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June 3, 2005 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:08
June 3, 2005, Friday, Hour #1
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All right, look, I just want everybody to know I'm still fed up with this Watergate orgy, with this deep throat orgy.
But I'm going to violate one of my own rules.
Even though I'm fed up with it, we're going to keep talking about it because there are still points to be made about it.
I think I'm fed up because I'm seeing a bunch of dinosaurs celebrate the Jurassic Age.
The media, I mean, they're just, and they don't know what fools they look like.
They really do not know how they're making themselves appear.
And also, a prediction that I made long ago, ladies and gentlemen, looks like coming true.
At least a number of roots are being planted that might make my prediction come true very soon.
Friday, let's go.
Yes, sir, Rebob, the fastest week in media.
And here it is already Friday.
And you know the rules on Open Line Friday.
And I'm allowed to break them, by the way, but you're not.
I don't care about Watergate or Deep Throat anymore, but I'm going to talk about it.
It's going to be a professional test.
Because when I talk about things I don't care about, I generally sound like I don't care about them.
But we'll see.
Monday through Thursday, we only talk about the things that, well, actually, I'm not breaking the rules because Monday through Thursday is when we only talk about things that I'm interested in.
But on Friday, I open it up to things I'm not interested in, including calls from you.
If you want to talk about something I don't care about, that's the day we do it.
So I'm going to include myself here as an Openline Friday caller.
I'm going to talk about something I don't care about or I'm fed up with.
And that would be Watergate.
So here's the telephone number, 800-282-2882.
The email address is rush at EIBnet.com.
Before we get started with all the substance of the program, just a programming reminder.
Today inaugurates our podcasting service at rushlimbaugh.com.
And just as I promised, the software, the Rush 24-7 Media Center software posted late yesterday afternoon at rushlimbaugh.com and it's there now.
It's compatible with both Mac and Windows.
And it's simple.
It's free and it's simple.
All you do is you go there, go to www.rushlimbaugh.com, click on the download.
It'll download.
Even if you people are using some of it, I don't know if anybody still uses modems out there.
It'll be quick.
It's a small file.
Download it.
It's very easy to install, particularly on a Mac.
I've not used Windows, so I don't know what the installation process there is, but I'm sure it's very simple there as well.
It is, Brian.
And what will happen is in the installation process, you will designate a location on your computer where you want the daily podcast files to be downloaded too.
It'll happen automatically.
And just so you know, these files, the MP3 files of each day's show will be available within an hour to two, more like two hours after every show.
So we finish at 3 Eastern.
That means about 5 o'clock Eastern.
You'll get a note on your computer saying the download's complete and you'll have that day, or in this case, today's program, each hour its own file.
So you'll have for each show three MP3s designated by hour one, hour two, hour three.
And once you have them, you know, you transfer them to your MP3 player and an iPod or whatever it is.
And there you have portability.
And if you don't, you just listen to them from the gloriously rich, expensive speakers on your computer.
And it's that simple.
You have to be a subscriber at rushlimbaugh.com in order to avail yourself of this service.
But it inaugurates today, starts today.
And again, the downloading software is free and it's simple.
I mean, it's indescribably simple.
Take you all to two minutes to do this.
But if you don't want to go the automated route, you don't have to download the software.
If you're a member, you'll be able to log on to the website and manually download the three files each day that represent the show, the first three hours, one, two, and three of each program if you'd rather do it in the automated way.
Now, just to remind you, and I want to mention this as briefly, but as thoroughly as I can, we are not able at this time to include any music or parodies in these MP3 files because of copyright laws.
And I know many of you have written and you've said, well, other shows are doing it, I know, but they're not big enough to get noticed.
Let me just be honest.
Well, we can't do this stealthily.
And there are laws against distributing copyrighted materials for free.
We can't do it.
We got hundreds of thousands of subscribers here.
And for every piece of music that would be included in the program, we'd be giving it away to that many hundreds of thousands of people, even parodies, because the parodies are based on copyrighted material.
And we're not lawbreakers here, and we're not going to flaunt it.
We'll work within the system to try to find a way around it.
But the cost to include it right now is prohibitive, and we would have to charge you an arm and a leg to include the music.
We may get away with bumper music because it's just 10 to 15 seconds of each selection.
