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Aug. 18, 2005 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:17
August 18, 2005, Thursday, Hour #3
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Time Text
Okay, everybody ready?
Good.
We have one exciting hour of broadcast excellence left, and you are here where only place you need to be, my friends.
This is show prep for the rest of the media that follows.
Except some of the media which refuse to listen to this program and instead lie about what is said on this program.
But never mind, we catch them.
We correct it when necessary.
Great to have you with us.
The telephone number is 800-282-2882, and the email address is rush at EIBnet.com.
All right, this is from the New York Times, and the headline of this story, fair, balanced, a study finds it doesn't matter.
Folks, do you remember back in, I think this is 97 or 98.
It's hard to remember because the Clinton administration was just a series of day after, day after day lies that emanated from the president and from the hangers-on that were there to insulate him, the director of cover-ups, Mac McClarty, and all these other people.
It was just an incessant, endless parade of lies.
And at one point during the administration, I want to say it's 97 during the Lewinsky thing, but it could have been in 94.
The New York Times ran a story, and the rest of the media picked it all up, and the cable news nets then went out and got psychiatrists to back this all up, that telling lies was actually good for you.
That telling lies protected other people's feelings.
That it was okay to go out there and lie if you were doing it to protect people's feelings.
But sometimes people just can't help hear the truth.
So now we've got a story in the midst of the mainstream media's plunge from its former monopolistic dominance.
And one of the reasons for its plunge is that it is so biased and it's so obvious and they so obstinately, stubbornly refuse to admit it.
And in the midst of this plunge, we get a survey which says that the American people, yeah, they know that there's bias in the media.
They don't care.
It doesn't matter.
It's a story by Alan Kruger.
A share of Americans who believe that news organizations are politically biased in their reporting increased to 60% in 2005, up from 45% in 1985, according to polls by the Pew Research Center.
Many people also believe that biased reporting influences who wins or loses elections.
A new study by Stefano Dellavina of the University of California at Berkeley and Ethan Kaplan of the Institute for International Economic Studies at Stockholm, however, cast doubt on this view.
Specifically, the economists ask whether the advent of the Fox News channel affected voter behavior.
They found that Fox had no detectable effect on which party voted or which party people voted for or whether they voted at all.
They actually asked the question about Fox.
Hence the headline, fair, balanced, study finds it doesn't matter.
Now, you know these people have got Fox on the brain.
You know these people hate Fox.
They despise Fox.
They think Fox and me responsible for destroying their monopoly.
And now they've gone out and commissioned a survey.
Hey, we're worried about nothing.
Why, Fox not only isn't determining how people vote, it isn't even turning them into voters.
Well, an appealing feature of their study is that it doesn't matter if Fox News represents the political center and the rest of the media the liberal wing or Fox represents the extreme right and the rest of the media the middle.
Fox's political orientation is clearly to the right of the rest of the media.
Research has found, for example, that Fox News is much more likely than other news shows to cite conservative think tanks and less likely to cite liberal ones.
Fox surely injected a new partisan perspective into political coverage on TV.
Did it matter?
The Fox News channel started operating October 7, 96 in a small number of cable markets.
Professors Dela Vigne and Kaplan painstakingly collected information on which towns offered Fox as part of their basic or extended cable service as of November 2000.
And then they linked this information to voting records for the towns.
Their sample consists of 8,630 towns and cities from 24 states.
Because many states do not report vote tallies at the town level, they could not be included in the sample.
Oy, a little important item there in the parentheses.
Local cable companies adopted Fox in a somewhat idiosyncratic way.
In November 2000, a third of the towns served by AT ⁇ T Broadband offered Fox, while only 6% of those served by Adelphia offered it.
Fox spread more quickly in areas that learned and leaned more to Republican candidates, but the imbalance was only slight.
Furthermore, looking within congressional districts, the likelihood that a town's cable provider offered Fox in 2000 was unrelated to the share of people who voted for Bob Dole, the Republican candidate for president.
What an effort here.
What an effort.
Disregarding third-party candidates, Professors Delavigna and Kaplan found that towns that offered Fox by 2000 increased their vote share for the Republican candidate by six points from 96 to 2000, while those that did not offer Fox increased theirs by an even larger 7%.
So Fox actually hurt the Republican vote.
