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March 10, 2009 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:42
March 10, 2009, Tuesday, Hour #2
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Greetings and welcome back.
It's Rush Limbaugh, and this is the most listened to Radio Talk Show in the United States.
Great to have you be part of it each and every day.
It's an honor and a thrill.
The telephone number is 800-282-288-2 if you want to be on the program.
The email address is Lrushbow at EIB net.com.
I I want to take a brief moment here before we uh get back to the uh literal uh content portion of the program.
And coming up is a three-minute uh audio soundbite of Obama calling the New York Times, objecting to the socialism question they asked him when they interviewed him aboard one of his two private jets.
See, I realize, ladies and gentlemen, and uh I realize this because we've got the data to back it up.
The audience of this program is literally uh multiplying it geometric progressions, proportions.
There are new people tuning in, quite understandably so, and as I've always said, you know, it takes some devotion to this program, some weeks, some days, to understand the context in which things happen.
Now, the last half hour of the previous hour was a pretty good example of how we do things on this program.
We illustrate absurdity by being absurd.
We play all these sound bites from uh Warren Buffett and from uh Barton Biggs and Jim Kramer, all of these people who say in soundbite after soundbite that they profoundly disagree and are terribly disturbed about Obama's economic policies, but they the boy they love the guy and they supported a guy and they and they dog, what a great family.
Oh, ho, ho, this guy's just wonderful.
I voted for him, I support the guy.
And I realize that people listening to to this way of making a point who are new to the program, they go, why why are you being so loud?
Why are you why are you making the point?
And see, if you're asking that question is a good question, and it it the answer to it is is found uh in this statement.
The people who listen to this program regularly have knowledge about me and this program.
One of the things they know is that I love this country.
Another thing they know is that I love people.
All conservatives love people, and we are colorblind.
We don't look out over a group of people and see, ooh, there's a group of women sitting over there, and there's a group of blacks.
We uh oh, there's some Hispanics.
Oh, there's some Walmart voters, oh, there's some people who think the era of Reagan's over.
We love the country, we love people, we love our and are in awe of the founding of this country and its blessings by God and the recognition in our founding documents that we are all created with certain inalienable rights, among them life, liberty, pursuit of happiness.
We conservatives three all see all three of those things under assault.
Uh I want, we in this audience want the best for every American.
We want everyone to succeed.
We do not want our country to fail, and we do not want individual citizens to fail.
Against that knowledge, understanding, and given, here we have an administration which is implementing policies that are anathema to the founding of the country, in our view, my view.
We have an administration implementing policies that are destructive to the way this country was founded.
They are destructive to the uh opportunities for happiness and prosperity that this country has provided for 230 years, and we're alarmed by it.
And I see that a lot of other people are alarmed by it too, but they don't have the guts to say so per se because they are afraid of having happened to them what has been happening to me with the White House and the media trying to destroy them or ruin their reputations or what have you.
So they they're cowed, and they have to say, oh, we love the guy, and I love the family.
Oh, it's so wonderful.
I voted for the guy.
Policies are disastrous, but we voted.
Well, to me, uh this is not about hero worship, and it's not about anything historical to do with his election.
He's all our presidents now.
He's he's uh and his policies are what matter, doesn't matter anything else as far as I'm concerned.
He doesn't get a pass on implementing policies that destroy the nation's past and its founding simply because he's new, historic, a young, smart guy, and lovable and likable.
Look past those things because it's the people of the country I'm concerned about.
It is the country itself I'm concerned about, not a single individual.
Deborah Saunders, columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, sent me a note during the program yesterday, and I got around to answering it afterwards.
And she wanted to take up this whole I want him to fail business, and she wanted.
Could you send me the original statement?
Could you send me when you first said this?
And I said, sure, it was January 16th.
It was a Friday, and it was the top of the last hour of the program.
And I said the same things then that I said now, just said to you.
And I said, why would I want somebody who is antithetical to the nation's founding to freedom and so why why would I want somebody to succeed in destroying that?
It's it's it's perfectly sensible.
And I was got to thinking uh about this.
