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March 14, 2011 - Rush Limbaugh Program
34:22
March 14, 2011, Monday, Hour #3
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Snerdly, did you get your iPad 2 over the weekend?
You didn't even try.
You were stuck in front of the TV watching the earthquake, tsunami.
Speaking of which, I have something here.
This is from the, what's the website?
What's the word?
Well, it supposedly is, by the way, welcome back, folks.
Great to have you.
Rush Limbaugh, the EIB network, blah, blah, blah.
You know all that.
800-282-2882 if you want to be on the program.
This is supposedly, because I say so.
Anybody can now fake what a New York Times story looked like from 1896.
And somebody has either done that or it's for real.
Do me a favor, when you hear this, Google 1896 Japan earthquake.
In fact, Google it now.
Just Google 1896 Japan earthquake.
And you tell me if you find something on it, then I'll do this New York Times thing.
Otherwise, I'm being hoaxed here.
Not purposely.
Somebody well-intentioned.
Anyway, I got my iPads.
I got two of them, Snerdly.
Yeah, and you know, these things are amazing.
They're actually twice as fast graphically loading web pages.
If you're a gamer, I guess there's this game out there that the iPad people use called Infinity Blade.
You a gamer, Brian?
And the iPad has, iPad 2 has something called video mirroring.
You can actually place whatever is on your iPad screen on your HD television, your flat screen, regardless how big.
I know a guy, it's called video mirroring.
Whatever is on the iPad screen is what's on the TV.
It's not video out where you play only movies and stuff.
It's whatever is on the screen.
And a guy was playing this Infinity Blade game at 1080p out on his iPad on his 50-inch television.
And it was just as smooth, just as responsive as the $60 Xbox version.
And the iPad app is like $9.
It's just stunning what the thing does.
It's got a gyroscope.
It's just amazingly faster.
And they have ramped up this processor speed like crazy, and they still have 10.5 to 11 hours of battery time on it.
Which I am convinced, I think one of the unspoken reasons the iPad is such a powerful thing is that battery life.
11 hours.
You don't get anywhere near that on a phone.
And there's not a comparable tablet out there that gives you anywhere near that kind of battery life.
11 hours.
Anyway, it's pretty cool.
Now they're sold out.
You can't find one anywhere.
They've not released sales figures.
But people are guessing 500,000 to a million units.
Ladies and gentlemen, there's a story at Politico today.
I'm actually now, I'm going to have to turn to some of you for some help.
I thought I had this figured out, but it's gone beyond my ability to explain this.
And that is this incessant, inexplicable, growing hatred of Sarah Palin by people on our side.
The political story here, she's becoming Al Sharpton, Alaska edition.
This is by Jonathan Martin and John Harris.
Sarah Palin has played the sexism card, accusing critics of chauvinism against a strong woman.
She has played the class card, dismissing the Bush family as blue bloods, complaining that she is the target of snobbery by people who dislike her simply because she's not so hoity-toity.
Most famously, she has played the victim card, never more vividly than when she invoked the loaded phrase blood libel against liberals and media commentators in the wake of the Gabriel Giffords shooting.
Palin's flamboyant rhetoric always has thrilled supporters, but lately it's coming at a new cost, a backlash, not from liberals, but from some of the country's most influential conservative commentators and intellectuals.
Palin's politics of grievance and group identity, according to these conservative critics, is a betrayal of conservative principles.
For decades, it was a standard line of the right that liberals cynically promoted victimhood to achieve their goals and that they practiced the politics of identity, race, sex, and class over ideas.
Among those taking aim at Palin in recent interviews with Politico are George Will, the elder statesman of conservative columnist Pete Weiner, a top strategist in Bush 43's White House, and Heather McDonald, a leading voice with the right-wing Manhattan Institute.
Matt LaBash, a longtime writer for the Weekly Standard, said that because of Palin's frequent appeals to victimhood and group grievance, she's becoming Al Sharpton, Alaska edition.
Conservative intellectuals, while having scant ability to drive large blocks of voters on their own, traditionally have played an outsized role in the early stages of Republican nominating contests.
Their approval has lent credence to politicians from Ronaldus Magnus onward hoping to portray themselves as faithful adherents to an idea-driven conservative movement.
This year, the conservative intelligentsia doesn't just tend to dislike Palin.
Many fear that her rise would represent the triumph of an intellectually empty brand of populism and the death of ideas as an engine of the right.
George Will said this is a problem for the movement.
