RUSH: The hot-to-trot news of the day. Beto O’Rourke, Robert “Beto” O’Rourke, after saying he wasn’t gonna run for the presidency, today went to Iowa and flailed around with his arms gesticulating, wildly claiming he is gonna run. He’s got the craziest agenda. I hope these people keep talking.
Every time these Democrats open their mouths, they are creating more Trump voters. Do not doubt me on this, folks. Do not doubt me. We have not become a socialist nation yet. These people are not appealing to a mass or majority of people in this country.
Only in the Democrat Party could somebody who loses a Senate race be said to be the front-runner in the presidential contest. But what’s happening, the Democrat Party’s not digging Beto. Beto is too white. And there’s all kinds of commentators and media people that are livid at people for being so excited over Beto! Where was this excitement for Kamala Harris, they’re saying. Where was this excitement for Cory Booker? There wasn’t any of this kind of excitement, proving there’s even racism on the Democrat side. Yet Beto gets in and all bets are off?
The Club for Growth has put together an ad or two on Beto O’Rourke video ads. They run about two minutes. They are awesome. And they are devastating. They make mincemeat of the guy. We’ll link to a couple of them at RushLimbaugh.com.
They asked Trump — Trump had an Oval Office meeting today with the Irish prime minister — did you see Trump’s tie? What a great tie Trump had on. Normally he wears solid colors. He was wearing a Foulard tie today with the dominant color being green. He had a little green pocket square in there in honor of the Irish prime minister in town. His name is Leo Varadkar.
Anyway, it was a mess. When Trump opened it up to the media, it sounded like 6-year-old Romper Room asking for ice cream. They went bonkers in there. You couldn’t even hear individual questions. But Trump was able to. And I guess they asked him at some point about Beto, and this is what Trump had to say.
THE PRESIDENT: He’s got a lot of hand movement. I’ve never seen so much hand movement. I said, “Is he crazy or is that just the way he acts?” So I’ve never seen hand movement, I watched him a little this morning doing, I assume it was some kind of a news conference, and I’ve actually never seen anything quite like it. Study it. I’m sure you’ll agree.
RUSH: I love that. “I’m sure you’ll agree.” He’s right. Beto was all over the place here. It was odd. It was odd. But aside from that, folks, I’m just telling you: When these people announce what they’re for, they are creating more and more Trump voters, even among people who may be even lukewarm toward Trump. Let me just give you a summary of what Beto said today. Beto O’Rourke… He “released a video alongside his wife, Amy, announcing his candidacy.” In the video he talks about “interconnected crises in our democracy,” “the economy and climate.”
He “promises to unleash the genius of the United States” to fix them. In his first-ever visit to Iowa, he starts off with this apocalyptic notion about global warming. He said that “large parts of the world will soon be uninhabitable.” You thought I was making this up. You thought that I was exaggerated a bit every time I’ve told you that there’s a bunch of Millennials out there who really believe the earth is not gonna be habitable by the time they’re 65. Here comes Beto! He says: Illegal immigration? No big deal!
And you better get ready for even more because mass migration of “climate refugees” will mean tens of hundreds of millions on the U.S. border. You think people want to vote for somebody that thinks this is gonna happen? Climate refugees, tens or hundreds of millions of people on the U.S. border — and what’s happening down there now is nothing compared to what’s gonna happen? He then “praised the Green New Deal as the best proposal to address the singular crisis we face, a crisis that could at worst lead to human extinction”!
Could you just see people running to the polls to vote for this? He’s got a website. It’s got merchandise and fundraising buttons. No issues or position phrases on the buttons. Here’s a summary of what Beto is for, his policy positions. He’s against a border wall. He voted against ICE. He voted against Kate’s Law — that’s Kate Steinle — on sanctuary cities. He voted against the Trump tax cuts. He is in favor of single-payer health care, Medicare for all. He voted against sanctioning Iran, and he has calls the cops “the new Jim Crow.”
This guy has determined that the electorate on the Democrat side is leftist insane, and he’s making a beeline for them. This has caused others in the Democrat Party to react with some caution. Michael Avenatti. Just after Robert O’Rourke announced that he’s running, Avenatti tweeted… Now, he’s the lawyer for Stormy Daniels — well, is the ex-lawyer for Stormy Daniels. He fired her. He fired his client. The odds are that she didn’t pay him. The odds are that there was no gigantic payday for Avenatti.
