RUSH: I certainly hope everybody had a great weekend. We’re back. I certainly did, I hope you did, and we’re off and running, folks, with a brand-new week of broadcast excellence right here on the ever important, increasingly popular, growing-by-leaps-and-bounds Rush Limbaugh program, where it has just been stated that you who listen to this program are self-brainwashing.
Have you heard that? You are self-brainwashing. And if you watch Fox News, you are self-brainwashing. If you listen to this program, and if you watch Fox News, do you know what it also means? It automatically means you do not watch any other media. And we know this because of a man named Bruce Bartlett who’s got his nose in a twit over something here about not being popular as a conservative anymore.
He used to be in the Bush Regime and I used to communicate with this guy e-mail-wise back and forth. He was a nice guy, and I started note — and I don’t remember what year. This is years ago now, two, three, four, maybe five. I’d have to go back to my e-mail record. He-he-he. But I don’t have one anymore, so I can’t do that. But may be I’ll be able to get it back. At some point I could go back and look at when all these exchanges took place, but I could track his disgruntlement with conservative and I don’t remember what it was.
But he’s gone over to the dark side now. And I remember I informed him. He was writing a book about, of all things, the Victorian age. I remember I informed him of something he didn’t know, maybe you didn’t know. Did you know the Tudors, the Tudor people, Henry VIII, did you know they only bathed once a year? (interruption) No, no. It is true. I learned this on a trip to London way back in the eighties on the tour guide trip, and we were out at the old estate where Cardinal Wolsey lived and ate five turkeys a day. He was a big guy.
The tour guide said the Tudor people bathed once a year. They believed that water and bathing damaged them somehow. I forget which. And naturally the birthrate every spring and summer — well, actually toward the end of the year, went crazy ’cause that’s when all the copulating took place, is after they bathed that one time a year. Honest to God. It is not something that’s reported much. Anyway, I told Bruce about it, he said, “I didn’t know that. I didn’t know that about Tudor people.” He looked it up, confirmed that I was right. And I used to have e-mail exchanges back and forth with the guy.
He was on CNN. Grab sound bite three. This is Reliable Sources, he’s talking to Brian Stelter about George H. W. Bush, by the way, not W., George H. W. Bush. He was the assistant Treasury secretary back then and he used to be just a rock-ribbed conservative. And I don’t know what happened. I mean, I could speculate, but that wouldn’t be fair ’cause I don’t really know.
But, anyway, he’s now a darling of the left because he rips into conservatives and conservative media. That’s why he was on CNN. So Stelter said, “You said: ‘It (Fox News) can almost be called self-brainwashing. Many conservatives now refuse to even listen to any news or opinion not vetted through Fox and to believe whatever appears on it as the gospel truth.’ Self-brainwashing?” Is that what you say this is?
BARTLETT: I don’t think that word is too strong. I think many conservatives live in a bubble, where they watch only Fox News on television. They listen only to conservative talk radio, Rush Limbaugh. When they go on to the Internet, they look at only conservative websites, like National Review, Newsmax, World Net Daily. And so they are completely in a universe in which they are hearing the same exact ideas, the same arguments, the same limited amount of data repeated over and over and over again. And that’s — that’s brainwashing
RUSH: Okay. Here’s my problem with this. You who listen to this program learn more about liberalism on this program than you would reading Politico or than you will reading the New York Times ’cause it takes me to interpret it for you. My point is, you who listen to this program hear much more about liberalism philosophically and what it is and how to recognize it and how to spot it and how to defeat it.
You learn that on this program, where supposedly you only come here to hear what you want to hear. You only come here to hear what you know to be true. You only come here to be validated. You’re not interested. You’re living in a bubble. You don’t care what happens outside of what you think. That’s absurd! You cannot listen to this program and only know what conservatism is, because the way conservatism is explained on this program is as a bounce-off, if you will, to liberalism.
For example, I don’t even need to give you an example. You know what I’m talking about, you know it’s true. The Drive-By Media is liberal. We talk about ’em all the time. Let me prepare you. The Drive-By Media has told us today what is the most important story of everything happening, and it’s a close call, ’cause there’s many of them that they’re focusing on, but the Supreme Court decision in the Burwell case on Obamacare and whether or not the subsidies live or die, that is the story the Drive-Bys are salivating over because they think the Republicans lose no matter what the Supreme Court does. And they can’t wait.
And I’m here to tell you, if you haven’t noticed it yourself, and how do I know this? Because I’m watching the liberal media. But according to Mr. Bartlett that’s not what happens here because we conservatives never consult anything other than our own comfort level. It’s so ridiculous and so absurd. Fox News has liberals all over the place. You can’t miss liberalism by watching Fox News. Half of their analysts are.
