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Nov. 11, 2005 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:35
November 11, 2005, Friday, Hour #3
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Time Text
Oh, here we go.
I can't let this one go.
I can't.
Oh, and this.
Yeah.
Oh, and that.
Well, I got a lot to try to get in here today.
Greetings, folks, and welcome back.
It's Rush Limbaugh.
This is the award-winning thrill-packed, ever-exciting, increasingly popular, growing by leaps and bounds EIB network.
It's Friday.
Let's roll.
Live from the Southern Command in sunny South Florida.
It's Open Line Friday.
Yip, Yahoo!
It's open line Friday, and this is a great opportunity for those of you out there because I want to call the program.
Normally, program is totally about what interests me.
I don't talk about things I don't care about because I don't want to be bored and I don't want to sound boring.
But I throw all that to the wind and I turn over to veritable rank amateurs, the important subject matter that we will discuss with callers.
They get to pick the ideas, the things we discuss.
As a highly trained broadcast specialist, I can do this once a week.
Telephone numbers 800-282-2882 and the email address rush at EIBnet.com.
Senator Kennedy has weighed in.
Excuse me.
Senator Kennedy has weighed in with his response to President Bush's speech today in a statement.
He said that Bush was using the Veterans Day speech, quote, as a campaign-like attempt to rebuild his own credibility by tearing down those who seek the truth about the clear manipulation of intelligence that led to war.
And this is laughable.
This is laughable.
This guy's a total buffoon.
Snerdley said, do you hear what Kennedy said?
I said, no, it's on your printer.
He sent it into me.
Well, here's what I think.
I told you before I started this hour, Snerdley, that there was not much time to do a lot of stuff, and you peppered me with this predictable Senator Kennedy crap.
I want to move on to other things out there.
Federal prosecutors conducting a criminal investigation into the levee failures that swamped New Orleans, looking into the possibility of corruption in the design, construction, and maintenance of the flood barriers.
U.S. Attorney Jim Latton said Wednesday his office began the investigation the week after Hurricane Katrina.
The scope of our interest is very broad.
Oh, I wouldn't want to be ensnared in this net when these U.S. attorneys say their scope is very broad.
They say we're going to bring the full force and power the federal government, which no one individual can withstand, into looking into this.
All right, little media discussion.
We got more Mary Mapes.
She was, where was she last night?
She was on, was it Larry King Live?
I thought, no, yeah, Wednesday night.
Wednesday.
She was on Larry King Live.
I meant to get to this yesterday.
I didn't get it.
It was Judy Miller that was on Larry King last night that I really don't care about.
But before we get to Mary Mapes, there's a book review in the New York Times today by Machiko Kakutani.
Machik is the reviewer.
The book is by Craig Crawford.
What is the title of this book?
Attack the Messenger, how politicians turn you against the media.
Now, Craig Crawford used to be the editor of the hotline.
He's now at Congressional Quarterly.
I think he is a paid analyst at PMS NBC.
And some of the, apparently it's a small book, and the reviewer doesn't think it's all that good compared to some of the other books that purport to address the same subject.
But he does offer some interesting excerpts here.
Mr. Crawford writes, one of the carefully planned strategeries of the Elder Bush's 88 presidential campaign was to run against the news media, which the candidate insistently portrayed as being out of sync with Middle America.
His crusade to turn the public against the media, Craig Crawford writes, would be finished by his son George W. Bush, whose White House treats the news media as just another special interest group rather than as a surrogate for the American people.
Do you realize?
Now, you may not know who Craig Crawford is if you don't watch a lot of television.
The hotline's not widely read by members of the public.
I bet if you saw him on TV, you'd recognize.
But this whole premise here just makes me gag.
This whole premise is crazy.
The media is just another special interest group.
The media is made up of ideologues.
The media is made up with people who have an interest in the outcome of events.
The media is made up of all of the media is.
It's just that certain members of the big media want to admit this.
They don't want to admit it, and they want to stay far away from it under the pretense of objectivity.
All media is thinking human people, thinking human beings.
Human beings that are thinking and engaged actively have interests in the outcome of events.
And for this continued notion that the big media is able to put those aside, no, these people don't care.
Why?
They don't even register to vote.
Why?
They're independent.
No, they vote Democrat.
The second thing is that the media is a surrogate for the American people.
Oh, is that it's interesting how Crawford looks at it.
The media just out there, the eyes and ears of the American people.
