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Dec. 26, 2013 - Rush Limbaugh Program
35:49
December 26, 2013, Thursday, Hour #3
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Yes, happy Boxing Day to you, or as it's known in America, Thursday.
Rush is away and he will return in the new year.
Mark Belling will be here for three hours of authentic all-American excellence in broadcasting starting tomorrow to round out the week for Friday.
But for the moment, this is your undocumented anchor man, Mark Stein.
Honoured to be here.
No supporting paperwork whatsoever, but always a thrill to be here on Boxing Day.
I think I've got the deal.
I haven't checked the paperwork, but I think I've got the deal now where I only work foreign holidays on the guest hosting shift.
So I'll probably see you again on Victoria Day.
But Boxing Day it is, and usually by this stage of the show, Mr. Snurdley, who also draws the short straw and works Boxing Day every year, has asked me, why do they call it Boxing Day anyway?
But for some reason, I think this is like the seventh or eighth or twelfth or fifteenth time I've done the Boxing Day show.
He didn't do it this year.
But Boxing Day actually is the day you give boxes of small gifts to your servants and local tradesmen.
This is how the tradition originated in medieval times.
So it's appropriate to make a, if not a gift, then a small cash donation to some humble tradesman.
I, for example, I gave a 10-shilling note to my Obamacare Navigator because he's an awfully decent fellow.
He's been trying for three months to enroll me, assist me in enrolling for Obamacare, and not his fault that it's not perhaps as speedy as it might be.
But I thought I'd do the decent thing and tip him 10 shillings for Boxing Day anyway.
That's the spirit of Boxing Day.
And Mike and Mr. Snurdley are protesting that they're humble tradesmen too, and they should be entitled to a Boxing Day gift, even though Mike has already had his bobblehead of Ron Burgundy left mysteriously on his doorstep on Christmas Eve, wrapped in swaddling clothes.
So he's already had his Boxing Day gift.
I'm not going to be getting Mike anything else.
We were talking about free speech and this business of tiptoeing on.
Well, the fascinating thing about all this tiptoeing on eggshells is that you can just be generally abusive about all kinds of things that aren't worth getting abusive over.
Among the changes that are being made, YouTube, which is owned by Google, has long been home, according to the Associated Press, Barbara Ortite, the AP technology writer.
YouTube has long been home to some of the internet's most juvenile and grammatically incorrect comments.
The site caused a stir last month when it began requiring people to log into Google Plus to write a comment.
And it's true, if you ever go to YouTube, I was looking up some Christmas stuff about a week before the big day, last week sometime.
And it's amazing if you go to some YouTube footage of Johnny Mathis singing Winter Wonderland, the viciousness of the comments underneath it are like extraordinary.
This sucks.
This guy's no good.
Come here to Andy Williams.
This guy, somebody should kick it.
You know, it's amazing to me.
It's like you look at the Andy Williams Johnny Mathis showdown, maybe throw in Steve and Edie, Donnie and Marie in there.
It's like the comments on the easy listening clips they have on YouTube are like the most vicious thing I've ever seen.
So I kind of am not unsympathetic to YouTube requiring that people emerge from the shadows a little.
And if they're going to grossly abuse Andy Williams, they should at least put their name to it.
But It's the way things are going now, like nothing little things, like Andy Williams singing It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year.
You can pile on and be as abusive as you want about that.
But if it's anything serious that you want to talk about, then the civility police suddenly start patrolling every little nuance of what you say.
And I said, I don't want to live in a world where we tipped her around on eggshells, thinner and thinner and thinner.
But here's the point as well.
You know, if you are not ready to defend speech that you find offensive, and if you're not ready to allow people to say things that you find offensive, then you're a totalitarian.
And it doesn't matter how nice a totalitarian you are, whether you're a liberal totalitarian, whether you're a gay totalitarian, whether you're a lesbian totalitarian, you're still a totalitarian.
And that is the defining feature of you.
And at some point, it is going to be, I mean, one reason why I mentioned that Steve Martin joke, it was a lame joke.
It was a nothing joke.
And I don't see why anyone would be offended by it.
He was making a joke, the premise of which it confused a common Italian pasta dish with the names of young African-American girls.
