The Media Meltdown Over Crazy Bernie
Feb 24, 2020
RUSH: You know, I’ve been looking at all this news over the weekend about Crazy Bernie and the Democrats, and there’s people writing columns about, “Oh, my God. The whole Democrat Party has gone socialist.†Really? What was your first clue? I’ve been trying to tell people what the Democrat Party is and how long it’s been that way, and so has Ronaldus Magnus.
You go back, look at Ronald Reagan’s radio commentaries that he wrote and delivered, over 300 of them, he’s been warning about Bernie Sanders for I don’t know how many years, 50 or 60 at least. The Democrat Party has been trending to where it is for the longest time. And all of this effort on the Democrat Party side to make it look like Bernie is an oddball and an outlier and a weirdo, don’t fall for this, folks. Bernie Sanders is far closer to the mainstream of the Democrat Party than he is an outlier. And we’ll be demonstrating this.
Of course, you have to wonder how desperate people are when the same intelligence community starts warning that the Russians — last Thursday, here’s what happened. The New York Times says the Russians are trying to help Trump. On Friday the Washington Post said that the Russians are trying to help Crazy Bernie. And both papers had the same sources.
It was so bad that Jake Tapper had CNN had to come out and debunk the New York Times story saying he’s got contacts in the intelligence community, and the New York Times story is not what it is, that Russia and Trump are not working together like they didn’t in 2016. But the new wrinkle is from the Washington Post that the intelligence community claims that the Russians are trying to help Crazy Bernie. Now, that makes sense. And we’ll break that down as the program unfolds.
We’ve got some fabulous audio sound bites from panicked Democrats, panicked media. Chris Matthews, PMSNBC, they’re demanding that he resign, folks, because he referred to Crazy Bernie’s victory in Iowa as akin to the Nazi brownshirts winning back in the 1940s. Can you believe this? So I guess there’s a Twitter demand that Chris Matthews resign.
The Democrat Party is just being twisted every which way you can imagine, and it’s all because they don’t have the guts like Bernie does to admit what they believe.
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RUSH: This was from February 21st, it’s Friday. “Feds Notify Bernie Sanders That Russia Is Trying To Help His Campaign – Federal officials have notified socialist Bernie Sanders that Russia is trying to boost his presidential campaign in an effort to impact who becomes the Democrats’ presidential nominee.â€
Do you realize how seriously screwy this is? Ladies and gentlemen, the Russians have been meddling in American affairs in a documented series of ways since the 1930s. There’s nothing new about this. What’s new about this is the way the intelligence community in this country has begun to leak and politicize this in an effort — the intel community is supposed to be pro-America. They’re supposed to be nonbiased. What a joke.
I mean, on Thursday the New York Times comes out and says that intelligence community sources say the Russians are once again trying to impact the 2020 election to elect Trump. They first reported that to Pencil Neck and his committee, Adam Schiff and the Intelligence Committee last week — the week before last now. And this Schiff calls a press conference, “See, this is exactly what we predicted was gonna happen if we didn’t convict Donald Trump.†Yada yada. It’s just more BS.
And then the next day the Washington Post comes out and says, no, the Russians are trying to help Crazy Bernie. It is just ridiculous. And it’s taking something that’s very serious and literally trivializing it. It’s making people react to this in ways that are unhelpful and unserious.
Now, I know you’re thinking, “What do you mean, Rush? The Russians have been tampering since the 1930s.†You ever heard of the Henry Wallace campaign? The Russians were trying to elect Henry Wallace way back. He ended up getting 2% of the vote. Do you remember the 1980s? You want to talk about election meddling? Ted Kennedy was seeking the Democrat presidential nomination in 1980 ’cause everybody in the Democrat Party knew that Jimmy Carter was gonna get creamed.