We go where the American people can't go, and then we tell them what happened there.
That's great in theory.
Might be journalism 101 at Columbia University, but it's not reality.
Surrogate for the American people.
I mean, look at Dan Rather.
Dan Rather's definition of news is what's going on that somebody doesn't want you to know about.
Like, you mean what happened inside CBS that led to your story on Bill Burkett?
You didn't want anybody to know how that story got put together.
Now we know how it got put together.
Now the person that put it together is making an absolute fool of herself on television, selling her book, literally making an absolute fool of herself.
She essentially says that we in the media can put anything out there and it's up to other people to discredit it.
It's not up to us to authenticate it or verify it.
We put what we want out there and it's up to critics to prove that we're wrong.
You couple that with this surrogate for the American people and it's Gag City.
Although the news media now enjoy higher approval ratings than President Bush, Mr. Crawford notes that the media's standing with the public has fallen sharply from its high during the Watergate era.
And he argues that the falloff in trust stems from the vilification of the news media by politicians, combined with a host of other developments, the proliferation of internet sites, cable TV outlets, many of them highly partisan in attitude and content, a series of self-inflicted wounds on the part of the press, Dan Rather and Jason Blair, and public distaste for the salacious details of the Bill Clinton, Monica Lewinsky scandals.
Mr. Crawford astutely notes, journalists seldom defend themselves.
Every day, it becomes more and more the twilight zone here, folks.
It's an alternative reality and a strange, two or three different universes out there these people are occupying.
As Mr. Crawford astutely points out, journalists seldom defend themselves.
Seldom defend themselves.
That's all they do.
There are more introspective shows on TV about journalists than ever before.
And they sit there in their roundtables and explain what they do and they defend themselves constantly and all the time.
What is Mary Mapes doing with this book and this book tour of hers?
In addition, writes Mr. Crawford, journalists allow themselves on occasion to be distracted from covering the news made by politicians and government officials to engage in cannibalistic navel-gazing, a phenomenon fueled by internet bloggers, cable news pundits, and talk radio partisans like Rush Limbaugh.
So we are taking them off their game.
We are causing the press to navel gaze.
We are causing the press, we are taking them off their game and we're losing their focus for them.
They're not focusing on the evils of politicians.
Instead, they're having to defend themselves except they don't defend themselves.
Which is it, Craig?
You actually want to give us credit for taking you off your game?
You've been on a game of five years intended to destroy George W. Bush, and now you are swimming and reveling in these poll numbers that you have succeeded in getting, and we are dubious how you got them.
But nevertheless, you've got poll numbers that you can trump out there.
And I've never seen such media glee since these latest round of poll numbers came out.
What do you mean you don't focus on politicians?
That's all you've been doing.
And his name is George W. Bush.
The idea you focused on Bill Clinton, yeah, to help with the cover-up, to help spread the word.
It was no big deal.
It's just about sex.
It's just a bunch of Republican perverts trying to get their jollies.
It's nothing really serious.
We remember how you covered Clinton.
As a result of all this, Mr. Crawford suggests in his book, politicians now, get this, folks, get this, get this.
Mr. Crawford in his book suggests that politicians now, quote, have the advantage in defining truth, quote, unquote.
Have the advantage in defining truth?
Defining it?
You mean if I, Rush Limbaugh, say the sky is blue, it's not true because unless you agree with me.
And if you think it's red, I'm lying.
Because you get to define truth as you want people to know it?
Is that what truth is?
A daily definition?
Jason Blair defined truth.
Jack Kelly at USA Today defined truth.
Stephen Glass defined truth.
Janet, what's her name?
Cook at the Washington Post, she defined truth.
Dan Rather defined truth.
I didn't see these people being taken off their game until it was too late for them.
Armies of press aides, pseudo-journalists, and well-funded advocacy groups are in place as an alternative to the traditional news media, Crawford writes.
The great irony is that the rise of this propaganda machine feeds on the belief that the news media is biased, yet often there's no more biased, no one more biased than those who hurl the charge.
His people do not understand it when they're talking and describing themselves.
The idea that, see, the Internet's bad.
Have you noticed Andrea Mitchell?
She's been caught.
She was caught on CNBC.
She said everybody knew Valerie Playmo CIA.
Now she said, no, no, no, no, bloggers took me out of context.
Mary Mapes is saying, no, bloggers, bloggers did this.
Is it partisan political operators?
