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April 8, 2016 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:28
April 8, 2016, Friday, Hour #2
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Time Text
The views expressed by the host on this program documented to be almost always right.
99.
Well, it's eight.
99.8% at a time.
Almost.
Great to have you here, folks.
It's Friday as we roll on.
Live from the Southern Command in Sunny, South Florida.
It's open live Friday.
And we are going to get to your phone calls.
And it's gonna happen in this half hour.
If you're on hold, I appreciate your patience.
Promise you, we will get there.
We're doing 26th annual Radiothon to cure the blood cancers today in conjunction with the Leukemia Lymphoma Society of America.
And we have set up any number of ways for you to once again be champions like you are and help us out.
The telephone number to donate 877-379-8888.
You can donate online at RushLimbaugh.com.
You can donate online at our Facebook page.
And even at our Twitter account.
Twenty-sixth year that we are doing this.
And as I said in the uh in the opening hour, I I get anxious every every year when we do this.
You would think that it would become routine.
Okay, we've done this 25 times.
There's another not it's folks, it's i I look at this like I look at pretty much everything in life that I'm serious about.
If I'm gonna do it, I want to do it as as well as I can.
I want it to.
If I'm gonna do something, do it better than I did the day before.
That still is a driving force.
If it's playing golf, if it's show prep, if it's doing this program, whatever it is.
And it's not like I thought it would be when I was younger, when success was a dream, a far distant dream, and I was imagining what it would be.
By the way, it's nothing like I imagined it to be.
Certain things are, but most of what I call success is nothing that I thought it would be.
One of the things was that I thought when I got 65, which I am now at 65, done this 30 years, and I remember my dream was I'm gonna be success, so that meant I'm gonna be number one.
I'm gonna be the most listened to, it's gonna be for as long as I do it, I'm gonna be number one.
And I figured, okay, time to get 65, maybe be doing it three days a week, two hours a day, phoning it in.
I could no longer I could no more imagine doing that today than ever.
The truth is I've never probably worked harder in terms of prep, intense focus, uh putting pressure on myself.
It's been the exact opposite.
The longer I do it, the harder I work at it.
And it's the same thing with this.
We're in a 26th year of trying to cure the blood cancers.
And every year but two during these 26, we have beaten our previous year.
You have.
You have.
I I really don't do anything but give you the vehicle.
You do.
And it makes me so fortunate, feel so damn lucky to have you in my audience, and not just for this, not just for this reason, not just because of this day, but for so many different occasions that things that have occurred to me in my career over the years, and you have hung in there, and more importantly, you have admitted it that you've hung in there.
They come around and ask you what you're listening to, you tell them.
And I can't ever express my gratitude for it.
The same thing here with the Leukemia Lymphoma Society in our Curathon.
It matters.
I want to tell you about my first experience with cancer.
My parents we were not, my brother and I were not babied.
We were not shielded.
We were not thrown into circumstances that might have been traumatic or not for our best interest.
But by the same token, my my parents did not sugarcoat life.
They wanted us to know what it was.
My first encounter with uh cancer.
In this case, it was not blood cancer, it was lung cancer.
My father had a cousin.
His first name was Rusby.
Always laughed at that name.
I thought it was one of the funniest names I've ever heard, Rusby.
Last name was not Limbo.
He was my father's cousin, however, and he was his my father's good friend.
And he was a doctor.
And Rusby would come over.
I'm talking about when I'm seven years old, eight years old, nine years old.
I remember.
And he was a volatile, loud guy, Rusby was.
And I can remember him having loud discussions with my father about cancer.
I didn't know why at the time.
I mean, they're in the kitchen.
I'm in a little room in a small house.
You can hear in a living room what's going on in the kitchen.
And they're arguing over whether or not there'll ever be a cure for it.
And I remember Rusby telling my dad, I said, Rush.
He had a raspy voice.
There's never going to be a cured.
Don't you understand?
Rush.
His theory was that there would never be a cure for cancer because we would never, as human beings, be able to unlock the secret of life.
Meaning, no way would human beings ever be able to create life from scratch.
And until such time as we could, we're never going to cure cancer.
