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July 19, 2010 - Rush Limbaugh Program
37:12
July 19, 2010, Monday, Hour #2
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We're back.
The views expressed by the host on this program, that's me, uh documented to be almost always right 99.6% of the time.
Which uh, I mean, and nobody's even close to that.
In fact, nobody's opinions are even audited because they wouldn't get close to that.
Rush Limbaugh at 800-282-2882, the email address, L Rushball at EIBNet.com.
Just one more thing in this monologue segment.
We'll get to the phones and the news items, because we gather we have a great audio soundbite roster and a really, really great stack of stuff here today.
But this is just too important.
It's just, it's it is just too rado radon radon.
Angelo Codevilla, the ruling class, in the July-August issue of the American Spectator.
Now, as I mentioned at the top of this, being the best at what you do does not get you into the ruling class.
You can be the best at what you do and have no prayer of getting into the ruling class.
Just as in high school, you could have been cool and all that, and if you just weren't judged to be right, you're not going to get into big click.
Nobody ever gets out of high school.
Except it gets more serious.
As the big clickers graduate from high school and move on.
Professional prominence or position will not secure a place in the ruling class any more than mere money.
In fact, it's possible to be an official of a major corporation, or a member of the U.S. Supreme Court, just think Clarence Thomas, or even President Ronald Reagan, and not be taken seriously by the ruling class.
Like a fraternity, this class requires above all comedy, being in with the right people, giving the required signs that one is on the right side, and joining in despising the outs.
So when Trent Lott says, Tea Party, we're gonna have to find a way to co-opt them if they win a lot of power in the Senate.
That's exactly what the ruling class wants to hear.
Once an official or professional knows that he shares the manners, the tastes, the interests of the ruling class, and gives lip service to its ideals and shibbolets, and is willing to accommodate the interests of its senior members, he can move profitably among our establishment's parts.
If, for example, and this is a great example.
If you are Lawrence Tribe in 1984, Harvard professor of law, leftist pillar of the establishment, you can quote unquote write your magnum opus by using the products of your student assistant, Ron Klain.
In other words, you don't write it, your assistant does.
And then a decade later, after your assistant admits to having plagiarized what he wrote, other parts are found to be verbatim or paraphrases of a book published in 1974, you, as Lawrence Tribe, claim that your plagiarism was inadvertent.
You can count on the law school's dean, Elena Kagan, to appoint a committee, including former and future Harvard President Derek Bach, that issues a secret report that closes the incident.
Incidentally, Kagan ends up a justice of the Supreme Court.
Not one of these people did their jobs.
The professor did not write the book himself.
The assistant plagiarized instead of researching, the dean and the committee did not hold the professor accountable, and all ended up rewarded.
By contrast, for example, learned papers and distinguished careers in climatology at MIT, Richard Lindzen, or the University of Virginia, S. Fred Singer, are not enough for their questions about global warming to be taken seriously, for our ruling class identity always trumps.
So this is a great example.
Tribe a plagiarist, not even everybody totally lied.
Not one genuine authentic action by a whole cadre of people.
But they circled the wag Dan Rather.
Dan Rather.
The George Bush National Guard story, proven to be based on fake documents.
What happened?
Brokaw and uh and and Peter Jennings circled the wagons, And the big members of the ruling class of journalism gave rather a career award.
And none of them did anything right.
But they are in the ruling class.
Now, instinctively, all of us know this.
And instinctively, we think something's not right here.
These people claim to be the best and brightest.
And yet the real best and brightest, the smartest among us, the people who actually make the country work are looked upon with disdain.
And they are discounted, no matter where they are, and particularly if they happen to live in the South.
Much less does membership depend in the ruling class on high academic achievement either.
To see something closer to an academic meritocracy, consider France, where elected officials have little power, a vast bureaucracy explicitly controls details from how babies are raised to how to make cheese.
And people get into an advance in that bureaucracy strictly by competitive exams.
Hence, for good or ill, France's ruling class are smart people certifiably, not ours.
But didn't ours go to Harvard and Princeton Stanford?
Didn't most of them get good grades?
Yes.