Who would believe it?
But the truth is out now because it's in the New York Times.
Fox actually hurt the Republican vote.
By the summer of 2000, 17% of Americans said they regularly watched Fox.
Another 28% said they watched it sometimes.
These numbers approached the viewership of the cable news network at the time.
Certainly many Democratic sympathizers feared that Fox gave Republican candidates an advantage.
Why was Fox inconsequential to voter behavior?
Well, one possibility is that people search for TV news with a political orientation that matches their own.
In this scenario, Fox would have been preaching to the converted.
This, however, was not the case.
Fox's viewers were about equally likely to identify themselves as Democrats as Republicans, according to a poll by Pew in 2000.
So Professors Delavigna and Kaplan offer two more promising explanations.
First, watching Fox could have confirmed both Democrat and Republican viewers' inclinations, an effect known as confirmatory bias in psychology.
When Yankee and Red Sox fans watch replays of the same disputed umpires ruling, for example, they both come away more convinced that their team was in the right.
One might expect Fox viewers to have increased their likelihood of voting, however, if Fox energized both sides' base.
But the professor's preferred explanation is that the public manages to filter biased media reports.
Fox's format, for example, might alert the audience to take the views expressed with more than the usual grain of salt.
Audiences may also filter biases from other network shows.
Is it interesting to you here?
And I've just read the whole first page of this story.
Is it interesting that there's no analysis of any liberal media outlet, be it the New York Times or be it CNN or anything?
It's only an analysis of Fox.
Fair balance study finds it doesn't matter.
The bias that's on Fox didn't affect anybody.
The bias that's on Fox didn't create new voters.
The bias that's on Fox did not make people vote more Republican than they otherwise would.
In fact, in certain areas of the country, Fox suppressed the Republican vote.
Well, if that's the case, why are they worried about it?
And if that's the case, if bias is irrelevant, then why does the media go out of its way to deny their own?
Why do they go out of their way to say, oh, we're not biased?
We're totally objective.
You don't understand.
Fox is biased.
I think the effort that went into this story, the commissioning of the survey, all of this is designed to make these liberals feel better.
They're sitting around there worried, sick about all this new conservative media.
So they've got a story in their house organ.
So don't worry about it.
It's not changing anybody.
It's not affecting anything.
Meanwhile, they're just going to keep lying to themselves.
They're going to, okay, good.
We got our monopoly back.
Okay, good.
We still determine the agenda.
Okay, good.
We still run the show.
We're still the power brokers.
Screw those Fox people.
Screw talk radio.
The bias isn't working.
And as long as they keep lying to themselves, as long as they keep exempting themselves from the analysis of what's gone wrong with them, they're just going to continue to plunge.
I have told you this over and over again.
Told you not to worry about these people.
They are self-destructing.
And this story is yet further evidence.
I mean, even the idea behind this story is further evidence that they're really quaking in their boots over what they've lost and are continuing to lose.
Quick timeout, folks.
We'll be right back and resume after this.
It's been a while since we've gone to the phones.
People have been patiently waiting.
We'll get there in just a second.
Did you hear about this?
President John McCain, Vice President Lindsey Graham toured Alaska out there along with Senator Hillary Rodham and they found that the earth is getting warmer.
Found global warming up there, fresh from visits to Canada's Yukon territory and Alaska's northernmost city.
Four U.S.
Well, two senators and President McCain, Vice President Graham said yesterday that signs of rising temperatures on earth are obvious.
They called on Congress to act.
If you can go to the native people, listen to their stories, I'll walk away with any doubt that something's going on.
I just think you're not listening, said Vice President Graham.
President McCain and Hillary Rodham told reporters in Anchorage that the Eskimo residents in Barrow, Alaska have found their ancestral land and traditional lifestyle disrupted by disappearing sea ice, thawing permafrost, increased coastal erosion, and changes to wildlife habitat.
Some observations provide more ammo in the fight for a bill co-sponsored by President McCain and Connecticut Democrat Joel Lieberman to cap U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.
President McCain said people around the country are going to demand it.
It's the special interest versus the people's interest.
You know, once again, Congress has to act.
Could somebody tell me what could anybody do?
Like, what is it here today?
It is 91 degrees outside where I live.
