Yes, great to be with you live from Ice Station EIB in far northern New Hampshire.
If you're fleeing the country, do swing by and say hello.
You can't miss us.
There's a big sign on the highway saying last Rush guest host before the border.
We're thrilled and honoured to be here because this is one of the jobs that Americans will do.
So it's an exceptional honor for an undocumented alien to get to do it.
And authentic all-American substitute host level excellence in broadcasting resumes tomorrow with Eric Erickson and then Mark Belling comes in.
And Rush is going to be back here on Monday.
And he will have plenty to say because they hold the news now for when Rush is away.
And they do all that.
It's like it used to be the Friday night news dump and they now do the Rush Vacation News dump and put all this big stuff out there when Russia is away.
So he will attend to some of that stuff when he returns on Monday.
We were talking about this bizarre ceremony at the Rose Garden and this Bo Burg Bergdahl guy and the John Walker Lynn fellow, which is where we came in on this war.
And in the big geopolitical sense, the question is whether it's we're on the verge of the post-American world here.
All these things are about the absence of American power.
You notice when Obama gives a speech, a clever speech, a speech that all his guys are pleased about, that they have one thing in common.
It's all about explaining why nothing is happening and nothing is being done.
That was his speech to West Point.
It's part of his perception of his reality thing, where he presents inertia as some kind of great principle policy, to the point where he's now elevated it into the Obama doctrine.
Don't do stupid fecal matter, as Politico has been excitedly reporting.
And it's not just, you know, Afghanistan and Syria and Boko Haram and any of these other places.
It's also in Eastern Europe.
Eastern Europe, there's a story in the New York Times today about Obama, who's in Warsaw pledging solidarity with Eastern Europe.
Now, what do you think actually pledging, when Obama pledges solidarity with you in Eastern Europe, what this actually means?
But Radek Sikorsky, the Polish foreign minister, here's a quote at this New York Times story.
It goes, for the first time since the Second World War, one European country has taken a province by force from another European country, said the Polish Foreign Minister, Mr. Sikorsky, in a telephone interview before Mr. Obama's arrival.
That's a reference to Putin taking the Crimea.
And again, by the way, Obama presents this as some kind of victory for U.S. diplomacy, that Russia is now absolutely isolated.
And in fact, he's just done a big deal with China.
He's back in the Middle East.
The Russians are for the first time in two generations in a big way.
He's essentially slowly making the whole of Central and Eastern Europe energy dependent on Russia.
The idea that Putin is isolated is like the famous London newspaper headline, fog in channel, continent cut off.
Fog in Obama's teleprompter, rest of the planet cut off.
Because Putin, the only reason Putin seems isolated is because he's surrounded by countries he's annexed.
So that's another thing where Obama's thing is to dignify inertia as somehow some grand geostrategic clarity that only he possesses.
So Sikorsky says, for the first time since the Second World War, one European country has taken a province by force from another European country.
America, we hope, has ways of reassuring us that we haven't even thought about.
There are major bases in Britain, in Spain, in Portugal, in Greece, in Italy.
Why not here?
The chances, Radek Sikorsky, of you getting an American base in Poland from this president are zero.
This president is basically ceding Poland back to Russia's sphere of influence.
By the way, Sikorsky isn't just some, you know, hick foreigner out there on the other side of the planet who doesn't really know the realities of life in America.
He's married to Anne Applebaum, who's an American and is a big commentator.
I don't know whether she's still a colonist.
She was a columnist and editor at the Washington Post.
I'm not sure whether she still is.
She used to be, in fact, my editor at The Spectator in London.
She did a terrible thing to me.
I wrote a piece about some aspect of the United States politics, and she edited it by taking out all the punchlides to my jokes, but leaving all the build-up in.
So it just read, it read, it made no sense at all.
So I have a slight, as you can tell, all these years later, it still rankles.
