RUSH: Man, oh, man. It’s getting even more embarrassing. It’s getting stupider and dumber and more embarrassing to watch our media on a daily basis. It is getting to the point for me of defying description of what the Drive-By Media is actually doing and perpetrating. I mean, I know what they’re doing and everybody else knows what they’re doing. But it’s gone beyond the realm of what anybody would consider polite sanity.
CNN yesterday actually sent a reporter to Bangkok to interview that honey pot that’s in jail who claims to have 16 hours of recorded phone conversations implicating Trump and Russia. This was after this fiasco with this sad sack — have you ever seen — by the way, this Nunberg escapade yesterday, the spectacle, is a classic illustration of the definition of Drive-By Media.
Greetings, my friends. Great to have you. Rush Limbaugh at 800-282-2882, and the email address, ElRushbo@eibnet.us.
So the big news of the day — you know, before I get into that, I want to remind you of something and the way to watch this, if you’re gonna endeavor to watch it. These people in the media, you know, you can argue about whether they believe this or whether they’ve become poisoned by their own hatred or whether it’s all an act and they know it’s an act and they’re perpetuating a myth knowingly. You can argue about that.
What you can’t argue about is that they have no concern and no awareness of how they look to the audience. And that means they don’t care really what their audience thinks of this. All of this is being done for the audience that is inside Washington, inside the Washington establishment. And there is a singular focus throughout that establishment, and I don’t care where you go, if you go to the intelligence community, the House, the Senate, if you go to the various cabinet-level bureaucracies, the objective there is to get rid of Donald Trump.
It’s pure and simple, and that’s all it is, and that is the order of business every day. Pure and simple, plain and simple, that’s the focus, that is the objective. There isn’t any news anymore. There isn’t even any reporting of news anymore. There is simply the daily agenda of getting rid of Trump and everything that happens that could be related to that that would move that objective forward.
So the big news of the day yesterday, supposed to be about some person that none of us ever heard of. A sad sack, clearly disturbed, unbalanced individual by the name of Nunberg. When I saw this, remember these OJ Simpson movies, the parodies on police, Police Squad or whatever. He played this idiot cop named Nordberg. That’s all I could think of when I kept seeing this guy’s name Nunberg. I thought I was watching a comedy. I thought, “I’m watching a comedy movie here.”
Sam Nunberg. Nobody ever heard of Sam Nunberg and that’s why Sam Nunberg is a basket case. He wants desperately to be heard of like every other Millennial out there, desperate to be known, desperate for everybody to know who he is, desperate to have his life have meaning, desperate to be famous. But your life is never gonna have meaning if you don’t have any responsibility, and this guy clearly doesn’t have any responsibility, and that agitates him.
He was fired I think from the Trump campaign three times. He was sued for $10 million for violating an NDA, a nondisclosure agreement. But we’re supposed to all be breathless and speechless at the things this guy was saying, even though he’s been fired three times, at least. He had low level staff jobs. I mean, the real question, if you want to really explore this, is what the hell was this guy doing anywhere near a campaign? You know, how did that happen?
But to think that this guy has the goods? These people, they go to bed at night dreaming of waking up with the magic bullet piece of evidence that Trump and Putin are friends and colluded and stole the election from Hillary. They dream of waking up with that story dropping right in their lap. That is how they begin every day. They begin every day thinking it’s gonna happen, praying it’s gonna happen. Well, I don’t know about praying. Hoping it’s gonna happen.
Believing that it is happening, when some lunatic like this shows up — I’m sorry — when some disturbed individual crying out for attention shows up and starts saying exactly what they want to hear, a guy who never worked on Trump’s general election campaign, a guy who never worked at the White House, again, exclamation point, on the fact that this means nobody has anything if this can become the news cycle.
This guy was on more shows than Susan Rice went on to deny what happened in Benghazi. This guy was on any show that would take him, and they kept him for 45 minutes. Nobody gets 45 minutes, especially when they smell adult beverages on his breath. So this guy is the news cycle. He has no direct knowledge of anything, which means Mueller doesn’t have anything, which means the Drive-Bys don’t have anything, which means there isn’t anything.
There is no evidence, and they’re grasping at every little bit of excrement somebody throws on the wall hoping that it will stick. And it’s even worse than that because the Drive-Bys knew that this poor soul had an axe to grind against Trump. Again, fired by the Trump campaign at least three times, even sued for $10 million, violating nondisclosure agreements.
But the Drive-Bys seized on this guy, Nunberg, because he leaked a subpoena to the Washington Post, which is seeking documents related to Trump and nine other people. So this guy got a subpoena to show up and said I’m not gonna show up. I’m gonna rip that subpoena up, I’m not giving Mueller, I’m not going. So he became an immediate get. And he claimed that he knew that Mueller has something on Trump.
