RUSH: Well, that’s just great, ladies and gentlemen, absolutely wonderful. You see where President Obama’s finally come up with a strategy to fight terrorism after all of these years. Oh, man, I’m so comforted. He has announced he’s gonna make the military more lean. What it means is he’s gonna gut it. But rather than say that, he’s gonna make the military more lean. He’s going to slash the military budget even more, even though it has already been slashed considerably.
Well, how much do drones cost? I mean, clearly the terrorism method that we’re using here is drones, which of course are not nearly as bad as torture, so-called torture. Hey, folks, it could have been worse. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he had ordered the military to start walking around with their arms up chanting “hands up, don’t shoot.” It can always be worse with this guy. This is the way you have to look at it.
Greetings and welcome to the Rush Limbaugh program, this the EIB Network and the Limbaugh Institute for — (interruption) you find that funny? Snerdley’s practically on the floor. It could have been. Would you have been surprised? Hell, everybody else is in the world is doing it. On CNN, did you see this? Those four infobabes sitting there with their hands up saying “hands up, don’t shoot” and one of them had a sign that said, “I can’t breathe.”
It didn’t happen. “Hands up, don’t shoot” didn’t happen. The truth is no longer a fact. The truth is not even objective. The truth is relative, and it’s a mess. So it wouldn’t have surprised me at all, given Obama’s trying to get in on the pop culture stuff, if he’d had the military walk around with their hands up saying “hands up, don’t shoot.” So it could always be worse.
Great to have you, folks, again the telephone number is 800-282-2882, the e-mail address quarterback ElRushbo@eibnet.com.
You know, the state of journalism today is horrible. Things that are untrue, just jam-pack lies are making it into the news routinely and regularly. Sometimes corrections are made; sometimes they’re not. The rape story at UVA with Rolling Stone. They’re just everywhere. Paying some attention to things over the weekend, I think journalism is undergoing a tectonic shift right before our eyes that’s not being seen. The results of it are being seen, but what’s actually happening isn’t being seen.
It all starts in journalism school, but not entirely there. I think the Drive-By Media, you know, they used to have a monopoly. Let’s review this for just a second. Up until 1988 the mainstream media had a virtual monopoly on the news. They had a monopoly on what they were going to report and what they were not gonna report. And that’s key. That’s big. When you had exclusionary rights, you were able to control the thought and the opinions of the public at large simply by what you decided to cover and what you decided to not cover. Then you add to that the monopoly to add opinion or bias to whatever you decide to cover. So they owned it, and that was a lot of power, and they used it over and over and over again.
Then 1988 came along and this program started, and it gave birth to what is popularly called an alternative media. First it was this program giving birth to other talk radio programs. Then the blogosphere came along, and then nine years later came Fox News, and the whole alternative media thing came up. And regardless what people think of it, it did destroy the mainstream media’s monopoly.
I have mentioned this on several previous occasions. I think that the realization by the Drive-By Media that their monopoly was over is the actual moment in time that gave birth to the media as unabashed, out in the open advocates for the Democrat Party and its agenda. They had always been that, but prior to the monopoly ending they were able to shroud themselves in this cloak of objectivity and fairness, mainstream, if you will. They were able to camouflage who they were. But the rise of alternative media in prominent places began obviously to challenge the orthodoxy. They lost power. They saw power ebbing and flowing away from them.
So they began to do things to, in many ways, prove to themselves they still had the power that they had under the monopoly. And the desire to prove their power to themselves dictated and demonstrated a lot about the stories they covered and the polls that they undertook. In other words, if you’re gonna cover “the news” with the objective being to prove to yourself you still have the monopolistic power to bend and shape public opinion, then you are going to cover certain stories, ignore others, and you’re going to cover them in a certain way to demonstrate to yourself as an accredited member of the Drive-By Media that your loss of monopoly has not resulted in a total loss of your power.
Well, now, we’ve been at this long enough that the alternative media, previously defined as me, talk radio, Fox News, the blogosphere, has given birth to yet another child, if you will, and this is in large part social media related, media, social website, Facebook, Twitter. But it’s also blogs and websites. But these are just plain old — and I don’t mean that as in plain old boring, but they’re just average, ordinary everyday, run-of-the-mill regular people who have websites, who have constructed the websites and structured them to look official.
It could be one or two people made to look like a massive news organization underway, and they do things according to the journalistic model in terms of the way stories are structured. Many of them are conservative, many of them are renegade conservative, but the point is it is causing the Drive-By Media further panic, and the impact that all of this New Media is having is clearly the erosion of the monopolistic mainstream media model. That deterioration is continuing. They’re now the dinosaurs. I mean, literally we joked about ’em being Jurassic Park. They really are now.
