Posted on 10/16/2004 5:46:07 PM PDT by writer33
Rush: Going back to the old media let’s talk CBS, Rush
Limbaugh: Yes, Rush.
Rush: Carl Bernstein said on Fox that if the Democrats gave Rather the forged memos, then Rathergate is another Watergate. What does El Rushbo think?
Limbaugh: I think this can be summed up very quickly. Les Mooves, the head honcho of CBS, said in the third week of this sordid tale, and I’m paraphrasing, “Obviously something got screwed up in our process.” That, to me, is utter denial. The process didn’t get screwed up here; the process is people. So there’s a big corruption problem at CBS. CBS cannot be honest about what they’re doing who they are, just like much of the left can’t.
If CBS said, “Okay, we’re going to admit it, we are here to do our best for John Kerry and the Democrats,” everybody would know how to watch what they’re doing, know how to measure it. They might be mad at them for their bias, but they wouldn’t be calling them dishonest and lying fakes. But CBS would never do that because all their Pulitzer prizes would be disqualified. So Moonves comes out and says, “Ah, the process is screwed up.” Well, who screwed up the process? People! People work at CBS. They don’t have robots in there. People corrupted the process, so you’ve got corrupt people in there.
They admitted this producer, Mary Mapes-who got into journalism to advance a feminist agenda, according to her father-has been working on this Guard story of George Bush for five years. For five years, they’ve been hoping and praying that they would get some sort of evidence, documentation-fake or otherwise-that could make this story seem good. They got caught because they wanted the story to be true. I don’t believe they were misled in any way, shape, manner, or form. I think they attempted to perpetrate a fraud. There were forgeries involved. This is a federal crime with potentially large fines and jail time if the forger is found and convicted. You’ve got collusion. You’ve got wire fraud, faxing and e-mailing these documents around. There are all kinds of penalties attached to this.
Rush: So is it another Watergate?
Limbaugh: The question is not, “How did CBS screw up?” The question is, “Who forged these documents, and why?” There are obvious connections between CBS and the Democratic National Committee and the Kerry Campaign. I do think what we have here is the CBS version of Watergate. It is extremely serious. It’s not going to go away with an independent panel. Ordinary Americans are going to go away with an independent panel. Ordinary Americans are going to be watching, and if what CBS tried to say about this isn’t the truth, it will not be accepted. People will continue to dig. And eventually, whether it’s a prosecutor or an ordinary American who digs up proof, the truth will be found.
I’m most intrigued by this notion that CBS needs an independent blue-ribbon panel to investigate this. What is CBS? What is this unit, “60 Minutes II” and “60 Minutes?” Investigative journalists! These are the guys who dig up the dirt on people, and then tell everybody else what dirt they found, and we’re supposed to believe them. But for some reason, they can’t investigate themselves. Nobody knows them better than they know themselves. If an investigative unit cannot investigate itself and come up with the truth of what really happened, how can they investigate anybody else and expect to be believed?
It’s about time CBS learned what it’s like to get a knock on the door, and there’s a CBS reporter and camera. It’s about time CBS found out what it’s like when CBS shows up. The fact that they’re not going to do this tells me there’s a greater reason to hide the truth than to get it out. What could that possibly be? The New York Times admitted to Jayson Blair, and two heads rolled: Howell Raines and Gerald Boyd. When NBC blew up the truck and tired to make it look like it was GM’s fault, Michael Gartner quit and went back to Iowa. But Dan Rather, as I interview myself here, still thinks these documents are not forged!
The point is, if there’s collusion, if the forger of these documents is in any way connected to the Democratic Party, the Kerry campaign-not only is it over for Rather, it’s over forever for CBS, and it’s over for the Kerry campaign. That may be something they’re all figuring is worth trying to protect, stonewall, and deflect. So they’ll get this independent commission in there, which is a stonewall effort-this is not to impugn the people on it, but it’s to delay the result of what they find so people will have forgotten about it. That’ ain’t going to happen.
Rush: Let’s talk broadcast standards. You lived through the Clinton Administration, and Administration that actually targeted you personally. The President himself called you a racist, among other things.
Limbaugh: Yes.
Rush: So you had plenty of reason to be adversarial.
Limbaugh: He accused me of being responsible for the Oklahoma City bombing because of the supposed anti-government hatred that I inspired. I created Timothy McVeigh. That’s what he tried to convey.
Rush: There were any number of people who would be the right-wing equivalent of Bill Burkett, people who had longstanding adversarial relationships with Bill Clinton. Yet none of those faxes ever wound up on the air on Rush Limbaugh program. “The Clinton Chronicles,” other videotapes, the Waco tapes, conspiracy theories, they never made it here. Because you insisted on broadcast standards that had to do with being able to identify the truth: The truth detector.
