Greetings, my friends, meeting and surpassing all audience expectations every day.
It's El Rushbow, your guiding light on Friday.
So let's hit it.
Live from the Southern Command in sunny South Florida, it's Open Line Friday.
Yes, sir, Ibam.
Great to have you, my friends.
A telephone number if you want to be on the program, and I'm going to get to your calls El Quicko.
I should have done that in the first hour.
I always try on Open Line Friday to get to phone calls in the first hour, and today I failed.
Not really a failure in the big sense of the word, but still, I should have done it and I didn't did it.
So I'll make it up to you.
800-282-2882 is the number.
So it's October 17th, 1965.
NBC's Meet the Press.
The candidates for mayor of New York City debated.
National Review magazine founder and conservative party William F. Buckley and then Representative John Lindsay, who was a candidate of the Republican and liberal parties, and the New York City controller, Abe Beam.
And they debated on Meet the Press.
And during the Q ⁇ A, a panelist, Richard Whalen, said, you've said repeatedly that you're the only authentic Republican in the race, yet you didn't enter the Republican Party primary, presumably because you thought you couldn't win.
You can't win this election, according to the current polls, yet you may very well defeat the Republican candidate.
So what, in your opinion, has the Republican Party in the city gained through your candidacy, Mr. Buckley?
The voters are going to show on November the 2nd that there are conservatives in New York who are interested in political realism, who don't believe in block voting, who don't believe in pandering to powerful forces, whether they are labor union or whatever.
And under the circumstances, my intention is to liberate them so that they, in turn, can liberate the Republican Party.
It is impossible simultaneously in New York to give people any kind of economic freedom or any kind of economic hope and continue to squander their money at the pace at which it has been spent by the Wagner administration, which managed to double the budget during the course of its tenure.
It is necessary, in other words, to stop fawning on the block voters and insist that if there are to be any solutions in New York, they have got to be approached with the kind of political courage that Mr. Lindsay, unfortunately, is so disgracefully lacking in.
Now, this is 1965.
Could just as well be this year.
Here you've got a conservative Republican up against the Republican establishment, in this case embodied by John Lindsay, who is attempting to give conservative voters in New York a voice.
And he was right.
There was no chance Buckley was going to win this.
In fact, he said even if he did, he wouldn't accept.
He wouldn't.
He did.
I just, I find it fascinating that this man, and I did get to know him pretty well, is used constantly by both the Republican Party and the Democrats to try to destroy the Tea Party.
You could say, in a sense, that Buckley was the Tea Party.
He was the forerunner of the Tea Party.
Whalen, the moderator here at Meet the Press, then said, in view of your opinions of three of the last four presidents then, what do you think of the American voter?
I think the American voter often has intuitions which are better than those of their own presidents.
That is to say, I think that presidents tend to, during the recent period, tend to have drawn more strength from the voters than the voters from their presidents.
As Franklin Adams once said, I think the average American is a little bit above average.
And under the circumstances, I rejoice over the influence of the people over their elected leaders, since by and large, I think that they show more wisdom than their leaders or than their intellectuals.
I've often been quoted as saying I would rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the Boston Telephone Directory than by the 2,000 people on the faculty of Harvard University.
Buckley could have been the dean of Harvard.
I mean, he was, in the classical sense, an intellectual, but he knew where the power in this country came from, and he loved people.
And he had a profound, deep respect for them.
He would have been right at home in the Tea Party.
And it really just wanted you to hear these two bites and to hear Jack Fowler, the publisher of National Review.
Some of you in the audience may not know who Mr. Buckley is.
You may have heard of him, but you're not really familiar with his achievements or his identity, per se, in the conservative movement.
But believe me, he and my father are the two most prominent reasons why.
Back then he was.
He was.
He was on Tonight Show.
Johnny Carson Lovey was a celebrity in that day, in that era.
But by the time this program started in 1988, he was starting to wind down day-to-day operations of National Review.
Still did speeches and so forth.
But regardless, I just, all of these efforts here to impugn the Tea Party, ostensibly taking one of the godfathers of modern conservatism and saying, not even he, is not true, folks.
And I'm just really, all I want you to do is not give up out there.
I think Harry Reid is apologizing.
Ted Cruz is not going anyway anywhere.
Obama canceling these trips.
