RUSH: Tim in northwest Ohio. Open Line Friday, your turn. Thank you for calling. Hello. CALLER: Hey, thanks, Rush. I’m a helicopter pilot and I fly part time for a coal company in West Virginia. RUSH: Thank you, sir.
CALLER: Flying around the executives I hear ’em talking about different things and one of the things that’s happened now is the EPA is starting to pull permits from mines in West Virginia, and the thing I didn’t realize is that we actually export coal. RUSH: I knew that we imported it. CALLER: No, we actually export it, too.
RUSH: So you’re a helicopter pilot, you fly part time for a coal company in West Virginia, you fly the executives around and you hear ’em talking about…? How can you hear anything on a helicopter anyway? You hear ’em in the headphones? CALLER: Oh, yeah. We got Bose headsets. Probably not as nice as on EIB 1, but they’re very nice. RUSH: We have Bose at EIB 1, the noise-canceling headphones, the same things you’ve got in your chopper.
CALLER: Yeah. RUSH: Yeah. So these guys know you can hear ’em, and they’re sitting there, they’re talking about the permits and so forth, EPA pulling permits from mines in West Virginia. But what is this about exporting coal? CALLER: Well, we actually have so much stuff in the ground, just like you were talking. I mean we got oil, we got coal, we got all sorts of things in the ground that we could get, but we just don’t. We’re not allowed to go get ’em. RUSH: That’s right. CALLER: We flew by 40 windmills the other day and it was kind of funny because not one of them was turning. There was only five knots of wind and not one was turning and one of the comments they made was, you know, ‘If you didn’t have to turn the lights on every day, windmills would be great.’ RUSH: Exactly right. And if you were deaf like I am and you couldn’t hear ’em, why, they’d be a panacea.
CALLER: That’s right. (chuckles) That’s right. RUSH: Okay, you’re right. You’re right. Instant research here: We do export coal to China! (laughing) We’re exporting coal to the ChiComs, and that’s ticking off our environmentalist wackos. CALLER: Yep. It just amazes me how wrong the press gets everything. If you don’t mind, real quick let me tell you a quick story. RUSH: Yeah, but the press gets it wrong because of their sources and who they believe. What is it you want to say? CALLER: I just want to say I was down in Katrina right after it happened. I was flying a helicopter down there. There were 300 helicopters down there. You couldn’t have got more helicopters into that airspace without a midair [collision] and, you know, I used to be in the Coast Guard a long time ago, and hoisting people off of roofs takes time. You could not have got those people out of there any quicker. And when George Bush came in on Air Force One, everybody was afraid it was gonna shut down the airspace, but that man didn’t do anything to shut down the airspace. I flew right by Air Force One, and when he turned to take off on runway I think it was 2-7 out of Louis Armstrong — RUSH: Yep. CALLER: — he took off, and when that aircraft rotated after going down the runway, you couldn’t even see it, there was so much debris on the runway. But he came in there anyway. I’m sure the Secret Service said, ‘No, don’t go in there,’ and ‘don’t go in there,’ but I’m sure that he overruled ’em and went in there anyway. And they did not change one thing when he came in. They didn’t put up a TFR, a temporary flight restriction, for him or anything. You know, there was obviously already a TFR there for Katrina, but they didn’t do anything different just ’cause he was there — and, you know, I have great respect for the man, and that was another thing the press didn’t mention or talk about. RUSH: Well. Tim, I’m glad you called. I thank you very much. I’m glad you got through. CALLER: Okay. Take care, Rush. RUSH: All the best. And enjoy those Bose headphones.