RUSH: ‘Fisher-Price to Recall Nearly One Million Toys — Toy-maker Fisher-Price is recalling 83 types of toys — including the popular Big Bird, Elmo, Dora and Diego characters — because their paint contains excessive amounts of lead. The worldwide recall being announced Thursday involves 967,000 plastic preschool toys made by a Chinese vendor and sold in the United States between May and August.’ Now, okay. So the ChiComs, they’re tainting our food. The ChiComs have lead in their paint. The ChiComs are sending us cheap stuff. Everybody is dumping on the ChiComs here for this, and the ChiComs are going to have to pay attention to this because they need us as an export market. But I want to take you back. I am 56, ladies and gentlemen, 56 years of age. I’m proud to admit it because every year my life has gotten better. I knew it would. When I was 12, I hated it. When I was 16, I hated it. When I was 19, 20, I hated it. I wanted to be 40, minimum, because I knew every year would get better and it has. But I was a kid once. My parents and my grandparents and I, all grew up with lead in the paint all over the house! We had lead toy soldiers. We’d throw them at each other, you know, do all kind of things.
You know why lead was in the paint? It wasn’t because corporate interests wanted to kill us and killed the customers. It’s because the made the paint work better! The paint covered more. It lasted longer. But! But but but but but but but but. The wackos pulled one on us when poor little children in various neighborhoods apparently developed an insatiable appetite for paint that was loose on their window sills. We had for some reason some poor kids in this country that ran around (slurp, slurp, slurp) slurping up paint chips that had lead in it, and they got sick. So a whole industry, a whole industry had to retool to fix this deadly problem, since the parents of these poor kids were unable to convince their kids not to eat paint. My parents told me not to eat paint. My grandparents told my parents not to eat paint, and we didn’t eat paint. But apparently some parents way back did not tell you their screwy little kids, ‘Don’t eat paint chips. Don’t do that.’ I’m saying, you go back… (interruption) H.R. said, ‘Are you for lead paint?’ Yes, I’ll come out for lead paint! I’ll come out for asbestos. Yes, I’m in the pocket of Big Lead. I’m in the pocket of big corporate interests. What I’m saying is when I was a kid — and, look, I don’t want to be an old fuddy-duddy and this is not walking in the ten miles in the snow to school because I wouldn’t ever do that, and I wouldn’t ever lie about doing that. But we grew up, I grew up, according to today, with so many life endangering risks like lead paint, asbestos.
When I was a kid we could go out and play all day and my mom never worried. I’d take the bike and head off. In fact, if we came back too soon she got mad. She was enjoying being rid of us for a while. If I brought the friends back, she got mad because they’d want to get into the Coca-Cola supply. (I’m just kidding about that.) But nevertheless, now where have we come? We’ve gotten to the point now where we baby kids to the point that we’re afraid almost to let ’em go outside, because something in the air is going to kill ’em; global warming is going to kill ’em. We won’t let ’em grow up. We treat them like infants from the time they’re born until they’re 25 or 30. We convince ourselves they can’t do anything on their own. They’re just innocent little victim flowers, little children and so forth. It’s a shame. It’s gotten so bad, three days ago there was a story that the wackos now say that the toner in your laser printer is deadly! It’s as deadly and dangerous as cigarette smoke. Nothing could be more preposterous, and yet the day after I did that story, Fox had this earnest-looking expert on talking it was a real and vile threat that corporate interests had snuck in on us. It’s like all of these laser printers (and most of these things come from China) want to kill us! It’s amazing how many American corporations want to kill their customers. It’s just stunning to me. So now, it isn’t going to be long before if there’s a printer anywhere near your precious little seven-year-old’s classroom, they’re going to have to forget it and go back to the mimeograph machine — and the mimeograph machines, that’s what we sniffed! That stuff stunk up the room like you cannot believe.