Maybe considered fair usage.
Now, as to the other programs that do it, I can't speak for them.
They may be ignorant of the law, or they may be willing to risk it until they're noticed and then have to cease and desist at that point.
But because we are a mammoth in size, we simply cannot hide what we do here.
And we're the industry leader, and so we're not going to break the law.
You know what the copyright laws are, and you know how vigorously they are pursued.
If you've rented a DVD or bought one, I mean, you've seen the FBI warnings that you can't speed through, and you can see you can get fined for 250 grand and sent to jail for your life if you're caught.
Well, I'm exaggerating, but I mean, who wants to go to jail for copying a DVD to somebody?
And then they're really watching this.
So it's just what we're governed by here.
But it all starts today, and the first downloads will occur within 90 minutes to two hours after today's program.
So wanted to get you up to speed on that big, big day here.
And we've all been looking forward to this.
And it's actually a result of meeting a public demand.
I mean, I was telling my broadcast partners here that, I mean, for months I've been, Rush, when are you going to podcast?
When are you going to start a podcast?
Of course, we've had a lot of things to decide about this.
You know, we're very loyal to our radio stations that broadcast the program.
And but since this is a subscriber service and we're not giving it away, we we made the decision that the demand is popular enough to what Mr. Sturdly, what are you laughing at now?
What in the world did I say that is causing you to lose your composure in there?
Here, I'm trying to be very serious with the audience, very informative, and so forth.
And you're sitting there laughing.
What is it?
Are you telling Dawn dirty jokes?
It has nothing to do with what I'm saying.
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Oh, yeah, I do qualify to get a $50 rebate from Abbot.
I was, I was, I was.
I have one of the iPods that I guess is, I don't even know what the battery defect is.
What is it?
It drained really quickly?
Okay, well, anyway, yeah, I do qualify because I bought my iPod before 2004.
But I'm not going to apply for the 50 bucks.
It's not worth the time.
I'll just go get a new iPod with a decent battery in it.
You know, I'm in no mood here to punish Apple.
I'm not one of those people.
I got in the mail yesterday.
Got three offers to participate in some class action lawsuit in a healthcare firm and I'm not even part of.
I mean, I got three different offers to participate in some class action lawsuit against a particular HMO or healthcare company.
I'm looking at this.
Never heard of this.
I don't ever file a healthcare claim with anybody, just pay it.
I mean now, if they're sending out these letters to people on a mailing list for crying out loud uh, you know.
So I just, I looked at them all and I trashed them.
It's just not my style.
You know, I don't, I don't, I don't feed off of others.
You know, and I I accept that corporations are going to make mistakes.
I'm just, I'm not built that way.
I'm not, I'm not a coupon clipper.
I'm not gonna run around and join.
You know, I took Viox.
I took Viox.
I'm not gonna join some stupid ambulance chasing lawyer's attempt to get rich because I didn't take it that much.
But I took, and I took Bextra when they took Viox off that, I took Bextra.
I can't watch television without seeing ads from these sleaze balls.
If you took Bextra and you took Viox and you think you're in danger of dying next week, call us at sleaze ball, incorporated it.
Just, it's not me, you know, I don't play the lottery, so okay.
So my battery drained a little fast.
I just charged it, didn't.
I didn't know the difference.
Battery runs down, you recharge it.
I sorry, maybe I'm just too much a realist uh, for all this.
At any rate, let me take a brief time out, my friends, we will be back and we'll get started with this this, this deep throat, rot gut and uh.
Then we'll get on to my uh.
By the way, Hr came storming in here today with the NEW YORK Times story, said, you know, I thought you were just having fun with Carl Bernstein.
You know that you were making fun of him being left out, not having any money, it all being focused on.
Woodward said, no no no, it's true.
He said I know NEW YORK Times.
There's a whole story here today about how Woodward Uh gets all the attention and Bernstein's basically a lap dog, the NEW YORK Times.
And so it's because I know these people folks how, 16 years, I know these people back after this, stay with us.
Okay, all right, let's start with this Watergate stuff.
Get this.
This is a um story from WBL BAL tv channel 11 in Baltimore.
