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Sept. 20, 2007 - Rush Limbaugh Program
32:55
September 20, 2007, Thursday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
Now, you remember what I said yesterday, Mr. Sterdley, about today's program.
Remember what I said?
Right.
We're going to do Open Line Friday on Thursday.
We're going to do that today because I am not going to be here tomorrow.
And by the way, some of you people sending in highly critical emails of me again taking another day off, contrary.
Oh, contrare.
Tomorrow is a work day, ladies and gentlemen.
I'll be out in Sacramento, along with four other speakers, General Abizade, Larry Summers.
I don't think they've banned him at this.
They did ban him at the University of California, Davis, earlier this week, and a couple of others.
Anyway, greetings.
It's great to be with you, Rush Limboy, here in the Excellence in Broadcasting Network, where we meet and surpass all audience expectations on a daily basis.
You know, normally, I come in here on Monday, and I have to clean up the mess that has been made of the news over the weekend.
But, folks, there is so much out there today that is just, it's bollocked up.
And I got to ride to the rescue today, and I am more than happy and eager to do it.
First off, as usual, start with some of the lighthearted stuff.
We've got a great audio soundbite roster today, too, as well.
President Bush with a press conference this morning, a couple of intriguing answers to questions he was asked about the moveon.org ad.
But look at this.
Typical Associated Press headline, unemployment claims make surprise drop.
The number of laid-off workers filing claims for unemployment benefits fell to the lowest level in seven weeks, an unexpected sign of improvement for the jobs market.
Who unexpected?
The drive-bys are every time we get good economic news, they have to say that their experts were stunned by it or that the news was unexpected.
How about this headline?
This is from the French news agency, and you don't see headlines like this.
In blow to Democrats, Senate kills anti-war bill.
President Bush's administration Wednesday thwarted the latest bid by Democrats to derail its Iraq strategy as the Senate blocked a bid to limit the number of troops ready for deployment.
After wavering Republican senators came under fierce political pressure, the bill garnered 56 votes.
You need 60 to get anything done in the Senate.
This was Jim Webb's bill.
It was co-sponsored by Chuck Hagel, a so-called Republican from Nebraska, but in a stinging defeat for Democrats, they fell four votes short of the 60-vote requirement.
The measure would have mandated rest periods for troops equal to the length of time that they spent on combat tours.
Now, folks, this is a huge defeat.
This one, the headline is not inaccurate here.
Once again, every time the Democrats try anything to alter the strategy of the war in Iraq, they bomb big time.
This was a surprise to them and everybody talking about unexpected results.
This was a surprise because this, the Democrats thought they would make hay with this because this was couched as support for the military.
Yeah, we love the troops.
We support the troops and we love them so much that when we bring them home, we want to keep them here for as long as they were there in the first place.
And they are not the commander-in-chief, and they don't set these policies.
If they want to affect the outcome, there's one thing that these people can do on Capitol Hill, and that's stop paying for it.
And they haven't got the guts to do that because that would secure the noose of defeat hanging around their necks.
And that's something that they just won't do.
How about this so-called controversy with Amazon Job from Iran?
First place, he's coming next week with Hugo Chavez.
And have you heard about what Hugo Chavez is doing in Venezuela?
He wants his own time zone.
He wants his country to be in the only time zone it's in.
So he's going to move on Monday.
The official time in Venezuela will be moved back by half an hour.
Now, the reason for this, he says, is so that kids in Venezuela can get to school in the sunlight rather than the darkness.
It's all being done for the children.
So his policy people went on TV to announce it and they goofed it.
They said on Sunday night, move your clocks ahead a half hour.
And Chavez had a cow.
No, you go back on there.
You get it right.
They're moving the clocks back a half hour because he wants his own time zone.
So anyway, Chavez and Ahmadinezad are going to be in New York starting Sunday night to address the annual UN General Assembly next week.
So Ahmadinezad says he wants to go visit ground zero, lay a wreath down there.
So this idiot mayor, Bloomberg, says, oh yeah, I'd be glad to escort you down there to NYPD.
We'll be glad to take a giant appeasement move.
And a firestorm erupted.
And they said, no way, he is not going down there escorted by NYPD, Secret Service, or anybody else.
He's not going down there.
