Castro "Gives" Rice Cookers To Women (Rush's Advanced Conservative Studies Lesson Alert)

I'm not joking. This is a Reuters story, and once again it's just classic. There is nothing about Cuba to recommend it, nothing about Cuba that you could write that is good. You could write about the Cuban people and make the case that they're oppressed and this sort of thing (interruption). Don't give me that, H.R. shouting in my ear, "They've got health care and they've got literacy programs." Find, H.R. your kid gets sick, send them to Cuba for treatment. If you're not happy with the New Jersey public schools send them to Havana, put him in school down there with Elian Gonzales. By the way, somebody confirm this for me. I got an e-mail, and e-mails can say anything. Did Elian Gonzales die? His grandmother did. Okay, this is why you can't trust anything in the e-mail. I got a couple e-mails, "Elian Gonzales died, Rush! What are you going to say about it?" His grandmother passed away. Grandmother down in Cuba or was it the one here? Oh, his grandmother here. She probably doesn't have a rice cooker. At any rate, there's nothing about Cuba to recommend it. There's nothing there. I mean, it's absolutely... Everybody knows this. It's an absolute hellhole. If the earth had body parts, folks, Cuba is an orifice that you can't see. That's the best way I can describe it for you. So here's this story from Reuters:

"President Fidel Castro has given Cuban women some good news on International Women's Day. Rice cookers are coming to every household." This is portrayed as Castro, what a great guy. Remember back in the homeless days, we had these guys that produced the video Dumpster Diving, and they were teaching the homeless how to dive into Dumpsters for food, and that was considered compassion? It was considered thoughtful and helpful. Oh, I'm sorry, it was Elian's grandmother in Havana, she was declared a hero by the state, right, because she died? Or when she died? Okay, anyway, so Castro's given Cuban women some good news. Rice cookers are coming to every household. "In a five hour, 45 minute speech to cheering women Tuesday night," five hours and forty-five minutes! "Castro announced 100,000 pressure cookers and rice cookers would be available each month at subsidized prices." Wait a minute, he's not giving them away and they're not coming to every household. They still have to be able to be afforded. "Castro said to applause from hundreds of women, 'Those of you who like rice cookers raise your hands.'" He then "spent two hours talking about the merits of pressure cookers" in his five hour, 45 minute speech. There's this paragraph next. "Castro's gesture may have carried some irony, coming on a day commemorating women's battles for equality."

May have carried some irony? May have? Here you have a maximum supreme communist thug dictator giving away for subsidized prices, rice cookers, on International Women's Day which is going to keep Cuban women in the kitchen, which is supposed to be a day and a week where we celebrate the liberation of women. "But many Cuban women who do the vast majority of domestic work despite advances toward equality under Castro..." I wanted to puke when I read red this. There are no advances toward anything other than the gulag, the jail, and the gas chamber in this country. Advances toward equality? Who's writing this? It's Reuters. We don't have a byline. "Many Cuban women who do the vast majority of domestic work despite advances toward equality under Castro, were only too happy to hear the Chinese-made rice cookers were on their way." They're probably just bamboo steamers. I'll bet that's all they are is bamboo steamers which is going to cause a problem for the pandas because that's what they eat. "The electric rice cooker is a treasured appliance in communist-run Cuber where the basic diet is black beans and rice. The cookers were among appliances banned to save energy a decade ago when Cuba was plunged into economic crisis and power outages due to loss of Soviet aid and oil. The cookers could now be distributed, Castro said, because Cuba was emerging from that crisis after 12 years and had resolved its latest energy crunch caused by failure of the island's largest power plant last summer. With average salaries of $12 a month, most Cubans cannot afford rice cookers that now sell for $60 on the black market."