But Anne Applebaum is the wife of Radek Sikorsky, the Polish foreign minister, hoping that Obama has ways of reassuring us that we haven't even thought about.
Well, if you mean he's going to fly in Bo Bergdal's dad to say Allahu Akbar to you, then you might be right, Mr. Sikorsky.
But Allah the most merciful in the name of Allah the most and all the rest of it.
But so it's not just the Middle East.
Eastern Europe is beginning to sense the contours of the post-American world.
But what's fascinating about this is that, as I said, this is where we came in on this war with this dopey guy who was caught trying to kill Americans in this prison in Afghanistan, who turned out to be John Walker Lind, who was the beneficiary of the most lavish childhood enjoyed by anyone on the planet.
And he's not so different in that from what Rush was saying last week about the fella in Santa Barbara, Elliot Roger.
He had everything, and whatever goes, whatever's your bag man, his mother converted to Buddhism, the children were raised with Native American spirituality.
He decides he wants to be a Muslim and changes his name to Suleiman, which they're annoyed about because they'd named him after John Lennon.
And these are like first world problems, you know, because we've all sat around at dinner parties in Marin County in Northern California, and we've gone, oh, you know, you'll never believe what Junior wants to do now.
He's changed his name to Akbed bin Jihad.
And well, I think that's nice.
He's getting all very multicultural.
And I think there is a real question here when you have this non-judgmentalism where all the point about multiculturalism is that all cultures are the same.
All have equal value.
So it doesn't matter whether you're talking about common law and the U.S. Constitution on the one hand, or you're talking about a Native American healing circle, or you're talking about the Pataliban's policy on homosexuality, where if you're found guilty of homosexuality, they build a wall and crush you to death under it.
They build a wall for the purposes of then crushing you under it.
It's the only construction work most people could get in Afghanistan.
It was building walls so they could crush you to death for homosexuality.
But who are we to judge?
It's nice that he's taking an interest in other cultures.
And they and these people, yes, it's nice.
It's the benefit because it's like technical.
It's like doing shop at an American school, which people don't want to do now.
They don't want to do it because it's too much like hard work.
So they'd much rather do transgender and colonialism studies.
But in Afghanistan, when you do shop, it provides useful practical skills for killing homosexuals.
So it's got that whole kind of frisson of gay studies, but with the practical benefits of learning shop.
So people don't.
So we got all these guys, these confused people out there with a whole, you know, and again, they don't have to be, you assume, well, these guys, their families, their great, great, grandfather got off the Mayflower.
And yes, the schools are a bit goofy now, but it's no big deal.
It doesn't really matter because their sense of who they are, they're rooted in this land.
And I think the lesson of John Walker Lind and the lesson of this other fella is actually that they're not, that this heart, this hole, the hollowness of this sort of whole celebrate diversity, whatever's your bag man culture, actually imposes real world costs.
And that's, by the way, on people who are American born and bred.
If you look at those idiots who blew up the Boston Marathon and blew a great big hole in the lives of those families in Boston, the Sarnaev brothers, they came here, their family was sort of conventionally conventionally secular Soviet Caucasian when they came to America.
After a few years of being at the Ryn School in Cambridge, which is supposedly the most diverse school in the country, these guys are on the internet doing YouTube jihad videos and all the rest.
And the older brother goes back to Dagestan to go to a Jihad training camp.
It's something, it is not a small thing when you leave people, when you raise people in a vacuum.
And it's something to think about in this week of graduation because I find I don't want to beat up on my poor old kids' schools, but there is something actually disturbing to me about the there's something hollow and tinny about in a lot of these commencement addresses and in a lot of the valedictorian speeches and the salute to tattorian speeches and all the rest of it,
where somehow one demonstrates one's greatest value now is that one has no values.
That the purpose of being a civilized human being in our schools today is to just accept everything, whatever's thrown at you.
And again, it boils down to the same Obama thing, that it's like taking a principled stand for doing nothing.
So you can draw a red line in the sand, but the red line doesn't mean anything.
