RUSH: Snerdley and I had a conversation yesterday afternoon. It’s going to become somewhat of a tradition for the big election issue of the Limbaugh Letter newsletter coming up in October. One of the things that he asked me about was do I ever see the end of dominance in the Drive-By Media? And I said, ‘I once asked Mr. Buckley if he ever envisioned the day where conservatism was the vastly dominant political ideology in the country, not just the way people live but the way they vote, and the question took him aback. He never considered that to be the case.’ He thought liberalism — because he had this phrase, actually, somebody else came up with this, but he repeated it to me.
He said, ‘Any person, any organization, any group that is not conservative will, by definition, be liberal.’ And what that means is that conservatism is an active intellectual pursuit, it requires a constant vigilance. You have to think about it. You have to understand it intellectually. It has nothing to do with feelings. Liberalism is the most gutless choice you can make. You see suffering, ‘Oh, (crying) I feel so horrible,’ you’re a liberal. When you want other people to fix what you think is wrong, you’re a liberal, when you don’t like inequality — and I’m not just talking about discrimination of equality, just two people are different — you think they ought to be the same in terms of outcomes or results, then you’re a liberal. So conservatism has to be worked at. He never thought that conservatism would be more than standing athwart history and saying ‘stop.’ But I think, and I told Snerdley yesterday, I think the media has descended now to a point that we’ve never seen and that we perhaps didn’t expect. It goes beyond just the fact that they’re losing audience, that they’re losing ad revenue, that their newspapers and magazines are losing circulation. It goes beyond the fact that they are losing jobs. There are layoffs throughout the Drive-By Media in all corners of it, from the newspapers to the magazines, television networks, and so forth. But Mark Penn is right.
It’s no different than the Democrats, by the way. The Democrats keep losing elections. They won in ’06, but they lost 2000, they lost 2002, they lost 2004. And look at the history of the Democrat Party through that period of time. They got even more radical, they get more extreme. For the first time in my lifetime we actually had a major political party rooting against the United States of America in a war. We had the Democrat Party rooting against and impugning the honor of America’s military, from Murtha, to Dick Durbin, to Harry Reid, they are rapists, they are murderers. They had more sympathy for our enemies, people who had exploded the Twin Towers on 9/11, their colleagues who wanted to do more of the same, had more sympathy for them than for the US military. They did everything they could to gin up as much anti-American fervor among the American people as possible. So as they lose elections and as they lose policy fights, they get even more extreme, they get even more radical. Rather than realizing their mistake and how to dial it back and, you know, liberalism, they used to mask it and cover it up. They’re not even worried about masking it and covering it up now, and the media has become the same.
With the fall of the media monopoly, brought about by this program and now Fox News and all the other New Media, the blogs and everything else, the Drive-By Media has now decided that they’re not going to fake it, either. They’re going to admit that they’ve always chosen sides and they’re going to be very open about the side they’ve chosen, like John Roberts on CNN this morning talking about some Democrat bit of news said ‘we’ were doing better, we’re coming up. I forget exactly what it was, but I can find it in a minute. It doesn’t matter. You might say it was a faux pas, slip of the tongue, perhaps it was. Those kinds of things didn’t happen in the old days when they were disciplined and in charge. So Mark Penn is right. These people are in the process of losing all of their credibility, and the more credibility they lose, the angrier they get and put more of their credibility on the line to lose. I’ve never seen an American business where the customer who complains is always wrong. You complain to your local editor or to a national editor of the newspaper or the New York Times, network or whatever, and what you will most likely hear is, ‘Screw you. You don’t know how we do what we do here. You’re not sophisticated and smart enough and educated enough to understand what we do. And if you don’t like what we’re doing here, take this,’ and they double what you don’t like and give you even more of it, all the while denying that they’re doing it in the process.
So there are a whole bunch of big institutions here that are losing credibility and they’re putting more of their credibility on the line each day as they lose it. One’s the Democrat Party; the other is the Drive-By Media. And they don’t get it. To try to understand it in rational terms is a futile, futile effort. It’s like the templates and the narratives that they constantly work under. One of those templates and narratives is that destitute, poverty stricken communist nations are somehow islands of promise, islands of great justice. They envy Castro for his total power. That’s the dirty little secret. So we had this news story this week, these two hurricanes go through Cuba and wiped parts of the island out. Cuba is so poor that the buildings in Havana, these great art deco buildings, they don’t have money to restore them, refurbish them, even maintain them, sitting there vulnerable. People get kicked out of their houses, their huts, their homes, it’s just destroyed. And what do we get from the Drive-Bys? We don’t get a story on how impoverished the people were to start with, because the truth is that life in Cuba is exactly like what life in New Orleans was like after Hurricane Katrina. That’s everyday life in Cuba.
