They're coming right after the end of the program today to take the EIB microphone and ship it in that container to Detroit so it gets there on time for the big show tomorrow.
So Dan, so I'm in Los Angeles and I'm hoteling it.
All right.
I'm watching, I'm twiddling my, you're in a hotel room.
What do you do?
You turn on the TV set, and there it is, Larry King live with Dan Rather last night.
And this, like I said earlier, I thought, well, all right, I'll watch this.
I don't know what else is what are my choices?
And so I'm looking at the thing.
And I started feeling bad.
I started feeling like I should not have eaten something.
I was starting to get squirmy.
I was going, oh, whoa.
And Larry King was asking these questions of Dan Rather.
And I literally wanted to cover my eyes.
I couldn't believe what I was listening to or seeing.
And it's more than just, it's more than just about Dan Rather.
Dan Rather's, you know, gosh, you can't, I mean, the man has had major success in his career.
He's going to be 75 years old in October.
And they get him to this kind of a, you know, good old, almost tearing up and almost feisty Dan Rather, which he's just a character.
He's a character.
But what I got out of this was a whole bunch of different things about not only Dan Rather, but about other people.
Other people in not only high positions, but just the way that some people just have a hard time coming to grips with reality.
And Dan Rather doesn't have a grip on reality.
Now, this is a man who was with CBS for, I think he said 44 years.
After 44 years in the business, I think you might see people come and go.
And as you see them come and go, you also see the whys and wherefores of why they come and go.
And almost always, almost always in the broadcasting business, it's about ratings.
I don't care what you say about who you like or who you don't like.
It's all about ratings.
And the fascinating part to me is that even though the audience is for television network news, the audience is going down and down and dramatically down because of new media, because of the fact that a lot of us, look at I'm a middle-aged guy.
I'm no young ex-jenner or anybody like that.
I'm sitting there.
I'm a baby boomer.
And yet I'm looking at the internet.
I get my news off of that.
I can get it on my cell phone.
I get it from all kinds of places.
And so I rarely watch the evening news anymore.
So it was interesting because Larry King, who's another guy who has this long major success, he's the biggest deal CNN has going.
So here you got these two guys that represent primarily another generation in where people are getting their news from.
Cable was part of it.
I mean, cable took away from network, and now internet is taking away from cable.
But it was also enlightening to hear some of the answers that he had, Dan Rather.
Because Larry King's asking him, saying, well, you know, you're, you know, Dan, they call CBS the liberal network, right?
And Dan says, well, they can call you names when you insist on being independent, Larry.
I think it's so important for the public to understand.
It's not important for Dan Rather, not important for people who make a lot of money and get more credit they deserve, but it's important for people to understand the journalist or journalistic enterprise that's willing to truly be independent.
And what this is, is listen to what he's saying.
You can learn a lot from other people by listening to the words that they choose.
And what he's saying is, even though he works for this big giant corporation, CBS, he wants to be independent of them.
Well, you can't have it both ways.
You put your money up, you go out, and you start your own television network then, Dan.
In the meantime, you kind of got to deal with the fact that you're working for them.
Now, I've been in this business for 20, I'm coming up on my 26th year.
And I started off, and I still do a lot of financial reporting in California.
I have never, in my 26 years of broadcasting, had ever had anybody come to me and say, Tom, this is what we want you to say.
Tom, this is what we want you to report on.
Tom, don't report on that or don't talk about that or don't say anything about that.
I've never, ever had anybody come and say that.
And the only reason I think I've never had anybody say that is because of the fact that I continue to win in the ratings game.
And I win big time in my market.
So they say, well, he's doing something right because he's got the ratings.
And Dan Rather knows that he did not have the ratings and he was always number three.
NBC was first for years and years and years, and Brian Williams has kept it going.
And number two was ABC.
And number three was CBS.
And then, so Rather's out of there, they move in Bob Schieffer.
Guess what?
I know after Peter Jennings died, all kinds of turmoil and problems and things going on over at ABC and with Bob Woodruff's accident.
But CBS actually, for the first time, actually beat ABC in a long, long, long time.
We'll see now that Charlie Gibson's running the show, versus Katie.
But I'm looking at what he's saying and listen to what he's saying.
