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Dec. 4, 2008 - Rush Limbaugh Program
33:12
December 4, 2008, Thursday, Hour #2
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From the office of America's Anchorman, it's Rush Limbaugh, one of the 10 most fascinating people in the country.
According to Barbara Walters of ABC special airing tonight at 10 Eastern on ABC following Gray's Anatomy, Rush Limbaugh back at you, 800-282-2882.
If you want to be on the program, I promise your phone calls are coming up soon.
We just got the first segment here for audio soundbites because they are funny.
This is Sunday morning on Meet the Depressed.
Tom Brokaw was interviewing the founder of CNN, Ted Turner.
Brokaw said, did you think at some point during those early days of CNN that it was really a fool's mission, that you couldn't pull it off?
I thought it through very carefully for several years and went over all the things that could go wrong because even before I started CNN, I knew what the greatest threat to it would be.
And that was a right-wing news network.
And in fact, Fox came along and was the greatest threat.
And I had a solution to that.
And that was headline news.
When I first heard that Fox was going to get started, I could have taken headline news and transferred it over to a right-wing network and hired Rush Limbaugh and let it be the right-wing network and preempted Fox.
It didn't happen.
In fact, I'll tell you, there's a funny little story about this.
Shortly after my TV show expired, when it ended, we've quit it after four years, so it'll be 1996.
And Fox started in 1997.
Ailes started Fox 1997, and it was 1988 or 99, I forget which.
CNN was floundering around trying to find some CEO to run the place, knew what they were doing.
They hired Walter Isaacson, who had been running a show over at Time magazine.
And Isaacson had an emissary call me and said, we want to consider having you on a Sunday morning show.
And we want to put you on the, there was a time we're doing their own little one-hour football pregame show.
They knew I liked football.
So we'll put you on the last 15 minutes of the football show.
Then you have a Sunday morning show that you do leading into something.
I listened to him.
I met with him a couple times.
And Roger found out about it.
And he called me, you going to CNN?
I said, no, I'm just listening to him.
You know what I think about television?
I'm just listening to him.
If you do it, you know, I'm going to counter programming.
I'm going to come out after I'm going to kill you.
I don't care.
I'm your best friend.
But if you go out, I'm just talking to him.
So Roger called Maureen Dowd and gave her a quote that lives to this day.
He said, I just heard that Isaacson's talking to Limbaugh.
I guess he's had to hire his own security inside the CNN building because nobody else at CNN knew about it.
It was not a popular thing, and that shut it down.
I can't laugh.
There were no more talks.
By the way, I got to tell you a story.
Snurdley said to me, We were talking about Plexico Burris and this brilliant move.
Now, how dumb?
I mean, this is just sad.
I know that the NFL has had some tragic deaths.
Sean Taylor killed in his home.
And I know that NFL players feel threatened because of this, because they've got a lot of bling.
They've got a lot of money.
They advertise they've got a lot of money.
They advertise they got a lot of bling.
And it's a security problem.
I understand that.
So the solution seems to be not to put on a lot of jewelry, get a huge wad of cash, and a loaded gun and go to a nightclub at one in the morning.
It seems to me that That's just me.
That's just me.
So we know what Burris did.
He hops in his, well, I don't know what he was driving.
But anyway, he went to this club, the Latin Quarter, which is a block away from the NFL offices.
One block away from the NFL offices.
Goes in there, the gun accidentally goes off while he's trying to balance a drink and he gets a flesh wound in the thigh.
And you've heard the story.
He has to go to hospital and all that.
The mayor, when the mayor found out that the cops weren't called about any of this, the mayor went ballistic.
The mayor went on television demanding hedge roll.
This is not going to stand.
And Snerdley said to me, I can't believe this little mayor.
This mayor's just inserting himself in every story.
I said, how in the world can you be surprised?
You're looking here at a dictator in the making.
This is a guy who told the term limits crowd to go away.
He's going to have his third term, even if there wasn't an election.
He's banned trans fats.
He told people to hell with your $400 property tax rebate.
We're going to have tax increases on grocery bags and so forth and so on.
Why does it take us so long to learn what's obvious and out in front of it?
