’s what is happening here. And that’s what people need to be told.
All of this needs to be explained to casual observers, American citizens, as to what is really going on. You know, I can play the game of defending Sessions. I’ve got all the Claire McCaskill tweets that show she met with the Russian ambassador and bragged about it even though she’s saying that Sessions should quit for having to do it. Sessions in his testimony during his confirmation hearings, this was not even about anything official. It was about that phony, fake dossier that the media and BuzzFeed had published.
Sessions was being asked questions about a dossier that was packed full of lies that nobody even maintained was true except the media. As I say, I’m gonna get to all of this in due course, but I actually think, folks, that the focus here needs to be on Obama and the Democrats and their motives. And I’ll tell you what’s driving this is Trump’s speech. Trump’s speech on Tuesday night has scared the devil out of these people.
They thought Trump was gonna continue to be what they think is a bumbling fool, you know, fortunately, luckily running into good things and eventually he was gonna start bumping into bad things, and he’s gonna screw everything up. He didn’t know politics. He didn’t know the establishment. It was gonna be easy to do end runs around him, and that speech came, and in their minds, that’s the greatest speech they’ve ever heard, and it scared the hell out of ’em.
Now, they were gonna do what they’re doing today anyway, but their intensity has been ratcheted up. I mean, I could point out all of the hypocrisy I want. Remember when special prosecutor was appointed for Loretta Lynch’s meeting with Bill Clinton just before the election? No, you don’t remember that because it didn’t happen. What was at all about? The Clintons and their Crime Family Foundation were under FBI investigation. They might still be, for all we know. But we don’t hear any clamoring to get to the bottom of that.
It looks like the Democrats were conspiring to cover up influence peddling and God knows what else. The Clintons were out selling access to the White House and her future presidency. Last time I checked, all of this is what led to the Republicans being elected. The Democrat Party has soiled itself in front of the American people, and they don’t want any more of them. That’s why Trump won.
You know what Sessions ought to do? “Yeah, yeah, I talked to the Russian ambassador about our grandchildren. You know, he’s got some grandchildren, I got some grandchildren, that’s what we were talking about.” Well, that’s what Loretta Lynch and Clinton said they were talking about on the airplane one week before a decision was coming down from Comey on whatever was gonna happen with the Clinton investigation into her emails and stuff. I can point that out and you go, “Yeah, yeah, right.” And you know what it’s gonna get us? Nothing!
Even in the court of opinion it’s gonna get us nothing because it accepts the premise that Sessions did something wrong and therefore we can mitigate that by pointing out, “Well, look what the Clintons did.” It doesn’t work that way. We should learn after 30 years, it doesn’t work that way. The Democrats are never held accountable for hypocrisy. There is no such thing where they are concerned in the eyes of the media and others who hold them accountable or don’t. I know the desire to defend Sessions. He’s a great man. He’s a decent man. He’s a good man.
And there’s no way he would do what they want you to believe. But it’s not about the reality, folks. It’s about the perception — and if we accept the premise, then that sets the perception almost in stone. And they’re gonna go after Sessions for the same reason that they made Trump get rid of Flynn. “He’s not trustworthy. He lied to me, lied here, lied to Pence. I don’t know, I gotta…” How do you not get rid of Sessions after having gotten rid of Flynn on that basis? So here come the calls from the Democrats: Impeachment! Special prosecutor!
There’s no evidence. Folks, there isn’t any evidence of anything, except the Obama administration and its holdovers in the deep state tried to sabotage the duly elected president of the United States. That is the story! That is what is happening! And it’s happening right in front of our eyes. It’s not even a secret. We see the results of it every day in the New York Times, which I believe is complicit with Obama and the Democrats in this attempted sabotage. I have no doubt. A special prosecutor, everybody is clamoring for? To investigate what?
What is there to investigate? Allegations? Seriousness of the charge? They’re trying to isolate Trump from the people he trusts. They’re trying to isolate Trump from the best people around him because they believe that Trump, without intelligence and guidance nearby, will fumble and stumble on his own because he doesn’t have a brain. He doesn’t have political instincts, and he doesn’t know what’s going on. Now, we’re told that Barack Obama was a huge statesman. “Oh, yeah, we so miss the statesman-like composure and stature of Barack Obama!”
Let me ask you this off the New York Times story. I’m assuming you all have heard all about all this now, and I don’t need to waste time setting the table with what happened, although as I… (interruption) Know what? (interruption) Okay, well, then I’ll circle back to it, but I don’t want to waste a lot time reporting things that people already know, because that just accepts the premise, too. “Hey, man, look what’s in the New York Times.” What’s in the New York Times and what’s in the Washington Post are just the latest attempts to sabotage and undermine the Trump presidency, and it had better be fought back on that basis.
