RUSH: Brian, Jacksonville, Florida. Hello, sir. Thank you for calling. It’s great to have you here.
CALLER: Merry Christmas, Rush. Thanks to you and your staff and thanks for having a good show.
RUSH: Thank you very much.
CALLER: I hope that I have as much passion in this phone call as I did this morning talking to my wife, and I hope I come across clearly. Listen, Sharpton and people like him, the only reason they’re still in power is ’cause people continue to give them the opportunity to have power. Sony has a lot going on, I realize that, but when the lady called to apologize or whatever she did to him, why does she feel obligated? It was a private interaction between her and another employee, and like you said the other day, I think it was the other day where you said, “Hey, it’s out there, she meant it. If they didn’t she wouldn’t have done it,” so why would you apologize for it? The only reason he and other people have power is because people keep bowing down and giving them power. Until somebody stands up and says, “Look, we’re not gonna do this. We might get hit on our profit margin, but why are you gonna give up your independence?” I still can’t understand —
RUSH: No, you’re right.
CALLER: — why people continue to back down.
RUSH: No, look, you’re right, but let me try to explain how this happens and what you must try to do here is relate to the liberal brain and the liberal mind. So let’s now become, for just a moment, you and me, Brian, will become Amy Pascal. She is the coleading highest executive at Sony. There’s the chairman, the CEO, and she’s the cochair of Sony Pictures. Okay, so right away we know she’s in a business filled with make-believe and phoniness and fraud, slapping people on the back and making a lot of people you don’t like, like you. It is its own world, it’s its own business.
As such, I don’t know what her real politics are. Probably liberal. But even if they’re not, she has to act like one. She has to be one. She has to give money to liberals. She has to kowtow to liberal causes. She has to go to liberal fundraisers. She probably is one. She probably likes it, but even if she weren’t, she has to do that, okay? As such, Amy Pascal is a student of media. She has seen what has happened to people Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson have targeted. She doesn’t want that treatment. She has seen that the media constantly align with Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson.
If Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson decide to target something or somebody, the media’s right in there amplifying it, promoting it, giving a little acceleration, and she doesn’t want that because she lives in a world where it’s more important what people think of her than who she really is. It’s more important to her what people think of her and her work than who she really is and what she really does. So the short way of saying this, if the media can make you, they can break you. If you let the media make you — in other words, if the public perception of you is not rooted in your work, your body of work, and if your work doesn’t speak for itself, if your success is because the media has told people you’re great and because the media has been in your corner, well, then you realize the media can break you.
She knows that race is something that people have been ruined and destroyed over. And she doesn’t want to go anywhere near it. So she will do anything, Brian, to avoid this. She will grovel. She will bend over. She will beg. She will go so beneath herself and go down to Al Sharpton’s level and raise him up to her level to save her career and job, because every bit of her identity, or the vast majority of it, is rooted in what people think of her. That’s why they’re in panic over these e-mails being released.
CALLER: Well, it must be great living in her fake and plastic world ’cause she has no freedom. And until people have freedom and stand up for what is right and what the principles are of this nation, then this is gonna continue. Stop giving them the power, regardless if it’s her or anybody else. You can’t bow down to people because then they will conquer you and —
RUSH: Wait a second. Who’s the last person that you can think of that stood up to Al Sharpton? Who’s the last person that said to Al Sharpton, “Go to hell, bud. I don’t care what you think. You can’t touch me. Go to hell.” Name one.
CALLER: Well, let’s start with me today. How about that? I’m not apologizing for anything I’m saying today, how about that, world, take that.
RUSH: Yeah, but Al Sharpton is not attacking you.
CALLER: Well, he might after this, won’t he?
RUSH: Well, it sounds like you want him to. It can be arranged.
CALLER: Well, it’s not a rage. It’s a passion, to where someone just needs to stand up and say the word “stop,” everybody just stop. If somebody would have stood up during Ferguson or all the other stuff (crosstalk) power or leadership to say “stop it.”
RUSH: It is a question of guts and the easiest route to someplace. That would be considered the hardest way for her to survive. She’s gonna take the easy path. But I want to make one point before we have to get out of here on this break, about your point about freedom and that she has no freedom. If she can’t be who she is, if she can’t react the way she’d really like to, she’s got no freedom. He’s exactly right about that. I want to share with you a very short story about Natan Sharansky. He was a Soviet Jew. He was in prison in the Soviet Union speaking out against the regime, Israeli as well.
I got to know him shortly after — he dates back to the Reagan era and a little bit beyond. And he tells the story that while he was in a Soviet prison, he would look at the Soviet guard and say, “I may be behind bars, but I have more freedom than you do,” and the guard, “What are you, crazy? Look at you. You’re behind bars. I’m on the other side of the bars.”
Sharansky, “Yeah, I can laugh at Putin. I can laugh at all of them. You can’t.”
“Yeah, but you’re behind bar bars.”
