RUSH: Brooksville, Kentucky. This is Vickie, and you are up first. It’s a delight to have you with us. Hello.
CALLER: It’s a delight to speak to you, Rush. Thank you very much for taking my call.
RUSH: You bet, madam. Thank you.
CALLER: Hillbilly dittos to you, man.
RUSH: Ha-ha-ha-ha.
CALLER: Hillbilly dittos.
RUSH: By the way, speaking of that, hey, Vickie, I gotta ask you a question, do you watch Justified?
CALLER: No, I don’t, but I’ve heard a lot of great things about it. Is it really good?
RUSH: Oh, it’s one of the best shows on television. You’ve got to watch Justified. It’s in season three and it takes place basically in Harlan County, Kentucky.
CALLER: Oh, there you go. That’s where my family is from, is down there, in the mountains.
RUSH: Now, in terms of the writing, production, and acting, it’s great. It doesn’t say the greatest things about Harlan County.
CALLER: Yeah, well, you know —
RUSH: Well, it’s about the criminal element there but, you know, Elmore Leonard created a character named Raylan Givens, sheriff, US Marshal. Now, it’s R rated, it’s got warnings — oh, folks, speaking of which, Vickie, hang on here just a second. I have been meaning to do this since the show started. This will not take away from your caller time. Folks, how many of you went and saw Act of Valor? You have got to go see this. It cleaned up. It was number one over the weekend at the box office. Folks, this movie, I’m gonna tell you, is unlike anything you’ve seen. It’s real Navy SEALs in a fictional story, intrigue, terrorism, worldwide terrorism. It is just one of the best war movies I’ve ever seen. The only problem with this movie is it’s rated R because of the language and some of you might not want to take your children to it because of that and it’s a shame because they would love it.
It’s not a propaganda movie. It’s not something officially pro-Navy, pro-SEAL, pro-military. It is just a great movie, and it has scenes shot… this stuff actually happens. They could not use stuntmen to do this. They needed real SEALs who had the physical ability and training to do some of this stuff. We watched it, and almost sat there and watched it again, talked about it for 20 minutes. I sat in my seat stunned when it was over. You’ve got to see it. Act of Valor. I kid you not. Okay, Vickie. Thanks for reminding me. What was it you called about?
CALLER: Well, first of all I wanted to say my husband is a 24-year Navy veteran. He’s a disabled veteran at this point and he was a “corpseman” and we have known many, many SEALs over the years, and they are, indeed, well worth our praise and glory.
RUSH: Right.
CALLER: And I can’t wait to see the movie. So what I called to tell you was, the big problem that the establishment, the reason that everybody is pissed off at you, Rush, and the reason that they’re running off at the mouth and diarrhea everywhere is because you’re telling us the truth, and nobody else is doing it. Even Fox News, as much as I love ’em, had fallen into the trap of pitching Santorum being nothing but social issues crap. And even my pastor of my little tiny church in this town that has 600 people in the whole county, knew that it was about religious freedom.
RUSH: Let me tell you something.
CALLER: So I mean even us hillbillies get it.
RUSH: It’s about what it is. The reason why you’ve got critics saying that people are afraid, they’re afraid of the media, and it goes back to something I spent a little bit of time on on Friday. It’s a human nature thing. I don’t know what can be done about it. It’s all wrapped up in people being afraid of what others are going to be think of them, and on this social business stuff, there is such an explicable stigma to being opposed to abortion. People don’t want to say that they’re anti-abortion in public. They’re afraid of what’s gonna happen to them because the culture has been created by the media to believe that they’re in a minority. And so because of the fear of what other people are gonna think, because of the fear of what independents might do, they want to sweep the subject under the rug. The bottom line is that Santorum and Romney and Newt are talking about everything. They’re not singularly focused on any one thing, social issues or economic issues or what have you. But I thank you. I appreciate your observation. I happen to agree with it as well, Vickie, so thanks much.
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RUSH: Act of Valor made nearly $25 million this weekend. That’s almost twice what it cost to make. Folks, when you watch this, and those of us who went to see it over the weekend, I know this is true, you’re gonna wish that you had the ability to rewind it and watch things again. You’re gonna wish that you had it on DVD. You’re gonna want to go back and see it again to watch some of the things they do in this movie, Act of Valor. Just unbelievably amazing flick.
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RUSH: Rick, Van Nuys, California, nice to have you on the EIB Network, sir. Hello.
CALLER: Rush, it’s great to talk to you. Even though we’ve never met, you’re an old dear friend of mine.
RUSH: Thank you, sir, very much.
CALLER: If you will allow me, I know you’ve been covering a lot of topics, but I’d like to go back to Act of Valor if we could.
RUSH: Sure.
CALLER: I’d like to echo everything that you said. After the movie was over, after I sat there in stunned silence, I gave it a standing ovation, along with everybody else in the theater. Then I went out and I was sitting in my truck for ten minutes with tears streaming down my face and then I went to Facebook, posted about it all over, was texting all my friends, “You gotta go see this movie.”
RUSH: Let me ask you a question about it.
CALLER: Sure.
RUSH: Because I’m sure that you noticed, you could tell that the SEALs were not real actors. Did that take away from the movie at all for you?
