Yes, America's anchorman is away and this is your undocumented anchorman sitting in, Mark Stein, no supporting paperwork whatsoever.
The only immigrant in the United States who will not be covered by the forthcoming amnesty.
I'm living in the shadows and I'm loving it.
Mark Belling will be here tomorrow and then Rush returns Wednesday to take you through the end of the week.
I've been talking because this is like the kind of depressing phase of the post-election blahs, isn't it?
The November, December, just that time when between now and the inauguration.
I guess they're going to have a whole bunch of inaugural balls again on January the whatever it is.
But although I noticed there's no sort of delirious, there's no kind of delirious magazine covers and anything this time.
It all seems to be a bit more low-key over on the Democratic side.
Even they can't seem to get enthused about what's coming up.
But Rush's monologue a week ago, I thought was very important because it was about how you can win.
Once in a while, you'll win the politics stuff.
We do very well in off-years, you know, in the midterms, 1994, 2002.
Republicans can have good years then because they're essentially because they're low turnout elections, so people who are engaged by politics vote.
In the presidential years, people who are people vote, a broader pool of voters comes in, and they're basically people who swim in the broader culture.
They're not people who know the names of their congressmen or governor and aren't terribly interested.
And that's a reasonable position.
And that's just a conservative position apart from anything else, because the point about politics is to free up time for you to be able to live your life to the fullest.
And that's the pitch the left make.
For the left, everything is political, because for the small core of left-wing activists, they control everything and it's full-time for them.
But they understand, they understand that for the majority of people, they're not engaged by politics.
And so the best way to position the left-wing side is not as one side of an argument or another, that's all very confrontational, but just to make it the kind of default position that is so obvious that it's not.
Everyone knows, everyone knows global warming is happening.
So what's the point of even discussing it?
And that's the classic template for them, to make theirs the easiest position for the people who don't want to think about politics.
And so we face getting clobbered every four years about that.
I mean, basically, there has been no decisive, if you discount the first President Bush, 1988, because that was basically Ronald Reagan's coattails, there has been no real active, enthusiastic vote for a Republican presidential candidate now in almost 30 years.
You know, we lost the left had a point.
We did lose the popular vote in 2000.
And you know something?
If we were like some countries, Australia has compulsory voting.
Everyone votes in Australia.
So you don't have these genius consultants who are hired at great expense to provide information on how to get certain people to the poll and who's likely to turn out and can we target these soccer moms in southern Ohio.
You don't have to do that in Australia because 100% of people turn out.
Everybody turns out.
And we all know, we all know that if 100% of people turned out in the United States, the Republican Party would never win.
The Republican Party would never win.
That's why they always say Polls of likely voters skew more Republican than registered voters, and polls of registered voters skew more Republican than polls of all adults.
In other words, if you're engaged by politics, you respond to conservative ideas.
But if you're just out there watching Dancing with the Stars, and as you're flipping through the channels, you happen to see something about some election that's happening in your school gym on Tuesday, so you might as well go down and vote for the president.
Those kind of people, the vast majority of those kind of people, are not, we have abandoned them.
We have abandoned them.
And we've got to get them back into it.
And the left, you know, the left is, it's absurd that the left have managed to take over Hollywood.
It's one of the reasons, by the way, that Hollywood is in the toilet.
It's kaput.
I said on this show a couple of months back that I think in the end all effective storytelling is conservative because it's about consequences.
You make a decision, you make a choice, and you have to live with the consequences of that choice.
And the left says, no, no, no, there are no consequences to anything.
You can wake up, you wake up on a Tuesday morning and decide you want to have an abortion.
There are no consequences to that.
You wake up on a Wednesday morning and decide, well, you've been a man for a couple of decades, but you'd like to try being a woman now.
There are no consequences to that.
Life without consequences.
And successful storytelling is about consequences.
It's how the novel was invented because of consequences.
A girl goes to a ball when she's 17, and she happens to accept a dance from the wrong gentleman, and her life changes because of that one incident.
And the left says, no, no, there's nothing.
There's no con do what you want.
If it feels good, do it.
There's no consequences to anything.
So all effective storytelling is basically conservative, which is why the only thing propping up Hollywood at the moment is basically old bits of English literature like The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.
And even Rush was talking about, when he was talking about his monologue, Rush was talking about James Bond.
Because Rush is a big Bond fan.
He just bought the whole lot in Blu-ray.
