Rush Limbaugh Program - April 4, 2008, Friday, Hour #1

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April 4, 2008 - Rush Limbaugh Program

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April 4, 2008, Friday, Hour #1

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	Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
	I am filled with gratitude.
	Thanks so very much.
	Rush Limbaugh is off today for a reason that all of us can appreciate, and we are with him symbolically, and I wish I were there with him literally because he today is at the funeral for William F. Buckley, St. Patrick's Cathedral there at 50th and 5th in Midtown Manhattan.
	And the heart of all conservatism is with Rush today in that building as America.
	And those close to Bill Buckley pay homage to the guy who framed what modern conservatism is, what Buckley did in firing line shows and in books and in columns.
	Obviously, that's a legacy that Rush himself carries, a torch that he started to carry, you know, with this very program a couple of decades ago.
	And so if he needs a day off to attend the William F. Buckley funeral, I think that's something that we can all certainly understand.
	And I'm very glad to be with you.
	Again, Mark Davis in the heart of George W. Bush is Texas.
	And I even am able to proudly say so because I still like the president.
	Yes, I'm one of those folks.
	Let's talk about a few things today that are at the top of today's news and maybe some larger conceptual things, whatever you'd like to do.
	Obviously, Friday on the Rush Limbaugh Show has that very open line Friday kind of look.
	That's pretty well what I do every doggone day in the local show that I do here in Texas.
	And so I'm hip to that concept.
	And let's get right to it.
	1-800-282-2882.
	1-800-282-2882.
	Phone numbers the same, only the host has changed.
	I'm Mark Davis.
	So say, hey, Mark, and I'll welcome you to the Rush Limbaugh Show all day today, and we're glad to do it.
	We have our usual diet of campaign news that we've got to take a look at today.
	Hillary on Leno last night.
	I tend to like it when candidates do that self-deprecating humor and shows a little bit of a human side, and heaven knows who needs that more than she does.
	So I tend to approve if that's not overdone, if they do the occasional Letterman Leno Saturday Night Live like Huckabee did.
	That's all good.
	But you got to really pick and choose what you choose to make fun of.
	And Hillary made a very bad decision last night, and I'll tell you about that.
	We will also have a war update, a story that the New York Times even saw fit to cover about a national intelligence estimate.
	This is now a couple of days ahead of General Petraeus' next visit.
	I wonder if the candidate herself will be there to badger General Petraeus as she so ill-advisedly did a few months ago.
	What did she say it required?
	Suspension of disbelief to believe that the Iraq war was going well.
	Well, son of a gun, turns out the war was going well.
	Go figure.
	Well, we'll see what senators of every stripe have to say when General Petraeus comes to Capitol Hill in a couple of days.
	But ahead of that, the National Intelligence Estimate has some things to say about progress in Iraq.
	And have you ever talked with your liberal friends, and I do recommend having some, if you talk to them about the progress, the military progress in Iraq, oh, man, the surge is working.
	The surge is working.
	They are very likely to get up in your grill and say, yeah, well, it may be working militarily.
	There may be less death.
	But how about political progress?
	There's no political progress.
	You'll hear that whether it's Senator Carl Levin of Michigan or a friend of yours in the next cubicle.
	Well, I'm going to give you ammo to give right back to them today because the National Intelligence Estimate, a document not immune to politics, you're aware of that sham thing they had not long ago.
	Iran, Iran is a nuclear threat?
	We were so wrong about that.
	Who got to those writers of that national intelligence estimate?
	Good grief.
	So if the NIE says something, you can bet that people of every political stripe had some hand in it.
	And this NIE of late says that not just military progress, but real political progress is at hand in Iraq.
	So, we'll have that for you today as well.
	And anything that you'd like to bring us on stuff that's been in the news this week, I always like to frame it.
	If there's anything I say or Rush has said or anybody that anybody said that you think is worthy of comment, go ahead and bring it.
	Or even if there's something, since it is Friday and to honor Russia's legacy of Open Line Friday, maybe there's something that you just don't think has gotten enough talk show exposure.
	Well, we'll be the judge of that, won't we?
	So, put it through the turnstile at 1-800-282-2882, and we'll just see what happens.
	Again, I'm Mark Davis, glad to be filling in for Rush today, and we look forward to his return on Monday.
	Today is April 4th, 2008, and so there's going to be a lot of attention paid to what happened 40 years ago today at the Lorain Motel in Memphis.
