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Jan. 26, 2015 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:48
January 26, 2015, Monday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
Hi, folks, and welcome to the EIB Network.
Here we are to kick off a brand new week of broadcast excellence.
And as always, we're happy to have you with us.
The telephone number, if you want to be on the program today, is always 800-282-2882 and the email address, LRushbo at EIBNet.com.
Ladies and gentlemen, indulge me for just a few minutes here.
We all here at the EIB network are experiencing a huge void in all of our hearts here today because of a death.
One of our staff members, the very first staff member to join me 27 years ago in New York, Christopher Carson Kit,
my trusted chief of staff, aide-de-camp, passed away today at 8 a.m. at his home in New Jersey after what really was a four-year battle and a really valiant.
I've never seen anything like it battle with essentially brain cancer.
Thought that it was beaten back two years ago, but it came back again last fall with a vengeance.
I'll give you an idea, December 19th, staff Christmas party, and he was fine normal as anybody ever remembered him.
And 10 days ago, I flew to New York to see him in the hospital, and it was the last day that he was had any kind of a short-term memory at all.
It's a good visit.
It was a really good day.
It was, and for him, too.
And I've always said that I wanted to be older, and I never factored something in about getting older, and that is people you know getting sick and dying.
But Kit was in all ways, every way I can think of, a special human being in person.
When the program debuted in 1988, nobody had any idea if it was going to work, and we had made no plans initially for it to get big.
It was just a radio show with a guy doing three hours on the radio and the itinerant things that happen.
But it took off.
It took off faster and bigger than anybody had planned.
And so such, folks, let me hit the cough button here for just a second and blow my nose.
Just one quick, don't go away, just one quick minute.
Okay.
So the phone started ringing and mail started coming in and things needed to be dealt with.
We didn't have anybody.
And Ed McLaughlin, who was the syndicator of the program at the time and the founding executive of the EIB network, had just come from ABC and knew countless people at ABC.
And in our building where we were at the time, ABC staffed its magazines, such as Prairie Farmer Magazine and American Homeowner or Contemporary Homeowner or something.
And Ed said, look, I got this guy that's going to come up from the magazine, and he's going to answer the phones and deal with the mail.
He's a good guy.
He's here in New York.
He's trying to become an actor.
And he'll help us out here in a pinch.
I said, oh, okay, great.
What's his name?
He said, some guy named Kit Carson.
I said, Kit Carson?
Kit Carson?
Like the cowboy?
Yeah, that's what he says, Kit Carson.
Okay.
So the next day, in walks this guy, cargo shorts, white ankle socks, black kids, and red hair that looks like it's got yeast in it piled so high on the top of his head.
And I was immediately jealous.
I said, what do you do?
You put yeast in your hair?
And he didn't know what I meant.
But it was immediately spotted in me.
He wanted to be an actor.
He had a performer's ego, and he thought I was crazy.
After one radio show, he thought I was crazy.
He's listening to homeless updates and all this stuff, and he just thinks that I'm a lunatic.
But he's going to stick with it because it looks like it could be fun for a while.
And he said, what do you want me to do?
I said, well, when it comes to the phones, and I did my best to explain who I was and what I did and what we were all trying to accomplish.
And he just, you know, sort of, yeah, yeah, yeah, you're the latest to get to New York.
You're going to hit it big, right, right?
Okay, got it, got it.
What can I do?
I said, well, when you're answering the phones, I want you to really learn how to do something.
And I really want you to learn how to do it.
And it's say no.
You're going to have people calling wanting me to do this, do that, request for all kinds of things.
And I don't care what and I don't care who.
Your first answer is no, and then you come tell me.
And we'll review who called and then we'll decide what to do.
It's harder than you think, folks.
It's easy to say yes to people and make friends and be good, have a good relationship.
But saying no to people does not promote good friendships right off the bat.
He said no.
He loved saying no.
He said, you really, I have the power to say no to anybody.
I said, yes, you do.
Started answering mail.
And anyway, it just evolved to where he became the resident expert on me and the program.
He became its number one champion, defender, evangelist.
And of course, he ended up doing much more than so.
Well, he never stopped saying no.
That job remained as important 27 years later as it was that first day.
And he enjoyed it as much as ever, except the people calling later on were like from the White House and good morning, America, and today.
He still said no and then came and told me about it.
58 years old.
He arrived around age 30 or 31, grew up in Milwaukee.
And he was insistent, you know, and he introduced himself to people.
Yeah, I'm Kit Carson.
And he assumed everybody thought that that meant he would be related to the famous cowboy character, Kit Carson.
