RUSH: Breaking news out of Raleigh, North Carolina: WRAL-TV there, Channel 5 is reporting that the district attorney Mike Nifong has moved today to drop all rape charges against the three Duke University lacrosse players. That’s all it says on their website. I am looking at it even as doing the program here. That’s all it says. It’s a Christmas miracle. It’s a obviously a great Christmas present for these guys, but there’s going to be much more to this in the ensuing days there, because where do these guys go to get their reputations back now? 
Where do these guys go? Look at all that happened. The lacrosse team was shut down! This whole thing has been a travesty, and Nifong apparently, if this little blurb on the Channel 5 Raleigh, North Carolina, website is accurate, has dropped the charges or has moved to drop the charges against the three Duke lacrosse players today. That’s all well and good, but how did this happen in the first place? Our criminal justice system is designed to protect the innocent. We all know how this happened. It was politics, and it was race. Now, speaking of Duke University I had a story here in the stack that I was going to share with you today, before I even knew that the little blurb was going to run that Nifong was dropping charges. This is from the Raleigh News & Observer: “Dogged by months of damaging news stories about the lacrosse scandal, Duke University has launched a costly campaign of alumni dinners, national surveys, and aggressive recruitment.
“The effort, which includes a 12-city tour by the president, Richard Broadhead and an entourage of faculty and students is part of a larger push to blunt publicity generated by gang rape allegations involving lacrosse players. The charges resulted…” Now, listen to this. “The charges resulted in an embarrassing examination of the school’s social and academic culture.” That is not what was embarrassing about this! What was embarrassing was the inexcusable way and the cowardly way that the faculty and the administration at Duke University responded to the allegations. What was embarrassing was the way the faculty responded, how they threw their customers, the students, under a business driven by a politically motivated district attorney. They didn’t question it at all. This is just typical. This kind of thing makes me cringe. All of the circumstantial evidence from the moment this case was announced cast doubt on these charges. Everybody had doubts about it, but look at what happened.
This is a great Drive-By Media example. Drive-Bys show up and they start launching all kinds of ammo and stuff and get everybody on fire. They just incinerate the place, and we had stories about how these are “wealthy, white, privileged elitist athletes” and how automatically they gotta be guilty! “Why, this is a racist society and why that is Durham, North Carolina. We know what Durham, North Carolina is. This is the South, and we know that racism lives,” and we had this poor black woman who was just struggling to feed her baby by stripping and showing up at parties like this and so forth. The presumption of guilt from the moment the charges were filed establishes a point that I have been making since my own little run-in with criminal justice, and by the way, this is not political. There is, in our society, this total respect for law enforcement.
They have infinite credibility. If they leak any details of the story to the Drive-By Media, and the story results with the phrase “sources close to the investigation,” everybody just believes it because everybody has a very high opinion of law enforcement. “Why would they lie? I mean, they’re out there catching bad guys. They are the one thing that protects us from total anarchy. Why would they make it up, why would they lie?” So it’s just a natural predisposition on the part of all of us to accept what law enforcement says as gospel. I think in this case, this is one of the most glaring examples of that, that there could have been, and it was epitomized and led by the sheer panic at Duke University. I call these students “customers.” These students pay or are on scholarship. They’re doing something to earn their way into this university, and the first mention of any of these kinds of charges, the university — I wonder if they’re still going to do their image campaign. 
I wonder if they’re still going to do this. I wonder if they’re going to do their twelve city tour with the president and an entourage of faculty, part of “their larger push to blunt publicity generated by gang-rape allegations involving lacrosse players. Duke officials are not going to say how much the image makeover costs, but its reach is extensive. ‘I’ve told you trustees going to take two to five years to recover…'” Recover from what? They didn’t do anything, unless you want to say that kids having a party in their house is bad for a university’s image, and I think that’s going to be a tough sell. I don’t think anybody out there expects that everybody at Duke is in bed by 9:30 at night and up by six or five, hitting the books, working out, going to practice, or what have you? What image do they have to rebuild? The image they have to rebuild is that they are not open-minded. The image that they have to rebuild is that they’re reactionary and that there may be not willing to accept the word of their students.
They shut down the whole lacrosse operation over this. “There are signs that Duke’s recruitment efforts could take a hit from the lacrosse fallout.” This story was published, by the way, today. The university’s early decision applications dropped by nearly 20% this fall, and officials concede the decrease was related partly to the scandal. The regular application deadline isn’t until January,” something or other. So it’s all for naught. It doesn’t mean anything. Duke would not have a reputation to have to repair if they had just sat back and let this stuff play out or maybe if they had instead aggressively sought the truth themselves and not presumed the guilt automatically. See, you talk about guilt. It was precisely that that made the Duke administration react the way it did — “Oh, my gosh, it’s gotta be true! White guys, black girl? Oh, it’s gotta be true!” — not because they’re administrators, because they’re liberals, and it’s just the way they look at these kind of things, and so now Nifong is dropping the charges, or has moved to drop the charges. The defense is saying this, by the way, but it’s all over the website WRAL Channel 5 in Raleigh and now the cable nets are starting to pick up the story.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Okay, have some more details now. They’re trickling out. All the charges have not been dropped in the Duke Lacrosse case. “The rape charges have been dropped against all three, but the DA said that he plans to proceed with kidnapping and sexual assault charges against the three players.” He’s simply dropping the rape charges, and there’s a reason for that. There isn’t any evidence of rape in any of the DNA testing; it’s contradictory statements. The accuser’s friend has really just destroyed the whole concept. The accuser’s pregnant, got pregnant tweaks after the alleged rapes took place, but Nifong is not dropping the whole thing. He plans to proceed with kidnapping and sexual sought charges against the three players. “Nifong’s investigators interviewed the alleged victim yesterday, and she told investigators that she couldn’t testify with certainly that she was raped.”
