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Dec. 15, 2014 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:21
December 15, 2014, Monday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
Yes, America's Anchorman is away, and this is your undocumented anchor man sitting in, America's last unamnested foreigner.
Honored to be with you today on America's most listened-to radio show.
As the exquisitely culturally sensitive President Obama said about us undocumented types at that fundraiser last month, they mow our lawns, they make our beds, they clean out our bedpans, they host our number one radio show.
I actually applied to clean out Obama's bedpan, but they're not hiring this week, so here I am.
Rush is out today, but he will return tomorrow for full-strength, authentic, all-American excellence in broadcasting through the end of the week.
We are live from Ice Station EIB in far northern New Hampshire.
Had a bit of a panic about 10 minutes ago.
I plugged in a space heater and everything in the studio, because it's a bit chilly in here.
We don't really have the old central heating type deal yet up in this corner of the world.
So I plugged in a $20 space heater and everything in the studio went out.
So that's the kind of technology we're operating with up here.
It's basically like Baghdad outside the green zone.
If the show suddenly dies about 30 minutes in, it's just because I plugged in the coffee percolator.
So bear with me.
I'll get myself the coffee and we'll be back on air once we've rejigged the fuse.
But don't worry, because Mr. Snerdley is running the show from New York City and they do have reliable electric service down there, I am assured.
We're starting the week with a lot of news.
The siege by this week's Islamic lunatic has ended.
Well, I say this week's, but it's Monday, so it's early days.
It could be like the number 17 bus.
There'll be another 12 of them along by Wednesday.
But the hostages at the Lint coffee shop and Martin Place in Sydney are now freed.
Police stormed the place within the last just a little over an hour ago.
And the jihad boy is pushing up virgins.
I know that street well.
I don't think I've ever been to that particular coffee joint, but I've been to other ones on that street for my hazelnut jihadiato first thing in the morning.
And you come out of that coffee shop and you've got the Commonwealth Bank headquarters just to your left and the Royal Botanic Gardens just to your right and one of Australia's biggest TV networks directly across the street, the Seven Network, which is ready to beam across the planet your big black jihad flag and the terrified hostages forced to hold it up.
So this guy picked his target well.
And if you remember the shooting at the War Memorial in Ottawa and the attack on the Canadian Parliament in October, that's really the equivalent of, I guess, the National Mall in Washington.
It's symbolic and it's historic.
And this Oz siege is the equivalent of seizing a bunch of hostages at Rockefeller Center in New York.
It's the commercial heart of the city.
It's like Rockefeller Center, Martin Place is where they have the big Christmas tree that everyone comes to visit.
All the moms and dads take their kids and all that kind of stuff.
The perp is a, quote, self-styled, this appears to be the euphemism of the day now, self-styled Muslim cleric.
Don't worry, he's not an official Muslim cleric.
He hasn't got the paperwork.
He hasn't got the big diploma from the hot shot madrasa in Saudi Arabia.
He's a quote, self-styled Muslim cleric called Sheikh Haron.
But don't worry, any moment now, as they do every time some ISIS guy chops off an American's head in Syria, President Obama and John Kerry will be assuring us that this is nothing to do with Islam.
So no Islam to see here.
And Sheikh Haron seems like a well-adjusted sort, even by the standards of these Islamic lunatics.
His present girlfriend is currently charged with killing his wife.
And he's been charged as an accessory to the murder of his wife.
And he's also facing more than 40 sexual assault charges.
Which I think is actually, I think that's more than Bill Cosby, which is kind of impressive.
So he apparently, his deal, he wasn't drugging them as Bill Cosby is alleged to have done, but he advertised himself as a spiritual healer.
And then when they showed up to experience his spiritual healing techniques, mysterious parts of their clothing had to be removed and so forth.
So he's on 40 sexual assault charges.
He also was convicted for sending offensive letters to the families of dead servicemen who died in, he was opposed to the war in Afghanistan.
So if a soldier died in Afghanistan, he'd then send offensive letters to the widow and children.
