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Nov. 18, 2010 - Rush Limbaugh Program
35:48
November 18, 2010, Thursday, Hour #3
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Time Text
America's anchorman is away and this is your undocumented anchorman sitting in completely unpatownable.
I'll be here tomorrow.
Rush returns Monday to take you through Thanksgiving and I don't like to say I don't like to say I told you so, but I did say this I think about a year and a half ago on this show.
This is from Politico.
announcing that Senators Scott Brown, Republican Massachusetts, and Ron Wyden, Democrat Oregon, are introducing legislation today to reform healthcare reform.
Okay, so we've now got healthcare reform reform.
When Obamacare passed, remember President Obama said, well, you know, we've been trying to reform healthcare for decades, and we finally accomplished it.
And all his courtiers in the press said, wow, that's right, healthcare's done.
Now on today, let's go on to cap and trade.
That's it.
Healthcare.
Lock it up in the box.
Put it in the filing cabinet.
We finished it.
It's done.
Let's go on to what's next.
No, the minute you pass healthcare reform, you're passing healthcare reform reform and reform, reform, reform, reform, reform unto the end of time.
There is no end to it.
And I said I'd seen this in a lot of other countries.
In Commonwealth countries, they appoint a royal commission every couple of years when it gets to like a three-year wait list for your MRI or the 10-month waiting list for the maternity ward or whatever.
Then they introduce, they set up a royal commission like this debt commission.
They put a lot of big shots on it and the big shots propose ways of reforming the system so that people won't notice how bad it is for a couple more years.
Usually it's usually things like they'll introduce a helpline.
So for example, you say you go along and you've got cancer and they say, well, we'd like to start the chemotherapy, but you've got six months to live and there's a two-year wait to get into the chemotherapy thing.
But don't worry because you can call this 1-800 number and find out on a day-to-day basis how much longer your chemotherapy has been postponed by.
So they'll introduce a new helpline.
So you have all the healthcare reform, reform, reform.
So now we're getting healthcare.
Here we are getting onto this several decades, half a century after most other Western nations, but it's already settling into the familiar pattern.
Senator Scott Brown, Republican, Massachusetts, and Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat Oregon, will introduce legislation Thursday for reform of the healthcare reform law.
Reform, reform, reform, reform.
Essentially, it's allowing states to opt out of the so-called individual mandate by imposing on them an obligation to set up their own state equivalent of the individual mandate.
That's great, isn't it?
So that's what I like about federalism, because you're getting a choice now.
You can get a choice now between which level of government it is that forces you to do something you don't want to do.
A lot of places, centralized societies don't have that.
Now, in the Soviet Union, it was just like the Politburo who would tell you what you had to do.
But here in America, we've got a choice.
We've got options.
So you can have your bankrupt federal government tell you what to do or your bankrupt state government tell you what to do.
That's good.
Maybe they can take you down to county level and we could have individual mandates imposed by counties.
It'd be fascinating to see that.
But what is interesting is that all the people who voted for Obamacare and supported Obamacare, these exemptions that they're getting, I think there's over 100 companies and unions.
The SEIU, the SEIU, which was sending guys out to beat people up if they objected to Obamacare, has now secured an exemption from Obamacare.
So if you object to Obamacare, they'll beat you up.
But because they object to Obamacare, they're getting a special Obama exemption from it.
And now they're saying that states would also be allowed to get particular exemptions from it.
And this is why, by the way, American big people think, and if you talk to the sort of sappier Democrats, the kind of NPR Democrats, the ones with those voices that sound like somebody's fired an elephant dart into their butt, they've got that very sedated feel, the NPR female NPR listener voice.
They say, well, I don't see what would be so wrong if we were to be more like Sweden.
And they think that America would be a large Sweden.
No, it's not.
It's not going to be a large Sweden.
Obamacare is going to be a disaster on a scale unknown even to the most decrepit healthcare systems in the world.
I'm feeling Pamela's butt again, aren't I?
I'm getting into dangerous territory there.
I don't want to upset Pamela again.
But it's going to be a disaster.