And Columbia University got in on the ex will, we can't have a great leader like this disrespected, so we want him to come speak to our students at Columbia University.
He's going to do that.
Then Ahmadinezad says, screw it, I'm going to ground zero anyway, whether you take me or not.
That's the way.
By the way, Norman Shu.
I don't know what makes me think of Shu when I am talking about Ahmadinezad, but it's official now.
He's been indicted on fraud charges.
Something about swindling $60 billion.
You know the drill.
We've talked about this.
And this is not good.
Whoever tried to get rid of him failed.
Including if it was himself who tried to get rid of him.
But they failed.
And now people, you know, we had a call the other day.
How did this guy get on the California Zephyr in a sleeping car?
You can't do that.
These things are sold out weeks in advance.
And I told you people, in certain people's lives, like mine, there's no such thing as sold out.
And I explained how this works.
But people are starting to ask, all right, somebody had to get him on that sleeper car.
Somebody had to do it.
They are sold out weeks in advance.
And to take the thing all the way to Chicago can cost you close to $1,000.
No problem for Shu.
But I just, it is an interesting thing.
We discussed who might have the power.
It's Amtrak.
By the way, one of Shu's excuses, lawyers says that one of the excuses is that they thought he was getting on BART.
Bay Area Rapid Transit.
Yeah, you make that mistake all the time.
Yeah, in Oakland, you've got BART goes through there, and then you've got the California Zephyr.
Of course, those trains look an awful lot alike.
And the ticket prices, I think BART's, what, seven or eight bucks, and the California Zephyr is close to $1,000 for the lawyer says he thought he was getting on in BART.
Anyway, back to Ahmadinezad.
So he's going to go address whoever at Columbia University.
Hell, they ought to bring him down here to some of the high schools.
I've been hearing some of the most incredible stories about what's happening in schools down here in South Florida.
I'm tempted to tell you about it, but it's, for example, Parent told me, daughter came home from school, mom, teacher will not allow the word God in the classroom and won't even type it on paper.
She types G dash D. She's teaching the students that the founding fathers were atheists.
And parents, what are we going to do about this?
Guess what?
This teacher was also doing.
Teacher, I don't even know what the course is.
I think it's history or something.
It's American history.
She's not even teaching American history.
She's politicizing.
This woman is a total left-wing nutjob.
She's out there.
The latest thing is Thomas Jefferson separation of church and state.
There's no God in this country.
Founding fathers were atheists.
So I said, well, have your daughter print out George Washington's first Thanksgiving address and have her take that into this teacher and see what happens.
And we're going to work on this Thomas Jefferson separation.
This woman's a liberal hack, but she's not even teaching the course.
She was giving the kids the tests and the answers 24 hours before the test so that she could get good performance grades because the better the students do, the better she looks.
But she's not even teaching the course.
She's not even teaching American.
So she's been called on that.
She's been told she can't give the students the tests, the questions, and the answers so that they all pass it.
Because she's not even teaching the stuff that she's asking questions on the Testament.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, the homework is to read editorials from the Atlanta Urinal Constipation.
Cynthia Tucker, who is herself, folks, you know, order a French fries short of a happy meal.
They're all what jobs?
Bring Ahmadinezad down here.
He probably would make more sense, your daughter's class, than the teacher that's in there now.
By the way, why don't they just have Ahmadinezad do a joint address at Congress?
I mean, if you're going to go to Columbia University, I mean, he's an enemy of Bush and he's a friend of the Democrats, right?
Friend of my friend is my enemy, or whatever that phrase is.
I was up late last night, ladies and gentlemen.
Warning could be a giddy program.
It was up so late, I didn't even pack.
I got to go home after the program today and pack, delaying my departure.
It was a long night, challenging night in many, many ways.
Anyway, I got to take a brief time out of it.
Yes, I know.
Dan Rather, we're going to get to all this.
This is unbelievable.
Yeah, okay, he wants to get paid.
Bernard Kalb's out there saying $70 million is pocket change to Dan Rather.
This is not about the money.
It's about honor.
Look at it.
Everybody was expecting Dan Rather to crack up on the air.
And he came close to it on this story here on the Bush National Guard thing.
But it's now official.
Because if you read his lawsuit, he makes it plain that he was just a puppet.
