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RUSH: Aw, darn it! Obama is trying so hard. The regime is trying so hard. They never worked harder trying to overcome all of the messes left by George W. Bush, and here we are. We’re on the verge of a recovery!

The unemployment situation (they keep telling us) is improving. Even though we added people to the unemployment rolls yesterday — that was called “stability” by the AP — we’re still at 375,000 unemployment applications every week. But we’re on the verge — we’re on the verge! — of overcoming the big mess left by George W. Bush. And (oh, no, damn it) now we got a flu outbreak, and the flu outbreak threatens to slow the economy back down.

It’s simply the media setting the table and offering up another reason or excuse that exempts Obama. And then shortly after sharing that story with you from CNBC, I got a couple here. One’s from CNN; another one is from The Daily Beast. “Flu Outbreak Spreads Across US as Media Drops the Ball.” The point of this story is that a major flu outbreak has popped up and it is spreading, and it is deadly, and it is making all kinds of people sick, and the media is ignoring it because they’re so focused on guns.

One of the stories makes the point that the flu will kill many more people than guns will. In fact, there are a lot of things every year that kill more people than guns do. The attention being paid to gun control, of course, is way out of proportion. There’s a reason why, and that is the left is hell-bent on getting rid of guns. This came up yesterday, and a number of people in the media pooh-poohed my notion that when Biden gets together with Obama and cabinet members and they start talking about the use of executive orders…

I asked, “What in the world could they be talking about?” Executive orders? You got the Second Amendment, and they’re talking about executive orders? Who are they? Avowed Democrats and leftists. What do they believe in? Getting rid of guns. Obama has already used executive orders to trump the Constitution two or three times, maybe more. It’s a natural thing — the logic is progressional — to conclude that if they could, if they think they can, they’ll use executive orders to somehow trump gun rights.

That’s the sensible way to look at these people, and the media took me to task because I asked a rhetorical question, or I made an ironic observation. As a way of illustrating my point, I said, “Who knew executive orders trumped the Constitution?” And again, my mistake is always overestimating the raw intelligence and education and knowledge of people on the left, including and particularly the media.

They don’t get subtle, ironic ways of making a point. They don’t get sarcasm. They don’t get parody. It’s because they don’t have a sense of humor, and they are so rock-rib loaded into their cocoon and their worldview that anything outside it just doesn’t compute. And their worldview is: “Guns are bad! Guns equal death! Guns equal too much freedom and power for people, therefore we’ve gotta get rid of them,” and that’s it. There is nothing else.

Any logic such as, “Well, if you’re really concerned about saving lives, ban the wheel.”

“Well, what do you mean?”

“Well, the car kills more people than guns.”

“That doesn’t matter. When’s the last time somebody drove a car into a school?”

“No, wait a minute. You said you’re concerned about saving lives.”

“That’s right. We are.”

“Well, then there are a lot of things to get rid of before guns.”

That kind of thinking doesn’t permeate. They don’t even consider it. It doesn’t make a dent. You can’t make logical debate points with these people. It’s not possible. They’re not capable. They’re so locked into what they believe that nothing permeates. So right now, because of Newtown, they are more focused than ever in getting rid of guns, doing something to get rid of guns, doing something to get rid of some kinds of guns, or some kinds of ammo.


They are all devoted to it because there’s groupthink. They are all devoted to it with the same amount of energy — and if you listen, it’s the only thing happening in the country is kids dying because of guns. Now, to illustrate the point even further: Point out to them (as we’ve done countless times in this program), “Forget Newtown; look at Chicago,” and then you point out what’s killing people in Chicago. Handguns.

Over 550 gun deaths in Chicago, a town run by Democrats for decades. It’s currently run by Rahm Emanuel. What did Rahm Emanuel do in regard to the gun violence in Chicago? He held a press conference and he told the gangbangers to keep killing people in the neighborhood, but to keep it away from schools and stop going out and targeting their kids. The mayor of Chicago said, “We’re gonna be watching you. Leave our kids alone,” meaning go kill your kids or go kill somebody else’s kids, but leave ours alone!

