RUSH: Once again, what are we faced with here today, folks? Once again, we’re faced with trying to put in perspective what’s being reported in the media about the Boston Marathon bombing and its aftermath. You know, I have to say something. I don’t know why this popped into my head right now, and I’m gonna get in trouble for this. I know I’m gonna get in trouble for it. The Red Sox game on Saturday, the Royals were in town, and you’ve all heard about David Ortiz dropping the F-bomb in the pregame ceremony, being applauded for it. The FCC, that’s fine with us; FCC, no problem.
He grabbed the microphone and said, “This is our F-ing town.” The stadium’s full. There are families there. I understand the raw emotion, and I guess I’m a fuddy-duddy. I don’t know. I think that’s the kind of thing, it isn’t gonna be long before the word’s commonplace on television now. It’s just another tiny little thing that leads to overall decay and decline. It’s not a big deal, but just some little thing that gnaws at me here. Anyway, the broadcast today is going to feature putting things in perspective.
Oh, and a deep gratitude-felt thanks to Mark Steyn for sitting in on Friday. I wanted to make sure, well, there have been members of the audience, Snerdley, who have thought me rude and impolite not to thank the guest hosts for coming in here and accepting our payment to — (laughing) — to do the program.
We all owe a debt to a smoker. A guy in his house wanted to smoke a cigarette. His wife would not let him smoke the cigarette inside. So he went out in the backyard, and while he was smoking his cigarette he’s looking at his boat. And he said, “There’s something strange about that boat.” Something didn’t look right. It was his boat, so he climbed up on his boat while he’s out in the backyard smoking a cigarette, he unzips the protective winter cover that he has on his boat, and he sees the bleeding, half conscious Boston Marathon Muslim bomber. Remember that old saying, for the want of a nail the kingdom was lost, something like that?
This guy wants a cigarette. We hate cigarettes. We hate smokers. But, if not for this guy being a smoker, if not for this guy being forced to the backyard to smoke his cigarette, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev might still be in that boat bleeding out. He might not have been caught if it hadn’t been for that smoker. Now, we don’t know because the guy did get caught, and it’s all downhill from there. I just wanted to let everybody know. “Mr. Limbaugh, you really enjoy this, don’t you? You know that everybody hates smoking and you like smoking and so you just had to –” I’m just pointing out what happened. I’m happy the guy smoked. Smokers do a lot of good in this country, and they’re a maligned group and I just wanted to single this guy out.
Can we go back, ladies and gentlemen, to the audio sound bites. Last Tuesday on this program, I want to replay for you a prediction that I made.
RUSH ARCHIVE: Let me ask you a question, again based on my observation in recent years. If you are a Muslim listening to this program, and it turns out that a Muslim did bomb the Boston Marathon, how do you feel? I dare say that, if you are a Muslim, you can be pretty certain, you can rest assured that everybody in the media will circle the wagons and say, “This is not because of Islam. This is a lone bad actor, lone wolf. This in no way says anything about Islam. It in no way says anything about Muslims. It’s just a lone nut,” and they will remind us that the vast majority of people denounce this kind of terrorism, the vast majority of Muslims.
So if you’re a Muslim and it turns out to be a Muslim bomber, you will be in no way associated with it. Which is fair. However, folks, if you are a conservative out there today, and it turns out that whoever did this has either a real or imagined connection to conservatives? Everybody in the media will unite to denounce your whole group. There will not be the same treatment. If this turns out to be some crazy extremist, domestic terrorist, everybody thought to be in that guy’s group is gonna be tarred and feathered as well. And, believe me, that’s what they’re all hoping for on the left. They are the ones saying so. They are the ones indicating that. Not me.
RUSH: David Sirota at Salon was hoping the bomber was a white guy. Because if it wasn’t a white guy, it was gonna set back liberalism. Now I suppose this is gonna set back immigration, gonna set back gun control. I am reading so many liberals out there today who are saying, “Would somebody explain to me why the Senate did what they did?” The liberals are still frosted over the Senate vote on the background check gun legislation. They are still frosted. They’re asking, “How could this happen? How could these senators do this? Would somebody please tell me, what would you say to the parents of the people who were killed in Boston?” I would tell them that the law that the Senate was debating wouldn’ta stopped this.
