By Tom Allison
Rush kicked off today's show with a little fearmongering, claiming that there was a serious possibility that Guantánamo Bay detainees would be acquitted in their criminal cases. Rush played some audio from Attorney General Eric Holder, where he commented that he informed President Obama of the decision to bring the detainees to criminal trial. Then Limbaugh claimed that Holder was “a stranger to the truth” and was very skeptical that Obama wasn't fully behind the decision to bring the five detainees to New York. Claiming that the decision could be Obama's most recent Waterloo, Rush claimed that Obama was degrading our national security and was endangering his chances at re-election:
LIMBAUGH: Folks, this could very well be Waterloo for Obama. He has stepped in it with this Khalid Shaikh Mohammed matter. All the frenzied writing and protests -- I mean, that's just the beginning. But what's happening here -- this is an in-our-face weakening of our security, which means that if a civilian target is hit again, particularly New York City, Obama is toast. He's done. The American people will tolerate a lot, but not a grotesque mishandling of security based on a contempt for your own country.
Rush also played Liz Cheney's comments from Fox News Sunday criticizing the decision to bring detainees to New York. Rush again said he didn't buy Holder's claim that he only consulted with Obama, asserting that Obama is “in charge” of the Justice Department.
After the break, Rush turned to AP's fact check of Sarah Palin's memoir Going Rogue. Rush read basically word for word from this Powerline blog post that critiques the AP fact check. Limbaugh couldn't believe that the AP would dedicate 11 “crackerjack” reporters to the article. Smelling a double standard, Rush asked, “do any other authors get fact checked like this? Not that I can recall.” Rush later dared the AP to fact-check Al Gore's most recent publications.
Rush: David Brooks “sounds angry” and “jealous” of Palin
Echoing the rest of the conservative echo chamber, Rush criticized Obama for purportedly bowing to the emperor of Japan. Once again following Glenn Beck's lead, Limbaugh cited a 1994 New York Times article that analyzed President Clinton's alleged bow. Limbaugh also joked that Obama bows because he's envious of monarchies and would like to be bowed to someday.
As more evidence that Limbaugh will take any story and use it to criticize the Obama administration or progressives in general, Rush read from a Washington Post story on hunger, unhappy with the article's reporting on Obama's plans to combat food scarcity.
Rush then played a montage of media reporting on Limbaugh's comment that Going Rogue was the most substantive policy book he's ever read, as first documented here at Media Matters. Rush explained that Palin “doesn't think about her own thinking,” unlike a lot of liberal scholars, and therein lies her genius.
After playing David Brooks' comments over the weekend that the country has a lot of serious problems and the idea that Palin is setting up a presidential run with this book is a “joke,” Rush inexplicably claimed that Brooks has Rush on his brain, and added a few personal insults to Brooks as well:
LIMBAUGH: This guy has got thin skin. He can't take it. He literally can't take it. He's taking everything she's saying personally, and he is amplifying her meaning and taking it as a personal insult.
Rush calls cap and trade “a vehicle for world government”
Rush then promoted a Rassmussen poll that found that 59 percent of GOP voters say Palin shares their values but did not mention that "[l]ast month, Rasmussen Reports found Palin in third place among possible contenders for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination."
Limbaugh read from an Associated Press article headlined “Obama retreats on climate change,” which proved to be the perfect jumping-off point to criticize progressives for purportedly fearmongering over climate change. Rush claimed that the seas weren't rising and falsely claimed that the “Earth is actually cooling.”
Limbaugh then shifted into high gear, claiming that health care reform and climate change legislation is merely a “vehicle for world government.”
A caller told Rush that she thought Obama was a coward for delaying the decision to send troops to Afghanistan. Rush replied that that might be the case, but thought that the term “deceitful” was more accurate. Responding to the caller's concern about the future of the country, Rush said, “You get up every day and you feel like you go to war with this administration.”
Rush called it “very clever” that Going Rogue doesn't have an index because it would enrage the Washington, D.C., crowd, presumably because it would make it more difficult to criticize.
After a caller expressed her concern that Palin would be victimized by the media if she were the Republicans' only chance in 2012, Rush claimed that “we beat the media all the time.”
Clearly reserving his most incendiary comments for discussions with callers, Rush told a caller that the country is “under attack internally”:
LIMBAUGH: So, the second option, I could've said, “Jason -- or Jordan, we're in trouble. I don't know if we can save the country. I have never seen it under attack internally this way. I have never seen this in my life. I have never -- I never dreamed in my lifetime we would have a president who dislikes this country as much as he does and holds as much of it in contempt as much as he does. I would have never dreamed that we would have had a president who is doing everything he can to destroy the very engine that creates prosperity and freedom in this country, the American private sector and capitalism.”
“I'm a talk show host. Am I not running the party?”
Rush returned to David Brooks' comments on ABC's This Week and complained about the media's reactions to and analysis of his dismissal of Palin. After pointing out that Palin doesn't actually have a talk show, Rush suggested the media were contradicting themselves by calling him (a talk show host) a political figure but degrading Palin by calling her a talk show host.
Again echoing Glenn Beck, Rush brought up a proposal in Britain, in its most nascent stages, for a carbon allowance program. Beck talked about this on Friday, suggesting to his audience that they read “the last part of the Bible” to answer where we're going as a country.
Wrapping up the program, Rush repeated the theory that has saturated conservative spheres as of late, that the Guantánamo criminal court cases was just an excuse to prosecute former Bush administration officials.
Zachary Aronow and Zachary Pleat contributed to this edition of the Limbaugh Wire.
Highlights
LIMBAUGH: Folks, this could very well be Waterloo for Obama. He has stepped in it with this Khalid Shaikh Mohammed matter. All the frenzied writing and protests -- I mean, that's just the beginning. But what's happening here -- this is an in-our-face weakening of our security, which means that if a civilian target is hit again, particularly New York City, Obama is toast. He's done. The American people will tolerate a lot, but not a grotesque mishandling of security based on a contempt for your own country.
[...]
LIMBAUGH: David Brooks, “Looks like it's a fair amount of score-settling.” It -- they're -- folks, I told her this in the interview last week, and I mentioned this to you on Friday when I told you what I told her, that people are gonna focus on the score-settling. And the score-settling is not score-settling per se, it's setting the record straight. And it's by no where anywhere near the majority of the book. It's a few short pages compared to the 415.
[...]
LIMBAUGH: This guy has got thin skin. He can't take it. He literally can't take it. He's taking everything she's saying personally, and he is amplifying her meaning and taking it as a personal insult.
[...]
LIMBAUGH: So, the second option, I could've said, “Jason -- or Jordan, we're in trouble. I don't know if we can save the country. I have never seen it under attack internally this way. I have never seen this in my life. I have never -- I never dreamed in my lifetime we would have a president who dislikes this country as much as he does and holds as much of it in contempt as much as he does. I would have never dreamed that we would have had a president who is doing everything he can to destroy the very engine that creates prosperity and freedom in this country, the American private sector and capitalism.”