You know, the Federalist Pers and the Constitutional Convention debates are rife with arguments about the separation of powers.
Now stick with me on this because this is a fundamental point to try to explain, especially to those of you who are new to the program, what it is that guides me.
The whole theory of the separation of powers, meaning legislative branch, judicial branch, executive branch, was ingeniously based on human nature.
Our founding fathers had studied history, and they knew that absolute power corrupts absolutely.
So we divide power.
We divide power between the states and the federal government.
We divide power within the federal government, and we further divide power among three separate branches of government.
We give each branch a different set of powers and incentives to protect their own prerogatives so they can keep an eye on each other.
These are called checks and balances.
And the liberals love talking about checks and balances very much.
The underlying assumption of this whole system is that the country functions better if everyone is of a skeptical bent of mind.
That's what keeps the next guy honest.
The whole reason that we have divided government instead of a king, is that the issue is not about one government official succeeding.
This country was not founded on the principle that the president is a king, and above all, the king must succeed.
In fact, the system is designed to ensure that the president fails when he is wrong.
That's the whole purpose of checks and balances.
It's the whole purpose of dividing power is to ensure the president fails when he's wrong.
The framers wanted the country to succeed, just as I do.
If they wanted the president to succeed, they would not have saddled him with Congress.
They wouldn't have saddled him with the courts, they wouldn't have saddled him with a free press, and they wouldn't have made him face re-election every four years.
They would have made him a king, whom no one could oppose.
If our nation was all about a single individual succeeding, simply because that individual must succeed regardless, we wouldn't have the form of government that we do.
Now conflating the president and the country.
And by that I mean assuming that the president is always the country, assuming that the president always has the country's best interests at heart, such as the founders did, turns a functioning democracy into a robotic cult.
And I fear that that's what we have right now.
We have a cult of fear and celebrity, robotic cult that is epitomized in Warren Buffett, it's epitomized by Jack Welch, it's epitomized by Barton Biggs and Jim Kramer and anybody else who knows what they see is devastatingly wrong.
It is horribly wrong.
But because there is a fear to oppose, because the assumption is that Obama is the country, that Obama equals the best interest of the country simply because he's Obama, that's what gives you a cult.
And the worst part of it is that many of these people who were making hay over this limb once Obama to fail garbage know full well, ladies and gentlemen, that what I just told you is the case.
This is not an honest debate going on here.
As we have demonstrated in the first hour of the program with the Warren Buffett sound bites and the Barton Biggs soundbites and the Jim Kramer sound bites.
It's not an honest debate.
What's happening here is the most cynical kind of down and dirty politics by people who not only wanted George W. Bush to fail, but worked night and day to ensure that he failed.
I say to you again, if the founders wanted a situation where the government was about one official succeeding, then George Washington would have accepted the role he was offered as king.
But we have separation of powers.
We have division of powers.
All of this is designed to ensure that a president fails when he is wrong.
And the framers wanted the country to succeed.
Let me add to this, Byron York today, writing at the examiner.com, DC Examiner.com, why the founding fathers would want Obama's plans to fail.
James Madison was not specifically contemplating Obama nor Pelosi when he wrote Federalist No.
63, but reading the document, one of the seminal arguments in favor of adopting the U.S. Constitution.
It's clear that James Madison knew their type, Obama and Pelosi.
And he knew that they would come along again and again in American history if Americans were lucky enough to have a long history.
Obama and Pelosi, along with their most ardent supporters, are the types to see a crisis, like our current economic mess, as a great opportunity, as the president put it last Saturday.
They are the types, after a long period out of power, to attempt to use that great opportunity to push through far-reaching changes in national policy that had only a tangential connection, if at all, to the crisis at hand.
And they are the types the founding fathers wanted to stop.
In the Federalist Papers written 221 years ago, James Madison addressed the need for a Senate to accompany the more populist House of Representatives, an upper body he wrote, maybe sometimes necessary as a defense to the people against their own temporary errors and delusions.
