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Rush To Excellence in Detroit
"An Evening with Rush Limbaugh"
May 3, 2007
RUSH: Thank you all. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you! I can't tell you how wonderful THAT makes me feel. It's great to be here, back in Detroit, and it's great to be here as part of WJR's 85th anniversary and it's an honor to be on that radio station, the number one radio station in this city, because of me.
RUSH: Just kidding. It's a great group of people. You know, there are a lot of people that do what I do, syndicated radio, and a lot of them do not have good stations to be on. You can be a factor in this business without a quality, blowtorch radio station, and WJR is one of those, and it's a thrill to be there. I understand some of you have been here since 11:30 this morning lined up to get seats. Could I see a show of hands? What, are you all on welfare or something? (Laughter) I heard a funny story today about Michigan. A dairy farmer here in Michigan needed to get a new dairy cow. His dairy cow died, and needed to get a new dairy cow. He didn't know where to go. He looked in the newspapers and found an ad. Some Ohio dairy farmer was selling a cow. So he called the guy up.
The guy said, "Come down and take a look at it. It's a pretty young cow. I think you'll like it."
He goes down to the cow, looks at the cow, and likes the looks. He says, "Look, I'm not going to buy this cow unless I can milk it."
"Well, go right ahead. Feel free. With every tug (Pshew! Pshew! Pshew!), the cow expelled gas. Every time!"
AUDIENCE: (Laughter)
RUSH: The guy from Michigan says, "Is that normal?"
"Yeah, and I can't explain it. I've never seen a cow like this. But it doesn't matter. Look at the milk. The milk is fine."
"Okay, okay. I'll take it." So he packs the cow up and brings it home to Michigan, calls his best buddy down the road, another farmer, and says, "Hey, I just got this new dairy cow. You have got to come check this out. You won't believe it."
So the farmer comes by and says, "Okay, it's a good cow, but I have to milk it too. I'm not going to take your word for it that it's a great cow."
"Well, go ahead! Be my guest."
With every tug, the cow would expel gas, and the farmer from Michigan says: "Did you get this cow in Ohio?"
"Yeah, I did! I didn't tell you that. How did you know that I got it from Ohio?"
"Eh, my wife is from Ohio."
AUDIENCE: (Laughter)
RUSH: On my program we have a lot of fun with Mrs. Bill Clinton, who, by the way -- this is very funny -- is falling in the polls.
AUDIENCE: (Cheers and applause).
It's early, folks. There's still, as we stand here tonight, an 80% chance she's going to be the next president.
AUDIENCE: (Groans and boos)
RUSH: We'll talk about that as the evening unfolds here. I'll tell you why I think that. It's tonight. This can change. Politics can change over night. But the guys on MSNBC, Chris Matthews, was doing a roundtable this afternoon because her numbers have fallen, and they all thought she was so great in that Democrat press conference in South Carolina. They thought she was just presidential. She was studly -- uh, uh, uh.
AUDIENCE: (Laughter.)
RUSH: Well, she does put her pants on one leg at a time like all the rest of the guys.
AUDIENCE: (Laughter.)
RUSH: (sighs) So they're all having this roundtable. They can't figure out why -- and Giuliani, in the same period of time, has gone up. They can't figure it out. Chris Matthews and the rest are tearing their hair out trying to figure out why in the world her are numbers plummeting. I'm watching this in stunned amazement. These people are so disconnected! They live in their own little world, and their own little world is what they think and their agendas -- and they already have her anointed, and they think that all she's got to do is show up and her numbers go up. It's the exact opposite! Every time she opens her mouth, this is what's going to happen.
RUSH: Let me ask you a question. In all candor now, folks, and I know that most of you in this room... By the way --I'm not going to do anything; I just want to know -- have any of you been dragged here tonight by friends who are not either listeners or conservatives? A show of hands. There's not one liberal here?
AUDIENCE: (Laughter.)
RUSH: Oh! Oh! There's one! Is it the young lady?
AUDIENCE: (Laughter.)
RUSH: Her husband is pointing her out, and she's going, "No!"
AUDIENCE: (Laughter.)
RUSH: The thing about Mrs. Clinton is, why is it that she's thought to be qualified to be president? Now, seriously. Forget politics now. This is not about left or right. This is simply about, "Who is she?" What in the world is it that recommends her to the point of inevitability -- not only as a Democrat Party nominee, but as a president? Who is she? What has she done? Do you know that everything she has had control of, he's botched in a political sense? Look at what happened with her health care plan. Now they're coming back with it incrementally step-by-step. She single handedly -- along with me (laughs).
AUDIENCE: (Laughter and applause)
RUSH: There's so many factors that have been clearly the way she handled healthcare is one of the reasons why the Republicans won the Congress in 1994, and then she was the mastermind behind the way her husband should handle Paula Jones and Monica Lewinsky and so forth. Yet she's said to be the smartest woman in the world. Now I know why, but these kind of things amaze me, because we live in this media bubble today. Take polling data. You can see a poll, the New York Times ran it last week: 56% people think that global warming is a threat. Well, whoopdeedoo! What good is a poll of the ignorant?
AUDIENCE: (Cheers and applause.)
RUSH: I don't mean that to be insulting, but what do the people know about it other than what they're told in the Drive-By Media and the Gore movie and all these tumult and chaotic news stories and scare stories? Why should the majority of American people determine anything? Why in the world? Okay, I hear a poll in the New York Times: 56% of the American people believe global warming is a threat. Does that mean I should believe not what I believe and agree with it? No! Yet we all get caught up into this kind of bubble. I don't care what the story it is. That's why I call them "the Drive-By Media." They go to a story. They wreak havoc on it, and then they move down the road while everyone else has to clean up the mess and do it all over again. The Virginia Tech shooting was a prime example, but practically every story they cover that way is something that just roils the country the country. They want us in chaos. They don't want happiness and content. This is the greatest country in the world. We have more affluence. We have more...
AUDIENCE: (Cheers.)
RUSH: Thank you.
AUDIENCE: (Applause.)
RUSH: Every day in this country is better than the day before. The opportunities in this country are limitless! We have more affluence, the live expectancy, the educational opportunity. (I'm throwing out Ann Arbor.)
AUDIENCE: (Laughter, cheers and applause.)
RUSH: Well, you have to make some local comments in these things. But this is a country that supports so much and so many. I've done troop visits to Afghanistan. You want to see poverty? Leave this country. I know everything is relative and so forth, but for everybody to be living in chaos and doom and gloom and worry? The economy right now is roiling, but the Drive-Bys and the Democrats are out there telling everybody we're just one paycheck away from whatever, homeless and destruction. This creates fear. It's natural. The human existence naturally goes towards pessimism and doom and gloom. It's just the way we are -- and some people, even when they hear good news, don't trust it. "No, that can't be." If you doubt me, look at how wealthy the people who write books on how to be positive have gotten. You can't go to the library and find a book on how to fail because we all have done it. We all know how. But how to succeed, how to think positively? Things that people write these, score very well. They make a lot of money and they create a lot of converts, and they can keep recycling it because nobody can keep it up! Pessimism, doom and gloom, is a natural human disposition. It doesn't take any work, just like it takes no work to frown.
It takes effort to smile. You have to use your muscles. It's the same thing. So we live in this constant tumult and constant chaos, and this media bubble is the reason for it. If you think about your own life -- and I know we all have problems and I know that we all have challenges and so forth, but if you just stop and think your own life, my guess it's pretty good, and you feel optimistic about your future -- aside from the fact that liberals are starting to control things too much. But you feel basically positive. What gets you down is when you hear your neighbors might be in trouble or something in another county has gone wrong or something wherever. I'm not saying that your involvement in the issues that we all care about are irrelevant, but they shouldn't define your happiness or not. What goes on in Washington or Lancing or any other capital, should not have an overwhelming effect on whether or not you're happy or optimistic about yourself. Why give away that kind of power to a bunch of people that really don't deserve it?
AUDIENCE: (Applause.)
RUSH: I like to focus... My best teachers at school were the ones that got more out of me than I knew I had. I didn't like them at the time. They pushed me, but they're the ones that I remember. We all need starters. We all need self-starters and everybody in this room, probably, can be much better than you are, no matter how good you are. We all have that ability. This is one of the things, the primary thing about liberalism -- and it's hard to nail just one. The primary thing about it that bothers me is that it doesn't see potential in people. If I were a liberal looking at you, I would see a bunch of victims. I would be counting up the women. "Okay, how many women are here? They need feminism? How many African Americans are here? Call Jesse Jackson. How many people might be disabled?" I would look at you and I would feel sorry for you, and I would look at you with contempt and I would say, "You've got no potential. You can't overcome the obstacles of life. You need me! I can do these things for you," and that's where liberals derive their power. They're constantly -- all of these things I've mentioned, they're in the media bubble each and every day assaulting you little by little, attempting to control your thoughts, attempting to control your speech, attempting to control your ideas. I took a visit out today. We've got a new sponsor. We've been working them for 16 years, and we finally nailed down General Motors last week.
AUDIENCE: (Applause)
RUSH: I know there are probably some people here from Ford and at DaimlerChrysler. We tried there, too. It's nothing against anybody else, but we got the deal with General Motors. I was out there meeting with some people and they showed me what's coming in the next two years in most of their lines. It's amazing. It, frankly, is amazing -- and I mean this as a compliment. Please don't misunderstand this. I'm looking at -- especially some of the Cadillacs that are coming. The exteriors are going to blow you away. But I was looking at interiors, and I said, "I can't believe this is an American car," and I don't mean that as an insult. It's a great thing. They're very excited about what they're doing. I talked to one of the guys in the design team, and I said: "Are you working on something big? Are you're working on a 12 cylinder behemoth? Are you working on something with 600 horsepower?"
He said, "We had to scrub the project."
I said, "Why?"
"Global warming."
AUDIENCE: (Groans.)
RUSH: No, no, CAFE standards. There are limits on miles per gallon that cars are going to have to achieve, and I said to him, "Why don't you fight back? Why does the company just bend over and grab the ankles? This is all a hoax!"
He said, "It's worse than a hoax. It's communism. It's nothing more than a religion."
"Why don't you fight back?"
"We can't alienate the customers."
"Alienate the customers, by giving them what they don't want?"
"No, look at the polls! Look at how many people believe we're destroying the planet with auto emissions."
I said, "It's crazy. We're not. Auto emissions of total vehicles worldwide are not even five-tenths of one percent. I nothing!"
