Oh you rascal!
Rush Limbaugh today announced that he might launch Operation Chaos 2. For those of you who have forgotten, the original Operation Chaos was launched by Rush during the 2008 primary season in order to help Hillary Clinton with the goal of prolonging the Democrat primary season. Wikipedia describes how the original Operation Chaos worked:
In late February 2008, Limbaugh announced "Operation Chaos," a political call to action with the initial plan to have voters of the Republican Party temporarily cross over to vote in the Democratic primary and vote for Hillary Clinton, who at the time was in the midst of losing eleven straight primary contests to Barack Obama. Limbaugh has also cited the open primary process in the early primary states of New Hampshire and South Carolina, which allowed independent voters to cross over into the Republican primaries to choose John McCain over more conservative candidates (such as Fred Thompson), as an inspiration.
At the point in which Limbaugh announced his gambit, Obama had seemed on the verge of clinching the Democratic nomination. However, Clinton subsequently won the Ohio primary and the Texas primary (while losing the Texas caucus and the overall delegate split) with large pluralities from rural counties; thus reemerging as a competitive opponent in the race.
Here is today's transcript of the possible launch by Limbaugh of Operation Chaos 2. The main difference is instead of helping Hillary as in the original, this time the purpose will be to boost Bernie Sanders:
Hey, look at this, folks. I'm not predicting it, but you never know. It could well be that we will have another installment of Operation Chaos before the Democrat primaries are all said and done. From a blog site called First Read -- and I don't know if this is part of Hotline or not. It printed out, but there is no source on this, although I'm familiar with First Read. It could be Politico. It could be TheHill.com with one of their, "Here's what's going on today," little summaries of the news.
But the story is this: "Get ready for a longer-than-expected Democrat race." Here it is. It's from Meet the Press. It's the NBC. Yeah. It's the daily "Here's what's happening summary from us," by the NBC political unit. "Get ready for a longer-than-expected Democrat race. On Friday afternoon, the Clinton campaign made two arguments to First Read why Bernie Sanders isn't Barack Obama 2.0," meaning why he's not a continuation of the Obama administration, why he's not automatic winner.
...So if Hillary and the Democrats are preparing for an elongated primary, well, it would be in the interests of this program if the Republicans already have theirs, for that Democrat fight to go on and on and on beyond March and April. And if we can figure out a way of doing that, here comes Operation Chaos 2. So we'll keep a sharp eye on that. In the meantime, back to the audio sound bites just to continue this with all of these people reacting to me.
Keep in mind that for Operation Chaos 2 to work, a Republican candidate will need to be the obvious winner of the primary season early on so that voters can cross party lines, where permitted, in order to cast their votes for Bernie. At the very least this could help make the Democrat primaries more fun to watch as they stretch on and on and.....