For the times when a political leader would attempt to capitalize on the errors and delusions of the people, the founders prescribed the Senate, with its members elected to terms three times the length of those in the House, and senators, by the way, were originally chosen not by the people, but by state legislatures.
From Federalist number 63.
There are particular moments in public affairs when the people stimulated by some irregular passion or some illicit advantage or misled By the artful misrepresentations of interested men.
There are times where the people misguidedly may call for measures which they themselves will afterwards be the most ready to lament and condemn.
In these critical moments, how salutary will be the interference of some temperate and respectable body of citizens in order to check the misguided career and to suspend the blow mediated by the people against themselves until reason, justice, and truth can regain their authority over the public mind.
Let me translate this for you.
There are going to be times that demagogues are going to come along.
There are going to be times that people who are power hungry, who are going to take advantage of a crisis, to say they've got all the solutions, and they're going to ram all these things through.
The solutions have nothing to do with the crisis.
They're just selfish desires of the demagogue.
The people because of the crisis is going to go along with it, even though in rational moments they would reject it all.
We need an element to stop this.
We need an element to protect the people from the kind of leaders who would abuse them, mislead them, and ergo.
One of those devices was the United States Senate.
Of course the economy is a crisis.
But if Obama had his way, everything would be treated as if it were a crisis.
Health care is a crisis, environments a crisis, education's a crisis.
Those areas are not crises, and it's the Senate's job to delay action on them until Obama's power to stir popular passion fades.
And I was just talking about this with Mr. Snerdley.
Because we were in his office at the top of the hour, and there's Obama out there making his health care initiative today.
And Snerdley's getting all worked up about it.
My gosh, every day it's a new initiative.
It's health care here, it's card check there, it's this or that and the other thing.
Where's the bill?
I said, Snerdly, you're missing the point.
There need not ever be legislation on this.
Don't you understand what's happening here?
Let me tell you people.
He goes out and says, let me take you manager to tenant health care reform.
Health care reform will get you a job.
Health care reform is one of the reasons the economy's tanking.
You need better health care.
Who doesn't?
Oh, Obama's gonna get his health care.
Mabel, Obama's gonna get his health care.
Obama.
Why, he's gonna educate our kids better.
So the approval numbers stay up.
And as long as the approval numbers stay up, all the approval numbers need to stay up is the right rhetoric from Obama.
He doesn't have to do anything, even though he's gonna try to ram a lot of stuff down our throats.
He doesn't have to.
As long as he keeps the approval number up, then Warren Buffett's gonna back down, and Jack Welch is gonna back down, and Barton Biggs are gonna back down, and everybody else is gonna back down as long as because they're gonna be afraid.
So we have to remember, folks, we don't have a king.
We have separation of powers.
We have a system designed to ensure that the president fail when he should back in a second.
So you see, ladies and gentlemen, all I want and all we want is success for every American.
If there's any worship on this program, it is not of a single man, it is of our Constitution and our other founding documents, and the founding fathers who gave them to us.
Certainly not of a mortal human being today.
And uh, I just I want to go through this to explain it because I think we got I know for a fact the tune-in factor, our our our cube, which is the total audience, I actually showed it to me yesterday, is literally uh geometric in its uh in its increase.
And as such, there are people listening here who haven't heard before who come to the program with all of these erroneous conceptions, misconceptions that they've been filled with by the critics of this program for all these twenty years.
Anyway, to the phone, Steve in uh in Southern Pines, North Carolina.
Great to have you here, sir.
Hello.
Hello, Rush.
Thank you for taking my call.
Yes, sir.
Uh, first of all, I took the opportunity to say happy birthday to my father who introduced me to your show twenty years ago.
And I'd like to say that uh this is one of the best shows I've listened to in that twenty years.
Well, thank you, sir.
I appreciate that very much.
Well, thank you.
And uh on the other side of the coin, I'd like to disagree with you that the war is lost to save our economy.
I actually believe that by Obama swinging for the fences his first time at play.
People are starting to surge in a grassroots movement that's going to give the Republicans the greatest victory in 2010.
And it's going to be VS Day.
Victory over socialism.
Well, now you I I under I understand your point.
