RUSH: Suddenly, now, on ESPN, on The Sports Reporters on Sunday morning, they have their little roundtable discussion there. It’s for a half hour. They do three or four topics, and Mike Lupica of the New York Daily News said this.
LUPICA: I didn’t think Rush Limbaugh should have lost his job on — on this network for what he said about Donovan McNabb, which — which isn’t — isn’t it the same thing?
RUSH: The same thing? What, were they talking about the whole Imus situation? What I said about McNabb was the same? Well, that’s crazy! I was talking about the media, for crying out loud! Now, in Lupica’s defense, when that McNabb-ESPN thing happened, he did write a piece excoriating me for being a coward, for quitting and not showing up on the following Sunday and facing the facts and dealing with it and trying to explain my position, and I wrote him back. I said, ‘I would have been happy to have been there but Tom Jackson told ESPN it was either him or me.’ He had people coming up to him where he lives in Cincinnati asking him if they could be in the NFL now that Limbaugh had made these comments. I told everybody I got out of there because I liked (past tense) the guys on that show, and I wasn’t trying to cause them any trouble. But Lupica’s a big friend of Imus and I think that’s the reason. To try to equate what I said about McNabb with this? I’m going to talk about this at much greater length as the program unfolds today, folks, because I don’t intend to let this go. There are stories out there. Salon.com has a little funny piece on how everybody thinks that talk radio, conservative talk radio is next and they’re making fun of us for thinking that we’re next in the crosshairs.
The reason why we all think this is because we already are in the crosshairs, and this organization… Let me make a quick point about this as sort of a tease before we get into this on a full-fledged basis, and it is this. Let me just ask you a question. Did America, did this country hear what Don Imus said on the Imus show? They didn’t. When Imus said what he said, was there a national uproar? Forget the fact his ratings are insignificant and tiny, which that fact is now starting to trickle out. The fact is, guests on the show, people who listen to the show, nobody said a word. Nobody could have cared less. It wasn’t any big deal. America didn’t hear it and America didn’t hear what he said on the Imus show. No, you know where America heard it? They heard it on YouTube, and they heard it on MoveOn.org, and they heard it on cable TV. They heard it on network TV. They heard it on the early news, the evening news, the late news. A combination of all these places said what Imus said thousands of times more than he said it, and that’s where America heard it. The Imus audience couldn’t have cared less, I don’t care how small that it is. So these pretenders… By the way, all of this was set up by Media Matters for America, and everybody thinks of this group as ‘a liberal media watchdog’ out there surveying the media airwaves and making sure that those who say these so-called outrageous things are held to account.
It’s nothing more than a Democrat Party front organization! It’s George Soros-funded. It is staffed by people that used to work for elected Democrats — and it’s tax exempt. It’s a tax exempt group, but they’re purely political, and all they are is an arm of the Democrat Party. They’re part of the Democrat machine. One of the things that make the Imus situation so ironic is that they took out one of their own. Imus was backing Kerry. He’s opposed to the war in Iraq. He gave all these libs all these platforms and so forth. They took out one of their own. There’s a lot to learn about this, folks, in the way people get information in this country and the way certain people get information. These pretenders, all of these holier-than-thou people repeating what Imus said thousands of times more than he said it, are a bunch of hypocrites. If it was so offensive, why did they air it in the first place over and over and over again? If it’s so offensive? Then they repeated it, and they repeated it, and they repeated it. This happened on Wednesday, April 11th. It happened about 6:15 in the morning, and he uttered a tasteless, offensive phrase that included the word (I can’t say it; I’d rather not repeat it). In all the sound and the fury from the media, how many heard what was said on the Imus show? Look, it’s a low rated show. Its a lowest rated time segment, from six to 6:30 in the morning. The Rutgers team didn’t hear it. They weren’t listening. They even said they didn’t know who he was. So I just want this to form sort of a backdrop for the direction that I want to take this, as we meld it with all the other exciting things on the big program today.
