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April 3, 2006 - Rush Limbaugh Program
34:18
April 3, 2006, Monday, Hour #3
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And we're back in the fastest three hours in media, the Rush Limbaugh program, fastest week in media, most listened to radio talk show in the country, a program that meets and surpasses all audience expectations on a daily basis.
A thrill and a delight to be with you.
President Bush is on his way to the Pitcher's Mound in Cincinnati to throw out ceremonial first pitch today.
It's opening day.
And there he goes.
A standing ovation and a sold-out ballpark in Cincinnati.
It's a totally rousing welcome, and it would make anybody who reads presidential polls a little curious.
Rousing welcome, standing ovation.
The Cubs and the Reds about to open it up in the National League in Cincinnati.
Greetings, my friends.
Here's the phone number if you want to be on the program 800-282-2882 and the email address rush at EIBnet.com.
Coming up in this hour, Senator McCain, as I predicted, I'm just surprised it's happening this soon.
The media turning on him.
They can't understand why he's trying to build fences with Jerry Falwell.
They think Falwell is worse than Louis Farrakhan, and that Pat Robertson's worse than all of them.
And so they're just beside themselves here.
And we'll have audio soundbites of Senator McCain with Tim Russert on Meet the Press yesterday.
We also have a Gorbasim coming up in this hour as we go back to our update archives.
Mikhail Segevich Gorbachev back out there now, echoing Bill Clinton and his criticism of the United States.
But first, ladies and gentlemen, as you know, we've been working feverishly on coming up with an update theme for the ports deal story.
It has achieved update status because it's going to be around for quite a while.
And here it is.
We have finally decided our boy Paul Shanklin put this together, sitting in the ports of Dubai to take off on Otis Redding's sitting on the dock of the bay.
That man was so great.
Otis Redding, he was just so great.
Sitting on the dock of the bay.
That's Paul Shanklin, S-H-A-N-K-L-I-N.
He's got a website, get all of his parodies there.
Now, for those of you listening to the podcast, unfortunately, we are not allowed to play the parody.
Suspend a bump.
No, don't use a bump.
We're not allowed to play parodies that feature music in them on our podcasts because we're not licensed for that form of distribution.
We do pay an ASCAP BMI license to broadcast.
Actually, local stations pay that.
Well, yeah, we all pay it.
But the podcasts and that new form of delivery system has not yet been licensed.
That's why we can't play musical parodies on our podcasts.
But just sit tight, folks.
Hang in there and be tough because that's going to change as the rest of the world gets up to speed with us.
Here, we are on the cutting edge of podcast evolution, technological evolution in general, as well as societal evolution.
But there is Ports Deal news today, and it is this.
The French have snuck in under the Ports Deal radar to snatch up a telecom equipment maker that does have U.S. military ramifications.
And we told you about this deal a week or two ago.
France's Alcatel S.A. will acquire rival telecom equipment maker Lucent Technologies in a $13.4 billion stock swap that would form an industry powerhouse with a product line broad enough to entice customers into a consolidating telecom industry.
Company leaders said yesterday they planned to shed 10% of the combined workforce that's about 8,800 jobs.
You know, the French are all excited now they can fire people.
And, well, yeah, they're not watering down the deal too much, are they?
Well, oh, Shirock did?
He suspended, so they can't fire anybody anymore.
So the French once again buckled to the let-em-eat cake crowd.
How about that?
Well, you were more informed than I, Mr. Sturdley.
Here's the impact for us.
To address U.S. security concerns about Bell Labs, Bell Labs is the Lucent research arm that does sensitive work for the Pentagon.
The French company, Alcatel and Lucent, announced plans to form a separate, independent American subsidiary managed by a board of three American citizens vetted by the U.S. government.
Because of the recent Dubai ports controversy, guys said we may see some lingering issues in Washington in regards to foreign investments.
So U.S. defense work now obviously in jeopardy, ladies and gentlemen, as the French have taken over the company which owns Bell Labs.
Well, if they're a French company, there's no question they're going to employ Arabs.
I just, I had to pass it on.