This is not playing out.
This shutdown and the upcoming debt limit argument.
It's not playing out like they thought at all.
They don't have the winning optics.
They don't have the winning hand.
You have to remember, none of this was supposed to ever happen again because of Obama.
Don't think people have forgotten that.
I mean, the Limbaugh theorem still is in play, and Obama gets away with not being held accountable for things.
But on something like this, partisanship, remember, he was going to end all of that.
You go back to the 2008 campaign, so many people who professed their love for Obama.
He was a blank canvas.
You could make him whatever you wanted him to be.
And the people that ran that campaign, the media that promoted that campaign of Obama's, they really focused on the fact that Obama was a new kind of politician that could end all the bickering.
He could end all the fighting, could end all the partisanship, and he could end racism.
I mean, it was magical.
And this is not something that he can pretend didn't happen.
It's not something that his supporters can say people misunderstood.
They capitalized on that.
They used it themselves.
They promised an end to the bickering.
They assured everybody that Obama, with the very force and the will that he brought to his personality, just going to make everybody melt and we're bringing them one nation again.
And everything was going to happen for the best for everybody and all that.
And they rode that into the sunset.
And they now can't, they just can't walk away from this.
And you're not going to see the media do stories asking people, well, what do you think?
You voted for Obama on the basis that he was a great unifier.
They're not going to go out and find those people because they don't want to.
But they exist.
You add all this stuff up, these exchanges, dude, it's a boondoggle.
And some state, some state, California, New York, I forget which.
Oh, yeah, we have 5 million hits.
My God, we don't know what.
Do you know how many hits Google gets in a day around the world?
It's in the billions.
And that's another for this bunch to run around.
And, well, my God, we had no idea so many people.
They have to.
People don't have a choice.
They've got.
But everybody trying to sign up at the exchange is used to getting anywhere they want to get on the web.
They want to go to Wikipedia.
It's never clogged.
They want to go to Google unless there's a service outage.
No problem.
There aren't any delays.
iTunes, Amazon, you name it.
It all works except Obama's.
And so they offer these excuses.
Well, we weren't ready for this mad dash of people.
What do you mean you weren't ready?
Everybody has to.
Nobody has a choice here.
Everybody has to go through these exchanges to get insurance at some point or another.
You know it's bad when they single out one or two people as success stories.
In a nation of 300-plus million people, the regime has now trotted out two people who successfully signed up for Obamacare.
And they're hoisting them up and they're saying, look at this.
This is a great example of how our program.
Two people.
It is an embarrassment.
And the Democrat behavior, you know, at some point, even they overdo it.
Even they.
I look at it.
Despite the fact that only CNN has made an issue of it, this business with Harry Reid getting caught saying that the life of a kid with cancer didn't matter to him, don't think he gets away with that because the media doesn't trumpet it.
Don't think there are lines, even for Democrats, that when they cross them, people hold them just as accountable as they do Republicans on a much shorter leash.
Got to take a break.
We'll come back and we'll get to your calls.
You sit tight, folks.
Don't go away.
It's Open Line Friday.
Let me give you an interesting William F. Buckley.
It's a quote, but it's more an observation.
Buckley pointed out: he said, in the 30s, we were told that we had to collectivize the nation, i.e., big government go socialist.
We had to collectivize the nation because the people were so poor.
He said, now we're told that we have to collectivize because the people are so rich.
And he's right.
Back in the 30s, FDR, all the boys, oh, yeah, we got way too many poor people.
We need to go socialism so that we can raise standards of living.
Today, why are we doing it?
Because they're rich.
We got too many rich people, and they're stealing everybody's everything, and we got to take it from them.
I think it's a great observation.
All right, to the phones we go.
We're going to start in Northfield, Minnesota, with Jan.
Thank you for waiting, and it's great to have you here.
Hi.
Hey, Rush, how are you doing?
Very well.
Thank you very much.
Good.
It's a lifetime highlight to talk to you and a precious honor to thank you for being the champion of freedom and morality.
Well, yes.
On a freedom side, yeah.
You embarrass me.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
At one time, I was the epitome of morality and virtue.
I give you a loose claim today, but I gave it my best shot every day, nevertheless.
I'm calling you today to point something out that has happened since Bill Buckley's heyday in the 1960s, and that is the fact that you have come on the scene.
