All Episodes
Previous Next
Aug. 19, 2008 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:22
August 19, 2008, Tuesday, Hour #2
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen.
Great to have you here, Rush Limbaugh, serving humanity simply by showing up, meeting and surpassing all audience expectations on a daily basis.
Our telephone number if you want to be on the program 800-282-2882.
And the email address, L Rushbo at EIB net.com.
Ladies and gentlemen, a little history lesson for you.
Never hurts to remember things.
Where are we today in the presidential contest?
We're depending on the poll, rolling average at real clear politics berries up a couple points, three points.
It's a statistical tie.
Where was this race in the polls back in March and April?
It looked bleak for the McCain campaign.
Barry was way up and uh was in a fight for his life with Hillary, and everybody thought that he had finally shut her out.
But then along came Operation Chaos.
And since Operation Chaos, it would be interesting to chart this or to graph this in terms of polling data.
Operation Chaos began with the Ohio and Texas primaries.
Since Operation And by the way, what was the expressed purpose by me, the commander in chief of Operation Chaos?
It was to bloody up Obama politically.
Because at that time the McCain campaign was signaling it wasn't going to.
And Hillary and the Clintons were the only ones left thus to do it.
So Hillary and the Clintons need to stay needed to stay in this race.
Hence Operation Chaos, which dispatched voters, Republican voters in upcoming Democrat primary states, to switch the registration for those primaries where that was permitted and to vote for Mrs. Clinton just to keep this alive, and it worked by every measure.
It was just yesterday we had this story, talked about the Sunday story in the New York Times.
Where the Democrats are getting worried they are nervous about Obama, and they have been for quite a while.
There is unrest.
There is unease.
There is unrest and unease in the Democrat campaign of Barack Obama because of Operation Chaos, which sought and succeeded in bloodying up Obama politically.
The Democrats know this, the Obama campaign knows this.
The Republicans probably don't, thinking that's their brilliance that has brought this race to uh being as tight as it is.
I just wanted to remind you these things matter and these things work.
In this case, Operation Chaos worked profoundly.
And it is, you know, Obama's trend line is down.
There's they're trying to recapture that magic from months ago, and you can't recapture that magic because that magic was well, it had a timestamp on it, and it it it had a specific duration, and if uh they've exceeded that duration, and they can't get that genie back out of the bottle again.
They've got to move on from it, and they're having trouble doing so.
Now I want to illustrate something else with this audio soundbite here.
Yesterday in Albuquerque at a town meeting, Barack Obama, he met with Boone Pickens, and he picked up some more talking points to robotically repeat.
Listen to this.
We're sending 700 billion dollars to foreign nations.
It's a huge transfer of our wealth.
It oftentimes leads us to funding both sides in the war on terrorism because we're sending a bunch of that money to the Middle East and countries that don't necessarily like us.
And it is fundamentally impacting our environment.
Climate change is real, and we're starting to see the effects of it uh in in profound ways.
And it's affecting people's pocketbooks.
So the only way that we are going to solve this problem is if we fundamentally change how we use energy.
Now, this is not an Obama original.
He had a talk with Boone Pickens, and then he goes out and repeats what Boone Pickens is saying.
700 billion dollar uh transfer of wealth to foreign nations.
There is no transfer of wealth going on here, and Boone Pickens should know that too.
We're not giving this money away.
We are getting something for it.
We're getting oil for it.
Forget for a moment from where.
We're gonna buy it from someplace if we're not gonna have enough uh of our own.
So whoever gets it, we are exchanging wealth.
We're not transferring anything.
And this idiot doesn't even understand that.
The principles of market economics are so foreign to this guy, because I'll guarantee he's never been taught market economics.
He wouldn't be talking about fairness in the capital gains tax rate like he talks about fairness in the income tax rate if he understood market economics.
The fairness in the capital gains tax rate in terms of the rich and the poor and who pays this is absurd.
Actually, it's absurd in the income tax rate as well, but again, it's just that that's liberal doctrinaire dogma.
So he goes and talks to Boon Pickens, and Boonepickens out there with a 700 billion dollar transfer of wealth, and bam, there's Obama picking it right up.
After one meeting with Boone Pickens.
