RUSH: You know what struck me over the weekend, ladies and gentlemen, is how the Big Media, the Drive-By Media, never, ever get investigated. They do not investigate themselves. CBS did over Rather, but they had to on that one, but they never, ever get investigated. They can distort. They can lie. They can ruin people. They can create total false impressions of reality that has real effect on people’s lives, and nobody ever demands an investigation. But you let it be Big Oil that does something or let it be Big Drug that does something or Big Retail or Big Tobacco, why, we’ll stop the presses and we’ll investigate. I know the media has First Amendment protections and I’m not suggesting Congress should do this.
I’m just saying, in terms of the institutions that guide our lives and shape our thinking, the one that perhaps has more importance and more power than any of these others never, ever gets called to task, never, ever is investigated, while they seek to investigate and destroy everybody else that gets in their way or of their agenda. Greetings, my friends, and welcome. Rush Limbaugh back, full week of — well, no, not a full week of broadcast excellence. Sorry, three days, then off to Hawaii on Thursday for a golf gig. (interruption) What? How can I…? (interruption) I’m going to Hawaii. I got some friends out there. A guy just built a new house. I’m going to go out there. I’ve been planning to go out there for a while. I’ve been putting this off for two years and finally going to go out there and it’s the only time I’ve got. It’s going to get swamp heavy here in the election season and so forth.
At any rate, greetings, folks, Rush Limbaugh, the EIB Network and the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies. 800-282-2882. The e-mail is Rush@eibnet.com. We’ll get to this latest resolution attempt by the White House and I guess the French and the United Nations to cease hostilities in Lebanon and Israel. This attempt, I’m going to tell you up front, makes me sick to my stomach. I hope it fails. I think it’s ridiculous, and I wish somebody would just get out of the way and let the Israelis one time finish the job. What nobody wants to admit here is that this is all about Iran and Syria, and if we don’t deal with this now we’re going to have to deal with it at some point, mark my words, because there’s no such thing as a sustainable peace, especially a sustainable peace that’s established on the Lebanese establishing a full-fledged government that’s going to have total control over the Hezbos.
If one thing we know is impossible, it’s that. This prime minister doesn’t even want that. He’s scared to death of the Hezbos, and this guy, ‘Sheik’ Nasrallah, has become a rock star in the Arab world. He’s supplanted Osama bin Laden. In fact, the Lebanese prime minister has essentially said that this proposed resolution, the first of two that was announced today by the president and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is no good because it allows Israeli forces to stay in southern Lebanon. Of course it’s no good. That’s not going to work in terms of a ceasefire. This frustrates me. (More on that in just a second.) The opening of the program here about the media never being investigated, I’m sure many of you by now have heard of the literal fraud perpetrated by al-Reuters with all of the fake and doctored photos coming out of the action in Lebanon.
It’s much too numerous to recount verbally here. We have this posted at RushLimbaugh.com. I was up ’til three in the morning on Sunday working on this when I first heard about this, and trying to organize all that’s out there in the blogosphere. Little Green Footballs was the first to call attention to this. Charles Johnson, who runs that blog, has had his life threatened now by a Reuters — we think it’s a Reuters employee. Somebody has used a Reuters e-mail address to send him a death threat essentially saying, he can’t wait, the writer said he can’t wait to see Charles Johnson’s throat slit. It all started with a bunch of fake photos about bombing attacks in Beirut. Photoshop has a clone tool. If you use Photoshop, you’re familiar with this — and you can clone any aspect of a photo that you want.
They did it with smoke, and it was just horribly done. It was so obviously hurried, not even professional, not even a professional attempt to doctor the pictures, couldn’t stand up to the light of day. Reuters took awhile before they retracted the picture, but it’s already out there, it had already been on front pages of newspapers just like these phony baloney, plastic banana pictures that have come out of Qana. We now know that much of these are staged. There are two other questionable pictures. There are actually more than that. This is tip of the iceberg, folks. Dan Rather was just the tip of the iceberg. This stuff going on here is confirming every suspicion I’ve had about fake news oriented toward the action line per story that Drive-By Media types had.
Anything outside that doesn’t permeate, doesn’t register, and they’re not interested in it. In fact, they’ll even make things up and enhance things and make it look worse than it was to advance their story line. Reuters ought to be disgraced forever over this. They ought to be investigated. They ought to investigate themselves. Haven’t heard any call for this, and that’s what made me realize, this outfit, this bunch, this industry, as destructive as it can be, both to individuals, to corporations, and to cultures and societies never, ever gets investigated, nor do the individuals in it ever get investigated. Now, the second picture — and this was a doozy — the second picture purported to show an Israeli F-16, although the F-16 was not in the picture frame.
