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May 30, 2006 - Rush Limbaugh Program
34:02
May 30, 2006, Tuesday, Hour #3
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What was it?
We had a whackout whack dot call from Oregon last week.
I forget the, was the name Helen?
What was her name?
Anyway, she was the one that said, you prove Hillary Clinton was against ethanol.
So I proved it.
She says, so can't people change their minds?
Remember that?
It was like talking to somebody not all there.
Well, get this.
From, and I don't know if it's going to be Eugene, Oregon, or not.
Oregon's strange place.
Eugene, Oregon Democratic Convention coming to Eugene, Oregon this weekend.
It will offer a half-day training session on religious outreach, an important part of the Democratic Party's attempt to extend beyond its core secular issues.
This is from KOIN.com.
I wonder if they are going to open the meeting with a prayer.
It's unbelievable.
These clowns are still trying to get into religious outreach, injecting spirituality into their core secular beliefs.
And as I say, if you have to inject it, it isn't there.
Greetings, folks.
Welcome back, Rushland Boy, the EIB Network.
I am America's real anchorman, America's truth detector, the doctor of democracy, and a general all-round, harmless, lovable little fuzzball, hated and feared by the American left.
800-282-2882, if you would like to be on the program.
All right, we just did the story, and I just analyzed it and blew it to Smithereens and Ron Fournier in the Associated Press Democrats I landslide in November.
Donald Lambrough, the Washington Times today, takeover of House and Senate, not likely.
This is an analysis of projections made by Charlie Cook and Stuart Rothenberg, who are competing for the title of most accurate political guru and forecasters.
Neither of them see a Democratic takeover as it stands now.
Charlie Cook says the 2006 midterm elections are a political analyst nightmare.
The national climate seems to portend big changes, yet race-by-race analyses reveal formidable odds against a Democratic takeover of either the House or the Senate.
Several structural problems confront the Democrats in the House.
Just three to four dozen House races are really competitive.
And among the 18 Republican seats that are open, only half are in districts where Democrats have a remote chance of winning, Mr. Cook says.
Making matters worse, the Democrats were able to recruit only second or third tier challengers in many key districts where the Republicans looked vulnerable.
Now, Stuart Rothenberg, who is Cook's chief rival in the political predictions business, believes the House definitely is in play, has increased his estimate of likely Democrat gains from five to eight seats to seven to ten seats, but that's still short of the 15 seats needed to topple the Republicans from power, though he thinks there could be greater Democratic gains.
Neither Mr. Cook nor Mr. Rothenberg see the Democrats taking control of the Senate, but they could make some gains in the Republicans' 55, 45 seat majority, they say.
This is all going to depend on Republican turnout.
It's all going to depend on the base turning out, whether they do or not.
And that's going to depend on the Republicans themselves.
It's in their hands.
They can blow this sky high or they can hold power.
And I even think they could.
It's not too late at all.
Why, hell's bells.
It's only May.
It's going to be June later this week.
But there's still plenty of time to actually go out and gain seats in the House if you ask me.
I'm no expert prognosticator with charts and graphs.
All I have is my finger on the pulse of the nation.
And I think a lot of people get into the analysis of this in a purely statistical way.
And that's fine after the fact when you want to analyze what happened.
But to make predictions on pure statistics and so forth, leaving out real-world circumstances like raw emotion on particular hot-button issues.
And especially if you misunderstand the raw emotion or don't even see it on those hot-button issues, then you, as a prognosticator, run great risks of being wrong.
Anyway, we shall see, but I think this is, you know, people say, well, what can we do, Rush?
You know, the argument, for example, over illegal immigration, as I said at the beginning of the program, and it's worth pointing out here, it's worth going into again.
We now find ourselves, as citizens, listening to the elites, the inside the beltway, drive-by media, both parties, and the elected political class saying there's got to be a bill.
We just have to.
In fact, I've got an audio sound about this.
Go ahead.
It's grab cut number nine.
This is Chuck Hagel, who was on Meet the Press yesterday.
Tim Russert said, what will be the political consequences this fall if a Republican president, a Republican Senate, a Republican House do not come together and find common ground on immigration?
Well, there will be political consequences.