So Steve Martin had to delete the tweet, respond to a barrage of tweets suggesting he was a racist by saying, my bad, my apologies, and all the rest of it.
You're a comedian.
All the time, all the time, we've been told comedians are supposed to be edgy and transgressive.
They're supposed to push the envelope and all the rest of it.
I never ever thought much about comedy until after my trial up in Vancouver.
One day, they devoted one day of the trial, the best part of one day, to discussing the tone of my jokes, which would normally just be the province of the Literary Review of Canada or whatever.
But they flew in an expert witness from Philadelphia and another guy from Toronto to discuss the tone of my jokes.
And I thought this was nuts.
But after my case, this ridiculous court in Vancouver doubled down and they fined a comedian $15,000 for a put-down.
He put down his audience.
You know, he did a sort of Don Rickles put-down.
You know, that's what your comedian does when there's some guy who shouts something out from the audience, you deliver the withering put-down.
But he was felt, this comedian, it was felt, he had put down these lesbian hecklers homophobically.
So he was fined $15,000 for putting down lesbian hecklers homophobically.
And ever since then, I've noticed that so-called edgy transgressive comedians are the most craven and conformist.
There has never been lamer comedy than the comedy we sit through now, where whenever anything is presented as edgy and transgressive, you can bet that they're actually just peddling the conventional wisdom and anything you care to mention.
So that Steve Martin, for the sake of his own profession, which is dying before his eyes, when Steve Martin is accused of making a racist tweet because of the sounder-like quality between a common Italian pasta dish and something that might be an African-American girl's name, he should just say, lighten up, clear off, get a life loser.
If you've got nothing to commit, if you've got nothing in Uganda, they passed the law saying they're going to jail homosexuals for life.
Right?
That's real, by the way.
That's real.
That if you're caught performing a homosexual act, you will go to jail for life.
But let's argue about what Phil Robertson says.
Around the world, girls are being honor-killed because 12-year-old girls are being honor-killed because they don't want to marry their middle-aged cousin in the next village.
They're being forced to undergo clitoridectomies.
Among Muslim populations, if you don't know what a clitoridectomy is, be grateful I don't explain it to you at great length over the airwaves.
Half the doctors in London, England report that they have seen girls from a certain immigrant group that it would be culturally insensitive to mention who have undergone female genital mutilation.
But people want to think that it's Mitt Romney who's guilty of the war on women because he's got, he says in a casual aside, he asked his subordinates to bring him binders full of women.
There's real things going out there that if you were really concerned about homophobia or women's rights or racism or any of these other things, there's stuff you just have to raise your eyes from your own stupid navel and all across the planet.
There's all kinds of things that would be worth you getting mad about.
But destroying some guy's life for one little aside is not, is not, not only is it not worth the time, it's the sign of tyranny.
I don't want to live in, I don't want to live in a world where an impeccably liberal woman loses her job for a tweet like this Justin Sacco did.
She's not a right-wing nut like me.
She's impeccably liberal.
She has lived in the liberal bubble all her life.
She lives by liberalism.
Everything about her is liberal.
And yet suddenly one little ill-advised tweet and she belongs in the same reviled category as me and Rush and Phil Robertson and everybody else.
Even liberals can't live up to this hideous, totalitarian, self-appointed hate finders general just prowling the internet for one little ill-advised soundbite that they can use to destroy your life.
And in that respect, it's one of the biggest stories out there.
Because free speech is essential to any free society.
The more you tell people, you know, in Saudi Arabia, you can't say nothing.
Some blogger is to be executed because he was deemed to have posted something on a website that is apostate.
These are our friends, the Saudis.
These are the one, this is the king that President Obama bowed to.
This is King Abdullah.
In King Abdullah's Saudi Arabia, this blogger has been sentenced to death for an apostate web posting.
In other words, something that is seen to be critical of Islam.
Because that's what happens.
In a world where you can't say anything, that's why they periodically have these things where people blow up buildings in Saudi Arabia.
Because when you can't say anything, when they say you can't say that and you can't say that and you can't say that and you can't say that, then as in Saudi Arabia and all these other third world basket case states, all you're left to do to express yourself is blow stuff up.