Bloggers did this.
Anytime a journalist gets in trouble when people find out that a journalist made it up or got it wrong, who's it's always somebody else's fault.
Bloggers, talk radio, Fox News, or what have you.
Damn it, if we could just get rid of them, we could go back to defining truth ourselves as we want to.
Indeed, one of my favorite mantras of the current, one of the favorite mantras of the current Bush White House and its conservative allies is that media suffer from a liberal bias, a constantly repeated accusation designed to drill this notion into the public's consciousness while putting the press on the defensive.
Recent history flies in the face of this assertion.
Fox News established itself as a dominant cable news network last year while Limbaugh and other voices continue to dominate talk radio.
To the dismay of Democrats, the media vigorously pursued stories about Clinton relating to impeachment charges of the Whitewater scandal.
And the press's failure to more aggressively question pre-war allegations that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction was in large measure a result of its over-reliance on sources aligned with the administration.
Making up for you now, aren't you, Craig?
You got your glomed on a whole bunch of whole other set of truths here that you are defining, and you've joined at the hip with a bunch of people who are telling lie after lie after lie about manipulating pre-war intelligence, that it was all a bunch of lies, and you're acting like no Democrat ever said anything prior to 2003 about this.
That all this history began on 2001.
Finally, the last paragraph of this review quotes from Craig Crawford's book, By Undermining the Credibility of the News Media.
Craig Crawford writes, Politicians get the upper hand in defining what is.
Far from targeting only bad actors, these politicians seek to undermine our best journalists in hopes of muzzling the truth.
And there you have it, admitting that the presumption that every journalist makes going to work every day is that everybody's going to lie to them.
And that their task is to prove that everybody's a liar.
And they can lie in process.
And they can define truth all they want in the process.
I'm happy this book got reviewed.
I would have never seen this otherwise.
In fact, I only saw this because a search field kicked my name out of it since it's meant.
I would have never seen it other than that, but quite illustrative.
Quick timeout.
We'll be back.
Now, following all that, after what you just heard from Craig Crawford in his new book, I want you to listen to Mary Mapes on Larry King Alive two nights ago.
You're listening to Rush Limbaugh on the Excellence in Podcasting Network.
Okay, Larry King Live Wednesday night.
Mary Mapes questioned.
So there's nothing in this story you would have done differently.
You might have released it a little later, but nothing you'd change.
I would have worded some things differently.
I would have put in some of the proof, some of the corroboration I felt we had so people would understand that it wasn't just the document analysis that was an issue for us.
And I actually think this is something even the CBS executives didn't understand.
It wasn't just document analysis.
It was corroboration.
It was vetting.
It was meshing.
Frankly, the story we did was something akin to reporting that cigarettes cause cancer.
Yeah, they do.
And having some new documents showing that they do in that, I think a lot of people know and have known for years there are problems with Bush's record in the National Guard.
There always have been problems.
And I think he should have had to answer these questions early on.
This is just unbelievable.
So she's got it in her head that there are problems with Bush's National Guard record.
She thinks everybody else accepts it because the press has reported on it.
And she comes up, she's so eager to get the story out there because she wants to be true that she's got these forged documents and then she says everybody else has to authenticate them, prove that they're not true.
I don't have to prove it because everybody knows this.
And then this is like documents getting cigarettes cause cancer.
We just got, well, I wonder if they made any of those up when they were reporting that.
So King says, well, how about those who said that you had a motivation, that you were interested in defeating Bush, you, Mary Mapes?
Well, yeah, well, it was a very small campaign on my part.
I lived in Texas.
That was probably the biggest deal for me.
I'd been there for 15 years.
In the same way I'd covered Carla Faye Tucker and a number of other Texas cases.
I viewed Bush as being in my bailiwick.
Did you get no personal at all?
Oh, my God, no.
No, of course not.
Oh, no, no, no, of course not.
Nothing personal.
No, no, no, nothing whatsoever.
Everybody knows the problem with his record.
Everybody knows it.
Oh, no, nothing personal.
So King says, you believe right this moment that those documents were not false.
I believe no one has proved to me that they were false after more than a year.
They were true.
I'm perfectly willing to believe they're false if somebody will just prove it.
No one has proven it.
No, they have not.
Their criticisms last year really didn't reach the bar of proof at all.
I tell you, folks, this is the best and brightest.
I mean, this is the king of the hill at CBS News when she was there.
