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March 11, 2009 - Rush Limbaugh Program
35:32
March 11, 2009, Wednesday, Hour #3
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Okay, I got a lot to do here to squeeze in this final hour, ladies and gentlemen.
And we'll get to your phone calls as well.
It's Rushland, because, well, I got to charity golf outing in the next two days.
So Jason Lewis will be here on Thursday and Friday.
Plus, I want to help the Democrats save some money.
There's no sense in running ads against me when I'm not here.
Telephone number 800-282-2882, the email address lrushbow at EIBnet.com.
All right, here, I know I promised this earlier, but this program is improvisational, extemporaneous exercise, and stream of consciousness.
When things happen, we talk about them.
So here is the long-ago-promised analysis of the Democrats' latest strategy to portray ourselves in a wall with the U.S. economy.
By the way, from J.P. Morgan Chase, I have some astounding numbers here.
Market cap losses, worldwide market cap losses according to certain dates.
Here are the values of the WCAU World Market Cap Index on requested dates.
The market cap index on the day Obama was nominated was $47.3 trillion, which means that the total market cap of industrialized countries around the world was $47.3 trillion.
On Election Day, it had dropped to $34.4 trillion.
On Inauguration Day, World Market Cap Index was $29.5 trillion.
Today, the World Market Cap Index is $25.6 trillion.
The world market cap, the wealth of the world has dropped by $27 trillion since Barack Obama was nominated.
That's how much Barack Obama has cost the world, $27 or $22, let's see, $22.
About $22 trillion in market cap, and it's continuing to plunge.
All right, Thomas Friedman, the highly respected, almost godlike columnist on foreign policy in the New York Times has a very funny, naive, and sophomoric piece today on the economy.
In the New York Times, a headline, this is not a test.
This is not a test.
That's a takeoff on the old EBS warning.
This is not a test.
This is a real warning.
We're at war.
Get under your desks.
The Russian nukes are on the way.
Remember that when you were in school?
It's always great to see the stock market come back from the dead, but I'm deeply worried, writes Professor Friedman, that our political system doesn't grasp how much our financial crisis can still undermine everything we want to be as a country.
Mr. Friedman, the political system knows exactly what's happening here, and they sit by and watch it.
I could stop after every sentence of this piece, but I'd be here the whole hour doing it.
So I will use discipline and only reply to the most sophomoric aspects of this piece.
He writes, friends, this is not a test.
Economically, this is the big one.
This is August 1914.
This is the morning after Pearl Harbor.
This is 9-12.
Yet in too many ways, we seem to be playing politics as usual.
Our country has congestive heart failure.
Our heart, our banking system that pumps blood to our industrial muscles is clogged and functioning far below capacity.
Nothing else remotely compares in importance to the urgent need to heal our banks.
Yet I read that we're actually holding up dozens of key appointments at the Treasury Department because we're worried about whether somebody paid Social Security taxes on a nanny hired 20 years ago at $5.
That's not why, Mr. Friedman, but even if it were.
So here comes the excuse to get all kinds of tax cheats who might be brilliant.
Anybody want to make the case for Geithner to me anymore?
Can somebody explain to me why we had to have a tax cheat?
He's the only guy that could deal with the banking crisis.
He's incompetent.
Dozens of key appointments, the Treasury Department, because we're worried.
I think we can't fill spots there because nobody wants to work there, Mr. Friedman.
Meanwhile, writes Mr. Friedman, the Republican Party behaves as if it would rather see the country fail than Barack Obama succeed.
Rush Limbaugh, the de facto GOP boss, said so explicitly, prompting John McCain to say, I don't want him to fail in his mission of restoring our economy.
Now, this is the result of Mr. Friedman being ignorant, naive.
He knows damn well.
Well, maybe he doesn't.
You know, I remember at the CPAC speech when I mentioned John Kerry, and I paused and I said, who, by the way, served in Vietnam.
And there was laughter from the audience.
And then later, when I read a review of the speech, some liberals were just aghast that conservatives would laugh at someone's service to their country.
And I said, we live in two worlds.
John Kerry, I said John Kerry, who served in Vietnam because he tells us every time he opens his mouth, particularly during the 84 campaign, that he served in Vietnam.