Not what Palin represents for conservatism because it is a creedal movement.
This is a disease to which it is susceptible.
The line of modern conservatism can be traced back to National Review founder William F. Buckley.
And it would be broken by Palin, George Will said.
There's no Reagan without Goldwater, no Goldwater without National Review, and no National Review without Buckley.
And the contrast between Buckley and Ms. Palin is obvious.
Asked if the GOP would remain the party of ideas if Palin catches the nomination, Will said the answer is emphatically no.
Columnist Charles Krauthammer, without talking about Palin specifically, noted that there's a healthy and unhealthy populism, and there is concern about the rise of the latter.
When populism becomes purely anti-intellectual, it can become unhealthy and destructive, Kramer said.
Pete Weiner, who's a good friend of mine, now a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, cited the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan's famous 1980 declaration that the GOP become a party of ideas.
Conservatives are very proud of that, Weiner said, but she seems at best disinterested in ideas or lacks the ability to articulate any philosophical justification for them.
She relies instead on shallow talking points.
Does Palin care about what conservative commentators say about her?
So far, the answer would appear to be no.
Palin defenders say she has good reason to be dismissive of elite critics.
She's outpaced their low expectations at every turn.
You know what I think?
I'm trying to figure this all out.
I can understand the left despising this woman.
I mean, it would make perfect sense.
But this rising vitriol from the conservative intellectual bench is mystifying to me.
But, well, I don't get this comparison, Al Sharpton.
I don't know where that comes from.
That's Matt LaBash at the Weekly Standard.
I don't know where that comes from.
What does Sharpton do?
Would somebody point out one similarity between Al Sharpton and Sarah Palin?
Where is the Tawana brawling in Sarah Palin's life?
Where is that incident?
Where are all the megaphone-led rallies and protests?
Where are those things?
Where are all of the compliment to the National Action Network and its annual convention and whatever?
Where is this?
Where's the you know, where are the lawsuits that Sharpton files against people?
Well, they claim that she's playing her.
Where is her tax cheating, for example?
Who is Sarah Palin shaking down?
And we're going to start making these comparisons.
What was it you just shouted at me, H.R.?
I was.
Well, that's why they say she's portraying herself as a victim because she's firing back.
They're saying that she should just shut up.
In the aftermath of being blamed for this Arizona thing, she should have just shut up.
The fact that she responded and reacted to it means that she's feeling sorry for herself and is portraying herself as a victim.
And that's something that the left does, portray themselves as victims.
She should have just been quiet and let the story ride itself out and let it go away and so forth as it would have.
And I used to think that a lot of this was just fear-based.
I've really had a tough time understanding.
To be honest, folks, I've had a tough time.
I still not sure.
I'm wondering if some of this is not rooted in the fear that our conservative intellectuals have that our current crop of Republican presidential hopefuls is kind of weak and that therefore she may be the most popular among them.
But I, it's like I told you this.
I love telling this story.
A couple of friends of mine who had recently met Palin, I've never met her.
I've spoken to her on the phone once when we interviewed her for Limbaugh Letter, the newsletter, when she'd had her book out.
Other than that, I've never met her.
She did tell a funny story when I did interview her.
She said that I met her father out in Palm Springs at one of the first two Bob Hope Chrysler golf tournaments I played in as an amateur.
That some guy came up and asked me to sign a copy of my book for his daughter.
Well, it turned out to be her dad, getting the book signed for her, and that she has that book in her office or her library in her home in Alaska.
That's the extent.
I don't know her.
I've never spent any time with her, but people that I know here had spent an evening with her, and a couple days later I met them for dinner.
And these are, folks, I mean, these are rock-ribbed conservatives, huge donors and fundraisers.
Reaganites pedigree is unquestionable.
And they said to me, you know, dear, we met Sarah Palin.
I think you would agree, dear, she just doesn't have the heft.
She's much prettier in person than even on TV.
I can't escape noticing that, but I don't know.
I think she's just not presidential.
Do you think, dear?
And, you know, I realized what circumstance was here.
This is not going to start an argument.
I didn't care to.
I didn't want to spend that kind of time there.
I said, yeah, you know what?
Anybody.
I'm going to give me four more years of Obama instead of Palin.
What do you mean by that, dear?
Well, Sarah Palin's so damn embarrassing.
I don't know how I might not even be able to say I'm a Republican if she gets the nomination.
I'm not quite following you, dear.
Well, she's so embarrassing.
Sarah Palin or Obama?
