RUSH: Well, some people are not happy. Well, that’s not the right way to put it. Well, maybe it is the right way to put it, not happy. Some people are disappointed of my characterization of the sissy yesterday, Julian Assange as a sissy, calling it gratuitous, one of my fans, supporters, Ann Althouse.
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RUSH: I want to get to Ann Althouse, who I like, Ann Althouse has a blog, and she’s posted a piece, ‘Julian Assange — he’s a sissy; he’s a waif, purely and simply an Internet creation.’ That’s quoting me from yesterday, ‘That’s how Rush Limbaugh talked about Julian Assange on his show yesterday. What I’m interested in here is not Assange per se or what Limbaugh thinks of him. I’m interested in the gratuitous disparagement of men whose looks and personal style fail to track the masculine stereotype.’
She’s not altogether happy with this disparagement of effeminate men as effeminate. Michaele at the website has just a perfect graphic. I called Assange Peter Pan, so she’s got him here as Peter Pan with his arms spread open, his Robin Hood outfit there, and Hillary Clinton. She also doesn’t like this masculine women stereotype that we put forth in comparison to Julian Assange as a sissy. But anyway, we’ll get to this, and I’ll respond it. (interruption) Why do I say that? ‘Cause I’m concerned about the chickification of things in our culture, which is something that should not come as a surprise to anybody.
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RUSH: Okay, let’s get to Ann Althouse and her post on me and Julian Assange. Here’s her post. ‘Julian Assange –‘ she quotes me, ‘– ‘he’s a sissy; he’s a waif, purely and simply an Internet creation.’ That’s how Rush Limbaugh talked about Julian Assange on his show yesterday. What I’m interested in here is not Assange per se or what Limbaugh thinks of him. I’m interested in the gratuitous disparagement of men whose looks and personal style fail to track the masculine stereotype.’ And then she quotes me: ‘Let’s look at Julian Assange. In a contest between Janet Napolitano and Julian Assange, who do you think would win? Big Sis, there’s no question about it. Now, if Janet Napolitano, Big Sis, can put her hands down our underwear at any airport in America she chooses, why can’t she get her hands on the State Department leaker? Why can’t she get her hands around the scrawny little neck of Julian Assange and all the other people at WikiLeaks? This little guy, this little waif, this little Peter Pan, Julian Assange, does anybody really believe that is his real name?’ Then I had to bleep myself when I came up with what I think is his real name. I did. I had to bleep myself. First time in broadcast history that I had to bleep myself.
So she then posts our website graphic that we put up yesterday of Julian Assange as Peter Pan. And Hillary is there as Tinker Bell, by the way. (laughing) And then she writes: ‘Limbaugh seems to have a general aversion to effeminate men (not to mention mannish women), and he’s not processing this rather low reflex into much of anything but the repetition of the word ‘sissy.’ I like Rush Limbaugh and have defended him many times, in front of people who tend to hate you if you say anything good about him, so I think my opinion on the subject of Rush Limbaugh has special weight. I think this ‘sissy’ business is beneath him. There’s something in the linked rant that was worth saying. If you read the whole thing, you’ll see that Limbaugh was criticizing our government for not being able to catch Assange. In that context, the apparent feebleness of the man is relevant. If Limbaugh wants to say Assange is a weak little man and he’s making us look weak, that’s fine. What I don’t like is the implication that in general men who look small, thin, and weak don’t count as real men. Now, Limbaugh’s own critics frequently, gratuitously point out that Limbaugh is fat. I’m sure that creates a temptation for the big man to swing back at little men. I’m not saying he has to resist that temptation every single time, but process it into something better than saying ‘sissy’ over and over.’
Well, I did, Ann, but I had to bleep myself. ‘The subject, after all, was strength and weakness, and that was weak comic rhetoric,’ calling Julian Assange a sissy. One of the problems here is that I assume that everybody takes everything I say in context because I assume everybody listens every day and thus everybody knows what I said yesterday, last week, the day before. Most people do listen all the time every day. Some don’t. And of course this would come under the general heading of the chickification of our culture and the chickification of our society and the chickification of our institutions, which, of course, is not a good thing. And to have somebody like Julian Assange be a hero to anybody just offends my sensibilities. The guy’s a coward. He won’t show up anywhere. He hides behind the skirts of women or wherever he’s hiding. (interruption) Well, Snerdley, she is not saying that sissy is an invalid term. She’s saying it is beneath my vocabulary communicative powers and skills; that I should have come up with something better than to just consistently use the word ‘sissy’ as a means of getting a laugh. I wasn’t trying to get a laugh with this, by the way. Well, sissy is effective. I don’t think there’s anybody that doesn’t know what a sissy is, and the people that hate it most are sissies, ’cause everybody knows who they are. Sissy means effeminate and also cowardly, and isn’t what Assange is doing cowardly?
