RUSH: Big news from Sarah Palin. Sarah Palin destroyed the New York Times in a Facebook post today. We mentioned at the top of the program that the New York Times ran an editorial today claiming that Sarah Palin had been responsible for the shooting of Gabby Giffords, which then led to the Hodgkinson shooting of Scalise and others yesterday. That it was all Sarah Palin’s fault because of her website that had a crosshairs logo or icon on it, talking about congressional districts that needed to be targeted for Republican victories.

And it was established that she had no linkage whatsoever to the shooting of Gabby Giffords. The guy that did the shooting was actually insane, had never been to her website, was not a political person, and, if anything, he exhibited what would be left-wing thinking on things.

So the Times runs this story which, you know, in the United States, proving libel if you’re a public figure is next to impossible. It’s like Trump says he wants to change the libel laws. Essentially, if you’re a public figure, you think you’ve been libeled, you have to prove that the organization or person libeling you intended to. You have to prove that there was malice. That means you have to prove that they knew they were making it up, that they think otherwise. And that is a very, very tall task. It’s an impossible burden.

So very seldom are there actual libel suits by public figures because of that high threshold. She may have a case because this is so over the top and out of bounds. This kind of stuff, folks, is poison. The New York Times has poisoned what I think is already a sick readership. I think they are turning their readership mad. They are people that have lost all rationality, because the Times, everybody that reads it believes what’s in it. It’s the Bible. It’s uncanny.

I mean, I’ve always known the New York Times is the New York Times. I’ve always known a lot of people thought it was the greatest newspaper ever. But I had no idea of the devotion its readers have to it. It’s not just a newspaper where you get up and read it, go to Zabar’s and get mad over what you read. It’s gospel. It is literal gospel.

And the New York Times has been publishing some of the most irresponsible — they have been leading the league here in all of these unsubstantiated leaks from present and former government officials in a position to know, always unnamed, always anonymous. Nothing but rumors, no substantiation whatsoever. All of these different leakers proving ostensibly that Trump colluded with the Russians. Now the case has fallen apart. Everything the New York Times published about this now turns out to be dead wrong.

And they publish a piece linking Sarah Palin to the shooting of Gabby Giffords as though everybody knows it, as though it was legally affirmed that Palin was responsible. Well, they had to run a correction today because Palin ripped ’em a new one on Facebook. They have published a correction saying there is no linkage and there never was any linkage between the shooting of Gabby Giffords and Sarah Palin.

This is hideous, what they’re doing. And the Washington Post is right in there. Here’s the correction that ran today. “An earlier version of this editorial incorrectly stated that a link existed between political incitement and the 2011 shooting of Gabby Giffords. In fact, no such link was established.” They’ve gone through the first green light toward libel, if she wants to go there. They’ve admitted that they published, “Well, we were under false impression. We really didn’t know.” They did.

People are gonna be telling Sarah Palin this correction’s not enough. I think she’s gonna be — I don’t want to say the word pressured, but there are gonna be people who are gonna ask her, “You gotta take this farther. You gotta go after these people. This is the first and best opportunity we’ve ever had.” A lot of people are gonna want her to do it for them. I don’t know if she’s gonna do it, but this is pretty — and I think it is typical of the kind of rotten atmosphere that exists throughout the Drive-By Media.