RUSH: I have here a CNN statement. CNN has made a statement about what happened in Paris. You know, the magazine is out with a new issue. Charlie Hebdo is out with a new issue, and a new cover, and it kind of has a parody caricature of the prophet Mohammed on the cover. They are not backing down at the magazine. This has prompted other news organizations to react, and I’m holding here in my formerly nicotine-stained fingers CNN’s reaction.
“CNN described its reasoning for not showing the latest cover of Charlie Hebdo (the first issue to be published after last week’s massacre) in a broadcast this morning.” One of the anchors at CNN read a statement and said the following: “CNN will not show you the new cover, which depicts the Prophet Muhammad, because it is our policy not to show potentially offensive images of the prophet.” Not “potentially offensive individuals” period. No, no. CNN said: “It is our policy not to show potentially offensive images of the prophet.” This is eerie.
Do you remember in World War II, did anybody doubt that we were at war with the Nazis and the Japanese? And we said so. In fact, we faced a threat beyond just the Nazis and the Japanese, and yet we still mentioned that our enemies were Nazis and the Japanese. In World War II, we faced multiple threats, and we identified them. But we’re not gonna mention extremism today. We’re not gonna talk about Islamist extremism. We’re not gonna talk about extremism, and now CNN says, “CNN will not show you the new cover which depicts the prophet Mohammed because it is our policy not to show potentially offensive images of the prophet.”
Does this mean they will show potentially offensive images of our Lord and savior Jesus Christ? Probably so. In fact, CNN probably would not even refer to Christ as “our Lord and savior Jesus Christ.” But they would obviously publish or show potentially offensive images. Do you think they would show potentially offensive images of Buddha? (interruption) You think they might? Clearly they would not have a problem with reviewing a movie that was anti-Christian and celebrating it.
They would not have a problem with denigrating anything to do with Christianity, abortion, pro-lifers, anything that’s associated with or thought to be associated Christianity, but this? “It is our policy not to show potentially offensive images of the prophet.” Can I rephrase the CNN statement? Here’s what it really means. “Our policy is not to show any images potentially offensive to one religion that will kill us if we offend them, but all other religions are fair game.”
So CNN has clearly been affected. They won’t do it. They’re not gonna go there. And so nobody appears to want to stand up to this. Everybody wants to cow to it. It’s an amazing thing. But go back in time, World War I, World War II, you name it, the communists in Vietnam, no problem identifying our enemy. We had no problem telling people about them. We had no problem showing pictures of what they did to other people. The Nazis particularly. We had no problem whatsoever.
You know, you can go to CNN’s website right now, if you dig deep enough, if you click and keep clicking on links, do you know what you can find at CNN’s website today? You can still find pictures of a crucified Jesus in a jar of urine, the famous work of art by Andres Serrano called Piss Christ. You can still find that at CNN. CNN still has a picture of that illustrious work of art posted. But they’re not gonna show potentially offensive images of the prophet.
Now, last week, I found a story in The Economist, and I have been toying with trying to get it into the program ever since I saw it, and I’ve been holding it and holding it and holding it, and I think finally it may have a place here. It’s called, “Home of the Unbrave.” And it is basically about the increasing cowardice and fearfulness of more and more young people, and Americans in general. It’s dated the 5th of January and it’s a story that has an incident in it.
Apparently there’s a place in America where it snows a lot, and the community has forbidden young people to ride their sleds. (interruption) Well, come on. They say it’s a liability issue, and I have no doubt there’s fear of lawyers, but it is also they’re afraid the kids might hurt themselves. I remember when I was a kid, Southeast Hospital up on top of the hill, it overlooked Broadway, and I remember one year my dad went out and got my brother and I Flexible Flyers.
Now, if you know anything about sleds, they were the Cadillac of sleds. And we sat around and prayed for snow, because that hill, from the top of the hospital down to Broadway, oh, it was ideal for sledding. It was two levels. It had its first incline that leveled off for a while to slow you down, then another incline, and I remember going down that hill a couple of times, and it was the most fun. That Flexible Flyer, you could steer it, it was so slick. I actually ended up in the curb of the street. I got nowhere near moving cars, but I got so far as the curb.
I went back and told my dad about it and he said, “Well, you went a little too far. You don’t want to go in the street, son,” but he didn’t take any action or sue the hospital or anything. He just told me how to avoid getting the sled in the street. But this story is about to stop all this, no more sledding. And The Economist’s theory is that fearfulness is overtaking America.
Pull quote from the story: “This crackdown on unregulated sledding –” how about that, unregulated sledding? A crackdown on unregulated sledding, for crying out loud. “This crackdown on unregulated sledding seems of a piece with the recent American tendency to curb marginally perilous childhood pleasures, such as tricycling without body armour or venturing alone into the back garden without a Mossad-trained security detail.
