All Episodes
Previous Next
Feb. 5, 2015 - Rush Limbaugh Program
35:11
February 5, 2015, Thursday, Hour #2
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hi, folks, and welcome back.
It's great to have you here, Rush Limbaugh, and the fastest three hours in media, the EIB network, the Rush Limbaugh program at the one and only Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.
There are no degrees, and there aren't any graduates.
And that's because the learning never stops.
Telephone numbers, 800-282-2882, the email address, lrushbaugh at EIBnet.com.
So Brian Williams was not shot down.
Well, he was not on the helicopter.
It was shot down.
He was on the helicopter behind it.
And the thing about this, he's been telling this story since the invasion of Iraq.
What is that?
It goes back to 2003.
Stop and think of this now.
Everybody on the NBC news crew that was with him on the helicopter has known all this time that his version wasn't right.
All the NBC News employees and journalists traveling with him, participating in this cover-up, these are the people that bring us the news, folks.
Well, they don't.
They bring us the narrative.
This is not a fly-by-night change, I have decided.
This is something that I think is actually right on the money.
They're not newsreaders anymore, and there's certainly journalism going on here.
It's not just NBC.
It's the whole drive-by media.
They're narrative readers.
You know, in the UK, they call them newsreaders.
You know, BBC, the news anchors, they're called presenters and newsreaders.
Here, they call themselves journalists, and they give themselves awards for bravery and courage.
All you have to do to get one of those is have the right trench coat and be seen in Beirut someday.
Just one tape of you in Beirut.
You can be seen as brave and in the middle of hostilities.
Peter Jennings did it all the time.
But they're narrative readers.
But think of all the people that knew.
And it was finally some military people at Stars and Stripes who blew the whistle on this.
They just got sick and tired, I guess, of hearing him repeat the stories on Letterman with it.
But it was unnecessary.
It didn't matter a hill of beans to his credibility.
I don't think it mattered to the NBC narrative audience whether or not he was on board a helicopter that was shot.
The thing about this is that all the while, these guys are totally opposed to the war anyway.
Why do they want heroism?
Why do they want everybody to think of them as great heroes when everybody knows they oppose the war?
Everybody knows they opposed Bush.
Everybody knows that they were in arms with the Democrat Party trying to discredit Bush's war in Iraq, certain elements of the Iraq war.
Why in the world during all of that would you want to be considered to engage in an act of heroism while being involved supposedly in the invasion?
It's just like when they doctored that 9-11 call tape in the George Zimmerman Trayvon Martin story, which was really outrageous what happened.
And that's not by any means a lone example.
But they doctored that 9-1-1 tape to make George Zimmerman look like a walking blatant racist.
And how many people at NBC knew that had happened and stayed silent?
These are the people that, quote unquote, bring us the news.
And the number of people that were in on this and never said anything.
To me, it's hard to comprehend certain elements of this.
So let's go to the audio soundbites.
Last Friday on the NBC nightly narrative with Brian Williams.
The story actually started with a terrible moment a dozen years back during the invasion of Iraq when the helicopter we were traveling in was forced down after being hit by an RPG.
Our traveling NBC News team was rescued, surrounded, and kept alive by an armored mechanized platoon from the U.S. Army 3rd Infantry.
And then that lie, none of that, that didn't happen.
He was not on the helicopter that was shot down.
Last Thursday night in New York City, Madison Square Garden, during a hockey game, the Rangers and the Montreal Canadiennes, we have the PA announcer, the public address announcer, talking about Brian Williams' helicopter being hit by RPG fire and the U.S. Army Sergeant Major who protected Williams afterwards.
Ladies and gentlemen, during the Iraq invasion, U.S. Army Command Sergeant Major Tim Terpak was responsible for the safety of Brian Williams and his NBC News team after their Chinook helicopter was hit and crippled by enemy fire.
Man.
Oh boy.
Oh boy.
So last night on the NBC nightly narrative, here's a portion: Brian Williams' apology for saying that a helicopter he was on in Iraq was forced down by RPG fire when it actually had not been.
I made a mistake in recalling the events of 12 years ago.
