Kurtz Takes Rush Out of Context on Hillary

RUSH: I want to start with audio sound bites today, folks, and another in a never ending, long line of illustrations of how it is that I (in this case) and many others are taken totally out of context, on purpose, by the Drive-By Media, and this happened on Reliable Sources yesterday on CNN, hosted by our old buddy Howard Kurtz. He plays an audio sound bite from me and this program last week that makes it sound like I think Hillary Clinton should loosen up, but that was not the case. We’ll play their bit, and then we’ll follow it with the whole bite of what I had said, putting it in context — and, of course, it misled one of the guests, a friend of mine, Debra Saunders, who’s a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, who was moved to profoundly disagree with me based on the out-of-context nature of the sound bite. So here we go. Howard Kurtz: “Let me play a sound bite for you from Rush Limbaugh’s radio show in which he talked about the way Hillary Clinton is being treated by the media these days.”
RUSH CLIP OUT OF CONTEXT: …Hillary needs to loosen up. Nobody really knows her, nobody really knows who she is. She’s just so tightly wound that she appears fake. So what do they want her to do, dance, smile, tell jokes, wear low cut dresses? Hell, wear dresses!
KURTZ: Debra Saunders, what accounts for the contrast between the way that Senator Clinton is treated and the way Senator Obama is treated?
SAUNDERS: Well, everybody has seen Hillary Clinton for years and she is not a new flavor. I couldn’t disagree more with Rush Limbaugh. We know a lot about her on a personal level. We know who she is. We’ve seen her. We know what she’s going to be like.
RUSH: All right, now, if you were just watching CNN and you heard that, you would think, “My gosh, there’s a conservative columnist disagreeing with Limbaugh,” and making it look like I don’t know what I’m talking about when it comes to Hillary. So remember where they started the bite. “…Hillary needs to loosen up.” They left out about 60% of the whole comment. What you just heard was maybe 30%, 20% of what I said. Here is the whole comment that I made — and note that I am talking about what people in Iowa are saying about her!
RUSH ARCHIVE: “Iowa Democrats say notoriously disciplined Sen. Hillary Clinton may need to loosen up if she wants the state to support her presidential plans. Gordon Fischer, the former Iowa Democratic Party Chairman, said Clinton’s carefully controlled demeanor might prevent her from connecting with voters, the New York Daily News reported Tuesday. ‘I don’t know that you can win in the Iowa caucuses and be a control freak,’ said Fischer, who supports the presidential ambitions of Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack. Fischer said [that Hillary] can improve her chances by visiting every county in the state before the Democratic caucuses, which are scheduled to be the first in the country, in 13 months… ‘You get a bus, and you go to all 99 counties…you’ve got to spend time, and really talk to people.'” There’s an interesting companion story to this, unrelated to the details of this, but it’s quite telling at the same time. The whole concept here is Hillary needs to loosen up. Nobody really knows her. Nobody really knows who she is. She’s just so tightly wound that she appears fake. So what do they want her to do? Dance? Smile? Tell jokes? Wear low-cut dresses? Hell, wear dresses! They want her to act human? They want her to take a position on something? They want her to cry? This woman cannot hold a press conference unless it’s totally planned and scripted to protect her. She hasn’t been asked any tough questions about anything from anybody in six years.
RUSH: Okay. So you see, I was totally quoting the people from Iowa and then ridiculed. What do they want her to do? They want her to loosen up? They want her to drive around, dance, smile, tell jokes, wear dresses, low-cut dresses or what have you? I was mimicking them. This is no big deal, and I’m not upset about it. Don’t misunderstand the passion and enthusiasm in my voice. That’s for my job. I just love the job and I get worked up. But this is a clear and classic illustration. Now, they had to have the whole bite, because they pulled what I said from the middle of it. It wasn’t the beginning or it wasn’t just the end, and so they left out the crucial part that I was sort of mocking the Iowans: What do you want her to do, what do we already not know about this woman? Essentially, Debra Saunders and I think the same thing about Mrs. Clinton. I was chiding the people from Iowa. But in this case, Debra was led astray by the out-of-context clip as aired by our old buddy Howard Kurtz at CNN.