Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
I guess I'm wrong.
I guess I'm the only guy that I know who thinks that a dirty trick was pulled last night.
I mean, if it was a dirty trick, it has to be one of the best that I've seen in I don't know how long.
I mean, they've got everybody playing along with it.
It's the most amazing thing, but it must not have been a dirty trick because I'm the only guy that thinks it was.
No, what happened at that Republican thing last night?
The New York GOP speech.
I'll show you here in a minute.
I'll show you what I'm talking about.
It's the most amazing thing.
And everybody just playing right along with the whole premise that is accompanying what happened there last night.
Greetings, folks.
Great to have you.
Rush Limbaugh Friday.
Let's just keep it rolling here.
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You seen the movie Grumpy Old Men?
Last night we got to see grumpy old Democrats.
What in the world are they so mad about?
No, no, I can answer my question.
I'm asking this question rhetorically.
What in the world are Bernie and Hillary so mad about?
The Republicans have essentially all but surrendered to them the past seven years.
To listen to these two last night, you would think that they have been shut out of power the last 20 years and that they're losing the country hand over fist and they're frustrated and they can't get it back.
But these people have been running the country for the last seven years.
And the rage and the anger that emanated from that debate last night, they're running the country into the ground.
They're out of their minds with rage.
Look, I understand it.
I've explained it.
I don't know how many times why they're coming because nothing that they believe in works, which keeps them coming back for more and more destruction.
Hillary's anger, she can't believe this is happening again.
That some old codger comes in here and has the audacity to seriously challenge her.
It's like Bernie forgot the arrangement.
Yeah, Bern, you can show up and yeah, you can talk about whatever it is that matters to you, but don't get any ideas that you really have a chance here.
And of course, Bernie thinks he does have a chance.
And Hillary gets booed at a Democrat Party debate.
It's the most amazing thing to see.
There were Bernie chants several times.
I mean, you can almost say, depending on how you look at this thing, Hillary got schlunged last night.
And depending on where you look, I've looked at a lot of the drive-by media.
You just can't, you just can't accept the drive-by media.
Hillary won slam dunk hands down.
No, she didn't win slam dunk hands down.
But the people who want to write the history of it last night are claiming that she did.
Anyway, we have a full audio roster of the highlights of the Democrat debate coming up.
But first, I also watched last night the Republican, the New York Republican Party black tie event where the three Republican contenders showed up to address.
It's kind of a mini version of the Al Smith dinner for Republicans only.
And Donald Trump led off, followed by John Kasich, followed by Ted Cruz.
And something remarkable happened a short time into Cruz's speech that did not happen during either Trump's or Kasich's speech.
And I watched this on the Fox News channel.
And the timing of this, it happened to coincide with the Kelly file, the TV show hosted by Megan Kelly.
And she had a focus group in there, minus Frank Luntz.
She just had a bunch of people in there from New York, a bunch of New Yorkers.
And there was a break between every candidate's speech.
Trump got up and spoke, and then there was a little time downtime before Kasich came up.
And during that downtime, they go back to Megan Kelly's show and she would discuss what they had just seen or what they thought of it with the focus group.
And the focus group was diverse.
You had supporters of all three candidates in there, and it was feisty.
It was kind of a hoot watching these New Yorkers go after each other.
Cruz fans, Kasich fans.
There were some Kasich fans in there, and of course, people for the Trumpster.
But something happened when Cruz got up there.
Now, by the time Cruz started making his remarks, I had my iPad Pro out, and I was multitasking.
I was doing some other things while listening.
I had watched a little bit of it, didn't watch the totality of everybody's speech, but I watched the last half of Trump's and I watched the intro to Kasich and most of his speech.
He went a little long.
I think it probably had all of it on.
And I had my iPad Pro out.
Cruz comes on after the focus groups.
Cruz comes on.
He goes last.
And I've got my head down.
The first, I don't know how many minutes, maybe three minutes.
Frankly, I'll be honest with you.
I tuned out a little bit because Cruz was doing his stump speech.
He was talking about his campaign's the only campaign that's beaten Donald Trump 11 times.
And he was talking about what he's going to do his first day in office.
He's going to rip up Obamacare and then he's going to abolish the IRS.
I said, okay, I'll tune out a little bit here and focus more on what I'm researching here on my iPad Pro.
