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Jan. 31, 2006 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:10
January 31, 2006, Tuesday, Hour #3
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The views expressed by the host on this program rivet the nation.
The views expressed by the host on this program, documented to be almost always right, 98.5% of the time.
By the way, the auditing group, the opinion auditing firm that audits my opinions is the Sullivan Group in Sacramento, California.
And a week from Friday, the president of that firm will be guest hosting the program, Tom Sullivan from Sacramento.
Next week, I'm going to go out to the AT ⁇ T, but unlike the Bob Hope, I'm not going to be gone a whole week.
I'm going to leave on Tuesday after Tuesday's program.
So I'll be here Monday through Tuesday.
I got Hedgecock on Wednesday and Thursday, and then the chairman and president of the Sullivan Opinion Auditing Firm, Tom Sullivan, so you can ask him about it, will be guest hosting the program a week from Friday.
Here's the phone number if you'd like to be with us today.
800-282-2882.
The email address is rush at EIBNet.com.
All right.
I have to address this.
I asked earlier in the program, did you people see 24 last night?
And I've got, I'll bet seven emails now from people who said they're fed up and are never watching it again.
And I have got to slap you people back to reality.
Well, look, I don't know.
I don't want to give...
Some people may not have watched last night's episode yet.
I have it recorded and so forth.
But since it's in the past and most people have seen it, I feel confident discussing it.
One of the moles in this season is this goofy Richard Nixon look-alike president's chief of staff guy named Walt Cummings.
Well, some canisters of nerve gas were stolen from the Ontario airport in a previous episode.
It turns out that these canisters of nerve gas were engineered to be stolen by Walt Cummings, the presidential chief of staff, and then given to terrorists, or terrorists were alerted where the nerve gas was.
They stole it.
These are terrorists from breakaway separatists from a breakaway republic somewhere in Asia.
We all know it's Russia, Chechens, and so forth.
And the plan, according to Walt Cummins in the story last night Cummings, is to get the terrorists to take these canisters of nerve gas back to their home country so that then the administration can prove that there were weapons of mass destruction there.
Now, people who watched the episode last night think that this is the writers of 24 insulting the Bush administration and chiding the Bush administration for the fact that there aren't any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
And so this is, what am I going to do with you people?
Number one, it's a television show.
Number two, the Bush administration, if it were going to plant weapons of mass destruction, would have already done it.
There's no correlation here.
But more than that, that episode of 24 last night, and I've watched every one of these episodes from season one, episode one.
That episode last night had more plot turns and twists than any single episode I remember.
The outing of a mole has occurred sooner this season than at any time I remember in any of the previous seasons, with a mole getting caught.
But I would caution all of you, this storyline, this weapons of mass destruction, is nerve gas and supposedly having a mole as the chief of staff to the president.
Who knows if this is the ultimate truth of this program?
There are still 18 episodes left between now and the end of May.
And if the rest of them are like last night, we don't know 10% of where this is going or heading.
And I just, I would rein it in, folks.
This is, Maybe some of you people are watching 24 because you think that its purpose is to establish the political objectives and foreign policy objectives of the administration, and it's not.
The purpose of the program is the same as I have on this program, to attract the largest audience possible and hold it so you can charge confiscatory advertising rates to advertise.
That's the purpose of the program.
And the writers are trying to break new ground and they're trying to make sure the program doesn't get stale.
I think they've set a new standard.
They're nowhere near getting stale.
It's just the exact opposite.
But I've seen a lot of people on blog sites today saying, hell with 24, I have weapons of mass destruction.
Well, now they're getting mad at books.
Well, hell with that.
I'm not watching that anymore.
Here's a sample email.
A friend stated he didn't want to watch 24 anymore because he felt last night's episode was a message about the current Bush White House.
He feels the show was delivering a message about there being no weapons of mass destruction, and there was a plot within the White House to convince the public that the problem actually does exist when it doesn't.
I disagree.
What's your take on it?
Well, I'm giving you my take on it.
You can't compare this current president 24 to George W. Bush anyway.
This guy's the biggest loony tune wimp that we've ever had as a president if he were in there for real.
You know, and here's another thing.
