RUSH: Now, before getting smack-dab into my debate analysis, I have to share with you a couple of stories. CNN is being roasted. They televised the debate. CNN is getting creamed last night and today for their coverage — and, by the way, it was bad. Can somebody explain to me…? I’m serious. It’s gonna sound like I’m being typically, naturally funny. How can you put on a stage somebody moderating a debate of candidates for president who once asked if the Malaysian missing airliner was swallowed by a black hole?

Do you realize how far that signals the self-reputation, the self-esteem of media executives has plummeted? I’m talking here about Don Lemon. He was one of the moderators last night. This is a guy who actually asked a former transportation secretary/expert (whose last name was Schiavo) if it’s possible that Malaysian 377 or whatever it is was swallowed up by a black hole. Now, how does that happen? You want to think of Walter Cronkite rolling over in his grave or Eric Sevareid or whatever?

I mean, gee whiz. But there it was, front and center. Now, the criticism that CNN is coming under fire for is legitimate. They made the debate about them. They made sure that they enforced a one-minute limit on everybody. People are tuning in to hear these candidates, and the only thing you heard was CNN moderator shouting at ’em, “Times up! Time’s up, Senator! Senator, we’re moving on! Time’s up, Senator!”

Wait a minute. If that’s what you’re gonna format this thing to be, it’s gonna guarantee to fail! You give these blowhards one minute each and then you limit how much they can react to one another? And then when some of those reactions do happen, CNN, you step in and stop it, ’cause it looks like somebody might say something mean. And it wasn’t just me. A Bloomberg opinion piece here: “Ten of the Democrats debated on Tuesday night. But the debate was dominated by Jake Tapper, Dana Bash and Don Lemon…

“It’s not just that the time allocations” meaning one minute per answer “were harsh. (The candidates were constantly being cut off, sometimes after being given all of 15 seconds to make their points.) And not just that the time allocation seemed somewhat arbitrary. No, it was the questioning that really fell short — very, very short. The CNN moderators, again and again, [asked] the very worst types of questions. One style that Tapper used repeatedly early on was interrupting to insist that the candidates stick to a portion of a topic that he found interesting…”

He asked a question; if they don’t stick to your question, you stop ’em. It was clear that CNN here either was trying to protect these people… You could have many different explanations of this. CNN knew these people were bombing out… Folks, I’m telling you, this this this this crew last night was so far radical left that it had to scare the bejeezus out of a whole bunch of people and Democrats. I don’t know why… Where do they…?

This stuff didn’t start last night. The radical extremism has been this party for 2-1/2 years. What’d they think, it was all gonna disappear and get reined in on the debate stage? And then here’s a piece from TheHill.com: “CNN faced backlash for its first primary debate … with members of the media comparing its production to a sporting event or movie trailer and others lamenting the time spent to kick off the event. …

“[T]he event started on Tuesday night at 8 p.m. with an introduction video, a commercial break and opening statements. The first question to one of the ten candidates was not asked until 8:23…” You know, that’s exactly how NFL telecasts go these days, or golf. You tune in at 3 o’clock to watch the final round and you’ll see the first shot 15 minutes later, after obligatory video of Tiger Woods waking up. Then the obligatory individual of how Tiger Woods is feeling.

Then obligatory video of Tiger Woods on the range. Then the obligatory recognition that Tiger didn’t even make the cut. Then they do a personal interest story on who the leader might happen to be — and maybe, in 15 minutes, they’ll take you to the golf course. And that’s what this thing was last night.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Audio sound bite number 5. This is part of the ongoing effort today to try to make as many Americans think that the Democrats are not socialists, they’re not radical leftists, they’re all just a bunch of moderate, down-the-center middle-of-the-roaders. It happened on C-SPAN today, Washington Journal. The host is Greta Brawner.

You know, I’m very embarrassed to admit that I don’t know any of the people on C-SPAN. I used to know ’em all. I used to know Brian Lamb. I knew Susan Swain. Brian Lamb. I don’t know any of them anymore. And the hostette of this one was Greta Brawner, and she was taking calls from viewers about the Democrat debate last night, and it was time for Pat from West Virginia.

PAT: Hunter S. Thompson said it best, he coined the term “fear and loathing.” Rush Limbaugh and Donald Trump and the Republican National Committee have been very deft in getting the message out, “socialism, fear, free stuff, communism” whenever we all know that’s not really the case.

RUSH: Oh, but it is, Pat. This is the thing. You know, Pat, all we do is quote Democrats here. That’s all we do. And then we put it into context for people. We just quote them. We don’t do fake news where Democrats are concerned, my man. We actually listen to what they say, as you’re gonna hear with the audio sound bites coming up, and we tell people what it means.

