RUSH: Okay, folks. This children and families being separated at the border? It is an entirely manufactured crisis. It’s entirely manufactured. This has been going on for years. It happened during the Obama administration. Nobody said a word about it, primarily the media. Some might say, “Well, that doesn’t excuse it continually happening.” You gotta keep it all in perspective, and wait ’til you understand why. This is all about asylum seekers, folks. It’s all about people attempting to invade our country, not emigrate here.

And I’m gonna do my best. You know, this is a very complex issue. Well, it isn’t. It’s been made to look complex, and, after they try to make it complex, then they try to simplify it by simply suggesting the United States — no, Republicans — hate kids and Republicans like separating families. And that’s what they’re trying to boil all this down to. So I’m gonna spend some time today explaining what this is all about with the aid and assistance of a few others.

And by the time we finish, you will understand how yet again this is just another manufactured crisis. Look, they’ve gotta change the subject. They have to change the subject. The economy is rip roaring. They’ve got to change the subject from the IG report. For crying out loud, that’s a devastating report about the culture of the FBI. They have got to change the subject. They’ve got to move off of the problems the Democrats are having electorally, culturally, and politically.

And so made-to-order, this manufactured crisis, somehow that Donald Trump is heartless, that Republicans are heartless, that they want to bust up families. Let me tell you who’s been busting up families. The Democrats. The Democrats have been literally subsidizing single motherhood in the black community for decades. It used to be called AFDC. You could also say that Planned Parenthood is excelling at separating families, couldn’t you? You want to talk about separating families, look no further than the abortion mills of Planned Parenthood.

I fully expect these comments to be controversial because they are bull’s-eye right on target. The Democrat Party has prospered from separating families. The Democrat Party has prospered for decades by assuming the role of father and provider in minority communities all over this country by subsidizing single motherhood. It is the Democrat Party who is seeking to have children brought here on trains from Central America without their parents, to create just the kind of scenario we are finding ourselves in the middle of today.

Now, to set all of this up, let’s remember some things. As was noted over the weekend… By the way, greetings. Rush Limbaugh, 800-282-2882. (You know all of that, so I sought not to waste that much time with the usual show open. Lots to do here.) It was — as noted over the weekend — three years ago that Donald Trump announced for the presidency. It was three years ago that he came down the escalator at Trump Tower, and we all remember his announcement speech, and most people’s reaction when that was over was laughter and ridicule and disbelief.

“There is no way this guy is serious! You don’t run for president or any office saying the things that Trump said.” I was one of the many people laughing myself silly at it (chuckles), ’cause I thought it was courageous and brave and way over the to — and I, too, was trying to figure out the motivation. But then I’ll tell you when my mind changed, ladies and gentlemen. That’s when I saw the first poll results. I was pleasantly shocked and surprised that there was overwhelming approval for Donald Trump as a presidential candidate on the Republican side.

That’s when the panic in the Republican establishment began. On the Democrat side, they never took it seriously. (laughing) All the way up to 8 o’clock on election night, they didn’t take it seriously. Except they did, because they were running spies in the Trump campaign as early as 2016! They were running Russian spies, trying to convince Trump campaign officials to pay them to take the information they were offering. The Democrat Party, the media, the FBI, the intelligence community, spent years trying to corrupt the Trump campaign — and with everything they tried, they failed.

There’s no evidence there was any collusion, despite the fact the FBI was trying to create some. Now, all of this is relevant to where we are today. But there is much, much more. What has happened in the three years since Donald Trump came down the escalator at Trump Tower? There is a renewed optimism in much of this country. In the vast majority of the square footage of this country, there is vast enthusiasm, a renewed optimism, a renewed pride, a renewed happiness in the future. The economy is roaring.

We are seeing statistics we haven’t seen in years — in fact, in some cases ever. Black, Hispanic, female unemployed rates are at a record, all-time low. The overall unemployment rate is statistically zero. It’s 3.9, 3.8%. This has long been regarded as statistically representative of full employment. The stock market has rallied and is out of sight and is still on its upward trajectory. There is a new satisfaction poll out from Gallup, and it is overwhelmingly upbeat and positive.