I went to see Skyfall the other day.
I enjoyed Skyfall very much.
Rush enjoys them.
But there is no doubt, there is no doubt that back in the early days, generally speaking, when Ian Fleming was writing those books, there was no doubt who the bad guy was.
Even in the Roger Moore era, the bad guy with the Soviets.
Yes, Bond usually wound up sleeping with the Soviet agent, but he still understood that she was on the other side and that in fact his seduction of her was part of subverting the Soviet plan for world domination.
Whereas when General Petraeus from the CIA, who is like America's James Bond, when he's having fun with his biographer, that's just a little bit on the side.
There are no geopolitical consequences to that.
When James Bond gets his leg over, there are geopolitical consequences.
And now you have a situation where films can't even, thriller plots are about nothing.
There's nothing at stake in thriller plots now.
You go and see your big conspiracy thriller, you know, and they'll be on a plane and there's some threat to blow up the plane and think maybe like the suspiciously swarthy Arab-looking guy in seat 37D is the guy who's going to blow up the plane.
And then it turns out that, no, he's just been set up by the vice president of a Halliburton subsidiary who's a friend of Dick Cheney's.
And so there's, and so films are not, film thrillers are not about anything.
There's never been a period in human history like this when you have entertainment storytelling that is not about it.
They had some stupid thing a couple of years ago.
There was one of these big thriller planes where it's a rogue plane, the plane itself, because you can't make anybody the villain.
Oh, we could have a Muslim villain.
That might be a bit problematic.
We could have a Chinese villain.
Oh, no, let's not go there.
Could have a Russian villain.
Oh, no, we don't do that anymore.
So they made the plane the villain.
It was an automatic plane that went rogue.
It's a plane and started flying toward a skyscraper in New York, right?
Which might ring a few bells with some of older listeners.
Might remember vaguely a few years ago there was something about a plane flying into a skyscraper in New York.
And it turned out to be some guy sitting in a cave in Afghanistan who'd been plotting this, and they were bad guys, and they sent the bad guys to the United States.
And the bad guys had a big conspiracy, and then they got past airport security, and then they got on the plane and they flew it into the building.
That's what happens in real life.
When Hollywood told that story, it was a rogue plane.
The plane went rogue.
The plane is the terrorist because you can't tell stories about anything.
And that is why, that is why we would be, we have got to get back.
And the great message of all those dumb, numbing, stupid, idiotic tales is that if you abandon that territory, then other guys tell your stories for you.
And the left tells the same stories.
Oh, there are no bad people out there on the planet.
There are just friends whose grievances we haven't yet sufficiently accommodated.
That's what the left tells you.
That's the siren song of the left.
And it's so easy because it means you don't have to think about anything.
You just can you know, you just can sit on your porch and strum your guitar and do a little dope or whatever they do these days, and the world goes on its way.
And you can work for your non-profit, and there are no consequences.
And we need to get back on all that ground and all that tough.
Every time there is a guy, there are fellas out there writing conservative novels, making conservative films, which doesn't mean they're political.
It doesn't mean they're making a film about what a great guy John Boehner is.
They're not making films about the Republican Party, but they're making films with a moral center that teach you that the choices we make as free people have consequences.
And when those people are telling those stories, we need to support them and we need to have more of them.
Because otherwise, there's not going to be anything left except the dumb, stupid reality shows.
Like what I was trying to find Fox News last night and I came across whatever it was, extreme Amish cougars on whatever it's called.
TLC, is it the Learning Channel?
There's no learning on the Learning Channel.
It's just Extreme Amish Cougars.
No, that's not, what is it?
Extreme Cougar Wives.
That's right.
Extreme Amish Cougars is a spin-off.
I'm actually pitching to Paramount this week.
So I hope I didn't give it away there.
But if you abandon that, if you just say to yourself, we're going to retreat and we're just going to discuss getting this or that congressman elected, then the sea that your children swim in and the sea that your grandchildren swim in will be liberal and it will be impossible to elect genuinely conservative candidates.
And the Republicans, which is what they're doing already, will slide further and further towards the so-called mildly right-of-center parties in Europe, where they offer to manage the left-wing state slightly more efficiently than the left-wing party does.
And that's the only way, once you let the culture become liberal, that's the only way you can get a so-called right-of-center party elected.
And we are far too close to that situation.
We may have Rush in the days after the election thought we'd cross the line.
I don't think we'd cross the line.