Pat, we ran the numbers. Every Democrat program proposed last night, if enacted, would cost $200 trillion, and it’s all gonna be free! Every bit of it is going to be free! The country thinks Democrats are socialist ’cause of me and Trump? They think the Democrats want to offer ’em free stuff because of me and Trump? No. Because the Democrats do!

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: One more quick one before we hit the break. Donna Brazile was on Fox & Friends today, and Brian Kilmeade said, “When you heard ’em talk about race last night, the Democrat debate, they agreed on one thing, that Donald Trump is a racist. Did that surprise you, Donna Brazile?”

BRAZILE: First of all, if you ask me, I didn’t think they talked enough about race, especial given all of the conversation we’ve had emanating from the president’s tweets.

RUSH: They didn’t talk enough about race. If you had watched it, your conclusion would be that’s all they talked about. It’s the only thing they talked about. Race and how it relates to everything. Race and health care. Race and immigration. Race and everything. And every one of them, again — you know, once Crazy Bernie said it (imitating Sanders), “Donald Trump is a racist. He’s a sexist. He’s a bigot.” And the facial expression, he forgot something. “And a homophobe!” He threw that in. “A homophobe!”

So there you go. There’s the cliche: racist, sexist, bigot, homophobe, and then they all chimed in. They all had to go on the record as yep, racist. And she thinks they didn’t talk about it enough. I hope they keep up. I mean, Trump was such a big winner again last night that it’d be hard to calculate by how much.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Now let me give you some on-the-spot debate analysis with audio sound bite backup, and your phone calls are gonna be thrown in here as part of the mix as well. I just made some notes as this thing was happening last night.

I wasn’t there for the entire thing. But I made a commitment to you people, I made a commitment to watch this, to watch enough of it to get a general flavor. And in no chronological order and really here nothing other than as unbiased a series of observations as I can make.

This group of people on that stage last night, to me, were singularly unimpressive. They were offering impossible, unworkable ideas. They seemed filled with histrionics. Most of them, not all, most of them seemed just very close to out-of-control anger and frustration. Bernie Sanders was ticked off, he was mad about American health care. And I just kept saying, “Well, I guess Obamacare wasn’t all it was promised.”

Do these Democrats even realize they’re out there ripping the American health care system to shreds — and I know why. They’re thinking that the current occupant of the White House is gonna get the blame. Somehow Trump’s not gonna get credit for the economy, but he’s gonna get all the blame. Everything people are upset about, Trump’s gonna be held responsible.

Do these people not realize everybody knows about Obamacare because Obama’s name was all over it all the time. We had the Obama exchanges. We had the Obamacare this, got Obama phones, we had the Obama Marts in Baltimore. So here’s Bernie letting everybody know how angry he is at the U.S. health care system not realizing that Obamacare must not have been all it was promised. Democrat plan.

It’s Democrat sponsored and signed health care that Bernie Sanders is mad at. And then he’s saying things like tens of millions of people lose their health care every year. Now, we’re not supposed to take the Democrats verbatim. But stop and think of that. Tens of millions. Not 10 million, which would be unsupportable if that’s what he had said. Tens of millions are losing their health care every year.

If that were true, I’m saying to myself, could Barack Obama be impeached retroactively? I mean, that really is bad. Tens of millions of people losing health care after the Democrats give us Obamacare. The more so-called moderate Democrats on stage last night, they were telling the country that it’s insane to take away private health insurance from 160 million Americans.

But that’s what Bernie wants to do. They all want to take away private health care. They want to take employer-based health care away and replace it with government-run health care. And everybody with a brain in the Democrat Party knows this is a nonstarter.

You want to turn people against…? People like their health care through their employer. They like it the way it is. They’re used to it. They’ve adapted to it now. They live with it each and every day. They’ve made it work. They’ve got complaints about it, yeah. But to be told they’ve got to get rid of it and then sign up to this massive, government-run system that Obama tried and that everybody on that stage is mad at? It was suicidal, what these people were talking about last night.

Look what the Democrats did. They passed Obamacare, they promised utopia — and, as usual, we get hell. We get misery, we get “infestation,” we get “vermin.” We get absolute misery and unhappiness. We get an endless parade of victims of whatever policies the Democrats implement. Now they’re back to promising utopia again! Obama promised utopia with Obamacare! It’s not working. So here they’re back trying to double down on it for some reason. The only things that find utopia when the Democrats are in charge are rats and flies.

You’d have to say that rats and flies and vermin are having their own utopia because they’re running free all over Democrat-run cities, are they not? It’s gotta be utopia for the rats and the vermin and the maggots. But it’s not utopia for the people the Democrats are promising all of this utopian stuff to. And as I watched, I was continually reminded of how angry these people are — literally enraged, poisoned with it. I think it’s their hatred over any number of things.