91 degrees.
It's hot.
It's no hotter than it normally is down here, and it's probably cooler here than other parts of the country.
But nevertheless, I am hot, and it's been hot for too long.
And the water in my swimming pool is evaporating too fast, and I'm having to refill it, and that's costing me money.
And I want Congress to act.
And I want Congress to act now.
And I want to know which of my neighbors are polluting my air with their fluorocarbons or whatever hell else is causing this heat.
And I want Congress to act.
I want Congress to stop it.
Just like last January when it got down to 45 one night here, I wanted Congress to act and make it warmer.
I'm not putting up with this.
What vanity we possess.
I have no doubt it's getting warmer.
It used to be a lot warmer on earth than it is now before we had any of this high-tech lifestyle that we've got.
The idea we have any control over this is just patently absurd.
The idea that we have to blame for it is patently absurd.
We are in the midst of cycles and we have an ecosystem over which we have no control.
And anybody who can call here and prove me different, I would love to be proved wrong.
I want to know what climatological event we prevented.
I want to know what climatological event we caused.
I want to know what climatological event we lessened in intensity or increased in intensity.
I want to know this.
And if it gets hotter now than it is some years ago, it may be that there's sunspot activity and it may be that the sun's going through one of its cycles.
I want to know what we did to change that.
Somebody can prove to me that we have control over climatological events and the temperature of the oceans.
I want to know.
I want to hear about it.
I don't like being wrong.
And if I can be proven wrong, somebody step forth and do it.
Michael in Crawford, Texas.
Crawford, Texas.
Welcome to the program, sir.
Hello.
Hi, Rush.
How are you?
Just fine, sir.
Hey, I wanted to give you a call and let you know that I agree with you 100%.
I'm retired military.
I went out.
I heard about all this hubbub with Cindy out here.
So I thought, you know, just Cindy who?
Cindy Sheehan.
Oh, we're back to that.
Okay.
So I went out and I had to see for myself, okay, what's going on out here?
What's all the hubbub about?
So I went out and I decided that I needed to walk in amongst everyone, the small little groups out there, protesters, and listen to what was actually being said.
And I'll tell you what I heard.
I never heard anything about Cindy's grief.
I never heard, and I'm sure she's grieving.
Anyone who loses a child will grieve.
I give her that.
I never heard anything about her grief.
I never heard anything mentioned from that group of people about Casey.
The only thing I heard from group to group was a constant barrage of, hey, keep the pressure on.
We've got to get the Republicans out.
We've got to get Democrats in in the upcoming election.
And I thought, oh, my gosh, wait a minute.
I thought this was a protest about the Iraq war and about Cindy's grief.
And it had nothing to do with that.
There's no doubt in my mind that this protest has absolutely nothing to do with anything but the upcoming presidential election.
And I say that from being able to walk amongst all those people and listening to them.
I spoke with her.
I shot pictures of her.
Oh, ho, ho, ho.
You spoke with who?
With Cindy Sheehan.
You spoke with Cindy Sheehan.
Did she cuss you out?
No, but I got to tell you, if they find out out there, they're not the nice people that CNN is showing.
I saw them go over and just about attack a young girl who was very distraught because her brother had died in Iraq and they had all those crosses up.
His name was on the cross.
And so the mother and the sister came out to remove that.
They didn't want him to be a part of that.
And so they encircled her, tried to stop her from being able to get the cross.
She finally did.
They, just about at the point of attacking her, told her that her brother was a murderer, that he had killed innocent people, and that he died for nothing.
Oh, my God.
You know, and as a photographer, I understand that, you know, I got to stop you there on that on that, Michael, because that is a, that is, they're parroting what Cindy Sheehan's saying when I tell you that they believe that independently of her, but that is part of her message that Bush is a murderer.
And so they're telling these parents that want their sons and daughters' names off these crosses, that they come down and try to remove the crosses of the names that their kids are just murderers.
No, you're right.
They will encircle them.
They'll do everything they can to stop them.
And they are, and I have to tell you now, they are not a peaceful group of people out there.
They can be very vicious.
I watched as I was speaking to a group of Bush supporters.
It was a small group, granted, but there was a group out there supporting our military and supporting the president.