Because in a world in which we celebrate diversity, who are we to say why that red line should mean anything?
Who are we to say that we shouldn't embrace all other cultures or that any other culture is worse than any other?
Who are we to say?
And you see it just to tie this whole thing together.
You see it at this 9-11 museum that's opened down where the big hole in Lower Manhattan used to be.
Which, on the one hand, is like just crass commercial exploitation.
I gather a couple of days ago they withdrew the American 9-11 heart cheese tray.
You could buy a cheese tray at this 9-11 museum in the shape of the United States.
I think just the lower 48.
There were no outlying bits of cheese for Alaska and Hawaii and the U.S. Virgin Islands and Guam.
So it was just the lower 48, a cheese tray of the lower 48, but with hearts at the points of the map on which Mohamed Atta flew the plane into the building and the plane crashed in Pennsylvania and the other plane crashed in the District of Columbia.
And this cheese tray was on sale at the 9-11 Museum.
But apparently they've withdrawn that now because they feel the cheese tray might be in a bit dubious taste.
And that's like just crass commercial exploitation.
Okay, and yes, it's in appallingly bad taste, but it isn't about anything except those guys not having any sufficient sense of propriety and decorum, except not to want to make a few bucks on the expensively marked up, lousy processed cheese tray.
But let's look at the bigger problem.
Look at the bigger problem with that 9-11 museum.
That people are going in there and complaining because the video of what caused 9-11 has the nerve to mention that the fellas who flew the planes into the building were doing it in the name of Islam.
And it's all qualified as well.
They're all saying radical, extreme.
No one's saying Islam, Islam.
They're all saying radical, extremist, extremist, radical, radical, extremist, extremist, radical Islam.
It's all qualified.
And even that is too much.
And it's why it was a whole waste of time even bothering with a monument to what happened at 9-11.
Should never have bothered with it because there is no agreement across 13 years of war.
There is now no agreement in this country as to what that event means.
And that's the weird thing about seeing that Rose Garden ceremony because you look at it and you think, wow, I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but if you ever wanted to believe in any of that Manchurian candidates stuff, then that guy the president standing up, embracing a fellow who's saying, in the name of Allah the Most Merciful in Arabic in the Rose Garden, would have you believing in all the Manchurian candidate stuff.
And that's what it would be if this was a Hollywood thriller.
But in real life, in real life, and the real problem here is that tens of millions of Americans think it's not just entirely normal for a guy to be speaking Arabic at the Rose Garden ceremony, but that it somehow testifies to your moral virtue.
And likewise, not mentioning, don't mention the I word at the 9-11 Museum also testifies to your moral virtue, which is why that 9-11 museum should never have been built.
You can't have a monument.
In the old days, you'd put up stone eagles or a big general on a pillar, and there would be stern words about righteousness and justice and truth, and everyone would be agreed on what you were meant to be commemorating.
There is no agreement in America on the meaning of 9-11 anymore.
Mark Seinfarush, we'll take your calls straight ahead.
Mark Snyder for Rush.
The Washington Post, by the way, says a huge majority of Americans support regulating carbon from power plants, and they're even willing to pay for it.
70%, 70% apparently back these new rules announced Monday by the Environmental Protection Agency, which the administrator says, well, just to take your electric bill, will add an average of $300 to the typical American electric bill.
Not to mention everything else that's going to go up.
Everything else.
But 70% say, because it's about, because as with Obama's foreign policy speeches, as with these commencement addresses I'm having to sit through, it's about moral preening.
It's about moral preening.
It's the right thing to do.
The more we regulate, the more regulations we impose on everything, the more it says what a better, wonderful people we are.
So let's have 70% Supporting federal limits on greenhouse gas emissions, and we're willing to pay for it.
Asterisk in the sense that the United States government can go into more debt and borrow more trillions of dollars, and we can stick it to our unborn grandchildren.
In that sense, we're willing to pay for it.