The former FBI official who revealed himself this week as deep throat, apparently also leaked information to the Washington POST about two of the biggest stories in Maryland in the 1970s.
POST reporter Bob Woodward wrote in thursday's paper that Mark Felt told him in the spring of 72 during the Watergate investigation that the FBI had some information that vice president Spiro Agnew had received a 2500 bribe.
The tip produced no story but Agnew resigned in 73 upon his conviction for income tax evasion.
A Maryland judge found in 81 that Magnew had accepted, or Agnew that accepted kickbacks, as uh Maryland governor Woodward also said Felt was his source for a 72 story about the investigation into the wounding of George Wallace in Laurel, Maryland.
What Woodward cited high federal officials as saying there was no indication that suspect Arthur Bremer had been hired to To shoot Wallace.
George Beale, a former U.S. attorney who prosecuted both Agnew and Bremer, said the leaks didn't hurt either case.
He said the reported bribe to Agnew was not substantiated.
The Bremer story eased concerns about a possible conspiracy.
So here you have Deep Throat also leaking information in Agnew.
This guy was leaking all over the place.
He clearly had a bug on for the Nixon administration.
And let's be honest, they were portraying this guy as a holier-than-thou devotee of the FBI.
The FBI was no romper room here when J. Edgar Hoover was running that place.
I mean, let's put it on the table here.
The FBI had its own brand of power structure corruption, shall we say.
Hoover had his own ways of getting presidents to tow his own line because he's out collecting dirt on them.
How do you think what's his name, Phelp, finds out about this stuff?
So the more we learn about this, the more we find out how dirty everybody is in all of this.
Phelps leaking all the time about all kinds of things, including Agnew.
There was no cover-up or threat of a cover-up in that case.
Sometimes his information was wrong.
It just shows that they liked the guy because he was attacking the Nixon crowd yet.
Now, I also found this little piece from Michael Ledean on the corner, in the corner at National Review Online.
Ladine writes, I sometimes lecture on journalism, and much of that talk consists of excerpts from all the president's men by Woodward and Bernstein.
In that book, they admit to a wide range of unethical and illegal behavior, from tampering with a grand jury to illegally obtaining and using private telephone records, a kind of private patriot act for the post.
Then I read from a section pages 184 to 192 in which they discuss an unhappy event.
They had written that grand jury testimony had fingered H.R. Haldeman as a conspirator in Watergate.
Ron Ziegler, Nixon's press secretary, violently denied it.
Woodstein went back to their sources and concluded they'd been deceived.
The story was wrong.
Then on page 192, the reporters said to Ben Bradley, their editor, they were virtually certain that Sloan must not have given testimony about Haldeman before the grand jury.
Woodward suggested writing that much at least and acknowledging the error.
No way, said Bradley.
Bradley turned to his typewriter after a number of false starts, issued the following statement, we stand by our story.
So Bradley stood by a false story published by Woodward and Bernstein.
And there's a footnote.
Bradley was later to recall, I issued two statements in that one, in that one year.
What options did I really have?
I can remember sitting down typewriter and writing about 30 statements, then sort of saying, ah, screw it.
Let's go stand by our boys.
And Ladine says, which is why I have no heroes in this saga.
So here you have, they admit in their book, All the President's Men, that a wide range of unethical, illegal behavior, tampering with a grand jury, illegally obtaining using private phone records, and then not admitting their mistake or error.
So you have Woodward and Bernstein admitting that they lied, that they cheated, and they covered up.
I mean, what Ben Bradley did standing by his boys was a cover-up.
They covered up.
Nobody investigates the post.
Nobody investigates other media outlets.
Oh, no, no, no, no.
They're insulated from what they do to other people.
They can go out and destroy anybody they want.
You better not try to find out anything about them.
They are able to conduct themselves in the same manner in which they try to cite others as unethical or crooked and then seek to destroy them.
Dan Rather was the same thing.
It just he got caught.
But here's what the point is, folks.
We have Woodward and Bernstein, by their own admission, in their book, Lying, Engaging in Unethical Behavior and Covering Up Mistakes.
And today, this is being called great journalism.
This whole orgy this week has been about, oh, this is our high point.
This is the peak of our mountaintop.
This is when we were the best.
This is what journalism is meant to be all about.
Yes.