And I turned and I saw a group of gentlemen over with Cindy, and they had a young boy, probably about 10 years old, and they kept sending him over to say things to try to antagonize the conservative group over there.
Let me stop you.
Did this really surprise you?
It should be well known who these people are.
They're nothing but filled with rage.
They're angry.
They're miserable.
And they're trying to make everybody else miserable at the same time.
And you're right.
This is all about electoral politics.
This is just the latest incarnation.
I'm going to add the Wellstone Memorial to it.
The latest incarnation of the Wellstone Memorial or the opportunity that Bill Burkett provided the left along with the media and the Jersey girls and Richard Clark.
I mean, it's obvious what this is.
And they're using Cindy Sheehan and her grief as a shield to give themselves credibility and to hide what their real motivations for being there are.
That's why they're exploiting her.
Exactly.
I'm not shocked at all.
Are they out there raising money?
Michael, are they raising money, passing the hat, trying to get people to give them money?
I didn't see them passing the hat, but I did take a picture of her sitting in her van, and I was standing right beside the van door, listening to a conversation, and she just lit up like her world just got, you know, fantastic.
And I heard her say, and I quote, that it is increasing by about $1,000 a day.
So what I took that to mean, and in talking to some of the other people out there, they're out aggressively trying to earn money.
And so what I heard her say is the one, I took it to mean that they had the website going and that they were increasing their funds by about $1,000.
Oh, it's not just one website.
It's all kinds of move on is down there.
Moveon.org.
And I'm sure Soros got some people down there.
And they're all using this.
They're all using her.
They're all using the occasion to advance themselves, to raise money.
And then you've got this silly, unquestioning, without any curiosity, sycophantic media.
And you know what the media's excuse is?
Well, it's the slow dog days of August.
There's no other news out there.
Ever heard of Abel Danger and Colonel Schaefer?
There's lots of news out there.
I talk about it all the time.
I can fill a program every three hours without ever once mentioning Cindy Sheehan's name.
I've been doing it all week long.
There's plenty of news.
They want this story, and they want it cast exactly as it is being.
Back in a second.
All right, we have a bit of a dispute amongst ourselves here at the Southern Command of the Excellence in Broadcasting Network.
Our last caller was Michael from Crawford, Texas.
Mr. Snerdley has his doubts about the veracity and the honesty of our previous caller.
And here's why.
Snerdley said to me during the break, I just don't believe this guy, Rush.
I think you're being, you're just, you're too open.
You accept these people.
They call here, and they just say anything.
I said, what do you mean?
Okay, the guy says he's down there one day.
He's one day, and he goes walking through this camp of vigilers, vigilists, whatever they're doing down there, there's a Cindy Sheehan Squatter's camp, and he's telling all these stories about fundraising.
And they're calling people have died in Iraq murderers when their parents want to come and take their names off the crosses.
And that they're all excited about how much money they're raising down there.
And the guy's been there one day.
We've been listening to the media for two weeks on this story, and they haven't said one thing about that.
Now, why do you think this guy's telling the truth?
He was just there for one day, and he didn't sound by the way.
He sounded like he was in air-conditioned comfort to me.
I didn't hear any sounds although he was outside and sweating and any of that.
What makes you Snerdley's asking me this during the break?
And I said, Well, I have to stop and think about this.
Snerdley has a point, folks.
He's got a point.
Here's our buddy Michael from Crawford.
He calls.
He was in there one day.
He's a photographer.
He's in there one day.
Oh, and get this.
After his call was over, he wanted to tell the call screener one more thing.
And a call screener told me during the break that this guy said that he stayed in a motel last night.
And do you know that who was in the room above him?
The room below it.
The room below, he's in a motel.
And do you know who he said was staying in the motel room below his Cindy Sheehan?
Now, that makes me also doubt this guy.
Snerdley may have a point because the media says that she's 24/7 in the ditch, that this is a vigil.
And then we heard that some guy who's got a ranch about a mile away offered his ranch to Cindy to stay there when the heat was getting a little bit oppressive and all out of attention and immediate, yeah, with more parking down there.
And he wanted this guy, was just trying to be a good citizen.
And I don't know if she took him up on it or not, but I mean, the media is telling us that this woman's roughing it out there, using port-a-potties and tree leaves for toilet paper and so forth.
And she's out there 24-7.