	I worked in that great city the last half of the 1980s, from 85 to 90.
	And a proud Rush affiliate, News Radio 600 WREC, will tell you all about that.
	And the listeners who are listening right there, right then, right now, can certainly tell you a few things about the King legacy, about the local battles fought at that time and ever since.
	The Lorraine Motel is now properly a civil rights museum.
	They were in the process of turning the building into that when I was there.
	And I have a thought or two I want to share, and then we'll hit our first break, come back, take some calls, and then I want to share some of the other thoughts that are being expressed.
	Other thoughts that, shall we say, differ from mine.
	There's an E.J. Dion column in the Washington Post that attaches a certain historical significance to April 4th, 1968, that goes way beyond Dr. King.
	You can feel the way you want to about him.
	You can feel the way you want to about his legacy.
	But EJ goes off on a rant that may well make your head explode.
	So I'll give you plenty of fair warning about that about what that day did to conservatism and liberalism and what he is calling for today.
	It's wacky, I promise you that.
	But when I look at April 4th, 1968, I look at it through the eyes of a 10-year-old boy because that's what I was.
	I was growing up in the suburbs of D.C., out in Camp Springs, Maryland.
	And it was a spring and summer that tried the minds and souls of grown-ups, much less kids, because in the course of what, six weeks, Dr. King killed, month and a couple of months later, I got to call it eight weeks, Bobby Kennedy killed.
	And I remember asking my mom and dad, my dad was 20 years Air Force and was working at the Pentagon at the time.
	And I said, what is going on?
	Because all I remember is that one of my favorite weekend things to do would be to head down to the Smithsonian.
	Of course, the Smithsonian doesn't allow kids anymore after that fifth grader outed them on some paleontology issue.
	But anyway, to go down to the Smithsonian and look at all the space stuff, which I was all geeked out about then and now.
	But to go downtown, gather my friends and head on.
	And it was the old days where you could actually dump your kids off somewhere and they wouldn't be smoking crack if you came back and got them in three hours.
	But we couldn't do that.
	I remember we couldn't do that in the days after Dr. King was killed.
	And I remember my dad said, well, Mark, we can't do that because downtown is on fire.
	And cities with heavy black populations, whether Washington or Detroit, were filled with particular pain and particular anger, understandably, because Dr. King had been shot by a white guy.
	That's never good.
	And the emotions were so raw and the times so societally prehistoric against today's backdrop, which is going to be a main theme today, the progress we've made.
	It's time for everyone to recognize how sad those times were, how turbulent, and how amazing the times of today are.
	Not that we fixed every problem, but that the progress has been amazing.
	So Dr. King is killed, and I'm just shy on my 11th birthday and asking, as many grown-ups did, what in the world is going on in America?
	Well, what I think wound up happening is that this was a catharsis of such gravity that it made a lot of people who had in fact denigrated the legacy of Dr. King.
	I don't mean his active haters, the people who just thought he was the devil.
	There's no rescuing that.
	But if there are people who wondered whether his approach of peaceful protest or his complaining about this or delivering I Have a Dream About That, you know, whether they were on board that much.
	When he took a bullet on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel 40 years ago today, a lot of Americans who are kind of iffy about this whole racial progress thing looked at it and said, dang, dang, maybe we do have some problems in America.
	Maybe this colored water fountain thing is something we got to get past.
	In 1968, remember, it had only been 11 short years, 11 short years since President Eisenhower had to call out the National Guard so that black kids could go to school at Central High in Little Rock.
	11 tiny years.
	And I assert that there had been progress in those 11 years, but not enough.
	Not enough for Dr. King.
	Not enough for various other folks, black and white.
	And I think that shook America to its core.
	And a lot of people spent 1969, 70, 71, 72.
	Because I'll tell you, listen, three years later, not that popular culture is the touchstone for everything.
	Three years later, 1971, what's the biggest thing on television?
	All in the family, in which the most lampoonable guy is Archie Bunker.
	Why?
	Because of, first and foremost, his racism.
	I know a lot of people say, yeah, but Mark, Archie Bunker was a lovable racist.
	You were supposed to like him.
	Well, that's because he was a familiar figure then and now, a guy who might not have been the most enlightened soul in the world, but who was not, would never probably truly mistreat a black man by his own hand at all.
	Maybe he became friends with George Jefferson.
	And I know this gets a little nutty, like please, Mark, make this metaphor work.
