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NBC Didn’t Want to Fire Matt Lauer — And Don’t Be Surprised When He Comes Back

by Rush Limbaugh - Nov 30,2017

RUSH: You know, folks, we like to be of service here. We like to help people who are in duress, people that are suffering. I said yesterday that I fully believe within a year Matt Lauer will be back on TV. This is what the establishment does. Brian Williams is back. Dan Rather is roaming around out there somewhere on the Drive-By Media plain. He’s filing reports on obscure networks, but he’s still out there, and he’s still guesting on various cable shows as a reporter and news person of stature.

The Drive-Bys have much to protect. They have to protect these individuals because that then protects their institution. And the institution here is the media itself, the Drive-By Media. So when any of them take big hits like this, eventually they’ll circle the wagons and Matt Lauer will resurface. I want to help speed that up. I was reading the Vanity Fair piece, which is quite descriptive on some of the things that Matt Lauer was doing to these women. Did you know that he had a button underneath his desk that he could press and lock the door to his office?

Now, why would one have that? I mean, he didn’t have to get up, he didn’t have to leave the desk in order to go up and lock the door. He had a button there. It could have been twofold. It could have been to keep women from leaving, but more than likely it was to keep people from walking in and interrupting what was happening in there. Now, the reason he didn’t want to get up to have to go close and lock the door is because of what he would have had to interrupt taking place to do that. So if there is some kind of sexual activity going on while Matt Lauer is sitting in his chair just reach under the desk and lock the door and you’re done.

So my idea… Because I know Matt Lauer wants to be back on TV, and I know that NBC wants him back on TV at some point. The Drive-Bys really do need that to happen. I’m just trying to offer a helpful suggestion. A reality TV show hosted by Matt Lauer called Locked and Loaded. It would be half dating game and half Survivor and would be filmed entirely in his office. Locked and Loaded with Matt Lauer. It would be reality TV. He’s got that door lock button underneath the desk. Think of the possibilities here, folks.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Kathryn in Baltimore. Great to have you on the EIB Network. How you doing?

CALLER: I’m doing great, Rush. How are you?

RUSH: Fine. Thank you. Great to hear from you.

CALLER: Yes. Just a couple points. The first point is, isn’t it interesting with all the harassment and assault charges coming, you know, against various politicians/media people, that the private sector fires, gets rid of almost immediately those that are accused. Matt Lauer, Weinstein, et cetera, et cetera. But in government, with John Conyers, Barney Frank, we have to have process, we have spokespeople.

RUSH: Right.

CALLER: We have to look at the legacy of the person. You know, the wheels of justice seem to take forever. You know, and again, it’s a little dose of the government versus the private sector.

RUSH: It’s a brilliant observation.

CALLER: Yeah.

RUSH: In fact, I would like to offer you an iPhone X if you would like one. But I want you to hang on ’cause I’m not gonna waste time asking your carrier, just don’t hang up and Snerdley will get the details from you if you want one.

CALLER: I do, but I have a second point.

RUSH: You better be fast. What is it? What is it?

CALLER: The fact that, you know, you have to implore people, as you spoke of morality, to judge people by the content of their character as an individual, not this group politics: all single mothers are wonderful, all people in the black national caucus are wonderful, all immigrants are wonderful.

RUSH: That’s the Congressional Black Caucasians.

CALLER: Yeah.

RUSH: I’m gonna take issue with one thing. Your observation is brilliant. But the private sector ain’t that fast.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Our previous caller was Kathryn from Baltimore, and her point was a good one, contrasting the difference between the private sector and the public sector when it comes to victims and perpetrators of sexual harassment, how they’re dealt with. She observed that the private sector, once they find out about it, they get rid of the perp right then and there.

The government, no. They take their time, they circle the wagons, they do everything they can to save the perp. They come out and say it’s none of our business. They come out and say it’s only sex; it didn’t get in the way of whoever we’re talking about’s job performance and so forth.

And while overall that’s true, if you strict comparison, but I’m gonna tell you, folks, the private sector’s not that fast. They’re not instantaneous. Everybody thinks that NBC decided to get rid of Matt Lauer in about five minutes. But I contend to you that they didn’t. I contend to you that they hoped not to have to get rid of Matt Lauer. And I do it on the basis of this.

You remember the original Ronan Farrow story on Harvey Weinstein that ran in the New Yorker? Some of you may remember that Ronan Farrow works at NBC. He’s a consultant, a stringer. He doesn’t have a regular gig, but he does contract pieces. They assign him to go do stories, probably to get him out of the building, and then he goes and does the stories, he comes back. And he came back, and he had the Weinstein story. He had it nailed. He had thousands and thousands of words, and he had interviews.