His belief, what is cancer, Rush?
He says the out-of-control growth of life.
It's the out-of-control growth of cells.
We can't stop it.
We can't cause it.
We can't stop it.
And this was his belief.
And then one day my dad told me that Rusby wanted to give us a dog.
I said, really?
We had a dog.
We had a little docs in, but this was going to be our dog.
My brother's, and it was going to be our dog.
He said, Yeah, uh, Rusby is dying.
And it hit me like, well, I don't know.
The last thing in the world an eight-year-old expects to hear.
And he wants you to have one of his dogs.
Rusby was a hunter, and he raised basset hounds.
So my dad put us in the car.
I must be ten, eleven years old.
We went out to Rusby's house.
It was an old rustic house in the woods.
And he uh he was in full-blown lung cancer, suffering it, talking to my dad.
My dad would ask him questions about things in general, and Rusby would say, What does it matter, Rush?
I'm dying.
Can't you see Rush?
I'm dying.
And they would cough up and spit something into a cup.
I'm ten years old.
I'm not uh this is shocking, it's scary, it's any number of things.
But it was real.
Rusby was young.
He was in his forties.
Maybe late forties.
Anyway, he took us out, and he'd picked out this basset hound of his that actually had a show name, Jason of Somerset.
And Bassett Hounds are the funniest-looking hounds.
They look sad and depressed, and they're low to the ground.
Jason was an adult.
So he gave us Jason.
We took Jason home.
Jason became star of the house.
But I never forgot that day when Jason was given to us.
We couldn't keep him in the yard.
I mean, he dug under the fence.
He'd get out.
My mother got some red boots for all four feet for Jason for when it snowed.
So that he wouldn't slip slide down the front hill in the front yard.
And he'd get out and we'd get a phone call from the gas station three miles from home, saying, Your dog's here.
What?
We look around, we couldn't find Joe.
How in the world did the dog get out three miles?
It happened two or three times to get a call from the grocery store, the furniture store, hey, Jason's here.
You want us to bring him to you, or can you come get him?
So my mom had put us in the car and we'd go get him.
He never once got hit by a car.
But Jason died of cancer.
Had this huge ugly tumor.
Right before I left for Pittsburgh when I was 20.
So we had Jason a lot, a lot of years.
In fact, Jason had to put him to sleep when I have to ride left home.
But look, the point of this is at age 10, I hear two adults arguing about possibility cancer never being cured.
And why, and sound like a good reason to me.
I mean, you're basing it on belief in God's secret of life, made sense to me.
My dad disagreed strenuously.
I've ever since then, every cancer researcher I have ever run into, I have run that theory by them.
That's how profound Rusby's theory was to me as a 10-year-old.
I can't tell you the number of cancer researchers I've asked.
And they all disagree.
They all think they're going to get a cure.
They all they're interested in the theory of, you know, science has a wall, much of it between religious belief in science, because they they need to be as as pure in their investigation research as they can be.
And so they all stop.
Some of them consider it, some have flat out reject it.
But they all claim there's gonna someday we're gonna be, there's gonna be a cure.
Someday we're gonna find a way to cure it.
Don't know how, don't know when, but we're all working on it.
I've never met one that didn't feel uh positively about prospect of curing cancer.
I have since encountered, obviously, many more people who have come down with cancer.
Close, distant.
I'm now 65, and anybody in my family or anybody close to me that is my age, whenever I just have to tell you, whenever they're feeling bad, and it's such that they need to go to the doctor, that's the first thing you think.
Is it cancer?
Is it in what kind?
Um of you are are at the age where you can't sleep at night because you think that phone call and two in the morning is going to be about your parents have been through that too.
And sometimes it is.
Millions of people are going to have fears of cancer confirmed about themselves.
It's really bad when it's a child.
It's really, really bad.
You have a bouncing baby that's growing up and enjoying life, you can just tell that your little baby just actively loves being alive.
And one day something's not right.
You try to stay uh positive, but you have to go to the pediatrician anyway.
And in the back of everybody's mind is the prayer, the hope that it's not any kind of cancer or other deadly disease.
But for many people, folks, that's exactly what they hear.
