RUSH:  Yeah, yeah, yeah, I saw that. I saw that.  Obama again, this is yet again, this time in the Atlantic magazine article blaming me and Fox News for why he doesn’t have support from half the country: It’s my fault, Fox News.  We created this character that’s Barack Obama.  He said (imitating Obama), “When I was in the Senate, and when I was not a national figure, I had 70% approval, and, man, and Rush Limbaugh, and Fox News create this character, and I don’t even know who this is. I wouldn’t like this guy.” 

So, me again.  And now he’s saying it outside of fundraisers.  In the last couple years he’s only mentioned my name like this at fundraisers because it causes deranged, unhinged liberals to write checks when they hear my name thinking I gotta be stopped.  Now he’s doing it on his way out of the Oval Orifice.  He’s clearly bugged.  This has been going on for eight years now. 

Anyway, little Brian Stelter at CNN is growing weary of Obama whining about me.  We have the sound bite coming up.  Look, wouldn’t you be?  If you’re Brian Stelter or if you’re anybody, wouldn’t you want Obama mentioning your name?  I mean they’re sick and tired of Obama blaming me.  It just bugs ’em.  We have a sound bite here where he said (paraphrasing), “Would Obama stop whining about Rush Limbaugh?  Enough already.  Did Obama ever reach out to conservative media?” 

Yes, he did.  I’ll explain it to you, Brian.  If you’re paying attention, Brian, you’d have known this.  It happened the first two weeks of Obama, maybe before he was inaugurated, I don’t know, but he tried to redefine who conservative media is by virtue of a dinner party he went to.  I was not there.  I’ll explain all this.  These people don’t know 90% of what they need to know to do their jobs.  They just don’t.  

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH:  No, I’m gonna do it right, because I told everybody about it, I’m gonna do it right now, I’m gonna get out of the way.  I, frankly, too, I mean, it’s Obama blaming me and Fox News for his problems.  And it’s explanatory in its own way.  It’s a great way of illustrating who Obama is and how he thinks.  Look at what Obama has at his disposal in order to get everybody to love him and to agree with him.  He owns practically every cultural leading pop culture entity there is.  By “owns” I mean they love him, he’s in total control of it:  Hollywood, books, movies, news, music, newspapers.

I mean, you name it, virtually every pop culture entity that has influence loves Obama. And, by the same token, not only do they love Obama, they routinely are hypercritical of me and others who are not in the Obama camp.  I mean, they’re constantly calling out Fox News and me.

Obama owns the world media.  And yet these two relatively small outposts, the Rush Limbaugh program and Fox News, somehow are responsible for him not being a beloved… what?  I don’t know what he seeks to be.  But his latest compliant was to a report at The Atlantic.  And what he’s essentially complaining about is that I have created this character that I have named Barack Obama, and I have created this character out of cloth.  And the character bears no reality to the real Barack Obama, and, therefore, you people who only listen to me, you have a totally distorted view of the real Barack Obama, and you are being lied to and he’s being misrepresented. 

You want to know truth about this?  The people in this audience also read all of that crap that idolizes Obama.  The people in this audience are not shut out.  The people in this audience absorb all media.  It’s the other side that closets itself away from us.  It is liberalism, it’s Democrats, it’s that whole mess of people, they are the ignorant ones, they are the ones that pay no attention to anything other than what they agree with. 

My point is the people in this audience have a much wider knowledge base, a much broader sense of the news and events that are happening.  They know more about Obama, the people in this audience know more about Obama than the people that read the New York Times.  If anybody has been presenting a caricature of Obama, it’s the New York Times.  If anybody has been presenting a caricature, a false character of who Obama is, it’s the mainstream media. 

The mainstream media’s created this mythological historical figure who’s next to perfect.  Smartest ever, the most well-spoken ever, the most whatever ever.  And of course that isn’t true.  It’s exactly the opposite of what Obama is trying to tell people.  The people that do not like Obama or the people that don’t support Obama’s policies do so from a foundation of real knowledge and information.  The people, for example, who don’t like me or who hate me, I guarantee you 95% of them have never listened to me.  I guarantee you they have never taken the time to talk to anybody who does listen to me.  It’s the exact opposite of what they think. 