A, they’re never happy to begin with anyway even when they’re winning. They’re not constitutionally capable of being happy because they live in a hellhole of a country, don’t you know? We live in a racist, Jim Crow country. They live in a country that’s unfair, and it’s not right. It’s mean-spirited, it’s racist, and it’s extreme. They’re not happy even in the best of times — and these are not the best of times for them. They are enraged constantly.

I’m watching this thing asking “How can this sell?” and then I have to stop myself. Because as I’m looking at this, I see varying degrees of lunacy, folks, varying degrees of delusion and you name it. And then I have to stop myself and realize that there are way many more Americans than we want to acknowledge that agree with this stuff. And then you stop laughing and it gets scary. And while they’re this angry, they are not likable. Now they’re fighting each other. They’ve got zero credibility on health care.

Can you believe it, health care is the number one issue? None of ’em have any credibility on it. Every one of ’em has a plan. I’m struck by how all of these people have a plan. “I’ve got a plan for that. I’ve got a plan for that. My — my plan.” You don’t have a plan! These people don’t have a plan for anything. They’ve never run anything. They don’t know what they’re talking about. None of them are health care experts. None of them are anything but lawyers. They haven’t done anything.

Most of them have been in government their whole lives like Obama, and yet they’ve all got a plan. And the plan involves nothing but spending money and giving things away to people. They don’t have a plan, and they do not trust the American people to make the best of circumstances. They don’t trust the American people, in their own existence, to end up creating and maintaining a great country. No. The leftist Democrats think that’s not possible. That can only happen with top-to-bottom control from command-and-control economics to you name it.

They don’t have a plan. Obamacare is a disaster. Medicare for all is a disaster. Look at VA health care. Who wants more of that? It’s not a model of excellence! It’s a nightmare! Canadian and U.K. health care systems are nightmares: Long wait times like they have there are not what Americans want. I mean, for crying out loud, folks, they’re telling us they’ve got plans for health care to make everybody well, keep everybody from getting sick.

These people can’t remove garbage from the cities they run. They don’t even try anymore. They just build tent cities. They build tent cities in places they call skid row, and they tell people to go live there, “and we’ll do our best to take care of you,” while blaming the Republicans for it! These people are gonna fix the planet! They’re gonna save the planet! Climate change, all that? They’re gonna save us from all this horrible pollution? They can’t even empty the garbage right in their own cities!

They cannot keep human excrement off the streets, and they’re gonna take over health care? It’s like the environment. They’re gonna clean the planet, save the planet, and we can’t even trust them with hygiene in their own cities. Now they come along and they want to give free health care to illegals — it’s insanity — and they want American citizens to pay for this! And they think somehow this is gonna get them elected to the presidency! This thing was a disaster for them last night!

I don’t care who you’re listening to that may be saying otherwise. It was an unmitigated disaster. When Marianne Williamson is judged to have won the debate — and many people think she did. She won the Drudge poll, and I’ve got a story right here (this is from PJ Media): “Debate Recap: Dems Should Go for a Williamson/Delaney Ticket if They Want to Win.” I’m telling you, folks, if Marianne Williamson made the best showing in the debate last night, you’re looking at a party in deep doo-doo.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Okay. Let’s squeeze another call in. Time is tight, but we can squeeze it in there. This is Keith in Palm Bay, Florida. Keith, I’m glad you waited. I appreciate your patience, and hello.

CALLER: Thank you, Rush. I don’t know if Jake Tapper wrote his own questions but the first few were just hilarious. He went down the line to the top candidates and he did the same thing to each of them. He started with Bernie, laid out a few things from his Medicare-for-all plan. And at very end, he asked them, “What do you think about Congressman Delaney calling your plan ‘crazy’ and ‘political suicide?'” I mean, the jaw dropping and faces were priceless, and it really the set the tone for the night pitting them against each other.

RUSH: Do you think Jack Tapper was talented and artful in doing that?

CALLER: I do. I think it really set off the whole night. They were biting at each other, especially at the beginning.

RUSH: Okay. So, Candidate A would say something loony, and then Tapper would ask the next candidate, “What do you think about what Candidate A just said about your stupid, ridiculous plan,” something like that?

CALLER: Yeah. What they did was they interviewed them for a couple days and they asked ’em about other people’s plans, and then he put them together into his questions. The first three or four of them, Pocahontas and everything, he’d lay out a few things from their plan and say, “Well, what do you think about so-and-so saying this about your plan?” and it was hilarious.

