CALLER: Hi, Rush. Happy upcoming Independence Day to you. Before I get to my point, might I be able to share another testimony about how your program has changed the way America thinks?
RUSH: By all means, sir. We love those kinds of testimonies.
CALLER: Good. We have to go back to February of this year, the day after the Super Bowl, and you were talking about the disparity — or the perceived disparity — by the mainstream media of the lack of black head coaches in America n football. And you said something that I’ll never forget, and I’ll tell you why. You said, ‘So here we have four head coaches,’ and the first thing I thought you were going to talk about was Paul Begala.
RUSH: Forehead coaches. You just had to try to get your little joke in there. Did you tell Snerdley that joke? Did he approve you telling that joke?
CALLER: No he didn’t.
RUSH: Okay. He would lie to me. He would lie to me. (laughing) Just kidding. I’m in a lighthearted mood.
CALLER: I genuinely thought of Paul Begala when you said that.
RUSH: Well, since you bring up the Super Bowl, and you started talking about the media and so forth, I had a lot of fun during the Super Bowl. The media was all over poor Rex Grossman. They just couldn’t give the guy a break. The guy was just out there, just messing up every time he took the field. It was a crapshoot when Grossman took the field with the Bears, and because of the comment that I had made about the media and Donovan McNabb, I thought I would tweak them, and it worked. I was like out there saying, ‘Why do you think the media is all over Grossman and trying to get rid of him? It’s because he’s a white quarterback,’ and they took the bait, and they actually ran with it. I set ’em up, and they ran with it. A few of them figured it out in time to spare their brethren from going overboard with it, because it was clearly a tweak of the media. They’ve got their agendas, and they’ve got their action lines, and if something happens to cause their knee-jerk reaction to keep moving that action line forward, what really is the truth about a thing becomes irrelevant. Now, what was it that you really called about, other than your joke? You know, I’ve warned people, don’t try this at home.
CALLER: What I really called about was an article that I found in the New York Times Sunday about how an angry Elizabeth Edwards called in to a TV talk show to berate Ann Coulter for the things that Ann Coulter said, or people didn’t understand how she said what she said.
RUSH: Yes, they did. That’s another thing. Of course they did! They just chose to ignore the context on purpose because the stand-alone phrase gave them a chance for their eyeballs to pop out, for them to have veins pop out and start saliva slipping down the corners of their mouth, and they could go nuts and make it look good for ratings. They purposely ignored the context. They knew what she said and how and where and when.
CALLER: And not only that, but the way the New York Times reported that story, they said that Elizabeth Edwards ‘spontaneously called into a TV talk show.’ First of all, I, and I think half of America knew that it was Chris Matthews’ Hardball show — and also, she didn’t call in ‘spontaneously.’ Chris Matthews arranged that call.
RUSH: Well, you can’t call in spontaneously if you don’t know the number, and Hardball doesn’t take phone calls. So there’s no way you coulda known the number. She had to call somebody to get the number, and the question is: Did she call them and ask to be on, or did one of the producers call and say, ‘Ms. Edwards, we got Ann Coulter on for the full hour, would you like to sandbag her?’ You’re right, of course. However, whoever started it, the whole thing was a setup and it was an ambush from the get-go, and it was planned that way.
CALLER: That’s how I understood it, but the New York Times didn’t report it like that. They reported it as a spontaneous incident.
RUSH: See, you have expectations of the New York Times that you should drop. Your expectation is they’re going to tell you the truth about things, and if you have that expectation of the New York Times you’re going to forever be saddened and disappointed or angry and outraged. It’s the last thing in this political climate that they’re interested in.