RUSH: As is the usual case, half my brain tied behind my back to make things fair, to make things equal, buzzwords for the Millennials. If I focus on fairness and equality, they will stop being scared and will love me.

Bill in Milwaukee. Glad you called, sir. You’re next on Open Line Friday. Hi.

CALLER: Hi, Rush. This is an honor. I’ve been a faithful listener since 1988.

RUSH: Well, that’s the beginning. You’re a lifer.

CALLER: Yes, I am.

RUSH: I really appreciate that. Thank you.

CALLER: Thank you. I was hoping you could explain the origin of the name Dingy Harry, please.

RUSH: Gladly. I forget what Harry Reid did to trigger it. It was something reprehensible, reprehensibly political, reprehensibly partisan. Clint Eastwood owned the term Dirty Harry, so I was trying to come up with something as close to that as I could without stealing dirt. I mean, if I called him Dirty Harry, that’s Clint Eastwood. So Dingy Harry is as close as I was able to get to it.

CALLER: It’s hilarious.

RUSH: Oh, I’m glad you like it. I’ll tell you when it might have been, and I could be wrong about this. Do you remember when this whole phony soldier lie started? There was a genuine phony soldier who was lying about all kinds of things. This is part of what the Democrats did, by the way, in creating this never-ending five years of hatred for the troops. There was a phony soldier out there who was making things up about the abuse that he had seen, except at the time he was thought to have been a real soldier. And the left immediately believed everything he said and glommed on to it, and I questioned this guy, and I called him a phony.

So Dingy Harry went to the floor of the Senate to trash me as someone who routinely bashes the military. Meanwhile, I am among the biggest supporters of the military for 25 years. And Dingy Harry, on the floor of the Senate, demanded that my syndication partner Clear Channel, happened to be Mark Mays at the time, either fire me or censor me or rebuke me or whatever. He sent Mark Mays a letter demanding this after criticizing me on the floor of the Senate.

I asked Mark Mays if I could have that letter to auction it off on eBay to raise money for the Marine Corps-Law Enforcement Foundation, which has been a charity I’ve supported since it was started in the early nineties. This was a very gutsy move for Mark Mays. He gave me the letter and we auctioned it off. It raised, well, close to $3 million, two and a half or $3 million? And I matched it. I matched whatever was bid.

Here was a United States Senate majority leader reaching out to a CEO demanding that he reprimand, fire, whatever, a private citizen employee. It was a classic illustration of government overreach, and for that reason it was historic. That may have been when I concocted the name Dingy Harry. But it might have been something else. But, anyway, that’s the reason for it. Tried to get as close as I could to Dirty Harry.