Rush Limbaugh: Obama telegraphing Dems' plan to control 'everything'

Talk-radio host Rush Limbaugh said Thursday that Barack Obama revealed in a podcast interview the ultimate intention of the Democratic Party is "one-party" rule over everything, including media.

Limbaugh brought up the comment on his nationally syndicated show because Obama had named him in the podcast.

Obama was asked by interviewer Tommy Vietor, a former Obama spokesman: "There's this debate about whether Trump is an aberration or whether he's the next phase of a Republican Party that's been built on racial grievance, built on cruelty on on immigrants and Fox News conspiracy theories. Now, we all hope the Republican fever would break after the 2012 re-election. Clearly it didn't. Things have gotten worse. Do you, Mr. Obama, have a view on this debate about whether Trump is an aberration?"

The former president said: "I did well in a bunch of white, evangelical counties, rural counties that I think, it's fair to say, there's no way right now that I could get those votes, right? And the reason is because they see me only through the filter of Fox News, Rush Limbaugh. Those folks right now are just being fed what’s coming through that filter.

"If they were watchin' Walter Cronkite, then you could, in fact, have just the normal debate — and in that circumstance, democracy works. Trump is expressing or mirroring — and in some ways, explicitly exploiting and took on — the crazy that was being pumped out through these venues each and every day."

Responded Limbaugh: "So, so, so there’s crazy here on this program. ... 'If we just had Walter Cronkite! If we just had Walter Cronkite back, then none of this would matter. If we had Walter Cronkite back, then we would have a media monopoly as well.'

"This is what they want, folks. They’re telegraphing what they’re gonna do if they win. They’re setting up a one-party everything. Good-bye, individual liberty and freedom on everything. This is drastic!'

Obama's confidence in Cronkite might have been mistaken. Howard Kurtz wrote in Newsweek in 2012 of a biography by Douglas Brinkley that documented "dents" in the longtime CBS News anchor's halo.

Do Democrats want to 'control everything'?

For example, Cronkite "cut a deal with Pan Am to fly his family to vacation spots around the world," which angered his boss, who called it a "blatant conflict of interest." But no action was taken.

"Had Cronkite engaged in some of the same questionable conduct today – he secretly bugged a committee room at the 1952 GOP convention – he would have been bashed by the blogs, pilloried by the pundits, and quite possibly ousted by his employer," Kurtz wrote.