	But here's what I mean.
	Just as Jack Bauer breaking the thumb on a terrorist shows, the fact that you can put that on television shows us that America does indeed have an appetite for interrogations outside the box.
	Otherwise, you couldn't make your protagonist do that on television.
	If the America of 1971 were not ready to see racism made fun of, Archie Bunker wouldn't have flown.
	It wouldn't have worked.
	So not that all in the family was begotten by the Dr. King assassination.
	Don't read too much into this.
	But I think that there's a continuum there, that when the 60s ended and the very next decade of the 70s began, all ready, we were on the way with a giant leap toward the progress that we've made since, that racism is just horrible and a scourge in our midst.
	And today we find a country where enough time has passed and enough healing has occurred and we are getting along better as a country where we can actually have a debate over whether affirmative action is racism, which, by the way, today it is.
	Affirmative action is also reparations, by the way.
	People have been clamoring for reparations.
	I would assert that decade after decade of dumbing things down for black applicants is reparations.
	Today, it is an insult to people of color.
	It tells people of color, you're not good enough.
	You're not smart enough to get this job or gain entry to this university without having things dumbed down for you.
	Today, heroes like Ward Connerly step forward and they've despised across much of black America.
	And why?
	Because today, what do we have?
	We have a conservative America and a liberal America that believe what they respectively believe.
	And one of my assertions today will be that it is the conservatives of today that are carrying the fire for Dr. King's dream better than the lip service liberals of today.
	It is the conservatives of today that love J.C. Watts and Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell on most issues and don't care what color their skin is.
	It is the liberals of today and some of the black folks of today that hate Clarence Thomas, that hate Ward Connerly, because politics is now superseded skin color as a factor for what you think about somebody.
	So we're going to pause and let's go right to your calls here on this and anything else you like.
	I can keep several fruit aloft at the same time.
	1-800-282-2882.
	It is the conservatism of today that hews more closely to Dr. King's dream of judging people not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.
	Who really believes that today?
	It is the conservatives of today, where the liberals of today continue to pay lip service and continue to keep people of color shackled to their culture of dependency.
	And yes, I intend that metaphor completely.
	So let's talk about that and a number of things on my mind and yours.
	It is the Rush Limbaugh Show.
	I'm Mark Davis, guest hosting from WBAP in Dallas, Fort Worth.
	The number, again, as you well know, 1-800-282-2882.
	And your calls are next on the EIB network.
	It is the Rush Limbaugh Show on the EIB Network.
	Friday, April 4th, I'm Mark Davis, filling in in Texas, and glad to have you here.
	All right, I mentioned I have this column by E.J. Deion, whose feelings about the Dr. King, actually, what I guess you might call the post-MLK legacy, what really happened in America on April 4th, 1968.
	His views are way different than what I just shared with you.
	Let me share some of his thoughts in the next segment because right now the perspectives I'm interested in are yours at 1-800-282-2882.
	Let us head to the Jewel of the Inland Northwest, Spokane, Washington.
	Charlie, hi, you are on the Rush Limbaugh Show.
	Mark Davis filling in.
	Welcome.
	How are you?
	Pretty good.
	How are you today?
	Doing great.
	First time caller into the show.
	Listen for around 15 years now.
	Well, he thanks you and I thank you.
	I have just one comment.
	I've been hearing about this Catholic priest back in Chicago.
	He's defending Lewis Farrakhan and Reverend Wright and all their views and everything.
	And the only one I saw that said anything about it since he made his big radical speech last Sunday was Bill O'Reilly.
	And he gave Bill O'Reilly's man an earful about how he wasn't a Marine and then Reverend Wright was a Marine.
	Well, you know, I wasn't a Marine, but I love my country and I respect the Americans in our country.
	And, you know, I think that there's a little two-sidedness going on around that.
	Well, there is.
	And thanks for that point.
	There's an interesting phenomenon going on with regard to the sugar coating and reputational repair for Reverend Wright.
	A lot of people who are as mortified as any good person should be, just mortified by Reverend Wright's racism and hate speech, cannot call it that because they know that to do so damages Barack Obama.
	And maybe they are just good-hearted Democrats, decent mainstream leftists.
	Yes, there is such a thing, I believe.
	And they know that if they sign on to the proper identification of Reverend Wright as a hate monger and shockingly unenlightened and horrifically horrifically ill-placed in his criticism of America and characterizations of the white devil and all that, that if they do that, that it will reflect badly on Barack Obama.