This is great journalism, right?
Well, if this is great journalism, then this is the standard by which we should measure them.
We should assume that journalists are lying, behaving in unethical ways, and covering up their own mistakes.
We should assume that that is what great journalism is.
They are every bit what we call them and think of them.
You know, I frankly, I don't think that Woodward and Bernstein and Bradley or the mainstream media realizes that the more we learn about Mark Felt and his motives and the Post's reporting techniques, the more sleazy and disreputable they all look.
While they're out there touting themselves as, this is great journalism.
This is when it was really good.
There weren't any distractions out there like Limbaugh.
We were able to go do whatever we wanted to do.
If we wanted to destroy a president with phony forged documents from the Texas National Guard, then by God, we could do it.
And that's great journalism.
Fine.
We will judge them on this basis.
Ladies and gentlemen, it's just that simple.
Ben Stein is back for more, the American Spectator Online.
Just a few more thoughts on the events of the day.
Now we read that Mark Felt's family and Mark Felt put out their story solely to make money off of it.
So this makes the family's karma even more unnerving.
The father, patriarch Mark, took out his anger and frustration for being passed over to the FBI by ruining the career of the peacemaker Richard Nixon.
So he condemned a whole subcontinent to genocide and slavery and poverty to please his own wounded vanity.
Maybe his nickname ought to be Sour Grapes and not Deep Throat because he has as much in common with that fox as with a porn star.
And blood will tell, as the old saying goes, his posterity is now dragging out his old body and putting it on display to make money.
Parentheses.
Have you noticed how Mark Felt looks like one of those old Nazi war criminals they find in Bolivia or Paraguay?
That same haunted, hunted look combined with the glee at what he has managed to get away with so far.
And it gets worse.
It's been reported that Mark Felt is at least part Jewish.
Well, the reason this is worse is that at the same time that Mark Felt was betraying Richard Nixon, Nixon was saving Aretz Israel.
It's a terrifying chapter in betrayal and ingratitude.
If he knows, even knows what shame is, I wonder if he felt a moment's shame as he tortured the man who brought security and salvation to the land of so many of his and my fellow Jews.
Somehow, I look at his demented face and I doubt it.
Third, correct me if I'm wrong about this, but isn't it a crime not only to dispense classified information, but also to receive classified information?
Why wasn't anybody ever prosecuted about this?
Is there a statute of limitations?
Now, this goes on.
Stein's piece, I've read about half of it.
I'll share the rest of it with you.
We come back from our obscene profit break, folks, here on the EIB network.
Rush Limbaugh on Open Line Friday.
And we'll be right back.
Stay with us.
Yeah, we roll on as Open Line Friday continues.
Now rejoining Ben Stein in his piece today, The American Spectator Online, I don't feel for Felt.
He writes, have you noticed how Mark Felt looks like one of those old Nazi war criminals that they find in Bolivia or Paraguay?
That same haunted, hunted look combined with a glee at what he's managed to get away with so far.
But there was and is a bigger story here than Felt.
Frankly, Nixon's no longer alive.
If he was a hero, he's a deceased hero.
Bob Woodward's nobody's idea of a hero.
Maybe a super businessman and accomplished writer, but no hero.
Mark Felt is only Richard Benvenista's hero.
But there are major heroes out there every day.
There are 140,000 of them in Iraq and about 15,000 in Afghanistan at lethal risk every minute of every day.
There are a million more ready to go.
There are millions of family members of these heroes.
Can we possibly, possibly, conceivably forget them?
Somehow I think we have.
The lead news stories are almost never about them.
The stories Michael Jackson or Mark Felt.
This is desperately wrong, and I do mean desperately.
I'm going to write a lot more about this Monday, but in the meantime, let's remember there's a war on, and the best and bravest of our nation are dying every day to protect a great nation, but one which seems lately to have forgotten even what the nation is all about.
George Newmeyer has a great characterization in his lead as to what is happening this week.
He's also at the American Spectator Online.
Mark Felt's emergence's deep throat has occasioned a prolonged old-timer's day of the American left, allowing various aging fakers to take one last-long victory lap.
With relish, they have renewed their intense moralizing about Richard Nixon, even though their own ethics evaporated a long time ago.