How many of you people in this audience know the name Sean Avery?
Sean Avery is in a national hockey league.
You ever heard of his name, Dawn?
Oh, you're going to love this story, Dawn.
You ladies that have not heard of Sean Avery, you're going to love this.
Sean Avery is known as what's in the NHL as an enforcer, meaning he's a brute.
Meaning on his team, he's a guy that gets even with other guys on the other team who mistreat his teammates.
And I mean, that means illegal checks into the glass, you know, a little gouge of the stick to the eye, you know, whatever.
Pure, you know, this is really violent stuff.
And the NHL have been promoting this guy this way.
They sell a game.
This is Sean Avery.
There have been a number of guys like this in the league, and he's just the latest one.
So before a game, last night, the night before, these days are running together, he's doing a press conference with some media or a YouTube video.
And I couldn't even hear what the question was, but he comes out with this answer.
He says, you know, I just find it amazing that all the guys in this league have to fall in love with my sloppy seconds.
Now, who he was talking about was Alicia Cuthbert, who played Jack Bauer's daughter on 24.
He used to date Alicia Cuthbert, but he turned her loose.
She's dating some NHL player now, and he's dated some other famous babe, and she's dating somebody else in the NHL now.
So he referred to those two women as his sloppy seconds.
And he got kind of a wink and a smile on his face and walked off and said, hope you enjoy the game tonight.
The NHL has suspended him indefinitely.
Now, here is a guy who is paid to beat the crap out of people on the ice who has been suspended indefinitely for the term sloppy seconds, referring to women that he's dated.
Now, what is happening here, folks, to us?
This political correctness is fine.
It's just, it's totally out of control.
It's irretrievable now.
It is.
I don't know if they're, I don't know, afraid of losing a female fans.
I am the good old days.
They would have put this guy on the ice that night and let these guys who are dating his sloppy seconds have a shot at him.
In the old NFL, he would have played.
They would have put him out there and he would have paid the price for it.
Oh, no, not now.
Called Alicia Cuthbert sloppy seconds.
Going to suspend him indefinitely.
Speaking of Plexico Burris, excuse me, and this is related to the automobile business.
Because I was, as I'm watching all this automobile stuff go by, one of the things that strikes me is these guys, I don't think, understand branding anymore.
For example, when you think of General Motors, I think they've done a good job with the Cadillac brand and bringing that back.
But, you know, Olsmobile said, what's a Saturn?
When you think Saturn, what do you think?
I don't know.
Ford, I can't even tell you their brands.
Chrysler, the only brand I know is the 300 Hemi, and that's because I see a lot of them.
Okay?
So I'm watching this while I'm sick on Monday or Tuesday.
It's Monday.
No.
Tuesday.
Hell, I can't remember.
It doesn't matter.
I'm watching ESPN.
And Plexico Burris drives up to Giant Stadium because he'd been ordered to show up to get treatment on a hole in his thigh that he shot himself with and a bad hamstring.
And he drives up in a van.
I said, what the hell is that?
That is a cool-looking van.
Normally, vans leave me cold when I think van.
You know, I think of Riddle car transit back and forth to the airport.
I think you don't want to be in these things any longer than you have to.
I said, wow, what is that?
I had never seen it.
Now, granted, I'm not a van guy, and I don't read automotive magazines and so forth, but I've never seen that.
I've never seen the thing.
It turns out, I just happened to find out by reading the New York Post because they described the van as well as what Burris was wearing when he arrived, as though it was some sort of total fashion statement.
But I think it's a GMC Savannah conversion.
Because I went to the GMC website to try to find it, and I think that's what it is.
Cool-looking thing.
Seven or nine passengers.
I've never seen it advertised.
And I'm thinking, good lord, there's a brand of something that obviously there's a van market, and the van lovers out there probably know all about this.
But it was, it was, and I know that so many brands and models that you can't advertise all of them.
But it just struck me.
And it looked really, it looked, that looked stylish and sharp.
Now, maybe it had been to one of these conversion joints and been jazzed up.
Could well be.
I didn't see the inside of it.
I just saw the body stand.