He's saying he defines journalism as being independent and being fiercely independent using his words.
Pulling no punches, playing no favorites.
It's become in recent years a bit of an endangered species.
Dan, a journalist is not technically independent.
A journalist is supposed to report the facts.
And if there are disputed facts, you report, this group says this and that group says that.
End of story.
Independent in Dan Rather's mind by using that word, what I read from him in my big psychoanalyst hat on.
I'm looking at him going, what he means is, I want to report it the way that I see it.
That's what he said over and over again.
I want to report it the way that I see things, my interpretation, my bias, my view.
Because otherwise, why would he say journalists must be truly independent?
No, they're not independent.
They are balanced.
To borrow from our friends at Fox, fair and balanced is the goal.
I don't know what you journalism professors think about the term independent.
Understand the idea and the concept of a journalist should be independent and not be able to be swayed or bought or hoodwinked or spun.
But that's not the way that Dan Rather said it.
And he said it over and over and over again last night that this is, it was code to me for the fact.
I don't even know if he realizes that he's saying it.
It's one of those things where I could see it.
I don't know.
I don't think he sees it.
Is that he thinks he should be reporting things the way that he sees things.
And a good journalist, and I agree with Dan Rather that they're becoming an endangered species, a good journalist will try their hardest to put away any of their own views and their own ideas and just report: here's what happened.
And here are the differing views of what happened.
This group says this, that group says that.
So he starts to do the high and mighty journalism role when I don't think he really was a good journalist.
He may have been in his early years.
He may have been as a young man, but he eventually got to the point where he thinks news is supposed to be the way that he sees things.
Now, he also is still living in a very strange world.
He still believes that the reporting, the false reporting, that everybody and their brother is finally come to the conclusion that the report about President Bush's National Guard period was flat-out false.
It was forged documents.
And Dan Rather is still, as of last night, still going, he still believes the story.
He thinks the process was a problem in getting the story out to the air, but he still believes the story.
So it was, to me, it opened up a door about the mainstream media, which, by the way, HR, correct me if I'm wrong on this, but I, you know, I never heard of the term main street media until Rush.
I believe he coined the term, and now it's used on a regular basis by everybody.
But I'm looking at this and going, this is a sign of where the people that are doing the network television news are looking and going, yep, I've got to report it the way that I see it.
Maybe that's why you're out, Dan.
Maybe that's why you were always number three out of three.
You were dead last.
You weren't second.
You never were first.
And he also brings up, which, by the way, I mean, he's a quirky guy.
I mean, he said that he, not last night, this has been reported before, that he went over and saw the movie Good Night and Good Luck five times.
And a number of the times he went by himself.
And so he comes up with this business.
He says, this was out of the news conference that he had with Mark Cuban on this new HDNet channel that he's going to be working on.
And at that news conference, he said, he said, you know, he said, listen, Mr. or Mrs., you report the news the way I want it reported, or I'm going to make you pay the price.
I'm going to mount a sizable and effective smear campaign on you.
Man, he is the most paranoid guy.
I've never had anybody say that to me, and I don't think most people in news have.
But he says, now this doesn't only apply to me.
If you've seen Good Night and Good Luck, you know what I'm talking about.
He also tries to do this.
There is this become fact, even though there's no history to support it, that somehow CBS is this higher-than-thou news organization.
It's just like everybody else.
It's just another news organization, not higher than anybody else.
The Tiffany Network.
The only reason it's called the Tiffany Network is because the people that worked at CBS called it that.
And so they started believing their own PR.
Now, beyond this, and take a break here when we come back, I'll give you some more of the insight of what Dan Rather, how he sees journalism and how he sees his job, and how he's, I just think, sadly, sadly, sadly gripping, hanging on to the way it was back in the day.
And it's not him alone.
Michael Jordan could not retire.
Magic Johnson, three times it took for him to retire.
And so it's not just celebrities.
It's not just athletes.
It's not just Dan Rather.
There's other people who, for some reason, go home, pick up gardening, say hello to your spouse, do something.
But good grief, would you quit hanging on to the yesteryear?
It's over, Dan.
Phone number to join the program, 800-282-2882.
My name is Tom Sullivan.
This is the Rush Limbaugh Radio Program.
Welcome back, Tom Sullivan.
