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Jan. 13, 2011 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:06
January 13, 2011, Thursday, Hour #2
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Time Text
Top of the hour news.
I knew it last night's setup for the State of the Union show.
Top of the hour news.
Obama will use the State of the Union to talk about civility.
That's where he's going to come get us.
Mark my words.
This is all a political calculation, and it's being used as a political tool.
And here's the template.
Liberalism, by definition, is civil.
And polite and calm.
Conservatism is, by definition, violent.
You watch civility, a theme of the State of the Union show.
Greetings and welcome back.
I am L. Rushbo at 800-282-2882.
The email address, lrushbo at EIBnet.com.
According to ABC News, the death threats against Sarah Palin have reached an unprecedented level.
I have the story in the stack in San Francisco today.
I guess we can say the president's words are being ignored because there are insulting posters of Sarah Palin on the streets or on a street which encourage violence against her.
The president's admonition for us to be nicer to each other not working.
And ABC News death threats against Palin have reached an unprecedented level.
Should Obama have specifically mentioned how wrong that is?
Should he?
This is not some vague academic hypothesis.
This is actually happening, and Obama is ignoring it.
Now, Obama has no problem warning against the backlash against Muslim terrorists.
And during the Fort Hood scenario, after it was discovered that Major Assan had been talking and getting inspiration from a militant Islamist guy named Al-Awaki, not only Obama, but some high-ranking generals said, I'm going to make sure my main priority is to make sure there's not a backlash against Muslims in the U.S. Army.
Well, okay.
All right, cool.
If that's your gig, fine.
What about the backlash against Obama?
Even ABC News is calling it a backlash against Obama.
Dan Balls, Washington Post, as Obama urged unity, Palin brought division.
Mr. Balls, why do you feel it necessary to stir things up?
Why is it that you want to continue to paint a bullseye on Sarah Palin, Mr. Balls?
Here's the drive-by media doing it.
So in this speech last night, basically Obama's saying what Chris Matthews and the others have been saying, that there's no causal relationship between this crime and public debate.
However, public debate, meaning conservative passion and arguments, needs to change.
Don't doubt me on this.
Can anybody name a single Republican?
I'm serious.
Can anybody name a single Republican who has said that this murder should be used to smear liberals or Democrats or to advance some political agenda?
We have off-the-record types saying it to Politico and others.
Anybody name a single Republican?
Is there any outpost of conservatism or in the Republican Party where a strategy is ongoing behind closed doors how we can use this to demonize liberals?
Or are we minding our own business and simply reacting to yet another spate of assaults on our character and dignity while we were minding our own business doing nothing?
President talks about challenging old assumptions.
Challenging old assumptions.
What the hell?
That's something he argues for when it comes to his agenda.
Challenge old assumptions.
That means the way this country's been in the past, no more.
Barack Obama.
I put the me in memorial.
Well, it starts out.
You spell memorial M-E.
Hi, Barack Obama.
I put the me in memorial.
Now, nobody's going to remember any particular phrase or sentence from this speech.
And I think some of the praise for this speech is forced.
I actually do.
Particularly among some of the conservatives who are doing cartwheels over this.
There are things going on beneath the surface.
People want to position themselves or to be viewed a certain way or whatever.
But that whole night last night was surreal to me in a whole lot of ways.
With much of it spent with my mouth in various stages, phases of open in disbelief.
Now, as you know, people from the beginning of time have tried to figure out why liberals are liberals.
I, on this program, have announced various theories and reasons.
Everybody has.
It's Mars-Venus.
How in the world can...
I mean, seriously, the left is mad that Sarah Palin is inserting herself into this.
Now, Sarah Palin, I don't know, maybe killing and dressing a moose on Saturday afternoon.
Incident happens.
30 minutes later, she's responsible for it.
So three days later, she does a video on Facebook, and they accuse her of inserting herself and trying to take over the story, to put herself in front of it.
They dragged her into it.
And Dan Balls, as Obama urged Yona Day Palin, brought division.
Division?
So here's more of the drive-by media pointing a finger of blame and suspicion at Palin.
