RUSH: Max in Sandy, Utah, I’m glad you waited. Welcome to the EIB Network. Hello.

CALLER: Hello, Rush. I’ve been listening to you for years. Yesterday you mentioned that the New York Times said, why would anybody eat meat, a survey or something?

RUSH: The New York Times in their magazine is running a contest asking for people to explain why it’s okay to eat meat, basically.

CALLER: Okay. How about to save the earth? Because hay and grass is useless to humans and when it dies back in the wintertime it all just rots, you know, like the leaves. And it turns into methane. But cows can eat what humans cannot. And as a result, they make food out of it like milk and cheese and meat, and less plant matter is available for bacteria to decay. So cows therefore are a carbon sync, a food maker, and its byproducts are a fertilizer to greening the planet.

RUSH: Well, you should send that in to ’em!

CALLER: (chuckles) I don’t have the availability. But I am kind of a science hobbyist and so I kind of think about these things.

RUSH: Well, here’s the thing about it, and this is a great teachable moment. See, you are unwittingly — and at the same time trying to be creative — accepting the premise. They’ve got this silly contest going. The premise is that eating meat is bad. It destroys the planet, causes climate change, kills you. So what they want is somebody to write in and tell ’em why that’s wrong. They want somebody to come in and tell ’em what’s so good about eating meat. Can you believe we’ve come to that, that there’s a contest for the best entry on why to eat meat? The New York Times intends to put people who eat meat on trial. The New York Times intends to stigmatize people who eat meat. That’s the purpose of this. “Tell us why it’s ethical to eat meat.”

Therefore the premise that they’re starting with is it’s unethical. Their belief says it’s unethical to eat this stuff, so you tell us why it’s ethical. They’re gonna make an example of your stupidity and your idiocy if you take the premise seriously. So the way to respond to this, if anybody wants to, is to attack their premise rather than accept it. If you want to accept the premise and try to come up with some really harebrain answers, okay. But these people have no humor and they are not clever and they will regard any attempt of you to be satirical or to do any kind of parody as offending them. They think you’re being offensive or you’re gross. They do not have a sense of humor. It’s wasted on them. They literally have no sense of humor, unless the joke is about Sarah Palin and then they’ll laugh, and it doesn’t matter whether it’s funny or not.

So I think it’s a great, great, great indication of exactly where the New York Times is in their thinking on things.