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May 4, 2007 - Rush Limbaugh Program
29:58
May 4, 2007, Friday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
How about this question?
What do you dislike most about America?
You watched a debate last night.
Well, I watched a little bit of it on a flight home from Detroit.
I got to see all the analysis of it before I saw it because they replayed it like around 11.
And they had questions from bloggers.
Or internet users of Politico was a co-sponsor.
And these idiots are standing up there and saying, what do you dislike most about America?
That was a question Mitt Romney got.
Anyway, greetings, folks.
Great to have you with us.
It's Friday on the EIP.
Live from the Southern Command in sunny South Florida.
It's Open Line Friday.
And the telephone number is 800-282-2882.
If you want to star on the program today, the email address is rush at EIBnet.com.
You know the rules on Friday.
I don't have to have any interest whatsoever in what you talk about.
That is a requirement Monday through Thursday.
On Friday, I'll thank being interested if I have to.
Because when we go to the phones, this show is yours.
Again, 800-282-2882.
Greetings to all of you watching the program today on the DittoCam at RushLimbaugh.com.
Well, I had a fabulous day in Detroit yesterday.
Left yesterday morning, got into town, went by General Motors, and I saw my friend Bob Lutz and some of his people at their design headquarters.
And they didn't show me, they showed me a bunch of stuff coming in the next two years, but they didn't show me to the super duper stuff way out because it's, of course, classified.
And I went through, I saw GMC, I saw Cadillac, saw Chevrolet, saw some Buicks, saw some Saabs.
They own Saab, you know that?
And I tell you, some of the stuff they've got, it really is.
Ever since I've seen this SRX that's out in the parking lot, that Snerdley, he wants to buy this thing now, right?
Snerdley is in love with this car that they've given us to drive for about a month.
And he may not surrender the keys to whoever, who is next in line to drive it in there.
Dawn?
Dawn's next up.
Well, anyway, it was just a fabulous visit.
And I've always wondered about the automobile manufacturing business a whole lot of ways.
And I finally got the chance to ask the questions and see what they're doing.
And they're extremely proud of what they're doing at GM.
And as is the case in this SRX, you know what they really, really are all hip to?
They think they've got the exterior designs, especially in the Cadillac line.
Well, all of them, but some of the cars coming in the next two years from Cadillac are going to blow your mind.
They're meant to compete with the Lexus and the BMW 3 and 5 series.
And these are cars.
The way I told Lutz, I said, you know, these cars look like what I thought the car of the future would look like when I was in the 60s or 70s.
They really, really do.
They look like nothing General Motors has ever made before.
And they even showed me this gigantic hybrid, combo gas hybrid SUV.
It's UConn.
Anyway, that was fun.
Spent about an hour, hour, 15 minutes there.
Went over to Quicken Loans, which is another one of our huge sponsors here and saw their call center and talked to all their people.
Then it was off to the hotel, a quick change, and off to the Rock Financial Center for last night's Rush to Excellence performance in conjunction with the 85th anniversary of our number one affiliate in Detroit, WJR.
Just a fabulous introduction by Paul W. Smith and Frank Beckman.
I have to tell you something, folks.
Last night's last.
We'll get to the debate here.
Okay.
What did Russ think?
What did Russ think?
Let me just tell you, I think, based on what I saw last night, I thought Gilmore did very well.
I was a little surprised at that.
I thought Romney looked Reagan-esque.
He was quite articulate.
Matthews wouldn't leave Rudy alone about abortion, and that was the only place Rudy stumbled a bit because Matthews wouldn't leave go of it.
McCain just didn't measure up.
It looked like he was, you know, had a bunch of Red Bull before the debate started.
He was really wired out there.
But we'll get to all this, and we've got audio sound bites.
We had about, I don't know, 2,000 or 2,500 people in the Rock Financial Center last night.
And it was just a fabulous audience.
It's tough for me to judge these because after I finished them all, I've always enjoyed myself and thought they went well.
But this one may have been, in my estimation, may have been the best one of these things in a very long time.