These guys had their guns. They violated existing law to get them. They had already violated gun law. There isn’t any new gun law that woulda stopped the Boston Marathon bombers from being armed. Did you hear President Obama’s remarks on the Boston bombings? His heart was really in it when he was lecturing us about not rushing to judgment. He said, “That’s why we take care not to rush to judgment. It’s not about motivations or individuals, certainly not about entire groups of people.” Isn’t that good of him to remind us of that? Kind of like the way he never rushed to judgment about George Zimmerman or the Boston cop.
Michael Goodwin in the New York Post yesterday wrote: “After the capture of the second Boston bombing suspect, President Obama gave a Friday-night speech to praise private citizens and law-enforcement officials. He called the bombers ‘terrorists’ and said, ‘They failed because the people of Boston refused to be intimidated. They failed because, as Americans, we refused to be terrorized.’ Good, strong stuff — before he ruined it. ObamaÂ’s uplifting tone suddenly shifted into peevish scold as he warned against a rush to judgment ‘about the motivations of these individuals’ or ‘entire groups of people.’ He continued: ‘One of the things that makes America the greatest nation on Earth … is that we welcome people from all around the world — people of every faith, every ethnicity, from every corner of the globe.'”
Is that really what’s made us great? Multiculturalism, diversity, that’s what he means. Is that really what made this country great, or is it freedom, is it our founding, is it the Declaration of Independence? Is it American history that’s made us great? What, open borders has made us great? Have to get a plug in for immigration reform. “‘People of every faith, every ethnicity, from every corner of the globe. So as we continue to learn more about why and how this tragedy happened, letÂ’s make sure that we sustain that spirit.’ My immediate reaction was loud and unprintable. Reading the transcript in the light of day didnÂ’t help. To put it kindly, the president is stuck in deep denial. Shadow-boxing against the truth, he canÂ’t bring himself to say ‘Muslim terrorists.’ To do so would, in his mind, feed a stereotype and fuel innate American prejudice. So reality must be avoided and important facts omitted about the extraordinary events in Boston.”
And that was my point in the sound bite. Live in denial, barely say the word “Muslim” here. Lone wolves, not tied to anybody. The Chechen president says (paraphrasing), “These guys were raised in America. If you want to find the problem, look at how they were educated.” He may have a point, but let’s listen to some sound bites, bouncing off my prediction what the media would do if the bomber turned out to be Muslim. We’ll start with Friday morning. ABC special report coverage of the manhunt. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, bomber number two, Diane Sawyer interviewing the suspect’s neighbor Larry Aaronson. Aaronson gives his reaction when he first saw the photos released by the authorities.
AARONSON: This morning around three or four o’clock in the morning when the pictures of him became clearer and clearer, you know, on the television, and on the Internet, I said, “My God, that looks like Dzhokhar. That looks just like Dzhokhar.” You know, said, “Oh, it can’t be, can’t possibly be.” And people said to me, “Why didn’t you call police and say something?” And I said, “Because I’m not sending the police out to some lovely Islamic kid who looks like this kid and have everybody go hound him down like they did to that poor Saudi kid.”
RUSH: Turned out he was the culprit. (imitating Aaronson) “I’m not gonna send the cops. This is a nice guy. I know this guy. I can’t believe it’s this guy. It looks just like him, I’m not gonna send the cops out to some lovely Islamic kid who looks like this. I’m not gonna do that, have him hounded like the Saudi kid was.” CNN Friday morning, Starting Point, special report on the manhunt, Jake Tapper, CNN national security analyst Juliette Kayyem have this exchange about it all.
TAPPER: It certainly seems as though these individuals are, uh, Islamic terrorists.
KAYYEM: Well, yes. But – but thatÂ’s – those are two separate words at this stage. Because I think after 9/11 we have this fear of tying a, you know, Muslim with terrorism. We shouldn’t do that.
