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May 27, 2013 - Rush Limbaugh Program
37:40
May 27, 2013, Monday, Hour #1
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NewsExpress sped a host on his program, me documented to be almost always right 99.7% of the time.
That, according to the latest opinion audit from the Sullivan Group, which is on the move.
Used to be in Sacramento, California, now down in, well, somewhere in Southern California.
They float around out there.
Telephone numbers 800-282-2882 and the email address El Rushbo at EIBnet.com.
I don't know if you've heard this or not, but last week, Fox News became the most watched cable channel of all of them throughout all of last week, including the USA network.
I mean, Fox was the number one most viewed cable network of all of them throughout all of last week.
Not just cable news, all of cable.
During the Boston bombings and the subsequent manhunt, Fox averaged 2.874 million viewers during prime time, 1.77 million in total day.
Now, is that not fascinating?
To become number one in all of cable, you don't even need 3 million viewers.
That's how fractured it is.
That's how many cable networks there are divvying up the American audience.
3 million viewers in prime time, about 2.874 million and 1.77 million in total day.
CNN was in third place, 1.985 million in prime time, 1.3 million in the daytime.
MSNBC dropped off the radar.
They ended up in 19th place.
Fewer than 1 million viewers tuned in in prime time, fewer than 600,000 in total day.
Now this is big for one reason.
CNN used to be it.
Now CNN benefited from being the only cable news network for a while.
As recently as 1988, when this program started, the only cable news network was CNN.
That was it.
It was CNN plus the networks and newspapers.
That was it when this program started.
Fox didn't come along until 1997.
CNN used to be the go-to network when any disaster or major breaking news occurred.
And even as Fox has overtaken CNN in recent years, that dynamic, not all that long ago, still held when there was major breaking news, like a the wall.
CNN would get the viewers.
They don't anymore.
Left-wing, liberal cable news networks are dying.
And how are they dealing with it?
Becoming more left-wing and liberal.
They're becoming more radical.
I'll tell you, folks, it dovetails with my often recently expressed theory that there isn't any news anymore.
That every time you turn on cable TV, all you're getting is the Democrat Party agenda.
You know what the primary focus of MSNBC and CNN is?
In addition to promoting and expanding the Obama agenda, and it's not just, it's in the Obama agenda, which happens to be the Democrat Party agenda, but believe me, it's Obama driving it with these networks.
It is also the reason they exist and the narrative of every story they put on is how conservatives are wrong and how Republicans are wrong, how you can't agree with them and how they're bad, how they're rotten.
Those are the two narratives that make up CNN and MSNBC.
And the cable viewing public, the new, well, all of cable, but the news viewing public is not interested.
Now, some people are hearing this and are saying, well, Russia ain't all that hot because Fox ain't all that conservative anymore.
And I understand that.
People remark to me, it's not what it was.
And they give me examples.
All the liberal commentators that happened to not show up there.
And people say, the only real conservative on that network anymore is Hannity.
Which in a strict sense may be true.
But the one thing still that Fox does, Fox reports news.
During the day, Fox reports news.
Now, at night, Fox News is talk radio on television, but during the day, they report news.
And they cover things the other networks don't cover.
And this is, you know, if you're at CNN today and you see this, or if you're at MSNBC, what's the reaction?
What do these people do?
They're going to double down with more liberalism.
They're going to double down with more radicalism.
They're going to tell people the audience is stupid.
They're going to tell themselves that the audience doesn't understand them, that they're not sophisticated enough.
And they're going to wear this low ratings, no ratings as a badge of honor.
At the White House Correspondents Dinner, I guarantee you, which is Saturday night, at the White House Correspondents Dinner, CNN and MSNBC will be praised and called out and singled out for great work that they're doing.
Fox News will be laughed at, impugned, made fun of while Fox News executives and staff are there.
That's why I don't go to the thing anymore.
You know, politics is showbiz for the ugly.
And that's what I gave up on this thing 20 years ago, maybe even longer.
Why go sit in a room of 3,000 people that don't like you?
But anyway, it doesn't put it in their face.
It wouldn't put it in their face if I showed up.
That's not.
At any rate, I just wanted to point this out.
But that number of stop and think here, folks, 2.8 million viewers prime time wins over every cable network out.