This is the one assigned to Dan Rather.
So after he interviewed What's Her Face, Mapes, he had a panel discussion.
King did.
And one of his guests is the former president of the AP, Lewis Bacardi, who also co-chaired the investigation, the forged documents, with Thornburg.
So King said, What do you make of what Mary had to say that you can't disprove these documents are true or whatever?
I'm not sure that it's our job to disprove it.
It's a curious kind of journalism that says that if you say something, you're not responsible for proving it.
Other people are responsible for disproving it.
That's not the kind of journalism I grew up with.
She's written an angry book, and I don't think it changes.
I know it doesn't change any of the findings that Dick Thornberg and I together made.
She talked about the examiners, the experts.
She said, I had four, and then there were two.
Well, two of the four jumped off.
One of them told her not to go ahead.
If you do this, the morning after you do it, every document examiner in America is going to be after you.
So two jumped off, and none of the four said that they could authenticate the documents because of the difficult nature of authentication.
One of the document experts, correct me if I'm wrong, named Cynthia Will.
I think that's her name.
I know her last name is Will, W-I-L-L.
I'm not sure if it's Cynthia, but she's got a website.
She has read this book.
She's gone through the book, and she's like a document expert.
She's gone through this book, and she's pointed out even more lies that Mary Mapes is telling.
So here's the former head of AP.
You know, these journalists are probably saying, why is this woman blowing our cover?
She's out there making us all look like idiots.
Yeah, we all operate this way.
We put stuff out there and we demand it.
People disprove it.
Now she looks like an absolute fool putting our policy out there.
Just shut up, Mary.
Just shut up.
This is fat.
No, this is fabulous.
I mean, you think she's the only one that operates this way?
My friends, wake up.
This is the top gun at CBS in their producer department with Dan Rather on the CBS Wednesday show.
She's high up there, and she's been there 15 years, long time or whatever.
You think she's the only one that operates this way in the big media?
They can put whatever out there, and it's up to other people to disprove it, to say it ain't right?
If you think she's the only one, then you also believe in a tooth fairy.
Quick time out.
We'll be back and continue in for those of you in real Indians.
Sorry for giving that away.
Oh, God.
Okay, so we just heard Mary Mapes for the second time this week suggests that she can put whatever she wants out there.
And it's up to people who hear it and digest it to prove it isn't true.
It's not up to her to prove these documents are real.
It's up to other people to prove that they're not.
Go back to Craig Crawford in his book.
What is his main complaint?
Politicians now have the advantage in defining truth.
He closes by saying, by undermining the credibility of the news media, politicians get the upper hand in defining what is.
So here's Mary Mapes.
Basically, this is why I'm saying you think she's the only one.
Craig Crawford's upset at her because she'd blown the whole lid off of this.
They get out there and they get to define the truth.
She was going to define the truth.
That's what she hoped to do, but somebody came along and blew it.
And now Craig Crawford's also upset.
And I guarantee a lot of other media people are too, because defining the truth is the power of their monopoly.
That's what the monopoly did for them, allowed them to define the truth, to create the reality.
They can't do it anymore.
And you see how hard it is for Mary Mapes to give up the whole premise.
Here's David in Portland, Maine, as we go back to the phones on Open Line Friday.
Hi.
Hey, Rush, make a deal.
How you doing?
Fine, sir.
Cool.
I would like to know where you came up with the origin name for Senator Lakey Leahy.
Leakey Leahy.
Pat Lakey Leahy.
We also have another name for him, Senator Depends.
These are these diapers that adults who have problems with their bladders or bowels wear.
And this is because Senator Leahy used to be on the intelligence committee, the Senate Intelligence Committee, and he once leaked intelligence and news of a secret attack that we were planning during the Reagan administration on Libya and Muammar Gaddafi.
He was kicked off of the intelligence committee and put on judiciary.
And as such, we give him the name Leakey Leahy, Senator Depends.
It's a dual meaning.
He leaks in a lot of ways.
It suits them fine.
Most certainly.
Well, that's why we do it.
You know, we don't come up with these names just arbitrarily, but I'm glad that you called to ask, since it didn't click with you, now it does.
Roger in Dubuque, Iowa.
You're next, sir.
Welcome to the program.
Hey, Rush.
I about had it with these liberal bastards in Congress and in the media because they really don't want victory or peace in Iraq.
They want the illusion of peace and the illusion of victory because they live in an imaginary world of illusion, Rush.
