RUSH: Here’s Mike in Greenville, North Carolina. Great to have you, sir, on Open Line Friday. Hi.
CALLER: Thank you, sir. I really appreciate it, Mr. Limbaugh. It’s a pleasure to be on your show, and let me do two things. First of all, I’m saying from the good people of North Carolina to you, good health. And you can be forgiven for confusing an F-4 with an F-104, as far as I’m concerned.
RUSH: I appreciate that, sir. Thank you for your understanding and your tolerance.
CALLER: Yes. Of course. I’m going to try to make some sense here for a moment. What I’m going to do is make a connection to something that you said yesterday that was interesting and powerful, and then I would like to try to make a point which is going to be, I hope, a polite disagreement with you. So the connection is yesterday, you know, it was interesting, that here Obama is in this almost perfect storm, right? Three major scandals all at the same time. There’s Benghazi, the IRS scandal, scandal concerning the procurement of AP e-mails, and what happened as a result of that, as you were saying, is that apparently, you know, the polls aren’t moving in response to these scandals, and I scratched my head — you said something I thought compelling, which is, well, this is a problem of the low-information public, that people aren’t —
RUSH: Well, the latest polling data is that only 25, 26% of the people are paying close attention or even care about any of these scandals.
CALLER: Yeah. That just makes your point — my point, which is that it’s important that people be informed. They need to know what’s happening. And you and I can certainly agree with that. But here’s the point. And I’m gonna ask you please, sir, to not cut me off. I just want to make the point. I wondered very much about what you were saying about the low-information voter, and that got me to go to a study that has recently been published —
RUSH: We’re running out of time here.
CALLER: No, sir —
RUSH: The clock is gonna cut you off if we don’t get to the polite disagreement.
CALLER: That’s what I thought you might do. I hope you won’t, sir, I hope you won’t. I hope you won’t say that you’re running out of time. I think you can do better than that. Harley [sic] Dickinson University, according to their study, Fox viewers are the least knowledgeable audience of any outlet. They know even less about politics and current events than people who watch no news at all. What’s really interesting about that, if you’re still there and you’re not gonna cut me off —
RUSH: You know what, if that’s the case, if Fairleigh Dickinson University says that the Fox News audience is the least informed, then I think it’s perfectly okay to bug their reporters. I’ll rethink this. If Fairleigh Dickinson University says that the Fox News audience is the stupidest and the least informed, then that’s cool, then it’s okay to bug their reporters. Ladies and gentlemen, this man speaking from the bottom of the barrel in which he lives, lied intently to Mr. Snerdley about what he wanted to talk about. And it took him much longer to get to his point with these endless implications that I was gonna cut him off, and he deserves to be cut off because he’s a liar.
What he said he wanted to ask me was, how can I claim that Obama declared the War on Terror is over. He doesn’t think Obama said that. That’s what he claimed he wanted to talk about. And instead he wants to insult the Fox audience. Now, if he would’ve said he wants to talk about the Fox audience being the least informed, we’d have talked about it with him, but he thought he had to sneak in here and then imply that I am unfair to callers when I am the most polite and the most tolerant as I’ve just demonstrated with this guy.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Now, Fairleigh Dickinson University, I did a little research. The North Carolina caller claimed he wanted to tell me that he disagreed with me when I said that Obama was speaking yesterday basically claiming the War on Terror was over. Instead what he wanted to do, what he was trying to do — in fact, you know what I’ll do? In an ultimate act of fairness, I will make the guy’s point for him. He didn’t have the guts to get right to it. But I’ll make this poor guy’s point for him. He started out, it took him 30 sentences to say this. “You talked about polls that show only 25 or 26% of people care about these scandals.” It took him literally 10, 12 sentences to say that, maybe more.
And then what he was gonna do was say, “Well, if only 25 or 26% care about it, and then you look at what Fairleigh Dickinson University says about the Fox audience being the least knowledgeable and the least informed, then it makes sense that the Fox audience doesn’t care about the scandals.” And it was his way of saying, “It’s no big deal for Obama. He’s not in any trouble,” which, by the way, I wouldn’t have disagreed with had he said that. I don’t think Obama’s in any trouble on any of this. I’m totally going the opposite way of the conventional wisdom. It looks bad, but it isn’t gonna matter. Obama’s not in any trouble. Obama’s not going anywhere. Obama’s not gonna be backfired. Obama’s going to get away with positioning himself as having had nothing to do with any of this. He’s gonna away with for five years. What’s gonna change?
I probably shouldn’t say this, but the Obama angle in all this is the least interesting angle to me in all these stories. The IRS story, and the Benghazi story, and the bugging of journalists, I am really interested in those stories, but not for the potential impact to Obama. I think, as I’m now blue in the face saying, those are ideal examples to instruct and demonstrate what happens without a controlled big government. And it’s liberals that do these kinds of things. Obama happens to be the most radical liberal that we’ve elected president, but it isn’t gonna affect him. He’s not gonna pay any price for this.
He could end up being embarrassed with people. I mean, intelligent right-thinking people are laughing at him when he claims he didn’t know anything about this. But in terms of it having any impact, it isn’t going to at all. However, they are very serious things. The Republican vote was suppressed. The Obama reelection deserves an asterisk next to it. And something does need to be done about this, and the people at the IRS level who did this deserve to be canned and thrown out of there, with no severance. That probably isn’t gonna happen, either, because it would have to be done by Obama. And, by the way, firing federal workers is one of the most difficult things to do anyway because of their unions and all that.
But they are all serious. In Benghazi, four Americans died. The regime is trying to cover it up and make it sure that whatever is learned about it, that it doesn’t attach itself to Obama, which has been what he’s tried to do for five years and what he’s succeeded in doing. All these stories interest me, but the Obama angle is the least interesting of any of them, to me. Plain and simple. Now, the pollster, I just want to close the loop on this. The pollster from Fairleigh Dickinson University admitted that his study that showed the Fox News audience is the least educated or least informed media audience around. That study, the guy that did the study admitted that his study didn’t actually identify people who got their news only from one source.
So they used “multinomial logistic regression,” quote, unquote, to create representations of such people who were then compared to a hypothetical construct of someone who had no recent news experience. In other words, they made it up. In other words, the pollster at Fairleigh Dickinson University made it up. It was total speculation and then hypothetical construction, and then they manufactured and projected what they thought it all meant to arrive at their conclusion that the Fox News audience is the least informed. The questions in the poll that produced that result are dumb and ambiguous. It was a judgment call whether somebody got the question wrong or not. It was just silly. I remember the poll. The questions were idiotic, and almost structured in such a way you could not answer them correctly no matter where you said that you got your news.
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