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Dec. 19, 2013 - Rush Limbaugh Program
31:53
December 19, 2013, Thursday, Hour #3
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Here we are back at it again for our final big busy broadcast hour here on the Rush Limbaugh program and the Excellence in Broadcasting Network.
It is a it really just a thrill to be with you each and every day.
I can't tell you how I still look forward to it as much, if not more than ever.
You know, life is a it's a it's a it's an amazing, it's an amazing thing.
And as a person gets older, it becomes more conflicting.
Because in my case, I've always wanted to be older because I thought I would be happier as I got older.
And that has always been the case.
When I was a teenager, I wanted to be in my 20s.
In my 20s, I wanted to be in my 30s.
The reason was that older people seemed to have more freedom.
They seemed to have a greater ability to be self-reliant.
They were obviously more successful.
And I always wanted to be older than I was.
When I was a kid, I always wanted to be an adult.
I can say I'm 62 now, and I'm not necessarily looking forward to being 75, but I'm not afraid of it.
Now, I wouldn't say I've reached the point where I'm no longer hoping to be older, but I'm not afraid of it.
But as I've gotten older, I'll just speak for myself.
And I assume it's like this for a lot of people.
As I've gotten older and the aspects of life that I thought would improve have, there are also some things that happen that conflict with the happiness.
And that is that as you get older, people that you knew and loved get sick and some of them pass away and die.
And that's not something that happens often when you're young for most people, but it begins to happen with increasing regularity, it seems, as you get older.
So on the one hand, for me, life has been better every year than it was the year before.
But in the midst of all of that, there has been incredible sadness to have to balance along with it.
And I should say this way for everybody.
I'm not trying to say here that I'm experiencing things nobody else has.
I certainly don't believe that.
But this has been one of those years.
I've lost two people that were really, really close outside of family.
Vince Flynn, the noted author earlier this year.
Both people, by the way, I would not have met were it not for this radio program.
And just yesterday, I was walking out of here at 3 o'clock.
I mean, shortly after the program ended, to get in the car and head up to a staff Christmas party.
And the phone was ringing, but I didn't know it for some reason.
So finally, I saw there was a text on the phone from a friend of mine who said, we really need you to call us.
I'm at Hutch's house in Seattle.
And I had known for a long while that Ken Hutcherson, the Reverend Dr. Ken Hutcherson, was ill.
He had been fighting cancer for 10 years.
But I had no idea how serious it was.
And that's because he wouldn't tell me.
A number of times I implored him to tell me the truth.
And he continually downplayed it and said, it's not important.
It's going to beat it.
And he was trying to totally set me at ease rather than apparently tell me the severity and the depth of it.
And because he had survived it for 10 years and because he was treating everybody else the way he was treating me with it, it was not something that I didn't think it was an immediate crisis until one night this week I got an email saying that they decided to stop chemo and move the Hutch into hospice.
But even at that, there was no expectation that yesterday would be the day he would pass away.
So I was finally able to return the phone call, and that was the news that I got yesterday afternoon.
And I was, I really was blindsided by it because I was just not aware that he was that sick.
And don't make a big deal out of that.
The point is, he didn't complain about it.
It was not something that was at the forefront of his life.
He didn't try to extract feelings from people by talking about it.
He dealt with it very privately, very internally.
And I remember I was on the phone yesterday afternoon with, it was Jim Zorn who called me and told me they were friends from way back that played together, Seattle Seahawks.
And I was talking to Jim on the phone as I'm driving to the Christmas party.
The Bluetooth in the car happened to be working well.
So I was able to use the phone miraculously almost.
I was able to understand every word he said.
And I remember I was getting mad.
Not at Zorn.
I was just getting mad.
I was thinking, I'd had no idea it was this bad.
I really didn't.
And I started to question whether or not I had paid enough attention to it or not.
And I thought about it.
I said, no, every time I brought it up with him, he swept it aside, would not let me talk about it, never once complained about it.
It was not allowed to be discussed.
And he was not afraid of it.
It was not that.
He was a man, folks.
He just, there was no complaining.
