All Episodes
Previous Next
Dec. 17, 2010 - Rush Limbaugh Program
35:37
December 17, 2010, Friday, Hour #2
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
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 rooms laid out here.
And as I come back, get ready for this hour to begin, uh, Brian, the broadcast engineer in a panicked voice on the IFB say here the breaking news.
No, no, no, what am I one of them?
The Eagles are benching, or the Redskins are benching McNabb.
That's why I knew that earlier this week when Shanahan was talking, but it is official.
The uh Redskins are benching Donovan McNabb.
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.
L. Rushbow here at the Excellence in Broadcasting Network.
Open live Friday, get talk about whatever you want to talk about.
Not the case Monday through Thursday.
You know, it's funny, it seems like on the 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.
I have McNabby can't catch a break, he can't throw one.
It's just a it's a terrible shame out there.
Again, uh 800-282-2882.
Great to have you here.
All right, so uh one folks uh um in all of this analysis of what's gonna happen in the next two years based on the tax deal and the uh omnibus uh spending bill going down the tubes.
You this is this is not 1994.
Uh the I I think a lot of analysts are forgetting this is a wholly different electorate now.
The Tea Party, these people are aware.
These party, these people know full well what's going on here.
These, you know, 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, they're dis in the email, their disagreement uh or their their opinion centers on the fact that the voting public's a bunch of idiots.
And uh two years from now I'm not gonna remember any of this, and it's all gonna be politics as usual, Democrats outsmarting us here.
I I think it's a different era.
I I think people are more involved.
Their country's future has been spent down the drain.
These people are desperate.
They're gonna they're gonna demand that health care be repealed.
They're gonna demand that all this spending be scotched.
Look at what hell look at the look at the outrage over the earmarks.
That's right, Mr. Lumbaugh, but while your people were fanbaged to looking at the spending in the earmarks, look at all the spinning that took place in the tax deal that they got snookered with.
They didn't get snookered.
They were opposed to it.
And uh in in in great numbers, they were opposed to it.
But the spending they're reporting, where is that?
Here it is.
The bills cost, the tax deal here.
The bills cost eight hundred and fifty-eight billion dollars would be added to the deficit, a sore spot among budget hawks in both parties.
This and 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 ten years costs nothing.
Stenny Hoyer.
Well, I know that we're gonna have to borrow every nickel in this bill.
Oh, come on, Stenny, we're not fools anymore.
You want to worry about all the the borrowing for this stupid tax bill?
What about the 1.3 trillion dollar omni?
We don't have the money for anything we're doing.
Everything is gonna be borrowed or printed, but there is no $858 billion.
And of that $858 billion, by the way, $700 billion is the tax rates.
It's not gonna 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 gonna say that we can now tax the rich.
If the economy doesn't recover, he can say, see, tax cuts don't work.
Um you can see how people might think that on the surface.
Therefore, isn't that a win-win for him?
And even I, L. 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.
If Durban would shut up, and another emailer says, well, nobody's going to remember what Durban.
Yes, they will, because I will.
But the ABC networks, the ABC, CBSNBC, the alphabet networks, they're not gonna, 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 Durban 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 gonna 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 Durban 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 re-election 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, you know, if you if if you want if you want to tell yourself that you're just being realist, and Obama's president, he has the bully pulpit, he's got a he's got a slavish media that loves him and they'll spin anything the way he wants.
And if he wants to say, after two years and the economy doesn't come back, see, I got 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 them 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 it's zero.
In two weeks, it's going to go 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 uh Not the law for a year.
So look it.
Um 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 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 explain to me how he's going to get away with raising taxes in 2022.
He's going to say he wants to, but he's going to placate his base.
See, right now Obama, he's triangulating.
This guy's so brilliant.
He's moving to the center.
And Rush, we told you he would.
We told you he drew it.
We told you he'd move to the center because he wants to get re-elected.
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 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 uh a huge structural employment hall 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 if 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 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 uh.
Yeah, I we'll see.
We all want the economy to come around.
We all do.
I take 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, a 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.
so I would, you know, I'd like to uh offer this analysis to those of you who think the media is going to beat us every time.
How did we how do we win in November?
Somebody's got to explain to me how we are hopelessly defeated at every election.
The media is going to always spin for Obama.
The media's 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 do 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.
They 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 tell why are they going to be able to do it in 2012?
How is a Republican ever won any election if the media is so all powerful?
How is it 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 how did how did it happen?
Somebody's gonna have to help me out here.
I 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 from Monroeville, 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.
Um, hey, I want to kind of go back to, you know, we're having this debate on whether uh Obama's gonna move to the center or not.
