http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2016/09/30/why_i_m_not_depressed_and_panicked_and_you_can_t_allow_yourself_to_be_eitherWhy I'm Not Depressed and Panicked -- And You Can't Allow Yourself to Be Either
September 30, 2016
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BEGIN TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: You know, so yesterday I make the point, and actually a couple days before that I made the point that Hillary has pulled out of Ohio. She's basically suspended campaign operations in Ohio. I said, "That's kind of shocking. I mean, Ohio, you can't win without winning Ohio." You know what's in the New York Times today? It doesn't matter. Our old buddy Jonathan Martin, used to be at Politico, "Ohio, Long a Bellwether, Is Fading on the Electoral Map." It doesn't matter anymore. Ohio, you're too white, too many white people to be in any way meaningful in a presidential election.
JOHNNY DONOVAN: And now, from sunny south Florida, it's Open Line Friday!
RUSH: Now, somehow Ohio still remains crucial. No Republicans won the White House since the "Jurassic" age without winning Ohio. But for the Democrats, it doesn't matter. Hillary pulls out, no big deal.
Greetings. Great to have you. Rush Limbaugh, the Excellence in Broadcasting Network. 800-282-2882. The email address, ElRushbo@eibnet.us.
Okay. I have to tell you, I am being inundated -- well, inundated may be a bit of an exaggeration, but not by much. I'm getting a lot of emails from a lot of people who are getting full-fledged panicked. I mean, it's time to keep the sharp objects away from some of these people. They are convinced that two things are happening.
They are convinced that Trump is blowing this as badly as anybody could blow anything by not forgetting about this porn star, tweeting out about this woman, this Alicia Machado babe even at three o'clock this morning, while other issues are much more important, the issues that frame and define Hillary Clinton as unqualified and unfit and as corrupt. And they wish Trump would stop this. There are too many other things, it's getting too close to the election now to be sidetracked by all this.
This Alicia Machado thing is a setup. It was a fix that has been in and has been planned by the Clinton campaign for a long time, just like Sandra Fluke was. In fact, Mollie Hemingway has a terrific story, and it doesn't even mention me. I don't know how that's possible, but it doesn't, a terrific story on how the Democrats set up this whole Fluke thing. I'm not gonna review too much of this, but it was made to look like it was a spontaneous event, that the Republicans were engaging in their War on Women and so forth, when in fact it was scripted and planned as a trap, as a setup for Republican candidates.
And Mollie Hemingway claims the same thing's happening here with this Alicia Machado, which I think is true. And thus people are just scared to death that Trump is blowing it by falling for this and spending so much time on it and taking it all personally and wishing he would just forget it and move on to other things.
And they are forgetting -- well, I'm not gonna excuse it. Look, I'm sharing you with what I'm inundated with.
There's another thing, too. The panic is not just about that. The panic is about the debate. The postdebate polls are coming in and it's clear that in the scientific polls that Hillary prevailed. And there are accompanying stories that Trump refuses to believe it and that some Trump surrogates refuse to believe it and that the Trump team actually likes these flash polls, they don't discredit the flash polls. You know, the Drive-Bys and noted conservative intellectuals pooh-pooh those flash polls that take place, these online polls where you click on who you think won as many times as you want. They trash those polls being inaccurate and unreliable and meaningless, in favor of the scientific polls 'cause the scientific polls are scientific.
The Trump team is out there saying, "We love these flash polls. That shows how popular the guy is. You can't discount those flash polls." They don't want to hear talk about the flash polls don't mean anything. To the Trump team they mean everything. They are a window into the vast popularity Trump has, which is much greater than the popularity Hillary has, and that I don't doubt. But popularity is not the single determining factor, as we all know, in how people vote.
But there's all kinds of conflicting information, but what I have gleaned -- see, I don't watch the stuff anymore, folks. I'm not depressed, and I'm not panicked. And I thought long and hard before opening this line of communication today with you. I thought long and hard about telling you this. I've mentioned this to Mr. Snerdley. He said, "Go ahead. They're not gonna think that you're phoning it in."
I said, "I'm not worried about that." I said, "They might think that I, by not watching TV every night, might think that I'm not fully as informed as I should be."
