We're Witnessing Two Institutions Disintegrate Right Before Our EyesSeptember 13, 2012
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RUSH: When the program was over yesterday, I told Snerdley, "You know, I needed three more hours." The stuff that we didn't get to yesterday was just overflowing, the audio sound bites, and it has given me a new resolve. We're loaded again today. It's just incredible. We're watching the disintegration of two institutions right in front of our eyes, and we're all wondering, are we the only ones who see it? We're watching the disintegration of a presidency. We are looking at blatant, uncompromised incompetence. And we are witnessing corruption of another institution, the so-called mainstream media. They continue to descend into depths they're not even aware of.
Everybody's talking about it. Everybody thinks they're the only ones who notice it. Believe me, you're not. Everybody's noticing it. Let me use as an example the audio that I opened the program with yesterday. I'd been told about it, we couldn't find it. Finally in the final hour of the program we found it. We've also identified the two people. Now, one was Jan Greenburg, or Jan Crawford. She used to be Jan Crawford Greenburg when she was at ABC. Now she's at CBS. She's just using two names. Jan Crawford. She's the one that did the profile, by the way, for 60 Minutes of Clarence Thomas, or maybe it was... I don't know what it was for. But she was the reporterette who did it, and there was some guy from NPR, and they were the ones yesterday that were coordinating their questions.
You know, we talked about this at the end of the program yesterday. It was very key to understand what they were doing. They were not coordinating questions. They were establishing the narrative of the day. What they were doing in collaboration with each other... and I'm sure they weren't the only ones. I had to laugh watching some television this morning. Gretchen Carlson at Fox was shocked. She said she was shocked. She never knew this kind of thing went on. Real journalists don't do this the kind of stuff. I imagine a lot of people were surprised. A lot of people still have a lofty view of journalism, that it is clean and pure as the wind-driven snow, it's objective, that the reporters are open-minded. All these traditional opinions people have had about the media are being blown up right in front of everybody's face now.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bubyh1Kc_4Y&feature=player_embeddedNow, what they were doing was establishing the narrative, and that is a key difference than just coordinating questions. They were setting the tone for what the story was gonna be, and it had nothing to do with the substance of what Mitt Romney was saying. That is precisely their objective. The answers that Romney gave to whatever questions they came up with were irrelevant. And this is common now. I learned this directly 23, 24 years ago when I first started being interviewed. One of the big mistakes that I made, and I had to learn it on my own; there was nobody to tell me.
I actually thought that when a journalist invited me, TV or print, for an interview, I thought they were really interested in what I had to say. And I looked at it as an opportunity to persuade them. I looked at it as an opportunity to convince them that I was right. I thought they were open-minded and interested. And that's not at all what was going on. I was too inexperienced to know it. Even 23, 24 years ago, their purpose in interviewing me was to find out how they could discredit me. They didn't like me. I was conservative. They weren't interested in being persuaded. They weren't interested in any answer that I gave, unless it fit the narrative that they were trying to establish. It's what defense lawyers do when they don't have a case. They try to establish a whole different narrative of the story, away from the defendant for the jury.
But they don't do it now in a monopolistic setting and they don't do it in a vacuum and everybody now sees it. Even if people don't understand that what they were doing was establishing a narrative, they still hear them collaborating and coordinating questions. And even if people don't understand that the narrative being set was what's going on, they're still appalled. They're still appalled that they would be coordinating. They think that these people are competitors. They think that the people at ABC compete with NBC and CBS to be first. No, folks. they're nothing more than Democrats with bylines. It's all they are. They're all in the same team: ABC, CBS, NBC, and I'll tell you what team they're really on, and that's the Ivy League graduate team.