So he told everybody, yeah, yep, my name is really Kit Carson.
So the first time I had to write him a check, I forget what it was for, I made it out Kit Carson.
He brought it back and said, the bank won't accept it.
I said, why?
He said, because this isn't my name.
I said, what?
You've been telling everybody for two years?
It's Christopher.
Okay, so I rewrote the check.
But he always remained Kit.
He was Kit to everybody that knew him.
He was Kit to his family.
He was Kit and dad to his teenage sons, Jesse and Jack.
His wife, Teresa.
It's such a void because he loved this job.
He loved being here.
He loved being part of it every day.
Folks, the last four years of his life, I kid you not, for the vast majority of them, he would get up early to do the show prep he had been assigned.
When the internet came, he and Snerdley were assigned various areas of internet to help me with show prep, and he had his.
And he was going to do them every day no matter what.
No matter how many times we try to tell him, forget it, just head to the hospital and get your treatment.
It was just incredible to see.
He would show up as often as he could these last four years, even if it only for a half hour.
He would try to get his cancer treatments moved to different times of the day so they wouldn't have to miss.
All the while we're telling him, hey, put yourself first here.
He said, I am.
I love this.
And he loved everybody here.
And everybody loved him.
We've all heard people remembered by having it said about them that they never heard the guy say a bad word about anybody.
How many times have you heard that in eulogies?
Well, Kit Carson, honest to God, never, ever had a bad word to say about anybody.
Kit Carson never, never had a critical thing to say about anybody he dealt with, anybody else on the staff.
He did not engage in backstabbing.
He did not ever, not a single time, try to undermine anybody else on the staff for his benefit.
And you know, that's common in office settings.
But he never did it.
He's the guy in the office who had everybody's back.
In fact, when I got mad at people, either on the staff or anybody, he's the first guy trying to talk me out of it.
He's, no, no, no, you're misunderstanding.
Don't get mad.
They're not.
He did not.
He did not.
He's not the kind of guy that relished in other people being on the dock, other people being in trouble.
Bothered him.
And anytime I got mad at anybody, he tried to, he defended him.
It was always my fault for getting mad.
Remember, he's the chief of staff.
It was always my fault for getting mad.
It was not their fault.
No matter what, no matter who.
There were exceptions.
I mean, I haven't had that many people do egregious things.
And we've only had it 27 years, two or three people leave the program.
So we've been fortunate to avoid a lot of this typical inter-office stuff.
But Kit obviously was employee badge one.
Well, I guess badge one.
He's number two.
He's been here longer than anybody.
As I say, he wanted to be an actor.
And he ended up enjoying what he was doing here so much that he still hang around with his actor buddies and friends, but he became 100% totally devoted to the program.
And his folks, he was such a patriot.
He loved this country so much.
And he started out not caring.
I mean, not caring.
It just wasn't the first thing on his mind was not what's happening in politics every day or what's happening in Washington.
But he came to care about it as much as any of us.
And he came to be as concerned, especially when his children were born.
He came to be as concerned about it as any of the rest of us are.
And it's what inspired him and motivated him every day to make sure that when it was his stack of show prep stuff, that it was right.
That I had it right.
And he always put his comments on the margins, you know, what he thought of things.
And there are times he thought of things I didn't.
And I stole them.
I stole his opinion sometimes.
Sometimes I gave him credit.
But he always knew that the he knew that what was important to me to show is the thing.
And it always was with him.
He was whenever I had to go anywhere, say Rush to Excellence tour, or he always went, some cases early to advance it, but he always accompanied me.
And, you know, I didn't like those things much.
I never really did.
They were things that were necessary to be done.
And he said, you're crazy.
This is the greatest job in the world.
What you're looking at, you're going to show up and get 5,000 people.
Can't wait to hear what you have to say.
Do you realize how many people would love that?
He did not allow me to be pessimistic or negative.
He didn't allow me to get down in the dumps about anything.
And if he sensed that I was, he would do anything that he could that enabled me to get the best out of myself.
Even if it was just a social soare that we were at or some business trip.
I was thinking about it last night.
I can't remember a time when he complained about things.
And you know how often people complain?
Oh my God.
People complain all the time.
People manipulate, try to manipulate you all the time.
There's nothing unique to me.
He never did.
Never, never did, and never undermined anybody.
Never wanted me to think ill of anybody that had anything to do with this program.
A special passion of his was a leukemia thon, the leukemia radiothon that we did every year.
He devoted as much time to putting that together and working with the leukemia thon people throughout the year and things like that.
