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July 3, 2007 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:03
July 3, 2007, Tuesday, Hour #3
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And greetings to you music lovers, thrill seekers, and conversationalists all across the fruited plain, well-known radio racon tour, general all-around good guy, harmless, lovable little fuzzball, L. Rushball, the all-knowing, all-caring, all-sensing, all-everything, maha rushy, doctor of democracy, America's real anchorman and truth detector.
Serving humanity simply by showing up.
Great to have you with us.
800-282-2882 if you want to be on the program today.
First winner we announced at the beginning of the program today of our iPhone giveaway contest.
We have 10 8-gig iPhones.
The first one goes to Tom L of North Platte, Nebraska.
He's listening to us on KODY AM 1240 out there.
I don't know if we've made contact with Tom yet or not.
We were attempting to via email.
We got nine more of these to go.
We'll take tomorrow off because we have a best of show tomorrow.
But when we get back here on Thursday, we'll have the next winner announced.
You're saying, how do I get one of these?
Well, it's easy to sign up.
You simply go to rushlimbaugh.com and click on, you can't miss this, but we've got this bannered all over the place on the website.
So you just go to the Rush in a Hurry banner, click on it, and sign up for our free Rush in a Hurry email newsletter that goes out about an hour after the program each day.
It's a summary of what's happened on the program, gives you a heads up about what's coming when the full website is updated to reflect that day's content.
And that's all you do.
It's free.
And there's no obligation here.
And your email address is not going to be given or sold to anybody.
We're not going to harass you with it.
We're just trying to bring a feature of the website to as many people as possible.
It's a free thing.
There's no cost involved in it at all.
And one of the things that we are, admittedly, we're promoting something here, folks, and that is our podcasts of the program each day.
The iPhone, of course, works with iTunes.
And we, via iTunes, make podcasts of the full radio program available each day.
And that happens within an hour after the program.
And log on and run your iTunes and throw a switch on our website, sign up for it.
It'll automatically download to your iPhone or iPod, if you have an MP3 player.
And then you've got Rush on the Go when you want it and at your leisure, doing whatever you want to do.
Some days you can't make the live broadcast.
Now, we are good people here, ladies and gentlemen.
We are thoughtful.
We are compassionate.
And above all, we here at the EIB Network are generous.
And we knew that giving away an iPod still incurs expense because to use it, you have to sign up for two years service contract with AT ⁇ T.
They are the loan provider of connectivity service for the iPod.
So with each iPhone, sorry, thanks for the correction in there.
With each iPhone that we give away here, we're also going to send the winner a check for $1,493.76, roughly $1,500, because that's what two years of service at $59.99 a month costs.
So no cost, no tax consequences.
The price here and the size of the giveaway does not get close to the $12,000 exemption that we all have and give anybody that much without paying any tax.
The recipient has to pay no tax.
The giver has to pay no tax.
It's a $12,000 per person exemption.
So there's no financial consequence to this at all.
And there's also, well, and there is something free here.
Each winner gets a $100 gift card from BocaJava.com, brand new sponsor of ours, some of the finest coffee, I mean, superior coffee that you've ever tasted.
And start the day with it each and every day here at the busy EIB broadcast complex while engaging in intense show prep.
So you sign up, costs you nothing.
You might win an iPod iPhone, sorry, and the amount of money to operate it for two years.
And you simply do this by logging on to RushLimbaugh.com.
It's called Rush in a Hurry.
And if you've previously registered for Russia in a Hurry, you are already registered.
You don't have to sign up again, whether you signed up months ago, a year ago, whether you signed up today or yesterday.
Moving on to other items in the stack of stuff here.
This from USA Today, businesses target failed immigration bill.
The business community already pushing to resurrect portions of a wide-ranging immigration bill that died in the Senate last week.
Among the priorities for businesses are provisions to allow more highly skilled workers into the country every year and to expand programs for farm workers.
We're going to have to go back and see how many things from the bill we can pull out and get fixes for.