He knew, he said, he knew Trump had to have done something, Trump must have done something. That’s all it took. And these guys in the media were like flies on a corpse. They just could not be dissuaded to stay away. And it’s that last thing that really set off the feeding frenzy. They thought at long last, at long last they had somebody from the Trump campaign who would say that Mueller has the goods on Trump because this guy had the goods on Trump and he told Mueller.
So the media put this guy on every program they could. He ended up doing six cable news interviews. And they were breathless and they were excited and the Drive-Bys kept trying to draw him out. This guy was either toying with them or inebriated or a combination of things but, man, if he was playing them along, he was doing it like a Stradivarius.
But it all backfired. It backfired when Nunberg contradicted himself and basically melted down on TV, which immediately threw cold water on all the media’s hopes and dreams of finally having proof that Trump had colluded with the Russians. And by the end of the day, Nunberg ended up basically denying he ever thought there was any evidence of collusion.
So all day long, all afternoon this guy’s on television everywhere, “Yeah, I know that Trump did something with the Russians, and Mueller knows it, too.” And he was feeding the beast, and they were soaking it up, they were eating it, they were swallowing it, they couldn’t get enough of it.
And then at the end of the day the guy owns up and contradicts himself while melting down, dashing all of their hopes.
By the end of the day, Nunberg ended up basically denying he ever thought there was any evidence of collusion. So all this ended up being was a perfect example of a media feeding frenzy that completely failed its objective.
You know, Mike Allen writing at Axios said, “This is why people hate the media.” This is only part of where why people hate the media, but it’s a good example. So now instead of presenting Nunberg as their prime proof of Trump collusion, the media… (laughing) Get this! The media is now trying to salvage something from this fiasco by saying that Nunberg just proves that Trump surrounds himself with lunatics and that they’ve done a great job ferreting that out.
They, the Drive-By Media, have once again exposed yet another fraud working for Trump, and this is supposedly evidence that proves that Trump surrounds himself with nut jobs, and so the sliming continues unabated. It was Erin Burnett of Erin Burnett OutFront… Here’s a little thought experiment for you. This Nunberg media circus ended with Erin Burnett asking Nunberg if he was drunk. She even said she smelled adult beverages on his breath.
Now, as a thought experiment, ask yourself if Ms. Burnett would have asked this question if Nunberg had followed through. If Nunberg had continued to claim that Mueller has something on Trump, would they have ever referenced that the guy was consuming adult beverages in the greenroom? They would have never mentioned it. We would never know that Nunberg might have been showing up while inebriated, but the media had to get that out when he started imploding and contradicting himself and backtracking off every claim that he had made.
There would be no questioning of Nunberg’s sanity or his drinking or drug use if he had continued to stay on message and affirm that Trump colluded with Russia. In fact, if he hadn’t backtracked, if he hadn’t melted down — if he hadn’t, at the end of the day, contradicted every assertion that he made — today there would be nothing but praise for the courage of a former Trump aide coming forward with this important information. As it turns out, it’s beyond description how useless and worthless this is.
But look at the time and the attention this guy got. There wasn’t any checking. There wasn’t any confirmation. They didn’t hold this guy’s TV appearances while they tracked down what he said. They didn’t do any checking on this guy at all. All it took was somebody from the Trump campaign dumping on Trump saying there had to be collusion between Trump and Russia. That was enough. “Put him on the air!” Six different times. He was on with Erin Burnett, I think, for 45 minutes. Did I see that? Forty-five minutes?
Now they’re trying to spin their failure with this. You see, they had hoped that Nunberg was gonna finally give ’em proof of Trump’s collusion, but instead of admitting they made fools of themselves by giving this whack job all of this wall-to-wall coverage, the media is now claiming that Nunberg cracked under the pressure of (laughing) Mueller closing in on Trump. All of this happened yesterday because Mueller’s getting close! Mueller’s getting close to Trump and that means Nunberg was feeling vulnerable.
Nunberg might be caught up in all of this, so he had to go out there and somehow protect himself. In the real world, nobody knew who the guy was! He was fired three times, sued for $10 million. The guy was a nonfactor. Can somebody explain something to me, by the way? Why is Carter Page still running around free? Well, no. The reason I ask this is ’cause he was the reason they got the FISA warrant. Carter Page. Where are the charges against Carter Page?
