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Nov. 24, 2010 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:31
November 24, 2010, Wednesday, Hour #3
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By the way, folks, it is Thanksgiving.
I might have been a little unkind to Congressman Charlie Wrangell in reporting his heartwarming Thanksgiving story of handing out 120 18 pound butterbowl turkeys donated by Fairway to bundled up constituents of his on a 61 degree day in Harlem
Now that the NEW YORK Times piece is really I don't know.
I just I.
They don't quite go all the way.
In praising Mr. Wrangell and I, I want to give him credit.
At least he gave the turkeys out instead of keeping them for himself.
There are other members of Congress who are want to keep such donations for themselves and their staff, but Congressman Wrangell actually gave away the donated turkeys to his constituents and for that we give him a hand here at the EIB network.
I see where they're finally going to get rid of the color-coded threat warning system.
You know, I first encountered the color-coded threat system.
I worked at a radio station in Pittsburgh, WIXZ.
It was actually in McKeesport, Wixie.
Salted, rot and mold, it's uh, oldies format, it's all it was.
I got in trouble there for playing under my thumb of the Rolling Stones more times than the playlist rotation permitted.
That's the kind of things they looked out for there.
They studied whether or not DJs were not following the playlist rotation.
At any rate, we had a general manager there who was obsessed with brevity on the part of the disc jockeys, and so he came up with a traffic system that was color-coded, and the radio station actually printed a color-coded card that we gave away as a promotion to drivers and all we were to say in the morning drive show is that Fort Pitt Tunnel is yellow.
Instead of giving details of the traffic and what the delays were, we're supposed to say yellow.
And the driver, the commuter, was then to consult the card that we had given out to translate what I was saying.
With yellow or red or green or brown or what have you.
Whatever the situation was, which I always thought was maybe risky.
We're asking our listeners to take their eyes off the road to consult our color-coded traffic card.
Uh.
which had our call letters on.
See, that was the brilliance, that our call letters on it would remind them what station they were listening to.
I, I kid you, not folks.
So of course I got in trouble making fun of this because I I said we don't have enough colors here to handle all the various, so I started mixing the colors.
I said we got a combination of red and and and yellow out there, and that's brown, and you know what that means.
I mean, you are in a heap of trouble if you head this way.
And it was not appreciated because it was not brief.
I was.
I was expanding on the color coded.
Well, those are the kind of things that uh, that we had to do.
So I see here that we are going to cancel the color-coded threat level system and we're going to replace it with g pg, pg14r and x.
The threat level is now what you're going to face at the checkpoint when you head to the airport.
No, we are getting rid of the color-coded system.
I don't know what we're going to replace it with, but they've decided to get rid of it.
Because it's been what?
It's been orange for a couple years, three years.
I mean, after a while, it loses its.
I remember in the early days, Fox had a constant crawl up there, threat level yellow, whatever it was.
And I didn't know what it was.
They had to put text behind it to tell me what the threat level yellow was.
And it was elevated.
And I didn't have a card.
They forgot to pass out the card to me, so I couldn't translate the colors.
George Washington's 1789 Thanksgiving Proclamation.
Here it is.
Whereas it is the duty of all nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey His will, to be grateful for His benefits, and humbly to implore His protection and favor.
And whereas both houses of Congress have, by their joint committee, requested me to recommend to the people of the United States a day of public thanksgiving and prayer to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many and signal favors of Almighty God, especially by affording them an opportunity peaceably to establish a form of government for their safety and happiness.
So the first paragraph of Washington's Thanksgiving Proclamation was essentially thanking God for the Constitution.
Was you don't smirk in there, Dawn.
That's exactly what it was.
It was Washington saying we owed God a debt of thanks for our freedom and for our nation and our Constitution.
He continued, Now, therefore, I do recommend and assign Thursday, the 26th day of November next, to be devoted by the people of these states to the service of that great and glorious being who is the beneficient author of all the good that was, that is, or that will be.
