Howard Kurtz cited me, America’s Anchorman, on his Reliable Sources show on CNN Sunday and he played some Dittocam footage of Nancy Pelosi commentary from me for a reporterette for The New Republic.
KURTZ: As long as we’re criticizing Nancy Pelosi, I want to play for you, Michelle Cottle, some comments by Rush Limbaugh about Nancy Pelosi and the media.
RUSH ARCHIVE: We’ve got one of these wacko, wild-eyed feminists who is a product of all this, and we got a soppy, lap dog Drive-By Media here who’s promoting and promulgating the myth that we’re a better country today and that we’ve reached some sort of a milestone, that we’re all going to be better people, and the end of all partisanship and confrontation is around the corner simply because a woman is running the show.
RUSH: All right, now, the reporterette was Michelle Cottle, C-o-t-t-l-e, of The New Republic. Kurtz after that bite — and, by the way, what I was referring to there was Charlie Gibson’s intro of the Nightly News on ABC in which he said, “Look at that! Look at her! There’s Nancy Pelosi, the new speaker of the House. She’s got grandchildren on her knee, or in her lap, whatever, “she can take care of children and take care of the country at the same time,” and he said it with a fawning admiration that was putridly sick, or sickening. It was just over the top. We were laughing at it here.
So the bites I played, “We’ve got one of those wacko wild I’d feminists who is a product of all this,” I had mentioned Charlie Gibson and I’d also talked about Kim Curtis who is this nutso professor at Duke who had flunked one of the lacrosse players simply because he was on the lacrosse team. She bought everything the accuser said. She’s a genuine, wild-eyed feminist nut case, a product of modern feminism and theory and she’s now teaching and this is what Duke students’ parents are paying $40,000 a year for. So I was talking about some wild-eyed wacko feminist who was saying we’ve got somebody like that in the office now in Nancy Pelosi, and you heard of the rest of the bite, and Kurtz said to Michelle Cottle of The New Republic, as a representative of the “lap dog media,” what’s your response?
COTTLE: Rush is being his usual objective self. This notion that the — the media is the lap dog of the Democrats is absurd, and, you know, I’ve — I’ve done pieces over the years about how, if anything, you actually wind up with the Democrats getting hit harder a lot of the time because the expectations are higher and also because Democrats tend to be chattier with media, and so you wind up with like leaks and back stories and a lot of metastories [sic] that do not serve them well.
RUSH: What in the world is she talking about? Can anybody help me? Obviously you cannot help me because this is delusional, especially since I was bouncing off Charlie Gibson in a pure lap dog manner, when he talked about how Pelosi… Cookie, go get that. I know you get that, it’s just from last week, not in a hurry, not immediately, but run it in there to Mike so I can remind people what I had been talking about specifically regarding “lap dog media” when it came to Pelosi and Charlie Gibson and her comment that she was able to take care of kids and the country at the same time, as though this has never been done before. Of course the whole thing that was being discussed, she was talking about “the children.” Everything is going to be done for the children, as though that’s unique. Nobody before today or last week has ever cared about children. Do you understand that, folks? Do you realize how revolutionary the Democrat control of the House of Representatives is? Finally, finally, finally, somebody is going to care about the children because nobody — not you parents, not you grandparents, not you teachers.
Nobody, Newt Gingrich, Tom DeLay, nobody has ever cared about the children. But now we have a woman. By the way, I thought modern feminist theory was that women are not supposed to be concerned with all of that. If you look at what happened in the House floor last week with Pelosi and all of the children, you’d have to say that if a feminist were being honest with herself, that was a setback. What Pelosi should have been doing was spanking a bunch of guys and telling them how it’s going to be in there, rather than trying to present this image of mother, grandmother, aunt, stepmother, godmother, what have you, nanny. Of course we know why they did it, they did it for the photo-ops. But this Michelle Cottle bite, “Rush is being his usual objective self.” Here, let’s get that out of the way. That’s fast action. Way to go, Cookie. Here is the Charlie Gibson bite from last week.
GIBSON: Good evening from Capitol Hill. Well, it is a hallmark of this American democracy that power transfers peacefully. For the first time in the 218-year history of the Congress, a woman was voted by her colleagues to be speaker of the House. Nancy Pelosi, Democrat from California, took the gavel, but in a picture perhaps even more symbolic, the new speaker was on the floor for a time —
RUSH: Now, listen.
GIBSON: — holding her six-year-old grandson all the while giving directions on how events were to proceed. It seemed the ultimate in multitasking: taking care of the children and the country.