I've had a couple people also say to me, What is it with these love scenes?
I can't believe it.
Jack Bauer is in the midst of saving the country from nerve gas, and all of a sudden he has to have negotiations with two women about whether or not he still loves them.
Now, I will admit, I watched that.
I said, come on, get this over with.
Understand why it's there, but let's move on.
Jack Bauer's not going to sit around and do this, the real Jack.
But that's another part of the brilliance of the people that do this show.
Folks, they have to attract an audience.
It's the Fox Network.
18 to 34 is a demo that they prize 2554.
The way you, I hate, I don't want to sound sexist, but the way you keep women watching a program.
Well, you think women care about bombs and blood and guts all over.
No, you got to put a love story in there.
Then a competing love interest.
You got to put that tension and drama.
They don't overdo it.
They get in, get it, and get out.
But it's something for everybody who watches the show to glom onto.
I have some female friends that watch the show, and I got emails from them last night.
And they said, you know, my favorite part of the show was taking Walt Cummings down.
And when Jack told her he never stopped loving her.
Well, so it proves my point.
Prove, prove, prove, prove, yeah, and of course the idea that a woman would not interrupt you while you're trying to save the country.
Jack, before you go, disarm the nerve gas, do you still love me?
It's perfectly realistic.
Of course it would.
It would have.
We have to talk.
I only want five minutes.
Can you help me?
Whatever.
I mean, this would happen.
If it's not about that, it's about some other aspect of the relationship.
These guys are brilliant that are doing this show.
They know what everybody watching it wants out of it.
They have to put that in it.
You people need to back off on this.
If you stop watching this, you're going to miss some of the finest writing and production.
This is amazing what these people do in a one-hour episode in 42 minutes.
It is amazing what they do.
And keep this movie.
I mean, you could watch the whole dirty Harry series, all those five or six movies, and everything that happens in five or six dirty hairy movies happens in one episode of this program.
Now, chill out, folks.
No, what?
What?
Well, I know.
Snerdley says that what makes these plot turns believable is that the State Department guys are running around.
The American people here stay, president's hijacked national security.
The president's hijacked foreign policy.
The president's hijacked all this from us.
Well, yeah, the elected officials.
It's a television show.
The idea that there's any association to reality here.
I mean, we would love it in certain cases if it were a reflection of reality.
Unfortunately, we'll never know.
We don't know if there's a Jack Bower and a CIA.
We hope there's a thousand of them.
And we hope there's a thousand Jack Bowers telling bad guys.
You're going to tell me what I want to know, or I'm going to carve your left eye out first.
And if you don't tell me what I want to know, I'm going to carve your right eye out.
Then you put the blade of the knife.
Now, with Ted Kennedy, and so, oh, I can't do that.
Well, that's a threatening torture.
That's inhumane or what have you.
Well, we hope those things are going on out there.
But the idea that the administration, this administration, is going to plant weapons of mass destruction somewhere to prove that they existed.
I don't know.
I just marvel at it, folks.
I'm sorry, but I do.
I got a quick timeout.
I want to speak in national security.
There was a news story last week.
We mentioned it here, but I didn't spend a lot of time on it myself, and nobody else has either outside of New York.
And in the whole context of this national security debate we're having, we need to spend some time on it, just a little bit, just to inform you about it.
Also, Iran has done it now.
Iran has really stepped in it now, folks.
They have made the UN mad.
Iran is going to be reported to the U.N. Security Council.
Here we go.
So.
So, Iran is going to be reported to the Security Council.
Somebody's going to tell the Security Council.
There's a tattletale out there.
They're going to tell Dominique de Philippin about Iran.
And I'll bet Iran's quaking in her boots right now because we all know this is how you bring rogue regimes in line.
Back after this, stay with us.
Ha, welcome back.
Nice to have you.
My friends are Rush Limbaugh with half my brain tied behind my back just to make it fair.
All right.
Liberal media out there trying to create hysteria about Bush spying on us.
Domestic spying.
Violating our civil rights.
Intruding on our deepest privacies.
He needs to be impeached.
Last week, all of the New York papers had a little story about a trial that's going on in Brooklyn right now.