Said Angelo Amador, the director of immigration policy for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, who also said that his group would push to give undocumented students who've been raised in the USA a chance to earn legal status and finish their education.
He added that businesses face increasing immigration raids and new legislation at the state and local levels precisely because the federal government is lax on this.
They are lax on all areas of enforcement of existing current immigration law.
The American Farm Bureau Federation will provide, or will continue, I'm sorry, pushing for a farm worker program, probably more expansive than the one in the failed bill.
That program provided a path to legalization for about 1 million current ag workers and made it easier to use a guest worker program.
What do you mean, 1 million?
Path to legalization.
By the way, isn't that interesting?
Path to legalization.
Now they start talking about what was in the bill for real.
Now they start talking about the truth.
In all these stories prior to this one, it was path to citizenship.
There was no path.
Well, there was a path there, but it was so loaded with landmines that the average illegal wouldn't bother trying to walk down the path.
All these fines, all these fees, there was no way.
Path to legalization is what it was, but it was certainly for more than 1 million.
Paul Schlegel, the director of public policy for the American Farm Bureau Federation, said it's an issue that we've been working on for a long time.
We're not going to stop.
Nowhere in this story is there any reference to border security.
Nowhere in this story is there reference, not one, to border control.
You know, Scott Rasmussen, the pollster, says that according to his data, the primary reason that there was so much opposition to this was no border control, no stopping of the invasion of illegals into the country.
Amnesty was bad enough, but it wasn't the one thing that bothered everybody.
It was border control.
And note that they still in Washington don't get it.
And folks, they're not going to because the people that are behind this and want this to happen want there to be a constant flow of farm workers, they are called here in this story, the current crop of low-skilled and uneducated people that form the labor pool that business would love to have.
Now, there is one thing good to be said about this.
One of the problems with this bill, one of the many, I mean, it's hard to single out one as being the overriding problem, but when you see on a piece of legislation the word comprehensive, comprehensive immigration, that is the wrong way to go about anything, trying to fix everything under the sun and add a whole bunch of new provisions that nobody knows about because it's not happening in sunlight, no committee hearings, no nothing.
The way this thing ought to happen is incrementally.
And this whole debate ought to be part of the presidential campaign, both in the primaries and in the general election.
It ought to be.
It is that important to the American people.
And this effort to get this thing passed in comprehensive form was simply a way to ram it down people's throats while nobody knew what was in it.
But of course, because of me and talk radio and all this other so-called new media, you people who would not have known anything about this at all on your own, because you're a bunch of adults, because of me, they were unable to sneak it through.
Now, I say this with due sarcasm and cynicism because you're not idiots, and it's about time that they stopped looking at you as idiots.
I mean, there are plenty of idiots in this country, but you people in this audience are not idiots, and furthermore, you are voters.
And that is what, well, they secretly know it, but they try to relegate that status of yours to something of lesser importance than it ought to be.
Anyway, we got the Red Skelton thing.
It'll come up right after the...
Oh, look at Bald Eagle no longer endangered.
Does that mean we can start shooting him again?
I'm just kidding.
I would never shoot a bald eagle.
I've got some great pictures I took of bald eagles when I was up there fishing for salmon.
I'm just kidding.
Folks, it'll lack a light-hearted day here on the EIB network heading into the 4th of July holiday.
Bald Eagle no longer endangered, but the bottom line is malaria victims still are.
Thanks to Rachel Carson.
We'll be back after this.
And we are back, El Rushball, behind the golden EIB microphone, the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.
You know, I heard about this some time ago.
And I, this next story, I can't remember since recently.
Maybe I saw something on television about it or was listening to people talk about it.
It's from Livescience.com.
Researchers at Harvard and McGill University, which is in Montreal, are working on an amnesia drug that blocks or deletes bad memories.
The technique seems to allow psychiatrists to disrupt the biochemical pathways that allow a memory to be recalled.
