Tone-Deaf, Formulaic Liberals Defend Harvey Weinstein

RUSH: Hey, folks, you know, the Harvey Weinstein story, this thing just keeps building now. Three women have accused him of rape. It’s in a New Yorker story by Ronan Farrow. Ronan Farrow is the daughter of Mia Farrow. And remember he used to do a show for a week on MSNBC. He had never been on TV before and won the Cronkite journalism award after his first night on TV. I’ll never forget that.

Brian Williams, these guys, “We’ve been doing this for 30 years, we haven’t won jack-whatever, and this guy one night and he gets the Cronkite Award?” Anyway, he’s got this story, and in this story, exactly what I told you, in this story you’ll see all over it, you’ll see the name Roger Ailes,. You’ll see the story and you’ll see the names, Bill O’Reilly. You know the name you will not see? I mean, this story’s long, 8,000 words. You know the name you won’t see in this story? Bill Clinton.

You do not see the name Bill Clinton in the story of Harvey Weinstein at all in the New Yorker. And you really have to look hard to find the name Bill Clinton in many of the other stories. Can anybody tell me if you’ve heard this, because I haven’t. Has anybody heard anybody defending Harvey, say, “Come on. It didn’t affect the way Harvey did his job. Come on, everybody does it.” Remember the old Bill Clinton defense we got? You haven’t heard anybody say that about Harvey?

Well, you know, Donna Karan came out and did defend Harvey until the blowback happened and then she walked it back claiming she was taken out of context.

RUSH: I want to get this Weinstein stuff out of the way. Oh, speaking of which, we have a statement from Bill Clinton on this. He somehow strangely is omitted in all of these stories. It’s uncanny, like this thing from The New Yorker just popped. You see Ailes’ name all over it. You see O’Reilly’s name all over it. It’s a story three women have accused Weinstein of rape. That’s two more than have accused Clinton of rape. So I guess Hillary can take some solace in that. But still, you don’t find Bill Clinton’s name in this or many of the other stories. But Bill Clinton has a statement on the upcoming rehabilitation of Harvey.

ANNOUNCER: Now, William Jefferson Clinton on the rehabilitation of Harvey Weinstein.

“CLINTON”: My fellow Americans, I’m here today on behalf of an old family friend, Harvey Weinstein, who is right now making amends for some unfortunate —

CLINTON: But it will take some time. Harvey is an old dinosaur learning new tricks.

“CLINTON”: Everyone in Hollywood loves Harvey’s power and money, and we will forgive and forget the fact that for a moment he lost control of himself and acted like Donald Trump for 20 —

“CLINTON”: Soon, he will be a changed man who respects women for who they are, not for their —

“CLINTON”: Trick number two. Wait until you are rehabilitated to do it again.

RUSH: William Jefferson Clinton on the rehabilitation efforts of Harvey Weinstein. That was obviously produced in a hotel suite somewhere. It’s great to have you here folks as we’re off and running on another three hours of broadcast excellence. Here’s Donna Karan. Donna Karan’s a good friend of Barbra Streisand. I’m just gossiping here throwing out things that I know. She started the Donna Karan clothing line, DKNY.

She had a statement last night. She was at some fashion film awards event and she spoke with reporters about allegations of sexual harassment against Harvey Weinstein. She basically said — now, this is a woman that designs clothes for women to wear, and she said, is it maybe our fault? Is it maybe the women’s fault, these women dressing too sensually, too sexy? Here’s how she responded.

KARAN: I think we have to look at ourselves, how do we display ourselves? How do we present ourselves as women? What are we asking? Are we asking for it, you know, by presenting all the sensuality and all the sexuality, you know? And what are we throwing out to our children today?

RUSH: Holy cliche Batman, for crying out loud, do you realize how this sets back the movement of the feminazis? This is the kind of thing that in the early days of this that men would offer as a defense, “Hey, look at the way they’re presenting themselves to me. They’re coming in here, they’re scantily clad. They’re showing off things. They’re walking seductively. They want it!”

Remember guys would say that? And remember how they were raked over the coals for being insensitive and disrespectful? Here comes Donna Karan, who is the generation of Streisand so she’d be, what, about 95 now, and she’s echoing these sentiments. Blame the women. Blame the victim. I’m surprised it took hours for her to walk this back. But it did. Now, we have another sound bite here from the same event she was at, this fashion film awards event, dinner, whatever it was, she continued speaking.