It did not take long to hear from some brave men and women and the air crews who were also in that desert.
I want to apologize.
I said I was traveling in an aircraft that was hit by RPG fire.
I was instead in a following aircraft.
We all landed after the ground fire incident and spent two harrowing nights in a sandstorm in the Iraq desert.
This was a bungled attempt by me to thank one special veteran and by extension, our brave military men and women, veterans everywhere, those who have served while I did not.
I hope they know they have my greatest respect and also now my apology.
Okay, so this is not, I'm not comfortable here.
And it's, you know, this is why, folks, I really don't go out of my way to meet a whole lot of people in the news, people in politics.
You end up talking about them, and the more you know them and the closer, the harder it gets.
And I've met Brian Williams a number of times, and he's been nothing but friendly and funny and engaging, and he's been fair.
This is just hard.
But I'm sorry, this was not a mistake.
There weren't any misstatements here, and there weren't any mistakes, and there wasn't any misremembering.
It's not a mistake to think that you were in a helicopter that was shot down when you weren't.
That's not a mistake.
And to claim that you bungled it and made another mistake is bordering on telling another falsehood.
What happened was that Brian, for whatever reason, told a story.
It wasn't true.
He put himself on board a helicopter, but he was not aboard.
And how many NBC News employees and journalists who were traveling with him and how many military people who were traveling with him participated in this cover?
Once he made the claim, how many people knew that the claim was untrue and helped cover it up or didn't know what to do with it?
But I guess he had just, he told it one too many times, and somebody who knew it wasn't true finally let Stars and Stripes know they couldn't take it anymore.
I got fired.
One of the many radio jobs I got fired from.
I worked with a guy that was a pathological congenital liar, and I couldn't put up with it.
I couldn't.
One day, I called the guy on about 10 lies that he was routinely telling.
Happened to be the program director who was my boss.
And I left the studio that day.
I said, I did it laughingly.
I said, you know, Jay, I just can't.
This is garbage.
You know, try this on somebody else.
But I know you don't even know these people you're talking about.
And if you did, you wouldn't be here.
You'd be in New York or Los Angeles.
You wouldn't be slaving away in this suburban radio.
Anyway, the time I got home, 10 minutes later, the owner of the radio station called and I was fired because this guy had made a preemptive move.
And I was so I just somebody couldn't take this any longer.
No, Mr. Snurdley, I was not shot down.
I was not on any airplane shot down when I went to Afghanistan.
Well, it does sound like this woman.
Mrs. Clinton, remember the sniper fire incident?
Lucky to get out of there alive.
I don't know.
It's, you can honor the military?
How do you, well, that's what he claims he was.
He was trying to honor this one military guy by claiming he was shot down and this guy saved him.
And that's what he says he was doing.
Here, March 26th, 2013, this is Letterman.
Late show with David Letterman.
And Letterman says, something happened 10 years ago in Iraq, Brian.
Tell people what it was.
What happened?
Two of our four helicopters were hit by ground fire, including the one I was in.
No kidding.
Kidding.
RPG and AK-47.
What altitude were you hit at?
We were only at 100 feet doing 100 forward knots because we had these massive pieces of bridge beneath us on slings.
What happens the minute everybody realizes you've been hit?
We figure out how to land safely, and we did.
We landed very quickly and hard, and we put down and we were stuck.
Four birds in the middle of the desert, and we were north out ahead of the other Americans.
And a conversation on Letterman, this is again March 26th, 2013, continued.
So we got hit, we sat down, everyone was okay.
Our captain took a purple heart injury to his ear in the cockpit, but we were alone.
They started distributing weapons.
We heard a noise, and it was Bradley fighting vehicles and Abrams tanks coming.
They happened to spot us.
They surrounded us for three days.
And this young man.
We were on the ground in combat for three days.
Unbeknownst to anyone back here, NBC sent my wife and children to the Breakers in Florida to keep their minds off of it and keep them occupied because no one knew where we were.
We couldn't be in touch.
I have to treat you now with renewed respect.
That's a tremendous story.