They hear it about their infants, they hear it about single-age kids, teenage kids about themselves.
And it's one of the scariest things you can ever hear.
Even when it is not you, when it's somebody you love, you wish it were you.
And that's when you start thinking and wondering and asking, what kind of advances have been made?
You hear about cancer all the time, you see people talking about it, raising money for it.
You read reports in the news every day that this has been tried at cancer, that's been tried, but you don't keep a running tally of it because you don't have a personal connection To it until you do.
Then you start trying to remember what you've read and start asking.
And that is when, in those circumstances and others like it, that is when if you end up with a diagnosis or somebody that you love ends up with a diagnosis of leukemia of Hodgkin lymphoma, non-Hodgkin lymphoma, myelomo, any of the blood cancers.
That is when you begin looking around for knowledge and support, good news, and that's where the Leukemia Lymphoma Society comes in because they are able in many cases to share good news with people.
They are able now to tell the diagnose, the diagnose of vast improvements in lifespan after diagnosis.
They're able to inform them of vast new medical discoveries and treatments because of ongoing research.
They're able to share with them all of the new things that have been learned because of other cancer research that is shared, and the leukemia lymphoma people do the same thing.
They learn things about other cancers that they share.
And so something that you know exists, and it's ravaging people each and every day.
The day that it touches you, everything changes.
It's like a slap in the face.
It's like a it's it's like nothing else matters.
It's like you immediately start making your tally of good behavior, bad behavior.
Do I deserve this?
Do I deserve beating it?
Go through every emotion you can possibly imagine.
And they'll tell you none of that matters.
The disease doesn't know gender, it doesn't know race, it doesn't know economic circumstance, it doesn't know anything.
It just happens.
And the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society and everybody there is able to, in many cases, offer much brighter outlook than what you first think when you hear the news.
Yes.
That you or somebody close to you has been diagnosed.
That's why, folks, what you do here each and every year with your contributions and your donations.
You help lessen, I'm sure it's happened to you personally, some of you, it lessens the shock.
It shortens the amount of time people spend in introspection, self-pity, and enables them to get in gear and start doing what has to be done at with what's available to treat the disease.
And along the way, you'll meet people that have something to do with the leukemia lymphoma society, you'll meet doctors and researchers and so forth, and uh you'll be thankful that if somebody you know or yourself, if this had to happen, you've got some of the best support staff, some of the best researchers, some of the best medical people in the world actually working for you and have been long before you knew them.
The number to donate's 877-379-8888, that's the phone number at rushlimbo.com.
You can do it online.
I've got to take a break, but there's just a little more to this, and we get back, don't go away.
Okay, I'm gonna tell you now.
Um usually do this in the first hour.
I never ask people to do something that I wouldn't do, such as I'm not gonna sit here and ask you to send money, donate whatever, and uh and have people say, Well, what about you?
Well, I'm donating my time.
Don't you realize what I've done?
That to me is one of the phoniest, flimsiest excuses.
So I always try to increase what we donate each year.
So I'll go ahead and say this year Catherine and I are going to make our own uh contribution of I'm gonna I'm gonna withhold the amount until as we get near the end of the program.
But just Well, I'm not trying to tease anybody.
I'm not, I'm not, I'm not trying to tease anybody.
I'm well, you how big a deal is it?
How much?
That's not a tease.
It's not a tease.
I'll do that.
It's 50,000 more than we did last year.
How about that?
We're adding to what we donated last year by $50,000.
877-379-888 or rushlimbod.com or our Facebook account or the Twitter account.
And again at Rushlimbod.com, you can see that various premiums there are for various levels of giving at Rushlimbod.com.
When we get back, we're going to the phones.
Promised you, and it's going to happen.
Okay, we go to the phones, Open Line Friday.
We combine everything here.
We do our Curathon and we do the regular Open Line Friday radio program all at the same time.
Again, 877-379-8888 to get hold of the Leukemia Lymphoma Society and help out.
Here is Eric in Columbus, Georgia.
Your first today.
It's really great to have you with us, hi.
Russ, it is a privilege to talk to you, and I want to tell you how much I appreciate what you do with the Leukemia Society.