I'm not that pessimistic.
There's still everything to play for.
But to do that, you've got to go big.
Mitt Romney fought a who's a good man and an honorable man, but he fought a small shriveled campaign on narrowly if ever there was an opportunity for a big what's the point of picking Paul Ryan as your running mate and not fighting a big picture election on where America is.
At least then.
If we'd had a big picture campaign, we could at least say we had lost with honor.
Instead, you know, play it safe, don't frighten the horses, fights, play small.
Don't even tell most people there's an election going on.
Just fight it out with a few turnout models in selected precincts in Ohio and Florida and New Hampshire.
It's pathetic.
I want the next time round, we deserve a candidate who fights a big national campaign on the existential questions facing the United States.
Mark Stein in for Rush, we got lots more of your calls.
Straight ahead, 1-800-282-2882.
Mark Stein in for Rush on the EIB network.
For the first time in history, adult diapers outsell baby diapers in Japan.
The demographic decline of Japan and Europe is well underway.
Adult diapers, if you're in the diaper business, if you're huggies or pampers, and you want to sell in Japan, the adult diaper business is the only business man.
No one's having any babies, but there's lots of non-agenarians around.
Terrific news.
Michael, let's go to Michael in Spring Green, Wisconsin.
It's great to have you with us on the Rush Limbo.
Thank you.
It's nice to be on.
Long-term listener from the late 80s.
Your whole concept of consequence feeds right into what I make here as a point.
I was in Vietnam in 1967, 68.
Within 36 hours, I was back in Madison, Wisconsin on the University of Wisconsin campus for the Cultural Revolution, is what I referred to.
And the Cultural Revolution evolved around sex, drugs, and rock and roll.
And I saw what was going on, and I did a lot of speaking out relative to the consequences, choices that are being made at that time and the long-term impact for our country, because I'm a patriot.
And, of course, it went over the top.
It was condescending towards me from those around me, which, hey, what's right is right.
I mean, we've got basic principles and standards we need to live by.
Well, let's move on to Obamacare now.
During that whole debacle, I made many calls across the country to religious leaders, to politicians across the country, relative to the fact that they would not work with the issue that should have been at the forefront, and that's sex outside of committed relationships and the impact.
The state of Wisconsin spends upward to $140 million a year, and these are two-year-old statistics, just for a single mother's birthing in the hospitals in the state of Wisconsin.
That's just the beginning of the economic impact for all of us in this state, because we need to carry that need out from a tax base to the age of 18, and as well includes college.
And that's rather frustrating to see that none of our politicians would want to address this particular issue, especially during the Obamacare period when this should have been addressed in terms of what was addressing health care costs.
And what do you do?
You see the churches, nobody wants to deal with reality.
You speak on the issue of abortion.
Abortion is another form of birth control.
It's what leads up to the need for the abortion that's not being addressed as well as how that impacts the tax base.
Well, the left has a compelling logic, Michael, in not addressing it, because from their point of view, as we saw, as we saw in this recent election, single mothers, single women generally, but single mothers in particular, are among the loyalist Democratic Party constituents.
Because for a single mother, big government is the sugar daddy who'll never let you down, who always remembers to send the check.
And one of the oddest things about that commercial, that campaign ad by Lena Dunham, I think, who stars in a TV show called Girls.
And she's an extremely big star, and it's a big hit show.
And she basically did an ad that said, if you want to, when you offer your virginity to somebody, it ought to be something special.
And she equates voting for Obama with losing your virginity.
And people thought it had been stolen from Putin because Putin did the same thing, is the big Russian strongman.
You know, he walks around all bare-chested.
I don't know why.
He's got moobs that would stop a truck, but he walks around Putin.
I hope that doesn't cause war between our two great nations, by the way.
But it's a fact.
And he walks around, he's fabulous, fabulous cleavage.
And he walks around with all bare-chested, and the women are devoted to him.
And so they make those virginity ads.
And in fact, it doesn't even come from him.
It came from an Australian senator.
It was the Australian Green Party that was the first one to try this thing that, you know, voting for your great patriarchal leader is the same as losing your virginity.
And in a sense, they're not wrong.
Because if you look at that Life of Julia ad, Obama is presenting himself to the women of America.
This is what the feminist revolution has dwindled down to.
My friend Rich Larry at National Review said: basically, Obama in this campaign ad is presenting himself to the women of America as father, lover, protector, the man that every woman needs, who's always there for you.