I'm not saying it's the end of the world, but basically it's going to get us closer to the end of the world than any previous apocalyptic pronouncements of mine have gotten us to.
So we have here a disaster on a scale way beyond the British National Health Service or the Canadian health system or anything else, because it's a peculiar combination of the worst elements of the Euro-Canadian government healthcare system and then all the carve-outs and exemptions and peculiar little local corruptions of the American system.
So, you know, the corn husker kickback and all the rest of it.
And so Senator Brown and Senator Wyden are now effectively going to provide for the first stage of healthcare reform reform.
This is why I say it's important to drive a state through the heart of it.
A basic rule of thumb is that no health care reform ever solves the problem it's intended to solve, but it does give you an exciting range of new ones.
I like Mitt Romney, don't get me wrong.
He's a nice fella.
He's a smart fella.
He turned around the Olympics.
He made more money out of people doing sports that nobody's got interest in than anyone.
If you ask him to make money and find an efficient way to devise a two-man luge event, he can do it.
But if you ask a Massachusetts bureaucracy to run a two-man luge event, it's a disaster.
And that's what's happened in Massachusetts.
Mitt told me that Massachusetts needed to reform its healthcare system because the uninsured were placing huge strains on the state's emergency rooms.
And so the rest of the population had to pick up the tab for that.
And that was why Massachusetts health costs have been driven up.
So now practically everybody in Massachusetts is insured, but emergency room use is higher than ever.
And 70% of the newly insured are all but entirely subsidized by state taxpayers.
And as a result, Massachusetts residents now pay 30% more for their health care than the U.S. average and wait longer to find a new family doctor than anybody in the nation because nobody wants to be a family doctor in Massachusetts.
So poor people in Massachusetts are trying to find a family doctor.
They now got to go up to southern New Hampshire.
So when New Hampshire introduces Obamacare, they're going to be having to drive to Canada.
And Quebec has the lowest doctor-patient ratio in the world.
So they're going to be having to take a boat to Costa Rica or to Cuba or wherever.
It never cures.
Massachusetts is the perfect example.
It never cures the problem it sets out to cure, but it does give you an exciting range of new ones.
And what I don't begrudge Senator Brown doing this.
Good heavens, you know, he's a Republican from Massachusetts.
He's a Republican from Massachusetts.
So he has very limited room for maneuver and he's going to be coming up for reelection and he's got to start giving a bit of thought to that.
But the basic problem is this, that tinkering by saying that we can run, by the right saying, oh, don't worry about Obamacare, we on the right will be able to reform it and tinker with it, and we will run the big government health bureaucracy more efficiently than the left will run it.
Sorry, that's not good enough.
That gets you to Jacques Chirac-style conservatism, but it doesn't get you to real conservatism.
It doesn't get you to real effective small government, which is what is needed.
This is what I, to go back to talking to Pamela, this is the kind of stuff that is just going to ensure that these problems stay around with us longer and longer and longer.
Already, these 100 companies and unions have figured it out.
McDonald's got an exemption, because McDonald's knows who to call in Washington.
When the head guy of McDonald's decides he's got a problem, he can get his senator on the phone.
The SEIU, the big union backers, the most, the crack stormtroopers of the Obama era, they knew who to call in Washington.
They wanted Obamacare for you, but they don't want to be bound by it themselves.
So they got an exemption.
The trouble is, if you happen to own Bud's hardware store on Main Street, you can't get an exemption.
You don't know who to call in Washington.
So you're screwed.
Unless you're a big-time union, unless you're one of his pals at Goldman Sachs, unless you know how to call in Washington, you can't get an exemption.
And that is why reforming Obamacare is not going to do it.
And what we need at this stage in the game is for Republicans to dig in.
Whatever you feel about the election in November, it was a referendum on the last two years.
And the result of that is clear.
The Democrats figured out that they could ram this stuff down the throats of the American people.
The American people have now expressed their objection to that.
And the Republicans will be betraying this historic midterm election if they decide that the answer is not to drive a stake through the heart of this crazy spending, but actually to work with it, to reform it, to roll it back.
That is not going to cut it.
