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Feb. 4, 2008 - Rush Limbaugh Program
34:15
February 4, 2008, Monday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
Yeah, it was a great game, but I not practically blew a gas.
I blew a gasket last night.
I literally started yelling and cursing and screaming so loud.
I had 40 people over last night for a Super Bowl party.
I had about 25 of them in a theater room, and the others were in my library.
The Patriots fans in one room, the Giants fans, and we're going back and forth.
And I started screaming when Belichick.
By the way, greetings, my friends, and welcome to the Rush Limbaugh program.
Full wicked broadcast exit was straight ahead here.
Telephone number 800-282-2882, the email address rush at EIBnet.com.
When Belichick, there was a two-minute commercial after Belichick punted, the Patriots punted after being held on third down and came back for commercial break.
And then during a two-minute timeout, he had challenged the Giants with 12 men on the field, a red flag.
And I just, two minutes to challenge some, two minutes.
I know it turned out to be a good challenge.
At the time, I was cursing.
I can't tell you what I said.
It was so loud and apparently so funny that people in the theater room came in just to hear what I was saying.
And then after that, they started asking me political questions.
I said, not now.
This is the game.
What a game it was.
I mean, it was, I was so happy for the Mara family.
I was so happy last night.
Neither team is my favorite, so it didn't matter really who won, but the Mara family deserved this, and they played well last night.
So anyway, folks, I'm sitting here, and I'm in a quandary.
By the way, welcome to those of you watching on the Ditto Cam.
It's great to have you with us at rushlimbaugh.com.
But I get the soundbite roster from Cookie at about 10 minutes prior to showtime.
And the first 20 soundbites are about me.
And most of them are from the Sunday show.
Some are from last Friday.
I'm going through, I didn't watch any of the Sunday shows yesterday.
So I didn't know any of this, and nobody had sent me emails.
I guess it's so common now that I get mentioned all over the drive-by media that nobody sent me any emails.
So I'm reading the roster here today, and I'm literally stunned at all of the questions that McCain and Huckabee and some of these other people, the Russert roundtable, got about me.
And then there was such glee on Fox and on the Meet the Press roundtable over my demise.
All of this means my demise.
And I've had a lot of requests over the weekend since last Thursday and Friday from TV people, from newspaper people, from website people to grant an interview to appear on election night coverage tomorrow night.
I've turned them all down.
I got a friend of mine running for city council here in Palm Beach.
You've met David Rosso.
He's been up here.
Rosso is running for town council here.
And his victory party is tomorrow night after, because we vote tomorrow in the Palm Beach Town Council races.
And his victory party is going to be tomorrow night.
And he's like, no, no, no, no, you've met him.
He's a great guy.
He's one of my golf buddies.
Brother lives in Minnie.
How could I hurt his chances?
Dawn Pythe, I hope you didn't hurt his.
How could I hurt his chances?
The elections tomorrow.
Oh, because I'm killing Romney now.
I'm going to kill Rosso.
Now he's going to win it tomorrow.
He's got his party tomorrow.
Told him that I would go to his victory party.
And that's going to be like at 9 or 9.15.
You know, and I'm going to stick with my friend.
What are all these drive-bys?
I mean, here they are ripping me to shreds.
They want me on their news networks and sit down there and analyze this.
I'm going to save my comments for you people.
But I did one thing.
I did one thing.
I granted an email interview to Howard Kurtz at the Washington Post.
Howie has always been upfront and he's always been fair.
And it was late Saturday afternoon, Saturday.
I got his email and I was prepping for the party.
I said, Howard, come on.
It's Super Bowl weekend.
You think I'm thinking about Super Tuesday?
I'm thinking about Super Sunday.
I got apologized.
Said those of us in the media focused on Super Tuesday.
I said, well, I know, but I can multitask.
So anyway, he sent me three questions, and I gave him one answer for all three.
And he wrote back and said, wow, we're going to have to.
It was originally going to run today, but he said, we're going to move this to Tuesday.
I think it's going to cause quite a stir.
And his questions were related to the kind of things that you'll hear on the audio soundbites coming up.
Is this really a measure of your declining success and your declining influence that your guy may not get the nomination?
You know, I just, I chuckle at this.