And you, using just your talent and truth, justice in the American way, you've done something that I would have thought impossible, but you've done it.
You've broken the liberal propaganda machine.
And it's very, very cool.
It's a very cool thing.
And I think that that's why we're seeing people scramble today and try to make, try to turn lies into truth, because without the liberal propaganda machine, liberalism doesn't work.
And so thanks a lot for doing that.
Well, you know, you are actually very shrewd and perceptive in a couple of ways.
You're also, I think you're a little bit excessively complimentary, but I accept your accolades nevertheless with great appreciation.
I do think I have often said jokingly to my friends who don't know what I'm talking about.
It's amazing.
There are so many days I'm on an island all alone, my thoughts.
I said, you know, I really do think that in one sense, I am to blame for the rancor.
In the sense that you nailed it, they had a monopoly.
They used to be happy as clams, the leftists, and they had a monopoly.
They don't anymore.
It's been busted up.
And I think the destruction of their monopoly is what has turned them into just extremely mean people.
I think it's any more complicated than that.
They had their monopoly.
They were very guarded for it.
And now they were jealous of it, envious, and they just are fit to be tied that they have to deign to explain themselves to anybody.
Who the hell are we?
We shouldn't have explained themselves.
And I think it's one of the reasons why the media has dropped the facade of objectivity and has just gone full-fledged into the agenda, because it's now it's open competition.
And you're right, in another sense, we here compete in what I call the arena of ideas.
They don't.
They compete in an entirely different way.
Their technique is to mischaracterize and destroy anybody opposite them who is credible.
They do not come into the arena of ideas and talk about ideas with us.
They do not debate ideas.
They destroy people who can articulate things that they don't want to hear.
And I could give you a list of names of people they try.
It never ends.
New people get added to their enemies' list every day.
And you talk about, you know, I came along and what did I do?
I didn't really do anything but validate what a lot of millions of Americans already believed, but didn't have an outlet for in national broadcast media.
And it did serve the purpose of unifying and joining, bringing people together and so forth.
And I just, you know, it's very flattering to me that you have that perception of it, how it happened.
So I thank you very much for it.
You're very welcome.
And I think that you identified all of us out here as a market.
And I'm just going to continue on a little bit and say that without having done that, how would Fox News have an audience?
How would that have formed?
You know, I think credit is yours, and I think you deserve it completely.
Well, you may be a bit excessive in your praise, and in your honor, I will accept it.
You're very nice.
And you're embarrassing me here.
I'm not often speechless.
But I do thank you.
You're very kind.
I do believe she said I identified a market.
There wasn't any of that, really.
And I'm not trying to say she is wrong.
I know what she means.
All I mean by it is when those of us who were here at the beginning, we didn't sit down and look at the country as a potential audience and say, what are we going to have to do to get one?
And we certainly didn't do any focus groups or any kind of testing.
And we didn't even sit around and say, you know, what's missing in the media today is conservative.
There wasn't any of that.
There wasn't a grand marketing strategy, and there wasn't any kind of a PR strategy.
And there wasn't, you know, how we get this demo, and how do we get that?
There wasn't any of that.
All it was was me realizing a dream to do a radio show the way I had always wanted to do it.
And I finally encountered people as partners who were unafraid of that.
And it then just clicked because it turns out we didn't need to do any marketing research.
And I didn't have to adopt any points of view or whatever to try to, you know, we didn't say, okay, what are we going to do to get the women?
We only did one thing ever to do that.
It bombed out.
And that was we asked women to send in pictures if they wanted to be allowed on the Aris Caller.
But other than that, there's never been one thing we've ever done that targets anybody as a group.
We aim here for the whole country.
But I do believe, folks, I wish I had a better way of explaining this.
But you, you, maybe you can understand how have you ever had a monopoly on anything?
I mean, that's huge to have a monopoly on any.
And the media had one.
I mean, they were it.
They determined what was news and what wasn't news.
What was covered, what wasn't covered.
They determined how.
They determined who was going to be covered.
They determined everything.
Everything.
And now that's long gone.
They don't have that monopoly anymore.
Much of what they do is for each other as they every day try to demonstrate to themselves that they still have similar powers as they had, like they had when they did have their monopoly.
Back with more.
Don't go away.
Open Line Friday.