But while getting into the Ecole Nationale d'Administration or the Ecole Polytechnique in France or the dozens of other entry points to France's ruling class requires outperforming others in blindly graded exams, and graduating from such places requires passing exams that many people fail.
Getting into America's top schools is less a matter of passing exams than of showing up with acceptable grades and an attractive social profile.
America's secondary schools are generous with their A's.
Since the 1970s, it has been virtually impossible to flunk out of American colleges.
And it's an open secret that the best colleges require the least work and give out the highest grade point averages.
No, our ruling class recruits and renews itself not through meritocracy, but rather by taking into itself people whose most prominent feature is their commitment to fit in.
The conformists, the people who will sacrifice their own identity.
The people who will sacrifice who they really are in order to be accepted by people they think are their betters.
The most successful neither write books and papers that stand up to criticism, nor release their academic records, i.e.
Obama.
Thus does our ruling class stunt itself through negative selection.
But the more it has dumbed itself down, the more it has defined itself by the presumption of intellectual superiority.
They think they're smarter than everybody else, and in truth, they are dumbing everybody.
Ted Kennedy, a classic example of the ruling class cheated in college, responsible for the death of a girl, and look, became such a lion that even Carl Rove admired him.
People wanted to be Ted Kennedy.
Distinct member of the ruling class.
Folks, we put together a montage here.
Have you changing gears here now because we're going to get her your phone calls after the break coming up and the other items here in the stack of stuff?
But I have been noticing throughout the ruling media, the ruling class media, the phrase Obama brought us back from the brink.
Obama, it would have been far worse had it not been for Obama and the state.
Obama brought us back from the brink.
Here is, and it's a lie, and here is a montage of ruling class media types since last Wednesday.
It seems so long ago that the economy was literally on the brink.
He brought it back from the world.
But isn't there two years ago, the U.S. economy being on the brink of collapse?
Help pull the economy back from the brink.
He's managed to get a lot on saving the economy from the brink.
As the president has pointed out, has been brought back from the brink.
Obama having to regulate the banks after the banks put all of us on the brink of economic collapse.
By the way, does this now not explain remember the montage we have of uh the media talking about gravitas?
Bush needing to select Cheney To have gravitas on the ticket.
They think the same, they act the same, they speak the same.
It's required to be in the ruling class.
So here now, another incarnation of this.
Obama brought us back from the brink.
The next time you hear that.
The next time you hear Obama brought us back from the brink.
Ask yourself, why can't he get us over the hump?
And we're back.
It's Rush Limbaugh, and this, the Excellence in Broadcasting Network.
And the Limboy Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.
So go back to September 20th, 2009, this week with George Stephanopoulos, Obama being interviewed by a fellow member of the ruling class, George Stephanopoulos, who says Merriam Webster's dictionary defines tax as a charge, usually of money imposed by authority on persons or property for public purposes.
George, the fact that you looked up Miriam's dictionary, the definition of tax increase, indicates to me that you're stretching a little bit right now.
Otherwise, you wouldn't have gone to the dictionary to check on the definition.
Well, no.
I mean, what if what you're saying is I wanted to check for myself, but your critics say it is a tax increase.
My critics say everything's a tax increase.
My critics say that I'm taking over uh every sector of the economy.
You know that.
Uh uh look, we can have a legitimate debate about whether or not we're gonna have an individual mandate or not.
But you rejected it's a absolutely reject that notion.
Now, here's what's interesting about this.
He rejected the fact that the individual mandate, the fact that we have to go buy health insurance is a tax.
So there's a lawsuit out there.
Attorneys general from various states, a bunch of people working a lawsuit saying, hey, the federal government cannot mandate the American people buy anything.
Commerce clause.
You can't do it.
So what has the Obama administration now said?
In defending that lawsuit, the Obama administration says that the individual mandates a tax.
That they have the authority to levy and raise taxes.
So Obama lied through his teeth.
Everything about health care that he said was an out and out lie.
Small firms are now no longer able to provide health insurance, small insurance companies are no longer able to provide it, and they're gonna send people in Massachusetts to the state to do it, and that's coming in the federal uh version of health care as well.
The private sector insurance companies are on their hang of a thread.
They're not gonna be around long on purpose.