“Public satisfaction with the direction of the country is the highest it has been since September of 2005,” but you would never know that if you did nothing but watch Drive-By news all day. You would never have any idea that public satisfaction is at the highest it’s been since September 2005. My friends, that is 13 years ago! Now, 2005 seems like yesterday, but it was the beginning of the second term of the Bush administration, and let’s take a look what happened in 2005. Why is today, the public satisfaction with the direction of the country the highest it’s been since September 2005?

Well, let’s remember. September 2005 was around the time the Democrats realized that they were not gonna win the midterm elections in 2006 by forcing George W. Bush to surrender in Iraq. So the Democrats and the media decided to try talking us into a recession. They didn’t let up on their attacks on the U.S. military. Every day in the American media the U.S. military and our war effort and the War on Terror and the Iraq war was being pummeled, criticized. American troops were being called terrorists by ranking Democrats like John Kerry and John Murtha of Pennsylvania.

The Iraq war was being said to be immoral. We had David Petraeus, who was accused of lying before a Senate committee before he had even testified. They decided to try to talk us into recession. Does anybody remember the first stage of that? Chuck Schumer started a run on a bank in California. That remember, Mr. Snerdley? I forget the name of the bank, but Schumer made some comments about the instability of small banks, and he named a couple of them, one of them in California, and created a run on that bank.

The media picked up the story and began talking about how bad the economy was, how bad the fundamentals were — and they didn’t let up. The last term, the last four years of the Bush administration were devoted to destroying George W. Bush and the war in Iraq. (interruption) IndyMac? No, no, no, no, no, no, no. That was an institution. I’m talking about the very small bank in California. What was that the name of it? IndyMac was a… Well, I remember that name. I know it’s part of this.

But it was the beginning stages of the attempt to talk everybody into believing that we were in a recession, and it was combined with the never-ending assault on the Iraq war. And what they succeeded in doing was driving George W. Bush’s approval numbers down to the thirties, and Wolf Blitzer couldn’t stop talking about it. You remember all of this. It was their effort to win the 2006 midterms. They were devastated that they thought they had won the exit polls in 2004 but had lost the real vote.

Remember? They were beside themselves. They had lost another election. It was the idiot Bush that they thought stole the election from them in 2000. Does this is all sound familiar? Does it ring relevant to today? It does. So they began pummeling the country. They began pummeling the successful in this country. They pummeled Bush. They pummeled the military. They made Americans feel nervous and distraught each and every day. We were in the height of being told we were torturers, that CIA had black sites.

We were mistreating people. We were causing torture. We were causing terrorism. George Bush was a leading recruiter. It was a never-ending negative assault, and they succeeded in driving Bush’s approval numbers down to 30%. They succeeded in making the American people feel ill at ease, unhappy, and nervous, particularly about the future. We got the recession. They got the recession that they wanted, and they won back control of Congress — and don’t think they’re not try to do that again.

They’ve been talking down the economy for months now, as Pelosi has these inane comments about tax cuts and how little it means to people and how this economy is not that good; it doesn’t really affect all that many people. So, yeah, folks, it’s time to change the subject. Oh. There’s one other little thing I’d like to add to it as well, and the headline: “Economic Growth…” This is the Wall Street Journal: “Economic Growth in the United States Leaves the World Behind — Second quarter growth GDP, the United States, on track to exceed a 4% pace, the fastest of any quarter in four years.”

Barack Obama never even approached 3% economic growth. Socialist Europe has let in massive numbers of illegal refugees from Muslim countries, and what happened very shortly after? Their economies sunk, against expectations. No one makes the connection. Angela Merkel is barely holding on. The European Union is barely holding on. Populist candidates are winning elections in Europe. There’s other factors, too, economies and so forth. But on the massive… In fact, it’s been an invasion of the European Union, too. It’s not just immigration.

They have opened their borders in the U.K., Germany, you name it. So we have a perfect storm all orchestrated by Donald Trump to renegotiate everything, every single little deal with these countries. We are finally deciding that it’s no longer required of us to take one for the team. Trump is standing up for America and fair deals for America. As such, “Economic Growth in the United States Leaves the World Behind.” They have to change the subject, folks. They can’t report any of this. They can’t report on the Gallup satisfaction numbers.

They can’t remind people of the low unemployment numbers. They certainly can’t remind African-Americans that they’re doing much better than they ever have done under any Democrat administration, but especially that of Barack Hussein O. Let’s throw in the fact that there’s actually been a head-to-head sat down with the communist tyrant thug of North Korea, Kim Jong-un. Consumer confidence is racing. They have to change the subject. So what do they do when they change the subject?