Shahawar Mateen Siraj, a 23-year-old Pakistani, is on trial for plotting to bomb a 34th Street subway station beneath Madison Square Garden during the Republican convention last August.
Now, the story, of course, was about this guy Siraj asserting his constitutional rights.
Here's what happened: Siraj had an accomplice, a guy named James L. Shafi.
They were arrested three days before the convention began.
They were carrying maps of the subway system and the Verrazana Narrows Bridge.
After waiving their Miranda rights, they were questioned by a pair of prosecutors, an FBI agent, and two cops.
And Siraj gave an oral confession and signed a three-page statement.
They waived their Miranda rights.
Now Siraj has a lawyer.
And lawyers arguing that when he was told he would be interviewed by a prosecutor, he thought that meant he was talking to his own attorney.
I never heard the word prosecutor before, Siraj told the court.
His current attorney, Martin Stoller, is trying to have the confession suppressed on the grounds that Siraj's failure to understand constituted a violation of his rights.
Now, the ruling on the confession isn't going to be made until sometime this week, but what is interesting to note, William Tucker here in the American Spectator writing about this.
What's interesting to note is how the case has largely escaped the attention of the press.
Siraj and Shafei met Osama Duaudi, an Islamic bookstore in an Islamic bookstore in Brooklyn.
They hooked up.
They spent several months planning attacks on various New York landmarks and public places.
But Duaudi was also a federal informer.
He carried a video camera.
He was actually able to make several tapes of the group scouting locations under the pretense that they were conducting surveillance operations.
They were going to carry their bombs onto the subway and backpacks.
All this happened before the London attacks.
The remarkable question is: why hasn't this case received more publicity?
There were a few first day stories, but they were more or less buried by the convention.
Not a single newspaper in the country has bothered to do a background story on this case, particularly in the context now that we're having this debate about the NSA and trying to find out who might be in this country talking to al-Qaeda overseas.
Here you have the exact case this program's designed to identify.
This already, his case, for some reason, they had identified these guys, and then they had an informer set up to meet them, and that's how this thing got stung.
Liberals are operating under the assumption that we are good people and therefore immune from attack.
Something good will happen to prevent it.
Eavesdropping, dogged police work, paid informers, those are all just underhanded techniques that threaten our civil liberties.
It's a bunch of liberals.
It's like Secretary of State Henry Stimson closing down the State Department's crypto analytic office in 1929, saying, gentlemen, don't read each other's mail.
Remember the name Harry Stimson is famous.
We're not going to do a cryptanology.
We're not going to do any of that.
We don't read other people's mail.
We are good people.
Good things will happen to us.
The fact is that only good intelligence work and extraordinary luck have helped us to avoid another London or Madrid, but you don't read anything about that in the papers.
It's amazing how, in such perilous times, the liberal press can find so many inconsequential things to worry about while overlooking so many obvious dangers.
And the focus of the story now is not even on the fact that these guys almost got away with blowing up the 34th Street subway station under Madison Square Garden.
No, it's whether or not the confession was coerced.
It's whether or not this terrorist had his constitutional rights violated because he didn't understand the word prosecutor.
Can't even get background details on what happened, why this is even a story in the first place.
And I'll tell you why.
I'll tell you, they ignore it on purpose because it would not fit the template.
It doesn't fit the action line.
The action line, anything that moves the story forward, is Bush is spying illegally on Americans because he's a mean guy and he wants to invade everybody's privacy.
Well, in the midst of trying to make that case for the Democratic Party, you can't then run a story about how domestic spying or intelligence, foreign surveillance, actually stopped an attempted blowup of the 34th Street subway station under Madison Square Garden.
Well, that would throw your whole template out the window.
So, and it's another reason why the mainstream antique media is losing credibility.
Look, you know, I saw the Time magazine, I mentioned this yesterday, but it's even worse than I thought.
66 people, or I thought it was just 40, 66 people will be let go at Time Inc., 26 of them in editorial.
The liberal media is suffering the death of a thousand cutbacks.
Time Inc., roiling with another round of cutbacks.
Time magazine and Sports Illustrated hit hard.