HBO, USA, Food Network, E! Entertainment, TMZ, you name it.
Well, I'm just sitting here thinking about that, but I don't want to go there.
People would say that I'm bragging, and I didn't bring it up for that.
I'm not going to compare my audience ratings to this.
It's two different things, a ball of wax, but different balls of wax.
Anyway, congratulations to the people at Fox.
It's a big deal because the really important thing about this is what they have done with CNN.
CNN, folks, CNN used to own it.
A story like last week, they used to own it, but now CNN, John King, is apologizing.
John King said it was embarrassing what happened last week because they ran with whatever stuff they were told.
Dark-skinned, they ran with all this stuff.
It turned out not to be true.
Well, let me find the number here.
Hang on just a second.
It's 17.
So audio soundbite number 17 is John King, and this was on the radio in Washington this morning.
Here's what he said: When you do something like this, it's embarrassing.
The one thing you do have to do is look straight in the camera and say, We were wrong.
In this case, we had two reputable sources, one of mine and one of colleagues of mine, who have been reliable in the past, who simply had bad information.
And we went with it, and we had to correct it.
The best way to deal with it is to look people in the eye and say, we made a mistake.
Here's how we made the mistake, and then move on.
Right.
Now, if last week, if last week was embarrassing, then every week must be, because last week was not that out of the ordinary.
I mean, last week might have been a little different in the focused importance of the news.
But getting things wrong, go back to Dewtown.
Go back to any column mine.
I mean, these people, after the Aurora, Colorado movie theater, whatever shooting, what do they do?
Tea Party.
They are alienating statistically half of the country.
That's a potential viewing audience.
They're alienating them.
And apologizing, I don't know that that's going to count.
Anyway, it isn't news anymore.
And that's where this has all fallen apart.
And I'll tell you that what I take from this, we have not reached the tipping point where the vast majority of people in this country are liberal.
We have not reached it.
We are still being governed by a minority.
And I think it's a pretty small minority, actually, in real terms.
And it's governing against the will of the people in this country.
The percentage of thinking in this country that is actually radical left liberal is not majority.
It's made to look that way.
It's made to appear that way.
But these audience numbers blow that the Smithereens.
I got to take a quick timeout.
Sit tight.
We'll be back and continue with much more after this.
Don't go away.
Get this, folks.
The Associated Press's Twitter feed has been hacked.
If you didn't know better, you would believe the following.
AP tweeted breaking from AP to explosions in the White House.
Barack Obama is injured.
AP has been tweeting that for the last 10 minutes.
So while they've been tweeting that, I've been looking at the there's nothing about it anywhere else.
And if it's on Twitter, I don't believe it ever.
Other than if it's my brother tweeting, and then I believe that.
And I, of course, believe the stuff we put on Twitter.
But Twitter is nothing more than a liberal cesspool.
Anyway, it turns out the AP Twitter feed has been hacked.
CNBC just tweeted that AP's Twitter feed has been hacked and that the AP is going to release a statement.
And they're saying, disregard any AP tweets about disturbance of the White House or injuries.
There has not been an explosion in the White House and Obama was not injured.
But there were people who bought into it.
By the way, speaking of AP, they are reporting that public health officials are now saying 264 people sought treatment at hospitals for injuries sustained in the Boston Marathon bombings.
14 people have lost limbs.
So the bomb damage is worse than originally thought.
264 seriously injured, 14 lost limbs.
Now, folks, if this isn't a war, what is it?
See, he had two bomb blasts.
You know, rush, those bombs weren't that big.
I saw them.
The puffs of smoke weren't that big.
What's everybody so worked up?
Pressure cooker weren't that big?
We've got people dead.
We've got 264 seriously injured, 14 people with lost limbs.
If this isn't a war, what is it?
Now, listen to the latest, the latest explanation.
This is just now on Fox.
Well, a little while ago, Jenna Lee, the co-host on Fox, was speaking with an author by the name of Ann Speckard, who has written something called Talking to Terrorists.
I assume it's a book.
Ann Speckard, author of Talking to Terrorists, was on Fox.
And she was talking about how Tamerlin and Jokar Sinaev may have become radicalized.