Great to have you here.
Back to the phones to Heartland, Wisconsin.
Hi, Steve.
You're next.
It's great to have you here.
Hi, Rush.
Thanks for having me on your show.
You bet, sir.
You know, I actually called in last week about the millennials and sort of pessimism and the book Atlas Shrugged.
And so I want to talk about something else today.
So I'm an 18-year-old college student, and I grew up in an upper-middle-class family.
And my parents always gave me good opportunities and a good life.
And sometimes I feel like I have to feel, like, guilty for being dealt a good hand in life.
Your parents gave you good opportunities and a good life.
Yeah, and it worked hard to do that.
Well, explain that.
Well, I mean, my dad's a small business owner, and so we've had a lot of good opportunities.
We've been able to travel a lot.
And sometimes when I'm in different neighborhoods, I kind of feel like I tell them what school I go to, and they're like, oh, that's the rich school.
oh, you guys are the rich people, and even though we're...
So the guilt is not coming from you.
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, I guess it's society.
Well, your father works, obviously, right?
Yeah.
Would you, if somebody said, did your father earn what he's got?
Would you say yes?
Absolutely.
I mean, he's worked so hard to give us a good life.
So why in the world, why in the world, or what in the world is there to feel guilty about that others don't have the same opportunities as you?
I don't know.
I guess I've just always grown up with people sort of, I don't know, criticizing me for being dealt a good hand.
And I'm not really sure why.
Are there people who have more than you do?
Your friends' fathers who have more than you?
Are you envious of them?
No, I mean, I'm happy with my life, and I feel like it's my goal in life to make the next generation behind me.
You feel guilty, and you think others are trying to make you feel guilty.
You don't obviously don't want to feel guilty.
So what are you doing about it, if anything?
Well, I mean, obviously I have good opportunities, and so I'm using my God-given talents to serve the community.
I like to think that I've had an impact in my Boy Scout troop and teaching Sunday school.
And I just want to make the most of what I have.
I mean, I have a lot of potential, I feel like.
See, I think this is interesting to me because all you're doing is living your life, and you're trying to make the most of it.
You can, it sounds like to me.
It sounds like your father did the same thing.
But there is a stigma.
There is a stigma in our culture today attached to success.
It's deemed to be unfair because not everybody is, particularly in a bad economy like this.
So you're no different than anybody else in your situation, but you do really have to fight it because Guilt is giving other people way too much power, and you're not going to be able to do anything about it.
If you were to throw away what you call your opportunities, if you were to discard these things, it wouldn't help anybody else's life.
It wouldn't make their life any better.
It wouldn't make them feel any better.
It wouldn't do anything for you.
Don't ever succumb to the temptation to diminish yourself in the face of all of this as a means of making people feel better.
That isn't the way to do it, and it doesn't work that way anyway.
Take it.
I guess I think what something else is that it doesn't matter if you're upper-middle class, middle class, lower-middle class.
And that's a totally different issue with how we judge people based on class.
But it doesn't matter where you are.
As long as if you're happy where you are, that's fine.
But if you want to advance yourself, there shouldn't be anything wrong with that.
Exactly right.
I feel like there is something wrong with that.
And there shouldn't be anything, you shouldn't have to hide it if you succeed at advancing yourself.
Yeah, and I mean, these now, it's perfectly fine to be humble.
It's perfectly fine to be well-mannered and polite and all that.
And, you know, this is a there's a it's like Buckley said, back in the 30s, back in the days of FDR, it was said that we had to go collectivist or socialist because too many poor people.
Now we have to do it because there are too many rich people.
The left just can't decide.
They just can't be happy.
And at the root of it, anyway, is control over people.
They just offer whatever excuse they think will sell at a given time to try to sell socialism.
If somebody like you comes along and you end up being the problem, you are pointed to as a problem.
You're pointed to as a rare example of what's wrong with the country.
And it's just the exact opposite.
You've had influences that have inspired you.
You can do the same thing for other people.
That's the value in success.
That's the value in achieving things: it has the ability to inspire others to want to emulate it.
And you can further that along.
Fight the guilt.
There should be no guilt whatsoever if everything you've come by is genuine.
Now, if you've cheated people out of it, if you've stolen from people, it's a whole different game, but you haven't done that.
