Rush Limbaugh Program - April 24, 2009, Friday, Hour #1

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April 24, 2009 - Rush Limbaugh Program

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April 24, 2009, Friday, Hour #1

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	Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
	Thanks, everybody.
	And from probably no further than 20, 25 minutes from George and Laura Bush's house.
	Hi, I'm Mark Davis in for Rush today.
	Rush is back on Monday.
	Enjoyed Mark Stein yesterday, and I'm Mark Davis today.
	Boy, Mark Belling, what is it with the Mark thing we got going on?
	I'm just glad to be one of them and glad to be back with you and glad to enjoy your company for what would certainly be Open Line Friday on the Rush Limbaugh Show.
	And the good news there is, if that's the drill that you are used to, the good news is that's pretty well how I conduct my talk show life.
	I got a bunch of stuff in front of me that, oh, there's some directions I'm going to take you.
	But please, from the get-go, you know that 1-800-282-2882 is your invitation to take it somewhere else under certain types of supervision.
	So let's hop in today on this Friday and do what I think a lot of talk shows like to do, certainly the one that I like to do on WBAP Dallas-Fort Worth, my home, and that's tie a big bow around things, wrap things up from an amazing week gone by.
	Started out with the 10th anniversary observation of Columbine.
	Wow, some of that analysis was just silly.
	Middle of the week, there was Earth Day, which ramped it up to a whole new level of lunacy, and Rush chronicled that well, to be sure.
	And now we find ourselves, as the week winds down, looking at just how ardently the White House might really want to beat this drum for prosecution, prosecution, mind you, of people who kept this country safe.
	This is one of the grand themes of these times.
	There will always be disagreements between right and left, disagreements between Republicans and Democrats, disagreements between fans of President Bush, President Reagan, fans of Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid.
	And that's fine.
	That is the music of democracy.
	It is the sound of free speech.
	But when winning the argument is not enough, when prevailing either at the ballot box or in the public sphere is not enough, when you live to drive your opponents from the arena of debate, when you live to criminalize their opposition to your narrative,
	that's pathological.
	And that's what we're seeing.
	I mean, listen, I'm 51.
	If we haven't met each other, I mean, my dad was in the Air Force for 20 years, and I came of age as an adult in the Reagan years, and that really just got my concrete dry as to where right and wrong were in terms of politics and a ton of other things as well.
	Not everybody growing up.
	I mean, there are a lot of people I could find born exactly the same year I was, 1957, who totally disagree with me.
	I don't know what happened to y'all, but maybe that's a whole other talk show.
	But what I'm saying is I know full well that there are going to be presidencies that I like and that I vote for.
	First president I ever voted for was Gerald Ford.
	I tried.
	I tried to fend off Jimmy Carter, but no.
	And I'm very proud of having voted for President Ford.
	Then I obviously got two chances to vote for President Reagan, and that worked out just fine.
	Then I voted for his vice president, President Bush, and felt the same kind of shiv in the ribs that many of you did as you went back on the no new taxes pledge.
	But, you know, hey, history has smiled on this man, if not totally politically and certainly personally.
	He and his family, I remain enormous fans of theirs.
	And his son, while I differed with him greatly on a couple of issues, kept my family safe, something that many of you seem not to appreciate.
	Many of you in America, plenty of you in the Limbaugh audience do.
	But then, of course, there were those eight years of Bill Clinton, and we survived, right?
	You know, when Bill Clinton was elected there in November 1992, I was working in Washington.
	I'd gone back to the town where I grew up and was hosting a talk show there in D.C.
	Oh, and it was a talk show host's cornucopia, as you might well expect.
	And at times, it just seemed like, oh, everything, everything that Reagan stood for.
	I mean, did the budget come closer into balance?
	Well, yeah, by raising all of our taxes to the stratosphere.
	That's not the way to balance a budget.
	You balance a budget with tax cuts and spending cuts because they both energize an economy.
	You know, we've all been giving and receiving that speech for a long time.
	But this is just so different.
	From the perspective of a lifelong conservative, these Obama years, this first hundred days is a nightmare that I could not have envisioned as I watched him take the oath of office.
	Watched it right there, went to the inauguration.
	I tend to go to all of these, and it's quite the emotional roller coaster that is between seeing someone sworn in whom you voted for and admire and seeing someone sworn in whom you just brace yourself and hope that things don't go as badly as they might.