The odds are that Avenatti may have thought he was gonna be in the front running or in the lead for the Democrat presidential nomination. Do not discount that. These people are that deranged. Anyway, none of that has materialized. None of the wealth, none of the riches, none of the acclaim, none of the fawning. None of this happened to Avenatti. So now he tweets, “If the Dems nominate a weak glorified cheerleader candidate to face Trump, then we deserve the outcome, which will be a Trump re-election. Trump is not to be underestimated.
“Nominating a candidate who is not battletested [sic] and a fighter will ensure he wins again.” So the Democrats… This is something that we don’t see very often. We do see it occasionally, but not much. The Democrats are now engaged, in the process of critiquing each other. And I’m telling you, Beto has brought a bunch of them out of the woodwork, and they are launching into him. African-American media people are livid at all the excitement that’s greeting Beto O’Rourke’s announcement. They can’t stand it!
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: You know how much I care about Beto O’Rourke right now? A big, fat zero. But I opened the program talking about Beto O’Rourke because it’s one of these things I think I should do. Because he is being treated, he’s being greeted by some in the media and some in the Democrat Party as the next great hope, the next great hope for admonishing and getting rid of Trump.
But he’s being met with his own degree of controversy within the Democrat Party, which is what I want to explore. It’s not that I don’t care about Beto. It’s just that it’s… To me, this is so far out now, and it just… You know, I’m a nonconformist, and I refuse to look at the narrative every day on cable news and have that determine what I talk about here. So all morning long on cable news it was Beto, because Beto was out in Iowa and he did his announcement for the presidency.
And, of course, the press dutifully falls in line and covers it and so forth. But there are other things out there to me which interest me more. But I have made a judgment that I should talk about this nevertheless. In fact, we’ve got… Let’s see. We have a couple callers. People want to talk about it. So it’s a wise decision to get back to it. I want to start here with audio sound bite number 9.
Now, Nia-Malika Henderson on CNN New Day today was asked… She’s African-American. (interruption) I don’t know. She’s a “person of color,” okay? I don’t know who’s African-American, Jamaican-American, Indian-American. I don’t know anymore. She’s a person of color, and John Berman said, “You wrote a piece,” Nia-Malika Henderson. “You wrote a piece about how Beto is treated differently than other candidates and specifically female candidates. What can you tell us about this?”
HENDERSON: The point of that piece was to talk about the ways, uh, in which Beto O’Rourke benefited from white privilege, uh, the idea that he could go off on this excellent adventure. I think he — he only felt, uh, emboldened and free enough to do that because he was white and because he was male, and (snickers) because his wife could, in fact, uh, stay home and look after the kids. There couldn’t be, I don’t think, a female candidate or an African-American candidate, uh, who could do that kind of exercise and get so much praise for it. The freedom, uh, that he could feel, uh, really, uh, I think has a lot to do, uh, with the fact that, uh, he is white and male. I haven’t seen, uh, Stacey Abrams on the cover of Vanity Fair.
RUSH: Oh, man! You see? The long knives are coming out! She’s jealous. She jealous. Beto O’Rourke apparently has a slave wife at home that will stay there and raise the kids and cook and do whatever’s necessary. Beto can go out and be free and be this guy with all this white male privilege. So he’s got freedom that African-American female candidates don’t have. Plus the fact that he’s got the cover of Vanity Fair, and so he’s benefiting from “white privilege.” This is an amazing statement, actually.
“[T]he idea that he could go off on this excellent adventure. I think he only felt emboldened and free enough to do that because he was white and because he was male, and because his wife could, in fact, stay home and look after the kids.” What about Cory Booker? Why can’t he engage in the same kind of freedom? Does the fact that he’s black and bald mean that he doesn’t have a wife at home taking care of the kids and he’s not as free? What am I missing here? Why is it that Beto is white is the reason he has all this freedom?
Does Kamala Harris not have some slave husband at home willing to do whatever’s necessary to — (chuckles) yes, she does, by the way — enable her to do whatever she wants to do whenever she wants to do it? Same thing with Elizabeth Warren. I mean, Elizabeth Warren (impression), “Hey, honey, grab me a beer!” And he lazily… “Never mind, honey! I’ll get that beer myself,” and she goes to the fridge, grabs the beer and opens it with her teeth. “Hi! Want to join me in a beer? I am Cherokee Nation number 1, Elizabeth Warren.”
What’s stopping these people from exercising their privilege and their freedom? Why is it only Beto O’Rourke who had freedom ? In fact, I’ve got a story here from Breitbart: “Left Mocks Beto’s ‘Messiah-Esque’ ‘Born’ to Run Remarks: ‘Peak White Male Privilege.’” These are liberals come down to poor Robert. “Left-wing activists and liberal journalists were quick to mock former Rep. Robert Francis O’Rourke (D-TX) on Wednesday evening after he told Vanity Fair that he was ‘born’ to run for president.