So just as TIME Magazine gave us this story -- one week after a cover story on me, I was on the cover with churlish look on my face, smoke curling out of my mouth, the TIME headline said: "Rush Limbaugh, is he Good for America?" And the following week a picture of Castro on the cover and a glowing profile on all the great work he was doing to try to revive his lovely, beautiful island paradise of a nation, "The Lion in Winter." That's what they called him, because he was getting older, not old enough and not soon enough for a lot of people. So now he's giving away rice cookers to all the women in Cuba and he is heralded by Reuters, and it's an insult to everybody's intelligence that have any modicum of knowledge of what goes on in Cuba.

RUSH: I need an address for Kim Gandy, the president of the NAGs. Dawn, do you think she'd like one? If Castro can give away these rice cookers and whatever they are, I'd like to get her a salad spinner. Well, I mean, Castro is such a magnanimous world leader, a great, great lion, has the respect of many leftists in America, and here it is International Women's Day, and he's giving the women of Cuber a rice cooker! I'm going to assume that Kim Gandy already has one, but we want to send her a salad spinner. You know what that is? You know what a salad spinner is? Oh, come on, you don't know what a salad spinner is? You don't have a salad spinner either, Mr. Snerdley? My chef uses one all the time. You put the leaves in there, you wet them and wash them, and then you spin the thing around, and it cleans them, and then throws the water off. You put it in the sink and that's how you spin it around in there, or you can put dressing on it that way by using the salad spinner. It's a great domestic device, and maybe (interruption). Oh, that's even a better idea: a deep fat fryer from Kirstie Alley. Send that to her, a deep fat fryer from Kirstie Alley. There are any number of things we could do, but we need to get in on this International Women's Day today to show that we, too, here at the EIB Network are sensitive and connected, in touch. Jim in San Bernardino, California, glad you called. Welcome to the program, sir.

CALLER: Hi, Rush. Thank you. Mega dittos, I never thought I'd say it, but here I am.

CALLER: About the health care in Cuba. I was there in '97. I was there to freelance write about a subject pertaining to Columbus' time. I was living with a family in Santiago de Cuba which is not far from Guantanamo, and during that time I was staying with a pediatrician. She was a surgeon, pediatrician, an internal medicine specialist named Hasela, and she earns 20 bucks a month, $240 a year. During that time her mother became deathly ill and almost died. And she got together five nurses, four other doctors to scrounge together enough medication to save her mother's life, and we had to save her in Hasela's home. I helped with the transfusion. I just merely held a bottle up there because we didn't have a rack to do it.

CALLER: Ah, good question. The only thing I had done is a little bit of first-aid, multimedia, CPR --

RUSH: Okay. So you had to get pressed into service in the wondrous and magnificent Cuban health care system. It's just one of the many myths that roll out of this place, and it's amazing how many Americans, elected Democrats in Washington and the House of Representatives and others, idolize this man and this country and hold what goes on down there up as a model for anything in this country. It's just flat-out insulting.

RUSH: Let's go to Elizabeth, Grand Junction, Colorado. Welcome to the EIB Network. Nice to have you with us.

CALLER: Well, I can hardly believe I'm here. However, I am and have been a fan of yours forever, practically, and when I heard you talking about Castro, I just about lost it because I think you totally -- well, you're too young, that's the problem. I have children your age.

RUSH: Well, I've talked about Fidel Castro on many previous occasions prior to today. If you were listening to me forever you could not have heard for the first time my comments on Fidel Castro today.

CALLER: I don't have a problem with your comments on him. What my problem is, with your failure to categorize him in my mind correctly. I see him as a hero. When I was young, Castro came to power, and I can remember rooting for him. And there's a reason why he has turned into what he has, and I put it on -- I blame us, the Americans.

RUSH: We're listening to the Dan Rather CBS Evening News since 1960. Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather. I remember Castro. I was around in 1959. I was eight or nine years old, I was watching TV. I remember Castro coming to the UN. I remember Castro. In fact, I have learned since that when he stayed in his hotel they brought a bunch of live chickens and slaughtered them on the floor and cooked them the kitchenette of the hotel room, they're absolute savages. They're just uncivilized savages. Yeah, we hoped Castro would join us because we were afraid he would join with the communists in Russia.

