RUSH: I wanted to let you know I was watching Steve Bisciotti do his press conference at four o’clock yesterday afternoon. He’s the owner of the Ravens and somebody actually asked him in the press conference, “Are you prepared to be forced to sell your team?” I sat up and said, “What?”
Apparently there’s a Forbes story saying that depending on what happens here, who lied, who knew what, when about the video in the elevator, Ray Rice, that Bisciotti may be forced to sell his team, as though he’s no different than Donald Sterling. And Bisciotti said (imitating Bisciotti), “Hey, you know, if they force me to sell it then I guess I’ll sell it. I don’t really work that hard as owner. I have other people to do that, so it’s not gonna be a big…”
I can’t believe it, forced to sell his team? We’ll have more on this as the program unfolds, but all of this stuff is just getting so far out of hand, this unbridled attack on capitalism coming from the politically correct crowd. Everybody seems afraid to stand up to these people, whoever they are.
You know, I mentioned this once before. I don’t know anybody who believes in political correctness. I’m sure they’re out there. Everybody I know is constantly criticizing it, laughing at it, lamenting it, making fun of it. But they must be out there in great numbers. I just don’t know who the spokesman is for the PC movement. But whenever some event happens, the media acts like there is this giant cadre of people all in agreement on the politically correct view of whatever issue, and they are demanding that people divest, give up, be forced to sell all of their assets as punishment for violating the PC code.
Who are these people? Really. Ask yourself, how many people do you know who actually admit to being politically correct, advocate it and try to force it on you? Now, there might be individual idiots. There might be individual people at work who say and do things and demand, like, “Put down that Playboy! That’s sexist and you are bullying,” that kind of thing. But the media doesn’t know who they are. It’s something that has intrigued me for a while. But in all of this, force Steve Bisciotti to sell his team, and nobody thinks that is overboard
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RUSH: We’ve got Charlie in Adrian, Michigan, on the phones. We want to start there. Charlie, thank you for calling here. Great to have you on the EIB Network.
CALLER: Well, it’s a pleasure to be on. Dittos and all that implies. I just was amazed that the NFL owner might have to sell his team ownership because of something he didn’t personally do but maybe he didn’t do enough as the top of his organization to prevent, whereas Bill Clinton sexually assaults an intern in the White House and isn’t held accountable. He’s impeached but the Senate wouldn’t remove him from office.
RUSH: No. He’s a big star now in the Democrat Party, and that poor woman’s life was basically ruined.
CALLER: It’s just amazing that that’s what we’ve come down to is political correctness now.
Jeffrey Lord writes for the American Spectator and NewsBusters, and he has a piece about all of the cases, the instances of domestic violence committed by journalists, ’cause he’s gotten a little tired of the moral preening. He’s watching all of this moral preening from journalists about how horrible and ugly what Ray Rice did was, and how Ray Rice has gotta be sent to the coal mines now, and anybody who had anything to do with Ray Rice should be banished from football.
This never ending, holier-than-thou, pure-as-the-wind-driven-snow attack on everybody involved in this. So Jeffrey said (summarized), “You know what? I wonder how many of these guys reporting on this and demanding X, Y, and Z be done have themselves been involved in domestic abuse cases.” He found, right off the bat, 10 or 12. A couple at ESPN, a couple at CBS New York, and his story names them and the specifics of their cases.
I’m sorry, I just have the text version of the copy. I don’t know where, which place he writes that this thing got posted. Let me see real quick if it’s here in the note. My guess is it’s the American Spectator in this case, ’cause I think his stuff for NewsBusters is on the weekend. I’ll find out. I just can’t do that right now. I have to wait ’til after the break.
But in addition, you know, Charlie, to your point, Forbes is who raised the possibility that Bisciotti might be forced to sell his team. The headline of the Forbes blurb (it’s a small piece): “The Baltimore Ravens May Become the NFL’s LA Clippers.” Here’s a little snippet from the article. “Will the Baltimore Ravens become the Los Angeles Clippers?
“That is, will the NFL force Steve Bisciotti to sell his football team like the NBA forced Donald Sterling to sell his basketball team? Perhaps, if a scathing investigation by ESPN’s Outside the Lines holds up.” So what you have here is the media thinks they’ve taken out one owner. Remember what journalism is. Journalism, it has many facets. I remember talking to people about this years and years ago, about the average resume for advancement that a good journalist puts together.
