Dear friend of the Media Research Center's David Limbaugh has a new book out entitled "The Great Destroyer: Barack Obama’s War on the Republic.”
On Tuesday he spoke to us about it and the media bias he sees in America today (video follows with transcript):
NEWSBUSTERS: David Limbaugh is a New York Times best-selling author as well as an attorney and of course the brother of conservative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh. His books include “Crimes Against Liberty: An Indictment of President Barack Obama,” “Bankrupt: Intellectual and Moral Bankruptcy of Today's Democratic Party,” “Persecution: How Liberals are Waging War Against Christians,” and “Absolute Power: The Legacy of Corruption in the Clinton-Reno Justice Department. His recent book “The Great Destroyer: Barack Obama’s War on the Republic” is once again a bestseller, and we welcome a dear friend of the Media Research Center’s to NewsBusters.
DAVID LIMBAUGH: Hey, how are you doing? Thanks for having me, Noel.
NEWSBUSTERS: Oh, it's a pleasure having you, sir. In reality, David, this is a follow-up to “Crimes Against Liberty” which was published about two years ago. When you finished that, did you expect to be writing a sequel so to speak so soon, or did the president’s behavior necessitate a really expeditious part two?
LIMBAUGH: Well, I thought that he had done most of the damage he could do in the first year and a half. I mean, I didn't really give it a lot of thought. You write one book, you're so intent. But when I started researching this book, it wasn't just an extension of the big picture items that he had done in the first year and a half – the stimulus and ObamaCare. There was so much material. I had thousands of articles and 57 folders. I actually did have 12,000 articles. Anyway, he has done just as much, probably more than he did the first year and a half of his term as hard as that is to believe.
NEWSBUSTERS: Before we get to the book’s specifics, you list a number of egregious acts by Obama. Could he have pulled any of these off without the media’s assistance?
LIMBAUGH: It's hard to say. It depends how you define assistance. There's acts of omission and commission. If the media ignores something or if they affirmatively help to slant it in a way that's favorable to him. I think he probably, even if they would remain silent, we could probably do better. But they help distort what goes on, and you guys are the best group out there at exposing the slant, the bias of the mainstream media. It's hard for me to tell what would happen. You know, even when we've caught him dead to rights, the one Issa and the others have caught Holder and Obama dead to rights on Fast and Furious and have held him in contempt, what next?
NEWSBUSTERS: The question we always ask as media analysts is how differently would the media have treated this president if he were a Republican?
LIMBAUGH: That is so, the contrast is so stark, it's hard to imagine. We see it in every, we see it every day how they treat things. I'm sure I could go through the archives of your site and it would be stunning. In fact, I don't know why you guys don't just do a book on this very thing. Everything that I've written about from a perspective of a media slant. I guarantee you it would be a best-seller. Tell Bozell I'll co-author it with him if he's ready to do it. Mr. Bozell to me.
NEWSBUSTERS: Mr. Bozell, I will let him know. Well, you rightly accuse Obama of shifting the blame for the lousy economy to others including the American people. Can you give us some examples of how he's done that?
LIMBAUGH: Obama, everybody talks about how likeable he is. I think he's a bully, an adolescent, a guy who's dividing us, a guy who says the Republicans want dirty air, dirty water, applaud when people lose their insurance and everything. He acts like a person who cannot accept personal responsibility for anything he's done. So when he told us that he would keep unemployment below eight percent – his adviser, big deal, that's him. Liberals are now picking nits over who said it. “No, it was his adviser.” As if he's not accountable for what his chief economic adviser said.
So, his adviser said he'll keep unemployment below eight percent if we pass the stimulus package. Once it went over shortly thereafter, it never went back and we've had it between eight and ten percent ever since. He says, “Okay, no problem, that's Bush's fault. We just underestimated the devastation that Bush delivered to us. Or Bush lied to us about how bad the economy was.” When you go back and you can look at your archives and show what Obama actually said when he got in in 2009. Worst economy ever. And so he could not have underestimated the degree of financial problems we had at the time.
The problem has been not President Bush but that Obama's policies will not work. He won't allow the private sector to breathe. So instead of alleviating the problem, he's exacerbated it by pouring more debt onto the fire. And so we've had extended unemployment, the longest extended high unemployment that we've ever had since the Great Depression. We've had the worst recovery since World War II. In every other recovery, we've made it back to where we started pre-recession within four years. In this case, this recession started in December of 2007, and if you fast-forward to December 2011, we're worse off economically unemployment-wise than we were when we began. That's never been the case. We've always had robust recoveries.
And they talk of a recovery. The recovery has been very, very limited and suppressed because they have sucked the oxygen out of the private sector. We've seen growth, it's been in the public sector. So Obama blames everybody but himself for his own actions.
NEWSBUSTERS: And the media let him get away with it.
