https://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2017/01/19/a-dangerous-act-of-irresponsibility-on-cnn/A Dangerous Act of Irresponsibility by CNN
Jan 19, 2017
RUSH: Right at this very moment Donald Trump has touched down at Joint Base Andrews, the old Andrews Air Force Base. You know why they call it Joint Base Andrews now, don’t you? ‘Cause it’s more than just the Air Force there. They’re economizing, efficiencizing, so it’s more than just the Air Force there. So Joint Base Andrews. Anyway, they picked him up in an Air Force jet at LaGuardia in New York and they flew him to Joint Base Andrews. He just touched down, almost exactly 24 hours before he will be inaugurated the president of the United States.
Okay. We all know that the Democrat Party is unhinged and their values are not ours anymore. They are a different breed now, and the same thing for the United States media. An act of utter irresponsibility occurred on CNN last night on Wolf Blitzer’s show — an act of total derangement, irresponsibility, and danger. To me, what CNN did last night disqualifies them from discussions of journalism, from giving them serious consideration and credibility. They did a report that… Well, let me let you hear it. Brian Todd reporting on Wolf Blitzer’s show, The Situation Room, last night on CNN…
TODD: A cabinet secretary called “the designated presidential successor” will not attend the inauguration, ready to step in if something happens. But it won’t be a Trump cabinet secretary since none of them have been confirmed yet. It will be an Obama appointee. By noon Friday, all of Obama’s cabinet secretaries are expected to resign. John Kerry, the current secretary of state, will be the first cabinet secretary in the line of succession, but he’s out of office by noon. Donald Trump’s pick for secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, may not be confirmed for another week or two. So who would be secretary of state on Friday afternoon? According to State Department sources, the job would fall to the highest-ranking nonpolitical official in the department: The undersecretary for political affairs, Tom Shannon.
RUSH: What this report is about, is CNN explaining to their audience what would happen — who would become president — if somebody assassinated Donald Trump before the inauguration ceremony tomorrow. We prepare for what Reagan called “a miracle.” The peaceful transition of power that occurs in the United States every four or eight years (depending) is, in the real world, a miracle. That it happens peacefully, that it happens at all. It’s not normal that people with power willingly give it up. It is one of the many miracles of this country.
The Democrat Party cannot, has not, and will not come to grips with what has happened. They cannot accept, they haven’t been able to accept, and they don’t want to accept what happened last November. I think of all of the stories in the past where there have been shootings, say, on school campuses, school grounds or in movie theaters. Each and every time without exception CNN, ABC, the Drive-By Media did everything they could to make viewers believe that the shooting, the mass murder, was a result of conservative media, primarily talk radio, primarily me, and then Fox News.
In one instance in Colorado, after a movie theater shooting in Colorado, Brian Ross of ABC News had the name of the shooter. The first thing Brian Ross did was get hold of a roster of members of the Tea Party to see if he could find the name. And, lo and behold, he found somebody on the membership rolls of the Tea Party in Colorado with the same name as the shooter! And really, before knowing anything, went on the air, on ABC — it might have been Good Morning America, I forget what particular show — and actually said, “While we haven’t been able to confirm it, it is possible that the shooter is a member of the Tea Party!”
It was their instinct, knee-jerk reaction. They believe any violence that happens in this country is caused by conservatism — caused by people who love and believe in the Second Amendment — and have done everything they can to impugn, besmirch, discredit, and destroy anybody who has leanings toward conservatism and the Second Amendment, gun rights, and so forth and so on. And yet here now is CNN with a story last night. You know how many deranged people are out there?
The U.K. Daily Mail has a story today about a family friend of the Clintons from down here in south Florida who has been arrested for claiming he was going to assassinate Trump. He’s 51 years old. He looks like a standard, ordinary, normal person. He doesn’t look like some deranged lunatic, but obviously is. He’s a close family friend of the Clintons arrested for claiming that he was going to assassinate Trump. We have heard stories. The media is eagerly and with great support telling us of all the protests that are going to occur tomorrow.
We are being led to believe that they are massive, that there are many more protesters that are gonna show up than there will be people supporting Trump’s inauguration. We are told that the Democrats, now up to number 66 of them in the House, are not going to attend in a form of protest. What it is, is a bunch of childish immaturity. At best, that’s what these Democrats are engaging in. The Drive-By Media is doing everything it can to incite unrest, to incite lack of acceptance, to promote whatever unhinged and deranged feelings there are out there.
The Drive-By Media is sympathetic to them and could even be said to be promoting ’em. And now we have on CNN a story last night: Assassinating Trump could keep the Obama administration in power, and this is what the story was about. “Well, if it happened…” Can you imagine if on either of the days prior to Obama’s inauguration, either 2004, 2008, I, on this program, had done a story about what is going to happen should something happen to Obama? Can you imagine the excrement storm that would have happened?
We have Jeff Zucker at CNN running around talking about how Trump has destroyed journalism but he’s not gonna let him, and journalists are getting introspective. I have a couple of really, really fascinating stories today. One of them is a two-parter that I found on one of my tech blogs, a New York University journalism professor with advice for today’s journalists on how to deal with Trump. I guess Obama yesterday telling them to not be sycophants and instead be skeptics wasn’t enough. Was that not a laugh, by the way?
Barack Obama telling his State-Controlled Media, “No. You know what? You’re not supposed to be sycophants. You are supposed to be skeptics.” Are you kidding me? He had a room full of sycophants. He had a room full of people who, if it kept on, would die of anal poisoning, they were so far up and gone. And Obama’s telling them, “Now, you gotta stop being this way. You gotta become skeptics now.” Obama with the illusion that they never were sycophants.