	Well, it's at that time, at that time, between the election, let's say, and the inauguration, people were calling me and saying that the earth is going to spin wildly out of its orbit.
	This is going to be just horrible.
	And I told every caller in that regard: look, I am similarly braced.
	Let's wait and see what the man actually does.
	Let's react not to our very well-founded fears, but let's react to what he actually does.
	Well, how's that working out for everybody?
	Because I've spent just about every day reacting to what the man has actually done.
	And except for beefing up troop forces in Afghanistan, and I don't know, I'm going to, I don't know, and the Easter egg roll.
	I have found everything to be abhorrent.
	This is the worst 100 days ever in my lifetime.
	And I think I'd say that if I were 150 years old, this, I mean, will this be the worst presidency ever?
	Well, I mean, it's glib and it's a generic talk show guy to say that it's the worst presidency ever.
	But words mean things.
	So how do we, and maybe we can go, I'm a master of things so tiny and so filled with minutiae as to be dorkish, and yet I also enjoy the grand broad theme.
	Here's a grand broad theme.
	How does one define the worst presidency ever?
	I know how Harry Reid defines it, a president who stands for a war that he hated.
	I don't ever, ever want to refer to a presidency as the worst ever just because I politically disagree with the president.
	It's when it goes just beyond the political differences that all of us will experience.
	No matter who we are, we're always going to have presidents whom we admire, presidents whom we voted for, presidents whom we didn't.
	We ride the roller coaster and we hope that by the time our time is done, that there's been more good than bad.
	These people are different.
	They're not just opposition to what I believe, but their derision of it.
	We're going to talk a little tea party today.
	A little.
	I'm doing my part to keep the tea party spirit alive.
	I was very, very, very blessed to be the master of ceremonies for the Dallas Tea Party.
	That evening was magical, as it was across America at events that you may well have attended.
	And if there is, and maybe there's something that angered you, maybe there's something that annoyed you, and I told the audience here in Texas, oh, no, no, don't gripe, smile broadly and walk more erect and upright and proud.
	Because to earn the derision, to open the valve of hate that flows through Janine Garofilo, just to pick someone.
	Can't watch 24 anyway.
	When Agent Janice Gold is on, I just got a T-vote.
	I don't ever want to be like that.
	I mean, today's Barbara Streisand's birthday, too.
	That's a continuing lifetime boycott.
	But anyway, to earn the kind of reactions that we earned with the Tea Party movement, there were people who said we were insane.
	We were unhinged.
	They did everything but talk about the issues.
	They did everything but talk about what we were actually there to do.
	Because if you categorize those of us who had kind of a Tea Party thing going, if you categorize us as racist, which was Janine's thing, if you categorize us as mentally ill, if you characterize us as, oh, I don't know, mildly retarded, which is what a lot of the commentary kind of sounded like.
	Well, then you know what you don't have to do?
	You don't have to address what was said at the Tea Party rallies.
	You don't have to address the push for liberty.
	You don't have to address the danger of profligate spending.
	You don't have to address the lower taxes that I still believe most Americans want.
	You don't have to address the content of the Tea Party movement.
	If you simply dismiss it and give it the back of your hand, well, then you're done.
	And let's, you know, let's move on from there.
	And that is what these people are about.
	Anyone willing to step into the arena and engage constructively about why I want lower taxes and you don't, why I want to win the war and you don't.
	Why I want to bring government down to the size the founders wished and you don't.
	I'll have that debate all day.
	I'll have it civilly.
	I'll have it constructively.
	And I will love every moment.
	But the point at which you step into the arena with me or with Rush or with Sean or with Levin or with any of the folks who nationally and locally are doing, you know, doing such yeoman's work on these issues, you step in and just dismiss them with name-calling and ideological bigotry.
	Well, forget you.
	But that happened in vast amounts on Tea Party Day leading up to it and the day after.
	And I want you to wear that as a badge of honor and as evidence of the Tea Party movement's success, because it freaked them out so badly that they could not even muster the clarity to address the subject matter.
	All they could do is heap hate upon the movement and its practitioners.
	So, let's get our first break in, come back.
	I got a couple of details to share here because now what are we doing?
	T, get it?
	T plus, T E A, T plus nine days.
	And I sense that the spirit is still alive.
	I don't know.
	People I talk to and maybe folks you talk to are still pretty stoked about doing something about this on Election Day 2010 and really doing something about it on Election Day 2012.
	There's miles to go before we sleep.
