RUSH: We have an object lesson in the Drive-By Media today for you folks, and it plays off of the New York Times story on Ben Rhodes. You remember the story, Ben Rhodes, New York Times Sunday magazine profile. It actually came out last Thursday. It appeared in the actual magazine on Sunday, and it was a story about how the White House openly lied to the White House press corps about the Iranian nuke deal, and Ben Rhodes was bragging to the guy that wrote the piece — a guy named David Samuels who has quite a left-wing literary pedigree, as it turns out.
Anyway, Rhodes is bragging about how he lied to the sycophant media. You know, the White House press corps loves and adores Obama. They’re slavish. They’re totally devoted. And inside the Obama White House, they speak of the White House press corps in the most insulting, vulgar terms. You know, it’s interesting. Obama resents the hell out of these people. He almost has no respect for them because they’re so easy. They think, on the other hand, that Obama loves them because they’re all fellow travelers. They think Obama loves them because they promote Obama’s agenda.
The Drive-Bys are now mad, but not at Rhodes for lying to them.
They’re mad at the guy that wrote the New York Times story for exposing how easy they are.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Now, I mentioned at the top of the program there’s an object lesson in the media today, and there is. But it’s not because I think there’s anything left for you to learn. I think you in this audience are so up to speed on the ways and means of the media and what they are and what they aren’t and how they do and don’t do what they do. But still it’s interesting. The focal point of this: We’re gonna zero back, we’re gonna double back here to that New York Times Magazine piece on Ben Rhodes, who is Obama’s chief media guy on national security issues.
He’s actually more than a media guy on it. Now, the thing about Ben Rhodes is, he has no experience whatsoever in foreign policy before Obama hired him. He was “a writer.” He was a wannabe novelist. He ends up being hired for this position in the Regime, and one thing I want to point out here is a lot of people are running around, “Trump’s got no experience! He’d better hire people with experience! You need people with experience in foreign policy,” and you say, “No, you don’t. Obama got everything he wanted without anybody knowing what they’re doing.”
Obama got everything he wanted. Obama got an Iranian nuke deal, and he did it by lying to the very media that slavishly covers him. That’s the point here. And the guy that was in charge of making sure everybody bought the lie was Ben Rhodes. That was his job. His job was to sell everybody, including the sycophant media in the White House press corps. His job was to lie to them and tell them the only reason that we were doing this is because there’s a new faction of moderate leaders in Iran.
Not the Ayatollah Khamenei and his boys. Not under the influence mullahs and not Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. None of these guys that have ties to the 1979 Hostage Crisis or terrorism or any of that. “These are a bunch of moderates!” It turns out that that’s what the point of the New York Times Magazine story was: There aren’t any moderates in Iran, and there was a profile of Ben Rhodes in which it was revealed that he lied to everybody about it, and the story was almost a puff piece on how he did it and how good he is at doing it and how important it was to lie to everybody about this in order to for Obama to get what he wanted: The Iranian nuke deal.
And Ben Rhodes is just the next Jonathan Gruber. Remember Jonathan Gruber? Jonathan Gruber is the architect of Obamacare, and the architecture of Romneycare. And he was out at cocktail parties and think tank seminars bragging about how they had lied to people about what Obamacare was, how they’re lying about, “You get to keep your doctor.” Oh! I wonder if we have this in the roster. Let me check real quick, ’cause I didn’t ask for this, so we might not have this. Charlie Rose… Charlie Rose… Charlie Rose… The pages are sticking together. I don’t think I’ve got it.
On the Charlie Rose Show last night or some Charlie Rose show… Maybe a CBS show. I don’t know what it was. But it was yesterday. He had on three Obama speechwriters, and the speechwriters were bragging about how they had come up with this lie in the speech for Obama: “If you like your doctor, you get to keep your doctor! If you like your insurance, you get to keep your insurance!” Charlie Rose was actually interviewing Obama speechwriters laughing about how they lied, and Charlie is laughing right along with ’em, laughing about how they pulled it off.
I mean, folks, that is not a laughing matter. In order to get Obamacare passed, they had to lie. Liberals have to do this routinely. And these speechwriters were taking credit for which one had come up with which lie, and the lie about, “If you like your doctor, you get to keep your doctor,” they just thought that was the best one, and Charlie and the rest of the speechwriters are laughing themselves silly over it. Like all of them were in on the joke, and all of us plebes out here, we were the ones taken to cleaners.
It’s just so funny how easy it was! And so now we get this puff piece on Ben Rhodes and how he lied. Okay, so here’s the object lesson to the media. In this story, Ben Rhodes describes the White House press corps as literal ignoramuses. He says they’re all 27 years old. By the way, there are 72 members the White House press corps; not a single Republican in the group. The average age is 27, and Ben Rhodes in this story talks about how they don’t know anything. They don’t know diddly-squat.
