Right and Wrong

I want to tackle something here, folks, for those of you watching on the Dittocam, this is in the stack. This is the remaining stack today that I promise we’re going to play the hits, we’re going to get more stuff from this stack in this hour than any other host. It’s good stuff. There’s something I want to say first. And it’s just to explain something to you as I see it. Last week I got a call that prompted me to say it. Somebody wanted to know if I was a hypocrite about my use of painkillers and the fact that it was wrong or that I have ostensibly said in the past that people who use drugs ought to be punished for it.
And my answer was, no, it’s not hypocritical because my behavior doesn’t determine the value of right and wrong. Nobody’s does. I mean right and wrong, there are absolutes of right and wrong. And there are people who waver from right and do wrong, and I’m one of them. We all are. Various stages, various levels. It doesn’t change what right and wrong are. And there may be some people who are genuinely interested in trying to get me portrayed as a hypocrite for their political purposes. I think people doing this are primarily people who are on the other side the political spectrum from myself, but here’s what I think is really going on about this, and it dovetails with what we talk about here all the time. You know, a lot of people say, “Rush, you’re too rigid. This right and wrong business, you have to understand there’s a lot of gray area out there.” And those are people who wish to be exempt from any moral judgment, and so they are taking the occasion of my story to try to weaken the whole concept of right and wrong by taking shots at me. And let them do that. They can do it all they want. And whatever I did, I did, but it doesn’t change what right and wrong are, which I think is the real objective of people who are taking this opportunity.

Let’s go back to the Clinton inaugural. This is one of the greatest examples that we can cite. Remember the week before the inauguration, there were all these song stylists and performers on the mall, and they were all singing songs, Aretha Franklin and others about how they’re free, we’re free, we have been released from the shackles. I thought, what are these people talking about? And it struck me that one of the things they were talking about was they were free from any moral judgment because there had been a lot of that, given party politics back in the late eighties into the early nineties, and you had Clinton himself who, by the way, is no innocent poster child for what’s right.
But, see, when Clinton did it, oh, no, it’s just about sex, it doesn’t matter, and so forth, and people didn’t want any assessment of right or wrong to take place, and so they harped on this business, well, there’s gray areas out there and you really don’t know until you walk in someone’s shoes, da-da-da-da-da. Then, of course, the big jets flew over in a rehearsal of a flyby and Ron Silver was there who at the time, he’s a big conservative now, at least a Bush voter, but at the time he was a big lib Democrat, and he got offended. He was offended when the jets flew over. And he looked up in the sky, saw Navy jets, the Air Force jets, and he was standing there. He said, “How dare they pollute our inaugural with those jets!” And somebody jabbed him in the elbow or the ribs and said, “Ron, those are our jets now.” Oh, yeah, okay, since we won the presidency, the military is ours, and so we can like it.

But, you know, we all in life have made mistakes, and I’m not trying to excuse mine by including others. I have made mistakes, and I’ve owned up to them and will continue to do so. But just because of that does not mean that I don’t know the difference between right and wrong, and I’m not going to shy away from what I think is right and wrong just because I failed to behave in the quote, unquote, right way. It’s like the liberals do the same thing with defense. They try to say that people who didn’t serve in the military can’t talk about defense, have no credibility on defense. Why, you can’t speak up for the defense of the budget, where were you when it was time to kill commies? And they do it on a lot of things.
You haven’t been to the moon, what do you mean we need to spend money on the space program? You haven’t been an astronaut. And what they’re really trying to do, in addition to discredit people who do speak out for right and wrong, they’re trying to blur the line between right and wrong anyway. I think that’s the real effort that’s being made, because nobody can live on the right side of the line all the time, a hundred percent. And there are some people who want an excuse for living on the wrong side of the line, or the fence, and if they can get as many people in the country, the population, say, yeah, we all make mistakes, right and wrong is a subjective thing, then there’s going to be less judgment of them.
I do think that that’s what this is primarily all about which is why I am not going to admit to being hypocritical about anything here, because if I were to admit that I’m a hypocrite, then I’m going to be disqualified from being able to say what I think is right and wrong. I’m not going to give that up. I’m not going to let anybody take that away from me, so that’s my answer to this. There’s some e-mails coming in and we had this prank phone call earlier about it and I just decided that I wanted to tackle it and tell you what I really think is going on with all this. Just so you can be aware of what the real motivation is.
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