And now, ladies and gentlemen, from the archives.
That's the trumpet fanfare.
He's back.
He's in the news.
Mikhail Segeevich Gorbachev.
Here's our Gorbasm theme.
By the way, do you realize that managing port terminals is something Americans just won't do anymore?
So for those of you new to the program, what's a Gorbasim you want?
Well, we got to go back to 1985, I believe.
86.
The left, the media is scared to death that Ronald Reagan is going to push the nuclear button and detonate us all.
They're desperately hoping for a summit between Reagan and a Soviet leader since Reagan took office.
But Reagan refused to meet with Soviet leaders because they kept dying on him.
And finally, a young and vibrant leader with a big birthmark on his forehead that happened, by the way, to grow, as did Soviet expansionism, came along, Mikhail Gorbachev.
They agreed to have a summit in Washington.
And so that day arrived, and the Alyushin 62 jetliner, technology to build, by the way, stolen from Boeing, lands out at Andrews Air Force Base.
You got State Department people out there, get the media out there.
Everybody just excited.
They can't contain themselves.
Gorbachev is coming.
Gorbachev is coming.
The world is safe now because finally somebody responsible in the world will convince President Reagan not to push the nuclear button.
They really thought this.
So that Alyushin 62 jetliner is taxiing in from the runway.
They roll the steps up to the front door of the airplane.
The door opens.
A collective gasp is heard from the assembled crowd as he steps onto the top step.
Mikhail Segevich Gorbachev arrives to save the world, and a collective gorbasm was heard and experienced by the collected leftists at Andrews Air Force Base.
All right, let's get on with the Gorbasm News.
Former Soviet leader and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Mikhail Gorbachev, has turned 75.
Bitter that the end of the Cold War.
Would you turn down the Gorbasm theme just?
Yes, thank you.
Turn bitter that the Cold War has left the United States with what he called a superiority complex.
It's spoken just like a true leftist.
It would be in everyone's interest if that big country America recovered from that disease, he said.
Now, get this.
Gorbachev, who launched the democratic and economic reforms that ultimately led to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, described the end of the Cold War as a gift that the United States has squandered.
Mikhail Gorbachev did nothing to end the Cold War.
Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher did it, but to this day, modern history writers accord that honor to Mikhail Gorbachev.
The launch of democratic and economic reforms that ultimately led to the collapse of the Soviet Union.
See that?
He tried to reform a socialist communist system, and it led to the downfall.
Media doesn't like that.
They wanted communism to reign supreme in triumph.
He tried to hold on to communism by doling out a little freedom here and there.
You can't do that.
Once the people get freedom, they don't want any more oppression and tyranny.
And Gorbachev had no choice.
We had infiltrated that society with blue jeans, Dallas reruns, and a number of things, which put the lie to everything Soviet leaders had told their people for 50 years.
Listen to the ABC treatment of the same story.
Gorbachev, the headline, laments U.S. arrogance.
Mikhail Gorbachev's magnetic brown eyes shine as brightly as ever.
That sort of reminds me of the story the Washington Post did on Clinton about how his tight jeans were crackling with power out on Coronado Island.
Magnetic brown eyes shine as brightly as ever.
And he speaks with the same passion about the collapse of the Soviet Union as he prepares to mark his 75th birthday on Thursday.
The man who ended the Cold War, says ABC.
By the way, the writer of this story, actually, it's ABC, it's the Associated Press, Vladimir Isachinkov, the man who ended the Cold War, Dream On Fled, and launched democratic reforms that broke the repressive Soviet regime.
That was not what he intended to do, folks.
Continues to enjoy the limelight, globetrotting on behalf of his political foundation and environmental group and taking part in charity projects.
I met Mikhail Gorbachev in Houston at George Bush 41's 80th birthday party two or three summers ago.
And we posed for a picture.
And damned in that picture, we'll put it on a website.
The birthmark ended up on my forehead.
Okay, back to the phones.
I want to thank all of you for patiently waiting.
Las Vegas and Scott, it's your turn on the EIB network.
Hi.