The only experience they may have is that they may have worked and covered presidential campaigns, but he says here (summarized), “They don’t know a thing about foreign policy. They know absolutely nothing. They believed anything I told them.” So who do you think the White House press corps is mad at today? You would think they’d be mad at Ben Rhodes, right? You would think they’d be mad at Ben Rhodes for lying to them and then talking about they don’t know anything and about how easy it was.
They’re not mad at Ben Rhodes, and the White House press corps is not mad at Obama. They’re mad at the guy who wrote the New York Times piece, whose name is David Samuels. That’s who they’re mad at. They’re mad at another press guy — another reporter — for reporting the truth about them, and they’re also mad that he got the scoop. They’re mad that he got the truth from Ben Rhodes and they didn’t. And they’re in the White House press corps, and he’s just a freelancer. And all of this is exposed in the Weekly Standard today in a story by Lee Smith.
Lee Smith has a story in the Weekly Standard about how the real story in the Ben Rhodes caper is not that the Regime lied, which everybody knew. The real story is how ballistically ticked off the media is at the writer of the story, David Samuels, for exposing them as a bunch of pliable sycophants of whom Rhodes and Obama played like a fiddle. Now, Lee Smith, who wrote the piece for the Weekly Standard. He knows David Samuels. He describes him as a writer with a real literary bent from outside the usual media White House foreign policy coverage zones.
His theory is that Ben Rhodes, who fancies him as quite the writer, knew exactly what he was doing. He sought out a guy, David Samuels, to write the New York Times piece. So when the New York Times piece came out, there were two ways it was covered. One, it was covered as a hit piece. And people couldn’t believe it. “What is this? The New York Times doing a story on how the White House lied about Iranian nuke deal?” That was one take. The other take on the story from the media was that it was a puff piece on Rhodes, that it was somebody writing a glowing story on one of Obama’s figures in the administration.
So, depending on where you went, who you talked to in the media, it was either a hit piece on Rhodes or it was a puff piece. But the media is ticked off because Rhodes did not tell any of them the story of the White House press corps. He went and found this other guy, David Samuels, who wasn’t part of the blob. Do you know what the blob is? That’s what Obama calls the Washington foreign policy establishment, including the media, the blob. And they are to be outmaneuvered. They are to be tricked. They are to be lied to.
The blob. It’s a bunch of people at the State Department, it’s a bunch of people in the diplomatic corps, but mostly it is the media. The story was how they successfully spun and lied to the blob. So what we have here basically is media on media, media angry at media, for basically high school prom type reasons. The story begins this way in the Weekly Standard.
“Man, Ben Rhodes had an excellent weekend. The 38-year-old Mets’ fan who serves as President Barack Obama’s deputy national security adviser for strategic communications got to watch the press tear itself apart in rabid confusion, which proves one of his essential points — the US media is a pile of dung.”
Now, another important take-away here that both of these pieces, the New York Times piece and the Weekly Standard piece here today by Lee Smith, one thing they expose is that Obama himself and many of the people in his administration hate the media, even the sycophants. In fact, they don’t have any respect for ’em at all. One thing that becomes clear here is that Obama and Ben Rhodes and some of the others think that this White House press corps is such a bunch of suck-ups, they have no respect for ’em whatever.
You would think that Obama would love these guys because they’re on his side and they’re greasing the skids for him and they’re lying for him and they’re spreading whatever disinformation he wants and they’re on his team, but Obama disrespects them, according to this story, ’cause they’re so easily used. Some people refer to people like this as whores. But the story makes it clear that there’s no respect for the media in the White House, that they’re so easy.
“Lots of people don’t know why the administration let Rhodes pull back the curtain.” Why did the administration let Rhodes tell the truth about how they lied to everybody? Why’d that happen? The answer is because the White House won the Iran deal. There’s nothing anybody can do about it now. Hey, we got what we wanted, here’s how we did it. We lied to you. We lied to everybody. And they’re doing this with pride. They want to take a victory lap. Obama and the White House sent Rhodes out to do this story about how they lied because they wanted to take a victory lap on how artfully they had pulled this off.
“Obama campaigned as the anti-Iraq candidate. Bush lied and got us into a stupid war, the White House would invariably argue. And yes, as president Obama lied to sell the Iran deal — BUT to keep America out of a stupid war with Iran.”
So Obama’s a great hero. Yeah, he lied and Ben Rhodes lied, but that was to keep us from getting into another war with Iran. But the real point of this is found on the last page.
“So why is so much of the press defending Rozen against Samuels? Why are they holding Samuels accountable for reporting what Rhodes said?”