Well, they either use the race card, or they throw down the card that “Republicans hate X.” Republicans hate kids. Republicans hate brown people. Republicans hate immigrants. Republicans this and that. That’s how they — and the media is right in on it. And I’m gonna demonstrate to you today that this is a manufactured crisis in the sense that nothing’s new here. This policy has been in place for years and was widely practiced during the Obama administration.

The only difference is the media didn’t tell you about it then. The Obama administration wanted it hidden, and so it was. But there’s nothing new under Trump, except an attempt to fix it by holding people accountable to the law. The only way circumstances like this can happen is if people are allowed to violate immigration law and not be punished. That’s the only way this can happen. Don’t worry, folks. I’m gonna unpack this and explain it all to you when I come back. A sound bite emergency. I’m gonna take you back to a Democrat montage from (it’s a shame when I need my glasses for casual things) 1995. I’ve got a sound bite from the budget battle of 1995 and a montage of many Democrats, same Democrats, over this past weekend.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: I’m watching CNN before the program began, and I got a great example of what I’ve been trying to mention, talk about, explain for months, ever since the ruckus caused after the Indiana Religious Freedom Restoration Act, CNN had a panel discussion going. The headline or the graphic chyron underneath: “Outrage Grows over U.S. Separating Immigrant Families.” No, it doesn’t! Outrage is not growing.

That headline is specifically designed to make the viewer think that Americans all over the country are outraged at Trump and are demanding that Trump do something about it. This is how the media misleads. “Outrage grows.” Certainly outrage is growing in the Democrat Party because it’s a political that they are ginning up on here, and they are causing outrage among several low-information voter groups. But their attempt, “Outrage grows nationwide.”

They don’t say nationwide, but that’s what the headline means. That’s what they want to convey. And this is how they do it: Make it look like what they’re reporting on, what they think is majority opinion of the United States population. More on that in a minute. Sound bites. Let’s go back. This is actually from a TV show clip. My TV show. We have a montage of Democrats talking about the Republicans hating children from the 1995 budget battle.

REP. JOHN LEWIS: They’re comin’ for our children. They’re comin’ for the poor.

REP. THOMAS BARRETT: Why do the Republicans want to take apples and milk away from six-year-olds?

REP. LYNN WOOLSEY: Starving children is not the solution …

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: It’s cruel to kids!

SEN. DICK DURBIN: Stop declaring war on our kids!

REP. LITTLE DICK GEPHARDT: The Republicans are taking food out of the mouths of millions of needy children.

REP. LUIS GUTIERREZ: We’re gonna let the kids go hungry again.

SEN. TED KENNEDY: War on their children! War on their children!

RUSH: Starving children? Republicans were starving children? These were phantom budget cuts, but just the fact they said it! Now, listen. This weekend and today we have a montage of some of the same Democrats talking about the separation of families issue.

REP. JOHN LEWIS: (outdoor noise) …sick and tired of (slams podium) what had happened to (slams podium) our children, (slams podium) to our babies, taken from their mothers (slams podium) from their fathers, separated. (slams podium) That’s not right! (slams podium) That’s not fair!

REP. SHEILA JACKSON LEE: (outdoor noise) To snatch children away from their families. This ugly, vile program that is harming children.

REP. JERRY NADLER: Babies being separated from their mothers. This administration is behaving like a bunch of thugs and gangsters.

SEN. CHRIS VAN HOLLEN: (outdoor noise) A cynical, evil policy to try to hold these kids hostage.

REP. LUIS GUTIERREZ: Children are being ripped from parents’ arms. I can’t think of anything more chilling, any more evil.

REP. JOE KENNEDY: (outdoor noise) We fight for these kids! We fight for their parents!

RUSH: You see the similarities? It’s the same playbook. It’s the same approach. “Republicans hate X.” Just change it to fit whatever issue is going on. It’s manufactured.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: So the Democrats have got to make a bunch of stuff invisible. They have to change the subject from that devastating IG report on the horrible corruption of the FBI. It’s become a problematic culture of corruption at the upper ranks of the FBI, and the primary thing to emerge from this, among all else, is remember: They’re trying to go after Donald Trump here for obstruction of justice for firing James Comey, the director of the FBI.