Well, okay.
Let me concede your point in responding to you this way.
Because I think there's something far more hideous than that.
I think they don't want victory or peace in Iraq.
They want the illusion of peace, the illusion of victory.
They don't want the illusion of victory either.
They don't want victory in Iraq.
That would redound to Bush.
That would redound to the Republicans.
That's why these anti-war people, people called yesterday, well, what could they do to protest the war, but not make it look like they were opposed to victory?
Nothing.
This current crop of anti-war crowns is, I'm telling you, they're anti-victory.
It's sort of the Libs.
They don't want to win there.
What the liberals want to do, and this points up the problem.
They can sit there and complain and moan all day.
Let's just give them the hypothetical for the sake of this discussion.
Okay, let's say there were lies.
Let's say all this was made up and we got into a rocket or false pretense.
Now what do we do?
Now what do we do?
They don't have an answer.
The closest answer they have is come home.
You don't hear them talk about winning.
You don't hear them talking about finishing the job.
Well, you do if they're pressed.
See, that's the thing, and that's why their base gets all nervous with them.
If they're pressed by the right people, well, of course we must whisper that we've got to prevail.
But they don't want it heard.
Well, they don't want to say it too loudly.
They have no plan.
That's why they can't be trusted with this.
This is nothing but propaganda.
This is the illusion of peace.
Their illusion of peace.
Here's where I'll grant you you have a point.
They would be content.
I firmly believe they have been lying and uttering this propaganda for so long that it's become pathological.
They believe their own lies now.
They don't remember they ever voted for the war.
They've got themselves, it's like Clinton.
Whatever he said was true in his mind because he said it, regardless of what he said five minutes prior.
He was contradicting himself five minutes prior.
I said that in my youth.
You can't hold that against me.
And these guys have been uttering this story about lies, weapons of mass destruction, pre-war intelligence.
They believe it.
They've got themselves to the point they believe it.
If you believe it, you also think we can just pull out of there and we can go back to pre-9-11.
They want to act like 9-11 never happened.
They think we can go back to a world where there's pre-9-11.
And yeah, we'll get hit by terrorists now and then, maybe here, maybe abroad, but it's not bad.
I mean, it's worse than what we're doing now.
We'd just soon have terrorist attacks than go to war.
Because, oh, gosh, how's that going to end up?
We can put up with this.
We just get us in power and we will appease the terrorists.
They will be convinced after talking to us that we mean them no harm.
Like the Spanish and like the Brits and any number of people, the French.
So that's their attitude.
So their illusion of peace is that we just won't threaten them.
We'll tell them we're nice guys.
We have no intention of changing them.
We have no intention of imposing our will.
No, no, no.
And they will leave us alone and we will have the illusion of peace.
And we may have a couple terrorist attacks, but far better that than what we're doing now.
And that's their attitude.
And until they say differently, it's the only thing you can assume their attitude is.
Erie, Pennsylvania, and Laura, you're next on Open Line Friday.
Hi.
Hi, mega-patriotic ditto's rush.
Thank you very much.
Thank you very much for the salute to our veterans, the real American heroes, those people that serve us with courage, your brilliant definition of courage, especially.
Wasn't mine as G.K. Chesterton.
Yes, a good Catholic.
I want to say real quick, real quick, a hello to PFC Jacob Patton and everyone serving over in Iraq.
He is our hero, and I want him to let them know they're in our prayers every day.
But I wanted to ask you, have you seen the commercial with the Kurds thanking Americans for their freedom and that passionate thing, thank you.
They need to be saying it to the American soldiers because they're the ones putting their lives on the line out there.
And I'm wondering what you thought of it.
I think it's a pretty slick propaganda move by the Bush administration to pay the Kurds to do this.
And I think Karl Rove probably actually, I don't think there's really Kurds.
I think Rove produced this or had it produced while he was supposedly being distracted by the CIA leak investigation.
He was actually getting these commercials produced.
And we want to find out who funded them because I'll bet you Bob Jones University or somebody paid for these things to get made.
And you just, you can't trust this stuff from this White House.
You think the Kurds actually thanking us?
I can't believe you would fall for it.
Well, I want those reporters to go over and interview those Kurds and ask them what they think about Senator Kennedy saying that we shouldn't have been there, that they don't deserve their freedom.
You won't find those people in the commercials in Iraq.
You'll find those people, you know, Hollywood, wherever they found the actors.