RUSH: Well, “hilarious” does not mean… (chuckling) Was it effective for…?

CALLER: Yeah, it set the tone (crosstalk) —

RUSH: No, no. Wait. Effective for who?

CALLER: Well, to get them to go after each other and really have a debate. I mean, they were the — the — (crosstalk)

RUSH: Yeah. But did any of them look good in the process here, or is the thing that you noted that Jack Tapper did a good thing, but it wasn’t good for the candidates, it was good for you as a viewer?

CALLER: (crosstalk) Ryan and Delaney really set off, you know, solutions and not taking away union… They really made Bernie look silly, and Bernie was (crosstalk) —

RUSH: Well, that’s true. That’s coming up. Tim Ryan and Delaney were both essentially saying (sputtering), “You guys… You can’t win doing this! We — we — we — we can’t do this!” and Elizabeth Warren got livid at Delaney at one point. I forget what the subject matter was. Well, Keith, I’m glad you called with that observation.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Okay, the last caller talked about John Delaney. He’s a… (chuckling) This is so classic. He’s a former member of Congress. I’m not even sure who he is, and I’m embarrassed to tell you that. I normally would have found out who he is. I’ve only seen him two or three times on these debates. But since I don’t think he’s gonna go anywhere, I have put my resources elsewhere. I think he’s former member of Congress. But! Last night he was accused of being a rich guy. So he was asked that since he’s so rich if he thinks the rich ought to be paying more in taxes.

Now, his net worth, they said, is $65 million. That is Bill Gates… That’s Kennedy family walking-around money, okay? But to these guys… (interruption) That’s right. He’s a former congressman from Maryland, John Delaney. Yeah, at any rate, of course, the obligatory, “Oh, yeah, yeah! We rich, we aren’t paying enough. Hell no! You’re absolutely right. No way we’re not paying enough.” I keep asking him via the TV, “So when did you write your last check to the Treasury to make up for what you don’t think you’re paying your fair share of?”

These clowns all come out and say, “Oh, yeah, I think the rich could pay more. The rich need to pay more.” Elizabeth Warren says, “We don’t need to do it Delaney’s way. We need to do it my way. I have a plan.” She said, “We’re gonna tax the 1% of the 1%. We’re gonna tax… If you make $50 million, fine. We’re gonna leave you alone. But we’re gonna tax every dollar you make above $50 million at 2? — and 2? is nothing! We could go to the Moon for 2?. We could go to the Mars. We could wipe out homelessness. We could wipe out sickness for 2?,” she was saying.

Now, Delaney was telling her your plan won’t work. He said, if you guys do Medicare for All, if you get rid of private health insurance — Delaney said — thousands of hospitals are gonna shut down tomorrow. In a Medicare-for-All system, hospitals are just gonna shut down. Paying 80%? Doctors will have to be government employees working for what Democrats think they should be paid, and that’s not why they went to med school, folks, to become government employees. They’re not gonna do it.

They will shut down and they will quit, and then who’s gonna be our doctors? Joycelyn Elders? Who is gonna end up being our doctors? The system is gonna chase away the best and the brightest if Elizabeth Warren gets her way, if any of them got their way on Medicare for All. The government paying everybody including employees in the health care system? You can wave good-bye to ’em! Fauxcahontas was asked a question. “Senator Warren, would you decriminalize border crossings?” and Warren said, “The point is not decriminalization.”

‘Cause Kamala Harris says, “We should decriminalize crossing the border.” Even though the law is very clear that it’s illegal to cross the border, decriminalize it. She said, “The point is not decriminalize.” Anyway, Delaney said, “Let me tell you the best way to raise taxes on the rich — and I am a rich guy,” he said, “so I know. What you do is you raise the capital gains tax. It is obscene that rich people who make their money investing get such a small tax rate compared to people who are working for their money.”

Now, there are people who do nothing but play the stock market, that’s how they earn their money. They sit there and they trade stocks, and they try to trade in a way that makes ’em a lot of money. And on capital gains, appreciated stocks — stock that you buy and it gains wealth or gains value and money — the capital gains rate is 15%, 18%. I forget what it is. He wants to raise that ’cause (impression), “It just isn’t fair! It’s not fair that people who don’t work should have a little rate where people who are working pay more.”

Lowering the capital gains rate is what results in unforeseen amounts of money pouring into the country’s Treasury. No matter how you slice it, these people want to start raising taxes. They get into guilt trips about having money and being rich and agreeing that they’re not paying enough in taxes. It becomes tiresome. It’s just worn out. Nothing new. Nothing but guilt over having been successful and a promise to get rid of the success, get rid of the wealth, a promise to make the rich “pay their fair share.” You talk about a tired, worn-out cliche that the rich aren’t paying their fair share when the top 1% is paying almost 50% of the entire tax burden now?