Hell, give me.
And I finally said, look, I don't understand all this.
The problem is Obama.
The Democrat Party is destroying the freaking country.
Sorry to yell here.
Now, we're sitting here sniping over.
I'd vote for Elmer Fudd if the Republicans nominated him.
If Obama's the Democrat, obviously there are elements of this that are personal that I don't understand.
I mean, look, I can understand not wanting her to be a nominee.
I can understand thinking there's somebody better.
But there's all that assault on her by our guys that puzzles me.
And now this latest to say that she's Al Sharpton?
Our version of Al Sharpton in Alaska.
So you guys got to help me out out there.
Somebody's going to have to explain this to me, because it's it makes you know I'm I'm totally immersed in logic and common sense and some of this doesn't register that way for me.
I don't.
I, I can think of not gonna mention any names here.
The Republican field what is it?
Nine or ten people that are said to be interested in it?
There are four or five of them that can't hold a candle to her as far as I'm concerned, but these guys don't think there's one.
So what did she do to them?
Does she embarrass them?
I okay.
If she does embarrass them, what okay?
Well, of course the liberals are gonna say she's stupid.
That's enough for us to say okay, we don't want her because the liberals are rejecting her.
So we've got to.
Okay, all right fine, fine.
Well, anybody else got any ideas?
I'm open to them.
Up, we got to take a break.
Okay, back we go to the phones and it's Alex in Exton, Pennsylvania.
Welcome to the EIB network.
Hello.
Hi, this is Alex.
I live in Pennsylvania.
Hi.
Ukrainian.
Lived in Kiev.
It's about our driving from Chernobyl.
Yes.
So very close experience.
Situation was, let's say, there are two kinds of society.
First is a socialist society with the government control over everything, radio, TV, internet, and whatever.
And United States, which I can appreciate.
So the catastrophe happened in night from Friday to Saturday.
I got information on Monday morning.
Very interesting.
Some of my friends found high level of radioactivity on the people that travel to work in regular passenger buses.
It's inside the Kiev.
And they found it was tens of millihenry.
Actually, it was about 5,000 times higher than standard norm.
Norm is 10 to 12 micro Rengen per hour.
Sorry.
And the Soviet officials didn't tell you.
Officials?
Ha!
This is the point.
There are two kinds of people.
There were two kinds of people in society.
First, it's the people, which should be the citizens and whatever, all these rights.
And there are people, the government people, or top party leaders, and the people that serve them.
It's two categories.
So-called blue blood, sorry, red blood, and the regular folks.
So, blue blood got information on Sunday.
It means day after.
And they started panic.
Why?
They got planes, charter planes, to evacuate kids from.
Okay, so this relates to the Japanese earthquake.
How?
How?
The reactor design is absolutely different.
That's number one.
Number two, despite of being in the vicinity of Chernobyl, I support nuclear power, and I think this is the only way to go.
Do you still have two eyes and ten fingers and all that?
And even something working, too.
Well, that's good.
40 miles is close, buddy.
That's very, very close.
And they didn't tell you how bad it was.
I mean, they watched.
No, no, no, no, no, no.
On Monday at 5 p.m., Gerbachev or somebody was on TV and told that there is a problem in Chernobyl.
And we had the joke, Prime Minister of Finland, called Mr. Gerbachev, we got a lead from Chernobyl reactor.
No, no, no, it cannot be.
Why?
It's written, reactor number four, lead, safety lead.
Gerbachev's answer was our reactors are working without leads.
It's not ours.
And government imposed, government imposed some kind of curfew on information.
The law was accepted to prevent any kind of rumor circulation and unauthorized measuring of reaction.
Now, well, you know, something, there's a point.
There's a point to all this, folks.
What is the benchmark for nuclear failures these days?
Chernobyl.
Everything is a Chernobyl.
Well, Three Mile Island wasn't a Chernobyl.
The International Atomic Energy Agency, UN, has just said Reuters very unhappy about this.
Has just said that what's happened in Japan is not a Chernobyl.
They want every nuclear event in the world to be seen by people as a Chernobyl.
Well, it was poorly designed.
It was managed by idiots and run by communists.
Everything about it, the aftermath, as Alex here was saying, was an abject lie.
And yet that's what that's their benchmark.
You think nuclear, you're supposed to think Chernobyl, that they're all that way.
And they're not.
You give me a capitalist reactor any day, as opposed to a communist one.
Okay, I've read the emails and they're pouring in.