Some 66 Time Inc. staffers have been handed pink slips at the nation's largest magazine publisher.
You know, folks, it's just a good thing our oil companies aren't run this way.
I don't care if the media wants to run themselves this way, fine and dandy, but I'm glad our oil companies don't.
Here's Patrick in Omaha.
Welcome to the program.
Great to have you with us.
Hey, Rush, Mega Dittos from the Big Red Red State.
Thank you, sir.
It's a great to talk to you.
Hey, I was calling about 24.
I've been keeping track.
We've got a Jack Power body count.
I've been keeping track of the number that he's killed.
We've knocked out the numbers that he is supposedly killed.
They weren't confirmed.
But at this point, I have confirmed dead six terrorists.
We got two knockouts and two unconfirmed deaths.
The man's lethal.
Yeah, you told me just in this season.
Yes.
Oh, yeah.
What would he, four or six hours into it, something like that?
Six hours into it.
Yeah, the man is a deadly weapon.
Yeah.
And he's my hero outside of you.
He's my hero outside.
Well, I appreciate it.
I'm honored to be lumped in with a superhero action figure as a hero.
Thanks for the call, Patrick.
This is George in Springfield, Massachusetts.
Hi.
Hey, Rush, I think that President Bush should get major kudos for his war on terror, which I think is the number one priority right now because Osama bin Laden slinched with his compromise verbiage and his last tape.
Iran is considering the Russian option of getting enriched uranium, and Hamas is on their knees begging to not reduce the aid.
So if we stay the course, we can break the back of terrorism, and it's all because of George Bush.
Well, yeah, that's the objective to break the back.
But I like your analysis of these things.
In fact, there's a story.
I guess it's an L.A. Times editorial.
And the L.A. Times editorial says Bush needs to reach out to Hamas.
We shouldn't be saying, we shouldn't be saying that we're going to cut off their aid.
We shouldn't be doing that.
That's unnecessarily provocative, especially since Bush got what he wanted.
Bush wanted democracy in the Middle East.
And so Hamas won.
And we can't say, well, we don't like the results, so we're going to withhold any aid.
I'm not joking.
It's an LA Times editorial.
Bush needs to reach out to Hamas.
Now, there's a reason why they are laying off hundreds of people, not just the 66 that we reported moments ago at Time and Sports Illustrated.
No, it's I'm telling you, folks, I'm partially depressed today.
I must because we used to do parodies on these newspapers and these liberals and come up with things.
I don't know how to parody this.
Bush needs to reach out to Hamas.
Bush needs to reach out to bin Laden.
I am not.
Bush needs to reach out to the terrorists because they want a democratic election.
They're happy that Bush got what he asked for.
And now it's up to Bush to reach out to them and bring them into the family of nations.
Yes, that's exactly what they're saying in their editorial.
Well, got to go.
Back in just a second.
Not only do we have the news, we have the proper opinion you should have of the news.
Just for you here on the EIB network, I've got a couple of emails about the, what is her name, Angelica in Texas City, who was all upset that we haven't captured bin Laden and that the sophisticated country and government like ours, we're not all that great on national security.
We haven't captured bin Laden.
So I asked her, I asked her, well, when did we capture Hitler in World War II?
I said, what was that?
1943 or 40?
I said, no, we never did.
Committed suicide.
Oh.
I wish I would have said, hell, Angelica, we still haven't captured Ted Kennedy for Chappaquit yet.
And we're doing a pretty good job of defeating him.
And these 60s rejects banging their pots and pans outside the U.S. Capitol tonight, hoping to drown out President Bush's State of the Union speech.
Why don't you guys go for the whole nine yards?
Why don't you also throw John Kerry's medals over the fence again?
If you're going to act out, act out all the way.
Call Senator Kerry, get his medals, and throw him back over some fence.
You want to put on a show?
Put on a show.
Now, a lot of people, you know, getting interested in 24, and some of you only recently started watching the program, and some of you, I'm sure, haven't started yet.
And you keep hearing about this guy, Jack Bauer, Kiefer Sutherland.
Let me give you a few little hints as to the kind of guy Jack Bauer is.
If you wake up in the morning, it's only because Jack Bauer spared your life.