Carter’s first and only term was an absolute disaster. It was an economic and foreign policy disaster. We had to have something called the misery index to actually quantify how bad life in America was under Jimmy Carter. You think interest rates — 14% interest rate. Try go get a house and a mortgage at 14% interest rate. Unemployment was over 8%. It was outrageously bad.
So Ted Kennedy is running for the Democrat nomination in 1980, and he is in contact with Soviet leadership at that point attempting to work with them to undermine Reagan. It didn’t work. Reagan wins in a landslide. In 1984 Ted Kennedy does it again. The letters that Ted Kennedy sent to the various Soviet leaders who kept dying at that period of time. There was Brezhnev first. That’s who Kennedy was first talking to. And then Yuri Andropov after that.
Then along came Gorbachev. And there were a couple others in there that lasted two or three days before palace intrigue took ’em out. But Ted Kennedy is literally promising the Russians, “Be patient. Work with us to get rid of Ronald Reagan, and everything will be back to normal.†What do you call that, if that’s not meddling in a presidential election? None other than Ted Kennedy.
There isn’t anything new about this. The difference is, we didn’t know it then. We only knew about Ted Kennedy because when the Soviet Union imploded, all those KGB files ended up being released so we saw the letters that Ted Kennedy wrote and we saw the responses from Brezhnev and Andropov to Kennedy.
It’s undeniable that it happened. It’s undeniable that Kennedy did it. And in 1980 Ted Kennedy is working with who? The Soviet Union, at that point in time the leading communist nation in the world. And now in 2020, 40 years later a guy named Bernie Sanders gets the Democrat presidential nomination, looks like, anyway, he’s leading it, and everybody’s worried about what’s happened to the Democrat Party.
The Democrat Party is what it’s always been. Ted Kennedy was in bed with Soviet communists to attempt to undermine a Republican president twice, Ronald Reagan. There’s nothing unusual about Democrat Party appearing to nominate Bernie Sanders. The difference is that Sanders is openly honest about it all and the Democrat Party, for the most part, masks itself and camouflages itself.
They began to come out from under the covers during the Obama administration and look what happened. Look what happened. They got creamed by somebody running for president, never even been in the political world before — that’d be Donald Trump — at least he was way outside the political establishment.
So this country is in no way interested in communism. There may be some percentage of it that’s willing to go for it with Crazy Bernie. You know what a lot of Crazy Bernie support is? Not all of it, but a lot of Crazy Bernie support is students and suburbanite college graduates who have just drowned in student loan debt. He’s promising to forgive it. He’s promising to pay it off. He’s promising free university tuition, college. Those are the people signing up with Crazy Bernie.
People are being killed by student loan debt. Who gave us that? Your old buddies at the federal government. They’ve destroyed a college education, made it so expensive that even if you get a great education you’re gonna spend the rest of your life paying off the loan, not getting ahead. So people are fed up.
And if some cranky old guy, 78 years old, comes along waving his arms around promising to forgive it, what are you gonna do if you don’t care about anything else? And then the guy says your health care’s gonna be free and then the next thing the guy says is that your Snickers bars are gonna be free and pretty soon your marijuana is gonna be free and legal. “Hey, what’s not to like about this?†they say, “Sign me up.â€
And this is what we’re going through right now. And the Democrat Party running around acting like they’re in panic because Crazy Bernie’s on the verge of winning, I’m telling, you there’s nothing different. When Ted Kennedy was the lion in the Senate and the figurehead of the Democrat Party, what was he doing? In bed with the world’s leading communist nation to undermine a duly elected Republican president twice, Ronaldus Magnus.
Do you think the Democrat Party’s moved that far left since the days of Ted Kennedy? It hasn’t. And all these brilliant columnists and commentators who are apparently shocked at what the Crazy Bernie lead and apparent nomination will mean, “Oh, my God. This party has become.†It’s always been this. Yeah, I’m little frustrated because I’ve spent how many years trying to get people to understand what liberalism is and that that is what the Democrat Party — this is now an extreme, extreme branch of liberalism called liberalism, socialism, communism, what have you.
