The Apology Culture

RUSH: A couple of See, I Told You Sos before we get on to the rest of today’s program, from American Spectator today, it’s www.Spectator.org. It’s a piece by Jennifer Rubin. I’ve mentioned over the course of the many recent broadcast weeks, that we seem now to live not only in a very wimpish and gutless culture, as evidenced by the way the Brits dealt with the Iranians. By the way, don’t think that wasn’t a big win for the Iranians. The Iranians have announced national nuke day! We may as well make this a national holiday, folks. Now the US may not be the only world superpower. National nuke day has been announced by Ahmadinejad. Libs will be happy that an enemy of the US is on the way to getting nuclear weapons, but if you’re the Iranians, and you hostage-take 15 sailors who start confessing within 24 hours and whining and moaning, what are you going to learn from it? You’re going to learn that nobody in the West is going to stop you from ramping up your nuke arsenal, and you also learn that you can play Western media like a Stradivarius. But we do. We live in a culture where saying you’re sorry is supposed to cover for everything. In fact, you’re supposed to say more than, ‘I’m sorry,’ after you do something or say something that people find horrible.

I still find it amazing that people should be fired for words as opposed to deeds. If we’re going to fire people on the radio for things they say, how about firing people like Al Sharpton for things that he does? Well, let’s take away Sharpton’s ministry from him. Tawana Brawley, anybody? How many lives did that actually harm? Anyway, we have all this sensitivity to words out there, and people go out there and they apologize, and in addition to apologizing, they say, ‘Well, you know, this really wasn’t me. That’s not who I am.’ Yes, it is! It’s who you are. If you said it, that’s who you are. Stand behind it. Don’t wimp out and start apologizing, especially if you have a track record of that kind of stuff. Anyway, I have made note of this cultural phenomenon in which we live, that we all have to run around and apologize, and I remember repeating this after I talked to Charlton Heston. The first time I interviewed Charlton Heston for the Limbaugh Letter, I noted in the interview that at the time he’d been married 50 years. I said, ‘How did you pull that off?’ He said, ‘Well, it’s really quite simple. I had to learn three words, and I had to use them often. ‘Honey, I was wrong.’ Just get it out of the way.’

No matter whether you’re wrong or not, just say you were. Say, ‘Honey, I was wrong,’ and it fixes everything and it stops everything dead in its tracks. Lo and behold, here’s a piece in the American Spectator today by Jennifer Rubin about all these people saying things and how they deal with it properly and how those who deal with it incorrectly do so, and she’s got the pull quote in here: ‘Mea culpas won’t immunize a candidate or eliminate a story but they can minimize the pain and maybe engender some sympathy. If politicians learned what husbands have known for years — you might as well apologize right away and get it over with — they would fare better. Besides, heartfelt apologies play very well on YouTube.’ See? I have told you this. Just apologize. In fact, apologize before you say something and apologize after you say whatever you want to say and the country will love you, and they’ll think you’re sensitive. Husbands have known this forever, as I pointed out after having learned it from Charlton Heston. I don’t know how many of you will remember this. Snerdley, you will. Do you remember Laurie from back in the WABC days when we were there? She was a broadcast engineer for a while, and she wanted to move on up.

I, of course, wasn’t married, yet I needed the services (some of the services) that a wife provides. So I set Laurie up, said, ‘Why don’t you just start doing things for me,’ and I called her my ‘rent-a-wife,’ remember that? She’d run around. She did the grocery shopping. She did all this sort of stuff, and predictably, the women in my audience had a fit. They just thought it was the biggest put-down on the face of the earth. ‘How could you do this?’ It was demeaning. It was insulting. It was beyond the pale. ‘How could you do this, Rush?’ and this came after the period where I tried requiring a photo from every female caller before they would be allowed on the air, and that worked. Women were sending in photos in droves and they were coming in various kinds of photos from all over the country, and of course even my sister-in-law and a couple friends blew up at me. One night I was in Bemelmans, the bar at the Carlyle — and, you know, Bemelmans is a reserved and refined place, and they’ve got some piano music in there, sometimes a singer.

I was getting yelled at in there to the point that people, other patrons were saying, ‘What’s going on over there?’ pointing at us in our corner of the room, and my sister-in-law giving me grief over (laughing) requiring pictures of women callers. Look, to tell you the truth, it wasn’t my idea. It was Mario Snerdley’s idea. It was Mario Snerdley on the prowl. I just thought it was funny. I decided to do it. But I have to take credit for it (the blame for it), because Mario Snerdley could have had the idea and if I didn’t execute the idea nobody would have known it. So I can’t pass it off on him, but then came the rent-a-wife, and it just blew people away. Well, looky here. This is from Sky.com, Sky News and the BBC: WWW.Rent-a-wife.com. See how on the cutting edge I am? Here we’ve got two stories today, one in the American Spectator saying: hey, if you politicians and public figures get in trouble, just learn what every husband has known: ‘Honey, I was wrong.’ Say it often. Say it loud. Say it soon. It turns out that it’s a bogus website, but it claims to rent out wives and ‘deliver them to homes in boxes.’ It’s been blasted by women’s groups across Belgium. ‘They have a 35-second clip showing a man strapping one wife into a box to be collected and going to the door to find the postman with a new delivery, a smiling blonde who waves through the perspex cover of her box.’ So again, they’re just now picking up on this and bringing it to you, even though it’s a bogus site. But the Rent-a-wife concept and the ‘Honey, I was wrong,’ over a decade ago on this program, just now hitting the real world.