All Episodes
Previous Next
March 28, 2007 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:14
March 28, 2007, Wednesday, Hour #2
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
So funny.
I frankly don't feel like laughing.
Not even your charismatic smile makes me feel like laughing.
What are you laughing about?
Well, anyway, greetings to you music lovers and thrill seekers all across the fruited plane.
It's more broadcast excellence straight up.
Right here on the platter.
We are at 800-282-2882.
The email address, Rush at EIBNet.com.
It's the Rush Limbaugh program from the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.
I want to go to the audio soundbites now.
We predicted this here at the EIB network, and we actually predicted the time.
We knew that when the Edwards thing came up and the comments that were made on this program, we knew they'd be taken out of context.
Half the fun of doing this program is knowing that that's going to happen.
Because the way this happens is that the people who end up commenting on this program never listen to it.
They read watchdog websites, liberal websites, which take out of context things that are said or even straight misquotes.
And that's how the drive-bys learn that what happens on this program.
It's as though you need a secret password and a special receiver that we only give to our listeners in order to hear this program.
It's amazing to me that they continue to rely on third parties and even second parties for the content of this program when it's plain as day.
We're on 600 and some odd radio stations.
Turn it on.
12 noon Eastern every day.
It's plain as day for anybody who wants to listen to it.
But we knew when this Edwards stuff happened that we dropped a couple key things in there within context, knowing full well that it would be taken out of context.
And we have now the videotape.
Well, the audio of the videotape to illustrate it.
Here is first off a montage of the drive-by media trying to distort what I said about Elizabeth Edwards.
And by the way, you know, it's amazing.
I got home from the golf course last night, about 7.30.
And I went in there and I checked the email and I went to the subscriber side, the Rush 24-7 email.
And there must have been, I don't know, 10 or 15 emails.
Rush, I'm sure everybody's telling you this, but I can't believe the way they just took you out of context on X Network.
And then about 10.15, another slew of emails.
I can't believe, I'm sure I'm not the first to tell you.
Everybody's telling me what you're probably telling you what they said about you on Larry King tonight.
Of course, I don't watch any of that stuff, so I don't know what was said.
All the emailers think that somebody else is telling me, so they just tell me that something happened, but they don't give me details.
So, you know, we have to wait for the transcript, go to the next.
It's, well, Cookie rolls tape on this stuff.
Unfortunately for her, she has to watch it in order to put these bites together.
We have two.
This is a Montage Inside Edition.
PMS NBC and Larry King Alive, I think.
Is that it?
Pretty much covers it.
Controversy over what Rush Limbaugh said about Brave Elizabeth.
Most people, when told a family member's been diagnosed with the kind of cancer Elizabeth Edwards has, they turn to God.
The Edwards turned to the campaign.
That's Radio Talk Show host Rush Limbaugh criticizing the decision.
Rush Limbaugh has been saying on his radio program that this is an effort by the Edwards campaign to relaunch his campaign.
To me, Larry, this is beyond the pale.
When a Rush Limbaugh says he's doing this as a political stunt.
Did Rush say that?
Yes, Rush did say that.
We'll have that full bite coming up in just a second.
But let's go back, shall we?
Controversy over what Rush Limbaugh said about brave Elizabeth.
And then they have the bite.
Most people, when told a family member has been diagnosed with a kind of cancer Elizabeth Edwards has turned to God.
The Edwards people turn to the campaign.
I said that.
You heard me say it, but the context was in the discussion of how all political people are different from other people.
And there were all kinds of phone calls from people that day who said they didn't understand it.
When their family members got cancer, they gave up work or they maybe kidned it to work, but they did spend as much time with the kids as possible, especially if they were young because they weren't going to see them graduate from Haskrule, walk down the aisle, and get married, any of this sort of thing.
And they just, callers did not relate, did not understand it.
I was trying to explain political people are a different breed.
The quest for the presidency is a huge, huge thing.
And by the way, what's wrong with saying politics is their religion.
That's where they did turn.
Now, the other voice, the Larry King voice, was Stephanie Miller.
And here's that whole bite that happened on Larry King Alive last night.
To me, Larry, this is beyond the pale.
When a Rush Limbaugh says he's doing this as a political stunt to boost.
Hold it, You know, I just now figured out what this is about.