And something happened.
My iPad Pro, there was a website I was looking at had a video on it.
And all of a sudden, the audio in my library just went berserk.
And I looked and said, what in the hell happened?
So I thought, maybe my iPad, maybe something happened on the iPad because it was striking.
Cruz was speaking at one moment and then a cacophony.
I mean, literally in a split second.
And my hearing is such, I am all sound is noise to me.
Even communicating with people in person, it's noise.
It's all irritating, folks.
The way you have to understand this for me, so that you can understand how I heard this.
All noise, even talking to people, is noise to me.
It's not, to people who can hear normally, the speech is not noise.
To me, it's all noise because it's all bionic.
It all sounds artificial to me.
I don't hear anything the way anybody else hears it.
I am so at home in complete, total, utter silence.
I keep the TV mute on oftentimes and just read the closed captioning because it's just noise.
But I had the video and the audio, I had the audio up.
And when this cacophony hit, I thought a video had started on my iPad.
And the first thing I did was turn the volume down because I thought I had two different audio sources competing.
And it was as irritating as hell.
So I turned the iPad audio down.
There wasn't anything on the iPad.
The change had occurred totally at the New York GOP affair.
So I studied it.
I looked at it.
In 30 seconds, I figured out what had happened.
They had cut Ted Cruz's microphone at the podium.
And they had replaced it with what sounded like microphones at five or six tables where you heard nothing but the table noise, the clinking of knives and forks on plates.
People swigging beverages.
You could hear people smacking their lips while they were eating.
At least it sounded like it to me.
You could hear people chatting with each other.
So what the hell is this?
It was so different from anything I'd heard all night at this thing that my attention was riveted.
And I said, something's going wrong here.
This is obviously an audio glitch.
And I stayed riveted for the Fox News channel to fix it.
And I stayed riveted and I stayed riveted.
And I continued to watch.
Five minutes went by and not one change.
Then another two minutes went by and then there was silence for a couple seconds.
Aha, I said they're going to fix it.
But when it came back, it was all the same.
Could not hear Ted Cruz.
Cruz had no idea.
And again, he's still up there gesticulating.
He's doing his normal speech.
Can't hear him anymore.
Don't know what he's saying.
All you hear is what's going on at the tables.
You hear the waiters running around.
It sounds as like people were dropping plates and knives and forks on the floor and stomping on them.
And then The next thing that happened was I saw the face of Sean Hannity who said, sorry, audio problems.
And then he turned to Eric Bowling to begin discussing the virtues of Trump and Corey Lewandowski.
And I said, well, hot damn.
I said, this is one of the best damn tricks I have ever seen.
I said, I have, they just sabotaged Cruz at this thing.
I said, I didn't know who did it, but somebody.
I said, this is amazing.
And I waited for the lid to blow.
I started weeding people's Twitter feeds.
I started reading all kinds of things.
And there wasn't one reference to it.
I said, this can't be.
I can't be the only person that noticed this.
I can't be the only person that saw it.
And then I finally saw a thread.
And I was even more impressed.
I was even more incredulous because the thread had a theme.
You know what the theme was?
Cruz was so boring.
Cruz was so bad.
Cruz is so hated that nobody listened to him.
We had drive-by media people supposedly on site as witnesses tweeting and reporting that nobody listened to Cruz.
That the crowd was getting up and walking around and milling around and being rude, that the whole room had turned Cruz out.
And I said, I just smiled.
I said, whoever put this together is a genius because they have coordinated every bit of this.
They have first place they sabotage Cruz.
Then they get to the media and make it look like what happened was totally natural.
Cruz is hated, despised.
Everybody started ignoring him.
Such tweets as, wow, this crowd is not digging Cruz's speech.
A lot of people talking amongst themselves as Cruz speaks at New York GOP gala.
So far, the most enthusiastic crowd reaction to Cruz had been a couple of moments of tepid applause.
It's legitimately loud in here.
People talking and eating and ignoring Cruz.
That's not what was happening.
The only people who thought that were the people watching on Fox News because the microphones had been something happened to them.
I don't know.
I'm going to take a brief time out and I'm going to come back and show you.
I'm going to play the audio here and you'll see what I'm talking about.