Because we have raised men to be feckless and actually to figure out that logically it's not worth getting mixed up with women in stable relationships.
You're much better to take the money to be in extreme cougar wives on TLC where you can go and do some show on TLC where you get mixed up with some 76-year-old cougar for four shows and get a nice little check than trying to build stable relationships, committed relationships, which the government disincentivizes.
Instead, the government tells you that the most important man of your life is the big patriarchal great national leader, Obama.
He will take care of you from the day you are born to the day you die, to the day you want to get an abortion, to the day you want to go on welfare.
Whatever it is, Obama is your protector and is there for you.
And we laughed at that.
But the fact of the matter is that to a lot of young women in America, that made perfect sense and they liked the message.
And that is the real problem in America today.
Yes, Rush is out today.
Mark Belling is here tomorrow, live from New York City.
And Rush will return to take you through the end of another week of excellence in broadcasting starting on Wednesday.
So substitute host-level excellence in broadcasting today, but Rush back Wednesday.
And you can go to rushlimbaugh.com and it will be as if he has never gone away.
Let's go to David in Oklahoma City.
David, thanks for waiting.
You are live on the Rush Limbaugh Show.
How are we going, Mark?
It's going great.
And how's it going out in Oklahoma City?
I love that city, by the way.
It's so spectacularly clean.
You could eat off the sidewalk.
Yeah, that's when they haven't dug up all the roads, I would have to say you were correct.
But I was going to get your perspective on something.
And I've been, like many conservatives, contemplating what's going on in culture.
And similar to what Rush said after the election, that he went to bed thinking we'd lost the country.
I was kind of in the same boat.
But I got to thinking that I don't think we really need to compromise on anything per se, but we need to reframe the argument as to how we present it to the public.
Because I think that there's one reality that can't be disputed.
It's that the general electorate has begun to tilt left.
But just like the people that I speak to, they don't know why they're tilting left.
And you've kind of touched upon that already.
I think you have to reframe the argument in such a manner as to people still vote with their wallets, but you have to indicate to them the true gravity of the situation.
Now, the pundits are always on TV saying, oh, we have $16 trillion in debt, da-da-da.
But the average layman has no idea what maybe that means and what the gravity of it is.
So I would advocate presenting it like this.
You can either try to draw off of our own economic engine something that can sustain, if anything can sustain, Wilber spending, you draw up our own economic engine, our massive GDP, or you go to the creditor, be it the investors or China, whoever it is.
And you frame it the argument.
There are a lot of people out there who just keep going in and they get their lines of credits maxed out.
They go get another credit card.
They go to a clappy lender.
They lose all their money to mention, they go bankrupt.
You frame the argument just like that on a macroeconomic scale.
And you try to reach the voting electorate through that prison because they don't understand the $16 trillion in debt.
They don't understand the fact that we're not going to be able to service it.
No.
Unless you put it in terms they can understand.
No, basically, if interest rates on the debt were to go up to what they were in the late 90s or the early years of this year.
I'm losing you, Mark.
Yeah, what's happened?
What's happened?
Something's gone wrong.
I'm here.
Okay, I got you.
I didn't hear you.
You heard me worried there.
My screen went blank.
I don't know what's going on here either.
Somebody's hacked into it.
But you can hear me, Sil, can you?
I can.
And can you hear me, HR?
Okay, that's good.
Sorry, I thought someone had disconnected the bit of wet string that connects New Hampshire.
New Hampshire is basically Baghdad outside the green zone.
I mean, it's like – no, you are absolutely right to put it in those ways.
Mitt tried to when he said, you know, I don't want to have to borrow money from the Chinese to pay for Big Bud.
But you're right, that most people don't understand all this trillion-dollar stuff.
And, I mean, it's so disconnected from.
What it really boils down to, though, is that every single American, man, woman, and child, their share of the debt is about $200,000.
Every American family, their share of the total debt, is about three-quarters of a million dollars.
That's the equivalent.
We were talking about royal families, the cost of royal families versus the cost of the Obama family at the top of the hour.
Basically, that three-quarters of a million is about the budget deficit of Liechtenstein, which is one of the wealthiest countries in the world.
And so His Serene Highness, the Prince of Liechtenstein, can afford that three-quarters of a million dollars in a way that Bud and Cindy cannot afford that three-quarters of a million dollars.
