George in Forest, Virginia. George, I’m glad you waited. It’s great to have you here. Hello, sir.

CALLER: Hello. Tea Party greetings from Forest, Virginia, Thomas Jefferson’s summer home, Poplar Forest. Thank you for having tea with George. Rush, I’m a founding board member of a Christian group that for the past 30 years has brought hope to the hopeless in some of the world’s most difficult areas. We’re all unpaid board members. We’re businessmen who just want to make the world a better place.

We usually begin our work with a soccer ball. You can go into a new area where you’re not known. You throw some soccer balls out into the field. People come onto the field. You get a soccer game going. You get some good conversations going, and you go from there. We’ve been working with reconciling the warring tribes in Rwanda, the Hutu and the Tutsi, and some have called that the miracle of Rwanda. We’re teaching self-sufficiency skills in Uganda, mainly in the ghettos of Kampala and then in Gulu, north Uganda.

President Obama and Nancy Pelosi have just made our work and a lot of other folks’ work a lot more difficult by airing what bad people Americans are, and the good feeling about helping out can and is being diminished. They’ve not just endangered us and our work, they’ve endangered some of the most marginalized people on earth, and it just seems to them and the sycophant media that the poorest of the poor are just collateral damage. It really doesn’t matter as long as they can get their digs in against Americans.

RUSH: Well, you know, you’re right on the money. The poorest of the poor are collateral damage. One of the biggest leftist objectives, environmentalism guarantees that poor people around the world stay poor. It guarantees it. But before I explain what I mean, “What do you mean by that, Mr. Limbaugh?” I’ll explain it in a minute. Your point is that Dianne Feinstein releasing this so-called report on torture is endangering people all over America. Americans like you are trying to help people because a high degree of mistrust is created among the people you’re trying to help for people like you. You’re American, you’re out there trying to help ’em and now all of a sudden the American media, the worldwide media is once again awash with news about how America tortures and mistreats people. And that puts you at greater risk, you think?

CALLER: Yeah, a lot of the folks where we work, they’re Muslim or they’re Christian or their animist. When we go in there, it’s not political, it’s not religious. They want something to eat. They want a chance in life. The kids, they want a safe place to sleep tonight —

RUSH: Yeah.

CALLER: — and not be captured by Joseph Kony’s group and forced into these children’s armies. I don’t know if you’ve read about him.

RUSH: I have.

CALLER: He may be the most evil man on earth. And they aren’t political; they just want help.

RUSH: And you, going into these far corners of the globe trying to help, are now victimized by this torture report. I totally understand. I do. Now, I realize many of you think environmentalism is a lofty worldwide, worthwhile pursuit. But what the militant environmentalists demand of everybody is an immediate halt to progress. Essentially militant environmentalism associates and blames progress with pollution, and therefore climate destruction, and therefore whatever else derives from it, such as global warming or the end of this species or that.

So let’s make up a little country in, say, Central America. Let’s call it San Cordoba. And San Cordoba has pretty healthy deposits of oil. But San Cordoba is just stuck in abject poverty. The country has been run by a series of dictators and military juntas over the years, and the people are enslaved. There is no standard of living per se, heavily militarized, and the leaders of the country are the only ones who make out like bandits, being paid off by people like the UN or what have you.

Then they discover these massive deposits of oil. The discovery of this oil could revive, could create a brand-new economy, and the first thing that happens, the militant environmentalist community goes in there and stops it, shuts it down, on the basis that drilling for oil and then producing it and creating it and shipping it out of San Cordoba to the nearest refinery will cause pollution and destruction and so forth, and so the country stays poor.

Militant environmentalism requires poverty. Militant environmentalism sustains poverty. Militant environmentalism is an attack on economic development and capitalism, and that’s why militant environmentalism is gonna guarantee that Africa remains a poor continent, because Africa happens to be the little petri dish, the laboratory for all of this militant environmentalist experimentation.

So it remains unsanitary and unclean. It’s why you have outbreaks of deadly diseases in large parts of Africa because people are not allowed to use such things as DDT or anything else to control infestation, vermin, what have you. They’re not aloud to experience any economic growth because that equals pollution and so poor people stay poor, destined to always be poor as long as leftist environmentalist wackos rule the day.

Now, I’ve got a whole bunch of sound bites in the Stack of Stuff about the torture report, and I want to use the next hour to dig deep and get into this. We’ve got some great sound bites from Dick Cheney and other things that need to be said and to put this in its proper perspective. Anyway, George, I appreciate the call. Thanks much.