Rush Transcripts...Dec. 19th

[mystery-ak]

https://www.rushlimbaugh.com/


I’m Not Surprised! Pelosi Doesn’t Want Trump Acquitted

Dec 19, 2019



RUSH: Now, I may say this, and it may sound like bragging when I say this, but I’m not bragging because as Babe Ruth said, it ain’t bragging if you can do it. I may be the only guy not surprised Pelosi’s not sending these worthless articles over to the Senate. None of this has ever made sense if you include the fact that Trump is gonna be acquitted. That cancels everything this is about.

So she’s not gonna permit that. She’s not gonna permit an acquittal. This is all about the blemish. This is all about the asterisk. This is all about the black mark. This is all about for 2020. This is all about Donald Trump was impeached, period. Not Donald Trump was impeached and acquitted in a Senate trial. Donald Trump was impeached. And she is counting on the fact that the idiocy of her base will think that means that Trump has been claimed illegitimate and unqualified and mission accomplished. That’s it.

This has never made sense. It is never made sense when you throw every likelihood into it. They do these articles of impeachment, they go over to the Senate, they have a trial, Trump’s acquitted. What do they accomplish? Literally nothing. The worst outcome in any event, the worst outcome possible for her is for Trump to be acquitted.

So how do you prevent that? You claim exactly what I said her out was gonna be. You refuse to send the articles and why? Because the Republicans are racist, sexist, bigots, homophobes, and they’re unfair, and they’re partisan, and there won’t be a fair trial. She’s not even gonna announce who her House managers are, the prosecutors, until she gets a low down on how the Senate’s gonna conduct itself. It’s none of her business. She has not a single thing to say about how the Senate does things, zilch, zero, nada. All she can do is try to force Chuck You Schumer into doing her bidding, which probably he would do, but she can’t tell McConnell to do anything.

The only way she can get what she ultimately wants is to make sure there isn’t a trial, because if Trump is acquitted then all of this is out the window. She’s already got a big enough problem by not sending those articles over because why? Well, Trump is such an immediate threat, we couldn’t wait. We couldn’t wait to do this. We couldn’t take the normal amount of time. We couldn’t take the 14 months it took for Nixon, because Trump represents such an existential threat to the country, to the Constitution, to the Moon, to Mars, to climate change, you name it, we gotta get rid of him.

Now they got the articles, and what? Why, Mitch McConnell has become the threat. McConnell is the threat. We can’t let McConnell get involved in this, Pelosi’s saying. Mitch McConnell is the threat? Yes, that’s right, ma’am, because Mitch McConnell would oversee the acquittal. Now, there are other reasons why she’s not gonna send these articles over there. They’re bogus! They’re fake! This was a fake impeachment to go along with fake news. Everything about it is political.

I have to tell you, McConnell was better today than I have seen him in years, nuking Pelosi from the floor of the Senate. We have the audio sound bites coming up. But, man. I’m actually feeling kind of puffed up here today because she’s doing exactly what I told her her out was. Now, look. I did not predict nor advise her not to send the articles over. But I told her her out was to blame it all on the Republicans. It can’t get a fair process. The Republicans are partisan. The Republicans are racists. The Republicans are bigots. The Republicans’ minds are made up. She’s saying all of that.

She’s really focusing on (imitating Pelosi), “McConnell’s already said there’s gonna be a fair trial. Well, I’m not gonna participate in this.” She is taking the only route she’s got. They got what they want. They got Donald Trump impeached. In fact, Chris Cillizza sent a tweet out last night, “Mission accomplished.” He says — I’m paraphrasing because I didn’t bother wasting the time to print it, but his tweet says something along the lines of, “From now to eternity, the first paragraph in everything written about Donald Trump will say Donald Trump, quote, impeached in his first term.”

That’s mission accomplished. That’s what they wanted. It is, they think, a necessity for hastening along their 2020 campaign. By the way, over on that side, there’s a Democrat debate tonight that I can’t find anybody who even remembered it was on, much less that wants to watch it. And now the long knives for Biden are coming out. Now there are doctors saying this guy’s got health problems that are being covered up, he’s got a heart problem. Yeah, separate Stack for that.

They’re really unloading on Biden here, but they don’t want Trump to have anything to do with dispatching Biden, i.e., this so-called stuff with Ukraine, which I’m gonna take another stab at putting that in perspective today what this is all about. A lot to do today, folks. It’s not slowing down. It is speeding up.

So here we are. Nancy Pelosi: Donald Trump’s gotta go. He’s an existential threat. We can’t wait. She’s got her articles of impeachment. Now she’s not gonna send ’em over. Ha-ha. Mitch McConnell’s the problem. There’s no way she wants an acquittal. And what she means when she says, “I’m not even gonna assign any managers” — prosecutors — “until I find out how Senate’s gonna do this.”

Well, that’s none of her business. All she’s really saying is she’s not gonna send those things over there if it appears that there’s gonna be an acquittal. Because that cancels out everything they’re doing here. It really isn’t any more complicated than that. In fact, let’s go to some Pelosi sound bites. We’ll start last night during a press conference after voting on impeachment last night, which, yeah, I had it on. I had it on. I watched it. It seems surreal to me.

It all seems scripted, on the Democrat side especially, and it was chock-full of just one lie after another. And I’ll tell you, folks, one other observation here before we get to the Pelosi sound bite. And this is a repetition of a point that I made probably earlier this week, maybe last. They released these comments last night the Democrats made, this is all about 2016. They are simply not letting go of Trump meddled in the election, helping Russia, benefiting. No matter the Mueller report, no matter any of the facts, that’s literally what they’re harping on, which tells me that they focus grouped all of this, and of all of the things they’ve got that might stand any kind of prayer at all, that remains it. This Ukraine stuff obviously is not polling well. It’s not testing well.