You keep it in your neighborhood. I reported this, and I’m literally dumbfounded. But nobody, the last I looked, was making a big push to get rid of handguns in Chicago. No, it’s just automatic weapons now, because of what happened in Newtown, Connecticut. And the reason was Newtown was a big story, plenty of pictures, plenty of emotion, and a massive number of deaths on one day. In Chicago, it’s two deaths one day, eight deaths the next. It barely gets reported. Therefore, it’s not a media story. But it is. Over 500 people, largely children, are killed with handguns in Chicago, not Illinois, in Chicago every year. And you can’t get the media interested in it because it will not advance the cause.

Another reason, folks, in Chicago and other places, the deaths and the gun violence is occurring in the minority community, and nobody’s gonna criticize the minority community. To criticize the minority community is racist, it’s bigoted, it’s prejudiced. So you gotta leave that alone. If a TV network, Oxygen, wants to do a TV show about a rapper, Shawty Lo, called All My Babies’ Mamas, we’ve gotta let it happen. We’ve gotta learn that experience. We have to learn that life. We gotta learn why that happened. We’ve gotta learn and adjust ourselves to it. There are reasons for it. It’s America’s fault. We must find out why, blah, blah, blah, blah.

So you don’t condemn anything that happens within minority populations or minority neighborhood. Even the Democrats don’t. You just don’t go there. But Newtown, that was as middle class as you can get, and that was with an assault weapon. It’s made to order, and so the media won’t let go of it.

Now, we got a couple stories, while they’re focusing on that, we got this big flu epidemic that’s kicking up up there, and they’re not even paying any attention to it, and some people are upset about that. The reason they’re upset is the media’s gonna have to do the warning. They’re gonna have to warn people, “Get the flu shot.” See, people are not smart enough on their own to take steps to avoid getting the flu. This is another thing you have to realize. In our country today, the people that run it and the people in the media have a contemptible view of average people. You’re incompetent. You’re incapable of running your own life. That’s why they have to.

You’re not innately able to do the right thing. You’re not innately decent people. And, by the way, this is a crucial point, if I might make it again. Why does the government want to control what you eat? Why does the government want to control what you drink and how much? Because they don’t think you’ve got the smarts. They don’t think, left to yourself, that you’ll do the right thing, as they define right, correct. They don’t think you will. You have to be controlled. People that have this desire for power, this desire to control as many details of the way people live as possible, are people who have no faith in other people, who have contempt for other people, who look down their noses at other people.

Meanwhile, the left gets away with being portrayed as compassionate, tolerant, understanding, open-minded. They are the exact opposite. They’re anything but. You’re not capable of doing it on your own. You are not inherently decent. You are inherently evil, in fact. Or you are innately prone to doing bad things. And society needs to be protected from people like you and you need to be protected from yourself. This is how they think. And it is thinking this way that allows them to pat themselves on the back and applaud themselves for having great compassion, a lot of caring, being very concerned. But I’m dead serious. It is hideous.

It’s just like when it snows. You have an eight-foot snowfall, you gotta have media people out there telling you it’s snowing, and they’re gonna tell you how dangerous it is to drive in the snow. They’re gonna tell you to stay home. Why? Because they don’t think you have the smarts to know how to deal with snow. You don’t have the smarts to know how to deal with a thunderstorm. You don’t have the smarts to know how to deal with anything. And so it follows that with a major flu outbreak people think the media better get in gear and start warning people, otherwise people aren’t gonna know and they’re gonna get sick and they’re gonna die and it’s up to us to keep people from dying because they’re not smart enough to know how to keep themselves alive.

But they’re so focused on guns that they’re missing the flu epidemics. And CNN’s worried about it, and we got this story here The Daily Beast: “Flu Outbreak Spreads Across US as Media Drops the Ball — A major influenza epidemic is taking hold across much of the United States, but there’s a curious lack of coverage in the media.” Curious lack of coverage. It’s because they’re so focused on guns right now.

Anyway, folks, it is being ignored because somebody dies from the flu, that’s not really a story. And the flu is not murder. The flu is not death via gun. And there’s no way to blame conservatives on the flu, or for the flu. With guns, though, you can blame Republicans, you can blame conservatives, you can blame the rich, you can blame the NRA. In other words, focusing on guns is a direct route and direct opportunity to it take out political opponents. But the flu doesn’t offer that, and that’s all the media is anymore. The media isn’t news. The media is not made up of people who tell you what happened where you weren’t so that you know. There is no reporting. There’s simply an agenda every day, and the overarching agenda is the elimination of any opposition to the left.

