RUSH: How many of you, in your life, how many of you have been to a ballpark? Baseball game, a football game, your whole life, how many times have you gone, and when you’re there — an arena, you’re watching hockey or basketball or what have you, how many hot dogs have you purchased and eaten over the course of your life? How many? Excluding Snerdley, he’s a vegan, but a hot dog is standard operating procedure. Yeah, I remember when I was a kid, my dad would take my brother and me up to old Sportsman’s Park, Busch Stadium in St. Louis, the capacity, 30,000 or so, go up there and watch baseball games, always had loge box seats right around first base or third base. My dad had pull. He was a powerful lawyer back when they were okay people. I remember walking in there, just the aromas of all the hot dogs and the guys there were smoking cigars. I mean, it was part of the whole thing, the ambiance consisted of the aromas and now they’re trying to sanitize all this stuff.
How many of you who have eaten hot dogs at ballparks or arenas are still alive? If you’re listening, you all are. A story out of St. Louis: ‘A new billboard debuting in St. Louis asks for ‘dietary disaster’ warning labels to be put on hot dogs served at Busch Stadium and other Major League Baseball stadiums. A nonprofit advocacy group called The Cancer Project is sponsoring the billboard that debuts Wednesday off Interstate 70 in St. Louis County. The billboard features an image of hot dogs jammed into a cigarette pack labeled ‘Unlucky Strikes.’ The billboard and a letter from a Cancer Project dietitian to Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig claim a link between processed meats and the risk of colorectal cancer.’ Now, aside from the details here, can I take you inside the newsroom of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch or any other newspaper? Do you think, with all of these budget cutbacks, do you think that they actually sent a reporter out and the reporter — who was it? Well, it’s another one of these unsigned AP stories. Do you think AP actually sent, or a newspaper, actually sent a reporter out, happened to be driving along I-70 and saw this billboard?
I’ll guarantee you what happened, an organization they’d never heard of, the Cancer Project, sent ’em a fax, press release or some such thing and of course since the State-Run Media is oriented toward attacking big, powerful institutions like Major League Baseball and the stadiums in which they play, ‘Oh, what a story here, Cardinals killing fans with hot dogs. We need end-of-life warnings,’ or the equivalent. This is just absurd. You know, I forget who said this, it’s one of our Founding Fathers. He said the tyranny of a brutal dictator is not as bad as the tyranny of a bunch of nannies who will not leave you alone, who are trying to save you or improve your life. The theory is that the dictator thug will occasionally take time off to go on vacation and leave you alone. But every day you have to put up with new organizations like this, the Cancer Project or the Center for Science in the Public Interest banning this or that in movie theaters. None of it is killing anybody, none of it is making anybody sick, life expectancy in this country is roaring. It’s just a bunch of people with too much time on their hands who want to force their way of living on you and everybody else. And they have all the support they want from the media.
If I was an editor — you want to save the newspaper business? An outfit like this sends you a press release, you throw it away, toss it in the trash can, and you say, ‘We’re devoted to real news here. We are not going to start schlepping for a bunch of you liberal special interest group wackos who are interested only in denying people their liberty and freedom.’ No, just the opposite, they gotta carry the water for these kinds of people. Once this starts, remember, in ’96 when the Sierra Club started targeting SUVs and I warned you people, I said it isn’t going to be long before your SUV is going to be thought of as an enemy and people are going to set ’em on fire and throw eggs at them and eventually you’re not going to be able to buy ’em and here you thought, ‘Rush, that’s a little extreme, don’t you think, that’s never going to happen.’ And where are we today? The government owns the automobile companies and they’re going to make sure that SUVs are not made unless they get whatever miles per gallon in which case they won’t be SUVs. So this kind of stuff never goes away.
You’ve got probably two or three people bored silly with way too much time on their hands that think they are better and smarter than everybody else and want everybody to live the way they do have targeted hot dogs, get ’em out of ballparks. ‘Rush, that will never happen.’ Let’s talk about it in five-or-ten years. Even Snerdley, I can see you don’t think they’ll succeed with this. You don’t think they’ll succeed in getting hot dogs out of ballparks. (laughing) It’s the same thing everybody said about the SUVs. But you know these people, they don’t ever stop, they don’t go away. There’s a story in the stack today, the FDA has an advisory group. By the way, I need to warn you all of something. Even if Congress doesn’t pass cap and trade, the EPA has the authority to implement it. Because the Supreme Court rendered a decision which said carbon dioxide is a pollutant and gave the government the right to regulate it. So even if cap and trade doesn’t become law as it is written, elements of it can be implemented by fiat from the EPA. You gotta start looking at the EPA, folks, as politicalized as the Justice Department or anything else in this administration.
This silly ban on Zicam, for example, 130 people in trumped-up legal cases claim their sense of smell was destroyed? You wouldn’t believe the number of cases that Zicam entered, had to defend and was victorious in. And because Zicam kept winning — Matrixx is the company — kept winning the cases the FDA finally said, ‘Okay, a sponsor of Limbaugh’s, well, let’s zap ’em.’ Now, the FDA advisory group yesterday suggested banning Vicodin and Percocet. Now, Vicodin and Percocet are painkillers. They are narcotic, they’re opiates, they’re derivatives of codeine. But that’s not why the advisory committee recommended they be banned. They recommended Vicodin and Percocet be banned because they have acetaminophen, Tylenol, which we learned yesterday is the next target of the FDA because all of these massive thousands and thousands and thousands of cases of liver failure or damage. Now, I’m not denying that acetaminophen can damage the liver, but every drug is metabolized by the liver. The liver is important. The liver is called the liver because the root word is ‘live.’ Everything gets metabolized in there.
Now, ban Vicodin, and of course a bunch of doctors said, ‘Wait, wait, wait, you can’t just do this. Pain management, especially in elderly people, you’re guaranteeing suffering.’ Not really, because there are painkillers without acetaminophen in them, but they are more powerful. But the point is here you have a narcotic, and you have Tylenol, and this advisory board looks at the two and says, ‘We gotta get rid of the Tylenol.’ It’s all of these people trying to micromanage everybody’s life under the premise that none of us need ever really die. None of us really need to die if we just give liberals control of our lifestyles, well, we’ll all live and live and live and nobody will die, nobody will get sick because we have national health care and nationalized medicine and so forth. So there is the most intricate micromanaging of the American economy and American lifestyles going on, and much of it without legislation, Obama’s czars, payment czar, now the fine print czar. These people don’t have to get confirmed before the Senate, salaries are unknown, Obama pays them whatever he wants. He’s their boss. They have more power than cabinet secretaries do. This is all extra unconstitutional. People are so afraid of this guy that everybody shuts up. People are genuinely afraid of whatever retribution might be heading down the pike.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: That quote is from C.S. Lewis. Levin dug it up. I’ve seen it in Tom Sowell pieces as well but it’s a great quote. Here’s the word-for-word quote. ‘Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.’ They will never leave us alone. They will get hot dogs banned in two to three years. The media will support it. You wait. They get hot dogs banned in two to three years, maybe five at the outside, ‘Because they’re doing it for us,’ and they think… See, they are good people. They care. ‘They are good people and they are protecting us from ourselves. They’re going to make sure that we never get sick and that maybe we don’t die,’ and then they will feel better. Then they’re gonna go after apple pie. They already have, if it’s made with trans fats. Sugar is not long down the pike. You wait. Look, they’re taxing Coke and Pepsi with sugar in it.