The Melania-Michelle Controversy (What Controversy?)

RUSH: Grab audio sound bite number one. I want to take you back to me on this program May 5. May 5th on this program, I warned everybody of exactly what's happening today. When Hillary Clinton is threatened by a female, then the media and her allies hop to. They get into gear and do whatever they can to take out the opposing female.

RUSH ARCHIVE: My experience with wives of conservatives and wives of Republicans -- and the Democrat Party and the media -- is that usually (there are exceptions, but usually) the media and the Democrats will do everything they can to diminish the wife, to diminish the woman. They will imply that she is brain-dead or that she's a gold digger or that she is stupid and dumb and is just following around as arm candy. Whatever accomplishments any Republican, conservative candidate's wife has will be ignored-- or, even worse, they'll do stories that say:

"She wouldn'ta had anything if it weren't for her husband! Her husband set her up." They will do everything they can to diminish. They do. It's nothing new. Look at... And it's quite the opposite with Democrat wives. In fact, what I just said that they will do to Republican wives is exactly what Hillary Clinton has done. She has attached herself to a man, followed him around everywhere, and tried to take over at various stages. But they don't show them any respect, very little whatsoever. It's all part of the demeaning and destroying campaign of the candidate, is what it's about.

RUSH: And sometimes not just candidates. Any effective conservative person's wife is fair game. And the Drive-By Media, we're seeing a little bit of that now.

RUSH: I'm gonna go to the phones early because I know a lot of you want to weigh in. So we're gonna start in Casselberry, Florida. This is Maria and it's great to have you here.

CALLER: Thank you. Well, I'll just go right to it. What Trump's wife said yesterday was beautiful. I don't care if it was a duplicate of what Michelle said because when it came out of Michelle's mouth it was all a lie. Now, coming out of Trump's wife, it's truth. So what people are saying, if it was mimic or not, I don't care. She's a beautiful woman, and what she said came out beautifully. And that's all I need to say.

RUSH: Well, now, wait. Now, let me ask you a question, because you said something interesting. You said when it came out of Michelle's mouth, you didn't think it was genuine.

CALLER: No. Whatever she said, it's a lie, 'cause nothing that any of them both have said is true. They're liars. Obama and his wife Michelle, they're both liars.

RUSH: Okay, but, look, I'm not trying to foment anything here. I just want to ask you specifically, plagiarism, that's what the media, they're not commenting on credibility, accuracy, honesty. They're saying that Melania stole passages from a speech by Michelle Obama and they're using that to say, "Oh, Michelle must have been great, so good that the only thing the Trump people could do was try to lift it." And now the media effort is to totally distract everybody from everything uplifting that happened last night, get 'em focused on the fact --

CALLER: And I don't think so, because a lot of the speeches that a lot of people, presidents, first wife or whatever, they're normally a lot, very, very similar. They're almost duplicate, you know, I don't care how many first wives, how many presidents, but when you really look they all kind of say the same thing, you know. And all I could say is whatever came out of her mouth last night, Trump's wife, I loved it. I loved it. And what the media is doing, they're gonna continue doing this.

RUSH: Of course. You're exactly right about that. And it's not gonna get better, folks. It isn't going to change. Go through this every year. And there's always a contingent of people who get depressed and down in the dumps because the media doesn't start promoting our side, and they think until that happens, we're never going to win anything, which of course isn't true. It is hard to deal with. It is hard.

I know before anybody learned of this plagiarism -- by the way, I'm not denying that it looks very close, but how is it that only one or two media people happen to remember that Michelle Obama ever said those words? Was your first reaction for example, Snerdley you watch this stuff, pay attention to this stuff 24/7, did you think when Melania uttered those words, "I've heard that before."

You didn't? Did you, Brian? Oh, you're watching the British Open replay. You thought it was great? Yeah, it didn't hit me, either. I thought she was charming. I thought she was great. I've sat next to her at a dinner. I don't know her, either. I know her but I don't know her. I've been around her a couple of times. I would never to be able to lay claim to being a friend or any of that. But I'm telling you she's no nonsense. She is aware and she is highly attuned to circumstances and situations, and she's no wallflower.