It’s not focus-grouping well. They’re back to this, because they can’t give it up. They’re too committed to it and so immersed in it. But that’s really it. When you strip away all of the complaints these people voice, they’re still prosecuting that, still trying to make people believe that the 2016 election was illegitimate, that Trump is illegitimate. Ukraine blew up on ’em. It’s just not panned out the way they intended when Trump released the transcript.

So here is Pelosi from last night. This is after the impeachment vote.

PELOSI: We have legislation approved by the Rules Committee that will enable us to, uh, decide how we will send over the articles of impeachment. We’re not sending it tonight because it’s difficult to determine who the managers would be until we see the arena in which we will be participating.

RUSH: The arena is Senate! No, no. This was the first indication. I saw this last night. I said, “Now it all makes sense. Now it all makes sense.” The one thing I didn’t foresee is holding onto the articles, not sending ’em. But it makes total sense when you realize the last thing that they want is an acquittal. It would blow everything that they’ve done up. It’s the one thing that’s never made any sense to anybody.

Every analyst talking about this has tried to figure out, “What in the world is she doing? This is gonna lead to an acquittal.” Now she’s trying to forestall an acquittal because she’s trying to forestall a trial on the basis that the Senate, led by Mitch McConnell and the Republicans, isn’t fair. It’s partisan.  They’ve already made up their minds and so forth.  Then she scolded the Drive-By Media for asking questions.

PELOSI:  We will make our decision as to when we’re gonna send it when we see what they’re doing on the Senate side.  But that’s a decision that we will make jointly.

REPORTERS: (shouting questions)

PELOSI: Okay, one… Wait, uh… (mumbling) You’re starting to act, like, another country. Don’t shout, okay?  Who’s not gonna shout a question?

RUSH:  Wait a minute, “starting to act like another country”?  I thought Trump had made us another country already.  Now she’s blaming the media for shouting like a bunch of kids.  That’s her technique for not answering questions. (impression) “You stop shouting.  I’m not gonna answer anything.  Don’t shout, okay?  Who’s not gonna shout a question?”

And of course, the press dutifully minds her and behaves.  Now, this morning at her press conference (which happens every Thursday), the CBS chief congressional correspondent, Nancy Cordes, said, “Do you run the risk, as some Republicans have said, of looking like you’re playing games with impeachment if you hold onto the articles for too long?”

PELOSI:  I’ve said what I was gonna say, Nancy.  When we bring the bill, which is… Just so you know, there’s a bill made in order by the Rules Committee that we can call up at any time in order to send it over to the Senate and to have the (pause) provisions in there to pay for the impeachment and then the next step, whatever you want to call it. The trial.  That is where you put the managers.  I was not prepared to put the managers in that bill yet because we don’t know the arena that we are in.  Frankly, I don’t care what the Republicans say.  Any other questions?

REPORTERS: (quietly asking questions)

PELOSI: Not on this subject! I’ve said this is it.

RUSH: (laughing) She’s got nothing! You know, she literally has nothing.  She’s got two fake articles of impeachment that mean nothing, that don’t contain a crime.  Wait ’til you hear McConnell nuke her today and nuke this whole process.  It really was classic.  “I don’t care what the Republicans say.”  Well, wait a minute, now, Madam Speaker. The Republicans are in charge of the so-called arena that you’re waiting to see what it is.  What does that even mean?

“I’m not prepared to put the managers in the bill yet ’cause we don’t know the arena we’re in.”  You know what she’s saying?  “I’m not sending them over there until I know we’re gonna get a conviction.”  That’s what she’s saying, folks.  Do not doubt me on this.  “Until we know the arena, until we know the lay of the land — until we know whether or not Romney can scrounge up enough Republicans to join the Democrats — I’m not sending it over there to get an acquittal.”  That is what this means.

That’s what “the arena” means: The lay of the land.  “I’m not gonna send these articles over there if we’re gonna lose.  I’m not gonna send ’em over there if there’s gonna be an acquittal.  I’m only gonna send ’em over there if I can find out in advance there’s gonna be a conviction.”  Now, we need to keep a sharp eye on any of these RINO Republicans in the Senate who may have heard her signal.  She’s really boxed herself in here, but she can’t send these things over there to lose, folks.

She can’t.

Now she’s got all kinds of explaining to do because (impression), “Donald Trump represented an immediate danger, a clear and present danger to the United States of America and to people, Americans, and our flag. Donald Trump’s gotta go.  We can’t wait! We couldn’t afford to wait.  Time is of the essence.  We’ve been praying.  We’re praying for the president.  We’re praying to God! We’re crossing our hearts and hoping to die with our fingers crossed behind our backs.  We’re doing everything we can because this man represents a terrible, terrible threat to the world, to the Moon, to Mars, to climate change.”

Now all of a sudden, “I’m not sending these articles over there.” What happened to the urgency?  There never was any.  All of this is fake.  It’s as fake as the news has become in the United States.  One more bite. She takes one more question for the purposes of bashing McConnell.  This came from Fox Capitol Hill producer, Chad Pergram.  He said, “Last night you suggested that you’d receive fair process in the Senate.”

PELOSI:  I heard some of what Mitch McConnell said today, and it reminded me that our founders, when they wrote the Constitution, they suspected that there could be a rogue president.  I don’t think they suspected that we could have a rogue president and a rogue leader in the Senate at the same time.  Anybody want to talk about, m… (sputters) Uh, the Mexico trade agreement?

REPORTERS: (silence)

PELOSI: Anybody care about that?

REPORTERS: (silence)

PELOSI: Jobs for the American people?