Illustrating, ladies and gentlemen, exactly what I have said that Obama learns well whatever he hears that interests him.
But in terms of being an original thinker, it's not.
He's not.
And all this other BS in his climate change is real.
We're starting to see the effects of we just saw last week where the Sahara Desert, an excavating team in there, uncovered evidence of a life lived by human beings in lush circumstances.
Five thousand years ago, the Sahara Desert was fertile and green and moist.
And all of a sudden it's desert, and it got to be a desert, not because of light bulbs, automobiles, coal plants, oil being discovered, or what have you.
So any time any chance I get to illustrate the and I think it's shallow.
I think when you get down to Obama, we're actually talking about shallowness, not depth, certainly not depth.
Now there's this.
In Denver on Monday, Arnold Schwarzenegger spoke via satellite to announce a new initiative from the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers and the American Automobile Dealers Association called EcoDriving.
And here's a portion of what Arnold said.
Just by following the recommendations and this fantastic website.
You can reduce your fuel costs by more than 15%.
And I'm talking about simple things like property pressure, avoiding rapid starts and sold.
Oh my god.
Keeping the engine tuned.
In fact, if all Americans practiced eco driving, the reductions in CO2 emissions will be an equivalent to heating and powering nearly eight cities the size of Los Angeles.
So we don't have to wait for the politicians to take action.
Each of us has the power to make a difference right now.
This is just sad.
This is disappointing and it's just a plain shame.
This dates back to the 70s.
All this malarkey about avoiding jack rapids starts and stops at keeping the engine tuned.
You don't tune modern engines.
1985, you don't tune them up.
And now we're back to this tire inflation business.
Let's not forget the concept or the I should say context.
Obama originally said that if everybody just inflated their tires, we would save as much oil as we would get with any new drilling.
Now that's something somebody else told him, and he just went out and regurgitated, because on the face of it, it is disqualifyingly absurd and silly and stupid.
We are a growing economy.
The game here is the creation and the production of new energy.
We're going to need it.
Not to say we shouldn't conserve.
And inflating your tires may make you know give you a little bit better gas mileage now and then.
But you can overinflate your tires if you're not careful, cause yourself all kinds of problems.
For Schwarzenegger to you know, we we've got one of the sorriest groups of leaders across this country that we've had in my lifetime.
Reduce fuel cost by more than 15% doing all this stuff.
This assumes that everybody's tires are improperly inflated.
It assumes that everybody's out there doing jackrabbit starts and stops.
It assumes that everybody is doing everything wrong, which is a liberal point of view about most people.
Anyway, uh this ongoing project here to detail and describe the lunacy that passes for policy on the left shall continue on this program.
Do I Jack Rabbit start?
Do I jackrabbit?
What is it well how would you define a jackrabbit start?
No, I do not put the pedal to the metal.
I do not jack rabbit start.
I live in an area where the speed limits 30 miles an hour for crying out loud.
I have a car to be 30 miles an hour in two seconds if I jackrabbit started it.
And then I'd be followed by a blinking red light getting me for speeding, because I'd be at sixty miles an hour in four seconds.
No, I do not jackrabbit start.
I'm I'm not echo driving.
I'm driving sensible.
I am a great, I'm a great example.
I'm already doing I'll tell you this.
I'm doing everything this stupid website says.
My tires are inflated.
I check 'em.
Have done it long before any of this.
And you know why?
Because my car tells me when the inflation pressure is down or up.
And then the Jack Rabbit starts, all this other garbage.
And last I looked, gasoline was the same as same price as it was a week ago or two weeks ago.
I mean, I'm not I whatever I'm doing right is not brought down the price of gasly, and I'm putting gasoline in the car as often as I always did.
This is just nuts, folks.
It's just absolutely welcome back, Rush Limbaugh.
Half my brain tied behind my back just to make it fair.
For those of you who haven't heard it, and those of you who have who'd like to hear more of it, here is our montage.
It's not a montage, I'm sorry.
This is seven minutes 35 seconds of Barack Obama stuttering us and uh, you know's and uh none of these are repeated.
They are all taken individually one time from a single 40-minute press conference a couple of weeks ago.
I also want to thank this, you know, is of their work.
I called, and I'm with, as that, and we have to do this as well as...