I'm just the anchor.
I was just the narrator.
He has finally pulled the curtain back on the truth of all of these network news anchors.
They show up.
They go through the motions of having the meeting and talking to the reporters around the world and getting the news.
And they write it up, supposedly.
It ends up on a teleprompter.
They do 22 minutes of reading.
And if they look authoritative and look halfway decent, no comment here on Katie Couric.
You can make big money and do well under the guise of being a newsman.
Dan Rather has just admitted in order to make himself a dupe here.
He was duped.
He had no role in the story.
He didn't know what was going on.
They made him the fall guy.
And yet you've talked to people who worked on the story who've been fired, like Josh Howard, 60 Minutes 2 producer.
And what the hell?
He's lost his mind.
He's going over the cliff.
He wrote every line.
He made every phone call.
He did all those interviews.
Mary Mates has taken a lot of grief for this, but this was Rather's story from beginning to end.
And now he's out there in his court filing saying it had nothing to do with it.
What's $70 million?
This is a godsend, folks.
This is, I mean, they keep, they keep, be it the elected Democrats or drive-by meeting, these liberals keep opening the door and bloodying their nose before they can get through the doorway.
Hi, welcome back, Rush Lindbor, you cutting edge of societal evolution.
Well, we've got another tape from, I get these guys confused.
Osama bin Laden, another tape is going to invade Pakistan and declare war in Pakistan and Musharraf, which, ladies and gentlemen, puts him on the same page with a Democrat presidential candidate.
That would be Barack Obama.
And let's go back to August 1st.
Obama gave a speech on counterterrorism, and here's a portion of what he said.
If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf will not act, we will.
All right, so we're going to attack Pakistan.
Poor Musharraf's going to get it on both ends if Barack's elected.
Also, ladies and gentlemen, I want to do this Dan Rather business since we brought it up.
I intended to make it put it later on in the program.
But, you know, depending on how far this suit goes, by the way, these people that say, and we got the soundbite coming up from, what's his Bernard Kaub says it's not about money.
Of course it's about the money.
When somebody says it's not about the money, it's always about the money.
Most everything is about the money.
If it weren't about the money, why $70 million?
Why not just $5 million?
Why not a million?
If you're really just trying to get the asterisk removed from your name, you're just trying to freshen up your image and build your legacy and try to get rid of this notion that you were a fraud and engaged in total deception, trying to affect the outcome of an election.
Why go for $70 million?
You go for $70 million to make sure you pay your lawyers and have a little bit left over for you, for yourself.
And something else here.
He is going to get questions.
If this goes this far, he's going to get questioned by opposing counsel in ways he has not been questioned before.
If this gets to that stage, CBS lawyers are going to just put him through the ringer.
I don't think he has the slightest idea what's ahead of him.
We've got audio soundbites about this.
Here's Tom Shales on MSNBC this morning with fill-in host Willie Geist.
And Geist says, hey, Tom, why is Dan Rather bringing this suit up at this time?
It's a matter of honor for him.
And it's kind of an old-fashioned concept these days honor.
The way CBS allowed this scandal to be called Rathergage, or it just came to be known that way because they pushed Dan up there as the frontman, a guy who took all the knocks for it.
And I don't think he wants the record books to have that asterisk next to his name that he left CBS after disgracing them with this so-called flawed report on George Bush.
So-called flawed report.
This is Tom Shales, the unassailable media critic of the Washington Post.
So what Dan wants is honor back.
They just, they pushed Dan up there as the front man, the guy that took all the knocks for it.
Once again, ladies and gentlemen, give you some quotes here.
Josh Howard, forced to resign as executive producer of 60 Minutes 2 after CBS retracted the story, says, why, he seems to be saying he was just a narrator.
He did every interview.
He worked the sources over the phone.
Was there in the room with the so-called document experts.
He argued over every line in the script.
This is laughable.
This is a guy who got canned for this as well.
The producer, Rom Hartman, former executive producer of Katie Kouric's newscast, now works for the BBC.
Uh says it's got to be.
It's got to be about this lasting sense of hurt and pride.
I was flabbergasted.
I just don't get it.
Uh, so he, you know rather, if you get him in the right moment, he's he'll still think the story's true.