It had better be dealt with on that basis, not that Jeff Sessions did something wrong. Not that there is an impeachable offense here. There isn’t any evidence, and they have been investigating this for over a year and a half. Hang on on that. I just want to make one point here. Because here we have the New York Times and the statesman-like aura of Barack Obama, and, “Oh, how we miss it! Oh, jeez, we long for it so much to return.” If Obama has known about all of this for all of this time, why wait until now?
Why wait until after Trump’s inaugurated?
Why not release what you knew about the so-called contact between Trump and his campaign people and the Russians in order to head off his election? Well, they tried, folks. Don’t think they didn’t try! They don’t have any evidence for it. They tried all last summer. They tried all October. The New York Times had a huge piece on this in October. But they had to say — way down, buried near the end — that the officials involved in the investigation still have no evidence that there were actual contacts. Why didn’t these Obama deep-state people become whistleblowers?
They’ve been there for four, eight years. I mean, if this has been going on this long, where were these people before today, before last week, before January? Why didn’t they go to their respective inspectors general in all these departments and blow the whistle on what they supposedly knew was going on with all of this contact between Trump and his campaign and Russia? Why didn’t they go to Obama? All these deep-state guys leaking all this, why didn’t they go to Obama and say, “Mr. President, it’s horrible what’s going on out there.
“The Trump campaign is talking to the Russians; they’re trying to sabotage the Hillary campaign!” Well, they did, and Obama went out and said there’s nothing to this. President Barack Obama back in December denied all this was going on. Here it is, and it’s a Breitbart story: “Obama Crushes Conspiracy: No Evidence That Russia Tampered with Votes in Election.” December 13, 2016, just three months ago. “No Evidence That Russia Tampered with Votes in Election — President Barack Obama emphatically denounced the conspiracy theory saying Russians successfully tampered with the American voting process.
“‘We were frankly more concerned in the run up to the election to the possibilities of vote tampering, which we did not see evidence of,’ he said. ‘And we’re confident that we can guard against.’ During an interview with The Daily Show’s Trevor Noah, Obama downplayed the hack of a private email account of Clinton campaign chief John Podesta, defending his administration for revealing in October that the Russian government was connected. ‘None of this should be a big surprise,’ Obama said, ‘Russia trying to influence our elections dates back to the Soviet Union.’
“Obama dismissed the hack and the leaked emails as ‘not very interesting’ and lacking ‘explosive’ revelations. He puzzled as to why it was an ‘obsession’ by the news media despite the knowledge that the Russians were responsible.” Yeah, they’re trying, but they didn’t succeed in doing anything. That’s Obama in December! So what has changed? In December: “Obama Crushes Conspiracy: No Evidence That Russia Tampered with Votes in Election.” Was Obama lying then? Why would he lie? Why didn’t he tell everybody?
He told Daily Show, Trevor Noah; it got picked up here by Breitbart. The New York Times didn’t pick it up. The Washington Post didn’t pick it up. But I remember telling you about it. And Obama did the same thing in March when the subject came up. Every time it came up all during last year, Obama pooh-poohed it. And you know why? Because it would have been a black mark on his administration. If the Russians had been able to hack the election while he’s president, what does it say about his national security apparatus?
So he’s out there all last year and as recently as December saying (summarized), “There’s nothing to this. No evidence that Russia tampered with the votes in the election,” which is something I’ve been maintaining for even longer than Obama said it. It’s absurd and it’s preposterous, and yet that’s what they continue to build all of these allegations on is contact between the Trump campaign and the Russians. So I’m just telling you, folks. The story here is not Jeff Sessions. Don’t get sucked into this. The story is Valerie Jarrett moving in to the Obama family home.
What the hell’s up with that?
There’s a story here is about how Obama and his people are running the resistance operation from that home, and that’s why she’s moved in. The story here is the Democrat Party being blown out of the water in election after election after election. The story here is Barack Obama’s agenda has been totally reputed by the American people. It has been rejected in 2010. It was rejected in 2012. It was rejected in 2016. It was sent packing.
The story here is that Barack Obama is humiliated and angry and embarrassed that his effort to transform the United States of America into some kind of socialist paradise has been interrupted, that he was the architect of the Democrat Party defeat. And that cannot stand for the history books! And so this story is all about the Democrat Party trying to rewrite history and make it look like they actually won were it not for the cheating of the Russians and Trump.