Well, let’s go to the audio sound bites just to give this some actual Democrat flavor. Here is a montage — and a lot of places have incorporated montages. We started this whole business of montages with the gravitas montage when George W. Bush chose Dick Cheney to be his veep. Now they all go out there and they do these montages, but nobody’s montages are better than ours. We still have the best montages because we were the original montagists or montagers, and here is our classic montage.

I told you they’d be focused on race, race, race, race, and listen to this…

KLOBUCHAR: I have had it with the racist attacks!

WILLIAMSON: … institutionalized hatred, collectivized hatred, and white nationalism.

BUTTIGIEG: Systemic racism has touched every part of American life!

WARREN: The president is advancing environmental racism, economic racism (slams podium), criminal justice racism, health care racism.

SANDERS: We have got to take on Trumps racism! What Trump is doing through his racism and his xenophobia is demonizing a group of people!

O’ROURKE: The very foundation of this country, the wealth that we have built, was literally on the backs of those who were kidnapped and brought here by force!

CROWD: (applause)

O’ROURKE: The legacy of slavery and segregation and Jim Crow and suppression is alive and well in every aspect of the economy and in the country.

RUSH: That was that dingbat, Robert Francis O’Rourke, otherwise known as Beto. (impression) “The very foundation of this country, the wealth that we’ve built was literally on the backs of the…” Somebody else kept… Marianne Williamson. She ran the numbers on if every descendant of a slave had been given 40 acres and a mule. She actually ran the numbers on what that would be in today’s dollars, and $500 billion won’t even come close to covering what we owe in reparations.

I mean, these people were just… It’s scary. They’re nuts. They’re lunatics, and yet every time you heard the audience applause, you stop short and you realize that there are way too many people agree with this stuff. And you know what the biggest…? This will shock you. Well, it may not. You may have figured this out. Do you know what the biggest group…? That’s not the right way to say it. Do you know the largest demographic group of extreme socialist liberalism is?

It’s not African-Americans. It’s not the feminazis. It’s not Hispanics. You know who it is? Wealthy white liberals. Wealthy white liberals make up the largest percentage of extreme, radical left-wing socialism in the Democrat Party. Now, stop and think of that for a moment. Rich white liberals. Now, there’s an obvious explanation for it, but I wonder if you know what it is. I mean, you would think that it would be people who think they’ve suffered nothing but grievance since they were born.

Wealthy white liberals have no grievances. The grievances they have, they’ve had to make up. The grievances they have are over (sobbing) “the guilt they feel over what a rotten country this is, and it’s not being fixed and it’s horrible,” and they feel horrible about it. But the truth is, the reason why wealthy (and I mean uber-wealthy white liberals) are the largest group… It’s close. There’s other groups close to ’em.

But the reason the largest group of extreme, radical liberalism is wealthy white liberals is because it’s a strategy. It’s a way to keep everybody from demanding their money. It’s an insurance policy. It is a way of making sure that whoever these livid, angry leftists are, they don’t attack them. So they lead the charge in what a rotgut place this country is. They lead the league in criticizing America for all of its injustice and unfairness, and they do this to keep the hordes away — and I’m sure some of them are so far gone that they believe it as well.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: If you are on hold on the phone, I want you to be patient. I appreciate the patience, but I have to get to these next sound bites because they’re right attached to that which I was just speaking about.

John Delaney, former member of Congress from Maryland, you could say that he’s telling the Democrats that if they follow through on their Medicare for All plan they’re gonna destroy hospitals and it just won’t work.

And this is after about 40 minutes, folks, 40 minutes of lunacy and irrationality arguing about Medicare for All, Delaney outed the entire Democrat Party, claiming, you people don’t care about health care. You just want government control over the private sector. He actually — hear, you listen and see if that’s not how you conclude.

DELANEY: I’ve been going around rural America and I asked rural hospital administrators one question: If all your bills were paid at the Medicare rate last year, what would happen? And they all looked at me and say, “We would close.” But the question is why do we have to be so extreme? Why can’t we just give everyone health care as a right and allow them to have choice?

BASH: Thank you, Congressman.

DELANEY: I’m starting to think this is not about health care.

BASH: Thank you, Congressman.

DELANEY: This is an anti-private sector strategy.

BASH: Thank you, Congressman. We’re gonna move on. We’re gonna move on.

RUSH: See what happened? They shut him down. Did you see that, Snerdley? Did you hear that? Let me point out what happened. They were speaking over him and he kept making the point. The question is, why do we have to be so extreme? He’s asking everybody on that stage and CNN, “Why do we have to be so extreme, have to close everything down put government in charge of it? Why can’t we just say everybody gets health care and let ’em choose how they get it?”