But it's it would Obama now has to go out and say, in order to defend this lawsuit against individual individual mandate, no, it's not, we're not mandating everybody by health insurance.
It's a tax.
And we have the authority to levy and raise taxes.
All the while denying, as he just did to Stephanopoulos, that's back in 2009, that it was a tax.
So now back to Mr. Cod Villa.
The 2010 medical law is a template for the ruling class's economic modus operandi.
The government taxes citizens to pay for medical care and requires citizens to purchase health insurance.
The money thus taken and directed is money the citizens themselves might have used to pay for medical care.
In exchange for the money, the government promises to provide care through its system.
But then all the boards, commissions, guidelines, procedures, and best practices that constitute the system become the arbiters of what any citizen ends up getting.
The citizen might end up dependent on all the boards and commissions that his money also pays for and that raise the cost of care.
Likewise, in 2008, the House Ways and Means Committee began considering a plan to force citizens who own IRAs to transfer those funds into government-run guaranteed retirement accounts.
If the government may force citizens to buy health insurance, by what logic can it not force them to trade private ownership and control of retirement money for a guarantee as sound as the government itself.
It's not clear that the government knows more about managing retirement income than individuals.
Is it not clear?
Who says they do?
And yet this is how the ruling class operates.
Okay, to the phones to TruLoc, California.
Patrick, uh glad you called, sir.
You're up first today.
Great to have you here.
Hi, how are you doing, Rush?
Great to talk to you.
Thank you, sir.
Um, well, basically, I like I was talking to the person I talked before I talked to you, I really wasn't a fan of yours until recently.
I voted for Obama, and I am now feeling a lot of vote regret, I guess you could say.
Within about the past two weeks, I've been literally feeling sick to my stomach, and I know a lot of other people have too, wondering what it is I've done, you know, feeling almost like I've betrayed my country.
Well kind of feeling really disillusioned.
Why?
What happened?
What changed your mind?
Well, the straw that broke the donkey's back, what almost broke the donkey's back with the DP spill and his lackluster response, but what finally broke the donkeys back for me is going in after Arizona for just trying to stick up for working citizens of the country, which is something I think is going to need to be done for way over ten years.
Yeah, yeah, right.
That absolutely.
And I think that kind of ties in with what you're just saying about how they despise the working class and working people actually.
Yes, it does.
Exactly right.
The ruling class doesn't think the country class knows what's good for it.
And if the country class dares challenge the ruling class on where it's going, it's going to be sued.
Pretty much.
What do they expect us to all do?
We all know we can't be in the financial market.
We tried that.
That's how we got in this meltdown.
Everybody was trying to sell insurances and mortgages and real estate and not really actually doing anything.
Right.
Now, in all of this, you said you said that uh you you disliked me, but now you've changed your mind.
What caused that to happen, by the way?
What caused you to change your mind about me?
I put a radio on my kitchen counter and I listened to you.
And actually, I started despising.
I used to watch Ed Schultz and Chris Matthews, but I pretty much despise them now because I think they're totally full of it.
Because they say they're trying to defend uh middle class families and working people and union workers, yet they support all the illegal immigrants, which seems to me completely destroys the other.
I don't I don't see how you can do that.
I mean, the numbers are simple.
There's what, fifteen million illegal aliens and fourteen million Americans out of work.
Uh let's let's do a swamp.
Exactly.
It's pretty much.
Obviously, a lot of these jobs will have to pay a little bit more money and this, that, and the other, it'll have to be worked out, but Americans are willing to do the work.
I find it insulting, frankly, that they act like we're not.
Right.
But you you don't you look around, you don't see the ruling class showing even any concern about the people of Arizona and what they're going through.
They don't show any concern for the people who are unemployed.
They continue, in fact, to attack Republicans for not extending unemployment compensation benefits.
And Scott Brown, God bless him, Scott Brown, Ted Kennedy's replacement in the Senate, guy that won them from the Republican Party in January, has come up with an alternative plan as a Republican to extend unemployment compensation benefits.
And the Senate Democrats won't hear of it.
They won't even talk to him about it.
And poor old Scott Brown is saying, How come I'm always the guy who has to compromise?
I'm I'm not making this up.
It's somewhere here in my stack of stuff.
