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April 20, 2009 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:25
April 20, 2009, Monday, Hour #3
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Time Text
No, I would say that it is reckless.
I'd say everything Obama is doing is reckless.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I'll explain it here in just a second.
The program started.
I got to go.
People in my ear think I can do 13 things at once.
Wish I can, which is why they do it.
Greetings.
Welcome back.
It's El Rushbow behind the Golden EIB microphone, the Limboy Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.
Nice to have you here, folks.
800-282-2882, the email address, El Rushbow at EIBNet.com.
Reckless.
Releasing CIA interrogation memos.
It's reckless.
Michael Hayden, let me look at the soundbite roster.
I want to see if I got Mike Hayden from Fox News Sunday yesterday.
Yes, we do.
Grab Soundbite 16.
Mike Hayden, the former CIA director, so we have just totally blown up national security, releasing the interrogation memos.
It's a very reckless thing to do.
And folks, I have to tell you something.
Now, this is just me, but I'm born and raised in the United States of America.
I love my country.
I am proud of my country, and I believe in the uniqueness of it for the good, not only the people of this country, but the people of the world.
I think we have done great things.
We have liberated people in bondage, slavery, involuntary servitude.
We have liberated political prisoners.
We've liberated whole populations.
We are the last great hope.
We are the greatest force for good on the face of the earth.
I can no more imagine, if I were to pretend to be president of the United States, I can no more imagine going anywhere, either in this country to make a speech or an appearance or overseas with foreign leaders.
I just, I can't relate to it.
I cannot imagine sitting around a bunch of America-hating dictators and listening to it without getting angry as I can be.
I cannot possibly, I cannot imagine myself standing up and agreeing with these people.
You know, most chief executives, most presidents try to maintain a continuity based on a shared belief in the greatness of America.
Some presidents had different views of what was great, but we've never had a president, I don't think, who didn't think we were great until now.
Now we've got a president who doesn't believe in the greatness of America.
He feels the need to apologize for it and to sit idly by and even chuckle when this nation's entire existence is ripped to shreds and all he does is thank them for not blaming him personally for it because he wasn't old enough to have participated in the rotten deeds that these people cite.
I can't relate.
As an American, I just can't relate to sitting around listening to this.
I can't relate going to a meeting where I know I'm going to hear it.
And I can't relate to not standing up and telling these people what I think of what they just said.
I think coddling the people that hate this country for whatever reasons is just reckless as it can be.
Now, individually, all of these things alone probably are not a great indictment.
But man, they're starting to add up.
And now equity in the banks and equity in the car companies and General Motors just announced they are laying off 16,000 salaried employees.
General Motors just announced they're laying off 16,000 salaried employees.
And the sad thing is that when I see that report, I imagine that in parts of this country there are people cheering and applauding.
And there are people who voted for Obama who are cheering and applauding that he's getting it right.
He's punishing those who destroyed it.
He's punishing those people who ruined me and who ruined us.
And it's about time those white-collar people found out what it's like to walk out of the door without a job.
This is a man who has so emotionally connected with the people that hate this country that they applaud harm and bad news for individual Americans.
They applaud it.
They're happy about it.
These are the people that voted for Barack Obama.
It's just I can't relate to any of it.
Now, as I've mentioned before, the Republicans don't have the votes to stop any of this in the House or Senate.
Senate's closer game than in the House.
They can't stop Diddley Squat.
The Senate, it's a little, he has a little iffier time there, but not really by much.
The only person that's going to be able to harm Obama is himself.
And the cumulative effect of these individual little things that most people, if they were just happening in an isolated way, probably wouldn't give much weight to.
But giving up all of our interrogations, Terry.
Here, listen to Mike Hayden talk about this.
This is yesterday on Fox News Sunday, Chris Wallace question.
So you're suggesting that we no longer will have the ability to extract the information that we need.
I think that teaching our enemies our outer limits by taking techniques off the table, we have made it more difficult in a whole host of circumstances I can imagine, more difficult for CIA officers to defend the nation.
The really dangerous effect of this, Chris, is that you will have agency officers stepping back from the kinds of things that the nation expects them to do.
I mean, if you were to go to an agency officer today and say, go do this, and why am I authorized to do this?