Now, right now, and identify if you want to...
that's a bunch.
Um so so let me take these off.
Um it is true that uh uh uh all right all right let it run but uh get around what I want to get back to the phones here, but you see I'll tell you this is how intellectuals uh speak.
Pseudo-intellectuals too.
I'll never forget one of the funniest things I ever saw when I first became aware of this this manner, this pattern of speaking.
I was watching Mr. Buckley's TV show Firing Line, and he had this guest, some professor from somewhere.
I don't remember his name.
All I remember is how this guy looked and what he sounded like.
And he was smoking.
He had the ugliest teeth that I've ever seen.
His hair was typically professorial all over the place, but not much of it.
He had a frozen smile on his face, like everything he was being asked was beneath him.
And his speech pattern went something like this.
Well, you see, the glacial component and identifier is perhaps too difficult for the average person.
they actually spoke way.
I'm still I'm laughing myself silly because this guy obviously thought that he was Mr. Wizard.
They do.
They speak this way.
I have long lampooned them.
Let's go to Bill in Coon Rapids, Minnesota.
Bill, you're next on the EIB network.
Okay.
Hi.
Hello.
Um, Rush here.
Yeah.
Uh good.
Well, um, what's the big deal about kids walking to and from school?
Dear me, they have to walk.
Let's see.
Um at one time when I was a kid, we were talking fifty years ago.
Ten miles in the snow.
Both ways against the wind, yeah.
Yeah.
And I'm in Minnesota, so that's saying something.
I believe you.
But they are missing out on the opportunity.
Here you got all these left-wing drive-by saying bemoaning the fact, and especially in California.
I can understand that after you spent a couple of months there, you know that nobody walks everybody drives.
Um Bill.
Bill, Bill, let me let me perhaps I wasn't clear.
You know, I I pride myself in being a master communicator, and and you uh uh uh uh I confused you, and that that's not good.
My my point was this.
We are the richest country on earth.
We, in political terms, for the past fifteen, twenty years have done everything for the children.
We have pampered them.
We have spoiled them.
We have made them think that our country's very existence is for their benefit.
And now, all of a sudden, when energy prices get too high, mean adults just throw the kids under the bus, except there's no bus.
The kids are being made to walk.
What has happened to our heart and soul and our conscience, making them go to school two years in a row with the same clothes in a nation that does everything for the children?
We're losing what made us us.
I had to walk to school too.
I had to walk a long ways to my bus stop, especially when it snowed.
And sometimes when I snowed, they never cancel school.
Very rarely, and I sometimes I'd go stand at a bus stop and a bus wouldn't show up, and I'd have to walk all the way to school.
And people who were being driven to school by their parents would roll down their windows, other students and laugh at me and humiliate me.
Because I had to take the Hoof Express.
And we've gotten past that.
We n we're now imposing hardships on our children, making them walk for for something as silly as pollution.
Gas prices.
We're gonna we're we're gonna increase the chance some of these kids will be hit by cars because it's gonna put more cars out there with parents taking kids to school.
Not only that, school lunch has gone up in some places 70 cents where it used to be a dollar thirty, now it's two dollars, two dollars for lunch in the United States of America.
My God, ladies and gentlemen.
What has become of us?
And then there's this story from Live Science.
As summer vacation ends and the children head back to class, they might need a new school supply.
About one-third of American schools are within an air pollution danger zone near major highways, and the pollutants that stream from cars and trucks, according to a new study from the uh UC Cincinnati Childhood Allergy and Air Pollution Study has shown that exposure of school-aged children to traffic pollutants near made roads is associated with a greater risk of developing asthma and other respiratory problems later in life.
This is a major public health concern should be given serious consideration in future urban development, transportation planning and environmental policy, said the study leader.
Other research uh has uh also shown children are exposed to pollution on school buses, and that one way to reduce their exposure is to stop idling the buses as they wait for their charges to board.
We had no idea we're killing our kids with idling school buses.
Now we're gonna turn them off and restart them after the kids.
Except there aren't going to be any buses anymore because they're pulling back on bus service for kids because of high energy prices.
And of course, there's no mention in this story, ladies and gentlemen, of the stupid mandate from years ago to bust kids all over creation for societal reasons that the liberals made up.