Thank you, Rush.
Megadiddles to you.
Thank you.
I just wanted to share your common sense and inner knowledge regarding that Sharon Stone movie and let you know that just for one person's perspective in Las Vegas, that's me, many members of my family, and a lot of people I know, we're not going to go see that movie.
And it's only because of that warped moral statement she made on sexual activity for children.
And that's the only reason we're not going to go.
And we were looking forward to going to it before that, but we're going to make sure that we're going to be able to do it.
What did she say?
She said something about oral sex is okay for kids because it's not really sexist or something like that.
Well, she said, if you have to do it and you get yourself where you can't say no, do the oral sex.
And that just picks me off.
Oh, that's right.
She was advising young Churon.
Of that.
That's right.
Well, she lost.
Add that to the mix then because she said a lot of things that are, I mean, they're just dumb.
She just said some dumb stuff in the process of promoting the movie.
Well, it just I was, I don't know that she's ever said anything smart.
That's not the point, Mr. Snerdley.
The point is the timing of her dumb statements did not help the movie.
It just, you know, the well, I know you could blame the movie company.
That's what I said earlier.
Who in the world turned her loose to say this kind of stuff the week before the movie comes out?
And old Scott here is right.
You know, telling a bunch of kids, if you can't resist the urge to have sex, just do it oral, just have oral sex and so forth.
But again, this is all being discussed here because the director of the first movie is defending the sequel.
It's like $3.2 million over the weekend.
It's a bomb, folks.
It's just a total bomb.
There's another thing, too, folks.
Now, we got to be honest.
Who is it that goes to movies these days?
We know movies are marketed for young people.
We know they're made for young people.
They always have been.
They always will be.
So you've got your average 19- to 21-year-old guy who's the target here or 18.
I mean, what is, I don't know what the rating of this movie is.
Say 18, 21, maybe 22.
And these guys, you know, they're just hopeless.
Their whole life is a fantasy.
They fantasize about everything because they don't have it in reality.
It hadn't happened to them yet.
Well, you put some 48-year-old babe on the movie screen and say these guys, yeah, she's going to get naked.
You may as well tell them a senior citizen's going to get naked.
A 19 or 21-year-old looks at a 48-year-old as their mother, in some cases, grandmother, if you're from Rio Linda.
And so it just, it's, it missed the boat on a whole lot of levels.
Did anybody stop to think, I haven't seen it, maybe it just isn't any good.
Maybe the movie just isn't any good.
You know, one of the things movie theaters love, studios love more than anything is word of mouth.
In fact, these actors that hate doing these pre-publicity interviews and premieres will all say that that doesn't matter ill of beans if the movie isn't any good, if the audience doesn't like it.
Word of mouth is what sells the movie.
They come out of there, wow, tell their friends, should have seen what I just saw.
I'm going to go back and see it again.
Wow, is it that good?
Yeah, well, let's go together.
Yip, yip, yip, yip, yahoo.
It obviously didn't happen here.
It opened up the first night with 1.2, then tapered off to like 1.0, and then tapered off to 750,000.
If there's any word of mouth on this movie, it's don't waste your money.
And so now Hollywood has to come out and defend this and blame the culture in which they're doing.
It's, well, there's a bunch of puritanical, conservative Christians out there.
You look at the political leadership at the top.
That's what's dictated.
We can't do our erotic movies anymore.
Susan in Richmond, Virginia.
I'm glad you waited.
Welcome to the program.
Hello.
Hello.
Thanks for taking my call.
You bet.
I just wanted to sound off a little bit on the immigration debate and sort of turn back to that subject that you were talking about.
By all means, go right there.
Well, I think as far as the guest worker program, I think there's some things that people need to remember.
We already have close to 40% of the Mexican workforce in the United States today.
And I don't think most people realize that.
And when you talk about a guest worker program, we tried that back in the 40s, 50s, and 60s.
It was called the Broquero program, and it brought millions of Mexicans to work in American agriculture.
And it was a miserable failure.
As it was in 1986.
Right, absolutely.
Absolutely.
