Rush Limbaugh on the Media Distortions

Excerpts from the transcript from his show of yesterday

RUSH: CNN, I just saw a portion of this. I'm sure it's CNN International, trying to humanize once again Hassan Nasrallah, the grand pooh-bah sheik of the Hezbos. Last night on CNN's Anderson Cooper 360, this is how the CNN staff announcer opened the program.

ANNOUNCER (with music): Deep inside Hezbollah country, a corner of the war you don't always see and you'll only see here. This is a special edition of Anderson Cooper 360. Crisis in the Middle East, day 27.

RUSH: Oh, we're counting the days now. (Panting). I'm panting with excitement, bated breath. Why, inside Hezbo country. Well, I was hooked. So let's go. Anderson Cooper says, "There are those who say that Israel underestimated the strength of the Hezbos. We have CNN's Tom Foreman look at where the Hezbos get their military strength."

FOREMAN: Another thing Hezbollah has going for it is shear geography. Their homeland here in southern Lebanon is full of mountains and trails and little villages, and they have had almost 25 years to dig in, and Hezbollah has help. Decades of running social programs, hospitals, and schools for Shiite Muslims have produced allies willing to provide a haven for Hezbollah.

RUSH: Here we go again! Last time I was here in New York, which is not that long ago, shortly after this thing broke out, we heard about what a great bunch of social works the Hezbos are in an attempt to humanize them. Yes, they have hospitals, and they have programs, social programs at schools for Shi'ite Muslims! I guess that's where they teach them to strap bombs on each other and blow themselves up? And then they say Hezbos have help. But did you hear them say in this segment that the help was coming from Iran? No. Did you hear them say the help has come from Syria? No. I wonder if in the ensuing bouts that we have we will hear that the help is coming from Iran. Of course we won't, folks, because that's not the story line. No!

What we're going to hear is they're brilliant tacticians, guerrilla fighters, never been anybody like 'em! They're brave. They know how to find cover. They know how to use their weapons effectively. Most guerrilla groups don't. They fight poorly. They run away in the face of danger, but not the Hezbos -- and of course they have help. I'm going to tell you something, folks, this royally offends me because this is nothing but spin, once again nothing but PR. All of this BS about how tough Hezbollah is; let me ask some important military questions. Has Hezbollah taken one inch of Israeli land? No. Have the Hezbos won a single battle? No. Have they taken out Israel's infrastructure? No. They're lobbing rockets into towns. They haven't accomplished a damn thing.

Unless you want to say they're making it tough on the Israelis than they've had it before to wipe 'em out, but we're not even sure that's the case because we don't know at what force strength the Israelis are actually proceeding with here. This is nothing more than a PR victory that is being anointed the Hezbos, meaning no victory at all. But here's a classic example of the media trying to help 'em. It's not just CNN. New York Times, we had a couple stories on Sunday, shared with you yesterday, it's on the website, about how great these guys are and how tough they are and what odds they're up against and so forth. They're purely pursuing a PR victory, and the media is helping them get it. You cannot find in strict military terms traditional signs of victory or success, and yet it's being assigned to them...

RUSH: Stop the tape, stop the tape. How is that possible, Mr. Foreman? Do you think you might be complicit? This is amazing to me, and the Hezbos, they have grown better at manipulating their public image. I guess Bill Clinton was pretty good at it, too, because you looked the other way, or you helped him craft an image that he didn't deserve, and you're doing the same thing for a bunch of terrorists, calling them guerrillas, marveling at their tactics and their bravery and their social work. This is obscene, folks. It is genuinely obscene. Here is the rest of this...

RUSH: Do not want to look like a real army! How in the world can these guys say this? They're dressed up as civilians! How in the world can it be said they want to look like a real army? And don't tell me tactics. You don't see them on the move into Israel, you don't see them advancing, you don't see them doing anything that you do to achieve military victory. My God, this is absurd. This goes back and reminds me of the conversation Anderson Cooper had with this clown from the New Yorker, "You know, it's really, really interesting how anti-Semitic Nasrallah is. He's so open about it. He's so outspoken about his anti-Semitism. It's really interesting Anderson."

"Yes, it is, Jeffrey, it's really interesting."

It's amazing what interests these guys.