What is it he says about this?
He says, oh, nobody has proved that the story is untrue.
Dian, you fraudulent docsman, you forged documents you, for they're fakes.
They be mr Limblaugh, but nobody's proved that the story is untrue.
And if it's untrue, I want to be the one to break that story.
Earth to Dan.
The story broke, you're gone.
You know what he did.
He had a feature.
He had a feature and this I meant to talk about.
This yesterday ran on the HD NET, which is where Dan is now located, doing the news, doing the DAN Rather, reports Mark Cubin's UH Network.
He found a disgruntled Boeing employee who's out there saying they got a brand new way of making the 787 Dreamliner.
Uh, that all the parts are assembled.
They put it together like you'd build a model.
All the parts are assembled off site and they bring all the fuselage, the wings, they attach everything to itself and uh new, new materials being used in the fuselage.
This disgruntled employee is out there saying that uh, this thing's a, this is it, don't hold up in a crash.
Uh, this is it.
And Boeing knows it.
And they're screwing everybody.
This plane is unsafe.
And, of course, this guy gets hold of Rather and Rather out there.
This is typical of what they do, one disgruntled employee uh, maybe with a couple of supporters, and they go out and they do this thing, and then Boeing's on the defensive here about their airplane.
Uh and, and this is this is just, this is typical.
This is what Dan Rather say.
Well, we must speak truth to power.
And, of course, who's power?
Well, power is Republican Administrations uh, big corporate titans, CEOS.
These people are all suspects to people like Dan Rather uh, and and.
So focus on this thing and try to tarnish the image of an airplane under the guise of doing great work to save humanity from possible dire consequences at the hand of evil profiteers who couldn't care less about their customers dying, which really makes a lot of sense.
Boeing's gonna make an airplane.
They're gonna put it out there.
He's gonna kill people.
It's like Mcdonald's is trying to kill their customers.
It's, it's.
It's absurd, but this is the.
This is the theory.
By the way, somebody explained to me, uh, what airplane is crash worthy?
I'll be back here in just a second.
Ladies and gentlemen, don't go away.
That's right, my friends.
Powerful, influential member of the media, as well as being a highly trained broadcast specialist, making it look easy like anybody can do it.
But they can't, and many have tried.
800-282-2882, 2882.
Let's listen to Dan Blather himself.
This is September 20th, 2004.
Infobabe Marcia Kramer, CBS Channel 2 in New York, interviewing Dan Rather.
I made a mistake.
I didn't dig hard enough, long enough, didn't ask enough of the right questions.
And I trusted a source who changed his story.
But there are no excuses.
This is not a day for excuses.
I made a mistake.
We've made a mistake, and I'm sorry for it.
Well, that's going to be tough to square when they play that at the lawsuit trial, if it ever gets that far, because a lawsuit says something entirely different.
It says, Look at, I was basically a puppet in there.
I was just reading the words they wrote for me, and they made me the fall guy, and I want $70 million.
Here's his on-air apology, by the way, September 20th, 2004, a portion of his report about Bill Burkett.
I want to say personally and directly, I'm sorry.
This was an era made in good faith as we tried to carry on the CBS News tradition of asking tough questions and investigating reports.
But it was a mistake.
I just have to laugh asking the tough questions and doing investigative reports.
Folks, you have probably forgotten the drive-bys carried this vendetta on this National Guard story in George W. Bush for five years.
There was never anything to it.
And finally, CBS, in a desire to scoop everybody, forged some documents.
They found some guy with a chip on his shoulder about Bush, and they had Burkitt out there who was already, you know, this guy's, you know, he belongs in a sleeper compartment with Norman Shue on the California Zephyr.
Anyway, these people, the whole thing was a setup, and Rather probably knew it and thought he could get away with it.
Now, this lawsuit comes up.
We memorialized all this in parody.
Okay, that's my way to make the point.
You could almost say that if you read Rather's lawsuit today, that he is accusing CBS of forcing him to make a hostage tape.
They forced him to go on the news and say that he was responsible when he wasn't.
What he needs to do, he needs to put this in graphic form.
He needs to have himself seated at the CBS News anchor disk, or something that's made to look like it.
This is still shut.