And the stories in the media today are all filled with tears. “Oh, my God, he’s actually leaving! I can’t believe it. What are we gonna do?” The New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof, “Missing Barack Obama Already.” He not even gone. But this thing that CNN did last night — and, by the way, they cloaked this as a genuine story on the order of succession, given the circumstances. But clearly the only reason for such a story is if something happens to President-elect Trump before he’s sworn in. So you know what they’re thinking about.
You know what’s on their minds. You know how unbalanced the entire American left is. You know how unbalanced the Democrat Party has become. I also have a fascinating story here in The Politico today. It actually prints out to 14 pages. Don’t worry, I’m not gonna spend 14 pages on it. But I’ve got a lot of highlights and pull quotes. “Democrats in the Wilderness Inside — A decimated party’s not-so-certain revival strategy.” Oh, I can’t wait to get to this for you. It is eye-opening. It is an actually honest and truthful assessment of just where they are, which is nowhere.
It’s an honest assessment of how many seats they have lost in the Congress and in state legislatures. It’s an honest assessment of how they are a regional party now, at best, not national. It’s an honest assessment how they are a Jurassic Park party, that the people on their bench that people are saying, “That’s gonna be our next nominee,” are all 70 years old or older. I mean, when this guy describes the Democrats in the wilderness, he’s actually doing it. He actually does it. So those are two things I’m looking forward to getting to.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Let’s do a little quick test. How many of you out there across the fruited plain are surprised to learn that CNN would run a segment rooted in…? Well, here’s how Wolf Blitzer introduced the segment. He said, “What if an incoming president and his immediate successors were wiped out on Day One?” How many of you out there are surprised that CNN would run a segment like this? Now, if some of you in the audience are shocked, then you may be new to the program, so welcome. You have a lot to learn.
The fact of the matter is, many people in this audience are not surprised at all. They may be angry about it, but deep down, not surprised. These people have gone off the deep end long ago. They’re making no effort to climb back on solid ground. They cannot accept reality. To this day, they believe that what’s happened here is a construct; it’s something that somebody created — like the Russians hacking the election or what have you — to deny them what is theirs by birthright, and that is power and winning elections.
And so they can’t accept what happened, and they’re not even making any effort to accept what happened. “What if an incoming president and…?” Can you imagine turning on Fox News eight years ago, and take your pick of any Fox anchor…? Bill O’Reilly. Bill O’Reilly says, “What if an incoming president is immediate successors are wiped out?” Can you imagine what the Drive-Bys would say? Can you imagine what CNN would say about it? It’s disgusting, and it’s beyond the pale.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: We’ll start here in Phoenix. Mark, great to have you. Welcome to the EIB Network. Hello.
CALLER: Hi, Rush. I would like to get your opinion on something that I saw on the news this morning that the Obama Regime sent a B-2 bomber to Libya and killed hundreds of ISIS people. I was wondering if he would have done something like this now so that it could possibly provoke attacks in the United States during Trump’s early days.
RUSH: Well, you know, I saw that myself, and like you, the first question I had is, “What is this?” and then I remembered that I once asked a defense department guy, Donald Rumsfeld. I once asked him as secretary of defense: “Do you know — is there anybody who knows — everything going on at any moment in time in the Pentagon?” He looked at me said, “There’s no way.” I said, “Well, pardon my naivete, but who does? Doesn’t somebody? I mean, how much independence is there? Can somebody launch military salvos without you, for example, knowing it?”
“Well, no. There’s structure, and everybody has orders and so on. But day to day what’s happening? There’s too much. There’s simply too much go. I asked the same thing of Michael Hayden. I ran into him at a Steelers game. He was running the CIA. I said, “You know, I’m a logistics guy,” which is the root of this question. I asked him, “Look, as director of the CIA, do you know everything going on?” “No. It’s not possible.” I said, “You don’t know where we have covert operatives and covert actions?” “Well, yeah, but I can’t tell you day to day what’s happening and who’s doing what.”
So I thought of that when I saw this story. It could well be that what happened today in Syria with the B-2 has been on schedule for a while and it’s part of the ongoing military operation that’s there, but I can totally understand your take. And I don’t think something like this would be… If they wanted… You’ve got me sounding like CNN here. If they wanted — meaning if Obama, if the Democrats wanted — to do something to cause a terror attack tonight or tomorrow, I don’t think this, by itself, would be enough.
They’d have to do something working much closer to home here, and then to pinpoint the time that it happens so as to happen on… That would require, I would think, a specific operation or plan. I don’t think they would say, “Yeah, let’s send a B-2 over Libya and hope some wacko attacks Washington tomorrow!” I just can’t imagine that would be the thinking. But before any of you out there get upset, we didn’t start this. This line of thinking was put out there last night by CNN, and this is exactly what happens.
CNN does a story on if Donald Trump is assassinated either right before or right after he’s inaugurated, takes the office, who becomes president? His cabinet hasn’t been sworn in! Is it Obama? That’s what they hoped. Is it Obama? Does Obama stay president? That’s what they wanted to hear. Could it be? Does Obama stay? Can Obama stay? Can Obama stay if Trump can’t go? Is that right? Can Obama come out and play?” They put it out there. So don’t blame us for starting to think this way. We react, folks. We’re not the aggressors in stuff like this. But I don’t think that this action with the B-2 doing whatever it was doing over Libya is connected. It’s too much, too big a chance to take that happen.
