RUSH: Here’s Steven in Gainesville, Florida. It’s great to have you on the program, sir, hello.
CALLER: Mega dittos, Rush. It’s an honor to talk to you.
RUSH: Thank you.
CALLER: Yeah, thank you very much for everything you do. I have a quick question for you on the Issa hearing, but I want to make a comment ’cause you brought up how the Drive-Bys and the liberals are reacting to this. I don’t know if you remember. You probably do, since you had it. But you used to have a show on TV about 20-something years ago, and I was a kid at the time. I picked it up on my antenna, and I remembered you had this lobster in the background.
You had him in a tank and you said you were gonna eat him on Friday, and this was before the Internet and there’s only three major networks. And I just remember how much, you know, uproar you brought nationally because you said you were gonna eat a lobster at the end of the week. What that told me was that… It just showed me that, one, Democrats don’t have any sense of humor, and, two, they’ll make a ruckus out of anything. There’s nothing logical about that.
RUSH: Since you bring that up — and I will not penalize you by taking time from your call — let me explain the lobster story, because you watched it when you were young. There are actually two elements to the lobster story. The first element is that a Los Angeles (Malibu, I think) bar or restaurant had Larry the Lobster (they had named him) in the tank. He was big and he was old, and they were going to eat Larry.
They were gonna do what they did, and Mary Tyler Moore and a couple of other Hollywood actresses launched a campaign to save Larry the Lobster, and I entered the bidding to buy Larry the Lobster so that I could eat him and share him with my audience — and that further outraged them. When I lost — and then there’s a second lobster story. Katie Couric was doing a cooking episode with some chef on the Today show.
The chef is cooking lobster, and the chef started cutting up a live lobster and throwing the parts on a skillet, and Katie was grossed out. (wailing) “Ewwww! Oh, my God! Oh, my Gaaawd! What are you doing! Oh, my God,” and the chef says, “Well, this is what you do. You gotta do these a certain way, otherwise they’ll poison you. Gotta…” Couric said, “Oh, my Gaaawd.” So then we had, later in the week, after playing that…
Of course I didn’t bring in a lobster and a chef and all that, but we brought our friends over from Patsy’s and started throwing fried calamari to the audience. So we did two episodes with the lobster. Yeah, the Patsy guys came over with just giant vats of fried calamari, and I just started throwing it into the audience in honor of Katie Couric being grossed out by watching the way you cook a lobster. Good memory, sir, because that’s 20 years ago.
CALLER: Yeah, it was a long time. I was only 12 or 13 at the time. But, you know, the thing… It’s just a paradigm to explain how illogical the liberals are on anything. And, you know, getting to the Issa hearing, I watched a bit, and you’re right. It looked like they were trying to turn it away from Issa. But here’s my question to you about Issa. Why doesn’t he make this front page by saying, “You know, Lois Lerner, you’re not answering. You’re pleading the Fifth. I’ll put in you contempt of Congress”?
RUSH: Well, because she can take the Fifth Amendment. That’s not a crime. I don’t know about the contempt of Congress. Contempt of Congress may be refusing to appear, and maybe it could be showing up and refusing to testify, not taking the Fifth. But the bottom line is, there’s no way. Even if that were permissible, legal, whatever, without any question, there’s no way. You know, Steven, as well as I do, the Republicans aren’t gonna put the woman in jail.
CALLER: Yes.
RUSH: That’s just… Oh, can you imagine? Can you imagine the hero she would become?
CALLER: Oh, yeah. Well, it’ll get spinned no matter what. You’re right there. But they need to stop being a doormat. We know the speaker we got over there is a doormat, and there are very few people over there on the Hill that are actually making a stand. But, you know, look, I would consider myself a person of the Tea Party. I’ve been to multiple rallies. I’ve been to one down there in West Palm, used to live down there. We are the most peaceful people out there, and people are very kind and caring, and generous about a lot of things about their lives, and all we really want to do is just live by the Constitution, you know?
RUSH: And it’s —
CALLER: Go ahead.
