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RUSH: Snerdley says, “By the way, you got that FSU quarterback suspended for the whole game.”

I said, “What do you mean?”


“You commenting on it and how silly it was that he gets suspended for the half. You’re the one that forced them to suspend him for the whole game.”


See, I don’t think in those terms. You can sit in there and think that what is said on this program can affect the policy of major institution. I do not allow myself. That would be… You know what?
To get caught up in that, that would be the height of arrogance and false presumption, and I don’t go there. I tell you what, I… (interruption) Well, I don’t know. There had to be a lot of people making fun of FSU for suspending the guy for the first half.

There had to be a whole lot of people. (interruption) There weren’t? (interruption) Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! I see. You think because I predicted he’d get a standing O, that’s what did it. All right. Okay. So Snerdley thinks the administration at FSU said, “No, we don’t want this guy getting a standing O.” Still, that would be the height of arrogance.


Just a couple things since you brought up football. A couple things about the NFL. You know, Goodell had his press conference on Friday, and do you know what we learned, by the way? We learned that the sports Drive-Bys know how to conduct a press conference. The news guys have forgotten how, since Obama became president. The sports guys know how to do it.

The sports guys want Goodell’s scalp. I’m telling you, it’s amazing. I have been listening to some of these sports guys. I have been reading some of these sports Drive-Bys. Even some of the former players. They want this guy canned. They want Goodell gone. It is amazing to hear. It is so knee-jerk. Some of it’s filled with literal hatred for the guy, and they are not gonna stop until they get the guy gone.

I don’t think he’s gonna go anywhere. The league is making too much money. Anyway, I’ll get into the details of that in a second, but they did a press conference on Friday. The way press conferences of presidents used to be. Here’s a guy in authority, in power, and these sports Drive-Bys hit him with every hypocritical thing he’s said. They hit him with everything they think is a lie.

They tried to trip him up every which way from Sunday, and it was not a good performance for Goodell. I’m watching this and I said, “You know, we haven’t seen one of these since George W. Bush was president.” Well, we haven’t. We have forgotten what a genuine media press conference, White House press conference used to look like. Now they are just fawning, bootlicking sessions.


We have some audio sound bite from this coming up in the program, and I will tell you about it, or play them for you. Joe Biden. It was announced that one of the women that Goodell is hiring to help get the NFL front office shipshape is Cynthia Hogan. She’s the former Biden staffer, if you’ll recall. So Biden was out there over the weekend. She was with one of his aides when he ran the Judiciary Committee.

That’s when he was trying to destroy people like Clarence Thomas and Alito and Roberts and all. That’s where she worked for him. Biden said, “The NFL ain’t seen nothing yet. They have no idea what they just bought into.” Now, what does that tell you? That this is, of course, political; that all of this is been seized on by the Democrat Party and leftist operatives as an opportunity to advance their agenda.

This is kind of — I don’t know what you’d call it — threatening? The NFL ain’t seen nothing yet, they have no idea what they just bought into, and now Chuck Hagel is asking his staff at the Pentagon to look into the military’s relationship with the NFL so that they can perhaps sever it. Yeah, there’s so much violence in the NFL (chuckling) it’s not looking good for the military to be associated with it.

Secretary Chuck Hagel is asking for information about military ties to the NFL. He’s asking his staff for detailed information about the relationships in the wake of all these scandals. You see, he’s supposed to be fighting Obama’s war, but they’ve gotta take time from fighting Obama’s war (which he doesn’t really care that much about anyway) and make sure they get in on the political movement of the day.

That is whatever they can move in their agenda tying to the NFL spouse abuse scandal. It says here in this CNN report, “The military has a zero-tolerance policy in the ranks for domestic abuse, but it also has a high-profile relationship with the NFL that goes back decades. Any Pentagon action to cut back support for the NFL would be the most direct involvement by the [Regime] yet in the scandal.

“The Army alone spends some $10 million a year buying advertising from television networks broadcasting NFL games. Games are also broadcast by the Armed Forces Network to troops deployed overseas.” I have a friend of mine in Kansas who said he had a bunch of Millennials in his house yesterday watching football. He has a daughter who’s 24, and a bunch of her friends came over and the football game was on.

