RUSH: To the phones, Dorothy in northeastern Pennsylvania, been waiting a long time, I appreciate your patience, great to have you here, Dorothy.
CALLER: Yeah, El Rushbo.
RUSH: Hi.
CALLER: Mega dittos. I wanted to let you know that you made the funny papers.
RUSH: Well, that’s not unique.
CALLER: Are you familiar with the Doonesbury cartoons by Garry Trudeau?
RUSH: Oh, well, of course, but I haven’t read one in probably 20 years.
CALLER: Well, get the one in today.
RUSH: There’s one today?
CALLER: Want me to read it to you?
RUSH: Sure. Well, I normally don’t let listeners read because they’re not trained professionals, and they sometimes sound monotone, which is boring. But give it a shot.
CALLER: I was a telephone operator. They used to compliment me on my voice so maybe I’ll be all right.
RUSH: Okay, let’s give it a shot. Let’s see if that experience helps out here.
CALLER: ‘Dana, Rush Limbaugh has been smearing the kid who urged the president not to veto the S-CHIP bill. It’s one thing to Swift-Boat a grown man, but isn’t it a bit beyond the pale to attack a 12-year-old boy?’ And then the answer is, ‘Well, in fairness to Rush, we’d like to see proof that this kid is only 12. He looked 13.’ And then at the end the guy says, ‘So you’re on board?’ And there’s some reply, ‘and if he is 13, what else is he lying about?’
RUSH: This is just childish and immature, and it carries —
CALLER: Rush, you’re in good company. He rips the Republicans and the president all the time.
RUSH: Oh, I know. Trudeau is a giant lib. He’s probably collecting these thousand-dollar checks from the Chinese in Chinatown for Hillary Clinton for all I know.
CALLER: Well, I knew that. Isn’t he married to a lady that used to be on NBC?
RUSH: Yeah, Jane Pauley, who used to host the Today show, that’s Garry Trudeau’s wife. Can’t hold that against her.
CALLER: (laughing)
RUSH: But, look, this is the latest, folks. The smear letter didn’t work, the phony soldier thing — I’m telling you, they are running against me. I don’t say this with ego. It’s just, it is what it is. And it’s going to be this way until the Republicans have chosen a nominee. I change minds. I change hearts. This is not to be permitted. And, of course, this is just another attempt — I told you there were going to be more of these things. I never attacked the kid. Nobody on our side attacked the kid. What we did was point out how the Democrats exploit people like this. There was some accurate reporting of the finances of the family involved because, don’t forget, the whole argument about the SCHIP program was the Democrats wanted to expand — now, folks, this is key; the Democrats wanted to expand the current, it’s been ten years running now — State Children’s Health Insurance Program to include not just poor children. They wanted to include families of four up to $62,000 a year and then give states the option to include families of four up to $82,000 a year, and they wanted to raise the age of a child to age 25.
So they got hold of the information that this kid and his sister were in a car crash, and they wrote a script for the kid to use answering President Bush’s Saturday radio address not long ago. They sent the kid out there to say that George Bush must be reprimanded and he must not win this. The little kid said, ‘I want kids in my condition to be able to get the health coverage that I got.’ Well, the dirty little secret is the current structure of the program is what got this family the health care coverage it needed somehow. It did not need to be expanded. So they send a kid out to basically say that if Bush doesn’t go along with the Democrats’ expansion, future automobile accident victims like this kid and his sister will not get coverage in hospitals because they won’t be able to be insured. That was an out-and-out lie. Now, I don’t think the 12-year-old is sophisticated enough to know all of this, and I doubt that he wrote his own words. We’re talking about a 12-year-old.
Now, maybe this, in their minds, constitutes attacking a child, but what this is really all about is, is what it’s always about. They come up with a plan designed to fool people, to misrepresent something, to lie about the president and his proposal, they come up with the elaborate scheme to use a child, sort of like the Michael J. Fox thing, you’re not supposed to attack a victim. A victim can enter the political arena, but he cannot be attacked when he goes political, and I’m not putting up with this anymore, I didn’t attack the kid. I attacked the whole plan that the Democrats had to lie to the American people. And they got upset. They used to get away with this, dragging all these injured people up on stage at their convention. John Edwards saying that Christopher Reeve would walk again, for example, if John Kerry were elected president. So when you attack the libs, or what they used to be able to get away with their monopoly, they gotta come back and try to destroy you.