STEVE DOOCY: Okay. If you’ve got children in the area of 48th and Sixth Avenue in Midtown Manhattan, get them over here, because The Wiggles, the biggest band to preschool kids, is live outside our building. Neil Cavuto has just called security.
GRETCHEN CARLSON: (giggles)
BRIAN KILMEADE: Now, is that why Rush Limbaugh is in New York, to see the Wiggles?
DOOCY: Absolutely.
CARLSON: He is part of the Wiggles there. I see him.
DOOCY: Actually, Rush Limbaugh, right this second, is in one of those buildings behind The Wiggles by about a block. Why? To talk to us. Here’s the story. Senate Democrats wrote Rush a letter to get him thrown off the air. They wrote it to his boss at Clear Channel. Well, now Rush Limbaugh is auctioning off that very letter to raise money for our troops. Joining us now on the phone, talk radio legend Rush Limbaugh. Good morning to you, sir.
RUSH: Hey, hey, hey! Steve, how are you? Such an honor to follow The Wiggles or whatever they are.
HOSTS: (laughing)
DOOCY: (laughing) The Wiggles, that’s right. Okay, so right now you’re auctioning it off on eBay. The bid is $50,300 with three days to go. What is the historical significance, Rush Limbaugh, of this letter that Harry Reid and company wrote?
RUSH: Well, there’s two things. First, it’s an abuse of power. I mean, here you have Harry Reid on the floor of the Senate denouncing me for ten minutes, reading this letter, then asking his Democrat buddies to sign it, of which 40 did — and, you know, that’s a failure. He didn’t get them all to sign. No Republicans did. But they did this during work hours, and this is the smear of a private citizen —
DOOCY: Right.
RUSH: — by this ‘greatest deliberative body in the world,’ based on a total lie that they have to know is a lie. And so for that reason it’s historic. I mean, my parents would not believe this. I wish they could know what all is happening to their son and what their son is causing.
DOOCY: Sure.
RUSH: You know, the thing about this, most people, I think, cower in this kind of situation, and I’m trying to laugh at it and make fun of them and fight back, which is probably putting a bigger target on my back as far as these people are concerned. But this is just something that you can’t ignore. Most of the time you ignore these kinds of things, but you can’t this —
DOOCY: Right.
RUSH: — because this is unique. I don’t think in modern American history there’s ever been something like this happen —
KILMEADE: Right.
RUSH: — where the Senate has gone after a private citizen and asked his partner in broadcasting to shut him up, censure him, apologize him, spank him, or what have you.
KILMEADE: So what Democrats are saying, and you know this better than anybody, they’re saying, ‘Well, that’s what you get, Republicans, for going after MoveOn.org.’
RUSH: Well, you know, this is the thing that everybody’s missing about this. The Democrats are saying this is tit-for-tat. ‘Look, you guys did this to MoveOn. You made us censure MoveOn. So we’re going to make Limbaugh get censured.’ The problem is, I didn’t do anything here. I was minding my own business. I said what I said on the radio. The same group of people — Media Matters, MoveOn.org; it’s the same George Soros, Hillary Clinton organization — did both things. They did the MoveOn.org ad, and they did the smear of me. I am the record. They twisted what I said on purpose, out of context, in order, I think, to deflect from the Petraeus ad —
DOOCY: Right.
RUSH: — because it totally backfired on them. The country ended up loving Petraeus. The surge is working. MoveOn had to pay the full bill at the New York Times. It totally backfired. They had to deflect that–
DOOCY: Right.
RUSH: — and so they came back at me. They created both of these. There can’t be any tit-for-tat because they are responsible for both of those episodes.
DOOCY: Sure. Now, Rush, we’re looking at some video from I believe Philadelphia over the last couple of days where you are on stage, and you’re exhibiting this letter that Harry Reid and the other senators signed and sent to your boss at Clear Channel. Now, as I understand it, whatever is raised on eBay, you’re going to match it, right? And the money all goes to the Marines?
