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Sept. 27, 2005 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:32
September 27, 2005, Tuesday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of The Rush 24-7 Podcast.
Hey, folks, a little bit of news here.
You uh you may not have heard.
Uh U.S. troops in Iraq have killed, murdered, wiped out, not murdered, killed, wiped out, destroyed.
Uh, the number two guy to um Zarkawi.
Uh, you're not gonna hear about this because uh the media is still in its blame Bush for everything mode today.
Mike Brown testifying uh currently.
It's been ironic in Spurts, but anyway, greetings.
It's great to have you with us.
We are here for full three hours of broadcast excellence today.
The Rush Limbaugh program and the Excellence in Broadcasting Network, I am America's anchor man, seated and ready to go.
The telephone number is 800-282-2882.
Email address rush at EIB net.com.
So I'm watching these hearings get underway.
The uh the uh the uh what would you call this?
The uh crucifixion of Mike Brown before this congressional committee, the uh retired uh debunked, fired, whatever he is, former head of FEMA.
And I, you know, I'm I'm really not all that interested in it because I know this is a typical maneuver here.
This is a uh congressional committee that gets to pretend like they had nothing to do with anything that went wrong.
Uh I don't care if it is run by the Republicans in this case, they get to act like they're just bystanders to all of this and bring up some guy and scalp him.
No offense, uh, Seminole Tribes or anybody else.
Scalp the guy and then feel like they've done what needed to be done.
So I'm I'm paying it scant attention, but something, and I don't know what.
Divine Providence, maybe.
Something made me look up at a certain point at the television monitors here.
And lo and behold, Brown is being questioned by Congressman William Jefferson, Democrat Louisiana.
And I'll say, Well, how ironic is this?
Here's a guy who's uh you know under federal investigation for a sting operation, who co-opted rescue vehicles for his own personal trip to his own home in the midst of the recovery and the aftermath of the hurricane, and it took two trucks and a helicopter to get this guy out of his home.
Water was up to the third step, and he walked in there and had to brought out a laptop computer, a box the size of a freezer and a couple suitcases, uh, while these assets were needed to rescue others that were stranded in their attics and on their rooftops.
And here is Congressman William Jefferson, Democrat Louisiana, going on and on and on and on and on about Mike Brown, uh former head of FEMA about a lack of response down there, and to his credit, former FEMA director Michael Brown aggressively defended his role today in responding to Hurricane Katrina and put much of the blame for coordination failures on the governor of Louisiana, Kathleen Blanco, and the mayor, Ray School bus Nagan.
He said his biggest mistake is to quote, my biggest mistake was not recognizing by Saturday that Louisiana was dysfunctional.
He actually called the Louisiana government dysfunctional.
This the special congressional panel set up by House Republican leaders to investigate the uh catastrophe.
Uh Brown's defense drew a scathing response from Congressional uh uh Congressman William Jefferson, Democrat Louisiana.
He said, I find it absolutely stunning that this hearing would start out with you, Mr. Brown laying the blame for FEMA's failings at the feet of the governor of Louisiana and the mayor of New Orleans.
I've overseen over 150 presidentially declared disasters.
I know what I'm doing, and I think I'd do a pretty guard j good uh job of it, Brown responded to uh Congressman William Jefferson, Democrat Louisiana.
We're we're uh we're trying to put audio together for you so you can hear some of the questioning from Congressman William Jefferson, Democrat Louisiana of uh former FEMA director Mike Brown, but we got an editing problem here.
Uh questions, uh Cookie told me uh questions that Congressman William Jefferson, Democrat Louisiana, uh, are asking, run into multiple minutes.
They are uh more like statement, and he's not exactly an exciting stem winder of a speaker, and we don't like to put people to sleep on this program.
So uh it's uh it's a dicey proposition here to come up with audio sound bites of Congressman William Jefferson, Democrat uh Louisiana.
By the way, uh uh so much of what's in the news today just establishes the fact that this program's on the cutting edge of societal evolution.
We've got see, I told you so it's all over the place.
We've got a story today uh in the Los Angeles Times.