"I know, but we can't do anything, can't make the politicians mad. They'll come down on us."
This is a perfect example: a major American corporations have to run scared because of a bunch of uninformed people. It's not their fault they're uninformed. They're being lied to every day by Drive-By Media, by people like Al Gore and that propaganda movie. I know a lot of you in this room --
AUDIENCE: (Applause.)
RUSH: A lot of you in this room probably, you want to be good citizens and you hear about how we're destroying the planet and global warming is happening. You want to do your part. I had to get a hotel room this afternoon and change clothes. I was in there for about half an hour and I couldn't find the light switch. It's on the freakin' lamp! I look and I can't find the lamp's light switch. I'm looking at it, and it's one of those damn fluorescent light bulbs.
AUDICENE: (Laughter.)
RUSH: I said, "We're just a bunch of lemmings." That's fine, if you want to buy those things. But to think you're saving the planet, I'm sorry, you're being duped. Your car is not destroying the planet. You're not killing polar bears. You're not melting glaciers because you and I combined with the world's population -- sorry to tell you -- don't have that power. We haven't the ability.
AUDICENE: (Laughter.)
RUSH: I don't want to get religious here. But people ask me all the time: "How come you seem so confident about what you believe, particularly about global warming?"
"Because I am, and I'm documented to be almost always right, 98.6% of the time. I know." I said, "I fly a lot, and I look down out of the window of the airplane," and I'm sorry, folks, I can't intellectually get my arms around the fact that the light bulbs we're using are going to melt the damn glaciers and snow peaks I'm flying over. We couldn't create this planet if we wanted to, and the idea that we think we can destroy it is one of the most egregious examples of human vanity that I can think of. On the one hand, Ingrid Newkirk of PETA will tell us 'a man is a boy as woman is a rat.' We're no different. In fact, we're worse. Those are animals -- and I love them. Those animals eating each other and spreading disease and so forth, they are more entitled to this planet than we are, because we're destroying it. I believe in a loving God. I don't believe a God would create creatures like us. You know what the human quest has been since the first days? Whatever they were, I don't care how many years ago. We can argue about it. The human quest has been to improve the quality of life, to expand the life expectancy to be healthier, to avoid sickness, to be educated. This is what we've tried to do. You go back a 100 years and the streets? There were horses on them, and there was cow manure and horse manure in the streets, and there were flies buzzing all around.
That was far more environmentally damaging than what we're doing today. What we're doing today is progress. The idea that using brains created by a God that loves us, is going to destroy what He created is, I'm sorry, I can't get my arms around it! Then I look at the people telling us that and what they're saying sounds suspiciously like another religion to me. Why there was a Garden of Eden! Yes, the pristine planet before Adam and Eve -- and there is sin, and the sin is a car you drive and the light bulb you use. But there's salvation! Salvation is agreeing with these people, letting them raise your taxes, reduce your lifestyle, have government get even bigger to further repress lifestyles. That's how you make good on the "sin" for destroying the planet -- and it all requires one other fundamental thing and that's faith, because the global warming crowd cannot prove it scientifically. They use the word "consensus." You can't have consensus in science. So they're just trying to just muzzle the critics, and that takes me back to the guy at GM. He said, "Rush, I'm worried. Do you know how many people in this country have to stop before they say something, and wonder whether it's going to get them in trouble, is going to offend them? I mean, that's the kind of stuff that people in the Soviet Union used to say! They're afraid. They might be heard by the State. They might be overheard by someone that would get themselves in trouble."
AUDIENCE: (Applause.)
RUSH: I hadn't thought of that in that way. It hit me between the eyes, recent events just in my industry on radio. Now, it's not so much the State yet. But it is groups of activists, who are liberal, who do not want to hear what we think and they don't want to hear us say it because they can't refute it. They cannot win in the arena of ideas.
(Applause.)
RUSH: So they don't want us to say it, period, and they try to silence us and shut us down. And who are we? We are good people. We don't try to shut them down. Conservatives didn't invent political correctness. We're not running around saying, "You can't say that! You can't say that!" When they say it, we laugh at them for saying it an dmake fun of it.
AUDIENCE: (Laughter.)
RUSH: When we say something that offends them (hyperventilating). They get mad and they want to take drastic action and so forth. They call some agency and they start complaining to radio station manager, or the FCC or advertisers or what have you. But the way he put it was exactly right, and this is all part of the creeping control. But we say, "Oh, but we don't want to offend you!" So if some group says, "You can't say that, Rush. I'm offended by that..." I'm not talking about something genuinely out of line, but we say, "Okay, I'm sorry." So we're all running around, and saying, "What can I say?" We're pausing before we communicate. When we don't say what we really think, we're not being who we really are and we are losing the battle because we are suppressing ourselves and we're letting them do it, and this is a problem. We have to fight this with confidence. We have to fight this with knowledge. We have to have history and information on our side and understand exactly what's happening. This Gore movie -- and you've heard me tell the story on the air. I live down in Florida. I have a woman who transcribes phone calls for me that I see on a computer screen in case somebody is using a cheap phone from WalMart and I can't hear what they're saying.
AUDIENCE: (Laughing.)
RUSH: Sorry, you know I love WalMart. When she can't make it, she has a couple of other women who substitute for her. She came in one day and told me that one of her substitutes had just called her, and said that her daughter -- 12, 13 years old -- was told by the school district, "Watching An Inconvenient Truth is mandatory and the parents had to go too or the child would suffer grade consequence." Public school, folks!
I said: "What did she do?"
"Well, she's going to go."
"She's going to go? She's not going to say, 'Hey, where is the balance? I'm not sending my kid to school to be indoctrinated'?"
"No, she's going to go. She's scared to death."
See? They get scared. They're the authorities. They dangle her daughter's grade over her. The worst thing is, when the mother came out, she was a believer -- after seeing the stupid movie!
AUDIENCE: (Groans.)
RUSH: I tore my hair out! The next time she was in to substitute for the regular, I devoted the first 30 minutes to global warming to humiliate her and I brought her back.
AUDIENCE: (Laughing.)
RUSH: But that's how insidious this is, because, see, everybody wants to matter. We all want to matter, and if the planet is "being destroyed," then, "Oh no!" because if that that goes, where do we go? Well, there is a new planet out there.
AUDIENCE: (Laughing.)
RUSH: Folks, there is, and it's real close: it's 120 trillion miles away. Do you remember how excited they were when they reported this new planet? Why? Because it's an opportunity to go to a pristine place and start all over with no oil wells and no oil, and no natural gas and no conservatives. Totally politically correct! It's only 120 trillion miles away. It's not even in our galaxy. It's on the edge of another one. The way you get there? You head for the outer edges of our Solar System, and when you get to Your Anus, you turn left.
AUDIENCE: (Laughing.)
RUSH: No, they were getting all excited about that. This is how it works. It's a creeping thing. We all want to matter. We all want to make us think we're "making a difference." So they tell us we're destroying the planet, and here's what we've got to do to save it, like, "One square of toilet paper."
AUDIENCE: (Laughing.)
RUSH: Now why is that not laughed off the face of the earth, when it's uttered?
"Well, because Mr. Limbaugh..." This is the voice of the New Castrati, by the way. "Mr. Limbaugh, it's the intentions here that count. What are you doing to save the planet, Mr. Limbaugh? You smoke your cigars. You drive your big cars. You have your big house! At least Sheryl Crow with her one square of toilet planet is trying to save a planet. At least she cares!" Okay, so I'm a cold cruel hearted SOB and Sheryl Crow is an ignoramus but she's someone who should be listened to. That's how this works.
AUDIENCE: (Laughing.)
RUSH: Was there a smattering of applause for Sheryl Crow? I don't mind listening to her when she's singing. Don't misunderstand. Now this takes me back to Mrs. Clinton. I'm sure you thought I had lost my place.
AUDIENCE: (Laughing.)
RUSH: The media bubble, remember? By the way, this whole presentation tonight is an illustration of something that really matters to me, which I'll clue you in on as we get on with it. But what is it that recommends her to be president? Who in the hell is she? I don't mean this in a partisan sense. Why? Do you realize if her last name weren't "Clinton," nobody would care? Nobody would know. Do you think she would have become what she is if that wasn't the case? I'm not talking about marriage or this sort of thing -- although I do have problems with that.
AUDIENCE: (Laughing.)
RUSH: No, here's what I think it is, folks. You have to remember now who controls the creation of the media bubble. It's the Democrat Party, working in concert with the Drive-By Media. Now, who is Hillary Clinton? As the left looks at Hillary Clinton: "Here is this woman who came out of Chicago. She had a lot of potential. She was on the Watergate Committee! She helped nail Nixon! She goes off to Wellesley. Oh, cool! Wellesley! Oh, wow. An Ivy League, feminist school, training this woman to be on her own! She ain't gonna be no Tammy Wynette! She's not going to need a man. She's going to carve new directions and be a role model for women: Hillary Rodham out of Chicago!" and then she goes to Yale, and meets this hayseed from Arkansas -- and in something that logic cannot explain, she was attracted to him and he was attracted to her.
AUDIENCE: (Laughing.)
RUSH: That's what's so great about love, folks: you can't explain it.
AUDIENCE: (Laughing.)
RUSH: What does she do? She hitches her wagon to this guy because his star, supposedly, is going to climb even higher than hers. But she's giving up all this opportunity to be a trail blazer, and do it in the feminist way: "You don't need a man to be happy. You don't need a man to have a career. Don't betray the sisterhood!" She meets up with this guy and she decides he's going somewhere. Her strategy is hitch her wagon to his and take over wherever he goes. But this (sigh) required going to Arkansas.
AUDIENCE: (Laughing.)
RUSH: (tapping podium)
AUDIENCE: (Laughing.)
RUSH: Do you know, if you are Eleanor "Squeal" or Gloria Steinem or the late Molly Yard, do you understand what it is for somebody with this potential out of Wellesley, to pack up and head to a swamp?
AUDIENCE: (Laughing.)
RUSH: I mean, that's how they look at Arkansas. It may as well be Mississippi. I may as well be Alabama. That's a foreign country to them. They get visas to go there!
AUDIENCE: (Laughing.)
RUSH: She goes down there and not only does she go down there, she has to be the breadwinner! She has to go to the Rose Law Firm and trade cattle futures and all this because her husband makes 26 grand a year as governor, and while he's being governor, there's a woman named Gennifer Flowers, a couple TV info babes that he's uhhhhh -- and she knows all about it, and she hangs in. She could have ended his career at any time, and she hung in there through the humiliation. They end up running for the White House and you know they win. They get there and she takes on his Manchurian candidate persona when they arrive.