	They are tasked with making Reverend Wright look like he's not really that bad.
	And some of the tactics have been exactly what you described.
	Well, he was a Marine as if that makes everything okay.
	Tim McVay was in the military, so excuse me.
	And no, I'm not drawing a parallel, just telling you that having worn the uniform at some point doesn't make you right today.
	Ask Congressman Murtha about that.
	Some of the other stuff they're doing, one of the favorite things people are trying to pull with me is, hey, Mark, look at some of the other parts of his sermons.
	Look at some of the other parts where he talks about Jesus and love and Christian forgiveness.
	Well, that's lovely.
	It's also completely irrelevant.
	That's like looking at a David Duke speech where he talks about lower taxes.
	I don't care.
	David Duke's a Nazi.
	By the way, I talked to the guy the other day.
	We got an email here at my local show in Texas.
	It says, hey, David Duke wants to weigh in on the Obama campaign.
	My talk show brain nearly exploded.
	What?
	David Duke wants to talk about Obama?
	I am in.
	And listeners said, Mark, why in the world would you put a hate monger like David Duke on to talk about Barack Obama?
	And I said, exactly.
	I mean, please, are you going to be listening?
	And they did.
	And David Duke comes across today as a nice guy, maybe even a partially reformed guy.
	I asked him, Dave, do you regret any of the folks you were hanging out with, you know, like in the 80s?
	And he said, well, maybe if I'd had that path to walk again, I would have found different people to associate myself with as I spread my concerns about the fact that a lot of Americans were not embracing Western culture, blah, blah, blah.
	There's still a whole lot of white supremacy nonsense in his rap, but maybe he's a slightly better guy than he was 20 years ago, which is not to say much.
	But the point I make is, I think the ultimate thing is Hitler loved his dog.
	You ever hear that one?
	The reason people bring that up is you can find any about the most despicable person, you can find something praiseworthy.
	But when you use that to say that maybe they're not that despicable, it usually fails.
	It usually fails, and it usually deserves to fail.
	In Wheaton, Illinois, Sam, Mark Davis, in for Rush Limbaugh today.
	Hi, how are you?
	Yeah, it's me, Sam.
	I'm a disabled veteran.
	Yes, sir.
	Thank you.
	I've been listening for a long time.
	Second time I've been in.
	You mentioned reparations a while ago, and I just wanted to note that as a Vietnam veteran, I came back with a 30% disability right out of the war, and nobody would hire me for anything.
	Got about 30 seconds, so I need you to get to that bottom line quick.
	I spent half of my adult life not working, and if anybody deserves reparations, it would be me because of the way the liberals treated me.
	You know, they worked themselves into the hiring positions.
	Well, Sam, I tell you what, you've got a great point.
	There are a lot of people with a valid gripe against American history.
	Does cash in terms of a check issued today make that all right?
	It doesn't.
	More coming up on the EIB network.
	Oh, no pressure there.
	Now, he's not that he had shoes to fill or anything.
	Rush Limbaugh attending the William F. Buckley funeral today, and we are with him in spirit and in mind.
	And it is the mind and spirit of Bill Buckley that infused and educated the ascendancy or Rush as a young man.
	Maybe many of you and me as young men and women, maybe not.
	That's why all opinions are welcome right here at 1-800-282-2882.
	I'm Mark Davis in Dallas-Fort Worth filling in for Rush today.
	And as promised, we're going to get back to your calls here in just a moment.
	I gave you sort of my opening thought about the Dr. King legacy, a legacy which, of course, is punctuated by the day of his death 40 years ago today in Memphis.
	And as sad and cathartic as that day was, I believe that it propelled America into a sort of a state of shock that was ultimately therapeutic.
	Had a lot of people looking at the 60s and Lord knows the killing of Bobby Kennedy a couple of months later.
	And Vietnam was turbulent, of course, and it just seemed like the conventions, that political year, I mean, rioting.
	My Lord, it just looked like America.
	We throw this around a lot today.
	Well, America's going to hell in a handbasket.
	In 1968, it was.
	It really looked like it was.
	Stuff today is arguably tame at times compared to then and other times in our history.
	We always have a certain narcissism that what we're living through is always the worst or the best or the most noteworthy.
	But I look back at that, at 1968, and our recovery from it, and our recovery from tragedies like the King assassination, that it was kind of a wake-up call.
