RUSH: Now, speaking of football, one thing got my blood up when I was gone. I mean, folks, I decompressed. I slept ten hours two or three nights while I was gone. I just tuned out. I mean this was what it must be like to be a Democrat, to be totally oblivious to anything. The only thing that was different about me and my vacation and being a Democrat is I paid for it. There wasn’t one benefit, nor did I run around hunting for any. There was one thing — you could talk to my wife about it, too — one thing that got my dander up while we were gone, and it was the snowstorm moving into the East Coast on that Sunday. We got up, you know, we’re five hours behind the East Coast out in Hawaii, and I got up and I’m starting to read things, and I see that they’re thinking about — first I see, ‘Blizzard headed to New York, Philadelphia.’ I’m thinking, ‘All right!’ because we got a football game. Folks, football in the snow is magical to a genuine fan. Football’s meant to be played outdoors in the elements on grass or the closest thing you can come to it.
I remember watching football in Denver in a genuine blizzard, 25 inches of snow fell. Football has been played in inclement weather. The last cancellation for snow was in the thirties or forties. And then I read that they might cancel it, and I said, ‘Oh, no, oh, don’t tell me.’ The first thought I had was chickification of the culture, risk avoidance. ‘We can’t do it. It might be too painful. It might harm people.’ I said, ‘Ah jeez, don’t tell me, the one refuge I thought we had where manhood was still manhood, the National Football League, and there it was about to crumble right before my eyes, become no different than beach volleyball,’ and I said, ‘Please don’t let it happen.’ And then it happened. The mayor of Philadelphia at two o’clock on Sunday, before a flake had even fallen, declared a snow emergency, saying that no vehicles other than emergency be allowed on the roads. Well, when that happened, that’s all it took for the NFL and the Eagles to cancel the game, blame it on the mayor, blame it on somebody else. There’s no question in my mind the Eagles would love to have the game canceled because all that snow and wind would negate whatever advantage Vick brings to the Eagles offense.
So I started having all these thoughts, and I started sharing these thoughts, and I was a little disappointed that I ran into so many people that agreed with the decision. ‘Yeah, Rush, you know, it’s really bad out there, and heavy snow during the game, you got these people walking out, getting in their cars after the game, might not be able to get out of there.’ Come on, it’s not the first time this has happened. If cars are banned on the streets you got all kinds of crews to be assigned to the parking lots. Then they canceled it and my heart sank. I was looking forward to it, and I started listening to all these comments and it sounded like liberalism had just overtaken everything. Risk avoidance, might be painful. The one silver lining is the players wanted to play. Everybody else got frightened and scared. And then something totally unbelievable happened. The governor of the state of Pennsylvania, Fast Eddie Rendell, well known as one of the biggest wuss liberals ever to come down the pike, started sounding like Ronald Reagan and Rush Limbaugh and John Wayne and every other self-reliant individual you’ve ever respected. We have two sound bites. This is Fast Eddie, the governor of Pennsylvania, on the wussification of America.
RENDELL: We’ve become a nation of wusses. The Chinese are kicking our butt in everything. If this was in China, do you think the Chinese would have called off the game? He’s right, the people would have been marching down to the stadium, they would have walked, and they would have been doing calculus on the way down.
RUSH: He’s right! This is a liberal Democrat governor; he goes to the games; he sits out there. Ed Rendell threw snowballs at the Dallas Cowboys at the Vet from his perch in the upper deck. He’s a genuine fan. He sits out there in this stuff. He doesn’t sit in the luxury box like I do. He’s talking about the wussification of America. I said, ‘Where has this guy been? How can this guy possibly be a Democrat? How can he possibly be a liberal?’ And he wasn’t through.
RENDELL: This is part of the wussification of America. We used to be a country that had a great pioneer spirit, a sense of adventure, a sense of courage that we could do anything, and we canceled the football game. At game time there were less than six inches of snow on the ground in Philadelphia, less than three inches of snow on the ground in the western suburbs, less than two inches of snow on the ground in Wilmington. Good Lord, what were the people in Wyoming and Montana thinking? What were the people in Chicago, Boston, and even Pittsburgh thinking?
RUSH: Exactly right! All I could think about was the Donner Party. You know the story of the Donner Party. A bunch of pioneers heading out to California got trapped in a blizzard in the Sierra Nevada mountain range out there near Lake Tahoe and they couldn’t get to Harrah’s, and they couldn’t get to any of the casinos. It was bad. They resorted to cannibalism to stay alive. If you read from the diaries that were kept by members of the Donner Party, you know what you find as a reference to the weather? One, ‘It was an unusually cold winter.’ There wasn’t any complaining. There wasn’t any whining. There wasn’t any moaning. It’s just what it was. These are pioneers. What would the Donner Party think if they knew that we were canceling a football game because of a forecast? A forecast, by the way, that did not eventuate in its severity for Philadelphia. And Cris Collinsworth that night, NBC, they sent their crew out there, they sent Al Michaels and Collinsworth and Bob Costas, they sent them out to the stadium to do the pregame show, they were able to get there somehow. And the NBC crew was able to get to their cameras and all their gear, and they fired everything up to do the pregame show, I don’t know how that happened. They got out there, and Collinsworth said, ‘Oh, this is bad.’
What precedent does this set? This is the league that has scheduled a Super Bowl in New York in February of 2014, canceling a football game because of the forecast of snow in Philadelphia in December. This is not about football, for those of you stick to the issues people. This is about our culture. Fast Eddie is right. I listen to Fast Eddie and he sits here and he says we used to be a country that had a great pioneer spirit. We did until the Democrats and liberals made everybody dependent. Sense of adventure? Can’t have any adventure. There’s risk in adventure, somebody might get hurt, can’t have any. Kids can’t even play dodge ball. Kids can’t even go outside anymore without a note from a doctor or something. A sense of courage. Courage? There’s no respect for courage. Courage is considered too macho. Courage is considered predatory male behavior. We can’t have any courage. We still can’t build buildings in New York how many years after 9/11 because we’re wussified. We’re worried about offending some group in a memorial that we might leave out.
So I was fit to be tied over this for two reasons. A, I was selfish. I did want to watch a football game in the snow. There’s only been one of them this year and that was the Bears in Chicago and the Patriots, and they played. Now, it wasn’t a blizzard, but people were still driving in the snow and they’re still drinking beer at Soldier Field, and they still had to get home, and nobody thought, ‘Oh, we gotta cancel the game, it’s snowing out there.’ These wuss liberals, and Fast Eddie’s one of them, but look what it was that made Fast Eddie abandon his liberalism, football, even if it was for a brief day or two.