RUSH: Man, that game was so boring last night, I betcha some people wish that some players had kneeled during the anthem and raised their fists. You don’t think so? You don’t think some people would have — I’m not saying I wish it would have happened, but I’m just saying I betcha there are some.
Calling it a throwback game because it featured defense. That was not a throwback game. That was just — ah, folks, that was just a quarterback for the Rams not ready for the stage is what that was and maybe an offensive game plan, neither, but no matter how you look at it — greetings. Rush Limbaugh, the EIB Network. A brand-new week of broadcast excellence. No matter how you look at this — let me tell you how the sports Drive-Bys are looking at it. Not all of them. But I have to tell you it’s not just the sports Drive-Bys.
The Drive-By Media is looking at this as though the Kaepernick supporting Los Angeles Rams lost to the Trump-loving white supremacist New England Patriots. Don’t get on me for politicizing the game. I’m not. Wait ’til you hear how this game was written about in The Daily Beast, which has become a mainstream left-wing news website.
In fact, let me just cut right to that. I mean, there were all kinds of things. Brady last night calls an audible and because most of the crowd was Patriots fans, they’re quiet during the Patriots’ offensive series and so you can hear Brady calling signals. He points out which linebacker’s the mike linebacker, which is how blocking assignments are assigned to the offensive line.
And then he starts putting his hands together, which means audible, audible, and shouts, “Reagan! Reagan!” It was an audible, and they ran a sweep to the right, and Tony Romo says, “Obviously, Reagan means we’re going to the right.” (laughing) I don’t know that it means that, but it lent itself perfectly to that kind of analysis. But that’s how little action there was in the game.
So here’s the Daily Beast writer, and this guy’s name is Corbin Smith. And I’m just gonna read you some excerpts. And I’m doing this — again, this is an object lesson. This is simply a lesson for people in the media and how insane, literally insane the mainstream of American liberalism has become. He’s not alone, this guy Corbin Smith. There are a lot of writers, news and sportswriters, who were disappointed by the game, mad that the Patriots won and are attaching political identities to both teams. I’m not making a word of this up.
“Their star quarterback, coach, and owner all supported Trump. But that’s not the only thing that makes the Super Bowl LIII-bound Patriots the preferred team of white nationalists.” On Brady’s speech at the Patriots send-off rally he said: “Obviously, Brady is referring to his aging, decrepit, cheating-[teams] progression to the big game. But, imagine you didn’t know anything about football, or who Tom Brady was, or anything like that. You would think that you were watching some square-jawed grifter throwing red meat to the hogs at an alt-right rally, screaming at the libs who thought Nancy Pelosi and her gender warriors were gonna keep DECENT AMERICAN FOLKS from BEING HERE.”
This is how he saw the Patriots pep rally before they got on the plane to fly to Atlanta. And he’s talking about a bunch of people that live in Boston! I think the Patriots fly out of Providence, Rhode Island, but their fans are still Northeastern.
“Of course, even if you do know stuff about Brady you may still think he’s on his way to pursuing this line of grifting. He flashed a red MAGA hat … in his locker back in the primary days,” a symbol of white nationalism in America. “He wasn’t the only one! Patriots’ Coach Bill Belichick wrote a goddamn letter to Trump right before the end of the campaign,” and the owner, Robert Kraft, is also Trump’s buddy, “and was even shouted out at Trump’s pre-Inauguration dinner in D.C. Look, it doesn’t matter if the Patriots like it or not, they are the official team of American White Nationalism, the MAGA Boys On the Field.
“When you root for the Patriots, you are associating yourself with a virulent and revolting strain of politics that seeks to Make America Great Again—which is to say, white, European, English-speaking.”
That last is really the lesson here. The guy could always fall back, “Hey, I’m just trying to be funny. I’m just trying to appeal to my left-wing reader base and you guys always say you do satire.” So we’ll grant him the opportunity to try to be funny. I don’t think so because I don’t think they have it in them. The left does not have comics anymore. They don’t have people that tell jokes and get laughs. Their comedians are seeking applause.
But “Make America Great Again” is and equals white European, English speaking country. And that is bad, and that’s what needs to be overthrown. And I don’t think that a significant percentage of Americans yet understand, even after the attack on the Covington kids and the Make America Great Again hat, I really don’t think enough Americans understand that the modern-day left, the mainstream of American liberalism actively hates this country as founded. And its mission is to overthrow it, transform it, however you want to phrase it.
But this game last night, because there was so little to it, got the mainstream media writing about it in pure political terms. I’d rather see it as the old, experienced, grizzled veterans up against the upstart, young, up-and-coming phenoms who had a life lesson spanked on their backsides last night. That’s how I choose to see it. I mean, does it not bother you? I understand sports is what it is, and during the Steelers dynasty, people hated ’em. My dad hated the Steelers. And he hated ’em because they were a machine. They were superhuman. They didn’t make mistakes. They won and won. And that’s understandable in sports.