CALLER: No, we didn't hope. I don't agree with you. I think we hoped that we wouldn't have to join him, we could just keep on running him and he's not about to let us run him. What about Batista and what he did in Cuba? I mean, the influence that he had, that's another thing that he felt the need to get rid of.

RUSH: Well, there's something weird going on in that state. Nevertheless, Castro--

RUSH: Let me tell you something, the automobiles and the homes and the buildings that were functional and brand-new during the Batista reign are still being used today, the '57 Chevy is the newest car you can get.

RUSH: They don't have any electricity. You can't possibly say that Castro's improved the lives of Cuban people. It's not demonstrable. You can't make the case.

RUSH: That island has gone to hell in a hand basket faster than any country that's been taken over by communists except maybe for Cambodia.

RUSH: Of course, I'm totally interested in your viewpoint because you've accepted my invitation to call --

CALLER: My version of it is, is that Castro fought a very difficult war. What you call it, the kind of war that he fought? I forget the name of it --

CALLER: He didn't do this for no reason, he did it because the Cuban people were being exploited, right?

CALLER: We, the Americans, owned the sugar plantations. I mean, we were in there just making money right and left. And then we backed Batista --

CALLER: So what? They were being exploited. Why do you think people have revolutions?

RUSH: Okay, I'm not even going to accept the premise that they were being exploited, but today they're being killed.

RUSH: They are dying. Do you understand it's a big deal to get a rice cooker. The average satisfactorily is $12 a month, Elizabeth.

CALLER: My feeling is, and has been for many years, is that we failed. We failed Cuba, and that's all I have to say. But I do like you, and am going to keep listening.

CALLER: I don't know, but the way to fix it is not to constantly bad mouth him. How about trying to do something to really help those people instead of us sitting on our butts like we're a bunch of --

CALLER: I don't know. Somebody needs to go over there and find out what that would be. But I really -- I identify with Castro, I understand where he came from. I don't have a problem understanding him. What I can't understand is how nobody wants to look at what he did --

RUSH: I'm really stunned, and I'm not pontificating here in any way. I'm genuinely stunned. You are talking in respectful and almost glorifying tones of a mass murderer. You're talking about a man who has sent his own people--

CALLER: He grew into that. That's the result of the fact that nobody, nobody faced what he was trying to accomplish.

CALLER: That's right, we did it. That's exactly what I say. So I can't keep yelling about it, and I don't mean to, but, yes, you heard me. You don't know my last name --

RUSH: I haven't thought you're yelling at all. You know, my whole life I've tried to understand how people who have viewpoints like you have just expressed here think. Because it doesn't compute.

CALLER: You're not -- you're not -- no, it computes, but you're not computing it. It computes. But you have to go back and start, back there.

RUSH: You start with a fallacious premise that somehow all of this is our fault, that Castro is a victim.

CALLER: (Laughing.) You're right, he's a victim of what we have not done, you're right.

RUSH: Well, he's tightened the embargo. We can no longer send dollars down there.

CALLER: Yeah, no, I do not like that. I think he's another one who's ignoring reality. That's exactly what I think.

RUSH: Do you have any compassion or concern for the Cuban people in addition to Fidel Castro?

CALLER: Come on! They rooted for him, they loved him when he came into power. What's happened? What's happened? What's happened? He was forced to turn to the communists because we absolutely wouldn't help him. And that's my take.

RUSH: He wasn't forced into anything. We don't do business with dictators, we don't prop them up, we don't go into relationships with them.

RUSH: If our aim is to get rid of them we'll enter into a relationship that used to be called constructive engagement or some such thing, but the purpose of it is to get rid of them, not prop them up and not support them.

CALLER: You know, that may be, but it does not apply with what we were with Batista.

