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Rush Limbaugh

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RUSH: I want to start here with a little teachable moment, a minor little thing, but it’s personal to me, and it affects you. Long ago, back during the peak of his career on Monday Night Football, people that knew Howard Cosell loved to tell stories, that on Tuesday or Wednesday of every week following a Monday night game, Cosell would walk into the office just fit to be tied, angry, livid. And he’d be holding up a copy of the Oshkosh Gazette in which he had been ripped and criticized, and he would walk in, and he would throw that down and ask (imitating Cosell), “Can you believe what they’re saying about me in Oshkosh? Look at this! These people don’t even know what they’re talking about.”

And people would say, “Howard, Howard, it’s Oshkosh. Howard, let it go.” Well, in a way, although I’m not coming to you in an agitated way here but, you know, this program has many elements in it, and this program is aimed at you, there’s no question. But there are two groups of people involved here. You, one group, people who listen to this program; and then the other group, people who don’t. Now, I do the program for you, obviously, people who listen to it. But I would love to attract people who don’t. That’s the objective, grow the audience.


Now, let’s then combine something else here. And that is one of the performance techniques that I employ is parody and satire, and it requires contextual listening for you to understand when I’m being satirical or doing a parody. This is why I have always said that you need to spend at least six weeks listening to this program before you can be assured that you understand everything that can happen here. Not that in six weeks you’re gonna learn everything you need to know, but you’re just gonna understand the program and what makes it unique and different from others.

Well, that’s all fine and dandy, but then there’s that group that doesn’t listen, and in that group are several journalists in local communities. And it’s frustrating in the sense that those people do not get the satire and do not get the parody, and then they report what was satire or parody as fact, which then helps create this impression that I’m something I’m not, which retards the effort to attract people who don’t listen to the program. That’s not a big deal, but it’s interesting to me and there’s no way around this. Because if you announce up front, “Attention, what’s next is satire. What’s next is parody,” it doesn’t work.

Now, the other day on this program, in the midst of expressing my frustration over the outrageous coverage of the missing jet, I advanced my own theory. It was a cockamamie, wacko, ridiculous theory that the plane was shot down by one of three countries and that the United States knows who did it. I said, “My theory is as good anybody else’s.” The theory was reported as serious in one little market, Wilmington, North Carolina. We’re big in Wilmington on the radio, but this TV journalist lumped me in with Courtney Love, who also said that she had a theory. In fact, she had seen it. She had seen the crashed wreckage on a satellite photo.

So let’s go, this is last night, WSFX-TV Eyeball News at 10 during the What’s Trending segment, and this is not the infobabe anchorette. This is a reporterette, Jennifer Merwitz, reporting about various conspiracy theories surrounding the disappearance of Malaysian Airlines Flight 370.

MERWITZ: This unsolved mystery has sparked up some conspiracy theories. Some believe that the flight may have been linked to aliens, the Illuminati, terrorists or even top-secret technology. Conservative talk radio host, Rush Limbaugh believes “the plane was shot down by some hostile country.” And even Courtney Love has her own speculation tweeting this photo. The picture Love tweets features drawn lines meant to point at what appears to be discoloration in the water and possible debris.

RUSH: There are none so blind as those who don’t listen. And this is not a criticism of Jennifer Merwitz. It’s just an illustration of how hard it is. I do not believe — and everybody listening to me knew that I was making a joke about the plane being shot down, because before that I had speculated that the Koch brothers were behind it, because the Koch brothers are evil incarnate to the Democrats and the American left. And, by the way, about that, with the Koch brothers, you have to understand what that means, too. It’s not strictly personal with the Koch brothers. The Koch brothers are a symbol.


When the Democrats and the media start blaming the Koch brothers for, it’s like blaming the rich en masse. It’s not just specific, although to some Democrats it is. I mean, they literally personally hate the Koch brothers. But on a balanced scale, who has done more for this country than the Koch brothers compared to Harry Reid? Why, Harry Reid hasn’t done diddly-squat for this country compared to what the Koch brothers have done with their business, the number of people they employ, the research and development in the oil business, any number of ways you want to measure it. Harry Reid can’t even hold a candle to the Koch brothers, and yet they are enemy number one to him, and he denounces them as he did me on the floor of the Senate.

So I thought I would the get in the mix and blame the crash on the Koch brothers, that they had some plans for the plane, or the missing airplane. Now, I’m just illustrating this because people watching this last night in Wilmington, North Carolina, who do not listen to this program are now going to think that I actually believe the plane was shot down and then they’re gonna start saying, “Limbaugh, that idiot, that wacko, did you hear what he thinks? The plane was shot down.”

And then there are gonna be others saying, “You know, Limbaugh may have a point.” (laughing) “Limbaugh may be right before you start laughing at it.” So I just am mentioning this. I’m not complaining like Cosell was, and I’m not personally offended. I’m just telling you how difficult it is, ’cause I know some of you… You know what happens? This used to happen a lot.