And Jenna Lee said, Jokar, the surviving suspect, been in our country longer than he was overseas.
He's an American citizen.
So what would be the key to radicalizing him if that's the case?
How would he go from the side of lightness to the side of darkness?
And here are stand by for this explanation.
It looks like his brother pulled him along, and someone pulled the brother in.
And the way I explain it, I listened to an interview in Russian of his kindergarten teacher, Tamerlan's teacher, and she said the family was wonderful.
They were well-educated, good people.
But when he came to preschool, he had come out of the first Chechen War.
And she said he was very sensitive to firecrackers and loud noises.
And she attributed that to war trauma.
So I wonder right from the beginning, does Tamerlan have PTSD?
There you have it.
Ladies and gentlemen, Tamerlan Sernaev has post-traumatic stress disorder because of bombs while he was in kindergarten in Chechnya.
She doesn't say this conclusively.
She's speculating.
So I wonder right from the beginning, does Tamerlan have PTSD attributed to the war trauma from when he was a track?
Because it's a great family.
And they were educated and a wonderful family.
Yeah?
So is Bin Laden from a great family and highly educated.
And so is Al-Zawaki or whatever his name.
Bin Laden's number two.
And the Muslim Brotherhood are well-educated, and they all come from wealthy families.
What is it?
People have this notion that these terrorists are dirt poor?
That's not the case.
Certainly not among the leadership.
But note again the question.
Joe Carr, the surviving suspect, he'd been in our country longer than he was overseas.
He's an American citizen.
What would be the key to radicalizing?
Could he have been radicalized here?
Don't forget the quotes we have from his buddies.
Well, yeah, he's filled with his anti-American stuff, but we hear that all the time here in Cambridge.
Isn't any big deal?
Yes, it is.
Julie in Clarkville, Tennessee.
Hi, welcome to the EIB Network.
Hello.
Hey, hi, Rush.
We have listened to you forever, but I've never persisted in getting on until I heard you say that somebody thinks Little Brother is just a normal college kid.
That really steams me.
Well, it steams me, too, because he's not a kid.
No, he's not a kid.
And I have our daughter's graduating from college a week from Friday, and she's a normal college kid.
And she still believes in American exceptionalism, and she has listened to you.
And we shut off the television when she was in third grade.
So we just really tried to be sure that we were in charge of what was going into her brain.
I don't blame you.
I totally understand.
You look at what kids are exposed to in school, what they're hearing, what they're being taught, what's on television for them to expose.
I totally look at just today we had the soundbite.
It was a normal college kid.
He was smoking pot.
He was watching YouTube videos.
There's nothing to see here.
I'll tell you, it was said earlier on this program that Obama's in denial.
I don't think Obama's in denial, but I'm going to tell you, a lot of the left has to be.
They cannot come to grips.
Do you realize their whole worldview is blown up every time one of these things happens?
They believe they're creating utopia.
They're really blown to Smith Areens when this happens.
They can't figure it out.
They don't understand it.
These people ought to love us.
We've had Obama in the White House for five years now, four and a half years.
We got rid of that evil bush.
We got out of Iraq.
And we're going to close Gitmo.
We haven't got there yet, but we're condemning waterboarding.
We're doing that.
We're ragging on the Tea Party.
We're doing everything these people hate us for.
We're fixing it.
Why are they still bombing us?
They think they identify.
They think these people are blowing us up because they hate the country the same way liberals don't like the country.
So the liberals think, well, we've got to clean it up and get rid of the grievances these people have, and they'll like us.
And when that doesn't happen, they're just confused.
Here's Brian Studio City, California.
Hi, I'm glad you called.
How are you doing, Rush?
It's an absolute pleasure to speak with you.
The reason why I'm calling, I'm going to feel silly actually making this point, considering you just gave us some stats about the cable news thing.
But I'm going to ask you to, you're doing this slow information voter thing, which I think is a great thing.
But unfortunately, I don't think it's going to go fast enough for our country to be saved.
So I'm actually challenging you to either approach CNN or CNBC or somebody like that to get an hour-long show on their network, which so that because part of the reason is because the only time you're ever in the news is when you're misquoted.
So, you know, the only people who listen to the people that listen to you understand your point of view.
I understand.
You know what?
I really appreciate it.
