RUSH: Back to the audio sound bites, 20th anniversary, cutting-edge sound bites. Let’s go back to last night, Larry King Live, one of his guests was Dr. Ted Schwartz from New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center. They have this exchange.
KING: Dr. Schwartz, how do you use your cell phone?
SCHWARTZ: I put it right up to my ear and don’t use an earpiece unless I’m driving, which I think is the general recommendations. Yeah.
KING: You put it I right up to your ear?
SCHWARTZ: I put it right here but I wouldn’t take a call. I think it is safe to use again based on the currently available data. You know, we don’t know whether watching television has an increased risk of causing cancer, we don’t know whether using a hair dryer increases your risk of cancer. In fact, there are some studies showing there might be a link, but they’re not well-performed studies, so we don’t go around issuing public health warnings about it based on the fact that we don’t really know.
RUSH: (laughter) Hair dryers. Don’t you think we’ve got enough evidence about hair dryers maybe causing cancer? They are used every day, multiple times a day by gazillions of people, just as much as-of-as much as cell phones. You would think that we have evidence. This guy admits they don’t know anything. … This is the latest attempt. Here is me from my TV show, can barely squeeze this in, February 5, 1993.
RUSH ARCHIVE: You may be wondering what this is. This, ladies and gentlemen, is the latest cancer causing agent to exist in America. This is a cellular phone, and I toyed with the idea of showing my solidarity with the cellular phone manufacturers, ’cause this is such bunk. These things haven’t been out ten years yet, and the idea we get cancer just like that from using these things, to me, is just a bunch of hysterical panic. So I’m going to wear this thing the whole show, folks. It’s only, we have dialed a 900 phone sex line, and (applause) I am going to be doing this entire show — and I’ve got a big, important dinner tonight, but I am going to risk putting a dent in my hair (laughing) with this clodhopper thing that we’ve arranged so that I can have the cellular phone on my face during the entire show. I’ve got phone sex going on right in this ear, and I am —
RUSH: No, I’m not going to go for it. I’m going to show you just how devoted I am to you and how, uh, able I — uh — am to concentrate on this show. Plus I’m going to demonstrate my solidarity with the cellular phone people ’cause I don’t believe this stuff causes cancer. You know, not long ago they said milk causes cancer. So we had everybody drinking milk on this show, and nobody who did is dead.