I'm talking about Dan Rather and his interview by Larry King last night.
It was bizarre.
And he has this view again that the story about President Bush was absolutely correct.
He still believes it.
He doesn't understand the business.
He was asked by Larry King.
He said, so why did he ask a bunch of different questions in which he answered the same way?
One of them was, so why did it end so badly, Dan?
And Rather's answer was, I don't know.
What about unkept promises, Dan?
Well, I don't know.
I wanted to stay.
Well, guess what?
Your time was over.
Now, I'm not saying that people need to just go home and wait to die when it comes time to retire, but good.
And I'm glad to see he's doing what he loves to do.
But there are a thousand bazillion ways to do things, but it's time to move on.
You don't own the ship.
You're a guest on the ship, and they said to you, you're over.
You've been dead last in the ratings.
You've caused nothing but controversy.
You've got your own political agenda, which you think is the only way to report things because you're so officially independent.
All these things come up, and you go, no wonder CBS told him to take a hike.
I just don't understand why the man doesn't get a grip on reality.
And furthermore, I don't believe he was telling the truth.
He knows darn well why he was let go.
He's just having a real hard time coming to grips with reality, which he's had for a long, long time.
Vinny in Brooklyn.
Hello, Vinny.
You're on the Rush Limbaugh program with Tom Sullivan.
Hi, Tom.
You're doing a great job for Rush.
Lovely.
Thank you to you.
Thanks.
You wonder if Dan is making a clear distinction here between the terminologies reporter and journalist.
And I think he is.
Dan seems to be saying that he was at CBS specifically to advance his point of view.
And by that, it seems like the term journalist, the way he says it, you know, takes on a certain exclusivity, even a majesty of sorts when you hear him say it.
Sure.
I mean, when Dan becomes anchor, I think, to CBS in 1982, if I'm not mistaken, the reporter was put away forever.
And the quote-unquote learned journalist came forward to endow mankind with his view.
And you see, that's why Dan was last in the ratings probably from that point on because he didn't report.
He espoused the point of view, and there it is.
And people didn't agree with it, and that was that.
It's that simple.
Yeah, it's no harder than that.
And that's why I say to be able to analyze this is so fundamentally simple, and yet he keeps saying he doesn't get it.
Now, I don't know whether he is so blinded by his self-importance because of the fact that he really did have a very powerful job, but it became where I think it went to his head, where it was what he sees and how he sees things is he's self-proclaimed, self-important, and he knows more and has a duty to tell all of us the right way to think.
He's the thought police, if you will, of the country.
And that role not only never should have been that, but also it's over.
The network news is always going to be there.
I don't know how you get your news, but talk radio, internet, blogs.
It's coming from everywhere.
It just, he doesn't seem to be able to get up with the times.
I don't know.
You work in broadcasting, Vinny?
Vinny's gone.
I mean, it sounds like there's a guy who understands the process.
It's not a difficult process.
Susan in New Haven, Connecticut.
Susan, hello.
You're on the Rush Limbaugh program with Tom Sullivan.
Hi, Tom.
I'm a print reporter in New Haven.
And I think what Dan is saying, and I didn't see the interview, I can only comment on what you were talking about.
When he talks about being independent, I think that he means, and this is how I feel, that you're independent from your publisher or your producer, your corporate interest.
That's what I think he means.
You have to be independent.
You can't approach news gathering from your publisher's point of view.
I mean, there were six reporters, I think six editors and a reporter, or maybe six editors and a columnist who resigned out in San Diego in the last week because they ran into this very thing, meddling from their publisher.
Yeah, no, I don't disagree with you.
I don't disagree with you, but I think you had to see it to see the fact that he was basically, it was a self-proclaimed importance about the fact that he's fiercely independent.
But I took it as that plus the way that he sees things, he's got to be able to report instead of just doing what most good reporters and journalists do, which is to say, here are all the aspects of a story for you, the audience, to decide whether or not you like it or don't.
We'll be back.
Tom Sullivan sitting in for Rush.
Yes, I am here.
You are there.
Welcome.
I'm sitting right there in your radio, and we are, I tell you, it's beyond Dan rather, though, and not to pick relentlessly on good old Gunga Dan, but there's a lot of people, folks, just a lot of people out there that have a hard time leaving.