Somewhere on that resume will be, “I did a story which destroyed X, some big time leader in the small town where I was working or some corporate CEO or whatever.” It used to be you take somebody out, somebody with a lot of power. You take ’em out somehow with a story you’ve done and that’s career advancement for you in journalism. Well Nixon, of course, was the pinnacle. They took down a president.
Now they got rid of Sterling, and so it’s copycat time.
Well, maybe we should next go after Bisciotti, the owner of the Ravens. Now, the Forbes piece, that little snippet that I just read you, the idea that Steve Bisciotti would be forced to sell his team seems to hang on whether Bisciotti tried to get leniency from the authorities and the NFL for Ray Rice early on beginning last February when everybody knew what happened inside the elevator but hadn’t seen it.
According to Forbes, if Bisciotti is seen to have conspired with law enforcement, just as you would with one of your kids… How many of you have had kids run a red light, or maybe blew one-tenth of a point over the legal limit on alcohol? How many of you had a kid in a traffic wreck, and you pulled every string you could to avoid charges that might be permanent, whatever? You did what you could. Maybe you couldn’t do anything.
You don’t know anybody. But how many people would try to do it for family member? Not to escape a lesson being taught, but it’s just a natural thing. So what they’re trying to say is that Bisciotti might have conspired with his cohorts to convince law enforcement in New Jersey to go lenient on Ray Rice, and if he did, then that is “tsk-tsk-tsk,” a no-no, and he must be forced to sell his team if he conspired to try to do that.
Now, ESPN had this bombshell of a story that was at least a couple hours after Goodell’s conference on Friday, Outside the Lines, and they are claiming in that report that Bisciotti did indeed conspire to have law enforcement and the NFL look the other way on Ray Rice. Minimal punishment so that one of his best players could remain on the field and playing, ’cause they’re paying him a big number, big dollar.
Now, the Ravens have said there are a lot of errors in the ESPN piece, and there are some. For example, the story says that in the opening game of the NFL season that a player was over at Rice’s house watching the game with him, except the player wasn’t at Rice’s house. He’s on the Indianapolis Colts roster. The player ESPN cited as being at Ray Rice’s house watching the game with him was actually playing for the Indianapolis Colts.
There are a couple of other errors like that. Those are errors that are not germane to the main thrust of the focus, but if a lot of those pile up the Ravens say, “Hey, you can’t trust anything in this story. Look at how many errors there are.” There’s a lot of curiosity about the timing, ’cause what happened?
ESPN spends 11 days putting that bombshell report together, and then they called the commissioner and the Baltimore Ravens and gave them 90 minutes to respond to it before releasing it — on a Friday afternoon five o’clock, which is document dump time? If you release stuff on Friday afternoon at five o’clock, you want it to not be seen. So ESPN is saying, “No, no, no, we didn’t do any of that. We just waited for when the story was ready, and we let it go.”
Why didn’t…?
If you’ve spent 11 days working on it, why did you only give the people you’re smearing — uh, reporting on — an hour and a half to comment? So, at any rate, that’s where all this is now. After all this, I’m watching this, this whole notion that Bisciotti might be forced to sell his team. This is what happens when there’s no push back on whoever these invisible little politically correct nerds are out there — these anti-capitalist, just miserable, unhappy people (whoever they are) trying to spread their misery across the country to everybody else.
This is what happens when there’s been no push-back. Big-time capitalists do not push back. They’re frightened to defend themselves. I was watching Andy Grove, the former CEO of Intel. He was on This Week “Needs” David Brinkley. It was back during the first term of Clinton. It was when Clinton had announced a maximum of a $1 million corporate salary that could be deducted as a business expense. And Andy Grove made a lot of money at Intel as the CEO.
So they asked him, “Andy, what do you think of this new law here that’s gonna make most of your salary not tax deductible as the administration attempts to limit how much you can earn?” He wouldn’t talk. He said to whoever asked him the question (imitating Grove), “I’m not gonna … the silly little concerns here, how much money I make.” They won’t talk. They will not defend themselves. They will not push back. It’s thought to be unseemly.