Katrina takes a troll a toll on truth and news accuracy.
Yesterday, it was the New Orleans Times Picky Yoon on their website today.
It is the LA Times going after the media.
Uh rumors supplanted accurate information and media magnified the problem.
Rapes, violence, and estimates of the dead were wrong.
If you haven't seen it, go to Drudge's homepage.
He's got a little montage of photographs of uh several key members of the media explaining uh or or well, actually just the picture tells the story uh about media incompetence.
There was incompetence everywhere here.
There was incompetence in the media.
In fact, and I said last week, uh before the the Times Peaky Unit story came out, before this LA Times story came out, that what we really have here is a media scandal.
We have a media scale.
The media still to this day, and I've got the stories of the stack trying to divide this country on race, even today, still using the race card, trying to play that.
And they're doing it for the express purpose of dividing this country in the uh hopes of affecting the election outcomes in 2006 and 2008.
Uh you remember last week, I I for me, I kind of lost it once once I had heard that New Orleans had put in this demand, or Louisiana put in this demand for 250 billion dollars in aid right before Hurricane Rita was supposed to destroy Houston.
That was its original track.
And you know, whatever this this country had just been generous uh as it could be.
Uh there were all billion dollars or more in private donations.
Uh the uh government via the taxpayers already allocated over $62 billion, and here came Mary Landrew and the rest of the Louisiana delegation demanding $250 billion.
Well, there are a bunch of people editorializing about that today, um uh agreeing with me.
Uh once again on the cutting edge here, my friends, you are if you listen to this program on a regular basis.
And and uh exactly what I predicted is happening.
I said, you know, it's one thing for people to be generous and charitable, but when the people who are receiving that charity then start demanding more, then it starts to rub you the wrong way, and then you start getting very uh trepidatious about being generous, because if generosity marks you, if generosity sets you up as a mark, then you uh you you you hold back.
So here comes all this generosity, and rather than a thank you, they come up with all these new demands, and the demands are still out there.
Now keep something in mind, folks.
As New Orleans is making these demands, and Louisiana making these demands, 250 billion dollars, there are areas in my state of Florida ravaged by four hurricanes in 2004 who haven't seen a dime of rebuilding money yet.
Some of them haven't been rebuilt at all.
Pota Gorda hasn't been rebuilt at all.
That was the uh the little town on the west coast of the state that was destroyed by one of the hurricanes.
I think it was Charlie.
This hurricane that was supposed to go to Tampa then took a little right-hand turn earlier than forecast and hit this little town where the people there weren't prepared for it as well as they should be.
I mean, that's that's that's another story.
But the fact is that even uh in in over a year now, or about a year, all of this magical aid that we're promising to New Orleans and Louisiana, not very much of it has has been seen in Florida, and Floridians is starting to notice this now.
It took a little while, but Florida newspapers are now starting to say, hey, wait just a second.
250 billion dollars, okay, fine, well and good, but we still got people up in Vero Beach who still don't have roofs on their houses yet because the aid to rebuild them, the insurance, whatever hasn't come through.
And yet everybody's bending over backwards and stopping whatever we're doing to make sure Louisiana gets I I predicted this.
I told you that after this charity was was was taken for granted and followed up by demands, uh the then the whole attitude about this was going to change, and it is starting to now.
I know, Mr. Snerdley, the media never even covered the extensive damage up in Port St. Lucy.
There's still tarps on roofs up there by the handful, uh, Which is uh, you know, on the on the east coast of the state.
It's about an hour from here if you drive up there, 45 minutes to an hour, uh, up I-95, and people are starting to notice this.
Uh, and I'll tell you what else, people start to know, wait a minute, what uh what what about all this spending here?
Does it seem to be any end to this?
So we've got a lot on the table today, and I we're gonna come back with some audio sound bites.
Last night I wasn't watching television last night.
I was I was well, not until the football game came on.
I had to get some work done so I could watch the football game.
And uh started checking the email and people, I mean, I started getting email in droves about Congressman Peter King destroying Chris Matthews on hardball last night.
