Posted on 11/30/2006 4:06:01 PM PST by goldstategop
The best cat I ever had was an abyssinian, he was a demon for headbutts. He also loved brushing so much you could brush him with a running shop vac brush and he would just sit there loving it. He taught our dogs how to ask to go out and behave.
I don't really have a preference of dogs over cats but my dogs say I can't have a kitty.
BOW! WOW!
This cat (blue-mitted ragdoll) will let a high-powered Hoover get right in her face without blinking...and no, she's not deaf.
Siamese Bump..
We Humanize Terrorists Like We Do Animals
RUSH: Ocean Springs, Mississippi, and Sherry. Nice to have you on the program.
CALLER: Hi, Rush.
RUSH: Hi.
CALLER: Greetings from Katrina country.
RUSH: I appreciate -- thank you very much.
CALLER: I called you because you made an analogy comparing people humanizing their pets to liberals humanizing terrorists.
RUSH: Yeah?
CALLER: And I think that's a poor analogy. I think you're doing a great disservice to our pets, and number two, I think you lost a lot of people with that remark.
RUSH: No, no, no, no. I never lose people here. After 18 and a half years, you have to know, we never lose audience on this program. Anyway, what was the great disservice to animals?
CALLER: Well, because they do have emotions.
RUSH: I'm not saying they don't. Let me take the opportunity here to further expand on this, because I am the biggest animal lover on earth. I'm a softy. In fact, I'm going to post pictures. We took some pictures over Thanksgiving, and we got some pictures of my cat Punkin head butting me, and as she was doing it, everybody in the room went, "Awwwwww, how cute!" I am a softy for these animals, but I think some of them don't even have an awareness of their own existence. They've done tests. You know, some animals can see themselves in the mirror and know they're looking at themselves. Elephants are one. Other animals haven't the slightest idea they're looking at themselves.
It's not their eyes (they can see better than we can), it's just they don't have a concept of self. Now, when I mean "humanizing animals." Animals are animals, but look what we do. We make movies and cartoons, and we give them voices -- and I'm sorry, your animal can't talk. I know some of you might think your animal can, but it can't. It just can't. Not even birds. Birds imitate and mimic, but they have no clue what they're saying. I're not putting them down, it's just fact. (interruption) African grays are the best mimickers, but they don't know what they're saying. If they knew what they were saying, they could expand a vocabulary beyond what they hear, and they can't.
Look it, time is dwindling here, and obviously I've upset some people. Here's how you can get fooled. My cat comes to me when she wants to be fed. I have learned this. I accept it for what it is. Many people in my position would think my cat's coming to me because she loves me. Well, she likes me, and she is attached, but she comes to me when she wants to be fed, and after I feed her, guess what? She's off to wherever she wants to be in the house until the next time she's hungry. She's smart enough to know she can't feed herself.
She's actually a very smart cart: she gets loved, she gets adoration, she gets petted, and she gets fed, and she doesn't have to do anything for it, which is why I say this cat has taught me more about women than anything my whole life, but we put voices in their mouths. You know what I'm talking about. Whales talk. Look at the movie Finding Nemo. We humanize them. We give them human characteristics for our own entertainment, and we want to believe that they're that way, we want to believe we can jump in a lion's den and treat them as a pet. We want to believe that if we just treat alligators right, that we can get along with them. We want to believe this.
We want to believe we can tame all of these wild creatures, animals that aren't domesticated. The analogy to terrorists is that we also want to think that they are like us, in the sense that they have the same values and the same principles, but that they have a misunderstanding about who we are. We've been made to believe that they think that we want to murder them, that we want to wipe them out, that we want to kill them, when it's just the exact opposite, and if we could only send really smart people like Jimmy Carter or Colin Powell to talk to the terrorists, then the terrorists would understand that we have nothing against them, and they would then love us. I'm sorry, this is sophistry, it is naïveté, and it is dangerous, and it is the best way I can explain this analogy.
Rather than deal with the truth of who the enemy is, we find it more comfortable and pleasing and dare I say hopeful to believe that they're just like us, to believe that they, too, would love a McDonald's in the middle of Hasran Nasrallah's neighborhood, and they're only upset because they don't have one, because we're denying them. We want to assume that everybody is good people, like we think that we are good people, and recognizing evil, recognizing that people are not who we want them to be is something a lot of people don't have the guts to do because then you have to admit what you face. It's easy to do the other. It's easier to deny it and to think that, well, there's just a lack of understanding. They're human beings. Why, they're just like us. We have pulled this off with animals because the animals can't come back and kill us for making fun of them in movies and cartoons that we draw about them. Well, some of them can, but not because of that, because they don't even know that they are appearing in cartoons as caricatures because they can't watch television. This is silly.
