RUSH: I want to talk about Andrew Gillum and Ron DeSantis for a moment. This is the Florida governor’s race, and there is moderately big news today. Gillum has been under investigation by federal and Florida law enforcement for quite a while. I have a story here from the Miami Herald… The Miami Herald, which is not Fox News. “Gillum’s Ticket to ‘Hamilton’ Came from Undercover FBI Agent, New Documents Show.” Now, it took five reporters to write this story.
Let me give you a pull quote from this. “Tuesday’s document dump was the type of event Democrats feared when Gillum won the party’s nomination in August but hoped would never come,” never come out. “Though supporters generally dismissed the significance of the texts and emails between Gillum and Corey,” I’ll tell you who that is in a minute, “one Democratic consultant acknowledged that anyone on the fence about Gillum could be deflated” by this.
“The timing of the release — exactly two weeks before Election Day and on the second day of early voting — comes during a key period for the Democratic Party, when voters typically begin showing up to the polls in large numbers and making up the advantage Republicans build during absentee voting.” Except it’s not working. The early voters are largely Republican this time around too. But here’s the deal.
“Undercover FBI agents paid for Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum’s hotel room and his ticket to the Broadway musical Hamilton during a 2016 trip to New York City, according to a bombshell trove of records that raises new questions two weeks before the Nov. 6 election for Florida governor. Among the records released Tuesday: photos, a video and dozens of text messages between Gillum, who is the Democratic nominee for governor, former lobbyist Adam Corey and an undercover FBI agent.
“They appear to contradict Gillum’s explanation for the expenses, which have been made a major issue by his Republican rival, Ron DeSantis. Gillum’s campaign has maintained — and continued to do so Tuesday after the records were released — that Gillum’s brother, Marcus, handed him the ticket the night of the show. But text messages at the time of the trip show Gillum was told the tickets came from ‘Mike Miller,’ an FBI agent looking into city corruption who was posing as a developer.”
They’ve been looking into Andrew Gillum corruption as mayor of Tallahassee for years! And there were a lot of Democrats very worried that all this was gonna come out if he did indeed win the primary fights and become the Democrat nominee, which has happened. “DeSantis’ campaign pounced…” You see, Republicans always “pounce” in the media. Republicans “pounce.” Democrats “stated,” but Republicans “pounce.”
“’It’s now abundantly clear,’” goes the DeSantis statement, “‘that Andrew Gillum has repeatedly lied about taking free gifts and trips from lobbyists. If he’ll lie about these gifts and trips from lobbyists on national television, what else is he lying about?’ … Once a close friend of Gillum’s, Corey is at the center of the FBI’s long-running probe into corruption in Tallahassee. No one has been charged, and Gillum has said that agents assured him he was neither a target nor a focus of the probe,” just like Comey told Trump.
“Gillum has repeatedly given vague answers to questions about who paid for the New York City trip. His avoidance of a direct answer became pronounced during a Sunday debate on CNN between DeSantis and Gillum. ‘Did you pay for the Hamilton tickets?’ DeSantis asked” him openly. A lot of people ask: “What is the big deal? Okay, a trip to New York, Hamilton tickets. Big whoop!” The guy won’t tell the truth about it, is the big whoop. But I think this is chump change compared to what’s really at stake here.
Chump change is the wrong thing to say because it is a window into who Gillum is, and he is somebody that wants to parlay his positions of power into positive, influential goodies for himself. He’s a classic politician in that regard who believes that holding high office equals an entitlement to perks and other things. And he’s willingly desirous of seeking them. In this era where everybody feels the need to denounce the special interests and not being beholden to them, Gillum can’t make that statement.
Now, let’s look at the polling data. “A Quinnipiac University poll Tuesday showed Gillum ahead of Republican opponent Ron DeSantis 52% to 46% among likely voters, with double-digit leads among women, Hispanics and independents. It’s the third such poll in recent days to show Gillum with a clear lead, as his overall edge in public polling widened to its largest level since Oct. 1…” Okay. So Gillum is a character. He is a person with clouds of suspicion that are hanging all over him.
In addition to that, he is a hardened left-wing activist hack who efforts Florida as his collective. He looks as things the way communists and Marxists do. He does not believe in the power of the individual because that leads to inequality and unfairness. He wants everybody to get free health care here and free medical care over there, Medicare for all. He believes in a guaranteed national income, these kinds of things that if ever implemented would bring to a screeching halt in Florida everything that’s happening nationwide that is building the economy.
But who is DeSantis? You know, a lot of people may not know much about DeSantis. So let me step in here and tell those of you in this vast and wide audience in Florida who he is. Ron DeSantis is a Yale and Harvard graduate who was a decorated JAG officer in the Navy – Judge Advocate General. He has a solid record of winning achievements as a representative from Florida. He has resigned his House seat in order to devote all of his time exclusively to his campaign.