RUSH: Yep. I hate to do, “I told you so,” but this was not a tough prediction. Knew this was gonna happen. You know how tough it was there for Jake? (imitating Tapper) “It certainly seems as though these individuals are — ah — ah, darn it, ah, jeez, ah, can’t believe it. Ah, I can’t believe I have to say it, oh, my, it looks like they’re Islamic terrorists.” Last Friday morning, CBS special report on the manhunt, coanchor Gayle King talking with Charlie Rose and Scott Pelley. Gayle King says, “News this morning, the suspects are from Chechnya. That’s what everybody’s been talking about.”
PELLEY: Chechnya is a province of the former Soviet Union, province of Russia, which is a predominantly Muslim province. But we also understand, as Bob Orr was reporting to us earlier, that these young men apparently had been in the United States for some time.
ROSE: And were legal residents.
PELLEY: Apparently, one of these young men has been here at least five years, so what is the connection to Chechnya? Is there a political or religious connection to Chechnya? I think we won’t know for a while.
KING: No, they’re being described as totally assimilated.
ROSE: One of the questions is whether they became radicalized after they got here, that, in fact, they did not arrive in the United States with the intent of committing terrorist acts, but something happened.
PELLEY: That’s right. At least one of them said that he had no friends in the United States, even after all of these years.
RUSH: Yeah, so he’s a lone wolf. You can’t blame — there’s nothing to see here. Tom Brokaw is blaming US drones for motivating the bombers. Has anybody seen any evidence of that? Brokaw was on Meet the Press yesterday, and he said, “I think we also have to examine the use of drones that the United States is involved in, and there are a lot of civilians, innocently killed in a drone attack, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iraq.” He said, “We have to work a lot harder at motivation here. What prompts a young man to come to this country and still feel alienated from it and to go back to Russia and do whatever he did? I don’t think we’ve examined that enough. There’s a enormous rage against what they see in that part of the world as a presumptuousness of the United States.”
Tom, I hate to tell you, and, folks, look, this isn’t easy. I don’t relish a program like this. And I don’t relish pointing out counterintelligence or countertruths. But, Tom, you don’t have to go to Pakistan or Afghanistan or Iraq to be radicalized against America. To me, you can be radicalized against America right here in America. You can be radicalized against America in American schools. You can be radicalized in America against America by watching American television and movies and websites. You can be radicalized by professors, many of them former bombers themselves, many of them with grievances against this country. You don’t need to go outside this country to be radicalized against it.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: You remember David Axelrod told us what Obama was thinking last week when this happened. David Axelrod, MSNBC commentator, a former Obama adviser — sorry — does both at the same time.
David Axelrod said, “I’m sure what was going through the president’s mind is we really don’t know who did this, but it was tax day. Was it somebody who was pro, you know, you just don’t know. And so I think the president’s attitude is, let’s not put any inference into this. Let’s just make clear that we’re gonna get the people responsible.” And he’s thinking, yeah, tax day, so maybe we got some bitter clingers out there that are all ticked off about taxes and everything. Kind of like Mayor Doomberg said that the Times Square bomber, at first, was somebody upset with Obama’s health care. That’s why we’re talking about this, folks, because the left is doing — It’s just truth. That’s what I care about here.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Okay, we played the sound bite of the guy, Larry Aaronson, who said that he recognized Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. (imitating Aaronson) “I’m not gonna call the cops. Why would you call the police? I’m not sending the police out to some lovely Islamic kid that looks like this kid, everybody is gonna go hound him down like they did that poor Saudi kid.” It turns out to be the perp. “I’m not gonna call.” We’re talking about assimilation here. The press and a number of people, “Ah, they weren’t radicalized over there. These guys didn’t have any anti-American bias. They’re just bad actors.”
Well, all of the brothers’ family and friends said that they recognized them immediately on the video. None of them called the authorities. None of them. We have one more dead, the MIT policeman, possibly another man, another cop is in critical condition. That might not have happened if they’d been identified sooner. And they were recognized by a bunch of people. “Ah, I’m not gonna call it in. That would be prejudicial. I’m not gonna be biased against Muslims. I’m not gonna phone it in. It looks exactly like these two guys, but I’m not gonna phone it in.”
