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Dec. 17, 2010 - Rush Limbaugh Program
35:37
December 17, 2010, Friday, Hour #2
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So I'm sitting here, I'm at the computer here, and I'm continually doing show prep with my back to the TV monitors, of course, the way the room's laid out here.
And as I come back, get ready for this hour to begin, Brian, the broadcast engineer in a panicked voice on the IFBC.
You heard the breaking news?
No, no, no, what about the Eagles are benching or the Redskins are benching McNab.
I said, well, I knew that earlier this week when Shanahan was talking about it.
It is official.
The Redskins are benching Donovan McNab.
I don't know, man.
This guy, this guy, he cannot catch a break.
He just can't.
Live from the Southern Command in sunny South Florida, it's Open Line Friday.
And we're back, Broadcast Excellence, authored by me, El Rushbo, here at the Excellence and Broadcasting Network.
Open Line Friday, get to talk about whatever you want to talk about.
Not the case Monday through Thursday.
You know, it's funny.
It seems like only yesterday, the news media was full of stories telling us that the Tea Party was already out of gas, that the Tea Party was compromised, that they had already failed.
And now the Tea Party being cited for killing the omnibus pork bill, which is the first glimmer of sanity on Capitol Hill for who knows how long.
Poor McNabb, he can't catch a break.
He can't throw one.
It's just a terrible shame out there.
Again, 800-282-2882.
Great to have you here.
All right.
So, folks, in all of this analysis of what's going to happen in the next two years based on the tax deal and the omnibus spending bill going down the tubes, this is not 1994.
I think a lot of analysts are forgetting this is a wholly different electorate now.
The Tea Party, these people are aware.
These people know full well what's going on here.
This is not the same old duped public that watches NBC and CBS and ABC believes everything they see there anymore.
We're dealing with an entirely a lot of the people disagreeing with me, in the email, their disagreement or their opinion centers on the fact that the voting public's a bunch of idiots.
And two years from now, I'm not going to remember any of this, and it's all going to be politics as usual, Democrats outsmarting us here.
I think it's a different era.
I think people are more involved.
Their country's future has been spent down the drain.
These people are desperate.
They're going to demand that health care be repealed.
They're going to demand that all this spending be scotched.
Look at the outrage over the earmarks.
That's right, Mr. Limbaugh, but while your people were fanbanked and looking at the spending and the earmarks, look at all the spending that took place in the tax deal that they got snookered with.
They didn't get snookered.
They were opposed to it.
And in great numbers, they were opposed to it.
But the spending, they're reporting, where is it?
Here it is.
The bills cost the tax deal here.
The bills cost $858 billion would be added to the deficit, a sore spot among budget hawks in both parties.
This is from the AP.
Now, the AP just can't help but keep lying about the cost of this bill.
Extending Bush tax rates in place for 10 years costs nothing.
Steny Hoyer.
Well, I know that we're going to have to borrow every nickel in this bill.
Oh, come on, Stenny.
We're not fools anymore.
You want to worry about all the borrowing for this stupid tax bill?
What about the $1.3 trillion omnipotent?
We don't have the money for anything we're doing.
Everything is going to be borrowed or printed, but there is no $858.
And of that $858 billion, by the way, $700 billion is the tax rates.
It's not going to cost us $700 billion.
These tax rates have been in place for 10 years.
It's not a new cost.
Dear Rush, if the economy recovers, Obama's going to say that we can now tax the rich.
If the economy doesn't recover, he can say, see, tax cuts don't work.
Now, you can see how people might think that on the surface.
Therefore, isn't that a win-win for him?
And even I, El Rushbow, in the early days of this tax deal, and one of the reasons that I was opposed to it was that Obama was setting up a win-win for him.
This is before I heard Democrats start talking about it the way they're talking about it.
If Durbin would shut up, and another emailer says, well, nobody's going to remember what Durbin.
Yes, they will, because I will.