They’re trying to convince the Europeans of this. They’re doing everything they can to delegitimize Trump, his administration, his victory. That is the story that people need to focus on because there’s evidence for that. There is evidence at every town hall protest. There is evidence all over this country every day that this sabotage is going on.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Absolutely! I was just asked a question: Do I think it’s a mistake for Republicans to pile on and demand that Jeff Sessions recuse himself? Absolutely it’s a mistake! We do this all the time, too. We eat our own, and we do this to try to show that we are “fair and balanced” and that we are “not the mean-spirited, partisan extremists the Democrats accuse us of being.” We won the freaking election! Big! It is time to stay on offense and not get defensive. Look at this story. This is the U.K. Daily Mail: “Valerie Jarrett Moves into Obama’s Home in Washington.”
It’s two miles from the White House! From the story. It’s “the nerve center for their plan to mastermind the insurgency against President Trump. Obama’s goal is to oust Trump from the presidency either by forcing his resignation or through his impeachment, a family friend tells DailyMail.com,” and Obama is being aided by his long-time consiglieri, Valerie Jarrett, who’s moved in to the 8200-square-foot home along with Michelle and Barack Obama. There’s no doubt what’s going on here, folks. It’s as clear as a bell. It’s even being published and written about.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Very simply, here’s what’s going on. Donald Trump surprisingly was elected president. He was elected president to fix the United States. What does that mean? Fixing the United States means attempting to unpack, to unravel, to unwind, to otherwise demolish years and years and years of socialism, big-governmentism, that had crept into our society and to our government ever so slowly over years and years and years to the point that our economy is choked; to the point that our people are having trouble earning incomes that rise; to the point that 94 million Americans are out of work and yet they’re all eating.
We are becoming very slowly but surely a welfare state dominated by the American left, which views that as their ticket to perpetual power. Meanwhile, the superpower status of the United States was also being undermine and unwound and we were going to become subservient to a global order, headquarters United Nations or wherever. This became unacceptable to millions and millions of Americans who elected someone to stop it and to hopefully roll some of it back.
Now, doing all of this requires taking action that is going to frighten, infuriate, and panic — what percentage of Washington, DC, would you say, Trump is fighting? Eighty percent? Eighty, 90% of Washington, maybe 95% of Washington, DC, Donald Trump is fighting, because that’s where this project to stop this transformation away from the nation as founded into something it was never intended to be must take place.
Well, when you are going to try to unravel eight years of what Barack Obama thinks was nirvana and heaven, and his supporters think the same thing, and, further, when you’re gonna try to unravel 50 years of left-wing creeping socialism, the people in Washington are not just going to sit idly by and let election results determine whether or not that happens to them. They are infuriated; they are angry; they are paranoid; they are scared. The world that they’ve constructed for themselves, but not us, is the Donald Trump administration crosshairs and they’re not just gonna sit idly by and let it happen.
Victor Davis Hanson has a brilliant piece today in National Review Online. Just who are these people that we’re talking about? Who are these elites? And I have a pull quote paragraph here that I think brilliantly sums up the people we are up against and why our country has devolved to its present state. “The public,” you and me, “no longer believes that privilege and influence,” and power and status, “should be predicated on titles, brands, and buzz,” and the like, but instead we believe that privilege and status and influence should be earned, not passed down.
It should be earned on the basis of demonstrable knowledge, demonstrable skill, and proven character.
This is the makeup of the American nation as founded, where it was character and success, meritocracy. It was demonstrable knowledge and skill and the pursuit of excellence that determined whether someone succeeded and rose to great stature in whatever chosen field that person endeavored. What’s happened today — and this is very crucial to understand, and this is why the people that we’re fighting are so precariously balanced on their perches and scared stiff that they’re gonna fall off.
The idea that brilliance can be found in trade skills or retail sales, the idea that courage can be found and expressed by dealing with the hardship of factory work or the fact that character and decency and goodness can be found on a farm, all of that is foreign to the Washington Beltway.
The Washington Beltway sneers at all of that. You work in a factory, you’re an idiot, you can’t possibly be worth anything, you can’t be worth any status. You work in a factory, you work in a manufacturing plant, you’re a farmer, you work in retail sales, you do things that don’t have media anointed status, then you’re nothing! You’re just one of the nameless, faceless mob out there that every four or two years becomes important. But beyond that, you don’t even rate.
Because what has happened is Hollywood, the Washington Beltway, and Silicon Valley, a great reputation only depends on the right ZIP code, only depends how high your income, only depends on your social circles and your media exposure. You don’t need to be good at what you do. You don’t need to be among the best at what you do. You don’t even need to be among the accomplished at what you do.
You don’t need to do diddly-squat. As long as you found a way to earn a lot of money. As long as you live in the right place. As long as you go to the right cocktail parties, travel in the right social circles, as long as you know how to get on Fox News and get a book deal. As long as you know how to get on MSNBC or CNN. As long as you can become an analyst or a spokesman or whatever, that’s what conveys stature today.