And I say, well, it's authorized by the president.
The attorney general says it's lawful.
And it's been briefed to Congress.
That agency officer is going to say, yeah, I know, but I see what's going on here now.
Have you run up by the ACLU?
What's the New York Times editorial board think?
Have you discussed this with any potential presidential candidates?
So he's right.
You're going to have reluctance on the part of operatives at the CIA to follow orders.
And by the way, Hayden, this is very, very important here.
Why am I authorized to do this?
Well, it's been authorized by a president.
The Attorney General says it's lawful.
It's been briefed to Congress.
Do you realize this waterboarding business, Pete Wayner at the Commentary Magazine, has gone back and has found the quotes from Democrats back in 2002.
They were briefed 10 to 20 times on what was planned with captured al-Qaeda prisoners.
And some Democrats said, is that all?
I think Pelosi was one that said, oh, you're going to, waterboarding was mentioned.
A lot of Democrats said, you've got to do more than that.
You've got to get everything you can from these people.
But again, that's 2002.
Now here in 2009, we have got to somehow find a way to punish the people that did this.
So it's just reckless.
This is a reckless young man.
And like I said, I don't think it's by accident.
I think he's been taught well.
I think he's smart enough to soak up what he's been taught.
And he's smart enough to be able to regurgitate it back, what he's been taught by the people that were formative influences in his life.
But I can't relate to any of it.
I can't relate to giving up the nation's secrets to our enemies like he's done.
I can't relate to siding with dictators.
They were just debating on Fox News what the Obama doctrine is.
Here's a good definition of the Obama doctrine.
The Obama doctrine means criticizing past presidents, apologizing for past American sins, real and imagined, apologizing to both allies and enemies on domestic and preferably foreign soil in the hope that doing so allows Obama to speak with greater moral force and clarity.
See, the Obama doctrine is all about making him look good.
The Obama doctrine is not about advancing the interests of the United States.
The Obama doctrine is about advancing his interests.
He is totally willing to falsely trash the past of this country in the eyes of people who have not our best interests at heart.
He's totally comfortable trashing country in front of people like that in order that they will like him, so that he will have moral authority and clarity.
My friend Pete Wayner puts it well.
He says, the overriding goal of the Obama doctrine is to make the person it is named after look good rather than, if necessary, at the expense of the nation he was elected to represent.
And that pretty much sums it up.
We've got a couple Obama sound bites from his first ever cabinet meeting at the White House today.
Here's the first of two.
Veterans Affairs has canceled or delayed 26 conferences, saving nearly $17.8 million.
And they're using less expensive alternatives like video conferencing.
The USDA, under Secretary Bilsack, is working to combine 1,500 employees from seven office locations into a single facility in 2011, which we estimate will save $62 million over a 15-year lease term.
Janet Napolitano at the Department of Homeland Security estimates that they can save up to $52 million over five years just by purchasing office supplies in bulk.
What a joke.
What an absolutely insulting joke.
Obama has run up $4 trillion in debt, if not more.
And he calls this big cabinet meeting today to announce how his cabinet departments are going to cut a total of $100 million.
And Janet Napolitano is going to cut $52 million over five years just by purchasing office supplies in bulk.
And USDA is going to save $62 million over 15 years.
This is an insult.
I'll tell you why this is happening after this next bite here.
One of the messages that I delivered today to all members of the cabinet was, as well as you've already done, you're going to have to do this.
I'm asking for all of them to identify at least $100 million in additional cuts to their administrative budgets, separate and apart from the work that Peter Ortzag and the rest of our team are doing to go line by line with the budget and identify problematic cuts that need to be made.
He doesn't have the line item veto.
He can't go line by line in the budget and cut anything.
Now, all of this is happening.
They're going to have to cut $100 million more.
And this gets back to the emotional connection.
This is what people want to hear.
They don't hear the amount.
Plus, $100 million sounds like a lot more than $8 trillion because $100 is bigger than $8.
100 million sounds bigger than 4 trillion.
4 trillion is the new spending in debt.
100 million, what's a lot of money, people think.
People want to hear he's going to cut spending.
He's going to cut the budget.
And I'm sure they've got internal polling data that shows these tea parties are successful, and these tea parties are a problem.