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RUSH: Now, this Imus affair, folks. It’s so much bigger than Imus, and I would like for you in thinking about this to put Imus out of your mind. Don’t let that whole circumstance and situation get in the way, because there’s so much that this episode illustrates, and it indicates a problem that…well, it’s a problem. It’s just a new fact of life in the country today in terms of how people hear about things, how people get their news. One of the things that this whole Imus episode illustrates is it shows why liberals are anti-war. The word ‘courage’ is not in their vocabulary. No courage, no spine, no backbone. It was Don Imus who made these guys famous, made them celebrities, and many more of them are coming out — Ana Marie Cox and a number of others have come out — and said, ‘Yeah, I wanted my elite media merit badge. That’s where I had to go to get in the club.’ So to these people — whether it’s true or not, to these people — it was perfectly fine, and not only that, it was often mandatory that if you wanted to be in the elite media, you had to go on this show. Now, I don’t care what you think. I think that’s, frankly, absurd, but that’s what they thought. So we’ll deal with that. He gave them celebrity. He promoted their shows. He promoted their stupid books, their TV specials, their magazines.
He promoted their political campaigns, their issues, their very careers. Now, what happened when he gets into trouble? They run for the hills! All they could think about was their own lily white rear ends. All they could think about was their own backsides. They couldn’t have cared less. A couple of them tried to hang in, but they weren’t part of the media elite. A couple of them did, but they were running for cover so fast. If you want to know why liberals are anti-war, and if you want to know why liberals have been cowed by feminists and become these linguini-spined cowards, just look at this episode. It also illustrated why liberals will never, never help inner city blacks and inner city girls. They demanded his head. They charged that he insulted our youth and damaged their psyches with possible lifelong consequences, and they fired him for that. Yes, they did. Well, the teachers unions have been doing this for years! The teachers unions have been screwing up the public school system for years. Don Imus never held one inner city kid back. Quite the contrary. He never got in the way of any inner city kid learning anything, and yet we fire a radio guy that no inner city kids ever even listen to, instead of firing a school system that all inner city kids go through.
In New York, you’ve got the dropout rate approaching 50%. The demonstrated failure of the public school system, particularly in inner city areas, is profound. It is well known. You go to the Washington, DC, and it is the minority community there that is begging for vouchers so that they can get their kids into better schools. Well, there’s no radio guy that has created this problem, and there’s no radio guy that’s dumbing down half the population. There’s no radio guy that’s standing in the way of their advancement. Yet, who is it that’s gone here because of this? This is a classic, folks, because the left, when they want to focus on — and I know Imus was one of them, which is the deep irony here. When the left wants to focus on people they think are mean-spirited, extremist, rotten-to-the-core and so forth, they have this amazing ability to avoid and ignore their own real failures, and they focus on words offensive to them and they say, ‘We’ve got to rid our society of this rot!’ Maybe we do, but we’ve gotta rid our society of a whole lot of rot that the liberals are running, that the liberals have had control over for years that is actually destroying futures, actually destroying lives, giving people no hope whatsoever, not preparing them for reality in any shape, way, matter or form — and yet they are immune! They are not subject to the same analysis or criticism that they mete out. They have no standard. Whatever standards they assign to everybody else, they exempt themselves from. They are irrelevant from any standard code of conduct.
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RUSH: RUSH: Our microphones, our cameras, our listening devices are everywhere, ladies and gentlemen, and since last Tuesday, actually, Don Imus has been trying to get hold of his friends, the people he made, the people he awarded media elite merit badges to, the people whose books he promoted, whose TV shows he promoted and so forth and so on. Here he’s trying to reach Tom Brokaw.
(Ringing phone.)
RUSH: Oops, no answer there I guess. He tried Andrea Mitchell, too.
(Ringing phone.)
RUSH: No answer from Andrea Mitchell. Up next on Imus’ list, was Frank Rich of the New York Times.
(Ringing phone.)
RUSH: Hmm. He’s not meeting much success. Surely Howard Fineman will pick up the phone.
(Ringing phone.)
