RUSH: To St. George, Utah, and Joe. Nice to have you here. Hello.
CALLER: Hi, Rush. How you doing? It’s been a couple of years.
RUSH: Very well, sir. Thank you.
CALLER: You know, it’s hard for me to get into this without sounding cocky, but you started your show on my birthday, the day I retired from broadcasting. I’ve been doing radio talk since 1969. And I have followed your career very, very closely, in fact all the radio talk shows. I just wanted to say that, of all the ones that I have seen, heard, been associated with over the years, you’re the best. I’m not sure you’re the smartest, but you’re certainly the best.
RUSH: (laughing)
CALLER: Because you handle the callers and you handle the subject matter so well.
RUSH: Well, thank you. Thank you very much. That’s very nice of you to say, Joe.
CALLER: Well, you know, we don’t often get a chance to express our admiration for those of us in the field. I mean I still consider myself a broadcaster even though it’s been, what, 20 years now?
RUSH: Yeah, easy, if you retired in ’69, yeah.
CALLER: Yeah. I’ve been trying to get through to you for a couple years, or for a couple or three months, four months maybe, you know, one thing I never heard discussed was the fact that we did, in our infinite wisdom, turn the Congress over to the Democrats two years before the Obama debacle. It was Barney Frank and Chris Dodd and the Democratic Party who purposely engineered the collapse of the financial system. That didn’t happen by accident, and it had nothing to do with George Bush. Sorry about that, Mr. Obama. And sorry about that, American people. We’ve gotta start paying more attention to who we put in the Congress. Anyway, it’s just a real pleasure to have a chance to express my admiration for you. You do a remarkably good job, and, you know, there are a lot of other guys out there trying to do what you do and actually have some excellent ideas and their heart’s in the right place, but they ought to all take a week off and just listen to the way you handle your show. And maybe Hannity might even back off long enough to let his guests get a word in edgewise.
RUSH: (laughing.)
CALLER: Maybe Mark Levin wouldn’t scare everybody off calling ’em nuts.
RUSH: That’s his shtick.
CALLER: Hang up on them. You know, Mark Levin knows what’s going on, but he surely doesn’t know how to be a radio guy.
RUSH: Well, now, everybody has their own style, and they have their own objective and their own purpose. And both of those guys are friends of mine.
CALLER: I know. You probably gave Hannity his beginning when you were using him as a back-up there for a while. You probably put him on the map. You think?
RUSH: Well, the way I look at that is he was a guest host, but if he didn’t have the talent he wouldn’t be where he is now. I mean it’s not just because he hosted this show. It may have been because he hosted this show it expanded his visibility, but you can’t take away the talent from these guys, they’re all good.
CALLER: Oh, yeah.
RUSH: I appreciate your comments to me. I really do, especially if you were in the business a long time. You know what amazes me, Joe?
CALLER: What?
RUSH: And I take advantage of it, is so many people in the other media, television and print, even a lot of people on cable TV, do not understand broadcasting. You referred to yourself here as a broadcaster. Not a talk show host. And a lot of people do not understand at all what this is about, what the purpose is, how you go about it, what the business model is, they haven’t the slightest understanding. They look at it as just another arm of a political operation, which it’s not. And some people who try to do this try to make it a political operation rather than a broadcasting enterprise because they don’t have the slightest idea about broadcasting. Broadcasting has its own skill set, talent requirements, so forth and so on. And most people who judge this and are critics of it haven’t the slightest clue what it is.
CALLER: That’s true.
RUSH: I think in a way their ignorance of that helps me to benefit from it even more.
CALLER: Well, listen, you keep doing what you’re doing.
RUSH: I’ll do that.
CALLER: Don’t change your style, don’t change anything. Just keep doing what you’re doing.
RUSH: I ought to call you a nut and hang up on you. (laughing) Get off my phone, you nut!
CALLER: (laughing) But I bought Levin’s book, I want you to know.
RUSH: Well, you’ve gotta say that’s a great book.
CALLER: Oh, yeah, it is, absolutely.
RUSH: And that book sold over a million copies, I think.