The family didn’t phone it in. Political correctness. “I’m not gonna be accused of racism. I’m not gonna be accused of anti-Muslim bigotry. It looks exactly like them, I’m not phoning it in.” So an MIT cop is dead, another cop is wounded. And we have just learned that the brothers hijacked a car. They let the driver go because he didn’t look like an American so he was okay. I’m just saying. Just recounting what’s out there. They let the driver of the car that they carjacked go because he didn’t look like an American. They were living in Cambridge. There are people living in Cambridge who are being radicalized against America every day. You know as well as I do, students are being told what a rotten place this country is every day in the classroom. And Axelrod (paraphrasing), “Well, Obama’s looking at tax day as the cause of this.”
Now, speaking of the media. The Salon writer who was praying that the bombers would be white Americans, David Sirota, has tweeted: “Our reaction to terrorism shouldn’t be predicated on the demography of the terrorists. Sad that bigotry apparently obscures this simple truth.” Isn’t that rich. This is the guy praying the bombers would be white so that liberalism would not be harmed, he has tweeted, “Our reaction to terrorism shouldn’t be predicated on the demography of the terrorists.” Meaning, just because these guys are Muslims and blew up the Boston Marathon doesn’t mean that we should be considering them as radical Islamists. That’s bigotry.
No, that’s denial. Fear or unwillingness to admit the truth. David Sirota, Salon.com, who wrote the piece hoping and praying the bombers were white so that liberalism wouldn’t be harmed, also tweeted: “Sad for the victims, sad for Boston, sad for America, sad for whole communities who will be wrongly blamed for the actions of individuals.” It’s exactly why I made my prediction last Tuesday. This is exactly what I was talking about. It’s only sad when these whole communities are not white or conservative, then you can tarnish whole groups if they’re white, conservative, particularly conservative, you can malign whole groups of people.
This is almost a caricature. This is almost cliche. This is almost Mad Magazine, The Onion. “Sad for the victims, sad for Boston, sad for America, sad for whole communities who will be wrongly blamed for the actions of individuals.” Meaning it would be a real shame here to blame Islam or Muslim. A real shame. I don’t think anybody’s doing that anyway, but that’s what these guys are hell-bent on saying.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: To the audio sound bites we return. Chris Cuomo. This is Friday morning, CNN’s Newsroom. This is during the manhunt for the marathon suspects. The coanchor Erin Burnett, co-anchor Chris Cuomo interviewed Eric Mercado, a former classmate of Tsarnaev. Erin Burnett: “You said that you had a conversation with him where you recall that terrorism actually came up.”
MERCADO: It was along the lines of, you know, terrorism is, when justified, you know, isn’t necessarily, you know, a bad thing, which, you know, kind of a red flag in your head, you know.
CUOMO: He was having a conversation with a friend that said terrorism is not necessarily a bad thing?
MERCADO: Right, when justified.
CUOMO: What does that mean? Give any context to it? Do you remember something that made that okay for him to say?
MERCADO: Not anything that, you know, would, you know, lead me to believe that he would, you know, believe it is okay. I can’t really say. I just know that that was the conversation that was had, and in that conversation, you know, obviously, you know, my friends were kind of alerted like, you know, well — but people say, you know, things all the time, and it’s never — don’t take it out of context. It is a conversation at the time, and you don’t believe anybody’s gonna be a terrorist because of those comments.
RUSH: No, no, you wouldn’t, and nobody would ever make that connection. So this guy said, “Yeah, I had a conversation with him about terrorism about how, when justified, it’s not a bad thing. It’s kind of red flag in your head when he said that, yeah.” Chris Cuomo said, “He was having a conversation with a friend and said terrorism’s not necessarily bad thing?” “Yeah. Yeah. When justified.” Cuomo said, “What does that mean?” “Well, you know, people talk about stuff. We kids, we talk about stuff all the time, nobody’d ever think he really was gonna do anything. He just thought it was okay.”
How many people do you know think terrorism is okay? Seriously, how many of you know anybody in a conversation, that’s a friend of yours, “I think terrorism’s fine when it’s, you know, in the right context, justified, terrorism, not necessarily a bad thing.” How many of you know anything who thinks that? I don’t know anybody. Very, very interesting.