We got hit, and I came away just with more respect for these men and women.
Now, I gather all that happened, except he was not on a chopper that was shot down.
Another chopper was.
His landed safely.
The other chopper didn't, but all the rest of that happened.
Well, I don't know for, I don't know for sure.
No, actually, no.
That's the, I don't know if we can be sure about that now.
I don't, I guess we can't be sure about it.
I just don't know.
And wife and kids sent to the breakers to forget about it.
Here's Howard Kurtz on the Kelly file last night in a Fox News channel.
She says to him, hey, Howie, it turns out that the story wasn't true.
It's completely untrue, and it is very difficult for me to fathom why Brian Williams, the anchor of the top-rated network newscast, the face of NBC News, would tell the story on the air at this ceremony about being shot down back in 2003 in a helicopter over Iraq.
It is very difficult for me to understand, and he has now apologized, and he has blamed the fog of memory.
But come on, if your helicopter was shot down, that's a life-changing event.
It either happened or it didn't happen.
And it's very hard for me to understand how he could make that mistake.
And I have to be candid and say it's a major blow to his credibility and that of his network.
Now, that's what I'm not sure of anymore.
I don't know how much does a network that employs Al Sharpton and Ronan Farrell care about its credibility.
Number one.
Number two, now the Twitter gang, which is a lot of millennials, they've been having fun and making fun of Brian Williams.
But at the end of the day, is this really going to harm his credibility?
He's a good liberal.
He cares about people.
He has compassion.
He's a big supporter of Obama.
Gets the daily narrative, right?
Okay, it was a mistake.
Probably PTSD.
He was scared, Mr. LeBo.
Any one of us could have thought our helicopter was shot down if one right by us was afforded.
I can, sadly, in our culture today, see that this is not going to have any lasting credibility problems.
But here, imagine if this was, say, Chet Huntley or David Brinkley.
Imagine if this was John Chancellor.
Imagine if it was Lawrence Spivak, who used to host Meet the Press.
Any of those people would have already resigned, and that they would have been fired.
It's a different day now.
It's a changing world.
It's a new era.
It's a different world.
And so I don't know that I just don't know.
I just can't understand it.
I don't know how you must tell the story.
You know, when you're a kid, when you're five years old, say, if you're watching Bonanza, you pretend you're little Joe.
Or in my case, pretended I was Big Horse.
But regardless, when you're 50 years old, you don't pretend you got shot down in a helicopter at Iraq when you didn't.
Here's Hillary Clinton, just to close the loop and make sure everybody remembers March 17, 2008, George Washington University.
I remember landing under sniper fire.
There was supposed to be some kind of a greeting ceremony at the airport, but instead we just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base.
It was a moment of great pride for me.
There was a saying around the White House that if a place was too small, too poor, or too dangerous, the president couldn't go, so send the first lady.
Man, what?
That's even worse.
That she's the only brave one that had the guts to go to these places.
She lies about having to avoid sniper fire and corkscrew in.
And that didn't happen either.
Here's the next bite, March 26, 2008, in which Mrs. Clinton tells us why she made that up.
I totally misspoke.
You know, I've talked about this endlessly.
I wrote about it, and I don't know what I was thinking because, yeah, we were told that we had to land under, you know, some threats, and the military did a great job.
I was the first First Lady taken to a war zone since Eleanor Roosevelt.
But that was just sleep deprivation or something.
What difference does it make now anyway?
Just like Benghazi.
What difference does it make?
Meanwhile, the real threat to America is posed by Republicans in the war on women and vaccinations.
And don't you forget it.
In the meantime, brief time out.
We'll come back and resume with your phone calls after this.
Back to the phones we go to Round Hill, Virginia.
This is Maggie.
Maggie, thank you for waving.
Appreciate your patience.
You're next on the EIB network.
Maggie, are you there?
Testing 123.
Did she hang up?
I'm here.
Oh, there you are.
Hi, Maggie.
Welcome to the program.
Thank you.
Hold on.
Let me get away from my dog.
I originally called because I wanted to let you know that the crusades, which you talked about earlier, were originally instituted because they were fighting back 450 years of Islamic terrorism sweeping across Europe, which some of your previous callers had already mentioned.