He has.
No, you know, he already has.
He's trying to he moved to the center.
He's triangulated out of it.
Exactly.
Well, I think um my opinion, Obama answered that question about two weeks ago when he had that press conference when he was just he was human mad at the press.
It it it reminds me of your saying a tiger is a tiger.
Yeah.
He was mad at it.
I think 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, uh, his base for calling him a sellout.
Yes.
And and and you know, which would include the media.
You're right.
Yeah, I forgot.
A liberal is a liberal, like you always say.
Especially this guy's more than a liberal.
This guy is a committed socialist.
Yes, absolutely.
You know, these people don't, they don't committed anything, 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 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 Olinsky.
It's for Soros.
It's for the world's Marxist.
When he moves, it is to simply camouflage who he is and what he's remember, all committed leftists have to do this.
So he's fulfilling the inside the beltway template.
There's a there's a there's a almost a handbook if you live inside the beltway after a sitting president loses big in midterm elections.
The template book says he will move to his opposition.
Whether he does or not.
It's what he's gonna do.
It's just what is done.
Everybody does this.
You got a re-election coming up in two years.
When the people reject you as soundly as Obama was rejected, he has to move in the direction of the voters.
Uh 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.
is not going to change.
Hope in line Friday.
Rush Limbaugh.
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 uh he uh had to go on unemployment.
And uh, 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 uh you know, it's 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 and have to turn to only one place for support, the government, uh 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 um 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 I couldn't agree more, Rush.
I'm self-employed, and I'm not eligible for unemploy you know any unemployment.
Yeah, I hear.
So when times get tough, it's me.
I it's me against whatever, and I have to make it work.
Well, yeah, very everybody does.
It's just it's it's you know, 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 uh is is hardwired the same way.
Can I go can I bring up another topic, Rush?
Yeah, go ahead.
Um 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.
Yeah.
But I'm an engineer.
I work in the professional world, I'm licensed in several states, and this has uh and you've mentioned it, you know, that uh what 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, it's 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 w 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 gonna make Larry King very mad.
Yeah, well, I think he's gonna get over it.
I mean, after all, he is pretty old.
Well, it's not his fault.
It's not 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 I mean 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.
Uh anyway, Rush, we love you.
We're out here and keep on and happy new year, buddy.
Same thing, thanks very much.
You know what he was talking about, you know, defining intelligence.
I've actually uh we have a way of defining intelligence.
That's IQ.
What I've always said, we're gonna have to redefine SMART.
Uh smart used to be defined uh in uh basically to whatever degree you were educated, you know, formally educated.
I remember Bill Buckley back when I was in Sacramento, I guess it's might this might have been 1986.
He wrote a story uh article, playboy 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 the knowledge that gets charted each and every year in virtually all fields.
And he made the point that it wasn't, you know, all that long ago that you could know everything that was known.
It would 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 isn't it is simply not possible for anybody to know everything.
It was possible at one time in long ago human civilization.
So what define smart?
Because I 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's 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.
How can you be how can you become president if you're not smart enough to navigate the political battlefield and so forth and so on?
Uh 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.
Uh uh 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.
What 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 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've 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, 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 I've always we just we we assume like Pelosi, uh, yeah, she's speaker of the house.
Yeah, she got healthcare done as well.
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 it 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 what was was I mean a lot of women, a lot of women wouldn't put up with one tenth of what Hillary's husband did.
So a lot of women do.
So it's always when you 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 that many of them one day want to be thought of as shapers of events, and the next day they don't be thought of as having nothing to do with events, they're way above them, and just commenting on them as the the wise men of the world.
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, ridicule the Republicans, just really outsmarted the Republicans here 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 I 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 ever trod the earth?
How smart was it to believe the guy was a deity?
How smart was it to believe this uh 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 thought that are taught to think?
I don't.
I think they're indoctrinated.
I think they 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 uh miniature human robots, and 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, and they haven't learned anything.
They've they've just been indoctrinated.
What they've not only have they been indoctrinated, What else has happened to them, and this is one of the 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 of what and as such, rather than being revolutionaries, these young students actually are obedient.
Rather than revolting and uh protesting things, they end up actually being obedient.
And this kind of uh 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 indoctrine, look at global warming.
Look at 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 that that has indoctrinated them is a denier, uh, 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, I'm I'm not just haphazardly putting syllables together when I say this.
Some German scientists, I had it in a stack of stuff this week, some German scientists has done a study.
He says, we 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's gonna 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 it.
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.
That is 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 not talk about how smart I am.
▲
Export Selection