Barbaro & The Sea Turtles

RUSH: This is a sad story, the horse Barbaro has been euthanized, and some people said, ?It’s just a horse. Why is it the lead story?? Well, folks, you have to understand this something. This is a championship horse. This horse was a battler. The veterinarians and doctors that tried to save the horse tried techniques that everybody said were likely to fail because of the nature of the injuries, and yet they tried to do so. I don’t think they got to the stem cell research, H.R. He’s been asking if stem cells could have saved him. This is big business. Barbaro was going to be able to garner gazillions and gazillions in stud fees. I mentioned this to Snerdley, who was being rather sardonic of the media culture. This horse is the essence of the innocence. This horse is a battler, it is truly sad. Everybody was hoping that all of this effort and the horse’s own will to live, which it obviously exhibited, would be miraculous.
Snerdley says, ?Well, they probably collected the sperm, right? If they got jars of the stuff for Studs, whatever.? I don’t know, Snerdley. I don’t know how you get a horse to masturbate. Maybe some people out in the state of Washington could be helpful in that regard, but I don’t know. Anyway, it’s a very, very sad thing, and when I saw it early on in the last hour, I felt sad about it, because it’s just the essence of innocence out there. I remember not long after this program debuted back in 1988, and some of you might remember this, there were a couple of whales that were stuck in ice up near the Arctic Circle. We had video of it, and we had trawlers and ice wreckers trying to cut a path because they couldn’t find a way out of there and they needed to migrate, and there were a lot of cynics back then. ?Come on, this is nature. If they’re too stupid to go where they’re going to get trapped, they deserve what nature has in store.? I said, ?You people don’t understand. These two whales were doing everything they could to help themselves. They were not welfare cases.?
They were doing everything they could to help themselves and we were doing our best to help them. I don’t know that we succeeded, I don’t recall if we cleared a path for them to get out of there or not. But I understand being sad about Barbaro being euthanized. I was sad the other day when they euthanized Townee the tiger here at the Palm Beach Zoo. It was a beautiful cat. Oh, folks, folks, speaking of, bear with me. You know, I seldom talk about local issues where I live, but I can’t pass this up. I just can’t pass this up. Every day on my way home I drive north on my way home, my house is on the ocean, and the road that I take is right along the ocean, right by the old Kennedy compound and then turns and goes right by the ocean. It’s about four or five miles from where our broadcast complex is here and for the last week I’ve noticed two signs that warn motorists that beginning today, through April 30th, the southbound lane of the road I take, which would be the direction I use coming in to work, the southbound lane would be closed.

Well, I looked at a local rag, the Shiny Sheet, to find out why, and I didn’t find out why until yesterday. They are closing about a quarter of a mile stretch, maybe a little longer, of the road, in order to repair a seawall that’s in front of the Palm Beach country club and another club that routinely get pounded by the waves when there’s a hurricane or when the waves are up, and the last two hurricanes have done great damage to the wall. So they’ve gotta rebuild the wall. And everybody is asking, ?Why do this at the height of the season when the population here is at its maximum?? I mean, our little island here has about 45,000 people from now through end of April. At the end of April it will go down to 22,000 people. They never do major construction like this until summertime when everybody’s left.
So I’m reading the story, and you know why they are doing it now and inconveniencing everybody who lives on the north end of the island? The turtles! But that’s not the half of it. Because they’ve gotta drop rocks down there on the beach and they’ve gotta rebuild the wall, they have to finish by April 30th, before turtle nesting season arrives. Now, excuse me, that means that April 30th – May 1st, is when the big sea turtles arrive to lay their eggs in the sand of the beach. Okay. Fine and dandy. Once again, human beings subordinate themselves to turtles here on Palm Beach. I’m perfectly fine with it, except this. We on the beach have to turn our lights out on March 1st. Now, if they can do construction on this wall and totally gunk up this beach all the way ’til April 30th because they gotta be out of there by then because that’s when the turtles arrive, would somebody explain to me why I have to turn my back lights off on the 1st of March? Well, I’ll tell you why, and you people that listen regularly know this is a big bugaboo of mine, because those lights in the backyard, they’re not only decorative, it’s beautiful the way the landscape is lit with them, but it’s also security oriented.
I’m in total compliance. I have been ever since I built the whole property, and I remember one night at ten o’clock in the meanest rainstorm, the buzzer at the front gate rings. I have three gates. The front gate rings, and it’s a cop with an environmentalist wacko, claiming my house is lit up like a Christmas tree and I’m in violation of the lighting ordinance to save the turtles. Well, I wasn’t. I had to go out there, had to talk to them, the environmentalist wacko said, ?Mr. Limbaugh, I just want to assure you. I’m a big fan of your show.? I said, ?Right. Are you bugging anybody else here that has their lights on?? Go to the south end of the island, and they’re lit up like Christmas trees all year long, and somebody may have given them some grief, but it?s these little things here like this that just, if I allow them to, really grate on me. So I think I’ve got a winning proposition here. I can have cranes. I can have boulders. I can have all kinds of trucks. I can have bulldozers all over that beach until April 30th, when the turtles arrive, but I can’t have my own lights on beyond March 1st.

