RUSH: I’m going to go to two sound bites here, one from Dick Durbin, the other from Barack Obama. I warned everyone yesterday that this was what was coming. First Senator Durbin on the Senate floor this morning.
DURBIN: Just yesterday, reports that a car in a garage of an Illinois state court judge on the north side of Chicago, was damaged by gunshots. The sad reality is that violence and threats against our judges are on the rise. Between 1996 and 2005, the number of threats and inappropriate communications towards judges has gone up dramatically, from 201 in 1996 to 943 in 2005.
RUSH: Stop the tape. Now, before you hear the rest of this bite, I want to ask you a question. When it comes to people in our society talking about judges, who would you say maligns judges more? Would it be Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee that you see televised? They’re trying to say these people are not qualified. ‘They are extremists. They are out of the American mainstream.’ They go out and about their way to try to destroy their character and their reputation. Who is it in this society that spends all this time ripping judges to shreds? Now, here’s Durbin’s theory.
DURBIN: There may be many reasons for this increased violence against judges, but one of the most regrettable is a rise in criticism and condemnation of these fine men and women, not only in the halls of Congress, but in some of the shock radio shows that go on and pass as news on some cable channels and radio stations.
RUSH: Whoa ho-ho-ho! So now it’s talk radio, and who do you think he means when he says ‘talk radio’? Of course he means me when he’s talking about what happens on talk radio — and cable news? What cable news channel do you think he’s talking about? He’s talking about Fox! So all the criticism of judges is occurring on talk radio and on shock radio and this sort of thing. So you have the whole Imus thing lurking over there as something that’s still sprouting branches for these guys to hang from and make this statement. Now, here’s Obama, and this is Monday in Milwaukee at a fundraiser.
OBAMA: Obviously, what happened today was the act of a madman at some level, and there are going to be a whole series of explanations or attempts to explain what happened. There’s also another kind of violence, though, that we’re going to have to think about. It’s not necessarily physical violence, but violence that we perpetrate on each other in other ways. Last week the big news, obviously, had to do with Imus and the verbal violence that was directed at young women who were role models for all of us, role models for my daughters.
RUSH: Verbal violence! So you have Durbin and Obama. Now, this is not unprecedented. Remember, the Clinton administration attempted to blame me for the blowing up of the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City. We called them on it and they ‘apologized.’ They went out there, and (Clinton spokesman Mike) McCurry said, ‘No, no, no! We’re talking about the short-wave radio communications of the militia, the Michigan militia or some such thing,’ but make no mistake about it, they take every opportunity. So now all of these acts of violence are being blamed on the ‘shock talk.’ I told you this Imus thing was about far much more than him, and now you’ve got this Virginia Tech issue, which is used as a launching pad to go after the one area of media that is perhaps the home of more openness, more free speech, more diversity of speech and thought. But because the dominance of talk radio is conservative, it is a target, and it is going to be dealt with as best these people can. I read a story on CNN today. I don’t need to read it to you, but the story was typical and it’s something that I predicted about the Virginia Tech shooting. It amazes me. All the talk about gun control! Here we have people on the campus who said that this student was nuts.
They knew he was nuts. They reported him as nuts. They sent him to a mental institution for a while. We don’t know what happened there. His writings were nuts, and there were red flags sprouting up because of all of these things. Shouldn’t there be a way to deal with nuts on campus? This guy clearly was disturbed and a whole lot of people knew it. Why wasn’t there some way to deal with this guy before the fact? Everybody thinks, ‘Well, get rid of the guns, and we’ll stop the OK Corral from taking place.’ We don’t have an OK Corral going on in this country! This is not something that happens every day or every month or every year, and that’s why the reaction to it is extraordinary. So we have all these people who had clear warning signs about the guy, but, I don’t know — because of political correctness or the unwillingness to judge somebody or what have you — nobody did anything about it. The gun seller, the guy that sold the guy’s guns didn’t know he was nuts but the people at the school did. Everybody wants to focus on the gun seller and the gun, but people at the school knew that this guy was not right. I’m not second-guessing here. I’m just responding to the clutter of talk that’s out there.
