RUSH: Bedford, Indiana with Tracy. Tracy, thanks so much for the call. I appreciate your patience.
CALLER: Rush, it is such a pleasure to talk to you! I cannot believe I got through. I’ve been listening to you since your TV days, so it’s a long time.
RUSH: That would be back to 1992. Thanks very much.
CALLER: Listen, we’re freezing our tails off in Indiana, so I for one am happy about global warming. I can’t even imagine how cold it would be without it.
RUSH: Yeah, right. (Laughing.)
CALLER: Okay, here’s my problem. My son — three or four weeks ago; two, three, four weeks ago — came home from school and he had seen that picture of the polar bears on the “melting” ice, and he was really upset about it, and he told me that the solution was we had to turn off our lights more at home, and I laughed, and I didn’t take it seriously because it sounded so ridiculous. I said, “You’ve gotta be kidding me,” but I could tell he was really upset about it, and he said, “No, mommy. Something from the plants where we make the electricity gets up into the air and it’s causing the ice to melt.” Now, he’s pretty levelheaded, he’s only ten, about stuff…
RUSH: Something from the plants! See, it doesn’t matter whether he’s right or wrong. This is what he believes, and this is what he took from the lesson: “Something from the plants is getting in the air and causing the ice to melt.” He believes it.
CALLER: He does!
RUSH: Whatever the teacher said, that’s what he heard.
CALLER: That’s exactly right.
RUSH: And the melting is stranding polar bears.
CALLER: Yes!
RUSH: Right.
CALLER: Yes, and what I wanted to ask you is how to combat this, because he’s levelheaded about most things but he loves animals, and I do not want him turning into some kind of environmental wacko because of this crazy stuff he’s hearing at school. So honestly, what do you suggest? I’m real serious about this. It sounds ridiculous, but —
RUSH: You’re asking me?
CALLER: — what do you think?
RUSH: I’ve never been a parent, never had a desire to be a parent, and you’re asking me how to counsel a ten-year-old.
CALLER: Well, you are brilliant, so, take a crack at it anyway.
RUSH: Well, but a ten-year-old is not in my league. If I start talking to a ten-year-old about this with their attention span, I’ll lose them in 30 seconds.
CALLER: Well, all I could think to say because it caught me so off guard was, “Well, other scientists don’t believe that,” but he saw the picture, and I didn’t know where to go to get information that contradicted that. I really didn’t. It caught me totally off guard.
RUSH: All right, well, here’s one thing you can do. I don’t know what his reading level is, but there are enough pictures in this. The story that I referenced earlier today about the hoax that is the polar bear picture, I’m going to have that linked on my website there. Are you a subscriber at RushLimbaugh.com?
CALLER: No.
RUSH: Ah.
CALLER: Darn it.
RUSH: For crying out loud.
CALLER: (Laughing.)
RUSH: See?
CALLER: Okay.
RUSH: Problem solved, if you were.
CALLER: Well, my husband’s an associate pastor; we never have any extra money for all this stuff because he doesn’t think I’d sit on the computer that long and read it. So it’s a long story but no, I’m not.
RUSH: I understand. It’s marriage.
CALLER: Yeah. (Laughing.)
RUSH: She really agreed with that pretty quickly.
CALLER: (Laughing.)
RUSH: I tell you what I’m going to do: Out of the goodness of my heart and the desire to help your child, I’m going to make you a subscriber. Do you use a computer?
CALLER: Oh, yes, I do! I even have a Mac, can you believe it?
RUSH: Well, that’s good. That’s great. They’re easier.
CALLER: Yeah.
RUSH: Now, I’m gonna make you a one-year complimentary subscriber, and you get the Limbaugh Letter as well. So when the call is over, hold on. Somebody will get on the phone and tell you what you need to do to become a member. You can probably start using the website this afternoon. We update it between 5:30 and six every day to reflect the contents of today’s show, and we’ll have the link up that has all the information that I cited in the first hour of the program about the bogusness of this whole polar bear thing, and the bogusness of the people. Now, the picture is there, but you’ll be able to show your son. I don’t know how well he reads. I don’t know ten-year-olds that well.
CALLER: He’s pretty efficient. He’s a good reader.
RUSH: Okay. Here’s the problem: even when you show him this and even when you read it with him about the hoax — that was not a broken off part of a glacier or an iceberg. It was something created by the waves of the ocean, an ice sculpture, and the polar bears went out to it. You’ll read that polar bears can swim a hundred miles.
CALLER: See, that’s good. That’s all good information. That will help convince him.
RUSH: They were out there on their own, and the guy that is claiming credit for the picture, a guy named Crosbie, was actually out digging a hole in the ice on another occasion, for some study of ice thickness and it was so much thicker than he thought that he writes about how they had to go get a bigger auger and this sort of thing, and there’s a picture of his buddy with the shotgun, and the reason for the shotgun is to protect them against polar bears!