Crowd was great.
They were just enthused and energetic, and I fed off of that.
It was just one of them.
I probably went about 140, maybe an hour and 45 minutes, and then headed to the airport and flew home.
And I got home, and there was this email in the Rush Commons email box from our website.
Dear Rush, I just had to write to thank you for an outstanding evening last night.
My wife, my daughter, and I were at your event in Novi.
I fully expected you to be witty and informative and topical and educational.
And you exceeded all of my expectations.
But what I did not expect was for my daughter to be so moved by your uplifting and positive message.
My daughter is an 18-year-old high school senior.
She faces the normal challenges and worries of moving forward in her life.
She's quite intimidated by them, as are most young people of her age.
She's done well in school, but she could have done better.
She's going to go to college in the fall, but she didn't get into any of her first choice schools, and that has her troubled.
In addition to making her laugh harder than she has laughed in a long time, you riveted her with your comments on being able to do anything and go as far in life as you want as long as you have the passion and the desire and the work ethic to do it.
Your message of self-reliance really hit home with her.
We talked about it.
We went to dinner afterwards.
I can't thank you enough.
We have a beautiful and wonderful daughter.
She's been fretting over her future due in large part to the doom and gloom she's fed in and out of school every day by others.
Your message has renewed her vigor and enthusiasm.
Thank you, Rush.
You got to her, and you brought out what we've always known she has inside.
I am sincerely grateful.
And I won't mention his last.
This is Paul.
We're going to post this note on the website later today.
But, you know, it's, for me, extremely gratifying and humbling to be able to reach people like this and to have that kind of reaction.
Yeah, it was videotaped, but I haven't seen any of the video.
And if the video doesn't look good, we're not going to use it.
It was audio taped, too.
And we've got, we'll have the transcript.
We may not get that up today because those files still haven't arrived and it takes a long time to encode them.
Oh, oh, you're there.
HR made it back from Detroit.
I thought you were just going to skip town.
Did you get my note about I need a car in Washington tomorrow night?
Well, all right, well, get in there again and call Owen down there because I need a car tomorrow night.
It's going in and out of there.
Get an SRX.
Yeah, call General Motors and have an SRX for waiting for me at Dulles.
Now, There was one liberal that I asked for a show of hands if any liberals because I this this had the hour in 45 minutes last night had a central theme that I connected in various ways throughout the evening.
So I asked if there were any liberals there or people who had been dragged against their will by friends and only one guy pointed to his wife and she started covering her her head and started laughing a little bit.
And she was laughing most of the night too.
Yes, I made a special note to look out there at her direction every now and then.
But I want to offer sincere thanks to everybody that was there last night and the people at WJR for putting it on.
It was just a tremendous great time.
When I finish things like this, I sometimes say, why don't you do them more often?
And then I say to myself, because if I'm not doing them, it must mean I don't want to.
But it was great.
I can't thank everybody enough for the energy that they were providing a lot of me to feed off of last night.
Let's take a quick time out.
We'll get to lots of other stuff happening in the news, as well as this press conference debate last night with Audio Soundbites galore.
Plus, it's Open Line Friday.
That means we're going to do our best to get more of your phone calls in than we normally do.
All that coming up right after this.
Don't panic in there.
Everybody's shortening and pointing.
Let me say, it's time to go.
I knew that.
Greetings and welcome back.
Rush Limbaugh on Open Line Friday, America's real anchorman, Mrs. Clinton, Unreal Soundbite here.
She claims in this soundbite, this was in San Diego, the California Democrat State Convention, on Saturday, and she claims to have babysat for the children of migrant farm workers from Mexico when she was a child in Illinois.
When I was growing up, the neighborhoods I lived in were surrounded by farm fields.
And every harvest season, we had a lot of the migrants who'd come up from Mexico through Texas following the harvest all the way up through Illinois and Michigan.
And the children would go to school with us.
And every Saturday morning, my church group, we'd go out and babysit the younger children so that the older children could join their families in the fields.
Why have we not heard this before?
Why have we not heard this before?
