Rush 24/7 Adopt-A-Soldier Program Rolls Out Amid Absurd Charges of Profiteering from KooksX

<font color=”#ff0000″>•</font> Visit This Website Alone for the Truth & Genesis of Rush’s Comments in Context
November 8, 2005: <a href=”/home/rush_24_7_adopt_a_soldier/eib_extra.html”>The Call That Started It All: Rush 24/7 Adopt-A-Soldier?</a>
November 10, 2005: <a href=”/home/rush_24_7_adopt_a_soldier/coming_monday.html”>How Rush 24/7 Adopt-A-Soldier Works</a>
RUSH: This is the 21st of November and I’ve got to do a little housecleaning here. I need to remind everybody that today is the day that we start matching donors in the Adopt-A-Soldier Program with military personnel around the world. We’ve been collecting information from you, the donors, and from military personnel and their families all of last week, and we’ve been doing a number of other things to create the database of qualified military personnel in order to be matched up with donors, and today we start that match-up process. So today, the complimentary subscriptions to the members of the US Armed Forces will start going out — and if you are a member of the US military, if you are a family member of a soldier, a sailor, a Marine or airman anywhere around the world who would like to have a complementary one-year subscription to not only the Rush website but the Limbaugh Letter, just simply go to RushLimbaugh.com and everything — it tells you what to do — is right there on the home page. So if you are in the US military and you have an FPO address, and we can verify that you are — and that’s part of what you’ll help us do when you log on and fill out the necessary information — you will then be matched up with a donor who has already contributed to the cause, so to speak.
And let me address something right off the top here.
I became aware of this last week. I was in Mexico. I went down and I played in a golf tournament. Played golf for six straight days. It was hotter down there in those six days than it’s ever been in the middle of the summer here in south Florida, but it was a fabulous time. Puerto Vallarta it was an excellent time, and I really got away. I took the computer and I used it a couple times and I have a little Blackberry and I’m getting e-mails and so forth, but I really didn’t spend a whole lot of time because I was exhausted at the end of each day. This was a tournament, long rounds, and there was a lot of social activities going on with this. But I was made aware, once again, of the fact that people have misrepresented what the Adopt-A-Soldier Program is all about and that some people took shots at me as attempting to profit on the backs of subscriptions to the US military and so forth and so on, and I’d just like to call your attention: It’s right there on the website. You don’t need to go to other websites to find out what I say. You just need to go to my own. You don’t need to go to any other website or listen to anybody else tell you what I said. All you’ve got to do is go to my website. It’s right there. Everything that I said about this is right there. So the idea here that somehow I am profiting, we are profiting, and exploiting members of the military is absurd. Very briefly, this whole idea came to us from a caller.

It was a brilliant idea. We instituted it. The context of it was Tom Harkin debating whether or not my program is on too much of Armed Forces Radio, a whole day-and-a-half of debate on the floor of the US Senate. Harkin was attempting to get a whole bunch of liberal talk shows that nobody in this country wants to listen to anyway on Armed Forces Radio, and in the process, was quoting some things that I have said on this program over the years out of context in typical “Dung Heap” fashion. So a caller called in and said, “Hey, look…” because only one hour of this program, the first hour, is on Armed Forces Radio in the first place. Just one hour a day. We had many calls from people who have subscriptions to the website say, “Hey, without this, we would be lost over here,” and a caller said, “Why don’t you do an Adopt-A-Soldier program and let people donate subscriptions to members of the armed services?” Which we did. We set it all up. I also said, when I announced this last week, I said, “I do not ask people to do things that I don’t do myself.” I made the point that I was going to be participating in this as well. I refused to specify exactly what it was, and the reason for that was modesty. I’m not going to sit here and tell you how much money I’m donating to this or donating to that, particularly when it’s my own enterprise — and I also made the point that it’s not going to be an accounting gimmick, that whatever I do is going to be money that I pay just like any other subscriber. So let me be specific about what I am going to do since there’s always some question. The idea that we would profit from this or try to profit from this struck me as absurd. I’ve been around here for 18 years doing things the way we do them on the program.
So the bottom line is this, and I just want to get this out of the way once and for all. I am matching every donation that comes in for a complimentary subscription to the Adopt-A-Soldier Program. However many there are, however many we match up, however many members of the military get matched with donors, I am matching that myself. So there is no way I will personally profit from this. There was no intent to personally profit from this by any stretch of the imagination. And yet some people assumed that that’s what was going on. They put it out there all over the place while I was absent last week. Then it got promoted throughout the fringe left-wing websites and some of our good friends on our very own radio stations saw fit to be critical as well, which I always appreciate. So the bottom line is: Whatever number of donations there are, I’m matching them. There will be no personal profit to me whatsoever. It was never intended as that. It was a caller idea. We thought it was a great idea and a great service to members of the US military and to do it this way. The Adopt-A-Soldier Program, we thought, was a cute hook to do it. It was a great idea. So there’s the bottom line of that. I will take a quick time-out here. We’ve got some audio from last week but I just want to summarize where we are right now.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Interesting question here. Just checking some e-mail during the break about the Adopt-A-Soldier Program. “Rush, why didn’t you just make it simple? Why didn’t you just donate however many subscriptions to military personnel as asked for them and it wouldn’t be nearly as complicated?” You miss the whole point. The idea is for the American people to be able to show their support for the troops. I can do that. But we had a caller who suggested the Adopt-A-Soldier Program — and I’m telling you, before I even reacted to it myself, during the next break after that call, we were deluged with people who wanted to participate in it, who wanted to show their support, people who were already subscribers who wanted to buy them for the soldiers. Some people said, “I’ll buy 50.” People said, “I’ll buy 10. I’ll donate 10.” We wanted to use this as a mechanism for the American people to show their support. We wanted to match a donor with a soldier, develop a relationship, so that the soldier would have contact with somebody who had donated the website subscription and have ongoing contact with somebody who supports what they’re doing. This was not complicated, but you have all these people trying to make this into some nefarious secret motive to make money on my part.