Dan Henninger, Wonderland column, Wall Street Journal.
Why the left lost it.
This is his attempt to explain all of this.
The accusation that the Tea Parties were linked to the Tucson murders is the product of calculation and genuine belief.
There has been a great effort this week to come to grips with the American left's reaction to the Tucson shooting.
Paul Krugman, New York Times, and its editorial page, George Packer of The New Yorker, E.J. Deion Jr. of the Washington Post, Jonathan Alder of Newsweek, and others in varying degrees have linked the murders to the intensity of opposition to the policies and presidencies of Obama.
As Krugman asked in his Monday commentary, were you at some level expecting something like this atrocity to happen?
The you would be his audience, and the answer is yes.
They thought that in these times, something like this could happen in the U.S. Other media commentators without a microbe of conservatism in their bloodstreams have rejected this suggestion.
So what was the point?
Why attempt the gymnastic logic of asserting that the act of a deranged personality was linked to the Tea Parties and to the American right?
Well, there's two reasons.
Political calculation and personal belief.
The calculation flows from the shock of the midterm elections of November 2010.
That was no ordinary election.
What voters did has the potential to change the content and direction of the U.S. political system, possibly for a generation.
And I keep reminding people of this.
The Democrat Party and the left is in a state of utter anger, disbelief, and shock because this was a shellacking.
This defeat goes all the way down to dogcatcher level.
It wasn't just all the new seats in Congress and in the U.S. Senate.
It was state legislatures.
It was cities.
It was counties.
It is deep.
The left and the Democrat Party was more profoundly rejected than at any time in American history.
They know it.
They are angry about this.
They are fully aware of the depth of that defeat.
And it's only 24 months after Obama's own historic election and a rising Democrat tide.
The country flipped not just control of the House, but deep in the body politic.
Republicans now control more state legislative seats than at any time since 1928.
What elevated this transfer of power to historic status is that it came atop the birth of a genuine reform movement, the team parties.
Most of the time, election results are the product of complex and changeable sentiments or the candidates' personalities.
What both sides fear most is a genuine movement with focused goals.
The Tea Party itself got help from history, the arrival of a clarifying event, the sovereign debt crisis of 2010.
Simultaneously, in the capitals of Europe, California, New York, New Jersey, Illinois, and elsewhere, it was revealed that fiscal commitments made across decades, often for liberally inspired social goals, had put all of these states into a condition of effective bankruptcy.
This stark reality unnerved many Americans.
The Tea Party's fiscal concerns were real.
Despite that, a progressive Democrat president and congressional leadership spent 2009 and 2010 passing the biggest economic entitlement since 1965, healthcare, driving U.S. spending to 25% or 3.5 trillion of the nation's 14 trillion GDP.
A public claim of that size has not been seen since World War II.
Yeah, they expected to take losses in November.
What they got instead was Armageddon.
Suddenly, an authentic reform movement linked to the Republican Party, whose goal simply is to stop the public spending curve, had come to life.
Well, this poses a mortal threat to the financial oxygen in the economic ecosystem that the public wing of the Democrat Party has inhabited all these years.
The stakes for the American left in 2012 could not possibly be higher.
If then, and again in 2014, progressives cannot pull toward their candidates some percentage of the independent vote who in November abandoned them.
They could be looking in from the outside for as many years as some of them have left or right about politics.
A wilderness is a terrible place to be.
Against that grim result, every sentence Krugman, Packer, Alter, the Times, and the rest have written about Tucson is logical and understandable.
What happened in November has to be stopped by whatever means become available.
Available this week was a chance to make some independents wonder if the Tea Parties, Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and Jared Lofner are all part of the same dark force.
Who believes this?
They do.
The divide between this strain of the American left and its conservative opponents is about more than politics and policy.
It goes back a long way.
It's deep.
It'll never be bridged, meaning there's no getting along.
It's cultural.
It explains more than anything the intensity that exists now between these two competing camps.
The independent laments, can't we all just get along?
The answer is no.