LIMBAUGH: Or he blames the tsunami, the Japanese tsunami. He blames ATMs. There's all kinds of things he blames. Whatever's convenient that day.
NEWSBUSTERS: You wrote, “Team Obama traffics in racism accusations and identity politics as a natural part of its leftwing worldview, but there is a crass political motive for it all; Obama’s empowerment depends on maintaining a certain level of support among specific demographic and ethnic groups, to whom he presents himself as a protector against racist, malevolent Republicans.” That trafficking in identity politics sounds a lot like what we've noticed with the liberal media seeking to whip up Democratic constituency groups with the "war on women" meme, attacks on voter ID laws as being suppression. Aren't the media at this point singing the same tune as Obama was concerning racism accusations and identity politics?
Joe Trippi, the Democratic strategist who's a basically nice guy, I challenged him on Twitter the other day on that very thing, and he responded to it by the way defending himself. I don't think it's right. It's bad faith when they say that Republicans are trying to suppress the minority vote with these various initiatives. We just don't want them to cheat. We don't want dead people voting. We don't want people outside the jurisdiction voting. And we don't want multiple people voting multiple times and cheating.
And this Department of Justice goes after states that just try to enforce their voting laws and suggest that we are suppressing the minority vote by requiring an ID is the most patronizing, racist statement itself. Are Democrats saying that minorities are too incompetent, too dependent, to come up with an ID on their own? Is that what they're saying? Have they thought through what they're saying? Blacks cannot help themselves even to the point of getting their own voter ID. That's what the Democratic Party is telling America. And I find it insulting, offensive, and reprehensible.
I mean, of course this isn't an initiative to prevent the black vote. Of course I don't like the fact, I would prefer a greater percentage of African-Americans vote for Republicans. But I would never support an initiative that suppressed their vote. I would never do that. That's what ends justifies the means Democrats do. We wouldn't do that.
NEWSBUSTERS: What's amazing about this, in the past month or so is their claim, and I'm talking the media and the Left as if there's a difference, is that there's no incidence of voter fraud. So we're trying to solve a problem that doesn't exist. Yet we just saw last week in Rangel's district they're saying there was all kinds of fraud. But the media are going to ignore that in the midst of all of this.
LIMBAUGH: Come on. There's no incidence of voter fraud. We saw what the New Black Panther Party did in the voter intimidation case and how the Department of Justice dismissed the case it had already won because of an unwritten policy inside the Department of Justice that said that white voters could not be the victims of alleged black perpetrators in voter intimidation. We saw, and I talk about it in “The Great Destroyer,” incidents where people in Texas try to protect the polls for honest voting and legitimate voters, and the Department of Justice goes after them, goes after the good guys who are trying to prevent voter fraud.
Of course there's voter fraud all over. St. Louis is notorious for it. Close to Chicago. Again, that doesn't pass the laugh test, but back to your venue, that's what the media does. They say the same lies over and over.
NEWSBUSTERS: The other thing that's been hysterical about this, David, is that as they've accused Republicans of voter suppression and there being no need for identification, and there is supposedly no voter fraud, what they've all ignored is that in 2005, a commission was set up headed by Jimmy Carter and James Baker to examine voting problems and irregularities in America. And their conclusion was – and again this involved Jimmy Carter – the conclusion was that we needed a voter identification.
LIMBAUGH: Yeah, well, you know, when you're a liberal, it means you never have to say you're sorry. And what you said yesterday you're not held accountable today for saying it. And because the media does not watchdog liberals like they do conservatives, you don't have any broadcasting of that, any accountability for that.
It's not just race, by the way, that Obama intentionally divides people on. As you know, he's fiercely engaged in class warfare, pitting the so-called wealthy against the middle and lower income groups, unconscionably dividing us all on the basis of gender, religion, sexual preference or orientation. He's continually trying to get us at each others' throats: business, unions, management. It's the most polarizing atmosphere we've ever had.
At the end of his second year, we had a 68 percent gap, the largest ever since it's been recorded. 81 percent of Democrats supported him, thirteen percent of Republicans did. You talk about the divisiveness and polarization during Bush. Well, there's a big difference. That was due to the Democrats ginning up lies about Bush. This wasn't Bush going out and trying to polarize. This was Democrats. This isn't they're bad, we're good. I'm telling you literally George Bush never treated Democrats as his political opponents like Obama does. They may have objected to his policies on Iraq, but he didn't go out and treat his opponents like a bully and demonize and vilify them. Never. And he never defended himself when they attacked him.
NEWSBUSTERS: Well, once again, the book is “The Great Destroyer: Barack Obama's War on the Republic.” The author and our guest has been David Limbaugh. David, we really appreciate your time today.
LIMBAUGH: Noel, thank you very much. Appreciate it.