I mentioned some time ago, and interestingly enough, there's a story that actually documents that another one of my instincts has been totally true. I often have thought that the purpose of getting into the Ivy League and graduating there was to set you up for a position or a life in government, in positions of power. And whether it be Brown or whether it be MIT or Harvard or Yale or Princeton, that's what the place was. The Ivy League, with its different tiers, was a singular entity for the express purpose of turning out editors, reporters, State Department types, bureaucrats, potential presidents, potential vice presidents. Interestingly, not members of the House. But even some Senators. But the highest levels of government. These people are trained, and they all come out, they all think the same thing about government. And it's a nonideological thing. They're all liberal, but it's like a giant clique. And if you're not in it, you are looked down upon, frowned upon, you are considered a second class human being.
It largely explains the way they treated Sarah Palin and reacted to Sarah Palin. She's not an Ivy Leaguer, and pretty much anybody else who is not. These people in the media are part of that cabal, or part of that subgroup, and they all come out, and they're not competing with each other on the networks. They're all on the same team, and they all always have been. They don't care, really, if their divisions make any money. In fact, they often argue that their jobs are so important, their mission is so crucial, that they ought to not be held to bottom-line concerns. In other words, the news divisions ought to be allowed to lose money. Dan Rather made that argument constantly. Every time somebody new bought CBS, the first thing they looked to cut back was the news division 'cause it was so fat. Every time that happened Rather would go out publicly and talk about how this is horrible, it's gonna damage America, damage the news division, damage the Constitution. News divisions ought not have to pay attention to the bottom line. Brokaw thought the same thing. I actually talked to him about it once.
All of these things are now becoming visible. People are now seeing it. They may not be able to put it in proper context or perspective. They may not understand creating a narrative versus collaborating on questions. But, nevertheless, it's happening, and we're witnessing it right in front of our eyes. At a most precipitous time in nation's history, we have the president of the United States, who's literally demonstrating not only incompetence, but a lack of concern or even any emotional attachment to anything.
He has no emotional attachment to the problems in the middle class -- which, by the way, is shrinking. The lower class is growing. Wholesale inflation is rising. The labor market is struggling. The Census says the middle class has shrunk to an all-time low. For many, the most trouble is "income inequality." Not that everybody's having a tougher time, but that the share of income that's still out there hasn't hit the rich as hard. This is a Washington Post story, as they try to shape this as an anti-rich story.
But the fact of the matter is, it's a story that demonstrates how liberalism fails; how the Democrat Party has utterly failed and is in the process of destroying the great engine of creativity and prosperity in this country. It's right before our eyes. And while all this is happening, the narrative set yesterday on Mitt Romney is that he's the enemy. He's the big problem. He's the one that's gotta be taken out.
He's the one. If I didn't know better, if I'd just landed here from Mars and I'm watching the media cover these two guys, I'd think Romney is the president. He's the one whose comments are being parsed. He's the one who's answering questions. He's the one the press is trying to get answers from. This other guy, this Obama guy, goes out in the Rose Garden and acts like he doesn't care about anything when he makes his comments.
He turns his back, ignores questions, gets on a plane, and flies to Las Vegas for a fundraiser they had to move indoors from outdoors because there's not enough interest. He goes on 60 Minutes and starts sounding just like Jimmy Carter. This is unbelievable. Of all the presidents! We did that side by side where his acceptance speech at the convention, parts of it, seemed to be lifted word-for-word from Jimmy Carter.
Yesterday on 60 Minutes, I actually laughed out loud when I heard Obama tell 60 Minutes that Romney has a tendency to "shoot first and aim later." This is the same Barack Obama who said that the Cambridge police "acted stupidly" when they arrested his good buddy, "Skip" Gates. Obama shot off his mouth about that without having the slightest clue what really happened, and here he is getting on Romney for "shooting first and aiming later," which is not at all what Romney did.
But that's the narrative: "Romney spoke too soon! Romney violated protocol! Romney this; Romney that!" That was the narrative. That was the purpose of the questions. Obama's entire presidency has just been an endless stream of shooting from the lip. I don't know if we really should be surprised hearing Obama say that or not, no matter how ironic it is. It's almost word-for-word what Jimmy Carter said about Ronald Reagan in 1980.
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