Re-cue that.
This is about Tony Snow.
This is about Tony Snow.
And I got an email yesterday from one of the producers at Larry King Alive asking me if I if they were going to do a show on Tony, wanted some of Tony's friends to come on, as if Stephanie Miller is a friend, and discuss Tony.
And I said, sorry, I can't.
I'm going to be watching House tonight.
Email back.
I don't blame you.
Anyway, this little bite here between Larry and Stephanie Miller is about Tony Snow.
To me, Larry, this is beyond the pale.
When a Rush Limbaugh says he's doing this as a political stunt to boost his political fortunes, Tony Snow had the good grace to say something nice about Elizabeth Edwards last week.
Did Rush say that?
Yes, Rush did say that.
And, you know, I don't know where we're at.
You know, my dad ran for vice president with Barry Goldwater.
I don't know what either of them would think today of a party that has produced Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter.
Ann Coulter, who just called John Edwards last week.
I asked my listeners to pray for Tony Snow and his family today, just like I asked them to play for Elizabeth Edwards and her family last week.
You know, I, like Obama, think that we really all want a better kind of politics.
Rush thinks Tony Snow's being political.
No, I know I don't.
I don't think that about Tony Snow because he's not Republican, apparently.
Now, what's funny about this?
King can't believe it.
And during this whole rant of Stephanie Miller's, all King was Rush Limbaugh said that Tony Snow would be political.
I can't believe Rush.
Well, Stephanie, well, she's, you know, you remember Goldwater's running mate, Bill Miller, and I did.
Well, I do, and it's his daughter.
And she's a comedian.
She's a lib comedian.
And she has one of these liberal talk shows that nobody listens to.
Or very few.
Sorry, I got to pound the desk here because I get static in the line.
I really do, Brian.
Static something with a connection under the desk here.
I'm sure it is.
All right, so let's put this in perspective.
Let's go back to last Friday.
Now, this is what happens when these people don't listen to this program and get it, get information of what was supposedly said on this program from these so-called watchdog websites.
And put this in context.
This is why it is important to listen to this program.
When the Edwards presser happened, I was stunned that the drive-by media's first take was what the political quality of it was and what the political boost would be and what the political outcome would be.
Howard Feynman, the first soundbite we played, raving about what a great political move this was.
There wasn't any tears for Elizabeth Edwards.
There weren't any prayers or any of this.
Howard Feynman said it was a 10 strike.
On the political scale, it was just fabulous.
And I'm sitting here aghast that these people are looking at a press conference where a candidate's wife has just essentially said that she's got a recurrence of cancer that has a 20% five-year survivability rate.
And they're looking at this and speculating, and they're all present.
We really hate to do this.
But it's a question that must be asked.
And guess who it is they're blaming for doing this?
Me.
I'm the one being accused of ever.
We've got the sound bites.
We had them yesterday.
They want to redo them again because it was redundant.
But if I have to drag them out of the archives, I guess I should drag them out of the archives.
They're all on yesterday's roster.
Mike and Cook, if you can get them.
We played all these soundbites of all these Democrats and media analysts who were talking about the political result and the political quality and the political impact of this press conference.
So let's move to Friday.
And on Friday, Tony Snow makes his announcement that testing has shown whatever it was, a new lump, something in his lower abdomen.
And he was going to go in and get it checked.
So I said, in my way of poking fun at the media and Democrats, I said, I wonder, and I was asking this rhetorically, and you people, and by the way, the emails that I got from people last night indicated to listen to this program know it full well.
I said, I wonder if Tony's just doing this to upstage the Edwards.
I think Tony's doing this to get Bush's poll numbers.
And we all laughed about it.
Tony is our friend here.
We know Tony Snow.
We know how they do and don't do things and how he does things and doesn't do them.
And I was just playing off the reaction.
And if we're going to examine the political impact of the Edwards presser, I wonder if the drive-bys are going to examine the impact of the Tony Snow announcement.
And then yesterday, we found out that it's a recurrence of Tony Snow's earlier cancer that was in his colon, which has been removed, and that it's now moved to his liver.
It's not penetrated a liver.
It's on the outside, had surgery to remove it, going to be in the hospital three weeks.
I asked again if this was an effort by Bush and Rove to upstage Edwards.
