RUSH: Okay, so what is the daily media soap opera today? What is everybody talking about today? No, what everybody’s talking about — and this is designed to create — (interruption) Not the pope yet. (interruption) No, it’s not the Ben Carson Muslim story, and it’s not the Donald Trump “what he should have said” story. It’s none of that.

The story, the Drive-By Media story, the daily soap opera script, today is, quote, “Once again, Republicans show their bigotry,” unquote. That’s what all of this is meant to be. They’re not talking about what Ben Carson said. If they talked about what Ben Carson said, they’d be debating it from both sides, and they would be explaining and asking, “Maybe, when we think about presidents, do we want a believer in Sharia law elected president?” They’d be discussing it seriously and intellectually. They’re not.

They’re talking about what a neophyte, inexperienced bigot Ben Carson is, and since he’s a Republican, that’s what Republicans are. And the same thing with Trump. That’s why everybody’s gotta stop falling for this stuff and discussing it on the premise or on the terms the left presents. But that’s all anybody’s doing, and so as far as the daily consumers of news is concerned, what’s on display again is Republicans defending themselves against charges of bigotry. Pure and simple.

And in the midst of that, what’s not being discussed? Obama! What’s not being discussed — and it’s a Republican presidential campaign — is the damage American liberalism and the Democrat Party continues to inflict on this country. We’re back now to Republicans are bigots. Next week Republicans are gonna be back to the War on Women, by the time the pope gets here or whatever. And this is how it goes day to day to day, week to week to week. And the Republicans have got to stop falling for this.

It’s as though they accept the premise because they think that the people are gonna believe these charges, therefore they need to take the time to defend themselves. And once you start doing that, once you accept the premise of this stuff, it’s tough.

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RUSH: We gotta deal with Ben Carson, but I’m not gonna let it dominate things here, and I’m certainly not gonna let it become the premise here that it has become everywhere else in the media. Ditto with Trump. You know, he sent out a couple of responses over the weekend and he got it mostly right. (paraphrasing) “Why am I obligated to defend President Obama? He wouldn’t defend me. Never has. Why am I obligated to defend him? Why am I obligated to tell everybody what his religion is when I don’t even know? Why am I obligated to do this?”

You see, the point of all of this is not the specific charge or the specific detail in every story. It’s the overarching theme, if you will, and that is Republicans and prejudice, or Republicans and bias, or Republicans and bigotry.

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Trump and Carson both refused to back down, as though they should back down. Why? They said what they intended to say. They said what they meant to say. Why should they back down? But see, that’s the objective. They get ’em to back down, get ’em to apologize, say something that will allow the Drive-Bys then to nail home the point, the real point here, which is they’re trying to get, trying to establish is that once again on display, here comes Republican prejudice, anti-minority bigotry, what have you, and immediate violation of political correctness.

There has not been one substantive discussion of what Ben Carson said. All there has been is this mock outrage, and do not doubt me for a moment, it is mock outrage. It’s not real anger, not from the Drive-Bys. “Man, I love this,” they’re all excited, “Look what Ben Carson just gave.” So they get to go on TV and act mad, outraged, personally disgusted, when in fact they’re filled with glee, happiness, and potential, because once again they get to carry forward one of their memes.

Here’s Trump. This is on Meet the Press Sunday morning, Chuck Todd, “In response to this controversy about the question at your town hall meeting, you tweeted out that you’re not morally obligated to correct anybody who criticizes Obama, and that I think you’re right about, but isn’t it appropriate, at least at times, Mr. Trump, to raise the level of political discourse and to correct some of the mythologies that are out there so that we’re ultimately all dealing with the same set of facts?”

TRUMP: The president can really defend himself very well. He’s a very capable person for that, you know, purpose. When somebody says something about me, is he gonna defend me? And I can tell you emphatically that the answer is no. It wasn’t my obligation to defend. In fact, as you know, ’cause I also tweeted that this is the first time I’ve ever gotten in hot water for not saying anything. I didn’t do anything.

RUSH: But more than that, here again, let’s go back to Chuck Todd’s question. It’s now up to Trump, i.e., a Republican, to elevate our politics. Yes. He’s morally obligated to raise the level of political discourse. And you see, you never hear that question or anything like it asked of a Democrat. Never, ever. There are countless examples of outrageous claims coming from them and their supporters, filled with lies. Twitter is filled with it. You talk about raising the level of discourse, when’s the last time anybody on Twitter or in the Democrat Party denounced anything that’s happening in that sewer?