And now there are people — Snerdley has heard this, I haven’t. Snerdley told me today that there are beginning to be rumblings, people on our side saying, “Hey, don’t fall for this idea that Crazy Bernie is gonna lose in a landslide. This is serious stuff.†It is serious. It is serious. But this country’s nowhere near electing somebody like Crazy Bernie, but it is scary how many Americans are gonna sign up for it.
And if they’re not defeated resoundingly and pummeled, they’re gonna keep growing and growing and growing. You have to continually inform and educate and fight people on this stuff, it’s hideous. Crazy Bernie is out defending Fidel Castro. Can I tell you what Crazy Bernie is saying in defending Castro? ‘Cause he’s getting sensitive. He said, “Castro had one of the best literacy programs the world has ever seen after his revolution.†Can I tell you what the literacy program was?
It was Cuban propaganda. It was how great Fidel is. It was how wonderful the revolution is. It is how you ought to understand why we put traitors in prison. It’s why you ought to understand the United States is the reason you don’t have any money, the United States and its blockade, which is what Castro called the embargo. His literacy problem was nothing but communist propaganda. It wasn’t a literacy program that educated Cubans on the classics. It wasn’t a literacy program that taught ’em how to read so that they can expand their horizons.
It was a propaganda program, Crazy Bernie! Saying that Castro had a brilliant literacy problem is the same thing as saying that Cuba’s got the best health care in the world. How utterly insane! And yet there’s Michael Moore making a movie about it with a bunch of left-wing American doctors agreeing to it, yet not one of them has ever gone there or sent their kids there for medical treatment. In fact, when Castro… Do you know what happened to Castro when he almost died?
You remember Castro was near death, and they actually announced it. But no. They didn’t say why, and this was a couple/maybe four years before he died. Castro had surgery involving his colon and needed a colostomy bag and refused to get it. He told the Cuban doctor, “Sew it up! I’m not doing a bag. Screw you.†So they did, and he got an infection and he almost died and they had to call in a bunch of doctors from Spain to deal with the infection because the Cuban health care system was totally ill-equipped to do it.
They succeeded. Castro got three or four more years after that. But he wasn’t gonna be some communist leader with a colostomy bag running around and have that rumor hit, have his people see that. There was no way. He said, “You sew it up and fix it.†He did, he got an infection, he almost died. He called doctors from Spain to save his life. You don’t see Crazy Bernie sending his kids or grandkids or great-grandkids or whatever kids he’s got down there. They don’t do it.
Hang on. Just got a notification here. Cool. All right. I gotta take a break. We’ll be back and continue and got some people on the phones, want to get to them. I still have these audio sound bites, the Democrats and the media panicking over Bernie winning in Nevada.
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RUSH: The Drive-By Media, the Democrats in full-fledged meltdown because of Crazy Bernie and his walloping victory in the Nevada caucuses. Here’s a montage. We have George Stephanopoulos, James Carville, the former Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel, a bunch of people from MSNBC, a bunch of people from NBC.
Speaking of, do you know that Chuck Todd rented a house he owned to Amy Klobuchar for a whole bunch of years? Something like $3,700 a month rent. Klobuchar and her husband lived in this house while she’s a Senator, and there’s F. Chuck out there interviewing her all these years on Meet the Depressed and now the Democrat campaign and didn’t think to mention once, “By the way, full disclosure, Klobuchar is helping me invest money in my real estate properties ’cause she rents from me $3,700 bucks a month.â€
Do you think it might have been helpful for people to know that? But F. Chuck Todd didn’t seem to think it was necessary to mention. Neither did Amy Klobuchar. So, anyway, here is the montage.
GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: If Bernie Sanders is at the top of the ticket that the Democrats could lose the House.
JAMES CARVILLE: If you’re voting for him because you think he’ll win the election, politically you’re a fool.