There are political consequences for everything we defer and don't do.
We're in the mess that we're in today on this issue is because we've deferred this tough issue.
My dear friend Jim Sensenbrenner and those who think like Jim on this, they want to continue to defer it.
That's why we have the political.
Just a second, stop the tape.
This was not even the point I was going to make.
Defer it?
It's the Senate that's deferring it.
They're punting it again.
There's no enforcement in the Senate, Billy.
The House has actually got a plan to deal with this by securing the borders first.
That is not deferring this.
Here's the rest of it.
There will be a political consequence for this.
That's not why we do it or should fix it.
But make no mistake, politics is wrapped around everything.
Politics is in the fabric of our very processes, as it should be, because politics is about accountability.
It's about leadership.
It's about courage.
This is the test.
This is a significant test.
Yo, so we've got to get a bill.
We have to get a bill.
Legislation for legislation's sake.
Even if it's wrong, we've got to do something.
We've got to show that we're not immovable on.
We've got to show that we can get something done here.
We're Republicans, and we've got to pass legislation.
That'll show the country that we can do something.
It will not if you pass the wrong legislation.
You think the frustration is just me?
Let me read to you the last two paragraphs of Peace The American Spectator Online today by Jed Babin.
This is no longer about George Bush.
It's a useless rhetorical exercise to ask what would Reagan do because the Gipper isn't here to do it.
With the White House neutered and Congress choosing among the many paths of retreat, there won't be much good coming out of Washington between now and November.
It has to come from us.
The conservative base that elected George Bush has become the second-class citizen of Washington.
That is his way of saying they look at us with a little contempt.
We're unsophisticated, uneducated, little hayseed hicks that have to be humored now and then.
We are the second-class citizens of Washington.
We need to stand up and tell the Republican White House and Congress long, loud, and continuously that we want some things done and some things not done before November 7th.
The things that should not be done are more important than those that should be.
Two things top the list of things that should not be done.
First, is any illegal immigration legislation that does not postpone guest worker and citizenship programs until after the borders are closed?
And second, is any effort to condemn the Marines or their leaders on this incident in Haditha until the legal process, not the political process, reaches a conclusion justifying such condemnation.
If the Republicans join in this with Murtha and everybody and start condemning these Marines before an official investigation is complete with answers forthcoming, and if they go ahead and pass an immigration bill that does not protect the borders first, there will be hell to pay.
And that is pretty much sums it up.
But you're asking, what can we do?
What can we do?
I told you last week, keep the powder dry until it's time to fire.
Now, this conference on the Senate and House immigration bills, they don't get back from recess till June 6th.
I don't know when that conference is going to start, but it might be going on when Chris Cannon in Utah's election comes up on June 27th.
And it'll be very interesting if the conference committee is still negotiating and his election proves a shock and a surprise to the people who think they have all the answers inside the beltway.
I have not forgotten, ladies and gentlemen, just didn't have it at the top of the priority stack today.
Dingy Harry accepted free ringside tickets from the Nevada Athletic Commission to three professional boxing matches while that state's agency was trying to influence him on federal regulation of boxing.
Dingy Harry took the free seats for Las Vegas fights between 2003 and 2005 as he was pressing legislation to increase government oversight on the sport, including the creation of a federal boxing commission that Nevada's agency feared might usurp its authority.
Do we need a federal boxing commission for crying out loud?
McCain thinks so.
McCain was at the fight with Dingy Harry, but McCain says he reimbursed for his tickets.
But Dingy Harry's out there saying, I don't have any problem with this.
I'm a big fan of the fights.
He used to be a boxer, apparently.
He says, nothing wrong with this.
Another little chink in the armor here of their culture of corruption charge.
I just want to see, and I've been waiting today to see how much coverage this gets, and it's not getting very much.
I wanted to see if it got as much attention as this phony Denny Hastert story on ABC.
And Denny Hastert said to be in the mix of the investigation of the Abramov scandal, despite repeated denials by the Justice Department.
I ran and ran and ran with that story in this Dingy Harry thing.
A scant mention here and there.
Back in just a sec.
Hey, Mike, grab the feminist update theme.
Feminazis all dispirited here because of what's happened to Elizabeth Vargas at ABC's Wordle News tonight.