Again, as I have been ruefully pointing out for years, the Rosetta Stone that explains this tribal divide is Columbia historian Richard Hofstadter's classic 1964 essay, The Paranoid Style in American Politics.
Hofstadter's piece for Harpers may be unfamiliar to many people now, but each writer at the opening of this column knows by rote what Hofstadter's essay taught generations of young left-wing intellectuals about conservatism in the right.
After Hofstadter, the American right wasn't just wrong on policy.
Its people were psychologically dangerous and undeserving of holding authority for any public purpose.
By this mental geography, the Birch Society and the Tea Party are cut from the same backwoods cloth.
American politics has often been an arena for angry minds, Hofstadter wrote.
In recent years, we have seen angry minds at work, mainly among extreme right-wingers who have now demonstrated in the Goldwater movement how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority.
So he goes on to write about this in continuing detail.
And let me basically translate and summarize for you.
Drive-bys like Paul Krugman, Jonathan Alter, and the hundreds more who have been using this tragedy to score political points of Democrats do so because they don't know how to write any other way.
It's how they were trained.
It's how they were taught.
It is how they have been programmed to turn anything that happens into something that they think will help Democrats and hurt Republicans, especially conservatives.
They never ask why because they already know the why.
They are purely agenda-driven in all of their content.
The leftist writers, the left in general, genuinely believe the lies that they tell.
They are so indoctrinated from their schooling and their cocktail parties in New York and Washington that they deeply believe that they see things objectively.
They are literally terrified of being thrown off the road, like they were after Carter and the rise of Reagan, which is why they are hysterical to destroy Palin, the Tea Party, me, talk radio.
Controlling things, being in power is their birthright.
Anything that upsets or interrupts that is abnormal and dangerous.
Evil.
When you're fighting evil, there's nothing out of bounds, nothing illegal you can do.
It's a waste of time to ask them about objectivity.
They think they are.
The accusation that Tea Parties were linked to the Tucson murders is the product of calculation and genuine belief.
That is the scary thing.
They genuinely believe this.
They don't have to have a meeting.
They don't have to have a strategy meeting after the event.
Say, oh, guess what we got here?
Okay, go and do this.
And they all fall in without ever having to talk to one another specifically about how they're going to go about it.
They already know because they already have the belief.
They genuinely believe the Tea Party and Sarah Palin and I were responsible for this.
They genuinely believe it.
That's what they've been raised to believe.
It's how they've been taught, programmed.
They believe it.
It's not a political calculation as much as it is an indoctrinated belief system.
I don't believe they have to calculate this.
Don't think they have to sit around, as I say, have a meeting to plan strategy.
They're actually, in their own way, mind-numbed robots in the way they have been programmed.
What's the only way to discredit a gigantic political movement?
See, this is in the handbook.
What it does better, the Tea Party could be something it hasn't created yet.
Before the Tea Party, it's talk radio.
It's the new media.
What is the only way to discredit that?
Make it look extreme.
You'll hear that Hillary Clinton used the word extreme to describe this guy.
Extremists.
It's a constantly used refrain.
What better way to paint somebody extreme than to pin a murder on them?
Okay, we are back.
It's Rush Limbaugh, and to the phones we go.
Again, the telephone number is 800-282-2882.
This is Kathy in Potomac, Maryland.
Great to have you here.
Oh, thanks, Rush.
Happy New Year and happy belated birthday.
Thank you very much.
Before I get to the reason for my call, I would like to make a very brief linguistic observation, and that is that civility is the new word for censorship.
Yeah, I think you're right.
That's a great point.
Yeah, we don't want to criticize the state.
So, Rush, the reason I called is I could only take two minutes of that Paul Wellstone memorial yesterday, and that's exactly what it was.
In essence, I think people were asked to worship at the altar of the state, and if I may be so bold as to say, the church of Barack the Redeemer.
That's why there were no religious figures reading from the Bible.
The status read from the Bible.
It was very discouraging.
Well, particularly, I'm sure, against what you were expecting.
Yes, yes.
In fact, I saw it on the television.
I decided eventually to watch it or to listen to it on the radio because what I saw on the television with people milling around that arena, I found very distasteful.