Let's go to Mike in Dayton, Ohio.
Mike, you are live on the Rush Limbaugh Show.
Hey, Mark, you're doing a great job pitching for Rush.
And I saw you, I had the pleasure of seeing you up in Ohio quite some time ago, and you do a mean song and dance dressed as a Park Ranger.
I'll tell you that.
Oh, that's right.
That was in Mansfield, Ohio.
I did my National Park Service saga dance routine.
And I actually.
Yeah, it tore me off those things for quite some time.
Yeah, I wore the uniform, which I gather is a federal offense to impersonate a National Park Service Ranger.
So I had it just before you put it on.
Yes.
I was inviting the National Park Service SWAT team to take me out there.
And then I had a great time in Badsfield.
That had a terrific night in Badsfield.
That's the prison where they filmed the Shawshank Redemption.
And I was so I would have actually, even if I'd been taken down by the National Park Service SWAT team, I would have ended up in a cool jail.
Yeah, I enjoyed that very much.
What else is on your mind, Mike?
Well, this has something to do with what I gave you there.
This is the same takeoff on that.
I was stationed in Iraq from 2006, 2007.
I was with the Air Force for 22 years.
I was a pilot, and this deployment was a little different than the ones I'd had before.
I was going to be embedded with the Iraqi Air Force.
And this is why I think that this private has served with distinction.
He's the only one I can remember ever deserting.
The people that have showed the greatest American values and virtues, which you were just talking about, well, I'll give you an example.
The guys that I worked with were colonels and generals that we had been basically at war with for 10 years or so.
We had blown them up.
I worked with a gentleman we actually shot down.
He came walking back from a sortie.
We had blown up their friends and family, and all that kind of stuff.
And do you know what they called us collectively when they were talking about the Americans?
They called it the friendly side.
And that really got my attention.
It wasn't because of me personally.
It was because I wore the American flag on the uniform.
And the courage and commitment that these guys had to doing things the right way, and I assume it's similar in Afghanistan, the road to Ho there is a little bit more difficult, I think.
But these guys and the young men and women that were joining up and trying to take care of the new Iraqi Air Force, you know, CNN was certainly more than happy to talk about Abu Ghraib, but they somehow missed the fact.
Hold that thought, Mike.
I've got to take a hard break here, but we'll come back and pick it up on the other side of it because I've got a couple of questions I want to ask you about that.
That's Mike talking about serving with the Iraqi Air Force while he was out in Iraq.
We'll pick it up in just a moment.
Hey, let's pick it up again with Mike calling from Dayton.
Mike, I was talking to Mike just before we had the break at the bottom of the hour, and we spent too much time kibbetzing about my Song and Dance Act in Mansfield, Ohio.
So we didn't get to the dub of the point he was making.
You were talking about when you were in Iraq, you were in a liaison capacity, as it were, with the nascent Iraqi Air Force, who, as is the nature of things, because you can't find a bunch of guys who can fly planes out of nowhere, were made up largely of people who'd been in the old Iraqi Air Force.
Correct.
And yeah, carry on.
Carry on, Mike.
And they were also starting up the new Iraqi Air Force, these young college kids.
And it was still dangerous enough there that you couldn't recruit as normal.
I mean, they dropped leaflets and things like that, and you kind of had to get in on the sly.
And that's what makes this PFC's action so despicable is these young Iraqi, and they're not kids, they're 22, 23 years old, had to go through absolute hell just trying to enlist in the Iraqi Air Force without getting tracked down.
And then they came in and learned English, and they had to learn English with their headphones, one headphone off because they could detect incoming rounds and mortars and rockets.
And so they did all this stuff.
And, you know, CNN was more than happy to talk about Abu Ghraib, but when these first four guys graduated the pilot training and speaking English at high levels of proficiency, learning how to do touch and goes and doing maneuvers that the old Iraqi Air Force wouldn't do, it didn't seem to make a peace.
