RUSH: Marie, Newport Beach, Arkansas, welcome to the EIB Network. Hello.
CALLER: Hi. Did you say Arkansas?
RUSH: Yeah, because I figured if there’s an Albany, Indiana, there’s gotta be a Newport Beach, Arkansas.
CALLER: There might be, but it’s Newport Beach, California.
RUSH: Okay, thanks for correcting me. Great to have you here.
CALLER: And it’s Larie, but that’s okay.
RUSH: What is it?
CALLER: Larie with an L.
RUSH: Well, the staff is making me look great again today. Thanks, Larie.
CALLER: Okay, Rush, it’s an honor and pleasure to speak to you. I’ve been listening to probably, if it wasn’t the first day, it was the first week you went national, so I’m a little ashamed of myself that I can’t figure out the answer to my own question. It has to do with what you said, you say a lot, that the left, the liberal media, they’re lapdogs for Obama so they can be invited to parties. And I have trouble wrapping my arms around that because, okay, there are comparisons made between Obama and FDR, and I know there are a lot of similarities, but the difference I think in them is FDR loved this country, I believe that, and he recognized our enemy and he fought them to defeat them, and the media supported the war effort, they weren’t counting body bags on Normandy. So my question is at what point did the media stop being watchdogs? Don’t Charlie Gibson and Diane Sawyer love this country?
RUSH: The timing of your call is profoundly propitious. I was discussing this very phenomenon with a friend last night in an instant message chat going back and forth. My friend is constantly pointing out to me all of the failings of the media when they fail to hold anybody accountable and so forth. Look at how they went after Nixon, they even went after LBJ, they even went after Kennedy, and I said, ‘There’s a reason.’ And I’m going to answer your question this way, Larie, and it’s one of these don’t doubt me points. I firmly believe — I’ve said this before on the program — I firmly believe that what has driven the media from liberal sympathy to liberal advocacy is me and the rise of conservative media. Back in the day before we existed, they owned it, they had a monopoly, and they were sympathizers, and they were all liberals just as they are now. But there was no opposition of any significance. The conservative opposition back then was, as they themselves refer to it, very civil, it was Mr. Buckley on Firing Line and his magazine, it was Bob Michel presiding over a hundred Republicans who played golf rather than went to work in the House of Representatives, and everything was fine. The libs got to run the show, occasionally they had to deal with a Republican president but the press would help take him out. But now the press is more interested in defeating me and us than they are holding the administration to any type of accountability. I think what’s happened here is that they have been forced into admitting who they always have been. Now there’s no pretense at objectivity; there’s no pretense of holding truth to power; there’s no pretense of any accountability because now it’s more important to defeat us than it is to hold Obama or any other Democrat accountable.
CALLER: Yes. It’s unbelievable.
RUSH: I told my friend, if we didn’t exist — of course, this is a hypothetical you have to just imagine because we can’t, we do exist, but pretend that we don’t. If we didn’t exist right now they would be behaving far differently toward Obama.
CALLER: Huh.
RUSH: There’s no question in my mind. We’re putting them out of business.
CALLER: Yeah.
RUSH: I mean the viewers of the NBC, CBS, and ABC nightly newscasts are gone. Whoever anchors doesn’t matter anymore. You know, they’re not godlike purveyors of truth anymore.
CALLER: Hmm.
RUSH: Their audiences have been fragmented — 25,000 people a night watch CNN some nights. Their most popular show, Larry King Alive is now finishing behind MSNBC. As David Bauder of the Associated Press itself asks, when’s the last time Larry King interviewed anybody that mattered?
CALLER: Well, could half of that be just the apathy of the country, I mean more people are tuning in to Dancing with the Stars and, you know, they’re oblivious? I’m a mother of two little kids and —
RUSH: Well, no, no, there’s always been that, there’s always been I Love Lucy, there’s always been Mission Impossible. I’m talking about it used to be 80% of the country watched Cronkite, Huntley, Brinkley and whoever ABC had.
CALLER: Yeah.
RUSH: Now it’s 15 to 20%. Look at the newspapers, look at the news magazines, they’re losing pages, they’re losing advertisers, they’re laying people off. Not happening to us on the radio.