Jack Bauer's favorite color is severe terror alert red.
His second favorite color is violet, but only because it sounds like the word violent.
Jack Bauer once forgot where he put his car keys.
He then spent the next half hour torturing himself until he gave up the location of the keys to himself.
Jack Bauer got Helen Keller to talk.
Jack Bauer was never addicted to heroin.
Heroin was addicted to Jack Bauer.
Superman wears Jack Bauer pajamas.
Jack Bauer doesn't miss.
If he didn't hit you, it's because he was shooting at another terrorist 12 miles away.
And understand this.
The only reason you are conscious right now is because Jack Bauer doesn't feel like carrying you.
Killing Jack Bauer doesn't make him dead.
It just makes him mad.
When life gave Jack Bauer lemons, he used them to kill terrorists because he hates lemonade.
In grade school, a little boy punched Kimberly Bauer, his daughter.
Kimberly ran home to tell her dead.
That little boy's name, Stephen Hawking.
Jack Bauer doesn't sleep.
The only rest he needs is what he gets when he's knocked out or temporarily killed.
In kindergarten, Jack Bauer killed a terrorist for show and tell.
Jack Bauer has literally died for his country and lived to tell about it.
As a child, Jack Bauer's first words were, there's no time.
Jack Bauer's family threw him a surprise birthday party when he was a child.
Once.
Guns don't kill people.
Jack Bauer does.
Every time Jack Bauer yells now at the end of a sentence, a terrorist dies.
Jesus died and rose from the dead in three days.
It took Jack Bauer less than an hour, and he's done it twice.
Jack Bauer could get off the lost island in two hours.
The inhabitants on that island have been there for two years.
Here is Matt in Redlands, California.
Hi, Matt.
Welcome to the program.
Great to have you with us.
Hello, Rush.
It's an honor to speak with you.
Thank you.
Hillary Clinton's hopes for winning the Democratic nomination in 2008 are fading fast.
Besides all the bad polling data, besides her recent racist statements, yesterday, Hillary actually voted in support of the filibuster of Alito.
This totally undermines Hillary's phony attempt to portray herself as a moderate.
And her vote to filibuster Alito proves once and for all that Hillary is really a hardcore leftist kook liberal who's out of touch with mainstream values.
I think she could never win a red state in a presidential election.
And I think Democrats are beginning to realize this.
I think a lot of them have realized it for a long time, but they should have been listening to me for even longer because I have not.
She's always been a hardcore leftist kook.
And she hasn't gotten away with this attempt to moderate to the center.
And she's not going to get away with it.
These people have not modernized.
I'm getting tired of being redundant.
These people still, they're stuck in the 70s, 30 years ago.
They do not realize what has happened to them media-wise.
They don't realize the scrutiny that their statements and acts get these days and the discredit that has brought to bear on them.
I just, things are not lining up well for Hillary.
But, you know, one of the problems for Hillary is we still don't know why she wants to be president.
We only are told why we should elect her.
And that's because she's entitled, because she's owed this, because of everything she's endured.
She was a leader of the feminist movement.
She went to college and she risked it all.
She risked happiness.
She risked everything to lead the cause of feminism and women in the workplace and so forth.
Marries this hayseed hick.
He takes her back to Arkansas.
That's reason enough to elect her president because she actually agreed to go to Arkansas.
What sophisticated woman wants to go to a state with more trailer parks than any other?
And yet she did it.
And she had to be the brains behind that doofus president of hers.
She had to stand by while this doofus president's having affair after affair after affair after affair, phony land deal scams all over the place, which she helped set up.
Then she had to go to the White House and endure all of that, the abuse from people who said she was co-president, afraid of a powerful woman.
She got to set up health care, made a total mess of it, made a total mess of the Paula Jones lawsuit, demanding Clinton behave in certain ways that guaranteed it would go on and eventually have to settle it out of court.
Then came Monica Lewinsky in the stained purple dress.
Then came impeachment.
She's owed it.
But other than that, Hillary Clinton can't tell us why she wants to be president.
She hadn't even announced that she wants to be.
But at this point in somebody's career, we generally have an idea why they want to be.