All right, quick timeout.
We'll be back right after this.
Don't go away.
Okay, as promised, Del Rushball, one of the top 10 most fascinating people in America this year.
The other nine are irrelevant.
It doesn't matter who they are.
We're going to go to the phones.
We'll start in Brooklyn.
This is Anne.
Ann, great to have you here, and thank you very much for waiting.
Hey, you're wonderful.
You, in fact, are all top 10 of the most fascinating men in America.
Well, thank you very much.
Listen, I just had a heartbreaking situation.
I went to Florida to buy my kids a new big car, and I ended up buying a Honda because I didn't know if GM and Ford were still going to be around.
I'm driving at 11-year-old Ford myself because I believe in buying American.
Right.
Well, you can buy a Honda made in America now.
Well, that's what this was in Alabama.
But you are 100% right.
All we need to do to save the car companies is tell the government to get the hell away from taxes and regulations and leave them alone, and they'll build a car people want to buy.
Well, it's a little bit more complicated than that, but it's look at, but we've lost this.
I'm watching these guys testify and I'm reading some of the closed caption going by.
They're all promising to go green.
They're promising to look at these guys have no, they have no recourse now.
They are beggars.
They're beggars.
And eventually, there are two words that are going to get this done.
As I told you in the first hour, the bailout is going to happen.
Because remember, as far as Pelosi and the Democrats are concerned, we're bailing out the unions.
I saw a YouTube today of a Ford plant in, I think, Brazil where they make a car, can't make the car here because of our own regulations, environmental regulations, other thing.
They have a whole brand new way of making the car.
They have their own port down there.
It's this fascinating video.
And they're just, they're saying you can go to Europe.
One of the most popular cars, American-made cars in Europe, is a car made by Ford that's not allowed to be sold here because of environmental regulations.
And this is a bailout of the unions.
It's just that simple.
These two guys, these three guys, as long as they say I'm sorry, because when they say I'm sorry, they'll take the blame all on themselves.
They will effectively insure Congress from any blame.
So they just say, we're sorry.
They're going to get bailed out, folks.
And they're going to get saddled with new regulations to build all these little putt-putts that if people wanted, they'd be buying in droves because they're out there to be bought already.
It's a sad day.
This stuff will get rolled back eventually.
It's going to be made right eventually, but it's going to be devastating down the road for the next couple of years or more.
By the way, you should be aware that there are some people who have an idea.
I think Charles Krauthammer originally floated this idea.
I think it was originally his.
See what you think of this.
As a means of getting rid of all of the cafe regulations, the fuel mileage standards.
Make sure via taxes that the price of gasoline is always four bucks because we learned that the tipping point where people's behavior will be affected by the price of gasoline is $4.
So right now, let's say that the national average of gasoline is two bucks, then the tax will be two bucks.
If the price of gas goes to $1.50, then the tax will go to $2.50.
So that the price of a gallon of gas always remains $4.
The theory is that at that point, you could remove the fuel standard requirements from manufacturing and that let the big three make whatever cars they want to make based on what people will buy at four dollars a gallon for gasoline.
If the price of gasoline goes up to three bucks, then the tax ostensibly would go to one buck.
But we know that wouldn't happen, would it?
I don't know of a tax that goes down.
So if, and we're talking the federal tax here, state tax, it'll be calculated here another way.
But so let's say that after a couple of years, the gasoline price national average, $2 now, let's say it does go to $3.50.
Okay, so the law in effect says a tax will be 50 cents because that's, we want to keep the price at $4.
What'll have to happen?
They'll have to scale in a growth of that $4 to after five years, $4.50 and then $5 and so forth.
And one of the theories behind this is that it locks in forever expensive gasoline.
Locks it in.
And that way you could take all the regulations out of Detroit and all the manufacturing and the cars they will make will be reflected by the cost of gasoline.
Kate in Cincinnati, I'm glad you called.
Welcome to the EIB network.
Hi, Russ.
This is the happiest day of my life.
My Christmas dreams have come true.
Well, thank you very much.
Anyway, all I called to say is that they forced us into these big cars back in the 80s with the child safety seats.