Scott Brown, why am I always the guy having a compromise with the Democrats?
Mr. Brown, uh this question has been posed by me and people like me for twenty years.
Why is it in this bipartisanship business that the only compromise is Republicans agreeing with Democrats?
Well, the reason is simple, Mr. Brown.
The ruling class is liberalism.
The ruling class is the Democrat Party.
And the ruling class does not compromise.
You, if you want to be in the ruling class, Mr. Brown, you are gonna have to compromise.
You are going to have to change.
You're in fact, you're going to have to apologize in a number of different ways for winning Ted Kennedy Senate seat.
Because the ruling class doesn't look at it as a Senate seat from the state of Massachusetts, nor does it look at it as the Scott Brown seat.
The ruling class looks at your seat as the Ted Kennedy seat, and you have committed a great sin by securing it.
Now you can atone for this.
Well, it's going to require, Mr. Brown, that you do a number of different things.
You're going to have to sell out the Republican Party or conservatism.
You're going to have to have nothing to do with any Tea Party people down the road, and you are going to have to go along with whatever the ruling class wants you to do in the United States Senate and beyond.
Other than that, it's pretty simple.
He actually did say, how come it's always me?
How come I'm the one that has to compromise with Democrats?
How come they never compromise?
We've been asking this question for twenty years.
And we know the answer.
You know, this business of seeking acceptance.
I've I I have been on this case for twenty years.
And it has always, it is always grated on me to see people compromise who they are, sacrifice who they are in order to be accepted by whoever they think are their betters.
People that play kiss butt, if you know what I mean.
People who network, people whose means of advancement is based not on merit, not on achievement, not on accomplishment, but on who you know and what kind of deal you can make, what kind of back you can scratch.
You know, this this is this explains why, you know, I I will never be embraced by any of these people.
The difference is I don't want to be.
If if I were if I'm ever embraced by these people, you can count that day as the end of my career.
I don't want to be, but don't worry.
I never will be.
But there are people on our side, so-called conservative media, who want to be accepted and who will do anything to compromise their principles, beliefs, and what have you, to be accepted in the ruling class.
And that is the power that Washington politics and social structure has over would-be Republicans and conservatives.
Reagan fought it, never did bow down to it.
You know what we do here, folks?
It's a great way to describe what happens here on the EIB network.
We practice preventive journalism.
Much like preventive health care.
We provide free political screenings.
It doesn't cost you anything.
The state controlled media of the ruling class works twenty-four-seven to make sure the American people are kept totally unaware of the health of their country.
The state controlled media of the ruling class ignores the carcinogens of liberalism.
The steady diet of platitudes, lies, and distractions in the White House.
And believe me, the ruling class is a carcinogen to freedom.
The ruling class is a carcinogen.
Liberalism is.
They ignore the cancers in Obama's legislative achievements.
The state-controlled ruling class media's practice of journalism is the equivalent of medical care in a third world country.
No screenings, no preventive care, no nothing.
No surgery.
EIB, on the other hand.
We practice preventive journalism.
El Rushball, the doctor of democracy, provides free political screenings, five days a week, three hours a day.
You don't need any insurance for it.
All you need is a radio or a computer.
EIB preventive journalism.
Back to the phones, Gary in Seattle.
You're next.
Great to have you here.
Hi, Rush.
Thanks for taking my call.
Yes, sir.
That 15 hours a week is uh meant a lot to me for about 20 years.
Thank you very much, sir.
I'm constantly amazed at how uh you remain relevant after that much time, but it it uh remain relevant.
I am more relevant than ever before.
I'm somewhat amazed myself, actually, but it's true.
Well, your opening monologue today in particular resonated with me.
It uh illustrated something I felt for a long time, but also showed a uh uh reminded me of a point in your history where I disagreed with you.
And that was back uh in the primaries leading up to the two thousand eight election when you came out a little bit harsh on uh Governor Huckabee for his populism, and did what I think at the time uh pretty much think is candidacy.
Partly because I think you represent uh the non ruling class, and you represent the attitudes and feelings of a great many Americans, many of whom I believe are Democrats.