“Thank you, Congressman, thank you, thank you, thank you, Congressman, shut up, Congressman, thank you.” And Delaney kept going. He said, “I’m starting to think that this is not about health care.”

“Thank you, Congressman. Thank you. Thank you. You can shut up now, Congressman.”

“This is an anti-private sector strategy.” That’s what Delaney was saying as they were talking over him trying to shut him down. The totality of his statement was, “Why do you have to be so extreme? Why can’t we just give everybody health care, say it’s a right, allow them to have a choice?” And Dana Bash shuts him down. Delaney says, “I’m starting to think that this isn’t about health care, that this is a private sector, anti-private sector strategy.”

“Oh, thank you, Congressman. Thank you. Thank you. That’s good, shut up now. We’re gonna move on.” And this is why, by the way, CNN is being roasted! So here’s somebody thinking differently, articulating differently, and what happens?

CNN shuts the guy down because, let’s be honest, nobody thinks John Delaney’s gonna be the nominee. Nobody thinks he has a prayer. And so there’s no way we’re gonna let him gum up the works by criticizing what the Democrat agenda is, is government everything for everybody. We’re not gonna let this guy come in here and blow the whistle on us. That’s exactly what happened here. Here up next was Fauxcahontas scolding Delaney. Why are you even running for president?

WARREN: I don’t understand why anybody goes to all the trouble of running for president of the United States just to talk about what we really can’t do and shouldn’t fight for. (cheers)

RUSH: So Delaney made the mistake of challenging the basic premise of the Democrat Party, which is take over life for everybody. Make no mistake. And he’s sitting there like, I don’t know this guy, he’s a Democrat, he may not know what has become of this party. He’s in Maryland. That’s close to Washington. I’m telling you, those people are disconnected from you and me, folks.

So Delaney is sitting there listening to all this. He listened to it in the first debate and he hears them say that they want to take over all of health care. He’s asked people that work at hospitals what will happen if that happens, and they said, “We will close down.” He says, “Why do we have to be so extreme?” The dirty word. This is why the media’s working overtime today to say that this kind of stuff did not happen last. Oh, no, no, the moderates, this is a moderate party last night. You saw it.

No, it’s not. Delaney shows up saying, “Why do you want to do this? This is so extreme. I’m beginning to think this isn’t even about health care. It’s about anti-private sector.” Elizabeth Warren: “I don’t understand why anybody would go through all the trouble of running to talk about what we can’t do and shouldn’t fight for.”

He’s trying to save your bacon, whether he knows it or not, Fauxcahontas. He’s trying to save your bacon. You guys are throwing it all away! You’ve got these impossible, irrational proposals that if they ever were implemented would destroy everything.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Delaney could have asked Fauxcahontas, “Why go through all the trouble to run if you’re gonna say and do things that are gonna keep us from winning?” That should have been his retort.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Okay, back to the audio sound bites. We just finished the John Delaney telling the Democrat Party, “You’re committing suicide. You people… If you do this, you’re not even talking about health care,” he said. You’re just engaging here in an anti-private sector strategy. Tim Ryan was next up, audio sound bite number 13. He’s a congressman from Ohio. Jake Tapper said to him, “Congressman Ryan, you’re from your Ohio, a state that voted twice for Obama and then went to Trump in 2016. Please respond to Senator Sanders advocating for Medicare for All.”

RYAN: I would just say Hillary Clinton was winning in the polls too. So take a snapshot in the polls today and apply it 16 months from now, whenever it is? I don’t think is accurate. Now, in this discussion already tonight we’ve talked about taking private health insurance away from union members in the industrial Midwest, we’ve talked about decriminalizing the border, and we’ve talked about giving free health care to undocumented workers when so many Americans are struggling to pay for their health care! I, quite frankly, don’t think that that is a — an agenda that we can move forward on and win.

RUSH: Uh-oh! Uh-oh! You can see the smoke signals starting to rise from Fauxcahontas. I mean, this can’t be allowed. They shut Delaney down when he was making this point. Crazy Bernie was next up to respond. Jake Tapper: Crazy Bernie, “can you guarantee that those union members that Ryan was just talking about will be as good as the benefits that their representatives, union reps fought hard to negotiate under your plan?”

SANDERS: Two things: They will be better because Medicare for All is comprehensive! It covers all health care needs for senior citizens. It will finally include dental care, hearing aids, and eyeglasses.

RYAN: But you don’t know that.

SANDERS: Second of all —

RYAN: You don’t know that, Bernie.