Limbaugh: Yes.
Rush: So how did CBS fall into a trap on “broadcast standards,” and didn’t weed out the kooks?
Limbaugh: Because their kooks are their mainstream. And CBS is a member of the leftist elite. I’m conservative. The difference is, I don’t need to go out and get “The Clinton Chronicles,” I don’t need to get the wacko kooks who think Clinton murdered 50 people, and they’re all buried under the White House lawn. I am confident in the power of my ideas to defeat the left in the arena of ideas. I don’t need to get Bill Clinton out of office on scandal. I don’t need to devote everything I have to defeating Bill Clinton that way. I can defeat liberals intellectually, argument after argument after argument, which is why they never call me on that basis to take me on. Liberals don’t take on conservatives that way at all. Liberals’ only way of dealing with conservatives today is to try to destroy them personally, impugn their credibility with scandal, so they are unable to influence anybody.
So here you have CBS, frustrated; Dan Rather and Mary Mapes have go to be frustrated as hell that Bush won in 2000 and Gore lost. They probably believe the election was stolen, even though they participated in a recount and found out it wasn’t. They cannot believe they’re losing their power. They cannot believe they’re losing influence to people like me, bloggers, and Fox. They cannot believe that George Bush, an idiot, in their minds, from Texas, is in the White House. They cannot believe we’re actually at war and in their view doing Vietnam all over again. So it doesn’t matter what it takes to get rid of George W. Bush, they’ll do it.
Rush: The overarching philosophy of liberal America today is: “We’ll lie to the people for their own good if we have to.”
Limbaugh: Exactly. This CBS story is lying to the people for their own good: “You people are too stupid to know that Bush is an idiot; you keep voting for him; you keep making him look strong in polls. Well, we know better. We know Bush is a dumkopf, an absolute rube, so whatever it takes to get rid of him, we’re doing for your own good.” Since liberals cannot debate and win in the arena of ideas, they hve to go the scandal route-which they learned after Watergate. They think Watergate was their ticket to ride, and they’ve tired to make everything Watergate. Every journalist has tried to be Woodward-Bernstein. This think may be Rather trying to bring down a President, just like Woodward and Bernstein did.
So I don’t need kooks because I have confidence may ideas, I know I will be here every day and can tell people what I think, and eventually I will win ‘em over.
Rush: An early staple of the show was you reassuring callers, “We are winning.” These people were depressed. When Republicans won in ’94, a lot of people thought that was a fluke. A decade later, Republicans still control the Houe and the Senate. Are we entering an era of Republican dominance?
Limbaugh: Nah, I don’t think we’re anywhere near that. Tom Daschle still runs the Senate, thanks to Lincoln Chafee and Olympia Snowe and other “moderates.” Another reason why it’s going to take time, folks: The Democrats were in power for 40-50 years. One day they woke up and they’re out of power. They don’t know how to act like they’re not in power. They’ve grown up that way. By the same token, Republican grew up being doormats. We grew up thinking, being in Congress is great, if they invite us to play golf and let us into an occasional meeting. Ass of a sudden we win; we’re in power. Didn’t know what to do! We’re still used to acting like we really don’t deserve this: “Hope you Democrats don’t mind that we’re here.” But Democrats’ attitude is, “You think we’re just going to give up because you won this? We’re not going to let you do what you want this is only temporary.”
To me, Republican dominance is not what matters. What I’m interested in is conservative dominance. And we’re a long way from that. But we are winning. I mean, you can’t go back 16 years and compare it to today and say we’re losing.
Rush: Many conservatives look at President Bush’s domestic agenda and say, “We’re not advancing much of conservatism.”
Limbaugh: But I’m telling you, you’ve got the left in this country on the run. And they haven’t been this vulnerable in a long time. More and more Americans are being informed and educated about all this. But look, it’s not going to happen overnight, even in my lifetime.
The era Republican dominance, party-wise, is already here in terms of donations, in terms of statehouses that Republicans control and so forth. But the President still can’t get his judges confirmed. He has to throw a bone to John McCain, so we’ve got campaign finance reform. We still haven’t closed our borders. We still have to do something about the public schools. We still have a long way to go.