RUSH: All right, I have this one little story. It was last Saturday. I had the whole family over. I got the whole family together for the first time in 20 years. There was only about five that couldn't make it, and they were here for like five and six days. It was just a total blast. It could not have gone any better. There was one uncomfortable moment and when you've got 48 people around for five or six days with only one uncomfortable moment, that's a success. Anyway, my little niece, Caitlyn, who is five or six. I'm sitting in my library seeking privacy on day five of the proceedings (Laughing) and I've got the door closed and somebody knocks on the door, opens it, "You've got to come see what Caitlyn has!"
So I got up, and Caitlyn had on her left hand, she was sitting on the front bench out in the front yard, she had a tiny little baby lizard. We love lizards down here. These little geckos, they're our little buddies because they eat insects, mosquitoes and all that. They're just the cutest little things, and she had one, and it was on her hand. It was totally comfortable and she'd move her hand around, and it would move to stay balanced and so forth. It would run up her arm and then back and down to her hand, and once it jumped up on her shirt, on her shoulder, so I picked it up and put it back down on her hand.
I said, "Let me tell you why it likes your hand." I'm talking to a five or six-year-old, but I said, "This is a reptile, and that means it's a cold-blooded animal, it's a relative of the snake, alligator, and that family of lovable, adorable creatures. As such, it's cold-blooded. You have a constant body temperature of 98.6 degrees when it's normal, but these animals don't, so if you want to find a lizard down here, find a hot surface like a sidewalk or patio or what have you, and that's where you'll find them because that's how they get warm. Now, right now, that lizard's staying on your hand because your hand is warmer than the bench that you're sitting on, and so it's feeling good because it's warming up because of your body temperature."
And she says, "You mean it doesn't love me?"
"Well, it probably does love you. That's why it's there."
It was just the cutest little thing. I just wanted to pass this on because it's how people feel. Look it all the kids books that use animals as training tools, and we humanize them and so forth. That's fine. I'm not being critical of that. I just want to expand again on what I was saying earlier about how we're doing the same thing with terrorists and with our enemy, rather than face who they really are. Tiger is a tiger, but we still live and breathe, we have hope. How many of you who have had pets (be honest with me on this) have hoped and prayed that your dog or cat was going to actually talk to you one day and break the laws of nature? Andy Warhol did. Andy Warhol went nuts one day telling his dog, "Talk! I know you can talk! Say something." Every human being hoped that. (interruption) Warhol went nuts? Was nuts? Well, we shouldn't speak ill of the dead. He had hope. But it's a common thing. You know, I'm all for it. People can construct little fantasies and so forth about what their animals do and think and say. I think that's one of the great therapeutic benefits of having an animal around, by the way. Cats are the best, because, you know, they only want you when they want you, and that's not much, and you never have to let 'em out. You don't have to house train 'em or any of that -- and they purr. They're cute. I love cats. I like dogs, too. I like 'em all, but I love these lizards. But when we start humanizing our enemies the same way, and hoping that they're just like us in terms of our culture and society, then we're making a huge, huge error, and we're in the midst of doing that.
Rush's analogy here is we think terrorists can be domesticated and tamed. They can't. They are in a whole different league here and they are exactly like wild animals. They will kill you without so much as a bye your leave. Ascribing human characteristics to terrorists is just as dangerous as anthromorphizing wild animals. That's the difference between conservatives and liberals. We have an appreciation for danger; they tend to romanticize if not dismiss it outright. Just think of the lib Timothy Treadwell who ended up being bear food. Nature is not Bambi Personified and neither are terrorists.
Awww. What an attractive cat!
Kitty ping :)
ping
A couple of real softies there...Punkin and Rush.
You said it. Serious "awww" material.
Great photos.
I heard Rush for the first time in my life today!
Normally I am at work ... you can't get AM stations while in a skyscraper.
That is one fine looking feline.
What's the circle part of Rush's hearing device? Is it a battery?
Great Thread! It's nice to see Rush with family.
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