Let me ask you this: As you’re driving around the country and you’re listening to our friendly fellow colleagues on my own radio stations rip me to shreds over this, how many of you probably heard them say, “He doesn’t need the money. Why is doing this? He doesn’t need it. Anything he can do to make it”? Is that not a very liberal thing? Who are they to say who needs money and how much anybody needs? What business is it of theirs? It gives you a little insight in the way they think. But more than that, the idea that this whole thing started as a profit motive is absurd, and a little bit offensive — and it’s all there on the website. All you have to do is go to my website to read what I said about it to find out that’s not the case. It’s simple. So here we have a great plan posed by a caller, a great idea — the American people can show support for troops stationed around the world by donating a subscription to my website — and it gets panned; it gets ripped to shreds, largely by people who don’t “support the troops,” even though they say they do, who don’t support victory, even though they say they do. These are people that do not want success of any kind. These are people who, as I say, are demanding defeat, ladies and gentlemen, because their future, as an ideological movement, depends on it. Their hope to recapture power depends on America’s defeat. Not just in Iraq, but in the war on terror.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Christopher in Sicily, from Italy. Welcome, sir. Nice to have you on the EIB Network.
CALLER: Good day to you, sir.
RUSH: Thank you.
CALLER: Sir, let me please start off by saying thank you and major dittos from Sigonella Sicily, Naval Air Station.
RUSH: We are honored to have you on the program. Thank you.
CALLER: Thank you, sir. I’m honored to be able to listen to you for the short hour we get over here on AFN News.
RUSH: Well, an hour’s not enough.
CALLER: No, sir. Sir, let me please start off by saying what terrible, terrible things that I’ve heard today, hearing that people are bringing you down for this wonderful program that you and the American people have started by offering us a free membership to your program. And I just — for the life of me — can’t think why people would have anything negative to say about that, to where you’d be profiting from us getting a free subscription to your program and your Limbaugh newsletter. Now, when Disney offered the military free passes to get into Disney, was it put out on them that they’re trying to make an extra buck off of us, or was it that they supported the military and they were just doing a kind thing?
RUSH: Exactly right. Well, I think, Christopher, you’ve partly nailed the reason here. The people on the left have a template view of conservatives, and they’re “mean, selfish, greedy, extremists, racists, sexists, bigots, homophobes, incapable of doing anything nice.” Conservatives don’t have hearts. Conservatives are heartless, cold and cruel, according to this template. But besides that, I couldn’t care less about that. What amazes me is that every detail of the program was right on my website, and I announced it on this program. I announced it… When was it? It must have been a week ago last Friday, or something, that I announced the details. You don’t need a password to listen to the program. You don’t need a password to read the free side of the website, and yet people will go where others have mischaracterized what I’ve said and it gets passed on as truth! But anyway, Christopher, I hope you’ve signed up. I hope you or your family have logged onto the website and registered, because we can match you up with a donor in this program. That way, you will not have to be restricted to just one hour of the program on the Armed Forces Network. I appreciate your call and God bless you for your service.
END TRANSCRIPT