So they're responding to the tea parties here.
That's all this is.
And they're responding to the tea parties with chump change, with irrelevant numbers.
Thousands of people turn out at tea parties to protest big government.
Obama can say, I heard you, I cut the budget.
$52 million over five years by purchasing office supplies and buckets.
It's a damn insult.
They should have been doing this years and years and years ago if this was the case.
I got to take a break.
I'm getting to the point of being fed up to the point I can't speak intelligently here about this.
Back to the phones we go here on Rush Limbaugh's EIB Network.
Also direct to you from the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.
I go to Dallas.
And Lois, Lewis, thank you for calling.
Great to have you here with us.
Hi.
Good to meet you.
Thank you, sir.
I guess my comment is I voted for Obama, and I actually thought that we were going to take this government into moving forward.
And I'm just watching a power grab, not watching any of these problems.
I voted for him to solve some of these issues, and I just don't see anything.
I don't see anything.
I'm disappointed.
What did you expect to see solved?
What did you think that he was going to take this government into moving forward?
I think that basically helping the people get what they need.
Healthcare is an example.
I believe that everybody should be able to get health care.
But to nationalize the health care, he had planned earlier to fix Medicaid and Medicare, to fix the product that the government already has.
And to nationalize our health care is just one of the problems that I see coming.
You didn't know that that's what he was talking about during the campaign, nationalizing health care, Medicare, Medicare?
Well, there were some issues where he said nationalizing campaign, but nationalizing our health care.
But he made it to seem to, here's a product, here's Medicaid, here's Medicare.
Let's fix it.
And which is, you know, I truly believe that everybody should be able to have health care.
And if the government can provide it, well, you know, that's great.
But, you know, as I'm watching.
Well, except there's a problem with that, and that is that government can't provide it.
Government has promised to end poverty since 1964.
Government has promised to end racism, sexism, and bigotry.
Government's promise to do a lot of things, and it fails at practically everything it does except war.
Now, let me ask you, this is a, since you have this mindset and you're a little bit dubious now about what you thought was going to happen versus what is happening.
I think one of the things that the Obama campaign in selling national health care, and I'm sure you'll recall this, I mean, everybody on the Democrat side complained about the 42 to 48 million Americans who didn't have health insurance.
And that was said to be unfair for a country this prosperous and this rich that 42 million Americans were uninsured.
We have to do something about that.
So a lot of people think, okay, Obama's going to come along and make sure everybody has health insurance.
Now, the thing to consider, let's pretend that he was able to do that.
Now, 20 million of these people at least don't want it.
They're young.
They don't want to buy it yet because they're healthy.
They don't think they need to have it.
They've got other expenses they'd rather spend their money on.
But let's just assume for a moment that everybody was insured.
The real question here: does health insurance guarantee medical coverage?
No.
No, I don't think it does.
And that's why, Rush, that's why I think that government health care should be as competitive.
You should be able to choose from your health insurance.
And, you know, if you can't afford to have insurance, and God forbid something happened to you, you should be able to hospital.
You should be able to go and get treatment.
And I think that the government should be able to provide an alternative, an alternate product that's affordable.
Has this ever been done anywhere in the world?
I come from El Salvador.
I have dual citizenship.
And in El Salvador, the health care does work.
And let me tell you why.
El Salvador's health care.
Doctors, if you have a practice in El Salvador and you're a doctor, practicing doctor, you must provide the government with a certain amount of hours at the end of the week.
You must provide five, four hours of your time during the week to go to the hospital and be able to get the health care.
Why did you leave El Salvador then?
Well, I mean, I'm from, originally I'm from Houston, but dual citizenship.
I went back to El Salvador in 92, back in the Clinton days, to start my own company.
And, you know, basically, I went out there and we provided, we did a few donations.
We exported medical supplies is what we did out there.
Why did you want to get paid for them?
Why did I want to get paid for?
Yeah, but you want doctors to work for nothing.
Why did you want to get paid for your medical supplies?
And your exercise.
Well, it just I donated a few medical supplies, but not all.
Here's what's happening in America right now.
And you've given me a lot of premises that I could fairly well attack.
Government should do this, government should do that, when there's no evidence government ever does anything like that on that big a scope, well and right.