First to Akron, Ohio.
Hey, Rod, I'm glad you called.
Welcome to the program.
Yeah, how you doing?
Just fine, sir.
Thank you.
Hey, when I call my congressman or my senator, I get a flunky that does or does not pay attention to what I say.
I think you could get the leader of the RNC on the phone, or you had Vice President Cheney on the phone.
You had Tony Snow on the phone, but you were too polite to him.
You didn't stall it out how bad this immigration bill is.
Well, that's not the impression a lot of people.
I got a lot of people telling me that I was too rude to Tony Snow, interrupting him too much.
He's a good friend and the president's press secretary, and that I was hammering him relentlessly, people said.
So I guess the truth here is somewhere in the middle.
I tried to tell Tony Snow what was up out there with this, but look at he's representing the president.
Think I could make a phone call and change this all around, you are sadly mistaken.
Well, I guess I gave you too much power.
Well, it's issue by issue, but you have to understand where we all are.
And it's, I'm, I'm, we're all in this together.
I'm, I'm part of the unsophisticated bunch of rubes with all of you that really don't know what's going on here as far as the inside the beltway crowd is concerned.
I have told you people, I'll repeat this: when the president first proposed this immigration bill, what was it?
This has to be around two and a half years ago.
And I, frankly, I didn't understand it.
I thought it made no sense.
I thought it was trying to out Democrat Democrats.
I mean, I understood the motivation.
I'm convinced that the president's desire here is to really decimate the Democratic Party.
They want to strengthen the Republican Party by grabbing a percentage of each of the constituent groups that make up the Democratic Party: the black vote, female vote, the feminist vote, the labor vote, gay vote, Hispanic vote.
And the immigration proposal that the president first posited was designed to do that.
But I railed against it on this program.
And it was less than a week I received a phone call from the highest positions of power in Washington requesting a personal in-face, face-to-face meeting.
Meeting happened, and I was regaled with statistics on the politics of this and how it was the wisest and smartest thing that could be done.
And I have not changed my opinion on it as such.
It wanted me to get my mind right on this, and I haven't got my mind right on it.
And now the conservative intelligentsia, the pointy-headed in the conservative media, taking shots at all of us.
We're a bunch of nativists.
We are restrictionists or what have you.
So, I mean, I could call Tony and said, Tony, party's going down.
In fact, I told Tony in the interview, I said this is like that we're presiding here over the death of the Republican Party if this happens.
And he fired right back at me.
He said, No, you're wrong, Rush, and this is why, and so forth and so on.
It was a spirited debate, very civil, I thought, even though some people thought I was rude.
Some people, yeah, you, but there were some people agree with you, Rod.
Got some emails.
That was a snow job.
You just allowed it to run right over you.
But this happens anytime I talk to somebody.
I mean, you know, you've got, I've got 20 million critics out there.
If I listened to every one of them, I would lose my mind.
You have to stick with your instincts, whatever they are, whenever.
Jim in Waynesville, North Carolina.
Hello, sir.
Welcome to the EIB Network.
Megha Ditto's Rush from a nativist rube in North Carolina.
Thank you, sir.
Welcome to the club.
Well, if you're in that club, I love being part of that club.
I was very upset when I heard Mr. Uber, I think it was, say and compare people to commodities when talking about immigration, labor.
Yeah, let me remind people: this was an email I got from a subscriber to my website who said he would not be renewing his subscription because I sound like Ross Parole when it comes to illegal immigration.
He said, you're all for NAFTA, the free flow of goods across borders.
You ought to be for the free flow of labor across borders.
And I try to tell him that there's a difference between commodities and human beings.
Yes, and if you did that, if you take a human being and say they're a commodity, Rush, that labor is slavery.
That's equating it to slavery when you treat people like property or chattel and say you can trade and use them at your will or at these lower prices.
And if Uber doesn't respect his subscription, I'll raise my hand and I'll subscribe.
I'll take his place.
As soon as I get off the phone, I'll sign up because if that gentleman really wants to bleed and help immigration, then he's doing absolutely the opposite by trying to get them to be considered property, which is slavery.
And that, unfortunately, is what's happening to a lot of the immigrants.