AUDIENCE: (Laughing.)
RUSH: She's given healthcare as the price for hanging in there and all this. I'm being serious. I know it sounds funny. Remember, I'm giving you this from the liberal perspective now. This is how liberals look at Hillary -- and then here comes all the Paula Jones and the Monica Lewinsky and Kathleen Wiley -- and what does Hillary do? Stays! In fact, she goes out and blames it all on the vast right-wing conspiracy as if people like me hired Lewinsky and got her the pizza collection job in the Oval Office!
AUDIENCE: (Laughing.)
RUSH: And there it is with Matt Lauer on the Today Show and Matt Lauer's saying, "Mmm-hmm. Mmm-hmm!"
AUDIENCE: (Laughing.)
RUSH: Now, folks, it's her turn! She's paid the price. She entitled. That, is the only reason that Hillary Clinton is out there. On her own... I'm not trying to be insulting. I'm just saying that this is an example of how thoughts, the media bubble are created. Ever since the Clintons have been in the White House, it's been the blue plate special: smartest woman in the world, the great things she's done, "It Takes a Village," all of these things. You listen to her speak, and it reminds me of my first two wives.
AUDIENCE: (Laughing.)
RUSH: Combined. People get caught up in it. "Rush, you think Hillary...?" and I've gotten so sick and tired of telling people what I really think, I just say, "There's an 80% chance she's the president," because they think it anyway! Everybody is scared to death! They think she's going to be president anyway, "So why are you asking me?" I ask them. An 80% chance, as of today, that she's going to be president. They ask: "Have you ever met her?" Yes. I have met her. It was in Brooklyn. A friend of mine, a rabbi, and another friend of mine who runs the Jewish organization in New York, that if you go to a state visit to Israel and want to see powerbrokers, you go through him, and they both have become very good friends, and the friend's rabbi's daughter was getting married at the Hilton Hotel in Brooklyn, and asked me if I would show up, and I said, "I would be honored to show up." So about a week before the wedding the rabbi calls me and says, "You know Hillary is going to be there."
I said, "Oh, no. Did Malcolm know this?"
"Oh, yes. He knew it."
AUDIENCE: (Laughing.)
RUSH: Folks, the upper crust of business and politics -- because Malcolm is a very influential fellow. Everybody was there. The wedding was on three floors. You the a big ballroom where the bride was. The groom and buddies were upstairs on another floor, and then there was the second floor where there were parties going on. It was huge. So I had my rabbi friend doing a little reconnaissance making sure I was on a different floor from Hillary. Malcolm comes up to me and says, "Hillary wants her picture with you."
AUDIENCE: (Laughing and groans.)
RUSH: I'm looking over my shoulder, and the rabbi is going (gestures.) So I said, "Malcolm? I don't believe you, Malcolm. It's you who wants the picture! You want that picture so you can score big tonight at your daughter's wedding."
"Alright, but would you do it for me?"
"I'll be glad to do it for you."
Bam! He runs off to get Mrs. Clinton. She comes back. I put my arm around her. he takes the picture. I tried making small talk. She never looked at me. She smiled. I'd say, "Nice to be with you, Mrs. Clinton."
"Thank you."
She never looked at me. She's looking down. I'm amazed these pictures, because there were flash bulbs all over, have not showed up -- these pictures have not shown up -- in the gossip pages in New York. I can't believe the picture didn't show up in her book, and they may still yet, during the campaign. So I had to leave. After this, I had to go -- and I'm on the elevator and the door's just about to close and she walks in!
AUDIENCE: (Laughing.)
RUSH: The elevator door closes. I didn't have my security guy with me. I'm at a wedding. What could possibly go wrong at a wedding?
AUDIENCE: (Laughing.)
RUSH: My security guy, Josef Stalin right here, by the way.
AUDIENCE: (Applause.)
RUSH: The elevator door closes, and she hits the stop button.
AUDIENCE: (Wooooo!)
RUSH: And she looks at me and she says, "I can't believe I had a chance to run in to you tonight. Do you know how long it's been since I felt like a real woman? You had your arm around me."
AUDIENCE: (Laughing.)
RUSH: I didn't want to say so, but I thought, "Yeah, I know how long it's been."
AUDIENCE: (Laughing.)
RUSH: She said, "Would you make me feel like a real woman, Rush?"
AUDIENCE: (Laughing.)
RUSH: Keep in mind, the elevator is stopped, here! She's talking about the elevator. So I said, "I'd be happy to. It'd be an honor." So I started to take off my clothes.
AUDIENCE: (Laughing.)
RUSH: I stopped at the underwear. I didn't take the underwear off. My clothes were just on the floor of the elevator. I said, "You really want to do this? You want me to make you feel like a woman."
(Breathily) "Oh, yes!"
"Well, fold them!"
AUDIENCE: (Uproarious laughter.)
RUSH: The liberal lady is laughing! Alriiiiiiight!
AUDIENCE: (Applause.)
RUSH: (Laughing.) I mentioned earlier that there's a reason that I'm sort of scatter braining this presentation on purpose. We've had some controversy ever since this Imus business with, supposed, controversial comments on the radio and it's gotten a lot of people again: afraid and frightened and afraid to say things, and I am not. And I have always had a way of doing my program that relies on one fundamental thing. That is: I respect and count on -- I take for granted -- the intelligence of all of you who listen. I do not think that you're an idiot, and I don't think I have to walk you through things.
AUDIENCE: (Applause.)
RUSH: I believe that if I say something on Monday, and something happens on Tuesday, and I do a parody on Wednesday that you will understand the parody because you knew what happened on Monday and you remember it. I think, you're engaged. I think you're intelligent. I think you listen actively, not passively. The way I do humor, I call it "illustrating absurdity by being absurd," and look, it's my personality. But it's also programming technique. Frankly, folks any conservative on the radio and start spouting conservatism. Mine is better than most, but it's not that unique in the sense that -- I mean, it's not just the sole reason that I happen to have the largest radio talk show audience in the country. It's because it's a performance. It is something I take very seriously -- and all these things I told you: I respect your intelligence. I have a connection with you. I feel like we're all family, and I always think you're in on the joke. The people that aren't in the joke are new listeners trying to get up to speed, and liberals who I know, when they hear some of these things, they'll pull their hair out because they don't want to laugh. They don't see things that are funny.
They want to be upset. They want to be upset. They want to be offended, because then they can say, "I'm offended! You can't say that," and we get political correctness and Speech-Thought Police. I guess one of the first things that I did -- this is back in Sacramento, California. I moved there in 1984. No guests. I'm the expert. I don't want to waste time asking guests questions. I hate having guests! I know more than the guests are going to say; I don't care who the guests are.
AUDIENCE: (Laughing.)
RUSH: I feel like I'm sinking to a new level asking somebody something I already know. Plus, I can't get any better guests than anybody else can. So let everybody else fight over them! I want to be the reason people listen to the radio, not this endless parade of guests who don't care. So I have to fill three hours -- and you can't rely on phone calls. How many have heard, "Yeah, man, I love the X radio show. Have you ever heard of the callers on that show?" If they're saying that, they're generally thinking that the callers are whacky. So one day, there's this news story out of Ohio. A minister, a preacher in Ohio, on the AP Wire said that he wanted the TV show Mr. Ed, which was running in syndication, banned because the theme song to Mr. Ed contained a satanic message.
AUDIENCE: (Laughing.)
RUSH: Now, this was reported and it got covered. I don't know why, but there were people that were taking this seriously. When I saw it, my first question was: "How the hell does this guy know, and how did he get a machine to play the theme song backwards and what is the satanic message?"
He said, "Actually when you play it backwards, 'A Horse is a Horse, of Course of Course,'" if you remember the song, "that backwards sounds like 'S-s-s-satan."
AUDIENCE: (Laughing.)
RUSH: I'm not kidding! I looked at this and I said, "I can get five days out of this."
AUDIENCE: (Laughing.)
RUSH: Most people would just report it and then start pounding them. "We need to quiet these preachers down! Why this is crazy," and that would be it. But this was too juicy!
AUDIENCE: (Laughing.)
RUSH: So, at the time I had the "Peace Update." I was playing Slim Whitman's "Una Paloma Blanca."
AUDIENCE: (Laughing.)
RUSH: One white dove. I called it "Una Paloma Baco" during the Olympics where the doves got fried in the official flame.
AUDIENCE: (Laughing.)
RUSH: It happened! It happened right there on NBC. Bryant Gumbel couldn't believe it.
AUDIENCE: (Laughing.)
RUSH: One thing you can't rehearse is the doves not missing the flame.
AUDIENCE: (Laughing.)
RUSH: So I went to Don Wright. Don Wright was production director. We went into our studio, the production studio, and I said, "I want to find a satanic message in 'Una Paloma Blanca' and I want to play it backwards." So the first thing we did is, we had to put it on tape, because there's not a turntable that plays records backwards. Everything was records then. There's no turntable to play the records backwards. We just didn't have it. So we put it on tape and we reversed the tape. Then there's a device called a harmonizer, and harmonizer, you speak normally into it and you can make it affect your voice any way you want. In this case, we created a Satan voice, a devil voice.
AUDIENCE: (Laughing.)
RUSH: And I told Don what I wanted him to say, and he put it together, and the next day -- which would be Tuesday -- I can't wait to get on the air. I'm going to do this, and I'm going to be invited on Johnny Carson. People are going to say, "This is one of the most brilliantly conceived, flawlessly executed parodies to make a point." Everything I do makes a point. This Ohio minister was a lunatic, and I was trying to illustrate that. Rather than just say, "He's a lunatic," I wanted to illustrate it, because you can persuade more easily and profoundly rather than getting into people's faces and wagging your finger at them. So we go in. The show starts at 9:00 a.m. Pacific Time. I said, "Ladies and gentlemen, I'm arriving here today with a heavy heart. I read a news story yesterday, and I owe what I'm about to do here today, to this great work done by this minister in Ohio who found a satanic message in the Mr. Ed theme. I would never have thought to consult the music I have been playing on this radio station, to see if it contained satanic messages. I have God in my heart. I decided to check -- and ladies and gentlemen, I have indeed found a satanic message in one of the songs I've been playing: Slim Whitman 'Una Paloma Blanca.' Now, I am not going to play this song for you because I feel as though I should resign today over this. I have been playing this song for two months. I have showered you with satanic messages. If it can happen to somebody like me, who knows who else it can happen to. I can't in good conscience continue with this program. I now have to check every bit of music I'm playing. I thought I was perfectly insulated from Satan, but apparently I'm not, and I'm now beginning to wonder if the words out of my mouth are not placed there by Satan and I'm poisoning you that way as well."