See, all of this is a one-way street. It’s up to Trump to elevate the political discourse. Why? Well, because the political discourse is in such bad shape because of these outspoken conservative Republicans. Yeah. So all these just established narratives that Republicans somehow end up obligated to address and to fix and to apologize for. Here’s This Week with Stephanopoulos. He’s talking to Trump. He said, “For the record, was President Obama born in the United States?”

Is this a legitimate question at this point? Trump has already been there and done that on this question I don’t know how many times. This is like Stephanopoulos trying to reignite this issue just as he ignited the War on Women issue with Mitt Romney, asking him some irrelevant question about contraception. Why are we answering questions from this guy anyway? He’s a Democrat operative disguised as a journalist. He ran the Clinton war room, for crying out loud and there’s another Clinton in the presidential race this year. “So for the record, was President Obama born in the US, Mr. Trump?”

TRUMP: I don’t get into it, George. I talk about jobs. They ask that question, and I just want to talk about the things, because, frankly, it’s of no longer interest to me. We’re beyond that. I want to talk about jobs. I don’t get into that.

STEPHANOPOULOS: The way to get beyond it is to answer yes or no. Do you believe —

TRUMP: That’s possible, but I don’t get into it.

RUSH: No, no. George, the way to get beyond it is not answer yes or no. The way to fall into your stupid silly trap is to answer yes or no. This is not even journalism, just more gotcha. I hate this stuff, folks. I get so fed up. It’s so predictable. There’s no excuse for any Republican ever falling for this stuff again.

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RUSH: You know, the mainstream media, the Drive-Bys, why are they never obligated to elevate our politics? I mean, you want to talk about the primary offenders. You want to talk about the people that actually make these assaults on our politics possible and level many of them, you’ve gotta look no further than the Drive-By Media, which is really inseparable from the Democrat Party anyway.

How many of you remember Joe Biden said the Republicans wanted to put blacks back in chains? It wasn’t that long ago. Anybody remember the media being outraged at the statement, just beneath our politics, asking the vice president, “Why don’t you want to elevate our politics, Mr. Vice President, why make such a baseless allegation?” Anybody remember that? I don’t.

Biden also called the Tea Party a bunch of terrorists. In fact, you can take your pick. Find a Democrat, go research what they’ve said about the Tea Party, and then ask yourself, “Why doesn’t anybody demand of the Democrats that they elevate our politics?” Take a look at Obama. I mean, this list is never ending. Bitter clingers, Jeremiah Wright, you name it. And yet here’s Stephanopoulos, Chuck Todd with Donald Trump demanding that he do something to elevate our politics. Maybe he doesn’t have to defend Obama, but couldn’t he do something about that idiot question to elevate our politics.

I maintain that that question — I don’t know whether the guy was a plant or not. I have no idea. Now, there’s a theory running around that the guy was a plant and that exactly what has happened was the objective. I don’t know. I don’t know enough. I think it’s too easy to say that, but the point is why does somebody like that exist? Why does somebody have questions like that? You know, you can find on the World Wide Web, you can find stories of secret terrorist training camps in this country, and you know gullible people run across things and read it all the time. I don’t know about you, but the stuff I get relayed to me by people who think they’ve found something earth-shattering on the Internet, I’ve had to set up spam filters to make sure I don’t get that garbage. And I get frustrated at people who ought to know better for sending it.

But it’s out there, you can’t deny it’s out there. And when you have circumstances in the country with things happening that make no sense and are inexplicable, people are demanding answers and they’ll fill the vacuum with something. You know, let me give you a good analogy here. I don’t know how many of you are — just stick with me on this for a second. I don’t know how many of you are aware, but Apple’s new operating system for the iPhone and the iPad is called iOS 9, and there’s something in it that has taken off and has created overnight best-selling apps.

You know what they are? They are content blockers for Apple’s web browser on the iPhone and the iPad which is called Safari. There are any number of these blockers, and many of them are free. Some of them will cost 99 cents up to three bucks. You buy them just as you would buy an app on the App Store, and after that, you go to Safari settings and you turn one or more of these blockers on, and then you go start suffering the Web, and you know what happens? Websites load instantly. It’s uncanny.

I’ve tested it. I tested it during the beta period. I don’t want to name any websites, but one very popular news site, without these blockers for everything, all the trackers to load, and the ads, and the videos, 55 seconds. With these blockers in, that same Web page loads in five seconds. It’s uncanny. Now, this has caused there to be a major debate. We now have customers who are purposely, eagerly, blocking ads. Now, this has been done on desktop computers for a long time, got ad blockers out there, but it’s never been the case on mobile.