RUSH: The charity is the Marine Corps-Law Enforcement Foundation, started by a bunch of Marines and FBI agents here in New York in the mid-nineties, and it funds college scholarships for the children of Marines and federal law enforcement officers who are killed in action, such as during the Oklahoma City bombing. There were a lot of Customs people in there. There were Secret Service people that were killed and, you know, not just military — and sometimes in massive cases they also provide such scholarships for other service branches beyond the Marines. So, yeah, the money is being raised. We’ll go through Friday at one o’clock. I think the big money is holding back here until Friday so as not to bid this up. I think it’s going to get huge as we get toward the one o’clock Friday deadline.
DOOCY: Sure.
RUSH: I’m going to match it, and I’ve asked Senator Reid and the other 40 Democrats that signed the letter to show their support for the Marine Corps-Law Enforcement Foundation —
DOOCY: Heh, heh, heh.
RUSH: — and ask them to match it as well.
DOOCY: Yeah. Good luck on that, Rush.
RUSH: Yeah. I’ve not heard from them.
DOOCY: Hey, Rush, speaking of Harry Reid, what kind of pleasure do you take in the fact that a local paper out in Nevada has done a public opinion poll, and your approval ratings are actually higher than Harry Reid in his own home state?
RUSH: (laughing) I love it because I’m not even a politician.
HOSTS: (laughing)
RUSH: He’s an elected official from Nevada for 30 years. Can you say Tom Daschle? You know, he’s not up until 2010, but his negatives are higher than mine. I’ve got a higher approval ranking, two points higher than he is. But I think where I saw that somewhere — it was the Las Vegas newspaper, the great thing — the last line was, ‘The thing about Limbaugh, he’s tried to be polarizing,’ which I’m not, but that’s what they think, ‘Harry Reid is just doing it anyway’ (laughing), which is not good. I mean, Hillary Clinton, if you look at that poll, too, you’ll see that in Nevada her negatives are 50. You know, everybody thinks there’s a sense of inevitability about her, but I can’t recall any time this country has elected somebody as polarizing, with such high negatives.
DOOCY: Uh-huh.
RUSH: So it’s going to be… This is all part of the ’08 race. Right now, the Democrats are running against me because I have a connection with a large percentage of the American people who think and are open-minded, and the Republicans haven’t chosen a nominee yet. So, right now, they’re coming after me, and it’s like a badge of honor.
DOOCY: Well, Rush, you’re not alone. They came after O’Reilly; they took some of his comments out of context — and look at Media Matters, what they did to Imus.
RUSH: Yeah. Well… Well. That’s, eh, a little… Don’t lump me in with that. I mean, O’Reilly and I have something in common in that we were lied about. Imus said what he said.
DOOCY: He did. Right. But Media Matters… Media Matters… Nobody really heard what Imus said until Media Matters brought the tape out and started sending it to different journalists.
RUSH: That is very key. The people that heard Imus say it, didn’t care. There was no brouhaha for two days. It’s like my comment with Donovan McNabb. I made it on a Sunday. It wasn’t ’til Tuesday that the world blew up on it, but that was local Philadelphia media that did that. What you have to understand, at least from my perspective, is that in 1988 when my radio show started and gave birth to all this new media, back then they had a monopoly. They had ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN. That was it in broadcast. You had the two newspapers, the news magazines, and they controlled what was reported, what wasn’t reported, and what was commented upon. They’ve lost that monopoly. Liberalism can only flourish when they have a media monopoly.
DOOCY: Right.
RUSH: So the Media Matters organization… When you say ‘Media Matters,’ say ‘Hillary Clinton and George Soros.’ She’s even admitted to coming up with the idea and help start it, and it is to try to discredit those of us in the, quote, unquote, ‘new media’ from having any credibility beyond our existing audiences because they cannot come in the arena of ideas and debate us and win. They have to shut us up; they have to discredit us. This has been happening to me for 12, 14 years now, but I know exactly what’s going on, and you guys have a good beat on it, too. You know what Media Matters is all about. They’re —
DOOCY: Yeah.