That we may then all unite in rendering unto him our sincere and humble thanks for his kind care and protection of the people of this country previous to their becoming a nation, for the signal and manifold mercies and the favorable interpositions of his providence in the course and conclusion of the late war, for the great degree of tranquility, union, and plenty which we have since enjoyed,
for the peaceable and rational manner in which we have been able to establish constitutions of government for our safety and happiness, and particularly the national one now lately instituted for the civil and religious liberty with which we are blessed and the means we have of acquiring and diffusing useful knowledge, and in general, for all the great and various Favors which he has been pleased to confer upon us.
And also, that we may then unite in most humbly offering our prayers and supplications to the great Lord and ruler of nations and beseech him to pardon our national and other transgressions, to enable us all, whether in public or private stations, to perform our several and relative duties properly and punctually, to render our national government a blessing to all the people by constantly being a government of wise, just,
and constitutional laws, discreetly and faithfully executed and obeyed, to protect and guide all sovereigns and nations, especially such as have shown kindness to us, and to bless them with good governments, peace,
and concord, to promote the knowledge and practice of true religion and virtue and the increase of science among them and us, and generally to grant unto all mankind such a degree of temporal prosperity as he alone knows to be best.
Given under my hand at the city of New York, the third day of October, A.D. 1789.
Father of our country, there you have it.
That's the first Thanksgiving proclamation.
There's nothing in there about the pilgrims.
There's nothing in there about the Native Americans.
There's nothing in there about a feast.
There's nothing in there about communal living and socialism.
And nothing in there about syphilis and starving.
And there's nothing in there about anything that you think Thanksgiving is about.
George Washington, and the numbers, a number of references to the Almighty and to God, why, if a president read that today, the ACLU would file suit.
A number of other groups would claim oppression and having to listen to it, having it forced upon them.
Also, ladies and gentlemen, I must note before our obscene prophet timeout that on the third day of October A.D. 1789 in New York, George Washington gave out not one butterball turkey, not one, zero, zilch nada, butterball turkeys were given away anywhere in New York,
including in what is now known as Harlem.
When you read that first Thanksgiving proclamation, it sure doesn't sound like George Washington believed any wall of separation, does it?
Between church and state.
I didn't, it doesn't sound like it crossed his mind at all.
All those references to God.
There's a famous painter, I'm reminded, a famous painter and poet, Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
Not to be confused with Rossotto.
This is Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
And he said the worst moment for the atheist is when he's really thankful and has no one to thank.
That's when the atheist wakes up.
Really, really thankful, but doesn't have anybody to thank.
And ladies and gentlemen, we found another myth, another Thanksgiving myth.
One of the things we always do here, by the way, is recite from my second book, See, I Told You So, the real story of Thanksgiving.
It's become a tradition.
comes up in the next half hour One of the great myths of Thanksgiving is that we swindled the Indians when we bought Manhattan Island from them.
That we swindled them, that we only paid them 24 bucks, the equivalent of $24.
We're just a dirty, rotten bunch of mean people back then it turns out, according to a book about Teddy Roosevelt, that that's not true.
It turns out the Indians are the ones who ran the real estate scam when they sold Manhattan.
It's a book on Teddy Roosevelt.
The relevant paragraphs well it that.
The book is Commissioner Roosevelt, The Story Of Theodore Roosevelt, The NEW YORK CITY Police 1895 1897, by H Paul Jeffers, and here are the relevant paragraphs about this.
A persuasive case can be made that the city of New York began with a swindle.
For generations Screwal children have been taught that a slick trick was played on unsuspecting Indians by the director of the Dutch WEST India company, Peter Minuit.
In 1626 he purchased the island of Manahattan for 60 guilders worth of trinkets, it's about 24.
What Minuet did not know at the time however, was that his masterful real estate deal had been struck with the Canarsi tribe residents of Long Island.
They held no title to the land that they sold to the Dutch.
In due course, the intruders from Amsterdam, who thought they had pulled a sharp one on the locals, were forced into negotiating a second and more costly deal with the true landlords of Manahattan.
That's what it was called then Manahattan, but it was the Canarsi tribe that pulled one over on us.
They now since, have located to Brooklyn.