But we'll keep you on developments in that story as they occur.
He is now dead.
And I love this tweet from that seven news network in Sydney.
It goes, police confirm live ammunition used in Martin Place.
If you want the difference between Sydney and American policing, that line does it.
Police confirm live ammunition used in Martin Place.
Yes, they stormed this coffee shop and they killed this guy.
And alas, they had to use live ammunition to do it.
Sydney is a very peaceful city.
It's like Ottawa.
It's a very open.
It's Australia's biggest city.
And like Ottawa, it's a very open city.
It's not like that whole Washington closed down thing that they've got going on.
So if there's any more developments on that story, we'll keep you in touch with them.
Have you been following these leaks from Sony?
This is a great story.
Last week, the big news was that all these Hollywood liberals, and not just any old Hollywood liberals, but women who shattered the glass ceiling and fabulously talented gay producers were all doing these race jokes about Obama.
And actually, not even sophisticated race jokes, but about as crude and banal race jokes as you can imagine.
They're emailing back and forth all their little racist cracks about President Obama because the woman who shattered the glass ceiling at Sony has had to have some tedious breakfast and interview him and wanted to know all-star breakfast, all-star fundraiser, and wanted to know what she would say to him.
And they're doing all these jokes about maybe you could ask him if he wants to be in the butler, which was Oprah's unwatchable movie about the butler at the White House.
And it's funny, and it's funny.
I'll tell you why it's funny that.
I'm a free speech absolutist, so I don't care about if Hollywood liberals want to make racist jokes, go ahead, do it.
But what it confirmed is that all these like bitchy little gay producers and female studio heads, they all recognize that things like the butler are unwatchable affirmative action drivel that you're only making to get points with the identity group crowd.
Anyway, they all know that.
So that's what it betrayed.
And of course, the Reverend Al Sharpton complained about it.
And So he wants the head of this female exec and the gay producer because he doesn't like them making racist jokes.
It's all right.
The gay producer could easily respond that Al Sharpton makes all these homophobic cracks.
He said that Africans had invented everything way before, quote, them Greek homos did.
And that's no obstacle to Al Sharpton can do all the Greek homo gags he wants and still get invited to the White House.
That's no obstacle to anything.
But one of them Greek homos responds by doing a few race cracks and he's got to be fired.
So that's that's and it's all good, clean father.
And there's no end of stories like that.
Today, the New York Daily News reveals that David O. Russell, the director of American Hustle, is mocked in these Sony emails for feeling up his transgender niece.
He's got a niece who used to be a nephew.
And in transitioning from being a nephew to being a niece, she had breast implants.
And the acclaimed director of the film American Hustle put his hand under her top and felt her new breasts.
And he also, this guy, it doesn't stop there.
This guy from Sony also brought Oscar-winning actress Sally Field to a party and reduced her to tears.
Can you imagine that?
Sally Field.
Well, she was reduced to tears when she won that Oscar, wasn't it?
She said, you like me, you really like me.
But anyway, she was reduced to tears by this American Hustle director at some party.
So I guess it's, you don't like me, you really don't like me.
But that's all it's been about so far.
And then today in the papers, in the New York Times, there's the revelation in these leaked Sony emails that the ending of this new film, The Interview, is being changed to avoid causing offense to Kim Jong-un.
Basically, Sony is a Japanese corporation.
This film, The Interview, is about two jokers who get a chance to interview Kim Jong-un, and the CIA says, while you're there, you've got to take him out.
And the guy goes, what do you mean?
Take him out for a drink?
And they explain, no, take him out, you've got to kill him.
And so the idea is that there's a couple of your usual useless American stoner trendy hipsters sent to North Korea to kill Kim Jong-un.
That's the joke.
And the North Koreans are unhappy about this and say it's an act of war.
And the end apparently showed his exploding head flying all over the screen.
And this is now being changed.
This has been toned down and may not even be seen in editions of the film Sewn Overseas.
So the whole Sony email leaks has now taken on a geopolitical things.