But the ABC networks, the ABC, CBS, NBC, the Alphabet networks, they're not going to, I don't care about them.
They're irrelevant as far as I'm concerned.
If I was concerned about them, I would retire.
They are becoming more and more marginalized.
CNN barely exists.
MSNBC is laughed at.
Now, the original thinking on the tax deal was, and I put this forward, okay, so leave the tax cuts as they are and the economy comes back and Obama says, well, let's go raise taxes on the rich.
Now the economy's back.
But we've now got Obama and Durbin and everybody saying we can't raise taxes right now to hurt the economy.
Durbin just said it.
A brilliant win for Obama.
You can't raise taxes.
Don't make me go through this again.
These guys could have done this two years ago and avoided all this damage.
These guys have wrecked havoc on this economy for two years, purposeful destruction.
And now all of a sudden, we can't let current tax rates expire because that would hurt the economy.
Well, they're admitting Reaganomics.
They're admitting high taxes hurt the economy.
So if the economy is roaring back, and it isn't going to be, but if it is trending upward in two years, and Obama's, okay, now we can raise taxes on the rich.
Well, we got Obama and Durbin on the record saying that raising taxes stymies an economy.
All we got to do is remind them of that.
I'll be leading the charge.
If the economy doesn't recover, he can say tax cuts don't work for there aren't any tax cuts.
There's not a single tax cut here other than the 2% one-year payroll tax.
And that one year is going to expire before 2012.
So we're not going to be going into the 2012 reelection campaign with a 2% payroll tax cut in place.
In fact, in the final year, we're going to have a tax increase because the 2% sunset for one year is going to be back.
So we're going to be talking about tax increases there, but there aren't any tax cuts here.
All they're admitting here is that raising taxes hurts the economy.
If there were tax cuts in this, yeah, the economy doesn't roar, but of course it would.
This is what Obama knows, which is why there aren't tax cuts of any significance.
You know, a one-year payroll tax cut's not any big deal.
So if you want to tell yourself that you're just being a realist and Obama's president, he has the bully pulpit.
He's got a slavish media that loves him, and they'll spend anything the way he wants.
And if he wants to say, after two years, the economy doesn't come back, see, I tried it Reagan's way.
I tried it your way, and it didn't work.
Well, he hasn't.
He hasn't cut anybody's taxes.
All he's done is kept them the same.
And he has admitted, Dick Durbin, Stenny Hoyer, all these guys are admitting that raising taxes right now would harm the economy.
So we've got him on record.
Raising taxes stifles economic growth, period.
Doesn't matter.
The only significant tax anything is the hike in the death tax, and that's up from zero.
And the left is livid about this.
They wanted it back up to 55%.
It's at 35%, but right now at zero, in two weeks, it's going to up to 35%.
Right now, the estate tax rate is zero.
So you can't even say that there's a tax cut there.
The Democrats are.
They're saying, just stupid tax cut, the estate tax.
There's no tax cut.
The old rate was 55%, but that's been out of not the law for a year.
So look, let me look at this another way, too.
As we sit here, this lame duck Congress is still dominated by Democrats.
Both houses, folks.
I mean, huge in the House of Representatives.
It's huge.
They still have, you know, the cavalry hasn't shown up yet.
The Tea Party Congress is not sworn in until January 5th.
If they can't raise taxes with Democrat majorities in both houses, how are they going to get it done with a Republican House in an election year?
They may come back and try.
Tax bills start in the House of Representatives.
Somebody explained to me how he's going to get away with raising taxes in 20.
He's going to say he wants to.
He's going to placate his base.
See, right now, Obama, he's triangulating.
This guy is so brilliant.
He's moving to the center.
And Rush, we told you he would.
We told you he'd move to the center because he wants to get reelected.
He hasn't moved to the center.
He has zagged away from his straight line to Marxism.
And you get to 2012 and he's going to zig back and he's going to start sounding every bit like the Marxist that the left wants him to sound like now.