So he decided to go in there and do a quick focus group survey, 24/25-year-old women. So he starts talking to ’em about what’s going on in the NFL and the various scandals. He said, “What do you think the NFL needs to do to prove that they really care about you and want you as a fan?” He said one of the 24-year-olds, Millennials said, “Look, if the NFL wants to prove they care about women, why don’t they start with getting rid of the cheerleaders? And if they’re gonna keep the cheerleaders…”

Now, wait a minute. “If they’re gonna keep the cheerleaders, make them more collegiate. These pro cheerleaders look more like strippers or pole dancers than cheerleaders.” So here’s a 24-year-old woman who thinks the NFL is objectifying women by having scantily clad pole-dancer types as cheerleaders. So the next question was, “Well, what do you think about the players wearing pink to show their support for breast cancer research?”

Another 24-year-old female Millennial said, “That’s silly. Just make a contribution. It’s stupid. Why go through that? If you’re in it, live it. Screw the symbolism. Make a donation and publicize how much and actually do something. How much does a guy wearing pink shoelaces actually do for breast cancer?” I thought that was pretty sensible. I mean, what a concept. Own who and what you are.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Now, Roger Goodell faced the media — the sports media — on Friday, right after this program. Barack Obama has not undergone one press conference like this probably in his life, but certainly not since 2008. If he had, if he had undergone a press conference like Goodell did, he might not have been elected. Now, I cannot go back in time and predict a new future.

But he’s never been vetted, never been grilled, never been challenged. Goodell was, and I think it’s useful to remind people that may not know what a media press conference used to be like. So we have here, let’s see… It’s a montage to start of reporters from NBC, CNN, CBS, the New York Post, and ABC all with questions for Goodell.


PETER ALEXANDER: If any of these victims had been someone you love, would you be satisfied with the way the league has handled this crisis and what would you say to them?

RACHEL NICHOLS: You’ve gotten it wrong in a few cases, and that tends to happen when there’s no checks and balances. How willing are you to give up some of that power?

SHARYN ALFONSI: Have you considered resigning?

BART HUBBUCH: Why do you feel like you should be able to continue in this role?

AARON KATERSKY: I wondered if you, personally, have ever been involved in an abuse situation in any capacity.

RUSH: Can you imagine? Not one question even approaching anything like that has been asked of Obama, and there have been numerous occasions where there could have been plenty, like Benghazi. “How willing are you? Have you considered resigning? Why do you feel like you should be able to continue in the role? You’ve gotten it wrong in a few cases like … everything. Obamacare.”

There’s none of this.

Here’s Goodell.

Now, let’s add TMZ to this, to the White House briefing.

We didn’t have their guy in the montage. If we added TMZ, we might have found out by now where Obama was on the night of the Benghazi attack. This is TMZ video journalist and stand-up comedian Adam Glyn, and he’s at the Goodell press conference. He said, “I have to go back into the video and your curiosity to see the video. You suspended Ray Rice after our video at TMZ. Why didn’t you have the curiosity to go to the casino yourself and get the video yourself instead of waiting for us?”

GOODELL: We have to be very cautious in not interfering with a criminal investigation, but we’ll evaluate that. Should we do more to get that information? I would have loved to have seen that tape. Should we do more to get that information in the future? That’s a question I want —

GLYN: Mr. Commissioner, we —

GOODELL: — these experts to do.

GLYN: We found by one phone call. You guys have a whole legal department. Can you explain that? We found out by just one phone call.

GOODELL: I can’t explain how you got the information. Only you can do that.

RUSH: Now, I know what some of you are thinking. “Wait a minute, Rush! Goodell’s not the president, and the NFL’s coming under unfair assault here.” In the sense that the cases, the incidents of spouse abuse, domestic violence and all that in the NFL are 13% below the national average, that is true. But, again, the media is the media. The media doesn’t care about that.

They’ve got blood in the water, and when the media sees blood they’re like a bunch of sharks, except when it comes to Democrat presidents. Now, Goodell has been one of the best politically correct commissioners in any sport ever, and look what it bought him: Nothing. They smell blood in the water. I’m not playing these because I have an animus for Goodell. That’s not the point. If I did or didn’t, it doesn’t matter.