That is what guides every news cycle: Where in today’s events can we glom on in a way to blame Republicans, blame conservatives, and do our best to get people blaming them and hating them so they never vote for them? That’s the objective. That’s the agenda. There is none of that with the flu. How do you tie the flu to conservatives? Now, somebody will. If somebody could come up with even the slightest credible way, it would become the big news of the day. Like if some conservative scientist at CDC was screwing around with various vials and test tubes and came up with a secret plan to infect half the population and some vigilant media reporter figured it out, turn that into a story or something.

Or there was a funding cut. Yes, if some Republican in a previous administration could be found to have cut funding for the Centers for Disease Control, and that led to this strain of flu being created or not being stopped, you could blame. But if a news story, quote, unquote, cannot be blamed on Republicans, it’s not gonna be covered right now. That’s what’s happening. And that comes from the top. That comes from the regime.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

Here’s Charles in Germantown, Maryland. Hi, Charles, I’m glad you called.

CALLER: As you were talking a little earlier about the motivation to tie some of this flu epidemic around the Republicans. I remember back in 2004 when Kerry was running against George Bush, that they were trying to basically indict George Bush and Tommy Thompson for not having enough flu vaccine prepared.

RUSH: That’s right.

CALLER: And Kerry, I looked up a couple of the quotes: “If you can’t get flu vaccines to Americans, how are you going to protect them from bioterrorism?”

RUSH: Right.

CALLER: And he also made a comment on National Public Radio: “If you can’t get flu vaccines to Americans, what kind of health care program are you running?”

RUSH: Exactly right.

CALLER: I just comment on that because up here in Maryland, as some of your staff were basically saying to you, there are shortages up here for the vaccine even now, because we’re expecting the flu epidemic not to come ’til February. It’s kind of ironic how likely the media will bring up anything, you know what I’m saying, about the current regime —

RUSH: Now, remember — this is a good point, this is an excellent point because it affords me the opportunity to repeat something that I said a half hour ago. The best way to understand the media today, is to have the courage to accept that what they are about, their objective is to eliminate the opposition to the Democrat Party and Obama on the part of the Republicans. If a news story does not offer the opportunity to blame Republicans for something, it will not be a story that’s covered, i.e., massive gun deaths in Chicago, which is a Democrat state with a Democrat mayor, a Democrat governor, and involving primarily minority victims.

Your example of Bush and the flu vaccine is made to order. You got a Republican president, a supposed shortage of flu vaccine, Bush doesn’t care about people. You got Hurricane Katrina when Bush is in office, Bush doesn’t care about black people in Louisiana. You got Hurricane Sandy in the Northeast. There hasn’t been a word about Obama’s incompetence in getting aid anywhere to people. It’s that simple. The news media is about destroying opposition to Obama; nothing else.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

Now, it’s very simple the way this works. We had a caller that really made a good point. Back in October of 2004, ABC News, here’s the headline to their story. “Poll: Voters Concerned with Flu Vaccine and Draft — Six in ten likely voters are concerned about the vaccine shortage. Twenty-seven percent blame the Bush administration. John Kerry,” who once served in Vietnam, “has been trying to boost that blame and tie the shortage to health care more broadly, his best major issue.”

So we had a flu outbreak in 2004, and the news then was, shortage of vaccine. Why? Bush doesn’t care about people. It’s the same thing with Hurricane Katrina. We had stories about Bush not caring. The government didn’t properly warn. Never mind the mayor and the governor didn’t do anything to evacuate people, not properly. They didn’t get any blame at all. They were Democrats. But the news media is oriented toward stories that offer the angle to criticize Republicans and to effectively eliminate any opposition to Democrats, in this case Obama, but back then it was John Kerry.

Fast forward to today. CNBC has a story on the flu epidemic, and you know what the story is? Not that Obama doesn’t care. Not that there’s a vaccine shortage. In fact, not that there’s any problem at all with it. In fact, the story is that this flu might stall the economic recovery. Oh, my God, poor Obama, he’s trying so hard. He’s worked harder than anybody ever has. He’s just now got this economy roaring again, and now here comes the flu. And it threatens to take us back into recession. Therefore, it isn’t gonna be Obama’s fault.

