Rush Limbaugh, Virginia Tech Murderer, Media Matters, New York Times

NEXT TARGET: RUSH

Post Imus, Media Gunning For Talk's Titan







While it's no secret that the mainstream media is gunning for Rush Limbaugh in this post- Imus world, there is one as- yet unsolved mystery: is the talk titan intentionally antagonizing them?

With El Rushbo calling the Virginia Tech shooter a "liberal", one wonders if he's looking for a fight. And sure enough, the George Soros- funded Media Matters fell for it hook, line and sinker:

Limbaugh said Virginia Tech shooter "had to be a liberal"


On the April 19 broadcast of his nationally syndicated radio show, host Rush Limbaugh declared that the perpetrator of the April 16 Virginia Tech shootings "had to be a liberal," adding: "You start railing against the rich, and all this other -- this guy's a liberal. He was turned into a liberal somewhere along the line. So it's a liberal that committed this act."

Limbaugh then complained, in a possible reference to Media Matters for America, that "Now the drive-bys will read on a website that I'm attacking liberalism by comparing this guy to them. That's exactly what they do every day, ladies and gentlemen. I'm just pointing out a fact. I am making no extrapolation." Limbaugh regularly describes mainstream media sources as "the drive-by media."

From the April 19 broadcast of Premiere Radio Networks' The Rush Limbaugh Show:

LIMBAUGH: If this Virginia Tech shooter had an ideology, what do you think it was? This guy had to be a liberal. You start railing against the rich and all this other -- this guy's a liberal. He was turned into a liberal somewhere along the line. So it's a liberal that committed this act. Now, the drive-bys will read on a website that I'm attacking liberalism by comparing this guy to them. That's exactly what they do every day, ladies and gentlemen. I'm just pointing out a fact. I am making no extrapolation; I'm just pointing it out.

Hey guys, it's even worse when you realize you're being played for fools, yet fall for it anyway!


Here's what El Rushbo recently had to say (16 April) about Media Matters:

RUSH: Suddenly, now, on ESPN, on The Sports Reporters on Sunday morning, they have their little roundtable discussion there. It's for a half hour. They do three or four topics, and Mike Lupica of the New York Daily News said this.

LUPICA: I didn't think Rush Limbaugh should have lost his job on -- on this network for what he said about Donovan McNabb, which -- which isn't -- isn't it the same thing?

RUSH: The same thing? What, were they talking about the whole Imus situation? What I said about McNabb was the same? Well, that's crazy! I was talking about the media, for crying out loud! Now, in Lupica's defense, when that McNabb-ESPN thing happened, he did write a piece excoriating me for being a coward, for quitting and not showing up on the following Sunday and facing the facts and dealing with it and trying to explain my position, and I wrote him back. I said, "I would have been happy to have been there but Tom Jackson told ESPN it was either him or me." He had people coming up to him where he lives in Cincinnati asking him if they could be in the NFL now that Limbaugh had made these comments.

I told everybody I got out of there because I liked (past tense) the guys on that show, and I wasn't trying to cause them any trouble. But Lupica's a big friend of Imus and I think that's the reason. To try to equate what I said about McNabb with this? I'm going to talk about this at much greater length as the program unfolds today, folks, because I don't intend to let this go. There are stories out there. Salon.com has a little funny piece on how everybody thinks that talk radio, conservative talk radio is next and they're making fun of us for thinking that we're next in the crosshairs.

The reason why we all think this is because we already are in the crosshairs, and this organization... Let me make a quick point about this as sort of a tease before we get into this on a full-fledged basis, and it is this. Let me just ask you a question. Did America, did this country hear what Don Imus said on the Imus show? They didn't. When Imus said what he said, was there a national uproar? Forget the fact his ratings are insignificant and tiny, which that fact is now starting to trickle out. The fact is, guests on the show, people who listen to the show, nobody said a word. Nobody could have cared less. It wasn't any big deal.

America didn't hear it and America didn't hear what he said on the Imus show. No, you know where America heard it? They heard it on YouTube, and they heard it on MoveOn.org, and they heard it on cable TV. They heard it on network TV. They heard it on the early news, the evening news, the late news. A combination of all these places said what Imus said thousands of times more than he said it, and that's where America heard it. The Imus audience couldn't have cared less, I don't care how small that it is. So these pretenders... By the way, all of this was set up by Media Matters for America, and everybody thinks of this group as "a liberal media watchdog" out there surveying the media airwaves and making sure that those who say these so-called outrageous things are held to account.

It's nothing more than a Democrat Party front organization! It's George Soros-funded. It is staffed by people that used to work for elected Democrats -- and it's tax exempt. It's a tax exempt group, but they're purely political, and all they are is an arm of the Democrat Party. They're part of the Democrat machine. One of the things that make the Imus situation so ironic is that they took out one of their own. Imus was backing Kerry. He's opposed to the war in Iraq. He gave all these libs all these platforms and so forth. They took out one of their own.

There's a lot to learn about this, folks, in the way people get information in this country and the way certain people get information. These pretenders, all of these holier-than-thou people repeating what Imus said thousands of times more than he said it, are a bunch of hypocrites. If it was so offensive, why did they air it in the first place over and over and over again? If it's so offensive? Then they repeated it, and they repeated it, and they repeated it. This happened on Wednesday, April 11th. It happened about 6:15 in the morning, and he uttered a tasteless, offensive phrase that included the word (I can't say it; I'd rather not repeat it). In all the sound and the fury from the media, how many heard what was said on the Imus show? Look, it's a low rated show. Its a lowest rated time segment, from six to 6:30 in the morning. The Rutgers team didn't hear it. They weren't listening. They even said they didn't know who he was. So I just want this to form sort of a backdrop for the direction that I want to take this, as we meld it with all the other exciting things on the big program today.