Most kids could be going to a school up the street.
No.
At any rate, uh, ladies and gentlemen, we need to rethink the way we're dealing with the kids.
We're pushing them too hard.
Hardships like walking an extra block or two to the high schools just too much.
Now right now.
And identify if if uh you want to uh uh that that's a bunch.
So let me take these off.
It is true that what in Iraq are seen as, and so, and if I was, if I were in his shoes, and so
uh a uh um from some place else uh the uh and uh to see uh that uh uh uh that uh uh uh the Messiah, Lord Barack Obama, the most merciful, struggling to put together a cogent thought at a press conference two weeks ago.
None of those instances were duplicated.
Each one happened individually, a total of eight minutes of this stuff in a 40-minute press conference.
A couple interesting things here from the Los Angeles Times blog.
The LA Times and Bloomberg have a new poll coming out today.
They'll release it at five o'clock Eastern.
They can't get too specific here, but the blogger is uh is is teasing this.
Don Frederick here with this way, said which White House contender had the better summer.
A new LA Times Bloomberg poll of registered voters across the country leaves little doubt about the answer.
Now, registered voter polls are worthless.
You need likely voter polls, but let's stick with this anyway.
We can't reveal the precise figures yet, can't do that till 5 o'clock Eastern Time.
Suffice to say, the results will not alter the perception that given a seemingly sunny political climate for Democrats, Obama is underperforming nationally.
Despite the fact that it seemed it ha and by the way, the perception is not that Obama's been doing swimmingly this summer.
The perception is just the opposite.
And it's all due to Operation Chaos.
Also says the Times.
A series of questions gauging voter attitudes about candidates' attributes makes clear which perceptions Obama needs to shore up between now and election day.
For McCain, the poll underscores that the more photo more voters focus on domestic issues, the greater the challenge to McCain's hopes of winning the presidency.
And uh McCain and his aides might be a bit surprised by the findings when voters are asked whether they view Obama as too arrogant and presumptuous and whether McCain could be considered too hot-tempered.
And finally, uh from the LA Times, it turns out that uh, you know, Jeremiah Wright has a new book coming out in October and a national book tour to promote the book coming out in October.
The highly controversial Jeremiah Wright, he of the anti-American and black nationalist rantings within and without the pulpit of his church, where Obama attended for twenty years, apparently oblivious to such statements, was planning an October book publication and a national book promotion tour.
Now, what would Obama's one-time spiritual mentor and family minister Be saying just days before the November 4th presidential election involving the parishioner who was forced to denounce him last spring shortly after saying in a major speech on race that he could never denounce him.
Was the book This Election Cycle's October surprise?
What a story.
And it was quickly picked up in recent days by several blogs, no doubt drooling at the thought of some more religious controversy mixed with politics.
But according to Wright's daughter Jerry, she reached her father in Ghana, which is about as far from Chicago in TV cameras as you can get.
There she said he has poor email access, but denied nonetheless the existence of such a book.
Jerry Wright told Essence.com I asked him if he was writing, and he said, No, I'm not publishing anything.
I'm not going on any book tours.
New York magazine has thus even published an online correction.
She said that she and her father are doing a book on the history of his former church, from which he just retired, which should be really exciting.
So there's a rumor that this big book's coming, and he's out there denying the book.
At any rate, it's just more tumult for the Obama campaign to have to deal with.
Here's Kyle in Fairfax, Virginia.
Kyle, nice to have you on the program.
Thank you very much for our rush.
I just wanted to thank you.
I've been listening to you since I was a junior in high school back in 1992.
A rush baby.
Oh, yeah.
So thank you very much.
And you actually introduced me to one of my most influential books, too, Atlas Shrugged.
But anyhow, um, getting to the point, I've been debating and contemplating this presidential election to where I feel the Republicans have given me no choice but to vote for Barack Obama for two reasons in this upcoming election.
A I'm tired of the stupid selecting election of two evils because the only one that wins is the evil.
And B, if Barack gets elected just like Jimmy Carter for the Democrats, he's going to destroy the Democratic Party from within.
And we might have somebody take over like a Ronald Reagan and bring conservatism back to the Republican Party in an actual small government instead of this monster that we have.
You know, this is a theory that we discussed earlier on in the campaign on this program in some depth.