We've got it.
Those count uh soundbites are coming up.
We also have sound bites of Dan Rather at Georgetown University last night in Washington, or maybe George Washington, I forget where it was, but it was in Washington.
Marvin Calb, who is the dean of the Schorenstein School for Journalism and Public Bundles at Harvard, had the most incredible interview of Dan Rather, and we have audio sound bites of that as well.
So sit tight, folks.
We must take a brief obscene profit break right now, but we will come back and continue with all the rest of today's program in a jiffy.
Stay with us.
By the way, folks, I was right about two other things.
In the Hill newspaper today, Patrick Leahy, fit to be tied, angry at dingy Harry, for going out on the Senate floor and saying he was going to oppose John Roberts without telling Leahy he was gonna do that.
Leahy then announced that he was gonna vote for Roberts to be Chief Justice.
There is friction in the Democratic Party over this.
I told people this is what it was.
Oh, no, no, no, right.
This is all part of strategy.
It's all part of their strategy.
You people got to get over the idea that these guys never make a mistake and they know exactly what they're doing, that they're running rings around us.
They are dysfunctional themselves.
Particularly over these court nominations.
The other thing, yesterday there was a story about Cindy Sheehan.
Everyone knows it's Cindy.
From the Associated Press, it was by Jennifer Kerr, and the uh story cleared before yesterday's program.
And it uh the line yesterday I don't have it in front of me, but I couldn't believe it.
I said that I can't, they're gonna have to change this lead, or this Jennifer Kerbabe's gonna get canned.
Remember that?
And I think the story that uh she had yesterday opened with Cindy Sheehan, the California woman who used her son to uh uh start an anti-war movement.
I said, Whoa, I've never seen this used her son.
They got it right at AP.
I said, they're gonna have to change this lead.
They changed the lead at 427 yesterday afternoon.
And here's what the lead became Cindy Sheehan, the California woman who became a leader of the anti-war movement following our son's death in Iraq, was arrested Monday along with they changed the lead.
In fact, this story, the first story ran during yesterday's show.
It was after Cindy was arrested.
And that openly, it did say Cindy Sheehan, the California woman who used the uh the the death of her son to da da da da da.
They changed it, folks, in less than two hours.
They changed the lead in the story.
Well, I'm sure the reporter's still there, but she's probably working on probation now.
You know, one more screwed-up lead like that, and you have to send her over to Al Jazeera.
Oh, how about that?
This conviction yesterday, Al Jazeera reporter is an actual member of Al-Qaeda.
You know, yeah.
Did you hear about that?
You didn't hear about that?
Yes, an Al Jazeera reporter, it was in Spain, right?
Convicted of being an al-Qaeda member.
And and yeah, the media watchdog group that they're they're mad.
The media watchdog groups in Spain are mad because you don't do this to a journalist.
So what?
Journalists is a journalist.
Journalists can be a commie, journalists can be Al-Qaeda.
It doesn't matter, it won't affect the way they do their work.
Oh, folks, what a day here.
You people, do you realize by listening to this program how ahead of the game you are?
I hope uh if you have been a doubting Thomas on that, you come around because we truly are on the cutting edge here.
All right, now to the audio sound bites.
Hardball with Chris Matthews, interviewed Peter King.
That's interesting.
It's a 5 p.m. Eastern time version of Hardball at a 7 p.m. edition, two different shows.
King was on the five o'clock.
He reamed Matthew's clock.
Matthews asked him to come back for the 7 o'clock.
It happened again.
Here are the highlights.
On the 5 p.m. edition, Matthews says, What should we be doing, Congressman King?
What should be done?
You look at the front Tory of the New York Times today, says that 80% of the money is going out in no bid contracts.
And as you say, sole suppliers, perhaps.
But doesn't that raise concerns by taxpayers the money's going to the usual suspects?
Well, fact it's the New York Times means nothing to me.
But having said that, obviously, any time you have no bid contracts or sole source contracts, it raises questions that have to be addressed.