“Maybe so, but I am free to be who I am, and you aren’t.” And Brian may not know it, but that’s the exact point he’s making about these Sony people. They are not free to be who they are. They’re all having to play a role here, and that’s why they’re all in trouble. They’re afraid to be who they really are, and that’s what’s been exposed.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: We’ve got some sound bites I’ve been promising on this whole Sony thing that are really quite delectable. I want to get started on ’em here. First is a montage. As I mentioned, George Clooney — and let me be honest about something. I don’t know George Clooney at all, but something about Clooney I like. Not his politics, but there’s something about Clooney. Clooney, to me, is our era’s Cary Grant. And I liked Cary Grant. I don’t know anything about Cary Grant, either, but Clooney, when he’s working, I mean he does like the Edward R. Murrow movie and some of the other stuff. But Clooney doesn’t offend me, for whatever reason. Clooney is a likable guy, to me. I’m just being bluntly open and honest here.
He sent a letter out, a petition type letter asking everybody in Hollywood to sign it, opposing caving to North Korea. He sent a letter out essentially wanting everybody to back Sony up, to stand together with Sony, opposed to the hackers, opposed to North Korea. He didn’t get one signature, not one signature, from an actor, from a key grip, from a director, from a producer, he didn’t get one signature!
But the Drive-Bys loved it. The Drive-Bys thought, wow, Clooney’s outraged and Clooney is courageous, and we love it. So we have a montage here of an actor, George Clooney, who is married to Barbara Walters’ Most Fascinating Person of the year, with their comments on Clooney his petition.
ELAINE QUIJANO: Actor George Clooney took aim at Hollywood’s elite.
CAROL COSTELLO: George Clooney is outraged.
MARIA BARTIROMO: George Clooney is firing back.
GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: George Clooney, speaking out.
ALISYN CAMEROTA: George Clooney wrote a letter.
ROBIN ROBERTS: George Clooney, who lashed out, calling it terrorism.
MARTHA MACCALLUM: George Clooney seems to be a singular voice, saying what he’s saying.
JOE SCARBOROUGH: I think what George Clooney said is right.
JUAN WILLIAMS: Clooney’s exactly right.
RUSH: That was Juan Williams. You don’t need the names here. It’s CNN and Fox and Joe Scarborough was in there as well. And Chris Rock, well-known comedian, who, it should be known, Chris Rock, need to remind you, says that he’s not gonna do stand up on college campus anymore because the kids don’t find anything funny. You want to talk about intimidated. Students on college campus will not laugh anymore ’cause they’re afraid that they’ll offend somebody. You know, Chris Rock said my job is to crack offensive jokes, and I’m not gonna do it on college campi anymore ’cause nobody there laughs at it. ‘Cause they’re too worried that their laughter would offend people.
But this is a pretty good lesson on Hollywood liberals, too. When the going gets tough, they fold like a cheap tent. This is the New York Times Talks forum, media columnist David Carr speaking to Chris Rock, he said, “Were you surprised that the normally courageous, fair-minded citizens of Hollywood did not stand up and stand with their brothers at Sony?”
ROCK: This whole thing is just scary, man. It’s your e-mails and it’s your private stuff, and I don’t — I mean, the whole town’s scared. Everybody’s gotta be scared. No one knows what — you know.
CARR: Nobody knows what to do.
ROCK: Nobody knows what to do.
RUSH: Nobody know what to do, man. The whole town is scared, dude. We haven’t the slightest idea what to do. It’s weird, man. This is folding like a cheap tent, suit or what have you. Man, personal e-mail, nobody knows what to do. And I think that’s true. There’s not a single soul out there that knows what to do. You know why? Because nobody’s focused on what to do. Everybody’s focused on what somebody’s gonna think of ’em if they do anything. ‘Cause the whole town’s built on buzz. The whole town’s built on image. The whole town’s built on perception. The media can make you. The media can break you. So there’s fear of being broken by the media.
Here’s F. Chuck Todd on the Today show today, the cohost Matt Lauer said, “They gotta come up with something public and visible, otherwise they have no way of warding off people who want to try something like this in the future. It’s just not acceptable.”
TODD: That’s why, frankly, I think they’re a little bit stumped on how to respond. I think that’s why you’ve got that phrase “proportional response,” which is code for we haven’t figured out how to respond to this yet.
ZAKARIA: If there were a way to shut down that unit in the North Korean military that does this, that’s an 1,800-man unit in the North Korean military. That must be connected to the world, probably through Chinese servers. We will have to have a very serious conversation with Beijing and say, “You have got to let us do this and assist us in doing this.”
RUSH: Okay, so Fareed Zakaria GPS understands that the North Koreans have an 1,800-man unit using ChiCom servers. So he wants us to beg the ChiComs for permission to retaliate. That’s what he said here. We will have to have a very serious conversation with Beijing in the world and say that you have got to let us do this and assist us in doing this. (interruption) What’s your what’s your question? Do you have a question? (interruption) Well, I guess we could hack their nuclear program and hack their nuclear test program. I don’t know. The CNN people, they want retaliatory action. Okay, they hacked us, let’s hack ’em back. Let’s just hack ’em. I thought we did hack ’em when we sent Dennis Rodman over there, but apparently…
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