You know, we have to be suspicious of this.
Remember, Mrs. Clinton said she was named after Sir Edmund Hillary, who was the first to reach the peak of Mount Everest.
The problem is when she was born, nobody had ever heard of him.
He hadn't reached the peak yet.
What did you think of the way she sounded?
You know, Hillary speaks in dialects wherever she goes.
She was in San Diego, Southern California.
And wherever she goes, she has a different dialect.
She has a dialect that adapts to that of the audience to whom or which she's speaking.
Now, you might wonder, where has Mrs. Bill Clinton learned to do this?
Well, it turns out she has her own school.
She has her own system.
You know, I'm just thinking, Mike, you better get, because in a couple days, when the media watchdog websites hear this, hear about it, you might want to get the bite of Mrs. Clinton and Selma doing this, which forms the basis of this.
By the way, since we're on the subject of Mrs. Bill Clinton, yesterday on the Senate floor, she said this.
The October 11th, 2002 authorization to use force has run its course.
And it is time to reverse the failed policies of President Bush and to end this war as soon as possible.
Go ahead, do this.
You don't have the guts and the courage.
This is another one of these political maneuvers designed to placate their base.
You noticed in the debate last night, the Republicans, when they play to their base, why, that's a crime.
When they play to their base, that's insulting.
When they play to their base, that's cheap theatrics and politics.
When Democrats play to their base, brilliant strategy.
Go away, you can't do this.
It's already been voted.
You voted for it.
Now to go back and change it.
I was telling the people at Novi, Michigan last night outside Detroit, this is something a president cannot do.
A president cannot change his mind willy-nilly in a matter of days or months or even years.
And these people are free to do so.
Now, Mrs. Clinton, propose it.
You're in the majority in the Senate now, and you're in the majority in the House of Representatives.
So don't just say this should be done.
Go ahead and actually propose it.
Put it on paper and put it up there.
You all want to own defeat, make it official.
Now, let's go back, by the way.
In fact, I want to play these two back-to-back.
So we're going to play six again and seven.
We'll follow it, bam, bam.
Because we're going to go back to October 10th, 2002 on the same Senate floor.
Here is Mrs. Clinton yesterday, and the next bite you will hear after that is October 10th, 2002.
The October 11th, 2002 authorization to use force has run its course.
And it is time to reverse the failed policies of President Bush and to end this war as soon as possible.
If left unchecked, Saddam Hussein will continue to increase his capacity to wage biological and chemical warfare and will keep trying to develop nuclear weapons.
He has also given aid, comfort, and sanctuary to terrorists, including al-Qaeda members.
Let's not forget the rest of this budget.
She's told, not on the Senate floor.
She went and talked to some feminist group.
It might have been Code Pink.
I'm not sure what it was.
And she said, look, I've looked at this.
I've looked at this intel myself.
This is my vote, and it's my decision.
And this is so cowardly convenient to just skip out of it and try to revoke the authority all to push a lie, which is that Bush lied.
Bush lied about nothing, ladies and gentlemen.
He lied about nothing.
In regards to Iraq, a war on terror, you're living in a media bubble here that just promotes this whole notion: well, the American people, Bush lied, 56% of the Americans.
So what?
We want to respect the opinion of a bunch of uninformed, ignorant people?
Why?
Well, that many people thinking it must be true.
Sorry, it isn't.
All right, moving on to the debate.
Just some preliminary comments.
As I said, I thought Jim Gilmore did pretty well.
I thought Romney looked Reagan-esque.
He was very articulate and quick.
The New York Post is all over poor Rudy today.
He did stumble a bit because Chris Matthews kept going back to him over and over and over and over again on abortion.
And people are saying that he was flip-flopping in the middle of answers without being aware of it.
McCain, to me, didn't quite measure up.
Duncan Hunter, I thought, was excellent as well.
And Drudge has got his own poll running, or did have.
Maybe it's not on the full view of my screen.
I'll find it in a moment.
But regardless, beyond all that, we got all this post-debate analysis going on.