SANDERS: Second of all —

TAPPER: We’ll come to you in a second, Congressman.

SANDERS: I do know it! I wrote the damn bill!

RUSH: (chuckling) This went by so quickly. Let me translate this. So Crazy Bernie is suggesting Ryan doesn’t know what he’s talking about, that his Medicare-for-All bill is gonna be better because Medicare for All is comprehensive. It covers all health care needs for senior citizens. It will include (Crazy Bernie impression) “dental care, hearin’ aids, eyeglasses.” Did you know that if the Democrats are in charge, you’re not even responsible for buying your own eyeglasses? Did you know that? No, they’re gonna do that for you!

Tim Ryan said, “But you don’t know that.”

Sanders then says, “Second of all,” and Ryan interrupts it again.

“You don’t know that, Bernie.”

Sanders said, “Second of all…”

Tapper said, “We’ll come back to you in a minute, Congressman. Shut up.” Well, he didn’t say “shut up,” but that was the meaning.

Sanders said, “I do know it! I wrote the damn bill!”

Sorry, Crazy Bernie, writing “the damn bill” has nothing to do with what gets passed. Ryan is right. Nobody knows what’s gonna happen to Crazy Bernie’s bill once it goes to the Senate or the House and then goes through the conference committee. Nobody knows yet, whether Crazy Bernie wrote it or not. Now Crazy Bernie, he’s getting ticked off. You know, our previous caller loved Jake Tapper’s questioning technique. “Crazy Bernie, would you respond to what Tim Ryan just said about you? Congresswoman Ryan, would you just respond to the extreme criticism you just got from so-and-so.”

So Crazy Bernie thought it was time to call Jake Tapper out…

SANDERS: What I am talking about — and others up here are talking about — is no deductibles and no copayments. And, Jake, your question is a Republican talking point. At the end of the day —

CROWD: (applause)

SANDERS: — and, by the way —

CROWD: (applause)

SANDERS: — and, by the way! By the way! The health care industry will be advertising tonight on this program.

RUSH: The health care… (chuckling) Let me tell you what advertising is out there. I didn’t request the audio for this because it needs the video. But the Republican Congressional Campaign Committee (the people that make it their business to get Republican House of Representatives members elected and reelected) has put together an ad, and it is incredible because it’s from the Republicans.

You don’t see this kind of thing. It’s gonna debut… It’s already run on Fox & Friends yesterday. It’s gonna air nationally throughout August, and what it does, is it shows a group of armed and masked burglars entering a suburban home in the middle of the night. It portrays the Democrats as burglars, home burglars. It portrays socialists as people that would break into your house and steal everything.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Here is Betty in Evansville, Indiana. Welcome. Great to have you with us at the EIB Network. Hi.

CALLER: Thanks, Rush. It’s a pleasure to talk to you.

RUSH: Thank you so much.

CALLER: Last night Bernie Sanders said, “I am not a liar.” Well, yeah, he is, when it comes to health care. I’ve been a medical biller for years. And Medicare does not pay for everything. There’s the $1,364 deductible —

RUSH: (doing Sanders impression) But but but wait. But wait. He wrote the bill, damn it, his health care, his Medicare is gonna pay for all of it.

CALLER: But why does he call it Medicare and say that he’s gonna pay for everything?

RUSH: No, it’s Medicare for All now. It’s just government-run health care under the Medicare brand, is what he’s pitching here.

CALLER: Well, that is true, but he’s lying to people. There is no way —

RUSH: Well, they all are! Their whole agenda is a lie! They can’t do what they’re promising to do!

CALLER: I know.

RUSH: They can’t do it! It’s not possible! It’s been tried. You cannot wipe self-reliance. You cannot eliminate people making something of themselves and replace it with government taking care of everybody. You just can’t do it.

CALLER: No, you can’t. And this has been coming down the pike for a while because the doctors that were, say, in their fifties, maybe early sixties, they are closing their practices or they’re being bought out by the hospitals. And that puts in terms for the younger ones that come in that don’t know any different from how it’s been with the payments for Medicare and all this stuff that’s going on —

RUSH: The things you’re talking about are things that Democrats don’t think are ever gonna come up and they’re never gonna have to explain it. It’s minutia, it’s in the weeds, people get bored hearing it. So they don’t even want this stuff to come up. They just want people to hear “free health care.” “You deserve it and you’re gonna get it.” The thing that strikes me — and Betty, thanks for the call because you’re absolutely right. What he’s talking about can’t be done.

But here’s the thing that has always got me. When I just said here, the Democrats really do seem to want to erase the whole concept of taking care of yourself, of providing for yourself, providing for your family, making something of yourself, which is the normal human condition, the natural state of our existence was nailed in our founding documents. Life, liberty, pursuit of happiness.

