Rush Limbaugh: We're NOT Losing

RUSH: I got an e-mail here. I was just trolling the accounts during the top-of-the-hour break. "Dear Rush..." This from a subscriber at RushLimbaugh.com. "How can you say we're winning? Tom DeLay is likely to be forced to resign while McDermott will go free. Bolton will not be confirmed. Bush will never get the ten judges because the weak-spined Republicans will never, ever invoke the constitutional option. The newspapers and media are still as liberal, as always, still exert more influence than you and all the conservatives combined. You guys have helped but the common belief is that you guys are the radical wackos not the liberal press. Sandy Berger gets a pass. Hillary and her fund-raising pals will get a pass just like Billy Boy did five years ago. You think we're winning because we control two branches of government? We have such inept Republicans they think they're in the minority. In fact not just a minority, but a minuscule minority. I'm glad you're optimistic. I need to get that through the day but winning? I don't think so. I keep hoping but I don't see it." This is from Ronald [name redacted]. This is the exact kind of thing I'm trying to keep you people from becoming. You have to look at this if you want to take a look at DeLay or Bolton or these things or the judges, look beyond them. It's one of the things I have always attempted to tell you: There is no question the Democrats are imploding. It is the mainstream media that makes it look like they're winning -- and it doesn't help that the Republicans have been recalcitrant so far to stand up for themselves, but regardless what the Republicans do, the Democrats are still imploding.

Let's take this Bolton business. The Democrats are in such a mess. If they actually succeed in disqualifying the guy because he "yelled at subordinates," they better be prepared for what's going to hit them with their next presidential candidate. If their next presidential candidate ever yelled at subordinates, then the picture of John Bolton is going to pop up, and the Democrats are going to be forced to say, "Well, presidents have to act differently than people at the State Department and the United Nations." They're going to hoisted in their own petard on so many of these things. It's not guaranteed that DeLay is going down. I would bet that he won't go down. I mean, you're probably reacting to the fact that it was discovered that this guy Abramoff's credit card paid for DeLay's trip. The Washington Post runs the story. The Washington Post never once said DeLay did anything wrong in this story! It's just smear. But the fact of the matter is let's see every other Democrat that's every gone on a trip and let's see the credit card receipts that paid for the Democrats trips. I'll bet we'll find that it's common. The credit card, by the way, DeLay didn't know it. DeLay thought the trip was being paid for -- and it probably was -- by this interest group. You know, and they have contributors, for crying out loud! DeLay filed all the appropriate paperwork. This is nothing but a smear tactic, and if you get down and depressed on all this and think it's going to work then you're allowing these people to win but look at their tactics. They don't have an agenda. They don't have one thing they stand for. They don't have anything that's going to help them win elections downtown road. All they're doing is corkscrewing themselves, and they're setting themselves up for the same stuff to come right back at them.

This business on the judges? They want to sit around and talk about how you can't criticize judges and yet they impale the Supreme Court every time they talk about Bush v. Gore in 2000! You know, the best way to think of this is, that the Democrats are losing everything they've ever controlled, and that's why they're in this veritable panic. It's only because the mainstream press is on their side that the illusion is they're still running things and that they are not losing power and they're not losing elections, but don't fall for that. Don't make these 16 years for naught, ladies and gentlemen! Please. You have to understand when things are trending in your direction. It's not perfect. You know, I've been one to criticize the recalcitrant Republicans in the Senate on this program, time and time again. But it appears to me, if you saw Jon Kyl on television yesterday, that some of these Republicans are not taking this anymore. They're fighting back. Tom DeLay is not taking it lying down. He's fighting back, and the same with Frist. Frist went on television yesterday, at this rally, broadcast between churches, and he was unafraid and fearless in doing so despite what the Democrats are saying about it and the Democrats today offer some sort of compromise. Broder offered a compromise and Biden tried to preempt him and offer his own version of the Broder's compromise early in the day on television. The fact that Sandy Berger got a pass? Don't think you're the only one angry about this. There are all kinds of voters out there that notice this, too. How many times have I told you we're not in a vacuum here?