Every single American family, their share of the debt is three-quarters of a million dollars.
And we ought to be able to explain that to people in a way that resonates.
Now, I think we've lost Oklahoma City.
Is that right, Kit?
Is that right?
Oh, I thought you'd dropped off the line.
We're having some technical issues up here.
By the way, I gave a speech in Oklahoma City just for a friend of mine a year or two back, and it struck me as a conservative, essentially a conservative state, but that was prone to temptation.
In other words, that even in what we think of as red state heartlands, you can see that there's a drift, that the ratchet effect of big government, even in what the Republicans now think of as their last red state redoubts, is already underway.
Would you say that's the case?
Mark, I'm just wasting your time.
I can't hear you over the industrial equipment in here, but generally speaking, it is a very conservative state.
But I think in a way, the Power City and the economic engine of the state, they have the luxury of being able to play both sides because they have a workforce that has generally conservative values that are out there working and putting in their time and doing what needs to be done.
Well, I'm glad to hear that industrial equipment whirring away back there.
I don't hear a lot of that as much in the United States as I used to.
I'm amazed to hear industrial equipment whirring this side of Shanghai.
It's Nazi Air Force Base, though.
I mean, about 22,000 people around here.
Okay, that's good to hear.
I do love it.
I said right at the beginning of the call that I love the cleanliness of Oklahoma City is amazing.
Because if you're like in these old East Coast cities like Boston, you know, there's like litter flapping down the street, New York, all the rest of it.
It's like the downtown area of Oklahoma City is like eerily, eerily clean.
It's like an invasion of the body snatchers thing that's going on.
Either that or they are imbued with admirable civic spirit.
Yeah, I mean, that's basically it.
It's got to be put in real terms that people understand.
By the way, just to go back to the other point that was made just then, which is, do we want to so-called compromise moderate our values?
No.
No, we don't.
And, you know, this is, again, to tie it all together, the social issues and the fiscal issues are part of the same thing.
That if you have, the best indicator of whether a child is going to have a reasonably prosperous life that allows him to live in stability and fulfill his economic potential is whether he's raised in a two-parent household.
That's simply a fact.
The statistical evidence on that is overwhelming.
And that doesn't mean you have to demonize single mothers, but you have to recognize that when a child is brought into the world by someone who's 17 years old and has no male figure in that household to raise the child, that that kid is starting off with a huge crippling disadvantage in life.
And furthermore, you have to recognize that that constituency is a constituency for big government.
Tocqueville, when Tocqueville toured America, he said the big difference between the American Revolution and the French Revolution was that the French Revolution hacked away all the intermediary bodies, intermediary levels between the state and the citizen.
In other words, they hacked away local government, they hacked away at the authority of churches, they hacked away at civic organizations, they hacked away at the family particularly.
And what the United States had was strong intermediary institutions between Washington and the citizen, so that Washington barely impinged on people's lives back then.
What happens when you destroy the family, when you diminish churches, when you diminish municipal and county and state government, there's nothing left except you the citizen at one end and good King Barak at the other.
And so the weaker families get, the more you will have a constituency for big government because the only intermediate, there are no intermediary institutions.
There's no other source of civic value and civic strength in the United States.
And so it's not a small thing.
And we know that because in the end, all those people, Bill Weld in Massachusetts, he was in office but not in power.
George Pataki in New York, he was in office but not in power.
Arnold Schwarzenegger in Sacramento, California, he was in office but not in power.
There's no point to electing these people who claim to have squared the circle because they haven't squared the circle.
They haven't squared the circle at all.
Mark Stein in for Rush.
More in a moment.
Mark Stein on the EIB network.
You know, Rush was talking about James Bond.
Last time around, 2008, Daniel Craig, who plays James Bond, was asked who would be a better Bond, McCain or Obama.
And he answered that Obama would be the better Bond because, as Daniel Craig put it, he'd be willing to quite literally look the enemy in the eye and go toe to toe with them.
McCain would probably be a better M, he said, mentioning Bond's boss, played by Dame Judy Dench.
Now, this was ridiculous because John McCain has lived James Bond's life.
I mean, whatever one feels about McCain's candidacy, he's survived plane crashes like Roger Moore in Octopussy.
He's escaped death in shipboard infernos like Sean Connery in Thunderball.
He's endured torture day after day, month after month without end, like Pierce Brosnan in the opening in the title sequence of Die Another Day.