There was no bleeding on people.
There was none of that.
He didn't want his relationship with anybody to be defined, even in what turned out to be the latter months of his life by his illness.
He was still writing and producing scripts for his TV show and for his work at the church, the Antioch Baptist Church in Seattle.
And he was, like I say, he was a great man, actually, and so was Vince Flynn.
And it's just the conflict with things doing well and every year being better than the year before, and then these Moments of real sadness and loss.
And I get very introspective when things like this happen.
I start thinking, which is for me deeply about it.
I don't know how deep it really is.
But tell you a little bit about the Hutch.
I met him quite by accident.
Howard Slusher, who at one time in his life was a sports agent and later in his life ended up working for Nike.
He was a management in Nike.
Had gone to some fundraiser where there was an auction, and one of the items was a fishing trip in Vancouver Island.
And he was the high bidder and won the auction.
And he was able to bring three other people.
It's a trip for four people.
So he invited a close friend of his, Paul Westphal, former player for the Celtics and the coach of the Phoenix Suns and the Pepperdine, the Sacramento Kings, and this guy, Ken Hutcherson.
And Westphal said, oh, yeah, you're going to love Hutcherson.
He used to play for the Cowboys.
He's a linebacker and the Seahawks and the San Diego Chargers.
And he's got a church now in Seattle, the Antioch Baptist Church.
I said, okay, cool.
So we convene at this place in Vancouver Island.
It's a salmon fishing trip.
And I've never done anything like this.
But I said, well, it's a three or four day thing.
And we had our own cabin.
And if we'd, whatever salmon we catch, we'd bring it back at the end of the day.
And the people that run the place would cook it up and we would eat it.
And it'd be just a guy fishing trip.
And that's where I met the Hutch.
And being the rabid at the time football fan I was, I just peppered him with every question I could think of about Dallas Cowboys and Tom Landry and his experience with the game.
And I learned quite a lot about him.
He's from Anniston, Alabama.
And he grew up during really bad racial strife.
He came from a pretty poor background.
And he grew up angry.
He grew up being told that he was only three-fifths of a person, that he couldn't eat or drink with the white people and so forth.
It was that bad, this little town where he grew up.
And I don't know if he would want me to say this, but one of the reasons that football was attractive to him was it was a legal way to hit white people.
And he would tell me that with a big smile on his face, by the way.
He never did anything but laugh.
Don't get the wrong idea.
He was not mad.
He was never angry.
He was not filled with rage.
He was not reliving the past.
He's just telling me about his life.
And he played, if you're a football fan, he played with Ed Too Tall Jones and Harvey Too Mean Martin and Jethro 2 Jethro Pugh.
That era of the Dallas Cowboys.
I remember Thomas Hollywood Henderson.
I met him at a golf tournament once after I'd met the Hutch, and I'd never met Hollywood either.
And I said, oh, I met somebody you might know, Ken Hutchison.
He looked at me, Hollywood Henderson looked at me, said, Tom Landry, on the day the Cowboys traded Hutchison, Tom Landry said, if he could have had a team filled with Ken Hutchisons, that the Cowboys would have never lost.
But the vagaries of the NFL were such that they had to trade the Hutch and so forth.
Anyway, after his playing days, he made it official and started his church.
And he was the minister who married Catherine and me on our wedding three years ago.
And he was sick even then.
He arrived and he was in and out of a walker and so forth.
It was obvious he was sick.
But again, he never allowed that to be anywhere near the focus of anybody's attention where he was involved.
And as such, I think a lot of people were not really aware how bad his cancer was, and that was by his choice.
So I get the news yesterday that he passed away right as this program ended yesterday, very much right real close to it.
And it's a sad thing.
He was 61 years old.
He had become very active in trying to revive and save the American culture through his work as a minister and as a human being.
He made the trek to Washington every year for the Values Voters Coalition and so forth.
He'd become a leader in the state of Washington, coming up with petition campaigns to try to influence votes in the state legislature there.
And he was constantly offering assistance.
And of course, you people have heard him on this program talking a couple of times on issues such as that.
