All Episodes
Previous Next
April 4, 2008 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:24
April 4, 2008, Friday, Hour #1
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 247 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 uh to Bill Buckley pay homage to the guy who framed what modern conservatism is, what Buckley did in uh 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 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 uh we could 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 uh hip to that concept, and let's get right to it.
1-800-282-2882, 1-800-282-2882.
Phone number's 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 uh 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 gotta 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 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.
Uh 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 if you talk to them about the progress, the military progress in Iraq, well, and 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 uh 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 we were 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 um enough talk show uh exposure.
Well, we'll be the judge of that, won't we?
So uh put it through the turnstile at 1800-282-2882, 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 Lorraine 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. Dionne column in the Washington Post that attaches a certain historical significance to April 4, 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 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 uh it's wacky, I promise you that.
But when I look at April 4th, 1968, I look at it through the eyes of a ten-year-old boy, because that's what I was.
I was growing up in the suburbs of D.C., not in Camp Springs, Maryland, and um it was uh it was a spring and summer that would 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 or a couple of months later, I guess call it eight weeks, uh Bobby Kennedy killed.
And I remember asking my mom and dad, my dad was twenty years Air Force and was working at the Pentagon at the time, and and I 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, there's a Smithsonian doesn't allow kids anymore after that fifth grader outed them on some uh paleontology uh issue.
But anyway, to go down to the Smithsonian and look at all the space stuff, which I was all geeked out about uh then and now.
Uh 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, Oh, well, Mark, we can't do that because uh downtown is on fire.
And uh cities with heavy black populations, whether Washington or Detroit were filled with particular pain and particular anger, understandably, because Dr. King had been, you know, shot by a white guy, that's never good.
And uh and the emotions were so raw in the times so societally prehistoric against uh today's backdrop, which is gonna 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 of my 11th birthday in 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, you know, thought he was the devil.
There's there's no rescuing that.
But if there are people who wondered whether his approach of peaceful uh 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 forty 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 gotta get past.
It in 1968, remember, it had only been eleven short years, eleven 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.
Eleven tiny years.
And I assert that there have been progress in those eleven 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 in India.
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, you know, 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 is 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 uh having things dumbed down for you.
Today, heroes like Ward Connorly step forward and they have 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 JC 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 Connorly.
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 is 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. Dion, whose feelings about the uh the the Dr. King la actually, what I bet I guess you might call the post-MLK legacy, What really happened in America on April 4th, 1968.
His views uh 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 1800-282-2882.
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 he thanks you and I thank you.
I have just uh one comment.
Uh I've been hearing about this uh Catholic priest back in Chicago.
He's defending uh Lewis Farrakhan and Reverend Wright and all their views and everything.
And uh the only one I saw that said anything about it since he made his uh big uh radical speech last uh Sunday uh was Bill O'Reilly, and uh he gave Bill O'Reilly's um man an ear full about how he wasn't a Marine and then then Reverend Wright was a Marine.
Well, you know, I'm not I wasn't a Marine, but I love my country and I respect the Americans in the in our country, and you know, I think that there's a little uh two-sidedness going on around that.
Well, there is, and and and thanks for that point.
Here's 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, and yes, there is such a thing, I believe.
And uh and they know that if they sign on to the proper identification of Reverend Wright uh as a hate monger, uh and and shockingly unenlightened and horrifically uh v ill um just just horrifically ill placed in his criticism of America and uh characterizations of the white devil and all that.
That if they do that, then it will reflect badly on Barack Obama.
So 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.
Uh 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 Mertha about that.
Uh 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 uh, you know, Jesus and love and Christian forgiveness.
Well, that's 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 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.
Come in, please.
Are you going to be listening?
And they did.
And David Duke comes across today as a nice guy, maybe even a ri partially reformed guy.
I asked him, Dave, um, do you regret any of the folks you are hanging out with uh, you know, like in the eighties?
And he said, Well, maybe if I'd had that path to walk again, I would have found different people to to associate myself with as I spread my concerns about uh 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 uh maybe he's a slightly better guy than he was twenty years ago, which is not to say much.
But the point I make is uh I think the the ultimate thing is Hitler loved his dog.
You ever hear that one?
The reason people bring that up is you can find any uh 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, uh Sam.
Uh I'm a disabled veteran.
Yes, sir, thank you.
Uh I've been listening for a long time.
Um second time I've I've been uh in.
Um you mentioned reparations a while ago, and I just wanted to note that as a Vietnam veteran, I came back with a 30% disability, you know, right out of the war, and nobody would hire me for anything.
You've got about thirty seconds, so I need you to get to that bottom line quick.
Okay, uh I I spent half of my adult life not working, and if anybody deserves reparations, it would be me.
Because of the uh the way the liberals treated me.
You know, they they worked themselves into the hiring positions.
Well, Sam, I tell you what, you you've got a great point that are 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 um it is the mind and spirit of Bill Buckley that infused and educated the ascendancy or rush rush as a young man, uh, 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 gonna get back to your calls here in just a moment.
I gave you sort of my opening um thought about the the Dr. King legacy, a legacy which, of course, is punctuated by the day of his death 40 years ago today in Memphis.
And uh 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.
It had a lot of people looking at the 60s and Lord knows the the the killing of Bobby Kennedy a couple of months later, and and Vietnam was was turbulent, of course, and it just seemed like the the conventions uh uh that uh that political year, the rioting, my lord, it just looked like America.
We we throw this around a lot today.
Well, America's going to hell in a handbasket.
In 68, it was.