But what makes this, what brings it all together is even today, watching Fox News, I'm watching Fox News, and they are talking today about, well, boy, honestly, it's just terrible last night for Ted Cruz.
Nobody cared what he had to say.
I mean, you should see it.
People getting up and milling around and walking around.
It was rude.
People didn't care.
It's really a big problem for Ted Cruz.
I said, that's not what happened.
It's just not.
It isn't what happened at all.
And then I saw Kelly Ann Conway on Fox.
She is Cruz's pollster, and she didn't even reference it.
She went along with the idea that a United States senator had been disrespected and how unfortunate it was.
Wow.
Whoever planned this, whoever orchestrated this, and whoever executed this, this was pulled off.
I mean, flawlessly.
This was a brilliantly conceived and flawlessly executed slam on Ted Cruz.
And I'm sure it's all about New York values.
I'm sure some people have been planning this for weeks.
When they found out Cruz was going to show up, I am sure people probably hate each other.
Every other day got together on this to come up with this scheme.
I mean, if they have pulled this off, I just hope and pray that they do something like this against Hillary when the time comes.
I'll show you what I'm talking about when we come back.
Okay, here we go.
We're going to first start out with Trump.
And Mike, I don't need to play the whole bite here.
Just play it till I tell you to stop.
I just need to establish enough here to let you know how everybody at the podium sounded last night.
Up first, the Graham Hyatt, which Trump used to own, sure still has some connections there.
Grand Hyatt Hotel, Grand Central Station, at the 2016 New York State Republican gala.
Here's Trump.
I love the potential of the building.
It's called the Commodore Hotel.
It was built in 1909, and it was a mess.
And they had a spa, and the spa was called Relaxation Plus.
And nobody ever got into what the plus meant.
You don't want to know.
Okay, that's enough.
Perfectly normal, right?
You could hear everything Trump was saying.
No problem.
Here's John Kasich next, his audio also loud and clear.
When we live in the dark, when we practice politics in the dark, over time, people don't like it.
I think when the public looks at a politician whose lips are moving, they figure that politician is lying.
And I'm a citizen myself.
And when people come to tell me about what they want to do and why they want to be elected, I always say to them, what have you done in your life?
That's Kasich.
And here is the first part of Ted Cruz.
Cruz goes last.
And this is what it sounded like at the beginning of Cruz's speech.
Totally normal.
The heart of our economy is not Washington, D.C. The heart of our economy is small businesses all across the United States of America.
And if you want to see the economy take off, it's very simple.
You lift the boot of the federal government off the back of the necks of small businesses.
All right.
If I'm elected president.
Okay, okay.
So we've established that the circumstances for all three, perfectly fine.
They could hear them each equally well.
They were all being listened to.
And then magically, I mean, I'm, remember, my face is down.
I'm looking and reading something on my iPad Pro, and my room goes berserk with audio that's twice as loud as any of the speech audio was.
And it turned out it was somebody giving Ted Cruz a taste of New York values.
If we remain divided, we will lose it.
And so I recognize many of the people in this room who started out supporting another candidate.
Maybe you started out supporting Ked Book.
Maybe you started out supporting Marco Rubio or Scott Water or any of the fantastic candidates to begin.
Stop it.
Stop it.
That is how the final eight minutes of Ted Cruz's speech sounded.
You couldn't hear him.
They turned the podium mic off.
Somebody turned the podium mic off and turned on all the other microphones in the room to pick up all the room noise.
And then there were tweets like this one.
It's sort of painful to watch someone speak passionately to a crowd who wouldn't even notice if he killed himself on stage.
I mean, the media was in on this trick.
Fox News was in on the trick.
Everybody would, they played along as though all of a sudden Cruz lost the room.
Now, Mike, here's what I want you to do.
I want you to grab soundbite number three.
It's going to be tight.
Yeah.
Grab soundbite number three, and just as soon as it ends, start number four.
The heart of our economy is not Washington, D.C. The heart of our economy is small businesses all across the United States of America.
And if you want to see the economy take off, it's very simple.
You lift the boot of the federal government off the back of the necks of small businesses.
If I'm elected president, we will repeal every word of Obamacare.
If we remain divided, we will lose it.
And so I recognize many of the people in this room who started out supporting another candidate.
Maybe you started out supporting Kennedy.
I expected all hell to break loose.