She's in the ditch.
And she is in the midst of a vigil.
And here comes this guy out of nowhere calling us and telling all these harebrained stories.
He was only there one day.
I don't know what to do.
Who do we believe?
Yeah, well, I forgot to ask if he knows Christopher Hitchens.
No, obviously, my friends, we're illustrating absurdity by being absurd.
The point is: here's a guy go down there, spend a day, not even a full day down there, get the full story of what's going on.
And what he tells us is not reflective of one thing we've heard from the mainstream press about this little gaggle of squatters down there, ostensibly engaged in a vigil for the sad fate of the murder of Cindy Sheehan's son by George W. Bush.
The president.
He did tell us that Sheehan was in the motel room below him.
She's she's not out there in the ditch.
She's not using tree leaves for toilet paper.
She's got all the comforts that a fine Texas motel can offer.
Joni and Bradyndon, Florida, welcome to the EIB Network.
Nice to have you with us.
Hey, Rush.
Listen, I just wanted to tell you, it just like makes me want to throw up about what a liar President Clinton is when you play that audio of him saying, oh, I guess I was too upset, obsessed with trying to get Osama bin Laden.
He is such a liar.
Whoa, Let's listen to the tape again because that's not what he said.
It's even better than that.
Let's listen to it and then give me your comments afterwards because you're commenting on it.
People may not have heard it.
We played it a little while ago.
It's a tape from September 3rd, 2002.
Bob Dole and Bill Clinton are on Larry King Live, and Clinton asks, or King asks Clinton, you remember what you were thinking, Mr. President, at the time the Twin Towers went up.
What would go through the mind of the immediate former president watching this?
I remember exactly what happened.
Bruce Lindsay said to me on the phone, my God, a second plane has hit the tower.
And I said, bin Laden did this.
That's the first thing I said.
He said, how can you be sure?
I said, because only bin Laden and the Iranians could set up a network to do this.
And they wouldn't do it because they have a country in targets.
Bin Laden did it.
Did you also think at the same time we came pretty close to getting him?
Yeah, I thought that my virtual obsession with him was well faced, and I was full of regret that I didn't get him.
I mean, I immediately thought that he had done it.
Oh, my God.
My virtual obsession.
Virtual is right.
You know, these virtual reality games, virtual obsession.
Absolutely.
So this guy wants us.
I mean, he was obsessed with bin Laden.
He was presented to him twice, maybe three times in the Sudan.
He didn't want to deal with it.
This is just, it's comical as it can be.
What is your comment about it?
Well, exactly.
And what I was going to say is it just makes you want to throw up.
If you read Lieutenant Colonel Patterson's book, Dereliction of Duty, he cites numerous occasions when our special ops guys actually had bin Laden right in their sights, and they were calling in for the OK to get him.
And they said, we can capture him, we can kill him, either way.
And Lieutenant Colonel Patterson, who, you know, carried the nuclear football for Clinton, who is right at his side for four years, relayed the message from Sandy Berger.
And he said, they can get him.
They have an hour of opportunity.
They need to know.
They need an answer.
What do you want them to do?
And Clinton kept saying, I'll get back to him.
I'll get back to him.
And he would go into like a VIP room and like schmooze at like these golf tour at a golf tournament while they were waiting every day.
Hey, hey, don't be too hard on golf.
Don't blame golf tournaments for what Clinton didn't do with bin Laden.
Yeah, but he was using that room to sit there and avoid going and giving our special ops guys who are desperate for the word to take the guy out and go and do it.
Oh, it just makes me.
And how come Lieutenant Carlos?
It makes you want to throw up.
It does.
And how come Lieutenant Colonel Patterson wasn't interviewed by the 9-11 Commission if they were trying to get to the bottom of what really happened?
Well, because they weren't.
They weren't trying to get to the bottom of it.
It was a whitewash.
It was, as I say, two purposes.
It was nail Bush, if possible, protect Clinton at the least.
And if those two both fail, make sure that no Washington elitist from the political class gets nailed in this.
That was the purpose.
I mean, these guys are going to circle the wagons around each other.
There's no question about what is this now?
Okay, now Snerdley, Joni, pardon me.
Just can you hang on here just a second?
I'm sorry, Rush.
Sure, I can go.