And NBC shelved it. NBC said, “Not interested.” NBC said, “We don’t think you’ve nailed this down.” NBC said, “We’re not comfortable with this.” NBC said, “Shop it somewhere else. We just don’t think this is ready for publication or for air.” So Ronan Farrow walked it down the street to The New Yorker, where they immediately ran it, and the rest is history.

Now, why would NBC have passed on this? Now, our old buddy Seton Motley believes that this is evidence that these news organizations do not do investigative news, particularly when it’s of and about themselves. They do everything they can to delay it or to hide it or maybe even cover it up. How long did CBS know about Charlie Rose and PBS before the time came where they had no choice but than to get rid of Charlie? It’s my contention these people at these places knew of this for quite a while. And to me the best evidence of it, look at Matt Lauer. Everybody’s saying they’re shocked, we didn’t know. At least that’s what’s published, published quotes.

But then we learn after the first 24 hours that some people, “Oh, yeah, we knew. Oh, there were rumors.” And then after 24 hours we have every detail we could possibly want about Matt Lauer’s secret button under his desk to lock the door. And these people have no problem finding Matt Lauer sound bites from way back in 2005 and 2006 where he tells Meredith Vieira, “Hey, bend over a little more.” Nobody had any trouble finding the Katie Couric sound bite where she said that the biggest, most noteworthy thing about working with Matt Lauer was that he liked to pinch her butt.

So I think they’ve known. I think there’s been suspicion. Jeff Zucker, who ran NBC for a while, was the exec producer of Today show now over at CNN (imitating Zucker), “I don’t know this guy. I never saw this kind of predation. Different guy. I didn’t know.” Well, there’s gotta be a reason that they didn’t run the Ronan Farrow story. And there’s also word that Matt Lauer had significant editorial control over what stories did make the air at the Today Show and what stories didn’t.

Now, granted, though, her point is right. I mean, the private sector is much quicker to move once they decide they’re gonna move. And I don’t dispute that. But my caution here is that the government, granted, they do everything they can to avoid having to make a move, particularly the Democrats. Now, the Republicans… The Republicans are the fastest to get rid of their own. The Democrats not so much. Democrats circle the wagons, give it every chance they can to survive.

And of course, can you blame ’em? Their big, formative event is the Clinton years. They got away — they literally got away, by the way, with the assistance of Matt Lauer — with suggesting that it was a vast right-wing conspiracy that sent Monica Lewinsky into the Oval Office to deliver pizza to Bill Clinton. Hillary Clinton shows up on the Today show. Matt Lauer was interviewing her, and she talks about this vast right-wing conspiracy, and Matt Lauer doesn’t say, “Come on. Don’t insult our intelligence. You really think there’s a bunch of right-wingers that made this happen?” Instead he just nodded his head.

And so from the Democrat perspective, they get away with it. The Democrat lesson is, they’re not held accountable. The Democrat lesson is that there’s nobody that can make them get rid of their stars. The Democrat lesson is using the big dog, Bill Clinton, they get away with it. And before him, Ted Kennedy. Ted Kennedy abandoned a woman at Chappaquiddick who died in the backseat of his car that he ran into a lake off a bridge. Ted Kennedy and Chris Dodd famous for the waitress sandwich maneuver at the La Brasserie restaurant private room.

The legions of Democrats — Hugh Hefner. I mean, the legion of Democrats that get away with this, and not just get away with it, they become bigger stars in the party. This is why I made an observation when this latest round of this stuff began, and even during the Clinton campaign, during the primaries, some of you may remember. Many months ago I predicted that the excrement would hit the fan once Millennial women learned the truth about Bill and Hillary Clinton’s treatment of women.

You know, Hillary and Bill were relying on the fact that even in the 2016 presidential campaign that it was the same media. Remember, the Clintons never did find a way to get out of the nineties. Their strategy, their assumptions of their enemies. It was all rooted in the history of the nineties. And they never moved forward. They stayed locked into the nineties and continued to treat events in 2014, ’15, ’16, as though they were happening all over again from the 1990s, and the strategies for dealing with them didn’t change.

Back in the 1990s, it was perfectly fine for Hillary Clinton to destroy women alleging her husband had abused them or raped them, perfectly fine. The Democrat Party said, “Great!” The Democrat Party applauded it. Women in the media applauded it. Female reporters said, “I would give Bill Clinton a Lewinsky as perpetual thanks for keeping abortion legal.”

