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March 3, 2009 - Rush Limbaugh Program
35:20
March 3, 2009, Tuesday, Hour #3
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From high atop the heavily fortified and bunkered EIB Southern Command Headquarters.
I am Rush Limbaugh, the last man standing.
The man President Obama has advised Americans not to listen to.
The man the President Obama White House singularly attacks day in and day out.
The man the White House lies and distorts day in and day out.
Happily here with you.
On the EIB network.
Telephone number if you want to join us in this hour is 800-282-2882.
The email address L Rushbow at EIBNet.com.
Okay, yesterday at the White House, during the press briefing, Ed Henry of CNN.
Get this question.
Uh Bob, the president has spoken a lot about bringing a country together.
And after the stimulus fight, there were a lot of pandering in both parties about bipartisanship.
What's a White House's reaction to Rush Limbaugh saying again that he wants the president to fail specifically on his economic plans?
And how does that bode for bipartisanship in the future working with the Republicans?
Ed, you're a journalist.
He's not working with the Republicans.
He's making a show of working with the Republicans.
Pelosi's not working with the Republicans.
She wrote the stimulus bill.
Nobody read it, nobody saw it, nobody debated it.
And some people asked her about it today.
Don't you don't you don't you think you could have let the Republicans in on this a little bit more?
And Pelosi said today, they ought to be lucky they got what they got.
I could have fast tracked this.
I could have made this happen a lot sooner than it did.
They ought to be lucky with what they got.
Remember, bipartisanship.
This is kind of like war.
The only time you get peace is when one side is defeated.
Bipartisanship only occurs when one side is defeated and loses in caves in.
Ask the Japanese about bipartisanship.
Ask the Germans about bipartisanship.
So it's a silly, stupid question.
Oh no, what does this do for our wonderful president's notion of bipartisanship?
Mr. Gibbs, what can we do?
What can we do?
And here's Gibbs' answer.
The best question though is for you to ask individual Republicans whether they agree with what Rush Limbaugh said this weekend.
Do they want to see the president's economic agenda fail?
You know, I bet there are a number of uh of guests on television throughout the day and maybe into tomorrow who could let America know whether whether they agree with what Rush Limbaugh said this weekend.
He doubled down on what he said in January in uh in wishing and hoping for economic failure in this country.
I can only imagine what might have been said a few years ago if somebody might have said that on the other side relating to uh what was going on in this country or our endeavors overseas.
Ed, did you hear what Gibbs said?
He said, I can only imagine what might have been said a few years ago if somebody might have said uh we want failure uh in the country or our endeavors overseas for God's sakes.
The Democrat Party not only pro wanted failure, they proclaimed it.
Everybody knows the Democrat Party wanted defeat in Iraq.
They were dissing the troops.
Well, we support the troops, we just don't support the mission.
It's like me saying, Well, I support the president, I just don't support his policies.
Uh I wouldn't be so sophist as to say that.
But this this this is this is incredible.
The Democrat Party for six years tried to run this economy into the crapper.
The Democrat Party for six years tried to orchestrate the failure of George W. Bush at every turn.
That's politics.
It's potting, but now all of a sudden we have the Messiah, and we're supposed to lay down.
The Messiah is too crucial, too important, too big to fail.
We must sit idly by, surrender everything we believe so that the Obama Messiah can succeed.
And then you hear him say it would be Charitable to say that Limbaugh doubled down, doubled down on what he said in January, wishing and hoping for economic failure in this country.
Now, I'm not telling you anything you don't already know, folks.
My income is derived from economic success.
My business model requires economic success.
Advertisers have to have healthy businesses, not just at the national level, but at the local level to support local radio stations.
I have preached, I have taught, I have prayed for economic success for everybody.
Hey, Bob, I have investments.
I've seen them dwindle in value.
My business partners have investments.
My listeners have investments.
You guys in Washington, you're going to get paid regardless what happens, Bob.
You're going to get paid, you and Emmanuel and Obama, you're going to get paid regardless of the success or failure of the economy.
You don't have any skin in the game, Mr. Gibbs.
You skim off the top.