Raise taxes on the rich, raise the estate tax back up, get out of Afghanistan.
Close get was going to be staying the same stuff all over again.
Here's what Obama's doing.
We got this special tape.
He was in the recording studio two nights ago, ladies and gentlemen.
Our microphones were there.
Now I'm looking for this economic piece that says we're not going to recover anyway.
I got it here in the, yeah, here it is.
It's a huge structural employment hole is going nowhere.
Initial jobless claims came in as expected, 420,000 this morning.
This is yesterday's report.
That's improvement over last week and shows improvement in the long run, but does it even matter?
The reality is that while claims are improving, the U.S. has a structural unemployment problem that is not being addressed.
There just aren't any jobs for people who have been hit the hardest by the housing collapse.
And with the way the housing market's going, there likely won't be any for some time.
We've also got all the new temporary hires taking place because businesses don't want to commit to full-time people because they don't know what circumstances are going to be.
So if we don't, if there aren't any indications the housing market's coming back, then there's a whole employee base that's not coming back.
And these guys at Business Insider claim that's not why we're not seeing a movement in the unemployment rate.
I mean, people honestly looking at circumstances don't see the ingredients for a massive economic recovery.
I don't doubt that's going to uptick some has to, but massive economic recovery that's going to permit people.
Okay, let's go back to raise taxes on the rich and let's yeah, we'll see.
We all want the economy to come around.
We all do.
I take it back.
Now, some of us don't.
The Democrats actually don't.
They would like the illusion of it.
2012 election.
Here's another emailer disagreeing with me.
I don't know what I'm talking about.
Dear Rush, you're missing the point.
It's simple.
In 2012, the Democrats are going to hammer the fact that they had to extend the tax rates just to get the unemployment benefits extended because Republicans held America hostage on these benefits just to help the rich.
And 95% of the media will pound that message and the Democrats win.
That discounts the existence of the Tea Party, which is a movement, by the way, that's only going to grow.
95% of the media will pound the message every day, and that assumes that 95% of the people will believe them.
I'd like to offer this analysis to those of you who think the media is going to beat us every time.
How did we win in November?
Somebody's going to have to explain to me how we are hopelessly defeated at every election because the media is going to always spin for Obama.
The media is going to spin for the Democrats.
They're going to avoid the truth.
They're going to make Republicans look like a bunch of Scrooges.
We're never going to win, Rush.
How did we win in November?
Oh, don't give us slick marketing.
How did we win in November?
We won in November because the public rejected Obama.
The public rejected the Democrat Party.
The public rejected everything about them.
The Republicans didn't stand for anything.
Purposely, they got out of the way.
So the media was not able to spin the country out of what they knew to be the case, the destructiveness of the Democrat Party.
So somebody, why are they going to be able to do it in 2012?
How has a Republican ever won any election if the media is so all-powerful?
How did Bush win two presidential races?
We know the media hated his guts, lied about him all over the place.
Hitler, this, how did it happen?
Somebody's going to have to help me out here.
I can sense my intelligence just oozing out of my brain.
Before this show's over, they're going to need to put me in a home.
It's Open Line Friday.
Guess you better take some phone calls.
Monroe, Ohio.
This is Kevin.
I'm glad you called, sir.
You're next.
Hello.
Hey, Rush.
It's a great honor to talk to you again.
Thank you very much, sir.
Hey, I wanted to kind of go back to, you know, we're having this debate on whether Obama's going to move to the center or not.
He has.
He already has.
He moved to the center.
He's triangulating it up.
Exactly.
Well, I think, in my opinion, Obama answered that question about two weeks ago when he had that press conference when he was just fuming mad at the press.
It reminds me of your saying a tiger is a tiger.
Yeah, he was mad at it.
I think he was so livid at the press that he didn't understand.
They didn't understand.
Listen, you idiots.
I am not moving an ounce.
Why can't you people understand that?