And I wondered if the drive-by media was going to be examining the political impact of this on.
And of course, none of that happened.
We didn't get one word of political analysis of Tony Snow, which is fine.
I mean, it's pointing out the differences.
We got a lot of sympathy.
We got a lot of other things.
But for them to say that, to accuse me of suggesting that Tony Snow did this as a political stunt, which is what was said on Larry King Alive last night, just goes to show what we're up against and what you as consumers of news are up against.
And I'm telling you, there's a great rule of thumb here.
If you're watching one of these drive-by-oriented shows and you hear comments about any Republican or any conservative, your best bet is to doubt everything you see or hear and find out on your own.
This has happened to me so much, and it's a routine now.
It's part and parcel of my existence.
I'm under the oppression.
I don't believe anything these people say when they report it, particularly about Republicans and conservatives, because they never, ever get it right about me, as you who are regular listeners of this program understand.
And of course, the satirical and the parodic humor cannot and is not captured by these blogs and websites that sift through this show and then put up these things out of context.
And even if they did get, well, they can't get the humor because they don't understand.
They're not funny.
And they certainly don't understand this kind of humor, even though they claim to love irony.
Now, about to you have the Feynman.
All right, all right, fine.
Well, here's Feynman.
Let's go back.
I'm being pilloried now.
What does they say in the first bite?
Controversy over what Rush Limbaugh said about brave Elizabeth.
Here's Howard Feynman from Friday.
Politically, diagnosed, if you will, politically.
That was a 10-strike of a press conference.
They showed guts was nothing short of remarkable and somewhat unexpected.
And it's always great when something unexpected happens around here.
And that was talking about the fact that there was a leak that was erroneous that Edwards is going to suspend the campaign.
And then all of a sudden, Edwards says, no, the campaign, we're not going to cowr in a quarter.
We're going to move on.
And Feynman.
Wow, that was fabulous.
We love this stuff.
We love press conferences with surprises.
So there's a 100% political analysis of this thing.
And yet the drive-bys are obsessed with controversy over what I said.
Who's the next one that you found?
Oh, yeah.
Here's Matt Wauer.
This is the Today Show, and this is from last Friday.
I'm stalling a little bit here because the question I want to ask you is one that's going to sound terribly inappropriate, and I'm trying to figure out the right way to say it.
Neither John or Elizabeth Edwards asked for this.
However, one of the facts that remains this morning is that John Edwards' picture is on the front page of the New York Times, The Washington Post, USA Today.
And in some ways, we have to ask the political question of what is the impact of this going to be on a campaign that was toiling in third place.
And now we know he got a bump.
He got a bump.
He's still there, but he got a bump.
He went from 9% to 14% or something like that.
Fundraising's up.
There's still stories in the paper about it today.
In fact, here's one.
Edwards moves in the LA Times.
Edwards moves in uncharted territory.
The theme of this story is that Edwards is now defined by his wife's cancer.
And will that continue?
And that could be a problem.
Yet, there is a danger to Elizabeth cancer, and the couple's personal travails will become all-consuming, drowning out Edwards' message and turning the focus away from issues that matter to voters, even though the announcement has humanized the Edwardses in a way that people can relate to.
Well, if the announcement humanized Edwards, it must mean he wasn't humanized before.
So what the drive-bys are saying, all this, there's Matt Lauer.
They're all talking about the political impact, and somehow I am the only one who dared do this.
As to Tony Snow, you know, there's an untold heroic side story of the Tony Snow news.
Tony Snow gave up a great gig, a high-paying job, to do work for the country he loves.
As a husband and a father, with a family he loves, he made a big financial sacrifice to answer the call when the White House said, we want you to be press secretary.
In the midst of this climate, he didn't need this, but he chose to do it.
And it makes him not only a nice guy and the object of our prayers, but in one sense, a true hero.
Tony Snow represents the kind of goodness that makes America America.
He's a longtime friend.
And for these people to think that sit here and seriously accuse Snow of making this up for a publicity stunt to blunt the Edwards press conference gives you an idea of where the so-called thinking on the left resides today.
We'll be back.
Stay with us.
And we're back.
El Rushmost serving humanity.
With every breath I take and all the carbon dioxide I exhale.
Helping to warm the planet myself in ways that millions of Americans could not even dream.
