RUSH: I better do this before I forget it and before time slips by. ‘Cause I’ve been talking about the latest effort at smearing me over this Ebola business. This happened yesterday morning on CNN’s Reliable Sources. Let me find sound bite six just to make sure. It is sound bite six? Okay, it is. CNN did a segment on Ebola attempting to tell their audience that I said slavery is the reason Obama will not ban flights from Africa to America.
Now, as you know if you’ve been here… Those of you who have been here know I didn’t even bring slavery up in this. A liberal Democrat author did, and I played him three times. I played this guy’s sound bite three times. They conveniently leave that out. They want their audience to think… Essentially, what they want their audience to think is what I’m saying is accusing Obama of thinking since Africans have Ebola, that we should get it. That’s what they’re attempting to do. It is a half-baked, not-even-good attempt to smear me, but, nevertheless, it’s the latest one. It happened with their media analyst, Brian Stelter. I guess it’s his show, Reliable Sources, and this is what he said.
STELTER: It has been amazing and frustrating to see the story become a red-and-blue battle over flights from West Africa and over the government’s incompetence. Rush Limbaugh, who is (pause) NOT an infectious disease specialist, said, “Stop the flights,” and then he said on his radio show that the Democratic administration won’t do that because… Well, he thinks that they think we all deserve to get infected!
RUSH: Now, the sad thing is that you’ve got such idiots watching CNN that they probably believe this. So this is one of those times where I’m gonna throw away the philosophy that says, “Don’t respond to it because you’ll only elevate it.” This deserves a response, ’cause Mr. Stelter needs to be called out here on what he’s doing. He either himself relied on other people to tell him what happened on this program…
He ought to know by now that he’s lied to when people do that. When he relies on “media watchdogs” to tell him what happened here or any other conservative show, he ought to know to be suspicious of it. He ought to know it’s never the full story, ought to know it’s out of context. Either that or he did listen and decided to do the smear all on his own. So after that sound bite where he said (summarized), “Oh, yeah! Stop the flights?
“He said on his radio show, ‘Democrats won’t do that because, well, he thinks that we all deserve to get infected.'” See, this is the guy that runs the show on media bias, right? So he plays a clip totally devoid of context and it’s the network… Well, I’m sorry. The description has got me totally confused. Let me just play the sound bite and I’ll do it
RUSH ARCHIVE: People at the highest levels of our government say (translated), “Why? Why shouldn’t we get it? Why should only those three nations in Africa get it? We’re no better than they are,” and they have this attitude, “Well, if they have it in Africa, by God, we deserve to get it because they’re in Africa because of us and because of slavery!”
STELTER: So now we’re atoning for colonialism? That’s what this is about?
RUSH: No, Brian, it’s not about that. It’s about this. It’s about a guest on your own network, on Anderson Cooper’s show back on October 2nd. His name is David Quammen, author of Ebola: The Natural and Human History of a Deadly Virus. I was explaining what he means, Brian, a guy who was a guest on your own network. He’s the guy who said what I was translating. He’s the guy who was saying what you said I was trying to say.
I don’t believe that crap! I don’t believe that nonsense. But you can make people think I did if you take it totally out of context the way you did. Here’s David Quammen. He’s talking with Anderson Cooper, and Cooper said it’s senseless to ban flights. You can’t ban them! There aren’t any anyway, right? “First of all, I don’t think there are many flights that directly connect from Monrovia to the US.” But it’s virtually impossible to track somebody, so we shouldn’t even try it, right, Mr. Quammen?
QUAMMEN: You can’t isolate neighborhoods. You can’t isolate nations. It doesn’t work. And people talk about, well, we shouldn’t allow any flights in from Liberia. I mean, we in America, how dare we turn our backs on Liberia, given the fact that this is a country that was founded in the 1820s, 1830s because of American slavery. We have a responsibility to stay connected with them and help them see this through.
“Liberia exists because we had slavery, and so what happens in Liberia, my God, we’re tied to it. We can’t turn our backs on these people. We can’t close our border to these people. We can’t stop people from flying here to Liberia. We’re responsible for Liberia.” Well, if we can’t keep ’em out, and if they’ve got Ebola, it’s only a logical progression to ask, “What results?” If you cannot keep Ebola patients out of the United States because they are in a country founded because of our slavery, we have a responsibility, right?
Maybe even a culpability. So after playing this sound bite two or three times I was explaining how people like this think. People who are politically correct do believe that it is not fair for a certain group to have a lot of money and some not to, and so we should take it away from those who have a lot of money. It’s not fair they have Ebola and we don’t; it’s not fair some people have AIDS and others don’t. We’ve gotta be fair.
But it was not I suggest that in order to be fair, we need to have Ebola come to the US because we’re responsible. It wasn’t I. It was a CNN guest on October 2nd. Now, either whoever informed Mr. Stelter of the so-called outrageousness on my program neglected to tell him what I was really reacting to, or he knew and decided to conduct this little exercise on his own. But all we do here is react and defend and respond to the outrageousness and the just lunacy sometimes of people on the left, such as this guy, David Quammen.
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