That's why Benny Thompson and I sent a letter to Secretary Shartoff telling him that as much as possible, contracts should be given out to local contracts, minority contractors.
That's why inspectors general are down there.
That's why my committee and others are going to be looking at this carefully.
If anything is done wrong, the price will be paid.
I'm just saying let's not rush to judgment.
Obviously, any time you go around the bidding process, the uh your presumption is that it has to be looked at.
It will be looked at very carefully.
I guarantee you that.
I'm just saying, don't indict and convict people before the facts are in.
Yes, Al, let me just give you a little heads up on this because that's what the subject of today's morning update.
This story in the New York Times reporting that FEMA signed a billion and a half dollars in contracts to clean up the debris from Hurricane Katrina, but 80% were awarded with little or no competitive build bidding.
And of course, who got it?
Uh Halliburton and the Shaw Group, both companies have been represented by Joe Albaugh, who was a former campaign manager for Bush and a former head of FEMA.
Now, just three weeks ago, here's the point.
Three weeks ago, the liberals were throwing a five-alarm tantrum because federal tentacles couldn't reach out and touch every victim of Hurricane Katrina Vanden Hubble fast enough.
It was a catastrophic failure.
The worst in history.
Rich Republican versus poor Democrat.
It was racist.
It was evil, capitalistic excess.
And most of all, it was all Bush's fault.
Now, when the feds act quickly to get the cleanup underway, it's rich Republican lobbying, it's evil capitalistic cronyism, it's Bush's fault, and why are we hurrying?
Why don't we have a bidding process?
Well, there's an answer to that.
It never occurs to these stuck on stupid liberals.
That the reason companies like Kellogg and Shaw and Bechtel, reason they're called on to get the job done is because they can.
It's because they can.
They can get the job done.
They have a track record of getting it done.
Unlike the liberals who are in charge of building the levies, where billions get diverted into a sinkhole of corruption?
But don't look for that expose in the New York Times.
They're too busy feeding talking points, designs disguised as news to the liberal kook base in the media.
I'm telling folks, it is it is an outrage here.
And King puts Matthews in his place.
Wait till the facts are in.
Well, the facts are these are the companies that do it.
The facts are, Chris, you were complaining and whining and moaning about how long it took.
Now we're going to get this done, and now you're all worried about we're not putting it out for bids.
You know how long that would take?
You want a bureaucracy to start a bidding process?
And by the way, we're going to take the low bidder.
We're going to take the low bidder and have the levees rebuilt by the same corrupt cronies that rebuilt them in the first time.
That's what needs to be said.
Moving on, Matthews says, Well, the president admitted that he hadn't given enough attention to this appointment to to Brown, who put it FEMA.
He didn't give enough attention initially to Katrina, so he's spending all these days down there now.
I think the president's been very honest about this.
There was a failure of oversight and who was heading FEMA.
There was a slowness to act by the president and his officials early on.
He's made up for that dramatically.
I don't know why anybody would want to defend the current system at FEMA, though.
Christ is sort of a frenzy here by the media.
Let's not forget the incompetence of the mayor of New Orleans, the governor of the Warren, they were the ones in the first instance who were required to do the job and they didn't.
As far as President Bush, it's wrong for you to say he wasn't caring.
He certainly was caring.
What he was not equipped for was to explain for the incompetency of the local officials or to explain the hysteria or uh anticipated the hysteria created by people like you in the media who go off the deep end.
Let's treat this with a little bit of rationality and a little bit of decency.
And King is right about something.
Bush is too classy.
He's not gonna sit there when peppered with questions and accusations about the slow response.
He's not gonna sit there and say, I'm dealing with incompetence down there.
You saw it.
Have you seen any problems like this in Mississippi?
Did you see any problems like this in Florida?
How come it's only happening in Louisiana?
He can't say that.
But you know what his response is?
His response is, as we told you yesterday, I'm gonna put them, I'm gonna Put the military in charge of all this to hell with it.
Are you gonna you're gonna sit here and complain to me?
Fine.
Here's what I'm gonna do about it.
I'm gonna make sure that I don't have to deal with the incompetence of local officials anymore, wherever there are disasters.