The female press corps in the 1990s did not lift a finger to hold Bill Clinton accountable or Hillary Clinton accountable, and not only that, they helped the Clintons destroy or damage to try to damage any opposition to the Clintons from the right or from the women who were Clinton’s victims. Well, I predicted, based on my study of Millennials and what they were being taught with never ending women’s studies and I’m looking at this rape culture on college and how it’s being promoted and how Lena Dunham and all these Millennial women are telling every other woman that rape is awaiting them right around the corner. Rolling Stone with a totally fake story.

And I surmised, using intelligence guided by experience, that once a significant number of these Millennial women reporters actually learn what happened, when they actually learn how Hillary Clinton ran a bimbo eruptions operation to destroy women alleging sexual harassment, that they would not behave the way the female reporters of the nineties did, that they wouldn’t put up with it and that they would begin to see the Clintons in a whole new light. Because they hadn’t lived through it.

The Clintons were not something they had a personal connection to. There was no investment in the Clintons. Their futures and their lives and their businesses didn’t depend on keeping the Clintons happy or keeping the Clintons at the top of the heap of the Democrat Party. And if you look, many of the infobabes and reporterettes that are writing stories on Franken and Matt Lauer and Harvey Weinstein, et al, are Millennial female reporters.

They have been marinating all of these years in women’s studies courses in the academy, and they’re not gonna put up with this kind of stuff. They’re not gonna put up with the groping and they’re not gonna ignore it and they’re not gonna think it doesn’t mean anything, and they’re not going to say, “We gotta protect the gropers for the Democrat Party.”

The generation of women before them overlooked all of that. The female generation before the Millennials actually enabled the sexual harassers and the gropers and the pervs, but not Millennial women. Except against Republicans, of course. That’s not changed. Can you imagine how Bill and Hillary must have laughed themselves silly over Bob Packwood being forced to resign while Bill was getting away with the things he was doing to women at that very period in time?

Speaking of how the Clintons got away with things, I just reminded you how Matt Lauer helped the Clintons facilitate that absolutely insulting idea that it was a vast right-wing conspiracy that somehow finagled Monica Lewinsky into the Oval Office delivering pizza. And it was somehow a vast right-wing conspiracy that ended up being responsible for Clinton’s semen on a dress that she was wearing. Matt Lauer helping to facilitate that very idea.

I think my prediction, to a certain extent, has come true. The Millennial women reporters reporting on this have no tolerance, they’re not willing to look the other way when it comes to these Democrat pervs. I don’t deny there’s a preference for these guys politically. I’m not saying that these women are conservative or supportive of Republicans. They have been literally marinated in women’s studies. They have grown up being taught that life as a woman is to be abused, harassed, and at worst raped. And so when there are examples of it, they’re not gonna give these perps a pass.

And I think it’s confusing the Democrat Party. The Democrat Party’s always been able to rely on the media, you know? The Democrat Party, that’s always been the fallback. The Democrat Party’s escape hatch. The Democrat Party’s pink slip. The Democrat Party’s permission slip. The Democrat Party note from the doctor, note by the parents has always been the Drive-By Media. The Drive-By Media has covered for all of them.

And elements of the Drive-By Media are trying to cover for them now, trying to cover for Franken, trying to cover for Conyers. They didn’t have enough time to try to cover for Matt Lauer. But don’t be surprised at some of the things you might hear in the future about how, “You know what? We might have overreacted in the early days of Matt Lauer and maybe some of these things we need to reconsider,” ’cause they’re gonna have try to rehab these people.

I don’t mean Millennial female reporters. I’m talking about the Democrat Party and the American left at large is gonna have to find a way to rehab these guys, because if they don’t, the taint is permanent. They may not succeed at rehabbing them, but they can’t allow this taint to go unbattled. Why are you frowning? Snerdley said, “How do you think Millennial women are gonna react to the rehab?” Depends on how they play the rehab.

If the perp comes out of rehab or whatever and is just falling all over himself in tears and “sorry” and so forth, you never know how it’ll play. Look, as human beings we want to forgive anyway. We are a people that are very much into second chances. I’m just saying beyond all that, I think our basic human nature, beyond all that, the politics of this, they’ve got to try to rehab and save these guys.

I don’t know how far they’ll go to try to save Al Franken, for example. That day of reckoning is yet to happen, but it’s gonna happen. Franken’s gone, just nobody involved knows it yet. Another prediction made by me here on the 30th of November at 1:22 Eastern time in the afternoon.


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