But Mexico's number two source of revenue after oil exports is all of the remittances that go back to that country from immigrants living here.
Something like $58 billion a year goes back to Mexico.
So there's a huge capital flight from immigration here that we have now.
And the idea that these are jobs that Americans just won't do, I think, is just a lie for the United States.
In fact, I have, I'm glad you reminded me that I've got the breakdown here from the Pew Hispanic Center of the jobs that they do.
And of course, we know that apparently Americans will not do port terminal work where we had to sell a company out of Dubai of terminals because Americans don't do that.
I don't know what Americans do anymore except media.
Anyway, Pew Hispanic Center, more than 40%, about 4.4 million people of the 12 million supposedly here have arrived within the past five years.
They account for about one in every four farm workers.
They hold 17% of all jobs in cleaning and building maintenance, 14% of all construction jobs, and 12% of food preparation jobs.
Now, I don't, you know, when Dick Durbin was on earlier and he said that you become neurosurgeons, I don't see that here.
I don't see what percentage of our neurosurgeons are, well, neurobiology, yeah, neurobiology, whatever.
I don't see that category here among the illegal immigrants.
But he said they are our future.
You know what's going on here, Susan.
They're just pandering to what they think is going to be a huge block of future voters.
We'll be right back.
Yes, as we always do here, ladies and gentlemen, that's one of the many daily objectives here of me and your crew at the EIB Network.
Back to the phones of Manhattan Beach, California.
This is Steve.
Hello, sir.
Hello, Maha.
Thank you so much for taking my call.
You bet.
And I like to call you God's Substitute Teacher.
But I was wondering if you would share with us the predictions for the opening day for the Major League season.
Predictions for opening day?
Well, predictions for the season.
Predictions for the season.
Oh, geez.
You know what?
I am woefully unprepared.
Well, sorry to hear that.
No, but I got to tell you the truth.
I couldn't begin to tell you who I think, let's see.
American League Ace.
You got to go to the Yankees.
Well, I got a problem with their pitching staff.
I think the Yankees' pitching staff is going to let them down.
They're starting pitching.
They've got this powerful lineup, but I think they haven't replaced that.
This is a tough long season like this.
Who do you think?
I'd be more interested.
You obviously have studied it.
Well, I certainly pray and hope that the Red Sox are the American League champions, and I would be delighted to see a rematch of 2004 with St. Louis over in the National League.
I do think the Cardinals are the best team at baseball.
You'd have to agree with that.
Well, you got to agree with that.
Come on now.
You've got to agree with that.
Well, I was prepared to listen to you.
I didn't want to be the one prognosticating.
I wanted you to.
Well, I mean, you're a football, big football program.
I can't get you to help out with baseball.
I have to be honest with you.
You know, this is, I hope you understand this.
I worked for a baseball team for five years.
A long time ago, from 1979 to 83, it was Kansas City Royals.
And I was in sales and marketing for most of it.
I was also in charge of ceremonial first pitches and choosing national anthem singers.
It was a very important job, and it hasn't been the same since I left.
Well, they've haven't been.
No, they haven't either.
I'll tell you, the thing that happened to me when I worked for the baseball team, long days, especially during homestands, we had the business day, which is a nine-to-five business day, then the game day.
And my responsibility the last three years I was there was director of scoreboard operations.
So it was a long, long, long, long day.
And I can remember a couple years at the end of the season hoping the team didn't make the playoffs just to return to some normalcy.
And I got so close to it that the magic of being a fan, there was no mystique left.
There was no mystery to it left.
There was no, I mean, it knew everything.
I knew what was in the sports pages in the papers was half the story, 10% of the story.
And It just took away some of the ingredients necessary to be a fan in the pure sense, and I haven't gotten it back for baseball, which is why I don't want to get anywhere near working for a football team.
I don't want to know what goes on there.
I want to keep it on the pedestal I have it rather than learning it may not deserve to be there, if that's the case.
And I'm only just now, like the last two years, able to actually sit and watch a baseball game on TV and get into it.