In a new study, the drugenolol, propanolol, that's what propanolol is used along with therapy to dampen memories of trauma victims.
They treated 19 accident or rape victims for 10 days, during which the patients were asked to describe their memories of the traumatic event that had happened 10 years earlier.
Some patients were given the drug, also used to treat amnesia.
Others were given a placebo.
A week later, they found that patients given the drug showed fewer signs of stress when recalling their trauma.
Similar research led by Professor Joseph Ledieu has been carried out at New York University on rats.
And they were able to remove a specific memory from the brain of rats while leaving the rest of the animals' memories intact.
I'm not so sure I like this.
I know it sounds nice.
We're back to that.
It sounds nice to be able to block our so-called bad memories.
I mean, some bad memories are not traumatic.
Don't all of our memories, isn't that the result of our life experience?
And isn't it our life experience that shapes us?
Yes, Mr. Limbaugh, but you must realize that unlike you, so many people have so much pain.
And if they could go through the day without remembering their pain, then it would free them up to enjoy their life more.
You just don't care, Mr. Limbaugh.
Look at what you liberals out there, nobody's going to be stress or trauma-free.
You're trying to inculcate us with crisis and death around every corner every day, sometimes multiple times a day.
For all the bad memories that you're going to be able to wipe out, you're going to help us create new ones just by having to deal with you.
Sure, I would love to be able to retract from my existence in my memory all memory of the Clinton years.
Actually, I wouldn't.
They were very traumatic, but they have shaped me.
Life experiences shape us.
And this is, you know, this is just about good, folks.
I'm telling you, it's not.
I know it.
It sounds nice.
Sounds sweet, but it's not.
You start tampering around this way, and there will always be unintended consequences.
But beyond the unintended consequences, the idea that you can shield yourself from bad things that happen to you for the memory of them, even if it could be done.
If you met somebody that had this, you would not be meeting a real person.
You wouldn't be meeting a person whose entire life experiences have been factors in shaping that person as you met them at that moment.
John in Boca Raton, Florida.
You're welcome to join us next on the EIB network, sir.
Hello.
Hi, Rush.
It's a real honor to chat with you.
Thanks for listening to you for here.
Just very quickly, wanted to get your take of the future of public television, which most Americans know as PBS.
If you ask them what public television is, I'm asking because I'm in the documentary business independently, and I give programs free to independent stations.
So I just wanted to get an idea from you.
I've got a certain opinion privately of PBS, and I just wanted to get a sense where you think public television as PBS is going and so forth.
Well, I don't think it's going away.
It's a liberal institution.
It's funded by the taxpayers.
And with the libs breathing down everybody's neck about the fairness doctrine and how unbalanced the media is.
If somebody made a move to actually defund PBS, I mean, there would be heart attacks.
There would be, I mean, there would be nuclear warfare over this.
Exactly.
Started by the lips.
No, PBS is not going to go anywhere.
And neither is NPR.
I mean, liberals are not going to let...
That's like saying, what's going to happen to CBS?
Right.
Now, the problem is CBS could implode.
The CBS Evening News with Katie Couric is imploding, but PBS doesn't need ratings because PBS doesn't need viewers.
PBS doesn't sell advertising.
All they need is a bunch of idiots that donate when they do their little pledge drives and their auctions and then the taxpayer money that they get and they can stay afloat and produce whatever they want.
Sure.
They're not really, they're not, they don't succumb to market pressures.
That's true.
So are you that you do documentaries for them?
No, no.
I have an independent company.
I'm the president, CEO, and we give these programs to real public television, which is the individual stations all over the country.
Right.
And then we have major global corporations and nonprofits that sponsor them.
So we give the programs to the stations, but PBS sells programming to those stations, which I know you're aware of.
Oh, I know every intricacy of how this whole network operates.
So they regard us, unfortunately, as competition, but we're out there independently working with, you know, like I said, the biggest names in medicine and the environment and so forth.
And it's tough.
It's not.
Okay, so you make your money selling your documentaries to local PBS affiliates.