RUSH: It’s a fascinating thing, too — and you made a good point. I want to elaborate on this, talking about Imus. Look, I’ve got a radio show, and I’ve got a website, and people can come to it. You know, you don’t need a secret code and a super-secret radio to listen. You just turn on the radio and tune to the station I’m on. You come to my website. You can hear what I say, read what I said. But the Drive-By Media doesn’t do that. They take their lead from Media Matters, so whatever Media Matters says I said is what they think happened.
DOOCY: Yeah.
RUSH: You know, during this whole thing, Steve, nobody from the Drive-Bys called me to ask me, ‘Did you really say this?’ They just ran with it, because they’re all on the same playing field. They’re all on the same side of the aisle: the media, Media Matters, you name it. But we know this. We know how to combat it, and our connection with the audience is what sustains us during these controversies.
DOOCY: Sure. Now, Rush, speaking of the mainstream media, you know, General Sanchez a couple of days ago was quoted as saying it was a nightmare in Iraq, and that little sound bite was played everywhere. But what the mainstream media did not report — and I know you did, and so did we — was the fact that he went on to a larger lambasting of the mainstream media in general — that their coverage, essentially, was dishonest.
RUSH: Oh, it was devastating. It was a devastating and accurate indictment. You know what they do, Steve, is not a secret. They are who they are. Things are what they are. They do what they do. The thing people need to understand is why. The Democrat Party and the Drive-By Media are willing accomplices with one another. The media itself has now gotten more partisan and more obvious about it than ever before, because they’ve lost their monopoly. So, the Democrat Party’s invested in defeat in Iraq. They cannot afford a political or military victory in Iraq because they have no way they can share in it. They have no way they can say, ‘We helped.’ They have been deriding the troops; they have been calling them murderers. Harry Reid says that the surge didn’t work. He waved the white flag of surrender back in May. The worst thing that can happen is for us to be showing success, which is happening in large numbers over there. Even Thomas Ricks of the Washington Post now has to admit it, and the Washington Post lead editorial on Sunday had to admit it. So when Sanchez came out and did his usual beat-up-the-troops and beat-up-the-effort and so forth, that’s all they wanted to hear, because that’s the narrative. The narrative and the template is: ‘We’re losing. We can’t win. Bush has screwed it up,’ so ignore everything else, which means you never get the truth, or you very rarely do, in the Drive-By Media anymore.
DOOCY: Sure. And you mentioned Media Matters, which is an outfit run by a fellow by the name of David Brock, who once upon a time worked on the right but then went over to the left side — and, in fact, this David Brock character has admitted that he published a bunch of stuff that he simply had made up. But his organization, which is supposed to be a ‘watchdog’ of conservative misinformation, Media Matters, only takes shots at guys like you, at Fox News. They never, ever, touch anybody on MSNBC. They never mention anybody on CNN.
RUSH: Well, they do, though, sometimes just for cover. They will rip a Democrat or a liberal media person if they attack Hillary, for example. That organization exists for one reason, and that’s to get Hillary Clinton elected. Make no mistake about this.
DOOCY: Now, why do you say that, Rush?
RUSH: Well, because she started it. The same thing — what do you think MoveOn.org means? MoveOn.org was formed in the nineties. It meant: ‘Can we move on from the Clinton scandals?’ And you’ve got George Soros’ money with all these organizations in an indirect way. Brock is a flunky. You know, he’s been all over the ideological map. Some of the stuff he wrote early about Anita Hill, the troopers in Arkansas, he didn’t deny the facts. He just said later he wished that he hadn’t written them and published them and so forth.
DOOCY: Yeah. Gotcha.