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From Rush -

Democrats Shopped Foley E-Mails for Months, Grandiose Victory Vision Falling Apart
October 11, 2006

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: The Washington Post has a story today which some people read and take different things from. I read it, and it makes it clear that a bunch of Democrats knew of these Foley e-mails and instant messages for months, which we've all known, but this is the first time it's been documented in the Drive-By Media. They're out there saying, "How can we do this to children? How could this happen to children? How could the Republicans sit on this while the children were at risk?" and so we find the Democrats were the ones that were actually sitting on it. I have a companion story that goes along with this regarding an attack on a gay man by a bunch of kids 16 to 20. They lured him for sex via the Internet, and when he shows up they beat him to death, or not to death, but they beat him to a pulp, ages 16 to 20.

The only reason I'm going to mention the story is because it confirms what I have said on previous broadcasts about the fact that the notion that all these pages are little Mary Poppinses out there, just a bunch of innocent clean and pure-as-the-wind-driven-snow little kids is not necessarily a correct portrayal of your average teenager today. (interruption) Who trained them? Who trained who to do what? Who trained the kids -- what are you talking about? (interruption) Who trained kids to -- you mean -- Oh. You're bouncing off the story out of Texas yesterday that we have to spend $95,000 to teach kids down there how to fight back. Well, that's somebody with a gun. I mean, when you're sitting in the schoolroom and the school gets attacked, taken over by a guy with a gun, we're having to teach them to protect themselves in that scenario by throwing books and scissors and paper airplanes at the assailant. That's a good question. All of this will be explored as the program unfolds before your very eyes and ears today.

There's another bogus report from the same group that tried the same thing, a couple of days before the '04 presidential race. I think it's the group called Lancet, I'm not sure. But two days before the 2004 US presidential elections, this group published an estimate of Iraq's civilian deaths at 100,000. Today, they are out with a report, 685 or 635, I forget which, 600-plus thousand civilian deaths in Iraq that would not have occurred had we not gone there. It is the most bogus -- when you hear the -- what would you call it, the statistical analysis and rationale for this, it is a pure political document. It is pathetic. It is obvious that the Democrats -- you know what I think? I think the Foley thing is not working for them. Did you hear what Chris Shays did? I have a story here from the Hartford Courant, today. "Shays hits hard in page scandal, invokes Chappaquiddick in rebuking his opponent. Polls show issue not helping Democrats." Let me give you the details.

"When the congressional page scandal broke last month, Democrats across the country saw a chance to lambaste Republican leadership - including Diane Farrell, who called on House Speaker Dennis Hastert to step down. But when Sen. Edward M. Kennedy came to Connecticut last week to help her campaign, Rep. Christopher Shays hit back. 'I know the speaker didn't go over a bridge and leave a young person in the water, and then have a press conference the next day,' said Shays, R-4th District, referring to the 1969 incident in which the Massachusetts Democrat drove a car that plunged into the water and a young campaign worker died. 'Dennis Hastert didn't kill anybody,' he added.

Shays' words were emblematic of the increasing bitterness over the fallout from the conduct of former Florida Rep. Mark Foley, a scandal that may not be helping Democrats as much as they had hoped. The GOP had seemed to be in deep political trouble a week ago, when many Democrats were stridently insisting that Hastert quit - and pressing their Republican opponents to make the same demand. But so far, the Democrats' idea to make Hastert the villain has not worked. An ABC News/Washington Post survey taken Oct. 5 to 8 found that three of every four respondents did not think Democrats would have handled the Foley matter any better, and roughly two in three thought Democrats were pursuing the matter for political gain, not to raise legitimate concerns. 'The Foley scandal has not earned the Republican leadership any goodwill, but neither does it look like a point of differentiation for the Democrats,' poll director Gary Langer said... Job approval of Republican leaders, 33 percent before Foley quit, went up 1 percentage point afterward."