	Many, many things we must do.
	And we're going to talk about what that takes and what you think it'll take and whether you think this is at this point, it's not just a one-day flash in the pan, but if it's a one-month flash in the pan, that's not good.
	If we lose this passion by Christmas, if we lose it by next summer, more of the same.
	No, we're looking to bring about real change.
	President Obama beat us to death with platitudes of hope and change.
	I now know what hope and change really mean.
	I'm looking to bring change that hadn't been in Washington for a long time.
	A change in the Republican Party.
	Because there are Democrats who must be fought, and there are Republicans of faint heart and jellied spines who also must be fought.
	And we've either got our act together for that or we don't.
	I'd like to hear where your finger goes on the pulse of that.
	And I got some stories from my Tea Party Day, just a couple.
	And I go at length about that.
	But a bunch of stories.
	We're really going to talk about some interrogation issues today.
	The White House seems to be peeling a little bit away from its fetish for prosecuting those who kept our country safe.
	Byron York, the examiner, is going to join us.
	And you've read Byron for a long time in National Review, and now he's a DC examiner guy and just a great writer.
	He'll join us at the top of next hour, and we'll talk a little bit about that.
	But the voices I truly crave are yours here on the Friday Rush Limbaugh Show.
	I'm Mark Davis in Dallas-Fort Worth.
	Glad to be keeping the seat warm today.
	So let's get going.
	1-800-282-2882-1-800-282-2882.
	And always visit rushlimbaugh.com, even when Rush is off.
	He's back Monday.
	I'm here today.
	Couldn't be happier.
	Your calls next on the EIB Network.
	Little Minute Work.
	Let's see who can it be now on the phones.
	1-800-282-2882 on the Rush Limbaugh Show.
	I'm Mark Davis, filling in in Texas.
	And if I'm going to invoke the phenomenon of Tea Party opposition, I'm glad to welcome somebody who apparently was not a big fan of it and glad to go to Jensen Beach, Florida.
	JJ, welcome to the Rush Limbaugh Show.
	I'm Mark Davis.
	It's nice to have you.
	Hi, Mark.
	How are you?
	I'm good.
	Fantastic.
	Yeah, I just wanted to call.
	I was tuning into your show today.
	I just was going back and looking at the history of the little Tea Party thing that just took place.
	And this thing was organized on the Internet from the top down.
	And in no way was a grassroots, you know, it's just not even feasible for 5,000 groups of people across the nation to do the same thing at the same time.
	Except that it has to have three people to have the same consensus on what they want to eat at the same time.
	You can if they're as stoked as we are.
	I mean, define top-down.
	Well, let's start with the Republican National Committee.
	You know, the people have, you know, and here's the dynamic that's going on here.
	Well, no, but finish the sentence.
	I mean, finish the sentence.
	I mean, what did the Republican National Committee do?
	I mean, Michael Steele, God love him, was not the most popular party.
	There are organizers to organize this thing on the internet and get people to go to these things.
	I mean, you know, that's what, you know, that's it.
	If you're involved with your party, and I encourage everyone being involved in politics, you know, I may not agree with what you have to say politically, but I'll fight to the death for your right to say it.
	You know, I mean, I come from a long line of military servers and supporters.
	I don't fit really in the quote-unquote liberal, as you guys would define.
	We may have time to examine that.
	Let me take a second on the top-down thing because, first of all, the vast majority of people showing up at tea parties had no concept of Dick Army's involvement or the RNC's involvement.
	They came because somebody tweeted or Facebook or called them and asked them to.
	It's the definition of grassroots.
	That's right.
	There was no more.
	There was no more.
	Right.
	So here's the thing.
	At an event of this type, at a phenomenon of this type, will there be some level of big organizations trying to stoke attendance?
	Yes, but no more than unions or Hollywood or teachers groups would stoke attendance at a liberal event.
	If they had not been there, this thing would not have taken place.
	Well, but would that be true if we have some huge pro-choice rally or some huge something else on the left?
	Would it be as big if we didn't have big labor?
	Absolutely, absolutely.
	There's no, and all I detect, all I detect is there is an attempt to deride and minimize the Tea Party phenomenon as if it was like one button pushed by Michael Steele or Dick Army that 175,000 people suddenly went to.
	And that's just a lie.
	No, What I'm saying here is that, you know, as I was telling your screener there, you said a comment earlier, you said these people.
	And I hear Rush say that a lot.