Democrats are not going to go away, either. I’m going to predict to you right now: if Bush wins this election, the first thing they’re going to do after January is launch impeachment hearings on Abu Ghraib. They’re setting that up. If Democrats lose this election, they’re not just going to slink away and try to figure out what they did wrong. It may get violent in places. Some of these kook Democrats will no know what to do. They’re going to be angry beyond belief. So I don’t even want to think about Republican dominance or any of that, because there’s still too much ground to cover. But that’s the fun part, the gaining ground, the success stories that take place every day. It’s a long process. A lot of work needs to be done. That’s why people can’t give up, and that’s why you’ve got to remain optimistic that progress is being made. You can’t start thinking that we’ve won it too fast, when you haven’t. You can’t lie to yourself, ever, about this; it’s too important.
Rush: You’ve asked the quintessential questions, Rush, of the Presidential campaign: Why is John Kerry running? Has anybody answered that question?
Limbaugh: No.
Rush: Why do you think he’s running?
Limbaugh: Because he has a sense of arrogant, condescending entitlement. I think he’s been planning to be President all his life. A guy who goes to Vietnam and “reenacts” acts of heroism that didn’t occur with a home movie camera; a guy who creates a phony biography of being in Cambodia and wasn’t; a guy who comes home from the war, notices the winds are blowing in an antiwar direction and starts leading that movement; a guy who is calculating as to who he surrounds himself with to advance himself politically-I think it’s his entitlement, it’s his run, he’s paid his dues for this. Part and parcel of every candidate is this ego that says the country can’t get along without him.
There are so many eye-opening things about Kerry. One, he’s a gigolo. Also, he’s got this policy, he wants to increase gas mileage for all these cars. So reporters point out, “You’ve got five SUVs.” He says, “Those aren’t mine, those are the family’s, I only ride in them.” Oh, come on; gutless. Then he takes a ski vacation at his wife’s chalet in Idaho. On the second run, oops, he slips and falls. At the bottom of the hill some reporter said to him, laughing, “Hey, how about your fall up there?” And Kerry snapped, “I don’t fall,” and pointed to a Secret Service agent, a man designed to protect his life, and said, “The son-of-a-bitch tripped me.”
One of the best ways to judge someone’s character is o watch how the treats people who can’t do anything for him. In Kerry’s case, here’s a man assigned to protect him, and Kerry still thinks he’s dirt. Kerry is so insecure, he cannot afford for anybody to believe that he would fall on the ski slopes. So it has to be that son-of-a-bitch’s fault, and he said “son-of-a-bitch” to the media: “I don’t fall.”
Now there’s a perfection complex. And those are dangerous. I think John Kerry has tremendous issues. When a man has to fabricate a case for heroism, and then constantly remind everybody about it, that tells me nobody would notice it on their own. Greatness does not have to be explained. Yet Kerry constantly has to explain his claims to greatness.
I’ve also notices something else about Kerry. Despite his height, he cannot stand out. The only way he can stand above people in terms of stature is to cut other people down so he’s bigger than they are when he gets finished with them. There’s nothing about John Kerry that says greatness, there’s nothing about him that says he’s a man of stature and achievement and accomplishment. He doesn’t want to talk about whatever those achievements have been during his 20 years in the Senate.
I see this guy getting off the airplane when he arrives for a campaign stop, and he waves at an imaginary crowd like there are millions who came out to the airport to watch him get off, he’s waving like “Whoa, look at me, I’m a big deal”-there’s nobody there, or there maybe a small greeting party. But it’s a staged thing for the camera. You can tell that there’s no genuine love and adoration for him when he arrives at these places. He doesn’t connect.
I’ll give you an example, using myself, of another time I notices this. 1992, Republican Convention, Houston. Coming back, I’m on the airplane, get this, with Ed Bradley of CBS’ “60 Minutes” and Peter Jennings of ABC’s “World News Tonight.” We get to Newark Airport, go to the baggage carousel, and all three of us are recognized-but I’m the only one who’s approached by people. People just stared at Bradley and Jennings, “Oh, yeah, there’s Peter Jennings and Ed Bradley.” But the people who recognized me came over and talked to me. They wanted to tell me what they think of what I do, and they wanted to tell me what they think about things I talk about. There was a connection; they felt like I was a member of the family. But these other guys, distant and far away; they’re people on TV; they don’t really know them.
And that’s John Kerry. He doesn’t connect with people. The attempt to pass this guy off as a real, down-home guy who shoots birds with an assault rifle and does all these common, ordinary things like windsurfing, it’s just so phony. The guy just strikes me as a 100 percent total phony.
Rush: You’ve said that liberals are no hurt when they lose. In fact, losing elevates them. Do you think that will hold true of John Kerry if he loses the election?