I told you when they try to make the case that Hastert is the villain here, do a name recognition survey of people across the country and ask them, how many people have heard of Denny Hastert, and you're going to get a hugely large number of people that never heard of him. To try to make him the villain in this, and now we're learning that the Democrats had knowledge of the Foley affairs and sat on it. Let me give you some excerpts from the Washington Post story today, because the Washington Post acknowledges the Democrats' role in Foleygate. "But there are indications that Democrats spent months circulating five less insidious Foley e-mails to news organizations before they were finally published by ABC News late last month, which prompted the leaking of the more salacious instant messages. Harpers Magazine said yesterday that it obtained the five e-mails from a Democratic Party operative, albeit in May, long before the election season." And they sat on them. So did the St. Petersburg Times and so did the Miami Herald. I'm not sure if the Palm Beach Post knew of it, but I think they've been thrown in the list, I'm not actually sure. Back to the Post.

"But new information suggests that the story of the release of Foley's communications with male ex-pages is more complicated than either side asserts. The most sexually explicit material -- the instant messages that forced Foley's abrupt resignation on Sept. 29 and turned his actions into a full-fledged scandal -- appears to be disconnected from politics. The two former pages who revealed the correspondence to ABC News and The Washington Post, however, may never have come forward had Democratic operatives not divulged the five more benign e-mails that Foley had sent to a Louisiana boy."

Alright, what we have here, unmistakably, more confirmation of what I have known all along, and it comes from the Washington Post here, that Democrat operatives were the source of the e-mails. In fact, don't forget what what's his name, Jordan Edmund, when it was discovered that he was the source of the salacious instant messages, couple of his friends told Matt Drudge's website that, yeah, well, we were doing this as a prank, and we were creating these things, and we were baiting Foley and were printing them out, were passing them around, and they got into the hands of Democrat operatives.

We keep hearing that phrase, Democrat operatives. So what we know is Democrat operatives were the source, or an operative, I don't know one or more of the e-mails. We know that the story was shopped from November '05 to August of '06. We even had Brian Ross admitting that he saw the e-mails, everybody who saw them, everybody in the mainstream media who saw them, there's nothing here, no big deal, they were more interested in trying to destroy the Bush administration over the Katrina anniversary and the fifth anniversary of 9/11. And it was after these e-mails came out that then some pages supposedly, hmm, I got some better than this, and it started to trickle out.

But the bottom line here is the Democrats have known about it all along. The Democrats held it, the Democrats intended it to sort of confirm the story we got yesterday from The Prowler and the American Spectator, that they were holding all of this for ten days away from the election but they had to go with it early because their fortunes were plummeting, gas prices were going down, the president's approval numbers were coming up, the economy was looking great, a number of circumstances -- The Path to 9/11, the Clinton administration was melting down over a bunch of things. So they had to go with it, and to keep it alive they had to go beyond Foley because Foley quit so he was no longer the story so they had to focus on Hastert, and that isn't working. Now, when we come back from the break, the transition from this to what I'm going to play for you next is unbelievable. Ellen Tauscher on C-SPAN today, would you believe me if I were to tell you that the Democrats today have set out across the media to make sure that everybody knows they are tough on defense and that they are for a missile shield, now that North Korea has claimed to have gone nuclear, the Democrats all of a sudden want to portray themselves as hawks and strong on defense and always having been in support of a missile defense, which is caca. And there's a headline here in the Washington Times, "Democrats veer to the right in fight for House."