Hollywood, in a supposedly edgy comedy, has now been told by its Japanese corporate parent to tone down the offense caused to Kim Jong-un in that film.
And I'll tell you why that's relevant a little bit later.
Now, the big story, the big story is basically everything that Rush said on Friday has happened.
If you were following the Cromnibus vote in the Cromnibus is now law, by the way, the United States Senate has passed it.
And everything that Rush said about that on Friday came true over the weekend in the genius hands of our Republican senators.
We'll get into that and we will take all your calls straight ahead.
1-800-282-2882.
Mark Stein in for Rush on the Excellence in Broadcasting Network.
Hey, Mark Stein in for Rush.
That situation in Sydney is still unclear.
Unconfirmed reports say that two people are dead, including the gunman, which means that one hostage is dead.
Think about that.
You died.
You died because you went to a coffee shop in a peaceful, free, open Western society.
And a refugee from Iran, a guy your country took in in 1996, and he stood up there and he took his oath of allegiance and he traveled and claimed to be a citizen of your country and he's no different in law from anybody else.
And you die because you went to a coffee shop that you've gone to every morning, every day.
Just exactly the same thing, exactly the same thing has happened in Ottawa.
Exactly the same thing as happened up in Quebec.
And when that soldier was run over by another one of these Islamic lunatics in October.
And there's a question to ask, and it's the question we don't ask.
Every time Obama says this is nothing to do with Islam, every time John Kerry says it's nothing to do with Islam, every time the Sydney Morning Herald says the Martin Place siege response tests our humanity, we face an even more difficult test of our empathy as well.
How should we feel for the perpetrator and his family?
So they've gone full Hillary Clinton.
They're going the empathy route so far.
As I said, there are unconfirmed reports now that two people are dead.
So that's the gunman and somebody who was just doing nothing except going to a downtown coffee shop in the heart of a peaceful, open Western society.
So we'll bring you any more details of that.
Now, I was listening to Rush on Friday, and then I was following events over the weekend.
And it occurred to me that the easiest way to explain what's going on, Rush had a caller who asked him whether, in fact, the election, do you remember the election?
Oh, it seems like years ago now, but in fact, it was only a couple of weeks ago.
The election a month ago, a month ago, the election, whether it was entirely meaningless.
And if you go to rushlimbaugh.com and you become a Rush 24-7 subscriber, and while you're there, take out a subscription to the Limbaugh letter too.
I don't know whether you can get back issues.
Expert you can, but in last month's issue, they've got an interview.
Rush interviews this guy called Mark Stein.
I don't know whether you know him.
He's one of these snotty-voiced foreigners who comes on the air and tells you everything that's wrong with your country.
It's kind of annoying.
But Rush interviews him.
And this Stein guy says in the course of the interview, we've lived through elections that made a difference.
Reagan's election in 1980 made a difference because if Carter had won, the West would have managed to contrive to lose the Cold War.
As rotten and decrepit and on the verge of collapse as the Soviet Union was, a second Carter term and we would have lost the Cold War.
So that election mattered.
And Mrs. Thatcher's election in 1979, had the Labour Party been re-elected then, that would have been the complete death of one of the oldest, most stable societies on earth.
So Mrs. Thatcher's election in 1979 mattered.
And if you live through elections like that, like Reagan and Thatcher, the saddest thing is when you have an election that doesn't make a difference.
And that was the tragedy of 2010.
That's this guy, Mark Stein, being interviewed by Rush in the current Limbaugh letter.
In last month's Limbaugh letter, the November one.
But if you go and take out a subscription to the Limbaugh letter at rushlimbaugh.com, you can get back issues.
I'm reasonably confident of that.
And I was there.
I was just plugging my book, and Rush called it a must-read book.
But I'm not even going to mention the name of the book because that little point I made there, when we're talking about the book, we're talking about the difference between elections that matter, elections that don't.
And I said that in the end, the tragedy of the 2010 election was that it didn't matter because the Obama administration just went ahead and did what it wanted to do anyway.