Let's take a look at both sides of these things.
Let's take a look at conservatives voting for McCain, and let's take a look at a conservatives voting for Obama or not voting.
One of the two.
If Obama wins, there is the theory that you just espoused, that he's Jimmy Carter too.
And if he does collect sizable voting majorities in both houses, that the Democrats are going to have pretty much a free ride to do what they instinctively will do, and that is destroy or severely damage the foundational building blocks of the country's economy, just as Jimmy Carter did.
And then the theory follows that that sets up the election in 2012 of a conservative on a white horse riding in to save the day.
Now, two things about that.
I mean, I can understand the theory, but it's not automatic that in 2012 Obama would lose.
It's not automatic that some conservative on a white horse would show up to clean up the mess.
And do we really want to knowingly, actively vote for somebody who is going to be such an anathema to our way of life, to our free market economic system, to our cultural differences?
Do we really want four years of this?
Do we want to destroy or greatly damage what we love so much in order to get the chance to fix it?
On the other hand, conservatives voting for McCain.
Now, this has changed a bit given his performance at Rick Warren's church.
Conservatives are, I think, a little jazzed here right now, but it's it's being tempered with these trial balloons or whatever they are, that McCain's going to pick a pro-choice liberal, either a liberal Republican or liberal Democrat as his running mate, and if he does that, he will cancel out everything he said Saturday night that appealed to the base for a very simple reason.
He'll start asking if he really believed what he said Saturday night.
If he really believed it, those are really his core values, particularly on abortion, how does he pick somebody pro-choice?
Whether the guy's a good friend from back days in the house or not, who who who people aren't going to stop to consider that kind of thing.
And if McCain thus wipes out his uh his great score from Saturday night with the wrong vice presidential pick, and you vote for McCain as a conservative, and McCain wins, then what you've done is participate in putting the conservative movement into bleachers.
Because the McCain campaign will be able to say, and the Republican Party will be able to say that they have won, not by being conservative, but by being moderates and even liberals and attracting a lot of disaffected Democrats and others.
And then the Republican Party and the Rockefeller blue blooders in there will be able to say, see, we don't need your conservatives.
That's been my dilemma from the get-go on all of this.
It's been a it's been a very troubling thing.
And then as as Obama has been revealed through succeeding days and weeks in this campaign.
It has become clear to me that in no way can this guy become president, because he really won't be the president.
There's somebody going to be behind him that's telling him what to say and what to do, because he's just a vessel.
I am more convinced than ever that this guy is nothing more than a sponge.
And he has been taught well, he's learned all of this psychobabble, and he's uh he's very good at regurgitating it when it's on a teleprompter and so forth.
But in no way can this guy he's not qualified, he is he is in no way ready to be president of the United States.
He's a street agitator with a hundred and forty days in the Senate.
His best friends are radical anti-Americans.
He's learned from them well.
In fact, his uh we talked yesterday.
Let me let me let me get this out of the stack.
Uh, ladies and gentlemen, we uh we learned yesterday that Obama uh had had, and we talked about the fact that he was he was working very hard with uh Bill Ayers back in the early formative days in Chicago.
And Bill Ayers, of course, was very instrumental in running uh, you know, education seminars that were counter to the American way.
One of the things we discussed yesterday that Bill Ayers uh tried to convince Obama that prisons were bad, we need to get rid of the prison industrial complex because it stigmatizes people in prison and it makes people not in prison feel superior to people in the prisons.
And if you look at Obama's voting record, uh, when given the chance to vote tough on crime, he never did vote tough on crime.
Records detailing the workings of a 1990s charitable group working to better education a city of Chicago that are housed at the University of Illinois Chicago are being shielded from the prying eyes of reporters.
The significance of these records is that the foundation in question was run by none other than Barack Obama.
The foundation was formed by none other than William Ayers, the radical weather underground terrorist, who Obama has referred to as just a neighbor, Stanley Kurtz.
National Review has tried to access records of the Annenberg Challenge on Excellence in Education and met with a stone wall.
This despite the fact the records are supposedly open to the public.
Now the records would would almost certainly make Obama out to be a liar about the extent of his personal relationship with Bill Ayers, who is an unreconstructed terrorist.