I'm gonna get the one group of people I know that can do things right in there right off the bat, and I'm not gonna wait around for these incompetent imbeciles to ask me.
That's what Bush is saying.
He's too classy to say it that way.
Russia say you have no class.
No.
Saying I'm not an elected official, I don't have to get votes, and I can speak honestly.
I don't have to worry about political correctness.
I don't have to worry about offending some incompetent politician by calling them incompetent.
The president obviously does, uh, or thinks he does.
Uh so that's why he has to play it close to the best.
He's letting his policy speak for him speak for itself.
All right, all right, fine.
You can explain to me.
Fine.
Here.
Uh honore is gonna head this up.
Honore is gonna be on every American street corner at the first sign of disaster.
Is that what you want?
Fine.
I'll give you honore.
Quick timeout.
There's more from the Matthews Hardball Show with Peter King.
Lots more.
Back and get to that in just a second.
You're listening to Rush Limbaugh on the excellence in podcasting network.
That's what we do.
Make the complex understandable.
Back to Hardball last night, the five o'clock show on MSNBC.
Uh, Chris Matthews interviewing Peter King, Republican New York.
Matthew says, Well, Congressman, most people trust the media on this story because the pictures of what was happening down there in New Orleans apparently got to them before they heard of any federal action.
But go ahead.
Chris, you are totally distorting reality, and that's the problem with you.
You were distorted reality, you're on this story.
You at MSNBC are carried away with this.
You shouldn't be ashamed of yourself.
You disgraced yourself and the media.
Matthews says, Well, you you, you you said that we're guilty of let me get the words of hyping this thing of hysteria, creating hysteria about this of totally distorting reality in our coverage of the hurricane and the damage done in the South.
You want to go on on that?
I'm talking about distorting President Bush's role.
Somehow this was almost entirely blamed on him.
That was the certain impression given by the media from the very first moment when the levees broke, and you had Andrea Mitchell on talking about that was because President Bush didn't put enough money into the water projects in Louisiana or the levy control projects when it turns out that he put more money in in his first five years than Bill Clinton did in his last five years, and no state gets more money in the country than Louisiana does.
There was much more focus put on what President Bush was supposedly not doing when the fact is it was the mayor who didn't provide the buses to evacuate the people, sent the people to the Superdome without adequate food or water.
And then also, you know, the governor, the governor of Louisiana, when I was down there last week, she said every report that was done before this said that a storm of this magnitude would kill 20,000 people.
The fact is so far there's less than 800.
Every death is tragic.
But why isn't your story, you know, less than four percent of those who are supposed to have been killed were not killed because of the efforts of the federal government.
The Coast Guard remember is part of Homeland Security.
Um Matthews, that that's a that's a almost a full minute that Chris Matthews did not interrupt, didn't say anything because he was back on his heels.
Because he doesn't hear this.
You have to understand, folks, the reason that you know that this is so powerful.
Matthews doesn't hear this.
This is the first time he's heard any of this.
He doesn't know that Louisiana got more money under Bush than Clinton, even though it's in them in the papers, he not the papers he reads.
It's not on the networks he watches, but more importantly, the people he talks to.
These are these people are of a clique.
You know, they're a group and they hang around with each other.
And they have their template and they have their operating premise, and that's all they talk about.
And they and they uh they add on and they pile on and they try to outdo one another, and they get caught up in this template.
And uh reality is the um is the thing that suffers.
Reality is the casualty.
I told you last week the media creates its own reality, and here we have Peter King saying the same thing.
You're distorting reality.
And I I guarantee you, this was the first time Chris Matthews heard any of this.
He really thinks that the people who trust the media.
He he really believes he thinks the they're doing the greatest job they've ever done since Watergate.
This is what they think.
And and about that, uh Peter King had some comments.
Matthews says, Well, weren't weren't you dismayed that the president didn't watch television for all those 48 hours?
That he had to be shown a picture of what we'd all been watching.
One of the reasons that these people are volunteering is because what they saw on television.