So it was kind of a moot point.
As far as Brian Williams is concerned, I think now he is primed to run for the presidency.
You mean it's a resume enhancement if you're on the Democrat ticket?
Exactly.
So that was the first thing that was.
Now, the way the left, if they wanted to mobilize and try to explain this away, and the way they would do it, that has worked in the past.
Hey, okay, look, he was there, right?
It happened.
He wasn't on a bird that got shot down, but he got shot down.
I mean, his chopper had to land, too, and they were in dire straits.
He just probably got confused after all this time.
When you're in a mission and one of the choppers gets shot down and you all have to land because of it, it's no different than your own getting shot down.
They all had to put down.
It was all in this, and that's the way they would justify it.
Hey, he was there.
Hey, he cares.
Hey, come on.
I mean, it didn't make up a whole thing.
There's any number of ways that these mistakes, quote unquote, are rationalized by defenders on the left.
Remember, now, the only reason that we know this, the only reason we know anything about this at all is because some in the military have blown the whistle on this.
They, I guess, just couldn't abide hearing it any longer.
And it does.
Some people are now going to wonder: well, what else do we hear on NBC that isn't true?
And that's a valid question.
I mean, it really is a valid question.
I wish everybody had that attitude about all these networks.
Is this maybe not true?
Are they maybe making some of this up?
Or is this not really news?
Is it really just part of the Democrat agenda?
Or is it some sort of, are they trying to advance some belief?
Are they trying to propagandize me?
I wish we had a healthy skepticism to that.
There's another, as a companion story of sorts.
MSNBC has just had its lowest ratings ever.
Maximum 55,000 people.
Do you realize there are more people going to the bathroom at one time in this country than are watching MSNBC?
And by the way, this all happens to coincide with my ban on playing any soundbites from that network.
I played a role in this, folks.
Well, it's even worse than I thought.
I just learned that we're not even getting the full version of the truth in the middle of Brian's explanations or apologies.
I just learned that his helicopter landed a full hour after the one that was shot down.
They were not shot down.
The helicopter that was shot down that Brian was not on did not land at the same time as the one he was on and following.
His chopper wasn't even fired on.
It showed up an hour after the chopper that was fired on went down.
You know, folks, I'm sitting here remembering Brian Williams used to call this program before he became the nightly news anchor.
Back in the day, MSNBC used to be entirely different than it is today.
It used to be a news network that actually was trying to be a mainstream that would have been still liberal, but news network.
And in fact, when it first went on the air as MSNBC, the MS was for Microsoft.
It still is, the original partner.
And if you remember way back in those, it wasn't that long, it's in the 90s, that they had a number of tech-oriented half-hours and full hours and guests and hosts.
And they made a big deal of incorporating computers and the web, the internet, with their presentation of the news.
And they had, you know, Ann Coulter was a star on MSNBC back in the day, and Laura Ingram was a star back in the day on MSNBC.
And back in those days, Chris Matthews was an entirely different person than he is today.
He was a straight down-the-middle, he was a Democrat, but he was a down-the-middle analyst.
He was, this is his activism.
I'm not falsely remembering this, but I mean, it's dramatically different now.
And not just at MSNBC, but it's dramatically different at all of these networks.
It has gotten worse.
The polarization in what is called the news has gotten worse.
And the people that are, quote, journalists, self-described, and in the news are now clearly not at all doing news.
And they clearly are not at all doing journalism.
They're making no leaving no doubts that they are not journalists.
They are fully invested activists, and they're not even pretending to be journalists, which is okay.
You do what you want to do.
The problem is they still publicly claim that they're journalists.
They do not own up to what they've become.
They do what they do now under the guise of journalism, and they clearly aren't.
They've abandoned that a long time ago.
Now, back in the day, I'm talking, Brian Williams anchored the 9 p.m. newscast at MSNBC.
And it was a legitimate full-hour newscast.
And remember, Oberdork had a show, but even Oberdork's show was, as best it could be, reasonable.