He built and maintained relationships that the program had with any number of people, sponsors, you name it, and maintained them and spoke for me when I was unable to.
And I have to say this too.
He is the one guy.
This is not meant to besmirch anybody else, but I never once doubted his instincts.
I had total trust.
I never once thought, for example, when he's advocating that I do something.
I never once thought that there was something in it for him, for me to do it, that it would help him with somebody that was asking me to do it or a friend of his.
Never ever got the impression that the only thing he cared about was doing what he could to make sure I looked as well as be the best I could be.
And he had this innocent, even age 58, this innocent exuberance about everything.
And it wasn't just me, he trusted everybody.
I mean, even the people he knew that he shouldn't.
Everybody got the benefit of the doubt.
You had to really earn his distrust because he trusted you right off the bat.
Complete and total trust in the guy.
Everything he told me, everything I asked him to give me a report on or do or whatever it was.
I never had any suspicions that he was trying to get me to do things or to say things or whatever that would benefit him with other people.
Anyway, I can't take a break here, folks.
There's just a little more here, but I wish all of you could have.
Many of you around the course of the country in various parts have probably met him.
And if you did, you know exactly the kind of person and personality I'm talking about.
But I wish everybody could have met.
Hang on, we'll be right back.
I just got a note that reminded me of something.
When Kid was undergoing his cancer treatments, he held on to his hair longer than most people do.
And he loved to go walking down 6th Avenue in New York.
And a Japanese tourist would think he'd Conan O'Brien.
And the point is, he found the good in everything, and he was always optimistic and upbeat.
I'll tell you that the happiest I can remember him outside of the birth of his kids, which that's something that, I mean, when he met his soon-to-be wife, Teresa, it was like Kid in a candy store forever.
And when they finally got married, I got married up in Boston.
And I remember I flew up for the wedding, and I landed at the airport.
A car is taking me, and they're on the Snerdley is walking to the, I guess, what do you come to the train station or something?
So I stopped and Snerdley got in the car.
We went to the wedding, and he just couldn't believe, honestly, he was, this is so sentimentally the truth.
He could not believe that he had actually convinced this woman to marry him.
He just, and he never stopped looking at her that way.
It really was, it was, it was special.
It was a fairy tale.
Exactly like a fairy tale.
When the preacher made it official and pronounced the man and wife, he turned to the audience and started jumping up and down doing fist pumps and started shouting, yeah, yeah, did you hear?
She said yes.
It was just, I don't know.
He loved life so much.
And it's cut short.
And welcome back, my friends, Rush Limbaugh, the Excellence in Broadcasting Network.
And just a few more comments about the late Kit Carson, our chief of staff here, who passed away, been with us with me longer than anybody else with this program.
Passed away this morning at 8 a.m. with from brain cancer.
And I want to talk a little bit about he taught everybody's incredible lessons in toughness and fortitude in the way he fought it.
I've seen a lot of people go through what Kit went through.
But honest to God, folks, I've never seen anybody deal with it the way he had.
And I've seen some heroics.
But I want to go back to something I've checked email during the break.
What's so big about saying no to everybody?
Somebody wants to know.
Folks, look, I don't want to make this too personal because this isn't about me, but you don't know.
I don't know how to say this.
Because this is not complaining.
Believe me, I have nothing to complain about.
But when I say that I was able to totally trust Kit with virtually anything he came to me with, any proposals that somebody else had, any requests somebody else had.
One of the things I had to learn, and I'd never been on a success track before until this program.
I didn't know what it was like.
And you would not believe the number of phonies that you come in contact with who portray themselves as your best friend.
And all they want to do is manipulate you into doing things they want you to do.
Either just parade you around so they can look like hot stuff or get you to do something they couldn't get done for themselves, all the while telling you, me, that it's for my benefit.
He never ever sniffed that out in other people and never ever did it himself.
And I can't tell you, for me, that was important.
Maybe other people in my position, they don't care about it.
But to me, I hated having my intelligence salted.
I hated being used.
I hated thinking that people were trying to manipulate me.
And when I thought it, they were gone.
That was the end of them.
I had no more time for it.
And I never, ever once had any doubt about Kit and his intentions in that regard.
And so saying no, that's how you weed it.
It became a policy of mine.
Hey, I don't like to do a bunch of outside stuff anyway.
The show's the thing.
I need to go somewhere to say what I have at a radio show to say it.
Why go somewhere else and say it?
But the point is, I had just entire, complete, total trust in him, never once doubting his motivations for sometimes he suggested I do things, thought they'd be good for me, and so forth.
Anyway, that's why saying no was important.