And the excuse for that was, well, you know, we only controlled one house of the legislature, so we couldn't really do anything.
Okay, what's the excuse this time?
It's only a month later.
We haven't actually sat the new Congress.
We're still in the lame duck session.
And already the Republican Party leadership, as Rush said on Friday, is telling us that this election didn't matter.
This election didn't matter.
This cromnibus junk passed in the lame duck session.
Now, perhaps, as some of you, if you're listening with the volume cranked high up and you've got the big speakers and everything, you might be able to just detect the wisp of a foreign accent in there.
So if you're an American and you've done all your civics courses, can you come and explain to me by what legitimate means a lame duck Congress?
What that means is that a bunch of the guys there have been rejected by the electorate.
The electorate has said, no thanks, pal, you're done.
We don't want you.
And the first order of business for the new Republican leadership that will be taking over control of Congress in January is to let the still 50-50 Republican House, Democrat Senate determine the level of spending for half of your term of control.
The Republicans basically just gave away in the lame duck session control of spending for half of the legislative term for which they will have been elected in this cronibus bill.
And what's in this cromnibus bill?
Well, it's the usual thing.
It's thousands of pages.
On page 1600, there's something in there.
Everyone thinks it's a continuing resolution.
It's to do with funding the government so that all those indispensable services don't seize up and the government gets shut down.
On page 1600, I think it is, there's some special favors in there, nothing to do with government spending for Blue Cross Blue Shield.
John Boehner, last time round, Obama said the 2010 election didn't matter.
This time round, the Republican Party, the Republican Party, is telling its voters that the 2014 election didn't matter.
That's the problem with what happened this weekend.
Say what you like about Santa Claus, but when he makes a list, he at least checks it twice.
That's more than the Republican Party did with that cromnibus thing they passed over the weekend.
Mark Stein in for Rush.
Rush will return tomorrow.
Let us go to Rama in Fairfax, California.
Rama, you are live on America's number one radio show.
Great to have you with us.
Okay, thanks for taking my call, Mark.
My comment is: I think the movie is not at all good about North Korea that shows some kind of assassination attempt on the leader of their country.
If they made a movie about one of our leaders being assassinated, we wouldn't like it.
I think we should give them the same respect, and this is definitely in the interest of world peace not to make that movie.
Did you see that film they made about the assassination of George W. Bush while Bush was president?
And that was made by Americans and it won some prize at the Toronto International Film Festival.
I'm not against anybody being assassinated, even if they're a bad person.
Think that we we need to respect each other's right to live, and that's why I'm against that movie.
So so you agree with the movie being toned down to avoid offending Kim Jong-un?
I think they should go even farther than that.
I think they should.
If there are movies that are made, they should be friendly and about love and peace, not about about violence of any kind.
Do you know that people are starving in North Korea?
Millions of people are held in.
Do you?
Do you know what a concentration camp is, Rama?
Maybe there are wrong things happening in all countries.
That doesn't mean it's good to no Rama Rama Rama, you've gone.
Full moral equivalence.
Now right, are there concentrate?
Let's put America out of it.
Are there concentration camps in Canada?
Are there concentration camps in Sweden?
Are there concentration camps in Slovenia?
There are two million people in American jails and they're not being treated well here either.
They get three squares a day in American jails.
They're not being treated well.
I know a lot of them.
No no no no wait, they're not.
They're not starving to death, they're not.
They're not behind and beaten.
So your, your your position on you.
You've gone now, full moral equivalence that everyone is bad.
So who are we to judge right.
No, I'm not saying that.
I'm saying we should make violent movies about people who.
This isn't helping the world get better.
The world can only get better if we care about each other and understand each other, not if we try and hurt each other.
First issue, first issue of Captain America in number one, I think the first issue in which Captain America appeared during the Second World War and actually this was before America entered the Second World War I think it was 1940 it showed him slugging Hitler.
Hitler, you remember that?
He was the Kim Jong-un of the Third Reich.
