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March 13, 2009 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:36
March 13, 2009, Friday, Hour #2
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Thank you all.
I can't tell you how uh how wonderful that makes me feel.
It happens everywhere I go, but it's still special.
If you all will indulge me, I learned something.
Uh I guess it's early Friday morning that I didn't know.
Maybe Ferdy morning Friday mornings when I learned this.
I learned that Fox, God love them, is televising this speech on the Fox News Channel.
Which means...
Which means, ladies and gentlemen, this is my first ever address to the nation.
Thank you.
Now, I have someone in back taking phone numbers.
In fact, in fact, I would like to introduce to you my security chief, man who runs all of my security.
His name is Joseph Stalin.
Joseph, would you please?
I am safe.
I am safe from any liberal attack in public because they would be afraid of offending Stalin.
Now the opportunity here to address the nation's serious one.
It really is, and I uh uh I want to take it seriously.
I want to address something.
I know that people are probably watching this who never have listened to my program and may not even really know what conservatism is.
They think they do based on how they've been told, the way we've been impugned and maligned and so forth.
One of the things that is totally erroneous about me, and I just want to get this up front, is that I'm pompous, and that I am arrogant.
Neither of these things are remotely true.
I can tell you a joke to illustrate this.
Larry King passed away, goes to heaven, is greeted by St. Peter at the gates.
St. Peter says, Welcome, Mr. King.
It's great to have you here.
I want to show you around, give you an idea of what's here.
Maybe you can pick a place that you'd like to reside.
King says, I just have one question.
Is Rush Limbaugh here?
No, no, no, no.
He's got a lot of time yet, Mr. King.
So St. Peter begins the tour.
Larry King sees the various places and they're just beyond anything we can imagine in terms of beauty.
Finally gets to the biggest room of all with this giant throne.
And over the throne is a flashing beautiful angelic neon sign that says Rush Limbaugh.
And Larry King looks at St. Peter and says, I thought you said he wasn't here.
He's not, he's not.
This is God's room.
He just thinks he's Rush Limbaugh.
Thank you.
So you see, I'm not pompous.
Now, seriously, for those of you watching on C-Span as well and on Fox, I want to tell you who we all are in this room.
I want to tell you who conservatives are.
We conservatives have not done a good enough job of just laying out basically who we are because we make the mistake of assuming that people know.
Well, what they know is largely incorrect based on the way we are portrayed in pop culture in the drive-by media by the Democrat Party.
Let me tell you who we conservatives are.
We love people.
Thank you.
When we look out over the United States of America, when we are anywhere, when we see a group of people such as this or anywhere, we see Americans, we see human beings, we don't see groups, we don't see victims, we don't see people we want to exploit.
What we see, what we see is potential.
We do not look out across the country and see the average American, the person that makes this country work, we do not see that person with contempt.
We don't think that person doesn't have what it takes.
we believe that person can be the best he or she wants to be if certain things are just removed from their path like onerous taxes regulations and too much government uh...
We want every American to be the best he or she chooses to be.
We recognize, we recognize that we are all individuals.
We love and revere our founding documents, the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.
We believe that the preamble of the Constitution contains an inarguable truth.
That we are all endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights, among them life.
Yes.
Liberty, freedom, and the pursuit of happiness.
Now those of you watching at home may wonder why this is being applauded.
We conservatives think all three are under assault.
Thank you.
We don't want to tell anybody how to live.
It's up to you.
If you want to make the best of yourself, feel free.
If you want to ruin your life, we'll try to stop and make it because it's but it's a waste.
We look over the country as it is today, we see so much waste.
Human potential that's been destroyed by 50 years of a welfare state, by a failed war on poverty that has destroyed.
We love the people of this country.
And we want this to be the greatest country it can be, but we do understand as people created and endowed by our creator, we're all individuals.
We resist the effort to group us.
We resist the effort to make us feel that we're all the same, that we're no different than anybody else.
We are all different.
There are no two things or people in this world who are created in a way that they end up with equal outcomes.
That's up to them.
They are created equal to give the chance.
So 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.
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, and you'll see demonstrated here as the afternoon goes on, doesn't exist on our side.
We want everybody to succeed.
I am...
You know why?
You know why?
We...
