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Jan. 2, 2009 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:04
January 2, 2009, Friday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
Hey, happy new year, America.
It's year zero.
Year zero.
The new era begins here in the United States of Bailoutistan.
I hope you had a very Merry Christmas.
And if you didn't, don't worry.
We'll all be enjoying a very hopy changemas in just a couple of weeks' time.
Rush is not here today.
He's still in re-education camp.
I understand.
He'll be released on Monday, complete with the glassy-eyed stare and the Chris Matthews leg tingle.
I had mine installed on November the 5th to avoid the rush.
Initially, it's just the ankle and calf that tingles whenever President-elect Obama makes a speech or emerges from the surf in Hawaii.
But by January 20th, they'll have increased the dosage, and I'm assured I'll be feeling the full Chris Matthews tingle all the way to the upper thigh.
So no rush today.
America's anchorman is away, and this is Mark Stein, your undocumented anchorman for the next three hours.
No supporting paperwork whatsoever.
Under the new fairness doctrine, we're bringing in some exciting new changes here at the EIB network.
Caroline Kennedy has graciously let it be known that she's willing to be appointed as host as long as it doesn't involve too much show prep.
Governor Blagojevich has sold the Tuesday guest host slot to his hair piece.
Wednesdays, as part of the auto bailout, the show has been outsourced to the UAW and in compliance with the new union agreement, the UAW host has agreed to work the full free hour shift, less the mandatory two-hour, 47-minute break in the middle to check over his health benefits.
Oh, and on Thursdays, Ahmed and Mohamed will be here.
As you know, President Obama has promised to close down Gitmo, and I'm sure he's going to stick to that promise.
And the boys didn't really want to go back to Yemen.
The food isn't as good.
And after having been brutally tortured by having Celine Dion and the Barney the Dinosaur song played to them non-stop, the guys worked up a rather good disc jockey routine.
So they'll be spinning the platters here every Thursday.
Hey, this is Ahmed here.
That's a big sound of Celine Dion and the theme from Titanic.
And just ahead of Barney the Dinosaur, we're going to check traffic with Mohammed.
So that's what they'll be doing on Thursday.
Oh, and it won't be open line Friday next Friday.
But Kim Jong-il and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will be here with a new feature, Fridays Without Preconditions.
So lots to look forward to here on the EIB network, the Excellence is Barak network.
And of course, notwithstanding the outsourcing of the hosting duties to a sub-minimum wage illegal immigrant, it is still, for the moment, business as usual.
Live from New York City, it's open lines Friday.
Yeah, 1-800-282-2882.
You know how it works.
Monday the Thursday, Rush runs this show with an iron rod, but Friday, the ruthless discipline crumbles and you can raise any issue you want here.
So go on, give it your best shot.
You can look back to 2008, that lost era of small government when the bailout was a mere $700 billion, or you can look ahead to 2009.
It's been a really exciting new year.
Israel, I see Israel has been criticized for its, quote, disproportionate response in Gaza.
I love that word.
Hamas can lob as many rocks as they want, as many rockets as they want at Israeli civilians.
But the minute the Zionist entity fires one back, whoa, man, that is totally, totally disproportionate.
So I think it ought to be part of the country's formal name by now, I think, the People's Disproportionate Republic of Israel.
And won't you all please rise for the national anthem, Disproportionate, that's what you are.
So anyway, we can discuss Israel's disproportionateness, or we could discuss President-elect Obama's position on the Gaza situation.
What's that?
He hasn't got a position.
Come on, don't be ridiculous.
The guy's the incoming president.
He's got to have a position.
Oh, no, no, no, wait, you're right.
He's been tied up in Hawaii doing this beach photo shoot for the centerfold of the inaugural souvenir all the last two weeks.
Every time I switch on the TV over the whole days, I love this.
There's been Obama on the news gambling in the surf in Maui.
And I've got to say this in a spirit of bipartisanship.
I'm with the network Anchorettes on this.
His pectorals are terrific.