You take a look Hurricane Sandy. Do you realize that relief to people in the Northeast is running behind in terms of the length of time it took to get relief to Katrina? Relief to Mississippi and Louisiana got there much faster than relief has gotten Northeast. That’s why Chris Christie is on the warpath. But even Christie’s blaming the Republicans for it, not Obama. The media is blaming Republicans for it, not Obama. But with Katrina it was Bush. Folks, this is one of the reasons why it’s not hard to predict what liberals are gonna do. It’s not hard to predict what the media is gonna do. It’s not difficult at all to predict what stories next week in the media are gonna be, nor is it hard at all to predict how they’re going to be covered.

There is no journalism going on anymore. There’s no reporting news. You tune in at 6:30 to find out what happened today. That’s not what you’re gonna get when you tune in. What you’re gonna get is why you ought not vote for Republicans, why you ought not support conservatives or Republicans. That’s what you’re going to get, each and every story that offers that opportunity. By the same token, here’s Obama, he’s meeting with Hamid Karzai at the White House. Karzai is the grand pooh-bah of Afghanistan and Obama and Karzai just announced that they’ve agreed to allowing a Taliban office in Qatar. The president of the United States has agreed to the expansion of the Taliban beyond Afghanistan to Qatar.

Now, Qatar happens to be run by the same emir who runs Al Jazeera, which just bought Algore’s network, which now just bought Algore as a lobbyist for their network, ’cause Algore remains in a consultancy role, which means Algore will now lobby for Al Jazeera, the new cable news network, in the United States. Karzai said: the Taliban office in Doha, or Doha, Qatar, will engage with Afghan High Council for Peace, will seek regional help for Pakistan. Obama said next year this long war will come to a responsible end.

Now, remember, Obama once said that Afghanistan was the good war. That was the war we had to win. We should never have gone to Iraq. Now we’re gonna lose in Afghanistan, we’re allowing the Taliban to expand, and everything’s fine. If this were happening under Bush, if Bush were agreeing with Karzai to open a Taliban office in Qatar, there would be hell to pay. So that’s all you have to do. If you want to know the media like I do, just understand the reason why they target any and all conservative either Republican individuals or conservative individuals. Anybody on the right they judge to be effective, opposing them, has to be destroyed, has to be discredited, impugned, maligned, or what have you. And any opportunity they get, they’ll do it.

There’s no news. There’s no telling you what you missed today. Newtown, Connecticut, opportunity to advance a leftist agenda; opportunity to criticize Republicans, gun control, get guns out of the hands of people, blame the NRA, big political opponent of Democrats. That’s all Newtown was. It’s not based on their love for kids. It’s not based on their concern with kids killing each other. If they were concerned about that, they’d ban the car. If they were concerned about that they’d go to Chicago and start talking about banning handguns. In fact, if they were serious about this they would talk about banning guns. If they were dead serious about it, they’d be honest about wanting everybody to have to give their guns up.

That is what they want. But they know they’ll never get anywhere with that position, and as such, as Dr. Krauthammer pointed out on Fox, when the left will not tell you what they really want, you can’t have a legitimate debate. You cannot have an honest debate with anybody who will not accurately represent their own position, and the left will not on gun control. In fact, you come up with somebody like me. This is so simple, it’s first grade stuff. You have the president. You have the vice president, Biden. They’re Democrats. They don’t like Second Amendment. They’ve said so.

Everybody knows what the Democrat view of the ownership of guns is. Everybody knows what the Democrat view of the Constitution is. Newtown happens. Liberals start pulling their hair out. Oh, woe is us, how we gonna get rid of guns? Biden says, “Well, we’re gonna look at executive orders.” Oh, executive orders? They’re obviously gonna look at executive orders as a way, perhaps, of trumping the Constitution. That resulted in me being literally bombarded with criticism from people on the left. How dare I be so stupid. Everybody knows that a presidential executive order doesn’t trump the Constitution. They can’t do that.

The reason they came after me is because I was more honest than they about their own position. The reason they came after me is because I told people what they really want to do. They can’t. They would never get a majority of votes if they were really honest about what they want to do. So you can’t have an honest and open debate with them about anything because they will not honestly, accurately represent their position. What they do is attempt to destroy their opponents, in the minds and hearts of low-information voters, rather than tout their own positions.

Now, the fact of the matter is, you know it and I know it, that if the modern day Democrat today could, he would eliminate the Second Amendment. You accuse ’em of that and they have a cow, they go bonkers, and they accuse you of lying about them and being stupid and silly, of course they don’t want to do that. In fact, they do. They’re the ones who will not be honest about it.

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