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Idiot Bird Extinct, Future of World at Risk

by Rush Limbaugh - Dec 1,2004


Mexico and other Third World countries, and this vice president made to look like Cheney, at the end of the movie is thanking the Third World for sheltering all of the people who had to flee the country — and I’m just guffawing! I’m watching this, and I said, “Nobody would believe this tripe when they watch it.” I mean, the ocean temperature in the arctic dropped 13 degrees in two minutes because of the melting polar ice caps. There were hurricanes that brought on the ice age over land. Los Angeles had five tornadoes that melded into one and destroyed everything and everybody, and this is the first ten minutes of the movie and, of course, the scientist who’s predicting all of this is considered a kook and a wacko by the administration and nobody is listening to him until it’s too late, and then nothing can be done, and it was just funny as it could be.
So I come in today. (BlackBerry and T-Mobile, still not working.) So I came in today, and I’m going through this show prep stuff, lo and behold, I find a couple of wacko — well, one’s an environmental story, one, nah, two of them. Listen to these wacko environmental stories. First from Honolulu, headline: “Death of Rare Bird Leaves Future Uncertain.” Our future is in doubt because a bird has died. “One of the rarest birds on Earth came closer to being wiped out – if not already extinct – with the death of one of the last three believed to exist, officials said. The male po’ouli bird died in captivity late Friday, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said Tuesday. ‘This species was a unique part of Earth’s history,’ said Eric VanderWerf, the Fish and Wildlife Service’s Hawaiian bird recovery coordinator.” Paid for by your tax dollars. “‘We’ll never have another one like it if it disappears. I kind of liken it in someway to the loss of the Mona Lisa or the Sistine Chapel. If we lost that, we could never get it back. We can never get another one.'” Yes, you could, there are pictures. You just repaint it.
“The rare Hawaiian honeycreeper had been kept at the Maui Bird Conservation Center in Olinda since it was captured for breeding on Sept. 9. Biologists failed to capture a mate for the aging bird, which was found in the Hanawi Natural Area Reserve.” They went out and captured a bird from its natural habitat in order to save it. How much sense does this make? You go capture a bird in its natural habitat, bring it into a cage where it has no clue what’s going on, and you’re saving it there to go catch a male so it can mate and it didn’t work out. Actually you could say the Fish and Wildlife Service killed the bird and caused this species to go instinct, and now, my friends, all of our futures are uncertain. What does this mean? What are the human ramifications associated with the so-called said to be extinction of the po’ouli bird? We’ll only have to quake in fear and wait with bated breath to find out how long we have to live, folks.
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More on the po’ouli bird in Hawaii. It’s now extinct: a sad day for all of animalkind. In fact other birds in Hawaii are reported to be depressed. Remember the story when some cows in Pennsylvania fell into a lake or were being lifted out of the a lake? I forget what the details were, but the report — yeah, they crashed; that’s right. The idiot cows were walking on a frozen lake and a couple of them fell in there, and concerned human beings, the only people around that could save the idiot cows from drowning, went and got a hoist and somehow were pulling them out of there, and the reporter said… What was it, H.R.? The other cows were “looking on with fear and hope.” The other cows were looking on with fear and hope, and I’m sure the same thing is happening in this bird museum in Hawaii. The other birds are looking on in fear and hope as the extinction of the po’ouli bird spreads through the bird population in Hawaii.
From London</a>: “British scientists seeking to protect the environment have designed a biodegradable mobile phone cover that breaks down in soil when discarded and sprouts a flower from a seed embedded inside the case.
Researchers at the University of Warwick in central England said the novel device, made from a specially designed polymer, is a boon for the environmentally sensitive. Millions of mobile phones are thrown away every year as the industry churns out new models. ‘It’s a real novelty in the phone industry and consumers are happy because they feel they are doing something for the local environment.'”
Typical liberalism. They’re doing nothing for the local environment. They’re throwing away a phone that sprouts a flower. Yip yip yip yip yahoo. So a flower is gonna grow in a landfill. So a flower is going to grow wherever they take the trash. Absolutely insane, ladies and gentlemen, purely absurd; more off-the-wall kookism from our friends on the left.
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RUSH: Laguna Beach, California, this is Gary. Welcome, sir, nice to have you with us.
CALLER: Mega environmentalist wacko dittos, Rush. It is a privilege to talk to you, sir.
RUSH: Thanks for calling. Appreciate it.
CALLER: I’ll tell you. I’m one of those conservative people. I listen to you every day, and I’m very, very concerned about the environment. One of the things I do want to bring up is the honeycreeper story. Rush, have you ever been over to the Hawaiian island chain like in Maui and on the big island of–
RUSH: Oh, yes. Yes, yes, yes, yes. I’ve been to Hawaii numerous times.