We want the country to succeed, and for the country to succeed, its people, its individuals must succeed.
Everyone among us must be pursuing his ambition or her desire, whatever, with excellence, trying to be the best they can be, not told, as they are told by the Democrat Party.
You really can't do that.
You don't have what it takes.
Besides, you're a minority or you're a woman, and there are too many people willing to discriminate against you.
You can't get anywhere.
You need to depend on us.
Well, take a look.
Someone has to say this.
I am thrilled for the opportunity to say it in my first national address to the nation.
I'm gonna touch on this in more detail in a moment, but this is just to get you thinking.
Take a look at all of the constituency groups that for 50 years have been depending on the Democrat Party to improve their lives.
And you tell me if you find any.
They're still complaining.
They are still griping about the same problems.
Their problems don't get fixed by government, and those lives have been poisoned.
Those lives have been cut short by false promises from government representatives who have said, don't worry about it, we'll take care of you.
Just vote for us.
Russia's CPAC speech continues after this on the EIB Network.
For those of you just tuning in on the Fox News Channel with C-SPAN, I am Rush Limbaugh, and I want everyone in this room and every one of you around the country to succeed.
I want anyone who believes in life, liberty, pursuit of happiness to succeed.
And I want any force, any person, any element of an overarching big government that would stop your success, I want that organization, that element, or that person to fail.
I want you to succeed.
Also, for those of you in the drive-by media watching, I have not needed a teleprompter for anything I've said.
Thank you.
And nor do any of us need a teleprompter because our beliefs are not the result of calculations and contrivances.
Our beliefs are not the result of a deranged psychology.
Our beliefs are our core.
Our beliefs are our hearts.
We don't have to make notes about what we believe.
We don't have to write down, oh geez, does I believe it I believe.
We can tell people what we believe off the top of our heads, and we can do it with passion, and we can do it with clarity, and we can do it persuasively.
Some of us just haven't had the inspiration or motivation to do so in a number of years, but that's about to change.
Thank you.
For example, we gather here.
Uh in the uh super exclusive private green room that nobody but about 55 people were allowed into.
And they and they said that there's a sense of liberation here among all of you that are attending CPAC.
And I understand what the sense of liberation is about.
But don't make the mistake at the same time of feeling liberated as thinking we're better and we can do better as a minority, because we're not a minority, and if you start thinking of yourselves as a minority, you're going to be defensive, and you're going to allow the majority to set the agenda and the premise.
You're responding to it.
The American people may not all vote the way we would wish them to, but more Americans than you know live their lives as conservatives in one degree or another.
And they are waiting for leadership.
We need conservative leadership.
We can take this country back.
All we need is to nominate the right candidate.
It's no more complicated than that.
People who...
Now 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 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 burners, that punishes, and he speaks negatively of the of the uh of the country.
Ronald Reagan used to speak of a shining city on a hill.
Barack Obama portrays America as a soup kitchen and 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?
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 are younger than nations that have been on this planet for thousands of years.
And by the way, we're no different as human beings than 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.
The freedom that we spoke of earlier is the freedom, it's the ambition, it's the desire, the wherewithal, the passions that people have that gave us the great entrepreneurial advances, the great inventions, the greatest food production, the human lifestyle advances in this country.
Why shouldn't that be rewarded?
Why is that now the focus of punishment?
Why is that now the focus of it of uh blame?
Mayor Bloomberg the other day, ladies and gentlemen, resisting his governor's call for an increased tax on the rich in New York, had some astounding numbers.
Eight million people live in New York.
Forty thousand of those eight million pay roughly 60 to 70 percent of New York's operating budget.
He was afraid that if he raised taxes on those people, some of them might leave.
Mayor, one already has, by the way.
Stop and think of this, though.
Stop and think of this.
40,000 people out of eight million.
He's got a he's he's right.
If 10,000 of them leave, or 5,000, they've got a huge problem.
Because New York has its own welfare state inside the one the federal government's created.
They've got a dependency class that has grown up and been educated, their entitlement is to be fed and taken care of by these evil mean people who have more than they do.
In if if New York City, New York State, or Washington, D.C. were a business, these 40,000 people would be taken on golf tournament trips to Los Angeles, and they would be wined and dined, and they would be thanked, and they would be encouraged to keep it up.
