{"id":292363,"date":"2018-11-19T15:23:00","date_gmt":"2018-11-19T20:23:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/admin.rushlimbaugh.com\/?p=292363"},"modified":"2018-11-20T16:01:52","modified_gmt":"2018-11-20T21:01:52","slug":"according-to-liberals-i-am-responsible-for-everything-the-left-hates","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/admin.rushlimbaugh.com\/daily\/2018\/11\/19\/according-to-liberals-i-am-responsible-for-everything-the-left-hates\/","title":{"rendered":"According to Liberals, I Am Responsible for Everything the Left Hates"},"content":{"rendered":"

RUSH: Audio sound bites. I had no idea any of this has happened. I got here and Cookie sends me the roster. “You\u2019re the first nine sound bites.” I said, “What for?” “Well, they\u2019re blaming you for the partisanship, but they get an amazing number of things right.” So we\u2019re gonna start. This was Friday on NPR, program called This American Life, and the producer is Zoe Chace<\/a>, and it\u2019s a report about me and how I — according to their website — either reinvented politics or broke it. You will hear Zoe Chace in this thing with Newt Gingrich.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s the first bite…<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

CHACE: The House is stuck with that permanent Republican minority. That\u2019s where the second guy comes into the story, the guy that made Newt Gingrich\u2019s dreams finally come through. No, I don\u2019t mean Democratic President Bill Clinton. Something happened before that, someone.<\/p>\n

GINGRICH: This is a man who I think has had an astonishing impact on America. He is in many ways the quintessential American.<\/p>\n

CHACE: Here\u2019s Newt Gingrich introducing him in a training event for Republican candidates in 1995…<\/p>\n

\"\"GINGRICH: We now have a media giant who stands astride the entire society. Join me in welcoming a man who\u2019s creating the twenty-first century, Rush Limbaugh.<\/p>\n

CROWD: (applause)<\/p>\n

RUSH: Yeah. Okay. So they start out here… See where this is going? The Republicans won the House in 1994, which is a very abnormal thing to happen. The Republicans hadn\u2019t won the House in 40 years, and it shouldn\u2019t have happened in 1994, and it wouldn\u2019t have if I hadn\u2019t come along. I mean, they go so far as to say that I made it happen, not Newt. Now, I have thought all these years that this is what these people really thought. I have thought all these years that this is one of the reasons why there is such a contempt or hatred for me. But this is amazingly open and honest about all that.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s the next bite from this show…<\/p>\n

CHACE: Rush was outrageous, inciting. He made his listeners feel like they were part of a righteous underground movement, the only people who are still sane in a world gone crazy and stupid.<\/p>\n

RUSH ARCHIVE: Thank you. Thank you very much. Nice to be with all of you extremists tonight.<\/p>\n

CROWD: (laughter)<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

CHACE: Rush\u2019s communications ambitions were just as high as his political ones. He never wanted to be in politics. He just wanted to make the greatest radio show ever.<\/p>\n

RUSH ARCHIVE: Half my brain tied behind my back just to make it fair. It\u2019s the Rush Limbaugh program from New York and our flagship station WABC.<\/p>\n

CHACE: He set the standard for political talk radio, and of course… (shuffling papers) Wait! I have it right here. (shuffling papers) Widely imitated. Rush was funny.<\/p>\n

RUSH ARCHIVE: Did you know that the White House drug test is a multiple-choice test?<\/p>\n

AUDIENCE: (laughter)<\/p>\n

CHACE: He ends up acting almost as Newt\u2019s de facto interpreter. He zhooshed up his message. Rush doesn\u2019t sound like a nerdy YouTube professor. Gingrich talked about saving America from liberal politicians. But Limbaugh sharpened the us versus them. Democrats were about this. Republicans were about that.<\/p>\n

RUSH: I\u2019m wondering why are they doing this now? I\u2019m always curious about this. But this, again, is from an NPR show. And NPR is widely listened to by American Millennials and liberals and so forth, you stop and think of the people hearing this, and I\u2019m trying to figure out, why are they doing this now? Is it that now that they\u2019ve won the House back they don\u2019t think it\u2019s any big deal and they can move forward with it? But it\u2019s amazing because there\u2019s so much of this that\u2019s actually true, buried within what is intended to be apparently mild criticism. Here\u2019s one more bite from the show.<\/p>\n