I know how frustrating it is for you all.
You listen here every day.
You know everything I say.
You like the program.
You like me.
You turn on.
You hear me being reported about.
It's all lies and misquotes and made up.
And you get mad.
And you want to do something about it.
You want me to do something about it.
Let me take a break here, but I'll continue with this when we get back.
Doing the job the mainstream media should be doing and maybe one day used to do, Rush Limboy here behind the golden EIB microphone.
So, Brian in Studio City, California, you need to get on CNN, Rush, because the only time you're quoted, the only time you're on mainstream TV, you're misquoted or you're lied about.
And I understand how you feel, folks.
You listen to this program, or you have in the past.
You know what happens on this program.
You know who I am.
You know what I am and what I'm not.
Then you turn on television and you see me characterized in ways you know are not true and it makes you mad.
And you want something done about it and you want me to do something about it.
You wonder what can be done about it.
What I've learned is nothing can be done about it.
What I've learned is the more you act upset about it, the happier they are and the more intense it gets.
It presents a real dichotomy.
The purpose is to mischaracterize me.
And not just me, any Republican or conservative that they think has credibility has got to be discredited.
Maligned.
They have to make sure, in their view, the worst thing could happen is if I became quote-unquote mainstreamed.
So they are always going to do things that keep me portrayed as a fringe figure.
I know how frustrating it is.
I mean, I go through the same thing when, well, what I do here every day.
You know, I see people that I respect and admire being maligned.
I come here and I defend them.
Clarence Thomas was under assault when he was nominated.
I came here to defend him.
I had not even met him.
I knew what they were saying wasn't true about him because I know liberals.
I knew the whole Anita Hill thing was BS.
I knew that Cocan and all that, I knew it was BS.
I knew this was a Democrat, liberal, trumped-up effort to destroy him.
Robert Bork, same thing.
That's what I do, actually.
I get up and I do my show prep.
And when I see people or institutions or traditions that I respect, admire, revere, or believe in under assault, I defend them.
Yet the portrayal of me is that I'm this mad-hatting attacker.
And I get up every day and I get up and attack people and lie about them and say horrible things about them.
That's not at all what happens on this program.
In fact, if I may be so bold, I think it's one of the problems in conservative media.
There's not enough of that.
A lot of times, a prominent conservative will be assaulted in the media and the rest of conservatives will run away from it.
They don't want to take the risk of defending it because they don't want to be tied to it.
So a lot of times conservatives are left hanging on their own out there.
And I defend them.
I defend conservatism.
I defend the ideology.
I defend the traditions, the institutions, the people that are under assault here.
That's what I do.
Now, going to CNN, it almost happened one time.
Let me tell you the story.
Walter Isaacson, who was the managing editor at Time, was transferred over to CNN, which is part of the Time Warner media conglomerate empire.
And I knew Walter.
I had met him at a couple of lunches at Mr. Buckley's house and a couple of other places, and I liked him.
I got along with him.
He most recently wrote the biography on Steve Jobs.
So one day I got an email from one of his emissaries on the guy's BlackBerry, and he wanted to meet and talk with me about what they ultimately proposed was, we want you to come over and do a 30-minute NFL pregame show on CNN, and after that, you do a one-hour Sunday morning show, whatever you want to do on it.
Well, I don't know how, but word leaked out about this.
Maureen Dowd of the New York Times went running to Roger Ailes and asked Roger Ailes what he thought of me going to CNN.
And Ailes said to Maureen Dowd, I guarantee you, Walter Isaacson is going to need a security detail to live in his own building.
He's going to need a security detail from his own employees since word's gotten out.
And of course, once the word got out, it was over because the employees of CNN, they did.
They had a cow.
They went nuts.
The rest of the media had a cow and went nuts.
And how could you hire a racist, a sexist, here came all the things?
And that was, I don't know, sometime early 90s, mid-90s.
No, it was after 97.
because after Fox was up and running, so it had to be after...
It was Brian.
Brian was here, and I'd mentioned it to Brian and Brian.
So Brian knew that Brian, he was hip.
He was in on him.
I know you didn't leave it.
I don't know who.
Somebody over at, well, look, because the process went on a while.
I mean, I actually had, by that time, I learned I had known how to deal with leftists.