I don't know why.
I mean, it's not that you have to go home, like I said, and die.
There's lots of things I would think that you might want to do and even maybe stay in this, like he's doing, he's staying in the business.
He's just going on to someplace else.
And Ted Koppel, Ted Koppel is out there with, he's doing the same thing.
He went over to Discovery and having a good time over there.
And even Coppel was, Ted Koppel was going, you know, he says, I like it over here.
You get a limited audience, but he says it's a place to go in the twilight of your career.
And Koppel, well, he said that clearly Dan made a mistake and was slow to acknowledge it.
Should that have cost him his career at CBS?
I don't think so.
But I'm where I am by choice.
Nobody forced me out at ABC.
That's because Ted Koppel's smart.
Ted Koppel gets it.
He understands that he was at the end of the run.
He knows the business well enough to know that.
And that's where he's looking at him.
He's a happy guy.
He's positive.
He's over there.
He's still doing some things.
He's going to put some specials together for Discovery.
He's doing some cable stuff.
It's not a big, big audience, but he's happy.
And instead, Dan Rather says, well, I'm not ruling out to suing him.
I haven't ruled that out.
Why would you sue your employer at that point?
At that point.
I mean, you've run the gamut.
The ratings dictate that it's not working, Dan.
Speaking of Dan, Dan in Sacramento.
Dan, hello.
You're on the Tom Well, on the Rush Limbaugh program with Tom Sullivan.
Good to talk to you, Tom.
Hi, Dan.
Hi.
Good to talk to you.
You're doing an excellent job.
Thank you.
Hey, actually, it's Don, but I wanted to say that I know Dan Hrather has made mistakes on a lot of big stories in his career.
I remember him making mistakes.
And I seen an interview with Dan on hard copy about two days ago, and he had admitted in the interview that he said perhaps reporting on false news was a mistake.
But he still believes the story.
But let me ask you a question, Don.
Why is it that people have you ever worked with anybody?
You ever seen anybody who has a hard time when it's time for them to go leave?
Yeah.
What's your take on it?
Why do people do that?
Do they have nothing else in their life?
Do they not have?
I agree with a lot of the things that you're saying.
I think it's a combination of not just that.
I think it's a combination of, you know, the executives at CBS said, well, you know, we can't really keep this guy around if he's going to embarrass us like this.
And also people were maybe getting tired of having three men and they wanted to have a woman come in, you know, a different look, a different feel for the World News or Evening News, you know.
And it's a combination of a lot of things, you know, and they wanted somebody perhaps younger.
You know, it's hard to say.
Yeah, that's, I mean, you know, the thing about it is, is, is that the laws are very clear about age discrimination.
By the way, do you know that you can claim age discrimination starting at age 40?
Yeah.
You can say they fired me because I'm an old geezer.
I'm 40.
And that's where the age discrimination line starts.
You can't claim age discrimination at 39, but you can at 40.
That must make a lot of you that are turning 40 this year feel pretty good, huh?
So you've got to look at these people and go, the reality is that in broadcasting, people want somebody that they can relate to.
And sadly, the audience is shrinking and the young people are getting their news elsewhere.
And you can't blame CBS for wanting to go get them and bring them to the CBS evening news.
Rich in Portage.
Hello, Rich.
You're on the Rush Limbaugh program.
Hi, Tom.
Great to talk to you.
Thank you.
I'm saying one of the things that I think has corrupted our journalism industry in the United States, particularly television journalism, is the reporters are giving up their old-fashioned objectivity for desire of their own celebrities.
They're doing everything to make themselves the news.
They're doing everything to make themselves the face of the news.
And they could care less about objective reporting that reports the news as it is.
Well, I agree in some cases, and I think that is the problem that we had with Dan.
I think he literally self-proclaimed importance because of his position.
And if it wasn't, if he was back out on the street like he was as a young reporter, probably nobody would be talking about him like we are today.
But at the same time, I'll bet you nobody would be talking about him, period.
I mean, he did stand out.
He definitely stood out.
But I just, I'm fascinated by the whole process about how people have a hard time moving on, moving on when their time is over.
And there's a time for everything.
There just is.
And in your career, there are benchmarks.