RAHM EMANUEL: This has been tried. We just saw it in Great Britain. Jeremy Corbyn went down dramatically.
NICOLLE WALLACE: Sounds a lot like political suicide.
JOY REID: Democrats need to sober up.
JANE HARMAN: The Democrats won’t win unless the ticket reflects the center.
KRISTEN SOLTIS ANDERSON: Democrats that go through the five stages of grief.
CHUCK TODD: Sanders may have crushed the hopes of a Democratic establishment desperate to stop him.
CHRIS MATTHEWS: The fall of France in the summer of 1940. And the General Renault calls up Churchill and says, “It’s over.†And Churchill says, “How can it be, you got the greatest army in Europe. How could it be over?†He said, “It’s over.â€
RUSH: That’s the comment Matthews made, now they want him to resign or be fired from MSNBC, comparing Sanders’ victory to the German takeover of France, the brownshirts in World War II.
But let’s look at some of these comments. Stephanopoulos: Bernie Sanders top of the ticket, the Democrats could lose the House. By the way, James Clyburn of the Congressional Black Caucasians in South Carolina, he’s the Democrat majority whip in the House, suspect he’s gonna endorse Plugs. Plugs is leading in South Carolina. But Clyburn’s saying the same thing, that if Bernie Sanders is the nominee, we Democrats could lose the House of Representatives.
Rahm Emanuel: “This has been tried. We just saw it in Great Britain. Jeremy Corbyn going down dramatically.†We’ve seen it everywhere, Rahm. We’ve seen it in Cuba. We’ve seen it in Venezuela. We’ve seen it everywhere socialism has been tried! I’m gonna tell you how Crazy Bernie does this. I’m gonna tell you how all socialists do this — how they seduce people — in just a minute. But the thing that I want to keep pounding at you, I don’t think that Bernie is that big an outlier. Now, I know he’s not a Democrat. This is the funny thing.
The Democrat nominee may not even be a Democrat. He is an avowed socialist. He does not belong. He votes with the Democrats, but he’s not a registered Democrat — and Bloomberg isn’t, either. Bloomberg is a Republican. The Democrats may end up nominating somebody that’s not even a Democrat. But the idea that Bernie’s an outlier? He isn’t! He’s right side by side with Ted Kennedy. Crazy Bernie honeymooned in the Soviet Union. Ted Kennedy worked with the Soviet Union to try to undermine Ronald Reagan in the 1980s.
Here’s Paul Krugman of the New York Times. Now, this guy is heralded as one of the premier, most brilliant economists in the world. He’s an idiot. He said after Trump was elected that we would go automatically into a recession, maybe a depression, an economic collapse the likes of which the country may not recover from. Where are we? We are in one of the greatest roaring economies of this country in 50 years.
Krugman should have been discredited and embarrassed and cast aside. But, no! He’s still out there, like Paul Ehrlich writing The Population Bomb back in 1976. He was dead wrong about every ecological prediction he made, and he’s still a hero to the left, as Krugman is. He was on — let’s see — a syndicated TV program called Democracy Now! today. Amy Goodman of the New York Times cohosting said, “Why do you say Bernie Sanders is not a socialist?â€
KRUGMAN: Bernie says he loves Denmark. I love Denmark. I think Denmark is an illustration of how decent a society can be. The Danes don’t think that they’re socialists. They think that they’re Social Democrats. They don’t use the word “socialist.†You say that you’re for universe health care; they [Republicans] say, “That’s socialist.†You say you’re for universal childcare; they say, “Think about how many people Stalin killed.†You know, it’s this crazy stuff. So why use the word? Why describe yourself…? I think it’s kind of self-indulgent to call yourself a socialist and give the Republicans unnecessary ammunition. I’m for the same kinds of policies. Why buy into the Republican effort to make this sound like something Stalin would do?