That is not going to do it.
That is not going to be enough.
As we see in the great lesson of Greece and France and even California is that people's sense of entitlement lingers long after the entitlement has ceased to make any sense.
All those deadbeats rioting, those students rioting for their pampered lifestyle in California, I don't begrudge anybody a pampered lifestyle.
I just don't see why I should have to pay for it.
And there aren't enough of the people paying for it to pay for it.
And that's how it's going to be if Obamacare survives in any form at all.
The only way to control costs in a healthcare system is to make as much of it as possible responsive to normal market pressures.
Right now, the minute you put a third party between, if you put a third party, it's a basic rule of economics.
Walter Williams would explain this far better than I do.
If you insert a third party between the buyer and the seller, all you're doing is ensuring that your costs are going to skyrocket up.
When that third party is the government of the United States, the costs are going to rock it up on a scale that has not been seen.
So we need to be serious about this.
We have got a small window of opportunity in which to roll back out-of-control, multi-trillion dollar spending that there are simply not enough people in the United States and indeed not enough lenders on the entire planet to be able to afford.
1-800-282-2882, Mark Stein in for Rush on the EIB network.
Mark Stein Infra Rush.
Let us go to Aiden in Roanoke, Virginia.
Aiden, you're live on the EIB network.
Great to have you with us.
Well, Mark, it's great to talk to you.
I'm glad to be able to take my call.
I've kind of got a personal question for you, if you wouldn't mind.
Yeah, lay it on me.
So a quick personal history about me.
I moved back from Scotland, living there for about three years, a few months ago.
And lo and behold, I fell in love with a nice little British girl.
So many were making plans to move her over here.
And of course, she has the wonderful old British mindset.
So I'm wondering, being a former Britain or an expat or yourself, what helped you learn more about our great country here and helped you learn about the conservative way of life and helps you really believe in that?
So you're dating a British girlfriend, that's right.
Is that right?
She's doing the jobs Americans won't do.
That's right, is it?
And she is emigrating to the United States.
That'll take you 10 years, by the way.
Just essentially a non-discretionary.
It'd be quicker to just take her to Mexico and have her swim over the Rio Grande.
That's my first tip.
But your point is you're saying she's been marinated in conventional British leftism, and you want to know how it is that I got out of into the more American mindset.
Is that what you're saying?
Absolutely.
Yeah, well, okay, let me put it this way.
That I've lived in socialist basket cases.
I was in the province of Quebec.
I've lived in the United Kingdom.
I've lived in other countries that are socialist basket cases.
But you know, they weren't always.
And your British girlfriend, who is marinated in all this leftism.
Scotland, for example, you say you spent three years in Scotland.
Everywhere you go on the planet, everything that works is built by Scotsmen.
The Hudson's Bay Company, the Canadian Pacific Railroad, the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, rubber plantations in Malaya.
Everything around the world was built by Scotsmen.
The Scots were dynamic, inventive people who, Carnegie down here in the United States, dynamic, inventive people, went around the world and did incredible things.
And so you don't want to connect the modern Scottish state, this moribund slough where the life expectancy in parts of Glasgow is now the same as it is in West Africa, and people are face down in these fried Mars bars that they eat all day there.
I mean, with the highest rate of heart disease and alcoholism and everything else.
You think to yourself, how could the Scots people who built the Canadian Pacific Railroad and the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank and the Malayan Railroad, how could they turn into, how could they turn into these people?
And the lesson to learn there for your girlfriend is that the transformation of a people can be accomplished very quickly.
Hayek wrote The Road to Serfdom when he emigrated from Europe.
He was in Britain during the Second World War and he wrote The Road to Serfdom because he saw then what was happening in Britain.
He said then that the virtues of the British people were their sense of tolerance, of small government, of self-reliance, were better than anything he'd seen among any other people on the face of the earth.
And what happened is that the big government, in the course of two generations, utterly transformed that so that almost every virtue that Hayek identified in the British people is almost invisible today.
People whine and moan.
Why doesn't the government do more for me?
That's their first response if anything happens.
Why doesn't the government do something about it?
