RUSH: The Drive-Bys are in a fit of outrage over what happened to two of their kind in Ferguson, Missouri. It almost seems like they’re more outraged over what happened to them than what happened to the young teenager named Brown. I mean, they are literally fit to be tied and it’s gotten them fully engaged in the story, and the subject now has to do with the militarization of police forces.
I have to tell you, folks, there’s a little bit of schadenfreude as I scour the Internet and read reactions to what’s going on in St. Louis and Ferguson from all parts of the American political spectrum. It literally is. It’s fascinating to hear people say, “This is exactly what happened in Tehran. Why, this is exactly what’s going on in Gaza. Why, how can this be? This is unacceptable.” These are young liberals writing this stuff.
One thing missing in all of this, if George W. Bush was president his name would be in every story here. Obama’s name is not. In fact, Obama, I think around 10 minutes from now, well, he’s always late, but he’s due to make some sort of a statement about this. He’s been fully briefed. The news reports say that he’s been awakened and he’s been reached on the golf course and at dinner and whenever he happens to be, that his briefers are staying informed and then passing on to him what they’ve learned. And he’s going to be making some comments about it here in due course.
A little note for our affiliate stations along the line, we will not be JIP’ing it. (interruption) Why, do you think we should? I mean, I don’t know how long it’s gonna go. We’re gonna be running tape on it and we’ll be able to replay whatever he says. I realize that our affiliate in St. Louis will take it, that stands to perfect reason. But every time we JIP Obama here, you wouldn’t believe the e-mail I get from people who do not want to hear it. They know they’re gonna hear it later, and they’d rather wait for my comments on it.
Now, we could play it and I could offer comments live. We have done that. The problem is I don’t know how long it’s gonna go, and that’s a problem. We can’t blow out obscene profit breaks for it, ’cause that just screws everybody up, including the affiliates. And that’s why they’re doing this. He could have done this at 11:45. He could have done this at 11:30. He could have done this when he got off the golf course this morning or before he hit the golf course. I mean, the choice of 12:15 is not random, not accidental.
At any rate, the militarization of police forces. You may not know this, but the Department of Defense actually donates unused equipment such as armored personnel carriers, certain kinds of weapons, ammunition, to local police departments around the country. I don’t know how all of that is done, how it’s apportioned, but it happens. And because the Pentagon is donating this equipment the media is on a high horse now about the Pentagon is involved in Ferguson. You can actually see that headline: “Pentagon Playing Role in Ferguson.” The Pentagon isn’t there. The US military isn’t there. But the idea that we’ve got equipment they don’t need? Maybe it’s outdated stuff that they’re donating to police officers.
Now, what happens and what is happening and what did happen in Ferguson, Missouri, is unacceptable, we all agree. But as usual, what’s missing here is a sense of proportion.
How many murders are there every week in Chicago? And there doesn’t seem to be any outrage about it. Even locally. There doesn’t seem to be any concern about it. You certainly don’t see the media there. Granted, most of the murders in Chicago are not mixed- race circumstances. Ferguson is. It’s a white cop and an unarmed black teenager. It’s made to order in terms of the daily soap opera/the media template for outrage, as Al Sharpton’s got everything.
But there are a lot of kids being killed in this country. There are a lot of murders taking place. Chicago is setting records for this, and there’s not a whole lot of coverage of that. I’ll tell you, as I read the Internet (and I scour it) and as I say, I’m reading as many different sources as I can and I’m trying to focus on websites, blogs and so forth that I know are written by young people who are predominantly…
Well, they think they’re liberal. They clearly have a self-attitude that makes them think that they are liberal in the emotional sense. It’s fascinating, literally fascinating to read what they say. “Yeah, it’s like Tehran! It’s like Gaza. This is horrible. Why, if we don’t stop this now, it’s gonna come to our town. If we don’t act concerned about it, when is it ever gonna stop?