RUSH: Because it’s what it is! So Paul Krugman is essentially saying, “I’m for everything Bernie’s for, but he shouldn’t use the word ‘socialist,’ ’cause it makes it sound like something Stalin would do.†That is the Democrat Party, in a nutshell. That’s my exact point, that they have radical leftists for as long as I’ve been doing this show. Those of you who have been listening to this program since the beginning or very near it know I’ve been as consistent as I could be. I’ve never wavered on this.
I mean, to the point that I’ll bet sometimes you thought I was a little off my rocker with some of the analysis I was making about them, but they are full-fledged… This environmental wacko movement. Do you realize this thing got started, folks, in 1987, ’88 right when I was leaving Sacramento to move to New York to start this show? The anti-nuke movement and the peace movement have been around long before this program began. The left is who they are. The Democrat Party is their home, and Krugman has just admitted it here.
To him, though, “You don’t use the word. You don’t use the word ’cause it makes people think of Stalin.†Let me ask this: Of people alive in America today, how many of them even know what Stalin did? American education covers for communists like you can’t believe. How many people in this country do you think…? Well, I’ll remind you of something. There was poll (actually a survey) of high school students up to age 24 — high school and college students from like 16 to 24.
Only 20% had ever heard of Stalin and knew anything about him, and 30% had heard of Mao Tse-tung. So 70% never heard of Mao and 80% never heard of Stalin. When that survey came out, I happened to be at a charity golf tournament that was being sponsored by a local private school of very high performing kids. So I did my own survey. They were at every tee box. They were helping the tournament along. Every time I ran into a couple of ’em, I’d ask, “By the way, can you tell me who Mao Tse-tung was?†“Uhhh, let’s see. He’s the Tiananmen Square guy, right?â€
“No, he’s not the Tiananmen Squrage guy. I’m sure he was there, but not the Tiananmen Square you’re thinking of.†Stalin? No clue. No clue whatsoever. They have no idea that Stalin mass murdered his own citizens and that Mao Tse-tung did the same thing. No knowledge of it. So Paul Krugman here is worried, “I don’t think we should be calling ourselves ‘socialists.’ It makes it sound like something Stalin would do.†Don’t worry, Paul. You guys have erased Stalin from history books. No concern there.
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RUSH: Naugatuck, Connecticut. Patty, I’m glad you waited. You’re up next. It’s great to have you here with us. Hi.
CALLER: Thank you so much for taking my call. It’s an absolute pleasure, sir.
RUSH: Thank you, ma’am.
CALLER: I was listening to Bernie, and, you know, I find this somewhat very disingenuous, and I find what people don’t know really could hurt the rest of us. But he’s been talking about Denmark. It is not a socialist country, and they don’t want to be called a socialist country. They are a very advanced society. They have advanced pharmaceuticals, renewable energy. They are what’s considered a modern market economy. They are very strict on immigration. They have very good quality of life. They have a high GDP. They also… Nothing, you know, is truly free in society, but they have policies in that country —
RUSH: Wait a minute. I’m confused. Are you advocating for Denmark and thinking that Bernie should?
CALLER: Well, when I think of Bernie, I think of Venezuela. I think of shared misery. I think that Bernie, to me, would be, “Food is a luxury; toilet paper is a luxury,†and Denmark has a very high quality of life. So when he’s selling his socialist agenda, which is more like communism, it is not representative of what Denmark is like.
RUSH: All right. Well, I’ll take that, and rather than get into an argument with you about Denmark (which would not be useful and fun or worthwhile), I’m gonna take something. I’m gonna take another element of your phone call and use it to explain why socialism ends up being so appealing. One of the things, one of the reasons is an overall degree of ignorance, but I’ll stipulate that. The trick to selling socialism, Marxism, communism, is to stick to platitudes.
Whatever you do, don’t get specific, because then you nail yourself down. Stick to selling things like “making injustice right,†“the righting of wrongs,†“reversing injustice,†“delivering fairness.†Stay at the intersection of Broad Avenue and Vague Street. To sell socialism and communism, you cannot get specific. You have to speak in platitudes.