What's happening is the government's already dictating to doctors.
And that's why fewer and fewer people are becoming doctors.
And more and more people are opting, more and more doctors are opting out of Medicare.
When you hear Obama say that he intends to squeeze more out of doctors and insurance companies, what he means is he's going to reduce their payments.
Well, now, as much as it costs and as much time as you have to invest to become a doctor, it's going to be pointless for anybody who's any good at it to want to go into the field.
If the government is going to be the sole determinant of what you earn rather than the market, and if the government's going to determine what you can and can't charge and how many patients you can and can't see, which is already starting to happen, then more and more doctors are going to pull out of Medicare and Medicaid.
They already are.
So far, the government can't stop them from doing that.
But that may come down the road.
When you have this kind of centralized planning over something as massive as this, it will never, ever work.
The American people are not entitled to government-sponsored health care.
It is nowhere in the Constitution, just like they're not entitled to cars, and they're not entitled to hotel rooms.
And there's more I'll add when we come back.
I know somebody has to be in this day and age.
All right, two things about health care.
First, a question.
If everybody had health insurance, does it mean everybody would get medical coverage?
And it does not.
And this is an important point overlooked.
The Democrats love to run around and talk about 42, 3, whatever it is, million people uninsured.
That's right, Mr. Limbo.
And if we just, everybody had government-sponsored health insurance and everybody would get medical coverage when they need it.
No, they wouldn't.
Here is something that's gotten lost in the drive to institute universal health insurance.
Health insurance does not automatically lead to health care.
More and more doctors are dropping out of one insurance plan or another, especially government plans.
And with that happening, there's no guarantee that you'll be able to see a doctor no matter what coverage you have.
Medicare Payment Advisory Commission has reported in 2008, last year, 28% of Medicare beneficiaries looking for a primary care physician had trouble finding one.
Primary care?
We're not even talking emergency here.
28% of Medicare beneficiaries had trouble finding a doctor.
The reasons are clear.
2008 survey by Texas Medical Association found that only 38% of primary care doctors in Texas took new Medicare patients.
These statistics are similar in New York State and in other states.
More and more doctors are turning away Medicare patients because of the diminished reimbursements and the growing delay in payments.
This is, by the way, an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal by a guy named Dr. Siegel, who is an internist, associate professor of medicine at NYU Langone Medical Center.
He's also a Fox News contributor.
More and more doctors turning away from Medicare, turning away Medicare patients because of diminished reimbursements and the growing delay in payments.
I've had several new Medicare patients come to my office in the last few months with multiple diseases and long lists of medications simply because their longtime provider, who they liked, abruptly stopped taking Medicare.
One of the top mammographers in New York City works in my office building, but she no longer accepts Medicare.
She charges patients more than $300 cash for each procedure.
I continue to send my elderly women patients downstairs for the test because she's so good, but no one is happy about paying.
Well, somebody pays, whether you do or not.
Somebody always pays.
I know it sounds awfully good, like in El Zalvador.
They make the doctors work five additional hours.
They make the doctors work five additional hours.
And that's considered proper government telling people how much they have to work.
And by the way, those are unpaid additional hours.
This is so, so out of whack.
But at least this young guy, he's disgruntled because Obama's not making this happen.
He thought there was going to be everybody with insurance in national health care, and it isn't happening.
He thinks that's important to him.
Everybody ought to have health coverage.
The dirty little secret is, we mention this I don't know how many damn times, every time this discussion comes up.
You have an emergency, federal law requires an emergency room treat you.
Nobody in this country misses emergency medical care if they want access to it.
Nobody misses it.
Lenny in Pittsburgh.
Lenny, home of the Steelers.
Great to have you on the program, sir.
Hello.
Hello.
How are you today, Rush?
Fine and dandy, sir.
Good.
Well, you want me to just fire off what I called about?
No, I want you to go kind of slow because I'm in a bad mood today.
Okay.
Well, what I'm calling about, actually, is a comment that you had made earlier.
You said that you don't choose your words, or actually, you didn't say it like that.
You said that you don't say things to evoke an emotional response out of people, that you do things and you say things to teach.
And it's, I guess, about learning on your show.
