LIMBAUGH EVACUATES AFTER SPENDING TWO DAYS LYING ABOUT HIS ORIGINAL HURRICANE MONOLOGUE

Well, this is satisfying:

Rush Limbaugh will be evacuating South Florida, just days after the popular conservative radio host claimed that Hurricane Irma would not hit the United States and that scientists and the liberal media were hyping up the hurricane as proof of their global warming “lie.”

“So there is a desire to advance this climate change agenda, and hurricanes are one of the fastest and best ways to do it. You can accomplish a lot just by creating fear and panic. You don’t need a hurricane to hit anywhere,” Limbaugh said on his show Tuesday. “All you need is to create the fear and panic accompanied by talk that climate change is causing hurricanes to become more frequent and bigger and more dangerous, and you create the panic, and it’s mission accomplished, agenda advanced.”

But on the show Thursday, Limbaugh said he would be off the air for the next few days.

“May as well... announce this. I’m not going to get into details because of the security nature of things, but it turns out that we will not be able to do the program here tomorrow,” Limbaugh said Thursday. “We’ll be on the air next week, folks, from parts unknown.”

To give Limbaugh his due, he didn't say Irma "would not hit the United States" -- he just said his listeners shouldn't believe what he thought was probably hype. Also, after downplaying news reports about Irma on Tuesday, he admitted that he was likely to evacuate if the storm approached south Florida -- he really wanted to stay, but he couldn't, for reasons of "security":

Look, the program has to go on. I can sit here and say, “You know what, I’m gonna stay, I’m gonna ride this out.” And I would if it weren’t for the fact that we’re gonna lose electricity. If we lose electricity, then there’s no way we can get the show done outta here. What are you laughing at in there? You think I’m making this up? I’m just telling you that we have a generator, but I don’t want to give away how it’s fueled. That’s a security breach.

But there are just too many variables when I could go someplace and have no concerns.

Yeah, he's really tough -- it's that ultra-secret generator that prevents him from showing you how tough he is!

Between Tuesday, when he sneered at the storm warnings, and his departure, Limbaugh spent parts of both Wednesday and Thursday insisting that all his critics were misquoting him.

Here was Limbaugh on Wednesday:

Bunch of loco weeds. They don’t even listen to the program, and they don’t even go to my website. They get most of it from Media Matters and then they rip me, “Oh, my God, oh, my God, I can’t believe, he did it, he did it,” and then they starting writing their brilliant pieces about it without even — you know, this is my point. On the left, there’s no curiosity, there’s no openness, there’s no tolerance.

I find Media Matters transcripts to be quite accurate, but the post I wrote about Limbaugh on Tuesday took all its quotes directly from Limbaugh's site. I see no evidence that any of his other critics used a dubious source when quoting him.

More from Limbaugh on Wednesday:

So here’s another one I didn’t know that happened. The Washington Post. The reporter is Callum Borchers. Headline: “Rush Limbaugh’s Dangerous Suggestion that Hurricane Irma Is Fake News.” Now, any of you listening to this program 24 hours ago, did I ever say the hurricane wasn’t there? Did I ever say it wasn’t a big storm? Did I ever call it fake news? I didn’t do any of that. I’m convinced Borchers didn’t even listen. He may have read a transcript out of context from a reporting site or whatever. All I did was tell you how the world works.

Borchers specifically said that Limbaugh didn't use the words "fake news":

Rush Limbaugh didn't say the magic words, but on Tuesday he basically accused the media of creating fake news about Hurricane Irma....

Borchers quotes Limbaugh at length. His quotes match what's on Limbaugh's site.

Yesterday, Limbaugh said:

... I want to spend the early moments here of the program on Hurricane Irma because, ladies and gentlemen, your beloved and respected host is being slimed and smeared with a fake news campaign that has been ongoing for three days....

... some in the media are lying, just bold-faced lying about what I said two days ago about the approaching Hurricane Irma.

I mean, some of the things that their saying... two hit pieces in a row from the Washington Post today. “Rush Limbaugh’s Hurricane Survival Guide: Stop Buying Water and Don’t Listen to the News.” Neither of those two things did I say. I never got close to saying either, and no reasonable, sane person ever would....

I said I’m not a meteorologist. I said I don’t come to you as an expert.

"I don’t come to you as an expert"? Yes, but as the second Post story (by Avi Selk) notes, Limbaugh said he was "the go-to guy" on hurricanes:

"I am not the National Hurricane Center,” Rush Limbaugh told his millions of listeners, by way of modest disclaimer.

“I am not a climatologist, a meteorologist,” he added, now 25 seconds into Tuesday’s radio show, which had so far been accurate.

But, Limbaugh continued, he was something of a hurricane analyst, having lived and broadcast for 20 years in Palm Beach County, Fla., a perennial target of sea storms, now directly in the predicted path of Hurricane Irma.

“When it comes to a hurricane bearing down on South Florida, I’m the go-to guy,” Limbaugh said, and then spent the next 24 minutes dispensing hurricane advice that no meteorologist or federal agency would likely dare utter.

That matches Limbaugh's own transcript. (Well, his transcript puts an "or" between "a climatologist" and "a meteorologist." So I guess Selk's transcript is fake news!)

What Limbaugh said on Tuesday was that while Irma might be a serious threat to south Florida, the threat from hurricanes is usually exaggerated by vested interests -- news organizations that want sensational stories, local merchants who want to sell emergency supplies, and (especially) meteorologists pushing what he sees as a phony climate change agenda.

So here comes a hurricane that’s 10 to 12 days out and here come the initial model runs, and if it’s close — sometimes it’s not close, sometimes the hurricane will turn to the north out in the mid-Atlantic and there’s no way you can fake that. But if, if they are going to approach a hit on the U.S., you will note that early tracks always have them impacting a major population center.

Unlike UFOs which only land in trailer parks, hurricanes are always forecast to hit major population centers. Because, after all, major population centers is where the major damage will take place and where we can demonstrate that these things are getting bigger and they’re getting more frequent and they’re getting worse. All because of climate change. I’ve got the audio sound bites to support. I can’t tell you the number of media people and elected officials all talking about this hurricane, Hurricane Irma, it’s no doubt due to climate change. And it never ends, it just never ends.

Did Limbaugh suggest that people "stop buying water"? You decide:

Do you realize here in south Florida, from where we are all the way down to Miami, you cannot buy bottled water. This hurricane, if it hits us, is not supposed to hit us until Sunday. It was never going to hit us before Sunday.

... How in the world is it that there isn’t any bottled water? And why does that cause a panic? Has anybody ever heard of the tap? I’m sure you have some empty water bottles from previous usage. Just put them under the faucet and fill it up. In many ways, it’s the same stuff you’re buying at the grocery store. You may not know that, but it is....

For those of you, by the way, in panic, there’s this thing in your kitchen called a sink, and at the sink there’s this thing called a faucet. And what you should do, if you like bottled water, is when you finish a bottle of water, don’t throw the bottle away. You put that bottle underneath that thing called the faucet and you turn it on, and water will come out and end up in the bottle and you’ll have bottled water, much like the water you buy in the bottle in the store anyway.

It’s perfectly drinkable, perfectly fine. It may not be vitamin enriched, but how do you know the bottle stuff is? And it may not have a bunch of electrolytes in it, but it’s water. God made, God created, has everything in it to keep you from being dehydrated. So it’s there, even if you can’t find it at the grocery store. So you don’t need to panic over the water.

I'll say it again: That's from Limbaugh's own site. And now, after two days of denying that he said anything like that, or that he claimed any amateur's expertise, he's getting the hell out of south Florida. For "security" reasons.