No, we give the programs to them.
We also give them to the U.S. government, Voice of America Television.
Wait, wait, wait.
You're going to have to help people understand if you're giving away your work, how you're earning money.
Right.
We make money because we'll do a documentary about an issue in medicine, a new medical device, a new drug, and we have corporations that sponsor those programs.
Aha.
So you've got underwriters.
Right, exactly.
And so the underwriters pay you more than what your actual production costs are, and that's how you get your profit.
Right.
They benefit from our economies of scale, but we do hundreds of these a year.
So that's how you're able to give away the programming to stations that PBS is also trying to sell programming to their opponents.
Exactly.
And so you probably wouldn't mind it if PBS as a network went down the tubes because you wouldn't have a limitlessly funded competitor.
Right, exactly.
And I'm a little guy, and they obviously regard little guys like me as competition.
No, no, no, no.
These are liberals.
They love the little guy.
You're a victim.
They ought to be subsidizing you.
It's just like Hillary and Obama raised all this money.
Poor Bill Richardson didn't have as much.
Winner Hillary and Obama going to start sharing what they have raised so it can be fair with these other Democrats.
It's an unlevel playing field in the Democrat primary.
And just like you, you are a victim.
You're a victim of a giant, massive bureaucracy, except this one's run by liberals.
And so you're not actually looked at that way.
You're looked at as a little, you know, you're a gnat.
Exactly.
You know, you're a competitor out there, and you're probably doing pretty good programming, and they'd like to find a way to snuff you out.
Right.
Well, as long as you keep giving your programming away, you know, PBS is into that kind of thing.
Do these PBS stations still do these telethons?
Yes, they do indeed.
I used to be on those all the time.
I was a local radio personality.
I was on one in Pittsburgh.
Got thrown off one in Kansas City.
One of my, yes, I can't tell you.
I can't tell you what.
One of my proudest days, they gave me the hook after my first segment.
It was Channel 41 in Kansas City.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I was being me.
And PBS, stuffed shirt, buttoned down.
Exactly.
You know, tell me, what would you say were I to say to you, you know, they put you to sleep here with their melodic tones, and I was, you know, can't tell you what I did.
And I got thrown off.
But I used to do those things, and they were fun.
That's where I met Mr. Rogers in Pittsburgh.
He was on one.
Oh, that's neat.
Well, that's why they need this interstitial programming because they can't afford for a viewer out of boredom to change the channel.
All right, look, next time that they do one of these telethons, call in and give them $500 for the free earmuffs or whatever the, you know, the prizes they give away.
For PBS, you remember, without your pledge, they can't dust.
That's right, a man, a living legend, a national treasure, a way of life.
Learn it, love it, live it.
It is a beautiful thing.
Mayor Antonio Villaragosa, Villa Ragosa, who is in the midst of divorce proceedings with his wife, acknowledged in a statement published today that he is in a relationship with a Spanish-language TV reporter.
I met Mayor Villa Ragosa one night when I was innocently minding my own business in New York at a restaurant where approached our table two times former President Clinton.
Second time he brought with him Mayor Villa Ragosa to distract me while Clinton started chatting up a woman I was with.
He said, it is true that I have a relationship with Ms. Mirthala Salinas.
Villa Ragosa said in a statement published in the L.A. Daily News.
As I've said that I take full responsibility for my actions, and I do.
And I once again ask that people respect my family's privacy.
For my part, I intend to stay focused on my job and to work as hard as I can every day.
I hope he gets the privacy he would what?
Which aspect?
Oh, oh, well, I've got to be working as hard as I can.
I want to listen to you.
I'll tell you this one.
I did not have sex with that woman's sexual relations, that woman, Ms. Lewinsky, not a single time ever.
I've never asked anybody to lie.
I've got to go back to work for the American people.
You're right, Mr. Snerdley.
It's right out of the Clinton playbook.
What gets me here is asking for privacy.
He'll probably get it.