He was a foreign head of state.
Do you think it was inappropriate to to to have a comic book uh, showing an American superhero taking out Hitler?
Yeah, I don't think.
I think it's ugly to do violence to anybody, even if the person's unhappy.
Wait a minute.
Wait a minute now.
Rama Rama, I understand you're a pacifist, okay.
So you don't believe I'm a realist?
And no, wait a minute.
No you're.
Your realism is unreal.
So okay, let's say, let's extend that further.
It's wrong to do violence to anybody.
Do you think the Australian police were right to put a bullet in this guy in the Sydney coffee shop an hour ago.
They're not right and the guy that was do that was holding the hostages, wasn't right.
They're both wrong, they're both angry, unhappy people and that's not okay.
So let's, let's say, Rama you you, you go into a coffee shop right, and one of these guys comes in and takes a bunch of people hostage.
What do you get?
What are you gonna do?
You're gonna put a flower in his gun.
What are you gonna do?
I don't know what I'm gonna do.
Hopefully, hopefully it doesn't happen to me and hopefully it just happened this morning to a bunch.
It's just happened this morning to a bunch of people who just went to a coffee shop and some guy tried to kill them Kim Jong-un.
Kim Jong-un, who is regarded as the kind of goofball dictator over here, has actually killed killed, murdered.
How many people does he have to kill before you get off your dime and say he's not entitled to the response?
Now, I agree with you, Rama.
It would be a mistake to make a film in which Seth Rogan has to go and murder you.
That would be unfair to you.
But when you're a mass murderer, why can't you make a film about taking out a mass murderer?
Because it's ugly to kill people, even if they're wrong people.
My God.
So did you agree with killing Osama bin Laden?
No, I don't agree with killing anybody.
I want everybody to have a chance to live and be happy on this planet.
Right.
And so that means then, the way that works is that Osama bin Laden kills 3,000 people in the World Trade Center.
And you say, well, that's a tough break for them.
I hope it doesn't happen to my office building.
But I'm not going to lift a finger to do anything about the guy who did that.
Osama bin Laden shouldn't have killed anybody, but we shouldn't kill people either.
We're both wrong.
Everybody that's violent is doing something ugly, and I'm against it.
And what do you think the outcome of that is going to be?
For the world?
Well, of everybody being happy, we're going to have a better world.
Actually, you're not.
You're going to have a huge pile of corpses, Rama.
You're going to have a huge pile of corpses because what that means is that you basically have Osama bin Laden kills a bunch of people and you saying, if you're going to San Francisco, be sure to wear some flowers in your hair at him.
Okay?
And then he kills a bunch more people and you sing all we are saying is give peace a chance.
And then he kills a bunch more people and you sing feed the world.
Don't they know it's Christmas at him?
And suddenly you notice that actually the streets have emptied out and there's not a lot of people left to kill and there's no one left to kill but you.
And you're going to be the guy in the coffee shop, the last coffee shop that some lunatic hasn't taken hostage and you're the one who's going to be dead, Rama.
I think you're wrong.
I think if we go on the way we're going now, there's not going to be anybody left.
we keep getting more and more violent that's what's going to happen we need to come so there are no enemies just friends whose grievances we haven't yet accommodated Is that what you're saying?
Not everybody loves each other, but it's a good thing if we could love each other.
Yeah, but nobody is ever going to love.
Did you agree with Hillary Clinton's remark about empathizing with enemies?
I'm not a real big Hillary Clinton fan, but I think that Hillary Clinton is some of the things she said sounds good, but I'm not sure if she really means them.
No, no, here's the problem, though.
When Hillary Clinton claims to be able to empathize with people who want you dead, you dead.
You see, you see humanity, we're all the same.
There's no difference between you, some Muller in Waziristan, Kim Jong-un in Pyongyang, Adolf Hitler in the Reichstag.
We're all built from the same flawed human clay.
And Rama and Adolph and Kim and the Mullahs all deserve equal respect.