CALLER: As you probably noticed there are lots of habitat destruction, and see, that’s what has happened with Hawaii. You have so much habitat destruction and that’s why a lot of the songbirds over there, the honeycreepers, the po’oulis, these are birds that are just unfortunately they’re nonexistent because of overdevelopment, just too many businesses in the area. Now, I’m not saying that everybody needs to eliminate their business. I understand, you know, people need their business, but a lot of the areas that habitat destruction has happened, that’s what’s happened to birds like these.
RUSH: Well, I’ll tell you what we need to do, then. I find this, by the way, very hard to believe, because Hawaii is a very liberal state in the past. I mean, it may be undergoing some changes now. But huge, huge, huge liberal state. I know that tourism is big, and so they have to moderate their tone when it comes to development, but what they ought to do, then, is pack these birds up and bring ’em to California because in California the mountain lions are now allowed to roam in your backyard and they’re allowed to chase you down the bike path because they’re no longer allowed to be hunted, and everybody says, “Well, we’re encroaching on their natural habitat.” Well, that’s what they once said about the spotted owl but the spotted owl moved to the K-mart sign. Remember that story? See, I’m dubious of this stuff, Gary, and I’ll tell you why: I don’t trust the environmentalist wackos because I don’t trust their agenda.
I think they’re anti-capitalist. I think the militant environmental movement is the new home for outsourced, displaced commies who just hate capitalism and who despise technological progress and they use the environment. Who wants a dirty environment? Nobody wants a dirty environment. So they use this notion of a clean environment and all this as a means of garnering support for their so-called agenda, and they entrap a lot of people who fall for the good intentions but don’t dig deep to find out what the real intention is. We covered the spotted owl controversy on this program as well as it was ever covered. There were so many lies told about the spotted owl. It could only live in a certain kind of tree, only in a certain part of the country, and that was said so that the timber companies would not chop down trees because the environmentalists don’t want trees chopped down, any kind of tree, even if it’s a tree that’s replanted.
So they come up with this sob story: Poor, defenseless little owl. Nobody wants to hurt animals. Nobody wants to harm animals, and so if we are going to harm this spotted owl and cause it to go extinct, we can’t cut down trees. Well, lo and behold, they tagged a bunch of them and they found a couple of them living in a Kmart sign, the red K in a Kmart sign. Spotted owl! And the Kmart sign, I hate to tell you, is not a tree. I don’t know if you can find any Kmart signs anymore, or as many, but these two spotted owls found them. Now, I’ve been to Hawaii. The idea that there’s not enough space in Hawaii for these songbirds to survive and live because of human development is something I just don’t accept, just like I don’t accept it in this country. But even at that, you know, we’ve taken this to such extremes, and I want to recycle some old news here.
Some poor farmer out in Bakersfield, California, was tilling the field and happened to kill a kangaroo rat and he went to jail for it, and then they took his private property usage away from him claiming he couldn’t do it because it was the only haven this kangaroo rat could survive. That’s not the way to deal with this kind of thing. That’s not the problem. The California condor. The California condor, they had a problem with that bird. It’s an ugly bird. It looks like a vulture, but still, they were just passing out of existence, and they got down to a relatively few number of birds and they captured them. They tried to breed them in captivity and they succeeded and they’d turn these things loose, and one of them, I remember, died from drinking from a pool of antifreeze on the highway because it looked good. I mean, they don’t know antifreeze from water, and bammo!
It was, you know, legs pointing to the sky after quick ingestion of antifreeze. But the California condor, it’s come back. It’s done okay, and you can’t find more development than you’ll find in California, for crying out loud. The California condor is back. There are people that want to shut down windmills because windmills might kill birds. It’s just absolutely absurd. Bald eagles are now well populated around the country. There are efforts that can be made to save a dying species, but sometimes you can’t. Sometimes it’s just nature. But what the automatic conclusion is, is that somehow it’s humanity’s fault. Humans are to blame for the extinction of a species, which really, when you stop and think about the extinction of a species, that is a serious thing and it doesn’t happen nearly as often as people would love for you to believe. I mean, do you realize how hard it would be if we were given an order to go wipe out a certain species?
Do you realize how hard it would be, because how do you really ever know you’ve done it? Just the other day there was a story, something like 15 new species of creatures in the sea were discovered. We don’t know what all is alive and crawling and flying around here. We think we’ve identified it all. The point is there’s a balance here that can be achieved. But I’m not saying I’m not upset or concerned that this bird has gone extinct if indeed it has. Remember, now, my objection here is the headline: All of Our Futures Are Now in Question. No, they’re not. Our futures are not in question because a bird died. I’m sorry. I hate to sound like an insensitive boob here but I’m just trying to be realistic here. This is absolutely — because this kind of emotional reaction can lead to deleterious reactions on us, on human beings. By the way, if a bird could grab a shotgun and fire back at us, it would, folks. Never forget that.
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