And I thought, I don't want to be distracted by watching all the people there, so I'll listen to it on the radio.
And when the hooping and hollering started, I just said, this is almost sacrilegious.
And I had to.
Well, let me ask you a question.
Since you were listening on the radio, I have to ask you what your impression was of something I was watching.
I was watching before everything got started.
They had the cameras in there, but they did not have the cameras on the orchestra.
There was an orchestra or a band in there that was played, but I didn't know that.
And shortly before the ceremony began, I kept hearing what I thought was gunshots or a drum or something.
And I'm trying, what in the world is going on in that room?
I'm looking around.
Nobody's reacting to it.
I think there's got to be a band.
Are you aware of what I'm talking about?
And if you are, I'm curious what you thought when you heard this.
No, I don't think I recall hearing a drum beat, but I'm wondering.
Not a drum beat, not a drum beat.
Every now and then, you know, somebody smashing a bass drum or something or a gunshot going off.
Obviously, it wasn't that, but I'm trying to tell you, what is this noise in there?
It was that the band was doing a warm-up routine or something.
Or maybe it was the medicine man.
Well, I did.
I thought maybe there's some Native American ceremony going on in here before the actual memorial begins because I couldn't see the band.
And I was wondering if something like that was going on.
Yes, well, that could well be, but it was unseemly for a memorial service, at least as I think of a memorial service.
Well, do you remember the Wellstone Memorial?
Oh, yes.
I remember President Clinton walking out and wiping the tear from his eye when the camera was on him.
And the college or the university president reminded me of the same thing, yucking it up beforehand.
Yeah.
Yeah, Have some sound bites from the Wellstone Memorial.
I'm debating whether or not we should go back and play them.
Draw.
There's a slight analogy, but I think her point about words is really great.
Civility is the new censorship.
Civility is the new word for shut the heck up.
On the cutting edge, our previous caller, when I asked if she had seen the Wellstone Memorial, oh, yeah, I remember Bill Clinton and the tears until the camera, that was the Ron Brown Memorial.
Now, the Ron Brown, this was a moment, NBC caught this on videotape over at our TV show.
Our astute and observant producers caught the one feed.
After we made their feed more public than they did, they pulled it.
They stopped using it.
Well, here's what it was: Ron Brown had been killed in a plane crash in Bosnia, and he was Clinton's commerce secretary.
They were all walking into the church where they were doing the memorial.
They weren't walking into a gymnasium on some campus.
And Clinton was walking next to a Pennsylvania minister by the name of Tony Campolo.
And they were telling each other jokes.
And they're walking along the sidewalk.
And Clinton happened to notice the camera and within a half step starts faking, crying, and wiping his eye with a finger.
Meanwhile, Campolo, not aware, keeps yucking it up and keeps laughing.
It is the most vivid illustration of the phoniness of Bill Clinton that there ever has been.
It was so popular, I could have aired it in a loop for 22 minutes straight on the TV show, and the audience still would have wanted more.
It was great.
We have this clip in the archives at rushlimbaugh.com.
Coco, I want you to pull it out.
I want you to make it a special link.
I want you to put it as a link highlighted on the app for the iPhone and the iPad so that iPhone and iPad, we got our own app.
Search the iTunes app store Rush Limbaugh and you'll find our app.
You have to be a website subscriber.
And if you are, then you can get all the content live streaming of the DittoCam of this program each and every day.
I archived DittoCam presentations of previous programs.
Video of each day's morning update.
Transcripts.
Tremendous amount of comment.
There are a couple of promos running for the Haney Project.
Oh, I don't have the numbers, but I got a note today, record ratings for the golf channel and the Haney Project on Tuesday night at 9 o'clock, but I didn't get any further details.
But, yeah, another, it was apparently it was big.
But one of these times, I'd love to be able to show you the video right now of Clinton.
Folks, it's just, it is classic.
I mean, within a half a step, he goes from out-of-controlled laughter and yucks to a pained face shedding a tear, wiping his left eye, I believe it is, with an index finger, while Campolo continues to tell the joke and laugh and yuck it up.