RUSH: (gags) Oh, man! Gag me. I understand Howard not playing that bite, but that’s what preceded my comment about lap dog media. So here’s Michelle Cottle of The New Republic saying with a straight face the media’s tougher on Democrats because they expect more from them? They expect less! Democrats are not held to any kind of standard or accountability. They’re best buddies! This should just show you: liberals do not consider themselves liberals. They are just what IS. Liberals are the natural order of things. Anything other than liberalism is a disease, it’s some kind of a problem — and, of course, the little snide comment: “Rush is being his usual objective self.” Michelle, I’m not objective. I make no pretence at objectivity in terms of the way you do. I clearly announce what my concerns are, what my interests are: I’m conservative and so on. I make no bones about it, but that doesn’t mean I don’t strive for the truth.
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Now, look at this story. Associated Press out of Ligonier, Pennsylvania: “Vice President Dick Cheney scheduled to be in western Pennsylvania today for a hunting trip. Cheney was to fly into Arnold Palmer Regional Airport after his morning briefing in Washington, his spokeswoman told the Pittsburgh Tribune Review,” and of course the last line: “Last year, Cheney wounded attorney Harry Whittington with shotgun pelts during a quail hunting trip in Texas. Whittington recovered.” Okay, so we’ve got a story here: Cheney is going hunting, hunters beware. Do we get these kinds of stories, Michelle Cottle, may I ask you, every time Bill Clinton is going to be around young women? Do we get warning stories from AP which say, “Warning! Bill Clinton today will be in a school with a bunch of high school and college women. Bill Clinton had an illicit affair with a cigar and Monica Lewinsky while he was in the Oval Office.
Do we see this? Of course we don’t see this, but of course the Drive-By Media, “Why, they’re not lap dogs! They’re really hard hitting. They have some high expectations of the Democrats. They hold them to much higher standard.” That’s absurd. By the way, nobody is commenting — at least in the bites we have, and I didn’t see the show, but nobody is commenting — on my reaction to Nancy Pelosi. They’re all reacting to my comment that there’s “a lap dog media.” That’s what really bugs ’em. It’s like all liberals. You accuse them of what they are, charge them be being who they are, “You can’t say that! Don’t you understand we’re in the business of hiding who we are? We’re not going to let you get away with that, Limbaugh!” Here’s Andrea Koppel. Kurtz says, “The Democrats said they were going to give the Republicans more rights as a minority than they had been granted when the Republicans ruled the House, then they completely flip-flopped and said, ‘Well, we’re not going to apply that for the first 100 hours. We’re just going to roll over and do what we want.’ Why isn’t the press hammering them for the hypocrisy?”
KOPPEL: I think we are. We’ve certainly been reporting the fact, and I think it’s a very legitimate complaint to say that Nancy Pelosi for the first two weeks of Democratic reign is blocking the Republicans from having pretty much any input in the legislating of this “Six in ’06” agenda.
RUSH: Why are they upset about it when I’m not? I haven’t been upset about this at all. I fully expect hypocrisy from the Democrats. I expect it. That’s not the only promise they’ve broken. They’ve broken four or five promises. They’re not working today. They were going to have a big five day work week, not working today, got the big football game tonight, the BSC championship out in Glendale, Arizona, between Ohio State and the Florida Gators. Now, in the real world, how in the real world would a buckeye, a tree, ever meet a gator? You know, if you did the environmental wacko pick here, which we might try later. But nevertheless, there are two or three other promises they’ve broken, but the Republicans did the same thing. The Republicans didn’t let the Democrats in on their first whatever it was agenda. They’ve got their power from the Democrats after 40 years of Democrats holding it.
What embarrassed me was the Republicans whining about this. We know who Democrats are. We should know what to expect. We should know in their first 100 hours that they’re not going to let the Republicans do anything. Hell, folks, it wasn’t that long before 1994 when the Republicans won the House when our old buddy Bob Michel was running the show for the Republicans. He was from Peoria. Half the time Democrats wouldn’t let Republicans in committee hearings! Not just the first hundred hours. Do you think people think I’m making this up? Snerdley thinks that you think I’m making this up. I’m not making this up. When the Republicans had 135 members in the House, the Democrats said, “Look it, we’re going to have a committee here. You’re not even allowed in here.” It didn’t happen frequently; it wasn’t a standard operating procedure, but it happened.
Of course Bob Michel didn’t care, as long as either Tom Foley or Jim Wright invited him over to play golf. Republicans knew of their place. Hugh Scott from Pennsylvania, they all knew their place in there. They weren’t supposed to ruffle feathers and they didn’t, but now it’s much closer than it was when the Republicans only had 135 seats, but everybody expected the Democrats to do this. Has anybody heard the media “hammering” the Democrats over this? They might be reporting that Pelosi has shut the Republicans out. It doesn’t matter.
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