RUSH: Tyson in Hays, Kansas, welcome to the EIB Network. Hello.
CALLER: How you doing, Rush?
RUSH: Very well, sir. Thank you. I love Chad Ocho Cinco! I mean I love all these guys in the NFL. They do something I wish I could do. They do something I wish I had done. That’s such a rare fraternity, especially to win a Super Bowl championship. You know how few people will ever experience that feeling? I idolize some of these guys for their ability. Anyway, I’m sorry about that, Tyson. What’s up?
CALLER: Well, I just had a comment about the swine flu. The media is completely just blowing this out of proportion and I heard you a couple days ago, I listen to you every day, you called it hog flu or the pig flu or something like that?
RUSH: Yeah, you know, I apologize. Are you in the pig business?
CALLER: I grew up doing it —
RUSH: I apologize.
CALLER: — since I was 12 years old.
RUSH: Well, God bless you. You’ve been in the pig business since you’re 12, that’s devotion. I’ve been chastised by fellow pig business people in previous phone calls, and they got mad at me for calling the stimulus bill a Porkulus bill because, you know, that was discrimination against pork as well. It’s just sometimes I love the way it sounds, the pig flu. But, you’re right. I’m scaring people into thinking that they get the flu from eating pork products. That’s your fear, right?
CALLER: Yeah, there’s a big misconception that it has something to do with a pig. There’s absolutely nothing to do with hogs.
RUSH: You’re right. I’ll try not to do it again because I understand. I’m still the nation’s biggest capitalist and you guys are fighting against all kinds of odds out there, and I do not mean to be making your job tougher.
CALLER: Yeah, but if you pay attention to the market and everything, I mean when that came out, it played a pretty big role in the hog business —
RUSH: I know.
CALLER: — and made it go down and people kept saying it was pig flu, the swine flu.
RUSH: Oh, yeah. Yeah. It’s bad out there.
CALLER: It makes people who are ignorant and don’t know the facts talking about how many people are dying because of these pigs.
RUSH: Yeah. Yeah, I know, it’s not true, and I know it’s bad out there.
CALLER: It’s the flu and people die from the regular flu all the time and —
RUSH: Yeah. Yeah. I tell you what. I’m going to have some bacon in your honor tonight to try to assuage some of my guilt.
CALLER: There you go. Get a little filet mignon.
RUSH: Tyson, thanks much.
CALLER: All right. Thank you.
RUSH: You bet. Speaking of all this, now CNN is going ape over my refusal to take the H1N1 vaccine. And let’s go back to MSNBC, Dylan Ratigan was talking to Kathleen Sebelius. Ratigan says, ‘I think Rush Limbaugh, how absurd his portrayal may be and his character is in many ways. He represents a point of view held by a certain percentage of our population, which is fundamentally so skeptical of the vaccine and the vaccine business and the government, period, that they may be willing to forgo the protections that could be afforded by something like this. How do you break through the skepticism of Limbaugh?’
SEBELIUS: This vaccine program is totally voluntary. Nobody is making anybody do anything —
RUSH: All right, stop the tape, stop the tape a minute and recue it. The story yesterday was, Sebelius, ‘You must take it,’ and that is what I was reacting to. I am not anti-vaccine. I am not anti-good health. I’m standing up for freedom and liberty, and I am not one of these people that thinks people in the government are infallible, that they never make mistakes and all they ever want to do is help us and protect us. What they really are are people who think we are incapable of taking care of ourselves or little nannies who want to control every aspect of all of our lives, and I’m not in that game. So I don’t even need to hear the rest of the sound bite. Coming up, I’ll get to it pretty soon, CNN did a segment on my ‘Screw you, Ms. Sebelius,’ they did it on MSNBC yesterday, and all this that I’m influencing people to not take the vaccine and they’re going to get sick and so forth. And I’ve got a compromise on this. I understand the people in the pork business do not want me to call this the pig flu or even the swine flu. And I don’t want to take the time to say H1N1 every time I have to talk about this, so I’m just going to call it the Rosie O’Donnell Virus.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: I promised you a piece of audio. It is a montage here. It’s hilarious. CNN’s segment on me saying ‘Screw you, Ms. Sebelius!’ They do a report on ‘Rush Limbaugh’s new pet peeve,’ and they ask Sebelius to respond — and she does, and on the video, they have a Chyron (laughing) that says ‘Screw you, Ms. Sebelius!’ (laughing) while she is answering the question. Here’s the montage of the bit.