This is Paul in Burlington, Connecticut, as we go back to the phones.
Great to have you, sir.
Hello.
Thanks, Rush.
Thanks for taking my call.
I take exception to the painting of the Democrats of advocating defeat, which I think you know that most of the people, not all of them, there's a cool thing.
Wait, wait, Don't tell me what you think I know.
I know what I know.
Okay.
You won't know what you're doing.
Here's what I think.
Most of these people think that victory is not obtainable the same way that Ed Meese did and James Baker.
And I'll bet you a Club Gidmo t-shirt that at the end of the day, when President Bush pulls up stakes, that he will have achieved something which no reasonable person will call victory.
We will have wasted lives to preserve his legacy.
I think the people that want out want because they don't think it's winnable, not because they want America defeated.
You know, this is your great call.
And I'm actually, I'm glad you took the time to call because you are the role model.
You are the microcosm of today's liberal Democrat.
A, you don't recognize defeat when you want it.
You can't deny they want defeat.
They want surrender.
They own it.
That's exactly what this is about.
It's so bad that the Democrats cannot afford victory to take place.
But beyond that, you know what's really shameful to me and what is truly, truly disappointing is that you, an American, do not think victory is possible in this, the United States of America.
If you don't think victory is possible, you know, there's one opposite to victory and that's defeat.
You think we can only lose.
You want us to lose.
You're telling yourself, you got your brain all tied in knots, telling yourself that, no, no, no, not about defeat, not about surrender.
We can't win.
Yeah, this is about securing Bush's legacy and so forth.
You think anything other than victory is going to secure any kind of a decent legacy for George W. Bush, given who writes legacies these days and who writes the history?
Now, you, people like you are truly frightening and sad and disappointing.
And I feel sorry for you.
When I actually stop to think that there are Americans like you, I get depressed because you do not represent the traditions and the ideals and the institutions that have defined this country's greatness.
And if you keep propagating, and you won't because of abortion, you keep making more and more of you people who think the way you do, our country and the way it's always been and its future is threatened.
You people get your hands in total control of this country.
You got yourself convinced that we don't face an enemy, that we're at war with the enemy, that the enemy is only the enemy because we've made them mad.
We are truly in deep doo-doo.
And I go through this mixture of emotions of feeling sorry for people like you because you sound otherwise intelligent.
You can speak.
And you can do so grammatically correct.
So it sounds to me you ought to be able to figure things out, but you're so warped out there that it's frightening and saddens me.
Just very sad at the same time.
Serving humanity simply by showing up.
I mentioned this earlier.
This is a fascinating, fascinating piece right up my alley here.
And I'm surprised that this piece got published in Newsweek.
And furthermore, that it was put on the PMS NBC website.
And the woman who wrote it is Paula Spencer, who lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
And I can't believe she will last there very long after having written this.
We protect kids from everything but fear.
With hand sanitizer and long-sleeved swimsuits, we're teaching our children a dangerous lesson.
This is in the April 2nd issue of Newsweek, by the way.
Four 11 and 12-year-old girls stood in front of my open pantry, mouths gaping wide.
Look, fruit roll-ups.
Oh my God, chocolate chip cookies.
You have regular potato chips.
We only get the soy kind.
After 14 years and four kids, I thought I'd feel comfortable as a mother.
Instead, I'm increasingly aware of a prickly new sensation that I'm some kind of renegade.
Who knew that buying potato chips would become a radical act?
Or that letting my daughters walk home from school alone would require the approval of the Screwel Administration.
How did I, a middle-of-the-road mom, become a social deviant?
Fear is the new fuel of the American mom.
It's not fear of her child becoming obese.
It's the fear of falling behind, missing out on a sports scholarship, winding up with a thin college rejection envelope.
Apparently, I'm not nervous enough.
Last summer, while I was loafing in front of the TV with my kids, the most benign things morphed into menaces.
For example, the sun.
Long-sleeved UV-protective swimsuits were all a rage at my neighborhood pool, while I could barely remember to bring the year-old sunscreen.
The water wasn't safe either.
At the beach, I saw tots dressed in flotation belts and water wings for shelling along the shore.
They weren't even in the water.
And goodbye, cotton candy and hot dogs.