	And I hear other conservative talk show hosts say that a lot.
	You know, really, I've never met one of these people, these America-hating, flag-burning liberals that you guys talk about.
	You know what?
	And that's a very important thing.
	Put it this way.
	During the Clinton years, my life was pretty good.
	There was money to be had.
	I'm an entrepreneur, business owner.
	Things were fat.
	Money was good.
	Money was all around.
	During the George W. Bush years, my personal finances, particularly towards the end, like everybody else's, went wrapper.
	And now, you know, what I hear, people, there was a term that came out towards the end of the Bush years, which was George W. Bush derangement syndrome.
	Exactly.
	Good lord.
	I am hearing a lot of Obama derangement out there.
	Except that it's not defined by vociferousness.
	It's defined by what is it based on.
	My distaste for the Obama agenda and my use of these people, by the way, does not deal with rank-and-file liberals who might just be good, proud Democrats, you know, from Michigan to wherever.
	When I refer, you say, I've never met these people.
	I never have either.
	I've never met Harry Reid or Nancy Pelosi.
	And I'm really talking about the Democrat power structure that I believe has an incredible hostility toward liberty that even most rank-and-file Democrats don't have.
	You don't seem to have it.
	We got about 30 seconds.
	Do you feel well represented by Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi?
	Well, you know, I'm glad you asked me that.
	And I'll have to say, honestly, they're a little further to the left than where I am.
	Bingo.
	And I don't mind saying that.
	It's just simply another difference out there.
	I hope what I was hoping that would take place here is that the staunchness of the Republican Party would serve to reel in any overly left actions that they may take.
	Well, you know what?
	You probably have to.
	And you may well, and you may well with that have defined what the Tea Party movement was all about.
	That really is what it's about.
	It's gathering not just Republicans, but Democrats, maybe Democrats like you, not to agree on everything from abortion to immigration, but to agree that these trillions of dollars of debt, this enormous abyss that's been dug for us and our kids to dig out of, gathering people together to agree at least on one thing, that it's too much, that this kind of change is not right.
	JJ, God bless you.
	Thank you.
	Mark Davis in for Rush.
	And we'll be right back with more of your calls in just a moment.
	Big Friday on the Rush Limbaugh Show on the EIB Network.
	Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart, right?
	The arithmetics are giving us the Obama administration official theme, would I lie to you?
	And the sad answer is yes, in a New York minute, if it keeps us in power.
	All right, having put the character type, the species of human that is the Tea Party organizer, Tea Party attendee, under the microscope to see, and it's funny because you can't generalize.
	At the Tea Party in Dallas that I was proud to emcee, there were people of all sizes, shapes, stripes, economic levels, and yes, races.
	I mean, did they tend to be pretty white?
	Yeah.
	Maybe talk shows of the future will deal not with the question of, you know, what is it that we're doing that repels black people, but why aren't black people more attracted by liberty?
	There's your question.
	And I really, really, really believe, I really believe that that will change.
	Change takes time.
	It just takes time.
	So we have an actual Tea Party organizer.
	Let's talk to Janine and Helen in Montana.
	Welcome to the Rush Limbaugh Show.
	Mark Davis.
	Janine, how are you?
	Hamilton, Montana.
	Hamilton, excuse me.
	Turned it into the state capitol.
	I so apologize.
	Yes, I was an organizer, and I am not a Republican.
	I'm an independent.
	In fact, I'm a recovering Democrat.
	Well, then let me ask you a couple of things.
	Are you a seething racist who hates the fact that a black man is president?
	Well, then the other Janine, that would be Garofilo, must have been mistaken about that.
	Unfortunate choice of names, but yes.
	So how did it go?
	If you really undertook this, not necessarily from a particularly consistently conservative point of view, A, how'd that work out?
	And B, how many attendees did you get who might well have disagreed with the average Tea Party organizer on 10 other issues, but agreed with the Tea Party spirit of less government and less taxation?
	Well, it was less spending, less government.
	Taxation was there, but I think it's the spending that had people more upset than the taxation, which of course is going to follow.
	We live in a town, I think the last census was 3,500, and there was 500 attendees, which is a pretty big percentage.
	And like you said, it was very diverse, young, old, white, black, and a group of peaceful, happy, people who were having a good time who said, you know, I've never done this in my life.
	And it was a nice day.
	People drove by.
	We had the biggest traffic jam downtown with people driving by and honking.
	It was a great, great day.