I think what really needs to happen is an analysis of the moderator of the debate and the panelists and the way the thing was conducted.
It was so different from the way they conducted the Democrat press conference.
But here the Republicans were.
They didn't run away.
Like the Democrats ran away from Fox.
They were there and they took the questions.
Presidents can't be afraid of these people, but Democrat presidents apparently can be.
We'll be back.
Your phone calls, some audio soundbites for the debate coming up after this.
Groans of pleasure and joy at the very mention of my name, Rush Limbaugh, the EIB Network, 800-282-2882, Open Line Friday.
You know, a lot of the questions that were asked last night, and it stands to reason.
Like the abortion, the abortion question that Matthews kept pounding Rudy on.
They were all, most questions last night were the product of liberal clichés about conservatives, especially this question on abortion.
I would venture to say, well, it's crucial and make no mistake about it.
It is not the single issue in this coming election, probably won't be the single issue, as it has been in the past because of the international threats that we face and the wide line of demarcation between the Republicans and the Democrats on how to deal with it.
And a lot of progress is being made on abortion.
Well, it's trending in the right direction.
But, I mean, asking these guys, which one of you is the next, Reagan, and all of this.
It was just a great display of the little universe in which these libs and drive-by media people exist.
And it was a great display of how they view Republicans.
It was here.
We've got a little montage.
It doesn't so much demonstrate that.
This is just Chris Matthews, the moderator, constantly interrupting things.
He had 60 seconds to answer.
There were 30-second rebuttals.
He had them people up there.
And Matthews indeed loved shout time.
Shouting at people.
Here's a montage of Chris Matthews interrupting the debaters last night.
We'll be able to bring our troops home safely.
Time, Governor.
I think one of the reasons that crime is still down in New York today.
That's the time we should be cloning people for the purpose of using these kinds of activities.
That's time to be used for a nuclear weapon in Iran.
Thank you.
The United States nationwide.
I ran the most conservative government in the last 50 years.
Reduced crime, reduced welfare, balanced the budget, lowered taxes 23 times.
Mr. Mayor, it's not necessarily whether you're a centrist or not.
I believe the McCain Feingold law prevents that from happening.
I think, frankly, I'm proud to work with the president of the United States manufacturing sector, trans energy systems, more marriages before babies.
It's going to be key for a future president.
Benjamin Franklin said in 1727, 1787 that he wanted Thompson.
Could I clearly?
Governor Thompson, please.
That's the time.
There you have it.
So that none of those are repeated, by the way.
Those are standalone.
Well, all of those are standalone instances from the debate last night.
Here's Barb in Davidsburg.
Davidsburg, Michigan, as we start with you.
Nice to have you on the program.
Welcome.
Well, thank you, Rush.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for coming yesterday.
I saw the show, and it was just, as your emailer said before, better than I even expected.
Well, that's what we try to do here: meet and surpass the expectations of the audience.
I'm glad you had a good time.
Well, you always do, and I just want to say I started my day yesterday drinking out of my rush mug from my friend Heidi in Cleveland, who's a fellow Rush fan.
And we just had a great time.
We have a picture that we're going to post.
The young boy was holding up a sign.
My mom and dad raised 12 Rush babies.
Oh, sweet.
Well, we have three Rush babies for you, and hoping they'll get some good Rush grandbabies for you.
Well, that's no question that'll happen.
We're not far from Rush grandbabies.
Now, that'll happen before every American agrees with me, which means I will still be here.
That's right.
Well, look, thanks, Barb.
I appreciate that.
You all in the audience were fabulous last night, too.
Could not have been better.
Take care.
Here is Tina in Fowlerville, Michigan.
Welcome to the EIB Network.
Hey, Rush, good talking to y'all.
Thank you.
Sorry we missed you last night in Novi.
Well, there might be a next time in 10 years or so.
I hope so.
My 15-year-old daughter said, Mom, can we get tickets and New Year sold out?
But I have a couple of rush babies here.
Proud of them.
Terrific.