Well, thank God for the baseball fan because President Bush gets treated the appropriate way when he does.
Hey, I'm not running down baseball fans, and I'm not, I don't condemn anything anybody likes.
Country music, that's fine with me too.
It's your taste, you like it.
I'm not going to condemn it.
Classical music, if you like baseball, that's fine.
I think, you know, the thing I did promise on Friday to talk about this Barry Bonds business because USA Today and some others, the typical civil rights groups out there trying to say that this steroid investigation is purely race motivated, and they're trying to get Bonds so that he doesn't break Babe Ruth's record.
And I think, you know, here's the interesting thing.
I got into a little trouble because of my McNabb statements about the media and race and how they had a hope vested in black quarterbacks doing well.
And I still believe it's true.
And I think I've been vindicated countless times since the episode happened.
Now, here comes this business with Bonds.
And some people are saying that the steroid criticism and the focus, the investigation on him is purely motivated by race is absurd because they can't stop him.
There isn't time to stop him from beating Babe Ruth.
Babe Ruth has 714 home runs and Bonds is relatively close.
He could beat that this year.
If he plays 120 games, he could beat that.
And no investigation is going to be completed with action taken against Bonds that will wipe him out this season.
I just don't believe they're going to move that fast on it.
In fact, George Mitchell has been appointed by Bud Seely to do the investigation.
He's on the board of the Red Sox are crying out loud, the number one opponent and enemy of the Yankees.
And there are two people on the Yankees who are going to be implicated in this investigation of Bonds because they were, you know, all part of a grand jury investigation, Jason Giambi and Gary Sheffield.
So if Mitchell comes out and says anything about the Yankees and they have to suspend people or whatever, this is a mess.
You're appointing Mitchell to do this.
Go get somebody that doesn't work in a game to investigate this.
They're investigating this book and all this.
The media largely driving.
I don't think the fans care.
Fans are showing up in droves.
Fans love to see big bomb home runs.
Fans aren't worried about it.
Maybe a couple here or there, but you never hear the fans complaining about it.
But the holier than now righteous moralist leaders in the media have been raising hell about all this for years.
Right.
But the bottom line in the race business is this.
The guy they're actually trying to stop Bonds from defeating is Hank Aaron.
Aaron has 755 home runs, and Hank Aaron was black.
Now, how can it be racial if they're trying to keep Barry Bonds, a black guy, from beating Hank Aaron, who's a black guy, in the home run race?
The Babe Ruth thing, and Babe Ruth is traditional and all that, but the home run king in Major League Baseball is Henry Aaron.
And he's of the same race as Barry Bonds is.
So I just, I think this is like Cynthia McKinney.
You know, the civil rights movement better learn to look forward and move forward.
Here's Cynthia McKinney, who's just a lunatic, regardless her race.
She had a big press conference today.
She slugged a Capitol Hill security guy last week because she didn't go through the metal detector and he didn't recognize her.
And they're out there making this sound like it's Selma, Alabama today in their press conference.
They're making it sound like it's a civil rights movement of the 60s.
She may as well be Rosa Parks.
And she's out there speaking.
She's the victim.
Her lawyer said she's the victim because she's black and she's in Congress.
Well, it's totally absurd in the United States of America in 2006.
It is totally absurd.
But yet they continue to play the same race card the same way, and it's not going to work any longer.
It's not going to work politically the way it did even as recently as 10 or 15 years ago.
The day has come and gone, and it just doesn't work.
What?
Oh, Mr. Snerdley wants to know what is the director of scoreboard.
Not director of scoreboard.
I produced the game.
The director of scoreboard operations is a club employee.
And you've got people that run the video and run the graphics in charge of the ball and strike count up there.
We play the music between innings.
We do the rallying of the fans.
I'm the one that directed all those things to happen during the course of a game.
More than one person, you've got a whole crew of people in there.
You've got the Jumbotrons now.
You've got the individual scoreboards.
You've got people playing music, commercials.
Some people run commercials on their videotrons between innings and so forth.
Yeah, there's a lot going on in there.
And it's key.
I remember one time I got yelled at.
