Are Rush and Ted Koppel Pals?

RUSH: Bob in Santa Rosa, California, you’re next on the EIB Network, sir. Hello.

CALLER: Yeah, hello. Rush.

RUSH: Hey, mega dittos from the liberal armpit of northern California.

RUSH: Yeah, I’ve been there.

CALLER: Yeah. I know you have. Hey, Rush, tell me you were only kidding when you referred to Ted Koppel as your buddy.

RUSH: Well, he’s not a buddy. But I know him. He’s a friend. I haven’t talked to him in years.

CALLER: He’s a fraud, Rush, and I can prove it.

RUSH: (sigh)

CALLER: He attempted to alter the 2004 election by airing an investigative report that was a bigger forgery than Dan Rather. Koppel made Dan Rather look like a choirboy —

RUSH: What was it?

CALLER: — by comparison.

RUSH: What was that?

CALLER: It was called, ‘What they saw, a day on the river.’ It was about Kerry’s Silver Star, and he had John O’Neill as his guest.

RUSH: Okay. I remember that now that you bring it up.

CALLER: Well, if you look at it, his first witness claims that her husband was killed that day in the firefight —

RUSH: Yeah.

CALLER: — and to support her position, she walked Nightline down to his grave. The date of death on his headstone said May 12th, 1969, and the Silver Star event was on February 28th. I mean if — I mean if — if — if their —

RUSH: I vaguely —

CALLER: — investigative report is that shabby, how can you believe anything else they told you?

RUSH: Well, I’ve been asking that question about much of the Drive-By Media for the longest time. All I can tell you is that — and I remember this story that you’re talking about, and the 2004 campaign had — the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. Look, truth is the biggest enemy to these guys, and the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth knocked that campaign of Kerry’s sideways. They had no idea how to deal with it, other than to try to characterize it as a bunch of lies. But Kerry’s own autobiography — he changed his story about when he was in Cambodia, whether he was in Cambodia, did Nixon send him to Cambodia? He said he was in Cambodia when Nixon was president. It was not possible. He’d been back. That ad campaign sent the agents of the Democrat Party into circling the wagons and trying to help their guy.

As for Koppel, I used to be on Nightline quite regularly early on in the career of this program, the history of this program. The first time I was on Nightline I debated Algore on the environment, in fact, and I was on subsequently for a while. I had a little falling out over an incident, and I mentioned it publicly, and that offended Ted and I was never invited back, but he mentions listening to me now and then. But he wrote a piece and delivered it on NPR yesterday morning, that is dead-on right. So when I say he’s a ‘buddy,’ he’s acquaintance. I haven’t talked to him in a long time, and I’m not going to back off from it. I’ve never had, other than the one little falling out, never had a bad experience with him whatsoever. I had a lot of phone call conversations with him. In fact, in the early days of this program, he was, in a way, somewhat fatherly. He loved the program. He tooled around in his SL-600, 54, whatever it was, his little Mercedes, and he listened and told me about it. He didn’t agree with everything, but they were all pleasant discussions. Anyway, I appreciate the energy and the emotion out there.