CALLER: No. No.
RUSH: But I really firmly believe this. I know I’m going to get some argument on this so let me make it clear. I’m not saying that if we aren’t around they’d be beating Obama up. Don’t misunderstand. They would be full-throated supporters of Obama, but if we weren’t around it wouldn’t be this slavish, in the tank, sycophantic coverage because they now feel it necessary to defend themselves and him against us. Look, Obama urges more opposition to us than he does Islamic terrorists.
CALLER: Yep.
RUSH: So there’s no question that in my mind that the ascension of this New Media has contributed greatly to the old legacy media going further and further and totally in the tank from just sympathizers with a pretense of objectivity to now full-throated agenda advocates. Can you get your arms around that?
CALLER: Yeah, but it’s just hard to believe.
RUSH: Why? Why is it hard to believe? If you understand human nature, if you understand the power that they think they had, the monopolistic power and now they don’t have it — can you believe a guy on the radio or a guy on television is the focus of enemy attack, media, all weekend long? I, a guy on the radio who can’t raise anybody’s taxes, can’t send anybody off to war, I cannot do one thing, I can’t harm you economically, I can’t do a damn thing and I am treated as a enemy of the state —
CALLER: And if you weren’t right you wouldn’t have the following you do.
RUSH: True.
CALLER: We wouldn’t be listening.
RUSH: Ever so true.
CALLER: Nobody listens to —
RUSH: Liberalism is a lie. They got away with the lie for all of these years. Now they’re being called on all of these things that are not true and they’ve got their backs up. That’s it.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Folks, don’t misunderstand me out there. I’m not saying that the media held Kennedy and LBJ’s feet to the fire. They did not do that. But there still was a pretense of some accountability. They had to explain themselves. LBJ, I guaran-damn-tee you, had to explain himself on Vietnam. The media did not like that. Who was it that forced him outta office? Now, my point is that had we been around during the Vietnam War, they woulda turned on us before they turned on LBJ. That is all I’m saying, because we were against LBJ. It’s one thing if they do it on their own, fine, but they’re not going to follow us. If we say, ‘I hope Obama fails ’cause I want the country to succeed,’ they’re going to take me on and defend Obama. It doesn’t matter. I don’t really think it’s all that arguable. I mean, the media didn’t have much to say about Hitler until he turned on the Soviets. That’s when they started hating Hitler because they loved the Soviets.
These people were always very soft on Soviet communism. They mocked anti-communism and made fun of it. They’ve just gotten worse over the years, and now they have been forced into owning up on which side they’ve always been. Look, they didn’t roll over for Jimmy Carter. They made fun of Jimmy Carter and so forth. They had a lot of problems with him. But it’s different now. And had we been around during Carter, Carter would have gotten almost the same treatment Obama does if we had been leading the charge against Carter as we are against Obama. Because they’re going to choose sides. If they are the lone force of accountability, they’ll be out there. By the way, Bill Clinton — I’ve been to two of these. The last time I went to the White House Correspondents Dinner, that night I was the guest of Judy Keen. She was at USA Today.
I’m sitting there minding my own business, and all of a sudden Bill Clinton, the president, says (doing impression), ‘Hey, do you like the way Rush Limbaugh stuck up for Janet Reno on his program the other night? Heh-heh. He only did it because she was attacked by a black guy,’ and the room went into a hush, and there was a, ‘Ooooh, and an aw.’ Today if that would have happened it wouldn’t have resulted in a standing ovation. Chris Matthews came up to me after the dinner that night. ‘You can’t let that stand! You’re not the Rush Limbaugh I know if you let the president of the United States call you a racist in front of the whole town here tonight. You can’t let that stand.’ Today, if I were to go to the White House Correspondents Dinner, I guarantee you — and I’m not. I got over 20 invitations from different people this year to go.