BREAK TRANSCRIPT


RUSH: Now, this Imus affair, folks. It's so much bigger than Imus, and I would like for you in thinking about this to put Imus out of your mind. Don't let that whole circumstance and situation get in the way, because there's so much that this episode illustrates, and it indicates a problem that...well, it's a problem. It's just a new fact of life in the country today in terms of how people hear about things, how people get their news. One of the things that this whole Imus episode illustrates is it shows why liberals are anti-war. The word "courage" is not in their vocabulary. No courage, no spine, no backbone. It was Don Imus who made these guys famous, made them celebrities, and many more of them are coming out -- Ana Marie Cox and a number of others have come out -- and said, "Yeah, I wanted my elite media merit badge. That's where I had to go to get in the club." So to these people -- whether it's true or not, to these people -- it was perfectly fine, and not only that, it was often mandatory that if you wanted to be in the elite media, you had to go on this show. Now, I don't care what you think. I think that's, frankly, absurd, but that's what they thought. So we'll deal with that. He gave them celebrity. He promoted their shows. He promoted their stupid books, their TV specials, their magazines.

He promoted their political campaigns, their issues, their very careers. Now, what happened when he gets into trouble? They run for the hills! All they could think about was their own lily white rear ends. All they could think about was their own backsides. They couldn't have cared less. A couple of them tried to hang in, but they weren't part of the media elite. A couple of them did, but they were running for cover so fast. If you want to know why liberals are anti-war, and if you want to know why liberals have been cowed by feminists and become these linguini-spined cowards, just look at this episode.

It also illustrated why liberals will never, never help inner city blacks and inner city girls. They demanded his head. They charged that he insulted our youth and damaged their psyches with possible lifelong consequences, and they fired him for that. Yes, they did. Well, the teachers unions have been doing this for years! The teachers unions have been screwing up the public school system for years. Don Imus never held one inner city kid back. Quite the contrary. He never got in the way of any inner city kid learning anything, and yet we fire a radio guy that no inner city kids ever even listen to, instead of firing a school system that all inner city kids go through.

RUSH: I want to mention to you, because you can't read an AP story on this Imus situation without them alluding to the "fact" (and I'm sure you've seen it elsewhere) that, "Well, what Imus said and what Imus said, but what about Limbaugh?" There's no question that I'm in the crosshairs. Everybody thinks I'm in the crosshairs "next." What they're wrong about, is I've been in the crosshairs long before Imus knew what it was like to be in the crosshairs, by a Democrat funded arm of their machine, this Media Matters for America, a tax-exempt foundation. What they do is they listen to these programs, all of them, and they put 'em up there, and that's where Drive-By Media types and the liberals hear -- or rather, a better point, they read -- what is said on this program within the context that the watchdog groups choose to present it. They never listen. They do not listen to this program or any others. They wouldn't deign to lower themselves. So they rely on these watchdogs. Mainstream media reporters do it. They all do. Now, I'm going to say something. I asked Mr. Snerdley here at the break if he thought that this would sound too self-serving.

He said, "No, you gotta say it." These people that are doing the watch-dogging, these people that are running these websites as arms of the Democrat machine and are agenda-driven, all of the critics of this program, they wouldn't last a week behind this microphone, with the scrutiny that I've had. They wouldn't last a week with the scrutiny they give anybody else in conservative broadcast media. They couldn't handle it. Most of these people read cue cards on the morning shows or on TelePromTers or on the newscasts. You put 'em behind a microphone with no net. You put them there with no guests, and you say, "Do fifteen hours a week and you make it so people want to listen." They couldn't do it, and the first moment they were criticized they would go bonkers and batty. They couldn't handle it, folks. They coul d not deal with the character assassination. They couldn't deal with the out-of-context reports and lies which are nothing more than attempts to destroy my credibility and others'. These are people who couldn't do what we do if their lives depended on it, and succeed at it. Another thing about talk radio: this is a spoken word medium. It is not the printed word.

Meanwhile, it isn't just Media Matters keeping tabs on Limbaugh. From today's New York Times:

Speaking on Wednesday on his syndicated program, which is heard on more than 600 stations, Mr. Limbaugh argued that future tragedies could be prevented by “a law banning political correctness.”

“This guy was sending up flares,” Mr. Limbaugh said of Mr. Cho, whose erratic and disturbing behavior had previously caught the attention of some fellow students and the campus police, to no avail. “Was everybody so concerned with the trumped-up global warming scare they didn’t notice a real threat, for example?”

“And how about this,” Mr. Limbaugh added. “The guy is Korean. He’s Asian. How many people refused to do anything about it or even complain about it because they would be tagged as racists?”

Yesterday, the day after NBC News showed excerpts from material it had received from Mr. Cho following the killings, Mr. Limbaugh singled out that network, and others in what he called the “drive-by media,” for what he described as their irresponsibility.

“If there are copycats who get ideas from the constant playing of these video clips and photos, who’s going to be responsible for this?” he asked. “It will not be the National Rifle Association. It will not be the fault of the gun that the next user uses. And it will not be the fault of talk radio.”

Of NBC he said, “Let’s set these people up, folks, for what might come after this.”

And then, in an effort to link the events of the last two weeks, Mr. Limbaugh said, “The only thing that Virginia Tech and the Imus situation have in common is NBC.”

Here's the $64,000 question: while we know the MSM is hoping to take Rush down in the wake of the Imus firing, is Limbaugh going out of his way to bring on the battle?


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