RUSH: Well, we get to start off today with some news that’s not going to make the left happy. “A USA Today/CNN/Gallup poll of 609 adults taken September 5th and 6th: 13% said that George W. Bush is ‘most responsible’ for the problems in New Orleans after the hurricane; 18% said federal agencies are most responsible; 25% said that state and local officials more responsible; 38% said nobody is to blame; 6% had no opinion, and 29% said the top officials in the federal agencies responsible for handling emergencies should be fired; 63% said they should not.” If you look at the whole poll, it’s pretty balanced. It’s pretty reasonable. The left, you know, if I didn’t know better I would say that after this, with this bad news for them, “13% blame Bush,” after what you people have seen on television for the 
last week and only 13% blame him? I tried to tell you yesterday. Can I tell you why this poll is what it is? It’s real simple. Most of the American people do not live and breathe politics like the mainstream media does. They don’t look at everything through a political prism. They just don’t. The mainstream media is that out of touch. I mean, every bit of news that comes out of the mainstream press today is looked at through a political prism and most people don’t look at it that way. It’s a hurricane! Can I make it real simple for you? A hurricane hit New Orleans. George Bush doesn’t live there. George Bush is in Washington. How can he possibly be to blame for this? And they don’t buy this notion that Bush didn’t do enough for global warming, and that Bush somehow steered the hurricane. It’s all rot, but the people on the left believe it, this 13%, they believe it. They’re just poisoned, folks. These people have literally become poisoned with their own hatred, something I have been telling you pleasantly that has been happening lo these many years.
The American people see the destruction, the devastation of New Orleans; they don’t think politics. They don’t look at this as a political event. A hurricane, it’s not a political event. But there’s the mainstream press because the mainstream press is on the same side of the aisle as Democrat liberal kook activists, and there is, as you know, an ongoing effort to destroy George W. Bush. “Oh, this is Bush’s whatever. This is the one we’re going to get him with. Okay, the Burkett stuff didn’t work and Cindy Sheehan didn’t work.” Nothing is going to work. The American people don’t look at all this the way the mainstream press and the Democrats do. Now, let’s look at this 13% number here: 13% said that George W. Bush most responsible for the problems in New Orleans after the hurricane. We will admit, we’ll have to admit, that there’s a percentage of this country that literally hates and despises Bush. I would like to posit for you, ladies and gentlemen, this number, 13%, probably is a grand total of the Democrat blogs — the Democrat Underground, the MoveOn.org, and the George Soros crowd — and some of the elected Democrats around the country, and I would bet also that that number hasn’t changed. I’ll bet you it’s the same number that held hatred for Bush starting in 2000 in the Florida election aftermath. Well, we know the number isn’t growing. I mean, every news cycle seems to feature a new avenue that the left thinks they have found to destroy the Bush presidency, and yet 13% — and this is a USA Today/CNN/Gallup poll — that 13% number is not growing, and the reason it isn’t growing is simple; it’s understandable. Hatred is not inspirational. Hatred does not
Nobody wants to hang around somebody that’s constantly angry and filled with rage and hatred, constantly unhappy. Nobody wants to hang around people like that. Those people don’t lead great movements. These people are not the backbone of America, and they’re going even crazier. As each of these efforts that they mount, each of these events that they look at through a political prism, as they fail they get angrier and angrier and angrier, and rather than realize this is failing, they say, “Well, we’re not hating enough, and we’re not being outrageous enough,” and so they continue to pile more hatred on top of more hatred, and they actually end up treading water, marking ground, or losing it. It wouldn’t surprise me, ladies and gentlemen, if this poll causes a panic that will result in the Democrats — you see where Jane Fonda had to cancel her bus tour? Her anti-war tour? Yeah, Jane Fonda canceled her death tour. The Pope’s death I think screwed up her book tour, and now the hurricane has canceled her anti-war bus tour with George Galloway. If I didn’t know better… The Democrats may put out a distress call to Cindy Sheehan and ask Cindy Sheehan to set up here anti-war rally somewhere on the outskirts of flooded New Orleans. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if that happened. I mean, the kook left, the fringe out there, just going to be beside themselves with anger over this and frustration. They’ll go back to the old playbook. They never move forward; they always go back.