REPORTERS: (silence)

PELOSI: Progress and — and addressing globalism and the issues? Anybody want to talk about the SALT tax we are passing today, important issues, uhh, that relate to the economic vitality of our communities?

REPORTERS: (silence)

PELOSI: Any other questions?

REPORTER: (coughing)

PELOSI: Because I’m not gonna answer any more questions on this.

REPORTER: (unintelligible)

PELOSI: I’m not going to go there anymore!

RUSH:  And that’s it.  Okay.  So you’re not gonna answer any more questions about impeachment? The press says, “Okay.  Okay.  We won’t ask you any more, then.  Thank you, Madam Speaker.”  She just shuts ’em down.  She’s not gonna answer any more questions on impeachment.  The question was… Look, you hear it here.  She is saying, “Mitch McConnell is partisan. Mitch McConnell is a Republican; he’s unfair.  Mitch McConnell, I can’t…” It’s exactly what I forecast her out would be.

Do you know what McConnell ought to say?  You know what I would love for McConnell to say?  And, by the way, I’m not unhappy with what he said.  I think it’s great.  You’ll hear it coming up.  I think McConnell ought to say something like, “I’ve looked at these articles of impeachment.  I’ve read them front to back.  No reasonable prosecutor would ever bring these two cases to court.  We can’t, in these articles, find any intent on the part of the president to do what he’s alleged to have done.  No reasonable prosecutor…”

I’m just parroting Comey.

I would throw Comey right back in their faces, but that’s me. I’d personally just love to hear it.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH:  So Pelosi impeaches on Wednesday night and does not want to talk about it today, is not gonna send the articles of impeachment to the Senate until she is assured that she will get a conviction.  What is Trump being impeached for?  Nobody can tell you!  “Well, he — he asked a foreign government to interfere in the elections.”  No.  No, he didn’t.  Donald Trump is being impeached for asking questions about the Democrat Party’s potential political nominee.

Donald Trump is trying to find out if his potential political nominee is corrupt, has engaged in corruption.  This is about protecting the Democrat Party’s potential 2020 presidential nominee.  It’s about protecting Biden from actual — well, let me say potential, very likely — criminal behavior and protecting themselves, the Democrats, from the consequences of such criminal behavior.  They are nervous that the Department of Justice has begun asking questions because a massive obstruction of justice took place in the form of the coup.

All Trump has ever wanted is answers to questions about that.

That’s what they are impeaching him for.  They bring in these civil servants and they claim, “Trump is going outside the norms, outside the channels.  He’s engaging in foreign policy where he has no business engaging, and he doesn’t know what he’s doing!” He simply wants to find out what happened to him.  He wants to find out who’s involved in it.  This is why the political tool of impeachment is being used.  The United States government lied to us for three years about Russian collusion that was designed to get rid of Trump and overturn your election.

[mystery-ak]

CNN Goes to Boston, Finds Democrats Upset at… Democrats

Dec 19, 2019



RUSH: I want you to hear an audio sound bite. CNN just this afternoon, they had a montage of voters in Boston talking about impeachment.

Now, CNN has been desperate to find Trump voters who are turning on Trump. They have been out to various states, battleground states with their video crews trying to find Trump voters on the farm, in the outhouses, in the diners, wherever they think Trump voters are, and they’ve been desperate to try to find Trump voters who are mad at Trump and think Trump ought to go, and they can’t find any.

So they said to themselves, where can we go? They desperately need people who appear to be average, ordinary Americans ripping into Trump. So they decided to go to Boston. And here is the montage of voters in Boston that they found talking about impeachment.

UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: I think that he absolutely should be impeached. No one’s changing anybody’s mind which is, like, really disheartening to me.

UNIDENTIFIED MAN 1: I think that it’s just tearing us apart right now. They’re not getting anything done. They’ve been after this guy for three years now.

UNIDENTIFIED MAN 2: They might be really blowing their – their effort on an impeachment when in reality they need to be finding someone to win in 2020.

RUSH: There you have it, folks, right there it is. You got three Democrats who say they’ve been going after this guy for three years. You can’t get it done. You’re wasting your time. You’re driving everybody crazy. You’re not changing anybody’s mind. All you’re doing is tearing everything apart. And these people are talking to the CNN reporter, which is a stand-in for the Democrats.

And don’t think for a moment Pelosi doesn’t know this. Pelosi and the Democrats all know it. They’re putting on a good front, a PR front, whenever they are in the media. But just none of this, none of this has played out the way they dreamed that it would beginning in 2016.

[mystery-ak]

The Turtle Nukes the Illegitimate Impeachment

Dec 19, 2019



RUSH: Let’s reiterate here. You know, try to make the complex understandable. Trump is being impeached for what?

It isn’t about the Ukraine phone call. It’s not about interfering in the election in 2020 and all of that. They can’t let go of what they thought 2016 was gonna produce. They are still locked in on that. They’re still focusing on it, still hoping that the allegation that Trump’s 2016 election was illegitimate. And what has Trump done?

All Trump has done is ask questions. One of the questions was of the president of Ukraine. Trump is asking questions. He’s got investigations going, trying to find out what happened to him. Who did this to him? Who did this to his voters? Who’s in the process of trying to disenfranchise his voters. He’s simply asking questions. He’s being impeached for trying to get answers.

The United States government — and by that I mean the administrative state — has literally lied to the people of this country for three years and counting now about Russia collusion. They’ve been trying to put Donald Trump in jail, not just reverse the election results. They have been trying to get Donald Trump in jail. Their problem is, he has been completely exonerated and vindicated by their own investigative body, the Mueller report.