We generally get some statement of core principles and beliefs.
We don't get that.
She believes that she's entitled.
Her supporters believe that she's entitled.
And that's not enough.
I mean, it doesn't even get close.
Here's Paul in Cleveland.
You're next, sir, on the EIB network.
Hi.
Hey, Raz.
I love the show.
Thank you, sir.
Hey, it's so hypocritical of the liberals to talk about George Bush compelling behavior from Palestine or attempting to by withholding funds.
The liberals love to withhold money to compel behavior.
They withhold money from, if they don't like the way you run your schools, they withhold education money.
If they don't like your speed limits, they withhold highway funds.
The liberals use, they overtax you and then they compel behavior, as you said before, by giving back a little bit of it at a time or not giving it back because they don't get the behavior they want.
So they've exposed their hypocritical nature once again.
Well, of course they do, but their hypocrisy is driven.
You have to understand these editorials, both in the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, wherever, they're driven by hate.
They're driven by hate and frustration.
And as I've said over and over again, we're finding out who they really are.
And I say more of it.
The more, the better.
I think I've been demanding that the Democrats be honest and step up and step forward and be honest on who they are so the American people can have an informed opinion of them and vote accordingly.
And they are acceding to my wishes, whether they're doing it for that reason or not.
It still is happening.
New York City, Brag.
Hello, sir.
Welcome to the program.
Hey.
Hey.
Have you heard about these comments Christian Amanpour made last week?
Oh, yes, I've been alive.
Yes, one media.
Yes, I heard about it.
You want to hear them?
Well, I tell you what, what I want to ask you first, and I'd love for you to play them so everybody can hear them, is if she makes these comments where she's making her lack of objectivity so very apparent, how can she still be the reporter on the Iraq war for CNN?
I mean, she has obviously abandoned any semblance of objectivity.
That's precisely how she can remain a reporter for CNN.
It would be, if she were objective, she'd have a problem.
I'm not.
Here's what she said, folks.
For those of you that have Grab Cut 16 there, Aldemont.
She was on Larry King Alive last night with Bob Schieffer and Lara Logan from CBS.
And this, oh, and Peter Annette, a former CNN, veteran war correspondent, was also on the show.
And I think they're talking about Bob Woodruff and his cameraman and the injuries they suffered in that bomb explosion over there in Iraq.
And this is among other things that Christiana Manpour said.
Most of the Iraqi people are now losing hope that the promised reconstruction is going to happen and that the quality of their lives is going to increase.
This is a big drama because hope is the only thing they have in the middle of this spiraling security disaster.
And by any indication, whether you take the number of journalists killed or wounded, whether you take the number of American soldiers killed or wounded, whether you take the number of Iraqi soldiers killed and wounded, contractors, people working there, it just gets worse and worse.
And let's listen to the one before this as well.
This is Audio Soundbite 15 Aldamont.
Christiana Manpour, same show.
If we don't do it, who does it?
We have to have an independent eye on these conflicts.
The war in Iraq has basically turned out to be a disaster, and journalists have paid for it.
The kind of awful thing that's going on there now on a daily basis has almost become humdrum.
So when something happens to people that we identify, like Bob and like Doug, we wake up again and realize that, no, this is not acceptable what's going on there, and it's a terrible situation.
So, thanks, Lear.
Well said.
Dits.
This was idiotic, but it's useful idiocy.
Because once again, it serves to enlighten and inform us.
Let's take it.
If we don't do it, who does it?
We have to be an independent eye on these conflicts, meaning the journalists.
The war at Iraq has basically turned out to be a disaster.
And journalists have paid for it.
The kind of awful thing going on there now on a daily basis almost become humdrum.
Journalists have paid for it.
It's all about them.
And because journalists are getting hurt and getting killed, it's worthless.
And it's not useful.
And we've got to stop it.
It's a disaster.
When something happens to people that we identify, like Bob and Doug, we wake up again and realize that, no, this is not acceptable.
What's going on there?
It's a terrible situation.
They don't care a whit when this happens to U.S. troops.
They use those troop body counts to heighten their own viewpoint.
This is nothing new for Christiana Manpur.