But he was a regular here during the playoffs of the NFL season during the Super Bowl, offering his expertise as a player and trying to help us understand who might win or what teams were involved going through it.
But he was a devout Christian.
He was a devout practicing Christian.
And as such, I don't think that he feared death because of that.
But he's gone now, and it's a great, great loss for his congregation and his family because he's a unique individual.
And nobody can be replaced when they're gone, but he's created an especially huge void for a lot of people because he was a counselor to people in trouble, no matter what the problem was.
He was one of these people that whatever your problem, he had the correct advice for you, and he was tough about it.
He didn't baby anybody that was off the rails.
He didn't hold their hands and commiserate.
He told them what was, what they had to do, and then told them they could do it.
He didn't baby anybody.
He had not been babied at any point in his life.
And it's a sad, sad thing.
But I remember when Bum Phillips, Bum Phillips died this year, the old coach of the Houston Oilers, and his son Wade said something that stuck with me.
In announcing his father's death, he said, Bum is gone to heaven, not has.
Bum is gone to heaven.
He's still alive.
He's just not has.
He is gone to heaven.
Bum was a devout Christian as well.
And that was the hutch.
The hutch is gone to heaven now, called home.
And everybody that knew him will never be able to replace him.
There isn't anybody who could replace what he was to people in their lives.
Feel kind of helpless because of that you want to be able to help kids family you do what you can but nobody can replace him and that's it's a testament but it's also a indication of the nature of the scope of the loss to people who loved him and were in his immediate family.
He had some of the funniest stories about the NFL, about the people he played with, about the coaches, about the owners.
I loved him.
I had more fun hanging around this.
He showed up here.
I'll never forget.
He showed up here one summer.
He had the family in tow, and they were going to Disneyland and so forth.
And he came in, and he would always taunt me with this black-white stuff.
He'd always hug Snerdley, say, what does it look like, man?
Two brothers hugging each other.
What does it look like?
He just is constantly taunting me.
I said, Hutch, you know, I want to give you a gift.
I've got a jersey that the Pittsburgh Steelers gave me.
Way, way back in the early 90s, and I want to give it.
He said, fine, will you autograph it?
And I said, sure.
I signed the jersey.
And I thought, well, this guy played the NFL.
What's he going to care for the jersey for?
He loved it.
He loved it.
Never played for the Steelers, but I figured he's got jerseys out to wazoo from the time he played.
Anyway, Ken Hutcherson is going to be terribly missed by a lot of people.
And I would be remiss if I didn't share with you some of the brief memories today.
I've got to take a timeout here, folks, but we will be back and continue after this.
Don't go away.
Well, guess what?
They have found out who Pajama Boy is.
He's a real guy, just like I thought, just like I told you, his name is Ethan, and he's a member of Organizing for America.
He's part of the Obama website brigade.
It's not some model that you got to remember.
They're going through everybody that's a member organizing for America.
They're going to say, okay, we've got to find a guy who's going to make the best impression.
We've got to find a guy who's going to force more people, influence more people than anybody else sign up.
That's the guy they chose.
That is all I am saying.
It's just.
What?
Oh, oh, oh, yeah.
We do have an Ethan on our staff, too.
Doesn't look anything like that.
By the way, there's a Gallup poll out, folks.
And again, this is one of these conflicting things.
For 40 years, there has been a campaign, and it's been a campaign issue.
40 years, the Republican Party, they haven't been doing this in the last five or six years, maybe 10.
But the Republican Party forever, for most of my life, has been running against the growth of government.
The Democrat Party has been running as the agent of government.
The Democratic Party has been running on growing government, making it more encompassing and more invasive under the guise of compassion.
And a record high number of people in the Gallup poll, 72% now say that big government is the greatest threat to this country.
72%.
Now I gotta...
Hang on.
Okay, here we go.
72%, record high in the United States, say that big government is the biggest threat.
72% say that big government's a bigger threat than big business and a bigger threat than big labor.
And by threat, what it means is a greater threat to the country in the future overall.
All-time high, 72%.
Now, here's my problem with it.