My impression, you know, after a conversation with her was that she doesn't suffer fools very gladly, and she's smart and so forth, and knows exactly what she thinks. Not arm candy or any of this sort of thing. Now, it does appear -- we've got the audio here. We could do side-by-side comparisons. I will. It's coming up here in just a second. It does appear she took a few lines from a speech that my butt gave in -- ah, gee. Aw, gee. That Michelle Obama gave, when was it, in 2008. But I think the contrast here is interesting.

I mean, they're out there charging plagiarism and copycat and so forth, but here's Melania Trump who emigrated here from Slovenia. She worked hard. She followed the precepts of the American dream and was rewarded. When she talks about the concept of hard work and the American dream, it had credibility. I believed it. I think that's something she has firsthand experience with. I don't think Obama and Michelle even believe in it. I think they give it lip service, 'cause they know they have to, because it's such a fundamental fixture of American life. But I think they look down on that like they look down on all the other institutions and traditions in this country.

I think they think it's a fool's game. I think this American dream business, in their world, that's a fool's game, only fools fall for that. What it means to them, yeah, you work hard, you work hard for the man, you're working for the boss and you never get paid fairly and you're discriminated against all the time and there's nothing fair about it and all this. I think they have resentment for it, but they can't ever say that. And I conclude this based on what they say about other things and how they talk about this country in general.

I mean, the concept of hard work, Michelle had a no-show job at some hospital in Chicago after her husband became senator, state senator there. Some people do work very hard and long to achieve it, and they only see it realized in the next generation. Some people get by on their special class to advance. Some people advance based on their grievances. Some people advance based on minority status. Some people advance -- let's just put it this way. A lot of people advance in ways that have nothing to do with merit, and the American dream is rooted in merit.

And there's all kinds of people that have connections. That's what the establishment's all about. All kinds of people have connections. All kinds of people have the skids greased for them. But most people don't. Most people don't. If you come from a family of connections and prominence, more power to you, but most people don't and they have to work for it. And, thus, they know what it is.

So it's hard for me to ratchet up feelings that are negative or rooted in anger at Melania. I really do feel sorry that this happened 'cause I think I have enough of an understanding of how events like this get put together that somebody either purposely or inadvertently and maybe unintentionally, it just happened, lifted some -- when you're putting speeches like this together, people do consult previous speeches. It's why I don't listen to anybody else. It's why I just don't.

It's too easy. It's too easy to hear something, "Wow, man, that is really smart. I'm gonna find my own way of saying that." It's a trap, and I've never listened to other people on the radio for this exact reason. I have watched people on television. Boy, I tell you, it's an ongoing, constant awareness. And with so much talk, so much commentary out there, do you realize how difficult it is to be unique?

You know, back in the old days, when there were just three networks, there were three Sunday shows, there were three nightly newscasts, and only two of them did commentary -- well, only two of them did commentary supposedly. The whole newscast was commentary, just nobody knew it. But ABC had a commentator, and CBS had Eric Sevareid. And that was where they supposedly took a break from the reporting of the hard news of the day to learned analysis from senior correspondents who traveled the world and seen all kinds of suffering and were therefore qualified to tell us what we just saw meant.

And then slowly and surely we had programs like the McLaughlin Group come on, and then it became a destination for all these columnists and opinion -- you know what happened? Tell you what happened. The television people have always been resented by the print people. It's true in news; it's true in sports. The reason's money. The TV people have always outearned by a factor of 25, in some cases, what people in print earn. And it just grated on the print people.

The ink-stained wretches, they've always thought of themselves as the real journalists. They're out there beating the path. They're using shoe leather. They're tracking down sources and leads, and the TV guys are getting makeup and hair spray and somebody's writing what's gonna appear on their prompter. And they look good, the tie is in a perfect Shelby knot, and they get out there, and they've got their TV wife or TV husband that's equally made up as well, look like they're going to a cocktail party, and they're reading the news, and they're getting paid 10 times the print guys who created the news. And they just couldn't stand it.