Limbaugh: No, because in his case they thought that he had already won it, as recently as August. Mainstream media sources reported, “Great news today, this is John Kerry’s election to lose.” They thought it was over when all those books came out in the fall; when the Michael Moore movie came out; when the 9/11 Commission hearings were going on; they thought bush was toast. There will be anger out in the hustings. There will be anger out among the great unwashed Democrats who actually think Kerry is there to win. He’s not. He’s always been there to lose, to make it look like he’s trying to win. This election is all about setting up Hillary for 2008. If there is anger, it will be aimed at people whose careers are finished anyway, like Bob Shrum. They’ll look forward to impeaching Bush, trying to ruin his second term and to setting Hillary up for ’08.
Rush: What are you expecting from the debates? We’ve got three, on Veep.
Limbaugh: I think Bush cannot lose them, because he gets credit for just showing up. You wait, by the time the press gets through setting up these debates, Bush will be a guy who can’t speak, who loses his train of thought, who will not admit mistakes. Kerry is a man of nuance, a man of deep and vast intelligence; Kerry will mop the floor. Bush will have no such expectations. Even his fans are going to be biting their fingernails, “Don’t screw up! Don’t say ‘nuclar’! Not in the debates!” And when he doesn’t goof it up he gets credit. His expectation threshold is much lower than Kerry’s. Plus, I think Bush is going to dazzle people with his command of facts, and his ability to speak. I think Bush team can’t wait to get at Kerry’s voting record and put into the debates some of the text we’re seeing in these commercials, like the latest one that’s running with Kerry windsurfing.
Rush: How are the Democrats going to spin their debate loss to the frat boy?
Limbaugh: Kerry will win them all as far as they are concerned. Like the recent speech he gave on Iraq, “Oh, wow, finally on message.” Yeah, the 18th message. It was a single, not a home run, but it was so different for him that they’re all excited about it. They’ll do their best to prop him up. But here again, what it boils down to for the people watching it, just like the two conventions, there’s no question which was better organized, more uplifting, more genuine, and the debates are going to show the same thing. Kerry is not a genuine guy; Bush is.
Rush: One last question. NFL. Who do you like, long term?
Limbaugh: I have to say New England. If-here’s the old NFL caveat-if they stay healthy. They didn’t do anything but improve themselves last year. You have some surprise teams. Everybody said, “Look at the Jets.” The Jets will fold.
Rush: All right, thank you for spending so much time with us, Rush.
Limbaugh: Hey, it’s time I would have been with myself anyway, so I’m happy to do it.
Rush: Thank you.
Limbaugh: Thank you.
Brilliant. I wish the typos didn't bug me.
hey, where's part ONE?
gimme one freebie, I want 2. (:^D)
Tom Daschle, could be in trouble in a state that overwhelmingly supports Bush. If he was so secure in the outcome he wouldn't have run a TV ad featuring him hugging Bush after the 9-11 attacks.
I just remember him, early on that day, standing alone with Hillary Clinton.
Good article Oct.15th, 2004 Fighting For His Life
Oops! That's my typo. I didn't catch it when I edited. All of this was done manually. So, I goofed on that one. It's not Limbaugh's typo. It's mine.
Standby for part one, bitt.
Here you go. Try to ignore my typos in there. There is one glaring one you'll find. That's mine. Not Limbaugh's. I typed all of this manually. For those that don't get the Limbaugh Letter. Maybe it's time that you do.
Isn't this Conversation With Myself taken from commentary played on his shows?.. as I feel I have heard most all of it before.
I believe so. A lot of people that only catch half his show don't get to hear some of this stuff. I've heard it before, but I think he regurgitates it in the letter so people that get the letter didn't miss anything they may have missed on the show.
Did you follow all that or did I confuse you as well? :)
BTTT!
Yes..scary! ;).. Thanks for taking the time to transcribe all this.
..meaning : Yes, I understood your post.
Good stuff. Thanks!
Limbaugh is really cookin in this one.
Thanks, writer33. A most enjoyable interview. God bless Rush!
No, no, Rush. They aren't buried under the White House lawn. They're scattered all over the place. As far as I know, the nearest they came to the White House Lawn was Fort Marcy Park.
To get a little more serious, no, these murders are "unproved." So if you don't want to go with the, fine. But they are by no means all that unlikely. Who else do you know who has maybe 200 close friends and business connections who have all committed suicide or died in airplane crashes?
bttt
All of a sudden, I'm feeling dazed and confused, it's a good thing I voted early today, and it wasn't a punch card ballot.
You're welcome. I'm happy to transcribe it for Free Republic. I've said it before, and I'll say it again, "Free Republic has some of the finest minds I'll ever know."
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