	Like, good Lord, maybe we all do need to work together and make some progress.
	And that maybe since he died trying to achieve it, maybe we do well in trying to seek out Dr. King's dream.
	Now, my assertion is that today's conservatives are doing that better than today's liberals, since his main thrust of that dream was a country that looks at content of character and not skin color.
	We're really working on that, and we're not there yet, but have made incredible progress.
	Well, let me juxtapose that, if I can, with the view of E.J. Deion, who is always interesting.
	Code language, I think he's crazy sometimes.
	But I've spoken to the man a few times, very nice, very gracious guy.
	And I just want to say those nice things because boy, did this column of his set me off.
	It is in today's Washington Post.
	You can see it at WashingtonPost.com.
	The headline is, When liberalism's moment ended.
	I'll skip around a little.
	I don't need to beat you with the whole thing, but I want you to consider these thoughts because I think they're widely held in liberal America.
	40 years ago, E.J. Deion writes, American liberalism suffered a blow from which it has still not recovered.
	On April 4th, 1968, a relatively brief but extraordinary moment of progressive reform ended and a long period of conservative ascendancy began.
	The assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and the ensuing riots that engulfed the nation's capital and big cities across the country signaled the collapse of liberal hopes in a smoky haze of self-doubt and despair.
	Conservatives on the run for much of the decade found a broad new audience for their warnings against the disorders and disruptions bred by reform.
	A shrewd politician named Richard Nixon sensed the direction of the political winds.
	When President Johnson's Commission on Urban Unrest released its report in early 1968 and blamed the previous year's rioting on white racism, Nixon would have none of it.
	The Commission, he said, blames everybody for the riots except the perpetrators of the riots.
	May I pause right here and assert and stipulate that Nixon was a crook and also a genius on more than a few things.
	Thank you very much.
	E.J. Deion continues.
	Nixon knew that his call for law and order was drawing working-class whites away from their alliance with the New Deal and the great society.
	I have found great audience response to this theme in all parts of the country, Nixon wrote to former President Dwight Eisenhower.
	Now get this paragraph from E.J. Deion.
	It is easy to forget that the core themes of contemporary conservatism were born in response to the events of 1968.
	The attacks on big government, the defense of states' rights, the scorn for liberal judicial activism, liberal do-gooders, liberal elitists, liberal guilt, liberal permissiveness were rooted in the reaction that gathered force as liberal optimism receded.
	The funny thing is that E.J. Deion writes as if these are bad things.
	He is writing about this as if it were the bubonic plague or an asteroid hurtling toward the earth.
	I lament the turmoil of 1968, just like anybody does, the properly lamentable portions of it.
	But if there's anything to be learned from the 60s, it's that at least some of us figured out that it was just a crazy quilt time, a ridiculous time from which we needed to mature and recover.
	And the ascendancy of conservatism is part of that maturity and part of that recovery.
	The realism that government is too big and does spend too much, and that with the progress we've made in race, that the real progress that to be made in race is treating each other better, person to person, not weighing American law down with all kinds of phony retribution and revenge.
	Deion continues.
	From the death of John F. Kennedy in November 1963 until the congressional elections of 66, liberals were triumphant.
	And what they did changed the world.
	Civil rights and voting rights, Medicare and Medicaid, clean air and clean water legislation, Head Start, JobCorp, federal aid to schools had their roots in the liberal wave that began to ebb when LBJ's Democrats suffered broad losses in 1966.
	The decline that 1966 signaled was sealed after April 4th, 1968.
	Now, the weirdness here is: here is E.J. Deion suggesting that the only reason that America signed on to, let's see, 40 years of skepticism about big government is that liberalism was thrown off the tracks by the Dr. King assassination.
	No.
	In fact, I would suggest that the moment Dr. King died, that empathy for his cause probably created some goodwill for his cause that might not have existed had he lived.
	And again, please don't come to me and say, well, Mark, you sound like you're spinning that the assassination was a net good thing.
	No, Just like 9-11, despite its horrors, reminded us that it's a dangerous world and has set us on a path to fight terrorism, a path we might not be on but for 9-11, this is not some search for silver linings from me, but just an honest assessment of what the aftermath of tragedy can contain.
	And E.J. Deion feels that but for the King assassination, liberalism would have continued its ascendancy and that we never would have grown tired of big government, never would have grown tired of entitlements, never would have grown tired of the liberal agenda, which to E.J. Deion would be just nirvana, just heaven on earth.