In other words, why is the media did not mad at Rhodes? Rhodes is the guy laughing about how he lied to them. Why are they mad at the guy who wrote about that? Well, the reason so much of the media’s going after Samuels is because they don’t want to believe Rhodes said it. “It can’t be real. It can’t be real that the Regime doesn’t respect us,” says the White House press corps. “That can’t be true. Those quotes, those quotes can’t be real. Rhodes didn’t really say it. Rhodes didn’t really say how easily it was to lie to the White House press corps.”
So they don’t want to believe it. That’s why they’re going after the writer. The writer is being attacked for making it up. But they’re not interpreting it correctly. Rhodes said it. But why? Why attack allies? Why do an interview in the New York Times and attack your media allies? Why brag about how you can so easily lie to them, when they help the White House push through everything Obama wants?
Well, the answer is for the same reason that anonymous White House officials called the prime minister of Israel chicken dung. For the same reason Obama called American partners free riders. For the same reason Obama shamed the leaders of two of America’s closest allies, France and the United Kingdom, in public, because that’s what this president and this White House is about, humiliating allies and friends. That’s what this administration is all about: humiliating allies and friends. Humiliating traditional allies and friends, like Netanyahu and Israel, and like the United Kingdom, returning the Churchill bust, for example.
So if the White House, the Obama White House loves humiliating allies and friends, why should it treat the White House press corps any differently? Now, you know those media montages that we do, such as gravitas, 15, 20, 30 reporters all using the same word, the same phrase? Might have, in this story also an example of how that can happen, coming up after this.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Here is that sound bite. Charlie Rose, PBS, Monday night, discussion with President Obama’s speechwriters, Jon Lovett, Jon Favreau, and there was one other in there, but he’s not part of the bite. Charlie Rose says, “Do you have equal impact? You speechwriters, do you have equal impact on serious speeches, as you do lighthearted, day-to-day speeches? ‘Cause it’s about style, it’s about use of language, et cetera.”
LOVETT: I really like — I was very — the joke speech is the most fun part of this, but the things that I’m most proud of were the most serious speeches, I think. Health care, economic speeches —
FAVREAU: Lovett wrote the line about if you like your insurance, you can keep it.
LOVETT: How dare you? (laughter) You know what? It’s still true. No.
RUSH: You believe that? “Lovett wrote the line about if you like your insurance, you can keep it.” “How dare you, ha-ha,” and they all started laughing. Charlie Rose is laughing with them. And then Lovett says in the noise there at the end, “And, you know what? It’s still true. Not.” It’s still a lie. This whole administration’s got people in it that do nothing but chortle and laugh and brag about how they get away with lying to everybody.
They lied about who they were talking to in the Iran nuclear deal. They’ve lied about this. They know they’re lying and they’re thrilled they get away with it. Here they are laughing in every American citizen’s face. And there’s Charlie Rose laughing right along with them.
You know, those media montages that we do here, this Rhodes profile, the Ben Rhodes profile in the New York Times actually explains how this happens so spontaneously. Such as everybody in the media referring to Dick Cheney as a gravitas hire or any other phrase that we have found that is used by countless media people in the same way. This is what happened when Rhodes, Ben Rhodes, at the Regime, when he found out on the day of the State of the Union address that Iran had taken a bunch of our sailors hostage, okay?
This is in the midst of negotiations on the Iran nuke deal, it was a day that Obama’s gonna do the State of the Union speech, they find out that Iran had taken a bunch of our sailors hostage. So Ben Rhodes instantly decides to go with the spin that the crisis will be resolved because, thanks to Obama’s Iran diplomacy, we now have good relationships with moderates in the Iranian government.
The New York Times writer of the profile, David Samuels, is sitting in Rhodes’ office as the media message goes instantly from Rhodes’ mouth to the ears of his deputy, Ned Price, who then emails those words out to Obama’s reliable network of media sycophants. And this is how it was written.
“Standing in his front office before the State of the Union, Rhodes quickly does the political math on the breaking Iran story. ‘Now theyÂ’ll show scary pictures of people praying to the supreme leader,’ he predicts, looking at the screen. Three beats more, and his brain has spun a story line to stanch the bleeding. He turns to Price. ‘WeÂ’re resolving this, because we have relationships,’ he says. Price turns to his computer and begins tapping away at the administrationÂ’s well-cultivated network of officials, talking heads, columnists and newspaper reporters, web jockeys and outside advocates,” and he types a single message to all of these people.
And it is, don’t worry, we’re gonna get ’em back because we’re dealing with moderates in Iran now because of our nuclear negotiations. And that’s how it was reported everywhere. David Samuels witnessed it. So Rhodes comes up with how they’re gonna spin it, his deputy types an email to 55, 60 different people. They all think they’re getting a custom email from the White House, and they run with it. And in this way the White House actually gets its own exact spin used by the Drive-By Media.
One example of how it happens. And there’s a paragraph here of all that being explained. I don’t want to take time to read it ’cause time is fast fleeting by here. But that is one way in which it happens.
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