Talk about American virtues and values.
These guys really picked up on that.
I mean, just before we left.
Yeah, and you know, that's one of the most interesting aspects of war is that people who start out on the opposing sides can come to respect the enemy.
They will respect the enemy for their profession.
Anyone who has, as I said, we're about to commemorate the 70th anniversary of D-Day.
Anyone who has listened to groups of elderly veterans on either side will know that it's not unusual for them to talk about, even when they were on the receiving end of some brilliant move that the other guys made, there's a professional respect with enemies.
But that is different from what this guy did in Afghanistan, where he basically, he's a loner, he's a misfit, he doesn't get on with his comrades, and he thinks that the solution is to go and join the other side that he doesn't know.
He's essentially just fetishizing them as the answer to his problems, Mike.
And the worst part is that he either deserted too, or in some cases they say he may have actively helped or whatever.
I don't know anything about that.
But they were the ones that are oppressing the Afghan.
The reason the Iraqis talked, said that I was from the friendly side was because of the millions of interactions that they had had with some of these low-ranking PFCs through the Army, the Air Force, the Marines, the Coast Guard, all those kinds of things.
And they were honorable interactions.
They didn't think that we were the friendly side because of what I did.
No.
They did it because of all the American efforts and the British and the Germans and all the hundreds of countries or at least tens of countries that were over there with us, how they acted honorably day in and day out.
And that's what makes this so despicable.
And just to add a final thought to that, Mike, one of the great tragedies of what has happened in both Iraq and Afghanistan in the last couple of years is the lesson that ordinary Iraqis and Afghans draw from what happens when you become friendly with Americans.
There were no important Afghans there to see Obama at Bagram Air Base a couple of days ago.
Why would you be there?
He's announced he's going, and 10 minutes after he's gone, you're going to have to deal with the new realities on the ground.
And in that situation, you don't want to be like one of those South Vietnamese guys on the roof of the U.S. Embassy scrambling for the helicopter as it takes off.
You don't want to be one of the guys who doesn't make it onto the last helicopter out.
And we are teaching a terrible lesson here because it's easy to say this is how wars end and we bring our guys home and all the rest of it.
But there are guys we leave behind too, guys who believed us, guys who believed us.
One of the worst things that happened to me happened to me after I came back.
And it was one of the guys that I was helping was a real stand-up guy, a great colonel.
And they actually took my advice and promoted him to general.
And I emailed his best friend a couple of times after I came home.
And I did get an email that said, Mike, I'm terribly sorry that I got your email today.
Our good friend Waheed has been killed by an IED.
So after this Iraqi general got promoted and was in charge of, and was the exact right guy, I mean, the al-Qaeda interact got him.
And so they have risked their lives alongside us.
And for this guy to do what he did is cast aspersions on the rest of all the great things.
And I mean that sincerely.
Yeah, you're absolutely right there, Mike.
Thank you for your thank you for your call.
And, you know, accepting what Chris across the river in Vermont from me said, it's a rotten, thankless war.
And it was fought ineptly by the smart guys in charge in Washington.
And if you're out there on the sharp end of it, it can be miserable.
But that is not the full story.
That is not the full story.
And not everybody who feels lousy about being out there and being trapped in a thankless situation does what this guy did, Bo Bergdahl did.
Only he did this.
Only he did this.
And I want to just pick up on what Mike said, too, about the casual betrayals of people we depended on.
And you don't even have to look far for this.
The most important person, and again, it comes back to what's important to this president.
What's important to this president.
You know, that buffoon who serves as the vice president of the United States was going around that this man, Barack Obama, he had the courage to do the toughest thing that anyone has ever done in the history of anything.
And that is to look Osama bin Laden in the eye and give the order to pull the trigger.
That's what had the courage that Barack Obama does.
There's cojones hanging down to the floor and dragging a mile behind him because they're so huge.
Only he had the courage to do that.