Kansas City by the manager.
Kansas City, well, a lot of times I got yelled out.
I've told you this story before.
I'll tell it again for those of you who are new to the program.
My first year, I'm director of group sales.
We got the largest group in the history of the year every year is Olathe, Kansas.
They sell tickets out there for their big night of the year.
And they were so big that we did pregame ceremonies with them differently than other groups.
We took the whole organizing committee out on the field.
We line them up, third baseline, first baseline behind the pitcher's mound.
I have a microphone actually on the field, and I'm the guy doing the introductions and announcing what great job the Olathe Night Committee has done and all this sort of stuff.
Normally, this happens in the PA booth, but we're doing it down on the field because they're so big.
It's an incentive to keep them doing it every year.
I mean, 7,000 of them.
Saturday night play sold out, 40,000 people.
And, you know, I'm a little nervous.
40,000 people doing this.
And there's a delay from the sound cluster, speaker cluster in center field.
So you hear yourself a half second after you.
So you've got to really stay focused on what you're doing.
I was so focused on doing that, I forgot to take a baseball out for the first pitch.
So I didn't know I didn't have the baseball.
It just totally slipped my mind.
And this is like the 20th first pitch ceremony I had done that season.
It's just not like this on the field.
So I turned to the guy who's going to throw the pitch.
Okay, Tom, let her rip.
But he says, I don't have a ball.
So we're stuck out there.
I've just called for the first pitch.
There's no baseball.
So I had one of two choices.
I could leave and go to the dugout and get one.
I knew if I did that, there wouldn't be one when I got there.
Or I could ask for one on the PA system.
So I asked for one on the PA system.
Every baseball and every bag in the dugout came thrown out of there.
The players just had the best time.
The Olathe Knight Committee scattered all over the outfield chasing these baseballs.
Meanwhile, I reen down, I pick one up, feel like a ground ball, give it to the guy.
He throws the first pitch while all this is happening.
And the whole committee, it must have been 75 people out there.
And they're running all over, and 40,000 people are laughing themselves silly.
Now, because I have a healthy dose of showmanship in me, I think, this is cool.
Doesn't bother me.
I got upstairs and I was greeted with frowns of disapproval by upper management.
This is not the way it's supposed to happen here at the Kansas City Royals.
The other incident was the crowds at the ballgame are notoriously reserved.
They didn't really make a whole lot of noise.
So one day, Jim Amon, who actually entered the data in the computer that went up on the scoreboard, this is before they had the videotron, the big Jumbotron.
I said, Jim, put the thing up there.
Says, let's make some noise.
Put it up there, and the crowd erupted, just started cheering.
That scoreboard door opened, and the PR director came in and started lashing me.
We don't artificially affect the atmosphere at Royal Stadium.
Take that BS down and don't ever put it up again.
Okay.
So, yeah, I had my share of troubles doing the job, but it was still five years I wouldn't trade, you know, because of the people I got to meet and the experience that I got to have.
I think it set me up for everything that was to follow, by the way, which came when I got back into radio in 1983.
I'm a little long here, folks, so I got to take a quick time out.
We'll be back and continue in just a moment.
Stay with us.
All right, now stand by on these sound bites because I'm going to get these McCain sound bites in.
I've committed to doing that.
I'm going to do it.
But first, Henry in Pittsburgh.
Hello, sir.
Yes, Rush.
Yes, sir.
We are on the program.
Thank you.
What is wrong with professional athletes using steroids?
They're paid millions of dollars to perform at a high level, and I think it's clear the steroids improve athletic performance.
So what's wrong with these athletes using steroids under a doctor's care?
You don't think it's cheating?
I mean, if the aim is to increase athletic performance, again, there's no doubt they work.
Professional sports is entertainment, is showmanship.
I'd say, why not?
This is one of the interesting things with it.
If you look at attendance, fans don't seem to be upset with any of this.
They're showing up in record numbers.
You have to hear pockets of it.
But you could make, and I'm not advocating steroids here.
But you could go back to the early days of the game.