CHACE: When Newt needed to communicate something to voters, he now had a direct line to millions of them, listening to Rush every afternoon. Newt wasn\u2019t just stirring the pot with divisive politics. He did have a policy vision. He got people to unite under it. Going into the 1994 midterm elections, hundreds of Republican candidates signed onto this thing, The Contract with America. For a moment they were all literally on the same page with Newt Gingrich. And with that Newt Gingrich, of course, got his majority, like he\u2019d always dreamed and became Speaker of the House in 1995. Although it was Newt\u2019s dream, many people called it the Limbaugh Congress.<\/p>\n

RUSH ARCHIVE: How does it feel to be part of a majority that\u2019s right? (cheers).<\/p>\n

RUSH: The Limbaugh Congress. I was made an honorary member of the House, the 1994 House, 1995, that was seated. We got two more bites here. Let\u2019s get to them.<\/p>\n

CHACE: From the moment Gingrich becomes speaker, things get pretty red versus blue. One Republican I talked to this week quoted to me from memory, indignant, something ABC News anchor Peter Jennings said on the air. When Republicans finally took the House and installed Gingrich as speaker, Jennings said the voters had a temper tantrum. This Republican\u2019s point was, it wasn\u2019t just Rush Limbaugh who was stoking the fires of partisan warfare. It was the mainstream media.<\/p>\n

The politics that follow are personal and vicious. With Timothy McVeigh, who blew up a federal office building in Oklahoma City, Clinton gives a speech blaming, in part, talk radio for spreading hate. It was gridlock politics. People signed up for red or signed up for blue. Politics is team sports. No compromises. In other words, we\u2019ve arrived at today.<\/p>\n

RUSH: This is amazing. She actually accurately describes how the media and the Democrats reacted to me and this program by becoming increasingly nasty and divisive. But she\u2019s also putting me right, front and center as the responsible party for today\u2019s partisanship, that if I hadn\u2019t come along, we may not be this divided. If I hadn\u2019t come along, there might not be this divisive conservative media out there. If I hadn\u2019t come along, maybe Newt wouldn\u2019t have won. If I hadn\u2019t come along, maybe there wouldn\u2019t have been this kind of gridlock, and on and on and on.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

It shows what these people have been thinking about, and it indicates how they have been just totally distressed over the loss of their monopoly. We\u2019ve got one more bite from this NPR show, This American Life. I don\u2019t know who\u2019s American life it was. Is it Newt\u2019s? Here\u2019s the final bite.<\/p>\n

CHACE: Rush Limbaugh was the opener for Trump\u2019s last rally before the midterm vote.<\/p>\n

RUSH ARCHIVE: I was just talking to people backstage, and somebody said that the president and all of us have been labeled by some Democrats in the media, divisive. (crowd boos) Divisive? The Democrats haven\u2019t even accepted they lost the election in 2016. (cheers).<\/p>\n

RUSH: Now, what could be the reason they\u2019re doing that? Are they afraid that history\u2019s gonna repeat itself? Are they afraid somehow that already the Democrats are gonna lose the House in 2020 and that Trump\u2019s gonna be reelected, and so this is to remind people of what happened way back in 1994-\u201995 and to be prepared for it.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s another show on A&E, and it\u2019s called The Clinton Affair, and in this show — I\u2019m not kidding — I am blamed for the Clinton-Lewinsky affair. I am blamed along with the vast right-wing conspiracy for the Clinton-Lewinsky affair, for the stained blue dress.<\/p>\n

BREAK TRANSCRIPT<\/p>\n

RUSH: Cookie tells me that she could have given me 10 bites from this podcast, This American Life, 10 bites. She gave me five. She says there\u2019s twice that much on there, but that\u2019s enough. I mean, I try not to make this program about me, as you well known. Some days it\u2019s impossible.<\/p>\n