Well, he was actually mad at liberal Democrats, his base, for calling him a sellout.
Yes.
Which would include the media.
You're right.
Yeah, I forgot.
A liberal is a liberal, like you always say.
This guy's more than a liberal.
This guy is a committed socialist.
Absolutely.
You know, these people don't, they don't committed anything.
They don't change just because of an election.
They may change how they want to appear, but he's still who he is.
He's still.
Now, Clinton, I think, didn't have as much of a core as Obama does.
When Clinton moved, it was really for the benefit of Clinton.
When Obama moves, it's for the benefit of the movement or the movement.
When Obama moves, it is for Owinski.
It's for Soros.
It's for the world's Marxist.
When he moves, it is to simply camouflage who he is.
Remember, all committed leftists have to do this.
So he's fulfilling the Inside the Beltway template.
There's almost a handbook, if you live Inside the Beltway.
After a sitting president loses big and midterm elections, the template book says he will move to his opposition.
Whether he does or not, it's what he's going to do.
It's just what is done.
Everybody does this.
You've got a re-election coming over two years.
When the people reject you as soundly as Obama was rejected, he has to move in the direction of the voters.
Clinton wanted to be liked.
Obama wants to be liked by Reverend Wright.
Obama wants to be liked by a certain group of people.
Nobody is ever going to convince me that Obama is going to change from being a hardcore leftist.
He'll never admit what a hardcore leftist he is in a campaign.
That's the difference.
But he is who he is.
It's not going to change.
Hoping Line Friday, Rush Lynn bought talent on lawn from God.
Mike in Atlanta.
Nice to have you on the program, sir.
Hi.
Merry Christmas, Rush, and may God bless you, your loved ones, and the entire EIB staff in this new year.
Thank you, sir, very much.
Listen, yesterday you had a caller.
I believe his name was Jerome.
And he said that he agreed with you 99% of the time until recently when he had to go on unemployment.
And, you know, by extension, I would argue that he always agreed with you until he had to rely on unemployment.
So this is an example of what economic hard times and economic disaster even do to even the best of conservatives.
You know, when you have no options in life, your only option is the government.
And, you know, it's just to me a perfect example of, you know, it's a micro of the macro that's happening right now.
Well, it is, because I understand your point.
The point is that we can lose conservatives to economic reality brought on by liberals.
That even the most committed conservatives, when confronted with economic reality, can have to turn to only one place for support, the government.
We can lose them.
No one can say it better than you, Rush.
Is that what you meant?
That is exactly what I meant.
So the only area where I would disagree with you and what I was trying to make clear to him was the government's not his only option.
He's his best option.
The government doesn't care about him.
Oh, I couldn't agree more, Rush.
I'm self-employed and I'm not eligible for any unemployment.
So when times get tough, it's me.
It's me against whatever.
And I have to make it work.
Well, yeah, everybody does.
We're all different.
Not everybody's cut in the same cloth, obviously.
Not everybody's self-starter.
Not everybody's cut out to be self-employed.
Not everybody is hardwired the same way.
Can I go bring up another topic, Rush?
Yeah, go ahead.
You and I have a lot in common, actually.
Aside from being lifelong conservatives, I hated school.
And as a result, I never went to college.
But I'm an engineer.
I work in the professional world.
I'm licensed in several states.
And this has, and you've mentioned it, you know, that how you define intelligence is something I've spent a lot of time reflecting on, okay?
Because life doesn't, you know, give you a scorecard.
It doesn't give you a report card.
And, you know, so the point is, the best definition I've ever heard of genius is somebody who affects the way other people think or behave.
And when I look around and I see the influence that you've had on our society politically, the broadcast world, I'm not trying to suck up the air rush, but frankly, in my opinion, you're the greatest genius that has ever been in broadcast or political history.
That's going to make Larry King very mad.
Yeah, well, I think he's going to get over it.
I mean, after all, he is pretty old.
Well, it's not his fault.
You know what Larry wants to do next?
