Politics

Rush Limbaugh: Media guilty of groupthink in giving Obama debate win

Jeff Poor Media Reporter
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Talking heads on both the right and the left gave President Barack Obama the win in Tuesday night’s debate, but conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh on Wednesday said the media rushed to judgment and overplayed suggestions that Mitt Romney had botched a key question on Libya.

“I’m seriously amazed,” Limbaugh said. “I really am, ladies and gentlemen, seriously amazed at the uniformity of thought and opinion across the spectrum on the debate last night. I must tell you, in all honesty, my view of what happened last night is not even close to what I’m hearing on Fox News, on MSNBC, on CNN, in The New York Times and The Washington Post. Well, actually, you know, some of the newspaper editorials are closer to the way I saw this last night than some of the people on television.”

“Let me start out by stating something patently obvious. … Romney had a big opening [on Libya].  He didn’t close it.  He didn’t secure it.  He could have said, ‘What are you talking about, terror attack? You blamed a video for two weeks.’ He didn’t say that.”

Limbaugh argued, however, that the missed opportunity was hardly a reason to call the debate a loss for Romney.

“Are any of you not going to vote for Mitt Romney because he didn’t have something to say at a crucial moment that you wanted him to say? Is somebody going to vote for Barack Obama that wasn’t going to because Mitt Romney didn’t say, ‘You were talking about a video for two weeks?’” Limbaugh said. “No, of course not. There weren’t any votes lost by Romney last night, and there weren’t any votes gained by Obama. Seriously. … This isn’t a college debate, where you lose for technique, according to some scoring system.”

“The geniuses and the analysts and the experts in Washington inside the Beltway judge these debates as if it’s a horse race or a chess game, in which both people start out even, and there’s nothing that’s happened before,” Limbaugh continued. “They look at these things as taking place almost in a vacuum, or a self-contained environment. But that’s not reality.”

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Jeff Poor