He's done everything James Bond has done except get lowered into a shark tank and go to bed with Gilson John.
As far as we know, I mean, I don't know about McCain, but he's basically has lived Bond's life, and that's why he looks like what a guy who's led an action hero life looks like.
He looks unkempt and scarred and maimed and kind of slightly wacky.
And yet, McCain, McCain, who has lived Bond's life, Daniel Craig says, oh, no, we'll give him the desk job because McCain is a real action hero, but Obama looks like what a movie producer would think an action hero would look like, cool, remote, and all the rest of it.
And that actually right there is the problem.
That as long as these guys can't even see the reality in front of their face, that McCain has actually lived that life.
McCain had lived that life.
McCain is the action hero and Obama's never broken a sweat.
He's a community organizer.
Nobody even knows what that does.
He's gone.
What does that mean?
You go into an office and shuffle flyers.
But he's the action hero.
In our cultural terms, he's the action hero.
And McCain's just the boring old guy who gets the desk job.
We've got to do something to change that narrative.
Let's go to Doug in Houston.
Doug, you're live on the Rush Limbaugh Show.
Great to get a lot of magic bibles from the great state of Texas.
Yeah, The great soon-to-be-seceding state of Texas.
I think that I live here and not some other places.
That's true.
That's true.
I wanted to make a point you had said earlier, and I wanted to comment on how you think we've not fallen off.
I don't want to say the fiscal cliff or even the social cliff or the cliff where we don't think we can get this back.
And I'm going to somewhat disagree.
And I think we've had 50 years of social engineering, and it's basically Lyndon B. Johnson's great society has come to fruition.
And it's taken 50 years to just about fully implement the social change in this country that so much of our economy now is devoted to giving free stuff away or getting things from the government.
I don't think we're going to get that back.
Well, you never know.
You can get it.
I think it is possible to get it back.
And I'll tell you why, Doug, because there's this thing called reality.
And it doesn't matter.
In the end, it doesn't matter whether reality is square and old-fashioned and not as cool as Obama.
Reality doesn't need to get to 270 in the Electoral College.
Reality doesn't need to swing 1,500 soccer moms in southern Ohio.
Reality can poll as badly as it gets with the focus groups and still trump everything else.
And reality is going to force changes on the United States, whether it likes it or not.
And the question then is how it responds to those changes.
I mean, I agree with you.
It's interesting that in a way, America's mythology hasn't caught up with the reality of the situation.
Basically, at the moment, America spends about 41% of GDP is spent by government.
Government accounts for about 41% of GDP.
In Canada, it's 42%.
So that 1% is the difference between a sturdy republic of self-reliant citizens and an effect semi-French monarchy socialist basket case of wimps.
42% Canada, 41% the United States.
And I guess I understand that point, but you talked about when will people realize or changing the narrative on how much in debt each person in the United States?
Well, none of them will ever know how much each one of them is in debt unless you send them a bill.
Yeah, reality won't set in until we get so far in debt that we have to either devalue our currency or inflation runs amok when somebody goes that's paying $2 for a loaf of bread has to go spend $6.
That will be reality.
But there's none of that reality right now.
No, you're right.
You're right, Doug.
It's only going to be on.
Effectively, America will have a choice between defaulting on the world and killing the dollar or defaulting on the people and risking social unrest.
So which of those calls you make is going to be critical.
Thank you for that.
We did get, I told you we'd get to total societal collapse in the end.
And we did with Doug.
The Rush Limbaugh Show on the Excellence in Broadcasting Network.
Stay tuned, bore ahead.
Mark Stein in for Rush on the Excellence in Broadcasting Network.
I want to say one quick word before we go about the great Larry Hagman of Dallas, who died a couple of days ago.
Great man and a great show, Dallas.
And the interesting thing about it was that it taught a lot of people in the 80s, it taught a lot of people in Eastern Europe.
That was their vision of what life was like in the West.
Ceausescu agreed to put it on television in Romania because he thought it would show people how horrible and appalling life was in the Western world.
And then instead they all saw J.R. and South Fork Ranch and thought, I want to live like that.
And after the Ceaușescus at Christmas time, it was about this time of year, just before Christmas, were put up against the wall and shot.
The first thing that Romanian television did after covering the shooting of Ceaușescu announcing the new regime was they showed the pilot episode of Dallas.
So rest in peace, the great Larry Hagman, son of Mary Martin, Broadway legend and a great figure in his own right.