AUDIENCE: (Laughing.)
RUSH: I'm hitting the cough button and laughing my ass off as I'm going through this.
AUDIENCE: (Laughing.)
RUSH: Because I know that some people are going to believe it, but I figure most of the audience gets the wink. This is so obvious, is it not? So I went to the phones.
"You've got to play it. You've got to!"
"No, ma'am."
AUDIENCE: (Laughing.)
RUSH: It went on for two hours, resisting the temptation to play it. The general manager at the 11:00 newsbreak at the top of the hour -- general manager Jim Rich -- says, "How long are you going to go with this?"
AUDIENCE: (Laughing.)
RUSH: I said, "Well, I figure I've got about a week." (Laughing)
He said, "I have preachers on the phone."
AUDIENCE: (Laughing.)
RUSH: I kid you not! "I have preachers on the phone, and we could have problems.
AUDIENCE: (Laughing.)
RUSH: "You've admitted here you're playing Satan messages."
I said: "Rick, come on! You know what this is."
"Well, can you just wrap it up?"
I said, "Okay."
So in the next hour I said, "Ladies and gentlemen I have been forced under duress -- and I think this may even be deed of Satan himself."
AUDIENCE: (Laughing.)
RUSH: "I have been forced under duress to play this song backwards so you can hear the satanic message. I, in no way, want to do this. But I'm being forced and I'm just an employee here. But I want you to know that when you hear it, resist it!"
AUDIENCE: (Laughing.)
RUSH: I know the whole town is tuned in by now.
AUDIENCE: (Laughing.)
RUSH: So we start the song, and you know, "Una Paloma Blanca" by itself is a hilariously funny song. It's a grown man yodeling! When you play this song backwards, even without the satanic message in it, it's hilarious. But here's what I had the production director record. It's two minutes and 50 minutes long, and this message is in it three times.
(Satan Impression) "Beelzebub!"
AUDIENCE: (Laughing.)
RUSH (Satan Impression): "Yes, it's me himself: the old Devil!"
AUDIENCE: (Laughing.)
RUSH (Satan Impression): "Lurking right here in the Slim Whitman record grooves!"
AUDIENCE: (Laughing.)
RUSH: I'm laughing myself silly while the song is playing! (Satan Voice) "I don't know where you managed to find a turntable that plays backwards like this, but --
AUDIENCE: (Laughing.)
RUSH (Satan Voice) "Me and my disciples are very interested in you. Well, gotta be headin' on down the line -- way down. Be seein' ya." Then the song comes back up and throughout the remainder of the song it airs two more times.
AUDIENCE: (Laughing.)
RUSH: The phones are going crazy. I figure by now, I'm going to be perceived as one of the greats -- and my friends, I kid you not -- and this taught me a lesson. The first call: "Oh, my God! Mr. Limbaugh! I have every Slim Whitman record! Do you think there are more satanic messages?"
AUDIENCE: (Laughing.)
RUSH: What can I do? I said, "Madam, take no chances. Burn them."
AUDIENCE: (Laughing.)
RUSH: All this from an Ohio minister saying there's a satanic message in the Mr. Ed theme! Anyway, I kept getting calls like that -- and there were a couple of Doubting Thomas calls, that I prayed for. Then I got a real belligerent denier. (Denier Impression) "You know, I've been listening to this. This is absolutely insulting! I can't believe the stupidity of people in your audience that believe this! I have that record!"
AUDIENCE: (Laughing.)
RUSH: (Denier Impression) "Now, my turntable don't play it backwards. But I have put the needle on the end of the record and I'm spinning it backwards, and there is no message there!"
AUDIENCE: (Laughing.)
RUSH: I said, "Sir, what year did you buy your turntable?"
AUDIENCE: (Laughing.)
RUSH: (Denier Impression) "I don't know, in the last couple or three years."
"If you bought this turntable prior to 1983, it does not have disgronification circuitry."
AUDIENCE: (Laughing.)
RUSH: (Denier Impression) "Now, you mean if I go out and buy a new turntable maybe it has that I could hear the messages?"
"Yes." In fact, I recommend Circuit City. "Go there and ask them for a turntable with a disgronificator in it."
Now the word "disgronificator," that happened when I was in Kansas City, in 1978 or '79. I was working for the Kansas City Royals. I was making $14,000 a year, driving this junk heap of a car. It broke down, and I did not have the money to get a new car. I took it to this place recommended to me. The guy had a plastic Jesus on the cash register, so I made the presumption of honesty. He said, "You need a new disgronificator."
AUDIENCE: (Laughing.)
RUSH: "I've never heard of it. How much is it?"
"Eight hundred bucks."
That was huge! I said, "Go ahead and put it in." I don't know what was ever wrong with the car, but life is show prep. That's where I got the disgronificator. Now the whole point of this, the Slim Whitman story, is I love parody and I love satire and I love making people laugh -- while making a point. I like being creative, which takes me to the Barack Obama, "Magic Negro" song.
AUDIENCE: (Wild cheers and applause.)
RUSH: I want to explain this, because there's a new phenomenon that has erupted in the last four or five years. Paul might know the exact year. But George Soros and Clinton, Inc. have funded a couple of so-called watchdog websites. They listen to programs like mine, and they take the offensive things -- to them -- out of context and that's how media people hear what's on my program. They don't listen to me. But you do, and this is going to be a challenge in the future because the way things people like me or Paul say, are heard by people who are not listening. I'm telling you, if you hear about something that happened on my show, and you weren't listening, and you're not going to hear it in context and you're not going to understand it and you're going to blow a gasket. Now, the roots of "Barack, the 'Magic Negro,'" actually start with Joe Biden.
Now everybody in this story is a Democrat, a liberal Democrat. Joe Biden -- who got away with this. The Drive-By Media just sloughed it off. "Oh, you know, he sometimes gets these pebbles in his mouth and you can't understand him." They excuse it. And he said, you might remember this, he said that of Barack Obama, when he was asked, it's great to have a "clean and articulate" African-American on our side running for president. Now, folks, when Joe Biden says of Barack Obama, he's somebody "clean and articulate," that's racism, because Al Sharpton has run for president and he bathes every day. Really, you stop and think about this. So in the New York Post, a couple of weeks after this, the Obama campaign still percolating -- and a couple of weeks after this there's a story in the New York Post -- which I talked about and laughed at and had a lot of fun with -- Al Sharpton was jealous and he was not throwing his support behind Obama, and the Post said he's jealous about it because they're calling Obama "clean and articulate," and they're talking about he can be this Great Hope. "Finally, a black candidate that can win," and so forth -- and Sharpton is admitting to the people in the press that this is making him mad and he's a little jealous.
So I make note of it. I talk about when it happened. Then in the LA Times there comes a story: "Is Obama Black Enough?" I'm looking at that. I said, "I thought these liberals had big hearts and compassion, and didn't see people according to the color of their skin." I read the piece. This is a columnist saying, no, he's not black enough, because he's not "down for the struggle," meaning he has no roots to the Civil Rights movement in this country because he was born in Hawaii and his mother was white, and Sharpton was also talking about that. He was raising questions about is Obama down for the struggle? and of course the (William F. Buckley impression), "Uh, Rev'rend Jack'snnn."
AUDIENCE: (Laughter and applause.)
RUSH: But you have to understand: these people are all human beings. Jesse Jackson has owned the race business for a long time; Sharpton is making inroads, and now this Obama guy is said to be the Second Coming? How are they going to feel? Of course they're not going to react to it in a positive way. Then there was another piece that came: is Obama black enough. I read the story and I'm incredulous about it, and I point out to my audience -- now this whole process is taking about three weeks. So I'm pointing out to the audience, "You know, folks, isn't it amazing to watch these people? They point to all of us and say we're the racists and sexists and bigots and homophobes.
"But look at this. They're judging this guy on the color of his skin, and, 'Is it dark enough? Is he black enough? Is he down for the struggle.' This is not about him! It's about victim identity politics, and they're the ones that claim they don't do this!" If a conservative -- if I -- had described Barack Obama saying, "That guy doesn't sound black," you know what would have happened to me? That's what Biden said. He's "articulate" and he's "clean."
AUDIENCE: (Laughing.)
RUSH: I don't want to think about it. Now, folks, let me be honest with you about who we are. As conservatives, what do we want? We want the greatest country that we can get, and we know for that to happen we need achieved, confident individuals who are free to use whatever ambition and excellence they wish to pursue. Now, we don't care what the color of their skin is, and we don't care what their gender is. We want quality people, and we believe --
AUDIENCE: (Laughing.)
RUSH: I said all this on the radio as well. We want people to be the best they can be! We don't want people to be in misery. We don't want people telling them they can't do something. We don't want people being told, "You don't have what it takes," or, "You can't do that because you're not X, Y, Z." We want people to think that they can be as great as they want to be! We are inspirational. We are motivational, and we try to live our lives optimistically, but we don't look out and see all of these different skin colors and say, "On the basis of that you can't do this or that." They're the ones that do it and this story is just rife with evidence of it -- and then the second column came on this, is Obama black enough? Then the LA Times, a black columnist, David Ehrenstein, writes this piece. I never heard of the term "Magic Negro," but he called Barack the "magic negro." Apparently its roots go back to Brown v. Board of Education. What it means, what the columnist said -- and he's not a Obama supporter. You have to understand: Barack Obama is not down for the struggle. Barack is not getting the black vote. Barack's strength is coming from white liberals and these guys don't like it, because they're looking at the white liberals and saying, "They don't know enough about Barack! He's only been around for two years. What could they possibly be going so gaga over? Why are they sending Barack so much money?" These people want Hillary. They don't want Barack Obama, which in and of itself is somewhat indicative of who and what they really are. But, nevertheless, he writes this piece. Obama is the "magic negro" simply because all these white liberals with guilt, are able to salve their guilt by saying they're for Obama.
It's like saying, "I believe in global warming. I'm going to change light bulbs." You get to make you feel better. That's what liberalism is all about, because they hate each other and themselves and they just want to feel good -- and you say things that are true that they don't want to hear, and make them even more miserable. They have this guilt to assuage. That's the role Obama played, and this guy called him the "magic negro." So, what have I got here?