He needs to get Sumner Rebstone of Viacom and Les Moonvis standing behind him, holding AK-47s with masks on their face, forcing him to read his apology.
He's a hostage of CBS News.
This is fascinating to me.
A conservative German politician yesterday proposed making marriage contracts expire after seven years with the option to renew for those not feeling the itch to get out of it.
I propose that marriages lapse after seven years, said Gabrielle Pauli to reporters in Munich.
This would mean that one will only commit for a fixed period and will actively have to renew your vows if you still want to continue.
This person, she has been divorced twice.
She's 50.
The proposal part of her manifesto as she prepares to contest the leadership of Bavaria's governing party, the ultra-conservative Christian Social Union.
Okay, since they're being called here the ultra-conservative Christian Social Union, probably means it's just mainstream normal people.
You know, seven years, this is Mr. Snirdley, would you be more inclined to commit to marriage if you know you were only getting involved for seven years, and after seven years, it was automatically going to end.
It is a way.
This is something that you babes out there might want to consider this because this might be a way to get these stubborn men to commit.
If you know you get out of it in seven years, no, there's no penalty.
It ends.
The contract ends.
You go out and you get married.
It's it.
You know, the vows forever after, life, death, whatever, whatever the vows are.
Seven months, seven years.
Maybe we can make it five, you know, whatever.
Well, if you have kids, I mean, work it out.
Try this headline.
This is from USA Today.
Get into your phone calls right after this, folks.
Divorce threat persists throughout marriage.
Really?
This is news.
This is USA Today.
It's written by an infobabe, Sharon Jason.
Here's the nut of it.
More than 70% of those who married since 1970 celebrated a 10th anniversary.
That statistic, one of many released yesterday by the census, shows that divorce itself has stabilized in recent decades, neither rising nor falling significantly.
But listen to this next line.
Experts say, experts say the longitudinal information also suggests that divorce remains a threat throughout married life.
Some may see divorce as a threat.
Others see it as a salvation.
But the idea that you would write a story and say that the threat of divorce survives and remains throughout married life.
They have to, even though the divorce rate actually is improving, we've got good news here.
We still have to pepper it with the usual drive-by pap and BS.
Yeah, the divorce rate may be stabilizing and may be getting better.
Those damn cultural conservatives are winning again.
Those Christian right mortal crusaders.
So we have to make sure that the news isn't all positive.
So yeah, the divorce rate stabilizing, maybe improving a little bit, but you could get divorced at any time.
The threat is always there when you're married.
And this passes for news.
All right, a quick timeout.
We'll come back and we'll get to your phone calls, more audio sound bites as we do Open Line Friday on Thursday.
Be right back.
Mambo number five, Lubega.
And we're back, Rush Limbo to the phones we go.
Open line Friday on Thursday.
Now, here are the rules here, folks.
On Fridays, which we're pretending today is, we abandon all the rules that govern phone calls Monday through Thursday.
And those rules are really simple.
If I don't care about it, we don't talk about it.
And therefore, you can't talk about something I'm not interested in because I'm not going to sit here and be bored because then nobody will want to listen to that.
But on Friday, I take a great career risk, one of the greatest career risks major media figures have ever taken.
I toss all those safeguards out.
And I turn over the content portion of this program when we go to the phones to you.
Lovable.
I so appreciate you.
But you are rank amateurs compared to me.
But I can handle it, folks.
It's always fun to do.
So the bottom line is, if you've got a question, a comment, you want to whine, moan, laugh, complain, whatever, this is the day to do it.
And we'll start in Paducah, Kentucky.
This is Shelly.
It's nice to have you on the program.
No, I didn't say that.
Yes?
No, no, no, I did not say that.
Look, ma'am, I'm not going to sit here and listen to these blatant assaults when I didn't say what you can't.
You cannot possibly have been listening to this program.
Sterling, what are you doing?
Give me the first.
I know it's Open Line Friday on Thursday.
What are you doing here?
Sorry, right.
No, Shelly.
Look, you know what?
I'm from Cape Girardo, Missouri, and I used to watch Channel 6, WPSD-TV in Paducah, and you are ruining my image of it.
I didn't say this.
Okay.
No, Shelly, I'm just trying to be nice here.
You can sit there and you can accuse me of all of this stuff, but I did not.
