Friday on his nationally syndicated radio show, conservative talker Rush Limbaugh sounded off on the release of the House Intelligence Committee FISA memo and the reactions from Democrats and the media.

Limbaugh said the much-anticipated memo was “more damning” than he expected and he said the reaction to that memo was symptomatic of the left’s attitude about the role of government in daily life.

Partial transcript as follows (courtesy of RushLimbaugh.com):

Folks, it is worse. It is worse than what I thought it was going to be. If anything, the contents of this memo were underplayed. They have not been overplayed. It is astounding. Now that I know what’s in this memo, you know what’s even more curious to me is that the FBI and the DOJ and the swamp didn’t make a greater effort to suppress this. I’ve been studying CNN today. CNN is the place to go to find out how the deep state, how the establishment is going to counter this.

Their only headline has been “Trump Allows [its] Release in Defiance of FBI and Justice Officials.” So CNN figures the best way to battle this is to try to position Trump as somebody refusing to listen to the professionals and the great patriots of the FBI and the Department of Justice. That’s all they’ve got. I wonder if these people… You know, people inside the Beltway, people in the establishment, don’t really have a connection outside.

They don’t really have an understanding, particularly the people who voted for Trump. But they don’t have an understanding of a large swath of the American public, primarily because they don’t want to. There’s generally a contempt, from the ruling class down — and it’s illustrated by Pelosi. Look at Pelosi talking about the tax cut. “It’s just crumbs.” She doesn’t even know that a $2,500 and $1,000 bonus is real money to a lot of people. To her, it may be crumbs, but to sit there and act the way they did during the State of the Union speech?

Petulant. Childish. All to satisfy the lunatic fringe of their base! And then to try to blow up the burgeoning, roaring economy by saying it’s peanuts and chump change, these people are not in touch with the vast majority of people in this country that make this country work. And I think that explains why a more serious effort to prevent this release was not undertaken. If these people have any idea how this is gonna be seen, perceived, how this is gonna register, there’s no way they would have wanted this out.

I actually think that some of these people who have been making a big show of not wanting it out really have wanted this memo out because they think that it’s gonna look bad on Trump. They think they can make Devin Nunes look like a lunatic idiot. They are totally misreading this! And it happens to people who are in high positions of power who believe that they’re untouchable, who then hold in contempt people who they think are beneath them in the food chain, so to speak. So just to review. This is more damning than I expected it to be.

I thought that since we’ve discussed it so much and pretty much informed you everything in it, I didn’t think I could be surprised. But I have been. The Steele dossier formed the essential part of the initial FISA warrant application and three subsequent renewals. All of these were warrants to spy on Carter Page, not Donald Trump. But to spy on Page means to spy where he is. If he’s in Trump Tower, you surveil wherever he goes. Again, the dossier is the basis of everything, and none of it’s been corroborated. None of it’s real.

It’s bought-and-paid-for opposition research by Hillary Clinton and her campaign. It’s no different than that garbage stuff that was put out about Mitt Romney not caring about animals because he put the family dog on the top of the station wagon during family vacations. It’s no different than an ad that was run claiming Romney didn’t care about people because the wife of one of his employees died from cancer and Romney didn’t care. It’s no different than any of that sick opposition research.

It’s no different than Harry Reid standing up and saying, “Friends of mine have told me that Romney hasn’t paid taxes in 10 years.” This is no different! It’s just as made up. It’s just as absent fact. It’s nothing but pure liberal Democrat opposition research politics that was dressed up in its presentation and in its creation as legitimate intelligence. I cannot emphasize enough that nothing in this dossier has been corroborated or confirmed — and I know the me saying so; it’s James Comey. Andrew McCabe, deputy director of the FBI, recently resigned, retired, confirmed that no FISA warrant would have been sought without the dossier.