It's simply not becoming to a free society to have these self-appointed identity group commissars telling you what you're allowed to think.
Markstein for Rush, 1-800-282-2882.
Hey, Mark Stein, in for Rush on the EIB network.
Let's go to Debbie in Kansas City, Missouri.
Debbie, great to have you with us on the Rush Limbaugh Show.
Hi, I'm so excited to talk to you.
I've been listening to Rush for 20 years, and you are my all-time favorite substitute host.
It's an honor to be in with you.
That's very kind.
That's very kind of you to say so, Debbie.
And I'm always honored as a foreigner and an immigrant to this country.
Well, it always makes me happy when I hear your accent.
And I know that you're going to be the one that I get to listen to for three hours.
Thanks.
Thanks very much.
Unfortunately, though, today I have to call in because I'm a little upset with some of the things that you have said this show.
And it's because we are a conservative Christian family and we have a transgender child.
And it does happen even to families like ours.
It's something we really didn't even believe existed until our child started telling us that her body did not match the way she saw herself.
And all the jokes about kids in California and equating someone like my child who just needs to go into the bathroom to go pee with a perverted criminal in San Antonio is upsetting.
No, no, just be clear on.
Let me just be clear on that, Debbie.
Because it's true that for many people, they can't, they're never, they hear about this, as you say, your family had no real idea this was out there and this could happen to them.
And when it does happen, it does impose, as you say, your child just wants to go into a bathroom and pee.
The comparison I made was this: that if you do what the state of California does, and that has basically said you can now identify which bathroom you want to use, go into, I was comparing the guy in San Antonio with some jock on the football team who decides that he's just going to identify as female just for just for fun this week or whatever.
I mean, I understand.
I understand.
How old is your child, by the way?
My child is six, and all of this started at the age of three, which is really pretty common because that's when kids are starting to understand.
We've been pointing out boys and girls, moms and dads, and they're starting to understand gender.
Okay, well, I'll say, and let me just go a bit further because I had years ago back in London, I had a friend, I had a, I was, I passed my entire childhood without coming across this phenomenon.
And then in London in the 80s, a friend of mine who's a singer was a transsexual, as people said then.
I gather transgender is the phrase.
And I wound up meeting at one point one of the Bond girls.
I think it was in For Your Eyes Only, who was a transgendered person and all the rest of it.
And I'm fine with that.
I'm fine with that.
I've become more concerned.
And I don't really care.
I mean, I think, again, when a person is an adult, how they choose to identify and all the rest of it is up to them.
And how far they want to go in terms of having operations and hormones and all the rest of it, again, is up to them.
It's a difficult business when it is happening to a minor.
And your child is basically in grade one, grade two, right?
Right now.
Right.
And I must say, I find that a slightly worrying trend, in part because of court decisions.
I'm not sure there have been any here, but there have been court decisions in Australia, for example, mandating sex changes and surgery, mandating surgery for people as old as 11, often against the wishes of their parents.
And the lesson I...
I've never heard of any kind of surgical intervention that young.
Usually the only thing that happens is they have hormone blockers to prevent puberty so that secondary characteristics like a lowering of the voice or development of breath don't happen and traumatize the child.
I would be surprised if that happened.
No, I may be wrong on the surgery thing, but the Australian case, which is a few years ago, was, if my memory is correct on this, as young as 11 years old.
And I think that is, I think you do move into a grayer area here.
And again, you are in a situation where you and your child are on the same page about this.
Whereas in the Australian case, as I understand it, the child and at least one of the child's parents were in profound disagreement about the situation.
And the judge essentially imposed the state's solution on the child.
And my problem here with what is going on in California is that it is the state-imposed solution.
I think it's a very different business when you're dealing with minors, and the presumption is that the parent has the say over that.
And I think that's fine for the parent to have the say over that and for the parents to discuss that with the school district.
I am worried, in part, because of decisions like the court decision in Australia about a state intervention in these affairs, Debbie.
And I guarantee you, there are transgender people using restrooms every single day around you, and no one is the wiser because you go into the bathroom and you lock the door.
Right.