I expected there to be outrage from pro-Cruz people over how he had been sabotaged, double-dirty-tricked, whatever it was.
And there was nothing.
All there was was a bunch of media people talking about how disrespected Crude was.
If people got tired of listening to him and got up and started walking around and making all this noise.
And it's just, even today, everybody continues.
Nobody cared about Cruz.
It was so boring.
Poor guy.
Okay, one more demonstration of this, just because I know many of, gee, play that again.
I want to hear it again.
I'm going to play it one more time.
Now, keep in mind, folks, to show you how brilliantly this thing's executed.
They did not, so you got three guys showing up making speeches.
The speeches go, I think, 15 minutes max.
There's a bunch of pre-speeches.
I'm watching this.
It's at 9 o'clock, and nobody has eaten yet.
It is important to understand that whoever orchestrated this also was smart enough to realize not to serve dinner until Cruz got up to speak.
There were no plates and knives and forks and all that to make any noise when Trump and Kasich were speaking.
But between the break between Kasich and Cruz, they served dinner.
So people were also eating during Cruz's remarks.
And it was at some point during Cruz's speech, they turned off, somebody turned off the podium microphone and turned on all of the room microphones, picking up all the white noise in the room, making it look like that was the only noise in the room that nobody was listening.
And meanwhile, if you're watching this, there's Cruz.
His arms are waving around and he's giving a speech.
Nothing has changed in his mind.
He's not off tempo.
He's not seeing a bunch of people walk around and mill around and ignoring him.
He's watching people still listening to him.
He doesn't know anything that's happened.
He doesn't know until it's over when somebody tells him, I'm sure.
The TV audience is thinking there's some audio glitch that's happened here and Fox is going to find it and fix it, but that never happens.
And then later that night, the drive-by media and into today, and everybody at Fox News is reporting what a dull, dry speech Cruz made.
It was so bad.
It was so boring.
It everybody ignored him, started walking around, talking to themselves, making noise.
How embarrassing.
And I am sure this is payback for New York values.
I'm sure that's what this is.
Cruz got a dose of it last night.
Whoever planned this pulled this off, and not only did they pull it off, they had to coordinate this with the media or else they relied on the stupidity and gullibility of the media.
They relied on what they know is the media's prejudice against Cruz.
They probably didn't even have to tell people.
My God, Cruz was so boring, nobody listened.
Probably didn't even have to tell the media that's the media's natural disposition to dispossess and disrespect Cruz.
So here, listen again, exactly as I heard it.
Listening to the beginning of Cruz's speech, my head's down, not watching the screen, multitasking, doing some show prep on the iPad Pro, and then all of a sudden, the noise changes.
And by the way, the noise in the second bite, the room noise, when you're watching TV, it was twice as loud as the audio of the speeches from the podium.
Here we go.
The heart of our economy is not Washington, D.C. Perfectly normal.
The heart of our economy is small businesses all across the United States of America.
No problems at all here, people.
Applause.
Here they're listening.
If you want to see the economy take off, it's very simple.
You lift the boot of the federal government off the back of the necks of small businesses.
If I'm elected president, we will repeal every word of Obamacare.
If we remain divided, we will lose it.
And so I recognize many of the people in this room who started out supporting another candidate.
Maybe you started out supporting Kim Hook.
Maybe you started out supporting Marco Rubio or Scott Walker or any of the fantastic candidates who began this race.
And yet at this point, those candidates are no longer fun.
And it's easy for those who are with other candidates who didn't prevail to say, I'm tired.
And so I sit back and wait.
Please sit back and wait.
In 100 days, this nomination will be decided.
In 200 days, the general election will be over.
So I am here tonight with invite to join our team to stand as one will stay united.
That is not how it sounded in the room.
It only sounded that way on TV.
In the room, all was normal.
There wouldn't have been any perceived difference.
You're watching on TV, that was all you heard.
And you would think, okay, something's happened.
There's an audio glitch somewhere.
But it went on for five or eight minutes and they never fixed it.
It just continued.
And finally, they bumped out of it.
They went in, and the next thing you saw was Sean Hannity saying, sorry, audio problems.
We want to welcome Eric Bowling.
Eric, what is a great guy like Corey Lewandowski doing tonight?
And that's, that was not even addressed.
So I think if I just am patient, I'm going to see a bunch of cruisers just blow up.