You're not the only one who notices bias in the press. You're not the only one that notices the disparity of fairness when it comes to the way Democrats and Republicans in the House are treated. A lot of people notice. Why do you think Democrats are losing elections? There's nothing they stand for that's inspiring. There's nothing they're saying that's inspiring anybody. You think what they're doing is enabling them to recruit voters from outside their voting bloc or their base? It's not. All they're doing is shoring up their base, and they're doing it right now to get money. Even Hillary is not going to pull of this move to the center or move to the right. She's not going to be able to pull it off. She's not going to fool people on this. Now, as to the media and how powerful they are. They're only powerful because you assign them that, because you grant them that. You look at the media, supporting Democrats and say, "Oh, nothing is changing." You're defining success on the basis of how the media looks at things. I've warned you about this. I've warned you people several times about this. If you set your definition for success or failure upon how the media portrays news events, you're going to always think we're losing. The media is not going to change. They're liberals! It's a religion! That's why they're so afraid of the Catholic Church. That's why they're so afraid of Christianity. That's why they're so afraid of these judges. Janice Rogers Brown? You know, this thing I read to you from People for the American Way, the one thing they didn't say about her she's a devout Christian. That's the primary reason they oppose her but they don't dare say it, but they're taking heat on that.

What this rally on Sunday was all about is focusing attention on this, but if you're going to sit out there and think, "Well, press still has more power because they're still the Democrats." They don't. The press's candidates are not winning. Are the press's candidates winning? Look what they did to try to destroy Bush. In the old days Bush wouldn't have got 10% of the vote. Dan Rather would have gotten away with that. You can't say that the media is getting more powerful, or you can't say the media is not losing some of their power. They are. Their circulation is down. George Will had a column yesterday in the Post, Washington Post, syndicated around the country and let me read you some statistics from his piece. "If you awake before dawn you probably hear a daily sound that may become as anachronistic as the clatter of horses' hooves on urban cobblestones. The sound is the slap of the morning paper on the sidewalk. The circulation of daily U.S. newspapers is 55.2 million, down from 62.3 million in 1990." So in 14 or 15 years in this country the big news papers have lost 10 million readers. "The percentage of adults who say they read a paper 'yesterday' are ominous." Sixty percent of 65-and-older people admit to reading a newspaper yesterday, and as you get younger the numbers of people who say they read newspapers gets smaller. This is what I was talking about earlier in the program. The news media is concerned because they're not reaching the yutes. They're not reaching young people. They're not able to inculcate them to liberalism. If you're between 50 and 64, 52% admit to having read a newspaper yesterday. People between 30 and 49? Thirty-nine percent admit to reading a newspaper yesterday. That's incredibly low! Between 18 and 29, only 23% of Americans admit that they read a newspaper yesterday. Between 18 and 29! Now, "Americans ages 8 to 18 spend an average of 6 hours and 21 minutes a day with media of all sorts but just 43 minutes with print media." Not just newspapers but magazines as well. Get this: "The combined viewership of the network evening newscasts is 28.8 million..." You know what it was in 1980? It was 52.1 million. They are down an incredible amount, almost 24 million viewers they have lost since 1980. "The median age of viewers is 60. Hence the sponsorship of news programming by Metamucil and Fixodent....'