KARAN: I don’t think it’s only Harvey Weinstein. I don’t think we’re only looking at him. I think we’re looking at a world much deeper than that.

KARAN: He’s being looked at right now, you know, as a symbol, not necessarily as him. I know his wife. I think they’re wonderful people. Uhhh, Harvey’s done some amazing things. I think we have to look at our world and what we want to say and how we want to say it as well. It’s not Harvey Weinstein! You look at everything all over the world today, y’know, and how women are dressing and, y’know, what they’re asking by just presenting themselves the way they do. What are they asking for? Trouble!

RUSH: They’re wearing her clothes! She designs the clothes that these women wear. She now says they’re asking for trouble. They’re presenting themselves the way they do, and that’s asking for trouble. This is before she walked it back. You talk about tone-deaf? You talk about being not connected to the present? This is… I read this last night and I said, “Somebody has to be amplifying this a little bit. Nobody could be this…” Particularly on the left. I mean, Donna Karan is as loyal a leftist as you will find anywhere.

She can’t explain much of it, but she’s there, and she believes it. She doesn’t know why. (She’s one of those.) It’s just the thing to be, given the business and industries that she is in. But this kind of boggles the mind. So now she’s walked it back after the predictable uproar and is claiming that she was taken out of context. She just was taken out of context there. Well, it’s hard to know what the right context would be. But the U.K. Daily Mail was all over this. “Donna Karan Comes to Harvey Weinstein’s DEFENSE Suggesting His Victims May Have Been ‘Asking for It.'”

And this comes from noted Hollywood actresses like Rose McGowan. Now we have Clooney has weighed in (paraphrased), “Yeah, it’s bad, but, you know, I’ve known Harvey all these years and I didn’t know. I never knew any of this was going. No idea! I — I — I heard rumors. I didn’t know any of this was going on. Yeah, there was talk about. I didn’t know any of this was happening. Nobody who knew Harvey was. I remember Harvey and I would go out. I never heard a thing about any of this.” It was just incredible the lengths to which people are going.

Donna Brazile… You know, I said the other day that the Democrats do not know how to innovate, that they’ve got a playbook that tells them what to say and when to say it about any issue that comes up, and it’s not relevant to current, present time. It’s just a standard, cliche response. Hillary is famous for them. Well, “Former Democrat National Committee chairwoman Donna Brazile deleted a tweet praising the Weinstein Company for taking the lead against sexual assault after they fired Harvey.” So this is exactly what I mean.

Harvey Weinstein admits to paying off… Well, he admits to mistreating. I don’t know if he has admitted to the eight pays off, but the eight women now paid off. The New Yorker is alleging three women say he raped them. It’s getting worse. In the midst of this they fire Harvey and they announce they’re gonna change the name of the Weinstein Company to the Popsicle Company or whatever it is, and Donna Brazile says, “Whoa, that’s the right thing! That’s great.” So she tweets out a praise for the Weinstein Company taking the lead against sexual assault after they fired Weinstein.

This is a classic, perfunctory, formulaic response that’s in the Democrat playbook that is tone-deaf and is unaware of present activity, things. How in the world do you praise the Weinstein Company for taking the lead against sexual assault? What she thinks she’s doing is being loyal to a donor. Well, the Weinstein Company wasn’t the donor; Harvey was. But she thinks that she’s being loyal to a donor. She thinks that she’s showing proper respect to a donor. It’s entirely tone-deaf, because all she did…

She probably doesn’t need the playbook because in many pages she probably wrote it. So an event happens, a programmed response is called for, and she utters it without any awareness of how hypocritical, ironic, or tone-deaf that it is. “The Weinstein…” This tweet was yesterday, or Sunday. This is Tuesday. This tweet was Sunday. “The Weinstein Company has taken the lead against sexual harassment and assault.” They got rid of Harvey! Donna Brazile is so used to doing PR for Democrats — so used to formulaically defending them — she just naturally tried to spin the story for the Weinstein Company because they’re good, loyal Democrat donors.

But this is as tone-deaf as Hillary’s tweet back in November 2015 when she tweeted at the height of sexual assaults-on-campus hysteria, “Every survivor of sexual assault deserves to be heard, believed, and supported.” This is from the woman who ran the “bimbo eruptions unit” in the Clinton White House, whose purpose was to destroy any women that came forth and alleged that Bill Clinton had done anything to them. Now, you may be saying — and if you are, it’s a good question — “Rush, big deal. So they’re formulaic.”

