GLENN BECK PROGRAM
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So I walk in and I get to the West Wing yesterday at about 10:00. The meeting is for 11:05 and I'm with some other talk show hosts and it was good to see them and they're all, you know, good people, but I'm just not -- I'm just not your typical talk show host, I think. I'm not a guy who -- I don't care about HR 571. They were all sitting around in a circle and talking about politics and bills and things like that and I'm thinking, not so much, I don't really -- I don't really even know what they're talking about at this point. I don't. They're smarter than I am. Somebody's going to figure out that I don't belong here. And so I just kind of pulled back from the group and -- because I -- you know, I'd never been to the West Wing before and I don't think many of those guys had been. Bill Bennett had been to the West Wing before obviously with Ronald Reagan, but I hadn't, and nor do I expect to ever go back to the West Wing. And I thought I'm going to appreciate "The West Wing". I've come to a place in my life where I realize that all of this crap could stop tomorrow and I'm just going to -- I'm going to enjoy every second of everything that I get to do that's just as normal people don't get to do because someday when it all stops, it could be this Friday. When everything all stops, I'll be able to go back and read my journal and say, wow, that was really cool.

So I decided to pull back from the power circle of the people who are smarter than I am and just look at the West Wing. I went back to the guy who was at the door, the marine who opened the door for us is when he first opened the door, I was just like, wow, I've seen this on TV a million times. I said, thank you very much for your service, sir. He didn't say anything. I don't think he was supposed to. Then I went back and I looked at the paintings. There in the -- I don't even know what you call it -- the lobby, the antechamber, the entrance, is the painting that you've seen a million times before. It's the original George Washington crossing the Delaware painting. You know the one where he's change in the boat and I would be the guy in the back going, hey, sit down, will you; you're rocking the boat. There's that original painting. Next to it is an original Remington of just this beautiful painting of this American Indian. The artwork alone is staggering.

So I'm looking at these paintings and I'm thinking, my gosh, nobody sees these. Nobody gets to see these. Who's coming to the West Wing? And so we wait there for a while and then we're brought into the Roosevelt room, named after obviously Teddy Roosevelt. And so a lot of the stuff is there's a Nobel Prize for Teddy Roosevelt, congressional medal of honor for Teddy Roosevelt hanging on the wall. This room you've seen before on television. There's a giant picture over the fireplace of Theodore Roosevelt that you've seen a million times. Just kind of tucked away in a corner is the painting of the Spirit of 1776 with the flag bearer, the drummer and the fifer where one guy has the bandage on his head? Just, it's a little teeny painting and it's just tucked away over by a lamp. And I looked at it -- oh, speaking of lamps, they're all fluorescent light bulbs. I checked. They're all fluorescent, the whole damn place is fluorescent light bulbs. Pisses me off. I wanted to say to the President, don't we pay enough to have somebody come back in and put the fluorescent light bulbs when you have, you know, Larry David's wife coming in here or something? Can't you get some, like, 5,000 watt light bulbs that are three-ways, like 75 watts, 150 watts, 5,000 watts? Don't you have something like that and so when you leave the Oval Office, you can just click it on the 5,000 watt? But I didn't ask.

So I'm looking at all of these paintings and then we're sitting at this long conference room table and everybody's name on this conference room table. I'm strategically positioned right face to face across the table from the President, and his is the only one that doesn't have a nameplate on it. It's just, don't sit at the one in the center with no nametag. I guess that's just something that, they figure if you're smart enough to be invited to the West Wing, you know, hi, this one's a neat chair; I'm going to sit here; I'll just move my nametag.

They bring out -- these guys come out and they bring waters for everybody. It's these glasses with the Oval Office seal on it, the presidential seal on it. Everybody has ice in their glass and a little White House doily underneath and, you know, nobody's sitting there with any notes. We're just kind of tapping our fingers talking. Bill Bennett is talking down the table about an experience he had with Ronald Reagan and it was quite neat and then it just kind of goes back down to politics. And I said -- I get bored again and I start looking at the artwork on the walls and I said to Bill, I said, Bill, what's the most impressive piece of art in the West Wing that nobody gets to see? Because I'm thinking, we should replace these with copies and put the real ones in a museum some place where people can see them. You used to be able to take tours. You can't take tours anymore. Nobody's going in and seeing any of this stuff. And I said, what is the most impressive piece of artwork that we have here? All of this stuff I've seen in books my whole life. There's stamps, for the love of Pete. One of the paintings of George Washington is on our money. And he said, he just looked at me like, what are you talking about? He said, I don't -- I don't know. I hadn't -- and he kind of looked up like I hadn't even noticed that there are paintings on the wall. And I thought to myself, man, I don't -- I just enjoy it. Just stop and smell the roses for a second.

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