And many of them from the public email account, El Rushball, EIBNet.com.
You idiot!
You're supposed to be the one with the answers.
You're asking us why everybody hates Sarah Palin, you idiot.
If we know, you should know.
That's how many of them begin.
Some of them say, you stupid fool, don't you know it's because they're jealous of her.
That seems to be, by the way, the number one explanation from people answering the question.
I haven't had a chance to read them all.
I mean, they're coming in here by the hundreds every 20 seconds or so, but it's they're jealous of her or they fear her.
Of course, all of that's true.
But it's I look, I think I get it.
I think I understand part.
I think the simple explanation here is: if you want to be an accredited intellectual, one of the tests is, do you hate Sarah Palin?
Do you think she represents a pox?
Is she a danger to whatever?
If you do, then you will pass the test and you are, therefore, an accredited intellectual.
It's sort of like it's sort of like the whole business of shibboleth.
If you're an intellectual, you should know what a shibboleth is.
It's from the Bible.
It's a Hebrew word that very few Hebrews could pronounce correctly.
If you could pronounce it correctly, you were an intellectual.
It was a test to see if you were an actual member of the tribe.
Well, right now, Sarah Palin is the intellectual's favorite shibboleth.
If you want to prove you are an intellectual, you have to say Sarah Palin's an idiot.
That's as much of an explanation as anything else.
I know she threatens the old boys club.
She represents, she hits an associates average people, whereas these people don't.
All those things that we have mentioned and pondered before on the program.
But here's what you need to know.
This is what you need to know.
And folks, do not doubt me.
Some of you weren't alive in the mid-70s.
Some of you weren't old enough in the mid-70s to remember.
But Ronald Reagan was just as hated by the intellectual class then as Palin is now.
Now, I'm not saying that Palin is Reagan.
I'm just telling you that Reagan didn't have the pedigree.
And I have warned you several times on this program that even during Reagan's presidency, many of the conservative intellectuals and Buckley was an exception, and many of the Republican liberals just despised the guy because he embarrassed them.
His folksiness, his connection he had to the pro-life community, he embarrassed them.
His the bombing starts in five minutes, calling the Soviets the evil empire.
I mean, the left all hated that, but so did a lot of people in the Republican Party.
Krauthammer used to write speeches for Walter Mondale.
Yeah.
George Will first, who did he, Howard Baker was his choice in 76 or 80, I forget which.
George Will was a later rival to the Reagan Revolution and eventually became a close friend and associate, but he was not.
Well, I don't want to bring myself into this HR.
I mean, what do I have to gain by saying they were cool to my arrival?
I'm not.
Buckley was not.
But Buckley was the exceptions.
And it's worth thinking about Buckley is, you know, folks, I'll tell you something.
There's something fascinating going on in the conservative intellectual media movement.
One of the things that Buckley did, I think this is a factor too, in a way.
Buckley is within this conclave, if you will, the conclave, the cardinal of conservative colleges, loved Buckley because he told the Birchers to go to heck.
He threw the Birchers out of the conservative movement, thereby sparing the conservative movement any association and accompanying embarrassment.
He just, I mean, he fillet them.
He wrote piece after piece.
He sent the Birchers packing.
Well, there are, I think, elements of the conservative intellectual movement today who are looking to be the next Buckley, excommunicating the next Bircher, whoever it might be, movement, individual, what have you.
So it could be a little bit of that, even though Palin's not a Bircher by any stretch.
He's not a conspiracy cook or theorist.
So Buckley remains, he was, Buckley, despite he was, he was, he was born wealthy, you know, silver spoon in his mouth, but he, he was, he was, he was not an enemy of flyover country.
He was not, he was not disdainful.
Buckley, I remember invited me.
I don't want to make this about me.
But that is an apt analogy about Buckley.
And there's still a lot of people trying to be Buckley today throughout the literary conservative intelligentsia.
But I, for me to sit here and to say that the Washington intellectual elite feels the same way about me that they do, Sarah, I'm not, I have a lot of people who tell me that, but I don't, I don't even want to go there.
This, because this is not about me.
There's not a political story about me.
This is Palin being the Al Sharpton of our version of Al Sharpton.
I just checked, I got an email from a guy in Virginia saying, well, wait a minute, the left loves Sharpton.
How's this not really a compliment?
I never heard the left criticize Sharpton.
The left loves him.
He's one of their favorite rabble-rousers.
All true.
No, it's always amused me.
It always amuses me.