"Writing in the Wilson Quarterly, in a section on 'the collapse of big media,'" a writer said in rejecting "the opinion of a CBS official that 'time is on our side in that as you get older, you tend to get more interested in the world around you.'" The writer here is David T. Z. Mindich who used to work at CNN, and he says we're in a post-journalism age. "Mindich cites research showing that 'a particular age cohort's reading habits do not change much with time.'" In other words, I read newspapers when I was 18, 16, 17. I don't read 'em anymore. I do it on the internet. But his point is, if you're not reading a newspaper by the time you're 29 years old you probably aren't going to be reading one by the time you're 59 years old. It doesn't change. You don't start reading more, and people are going to be reading print less and less and less as technology changes. "Baby boomers who became adults in the 1970s consume less journalism than their parents did. And although in 1972 nearly half of those 18 to 22 read a newspaper every day, now less than," 25% do. In 1972 nearly half of those 18 to 22 read a newspaper every day. Now they don't. "The young are voracious consumers of media, but not of journalism. Sixty-eight percent of children 8 to 18 have televisions in their rooms; 33% have computers. And if they could have only one entertainment medium, a third would choose the computer" over a television. Twenty-five percent said they would choose TV. "They carry their media around with them: 79% of young people ages 8 to 18 year olds have portable CD, tape or MP3 players. Fifty-five percent have hand-held video game players. Sony's PlayStation Portable, which plays music, games and movies, sold more than 500,000 units in the first two days after its March debut." So the point is fewer and fewer people are reading newspapers. The demographics of those who do read newspapers is getting older. Fewer and fewer people are watching the New York News. So please, folks, get with it, will you? and don't sit out there and be perpetually depressed because of what you see on the mainstream media.

Because I'll tell you this: Even though this viewership may be down the people who are watching it see exactly what you do. They see bias. They see unfairness. You know, news is a product. The thing you have to understand. For the longest time we grew up in this country we were idealistic we thought the news was "what happened." The news is a product. Editors, packagers, producers decide every day what news you're going to see. They produce a product for you to see. Based on what? Many things. Their biases, what they think is important, how stupid you are, what you might not understand. All these things go into the mix. It's not "what happened" today. Walter Cronkite said, "That's the way it is." It's not the way it was. It was the way Walter Cronkite wanted you to think it was. It was the way Walter Cronkite saw it, but it's wasn't what happened. The news has never been what happened. It's always been packaged. It is a product like everything else that comes in a box that has a brand and a logo. The only difference is that all the people producing it are making the same product. Ergo, talk radio gets born; the blogosphere gets born, and Fox News is born -- and guess where those viewers are coming from? They're leaving the old guys in droves. Don't sit there and tell me that we are losing. I'm not saying that we're winning per se; the trend is obviously in the right direction because our opponents are in a meltdown. Now, it's up to us to take advantage of it and we here are and a number of other places are. We only hope it continues in the Senate but we'll see. But don't sit there and continually be cowed by what you see in the mainstream press which has declining viewership, declining readership and thus declining influence.

We've put them in a majority position and we have little to nothing to show for it.

That's a ridiculous statement. What you mean is we don't have everything we want. We do have good national security. We do have the assault weapon ban gone. We do have conservatives being nominated to the courts (and I agree we need to get more confirmed). We are close to getting drilling in ANWR. We have lower taxes. We are much better than with a Democrat. Conservatives need to keep working in the GOP and continue to expand our influence. I'm old enough to remember the sixties, seventies, eighties, etc. We are stronger today than at any time, though we (conservatives) don't have a Senate or, probably, even a House majority, yet. Be happy folks, we ARE winning, though not everything at once.

No one can deny that what Lott said was pretty dumb, but in my opinion not nearly as offensive as the liberal spin machine blew it up to be. Not as offensive as Senator dirty Byrd's comments about knowing some white ni----s, for instance. Republicans aren't the only ones who occasionally stick both feet in their mouth. Republicans however are the only ones ever demonized for a faux pas, and have their careers ruined by the party of the enemy and the enemies MSM.

Obviously, we must learn to dig our feet in the ground, and refuse to yield on this. Defend Delay, Defend Bolton & keep on the attack.

The Dems are essentially finished. This is their last gasp offensive. Come 2006, they will be routed in the mid-term elections. And then we will be able to shape the Supreme Court, populating it with those who strictly interpret the Constitution.

Gone will be intrusive federal regulatory agencies (OSHA, EPA, Securities & Exchange.) Gone will be such things as minimum wage and the "right" to unionize. And gone will be automatic docking of one's pay for Unemployment Insurance, Social Security, etc. FDR's New Deal will be subverted.

