| Why We Took Out This Advertisement |
| May 13, 2004 |
Listen to Rush? (...explain why he took out an ad to confront the Palm Beach State Attorney's offensive) BEGIN TRANSCRIPT  Folks, if you will indulge me for just a moment. Well, it's a personal matter, but it actually is. Now that it's been tied into the news of the day, I want to alert to you something that we did today. We've been working on it all week. Today in the Palm Beach Post and the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, I have purchased and am running two full-page ads. (Press Release || .PDF of ad) They're the same ad, and the ad consists primarily of a reprint of a Washington Times editorial that ran on May the 9th, and it is an editorial that has to do with the Times opinion and impression of the excessive prosecution that is being conducted against me here in Palm Beach County. It was a Sunday editorial in the Washington Times, last Sunday in fact, and when I saw it, I was stunned by it, and so we sought their permission to reprint it, and we bought full-page ads in the Palm Beach Post today and the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. Here's why. This past Sunday there was a column, or columnist, Frank Cerabino is his name, and he had a column in the Palm Beach Post, and in this column he starts out by saying I (Rush Limbaugh) am "a slow learner," and he ends, his point was, as I was able to make sense of this piece, his point was that because of my Skull and Bones comment on the first day of the release of Iraqi prison pictures, because of my Skull and Bones comment, this entitled the Palm Beach state attorney to go after me and do whatever it takes to show me, teach me a lesson -- and I was astounded that anything that I would say about any issue would have become or could become a factor in a legal case that is about evidence, and that a columnist in the Palm Beach Post would assume that the prosecutor is now given additional ammo, reason and purpose to pursue me simply because of comments that were taken out of context, totally so, by everybody who's used them in the mainstream media, about my Skull and Bones comment, was just stupefying to me, and so we decided. |
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We just can't get our story out in the editorial pages of the Palm Beach Post. They just refuse to look at my side of this story. So we decided the only way that we're going to be able to get my side in print for the readers of the Palm Beach Post was to actually buy an ad, and we did, and that ad is available and viewable at RushLimbaugh.com. It's one of the first things you'll see when you go to the home page. It's a pdf file. It downloads fast, and you will see it's a full-page ad. The Palm Beach Post actually placed it on the first page prior to the editorial page. It's actually great placement, and let me just read to you the lead-in paragraph to the ad, which will sum this up:  ?While editorial writers and columnists at the Palm Beach Post search for new ways to bash Rush Limbaugh and discredit him ? most recently by taking his comments about the Iraqi prisoner issue out of context and then using those distorted quotes as a means to justify the investigation of Mr. Limbaugh by Palm Beach State Attorney Barry Krischer -- a number of prominent national and local journalists, commentators and editorial writers have questioned or charged that the investigation of Rush Limbaugh by Mr. Krischer is politically motivated. We believe that readers of the Palm Beach Post deserve to see this, more widely-held, point-of-view. Following is the latest such opinion from the May 9, 2004 Washington Times.? And so I'm not going to read the whole Washington Times editorial to you, but it's just a terrific summary of the events of this whole case that involves me, which is now pending, one factor of it pending, at the Fourth District Court of Appeal here in -- well, over there in -- West Palm Beach, Florida. So I wanted to mention this to you, because the... Reuters did do a little wire blurb on the existence the ad last night, and the ad is up and running, and for those of you that are not in the circulation areas of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel or the Palm Beach Post, you can see the ad and the reasons for it at RushLimbaugh.com. |
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So... I really didn't quite know how to react. I mean, here's a column on Sunday that, in the first place, takes these out-of-context quotes about the Skull and Bones Society initiation and the first series of pictures on the first day out of Iraq, and then says because of those comments, the state attorney down here is even more entitled to go after me and teach me a lesson. It's a columnist. He can say whatever he wants, but the fact of the matter is that's not the kind of thing that ought to spur on the legal system. It shouldn't even be a factor and normally isn't a factor. Just, we have to do what we have to do to get my side out here in the local media. [program observer interruption] What, Mr. Snerdley? What are you frowning at in there? Well, no, no. Well, the [program observer interruption].  Anyway, so that's that, and I thank you for your time for this personal matter here at the top of the program, but as I say, it does now. I guess it's not so much personal when something I've said about the Iraqi prison story ends up in a column justifying the state attorney going after me, I guess it goes beyond the personal and becomes relevant to the news of the day. I guess... It's just amazing how this one question, the Skull and Bones quote, is showing up in newspapers all over the country used exactly like Mr. Cerabino did in the Palm Beach Post. These are a bunch of lemmings. They're not original thinkers. They don't... Not one of them has called me. Not one journalist who's used this quote has called me to ask for my context on it before they used it. Not one journalist has called, "What are you talking about here? Do you really...?" Not one journalist has dared call, and don't say it's because, "Well, you don't talk to 'em anyway." That shouldn't stop them from making the effort so they can say that they did. But, no, they just assume that the source from which they got it is accurate and (clap) bammo! They ran with it. So we responded. END TRANSCRIPT |
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| Read All of Rush's Coverage... |
| (Rush's Media Battle with Palm Beach SAO) II (.pdf of ad) II (Press Release) Read the Articles... (Palm Beach Post: Limbaugh's school of hard knocks for others) (Washington Times: Aiming for Rush) (Reuters: Limbaugh to Criticize Fla. Prosecutor in Ads) |
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