RUSH: I’m going to pick up where we left off yesterday. The last half hour yesterday was one of the — well, actually the call from the nine-year-old in the first half hour, then the last half hour of that show yesterday was, I mean, crazy! It was fun-crazy, partially owing to Snerdley’s choice of callers to give me. I’m still marveling here that we had — you should have heard this. We had a grandmother call, the last call of the day, giving me grief because I was making it sound like it’s okay to go out and eat fast food and French fries and potato chips, and she misunderstood. I just don’t want the government regulating what we eat. I don’t want the government regulating our behavior any more than they already do. If you don’t want to eat McDonald’s, fine, I don’t want to force you to do anything. That’s the point. I want to leave you alone. All of us will leave you alone, do what you want. You can’t leave us alone. This woman calls giving me grief over the fact that I am countering and harming and damaging her efforts to get her grandson to eat the right foods. I said, ‘Well how old is your grandson?’ She said 26, and it kind of zoomed by me. Then I saw on the screen that Dawn transcribes the calls, ‘Did I just hear you say your grandson is 26, and you are trying to tell him what to eat?’ ‘Yes, and you’re making it hard for me,’ she said. I said, ‘When are you going to let him be an adult?’ At any rate, we’ve got countless other stories along those lines.
Then we had this effete snob liberal that called from San Bernardino yesterday. You know, one of these, ‘Mr. Limbaugh, don’t you think you’re really a little over the top with the smoking thing? Don’t you really understand that nobody’s attempting to stop anyone from smoking in their homes? Isn’t that just right-wing paranoia?’ You know how these liberals are. The only thing he didn’t do was (making strained noises) like the intellectuals on Firing Line used to do. But it’s all over the place. We got a story out of Hawaii from May. Headline: ‘Homes Next Target for Smoking Ban.’ We also found where San Francisco is doing the same thing. I got lots of e-mails from people who live in apartments, and that’s a home, if you live in one, where you can’t smoke a cigarette in your apartment, much less a cigar. So it’s already happening. They’re already in the house, the feds are, regulating things.
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RUSH: Cape Coral, Florida, and Carl, it’s great to have you with us. It’s nice to welcome you to the EIB Network.
CALLER: (background noise) Hello?
RUSH: Yeah, yeah. Hey, Carl. What’s up?
CALLER: Rush! I didn’t know I was on. I’m at a shooting range about a hundred miles west of you, so it was kind of loud here.
RUSH: I thought your cell connection was going bad, but you’re at a shooting range? You’re shooting bullets?
CALLER: Shooting real bullets. Killing bullets. We’re shooting them here. We’re on a break right now because we have a cold range, and we have to set up new targets.
RUSH: Wait a minute. What were you aiming at?
CALLER: We are aiming at paper targets.
RUSH: Paper targets. Okay.
CALLER: We’re punching holes in paper and doing it in a very expensive fashion.
RUSH: Just checking. I wanted to make sure.
CALLER: This is not your local post office over here.
RUSH: (Laughing.) All right, Carl. Well, I’m glad you took the headphones off and here we are.
CALLER: Okay. (Laughs) I’m a retired New York City Police Officer and I was out on vacation, I was on vacation, my family just recently. We were out in California. We were in Monterey, and having dinner in a small restaurant in Carmel and picked up the local newspapers, and they were touting how the local police, the Carmel Police Department, just signed their new contract and in their new contract it stipulates that police officers are not allowed to smoke on duty, off duty, in their own houses, in their private cars, anyplace, and they’re subject to dismissal if they are caught doing it.