Doesn't sound like it.
It's like your father has.
There's no reason to feel guilty.
Actively fight it.
It's a prison that you're going to put yourself in, and you're going to fall prey to the class warfare that the Democrats use.
That it isn't fair for people like you.
And we're going to have to take from you because you're not paying your fair share.
You've got more than you should have.
You've got more than you need.
You don't need as much as you have, but we're going to come get it.
The danger is that there are lots of other Americans who will agree with that and who even know you will end up resenting you or disliking your what have you.
It's a tactic that the left has used.
Democrat Party has popularized it.
And you're impressionable.
You know, you're 18 and so forth.
And you still have lots of failure ahead of you, too.
Not everything's going to work out.
You have a lot of opportunities.
You're going to botch some.
It's called life.
And you're going to see both sides of this.
And you'll have a greater appreciation for success as those things happen.
Everything is a learning experience.
You'll see what I'm talking about.
Steve, I appreciate the call.
This is Don, Valley Stream, New York.
You're next.
Great to have you on the program.
Hello.
Thanks for taking my call.
You bet.
Yeah, my softball team is starting our championship series tonight.
And I've received multiple texts from our captain that if we don't bring a photo ID and it doesn't match with the roster of the players all season, we will not be allowed to play.
And, you know, it's just fascinating.
Now, wait a minute.
Hold it.
Whose rule is this?
Well, this is the league's rule, but the league, it plays on a village field and a village rec center.
Because what happens is, and there was a big problem, that players would.
Does your team have a bunch of illegals on it as ringers?
No, well, that's what happens.
People would bring down, they'd wait until the championship.
They'd have their regular guys all season.
Then, when the championship rolled along, they'd bring down all the ringers.
And, you know, it would just get thrown out of Iraq.
It would be illegitimate, and they made a mockery of the league.
So they impose this rule that you have to have a photo ID, and it has to match with the roster.
And it's amazing that, you know, Holder and Obama, they're actually, you know, going after states for imposing the same policy when people vote because the same exact thing is happening.
You know, there's people on the rolls, and then other people show up to vote and to vote in the way that the Democrats want.
And it's outrageous.
I know.
This is amazing.
You've got to have a freaking photo ID to be compared with a roster of your softball team.
This is a hobby, right?
You people are not in a professional league, are you?
No, no.
We all play for the bars in the area.
And then, you know, then we go and celebrate after the game.
Exactly.
You celebrate during the game.
You got six pack on the bench, a keg or what have you.
We're not technically allowed to do that, and we don't because we want to win.
And, you know, sober people usually celebrate.
But yeah, this is such a winning issue.
This is such a winning issue for conservatives.
It's so frustrating that more candidates.
Eric Holder is starting to sue states that are passing voter ID laws.
The federal government, the Justice Department, is starting to file lawsuits against those states for the usual reasons.
Racism, discrimination, voting rights act violations or some such thing.
Anyway, well, good luck.
I hope your team have a legitimate chance here at winning the they all managed to come up with a photo ID if they want to play.
You know, and there's people from all walks of life in our league.
Is this the end of your season coming up here?
Is this what this is about?
Yeah, this is the end of the season.
This is the playoffs.
The playoffs.
We played all season.
And if your ID doesn't match the roster of the guys that were there all season, they're not going to let you play.
Was it slow pitch or fast pitch softball?
This is high arc.
It's low pitch.
High arc, slow pitch.
That's why you can drink beer during the games.
Yeah, exactly right.
Okay.
Don, thanks for the call.
Appreciate it.
We'll be back after this.
Open Line Friday, El Rushbo and Ron in Chilcoat, California.
Great to have you on the program.
Hi.
Thanks, Rush.
Thanks for taking my call.
You bet, sir.
Hey, yesterday, I had gotten up and walked over to my in-law store here in Chilcoot, a little family store, and my mother-in-law was telling me that they had just shut down a local lake right here in this town called Frenchman Lake.
I go, what do you mean they shut it down?
Well, because of the government shutdown, they shut down the lake.
And I said, well, that's not a federal lake.
There's no federal employees up there.
The campgrounds are ran by the thousand trails personnel.
So I said, well, that just isn't right.
So I called my local supervisor and asked him what was going on.
And he said that they had had a meeting that morning.