My son was diagnosed at six with leukemia.
He relapsed uh with lymphoma tumors.
Uh we utilize benefits from the from the society for gas money to get up to his treatment.
And uh, let's know that uh this past Monday was his birthday.
He's 34 now.
No kidding.
I was one, I was hoping I was going to hear something like that.
I had no idea where you were going with this.
That's fabulous.
Yep.
So I just wanted to pass along.
Hopefully it'll it'll help to bring more money into the coffers today.
Well, I appreciate that.
I really do.
Uh Eric.
I I look I uh you know, 30 years ago, I'm 35, and I don't think about things.
When you're 35, you have different uh life experiences.
You've yet to have a bunch of life experiences there are.
You know, I've I've always I've told you I can't wait to get older.
I've every every bit of evidence I saw life got better as people got older, and it's certainly been true for me.
And it still is.
I have not yet reached the point where I worry about getting older, but there is a downside, and that is that a lot of your friends start getting sick.
It's part of age.
A lot of your friends aren't able to do things they used to be able to do with you.
Something as simple as uh as playing golf.
And so everybody's perspective changes with uh new life experiences.
And at age 35, I would have never stopped to think about somebody like you going to the doctor and hearing the diagnosis you heard.
It just would never have crossed my mind unless, of course, I had met somebody that that happened to.
Now it's something you know happens every day.
Experience it, and it's devastating.
It's just there's no more helpless feeling in the world.
And no more start asking questions.
Why, why there aren't any answers to them.
There's not an answer to a single question you ask.
When you hear something like that about your child, all you can do is snap two and avail yourself of the best there is that you can access to do what you can for your child or yourself or your spouse or whoever.
And again, that's where the leukemia lymphoma society shines.
That's where they come through.
Now there's a new study of a chronic kind of leukemia.
This is called myelomonocytic leukemia.
It has identified genetic markers that predicted which tumor samples would likely respond to treatment.
The Leukemia Lymphoma Society provided funding to this study, and it may result in findings that will show which patients could be spared lengthy Courses of treatment because it's unlikely to work, and instead focus on other treatment, which saves money and saves time.
I mean, this is huge to identify genetic markers that predict which tumor samples will respond to treatment and which won't.
All they have to do is diagnose properly, and then they will know what not to attack because there's nothing that'll work, or what to attack.
And that's just one example of some of the latest and greatest advancement in research that's made possible by the leukemia lymphoma.
These are all volunteers, by the way, at the society itself.
They nobody gets paid much for doing this, if if any, you know, it's a volunteer effort.
And it's made up of people who have been impacted, affected by the disease.
They're in their 67th year.
They've invested a billion dollars into research.
One billion dollars, in addition to their time and money from donations, people like you in nearly every therapy currently used to treat blood cancer patients.
And as you know, I mentioned earlier that they collaborate.
Their research on leukemia lymphoma will produce results that are worthwhile and valuable, applicable to other forms of cancer.
One of the great success stories of that kind of collaboration is that drug Glevec that we talk about every year for acute myeloid leukemia.
The Leukemia Lymphoma Society joined with Dr. Brian Drucker at Oregon Health and Society University to make a precision medicine a reality.
And Glevec goes way above and beyond just the blood cancers.
It's uh for some it's been a really miracle drug.
It's just a couple of examples of the advancements that are being made.
But this identifying genetic markers, that's huge because that can save a lot of money and time.
When you know that there's certain tumors that you just don't have any treatment for, they're not going to respond to treatment, then you you choose another way to attack rather than waste time and money on something that you know you don't have any medicine for.
It's just just it's brilliant.
Here's uh here's Bob in Quincy, Illinois.
Bob, you're next.
Great to have you on the EIB network alone.
Oh, hi, thank you, Rush.
Um, you commented uh and explained Bill Clinton's uh Black Lives Matter uh situation regarding his past uh record as a politician.
What I was wondering is to me the message when I heard it and when I read the transcript, it sounded almost word for word with uh a populist message.
I would have guessed Donald Trump said that if I you just gave me the transcript.
What specifically?
Tell what what specifically, if you can remember it.