Well, a point I wanted to make, Rush, is I'm extremely irritated that the presidential debate, Republican presidential debate, was on MSNBC.
And of all people, Chris Matthews.
I mean, come on.
Well, what do you expect?
I mean, if MSNBC is going to do it, they had Brian Williams do the Democrat debate.
Matthews, he ran that debate last night like he hosts hardball.
I could barely bring myself to turn it on my TV.
I thought my TV might blow up.
I have an MSNBC on my TV.
It should have been on Fox.
It should have been with a Fox reporter or host.
I couldn't believe it.
Chris Matthews, of all people, is disgusting.
Well, you know, I have it's interesting you say that because we ran the poll not long ago on my website on who people think should quit at MSNBC and allow a person of color, a minority, to take their primetime slot.
Matthews won that over Keith Oberdork by 49 to 47.
But now after the debate, I've gotten some email from people who want to change their vote to Matthews to give him an even bigger majority.
You have to understand this is what they want.
These are the Republicans, and it was a Republican audience, and they want you to be irritated.
I'm sure that some of them would like to also have your respect for having done a great job, but at the same time, the media has chosen sides here just like most other people in society have.
The big difference is, for example, you people know where I come from.
I make no bones about it.
I don't hide it.
I'm very proud of what I believe.
The drive-by is trying to say, it wasn't biased.
We're objective.
We're just reporting the news.
We have no interest in the outcomes.
And nobody believes that anymore.
They've become so oriented toward the left agenda.
And what's insulting is that they deny it and that they spread things that are not true in the process of furthering the agenda.
And it's quite irritating.
Republicans are not going to run away from MSNBC.
They're not going to run away from debates on CNN.
That's not what Republicans do.
The Democrats are running away from debates on Fox.
Here's another bite.
Bush bashing questions were typical of drive-by drivel last night.
This is a montage of the moderators, Jim VandeHay of the Politico, John Harris from the Politico.
They were co-sponsors.
And Chris Matthews posing questions to the candidates.
Do you think Scooter Libby should be pardoned?
Would you have fired Don Rumsfeld before last November?
What do you dislike most about America?
Is Karl Rove your friend?
Would you employ Karl Rove?
Jack Abramoff, Mark Foley, Duke Cunningham in prison for bribes, FBI raids of two Republican members of Congress.
What's with your party and all this corruption?
Let me ask you a question which has grabbed a lot of Americans personally.
The Terry Shaivo case.
If you watched Al Gore's environmental documentary, An Inconvenient Truth.
Seriously, would it be good for America to have Bill Clinton back living in the White House?
What can you say about this?
I mean, this doesn't need any analysis.
You are now informed and sophisticated enough to understand this.
But folks, it is what it is.
And if you're going to run for president as a Republican today, you have to know that this is what you're going to get.
And you have to be able to deal with it, and you have to be able to knock it out of the park.
I would have loved to have been on that stage and gotten every one of these questions.
They're parody questions, but what they indicate is the mindset.
The Republicans are a bunch of pretenders.
The Republicans are jokes.
Remember, to the left, there is no debate.
Republicans, conservatives, in the minds of the left have to spend their entire existence justifying that existence.
Every one of these questions goes to a liberal worldview.
Do you think Scooter Libby should be pardoned?
Would you have fired Rumsfeld last November?
What do you dislike most about America?
That question came from a somebody, a general public, I think from Walnut Creek, California, that was submitted the question via the Politico.com website.
And of course, the root of that question is, well, conservatives hate America.
Conservatives hate.
Conservatives are racist and sexists and bigots and homophobes and all this, and they just hate people.
And what do you hate most about?
That is a question that if you asked a liberal and the liberal were honest to answer it, he couldn't come up with a list of 10 because that's too few items.
What do you dislike most about America?
Where is the dislike for America?
Romney had a great answer.
He said, gosh, I love it.
In fact, here's the whole question.
Here's Romney's answer.
Let's go to Soundbite 12.
Romney's answer to the question, what do you dislike most about America?
Gosh, I love America.
