RUSH: Do you remember the kerfuffle, do you remember the controversy that ensued in January of 2009 when I told the Wall Street Journal I didn’t need 400 words to explain my hopes and dreams for the Obama administration, I only needed four, and those words: “I hope he fails.” Do you remember the ensuing controversy? And what was it based on?
They said that I, your beloved host, El Rushbo, a household name in all four corners of the world, was advocating for the failure of America. By not hoping the president succeed, I was hoping America would fail. And of course I corrected them boldly and frequently. “No, no, no, no. I’m hoping America survives. America will survive if Obama fails to implement his agenda.”
Well, he didn’t fail to implement his agenda, and we had eight years of stagnation and the near transformation of this country into something it was never founded to be, and that transformation was arrested and stopped and reversed and is in the process of being reversed by Trump. But, in contrast, take a look at CNN. CNN, MSNBC literally are unhinged and insane now. And it fascinates me to watch it.
CNN all morning and even during the last break, they are totally devoted to the news that Stormy Daniels of the Make America Horny Again Tour fame didn’t sign the nondisclosure agreement and thus is free to tell all the details of her affair with Trump, despite the fact that she accepted what was supposedly hush money from somebody, 130 grand, she can now tell the world the truth of her affair with Donald Trump. And they think it’s gonna matter.
This is the guy that survived the Access Hollywood video. People that voted for Trump see this kind of stuff, and they reject it because it’s the politics of old. It’s the same old version of an October Surprise but CNN tries to have one every day. And it’s become comical. They’re beclowning themselves. CNN, MSNBC, New York Times with their fledgling attempt to find anybody whose taxes went up and couldn’t.
But CNN has become an ongoing joke. And their numbers in February tanked even further. They don’t even have at any point of the day an audience that’s in total a million people. I do sit here as I watch them. It’s like watching a car wreck every day. It literally is, folks. It has become predictable from CNN host, anchor, guest. It is entirely, totally predictable. And I find myself asking myself, what must the people that go to work there every day think?
Are they really this off their rocker? Every one of them, from Jake Tapper to Anderson Cooper to John Berman to take your pick of anybody there, Fredo Cuomo. Are they really off their rockers, or are they really now so detached from reality that they could be committed along with Nunberg? What is the difference in a CNN and Sam Nunberg day to day? And the answer is very little. The CNN anchors might be sober while Nunberg wasn’t, but other than that you can’t tell ’em apart.
They’re hysterical, they’re senseless, they’re wandering aimlessly, they’re throwing things up against the wall and hoping they stick. CNN is a network of Sam Nunbergs. And so is MSNBC. I wonder do these people, when they get up and contemplate their day, do they rub their hands together with glee and say, “Man, I can’t wait to get to work today where I get to once again devote myself to destroying Trump over things that didn’t happen”? Or do they get up with drudgery say, “Ah, jeez. I gotta do this again” because it’s what the network is ordering them today. And the answer is it’s probably a combination of the two.
I stare at it like it’s a museum exhibit that is out of this world and unbelievable and incomprehensible. An organization professing to be populated by a bunch of professionals. And they’ve literally been reduced to what looks like an insane asylum with cameras on the walls. It’s become an absolute joke. And I just wonder, the people that work there, are they in the on the joke, are they doing it because they’re ordered to, or have they all collectively lost their minds? Not that it matters.
I’m just curious. ‘Cause I couldn’t get up and go to work every day under such orders. I couldn’t come in here every day — thankfully I don’t because nobody can tell me what to do, but if there were, I couldn’t come in here under orders, just lie about everything and take the absolute wrong take on everything. I could not do it, constitutionally, emotionally, mentally I couldn’t do it. They seem to have no problem with it.
Okay. Texas. Was there a blue wave? See, ladies and gentlemen, up to the primary election yesterday, the Drive-Bys, including the unhinged and deranged at CNN and MSNB, and we have to include the Washington Post and the New York Times. (interruption) No. No. The point about Obama failing, look at what CNN’s doing. CNN is not only hoping Trump fails; they’re trying to engineer the failure, is my point. I never tried to engineer the failure of Obama. I hoped that he would fail on the weight of his policies.
But CNN was part of that group that just dumped on me all over the place for hoping Obama fails, and yet look at what they’re doing. CNN is trying to engineer and direct and bring about the failure of an administration and get rid of a duly elected president. And yet I was somehow a bad guy. And that’s the contradiction.
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RUSH: I want to play an audio sound bite last night. I was… I had to go on DirecTV. I haven’t watched cable news in a while. As you know, when I do see it — and by, this is not a criticism. Please don’t anybody misunderstand. It’s just… Would you watch CNN for any other reason other than to watch a car crash or be entertained by the utter debacle of it? But if… Do you watch things numerous times? IF you know what’s gonna happen, do you watch it again and again? Sometimes classic movies, your favorite TV shows, yeah. But otherwise no.