I'm very proud of the media the past couple of weeks.
We're not always perfect, but I gotta tell you something.
Latest polling shows almost 80% of the American people say the media's done a fabulous job in handling this hurricane because it's the pictures that people have Seen on TV in their homes that have alerted them to this tragedy, and maybe to a large extent push the politicians to move a little faster.
Now, the fact is, Chris, you guys are giving yourself too much credit.
You guys dwell in self-congratulation.
The fact is the media shots were just story.
Most of the time people give us up.
Let me ask you about this.
Congressman, we got started on this today.
Let's get back to, okay.
Chris, you won't give me a chance Just because the president doesn't watch you on television doesn't mean he's not doing his job.
You know, Franklin Rosewell wasn't hired to listen to radio concept D Day.
You're hired to do the job, and the president can do his job without having to listen to Chris Matthews or Andrea Mitchell or Tim Russet or any of the others.
He is doing his job.
Amen.
It's about time.
The president doesn't watch you, so he doesn't know what's going on.
That's the mindset.
Now, this is two days in a row.
Yesterday the New Orleans Times pick a union, today the LA Times.
Two days in a row that we have massively long stories about the distortions of reality that came out of television reporting in uh New Orleans.
Massively long stories about all of the things that were wrong.
This is a media scandal, folks.
And this is the second day that we've had the reports and the facts out there, and you still haven't seen one correction, as King's noted.
They still haven't done the story.
Hey, you know what?
10,000 people didn't die.
It's a much better outcome than what we because that's not the template.
The news cycle is this was devastating.
This was horrible.
This is worse than 9-11, and Bush caused it.
And it's racism because Bush is a Republican, and they're not gonna let go of that.
And I can take you through the stacks of stuff today to fry to provide further evidence of that for you.
Here's just a little bit for the LA Times story today.
Headline, Katrina takes a toll on truth, news accuracy.
Rumors supplanted accurate information.
Media magnified the problem.
Rapes, violence, and estimates of the dead were wrong.
Now you might be saying, what's going on with the LA Times?
Here's what's going on with the LA Times.
They are losing circulation like fast.
They got rid of Kinsley, who was running their editorial page.
He was not even living there.
He was living in Seattle running the LA Times editorial page.
So he finally got rid of Kinsley.
This is the Tribune Company that owns this paper.
They're losing circulation.
They're losing advertising.
They got to do something.
So there may be some explanation in that, or some reason in that explanation as to why the Times decides to run the story here.
Because it is by two of their staff writers, Susanna Rosenblatt and James Raney.
Major Ed Bush recalled how he stood in the bed of a pickup truck in the days after Hurricane Katrina, struggling to help the crowd outside the Louisiana Superdome separate fact from fiction.
Armed only with a megaphone and scant information, he might have been shouting into well a hurricane.
The National Guard spokesman's accounts about rescue efforts, water supplies, and first aid all but disappeared amid the roar of a 24-hour rumor mill at New Orleans' main evacuation shelter.
Then a frenzied media recycled and amplified many of the unverified reports.
It just morphed into this mythical place where the most unthinkable deeds were being done, said Major Ed Bush, Monday of the Superdome.
His assessment is one of several in recent days to conclude that newspapers and television exaggerated criminal behavior, particularly at the Superdome and the Convention Center.
The New Orleans Times Picky UN yesterday described the inflated body counts, the unverified rapes, unconfirmed sniper attacks, as among examples of scores of myths about the dome and the convention center treated as fact by evacuees, the media, and even some of New Orleans' top officials.
Indeed, Mayor Ray Nagan told a national TV audience on Oprah three weeks ago of people in that frickin' superdome for five days watching the dead bodies, watching hooligans killing people, raping people.
We had who was it?
Uh uh Randall Robinson's saying that black people being forced to eat the corpses of the dead because Bush hadn't gotten food in there to them.
Journalists and officials who have reviewed the Katrina disaster blame the inaccurate reporting in large measure on the breakdown of telephone service, which prevented dissemination of accurate reports to those most in need of the information.
Race may have also played a factor.