It was cropped out. What it showed was three or four missiles being launched, obviously on innocent civilian targets. The caption is as important as the picture. It turns out that the real picture was of an Israeli F-16 firing off one flare, as in chaff, to try to confuse surface-to-air missiles if the Hezbos have any and if they were going to launch any. You take the picture; you duplicate or clone the flare and its streak of smoke through the sky which was being emitted from behind the F-16 when you see the real picture. The cropped version made it look like these were missiles that had been fired. There were four of them. The other thing that has just been discovered — and countless more. There have to be countless more, not just with Reuters.
Reuters has finally said: We’re not going to use this freelancer anymore, Adnan Hajj, al-Sheik, whatever his name is. I couldn’t care less. They pulled his entire portfolio from their website, but there’s another picture showed from about a week apart. First picture is a wide-angle view of a destroyed building somewhere in Lebanon, and I think that’s on July 24th or the 28th. On August 4th, the same picture — well, picture at the same place, close up, showing one of the same buildings with a forlorn woman walking through the rubble was sent out on the wire again as evidence of a second bombing. It was the same place, the same destruction, with different angles, different fields of view from the view finder, and it’s all been portrayed as two separate attacks. In the first instance where the smoke was cloned to make it look as though the whole city was on fire, they even cloned buildings.
They cloned damaged buildings. I mean, it’s clear what the intent here is. The intent is to lie to the American people. They know that their willing accomplices in the Drive-By Media internationally are not going to investigate, are not going to be curious. Reuters wasn’t even curious. These obvious fakes got past their professional editors, their photo journalist editors. They didn’t get past anything. They tried to sneak a bunch of fraudulent photos past other media, which would not be hard, because they’re all on the same page, and of course consumers who read this. Once again, as in the Dan Rather situation, it was the blogosphere that brought this to light and to everybody’s attention. It started by Little Green Footballs, and their website got clogged and other websites picked it up. What we have, if you’re new to this or if you haven’t seen as much of the detail as there is to see, and as much of the analysis — because it is devastating, folks, the photo analysis that photo journal experts have engaged in here — we have quite a few examples on the website at RushLimbaugh.com. We put them up yesterday.
So I think this is just the tip of the iceberg. I don’t think it’s just limited to al-Reuters. I can’t help but go back when I first leveled the claim here about the phony, staged photos in Qana, how the executive vice president — Carroll was her last name, I can’t remember her first name — made the remark, ‘How can people in an air-conditioned studio like me or in a cubicle with a computer some 6,000 miles away possibly understand what’s going on? They don’t understand the competitive nature of what we do in this business.’ There’s no competitive nature, because what we have found is that in the case of Qana, the media is herded it into a waiting area. There’s no competitive anything.
There are two guys. They’ve been named
So this is a really serious thing as far as I’m concerned. You know, it’s sort of like I’ve always told you about law enforcement. There just is a natural tendency on the part of citizens — forget politics here. There’s a natural tendency on the part of citizens to believe law enforcement. Law enforcement is the good guys. They’re always the guys in the white hats and they’re always going out grabbing the bad guys, and when they say somebody did something, the human nature tendency is to believe it. Big Media benefits from the same thing. It’s just been they’re there, they’re on the scene, they’re trying to get the facts, plus when they show you pictures, why, pictures are what move in many cases, and in this case, al-Reuters is being done in by the pictures.
This is, I think, on purpose, especially by al-Reuters, for the express purpose of harming and destroying the Israelis’ effort to win this war. They have clearly chosen sides, and it is with the Hezbos. Much of what I call the Drive-By Media has done the same thing. Now, you may be hearing about this for the first time. I don’t know how engaged you were over the weekend and how much you have been made aware of this, but if this is the first you’re hearing of it, there’s a reason. Nobody in the Drive-By Media in this country is the least interested in this. Nobody! Just like they were not interested in Rather for a while. What happened after the Rather exposure was that the Drive-By Media started denigrating the blogosphere, calling them the pajama media, a bunch of lazy guys who don’t go report. There are no editors. Well, there are no editors at al-Reuters, either — and if there are editors at al-Reuters, they’re worthless skunks. They have no excuse on this. They’re withdrawing the portfolio, withdrawing the pictures and so forth.