She has always thought the Iraq war is a disaster because Bush is the one who is the architect.
She has always thought it was.
She's just now getting free to say so, or feeling free to say it because of the accident or the event that happened with these two journalists.
But once again, just like David Weston said, we played it for yesterday, this is a wake-up call for Christiane Amanpour.
When something happens to people that we identify, like Bob and Doug, we wake up again and realize that, no, this is not acceptable.
What's going on?
Wake up again.
Meaning, you have thought it's unacceptable beforehand, but you got lulled in because Bush is so good.
He's so incompetent, so inept, but he's good enough to rope you in and make you lose your sensitivity to it.
But when people you know, who, by the way, are getting paid like a million dollars or more a year to go there and do this, I'm sorry.
I think so much attention has been paid to this that it helps us to understand just how almost like the baby boom generation the whole media is.
The world revolves around it.
They are the stories.
But there are more people killed.
Let me just give you this fact, Christian, if you want a disaster.
There are more people killed in American blue cities every year than in Iraq.
Are those disasters?
More people killed in New York on 9-11 and in the Pentagon on 9-11 than in Iraq.
Is that a disaster?
It's just I wasn't going to play this and we got the call about it.
I'm glad you called Bragg, but I just think this is unsurprising to me.
This, again, is who these people are.
And to ask, well, she's just abandoned all her objectivity.
How can she still be at CNN?
As long as I've been watching, I haven't seen any objectivity.
I have seen a point of view.
She's free to have it.
I don't care what it is.
But to pretend that there's objectivity going on, that's where they're losing credibility because people now understand that they aren't objective and that they aren't neutral observers.
They have chosen a side, and it ain't ours.
Back in a moment.
Well, liberals got something to cheer.
Humpback Mountain got eight Oscar nominations out there today, including for best score.
Brokeback Mountain.
What did I say?
Humpback.
Say that again.
Brokeback Mountain.
Eight Oscar nominations.
Why don't you hear one more soundbite?
Audio soundbite number 14, Peacha Arnett on CNN last night.
Larry King says, Peter Arnett, journalism died.
Been killed in Iraq.
What do you make of that?
Highest figure ever for journalists who have been killed in a war.
What do you make of Woodruff?
The cameraman, Mr. Bowler.
You cover wars, you die.
But really, in a democracy such as ours, the mainstream media has a major job to get out and see what's going on.
Otherwise, what will we have to choose from?
What our government tells us and today what Al Jazeera tells us.
We have to be there with an independent voice to do it as well as we can.
It just makes me want to puke and laugh at the same time.
Independent voice.
I don't ever hear any criticism of Al Jazeera.
And I don't ever hear any criticism of insurgents.
I hear them being played up as the modern equivalent of our founding fathers.
Can't trust our government.
I would even suggest that you guys don't even cover wars, Peter.
You make up news stories about U.S. troops using sarin gas.
That's what Peter Arnett did.
He's still on TV as an expert in all this.
He participated in a phony baloney plastic banana made-up totally story.
Christiana Monpor is no better.
The polling data out of Iraq shows that there's not there's more optimism about the future than pessimism there.
Let's grab Scott.
I guess it.
Yeah, Scott in Morristown, Tennessee.
Welcome to the program.
I got about 45 seconds out there.
It's an honor to talk to you.
Thank you.
I'm a longtime listener.
I had a break because of the war and I was deployed.
But the comments that the media is making about the soldiers or about the reporters being the only one that really matter right now, now it's more real.
It's disgusting.
And to hear basically everything they're saying is all it is is demoralizing the troops that are there.
Because in the real world over there, you have kids that come up to us every day.
I want to know that.
I know that's the thing.
I have to stop you because of the constraints of time.
I'm short on it.
But I know exactly.
The kids come up.
There's optimism over there.
What these comments from Arnett and Christian Amunpour serve to indicate, serve to illustrate, is that all of this is more about them than anything else.
I guess the best thing could happen to most journalists is get it through their heads, you're not that important.
Have a great day, folks.
We'll be back here.
State of the Union speech tonight.
And we'll, well, we'll have reaction or whatever tomorrow, whatever else happens.
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