We can have 25% unemployment.
You're gonna get paid, Mr. Gibbs.
You got no skin in the game.
Do you realize, you know, you you I'm using the term a lot today because I actually think it fits.
You you butt boy media people in that White House press room.
Do you listen to what this man says to you?
You actually believe I want economic failure.
Don't you understand that Obama's policies equal economic failure?
Obama's policies destroy the ability for the private sector to create wealth and prosperity and opportunity.
That's all going to be transferred to the government, which will pick winners and losers.
And he's gonna tax and punish wealth achievement starting at 250,000 a year.
He is going to offer disincentives to people to work hard, Mr. Gibbs and Ed.
You you I you you people in the media, that's why I'm calling you butt boys.
You haven't the slightest bit of curiosity about any of this.
And you think I'm supposed to shut up and lay down?
I don't want to see the wealth of this nation destroyed.
I don't want our economy to fail.
What is so hard to under well, it's not hard to understand.
They are purposely distorting all of this for a multiplicity of reasons.
Gibbs also said there was something else in this piece.
Do they want to see the president's economic agenda fail?
You know, I bet there are a number of guests on TV throughout the day, and maybe into tomorrow, who could let America know whether they agree with what Limbaugh said this weekend.
So the White House is directing and leading reporters on what to say, what guests to get, and what questions to ask them.
This is a teachable moment.
That's not what I said.
The White House needs a press release of some kind of direct communication, maybe another open letter to the president.
Maybe I should write another op-ed or something.
At any rate, uh, ladies and gentlemen, let's go as promised, and people um I will admit I've been waiting to the uh to the third hour of the program on both days here to play excerpts from the speech on Saturday, because I think, contrary to what you might think, I don't want to be distracted from the news of the day by focusing on something I said Saturday.
So the first two hours of the program, I'm hammering this economy.
I'm hammering Obama.
What?
What'd you say?
Well, I know it's still the news, but there's been news made since.
I'm dead, I'm doing it, Dawn.
I'm playing the excerpts.
We're starting now.
But there's a lot of other stuff.
I'm not gonna let them take me off track.
I'm not gonna lose focus.
I'm not gonna be distracted, is the point.
It's a three-hour show.
And we get everything in that we need to talk about.
All right.
This excerpt.
Who are the real racists in our culture?
We don't hate anybody.
We don't.
I mean, the racism in this country, if you ask me, and I know many people in this audience, let me just deal with this head on.
You know what the cliche is of a conservative racist, sexist, big, and homophobe.
Excuse me, ladies and gentlemen of America, but if you were paying attention, I know you were, the racism in our culture was exclusively and fully on display in the Democrat primary last year.
Thank you.
It was not us asking whether Barack Obama was authentic.
What we were asking is, is he wrong?
We concluded, yes.
We still think so, but we didn't ask if he was authentically black.
We didn't say, as some Southern Christian leadership conference leader said, uh Barack is not authentic.
He's not got any slave blood.
He's really not down for the struggle, but his wife does.
So don't expect the race industry to go away.
Southern Christian leadership conference, you may not even know this, it wasn't reported in the drive-by media.
The racism, the sexism, the bigotry that we are all charged with.
Just so you across the United States of America know on you'll see demonstrated here as the afternoon goes on, doesn't exist on our side.
We want everybody to succeed.
Right on, right on, right on, right on.
Right on.
Shall we uh shall we talk a little racism here?
Story by Bill McGurn, the Wall Street Journal.
Dick Durbin has a nasty surprise for two of Sasha and Malia Obama's new schoolmates, and it puts the president in an awkward position.
The children are Sarah and James Parker, and like the Obama girls, Sarah and James attend the Sidwell Friends Scrual in the nation's capital.
But unlike the Obama girls, they couldn't afford the school without the $7,500 voucher that they receive from the DC Opportunity Scholarship Program.
Unfortunately, a spending bill that the Senate takes up this week includes a poison pill that would kill the program.
Now we've talked about this.
There are other special schools in Washington that allow minority parents to use vouchers to get their kids in.
