RUSH: Well, I wish you could have been here during the commercial break, ladies and gentlemen. The Official Obama Criticizer, Bo Snerdley, jumped in my chili, and I am the boss. As soon as that segment was over, my IFB (that’s the interoffice inter-staff intercom) came to life, and he said, “They’re not looting because of any profound thoughts! They’re not looting ’cause they’re saying, ‘Hey, notice me, and I’m angry!’
“They’re looting ’cause it’s a chance to get free stuff.” Is that what you said? (interruption) “They want to steal and they’re taking advantage of the situation to go steal things they’d like to have, and that’s all it is.” That’s all the loot…? (interruption) “The looting is not, ‘See how angry I am.’ The looting is not, ‘This is how I feel disenfranchised, and this is why.'”
This has nothing to do with anything like that? This is pure…? (interruption) Okay. The looting, according to the Official Obama Criticizer, is simply, “Hey, there’s a riot out there. Let’s go steal a phone! We’ve got a great opportunity ’cause they’ve already busted down the windows to the store, so let’s go steal one.” (interruption) Okay, then I misspoke. Then what I meant to say was that the anger..
Forget the looting. I think the anger, the looting or the civil disobedience, what have you, you is the mechanism by which… It’s a learned behavior. I mean, who leads marches? Who does this kind of stuff, folks? It all… Look, there’s an explanation for everything. It’s just that many people do not want to hear the actual, real explanation for many things.
Here’s David in North Miami Beach. You’re next on the Rush Limbaugh program. Hello.
CALLER: Rush, good afternoon.
RUSH: Why are they stealing, anyway? Maybe Obama hasn’t come through? So they’ve gotta take matters…? David, I’m sorry. Welcome back to the program.
CALLER: Thank you. Tremendous message today, like always, Rush, and the parodies are cracking me up. So we appreciate that. We need a little humor in the day.
RUSH: He’s talking about what he hears on hold, folks. For callers on hold we play all the parodies that we’ve aired in the past down the line on hold.
CALLER: (laughing)
RUSH: That’s the humor he’s talking about. If you’re thinking you’ve missed some humor here, it’s people on the phones on hold.
CALLER: Oh, you gotta get those to everybody else. I didn’t realize those weren’t on air. Hey, I just want to mention, you know, the dissatisfaction, it’s really surprising to me because I don’t know what the community could want. They’ve got the FBI there, the Justice Department there. I mean, what more can be done to ensure rights? I mean, here in North Miami —
RUSH: Well, now, wait a minute. This is another point. They can bring Eric Holder himself in there, and it’s not gonna reduce any anger.
CALLER: Right. But by comparison, Rush, I’m trying to say, we had a situation here recently. There was anti-Semitic graffiti on a couple of shuls in the neighborhood, swastikas. “Hamas” was written, and in that same neighborhood last weekend, a rabbi was approached on the street and murdered in cold blood, shot dead, and you don’t hear a word from the Justice Department. I mean, such an obvious hate crime. And, not only that, it’s being treated — get this, Rush — as a robbery. But here, there’s not even the suggestion that there may be a hate element involved when a rabbi gets gunned down on the way to his synagogue on Shabbos —
RUSH: Look, you’re a smart guy. I know the incident that you’re talking about. You know why they’re different. You know why nothing happens when the rabbi gets shot and why something happens when an 18-year-old kid gets shot in St. Louis. You understand why.
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RUSH: Here’s Doug in Charleston, South Carolina. Welcome to the EIB Network. Great to have you. Hello.
CALLER: Hey, it’s an honor, Rush to talk to you.
RUSH: Thank you. Thank you very much, sir.
CALLER: I’m calling in regards to this young man being killed in St. Louis. I had some thoughts about that, so I looked up some statistics on the CDC, and although black people represent 18% of the over all population, they represent fully half the murder victims in the entire country, which makes them six times more likely to be murdered than white people. Now, of course it’s the leading cause of death for young black males between 18 and 24. The big stat is that 96% of blacks that are murdered are murdered by other blacks —
RUSH: Ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah! You’re not supposed to point that out.
CALLER: (chuckles) That’s the inconvenient truth, isn’t it?
RUSH: Well, no, it’s just you’re not supposed to… (sigh) Well, inconvenient? I don’t… That’s just politically incorrect. Shortsighted? It’s shortsighted, it’s insensitive, and it’s irrelevant, according to the experts.
CALLER: Where are the black leaders? Why aren’t they talking about this? They’re out marching. If this young man was actually murdered, then that hopefully will come out and justice will be served against the police officer who murdered him. But the real truth is that that is a drop in the bucket for young black males being killed on a daily basis by other black males. Why isn’t this being talked about?
RUSH: Well, what do you think? I mean, look at Chicago. The murder rate in Chicago is off the charts. It may be safer in Central American countries than in Chicago.
CALLER: (snickers)
RUSH: I mean that seriously. That is same race-on-same race crime, and the statistics are about all you see. The number of deaths this weekend and the last three day period or whatever. But there’s never any corresponding anger, not like you have here in the situation St. Louis or with Rodney King. When you have police officers involved, that feeds Bull Connor. That all can be traced to civil rights movement.
One of the reasons for it was the cops who turned water hoses and dogs and billy clubs on blacks crossing the bridge. It turns out they were all Democrats doing this, but nevertheless that’s the root. So there’s a police officer involved here, which has historically traceable roots of discrimination, bias, all of that. That serves a purpose for certain people in the race business. That’s why I said…
Look, I get your point. This whole thing bothers me as much as it does you. A, that it happened. It’s just tragic. It is just absolutely tragic. You just wonder: Why did this have to happen? Could something else have been done instead of pulling the trigger? You would hope that people who are cops would understand what the ramifications are gonna be, that the last — absolute last — choice you would make would be to pull the trigger.