It's been 20 years, and the people in the drive-by media still do not know how and why I do what I do and what my main objective and focus is.
And I kind of spelled it out for Howard, so we'll see what he has.
Well, that's true.
If anybody knows what demise is, it's the media.
If anybody ought to be examining a demise, it's them.
They're losing circulation.
They're losing viewers.
They are losing advertisers.
None of which is happening to me through any of this.
What?
What do you, okay, what Snerdley thinks there's something else at work here, something other than the personal.
What do you think?
Well, they are trying to kill conservatism off, and I, to them, am conservatism.
And they think that if I somehow fail to rally my robots in the audience to whoever it is I'm for or to vote against whoever it is I'm against, that conservatism is finished.
And they're, of course, eager for that, which is one of the reasons they love McCain.
McCain will kill conservatism as a dominant force in the Republican Party.
So we'll get into all that.
As you know, folks, we've got three hours here today, and it's impossible to squeeze it all in in the opening segment.
Let's start with audio soundbite number two.
This is the tonight show.
Last Thursday night, Jay Leno interviewing Senator McCain.
They had this exchange.
On conservative radio, Rush Limbaugh especially, he said the Republican Party is dead.
If John McCain gets elected.
What do you do there?
Do you try to win those guys over?
Do you just ignore it and hope they come around?
I mean, because the right-wing radio thing is pretty powerful.
I mean, would you go on his show if he invited you?
Oh, I'd go on most any show if I was invited.
I think the important thing is to convince our Republican base, which is a very conservative.
One, I'm a conservative.
Two, is that I'm the best qualified in taking on their major concern, and that is this struggle against radical Islamic extremism.
And I think I've been able to do that pretty successfully.
You know, ladies and gentlemen, I'm going to apologize here up front because reacting to this is going to require me to be repetitive.
You know, and I like to bring originality to this program, but I guess the repetition is called for.
You know, Senator McCain may be conservative on one thing or two things.
The war on terror, the struggle against radical Islamic extremism.
See, I happen to believe, ladies and gentlemen, that if the Democrats win the White House, they are not going to surrender the country to Islamic radicalism or the war in Iraq.
They are not going to do that to themselves, despite what their base says.
I do not believe the notion that there's only one candidate on any side of the aisle here that cares about the war on terror.
I know that Huckabee may not be prepared for it, but you can't convince me that Romney is going to punt the war on terror.
You know, the idea that we've only got one person in this whole roster of candidates, either party, that is willing to take on the war on terror is frankly absurd.
The Politico today has a piece by Jonathan Martin.
And here's the one line from it that everybody just needs to hear to know what the story is about.
Put simply, McCain is winning the character contest.
Conservative unease with McCain and the Arizona senator's inability to win support from his party's right wing has been much discussed and analyzed, but there's another emerging fault line in the Republican race that may better explain why, despite his checkered past with the party base, McCain has won consecutive contests and could wrap up the nomination on Tuesday, and that is he's winning the character contest.
I'd like to know when did character start mattering again?
I mean, the character apparently didn't matter in the 90s with Bill Clinton.
It didn't matter with the drive-by media.
George Bush's character has come under assault.
He's a liar.
He's this and that.
And now all of a sudden, character matters.
You know, they're looking for reasons to explain this, but let's look at the character business for a second.
John McCain has stabbed his own party in the back.
I can't tell you how many times.
He stabbed his own president in the back on legislation a number of times.
He doesn't support his party or his president when the chips are down.
He called people who want to protect the border racists, nativists, protectionists, and worse.
And what kind of character is it that tries to slide all that through under cover of darkness in a back room who I think it was McCain who said, we got to get the politics out of this issue to get it passed.
Well, what does that mean?
It means we can't let the American people know what's going on in this amnesty bill.
We can't have the usual debates.
We can't have any committee hearings.
This is too important.
We've got to get it through before they know what's happening.
A lot of character in that, isn't there?
Slides right into bed with the liberal socialists every single time they wink at him.
It's a strange way to define character.
And I noticed something else going on.
I mean, even out there in the right-wing media, the right-wing blogosphere, one of the arguments being made is we are to blame.
We conservatives here are to blame because we didn't come out and support Romney early enough.
That we let.