This is basic human nature. So Trump is pursued, he’s lied about, he’s libeled, he’s slandered for three years. Then he is completely exonerated and vindicated, so what does he do? He starts asking questions about what the hell happened? He starts asking questions. He wants answers about how in the hell this happened. And he’s talking to the president of Ukraine, and he’s asking him to help come up with some of these answers.

And now the same people that set Donald Trump up, the same people that lied about him and tried to put him in jail are now impeaching him for defending himself. They’re the ones who behaved illegally. They are the ones who threatened the Constitution. They are the ones who have stood everything decent upside down.

Trump is simply asking questions about them, who they are, what they did. All he’s doing is defending himself. He’s being impeached for defending himself, pure and simple. Because in today’s Democrat world you are not permitted to defend yourself. You take the allegation and you deal with it.

Let’s go to Mitch McConnell and the sound bites. We’re gonna start here. This is in order at number 1. Pelosi was scorched today by the Turtle. It may not sound like it in every utterance because the Turtle is the Turtle, but he blew her up in this 30 minute speech on the Senate floor. Here’s the first sample.

MCCONNELL: Speaker Pelosi’s House just gave in to a temptation that every other House in our history has managed to resist. They impeach a president whom they do not even allege has committed an actual crime known to our laws. They’ve impeached simply because they disagree with a presidential act and question the motive behind it. There were powerful reasons, Mr. President, why Congress after Congress for 230 years — 230 years — required presidential impeachment to revolve around clear, recognizable crimes, even though that was not a strict limitation. Powerful reasons why for 230 years no House, no House opened the Pandora’s box of subjective political impeachments. That 230-year tradition died last night.

RUSH: He continued.

MCCONNELL: Speaker Pelosi suggested that House Democrats may be too afraid, too afraid to even transmit their shoddy work product to the Senate. Mr. President, looks like the prosecutors are getting cold feet. They said impeachment was so urgent that it could not even wait for due process, but now they’re content to sit on their hands.

RUSH: The next bite is one that resonated with me because I think in this bite I will be able to indicate, I’ll be able to illustrate for you a prediction I made yesterday, that maybe not in our lifetimes, but at some point down the road the Democrats realizing the one thing in our political system they don’t control, that stands in their way, is elections. And at some point, folks, it’s gonna happen.

Some Democrat somewhere, someday is gonna come along and suggest that elections are old-fashioned, outmoded, outdated — and they’ll have all kinds of reasons. It’ll be because people are uneducated. People don’t know what they’re talking about. The people are too stupid, or we can’t trust them to do the right.  It will be something along those lines, but it’s gonna be because Democrats keep losing, and in this bite, I might be able to extract… Not evidence of that.

But it’s an indication that that’s how the Democrats are thinking.  Here is McConnell suggesting that he’s not gonna let “thirdhand testimony from unelected” bureaucrats, i.e., Lieutenant Colonel Vindman — O say can you see — and Yovanovitch and Fiona Hill and what’s his name, George Kent — the bow-tie guy — and Bill Taylor… He’s not gonna let testimony from unelected, thirdhand bureaucrats determine who is and who isn’t president.

MCCONNELL:  President Trump is not the first president with a populist streak, not the first to make entrenched elites uncomfortable.  He’s certainly not the first president to speak bluntly, to mistrust the administrative state, or to rankle unelected bureaucrats.  None of these things — none of them — is unprecedented.  I’ll tell you what would be unprecedented.  It will be an unprecedented constitutional crisis if the Senate literally hands the House of Representatives a new partisan vote of no confidence.  It will be unprecedented if we agree that any future House that dislikes any future president can rush through an unfair inquiry, skip the legal system, and paralyze the Senate with a trial.  It will be unprecedented if the Senate says secondhand and thirdhand testimony from unelected civil servants is enough to overturn the people’s vote.

RUSH:  Let me take a brief time-out.  We’ll come back and I’ll explain some things about this bite when we get back.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH:  McConnell made the point that the Democrats over in the House requested extraordinary amounts of sensitive information from the Trump White House, exactly the kind of things over which presidents of both parties have asserted privilege in the past.  It was predictable and appropriate for Trump to do this.  He’s been impeached for it! This is what they’re calling “obstruction of Congress.”  But it’s a never-ending quest for power that the branches fight with one another, that they have now criminalized in the form of impeachment.

McConnell made the point that none of what Trump has done here is unprecedented.  In fact, it’s all happened before, and it’s common. Houses of Representatives have always wanted White House documents.  Presidents have always said, “Go pound sand.  If you want ’em, we gotta go to court.”  The president’s gone to court claiming executive privilege.  More often than not, the president prevails in court.  This is exactly what the president did in these circumstances.

They’re calling this “obstruction of Congress” because they’re desperate to get the word “obstruction.” They want to use the word “cover-up.”  They think it went well during Watergate.  He says, “This is not a constitutional crisis. We’re nowhere near a constitutional crisis because this is normal!”  None of this is unprecedented.  The routine occurrence of separation of powers is nothing.  What happened is what should have happened! It’s what always happens.

There’s nothing here that Trump has done that constitutes anything unconstitutional or illegal or obstructive.  I mean, McConnell was on fire.  But I want to go back to his specifically mentioning, “It would be unprecedented if the Senate says secondhand and thirdhand testimony from unelected civil servants is enough to overturn the people’s vote.” That is exactly what this has been about since the entire-Russian meddling-and-Trump-collusion fiasco began.

It has been about reversing the election result, as you well know.

Now, I contend to you that a party brazenly and openly attempting to reverse election results is a party that is entirely capable down the road of canceling elections, period.  Now, don’t misunderstand me.  I’m not suggesting that this is Pelosi’s objective now.  I’m telling you, I’ve studied the trend line of the American left and where it’s headed my entire life, and particularly the last 30-some-odd years of this program, and they have trended so far to the left now that they are openly socialist and trending communist.

