RUSH: Here’s Rick in Greenwood, South Carolina. Welcome to the program. It’s great to have you here.
CALLER: Thank you, Rush. I appreciate it. Quick question: Do you think that the revelation of the Justice Department investigating the AP — and if that’s the one that is revealed, there’s probably some others that you don’t know about yet. Do you think something like this would cause the Drive-By Media to wake up to the fact that once the left is through with using them as a propaganda machine — once the left gets fully entrenched in power — they’re gonna shut them down and throw ’em out like yesterday’s laundry, and freedom of the press will be a thing of the past?
RUSH: No, I don’t think that.
CALLER: Oh. I wish they would wake up to that ’cause that’s what’s gonna happen.
RUSH: I know that just like Obama hopes and dreams of the day when just one Republican would publicly denouncing me and tell the country that I’m the problem with America — he dreams of that — so do you dream that the press is gonna wake up one day and see Obama for who he really is and divorce him. What you have to understand is the AP, they’ll express their outrage here and whatever, and they’re ticked now. They’re very mad at him.
But that’s not gonna last.
They’re on the same team. These reporters are human beings. They want to be in the inner circle. They want to be thought of as friends and coconspirators and fellow travelers. They think they’re on the same level. They think they’re on the same team. It’s gonna take more than this for the AP to turn. Don’t forget, the primary objective of the media is to deny us a win, to deny us any kind of a victory. They’re not gonna throw Obama overboard by virtue of whatever he does.
They’re just not gonna do it. Now, there’s no question the AP is mad now. They wouldn’t have sent the letter, and they wouldn’t have gotten their lawyers involved. But I don’t think it’s gonna last. It’s true. Of course it’s not gonna last. Do you really think that the media is gonna end up divorcing Obama and end up opposing him over this? How’s that gonna manifest itself? What are they gonna do, demand impeachment? Oh, you really think they’re gonna start reporting more objectively on this?
This is a lover’s spat.
They’re gonna kiss and make up inside of a week.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: So many people are hoping that because the Department of Justice was spying on AP reporters, that the AP will wake up and see the light about who it is they’ve been covering for and abandon Obama. It’s not going to happen, folks.
Audio sound bites. Last night, the Situation Room, CNN. Wolf Blitzer, the host, talked to their correspondent John King about the DOJ acquiring months of phone records from twenty lines connected to the AP. Blitzer said, “John, you used to work for the Associated Press. When you heard about this — that the Justice Department secretly monitoring phone calls from reporters and editors of the AP supposedly looking into allegations someone is leaking information to them — how did you react when you heard that?”
KING: If you work in our business — and I worked at the Associated Press for 12 years, so I have a personal tie to that company — this is very chilling. This is very chilling. The government gets angry about leaks of classified information, I understand that, and they have ways to investigate them. But did they cross a line here? Did they do something inappropriate here? Did they possibly do something that went over legal barriers here? It sends a chilling message from the government to people in our business — and the AP, I think, is justifiably outraged.
RUSH: That doesn’t sound like he’s particularly upset about it. It sounds like he’s saying what he thinks he should say, “But in the end, it ain’t gonna change what I think about Obama. Yeah, my guys over at the AP outraged by it, but what’re you gonna do? Stuff happens!” So then Blitzer, he didn’t seem to mind at all about this.
BLITZER: If you take a look from the other side, if there was a serious leak about an Al-Qaeda operation or whatever, they’re trying to find out who may be leaking this information to the news media. Do they occasionally have the right to secretly monitor our phone calls?
RUSH: So it’s okay with Wolf.
“Hey, if somebody in our business is leaking secretly and so forth and it might lead to terrorism, then don’t they have a right to monitor us?” Now, do you think Wolf would have that opinion if George W. Bush and his administration were doing this? No. They’d be in the streets. They’d be burning down Washington today. They’d be making tracks to the White House. The media would be protesting in front of the White House. But Wolf’s saying of Obama doing it, “Well, you know, you gotta understand. If we’re leaking stuff that they don’t want us to leak, you gotta kinda understand that they’d be mad.”
So does that help explain this?
That’s why I played those bites for you, folks.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Okay, Snerdley, you want more proof that this DOJ, AP thing isn’t any big deal? You got Holder up there at his press conference just a moment ago — by the way, the White House never sent Holder out to talk to the media about Fast and Furious. Let’s just make that observation. That never happened. Holder’s out there talking about this. Someone, in the midst of this controversy with the AP basically grabbing the phone records of over a hundred AP reporters’ numbers and all that kind of thing, a reporter asked Eric Holder about the CIA interrogation policy. Are we still waterboarding? Are we engaging in torture?
Another infobabe, a reporterette, asked about Obama’s drone policy, in the middle of this. He’s out there doing a press conference on their grab of AP phone records. Where do they get these reporters? Had a couple of reporters who don’t even care about that. Now, just to clarify, the allegedly leaked AP story was about a foiled terror plot. It supposedly “disclosed details of a CIA operation in Yemen that stopped an al-Qaida plot in the spring of 2012 to detonate a bomb on an airplane bound for the United States.” That’s what this scandal’s all about. There were leaks about that, and the DOJ is trying to find out who leaked it and where.
So they went out and they grabbed a bunch of phone records from the Associated Press via cell phone, telephone companies, and the AP didn’t find out about it ’til after the fact, didn’t grant permission. So the AP lawyer sent a letter to the DOJ complaining and whining and moaning about it, so Holder goes out there to do his press conference today, (imitating Holder) “Mr. Attorney General, are we still engaging in torture? Is the CIA still using harsh tactics in interrogations?”
So, look, I’m not trying to throw cold water on things here, folks. I’m just sharing with you the benefit of two things: my intelligence guided by experience. And I long ago learned to not analyze these people as you would analyze your neighbor, or your friend or yourself at work. Somebody does you wrong, by golly, by gosh, you’re gonna deal with it. It doesn’t work that way in the hallways, the cobwebs of the web of deceit of liberalism. These people, they are all on the same team. The media is just another branch of the Democrat Party. They’re not reporting on the administration. They’re the stenographers.
I’ve been doing this for 25 years. And every year, every month of every year, I get a question, either in the e-mail or on the phones. The thrust of the question is, “Rush, Rush, when is the media gonna wake up and recognize what the Democrats are doing to the country?” It’s never gonna happen. If you are waiting to define success as the media turning on them and joining us, you are going to be perpetually and forever disappointed. So this AP story hit, DOJ grabbing phone records — I know a lot of people, “Maybe this it. This is the one. This is the one.” It’s not that big a deal. They’re not that happy about it, but they’re not gonna throw the regime overboard because of this. In two weeks this will be forgotten, they’ll have made up over it, and it’s not gonna be that big a deal. You wait.
By the way, I would love to be wrong. I would love to be wrong. I wish this were what you all think or hope that it should be.