RUSH: You’re a threat, man. You have to understand. You are a threat to what they want and what they believe. The Tea Party people are the salt of the earth. The Tea Party is the backbone of this country. I categorize them as the people who make the country work. You’re not seeking fame or notoriety. You’re not vomiting everything about yourself on Facebook or Twitter.
You’re doing your best to raise your family and behave right and do all that, and you’re working, trying as hard as you can to overcome the odds of life — and you see your government out of control, and for the first time ever in your lives, you organize, you start going to these Tea Party rallies, and the left doesn’t know what to do about it because it’s brand-new. It’s not tied to any other party. There is no singular leader that they can demonize and destroy.
So they created Occupy Wall Street as the counter. They literally manufactured a protest group made up — I mean, just human debris, these people were. They were organizing in these rotgut manners, ways. They were just filthy and so forth. And they became media darlings. These people, in Occupy Wall Street, Steven, were the kind of people the media was describing you Tea Partiers as being, and they became instant heroes. They became just the most wonderful people, protesting Wall Street, demanding fairness, and they were totally manufactured. They were totally created by the Democrats to counter the Tea Party. And I know how frustrating it is for you.
I know exactly what you’re talking about. You’re out there, you live in Gainesville, Florida. You’re a nice guy. You don’t harm anybody. You don’t intend harm on anybody. You don’t hate anybody. All you want is for your country to be the best it can be because of your kids and your own future. You want the land of opportunity and the American dream to prosper and survive, and you see a bunch of people that are getting in the way of it, and you want to stop it, and you become villains, and they start making up all of these horrible things about you and other people in the group, the furthest thing from what you really are. And I know how frustrating it is that nobody speaks up for you. The Republican Party themselves has people trying to wipe you out because you threaten them.
The great thing about all of you in the Tea Party is you’re hanging in there. This is not your life, this is not your business, this is not what you committed your life to, and they’re trying to get you out of it. They’re trying to scare you, impugn you. They’re trying to just intimidate you so you’ll give up, you don’t want this, and it’s not working. Tea Party people are hanging in. And if anything, they’re getting stronger. Remember, elections in Texas yesterday.
And the Rasmussen people — Scott Rasmussen’s gone, by the way. He’s outta there. His own company threw him away or something. I don’t know what happened, but he’s not there. But the Rasmussen poll was released at noon today. The Texas governor’s race, Abbott leads Wendy Davis by 12 points, 53 to 41. There were five other elections. Ted Cruz-endorsed-candidates won all of them. It was a great electoral night for conservatives. The fifth Ted Cruz-endorsed-candidate is in a runoff, and looks to be in pretty good shape.
I can’t tell you, I wish I could mention names, but it’s trouble I don’t need. But you’d know these names. They get in my face. “Rush, you really think Ted Cruz is the future of the Republican Party? Are you telling me you think Ted Cruz is gonna get elected to anything? You can’t possibly. You know as well as I do, Rush, he’s a glittering idiot, just like Sarah Palin.” I have people that are on television every night, folks, or three times a week, who get in my face, e-mails, in person, saying things like that to me. And yet here’s Cruz and his endorse — now, he didn’t have a candidate. The Tea Party didn’t have a candidate opposite John Cornyn. Cornyn won with 60% I think in his primary, but he wasn’t up against a Tea Party opponent. But everybody said, “Ah, Tea Party nothing. They couldn’t get rid of the establishment guy, Cornyn.”
They didn’t try. I don’t think there was a Tea Party candidate opposite Cornyn. But everywhere else that Cruz went, his endorsed candidates cleaned up. It’s another one of the things where if you depend on the Drive-By Media you’re not gonna get the true interpretation of what happened. Erick Erickson at RedState.com has a good take on the Texas elections. But Abbott’s up over the beloved, the adored Wendy Davis by 12 for the governor’s race there.
Anyway, hang in there, Steve. That’s the best I can tell you. You’ve entered a world where the media is on the other team. The media is the other team and there’s nothing that’s going to change that. The way you’re treated is the way you’re going to continue to be treated. If you win, it’s gonna get worse. Be prepared for it.