Now, it’s gonna take a while for all of this to manifest. And don’t misunderstand. I’m not saying that they’re not effective. I don’t want anybody to misunderstand. I’m not saying they’ve lost influence. I’m just saying the ground is shifting. Look at the New York Times. Look at these newspapers. They can’t sell advertising. They can’t keep up their circulation. They are buying out employees, and if they don’t take the buyout, they fire them. They’re not paying them very much. Their severance is not very high. All of their benefits packages are gone. It’s misery in many places other than for a select few stars at these places.
In fact. David Carr, I think it’s Carr or Carter, I’m not sure which, Bill Carter, David, one of the two people at the New York Times, wrote a piece on this without, I don’t even think really realizing what he was writing. He was writing a piece on this New Media. He was ripping them to shreds, how they’re not real journalists, how they don’t have any credibility. When you do a history check on them, you can’t find anything that would qualify them. But, see, that doesn’t matter anymore. The Internet itself confers authority. Just the net itself. And if you know how to structure your story or stories on your website you can confer or have authority conferred on you whether you deserve it or not.
The American people — and I’m not being critical. You know me, the more the merrier and the freer the speech, the better. I can deal with it. You know, I’m in a content, content, content business. I’m proud of my content. I don’t make it up, and I don’t lie about it, so I got nothing to worry about. But the people in the Drive-Bys who have been living a lie for all these years are being exposed, and they are in panic. They’re running stories that are flat-out untrue. They’re running stories that are flat-out untrue because they’re ending up hiring people that have no business being hired as journalists. They’re hiring little inculcated propagandized young skulls full of mush out of political science departments or out of journalism schools.
This is just one example. On Friday, I reported to you via the New York Times that the pope, Pope Francis, had told a young boy that his dog would go to heaven and that he would see his young dog in heaven because animals are part of God. It turns out Pope Francis didn’t say it. Pope Francis didn’t get anywhere close to saying it. Pope Paul VI said it years ago in a specific circumstance to comfort a six-year-old, I think, who had asked him a question about it. Pope Paul VI was not speaking in any official papal announcement, authority. He was just trying to comfort a kid.
The New York Times just made it up, and they had to write an immediate correction. “On Thursday, The New York Times reported Pope Francis was endorsing the thesis of the cartoon All Dogs Go To Heaven. On Friday, they were pressed to run a correction, suggesting the media are eager to promote the notion that the Pope is frustrating conservatives and breaking with longstanding Catholic teaching.” And that is exactly why the Times wrote what they wrote. They wrote what they wanted to believe was true. They wanted the pope — remember, now, the left despises the Catholic Church for a whole host of reasons, and so this pope has come along and has given them some encouragement.
This Pope Francis has come out, in their minds, and attacked capitalism, and they had to retract that, by the way. But the pope has said a number of things that the Drive-Bys and the left consider to be attacks on conservatism. That’s all it took for the New York Times to think they had a scoop and think they had a story. I’ve joked about this in the past, but I think this is absolutely true. I think I can prove it in the audio sound bites today, and if not in the audio sound bites, in the Stack of Stuff.
I think that the Democrat Party today, the American left and the US media, if there’s any distinction in them, really do consider American conservatives to be a bigger threat to their way of life, their version of America, what they think is true, than they consider the Taliban or Al-Qaeda or Iran or any other foreign enemy, the ChiComs, the Russians. And I’m not exaggerating. This is another one of those things I used to joke about that actually has come true.
I really do think that they are so twisted with this hatred for us that the moment they see a shred of anything that might indicate that conservatives are gonna take it on the chin — so the pope, the Vicar of Christ, telling a guy, papal statement that dogs go to heaven, the New York Times knows that conservatives are gonna have an outrageous reaction to that. That’s why they did the story, just to tweak us, just to try to convince us that another of our precious and beloved institutions — in this case, the Catholic Church — was abandoning us.
I’m telling you, the sense of war and opposition and hatred for American conservatives by the American left I don’t think is something people have a full grasp of. I’m without doubt convinced that nobody in the Republican establishment understands it, except to the degree that they agree with the Democrats. I think you get the budget deal, you look at the way things happened there, you look at Jeb Bush, who’s announced an exploratory committee today, it is clear, ladies and gentlemen, that the number one enemy — (interruption) no, no, don’t, Mr. Snerdley. You’re still stuck some years ago in the usual model or paradigm of how Washington is structured and acts and behaves.
I’m telling you, as far as the donor classes of the Democrat and Republican parties, and they are the ones with power, the donor class, the Tea Party or conservatives poses the biggest threat on a day-to-day basis to them, far bigger than the Taliban, far bigger than Al-Qaeda. So anything that can happened that can be reported as conservatives taking it on the chin, any evidence that we are losing, any attempt to beat us is going to be at the top of their lists. And I don’t think there is any question about this.