"Come on, Rush, there's nobody in the world that's gonna think you're not informed." True. I understand. But, folks, I have -- and it's not just in this campaign. I think I've mentioned a number of times, I finally have had my fill. Just like the Sunday shows. Years ago they stopped being appealing to me. There was a time in my life when the McLaughlin Group was appointment television, the McLaughlin Group, I was in Sacramento, it's the 1980s when that show started, and when I saw the McLaughlin Group I had dreams of being on a show like that someday. I'm planning my career rise and climbing my career ladder.
I was never invited to be on that show, but it doesn't mean anything. I was invited to be on Novak's show and a bunch of others. The point is -- don't want to sidetrack myself here -- at some point they stopped, and this is not a criticism of them; it's a comment on me. At some point they stopped exciting me. They became predictable. I knew, based on the guest panel, what was gonna be said. Who needs to watch Eleanor Clift every day to know what she says or what she's gonna think? And the same thing with the Sunday shows.
You couldn't pull me away from This Week with David Brinkley. They had the roundtable there with Cokie Roberts and Sam Donaldson and George Will, and then Brinkley was the straw that stirred that drink. You couldn't pull me away from it, and now, I mean, even if those same guys were on it, you reach a point where you don't learn anything, you're as informed and as knowledgeable and you have your opinions.
It's not that I'm not open to other opinions or ways of thinking. It's just the shows, in a broadcasting sense, Meet the Press, I never did watch the stuff on CNN. I don't watch any of it, is the point. I don't watch cable news at night. So I can honestly tell you that I am not in a funk, I am not depressed, I'm not suicidal, I'm not thinking it's over, and I told Snerdley today maybe I'm making a mistake.
Maybe I ought to be watching this stuff so that I end up being as depressed and fatalistic as everybody else and come in here every day and reflect it. But I'm sorry, folks, I can't. I don't want to get depressed, I don't want to get down in the dumps, and I don't want to get teased with the idea that everything's rigged and everything's fake. You wouldn't believe the stuff that's going around now. You know me. I see everything.
I do my own show prep, and I've never stopped doing my show prep, and then there are all kinds of little helpers that send me stuff, trying to help. I got one this morning. I didn't see this on my own. Some website I never heard of has done a narration of the postdebate video to "prove" that Hillary had assistance in her podium. She had maybe a secret teleprompter and other things because her cleaner, her guy... When nobody was looking, some guy came out and snatched a bunch of stuff like papers and stuff from Hillary's podium while nobody was looking.
He was banished off the screen, and nobody did that to Trump's podium, and so the theory is that Hillary was cheating; Hillary had some assistance in there and that nobody knows about it, nobody cares to find out about it. But this one website... I got people sending me this, and then the usual bromides about all the election locations that are rigged and fixed now. I just don't spend a lot of time focusing on that. If elections were rigged, the Republicans wouldn't win any. I understand the Democrats attempt fraud left and right. I'm not...
Don't misunderstand, I'm not being naïve. But the overriding point here is, folks, that I don't immerse myself in the media narrative every day. I establish my own media narrative on this program, and that's what I live. I'm aware. I'm aware of what the Drive-Bys are doing. I come in and report on it and tell you every day, but I don't immerse myself in it. And, as such, if you are feeling fatalistic and defeatist and depressed thinking it's over, I don't. And if you do, I think I understand why, depending on how many of you might be immersing yourself in it.
What am I talking about is CNN every night, Fox News every night, MSNBC, whatever it is. If you're watching television, I don't care what you're watching. If you're watching cable news, you are going to get a distorted picture. Even on Fox. Don't forget, now, Trump is so unusual and so outside the norm that having a perspective, a proper perspective report on Trump network-wide is gonna be difficult.
You're gonna have individual guests or commentators that may be able to put this all in proper focus. But I just don't even subject myself to it. So I've got my Stacks of Stuff here. Don't misunderstand. I'm not living in denial about things. I've got all the news here. There's further polling data on Hillary postdebate having won it. The conventional wisdom on Trump just not being able to get past this Alicia Machado story, tweeting at three a.m. about it -- a tweet storm, as it was. And people wishing he would get back to the issues, so forth.
And various other stories relating to what the Trump campaign is doing. In fact, here's one. There was a... I guess the New York Times had a story featuring unnamed members of Trump's campaign admitting he lost the debate, and Trump is apparently livid about that, as are members of his campaign, and they are telling surrogates such as the people who go on TV to speak for Trump in the campaign to stop saying he lost the debate.