RUSH: All right. Well I love your passion out there, even though I haven't the foggiest. The inability to think, to draw a distinction between the lesser of two evils. I have no brief for Batista. I'm not here defending Batista, but the Cuban people are slaves, the Cuban people live in some of the worst poverty that the world knows today. It's just a crying shame. I've never understood our policy with Cuba. We've got this embargo on them that I think is more than anything else just a legacy to JFK who slapped it on them. I don't think anybody can explain anymore why we really have this embargo. We've traded with other nations such as Vietnam and the Soviet Union and so forth, and it worked in neutering them in certain ways. But the dirty little secret is that when we have gotten close to raising the embargo, lifting it to opening up trade, Castro does something to stop it. He'll shoot down some innocent freedom fighters flying around in what he claims is disputed airspace. He'll do anything he can to avoid us lifting the embargo and there's only one reason why, Elizabeth, and that is, he tells the Cuban people -- and you seem to have fallen for it -- that their plight and the reason that the circumstances they live under are so dire is because of the United States. We are the great Satan. He has a lot of people down there believing that and he will doing anything he can to hold onto that because we are the scapegoat for his utter inability to lead a nation with any modicum of freedom or prosperity. He never was interested in it. He's a dictator. He is a thug. He kills. He murders.

He'll do anything to keep people in the country except his worst dregs of society, which he will release, and presidents like Jimmy Carter will open their arms widely and accept them as in the Mario boatlift. Our Cuba policy, I'll tell you what it is, we're all waiting for Castro to die. That's our Cuba policy. We're waiting for him to die, because nobody wants to do anything about him until then. We've had a policy in effect for basically 40 years, designed to bring him down, and it has done nothing of the sort. It's only exacerbated the situation, and I think if you go to certain people they can't tell you why this policy is even in place. There's no precedent for it, there's no track record that you can point to you in our policies with other countries where what we're doing in Cuba has worked there. So it's a giant mystery to me, but -- well, there's electoral -- I know, the Cuban exile vote is powerful, and, of course they have their own clout where this is concerned. That probably does explain it more than anything else. But even take that out of the mix, take that out of the mix, I know it's hard to, but there's no logical explanation for any of this. Meanwhile, we get stories such as every Cuban woman is gonna get a rice cooker at a subsidized price, and we get stories hailing this as some major achievement down there, and then Elizabeth calls in to tell us we misunderstand Castro and that it's our fault. It's no different than Oliver Stone. But Oliver Stone is a big pure lib. She claims to be a Republican.

RUSH: I was afraid of this. I knew this was going to happen. We now have people calling in in droves who want to respond to Elizabeth from Colorado and we'll take a couple here. Oswaldo in Miami. Glad you called, Oswaldo, welcome to the program.

CALLER: Thank you, sir, and it is an honor. Mega dittos from the most conservative Hispanic community in the United States you would say.

CALLER: My name is Oswaldo Peres. I came from Cuba in 1964 with my family in a boat. Presently I'm an architect, registered architect working here in Miami. I am totally baffled by the statements made by the lady that you were previously on the phone with. I'm a little nervous. I never been on this show before or on any show before. The premise that she established in reference to Batista regime, like she mentioned. I have a couple of questions to ask her, and that would be first of all, I think it was in 1968, the dollar and the peso were worth the same! The economy in Cuba was one of the most prosperous in Latin America.

RUSH: I know. It was a vacation destination. It was a gambling Mecca. It was all kinds of stuff.

CALLER: She mentioned the fact that Fidel, you know, seems to be like he wants to be like independent from the United States. Well, she forgot to mention what about the issue that he sold our soul and our country to the Soviet Union?

RUSH: No I did, I did, and she disputes that. She said Castro didn't want to do what he's done. We forced him into it. You know, Oswaldo, I understand how a call like that can get your blood pressure up. This used to happen to me regularly when I would listen to Ted Kennedy or go back in the days of Jim Wright or any of these prompt Democrats. I felt the same way when I listened to them as you felt when you listened to Elizabeth talking about Castro, but it's a different era out there now and you have to understand, you don't have to correct anybody's thinking because I don't think that Elizabeth struck a chord with anybody on a positive note. It's just there are various population groups in the country, attitudes about things, and pretty much they have an ideology that is not going to be shaken by fact. But don't worry about it, she's not persuasive. It's long past that point now, and I think that a call like that is actually useful in helping people to understand. We're all asking, "Why do people vote for Democrats? How can anybody?" I get the question all the time, "Rush, how can anybody be a liberal?" I can't explain it, folks. I can't explain it, but they can, not in a way that we understand it, but at least we see it and we understand that it's pointless to try to change them. I mean, I gave it my best shot, and you people, you understand my best shot's as good a shot as you're going to get, and I didn't make a dent. I did not make a dent because facts don't matter when trying to impregnate emotions. Is impregnate the right word? I don't think so in this case.

