RUSH: We have a ban on playing what happens on MSNBC, and I’m not yet prepared to lift that ban. By the way, I should tell you that there is a lot of soul-searching going on over at NBC about what to do now with MSNBC. They finally have figured out that the garbage and trash on that network — and they admit, by the way, that it was a direct result of Fox, that they did their own version of Air America trying to take this program out. Well, they tried to do their version of Fox News on MSNBC, thinking that would be the way to compete and beat Fox, ’cause they think there are many more liberals in America than there are conservatives, and if conservatives are watching Fox, we’ll go get the liberals and we’ll smoke ’em.

And just as the people running Air America had no idea what they were doing, they had no idea why conservative talk radio succeeds, the liberals at NBC have no idea why Fox succeeds. They have no idea. Even the liberals who work at Fox, like the analysts and the commentators — and there are lots of ’em — even they do not know why Fox succeeds. They know Fox is number one, but they can’t figure out why. And the reason they can’t figure it out — I probably should not give up the ghost here. The reason they can’t figure it out is they do not understand connecting to an audience. They literally have no concept of what that even means.

The whole idea of connecting with an audience to liberals is beneath them. The audience is not worth connecting to; they’re not that smart. Otherwise they’d be here on the air, not watching us. There’s a general contempt for audiences, particularly the audience at Fox News, but even their own audience there’s a contempt for them, and they have no idea how to connect. So they make the assumption Fox succeeds because it’s conservative. They have no idea why Fox succeeds. That has maybe something to do with, I can’t deny that, but that’s not the sole reason, and it’s not even the majority reason Fox succeeds.

But you’ll never persuade a leftist of that. Some of the highest paid, supposedly most qualified news broadcast executives in the world work at NBC, and they do not know how to compete with Fox News. The first thing they do is look at it, they look at its success and then they ignore it. They say, “Well, you know, it’s a bunch of kooks and freaks. It’s a sideshow and it really isn’t representative of America, so we don’t really need to worry about it.” And they live in a state of utter and total denial.

Then they realize they have to compete with it so they do what they think Fox does only on the left side, and that’s just go wall to wall, total, extreme, radical leftist ideology, which is what they think Fox is on the right, and that’s not what Fox is, but that’s what they think it is. And the evidence is clear, they don’t have any audience. MSNBC is one of the greatest failures of all time in media.

What I was gonna say is that Ted Cruz was on MSNBC, I think it was this morning, with Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough. He just took Mika to school on this whole subject of the letter sent to the Iranian mullahs by 47 Republican senators. And you know how he took her to school? He simply explained the Constitution. She didn’t know what he was talking about. He just simply explained to her the ways things become law in America. And whenever he got to pointing out Congress either has to pass a law that gets sent to the president for signature or they have to ratify a treaty, which is what we’d be talking about here with this Iranian nuke deal, she couldn’t get past the idea that the Senate has any right to participate.

What gives them the right to participate? The president’s negotiating this deal, if the Senate gets involved they’re undermining him. And Cruz said, “No, no, no.” She was lost. No, I don’t want to say she had no clue. I mean, when he started talking about the system of checks and balances and how that separates us from tyrannies and dictatorships, she got lost. I mean, it was amazing to watch. A friend of mine sent this clip, said, “You gotta watch this, you gotta watch this. Ted Cruz just mops the floor with Mika.”

So, okay, my expectations were he’s gonna make mincemeat of her. That’s not what happened. It was a reasonable, no shouting discussion that ended up being a little seminar on the US Constitution from a guy who understands it to somebody who doesn’t. She was not rude or any of that. The discussion was civil. It was just striking that he was explaining two plus two equals four. Zbigniew Brzezinski’s daughter, yeah. And I don’t mean to be ripping her. Don’t misunderstand here now, because this is instructive.

Her basic point of view was, well, Obama’s the president and he gets to do whatever he wants to do, and anybody standing in his way is undermining him. And Cruz explained, no, we’re not undermining. We are protecting American foreign policy. We are using our legitimate constitutional role to be participants in this process. This cannot become law without us.

And since Obama’s doing it, people on the left think “oh, yes, it can, because you are the dreaded evil Republicans and what right do you have? You people are the problem. Obama has to go around your back, or over your head, because you’ll do nothing but sabotage him.” It was that kind of thing. She didn’t use those exact words.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: I’m sure Mr. Snerdley knows this, but even this was misunderstood this morning on MSNBC. That letter signed by the 47 Republicans, it was never sent to anybody. It was just posted. It was an open letter. It was posted on Senator Cotton’s website, and then it got reposted all over the place on social media. It wasn’t sent to the mullahs. What, they FedEx it over there? They didn’t do any of that. Does FedEx go to Tehran, DSL? No, of course not. I’m just joking. But you would think that the letter was actually delivered and it was insulting? It’s incredible.