We have pictures from the Sacramento event. It was called Perspectives and it was put on by the Sacramento Metro Chamber of Commerce. They do it every year. There were five speakers. I was one, John Abizaid, who I met in the hotel just before I left to go over to the convention center, was another. Former Harvard President Lawrence Summers — when I got there, I go to the greenroom and he was sitting on a sofa and came up and introduced himself. The Pursuit of Happyness guy, Chris Gardner, was speaking when I arrived. I never got a chance to meet him. He was lighting it up out there, and Colin Quinn was the other speaker, the comedian who used to be on Saturday Night Live. I’ll tell you, folks, it was fun. I had a blast. It’s always meaningful for me to go back to Sacramento because Sacramento is the first place in all of my broadcast career that I ever found any success, the first time I was ever on any kind of a real success track. I was there for three and a half years, and it seemed like ten. I mean that in a positive way, in a fulfilling way.
I’ve been gone 19-and-a-half years, and it seems like it was just yesterday. Every time I go back there, I feel the same way. I walked out and there were 3500 people in the convention center. I don’t know if you can visualize this, but this room seemed, to me, from the stage, from where I was standing, it looked as big as a football field in there. It’s tough, even though I pulled it off because I’m a seasoned professional, it’s still tough to establish intimacy with a crowd that big, all on the same level. They were all on the floor, stage was very high, and I walked out there amidst thunderous applause and a standing ovation, and I said, ‘Hey, if any of you people get out of line I just want you to know that I have literally hundreds of security people scattered amongst you with Tasers.’ I shot that down right off the bat. I also took applications for a California mistress. I don’t have a California mistress. There were a couple of big screams that erupted from the crowd at that point. Then the photographers started going nuts so I stopped and I would pose as I am wont to do because I want to give them a good shot, and the photographers, a couple of them, looked clearly irritated that I would pose for them. They kind of got this, ‘Nah, come on, get serious,’ look on their face. But the whole thing was just a hoot.
Now, from Sacramento, I flew down to Los Angeles, because I had a dinner to do on Friday night. Saturday, I went to Washington, flew into Dulles because there was a dinner at Mount Vernon, the home of George Washington. I hadn’t been to Mount Vernon since I was 14. (interruption) Did I see the bust? Yes, the one that Algore could not identify, all the busts, when Algore was being escorted through (Monticello), didn’t know who various Founding Fathers were and the curator was saying, ‘Huh, Mr. Vice President, this is Ben Franklin.’ How do you not know Ben Franklin? But the thing is, the reason for the dinner, a good friend of mine who lives here in Palm Beach, Gay Gaines, it was her, I call it swan’s song, she’s finishing her term running the place, essentially, and I had no idea what she had done. She told me about it, but they’ve got an education center that’s open 365 days a year, including Christmas, that puts the history of George Washington, the founding of the country, they got two or three movie theaters, it’s indescribable, it’s just amazing. It’s normally a four-hour tour, and they showed me the highlights of it in about 30 minutes because it was time to go on to the adult beverage portion of dinner after that. It is open to American history school teachers. It’s open to anybody that wants to go. It would shock the average American history school teacher today, particularly those here in south Florida.
But I have to tell you, we had dinner — there were 26 of us there — on the back porch of Mount Vernon overlooking the Potomac as the sun was setting. There were all kinds of geese in the backyard. When you stop and think of who has been on that porch, and the things that were discussed on that porch — (interruption) I don’t think the slaves made the porch, Mr. Snerdley. Would you just cool it in there. Sorry about this, Gay. I’m dealing with insolent employees today. But she’s done such a fabulous job, and there were a lot of tributes to Gay for the great work that she’s done. When I got home yesterday afternoon I was going through subscriber e-mail, the Rush 24/7 e-mail, and a subject line kind of grabbed my attention. So I read the note, some woman said: ‘Was that you about five p.m. landing at Dulles? I was trying to get out of Washington to return home to Houston, and some jet with your logo on the tailfin lands, delaying our departure.’ Then she said: ‘I continued to watch, I watched where you parked, and I saw the door open, but I didn’t see any limos, so I don’t know if it was you.’ So I wrote back, ‘Yeah, it was me, but what were you doing looking out the windows of a tiny little commercial plane? How can you see anything?’ I mean, I’ve heard of pilots blaming me to their passengers for late departures, ‘Well, the EIB jet is ahead of us,’ or whatever such thing. This is the first time I’ve got an e-mail from an actual passenger. (Laughing.) It was funny. She didn’t believe it was me replying. You know, when I reply to e-mails I invariably get: ‘Thanks for this reply, whoever it is. I’m sure it isn’t Rush.’ Like it would be beneath me to reply to my own e-mail account. I tell ’em nobody reads these accounts but me, and I can’t reply to all of them, but I do.
I want to thank everybody in Sacramento for making it such a pleasurable event. I’ll tell you what I spoke about. I did a couple greatest hits from my days in Sacramento on the radio. I told a couple Hillary jokes, but the main thrust of it was the thing I did three or four weeks ago. I had the little conversation with the liberal about, ‘You ever thought about how, in less than 250 years, less than 300, people [in the United States] have outperformed any other group of people in the history of the world, in the history of human civilization?’ Because I think it’s important. So many people take the country for granted, understandably so, they don’t know anything else. The audience was at rapt attention. Well, they always are. I own the stage when I am on the stage.
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RUSH: Linda in San Diego, welcome to the EIB Network. Hello.
CALLER: Okay.
RUSH: Hi, Linda.
CALLER: Hi, Rush. How are you?
RUSH: I’m fine and dandy. Who’s distracting you there?
CALLER: Oh, who’s distracting me here? I’m at the hospital getting ready to have my knee operated on.
RUSH: Oh, gee, I’m sorry.
CALLER: That’s okay, I’ve been waiting a long time. But, anyway, I disagree with something you said this morning.
RUSH: What’s that?
CALLER: And it bothered me.
RUSH: What’s that?
CALLER: You said that American history teachers would be amazed at Mount Vernon. There are lots of us American history teachers out there that actually teach American history, teach the Founding Fathers, teach the Constitution.
RUSH: Okay.
CALLER: And we need to get credit for that.
RUSH: Okay, a little test question for you, then.
CALLER: Okay.
RUSH: Who gave George Washington’s first Thanksgiving address?
CALLER: He did.
RUSH: All right, all right, okay. (Clapping.) Very good.
CALLER: Of course he did. You’re so silly. We’ve been listening to you a lot of years, and lots of times we agree with you, but every now and then we get upset with you, and this is one of them, because there are hundreds of us American history teachers out here that actually really teach American history.
RUSH: I understand that. And you’re right.
CALLER: And I’ve been to Mount Vernon.
RUSH: I made a hasty generalization born of a fear that I think that there are fewer of you. There are a lot of teachers that may know it, but they’re not teaching it. They’re using their own political agenda as the syllabus under the guise of calling it American history. I’ve heard too many examples of this, admittedly here in south Florida. I don’t want to get a bunch of arguments going here over which teachers are good or bad. But clearly, there’s some politicking going on in the high school classrooms across America today, and I appreciate the fact that your feelings were hurt, and I now know that you know American history, so I feel better about it.
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