On the left, just to kind of combat this notion that they're the smartest people around these intellectuals, some of the people on the left who despise Sarah Palin loved John Edwards.
Now, if there's ever a disconnect, and John Edwards, as a human being, is clearly lacking.
And yet, there were people who thought John Edwards was the beginning and end of everything, just cats-meow, whatever, who hate Sarah Palin.
By the same token.
By the same token, some of these conservative intellectuals were totally smitten with Obama at the outset.
Remember?
Totally smitten with Obama.
And in the case of David Brooks, it was because of the freaking crease in his pants.
He said that.
That crease in his pants made me know he was going to be president.
And these are the intellectuals.
But to these guys, Obama was like them.
They were like Obama at the outset.
I don't think too many of them want to be perceived as like Obama now, but at the outset.
But Palin never, they never see themselves as like Sarah Palin for obvious reasons, be it the pedigree, the education, all the other things.
Turns out to be true.
This is not a faked New York Times story, but you have to be careful these days.
New York Times, September 3rd, 1896, reports have been received here.
This is from Yokohama, Japan.
Reports have been received here that a great earthquake ravaged the northeast provinces of Japan on Monday night, destroying the town of Rokugo and other towns in that section.
Thousands of persons are reported to have been killed and many more injured while the damage to property is incalculable.
On the same day of the earthquake in the north of Japan, the southern coasts of the country were swept by a typhoon, which destroyed a vast amount of property and caused the loss of many lives.
The territory visited by the earthquake was similarly ravaged last June when many towns were destroyed by an earthquake and an accompanying tidal wave, which caused an estimated loss of 30,000 lives.
So, but the point is, this is really not new to them.
This has happened before.
Imagine a hurricane and an earthquake in the same day.
And this is before any nuclear power.
I know the whole region.
That's why I'm talking about the Ring of Fire.
The whole Ring of Fire, which is the Pacific Plate.
And the place that has not yet had a shift is in our great Northwest, where Sarah Palin lives.
Alaska, up there.
Well, it would.
If something hits up there, if you have earthquake in Alaska, the great Northwest area, if it's strong enough to affect the San Andreas Fault, you know, go buy addictomies at the local hospitals.
They're going to have other things on their minds.
Anyway, that's what the latest news week is suggesting.
The worst could be yes to come because it's happening in Chile.
That's one region of the Ring of Fire, the Pacific Plate.
Japan, Australia is another.
The fourth corner, untouched yet, Great Northwest.
So the fear factor, ladies and gentlemen, ramping it all up.
I left home today.
I locked the door and I got in the car and I fastened the seatbelt.
And the only reason I fastened the seatbelt is because this thing starts going nuts chime-wise if I don't.
But I still did it.
I didn't expect somebody to break into the house, and I didn't expect to have a car accident, but I was prepared just in case.
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Hello, John.
Great to have you on the EIB network, sir.
Hello.
Hello.
How are you today, Rush?
Excellent.
Thank you, sir.
Thank you for taking my call.
You bet, sir.
I mean, was that it?
Or is he going?
No, I was expecting an invitation to talk.
Oh, well, you have it.
By all means, feel free.
Rush, my reason for my call was concern over the conservative communication in the aftermath of Walker's victory in Wisconsin.
Oh, yeah.
And as you well know, the liberal media and the unions have been beating the heck out of Walker and Republicans, you know, based on trickery and forced down their throats.
It's mean-spirited and all that stuff having to do with process.
Standard operating procedure.
There you go.
And the Republicans have, rightly, been focusing on the outcome in terms of the positives.
Right.
But I find myself concerned that there are three errors of omission in the Republican communication, or at least a lack of explicit emphasis.
What's one of them?
I got a time probably.
What's the most important one?
Well, the most important one is there's no emphasis on the fact that he saved 6,000 teacher and other union jobs by doing it the way he did do it.
Okay.
The second part of that is that.
Yeah, you know, we've had, I don't mean to be rude, but I've got this brake doesn't move.
I can't, it's not flexible.
But this is an ongoing complaint.
Where are our good headlines?
The good result doesn't matter.
I want the headlines.
Remind me to chat this up tomorrow.
I've got to explain this.
Now, to show you how things don't change, the 1896 Japanese earthquake was blamed on experiments being conducted by Nikola Tesla in Manhattan, the famous electrical guy.
His experiments caused the earthquake in Japan in 1896, just to show you how things don't change.
That was in the New York Times.
This is even before Godzilla, folks.
See you tomorrow.
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