There are people who are trying to be, I think, the smartest people in the room when it comes to economics of this.
There's a whole lot of fact, there's a story in the Palm Beach Post today.
This is actually a fascinating story.
Story in the Palm Beach Post about how we've got I-95 down here, and they're widening it all over the place.
I've lived here since 97.
There's been construction going on in I-95.
So there's a story in the Palm Beach Post today about how one of the contractors is being offered a bonus to finish the widening at the Southern Boulevard, which is near the airport here, an I-95 interchange.
Well, it's a bonus of like $1.5 million.
He's going to get that bonus by taking workers from another project elsewhere on 95 in order to complete this one.
If he can get it done in 60 days, I think that's what the time limit now is to get the bonus.
But in so doing, he will miss the bonus for coming in early on the project that he's going to take workers from.
The whole point of the story is there aren't any skilled construction and contractor workers for this kind of work.
They can't find them.
The ones they have can't afford to live here, so they live up in Brevard County and they commute 200 miles a day to get here and work, but they need some pipelayers.
They need people who can drive heavy construction equipment, and they just, they can't find people.
There's just the labor force is sadly not providing the kind of worker necessary for these big-time heavy equipment, heavy construction jobs.
Now, there's no mention in the story of illegal immigration.
There's no mention of legal immigration.
But I'm thinking, what?
Americans won't do these jobs.
This is, they're laboring out in a hot sun, folks, and they're widening the roads.
And there are barriers up there, but they run the risks of out-of-control maniac drivers frustrated by all the delays going both ways, north and south, on I-95.
My point is that the people who are focusing strictly on the illegal immigration as an economics issue point to stories like this and say, see, we need labor.
We don't have enough workers in this country, and we need to get them from wherever we can.
We're going to lose our GDP.
The GDP is going to be going to, we need, and so that's what Mr. Burke was trying to remind me of.
Hey, hey, if you're all for the free flow of goods, why not the free flow of labor?
Of course, human beings are not commodities, and they have far greater impact when you import them or when you go back and forth across borders than commodities do.
And we got to take a break.
We'll be back after this.
Stay with us.
Here we go.
Time for the archival trip down memory lane feminist update time, ladies and gentlemen.
It's the Forrester Sisters with actual audio from a pro-choice rally.
There you have it.
That's actual audio from a pro-choice march in Washington some many years ago.
And we interspersed with the Forrester Sisters and men.
You know, I was thinking, our first feminist update theme was by Sandy Posey, daughter of Jim Posey, born a woman, born to be hurt, not heard.
Mike, you still have born a woman in the prophet he's looking for it right now.
It might be fun to go down memory lane and listen to that because it was in 1967 tune.
One of the first songs I played as a struggling young disc jockey and star of the future, my very first radio gig.
Hey, let me know if you come up with it.
The Feminazi is all upset here over what has happened to Elizabeth Vargas at ABC News.
Now, this is typical, too.
Elizabeth Vargas, financially secure, lots of clothes, plenty of opportunity to choose what she wants to do for herself, and the NAGs have chosen to come to her defense.
The National Association of Gals, our pet name for the now gang.
I mean, there are women all over the place.
I mean, if the NAGs are genuinely helpful anymore, there are women all over the place, and NAGs could really help.
But they'd rather fight here for a pampered, wealthy woman with a bunch of clothes that she doesn't, you're never going to have any struggles there.
And in this story, it's a Washington Post story by Paul Farhe.
Kim Gandy, the NAGS president, actually compares Elizabeth Vargas being taken off world news tonight with ABC canceling the Gina Davis show, Commander-in-Chief or whatever.
Here's some excerpts from the story.
This is from Elizabeth Vargas.
For now, for this year, I need to be a good mother, she said in an interview on Friday, a few hours before anchoring her last newscast.
Just need to be a good mother for the year.
Just the year?
What about next year?
What about the year after that?
You just have to get one good year in as a good mother, and then you've done your duty, you move back into whatever.
I mean, this is my reaction to it when I read the comment.
And of course, the feminists say, they don't like it when women say they want to be mothers.
It sets the cause back.
It's detrimental to the sisterhood.