Carter Page was the reason for the first step they took to try to establish that Trump was colluding with Putin and Russia. Now, the FBI and everybody in the Drive-Bys say, “No, no, no, no! It wasn’t Carter Page. You are wrong. It was Papadopoulos.” Oh, really? Papadopoulos? Well, guess what we’ve learned about that? This Australian lawmaker, whoever he was — ambassador — that Papadopoulos started running off at the mouth to? Guess where that guy used to work? He’s a donor to the Clinton Foundation!
He’s a 25- to 50-million-dollar donor to the Clinton Foundation, the guy that Papadopoulos ended up making a drunken comment to! The Clintons are everywhere in this story. They are everywhere, and they’re being ignored. They’re being exonerated; they’re being passed by. So on one hand, it was Carter Page was the reason that we got the FISA warrant to spy on Trump. Yet he’s walking around free as a bird. No charges, no plea deals, nothing!
Meanwhile, people that haven’t been named, people that weren’t involved in the FISA warrant are either pleading guilty or being charged. Then after the Carter Page thing blew up, Adam Schiff and the Democrats and their precious little response memo are trying to say, “It wasn’t Carter Page that got this all started. It was George Papadopoulos!” Well, they didn’t know about Papadopoulos until six months into this.
And Papadopoulos is another bit player that Trump has never met on the fringes of the campaign. You know, a campaign in politics is like a rock tour in music. There are groupies and there are hangers-on, and the band doesn’t know 90% of ’em. They trust the unit managers and all that to keep the creeps and the groupies away. Unless the band, you know, wants a night with a groupie; then that’s arranged. But other than that, the wackos are kept out.
So Papadopoulos is talking to an Australian ambassador some such thing, and he’s had too much to drink one night, and he starts talking about Trump and the Russians. And little Adam Schiff says, “That’s what got the FISA warrant going. That’s exchange. It’s not Carter Page.” Well, that’s BS. It was Carter Page. It was all Carter Page. Papadopoulos is a fallback position because the first attempt at getting this FISA warrant was bogus.
Now we find out that the guy Papadopoulos was mouthing off to is a big-time donor to the Clinton Foundation, and you know what that means. He’s a big-time investor in the Clinton political fortunes. Everywhere you look, the Clintons are involved here. And they’re being ignored. They’re being given a big pass. They’re being exonerated, in fact. Comey exonerated Hillary, and I’m telling you: The Clintons and their widespread universe is really the focal point. It’s Ground Zero for all of this crap.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: You know, I have to… You people in the Drive-By Media, you need to be embarrassed. At some point, you need to fess up. There has to be some semblance of maturity and responsibility. Are there no adults left anywhere in the media? I’m being serious. Are there no adults? Walter Cronkite would never do this. Walter Cronkite, Edward R. Murrow, the legends that our present Drive-By Media seek to someday be — the people they respect, the people they emulate. Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite, John Chancellor.
These guys would never put somebody obviously drunk and inebriated on six different shows for 45 minutes each! Well, maybe a Kennedy, but outside of that, they wouldn’t put this guy on. I mean, this guy Nunberg… We’ve got a little montage of some of the things he said coming up. He called Sarah Huckabee Sanders “a fat slob,” and they did not admonish him over that, by the way. He told her to shut her “big, fat mouth.” The guy had no credibility. He wasn’t credible. He wasn’t under control. Yet this guy drove the coverage for hours — for hours! — because these people in the media are obsessed.
And this is even further evidence they’re not gonna give this up.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: By the way, this guy Nunberg left the Trump campaign in 2015. Well, that’s when Trump announced. Trump announced on June 16th of 2015, and this guy was gone not long after. The guy doesn’t know anything. He remained… I’m told he was a loud advocate for Trump, but he had no pass. He was not part of the campaign apparatus. He was not an employee. He was actually fired three different times. A nonentity. A total nonfactor.
This guy actually fleeced and maneuvered America’s Drive-By Media. The entire media industry basically self-immolated. They set themselves on fire simply because some guy that nobody ever heard of came along and claimed that he knew or thought that Trump had colluded with Russia. Now, does this not do something very significant? Does this incident not fully discredit every story they have run beginning in November of 2016 with all of these deep-state sources? Remember all of these Washington Post and New York Times and CNN stories with multiple reporters.
And all of these anonymous sources that we were told were from various elements of our defense and intelligence apparatus? We had people from the intelligence community were sourcing. We had people from the defense department. We had people from the State Department. All of these people were anonymous and all of them were claiming that Trump and Russia had colluded one way or another. They were stating it; they were implying it.
Every damned one of them was anonymous, and yet every one of those stories — there might have been a couple, three exceptions. But every one of the stories had a little line in it somewhere that “to date, there is no evidence of these allegations, but the officials we’ve spoken to are certain that it will soon be forthcoming” or some such thing. Well, given what we saw of how they used this guy, I think we have to call into legitimate question just who were all of these anonymous sources? Did they really even exist, or were they just made up by these reporters?
