RUSH: Okay, Donald Trump. And if a lot of people haven’t harped on this yet or found it yet, look out, because they will. Here is the tweet: “Remember, it was the Republican Party, with the help of Conservatives, that made so many promises to their base, BUT DIDN’T KEEP THEM! Hi DT.” From TheRealDonaldTrump.
Now, when you first see this, depending on who tells you this, depending on how you first see this and if you just see it by yourself and you’re left to your own devices to interpret it, react to it, or if you see it as part of a piece that somebody has put together in a way to influence, some people are gonna see this as Trump admitting he’s not a conservative. Some people are gonna say: “See? Trump is now so in the driver’s seat he feels free to come forward and admit that he’s not a conservative and it’s actually conservatives that screwed everything up.”
Others are gonna look at this — remember, it was the Republican Party with the help of conservatives that made so many promises to their base but didn’t keep them — others are gonna try to tell you that this is Trump admitting that he isn’t a conservative. Others are going to tell you — meaning it’s up to you what you think about this. Others are gonna try to tell you that Trump is letting everybody know he doesn’t want to be thought of as a conservative, and he’s dumping on them left and right here.
Others are gonna tell you this is how he’s going after Ted Cruz. Conservatives don’t get things done, conservatives are liars, conservatives make promises and so forth. It’s gonna be all over the gamut here. In other words, people’s reaction to this. Now, for me, I’d like some names here. Now, I know it’s hard to give names, 140 characters in a tweet, which, by the way, I see they’re thinking of expanding that. Speaking of, can I make a brief departure here? I do not tweet. And I’m gonna admit something, and I know nobody’s gonna believe this, because I am the go-to tech guy in my group of friends and family.
If anybody has a tech question, an operational tech question or maybe even a repair or fix suggestion, I’m the guy, and I always have the answer. My brother said to me one day recently, “Wouldn’t it be great if on my iPhone I could download the computer version of a website?” And I said, “You can, just hold down the reload button and you’ll get an option: download desktop site.” “Wow, you just know everything, don’t you?” I said when it comes to this stuff, yeah.
So Twitter, stock price plummeting, no growth, no customers, flatline. There’s not no customers. They’re not increasing users. And then there’s another story that they’re gonna get rid of this 140-character limitation, expand it to 10,000. Well, if they do that, it’s not Twitter anymore, is it? But what Jack Dorsey, who’s one of the founders of Twitter says (paraphrasing), “Look what people are doing? They’re copying and pasting screenshots and all that, which count as one character, in order to beat the 140 character limit per tweet.”
I hate to admit this. I cannot figure it out. There’s a bunch of reasons why I don’t use Twitter. But one of them is I can’t figure it out. I’ve had my brother try to explain it to me. I’m looking at it, I can’t tell you why, it doesn’t make any sense. I’m too logical. I’m the mayor of Realville. Twitter does not make any sense. I look at a line, a list of tweets, I don’t know where the original one was, I don’t know who’s saying what to who. It’s impossible to figure out. So I gave up trying many, many moons ago.
Snerdley says, “You would own Twitter, you would own Twitter if you got into it.” You know, Koko sent me a note the night of the Hawkeye Cauci, and he said, “As usual, if there’s anything you want to post tonight, you want to put it on the website, you want to put it on our Facebook page, let me know and I’ll get it up there.”
I said, “Okay.” And there were numerous occasions during the night where I toyed with the idea of putting something up. I always decide not to because I’m an old-fashioned marketer, and my attitude is, if you want to find out what I think about something, see me at noon every day right here on the radio. But other people say, “No, no, no, no, you could tease it, Rush, you could tease it, little tweet.” So I’m thinking about it, I’ve got these two or three things that I thought — I don’t remember what they were; doesn’t matter. And I then said, you know what? I don’t want to be wedded to this yet. I’m not sure I really know yet what I think of this stuff. I need to sleep on all this and wake up and see if the way I’m thinking now is the same way I’m thinking when I wake up. I do that all the time so that I avoid knee jerks and so forth.
And I would hate to tweet or post something on Facebook or on my website that I woke up in the morning wishing I hadn’t put there ’cause once you hit the “send” button, bye-bye. I couldn’t delete anything. They’d be screen grabbing everything I put up there. They’d find ways to Photoshop it and make it look like I said something totally unrelated to what I said.
But two main reasons. One is that I believe if you want to find out what I think, I’ll see you here at noon every day Eastern. And then the other thing is, I don’t know, midnight, one o’clock in the morning, whenever I’m thinking about some, what if it’s not finished? What if the returns are not in? What if we really don’t know what happened yet? I don’t want to be wedded and committed to something, and that’s what really held me back.