	What is the, I was going to say plight?
	That seems kind of dark, but where does the path lead here?
	And maybe I'm talking about you and some others who as independents or moderates or whatever you want to call them, people who may have some views that are fairly conservative, some that are fairly liberal, others somewhere in between.
	Clearly, the Tea Party goals cannot be achieved, cannot be achieved in the short term without voting out a ton of Democrats and bringing in an army of Republicans driven to do what the Republican Party is supposed to do, and that's reduce taxes and spending.
	Oh, I absolutely agree with you.
	And my goal is the next two years.
	I think that it has to happen in the off-year election, and we need to be organized, and we need to know what we're going after.
	See, here's my theory on change.
	The change that Barack Obama subliminally, I can't say that, was promising us was to get rid of Bush.
	Bush was the problem.
	He was going to get rid of Bush.
	That was the change.
	So people are still happy.
	And every time one of his policies comes up, Bush keeps coming back up because he keeps saying, see, I changed things.
	I got rid of Bush.
	And when people start seeing that the change he's really bringing us is a fundamental change of the American system, eventually he's going to not be able to bring up the straw man Bush, and people are going to see that the change that's being shoved down our throat is not what we thought we were being promised.
	Sure.
	I am sufficiently compelled and energized by you that I want to take our final 60 seconds and play a little game that I've made famous on the local show here in Texas.
	It's called What is This Caller Really?
	Ready, Janine?
	Here we go.
	Give me, you've identified yourself as an independent.
	Great.
	Give me a couple of liberal views that you are proud to hold.
	Okay, I'm thinking, thinking, thinking.
	I'm not crazy about gun control.
	You're not or you are?
	I like gun control.
	I'm sorry.
	Okay, all right, that's why I like gun by and large.
	I don't treasure my rifles.
	Okay, you are probably more willing to, you know, sort of fiddle with the Second Amendment than maybe I am.
	Yes.
	Okay.
	All righty.
	Anything else?
	I'm thinking, I'm thinking.
	Even if that's all, that's all.
	I'm ambivalent about pro-choice.
	I'm becoming more pro-life, but it's not a litmus test for me.
	Hmm.
	So you may be a work in progress there.
	I told you I'm a recovering Democrat.
	Indeed, so.
	Well, then maybe we've just sort of caught you in the middle of that recovery.
	Not that I'm trying to turn everybody into, you know, just like me or just like Rush or anything else, but I'm amazed.
	That's right.
	I am amazed.
	And not that that's necessary.
	I mean, wherever anybody is, that's where they are.
	But I just run across so many people who go, well, I'm a moderate.
	I'm a conservative.
	Even some people who say I'm a Democrat.
	And then they talk to me about how they actually support the war and think we're taxed too high and think we're spending too high.
	I eventually just have to break the whole thing down into the game and say, what are you really?
	And people find out, often to their shock and chagrin, that they're way more conservative than they thought they were.
	And so I'm not trying to turn anybody into that, just looking for clarity on what people are.
	Well, I know what you are, a delightful woman.
	And thank you in my best to everybody in Hamilton sending too much of your money to Helena, Montana.
	Thank you, Janine.
	All right, it is the Rush Limbaugh Show.
	Go to RushLimbaugh.com.
	It's always a good place to be.
	And the phone number is always 1-800-282-2882.
	1-800-282-2882.
	There is already right now, having come off of the Dallas event, which I was proud to emcee, if you can make it down from Montana or anywhere, and there may be, I don't know how many other cities have a similar vibe, but I know that this one, this ball is rolling.
	What are you doing on the 4th of July?
	What are you doing on the 4th of July?
	If the default and proper answer is, why?
	Celebrating America.
	Hey, cool.
	If you want to come to this neck of the woods, the wonderful folks, Philip Dennis and my friends in this movement that got the Dallas Tea Party going, they're looking at doing some, I mean, big mondo, massive America's, like we're obnoxious enough in cowboy land to call them America's team.
	So we might as well call it America's Tea Party.
	And I think that's a working title.
	So just, and again, just as the months pass, you and I will talk, I hope, on a couple of days between now and July 4th.
	In fact, we will a couple of Fridays from now, May 8th.
	Just, you know, Tea Party plus Dallas plus July 4th.
	We're having apparently a massive one that's in the embryonic stages.
	And there may be others of those around the country.
	And on days that I fill in, I'm glad to plug those.
	And I'm sure Rush will be glad to hear references to those when he is here.