So your girlfriend you should read selected portions of the road to serfdom to her and say, This is what your people used to be.
This is what your grandparents' generation were.
It is not that America is the aberration, but that you have changed.
After all, the American Revolution, who fought the American Revolution, they were British subjects who wanted to take English ideas on liberty a little further than people wanted to back in the metropolis in London.
But the idea that somehow America is now off the charts crazy with this kind of small government and self-reliance and the right to bear arms and all the rest of it and non-confiscatory taxation, these were all things that Britain and Canada and other Western countries believed in within living memory.
Canadians have the same problem.
Oh, well, you know, we now define government health care as central to our national identity.
Really?
So you're saying that Canada had no national identity before some bozo bureaucrat introduced government health care in the 1960s.
There was no Canada.
The Canada that didn't have government health care fought the Second World War, got a hell of a beach on D-Day, Juneau Beach, a miserable, tough beach, and did big, brave, killer things on it.
The Royal Canadian Navy was the third largest surface fleet on the planet in 1945 after the United States Navy and the Royal Navy.
And what your leftist girlfriend needs to understand is that she is not at odds with the United States.
She is at odds with her entire inheritance going back all the way to Magna Carta, that the status swamp into which Britain has now descended is entirely at odds with her country's own history.
And I wish her good luck getting through the U.S. Immigration Service because it's a non-discretionary thing.
You want to marry her, so you want to bring your, and in theory, in law, an American has the right to marry anybody from the planet.
You can fall in love with a Belgian, you can fall in love with somebody from the jungles of New Guinea, you can fall in love with anybody on the planet, and it's non-discretionary.
But it still takes a decade for the incompetence at the U.S. Immigration Service to process this because they're too busy patting down everybody at the airport.
So they'll take ages to process your girlfriend.
And that incompetent, slothful bureaucracy will seem very familiar to her.
It will ease the transition for her as she abandons her old country and comes into this new one.
But if she feels, if she feels that all these leftist ideas are right and that America just needs to catch up to them, she is not, it's not that she is at odds with America.
She is at odds with her own history.
If you took an Englishman or a Scotsman from 1897 and you propelled him forward in H.G. Wells' time machine to 2010, he would not recognize the status swamp of modern Britain today, where in the city of Newcastle, 75% of people are employed by the government.
You wonder how much bigger American government can get in Newcastle?
It's 75% of the population.
Yes, 1-800-282-2882, Mark Stein in for Rush.
Rush returns Monday.
Don't worry.
Don't worry.
I am an officially accredited guest host.
I do have a license.
I do have a government license allowing me to guest host.
I did attend the Association of Accredited Guest Hosts Convention in.
Yeah, it's true.
The license actually expired in 1983.
But I mean, I figure it's still, if you don't look too closely, the weather date is slightly blurry.
So if I am asked to check on it, yeah.
But at the Association of I did attend the Association of Accredited Guest Hosts Convention in Vegas last year, and I got lucky with this chick who subs for Rachel Maddow.
And what can I tell you?
We get to the hotel room, and she like tears my, practically tears my clothes off, and I'm like standing there naked, and it's all like going great.
And she says, hey, she just steps back and looks at me and she goes, hey, wait a minute.
You're the guy from the Janet Napolitano training video.
What can I, you know, what can I tell you?
I was young, I needed the word, but it always catches up with you.
And it's like out there on the internet now.
I don't know.
Let's go to Rich in White Plains, New York.
Rich, you are live on the EIB network.
Hi, Mark.
How are you?
I'm doing great.
You ready for your audio pat-down?
Do I have my...
Yes, I do.
You know, you just mentioned, I wanted to say something, but you just mentioned Janet Incompetano, and I was wondering if you heard her, and I won't say answer the question, but trying to answer the question of if she would use the same standards on the women wearing burqas.
And I've watched this woman pretty regularly not answer.
Do any of these people know what a yes or no answer is to a question?
Well, you have to imagine she's thinking at the back of her mind that if she's saying she will submit Burka-clad women, this is why they won't, by the way.
I would love to see the first TSA agent pat down a Burkha-clad woman.