So the TV guys were smart. They started hiring the print guys to come on as commentators. So the print guys were converted to TV guys. They kept their print jobs, became TV commentators, started earning the big bucks, and the same thing happened in sports. That's why you watch an ESPN sports documentary, every expert commentating on whatever the subject is is a writer from the Newark Star-Ledger or the Poughkeepsie Beaten Path or whatever it happens to be. That's how the TV guys made peace with the print guys and got rid of that enemy type existence.

And now everybody's a commentator. And it's just hard to come up with things that other people don't think and don't say. So when you're writing a speech for somebody, you will consult other speeches that have been successful, and, depending on your proclivities, you either lift it and try to get away with it or you'll change it enough and try to adapt it to whoever. I'm not making any excuses here. Please don't misunderstand. I'm just explaining how these kind of things can happen. The point is, Melania Trump is not a thief. And I don't think that was at all what happened here.

RUSH: Okay, now I'm gonna play some of the side-by-side Melania and Michelle Obama sound bites so you can judge for yourself. But I'm gonna tell you something else here. There's another reason why the Drive-Bys are hyping this, or harping on this, and that is so they don't have to give any attention to Rudy's speech, and so they don't have to give any time to Sheriff Clark's speech out of Milwaukee. There were some great moments last night, and the Drive-Bys have their excuse to ignore them with the Melania Trump plagiarism controversy.

And it'd being easy to fall into the trap. Half my sound bite roster contents here are related to plagiarism. Looking at the roster, I see this is what always happens. Something like this, when it happens, the Drive-Bys focus on it. We get in gear and think, "Okay, we gotta defend them. We can't let 'em get away with this." Once again, they set the agenda. We start defending -- and then in the process of defending, we go back and find examples of all the Democrats who plagiarize. We got Biden plagiarizing Neil Kinnock.

I've got a couple of sound bites of Obama plagiarizing people. If I used all these sound bites, I wouldn't get to Rudy Giuliani or Sheriff Clark until halfway through this program -- if I chose to go with them first -- and that's the objective, the Drive-Bys. In fact, NBC pulled out of Rudy's speech. The moment Rudy started talking about Hillary last night, NBC canceled their coverage and went to their roundtable discussion of their commentators telling everybody what they were seeing and what they had seen. And this is done on purpose as well.

So we have highlights from Rudy's speech. We're gonna play those today. We're not gonna let the Drive-Bys trick us into giving up the totality of this program to their agenda, which is the Trump campaign cheats, the Trump campaign is a thief, the Trump campaign stole the best material of the night from the existing first lady. Oh, there's so much wrapped up in this that gives them every reason and excuse in the world to ignore what happened.

If you didn't know better, you would think two things happened in the convention last night. You'd think three. You would think there's such rancor over the rules that the party almost ripped itself apart at four or five o'clock in the afternoon, and the convention almost didn't happen. Then you would learn that one of the mothers of a person killed in Benghazi just very unfairly and low class blamed it on Hillary Clinton, and it was gutter-like and it was horrible, and it was rotten.

And then the third thing you would know is that Trump's wife stole her speech from Michelle Obama. And if you watch ABC, NBC, NBC, New York Times, Washington Post, that's what you think the Republican convention was last night. That's it. You don't know about the sheriff from Milwaukee. You don't know about... Well, you might. You might hear 'em say that Rudy was just unusually animated last night. "He was really, really overboard in his caustic comments on Hillary!" But they won't be using many highlights of Rudy's speech.

Grab a quick call before we start with all the rest of that. This is Ed in San Antonio. Hey, Ed. Great to have you with us. Hello, sir.

CALLER: Hi, Rush. I'll get right to it here. I've been frustrated with the leadership of the RNC for the last 10 or 15 years. It seems like they're always one step behind the topics of the day, and they let the Democrats identify what's going on rather than... Of course, they feed that to the Drive-By Media -- or the media -- too, but they don't ever stand up and get the truth out on a timely basis. I'm frustrated with the fact that McConnell made a deal with the devil so that his reelection wouldn't be opposed by anybody strong, and the fact that Boehner was just a seat polisher. He really didn't take the lead in anything. And that the vote yesterday on the floor wasn't necessarily about walking out on Trump. It was trying to get the rules in place to get the RNC brought up to speed and get the good old boys out and some people who know what they're doing in there.