I hope he does.
I certainly hope his family does.
I have had many episodes in my Sterling public career that I would have loved to have had privacy.
And I just know damn well that if I'd ever brought it up, I would have gotten 10 times the lack of privacy that I was already experiencing.
Here's Victor in Stockton, Missouri.
Victor, I'm glad you waited.
Welcome to the EIB Network.
How are you today, Roger?
Just fine.
Couldn't be better, sir.
All right.
I had a question for you.
Yeah.
Some years ago, you were belittling the idea that there was an internal conspiracy to overthrow the Constitution and the government.
And I'm wondering if you still have that opinion.
Of course I do.
An independent conspiracy, internal conspiracy, to overthrow the Constitution of the government.
Yeah, I'm still dubious of that.
You have evidence?
Well, I just look at the way things are going, and I look back to when Reagan was president and he was engaged in the large military buildup during that time.
I just have a theory that the people who were behind the Soviet Union at that time decided they were not going to ride that horse to victory, so they decided they'd have to take another approach.
And I think they figured out that the best way to do it is go after the biggest, baddest guy on the block.
And the only way to do that was to do it politically.
And I think they set their sights with the Democratic Party, which was in power at the time, at least in Congress.
Well, who's the biggest, baddest guy in the block?
Us?
That's the United States, yeah?
United States, yeah.
So if they could take over a political party and you ride that horse to victory, then I think they would have a much better shit.
Now, wait, that's going a little bit far.
I don't think that these internal conspiracists would have to take over a party.
I think they already have one.
Right.
See, here's the thing, Victor.
I do think in this country that there are plenty of people.
Whether they're conspiring, I mean, you and I are conspiring right now and talking about this.
But I know what you mean by conspiracy.
I don't think, for example, that there's a media conspiracy.
I don't think there has to be a media conspiracy.
They all think alike as it is.
They don't have to get together in order to figure out what they all think and believe and are going to say.
It just is the way they are.
You don't think there's a Joseph Goebbels somewhere with a printing machine that sends out all the propaganda they put out to drives the media and drives it?
Of course they have people at the headquarters that fax up talking points to pundits that go out there and so forth.
But that's not being done in the closet.
That's out in the open.
Everybody knows that's going on.
Well, the ones you can see, I think, are.
No, there aren't any secret points going out there.
There's no way to keep that stuff secret.
You don't think the George Soros of the world would love to get control of the Congress of the United States?
I think George Soros would love to reshape this country.
A whole bunch of liberals would like to destroy the institutions and traditions that have made the country great and rebuild it in their own vision.
Yeah, but that's happening right in front of our eyes, Victor.
It's not a conspiracy.
Well, I don't.
See, I'm not really sure whether they're using the Leninist model or they're using the Nazi model.
I see the tactics of...
Wait, the Leninist or Nazi model, did you say?
Yes.
Yes, because I see them using the same tactics.
It's neither one.
They're using the Stalinist model.
Right, there you go.
There you go.
You know, Lenin and the Nazis went out and murdered their opponents and mass murder.
We haven't gotten to that point yet, Hugh.
Well, yeah, but they didn't get to power until they had convinced the people to vote, vote in.
Yeah, but the Democrats have had power all these years, and they have not engaged in mass murder of conservatives and so on.
I don't think the Democrats would do that.
It's not going to, well, I think, see, I have a difference between what I consider a liberal and what I consider a Marxist, a solutionist, or a Stalinist.
That's a very fine line when you start liberals and socialists.
You can hardly see the space between them, Victor.
Well, there's a difference between a socialist a la Sweden and a socialist a la Marxist or Hitler.
A socialist in Sweden doesn't have any power.
They're neutral, so they're just destroying themselves.
Exactly.
But the idea is that if they get power, that they could have the control of the U.S. armed forces, then they could reshape the world any way they wanted to.
They already did that.
Bill Clinton controlled the armed forces for two years.
Two terms, two terms.
Yeah.
