RUSH: Ladies and gentlemen, the media is all atwitter. The Ted Wells report on the Miami Dolphins has just been released, and there were, indeed, racial and homophobic slurs. There were insults. There was harassment. There was inappropriate touching. And it wasn’t just Incognito. It was other offensive linemen. John Jerry is the name of one guy; Mike Pouncey is another. And this sort of contradicts some stuff from earlier in the week, which looked like it was gonna exonerate Incognito.
It’s Friday, folks. Let’s go.
JOHNNY DONOVAN: And now, from sunny south Florida, it’s Open Line Friday!
RUSH: Yes indeed, ladies and gentlemen, a pattern of harassment in the locker room at the Miami Dolphins. Jonathan Martin investigation, being bullied and so forth. And it’s still in the early stages of reviewing this thing. Just came out. It’s over 140 pages. And apparently the report says that Jonathan Martin was subjected to a pattern of harassment that included racist slurs and vicious sexual taunts about his mother and his sister by three Miami Dolphins teammates.
The report said that Richie Incognito, offensive lineman John Jerry, and the center, Mike Pouncey, harassed Martin, as well as other offensive linemen and an assistant trainer. And there is a transcript of a text between Mike Pouncey and Incognito where they talk about Martin being a snitch for blabbing about all this, and there’s a text from Incognito to Pouncey: “Yep, you snitch, you stitch.” Meaning, they’re gonna bloody the guy up.
Now, for all the talk about it being racial, Mike Pouncey’s black. Jonathan Martin is black. Pouncey’s accused of being one of the harassers. It’s interesting because earlier this week Incognito went crazy on Twitter, acting like the report was gonna totally exonerate him. I mean, he was tweeting things out like, “Where do I go to get my reputation back? Where do I go to be apologized to?” Because, apparently, the early indications were that everything said about Incognito was not true, and the media piled on, and now it turns out that all this stuff that happened earlier in the week not true, and it looks like everything we thought we knew at the beginning of this turns out to be true. But, as I say, it’s just the early stages of the media getting their hands on the report and going through it.
The program observer has a question. What’s the question? Hm-hm. Well, I don’t know about allegations of physical violence. I haven’t gotten that far. But there were allegations of inappropriate touching. In a related story, Michael Sam, the first openly gay player, as you know, is going to soon be joining the National Football League. So I don’t know any more than I’ve told you. I mean, here’s another passage in the report.
“To be candid, we struggled with how to evaluate Martin’s claims of harassment given his mental health issues, his possible heightened sensitivity to insults and his unusual bipolar friendship with Incognito. Nonetheless, we ultimately concluded that Martin was indeed harassed by Incognito, who can fairly be described as the main instigator, and by Jerry and Pouncey, who tended to follow Incognito’s lead.”
The Washington Post has posted on their website a PDF of the whole 148-page report. In addition, the report says that Jonathan Martin, in an attempt to fend off some of the treatment, joined in treating other people the way he was being treated, sort of like trying to be one of the guys. And that’s what is meant in the reference to his heightened sensitivity to insults and his unusual bipolar friendship with Incognito.
Anyway, folks, that’s it, that’s the early report on it, looks like everything that was alleged in the very beginning here turns out to be true. If you were paying attention to anything on Twitter earlier this week, this is gonna come as a surprise to you. If you believed what was on Twitter earlier in the week, ’cause clearly what was on social media earlier in the week, Incognito was out running around acting like he was gonna be totally exonerated in this report. He was doing a Ray Donovan, you know, “Where do I go to get my reputation back?” So that was, obviously, preemptive, and he may not have been accurately informed as to what the report was gonna say.
He’s been so nutso. He got mad at his own lawyer or agent and put the lawyer’s phone number up on Twitter and asked people to call and bug his own lawyer, ’cause his lawyer was telling him to shut up and stop tweeting this stuff. Yeah, I know, it sounds like my seventh grade junior high school football locker room in a way. I’m just kidding. I was just kidding, media. Just kidding. Don’t start an investigation of my junior high school in Cape Girardeau and find out what went on when I was there. No, no, no. Just teasing.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: It was back on February 12th that Richie Incognito tweeted the following to Jonathan Martin of the Miami Dolphins: “Dear Jon Martin….. The truth is going to bury you and your entire ‘camp.’ You could have told the truth the entire time.” So that was couple days ago, and the report comes out today, and it does not exonerate Incognito, which he clearly thought it was going to. It’s either that or he was advised to get out in front of the bad news and portraying it as good news.
I mean, who knows? You get a media consultant or lawyer involved today, and the attempt to manipulate the low-information news consumers, I guess anything could happen. The theory might be that the low-information news consumer believes the first thing he or she hears about something. That could very well be the theory. So let’s just assume here that Incognito’s team has to know.
They have to know what this investigation shows, and therefore they have to know what the report is gonna say. They have to know that Incognito’s gonna get creamed. They have to know that two other players are gonna be involved. They have to know that it’s gonna be reported that Martin was bullied. Okay, so two days prior to the report — and they don’t know when the report’s coming out. The best guess anybody had was it was coming out yesterday (Thursday).
This would be the famous Ted Wells report that just came out a half hour ago, maybe an hour now. So maybe they got together and said, “Okay, you know what? Let’s go out there and let’s start tweeting like mad that I’m innocent, that Martin lied, and that Martin’s gonna get buried by the truth. Let’s just saturate Twitter with our version and then make it look like the report’s lying.”
Now, where would they — where would anybody — get that kind of theory? How would that kind of theory be created? The theory being: People are gonna believe the first thing they hear. No matter if the second thing is what is quote/unquote “official,” people will believe and react to the first thing they hear about something. I would think that the Incognito crisis management team, if there is one, is probably studying crisis management in the Democrat Party, specifically with the Clintons.
The Clintons clearly had that strategy. You put something out first, and put your version out first. Whether it’s true or not, you put what you want out first, or what you want to be truth — or, if you’re gonna lie, if you want to create whatever impression, you put it out first because that’s what people will inherently believe. It’s the old theory that a lie is halfway around the world before the truth gets out of bed, that kind of thing.
So it will be interesting to see here. Now, it’s gonna be a tough road for Incognito because the media is just predestined to hate the guy. They just despise the guy. So it’s gonna be very, very difficult for Incognito to convince the low-information crowd that he didn’t do it. The report says he did because now the media is gonna be going wall-to-wall, ESPN, all these other places are going to be going wall-to-wall on what a racist, sexist, bigot bully Incognito is.
They are going to basically drown out and just overwhelm his tweets of two days ago — which, again, said (paraphrased), “The truth is gonna bury you, Jon. The truth’s gonna bury you and your entire ‘camp.’ You could have told the truth the entire time.” So it’s fascinating to me to watch how people manipulate things. I just love it.