So the idea that it's going to affect the 99% of kids who are, quote, normal, or that there are going to be people who are just looking to be peeping palms in the bathroom is just an uneducated scare tactic.
Because my kid would be horrified if anyone had any idea what parts she had.
No, that's a good point, Debbie.
And thank you for calling.
Just to be clear, the issue in the California system is WAGs taking advantage of it for their own larkiness.
And we'll see how that plays out, and we'll see how comfortable girls are with it as the Rush Limbaugh Show continues on the EIB network.
Hey, happy Boxing Day from America's number one radio show.
I don't believe there are any songs for Boxing Day, although the 12 Days of Christmas is a kind of Boxing Day song because it's about the 12 days between Christmas Day and Epiphany.
So I think in the 12 days of Christmas, this is actually the second day of Christmas.
So it's not, what is it after the partridge in a pear tree?
I can't remember.
On the second day of Christmas, gave it to me.
Two, two, what is it?
Not Lords of Leapin, whatever it is.
Two turtle doves and a party.
Yeah, of course, two turtle doves.
There's only one thing more boring than the 12 Days of Christmas, and that's the parody versions of the 12 Days of Christmas.
I was staggered.
I came across one the other day, late on Christmas Eve in some store.
Some lame must have been funny.
I think it was like topical Christmas gags from 12 Days of Christmas parody in 1963, just absolutely terrible now.
The only thing worse than the real, anything more boring than the original 12 Days of Christmas is parody versions of the 12 Days of Christmas.
But no songs for Boxing Day other than that.
Mark Belling will be here tomorrow.
And who's in on Monday, Mr. Snerdley?
Oh, me, me.
I should read the memo more carefully.
I'm here on Monday.
And Rush will return in the new year.
Mark Bellig will be here for Open Line Friday tomorrow.
Politico is reporting that Edward Snowden is now taking a higher profile.
He's basically living in Moscow, but the former NSA contractor is now resurfacing in the media, saying he's confident his personal mission has been accomplished.
He gave a 14-hour interview to the Washington Post.
That's like longer than an Obama speech.
He gave a 14-hour interview to the Washington Post, his first in-person interview since he arrived in Moscow.
He then gave a television address to the people of the United Kingdom that followed Her Majesty the Queen's annual Christmas Day message to the Commonwealth, which is like the formal thing.
And then this edgy, transgressive television network, Channel 4, has an alternative Christmas message, which they gave to Edward Snowden to deliver this year.
And he called modern surveillance more invasive than any envisioned by George Orwell.
And I got this story from Politico, and Mr. Snerdley had just written on it, Why is this guy alive?
Question mark.
And you're right.
Like, this is the NSA.
He's stolen all the NSA's secrets.
He's done that thing you see in all the thriller movies.
What's the one, the first Mission Impossible, where Tom Cruise is lowered on a piece of string into some vault in the Pentagon or wherever it is.
And if he moves a quarter of an inch in any direction, the whole thing will go.
He didn't have to do any of that.
He didn't have to be lowered down on a piece of string and do the full Tom Cruise.
Edward Snowden just walked out with everything the NSA had to offer.
And Mr. Snerdley says he's now living in Moscow.
He's giving 40-nower interviews to the Washington Post and he's giving speeches on British television.
And Mr. Snerdley writes, Why is he still alive?
Because obviously, if they tried to drone him, they'd blow up a shopping mall in Moscow and kill some visiting European Union cultural delegation or whatever.
It wouldn't work out well.
But this is what is the problem with Edward Snowden and the NSA is not that the NSA is not primarily that the NSA knows everything we're doing and it knows all the secrets and knows everybody.
It's that it entrusts them to him, who's some sort of freelance contractor who's able to snaffle them all out of the building.
And that's one of the big problems with this money-no object security state.
It's basically the NSA version of that ludicrous scene in South Africa, in Pretoria, or Soweto, or wherever it was, a couple of weeks ago, when the United States taxpayer pays a fortune to fly Obama in Air Force One to South Africa.
It pays a fortune for the decoy Air Force One because it's not just that the president has to have his own wide-bodied jet, but you have to have a decoy wide-bodied jet so that in case they decide to shoot it out of the air, they shoot the wrong one out of the air.