And this is during the Lewinsky era, by the way, that I'm referring to, the mid-90s and afterwards.
And I'm sure those of you who used to watch it, if you put on your memory caps, you'll remember all this.
And it is so different now.
It has taken such a plunge into the darkness of full, unabridged, undiluted, just full-fledged, poisonous, practically Marxism.
And I'm trying to sit here and remember when, well, I remember when it happened, but what was the catalyst for it?
Now, clearly, the arrival of Fox News and the, to these people, the overnight success of Fox News and what their perception of Fox News was and still is, their perception of Fox News.
Remember when Air America started, they bombed royally.
Air America never amounted to Hill of Beans because they looked at it the way they looked at conservative talk radio.
They didn't see a commercial enterprise here.
They saw a political organization that they thought was being funded by power brokers.
And so they set out to duplicate, well, not even that.
They didn't know how to engage in a commercial enterprise.
The people who did Air America hadn't the slightest idea about radio, didn't know the first thing about broadcasting, didn't understand what it was that made it work, couldn't be made to understand connecting with an audience if they had to.
Didn't understand the whole concept of selling ever.
None of it.
They just thought put liberalism on the air and the donors would show up and the funders and the underwriters and they'd be off to the races.
It never.
But at the same token, the MSNBC people looking at Fox, they think a rabid right-wing news network has shot up and they're scared of it and they're offended by it and they're angered by it.
And so their desire or their thought to counter it is to go full tilt left-wing because they believe there are far many more liberals in America and progressives than there are conservatives.
And they still believe it.
And of course, if you want to look at relative audiences for things, you can disprove many of these silly ideas that the left has about the composition of the body politic in this country.
But I just, I'm struck by what MSNBC used to be.
And Brian Williams was one of the, I guess he's still, he was one of the just most personally, naturally funny people.
He and Kit Carson got along like you would not believe.
Kit would go with me sometimes when I, I used to appear on MSNBC.
Chris Matthews, one-time guest hosted this program.
I mean, just to show you, just to illustrate, I know that was eons ago, but in the midst of all that, we haven't changed here.
I mean, we modernized with the time, but who I am is who I am.
I have not changed who I am.
I've not gone over to any dark side or bright side.
I'm a solid guy.
My core beliefs are my core beliefs, and they haven't changed.
The way I present them hasn't changed.
You modernize in other ways, change with the times in other ways, but these people changed who they were.
They tried to change their very identity.
And it's just, they poisoned themselves.
And now you've got stories like this sad thing of Brian Bridge totally making this stuff up.
And Dan Rather, the same.
I tell you, I think that they were never challenged.
They had this monopoly.
ABC, NBC, CBS, the New York Times, the newspapers, all the magazines, the publishing houses, they had a veritable media monopoly.
And this program started in 1988, and it spawned a whole lot of others.
And then Fox News and conservative blogs and the websites and so forth.
And I don't think they even now know how to deal with it.
They have been so continually bamboozled by the destruction of their monopoly.
They never have understood the whole idea of competition.
They never had to compete.
And they really didn't compete with each other.
ABC, CBS, NBC looked at themselves as one entity.
I mean, they all wanted to be number one for what it might matter to their salary, but it wasn't what made them live or die.
It wasn't what motivated them to get work every day.
The news was a fraternity to them.
Whatever network they were on, they were in a fraternity, and the networks were just different frat houses.
And they were all on the same page, and they all had the same objectives, and they all looked the same way.
They talked the same way, they sounded the same way, they thought the same things, they believed the same things.
And then, for the first time in many of their professional lives, they're faced with the destruction of their monopoly and then competition.
And I think it has caused a descent to darkness, the likes of which they don't know and don't even comprehend themselves.
And that's what leads Dan Rather to start just making up the news.
You know, before there was conservative media, if Dan Rather wanted to destroy a Republican president, he had no opposition.
He could go after Richard Nixon all he wanted.
He tried to do the same thing with George H.W. Bush and then George W. Bush, and he ran into opposition with George W. Bush.
He ran into people for the first time in his life scrutinizing his work, not letting him get away with it.