He looks fabulous without his clothes on way hotter than Taft or Grover Cleveland or any of those other guys.
You know, when they chisel him into Mount Rushmore, I think they should make him topless just to rub it into Teddy Roosevelt and those other losers.
You know, and I'm not... I'm not being...
I'm not...
Seriously, I'm not being flippant here.
The importance of a world leader's pectorals can be critical.
I was down in Australia a year or two back, and I was having dinner with a very senior Australian politician.
I won't make it any more specific than that.
And there'd been some terrorist plot or other in Britain, and Tony Blair had interrupted his holiday to give an impromptu press conference from his vacation.
And this senior Australian politician goes to me, so what did he think of Tony Blair's press conference on the beach?
Do you think he's starting to get man boobs?
And I was stunned.
You know, I thought we were having dinner to discuss the big geopolitical picture, and instead he wanted to talk to me about whether Tony Blair was getting bad boobs.
So I think it's important for, I do think it's important for President-elect Obama to work on his pectorals.
And, you know, to go back to what we were saying about Israel being disproportionate, you know, nobody's going to say that about this guy.
He is beautifully proportioned.
Yeah, I don't know what his position on Gaza is, but if it's anything like his position on the beach, it's just fabulously proportionate.
So it's not, you know, he hasn't been working on the left pectoral while the right gets all flabby and distended.
It's clear he believes in a two-pectoral solution.
So I'm all in favor of what Barack Obama has been doing there.
I think he's really good working out.
Of course, we're all getting very excited now.
It's only two weeks more to the coronation.
In France, quote, youths have been marking the new dawn by burning 1,147 cars on New Year's Eve.
That's a record.
They only did 830 cars last New Year's Eve.
And forget, these are valuable Renaults and Citroens we're talking about here, not just excess inventory from General Motors.
I always love the way these reports on the youths' car burning, they're always youths of no distinguishing characteristics whatever.
You never know from reading these reports about youths mysteriously burning cars every night in France that they were anything to do with a religion beginning with I and ending in slam.
That's entirely kept out of it.
But these youths burning cars in tradition in France is a big thing.
President Sarkozy issued a strong statement about it because it is something that could really have problems for the stability of the country.
You know how it works in France?
It's a terrible nuisance.
You're there having dinner with your mistress and you've got it all arranged.
You're having a fabulous evening with your mistress and you're going to be back to see the wife at 11 o'clock and then you look out the window and there's your citron on fire.
I mean, it doesn't help.
So they're cracking down.
Sarkozy has promised to crack down on these youths burning cars.
In Florida, meanwhile, I was thrilled to see this.
Thousands of shoes were dumped this morning on a Miami Expressway, causing significant traffic delays.
Lieutenant Sant'Angelo says the Florida Highway Patrol received the report during rush hour Friday morning.
Workers were able to clear at least one lane after a short time by sweeping all the shoes to the shoulder.
I mean, this is one serious amount of shoes here.
But delays are expected to last all morning until all the shoes could be removed.
Sant'Angelo says the shoes appeared to be used and most were tied together in pairs, and he has no idea where they came from.
Now, obviously, this is like that guy in Baghdad who did the good riddance to Bush thing by throwing his shoes at him, but obviously in Iraq, they can only get one guy to throw his shoes at Bush.
Over here, it's a mass movement.
You know, if only I'd listened to my stockbroker back in the summer, six months ago, he said, you know, dump your GM, dump your Lehman Brothers, Wachovia, AIG, and put it all into payload shoe sauce.
But the highway in Florida right now is still clogged with shoes.
And speaking of shoe leather, ABC News reports that thousands of tourists pouring into Washington, D.C. for President-elect Barack Obama's inauguration will be sharing the nation's capital with thousands of predominantly gay leather fetishists in town for their annual convention.
The 25th annual Mid-Atlantic Leather Weekend, hosted by the city's Centaur Motorcycle Club, quote, a group of men with an enthusiastic interest in motorcycles, leather, and other men, is expected to draw between 2,000 and 3,000 attendees.