So I just just setting you up here for the uh true story of Thanksgiving, which essentially i'll give you a heads up is essentially about the failure of socialism.
That's really what it's about.
But we go to the phones and we'll go to uh more Oklahoma with David.
I'm glad you waited, sir.
Welcome to the EIB Network Rush, and happy thanksgiving to you and your entire family.
Thank you very much, sir.
I am the father of 11 RUSH babies and one thing that we love about you is the historical perspective that you provide.
Thank you very much information you give us.
Uh, every fourth of july we read your father's story on the Americans who risked everything, and there's never a dry eye, and we love that.
So we love you, Rush.
Keep it up.
Thank you very much.
That would be the signers of the declaration of independence.
Yes sir, and um we, we study the pilgrims intently in our home and uh, one of the things that you said this morning I took a bit of issue with, I I think I understand where you're coming from.
Uh, the first thanksgiving, as we understand it, that that The Pilgrim Fathers gave and held, was not giving thanks to the Indians.
It wasn't giving thanks necessarily for the Indians, but it was giving thanks to God.
And one of the benefits and blessings they saw as coming from him was the relationship they enjoyed with the Indians.
And so when they held their feast, of course, they invited the Indians to join them.
Right.
And they held it with them.
And I think you may be reading too much into it by saying that Obama's trying to perpetuate that entire myth, although I wouldn't put it past him.
No, I'm not.
I'm just reading what he wrote on there.
Sure, sure.
He said that Thanksgiving is about the Indians saving us with their agriculture and everything else.
The true story of Thanksgiving is how socialism failed.
Of course, we showed them gratitude.
We shared our bounty with them.
Not because we didn't know how to make it, it was because we first failed as socialists.
Only when we turned capitalists did we have plenty.
The Indians didn't teach us capitalism.
That's true.
That's true.
They did look at Massasoit.
Bradford did call Massasoit the protector of the pilgrims, and they did recognize that without his protection, they might have been toast with the other tribes around.
And Massasoit did show great courage in welcoming the pilgrims.
And he had been burned before by a pirate to the area named Black that had stolen away a lot of his tribe members.
So for Massasoit to not come in immediately and attack the pilgrims was a blessing from God, and they recognized that.
And so they were thankful.
But there also came a time when Massasoit was truly thankful for the pilgrims, and they actually saved his life on more than one occasion, and he was grateful for them.
So they enjoyed peaceful relations for 15 years.
What have I said that gives you the idea that I disagree with this?
I mean, after all, the Indians had to show the pilgrims where the water sources were.
I didn't know any of this stuff.
There had to be mutual sharing.
What did I say that gives you the...
Well, I think to imply that they weren't thankful at all for the Indians or for what the Indians had done for them or to say that the Indians did not protect them.
No!
They didn't say that.
They clearly were because they shared their first feast with them.
They shared all the bounty with them.
Well, then we have no disagreement.
It was free-range turkey.
Your 99.7% rating is still intact then.
Look, I enjoy the scrutiny.
I'm always interested to know how people hear what I say because I'm a professional communicator.
And if I fail to communicate what I mean, then I need to know that.
So you've served a very valuable purpose here because I did not mean to imply that we steamrollered over these people.
Well, and I know that much of what you say is also designed to provoke thought and to make people to be absurd sometimes and make people go to the limits of absurdity and look at their own beliefs.
That's exactly right.
We do illustrate absurdity by being absurd here.
Those who forget that quickly can lose their minds.
Well, God bless you and your family, Rush.
Thank you, David.
Same to you.
Where are you going to be for Thanksgiving?
At home or you're traveling.
He hung up out there.
Well, we did not steamroll the Indians.
Not at Thanksgiving.
That came later.
We didn't steamroll them at Thanksgiving.
Who's next on this?
Where are we going next?
It's Spokane, Washington.
This is Joe.
Thank you for calling, sir.
You're next.
Yeah, God bless you and your family, Rush, on these holidays coming up.
But I want to take this view in a direction.
I have a question for you.
I would like to know how we have a very serious issue in the world right now called North Korea.
