RUSH: So Trump gives the Congressional Medal or U.S. Medal of Honor, whatever it’s called, to Tiger Woods, and the Drive-By Media is livid that Woods accepted it, livid that Woods went up there and stood side by side with Trump and accepted this high honor. They’re ripping him to shreds out there.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Trump awards Medal of Freedom to Tiger Woods. In fact, we’ve got the sound bite. Grab sound bite number five, six and seven. Here is Trump actually presenting the Medal of Freedom to Tiger Woods yesterday in the Rose Garden at the White House.

THE PRESIDENT: This evening we are in the presence of a true legend, an extraordinary athlete who has transformed golf and achieved new levels of dominance. He’s also a great person. He’s a great guy. Tiger introduced countless new people to the sport of golf, from every background and from every walk of life. He inspired millions of young Americans with his thrilling wire to wire victories.

Tiger Woods is a global symbol of American excellence, devotion, and drive. Tiger endured knee surgery and four excruciating back surgeries. I know that you remember too. That’s not good. But it ended up good. Including a spinal fusion in 2017. He fell from number one in the world rankings to 1,199th. I don’t believe that even if he had one leg, I don’t believe that.

Tiger’s injuries were so profound that for two years he could barely swing a club. As Tiger said, “There was a point in time I didn’t know if I’d ever do this again,” if he’d ever play again. But Tiger fought through the terrible pain, and he fought all the way back to the summit of golf.

RUSH: And when Tiger got up to speak, he was genuinely choked up talking about his parents.

WOODS: I just want to say this has been an unbelievable experience. And to have the support that I’ve had for all these years, some of you for my entire life, and some of you for more than half my life. You’ve seen the good and the bad, the highs and the lows, and I would not be in this position without all of your help. In ’97, yes, I won the Masters, and I ended up hugging my dad and my mom. My dad’s no longer here, but my mom’s here. I love you, Mom. Thank you.

RUSH: I want to revisit something about this before we get to the predictable tearing down of Tiger Woods in the Drive-By Media. When Tiger won the Masters, his fifth green jacket and his 15th Major, the next day I made a point of trying to share with you one of the life lessons to be learned here. And I remember how I began that monologue.

If you have ever been in the prison of being totally paralyzed with fear and fright over what other people think of you, then remember two words: Tiger Woods. They can talk about everything Tiger overcame physically, and that’s not insignificant.

But he had to overcome something, in my mind, much greater, and it is — perhaps if on the professional level skills are a given, that everybody out there has a certain level of professional level skill, the difference is in the head of the winner, the psychology, the mental makeup, the mental toughness, the ability to focus, of champions. That’s what Tiger had to overcome.

Tiger Woods, on Thanksgiving night, back whenever it was when he ran his car into the fire hydrant, his life opened up in ways he never thought it would. The things that he had done that he thought nobody would ever learn all came gushing out. Every blemish, every negative, everything that the image makers had tried to cover up, pretend wasn’t happening, came out in droves and everybody in America became instantly privy and aware of all of the failings, quote, unquote, of Tiger Woods. And he knew it.

So, in addition to suffering injuries and having to make physical recoveries from those, which is not insignificant, Tiger Woods, from the moment he returned to golf, tournament golf, first time he shows up at the Masters after all of that, after going to therapy, after going to rehab, he knows that everybody on that golf course is looking at him not as Tiger Woods the golfer, but as Tiger Woods and what they’ve just learned about him.

None of it flattering, none of it character building, none of it positive. And he knows that everybody is looking and he knows that many people now want him to fail. He knows that many people think he deserves to fail after being that kind of phony, after living this secret life, that he deserves to never win again, Tiger pulled the wool over. And he knew all of this. He knew what everybody thought of him.

And he had to be aware that there was a lot of negativism and a lot of people hoping he would fail, a lot of people hoping he would never win again, a lot of people feeling betrayed who had bought the image made, Tiger Woods, and now they realize he wasn’t anything special, he wasn’t anything a cut above, he was just like everybody else except he could play golf.