I was lampooning Kerry, not public service, military service.
At any rate, the Republican Party believes and behaves as if it would rather see the country fail than Barack Obama succeed.
Mr. Friedman, what we know is that the country cannot succeed if Obama succeeds with his policies.
And that's what you're writing about.
You're writing about the failure of the economic banking system.
Obama's in charge of it, and you're blaming me, and you're blaming Republicans.
Obama's in charge of it.
Geithner's in charge of it.
They're ignoring the banking bailout.
They're ignoring the banking business.
They're ramming liberal socialist policies down our throats while everybody's distracted by this other thing and being distracted by this attack on me in which you are now participating.
We don't want the country to fail, and we have never said it.
It is the exact opposite.
We want everybody to succeed.
We just know that Obama's policies will not bring that about.
As for President Obama, writes Mr. Friedman, I like his coolness under fire.
Yet sometimes it feels as if he is deliberately keeping his distance from the banking crisis while pressing ahead on other popular initiatives.
Thomas, I call this the Buffett Welsh Bart big ush, whatever it is, head fake.
Barton Biggs.
He just has a paragraph about me and the Republicans wanting the country to fail, which is a lie, and then turns around and scratches his head.
Gee, I love Obama's coolness under fire, but it feels like he's deliberately keeping his distance from the banking crisis.
I understand he doesn't want his presidency to be held hostage to the ups and downs of bank stocks, but a hostage he is.
We all are.
Mr. Friedman, you know what you ought to do?
Do you want to write a column dedicated to Obama and just try to convince him to ask his buddy George Soros to fix all this?
Tell George Soros he can stop shorting the U.S. economy.
First rights, Mr. Friedman, to get out of a crisis like this, you need to let markets clear.
You need to let failed companies or homeowners go bankrupt, unlock their dead capital and reapply it to thriving entities.
Mr. Friedman, this is why I characterize your piece today as sad, naive, and sophomoric.
What is it I have been saying for two months?
Let the failed companies fail.
Don't bail out homeowners who can't pay the loans in the first place.
Don't make the rest of us who are affording our mortgages barely in some cases pay for somebody else's, including their second loan.
You are parroting me.
How do we fix this?
This is what I suggested that we do.
People like you just make me a straw man.
I want Obama to fail because he's doing the opposite of what you're suggesting.
Obama's the one doing, Obama's bailing out losers.
Obama's bailing out losing companies.
Obama's bailing out losing homeowners.
You say they should fail.
I say they should fail.
The market needs to cleanse itself.
I'm getting blamed.
Anyway, it goes on.
President Obama announced today that he had invited the country's 20 leading bankers, 20 leading industrialists, 20 top market economists, and the Democrat-Republican leaders to the House and Senate to join him and his team at Camp David.
Tom, when are you going to realize that Obama has a checklist?
And on the checklist is something like banking problem.
So what he does, he'll convene these 60 or so people at Camp David for a couple days.
He'll give them a lecture.
They'll go have their little sessions.
They'll come out after their breakout groups.
They'll report back.
Nothing will change.
And he'll check the box off.
I've dealt with the banking problem.
Because his purpose, Mr. Friedman, is not to deal with anything.
It's just to keep that approval number up.
He wants people like you and others who voted for him to think he's dealing with it or has dealt with it or that he's paying attention to it.
Well, it never gets fixed.
So he just got a series of checklists.
He defines his success by how many of the checklists does he get through every day.
Bam, bam, bam, got that, got that, got that, got that.
Y'all had the women's summit.
Y'all had the healthcare summit.
Y'all had the mortgage summit.
Y'all going to have the banks up and up at Camp David?
Yep, yep, yep.
What a good day's work.
Problem solved.
Now let's go to the Wednesday night cocktail party with $100 Wag You Beef and whatever else the taxpayers are paying for before I hop on one of my two private jets for a dinner party weekend in Chicago.
Mr. Friedman, you got to realize this is how he operates.
He doesn't fix anything.
He just wants people to think he cares about it, is working on it, and maybe has dealt with it.
That's what got him elected.