I would like to know how you would handle that situation that has not been handled.
And then I'll give it if you want to hear my opinion of it.
Let me hear yours because I've got a minute and 15 seconds left.
My opinion is we should have had the IBMs, or not the IBMs, we should have had the cruise missiles already locked in, did something similar to Libya, where we go over and kill the families and the rulers of that country.
And I'm going to respond to it by this way.
I have a career, I worked in the prison system.
When you keep warning somebody and telling them, oh, you've got to quit doing this, eventually it's going to escalate into violence where people get hurt, and we can't just keep scolding them and warning them.
We have to take decise action there.
And that would be because of my experience in counterterrorism in Southeast Asia and having fought with the Rock Marines.
I say we take very decise.
We kill these people, not the people themselves, the ruling class and the leaders.
And that's what my response would be.
Well, in the old days, that's what we would have done.
But the old days go back a long time.
Look, the North Koreans hijacked a ship of ours from Lloyd Bucher and the boys.
But the problem now is one of diplomacy, and that is the Norcs are a client of the Chikoms.
And we are owned in part, a large part, by the Chikoms.
We have to take into account the Chikom's retaliation that we might do.
I got an email here I want to read with you from the public email account, LRushboardEIBNet.com.
It's from Rich.
Your show, sir, has become a joke, especially today.
You become a caricature of yourself.
There's nothing left.
Tough crowd today.
Tough crowd today.
And I, well, let's forge ahead here.
Nevertheless, apparently, the audience is fleeing the program in droves today.
So, before all of you are gone, for one reason or another, let's talk about golf and then football.
And maybe if we have time, we'll get to the real story of Thanksgiving, which you probably all know anyway because everybody's stolen it from me over the last 20 years.
But still, there's nothing better than the original.
So here it is: Time for the traditional true story of Thanksgiving, written by me in my second bestseller, two and a half million copies in Hardback.
See, I told you so.
Chapter 6: Dead White Guys, or What the History Books Never Told You: The True Story of Thanksgiving.
The story of the pilgrims begins in the early part of the 17th century.
The Church of England under King James I was persecuting anyone and everyone who did not recognize its absolute civil and spiritual authority.
Those who challenged ecclesiastical authority and those who believed strongly in freedom of worship were hunted down, imprisoned, and sometimes executed for their beliefs.
A group of separatists first fled to Holland and established a community.
After 11 years, about 40 of them agreed to make a perilous journey to the New World, where they would certainly face hardships but could live and worship God according to the dictates of their own consciences.
On August 1st, 1620, the Mayflower set sail.
It carried a total of 102 passengers, including 40 pilgrims led by William Bradford.
On the journey, Bradford set up an agreement, a contract, to establish just and equal laws for all members of the new community, irrespective of their religious beliefs.
Where did the revolutionary ideas expressed in the Mayflower Compact come from?
They came from the Bible.
The Pilgrims were a people completely steeped in the lessons of the Old and New Testaments.
They looked to the ancient Israelites for their example.
And because of the biblical precedents set forth in Scripture, they never doubted that their experiment would work.
But it was no pleasure cruise.
The journey to the New World was a long and arduous one.
And when the pilgrims landed in New England in November, they found, according to Bradford's detailed journal, a cold, barren, desolate wilderness.
There were no friends to greet them, he wrote.
There were no houses to shelter them.
There were no inns where they could refresh themselves.
And the sacrifice that they had made for freedom was just beginning.
During the first winter, half the pilgrims, including Bradford's own wife, died of either starvation, sickness, or exposure.
When spring finally came, Indians taught the settlers how to plant corn, fish for cod, and skin beavers for coats.
Life improved for the pilgrims, but they did not yet prosper.
And this is important to understand because this is where modern American history lessons often end.
Thanksgiving is actually explained in some textbooks as a holiday for which the pilgrims gave thanks to the Indians for saving their lives, rather than as a devout expression of gratitude grounded in the tradition of both the Old and New Testaments.
Here's the part that's been omitted.
The original contract the pilgrims had entered into with their merchant sponsors in London called for everything they produced to go into a common store, and each member of the community was entitled to one common share.