It's just a TV audience, our live studio audience, just, I mean, they just started laughing uncontrollably at it.
So that was the Ron Brown Memorial.
The Wellstone Memorial was in 2002.
This was after Senator Paul Wellstone was killed in a plane crash.
This is the memorial where Republican Senators Trent Lott and a couple others were booed out of the place.
They had to leave.
And I didn't think last night, I thought after the Wellstone Memorial, they're not going to get anywhere near what the Wellstone Memorial was, but by gosh, they started that way.
It was here.
I'll tell you what, let's do.
Let's see.
Hang on, Mr. Broadcast Engineer.
I'm looking here.
Well, I'm sure we got four of these.
I'm trying to figure out which one I want to use.
Grand number 35.
This is Wellstone student and treasurer of his campaign, Rick Kahn, at the Wellstone Memorial, Wellstone staffer, imploring the crowd to organize to elect Fritz Mondahl to Wellstone's seat.
Everybody was expecting a memorial to Paul Wellstone.
Everybody who knew him liked him.
He had this airplane accident crash and he died.
And they turned this into this is one of the reasons they lost the midterms.
This took place October 29th, just a week before the elections.
He needs you now.
I am begging you, please let the people of this state hear your voice on his behalf to keep his legacy alive and help us win this election for Paul Wellstone.
I can still hear that strong, clear voice calling to me that it is now our time to stand up for the people he fought for.
That we need to stand up for our children.
We must stand up for our seniors.
We have to stand up.
We are going to stand up together and then we're going to organize.
We're going to organize.
This is a memorial for Paul Wellstone.
We're going to organize.
We're going to organize.
And then Tom Harkin.
By the way, this was at Williams Arena at the University of Minnesota.
For Paul Wellstone, will you stand up and keep fighting for social and economic justice?
Say yes.
For Paul.
For Paul, will you stand up and keep fighting for better wages, for those who mop our floors and clean our bathrooms, for those who take care of our elderly, take care of our sick, teach our kids, and help our homeless?
Say yes!
For Paul, will you stand up and keep fighting for cleaner air and cleaner water, for a cleaner environment for our children and our future?
Say yes!
For Paul, for Paul, will you stand up and keep fighting for peace and understanding and to stop the exploitation of women and children around the world?
Say yes!
For Paul, for Paul, will you stand up and keep fighting to end discrimination based on race, gender, religion, ethnicity, or sexual orientation?
Say yes!
For Paul!
For Paul, will you stand up and keep fighting for the poor, the homeless, and those left on the roadside of life?
Say yes!
Now, let's all get on that bus together, that green bus, that bus of hope, and let's keep it moving to a better America.
Keep!
Keep standing up!
Keep fighting!
Keep saying yes to justice!
To hope!
For people!
For Paul!
The only thing missing was the medicine man.
That was the only thing missing.
By the way, I have a question, you know, if politicians, we keep hearing about uncivil, and I love our previous caller's comment that this civility equals censorship.
That's exactly what Obama and the left mean when they start talking about civility.
We need to bring civility back to our discourse.
That means shut us up.
Censorship.
Now, if politicians are uncivil to us, if they are dismissive of the last election, for example, they lost.
They got shellacked.
But if they are dismissive of that election, if they are dismissive of the Constitution, as they were the other week when it was read on the floor of the House, how are we to react to them?
Say we disagree, but do it quietly, without passion, in hushed tones, with the words please and thank you.
How are we supposed to react when they are uncivil to us?
I've actually been thinking about doing a program the way they would like to hear this program done.
I think it'd be fun to try, you know, to do an hour of civility as they mean it.
Don't get scared, snurdly.
There's no reason to fear this.
No, there's not.
No, there's not.
It's like every other illustration we do on this program, make the point of how silly and stifling it would be.
Well, no, I could be boring.
I could very easily be boring.
I just have to be myself.
Oh, seriously, I've been thinking about it.
Yeah, they want it.
Okay, here's what it would sound like.