He had to overcome the prison of what other people think and had to be able to face literally thousands of people standing on the sidelines hoping he failed. Don’t deny this. You know how people are. And you probably know people who felt, or at least told you, that they felt let down and betrayed. “He doesn’t deserve to win. I hope he never wins again.”

And then when he started playing again and failed to make cuts, you know people who were happy. You probably may have been one of them. “He doesn’t deserve to win it. I hope he never makes another cut. I hope he never wins again.” I heard this all over the place. He knew it. He had to face it each and every day he left his house. It’s something he had to overcome.

Most people never learn how to overcome the fear and prison of trying to be what others think you should be or what you think people want you to be. The reason this is such a prison, the prison of worrying about what people think of you, is that everybody’s raised this way. Everybody’s raised to not be offensive and to make sure you’re liked.

Nobody wants to be hated. Nobody is raised to be disliked and hated. It’s just the exact opposite. In the process, you make a very big mistake, and we all do. We assume that everybody judging us is perfect. That they have their act together and that their judgments are thus valid. If they think we’re deficient, they’re valid.

What we don’t realize is that everybody’s as messed up as everybody else and that most everybody is still thinking about what everybody thinks of them, not what they think of you. I maintain that having to overcome that aspect of this is as seminal achievement as recovering physically. He had help recovering physically. He had doctors, surgeons, the best doctors and surgeons and the best physical therapists and so forth.

But the stuff inside his own head, he had to do that all on his own. And he had to do it over the course of years. It did not happen automatically. He wasn’t able to put out of his mind what he knew everybody thought of him. He had to find a way to let it not affect him. He had to find a way to have it not get him down, not get depressed, not cave in to it, not give up. It’s really, really hard.

We all know people who are obsessed with what people think of them, and when something goes wrong and they think that everybody’s down on ’em, we’ve seen how depressed those people get and despondent they get and how they don’t want to show their faces in public and they just don’t want to go anywhere where anybody knows them. It’s a prison. It’s a self-imposed prison. We all put ourselves in this prison. And he was in it. And his fall was humongous. Humongous.

I think overcoming that, with all the other things, is as noteworthy as the rest. It required, and will continue to require, a mental toughness and focus that is never going to be easy. And confidence. There’s no substitute for confidence no matter what it is you’re doing, when you’re doing it. If you don’t have confidence about what you’re doing — and it doesn’t take much to shake confidence. If you don’t have it, you’re not gonna succeed.

In light of all this, “CBS, NBC Whine About Trump Giving Tiger Woods Presidential Award — In a ceremony at the White House Rose Garden Monday, President Trump awarded golf star Tiger Woods the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his contributions to the sport and his historic career. But members of the liberal media groaned because the two men had been friends for years. NBC Nightly News went so far as to have one of their analysts claim Trump had cheapened the award,” by giving it to Woods.

“In the middle of their report on the ceremony, NBC White House correspondent Kristen Welker commented on how, ‘Now, some critics are questioning Mr. Trump’s decision to give what is considered a lifetime achievement award to someone who still has a flourishing career.’”

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Eugene Robinson, Washington Post, suggested that Trump has sullied the hallowed nature of the award. “He gives this award — which was a hallow award; maybe someday it will be one again — to people he wants to associate himself with. And so, he likes golf,” but Trump has tarnished this award by giving it to Tiger Woods. Here’s Christine Brennan, formally of the Washington Post, now USA Today. She was on CNN last night talking about this.

BRENNAN: Well, certainly Tiger was more heartfelt and more emotional than Donald Trump, who I don’t think he skipped even one sentence of the Wikipedia entry on Tiger Woods. Uh, my goodness. That went on forever. You can see Donald Trump wants to attach himself to Tiger Woods — and that’s what, I think, this was about. When you think about golf and you think about these two men linked together, this was just a kind of a — a bro event, almost like a 19th hole without the alcohol. It was all about golf and — and Trump attaching himself to Tiger Woods.