If this is true, who are seen right now as the architects of big government?
I mean, what are people reacting to here?
Obamacare, right?
They reacted to Obama.
Obamacare, they're reacting to Democrats, right?
So if this is really accurate, the Democrats ought not win the presidency in 2016, and they ought not win the congressional midterms, and they ought not win anything.
If 72%, an all-time high, the American people think big government is the greatest threat, then doesn't it follow that they would associate the Democrats with big government?
But what if they don't?
Maybe the Republicans ought to look at this and start once again tying the Democrats to it.
Maybe they shouldn't just leave that to chance because we know, based on past experience, people will not automatically come to that conclusion.
If they did, the Democrats would have never won anything after the 1980s.
But of course, they did.
So I don't know, folks.
I see these polls and everybody gets all excited about it.
And you watch Democrats will win the next election, and people say, what?
I thought the poll said that 72% of people big government's the biggest threat.
You know, it just means some Democrat came along and lied about believing in smaller government or that the Republicans didn't connect the Democrats to big government.
Probably that more than anything else.
Here's Scooter in Gainesville, Virginia.
Hi, Scooter.
It's great to have you with us.
Hello.
Hey, Rush.
Thanks for taking my call.
You bet, Scooter.
Hey, listen, I'm a 20-something living outside of D.C., and I realized listening to your show that I'm the guy who Obama hosts as one of his pajama boys.
I'm him.
How so?
Well, I'm a 20-something young professional.
He hopes that I'm going to sign up for Obamacare.
He's banking on the fact that I will pay for the future health care costs of those on the other end of the healthcare sector.
Right, but the elderly and the sick.
They're counting on you.
He's counting on me.
Yeah, I didn't feel a lot of times listening to your show.
But the point actually I wanted to make was, you know, the media coverage of this whole Duck Dynasty controversy versus Martin Bashir's attack on Sarah Palin is absolutely disgraceful.
You had a situation where a reporter asked, and basically Phil Robertson gave his opinion on what he considered to be sin, his own personal opinion, which he followed up by saying, but I'm not one to judge.
And then you had Martin Bashir on live national television insinuating that someone should defecate on Sarah Palin.
And there was absolutely zero major media coverage aside from Fox and talk radio and a couple others.
Yeah, but the people you're talking about were not offended by that, were they?
And it's an absolute disgrace.
You know, unless you're living under a rock, at this point, most of America has probably heard of the controversy with Phil Robertson and Duck Dynasty.
How many of those same people could recall what Martin Bashir said or insinuated should be done to stare panels?
Well, but let's be honest now.
Phil Robertson is about a gazillion times more popular than Martin Bashir and a gazillion times more known than Martin.
Martin Bashir is invisible.
He's at MSNBC.
Nobody watches.
So if it's not reported that he said that, nobody's going to know it because nobody watches him.
Very good point.
But no, it is a good point, but your point is not invalidated by that.
The fact is it was reported and people did find out about it.
And the people who are outraged over Phil Robertson could not have cared less.
And Alec Baldwin, Ed Schultz, the list goes on.
I mean, Martin Bashir is definitely obscure, but the list of center-left to liberal media figures who have said absolutely outrageous, offensive things about women, about conservative women, about gay people, the list of people goes on, and the media outcry, it's not even a comparison.
Well, except for Alec Baldwin, he went one step too far, apparently, because they did make the decision to pull a plug on him.
Yeah, I went a couple steps too far.
But no, look, you're exactly right.
Scooter, before you go, are you going to sign up for Obamacare?
Are you going to be Ethan Krupp?
Are you going to go out and sign up?
Well, luckily, at the present time, who knows how this shakes out, but luckily I work from an employer who provides excellent health care in return for my hard work and labor.
Oh, good.
So I have absolutely no intention of signing up unless the Obamacare police come knocking at my door and force me to sign the papers, which I'm not saying will happen, but that's about the only way at this point, unless something changes in the immediate future, that I would have to sign up for Obamacare.
If Obama gets his way, you are going to lose what you've got, and you'll have to re-sign up with him if he gets his way.
