RUSH: Okay. Here come all the conspiracy theories now. The supernatural impact on the missing Malaysian airline flight. Yes, we even had a caller call it the “Malaysian Triangle” or whatever it was last week. It’s getting absurd now, is the point. All the conspiracy theories: “You know, that thing has been hijacked.” “You take the seats out of that thing and you can turn it into a giant nuclear bomb.” I guess.

Anyway, greetings, my friends, and welcome back. Great to have you. I hope you had a great weekend. The telephone number here if you want to join us, 800-282-2882. The e-mail address, ElRushbo@eibnet.com.

I forget who said it, and I’m not even gonna get the saying right, but it might have been Sir Arthur Conan Doyle writing as Sherlock Holmes who said something like, once you have ruled out everything and the most improbable, the simplest explanation for any mystery is probably the case. The problem with trying to figure what happened with this airliner is that it’s impossible to conceive of the simplest explanation because now we’re at 10 days. Ten days that people have been watching television. Ten days of nameless, faceless experts all over every network, none of ’em know anything, all advancing theories. And so the starting point, before you know anything, all you know is they got a missing airplane. Don’t know where it is. That’s all we know now, essentially.

We know some things about the changing in altitude, the changing direction, but we don’t know really any more than we knew in the first 24 hours. But it’s impossible to conceive of that because everybody has been treated to all of these possible explanations, some of them outlandish, some of them sensible. But you watch, when this is all said and done, the simplest explanation for what has happened here is what’s gonna end up being the explanation. It isn’t gonna be something extravagantly out of this world, my guess, and I’m not positing myself as an expert here. I haven’t even been watching. You know, Kathryn cannot believe that because I’m such an aviation bug. It’s not that I’m not interested. Folks, I can’t handle the media on this. I literally cannot.

We’ve got anchors and anchorettes who don’t know beans about even why an airplane flies. They couldn’t explain the concept of air pressure differential or lift to you if their jobs depended on it. They go get guests, and nobody knows what happened here, so you got a bunch of people on TV who just want face time. I’ll give you another example. I started making fun of the coverage last night, and Kathryn’s really into this, so she kind of looked at me and rolled her eyes and walked out. I said, “Look what they’re doing here.” On half of the screen you’ve got the host and the guests and then on the other half you got B-roll. It’s B-roll, a videotape, of a helicopter flying over water and we’re supposed to think this is a live shot of somebody actually peering out of a helicopter looking for wreckage.

Then they show us a gauge, just a meter, just any kind of an electronic gauge or meter while they’re talking about pings. And we’re supposed to think, “A-ha! Keep your eye on the gauge! Keep your eye on the gauge! We might see a ping!” And it’s all such a show. I can’t handle the media coverage of it, and it’s like Obama’s plunging approval rate. Yep, I know it, when it hits 30, call me. Well, 35, when it hits 35, call me. Other than that, I don’t care. I know which way it’s going, and I’m stupefied that it’s as high as it is. So when it gets down to where it should be, let me know. In the meantime, I’m gonna entertain myself doing other things, whatever it might happen to be.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: I mentioned earlier that I can’t watch media coverage of the missing airliner. I just can’t. I don’t care what it is, because to me there isn’t a person who knows that is appearing on TV. And yet they’re all on TV. Everybody who knows nothing is on TV. Not to put them down, folks. I mean, it’s just the nature of the beast. Go get people that don’t know anything but might have an intriguing sounding opinion, whatever.

This has just created this primordial soup atmosphere for conspiracy theories to just go through the roof, and it’s now so far gone that the simple explanation is what’s gonna end up being the truth here, but nobody’s gonna accept it because they’re so far gone now with potential theories that it’s gonna be difficult. People are not gonna believe the truth once it’s known.

But my point, I just can’t watch. I’m interested in it. I’m fascinated by it. But, if I do watch it, I start making jokes about it, irritating the people who are watching with me. Well, I’ll give you an example. Watching one of the networks over the weekend, and some guest is talking about his theory of pilot suicide or it’s flown to Pakistan and they’re gonna kill all the passengers, put a giant nuclear bomb in it. And they’re talking about the techniques of finding an airplane that’s lost in the technological advancements we’ve had with location data and pinging in the engines and how they continue to send information long after the plane disappeared.

And, as they were talking about that, B-roll showed up of what looked like the Vietnamese Navy and a fishing trawler with a bunch of these Vietnamese military guys in their weird army hats with binoculars looking out over some body of water. So I said, “Look at that. They actually want us to believe that this is video of an actual search for this airplane” — and it’s B-roll! Then, after that, we get a close-up of some kind of electronic gauge like on a dashboard or in some high-tech studio or equipment room. And so I said, “Look! Look! Maybe we’ll see a ping! They’re showing that gauge in case there’s another ping from the airplane!” And the people sitting with me, “Would you stop?”

And I said, “I’m just watching this like the low-information crowd would be watching it.” So we had some audio sound bites nevertheless. Even though the coverage may leave me cold, I realize a lot of people are fascinated by it, so what are we gonna do? We got CNN. We chose this because they’ve gone now into the supernatural to explain this. The explanation for what happened to Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 is now supernatural. And I think this series of bites illustrates, sums up, what CNN and the Drive-Bys have become. The news story is not “what did happen.” No. The story is “what might happen.” The story is not what did happen. And, of course, we don’t know.

The coverage, they could do everything they know about this in 10 minutes, is my point. Instead, they’re doing it in segments of 24 hours. So they have to talk to experts about what could have happened, and that’s become the news. Not what did happen, but what might have happened, and what might still happen, and then what would explain what has happened that we can’t figure out and we don’t know.

Brad Meltzer, The History Channel. He hosts a show called Decoded. Decoded, like decrypt something, decode. Not strip the paint off of something, for those of you in Rio Linda. Decoded. He’s the host of this History Channel show, and he’s on there about the missing airliner. Don Lemon, the anchor. “You deal with conspiracy theories all the time on your network, The History Channel.” There’s a lot of conspiracy theories in history, folks, and that’s why this guy’s on. “So what do you make of this, Brad? What do you make of it? I mean, how can a large passenger jetliner just vanish like this? It seems to have fallen off the edge of the earth.”

MELTZER: What we’re looking at, really, it’s almost like the pilot episode of Lost. And that’s the scary question, right? How does it vanish? We have to remember, that makes it a mystery, and mysteries, like any stories, a story isn’t what did happen; it’s what could happen. That’s the scariest part to me. It’s not just that they’ve vanished, but we haven’t heard anything in all this time. We all know how impossible it is. It’s where every conspiracy theory falls apart: How do you keep everyone quiet?

RUSH: This is the author, Brad Meltzer, I think he writes mystery books. It could be the same guy. His books are good. But even he gets to it here. It’s almost like the pilot episode of Lost. Now, I imagine when some people heard that, “What pilots, what’d the pilots of Lost do?” No, no, pilot of the first episode. In fact, I’m just gonna tell you. We’re watching it, got some people, you know what I said? It really ticked ’em off. I said, “You know what this is? This is all a publicity stunt. Some TV producer is actually doing Lost for real. This jet’s landed someplace, they’ve got cameras, and they’re doing a TV show.”

And so here’s Meltzer, “Hey, it’s just like the pilot episode of Lost.” And then he talks about the conspiracy theory, said, “The problem with a conspiracy theory is that everybody involved has to be quiet. They can’t give it away.”