He's never fixed anything in his life, Mr. Friedman.
He's never been an executive of anything.
He's never solved a problem.
He's simply taking advantage of them, Mr. Friedman.
And you are right in there offering guidance and support along with the rest of the naive and hapless who have invested so much emotionally here that you've checked your intellect at the door before you went in to vote.
Back after this.
USA Today, more Visa and MasterCard accounts have been breached.
Visa MasterCard being circumspect about another breach of credit and debit card transaction data from yet another payment card processor.
All of this stolen data feeds directly into a sophisticated underground market that puts it to quick use with identity theft.
Let me give you some numbers.
22%, 600%, 9.9 million.
22%, the increase in identity theft victims the past year.
Five-year high.
600% is the increase in tax return-related fraud past five years.
$9.9 million.
That's how many of you were victims of identity theft in 2008.
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Use the promo code RUSH.
Just heard Thomas Friedman lament that we can't get good people to help poor old Geithner because of the nanny tax problem.
Well, this afternoon on Andrea Mitchell, NBC News, she talked to Barney Flank and she asked him what Friedman said.
Is there really a problem here?
And here's what Barney Frank said.
The media is the problem here in part.
It is the overfocus on the part of people and media to relatively minor infractions that causes this.
I guarantee you my colleagues would not on their own be doing this.
I take your point, Mr. Chairman.
You're right.
And we plead guilty.
The people who may be breaking us out of this are the average citizens.
They are so now focused on real problems that I have found, encouragingly, they are much less interested in the gossip and in the trivia and even the minor infractions than they are in, are you going to get credit flowing?
Am I going to get a job?
What will happen to my health care if I lose my job?
Adversity does seem to be concentrating the mind in a very good way.
Barney Frank blames the media for the fact that they're focusing on too many tax cheats who otherwise would be great employees at the Treasury Department.
And Andrea Mitchell says, I take your point, Mr. Chairman.
You're right.
We plead guilty.
Moving on with the war.
Moving on with the, yeah, she did come off like a butt boy there, I know.
They all are.
You know, and people don't like the term, snurdly.
You know, we got new people tuning in, and they're going to hear the term.
They're not going to understand the humor with which we intend this.
I apologize, folks.
I know that there are millions of you new tuning in, and you're just waiting for an excuse to tune out because you're waiting for all these misconceptions you have to be confirmed.
But call Nancy or whatever, Andrea Mitchell, whatever you want.
The media, she now accepts blame.
Yeah, the media is keeping good people out of treasury because they're focusing on tax cheats.
Anyway, morning, Joe.
Scarborough today spoke with Tom Brokaw.
And this is about the theme that's been advanced here, that we are in an economic war, that this is the first day of 1914, that this is the day of Pearl Harbor.
This is 9-12.
This is an economic equivalent of war.
The country is being reset in every conceivable way, economically, culturally, politically.
We'll be looking back on this period of time and saying that was another beginning of another chapter in the American saga.
And as I go around the country and talk to groups, I say, you know, 100 years from now, the historians will judge this time not just by what Obama does, but by what will we do?
A hundred years from now, the historians will judge this not by just what Obama does, but what we will.
Yeah.
That's damn right more than he knows and in ways he can't even imagine.
Here is author Frank Schaefer on MSNBC Live yesterday afternoon.
Republicans have become to our war against economic collapse, what Jane Fonda was when she was in Vietnam rooting for the other side.
We're in another war now.
This is an economic war, and everybody who loves this country has to stand together and back our president.
Geez, I don't know who this guy is, Frank Schaefer, but now we're Jane Fonda.
And whatever the president wants, and he's a king, whatever he wants to do, we have to back him.
No, we don't.
We have a constitution.
We have separation of powers.
We do not have a king, Mr. Schaefer.
But I'm reminded of this in Connecticut, April 28th, 2003, talking about backing our president.
I am sick and tired of people who say that if you debate and you disagree with this administration, somehow you're not patriotic and we should stand up and say, we are Americans and we have a right to debate and disagree with any administration.
High blood pressure every time I hear that.
Doesn't that, for you new listeners, especially you gentlemen, doesn't that, that was Hillary Clinton, doesn't it remind you of your first and maybe your second both, your ex-wives?