Now, it used to be — and I describe the people who make the country work. And Washington, DC, is not where the country works. The people who make the country work do not live there. They think they are the reason the country exists, and they believe that Washington is the sun and everything else is in orbit around Washington.
And they want all of you to think the same thing. And just by being in Washington, no matter what you do, as long as you’re seen on media or you have a column, or as long as you’re a donor, as long as you know a lot of people, whatever, you do that, then you’re automatically granted status as a success, as a somebody. You haven’t done diddly-squat.
Meanwhile, the people in America who actually do things and make things and make things happen and elevate circumstances and standards of living for everybody, they no longer matter. There’s no status attached to that by the elites. Well, you don’t need me to tell you that this definition of status and success is pretty flimsy. It’s all based on what somebody thinks of you. It’s all based on perception, not what you’ve really done. That’s what Trump is fighting, and that’s what we’re all fighting. And they know how precarious they’re balanced. They know how thin the stage on which they stand.
And Trump has made no bones about the fact that he wants to come in and blow the place up and put it back together where the people of the United States of America once again matter. And so the elites are circling the wagons and banding together to do anything they can to stop this effort to reclaim America. And that’s what the story is, folks. The story is establishment and everybody in it doing what they can to sabotage and thwart the Trump administration.
This is not an empty, blind, defend-’em-at-all-costs strategy on the Trumps. I’m not doing this at all. I’m just trying to get everybody focused on what’s really happening here. Jeff Sessions is not the story. Russian contacts during the campaign, not the story. We already know this. There’s no evidence for it. Barack Obama last December said it never happened. But now we know that there is an effort to actively sabotage and undermine the Trump administration focused in Obama’s home, according to the U.K. Daily Mail.
And even if it isn’t focused in Obama’s home, it’s focused in Washington and it’s focused in the deep levels of the American government, the bureaucracy and so forth. And that is the story here. And the only thing the establishment has to undermine Donald Trump and to sabotage his presidency and his victory is Russia. They don’t have any ideas that they can combat Trump with. Trump makes his speech, did you hear any idea disagreement or reaction? No; you hear character smears. You hear Trump using a poor widow as a prop. But you don’t hear any of them come back with better ideas.
Their ideas never have been better. They know it, you know it, and I know it. The way to sell their ideas is not to sell them. They force them on everybody. But now they’re out of them. They don’t have any ideas that they are willing to publicly stand for. They don’t have any policies that they’re willing to publicly stand for. They don’t have any arguments they’re willing to make that they think can win. They have no success stories to point to and say, “See? Our way works.”
They can’t point to Cuba. They can’t point to the ChiComs. They can’t point to the European Union. They can’t point anywhere that there is a place better than the United States running a government based and rooted in socialism and Big Government. They cannot do that. They can’t point to any leaders around the world who believe what they believe, attempting to implement what they implement, who are succeeding. They can’t do any of this.
They do not offer a rosy, optimistic future. They don’t even try. Their world is one of the apocalypse. Their world is the one that’s dark. Their world is the one with carnage all over the place. Their world is where America’s best days are behind us.
That’s what they stand for, that’s who they are — and any effort to undo that, they can’t fight, because everything they believe in went down in flames in November, and it went down in flames in the midterms in 2010, and went down in flames again in 2012, and it went down in flames in 2016. There isn’t a single success story. Even their grandiose plans to improve life in America, like Obamacare, are falling apart and imploding — and they don’t even have anybody willing to defend it to the hilt!
They have nothing with which to change your mind and to make you think they are a better alternative. All they have is Russia. All they have is a phony allegation that Trump’s election was fraudulent. The only thing they have is that Trump’s election should not have happened. The only thing they have is that Hillary should have won and would have won if it weren’t for the Russians. And we’re told in the New York Times, that Obama has been collecting and preserving and saving all of this evidence.
Yet there isn’t any! Why was Obama collecting it and preserving it instead of using it? Why is Obama waiting until now, until after the election? If this was happening and there was real evidence of collusion, they could have stopped Trump from being elected. Instead, Obama was saying there is no evidence that the Russians had anything to do with voting — and there isn’t, and there won’t be, because they didn’t. (pause) And that, my friends, is the story.
The Democrat Party has been decimated. It has been rocked. It doesn’t have anything it can say to you that will make you want to prefer it. They would have won the election in November if they had that. They don’t. They wouldn’t have won in 2012 were it not for factors that had nothing to do with issues as well. All they’ve got is the Russians. All the media has is the Russians. Try substituting “communists” for “Russians” and see how this all plays out in your mind.