So you’ve got a bunch of unsettling, upsetting things happening in journalism. Heads should be rolling at Rolling Stone and any other number of media places. The outright lies that are ending up as news. You’ve got four analysts and maybe an anchor at CNN sitting there, hands raised, in solidarity with something that did not happen. A news network claiming to be America’s leader. “Hands up, don’t shoot.” And this pope story is just one example. The New York Times corrections page could fill the bottom of half of the front page most days. So there’s, I think, earth-shattering things happening, but not clearly visible. You see the results of them.
Stephen Glass at the New Republic was fired for making things up just left and right, didn’t matter, canned without a second thought. It turns out that the infobabe that wrote the fraudulent story on rape was a classmate of Stephen Glass’s when they were in college, wherever it was in 1994, they were classmates. They may have even known each other. But in addition to these young kids, quasi-journalists, coming out of school already oriented this way, the professor or the professoriate, if you will, the faculty at these places is in large part responsible for the creation of these attitudes.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Here’s how the fraudulent New York Times story began. “Pope Francis has given hope –” now, listen to this. You have to read this in the context of who’s the enemy here. Why is this story written? The story is written aiming at conservatives. It’s a nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah. It’s “we’re beating you! We’re gonna kick your butt! We hate you, you conservatives, here’s another of your precious institutions abandoning you.” That’s the theme.
“Pope Francis has given hope to gays.” See, we conservatives are supposed to be mad about that. “Pope Francis has given hope to unmarried couples.” We conservatives are supposed to hate that, too. “Pope Francis has given hope to advocates of the Big Bang theory.” Yeah, we’re supposed to hate that, too, see, because that’s evolution. So you conservatives, this pope’s abandoning you. Nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah.
“Now,” writes Rick Gladstone, New York Times, now, Pope Francis “has endeared himself to dog lovers, animal rights activists and vegans.” See, you conservatives are losing everybody. The pope recognizes that all of the weirdos on our side are actually the normal ones and you are the freaks.
“During a weekly general audience at the Vatican last month, the pope, speaking of the afterlife, appeared to suggest that animals could go to heaven, asserting, ‘Holy Scripture teaches us that the fulfillment of this wonderful design also affects everything around us.’
ItalyÂ’s Corriere della Sera newspaper, analyzing the popeÂ’s remarks, concluded he believed animals have a place in the afterlife.” Then they go on, the story further is written in a way to frustrate conservatives, and then they had the next day to run a correction.
Pope Francis said none of this. That whole story was made up from a single quote of Pope Paul VI in a nonofficial moment trying to comfort a little six-year-old boy who had asked him if his dog was going to go to heaven, and the pope, Pope Paul VI decided he wasn’t gonna get deep and in the weeds with a six-year-old. So he made a decision. That was years ago.
New York Magazine, there’s another story here. “MondayÂ’s edition of New York magazine includes an irresistible story about a Stuyvesant High senior named Mohammed Islam who had made a fortune investing in the stock market.” Except that he didn’t. He made zero. It was a totally fraudulent, made up story, not checked, because the narrative of the story was too dreamy, a set-upon Muslim scoring big in America.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Let me give you another example story here. Well, the New York Magazine. Let me flesh that out for you. “MondayÂ’s edition of New York magazine includes an irresistible story about a Stuyvesant High senior named Mohammed Islam who had made a fortune investing in the stock market. Reporter Jessica Pressler wrote regarding the precise number, ‘Though he is shy about the $72 million number, he confirmed his net worth is in the “high eight figures.”‘
“The New York Post followed up with a story of its own, with the fat figure playing a key role in the headline: ‘High School Student Scores $72M Playing the Stock Market.’ And now it turns out, the real number is … zero. In an exclusive interview with Mr. Islam and his friend Damir Tulemaganbetov, who also featured heavily in the New York story, the baby-faced boys who dress in suits with tie clips came clean. Swept up in a tide of media adulation, they made the whole thing up.” They made the whole thing up and it ends up in New York Magazine in the New York Post!
By making fun of conservatives and relegating them to this places of idiocy and irrelevance, the Colbert Report was the greatest thing that ever happened to America. She wrote that the Colbert show affirmed “American values for those who think critically. For the first time in decades we had a comedian critiquing [conservatism] and suggesting that such critique was the highest form of patriotism.” She’s celebrating that mocking, making fun of conservatism is patriotism today. And then she said this, and this is the key right there.