I mean, that'll send you down to Archie Bunker's bar faster than anything in the country, including your kid getting an F on a report card.
But her point out there was, we're not going to just sit around and blanketly agree with George W. Bush.
No, See, it was patriotic to dissent then.
Now it's unpatriotic to dissent.
You see how the left is allowed to change their definitions.
All right.
We've got to take a brief time out here.
The next sound bite we have is with Chris Matthews and Socialist California Representative Barbara Lee.
Remember yesterday when I proclaimed, look, if Obama is the general in this war, this war is lost.
That sent poor old Chris, who normally gets leg tingles on his show, that sent him over the edge.
Totally missing, again, sense of humor and the irony, the sarcasm and the satire.
Details when we come back and then more of your phone calls.
James Carville and Stan Greenberger out with their new poll on me.
I told you, McClatchy's got one out.
My approval number is 33%.
I am one of the most popular individuals in America today.
I have a higher approval rating than lawyers, journalists, doctors, well, not doctors, actors, Hollywood, and Congress.
My approval number at 33% is higher than Obama's will be at the end of his term.
My approval rating of 33% of McClanche poll higher than Biden's IQ.
So here come Carville and Greenberg with their poll out today.
And this is the analysis graph or sentence.
National Survey shows talk show host unpopular with everybody.
Unpopular with everybody, except conservative Republicans who defend him and share his values.
That's a pretty healthy number out there.
But this, we had the story, Bill Salmon's story today that Carville and Greenberg were talking to journalists on the morning of 9-11, 2001, telling them they wanted Bush to fail.
And they were going to do polling data to try to gin up failure for Bush.
Then they learned of the attacks and they shouted to the media, forget what you just heard.
This changes everything.
Now, that story's been up since around noon on the Fox News channel.
It's a Bill Salmon story.
It will get no coverage beyond the Fox News channel.
But this Carville poll, which is everybody hates me except everybody.
Everybody hates me except conservatives.
This is going to be, I guarantee me, every newspaper, every website, every blog.
Everybody hates me.
Okay.
Dawn, don't shake your head in there.
I talked about this in the first hour.
This is just fine, believe me.
See, my staff wants everybody to know me as they do.
And they're so desirous that everybody love me like they do.
Ain't going to happen.
And see, I'm not burdened with those expectations, so I'm never disappointed about it.
I appreciate the sentiment in there.
I really do, but it is what it is.
At any rate, not doing this for popularity anyway.
Here's Matthews talking with Barbara Lee.
MSNBC hard-boiled last night.
Matthews just lived in no sense of irony.
They have no we live in two different worlds.
I don't know if they even have any memory of things that actually happen that I play off of on this program.
Listen to this.
Here's Rush Limbaugh today with his thoughts.
It's around nine minutes to one Eastern time on March the 10th, and I, El Rushbo, proclaim this war is lost.
He's talking about the war on the economy, on the bad economy.
Barbara, Congresswoman Lee, what do you think of Rush Limbaugh saying that the Barack Obama war to save the American economy is lost?
Well, you know, for those who listen to Rush Limbaugh, so be it.
Rush Limbaugh has no clue.
The economy is not lost.
The president is working very hard.
Well, that's a ringing endorsement, isn't it?
He's trying hard.
He's working very hard.
The economy isn't lost.
Well, we kept hearing it was lost from these people for six years during the Bush administration.
But, folks, see, it's like at the CPAC speech when I said, and John Kerry, who, by the way, served in Vietnam, and everybody, everybody laughed because we make fun of Kerry for telling us every time he opens his mouth that he served in Vietnam.
Well, Chris, for whoever monitors this program for Chris, I want to take you back.
We have, let's see, two soundbites, both from Harry Reid in April of 2007.
This war is lost and that the surge is not accomplishing anything.
And the next one?
As long as we follow the president's path in Iraq, the war is lost.
Harry Reid twice before the surge began.
This war is lost.
This war is lost.
Harry Reid surrendering.
Harry Reen trying to secure the defeat of American military personnel in their mission, Chris.
And I'm parodying Harry Reid.