Now, wait a minute, we can't win for losing here.
I thought, you know, we start endorsing people.
That means we're abusing our privilege here.
I think what's going on here, they're trying to say it's going to be our fault if McCain beats Romney.
And, you know, they say three crucial weeks went by after January 8th.
It took McCain's win in Florida to get a lot of those critics off the sidelines.
And this is happening.
This is right-wing commentary.
This is conservative commentary from a conservative blog.
I think it just, it's more the same, people not understanding what happens here and how it happens and what the objective of this program is.
Anyway, I've got to take a break here.
I'm a little over time.
So the next segment's going to be a little shorter than it should be, but be patient.
We'll be back and continue right after this.
Don't go anywhere.
Ha, we are back.
Great to have you with you, Rush Limbaugh meeting and surpassing all audience expectations on a daily basis.
So the politico today, Jonathan Martin, yes, it's McCain's character that is putting him over the top.
Well, let me ask you if this is character.
I'm asking you.
I'm not going to try to define it for you.
I'll just ask you.
Is it character when you lie about your opponent's position on timetables for withdrawal from Iraq, are proven to have been wrong about it, and yet continue to lie?
Now, that's pretty Clinton-esque.
And I don't know that we associate character with the Clintons, but I'll leave the question and its answer to you.
Senator McCain has also lied about his reason for opposing the Bush tax cuts.
And the drive-bys let him get away with this.
His original reason was that he didn't want to support these tax cuts without appropriate budget cuts, spending cuts.
That's not what he said at the time.
And no less than the Associated Press has gone out and fact-checked this.
In 2001, McCain said the tax cuts favored the wealthy at the expense of the middle class.
In 2003, he said there should be no tax cuts until the Iraq war costs were known.
He's changing his position and his explanation on his position practically every time he's asked about this.
And frankly, folks, I don't find it very conservative.
I don't even find it Republican to start talking about wealthy people or hardworking entrepreneurs as somehow the problem as the enemy that need to be punished, which he has been saying throughout this campaign.
Character business is up to you to figure out, but I know it stems from the prisoner of war period and so forth.
I'll tell you, if I could boil this down to something other than McCain and the issues, which trouble me, it is this.
Do you folks understand that it is the drive-by media selecting our candidate?
The drive-by media is the entity that is convincing everybody of McCain's character, of his robust stature, his supposed greatness, various policy things and so forth.
If you want the drive-by media to pick your candidate on your side and your party, then fine, but understand that's what you're doing.
As far as what we're being told by people on the right, I mean, I read some of our right-wing pundits, and we are being admonished, people like me being told, you know, you just need to be quiet.
Need to grow up and you understand this is the best we can get and you need to suspend your principles before Super Tuesday so as not to mess all this up.
My question is this, you know, the Patriots were inevitable until they played the game.
We are being told that we should all of a sudden now rally behind McCain when he's not even the nominee of the party yet and may not be after tomorrow in terms of the delegate count.
All these geniuses in our movement and in our party demanding that people like me announce for McCain today and join Schwarzenegger and Olympias Snow and Susan Collins and on and on and on, that he's inevitable before Super Tuesday, that there's no stopping him.
And if you guys know what's good for you, you'll just suspend your principles and get on board with all of us here.
The Patriots were inevitable until they played the game.
I happen to think, in fact, I happen to know, ladies and gentlemen, that the people on my side of this are the ones who are acting rational.
People with Senator McCain are the ones who always have to spin to say that their guy is something he isn't.
They're always making excuses for the weaknesses that he brings and the thing they won't matter.
Don't worry about them.
Yeah, that was then, this is now.
We got to go out and beat Hillary.
We have to go out and beat the Democrats.
If some on our side say that they are endorsing Romney or whatever, then they say we're being intellectually dishonest when we're not.
I think they're trying to turn lemons into lemonade, and yet we're all being lectured by people on our side about what we ought to do to come to grips with reality.
If none of this matters, if ideology and principle boil down to irrelevance and not mattering, then what's the point of having principles and ideology anyway?
I think here's the difference.
There are just some people that don't hold as reverent and as important the principles and ideology of conservatism as I do and several on my side of this.
And so they ask us to compromise with them.
They are the establishment.