	No, Mr. Deion, opposition to big government doesn't stem from the derailment of liberalism in 1968.
	It stems from the fact that the pendulum just swung, sir.
	The pendulum just swung.
	America took a look at big government and said, you know what?
	This doesn't work.
	America took a look at high taxes and said, you know what?
	We're getting screwed here.
	America took a look at the military and said, you know, this is not a culture to be reviled.
	It is a culture to be embraced.
	Took a little while, took a little while, had to endure the Carter years, which helped push the button a little harder so that the pendulum would swing back a little more with the election of Ronald Reagan, which we realized once and for all that taxes were too high, that our country was truly good, and that the military was to be revered and not reviled.
	So, anyway, let's hop at some calls, and you can catch the rest of E.J. Deion's selective memory about Dr. King's killing and what sort of 1968 meant.
	The column is called When Liberalism's Moment Ended.
	Oh, would that it were true?
	Liberalism's moment in the 70s?
	Oh, liberalism didn't do anything in the 70s.
	You got that disastrous Jimmy Carter presidency.
	You had the Equal Rights Amendment, that nonsense blowing through the wind.
	You know, feminism took flight.
	Liberalism did fine in the 70s.
	Liberalism's excesses, too much success in the 70s, is what gave us Reagan in the 80s.
	You know, and maybe you could argue that the 1980s were not a good decade for liberalism.
	The 90s were.
	I mean, this is like a ping-pong match.
	I mean, the 90s were really good for liberals.
	Eight years of Bill Clinton, we couldn't get rid of that skank.
	Liberalism was, I mean, in the ascendancy of this show, Rush Limbaugh on the way to the historic mountaintop of talk radio and Bill Clinton's elected twice.
	I would suggest that that's exhibit A, that liberalism was doing fine on all of its cylinders in the 90s.
	Now here we are in what?
	These the aughts, whatever you want to call this decade.
	I think we're a 50-50 country today.
	Liberal concepts are holding sway in a lot of ways, yet the battle over taxes is still about how low should they be, how much should we cut them.
	The war is, of course, still very contentious.
	The left is winning on that because the left is tired of it.
	I think it's kind of a stalemate now, the history of which might be a blank slate written large with the results of this year's election.
	This decade is almost over.
	It'll be interesting to see how historians or how we, before it's even done, view it as a big, I don't think anyone will be able to view it as a big decade for conservatism.
	I mean, yes, Bush won twice, but please, government continues to skyrocket.
	Those of us who care about the border have not had a president we could rely on until like the last six weeks.
	Have you noticed that Bush now wants to build the border fence?
	I mean, God bless the president.
	I love him.
	I'm glad I voted for him every day.
	I love the guy.
	Thank God he's kept my family safe since 9-11 with a war that I know to be right and just and proper.
	But I share the same angst about the Bush presidency that most real conservatives have.
	And that is that government is still way too huge and our border is still way too porous.
	That's why I was greedy this year.
	I was greedy this year.
	I wanted somebody who would continue to fight the war and try to win it, but who would also make government smaller and secure the border.
	Now the big questions for me are, is John McCain that guy?
	I better hope so.
	And I've been given some reason for optimism.
	We can talk about some of those today when we talk about stories from the campaign trail.
	All right, but there's the EJ Deon column.
	Some of my thoughts mixed in.
	Next up, more of your thoughts at 1-800-282-2882.
	1-800-282-2882.
	I'm Mark Davis, filling in for Rush Limbaugh on the EIB network.
	It's the EIB Network, where the Rush Limbaugh Show is heard.
	Today, hosted by me, Mark Davis, guesting here from WBAP, Dallas-Fort Worth, while Rush takes on the noble, noble task of being there for all of us at the William F. Buckley funeral.
	May God rest Mr. Buckley.
	And we are left with a legacy of conservatism, of his many writings and many firing line shows, a legacy kept very much vibrant and alive by shows like this one.
	And Rush will be back with you on Monday.
	All righty, again, I'm Mark Davis.
	I look forward to saying howdy to you.
	Let's do so right now by going to Minneapolis.
	Richie, Mark Davis, in for Rush Limbaugh.
	Welcome.
	How are you?
	Hey, Mark, I'm fine.
	Hey, I want to thank you for being a radio scholar and a gentleman.
	Well, you're kind and probably mistaken.