We overthrew a corrupt order, they in effect say, by puffing themselves up, an arrogance that would be more comprehensible if they hadn't proceeded to create a new corrupt order.
The champions of Deep Throat built atop the ruins of Richard Nixon, not a better culture, but a base culture that would culminate in the deep throat presidency of Bill Clinton.
And it's sort of the point that I'm making.
These guys have assumed what Nixon was.
They have become what Nixon was, the people in the mainstream press.
Let me give you an audio soundbite here to demonstrate it.
Dan Rather, last night on CNN, the second edition of Larry King Live, a caller called in, said, yes, I have a question for Dan Rather.
I'd like to know your opinion on the speculation that Mark Felt should have gone to his boss at the FBI or to the president with concerns about the Watergate investigation.
You played a major role in investigative journalism, Gunga Dan.
It's realistic to even think that?
No, I don't think he had a choice.
I think he took the way that he knew would be most effective.
I think the country owes Catherine Graham, Ben Bradley, Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein, and Mark Felt a debt of gratitude for what they did.
Because I repeat for emphasis, this was people believing they were above the Constitution, they were above the law, and they were very nearly pulling it off.
And whatever it took to get them, that is to expose them, to bring it into the sunlight, I don't think you can applaud enough.
Whatever it took, whatever it took, forged documents.
We know the story is true.
If we can't prove it, we'll manufacture the evidence.
Whatever it takes, whatever it takes to get them, the media is granting to themselves unchecked, unboundaried behavior to get the bad guys.
And in the process, they do what they accuse the bad guys of doing, but let somebody start an investigation of their tactics.
Oh, no, no, no, can't do that.
Of course, Ben Bradley, all these people are owed a big debt.
Notice that nobody cares to find out what Bill Moyers did asking the FBI for name checks on Senate staffers of Barry Goldwater.
And the legions, the examples here are legion that I could give you of other presidents, other administrations engaging in Nixonian-like behavior.
But of course, those were Democrats, and as such, they were untouchable.
Let's listen to a little bit of Ben Bradley, the former editor of the Washington Post, who decided to cover up a huge error made by Woodward and Bernstein when they misreported evidence that supposedly had come from grand jury testimony, which was leaked, which is illegal.
He refused to stand.
In fact, stood by an error rather than correct it.
Last night, he was, or I guess yesterday, Judy Woodruff, Inside Politics, Judy says, here's something else that Chuck Coulson's saying.
He says he thinks it's very sad that Mark Felt broke the trust and the confidence of the president of the United States.
Terribly sad.
I mean, I'm crying.
Why is it sad?
I don't get that.
He said, and think for a minute, where would Felt have gone?
He said he saw something wrong in the government, and what should he have done?
He couldn't really go to his superior, who was L. Patrick Gray, who was busy throwing documents into the Potomac River from the bridge.
He couldn't go to the Attorney General who was on his way to jail himself.
You hear the contempt here?
FBI director throwing documents off the bridge.
You hear the contempt here.
And let's not forget, ladies and gentlemen, Mark Felt could have resigned publicly and said there's corruption here and I'm not going to be a part of it.
I love the FBI too much.
Could have gotten the medium.
But you see, the template here is, is that, no, no, no, the press has to be the ones to uncover this.
You can't do it internally.
You have to come to us.
You have to come.
It's the only thing he could have done.
Rather said it.
Now Ben Bradley has said it.
A hatred for Nixon is just dripping in this next bite.
Judy says, let me read to you what Colson says.
He says, if Felt wanted to talk, he should have revealed it to a grand jury or prosecutor.
He says he should have gone to the president himself.
He said, if the president thinks the FBI is going to investigate him, he's going to act.
He said the president couldn't have ignored this.
You don't think he could?
I mean, the president goes to Nixon?
Give me a word.
Felt could have gone directly.
It is not realistic.
Yeah, it's not realistic.
I guess Woodward coming to Ben Bradley, saying, you know, we've really goofed up here.
We made a mistake.
We misreported illegal grand jury testimony.
We're going to stand by it.
What else could Woodward have done?
What else could he have done?
Could Woodward have gone to the New York Times?
Is that what he should have done?
Should he resigned?
Should he have said, I'm not going to work this way.
We made a mistake.