And the kids love these, love these schools, and the kids recorded messages to Obama.
I want to grow up to be a man, Mr. President.
Please save our school.
The school, this whole program is going to be junked by the Democrats in the Senate.
Obama's gonna sign it.
It's being led by Dick Durbin, known as Durban Language after the Illinois Democrat came up with it last year.
The provision mandates that this scholarship program end after the next school year unless Congress reauthorizes it and the District of Columbia approves.
Now the beauty of this language is that it allows opponents to kill the program simply by doing nothing.
Just the sort of sneaky maneuver that's so handy when you don't want inner city mothers and dads to catch on that you're cutting one of their lifelines.
They're cutting minority vouchers in the nation's capital.
The Democrats are doing this.
The kids affected are black.
The program is aimed at blacks.
The DC Opportunity Scholarship Program, and you know, Dick Durbin needs to be.
I mean, there ought to be they ought to be marching in the streets in Washington over this, but I don't think they know it.
Some of them have got a hint because the school did send out some recorded messages to the president to uh save the program, but it isn't gonna be because it's a threat to the teachers' unions, among other things.
Quick timeout.
We'll be back after this, folks.
Stay with us.
I know it's sort of like spitting into the wind here, but I want to make another point on this failure business.
Remember back in 2002 when we had a plummeting Dow Jones Industrial Average, and Dick Gephardt was happy.
Dick Gephardt, then the Democrat leader in the House, gleefully said, every hundred-point drop in the stock market, we pick up another seat.
You think Dick Gephardt was hoping for economic failure.
Yes, Dick Gephardt was hoping for economic Failure, and he was publicly gleeful when the economy was tanking.
In fact, talking about wanting the economy to fail, the Democrat Party tried to engender Democrat collapse for six and a half years.
Telling the American people the future was dismal, it was gloomy, that people were losing their jobs, that there wasn't any real progress being made in a gap between wage earners.
The Democrat Party and you people in the media ought to be ashamed.
You tried to talk the people of this country into believing that we had a bad economy.
You were rooting for economic failure.
And in some cases in the Democrat Party, you were trying to bring about economic failure in order to win elections.
This notion that I want Obama to I want everybody to succeed.
This is not hard to understand, and the fact that they won't report the truth on this shows to what extent they have become butt boys.
For the Obama administration.
Back to the phones to Chicago.
This is Art.
Great to have you on the program, sir.
Hello.
Ratch, how are you doing?
Congratulations on your uh mother of all bombs uh presentation at CPEC.
Thank you.
Excerpts from that coming up soon, by the way.
Thank you very much, Art.
Yeah, I ain't called Iraq CPEC in 2008, and uh I think you set the global warming high water mark uh this year.
So uh I'll get to my question.
Uh Mr. Obama I want him to succeed.
He's the guy that uh probably says uh nothing more eloquently than even Paul Harvey.
Uh I want him to succeed so that even his Obama would realize that I'm the jab training is uh really not any way to run a presidency.
Would I would I be wrong in uh wishing that?
What exactly are you wishing?
I'm wishing that he would succeed in uh so much that uh even his Obamas that voted for him this time that realize that I'm the jab training is not a way to run a presidency.
Uh sounds to me you're hoping for economic failure so that people realize just how uh inexperienced and and uh and poor a president uh Obama is.
That's pretty much it, yeah.
Well, see, I don't want that.
See, I I don't want it to happen that way.
I'm afraid that it will.
I don't want economic failure.
I don't want the kind of pain and suffering that we have now to get any worse.
It's the exact opposite.
I don't want this economy to get worse just so people learn the truth about Obama.
It may take that, I hope not, because if it takes that, we may not have enough power left to gain control of our economy the way it was.
But I don't want the economy to fail.
I don't want people losing their jobs and being kicked out of their houses.
I don't want people going on welfare and unemployment just for people to realize what a mistake they made with Obama.
That I'm I that's I I want Obama to fail, not the country.
I want Obama to fail in being successful with his economic plan.
Now, if Barack Obama all of a sudden came out and said, you know what?
I think we need to do something here in the midst of this research.