They even use the word “socialist” in many of their factions proudly to describe themselves.  But make no mistake.  They don’t like the results of this election, and they’re trying to reverse them — and look how they’re doing it.  They’re bringing in so-called experts that are not elected to comment on the qualifications of the man who was elected, and they’re turning to these unelected bureaucrats that you never heard of before any of this happened, that you didn’t know of. You had no idea what they do, how good they are at it or not.

And now all of a sudden, their testimony is sufficient to produce an article of impeachment suggesting that this president — elected in an Electoral College near landslide — is unfit.  McConnell’s exactly right.  The basis on which this impeachment process is attempting to overturn the election results is the fact that the existing Washington establishment claims this man is not qualified, this man is unfit.  They are exactly trying to overturn a duly constituted election by lying about it, but falsely accusing people who won it and participated in it.

What are they trying to do?  They’re trying to deny the election result.  They’re trying to deny the choice and the will of the American people.  We’re not far from it.  We’re not far from the day — and, believe me, they’re already thinking about it.  I will as close to guarantee it as I can without having actually heard them talk about it. But I will wager you that they, among themselves, have had conversations about the problems they face just having to do elections.

That they resent having to go through this whole thing, this whole process of elections. If they could ever find a way to eliminate them, not… They would replace them with something.  I mean, they’d try to make it palatable to the American people.  It’s who they are.  They are attempting to do it right now.

They have been for three years.  They’re not going to stop.  This entire next year is going to be based and predicated on “Trump’s unqualified.” Now they’ve got the blemish: Impeachment.  That will be part of the 2020 campaign.  The last thing… The one thing that Pelosi will not permit is Trump being acquitted.  Ergo, there won’t be a Senate trial unless, somehow, she’s convinced there’s gonna be a conviction.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH:  One of the ways they could try to replace elections is do it with polls.  Think of how they use exit polls today.  Those involve elections, but the signs are all there.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: One more Mitch McConnell sound bite.  It’s number 4.  Now, this is a favorite topic of Senator McConnell’s.  When I first met him — and I don’t remember when that was — he gave me a lesson on what the purpose of the Senate is, as designed by the founders, and he touches on it in this bite.

MCCONNELL:  The framers built the Senate to provide stability, to take the long view of our republic, to safeguard institutions from the momentary hysteria that sometimes consumes our politics, to keep partisan passions from literally boiling over.  The Senate exists for moments like this.  There’s only one outcome that is suited to the paucity of evidence, the failed inquiry, the slapdash case — only one outcome suited to the fact that the accusations themselves are constitutionally incoherent. Constitutionally incoherent.

Only one outcome will preserve core precedents rather than smash them into bits in a fit of partisan rage because one party still cannot accept the American people’s choice in 2016.  It could not be clearer which outcome would serve the stabilizing, institution-preserving, fever-breaking role for which the United States Senate was created, and which outcome would betray it.  The Senate’s duty is clear.  When the time comes, we must fulfill it.

RUSH:  Now, the way he described it to me when I first met him is he said, “Rush, I want you token of the Senate as a cup and saucer.  Over in the House and all through the country rabid partisanship is the name of the game.  Imagine that rabid partisanship is coffee that is poured into the cup, and that partisanship sometimes boils over.  It gets so rancorous and it gets so mean and it gets so heated; it just boils over, and where does it end up?  It ends up in the saucer — and, Rush, the Senate is the saucer.

“The saucer is where what was in that cup boils over and ends up cooling down.  It doesn’t get consumed. It sits there in the saucer and it just sort of cools down and sits there — and that, Rush, is the role of the Senate: To slow everything down, to take the partisanship out of it.”  That’s what he’s talking about here.  And he, in this case, has accurately described Pelosi and the House Democrats and what they have done.  But I just have to comment because this was one of the best floor speeches in regards to this kind of partisanship in Washington that I’ve heard him give.

I mean, he referred to it as the most unfair impeachment inquiry in modern history.  He ripped Pelosi for delaying all this, said the Democrats are afraid to transmit shoddy articles.  What it is, just to refresh your memory or if you missed the first hour… What all of this is, is Pelosi knows she’s not gonna get a conviction in the Senate so not gonna send ’em over there.  This is, again, the thing about this that had everybody puzzled.

All of these official commentators, official analysts on cable TV and in the newspapers and the blogs and the websites asked, “Why is she doing this?  It’s gonna lead to an acquittal.  It’s the exact opposite of what she wants.” Not if she doesn’t send the articles over. If there isn’t a trial, there can’t be an acquittal.  And what she’s basically saying is she’s not going to assign any House managers, any prosecutors until she gets an idea of “the arena.”

What she means by that, she’s not gonna send them over there until she can be assured that they’re gonna convict and remove Trump from office. Otherwise they’re not gonna be sent over. Which makes total, perfect sense. They want the blemish. They don’t want the news stories, “Donald Trump impeached in December of 2019 and acquitted in January of 2020.”

They don’t want that. They don’t want anything other than Donald Trump impeached in December 19th and removed from office in January 2020. That’s what they want. If they don’t get that, she’s not gonna send ’em over there. The absolute worst thing that could happen is for this reprobate, in their minds, this existential threat to the country, this guy that colluded and stole the election has to be thrown out, to have all of this be thrown at him, and he ends up being acquitted in an election year? Ain’t no way. Ain’t gonna happen.

And her out is going to be claiming the Republicans are unfair because they’re partisan. They’re racist, sexist, bigot, homophobes, whatever else she wants to throw into the pile as her justification for not moving forward. (imitating Pelosi) “It won’t be a fair trial. I’ve heard Senator McConnell already say that he’s going to acquit. I can’t do this. I can’t conduct this if it’s not going to be a fair trial.” Well, there hasn’t been anything about this from the get-go that’s been fair. But that’s her out.

