RUSH: Pat Schroeder on Weekend Today on Saturday. Lester Holt interviewed her, and of course the subject was Imus, and Mr. Holt said, ‘Where has the outrage been all these years?’
SCHROEDER: Well, the outrage it’s been — I’ll tell you what, we’ve really been tempered. For many years there was — Rush Limbaugh used to called me a feminazi.
HOLT: Mmm-hmm.
SCHROEDER: I never thought that was funny. I thought that was horrible but, you know, if you said anything about it, people said, ‘(Gasp!) Those women, they have no sense of humor. Get over it. Laugh it off.’ You know, what — what’s to laugh off about being called a Nazi? I don’t think it’s funny.
RUSH: Well, speaking of that, Ms. Schroeder, how many people on your side of the aisle called George W. Bush that every day? You’ve got media figures out there doing the ‘zieg heil’ salute on MSNBC. NBC doesn’t find anything wrong with that. Yeah, go do the zieg heil salute every night as an attempt to lampoon right-wingers and so forth. I don’t know. Did I ever name her a feminazi? I don’t recall. When I came up with the term, there were 12 or 13 feminazis, and all these women out there thought I was talking about all of them. I don’t remember if she was in the original list. She could well have been. I do remember laughing at her over a number of things, like when she fell for the line I gave in the speech at GOPAC. It was the ’95 budget deal, and the Democrats are out there saying Republicans want people to starve, the kids to starve in school, and they’re out there saying that it’s getting so bad for senior citizens, they gotta choose now between dog food and medicine. Yeah, and I went out there and I said to GOPAC, ‘Well, I just want to greet all of you fellow budget cutters here at GOPAC. I’m with you. I just want you to know I’m sensitive to this, and I went out and bought my mom a brand-new can opener for the dog food she’s going to eat.’
So Pat Schroeder… This is a classic, by the way, a classic illustration. Somebody told her what I said without the context, and of course they don’t have any sense of humor on the left. Nowhere do they laugh or smile. None of them are happy about anything. They can’t laugh. So she goes to the floor of the House of Representatives and tells this story as though I was dead serious about it. I guess the pièce de résistance was when she ran for, or thought about running for the Democratic presidential nomination at some point. It was the early nineties. What was it, ’92? It had to be ’92 because it wasn’t ’96, and it wasn’t ’88. No, wait! It might have been ’88. It might have been ’88. Yes, it could very well have been ’88. Now, I had been following Pat Schroeder as a struggling and striving young talk show host of the future, and I never saw anything about her husband. She never talked about her husband. The media never talked about her husband. I knew it was ‘Mrs. Pat Schroeder,’ but her husband was a non-factor.
Then one day, she went to the base of the Rockies to announce that she was not going to seek the presidential nomination of her party after all, and there was this mystery guy standing next to her. I’d never seen this guy before. When she announced that she was not going to seek the nomination, she started crying, and she said she concluded that she couldn’t win, and then the tears came. ‘I just — I just can’t win. (Crying.)’ and then she fell into the arms of this guy and started crying on his shoulder, who I later learned was her husband Jim. Yeah, feminazis didn’t do that. So I don’t know that she was ever an original feminazi. That’s the first time I’d ever seen her husband. This might have been ’84. Well, I remember talking about this in Sacramento, and I didn’t leave there ’til 1988 in July. I don’t remember when it was. It’s really not relevant. It was in one of those spans. I do remember that the video was all over television, and the feminists were not happy because she had turned to the arms of a man at a time of suffering, distress and discomfort, and she was crying and so forth. This was setting the movement back — which, of course, just inspired me to play the video and the audio of it all the more. We have one more bite from Pat Schroeder, again with Lester Holt interviewing her on the Weekend Today Show on NBC Saturday. Holt says, ‘We keep having a conversation. Are we changing, though, as a culture?’
SCHROEDER: Part of it — what we’re seeing in Iraq, we’re seeing in Iraq the Shi’ites and the — and the Sunnis.
RUSH: You’ve!
SCHROEDER: — fighting tremendously —
RUSH: Gotta!
SCHROEDER: — and we’ve gotta realize that a diverse democracy —
RUSH: Be!
SCHROEDER: — is a difficult thing to do —
RUSH: Kidding me!
SCHROEDER: — and we really can’t allow people to stereotype and attack other folks on public airwaves and do things like that.
RUSH: Holy!
SCHROEDER: Because that’s the kind of — of — you breed all sorts of hatred and things that way. It’s just not a good thing to do, and so I think maybe we’re having a pull-back from this meanness where we really thought meanness was cute and somehow it was masculine or something. I don’t know. But let’s hope there’s a real pull-back on that.
RUSH: Did I hear this right? I know I heard that right because I followed it on the transcript. She’s out there saying something that’s 1200 years old, the Shi’as and the Sunnis hating each other’s guts, is because of Imus and because of the coarseness of the culture in this country. Public airwaves? What public airwaves are there in Iraq? We’re seeing it in Iraq? (sigh) They’re stupid! They’re just plain stupid. She’s wandering in vain here for any cogent thought. She was speaking without knowing where she was going, and I am sure when she finished this she thought that she’d really hit the nail on the head, and had really been brilliant. All she’s done here is illustrate her ignorance of the situation between the Shiites and the Sunnis. They’ve hated each other long before we got over there. They’ve hated each other for decades, centuries, for crying out loud, but now all of a sudden it’s because the American public is coarsened by people on the public airwaves? I’m telling you, folks, this is about getting rid of people on the public airwaves that liberals don’t want to listen to and they don’t want anybody else to hear as well.