You know why?
Because it's like I, at a citizenship ceremony a couple of years back, it ended with the judge saying, now turn around and welcome the newest members of our great national family by shaking their hands, the traditional form of greeting.
So I turn around to shake hands with this Muslim woman in a hijab, and her husband luckily intercepts me and swats my arm against a pillar because if I had actually succeeded in shaking her hand, he would have had to kill her.
And so the first time that somebody has been, a Muslim woman has been patted down, say, you know, the third wife of a Saudi prince gets patted down, landing, you know, at JFK or whatever, and then the Saudi prince has her stoned to death when they get back to Riyadh, because she's now, I think, I don't think Janet Incombatano is going to want to get into any of that.
I just don't.
So that's why at first it sounds ridiculous.
But these guys take the line of least resistance.
It's easier for the TSA guy to strip search the three-year-old girl than it is to do it to the Muslim woman with her men folks standing around her.
So that ain't going to be happening.
And that's why all this stuff is just security kabuki.
It's theater.
It's ritual.
And it's not only a complete waste of time, it's destructive of our liberties.
It is turning us into the sheep that Tocqueville warned about.
If there is any example of a herd tended by the government shepherd, as Tocqueville put it, it is the scene you see at U.S. airports today.
What else is on your mind, Rich, while we go?
Oh, you're in White Plains, so you're just on the edge of the great New York air transport area.
We get to hear right from the horse's mouth about the mosque and all those wonderful issues.
You can see White Plains from the Ground Zero Mosque.
I think if you stand on the top minaret, we'll have a great view of your backyard.
The same issues have been dominating the news cycle for the last week.
The Bush tax cuts, extending them, and earmarks.
And as Rush rightly pointed out, this is just nibbling around the edges.
The Democrats are obviously trying to make a big deal about them, saying, you know, if they get done, if they appease the Republicans, they'll say, well, we gave you that, you know, which is not going to make a single bit of difference in what happens, you know, in the plight of our economy.
And I'm looking for something new in the news cycle.
And I heard Judd Greg, senator from New Hampshire.
I know my senator.
Yeah, he's really, he displays the correct disposition of disgust at the way our government is running this country into the ground with deficit.
And he pointed out how they realized that they need a new paygo system, that we have to start, look, we have to start, you know, paying for things as they come along.
We can't pass legislation until we know we can fund it.
And with this disgusting look on his face, he said, since that new initiative was cast forward, there have been 200 and something occasions where legislation has needed funding, and the new pay go had been waived every time.
And this is why, that's like all the, that's why Obama and the Democrats have been entirely fraudulent about this.
It's the same thing with Obamacare, with the exemptions.
It's the same thing with the 3,000-page bills.
A 3,000-page bill is nothing but exemptions.
The minute you get it, there's no point saying, oh, we're going to pass the PAYGO thing, but then every time there's something a little bit inconvenient, we're going to exempt it from that.
And it gets back to the point I made earlier, Rich, that we are voting ourselves a level of government nanny stating that we are not prepared to pay for.
And it's very simple, because if we did pay for it, we'd all be living in one-room apartments.
We wouldn't have any cars.
We wouldn't have any plasma TVs.
We'd be standing in line at the bus stop, riding hemmed up in there like on trains in India, and then sharing rooms that are the size of apartments for people in the Soviet Union days, because we cannot afford this level of spending.
And that's why Judd Gregg is right.
In the end, it's about the spending.
If you're not talking about the spending, you're not serious.
If you're talking about taxes, if you're talking about raising taxes to cover this, you can't raise taxes to cover this.
Last time I was here, I brought up the point that America has outspent not just America.
American government has outspent the planet.
The Obama spending calculations for the next decade require the rest of the planet to be willing to put 20% of the planet's GDP into buying U.S. Treasuries.
They ain't going to do that.
It's not going to happen.
So we've outspent big government, American style, has outspent not just the United States' ability to pay for it, but the planet's ability to pay for it.
And whatever my difference is with Judd Gregg over the years, on that, he's very clear-sighted.
He says no matter, you can't grow the economy big enough to cover this.