Pardon?
I can hang up.
That's right.
No, I don't want you to hang up.
I want you to hold on.
Okay.
Put her on hold out there.
Snerdley, stop this.
I don't know what's gotten into you.
Snerdley interrupted me during a brilliant response to what she was saying, but telling me he doesn't believe her either because he hadn't heard any of this in the mainstream press.
She can quote a book that this guy Patterson wrote, but the mainstream press has a reporter, so how can we trust it?
What's gotten into you?
Okay, I haven't seen one story that supports this, but I've not seen it on ABC.
I've not seen it on NBC.
I've not seen it on CBS.
So he's raising his hands in victory.
Okay, so now two people in a row.
You think this woman from Brayden, Florida, is a kook because she's relying on this Patterson guy who you think is a kook, and then his photographer, Danna Crawford, you think is a kook because we haven't heard any of this in the mainstream press.
Okay, point, point taken.
Bring Joni back here.
Joni, I'm sorry for that interruption.
I'm losing control of Snerdley here today.
Are you back?
Yes, yes, Rush.
There you are.
The thing about, let me answer your question about, you know, okay, Clinton is told by burglar, okay, we've got an hour.
The special ops guys want to go get him.
I have two theories on this.
The first theory is: I don't think Bill Clinton in his entire eight years wanted to deal with one thing big.
I don't think he wanted to deal with anything that risked his poll numbers.
I don't think he wanted to do anything that would risk his legacy.
I think he wanted to preside over a decade that after it was over, he could say was the best in America.
We had no worries.
The Soviets have been defeated.
The Cold War was over.
We had the peace dividend.
We could spend it left and right.
We could concentrate on making the country whole and we could do all these wonderful things in his great roaring economy.
He didn't want to deal with hard issues.
I think that's why the Able Danger guys had trouble getting the news of Mohammed Atta to this administration back in 1999 and 2000.
They didn't want to deal with this.
And that's one of the reasons for the wall.
They build the wall and they handle these cases and other legal cases and they send all the data to the grand jury.
And Clinton didn't want this going to the grand jury.
He didn't want the news that bin Laden was in sights because the answer would have been from Clinton.
Well, I can't just assassinate somebody.
Frank Church says I can't do that.
CIA can't assassinate.
I just can't do that.
I mean, we got nothing on this guy, nothing whatsoever.
So he's at a trainee training camp out there and eating lamb blood or whatever.
He's like, I can't do anything about it.
I can't do it.
The reason he didn't want to do it is because he was afraid of the reaction in the bin Laden world and he had no stomach for it.
And yet, after 9-11 happens, the Clinton people start bellyaching and whining and moaning about how nothing big happened on their watch.
Clinton never had a real chance for greatness like Bush did.
And they were lamenting that if 9-11 was going to happen, why couldn't it have happened when Clinton was in the office?
This administration is as psychosomatic as its leader was.
And it is the longer time passes, the more time passes, and the more we learn thanks to guys like Buzz Patterson, it isn't going to be long before everybody understands just what incompetence and selfish self-absorption dominated the day for eight years in that White House.
That's absolutely right.
Because until the American people actually have the guts, and especially those senators and Republican senators in Washington, to actually call it like it is, it was because of this guy and no guts and he hated the military and he didn't want to be involved.
And all he cared about was his legacy.
The 3,000 innocent mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters have been murdered and nobody has the guts to say it.
Somebody needs to read Colonel Patterson's book.
He was the one that was right there standing next to him.
And, you know, how come he, like you said, why isn't he being interviewed by ABC?
And why isn't the New York Times doing an investigation of what he has to say?
But they're all sure a tech all investigating, you know, whether President.
Everybody knows the answers to these questions.
They don't want this kind of news.
To them, all these people are kooks, and all these theories are wacko and conspiratorial, and they don't want any part of it.
Joni, I'm glad you called, but I'm up against it on time.
I have to run.
Thanks for your patience with us as I had to deal with Snerdley again.
We'll be back here in just a second, folks.
Stay with us.
Ladies and gentlemen, I'm watching television.
I can do many things at once.
I do a number of things while hosting this program.
I'm a human sponge.
I absorb things, I remember them, and I'm able to articulate them right back at you.
