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.
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.