So we get this story not on the trials and tribulations and not the oppression and the dictator thuggery that the people of Cuba live under because of Fidel Castro. No, we get a story on how much there is to learn from Cuba about hurricanes and what we have to learn is evacuations. They do it so well. They evacuated all these people into something like 2,300 government centers. Government centers where? What are they made of? How do we know those things hold up? Most of them are probably jails. And then we get a story, the writer, Anita Snow is her name, about it’s so wonderful in Cuba, there’s no looting. Nobody has anything to loot. Now, here’s a woman, Anita Snow, who is so out to lunch, so out of touch with reality, so imbued with a narrative and template that’s probably taught from journalism school on, and it’s absurd. Anybody with any reasonable education about Cuba would read that story and understand it’s stupid! There is not one American who thinks we have anything to learn from Cuba. Well, I take it back. There obviously are, some kook-fringe Democrats probably think we have a lot to learn from Cuba, but nobody rational, nobody sane thinks we have anything to learn from Cuba. There’s nothing the Cubans can show us.
Guess what? We have this trade embargo. Cuba’s been destroyed by these two hurricanes. The Cubans want to buy food and stuff from us. And we’ve said, ‘Well, we’ll donate a hundred thousand dollars worth of stuff,’ which is a big, big slap in the face. When you tell an island nation the size of Cuba that we want to send you a hundred thousand dollars worth of food, goods, and services, that’s like the government offering you a dime to deal with gas price increases. And of course the Cubans say, ‘We don’t want a handout from the United States, we want to buy things.’ And then we say, ‘Sorry, we can’t, we’ve got a trade embargo with you,’ and the Cubans say, ‘Well, why don’t you let some of your financial services people come down here and help us?’ ‘No, we’ve got a trade embargo with you.’ Nobody’s seen Raul Castro. Nobody’s seen Fidel. We get all these stories about how wonderful Cuba is. I actually thought that if these two hurricanes were bad enough that it might provide the first dent in relaxing the embargo because the Cubans are going to have to get help from Spain, no problem, have to get help from Canada. Everybody blames the embargo for destroying Cuba, the US embargo. It doesn’t.
The Cubans trade with everybody else in the world, and they’re still a dilapidated, Third World country now, just because they don’t trade with us. That’s what they tell their people. So anyway, this is just one small example of the total abandonment of reality and thus credibility that the modern Drive-By Media is going through. This stuff they’re trying to do to Sarah Palin, it’s all personal. The way you have to understand, from Anne Kornblut at the Washington Post today who distorted her answers last night to Charlie Gibson on God and Iraq, to Pamela Anderson, to all these other people, it’s personal. They hate her personally. They despise her personally because she — it’s not just about this election — she threatens to destroy the entire lie that the Democrat Party and liberalism is built on just as Clarence Thomas destroyed the myth that black people of America can get nowhere in this country. The only place they can get it is by going through Jesse Jackson’s civil rights coalitions, and so forth. We are living on the threshold here of a potentially seminal change in several institutions of the country. It’s not automatic, but I’ve never thought that I would see in my days the Democrat Party, any party rooting against its own country for years, wanting it to lose a war. I would have never thought I’ve seen the media do some things they’re doing, as bad as it’s been. We continually are surprised.
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RUSH: We’re going to go to Chicago, and this is Carl. Nice to have you, sir, on the EIB Network. Hello.
CALLER: Rush an honor to talk with you today.
RUSH: Thank you very much, sir.
CALLER: I know my brother-in-law, Chuck in El Paso, is listening, so I’ll get right to the point. You stole a bit of my thunder in your monologue at the top of the hour comparing the Gallup generic ballot, but to add to what you said: What has been a year-long double-digit Democrat lead is now a statistical dead heat in the Congress.
RUSH: Yes.