REPORTER: Rush Limbaugh has a new pet peeve: the H1N1 flu vaccine.
RUSH ARCHIVE: And now you’ve got Kathleen Sebelius saying you must take the pig flu vaccine. You must take it. Screw you, Ms. Sebelius! I am not going to take it precisely because you’re now telling me I must.
REPORTER: The health secretary says Limbaugh is mistaken.
SEBELIUS: The vaccination campaign is voluntary. No one in the government is saying anybody —
RUSH: Now, stop it tape a minute. At this point they put the Chyron up underneath her: ‘Screw you, Ms. Sebelius!’ (laughing)
SEBELIUS: — must do X, Y, or Z. This is made exactly the same way seasonal flu vaccine is being made year in and year out. A hundred million people a year get seasonal flu shots. We’ve got years of track records of safety. So this is safe. It’s effective.
REPORTER: Thirty-eight percent of parents do not plan to get their children vaccinated against H1N1; and perhaps even more striking, another poll shows 27% of health care workers will not get vaccinated. Another 35% are unsure. The consequence, says Sebelius: A lot of people will get sick, some very seriously.
RUSH: And of course now I, El Rushbo, will be blamed for all these other people not taking the vaccine. So let me state, folks: It’s totally up to you. I do not… In fact I just remembered I have to do something. Yesterday in the interview with Jamie Gangel for the Today Show (it will run in two parts at 7:30 on Monday and Tuesday) Jamie Gangel pressed me on my concept of my power.
‘You have a lot of power. What’s your thought about that?’
I said, ‘I don’t think about it. I probably do have power, but I don’t get up every morning and say, ‘Okay, how can I manipulate things to get the outcomes I want?’ That’s not at all what’s in my mind when I do this program. I’m a broadcaster and what’s in my mind is doing a good show, holding the audience as long as I can, as big an audience as I can get so I can really charge confiscatory advertising rates even in a recession, which I have succeeded in doing.’
‘It’s about ratings!’
‘Yes!’ I said. ‘It’s about ratings!’
But I promised her that I would relinquish my power today. So I, El Rushbo — and what better place to do it than here in a segment about the H1N1 vaccine? Ladies and gentlemen, I am not from the government and I will never tell you what you must or must not do. I will never tell you what you can nor cannot do. I will never tell you I am infallible. I will never assume that you are brain dead and incompetent. In fact, quite the contrary. I speak to you each and every day because I have a profound respect for your intelligence and your informed status. I have profound respect for all of you. I do not condescend or look down upon any of you. Contrary to the nannies in our government who think you are incompetent and incapable of handling your own money, buying your own car, handling your own health, getting your own job, getting to school on time.
Whatever it is, they don’t think you can handle it — and they want more and more of you to be as incompetent as they see everybody else. So in a discussion of power, the power everybody needs to be concerned with is that concentrated power in Washington, the government and the people in it, and now the supporters of that power rather than the people who question it and probe it. That’s what the media used to do, but no longer. They simply are partners in that power. They also look at you as incompetent, incapable, unintelligent, childlike, incapable of understanding the great task they have each day to report to you the news. And when you complain to them, you are wrong because you are not sophisticated enough to understand the intricacies and the importance of their work.
It’s the only business where the customer is always wrong, the only business where the customer is always a sap. The news business is the only business where the customer, the consumer, is always a blithering idiot. I, my friends, do not look at you this way. However there are many people out there afraid of my power. MSNBC and CNN are deathly afraid that I single-handedly am inspiring the millions of unsuspecting, stupid-dupe Americans to not take the vaccine for the H1N1 virus. And of course I have never, ever urged anybody to or not to take the vaccine. I simply said, ‘I’ve never taken a flu shot. I’ve never had a doctor tell me I should.’ I don’t really react well to people who aren’t experts telling me what I have to do, especially if they’re ‘from the government,’ which means that on average the are wrong, 89, 90% of the time. But in the interests of comity (c-o-m-i-t-y), I hereby relinquish my power. Whatever power I have, I am giving it up. I now admit I am powerless over you. I’m not giving up my power over myself, I can’t do it, but I relinquishing it — and I hope everybody in the State-Controlled Media hears me do this. This is a major, major shift for me to acknowledge that I am giving up and relinquishing my power. It’s gone.