“Shutting down sledding hills is inspired by the same sort of simpering caution that keeps Americans shoeless in airport security lines and, closer to home, keeps parents from letting their kids walk a few blocks to school alone, despite the fact that America today is as safe as the longed-for ‘Leave It to Beaver’ golden age.”
Now, The Economist is a Brit publication. It goes back and forth, but for the most part it leans kind of left, which makes this story kind of cockeyed. Normally they’d be in favor of this kind of political correctness and fear, but they are really taking after us.
“The ominously named ‘Winter Storm Gorgon’ is set to dump scads of the white stuff across a broad swathe of America, from the Rockies to the Poconos. Law-abiding families mustn’t rush to break out the toboggans, however, for there is a trend afoot to outlaw sledding.” That’s another thing. We’re now naming snowstorms like we name hurricanes.
“[F]aced with the potential bill from sledding injuries, some cities have opted to close hills rather than risk large liability claims. No one tracks how many cities have banned or limited sledding, but the list grows every year. One of the latest is in Dubuque, Iowa, where the City Council is moving ahead with a plan to ban sledding in all but two of its 50 parks.” You know what the headline of the story is? “Home of the Unbrave.” Not “Home of the Brave.” “Home of the Unbrave.”
“Other wholesome locales, such as Des Moines, Iowa and Lincoln, Nebraska have also restricted sledding to certain hills posted with sled-at-your-own-risk warnings. This crackdown on unregulated sledding seems of a piece with the recent American tendency to curb marginally perilous childhood pleasures, such as tricycling without body armour or venturing alone into the back garden without a Mossad-trained security detail.”
I mean, they really rip us over the coals for this. And at the end of the story The Economist says: “Perhaps this is not as surprising as it may seem. Americans are not so much unusually litigious as unusually fearful, and this fearfulness extends to the prospect of lawsuits. The occasional jaw-dropping award in a personal injury or class-action lawsuit creates, like the occasional terrorist attack, a salient sense of pervasive danger.
“It’s not that Dubuque or Des Moines suddenly faces a new and extraordinary risk of getting sued into oblivion. It’s just that the risk, as small as it is, now looms larger in the imagination, becoming too great for the no-longer-bold American spirit to bear. Shutting down sledding hills is inspired by the same sort of simpering caution that keeps Americans shoeless in airport security lines and, closer to home, keeps parents from letting their kids walk a few blocks to school alone.
And I’ll tell you, when you look at the behavior of institutions like CNN (imitating CNN), “Our policy is not to show any images potentially offensive to one religion that will kill us if we offend them. So we will not show potentially offensive images of the prophet.” Everywhere you look. The Economist raking us over the coals for being a bunch of cowards. And get their point about lawsuits here. It’s not that we are afraid per se of the settlement. It’s not that they think we’re afraid of the actual lawsuit. Our imagination goes wild and we keep constructing things rooted in fear that tell us, “No, don’t do that. No, don’t do that. No, don’t let the kid go in the backyard without body armor, you never know what’s out there. Don’t let the kids sled, you never know what might happen.”
And I think they have a point. I think it’s really relatable to people that run political correctness. When you go back and look at America in a different time you don’t see evidence of this kind of fearfulness. We had no compunction whatsoever calling Hitler what he was, detailing what Hitler was doing, showing pictures of what happened, and defining it as Nazism. No compunction. Same thing with the Japanese. None whatsoever.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: To Dallas. This is Paul. Great to have you, sir. I’m glad you waited on the EIB Network. Hello.
CALLER: Hey, Rush, great to be on here.
RUSH: Thank you.
CALLER: How’s it going?
RUSH: Very well, thank you. I appreciate that.
CALLER: Good. So, actually your last point from the article in The Economist really kind of segues pretty well into my point. I really agree. I think most Americans live in kind of a security bubble. I served in the Marine Corps. My dad did, too, and my brother’s still in. We know that you have to sacrifice safety and security for liberty, and our forefathers knew that, and they did that. But the vast majority of Americans don’t understand that.
RUSH: Now, wait, wait, wait, wait. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Benjamin Franklin actually told someone —
CALLER: Yeah.
RUSH: — that people who would sacrifice a little liberty for security and safety deserve neither.
CALLER: That’s exactly right. Yeah, and that’s the point. I think most Americans now, they flip that. They would be willing to sacrifice liberty to get safety and security.
RUSH: Oh, hell, yeah! It’s been going on for years now. There’s nothing new.
CALLER: Yes.
RUSH: Absolutely they have been.