Let me ask you one more question, too.
Yeah.
Do you think that we can solve this immigration problem without first solving the abortion problem?
In other words, does 15 million Mexicans replace 45 million Americans?
Well, I think you've probably heard me make this point.
I think one of the reasons the proponents of illegal immigration are so adamant here is we have aborted 40 million would-be Americans.
And the bodies need to be replaced for another reason, for no other reason than Social Security taxes.
Yeah, I understand that point because I've heard you say that before, and I agree with that.
But I look at our society as being a consumer-based society, and when you take that many people out who would already be having children now, there's a, and we have people, we have needs for manpower in the armed forces, we have needs for manpower in all kinds of different fields.
And I'm wondering what we would be doing if we didn't have those 15 million Mexicans who be taking some of these jobs.
Serving in the armed forces, for that matter.
Taking some of these jobs and serving.
Well, you know, it's a what if.
It's an if question because an if is for children.
It's a what is is.
And we have aborted 40 million.
So you can't, what if we hadn't?
Now, you can you can maybe look at that argument and say, okay, well, we're going to stop all these ill these abortions.
But that's, you know, that's, you've got to be realistic.
Well, I don't think you can get rid of Roe v. Wade, but I think there has to be an effort somewhere along the line.
I think it's in the process of working.
I think, you know, changing people's minds and hearts, having a greater respect for life.
But these battles, Victor, have always been fought.
There have always been different ideologies, political parties, partisanship that has roiled the country since the beginning of times, the beginning of our founding.
The Civil War was that period was people here alive today would not believe it if they really dug deep and found out the kind of divides and the things that politicians and public figures were saying about each other.
This stuff is always, you've always got to have a battle for control because this is all about power.
I don't, if there are a bunch of conspiracies out there that we don't know about, Victor, they're pretty pathetic.
They should have taken over by now.
If they're as powerful as we all assign them to be, well, you assign them to be.
If they're that powerful, we ought to all be in jail now anyway.
We ought to all have our freedom gone.
George Soros should be representing this country at the UN.
But George Soros lost the election in 2004.
His candidate went down in flames.
How does that happen?
Well, you can't say, well, a conspiracist did that just to set us up, to get us to relax.
If they were that all-powerful, they would have already taken over.
They would have neutered the U.S. military.
Most of this stuff's happening right out in the open.
And it's tough enough to get some people to believe what they're actually seeing when you explain it to them.
That's tough enough.
If you start getting into all this garbage, what's going on behind the scenes that we can't see and these giant puppet masters pulling the strings of the people that we can see, you're going to lose everybody, Victor.
Nobody's going to want to believe that in the first place.
Life in this country is too good.
There's too much affluence, well, not too much, but there's great opportunity for affluence in this country.
We've never had a better economy than we have today.
We've never had a better future than we have here.
Everybody's feeling pretty pumped up because we stopped a huge, horrible piece of legislation.
How did conspiracists let that happen?
I mean, that shouldn't have happened.
That was the comprehensive Destroy the Republican Party Act of 2007.
And somehow, the people staved it off.
You talk, one more thing about this abortion business, Victor.
For all this talk about jobs Americans won't do and all of that, one of the things that I think is going on in this country and has been for the longest time is a softening of too much of our young population.
We're treating them as babies into their 20s and 30s.
We make excuses for them when they still live at home with mom and dad when they're 35.
We are afraid to raise kids and toughen them up.
Everybody feels entitled to something.
Too many people, not everybody, too many people think they are owed something because they're Americans, that just by being born and getting up and being Americans every day, there's something valorous in that.
And I just, I think we can overcome all these problems that we have with just the constant reinforcement of a conservative culture and a morality base and occasionally being able to stop or check the advances that the liberals are trying to make.
The biggest, if you want to talk about conspiracies and mention in a way that you will relate to it, if you want to talk about people that are hidden, who are doing things that we don't see, well, I see them, and I don't see them, but I know they're there.
