RUSH: Bill in Chicago, thank you, sir. Welcome to the EIB Network.
CALLER: Hey, Rush, what a thrill.
RUSH: Thank you.
CALLER: Mega dittos from a former Marine naval aviator.
RUSH: Well, we’re honored to have you here. What did you fly?
CALLER: Well, as a matter of fact, I had to train a lot of the Marine pilots that made the last flights into Saigon and brought our Marines and embassy personnel out. That was that HMM-164, one of my old squadrons.
RUSH: Wow.
CALLER: So, anyhow, I’m also a history major, and tomorrow is the beginning of the Battle of the Bulge, and I thought it was appropriate to remind everybody that we lost 90,000 young men in about a 30-day period, 1944, 62 years ago, same age as I am, and I wonder how the press would react today if we lost that many people in such a short period of time.
RUSH: We have talked about the Battle of the Bulge in exactly that context throughout the media’s efforts to gin up anti-war support as they breathlessly and panting-ly counted up to 1,000 deaths.
CALLER: You know, we almost lost that war. Eisenhower was running out of men, and they started emptying flight schools, officer training corps, bringing in 16 and 17-year-old kids to fight in that battle, and I think the problem with people that don’t study American history, they have no sense of context —
RUSH: Exactly.
CALLER: — of how important this war in Iraq is to us.
RUSH: That’s exactly right, and it’s not that they’re not studying it, if they’re not being taught it as you and I were taught history.
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: The whole history curriculum has changed. I’ll never forget, when I read John Silver, who was at the time president of a University in Boston. I think it was Boston University, I’m not sure which, but he was a brilliant guy, and he did a study of high school textbooks that were being used at the time. This was in the early nineties, mid-nineties, perhaps, high school textbooks all over the country, and he found that in most of the textbooks, the average reference to Abraham Lincoln was a paragraph, and there were multiple pages devoted to recent Democrat presidents and so forth. It was astounding to me. I think the whole public education history curriculum is responsible for people not knowing history. And, frankly, a lot of people are bored by it because everybody is looking forward.
CALLER: Well, how can you love this country if you don’t understand the sacrifices for our freedom?
RUSH: Precisely.
RUSH: It’s not just how can you love the country, it’s how can you appreciate it if you don’t know how it was formed, what was necessary, and what sacrifice the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence, the risks they took.
CALLER: Absolutely.
RUSH: They legitimately pledged their lives, sacred honor, and their fortunes, and many of them lost a lot simply because they signed. I agree with you a hundred percent: battle of the Bulge, 90,000 deaths. What is the correct figure on this, Bill, because we talk about this– <a target=new href=”http://www.history.navy.mil/faqs/faq20-1.htm”>(Operation Tiger)</a> There was a training exercise for D-Day, and there was an accident, and I think there were multiple thousands injured and wounded in that one, right?
CALLER: Well, it was a training exercise, and basically the whole landing crew, it was a joint American and British crew, and they were wiped out, and the rest that weren’t killed were taken prisoners. Those are just absolutely staggering numbers: 90,000 in the Battle of the Bulge, 130,000 Germans were killed, doesn’t even compare to the Battle of Okinawa. You know, these tremendous sacrifices, and my son’s going to be going into the Air Force, I’m very, very proud of him. But you look at 2,940 young men and women killed in Iraq and how critical it is to the safety of this country, God bless every one of them, but the sacrifice pales in comparison to what we went through in World War II.
RUSH: Well, there’s also another big difference, Bill, and we’ve had a number of things converge, speaking of history, at the same moment in time. We’ve had the evolution of 24/7 media that can go anywhere worldwide, and we have that media which has now dropped all pretense of objectivity. That media today is totally invested our defeat, and they have spent three years trying to amplify the deaths in Iraq with smoking scenes of ruin and blood for 20 or 30 seconds every night for three years on the nightly newscasts and so forth.
CALLER: You know what that’s called, Rush? That’s called subjectivism. That’s where you create your own morality based upon what you believe, and you try to force everybody else in that belief system. There’s no moral equivalency to it. It doesn’t stack up in a moral code, and that’s what we’re being preached to every night. That’s what our children are being subjected to in school. So there’s a new word I would like everybody to think about, subjectivism.
RUSH: What do you think would have happened if we would have had this kind of media, this kind of technology during the Battle of the Bulge?
CALLER: Well, interestingly enough, and I talked to my parents about it, they told me that when Patton was brought down because he slapped a soldier, the American public was strongly behind him, but the press made such a fuss about it that he was chastised. So evidently this is an ongoing battle, and the problem is that you have to learn what American history is all about so you can read between the lines. This is not something that just happened the last ten years, 15 years, 20 years.
RUSH: Right.
CALLER: It’s been going on ever since I was in college. I was a Goldwater supporter at the University of Vermont back in the sixties, when conservatives were unheard of, with a group called Young Americans for Freedom. And back then, everybody liked to be called a moderate, because that meant you weren’t brand with any particular —
RUSH: There’s still plenty of those wusses today. They haven’t gone away.
CALLER: Absolutely. So I’ve seen a total change in how Americans look at themselves and the conservative movement.
RUSH: Well, you just nailed it. You just nailed it. I was talking about this with Sylvester Stallone a moment ago, the way Americans look at themselves, the baby boomers in particular, that’s all they do, is look at themselves. Everything is about them, because they had a charmed life. They think their lives are tough, had to invent all their traumas. I’m one of them. I know this. I know where of which I speak, and, you know, our society is becoming more and more passive. I don’t know, sort of shocking and amazing to see. Bill, I’m glad you called. I must move on. I have the Battle of the Bulge on my DVD server system at home. I’m going to watch it tomorrow, because I’m vegging part of tomorrow. This nonsense of last night, I didn’t get my vegging in last night. I’m going to pull it out, and I’m going to watch it.