And in fact, the guy who had the courage to look Osama bin Laden in the eye and then figure out a way to get that information to the Americans was a Pakistani doctor in Abbottabad who figured it out that Osama bin Laden was holed up in that compound.
And he is rotting in a Pakistani jail.
And I would far rather, if we're going to have these stupid ceremonies at the Rose Garden, that the president had been standing there because he'd leaned on, what's his name, Sharif, the Pakistani prime minister, to get that guy out of jail, to Sharif, who depends, who depends on Western aid and said, I want that guy on the plane out of there.
I want that Pakistani doctor out of there.
You put him on a plane.
No, we're not leaving it to you to put him on a plane.
We're going to get him from that jail.
We're going with your guys to the jail to get him, and we're putting him on a plane to Washington because I want him standing next to me at the Rose Garden.
The lady I mentioned a few days ago, Miriam Ibrahim, who is the wife of an American citizen and is the mother of an American and has just become the mother of another American.
She gave birth in a filthy, disease-ridden jail cell shackled to a wall in Omdurman in the Sudan, the Omdurman women's prison.
Miriam Ibrahim gave birth to the child of an American who lives in my state, Manchester, New Hampshire.
Sudan receives massive amounts of Western aid.
Where is Obama getting on the phone and saying we want Miriam Ibrahim on the plane?
Because I'm now widening my rose garden ceremony.
I'm going to be with the Pakistani doctor who fingered bin Laden.
I'm going to be with Miriam Ibrahim, forced by you barbarians, sentenced to death, sentenced to hang, and forced to give birth to an American baby in your squalid, filthy prison.
I want her at that rose garden ceremony too.
And I tell you what, while we're at it, I'd like that U.S. Marine in Mexico because Mexico keeps telling us we've got to take 30 million Mexicans, but in return, they won't give us back our one American.
Hell in what has happened to the United States, the eunuch superpower?
What is the point of spending being what is the point of do you think anybody in Afghanistan or Sudan or Mexico is impressed by American nuclear weapons?
Because nobody thinks you're going to use them any more than the Taliban and the Mullah Omar, when he gave the green light to Osama bin Laden on September the 10th, 2011, never had a care in the world that America would ever use its mighty nuclear weapons on Afghanistan.
America spends 44% of the world's military budget, and everybody laughs at you.
They jail a U.S. Marine in Tijuana.
They jail the wife of an American and sentence her to hang in Omdaman.
They jail the doctor, the doctor who enabled that hideous hollow braggart, Joe Biden, to go around doing, nobody has the guts and the courage of Barack Obama.
He's that the toughest decision anyone's ever taken in all of human history.
No, the guy who took the tough decision and has lived with the consequences is that Pakistani doctor.
And you can't go around betraying, betraying not only your own, but betraying your friends too around the planet without people getting the picture and figuring what's really going on.
Mark Stein in for us, lots more still to come.
Dr. Shaquille Afridi.
Dr. Shaquille Afridi.
That is this guy's name.
And I want to make sure I say his name because people should know it.
He is the doctor.
He is the doctor who let the Americans know that Bin Laden was holed up in that compound in Abbottabad.
And he ought to be in a beach house in Malibu right now, but instead he is in a Pakistani prison and he has been there, been there since three weeks after the killing of bin Laden, all during the bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive.
All through that nonsense.
This guy, how do you think he, how did it work out for him helping the Americans?
Where's his rose garden ceremony?
Dr. Shaquil Afri.
Why can't Obama pick up the phone to Prime Minister Sharif, who's a corrupt man from one of the most corrupt families?
They all live in a compound.
It's like the family in the Ewing family.
It's like South Fork.
They live in the South Fork of Islamabad, altogether, the Sharif family.
Very corrupt bunch of guys.
They'll do anything for the money.
That guy should, Dr. Shaquille Afridi, should have been on a plane out of there.
Miriam Ibrahim should have been on a plane out of Khartoum.