They have to lie to win the heartland. It's a story about Heath Heath Shuler, the former Washington Redskins quarterback. He's a Democrat running for a House seat in North Carolina declaring himself a pro-life member of the pro-gun NRA and accusing his opponent, Congressman Charles Taylor, of supporting amnesty for illegal aliens. So you've got Heath Shuler, a Democrat, trying to outflank a Republican on the right. Now, wait 'til the Democrat base hears about this. Wait 'til the kook fringe base on the blogs of theirs hear about all of this. They're going to be in a tizzy. Because the Democrats, to them will be abandoning their principles. And Ned Lament actually was on with Chris Matthews and shocked Matthews, couldn't believe it when Lament said he might favor an attack on Iran, not Iraq, an talk on Iran. So the sense I get here is that just from Monday and last Friday to today, once again, the grandiose visions of the Democrats to take it all back are crumbling in their very hands.

The keys to the House have become dust, and the dust is sifting through their fingers. They can't hold it tight enough. It's amazing. They have opened the door, and they've smacked it into their face, bloodied their nose yet again, because, ladies and gentlemen, their motives are now seen for what they are. They're not trying to protect kids. They are not anything other than political. Nobody in this country hates Denny Hastert. I've maintained for a long time that if you're going to portray somebody as a creep, they better look like one, and they better have some history you can point to that shows them as a creep. They try to make Denny Hastert an evil devil, and he's not. He's the most nondescript figure, other than his size, patrolling Washington. Nobody ever sees the guy! Despite his stature. So they're out there trying to portray this guy as the epitome of evil, a guy who didn't care if kids were abused, or set upon by a predator. And it doesn't work because even when you see Denny Hastert for the first time, it just doesn't work. Just doesn't connect. All these evil, rotten things that they're trying to say about him don't stick 'cause it's not true, and it's obviously not true.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

I want to go back before we get to the phones to this Foley business and this Washington Post story today because as I read the Washington Post story you come to the conclusion that there were at least two Democrat operatives who were shopping the e-mails, not the instant messages, the e-mails, and one of the sources for this is Harpers magazine in a story by Ken Silverstein. Now, Silverstein said that his source was a Democratic operative, the same source that had provided the e-mail exchanges to the St. Petersburg Times in November of 2005. Now, this is October 2006, 11 months ago. All these things were being shopped around, folks, 11 months ago. Both the magazine and the paper declined to publish a story, but the source was not working in concert with the national Democrat Party, Silverstein added.

This person was genuinely disgusted by Foley's behavior, amazed that other publications had declined to publish stories about the e-mails, and concerned that Foley might still be seeking contact with the pages. But a second source emerged, still reading here from the Washington Post, second source emerged however, just last month peddling the e-mails to several other publications, including the Washington Post. And Brian Ross of ABC News has stressed that his initial source was a Republican. The way I'm reading this story, you come up with two Democrat operatives who are out there, for whatever reasons they want to state, who knew of the story. I find it a little interesting that the Silverstein here at Harpers says, well, yeah, it wasn't working in tandem with the national Democrat Party, he was just really upset that Foley might still be doing this stuff. He was concerned about the children. Really?

Well, why shop it to the media? If you had this stuff for a year almost now, you sat on it, why shop it to the media? And then, when the media doesn't run with it, you just forget it? If you're really concerned about the churrin, the media doesn't do what you want, why don't you go to Hastert then? Why don't you confront Foley if you're really concerned about this? I mean, this stuff is starting to blow up in their faces and backfire, and it's something that was almost foreseeable the way they were playing it. Anyway, let me just give you the timeline here in this story, that Silverstein writes in Harpers, because they say they were given Foley's e-mails by Democratic operative months ago. Ultimately they, the magazine, along with these Florida newspapers, decided not to run a story about them. The Drive-By Media, however, now is drilling the Republican leadership for not doing anything about Foley, when many of them decided not to expose him, either?

I mean, that's the best way to sum this up. We had a bunch of Democrat operatives out there claiming to know about this, trying to stop it with their friends, the media, getting no support, now all of a sudden, for all this time, Democrats have been denying they had anything to do, "First I've heard of it, never seen it, nope, don't know anything about it, first I heard of it was in the paper," blah, blah, blah. Now they dump on Hastert for not doing anything about it, when Democrats have known for almost a year.