This is from ABC News.
I don't see why a double booking should ruin the occasion.
You know, why can't the mid-Atlantic leather guys serve as the president-elect's motorcycle outriders, perhaps scooping up all the leather shoes being hurled at the outgoing president?
I don't know whether you remember this when this came up before as an example of the internal contradictions of liberalism.
But as I recall it, the gay leather fetishists were picketed a few years ago by Peter, the militant vegan crowd, for using real cowhide for their leather.
I thought Peter wanted the mid-Atlantic leather weekend to be replaced by a mid-Atlantic polyester weekend or whatever it was.
But maybe we could incorporate the PETA protest into the parade and have President Obama followed by the gay leather fetishist motorcyclists and then followed by the PETA protesters hurling arugula at the gay leather fetishist motorcycle outriders.
It should all work well.
It'll be a lovely parade.
January the 20th.
So all very excited here.
The new age, the new dawn of the Obama era is almost upon us.
And we'll be talking about that and much more straight ahead on the EIB network.
1-800-282-2882.
Oberline Friday with Mark Stein in Farush.
Mark Stein in Farush, Oberline Friday on the EIB Network, 1-800-282-2882.
It is the first live show of 2009, and you are free to talk about whatever you want to talk about.
We've just had a useful suggestion here that, in fact, President Obama could wear leather chaps to the inauguration and please both the folks who are there for the inaugural and the leather fetishists who are there for the Mid-Atlantic Leather Weekend.
So that's a very useful contribution.
You know, one thing I've learned over the years is that you should never make a joke because sooner or later someone will come along, whatever joke you propose, someone will come along and do it for real.
Years ago, when they started talking about undocumented immigrants, I couldn't believe this because, you know, this stuck me as such a kind of cockamame abuser language that I figured this is never going to fly.
When Democrats started stopping using the word illegal immigrants and started talking about undocumented immigrants, I thought this is crazy.
It's never going to work.
People won't buy this.
And to make a joke about it, I started talking about fine upstanding members of the undocumented American community just as a kind of throwaway line.
Didn't think anything of it.
A couple of years later, on the Senate floor proposing the amnesty bill, Senator Harry Reid comes out and says we need to pass this amnesty bill to bring these undocumented Americans out of the shadows.
Undocumented Americans had jumped from being a cheap joke of mine to real.
It's now in the language.
Harry Reid's using it on the Senate floor, undocumented Americans.
Same thing happened.
Same thing happened a few months ago when the New York Times got downgraded to junk stock by Moody's.
I made a throwaway reference that the New York Times was too lib to fail and the newspapers should be in line for getting their share of the government bailout.
As I said, just a cheap joke, you know.
Who would think seriously that the United States government would be bailing out newspapers?
Well, here we go.
Story from Reuters from Connecticut.
Connecticut lawmaker Frank Necastro represents Connecticut's 79th Assembly District, which includes Bristol, a city of about 61,000 people outside Hartford.
Its paper, the Bristol Press, may fold within days, along with the Herald in nearby New Britain.
This is because their publisher is in danger of being crushed under hundreds of millions of dollars of debt and says it can't afford to keep them open anymore.
What solution does State Representative Frank Necastro propose?
He wants the state government of Connecticut to pay for the continued publication of these newspapers.
You know, they have state newspapers in many parts of the world.
In the Soviet Union, they had them.
They were called Pravda and Izvestia.
Now Connecticut is proposing to go after the Pravda and Izvestia media model.
As I said, I just did this a couple of months ago as a throwaway line, then now it's happened for real.
The government is proposing to take the Connecticut state newspapers, private newspapers that nobody wants to read anymore, and publish them at taxpayers' expense.
There's a reason, by the way, why American newspapers are failing, and that's because they're largely dull and unreadable.
One reason isn't even the left-wing bias particular.
I mean, there's left-wing newspapers all over the world, and say what you like about, you know, The Guardian in London.
I had a very interesting conversation once with a big-time Hollywood star.
I won't embarrass him by mentioning him.