Well, you know, it's pathetic that they don't get it.
Those soldiers are over there because they know what freedom is.
Every one of us has it because of American soldiers that gave their lives.
Look, I can't let this go any further.
You're absolutely right, folks.
I'm teasing.
I'm just reacting as I know that the wacko kook left will react to those commercials.
They're totally fake.
They're phony.
They're produced.
We want to check the source of the fundraising on those to see if it violated FEC rules because it's actually a campaign commercial and it's for the Bush policy.
And we want to know who put those together, probably Rove, while he wasn't messing with a weather machine on hurricanes and so forth.
You just know that's what the left's reaction to this is.
The true response is, I think it's fabulous.
Snurdley pointed out these commercials to me yesterday.
I think they're factors.
By the way, I know that you think they should be thanking the American soldier, but when those commercials run in this country, they are thanking soldiers' families.
They're thanking soldiers that are back from Iraq who've been there, and they are thanking the American people.
The American people fund the effort.
The American people support the effort, make it possible.
I think it's a, I think it's a win-win.
I think it's fabulous.
I just, I just, I think it's a shame that there are Americans out there doubt the sincerity of it like I portrayed, because you know they're there.
But look, I appreciate your nice, your nice comments, reaction to the way we opened the program.
Well, after the president's speech, we did a mini tribute here to veterans since it's Veterans Day, and that will be on the website tonight at rushlimbaugh.com.
Thanks much, Laura.
Before we go to this brief timeout, a little change of pace.
And I just, I can't wait to see Snardley's reaction when I pass this news off.
Because I know, and Dawn's too, for that matter, but I know exactly what the reaction is going to be.
All I need to do is tell you the headline.
It's from the Daily Telegraph in London.
Marriage lowers the male sex drive.
We'll be back after this.
A brief personal note.
I got a, this is just terrible.
I can't believe this is happening, but life goes on and things change.
Many of you people in this audience have heard me over the years discuss some of my favorite places to eat around the world.
And one of those places in Kansas City, Strouds, the absolute best fried chicken, gravy, mashed potatoes, cinnamon rolls, fried shrimp.
We even had an economics discussion on this program once about Strouds.
Remember that?
Strouds has the biggest shrimp you've ever seen.
They fry them, fried shrimp, biggest shrimp.
I kid you not.
You'd think these things have been double or triple cloned.
And so you're sitting there in the right smack damn middle of the country, Kansas City, Missouri.
How in the heck do the biggest shrimp in the world get there?
And it's an economics question.
It has very little to do with Stroud's purchasing philosophy, and it has more to do with the economics of the shrimpers.
But I'll not go back into that.
You can think about it.
We can talk about it another time.
I got this note from one of the waitresses there, Sherry.
Hey, Rush, hope all's well with you.
I don't know if you're aware of this or not.
I wasn't.
But the city has decided to widen the road that Strouds is on, forcing us to close our doors.
I can't believe the greatest fried chicken place in the country is going to be bulldozed for a road, but it is.
She says, it's going to be heartbreaking to walk away the last night, knowing our beloved Strouds could become a pile of rubbish at the whim of City Hall.
Mike, the owner, scouting around for a new location, it'll allow us to recreate the atmosphere as close as possible.
He's even hoping to move part of the building so that we may be able to salvage a bit of the imperfection that we're all so familiar with.
Our last night will be New Year's Eve.
So if you ever want to see our smiling faces in the old locale, you ought to plan on coming to Kansas City before the end of the year.
We'd love to see you.
I'll keep you posted as to our new digs.
I hope they find a place to move.
This place is just, you wouldn't believe it if you've never been there.
And, well, it's, I don't know if they're in a domain.
They're going to ride in a highway.
Yeah, highway taxes will go.
It's a two-lane road.
I mean, it's right under a bridge.
85th and Trust is where it is.
And I can understand I'm wanting the upgrade to neighborhood.
You ought to see this place.
I mean, they've made this.
They built this place to look like it's falling down.
The windows are put in crooked.
The roof is not straight.
The floor is not straight.
Some of the planks on the floor are not level with the others.
They built it that way.
They wanted it to look like it's old and they succeeded.
Cheap little curtains on the windows.
No reservations.
People wait three hours to get in this place, sometimes standing outside regardless of the weather.
So I was devastated to hear this last night.
So I got to go back.
Yes, everybody.