If Obama is the general of this war, and I said this date, I said, nine minutes to one o'clock Eastern March, because I know he was marking it for the media, because I knew what they were going to do.
I love tweaking these people.
I know how they're going to do it.
I. L. Rushbo proclaim, this war is lost.
If Obama is our general, this war.
And here, play these two Reed bites back together.
April 2000.
It's only two years ago, Chris.
You've got to have enough of a brain left to have two years' worth of memory.
This war is lost, and that the surge is not accomplishing anything.
As long as we follow the president's path in Iraq, the war is lost.
And to the phones now, people have been patiently waiting.
This is Sean in Dallas.
Great to have you on the EIV network.
Hello.
Hey, thanks, Rush.
I wonder how much of the new listenership is women.
Did the women summit work?
Haven't seen the breakdown on that.
This is just total audience numbers.
And by the way, it's just we only have it for really 15, the top 15 markets, which are rated now in a new way as opposed to the old way.
What he's talking about is a couple of hours ago, since this audience size, the ratings of this show, have been disputed in the media.
We finally ran the numbers yesterday because we know.
I mean, the Washington Post ran a story.
What are Limbo's real numbers?
And they talk to people.
It's really impossible to know.
The hell it is.
Do you think Campbell's doesn't know how many cans of soup it sells?
It's our business.
We know what our ratings are.
We don't lie.
And they are up.
It's January, February, and March, or February and March, or January and February.
I'm not sure which up to double check, but it's in the first quarter, up 32% over our baseline, up 32% over a year ago.
And our baseline's high.
That's a significant increase.
That's total audience.
That's cum.
That's not average quarter hour.
That doesn't break down demographics yet.
Oh, yeah, a lot of people like me, Dawn.
I mean, the Greenberg Carpenter was everybody hates me except conservative Republicans.
That's not true because I have a lot of liberal friends who love me.
I have a lot of liberal free people who like me.
Would love to get on this program now and then.
It's just host unpopular with everybody.
That's a poll.
Host unpopular with everybody.
We don't know what percentage of it is women.
Here is Tom in Manhattan, Kansas.
Thank you for waiting, sir, and hello.
Hello, Rush.
It's honored to talk to you, sir.
Yeah.
Before I get to my question, I just want to say I find it hilarious that liberals have no problem linking the word war to the economy, but have major issues linking the war to terrorism.
Oh, exactly.
We shouldn't have a war on a terror.
We shouldn't have war on it.
Oh, exactly.
Yep.
But anyway, Rush, I grew up in the 90s, and my parents were singing your praises because of your effect on the 94 elections.
And I was kind of praying that we hope we see something similar in 2010.
I was only seven when Clinton, his administration began.
So I was just wondering if you could maybe talk about some of the similarities and differences you've been seeing between the Clinton to the beginning of the year.
Oh, yeah.
Damn, that's an excellent question.
That is a hell of a good choice.
I applaud you.
You're 23 years old, right?
Yes.
Oh, this is a great question.
I can tell you right now what the big difference is.
Back in, starting in 1988, when I started this program through 1989, there were two huge scandals in the House of Representatives.
The big one was the House Bank scandal.
Do you remember that, Money Chancellor?
Did your parents tell you about it?
I've heard about it, but I don't remember.
Anyway, here's basically what it was.
The House of Representatives at the time had its own bank for members, and their paychecks were automatically deposited there.
But it really didn't matter what they were paid.
They were allowed to write checks for money they didn't have.
Some of these people were overdrawn hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars with no attempt ever to recoup it.
If they needed to spend $50,000 on something, just wrote a check, the House Bank covered it.
This blew up because everybody could understand this.
Nobody else can go to their bank and write a check for money that they don't have.
The second scandal that was discovered shortly thereafter was the House post office scandal.
That is where members would take a check from a constituent, a campaign contribution check or whatever, and go into the post office and buy a dollar's worth of stamps and get $50,000 in change.
I'm not, I mean, that's a bit of an exaggeration, but the House Post Office and the House Bank were personal piggy banks.
That blew up.
Then, while all this was going on, there was an agitator in the House of Representatives who was trying everything he could to take out the leadership.