At a major league game, I saw moms and dads nix the stuff as if they'd never eaten the occasional ballpark treat, as if their children would balloon to juvenile diabetes statistics if a single swig of sugary soda passed their lips.
Half of my kids' friends, who already make A's and B's, had summer tutors in order to keep it fresh.
I thought vacation was for relaxing, recharging.
What would our pioneer four moms think?
You want something to worry about?
Let me show you frostbite, typhoid, and bears.
Heck, what must our own mothers think?
Snap out of it.
You know, go worry about something truly scary like how you're going to pay for retirement.
I thought that once the kids were back in school, things would calm down.
Instead, a fresh seasonal crop of anxiety sprouted, this time over corrupt candy fundraisers and insufficient use of hand sanitizer.
I know one mother who wants to change her son's schedule because he doesn't know anybody in his classes.
She's worried he'll be socially traumatized all year.
Another is afraid of learning disability that she just read about, though her child seems bright and charming to me.
And then there's playground panic.
I had to laugh when an Australian study recently found that playground injuries continue to rise despite safety improvements.
One of the suspected reasons, the safe new play structures are so boring that kids are taking more risks in order to have fun.
The fears are as irrational as they are rampant.
Recently, my children's elementary school failed to meet adequate yearly progress goals for a particular minority's reading progress under the No Child Left Behind Act.
They were placed in a warning list.
This meant that parents might gain the right to transfer their kids to another school in the district.
Never mind that this very same school sent more kids to the district's gifted program than any other, or that this entire district has the highest SAT scores in the state.
The day the news broke, six different mothers asked me if I was planning to transfer my kids from neighborhood pride and joy to threat to child's future overnight.
It's not that I think parents shouldn't worry about anything.
I'm personally petrified of SUV drivers on cell phones.
I fret as much as the next mom about how to pay for college.
I pray my kids won't wander onto my space and post something dumb.
Hey, that's probably already happened.
But you can't go around afraid of everything.
It's too exhausting.
No matter how careful you are, bad stuff happens.
Diaper rash, stitches, all your friends assigned to another class.
And it's seldom the end of the world.
Watching my daughter's friends ogle my pantry, I realize there's one big legitimate fear that I haven't heard anybody mention.
What's the effect of our collective paranoia on the kids?
Yes, these very kids, we want to be so self-sufficient, so responsible, so confident, so happy, so creative.
They're growing up thinking these weirdly weeny views are healthy and normal.
Walking out my front door that day, each girl happily clutched a plastic baggie stuffed with exotic kid snacks that my daughter had doled out to them in pity.
I may be a rebel mom, but at least I'm not afraid of a chocolate chip cookie.
This is right up my alley because I don't know whether this woman realizes, as Paula Spencer, just how squarely she has hit the nail on the head here.
I'm sure you've seen this.
It's been floating around the internet for I don't know how long about the things that just, I'm 56, just the horrors that we survived growing up compared to the attempt to sanitize children's lives today.
But global warming, all of these other political fears get thrown into this mix too, and it works.
You have little children who can't sleep at night now because they think that we're killing polar bears.
In fact, polar bears are killing panda bears in a Berlin Zoo.
Well, they play a role in it, so it said.
Details of that coming up.
But we've got all of this paranoia.
This is going to cause this.
This is going to get you sick.
This is going to get you this.
This is going to cause that.
And every day there's more of it released, and it's just absurd.
And so she's right.
There is a climate out there that's creating paranoia and fear of nature, human and otherwise, to the point that people are expecting that it's entirely possible to have a flawless existence, one with little danger, one with hardly any disappointment, one with no failure.
And we want to shield all of our young people from the slightest bit of confrontation, the slightest bit of pain, discomfort.
All of the lessons that life teaches, these fears that are being promulgated by nanny state liberals are actually stunting the growth of young kids.
And they're going to grow up and they're going to become adults.
And the fears are going to be realized and they're going to be passed on.
And they're not going to have the slightest ability to cope with what the real world is really all about once they leave parents' house, leave the protected environment of a grade school or what have you.
And this is something that, you know, I remember when it first hit me, go back to the early 90s.
And it's one of these water volleyball games up at Croton on Hudson I've told you about at Roger Eles' house.
These are fun events.
And, you know, we didn't cut the women any slack.
I mean, women and men are on the same teams, opposite sides of the net.