After you get your fill of it, you know what’s coming, you don’t need to watch it. So I had to go on DirecTV and erase a bunch of my DVRed shows to free up space on my DVR box hard drive, and when I turned it all on it defaulted to Fox News, and you watch live TV in the upper left-hand corner while you’re deleting the recorded content from your playlist. Chatsworth Osborne Jr.’s show was on, Tucker Carlson, and he had this… Tucker was… By the way, I loved Tucker last night. (chuckling)
He was as exasperated as I have been. He was just exasperated over this whole Russia investigation and the media and what’s happening, and he said something I had not heard. You know Samantha Power who was Obama’s last ambassador to the United Nations? She was very much involved in unmasking Americans, along with Susan Rice, toward the tail end of the Obama administration. Anyway, they had a big election in Italy this week, and it was almost a repeat of what happened in our elections in 2016.
A coalition of, quote-unquote, “conservatives and nationalists” just swept everybody out of the way, and it was a major, major win for center-right people in Italy and the added bonus was that it contains a great threat to the solvency of the European Union. One of the issues, one of the primary issues that determine turnout and vote was Italians are fed up with immigration. They’re fed up with their culture being diluted and wiped out. They’re fed up with their government caring more about migrants and illegals than about the native population.
Sound familiar?
Anyway, Samantha Power blamed it on the Russians!
The Russians stole the Italian elections, too — and this is where you just pull your hair out. Because now we’ve got an ongoing narrative and meme that anything that goes wrong for the Democrats, the Russians did it. And they take to the media and they seriously say this stuff. It is deranged. It’s beyond my ability to describe how literally insane and deranged, unhinged whatever this is. I ask myself — I really do — do they really believe this, or is this just something that they know or they think they can convince people is true just by saying it over and over?
You know, the jury is out. There’s a big part of me that thinks people have lost it so much that they really believe it. There’s a big part of me that believes they have been so poisoned by the hate that they contain within themselves each and every day that they have been rendered completely irrational. And the other part of me says, “They’re not this stupid! They can’t really believe the Russians stole our election and now the elections in Italy and they’re preparing to steal the elections in China…”
Oh, wait. There aren’t any. The elections wherever they are, the Russians are there? Folks, Russia… There’s another thing wrong. Russia is being portrayed as this gigantically powerful, omnivorous presence that is just dominating and swallowing and swarming everything, that the Russians are running the world. I’m here to tell you, the Russians still remain a Third World country, at best, with a First World military and intelligence operation. The Russians are not an economic superpower. They’re in no… They’re in no way.
They do not singularly have the kind of power that’s being assigned to them. Our CIA and NSA have a better chance of stealing an election in Italy than the Russians do. Even in our elections, when you look at the amount of money Russians spent on Facebook after the election, they were pikers. They didn’t spend anywhere near as much as even labor unions do. And yet look at how they’re being held up, hoisted up, and paraded in front of everybody.
And what’s really ironic about it is the Democrats and the left used to love them!
They used to want to be them.
When they were the Soviets, the Democrats in this country looked up to them. The Democrats thought the Soviets had the answer. When the Soviets wanted to build a client state in Nicaragua, the Democrat Party helped them do it! But now all of a sudden they’re best buddies, the Russians, the former Soviets have become this great, gigantic monster of an enemy? It just isn’t true. Well, anyway, Tucker brought on Brit Hume, the commentator/analyst emeritus, to analyze this seeming insanity, irrationality and lunacy that has overtaken Washington, D.C.
Now, you have heard what Hume is gonna say here, as I’ve been saying it myself in my own way for years now. But I still wanted you to hear this. The question that Tucker asks Brit Hume, “You have somebody who’s under the influence of alcohol” — this is Nunberg — “jump around the set, humiliate himself, but not only that, degrade the person that is interviewing him, I wonder if there is a cost long-term.” He’s asking Brit Hume if these networks are actually in the long term wiping themselves out, harming themselves reputationally, business-wise with incidents like Nunberg yesterday and here is the answer.
HUME: There’s been a belief for the longest time that the Trump election was illegitimate and there’s been a sense in the media that his election constitutes a kind of national emergency because he’s such an unqualified character and so likely to lead us off a cliff that it is a job of the media to join the resistance and to find out what must be behind his election and what scandals must lurk there to take him down. That’s plainly what this is all about. The media clearly joined the resistance. It borders on hysteria. It’s just so over the top. I mean, you don’t have to be a Trump admirer to realize that the things that are being said are just wildly out of proportion.
RUSH: Now, Brit Hume has not thought this for very long. I think recent events have brought him to this reality. And this view that you just heard him espouse is not common inside the Beltway. There are a lot of conservative bloggers, the Never Trumpers, they don’t think this. They think Trump’s the problem, they think Trump’s the deranged one. A lot of conservatives. So this is still not a majority opinion, but even with this opinion, I think there’s something that’s slightly different.
I am not picking nits here and I’m not being critical of Brit Hume, so don’t anybody start firing off angry emails and tweets and stuff. It’s just a tiny, little difference of opinion. When he said, “There’s been a sense in the media that Trump’s election constitutes a kind of national emergency because he’s such an unqualified character and so likely to lead us off of a cliff that it is the job of the media to join the resistance and find out what must be behind his election.”