The wild rumors filled the vacuum and seemed to gain credence with each retelling that an infant's body had been found in a trash can, that sharks and Link Pachatrain were swimming through the business district, that hundreds of bodies have been stacked in the Superdome basement.
I mean, it doesn't take anything to start a rumor around here, said Louisiana National Guard second lieutenant Lance Cagnolati at the height of the Superdome Relief Effort.
There's 20,000 people in here.
Think when you're in high school, you whisper something in somebody's ear, but the end of the day, everybody in school knows the rumor, and the rumor isn't the same thing it was when you started it.
Well, there's a I I thought that there was uh insurance against something like this.
It was called journalism.
Now, I I I thought that journalism, I what do I hear from journalists about, say Drudge or the blogs?
Well, there's no filter.
What have they said about me from Dave?
Well, there's no filter.
You know, Limboy, you just can't trust what he says.
All he does is make things up if it fits his worldview, he utters them.
This has been the criticism of me from the get-go from these people.
Same thing with Matt Drudge, same thing with the bloggers.
There's no filter.
Well, where was the filter here?
Why did the media simply accept these rumors as true?
There's an answer to that.
They wanted it to be true.
Just like Dan Rather wanted Bill Burkett's memos to be real.
Just like they wanted the National Guard story of George W. Bush's abandonment to be real.
They wanted this to be.
They wanted this disaster.
They wanted these dead bodies.
They wanted the sharks swimming in the in the streets of the business district.
They wanted these rapes.
They want to get made for a better story at the least.
And at the worst, it allowed them to continue in their news cycle that Bush is incompetent, that Bush is a racist, that Republicans are pigs, and that they don't care.
Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And by the way, it wasn't just one network.
It was all these networks.
And it was Oprah Winfrey.
I mean, Oprah was spouting a lot of this stuff herself with her shows from down there.
The media did a fabulous job of handling the hurricane.
What did they do?
We got stories from people like Shepard Smith and Heraldo, and you know, God love these people, but they're down there, and they're saying it's, oh, it's this is horse, the end of the earth.
It's the end of the world.
Well, this is never going to be the and of course, when you look at the pictures of a flooded city and add what you think are uh is truth being told to you by the anchors at CNN and by the reporters at CNN and so forth.
Uh and then we got treated as stories from media watchdog groups uh telling us which reporters were making a name for themselves and which were going to be the stars for the rest of their careers based on all this.
So the media was watching itself, analyzing itself, picking its own stars, telling us who had done the best job, blah.
It's all a myth.
It was all distorted.
It was all an alternative phony reality.
Now to Haroldo Rivera's credit, the New York Times sandbagged Heroldo Rivera, and he has been demanding an apology for the last two or three weeks, and finally officially well, I don't think if it's official, but he got one.
The New York Times has this babe, Alessandra Staley, who writes the TV story.
She wrote a piece saying that she had seen or had been told, or the video of it showed that Haraldo had nudged National Guard rescuers out of the way so he personally could be seen rescuing a woman and her child, something like this, for his own show for his own Fox cameras.
And he took the video to anybody who'd look at it and said, Can you see where I did this?
I got out of the way.
I did not impose myself on the story.
Finally, the New York Times ombudsman had to write a piece in the Times needs to apologize for this.
They need to correct this because Haraldo Rivera is right.
So even members of the media were impacted by the irresponsibility of other members of the media in this story.
This is a full-fledged scandal from top to bottom.
And two days in a row now, we've got the facts about the story, and yet when you turn on television to watch what's going on down in New Orleans, you still think that 10,000 people died, that the city is doomed, it's over, it's finished.
All those horror stories are still being allowed to live and survive and thrive.
And by the way, this is not the only example.
This is just the most recent and perhaps uh a glaring one.
Uh, but it's it's as phony as the fact that liberal radio networks are succeeding.
They aren't.
Nobody listens, they're having to Beg their listeners now for money because they're commercial failures.
And yet the media built all these networks up to be the second coming.
Oh, well, we finally got somebody to take on Limbaugh.