	And he will be returning, by the way, on Monday.
	As we go to, let's do one more call before we break here.
	Boy, am I going to regret this?
	Am I going to shut the system down?
	I'm tweeting like a son of a gun.
	I've been dragged into this world of Facebook and Twitter.
	And I have a very creative Twitter name.
	It's Mark DavisAll One Word.
	Wow.
	So if you want to follow me, you never know where I'll take you.
	Right now, I'm about to take you into another call.
	So 1-800-282-2882.
	Mark Davis in for Rush.
	And if you want to see what in the world I'm tweeting about, I will not abuse the privilege.
	I don't sit there and tell you, hey, I just finished a sandwich.
	That's not what this thing is for and when it's best used.
	But I'm a Twitter guy at MarkDavis, all one word.
	All righty.
	Here's one word.
	Chuck, here are two words.
	Casper, Wyoming.
	That's where he is.
	Welcome to the Rush Limbaugh Show.
	Chuck, Mark Davis, how you doing?
	I'm doing fine.
	Mark, thank you for taking my call.
	The Freudian slip of a lifetime.
	Thank you, man.
	Absolutely.
	We'll have it.
	First call for anybody, anytime, anywhere.
	And I was just motivated to action this morning.
	I've been thinking about some things, and your opening comments dovetailed with them, so I thought I'd see if I could call.
	You mentioned in the beginning that we as conservatives are kind of in a defensive mode right now.
	After all, we, of course, did lose the elections, and the Congress and the White House and the rest of it were kind of on the defensive.
	And lately I've been thinking about things I learned years ago in my misspent youth, professional youth, as a military guy, and kind of dovetailed some basic concepts, defense versus offense and strategy versus tactics.
	And I've been asking myself lately, why are we feeling so concerned?
	Why are we feeling so ineffective as conservatives in dealing with current events and where we think things are going?
	And it reminded me that there are some basic traits of defenses and offenses.
	And one of them is that a defense is an inherently vulnerable, passive position, and that an offense is inherently aggressive and is usually more effective in the military sense and in the business sense and the political sense.
	Because it suggests confidence rather than fear.
	Sure.
	There is no defense that's ever been devised by the mind of man that cannot be overcome by the mind of man.
	You set up a defense, the other side looks at it and figures out what it's going to do to overcome it, and it does.
	We need to change some of our thinking now, even now, in what looks like a defensive position.
	We need to become more offensive.
	I have a feeling, Chuck.
	I have a feeling that the news is good.
	And let me thank you because I've got to scoot into this break.
	And first of all, no youth spent in the military is misspent.
	I know.
	Yeah, I know your teeth.
	But I think that this notion of conservatism as recoiling, our tails are between our legs.
	We're stunned.
	We're disoriented.
	That strikes me as very February.
	Very February.
	And by that, I mean that the passage of just these last couple of months, not that the tea parties were some magical flipping of a switch and now we're all, you know, ready to go.
	But a whole bunch of us are, more of us are than were before.
	And it's given me, if I can still use this word in the English language, it's given me hope about 2010.
	Let's examine that some more in just a moment.
	It's the Rush Limbaugh Show.
	Mark Davis filling in with EIB Network.
	To the 134 of you who have just become followers of mine on Twitter in the last three minutes, thank you.
	Golly.
	Oh, my.
	The power of the Limbaugh Show.
	What you going to do?
	What you going to do?
	These are good times.
	I'm Mark Davis filling in for Rush.
	And I did indeed mention that Mark Davis on Twitter, and I'm kind of tweeting the experience for those who are interested in me.
	What's it like to fill in for Rush?
	It is a joy, and part of it involves just hanging with these wonderful folks who Rush gets to work with every day.
	It is just a little inside baseball.
	He is every bit the prince you would want him to be, and the folks who work with him are every bit the dedicated, spectacular, motivated souls that you would want them to be.
	It's a joy to be in their company.
	And in yours, as we give you the phone number 1-800-282-2882, 1-800-282-2882.
	Go to rushlimbaugh.com.
	May I head right to my own neighborhood into the audience of WBAP and Dallas-Fort Worth and say hi to Jeannie.
	Welcome to the Rush Limbaugh Show.
	Mark Davis, how are you?
	I'm thrilled to talk to you.
	I'm thrilled to talk to you too.
	How's it going?
	Great.
	Listen, the reason I called is because I feel like Americans have lost their debating skills.