And same with the Marine in jail in Tijuana.
Five minutes, three phone calls, and Obama could have the all-time greatest rose garden ceremony that might signal to the world that this country is back in business.
The other big story of the moment, as I said from the Washington Post, is that apparently 70% of Americans support federal limits on greenhouse gas emissions and are apparently willing to pay for it.
More fool, you know, if you're one of that 70%, more fool you.
Because we've got a stagnant economy.
It contracted.
We were talking about this on Friday, the mysterious shrinkage due to the cold weather, the 1% contraction of the American economy at the dawn of recovery summer number five or whatever it is.
And now Gina McCarthy is proposing to regulate it, hyper-regulate it even more by reducing carbon.
This will do nothing.
By the way, by the way, we're talking here about to mitigate global warming, of which there has been none.
for over a decade and a half now.
It's called the pause.
They didn't acknowledge the pause for the first 14 years, but they're now prepared to acknowledge there has been a pause and they cannot explain why there's been a pause in global warming.
And if your kid, I've been bemoaning these graduation ceremonies, but if your kid is graduating from high school this year and you say to him, there's been no global warming since you were out of your crib, he would be stunned because it doesn't seem like that.
He's been fed this stuff all his life, that somehow there's a great crisis of global warming.
There's been none since this graduating class was born.
We're about to enter, in a couple of years' time, we'll be entering the third decade of the so-called global warming pause.
But we now have to impose additional costs on a stagnant U.S. economy in the cause of mitigating global warming, which stopped in 1997.
That's genius.
That's some kind of genius right there.
And what I love about Gina McCarthy, when she was to say why we needed to do this, she said, oh, it's not just the disappearing polar bears.
That's, again, that's the Al Gore thing.
Everyone thinks the polar bears, oh, the polar bears are disappearing.
There are no disappearing polar bears.
They don't actually know.
The guy who is the head of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature's Polar Bear Specialist Group, a fellow called Dr. Dag von Graven, Dr. Dag von Graven, who I assume is some kind of Dutchman, but he has said that it is important to realize that the official number of polar bears that they said,
the basis on which you've seen all those pictures of the polar bear on the little ice flow looking all sad and lonely because the North Pole has melted and he's stuck there.
Or maybe you saw the crazy commercial they put out of polar bears plummeting to the earth in like 9-11, like the fellas jumping from the Twin Towers, where the polar bears were sort of landing in the streets of some American metropolis and crushing cars and taxicabs underneath them.
And the tagline was that every time you take a long-haul flight, it's equivalent to the weight of a polar bear.
So every time, in other words, every time you decide to take a long-haul flight to Hawaii, a polar bear loses its wings, as they say in It's a Wonderful Life.
And there is no evidence for this.
This guy says it's important to realize we've never had an estimate of polar bears in a scientific sense.
Only, quote, a qualified guess given to satisfy public demand, unquote.
There is no polar bear crisis.
He came up with a, quote, qualified guess to satisfy public demand, unquote.
And the next thing you know is Gina McCarthy is standing up there imposing all these extra regulations because we all know about the disappearing polar bears.
There are no appearing polar bears.
And if they're still dropping from the skies, as in that commercial, then I would love for them to drop from the skies and crush the Environmental Protection Agency headquarters.
Mark Stein for Rush, more to come.
Mark Stein in for Rush on America's number one radio show.
A middle school history teacher in small town southeast Michigan has been placed on paid administrative leave because he informed his class that white entertainers used to paint their faces black to imitate black people.
And he showed kids a video about it.
So he's like, he's, I don't know what video, Al Jolson down on his knees going, oh, my ever loving Mary down in Alabama.
Whatever he showed, he's showing them a historical artifact of something that actually happened.
He's showing them reality, something that happened to teach them about what reality used to be, and he has been suspended for it.
And that, again, gets to what we've been talking about, the common theme of what we've been talking about these last couple of hours, perception and reality.