They wouldn't be told they're the problem.
They wouldn't be told, except there's you know, I pride my accuracy rating.
There is one other business where the customer is always wrong, and that's the media.
Sorry, but have you ever called them to complain about whatever they do?
They say yes, sir, yes, sir, three bags full, they hang up and say you're too stupid to know how they're doing what they're doing.
You can't get it, you are not sophisticated enough.
So that's another business where the customer is always wrong.
But seriously, the people who have achieved great things, most of it is not inherited.
Most wealth in this country is the result of entrepreneurial, just plain old hard work.
There's no reason to punish it.
There's no reason to raise taxes on these people.
Barack Obama, the Democrat Party, have one responsibility, and that's to respect the oath they gave to protect, defend, and follow the U.S. Constitution.
They don't.
They don't have the right to take money that's not theirs and none of it is from the back pockets of producers and give it to groups like Acorn, which are going to advance the Democrat Party.
If anybody but government were doing this, it would be a crime.
And many of us think it's bordering on that as it exists now.
Thank you.
President Obama is so busy trying to foment and create anger in a created atmosphere of crisis.
He is so busy fueling the emotions of class envy that he is forgotten it's not his money he's spending.
He has seems to have.
In fact, the money he's spending is not ours.
He is spending wealth that has yet to be created.
And that is not sustainable.
It will not work.
This has been tried around the world.
And every time it's been tried, it's a failed disaster.
What's the longest war in American history?
Somebody saying the war on poverty.
Smart group.
Yep, war on poverty.
War on poverty essentially started in the 30s as part of the New Deal.
But it really ramped up in the 60s with Lyndon Bain Johnson, part of the Great Society, war on poverty.
We have transferred something like 10 trillion, maybe close to 11 trillion, from producers and earners to non-producers and earners since 1965.
And yet, as I listen to the Democrat Party campaign, why America's still a soup kitchen.
The poor are still poor, and they have no hope.
And they're poor for what reason?
Well, they're poor because of us, because we don't care, and because we've gotten rich by taking from them.
That's what kids in school are taught today.
That's what others are said to the media.
You know why they're poor?
You know why they remain poor?
Because their lives have been destroyed by the never-ending government paid that's designed to help them, but it destroys ambition.
It destroys the education they might get to learn to be self-fulfilling.
And it breaks our heart.
It breaks our heart.
It is.
We lose track of numbers with all of the money.
With all the money that's been transferred, redistributed, with all the charitable giving in this country.
Ladies and gentlemen, there ought not be any poverty except among those who are genuinely ill-equipped.
But most of the people in poverty in this country are equipped for far much more.
They've just been beaten down.
They've been told, don't worry, we'll take care of you.
There's nothing out there for you anyway.
You're going to be discriminated against.
And it breaks our heart to see this.
We can't have a great country and a growing economy, with more and more people being told they have a right because of some injustice that's been done to them or some discrimination, that they have a right to the earnings of others.
And it's gotten so out of hand now that what worries me is that this administration, the Barack Obama administration, is actively seeking to expand the welfare state in this country because he wants to control it.
George Will once asked Dr. Friedrich van Hayek, tremendous classical liberal economist, great man.
George was in 1975, Dr. Van Hayek.
Why is it that intellectuals, you know, supposed smartest people in the room?
Why is it that intellectuals can look right out their windows, look at their own homes, their cars, look at their universities, and not see the bounties and the growth and the greatness of capitalism.
And von Hayek said, you know, I've I've troubled over this for years, and I've finally concluded that for intellectuals, pseudo-intellectuals, and all liberals, it's about control.
It's not about raising revenue.
You think Obama has any intention of paying for all this spending?
Folks, if he had any intention of paying for it, he wouldn't do 90% of it because we don't have the money.
They don't care about paying for it.
All that's just words.
All that's just rhetoric paying for it because he knows you have to worry about paying for it.
He knows we all have to be concerned about, oh, except wrong again.
Except the wards of Barney Frank and Chris Dodd who were getting given homes that everybody knew they could never pay for.
And now Barney Frank and Chris Dodd, the architects along with Bill Clinton of the policy that gave us the whole subprime mortgage crisis, get to sit around and act as innocent spectators to investigate what went on when they largely had the biggest role in causing it.