And that's fine, but the trouble is they don't think like that.
They want to kill you just because you're you.
You don't have to do anything.
They don't distinguish between you and Donald Rumsfeld.
They look at Rama and Rumsfeld and they see the same thing.
And so the fact that you're there holding a daisy up and Rumsfeld is already cocking his gun makes no difference to them.
You and Rumsfeld, Rama, Rumsfeld, Rumsfeld, Rama, they can't tell the difference.
But I can tell the difference.
Yeah, well, that's not going to be any consolation to you when you're a corpse.
They don't distinguish.
This is the point here.
Kim Jong-un doesn't care about you.
He's happy to kill you.
He's happy to kill his own people.
He's happy to kill his own people on an extraordinary scale.
You know, once upon a time, Rama, peace activists like you took the words said after the Second World War and which appear in the Holocaust memorials never again seriously to mean that you were never going to allow mass murder and concentration camps ever again.
And you've got mass murder and concentration camps right now in North Korea.
And there are arguments to be made saying whether it's in America's national interest to go and take this guy out or whatever.
You can make those interests.
But you're saying it's beyond that.
You can't even make a movie mocking the guy as a worthless piece of human garbage and using him as the punchline for an assassination comedy.
You object to that, Rama.
Nobody's a worthless piece of garbage.
Nobody's a worthless piece of garbage.
No, everybody has the potential to be a beautiful human being.
They just haven't realized it yet.
When do you think Kim Jong-un is going to realize it, Rama?
He's friends with Dennis Rodman?
What?
So you think that Dennis Rodman, a dupe, a Patsy, is going to be the one who turns Kim Joggard into a beautiful human being.
By the way, is Dennis Rodman your idea of a beautiful human being?
I never met him, but I think he's made friends with the leader.
I think that's a beautiful thing.
If they're friends, that's good.
Right.
So would you be in favor of Justin Bieber making friends with Iranian mullahs?
I'm in favor of everybody being friends with everybody.
That's the best way to do it.
Would you be in favor of Miley Cyrus going over to see the Ayatollah Khamenei and maybe twerking for him so that he might become a beautiful human being?
No, everybody has the potential to be beautiful.
Everyone is beautiful in his own way, even if he's starving millions of people to death, Rama.
That's great to know.
What a huh.
Everyone is beautiful.
Thanks for your call, Rama.
Everyone is beautiful.
Starving people to death in concentration camps.
This is Mark Stein in for Rush.
We'll have more of your calls straight ahead.
Mark Stein in for Rush on the Excellence in Broadcasting network.
Rama objected to this forthcoming film in which two kind of dweeby hipster stoner type, actually fellas who sound in large part not unlike Rama, get an interview with Kim Joggard and then are told by the CIA that they have to kill him.
And Rama, in fairness, when I asked him about the movie that won the awards at the Toronto Film Festival about killing George W. Bush, said he objected to that too.
There was a whole, actually, there was a whole genre of Bush assassination porn by Americans.
Americans, it's offensive for Americans to make a movie about killing Kim Jong-un, but for Americans to make a movie about killing George W. Bush, a novel, what was that fella?
He wrote a novel, a novella about killing George W. Bush.
I went into Barnes and Noble the other day, and they've got a novel there by a lady I used to work with at the Spectator in London called The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher.
So you can write books, you can make films fantasizing luridly about putting a bullet through Bush's brain or Margaret Thatcher's brain, but if you want to do it through Kim Jong-un's, then the head of Sony will prevail on you to tone down the ending and actually not to show the ending at all to the film that's shown to the rest of the world.
And just to tie it back to what happened in Sydney this morning, where there's already the where we've already reached the stage at which people are warning that there might be a backlash against Muslims.
And you know this.
It's like the Fort Hood.
People are sad about the dead people at Fort Hood for 20 minutes.
And then they start worrying about the real danger here, which is that people might there might be a backlash against Muslims.
Because no matter how many people they kill, Muslims are always the real victims here.
