RUSH: Back to Brian Williams on the sound bite roster today.
RUSH: I’ve done my best to diversify the program, folks. But, I mean, Brian Williams is all over the Drive-Bys. Here’s Lester Holt, who is sitting in for Williams in the anchor chair.
HOLT: We want to take just a moment to tell you where Brian is tonight. In a message to his colleagues over the weekend Brian told us he’s taking several days off this broadcast, amid questions over how he recalled certain stories he covered.
RUSH: God! (chuckling)
HOLT: In a career spent covering the news, Brian told us it’s clear he’s become too much a part of the news. He’ll be off while this issue is dealt with.
(impression) “You know, I just remembered I wasn’t on that Chinook. I didn’t show up for an hour after it was shot down, and I wasn’t on the one that followed. You know, I just now remembered that — with the help of some military veterans at Stars & Stripes who were on the helicopter, too, and also didn’t see me.” Jeff Greenfield had an interesting take. Before we play for you what Jeff Greenfield’s thought is, let me replay for you something I said on this program yesterday.
RUSH ARCHIVE: You know what’s gonna happen? There’s gonna be rehab for lying, and some enterprising entrepreneur is gonna open up a liars’ rehab center, pathological lying rehab center.
RUSH: Now, Jeff Greenfield on CNN last night.
GREENFIELD: In this day and age, the anchor has to be something other than a deliverer of gravitas. He has to be a vivid personality. If the stories that are now being looked at reveal more fabulism, exaggeration, lies — whatever the right word is — he can’t survive. I don’t mean to be flip, but if Brian were, like, a rock star — and if Oprah Winfrey or Barbara Walters were still around — he could go and confess to an addiction for exaggerating.
RUSH: (laughing)
GREENFIELD: He could go into a clinic for four weeks and come out purified. I don’t think for a journalist that’s possible.
RUSH: Hee-hee-hee-hee-hee! Do I know these people or do I know these people? Yes! You know, might Oprah come out and do a special? Might she return for a special for Brian Williams to show up and confess and essentially attend a one-hour rehab session? I think Oprah still has some tears left in her. She could pull this off. Maybe Barbara Walters and Oprah co-host it, one from each network. Larry King decided to get in on this. This was on the syndicated entertainment magazine show, The Insider. Correspondent Michael Yo spoke with TV host Larry King about the Brian Williams scandal.
KING: Smart! Now, let it die down. Maybe it will go away. I don’t know how to make an excuse. I’ve never had it happen to me, thank God.
RUSH: Never had it “happen” to you? (laughing) What about you never did it? (impression) “I never had it happen to me, where somebody put a thought in my mind and I didn’t know about it and then I spoke it! Thank God it never happened to me. Let it die down. Maybe it will go away. I don’t know how to make an excuse. I never had it happen to me.” (laughing) Jon Stewart last night, auditioning for the NBC Nightly News gig.
STEWART: I am happy. Finally someone is being held to account for misleading America about the Iraq war.
AUDIENCE: (laughter and applause)
STEWART: Finally. Now, it might not necessarily — might not necessarily be the first person you’d want held accountable on that list, but never again will Brian Williams mislead this great nation about being shot at in a war we probably wouldn’t have ended up in if the media had applied this level of scrutiny to the actual f(bleep) war.
RUSH: Right. They had to love that at NBC News. This is the guy they tried to hire for Meet the Press. And, by the way, he went on to excoriate Williams. I mean, after he applied for the job there, he went on and he just ripped Williams a new one time and time again last night on Comedy Central. But did I not also tell you that this is ultimately gonna be blamed on George W. Bush?
‘Cause if it weren’t for Bush, we wouldn’t have been in Iraq. Now, Brian hasn’t played that card yet, but it’s still in his deck. (interruption) I know. I know. Jon Stewart’s about three days late with that joke. But the people that only watch Jon Stewart don’t know that. Now, I have to take another brief time-out. Coming up, one more sound bite. Infobabe anguish. Infobabe anguish. An infobabe at CNN is really distressed about all this and more.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Infobabe anguish, Brooke Baldwin, who we like, we like Brooke Baldwin here at the EIB Network. She’s Charles Barkley’s favorite infobabe, and she was on CNN yesterday afternoon talking with Travis Tritten, correspondent for Stars and Stripes, about his interview with Brian Williams, and she played the clip of Williams saying that he assumed that all the airframes were hit because they all went down and then they had this little chitchat.
BALDWIN: So I’m clear, when you’re talking to him five days ago, and you have him on the phone, and I hear you that you’re pressing him, but still in this phone conversation, before this big public apology on Nightly, he is telling you his helicopter was hit and it went down?
TRITTEN: Yes.
BALDWIN: Ugh. Just as a journalist, it’s just tough to take all this in, first and foremost. We know that he’s now, as managing editor of the show, he’s removed himself. NBC is doing an internal investigation. And it seems to me, at the time, I mean, this is before, I think, probably anyone at NBC, perhaps even including Brian Williams, knew how big of a deal this would be.
RUSH: How could you not know how big of a deal this would be? And what internal investigation? Are they looking for other examples? Anyway, there’s infobabe anguish there. This is tough. It’s tough on journalists everywhere to see this, ’cause everybody knows it happens, but not everybody gets caught. That’s the problem.
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