AUDIENCE: (Laughing.)
RUSH: I've got Joe Biden. I've got Al Sharpton and Reverend Jackson. I have these three pieces. The UK Times did a piece on it. Is Obama black enough? The UK Times! They don't even have any people over there that vote here!
AUDIENCE: (Laughing.)
RUSH: So, I hear this "Magic negro." So here comes the parody. Now, I assume -- and maybe I'm wrong to do this, but I assume -- by the time the parody hits, you know all that preceded it because you listen every day -- and remember I respect your intelligence. I trust your ability to get this stuff. I'm talking to you now just the way I talk to you on the radio. Even though I don't see you on the radio, I see you. At times you're a massive group. Other times you're one individual. But I talk to you -- not over you, not under you, not at you. I assume that by the time...
AUDIENCE: (Applause.)
RUSH: I assume that by the time we get to the parody, I'm not going to have to spend this much time explaining it, because if I have to spend this much time explaining it, it isn't going to be funny! Also, good comedy requires one thing to be funny, and that's an element of truth. Well, that parody is rife with truth! Everything in it is the truth! Now, I can understand when little old David Brock's Media Matters for America, he'll see it and say, "Oh, boy! Have we got an opportunity here!" So they'll take the song, and they make a video out of it that I didn't even make. They put it on YouTube and then they alerted the Drive-By Media. The Drive-By Media, that's their primary source for what people like me say. They do not listen. They read it. It's like Imus. Imus said what he said about the Rutgers women's basketball team at 6:14 on a Monday morning. It wasn't until Wednesday morning that all hell broke lose. The people listened to Imus didn't care. There aren't that many of them anyway, but...
AUDIENCE: (Laughing.)
RUSH: They didn't care. His audience was not offended by it. His audience couldn't care less. That's what Imus does! But these outside groups got hold of it, plastered it everywhere. The Rutgers women didn't hear it. Nobody heard it! I'll tell you one thing. I got no brief for Imus, but Don Imus has never held back one black kid in this country. Quite the opposite, he's probably helped a bunch. He hasn't held black kids in this country nearly as much as our public education system is holding them back.
AUDIENCE: (Wild applause.)
RUSH: But he had to go!
AUDIENCE: (Applause.)
RUSH: He had to go because he said something offensive to somebody. What Imus should have said was, "It's a joke! Screw you. Go listen to it on urban radio. Leave me alone." Instead, where does he traipse off to? The Reverend Sharpton's radio show, which is on 12 stations.
AUDIENCE: (Laughing.)
RUSH: He bent over, grabbed the ankles.
AUDIENCE: (Laughing.)
RUSH: It didn't work. Back to the "magic negro" thing. What I expect when I do these things is that because -- and I'm not afraid to do them. Everything in it is true! It was funny, and it made a point, and the point is that the libs are exactly who they say we are and we're not! What bothers me, is when people who I think are listening every day don't listen to it. I had the same thing Imus did. I played this thing for a month and a half, and nothing happened. Nobody complained. Nobody said a word -- not that I heard about, and I usually do. Then the Imus thing happens, and then the newspaper columnists started writing about it. They heard about it on YouTube. They heard about it on Media Matters for America. Last Friday, 15 of my radio stations called our offices, the general managers. They were in a panic! They had some employees and they had some listeners, "You know, Rush, we have a real problem here."
I said, "What? This is two months old!"
It was an organized campaign. This wasn't any spontaneous reaction of being wildly offensive -- and this was the thing I was speaking about earlier that we, in this business, now face. My radio show is on 603 or 604 stations. You don't need a secret decoder ring. You don't need a password.
AUDIENCE: (Laughing.)
RUSH: Just turn it on. If you're driving through my home state of Missouri you can hear it at the same time on no fewer than five radio stations -- and I'll be damned if I'm going to sit around and be intimidated and silenced by people who aren't even listening to it!
AUDIENCE: (Cheers and applause)
RUSH: Who are trying...
AUDIENCE: (Cheers and applause)
RUSH: I'm not going to.
AUDIENCE: (Cheers and applause)
RUSH: Thank you. I want to bait these people because I want to call them out! I want to make them look like the censors and the knuckleheads and the close-minded bigots that they are, because I can back up everything I do with truth, humor -- no racism, no bigotry, none of this stuff!
AUDIENCE: (Applause)
RUSH: Do you think...? We're going to have our 19th anniversary on August 1st. Do you think a program of hate and racism and all these things that are said about, not just me but other conservatives, could survive? This is not a country of hate and racism, but the left wants you to think that all of conservatism is. Just like they denigrate conservative Christians in the South as a bunch of hayseed hicks and so forth, as anti-feminist, anti-gay, all these other things. Do you think a show featuring all that stuff can be this big for this long and have this many advertisers? It's not possible! So everything they say is a lie. People say, "How do you deal with all the criticism?"
I say, "It's easy. I know the truth. I have sort of like a suit of armor. When people say things about me that aren't true? Pfew! They bounce off."
AUDIENCE: (Laughter.)
RUSH: Well, why should I give other people the power to make me worry about myself when they're lying about me?
AUDIENCE: (Applause)
RUSH: Some people say -- and this was a learning experience for me in 1988 when I went to New York, because nobody prepared me for this. Throughout my whole life, not even in Sacramento during the Slim Whitman episode, did anybody think I was a "hater" or that I was "anti-" anything other than liberalism which is an ideology. All of a sudden, I get to New York. We started on 56 stations and it really grew rapidly. All of a sudden, I start seeing these stories: "Racist! Bigot!" You know the stereotypes and the clichés -- and nobody that's ever known me has ever thought that about me. I had some people that don't like me, we all do, but nobody... I didn't know what to do about it. I went to some people and said, "What should I do?" I got multiple types of advice. "Well, you can't let this stand! Somebody says something like this about you, and you have to fight back." Well, that sounds right. The problem is, the people saying it were small fries and I was elevating them to positions they wouldn't have achieved on their own by calling their names out. So that wasn't working. Plus, when you get a critic and they aim at you and you reply to it, the critic is just going to say, "Ahaaaa! We hit a soft spot!" and they just keep boring in, because they think you're getting defensive. Other people say, "You have to ignore it. You just have to ignore it. You have to learn to take it as a measure of success."
"Oh, really? That's psychologically healthy."
AUDIENCE: (Laughing.)
RUSH: Stop and think about it. I get a call from my mother every night. She'd say, "How is the day is going. I just want to check it."
I'd say, "Mother, this is another profoundly successful day. At least a third of the people who heard me, hate my guts."
AUDIENCE: (Laughing.)
RUSH: "No, son, they don't. They love you!"
But I'll tell you what, it was a psychological challenge to learn to have to take -- as a sign of success -- the fact that there's a certain degree of professed hatred, and most of it is in the Drive-By Media -- and they're still the majority, even though they're shrinking and their monopoly is over. I've had to accept that as a badge, as a sign that it's working because we are in a war, folks. We are in a war for the future of the country, the ideas that are going to shape the future, not just in Iraq. I'm talking about here. That's a whole other thing. But one of the first times I went to the restaurant 21 was when this all opened up for me. My friend that took me, said that the restroom attendant was a huge fan and he had my book -- I'd had one book published by then -- and he wanted me to sign it. So we got to the restaurant, and I made a beeline for the place after we had the first couple of drinks. I walked in there, and this black preacher -- "the Rev," that was his nickname. He had his church up in Westchester County, but he liked this job because of the people he got to meet. The biggest smile broke out on his face when I walked in.
He said, "Mr. Limbaugh, this is the second biggest day in my life! The first one was when I met Mr. Reagan -- and you know, Mr. Limbaugh, he just laughed at 'em!"
I hadn't said a word, and I said, "Well, here's a man of God-d telling me what Reagan said to him. It's divine intervention! I've just been told how to deal with them," and that's what I do, and if they react to it, so much the better. But I'm serious, folks, there's too much that's invested in my program and all the people that are responsible for it and all the radio stations -- all of you -- my partners. I'm not going to sit around and be intimidated into shutting up because a bunch of mamby pambys can't handle the truth and don't want to hear it.
AUDIENCE: (Laughing.)
RUSH: So how does this all tie together? Well, it ties together: when you watch the news, understand you're watching packaged, produced sound bites to advance an agenda. People that produce news are no different than people who produce cereal. They package it; they market it; they put it on the shelves and they hope you buy it. The idea that there's some pretext of objectivity and that everybody's just trying to tell us what happened? We all know that that's not true, and yet... It's like polling. I mentioned it earlier. Look how seductive it is to be lulled into accepting things that -- they may be true, but what do they mean? What does it matter that 56% of the American people think that global warming might be a problem? What does it matter? I'll tell you why it matters, because you all hear it is: "Ooh! They must be right. The news is doing a poll on it. They must be right." Fifty-six percent of the American people think X? "They must be right!" When you're pummeled with this -- and you know, polls have become news stories now. Polls are just the way to get the editorial agenda on the front page or as the lead item of a broadcast, as a means of advancing an agenda -- and creating news, by the way!
"FOX NEWS ALERT!" or "BREAKING NEWS MSNBC: NEW POLL!"
Who cares? A poll is not news, and besides, how do we know that the people polled know the slightest thing about anything? We don't know it! We're just being told that, "Well, a consensus of the America people think so. It must be true," because we all have a tendency to think everybody is smarter than we are, or somebody knows more than we do or somebody is happier than we are, or somebody has whatever that we don't have is. Four years of tumbling! For example, we've been told that the majority of the American people want us out of Iraq. Well, I happen to know that it isn't true. One reason I know it isn't true is because the way this bill that House and Senate sent to the president, had $24 billion of pork in it to buy the votes of enough Democrats to make it pass!
AUDIENCE: (Applause.)
RUSH: So if you have to spend $24 billion of pork to buy votes, where is the will of the people in that? And if the "will of the people" is overwhelmingly in support of getting out of Iraq, then why didn't they override the president's veto? There is no majority of the American people that wants to LOSE in Iraq. They may wish it weren't going on, and they may wish we could get out, but they do not want the US military to be unfunded, and they do not want the US military to lose.
AUDIENCE: (Wild applause.)
RUSH: So it's all...
AUDIENCE: (Cheering and applause.)