The announcement has been met with a mixture of disappointment and skepticism in some quarters.
Some observers found the news curious, given that Vargas will return to another demanding but less visible job.
That's co-anchor of 2020 after she gives birth to her second child.
Kim Gandhi, the president of the NAGS, said it seems unlikely to me, having survived and thrived through her first pregnancy, that she would logically give up the top job in TV a few months out, anticipating she couldn't handle it.
It doesn't, it doesn't, it strikes me odd.
It's a logical explanation.
I don't think there are too many men who would be happy to be removed from the anchor chair.
Yeah, you could probably get that right from talking to Dan Rather.
Kim Gandhi said last week, by the way, that she hopes to see pregnant women in their seventh and eighth months, even ninth months, anchoring the news.
And I pointed out to her, it's happened at the hated Fox news channel.
And believe me, you can only take so much of it.
You say, take your leave.
You feel like grabbing a little pin and just let the air out.
It's a distraction.
I know it's a beautiful thing.
Don't confuse me here, but I mean, it just, it's television, it's television, and it just makes you want to burp, you know, relieve the pressure.
At any rate, you got the song.
Hang on with the song.
Kim Gandhi added that ABC, which is owned by Walt Disney, doesn't look like a very woman-friendly or family-friendly workplace.
The NAGs have joined with two other prominent women's organizations to protest Vargas' departure in a letter that will be sent today.
This is yesterday's story, to the president of ABC News, David Weston, and the Disney ABC television group president Ann Sweeney.
Organization calls Vargas' status a clear demotion, characterize it as a dispiriting return to the days of discrimination against women that we thought were behind us.
The letter suggests that Vargas' job change is parallel to ABC's cancellation of Commander-in-Chief, a fictional program featuring Gina Davis as the first female president.
The network has now managed to eliminate two of the country's most visible women role models and high achievers from the TV lineup, said the letter from Kim Gandhi, president of the NAGS.
Nobody was watching Commander-in-Chief.
Here's the last line.
But that still leaves Nows Gandhi unsatisfied.
If she can't have it all, meaning Vargas, if she can't have it all, she said, who among us could?
She is having it all by definition.
Anyway, folks, here's our first feminist update theme: Sandy Posey, 1967, born a woman.
love this, Don.
Comes home and drinks.
Be glad it happened that way.
No price too great to pay.
Sandy Posey, folks, our first feminist update theme.
That song originally recorded in 1967.
Speaking of which, I have to comment on this.
I guess it was two weeks ago during one of my diatribes.
Well, it's not diatribe, one of my little monologues here on children and how they're not for me.
And so the woman called here and said, well, you've got two choices.
You could just run around and try to spend some time with young women until they want kids and then move on to another one and have cheap, meaningless relationships.
And I chose that.
It was actually option number two.
The first option was I could find a woman my age and get serious to settle down.
The woman doesn't want kids and so forth.
But then she gave me the second option, which was a bunch of cheap, meaningless relationships.
I choose option two.
I have gotten more militant email from that comment than any in a long time.
I haven't shared it with any of you.
The last time I got anything like this, way back a long time ago, were a little stunt requiring all potential female callers to have a photo on file.
It was just a harmless little joke.
And we got pictures from all over the country in all kinds of poses, different well, they covered random gamut.
And one night, we were in the Carlisle in the Bimmelmans at the Hotel Carlisle in New York, my brother, my sister-in-law, a couple other friends, and this is a place, a quiet bar.
They have music going on in there.
And my sister-in-law and friends started practically yelling at me about this picture requirement for women to appear on the program.
And this, you know, choosing option number two, a series of meaningless relationships with a bunch of young chicks, has just caused an uproar out there among women who are emailing me.
And I've just, it's just, I'm not going to sit here and say I was just kidding because I was, but you're not going to believe that now after the fact.
It just seemed like too delicious an option to pass up because I knew it would have the effect that it did, but I'm still getting email on this.
Some of it really vicious.
People threatening to cancel their subscriptions to my website and newsletter.
Some saying that they were going to try to look me up, but not now.
At any rate, quick timeout here, folks.
We will be back and continue with more fun than a human being should be allowed to have right after this.
My friends, it would be remiss.