Recent arrivals here — brand-new and in love with the program, into their second or third month — know people who will not listen to me because they believed all this negative press out there. And they finally convince their friends to listen, and then I come up and use the word “feminazi.” (I don’t know any of this, of course.) Then I get e-mails, “You know what? You blew it! Here I just convinced my friends to listen to you after three months, and you go and do that, and there’s no way they’re going to understand!” What am I supposed to do, cut back on what I do to avoid offending the people that don’t listen? It’s just a challenge, folks, because I know you’re like me: You want this program to expand in geometric portions, and you see stuff like this happening.

I wouldn’t even know it except our eager beaver audio sound bite pursuers found it.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Well, folks, I went out there, and I looked, and I cannot find it reported anywhere how much fuel the Malaysian airliner was carrying. I mean even in articles about the amount of fuel from two days ago, we’re told it’s not clear exactly how much fuel the plane was carrying. Yes, it is! It has to be paid for. It has to be ordered. The airline, whoever runs operations at the airline, orders the fuel, the truck comes and fuels it up. They know how much fuel was on this thing.

But you know something else that’s happening in this coverage? This poor country Malaysia is being dumped on like it is backward sticks Fred Flintstoneville. Everybody is dumping on Malaysia. Backwards airline, backwards country, backwards tracking systems, backwards training systems. It’s amazing to watch this. Anyway, the thing flies, normal operations, 639 miles an hour cruising at 35,000 feet, carries 31,000 pounds of fuel. You know why they measure fuel on an airplane in pounds and not gallons? ‘Cause it burns so fast that gallons don’t tell you anything, and pounds, they have to factor weight for how long a runway they need to take off and land safely, takeoff weight, landing weight. So it’s all weight related.

But I don’t know why they can’t find out how much fuel the thing took off with. I mean, the pilot cannot come and add three or four thousand pounds of fuel with nobody knowing it, whatever was on the original manifest. And it just seems to me, I’m sorry for being, you know, so un-conspiracy oriented here, but it just seems to me that if you know how much fuel, you can calculate various ranges the plane could fly at various altitudes. You could do any number of things. But you could get an outer limit. You could come up with a maximum range the thing could fly. Somebody has to have done that. Somebody, the search team, somebody has to know what they’re doing in that regard. The fact it hasn’t been reported may not mean anything.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: We go to Pittsburgh. This is Rich. Great to have you, sir. Hello.

CALLER: Hello, Rush. Thanks so much for taking my call.

RUSH: Yes, sir.

CALLER: It’s a real pleasure to speak with you. I have a theory about Flight 370 that I’m not sure has been articulated yet.

RUSH: Wow! That… Okay.

CALLER: We’ve heard so much about the pilot and his activities and how what he did was highly suspect and everything else. Let’s assume for a second that he was not involved in this from the start. Let’s assume that, let’s say, the engineer that was on board and the two unknown Iranians and so on somehow fabricated some sort of object that looked like a bomb during the flight and hijacked the plane.

RUSH: Shoe bomb.

CALLER: And, in the process, this pilot, realizing that this plane could possibly be used as a missile down the road or used for some other nefarious purpose, jettisoned the fuel in the process. Now, my friends who are pilots and work for the Air Force and so on have told me that fuel that’s jettisoned from that high up typically dissipates.

RUSH: Oh, yeah, it would. It would evaporate so fast. That’s an interesting theory. We should tell Jennifer Merwitz at WSFX-TV News at 10 in Wilmington, North Carolina, about this theory. ‘Cause that’s the great news anchor there that is keeping up on this stuff.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Our last caller’s theory… We didn’t have a lot of time. You know, I didn’t want to seem rude to him. The caller from Pittsburgh, his theory is the pilot was not involved. It’s that some kind of a shoe bomb was on board and the two Iranians were involved in a possible hijacking. So the pilot, recognizing that the hijackers could turn his airplane into a missile or something, just decided to dump the fuel.

And because, you know, fuel dissipates and evaporates, there’s no trace. Kerosene is jet fuel, Jet A. You throw it out there and it’ll dissipate pretty rapidly. After that, its range is obviously greatly reduced and then it plunges. He said he’s not aware of anybody having offered that theory. That sounds plausibly reasonable. It’s not so much conspiratorial, ’cause there have been hijacked airplanes and have been pilots that have been heroes.

But it is different because this pilot is in the process of being just destroyed as a lunatic wacko political ideologue. The latest on this, by the way, is one of the islands in the Maldives has a 13,000-foot runway, and he happened to be on the course right for it. The latest development is that citizens on one of these islands in the Maldives claimed they saw it flying so low that they could read the markings and see the doors on the airplane.

They said they’d never seen a jet fly that low, which would buttress the theory that the thing was flying low to escape radar detection. Anyway, folks, I’m just telling you: Even after it is learned what happened, CNN’s gonna be on this story for the rest of the year. They’ll break away for election coverage every 10 minutes or so, but that’ll be it.

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