RUSH: You know, listening to this guy — I’m sorry — listening to the president talking about censorship and his new pet phrase, “That’s not who we are,” about everything. “That’s not who we are. That’s not who we are.” I don’t know, folks. I don’t know how much more of this I can take. I really don’t.
JOHNNY DONOVAN: And now, from sunny south Florida, it’s Open Line Friday!
RUSH: This is sheer sophistry. Anyway, greetings, and welcome back. Open Line Friday, final hour of the week. We will be here next week, in case you’re wondering. I know that most everybody has decamped and commenced the two-week break, but not me. I like this time of year. I like being here. I like being the only regular guy you can tune to during this time of year. So we’ll be here some of next week. You can rest easy over the weekend and be confident that when it comes to the EIB Network, you are gonna get the best. Telephone number, 800-282-2882. E-mail address, ElRushbo@eibnet.com.
So Obama, he said Sony just made a mistake. For what, caving to terrorists? Obama just caved to Cuba. Cuba’s a terrorist state in its own way. The people we released are Cuban murderers. Look, and then he started talking about (imitating Obama), “That wouldn’t be who we are. What if we started self-censoring? What if people stopped making movies, stopped saying things ’cause they’d be afraid of offending somebody else. We can’t have that. That’s not who we are.”
What do you mean, that’s not who we are? Half of the people in this country are afraid to speak up. Half of the people in this country are afraid to speak up out of fear of what someone’s gonna do to them. Businesses are practically, in some cases, afraid to open up because of the crap that they’re gonna get from customers that may not agree with them or what have you. There’s a whole industry. The left has developed an entire industry of militant, quasi-violent censors.
I don’t like making any of this stuff personal because I can handle it, but talk radio is among the most targeted. Sony, sorry, I got no sympathy for you. If you want to cave to the North Koreans, fine and dandy. My friends, I’ve been doing this for 25 years, and if you’ve been paying attention, you know how many attempts have been made to get me to, quote, get my mind right. It happens regularly. There are all kinds of threats made and attempts to ruin me or to damage my business or what have you, based on something I said that offended somebody.
Here’s Obama, “That’s not who we are. We engage in self-censorship. We can’t be afraid.” That’s how the left survives is intimidating people that say things they don’t agree with. Obama’s own party, Obama’s own organization, MoveOn.org, whatever organizations, ACORN, you name it, whatever organization he’s running out of the White House are built on intimidating opponents and silencing them.
Obama specializes in censorship. Obama’s friends specialize in censorship. Obama’s political allies, that’s how they get done what they want to get done. They can’t win in a debate of ideas. They don’t even want to go to the arena of ideas. They don’t want to debate. They try to get rid of opposing views. They don’t want a level playing field. They don’t want anybody else anybody else on the playing field. They engage in all kinds of despicable tactics to intimidate anybody and everybody who might even think or say one thing they disagree with. They are the most intolerant bunch of petulant babies running around crying, but they are attempting to do real damage.
And here he’s up there daring to chastise people who caved to it when that’s how he got where he is, if the truth be known. “Yeah, we gotta make sure that we don’t cave to terrorism.” What do you think he did sicking the IRS on Catherine Engelbrecht and every other organization, Tea Party, trying to get 501(c)(3) fundraising status? You think that wasn’t intimidation, censorship, whatever you want to call it? They specialize in it. In a way it’s kind of interesting to see them hoist on their own petard. It’s kind of interesting to see the way they react when it happens to them. Sony being them. The Norks being the equivalent of ACORN, except in this case ACORN’s not attacking conservatives. ACORN’s attacking liberals. And you see what a bunch of gutless wonders they are.
Not only caving to North Korea, whoever the hackers are, but now caving to Al Sharpton? In the midst of all this the president stands up says (imitating Obama), “This is not who we are; this is not what we’re going to do” from a guy whose buddy, Saul Alinsky, his mentor, teaches these tactics, specializes in them, and the American left today is one giant intimidation Mafia, and they use their buddies in the Drive-By Media to do it as well.