That's not a test.
I just want to know specific.
He said something about uh cra or uh either uh drugs or hopped up on things, you know.
I mean, it would it would have been a very you know racially charged statement coming from Donald Trump and I mean I think it was a very legitimate statement, but um hopped up on drugs and killing other kids and so forth.
I mean it just struck me as a very now what I think is going on.
You're asking me, I think, if if this was Clinton trying to protect his record or uh trying to help Hillary or I think there's two things happening here with Clinton.
One of them definitely is trying to protect his record.
There is you have to understand Bill Clinton's mentality.
Bill Clinton's the first black president.
In his mind, he really was.
And that mattered.
Bill Clinton's the kind of guy that, you know, specious, dumb, stupid awards have a lot of substance.
Of course, he's not black.
But Tony Morrison, a renowned African American writer, dubbed him America's first black president because he had the ability, grew up in Arkansas, and that apparently means he had the ability to know what it was like.
What Clint's the kind of guy eats that up, absolutely adores it, and he thinks it inoculates him from any allegation, any suspicion that he's racist.
So when Obama threw the race card down on him back in 2008 in the campaign, he was Ted Kennedy from South Carolina, he took it personally, and he hasn't liked Obama since.
And this Black Lives Matter thing, the Clinton is genuinely ticked off about this because the very people, well, now they're representatives, but the very people that came to him and begged him to do something to stop the ravaging of the African American and minority neighborhoods.
It was crack cocaine that was doing it.
And they came to him and they asked him to do something about it.
They needed more police.
Folk, this is 1994.
They needed more police.
Can you imagine?
They needed more police.
They got midnight basketball.
They did anything they could come up with to occupy African American and minority youth so that they would not be out engaging in destructive behavior.
This is midnight basketball, all these new cops.
And Clinton got it done.
He got all hundred thousand cops, spent more money on a crime bill than had ever been spent.
And now here these people are coming back and blaming him and blaming Hillary and showing up and protesting him.
I guarantee you he takes it personally.
I've heard people say that he's engaging in a sister soldier moment because that helped him in his first campaign 1992 when he came out against Sister Soldier for whatever she was doing.
I forget the details of it, but uh it was the equivalent of a liberal Democrat criticizing a fellow liberal Democrat that happened to be African American.
So it showed that he was a moderate, not a liberal.
It was it enabled him to cross a bridge and be seen as a centrist.
And that redounded well to his benefit.
I don't think he's doing that now.
He's showing up.
He's, you know, in his mind, he's he's he's the star.
He's the rock star of the Democrat Party.
You don't go out and protest this guy.
This doesn't happen.
And certainly not the first black president.
So I'm taking it personally, and he's reacting personally, and it's really not helping Hillary.
And she is looked at now as in on the verge of losing control of her campaign.
I just saw a story, and this I think is the second one in a week.
This is from Salon.com by H. A. Goodman.
Hillary's world collapsing around her.
Wisconsin, Bernie Sanders surge, the FBI probe poised to derail her White House bid.
Clinton isn't only facing a possible indictment, but also Sanders and millions of voters are sick of status quo, meaning insider politics.
Let me tell you something.
Hillary Clinton, in certain left-wing publications, is getting just as negative press coverage in New York as Ted Cruz is.
And there are people who can't believe this.
You know, 57% of voters in Wisconsin were female, and the women of Wisconsin abandoned Hillary Clinton.
They voted Bernie.
You know, all these areas, African Americans, women, all these areas she's supposed to be cleaning up and have a lock on this, she does not have.
Now you've got Clinton out there insulting Black Lives Matter when what Democrats are supposed to do is agree there is no black on black crime.
The premise that they're supposed to operate under is the only reason young black kids are dying is because of racist cops.
Black lives matter does not mean all lives matter.
The only lives in question here are black, because white lives are not being snuffed out.
And then you point out black on black crime, like both Ray Lewis's done and Clinton's done, black on black, and that you you you you have you have uh you've almost violated a fundamental religious tenet here.
And so they're they're fit to be tied, and Clinton's fit to be tied.
I don't I don't I don't think there's any game playing going on here.