Because it's easy to say yes and befriend somebody, particularly if they're a powerful person on the other end of the phone.
It's the easiest thing in the world to say, yeah, become their friend, become a good guy.
Yeah, I can get Rush to do that.
Never did that, folks.
And that was big.
But the way he fought this disease, it was just terrible to watch it.
But it was also inspiring.
Honestly, I'm not exaggerating the emails that we would get when he was in the midst of the worst treatment, the chemo, the radiation, the whatever.
He scheduled as much of it as outpatient as he could, much more than he should have, because he didn't want to let anybody down.
I Last time I was able to talk to him meaningfully was a couple of Wednesdays ago in his hospital room.
And short-term memory was mostly gone, but he remembered the magazine that he came from 27 years ago.
And he remembered all the stories we were reminiscing about over the years.
But what had happened the last couple hours, a couple days were tough.
But at one point, you know, Jack and Jesse, his kids are there.
And Teresa, and I grabbed his hand and I held his hand.
I said, let me tell you something.
There's nobody who can replace you.
There's nobody who can do what you do.
And he looked at me, and I don't know how much there he was at a given moment.
Brain cancer is a horrible thing.
But he looked at me and said, that's not true.
And I said, oh, yes, it is.
And I kept shaking his or squeezing his hand and letting him know that it was true.
And I wasn't just saying it.
And it is because of the trust.
So he would, he was just insistent on getting his portion of the show prep in.
He was asked permission.
I mean, I never got over.
He asked permission to go get his next cancer treatment.
And he would, if, if we had said, well, that's going to be really tough, he would have called the hospital and doctors and tried to move it.
No, we never did.
Don't misunderstand.
With 27 years, and he's even in the fight for his life, he's putting our concerns ahead of his.
We had to insist with him a number of times.
Look, just take care of yourself.
We all know the story here.
Just go take it, which he did.
But it still was.
I mean, one time when he was in the hospital for treatment, he learned how.
I still don't know how he did it because he could barely use a computer.
But he figured out in the midst of all this, because he had lost the ability to type for a while, the dexterity.
He learned how to set up drag and dictate and was able to dictate things and email them off.
And at the time, I went to the hospital to visit him at that point and I saw the setup.
I said, you could not, how did you do this?
He said, I don't know.
I don't know, but it had to be done.
I'm looking at it.
I said, this is not possible.
I wouldn't have known how to do it the way he did it.
Now, he might have had some outside help, but he was so insistent on whatever all this was, not harming the show or me, that he did everything he could.
And it was just amazing to watch.
And it was instructive to watch the success and then the failure of all of the various treatments.
You could see this.
I mean, the first time the brain tumor was zapped with radiation, I mean, it was phenomenal within three days.
I mean, there were one day in the hospital, he would not walk in and say, hi, know who you are, and five minutes later not know who you are, and ten minutes later not remember you'd been there a while.
And after the first time that tumored zapped, all that was going to back to being perfectly normal.
It was amazing to watch the effectiveness of the treatments.
But then everybody says when it comes back the second time after you think you've been in remission, it's really bad trouble, and it was.
And he ended up succumbing to it at 8 o'clock this morning, but never ever gave up on it.
And all he ever wanted to do was these kids graduate from high school.
Jack and Jesse.
But the exuberancy, I remember one year, occasionally we here get a suite at the Super Bowl to entertain clients and others.
And this Super Bowl that we went to took Kit, he went to this one.
It was Dallas, and it was the Steelers and Packers.
The Packers was his team.
He loved the Packers.
He grew up in Wisconsin.
And this is just five years ago, whenever that Super Bowl was.
So he's been with the radio program 22 years, and he's game started.
And he's sitting in the suite after doing some of the work involved with the dinners that we had the weekend prior to the game.
He's sitting there watching the game, and I get up from my seat to go bathroom or something.
And he's sitting there, and he stands up and he hugs me.
He says, Rush, this is just great.
This is just great.
I can't believe it.
I have such a great time.
My God, the Packers.
I'm here at the Super Bowl.
This is so great.
And he was always appreciative.
He was always very much aware of how special things were.
I mean, to him, the special things stayed special, never anything taken for granted.
But they have that kind of exuberance after, I mean, a lot of people 22 years have become jaundiced.
Now, you mean I got to go work the damn suit.
Come on, Rush.
Can you have somebody else?
Never.
He wanted to be the first one there, whatever needed to be done.
And he was able to turn it into a pleasurable thing.
But standing up and hugging me, telling him how great it was to be there to see his Packers against my Steelers Super Bowl, something he never thought he'd be able to do.