	But thank you very much.
	As I told you, Screener, basically 40 years ago today, I was down in Rock Island, Illinois.
	I was down there, believe it or not, as an advanced guy for Eugene McCarthy, Senator Eugene McCarthy, when Johnson said he wasn't going to run.
	Eugene was looking for the possibility of getting in.
	And, of course, we knew Hubert Humphrey and all that might make the run of time.
	But as I told the screener, I said I was working basically janitorial job and cook job doing donuts of all things.
	And my bosses were black people, a black men in both cases.
	And we cried that day.
	And I think what we did is we cried because we knew something very, very unique had happened in terms of the death of Dr. King.
	And when I look back and I said, hey, in 1964, of course, the Civil Rights Act was passed by, I guess, a Democratic Congress with Johnson and Humphrey and such.
	Plenty of Democrats opposing it, by the way.
	Yeah.
	But things had changed quite a bit already in four years.
	And as I say, we cried that day.
	And basically, I was hoping to keep my rear end out of Vietnam.
	I wasn't fortunate because I ended up being a corpsman in the National Guard.
	We got shipped over to Saigon and helped our Navy friends out do what we had to do.
	But I sit here now 40 years later and say, my goodness, me, you talk about a flashpoint in history.
	It happened.
	But good things did come of it.
	And as you say, there's always a silver lining.
	And good things did happen and how things have been twisted.
	How my thinking has changed.
	Basically, I'm a card-carrying Republican.
	And again, I listened to Rush faithfully.
	I listened to Jason Davis here in Minneapolis, who I think you might know.
	He feels in for us once in a while.
	And again, things have changed.
	And my heart changed that day when I looked in the eyes of my employers.
	The people who were taking care of me and said, life is changing.
	That is a fantastic story.
	Let me thank you for it and for your service to this country.
	And I believe that scenario was played out in workplace after workplace after coffee shop after bar after street corner all across America that day.
	And it's just, listen, and I'll make this connection once again.
	I mean, 9-11 was a brutal, horrific day.
	It brought us, for a little while anyway, together as a country to realize how dangerous the world is.
	It gave us a certain clarity.
	Now, this is kind of funny.
	The post-9-11 clarity, let me come out the other way.
	The clarity of the shock of Dr. King's assassination with us still today.
	It was momentum that started that day and continues to this day.
	The moral clarity post-9-11, about six months.
	After that, everybody had returned to their normal corners.
	Liberals hating Bush and any war attached to him, loathing the military and what they were trying to do.
	Everybody just went back to their normal default setting.
	As Darrell Worley wrote in that great song, Have We Forgotten?
	Yes, we did.
	We never forgot what Dr. King was trying to do.
	Today, though, it is the conservatives among us who are trying to keep that dream alive by looking at content of character and not skin color.
	We are in Philadelphia.
	Donna, Mark Davis, in for Rush.
	Hi, how are you?
	Hi, Mark.
	Just a little issue that I've had on my mind regarding this racism.
	I myself have grown up in a very mixed family.
	And I guess the question and thing that I have is with this church and Mr. Obama is the fact he's running for one of the most important jobs in this country to be commander-in-chief.
	One.
	Not just of one race, but the entire country.
	Right.
	And he sat in this church and never once defended America or the American people.
	Or never once left.
	I mean, I wouldn't be looking for him to start an argument with Reverend Wright in the pulpit, but a statement he could have made was to say, you know what?
	I've got to get out of here.
	This is too much America hating for me.
	Exactly.
	I mean, I'm from the 60s.
	I was for civil rights.
	I marched.
	And, you know, we did what we did.
	We had people that agreed with us and disagreed.
	And Mr. Wright is supposed to have been a so-called very close friend of Mr. Obama.
	My family pulled me aside and pulled me when I was going over the edge.
	And he never did that.
	And like you said, never got up, never walked out of the church.
	In fact, defended him and then got up and never walked away from him.
	That's what's tricky, Donna.
	Thank you.
	That's what's tricky for Senator Obama.
	I want to give Senator Obama credit for not seeming to run for president of black America.
	In the cartoonish candidacies of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, that was not president for all of America.
	Senator Obama looks like he is trying to run for president of everybody, and that's harder for him to do as long as he remains tied to Jeremiah Wright.
	A new national intelligence estimate says there's not just military, but political progress in Iraq.
	Will anybody listen?
	We'll talk about it next hour.

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