But now that you can't hear them, and now that they can't make money, and now that they're having to beg their listeners, like NPR does for money.
You get a tote bag, yip, yep, yep, yep, yahoo.
It's probably a paper bag you can put on your face to hide the fact you listen to the damn thing.
But we can't get one story about that failure.
Not one.
I'm telling you, folks, there is no mass respect for the mainstream media in this country.
Their numbers are down.
Journalists, as you know, don't rank much higher than politicians or uh any other job that's ranked low in public reputation.
I gotta run quick timeout.
We'll be back and continue here in just a moment.
And let's connect the dots, folks.
Isn't that what we're supposed to do here?
Let's connect the dots.
One dot can be connected from New Orleans to Iraq.
Because the point is that what the media is doing covering New Orleans is exactly what they have been doing covering the war in Iraq.
Proclaiming it a dismal failure, Bush is incompetent.
People are dying for no reason.
They lied about Vietnam, too.
We were winning there.
They have covered up the true nature of the anti-American protesters in Washington.
A bunch of international answer fascists.
That's the name of the group.
Answers the group, and there's an international uh uh chapter of it.
In fact, uh the gang at Little Green Footballs has come up with another AB side-by-side photo comparison.
Some anti-war protester put on some black hood and a black robe as though he were uh uh the grim reaper.
He was standing on a box with his arms outspread as though he were on a cross, and the media has a cropped picture of this.
Uh that's the AP picture, but a guy from Getty Images was behind this scene, and he took a picture of this protester in the black hood and the black robe from behind.
And his full picture shows that the only body, the only people, that were standing around this protester were all the media photographers.
There were no other protesters.
It was just a handful, maybe eight or ten photographers taking this guy's picture, and AP plasters the cropped picture all over the wires as though this is just one of uh, what was it, a hundred thousand, three hundred thousand protesters?
The whole thing, folks, is a lie.
It's a distorted bit of reality.
And their evidence is just replete.
Uh, I'm gonna we'll we'll find a way.
Little Green Footballs is a blog, and they've got the pictures and newsbusters, the uh the website, the media watchdog website of the media research search center picked it up as well.
And uh I've I've seen the pictures.
It's stunning.
It's nothing new, but it's uh it's you know, it's just like when they cropped the picture of uh of Al Sharpton and Cindy Sheehan down at a ditch in Crawford.
They cropped the picture, made it look like 30 or 50 or 100 protesters were gathered around, but you see the picture uncropped, and it's Cindy Sheehan and Al Sharpton and photographers and media with boom mics, all sitting there taking pictures.
Uh it it's it's a game, folks.
It's uh it's a game.
If the best way to think of news is to don't think of it as news.
It's a product, and it represents the viewpoint of the people who want to sell it to you.
It's a product that they're trying to sell, just like anybody else puts a product on the shelf to sell.
They have marketers, they have designers, they have people that put the product together in hopes of its success, and everybody wants their product to succeed.
The definition of success in terms of their product is convincing as many people to believe in the false reality they're putting forth as possible.
It's it's no different than you walk through a grocery store and a bunch of products on the shelves.
You turn on the television, and you do to a news channel, you're watching a product.
Just keep that in mind.
Quick timeout, got to run.
Back, and we will continue on our roll right after this.
I'll have more on this in the uh opening monologue of the next segment, along with Dan Rather Audio from his C-SPAN appearance last night, but New York Times, MSNBC today, at least two major corporate clients of lobbyist Joe Allbaugh, President Bush's former campaign manager, have already been tapped to start recovery work along the battered Gulf Coast, and these are no bid contracts.
One of these is Halliburton, used to be chaired by Vice President Cheney.
The other is the Shaw Group, and that's all I say about it.
That's all they say about the Shaw Group.
You know who the Shaw Group is?
The chairman of the Shaw Group is J.M. Bernard Jr., founder, chairman, chief executive officer.
He's a big Louisiana Democrat.
He has ties to Governor Kathleen Blanco.
He has run and been very operative, not run, but he's been very high up in the Louisiana Democratic Party.
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