RUSH: Come on. Give this a couple more tries. Fineman certainly would pick up the phone!
(Ringing phone.)
RUSH: Well, Imus having no luck here. Let’s see. Next try, Jonathan Alter of Newsweek.
(Ringing phone.)
RUSH: This is embarrassing. None of these people answered. That’s it. That’s it. David Gregory? This is when he tried to call him.
(Ringing phone.)
RUSH: He’s just looking for some support. He’s just looking for some help from people that stood by him and that he made, in a sense, in their own words. Evan Thomas of Newsweek was next on his list.
(Ringing phone.)
RUSH: He even tried to call a couple politicians. Joe Biden, presidential candidate.
(Ringing phone.)
RUSH: You see here, ladies and gentlemen, nobody picked up the phone. Nobody offered any assistance whatsoever. It was all about them. They couldn’t hang in. They had to run for the tall grass, which is ironic, because they knew all of this was going on, this and more (and some would say worse) for years and years and years — and the interesting thing about that to me is that these are the same people who are scouring this country for any sign of racism or any sign of bigotry, any sign of homophobia, and when they find it, they pounce on it! They have shown themselves to be insincere hypocrites. They have shown themselves to be agenda-oriented, here. They have shown themselves to only care when certain people say these things, because, you see, Sharpton and his gang are out there now supposedly targeting the rap industry. But let me ask you a question: When’s the last time they picketed an urban radio station? When’s the last time they picketed Viacom, which owns MTV? When’s the last they picketed Hollywood for putting out movies with these kinds of characters and lyrics?
Zero, zilch, nada, and you know why? Because they’re minorities and they don’t have ‘hate in their hearts.’ Only right-wingers, only conservatives have ‘hate in their hearts.’ They couldn’t contain the Imus thing. Remember, what happened on Imus’ show took two days to hit, much like what I said on ESPN. There was no outrage for two days after my ESPN comments until the Philadelphia print media, all five or six, had the same column on the Tuesday following the Sunday show. That’s when people were supposedly outraged and offended. By the way, the same thing happened in that case. Well, worse things happened. What I said was totally distorted. I was making comments about the media, not Donovan McNabb, yet it got totally distorted. Michael J. Fox was the same scenario — and there is this group. The only reason for last week, Sharpton, these guys are out there supposedly targeting rap music, but that’s just to give themselves some street cred. Everybody’s asking about that now. So if they go out and they target rap music and say they’re going to try to clean it up and the urban radio stations that play it and all these corporate interests that broadcast it and produce it, they hope to have street cred for the next talk radio guy they go after.
Which is, believe me, their aim. That’s their desire. The only reason for last week is that it is an excuse to assault conservative talk radio, even though conservatives had nothing to do with what happened last week, even though talk radio is far cleaner than urban radio, far cleaner than television, far cleaner than movies and books. This is a politically directed attack by Democrats and their media outlets. Everybody is saying, ‘How come Sharpton and Jackson are the final arbiters here of what’s good and just?’ Sharpton and Jackson, folks, you have to understand, would be nothing were it not for the Democratic Party elevating them to these positions. They both have seats at the Democrat power table because they deliver votes and they’re on the team. They’re part of the Democrat machine. That’s why they are with this power now. Everybody is asking me at the cigar dinner, ‘How come Sharpton…?’
‘Well, hey, I don’t know if you’re a Democrat or not, but if you are, you’re partially responsible, because those guys never get criticized for anything they say or anything they do.’
The Democrat Party is the party that he has made them viable and has made them powerful, and now you could say that Sharpton runs CBS and NBC given the way everybody was cowering in their boots when he showed up. The ironic thing is Imus is no conservative. Most of his guests were liberal, but he was critical of Hillary, and so he had to go. This is an election year, Clinton, Inc., you get on their case, they’re going to take you out. They’re going to do what they can to marginalize you or do whatever. I’ve seen a couple stories I was reading over the weekend that the Clinton team saw their opportunity, and when I say ‘the Clinton team,’ I include Media Matters for America, this tax-exempt, supposed media watchdog group. It’s just an arm of the Democrat Party. They have an agenda. They are tax exempt, and they’re doing nothing but advancing a political agenda, and they are George Soros funded. This is clearly part of the Democrat party machine, and I had some people say, ‘Rush, you going to talk about this today or are you going to ignore it and let it go?’ I said, ‘No,’ because the main point I want to make about this is that this is a Democrat operation.