RUSH: No, it wasn’t. See, this is why there isn’t any depth anymore in journalism. Tiger Woods required eight years to come back from that night he ran over the fire hydrant outside his house. Do you remember the cascade of events, the cascade of revelations that happened, and then the physical injuries and then all of the surgeries that had to take place? The media hammered Tiger Woods for years! “He’s never gonna come back.”

The sports media wanted him to come back, the golf sports media did. But the rest of the media just hammered him, and they’ve been hammering ever since they learned he plays golf with Trump. They can’t believe he won’t denounce Trump, so they’ve been hammering him for that, and yet he stands by Trump. This was not “a bro event.” This was somebody recognizing what Tiger Woods has done to regain what he had achieved against impossible odds.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Now, I have the Baltimore Sun piece blasting Tiger Woods for accepting the award from Trump. Some of the other journalists are getting all on Trump for sullying the award. Tiger’s not finished. His career is ongoing. This is just a bro event. He just wants to hang out with Tiger since nobody else wants to spend any time with him. (That kind of drivel.) “Plenty of Athletes Are Refusing to Stand with Trump. Not Tiger Woods. —

“A growing list of athletes have declined invitations from President Donald Trump to visit the White House as a stance against his racist and anti-immigrant rhetoric. Sadly, Tiger Woods isn’t one of them.” By the way, the left says everything they disagree with is racist or anti-immigrant. Trump is not anti-immigrant, and he isn’t racist. Donald Trump has done more for African-Americans in terms of economic opportunity than any Democrat president ever has and ever will, for that matter.

These people are just a bunch of closed-minded bigots who are not open to anything other than what their prejudiced belief system is, and here they present themselves as God’s gift to knowledge, God’s gift to moral judgment, God’s gift to moral superiority. These people are a bunch of reprobates who sit in judgment of everybody else but cannot stand a split second of judgment about themselves.

Tiger Woods “won’t be the first athlete to garner such an accolade. … Mr. Woods made an indelible mark on the sport of golf and certainly is as legendary and deserving of the honor as the athletes who came before him. Despite this, we wish Mr. Woods would have taken a stand against hatred and declined the award given the racial and ethnic rift Mr. Trump has widened and exploited in the country since taking office.”

Let me tell you something. The racial divide in this country is owing to Barack Hussein Obama. It was predicted and it happened. The racial divide in this country precedes Donald Trump, and this is another thing. His “hatred.” This is… Every leftist out there says that anybody who disagrees with them is a “hater.” It’s intellectual laziness. It is the absence of any kind of serious thought to just label people “haters.”

It’s part of the way the left simply tries to discredit the people they don’t like or agree with rather than engaging them. So they throw around all these labels that are not accurate, and then sit there in high moral judgment of everybody else, when none of them… I don’t care who wrote this editorial. I don’t care how many people contributed to it. There’s not a one of them who could do what Tiger Woods has done, and not a one of them could do 10% of what Donald Trump has done.

Yet here they are sitting there from some high moral perch in an editorial chair at the Baltimore freaking Sun passing judgment on people they couldn’t even hope to be in the same league with. How has Trump “widened and exploited racial and ethnic rifts in the country”? By constantly reaching out to blacks and minorities? By campaigning for their vote like no other Republican in history?

By lowering the unemployment number for blacks and Hispanics to the lowest number on record ever since records started being kept in 1947? “As we have noted many times before,” writes the Baltimore Sun, “hate crimes have unmistakably risen under Mr. Trump.” No. Crimes that you call hate crimes mistakenly and erroneously, just like you mistakenly and erroneously promised everybody Trump was colluding with Russia.

How do you people have the guts to get out of the bed and face your readers anymore with as much as you’ve lied to ’em over the past 2-1/2 years? “Just because he is famous doesn’t mean Mr. Woods has any obligation to be a spokesman against racism in America. He did indeed train all his life to play golf, not lead a modern day Civil Rights movement. But” [there’s always a “but”] his position as a star athlete, particularly as an African-American in a sport that has historically been overwhelmingly white,” which, of course, makes it what?

Invalid.