“Finally we had someone remind us that you could care about your nation and simultaneously find American exceptionalism disturbing.” There you have it: A professorette at Penn State lamenting the loss of a comedy show because a comedy show finally put conservatives and conservatism in its place. Because this talk about how great America is, this talk about how special and unique America is has got to go. American exceptionalism is “disturbing.”
Throughout modern liberalism — hell, not even modern. Throughout all of liberalism, you’ll find maybe even the foundational theme is a blame of America, a dislike for America, a resentment of America as exceptional, as a superpower, as what have. But the point of this is, folks, is that to the Republican Party, the Democrats are not the big threat; you and me are. To the Democrat Party, the Republicans are not the big threat; you and me are.
Not the Taliban.
Not Al-Qaeda.
Not Islamic jihadist terrorists.
No, no, no. That’s a threat, yeah, but we’ll take care of that with some drones and we’ll pare down the military. The real threat is American conservatism: The Tea Party and anybody in conservatism or the Tea Party who somehow becomes prominent. (interruption) Paul VI, not John Paul VI. It’s Pope Paul VI that made the comment to the young child Did I say John Paul VI? (interruption) I correct myself. Pope Paul VI is the one the New York Times took his words and put ’em in the mouth of Pope Francis.
By the way, this professorette at Penn State is not alone. You… I don’t know how widely read you are on all of this, but because, “It’s my job, man,” I read all of this stuff, and I’m telling you: It’s getting harder and harder to remain in good cheer. I can’t tell you how ticked off I am every day by 11 o’clock, literally ticked off at some of the stuff I run into. On my tech blogs I can’t escape this stuff about how America sucks.
I can’t escape celebrating when America takes it on the chin. I can’t escape these professors and these lies and all this crap that’s in the media about everything that so-called wrong with America. Meanwhile, we’re losing everything this country’s known for. The culture is rotting away, the culture is corrupting itself away, being perverted away, and all of that’s being celebrated. People trying to stand up and defend the culture and stop it and make it whole again are considered the enemy, and the whole notion of American exceptionalism is considered threatening.
The point of it now is even lying in the media is perfectly fine. It doesn’t matter. What is the phrase? “Fake but accurate.” They concocted that after Dan Rather made up the whole thing about Bush and the National Guard. “Well, it was true. The documents might have been fake, but it was a true story.” So the fact that it was accurate and can only be confirmed with fake things didn’t matter. Fake was okay because, in their minds, it was true.
So, it’s the same thing with rape in the Rolling Stone story.
“Well, it may not have happened, but we know it happens all the time, and this is a good story to get out there and have it in the public consciousness. Yeah, maybe these guys that were accused didn’t do it, but it still happens, you know it and I know it.” It’s like Ferguson, Missouri. “Well, okay, the Gentle Giant may have robbed a store. Yeah, the Gentle Giant might have inserted himself in the cop car, and the Gentle Giant might not have had his hands up. It still doesn’t erase the fact that white cops are killing black kids every day!”
No, none of it’s true.
Doesn’t matter.
See, the truth is relative. It doesn’t matter. It’s fake but accurate.
“Okay, the pope didn’t say that, but it still let us literally rip conservatives all to hell so it’s worth being wrong, and nobody will see the correction anyway.” In the process, as so often happens with liberalism, the standards decay. Everything’s being corrupted. Everything decent is being corrupted, torn apart, perverted, and what have you by a bunch of miserable, unhappy people who simply cannot be happy no matter what they do and no matter what happens.
But it’s corrupting countless institutions that people trust and still do, and that people believe in. I mean, for crying out loud, American exceptionalism is easy to explain. These people are even lying about what that is. American exceptionalism, in their minds, you know what they think we’re doing with it? They think we’re running around saying, “We’re better than you! We’re better than you Europeans! Yeah, we’re better than you Africans. We’re Americans! We’re superior.”
That’s not what it is, but that’s what they think it is — and, of course, “That’s just not right. Everybody’s the same. Nobody’s better than anybody else. It’s not right for us to be better. Besides, those people are probably better than we are. We have everything we have because we stole it from those poor people.” It’s just perverted sickness out there everywhere, and I just… You know, you do what you can to battle it and fight it, but they do not stop. They’re just on a forward, constant, almost smothering march with this stuff.
I can remember pieces written by Victor Davis Hanson over the years, the past 20 years at National Review Online, where he would chronicle this decay. He would chronicle the corruption in this element of the news or this element of society or that part of the Democrat Party. His belief was that the corruption itself would cause ruination, that we really didn’t have have to take any remedial action because these people were corrupting themselves.
They were corrupting their own institutions, and nobody would buy what they were doing. Nobody would believe the outrageous claims. Well, he was wrong, and everybody who thought like that was wrong. They’re not falling apart. They are corrupting themselves, but they’re not losing. At least on the surface.
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