Sunday morning on Fox News Sunday, Chris Wallace interviewed Representative Peter King, Republican, New York. He said, “You’ve said political correctness be damned, we have to do more effective surveillance inside the Muslim community.”
KING: Yeah. Listen, the threat is coming from within the Muslim community in these cases. In New York, that’s why commissioner Kelly has a thousand police officers out in the community. Unfortunately, he gets smeared by the New York Times and the Associated Press. But the fact is we’ve stopped 16 plots in New York because we know that Al-Qaeda has shifted tactics. Ninety-nine percent of the Muslims are Americans. The fact is that’s where the threat is coming from.
RUSH: Dianne Feinstein was also on the program, very, very, very uncomfortable with that, and she implies here that King shouldn’t even be discussing this on TV.
FEINSTEIN: With respect to the whether we are doing enough in the Muslim community, I think we should take a look at that. But I don’t think we need to go and develop some real disdain and hatred on television about it.
WALLACE: I must say, I don’t think that’s what Congressman King was saying. He was saying that’s where the threat’s coming from. We have to address the threat.
FEINSTEIN: Well, this came at this point from two individuals. That’s what we really do know. We do not know what their connections are.
RUSH: We don’t know, folks, what their connections are. We’re really not doing the right thing here when we’re speaking with disdain and hatred on television. Well, he wasn’t saying that. He was just saying that the threat is coming from Muslims. Well, we don’t know what the connections are. Senate Intelligence Committee, Dianne Feinstein. Gun control committee. Guns may have played a secondary role in the Newtown shooting. Islam might have played a secondary role in the Boston Marathon bombing. Friday night, ABC special report coverage of the manhunt for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. Coanchor Diane Sawyer talked with the Senior Justice Department correspondent for ABC News, Pierre Thomas.
SAWYER: This is beyond any drama that can be written, Pierre, and again when we hear that he is in custody, what does that mean?
THOMAS: Well, that means that law enforcement officials have taken him. He is in police custody, Diane.
RUSH: That was news. That was news (imitating exchange), “We hear, Pierre, he is in custody. What does that mean?” “Well, Diane, it means that law enforcement officials have taken him. He’s in police custody.” “What does that mean, Pierre?” “Well, the cops have him. He’s in custody.” “You mean the cops have the children?” “No, no, he’s in police custody. There are no children.” Let’s go back to March 14th 2011, ABC’s World News Tonight, Diane Sawyer touring a shelter for refugees in Japan.
SAWYER: This is a shelter. Some of these people are here for days. And, look. It’s recycling. Organize for recycling.
WOMAN: Plastic; combustible, burnable; cans.
RUSH: Pierre, what is recycling? What does that mean, Pierre?
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: I wonder if Dianne Feinstein has any problems having disdain and hatred for gun owners, the NRA members. You know, folks, I said the beginning of the program, this isn’t easy, because the consensus in the country, I’m not sure consensus, but clearly people are listening to what the media’s saying and they’re eating it up and they’re swallowing it and everything’s cool, and here I come along challenging it all. “You just have to be so contrary all the time, Mr. Limbaugh, just have to be so contrary. You just can’t get in the spirit of things like the rest of America, celebrating everything that happens, very good, successful prosecution and capturing, you have to…” I don’t drink the Kool-Aid.
Anyway, my point is here that the media sure are showing a lack of curiosity about these suspects. And boy, they’re just doing everything they can to make it look like what’s obvious isn’t.
I, on the other hand, have some questions. How did they afford such fancy cars? These guys are driving Porsches and Mercedes. How do you afford trips to Russia for six months and the fancy clothes? How do you afford all this stuff? That kind of stuff is interesting to me. As somebody who pays for everything I have and do, that is interesting to me. I don’t have arrangements where people give me things or arrange things for me. I don’t accept stuff like that when it’s offered and it’s never offered, but if it were, I don’t accept it. I don’t want to be obligated. I wonder about those things. I’m curious. As a consumer of news, I’d kind of like to know, how are these guys affording these kinds of cars. Neither of them had a job. Best I can tell.