He's like a Hollywood lefty.
And he said to me, before he goes to bed at night, what he does is read the left-wing newspapers from London online.
He reads The Guardian and The Independent.
Now, this guy lives in a town with the Los Angeles Times, which has catered to him and pandered to him and pandered to all his left-wing biases for decade after decade after decade.
And the result is that even this hardcore lefty doesn't want to read the Los Angeles Times because it's unreadable.
America has the dullest newspapers in the English-speaking world, and that is why people don't want to read them.
And the idea that somehow the government should be propping them up, that the government should invest in this failed model.
I mean, it makes total sense.
It's the, you know, these unread newspapers in the Connecticut, in Connecticut, basically they see General Motors and Ford and wealthy banks, once wealthy banks getting their share of the bailout, why shouldn't they be on the dime?
So I am opposed to bailing out state newspapers.
And if you're in the government and you're thinking about it and you're thinking about bailing out these newspapers, I mean, I think even Obama might draw the line at this because for years you've been getting the stuff free for them.
Effectively, they've been cheerleaders for you now for these last two or three years entirely for free.
Why on earth should Obama now start paying for them and subsidizing them and in fact getting taxpayers to subsidize for them?
There was a joke years ago.
The CIA was convinced that the Canadian Prime Minister, Pierre Trudeau, was in the pay of the KGB.
And as far as we know, Pierre Trudeau was not in the pay of the KGB.
But the problem at the CIA was that when they listened to Trudeau talk, they figured he had to be being paid to say this stuff.
You know, that no sane man, no sane man would talk this way for free, unless he was on the payroll of the KGB.
They couldn't get it into their heads that he was willing to say this stuff for free.
Well, that's the situation of the American media.
They've been saying this stuff for free.
Why should they now get paid by the United States government to say it?
The reality is that most American newspapers, these boring monopoly dailies that they have now in most American cities, are a disgrace to a free society.
And what they need to do is actually go in there, let a lot of these ones fail.
There will still be print journalism.
I wouldn't mind seeing Rush buy a newspaper somewhere or other.
But they're not going to be on these models.
Basically, the Boston Globe is now valued at 2% of what the New York Times paid for it 15 years ago.
If you look at the Miami Herald, that's up for sale.
And the newspaper isn't worth anything.
The newspaper is worth nothing.
And the only thing they've got that's any value is their prestigious waterfront property.
They're just like General Motors is basically a giant retirement home with a small loss-making auto subsidiary.
The Miami Herald is a potential beachfront condo development with a small loss-making newspaper.
We'll be talking about that and more straight ahead on the EIB network.
Open Line Friday with Mark Stein in for Rush.
Hey, happy New Year, America.
It's January the 2nd.
I believe that is still actually a holiday in many European countries.
I know it's a public holiday in Scotland still because they need an extra day to sober up after New Year's Eve.
And no doubt we'll be getting the great three-week European Union mandatory Christmas break this time next year, something to look forward to under President-elect Obama.
You know, I was talking earlier about how terrific he looks in all these shots of him gallivanting in the surf in Hawaii.
It is amazing.
It's a heartwarming sight.
I saw it all over Christmas.
It's the, what was that?
What's that song?
Barak Hussain Obama is the thing to say on a bright Hawaiian Christmas Day.
And I just love it, looks fantastic, looks terrific.
And I love all the way that the columnists who used to mock the way that Bush used to work out and go jogging and brushcutting are now hailing the Obama fitness regime.
He'll soon have all of us doing it too, I hope.
Let's go to Bob in Kingsport, Tennessee, I believe, who wants to talk about Obama's fantastic pecs.
I thought, Bob, you all bit are gunklingers down in Tennessee.
I didn't realize you were now seeing the error of your ways and taking up the admiration of Obama's physical perfection as an alternative hobby.
But good to talk to you, Bob.
Welcome to the EIB Network.
Thank you, Mark.
First, let me say you're one of my favorite commentators.
No, thanks a lot.