And they have then they have the 120-car motorcade, and they have all the Secret Service agents with the reflector shades and the telephone wire hanging from their ear and all the Colombian hookers they need to get them through a weekend in South Africa.
And you have the full money-no-object security state with Obama, secures the stadium, delivers him into the stadium, and then stands him on stage 18 inches away from a guy who's been charged with rape, kidnapping, murder, necklacing two black guys in Soweto.
And that's it.
That's it.
That's what the money, no object presidential security detail from the Secret Service gets you.
And likewise, what the Money, No Object, National Security State at the NSA gets you is they monitor your every single phone call, your every single email, everything you do.
The post office now scans the front of every single envelope and gives it to the NSA, the front of every single envelope.
So even it's not just the computerized ones, even your granny's little quavery handwriting when she sends you the card at Christmas is scanned and sent to the NSA.
And then the NSA, and that's, you know, so that's your big money, no object security state.
And then the security state gives it all to Edward Snowden, just as the United States military gave it all to, speaking of sex changes, Bradley Manning, who's now transitioning to a woman in whatever jail he's been sent to, Private Bradley Manning, this confused Welshman who managed to take the Pentagon secrets out, put them, download them all onto one CD and release them to the world.
And that's the problem.
That's the problem.
Is that even if it were a good idea, the big brother national security state, money, no object security state is incompetent, entirely incompetent.
Let us go to Bill in.
Can we go to Bill in Fort Riley, Mike?
Let's go to Bill in Fort Riley.
I think we've had Steve, haven't we?
Didn't we have Steve in Tucson?
Hi, Bill.
You're live.
Bill from Fort Riley.
Bill, you're live on the air.
Great to have you with us.
Thank you.
What's on your mind today?
I'm not making a big deal about this.
A lot of people already probably are well aware of this issue.
It's in reference to the statement you made about that liberal lady that kind of made a fool of herself.
Right.
I guess she misspelled Kenya or something.
You were probably joking, but you kept referring to the Tea Party as teabaggers.
I mean, I've been in the military for about seven years now, and the line of work I'm in, it's most that I've worked with in my line are kind of naive, but I've grown extensively in learning more about the depravity of man, and I was a little shocked at what teabagging really means.
It's just what I heard you describing the tea party is that I was kind of wondering, do you know what that means?
Yeah, don't mistake me for doing what got this silly little girl in trouble.
She said, I thought I'd go to the party as a teabagger.
That's her term for it.
That's her term for it.
I well know what it means.
It refers to a sex act which is for those of a particular taste.
I know, and I think the Tea Party, they're trying to downplay the liberals calling them that to maybe make a joke of it.
But if I were to say that, it almost implies that I'm associating with that.
And so just when I heard you say that, I thought you said it numerous times, and I thought, I certainly knows what that is.
You know, that's the problem, Bill, in the world we live in.
That's what would be called when I was 11 years old and in my English composition class, that would be called indirect quotation.
It would be understood that even if you didn't put it in quote marks, you were alluding to her own use of the word teabagger.
Anderson Cooper, who's just received some award for GLAD as the GLAD man of the year or whatever, introduced it to national television, I believe, by talking about teabagging on CNN.
The President of the United States used it, by the way, in a letter to a fellow called Thomas J. Ritter, who is a fifth grade teacher at the Sally B. Elliott Elementary School in Irving, Texas, basically saying that he was he was the Mr. Ritter was complaining that any citizen who disagrees with your administration is targeted and ridiculed.
And the president wrote back to him, wrote back to him personally, got a letter back from the president that I believe he auctioned on eBay eventually.
But he said, I do have to challenge you.
This is the president of the United States.
I do have to challenge you on the notion that any citizen that disagrees with me has been targeted and ridiculed or that I have made fun of teabaggers.
The 44th President of the United States is the first president in history to actually use the word teabagger in a letter to one of his fellow citizens.
Chester Arthur never used the word teabagger.
Franklin Pierce never used the word teabagger.
Martin Van Buren never used the word teabagger.
Calvin Coolidge never used the word teabagger.