This Democrat operation ignores large swaths of entertainment and media. We didn’t hear about Bill Clinton’s abuse of women from people outraged by that. That was a personal matter! It was sex. It was none of our business. In fact, when the Clintons took out after those women as trailer trash, we all chuckled and laughed and we got treated to James Carville talking about what you get when you drag a dollar bill through the trailer park. Where was the outrage over that? Where were the media watchdogs? This was coming from the office of the president of the United States! There’s somebody who has genuine power. Hillary was bad mouthing the Bill Clinton women, unleashing the war room against them. That was okay, too, because that showed her strength. That showed her devoted loyalty as a wife. That showed she’s not going to stand by and let her man be impugned and so forth. So whatever they do, that’s fine. They’ve got a built-in excuse. They can’t hate. They don’t hate! They’re liberals! They have no evil intentions in their hearts. Only right-wingers are guilty of that. Of course, in the case of the Clinton women and the women he’d abused, it was right-wingers that were calling attention to it.
‘The right-wingers have hate in their hearts! So the right-wingers are just trying to take out our people. We’re going to circle the wagon around our president. I don’t care what he did, it’s a bunch of right-wingers trying to take him out.’ This is nothing but politics. It’s a pure political agenda, driven by the Democrat Party machine. You can bash Christians. You can compare the president and the military to Nazis. If you’re Robert Byrd, you can use the N-word on Fox News Sunday — and all of that is okay, because they’re wiser, and they don’t say their words with hateful intent. You have corporations making millions, tens of million dollars from rap. That’s okay. You have liberal talk show hosts using some of the most demeaning hate speech in the world, not even worthy of recording or commenting about in the Big Media. All we get about liberal talk radio is the next chance they’re going to try to be successful. They keep waiting and waiting and waiting for liberal talk radio to amount to something. It never will because liberals don’t like to argue. There is no argument! There is no alternative point of view, in their mind, and they don’t want to be public about what they really think because they know they’re wrong anyway.
So you have Hollywood. You have the rap industry. You have the record industry. It’s all part of the Democrat machine, and they don’t apply any standards to themselves. Those who propped Imus up all these years, pay no price. NBC gets away with, ‘We are so sad. We are so shocked by what happened. But we’ve done the best we can. We’ve thought long and hard, and we’ve made the change.’ They knew what was going on in that show for decades, and they’re out there selling advertising to it, and they’re loving and yukking up every minute of it! The same thing with NBC and MSNBC simulcasting the thing. They pay no price at all for this whatsoever, and they’re the ones that provided the studio and the air that made all this possible — and they get off scot-free. Who paid his salary? They’re getting off scot-free as well, CBS and NBC. They act like they knew nothing of his past until they denounce it. ‘Oh, we’re shocked! We can’t believe it.’ It’s pathetic. I’m going to tell you something, folks. There are literally tens of millions of us who are going to fight these people on the left every step of the way when they attempt to destroy the new media, and that includes talk radio. It includes the Internet. It includes Fox News. It includes conservative blogs.
This is an election season. It’s only going to intensify. The left knows they can’t win in the arena of ideas, in debates, on this show or anywhere else, so it’s time to take ’em out. They get a trial run here with this Imus thing and they’re feeling their oats, I’m certain, and make no mistake, other people are in the crosshairs and are targets, and it’s a Democrat Party machine operation that is getting this done. I look at this, and I say, ‘This is my country, too, and I’m not going to let the Democrat Party or the left or some lackey watchdog group or a couple of race hustlers dictate my speech.’ I’m just not going to let it happen. They don’t get to use the power of government to silence conservatives, which is their real purpose. These are totalitarian tactics that they are employing here. It’s the liberal constituency that repeatedly and daily demeans people — black, white, in between, I don’t care. We don’t play rap music on this show. We’re not demeaning people on this program in any way.