You're going to cover it up.
So the Washington Post involved in its own cover-up, admitted ethical lapses and so forth.
Here's the final bite.
Judy says, the legacy of Watergate.
Clearly, nobody disagrees that toppling a president, getting this government back on an even keel, critical outcome of this.
But the other, there is a debate, a bit of, by the way, we do debate that, Judy.
You say nobody disagrees that toppling a president.
A lot of people debate this.
But she says the other, there's a debate, a bit of a debate that goes on among journalists about whether what Woodward and Bernstein did, on the one hand, people say, yeah, led to good, vigorous investigative reporting when others say, but it also led to people who just want to make a name for themselves.
It led to people like, you know.
It wasn't just Woodward and Bernstein.
I mean, they did lion's share of the early work, but there was some great reporting done by other newspapers, including the Times, the L.A. Times, the Globe, and in Boston.
So we're getting all the credit we need.
And there are other newspapers who did plenty of things.
Second, I mean the anonymous source was essential to it.
Yeah, it gave us guys like Stephen Glass.
It gave us guys like Jason Blair.
It gave us guys like reporters that have been fired at the Boston Globe, all these anonymous made-up quotes and sources.
Yep, I'll tell you what, if this is the zenith of modern American journalism, Watergate, and what all happened there, we are thus being asked to judge journalism in that way and in that context.
And so we're happy to do so.
Because we have been all along.
That's the dirty little secret.
We have always suspected the media.
And I'm going to tell you something, folks.
It is important to note.
Here they are committing the same kinds of transgressions that they think they need to put other people out of business for, that they seek to destroy.
But by Dan Rather's own admission, well, we can do whatever it takes.
And we are the guardians.
We're the guardians of the Constitution.
We're the guardians of the First Amendment.
And then he went on to say, and I've got that bite.
He went on to say when he was being asked about his mistakes in the National Guard story, well, journalism's not an exact science.
Of course not.
It cannot be exact, nor can it be a science when your mandate is whatever it takes.
Anyway, I got to go quick timeout.
We'll come back, grab some of your phone calls here as Open Line Friday rolls on.
Stay with us.
I know I said we're going to go to the phones, but since I mentioned Dan Rather, we may as well get these other two bites in.
From Larry King Alive last night, this is about the forged document, Bill Burkett, Bush National Guard story.
Larry said, as you reflect, and after seeing the report, what went wrong in your Matter, the Air National Guard story, where along the way did it snap?
The documents were part of a fairly wide array of information we had, that the facts that we presented.
Stop the tape.
There aren't any facts.
That's the point.
That's the problem.
There aren't any facts.
The only thing of which there is a wide array is paranoid satellite antenna coming out of Dan Rather's head, thinking that things he's making up are true.
There aren't any facts.
We'll listen to more of this.
And some of it new information was supported by all kinds of things other than the documents.
Stop.
The tape.
Then why did it get retracted?
Why did it get apologized for?
Where is all of this other detail or material?
Where are all kinds of things other than the documents?
Where are they?
Why all the people involved quit or fired?
Here's more.
The panel came forward.
What they concluded, among the things they concluded, after months of investigation and spending millions of dollars, they could not determine that the documents were fraudulent.
Oh, important point.
Oh.
We don't know whether the documents are fraudulent or not.
Be still my beating heart.
My God, folks, he thinks they're still real.
Does it occur to anybody here we have the CBS News Investigative Journalist Department, the Investigative Journalism Division?
Something goes wrong with one of their stories.
They can't investigate it themselves?
If they can find all manner of things about Enron, Walmart, Bill Burkitt, George Bush, why can't they find out what went wrong in their own shop?
Why does it require an independent commission?
Is it because maybe people wouldn't believe what an internal investigation produced?
Yes.
What does it say about an investigative journalist who cannot investigate his own work?
Because nobody would believe the result.
So you have to bring in a lawyer, Richard Thornburg, who, by the way, was also retained by CBS for other things.
He can't produce a report that harms his client.
He'd be guilty of malpractice.
That's why there was no bias was part of the report, and that's why we couldn't conclude anything about the documents.
So it was a whitewash in a way, but it was also kid glove treatment for the people inside CBS.
But we all know they're forged.
Everybody knows it.