They say we should put our principles and ideology on hold and be quiet and understand the reality that we face and get on board and stop making fools of ourselves and stop being childlike and so forth and grow up and understand the reality of things.
And I'm sorry, but it's just not that easy to just throw principles out the window.
I've got 20 years in speaking to all of you of adhering to my principles and backing them up and explaining them and informing more and more people about them and bringing more and more people to them.
And now all of a sudden, for the sake of party unity, which doesn't matter to me when compared to my principles, I'm supposed to throw it out the window, doesn't work.
That's not me.
Back in a second.
Your guiding light through times of trouble, confusion, murkiness, tumult, chaos, mutiny, and even the good times.
Well, we know who wants McCain, ladies and gentlemen.
That's the drive-by media.
A number of liberal independents and moderates.
And Senator McCain and those endorsing him are happy to have them join the party as liberals and moderates.
You know, I'm all for expanding the party too, but not by changing the party into a liberal wing of the Democrat Party or at a subset of it or the minor leagues of the Democrat Party.
If you want to bring some liberals in, some independents, do it.
But not by being like them.
And that's what's happening out there.
And we're going to rule the day.
We're going to rule the David Frum, who is a blogger.
He's an author, former speechwriter for Reagan.
He's back and forth on this.
But he was on Chatsworth Osborne Jr. show on PMSNBC last week.
And he said this about Senator McCain.
It's not my words.
These are his.
McCain has made it very clear over the last half dozen years he does not love the Republican Party.
He'll put up with it.
He'll tolerate it.
If they'll follow him, he will consent to lead them.
But he doesn't love this party, and the party knows it.
There are substantive issues of which immigration is far and away the most important.
It's a hugely important issue.
McCain doesn't just try to explain to the party why he disagrees.
His method is to explain to the party why not only does he disagree, but that they are racists and wrong and stupid for thinking the way they do.
And people don't like to be told they're racist when they're not.
And they don't like to be told they're stupid when they're not.
And then this.
David Frum said McCain is not interested in the project of saving conservatism in the Republican Party.
He's not really trying to save the party.
He's trying to build a personal movement with the Republican Party as its vehicle.
David Frum.
I'd go a little bit farther.
I think McCain has an animus toward the Republican Party.
I think ever since South Carolina 2000, he's had it in for the Republican Party.
And one of his objectives is to destroy it and change it.
And I think this is one of the reasons why so many people who drive by media and so many liberal independents love the guy because they too hate the Republican Party.
He has far more in common with those people than he does with his own party members.
It's just the way it is, folks.
Up to you to do with it whatever you choose.
Nancy, Jacksonville, Florida, we start with you on the phones.
Thank you for calling and welcome to the broadcast.
Thanks, Rash.
Well, you brought up all some great points, but I need to talk to you about why Fred Barnes, Michael Medbed, and Bill Bennett are wrong about McCain and why Romney is the one we need to rally behind, especially for Reagan's birthday, which is February 6th.
We need to go in for the Gipper to preserve his three-legged stool.
Okay, Fred Barnes lectured us to grow up.
Medbed said conservative issues are irrelevant, which is wrong, because the nominees that John McCain would put on the Supreme Court would not be any way conservative.
One of the people advising him is Redmond, I understand, who was responsible for David Sauder.
On the life issue, Bill Bennett is counting.
Excuse me?
David Souter is how you pronounce his name.
I just want to say.
Well, I'm not a fan of his, so I don't follow that as closely, but I do follow their own.
Well, now wait a second, wait, wait a second, Nancy.
Because yes, Warren Rudman's involved in the McCain campaign, but last week, Ted Olson endorsed McCain as, I forget the title.
It's something like judicial advisor pertaining to nominees and so forth.
And Ted Olson's not a Warren Rudman.
Does that soothe you at all?
No, because he was actually on Rudy's campaign, and Rudy is a liberal.
Rudy is for taxpayer funding of abortion.
And you cannot unite all three legs of the three-legged stool if you have one faction in our coalition that doesn't unite the party.
That's the problem.
That's the reason we're where we are, to be quite honest with you, is that there isn't one candidate who does unite all three legs of the stool.
So it appears the party's fractured, but it really isn't.
This is nothing.
Drive-bys are missing with a conservative movement.