And the IG report is making everybody ask, “Why didn’t Obama fire this guy even before Trump did?” The IG report confirmed that Comey was… (snorts) His firing was certainly warranted. By the way, did you see what Comey did over the weekend? He went out to a cornfield in Iowa and tweeted some message that makes people think he’s running for president in 2020? I mean, why go to a cornfield in Iowa to tweet something out? So supposedly, Twitter “melted down.” That’s another thing. I’m getting sick and tired of everything happening on Twitter being determinant.

So the hell what!

They never said — back in the nineties and the early 2000s — that talk radio was melting down and acted like what was happening here was representative of what’s going on in the country, and it’s far more so than Twitter is! Twitter has become the biggest joke, and it’s become the avenue of laziness for mainstream media. Rather than pick up the phone or rather than actually travel to parts of the country you hold in contempt, you just turn to Twitter and you make pretend that whatever happening on Twitter is the national reaction to something.

So much of Twitter is fake. So much of Twitter isn’t even real people. It’s computer robots that are executing algorithmic programming. It’s all bogus. You want to talk about Fake Media, talk about fake news? Go to Twitter. Go to Facebook. So Twitter “melted down.” So what? What does that mean? What, are we supposed to change the way we look at the news because Twitter melted down over a Comey tweet from a cornfield in Iowa?

The bottom line is there is no obstruction charge that will ever hold against Donald Trump, because he cannot obstruct justice performing constitutional presidential duties — and among those is the prerogative of firing the FBI director or the attorney general or anybody else in the cabinet that he wants to fire. He runs it! There are political ramifications of doing so, but not legal, not constitutional. The Democrats are slowly coming to the realization, too, that Robert Mueller is not their savior.

Robert Mueller is not going to be able to get rid of Donald Trump. They have hoped and prayed that Trump would be gotten rid of in six months by virtue of the leaks, the massive fake news about colluding with Russia. They thought their barrage of mainstream media stories would prove so embarrassing and so enraging that Donald Trump would lose public support from those that voted for him — and in that way, they sought to get rid of him.

They really were trying to drive his approval numbers down to the twenties, and they thought they would succeed in six months, just like they thought Hillary was gonna win in a landslide. These people are wrong every time they predict or project something. And what they are learning they’re wrong about is the ramifications and boundaries of their own power. In their world, they have the power to stop a Donald Trump from becoming president, except (Oops!), they didn’t.

In their world, they’ve got the power to get rid of somebody who wins that they don’t like. Oops! That’s not working out, either. In their world, they have the power to destroy people left and right. And, oops! That is working against people that haven’t done anything! Flynn, Manafort, you name it. The point is, every objective they’ve had has fallen flat, because in no way was the special counsel ever going to be able to get rid of the president of the United States, not without driving his approval numbers down.

The only way Donald Trump is driven from office is by the United States Congress.

That’s the only way it can happen. You can’t indict a sitting president. You can’t charge him. You can’t sue him. Because if you could, it’d be the way the opposition could tie him up every day and prevent it from ever getting anything done. The founders wrote it in that impeachment is the way that you remove a president — and would you like to know that in the history of the country, a president has never been removed by virtue of an impeachment conviction in the Senate. Meaning two-thirds of the Senate voting to get rid of him.

It’s never happened. Presidents have resigned before it got to that point, or impeachment efforts have failed, such as the one against Slick Willie, Bill Clinton. So they’re slowly coming to the realization that Robert Mueller is not their savior, that Robert Mueller can’t get rid of Donald Trump. Now, they are still saying — and I find this so offensive, I can’t tell you — that Robert Mueller is the only person in America who can clear Trump of all these charges. I cannot tell you how repulsive that is to me. These charges are manufactured and made up!

Political charges manufactured, made up by Trump’s enemies are now being investigated by a so-called unquestionable “integrified,” honorable guy in Washington: Robert Mueller — and he sits in judgment of whether or not Trump passes muster? Sorry, not here. But that’s what they believe, that Robert Mueller is the only person that can clear Trump. Trump cannot clear himself. Trump cannot say (I don’t care how many times), “I didn’t do it. There was no collusion. There was no obstruction.”