RUSH: You know, I want everybody to be as aware of this. I know that people who listen to me and Paul W. Smith and others that are on this, I don't mean to address you as though you're not aware of this. I just want people to have, as many people as possible to have, the confidence to reject the conventional wisdom that shows up in polls or that shows up in the news, because all it is, is an attempt to control you. It's nothing more than an attempt to control what you think, to effect the way you will speak about it. It's an attempt to influence what you will vote on and how you will do it. It's control! It's thought control, action control, a number of things that are all rolled into one. For example, on Iraq, the Democrat Party is actually saying, "We've lost Iraq." Dingy Harry Reid: "Iraq is lost." It's not lost! I had conversations on the radio on Wednesday. I had a guy call: "Rush, I listen to you all the time, but we can't stop these people over there from killing each other. They've been doing it for 1400 years. The US Military can't win." I do a slow boil when I hear, "The US military can't win."
"Sir, are you an American citizen?"
"Well, of course."
"Are you proud of your country?"
"Well, yeah."
"Then what the hell is this, 'America can't win'? Thank God we don't have a majority like you."
"Well, Rush, you know this is a whole misconceived mission over there."
"Do you know why we're in Iraq, sir?"
"Yeah. We're over there because we wanted to get rid of Saddam, and we didn't realize there was going to be so much hell break loose."
"No. That's not why we're there. We got rid of Saddam, but the reason we're there is that al-Qaeda was in Iraq before 9/11."
"No, no, no! Cheney is lying about that!"
"Cheney is not lying about it! George Tenet even writes about it in his book that just came out. They were there. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was there! Nobody ever said, from the White House on down, that there was operational cooperation between Saddam and al-Qaeda. But, sir, you have to understand something: the United States is a great nation at serious risk in the world. We are so affluent and prosperous, we have a lot of Americans that can ignore it and pretend it don't happen. It's not affecting their lives."
We have three thousand Americans that died on 9/11? We have Democrats who say, "That's the new way of the world. We have to learn to accept this."
No, we don't.
Imagine that attitude after Pearl Harbor. We don't have to put up with this -- and there's one man who has stood tall against all this, regardless of whatever else you think about it, and that's George W. Bush, and he has...
AUDIENCE: (Cheers and applause.)
RUSH: I said, "Sir, the problem that I have with you is that you know everything I'm going to tell you. You've either forgotten it or you have chosen not to believe it, or people have talked you out of it. But you know everything that I'm going to tell you. We were hit on 9/11. We know who did it. They've taken credit for it and they've promised to do more. We have a President of the United States whose job it is to defend and protect the country and the Constitution. He doesn't have the ability of minority politicians to run around and change their minds every ten minutes or ten days, and he has to come up with policies and plans to do this, and he's got a vision. You just said, 'We can't stop these people from killing each other.' Sir, they're not all killing each other! Not every Arab and not every Muslim is killing each other. Now, they happen to be in Iraq. But the only reason they weren't is because Saddam was either raping or murdering them or torturing them, and keeping them in dungeons. He's gone, and now they're picking up hostilities. They're resuming hostilities.
"But Al-Qaeda is coming in, in greater numbers than they were in there before 9/11, and they're agitating all of this, and the President of the United States sent a message to the world, to Al-Qaeda, 'Wherever you are we're coming to get you.' So we're in Iraq, and we're not in Iraq for oil. We're not in Iraq for Halliburton. We were in Iraq to get rid of Saddam Hussein. Have you forgotten, sir, that he said he's got weapons of mass destruction? Have you forgotten that every intelligence agency in the world said that he had weapons of mass destruction? Have you forgotten that in 1998, Bill Clinton, Tom Daschle and Harry Reid were all warning us -- John Kerry too -- about weapons of mass destruction? Have you forgotten this, sir? What's the point of knowing something, sir, if you forget it? You've fallen prey to the talk that there were no weapons of destruction were ever there, or wherever it is. 'Bush lied. He cooked the intelligence.' Everything you believe is wrong, sir, and you're calling me telling me we can't win? God bless it, I hope you never get elected to anything, because it is outrageous."
Folks, this is happening because people do not know how to take in the media and not be affected by it. I'm going to tell you what I think about George W. Bush. What he's trying in Iraq -- do you hear the Democrats with a solution to terrorism? Oh, the UN!
AUDIENCE: (Laughing.)
RUSH: Well, did you hear in the Democrat debate the press conference when Brian Williams asked all these guys and Mrs. Clinton, "God forbid who was sitting here and two cities are nuked by Al-Qaeda. What do you do?" They all, except Hillary, took the Bush lied tack. "Well, the first thing we have to do is make sure our intelligence is right. Then we gotta get the whole community involved!" I'm watching this and I'm incredulous. The example -- and by the way, his example said "and without a doubt it's al-Qaeda." So screw this "intelligence" business. Hillary Clinton is the only one that said: retaliate. The rest of these people said -- and why? Because we're in the media that Bush lied; we cooked the intelligence, and they think that that's what you and everybody else is going to react to. So they think they'll get your vote if they can say things like that. George W. Bush can't afford to parlay what he wants to do into the public opinion. If he sees a poll that says 60% of the people want us out of Iraq, he can't -- because of leadership and responsibility in his oath of office -- take us out of Iraq. He can't engineer defeat! The Democrats want him to, but he can't.
The vision that he has: the cauldron of effervescent hatred over there is producing these future terrorists and so forth, and Bush has a vision -- and he believes, and he's a religious man -- that all human beings are created by God and that they all have certain fundamental elements and they, by the way, are embodied in our Declaration of Independence. "All men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, among them Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." Contained in there is this belief that we are all created with a natural yearning to be free. It's part of the human spirit! We don't want to be controlled. As babies we need to be. But as human beings, as adults, we want to make our own decisions. We want to choose our own path in life. Some people don't. They find comfort in being taken care of. But I'm talking about, now, in a general sense of the common existence of human beings. Now, if you've been oppressed under religious or radical political tyranny for generation after generation, and all of a sudden peace and freedom is thrust upon you, you might find it a little strange what to do. It might take some adjustment. But when the Soviet Union fell, there were liberals in this country were saying, "Freedom is not for everybody."
Really? Listen to that: "Freedom is not for everybody." They believe it! Bush is ridiculed about this. "Ach! Democracy? Middle East? Ha-ha-ha! Who is he kidding?" Anybody hearing any better ideas, other than their idea of losing? You've gotta start somewhere. If it can be done to create in that country, or somewhere in that raging caldron of hate, something that looks like economic opportunity and freedom for people who were oppressed, do you know what that's going to look like to the people in the region? It's going to be infectious! I don't know what's going to happen, but I wouldn't be surprised -- and we'll not know because the historians are going to write the history I'm talking about are not even born yet. But the historians who write the history of this movement and this presidency and this aspect of this presidency, not all of it, in the next 50 to 75 years, I think Bush has a chance to be ranked in the top five presidents who had momentous ideas for America's future and existence in the world.
AUDIENCE: (Applause.)
RUSH: And everybody...
AUDIENCE: (Laughing.)
RUSH: It's just a shame. I know the man somewhat. It's just a shame, folks, he can't articulate it on TV the way he can if you're with him in private. This is a mystery to everybody that knows him. It's just an absolute shame. But still he's sticking to it, and the other people to me -- even in the Republican Party. There are some Republicans that have linguini for spines, too, and they just look so small comparatively. You can't take 9/11 out of the equation. You just can't say that we can go back to 9/10. We just had the Saudis claim 172 terrorists were caught before they blew up the oil fields in Saudi Arabia or some of them, and of course we have to ask the right questions these days when we hear that. "Well, were they tortured?"
AUDIENCE: (Laughing.)
RUSH: "Are they going to be granted lawyers?"
AUDIENCE: (Laughing.)
RUSH: "Are they going to be given new prayer rugs and Korans while in prison? Are they going to be allowed to face Mecca five times a day?" That's what we have to do down at Club Gitmo. By the way, I see the Club GItmo shirts here in the front row.
AUDIENCE: (Applause.)
RUSH: What time is it? Wow, I've gone 30 minutes over!
AUDIENCE: (Cheering and applause.)
RUSH: So the people that are opposing Bush and trying to pull us out of there, it's all through the prism of electoral politics. They're reacting to these imaginary polls that American people want out. As I say, they may want out, but I'll be damned if I believe that the country wants to lose and wants the military de-funded and to be dragged out of there in humiliation -- and that's what the defeat would be. I'm going to tell you a little dirty secret. I said this on the radio earlier this week. It was quite provocative and a lot of people disagreed with me, until the Democrats admitted it three days later. I say this because it's true: "I know these people like every square inch of my glorious but shrinking naked body."
AUDIENCE: (Laughing.)
RUSH: I know who they are. I know what they're going to do. I've studied them -- and the dirty little secret is this: If they win the White House in 2008, and if we're still in Iraq -- which we will be. Bush is not going to pull out of there in the next 18 months. If that happens, the Democrats are not going to pull us out. They do dare not. They have boxed themselves into a corner. They have sewn the seeds of their eventual demise a'la George McGovern in 1972. I don't know when it's going to happen. It may not happen in '08. It may happen 2012. Even David Broder, "dean of the Washington commentariate," and Ted Koppel have written pieces warning them in the last two weeks that they're in huge trouble, because they would love to force Bush to have defeat hung around his neck, but they're not going to do that. They're not going to pull these troops out of there, if they're elected president. They're not going to do it! That would equal defeat. People say, "Well, what about their anti-war supporters, their base of their voters? There'd be riots in the streets!"
Yeah, there will be. Because they've given themselves a real problem. See, the problem the Democrats have is, if you stop and think of this, they have given themselves no opportunity to participate in victory. If we have a victory, can anybody run around and say they had anything to do with it? They've been advocating defeat! They own the deed on defeat. They have been agitating for it. They want us to lose. Dingy Harry Reid is out there saying we already have. I think that you'll never see -- It's the media bubble again. You don't see outraged Americans like you and I on the news at night reacting to this, but they're out there. The thing that concerns me is the Republicans who are a bunch of wusses! If the Republicans...
AUDIENCE: (Applause.)
RUSH: Well...
AUDIENCE: (Cheering.)
RUSH: If the Republicans weren't engaged, if they were on the playing field, the minute Harry Reid says, "We lost," they would be out there asking every Democrat to agree with Harry Reid or denounce them. They don't do it! So it's allowed to escape into the ether with the Drive-By Media saying, "You know what he's talking about. He's trying to say we can't win a civil war."
No, that's not what he said! He said, "We've lost." So they circle the wagons for each other and cover their rear ends. The Republicans are nowhere on the field. Tonight it's a big Republican debate. I bet that audience wishes it were here!