CALLER: And it shows in a million different things. The main point I was gonna bring up that I called for is, I think this whole, you know, Obama not going to France stuff? That’s a distraction. You know, we currently have over 10,000 troops in Afghanistan right now. We have around 3,000 in Iraq right now. We are still fighting a war or a semi-war or “police action” or whatever you want to call it. It’s going on, and we’re still fighting. You know, we get so focused on these, “Oh, you know…” kind of social engagements.
RUSH: You know what? I call it the daily Washington soap opera. You’re exactly right.
CALLER: Yeah.
RUSH: This is the latest chapter or edition of the soap opera, the latest episode that we’re all supposed to pay attention to ’cause it’s the news of the day — and it really isn’t.
CALLER: Absolutely. Absolutely. It upsets me because I know that we should be focusing on completely different things, on how to win. Regardless of what the motivation are — you know, like the Abu Ghraib incident and all that stuff, whatever it is — that’s almost neither here nor there. The fact of the matter is there’s a very large group of people who are willing and able and try very hard to kill us and to kill our allies and to make trouble —
RUSH: But we can stop that if we would simply be nice and stop criticizing them and leave them alone.
CALLER: (chuckling)
RUSH: That’s what the belief is. They’re totally wrong.
CALLER: Yes. That is the belief. But ultimately it’s the exact opposite. If you’re going to fight a war, if you’re willing to put lives on the line and kill other people, you have to go all-in. You have to fight a total war. You can’t just be like, “Oh, you know, we kind of want to fight, but we don’t really want to set clear objectives and win.” We just kind of want to be there and hopefully eventually it’ll all work out.
RUSH: Well, if you’re a liberal Democrat, you’ve got a pacifist image, and all you care about’s shoring it up and showing you’re a tough guy. So you send some people off to war and don’t worry about winning it. Just the act of doing that’s supposed to reverse your image as a pacifist.
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: That has largely been going on here.
CALLER: Absolutely.
RUSH: There’s no effort to win this stuff. Look at the rules of engagement, for crying out loud!
CALLER: Yeah. Yeah. It’s a broad issue. It’s an issue now, but it’s been an issue for decades going back to Korean War, Vietnam, our action in Somalia, all of Iraq and Afghanistan. The only of war that’s been close to fought in a way where we had a clear objective and we won and didn’t overextend ourselves, was Desert Storm One. But even in that — even though we won, absolutely blew away the enemy — we pulled out and just kind of let Saddam do his thing.
RUSH: That’s right. We quit! We quit right at the moment we could have wiped them out to not have to deal with them again. Thank you, Colonel Powell. I’m sorry, General Powell. He told George H.W. Bush, “No, if you engage in a massacre now when they’re retreating, the world will hate you. No, no. Let ’em be,” and then Schwarzkopf told his negotiators, “Do not gloat when they come to sign the surrender papers,” blah, blah, blah. Anyway, I get your point entirely. Everything is for show now. Everything’s buzz and PR and image. There’s very little substance, really.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Andrea Mitchell, NBC News, Washington, actually on television on NBC, actually asked the French ambassador to the United States, whose name is Gerard Araud, “Why is it permissible to be as provocative as these anti-Muslim cartoons were? This is a debate that we’re having in the US, journalistically.”
Can you think of anything that Andrea Mitchell, NBC News, Washington, has ever been worried about offending anybody? And here she is asking the French ambassador to the United States, essentially, “Why do you let ’em do it?” What would happen if I were to come on this program and let’s say talk to somebody in the Obama administration, “Why do you let MSNBC do what they do?”
Or pick any, “Why do you let Fox News Channel do what they do? Why do you let Bill O’Reilly do what he does to you every night?” Can you imagine what the reaction would be? And here’s Andrea Mitchell asking the French ambassador, “Why do you permit that magazine to do all these cartoons? Why is it permissible?” She’s a journalist! You would think that she would be on the side of the magazine regardless, freedom of speech, freedom of the press. You go with the flow. You roll with the punches.
But, no. You see, what this teaches us is that journalists, particularly in the modern era, journalists are not journalists. They’re liberals. They associate with big government. They are perfectly fine with big government using its power to silence people that present a problem or people that they disagree with. This is too much. Here’s Andrea Mitchell getting away for these years with this idea she’s a journalist. No restrictions, go anywhere, get to the bottom of it, get to the truth, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
What she is, is just like everybody else in this business these days, a statist. I would be embarrassed if I were Andrea Mitchell, NBC News, Washington, I would be embarrassed. You know, get Marie Harf. “Hey, Marie, why do you guys let Fox News make fun of Obama the way they do?” Or, better yet, get Marie Harf on, “Hey, Marie, why do you let me get away with making fun of Obama? Why don’t you shut me down?” And she would say, “Well, if you’d go along with it, we would.” It’s such a teachable moment.
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