Everybody's missing this.
They think we're fractured.
We're not in terms of ideology and principle.
It's just that there's not one candidate that takes all three legs of the conservative stool and unites them.
Those three legs, as they exist today, are the fiscal conservatives.
Those people, that's a low-tax crowd, the small government crowd, to get government out of the way crowd.
Just leave us alone, crowd.
We'll be fine.
Then you have the national security bunch, which has gravitated toward McCain.
The fiscal conservatives are going a number of different ways.
The social conservatives are the other people.
That's the Christian right, the evangelicals, and so forth.
And they're split between Huckabee and McCain.
So really, what it all adds up to is that there hasn't been a single candidate in our roster that embodies all three.
So everybody's acting all these members of these three legs of the stool are all independent contractors, and out there running around supporting people on the basis of what their primary concern is.
So it is what it is.
And people say, well, Rush, doesn't it prove that the conservative movement's in trouble when you can't find one candidate?
No, I don't think that's.
Conservatism is what it is.
It is always going to be here, just like liberalism is.
There are people writing it.
It's over.
It's finished.
It can't be over.
It's principles, its ideology.
It can never be gotten rid of.
It was not invented.
I mean, conservatism is what founded the country.
Conservatism is the way most people live their lives.
It's not the way a lot of them vote, but it's the way most people live their lives.
Donald in Valley Stream, New York, you're next.
Hello, sir.
Hey, Rush, how are you?
Fine, thank you.
God, great to speak to you.
The reason for my call, excuse me, is first of all, I just want to say that McCain always runs on the right and legislates on the left.
And what you have here is you have a very powerful mainstream media and radio, TV, newspapers, even the education system in this country, which is pushing everybody in one direction.
And you yourself and other people on talk radio, and you are the king of talk radio, are definitely very influential.
However, you're going against this tide, which is really very powerful.
It's like being a salmon swimming upstream.
And there are people within our party and people that we know as conservatives that are folding to this.
And they're trying to go along with the tide because they're tired of swimming against it.
We need more people like you to give us that direction, to swim against it, to try to turn the tide around.
But unfortunately, it's such a powerful, powerful tide that's coming up.
I think I have an answer to this, but I'm going to see what you think.
What is the pull?
You call it the tide.
What is the pull that would take people on our side of the aisle who were formerly big gung-ho reagenites?
What would make them abandon it?
What would make them abandon it for somebody who's clearly not, simply says he is, but clearly isn't?
What would make them abandon it?
See, there is an answer to this, but I want to know what you think it is.
I truly don't know.
I mean, in this case, there are many of these people that are friends with McCain for many years, and maybe they're joining on board with him because they are friends with him, even though that philosophically they don't agree with him, which I think is very possible.
I think some of the people, they're thinking, you know what?
If he changes his stuff and it's liberal or whatever goes on, they're not going to be affected by it because maybe they're very wealthy or whatever they feel that they're not going to get affected by it.
I mean, I watched that debate last week on the Democratic debate, which is just to bring a point then, with Hillary and Obama.
And you had a room filled with millionaires at Kodak Theater.
It was absolutely incredible.
And these people are talking about raising taxes, and the audience applauded them.
I mean, I just couldn't believe it that these people are so blind and so absolutely, they're just following these people.
They're willing to do that.
I think McCain wants that audience.
I think he thinks that that's the audience that's the future of this country.
He does.
He wants to be part of it.
He does.
McCain is saying that the best ideas out there are coming from the Democrat side.
He is saying this.
It's not true, though.
I mean, listen, I'll give you another little example.
It's not true, but if he thinks that, and if he thinks that's what it's going to take to get elected, then he's going to go there.
You know, this is quite an illustration here, quite a lesson that's out there.
If he call it populism, the desire for power or whatever, but he's not willing to fight those ideas.
He wanted to go right along with them as a Republican.
He said, while claiming the mantle of Reagan, he's out there.
He says, I've got a ball, point, pen, and pencil shed that Reagan gave me.
And I'm going to use it in veto.
Every pork bill that comes across my desk.
And that's making everybody, see, I'm Reagan.
I am a Reagan.
I'm the logical head Reagan.
I got a ball point pen and pencil shed for Reagan.