I need, I'm gonna rescend my capital gains tax increase and I'm gonna suspend capital gains.
And you know what?
I think I think we can really improve the economic circumstance if I would cut the corporate tax rate in half and maybe just suspend capital gains for three months, maybe have a tax holiday on uh on uh uh FICA, social security withholding.
Well, I'll tell you, I would become Barack Obama's biggest cheerleader in this country.
If he actually proposed ideas to jumpstart this economy so there isn't any more economic payments, we can bottom out at some point and start building this back.
But folks, his plan doesn't do that.
Government spending does not elevate the private sector.
It does not stimulate the private sector.
It does not, in any way, shape, manner, or form expand the private sector.
But hear me and hear me loud.
Look at me.
I don't want the economy to fail.
That's why I'm sticking my neck out here.
I actually care about the people who are seeing their financial lives damaged and in some cases ruined.
I'm the one among many on my side who are truly worried about this.
Some of you are hoping that the words from Obama's mouth will magically bring you back, and ain't gonna happen.
I do not want economic collapse.
This is it for me.
This is enough.
It's got to stop.
The problem is this administration has no interest in it stopping right now.
We're back in Rushboard, the cutting edge of societal evolution.
The Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.
President Obama's budget so ambitious with vast new spending on health care, energy independence, education, and services for veterans.
Experts now say he probably will need to hire tens of thousands of new federal government workers to realize his goals.
Really, you think that hadn't been part of the plan all along.
Remember when I speculated 600,000 new jobs was his first number?
You could do that with the draft.
The $3.6 trillion dollar plan released last week proposes spending billions to begin initiatives and implement existing programs given Obama's insistence, blah, blah, blah.
Exactly how many new workers would be needed remains unclear.
One independent estimate was 100,000, while the Heritage Foundation said it's likely to be closer to a quarter of a million new federal workers added to the federal payroll to handle all of the federal expansion that Obama has proposed.
Exactly.
Precisely this is the plan.
Grow government, more government employees, more union employees dependent on government.
Thank God for the Heritage Foundation.
I you know, folks, I am learning a lot with with this latest incident of being enemy number one, target number one of the Obama administration.
Now who am I?
Well, aside from being Rush Limbaugh a talk show host, who am I?
I'm an American, I love the country, and I stand and defend conservative principles.
I have been doing it for 20 years.
I don't say it, but others do, that I am the leading conservative spokesman of the country today, and this angers many other conservatives, of course.
I don't claim that, but others do.
But you know what?
I look around where there is supposed to be a conservative media establishment, publications, blogs, and I don't see it.
Many of these publications are legacies of great conservatives in the past that bear no resemblance to their founders.
It's stunning to me to watch this happen.
The greatest opportunity in the world, I mean, if you look at it as a business, the greatest opportunity to build subscriptions to contrast yourself with the exact opposite of what you believe in your heart that's taking place in Washington, D.C. today.
What Barack Obama is doing is the antithesis of conservatism.
It is the antithesis of the principles of the founding of this country.
And yet you, it's not just the Republican Party.
You can't find very many supposedly conservative blogs, websites, publications that are willing to take the lead.
No, they've become I don't I don't even want to characterize it.
My point is that one of them that's not caved in, that it's still leading the way, and it exposes what's going on as the Heritage Foundation.
I love these people.
By the way, they have asked me to speak at their annual president dinner on May 4th.
And I agreed.
So I will be speaking in Washington on May 4th at the Heritage FitzInk.
It's a Monday night.
And they've got this website, AskHeritage.org.
You may have trouble finding on websites other than mine genuine conservative answers to all these questions.
You will not have that problem at Askheritage.org.
All right, back to the audio sound bites.
Excerpts of the speech.
250,000 new federal employees.
Heritage Foundation has people studying this stuff that Obama's proposing, giving the results.
This is my reference in the speech on Saturday at CPAC to President Obama.
Let me speak about President Obama for just a second.
President Obama is one of the most gifted politicians, one of the most gifted men that I have ever witnessed.
He has extraordinary talents.
He has communications skills that hardly anyone can surpass.