Happiness is made up of many things. But one of the things that comprises happiness is the notion of accomplishment and achievement, of setting out to do something and getting it done and maybe doing it better than you thought you could, being better at something than you thought you could.

You listen to the Democrat Party — and this isn’t new. It’s just that this line of lying has now become the defining aspect of the party. They look at this country and they see a dystopian misery and failure. And they think or they want to construct a scenario where everybody’s miserable, where everybody is mad about their inability to make something of themselves and the reason they’re mad is because there are other people preventing them from doing it, and those people happen to be Republicans. Republicans are standing in the way of you being happy.

So instead of finding ways for you to take care of yourself, we’re gonna punish the Republicans. We’re gonna wipe ’em out and we’re gonna make sure they get punished. And that’s their agenda! But the vision that they try to sell of this country is one of a Third World dystopian. If you listen to the Democrats you’d think the nuclear bomb has already gone off and there isn’t anything anymore. The government’s gonna have to start from scratch to recreate everything a human being would need. The Democrats are the only ones that care enough to do it and they’re the only ones that have a plan to make it all happen.

But their overall view of individuals and their overall view of the country which they proudly enunciate constantly is of a population of people that are incompetent, incapable, and undesirable. It’s the most amazing thing. The Democrats want to punish the people who are able to fend for themselves and have as somehow unfair. If you’ve made something of yourself, if you have succeeded, if you have lived your life setting goals and you’ve achieved ’em or gone beyond them, somehow you’re a suspect in the Democrat worldview, and you need to be eyed warily, there needs an air of suspicion about you, and you are absconding with more than your share, and you’re not being fair about it by giving most of it back.

So here come the Democrats to level the playing field and square all of the odds here so that people don’t suffer. In the meantime, the scenarios they construct guarantee ongoing misery and unhappiness because the Democrat Party is going to stand in the way of personal achievement. It’s gonna stand in the way of personal accomplishment and success.

But more than that, the thing they see when they open their eyes and look out over the country, what they must see. You know, dystopian, for those of you who’ve never seen a Mad Max movie, dystopian is the opposite of utopia. Utopia is everything is beautiful, everything’s wonderful, everything’s perfect. There’s no bullying, there’s no hurt feelings, there’s no heartbreak, everybody’s happy or content or drugged up, whatever.

Dystopian, the exact opposite. Everybody’s miserable. The nuclear bomb has gone off, climate change is out of control, there isn’t any way for people to get food and water. Human feces are piled 10 stories high in San Francisco, and only the Democrats, who caused that scenario, can come in and fix it.

I’ve never understood — well, politically I understand. Intellectually I don’t — I’ve never understood the desire to be in a political world where that is the starting point, that that’s where you start trying to get supporters, by telling them how rotten their country is, or worse than that, by trying to agree with them that their country is in bad shape, sucks, is unfair, you don’t need to be saluting the flag, you don’t need to be singing the anthem. Which none of them did last night. Did you notice that?

One of them didn’t even place his hand over his heart. The others, not a one of them sang the anthem. They may not know the words. I marvel that so many people have not yet figured out what it is that really propels these people on these stages at these debates. If you listen — and you don’t have to listen carefully — you can clearly detect that they think nothing of you. You’re nothing but an incompetent, incapable, uneducated, sometimes bigot or fool or just an unfortunate idiot and that you don’t stand a chance because you live in an unjust and unfair country that they are going to rectify and fix.

They see a country that nobody wants to see, that few people actually agree exists, but they want it to exist. It’s why they’re for open borders. The perfect Democrat constituent is storming the southern border in great numbers every day. They love it. That’s why they don’t want to shut it down. And the real irony of all this is that while they have this attitude of dystopian failure and misery, somehow they have cornered the market on the idea that only they care about people.

They don’t have faith in people. They don’t have confidence in people. I really have never understood — some people on the left are smart — I’ve never understood how they get sucked into this other than trying to understand the quest for power. But liberalism is in itself some kind of a psychological disconnection in the deep, dark crevices of the cranium, so it may be inexplicable actually.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Well, the overnight ratings are in on the Democrat debate stage one on CNN last night. The audience is a paltry 10 million. Now, that’s larger than CNN’s had in 25 or 30 years, but that’s three million lower than watched the Mueller testimony. The Mueller testimony was during the day! CNN, in prime time, 10 million people watched. It was so bad, CNN’s not even talking about it. You would think if there were fireworks last night, they could have used those to promote tonight. They’re not even doing that. They are as far… If you’re watching CNN, you don’t even know this debate happened last night. That is how much they are ignoring it.