AUDIENCE: (Applause.)
RUSH: Again, I was watching on the airplane flying out here this morning -- PMSNBC covered the debate, going wall to wall to get their countdown clock and all this.
AUDIENCE: (Laughing.)
RUSH: Really. I guess we got wheels up at 10:35. I turned in a little after 11:00. "Countdown: eight hours and 58 minutes until the Republican debate!" Counting down a debate like it's a space launch!
AUDIENCE: (Laughing.)
RUSH: It's not even a debate! It's a press conference. But you know what their theme was? Well -- and they had all their Drive-By "experts." They had experts from Newsweek. They had their experts from the Washington Post. They had experts from everywhere, and all these experts said: "Well, you know there are too many Republicans on the stage tonight. Nobody is really going to stand out. The only really important thing to watch is to see how many of them bash Bush," and I, of course, am not watching the debate. I'm here with you.
AUDIENCE: (Laughing.)
LADY AUDIENCE MEMBER: Thank you!
RUSH: But if I find out tomorrow that any of these Republicans wasted a syllable bashing George W. Bush, I'm going to be fit to be tied. He's not on the ballot. Let the Democrats bash Bush and waste their time. What in the world...? See, if our Republican candidates think they have to bash Bush in order to relate to the American people and the Republican voters, then they're woefully out of touch with their own voters for crying out loud -- and that's not good, folks.
AUDIENCE: (Wild applause.)
RUSH: It's not that Bush doesn't deserve to be bashed. That's not the point, because he does over certain things. But bash the Democrats! They're the opponents coming up in the '08 election, and Bush is not going to be on the ballot. But then they all said, these experts said, "Well..." See, they're all really disappointed that Senator McCain didn't keep bashing Bush, and he's no longer their favorite guy. The "Straight Talk Express" has now been something else. I forget what their new name is for it is. They've thrown him overboard. He was upset about this. He thought he owned them. The media was his base. So you get these guys up there and later after the debate.. I want to see what happens when I mention this name, just this little test: Fred Thompson.
AUDIENCE: (Wild cheers, applause and whistling.)
RUSH: I didn't see that picture. Your reaction doesn't surprise me. Fred Thompson is making a speech. This debate is at the Reagan Library. Fred Thompson is making a speech in California about Reaganism, and why we need to get back to it -- aou think that's not going to overshadow this Republican debate?
AUDIENCE: (Applasue.)
RUSH: It probably will. But your reaction is interesting. When I mention on the radio, the phones light up. People want to talk about Fred Thompson, and people ask me -- on the golf course or places like this, wherever I go, they ask me -- "Do you think Hillary is really going to be elected?"
"Well, yeah, with Republicans not willing to attack Democrats, afraid to attack Hillary, especially -- not even on the playing field trying to defend their own country in Iraq. Yeah!"
"What about the Republican nominee? Who do you think it's going to be?"
"I gotta be honest with you: there's not one that excites me. It's too soon! The primaries don't start until six months from now."
"You gotta get a preference, Rush!"
"Nope, I really don't."
It's sort of like the buffet at Denny's.
AUDIENCE: (Laughing.)
RUSH: Is there a buffet at Denny's?
AUDIENCE: (Laughing.)
MALE AUDIENCE MEMBER: No.
RUSH: There's not a buffet at Denny's? That's not good. See, I've just shown how out of touch I am.
AUDIENCE: (Laughing.)
RUSH: Well, it's like a buffet anywhere. You like some of it but you don't like all of it. The thing that concerns me about the Republican field is that each one is trying to define themselves as conservative -- and parts of them are, but they're not all conservative, and I am a conservative, and I don't want to get the water down to where conservative equals pro-choice.
AUDIENCE: (Applause.)
RUSH: Or conservative equals gun control or some such thing. But the fact that Fred Thompson, who hasn't even announced -- and is probably substantively not even that well known. I mean, he was a senator for a while and he's an actor -- which I don't discount, by the way. It's a television era of campaigning. He certainly knows how to use it. He's been in Top Gun or some of these movies. Young people have watched him. The greatest thing about Fred Thompson is (snickering) especially for me? If that guy is a lady's man (rubbing his hands together) I'm in Fat City!
AUDIENCE: (Laughing and applauding.)
RUSH: But he is. He's a lady's man, but people are rallying to Fred Thompson, and there has to be a reason for it. I think it may be partly due to him and his personality. He comes across authoritative. He comes across as confident and serious. He has a presence and a serious manner about himself - and you know, there's something to be said for not appearing to really want it so bad.
AUDIENCE: (Laughing.)
RUSH: Well, no, really. It's not that he's trying to be drafted for it, but he comes off as an adult. I think it also has to do with the fact that even though these Republican nominees -- Rudy Giuliani is a prince of a guy. He's a nice guy, unless you happened to be a criminal when he was US Attorney.
AUDIENCE: (Laughing.)
RUSH: McCain?
AUDIENCE: (Groaning, a smattering of boos.)
RUSH: Well, he's not a conservative, folks. Let's leave it at that.
AUDIENCE: (Applause.)
RUSH: He's got some conservative things, but -- and by the way, I do parodies on Republicans. I make fun of McCain all the time. I do a great McCain voice all the times. Sometimes it works. If it doesn't, I use my impersonator's voice, Paul Shanklin. He came at this song "Bomb Iran"?
AUDIENCE: (Cheers and Applause)
RUSH: Oh-ho-ho! He was, I guess, in South Carolina somewhere, and the press or somebody said, "What do you think we ought to do about Iran?" He said, (McCain impression) "Bomb 'em, sailor! Just bomb 'em, you hear me? Bomb 'em!" and I said, "Well, bomb Iran?" So we put together the song and we ran it, and of course nobody cares about that. We're making fun of Republicans. Nobody thinks that's mean. Nobody thinks that's something untoward. But we take our shots at our side. We take shots at Bush sometimes with parodies, but the thing with Fred Thompson has to be the dissatisfaction with all these other people. Giuliani is okay. I've not met Mitt Romney but a couple of times. I think it's... (sigh) I don't know if you know this or not, but he's Mormon.
AUDIENCE: (Smattering of laughter.)
RUSH: Which, frankly, in the big scheme of things doesn't bother me. I keep getting the news stories. "Yeah, yeah, how many Mormons had wives 50 years ago!" Well he hasn't! He's the only guy in the race who has never been divorced.
AUDIENCE: (Laughing.)
RUSH: Giuliani's has had three wives. McCain's had two.
AUDIENCE: (Laughter and applause.)
RUSH: Fred Thompson's had ten or twelve -- and the Drive-Bys are trying to destroy Mitt Romney because he's a Mormon! There's a movie. Robert Novak is writing about a movie that's coming out soon that details, some 140 years ago. I don't remember all the details. I just scanned this today. One hundred and forty years ago some Mormon atrocity took place, and, "Will it affect Romney's campaign?" Was he alive 140 years ago?
AUDIENCE: (Laughing.)
RUSH: Has anybody done a story on Kennedy on Chappaquiddick, whether it will affect his campaign?
AUDIENCE: (Applause.)
RUSH: Democrats out there say: "Well, we won the House because of the will of the people. We want out of Iraq! Democrats, we won the Senate because the America people want us out of Iraq." They won the House because of two words "Mark Foley," and they won the Senate because of one word: "Macaca." They did not run on an agenda. They purposely held the agenda back. They ran on hatred for Bush. They didn't even run on getting out of Iraq. They are claiming it as a mandate. Now they've won, they're all powerful can't hide their agenda, and I hope they keep it up. I hope the Sheryl Crows and the rest of these people keep doing what they are doing. We need to have as many American people as possible hear what these people really believe, and hear what they really think -- and they'll hear it. They really will. But the media, folks, is not about informing you. It's about moving you. It's about influencing you, mobilizing you -- and you say, "Well, Rush, is that what you're trying to do?"
Yes, but I'll tell you.
AUDIENCE: (Cheers and applause.)
RUSH: Did I walk out of here tonight pretending to be objective?
AUDIENCE: (Laughing.)
RUSH: Did I walk out here trying to be anything other than a conservative? Of course, I'm trying to persuade you I'm right, but I'm not lying to you, andd I am not making things up about what the other side said.
AUDIENCE: (Applause.)
RUSH: I make a mistake now and then, but I don't purposely get things wrong on purpose to further an agenda. Speaking of Ted Kennedy, I have a funny story.
AUDIENCE: (Laughing.)
RUSH: You've all heard of the Council on Foreign Relations. It's a David Rockefeller group that many people think it's the seat of the future one world government to take over the world. So conservatives put together their counter group, called the Council for National Policy, and in the early '90s -- and I've been doing my show two or three years -- I was asked by the organizers to come emcee their annual big dinner at the Ritz Carlton at Pentagon City in Washington. So this was a high honor. The Council on National Policy, I thought, was made up of really brilliant intellectuals. It is, but I didn't know the entire makeup. So I told the following story at the beginning of the evening. Remember, I'm just the emcee. I'm setting it up, and as the emcee you have to start out with funny stories. This is 1990 or '91. It was only five or six years prior to the date that Senator Ted Kennedy was on vacation in the south of France, and he was accompanied by a very scantily clad, nubile young woman and they were in a speed boat or some kind of boat, and there were helicopters of paparazzi that followed them out and were taking pictures, and the New York Daily News published the pictures. The first picture shows the scantily clad, bikini clad woman diving off the side of the boat. The second picture showed Senator Kennedy holding his nose and jumping in after her -- which, I said, to me was a first: Senator Kennedy going in the water after a woman.
AUDIENCE: (Laughter.)
RUSH: You know, this is not a good sign. In the third picture, they're back in the boat and embracing and...and...and exploring one another.
AUDIENCE: (Laughing.)
RUSH: These pictures made the rounds. This is a true story. They gave them to Howell Heflin, the now-deceased but big, huge Democrat senator from Alabama. He looked at the pictures and he said (Heflin impression): "Why I do declare! It sho' do look to me like Senator Kennedy changed his position on offshore drillin'!"
AUDIENCE: (Laughing.)
RUSH: It's a true, Paul! It's a true story.
AUDIENCE: (Laughing.)
RUSH: Well, at the Council For National Policy about a third of the room had the reaction you did. The other two-thirds were dead silent and glaring at me.
AUDIENCE: (Laughing.)