CALLER: I heard you say that! I was laughing so hard!
RUSH: If they were attacked by polar bears, they were going to kill them.
CALLER: Yes! (laughing.) I know. Isn’t that crazy?
RUSH: Look, what you’re up against is, you’re the parent, and the teacher is the authority figure.
CALLER: I know, I know.
RUSH: So you gotta be careful because the kid saw the picture, and he wants to believe what he wants to believe. This is sort of the secret in how they’re so seductive. People are oriented toward believing that helpless entities like bears, supposedly helpless, are being destroyed by man. It’s a cruel psychological hoax that they’re playing on everybody, so it’s going to be a challenge for you, but you’ll have some evidence there. If it were me, I wouldn’t even get into the science. He’s ten years old.
CALLER: Yeah.
RUSH: I would go about it much as I did last Friday, just in a common-sense fashion. More than anything, rather than trying to convince him I would try to persuade him — and he’s not too young to do this — to be curious about everything he’s told. Don’t just accept everything.
CALLER: I did that, yeah.
RUSH: Be curious about it and challenge it and be somewhat suspicious of things until he can figure it out himself or ask other people about it, because you can tell him there are people that do have an agenda that he grow up thinking what he’s thinking now for political purposes.
CALLER: Yeah.
RUSH: You might tell him, I don’t know, that there’s very little science associated with all this, that it’s all politics. That’s all true, I just don’t know what his acumen is and his perception of things political is at age ten. So you know him and I don’t. You’re going to have to figure all that out yourself. But you can start with what you’ll see on the website.
CALLER: You don’t know how much I appreciate that. Thank you so much.
RUSH: You bet. Now, don’t go away
CALLER: I won’t.
RUSH: The guy on the phone here, as soon as we get to the next call you’ll be on hold and he’ll talk to you, okay?
CALLER: Can I tell you something?
RUSH: Sure.
CALLER: I’ve been mad at you all weekend because you picked the Bears. If you would eat some crow about the Super Bowl, I would really appreciate it.
RUSH: Well, did you hear the whole pick?
CALLER: No.
RUSH: Well!
CALLER: I didn’t. I had to leave. I turned it on at like 2:58 and you said, “Okay, I pick the Bears.”
RUSH: I picked the Bears to be contrary.
CALLER: Okay.
RUSH: Because everybody was picking the Colts, and I don’t go along with conventional wisdom, in my little office pool I was the only one who picked the Bears.
CALLER: Okay. So I’m okay with that.
RUSH: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
CALLER: I’m okay with that.
RUSH: If you look at this game on paper, statistics, there’s no way the Bears can win it. That’s why they’re the underdogs; that’s why everybody was picking the Colts.
CALLER: Okay. I just wanted to clear it up because I know you do things sometimes to be contrarian. I didn’t hear it all.
RUSH: Okay, it was a contest: Who do I make mad here, Indianapolis or Chicago?
CALLER: Yeah, well, you really did make me mad.
RUSH: Well, but Indianapolis is a smaller city.
CALLER: (Laughing.) That’s true.
RUSH: All right.
CALLER: Okay, we’re good.
RUSH: All right, all right.
CALLER: We’re good!
RUSH: Don’t hang up.
CALLER: (Laughing.) Thanks, Rush.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Tracy in Indiana, I know you’re still out there, still gleeful and ecstatic over becoming a new subscriber to RushLimbaugh.com. I should have said something to you during your call asking and seeking my advice on how to deal with your ten-year-old child that came home from a propaganda session on global warming. Look, here may be the simplest way to do this, after you use the stuff you’re gonna see on my website later this afternoon. You all are a religious family. (I think she said that her husband is a pastor.) One of the simplest ways I think to deal with all this is your ten-year-old comes home and says, “Mommy, we’ve gotta turn the lights off because there’s something in the plants that’s heating up the planet, melting the ice.” One thing you could try, Tracy, is a very simple question: “Son, do you really think God would create and design a planet and systems where something that natural causes disaster and destruction — and if he did, why hasn’t been happening since the beginning of time?” (interruption)
Right. Oh, oh, oh, yeah electrical plants, the electrical plants. Well, okay, it still follows because you could then say to your son, “Son, do you really think a God who created human beings, who can create inventions that improve the quality of life and have done so for years — the quality of life on this planet has never, ever been better — do you really think God would create people who, in improving their own lives, would destroy the planet?” That power plants are actually what’s causing ice to melt? There’s a number of different ways here. The challenge here is ten years old. I don’t talk to ten-year-olds, and when I do I still am tempted to say, “Goo-goo and gaga.” In this regard I’m woefully — and I will admit it — inept in trying to figure out how to reach them. A ten-year-old. They run away from me in tears. You know, my voice is loud. I’m tempted to spank ’em if they get too loud. I know that’s not the way.