RUSH: Well, whatever, it bombed out. It didn't work. And it was not nearly the rancor that everybody was trying to make it out to be.

RUSH: As Joe Biden said: Everybody does it. What's the big deal? He did. Well, not to this, but, I mean, he's been accused of plagiarism. Everybody does it. Everybody steals from others. That's my point. It's almost impossible not to. Folks, I could tell you stories. I could tell you stories.

In fact, I will predict to you right now that after I retire (if the day ever happens) all kinds of people gonna pop up and say they wrote everything I ever said and try to sell a book on it. It's just the way things go. Of course, my defense is gonna be, "Well, you had to do a lot of writing out there, because I spoke three hours a day, 15 hours a week for 35 or 40 years. You had to do a lot of writing that I had to see." I have had a caller on this program say something and somebody write me, "That caller stole exactly what I said on television the other night!"

I said, "You gotta be kidding me. You think the caller heard what you said and then called me and repeated it?" "Yes. Damn straight." "As though nobody else said what you said? Nobody else is saying what you said?" It's everywhere out there. Everybody is accusing other people of theft. Everybody says other people are thieving themselves, stealing themselves and so forth. So before we get into the audio sound bite A-B, side-by-side comparison, have you ever stopped to think of something here?

I don't want you to get mad at me on this. Do you ever stop to think that maybe the objective here was to have Melania Trump compared to Michelle Obama? Well, I mean, in the modern era, with the Drive-By Media, Michelle Obama's the queen, right? I mean, Michelle Obama's her approval numbers happen to be in the nineties. Isn't that the case with most first ladies? She doesn't have to do anything. She's just there, first African-American first lady. Who in the world is gonna give her bad approval numbers?

My point, it's not bad company to be in in the political realm if that's how you see things. I don't happen to see things that way, but maybe to the political people in the Trump campaign, you know, it wouldn't be bad. Hey, I'm throwing out possibilities. I don't know anything, folks. I'm like you. I don't know anything here. Breitbart has an interesting take on this, and they say... In fact, this is Joel Pollak. Joel Pollak is a great writer at Breitbart. He says that that the lines that Melania's accused of stealing, Michelle Obama actually lifted from Saul Alinsky in the book Rules for Radicals.

Now, we have a bunch of sound bites. You know, how about when Obama stole the "it's just words" from Deval Patrick, who happened to be the governor and mayor for life of Massachusetts and Boston? I'm joking. He was the mayor for life. He wasn't also governor. "Melania Trump, wife of imminent Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and potential First Lady, faces accusations of plagiarism after several passages in her speech..." By the way, here's another thing: What is so bad about Melania being the focus of the news today?

Forget the plagiarism. It's not a bad thing. Melania was charming as she could be last night. She was a huge plus. I mean, even Cokie Roberts at ABC News said that she came out and it humanized her. That's another thing they do. Conservatives and Republicans, men, they're barbarians. I mean, they're cavemen. You know, they're brutes. They're predators. And their women? Their women can "humanize" them. Cokie Roberts at ABC News has come along and said that Melania humanized Trump last night.

So maybe it ain't so bad that the focus of the convention, as far as people last night, is Melania. But Rudy deserves his accolades as well, which we'll get to here in due course. Now, as Mr. Pollak at Breitbart writes: "Trump's wife joins Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and Joe Biden as accused plagiarists. Even Michelle Obama was accused of plagiarizing part of her own 2008 DNC speech." First off, Obama. Let me see if I have the sound bites here in order. Yeah. Eight and nine. Sound bites eight and nine to start with. This is Obama and Deval Patrick. First up, Deval Patrick, June 6, 2006, Worcester, Massachusetts, addressing the Massachusetts State Democratic Convention. This is fast. It's a 10 seconds.

PATRICK: I am not asking anybody to take a chance on me. I'm asking you to take a chance on your own aspirations.

RUSH: Barack Obama, November 2, 2007, during a campaign speech in South Carolina...

OBAMA: I'm not just asking you to take a chance on me. I'm also asking you to take a chance on your own aspirations.