Fit of tirades all over the media watching last night.
And I didn't see anything except the media tweeting and posting blogs, blog posts about how boring Cruz was, how nobody listened.
It was a shocking thing.
I said, geez, they must be in on it.
At no time last night did I see anywhere anybody questioning what happened, what might have gone wrong with the audio during Cruz's remarks.
So I get up today.
I start show prep.
I've got Fox on in here.
And still, they're continuing with this premise that Cruz was so dull, so boring, so hated that the room, fellow Republicans, just totally disrespected him.
They got up, they walked around, they talked amongst themselves, they were eating, they were making noise with their plates and knives and forks.
And I just had to marvel at it.
I said, this is a multi-part trick that involves the cooperation of a whole lot of people.
And every one of them played along.
Not one person blew the whistle on this.
Even now, there has nobody blown the whistle.
The media is still writing about what a dull dryball Cruz is.
They're still writing about how the audience totally tuned out.
I even had Kelly Ann Conway on.
She's with the Cruz campaign.
She's a pollster and works with the Keep the Promise Super PAC.
She's the president of it.
And she was on this morning on Fox.
And the question she got, okay, you were there last night.
You've seen a lot of the reporting this morning as Senator Cruz was ignored.
See this?
This is Martha McCallum carrying on with this charade.
You've seen a lot of the reporting this morning that Senator Cruz was ignored, that people were intentionally not paying attention.
And the thinking is that this is because of the New York Values comment.
What was your take?
Some people waited up to 90 minutes just to get through metal detectors last night.
Mr. Trump has Secret Service Security.
So by the time dinner was served, the event started an hour late.
I think Senator Cruz was speaking as people were eating for the first time all night.
And I think it would be unfortunate if people, as you suggest, were intentionally ignoring a United States Senator from their own party and a presidential contender from their own party because of a comment he made, which he has since explained.
It really goes to Donald Trump's comment.
That was a phrase Donald Trump used many years ago to explain his position, his support for partial birth abortion.
Apparently, she didn't even know what happened.
She was accepting the premise that her candidate was universally despised and reviled, and thus he was ignored and mistreated and treated rudely.
And she could only say that it was a sad thing that this happened to a sitting senator and then sought to justify the New York Values comment.
And it continues as we sit here today, as we sit here at this moment.
That is still the premise.
That's still the narrative.
That's still, and I'll tell you, if you're the Cruz campaign, since this happened once, and you know that whoever was involved in this, they could do it again.
What do you mean, broadcast engineer?
You think something broke?
Like, like, oh, come on, Brian, he's like Umo Thacker, you know, the old United Screeners of America union thug head back in New York.
So you're not going to cast aspersions on your engineer brethren.
So you think something broke last night?
Like maybe the wires, the cables connecting the podium mic to the amplifier just accidentally came unplugged, maybe.
And they couldn't figure it out in 10 minutes of trying to troubleshoot the problem.
Yeah, just one of those unfortunate technical glitches that nobody in 2016 could figure out how to find and fix.
Oh, yeah, little ZZ Top in the bumper music rotation open line Friday.
We always strive to get phone calls started in the first hour.
We're going to go to Pittsburgh.
Jesse, great to have you on the EIB network.
Hi.
Hi, Rush.
Thanks for taking my call.
I wanted to talk about what you were talking about, what Fox did to Ted Cruz last night.
I was absolutely, I just couldn't believe it, the lengths, the depths that they would go to.
Well, now wait, I wait.
I know why you think Fox did it, because they are in charge of the telecast.
So you're thinking, okay, there's got to be a control room.
There has to be somebody there.
The audio engineers have to hear something's wrong.
And the first thing you would do is turn down the crowd mics.
If you can't hear the podium, you'd put up a banner that says, technical difficulties, we're working on it.
Please stand by.
So it was none of that.
So that's why you're thinking, Fox.
I think it goes deeper than Fox.
Really?
Well, it has to.
It goes to when they decided to serve dinner.
There wouldn't have been any crowd noise unless they had served dinner before Cruz started to speak.
You see, I mean, I think this is deep.
I think this trip, this district has tentacles, woven tentacles of deceit that are deeply throughout this event last night.
You have a lot of people that played along with this one, and they're still playing along with it today.