Then Koko said the same thing in the New Hampshire primary, “Hey, I’ll be ready, anything you want to put up there.” There’s any number of things I could have put up that night, but I fell back and didn’t do it. Anyway, the point is I can’t figure Twitter out. My brother’s tried to explain it. We sat down and he tried to explain it. I don’t get it, I’m embarrassed to admit this, ’cause I am Mr. Tech.
He showed me tweet deck. It made it even more confusing. And I looked at Tweetbot, and I looked at the Twitter app itself, I looked at it on the web at Twitter, whatever, dot-com. One of the things that gets me is the people’s name. Why are you called @realDonaldTrump. Why can’t it just say Donald Freakin’ Trump there? Why this “at” business? To me that means to somebody. In Twitter it means from somebody. So I can’t figure it out. And, in fact, I’m not alone.
The revered Walt Mossberg. You know who Walt Mossberg is? Walt Mossberg is a reviewer of tech gadgetry for the Wall Street Journal, and he just wrote recently that he can’t figure Twitter out, either. (interruption) Well, he… (interruption) No, he uses it. He can figure that out. He says it’s too complicated. That’s the problem Twitter is having: It’s too complicated. And I saw that and said, “Well, he’s speaking truth for me,” and it’s embarrassing ’cause, folks, I can tell you about your iPhone and iPad.
I can tell you things to do with them — how to fix ’em, how to make them hum, how to fix your battery life — that you don’t even know exist. And here I can’t figure something like Twitter which everybody and their uncle uses. So I figure I’m just too smart for the app. I don’t know what it is. (sigh) (interruption) What, divine intervention, that I really…? Snerdley is telling me I would be hooked on it and…? (interruption) Political crack? You mean once you go on Twitter and you start tweeting and people react to it and your stuff gets retweeted, that’s like political…?
Well, I already have that here. See, that’s the point. I already have that. I get all of that kind of feedback here. Anyway, back to the Trump tweet. I just want to prep you that there are a lot of people today, depending on who it is that analyzes, who are gonna tell you that Trump is admitting here — or not admitting, demonstrating, showing, illustrating — that he’s not a conservative, or that he doesn’t understand it, that he doesn’t know the difference between the Republican Party and conservatives in the Republican Party. So you Trump fans, I’m just giving you a heads-up as to what might be headed your way today.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Look, I got nothing against Jack Dorsey. I got nothing against the entrepreneurs that came up with Twitter, but I think Twitter is a sewer. I think Twitter is where the dregs, the human debris of our culture go to hang out anonymously — at least a lot of them. There’s some good people out there tweeting because, you know, everybody wants to be famous. Everybody wants to know everything about ’em. Everybody wants to just vomit every personal bit of information about themselves. Everybody wants everybody else to know what they think.
Everybody wants followers.
Everybody wants fame.
Some decent people are out there. But Twitter, in many ways, has become the sewer of anonymous human debris, and I say this not from afar. We have to do battle with it every day here. It’s a business proposition, but that has nothing to do with my comments on how complicated it is and how it doesn’t make sense to me. Those are two separate things. Look at how many careers Twitter may have played a role in destroying.
Some idiot goes out and tweets something that’s silly and foolish and everybody sees it. It gets retweeted and blown and up amplified, and the person’s gotta go around and apologize and explaining some things. And it may not even have really been what whoever tweeted it thinks. It’s fraught with great risk out there. Anyway… I don’t want any calls on this. I don’t want to end up talking about Twitter, Mr. Snerdley.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: John in Verona, New Jersey. I’m really glad you waited. Great to have you here, sir. Hi.
CALLER: Hey, good bumper music dittos today.
RUSH: Thank you, sir. I’m glad you like it.
CALLER: You know, the media is telling us we should all be clutching our pearls because the ugly P-word was used at a political rally. If I had a dime for every time the media mentioned “Pussy Riot” a year or two ago I’d be a member of the 1%.
RUSH: Oh, yeah! What was that, the Pussy Riots? That’s a rock group, right?
RUSH: Russian women’s rock group. That’s exactly what it was. And you’re right. Nobody had a problem whatsoever repeating the name of the group.
CALLER: Yeah. Furthermore, you had a caller earlier in the week. He pointed out that the word used at the rally was short for pusillanimous, and it meant cowardly?
RUSH: Yes, that’s right.
CALLER: With Pussy Riot, they aren’t actually using the word to refer to themselves as cowardly riot.
RUSH: No, they obviously are not. They’re using it as the synonymous, like in the Vagina Monologues, you can —
CALLER: Yeah, I don’t offend easy. I’m just that type, you know? But if you’re gonna be offended, wouldn’t you be more offended by that?
RUSH: Well, in this case it’s always mattered who says it.
CALLER: Oh, yeah.
RUSH: But in either case what we’re talking about doesn’t matter, John. It’s undefeated, bottom line. This discussion proves it. It’s undefeated.
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