Apple decided to do this, so goes the theory, because Web pages were taking so long to load and there were so many ads that it was eating up battery life. I went out, I got a program that tells me everything that gets loaded on any Web page that you load. And I don’t want to mention any pages; it’s not the point. But they’re pages everybody uses. Try 35 different trackers including ads, analytics, trackers that tell the host website where you are, what your IP address is, what other things you’re clicking on on that Web page. That’s how they’re able to target advertising for you.

But the question has been raised, okay, well, this is horrible, because from the advertiser’s standpoint, their ads are being blocked, and from the website standpoint, this is horrible because their ads are not being seen and that’s their only source of revenue. They don’t charge for the actual site like the New York Times or the Washington Post does. They don’t have a pay wall, they’re free, and advertising is what supports them and how they stay in business and pay their bills. But if these content blockers are gonna grow in popularity, nobody’s gonna see their ads.

So the debate has begun, whose fault is this? Is this Apple’s fault? Does Apple have some reason here they want to harm advertisers on the Web because Apple’s own programs are not blocked. It’s just safari. It’s just their website. But Apple has a new app that is an option for news websites to join where ads are not blocked, they will be seen but Apple gets a cut. Look, I don’t want to get too much in the weeds here, but the question is who’s really to blame, and there are two answers to this.

One is greedy advertisers and websites who just kept loading these websites with ad after ad after ad and video after video after video to the point that people got so fed up they didn’t want to deal with it anymore, stopped visiting these websites, the ads, some of them, were X-rated. Some of them were just inexplicably bad, and the pages just kept selling these ads ’cause that’s their revenue source. It finally got to the point where, for their customers, Apple had to come in and give relief.

And the other side says, no, no, no, it’s not the website’s fault and it’s not the advertisers’ fault. It’s Apple’s fault and their anti-capitalist and they’re anti-trade, free trade and all this. The point is, depending on where you come down on the debate, most people are conceding that too much junk has ended up on too many Web pages, and consumers, when given the choice of either dealing with the mess that exists or blocking the content, are choosing to block it.

Well, the same thing here in politics. The same thing with this media stuff. You know, who’s really to blame? So this guy stands up at the Trump thing and starts talking about all this odd stuff and asking Trump about it. He’s not the only one. There are websites devoted to this out there. There is such fundamental change going on in this country, fundamental change that has never been voted on. Fundamental change Obama never told the truth about.

If Obama had told the American people that by the time he left office the Iranians were gonna be paid $150 billion to spread terrorism and they were gonna have a nuclear weapon, do you think he would have been elected? Do you think if Obama had promised people there was gonna be a national health care system and everything that’s happened with it that has happened was going to happen, you think he’d have been elected? Go down the list of everything that has happened with the Obama administration. Immigration, do you think if Obama had campaigned in 2008 on amnesty and again in 2012, he’d been reelected? No.

So there are a lot of people that feel defrauded here. A lot of people already feel powerless because Washington is it’s own place and it has obviously no interest, concern, or care for what the people of this country think. It only cares about the people that donate money and contribute money. Those are the people running Washington, DC. There’s a giant, giant disconnect that we have been talking about.

So people started evolving oddball, kook theories to try to explain this, because it doesn’t make common sense to them. And somehow it’s Trump’s fault now? There’s been so much misrepresentation reported as fact in the media. There’s been so much disinformation, misdirection, out-and-out lies told as fact in the media. You’ve got a Republican Party that doesn’t stand up against any of it. The Democrat Party gets away with running around saying and doing whatever they want to do with impunity. You have to somehow understand how people are frustrated here.

And yet here comes Stephanopoulos and here come F. Chuck Todd demanding that Donald Trump and Ben Carson explain this. It’s up to them to elevate the tone of our politics and so forth, when I would submit the tone of our politics has nothing to do with Donald Trump. It has nothing to do with Ben Carson. It has nothing to do with anybody on the Republican side. It has to do with what’s been happening to this country over the last number of years, inexplicably, and most of it, I dare say, even though Obama won two elections, hasn’t been voted on.

So which came first, folks? People that believe in these conspiracy, kook theories, or people planted to ask those questions, or a media working with the Democrat Party doing everything they can to fundamentally transform the greatness of this country to mediocrity. And whole bunch of people who oppose it want no part of it and are grasping at straws to try to stop it because they don’t have political representation in Washington. They do not have a political party representing them, pushing back, trying to stop any of this. You ponder that.