I just have to laugh, here we have CNN, which has an audience you can now fit in a thimble. And MSNBC, an audience that you couldn’t find in a thimble, sitting here lamenting what’s wrong with Fox News. It’s like the chickens describing how Colonel Sanders is screwing up. I mean, these people are sitting there dying professionally. They have no audience, nobody cares what’s happening on CNN or MSNBC, and yet every day they do their media shows and try to tell everybody what’s wrong with Fox. What’s wrong with the people doing it right? What’s wrong with the people winning? It’s the most amazing thing. And it’s psychological.
But, anyway, my point is that I spend countless hours on this program instructing, teaching, informing, explaining, dissecting, analyzing, and everything else, liberalism. People who listen to this program who are conservative know more about liberalism and why and who liberals are, why they do what they do than liberals themselves. So it’s a false premise, and once again, it’s almost like it’s — I don’t know — chip on his shoulder, poor taste in his mouth, I don’t know what it is, but it’s patently absurd that conservatives self-brainwash.
The brainwashing, if there is any in this country in the media, is in the Drive-By Media, the left-wing media. In the public school system is where brainwashing is taking place. We are trying to counter it. We’re trying to open it up and expose it. We’re trying to free people from brainwashing, which is what education’s become. Education is not mind expanding. Education has become mind limiting. Education has become propaganda or something worse. Indoctrination. And we expose it all. And we couldn’t expose it if we didn’t talk about liberalism. In talking about liberalism, we explain it so you who listen to this program are well versed and well informed.
I am more honest about liberalism than liberals are. Liberals have to cover up who they are. They have to mask and camouflage who they are, what they are, what they believe and what their agenda is. A majority wouldn’t vote for them otherwise. So you on this program learn more about it than you will hear anywhere because liberals out there are trying to cover up who they are. We expose them.
Now, how in the world this results in conservative brainwashing is beyond me, but it’s an often-heard lament from people in the media who are losing to the power of conservative media, and believe me there are a lot of people. I’ve got story. It’s not just conservative media and liberals losing this. You know, one of my main points since the midterms of 2010 and last year, has been the overwhelming, it’s phenomenal, just shellacking defeat the Democrat Party has had in the last two midterm elections all the way down to dogcatcher level. It’s so bad, even Michelle Obama talks about recapturing the dogcatcher office in a graduation speech at Oberlin College.
I’ve got a couple of stories here lamenting what’s happened to the Democrats and how they don’t have a bench, and this is in the Drive-By Media here, folks. So you are on the cutting edge of societal evolution and political evolution and analysis if you listen to this program. Whenever you have a comment like this, that people are self-brainwashing, it’s actually an assault and an insult to actual members of the audience. I think it’s the exact opposite as you well know. I think the conservative audiences in this country are the most informed, the most open-minded, the most aware, and the most objective people in this country.
I think the audience of this program and Fox News are probably among the most informed audiences in this country. And yet they’ll show you polling data which says something close to the opposite of that, which is, again, disingenuous and illegitimate because we all know how the left uses public opinion polling and their news media agenda, which is to form and shape opinion, not reflect it. But brainwashing, actual brainwashing does work. I mean, look at the school system, K through 12, college education proves that brainwashing works.
I mean, hell, the people Rio Linda, I would bet you that the people of Rio Linda are more informed and objective and probably in a better mood every day than your average liberal audience member is of anything he or she happens to watch.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: I just realized something, ladies and gentlemen, since I obviously I cannot listen to myself, how in the world could I self-brainwash? As Mr. Bartlett claims happens. Maybe he wasn’t talking about me. Maybe he was talking about you, the audience. But even if that’s what he meant, that can’t be true because as I say, you people know more about liberalism here than liberals themselves, because you know the truth about them. They live in denial. And that’s not an exaggeration. But I couldn’t be self-brainwashed because I can’t listen to myself. And I don’t watch a lot of cable news.
I told Snerdley I treated this weekend as a mini-vacation. I did not turn on one single news related television program, not even for two seconds, not even channel surfing did I happen to whiz through a news station. It’s not that I didn’t do show prep. I read all kinds of things, but I just didn’t have it on on the television. So it’s just further evidence that I, El Rushbo, am not self-brainwashed ’cause I don’t do apparently what’s necessary to become self-brainwashed. I don’t listen to me or other talk radio, and I didn’t watch Fox News. I don’t mean that to be cutting. I’m just telling the truth.
Related Links