[mystery-ak]

Schumer’s Article II Lies

Dec 19, 2019



RUSH: Now, let’s move on. Senator Schumer, gotta play this, sound bite number 5, after the Turtle went to the floor of the Senate, Schumer said he had to go, so he went and here’s a portion of what he had to say.

SCHUMER: The president of the United States has spent the past several months telling Congress it has no right to oversight, no right to investigate any of his activities, that he has absolute immunity, that Article II of the Constitution gives him, quote, the right to do whatever he wants, unquote. That’s the president’s words. The Senate has said in the past that the president serves the people, not himself, that he is not a king, will it do so again or will it shirk from that responsibility.

RUSH: Now, ladies and gentlemen, this is an abject lie. In fact, none of what Senator Schumer said is true here. So if they’re willing to continue lying about this Article II claim, then what are we to make of everything else that they are alleging? The president has not spent the past several months telling Congress it has no right to oversight. He’s never told them they have no right to oversight.

They have requested documents. They have requested certain members of his staff, and he’s gone to court to prevent that from happening, like every president in the past has. Article II, the president has never said that he has absolute immunity. He has never said Article II gives him the right to do whatever he wants. He’s never said that. Yet they put it in an article of impeachment. They continue to pound it.

It’s totally taken out of context. It is an abject lie, like much of the fake news is a lie every day, and has been, about Russian collusion. So if these few things here are lies, what about the rest of what they’re saying? I want to let you hear what Trump was talking about when he uttered Article II allows me to do whatever I want. They’re taking it out of context.

There was a specific context in which the president made these comments. June 16th this year, five months ago. Special episode of 2020 on ABC hosted by George Stephanopoulos of the Clinton apparatus. Stephanopoulos said, “You say that special counsel Robert Mueller was conflicted, that that meant that he had to go.”

THE PRESIDENT: Look, Article II, I would be allowed to fire Robert Mueller, number one, I didn’t. He wasn’t fired. Okay, number one, very importantly, but more importantly, Article II allows me to do whatever I want. Article II would have allowed me to fire him.

RUSH: The context is clear. He was talking about — and, by the way, this is in June of 2016. The Democrats have tried to convict Trump and impeach Trump for what he thought about doing. He was thinking about firing Mueller. The Mueller report recounts numerals times where Trump was talking to his associates about firing Mueller, and they want to impeach him for that, they want to convict him of that, for his thoughts. But he never did.

So Stephanopoulos brings it up here for like the twenty thousandth time. And Trump’s getting frustrated with it. “I didn’t fire the guy, but I coulda. Article II says I can do whatever I want. Meaning within the Department of Justice, I run the executive branch, I could fire Comey, I could fire Mueller, I could fire anybody, I could fire anybody I want.”

He was never saying Article II lets him be a king, lets him be a dictator, and they know it. They are purposely misleading, purposely lying. And it’s evidence they’ve got nothing. They’re having to manufacture this horrible example that they have to put in one of the articles of impeachment. These people are actually I think hapless and haven’t the slightest idea how they’re seen, and that’s gonna end up being a very, very grave error they are making.

[mystery-ak]

The Way This Can End Even If Pelosi Withholds the Articles

Dec 19, 2019



RUSH: Chicago. Steve, great to have you with us, sir. Hello.

CALLER: Hi, Rush. Just a quick question. Is it possible for Nancy Pelosi to withhold articles of impeachment from the Senate until after the 2020 election, wait for a possible Democratic win, then submit?

RUSH: I’ll be honest with you, I don’t know. This is uncharted territory for a lot of people. The idea of holding these articles until after 2020 — you’re presuming Trump’s reelected?

CALLER: Yes. Of course. Yeah.

RUSH: My off-the-cuff answer to this is gonna be that unless specified, like legislation, an act of Congress ends when that Congress ends, and Congresses have two-year life spans because that’s the term of House of Representatives terms. In the Senate it’s six. There’s one more year to go for this current Congress, which was sworn in this January, January 2019.

CALLER: Hm-hm.

RUSH: I don’t think it would work that way. But it’s kind of academic because they’re not gonna stop. I fully expect them to add to these articles.

CALLER: Yes. That would give them time to add also.

RUSH: I think that’s gonna be the name of the game. As long as Pelosi is convinced that there will not be a conviction, she’s never gonna permit a trial. Now, there’s another thing that she’s attempting here. I should have mentioned this at the top. She is attempting, along with Chuck You Schumer, to engineer a Senate trial that actually is an investigation of additional charges.

That’s why they want four witnesses called. That’s when McConnell shut that down yesterday. Said, look, we judge the case. The House makes the case. The House is the prosecutor. They do the indictment, articles of impeachment, deliver to us, and we act as the jury and the chief justice is the judge and we go from there. We do not conduct investigations. We do not, as the jury, add to whatever is presented to us.

But they’re gonna try to force that under this rubric of fairness. And they have experience succeeding with this. Accusing the Republicans of being unfair in the past has worked. It worked in the Kavanaugh thing, for example. They let Blasey Ford come forth at the last moment and gum up all the works. They’re gonna try something like that here too.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Okay. Here’s Joel Pollak’s piece in Breitbart: “Senate Can Acquit Even If House Withholds Articles of Impeachment.”

Now, a lot of people have asked me that if Pelosi refuses to send the articles to the Senate, is there really any impeachment? Yes. She doesn’t have to send the articles for Trump to remain impeached forever.