You cannot, you know, they eliminated the station wagon, and you cannot put three baby seats in a Honda or in a tiny car.
Now, Kate?
It doesn't happen.
Now, Kate?
Yes.
Need to teach you a little economics here.
Okay.
They didn't force you into anything.
Who forced you into it?
Are you saying by the requirement that you had to put your little crumb cruncher in a baby seat?
Yes.
And that was a federal requirement.
You know, and I think that goes state to state, but the state of Ohio, right now, I think our law is.
Okay, okay.
So perhaps I thought you were blaming the automakers at first, so I misunderstood.
No, I'm blaming the government.
Okay, so the government requires all these things, which required you get a bigger car based on the size of your family.
Yes, if you've got your standard, you know, 1.8 children, then you can fit in a tiny car.
But if you have three children, there's no way.
Let me tell you something.
You do not know how right you are.
Thank you.
I'm so happy to hear you.
And I can relate to this.
Last Wednesday, the night before Thanksgiving, I had 28 people arrive.
And not all of them can stay at my house.
Some are going to the breakers.
So I gathered every SUV that I had on my property goes.
And because one of the guests is an infant that required an infant seat, it screwed up everything, and I had to go out and get another SUV because I couldn't fit as many people in the SUV with the infant seat.
Yes.
So you see, I can relate to your problem.
Yes, I have a 6-foot to 13-year-old, and he just does not fit in any normal back seat.
So we have a Ford Expedition.
6-foot to 13-year-old.
Yeah, he'll be 14 in February.
We don't even want to talk about your weekly food budget.
You know what?
We went on vacation at $3.99 a gallon and drove 500 miles, and it's, you know, cost.
Thank you very much.
Having more fun than a human being should be allowed to have, Rush Limbaugh, the excellence in broadcasting network.
Okay, it doesn't matter.
It could be the automobile guys asking for a bailout.
It could be Fannie Mae Freddie Mac asking for a bailout.
It doesn't matter, ladies and gentlemen.
The new power base, Barney Frank, our new banking queen.
It's our old buddy Paul Shanklin, ladies and gentlemen.
Banking queen.
A vocal portrayal by Barney Frank, Democrat congressman in Massachusetts.
Okay, John, in Vero Beach, Florida, thank you for waiting, sir.
You're next on the EIB network.
Hi.
Yes, sir.
Welcome back.
Thank you.
Yeah, you probably got bugs from people who brought them in from the rest of the country.
Could well be.
Yes.
No, I just wanted to say that probably some of the major problems with the automobile industry today, the local automobile industry, the domestic, is what happened in the mid-40s when Harry Truman came in with wage and price controls.
And you could not raise wages at that time, but you could give benefit.
Yeah, but I mean, that, you know, World War II gave us a lot of things that we haven't lived down.
Withholding.
Tax withholding was World War II to make sure it was collected.
Yeah.
I don't know that you could give the automobile companies thrived.
They had 91% market share in the 50s and in the 60s before a number of things started to happen.
You go back, I'll tell you, you look at some of the classic styling of those 1950s and 60s and 70s cars.
Well, the 70s, that's when they started doing them all the same.
But man, there were no regulations.
There were no this.
I know there was no Japan left for a while.
I know.
But even then, they were just competing against themselves is the point.
And it was just the glory days.
I don't know that World War II had so much to do with it, with wage and price controls, because they were eventually lifted.
Anyway, thanks for the phone call.
You've waited long enough here, but I had to go be loyal and get some of these calls in people who had been patiently waiting.
Here are the last number of sound bites relating to my appearance tonight as one of the top 10 most fascinating Americans as chosen by Barbara Walters.
We have four soundbites from The View today.
And here's the first.
We'll just play these in order.
I don't even think they, yeah, this is just how it went and in order even to set them up.
I want to quote something you said.
Does the country actually want to watch a woman get older before their eyes on a daily basis?
You said this about Hillary Clinton.
Yes.
You have watched me get older on a daily basis.
Sarah Palin, whom you love, is going to get older on a daily basis.
Men get older on a daily basis.
What's with you, Rush?
You know, the context.