And listen, I really am trying as hard as I can to love Barack Obama.
And I'll admit he's got perfect pecs, but I am somewhat concerned.
I doubt we should put him on Mount Rushmore until we have someone take a look inside his lungs and see if they're healthy.
You know, he smokes, and I understand he hasn't been able to quit.
No, no, no, that's true.
He is the, I believe he's the first smoker in the White House since Eisenhower.
And I think that's incredible that America is mature enough to get over its deeply incrained prejudices and elect a smoking American to the White House.
I think it speaks well for us for the ability to overcome our prejudices.
You object to him smoking in the White House, do you?
No, no, not at all.
I don't object to it.
It's a free country, and if he wants to do that, fine.
But as one who smoked for 24 years and then quit 24 years ago, I'm just concerned that he'll last out his first term.
They say that smoking is unhealthy.
Now, I understand George Bush is in virtual perfect health.
Right, right.
I'm afraid we're going to get this great president in office, and he's going to do all these wonderful things, and then lo and behold, he may not survive.
Well, you know, we can, if only to avoid the thought of having to say the words President Biden, I think we should hope that he has incredibly, incredibly long life.
I don't know.
I'm more relaxed about the whole smoking thing.
People used to smoke.
At one point in American history, all the presidents smoked, and then suddenly they stopped smoking.
There's a tape of Sinatra doing America the Beautiful, and he's rehearsing it or something, and he's going, oh, beautiful, through spacious sky, through amber waves of grain.
I would feel a whole lot better about it if Obama would say, I love to smoke.
I intend to continue smoking.
It's my right, and nobody's going to tell me not to.
But rather, I understand he's trying to quit and doesn't have the.
No, no, he's sadly, he's a closet smoker.
I agree with you.
I think he should get it right out there in front and do the inauguration the way Sinatra did that song.
I, Barack Hussain Obama, do solemnly swear to faithfully.
I think that would be far more inspirational for America to see that we finally put this deep prejudice against smokers behind us.
Anyway, he does, for Smoky, he looks in terrific shape.
But Bob in Kingsport, Tennessee, thanks for your call.
Is a wee bit concerned about the underlying health issues there.
It's true, you know, that if you can only imagine if John McCain had been a closet smoker, hard as it is to imagine that, you know, he could have lost any worse than he did.
But you can imagine that would have been an issue then.
McCain's inability to give up smoking.
What does it say about him?
You know, poor old McCain, the guy gets tortured for five years, so he finds it hard using a keyboard.
So he's not going on the internet all that often.
And the Obama campaign and the media are putting out these attacks on McCain for his inability to use a computer.
He was tortured by the Viet Cong.
That's why he can't use a computer.
But he did, he did give up cigarette smoking.
He comes from the generation that smokes all the time.
He doesn't smoke.
Obama is really the post-smoking generation and he's entirely comfortable with smoking.
By the way, I said he would be the first smoker in the White House since Eisenhower.
That is a cigarette smoker.
Clinton, I believe, had cigars in the White House, but if you read the Star report, you'll know that they were famously unlit because Hillary Clinton banned actual lighting up in the White House.
But in one of those cunning legalisms, apparently, she didn't specifically forbid tobacco products in the White House.
So if you do recollect your Star report, you'll know that they were actually using tobacco products in the White House one way or the other.
But he does look terrific, Obama.
And I do share your health concerns, though, though, Bob.
By the way, in case you didn't hear about it, in Iraq, the war is over.
It's official now.
It's on the front page of the Washington Post, page A1 today, Friday, January the 2nd.
In Iraq, the day over.
The war, in a sense, is over.
Isn't that amazing?
Isn't that amazing?
The war mysteriously just ended in time for Barack's coronation.
That's marvelous timing, isn't it?
Who would have thought it?
The last time I read anything in the Washington Post about it, it was this like quagmire thing, and now it's all suddenly over.
Don't worry, don't worry.
We're not saying Obama was wrong in the war.
We're not saying when Harry Reid said that there was no question of winning the war, that Senator Harry Reid won the great foreign policy colossi of this country.