So you can't, we can't get there.
We can't get Obama.
We couldn't get Bill Clinton's health records.
Your Democrats hide everything they can because they know it's damaging.
Now we can't get to these supposedly public files about Obama's foundation at the University of Illinois Chicago on his charitable work to better education because the architect of the improved education was Ayres, and among other things, Ayers was urging people in education settings to start advocating the abolition of U.S. prisons because they don't accomplish anything except to stigmatize the prisoners and make them feel bad.
Now, this guy's an anarchist.
He wants these kinds of people roaming the street.
He suggested house arrest in exch in exchange for getting rid of prisons.
House arrest.
Leaving these people in the neighborhoods they terrorized in the first place.
I believe people like Ayers want that kind of anarchy on the streets.
I think they I don't he doesn't like this country at all.
Wants to, he wanted to blow up the Pentagon once.
And this is who Obama has hung around and in part been influenced by.
So the records detailing their work together in this charitable foundation based in education are locked.
We can't get them.
We'll be back right after this, my friend.
Stay with us.
Hi, welcome back.
It's Rush Limboy and the EIB network coming to you from the illustrious and distinguished Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.
I have been referring today to the uh uh possibility that Senator McCain would choose Senator Lieberman as vice president as perhaps floating a trial balloon.
I have since been informed that it is far more than a trial balloon.
Apparently the McCain campaign is having delegates to the Republican convention polled on the issue of Lieberman on the ticket.
Also the highest level donors, those who have given two million dollars or more are getting calls from Carly Fiorina and uh Schmidt, the uh the new guy brought into the run a campaign of Charlie Black.
Uh it's not a head fake, apparently.
It's serious, serious float.
McCain's trying to gauge and take the temperature of delegates to the convention and these high donors to uh to Lieberman.
You know, here's the thing about this is tough because I uh I like Joe Lieberman a lot.
He's he's a fine guy.
I met him a couple times.
Last time I met Lieberman, last time I saw him was uh last April.
It was in New York, the Marine Corps Law Enforcement Foundation annual dinner.
Of course, I was there to receive a uh a little award here for the uh Harry Reed smear letter that generated a total of 4.2 million dollars for the Marine Corps Law Enforcement Foundation, and Senator Lieberman was also being given an award because he's great on the war and he's great on national defense, and as such, somebody tell a McCain campaign he'd be fine as a Secretary of Defense or Secretary of State.
He'd be a f perhaps better at defense, but he'd be fine there.
But Senator Lieberman got up on stage and said, This is the weirdest political season of my life.
Here I am, an independent from Connecticut at the Waldorf Hysteria Hotel addressing a room full of military people.
And I have to ask Rush Limbaugh, also in the audience to support the Republican candidate for president.
Who would ever believe this, Senator Lieber?
And then, you know, that brought the house down.
Everybody started laughing.
And as I had I as soon as the event was over, I made my way to the door because they had to get out of there, fly back home for big uh weekend guests coming in.
And I stopped by Senator Lieberman's table and talked to him.
He said, We need to talk.
We need to talk.
We have never gotten around to talking.
But if this is a if what I'm told is accurate, a serious float, and they're talking to these big donors and the delegates and taking a poll on this, then it it's it's uh you know it's a very serious thing.
It's it's it it could just destroy everything they came gained on Saturday night.
I cannot emphasize this enough.
Uh let's see.
By the way, Nancy Pelosi.
Here's see, this is another the Obama campaign is in trouble.
The Democrats are in trouble far more than what and oh, by the way, Howard Feynman is out there saying that that uh Obama he's heard it's it's Biden for Obama.
Let's see.
What and if that's if that's the case, you know, I don't want to do anything to upset that decision.
That's a decision we want.
We want Biden on the ticket.
I mean, that the the combined arrogance of the Democrat ticket.
Bring, bring it on.
So don't say much about this.
Don't tell people you're happy about this, folks.
Shh.
Don't spread the word here any farther than the program.
We're all we're all for that.
Anyway, bloggers are upset at the Obama campaign.
We'll share that with you.
Lots to go straight ahead after this.
Um what is this?
The Huffington Postal looks like.
Three prominent progressive bloggers suggest Obama has serious weakness.
▲
Export Selection