Rolling back the nanny state will occur when we appointed the correct judges - we don't even need to pass legislation. Yes, it will cause hardship & suffering. But it will also be a liberating feeling, living soley by the sweat of our brow.

And it will probably generate economic efficiencies, as more current retirees are brought back to work.

I heard him today. He was talking about this alot. He has a great stake in this subject, as he of course has been the one most powerful and influential force working against the old left media propaganda. He's a smart guy and very dedicated, but even he is somewhat pollyannish about this.

I'll bring up the CFR legislation again. You already mentioned the emails that were sent in protest. That was a good thing to do but unfortunately not nearly enough.

The fact that this totally unconstitutional legislation elicited so very relatively little ire from the public goes to prove my point (which really cannot be denied), that point of course is that a great percentage of the American people are still getting their impressions of events from the lying liberal media. To deny that serves only to help old media to continue, imo.

I wish it were different. CFR was an abomination. But when it was passed nowhere in the old liberal media was it honestly portrayed as the unconstitutional evil that it was, and look what we got from it. We got a George Soros driven election, one that Kerry was nearly able to win.

No, Rush is out there fighting the good fight, but the tentacles of the old media are still everywhere.... in the entertainment business, in advertising, in the news media of course, in the literature and books in the schools. To deny the overwhelming influence of the left (media) is just plain unwise and unproductive.

CFR and the American citizens' (non)reaction to it should tell you everything. Did you see any 500,000 people protests in D.C.? No. You saw some good FReepers sending emails and a few other things. The rest of the public (way over that 80% we spoke of) snoozed as they “learned” of CFR from the old media, the old media that covered up the reality of the unconstitutionality of it, the old media that completely ignored the reality of it. Plain and simple, the great majority of the American people are still greatly influenced by the old liberal/socialist media, whether they know it or not.

To deny it it is only to help it continue.

"This goes far beyond Democrat and Republican. Our nation has become like a ship caught in a gale without a compass."

Yes, it does. It's about the difference between right and wrong, and how one decides that. What was done to Robert Bork was wrong, same with Clarence Thomas, now with Bolton, and others have gotten it to a lesser degree. Name me one person the Republicans have Borked? There isn't one.

And, it's about whether we will be ruled by judges, or whether the people will retain sovereignty. Democrats and liberals like to portray Republicans and conservatives as authoritarian, but the truth is exactly the reverse.

Anyway, for all the talk of fighting fire with fire, we do need to remember that we're fighting FOR GOOD, and against the moral relativism that re-defines as "good" whatever tactics accomplish one's goals. Because if the Republicans adopt the ethical standards of the Democrats, droves of ordinary Americans (and all true Christians) will abandon politics and voting altogether, and we'll sink into the same sort of soft tyranny that Europeans live under. That would be the worst outcome possible. I am convinced that the whole purpose of Europe is to serve as a model for what we don't want to become.

I think tye opposite. I am not sure about the judges but I think Delay will stay and Bolton will be confirmed. I admit that I was one of those who called for the removal of Trent Lott. Lott always sickened me and I thought that Frist would be a good change. It looks like I was wrong.

With Delay, however, it it is different. He is strong in his district and he is a fighter. They can beat him up but I do not think they can tie Republicans to him and get Dems elected.

With Bolton, I think the White House will twist some arms and the Repubs will get him through the commitee. However, I for one cannot see why a person allows themselves to go through something like this.

I think Rush makes some good points though I am still getting off my arse today and call Frist's office. Let them know that even though I am not a constituent, I am a conservative that will not support weakness.

DeLay is toast! He was too damned greedy for too damned long.

What Delay did is standard practice in DC - especially for Dems. For us to abandon one of our captains & leaders would be to show craven fear & appeasement. The Dems would then realize we are a bunch of girlie men, unable to defend ourselves, and they would start attacking more of our leaders. Folks we have struggled too long to abandon the fight now!!!

All Freepers are expected to support Mr. Delay & be faithful unto death! And all of those "Summer Patriots" who refuse to defend Mr. Delay will have their conservative credentials cast into doubt.

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