So what I ought to do is go bring a bunch of cranes in, go out to the beach and, you know, pretend I’m building a wall out there, or maybe build a wall out there to shield my lights from the turtles. I know it doesn’t have anything to do with Hillary Clinton and I know it doesn’t have anything to do with national security and I know it doesn’t have anything to do with anything substantive here in terms of those things we talk about. But it does in a way. It illustrates how everybody just kowtows to these special interest groups, the environmentalist wackos or the animal rights people or a combination of both. It’s like I told the NPR guys the other day when I did the interview and they said, ?Do you worry about offending people?? I said, ?No, I don’t worry about offending people. People running around saying they’re offended is just a new form of political correctness to shut down free speech. ?You can’t say that! That offends me.? ?Oh, I’m sorry, I don’t want to offend you.? People get offended all the time. You shouldn’t grant people that much power to offend you.?
This is the same thing. The environmentalist wackos are offended if there are lights out there two months before the turtles even arrive, and they go to the town council. They kow the town council. The town council doesn’t want to be thought of as hateful to turtles, so they’ll turn and say, ?Okay, residents on the ocean, you have to turn your lights off on March 1st. Can’t turn them back on ?? by the way, the turtles are gone and hatched by at least September, but ??can’t turn the lights on ’til December 1st.? So December, January, February — three months out of nine you can have the backyard landscape lights on. Gosh, it’s even worse than I thought. In my mind I thought it was four months. I’m not going to have commuting issues. There’s an alternate road coming to work that I can take and the lane that I need going home will be open. I’ll have to wind my way through the dust and the rocks and the construction crews and the cranes and so forth, but it won’t be a problem. I think the next thing I’m going to do is put up a giant flagpole and a giant flag. Rather than have an American flag, I want to put a turtle logo on my giant flag and make the town of Palm Beach make me take that down. I’m sorry to bleed on you people with this, but this stuff just really grates on me. It just does. But I’m still sad the horse died.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Wayne in Elida, Ohio thanks for waiting sir. Welcome to the program.
CALLER: Hi, Rush, it’s a pleasure, long-time listener, and a big fan, and it’s a thrill to talk to you.
RUSH: Thank you, sir.
CALLER: I was just making a quick call. You brought up the Barbaro incident there in the first hour and mentioned about saving the sperm, and I just want to let you and any listeners know that thoroughbreds are not allowed to artificially inseminate. It has to be all natural breeding, so, no, there was no sperm saved.
RUSH: Oh, no. That makes the loss deeply financial as well as —
CALLER: Yeah, major. He would have had to have a stud fee in the hundred thousand dollars plus range, and you breed a hundred a year to somebody like that, you’re talking a possible ten million bucks a year.
RUSH: Yeah, I know. I know. And the horse loves it.
CALLER: Yeah.
RUSH: Well, it’s just a sad thing. I didn’t know that about thoroughbred racing. I appreciate the information.
CALLER: Well, you’re certainly welcome. I just wanted to let you know.
RUSH: Wayne, I’m telling you something, you need to be really, really honored, feel really special about yourself. Do you know how rare it is that a caller is able to inform me about something about which I’m ignorant? Doesn’t happen, Wayne, it just doesn’t. You should go out and buy people dinner tonight and tell this story, because very few people over the course of 18 years will have been able to do what you will be able to say. “I told Rush Limbaugh something he didn’t know.”