If he gets his way.
Hopefully in the next few years, things will turn around and that possibility won't have to happen, but we'll see.
I hope you're right.
If the pajama story works, who knows?
I know.
That's a scary thought, isn't it?
If the pajama boy ad works.
That is a scary thought.
On that scooter, I got to hit the trail.
But thanks much.
Great to hear from you.
Back after this, folks.
Don't go away.
And we're back.
El Rushbow, having more fun than a human being should be allowed to have.
Our final busy broadcast of the year.
Eric Erickson of RedState.com will be here tomorrow, and we've got Mark Stein in here next week.
I want to show you a tweet that we got at 2FBT and Rush Revere and the Great Pilgrims.
They got so many, we got Facebook, Twitter, websites were everywhere.
And I mentioned to you yesterday that we had all of these entries.
We'd asked for the best entry.
We wanted to send a bunch of copies of Rush Revere and American literary classics to a school.
We asked people to submit entries telling us why their school was the best.
And we were unable to pick one because they were all so good.
So, what we did, we're just going to send copies of Rush Revere and the Brave Pilgrims and other American classics like from Mark Twain and so forth to all of the schools represented by people who entered.
And we got this tweet.
I just have to show you this because this is a tweet sent by someone of a young man who was happy to find out that his school was going to receive Rush Revere and the Brave Pilgrims.
And he had his copy of his Ted T. Bear there.
Have I got, can you read that?
I've got it positioned, hopefully, on the screen.
And so it's just as cute as it can be.
And if you would have told me that I'd be getting tweets from little crumb crunchers like this, all happy over what I'm doing, I would have thought you needed to be committed.
But it's happening because of Rush Revere and the Brave Pilgrims.
And I just, I had to share this little tweet with you because what it says, if you couldn't read it, Ted T. Bear and his pal just found out their school will get copies of your book.
It was obviously his mom had taken the picture and sent us the tweet.
And this is amazing stuff that is happening with this book and kids and families.
It's something I just wanted to share with you.
Ramsey Shelbyville, Kentucky.
Great to have you on the program.
Hello, sir.
Hey, Rush.
I'm so excited to talk to you today.
Thank you.
It's great to have you here.
Listen, I'm really, really mad at you.
Why?
Because my husband's Christmas list was socks and a shop bat.
And I thought that I would blow it out of the water this year by ordering him some tea.
And I thought with free shipping, surely it will take a week to get here.
So the one day, one day Rush that I'm out of the house, your package is delivered.
And my husband got it.
And he saw plain old tea on the box that he knew.
Oh, no.
That was awful.
So we got it to you too quickly.
You did.
It was less than 48 hours.
Well, that's what we do.
It was awesome.
We had to open the box and try to see it.
It was amazing.
Well, it's probably gone now, right?
Well, we're saving some so that when my Libby Calm mother gets here for Christmas.
Since we goofed up, since we goofed up and got it to you too soon, we're going to send you some more.
So just hang on.
Mr. Snowdly will pick up the phone and he'll get the flavor you want and your address and we'll get some more out to you so that at least we can make up for our super fast shipping and having got it to you too soon.
It's Ramsey and Shelbyville, Kentucky.
Well, folks, that's it.
Another amazing year here at the EIB Network.
And look, brevity is the soul of wit.
I could spend all three hours thanking you.
I could spend all three hours trying to express my gratitude.
And I really don't have to.
It's just very simple to say.
My life is an adult Christmas every day.
And it's because of you.
Were you not there, had you not stayed there, had you not hung in there, my life wouldn't be what it is.
I'll never be able to adequately thank you other than to tell you how important and how much you mean to me and my family and everybody that's associated here with us at 2F By T, Rush Revere, the Great Pilgrims, and the EIB Network.
I hope you have a Merry Christmas.
Hope you have a great, great Christmas season.
See you back here as soon as we can in the beginning of the new year.
Thank you so much again.
Thanks again, folks.
And let me again wish all of you just the best Christmas season ever.
And if not this year, next year, whatever, we'll make it happen.
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