I mean, after all, who can argue with “justice� Who can argue with “fairness� Don’t let them figure out that what your campaign is really about is anger and envy and hatred and control. That is what’s propelling Bernie’s supporters. You take a look at ’em. They think Bernie is all about getting even with somebody and making somebody pay for having more, for doing more, for being better, what have you.
But you must, above all things, stay away from details. You have to stay away from how much your “fairness†will cost. You have to stay away from the things like the rights that you will lose in the process of the government gaining control. You stay away from the fact that you’re gonna be taking people’s private property away from ’em. That’s not feel-good rhetoric. So you avoid all details — like calling indoctrination “a literacy program,†propaganda “a literacy program.â€
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RUSH: This is Deborah in upstate New York, somewhere there in the wild wilderness. Great to have you with us. Hi.
CALLER: Thank you very much. I’m a lifetime Democrat, and I switched in 2016. I voted for Trump. I’m 67 years old.
RUSH: Hang on.
CALLER: Most of my —
RUSH: Hang on. Hang on.
CALLER: Yes? Yes?
RUSH: Did you switch parties to become Republican or vote for Trump as a Democrat?
CALLER: I voted for Trump as a Republican.
RUSH: All right. Okay.
CALLER: Yeah. And, you know, frankly, I couldn’t vote for Clinton, but that’s another story. Anyway, most of my friends, obviously, are liberals, and they had a visceral hatred for Trump. And at first they wanted no parts of Bernie, but now that he’s gained momentum I see them working hard to justify to themselves voting for him. And they’re lobbying friends.
And these are not Millennials. These are middle-aged people, remnants from the sixties and seventies, people who had said they wouldn’t vote at all if it was Bernie. So they’re lobbying them with passionate and reasoned — and I put that in quotes — arguments to find comfort in voting for a socialist. And I have to say, I see it working.
RUSH: Well, I’m not surprised. You’re talking about remnants, people who are remnants from the 1960s.
CALLER: Yeah.
RUSH: Bernie Sanders is exactly that. This is another bit of evidence, folks, why I continue to assert that Bernie is not an outlier in the Democrat Party, that he is, rather, a mainstream member, even though he doesn’t call himself a Democrat. The Democrats —
CALLER: Yes, exactly.
RUSH: — have been tending toward socialism my entire adult career here. And you’re seeing evidence of it. These people —
CALLER: Yeah.
RUSH: — they’re just coming home when they find this stuff familiar.
CALLER: Well, what’s interesting — and this is speaks to your point — is that the reasoning that they’re using is they’re asking the question, how different are Bernie’s views compared to what we as Democrats have been fighting for? And that’s what they’re saying, they’re worried about health care, the environment, threat to women’s right to choose. And then the biggest issue that they grab a hold to is this idea that Donald Trump is destroying the country. You know, the more articulate of them point to his court appointments, from a liberal’s point of view, understandable. And they are very, very worried about another Supreme Court justice.
RUSH: They damn well ought to be. They’ve already lost the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and don’t know it yet. Are you aware, they have lost the Ninth Circus! We can’t call it the Ninth Circus any other ’cause Trump has converted it — it’s almost a conservative court. They’re right to be concerned about the Supreme Court. But one thing else there, “You know, Bernie’s no different than Trump. They’re the same candidate. One was in 2016, and one is 2020.†They’re trying to draw an equivalence of two outsiders. That’s so bogus, I have to nuke that too. I’m glad you called, though, Deborah. Out of time. Sorry. Back with more in a moment.
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RUSH: Let me put it to you this way. How different is Bernie Sanders from your average university professor, particularly Ivy League or some other institution of higher learning? How much different? He’s not. He’s identical. He’s what you get in the faculty lounge, particularly the platitudes.