	And this is something that we have got to work on if we're going to actually solve problems instead of throwing spears at each other.
	You know, when I think back to the Republicans in Congress who seem very weak-kneed in their response to Democrat attacks, I think back to the presidential debates that are moderated by the media.
	I would like to see some old-fashioned, one-on-one arguments of thesis, antithesis.
	And I think we need to teach this in the schools.
	And I have to tell you, I am thrilled to death that our local university is setting up a debate chamber, and they're going to work on solving that problem.
	You're talking to TCU?
	Yeah.
	Wow.
	Give me 30 seconds on how they expect to do that.
	Well.
	I mean, just an actual debate class where people learn, as you just described, the real nuts and bolts of how to do this rather than just sending people out into the cage for some kind of hair match.
	Yes, that.
	But in one of their new buildings, they've created what they're just calling the debate chamber at this point.
	And it's going to be a fabulous setup.
	Wow.
	Much like Oxford, where people gather with good manners and good points to make.
	Yes.
	Well, that's cool.
	Yeah.
	You know, it's funny because what you describe, it really is true.
	I mean, civility has been on the wane.
	And a lot of things that I and maybe you consume every once in a while are maybe partially to blame.
	I happen to be kind of a big fan of the key.
	I was always a big fan of Crossfire.
	I mean, you know, I know what side I was always on.
	I was always on the Novak Buchanan or whatever.
	That was all, but I enjoyed the brevity, the quickness, the ability to turn on a dime.
	But I never traded in my appetite for more detailed, thoughtful, longer-lasting perusal of an issue in a more traditional debate format.
	Yeah, we have such huge issues to address.
	I wonder if America's attention span is just shot, though.
	And I'm not going to beat up on USA Today or Twitter that limits us to 139 characters or whatever.
	There are many who say that the very notion of reading a book, the very notion of sitting down for an hour of debate is just something that we are no longer humanly wired for.
	If we don't get a burst of opinion that lasts 60 seconds or less, and then another burst of opinion that hopefully lasts 40 seconds or less, bam, bam, commercial break, bam, bam.
	And I'm a big fan of that.
	It's almost sport, but I like it.
	I'm, in a way, part of it.
	Although I like to get into some detail here and welcome all views.
	People blame Talk Radio for the lowering of discourse.
	I'll just be, if you don't mind my saying so, only some shows have done that.
	And obviously, this one ain't one of them because actual civilized discourse has been what the Limbaugh show has been around about forever.
	Doesn't mean Rush isn't aggressive.
	Doesn't mean he doesn't engage in some parody and have some fun.
	But, you know, please.
	So her point, though, is still well taken.
	And maybe it's not so much a media phenomenon.
	It's just maybe that when we all get together over the back fence, which we don't do enough anymore, or in town halls, which we don't do enough anymore, that all we're left with is this bitter, bitter anger.
	And as a matter of fact, let me tell you something.
	Let me get this break in.
	Here's a quality tease.
	There is a phenomenon of the modern world that may be more responsible than anything else in reducing all of us to just screaming at each other.
	And I'll tell you what that is next on the Rush Limbaugh Show.
	I just want to celebrate another day of filling in on the Rush Limbaugh Show.
	Mark Davis, Infor Rush in Texas.
	Okay, ready for a little societal rumination from me as we wrap up this hour?
	We'll begin the next hour talking to the great Byron York about where the White House is really going or maybe not going on prosecuting those interrogators who kept us safe for these last few years.
	That'll just be one segment, and then before you know it, Lickety Split, we are right back with you.
	Okay.
	What more than anything else has reduced discourse to incredible brevity and incredible ugliness?
	It might be an internet phenomenon.
	First of all, here in the talk show world, what do we do?
	We bring up stuff and ask you to reply.
	That's how they work.
	Newspapers all of a sudden, magazines all of a sudden want, and TV stations with their websites all of a sudden want to be talk shows.
	They'll give you a story and then say some of the most noxious words ever.
	We want to know what you think.
	God help us.
	Now, I always want to know what you think.
	This is what I do.
	It's a talk show.
	But when a newspaper or a TV station website puts up some story and says, we want to know what you think, and everybody sees that, what usually happens is a festival of the ugliest, most immediately to the vast corners of the debate, harshest people in the world.
	And that then becomes the template by which other forms of debate are judged.
	So that whole comment fetish, I wish that people other than on talk shows would just kind of get over it.

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