And did those guys back then work out and they have gyms and personal trainers and build themselves up using machines that exist today that didn't back then?
We've monkeyed with, we've jacked up the baseball.
There have been periods of time and seasons.
We have a dead ball.
We have a live ball.
We've had home runs jump out of the park one year, next year, hardly any by comparison.
We've toyed with the height of the pitcher's mound, give pitchers an advantage or disadvantage.
They've monkeyed with this game over the years in any number of ways to try to stimulate offense or to harm it, depending on the powers that be that run the game and how they react to it.
There's something about putting a substance, human growth hormone in your system that is considered to be unnatural and cheating.
And there's a stigma that's always going to be attached to that.
And I guarantee they're never going to legalize them.
They're never going to get to the point, go ahead and do it, even though there's questionable data on whether or not they're actually harmful.
You have all kinds of different medical opinions tell you, no, there's no proven link to steroid use and damage.
Others say, that's BS.
Of course there is.
Biggest example, Lyle Alzado, football player, Oakland Raiders, Cleveland Browns, died of brain cancer.
He blamed it on steroids, but there's not a doctor around who can say, yep, his brain cancer is because of steroids.
At any rate, I got to get to these McCain soundbites because the media is turning on him, folks.
They can't understand.
He's flip-flopped on tax cuts.
He's flip-flopped on Jerry Falwell.
And I told you this is going to happen.
And this is actually very beneficial for McCain as far as the Republican base is concerned because they don't like the mainstream press.
It was on Meet the Press yesterday.
Rustert, you're now voting for the tax cut that you not voted for.
You came out and said we should teach intelligent design in classes as well as evolution.
Jerry Falwell, you're now giving a commencement address at Liberty University in May.
You believe Falwell's still an agent of intolerance?
The tax cuts are now there, and voting to revoke them would have been to not to extend them, would have meant a tax increase.
I've never voted for a tax increase.
Well, that's important.
I mean, I finished saying what I've done.
But for the record, it would have gone back to tax rates that you had supported.
Yes, but the economy had adjusted, the tax cuts were there, and it would have been, and that's the way it was designed, would have been tantamount to a tax increase.
And I've never voted for a tax increase in my life with the exception of tax.
I do things because I think they're right.
Yeah, and the next question.
McCain, by the way, he added this.
As regards to Reverend Falwell, which is the major thrust of your comments, I met with Reverend Falwell.
He came to see me in Washington.
We agreed to disagree on certain issues, and we agreed to move forward.
I believe that speaking at Liberty University is no different from speaking at the New College or Ohio State University, all of which I'm speaking.
I speak at a lot of colleges and university.
Do you believe that Jerry Falwell is still an agent of intolerance?
No, I don't.
I think that Jerry Falwell can explain to you his views on this program when you have him on.
You know, Falwell Robertson doesn't matter, but people will never ask somebody, why do you support Calypso Louie?
Louis Farrakhan.
Russert won't let go, though, telling him here he thinks he's losing credibility as a maverick and with his base in the media.
I think most people will judge my record exactly for what it is, where I take positions that I stand for and I believe in, whether it be climate change, whether it be torture, or whether it be a number of other issues with which I am in immigration.
I don't think that my position on immigration is exactly pleasing to the far-right base.
I will continue to take positions that I believe in and I stand for.
And I recognize that a lot of my credibility is based on that.
And I think most Americans will judge me by my entire record.
Finally, McCain Russert says, could we have two wars at once?
You're invading Iran.
I think we could have Armageddon.
But I think that if we handle this right and our European allies stand with us and the Russians and the Chinese stand with us, sanctions might do the job.
And I am confident that this administration will exhaust every effort before contemplating seriously a military option.
And that's it, folks.
The honeymoon's over.
He's praising Falwell.
He's praising Bush.
He's praising tax cuts.
Media is not going to continue to hoist this guy up as the maverick and the great moderate that can unite the differences in this country.
It's over.
As always, my folks, it was just better than almost anything being here with you and doing this program.
And we'll do it again tomorrow.
And I'll look forward to seeing you then.
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