Um I I know that you have a reputation in the uh drive by media is representing only a uh a slim uh group of Republicans, but I uh don't believe your program would have been or continue to be as successful as it is uh if you didn't tap into what uh I think is essentially a broad-based feeling in America that's evidenced today in the Tea Party movement and in the candidacies uh of uh
some of these uh new faces and new voices uh in America that I think represent the same kinds of things that Governor Huckabee and Sarah Palin represented in terms of a non-ruling class, open-minded uh uh candidate that sought to tap into the frustrations that you've tapped in for twenty years.
So I think the only mistake I've ever heard from you, and I know you're correct, 99 point whatever percent of the 99.6.
Yeah.
Uh but that point four probably for me was at that point in time when uh uh we lost Governor Huckabee's voice for uh issues that I think were present and are particularly needed right now.
Wait a second.
Did I lose things for Governor Huckabee, or did he make a deal with John McCain?
Well, I think in the old in the end you're right that he did make a deal with John McCain.
I think so.
Uh yeah, all of that was history.
But at the very point when you began to depart from his can uh candidacy because of his populism, uh, I'm not sure that you were as in touch then as you are now to the seeding anger that's motivating the grassroots uh in America right now.
America is tired, Rush, of anti-capitalism.
Uh the country has a an abiding faith in capitalism.
Right.
And and capitalism, uh, even if you're a labor union member or a uh public corporation executive, capitalism is the only means for people of all stripes to accumulate the capital necessary to forward their life.
Here's the thing that you have just you have just swerved into something.
That's what we in the country class believe.
The people in the ruling class have proved proved is not true.
The most incompetent, the most inexperienced can get wealthy.
They simply have their snoots in the public trough of government money.
They live off government.
That's one of the points of Mr. Uh Codvilla's piece here is that and it really when you get down to it, folks, it's all about money.
Always follow the money.
You know, left and the ruling class love to say that they do things out of altruism, uh out of compassion, uh big hearts and so forth.
These people are a bunch of lazy SOBs who have no business in the private sector because they can't succeed there.
The only way they can succeed is to be a bunch of uh brown nosers in the ruling class and try to move their way up that ladder and get whatever they can out of the public trough.
The ruling class has gotten rich off of government.
It has not gotten rich in the private sector.
And therefore the private sector does threaten them.
The private sector is where the ruling class would fail.
The ruling class is essentially made up of people who have never even been the private sector, never held a job, never made a payroll.
Don't understand at all what is these are the these are the kind of people Obama and Steve Ratner and these guys that come along after they buy up Chrysler and GM and order all these dealerships closed.
Under the under the guise of saving money or saving the industry, when in fact they put a whole bunch of people out of work.
And in the process, they shut down a lot of economic activity in communities where these dealerships were.
They're threatened by the private sector.
They couldn't compete with the average successful person in the private sector.
And what's maddening about this is that they have the audacity and the gall to portray themselves as better than us, better than everybody else, smarter.
We're too stupid, you see, to understand what's best for us.
That's why we need them in charge of our health care.
That's why we need them in charge of our salt intake, of our trans fat intake, and of obesity for our children.
That's why they're talking about dinners now being served in school.
Because parents simply aren't responsible enough to feed their kids right, otherwise you're going to be fat slobs and put strain on the American health care system.
This is an insidious bunch of people.
The ruling class has a fear.
They know that they are a minority.
And they know that their time is going to come.
They know that their ruling class status can't be sustained.
It hasn't been throughout history.
There have always been revolutions.
And this piece, by the way, Mr. Codvilla touches on what happens next.
What is the revolution?
Because he points out that the ruling class of today is far more uh uh discriminatory and punishing than King George was of the colonists in the days of our revolution.
And the Tea Party is the modern equivalent of our revolutionary.
But what but what what how do they do it?
They it in our structure today, he points out they need a party.
The Tea Party needs a political mechanism in order to revolt and replace the ruling class.
And if it's the Republican Party, uh well, I'll I'll not try to paraphrase what Mr. Codvilla says.
I'll make sure I share with you his uh his point on that as the uh as the program unfolds.
But you know, the the you talk about Huckabee.
I mean, I I opposed Huckabee and McCain during the primaries.
The McCain is part of ruling class.