We're not saying that he was wrong.
The Washington Post is simply saying that the war is over.
It sounds very nice there.
Perhaps, writes Anthony Shaddid, it was the smiles at checkpoints and the shouts of Iraqi policemen navigating the snarl traffic.
God's mercy on your parents, they beseeched.
God's blessing on you.
Maybe it was the music box still playing Santa Claus is coming to town at a kiosk overflowing with Christmas tea decorations and heart-shaped red pillar.
Isn't that lovely?
They got Santa Claus is coming to town on the streets of Baghdad.
You can't do that at a New Jersey grade school or the ACLU will shut down your holiday concert, but you can do Santa Claus is coming to town at a kiosk in the heart of Baghdad.
It's lovely what's happening there.
The war in Iraq is over.
It's official.
It's on the front page of the Washington Post, and it's just in time for the combined Obama inauguration gay leather weekend festivities in Washington in a couple of weeks, in a couple of weeks' time.
So if you still want to argue about the Iraq war, that it's unwinnable and all the rest of it, do give us a call.
1-800-282-2882.
Open Line Friday on the Rush Limbaugh Show with Mark Stein in for Russia.
The other thing I love in the news at the moment, this business of Governor Blagojevich in Illinois.
Now, he's appointed.
He's the guy running the replacement for Obama's Senate.
And he got into a little difficulty, and he's now under indictment.
And they've got these tapes of him apparently trying to sell the seat and everything.
But he did appoint this guy, the former Attorney General of Illinois, Roland Burris, who is an African-American to the Senate.
And the Senate Democrats are now refusing to seat him.
There's no possible legal basis for them being able to actually keep him out.
There was a Supreme Court case about this 40 years ago.
It seems relatively clear that whatever one feels about Governor Blagojevich, Roland Burris is not a lawbreaker or anything, but he is an African-American.
He would be the only African American in the Senate.
And now Harry Reid and his phalanx of Democrat senators have all signed on to this thing saying, no, we can't have the black guy here in the Senate.
If he tries to get in, we're going to bar the way.
We're going to get, you know, we'll have the cops barring the door to the Senate executive washroom.
He's not going to get in here.
And that looked really good the last time they did that in the 1960s.
I think that'll play really well on TV.
But I love the way the new post-racial era in American politics.
We're putting race behind us.
And one way we're putting race behind it is Democrats stopping this black guy from getting into the Senate.
I feel like Jim Baker, when Jim Baker said about the Balkans, we don't have a dog at this fight.
We guys in the Republican Party, we don't have a dog in this fight.
We should just sit back and enjoy it and let Harry Reid and the Democrats tear the Chicago machine poll Roland Burris apart.
We'll have a great time.
Elbert Leid Friday, January the 2nd, start of a brand new year, and Mark Stein honored to be here sitting in for Rush.
More of your calls straight ahead on the EIB network.
Hey, yeah.
We can boogie day.
It's like mid-Atlantic leather weekend here on the Rush Limbaugh show.
Mark Stein in for Rush on the EIB network.
Don't forget 1-800-282-2882.
You can get all the stack of stuff and all the other great stuff at rushlimbaugh.com.
Rush will be back on Monday, Remindigo, fully rested from his European Union-style holiday.
He'll be Rowan to go Monday, January the 5th at midday, Eastern 9 a.m. Pacific.
Jim in the Bronx, Jim is called into Open Line Friday.
Good to talk to you, Jim.
Happy New Year.
Thank you, Mark, and the same to you.
I just wanted to add that I feel that it's not just because newspapers are boring and dull that they're losing readership, at least in my one example and other friends that I know.
The major newspapers, in particular, the New York Times and the LA Times and the Washington Post, all these media are just too biased.
And you could see what happened with John McCain during the presidential race, even his wife, Cindy McCain, where they ran a front-page article on her.
Yeah, and they did what they did with Sarah Palmer.
Instead of editorializing merely or only on the editorial pages, they editorialize everywhere.