No, seriously.
No, no, no, no.
I'm being I'm being very serious about this.
It just breaks my heart that he does not use these extraordinary talents and gifts to motivate and inspire the American people to be the best they can be.
He's doing just the opposite.
And it it's such it's a shame.
President Obama has the ability, he has the ability to inspire excellence in people's pursuits.
He has the ability to do all this, yet he pursues a path, seeks a path that punishes achievement, that punishes earners, that punishes, and he speaks negatively of the country.
Ronald Reagan used to speak of a shining city on a hill.
Barack Obama portrays America as a soup kitchen in some dark night in a corner of America that's very obscure.
He constantly is telling the American people that bad times are ahead, worse times are ahead.
And it it's it's troubling because this is the United States of America.
Anybody ever asked?
See, I'm in awe of our country, and I ask this question a lot as I got older.
We're less than 300 years old.
We're younger than nations that have been on this planet for thousands of years.
We nevertheless, in less than 300 years, and by the way, we're no different as human beings in any of them, any others around the world, our DNA is no different.
We're not better just because we're born in America.
There's nothing that sets us apart.
How'd this happen?
How did the United States of America become the world's lone superpower, the world's economic engine, the most prosperous opportunity for an advanced lifestyle that humanity has ever known?
How did this happen?
And why, pray tell, does the President of the United States want to destroy it?
It saddens me.
Thank you.
I'll tell you how it happened, folks.
You can find there are many elements to it.
It's it to me, it's a great question.
And I think it's a question that nobody, or very few people in this country ever ask themselves.
They just, you're born here, you take it for granted, you accept that America is what it is.
To the extent that you have traveled, you do see the differences, uh, the plus side differences in America.
But if you haven't traveled much around the world, you assume everything is not nearly as bad around the world as it is.
You don't really have the full-fledged appreciation.
And if you're not taught much history, then you really don't ask.
Gosh, how did this happen?
Europe, Asia, been around thousands of years.
They should be light years ahead of us in every measure.
But they're not.
Why?
Well, John Adams said, paraphrasing, we've written a document here that's for a moral and religious people.
We um we don't have a document that can handle people who aren't.
We we knew full well that that people lived outside the the realm of religion and morality were going to present problems.
The Constitution was a problem to them.
That's one element.
The other element is that our founding documents establish our origins.
Created with certain inalienable rights by God, life, liberty, pursuit of happiness.
And the great thing about this country is there have been assaults on it from within, and it's always survived.
And it's always come back.
I mean, came back from the Great Depression, came back from World War One.
We survived Jimmy Carter.
And it's it's gonna be a little tougher to survive this because we've never had this large an assault on the foundation of this country ever.
This makes what FDR did look like chump change.
The people of this country's uh have have been able to use their talents, their entrepreneurial skills, because of the acknowledgement of the origins of freedom, that our freedom does not come from whoever we elect, that whoever we elect is a threat to that freedom, that men do not grant freedom to other men, men can only imprison and take freedom away from other men.
Women too, but I'm using it in the general sense.
No other country has a constitution like us, like ours.
No other country was founded like ours.
It's key to the way we were founded.
That's why I continually focus on it.
It's the founding principles that are under assault here and being overturned.
And America's greatness as we've known it is threatened.
And that's why to me it's willing, it's worth fighting for.
And it does sadden me.
It really does break my heart.
You've got a guy in the White House who has the ability to inspire and motivate people the way he does.
You think how great this country would be?
If if this guy were different, if he had different ideas to go along with his remarkable communication skills.
But sadly, he wants to use it for just the exact opposite purposes.
Depress people, anger them, fill them with anxiety.
One more bite than a break.
Do you know that President Obama in six weeks of his administration has proposed more spending than from the founding of the country to his inauguration?
Now, this is not prosperity.
It is not going to engender prosperity, it's not going to create prosperity, and it is also not going to advance or promote freedom.
It's going to be just the opposite.
There are going to be more controls over what you can and can't do, how you can and can't do it, what you can and can't drive, what you can and can't say, where you can and can't say it.