They don’t even notice it. In fact, they may even applaud it.
How about the IRS going after 500 conservative organizations and denying them their civil rights and targeting them as criminals just because they were conservative? “Ho-hum. Yawn. Nothing to see here. No big deal.” Remember how the media said that that was Nixonian and unacceptable? I don’t, either. The media did not say that.
All these incessant attacks from our government on conservatives, all of the scandals that have erupted? A yawn. A ho-hummer. But this in Ferguson — and I’m not suggesting it shouldn’t. It’s just, why is it alone? Why is it the only example of the exorbitant display of state power that gets noticed and causes fear and causes concern? I understand guns are involved. I understand militarization of a local police department.
I understand optics and all of that. But there are many, many examples of the overreaching power of a state, in this case the federal government, which goes unnoticed, and it would be helpful if it were noticed and if it were reported on. Now, let’s go to the audio sound bites because, as I say, the Drive-Bys are on fire over the journalists and their plight in Ferguson. There are two of them.
They were arrested and then not arrested and released. One was supposedly arrested for trespassing in a McDonald’s. I don’t know how these journalists reacted to the cops at the moment of contact. I’ve always found, in any interaction with police, if you’re just polite and respect their authority and don’t taunt them, you’ve got a much better chance.
If you’re in a situation where you’re not guilty — you haven’t done anything — you have a much better chance of extricating yourself than if you challenge them, call them names, insult them, or what have you. It’s just the manners, politeness and realizing they’ve got the guns and you don’t and they’re scared, too. They are scared, too.
There are people trying to kill the cops. They know they’re targets here. It’s not just a one-way street, and it’s getting scarier and scarier out there for local law enforcement all over this country. I mean, you’ve got lawlessness everywhere. You’ve got lawlessness at the Southern border with massive immigration now, and the Border Patrol is not allowed to do its job.
They see some of the drug cartel gang members crossing the border. Cops feel scared, too, in many cases. There are bad cops everywhere; good cops mostly. But let’s go to the audio sound bites. This is last night and this morning. It is a montage of bunch of reporters talking about the journalists arrested in Ferguson, Missouri.
REPORTER: Two reporters covering the unrest in Ferguson were arrested!
REPORTER: Journalists have been arrested there trying to do their jobs.
REPORTER: …arrested two reporters.
REPORTER: Can you ever take journalists into custody like that for simply doing their jobs?
REPORTER: Two reporters covering the protests were arrested at a McDonald’s.
REPORTER: I’ve never seen anything like this before in this day and age, and the fact that journalists are being, you know, arrested for trying to tell the story.
REPORTER: We’re journalists ourselves so we take a special concern when our colleagues are arrested.
RUSH: Now, I don’t want to be misunderstood here. For as many times and as often as I complain about the lack of professionalism and the overall horrible job I think the mainstream journalists do today, I do not nevertheless believe that any of this is called for, and I don’t think this is the way to deal with them in any way, shape, manner, or form. But one thing.
The media loves covering the media and so this is at the top of the food chain for them today in terms of things they’re interested in. They love talking about themselves, and they love talking about the pressures, and they love talking about the bias they face. The disconnects that happen here, though, are just amazing. They’re talking about a police state. When? Who’s running things?
Who’s running Ferguson? Who’s running the country? Who’s running all these things now when this police state and all these horrible things are happening? Who’s in charge? What kind of thinking is allowing this to happen? Who is it that believes in an all-powerful Big Government behaving in manners like this? Let’s go back to June 2nd, 2013, CBS Slay the Nation.
The host was Bob Schieffer, and still is, interviewing then-New York Times editrix Jill Abramson. Bob Schieffer asked her this question: “The attorney general asked the bureau chiefs the various news organizations here in Washington to meet with him to discuss his handling of all these leak investigations, Jill. The New York Times, CBS, some others decided not to attend. The reason we didn’t go is because they told us it would be off the record. Why did you,” at the New York Times, “decide not to go?”