And so we get a soundbite of them saying Sarah Palin is asserting herself improperly.
She's dumb and stupid.
What would be the civil way of reacting to that?
What would be the civil way of reacting to their allegation that this program's responsible for what happened in Arizona?
What would be the civil way of reacting to it?
Because understand, it is not uncivil to make the accusation as they define all this.
There's no limit on them.
They are not guilty of anything.
What's uncivil is when those of us minding our own business, bothering no one, are accused of some atrocity and we respond to it.
That's the uncivility or incivility.
So what would be a civil response to that allegation?
I've been toying with it.
I don't know.
Someday I may just spring it on you without even telling you that's what I'm doing.
I would be instantly spottable.
You'd know instantly what I'm doing.
But I've I just want you to know that I've been toying it.
When they pass laws to harm our businesses or control our lives, what should we do?
What's the civil response?
What is the civil reply to legislation that limits freedom?
What's the civil response to legislation that further erodes the opportunity for economic prosperity?
Well, some say that I wouldn't have to do a program the way the libs want me to.
I just listen to NPR, and you have the idea.
And to a certain extent, yes.
And I could do NPR.
I've done it way back long ago.
I did a half hour or so that way on this program.
I actually tried to become a liberal for a half hour, and some people bought it.
The point was to prove, I'll tell you what, I forget exactly what it was, but it was I was getting inundated with calls about how Republicans always fail.
They tell us one thing and they're going to lie.
And you know what?
They're going to go out there and lie to us in the campaign.
They're going to cave when they get into governing.
And I was being inundated as though I was responsible for it.
What are you going to tell a Republicans?
What are you going to tell a Republican?
Why are the Republicans?
I'm not them.
What do you, I was in, I was judged to be the one to have the ability to make them stop.
So I was going to actually be one of those guys that caved.
I still think it'd be fun.
So I'll spring it on you when you are least expecting it.
In the meantime, the brief time out.
We'll come back right after this.
Don't go away.
All right, we forgot all about the Coretta Scott King service.
It took three hours for somebody to remember that there was a body in that casket, and that was Bill Clinton.
So you see, that's a parody of ours from years and years and years ago.
There's a pattern of behavior here.
Of course, very civil behavior.
Let me ask you a question here.
Saul Lelinsky, was Saul Lewinsky civil?
Did he preach civility?
Was Reverend Wright's Church civil?
Bill Ayers, architect of the Pentagon bombing, Obama's buddy, was he civil?
Let's have some examples of leftist civility.
The next time they talk about it, which will be sometime today, tonight, let's ask, well, give me some examples of your civility.
Let's have some examples of leftist civility.
Where is leftist civility in any of your discussions of Sarah Palin?
Was John Kerry civil during his happy days protesting against the Vietnam War?
Have you noticed we haven't heard much from Harry Reid?
My guess is they locked him away somewhere, keep him away from this event.
Because very little that's civil that comes out of his mouth.
Pete Stark, Fortney Pete Stark, Monty Frank, well known for their civility, insulting their own constituents.
Was Barbara Boxer civil when she berated that general for not calling her senator?
When the late Ted Kennedy went on the Senate floor and smeared Robert Bork when he was nominated to the Supreme Court by Reagan?
Was Kennedy civil in his vicious accusations against Bork?
Was Joe Bitney civil when he orchestrated a hateful smear campaign against Clarence Thomas during his confirmation hearings?
And if you'll permit me to be blunt, you can say much about this current presidency, but civility is one of the last words that comes to mind when thinking and talking about this regime.
Has Obama been civil to his predecessor, George W. Bush?
Has Jimmy Carter been civil to the state of Israel?
And who can forget all that civility surrounding the candidacy of Sharon Angle or Christine O'Donnell?
Okay, civility lessons.
Civility practice.
Practice, ladies and gentlemen, your civil reaction to this charge.
The Republican Party's policies are based on hate and racism.
Tell me how you would respond in a civil way.
The reason you oppose immigration is because mostly Hispanic people are coming across the border and taking your job.
Give me the civil response to this charge.
I got some other examples, too.
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