So after the Fort Hood thing, people say, oh, there might be a backlash against Muslims.
After the London tube bombings, oh, there might be a backlash against Muslims.
After the Boston Marathon, oh, there might be a backlash against Muslims.
And there never is, and there never is.
But they've already moved on to that stage, and someone has launched a campaign.
Brave lady in Sydney has launched a campaign to show that she's not afraid to ride a bus with a woman in a hijab as her way of showing solidarity with Australia's Muslims before this big mythical backlash descends on them.
Because no matter how many people they kill, Muslims are always the real victims.
And you think, so you think if you're in Hollywood, you want to make an edgy comedy, and you can make an edgy comedy, say, about taking out Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran.
Because that actually would be in America's strategic interest, that you go there, you destroy the Iranian leadership in some way that leads the people to rise up and get rid of them, and Iran returns to the ranks of civilized nations, and they're not interested in nuclear bomb anymore.
You can make that, but that's a bit too edgy, too edgy.
And so instead you have this Kim Jong-un figure, because North Korea is like the comedy dictatorship.
It's like it's the dictatorship you can make jokes about because it doesn't involve any complicated issues of race and religion and all the rest of it.
It's just the funny dictatorship.
And so they made Team America World Police a few years ago.
And now they were going to make another little edgy comedy, edgy comedy.
And you never make an edgy comedy about Islam because that's too edgy.
Because they'll come and blow up your studio.
So you don't want to do that.
You don't want to do that.
You don't want to make an edgy comedy about Mullers.
You don't want to make an edgy comedy about ISIS.
Wouldn't that be great?
An edgy comedy, an edgy hipster comedy about ISIS, about some doofus who gets to go and sign up to fight for ISIS and behead his way around the Middle East.
And you make some edgy comedy about that, taking out the ISIS leader.
No, no, no, no, that's too edgy.
That's too edgy.
They'll be waiting for you at the premiere, and all the starry people at the premiere who come to your premiere, all your Miley Cyrus's and your Cameron Diaz's, they'll all be blown up at the premiere.
So that's too edgy.
So you pick the safe, the safe dictatorship, the one everybody jokes about.
Because Kim Jong-un, his nuclear missile is called the No Dong.
That's what a laugh he is.
It's comedy gold.
It's dropping off the trees.
His missile is called No Dong.
It's comedy gold.
It's there for the taking.
Despite having a missile called No Dong, his principal export, apart from nuclear technology, is Knock Off Viagra.
It's comedy gold, this dictatorship.
So you can make, don't make your edgy comedy about Islam.
That's way too edgy, man.
Way too edgy.
But just make it about the comedy dictatorship.
And we forget that Columbia Pictures is owned by Sony, which is a Japanese company.
And in Japan, they don't find a nuclear North Korea quite so funny.
You'd be surprised how that happens.
Americans might not find the idea of a nuclear Cuba quite so funny.
And it concentrates the mind.
And so the Japanese corporate parent says, oh, no, no, no, that may sound just edgy enough for you big liberals at Hollywood.
It's the guys, it's the dictators it's safe to make jokes about, but it doesn't sound quite so safe to us.
And these Sony email leaks are in a way as fascinating as the WikiLeaks in what they reveal about the decayed culture and the kind of people who actually determine what it is we watch when we go to the multiplex on a Friday evening.
Mark Stein in Farush will take lots more of your calls straight ahead.
Did you see this story in Saturday's New York Times?
Washington, when former Governor Jeb Bush of Florida quietly visited Senator John McCain in his Capitol Hill office this fall, discussion turned to a subject of increasing interest to Mr. Bush, how to run for president without pandering to the party's conservative base.
Yeah, you know, I certainly got the impression from what happened over the weekend with this cromnibus thing that there is way too much pandering to the party's conservative base.
I said earlier the 2010 election turned out not to matter.
The 2014 election turned out not to matter.
And now all the geniuses in the Republican Party establishment are figuring out a way to make the 2016 election not matter.
This is Mark Stein in Farush.
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