He didn't know how to deal with it.
And so he has it in his head that Bush is a fraud.
He just personally believes it.
He's got no evidence.
So, all right, if you have this truth, Bush is a fraud.
You don't have any proof.
You've got it.
You don't have any evidence, but you have this belief.
You just know it.
Okay?
Then morally, you are perfectly fine in making up a story.
This is how they think.
If you have to make up a story to prove what you already know is true, then making it up is fine.
That's the moral equivalence.
If you know Bush is a reprobate, and nobody else does, but you know it.
You just know it, but you can't find any evidence.
So make it up.
You do what you have to do.
And I think they were driven to all this by the specter of competition, the likes of which they'd never faced.
When you've had a greased skid, when you've had a free reign, when you've had an open road to get wherever you want to go, and all of a sudden there are obstacles and you've never had to face them before, it can play with your ethics.
And it clearly has here.
And what has happened to what used to be called mainstream journalism, it's stunning.
And what's happened to MSNBC is a great microcosm.
And what Rather did making up the stuff on Bush and the National Guard, another microcosm.
It's breathtaking to watch.
They're full-fledged panic.
And I think they've been in full-fledged panic for I don't know how long.
I think it's the only thing that explains the irrational behavior that they find themselves in, or that we are witnessing them.
I think it explains their, well, and a couple other things.
It explains their total, unquestioning, idolatrous support of Obama.
I think it explains the fact they think we are a bigger enemy than any foreign threat.
No question that they believe that.
Anyway, sit tight, my friends, back with more.
You know, the CEO of Gallup is doubling down when he first wrote his op-ed on how the unemployment rate in America is being lied about by the regime and explained the difference in the U6 and the U3 designations.
He's doubling down and going even further now, going stronger on this.
He was on Fox today.
We've got some soundbites coming up.
After this, don't go away.
You know, you look at MSNBC.
They are barely breathing.
They barely have an audience.
They barely have enough to rate an asterisk.
It's embarrassing.
55,000 people peek on something that bills itself as a national news network.
And what did they do?
They threw out anything that could be considered mainstream and they just went pedal to the metal progressive left-wing extreme.
And they had the proper diversity.
They had a quasi-conservative male host with a liberal female co-host in their morning show.
Then they have the requisite number of African Americans, a requisite number of European-accented Americans.
They have a number of lesbians.
They have Hispanics.
This whole diversity thing, this silly diversity thing, as though everything depends on what you look like.
And they forgot all about content.
And the reason they forgot about content is because they were arrogant and assumed that everybody is as insane as they are.
And I think, you know, I often sit here and say that the Democrat base has been driven insane with rage and hatred by the daily utterances of Democrats.
I mean, the Democrat Party today is filled with hatred, filled with rage of all of their enemies, opponents, people they don't like, and they have driven their base livid with.
I think they have succumbed to it, in a sense.
They're always angry.
They're constantly angry, filled with rage and hatred.
They don't just disagree with us.
They have a visceral hatred.
And it shows up.
And nobody wants to watch that.
And they think that's who their audience is.
They have no idea about content, content, content.
And they think they can steal the day by being properly diversified.
It's just the silly crap that they believe on display.
They are a walking failure.
They are a demonstration of the abject failure of liberalism, MSNBC.
By the way, I deserve some kudos for this because they had a much higher audience when I was playing soundbites from that insane asylum every day on this program, and I decided to ban them.
Why in the world should people who think and talk this way be given any added publicity?
Why elevate what's happening on that stupid network?
So I banned them.
And the ratings plunge at MSNBC coincides with their official ban.
You're on the EIB network.
Ladies and gentlemen, do not doubt me.
When I tell you I know these liberals and I know these leftists better than I know myself, better than I know every square inch of my glorious naked body, do not doubt me.
Dan Rather has spoken up and is backing Brian Williams.
You stay right where you are.
I don't have enough time to treat it properly before now in the ear-splitting tone, which will happen in mere seconds.
But don't go anywhere because it'll be the first thing that I inform you of when we get back.
There's that ear-splitting tone.
▲
Export Selection