Our encore presentation of the Rush Limbaugh CPAC speech will continue on the EIB Network.
Congressman Frank's definition of affordable housing is you get a house that you don't have to pay for that everybody else in the neighborhood will pay for.
And why?
Well, because it's unfair that some people can have a house and some people can't.
See, it's just unfair.
So here we have two systems.
We have socialism, collectivism, style, whatever you want to call it.
Versus versus uh capitalism.
Now, admittedly, over here on the right side, capitalism, there will be unequal outcomes because we're all different.
And some of us care more and have more passion, and we know what we want to do, and others are still struggling for it.
Some people are just gonna work harder than others.
Okay, you get what you work for.
Those who have a genuine inability for whatever reason are taken care of.
We're compassionate people.
On the on the left side, when you get into this collectivism socialism stuff, these people on the left, the Democrats and Liberals today, claim that they are pained by the inequities and the inequalities in our society.
And they they they believe that these inequities and inequalities descend from the selfishness and the greed of the achievers.
And so they tell the people who are on different income quintiles, whatever lists, they say it's not that you're not working hard enough.
You could have what they have, perhaps, if you applied it.
They're stealing it from you.
So what liberals do, and I say this again to the another thing, I know the people of the country are watching.
I was watching a focus group after um some event this week.
It might have been after Obama's State of the Union show.
And uh and they had it was it was uh I it was a typical, you know, drive-by media focus group.
They round up losers who hear Obama speak and think that the next day their gas tank's gonna get filled up, they're gonna get a new house, a new kitchen, a new car.
So this one guy said, Oh, I get it was it was it was some guy responding to Bobby Gindle.
Oh, by the way, did you hear about Joe Biden?
Joe Biden was mystified how Bobby Gindle got his shift off at 7-Eleven that night to make the speech.
Wait a minute.
All right, time out, time out.
Suspend speech for explanation of people watching at home.
See, this this I'm glad this happened.
What is that?
You think I just made a joke, an ethnic joke about Bobby Gindle, don't you?
I didn't.
I made a joke about the bigotry of the Vice President of the United States, Joe Biden.
Thank you.
It was Joe Biden while walking through the train station, he knows so well because he's such a real guy.
Uh that he made a comment that you can't go into a 7-Eleven without seeing some Indian guy behind the counter there all over the place.
Now let a conservative say something like that, and he's brought up before a John Conyers committee with Pat Lahey wanting at you next.
Okay, I many of you think I lose my places in these speeches when I interrupt for Mr. But I'm not, by the way.
What time is it?
Okay, we have plenty of time.
We have to be out of here by here by six, otherwise there's all right, okay.
Depends on how you behave.
I'll decide as we go on.
What liberalism Democrat, for those of you in the country, I really I really want you to believe this because it's the truth.
I'm not saying just because I believe it.
It's in my this is a core.
Want the best country we can have.
We want the most prosperous people.
We want to be growing.
We want to lead the world.
We want everybody to want to come here legally.
We want this country to be so damn great.
And we just cringe to watch it basically capitalism be assaulted, assaulted, and our culture be reoriented to where the people that make it work are the enemy.
That's not the United States of America.
The people that make this country work, the people that pay in their mortgages, the people getting up and going to work, striving in this recession to not participate in it, they're not the enemy.
They're the people that hire you.
They're the people that are going to give you a job, the people that are going to give you a raise, the people that need you to do work for them.
Thank you.
President Obama and uh take your pick of any Democrat love to say, we've tried it your way.
Meaning Reaganism.
We've tried it your way.
We tried it your way in the 80s, it didn't work.
We tried it your way eight years, just eight years, last eight years it didn't work.
Oh, excuse me.
Excuse me.
Have you ever noticed those of you watching around the world in my first international address to the world?
Fox is on some international satellites.
They're watching this in the UK right now, going.
Um, when Obama talks about past economies, he somehow always leaves out the recession of the 80s, which's worse than this one.
Why does he leave it out?
Because you know why he leaves it out?
America?
Leaves it out because we got out of that recession with tax cuts.
Our encore presentation of the Rush Limbaugh CPAC speech will continue on the EIB Network.
Rush Limbaugh CPAC We got out of the 1980s recession with tax cuts.
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.
Spending 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.
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