We’ll go to St. Louis next. Steve, thank you for waiting. You’re on the program, sir.
CALLER: It’s an honor to talk to you, Rush.
RUSH: Thank you.
CALLER: I am furious, and I’ve been furious for quite some time. (Oh, third-time dittos, by the way.) This whole thing with the nonsupport of the war and everything that’s going on over there and the political parties? I’ve got a question for you — and I know you can answer this, and I know it’s going to make you look good. How would you categorize the sports fans in this country? It doesn’t matter if they’re football, baseball, basketball. Are they, on the conservative side mostly, or liberal side, or is it kind of evenly split?
RUSH: I would have absolutely no way of knowing. Sports fans?
CALLER: The fans, yeah. I know you’re connected with a lot of sports people up higher, but how would you categorize the people that sit down and watch?
RUSH: Well, you may be going somewhere here that I don’t know, but remember, I worked for a baseball team in marketing, and it was the objective to get some of these people out to the ballpark as possible, as often as possible and we didn’t look at them and I didn’t study them on that basis. They were looked at in an entirely different way. I’ve never focused on whether the fans are liberal or conservative. See, what we knew was that sports, to the average fan, is an escape from all of the drudgery and the humdrum and the boredom and the disappointment of every day life. Sports was an escape for them to go fantasize and forget things for whatever length of time they’re spending engaging in being a spectator. So that’s why I never attached an ideology label to sports fans. Sportswriters, sports media people are an entirely differently thing where I would have to tell you it’s 95% liberal if not more.
CALLER: Well, that might add a little more to the question, then. The reason why I’m asking is, say it’s the football playoffs, Super Bowl. Say that one team is down by 20 points at halftime, and the staff on that football team says, “You know, we just can’t win this. Let’s start pulling our guys out. We’ve got too many injuries. Let’s just pull out.” How do you think the fans would feel?
RUSH: Oh, the fans would get livid.
CALLER: They would lynch that team!
RUSH: Yeah, but the correct analogy is that the coach gets a call from the owner or somebody on the owner’s staff like the general manager. The coaching staff probably, the generals, they wouldn’t want to pull out. The quarterback, who’s the field general wouldn’t want to pull out. But the owner, maybe his staff, the general manager up there would think, “My gosh, you’re going to lose the whole team. We won’t have a season next year. It’s silly. Why should I get my team involved in a civil war down there?” Yeah, the fans would be livid. Okay, I see where you’re going now.
CALLER: The other question is: How would the players feel on the team if all day they started being called off the field and they were outnumbered by the other team?
RUSH: You don’t want me to answer that. (Laughing.)
CALLER: So now you correlate that to the war in Iraq. Pardon me. Not “the war in Iraq,” the war on terrorism.
CALLER: So my question is, there must not be very many liberal sports fans. How can they relate? I’m kind of nervous, but, you know, I’m furious over this fact that if you’ve got a room full of liberals watching the Super Bowl, and they’re all rooting for one team, and all of the sudden the coach starts pulling people out or the head office starts pulling people out because they’re losing anyway; they might as well just go home, how do you think they would react? They would be furious.
RUSH: I don’t think they’d even get to that point. They’d still be counting up how many black coaches are in the game, versus black players.
CALLER: (Groans.)
RUSH: They’d be all upset about whether there are black referees, or if the guys that are carrying the yard sticks are black. How come there aren’t any more blacks in media, sports media? Do you know how many blacks there are in sports media?
CALLER: No, I don’t.
RUSH: It’s tiny. The percentage of black sports reporters and TV people, is tiny, compared to the full population of sports media. So they’d be worried counting all this stuff. They’d be worried if one team at a disadvantage and maybe the game is not fair from the get-go. But look, I get your point, and it’s an excellent point. But see, this is the great conflict. I think there are plenty of liberals who watch their sports teams. The real question is, are there any liberal sports fans, because it’s so violent; it’s so brutal. But to the extent that there are, I still think these liberal sports fans love it when their teams win! They love it when their teams crush; they love it when their teams dominate. (interruption) No, I don’t feel guilty with their team wins. That’s the point. The sports media might feel guilty if a team wins based on something, but the fans…? The analogy is somewhat flawed even though I really appreciate the thought process that you’re engaging in out there, Steve, because the whole thing is an escape from realty, and liberals will not see a football game or a basketball game the way they see war. They just won’t. Plus we don’t have college professors telling me that sports sucks. What’s the sports equivalent to Vietnam? There isn’t one. The political aspects of this… Liberals are probably more upset when I talk about sports than when they watch it.
CALLER: Well, I have one other thing.
RUSH: All right.
CALLER: I have you on the radio whenever I work. I’m an independent carpenter, and when I go into somebody’s home to work, I play my radio, and it’s amazing to see the responses of a lot of people where they just look at me and say, “How could you listen to that?” and I said, “I love this, and you ought to listen to it to.” So I don’t turn it off. I’m doing the best I can to promote you.
RUSH: I appreciate it, but how many people want to listen along with you?
CALLER: Oh, no, they just walk through the room and go on. But it’s playing.
RUSH: Right, but how many people are glad, and what I’m getting at?
CALLER: Oh, there are a number of them. I would say it’s probably a 50-50.
RUSH: Yeah.
CALLER: Yeah.
RUSH: That makes sense. What do they do, the ones that can’t believe you’re listening to this show? What do they do when you tell them that they should?
CALLER: They give it the same response that most of them do when they hear you, you know, talking about, oh, you know, fat ass things or they talking about just ranting and raving things and not making any sense, and I said, “Well, you haven’t listened long enough.”
RUSH: Well, they haven’t listened at all. This program makes more sense in five seconds than anything else they could possibly listen to. You could listen to inspector in five seconds, you know what you’ll hear on NPR in five seconds? Mmm-hmmmmm. Hmm-mm-hmm. Mmm-hmm. Mm-huh-hmm. I haven’t heard a thing yet in five seconds, anyway.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Bob in Cherry Valley, Illinois, welcome to the EIB Network.
CALLER: Hi, Rush.
RUSH: Hi.
CALLER: Thanks for taking my call. I’ve listened for the last 15 or 16 years, and this is the second time I’ve called.
RUSH: Well, I’m glad to have you back, sir.
CALLER: I grew up reading Lincoln Steffens and The Muckrakers, and I love satire, and I think you carry on in that tradition beautifully.
RUSH: Thank you, sir.
CALLER: I appreciate that greatly. I had two comments on the previous call. One, the immediate one about the sports thing: the true politically correct liberal position on the Super Bowl is that the game ended in a tie and was equal on all sides.
RUSH: Yeah, but, see, they do that in kids’ sports. They do that in Pop Warner Football and Little League, if the teams are not evenly matched, but when it comes to professional sports, liberals are fans just like everybody else is.
CALLER: I know.
RUSH: We can sit here and have fun about how liberalism would impact, say, pro football if liberals were actually in charge of it, but the point is that they’re nowhere near that. Now, when they start making the case that women should be allowed to play on pro football teams, just as they should be allowed to be in the military.
CALLER: Then we got a problem.
RUSH: Hold your thought here, because you made me realize something here.
CALLER: Yes?