RUSH: Robert in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, welcome to the EIB Network, sir. Hello.
CALLER: Oh, good afternoon, Rush.
RUSH: Hi.
CALLER: Yeah, I was at the welcome Obama rally yesterday, and I didn’t know about the Reverend Wright speech or I might have been interested, it might have had more substance than the welcome Obama rally.
RUSH: Where was the welcome Obama rally? There were a bunch of them, weren’t there?
CALLER: Well, it was front of the Lincoln Memorial.
RUSH: Oh, okay.
CALLER: — along the reflection pool and —
RUSH: By the way, I saw an aerial shot of that from HBO, the place wasn’t even half full. The media was creating the impression it was teeming with people, but it wasn’t.
CALLER: Well, I had to go through — it was full, I mean I was in an area that was certainly — they had to stop security, had to stop people from coming in —
RUSH: Yeah, yeah.
CALLER: — it filled up all the way back to the Washington Monument, but —
RUSH: The pictures didn’t show that, Robert, I’m sorry.
CALLER: Well, anyway, I saw it, but some of your points about the personality cult thing, I do see, there is a reaction that I saw in people where they were reacting to personality, didn’t seem to have a lot of content in it, in some of the reactions. And I think there’s a lot more that needed to be said at a welcome Obama rally or a transition rally. It’s much beyond just having a black guy elected. And that was not Martin Luther King’s vision at all. He never mentioned it. You know, Martin Luther King evolved into looking at poverty and war and nonviolence in America, which he called the biggest purveyor of violence in the world. Those were the concerns that he realized or he came to believe, and that’s not kind of what we’re talking about mostly today, is the poverty and the elimination of war, as a means to solve problems. So we don’t like that message. As long as we’re talking about civil rights, that was fine and that’s what a lot of these guys who you were quoting today are still talking about. But King went beyond that, and his message is — you know, it’s sad, because we could have really used him, or used his message in these times that we’ve been through with the Bush administration.
RUSH: Yeah, war is a horrible thing out there, it really is, people get killed.
CALLER: Well, they do, and when you’ve got a world where you’ve got nuclear weapons, biological weapons that could kill everybody, viruses that could be created, is war really wise, is it really practical, or isn’t that kind of naive —
RUSH: I think it’s naive, I mean, look, the Iranians are trying to get nuclear weapons, too, and that’s certainly not good for anybody, but they want them and they’re a minority, we should let them have them, that would stabilize things.
CALLER: No, but can war — like is war, like King talked about nonviolence versus nonexistence. So it’s not like we can choose, even the great thinkers, Einstein believed that you couldn’t continue to have war and the type of violence internationally and still survive as a species. That’s a higher level of thinking —
RUSH: How much longer do we have? Look at the Israelis and the gazookas.
CALLER: Well, we don’t know how much longer, right? But in the old days you could have these wars and there would be a limited amount of damage, as Robert McNamara said, but nowadays you have —
RUSH: What do you mean, limited amount of damage? One death is too many, Robert.
CALLER: Obviously, anyone who’s killed is too many. But now we have the potential to end life on the earth, which we never had before, and don’t you kind of think war is kind of outdated in a civilized — you know, people talked about this for thousands of years, Jesus talked about it —
RUSH: Yeah, of course —
CALLER: Right?
RUSH: I think it’s entirely outdated. We don’t accomplish anything with it. I think, in fact, I watched a war last night. I was in Pittsburgh and I watched the Steelers and the Ravens, they didn’t fire any weapons, but a guy almost got killed. It was too violent. I hope Obama bans the Ravens and the Steelers in the NFL after that game last night because that’s not healthy for anybody, it was not good for the women and children to see, and it was so unnecessary, so brutal, and it’s just a game. How did we make something we call a game become so risky? I think of games, think of Tiddlywinks and Monopoly, where everybody wins, of course, I don’t think one person in Monopoly ought to have all the hotels, everybody ought to have some hotels. Robert, thanks for the call.