Even if you had 5% economic growth over the next 10 years, which isn't going to happen, not with what Obama's doing to the economy, there is not going to be enough to, that still wouldn't cover the multi-trillion dollar hole that we are digging ever deeper for ourselves.
Thank you very much for your call, Rich.
Let's go to Tom in Longmont, Colorado.
Tom, you are live on the EIB network.
Great to talk about it.
It's great to talk to you.
It's great to talk to you, too.
You're my favorite substitute host.
Oh, that's a huge compliment.
Really?
I think that's like Al Gore's labored joker about being the most influential vice president, like Jumbo Schrimmer.
I'm just getting you ready for your pat down.
Okay.
You're going to.
I was going to say, I think you're kind of going on and on about nothing with this Pat Down thing.
No, no, no, no.
No, no, no.
Now listen to me.
The groping of every airline passenger may seem a bit unsettling, but you've got to get used to these things.
And then there's going to be the don't ask, don't tell Pat Downs.
And then you may not even want to get on the plane.
You might want to just drive home, have a cigarette.
What do you think?
I think so.
But you can't even do that, by the way, in the sterile era.
I know, that's what I'm saying.
You can't have a cigarette.
Hey, Mark, I'm speaking of the guy who went from the bottom.
I'm not going to doctor hand me cigarettes to being told I'm being executed if I smoke one.
That's the way it's gone.
That's the way it goes.
Yeah.
Very slowly.
And by the way, if you are at an airport and you do enjoy the Pat Down and you start to think, wow, the Earth is moving for me.
No, that is like the guy they didn't Pat Down just like sneaking through with the PTN in his pants.
So if the Earth does move for you at O'Hare, it's not a good thing, Tom.
Hey, Mark, I do have a question for you.
Can I get your past articles anywhere?
Because you had a brilliant piece on the Clintons and you were comparing them to the Mary Tyler Moore Show.
Really?
Do you remember that article?
I remember actually when Hillary was trying to reinvent herself.
Do you remember when she was doing her New York listening tour?
And she was doing, yeah, I remember who can turn the world on with a smile.
I thought it was a brilliant piece, and I'd love to have it again.
Hillary Tyler Clinton, Mary Rodham Moore, whatever it was.
It's blurry.
It's a long time ago.
It'll take a while to swim into focus.
Yeah, I do remember writing that.
That was the 2000s.
That was brilliant.
That was my first thing I read by you.
Yeah, well, that's...
My brother sent me.
That was brilliant.
That's good.
No, that's 2000.
So you've only been reading me for 10 years.
Oh, you should have seen.
I was past my best by then.
The early 90s was good.
The early 90s.
And actually, no, you're right.
That too wasn't actually up to maybe like the mid-50s, I think.
Actually, my column on the relief of mafeking in 1897 during the Boer War, 1899, during the Boer War, that was the best one.
It's been downhill since then.
Tom, thank you.
Thank you very much.
Great to have you with us.
Now I feel like those, you know, Hollywood.
I saw poor old Mira Sorvino being interviewed in the taxi.
You know, they show you the TV in the taxi now, and they had Mira Sorvino, the actress who won a best supporting actress, like in Oscar, 1994.
And they were interviewing her, and she had a new movie out.
And so they dispensed with the new movie in about five seconds and then asked her about all these movies she'd made in the early 90s.
I feel like that with Tom from Longmont, Colorado.
I feel it's like it's like for substitute hosts, that's like the Lifetime Achievement Award because you haven't done anything good in the last 20 years.
But I'll try to keep my spirits up.
Mark Stein, Infra Rush on the EIB network, Mordicam.
Oh, I love that.
We are family.
I grope you, but you can't grope me.
It's like it's the TSA.
It's the new official TSA anthem.
I love it.
Let's go to Joe in Sutton, Nebraska.
Joe, you're live on the Rush Limbo Show.
Great to have you with us.
Hello, Mark.
Mega Diddos from Flyover Country.
Hey.
Calling about the comments that Senator Rockefeller made yesterday regarding how MSNBC and Fox News should be taken down.
