So the guy’s boss said (paraphrased), ‘Hey, big problem here. You can’t go out there and endorse vandalism,’ like this guy did. He has been spoken to about it. I’m waiting for all the cable news networks. They’re probably, at this moment, sending video crews to Baltimore, and there are going to be round table discussions later on, ‘What’s happening to the civility in our society?’ I will be blamed for defacing my own billboard. Whoever did it will be made a hero. (Laughing) You just know that they’re scrambling now to get video of this before the billboard is fixed. The general manager of WCBM, Bob Pettit, said they’ll fix it this afternoon or sometime today. He said, ‘It’s tough to be number one. People deface billboards all the time.’ That’s true, but it doesn’t make the news when it happens.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Hang on. I just got a great e-mail here and I gotta print this out. I gotta read it out to you. Hang on just a second. Greetings my friends, welcome back, Rush Limbaugh, the cutting edge of societal evolution and half my brain tied behind my back still in order to make it fair. This is the EIB Network. Our phone number if you want to be on the program. 1-800-282-2882. And the e-mail address rush@eibnet.com.
Rather than go through the usual corporate channels I’m going to make this on-air appeal to the management of our Baltimore affiliate WCBM. In case you’re just joining us, you can see this on The Drudge Report. They have a billboard of me up on I-83 in Baltimore that’s been defaced. Someone, under the cover of darkness, went over to the billboard and plastered the bottom half of my face with different colors of paint. The great e-mail suggests, ‘Don’t touch it. Leave it alone. Just add one line: ‘Listen and see what the left doesn’t want you to hear.’ Leave the billboard defaced. Leave the paint up there. Add a little line: ‘Listen and see what the left doesn’t want you to hear.” I think that’s a great idea. I don’t know. They said they were going to start fixing and repairing the billboard today and they may have already started. I don’t know if it’s too late. But if it’s not too late, you guys in Baltimore might want to think about that. It doesn’t bother me, actually funny.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Speaking of this defaced billboard of me in Baltimore, it reminds me when I was in Sacramento at KFBK (and back when the television news operations out there were really solid, just as an aside). The station put a series of billboards up on me because, believe it or not, I was controversial then, too — and this billboard that I’m going to describe for you won a local ad club award. There were two or three of them around town, and it was a picture of a car radio dial back in the ’80s. Nothing was digital. Digital was just starting. So you had the AM dial and you had the five or six push buttons under it that you could push to change stations, and there was a hand with one finger ready to push a button, and it had our station — KFBK 1530 — denoted on the radio dial.
The line was: ‘Wouldn’t you just love to punch Rush Limbaugh?’ Then the next billboard had tomatoes and it looked like eggs and stuff thrown at it, and the next billboard had even more of that kind of stuff. So we defaced our own billboards, just as a humorous marketing campaign. So that’s why the idea — and I got this from the e-mail — hey, leave that billboard alone and add another line to it and say: ‘Listen to hear what the left doesn’t want you to know,’ is a good idea. I don’t know if it’s too late. It’s WCBM’s billboard. They might want to clean it up. That was a performance art billboard. It was made to look like it had been defaced. It wasn’t. It was painted. The paint and all that, the eggs, the rotten eggs and tomatoes and stuff, were thrown over my name. They didn’t put my picture on the billboard. The local station didn’t want me getting too popular because then they’d really have to really pay me a lot of money. That’s just how local radio is. I was stunned I got the billboards, frankly. Anyway, if you haven’t done anything down there at WCBM, leave it alone. Just add a line to it: ‘Listen to see what the left doesn’t want you to know.’ Heh, heh, heh.