But President Obama wrote the word teabagger in a letter to a fellow American citizen.
And Bill, I know it's offensive to you, but this is the point.
This is the point.
They get away with this stuff all the time.
This guy, Obama, basically can make the argument, oh, I was mocking his use of the word teabagger.
If he'd been Cliff Phil Robertson, if he'd been Phil Robertson, if he'd been anybody on the right and he'd used a disparaging term ironically or alluded to it or as indirect quotation for the left, if he had used some offensive term, his career would be over.
But the president used the word teabagger and nobody minds because liberals love their insults and they don't think that they're, they think the right's insults should be criminalized and the left's insults.
It's okay if the president of the United States writes it on a White House letterhead.
And that's why there's no point playing their game.
I don't, if Martin Bashir wants to go on national television and express his kinky urge to defecate in Sarah Palin's mouth, let him.
It's always useful to know what people are really like.
If Anderson Cooper wants to talk about teabagging on CNN and it makes him happy, let him.
Let him.
I'm not so scared of my arguments that I want to ban Alec Baldwin or Martin Bashir or Anderson Cooper for using words.
There are no bad words.
There are no criminal words.
And I would rather have a free-for-all and may the best.
I'm confident in my arguments.
If we have free speech and we have genuine argument, I can clobber Martin Bashir.
I have no fear of Martin Bashir.
I don't need to ban Martin Bashir.
I don't need to fire Martin Bashir.
I don't need to fire Alec Baldwin.
I don't need to destroy Anderson Cooper.
I'm not scared of them.
All I want is to be free to say what I want and they can say what they want and may the best man win.
And we shouldn't be like the left in criminalizing and shutting down and complaining about speech.
If they call you a teabagger, good, embrace the term.
Teabag baggage you.
Teabags are go-go.
Run that teabag up the float of the flagpole and see who salutes it.
The alternative, which is joining the left in saying, you know, you can't say this and you can't say that, and we've got to ban everything and we've got to fire everyone.
And there'll be nothing on the airwaves except Kim Kardashian.
And who the hell wants that?
Mark Stein for Rush, more straight ahead.
Mark Stein in for Rush on the EIB net.
Well, let's round things out just by talking about where we were right at the top of the show with the visit, the vacation of President Obama and his wife and two children to Hawaii.
And the cost of it last year wound up being about seven million dollars, seven million dollars.
And I said, for the purposes of comparison, the total bill for flying the entire royal family, queen, princes, dukes, duchesses, the works all around the world for one year was actually less than that, £4.7 million, which is just under the cost of the president's Hawaiian vacation.
But in fact, in the last year, it's gone down because the cost of the royal family's travel for the year has gone down to $3.1 million or about £3.1 million or about $4.5 million.
$4.5 million.
You look at the cost of some of this thing.
The Duke of Edinburgh, the Queen's husband, he flew to Germany and back on a chartered flight to present medals to the Royal Engineers at a British military base in Germany.
Total cost about $15,000.
You can't take the President of the United States, the citizen executive of a self-governing republic of freeborn citizens and his 40-car motorcade to pretend to visit an ice cream parlor on Martha's Vineyard for a tenth of that.
But for $15,000, you can fly the royal family to Germany to present medals to a military base.
It's out of control, the imperial presidency, until he needs a stand-in to actually go and pretend in person to enroll in his Obamacare enrollment plan at the healthcare office in the District of Columbia, as he did a couple of days ago.
So in other words, you can't even have the president acting in his own phony baloney photo ops anymore.
Mark Stein for Rush, more ahead.
CNN reports a new poll showing that Congress is less popular than lice.
Yeah, I found that a bit of a head scratcher too.
Anyway, Mark Belling, Mark Belling, the great Mark Belling, he will be with you tomorrow for Open Line Friday to round out the week.
I will be back for a couple of days next week, and Rush returns in the new year.
But it's been great having you with us today.
I think we covered the range.
Stand for free speech.
Don't let them tell you what to say, because in effect, it means they're telling you what to think.
Don't let them shrivel your free speech.
It's the core right.
Thanks for sticking with me.
Have a great boxing day and I'll see you the Monday before Hogmanay.
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