CALLER: And that difference, as you know, is Sarah Palin, and the media have zero choice but to destroy her — even at the risk of losing what little credibility they have left. To paraphrase John McCain, ‘The media would rather lose her credibility than lose an election.’
RUSH: Very true, very true. That’s something the Democrat Party has always believed. They’ll tear it all up if they have to to win, and they’ll fix it in their own way afterwards. But yeah: clear the playing field, search-and-destroy. But if they keep trying this with Sarah Palin… See, I don’t think they can do it with her. I don’t think they can destroy her. I think only she could do it if she slips up and does something. I do not believe they can do this.
CALLER: I have to agree with you, and I’d like to make one more point, if I may.
RUSH: By all means. Thirty seconds, but you’ve shown the talent to squeeze it in.
CALLER: Thank you very much, sir. Have you noticed in the news this week that there is a global consensus that there is no clear-cut answer as to who is responsible for the 9/11 attacks?
RUSH: Yeah, I saw that.
CALLER: There is global consensus on who should be president of the United States.
RUSH: Barack Obama.
CALLER: Thanks very much of your time, sir.
RUSH: You bet. By 80% in France, they think that Obama should be the president, and probably in Germany, too. See, helps, too. You don’t tell the American people what the world wants them to do. It doesn’t work that way. They can try all this stuff. Folks, it’s going to backfire. Don’t doubt me.
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RUSH: Let’s see here. The Associated Press is reporting this. ‘The investigator looking into whether Alaska Governor Sarah Palin abused her power in trying to fire her former brother-in-law is asking state lawmakers for the power to subpoena 13 witnesses and the phone records of a key Palin aide. In addition, the Troopergate investigator has asked lawmakers to subpoena her husband, Todd Palin. The probe has taken on new significance,’ says the AP, ‘since John McCain picked Palin as his running mate. Retired prosecutor Stephen Branchflower made the request of the state House and Senate judiciary committees, which are expected to approve his request.’ There’s political hackery going on here. This trooper that was fired did something, that’s right, Tasered a ten-year-old and a couple of other things. Now, look, I want you people to remember something. Barack Obama’s campaign also pushed behind the scenes to have Republican Jack Ryan’s divorce records released. He succeeded, which led to Obama winning his Senate seat.
Ryan was leading. Ryan’s divorce records were made public, and he had to quit the race. This is typical Chicago thug politics. You don’t just defeat your opponent, you clear the playing field. So now we have a partisan prosecutor as well as a Democrat state senator pushing a phony investigation. I can’t prove it, but it would not surprise me to know that these guys are working with the Obama campaign or surrogates of the Obama campaign behind the scenes. We know that there are 30 lawyers and investigators that have been dropped up there and they’re running around with piles of money trying to drag out stories from people. If there were anything to this story, it would long ago have come out, it would have long ago been there. Now, this is just my instincts, and folks, it’s not wishful thinking. I want you to understand I’m more mature than that. My instincts are that this stuff is all going to backfire on them, not to say it’s not serious. These people are brutes, and they will do whatever they have to do to destroy her, whatever they have to do, including make it up. I just have a tough time accepting that it’s going to work.
My instincts are this. You can take a person of fine, upstanding character that everybody knows, and you can throw out a bunch of charges, and there has to be some degree of believability before people will accept it, before there’s any proof of it. She just does not come across as someone who ran a thug office as governor, who engaged in political hackery. But we’ll find out. I think it’s a bogus investigation. As I say, I’m not looking at things through rose-colored glasses here. My instincts are that everything else they’re doing is backfiring on them. This could just be another bag of manure that has been placed in front of them. Now, I can see by the looks of the people on the other side of the glass that they think I’m all wet. You would be amazed, ladies and gentlemen, despite 20 years of credibility, proof, establishment of correctness and so forth, you’d be amazed the number of times I am doubted by even those closest to me. If I were a person weaker in character and stature than I am, I would be a basket case. I wouldn’t have the confidence to believe anything, ’cause even those closest to me, you ought to see this. Sometime I’m going to lower the shade so I just don’t have to see your reactions in there. ‘Oh, there he goes again, oh, no, you’re forgetting,’ what do you mean we all thought X was a great guy, and then all of a sudden. Who are you thinking, Jim McGreevey? Bob Torricelli? See, the problem is when you make allegations about those guys, you can believe ’em. That’s exactly my point.