I, of course, as uh one of the last remaining full-time optimists.
Of course we're gonna triumph over this.
We're Americans.
And at some point we are gonna triumph over.
My only hope is it doesn't take us ten years to dig out of this or longer, even a generation.
However, um, this idea uh that that uh the war is lost, um the way Obama's fighting that it's lost.
This war is lost.
This war is lost.
In the words of Harry Reid on the surge in Iraq before the surge even began, this war is lost.
With Obama as the general this war is lost.
Badoo, babadoo, babado.
Folks, I think I have the solution to our economic problems.
Very simple.
How are we going to work our way out of the next four years?
It is so simple, my friends.
Only I could work it out.
There are two premises.
One premise is America loves Obama.
The other premise is America dislikes Obama's policies.
What to do?
They love Obama.
I won't like what he's doing.
Very simple.
He stays president, we seize his teleprompter, and we send somebody out there to speak who understands economic growth while Obama stays president.
That way, everybody will love Obama, we'll get economic growth.
All we need to do is get that telepromp away from him.
Well, here, let me show you.
We've made this point.
I realize many of you new tuner-inners think I'm being cruel and mean-spirited.
Not in the least.
I am not swayed by the tug of popular sentiment.
I'm not a conventional wisdom guy.
I don't go along to get along.
You know, one of the problems that we have, you want to explain Warren Buffett and uh and Jack Welch.
I mean, I can go a little further in explaining it to you.
They believe, and this partly our fault, they believe that if you espouse liberal ideas, people will think you have a big heart.
And that you have a lot of compassion, that you care.
And then after you do that, you can say what you want to say.
But if you don't articulate traditional liberal gobbledygook ideas, you are gonna be thought of as a mean-spirited capitalist pig, greedy SOB wanting to destroy everything.
And they don't have the guts to stand up for capitalism, so they capitulate and offer the phraseology and the words or whatever they think is necessary to time, make people think that they a little liberal.
And this is because we have failed, I've mentioned this countless times.
We have failed to properly define conservatism as the genuine compassion and love for people.
We've seeded that to the left, and then it's the point I tried to make of the CPAC speech.
Just take a look.
Everywhere liberal Democrats have said to people, we're gonna make your life better.
Take a look at where those people live and tell me if you want to join them.
They don't improve people's lives.
They destroy them, in fact.
Or damage them greatly.
At any rate.
Obama, as you know, had an interview with the uh New York Times on Air Force One last Friday, flying back from Columbus, Ohio, to the nation's capitol.
And in that interview, the Times asked him about socialism.
And for some reason, when the plane landed, Obama or somebody said, you know, I think you were a little flippant on that socialist stuff.
Obama thus thought it necessary to call the New York Times back and uh go for take two.
Which they granted him the opportunity to do, of course.
Go for take two on what he thinks about socialism.
I have that.
It is uh it's about two minutes and eleven seconds.
Now we normally have a sound bite policy here of not playing a soundbite longer than a minute.
But in this case, I want to play the whole sound bite as found on the New York Times website.
Because what I want you to notice here, listen to the stuttering, bumbling mannerism as he talks his way through this phone call, this backup follow-up phone call to the New York Times.
There is no teleprompter here.
It is cringe inducing.
And then to claim that Bush is the real socialist while he Obama is the free marketeer.
So here it is.
Barack Obama unplugged, including the prompter unplugged.
Yeah, just one thing that I was thinking about as I was getting on the compter, because, you know, it was hard for me to believe you were entirely serious about that socialist question.
I did think it might be useful to point out that it wasn't under me that we started buying a whole bunch of shares of banks.
It wasn't on my watch.
And it wasn't on my watch that we passed a massive new entitlement, uh, the prescription drug plan without a source of funding.
Uh and so I think that uh it's important just to note uh when you start uh hearing folks uh throw these words around that uh uh we've actually been operating uh in a way that uh is entirely consistent with free market principles uh and that uh uh some of the same folks who are uh throwing the word socialist around can't say the same.
Right.
So whose watch are we talking about here, sir?