But here's the last holdout, Dan Rather.
And here's a bite on that.
Larry says, are you saying the story might be correct?
Well, I'm saying a prudent person might take that view.
You'd have it.
Well, I'm saying a prudent person might take that view.
Number two, important.
Wait, wait, wait, wait, We're talking about facts here.
We're talking about journalists.
Journalists, a prudent person might take the view that the story's right.
Well, do you have that view, Dan?
Just saying a prudent person might take that view.
Isn't that the kind of answer a president would give you, Dan, in a press conference that you'd launch into him all over him as evading?
Isn't that the kind of an answer that you'd spend two weeks trying to destroy a president over for not being forthcoming?
What's he trying to hide?
Why won't he be forthcoming with us?
Here's the rest of the bite.
This story was not, they concluded.
The story was not born of any personal or political bias.
I do hope people will keep in mind that two of their findings were what I just described to you.
It wasn't born of political or personal bias, and they could not determine whether the documents were fraudulent or not.
Stop the tape a minute.
Did anybody hear Larry asking about that?
When people start denying something, it hadn't been asked.
Now, I know the allegation has been out there that there was bias in the reporting, but Larry didn't ask him that because Larry wants him to come back someday.
Larry didn't have it.
He's out there denying it anyway.
You always got to be suspicious of that.
It's not a complaint, but I do want to point out, and I understand when people write about this story, they often say, well, they dealt with fake documents or fraudulent documents.
Let's just say gently that that's not known.
You know, I have a obvious include.
Come on, Dan, wake up.
I mean, get out of the fog.
It's not known that they're forged.
Yes, it is.
It is.
They had their own experts that told them they were forged, and they didn't use them because they wanted the story.
They didn't want the fact known that these were forged.
They tried to get away with this because they forgot that their power no longer exists.
They don't have a monopoly anymore.
But all that aside, all that aside, we just heard Dan Rather say in praising Woodward Bernstein Phelp Bradley et al., whatever it takes.
Now, clearly, Dan Rather believes that George Bush didn't do right at the National Guard.
Clearly, Dan Rather believes this.
Clearly, Dan Rather believes that George W. Bush lied and got favoritism-type help from his powerful father and was allowed to get away without going to Vietnam for cushy job flying jets.
Rather believes this.
Does he not?
He believes it.
Well, Dan, what happened to whatever it takes?
If whatever it takes to get somebody you believe is corrupt and lying at the highest levels of power, why don't you stand behind the forged documents?
You're just doing whatever it takes.
Why have to defend the document?
Why have to get into an argument about whether documents are forged that you believe them?
So say, I know this is true.
Whatever it takes, Dan, whatever it takes, this wouldn't be the first time that you and your practitioners have used lies and deception and false charges to try to harm people.
Why not just follow it out?
Follow it through.
Yeah, we forged the documents because we know he's guilty.
And whatever it takes to get powerful people.
Why don't you admit it's what you're doing about Watergate?
You're going back 32 years.
What's the Washington Post done for anybody in 32 years?
But lose subscribers.
What are they doing?
Have to go back 32 years to celebrate the salad days?
And in the process of celebrating the salad days, we're told the epitome of great journalism is this?
Well, if so, Dan, if that's the epitome of great journalism, you need to change your tack on this.
You need to admit the documents are forged and give yourself credit for doing what you could, whatever it took, to get a corrupt president out of office.
And then keep trying.
Don't admit failure.
Make up more stuff about Bush.
Whatever it takes, Dan.
I want to both apologize and thank, apologize to and thank those of you on hold because I told you I was going to get to the phones 10 minutes ago and I didn't.
Well, I'm going to make it.
We'll get to the phones in the opening segment of the next hour because they've been on hold for an hour.
It's open on Friday.
People want to weigh in on this, but I just, you know, I just wanted to see how good I could be talking about something I don't care about.
I just wanted to test my own professionalism.
Thank you for indulging me on this, ladies and gentlemen, because it was a big test.
You know, how many times have you got to talk about something you don't care about?
Blah, It gets boring.
Well, Frank, I'm fed up with all this.
But I nevertheless, I'm always testing myself.
I'm always reaching for new horizons.
And I thank you for indulging this examination of self.
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