All of these things are coming down the pike because it's not about revenue generation to them, it's about control.
They do believe that they have compassion.
They do believe they care.
But see, we never are allowed to look at the results of their plans.
We are told we must only look at their good intentions, their big hearts.
The fact that they have destroyed poor families by breaking up those families by offering welfare checks to women to keep having babies, no more father needed.
He's out doing something.
The government's the father, destroy the family.
We're not supposed to analyze that.
We're not supposed to talk about that.
We're supposed to talk about their good intentions.
They destroy people's futures.
Future is not big government.
Self-serving politicians.
Powerful bureaucrats.
This has been tried, tested throughout history.
The result has always been disaster.
President Obama, your agenda is not new.
It's not change, and it's not hope.
Thank you.
Spending a nation into generational debt is not an act of compassion.
All politicians, including President Obama, are temporary stewards of this nation.
It is not their task to remake the founding of this country.
It is not their task to tear it apart and rebuild it in their image.
President Obama said this morning, that's exactly what he is doing is remaking this country.
Quick timeout.
We'll be back after this.
Don't go away.
Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Snerdley just told me something I did not know.
Port St. Lucy, Florida, which is just 45 minutes north of here.
It's where the uh the New York Mets always botch up spring training.
And uh I didn't know this, but they're thinking of declaring it a disaster area because of all the foreclosed homes up there.
It was a disaster area before that, but I did not on that.
Well, I no, uh Port St. Lucie's not a county.
It's not it can't be the fastest growing county.
Martin County.
Fastest growing city in Martin County.
In the country?
Uh, snerdleave.
That can't be.
Have you have you ever been there?
Anyway, in addition to that, Florida is number three in the nation for identity theft complaints.
Identity theft continues to be the chief complaint reported to the FTC.
Data reported this week shows identity uh identity theft incidents in Florida climbed about 25% in 2008.
Folks, you hear me talk about life luck.
I'm talking about it again.
It is a cheap and expensive way to stop worrying about it.
Identity theft is on the rise because of the economic downturn.
9.9 million people victims of identity theft in 2008.
Here's a number, 80040-4833.
That's Lifelock's number.
You call them up, and the statistics will not matter anymore because you're going to be protected.
Call now, use the promo code Rush.
You'll save 10%, plus you'll get 30 days free.
1-800-440-4833.
There's a $1 million guarantee.
If they fail to stop identity theft, one million bucks to you.
But they will stop it.
Is something you never have to worry about.
1-800-440-4833.
Offer code Rush.
All right.
Let's see if I've got time to do this.
I darn it.
I'm going to have to because this is a good one.
The soundbite that I was going to play here is a good one.
It's about how Americans keep score.
They're competitive, whether we're told to be or not.
We'll have to get that one tomorrow with new excerpts tomorrow.
In the meantime, Craig and Charlotte, North Carolina.
Welcome to the EIB network.
Hello, sir.
Hey Rush, how are you?
Very good, sir.
Thank you.
I guess I was calling, first of all, uh, you know, I saw your CPAC uh speech.
It was great.
And um uh you're right with your beliefs uh regarding the markets and regarding uh how our economy works.
And uh Obama and his team uh are really operating under a really bad set of beliefs, and they're gonna take us into a pit.
Uh they're just raising our costs dramatically, and they're they're raising the structural costs of the United States.
Who is our when you say raise our costs dramatically?
Uh the American people in our tire our you know, entire economy.
Okay, let me ask you a question about that.
Because I've said many times that that uh time's time constraints.
Um I uh can I want to call you tomorrow.
Will you give us your number?
We call you back tomorrow.
I want to ask you here's the question I want you to think about it.
You won't have time to answer.
You sound just like the Republicans who are nibbling around the edges on the policy.
Obama, you said, I may be wrong, you said Obama people they don't seem to understand.
I think that's B.S. I think they full well understand what they're doing, and I want to talk to you about it.
We'll be back in just a second.
Port St. Lucie, one of the fastest growing cities in the last five years, like like saying Rio Linda was.
I don't buy it.
Folks, have a wonderful day.
We'll be back tomorrow.
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