Well I I just think it's clear that by the time we had uh by the time we uh got here uh you know they're already had been uh an enormous infusion of taxpayer money into the financial system.
And uh the the thing I constantly try to emphasize to people is that if coming in the market was doing fine, nobody would be happier than me uh to stay out of it.
Right.
Uh you know uh I I have more than enough to do uh without having to worry about the financial system uh and the fact that uh we've had to take these extraordinary measures uh and intervene uh is uh not an indication of my ideological preferences,
uh, but an indication of the degree to which uh lacks regulation uh and extravagant risk taking uh has precipitated a crisis.
So there you have it, President Obama uh lamenting the fact that he's got uh spend all his time on the financial system.
But this is what's amazing about this is Bush is the socialist.
Hey, I didn't come up with that Metaclair plan as though he would have voted against it.
Did Obama vote against any of the TARP bailout money, or maybe maybe he recused himself because he's running for president, I don't know, but he would have voted and did vote for all of this stuff.
Uh but but you know, they had as I'm told, they had 90 minutes to think about this phone call before they made it.
And it's uh you know, it's it's frightening it it to me here, just how you how different this guy is without the prompter.
And how disingenuous to call himself free market principles.
Oh, yes, sir, yes, sir, yes, in the New York Times.
At any rate, back to the phone.
Susan Gross Point, Michigan.
Nice to have you on the program.
Hi.
Thank you, Rush, for taking my call.
Yes, ma'am.
Um your use of the word failure with the president was definitely a provocative term, and that's good.
That makes you a provocateur, which means that you're interested in stirring debate and drawing attention to what's going on.
And that's a good thing.
It's uh you're probably even more successful than you thought you'd be with the rise in your listeners.
But I have one comment to our wonderful conservative friends that we all dearly love.
Those people who thought that John McCain wasn't conservative enough or wasn't their candidate, and they sat on their hands during the last election.
I hope they're all happy with what's happening because in a few short months he is beginning to undo and unravel everything that Reagan tried to accomplish and Bush, and it's really a very serious situation that we have on our hands.
Yes, it is.
We faced both those ops uh options.
I I addressed them both during the campaign, and I asked people to think about that.
And neither of the options, you know, were optimum.
Well, it's been a very frightening couple of months for me personally to see how quickly with such speed this this administration is unraveling the government and now can I honestly, Susan?
I have a s a serious question.
Sure.
Why are you surprised?
See, none of this surprises me.
I listened to what Obama said for a year and a half.
Now don't mis please don't misunderstand my tone.
I'm not I'm not trying to be insulting or or or condescending.
I'm genuinely stunned that intelligent people did not understand what we faced with this guy, who his associations were, who mentored him, what his anger and and uh inspirational things in life were.
This was you could have written this in stone that this was going to happen.
That is why I flipped a lid shortly after the election when I started hearing our side talk about no, he's a moderate, he's gonna govern from the center.
You need to back off, Rush.
We need to give him a chance.
We want the president to succeed.
Don't forget, I wasn't the first one to say I want him to fail.
Our side said they wanted the most extreme radical liberal president ever elected to succeed.
And I said, What am we or we dealing with here?
What have happened to our great minds?
They've turned into skulls full of mush.
And it was beyond f I I couldn't explain it other than, you know, in simple little high school emotional terms.
But I really don't understand why people are shocked at the speed with which this man is trying to undo the fabric and foundation of the country, because I'm not.
Well, I'm not I'm not shocked, certainly, at the goals.
I think you could have seen his goals by his associations, clearly.
Uh we all knew what he well the thinking people knew what he was.
I think it's the Cajones that that they have gone so quickly and so boldly against eight years of Bush and what uh President Reagan had accomplished, and we all worked so hard for those goals, and at least we were able to keep Bill Clinton on the straight and narrow.
Well, there's some fundamental differences.
That's a good point.
Can you hold on?
I gotta take a quick commercial timeout.
Sure.
I'd like to continue this with you on the other side.
We'll be right back.
This is Susan from Gross Point, Michigan.
Stay with us.
