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RUSH: Here’s Stewart in Charlotte, North Carolina. Great that you waited, sir. Thank you.

CALLER: Hey, Rush, thank you. Look, I am just blown away at how far into the weeds we have allowed the whole Ukraine call thing to get. I think the administration should not waste any time defending that which does not need to be defended. No matter what Trump said on the phone call, foreign aid is given to countries with the mutual understanding that those funds aren’t gonna be wasted or pilfered by corrupt government officials. I mean, Trump is, the president is the chief law enforcement officer of the United States. It’s his duty to root out corruption when he can.

RUSH: You know, you raise what has always been a fascinating point, and you make a good one in the process. And let me translate here on what Stewart is saying. He thinks it’s a waste of time, as far as Trump and his administration is concerned, it’s a waste of time to accept the premise. It’s a waste of time for Trump to tweet that it’s a witch hunt. It’s a waste of time for Trump to say the phone call was perfect. It’s a waste of time to even respond, is what he’s saying, because responding to it even when you try to refute the premise is still accepting the premise.

And I get that. It, however, happens to be a natural thing to do. You wouldn’t believe — I get more emails than you would believe here, and I cherry-pick and I read them. It is amazing just in terms of the sheer numbers, you know, everybody wants to help and everybody thinks they’ve got an idea and they’re trying to give me a suggestion here, a suggestion there. It’s amazing, something like this happens and emails come in with what Trump ought to say. “This is what Trump ought to say.”

And what they’re doing is really saying what they would like to say if they had a microphone or some other mass media utensil to help them say something. But the natural tendency is to accept the premise and refute it. Because what you think is that the American people who hear it are gonna believe it. So in this scenario the media reports that a whistleblower reports in a phone call that Donald Trump asked Ukraine to dig up and make up dirt on the Bidens!

Okay, so you think the American people believe that, so the natural tendency, the knee-jerk reaction, “No. We’ve gotta refute that. We’ve gotta say that’s not what Trump said.” And then Trump releases the transcript! This is one of the greatest examples of the failure of this method that I can give you. The White House did everything humanly possible to refute this bogus accusation. They released the transcript! In so doing they, in the real world, relegated the whistleblower to irrelevancy.

The whistleblower, part of his whistleblowing, was that he didn’t hear the call, that he was told about it by people who did hear it and who were really, really upset, “Oh, my God. It was so bad what Trump did.” And the whistleblower could not stay quiet. So, like I’ve told you, Trump releasing that transcript totally blew up Schiff’s plan! They didn’t think that would ever happen.

So the whistleblower was stage one, then Schiff and the Democrats would demand the transcript and they think Trump would not release it, then they could say, cover-up, the magic Watergate word. Cover-up, cover-up, Trump’s covering up, Trump’s obstructing justice. That’s what they planned.

Trump confounded them. He released the transcript. The transcript made it plain the whistleblower was much ado about nothing. But where are we? The whistleblower is still front and center. The whistleblower is still all over the news. The whistleblower doesn’t know jack, folks, but the whistleblower is all over the news. Trump directly refuted the premise, and it didn’t matter. It didn’t change the way Schiff or the Democrats or the media are attacking him.

So what does that mean? It means it isn’t about the phone call, it isn’t about the truth, it’s not about the substance of the phone call. It is about whatever Schiff and the Democrats working with the media can create in terms of image or illusion to persuade the American people that Trump was dirty, that Trump was un-American, that Trump broke the law on that phone call.

But wait, the transcript’s been released. Schiff should shut up, Schiff should have been slinking away cowering in the corner. He’s been beaten. No. The transcript may not have been released. It may as well not have been. So was directly refuting the premise, did it work? Well, I think it did because I think it confounded them and it’s made them make other mistakes, but the mistakes haven’t revealed themselves yet because the media’s still covering up every slimeball mistake that Schiff is making.

But still, for everybody who thinks “you can’t let ’em get away with that lie,” the Trump card, release the transcript. Now what have the Democrats done? They brought forth somebody else, another whistleblower, in effect. This Vindman guy. And he was doubly upset. Oh, he was so upset that he’s now claiming that the transcript is a fraud and that he tried to correct it and he’s admitting that he tried to correct it because he’s a great patriot.

The Democrats, my point is, are not dropping their premise even though it’s been nuked. Even though it’s been blown to smithereens. So is that the right way to deal with it? I’m just asking. So what else could have been done?

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