He wants to go on a comedy tour.
Well, you could arrange it for him, but, you know.
No, but he wants to be the one telling the jokes.
That's the interesting thing about it.
Well, you're setting it up would be the funniest part of the whole thing.
Anyway, Rush, we love you.
We're out here and keep on and happy new year, buddy.
Thanks very much.
You know, what he was talking about, you know, defining intelligence, I've actually, we have a way of defining intelligence.
That's IQ.
What I've always said, we're going to have to redefine SMART.
Smart used to be defined in basically to whatever degree you were educated, formally educated.
I remember Bill Buckley back when I was in Sacramento, I guess this might have been 1986.
He wrote a story article, Playboy Magazine, Redefining Smart.
And he tackled it from the standpoint: at what point in human civilization was it no longer possible to know everything that was known at the time and he calculated Calculated the knowledge that gets charted each and every year in virtually all fields.
And he made the point that it wasn't all that long ago that you could know everything that was known.
That it was possible for somebody to know everything that was known, not to know everything that is, but to know everything that was known at the time.
Now that's not possible.
It is simply not possible for anybody to know everything.
It was possible at one time in long ago human civilization.
So what defines smart?
Because I constantly listen to, I don't think Obama's smart.
Obama believes things that are terribly wrong.
Obama believes things that are destructive.
Obama is educated.
Obama is able to sound like he's confident in what he says.
But how can somebody who is wrong at the same time be smart?
Well, okay, that's then that's okay.
Certainly says, well, wait a minute.
How can you become president if you're not smart enough to navigate the political battlefield and so forth and so on?
Well, you can be formally educated and smart, and you may not be formally educated and be smart.
Every individual is different.
That's the point.
But we have this blanket assessment of people that says, yeah, he's a pretty smart guy.
Based on what?
To me, there are a lot of people, publicly known people, who are said to be very smart, and they're dead wrong about so many things.
So my question always is: what is smart about being wrong?
Are you smart because other people think you are?
Are you smart because the right people say you are?
Are you smart because you sound smart?
Look at the people who are called dumb.
Look at the people who are called stupid or short-sighted or what have you.
You know, there are an awfully lot of stupid, very successful people.
And there are a lot of smart failures.
So it's always amazed me how we define smart.
And I always fall back on common sense.
Common sense to me is something that really can't be taught.
It's born of experience.
It's born of an innate intelligence.
It has nothing to do with education.
Some of the greatest wisdom in human history has come from people who never set foot inside a classroom.
But they had certain life experiences that taught them things.
They read certain things, taught them things, of course.
And I've always, we just, we assume, like Pelosi, yeah, she's speaker to house.
Yeah, she got healthcare done.
But is she smart?
She's calculating.
She understands how to put the fear of God into people she's leading.
But when it comes to really common sense right and wrong, is the woman smart?
And folks, I swear I listened to her and I said there's no way this woman is smart, but she's very skilled and very talented at certain skill sets.
They said Hillary Clinton, I'll never forget, the smartest woman in the world.
Why?
What did Hillary Clinton ever do but allow herself to get stepped on every day of her marriage, but turn it around to her benefit?
It was, I mean, a lot of women wouldn't put up with one-tenth of what Hillary's husband did.
So a lot of women do.
It's always, when you talk about somebody who's smart, it's always interesting to me who's calling them that.
Who's telling us so-and-so is smart?
And I know that many of the people I think are smart and brilliant are routinely laughed at, made fun of, impugned.
Most conservatives are considered to be, and by the way, I think, now that I bring this up brilliantly, I think this whole business of who is considered smart is what motivates many of our people inside the beltway to say and do things that they say and do, so that they will be perceived as smart by the people handing out the judgment.
And I think there is a quest on the part of many to be smart, and in some cases, to be the smartest in the room.
I look at commentators left and right inside the Beltway, and I see that many of them one day want to be thought of as shapers of events, and the next day they're only thought of as having nothing to do with events.