And I'm watching as the families of the BTK killer talk to the court, to the judge, about the effects that his actions have had on their families, all of these murders and so forth.
But the interesting thing to me is that the BTK killer looks to have aged about 20 years since I first saw him.
He looks to have lost about 80 pounds.
And he is expressing remorse today.
He is saying he's sorry.
Now, I don't expect this to change the sentencing or anything, but this is, of course, a big test.
Many Americans will feel better about all this when he expresses remorse, and he has done so and is in the process of continuing to do so.
And I just wanted you to know, Marvin Kalb, who runs the Shorenstein Center for the People in the Press or whatever it is up at Harvard, recently hired by the Conservative Fox news channel as a commentator and analyst, has a column published in the Financial Times.
And he basically says that the Karl Rove leak of Valerie Plame's identity as a CIA agent is Watergate.
It is the same thing as Watergate.
This is patently absurd, except in this sense.
They're going to try to make it Watergate.
Have you noticed how the mainstream press is occupied with seemingly recapturing its glory days, trying to turn the American people against a war, trying to get a current sitting Republican president out of office?
It is amazing.
They're not forward-thinking at all.
They're being assaulted on all sides by people for their lack of credibility, lack of thoroughness, lack of honesty.
So they're seeking refuge in their glory days.
Well, let's take a look at their glory days.
I see the numbers on drudge here for book sales.
And you know what's at the bottom of the list?
Bob Woodward's book on deep throat.
Nobody cares.
This book is not selling diddly squat compared to previous Woodward book because nobody cares.
It's a classic illustration of the disconnect that exists between the mainstream.
Remember when Felt came out and identified himself.
Remember the orgy we got for a full week over, well, this is our greatest legacy.
And they just orgied on and on and on and on and on about how important Watergate was, what a rotgut Nixon was, how important it was to get that SOB out of office and blah, blah, blah.
And it just contributed more and more of a backlash.
So here come everybody.
Supposedly we were breathlessly waiting for Woodward's book.
Unfelt, where was the garage that they met?
How did these things actually happen?
Well, the book's out there, and guess what?
Nobody cares.
Nobody gives a rat's rear end about it.
And so here comes Marvin Kalb.
Hey, America.
Karl Rove is Watergate.
The leak of Valerie Plame, the name of Watergate.
He couches it in a piece about what the White House can learn from Watergate as they go through this.
I want to read a story to you.
I want to get your reaction to this.
I, for one, am not surprised that it is datelined, Florida.
It's from Orlando, one of Central Florida's largest pest control companies, has been recruited by police to help fight crime.
Technicians from the truly Nolan Pest Control of America are being trained by law enforcement, local law enforcement, to spot anything unusual as they visit customers' homes.
Our vehicles really get into the bowels of the neighborhood, and we're back there where all the homes are, Nicole-de-Sac, said Truly Nolan spokesman Barry Murray.
And part of being a good neighbor is looking out for one another.
The pest control workers will call the cops if they see something unusual during their stops.
The pest control technicians who are coming to your home to investigate termites don't have any law enforcement capabilities, but if they see some two-legged creatures trying to make their way into your home, they're going to call a cop, said local six news reporter Deborah Garcia.
Our point is not to invade people's houses or make them feel like their privacy is being invaded.
It's just to try to have an extra set of eyes and ears out there, said the worker, a pest control worker for Truly Nolan, a guy named Ronnie Rachels.
Well, you know, these pest control people, they don't just, you know, spray outside your house.
They go inside your house.
And apparently they've been authorized to report anything they see in there, which means they've been authorized to peek.
Which means they've been authorized to look.
Back in just a second.
You know, it just isn't enough time to be fair with other callers.
Let me tell you what I'm going to do tomorrow.
The highly acclaimed monologue.
that aired in the second hour of Monday's program that is now up on audio and dittocam video and transcript at rushlimbo.com.
I'm going to replay that since it is so highly acclaimed tomorrow.
And I'm going to do it in the first hour because the first hour of this program is what goes worldwide to the Armed Forces Radio Network so that uniformed and other military personnel around the world who listen to the Armed Forces Network will be able to hear it.
We'll do that tomorrow in the first hour of Open Line Friday.
We'll look forward to seeing you then.
Hope you have a great day, folks.
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