ABRAMSON: (haltingly) The Times and our readers are quite concerned about the six active, uhh, criminal leak cases that the Obama administration has pursued. That’s more than all the other administrations combined, and, you know, we are concerned that the process of news gathering is being criminalized.
RUSH: (impression) Reeeally? So the editor of the New York Tiiiiimes told the host of CBS Face the Naaaation that she was very worried that the Obama administration was criminalizing news gathering. That’s back on June 2nd, 2013, and now we fast-forward to September 13th and 14th in Ferguson, Missouri. This morning on CNN’s New Day fill-in host John Berman was speaking with the legal NSA, Jeffrey Toobin, about the protest and the police response in Ferguson, Missouri.
TOOBIN: One of the words you’re hearing is “proportionality” which, my God, is a word we were hearing in Gaza over the last several weeks.
BERMAN: Right.
TOOBIN: When you talk about “proportionality,” legally speaking, is there a clear line? If you look at the many, many protests that take place in cities like New York and Chicago and Los Angeles where people protest even at night and (sic) they’re not rubber bullets, they’re not tear gas, they’re not reporters being arrested for sitting in McDonald’s. It can be done well, and it can be done badly, and crowd control certainly seems to be done very badly by the Ferguson police.
RUSH: Wow, so we’re gonna compare Ferguson to Gaza. Now, look, folks. These people are rightly concerned about journalists being arrested at McDonald’s. They go through all this (summarized): “There are many protests that take place in cities, like New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and there aren’t reporters being arrested for sitting in a McDonald’s.” Now, that is considered an outrage.
But my point is, there are many other outrages which do not bother these people. I’m sorry to go back to it, but it fits. This government’s effort to criminalize conservative fundraising via the IRS is no different than this. It’s no different than being arrested in a McDonald’s, being accused of breaking the law and therefore being denied tax-exempt status. We know the e-mails that have been written.
We know the phone calls. We know the back-office communications that took place at the IRS aimed at conservatives and Tea Party people. We know that this government has attempted to criminalize conservatism. This government and the American left has attempted to criminalize, in many cases, policy — and that’s been happening for a while! That didn’t get anybody concerned in the media.
That didn’t even raise any eyebrows.
But when it happens to them, “Oh, it’s gotta be reported. Everybody’s gotta know it, and everybody better be outraged by it.” Benghazi happens? “That’s just a Republican scandal! There’s nothing to see there. The Republicans are just making it up. They’re just racist, sexist, bigot, homophobes,” all of this stuff.
The mischaracterization, the lies — and the attempted effort to attach criminality to basic mainstream conservatism — never even gets noticed by somebody.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: I don’t think you can deny it, folks. The Drive-By Media every day tells us that we are supposed to trust the government with every aspect of our lives. Every aspect: health care, housing, food, you name it, except the cops and except the military. When it comes to government with guns, we are not supposed to pay any attention; we’re supposed to be very, very suspicious. When the government has guns, i.e., police force, you name it, any armed agency of the federal government we’re supposed to distrust. But all the others we’re supposed to love them and trust them with everything.
Now, AP has a story about these two journalists. “Protests Turn Violent in St. Louis Suburb — Protests in the St. Louis suburb rocked by racial unrest since a white police officer shot an unarmed black teenager to death turned violent Wednesday night, with some people lobbing Molotov cocktails and other objects at police who responded with smoke bombs and tear gas to disperse the crowd.” How did the protest turn violent last night? Haven’t the protestors been looting for several days now? I mean, isn’t looting and smashing in a storefront, isn’t that violent?