They're way above them and just commenting on them as the wise men of the world.
And what's the quest?
The quest is to be thought of as smart.
In fact, in this analysis of Obama as having won the day, ridiculed the Republicans, just really outsmarted the Republicans who are in the tax deal.
Really, this guy's so smart.
Why?
He's the comeback kid.
I go totally against the conventional wisdom when I say I don't think Obama is smart because I think Obama's wrong about so much.
And I just have trouble with that contradiction, being wrong and yet being smart.
Yeah, I know I have said in the past that the ugly know who they are.
Unfortunately, many dumb people don't know they're dumb, which is one of the problems.
We are led by a bunch of those people.
Here's another one.
How smart was it for Obama's voters, believers, supporters to believe this notion that he was unlike any politician that ever trod the earth?
How smart was it to believe the guy was a deity?
How smart was it to believe this messianic stuff?
How smart was it to believe that?
But more importantly, how smart was it on the part of Obama to act it?
Was Obama smart in also thinking of himself that way?
Is that smart?
You know, so much of what we call education today is nothing more than indoctrination.
You think most people in college today are taught to think?
I don't.
I think they're indoctrinated.
I think they walk in there as young skulls full of mush, and the liberal establishments at these places bend and shape their minds into a bunch of miniature human robots.
They come out of these institutions thinking that they're special, that they're smarter than everybody else, that they are above and beyond.
They end up being arrogant and condescending.
They haven't learned anything.
They've just been indoctrinated.
Not only have they been indoctrinated, what else has happened to them, and this is one of the major problems of higher education, they instill the establishments at these schools, the professoriate, instill a respect for the authority of the establishment's perceived wisdom.
While they're being indoctrinated, at the same time, they are told to respect the utter, infallible authority of the professor of the establishment of the university.
And as such, rather than being revolutionaries, these young students actually are obedient.
Rather than revolting and protesting things, they end up actually being obedient.
And this kind of instilled respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth because it kills, stymies, the pursuit of truth.
It does not promote critical thinking, and therefore real wisdom never happens.
You can't have wisdom without an active thinking mind.
But if all you are is the subject of look at global warming.
Look at how simple it has been to indoctrinate a bunch of people into believing a hoax.
And global warming is just one.
But how is that possible?
How can thinking people not at all be curious about the other?
How can thinking people automatically reject the opposite point of view?
They can't, but an indoctrinated person can.
Somebody who has had instilled in them the ultimate respect for the establishment liberal authority becomes a member of that army, and anybody that opposes that authority that has indoctrinated them is a denier, is a radical, is an extremist or what have you.
And look, the so-called smartest people among us all believe in man-made global warming.
We're in the middle here of a mini-ice age, it looks like.
And I'm not just haphazardly putting syllables together when I say this.
Some German scientist, I had it in the stack of stuff this week, some German scientist has done a study.
He says, not only are we not in any kind of a warming period, we actually have the aspects here of the beginning of a mini ice age going on.
And he's citing not just meteorological data, he's citing climate data as well.
Well, you know what this guy is going to have happen to him?
Look at how easy it's been to indoctrinate the kids of this nation with a phony movie.
Look at how easy it's been to indoctrinate people who believe that polar bears are dying off because of fraudulent, phony, photoshopped pictures.
That's only possible if those people are not being taught to think.
If they're not being taught critical thinking, they're just indoctrinated boobs with an instilled respect for the establishment authority that's doing the indoctrinating.
So instead of being smart, they're robots.
They're programmed little liberal automatons.
They think they're the smartest people in the world, and they don't know diddly squat, and yet they're called smart.
Here's another thing.
Smart people never have to advertise that they're smart.
Smart people don't have to run around and tell other people they're smart.
It's like me.
I never tell you I'm smart, and you know I am.
You know, half my brain tied behind my back.
No, that's not, that's, I'm, that's how I'm not talking about how smart I am.
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