And I kind of take offense to that because every day, all day, I hear one thing after another that is somewhat exaggerated just to get an emotional response out of people.
Give me an example.
Oh, okay.
You say that Obama was pallying around with those world leaders.
The word pallying around kind of is to get an emotional response from people, I would think.
You know, you call him the prophet and the Messiah.
Well, he's really not those things.
He thinks he is, though.
He thinks he is, and he acts that way.
Well, but for you to say those things is just to get an emotional response out of people.
No, I'm trying to communicate what I think about the guy, and I'm trying to communicate what I think other than how other people react to him.
This program operates in the arena of ideas.
I am trying to share my own critical thinking with people so that they pick up on the technique.
Using emotion, as I mean it, is President Obama telling people things that'll never happen, promising them that they will.
Emotion is used primarily in demagoguery and populism.
You identify what people think they want and you tell them you're going to give it to them when you're going to give them the exact opposite, when you're going to not do it at all.
That's using emotion.
The last thing Obama wants is for his voters to start actually thinking about what's happening versus what he's saying, because if that ever does happen, he's going to be in a world of trouble.
Because they're two different things.
But everything I tell you, I believe, when I say I want Obama to fail, you think that's an emotional ploy?
Yeah, kind of.
Well, no, originally I said.
That's 100% intellectually honest.
Now I actually believe that you believe that, which is, you know, you're spreading that around now, which is getting an emotional response from people.
I truly believe that a lot of the tea parties and all that activity had a lot to do with you and some other conservative radio and Fox News, who is fair and balanced, but they were actually, they had like commercials for this.
This is a classic.
Now, what you're doing to me, what you're saying, you are regurgitating the drivel I have read on left-wing blogs.
You are classic.
You have not said one original thing.
I've heard everything you've said spewed by television commentators or written by bloggers.
And you are trying to mischaracterize and impugn the people that went to the tea parties as nothing but a bunch of mind-numb robots who were led there by Svengalis and Pied Pipers like me.
I had nothing to do with a single tea party.
These people that showed up showed up because they understand intellectually what is happening to their future and their children's future and what's happening to their country.
And they want to stop it.
Now, I can't argue with you that I get an emotional response from emotional people, but I wish I didn't.
When I say I want Obama to fail, I want people to stop and think, what does he mean?
What is he really saying?
Even though I say it as clear as I can, it is the emotional response that people think I'm saying I want them to fail because they have an emotional tie to Obama because he's a cult leader to them.
So they think I'm insulting them when I'm actually standing up for them.
Individual liberty is going to triumph only if Obama fails.
How anybody can say after this summit, after giving up the interrogation memos and secrets of the CIA, after $4,000 billion in debt, that sounds bigger than $4 trillion, right?
$4,000 billion in debt, $4,000 billion in debt, he's going to cut $100 million.
Now, I'm telling you, Lenny, what's happening out there is destruction of the country as we have known it, sidling up.
He was palling around with people.
He was paling around with these people.
I understand I get an emotional reaction and I hate it.
Because anytime I get an emotional reaction, it is not fact-based and it's so embarrassingly wrong, it makes me worry about the country.
I can say, I sit here and I plan it very carefully what I'm going to say, even though I do improvisational monologues, but I say what I think.
And the fact that people respond emotionally without even hearing the intellectual substance of it is a frightening thing.
It's frightening where our country is.
But the Democrat Party, not just Obama, the Democrat Party and liberals live off this emotional connection.
The greatest emotional connection I can think of, and it may not be the, right, is the attachment that black voters have to the Democrat Party.
The Democrat Party has destroyed the black family for 50 years.
The Democrat Party has done not one thing they have promised the Democrat Party except to try to go out and punish a bunch of people who they think have held black people back.
Well, just like Obama, here's what I would say to Obama.
Obama thanks Danielle Ortega for not blaming him for what happened when he was only three months old.
Obama thanks Ortega for not blaming him for the rotten aspects of America.
I would like to say Obama, well then stop blaming me for slavery.
I wasn't alive.
But see, they still do.
They blame white America today for continued ongoing slavery.
The Democrat Party has done more to keep this country divided and roiled and failing to make progress than anything I could have attempted myself.
Because I want just the opposite.