Trump doesn't think he lost the debate. Do not say that and do not agree with it. Do not go along with it just to make it look like you're thinking the right way. "We didn't lose the debate. There are three of them. We used the first debate to set Hillary up." They've got their own charter here about what their strategy is with these debates, and so they're a little bit upset that even some Trump campaign people are going on TV and admitting, "Yeah, Trump lost the debate," or admitting that the flash polls afterwards don't tell an accurate or full story.
The truth of the matter as I see it here? I don't see the Democrats acting like this is in the bag. I don't see them acting like it's over and it's smooth sailing. I see 'em panicking. Did you see what the U.N. did? The U.N. sent out a story from their... I didn't even know the U.N. had a news agency. The United Nations has a new agency. They ran a story begging the eight million Americans that don't live in the country, scattered around the world, to sign up and vote against Trump. We can't have Trump. Trump is the worst.
The USA Today newspaper, which has not -- and I didn't know this, but that's what they say. They say they haven't endorsed for the presidency in 34 years but they have now. It's too important. Nobody should vote for Trump. We can't have Trump. You gotta vote against Trump. We gotta get rid of Trump. Trump must go. The New York Times, same thing: Trump must go. Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, pulls out of Ohio.
Hillary Clinton is not pulling ahead. Even in these postdebate polls where it is indicated by the New York Times that she won the debate, it doesn't mean anything. She's not getting a boost; she's not getting a bump in the other polls. And even the people responding to these "who won the debate in your opinion" polls, most of them are not saying it matters in terms of changing their mind or influencing how they're gonna vote. Gallup has a new report today that young people...
A greater percentage of young people than in the last, I think, 10-15 years are now saying they're not gonna vote, and that's got the Democrats panicked. The youth vote, Obama got it. Obama got a vast majority of the Millennial-type youth vote. The same cohort is claiming in polling data anyway that they're less interested in voting this year in greater numbers than we've seen. That's got the Democrats bothered. They're bothered by the fact that Hillary is not 50 points ahead.
They're bothered by the fact that Hillary can't pull away, that she doesn't have a lead. The media is upset! F. Chuck Todd and a number of media people are expressing frustration at their inability to take Trump out despite everything they've thrown at him. They know they have abandoned the principles of journalism. They know they're making no pretense at anything journalistic. Fair? Objective? All out the window. They're throwing the kitchen sink at Trump and they're admitting it doesn't work.
It isn't taking him out, no matter which poll you look at. You also have to keep in mind that it is an objective of the media-Democrat Party complex to dispirit you, to depress you. It is their purpose. The media-Democrat Party complex objective is to get you so depressed, so dispirited that you think it's over now. Beyond help. It's beyond fixing. They want to you lose your enthusiasm. They want you to begin to think of Trump the way they think of Trump.
And you notice the thing that they are not doing? For all this talk about what Trump's not doing and what he ought to be focusing on instead of the porn star, whatever she is, the Hillary campaign's not talking about what great stuff she's got planned. The Hillary campaign is totally devoted to Trump. They're not exactly running a big, positive campaign on all the great things that lie ahead of America if only Hillary Clinton is elected. They're not going there.
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RUSH: Now, folks, there was a piece... I've talked about this, but I'm gonna read you an excerpt of it again. Thomas B. Edsall used to write for the Washington Post, and I think he has something to do with the Obama campaign now. If I'm wrong about that, it doesn't matter. This ran in the New York Times, actually. It was July 23rd, 2012. The headline: "The Politics of Anything Goes," and here's an excerpt from the article, and it is directly applicable to right now.
Here we go: "Now, faced with a tough re-election fight, President Obama has, in fundamental respects, adopted the strategy he denounced eight years ago. [Obama] is running a two-track campaign," in 2012 here. "One track of his re-election drive seeks to boost turnout among core liberal groups; the other aims to suppress turnout and minimize his margin of defeat in the most hostile segment of the electorate, whites without college degrees."
My point is back in 2012, this guy in the New York Times wrote of Obama's reelection strategy, which means the Obama campaign had told him what it is. The Obama strategy was to dispirit, to depress, to suppress vote turnout of "white" Americans "without college degrees," primarily white men. And it's the exact the same thing that they're doing now -- the exact the same thing they're trying now -- and you have to have a stiff upper lip and resist this!
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