So they sit here and they take the abuse. Nobody else defends them, either, especially now. They’re under assault, all of capitalism is. The new constitution of global warming is Occupy Global now, which is simply a new name and a new cover story for the anti-capitalism of their movement.
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RUSH: Canton, Georgia is next. This is Dr. Mitch. Dr. Mitch, welcome to the EIB Network. Great to have you here, sir.
CALLER: Dittos, Rush. I don’t know how you can evaluate this football elevator scene without hearing what the lady said. What if she said, “I’m mad at you and I’m gonna get back at you and what I’m gonna do and what I’ve already done is screwed Goodell.” Saturday Night Live could do a parody on this.
RUSH: Your point being that the video alone of what happened inside the elevator is insufficient to properly judge what we saw happen?
CALLER: Exactly.
RUSH: Why? What words could she have uttered that would have made it permissible for him to punch her and knock her out?
CALLER: She could say, “I screwed Goodell to get back at you.”
RUSH: Screwed Goodell. You mean that in a biblical sense?
CALLER: I do, yes, full understanding of carnal knowledge, yes.
RUSH: Yeah. So we’re coming up with hypotheticals, something she could have said in the elevator to —
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: Well, now, one thing that she did, when she when she came to, this much we do know, he drags her out of the elevator unconscious, and there were people standing there — we saw this — Ray Rice is explaining her state of unconsciousness by telling people, “She passed out, she’s drunk. You want to give me some help here?” She came to, and the first thing she said, “How could you do that to the mother of your child?”
That’s what has been reported as the first thing witnesses heard her say, “How could you do that?” And course nobody had any, “What the hell’s this?” They think she’s all drunk and passed out ’cause that’s what he said, and then she says, “How could you do that to the mother of your child?” which had people scratching their heads, saying, “What what what what?”
She didn’t appear drunk. She was woozy, obviously. I don’t know. My instincts tell me that it doesn’t matter, that nothing she could have said in your average argument that couples have would have excused Ray Rice cold cocking her and leaving her unconscious on the floor of the elevator. It may be interesting for people’s prurient interests to know what the argument was about. What do you think, is this another set-up-the-host call, Snerdley? (interruption) You don’t think so? (interruption) No, there were a couple of them last week that were definite setups.
Look, he’s not the first guy to raise the question of the absence of audio in there and did it play a role. But I think if you’re gonna ask that you then better be prepared to answer the question, “Okay, what could she have said that would excuse or validate him knocking her out?” (interruption) Well, maybe if you’re in the court of law. But the NFL’s not gonna care. There’s nothing she could have said to him that’s gonna reverse their thinking on his suspension. “Oh, she said that to you? Fine, you knocked her out, okay, you can come back.” It’s not gonna happen. There’s nothing she could have said.
Even if she threatened to kill him, that would just be judged as she didn’t have a weapon in there, there was no means by which she was gonna do it. It would have been thought of as heat of the moment rhetoric. There’s nothing that she could have said that would make this okay for Ray Rice to have done, I don’t think. I mean, I don’t even think it’s a close call. Because you just — I don’t care. This is another thing where the feminists have just… No matter what, you don’t hit the girl, never, you do not! You take the slap and you walk away. You do not hit back. Propriety and everything. You just don’t do it. There’s no possible something she could have said to validate this.
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RUSH: I need clear something up. Going into the break the bottom of the hour, I guess I was misunderstood. I do not think feminism has anything to do with the old adage, “Don’t hit the girl.” That goes back to the beginning of time. That’s chivalry! Feminists have nothing to do with it, and I didn’t mean to imply that they did. What I was trying to say was about the feminists, with this mad-dash push for equality and sameness.
“There’s no difference in men and women except for their social conditioning. There’s no difference in men and women except for the way they’re raised. There’s no difference in men and women except for the social mores that we treat them with.” If the feminists ever got what they wanted, it’d be okay to hit women, ’cause they’re equal, right? There’s no difference. But it’s not the case! You never hit the girl– ever, no matter what!
No matter how much success the feminazis have in trying to blur the lines, you just don’t hit the girls. Feminists had nothing to do with that. My point in referencing the feminists was that that chivalrous belief, in and of itself, destroys one of the central planks of feminism. That is that we’re equal, that we’re the same, and that it’s only prejudice and bias and sexism that makes us different. And it isn’t! We actually are different, men and women. That that is news to people still astounds me.
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