Rush Limbaugh says conservatives who are surprised at a salacious New York Times article on Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, later appended with important missing details, need to “wake up and understand that it isn’t media — it’s left-wing Democrat Party activism!”
The radio host told listeners Monday that occasional public apologies and clarifications by the newspaper’s staff are just for show, meant to mitigate outrage before continuing with an agenda to “intimidate, scare, [and] frighten conservative judges into not taking the gig.”
At issue is The Times’ Saturday piece on an anti-Kavanaugh book titled “The Education of Brett Kavanaugh: An Investigation,” and its reiteration of charges by Deborah Ramirez that the future Supreme Court judge had once put his penis in her face when the two were undergraduate students at Yale University.
As corroboration, the book and article break for the first time Max Stier’s claim that he had seen Justice Kavanaugh expose himself as other students pushed his genitals into a female student’s hands.
The newspaper deleted a tweet and offered the following clarification after coming under fierce criticism.
“The book reports that the female student declined to be interviewed and friends say that she does not recall the incident. That information has been added to the article,” The Times added.
But Mr. Limbaugh warned that journalistic missteps are deliberate and irrelevant to mainstream-media outlets’ actual goals.
“This isn’t embarrassing for the New York Times,” Mr. Limbaugh responded. “They’re in their editor’s newsroom rubbing their hands together and saying, ’We did it again!’ … I’m sorry, folks. I can’t join the chorus of people shocked and saddened by what the Times has done here ’cause I’m not shocked by any of it, and I’m not saddened by it. I’m ticked off that everybody seems to think the Times screwed up here! It just tells me how hard the job going forward is going to be in continuing to educate people about the media, who they are today, what their objective is, and how they don’t do news. There isn’t any news in journalism today because there isn’t any journalism in the upper echelons of Drive-By Media.”
The conservative also blasted The Times for referencing Mr. Stier as a former classmate who “saw Mr. Kavanaugh with his pants down at a different drunken dorm party,” without mentioning his ties to the Democratic Party.
“Max Stier, who is behind this latest bogus attempt to paint Kavanaugh as some serious sexual abuser, was working for Clinton when Kavanaugh was on the Starr investigation,” Mr. Limbaugh said. “So Ken Starr is investigating the Lewinsky thing, which led to Clinton losing his law license because he was lying under oath and suborning perjury (trying to get other people to lie). Max Stier, who went to Yale with Kavanaugh, was working for Clinton during the Starr investigation on which Kavanaugh was an investigative member. You think there isn’t a little payback going on? And the media knows this. But they don’t report that because they purposely do not want any of their readers to think that Max Stier might be motivated here by something other than truth, other than the facts of the story.”
The Times referred to Mr. Stier as someone who “runs a nonprofit organization in Washington,” but ties to power players in the Democratic Party were not included.
“The New York Times is out trying to destroy him again,” Mr. Limbaugh said, a reference to coverage of uncorroborated allegations of sexual misconduct made by Christine Blasey Ford. “There isn’t any media accountability … How do you hold the media accountable? One of the ways you hold ’em accountable is to wake up and understand that it isn’t media. It’s left-wing Democrat Party activism!”
• Douglas Ernst can be reached at dernst@washingtontimes.com.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.