RUSH: Joe in Ft. Lauderdale. I’m glad you called, sir. Great to have you on the program. Hello.
CALLER: Thank you very much, Rush. Let me tell you what a great pleasure it is to finally make contact with you after trying for many years.
RUSH: Well, I’m glad you got through, sir. Thank you much.
CALLER: So am I. I was wondering… I missed your broadcast where you were discussing O’Reilly’s interview with the president, and I was wondering what is your opinion of it?
RUSH: Well, let me remember what I said.
CALLER: (laughing)
Normally you talk to the president about American stuff — football, the game, really innocuous things. The president gets a little PR out of it and the televising network gets a little PR and some presidential access. It takes 10 or 15 minutes, and you move on. O’Reilly hit Obama with questions he hasn’t been asked, so much so that the AP accused O’Reilly of asking “Republican questions.” I thought, “It’s a shame it’s gonna be wasted.
“Nobody’s gonna see it,” and the people that did see it are not gonna care because it was gonna come off as an intrusion. But then O’Reilly was able to play it on his show, and he was able to expose it to three, 3.5 million people, and they’ve gotten a lot of fodder on it for the remainder of the week on Fox. I actually thought it was fascinating. These questions were questions that Obama should have been asked numerous times over the past months, and basically all he did was tell O’Reilly how insolent he was for asking them.
He was whining about them. I just can’t ever recall any president whining and moaning and complaining about the network that the journalist is from while the interview is going on. I don’t know how instructive it was. My big fear… It’s not a big fear. That’s not the right word. The probable reality of the thing is that Obama’s now able to say, “I’ve answered the tough questions. I haven’t ducked ’em,” and he answered them in a place where the vast majority of the audience that day wasn’t interested, didn’t really care. I mean, they do not want, at four o’clock on the afternoon of the Super Bowl, to be drug deep down into the bowels of what happened at Benghazi.
That’s, I guess, an amalgamation of my thoughts.
What were yours?
CALLER: Say that again?
RUSH: What were your thoughts?
CALLER: Well, first off of all, I agree with everything that you just said. You and O’Reilly are the two people that I turn to for most of my information and news, and you primarily, because sometimes, in my opinion, O’Reilly isn’t forceful enough. I understand it’s because of two different medias that you’re involved in. He has a very close time limit on how long he can spend with these people, and they bloviate on him, and he tries to control that, where you have a little more leeway than he does. But I was very disappointed in him. I think especially about what he said after the live interview. When he was replaying it, and he was discussing it with other people, he was saying, “I really don’t think that Obama is a bad person. I don’t think he really wants to hurt the country,” and I think that just destroyed him as far as I’m concerned.
RUSH: Why do you think…? Okay. Now, that is a post-interview comment, and if you’d have asked me about that I would have told you what I thought. That’s a good point you bring up ’cause when the interview was over, later on the next day, for whenever it was, he was doing the perfunctory appearance on different parts on Fox where the anchors act fascinated with what Obama and O’Reilly said in the interview the day before.
It’s a standard network promotion. O’Reilly did say, “Well, you know, I’m not like those right-wingers. I think Obama’s a good guy. I don’t think he wants to hurt anybody. I don’t think like those right-wingers think. I don’t think that he’s trying to destroy anybody or anything.” Well, why do you think he does that? I mean, you say you watch him a lot, and you get a lot of your news from him.
CALLER: And I disagree with him.
RUSH: So why do you think he does that?
RUSH: I think that Obama is intentional trying to hurt the country. I think Obama is a Trojan horse in our country. In fact, I have a favorite nephew who was a big fan of Obama and he voted for him, and before he was even sworn in, I told my nephew, “Mark my words: The day is gonna come when he’s gonna be put down in history as if not the worst president, as one of the worst, but definitely the most dangerous president that we have ever had.”
RUSH: Yeah, I would use that word, too.
CALLER: You would?
RUSH: Yep. In the history that’s gonna be written by people not yet alive, yeah.
CALLER: Yeah, I agree. In fact, he’s been in office now for five years, and my nephew last month, we were talking about politics, and he was complaining about how disappointed he was in Obama. I told him, I says, “Do you remember before he was even sworn in when I told you that he was gonna be going down in history as one of the worst presidents of all time, but more important, the most dangerous?” He says, “Yes.” He said, “I remember it distinctly. You were 100% right.” So, at least I got him converted.
RUSH: Yeah, but see, that’s all well and good, but think about how much better it would have been if he’d have believed you at the beginning. I know it’s crying over spilt milk. But all the people that have now been fooled, imagine if they hadn’t been. Thanks, Joe. I appreciate the call.
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