We don’t air South Park. We don’t air MTV or Comedy Central on this show, and the rest of talk radio doesn’t, either. Now, look at Sharpton and Jackson. You have two liberal Democrats who ran for president who are bowed to by the likes of Hillary and other Democrats despite their long history of anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism is a problem festering in the Democrat ranks, not in the Republican Party. These constantly, unrelenting, demeaning attacks on minorities come from liberal entertainment outlets. I watched a movie last night (I’m not going to tell you what the movie; it doesn’t matter) and there are some black characters in it and they’re made out to be criminals, drug dealers, pimps, whatever. We on talk radio do not do this! We do not perpetuate these stereotypes. We do not offer these roles to blacks to go out and play these kinds of demeaning characters. It’s the entertainment industry that’s done it, and that is doing it, and they’re getting a free pass on this, and they are profiting from it at the same time — and when somebody says, ‘Well, how can this be?’ They don’t have hate in their hearts because they’re good liberals, you see? It’s impossible for a liberal to hate.
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RUSH: Look, folks, you know this. We all know this, but I’m gonna say this again. The Drive-By Media in this country are part of the Democrat machine now. As the rise of the new media has occurred and new media has gained more and more power, Bush has won two elections. Fox News is the most popular cable network. They have thrown much of the pretense to objectivity out the window. They still maintain that they’re not liberal or this, but their agenda-driven aspects are just obvious. They’ve chosen sides. It’s a partisan battle. The media is now in battle with everybody else. They’re not trying to inform people. They’re advancing an agenda, and they are part of the Democrat Party machine, and that’s why they give a pass to their own constituencies and to their sponsors. That’s why they target conservative talk radio in hopes of destroying it, and that’s why liberals get away with virtually everything because the presumption is there’s no hate or evil in their hearts so whatever they say is not trying to hurt. It’s not trying to be bigoted or anything. No, no, no! They’re allowed to do this because they are special. They’re protected. They’re elitists. They’re a better class of people.
You know, they fired Imus. Why not the journalists who repeatedly appeared on his show? Weren’t they facilitators? Weren’t they enablers? Didn’t they sit there and laugh at this stuff? How is it they have any credibility left, either? They’re supposedly the arbiters of taste and decency under the tenets of political correctness, yet they get a total pass here. Didn’t they compromise their standards beyond repair by sitting there year after year after year after year laughing at it and begging to go back on that show? I look at this, and I marvel. The mainstream media, they’re populated with Democrats who used to work for Democrat politicians, or come from prominent Democrat families, and the media make no apologies for it. You have the Kennedys and the Cuomos all over the media. You have Matthews who used to work for elected officials. Stephanopoulos worked for Clinton. Bill Moyers worked for LBJ. I’m not talking about the guests. I’m talking about so-called journalists. I’ll tell you who’s out there doing all this monitoring and then reporting things out of context, and that’s our old buddies at Media Matters for America.
If you want to know what the liberal media are going to report as news, ask them. Ninety percent, it seems, of what is said about me in the Drive-By Media does not come from them hearing me say it. It comes from where they read it on these watchdog websites. They don’t listen to this program. The latest example of this was good old John Harris at The Politico who was told by people that I compared him and a buddy of his that left the Washington Post to the Indianapolis Colts! I never even talked about the Indianapolis Colts and the subject when it came up about the Edwards press conference and all of that. They don’t listen to our shows! They go to these websites which are part of the Democrat Party machine, and that’s where they hear what was said and they believe everything they see on these websites and everything they read. That’s where they get their talking points, and they are taking direction (in essence, they are taking their talking points and their direction) from Democrat fundraisers: George Soros, Hillary, the DNC, because that’s who it is that’s telling the rest of the country who don’t hear what’s said on this show, what wasn’t said on this show.
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