RUSH: This is Blaine in La Grande, Oregon. Hi, Blaine. Nice to have you with us.
CALLER: Hey, Rush. Hey, thanks a lot for all that you do, and especially the podcast that you provide us so we can listen to all three hours of your programming and listen to it at our leisure rather than have to —
RUSH: By the way, I need to interrupt you for a minute on this.
CALLER: Sure.
RUSH: If you’ll permit me. It will not take away from your precious call time.
CALLER: Roger that.
RUSH: But your mentioning the podcast reminds me — I haven’t talked about the podcast much, but the podcast is a service to subscribers at RushLimbaugh.com and the podcast is of the program and it gets fed either to your computer directly or put up on iTunes. You’ll have it by 30 minutes after the program, normally, sometimes it’s an hour, but you’ll have it there. People ask, “Why don’t we hear the theme song? We don’t hear any of the satire. We don’t hear any of the music? Why is that?” It’s a licensing issue, ladies and gentlemen. Blaine, I’m glad you brought this up because I’ve been meaning to answer this question for the longest time and it keeps slipping my mind. The way that we’re able to play music on the radio program is that our member stations, our affiliate stations all pay licensing fees to BMI, ASCAP, and the licensing agencies. But there is no license set up yet for us to legally replay that in other forms.
It’s in the process of being worked out. We could probably put some of the parodies that don’t have music in them, but anything that has music that is either one of our parodies off of a real song or an update theme, even the bump music we can’t put on because we don’t have the licensing permission to do that. It’s something we’re constantly trying to rectify. It’s just going to take time because all of this is new territory, and when we first started this, people said, “Well, other hosts put their music on there.” Well, they may not know it, but they’re violating regulations and the law. They’re so small, nobody knows it. BMI and ASCAP are not picking them up. I can’t get away with that, folks. So that’s the answer. All right, Blaine, thank you for allowing me to interrupt your call to make that point. Now launch. It’s all yours.
CALLER: Well, Rush, I kind of wanted to reiterate what you were talking about on the podcasts. It’s really important for guys like me so we can listen to all three hours and at a time that is convenient for us, and, you know, it’s just hard to get a hold of —
RUSH: What do you mean, guys like you?
CALLER: When, you know, you might have to go on a patrol or something like that.
RUSH: Well, what are guys like you? You’re military, go on patrol?
CALLER: Roger that. I’m stationed in Baghdad. I volunteered to go to Iraq, and now I’m an advisor to the Iraqi national police. Right now I’m on leave with my five kids and my incredible wife, and so I thought I’d give you a call and talk about what I’m seeing back here on the media, and seems like a lack of leadership, but we’ll stick to the media today. How about that?
RUSH: Go right ahead.
CALLER: Hey, listen, I talked to some foreign correspondents when I was down in Iraq, and I launched into them a couple times —
RUSH: What network? Do you remember the networks you talked with?
CALLER: Yeah, it was some CBS folks I talked to, and I got ’em a little bit ticked off. But I just wanted to share that with you, that, you know, some things I talked to them about was, you know, I really resent the coverage that they’re doing. It focuses on casualties and number of attacks. And that’s okay. They can report that. That did happen, but it’s not the whole story. It’s basically a scoreboard for the enemy. I understand that every death is a tragedy, and —
RUSH: You know, that is a good point.
CALLER: I lost one of my good friends in 2004, and I named my second son after him, but the number of casualties do not justify the news coverage. We’re talking — you know, we lose tens of thousands to car accidents ever year. You were talking about 7,000 for poor penmanship of doctors.
RUSH: Yes.
CALLER: We got, you know, close to a million a year for abortion, and we’re talking about 800 a year in Iraq.
RUSH: Not all of those, not all those are combat deaths.
CALLER: Correct. Correct.
RUSH: Let me ask you a question about that, because every time we get a call from a member of the military who is home on leave or is back for good after serving, we hear the same story. The frustration in your voice, you come back, you watch the local media, and you see a whole different presentation than what you saw on the ground in Iraq. I love your phrase, scoreboard for the enemy. Drive-By Media in America, scoreboard for the enemy. That’s brilliant phraseology.
CALLER: Well, they don’t even report what we’ve done. You know what I’m saying? It’s only telling what happened, the score —
RUSH: Well, it’s not fair to talk about the enemy who are dead, because they’re minorities and victims, you see.
CALLER: Yeah, that’s right.
RUSH: By the way, I read something today. I want to ask you about this. I don’t know that you will know this.
CALLER: Okay.
RUSH: Mark Steyn, who is a brilliant writer from Australia and publishes in many different areas here in the United States has a column today in which he says that he was invited to the White House with a number of other columnists some time ago, not long ago to meet with the president. The president told these guys, these members of the media, that 80% of the casualties in Iraq are taking place within 50 kilometers of Baghdad.
CALLER: I wouldn’t know. Rush, I don’t get a whole lot of time to read that stuff, but, you know, I don’t know where he’s getting the data from. Baghdad’s a rough place. It’s a rough neighborhood. But it’s not all bad.
RUSH: Well, that would include Baghdad. But the point is that if 80% of the garbage is happening within 50 miles of Baghdad, including Baghdad, that would lead us to conclude the vast majority of the country has been tamed.
CALLER: Well, roger. Most of the landmass, right, but, you know, you gotta look at where most of your population centers are in Iraq, and Baghdad is definitely the largest population center. It’s like the second most populated city in the Arab world, behind Cairo. So there’s an awful lot of people there, and there’s quite a bit of violence, but at least in my sector, what I can talk about, my sector of Baghdad, about eight square kilometers, it’s not that bad, and we just don’t get that many attacks and everything. There are a lot of good things that are happening. For instance, I work with an Iraqi national policeman, and he’s a nonsectarian guy. They’re normally seen as Shi’a, and he is Shi’a, but he works with the Sunni. He’s gotten in trouble with his higher for doing that. But he’s got a good relationship with the population and coalition forces —
RUSH: All right, let me just ask you this because time is dwindling, and you —
CALLER: Sure, sure.
RUSH: — you are well-spoken and you’re informed and you’re going back. How do you feel when you hear about John Murtha’s plan to slow bleed, deny you reinforcements, deny you armor and equipment to keep doing your job? How do you feel when you hear the Democrats want to pull you out of there because they own defeat, because they think we’ve already lost this?
CALLER: Rush, I’m a soldier, and by definition I can’t be a political animal, but I’ll tell you this. The administration has decided that Iraq is in our national security interests. We need to decide as a people if Iraq is in our national security interests or not. If it is, we need to support the administration and achieve a free and stable Iraq, not pooh-pooh it and decide we want to phase defeat and pull out and leave our friends high and dry.
RUSH: I have to stop you because of time, but I appreciate your well-spokenness on this and your answers on this. It’s great to hear from you.