I did not.
Dan, I did not.
Dan rather made it up, Shelly.
If you want to believe Bush didn't serve in the National Guard, then you go right ahead and believe it.
But everybody in the world knows that he didn't do anything wrong.
Who's next?
Kevin in Moberly, Missouri.
Welcome, Kevin.
Nice to have you on the program.
Hey, it's an honor, Rush.
I've been listening to you since the day after the Oklahoma City bombing.
I appreciate that, which the Clinton administration tried to blame me for, you might remember.
Yeah, I remember that.
I had a hard time making the connection.
Well, so did I. Anyway, what's up?
Well, this is something that's been annoying me for about 20 years now.
How can there be such confusion in what is presumably an educated country about the firewall between church and state?
Now, as I understand it, the church and state separation is there to ensure two things.
One, that I cannot be compelled by force of law to attend church, and two, that my money cannot be compelled to be given to it, which would mean no federal mandating of attendance and no federal mandating of funding.
Beyond that, there is no separation of church and state.
And if you go back to our early founders' documents, the references to God and religious faith are replete.
Yeah, well, that's the place to start with this.
And by the way, let me, Kevin, thanks for the call.
I appreciate it.
The way this all started, and I want to spend a little bit more time on this.
I've been hearing some of the most incredible stories about what is or how American history is being taught in high school here in South Florida.
There is an instance, there's a teacher who has got a PhD.
She's a doctorate.
She brings in her total hack liberal political bias and teaches that as American history.
For example, God's not part of this country.
It was never intended to be.
The founding fathers were atheists.
This woman, this teacher, will not even on papers type out the word God.
She types G-D.
She's now, the latest is that the separation of church and state, that Thomas Jefferson was an atheist, and it was never intended that the Christian right have this kind of power in this country.
And she just makes them read editorials from the Atlanta Uranal Constipation newspaper, so forth.
Woman does not teach the course.
What she does in order to get the kids passed is give them the test and the answers, questions and the answers, 24 hours before the test, so they all pass it so that her review looks good.
And she finally was called on this, and the principal said, you've got to stop giving them the questions and answers.
And the teacher went back to the class, and guess what?
I can no longer give you the questions and the answers.
Now, you might be saying, well, why don't the kids stand up?
Folks, let me tell you something.
If I was a kid and the teacher's given me the questions and the answers, I stood up.
I take it, I give it, and I put up with whatever rhetoric as part of it.
But hell yes, I hated school too.
Anything to make it as easy as pie, I did.
I took the least path of least resistance.
But this is just absurd what is happening in this classroom.
So I suggested to the mother here, get your daughter George Washington's first Thanksgiving address and have her take that in.
This is an American history course and see what this nut job teacher does with that.
And then the Thomas Jefferson separation of church and state thing came up.
Let me deal with this.
This has been taken so out of context and has been amplified far beyond what Jefferson ever intended.
For example, Thomas Jefferson, I don't know how many of you people were taught this, thus I don't know how many of you remember it.
Thomas Jefferson wrote the first draft of the Declaration of Independence.
And of course, it speaks of God repeatedly.
It speaks of unalienable rights, which are endowed by our Creator.
Now, the Declaration of Independence is our founding document.
So if Thomas Jefferson was hostile to religion, the basis of which is God, it's hard to explain his writings in such an important document.
And it is actually shameful that a woman with a PhD has access to young skulls full of mush to pollute their minds with such nonsense.
How in the world can you say that Thomas Jefferson didn't believe in God, didn't want God anywhere near?
He wrote the first draft of the Declaration.
Now, in 1947, here this all started, 1947, the Supreme Court seized on a letter that Thomas Jefferson wrote.
The wall of separation between church and state taken out of context in a letter that Jefferson wrote to the Danbury, Connecticut Baptist community, in which he explained why he didn't call for national days of fasting and thanksgiving, as George Washington and John Adams had as president.
But two days later, he went to church.
He attended church services in the House of Representatives.
He continued as a regular attendant throughout his presidency.
I got to run and take a break.
There's more to this.
We'll be back.
All right, the first hour of the fastest three hours in media is over.
In the can, soon to be going over the warehouse housing artifacts of the future Limbaugh Broadcast Museum.
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