Everybody is just righteously indignant, righteously offended. ‘Why, how can anybody say something like that! Where does that come from?’ but, The Offended are very selective in what it is that offends them. They’re only offended when certain people do or say things that offend them. If others that are not members of the so-called majority engage in the similar behavior or utter similar words, you never hear that they’re offended. That’s what’s sort of delectable and juicy about this. This is all libs. This is all libs, and they’re tying themselves into knots here, ’cause you’ve got the charge of racism and bigotry on the table, and that charge is usually leveled at conservatives. But the person in question here can in no way be considered a conservative. So they’re tying themselves into knots over trying to do what would be consistently correct and make sense for them to do, but they don’t like doing it. They’re having all kinds of problems. I just want to reiterate one point. When I say that the media is largely responsible for this, ‘responsible’ may be the wrong word, but to say that the media is simply watching this from afar and being objective on it is a joke. It is laughable.
The Today Show’s Matt Lauer really lit into Don Imus today, but guess what? NBC owns the network that simulcasts the radio show. As if they didn’t know! Did they just learn this last week? Every reporter for that network of any stature has been on the Imus show or wanted to be on that show, including Matthews and David Gregory. The list is long and far and wide, and they’ve all known what is going on. Now they’ve gotta pretend that they’re objective in covering this event even though they’ve sat there while guests on this show and heard similar things for all of these recent years and never said a thing about it. But now all of a sudden they can be objective. Now the network that put this show on television, NBC, has decided, ‘Well, we can’t put up with this. We’ll suspend this show for a couple of weeks.’ They’re gonna pretend objectivity, and that’s exactly what is going on. This is pretend objectivity, as if they didn’t know about what was happening on this show for all of these years — and in the process of this, guess who’s getting a total pass? NBC’s getting a pass. MSNBC’s getting a pass. Their reporters are getting a pass. The reporters from Newsweek and TIME that go on this show, they’re getting a pass.
But they were all enablers. They were going on the program for their own selfish reasons. They were there for selfish reasons of the host. It’s a mutual usable society, if you will, or mutual user society. They all sat there and enabled this. Look, if it hadn’t been for all of these liberal media types going on this program, the truth of its smallness would have been known long ago. I’ve said many times in describing buzz and PR, there are a lot of things — movies, television shows, radio shows — that have a lot of ‘buzz’ about them, but no audience. This is one of them, and the buzz comes from the guests who appear on the program. These reporters who are now doing their damnedest to appear objective about it, and shocked, and outraged. ‘Why, this can’t go on any longer! Why, he took a pledge! Why, he promised this wouldn’t happen any more,’ blah, blah, blah. But they don’t like doing it. It’s a very uncomfortable position because this is normally what they do to conservatives. The media are so cowed in this. They won’t say diddly about Al Sharpton or the Reverend Jackson’s past. They’ve both made racist and anti-Semitic comments, and Sharpton in his case, sickening actions — the Tawana Brawley episode, and the Democrat Party’s embracing these two guys.
Meredith Vieira had Jesse Jackson on today and said, ‘I’m sorry, Reverend Jackson, but I must bring up the Hymietown. I’m sorry to do that.’ Well, there’s fear there, a little fear. You gotta apologize for bringing up the Hymietown remark. ‘I have to mention that this happened,’ and so forth. So the bottom line is that we’ve got an Offended industry. We’ve got an industry of the Offended and the Concerned, and they spring into action. I don’t know. It’s almost like a plan. You know exactly what’s going to trigger it and when it happens you know it’s going to get triggered; it’s just going to be a matter of time, and of course the question that I have is, ‘How long is it going to be before the American people simply get tired of all this?’ Every day you wake up, you turn on the news, and you find out somebody’s outraged about something. They’re outraged about secondhand smoke. They’re outraged. Look at the Drive-By Media! For crying out loud, folks, all it does is try to keep us in chaos and tumult every day. ‘This is going to kill us. This is going to destroy us. This is going to make us sick. This is going to shorten our life span.’
From global warming to whatever, the business of the media today is chaos and fear, and to keep you constantly in tumult, and then the Offended chime in and say, ‘Well, we can’t permit this to be a civilized society and so forth.’ I just wonder where the tipping point’s going to be where a majority of people say, ‘I don’t want to grow up and be offended every day. I don’t want to wake up and be offended. I’m sick and tired of it. People are just overly sensitive and so forth.’ Remember the old saw, ‘Hey, look, lighten up. This is nothing.’ This really boils down to this, to the Offended. I’ve mentioned this before on many previous occasions on this program. I very seldom get offended. It’s a waste of time. It’s a waste of energy, and it’s a waste of intellect. But more than that, it is a surrendering of self, a surrendering of power. Why in the world would you want to grant people, people you don’t even know, the ability and power to offend you? See, the dirty little secret is that half or more of these people who are offended are not. They are in the midst of a political agenda.
Liberalism runs clear through this whole controversy, and being offended is simply a liberal tactic in order to squelch behavior and speech that you don’t like, and when you say your feelings are hurt and you’ve been offended by this and you don’t understand why, essentially, if you strip it all away, people are admitting that they’re just a bunch of linguini-spined, limp-wristed individuals who have no guts and no courage. Why in the world would anybody want to run around and make their whole life being offended? Who wants to grant somebody that kind of power, that kind of authority over them? People say things, let ’em bounce off! It’s no big deal. Now, in certain instances of it, it’s difficult to do. I will admit that. If people close to you, people that you know do things that offend you, take advantage of you, misunderstand generosity in some cases, but I think that’s more disappointment than it is wasting time being offended. We have a whole ‘being offended’ culture out there and never, ever forget this, that the vast majority of these people who are trying to create as many of you in that group of Offended are simply executing a political agenda, as all of liberalism is.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: To Orlando, Florida. This is Roger. I appreciate your patience in waiting out there, Roger. Nice to have you with us.