“O’Rourke told Vanity Fair, ‘You can probably tell that I want to run… I do. I think I’d be good at it.’ ‘I want to be in it,’ O’Rourke said. ‘Man, I’m just born to be in it, and want to do everything I humanly can for this country at this moment.’ Hours after Vanity Fair published its fawning cover story, O’Rourke confirmed to KTSM in Texas that he would announce on Thursday that he is running… ‘I’m really proud of what El Paso did and what El Paso represents,’ O’Rourke [said]. ‘It’s a big part of why I’m running.
“‘This city is the best example of this country at its best,'” and it is a “gushing Vanity Fair profile.” They love the guy. It “framed O’Rourke as someone who, in contrast to President Donald Trump, ‘can appear almost too innocent’ and ‘decent’ to be a politician.” He’s just… He’s too potted plant. You know, he’s just… He’s too nice. He just too innocent. But his “critics on the left immediately pointed to his ‘white privilege’ and mocked his ‘weird as hell’ ‘Messiah-esque’ tone that they predicted ‘will not serve him well’ in a presidential run.”
We… (interruption) In the Democrat Party, you mean? (interruption) “Whites need not apply”? (interruption) Except he’s got his supporters in the Democrat Party. It’s not just… (interruption) Snerdley says, “Why don’t they just have a sign: ‘Whites need not apply’ in the presidential nomination in the Democrat Party.” (interruption) White males! White males. Here’s Kirsten Powers. This gets even better now. She’s on CNN this morning, and they’re having a discussion about Beto running for president. She’s now a columnist at USA Today, by the way, and this is what she said…
POWERS: Can I just say one thing, though, about what’s bothering me about this isn’t so much about what he’s doing, it’s what the media is doing. So the fact that he gets this Vanity Fair cover and I – and I feel like, you know he is getting kind of this special treatment that’s not proportionate to what he’s done. He’s had a big accomplishment, but so did Stacey Abrams. There are a lot of other candidates who’ve accomplished a lot. Like, it’s not clear to me why he’s on the cover of Vanity Fair and Kamala Harris isn’t.
HARLOW I want to know why – why do you think it is?
POWERS:: Well, ’cause I think that there is still a – an issue in this country where people just get very, very excited about white men.
RUSH: Holy smokes, folks, this is the Democrat Party! They’re supposed to have fixed all over this! There aren’t supposed to be these tensions and this divide. But do you hear these people? They’re just jealous! How does this guy get Vanity Fair and Stacey Abrams hasn’t? How come Kamala Harris hasn’t gotten it? Why is Beto? I’ll guarantee you — Beto lost, too, that’s another thing they’re not saying. They’re thinking, this guy loses, he loses to Ted Cruz, and he’s the biggest thing we’ve got?
But the jealousy here, the jealousy over the media. Isn’t it just delightful to listen to leftists whine about an unfair, unrealistic media? (imitating Powers) “I’m upset by what the media’s doing. So he gets this cover. I feel like, you know, he’s getting kind of this special treatment that’s not proportionate to what he’s done.” She has no idea what it’s like to be a conservative or Republican in media. You talk about getting criticized for things, how many media enterprises that have no audience are labeled as hot and number one in the media if they’re left wing or liberal?
It’s establishing a point. They can’t deal with adversity in the media. They can’t. People on the left, they’re so unaccustomed to getting it that, when it happens — but now the divisions, all of these women. And Kirsten Powers is not a woman of color except for her red hair. She is a white woman from Alaska out there. And even she’s ticked off. (interruption) What makes Stacey Abrams so attractive? Don’t make me answer that. I don’t want to have to — see, I can’t do anything other than tell the truth, and there’s nothing to be gained by answering your question.
Snerdley wants to know why — we’ve had two people now, Nia-Malika Henderson and Kirsten Powers compare Beto to Stacey Abrams. Beto gets his Vanity Fair cover, Beto gets star treatment by Drive-Bys, and why hasn’t Stacey Abrams? Why are they angry Stacey Abrams isn’t — well, again, I can’t answer this. I mean, I could, but I don’t know how much it would serve or assist me in doing so. (interruption) Well, Kamala’s not gotten the cover of Vanity Fair, though.
And, by the way, what’s Kamala’s great claim to fame? She had an affair with Willie Brown that he has confirmed. She was the front-runner when she was the only runner, yeah, she was the front-runner when she was the only runner. Well, her dad did some dirty deeds too. Well, her dad got mad because she portrayed a bunch of Jamaicans as just sitting around blowing weed all day. He didn’t like that.