Rush's Advanced Conservative Studies Lesson Alert. Question to today's pupils: what do you get in Cuber that isn't free and isn't coming to every household in the country? Passing grade will be awarded to aspiring conservatives who provide the answer. Bonus question for students: what do you call someone who shills for Fidel Castro but claims to be a pro-Bush Republican, like caller Elizabeth from Grand Junction, Colorado? Correct answer earns one a Advanced Conservative Certificate status. Fire away kids and have fun picking this Maha Rushie masterpiece apart!

(Denny Crane: "Sometimes you can only look for answers from God and failing that... and Fox News".)

Castro's rice cooker announcement is lifted 100% from George Orwell's "1984" management techniques of Ingsoc Party proletarian politics.

(Ingsoc = Newspeak for English Socialism)

I'd say you're right. I guess they've never heard of George Foreman's famous indoor grills in Cuber! (laughing)

(Denny Crane: "Sometimes you can only look for answers from God and failing that... and Fox News".)

I guess they've never heard of George Foreman's famous indoor grills in Cuber!

If they get this excited over rice cookers, I can't even imagine what would happen if they found out about the lean mean grillin' machine! It would start another revolution, especially when they find out the new ones have removable plates that make it easier to clean.

I thought he had announced that everyone was getting pressure cookers. Maybe they'll be getting both technologically advanced deviced. We should be so fortunate to have such wondrous devices in our rustic kitchens here!

I have an advantium oven in my kitchen - it has a speedcooker function - it cooks with halogen light, and it a wonderful time saver. Pressure cooker? Bah!

"In a five hour, 45 minute speech to cheering women Tuesday night," ... "Castro announced 100,000 pressure cookers and rice cookers would be available"

Che must be turning over in Bolivia!

Nah. Che's buried in a masoleum in Santa Clara. Its one of the revolutionary cradles in Cuber.

(Denny Crane: "Sometimes you can only look for answers from God and failing that... and Fox News".)

especially when they find out the new ones have removable plates that make it easier to clean

Yeah, almost makes me wish I had waited to get mine -- those removable plates would make things so much more convenient!

Yeah, me too. Cleaning it is difficult. I wait until it cools off and use Power Dissolver on it. I have the smaller one so I just hold it over the sink and wipe away all the goop right into the sink. I don't know what I would do with the larger unit.

"I can't even imagine what would happen if they found out about the lean mean grillin' machine! "

It would be useless to them. They have no meat, only rice to eat.

Anything you can throw on a grill you can throw on the George Foreman grill, not just meat. Although, I bet beans and rice would be quite a challenge. ;-)

The most depressing aspect of Fidel's announcement is that it took five hours and forty five minutes to make. sheesh..... what a piece of work he is.

I would try to swim to Miami if I had to listen to that POS for five hours.

This article gives me pause to reflect on just how blessed we are as God fearing Americans.

Thank God for our many blessings. And pray to God that the spirit of freedom that has taken hold in the Middle East, will some day reach Cuba.

Yeah, almost makes me wish I had waited to get mine -- those removable plates would make things so much more convenient!

I hear ya. I'm beginning to wonder if this was all planned...

I hear ya. I'm beginning to wonder if this was all planned...

It does just scream "UPGRADE!!!" doesn't it? Too many gadgets, too little money (and space)...

19 posted on 03/10/2005 12:02:50 PM PST by kevkrom (If people are free to do as they wish, they are almost certain not to do as Utopian planners wish)

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