Impeachment is a two-pronged process. And he has been impeached. They voted articles of impeachment in the House of Representatives. They created an indictment with two charges. So he’s been impeached. If there is nothing further that happens, if there’s no trial, if there’s no verdict, he’s still been impeached. (interruption) No, impeachment is not inclusive of a trial. He has been impeached. No matter what happens from this day forward, he has been impeached.

Bill Clinton was impeached and acquitted. Found guilty of lying. Trump will be impeached and maybe no decision, which is what Trump doesn’t want. But, no, nothing erases the fact that he’s been impeached. The problem, the reason people are asking this is ’cause a lot of people think impeachment means guilty. It doesn’t.

Impeachment is not a statement of innocence or guilt. It simply says the president has been judged, by the House in this case, which is rabidly partisan, to have engaged in constitutional high crimes and misdemeanors.

There’s Lisa Page on TV. You know, this is class. Classic, classic, classic. Lisa Page, who’s going back and forth with her texts with Strzok and just ridiculing Trump and plotting Trump’s demise, putting together a plan whereby she and her buddies at the FBI can get rid of the guy, can falsely charge him, falsely accuse him.

And then it’s all revealed that she’s been engaged in these texts back and forth with Strzok. It’s been revealed that she was a lousy FBI agent and lawyer. It’s been revealed that she was part of a process trying to rig the outcome of this investigation. And it was revealed she was having an affair with Strzok.

So what does Trump do? At Trump rallies, he simulates Strzok and Page having a very wonderful, romantic interlude. And she loses it. She loses it. She thinks it’s outrageous, it was the last straw, that’s why she had to go public, when Trump started making fun of her orgasms. So you see, these people can dish it out, and they can do whatever they want to do to literally destroy people. But you make fun of them, and they haven’t the guts — these people couldn’t take one one-hundredth of what they dish out to Donald Trump.

They’re nothing but a bunch of, when you get right down to it, wimps who live in little protective cocoons that they have built for themselves where they’re able to tell each other how important they are, how wonderful they are, how great they are, and therefore they get to create the illusion of their wonderful life. Somebody like Trump comes along and blows it up, and they can’t deal with it. It happens all the time.

Now, here’s Joel Pollak’s piece. “Senate Can Acquit Even If House Withholds Articles of Impeachment.” That’s because the Constitution, says Joel Pollak here, is absolutely clear about the Senate’s authority. Article I, Section 3, says the Senate shall have the sole power to try all impeachment. That is all it says. It doesn’t say that the Senate will. It doesn’t say that the Senate has to. It doesn’t say that the Senate must conduct a trial. It says the Senate shall have the sole power to try all impeachments.

“The Chief Justice presides over a trial involving the president, but the Senate makes the rules. And the Senate is controlled by Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), who regards what the House has done with contempt. Politico outlined Democrats’ new idea,” citing the so-called constitutional authority Laurence Tribe, who’s a Harvard Law professor. They don’t cite the Constitution. No, no, no. In outlining the Democrats’ idea, they go to a Harvard Law professor who is himself a rabid, sick, partisan Trump hater.

“Pelosi hopes to pressure McConnell into holding a ‘fair trial’ — this, after she and her party broke every relevant House rule and precedent, and several Amendments in the Bill of Rights, all in the name of their ‘sole Power of Impeachment.’ They forget that a ‘fair trial’ applies to the accused, not the accuser, and has since 1215.” Magna Carta. The right to a fair trial is solely about the accused.

“If Pelosi refuses to submit the articles of impeachment to the Senate, McConnell can convene the Senate anyway, summon the Chief Justice, and swear in the Senators as jurors.” And he can dismiss the case. And that’s what the hell ought to happen. And it ought to happen before Christmas. It ought to happen by the end of this week, dismiss this, because McConnell has the full authority and power to do it.

[mystery-ak]

How to Psychologically Withstand Hatred from the Left

Dec 19, 2019



RUSH: Wes in Russellville, Arkansas.  Great to have you, sir.  Hi.

CALLER:  Hi, Rush.  Dittos.  Oh, man, what an honor.  I can’t believe I’m talking with you.

RUSH:  Well, thank you very much.  It’s great to have you here.

CALLER:  Well, thank you.  As a retired Air Force vet — and I have a son, me and my wife have a son who lost a leg in Afghanistan — let me say thank you for all the things that y’all have done so quietly and behind the scenes for veterans.  I know.  So, please, take my “thank you” for that.  But you know, you’ve been known as the Congress-maker back in ’94 where you made the House of Representatives.

And I submit — and I’ve said this for years to my friends — that you’re the president-maker, and I say that because look at what they’ve done to you. They have… I started listening to you in ’92 when I came back from Germany, and I was watching the show, and they did everything they could to get you off the radio. They put you on as late as they could in markets on the TV to get you off — which, by the way, your TV show was the blueprint for Fox News too.

So what they did was the Fairness Doctrine and all those things that they did to you. They thought you would do what they normally see, and you’d just back off and back down.  Well, no. You’re the person that when they try and take you down, you thrive.  You do great things.  You go way above and beyond those things.  Well, they used that blueprint on all of our presidents since, and they would back down.  Well, you made this president, Mr. Trump.

RUSH:  Ehhh… (uncomfortable sigh)

CALLER:  He does exactly like you do.  He doesn’t back down.  I don’t see this as being a blemish on his record.  I think he’s gonna take it as a badge of honor.  But had it not been for you and what you started in the late eighties and early nineties and through the aughts, they would have never — we would have never — had a president that would have stood up to these folks.  Does that make sense?

RUSH:  Yeah.  I mean, it does, and I appreciate it very much.  I don’t talk about specifically the things the left has done to try to damage me — some would say destroy me — because I’ve always thought it would sound like complaining, and I never complain.  I don’t, ’cause I don’t know how to deal with other people who do complain, and I try not to whine about it.

