RUSH: I gotta tell you a little story. I got an invitation to attend a screening of an HBO made-for-TV movie. The screening was last night at the Time Warner Center. I went. I was invited by columnist Cindy Adams of the New York Post, which today, by the way, endorses Obama. This is after Rupert Murdoch has all these fundraisers for Hillary. Whooo. Anyway, that’s off the beaten path. Now, you can imagine an HBO screening in New York for a movie starring Susan Sarandon. She plays Doris Duke, the tobacco heiress, and the movie is basically about Doris Duke’s time with that butler, Bernard Lafferty. So I said, ‘Okay, I’m game. I’ll go.’ I show up and there are 150 people there, maybe a little bit more, and there’s a little cocktail party in the giant room before we’re ushered into the screening room. It was the usual New York entertainment and literati crowd, a bunch of progressives, liberals, shall we say, many of whom I’ve known of but I’ve never met.
She asked me to appear with her as a guest on a couple TV pilots, one up in New Haven, Connecticut, and one I flew out to California for. I did it for peaceful coexistence, you know, supporting a fellow colleague, throwing politics out the window. So I saw her there with her boyfriend, a guy named Steve who’s been her boyfriend from back in the WABC days. She’s got a purse, she’s got this big coat and she’s trying to take it off, and my strategery here: Make the preemptive strike. So I walked over, I gave her a huge hug and a little peck on the cheek. She has no idea who it is because I came up from her left side, she didn’t even see me yet. So I give her a little peck on the cheek, ‘Joy, how are you?’ and she starts sort of trying to push me away, then looks at me, and said, ‘What the hell are you doing here?’ And then we started talking and so forth. Now, she told a version of this on The View today that is not correct. She exaggerated. I’m not even going to bother playing it, but Regis Philbin was there last night and was an eyewitness, and he talked about it on his show this morning, and this is what he said he saw.
KELLY RIPA: Okay.
PHILBIN: Rush Limbaugh, who came with Cindy Adams, I haven’t seen Rush in years, you know, he lives down there in Florida. There he is and when he saw Joy Behar — now, they are on two different poles of politics, do you know what I mean?
RIPA: Yes, they are.
PHILBIN: He’s a conservative. She’s a liberal. He went over, took her in his arms.
RIPA: In his arms?
PHILBIN: And gave her a great big giant bear Rush Limbaugh hug.
RIPA: (gasping) And what happened next?
PHILBIN: And I must tell you, so I go up to Joy Behar, she said, ‘He gave me a hug.’ And I said, ‘Yeah.’ And you know something I noticed? Joy Behar’s face was flushed. She enjoyed it. (laughter) She loved it! Yes, I saw that with my own eyes. There could be something developing there; I’m not sure.
RIPA: Hmm. Interesting.
PHILBIN: It became the talk of the night.
RUSH: It became the talk of the night. Preemptive strike, Mr. Snerdley. (laughing) You kill them with kindness. I haven’t seen her, gotta be 12 years, or maybe even longer than that. I don’t know. Time flies by so fast, I get lost in tabulating the years.