RUSH: I froze. "Gosh, what a coming out party this is! How can I lose with a Ted Kennedy story to this group?" So I went back to the table and Paul Weyrich was at my table, and he said, "You really owe them an apology.
I said: "You gotta help me understand. Why do I owe them an apology over this?"
He said, "Don't you know who this group is?"
"I thought they were conservatives."
"This is a coalition of business and religious groups!"
AUDIENCE: (Laughing.)
RUSH: So I went back, after the first course, the appetizer. I apologized, and did the rest of the emcee job. They accepted the apology; they were very gracious about it. After it was over and I'm walking through the ballroom to the exit,and I look over and I see Dr. James Dobson, who I had not met --
AUDIENCE: (Laughing.)
RUSH: -- and I could swear standing next to him was Donna Rice. You remember Donna Rice? She was on the boat with Gary Hart out there in Bimini, and it drove him out of the race. He was having an affair with her. I said, "Wait a minute! I just got roasted here for Ted Kennedy joke, but he's here with Donna Rice?"
AUDIENCE: (Laughing.)
RUSH: So, finally she moved on to talk to other people. I walked up, introduced myself to Dr. Dobson and I apologized to him personally. I said, "I could have sworn that was Donna Rice."
"It was," he said. "She found the Lord. Something you might investigate."
AUDIENCE: (Laughing.)
RUSH: We've been friends ever since, but these are events that I remember that shake my life, and I want to tell you just a couple personal things. Aside from five years at the Kansas City Royals, I've been in radio 35 years and those five years. I started working in radio when I was 16. I was the only member of my family to not get a college degree. You watch a lot of people on TV after sporting events or it doesn't matter what, and interviewing the star of the day, "I'm the first member of my family to get a degree!" Everybody goes, "Ohhh!" (claps). I'm the first in mine that didn't.
AUDIENCE: (Laughter and applause.)
RUSH: My family is all professionals, lawyers --
AUDIENCE MAN: Boo.
RUSH -- and doctors, and they have been amazingly supportive, but they really were worried that I had no future. Growing up playing Donny Osmond records on the radio? They don't get the social significance of that.
AUDIENCE: (Laughing.)
RUSH: But they were always very supportive and they stuck with me. My father was especially troubled, because he took me aside. You have to remember now, my father and mother, their generation, they're the greatest generation. They had to grow up a lot sooner than their kids did. They had the Great Depression, World War II. When they were 40 and 45, their life was set and the primary achievements that they'd had were behind them. I'm 56, and there are days I still feel 18 with a lot of ground to make up, because I've had such a cushy life compared to them. In my generation, the baby boomers, we've had to invent our traumas. Now they're real. We've made them real. The stress is real. But we've had to invent them to tell us our lives are tough. They've been cushy because of the work our parents and grandparents did. But because of those experiences, my dad had firm belief on success": if you didn't go to college, kiss it good-bye. You didn't have a prayer. I had no interest in college. It bored me. I flunked speech twice.
AUDIENCE: (Laughing.)
RUSH: I showed up. They should have called it "Outline 101." This is how I do a speech. (holds up a sheet of paper) This is what I've talked about tonight. It's one page. It's a bunch of lines. It's not even an outline. It's not even in the order that I wrote it down. So I flunked because I did it like this.
AUDIENCE: (Laughing.)
RUSH: In high school, they said, "When you get to college, you're on your own! They're not going to baby you. You're an adult."
Right. I see my first required PE course: ballroom dance taught by a lesbian former drill sergeant in the WACs. Well, everybody in town knew she was a lesbian. It was no big deal, but ballroom dancing? I loved radio! I wanted to get on with it and this thing was just a roadblock. My dad set me down. "Son, let me tell you what's not going to happen to you. If you don't get this degree, you're going to lose all of your friends. They're going to surpass you intellectually and they're going to want nothing to do with you. You're not going to be able to maintain the economic and social status you've become accustomed to because you won't be able to earn enough money to provide for it yourself." Get this one. To show you the generational changes and difference: "You're not going to find a decent woman to marry because what woman wants to marry a man who can't support her?"
AUDIENCE: (Laughing.)
RUSH: Whew! Little did he know that two years later the modern era of feminism would begin, and that was the definition! It screwed me up more than it did women.
AUDIENCE: (Laughing.)
RUSH: But I said, "Dad, I'm willing to take the chances."
So I left. I went to Pittsburgh. That was my first job away from home, and it wasn't until after I left home that I realized he was right about a lot of stuff. I didn't have a piece of paper that was going to prove I knew stuff, and it was not going to get my foot in the door. So I figured out I was going to have to be able to demonstrate what I knew, which a lot of people that I know who have gone to college can't possibly do. I know more idiots that have come out of college.
AUDIENCE: (Applause.)
RUSH: But really, achievement is 80% passion and desire. "Do you really want it?" That's why I think kids need to be allowed to dream -- allowed to dream and not scared to death from the moment they're born. I really cringe when I read these stories that kids in the Netherlands are mad at their parents. They're scared to death we're destroying the planet, seeing the polar bear supposedly dying. Why do we do this to kids? There was a story the other day about left-handed women have a 40 percent chance of dying in general because they're left-handed. What the hell is that? How can anybody possibly know that?
AUDIENCE: (Laughing.)
RUSH: What? With men, maybe. That's got to be poor potty training in the formative years. But women?
AUDIENCE: (Laughing.)
RUSH: So anyway, my father had a hearing problem, and of course when I left he couldn't hear me on the radio stations I was on, because they couldn't be picked up in my little town of Missouri. It was really nothing to write home about anyway in those early days, but I'd send tapes home. My mother would constantly say, "You're special. Your talent is special." She had the performer's ego in my family. She was the jokester and had the great sense of humor, and that's where I acquired it. She heard me do a phone bit with Lily Tomlin. Lily Tomlin was in Pittsburgh promoting something. This is back when I was playing music and still had guests, and to promote whatever she was doing -- starring in some stage show or movie, whatever -- they wanted her to come on the station. "I said, 'Okay, how about she plays Ernestine the Operator and I'll be calling a grocery store, asking for the frozen raccoon TV dinners?"
AUDIENCE: (Laughing.)
RUSH: That's all that was said, and she took it and vamped and made it hilarious. She was going to turn me into the ASPCA. The phone company had been monitoring perverts like me. The frozen raccoon? She accused me to use that line to pick up women, and she's not going to be fooled by being picked up like some jerk like me. I sent it home to my mom and my mom just thought it was fabulous.
I said, "Mom, it's not me. It's Lily Tomlin."
"It doesn't matter. You made it happen."
AUDIENCE: (Laughing.)
RUSH: But it gave me confidence. It gave me confidence. I go to Sacramento, to really make the story short here, and that's where I got my first talk show, and that led to the New York talk show. None of this my dad can hear, and his hearing is so bad that if I sent tapes, it just irritated him to try to hear it. So he never heard this. All he heard about was the career was going okay. But still to him -- and again, to his generation -- if you weren't doing the CBS Evening News, you weren't big in media. Radio, of course, to him was nothing because ever since television came along radio -- Jack Benny and those guys -- died. TV was where it's at, and even though he hated Cronrite, he knew that Cronkite had achieved. It was the same thing with Sevareid and Edward R. Murrow and all that. After a couple years or three in New York, I get my first invitation to go on Nightline -- and it's to debate Gore, incidentally, on the environment.
AUDIENCE: (Murmuring.)
RUSH: I accepted it. I did it, and my mom tells me this story. This would have been 1990, six months before my dad died. He was watching it with her, and it was the first time he had heard anything about what I was doing since 1984, because prior to that. I was playing records. I was a DJ. My mother told me that he was dumbfounded.
AUDIENCE: (Laughing.)
RUSH: He was staring open mouthed at the TV, and at the second commercial break, she tells me, he looked over at her and said, "Milly, where in the hell did he learn this?"
Now, remember: I didn't go to college so I had no chance of knowing anything. That was his world.
AUDIENCE: (Laughing.)
RUSH: he looked at him, she told me, and she said, "From you, silly," which was true. He was probably the most influential and educational source I had growing up. But the point of telling you this, is that even though my dad had problems with what I was doing -- and it was only because he was afraid he was a failure as a father. He wasn't angry at me. He just thought he had failed. That Nightline appearance, thankfully, showed him otherwise, because it was television, network television! Big! So I made it as far as he was concerned. My mother was happy that it had happened, too. But they'd always supported me. They had never told me that what I wanted to do was worthless. They may have thought it. They may have really worried about it, but they never told me -- not my dad nor the rest of the family. They never discouraged me. There are so many people in this country -- and it happens in homes all over the country -- where a young kid will say, "I want to do X."
"Are you kidding? You'll never get out of this town to do that!"
There's all this negativism that people are hit with, and it's possible to triumph over it, but it is passion and desire that make that happen. People tell me all the time -- and I appreciate it -- how much the radio show means to them and all that, and I know why it does. The critics of my program and others like it, think that you're just a bunch of mind-numbed robots and I'm just a pied piper. I'm telling you how to think because you haven't the slightest a clue what to think on your own -- and that's because you can't possibly be a conservative and come up with that on your own! You have to be brainwashed to be a conservative. But what really happens is that I come along and in '88, in the national media, there was nobody saying what I say. Conservatism is laughed at, made fun of and impugned -- in books, movies, television shows -- and then here comes this voice. All I've done is validate what you already believed, and in many cases -- like what William Buckley did for me and my dad -- I was instinctively conservative, but when I was younger, I couldn't explain why to anybody -- and that's not good. A lot of people are that way now too.
But one of the things about alternative media is that it has helped people to, A: understand and validate what they already believe; and B, to explain it with confidence so that you probably have more influence on other people's lives than you will ever know, certainly on your families. The people you do influence probably are not going to come up and say, "You know you changed my mind." They're mad at you for doing it. But you never know who you're going to impact. You never know who you're going to influence, for the better, in your life. I have people tell me that this is what my program does for them, and I understand it and I appreciate it. But, folks -- and I say this to you; I say to this every group that I address. I mean to include the radio stations that carry my program, because if they didn't... Do you know the grief that they've put up, especially early on and the pressure they've put up and withstood? I'm nothing but a product of all of the support from all of you, and whatever the program has meant to you, I tell you honestly: I cannot find a way to adequately express what your support, what your listening -- and admitting that you listen when you get a diary --
AUDIENCE: (Laughing.)
RUSH: -- what it has meant to me. I can only say thank you and God bless you, and I love you so much, because you do not -- can't possibly know -- how much you've meant to me.
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