Nobody went easy on slamming the ball, dunking it.
If a woman was in there, it was water volleyball.
And everybody had a great time.
No problem whatsoever.
After one of these things, always had a barbecue, sat around Chew DeFet, some 26-year-old school teacher who was a babe started talking about how we're pushing kids too fast and just pushing them too hard.
We're really, we're demanding too much.
I was appalled.
I said, what do you mean pushing them too hard?
We're trying to make them learn too much too soon.
We're trying to make them grow up.
We need to relax.
We just let these kids find their own way.
So what do you want the inmates to run the asylum?
What do you mean by that?
Well, you want the kids to tell you when they want to learn and what they want to learn and what they aren't going to learn and when they are going to show up and when they're not going to show up and when they're going to leave?
Well, I just think we're being too hard.
We're pushing them too hard.
Our expectations are too high.
Expectations too high.
That's exactly how you get more out of them.
It's when they're young.
Why do you think most people are in school at that age?
Because they don't know diddly squad, and that's when they have the energy to soak it all up and learn it.
It's when they have the energy to study and do all these things.
They don't have any other responsibilities.
That's theirs.
They're too young to go out and earn a living.
This is what they have to do.
We need an educated society.
You cut back on it, and you're going to create a generation of blithering idiots.
Became a knockdown dragout.
Because she just, you're the problem.
You people like you are the problem.
You're just a slave driver.
I said, I don't drive any slaves.
I don't have any kids.
But I'm damn glad that my kids aren't being taught by you because every night I'd have to do a little mind reworking after you'd programmed them into a bunch of marshmallow men robots.
Who do you say?
Well, you say we were not pushing them hard enough.
And I want my kid to learn.
I want my kid to think that I would want my kid to know that there are great expectations.
I want him reaching for heights that he doesn't think he can get to.
Well, you're just, that sets him up for disappointment.
What if he fails?
We all fail.
Are you what you really wanted to be?
Have you reached your life's dream teaching school and telling us that it's too much the way we're doing?
Have you really reached your 26 years old?
Is that it for you?
I resent that question.
I'm doing this because I love, I'm sure you do love children, but you're not doing anything if this is the way you're being teaching them.
You're not prepping them for anything other than to be a bunch of softies.
And you're nowhere near getting their full potential out of them.
Well, how do you know what their full potential is?
Well, see, that's basically the difference between you and me, because I think most people have far more potential than they realize themselves.
Most people have a comfort level, and when they get there, they stop.
But most people have the ability to go far beyond their comfort level if they're just inspired and motivated.
And you don't inspire people and you don't motivate people by acquiescing to their cries and moans that it's too tough.
I asked her, I said, how are you at math?
Well, I'm not the best at math, but I don't teach math.
I said, it doesn't matter.
You know why you're not very good at math?
Because you've been told that math is tough for women, that women don't do well in math, so you probably didn't pursue it.
Who says women aren't any good at math?
That may be statistically true, but you probably have a, you could learn math if you wanted to, if you had somebody made it interesting to you.
But you fall for all this stuff, and now you've got these kids falling for all these things.
We're pushing them too hard and so forth.
This is a problem.
It's just exacerbated now, and it's amplified.
It's been amplified.
I don't know how many times.
To where life is nothing but a constant fear.
A constant fear of the food we eat, constant fear of the cars we drive, a constant fear of the barbecue pit and what it's doing to the environment, a constant fear.
And when you've got the essence of innocence, these little skulls full of mush who are primed to soak up as much as they can, when all you're putting into their heads is fear and paranoia and all those things based on lies like they are killing the polar bears or worse, their parents are.
It's this.
I'll tell you what the purpose this is.
It's to create a whole generation upon generation, a generation of little young leftist radicals who are going to end up incapable of getting any kind of work except going to a non-profit where they have to rely on the donations of other saps because they're not prepared to go out and earn a real living with real work in the real world.
And there's a bunch of that happening out there.
I don't have any patience for it whatsoever and I love running into people that have that kind of attitude, especially people they think they're doing so much for the human condition and so much for people when they're not doing diddly squat.
Well, I get together with these kids after school, you know we have conversations, teach them arts and crafts and dancing and say, well, that's all well and good makes you feel good, but it's worthless if that's it, if that's the full scope of what you think you're doing for kids with keeping them off the streets.
