RUSH: Rob in Greenville, South Carolina, hi, and welcome to the EIB Network.
CALLER: Hey, greetings, Rush, 24/7 dittos and respect.
RUSH: Thank you, sir, very much.
CALLER: Hey, on the website Hot Air today there was a link to an interview with Bloomberg where transportation Secretary LaHood says that he may push for an all-out ban on the practice of cell phones in cars, even if it’s conducted with-hands-free technology.
RUSH: Yeah. Yeah. I didn’t specifically see that, but I’m not surprised because I think it’s been trending in this direction.
CALLER: Well, here’s my question, Rush, does that mean that the police and fire departments have to give up using their car radios?
RUSH: No.
CALLER: Will FedEx and UPS have to give up communicating with their drivers?
RUSH: Maybe. Probably not.
CALLER: So how many lives have been saved because people have been able to use their cell phones to call in traffic accidents?
RUSH: Ah, ah, ah, ah, see, it’s not about saving lives. That’s just the smoke screen. It’s not about saving lives. What do you think the real reason might be that a federal government, a massive government might be interested in forcing people to not use their cell phones as much. Remember, now, this is not an isolated incident cell phones created danger while driving. For years they have been telling us that cell phones cause brain cancer. They have been trying to scare us out of using our cell phones for a long time. Why do you think that might be?
CALLER: I’ll have to defer to you, Rush.
RUSH: Cell phones, like automobiles, are a singular expression and illustration of unlimited freedom. Cell phones allow people to organize, people of similar viewpoints, plan meetings and so forth, to, say, oppose the government. Totalitarian states, authoritarian states, statists wish to limit the communicative abilities of the population as much as possible. Look at the old Soviet Union. How much news do you think there is in North Korea? How much real news do you think there is in communist China? How much news is there in Cuba? To authoritarian statist regimes, the free flow of information is the greatest threat to their existence. So, here come cell phones, automobile accidents, hands-free. Yep, big danger. Too many people texting; too many people making phone calls. Isn’t practically everything liberals do oriented toward making the world safer, like incandescent lightbulbs going away for compact fluorescents and these little Smart Cars and electric cars and hybrid cars that get squished by bigger trucks and so forth. The whole quest to make people safer actually ends up killing more people.
Liberalism, socialism, communism is responsible for more deaths than cell phones could ever hope to be. Liberalism, socialism, communism is responsible for more deaths than cancer. Yet everything they do is predicated on saving us from ourselves, everything they do is predicated on keeping us safe. Michelle (My Butt) — uh, Michelle (My Belle) Obama is out there talking about nutrition. You can’t eat that, you shouldn’t eat that. She’s making field trips to food manufacturers trying to force them to alter the way they manufacture food. The mayor of New York is demanding that you cannot eat trans fats or salt or what have you. All of this is under the guise of what? Making us healthier? Making us safer? But what has to happen? We all have to lose some freedom for this stuff to be successful. We have to give up the freedom to use our cell phone, which, in an emergency, comes in pretty handy in a car. We all have to give up sugared soft drinks. Our kids cannot get subsidized school lunches if vending machines selling potato chips are going to be on site. All of this designed to make us healthier or to protect us, to make us safer, and yet for all of it to happen we have to give up some freedom, or we have to see it taken away from us rather than give it up.
How long have they been studying whether or not cell phones cause brain cancer, for crying out loud, folks? How long have they been studying this? And isn’t there a new study every year that makes it even more and more possible? And every year it becomes more and more frightening, brain tumors and cancer and other types of cancer could be from extended cell phone use. And now automobile accidents, even if you are on a hands-free phone it’s not guaranteed to protect you from an accident. Yet we would not have the safe air traffic control system we have in this country were it not for continuous radio communications between the pilots and the ground controllers. Even when airplanes land, they have to contact ground control at airports for taxi instructions. Pilots and copilots are in constant quasi-cell phone communication with somebody during flights, particularly takeoff and landing and taxiing.
Now, you would think that we would have to take radios outta airplanes ’cause the pilot’s being distracted, and those are hands-free. They’re not actually holding the radio communications gear in their hand. It’s all hands-free. So is it really about phones distracting people and causing accidents? When’s the last time you heard of an accident being caused by somebody on the phone in the car? Most accidents are because SUVs take over and wipe out somebody, right? Accidents involving SUVs are traditionally reported as though the driver doesn’t even exist. I’m being facetious here. But just stop and think, every time one of these proposals comes along to make us safer, to make us healthier, in order for it to happen we must give up, either voluntarily or by force, some freedom.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: I have said it time and time again, as in the case of cell phones. The issue is never the issue. Okay, so LaHood goes out there and says, (paraphrasing) ‘Cell phones are dangerous. We need to ban cell phones.’ That’s not the issue. Cell phones are not the issue. There’s something else going on. They either want to raise taxes to use your cell phone or there’s something more nefarious than that and that is limit your ability to use the cell phone period ’cause they don’t like all of the extended communication ability a cell phone provides. But the issue is never the issue. Remember when they said the SUV has to be banned. That’s global warming. The issue is never the issue. There’s always something else.