So, for example, in one of the meetings with the people who were going to be the producers, I said, I want to know how you guys are going to handle the first day when I am ripped to shreds and you're ripped to shreds.
Are you going to defend me?
And how would you do it?
And they had no idea what to say.
I said, you really have no way to defend your hire here?
These are producers.
You have no, somebody, you know, newspaper article rips me or another TV show rips me.
You don't have any way of going out there and saying, no, Limbaugh's not that.
We wouldn't have hired him if he was that.
Somebody calls me a racist, sexist, bigot, homophobe.
You don't have anybody at CNN can go out there and say, no, Limbaugh's not that.
We wouldn't hire people like that.
They were not willing to commit to doing that.
I said, well, what the hell am I doing here?
And the support staff that I was talking to that would have, they were not hip to it anyway.
The meetings were very cold.
In discussing what the program would be, there was not much enthusiasm for it.
So they had a chance to save CNN at one point, and they rejected it.
So now, Peter, Brian from Studio Cities, you need to get an hour on CNN.
How would that happen?
What do I do?
Call Jeff Zucker.
Hey, Zuck.
Hey, Zachel Rushbo here.
I think you need me for an hour.
Click.
He would need a security detail three times larger than Walter Isaacson needed.
They don't care about this shit.
Hey, look at this shit.
Snerdley's saying they have shareholders.
They might be.
No, no, no, no, no.
No, no, no.
CNN.
Even while they were losing and plummeting to where they are now, even when they were losing everything causing to hire Zucker, they were celebrated.
They were revered.
Badge of honor.
Even though the audience was getting smaller, they didn't flinch.
They stayed true to the cause of liberalism.
They were willing to lose money for the cause.
They were celebrated.
They were putting cocktail party chatter.
CNN was wonderful.
And the same thing will happen now.
This news comes out about how they're even further down and they're going to be even more celebrated by the cocktail party circuit.
I'll guarantee you this, too.
You know, people, you understand that advertising is what supports all this.
Do you know that I don't want to let too many cats out of the bag here, but I mean, Fox has been number one for a long, long time.
And they still weren't getting a majority of the media buys because the media buyers at advertising agencies are young women fresh out of college, liberal feminists who hate conservatism.
And they had the sophistication to know that even if CNN was tanking in the ratings, they could still run all the advertising there, keep the financial support up.
And that's what happened.
When you look at a network, for example, on anything or a show that is by far number one and they're still running penile enhancement ads, what's happening is that mainstream media buyers are sending money elsewhere trying to harm them.
Well, penile enhance.
Take your pen.
Give me the Ronco Vegematic, you know, while McDonald's and Koch and Meineke are everywhere else.
These are things we had to overcome on this.
We have to fight that battle every day here anyway.
Because these little snibbling jerks are out there trying to scare advertisers.
It still goes on.
Anyway, this is a long drawn-out way of saying it would never happen.
And I don't want to do TV anyway.
You know why, folks?
You know the main reason I don't want to do TV?
Yeah, I don't like it, but why?
If I could just go in and do the show like I do this, I'd do it.
It's collaborative, and I don't collaborate.
A TV show, by definition, takes a whole bunch of people.
You have to sit down and you have to plan it out as it's happening.
You have to have guests.
I mean, you can't do an hour TV show with just clips.
Well, it'd be tough.
It'd be tough.
But so you have to have guests, and you have to have video segments, and then you have to plug this in.
The producer has to know what's going where.
The videotape machine has to be loaded with all the stuff in order.
The cameraman has to know where to go when.
It's all scripted.
And then there are the endless meetings every day to put all that together.
And those meetings are arguments with people over what I don't want to do or what I should do or what they think I should do that I don't want to do and have to let them down.
No, no, no.
I don't want to do that.
I don't care about.
And I don't collaborate.
I have not had one meeting to do this radio show ever.
I've never sat down with anybody and said, well, okay, at 1217, be ready for this because this is going to, unless we have a guest in here.
And those only happen when somebody desperately calls and wants on.
We don't seek them out.
It's just, I don't collaborate.
I don't, I've been doing this so long my way that television is just foreign to me.
Hell, folks, I hate makeup.
Sit there for 20 minutes doing the makeup.