Yeah, part of that’s true, that they can’t believe how it happened. They thought they had the election wired. Hillary was gonna win hands down. They’ve had to concoct the excuse to explain why she and they lost. But I don’t think that the media gives a whit about the country falling off a cliff. I don’t think they have the capacity to care about that. I don’t think that’s what the resistance to Trump is all about. I don’t think the resistance to Trump has anything to do with these people worried about what it means for the country.
I think it all has to do with them being worried about what it means for them. These people all think they’re elites! You know, when you get inside the Beltway, when you get inside the Washington establishment, it’s kind of like going to Davos. Class distinctions don’t exist inside the establishment. You’re either in it and you’re an elite or you’re not. There’s not elite level one and elite level two and elite level three.
You’re just in or you’re out. And it doesn’t matter if you’re in media or at a think tank or the State Department or in the administration or on the staff of an elected congressman or senator, you are an elitist. You’re there. You’re in the club. You’re in the establishment. And that’s what they think is threatened here. They’re worried that they’re little fiefdom is gonna be blown sky-high. They’re worried that their little protective club where everybody’s looked out for and protected and their futures are guaranteed, that’s what they’re worried about.
Plus, they’re worried about their own influence and effectiveness. How could this have happened? They own everything, in their minds. They own public opinion. How could this guy survive everything they did to take him out? They’re taking it personally. They can’t believe it. And they’ll be damned if it’s gonna happen again and damned if this guy’s gonna succeed. They can’t afford for him to succeed at anything! It blows up the illusion that only they have the brains and the smarts to run things.
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RUSH: Sean in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Hi.
CALLER: Hi, Rush. I wanted you to know that I love what you do, not only for America, but for conservatism. I have a quick comment and then maybe an opportunity to make you, the host, look good. I developed a little acronym I think that we can, as conservatives, use to kind of describe how Trump has succeeded in repudiating things that occur every day and have been done in very different ways, that is the word “trump” sort of like the verb, like America’s been trumped.
RUSH: Oh, yeah.
CALLER: Total repudiation unrecognized by most people every day. I mean, he does it in so many different ways. What do you think about that?
RUSH: I like it. I like anything that’s communicative.
CALLER: Sure. Sure. We know he’s dominating Washington also with a game that liberals developed but really no Republican has been able to win at. He uses tactics that have been used for many decades, but he uses them to promote his more conservative agenda.
I’m not sure if you’re thinking of the same thing I am, but I’m thinking of Saul Alinsky. Several of his rules describe almost to a T what Trump does. Number 13: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, polarize it. He does this with the rocket man, Fauxcahontas. The threat, number 9, the threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself. I think this comes to play with his negotiating. As the expert on all things conservative, what does the Maha Rushie think himself.
RUSH: Well, I think not only that he freezes it and isolates it. I think the greatest example of Trump using Alinsky-like tactics is “fake news.” I mean, he just gets in their faces, and it clearly has worked. Jim Acosta, otherwise thought to be an adult… Jim Acosta at CNN. These people are nothing but babies. They are spoiled-rotten babies, and somebody has told them along the lines of their education that because their job is mentioned in the Constitution, that they’re special and that they’re above criticism.
Who was it? I had this the other day, and I don’t remember who said it. It was some journalist or some commentator — and it might have been CNN — said that you cannot criticize media people. You cannot criticize journalists. It might have been Bob… No, it wasn’t Woodward. It was somebody who is a relatively big name in media. “You cannot criticize us! To criticize us is to do great damage to our democracy. You cannot criticize media.” Now, they are taught this.
These are… Journalists are cookie cutters. They’re taught as cookie cutters. They come out all thinking and doing the same thing, and they believe their job is unique and special and unassailable because it’s mentioned in the Constitution, freedom of the press. Here’s Trump just taking it right to ’em — fake news — and pointing out examples, and making fun of them. Ridicule is a key ingredient of Alinskyism. Ridicule is considered to be one of the most effective ways of ridding someone of respect. Ridicule — and Trump ridicules them constantly.
Here’s Jim Acosta after a White House briefing earlier this week literally whining to Sarah Huckabee Sanders, “You haven’t called on me in three days! (sobbing) You haven’t called on me in three days! (sniffles) It isn’t fair,” like a kindergartener! Which is why, you know, I go back and forth about are these people really this dumb and stupid or is some of this an act? And I think the former. I think they believe all this garbage. I think they’re obsessed here with…
You have to be really wary of people who think they are important and irreplaceable. You have to. Those people you need to be at arm’s length from and never trust them, because they’re not healthy. People that don’t have any humility are dangerous. You don’t want to be friends with them. You don’t. They end up destroying the friendship. You will have very little in common with somebody who doesn’t have any humility at all. It’s a fundamental human requirement in terms of human ingredients.
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RUSH: You observe that these media people, they hate Joe McCarthy, but I think that’s who they’ve become. They hated McCarthy ’cause they said he saw a communist everywhere in the government. Look at these media people! Are we not at the point of asking them, “Have you people no shame? Can you not give up this Russia collusion business?” We can’t shame ’em, though. It’s not possible.