I never thought I'd be sitting here doing a number with you.
The context of the statement was how unfair our culture is to aging women versus aging men.
You weren't fighting our battle.
I was.
I meant it as a comment on our culture in a sympathetic way.
I will let that go.
Now, so they discuss it on The View, and Whoopi Goldberg starts.
No, sorry, Barbara Walters starts out, but Whoopee says in this bite that this is not what I really meant.
He was a good sport.
I appreciated his coming on with us.
He is entertaining.
Yeah.
Well, what he said, though, I was reading the transcript, and he used a lot of comparisons to Hollywood.
And I don't know, we've never had a woman who's gotten so far that we could say that.
No, no, I'm sorry.
Politics, I'm talking about the politics.
Barbara, I'm talking about apologies.
I think your point, Sherry, is one that's important.
I think in his transcript, it was more of a social commentary on how we are obsessed with looks and aging and weight.
And it's more difficult for a woman.
He has a hard time getting old.
Come on, he was doing what he does.
I not only will read the transcript, I listen to him.
I listen to him on a daily basis, and I'm telling you.
He was being a little crappy.
Come on.
He was no.
Forget the sector.
He was being crappy.
Yes.
He called us several other names that were not attractive.
You're talking Hillary Clinton.
Yeah.
When it comes to Hillary Clinton, he was being not a very nice man about it.
You know, that's all I'm saying.
Sternly wants to know who the guy was.
That was Whoopee Goldberg.
They're only women on this show.
James.
That was Whoopee.
Okay, so conversation continues.
And it's clear that they've got the transcript to know what I was talking about, but they had to keep debating this.
And it's interesting.
You'll listen to this next bite goes 48 seconds and not one of them stops to breathe.
We don't tolerate aging well in this country anymore.
That's not what he was talking about.
Absolutely true.
He also said about Hillary that he thought it was such a wise decision of Barack Obama to make it because now he took a lot of the running for president.
But he wasn't as smart.
A lot of what he says is true because, but in this particular environment where people are losing their jobs and we're worried about the wars on two fronts and all this other stuff, looks don't matter as much.
Or Sarah Panlin would have won the award for, would have won the election for John McCain.
But remember, Madden Albright, when you see her, she's not a beautiful woman and she's getting older.
But you say that woman has gravitas.
She knows what she's talking about.
Would be a look-obsessed society.
We are a look-obsessed society.
Everybody knows that.
I mean, anything new.
He made that very clear.
$48 million for that comment.
All right, now let's go back.
Let's listen.
This is what I said.
December 17th, 2007.
See, we can always go back.
Now, they claim they had the transcript for this.
But here it is, December 17th of 2007, right here behind this very same golden EIB microphone.
This is a country obsessed with appearance.
It's a country obsessed with looks.
The number of people in public life who appear on television or on the big screen who are content to be who they are, you can probably count on one hand.
Everybody's trying to make themselves look different.
And in that situation, in that case, they think they're making themselves look better.
It's just the way our culture has evolved.
It's the way the country is.
It's almost an addiction that some people have to what I call the perfection that Hollywood presents of successful, beautiful, fun-loving people.
So the question is this.
Will this country want to actually watch a woman get older before their eyes on a daily basis?
We know that the presidency ages the occupants of that office rapidly.
You go back and look at, well, you can't use Clinton because he dyed his hair based on the audience he was speaking to.
But take a look at some pictures of Bush in 2000 when he was campaigning, 2001 when he was inaugurated.
Take a look at him now.
It's just been eight years.
The difference is stark.
He's kept himself in good shape and so forth.
But you can say that this is a sad, unfortunate thing.
But men aging makes them look more authoritative, accomplished, distinguished.
Sadly, it's not that way for women.
And they will tell you.
Well, Sterling, you know, you're just sitting there thinking that I'm on the precipice of a cliff here without a bungee cord.
I'm not.
I am trying to be, look at, if I'm on the edge of the bungee cord and I'll take the leap, bungee cord will save me because this is, I'm just giving you an honest assessment here of American culture.
I mean, look at all of the evidence.
I mean, I've just barely scratched the surface with some of the evidence.