I mean, it really looked like it was.
Stuff today is 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 I look back at that at 1968 and our recovery from it, and our recovery from tragedies like the 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 uh thrust of that dream was a country that uh 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. Dion, who is uh 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.
Uh 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 know, need to you know beat you with the whole thing, but I want you to consider these thoughts, because I think they're widely held in liberal America.
Forty years ago, E. J. Dion 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. Dion 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. Dion.
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. Dionne 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, you know, the the turmoil of 1968, just like any 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 be made that to be made in race is treating each other better, person to person, not weighing American law down with all kinds of uh uh phony retribution and revenge.
Dion 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 job corps, 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. Dion suggesting that the only reason that America signed on to uh, let's see, 40 years of skepticism about big government is that liberalism was thrown off the tracks by the Dr. King assassination.
No.
I would assert in fact I would suggest that the moment Dr. King died, that empathy for his cause probably created some good will for his cause that might not have existed had he lived.
You know, 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, no, no, no, no, no, 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. Dion feels that 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. Dion would be just nirvana.
Just heaven on earth.
No.
Mr. Dion, 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 some 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 when 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 let's hop some calls and you can catch the rest of the uh of E.J. Dion's um selective memory uh about uh Dr. King's killing and what sort of nineteen sixty-eight meant.
The column is called When Liberalism's Moment Ended.
Oh, would that it were true.
I mean liberalism's moment in the 70s.
Oh, liberalism didn't do anything in the 70s.
You got that disastrous Jimmy Carter presidency.
You had uh the the Equal Rights Amendment, that nonsense blowing through the wind.
Uh, you know, feminism took flight.
Liberalism did fine in the 70s.
Liberal liberalism's excesses, too much success in the 70s, is what gave us Reagan in the eighties.
You know, and maybe you could argue that the 1980s were not a good decade for liberalism.
The nineties were I mean, this is like a ping pong match.
I mean, i the nineties 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 the historic mountaintop of talk radio, and and and and 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 nineties.
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.
Um I think it's kind of a stalemate now, the deaf uh the history of which might be a blank slate written, written large with the results of this year's election.
This decade is almost over.
It'll be interesting to see, you know, uh how historians or how we, before it's even done, view it as a big uh I 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.
Uh 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's 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 E.J. Dion 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 uh 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 uh with a legacy of conservatism, of his many writings and many firing line shows, a legacy uh kept very much vibrant and alive by shows like this one, and and Rush will be back with you on Monday.
All righty, again, I'm Mark Davis, so 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.
Uh well, you're you are fine.
You're kind and probably mistaken.
Well, probably thank you very much.
As I told your screener uh uh basically 40 years ago today, I was down in uh Rock Island, Illinois.
I was on there, believe it or not, as an advanced guy for Eugene McCarthy, Senator Eugene McCarthy when Johnson said he wasn't going to run.
You and Jean 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 a screener, I said I was working uh basically janitorial job and uh cook job doing donuts of all things and and my bosses were black people, uh black man uh in both cases, and uh we cried that day, and uh, 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 uh when I look back and I said, hey, uh 1964, of course, the Civil Rights Act was passed by uh I guess the Democratic Congress with Johnson and uh uh Humphrey and such and plenty of Democrats opposing it, by the way.
Yeah.
But things had been uh had changed quite a bit already in four years.
And uh uh, as I say, we cried that day and and uh basically uh I was hoping to keep my rear end out of Vietnam.
I wasn't fortunate because I ended up uh uh being a corpsman in the National Guard.
We got shipped over to uh Saigon and and uh helped our Navy friends out do uh do what we had to do.
But uh I I sit here now 40 years later and say, my goodness me, you talk about a flashpoint in history.
It happened.
Um good things did come of it, and as you say, as long as a silver lining, and good things did happen and how things have been twisted, and how my thinking has changed, uh basically, I'm a card carrying Republican.
Uh and again, I listened to Rush faithfully.
I listened to Jason Davis here in uh Minneapolis, uh, who I think you might know.
Uh he feels in for Rush once in a while.
And and and again, things have changed, and and my heart changed that day when I looked in the eyes of of my employers.
The people were taking care of me and so.
That is life is changing.
Uh that is that is uh d fantastic story.
Let me thank you for it and and for your service to this country.
And I believe that scenario is played out in workplace after workplace after coffee shop after bar after street corner, all across America that day.
And it's just uh listen, I and I'll make this connection once again.
I mean, 9-11 brutal, horrific day.
It 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 the post-9-11 clarity, and 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 eleven, about six months.
After that, everybody had returned uh to their normal corners.
Uh liberals hating Bush and any war attached to him, uh uh loathing uh you know the military and what they were trying to do.
Everybody just went back to their 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.
Um, just uh uh a little issue that I've had on my mind regarding uh, you know, this uh racism.
I've myself have grown up in a very uh mixed family.
And um I guess the question and thing that I have is with uh this uh church and uh Mr. Obama is the fact he's running for one of the most important jobs in this country to be commander in chief.
What 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.
Well, or or never once left.
I mean, I I I wouldn't be looking for him to start an argument with with Reverend Wright in the pulpit, but a statement he could have made was to say, you know what, I gotta get out of here.
This is too much America hating for me.
Exactly.
I mean, I'm I'm from the sixties.
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 uh a so-called very close friend of Mr. Obama's.
My family pulled me aside and told me we're not just going over the edge.
And uh 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, uh, Donna, thank you.
That's what's tricky for 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 uh 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 it's 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.
▲
Export Selection