CALLER: Oh, thanks. It’s great to be here. I just need my Rush prayer rug so I can lead the jihad against liberalism.
RUSH: (Laughing.)
CALLER: Hey, Rush, we talked about… That one lady that was on was beautiful. I always say, ‘You always have to ask yourself, ‘How does this affect anybody’s life? How did Imus’ words affect anybody’s life?” Not at all. Not a single way.
RUSH: John McWhorter, who is black and who is a scholar, was on John Gibson’s Fox News show yesterday, and Gibson said, ‘What do you think about this?’ and John McWhorter said, ‘I’m too busy to worry about the comments of some little man.’
CALLER: Yeah. Absolutely.
RUSH: That’s exactly right. That is exactly right! If you allow this kind of stuff to upset you, it’s just distracting. It’s distracting, and it’s wasting energy.
CALLER: And think back real quick to recent history. Some people that did say something that did affect people’s lives. It cost a team its championship. It cost a team three players. It cost a member of the team his job in New York. It cost the coach’s job, when nothing happened. The things that were said affected the entire Duke Lacrosse team’s life. Yet we have not heard a single apology, nothing.
RUSH: No, in fact the charges still haven’t been dropped against them.
CALLER: Wait a second. I’m sorry. They were rich white guys. Sorry, Rush. I forgot.
RUSH: That ties into what I was saying earlier about when you’re a minority, you’re going to get the benefit of the doubt in everything. It’s like Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas. You might say, ‘Well, where’s the minority there?’ Anita Hill. Clarence Thomas is not a black guy. Clarence Thomas is too white; he’s conservative. So she comes along at the last minute with this charge, and the libs even said, ‘Look it’s not so much the nature of the evidence that matters here. It’s the seriousness of the charge. That’s why we’ve gotta look into this.’
CALLER: Absolutely.
RUSH: The Duke Lacrosse case is a good example of the double standard that exists, but that’s not just the outgrowth of black-white relations in the country. There’s also a lot of feminism in that one that was driving people to draw conclusions before any evidence was ever in or presented. It turns out there isn’t any, but it fit the template that liberals have constructed of the various groups — not individuals, but groups — that were involved, and that’s another problem with groupthink. People don’t become individuals anymore. If you’re a member of a group, if you’re a minority, you could be typecast, and if you’re a member of a so-called protected majority, you could be typecast without anybody ever knowing you personally, or knowing anything about you. For all this talk, folks, about racism and so forth, let me say this again. The people in this society who first look at individuals and tie them to groups are liberals. They see skin color first. They see gender first. They see sexual orientation first. They see economic and socioeconomic circumstances first.
They don’t see individuals. They’re the ones that do all this. The people that were jumping on the Duke lacrosse players were all liberals. The professors, the first 88 signed that letter, the coach got canned, with no evidence whatsoever. Where was the university defending its customers, its students? It was nowhere. Everybody folded the tent the minute the allegation was made, precisely because nobody wanted to be accused of racism. The North Carolina Senate just passed an apology for slavery bill, and it’s going to go to the House, and what do you bet before it’s all said and done, that a bunch of Republicans in the House in North Carolina go ahead and say, ‘Okay, we apologize for slavery,’ which will lead then to reparations, and the reason they’ll do so is simple. If they vote against it, they’ll be afraid that in the next campaign, the opponent will do a TV commercial calling them a racist, and that’s how you paralyze independent thought and that’s actually how you intimidate. A classic illustration is what’s happening here. Linda in Orange County, California. Is that right? Yeah. Nice to have you, Linda.
CALLER: Hi. Thank you. We love you, Rush, but this morning I am just outraged. I am very upset about these Don Imus comments. Let me tell you, I happen to be white, but when I heard what Imus did, I was outraged for these young ladies, and all those young ladies became my daughters. What I see are a group of very intelligent women. Rush, these young ladies are at a major university. They are athletes. My son is in college and an athlete. I know what it takes, Rush, for them to have joined and been on a team of this stature. They have accomplished more in their young life than Imus ever has. They are the future of our country. How dare he take nonpolitical people and try to tarnish their joy or their success.
RUSH: Now, is an interesting point. The coach, C. Vivian Stringer, made the point. She was responding to, well, some of the people defending the perp here, the suspect. Some of the people defending the perp have gone out and said, ‘Hey, look, it’s a satire show. It’s politics! It’s a satire of popular culture and all this,’ and C. Vivian Stringer said, ‘Wait a minute, my team are not public figures. They’re not politicians.’ (Well, it’s arguable whether public figures. They just played for the national championship in basketball.) At any rate, I thought she had a good point in that regard, which is one of the things that you are echoing here, but I’m struck by how much this bothers you. These women are not your daughters, yet they’ve become your daughters.
CALLER: Oh, absolutely, Rush! I feel exactly the same way about these young women as I did that morning with John Kerry and his comments about Mary Cheney. To take nonpolitical people, young people who are living their lives who have quasi-public lives. Maybe, all right, they’re on TV.
RUSH: Yeah, but wait a minute, now. John Kerry was running for president. If he won, you have a guy that’s going to have real power. We’re talking about an insignificant radio guy here!
CALLER: He is insignificant, Rush, and I hope the American people vote with their remote controls and never watch him again.
RUSH: There are only 300,000 watching it anyway — and that’s with numbers up like 30%. You realize nationwide that’s not one-tenth of one percent? It’s insignificant.