Sorry, folks.
Sometimes lose control.
We'll be back.
You will not believe this.
Snerdley just asked me, and I mentioned in the opening of the program, a good friend of one of my golf buddies running for town council here of a little island, Palm Beach, tomorrow, David Rosso.
And Snerdley says, good if he wins and you'll be able to fix the turtle light problem.
I said, no, this is what you don't understand, Snerdley.
Yeah, I got a problem with the turtle lights.
But this is the thing that I admire about Rosso.
You know, he's not, what's the term for it?
No, it's not, it's not, no, no, no, no.
He's not crony.
He's not a crit.
He's doing this because he cares about it.
I admire that.
Somebody running for the town.
65, what does he need?
He's going to have, like all town councils do, all kinds of people mad at him for as long as he served.
But he really, he's got some things that he wants to do that he thinks need to be changed here.
And he's, you know, when he started this, everybody's sort of like, what are you doing?
And he's worked hard.
He says, gosh, I have a new appreciation of these presidential candidates.
I am worn out.
He's only been campaigning like six weeks or two months, I guess, whatever it is.
But he gets to sleep in his own bed every night.
These guys are traveling all over the place.
Snurdy, I wouldn't dare.
I wouldn't even suggest, okay, now I got a buddy in a town council.
All right, I'm going to get the turtleite problem.
I wouldn't go about it.
I would not use a relation, friendly relationship.
Nor would I give him money in exchange because there's a $500 campaign limit in this race anyway.
But no, that's what's good about the guy.
He's not a crony.
He's not going to be out doing the bidding for any of his buddies.
That's not why he's running this.
I'll get this turtleite thing handled on my own.
Now, I'm not going to play the game, and neither will he.
No, I'm not going to play the game.
I'm going to follow the process, follow the rules, and so forth.
But anyway, I want to answer the question I asked that last caller.
And I said, why?
He said, he posed the theory that there's just a huge tide, like the salmon running upstream at spawn time.
You rush and your buddies and talk radio.
You're the salmon.
You're running against the stream.
You're running against the tide.
And so many people on your side of the aisle have joined the tide.
Why is that?
Now, there are a host of reasons here, folks.
And this is very tough for me, you know, because this, I've always envisioned these people I'm talking about as at the end of the day being on the same team, where the country is concerned.
I understand that as conservatism has flowered, as it has blossomed, as it has bloomed, the truth of the matter is conservatism in all of its iterations now is so big that it's become like a high school senior class.
And everybody is trying to be the smartest guy in the room.
And everybody is trying to be perceived the leader, whereas some of us are just trying to advance the ideas.
And we don't care who gets the credit.
Others are totally absorbed in getting the credit.
Others are totally threatened by the presence of others.
Now, in terms of why people are swimming against the tide, folks, this is, or going with the tide, I think this is the crucial answer to the question.
We are talking about who.
We are talking about people who live and work, whose jobs, whose social lives and everything is inside the Beltway.
That's who we're talking about.
When you live and work inside the Beltway, your focus is power.
Your focus is mattering.
Your focus is being on the powerful winning side, no matter what they stand for.
As long as they're from your party.
And so some of these people who are telling me, just shut up, will you?
Why don't you see the light and understand that this is the only way we can win?
They want most favored person status after their candidate is elected.
And they want that candidate to know that they were instrumental in supporting him and getting him elected so that there will be return favors, not favors of, you know, granting access or what have you.
There is also this desire, and this is not just contained to people on our side of the center aisle.
I mean, as you will hear in the audio sound bites coming up during the remainder of the program, there is a desire among the inside the beltway elites of both Republican and Democrat persuasion to eliminate talk radio.
They don't like it.
It causes them problems.
We are not insiders.
We are the definition of outsiders.
And outsiders are never welcome as outsiders.
You've got to compromise and you've got to lick boots and you've got to kiss rear ends in order to be accepted.
And even then, if you don't have the right university pedigree, you might have a problem being admitted into the club.
There's a lot going on here with this and it's distracting as hell.
The bad thing is that our ideas and principles are being abandoned by people who once held to them.
All right, folks, the first hour is in the can.
I got to clarify something I misspoke moments ago, but I got to wait till the next hour to clarify it.
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