And so will Americans want to watch a woman get older before their eyes on a daily basis?
And that woman, by the way, is not going to want to look like she's getting older because it'll impact poll numbers.
It'll impact perceptions.
Politics, perceptions of reality.
So there will have to be steps taken to avoid the appearance of aging.
You know, politics is not for sissies.
Now, I'm looking at people on the other side of glass here, and they're laughing and they're smiling.
They think I'm making a joke here, and there's some big punchline.
I'm not, you're not laughing at that.
What are you laughing at?
You're laughing at how, you know, he's smiling because it's true.
Okay.
Mamon is smiling because it's true.
And what also happens in this, when you say something that's true that people don't want to hear, man, do you catch it?
I am fully prepared.
I'm going to catch it here.
And that's really why he's smiling because he knows I'm going to catch it.
But you also are smiling because you know I can take it.
You know that I can catch it and throw it right back.
And as I look back on this, I do see that the Democrats nominated Obama.
As usual, talent on loan from God.
Here is Kevin and Bozeman, Montana.
Hi, Kevin.
Thank you for calling.
You're up next on the EIB network.
Hey, Rush, glad to have you back.
Thank you, sir, very much.
Man, it was tough listening to those ladies cackle while I was on hold.
Yeah, and they don't breathe.
I mean, not one of them took a breath.
Oh, and I'm listening on the phone, too, and it's right in my ear.
Yeah.
Well, you're a trip, man.
I appreciate you putting up with it.
Absolutely.
Hey, I've got a question for you.
I just wanted to run by you.
So in the age of these bailouts, you know, everyone's getting bailed out.
I've seen a couple AP reports, and they don't talk about the bailout, but I kind of linked them together, and I wanted to see what you thought about it.
One of them was about university endowments, you know, being crippled because they're all vested in the stock market, and they're all down 40, 50%.
And then tuition hikes and people not being able to afford it with the economy going down.
I wanted to see what you thought about the back door of socialism coming through here to universal education.
They're going to say they're too big to fail and they're going to need a bailout.
Well, now that's it's interesting the way you put it because the first reaction that I would have is that there is a symbiotic and business relationship between the left, elected politicians, and institutions of higher learning.
They're all liberals, and they, you know, have you ever wondered why, for example, even in the good times, like the Harvard endowment is down, they're guessing, $8 billion to $39 billion.
It was the largest endowment.
They had an endowment of over $50 billion or some such thing, and they never cut tuition.
Nope.
They never cut tuition, and yet the Congress, which is always aiming at big oil and always aiming at big retail and always aiming at big auto and always aiming at big pharmaceutical, never aims at big education.
And big education costs people an arm and a leg to put a kid through education and housing and all this for just four years of undergraduate.
It's the way we come up with this.
So we do student loans.
We don't do anything.
We don't target big education.
We don't run them down.
We don't force them to lower prices.
We don't get autumn for being out of touch, for not understanding the things people go through.
It's a symbiotic relationship because they know that these schools are churning out little liberals.
There was a report that said they could pay for all the tuition for all the undergraduates and all their graduates, and they would still have like 90% of their endowment intact or whatever.
Exactly right.
And these endowments are just donations from alumni and other things.
Like if your last name is Gook and you want the medical building named after you, the Edward B. Gook Edward medical building, you give the endowments some money.
What do you think?
I know.
Well, they're too big to fail.
There are too many jobs.
And then our kids will be, they'll say our kids won't get an education and we won't be able to compete in the global world.
And I think it's coming and it's going to be like high school, free high school, free college now.
Look, free, of course.
Yeah, well, here's what I really think is going on here.
This one says it's on one hand, you have to laugh at it.
On the other hand, you can drive yourself crazy getting angry about it.
But what we really have is the government growing exponentially in geometric progressions just in time for the most avowed extreme leftist president we've ever had to be inaugurated to have total control over it and this is all Being done under the guise of saving this industry,
saving that industry, but all it's doing is advancing, as you say, a socialist agenda with hardly any opposition to it whatsoever.
Okay, folks, a brief time out here at the top of the hour.
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