This is the first time Nifong spoke to her. She can’t be certain she was raped? She couldn’t testify with certainty she was raped? Wait a minute. That doesn’t jibe with anything what we have been taught about rape. You get raped, you know it. This is still a mess, total mess. This is some sort of a face-saving move, obviously. Also breaking news from ABC News. They are reporting that they have learned “that Al-Qaeda operatives in Greater London are being encouraged to strike during the Christian holiday.” Well, why not? Of course! We deserve it, ladies and gentlemen. We deserve to be hit, particularly on a highest Christian holiday. We deserve to be hit. Absolutely! We need to get our just desserts for all these years of poisoning the world and dominating the world and destroying resources and creating havoc and causing pollution! We deserve everything we get. Seth in Delhi, Louisiana, you’re next on the EIB Network. Hello, sir.
CALLER: Dittos, Rush.
RUSH: Hey.
CALLER: Okay. I wanted to know if it was more the police or the prosecutors leaking this information, because my understanding it was more the prosecutor’s office leaking all this information, not the police.
RUSH: Wait, in this particular case?
CALLER: In the Duke rape case.
RUSH: Uhhhhh, look. (laughing) It’s both.
CALLER: You think?
RUSH: Of course. It’s not the DA himself. He’s got people in the office that will leak. This whole thing has been done in the media. The whole purpose of this was to put it in the media to help Nifong’s primary reelection chances last spring —
CALLER: I agree with that.
RUSH: — and you can’t get it in the media unless you leak it.
CALLER: My understanding is it was the prosecutor’s office that was making all the press announcements and the like.
RUSH: Well, Nifong was making some press announcements, there’s no question. I thought you were asking me about leaks.
CALLER: Leaks.
RUSH: Well, a press announcement is not a leak.
CALLER: I understand that.
RUSH: All right. Well, now I’m confused. Are you asking me if it’s cops that leak and the prosecutor didn’t, or vice-versa, or the both?
CALLER: What I’m saying is my understanding is it was the prosecutor’s office that leaked all the information, not the police.
RUSH: Okay. All right. Are you bouncing off the fact that I have just said that law enforcement leaks things and you’re interpreting law enforcement as police?
CALLER: Yes.
RUSH: Ah. Okay. Law enforcement is everybody wears a badge. The DA has a badge. He doesn’t wear it, but they all have badges. He is the boss of the cops. He’s the boss of the police chief, in a sense — well, the sheriff, sheriff’s department. He’s above them, and his office gets the information and decides whether or not to prosecute a crime, and the collection of that evidence ends up with him in a situation like this in his office, and so law enforcement can be anybody — cops DA, PR person in a DA’s office, who knows? It could be a secretary. Leaks can come from anywhere and they do. It’s the name of the game.
RUSH: I think we broke this story in terms of broadcast media. We were the first to hear about it from the Channel 5 website in Raleigh, North Carolina. Rape charges have been dropped in the Duke lacrosse case. The DA down there, Mike Nifong…
You talking about dumping news when nobody is paying any attention. (laughs) Well, he thinks. He could have done it Christmas Eve. He did it today. He had a conversation with the accuser yesterday, and the accuser told him, told his investigator that she couldn’t testify with certainty that she was raped. That makes this even more incredible. So, anyway, the rape charges have been dropped, but the DA, Mike Nifong, said he plans to proceed with kidnapping and sexual assault charges against the three players. This sounds to me like he is gradually trying to withdraw from this thing rather than do it all at once, trying to save a little face here to make it look like, “These guys still did something. Maybe they didn’t rape her but they kidnapped her and there was definitely some sexual assault in there.” So it’s definitely moving backwards for Nifong now, and of course without this woman’s testimony, he couldn’t have gone forward on the rape charges anyway.
The lineup was a fraud, the way that was all handled. We had a story in the first hour, Duke University is mobilizing, marshaling its forces to try to repair its image, and its image needs repair only because of the way Duke reacted to this: just assuming and presuming guilt at the first moment this case was charged, or even alleged, before it was charged, and throwing its own students under the bus. Now they gotta spend a whole lot of money to recapture their image because their recruitment is down, the number of students. If you’re a student, why would you want to go to Duke when you’ve got an administration like this? You’re the customer when you’re the student, and they just throw you under the bus at the first sign of any trouble to protect their sacred image. This has been just an embarrassment from the moment it started, and there has been more than reasonable doubt from the moment this all started, but this is, again, a terrific example of how the Drive-By Media can get people all worked up into a chaotic frenzy with presumptions of guilt that were fueled by bigoted and prejudicial opinions.
“White guys, rich! Why, oh, yeah, everybody plays lacrosse, why, elitist! They’re rich. They’ve gotten everything they wanted! They’ve never had it tough. They think they can rape people, particularly black women, and get away with it. Well, not anymore!” That’s what drove a lot of thinking in the Drive-By Media that these guys had to do it. With liberals, never forget this, folks. It’s not the “nature of the evidence” that turns them on, it’s the “seriousness of the charge,” and in the Drive-By Media world and in the liberal world, this just fit a template better than anything could. The template consists of: America is a bigoted, racist nation; America is guilty of bigotry and racism and sexism. A poor, struggling-to-feed her kid dancer comes up and says she was raped. She was just trying to feed her kids and gets raped by these guys! “Well, of course she did. Why would she lie? The seriousness of the charge! Oh, what a great story we’ve got here that proves that the South and America are still in sin, still flawed, still imperfect! It was just made to order for them. The nature of the evidence was irrelevant. It’s the seriousness of the charge.