RUSH: Whoa! I mean, that was word-for-word. You want to hear it again? Deval Patrick... Audio sound bites eight and nine here. Deval Patrick, June 6, 2006, Worcester, Mass.

PATRICK: I am not asking anybody to take a chance on me. I'm asking you to take a chance on your own aspirations.

OBAMA: I'm not just asking you to take a chance on me. I'm also asking you to take a chance on your own aspirations.

RUSH: It took Deval Patrick 10 seconds to say it. Obama got it in in nine. But that is word-for-word. Another one: "As then-Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) surpassed Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary, largely on the strength of his oratory, Clinton said that Obama's record was 'just words.' Obama responded in a speech whose refrain was lifted from then-Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick," again. "The Obama campaign did not even bother to refute the claim. Instead, it circulated examples of lines that it said Clinton herself had borrowed from Obama.

"The left [Drive-By] media defended Obama, saying that he had not committed plagiarism, but merely, at worst, 'poor footnoting.'" And that's how it works, even though he had. And Obama... There's the famous Obama sound bite, "Words! It's just words! It's just words." Deval Patrick. "Hillary Clinton: 'No bank can be too big to fail, no executive too powerful to jail.' After the Obama campaign accused Clinton of stealing lines in 2008 -- a claim supplemented by The New Republic, which accused her of stealing lines from then-Sen. John Edwards (D-NC) -- she ought to have learned her lesson.

"But in 2016, [Hillary] stole lines from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), who responded by telling NBC News' Meet the Press, jokingly: 'We're looking into the copyright issues here.' Clinton was accused of lifting other lines, too -- and Sanders supporters responded on Twitter with the wry hashtag: #StealTheBern." You haven't heard much about this because it's on the Democrat side and they're not into highlighting negatives on the Democrat side when it comes to Hillary. But Hillary Clinton? You want to talk about plagiarism?

How about these out-and-out lies, such as she was named after Sir Edmund Hillary who hadn't even climbed the mountain 'til she was six years old? Nobody knew who he was when she was born. She couldn't possibly have been named after Sir Edmund Hillary. And her career is filled with little lies like that, such as landing in Bosnia somewhere dodging sniper fire. And then of course they had actual pictures of her landing and she got off the plane and was greeted by young children and the scene embracing them.

There were no snipers anywhere, and the plane she was on did not have to "corkscrew land" to avoid terrorist fire. Joe Biden famously lifted words from the British member of Parliament, Neil Kinnock. "Michelle Obama: '…the world as it should be.' In 2008, the [Michelle Obama] was accused by bloggers of lifting lines for her DNC speech from Saul Alinsky. Alinsky wrote, in Rules for Radicals: 'The standards of judgment must be rooted in the whys and wherefores of life as it is lived, the world as it is, not our wished-for fantasy of the world as it should be.' Michelle Obama said: 'And Barack stood up that day, and he spoke words that have stayed with me ever since. He talked about "the world as it is" and "the world as it should be."'"

So who is she actually lifting from, Saul Alinsky or her own husband? It's understandable her husband would have lifted from Alinsky. Now, the Trump campaign is denying the plagiarism. The Trump campaign is denying that they borrowed any lines from Michelle Obama. They said you work hard for what you want in life, your word is your bond. Jason Miller, the senior communications advisor said, "In writing her beautiful speech, Melania's team of writers took notes on her life’s inspirations, and in some instances included fragments that reflected her own thinking. Melania’s immigrant experience and love for America shone through in her speech, which made it such a success.”

Okay. So let's start. Here is the Michelle and Melania comparison. The first passage that's similar to Michelle is all contained here in cut two. So cut two is contained, cut three. Here we go.

MELANIA: From a young age, my parents impressed on me the values that you work hard for what you want in life, that your word is your bond, and you do what you say and keep your promise, that you treat people with respect.

MICHELLE: Barack and I were raised with so many of the same values, like you work hard for what you want in life, that your word is your bond, that you do what you say you're gonna do, that you treat people with dignity and respect.

MELANIA: Because we want our children in this nation to know that the only limit to your achievements is the strength of your dreams and your willingness to work for them.

