RUSH: This is Keith in Atlanta. It’s great to have you, Keith. How are you doing, sir?
CALLER: I’m great, Rush. Thanks for taking my call.
RUSH: You bet.
CALLER: I’ve been a listener since the early nineties and I’ve always been a fan of your nicknames. I think you and Trump have a unique talent for that. And one that I’ve always gotten a chuckle out of that I almost feel like it’s a private joke because I’m not sure that everybody gets it, is Dingy Harry. I’m pretty sure I know the origins of it, and I was wondering if you’d indulge me.
RUSH: Sure. Harry Reid to me was dirty. This is a guy lying about Mitt Romney not paying his taxes. This is the guy who tried to get me censured and apologized for, for claiming I was opposed to the U.S. military by creating a phony soldier. And, by the way, we raised $4 million off of the letter he wrote. The guy that was running Clear Channel at the time was Mark Mays. And you want to talk about a brave CEO, Mark Mays, he’s one of the sons of Lowry Mays, the founder of Clear Channel.
So Dingy Harry, Media Matters got this phony thing up. I’d criticized a guy who was not a soldier, who was passing himself off as a decorated war veteran ripping into George W. Bush. So the media says, “Limbaugh rips into some guy, claims he’s a phony soldier,” which he was. Dingy Harry went to the floor of the U.S. Senate to condemn me, a private citizen. I wished my parents were alive to hear it! And then he demands that Mark Mays do something to me, apologize for me or what have you.
Mark Mays gave me the letter that Dingy Harry wrote him, and I auctioned it on eBay as an example of your government attempting to infringe on the free speech rights of an individual citizen, me. I promised to match whatever the highest bidder for that letter was. And somebody actually bought that letter for $2 million, two point one or something. I matched it so it was over $4 million that was raised for the Marine Corps-Law Enforcement Foundation.
That’s Harry Reid. So you got Clint Eastwood out there as Dirty Harry. So you can’t call him Dirty Harry ’cause Dirty Harry’s already taken. So I came up with Dingy ’cause Dingy’s even better because dingy is dirty and cloudy and murky and filthy. So that was my thinking on it, Keith. Is that what you assumed?
CALLER: That’s exactly right. And I love it, Rush. And again, it makes me smile every time I hear it. So thanks a lot for everything that you do.
RUSH: I appreciate that. Thank you very much. I love those kinds of questions. How’d you come up with the name Dingy Harry? I think I know, but I’m not sure.
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