Jim Wright, Thomas Foley, you name it.
His name was Newt Gingrich.
Newt Gingrich was leading the Reagan Revolution in the House of Representatives.
He was contrasting, starkly so, the views of Reagan conservatism with the liberalism of then, which is identical to the liberalism of today.
The liberalism of today is no different than the liberalism Newt was fighting then.
It's identical.
Abuse of power, wanton spending, doing everything they could to tax the rich, limit individual liberty and opportunity, and Newt was having none of it.
And because of the scandals and because of the emergence of this show that provided a national media platform to focus attention on the Democrats and their scandals and their corruption, combined with what Newt was doing, after years and years of doing this, finally, the American people were fed up with 40 years of one-party rule in the House and decided that they would want change, that they wanted some change.
And Newton and the boys, with the help of a couple consultants, came up with a contract with America that had 10 understandable items.
Here's what we're going to do.
We get into power.
Such things, term limits, balance the budget and so forth.
And the third thing they did, they went all to these House of Representative districts that Democrats had all over the country and they nationalized those elections rather than made the elections about who brought home the most pork or who built the newest old folks home.
They instead talked about the danger this Democrat was to American foreign policy with the Soviet menace racing and so forth in Central America.
And that combination of things, but it was primarily that there was an army of conservative Republicans in the House, hell-bent on throwing the Democrats out.
That's what does not exist today.
And the leader of that revolution somehow doesn't see liberalism today as he saw it then.
We will be back.
Stay with us.
Just as I predicted, the Carville poll is all over the media.
The Bill Salmon story about Carville wanting Bush to fail in 2001 still obscured.
But the new Carville poll on me is all over the place.
And get this.
The poll finds that Limbaugh has grown.
Gosh, I wish my parents were alive.
I would just relish my dad's reaction to this.
The poll finds that Limbaugh has grown even less popular with swing voters since the election.
Swing voters.
That's right.
When I started this program, ladies and gentlemen, I said my objective is to get swing voters.
What am I running for?
Swing voters.
What?
Well, if it was a cold, it was the Zycam that did it because I have been using it.
I didn't think it was because this stayed in the chest.
You know, I've been down with this bug and it was, I mean, a couple days this week.
It's been really, really bad.
It was a cough, but there was no other remnant of a cold.
Then all of a sudden, the congestion started breaking up.
And it is much better.
I've been taking Zycam throughout it.
So if it was a cold, then the Zycam worked.
Actually, you know what I've done?
When I, because I believe in Zycam and I want to show how it works, I have actually allowed myself to be in a perpetual almost cold this whole season so that I could do the effective Zycam commercial by showing you just how Zycam prevents the full onset of a cold.
And it does.
And it has worked for me.
And don't forget, folks, I've made an executive decision.
We are going on Friday afternoon.
We're just going to ram it down our throats.
On Friday afternoon, the last half of this program, we are going to replay in its entirety my speech to CPAC, which will have been by that time two weeks ago.
Oh, yeah, it might be the last, yeah, it's 90 minutes since we got, yeah, it's okay, it's 90 minutes.
We got commercials in there.
So we'll play a lot of it.
There will be a lot.
It may take the last two hours to get the last 90 minutes in there.
Jason Lewis will be here for the opening of the program as well.
Again, I have a long ago scheduled charity golf outing this weekend.
So actually, it's Thursday, Friday, and Saturday.
If we had a show here on Sunday, I could do that, but we don't.
Brief timeout.
We'll come back after this.
Stay with us.
Another story here in the New York Times.
The list of demands keeps getting longer.
Some banks are just angry as they can be, folks, over all the strings attached to their activities now.
And they want to give back this bailout money.
Conditions have become so onerous that they want to return the bailout money.
They're not allowed to run their business the way they've wanted to in the past.
Now, granted, if you're going to put your hand out and you're going to take somebody else's money, I don't care whose it is, that person's going to have some say in how you run your business.
But the banks are getting fed up with it.
So there's a potential for more cracks and fissures here.
Jason Lewis tomorrow and Friday, CPAC speech in its entirety on Friday.
See you back here Monday.
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