RUSH: Okay, as always, it is up to me to provide context for the people who claim to be professional journalists and are aware of everything. Now, the setup for this, of course, is that I was libeled and slandered by countless members of the media, fabricated quotes, made-up quotes I never stated, never uttered, never wrote, nothing, were repeated all over this country by sportswriters, television cable hosts and so forth. After we proved to them that I didn’t do it they retracted it a week later, after the damage, and many of them said, ‘It still doesn’t matter, we know Limbaugh thinks it anyway.’
So last Friday, I get a note from a friend who says, ‘You ought to see what’s on this blog.’ I looked at it, and it was Obama, his thesis from Columbia, ‘so-called Founders,’ didn’t like what they did with the Constitution, there wasn’t enough talk about distribution of wealth and so forth. I said, ‘Well, this has a ring of truth to it,’ because we’ve got Obama on radio from Chicago 2001 complaining about the Supreme Court not doing enough about redistribution. So we ran with it, made a big deal out of it in the first hour. In the second hour, I got a note saying, ‘Hey, Rush, we looked at this, we can’t back this up, we can’t find any actual sourcing for this.’ So at that point I warned the audience that it may not be true, that we are still checking it.
Shortly thereafter I learned that the whole thing was made up, it was a satire piece on an obscure website. Then I said, ‘Okay, folks, I have to tell you, it’s satire, there’s no evidence that Obama ever wrote this, but, Media Tweak of the Day, I don’t care, I know he thinks it anyway because I’ve got audio of Obama saying it, talking about the Supreme Court.’ And we all got a great laugh about it because I corrected it immediately, I explained that it was a hoax, or was satire and then to tweak the media I said, ‘But I don’t care, I’m sticking with it because I know he thinks it anyway.’ So I dished out to Obama what the whole media did to me and I dished it back at the media as well. And Koko at the website called me on Friday here, e-mailed me, said, ‘Look, you want me to leave this thing up?’ I said ‘Yes, leave it on the website as is, so these idiot media people who want to find out what actually happened can go in and take the time to read it and see it. And leave the original piece up where I got the first information that this was something he had written in his thesis.’ So here is yesterday morning, Monday morning, 1010WINS in New York, a montage of correspondent Alice Stockton-Rossini’s report about this.
ROSSINI: When Rush Limbaugh discovers a hoax, he corrects it immediately. So what he spent a good part of his Friday broadcast gloating over an Internet story about how a TIME Magazine reporter got a hold of the president’s college thesis, and in it he disses the Constitution? So what the story was fake? When Limbaugh realized the report was fake he didn’t say sorry, not even oops. He insisted the fabricated theses is still in line with what the president thinks. How does he know? Because, says Limbaugh, he’s heard Obama say it. A transcript of the Friday broadcast is still at the top of Limbaugh’s Web page. The headline: ‘Obama’s Disdain for the Constitution. We know he thinks it, don’t we?’ But being Rush Limbaugh means never having to say you’re sorry. When Limbaugh realized the story was satire, he admitted the report was a fake, then added, ‘For good comedy to be comedy, it must contain an element of truth.’
RUSH: I continue to be amazed, and I marvel at how easy it is to make these people look like fools. She even says she went to my website. All of this ’cause I didn’t say I’m sorry. I don’t know that I’ve gotten one apology from anybody in the media about using fabricated quotes attributed to me. They live in such a narrow world; they are so unaware of what is really going on. I continue to be marveling at the fact that they don’t really know what happens in our world, folks, but we know everything about their world because we study ’em and we research ’em, and we don’t read fake websites quoting what media said. We listen to them. It pains us, it’s frustrating as hell, but we do it. Here’s Chris Matthews last night on Hardball.
MATTHEWS: Rush didn’t realize that it was a joke and broadcast the thesis story Friday as evidence that the president is, quote, anti-constitutionalist. Later in that same show Rushbo was told that the story was a hoax. Did he correct the record? Not exactly.
RUSH ARCHIVE: I shout from the mountaintops, ‘It was satire.’ But we know he thinks it. Good comedy, to be comedy, must contain an element of truth, and we know how he feels about distribution of wealth so we stand by the fabricated quote because we know Obama thinks it anyway.
MATTHEWS: You can’t beat that, did you hear that? Rush stands by the hoax because he told his Dittoheads a hoax contains truth. Well, it takes a true Dittohead to register on that one.
RUSH: These people! He has no clue that I’m parodying what happened to me, that he participated in. I don’t think I’ve gotten an apology from Matthews on this. So we stand by the fabricated quote? (laughing) I don’t know, folks. It’s fun. Did he correct the record? I shout from the mountaintops, element of truth, we know how he feels about distribution — We do know how he feels about it, so we stand by the fabricated quote. (laughing) Which is exactly what happened to me. I’m out of words to describe the insular world and the utter, utter lack of a sense of humor that these people have, particularly where Obama is concerned.