They may even go try to find Bill Burkett and say, “Bill, would you join Cindy Sheehan on the outskirts of New Orleans at an anti-Bush protest?” While it’s funny, you know, it is. I mean, the first thing you do is laugh at it. I don’t know how many of you heard the call yesterday from Vince, a black man in North Carolina who is convinced that there’s a racial component in New Orleans and that Bush wants black people to die and might have even been responsible for as many black deaths as possible. I had a conversation with him 
yesterday, took about ten or 15 minutes, and I said to him, “You know, Vince, your attitude here — because I know you probably speak for a lot more people than you realize — is more depressing to me than what’s happened in New Orleans, because that attitude is going to survive.” That attitude is going to grow. That attitude is going to prevail. New Orleans will get fixed and rebuilt and cleaned up in time, but the poison that is flowing through the minds and veins of some Americans is still there, and you hate to see it. These people are ruining their lives. It’s tough. It’s really hard to believe that they’re Americans. It’s hard to believe that we have people like this in this country. It’s very sobering when you stop and think about it, and if you let it, it can become depressing. So who wants to be depressed? So what we choose to do is just laugh at these yokels and say, “Hey, they’re making their bed; they can lay in it. They’re taking their shower; they can drown in it,” whatever metaphor you want to use.
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RUSH: I just shared with you the striking thing about the poll: 13% of the country say Bush is most responsible. Only 13%. If you look at the coverage in the press — there’s no question about this — the media has sought to destroy George W. Bush along with their allies on the left. So here comes the poll, and there’s a lot of stuff in this poll, but the thing you look at and compare it against is the figure here that consider Bush to be most responsible. It’s a lowly 13%. It indicates total failure on the part of the press and the leftists to convince Americans that Bush is single-handedly to blame for this. So it’s a USA Today/CNN/Gallup poll. I couldn’t find this poll for a while today. I knew the 13% was out there, but I couldn’t find on the CNN site or USA Today site the poll. Finally, about 11:30 today, a little less than a hour ago I found the poll on CNN. You know what the headline there is? “Most Americans Believe New Orleans Will Never Recover.” (Laughing.) Subhead: “Still, 63% of respondents say city should rebuild. The majority of Americans believe the city of New Orleans will never completely recover from the effects of Hurricane Katrina and the resulting flooding, according to results of a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll.” To get to the 13% figure, you have to go to the fourth-to-last paragraph, and it’s hardly mentioned at all. It’s mentioned in passing: “Respondents also disagreed widely on who is to blame for the problems: 13% said Bush, 18% said federal agencies, 25% blame state or local officials, 38% said no one is to blame, and 63% said they don’t believe anybody at federal agencies responsible, should be fired,” blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Clearly they’re not highlighting the most important result from this poll because it’s not what they want.
So you take that, and you go to the Washington Post today, and this is going to illustrate a point I made at the top of the program. Most Americans outside of an election year, and particularly in the midst of a disaster like this, don’t look at news and don’t look at events through a political prism. Most people just don’t. So here is Dan Balz in the Washington Post today: “For Bush, a Deepening Divide; Katrina Crisis Brings No Repeat of 9/11 Bipartisanship — When terrorists struck on September 11th, Americans came together in grief and resolve, rallying behind President Bush, but when Hurricane Katrina hit last week, the opposite occurred: Americans dividing along sharply partisan lines in their judgment of the president’s and the federal government’s response.” No, they didn’t. That’s the point. The majority of the American people didn’t look at this that way. Most people are sensible. Most people don’t take a natural disaster like this and start looking at it in a political way. The Washington Post is convinced that Bush is taking it on the chin. Now, granted, Mr. Balz’s story went to bed last night before the USA Today/CNN/Gallup poll results were known. Here’s another paragraph from Balz’s story. “To his critics, Bush is now reaping what he has sown. Their case against him goes as follows: Facing a divided nation, the president has eschewed unity in both his governing strategy and his political blueprint. These opponents argue that he has favored confrontation over conciliation with the Democrats while favoring a set of policies aimed at deepening support among his conservative base at the expense of ideas that might produce bipartisan–” See, this is all balderdash. This is written from the perspective that liberalism is supreme, that liberalism is dominant, that liberalism is just what 
This is all just balderdash. But, you see, from the standpoint of the mainstream press, liberalism is what is. These are arrogant, condescending elites. They don’t yet know they’re in the minority, and so Bush, in order to be a good governor — and I mean governor with a small G — needs to, uh, “reach out” and govern in a “bipartisan way.” Notice it is never stated when Democrats run the show that they must do the same, that they must reach out and govern in a bipartisan way. In fact, there’s no such thing as Democrats being partisan when they are liberals because that’s just what is. So here’s this big, brainy piece and our buddies at ABC The Note cite this piece today as the must-read story in the Washington media. Our buddies at ABC The Note point out if you’re going to read anything today, read this because it’s the best thing going today, the Dan Balz piece. Now, in this same paragraph, where Balz starts out to his critics, “Bush is now reaping what he has sown and their case against him,” blah, blah, blah, blah. “These opponents argue that he has favored confrontation — but allies and advisers, while acknowledging that polarization has worsened during the past five years, say the opposition party bears the brunt of responsibility. Democrats, by this reckoning, have rebuffed Bush’s efforts at bipartisanship, put up a wall to ideas that once enjoyed some support on their side, and, even in the current crisis along the Gulf Coast, are seeking to score political points rather than joining hands with the president to speed the recovery and relief to the victims.”