That seems to satisfy. ‘Ooh, we made a mistake.’ Okay. Reuters has corrected it. There’s no curiosity in the rest of the media about, well, wait a minute, if they’re doctoring photos, could they be doctoring captions and making them up? If they’re doctoring photos, maybe what we learned out of Qana did not actually happen? No curiosity. No desire to go revisit it. That’s the Drive-By Media. You drive by, you throw words and images into the crowd that totally distort, totally shake things up get everybody all roiled up; then you drive down the road to the next event and do the same thing. It’s going to be interesting to see if anybody in the mainstream Drive-By Media in this country has any outrage over this in terms of at least wondering if that kind of thing will boomerang or bleed into their own reputations. You know, this photo guy will end up having the wagons circled around him, he’ll be given a Pulitzer Prize by somebody. He may be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for all I know because the trend is for all these people in the Drive-By Media to circle the wagons when one of them is under assault, even when so blatantly obviously guilty that it ought to be embarrassing and it ought to cause an investigation, it ought to make these people worry about their own credibility industry-wide. But (raspberry) nothing.
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RUSH: This business of doctored photos and forged documents courtesy of Dan Blather. I’m sure you could think of countless examples. People on the phones are thinking of countless other examples. It’s only going to get worse for these people if they don’t wise up here and understand that there are now members of an alternative media that are scrutinizing everything they do, and their credibility is waning. ABC has a story again today. This was something we reported on just a couple weeks ago, if not even that long ago. ‘Half of US Still Believe Iraq had Weapons of Mass Destruction.’ It’s on the ABC News website, but it’s an Associated Press story by Charles J. Hanley, AP, special correspondent.
“Did Saddam Hussein’s government have weapons of mass destruction in 2003? Half of America apparently still thinks so, a new poll finds, and experts see a raft of reasons why. A draft and drumbeat of voices from talk radio to die-hard bloggers to the Oval Office, a surprise headline here or there, or rallying around a partisan flag and a growing need for people in their own minds to justify the war in Iraq.” How about the possibility that they are there or were there? Everybody knows that they were there, and Clinton and Kerry and everybody in the Democratic Party in 1998 warned us of the same thing. But Mr. Handley of AP says, “‘People tend to become independent of reality in these circumstances,’ says opinion analyst Stephen Cull.” Note here the media just beside itself! Half of us still believe that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, and they blame us for being stupid.
We’re the ones who cling to alternative realities. It’s inverted. It’s just the exact opposite. It is they who have no curiosity. It is they who operate on the premise now: there were never any weapons of mass destruction. History on this didn’t begin until George Bush began talking about it. What Bill Clinton said in 1998, what the Drive-By Media wrote about weapons of mass destruction in 1998, ’99, and 2000, which we have documented and found and put on our website. Never happened, apparently. History began when Bush first started talking about this. So now of course you people, mind numbed robots, incapable of self-thought, incapable of your own research, you’re being hoodwinked again by people like me and the bloggers, and of course the deceit-ridden Oval Office. I love this. People tend to become independent of reality in these circumstances. It’s not that people think they’re still there. It’s that people knew they were there. They had been used.
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RUSH: Joe in Sparta, New Jersey, I’m glad you called. Welcome to the program, sir.
CALLER: How you doing, Rush? Second time caller.
RUSH: Fine. Thank you.
CALLER: I was looking at Little Green Footballs about the articles, and in “comments” there’s a link to an 18-minute documentary about the Palestinians. They show footage from an unmanned Israeli drone of a funeral of one of the martyrs. Well, before they get to the crowd, they — by mistake — drop the litter, and the body (supposed body) rolls off. Well, the “martyr” gets back up and gets back on the litter by himself, and then gets covered with the flag they showed to the crowd for the cameras.
RUSH: So it’s a fake corpse.
CALLER: It’s a fake corpse.
RUSH: It wasn’t a corpse. It was a live body acting like a corpse, but he fell off the stretcher or the litter or whatever and had to get up real quick?
CALLER: They have the footage from an unmanned drone, he gets back up and they cover the body with the flag again and go on to the photo-op, but it’s a very informative documentary. It’s called Pallywood (You Tube Video: Pallywood), and it’s off one of the links of Little Green Footballs. RUSH: Oh, yes, I’ve heard of this. Pallywood. In fact, the same term has been used in a different form attached to Hezbollah, Pallybazoo or something like that — I forget what it is, but it’s all about the fact that they’re staging. They’re acting, creating events for cameras. You know, here’s another thing, folks. I’m not going to sit here and believe that people are this stupid, that these photojournalists are this stupid. These are freelancers over there. They live in Lebanon. The Reuters people, this one guy did, Hadji, al-Sheik, al-Mani, whatever his name is. I couldn’t care less anymore. But the bottom line is, they get these freelancers over there and they hire them. You can’t tell me that this guy made mistakes. His mistake was carelessness in getting caught. You can’t tell me these people are innocent victims of their own hearts. You can’t tell me that they’re trying to do the best that they can, and you can’t tell me that the competitive pressures, particularly in a war zone, are the primary culprits here.