It’s also true in politics. People that win and win and win and win, i.e., the Kennedys, there are people that just resent that. But the Patriots are unique in all this. There’s never been a dynasty like this, particularly in football. There probably will not be again. And it doesn’t matter from year to year who the players are, the team performs as great as it has in previous years.
I mean, they don’t win every game, they don’t win every Super Bowl, of course, but it’s a phenomenal achievement and a testament to the pursuit of excellence and a testament to a culture that is unwavering. And in all of the news about football players doing things that are sabotaging themselves, social life, social media, things that young players do because of their immaturity.
You never read about anybody on the New England Patriots in a nightclub at two in the morning throwing hundred-dollar bills at strippers. You just don’t read about it because they don’t do it. They may do it in the off season, and Gronkowski may be leading the bunch, but during the season they do not do it.
I’ve had a lot of people sending me emails, “Rush, I don’t understand these ads. Am I getting old? These ads are not working for me. They’re not funny. The ads in the Super Bowl used to be edgy and so forth.”
No, you’re not getting old. This is a key point. You know, you can ask, “what was better last night, the ads or the game?” The Super Bowl used to showcase edgy and truly funny commercials. But times have changed. And there aren’t any edgy commercials because everybody in advertising land is worried about Twitter blowing up. Everybody in corporate America is worried about the internet blowing up.
They’re worried about Twitter mobs blasting companies who make products and sell services who may be engaging in politically incorrect behavior. So that’s why you get an Anheuser-Busch ad selling beer made by windmills. That’s what’s apparently safe. I don’t know that they even think that’s how you sell beer. It’s just safe. If you’re advertising beer made by windmills as opposed to fossil fuels, then you’re probably not gonna cause a Twitter eruption by the deranged left urging people to not buy or boycott your product.
So in a microcosm of what’s happening here, corporate America has become like the Republican Party with the media: Afraid, worried, hell-bent on trying to show everybody that they are not what the public image of them says they are. So everybody is in a fearful, defensive posture. And when you run across somebody or come across somebody who does not live that way, they really stand out. Some people think they’re crazy. Some people think they’re courageous. But Trump would be a great example of somebody who simply does not act according to the current zeitgeist. But the Super Bowl ads, for the most part, were.
The first two Super Bowl ads were about women’s rights, for example. One was about the new season of The Handmaid’s Tale. You liked that, didn’t you? (interruption) You liked it. (interruption) See, I’ve got a woman here on the staff who liked The Handmaid’s Tale. It’s one of the most undermining, fright-inducing pieces of BS that could ever come down the pike, that the future of women in America is as sex slaves owned by white, corporate, English-speaking bad guys who force women to run around looking like they’re milkin’ cows all day until it’s time to come home and get raped.
Because everybody thinks Coke has been the official brand of the National Football League, and Coca-Cola is headquartered in Atlanta. I think PepsiCo is too. No, they’re up in New York. Coca-Cola is in Atlanta. “Is Pepsi okay?” It was Pajama Boy week! I saw so many Pajama Boy-type ads. That Budweiser ad used Bob Dylan’s blowing in the wind, the Bob Dylan song, to tout beer brewed with wind per hour. Millennials don’t even react. They like craft beers. The state of advertising is not strong, but it is quite indicative of where advertisers and corporate America think our culture is right now.
Ralph Northam. No, I have not been avoiding this. I just… The fact that this guy is still hanging on and that there are people trying to make sure he can hang on, like Terry McAuliffe, former governor of Virginia… This is quite another object lesson in the differences in the two parties and how they go about dealing with controversies and where the media falls on each one. But as a prelude, I want to share with you a real story before we go to the break here. (interruption) You like the Amazon ad with Harrison Ford? Now, that was funny. With the dog ordering all the food because the Alexa was out of control and Harrison Ford… I thought that was edgy.
Amazon advertising an out-of-control Alexa, an Alexa that a lot of people — privacy advocates — are scared to death of, that their voice-assisted little piece of equipment’s gonna go nuts and spy on ’em and order all kinds of things delivered. Yeah, that was funny. You have to admit.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: I have Patty here from… is it New Berlin, Illinois, or New Berlin? How do you pronounce it?
CALLER: We pronounce it New Berlin.
RUSH: I thought that. My instincts told me that’s the way you’d pronounce it. Glad you called, Patty. What’s happening, what’s shaking, what’s up?
CALLER: Well, I just called to say I disagree with your assessment of why the Super Bowl commercials were so awful. Actually, I couldn’t tell the difference from their commercials from a regular commercial on television. I think it’s because the people who are now in marketing and the making of creating of commercials, they have no imagination. They’re on their cell phones, they’re on their computers all day, and they don’t communicate. They have no idea how, you know, no creative mind.