People who do listen to this program love it.  That’s the danger in it.  Let me take you back to 2002.  Mr. Snerdley loves this memory.  In 2002 the Democrats thought they were gonna clean up in the midterms.  This is the year of the Wellstone memorial.  And they lost.  They actually lost seats in a midterm election they should have won. 

And Tom Daschle, who was then the leader of the Democrats in the Senate, was appearing somewhere in the media, it might have been Meet the Press, and he was very alarmed.  Daschle’s one of these soft-spoken guys (imitating Daschle), “We’re very concerned, Tim. We’re concerned that the mean-spirited, racist, and bigoted Klan-like Republicans are really trying to deny people their water every day, Tim.  We’re deeply concerned.” 

And Harry Reid tried to pick up this mild, soft-spoken, don’t scare anybody.  But Puff Daschle went out there and said that they had just seen some research, and they were shocked.  “It showed that a lot of people are listening to Rush Limbaugh, and a lot of our people, we were shocked to learn that there are many former Democrats that listen to Rush Limbaugh,” totally discombobulated. 

Anyway, little Brian Stelter at CNN who is their media analyst — you might say, who is Brian Stelter, where’d he come from?  I’ll tell you.  Brian Stelter started a TV blog called the TVNewser.  You ever heard of the TVNewser?  You still to this day haven’t heard?  It’s a blog that basically did TV gossip.  It was a miniature Drudge Report of television news, of Drive-By network television news.  And I can remember this goes back, this has to go back 12 years, when nobody else heard of TVNewser yet, either, but if, for example, CNN was written up poorly, discombobulated everybody at CNN, they thought everybody read it, but it was very tiny. 

Anyway, the New York Times was so impressed by this blog that they hired little Brian to be their chief media writer. He was a blogger, a pajama-clad, you know, in the basement there blogger type guy with TVNewser. The New York Times hired him and he spent some time at the New York Times writing. You go to school at the New York Times, you learn how to write for them, the stylebook and, you know, the various things you have to do to make it obvious it’s a New York Times story. 

After that CNN picked him up and now he’s the chief media analyst for CNN.  And he got caught recently, he tweeted out some fake news, and he got caught up in it. I forget what it was about, it was just this week.  Anyway, that’s a diversion.  This afternoon on CNN, cohost John Berman at CNN brought in Brian Stelter who hosts their Reliable Sources show to talk about Obama’s latest comments in The Atlantic in which he said he thinks conservative media has vilified him and that Trump supporters who don’t like Obama are simply responding to this fictional character named Barack Obama that Rush Limbaugh created.  And Berman says to Brian Stelter, “Do you get the sense that the president’s gonna watch much Fox News Channel in retirement, Brian?  What is really going on?”

STELTER:  The president took sideswipes at Fox over the years, but now he’s swiping much more directly, commenting much more directly on what he thinks Fox did to his presidency.  You know, we knew back in 2009, Fox News was an opposition network to Obama. Rush Limbaugh, conservative talk radio as well.  I would flip it around and say, did the president do enough to try to persuade those viewers, those voters?  Did he do enough to try to reach out to conservative media listeners, or did he treat it as a lost cause?  I think candidly some of his aides now look back and say, maybe there was more they could have done.

RUSH:  Come on!  Can we get real here?  There was no way there was ever gonna be outreach.  Let me tell you two key things — you probably know one of these because you listen to me.  Two weeks after Obama was inaugurated, he had a joint meeting of congressional leadership up in the White House.  Republican and Democrat leaders in the House and Senate, and it was at that meeting that he looked at the Republican leaders, looked really at John Boehner and said, “You’ve got to stop listening to Rush Limbaugh.  You can’t get things done that way.”  