(impression) Yeah, it’s historically white. It’s historically private clubs. Therefore, it is to be condemned. This all “makes him a role model in this regard whether he likes it or not. He could use this opportunity to raise awareness of an issue that has surely impacted his life, as well as those of many of his relatives and ancestors. Or he could at least decline to allow the president to co-opt his glory with a White House photo-op.” Awareness of what issue, that Trump’s president?

This is just blind hatred in this editorial, with the crazy assumption that every American needs to become a civil rights activist with the approval of the mainstream media — and if they don’t, then the hell with whatever else they’ve achieved. Let me skip forward to the final two paragraphs, the real money quotes in the last two paragraphs. “But taking a stand on race can be bad for business. (Just ask Colin Kaepernick.)

“And Tiger Woods has always been about the business of Tiger Woods, and this trip to the White House is no exception. … Mr. Woods has made his choice, and part of his legacy will be embracing a man who incited bigotry and racism.” Can you people on the left come up with something new? Can you try some new cliches? We conservatives are worn out being called racists and sexists and bigots and homophobes.

Can you come up with something new?

Can you innovate?

Can you come up with some new set of lies about us?

They’re are getting old and tired and worn out.

Now you want to throw Tiger Woods in association with ’em? “That’s the opposite of athletes like basketball players Stephen Curry and Lebron James who have declined White House visits and openly criticized the president. Red Sox manager Alex Cora said he will not visit the White House [on] Thursday because of Mr. Trump’s response to the devastation left on his native Puerto Rico…”

What do you mean, lack of response? We have spent more money on hurricane relief in Puerto Rico than in Houston and New Orleans combined. Where is this story coming from that we don’t care about Puerto Rico? It’s coming from dummkopfs like this in the Drive-By Media who then infect the minds of other people who come in contact with their work, such as the manager of the Boston Red Sox.

“[H]e will not visit the White House [with the rest of his team] Thursday because of Mr. Trump’s response to the devastation left on his native Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria. Many families are still living without basic necessities such as electricity.” Yeah, it’s Donald Trump’s fault. Yeah, $91 billion has been sent down there — or $91 million. (You know, I get confused on the M and the B. Millions and billions, they run together.)

But, man, this attitude. You talk about hatred? You want to talk about hatred and bigotry? The Baltimore Sun editorial is the epitome of hatred and bigotry. “Unlike Tiger Woods, these athletes are using the platform they have been granted to stand up for something they believe in. They will be remembered for it.” They have not been “granted” platforms. They have earned them, and Tiger earned his! It’s a free country.

You can use your platform however you wish, and just because somebody doesn’t kowtow to the chicken-excrement liberalism you people demand does not make them all of these isms that you label them with — racism, sexism, bigotryism, and all the rest that you attach to people. All because Tiger Woods would not do the media’s job for them and condemn Donald Trump. All because Tiger Woods says: You know what? He likes Trump; he’s standing by Trump.

No credit for any of those characteristics. So I just wanted to point all of this out because it all fits in with the totality of things that Tiger Woods has had to battle and overcome, and those are going to continue simply because he refuses to be a follower. He refuses to be a gutless follower of a bunch of brain-dead leftists who are so possessed with racism, bigotry and hatred that they miss greatness.

They miss fantastic achievements, and they take for granted living in the greatest place on earth, and then they use their platforms to try to spread their hate and bigotry to as many minds as they can. Because their objective is mass misery, mass anger. Tiger Woods doesn’t want to play their game. He doesn’t want to be angry all the time, doesn’t want to be miserable all the time. Nobody rational does.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: You know, it’s almost too pat to say. I almost feel like a fool pointing it out. If Donald Trump is such a racist, what the hell is Tiger Woods doing in the Rose Garden in the first place? But I mean that’s just so damned obvious to point out. These people, some days, folks, they just make me sick, I can’t see straight because of these people.

It’s the arrogance. It is the condescension that they bring to everything, that they’re somehow morally superior, politically superior, when they couldn’t walk in Tiger Woods’ shoes or Donald Trump’s for half a day. Sitting there demanding and commanding that somehow they behave according to what these editorial writers think is a politically correct social and economic stance.