RUSH: Ladies and gentlemen, I just received a flash e-mail from a very close friend of mine who happens to be an attorney, and the subject line is ‘You are lying about our president, and if you keep this up, they’ll keep Club Gitmo open just for you,’ and I had to stop and think about that because you know there are all kinds of loopholes in this executive order. The devil’s in the details, and I said on Hannity on the Wednesday night edition of the interview, that I don’t believe they’re going to close it at all until there is profound victory they can claim. I think this one year thing is just a political statement. It’s a political executive order. It’s not about security. You wait and see. But now this lawyer says this. He’s a good friend of mine. He’s a leftist lawyer, by the way.
He says, ‘You are lying about our president. And if you keep it up — believe me, I know these people — they will keep Guantanamo Bay open if they have to just for you. Just because the Obama administration ordered the killing of ten Pakistanis, Rush, does not mean that their families cannot have a trial. You are going to have to get with it, Rush. You’re from the stale ideas of the past, where we have to make a false choice between our values and our security. There is nothing that says just because a bunch of jihadists are dead that their families cannot have lawyers appointed, that we cannot interrogate their families with dignity, and that the families of the victims here could receive a trial and perhaps win a verdict on the guilt of the United States in this attack. Get with it! When is white finally going to be embrace what is right?’ is how, my friend, the leftist lawyer concludes — and he’s serious, about some of this.
Many people are e-mailing me, some from the ignorant brigade. ‘What do you mean, you want our president to fail?’ And, of course, others are e-mailing me saying, ‘I can’t understand Rush, how you are being purposely misquoted and purposely taken out of context, even when, as CNN did, they play the whole context of what you said I still don’t get it.’ I want to write ’em all back. I don’t have time to write ’em all back. This is Michael J. Fox redux, and these incidents happen with me frequently. Now, what it adds up to… I see the news stories. Like Mark Halperin was on CNN, I guess it was; I don’t know, last night or the night before. It might have been last night. Yeah, I think it was last night. Campbell Brown and her show, No Bull, No Bias (snickers) did a segment on just how outrageous this is. Maybe I’ve gone over the line now, hoping that the president fails.
Halperin said, ‘You know, this is really so off-tune with what everybody in the media is saying and everybody in the Republican Party is saying,’ as though, ‘How could somebody not get it?’ Mark Halperin… My problem here is that I’m off the reservation occupied by the mainstream media. ‘How in the world can he be this tone deaf?’ You know, the news stories featuring shocked people at my healthy skepticism prove my entire premise about the State of the Union of American journalism as well. The Drive-Bys are reporting on my failure to drink the Kool-Aid when it’s their job to do exactly what I am doing. It is their job to be skeptical. I made a mistake, by the way, when I said that a cameraman stepped in and saved Obama and said, ‘Mr. President, you want to do that again?’ I am told that what the cameraman did was, ‘I want to say that again: ‘Mr. President!” as though the reporter was just in heaven, couldn’t believe that he was actually being able to address Obama as ‘Mr. President’ and wanted to do it again, totally in the tank.
So what’s happening here is that the once respectful deans of the Drive-By Media are criticizing me for doing their job and then pretending somehow that I am the problem as the Last Man Standing.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Last night also on Larry King Alive, John McCain, Larry King said, ‘Rush Limbaugh said, I believe yesterday about this administration, ‘I hope he fails.’ What do you make of that, Senator?’
MCCAIN: I can’t really analyze Mr. Limbaugh’s remarks particularly since I don’t know the context. I think most Americans want this president and this country to get out of this ditch we’re in. If Mr. Limbaugh’s remarks were in the context that —
KING: I think he was saying —
MCCAIN: He doesn’t agree with his philosophy, I understand that.
KING: He was saying he doesn’t want government to solve things. He wants private industry, although as someone said, private industry is the thing that got them into trouble in the first place.
MCCAIN: Well, what I hope is that we can have the kind of economic recovery that will restore business, free enterprise, et cetera.
RUSH: Then oppose the stimulus bill. Oppose the stimulus bill. Larry King epitomizes the degree of ignorance there is in the so-called elite classes of the media. Private industry got us into this mess? Have you ever heard of Barney Frank and do you know what he did, Larry? Have you ever heard of Chris Dodd? Do you know what he did? Have you ever heard of Bill Clinton and the Community Redevelopment Act? Do you know what it did? Ever heard of ACORN? It’s stunning. I can understand people who line up at Blockbuster 35 deep on a Friday night when it’s two below being ignorant about things, but it’s one of the most stunning realizations to understand just how ignorant — not stupid — how uninformed some of the elite media people are in this country. You ought to look at the New York Times corrections these days. The mistakes that they make are just profound. The reporters don’t have a basic education. There was one instance some reporter mistakenly characterized some institution as being 64 square miles when it was eight square miles, just basic ignorant things that they’re having to correct here. Private industry. The mainstream media does what it does for everybody else in the mainstream media so the templates are set and always followed.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Jim VandeHei (I’m not sure how he pronounces it) was on MSNBC yesterday talking about me wanting the Obama administration to fail. I find this fascinating. Did we not go through five years of the Democrat Party trying to destroy this country? They want us to lose in Iraq. They try to talk people into a recession. They wanted people to hate the US military. Here I am. I’m saying, ‘I don’t want his policies to succeed,’ and all of a sudden I’m the Indian off the reservation!
VANDEHEI: Well… (laughing) I’m kind of laughing because I see that everybody seems obsessed with what Rush Limbaugh said. He’s a conservative. He doesn’t like Democrats. He has a talk radio show and his job is to be combative and he’s saying, ‘You know what? I don’t like Big Government.’ He never has. I think that you will see frustration build among the rank-and-file conservatives who feel like so much money is getting spent and so little opposition is coming from Republican lawmakers in Washington.
RUSH: Jim VandeHei, Drive-By Media specialist at the Politico.com. He’s one of the founders.