And we're just going to be really missed.
Everybody here is, even though we've known this was coming for a few weeks, it still is a huge void in everybody's heart.
Because whenever he was on the other end of something, you knew there was going to be a laugh or a joke or a smile.
And I'm not trying to sound cliched.
It was really true.
And you knew you were talking to somebody who actively loved being alive and had great respect for being alive.
Did not take that for granted.
He loved his job.
He loved the country.
He loved his kids and his wife, Teresa, so much.
That's the one bad thing about getting old.
Your friends start, they get old too.
Anyway, thank you for indulging me on this.
I haven't even begun to do him justice, folks.
But I wanted to share with you a little who he was because he was such an integral part of this program every day, even though you never heard him.
And even though many might not have known who he was or what he did other than hearing me call him chief of staff, he was irreplaceable, and it's just a very, very sad, unfortunate thing that happens to everybody.
And the way he dealt with it was a lesson in and of itself.
Catherine has been spending a lot of time with Kit's family in the past couple weeks.
She had a great idea, Snerdley.
I don't know if she mentioned this to you.
She thinks we ought to put a chair in there.
And up in New York, it's called the kit chair, the honorary kit chair.
He's always going to be there.
That chair is always going to be for him, always going to be where he sat.
So we're going to do that because it is a great idea.
But he walked in the room wearing those cargo shorts and the short white socks and the black heads.
It's just, he didn't care.
You were laughing at it.
Didn't matter.
He made everybody laugh.
Now, folks, let me review some of the things we have here in the stack of stuff that we'll get into in the remaining two hours of the busy broadcast today in addition to Deflategate.
Pretty much everything I said about that last week is coming to pass, i.e., there's not going to be a resolution of this before the Super Bowl.
But there will be some comical things happen because of the media.
But here's some of the headlines.
All the Obama and everybody in the regime running around talking about all these great, great economic numbers and all this great job numbers, the unemployment numbers coming down.
There's a story here from National Review, but it's actually some economics outfits ransom numbers.
They found out that the so-called, if you even want to call it this, the economic boom in 2014, you know what the real reason for it was?
Unemployment extensions expired.
Unemployment benefits expired.
They were not extended.
These people 99 weeks maximum and they had to go out and find work.
That's one of the reasons why the unemployment number went down.
The Vatican has decided not to release doves anymore during ceremonial moments because the dove is a symbol of peace.
They're going to release balloons now.
No, it has nothing to do with the environment.
The last time they released a couple doves, a crow came and attacked one of them, and a seagull came and attacked the other one.
So here's the Vatican releasing doves, the symbols of peace, and they're set upon and attacked by a crow and a seagull.
That's not as bad as the Olympics, where the doves got roasted in the Olympic flame.
It was una Palomo Baco.
So they're going to release balloons now.
Any details on all Scott Walker, Scott Walker wowed them in Iowa at whatever this thing was, this Republican/slash conservative.
Just wowed them.
You know, me, folks, if you have spent any time listening to this program in the last two years, you know that I believe Scott Walker, he is the blueprint for the Republican Party if they are serious about beating Lyft.
Scott Walker has shown how to do it.
And apparently he showed up and he made a speech on Saturday that had people telling them it reminded them of the speech I gave at CPAC.
Now, if that's true, that means that he went pedal to the metal, wall-to-wall conservatism with charisma and bold ideas and solutions based on his own policies.
We're going to review this because there are all kinds of people now, media types, conservative organizations, are handicapping the Republican nomination race.
And do you know that Scott Walker's leading in one of these polls or handicap questionnaires?
People, who do you give greatest odds to getting an op?
Scott Walker.
He has come out of nowhere.
And my point is, he hasn't come out of nowhere.
He's been front and center, but unreported on.
But Republicans and conservative voters and so forth know exactly who he is and what he stands for.
Here's another.
Scott Walker takes Iowa by storm.
This is thehill.com.
The other story is in The Hill 2.
But there's a third one.
Glenn Harlan Reynolds has a column in USA Today explaining in detail what we pointed out last year.
Remember the 529 program we talked about, the education savings accounts that Obama is now going to start taxing when you withdraw for the express purpose of your kids' education.
It's supposed to be tax-free.
More details on that.
Meaning, Obama, looking out for the little guy, is going to raise taxes on the little guy while making you think he's going to raise taxes on the rich.
Lots of other things here.
American Sniper continues to run rings around everybody.
I have a theory about that, but I have to take a break.
Don't go away.
Okay, folks.
That's it for this busy broadcast hour.
Get back to it.
When we get back, won't be long.
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