CALLER: Yeah, it did, great book. And Hannity, you know, does this thing, he was out in Provo, Utah, one time on the Fourth of July, does a lot of great things —
RUSH: The freedom concerts. We all have our roles, Joe. I remember I went to the National Review 50th anniversary dinner at a very ornate building, museum in Washington, DC. And some of the invited guests there were wounded from Walter Reed. I was told that there were about eight of them, and I was told they wanted to meet me. So I said, ‘Sure.’ I was escorted over to where they were and they were pretty severely injured, missing eyes, arms, legs. And I got really embarrassed and humbled as they started thanking me, and I looked at them, and I said, ‘You’re thanking me? All I do is talk on the radio.’ ‘No, no, no, Mr. Limbaugh, we all have our roles. And you support what we do, and you defend us.’ And they were very appreciative. I’ve never forgotten that, ‘we all have our roles.’ And everybody involved in what is right now an effort to save the country, we all have our roles, and everybody has their own way of going about it, and we hope that the combined effort here is ultimately successful. It looks like it’s going to be. Joe, thanks again very much. I really appreciate it.
This is Alex in Minneapolis. Great to have you, sir, you’re on the EIB Network. Hello.
CALLER: Hello, Rush Limbaugh, it’s a real honor to talk to you. I wanted to do this for some time now, and I have a question.
RUSH: Yeah.
CALLER: Why does MSNBC, CNN, and HLN, why do they keep doing their liberal bias? It’s not where the money is anymore. They’re losing viewers and they’re losing cash from advertisers.
RUSH: Let me ask you this. Why does the Democrat Party keep doing what it’s doing, which is going to guarantee its shellacking defeat in November?
CALLER: Because they believe if they can get something through now, it might help them and preserve them for the future.
RUSH: They believe it, they do it because they are committed to the end result and they will pay with their careers to get it. That’s how committed they are. The same is true of people in the media. They are so committed to the Obama agenda, they are so committed to remaking this country that they will gladly suffer these losses: jobs, profits, and so forth. They think that their business should be insulated from profit. I’ll never forget Dan Rather, when Larry Tisch took over and bought CBS first thing he did was look at the news division and said this place hasn’t made a profit in 20 years and laid off 200 people. Dan Rather had a cow, (imitating Rather) ‘We’re the Tiffany Network, why, this is the news division, why, you can’t do this, we shouldn’t be held to bottom line costs.’ They think their mission is far above simple capitalism. They do all wish to get paid and paid a lot, and they don’t think that should be a pain for anybody who’s paying them. These people are committed.
In fact, Alex, it’s even worse than you think. Those people, that’s the one business I know of where the customer is always wrong. You write a letter to the editor about the newspaper, they publish it, they’ll rip you to shreds for not understanding what they do. If you call and complain about bias they’ll tell you they’re not, that they’re not liberals, your mind has been poisoned by people like me. They don’t think they’re biased. They don’t think they’re liberal. They are that ignorant. They think that what they are is just natural, just is, and that we are the kooks. And when they see people abandoning them in droves, they say, ‘Okay, fine, we don’t want you anyway.’ They have a bigger investment in defeating us than they do in defeating terrorists who want to blow up the country. I think that one of the reasons why Ben Nelson and Blanche Lincoln and some of these people who know better voted for Harry Reid’s health care bill is not because they support the bill and not because they think it’s good. They were gotten to. And it was said you cannot let the Republicans win, no matter what, you can’t let the Republicans win.
The partisan divide in this country is worse than anybody thinks, and it exists on the left as a life or death situation. It is career versus death situation. That’s how committed and how fervently they are committed to it and look at it. They don’t want to be bothered with profit, they don’t like losing their jobs, and they refuse to admit why. Well, they’re a blaming it on the Internet. The Internet. They don’t understand, it’s content, content, content. Anything in the media is about content. People will go for the content they want wherever it is and if they’re not getting it someplace, they’ll go someplace else. And they’re never going to change the content at the New York Times, CBS, NBC, they’re never going to do it. Look at MSNBC. I don’t even know how to describe what they do. It’s worse than propaganda. It’s indescribable what they do. And they think they’re kicking ass. They think they are hitting home runs. They think they are helping defeat Republicans and conservatives. And that’s what they want to do.
I know what you’re saying. ‘Well, Rush, aren’t you trying to beat liberals?’ I’m trying to save the country, folks. Yeah, we gotta defeat them to save the country but I’m not trying to defeat them just to defeat them and I don’t have a personal dislike for any of them. They can’t say that about us. Their dislike and their animus is personal, as well as issue oriented and ideological. You can tell by the over-the-top mischaracterizations, character assassinations, criticism and so forth and so on. That’s a good call. I’m glad you asked me that. Needed to be said.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: I was just talking about it, and it just happened. I was just talking about it, and it just happened. More positions are being cut from the Obama administration. ‘Los Angeles Times to Cut 80 Jobs — Tribune Co’s Los Angeles Times said it would close its printing operations in Orange County, California, resulting in about 80 layoffs, as part of cost-cutting measures.’ So certain parts of the Obama administration are being cut.