RUSH: Okay. So you disagree with my assessment that the people in advertising marketing departments are scared to offend the mobs on Twitter, so they produce this safe, politically correct stuff that doesn’t connect. You think they think they’re really talented but they’re not. They have no imagination because they’re so preoccupied with people on their screens and computers, they’re not living life and they’re not experiencing enough to dream and imagine other things?
CALLER: That’s exactly what I think. If you go to the theaters, look whose movies really knock ’em out. It’s Clint Eastwood, the old guy. He didn’t grow up on a computer —
RUSH: No, it’s not. No, no, no, no. No ho! The movies that knock out the people we’re talking about are remakes of comic books! They are things they read as children that come to life as action movies from Marvel or other things, the superhero stuff.
CALLER: Or they remake old movies that were hits because they have no imagination for creation. They just don’t know. They don’t have a clue what they’re doing.
CALLER: Exactly.
RUSH: Okay. Well, that’s a valid —
CALLER: Immersed in their technology.
RUSH: Okay. But let me ask you a question. Do you have a bias against technology? Do you think that it’s intrinsically damaging before you even make a comment like — in other words, how much is your own negative opinion of technology, if one exists, responsible for this opinion of yours?
CALLER: I have a cell phone, an iPad, a computer. I mean, I’m not against it. And I used it at work. I’m a retired nurse —
RUSH: Okay, I was just checking.
CALLER: — Obamacare brought the computers into everything.
RUSH: Okay. There’s nothing wrong with anti-tech bias. Perhaps the wrong word. When you have bias talking about journalism or prejudice, those are automatically bad terms. I’m not suggesting that you think tech is a bad influence necessarily a bias thing. I’m just fascinated by your example, lack of imagination. I’m trying to apply that to other things I see in the Millennial generation, like late-night comedy. It’s stunning to me what’s happened to that. It’s not funny. Late-night comics seek applause now as opposed to laughter, and in fact many of them, if there’s laughter in their routines, then somebody’s gonna be offended in the audience, and then all hell is gonna break out.
Not offending anybody seems to be the overriding concern of a very large swath or segment of our society. And I think it’s infected advertising. But the definition of offensive has gotten so broad now that it really boils down to nobody having a thick skin anymore. You say that this is lack of imagination and you may have a point. I’m glad you called. I appreciate your thoughts on this.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Here’s Kirk in Waterford, Michigan, as we head back to the phones. Great to have you, sir. Hi.
CALLER: Good afternoon, Rush. Thanks for having me on your show. I watched the Super Bowl yesterday and it was boring. The highlight was the national anthem. There was one commercial that was okay, the Audi commercial. I’m a car guy, and that was a good dream. But the one with the food, throwing the football around, that just made me sick wasting food like that. I’m the same generation as you. You went to the university in the states. I went to the University of South Vietnam ’69 to ’71. So that’s our age frame.
RUSH: I went to university for six months at the University of Ballroom Dance taught by a drill sergeant in the WACs.
CALLER: (laughing)
But there’s nothing about it that felt majestic, nothing about it that felt big. It didn’t feel like anything different than a regular season. Even with all of the trapping of the national anthem, and I think Gladys Knight was fabulous. But it just for some reason, it just didn’t — I mean, even before the game started, it just didn’t capture, for me, what the Super Bowl has always meant. And then the game starts — and I guess we can’t all the time, we’d get spoiled. We did not get stellar performances from the skill position players that we saw them perform during the regular season.
So you chalk that up, “Well, the defenses were really good, Rush.” I understand that, but it got so boring that Jim Nantz and Tony Romo were reduced to just reciting meaningless statistic after meaningless statistic for a while there. I don’t know. I can’t pinpoint it. You’ve been specific in what it was to you. It was just the overall aura of the day never hit me. And what the Patriots have done, this is another thing. The Patriots have accomplished something that is unlikely that another generation or two of fans are going to see.
This makes mincemeat what Bill Belichick and Tom Brady have done. Every year is a different team. This guy, Belichick, has had so many different players, so many — and it doesn’t matter. He plugs them in, schemes ’em up, and they triumph and win. The Belichick trophy. It will never happen. The Lombardi Trophy is always gonna be the Lombardi Trophy. But these major achievements, and they just didn’t permeate.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Let me grab this call. Bill in Clearwater, Florida. Bill, I’ve got about 45 seconds max, but I want you to try to tell me what you thought of the Super Bowl based on what it says here on the call board.
CALLER: (silence)
RUSH: Is Bill there?
CALLER: (silence)
CALLER: That’s right.
RUSH: Oh, there you are.
CALLER: Yes.
RUSH: Well, now we got 10 seconds or 15. Go for it. Go for it.
CALLER: Well, you know, the social justice situation, I was offended by it, whether it was the commercial or the media people. It was just bizarre. I wanted to see a football game! I didn’t want to see preaching.
RUSH: Who preached to you?
CALLER: The media! There was one of the commentators. They talked about “social justice” multiple times throughout the program.
RUSH: Well, I noticed the league was honoring Martin Luther King, and that equals social justice. They were in Atlanta.
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