It’s a serious question. If they’ll take a guy that they don’t even know and they know that he’s drunk — they can smell adult beverages on his breath — and they’ll still put him on the air, six different shows (45 minutes in one interview), knowing he’s drunk, knowing he was fired in 2015… They’ll put him on the air simply because of what he says that they don’t check, they don’t verify, they don’t corroborate, just like they didn’t check or corroborate or verify anything that Christopher Steele said in that stupid dossier.
So tell me: Just what value has any of the reporting on this had? If you ask me, this escapade yesterday serves to disqualify every story the media has run on this. The only thing different about this guy was we actually saw him, and we have a name. But all of these others anonymously sourced — the Washington Post, the New York Times, CNN, take your pick — we don’t even know who they are, and we don’t even know that they really exist.
And we do know that whatever they said was hokum. We do know that everything they implied and everything that they intimated turns out to be totally 180-degrees wrong. This episode yesterday, as far as I’m concerned, disqualifies every story these people have run to date, because the way this happened yesterday is proof positive of the way this whole story happens each and every day. The way the media is dealing with this and reporting this and treating it every day, we saw it.
There isn’t anybody yet that has any evidence. We have a year and a half of reporting on this now. There’s not a single person with a shred of evidence! The evidence, in fact, points straight to the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democrat Party, and it is being studiously, purposely ignored.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: We’re gonna move Flippy, the burger-flipping robot story to about eight minutes from now. So hang in there and be patient. In the meantime, we’re gonna start in Oakland, Nebraska. This is Chad, and it’s great to have you, Chad. I’m glad that you were patient and waited. Thank you.
CALLER: Thanks, Rush. Good to talk to you.
RUSH: Thank you.
CALLER: Hey, this is not really about the education that you were just talking about, but I want to know —
RUSH: Chad? Chad, wait.
CALLER: Yes.
RUSH: No, everything is about education.
CALLER: (laughing)
RUSH: That’s the point. Everything can be linked to education.
CALLER: Yeah. (laughing)
RUSH: No, I’m not kidding. Everything can be tied back to, linked to education in one way or the. I could demo this if you want after you make your point.
CALLER: Well, I hear you, Rush. I believe you. But what I’m wondering is this drunken moron, when CNN was interviewing him, you know, he said that Trump’s approval rating was only 35%. I’m just wondering, “Where do they come up with those numbers?” Where did they come up with that 35%? Because forever we heard when Trey Gowdy was interviewing Hillary Clinton, she kept saying, “Well, I’ve given 98% of the emails to you already,” and Trey Gowdy insisted, “You’re the only person that says 98%. Where did you come up with that number?” Is this the same person that’s coming up with this 35%?
RUSH: Wait. The answer is very simple. Nunberg is either a stupid idiot or lying.
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: And Hillary was lying.
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: It’s not complicated. Nunberg… Approval numbers? Nunberg hadn’t been there since 2015. There isn’t a poll that anybody considered worth it that has Trump at 35%. Trump’s approval numbers, in fact, no matter what poll you look at… February he had a good month, his approval numbers were tacking upward in every opinion poll, and he’s hovering between 48 and 50% at Rasmussen. But it’s nowhere near 35%.
CALLER: No, and 48 to 50 sounds a lot better, but I just gotta believe it’s even higher than that because I’ve never seen this poll. You know, they’re not coming out to the sticks here and asking us about our approval. (chuckling)
RUSH: Well, they don’t go anywhere. They call people on the phone.
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: Much of polling is done on phones, and they’re still having trouble finding cell phones. You know, there’s not a cell phone number like there is for landlines.
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: So you… Look, the thing… Here’s what you have to do to understand polls. It’s up to you to believe whichever one you want to believe, whenever they come out. But the primary purpose of polling data today, Chad, is to shape public opinion, not reflect it. The prime… The secondary purpose of polling is to create news stories. Isn’t it amazing that pretty much every poll result, particularly in a campaign, becomes its own news cycle? Its own series of stories. That’s why it’s done. But here’s another thing to look at, Chad. What does it mean? Let’s go back one year. Let’s go back to March the 6th of 2017. Do you remember, Chad, what Trump’s number, his polling number in the presidential race was one year ago?
CALLER: No, I don’t.
RUSH: Why not?
CALLER: Uhhhh….
RUSH: Because it didn’t matter. It didn’t mater. Does it matter what horse is in the lead at the halfway point? No! It doesn’t tell you anything. These polls are useless, unless you allow them to shape your opinion of things — and that’s what they’re trying to do.