I do believe that the tentacles are deep in that, but I mean, Fox had to do something with it.
I mean, they had to be part of it somehow.
Well, look, yeah, maybe, but are you of the opinion that Fox and Fox alone decided to actually sabotage Cruz's speech?
No, no, definitely not Fox alone.
Like you said, I think this was bigger than just Fox.
Okay, so you think Fox, though, you think Fox killed the podium microphone?
I do.
I do.
That could have been somebody that had nothing to do with Fox.
There could have been somebody backstage at the amplifier, turned it off, unplugged it.
Could have been a circuit breaker, could have been a number of things.
But there's a in the labyrinth of audio and video connections, there's a bunch of stuff that happens before you get to the Fox feed, per se.
I understand why you would think it's Fox.
When you lose the audio on a football game or TV show, you think it's the network.
So it makes sense to think that, yeah.
Yeah, and you're right about not really seeing too much online about it because right when it was happening, I went out to Fox's site on Facebook, and nobody was mentioning it.
They had Ted Cruz's speech out there because it was a little bit afterwards, and nobody was mentioning it.
But then slowly throughout the evening, people were starting to comment about it, and they were pretty mad.
Yeah, but they were in the minority.
Most of the comments, most of the first early tweets were from media people perpetuating the hoax, essentially, which was also crucial.
I mean, that's what I mean.
There were a lot of elements of this that somebody had to coordinate.
There are a lot of people that played a role in this that had to be silent.
Somebody had to be assured that all the players here would not give up the trick and blow it, even at this point.
Nobody has, I mean, the fact that the narrative still remains, Cruz was a dull, drying, whatever speech, and nobody cared is what survives as the narrative of the night.
So I don't know how you watch that on TV and not think that there was something wrong with the audio.
Whether it was done on purpose or not, how do you not conclude that there was something wrong with the audio?
As you heard it, as I played it for you, and believe me, had you been watching it live, the cacophony of sound from that room was much louder than any of the speeches from Trump, Kasich, or Cruz.
I mean, it was loud enough.
Yeah, I mean, literally, they bumped out of Cruz.
He still wasn't finished speaking.
They bumped out of it, and Hannity said, sorry, audio problems.
And then that was it, and then went right into his program, interviewing whoever it was, Eric Bowling.
No explanation.
Just sorry for the audio problems there, as though that was the excuse for bumping out of it.
The reason they were leaving the Cruz speech, sorry, we got some audio problems here, and bam, that was it.
Classic.
I suspect Megan Kelly.
Just kidding.
Just kidding.
I appreciate the call up there, Jesse.
Thanks.
It's Janet Marie in Pleasanton, California.
You're next on Open Line Friday.
Hi.
Hi there, Rush.
Thank you so much for taking my call.
I have to tell you, I came home, I was listening to Ted's speech.
I was working out at the gym, and all of a sudden, everything started cutting out.
And I came home spitting mad.
I blamed it on Fox.
I didn't have the background you have.
But the other thing that occurred to me, because I've run charity events and galas, and I was furious that they were starting to serve dinner while he was speaking.
Ted Cruz was hitting it out of the park.
He got more response from the audience.
There was more clapping.
I thought he hit a home run last night, and then they cut it out, and I came home, and I said to my husband, I'm done with Fox.
I am done.
Well, look, I can understand to be your knee-jerk, your first reaction to it.
I had a different take in Cruz's speech.
Let me just repeat this because I thought I was actually the reason I was multitasking with the iPad Pro, the big one, the 12.9-inch, in case you're wondering, was because Cruz was doing his stump speech.
There was nothing at the time this happened that was even specific to New York, which I thought, what is this?
I mean, he was talking about how this campaign is the only campaign that's beaten.
Well, that doesn't matter anymore.
And then talking about what he's going to do the first day in office, he's going to rip up Obamacare and he's going to abolish the IRS.
It's a wait a minute.
It was the stump speech.
And so I thought, yeah, I'm just going to focus on something else here until he and if he gets into something specific to the New York primary or current events, something other than stump speech.
And it didn't happen.
And maybe he was pivoting and heading into some different area when the audio snafu happened.
But after that, nobody knows what he said except the people in the room.
The people in the room, everything appeared normal.
You had to be watching this on TV to know that any kind of a sabotage had taken place.