I mean, when you talk about reaching across the aisle, when your campaign slogan is I can work with the other side and be biparcel, you you are you're basically acting as a slave to the ruling class, saying, please accept me, accept me.
I want to be, I want to be in your group.
Please say I'll work with you.
I'll work, I'll show my shade out just to be with you.
I'm getting old, I want to be happy before I pass away.
Folks, human nature is human nature.
It doesn't matter where you're in high school, or even if you achieve power in high school, what does it mean?
You get the cheerleader, big deal.
You achieve power in Washington and become a member of the ruling class.
You really don't have to work in order to become wealthy.
You do not.
This is the point.
We in the country class believe that success and uh uh wealth, however we define it, is the result of achievement competence, merit.
We believe merit reward, it's not rewarded in the ruling class.
In fact, it is disdained.
Merit, accomplishment, achievement, that's almost a threat to many.
You think at the end of the day, would you trust Barack Obama to run anything in your personal life?
Would you trust him to run your business, be a CEO, a C O, a vice president?
Would you trust him to do that?
Would you trust Barney Frank?
Would you trust Nancy Pelosi, Chris Dodd?
Of course you would not.
Who's running the show?
Nevertheless.
I ask you.
And welcome back.
It's L. Rushbaugh, the cutting edge of societal evolution.
Harry Truman.
Harry Truman like Rinaldus Magnus was never, definitely never, admitted to the ruling class.
And here's it, here's a great great quote from Harry Truman.
I remember when I first came to Washington.
For the first six months, you wonder how the hell you ever got here.
For the next six months, you wonder how the hell the rest of them ever got here.
Truman never figured it out.
Which is why he was never admitted into the ruling class.
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The ruling class's appetite for deference for power and perks grows.
The country class, us, disrespects its rulers, wants to curtail their power and reduce their perks.
The ruling class wears on its sleeve the view that the rest of Americans are racist, greedy, and above all, stupid.
The country class is ever more convinced that our rulers are corrupt, malevolent, and inept.
The rulers want the ruled us to shut up and obey.
The ruled us want self-governance.
The clash between the two is about which side's vision of itself and of the other is right and which is wrong, because each side, especially the ruling class, embodies its views on the issues, concessions by one side to another on any issue tend to discredit that side's view of itself.
One side or the other will prevail.
The clash is as sure and momentous as its outcome is unpredictable.
But it's coming.
And in this class, the ruling class holds most of the cards because it has established itself as the font of authority.
Its primacy is based on habits of deference.
Breaking them and establishing other fonts of authority, other ways of doing things, would involve far more than electoral politics.
Though the country class had long argued along with Edmund Burke against making revolutionary changes, it faces the uncomfortable question common to all who have had revolutionary changes imposed upon them, and we have.
Are we now to accept what was done to us just because it was done?
Sweeping away a half century's accretions of bad habits, taking care to preserve the good among them is hard enough.
Establishing even re-establishing the set of better institutions and habits is much harder.
Especially as the country class, us, wholly lacks organization.
By contrast, the ruling class holds strong defensive positions, is well represented by the Democrat Party.
But a two to one numerical disadvantage augers defeat for them, while victory would leave it in control of a people whose confidence it can't regain.
Certainly the country class lacks its own political vehicle, and perhaps the coherence to establish one in the short term at least.
The country class, us, has no alternative but to channel its political efforts through the Republican Party, not a third party through the Republican Party, which is eager for its support, but the Republican Party does not live to represent the country class.
For it to do so, it would have to become principles-based, as it has not been since the mid-1860s.
The few who tried to remake it.
So the party that the party treated as rebels, Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan.
The party helped defeat Goldwater.
When it failed to stop Reagan, it saddled his and subsequent Republican administrations with establishmentarians who, under the Bush family, repudiated Reagan's principles as much as they could.
Barack Obama exaggerated in charging that Republicans had driven the country into the ditch all alone, but they did have a hand in it.
There is some lighthearted news out there today.
At least some might consider it lighthearted.
From Clearwater, Florida, Food Bank mistakenly gives out dog food.
That's my food bank in Clearwater, Florida, distributed a can labeled as superfood.
Turned out to be a can of dog food, according to the recipient.
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