Right before the break ended, the Democrat — and I never heard him of this guy. I don’t know who he is. (Some red freckle-faced kid whose parents would not have had him had been proper testing, because who wants a redheaded freckle-faced kid these days when you can put designer babies together, so he’s lucky to be alive.) He’s there saying, “Jack Bauer can’t seen save Bush and his administration…” He’s deadly serious! “Not even Jack Bauer…” and of course Drudge had a story yesterday that some Fox unnamed source told him, “Yeah, it’s time to…” I forget the exact quote. Time to give the country a wake-up call or some such thing, as though the nuke in the show is designed to show the American people what can happen. Well, it can, but (laughing). I moderated a seminar last June for the Heritage Foundation with Howard Gordon, who is the lead writer and executive producer, and Joel Surnow, who is the executive producer-creator, and Mary Lynn Rajskub was there (Chloe) and Carlos Bernard (Tony Almeda), and a couple other people, and Bob Cochran, who was Surnow’s co-creator, and of course they were kind of amused at the serious think tank-type questions that were being lobbed at them. They said, “Well, we do take terrorism very seriously, but it’s a television show, and we write this thing so many months in advance that to try to predict future events and then tie our show to them is sort of impossible. We don’t do that. We’re just trying to make every episode better than the last one,” but these libs in the media are panicked, because a nuke’s been lit off, and they’re worried the American people will say, “Well, you know, that actually could happen here,” and will that help Bush? You see, they’re on the verge out there, folks, of turning the whole country against Bush on not just Iraq, but the whole war on terror. It’s hilarious to watch this.
RUSH: This is Scott in Austin, Texas. Thank you, sir. Welcome to the EIB Network.
CALLER: Yeah, hi, Rush.
RUSH: Hey.
CALLER: Yeah, talking about the “24” show. I don’t know if it’s intentional propaganda the way those others were saying, but the first thing I thought of when I saw this nuclear explosion is I thought, “Good. Maybe that will wake some people up who have forgotten about 9/11 and how serious this is,” but the more I think about it, as the debate goes on and people trying to get some of these people wishy-washy types to be more serious about the war on terror, “Look what could happen, nuclear war,” I’m wondering if the other side is going to say, “Ah, that’s just TV! That’s just a TV show. That could never happen,” when it could happen.
RUSH: Let me ask you a question.
CALLER: Okay.
RUSH: Do you really think that the liberals as we’ve come to know and love them today, who are convinced that America is responsible for all of the bad things happening to us –, that we have created hatred around the world because of our various “selfishness,” our “pollution,” our superpower status, all these things — and as such their guilt is so profound they feel that we are justified in losing a war. “We deserve to be taken down a couple notches. We deserve to lose. We deserve to be embarrassed,” and so forth. Do you really think a television show which lights off a nuke in the context of terrorism is going to cause them to change their minds about anything?
CALLER: Well, on a certain level —
RUSH: It won’t.
CALLER: — do think we deserve… There’s a segment of the crowd that thinks that. I don’t think anybody is ready for a nuclear bomb. I hope that isn’t the wake-up call they need. Maybe just the show is what they need to get serious about it. They’ve forgotten about 9/11. That was a million years ago to them. That’s ancient history, and they’re not taking it seriously anymore.
RUSH: Well, I know. A lot of people aren’t, because they don’t have to. This is not hard, psychologically, to understand. We are at war, but we aren’t! The country doesn’t have to come together for us to be at war. Those who don’t want to even acknowledge that we are at war don’t have to! Their lives are unaffected by it. Their jobs are there every day, more so than ever before. Affluence and the opportunity for it is at an all-time high. I have to find the story in the stack yesterday that dovetails with this. It’s all about how the middle class is doing everything it can to pretend it’s rich! It’s trying to live its life (or live their lives) as they read that the rich do. So there’s clearly a desire on the part of more Americans than ever before to be upwardly mobile because they think they can reach it. The liberals keep running around, “Well, we haven’t sacrificed.” What do you want us to do? “Well, you should pay higher taxes.” We don’t have to! What is this notion of sacrifice? Nobody thinks they have to in order to fight this war on terror. Hell, the Democratic Party in this country has done its best, Scott, to erase of memory of 9/11!
New York City still can’t agree on a plan to start rebuilding the World Trade Center. When that starts going back up, it will bring some memories; we’ll refocus. But in the end — and I really don’t throwing cold water on things. I really don’t, because I know people get all excited about their own interpretations of things, but when it comes to the nuclear light-off last night, the nuclear explosion on “24”, please try to keep in mind the context of the program. This is Season Six, and you have to keep doing something new. I know they debated this a long time. They wondered about the ramifications of it and so forth. What it boils down to is: at the end of the day they’re doing a television show; it’s highly competitive out there, and they just can’t keep repeating the same old thing. In fact, I wonder what they’re going to do next. What else is there to do after six years of this kind of exploration of terrorism on “24”? This is just my guess, okay? I’m just like you. I don’t know this. I’ve not discussed this with my buds there. I think they’re going to throw everything there is left in the scenarios of militant, dramatic terrorist acts in this country into this season and then next year move on to something else. I have no clue what it would be. So there are still four suitcase nukes out there in this show. Folks, you think one nuclear blast is shocking? What if there are four more? Well, there won’t be four more, because Bauer has to save the day on one of them, I would think.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: We’ve got the sound bite here from the redheaded freckle-faced guy that was on MSNBC a moment ago with Norah O’Donnell discussing the propaganda that 24 is for the Bush administration. His name is Michael Feldman, and he’s a blogger at HotSoup.com. He’s a former Algore advisor, and Norah O’Donnell said, “The Drudge Report yesterday online quoted an unidentified Fox executive as saying, ‘It’s time to wake up the country.’ Is this propaganda, or is it entertainment?”
REDHEAD: Look, it’s entertainment, and not even Jack Bauer can save President Bush and his administration, especially right now and given his popularity, but — but seriously, I think the American people know the difference between fact and fiction. But, uh, in a post-9/11 world, especially in a place where Americans have fears, uh, about, uh, their homeland, attacks on their homeland, uh, about terrorism, popular culture can tap into something, and there’s no doubt that these issues in this show taps into a psyche, uh, with the American people.
RUSH: Well, then you ought to be worried, Mr. Feldman, because your party is doing everything it can to say these fears don’t really exist.