And one of them is you should look forward to having other things in your life besides your work.
I love what I do, but I have other things that I like as well.
Let me take a little bit of an early break because I want to come back and I want to talk to you about big new ideas coming for the Democratic Party.
This is the latest chapter, the latest edition of Nancy Pelosi's big idea to take back Congress when the election comes around this November.
She's got it all figured out.
It's the latest version.
I know we should be able to put together volume.
Well, I don't know how many volumes we would be on now as far as the latest version for the Democratic Plan because everybody says they don't have a plan.
Well, she says they do have a plan, and I'm going to share it with you when we come back.
Phone number 800-282-2882.
And don't forget to check out RushLimbaugh.com.
My name is Tom Sullivan.
This is the Rush Limbaugh Radio Show.
Welcome back.
Tom Sullivan in for Rush.
He'll be back on Monday.
Tomorrow, Paul W. Smith from Detroit.
So, Wall Street Journal says, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, come on, let's sit down and have an interview with the Wall Street Journal.
So the journal ran this article today, the interview article.
And what she said was, I mean, you got to understand what they do.
You know that they go out, everybody does in politics.
They go out and they poll and they poll and they poll to find out what it is that you are thinking.
What are your concerns?
What are your wishes?
What are your fantasies?
Whatever it might be, they want to know.
And then they will check your words that you use.
And as people repeat those same kinds of words, that becomes the way you put together the political commercial using the exact same words so that you will find some affiliation with it.
Well, they found that a lot of us in this country are very unhappy about, well, you know that the ratings for Congress are in the toilet.
They have been for quite a few years, but they're getting worse.
They're lower than the president's.
They're down.
If I remember right, the last one I saw was in the low 20% range of approval.
Yeah, almost 80% of the people say, Congress, you're not doing the job.
But here's the problem with Congress, obviously, is everybody likes their own Congressperson, but they don't like Congress.
So they went out and they got this whole research, and it said people are mad about the out-of-control spending.
And this ties in a little bit.
Maybe I can pick this up next hour, is about this deficit that we have and how it improved.
And we'll get into some of that as well, some of the economic stuff.
So Nancy Pelosi goes out and they find out people are mad about the runaway spending in Congress.
She says to the Wall Street Journal, she says, I've got this plan to win.
This is HR, how many plans are we up to volume three yet on the plans the Democrats have to win?
Because they don't have to give us a political electoral.
Oh, that's right.
John Kerry had one, but he wouldn't tell us until he was elected.
So we'll never find out.
Oh, no.
How can he do this to the country?
We'll never find out.
So Nancy says, all right, I've got a plan.
The plan is that she's going to cut back on spending.
She says she listed various initiatives to the Wall Street Journal that she said would not strain the government's coffers.
One of them is she wants to raise the minimum wage.
We're back to that.
And I'll get into that again because there's no question that the Democratic Party is taking a shot at and betting on the fact that that somehow will resonate with people that they're for the little guy.
That's what the message is supposed to be, even though economically it doesn't mean a hill of beans, but at the same time, it means it sends a message.
People are in polling groups.
I'm sure the polling comes back and says, yeah, I think people that's not enough to live on.
Yeah, they should raise them.
I'm sure there's some support for it in the polling.
That's why they keep hammering on it.
It's not an economic issue, even though people think it is, it's a political issue.
And the other thing she's going to say is she's going to raise the minimum wage, and she says that won't strain the government's coffers.
Well, I don't know if there's an employer out there who isn't going to add another job because of the minimum wage.
That means that the government's going to get less money from the person who would have had a job.
And the other thing she's going to do is she's going to demand higher royalties from oil companies.
Let's see.
Oil companies get their money from whom?
Oh, yeah, from you and me.
So if she's going to raise taxes on oil companies, then she's basically that's going to be passed on to you and me.
But she says the big key here is that she says we would use the rollback of the tax cuts to address the deficit since it's the biggest drain on the next generation.
Now, I could have swore just a couple of days ago, we showed once again, history keeps repeating itself that when you lower the rates, the amount of tax collections goes up.
When you raise the rates, the amount of tax collections go down.
It's been done over and over and over again, and for some reason, they ignore it.
They won't admit to it.
They won't agree to it, even though history has it documented many, many, many, many times.