Yep, Brian says, do you wait three hours?
Everybody waits three hours.
You can't even do this.
You can't even send in a surrogate to get in line for you.
If they find you doing that, slap on the wrist, you get sent back to the back of the line.
Tried that once.
I even took the San Diego chicken in there, Ted Giannoulis.
I said, hey, hey, Ted, taste some great chicken?
Took him in there after a Royals game one Sunday afternoon.
But I tell you, it's just a fun place.
But no, nobody can bump the line.
Now, circumstances have changed.
They're closing down.
The reason they don't do that is because it's infuriate all these people standing in line.
But if you're closing down, who cares if people get mad?
So I may try it.
I don't know.
But no, I've never, never, ever.
Doesn't happen.
Nobody gets moved.
It doesn't matter who they are.
The president of the United States wouldn't.
They'd probably shut it down for him so there wasn't a line.
But it doesn't happen.
Joe in Colorado Springs, you're next.
Welcome to the program, sir.
Hello.
Yes.
I believe there's still a Strouds location in Wichita, Kansas.
It's a satellite location.
It's not the real thing.
True.
But if they do shut down the KC, at least there's still Strouds somewhere.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, is it the same as have you been to the one in Kansas City?
No, I haven't.
Well, then until I know that it's the same thing, I mean, this place is unique.
One time I described it for people, and I went in later about two weeks later, and the owner came up.
His mother was there, kind of gave me a little grief for this.
I said, this is the kind of stuff they scrape out of you when you have open heart surgery.
You know, you don't want to eat there every night, but gosh, it's good.
I mean, it's just.
So Mike came up smiling.
Hey, I really like that stuff about scraping us out of the.
I said, hey, it was just clever descriptive technique.
And it's not big.
I mean, it's not a huge, huge place either.
That's why the lines are big.
And this is, they're longer on weekends, obviously.
But you can go in there at 4 or 5 in the afternoon and not have a line.
But who wants to do that?
Unless you're really going to chow down so you've got all night to digest it.
Portland, Maine, this is Jim.
I'm glad you waited, sir.
Welcome to Open Line Friday.
Hello, Rush.
Mega Dittos from the Little Berkeley of the East.
Thank you, sir.
Yeah.
You mentioned Senator Snow earlier on your show.
And here's the deal, I think, that's got to happen.
There's a number of people here in Maine who've just about had it with her brand of Republicanism.
So I think all that needs to happen is one time, and this may be the place there's a number of us ready to do it, is just turn on her, get a Democrat in there, run against her, doesn't matter.
Take the long-term view.
One senator goes down at our hands, and I think the rest of them snap back in line.
You know, this has been bandied about this theory.
And in fact, the last time this happened, the last time this happened in American history that I know of, it was engineered by William Buckley against Lowell Weicker.
Oh, yeah.
Lowell Buckley, Lowell, William Buckley, created a PAC called Buck PAC, and he used National Review to raise money, and it resulted in the election of Senator Lieberman, who still to this day is a better guy to have than Lowell Weicker, because at least you know he's on the Democrat side to start with.
But he's certainly more pro-war than any Democrat is.
I like Lieberman.
I like Senator Lieberman.
But doing something like that in Maine, I've heard this talked about.
Getting rid of Olympia Snow and Susan Collins is the same thing as saying that the Republicans are going to get the majority to black vote.
But I don't want to discourage you either at the same time.
Well, it is, but I just don't want to discourage you because I was up there.
I was up President Bush's place for a golf charity thing back in October, September.
And my driver, I mean, whining and moaning about Olympia Snow and Susan Collins.
But everybody that I know up there, I asked the guy, everybody, every time I come up here, which is not often, but every time I come up here, people just rail and moan.
How do they win?
Very liberal state rush.
Very liberal state.
And it is.
So Republican, Democrat, you're still electing a liberal up there.
Six and one, half dozen or the other.
We'll be right back.
Stay with us.
I'll be gone next week, folks, reminding you, I mentioned this yesterday, and it's a vacation.
We radio people never take vacations in November because it's a ratings month.
And I said, I'm into my 18th year to heck with that.
I'm going to take a vacation week in November.
Why?
Because I can.
We have guest hosts coming in next week.
They'll chat up the Adopt a Soldier program.
And I promise, I promise when I come back the week of Thanksgiving, we will do a fourth hour on one of those days.
So have a great weekend.
Be thinking of you next week a little.
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