CALLER: No. You know, it’s funny you mentioned that because being former military, I’m always hesitant to see a movie coming out of Hollywood about military. I always go and look at the reviews, and there were negative reviews, and one of them mentioned that they’re not actors, they should stick to what they know, but they did a great job as far as I’m concerned. You could tell that they’re not professional actors, but for me that’s a great thing. I love to see real people.
RUSH: Kathryn and I had the —
CALLER: — and I loved the fact that these guys were real and that’s why I went to see it. I went to go see it because I heard your review last week.
RUSH: Well, we had the same reaction to it. It’s obvious that they’re not trained actors, but it adds to it. It adds to the realism of it all. I mean there are stunt people in this movie, but all the exercises performed are actual exercises and tactics that SEALs are trained to do and perform. I’ve never seen half of them. There’s no action adventure movie — I mean, they do impossible things in like Mission Impossible. This is real stuff that I have never seen done before. I had a DVD to watch; I could rewind it. You’re gonna wish you could do that if you see it in a theater.
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RUSH: I want to say one more thing about the movie Act of Valor and then I’m gonna shut it down, because I don’t want to build the expectations up so high that they can’t be met. That happened to me with The Exorcist. I was one of the last people to see The Exorcist and by then I’d heard it was the most horrifying, scary, gory movie ever. So I was really expecting this over-the-top thing. When I finally saw it, when it was over I said, “What was the big deal?” So I don’t want that to happen to you if you go see Act of Valor after I discuss it. But I do have to tell you that they shot this on a $3,000 camera. And it is the most beautiful movie I’ve ever seen, from the standpoint…
Now, I’m not a professional reviewer of movies, so when I say ” cinematography,” I’m just talking that every frame looks great. I was lucky. The print that I got, the copy I got on my DVD was almost like Blu-ray. So it was that good. I’m telling you: Some of the shots, some of the places they put cameras, some of the action that they got, I’ve never seen. In any movie where they stage these kinds of events and come up with impossible things that human beings cannot do, this consists of everything SEALs do and can do and are trained to. But I was just overwhelmed by it. We had the flexibility of hitting the pause button now and then, and rewinding to look at something now and then — which, I’m telling you, you’re going to wish you could do.
That’s as much as I’m gonna say about it because any more would be overkill.
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RUSH: I just got an e-mail. I said I wasn’t gonna talk about Act of Valor anymore. I got an e-mail from my buddy Mark Hasara, retired Lieutenant Colonel from the US Air Force, who overwhelmed me one day by flying a flag in his tanker and six other aircraft in the original invasion of Iraq in 2003. He FedExed it to me just out of the blue with the certificates of all the aircraft and a letter explaining it all. I was blown away by it. I’ve become his friend. He sent me a note about Act of Valor, said, “I’ve been listening with interest to your commentary on the movie. The first thing which came to my mind was that these are not actors and this is not acting and this is what it looks like in real life for the team.”
That is the best way to describe this movie. It isn’t acting. The SEALs are not actors. There are actors in the movie acting, but what they do, this is not Hollywood. It is the best way to describe it. This is what it looks like in real life, which movies don’t capture. All right, what are you laughing at in there? I’m watching this movie with Kathryn and I told her before it started there’s all kinds of criticism of it from the left and we’re watching it and she asked me to pause it, “Why do they hate this?” She knows that it’s because it portrays the US military in a positive light. There’s a lot of left-wing blogosphere ripping of this movie as propaganda because it makes the military look good.
All it is, is what they really do. But the west way to describe it is this is what it looks like in real life, and that’s why I’ve never seen it before. That’s why when you watch this, you haven’t seen this before. Unless you’re a SEAL or unless you’ve worked with them, you haven’t seen this before. You haven’t seen this portrayed in a Tom Cruise movie or a Matt Damon movie or any other action adventure thrill type. This is what real life looks like.
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RUSH: Snerdley, do this. Google “Act of Valor” and “propaganda,” and you should get about 1.7 million results. There is an ongoing campaign on leftist websites to discredit this movie. If you go see this movie, you’ll come out of there asking yourself, “Why would anybody want to discredit it?” Folks, it’s not even a pro-America movie. That’s not the purpose of it. It may end up being that, but that’s not why it was done. This is a Hollywood studio that did this. It’s not some fringe outfit. This is Relativity Media. They’re a mainstream Hollywood production house.
If you look up this movie, if you read about how it came it be, it’s the result of these two guys that produced it. They actually did want to do a training film using real SEALs, and that spawned the idea of a movie, but it’s a fictional story. It’s just like any other action adventure movie. There’s nothing propaganda about it. There’s nothing dishonest about the movie. That’s what’s so great about it. My gosh, this movie is dripping with reality. I don’t want to talk about it anymore. I’m gonna destroy people’s expectations for it if I keep talking about it. So that’s it.
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RUSH: All right, one more time on this. I did not like Act of Valor because I’m conservative. I do not say what I’m saying about it because I’m conservative and there’s a conservative message in it. It is a good — maybe great — movie with things I’ve never seen before, pure and simple. I happen to have an awe and respect for the US military. I can’t deny that. But I don’t like this because it fits my political agenda. There is nothing agenda-oriented about this movie! The left is scared of this and it makes no sense, and the fact that they are is quite telling.