And because this lake was on federal property, they had to shut it down.
Had the Sheriff's Department go up there and kick everybody off the lake and was closing up the campgrounds.
So I said, well, okay, thanks for the information.
Wait, wait.
Who made the decision to close the lake?
The federal government.
But it's not their lake, even though it's on federal land.
It's on federal property.
And my supervisor told me that because they had a contract, the federal government had a contract with 1,000 trails to run the campgrounds, they shut it down.
So I said, well, that just don't seem right.
So I made some phone calls.
I got on the phone to my, or I called my congressman there in D.C., Doug LaMoffa.
Wait a minute.
Wait a minute, how'd you get through?
The phone lines are shut down because.
Now, here's what I wanted to tell you.
Doug LaMoffa's phone number was open and running.
And an individual answered the phone, and I voiced my concerns and asked if they would pass it on to my congressman.
They said, you bet we will.
So then I called my two senators, and you know who they are.
You're right.
Their phone numbers were shut down.
So I called the White House.
Their number was shut down.
I said, that's odd.
So I called a couple of more congressmen in California that were Republicans, and they answered their phone.
And I voiced my concerns.
Wait a minute.
So it sounds to me like if you call a Republican, you can get through.
If you call a Democrat, they got their phones shut down.
That's what it sounds like to me.
But then, you know, this morning I'm watching TV, and I'm noticing all the cemeteries shut down, the Normandy Cemetery shut down over in France.
And I got to thinking, okay, government jobs all shut down.
Why is Obamacare still up and running?
Mandatory spending.
Mandatory spending.
Mandatory spending does not get shut down in this kind of framework.
You know what you need to do if you really want that lake opened?
You need to call Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker.
Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker has simply refused to shut down the things in Wisconsin the federal government has ordered shut down.
They're paying for it as well.
So there are a lot of parks in Wisconsin that the feds tried to shut down and Scott Walker said, nope, you don't have total authority here because we spend some money on them ourselves and we're not shutting down.
If you go to Arizona, the federal government has shut down a Grand Canyon.
You cannot go to the bottom of the biggest hole in the country because they've shut it down.
The state of Arizona wanted to pay their own money to reopen it.
Obviously, it's a tourist site.
And the federal government is denying permission for the state of Arizona to open the Grand Canyon.
Here's the AP story on this is fascinating.
And there's no doubt in my mind that this regime has a war on Arizona.
The AP, Arizona governor, rejected an offer to reopen Grand Canyon.
Arizona's Republican leaders known for picking fights with the federal government.
Oh, how horrible they are.
Is that what Arizona Republican leaders are known for?
Picking fights with the federal government?
How about Arizona Republican leaders are known for defending the Constitution in their state, AP?
Anyway, get this lead.
America's or Arizona's Republican leaders, known for picking fights with the federal government, are seething again.
Now that the Grand Canyon is closed because of the budget crisis in Washington, oh yeah, the Republicans are seething.
It's all the fault of these Republican hotheads.
Yeah, seething.
Governor Jan Brewer wants the state's signature national park reopened, has offered to pay for it to open with state money.
But her proposal was rejected Thursday by a park official who said that as long as the federal government remains shut down, such a plan isn't an option.
Park Superintendent Dave Uberwaga, I guess it's pronounced, said, I appreciate the support and I thank them for the offer, but it's not an offer we can accept.
Why not?
Why not, Dave?
This has been done before during previous shutdowns, even in Arizona, 1995, and 1996.
The Grand Canyon remained open in previous shutdowns in much the same way.
The regime doesn't want these places open.
They've got the World War II Memorial chained shut.
They've put a chain on the fence at the World War II Memorial.
They won't let people go to the Grand Canyon.
I mean, it's being done on purpose, and the only reason is because Obama knows that snarky little news agencies and reporters like whoever wrote this, Bob Christie for the AP, are going to write it in such a way.
You imagine the bad guys here, the seething, angry bad guys, are the ones who want to open the Grand Canyon?
And the people arbitrarily closing it?
They're the angels.
They're the good people.
This is sick.
I don't know where the time is going.
It's all right.
Just one hour remaining here today on Open Line Friday.
Fastest three hours in meeting.
I haven't talked about the woman shot yesterday, the Obama stalker.
But I have some thoughts on that, folks, and we'll get to that.