MICHELLE: Because we want our children and all children in this nation to know that the only limit to the height of your achievements is the reach of your dreams and your willingness to work hard for them.

RUSH: And they can obsess all they want about those two similar paragraphs, but see if you can imagine Michelle Obama saying this.

MELANIA: I arrived in New York City 20 years ago, and I saw both the joys and hardships of daily life. On July 28th, 2006, I was very proud to become citizen of the United States. (cheers) The greatest privilege on planet Earth.

RUSH: Well, now, can you imagine any of that coming out of the mouth of any Democrat today? Some of them probably you can, but clearly that wasn't lifted. The majority of the speech wasn't lifted. It was her own words. But there you have the side-by-side comparison, and so this has now given rise to all the other examples of other politicians committing plagiarism and stealing and so forth. And now people are coming forward and saying it's impossible not to. So many words have been spoken. So many speeches have been given. So many things have been said, it's not possible to be original anymore, particularly about tried-and-true philosophy.

How many ways are there to say work hard, keep your promises, treat people fairly, how many different ways are there to say that? So it comes down to: Do you believe people when they say these things? That's really what this adds up to, to me. Do you believe Melania Trump when you heard her speak last night? Or did you think that it was just a collection of words written by others that she had rehearsed because somebody figured it would sound good? That's the key in all of this, is the credibility of whoever it is speaking.

Do you believe them? Do you think they are telling you what they really think and what they really believe? And when you apply that test, I don't think there's any problem here at all.

The real story is that this is the worst thing the media could say about the whole first day of the convention. And it’s soooooooo lame. The speeches were great, diverse in tone and style and perfectly timed. It’s the first time I’ve seen average citizens given the podium at a national convention. . .talk about genius.

In 2008, the aspiring First Lady, Michelle Obama, used these lines for her DNC speech. Saul Alinsky wrote, in Rules for Radicals (emphasis added): “The standards of judgment must be rooted in the whys and wherefores of life as it is lived, the world as it is, not our wished-for fantasy of the world as it should be.”

Michelle Obama said in her speech: “And Barack stood up that day, and he spoke words that have stayed with me ever since. He talked about ‘the world as it is‘ and ‘the world as it should be.’” (Perhaps Mr. Obama who left out the attribution.)

I don’t care. Maybe she should have added- as others have said before me- but there is hardly a phrase in the English language that hasn’t been repeated a million times. None other than the DEIFIED J.F.K. STOLE his famous ‘ask not what your country can do for you...” quote! Mrs. Trumps speech writer should have been more creative;even now they could spin it as a gracious agreement on basic morals, but- what difference does it make...right?

It was all to take away from the REAL substance of the talks—about the killer and liar “Hillary” and the killing actions of the insane evil immigration policies and the cop-hate-baiter-in-chief.

All MSM does is control the Narrative (what people talk about so they can elicit emotions (evil Melania, good, perfect Michael).

As Ray Bradbury stated, all MSM is to control your emotions and keep you away (addicted/occupied) from the Truth.

Yes! And here is how you effectively counter, this modus operandi:

Let me suggest how to turn the silly efforts to smear Melania into a real plus for the campaign--particularly with women.

The speech, as I recall, took about 20 minutes. Buy half hour program times--some when the audience will be mostly female, some at times when the audience will be mostly men, and have Melania take five or six minutes to describe the controversy, pointing out how it would be virtually impossible for anyone to invent a completely original way to communicate the family history, captured in the over-vetted sentences. Then ask the viewers to decide what they think, before playing the whole speech.

Confront the silliness head on, and let her very engaging, very appealing personality, both in the proposed introduction and in the actual speech, work its dynamic potential.

This would both allow her to project her enthusiasm for the candidate, while making those carping about "plagiarism" look stupid. If the powers that be in the campaign doubt my take? Let them try the approach with a privately organized focus group, and see for themselves.

I have enough experience in the use of spontaneous TV, to be firmly convinced that this would be a very dynamic way to exploit the idiocy of those supporting Mrs. Clinton.

This can be a "little dog Checkers" opportunity. And Mrs. Trump has the sincerity, warmth & class, to carry the refutation out to perfection.

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