All of the land that they cleared and the houses they built belonged to the community as well.
And they were going to distribute it equally.
All the land they cleared, the houses they built, belonged to the community.
Nobody owned anything.
They just had a share in it.
It was a commune.
It was the forerunner to the communes we saw in the 60s and 70s out in California.
And it was complete with organic vegetables even, just like the communes of today are.
There's no question it was organic vegetables.
Bradford, who had become the new governor of the colony, recognized that this form of collectivism was as costly and destructive to the pilgrims as that first harsh winter, which had taken so many lives.
He decided to take bold action.
Bradford assigned a plot of land to each family to work and manage, thus turning loose the power of the marketplace.
Long before Karl Marx was even born, the pilgrims had discovered and experimented with what could only be described as socialism.
And what happened?
It didn't work.
They nearly starved.
It never has worked.
What Bradford and his community found was that the most creative and industrious people had no incentive to work any harder than anybody else unless they could utilize the power of personal motivation.
But while most of the rest of the world has been experimenting with socialism for well over 100 years, trying to refine it, perfect it, and reinvent it, the pilgrims decided early on to scrap it permanently.
What Bradford wrote about this social experiment should be in every school child's history lesson.
If it were, we might prevent such needless suffering in the future, such as that we are enduring now.
The experience that we had in this common course and condition, this is Bradford, the experience we had in this common course and condition, tired or tried Sunday years that by taking away property and bringing community into a common wealth would make them happy and flourishing as if they were wiser than God, Bradford wrote.
For this community, so far as it was, was found to breed much confusion and discontent and retard much employment that would have been to their benefit and comfort.
For young men that were most able and fit for labor and service did repine that they should spend their time and strength to work for other men's wives and children without being paid for it.
That was thought injustice.
Why should you work for other people when you can't work for yourself?
What's the point?
That's what he was saying.
The pilgrims found that people could not be expected to do their best work without incentive.
So what did Bradford's community try next?
They unharnessed the power of good old free enterprise by invoking the undergirding capitalistic principle of private property.
Every family was assigned its own plot of land to work and permitted to market its own crops and products.
What was the result?
Bradford wrote, this had very good success, for it made all hands industrious, so as much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been.
Is it possible that supply-side economics could have existed before the 1980s?
Yes.
Read the story of Joseph and Pharaoh in Genesis 41.
Following Joseph's suggestion, Pharaoh reduced the tax on Egyptians to 20% during the seven years of plenty, and the earth brought forth in heaps.
Well, in no time, the pilgrims found that they had more food than they could eat themselves.
Now this, this is where it gets really good.
If you're laboring under the misconception that I was, as I was taught in school, they set up trading posts.
They exchanged goods with the Indians.
The prophets allowed them to pay off their debts to the merchants in London.
And the success and the prosperity of the Plymouth settlement attracted more Europeans and began what came to be known as the Great Puritan Migration.
But this story stops when the Indians taught the newly arrived suffering and socialism pilgrims how to plant corn and fish for cod.
That's where the original Thanksgiving story stops.
Story basically doesn't even begin there.
The real story of Thanksgiving is William Bradford giving thanks to God for the guidance and the inspiration to set up a thriving colony that socialism caused near starvation.
The bounty was shared with the Indians.
They did sit down.
They did have free-range turkey and organic vegetables.
But it wasn't the Indians who saved the day.
It was capitalism and scripture which saved the day, as acknowledged by George Washington in his first Thanksgiving proclamation in 1789.
And we're back on our pre-Thanksgiving show, El Rushbo from the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.
By the way, as a warning, the History Channel tonight is re-airing what they're calling the real history of Thanksgiving, which is the usual incorrect information that's on the History Channel.
And by the way, just as a side note, women were not allowed to vote when the pilgrims arrived.
Just thought I would throw it in.
Lee in Leesburg, Virginia, welcome to the EIB Network.
Nice to have you here.
Thanks, Rex.
Wixie Dittos.
I got a question, Russ.
Since when in American history did it become taboo to speak about God or Christ in public?