Do you know whether they had a job? Have you read anything about the jobs that they had? Their father’s supposed to be a garage mechanic and he’s not even here. He’s in Dagestan. The whole family came here on asylum because their lives were at risk in Dagestan yet they went back to Dagestan. The older brother went back to Dagestan for six months just for the fun of it. He wasn’t radicalized there. Here, listen to Obama. Grab sound bite number 10 very quickly. Friday night, Obama at the White House.
OBAMA: Obviously tonight there are still many unanswered questions. Among them, why did young men who grew up and studied here as part of our communities and our country resort to such violence?
RUSH: Now, see, this is where I am ripe for getting in trouble. Why is it so strange to believe that young kids could be radicalized in America? You got former bombers as professors in New York and Chicago. You have radical leftist professors who think this country’s guilty, teaching kids every day about what’s wrong with this country, about how unfair this country’s been, how unjust, how immoral this country is since its founding. What in the world do we think elite education is in this country? When you have a study of high school textbooks, nine different textbooks, the longest reference to Abraham Lincoln is one paragraph, but all kinds of references to the horrors of slavery and evil Republican presidents, how great Bill Clinton is.
How did Obama become what he is? Who taught Obama that America is so wrong? Who raised Obama to believe that America needs to be radically transformed? Well, we don’t know that they were taught conflict resolution. The odds are they might have been but they probably laughed all the way through that class. Can you imagine these guys in a Conflict Resolution 101 course? “Now, you are not supposed to resolve differences with violence. You are to find your combatant and talk about it and find wonderful things you have in common.”
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Here is Jeff in Greenwood, Indiana, thank you for your patience, sir. Welcome to the EIB Network.
CALLER: Oh great and powerful, Maha Rushie, what an honor it is to talk to you.
RUSH: It’s great to have you here. Yeah, really is.
CALLER: Earlier you talked about with where these guys come from. The definition of difference between a liberal and a conservative is the liberal, when sharing things about a great country, people from another country, will point out that he recognizes what’s wrong with it, whereas a conservative will point out what is great about it. Well, that’s what happens when these young guys live in this area which is a liberal hotbed, all they hear all their lives even from people who are supposed to love this country is what a horrible place it is and what’s wrong with it, so it’s no wonder they turn out to be, as you call it, you know, become radicalized by our own nation.
RUSH: They do. They hang around people that don’t like America, they get inspired or influenced by it somehow, and it’s no wonder. Look, folks, Boston’s a hubbub of liberal elite intellectual thought, all the universities there. And if you end up around the wrong people long enough and you’re young enough and impressionable enough, then that kind of thing can happen. It is an interesting point about the difference between liberals and conservatives. Liberals will tell you what’s wrong with the country from the founding. Conservatives will say what’s wrong with the country because of liberals, while telling you what’s great about the country — if the liberals would move out of the way.
Let’s see. Ann in Kinston, North Carolina. Welcome, great to have you here. Hello.
CALLER: Hello, Rush. It’s a great privilege. Thank you so much.
RUSH: You bet.
CALLER: I just got really tickled when you were talking about Earth Day. I was 10 years old in 1970, and it scared the pure fire out of me that there was gonna be an ice age, and I worried about how my daddy was gonna pay for the heat and what were we gonna do there are gonna be icebergs and all this and I have laughed and laughed about that for years, thinking that with my kids and telling them that this global warming this stuff is just the same people with a new story.
RUSH: Right, so they scared the daylights out of you when you were 10. How how old were you when you finally figured out that you need not be frightened by that stuff, anyway?
CALLER: Well, I guess I was probably 20 years old, and I thought, well, I wonder whatever happened to the ice age? I guess it didn’t happen, you know, 10 years later, and I just thought, that was a bunch of silly stuff, and I thought, you know, I remember the Life magazine and TIME magazine, they had all these things for kids to read in school, propaganda, and it just, it, you know —
RUSH: Well, Newsweek —
CALLER: — about it.
RUSH: — in 1979, you know, 10 years later, Newsweek actually did a cover on the coming ice age, after they had joined the global warming fear-mongering just 10 years earlier. Anyway, well, that’s great. I’m glad that you called, it’s great to hear from you.
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