Now, we have in what we’ve learned about this guy, a reported attempt to set a fire in the dorm. We have sicko writings noticed by a professor. He was recommended for counseling. We don’t know anything about that, if he went or not. We have reports of him stalking female students. Yet it’s much easier to yell, ‘Gun control! Gun control! The NRA is bad! Bush the GOP are responsible!’ It’s much easier to just go out and say that, than to deal with this kind of aberrant behavior on campus because of all the PC rules that are in place, both the formal and the informal PC rules. But why not focus on that? Why not focus on the clear and early warning signs that something was not right with this guy? Have you read some of the things he wrote? It’s all about death and killing and dying and these sorts of things. The guy was just nuts, and a lot of people knew it. Now, I’m not saying this to lay any blame. I’m just trying to point it out, and they’re going to have an after-action review of this. They always do. The governor’s office is going to do it, and I wonder if they’ll include this aspect in their after-action review. It looks to me like the people in charge here had plenty of early warning signs, not that he would slaughter 32 people, but that he was nuts. Nobody’s going to ever be able to predict that somebody’s going to murder 32 people. You’re not going to be able to predict that. But, people don’t just wake up one morning and decide to slaughter other people, and that’s the point, not gun control. How could a guy like this get a gun? Well, now we know how: Nobody fingered the guy as a potential danger to the community! That’s why.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Can we go back, Mike? I want to go back to the Obama sound bite, which would be number three. This is Obama Monday at a Milwaukee fundraiser, and he connects what happened at Virginia Tech with the kind of ‘verbal violence’ that was on the Imus show.
OBAMA: Obviously what happened today was the acts of a madman at some level, and there are going to be a whole series of explanations or attempts to explain what happened. There’s also another kind of violence, though, that we’re going to have to think about. It’s not necessarily physical violence, but the violence that we perpetrate on each other in other ways. Last week the big news, obviously had to do with Imus and the verbal violence that was directed at young women who were role models for all of us, role models for my daughter.
RUSH: Now, I knew, and I said so yesterday, that it was only a matter of time before this connection was made to what happened here at Virginia Tech with ‘shock radio’ and so forth. Ben Smith’s blog at ThePolitico.com, of course, talks about how this guy’s pretty smart, this Obama guy. ‘It’s worth a listen.’ The bite I just played for you. ‘It’s worth a listen, and it captures what moves a lot of people about Obama, and bothers others: His instinct for abstraction and large themes, and his sense that America’s problems have at their root solutions that have as much to do with hope and process as with any specific course of action. Other politicians would — and will — stay with the concrete. They’ll talk about this tragedy, and, soon, gun control. But while Obama mourns the slain students, he takes the massacre more as a theme than as a point of discussion. ‘Maybe nothing could have been done to prevent it,’ he says toward the end. So he moves quickly to the abstract: Violence, and the general place of violence in American life,’ and then he talks about there’s another type of violence: ‘Verbal violence.’
So Ben Smith, who writes the blog at ThePolitico.com, is very, very, very, very, very, very excited with the way Obama is handling this. Now, to me, Ben Smith and others who will swoon over the sound bite you just heard from Obama, are simply impressed with people that talk BS nonstop, because that was a BS bite. It may sound worldly and above the fray and we need to deal with violence. We don’t need to ‘deal with’ violence. Our whole society is built on dealing with violence! The idea that we’re not trying to deal with violence is absurd. So according to Obama, this is America. You have to look at what these people say, not in the abstract, but take a look at what they really say. This is America — and we need to ram this down his threat and everybody else who’s thinking Obama is this greatest guy to come down the pike, because this is his America. We have ‘verbal violence’ everywhere. We have violence all over the place, not just what happened at Virginia Tech.
But see, the problem with what happened at Virginia Tech is this is not about America! This is not about common Americans or Americans in general. This is about a lone nutcase who slaughtered other people — and any politician who would dare, as Obama has done, to go out and paint his fellow countrymen with such a stupid view doesn’t deserve to lead us. Now, Mr. Smith at The Politico, I’m sorry to disagree with you, but this is how I look at it. This is not something earth-shatteringly new and foresighted and brilliant and so forth. He just got through saying this is typical of America. We have violence here. We have violence Virginia Tech. We have violence on the radio. We have ‘verbal violence’!’ We don’t! This is not a typical American circumstance or event that happened at Virginia Tech yesterday. I had to make that point.