RUSH: Dadelut dadelut dadelut dadelut. We are gonna go back to the Grooveyard of Forgotten Favorites. Ladies and gentlemen, the SUV has reentered, at least in a part of this country, and we have one of our favorite all time updates.

(playing of SUV update theme song)

RUSH: They drove with pride out there.

(continued playing of song)

RUSH: That’s white comedian Paul Shanklin channeling Elvis Presley’s In the Ghetto. One of our all-time update favorite themes, In a Yugo. Now, this goes back to the mid-nineties. Sierra Club issued their first report on the SUV as a destroyer of the climate, and the SUV is an unfair vehicle. It’s unsafe for some people to be in an SUV. In an accident they would survive, while other people in a smaller car would die. So rather than put everybody in the safer vehicle, we take people out of SUVs, put ’em in little cracker boxes and make everybody equally at risk for injury on the road because it’s simply unfair. Plus the SUV was destroying the climate.

I remember first touting this. I told people they’re gonna be coming for your SUVs. People laughed at me, “Ah, Rush, you’re exaggerating here. They’re not that stupid,” and a decade-long effort began to discredit the SUV and to lie about the SUV. We began to chronicle news stories where SUVs appeared to be driving on their own without drivers. An SUV drove off the third level of a parking garage and crushed a poor homeless guy sitting on a bench reading a week-old issue of the New York Times. We never heard about a driver. The SUV did it. Every time there was an accident involving an SUV, it was the SUV out of control.

It was amazing to read these things. Well, eventually those stories dried up. The SUV was saved. It did not get banned. The American people continued to vote with their pocketbooks and buy them. So the left had to move on to some other thing to try to scare people into living the way they wanted ’em to in order to save the planet. Guess what? I was perusing a blog I read now and then called Power Line, and there was a post last night entitled, “The SUV Did It!”

I said, “Whoa, what’s this?”

Apparently a 16-year-old girl in St. Paul, Minnesota, “was sitting in the grass at her high school, nowhere near the street, when she was struck and killed by a vehicle that careened out of control and bounced off a fire hydrant. The vehicle was driven by an illegal immigrant who has been in Minnesota for ten years without ever having a driverÂ’s license. He was known to local authorities, having been convicted of drunk driving in 2001 and driving without a license just a few months ago. But the immigration laws are not enforced in St. Paul.”

So the St. Paul Pioneer Press yesterday reported on the funeral of 16-year-old Clarisse Grime. That’s the name of the girl that died. Pioneer Press reporting on her funeral, this was the headline: “St. Paul Teen Killed by SUV Remembered at Her Funeral.” Killed by SUV. It’s an oldie but a goodie. These stories happened every day for a ten-year period starting in the late nineties. And then in the second paragraph of the story: “Clarisse Grime, run over by an out-of-control sport-utility vehicle, was Martha Tamene WoldegiorgisÂ’s only child.” Run over by an out-of-control SUV. You had to read to the end of the story to find out who the driver was, and that he was an illegal immigrant.

The people who put the story together left out the fact there was a driver for two reasons. A, the SUV did it. Laugh at me all you want, there is still, in mainstream liberalism, bias against SUVs except when they have one to get their families around, but not for you. There’s a bias against SUVs. They’re killers by virtue of their very existence. And this one was driven by an illegal. Can’t have people find that out. We don’t want any bad vibes out there about illegal aliens, so the SUV did it. I haven’t seen a story like this in I can’t tell you how many years, and they used to happen every day. Maybe they’re coming back. We can only hope.