All these little Ivy League liberals come out of these schools and they go there for one reason.
Parents and family went there.
They're legacyed in there.
And they have an objective.
And that objective is to run the government at every level, from appointed positions, high-level appointment positions to just menial bureaucratic career positions.
But their goal is to get hold of as much of the fabric of the government of this country as possible in a way that insulates them from elections, i.e. the judiciary and the academic professors.
Those people have tenure.
You can't do anything about them, no matter how outrageously bad and incompetent and poisonous they are.
So liberals have done a good job of insulin.
We know they're there and we know what they're doing.
We may not see them in the process until we know they're there.
Conservatives, on the other hand, they don't want to run government.
They want to get it out of our way.
We want to get government as small and as responsible as possible.
We're not raising our kids to go to the Ivy League and come out and wear these striped pants and these stupid-looking diplomat shoes that they all wear.
They look like robots coming out of there.
And they get themselves embedded in the State Department, a CIA, and the Pentagon.
And when new presidents don't clear out as much of the chaff as they can, then they're there.
And they can destroy future incoming administrations, like has happened to Bush.
He didn't get rid of enough of these people because of the new tone.
But there are reasons, there are explanations for all of this.
And you have to be honest about it because that's the only way you can fight it and oppose it, which is what we're doing.
I'll tell you what, I feel pretty optimistic about all this.
The last 19 years of trying to try to think where we would be had it not been the evolution of this new media.
If you want to think about something, think about that.
Because that did happen.
And it's a great illustration of how it can continue to happen.
There's all kinds of reasons to be optimistic out there.
You're an American.
And you're not going to give up.
We'll be back here in just a second.
Stay with us.
As promised, ladies and gentlemen, from the archives, a grooveyard of forgotten favorites, Red Skelton.
I remember a teacher that I had.
Now, I only went through the seventh grade.
I went to the seventh grade.
I left home when I was 10 years old because I was hungry.
I used to.
This is true.
I work in the summer, I go to school in the winter.
But I had this one teacher.
It was the principal of the Harrison School in Vincent, Indiana.
To me, this was the greatest teacher, a real sage of my time, anyhow.
He had such wisdom.
And we were all reciting the Pledge of Allegiance one day.
And he walked over, this little teacher, Mr. Laswell was his name.
Mr. Laswell, he says, he says, I've been listening to you boys and girls recite the Pledge of Allegiance all semester.
And it seems as though it's becoming monotonous to you.
If I may, may I recite it and try to explain to you the meaning of each word?
I, me, an individual, a committee of one, pledge, dedicate all of my worldly goods to give without self-pity.
Allegiance, my love, and my devotion to the flag, our standard, oh glory, a symbol of freedom.
Wherever she waves, there's respect because your loyalty has given her a dignity that shouts, freedom is everybody's job.
United.
That means that we have all come together.
States, individual communities that have united into 48 great states.
48 individual communities with pride and dignity and purpose.
All divided with imaginary boundaries, yet united to a common purpose.
And that's love for country.
And to the Republic.
Republic.
A state in which sovereign power is invested in representatives chosen by the people to govern.
And government is the people.
And it's from the people to the leaders, not from the leaders to the people, for which it stands.
One nation.
One nation, meaning so blessed by God.
Indivisible, incapable of being divided, with liberty, which is freedom.
The right of power to live one's own life without threats, fear, or some sort of retaliation.
And justice, the principle or qualities of dealing fairly with others.
For all.
For all.
Which means, boys and girls, it's as much your country as it is mine.
And now, boys and girls, let me hear you recite the Pledge of Allegiance.
I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands.
One nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
Since I was a small boy, two states have been added to our country, and two words have been added to the pledge of allegiance under God.
Wouldn't it be a pity if someone said that is a prayer and that would be eliminated from schools too?
Folks, hope you have a great Independence Day tomorrow with all the fireworks going off and the backyard barbecues and whatever.
Take a moment, remember what it's really all about, and to remember it.
Cherish it.
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