How Can We Trust Senate Liars?

RUSH: Dave in Gurnee, Illinois, welcome to the EIB Network, sir. Hello.

CALLER: Hey, Rush. I wanted to tell you how I use your Harry Reid smear letter. I use it as the official Rush Limbaugh Senate scorecard. And what I do is I have it next to the TV so when I have C-SPAN on, watching the Senate, I can put the face to the name to how they actually find out information about legislation before they sign it. Because they signed a letter that they did not have full information on, and knowing the full story myself, if they’re so flippant that they can put their signature on something where they did not have the full story, how can we trust anything that they’re going to present?

RUSH: Well, you know, we’ve heard these stories a lot that some of these bills are so massive that it’s not possible for anybody — well, it is possible, they just don’t read it all. They occasionally assign some staff to read it, but it really isn’t true. The real question that I would have for you, David, is, do you really think that Dingy Harry and his gang didn’t know the truth when they wrote and signed that letter?

CALLER: Oh, no. I believe that they knew the truth, but they knew that this was a way to bring attention and get you mentioned on the Senate floor in a bad light where it’s going to get national attention. It is such a smear. Knowing the full truth, I remember when I was listening to you that day, and I’m going, ‘Whoa,’ you know, I mean, just listening to the conversation, and then to hear Chris Matthews come on Hardball and one of the first things he said is how you called the troops phony, that was his first line on Hardball —

RUSH: I know.

CALLER: I actually called MSNBC and left a message saying, ‘How can I trust even Chris Matthews on reporting a story, if he doesn’t get the full facts?’ Or, you know, present them the right way. And, you know, basically to kind of take away the credibility that he professes to have.

RUSH: Well, look, it’s an excellent question to ask. How can you trust anything these guys say in the Senate anymore when you now know they’re willing to lie, when they’re willing to put their signature to a lie, and the same thing with a lot of other — you can go beyond Chris Matthews and a bunch of other Drive-By journalists and ask the same thing, and the answer to it is, ‘You shouldn’t, because they’re advocates.’ They’re activists hiding behind either the title of journalist or even commentator and so forth, but they have agendas. And, of course, everybody does. It’s not that they’re committing some sort of professional malpractice by having an agenda. Thinking, engaged human beings can’t help but having a preference for certain outcomes, issue by issue. It’s always been absurd to me, it’s always been ridiculous to expect that functioning, thinking, engaged human beings, within journalism or whatever, to not care about the outcome of the things they’re reporting on. Of course, they do! The big lie has always been that they don’t care, that they are objective and that they are unbiased and nonpartisan. And the lid’s been blown off that.

Everybody knows they’ve got agendas; everybody knows they care about the outcome of events they cover and others. They maintain that they don’t. They maintain that they’re just reporters; they’re just doing their jobs. And they’re not. Not as reporters. Everybody is an activist and an agenda-oriented person today that’s in media, news media particularly. Some admit it and some don’t. The ones that don’t admit it are the ones that get the most heat. Like, for example, Matthews. If Matthews would just say, ‘Look, this Limbaugh guy has been a thorn in our side, Limbaugh this, Limbaugh that, he came out here and he said this about phony soldiers, he may be right, he may be wrong, but he shouldn’t have said it in this context and created a confusion,’ but they don’t do it that way. They have to lie because circular route goes back to the theme: liberals, liberalism cannot flourish without a monopoly. They don’t allow debate, they don’t allow competing facts.

In fact, they’ll establish their own set of facts that aren’t, in an alternative universe. They don’t care if they advance their cause on the basis of lies. We do. We don’t want false success; we don’t want an agenda or a mandate that’s based on the fact that we’ve lied to people. They couldn’t care less because it’s not the people they’re interested in. The people’s relevance and worth to liberals only goes so far as getting their votes, and after that, couldn’t care less. Ask any minority group that votes en masse for Democrats, have they not been complaining about the same misery that the Democrats have been promising to fix for 50 years? Dirty little secret is, Democrats don’t want to fix it. They want them kept miserable so they keep blaming Republicans and racism and all these things for it that are not relevant.