But in this case, it happened. So it’s gonna feed what it feeds. In addition to the tragedy contained within its own identity here, what is also tragic about this is that it is going to feed a stereotype that is going to prevent others escaping circumstances that they have no business being in, and it’s just not necessary. The whole thing is not necessary.
But there’s nobody inspiring people. Instead, we have the soft bigotry of low expectations, which comforts people in their misery and blames other people for it, explains it away. And it’s just such a loss of human potential. It’s just an absolute diminishing and loss of human potential that is not necessary. I wish it weren’t the case. Doug, I appreciate the call.
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RUSH: Here’s Doug in Alexandria, Louisiana. Great to have you on the program, Doug. Thank you for waiting. You’re next. Hello.
CALLER: Thank you, Rush, for all the insight you bring to the table over the years.
RUSH: Well, I appreciate you appreciating that.
CALLER: I followed you since the days of “America held hostage” in the mid-nineties.
RUSH: (laughing) That was the day Clinton was elected. Yes.
CALLER: That’s right. Well, the occasion for calling right now is to give some added evidence to the Snerdley Doctrine. Even before you were dumped in the chili, an expression I’d never heard before, it occurred to me that these looting and rioting acts were not narrowly tailored, as the courts would say, to the issue at hand. And call to mind the fact that even when a sports team across the country is victorious, the people in the home city will riot and loot just because there was a victory. And you might think there’s some excuse if they lose. Of course there really isn’t. But the fact that they riot and loot when their sports team across the country is victorious indicates even more so that there is a disconnect between their behavior and the incident. It’s totally disconnected.
RUSH: Oh, no. No, no, no, no, no, no. The leftist psychiatrist would tell you there’s a totally understandable reason why, traceable to George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan, as to why people whose teams win nevertheless go out and loot and pillage and all that, and it’s because of the failed promises of the Reagan and Bush administrations. And people still are suffering. And here they are in the midst of euphoric happiness, and then they realize the victory doesn’t mean anything, ’cause they don’t have any more now than they did before they won. And so it’s time to fix that, take matters into their own hands. And if the Bush and Reagan administrations had been fair economically, there wouldn’t be any need to loot, you see.
It is interesting that teams who lose, rarely do their fans loot. It’s only the winning team. There are occasions when losing team fans go berserk. But in many cases, you’re right, it is winning teams who loot, and in a legal sense, there is a total disconnect. The looting has nothing to do with the winning, and the Snerdley Doctrine here is that in St. Louis the looting has nothing to do with the incident. That’s the Snerdley Doctrine, the Official Obama Criticizer here.
Now, you misunderstood when you said you’d never heard of — when I say Snerdley jumped in my chili, it’s just my phrase for he was giving me the business. He was chiding me, ridiculing me for being so terribly wrong in my analysis. That’s what jumping in your chili means. You know, giving ’em static, irritating them, bothering them. And his point was to me that the looters in St. Louis are not looting over any outrage or desire to express outrage of their circumstances. It’s just a chance to get some free stuff, where they know nobody’s gonna stop ’em. And it’s come one, come all, grab as much as you can, you’re gonna get away with it.
I guess you’d call it the Snerdley Doctrine. It may as well be the Snerdley Doctrine. The looting here is not tied to the actual event where it’s happening. Now, some people will disagree profoundly with this and say that the looting is exactly what I said it was, that it is a reaction to the unfairness, to the wanton discrimination, and it’s just typical, this is what happens to people that live in these kinds of neighborhoods in America, and looting is the only way these people can show how mad they are about it, is to go out and loot, bust up storefronts and this kind of thing.
But the Snerdley Doctrine is it’s just a chance to steal and get away with it. So, as one who has never looted, I will admit that I’m making an educated guess in my analysis. I should really ask Spike Lee. He knows. He’s made movies about it, right? (interruption) No. No. No, no, no. I take that back. I got in trouble for saying — never mind. No need to relive that. Remember the TV show? Spike was doing seminars, and I said, “You know, you forgot to teach ’em –” oh, yeah, hell to pay for that. It’s one of those instances of being so right on the money that you should never say it. And so, yeah, that’s what that was.
But the looting on the part of sports fans whose teams win — and, by the way, it’s not just looting. They set cars on fire, and it usually happens in a neighborhood near the stadium. And it always happens when the winning team — not always, but mostly it happens when the winning team wins on the road, is out of town. ‘Cause there’s not a security presence at the stadium. Well, not nearly the security presence and police officers that would be there if the game were at that stadium. It’s an interesting observation.
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RUSH: Somebody said to me, “Hey, Rush, I can prove this guy’s point even more. Look at the looting in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. That wasn’t about anger.” Au contraire. It wasn’t about anger? You got Wolf Blitzer, you got Shep Smith, you got what’s-his-face, Anderson Cooper down there, they’re all asking, “Where’s Bush? Where’s FEMA? Where’s help? Where’s fresh water? Where’s Bush? Bush isn’t here! FEMA’s not here!” Wouldn’t you loot? What do you mean, there wasn’t any anger? There was anger at Bush. There was anger at Brownie. There was anger at FEMA. Hell, Bush steered the hurricane in there. Everybody knows that.