Folks, do you realize if I went to that the whole night would change? Every speaker would ad-lib comments about me, including Obama, and every joke — derogatory or otherwise — about me would get a standing O from the 1,200 people in the room. I don’t go out of respect for these people. I don’t want to ruin their night, in manner of speaking. And I don’t want to upstage all the Hollywood celebrities that they’re bringing in. ‘Cause if I showed up in the room it would come to a halt. It’d come to a screeching halt. Somebody would say, ‘Oh, we gotta tell Obama! Limbaugh is here. Find out what table Limbaugh is at.’ So I’m not going. Now, the ‘black guy’ happened to be John Conyers and John Conyers had conducted hearings into the Waco invasion, and I thought that Conyers had showboated to make himself look like a big guy.
He was being rude to Janet Reno rather than trying to find out what happened, and we wanted to know what happened. And he was spending time raking her over the coals. I wasn’t defending Reno. I was talking about the unproductive nature of the hearings because of the grandstanding by Conyers. So Clinton tells his joke (doing impression) ‘Yeah, yuk-yuk! You like the way Rush stuck up for Janet Reno on his program the other night? He only did it ’cause she was being attacked by a black guy.’ You know, when President Obama leaves office, we will effectively have no manned space program. We will have no insurance companies, health insurance companies. We’ll have probably no private automobile companies. See the fine Toyota got? Where does the money go, by the way? No private student loan operations. No energy production, no growth in energy. And, of course, no money left. That’s just scratching the surface.
My friend wrote to me last night: ‘What is so troubling is the complete breakdown in any sort of accountability. No one in the Democrat Party has spoken out about Obama. They spoke out when FDR tried to pack the court, the Democrats did. They spoke out against Truman. Some of them spoke out against JFK and Carter, but they circled the wagons around Clinton and they’re doing the same for Obama. This is a party and media that does not put the country first and the argument that seemed to get the votes necessary for government-run health care was ‘to save Obama,’ not to help the people.’
I wrote back, ‘It’s not the same Democrat Party. Genuine radicals are now leading it.’
He responded, ‘The media that hunted down Nixon and tried to destroy Reagan is in full defensive mode, and as such there’s no check. They had to purify their own party before they could take the notion.’
I said, ‘Here’s the dirty little secret, and I’m thoroughly convinced of it: The media has hardened solidly left now because of the ascendancy of our New Media. The motive will always be to destroy us before holding Obama or any other Democrat accountable. I would almost posit that were it not for our existence and the perception they have of our power — that if we were not around — they would be more circumspect of Obama even though probably less than normal because of his race, give him more of a pass because of his race.’
‘What do you mean, Rush? Are you afraid to go to the dinner?’
No, I’m not afraid to go to the White House Correspondents Dinner! Folks, the real reason I don’t want to go to the thing is it’s phony. Twelve hundred people get together in a room. You know, politics is show biz for the ugly. This is their equivalent of the Academy Awards, and they all get together and they pretend they like each other for a few hours — and they don’t like each other. They all have yuks and so forth but they don’t like each other. I don’t want to go in there and pretend I have some sort of fraternal relationship with these people because I don’t. They don’t think I’m in the fraternity, and I don’t want to be in the fraternity. And last year, was it Wanda Sykes who said she hoped I died? She got a standing ovation at the White House Correspondents Dinner.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: And one more recollection from the past, ladies and gentlemen. Just as this past Friday, when President Clinton first floated that I was responsible again for Oklahoma City and that the tea party would be responsible for any future such acts, we were in the process of raising millions of dollars for the cure for leukemia and lymphoma. After the Murrah building was blown up, it was this program which raised millions of dollars for victims inside via the Marine Corps-Law Enforcement Foundation. The Marine Corps-Law Enforcement Foundation raises money and passes it all back. There are effectively zero administrative costs, I mean one or 2%. They provide college scholarships and educations for the children of Marines killed in action, and during events such as the Oklahoma City bombing, they extended that to the children of Customs agents who were killed, FBI agents who were killed, other federal agents, children were taken care of after the Oklahoma City bombing, and who was it that was raising money for that? It was you and me on this program. And yet we were implicated as being responsible for it. This is why I have no desire to go to a party in Washington and pretend that I’m in the same fraternity as these people. Zilch, zero, nada.