So what she says is that they're going to roll back the tax cuts, which is another way of saying, we're going to raise taxes.
That's what we're going to do.
And we're also demanding higher royalties from oil companies.
We're going to raise taxes.
Now, do you think that that will help?
Because over at the House Appropriations Committee, you've got, for example, and this is the group that figures out where the money is going to be spent.
You've got this congressman from Wisconsin, David Obie, who is proposing that what they do is that they go out and they say, we will scale back.
We'll scale back by getting the tax cuts back from the high-income households.
Now, have you ever seen a tax hike by the federal government on just a group of people that are targeted?
It never works that way.
It always goes across the board.
And remember, the big rich people have all kinds of different things that they can do to control that number, a lot of it, especially from capital gains, so they don't sell.
There's lots of things you can do when you have a lot of money that you don't necessarily have to pay taxes on until later.
You'll pay them eventually, but you don't have to pay them right now.
And so they think, at least David Obie thinks that what they're going to do is they're going to get the tax cuts rolled back on the high-income individuals.
So it's the same old, sorry, worn-out game plan that we've heard from the Democrats years after years after years, which is raise the minimum wage and let's go soak the rich.
That's what the answer is.
Now, here's Obie's plan.
He says, all right, if we do this, if we go and we're able to take control of Congress, then what we're going to do is we're going to go ahead and we're going to raise the taxes on the rich and we're going, well, he didn't say that.
I'm saying it.
And what we're going to do is a 50-50 split on the resulting revenue.
But he's assuming that the revenue will still continue to come in exactly the way it has been coming in, even though the rules have been changed.
It won't happen, David Obie.
The resulting revenue always comes up short when you raise the tax rate.
So he says, well, it'll yield $13 billion for deficit reduction.
Well, that's fabulous.
Out of $300 billion, you're going to whoop it with $13 billion.
And the other $13 billion we're going to use for more spending.
That's what he says.
I'm not making this up.
I'm just telling you, for those of you that are good Democrats listening to this program, is that what you want?
Is that what you want your party to be?
Is again the tax and spend party?
I mean, I could see if one of them could come out and say, I mean, I don't think they would do it, but I think this is the way to win.
I don't mean to give them the formula because I know they won't use it.
It's to come out and say, we're going to cut taxes and we're going to cut, or we'll leave taxes alone.
We'll just make the current tax law permanent, by the way.
And the other thing, we're going to cut government spending.
That is what this country is wanting.
And any politician who comes out and says that, I truly believe, will be successful at the next time that somebody goes in to vote for them.
But no, David Obie says we need $13 billion more of spending, and we'll take $13 billion to apply it to the deficit, and we're going to tax the oil companies and the rich people.
And that's the way, that's our big new strategy on how we're going to win in November.
It's amazing.
Phone number 800-282-2882.
My name is Tom Sullivan.
This is the Rush Limbaugh Radio Program.
Welcome back, Tom Sullivan in for Rush.
Paul W. Smith will be here tomorrow.
Rush is back on Monday.
It's truly pollster stuff.
The journal says that James Carville wrote in a memo for the Democratic Strategier.
He said, Democrats actually win their biggest advantage in this survey when we put a Republican tax cut message against a Democratic one that attacks the Republicans for cutting taxes for the wealthy, for running up the deficit, and for passing on the bill to our kids.
And she says, she told the journal, she said, Democrats argue that given widening income disparities in the U.S., voters will oppose continued tax breaks for high-income Americans.
May I refer you, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, one more time to the front page, the homepage of RushLimbaugh.com.
The top 50% pay 96% of all income taxes.
The top 1% pay more than a third of all income taxes.
So the question that I have is, since we have this progressive, as it's called, progressive tax system, the more people make, the more they pay in taxes.
And so the only way you're ever going to be able to change that is to change the progressive tax system.
And they're not willing to do that.
They're not willing to do that.
And she also said, oh, yeah, she said, she told the journal, we're going to do away with all these earmarks.
They're costing a tremendous amount of money.
And she says, but I have to admit, I'm trying to get the Democrats to that point.
But she said it's not realistic for her to expect earmarks to be eliminated.
So she's proposing stuff that she knows doesn't have a snowball's chance in you-know-where of ever getting past.