This is simply an illustration of how the media used to act. The last time they did things like this was with George W. Bush, pounding him for an hour at one press conference to admit just a single mistake. “Everybody makes mistakes, Mr. President. Have you made any?” Bush knew what was on, and he wouldn’t bite. But that’s the role. If you are in a position of power, that’s one of the things you know is coming.

It’s the league you play in. So I’m not doing this to arouse sympathy for Goodell, and you could get mad and say, “These guys are unprofessional and they’re boring in and it’s unnecessary and they’re trying to destroy him,” all of which is true. But it isn’t true with Democrat politicians, and that’s just the whole point. Now, George Will on Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace.

Chris Wallace said, “George, you’re close to Major League Baseball. How do you think NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell has handled this? And your sense of this, does he survive?”

WILL: He will survive. He’s handled it terribly and it doesn’t matter. Last week’s three most viewed television programs were Sunday Night Football, Thursday Night Football, and Monday Night Football. And money talks and will continue to talk. And this will pass over, and football will go on its merry way. I happen to believe the problem with football is FOOTBALL! Which is to say it is merchandising, consciously, violence. And some of it spills over.

RUSH: Now, if you’re casually listening, that’s the kind of thing that might makes sense, but again the statistics don’t bear that out. I contend, as I said last week, there’s something about professional athletes, folks, that is true and it’s universal. I don’t care basketball, football, soccer, tennis, you name it. An athlete who is a professional, guaranteed exhibited the talent by age 11 or 12. Particularly in baseball, maybe tennis.

From the moment a child athlete is thought to have the potential to go far, that child is immediately treated like a king. It’s just cultural. (There’s that word again.) They are coddled; they are protected. The way is paved for them, sometimes by their parents, because it is the silk road if they can get there. I mean, it’s big bucks. It’s stardom, it’s royalty, it’s fame. They don’t face common, ordinary, everyday discipline except in rare exceptions.

My contention is, even though all these guys come out of college, the NFL is the first formal discipline they ever really encounter. It doesn’t matter what race. There are some different cultural things there, of course. But I’m talking about the discipline at the team facility, what is necessary to make the team. Now, granted if somebody is a superstar and a reprobate they overlook the reprobate and it comes back to haunt them later.

Nothing’s ever perfect here. But the idea that the behavior in the NFL — the spouse abuse — is directly relatable to the violence in the game, that’s what’s not borne out by the statistics. It’s the exact opposite. The instance of spousal abuse is only 13% in the NFL what it is in the population the large, for example.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: You want to hear something that’s funny? It’s funny if you have a certain level of understanding about this NFL thing. If you don’t, it might not be funny, and I don’t have time to tell you why it’s funny if you don’t know. So this is for those of you who do. It’s Ray Lewis on ESPN’s Sunday NFL Countdown yesterday talking about the Ray Rice situation with Baltimore Ravens and the NFL.


LEWIS: We’re here for one reason and one reason only. We’re here for domestic violence. We’re here because we saw a friend of mine brutally hit his wife in the face in an elevator. There’s some things you can cover up and then there’s some things you can’t. Right now it’s a sad day for me, because the reputation that I left in this organization, this isn’t it. This isn’t it. What was built that many of years took hard work to get that, took a hell of a reputation to — to put on the line. Ray Rice put a lot of people at jeopardy with his actions. A lot of people at jeopardy, not just himself.

RUSH: Okay. So Ray Lewis says, “We’re here…” meaning the crew on ESPN talking about this. “We’re here for domestic violence.” No, you’re there for an NFL pregame show. You happen to be talking about domestic violence today. But then he says he did so much to build up his reputation, and the Ravens’ reputation, and it’s a sad day, ’cause he left that organization with the greatest reputation.

And this Ray Rice thing, that isn’t it, and what was built there many years took hard work, hell of a reputation to put on the line. So Ray Rice has destroyed everybody’s reputation. (interruption) Mmm-hmm. Mmm-hmm. Mmm-hmm. (interruption) They don’t bring it up. Well, they did on the first day. They did on the first day and he sai, “Nah, nah, nah. You can’t compare that. It’s night and day. What Ray did and I did, you can’t go there. No, no. It’s not the same. Oh, no, no, no.”

That’s the only time anybody brought it up.

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