He singled me out.  No, I wasn’t offended.  No, no, no, no, no.  For a moment I was a little alarmed because I knew what he was doing.  But the key to this was, why would Obama take the time, here I’m a radio talk show host, his first meeting with congressional leadership, why tell these guys?  I’ll tell you why.  Because he believes, too, the poppycock that’s in the media, and the poppycock that’s in the media is that the Republicans in Washington are scared to death of any criticism that might come from me. 

They are afraid to cross me, and, therefore, they will never do the, quote, unquote, right thing.  They will never go along with a Democrat even when they want to because they’re afraid of what I will say.  Obama believed that because it’s in the media that he reads.  It’s a common misconception that’s out there.  It’s fake news.  So Obama goes into the meeting believing that that’s what those guys think and do and are, and so he warns ’em, “You gotta stop listening to Rush Limbaugh.  That’s not how things get done here.” 

And I’ve told you, I happened to talk to Boehner right here in this office sometime not long after, and he was telling me about it, and he looked at me and said, “Why would he do that? We’re looking at each other, why would he do that?”  And I said, “I’ll tell you why he did it.  He was hoping that you’d walk out to that set of microphones outside the White House and agree with him!  He was hoping you would realize it’s a new day, got this brand-new president here, postpartisan, postracial, posteverything, and we’re gonna stop global warming and we’re gonna fix our reputation in the world and everybody’s gonna be happy, it’s gonna be utopia. And he wanted you to go out there and say, ‘It is a new day and listening to Rush Limbaugh, we never really have and we’re not going to.’  He wanted you to go out and discredit me.” 

And Boehner looked at me, “I don’t know why he thought we’d do that.”  I said, “Well, I do.”  But here’s the next thing that happened, and you probably remember some of this.  Do you remember — I don’t know if this was before he was inaugurated or after, but there was a dinner at George Will’s house that Obama attended, and it was touted in the media as “Obama meets with conservative leaders.  Obama dines with media conservative leaders.”  And it was George Will, it was David Brooks, and I think it was at that dinner where Brooks saw Obama’s crease in his slacks and concluded he was gonna be a great president because of it.  Larry Kudlow was there.  I forget who else.  Dr. Krauthammer was there.  Six or eight of ’em. 

I was not there.  Now, the objective of that — do not doubt me — the objective of that was twofold:  Obama, who at that time, he was reveling in this massive popularity like Trump has now, except Trump’s is real and Obama’s was still in the hope stage.  But still, he had won the election, and the media was still having orgasms over it and the historical aspect, first black president, they just barely contained themselves. 

So he’s universally popular.  The point was that Obama was now defining who the reasonable and responsible conservative media people are by choosing which ones to socialize with.  Well, it was no accident that he chose a bunch of academics who are not in the fight.  I mean, they write their opinions and they put ’em in their columns, but they’re theoreticians and academics, and many of them, like Brooks, are not even full-fledged conservatives!  They were all establishment types. 

But the point of it was that I wasn’t there, nor was anybody from Fox News there.  It was designed to tell everybody in the Drive-By Media that Fox and Limbaugh don’t matter.  Krauthammer was there as a Washington Post columnist, not as a commentator on Fox.  Those two things, he did those two things expressly and specifically to try to get Washington and the media and Republicans to cast me aside, to throw me overboard. 

And now Brian Stelter comes along saying that their members of the Regime, maybe if we had reached out to Limbaugh in early days of their administration, maybe it would have been different.  These people still don’t understand who liberals are, what Obama is.  I mean, he is a community organizing agitator.  There wasn’t any desire for unity, unless the unity could be achieved by people like me willingly conceding defeat.  There’s no attempt at that. 

And that’s why Obama’s upset.  A lot of Republicans went along with him.  A lot of Republicans, “You know what?  This hope and change, we need to give it a chance.”  Racial component, don’t you know.  But it must be bugging him.  I mean, if he keeps talking about it, it must be.  That’s why I say I’m living rent free in the head, the mansion, whatever, and I’m there every day. No Airbnb about this.