That's right.
He said there's a little bug inside of me, I think is the way he put it, which wants to get the Federal Communications Commission to take Fox and MSNBC off the air.
Goodbye.
That's what he said.
Right.
Well, I have a theory about what's going on there.
I wanted to run it by you just to see what you think.
I think it's predictable.
The predictable response is for MSNBC and Fox News supporter to be outraged by a United States Senator rattling his saber against the First Amendment like that.
But I think something more subtle is going on.
I think his pontifications are part of a new strategy being developed by the left to discredit Fox News in the eyes of independents.
And by that I mean by voters who are politically rudderless, easily manipulated.
And I say that for this reason.
The left would gladly give up MSNBC if Fox News went off the air.
Oh, right, right.
You know, no one watches MSNBC anyway.
No, I mean, and that was, I think, the cover for what he was saying.
That what he wants, I think, is to return.
He put it this way.
He said it would be a big favor to political discourse and, quote, our ability to do our work here in Congress, unquote, which means that what he wants to do is to get back to that little cozy little three-network world, or as close to it as you can get, where people are just Jay Rockefeller says that's the way it is, to Walter Cronkite, who says that's the way it is.
And your impressionable independent, as you put it, thinks, oh, well, yeah, okay, that's just the way it is.
And everybody is just like taking their orders, as it were, within a much narrower kind of political discourse.
Exactly.
I saw Ted Koppel using the exact same strategy last week in the Washington Post.
Yeah, but yeah, Ted Koppel, by the way, he wrote this.
Thanks for bringing that up, Joe.
You know, Ted Koppel wrote this piece sneering at the whole kind of cable news thing, talk radio thing, bemoaning the way it was in his day.
I saw Ted Koppel host a, in the year 2000, host a thing with Bill Bradley live in New Hampshire.
Well, it wasn't live.
It was with Bill Bradley in Claremont, New Hampshire.
It was the most incompetent performance I have ever seen.
I was astonished because I always thought Ted Koppel was actually quite good at doing this stuff.
Ted Koppel gave this absolutely incompetent performance that went on and on forever.
And then it was all left to the editing to edit into a barely coherent 22 minutes on Nightline that evening.
The idea that we need to take any lessons from Ted Koppel is ridiculous.
That kind of complacent, grandy, gatekeeper Palace Guard media is as dead as dead could be.
And anybody, whether you're on the right, as I am, or whether you're on the crazy left with the Daily Cost, Huffington Post, guys, anybody should rejoice at the death of that boring Palace Guard media.
Mark Stein in for Rush, more to come.
Mark Stein in for Rush.
We missed some of the news today.
For the first time in over 60 years, there were no Kennedys in Washington, no Kennedys in Washington.
The last one, whatever he was, Representative Patrick, Joseph, Joseph, Patrick, Kennedy, Smith, Shriver, Lawford, Kennedy Jr.
He's out, and we're Kennedy Free Washington.
Let's go to Richard in Reno, Nevada.
Richard, you're live on the Russian Book Show.
We've got to run.
Make your point.
Yes, Mark.
About a year and a half ago in Portland, Oregon, I went through a scanner that puffed up air from the bottom and then sniffed out bomb residue.
A lot less invasive, my understanding, a lot less expensive and more effective.
Why are these not in the conversation right now?
No, no, they don't want to do those ones because it doesn't afford them as much hands-on pleasure.
That's right, but it would have caught the underwear bomber.
It would catch, including those, you know, the things they rub on your, the cloth they rub on your hands on your back.
Those are very effective if anybody's handled it.
Explosives, and yet they're going for the more invasive procedures, mainly, I think, because the lobbyists are that's what they've sold to Congress.
Yeah, no, no, that's it's more great, great, great stimulus spending.
I think it deepak Chopra owns the company.
Thanks for your call, Richard.
By the way, I did say an hour ago: no truth to the rumor you can get pregnant from an enhanced pat-down.
The TSA has now issued a clarification to say that if you do, they'll be happy to pat down the baby too at the point of delivery.
That's it from me.
I'll see you tomorrow.
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