RUSH: Well, we gotta draw a fine line here. The police department is an agency of government, and I understand that. There are a lot of companies, too, that have rules of behavior for their employees. I know some — I can’t think of them off the top of my head — but they just told their employees, ‘In two years you can’t smoke period. You can’t smoke in the office now, but in two years you can’t smoke at home. If you do, you’re going to get fired.’ Now, that’s a little dicey, but that’s private enterprise doing it, and when the government is telling its own employees, that’s another thing. But if you want to be a cop in Carmel, then that’s what the requirements are. My concern is that this going to be that this is gonna be behavior that they’re going to exhibit in our own home. Well, it’s already happening. I don’t want to repeat myself from yesterday, but more and more people don’t smoke, and so when all these penalties are announced, new policies against people who do smoke, the people who don’t think it’s not going to have any impact on them, and they probably hate smokers anyway. So they say, ‘Good. Good! Make ’em quit. Make ’em not smoke around me! I don’t even want to see it. Raise their taxes!’ Right. Well, if we’re going to raise their taxes, and that raising of taxes is going to reduce the consumption and purchase of the product, and if the taxes of that product (tobacco in this case) are going to fund children’s health care, then you had better — if you’re a wise-guy government person, you had better — figure out that you better make it a usable product that you’re taxing. But more and more you can’t smoke anywhere, and that’s one of the reasons for the decline, not just the taxes. So as I said yesterday, ‘When the tax revenue from tobacco and cigarettes falls short for the children’s health care program, guess who’s next?’ All of you that were out there (applauding) cheering the tax increases on cigarette smokers, because they are not going to be enough cigarettes smoked, therefore not purchased, in order to fund anything. So they’re going to come after you next.
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RUSH: Eric in, what is this, Huntingburg, Indiana, you’re next.
CALLER: Yeah! Rush, fellow-smoker dittos.
RUSH: Thank you, sir.
CALLER: I’m just actually calling about smoking. I worked in a bar there while I was in college, and the town I was in was a crazy liberal town, and they passed a smoking ban. The owner of the bar, he was furious. He wasn’t a smoker, though. I’m just wondering how the government can come in and say a private business can not allow smoking when they’ll still sell ’em at the gas station and, you know, they’ll allow the use and tax ’em, but you can’t use them. You can sell whatever else there.
RUSH: Well, New York has done it across the board, and they do it on the basis of ‘public health.’
CALLER: And the government’s not coming in and giving the startup money for the businesses. They don’t seem to have any right in that.
RUSH: No.
CALLER: And the public doesn’t have any purpose or not.
RUSH: This came up today, a bunch of bars in New York thought, ‘My God, we’re going to be put out of business. I mean, half our patrons come in there and smoke.’ So the patrons still go. They just leave every ten minutes and stand outside in the weather and smoke and head back in.
CALLER: No one’s entitled to go into those restaurants anyways. That’s their personal choice to go in. They can deal with it or they don’t have to deal with it.
RUSH: Well, it used to be that way. There was a smoking section, and a nonsmoking section. Some places were all nonsmoking, and some places were smoking. The government says, ‘Nope. We’re not going to have smoking anywhere.’ It’s a great point. The full force of whatever governmental body can do whatever they want, and it wouldn’t have been made possible without bogus research on the death statistics associated with secondhand smoke. It wouldn’t have been possible without pulling that off. So you couldn’t be anywhere near it because it was harmful, you could die. Well, you got a UN body putting that information out. That’s all it took. Then you had some of the anti-smoking people became activist zealots. Remember this about liberals out there, Eric. They are not content. If you want to smoke and kill yourself, they are not content to let you choose that. They are going to force their way of life on you because they are elitists. They know better than you, Eric. They know better, and it’s not that they care about you. They want to exercise their power and control over you, because they’ve got themselves convinced that even if you do smoke when you’re nowhere near them, that somehow it’s going to harm ’em.
Their country just isn’t right. Whatever. Also, none of this would be possible without an electorate that was dense and uninformed about the consequences way down the road of allowing the government in anywhere to regulate private behavior that was not of course against any existing law. This, again, is where the liberals come in because they’re just content as they can be to have people’s lives controlled. The whole concept of personal liberty, private property, all of these things went down the tubes with all these smoking bans and so forth. See, it only takes one. When people cave and give away their personal liberty and property rights, in one instance, well, the people are going to come take it away from you are not going to be satisfied with a little, small bite like cigarettes. So then you can’t use your backyard, or you can’t use portions of your farm the way you want it because there might be some endangered species. This stuff, it just keeps cycling, until someday, somebody’s ox gets gored who was one of the original enablers — then they get mad and they start to see the light and you get some victories and you win back some rights or some freedoms that you lost previously, but you can’t give up on this kind of stuff, in a philosophical sense.