The day before he kept repeating how surprised he was that Newt said this bad stuff about Reagan. He used Fred Thompson and others as examples of why he doesn't endorse, asking what they think now that they have heard all these quotes, quotes that are now shown to be cherry picked and out of context.
Either his show prep was bad, his loyalties conflicted, or he has simply lost his touch. To discover how wrong Rush was, all you had to do was read the articles posted on FR before Rush spoke so negatively about Newt one day earlier.
I've always defended Rush before, he now has me wondering about his core beliefs. His inability or unwillingness to rail against Romney early on, and often has been more than disappointing. Romney has not been a conservative in the past, has been running a scorched earth negative campaign from the beginning, and if he wins he will bring down everything that Rush has claimed to be for.
He's been more disappointing to conservatives in the past month than I can express.
Rush was waving the bloody shirt in victory after his performance on Bloody Thursday.
Rush did his dirty work on Thursday, and this is how he rubbed our faces in it, he knew what he was doing, he teased us with the fact that he knew the truth, and then tossed the truth into the trash.
RUSH (on ‘Bloody Thursday’) But I’ve got a blog here, guy named Dan Riehl. He claims that the video of Newt bashing Reagan is bogus, this 1988 audio that we played of Newt saying that Reagan’s wrong.
Here’s the little blog post. “There’s a short excerpt of a 1988 C-SPAN video purportedly showing Newt Gingrich bashing Reagan when talking about how Bush, Sr. should run” his campaign, should not run as more Reagan, but do something new. Riehl writes, “As I suspected, it’s edited to give a false impression. What you don’t see is immediately after when Gingrich praises Reaganism and the Reagan platform. If you can’t watch it all, it begins at about 2:30 in to confirm it’s the same segment. It’s the minute or two afterward you also need to hear to understand that Newt wasn’t bashing Reagan at all. He was merely saying, Bush isn’t Reagan and the GOP needs something new to sell.”
So I knew something like this was gonna happen. It’s not really that it’s been doctored, but that it has been selectively chosen from. So I sent it up to Cookie ‘cause I can’t listen to it, I didn’t have the time to listen it. Cookie said, “Look, this thing is an hour long. I’m sure he praises Reagan at some point or another, but I wouldn’t say it’s doctored.” So my expert says it’s not doctored. The blogger says it’s been selectively edited or chosen. So I just wanted to get it out there. I think Cookie is protesting having to listen to an hour of Newt, basically, in order to find — (laughing) — what I asked her to find. He-he-he-he-he-he.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Cookie is defiant. She’s giving me a minute and a half after of the Newt bite and she’s insistent that nobody’s doctored this and nobody’s changed — and I’ve read the transcript, that’s true. Newt still says look, the eighties were great but we gotta look forward, people — people care about the future, da-da-da-da-da. He praises Reagan in the bite, which the first — the — the excerpted bite doesn’t include any of but it doesn’t change the fact that while praising Reaganism, he still says to George Bush, you — you’re wasting your time if you campaign on Reaganism. Nobody wants more of the past. We want to look forward, nothing changes about that. So the — the Cookster was right.
END TRANSCRIPT
There’s a clip being played of Newt apparently describing himself as a “Wilsonian progressive.” He better explain what context that soundbite was in because as it is it sounds bad and Beck has been playing that unrefuted for weeks.