Clinton's some people think he may be purposely sabotaging Hillary.
This is the age-old belief that he doesn't want her ever in the White House.
Because he wants to be the only one in the family to ever been president.
Who knows?
What we do know is that it's not Queen for a Day out there, and it's there is not happy-go-lucky time.
These are people ought to be sitting on top of the world on the verge of securing the party nomination, realizing A lifelong dream of having a woman who doesn't know where she is half the time become president of the United States just because her last name's Clinton.
She went to Wellesley, and she's a feminist, and that's the bit of the qualification.
They're on the verge of it.
Now they see it slipping away.
They're going, oh no!
And the infighting has begun.
And the insult is she's losing to a 74-year-old socialist who doesn't know what he doesn't know.
So everybody's watching this with eagle eyes.
As are we.
877-379-8888.
Don't forget it.
That's the number.
To help cure the blood cancers our one day a year that we focus attention on it.
Leukemia Thon Radioton for the Leukemia Lymphoma Society of America.
877-379-8888.
And we're back in a moment.
And once again, 877, we pay for it.
So total free call, 379-888 to help out the Leukemia Lymphoma Society of America continue its great work on curing the blood cancers.
It's all made possible by people like you year round.
And just a reminder, folks, I I learned things late in life.
I like I mentioned the uh a lot of these telephones, they raise money year round, and then they go on the air for the telethon for their three hours or 12 hours or 24, and it's made to look like they're raising all that money in the period of time they're on the air.
That's what I always thought.
And I was really impressed.
Singing song at the end and uh pulling in the last two million to put them over the top.
Wow, that's amazing.
Little did I know that 95% of it's raised before they even go on the air.
We don't do that.
We start at zero every year.
I mean, it's all right in front of you.
There's there's there's nothing that you don't know going on behind the scenes to boost to to boost it, to bump it up.
We just we wing it and we pray it.
One day a year.
For three hours.
We just put it out there and hope and pray and keep our fingers crossed that you are able again to help out.
We know you all want to.
It's not a question.
This is being able.
Uh the tough economic times, everybody understands that.
That's why everybody is so greatly appreciative every year.
When everybody comes through to the degree we outperform the previous year.
877-379-8888.
Here's Ethan Hillsborough, New Hampshire.
Great to have you on the program.
Hello, sir.
Hey, Rush, thanks for taking my call.
Yes, sir.
Yeah, my name is Ethan Zon.
I was the winner of Survivor Africa, the reality show, and I'm also a two-time cancer survivor.
And I just want to thank you and all your listeners for funding organizations like Leukemia Lymphoma Society because, like you and your hearing, I was lucky enough to get a second chance because of a drug that LLS funded at the very time I needed it.
And between the two transplants, this new drug emerged on the market, and that was a drug funded by LLS.
You have won the Survivor series?
Yes.
Pretty ironic.
Cancer Survivor was on a reality show called Survivor.
The show that's on CBS.
Exactly.
And yours was Survivor Africa.
Yep.
One of the earlier seasons, the third season of Survivor.
Third season.
And what you you you been benefited from transfusions or transplants, did you say?
Transplants, yeah.
I had a rare form of blood cancer called uh CD20 positive Hodgkin's lymphoma.
And I had an autologous stem cell transplant, which failed.
And then I had an allogenaic transplant, which kept, and I used my brother, Lee, as the donor.
How long are you in treatment?
I was in treatment from um age 35 to about age 40.
Wow.
And uh and went on to win one of those survivor contests.
Well, I won Survivor before I got cancer.
I don't know if there's a correlation or not.
Oh, well, that's still impressive.
Thank you.
But I really do want to assure everyone who's making a donation today that, you know, the work that these doctors are doing, the work that Leukemia Lymphoma Society is doing, is saving the lives of real people like me.
Thank you, Ethan.
It's important.
No greater testament could we have.
Appreciate that.
We'll be right back here, folks, out of time for this.
That was that was Ethan Zon.
Z O H N Survivor winner, who had also suffered a rare form of leukemia.
Okay, folks, we have one big, exciting hour to go.
And again, it's 877-379-8888.
We be right back.
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