RUSH: We’ll start in Granville, Michigan. This is Joel, and it’s great to have you. How you doing, Joel?
CALLER: Wow, a listener from since your first week on The Big 89 in Chicago, and I can now check this one off my bucket list.
RUSH: Well, it’s great to have you with us. I’m glad you called.
CALLER: I just love it. But you disappointed me, my brother. You were talking about Hillary Clinton, and I thought you were gonna mention — I saw her on MSNBC — and she used the quote, “I’m now living rent free in Donald Trump’s mind.”
RUSH: Oh, yeah, I did see that. I saw that over the weekend. I got so many emails from people who said, “I wonder where Hillary heard that line.”
CALLER: That cracked me up. I about died. And there was a good comment underneath that says, “Wow. I guess that puts her back in the White House.” So funny.
RUSH: I said this about both Clintons, that I’ve been living rent free in their heads since the 1990’s. And it must have really stuck with them. It must have really hit home with Hillary.
CALLER: I can’t believe she was so ignorant to use it, ’cause it was so obvious. I just had to mention that to you. It cracked me up.
RUSH: Well, wait, wait, wait, wait. I appreciate your thinking of me when you heard her plagiarize me, or I should better say adapt what I said.
CALLER: Correct.
RUSH: But why do you think it’s ignorant for her to use that? Because it’s so obvious to everybody?
CALLER: So obvious. Everybody in the world — well, her people wouldn’t know that. So maybe it’s not. Your listeners would know that. But the other people would think, “Wow, that’s pretty clever,” ’cause they never listen to you.
RUSH: Oh, I guarantee, there are a bunch of pajama-clad people on Twitter who’ve never heard it before who think it’s typical Clinton brilliance. Look. You got it, and most of the people that listen to this program got it, as indicated by the vast and voluminous amounts of email I received on this.
CALLER: Although I’m talking on a Monday, I have one suggestion. I’ve always thought I wish you would consider Monologue Monday. You got Open Line Fridays. Monologue Monday, Snerdley could have that extra day off to work on his golf game, and it would be great.
RUSH: What, you mean you want me to take no calls on Monday?
CALLER: I think you’re up to it. I think you could do it. We wouldn’t be disappointed. Like I say, you can give the staff the day off.
RUSH: All right, now, wait a minute, Joel. I’m gonna ask you a question. You need to be really honest with me about this, okay?
CALLER: Okay.
RUSH: I’m not indicating that you haven’t been honest. Don’t infer anything here.
CALLER: No worries.
RUSH: I could do monologue every day. I could do monologue Monday, monologue Tuesday, I could go every day on this program without phone calls —
CALLER: Yep.
RUSH: — but I don’t because I invite people to call. It would be very rude here — do you think people would actually accept me taking no phone calls one day a week?
CALLER: Not a problem.
RUSH: You don’t think they’d get mad at me?
CALLER: Nope.
RUSH: Really?
CALLER: And like I say, I’m just thinking about Bo Snerdley. I mean, he’s probably gotta work on that golf game and do whatever else. And just thinking about your employees.
RUSH: Give everybody a day off on monologue Monday. Snerdley doesn’t play golf, but I get you. He does have sybaritic pursuits.
CALLER: There you go.
RUSH: All right.
CALLER: There you go.
RUSH: All right. Well, if you think it wouldn’t offend people, ’cause I tell you, you would not believe — I go back and forth every day. At the end of every show I’ve got stuff that I prep that I didn’t get to. You would never know it if I didn’t tell you. It’s kinda like when I was a DJ back in the day. I worked for ABC, The Big 89 KQV Pittsburgh, and they had a theory about music, that you could never be hurt by a song you never played. But you could be hurt by a song that was no good that you did play, it would cause tune-outs.
So the play lists were very tight, and they were very scientifically prepared, and they took no chances. There was no new music. The playlist was like 22 songs mixed in with the oldies and it was changed every week. But there was no way new songs — maybe on a Sunday night they had a featured upcoming music, if you want. But during the rated days and day parts of the week, never play anything nobody recognized. You could be hurt by it if they don’t like it.
You could get through life never playing the number one song and not be hurt by it, because nobody would ever know that you didn’t. They would just assume you are. So I got this same philosophy, got all this stuff here, but you don’t know that I’ve got this great stuff here if I don’t tell you, but if I walk out of here thinking, “Aw, damn it. If I’d have been a little bit more disciplined, I could have gotten to some of that stuff.”
But then it’s just an internal thing bothering me. But you don’t even know. You think every show goes as intended and planned and if I didn’t talk about it, then I didn’t intend to. But then I go and tell you what I didn’t get to. Now all of a sudden you know. So am I committing a programming error there? No. I don’t think so. I’m looking at it as being totally up front and honest with you.
But the point is, the news cycle is crazy today, it would be — and I don’t mean this to be insulting — it wouldn’t be difficult at all to go through a program not taking any calls. And again, that’s not meant to be critical or insulting. It’s just an indication of how much there is out there.
But the reason I like taking calls is because one of the things — I love reacting. My creativity, my original thinking, my functioning synapses and little gray cells are really inspired in reaction mode, like when somebody says something to me or I see something that I want to react to, rather than sitting and brainstorming.
I don’t prep monologues. I don’t write them down, I don’t even make notes because my brain doesn’t work that way. I can’t write a speech in advance. My brain freezes. And if I trying to write something, you know, I’m one of these people that corrects every typo the moment I make them, and that just destroys train of thought and destroys memory, so I’ve given up even trying to do that.
So phone calls provide many purposes on the program and I love getting reaction from people and I love, as I’ve mentioned, finding out how people think. Certain examples of it are incredible. People have a reaction to something that I have never even considered, and that’s one of the ways in which the purpose of calls is realized, and that purpose is to make the host look good. But not by endless compliments and sycophancy and things like that, but rather inspiring an already fertile brain to even higher speeds and greater output.
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