It's keeping away from drugs.
I appreciate that, but it's far beneath all that they're capable.
We have to build their self-esteem.
The best way to build self-esteem is through achievement and accomplishment, not by taking the self-esteem of others and trying to whittle it down.
Anyway, well, we had a story not long ago, the promotion of all this self-esteem in school was doing what was causing all kinds of problems because we've got a bunch of ego freaks running around who don't deserve to have the huge egos.
I have been taught to love myself and I love myself and I'm good.
And they have no reason for it.
They've just been told that that's a justifiable way to behave and have an attitude.
Yeah, they get out there to get crushed by reality.
The first time they go out for a job interview and they're treated like just one in a million of the ants that are showing up.
And when they're 24 and don't have the 5,000 square foot house that they grew up in, then all of a sudden it's Bush's fault or the country sucks or what have you.
Anyway, I've got to take a break.
I'm a little long here in this segment, which means the next one's going to be proportionally short as well.
Sorry about that, but you know the drill.
Back in a second.
I feel like I'm in my first radio station.
Blow on the microphone.
It went out.
Massive bolts of static here.
It had to bang on the desktop, which creates static in itself, but it gets rid of it sometimes.
Anyway, Kathleen in Grants Pass, Oregon, you're next on the EIB network.
Welcome.
Hi, Rush.
Nice to talk to you.
This is about the Elizabeth Edwards thing.
And regarding your show that day, you made a comment that there was a leak that day that said that they were going to shut down the campaign.
And of course, after the news conference, everybody knew that they weren't going to shut down the campaign.
And you made a comment that was this a political ploy.
You did not say, was John Edwards using his wife's cancer as a political ploy or using this to his advantage?
I haven't, but others have, by the way.
And others have said even worse.
Right.
But that day, the minute you said that about his campaign floating the idea or coming out and actually saying the campaign was going to shut down with a political tool, I knew right then and there somebody was going to misconstrue this or not misconstrue this, was going to out and out lie about the fact that you said that Edwards was going to use this as a political tool.
And that's what Miss Miller's comment was about.
It was not about Tony Snow.
It was about you, but absolutely an untruth about you saying that Edwards was using this as a political tool.
And that's why Larry King was so incredulous that you would say this, because she was giving him the idea that you actually said that John Edwards is going to use his wife's cancer as a political ploy.
And that's what it was.
It was not Tony Snow.
Oh, okay.
Well, I didn't do that either.
No, you absolutely.
I heard the show.
I heard the show.
But the point is, you know, it's not that Stephanie Miller is, who is a babe, by the way, I must point this out.
It's not that she is confused, in a sense.
It's that she's not coming to the source.
I can give you the two or three websites that have made it their business to take this program out of context, take me out of context, and create all of this hubbub.
Let me give you a short little story.
I hope I have time to squeeze this in.
The leak showed up on the Politico.com website, which is these guys that left the Washington Post, John Harris and Mike Allen and Roger Simons over there.
And they put a leak out at 11 o'clock, which is about 11.05, which is an hour before the Edwards press conference, which said that the Edwards campaign was going to be suspended.
They had a clean, good source that had never done them wrong.
Then press conference comes and Edwards' going to extend the campaign.
The leak was inaccurate.
The Politico corrected it and they did it quickly.
But then I heard the Howard Feynman bite and Howard Feynman said, oh, this was exciting.
So I speculated on the expected, what if the Edwards people to spice up the press conference, because everybody knows that press conferences leak the contents first or announcements like this.
What if they purposely leaked that there were going to be a suspension of campaign so that when they announced the opposite, it would really light off balloons and so forth.
And I'm going to run out of time for this, but I want you to hold on to the break here, Kathleen, because I want to explain this.
I want to get your reaction.
Okay.
I then got emails from John Harris at politico.com who told me that friends of his, sources, told him of things I had said about Politico, which I hadn't even gotten close to uttering the syllables.
It's exactly what happened to Stephanie Miller, but I've got to sit tight because we'll get to this.
Can't wait to tell the rest of this story.
Don't go away.
Hang on out there, Kathleen.
Got another break here.
I'm going to go out and swing the golf clubs here in the parking lot.
▲
Export Selection