Russia News Coverage: We’re Watching People Lose Their Minds

Today’s Russia Collusion bombshell about a Donald Trump Jr. meeting and just like the others, after a year, none of it has panned out. This won’t either.

RUSH: Man, oh, man. I watch this corrupting obsession that the anti-Trump forces all over this country, highlighted, of course, by the Drive-By Media, have. And it’s everything I can do to avoid laughing and feeling snarky and so forth. I feel like I’m watching people — and I do watch this in the daytime. I don’t watch cable news at night, as you know, but I watch this and I actually think I’m watching people lose their minds. This is what it looks like.

Stop and think, folks. Let me put this in perspective in one regard. How long has this story been out there? We can say it’s been out there a year. I mean, this is July. The latest story, Donald Trump Jr. and his email from that Russian honey trap was in June of last year, so we call this a year. And think of all of the bombshells there have been in this past year. Think of all of the stories based on all of the leaks from unnamed sources in the intelligence community, former government officials, high-level U.S. officials, however they have been characterized.

The Washington Post in one story in the past year actually referred to the fact that they had as many as 15 of these kinds of sources informing them on one story. All told, I think the Washington Post has actually cited 30 different unnamed sources. I can’t recall them off the top of my head, but just remember, if you will, generic sense, all of the bombshells — and it seemed like for the last six months there has been one every day.

And for a period of a month there was a bombshell every afternoon at five o’clock. It was guaranteed to make the nightly news. There was carryover that night into cable programming and to set the stage for panel discussions the next morning on cable TV. Think about all of those bombshells. You don’t even have to remember the specific bombshell. All you have to remember is that each one was treated as the smoking gun, the answer.

Every one of those stories was treated as the gotcha, this is it, we’ve got the goods on Trump. Every one of those stories, if you read down far enough, had to include a sentence or maybe a short paragraph acknowledging no evidence for the allegations has yet been found, but suspicions remain high, or some such thing. Think about all of these bombshells, all of these reports, all of the time spent.

Media Research Center, our buddy Brent Bozell and his gang at NewsBusters actually chronicle the usage, and they found in the — I forget what the universe was, nightly news or cable news, whatever, 353 minutes was devoted to anti-Trump stuff like this and 45 minutes was devoted to stuff that was not critical of Trump. I mean, the balance here has been so out of whack and out of proportion.

Now, after a year, not a single one of them has panned out, from the golden showers dossier on down, not a single one of them has panned out. And how do we know this? Because of the way this little email chain and meeting between Donald J. Trump and a Russian honey pot is being portrayed. This is it. The bottom line is, this is all they’ve got. Everything that came before is obviously inoperative. It has been forgotten.

None of it is being linked, none of this Trump Jr. stuff is being linked to anything that’s happened in the past. Michael Flynn’s name does not appear in this story.

They’ve got nothing. They never have had anything, on this collusion business, on the Russians working with Trump to steal the election from Hillary. They’re not taking this story and adding it to all these previous stories and trying to sell a cumulative pile of evidence. This is a standalone. Some stories I’ve seen have featured the terminology, “Finally we have the evidence we’ve been looking for,” admitting that they haven’t had any evidence they’ve been looking for prior to this iteration of the story.

You ask, how long can this go on? It can go on as long as they want it to. I think now that this has become a way of life. I think getting up, if you’re a modern-day American journalist working in Washington or New York — well, hell, in the Washington establishment. LA Times reporters there would suffice as well. I think this become a lifestyle now.

This is not just a story that people are pursuing; this is a lifestyle. This has become a mechanism whereby these people state their identities. They are now defining themselves on the basis of the pursuit of this story. They can’t stop it. They cannot help themselves. They will never get to the point, even if there is ever incontrovertible evidence that it didn’t happen, they are not going to be able to accept it; they are too invested.

And it’s not professional investment; this has gone now into the psychological. It has gone to the personal. And it is an erosion of principles; it is an erosion of objective; it is journalism consuming itself. It’s journalism eating itself. And you know what happens after you eat enough; you have to go to the bathroom. And that’s where all of this stuff is headed. And it is breathtaking to watch this.

And I look at all the people who have been corrupted, every guest, other than the assigned Trump supporters on every cable channel, every expert guest.

There is literal self-worth tied up into this, as far as the people that are engaging in it. And they’re in a competition. All the analysts are competing with all the other analysts to come up with the unique take on every story that will focus everybody’s attention on that particular analyst. Everybody’s trying to be the smartest guy in the room, the most perceptive guy in the room.

There is no legitimate trail of news here. There’s no legitimate pursuit of facts or evidence. There is a theory. There is a result. There is a narrative. And the outcome has already been implanted in all of their heads, and now they’re pursuing whatever they can do to make that true, the exact opposite of what journalism’s supposed to be.

And as I say, I’m watching this, and I’m looking at these people literally lose their minds. And I like it. Don’t misunderstand. I think it’s fun to see. This is a self-immolation that is happening here, and they’re not even aware of it because they fool themselves into thinking that they represent the majority of thinking in America. They believe if they believe something, everybody else does. Call that hubris or arrogance or what have you.

This babe calls Trump Jr. under a false premise, claiming she’s got dope on Hillary Clinton, and they take the meeting ’cause who wouldn’t want to get oppo research on your opponent?

That’s standard operating procedure in political campaigns. And then the woman shows up. “No, no, no, no. You misunderstood! I’ve got this Magnitsky Act or something I want you to do something about.” The whole thing smacks of a setup. The one thing here: If this meeting was about collusion, what was the collusion? And that remains the question in every story that we have been dished for the past six months. What is the collusion? What was the hack? Two separate questions. But what was the collusion here involving Donald Trump Jr.?

What did the Russians get out of it? Nobody got anything out of this meeting! The Russian honey pot didn’t get anything she wanted. The Trump campaign did not get what they thought they were gonna get. It’s a big nothing. Now, some Never Trumpers simply can’t bring themselves to admit that. To them, it’s a smoking gun. “There may not be a lot of smoke, but there’s a lot of smell to the smoke that we can’t see, and it deserves further investigation.” But nobody got anything out of this meeting. The whole meeting took place under false premises.

Nothing changed because of the meeting. Not a single thing changed! In fact, my friends, there is more evidence that this Russian lawyer was working with Fusion GPS to discredit Trump than anything else. That’s the same outfit that did the golden showers dossier, and that’s why I think there’s a similarity. I think all of this was aimed at getting Trump, if you want to know the truth — and the way the media’s covering it I think proves that.

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