Here’s a companion story. This is from a geek tech site. It’s called The Register, and this story is posted out of San Francisco. ‘WikiLeaks is hosting its cache of confidential US State Department cables on US-based Amazon servers, just as it did with with the classified Iraq War documents it released last month. According to NetCraft’s records, the whistle-blowing website is mirroring the diplomatic cables on Amazon’s US-based EC2 service and France-based servers operated by French ISP Octopuce. The main WikiLeaks site is mirrored on Ireland-based Amazon servers.’ Now, you would think that Amazon might do something about this, but then again you might not. ‘WikiLeaks also uses a US-based domain name registrar (Dynadot) and a US-based DNS service (EveryDNS). In theory, if the US government decides that WikiLeaks has broken the law in publishing federal intelligence data, it could move to have WikiLeaks booted from such US-based servers.’
In fact, the DHS, Homeland Security and ICE could even close down these sites and take over their domain names as they are wont to do with piracy sites that might impact the US entertainment industry. That’s why I said yesterday, if only Assange would start making stolen rap CDs available, we’d make a move on him. We’ve shut down 75 domains that were making available pirated music and so forth. But pirated State Department data? Well, not much we can do about it. And that begs the question, why not? Now, Peter King, congressman, Long Island, thinks that Obama identifies with a guy like Assange and that that’s why he doesn’t seem all that upset about it. I said so yesterday in my own inimitable way, which is, okay, this is proving truly embarrassing and disconcerting to the US and isn’t that the idea of this administration, isn’t that the point? Doesn’t Obama think this country’s guilty? Is he really that upset about all this? In a professional legal sense, who really is harmed here? It is all coming out of the State Department. This is Hillary.
And now we got a story today that the cables said that Hillary was ordering State Department employees to spy on UN diplomats. That’s totally believable. I mean this is the bunch that had 900 FBI files when they were in the White House. So it makes total sense that Hillary would be ordering her people to spy on these diplomats at the United Nations. Then she went down to, was it Argentina, and she did an in-depth study of the drug use and other personality quirks of this Cristina babe, this president down there. So Hillary has assigned herself the task of spying on people at the UN and determining the fitness of this Cristina babe. Hillary is treating the United Nations like Bill’s bimbos. You know, creating dossiers on them. It could be the reaction to Reverse Operation Chaos. I don’t think you can take that out of this equation. My Reverse Operation Chaos, the behavior of the Clintons here. And you have this little sissy, Julian Assange, thrown in the middle of it. Assange is a community organizer on the world stage, and who’s his enemy? The United States of America.
This little gutless wonder hates this country and he’s doing his best to harm, damage, embarrass, and impugn the country, and, frankly, I just have to say that the protestations of outrage coming from our government just don’t seem to have a whole lot of energy behind ’em, from Holder and his threatened lawsuits and Hillary and whatever. There doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of outrage over this. New York Congressman Peter King says Obama can identify with a guy like Julian Assange, who is effeminate and cowardly. I mean, look, to those of you who are offended by my description of Assange as a sissy, would you want him in the foxhole with you? I mean that’s a common way of asking, would you want this guy to have your back? Is this somebody that you could depend on?
Look, the chickification of our culture and society is rampant. We’ve become defensive. We’ve become politically correct. We’ve been overly concerned with everybody’s feelings about things, thinking that we’re in charge of them and we can manipulate them, and all of this. I mean I never said Ellsberg was a sissy. I never said that Gordon Liddy was a sissy. I never said that E. Howard Hunt was a sissy, but I did say that Julian Assange is. (imitating Assange) ‘They are attempting to destroy our organization.’ He does this, he gets on Skype or something from whatever little hole that he lives in and goes on television in Arab countries to explain what he’s doing. Big whoop. Why don’t you go on Fox, Mr. Assange, or go on CNN even, or go on MSNBC, they’d love you.
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RUSH: (laughing) There’s the sissy right there, there’s Assange, look at that, look at that picture there on Fox. Little twerp. How’s that? Is that better? Well, we’re differing the names, a little variety in there.
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RUSH: Everybody thinks I’ve been too hard on Julian… Well, some people think I’ve been too hard to Julian Assange, calling him a sissy over and over again. I could have been harder. This is what people don’t stop to consider. I could have been much harder. For example, I coulda said that he looks just like Bill Maher.
I think he’d rather be called a sissy, don’t you?