RUSH: This is Neil in northeast Pennsylvania. Hello, sir. Thank you for waiting.
CALLER: Hi. Mega dittos, Rush. Pleasure to talk to you from a gun-toting, God-fearing man from a small town in Pennsylvania.
RUSH: Well, it’s great to have another one of you hicks on the program with us.
CALLER: That’s correct. Although this hick is a licensed attorney in the state, so I guess my backwoods attitude has been shined a bit.
RUSH: Well, do you go to church, have a gun?
CALLER: Absolutely.
RUSH: Then you’re a hick.
CALLER: That’s okay.
RUSH: That’s all right, I know.
CALLER: Just on your first caller there today, the American exceptionalism. In 1982, I broke my neck and ended up a quadriplegic in a wheelchair, and I realized I had to do something with my life. I’ve been a Republican, conservative all my life, and my parents taught me there’s no such thing as fairness in this world, so I picked myself up by my bootstraps, went to college, went to law school, graduated, became an attorney, and —
RUSH: What kind of law do you practice?
CALLER: General law.
RUSH: Do you have some courtroom work, do you have trial work?
CALLER: No, I don’t do trial work. I am an Operation Chaos agent, and I’ve been dying to hear somebody just challenge me on the issue, and that would be a fun case to play. The other thing I wanted to talk to you about was this statement that Obama made about us small town people. If you look at it real close, he talks about we’re anti-trade. Isn’t that counter to his stance on trade?
RUSH: Yeah. He’s also anti-trade.
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: He’s anti-NAFTA. But he’s pro-illegal immigration, and you aren’t. You don’t like these people of color coming in, people that don’t look like you. That’s when you go to church with your gun.
CALLER: Yeah, right. I said that to my dad the other day. Hey, I don’t want to take too much of your show, but I think I —
RUSH: Wait a minute, no, no, no, no, you’re not going to get away this easy.
CALLER: Okay, go ahead.
RUSH: You have a lesson to teach people.
CALLER: Okay.
RUSH: It did not escape me, you ran through it very quickly. You broke your neck at what age?
CALLER: It was just before my 18th birthday.
RUSH: And you have been a quadriplegic since?
CALLER: Since ’82, that’s correct.
RUSH: So 1982. And yet you said you pulled yourself up by your bootstraps, you went to college, decided you wanted to become a lawyer, and you’ve done all that.
CALLER: Yes, sir.
RUSH: Now, you made it sound like all you had to do was decide.
CALLER: That’s right. If I wanted something, I would figure out a way to get it.
RUSH: Now, there are a lot of people who have full ambulatory use of arms and legs who are sitting around thinking they can’t do anything for a whole host of reasons. You have to give us a brief story of what you did, how you did it. I’m sure when this happened to you, you woke up you said, ‘Oh, my God.’ You had to go through some period of disbelief, maybe some depression, but what was it? I know your parents raised you, you credited them. But what did you do? There had to be a catalyst. At what point did you decide that you were going to do what you wanted to do anyway and being a quadriplegic wasn’t going to stop you, and how did you go about it? You can teach people a lot here who think they’ve got it tough and don’t know what tough is compared to the circumstances you’ve faced.
CALLER: Well —
RUSH: I’m not trying to embarrass you.
CALLER: Oh, that’s fine, that’s fine. I’m free to talk about anything I want. I’m a free citizen in this state. Like I said, it goes back to my upbringing. My parents taught me to be self-sufficient. They taught me that life is not fair, it’s only fair to those who take the initiative and do the things and take the steps that they want to —
RUSH: Right, but at some point you had to take action.
CALLER: Correct.
RUSH: Even though you’re in a wheelchair.
CALLER: Yes.
RUSH: What was the action you took?
CALLER: Well, to be honest with you, I was sitting at the welfare office about probably two years after my accident, and I was sitting across from a gray-haired lady, and I was applying for food stamps, and they asked me my income, and they went to the lengths of asking me if I received birthday money in a birthday card and so on, that all had to be included, and I thought to myself, this is the most depressing thing I have ever been involved in and I could not stomach it any longer. So I took what my parents gave me, as far as foundation and I picked myself up and I went on. Unfortunately, I’m not practicing now because I was involved in another accident, but I am in the process of picking myself back up and getting back out there.
RUSH: But you’re a full-fledged accredited member of Operation Chaos?
CALLER: Absolutely. And so are many, many members of my family. I come from a large family, Rush.
RUSH: Well, I’m glad, you know, this is precipitous, if that’s the right word, that you called today, because you just happened to coincidentally fit the theme. There’s been an overall theme to this program the past couple days this week, which generally is not the case other than the broad theme of we’ve got to defeat liberalism, that’s a constant theme here. But stories like yours, man, they’re inspiring. I suspect that you just didn’t get out of the hospital and say, ‘Okay, gang, I’m going up and I’m getting started to do what I gotta do.’ You were at the welfare office, you were down and out, your parents didn’t have enough money to give you and sustain you, and the whole thing repulsed you. At some point, you said, ‘This isn’t for me.’ And you turned to yourself and your upbringing and you did what you did. I’m proud of you. Congratulations.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Wally in Denville, New Jersey. Nice to have you, Wally. Welcome to the EIB Network.
CALLER: Hey, Rush. Wally. I talked to you about ten years ago when I was a captain in the Army, and listening to The Battle Hymn of the Republic today kind of struck a chord, and the caller — not the last one, but the one caller — who broke his neck; I had a similar experience. But The Battle Hymn of the Republic, listening to that… When I graduated from The Citadel, and I was a brand-new infantry, second lieutenant; that’s what my whole being was about, was to ‘be a man that would set others free,’ which is in the song. And I think people in this country have lost sight of what we’ve done. We’ve gone to Iraq and Afghanistan, and we set 40 million people free — 20 million of which are females, that were living horrible lives. And my whole heart and soul was into, that’s what American fighting men do, and that’s what they’re still doing — and it just makes me sick when I see people think that what we’re doing over there is corrupt and horrible and a lie. What we did was, we set people free, and just hearing the song the way it was, just inspired me.
RUSH: Yeah, you’re right. Some people may not have been able to hear the lyrics, but in the lyric line is, ‘Let us die to make men free.’
CALLER: Yup.
RUSH: And, of course, that’s the United States Military. We liberate the oppressed and so forth. Sir, I understand totally where you’re coming from. More Americans than you know have been livid for more time than you know over this constant berating of the US Military, its mission, its purpose; the attempt to make them out to be murderers and rapists and torturers — and who’s doing this? Other Americans in the Democrat Party, the American left, and frankly it’s beyond offensive. It’s outrageous. The fact that those people who do this still have viable careers in politics is also very frustrating.
CALLER: It makes me sick. You know, when I think of it. Eleven years ago, I, too — like one of your other callers — broke my neck when I was a company commander at Fort Hood, Texas, and I was subsequently medically retired from the Army. When I think back and I think of some of my soldiers, who are probably now senior NCOs, most of my officers who were lieutenants are now majors. These were honorable, honorable, good men that I worked with. And to hear them castigated the way they are sometimes just — just gives me the… It makes me want to vomit some days.