I'm afraid I'm going to be at a loss for words because America for me is not just our rolling mountains and hills and streams and great cities.
It's the American people.
And the American people are the greatest people in the world.
What makes America the greatest nation in the world is the heart of the American people.
Hardworking, innovative, risk-taking, God-loving, family-oriented American people.
It's that optimism we thank Ronald Reagan for.
Thank you, Mrs. Reagan, for opening up this place in his memory for us.
It is that optimism about this great people that makes us the greatest nation on earth.
Yeah, well, that's a good answer.
But the question, what do you dislike most about the seething rage and hatred, we all know where it resides politically in this country, and it ain't on our side of the aisle.
But then some of these other, it's Karl Rove, your friend.
See, Rove is a criminal.
He just haven't been caught yet.
Would you hire Karl Rove?
Everything, they didn't, they might not have mentioned Bush's name a lot, but they were doing everything they can to indict these guys by getting them to answer questions in a way that make them look just like Bush.
If they said, sure, I love Karl Rove.
I'd hire him in a minute.
If I could have him running my campaign now, I would.
Jack Abramoff, Mark Foley, Duke Cunningham in prison for bribes, FBI raids of two Republican members of Congress.
What's with your party?
What about Congressman William Jefferson, Democrat Louisiana?
What about Senator Feinstein?
You know, these guys, I'll bet you that these wizards on this panel do not even know that there is a brewing scandal with Senator Feinstein and the fact that when she ran that subcommittee on military affairs, she was funneling money to companies owned by her husband.
And I'll bet they don't even know it.
I'll bet they don't know it.
Because the news is from an alternative, not an alternative, it's a weekly paper out, I think, in Marin County.
Might be San Francisco.
It's been picked up in the Washington Times.
These people wouldn't gain to read the Washington Times.
And it hasn't been anywhere.
They probably don't.
What is this culture of corruption?
That is a Democrat Party talking point from the last election.
The culture of corruption.
These questions are embarrassing.
These questions are, and these people are probably very proud of them.
The Terry Shivo case?
Abortion.
See, Matthews could not let go of abortion.
He thinks that the next election is going to be based totally on abortion.
I mean, you know what was funny?
When I was flying up to Detroit yesterday, I was channel surfing around.
And I'll be I checked the movie channels first and there was nothing on the movie channels I wanted to see, so I started surfing the news channels.
And MSNBC was talking about the debate.
I had a countdown clock.
They had that account.
What time was it?
A little after 11 o'clock.
Countdown, eight hours, 54 minutes to report.
Like it was a space launch or something.
And they were all analyzing this thing before it happened.
And in the process, Chris Matthews had a little roundtable, and he couldn't figure out why Hillary Clinton's poll numbers are falling because everybody thought after that debate, she kicked rear end.
You know, she was called Reagan-esque by Pat Buchanan.
She was the only one to answer the question about if we were attacked, what would you do?
She said retaliate.
The others chimed in later.
And so in their worldview, that should have just launched Hillary into the 70s.
And she's plummeting.
And they literally, it was funny to watch these people in their roundtable trying to figure it out.
And I'm shouting at the screen.
You people ever heard of the fact that she and her party want to lose in Iraq and they want the U.S. military to lose?
Do you people have any idea how the American people outside of your little bubble actually see what she says and does and what her party stands for?
But you look at these questions and not only are they cliche-oriented, they are arrogant and condescending.
And they are oriented in the belief that Republicans are some conservatives, just some sort of freak oddballs that have to justify their existence.
And this is the kind of thing, folks, that eventually is going to come back and harm all of these people because contrary to them thinking they're doing fabulous jobs out there.
What about this question?
Would it be good for America to have Bill Clinton back living in the White House?
Now, I don't know if he was trying to be funny with that, if it's just a setup question.
Still, it was on his mind to ask.
These kinds of questions do not get asked of Democrats.
We'll be back.
Stay with us, folks.
Don't go away.
We're off to the usual rousing start, ladies and gentlemen.
Unfortunately, we have to interrupt it here for mere moments.
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