He’s got a great family. His wife is all in for this. Got the young kid. He’s just an epitome of a decent, solid American citizen who has achieved tremendous, great things. Now, on TV, I think it was this morning, he was on Fox, and he very calmly and very simply outlined a pattern of corruption by Andrew Gillum. He pointed out the FBI has had Gillum on its radar for years, as they sent in undercover agents to catch him breaking all kinds of laws and accepting bribes in return for development deals. Pay-to-play, so to speak.
Gillum graduated from college, was given awards by socialist organizations, which propelled him at a young age to get elected to the city commission in Tallahassee. Then he became mayor for three years. He’s been under some kind of cloud or investigation ever since. He wants Florida to be a sanctuary state. He wants Florida be open borders for not at all illegal immigrants. He is the classic American socialist who believes America is the problem in the world and that poverty in Central America and the Southern Hemisphere is our fault because we have hogged and stolen too many and too much of the world’s resources.
And we have hoarded it all and we have denied it to our neighbors. We have stolen America from the Native Americans and so forth. There’s nothing decent about the American founding. The Constitution is all outdated now. And the guy is a classic throwback. He is a walking, talks, Barack Hussein Obama on steroids, if that’s even possible. If you compare the current crop of Democrats, Andrew Gillum is not unusual among the Democrats. The Democrats are putting people like him up all over this country. And in many places, they are biting the bullet.
Have you heard what’s happening to Heidi Heitkamp? Did you hear what she did? She just… I’ll tell you in a minute as time unfolds here. She’s down 13 in her Senate race. She voted against Kavanaugh and then thought she’d be able to recover some Republicans that got mad at her, but she has blown that sky-high. She’s just misjudged things terribly. Details are coming up. I don’t want to get too sidetracked here.
The point is that the Democrats are nominating quasi-socialists and people who have problems with America all over this country, people who think America is flawed, that there’s no such thing as American exceptionalism or greatness. And people who think that are unfairly biased and don’t know the truth of all the pain and suffering that America as inflicted on many of its own people. Martha McSally. Martha McSally running in Arizona, she’s got an arm’s length of accomplishments that would be the envy of anybody.
And she’s being compared to this nasty bisexual socialist she’s having to run against down there named Sinema. This is the woman running around, who has been caught saying in the past that American women who become housewives are nothing but leeches and are traitors to the cause of feminism. They cannot possibly be feminists. She’s just off-the-charts senseless. There is nothing about this Sinema character in terms of common sense that would recommend her. Martha McSally, first female fighter pilot, military achievements and other awards, an arm’s length long.
It should be no contest. John James running against Debbie Stabenow. John James, African-American, another of the decent, great Americans multiply and you go back and forth looking at the race there as to whether or not he actually has a chance. Some days you think he does. But Debbie Stabenow has been in office a long time, tired, worn-out, classic leftist Democrat senator who gets away with being thought of as a moderate, not a radical, when in fact they all are radical.
And then you’ve got Beto O’Rourke, who is a veritable lightweight compared to Ted Cruz. Appears Cruz has been pulling ahead in that race. My point is that from DeSantis versus Gillum, John James versus Stabenow, McSally versus Sinema, Beto O’Rourke compared to Ted Cruz, these Republican candidates are just good, old-fashioned, decent people. They are good, old-fashioned solid citizens. They are the kind of people that everybody in town reveres, looks up to in the old days.
Everybody would be proud to live in a community with these people in it. They are active in the community. They are responsible. Many of them give communities, in which they live, their face and their ID, their identification. And they’re just down-to-earth, decent people. There’s not a mean-spirited extremist among them. They all love America, want it to be the best it can be for everybody. They understand that a great America requires great citizens, great people. They all understand who it is that makes America work.
There’s just no comparison, just in terms of solid citizen, decency, straight-down-the-middle normalcy, there’s no comparison in the names like Gillum versus DeSantis, it’s not even a toss-up. And the same thing with McSally and Sinema, John James and Stabenow, and Beto O’Rourke and Ted Cruz. And I could go on. And it may be that we’ll do some comparisons here as the election nears. The differences, to me, are striking.
And it’s these kind of races, you look at how close the Democrats are making some of these, and in others the Republicans are pulling away. But it is striking how far gone and how lost the Democrat Party has taken the people who support them. I mean, it’s a hodgepodge of people that have given up and become victims and blame everybody else, including the country, for whatever is going wrong in their lives, and they turn to politics.
And they want the force of political power to not fix what’s wrong with them but to punish people they think did it to ’em, whatever it is! And so we’ve had the politicization of what are disorders of one degree or another that need to be dealt with clinically, medically, professionally, and are not being dealt with at all. They’re being promoted and magnified by politics, they’re justified. There are people that genuinely have some serious disorders that need help, and the Democrats are not about that. These people are being ostracized and built up and being urged to continue in the behavior that’s harming themselves all for the express purpose of Democrats winning elections. An abject shame. And, hopefully, will be brought to a halt.