The reason I mention that, it’s not just the talk. It’s part and parcel of my belief that these people are ripe for being defeated, folks. Remember, it’s all about that, as far as I’m concerned. These people have to be defeated in the arena of ideas and at the ballot box and in the culture. They have to be defeated. So if they’re this inept, if they’re this formulaic and out of touch, to me it makes them easier targets. There’s no reason to be afraid of them, there’s no reason to fear them, even though the media is on their side. This is my point in pointing this out.

The fact that it’s a formulaic response and is tone-deaf and may even be hypocritical means nothing in and of itself, other than these people are not as brilliant as everybody thinks. But the real point about it is they aren’t innovating. They are not living in 2017 with their policies, their issues, their agenda. They’re ripe for defeat, is my point, and this is something that should instill confidence in the people fighting them, that they’re not (as so many people believe) unbeatable, that they are not formidable. They’re actually antiques, and they are ripe for being defeated in the arena of ideas.

RUSH: To wrap up this Weinstein stuff The Daily Beast is reporting today that the New York PD was ready to arrest Harvey Weinstein. A woman went to the Special Victims Unit after an encounter with Weinstein, and they wanted her to wear a wire and go back to a meeting which she had told Harvey she would not meet him for the next day. They wanted her to go back with a wire and get him on tape admitting what he had done the day before and then doing whatever he did.

The woman’s name was Ambra Battilana. “She excused herself to use the restroom and was met by a detective from SVU which had been using two cell phones to record a meeting in March of 2015. By the time it was all over, the New York Police Department said they didn’t have enough to charge a felony,” but they were ready to. That’s how many complaints they had been receiving — and, as a result, they were watching Weinstein. I don’t know to what extent he was under surveillance, but he was on the radar. Now, all that means is that this is pretty serious stuff.

You know, this has gone beyond the realm here of Hollywood gossip and gotcha. You know something else that I thought of when all this was happening? This was an original thought that I have since abandoned as an explanation. But you know, setups like this happen all the time. There are law firms and there are people who try to set up people and get them to behave in embarrassing/illegal/compromising positions all for the purposes of blackmailing them or suing them. And when I first heard this, I said, this is Hollywood — Hollywood, where cutthroat competition and personal envy and rivalries are off the charts.

RUSH: “Harvey Weinstein’s Name Will Be Removed From All TV Shows He Produced — The Weinstein Company also reportedly wants to change its name,” in addition to taking Harvey’s name off of anything they’ve ever produced — TV, movies, whatever. “The name Harvey Weinstein is being purged from Hollywood. On Monday, Deadline reported that the Weinstein Company is removing Weinstein’s executive producer credit from any TV series he’s worked on, and plans to wipe it from upcoming movie releases. The outlet also reports that TWC is auditioning ad agencies to change its company name altogether.”

That’s the Soviet style. You know, the way you get rid of problems is just change the name. Also what else? (interruption) Well, I don’t think Harvey could even survive air brushing. I mean, that is one ugly… (cough-cough) You know something? Something else about this. I was reading my tech blogs, and even Apple is trying to get in on the We Hate Harvey Now bandwagon. Apparently, there’s some Elvis Presley biopic or some such thing that you can rent or buy on iTunes, and Apple made a big deal out of saying, “It’s not available.

“We’ve pulled it. You can’t buy it; you can’t rent it, because that pig, Harvey Weinstein, had something to do with it.” They didn’t say “pig,” but that is what is implied. We also have Mrs. Clinton, ladies and gentlemen. Not only did she tweet that all women claiming abuse have the right to be believed, she said so. This is her campaign website YouTube channel, September 14th. This was part of a new ad that Hillary had released. “Hillary’s Message to Survivors of Sexual Assault.” (laughing)

No, I’m not laughing at it premise. I’m laughing at the title. “Hillary’s Message to Survivors of…” The irony here. Her husband was the predator-in-chief. She was the woman that ran the unit in the White House whose objective was to destroy the lives and reputations of any women who might come forward to accuse her husband of having abused them or been in a relationship such as an affair with them. Hillary and Betsey Wright ran the “bimbo eruptions unit.” So the irony here is why I’m laughing, and this is from that ad, “Hillary’s Message to Survivors of Sexual Assault.”