I was born in the mid-60s, born and raised in Keysport, Pennsylvania.
And ever since I was a kid, it had always been don't mention anything like that, even though I'm surrounded by churches.
Everybody's going to church on Sunday.
We all know where we're going.
But to speak about it outside of that context was always like you were stepping on eggs or something to speak about it.
When did that start and why?
Well, it depends on what part of country you're in.
For example, in California, you would never been permitted to.
I was thinking about this.
I look at your call up there, and I'm thinking back when I was born in 1951 and all through the 60s, I'm a small town in the Midwest, but it was never taboo.
We had a nativity scene, a Christmas decoration.
Nobody, nobody ever tried to stop anybody from any public display, a Christmas holiday, talking about God.
My best guess without doing original research on this would be the 60s.
I think most of the maladies that we're undergoing today started with the counterculture 60s.
Madeleine Murray O'Hare sued.
The Supreme Court ruled in her favor.
She was an atheist.
That was 1964, at least as far as the schools were concerned.
That's where it began.
You could not mention God in the schools because Madeline Murray O'Hare had victory at the Supreme Court of the United States.
Yeah, Eisenhower added under God to the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954.
And that was, Madeline Murray O'Hare said, take it out of there.
You can't put God in there, none of the public schools.
And there it began.
And then the assault on nativity scenes or any public display of Christianity came under assault.
And it was all part of something that continues to this day, and that is simply an attack on the traditions and institutions that built this country.
Now, as I said, there have always been in this country, always been people who don't like it.
There have always been atheists.
There have always been people upset that God was mentioned, but they shut up about it.
You know, they just stayed in their little hovels and they complained and moaned to themselves.
They felt like victims to themselves.
Then suddenly Madeline Murray O'Hare comes along and all these minorities of people that finally decided, you know what, there's victory in the politics of grievance here.
And we can get what we, we can change this society so we don't have to be faced with this stuff that repulses us.
And it just, it grew and grew and grew.
And of course, fairness and not wanting to offend anybody and everything that you might say was held sacred by people of the country was under assault.
And people just said, you know, it's easier to laugh.
Okay.
You know, it got in the school.
Fine.
I'll go to church.
People didn't want the confrontation.
The people that were opposing all this were blowing up buildings and so forth as they opposed the Vietnam War, burning down, you know, firebombing cars in Chicago and this kind of thing.
It is an interesting historical trace.
Madeleine Murray O'Hare, some of you may not know this, Madeline Murray O'Hare was the chief speechwriter for Larry Flint's 1984 presidential campaign.
She was the first guest on the Phil Donahue show.
So you can see all of this stuff has its roots with Madeline Murray O'Hare and the 60s.
And now there's no culture anymore.
All we have is counterculture.
A counterculture.
We get Obamaites, former Obamaites now, praising Mao Zedong at the National Cathedral.
What was the name of Anita Dunn did that?
So there is no distinct American culture.
That's what's in hiding.
The distinct American culture, that's what takes place behind closed doors so nobody's offended.
The counterculture today is what dominates, especially in pop culture, the entertainment, community, movies, books, Hollywood stories, and so forth.
So that's that.
Best I can answer the question.
Glad you called out there, Lee.
And folks, we have to run.
Like you, many of us have to travel through the woods.
Some stop there, some keep going to get to Grandmother's House.
But I want to thank all of you again for always being here.
Even those of you who claim you're not, we know you are.
We thank you.
This couldn't be done without you.
You are more valuable to all of us here at the EIB network than we could ever be to you.
And we thank you immensely for it, more than we'll ever be able to in a tangible way.
Under my thumb, Rolling Stones, a song I got in trouble for in Pittsburgh.
By the way, Madeline Murray O'Hare founded an atheist radio program in which she criticized religion and theism and a TV show she hosted.
American Atheist Forum was on more than 140 cable TV systems.
This was under the fairness doctrine, by the way.
You have a wonderful Thanksgiving holiday.
I don't even know who the guest hosts are coming up next week or today.
Best of tomorrow.
What about Friday?
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