Okay, so that paragraph spells out where the two supposed partisan sides are in this. Next graph is this: “Wherever reality lies between these mutual recriminations, the path from post-9/11 unity to the rancor and finger-pointing in the aftermath of Katrina’s fury charts a clear deterioration in political consensus in the United States and a growing willingness to interpret events through a partisan prism.” I wonder why that is? The fact of the matter is, though, Mr. Balz, the majority of the American people are not looking at it that way. Inside the Beltway, inside the media culture, which I contend is out of touch with real America, everything is looked at through a prism of politics, and not only that, it’s looked at through the prism of the destruction of George W. Bush politically. How can we destroy Bush politically? That’s where all this stuff gets started. It bubbles up from these kook websites and finds its way into the mainstream press, like these ridiculous and silly allegations that there’s racism going on down there when you have 75% of the population of New Orleans is black, and you’ve got the government black, and the state leadership is Democrat, and the mayor is a black Democrat, and yet somehow Bush is a racist. It’s silly. It’s absolutely stupid. Yet these people believe it. But most Americans don’t look at it that way. Most Americans don’t want to go through life looking at everything through a partisan political prism. They save election years for that, and then they go live their lives and they see a disaster, they see a hurricane, they say, “Whoa, a natural disaster, a terrible thing that happened there,” but they don’t stop, “Bush did this,” and when some lame-brains come along and say, “Bush did this! Bush is responsible! Bush wants blacks dead! Bush wants poor people dead!” they don’t hear it, because it’s so senseless. It just bounces off.
It’s clear here that, this deepening divide does not exist as Dan Balz writes about it. It just doesn’t exist. This USA Today/CNN/Gallup poll is sensible. It shows pretty much the sensible reaction by the American people, if you look at the majorities and the answers to these questions, it’s pretty sensible reaction. But the desire that everything be seen through a political prism forms the template of the reporting on these things, and since media people tend to think the world resolves around them. How many of you are sick and tired — I’ll raise my hand first here — how many of you are sick and tired watching television every day and watching these reporters congratulate each other for a job well done? It’s their job, for crying out loud! Is it only now that they’re really doing it well? Well, no, they compliment each other every day on the great work they’re doing. But the whole world seems to revolve around these people, and not just television. The whole media gets in and they start analyzing how they’re doing and what effect they’re having. Of course, it goes back to what they’re taught in journalism school. Why are you here? Go walking down the hall of any major journalism school in America, ask a budding young journalism student, “Why are you here?”
“I’m here because I want to change the world.”
“You’re not in the right place. You need to go get elected to office, get yourself into a policy position somewhere. You’re just supposed to report things that people didn’t see; tell them what happened.”
“No, I’m here to right the social wrongs, create social justice and make sure that there’s equality everywhere.”
“No, that’s not what journalism is about. Journalism is simply recording events people didn’t see and telling them about it. It’s not activism,” but that’s what it’s become and as such the journalists have lost touch with America while they think they’re doing a great job.
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