The only person who can exonerate and clear Trump is Robert Mueller, and that is what they’re holding on to, because everything else is slipping through their fingers like melted butter. None of this was supposed to happen. The country was not supposed to be in this great a shape. Economic growth was not supposed to happen. We were not supposed to be getting out of these global arrangements and circumstances where we were being stolen from. We were not supposed to fix all this.

The United States was still to be the world’s patsy because that fit the arrangements these establishment types had made with other global leaders, for whatever obscure and perverted reasons. But, anyway, Trump has blown all of that up. And now Trump stands athwart their effort to forever transform this country into what it never should have been via immigration and his border wall. Trump just tweeted something. I have it here. And this is absolutely right.

“If President Obama (who got nowhere with North Korea and would have had to go to war with many millions of people being killed) had gotten along with North Korea and made the initial steps toward a deal that I have, the Fake News would have named him a national hero!” It’s true. It’s true, and Trump’s voters know it, and the hypocrisy of all this just continues to build and fulminate and anger Trump supporters. Rather than separate Trump from his supporters, all of these efforts to destroy Trump are strengthening the glue that keeps Trump and his supporters together.

So now what? Now we have to call that a cult! We can’t legitimize that. No, no, no, the establishment, the Democrats, even some Republicans cannot legitimize Donald Trump’s support. So now it has to be called a cult. The point is every day we get up, and we are faced with another manufactured crisis, a manufactured political issue, the center of which is Donald Trump in either corruption or incompetence or danger or what have you — or inhumanity, you name it. But it is all manufactured. What is real is tangibly real, noticeably real, livable and real.

It is the antithesis of the Obama administration, and it is driving them batty. It’s driving them up a wall, to the point now that a policy that has existed for years and years is being singularly attached to Donald Trump, when he hasn’t had anything to do with it. Now, there are people… Let me jump in here on myself and say that there are reasonable people who are saying, “This is a lousy defense! Just because it’s been going on for a long doesn’t mean that it should continue. This is an inhumane policy that the United States has, and we must stop it.

“Trump must stop it! You can’t defend it by saying it was going on for a long time.” I damn well can because this is not an attempt to fix this issue! The Democrats do not care about these kids. The Democrats do not care about these families. Not primarily. Maybe tangentially. Their focus is Donald Trump. Their focus is damaging Donald Trump. If they cared about these kids and their families being separated, they would have done something about it when Obama was president rather than cover it up and hide it.

One of the biggest myths in the United States for the longest time is that Democrats care about people and Republicans don’t. It’s an absolute myth, and it may be 180-degrees false. I was watching Fareed Zakaria Global Positioning Satellite, and he said (paraphrased), “The left is at its lowest power in terms of seats held — elected seats held — since the 1920s, which is a really puzzling thing, because the left has always stood for progress and people improving their lives economically.”

No, it hasn’t, Fareed! If you improve your life economically and become independent from the Democrat Party, you’re no longer looked upon with any love. You become part of the enemy. The Democrat Party exists on dependency, and people that escape it pose a problem. So don’t buy that the Democrats care about separated families. Because, after all — and let me remind you — the Democrat Party literally subsidized single motherhood in the black community for decades. It was called AFDC.

The Democrat Party promoted a welfare policy that gave single women additional money for every child they had. The father need not ever be around. In many cases, the father was not even known, the father was not even identified because the Democrat Party assumed the role. Actually, the Democrats made the government assume the role of father. If you want to talk about honestly separating families, the Democrat Party wrote the book on it and promoted it and campaigned on it and won elections on the basis of separated families where the government took over the economic responsibilities of the father.

So the father was allowed to wander away with no responsibility whatsoever; single mothers were rewarded for every child they had. The government came in and paid X-amount. It became a pretty big political scam. The Democrats continued to pay it because it created the idea that government is daddy, that government is parent, that government is Santa Claus — not just one day a year, but every day.

Now they have the gall and the audacity to say that Donald Trump is mean-spirited and extreme because he likes separating immigrant families and children from their parents. Not. So. If anybody is gonna fix it, like everything else, it’s gonna be Donald Trump. But it’s gonna be on his terms, and it’s not gonna be part of an immigration deal that allows mass amnesty by DACA kids and others for the sake of “fixing” this. It’s a manufactured political issue designed to change the subject from all the robust goodness and decency that is springing up all over this country.