I would be remiss if I allowed this program to end today without alerting you as to what's happening with the Democratic Party and the presumed presidential candidacy of Hillary Rodham Clinton.
It is amazing to watch the drive-by media just become totally infatuated and absorbed in a potential presidential candidacy by Al Gore.
Now, I know Al Gore is out there saying he's not interested.
He doesn't want to run.
He's had a fill of politics and so forth.
But this is not just the kook fringe.
This is the mainstream drive-by media is excited as they can be about this.
And they are running pieces in an attempt to promote this that are denigrating Mrs. Clinton.
The L.A. Times with a double hit on May 28th.
First, on the op-ed page, a piece by Jonathan Chait, Hillary Clinton's character gap.
How did this happen?
It appears the Grand Clinton strategy is backfiring, he writes.
As a prospective national candidate, she has two great vulnerabilities.
First, many voters think she's too liberal.
Second, many voters also see her as cold, calculating, and unlikable.
Her response to this was to position herself in the center, cozying up with her former GOP tormentors in the Senate, staking out hawkish positions and making an overture to cultural conservatives.
But instead of moderates focusing on her positions while liberals focus on her persona, the opposite seems to be happening.
Moderates fear she remains too culturally divisive to win, and liberals can't stand her centrist positioning.
It's the worst of all worlds.
Clinton's problem is that everything she does to staunch her perceived ideology problem compounds her perceived character problem.
What she says about the issues may be popular, but what the issues say about her is that she's a shameless self-reinventor.
Hillary Clinton's character gap.
Al Gore much hotter in the Washington Post.
Clinton is a politician not easily defined.
Senator's platform remains unclear.
Is there a coherent governing philosophy for the smartest woman in the world?
Don't look for a slogan and get ready for nuance, they say.
One clear pattern she likes to use, the military going back to Bosnia and Kosovo.
They're trying to like Hillary in this piece, but it's hard to tell if they do.
They write that she's still trying to demonstrate whether these yielded a coherent governing philosophy.
For now, she's defined by a combination of celebrity and caution that strategerists say leaves her more vulnerable than most politicians to charges that she's motivated by personal ambition and tactical maneuver than by a clear philosophy.
And then New York Magazine, its latest cover is the un-Hillary President Gore in question mark.
This issue is all devoted to the possibility that Al Gore could possibly be a better candidate than Hillary Clinton in the 2008 presidential election.
When New York magazine, the un-Hillary, and Gore's picture is about five times as big as Hillary's is on the cover.
And then the L.A. Times had the craziest editorial on May 28th.
The best thing Hillary Rodham Clinton could do for humanity is not run for president.
Nothing against her personally, mind you.
It's just that her aspirations should get in the way of her husband's worthier ones.
In our continuing quest to find an appropriate job for our favorite ex-president, a year and a half ago, we suggested he become chairman of the DNC.
We now offer an even better suggestion.
This time, it's a post he has coveted.
Not long after leaving office in 2001, Clinton reportedly told an aide that his dream job would be Secretary General of the United Nations.
That's our dream, too.
So you've got the New York Times, the Washington Post, New York Magazine, you've got the blogosphere out there.
They're just excited over Gore, and they don't like Hillary, and they're not in favor of her.
And when they start writing things, is she just an opportunist?
Is it just that she wants this because she thinks she deserves it?
Yes, they're right about that, by the way.
Plus, she's like anybody else in politics.
She's power crazy.
Now the L.A. Times, just get out of the way, Mrs. Clinton, so your husband can mean something again.
But they say that Hillary, if she runs for president, Bill will never be allowed to run the U.N. while she's president, that the UN would never do that.
So the LA Times trying to, the Times trying to suggest she get out of the way on her own so that Clinton can run.
Can you imagine a Clinton household if this subject came up?
But yeah, that's the thing.
The thing that's the most amazing about all of this is how excited, near-orgasmic these Democrats are about one of the most boring and colorless figures ever to grace American politics, and that's Al Gore.
I'm thinking here that the best thing Hillary could do for humanity right now is at least change the pantsuits.
All right, folks, that's it for today.
We'll have much more broadcast excellence for you tomorrow as we have already reached the middle of the week.
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