RUSH: We got we go to Stillwater, Oklahoma, this is Thomas. I’m glad you called, sir. Nice to have you on the program.
CALLER: Hey, dittos, Rush.
RUSH: Thank you.
CALLER: Hey, I just wanted to say, the whole issue with the senators and the congressmen going to the floor, to kind of continue on your point from the man earlier that was talking about the public ignorance, it worries me a great deal when our, quote, unquote, elected leaders don’t have the ability to even find the truth in a story as simple as that when it takes about ten minutes. I know they have a large staff, I know they have a lot of people working for them, and, to me, it’s another form of giving aid to the enemy.
RUSH: If it only would take them ten minutes, and it’s been eight days, and they still don’t get it, what does that tell you?
CALLER: Well, it obviously tells me they’re telling lies on purpose.
RUSH: A-ha! So it’s not a matter of them knowing. They know. It’s not a matter of them learning. They know. This is a political smear. This is how they operate. I’ve been saying this all week. It’s not about truth, for them.
CALLER: No, but I guess the thing that bothers me about this is, yes, they’re lying, but then you know their cover is going to be, ‘Oh, well, well, we didn’t realize.’ If they ever are held accountable, they’re going to play dumb.
RUSH: Who’s going to hold ’em accountable?
CALLER: Well, I know you’re trying.
RUSH: They’re not going to respond to me. They’re lying about me. They can’t use me to hold them accountable, because to them I’m lying, I’m demoralizing the troops. There’s an institution out there supposed to hold these people accountable. The journalism community, if you talk to them, exists to — what is this silly phrase — speak truth to power. What that means is when people who have power over other people are abusing it and lying about it, the journalism community is supposed to go and say, ‘Oh, yeah? Well, we caught you here in a lie,’ but they’re not going to be held accountable by the people that are supposed to because they’re on the same side. Look, I’ll give you an example. Poor Dawn came in today and the first thing she said to me, not even, ‘hello, how are you? Gee, you look really great today, smell nice,’ the stuff she normally says. She came in here and said, ‘I am never watching Geraldo Rivera and Alan Colmes again.’ And I had seen that last night, and I said, ‘I know.’
Geraldo, it’s kind of sad. He’s become a shadow of what he once was. I got a lot of e-mails about Geraldo. He was a pretty good investigative reporter back in his ABC days. He was a great investigative reporter, and he got to the bottom of things and got facts. He obviously has not even bothered to take a look. His argument last night on all this, which, I’m sitting watching this, and maybe you people can understand how surreal this all feels to me, the whole incident. But I’m watching this last night, and Geraldo says, ‘Well, I’m not so sure here. I mean, there’s too much ambiguity about this.’ Hannity said, ‘What do you mean, ambiguity?’ ‘Well, there’s a lot of doubt about what Limbaugh meant. There’s a lot of doubt about what he said. There’s ambiguity.’ He said, ‘Rush ought to just apologize for the confusion and this would be over.’ And I’m thinking, ‘Ambiguity? Who created the ambiguity?’ The secret of this is is that they create the MoveOn.org ad, they run it in the New York Times, basically calling General Betray Us a liar, a traitor, and that ad emboldens Democrats in the House and the Senate, who are going to be on committees getting testimony from General Petraeus, to call him a liar and a stooge and a puppet of George W. Bush before he even opens his mouth, knowing full well you can’t respond to them in ways that they are speaking to him.
Then this episode backfires on them, backfires huge. Petraeus is loved by the people in this country. This Petraeus thing backfired on MoveOn.org, it backfired on the left, it backfired on the Democrats in the House and Senate. So they huddle, and they come up with this plan. When they hear me say phony soldiers, bam, almost like it had been preplanned just waiting for a moment to roll it out, they roll it out. The bottom line is this: They created the Betray Us ad and that situation and circumstance, and they created this phony soldier thing. They created both. The ambiguity was created, Geraldo. There is no ambiguity. I said what I said about specific people. I made it very clear about whom I was speaking. There’s no ambiguity. I didn’t say what I didn’t say, and, Geraldo, they don’t get to determine for you what I said.
They don’t get to determine what I was thinking, which they’re also trying to do. This is the loss of meaning. So Geraldo’s solution to this is to just apologize for the confusion. I didn’t create the confusion. They did it on purpose. There was no confusion. And now they’re saying I said things I didn’t say, I meant things I didn’t mean, when it’s clear they took two words and amplified it now to hundreds and thousands of words, for an eight-day little controversy. Geraldo said, ‘Well, look, I don’t listen to MoveOn.org, and I’m not going to listen to Rush,’ lumping me on the right extreme with MoveOn on the left, which is a cop-out, Geraldo. You’re an investigative journalist. Your job is to get the truth. You’ve got your own show that people are watching. They’re not going to believe anything you say anymore.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Don’t misunderstand, folks. I don’t need Geraldo Rivera’s advice, I didn’t ask for it, either. I don’t need anybody else’s advice. The idea that I have to have a liberal say that what I said is okay, seeking support for a liberal as a way of justifying anything, that’s baloney. Geraldo is over there drawing maps of some military location in the dirt. Did anybody ask me what I thought, Geraldo, when you were doing that? No. And you wouldn’t have cared, either, no matter what I had said about you drawing maps of some military location in the dirt on television. They all want to be me. Don’t smirk in there, Dawn, you know this is the case; you know it’s true.