In any case, the latest news media photos make Ferguson look like the Gaza Strip. They actually do. But there’s an interesting comment that one of the arrested reporters made. Ryan Reilly of the Huffing and Puffington Post actually said something that if you parse it and — In fact, what he’s basically saying is it’s unfair that he was released so soon when others aren’t, that he has status as a white person and as a journalist. His status as a white person and journalist got him released earlier than other people, and it’s not right. It’s almost like he wanted to be held longer.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Now, back to this AP story about the arrested reporters in St. Louis — actually, in Ferguson. I had to race through this, ’cause I wanted try to get it in before the bottom-of-the-hour break. But here’s the natural tempoed explanation of this. One of the arrested journalists is Ryan Reilly. He works for the Huffing and Puffington Post. He talked to a reporter at MSNBC and he suggested that he was mistreated by the local authorities. He admits that. He’s very upset about it. He was mistreated. He was prematurely arrested. He was hustled out of there. They accused him of trespassing.
But then he said, “It was just a terrible experience. The worst part was he slammed my head against the glass purposefully on the way out of McDonald’s and then sarcastically apologized for it. And it was just a terrible experience, and I recognize I’m sort of in a place of privilege here both as a journalist and as a white person, frankly, in that I was — evidently the police chief made the decision not to go ahead and hold us.”
There was a big holding room where a bunch of people had been taken either having been arrested or were going to be, and a cop walked in and shouted, “Okay, who’s media?” And these two reporters raised their hands: “We are, we are.” “Okay. Get outta here.” And they got rid of ’em. Nobody else was allowed to leave. So this guy, Ryan Reilly went on MSNBC today to share his guilt over the fact that he, as a person of double privilege — A, he’s a white person. That’s privilege number one. B, he’s a journalist. That’s privilege number two. He was let go early. That’s not fair. That’s not fair.
It’s almost like he was making the case that he was released too quickly and should have been held longer. Nobody else was released, not fair. They let me go because I am a person of double privilege, white guy and journalist. We have audio sound bites from the reporters. Up first, Wesley Lowery of the Washington Post, also arrested. He was on CNN today with Kate Bolduan and the question was, “Wesley, why were you arrested, and what did being arrested tell you besides the fact that you were arrested?”
LOWERY: I asked specifically under what charges am I being held, why IÂ’m being detained. He said for trespassing. So we were trespassing as patrons of a McDonald’s where we both made purchases and had been working for a long period of time. The police I guess now have jurisdiction over private businesses. All of this went down, as you can see in the video, in less than two minutes. There were not any protests within two blocks of us. I would love an explanation from the police department about what the eminent risk to our safety was. We had to be forcibly removed from a McDonald’s while we were trying to pack up our bags. We ended up standing outside the McDonald’s for 15 minutes in the handcuffs. We were in the same location so what was the public safety?
RUSH: So they were in handcuffs and were eventually let out. And that’s not fair. ‘Cause they had double privilege, white guys and — well, I don’t know if Wesley Lowery’s white, but Ryan Reilly is. And here is Ryan Reilly next. Kate Bolduan said, “Is there any regret that you became the story rather than covering the story, Ryan?”
REILLY: It’s really frustrating. We gathered a lot of good material that I would have loved to get out there yesterday had it not been for the fact that I was detained and whisked away because apparently I didn’t pack up my bags speedily enough for some cops who got a little hotheaded here. And it’s a distraction, honestly. It was a completely unnecessary situation. We’re trying to do our jobs here and the attitude of the officers we dealt with was just extraordinary. I’m angry, frankly. You know, you sort of understand some of the frustration, honestly, that I think that people feel based on the mentality of at least some of the police officers that are on the street. The idea that we posed any sort of threat because we weren’t quickly enough packing up our bags is just ludicrous.
RUSH: That’s Ryan Reilly of the Huffing and Puffington Post. When the cops give you an order, it’s like your drill sergeant giving you an order. “Right now” doesn’t mean in 30 seconds. We’ve got tense circumstances, heightened awareness on the part of everybody and everything, and the cops know the journalists are not on their side. The cops know the journalists are looking to make them look bad. So you talk about trying to keep everything in perspective, there’s that aspect of this as well.
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