You got to take it off.
You know, Greta Vancestran will come in here and do an interview.
And to do a 20 or 30-minute interview is a two-hour project.
A three-hour radio show is a three-hour show.
I mean, with the show prep, but I don't have to do makeup.
I don't have to sit around and have a meeting with anybody.
There aren't any lighting people have to come in here and make sure the lighting's right.
Oh, wait a minute.
Battery just died in the tape machine.
Got to do that segment over.
And it was a great, I just, none of it.
None of it.
Now, if you could walk into a TV studio without having said a word to anybody, just sit down, maybe the video bites that you're going to use, maybe the video highlights.
You've got to have a rundown of that and know what you have.
But if you could randomly choose what you want, when you want, and plug it in, fine.
But you can't.
They plugged in the machine in order.
Some people are drawn to TV because it's FaceTime.
Not me.
If I ever did TV, I'd put a mask on because I'm into low profile now, Starkly.
This is interesting.
Austin, Texas, Chris, thank you for waiting.
Welcome to the EIB Network.
Hello.
Hey, Ross Steeler Dittos from Texas.
Thank you, sir.
You know, I just don't understand this.
You were talking earlier about the degree of education that Tomerland had.
And why is it that, and I never hear anybody counter-argue this.
Why is it that so many people think that the higher level one has of education, the less they would be susceptible to evil or committing immoral acts or just being evil people?
As if education somehow is the golden grace of God.
Well, who is it that thinks that?
It's other educated people.
But that's becoming more mainstream.
I hear this in regular average conversation.
Well, they need more education.
If we had more education, that would solve racism.
If we had more education, that would solve, I mean, you fill in the blank.
Education has nothing to do with it.
I think the lack of any kind of spirituality, because that's so, you know, you can't talk about that.
But if we don't talk about spirituality, we don't talk about God, we're denying something that is anthropologically true about us.
And it aggravates the heck out of me.
And the thing that is anthropologically true about us is that we need a belief in God, that we need that for our souls.
Not only that, Rush, but also to be an antidote to the evil that is always going to be lurking, dragging us and tempting us into these acts.
Why is it so bad to talk about something that is demonstrably true?
Most of the liberal elite that's highly educated eschews formal religion because they think it's for the dim-witted.
Exactly.
And see where all the crimes are committed.
Look at Bill Ayers.
Look at these guys from Chechnya.
Look at that, as you were saying.
Well, wait a minute.
You've got our share of idiots that commit crimes, too.
And we've got our share of idiots that when there aren't any chicken McNuggets, they call the White House or 911.
I mean, you can't.
But education is not all.
It's not the key.
No, I agree with that.
And the idea that it is because these other people are educated, look at themselves as virtuous, class-act citizens, and they think nobody like me would ever do anything like this.
Then you know bin Laden probably has more education than you do.
And education defined as time spent in a formal classroom or university.
Not what you know or not what you've been taught, but just exposure to it.
But doesn't that then lead to denial?
Then when immorality comes in, and you just, as you said earlier, I don't think it's well, yes, it's denial, but I think it's also something else.
I think it's contempt for people that aren't educated, as to the degree that the people we're talking about think of themselves.
And I think it's arrogance.
I think it's condescension arrogance, condescending arrogance on the part of the educated elite who think that people of their stature are not capable of such acts of barbarism, not capable of such depravity, and so forth.
They have a lofty, lofty opinion of themselves.
That's why they don't understand this.
It's one of the many reasons when you have those people and they're in positions of power.
The danger is that that corruption breeds and it goes around and it gets into the mainstream, into high schools, into education, into lower levels of education.
And then it becomes the norm.
And then people can't understand why, where's the evil coming from?
Why was it happening?
They're asking all these questions now because they're in such denial.
I know.
And that's why they come up.
Well, it's post-traumatic stress disorder.
This kid was afraid of firecrackers as a kindergartner.
That explains it.
Anyway, I got to take a break.
I appreciate the call, Chris.
Don't go away, folks.
There's a common mistake made when people start thinking about education.
They think it equals intelligence.
And doesn't.
Education does not correlate to intelligence.
It may correlate to knowledge, but what if what you know is wrong?
What value is it?
We will be back.
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