RUSH: It’s Open Line Friday, and time to hit the phones. We’ll get back. We have taken a call today. We have. So it’s not as though we’re just now starting. We’ve done pretty good. And it’s Peter in Seattle. Peter, great to have you on the EIB Network, sir. Thank you for waiting.
CALLER: Rush, it’s an honor to speak with you. Nothing could be more fascinating than talking to the man who is the source of all true knowledge.
RUSH: I appreciate that. I really do, sir. You’ve humbled me.
CALLER: (chuckles) Sure.
RUSH: Thank you.
CALLER: I just want to point out, relative to the Brian Williams incident, they are claiming that someone should have fact-checked him in the government. They had a few things to do. Brian Williams claimed that his story occurred on March 24th. On March 23rd in 2003 Jessica Lynch and five fellow American soldiers were captured in Nasiriyah in Iraq and taken prisoner.
RUSH: It’s amazing. You go from being captured in Iraq to being nominated for attorney general. That is amazing. I’m just kidding. It’s a different Lynch. That’s interesting. One day later an entirely much bigger story than Brian Williams being shot down out of the sky happens.
CALLER: Right, and you had a 19-year-old private first class who had the honor and the decency to say that the heroic acts which some were occurring to her did not occur, and you have a network anchor who takes credit for things that never occurred. It’s very instructive, too, to look at how NBC News previously handled a deceptive reporter, Jayson Blair of the New York Times, who was interviewed by Katie Couric on Dateline in a story called, “A Question of Trust.”
Get your screen captures now before they pull it down. She asked the reporter, Mr. Blair, “Some people might you claim, ‘Hey, this guy is completely amoral. He has no integrity, has no character, has no sense of the difference between right and wrong. He does not deserve to profit from what he did and the deceitful lies he told.'” So if you want to know what an NBC News anchor at that time thought of the type of misinformation and false information put forward, you can look at that.
RUSH: Well, wait a minute. That was Katie Couric saying that to Jayson Blair?
CALLER: Yeah, she said that to Jayson Blair.
RUSH: What did Jayson Blair say in response to, do you happen to remember?
CALLER: No, I’m just looking at it here on Dateline NBC’s website.
RUSH: Oh.
CALLER: He just says is, “The first thing I’d say is I’m not sure exactly what I’m a supposed to do to show my remorse other than to say I’m remorseful. And a second thing is in America collectively we believe in giving people chances if they come clean.”
RUSH: Right, right. Justification. Justification.
CALLER: But to think that a network anchor can get away with it and a reporter for the New York Times can’t, under the exact same standard would be very ironic.
RUSH: Well, wait. Wait. This is a different time. We don’t know that they would fire Jayson Blair today, and I’m dead serious about that. We don’t know the Times would get rid of Jayson Blair, and the Washington Post had a couple of them, too, a woman named Janet something or other. (interruption) Yeah, she won the Pulitzer on totally made up, by the way, suffering family. Totally made-up story won the Pulitzer. You know, it’s interesting, what is happening to the American left, Peter.
As they are more and more being caught in the falsehoods of their existence, it’s fascinating to listen to the way they justify what they did. They never apologize. They only have explanations or excuses or reasons, and one of the most common goes like this. I’ll use Brian Williams just as an example. He has not done this. He has not used the example I’m gonna give, but you’ll recognize it. Okay, let’s say that in many cases it’s found by others that the guilty party doesn’t admit or own up to the quote/unquote, “mistake” like Brian did.
So when it’s discovered… Well, it has been. What was it? The rape story at UVA in Rolling Stone was totally made up, 100% totally made up. Rolling Stone refused to pull the story. So Brian Williams not being let go by NBC is not news. It’s not surprising, if you know how the left is operating today. The way Rolling Stone and the reporter on that totally bogus rape story explained it away — and if you didn’t hear this, I’m not making this up, and I’m not exaggerating it.
This is what they offered as the excuse: “Well, maybe it didn’t happen there, but we know it happens. We know there is a culture of rape on American college campuses today, and all we were doing was raising everybody’s consciousness to it. Okay, so maybe it didn’t happen as we said at the University of Virginia, but it’s happening. And all we were doing was calling attention to it. The fact that it didn’t happen here is incidental to the seriousness of the problem.”
So it’s a variation of another famed tactic used by the left when there is no evidence of any wrongdoing on the part of a Republican or conservative. They say, “That doesn’t matter! The nature of the evidence is irrelevant. It’s the seriousness of the charge that matters.” That is how the left justified witnesses in the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings that were totally making things up about him. “Well, well, that doesn’t matter! The nature of the evidence not so important here. It’s the seriousness of the charge.”
When I first heard that one was a couple years after George H. W. Bush was elected president, and some professor at Columbia University appropriately named Gary Sick wrote a full-length book on how Bush had flown to Paris on an SR-71 to meet with officials from Iran during the presidential campaign of 1980 and had arranged. They struck a deal with the Iranians to hold those hostages until after the election so that Jimmy Carter, the incumbent president, would not benefit from a hostage release.
Nobody had ever heard this before.
There was no evidence of it.
It came out clear blue.
But because it was asserted in a book by an intellectual from Columbia, “Why, who knows? It might be true.” I’ll never forget Thomas Foley, who was then the Speaker of the House, determined that they needed to investigate this. Even though there was no evidence, even though nobody had produced a scintilla of evidence that George Bush had ever flown in an SR-71 anywhere, much less Paris. There was no evidence he’d ever met with anyone in Iran, no evidence he’d ever had a deal with the Iranians.
Tom Foley said, “The seriousness of this charge requires us to investigate,” and their investigation produced a bunch of other liars. Now, it ended up going nowhere. Its point was to never go anywhere. Its point was to discredit Bush while in office and have low-information lug heads question Bush’s honesty and integrity. This is what the left does. “Well, yeah, the rape might not have happened there, but we know that men are raping sorority sisters all over this country! And you need to know about it, and we did a great job here of raising everybody’s awareness.”
“But wait. You made it up. It didn’t happen.”
“No, we didn’t make it up. It happens. It didn’t happen here, you’re right. I had bad intel. Didn’t happen there. But we know it happens.” That’s how they excuse themselves. That’s why I think that if NBC is really serious about saving Williams, I’m telling you, don’t be surprised if over the weekend or sometime in the near future, we start seeing leaked stories about how an anchor or reporter at some other network has done the same thing. Maybe a couple or three reporters have done the same thing.
The point will be, “See, it’s not that strange. It’s not that unique.” And then will come, “And, by the way, it had a purpose, it had an objective, and that was to raise everybody’s consciousness to the seriousness of war. Yeah, Brian might not have been shot out of the sky, but other people were, and Brian was able to help people understand the horrors of it.” Folks, that’s how they do it now, and you’re left scratching your head. You say, “How do we refute the hell out of this? These guys made it up!”
And then they’ll, “Yeah, yeah, yeah. But we did it for a larger purpose. We did it to cover the news. We did it to raise consciousness so that people understand how terrible and bad war is. Because while Brian might not have been shot down, American soldiers were, and Brian knows how bad it is. That’s what qualifies him to do the news.” This is the twisting and the convoluted pretzeling that these people engage in, in order to excuse themselves.
They end up creating fantasy lands and alternative universes in which they just end up believing these lies they tell, and that becomes pathological. That’s why I call them “narrative readers.” You don’t know what’s being told in the news every night that’s true, half true, not true at all. It’s just making a total mess of everything. Anyway, I appreciate the call, Peter. Thanks el mucho. A little Spanish lingo there.
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