I think it is totally reasonable to assume that all these people are actively engaged human beings and they’re in a war zone. Active, engaged human beings think. And active, engaged human beings have an interest in the outcome of events. It is clear through all these doctored, fake, fraudulent photos that people are attempting to present a false image and impression, hoping to condemn Israel in the PR sense, in the spin phase of this to make their job even harder, and to also stoke the world up in sensitivity and sympathy and in favor of the Hezbos. There’s no question this is being done on purpose. It is these, oh, my God, we’re shocked! Why, we can’t believe that these pictures got by our vast professional editors. They got past the editors because the editors passed them, just assumed nobody would question it. That’s what I mean by the arrogance of these people. Even after Dan Rather, even after all the other exposés, most of the people in the Drive-By Media still do not get the fact that they are being investigated on a daily basis by alternative media.
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RUSH: Right before the program started today, Drudge posted the following story from Reuters. ‘Lebanese prime minister Fouad Siniora said on Monday that one person had been killed in an Israeli air strike on the southern border village of Houla rather than 40 as earlier feared. A resident said about 50 people had been found alive under the rubble. ‘The massacre, it turned out there was just one person killed,’ the PM told reporters. ‘They thought the whole building smashed on the heads of about 40 people. Thank God they have been saved.” Yes, yes, thank God they’ve been saved. Bottom line, ladies and gentlemen, is that correction never makes as much news as the original. In fact, I just saw something about one of these fake pictures that a Drive-By Media still can’t get it right.
The Israeli F-16 that was photographed out of the picture — well, it was in the picture. They showed apparently four missiles being launched, four missiles from the F-16. They were not missiles. It was one flare, chaff. It’s stuff jets release to confuse surface-to-air missiles, and the one flare that was released, of course, with its blazing front end, was cloned into four different flares, made to look like missiles. But flares don’t do any destruction, and they’re still talking about the destruction of one missile. There was no missile. It was a flare, launched backwards. The jet is streaking through the sky down, the flares launched backwards to try to confuse any surface-to-air missile. It’s not hard to understand if you have a rudimentary understanding of aviation and aircraft, particularly military aircraft. Let me ask if you’ve seen this story anywhere in the Drive-By Media.
There is a Wahhabi mullah or imam in Saudi Arabia. A cleric who was instrumental in inspiring Osama bin Laden issued a fatwa demanding that Saudis oppose the devil in this context. The devil is Hezbollah. Have you seen this reported? Of course you haven’t seen this reported! ‘A top Saudi Sunni cleric whose ideas inspired Osama bin Laden issued a religious edict Saturday disavowing the Shiite guerrilla group Hezbollah. Hezbollah, which translates as ‘the party of God,’ is actually ‘the party of the devil,’ said Sheik Safar al-Hawali. ‘Don’t pray for Hezbollah,’ he said in the fatwa posted on his Web site.’ So all this talk about Arab unity and the changing course that Arabs are all of a sudden siding with the Hezbos. If that’s happening, to any extent, it’s just because Hezbollah is getting its butt kicked, like I spent great time telling you on Friday.
Now, how about the New York Times? The New York Times, as we know, sympathizes with terrorists. I’ll give you a couple examples from August the 6th, yesterday. ‘A Disciplined Hezbollah Surprises Israel With Its Training, Tactics and Weapons.’ Oh, they are marveling at the New York Times over the military capabilities of a bunch of terrorists. They’re romanticizing them. The second story was by Steven Erlanger and Richard A. Oppel, Jr. The second story: ‘Arab World Finds Icon in Leader of Hezbollah,’ and this was by Neil MacFarquhar, who said from Israel last week that he lamented that from we now get Bush’s bombs instead of Kennedy’s milk. Same guy. ‘Arab World Finds Icon in Leader of Hezbollah,’ trying to build up the enemy again at the New York Times. Of course they’re not the enemy to the New York Times.
George W. Bush is the enemy, and anybody allied with him — in this case, the Israelis. Bush and the Israelis are the enemy. ‘The success or failure of any cease-fire in Lebanon will largely hinge on the opinion of one figure: Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, the Secretary-General of Hezbollah, who has seen his own aura and that of his party enhanced immeasurably by battling the Israeli Army for nearly four weeks.’ Yeah, and they’ve had a lot of help out there, Neil, from fake, forged photos and pictures, staged events, you and your buddies in the Drive-By Media have done a bang-up job in shifting world opinion against the Israelis, but this is just over the line here. The Secretary-General of Hezbollah? As though they are a legitimate government, elected by their people? Secretary-General of Hezbollah? Who gave him that title? And if he gave it to himself, why in the world do you respect it, Mr. MacFarquhar? Secretary-General!? We are now, in the Drive-By Media in this country, extending titles of respect and auras of admiration to terrorist leaders.
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