I can’t count the number of times that I have been misquoted, misrepresented, lied about, taken out of context, come under attack, attempted to be destroyed, what have you. But I haven’t changed. I have altered one opinion I have about anything or anybody as a result of any of that. And I never would. And I’m not asking anybody for a gold star. My point here is, you can resist this stuff. I frankly don’t understand people that don’t.
I mean, let’s say you’re an advertiser and you decide to advertise on some radio show or TV show and all of a sudden you are hit with supposed e-mails and tweets threatening you and telling you that if you stay in business with that TV or radio show that you’re gonna lose all these customers. And then you find out that all of those e-mails, all those tweets, those tens of thousands of tweets are being sent by Twitter robots that are manufactured by ten people. When you learn that 10 people are responsible for all of those thousands of threatening tweets and e-mails you get, why don’t you have the ability just to say, “Okay, screw it. I’m not gonna be intimidated by this.”
That’s what the left does. They’ve got a whole bunch of these robot or bot-net type of operations using Twitter and a new advertiser will show up on a radio or TV show, conservative, and all of a sudden that advertiser gets inundated with complaints that are made to look like residents in the town where the business exists. You find out that in most cases the e-mails don’t even come from the same state and that they’re being created by 10 people.
It’s fakery. It’s totally fraudulent. But I would think that once you’re the advertiser and you’re told this and you learn it, “Okay, screw it. It’s not even real. There aren’t millions and thousands and hundreds of people protesting my decision to advertise here or there. It’s not happening.” But that’s what they do in more ways than one to try to intimate people, and it’s not just advertisers; it’s everybody.
They intimate cartoonists. They intimidate op-ed writers. They threaten, they intimate any number of ways anybody that might say anything they disagree with. And now all of a sudden it happens to them with a bunch of hackers maybe from North Korea saying, “We’re offended. You better not play that movie, The Interview. We’re greatly offended by it.” And they cave to it. And so now Obama’s — I’m sure he’s mad. Their side’s not supposed to cave. They’re the ones that make people cave.
And here comes Sony, his buddies out there caving. (imitating Obama) “Hey, hey, this is not who we are. That’s not what we do.” I don’t know, folks. It’s amazing to watch this. It’s extremely frustrating to hear Obama go on and on. “That’s not who we are.” He just said that we can’t let people who make movies be intimidated. Too late. Sorry. They already are. They just admitted it. But how about Nakoula Nakoula. Obama threw the guy in jail for making a video, not even a movie, a YouTube video.
“We can’t let people that make movies be intimidated.” You did it. You blamed an entire disaster at one of our consulates on this poor guy and his video that nobody saw, and he was intimidated. He willingly went to jail just to get out of the line of fire. This guy ends up in jail, Obama puts him there, and Obama’s out there saying we can’t let people who make movies be intimidated.
And then Obama, you know what else he said? (paraphrasing) “I wish Sony had spoken to me first. I wish they’d a called me. I’d a told ’em what to do.” What would you have done? Given them help on how to cave without looking like you’re caving? What would you’ve told ’em? The message of this administration is we can’t stop cyber war. Our options are limited. I have it right here.
“Suspicions that North Korea was behind a destructive hacking attack against Sony Pictures and a threat against movie theaters are intensifying calls for tougher US steps to cut that country’s access to hard currency … At first glance, US options are limited.” That’s from our own government. Whoa. Here is a little sliver of a country where over half the people are starving and eating dog, and at night it’s dark because they don’t have enough electricity to turn on the lights, and we are limited in options?
“Well, that’s right, Mr. Limbaugh, because the North Koreans have as a accord with, as you call them, the ChiComs.” Oh, yeah, the Chinese, that’s right, now we really are afraid of the Chinese. I think that this is hypocrisy, the face of it, and it ticks me off, caving to cyber terrorism, caving to Al Sharpton. And then as good liberals, wanting credit for understanding and wanting credit for compassion and wanting credit for understanding. “We’re sorry we offended you. We didn’t mean to offend you. That’s not who we are.”
Is throwing a guy in jail for making an anti-Mohammed movie who we are? It is leftists like Obama and every other Democrat in this country who are hell-bent on making us self-censor. The purpose of their intimidation is precisely that, to get us to shut up, to get us to stop and think about what we’re gonna say, maybe not say it or it might offend somebody. And the offended might have a rally in town and blow up a courthouse or something. Oh, yeah, so we had better shut up.