Ha, welcome back, Rush Limbaugh meeting and surpassing all audience expectations on a daily basis.
Susan in Gross Point, Michigan, thank you for holding on through the break.
So we were able to to hold Bill Clinton in check.
How do we do that?
Well, we he didn't get all three houses right away, and he those of us who were around never had three houses.
That's right.
And you see, with r with uh Obama having all three houses, what are we left with?
Well, we've got some good people on the Supreme Court.
But Rush, my husband and I were both part of the Reagan administration.
And I know how difficult it was for us to get anything accomplished in the bureaucracy.
Even though they were mostly liberal Democrats that we worked with, they had to follow some of the political appointees' suggestions.
And still it was very difficult.
And for the Obama administration to be able to accomplish and get through everything that he's done so quickly is truly amazing and saddening to me.
Very sad.
Now that's what I want to discuss with you.
You went to Washington with Reagan not to take over the government and to use it as a force against people.
You went to Washington to try to diminish its size, and you were up against people in those bureaucracies who were going to fight you, hook, line, and sinker.
Oh, yeah.
Um you went to Washington to eventually be able to get the hell out of there after finishing your work.
These people have gone to Washington to take over.
They the the bureaucracy already has liberals in it.
Now you've got the Democrat, liberal Democrats controlling the House and the Senate and the White House.
Now and and much of the federal judiciary via appointments made by Bill Clinton and stalled Bush appointments for the past eight years.
So the the the your the answer to your question, I think lies again in something that I remain incredulous about, and that is people's utter lack of understanding of just who liberals are and what their agenda is.
We saw Pelosi and Reed the past two years, past four years actually, with two thousand six, the past two years, after they took over the House and the Senate.
We saw how they tried to destroy George W. Bush.
They tried had to destroy virtually everything.
They were they were they tried to destroy the U.S. economy.
They tried to talk people into thinking there was a recession when there wasn't, so they would live in a way that would loss cause the economy to go down and enhance their election chances.
Liberals are they're out there for everybody to see.
They are mean spirited, they are racists, they are bigots, they are power mongers, uh, and and and they're Stalinists in some cases.
Why this is not seen by uh uh uh intelligent people and I I'm not talking about the average citizen.
I'm talking about people on our side who do not the explanation for every question you've got extremism, radicalism, liberalism.
Now, as far as what Obama's got done, see I think it isn't that much yet.
He's just made you think a lot of it's getting done because he goes out and does these campaign appearance on health care and education today, and card check and stem cells.
He did get that done with the executive order, and he did do some things with executive orders, but the primary piece of legislation that's happened so far is the porculus bill.
Uh the budget, this omnibus budget, which he voted for every provision in it, but he says he inherited it.
That's running into trouble.
He's not yet getting that much done.
That's why I'm asking everybody stand up and stop this and oppose this rather than treat him like a king who is allowed to get whatever he wants to get simply because he's Obama.
We've got time to stop this.
Well, if I could just say three things.
First of all, there is an elected official up there who's gonna stop him.
Pelosi and Reed are both in his pocket.
They're all out for the same liberal socialist agenda.
So that's number one.
Number two, your word, that's why your word failure is so important and its effect on people, because it has gotten people.
It has started the Senate who've never listened to you.
It has started the debate.
This is what I love about it.
I don't care what the everybody's debating the concept now.
Everybody's thinking about it, and that's ultimately good.
But look at Susan, I really I appreciate I'm I'm running out of time.
I know you had a third thing, but I don't have time for you to get to it right now.
Tell Mr. Snergly what it is.
Uh and and uh he'll he'll pass it on and I'll relay it to the audience.
But you say we can't stop Pelosi and Reed, we can't stop Congress.
Folks, that may be true.
That may be true, but they're it it's not written that we cannot take down his approval numbers.
Remember, that's the key to all of this.
The key is his approval numbers.
As long as they stay up, he's gonna get what he wants because people are gonna be scared to death to oppose him substantively.
And uh if it's a mistake to say that only he can take his approval numbers down.
The American people, they're the focus of what we do here.
Their minds, their hearts, their education.
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