If there's ever anybody who really wants us all to agree, it's me.
It's just, I want you to agree with me because I'm right.
And I have the best interests of everybody in heart.
I want you to succeed.
I want this country to be greater than it's ever been.
And you realize how frustrating it gets to see for me to see stupidity multiply to geometrical progressions.
Every time I utter something that I passionately, truly believe that is singularly intelligent, brilliant, or whatever you want to call it, to look at the stupid, uninformed, ignoramous, head up the rear end emotional responses from fellow Americans.
That's what's frustrating.
To watch people like you swallow the Kool-Aid on the false premise that the people you vote for are the nice ones, the compassionate ones, the tolerant ones.
I want to grab you by the shoulders and shake you until you wake up.
I want you to start using your head instead of blindly following your heart.
Start thinking something of yourself rather than hoping other people get cut down to size so you feel better.
Love yourself.
Realize how great, unique you are.
But you're never going to do that if you're caught up in emotional tugs with a president or popular sentiment or whatever.
Well, I don't want to cash my individuality in at the door.
I don't want to check it when I walk in anywhere.
So, yeah, people have emotional reactions to me.
It's the last thing I want back after this.
Ha.
How are you, Rush Limbaugh on a roll, kicking off a brand new week of broadcast excellence?
This is Daniel in Goldboro, North Carolina.
Daniel, hi.
Nice to have you here.
How are you doing, Rush?
It's an honor to talk to you.
Thank you.
After years of watching you on TV on AFN when I was stationed overseas and listening to your show religiously.
Can you please tell me, oh, wise one, when is America going to wake up?
I watch the news.
I consider myself a somewhat educated person, but how can the wool be pulled over so many people's eyes without them realizing what's happening?
Oh, demagoguery is not a new thing.
The wool's been pulled over people's eyes for ever.
I mean, I spent 24 years in the Air Force working on airplanes, and now I'm in the law enforcement career field.
Wait a minute.
You're an ex-vet.
That means the Department of Homeland Security thinks that you're a Timothy McVay.
Yeah, I was going to ask you what you thought I was.
Well, I'll tell you what I think about that.
I'll tell you what.
If one bad ex-military guy can force Janet Reno Napolitano to keep watch on all former military people, then I would think we also need to keep a sharp eye on all of Obama's friends and associates, since two of them, Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dorn, actually blew up the Pentagon.
They were domestic terrorists.
I think we need to keep a sharp eye on every professor in this country who is advocating some of the most extreme radicalism to these students.
If Janet Napolitano wants to really protect the homeland and she's really worried about domestic terrorists, then keep a constant tail on Bill Ayers when he goes to Venezuela and champions Hugo Chavez' reformist education forums and so forth.
That's what I think about it.
Yeah.
So I'm okay.
You don't feel like I'm a threat to our country?
No, I don't think you're a threat to the country.
Well, I thank you, but that means a lot coming from the U Center.
I truly mean that.
To the contrary.
You're not a threat to the country.
I was holding up my sarcasm, Carter.
I understand that.
Well, I appreciate the phone call.
People wake up when enough things happen all at once.
You know, this is water torture.
You know, there's a cut by a thousand, a death by a thousand cuts, and we're at three or four cuts.
And we've got to have a whole bunch more cuts before people wake up.
We've lost, you know, young people, and young people are always the idealistic ones, and they're the ones that more easily fall prey to utopian idealism.
And it just takes them growing up.
It just takes them growing up.
We're in a position here.
We don't have the power to stop Obama, so he's going to have to stop himself.
And with nothing to stop him, there's nothing to stop him.
And as there's nothing to stop him, he's going to continue to try to get away with as much as he can.
And at some point, people are going, wait a minute, is it not what I realized?
I didn't think I was going to have to go to DMV to withdraw money from my bank or some such thing.
Anyway, I've got to take a brief time out here, folks.
I'm glad you've been with us today.
We've got a little bit more to wrap it up right after this.
So Obama's going to go over to CIA and talk to people at the CIA.
What are they going to apologize for?
Whatever.
They're going to all end up loving the guy.
That's what they'll have to say.
That's what they'll be reported as saying.
And we will be back tomorrow to do it all over again at that time.
See you then, folks.
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