Think Al Sharpton specializes in intimidation? Yep. Think he specializes in censorship? Yes. There’s all kinds of censorship going on. There’s all kinds of intimidation going on against conservatives, against conservatives in the media. Obama will not speak up against it ever. He’s in favor of it. He teaches how it’s done. It’s what community organizers do. They’re intimidators, they’re agitators. As you can tell, this ticks me off.
And let me give you an example of how it manifests itself.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: All right, let’s do sort of an A-B, side-by-side comparison. Obama now and Obama then. This is Obama this afternoon at the press conference where Major Garrett was just captured taking single still shot pictures of Obama while he wasn’t asking questions. I guess he’s a Fanboy. Or maybe CBS cut back on cameramen to pay Colbert. And maybe now the correspondents have to provide the pictures, too. Who knows. Anyway, Obama’s up there and he got a question from an unidentified infobabe who said, “Did Sony make the right move in pulling the movie, or does that set a dangerous precedent, Dear Leader?”
OBAMA: We cannot have a society in which some dictator someplace can start imposing censorship here in the United States.
RUSH: Well, we do.
OBAMA: Because if somebody is able to intimidate folks out of releasing a satirical movie, imagine what they start doing when they see a documentary that they don’t like or news reports that they don’t like.
RUSH: Well, yeah.
OBAMA: Or, even worse, imagine if producers and distributors and others start engaging in self-censorship because they don’t want to offend the sensibilities of somebody whose sensibilities probably need to be offended.
RUSH: What in the —
OBAMA: So that’s not who we are. That’s not what America is about. I wish they’d spoken to me first.
RUSH: Jesus — pardon me. See, I’m at my wits’ end. (imitating Obama) “That’s not who we are. I wish they’d spoken to me first. I have all the answers.” What is this? We can’t engage in self-censorship because we don’t want to offend the sensibilities of somebody’s sensibilities who probably need to be offended? You try doing any satire or parody of anybody on the left, and nobody from Obama on down’s gonna come along and applaud your First Amendment right to do it. They’re gonna try to destroy you for doing it.
Self-censorship is exactly what Obama and other leftists like him want. They want you afraid to speak up. They want that. That’s exactly how they win, is having you afraid of being ratted out, have you afraid of being overheard, or have you afraid simply to say what you really believe just on basic principle. They want you afraid to do that. Here he’s coming along, “We can’t have that.” His party survives on that technique. But even at that, you heard this, “We can’t have self-censorship. We can’t allow people to do this. We can’t not make movies just because it’s gonna offend somebody.” But back on December 25th of 2012, he said this.
RUSH: Right. And they put the guy in jail. Where is the tolerance for this poor guy? Nobody even saw this guy’s little video. You know, even back within the first two weeks of being immaculated, Obama held a meeting with the joint congressional leadership of the White House, two weeks after being immaculated, and he told John Boehner, “You can’t keep listening to Rush Limbaugh. That’s not how things get done.” And that was reported, by the way. That’s how I knew about it. But he openly said right to Boehner’s face and the other Republicans there, too, “You can’t listen to Limbaugh. That’s not how things get done. You gotta stop doing that.” Was that was that trying to intimidate them, censor me, censor them?
Not long after that Boehner came down here on a fundraising trip, played golf, and he stopped by the office here. We talked about that and he looked at me and said, “I can’t figure out why he was doing that. I don’t know why he said that. What’s the point in telling us to stop listening to you.” Which kind of took me aback.
I said, “Well, Mr. Speaker, what he was hoping would happen is that just one of you Republicans, just one, all it would take is one, just one of you would leave the White House and go to the microphones they have set up out there in the driveway and agree with him. He was hoping that that’s how you would define crossing the aisle and bipartisanship. Even you, Mr. Speaker –” this is what I told Boehner “He was hoping you would go out there and say, ‘We’re not gonna listen to Rush Limbaugh anymore.’ That’s what he wanted you to do. That’s what he was hoping you would do.”
And Boehner said, “Well, ha-ha, as though he thinks that’s ever gonna happen.” (laughing) Yeah. Right. Okay.
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