CALLER: Right.

RUSH:  I just don’t. But I can share some insights with you if you want.  In the first place, Trump got himself elected.  I appreciate your compliment there, but nobody voted for me.  They voted for him.  Don’t take that away from him.  He’s the one who won.

CALLER:  Oh, by all means.

RUSH:  But you’re right about the attempts to undermine and destroy.  That’s how I recognize them.  That’s how I know how to withstand them.  That’s how I’m confident they can be beaten. That’s why I get so frustrated with Republicans that cave to it, because it’s not necessary to cave to it.  You can beat it back.  Now, getting an audience on radio is different than getting votes.  I understand that.  Like, you can have a very large audience with 20 or 30% of them hating your guts.  You can’t get elected being hated.

CALLER:  Right.

RUSH:  But you can have a huge career being hated by 20 or 30% of the audience.  In fact, we call that perfect polarization.  There’s even a name for it in media.  Not that I strive for it.  But you said that Trump will wear this as a badge of honor.  Let me tell you what I think — and I haven’t spoken to him yet about this, but here’s how I think this affected him.  Donald Trump is as normal a human being as you will ever meet, and in that I mean he wants to be liked and he wants to be appreciated.

But if he’s not, it isn’t gonna stop him from doing what he thinks is best or needs to be done.  Now, I’ll guarantee you this is a dichotomy for him, because no president wants to be impeached.  Nobody wants that on the historical legacy or record.  But psychologically, he is going to have to look at that as a sign of success.  That’s not normal.  It is not normal to take negative things that are said about you and transfer them internally to signs of success.

Nobody is raised that way. But in order to survive in this league or in this atmosphere, those are the kind of things you have to do.  So I guarantee you, he’s not happy that he was impeached, and he’s not running around throwing parties for it.  But at the same time, he understands exactly what it means.  It’s happened because he’s so effective that they can’t stop him — and so it’s ultimately a positive. You’re right.  But it’s not a badge of honor.

It’s not something he wishes would happen.  It’s something he wishes didn’t happen.  He wishes — because he loves the country — that everybody that doesn’t like him did.  He wishes that everybody — and just like I do.  I wish everybody understood exactly what I’m saying here.  I wish everybody agreed with me, because all I want is for everybody to find their dream, to be successful, to at least access the opportunity that it is — the blessing that we all have — to live in this country.

I hate these people that try to depress people — dispirit them, tell them they have no chance, tell them they have no hope — and then blame people like me for it.  It’s frustrating like I can’t describe for you.  And then the efforts that they mount, like what they did to Kavanaugh.  I’ve been through all of these things, multiple times.  They are all a sign of effectiveness, and that’s how you have to learn to deal with ’em psychologically.  It’s something the left does not have to do.

They don’t have to learn to deal with this kind of thing.  They don’t. It’s not a level playing field in that regard. I mean, Democrat elected officials, they thrive and survive only on the fact that they’re universally adored and loved.  They couldn’t deal with what Trump gets every day.  There’s not… Look at Pelosi.  One little question about, “Do you hate the president?” and she shuts it down and walks off the stage and starts admonishing them.

Meanwhile, Trump is accused of hating everybody every day.  He’s accused of being a white supremacist.  He’s accused of being a pig.  He’s accused of being all these things that he’s not.  And he knows he’s not, and his family knows he’s not, which is the strength.  And everybody in the world who knows him knows he’s none of these things.  An increasing number of the American people figure it out as time goes by that he’s none of these things.

But they’re still said, and they are said as a political weapon designed to diminish his effectiveness and hopefully make him want to give up and quit.  That’s what they miscalculate about him.  That’s not who he is.  That will never happen, and he’ll do whatever he can to force all of this right back down their throats and make them pay a price for treating him this way, for doing this to him — and he’ll do it within the political arena.

He’ll do it as best he can. But I appreciate your assessment of me and the program. I’m thinking about what happened to Kavanaugh. What’s the best example I could give? Let me think. I’m up against a break here. Well, there are too many to single one out, plus I’ve gotta take the break.

Does one come to your mind off the top of your head where I was totally blasphemed and lied about and misrepresented? (interruption) Oh, okay. When I was a very minority member in an ownership group that wanted to buy the St. Louis Rams, the moment that leaked out, there were stories all over the media that were totally manufactured, such as, the big quote that circulated and found its way into every major newspaper in this country, it was headlined on ESPN that I had said slavery was a period of time where blacks were better off than they are today and it wasn’t that bad or some such, something I’d never said.

Media Matters had reported that I said it. Some guy wrote a book chock-full of lies, things that I had said. The media, not one of them called me to say, “Did you really say that?” They just ran with it. And that was just one of the misrepresentations and lies that they ran with. And it’s been a staple. These are the kind of things that you have to say — Trump same thing — you have to say to yourself, “These are happening because you represent a threat. They’re happening because you’re effective. They’re happening because you pose a danger to people, and they can’t find a way to get rid of you, so they’re doing this.”

And for me it was a very tough psychological transition, to learn to take that kind of hate as a sign of success, ’cause that’s not how I was raised. I mean, I don’t know anybody that’s raised that wants to be hated, and it’s not normal, it’s not natural, so you have to cross the psychological barrier in order to keep it from overtaking you and — not ruining you, but changing your personality so that you become what they say you are. You can’t let that happen. Gotta stay who you are.

And Trump — I’ve not seen anybody — I don’t think there is anybody, I’ve never seen anybody get this amount of incoming grief, the lies, the misrepresentations, the outright slander and libel. And I don’t know of anybody alive who could take it for as little as three or four days before asking and begging, “Stop. Stop. I’ll quit if you want. Just stop.”