It's just gotten to be intolerable.
Well, you're right that there is certainly a double standard, Jim.
I mean, they like turn on a dime with Sarah Palin, hopelessly unqualified, ridiculous.
The idea of this woman even being elected to vice president is completely absurd.
But whoo, 10 minutes later, Caroline Kennedy, incredibly qualified for the Senate on the basis that she edited a book of her mother's poetry.
Did you know Jackie Kennedy wrote poetry, Jim?
Can you quote any Jackie Kennedy poetry to me?
I didn't know.
Who knew?
But apparently, Caroline Kennedy edited a book called The Best Loved Poems of Jacqueline Kennedy, Onassis.
The best loved poems of Jacqueline Kennedy O'Nassis.
What does best loved mean in that scenario?
It's that it's the idea that there are different gradations of poems by Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, that some are better loved than others.
Nobody knows any poems by Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, but you edit a book on Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, and you are a towering intellectual genius who should be in the United States Senate.
But you know, Jim, you raise a good point.
Obviously, these newspapers are, these newspapers are biased.
You see that because you're a conservative.
If you are someone who is not terribly political, though, the danger about American newspapers and about the media and the culture in general is that the left-wing position to most people is the non-partisan position.
Like, if you take an issue like global warming, to believe that global warming is real and happening and that we should all save the planet is not seen as a left-wing position.
That's seen as the non-partisan position.
If you argue for that, then you're not taking a strident extreme political position.
You're taking the mainstream position around which we can all unite.
If you take other issues like this sort of stupid multiculturalism they peddle now in American schools, this ridiculous idea that all cultures are entirely the same and there's nothing particularly better about the United States cultural inheritance than anywhere else, that's not seen as an extreme left-wing position.
That's essentially the non-partisan position that people of all backgrounds can supposedly unite around.
The left is very cunning at presenting what are actually extreme positions as being entirely uncontroversial.
And that's what you see in American in the broader, not just newspapers, but in the broader American culture, I would say.
And you can take it further.
I mean, if you just read the Times for the business reporting, for example.
I defy you to find somebody that gets the business news exclusively from the Times to accurately report what the market did, say, from 2003 to 2008.
No, no. The water was up 100% during that time period.
And if you read the New York Times, I guarantee you you could not tell me that.
No, well, I love the way left-wing politics infects every corner of the newspaper.
You know, it's even worse.
If it's any consolation, it's even worse when you pick up like a Canadian or a European or an Australian newspaper because you often find the like, you know, you expect people to be anti-American on the op-ed page.
It's like when the gardening columnist is ferociously anti-American.
The architecture columnist of the Toronto Star, which is Canada's biggest selling newspaper, they put up a new bridge at the border post between Niagara Falls, New York, and Niagara Falls, Ontario.
And he's writing a thing about the architecture of the booth on the Canadian side, comparing it to the booth on the American side.
And this guy says, he begins his architectural little featurette with the words, as the United States descends into fascism.
That's the architecture guy.
He's not writing about Paul.
He's not on the Om-Ed page.
He's writing about architecture.
He's writing about the booth on the Buffalo, on the Niagara Falls, New York side of the New York-Ontario border.
And he's still listening.
Jim of the Bronx, thanks for your call and a happy new year to you.
It is open line Friday on the Rush Limbaugh Show.
Mark Stein in for Rush.
More straight ahead on the EIB network.
The Rush Limbaugh Show on the Excellence in Broadcasting Network.
This is Mark Stein on the first live show of this new year.
I'm thrilled to be here.
I always get a lot of great reaction when I fill in for Rush.
After the last show I did, a listener at the U.S. Immigration Department was so moved.
He reassigned Obama's aunt's deportation order to me.
I was so deeply honored.
We've got lots more straight ahead in the next couple of hours.
The news is now that the bailout is just too small, just too small.
We're going to need at least a trillion dollars because, says Representative Lynn Woolsey of California, anything much less than $1 trillion will be like trying to put out a forest fire with a squirt gun.
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