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April 11, 2011 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:40
April 11, 2011, Monday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of The Rush 24-7 Podcast.
You remember, uh, ladies and gentlemen, remember when talking about the budget was considered deadly boring.
I remember back in the early informative years of this program.
If I were going to talk about the budget, I mean it was death.
I might as well be putting up the test pattern.
I mean, it was the last thing.
I mean, it was esoteric, it was not sexy, and when there was no drama in it, it was something you just avoided as a uh as a radio talk show host at all costs.
And apparently the Tea Party has changed all of that now.
The budget, I never thought I would see this day, where the budget is the primary focus of interest in the United States of America, where the budget is something that everybody today, I know that a record number of people are tuning into this program today to find out what to really think on this budget.
I know that.
And that is such a remarkable evolution in uh in this program and in public sentiment in just uh in just 22 years, and the Tea Party has changed all of that, and the November elections last year changed all that.
We wouldn't even be having this conversation today.
There wouldn't even be this uh royaled debate going on if it weren't for the Tea Party and their victories in November.
Elections really do have consequences.
Greetings, my friends, and welcome.
It is the award-winning, thrill-packed, ever-exciting, keep you on the edge of your seats, EIB network, Rush Limbaugh program from the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.
Our telephone number, if you want to be on the program, is 800 282-288-2, and the email address L Rushball at EIBNet.com.
So what happened?
Friday night, I drove about eight miles south of where I live to the Four Treasons, Four Seasons Hotel, and made a speech to a gathering of Heritage Foundation people.
And while I was driving to the speech, I was I had Fox News on in the car, and I was listening to trying to get the latest information on the budget negotiations as I'm ready to go in and make my speech.
It was supposed to be 20 minutes of speech and then 20 minutes of QA and then out, and it ended up being an hour and 10 minutes of speech and five minutes of QA.
The questions were written on cards, and I had ended up answering all the questions in the in the course of doing the uh doing the speech.
And the last number I heard uh as I parked a car, well, I didn't park the car, the valet took the car.
Last number I heard as I arrived at the front of the four seasons was $38 billion.
And I got a card, I practically slammed the door.
$38 billion.
What happened to the campaign promise of 100 billion dollars?
And okay, that got prorated down because months have dwindled.
That 100 billion dollars was supposed to cover 12 months.
That got prorated down to $61 billion was the promise, and now I'm hearing going into my speech, $38 billion.
So when I got in there, and at the point uh in my talk where I got around to this subject, I told the audience it's about 250 people in there.
Heritage Foundation guests and members and officials, scholars, uh thinkers.
I could see them sitting there thinking as I was speaking.
I mean, that's your think tank, that's what you people do.
And I told him, I said if there if if 38 billion dollars is it, there's gonna be hell to pay here.
This is not gonna be satisfactory.
Not when we accrue 38 billion dollars in debt in two and a half days, to run around and start talking about 38 billion dollars in cuts.
As though it's it's some great achievement.
It's not going to uh this this is this is not gonna cause people to celebrate and raise the victory flag and so forth.
So I finished the speech and driving home, I get home and I I know they're gonna settle this right before midnight.
You know it's gonna have you know there's not gonna be a government shutdown because you know Boehner doesn't want a government shutdown.
He said he didn't want a government shutdown, and lo and behold, there wasn't a government shutdown.
The number's 38 billion.
Or 38 and a half billion.
And then I started uh delving into the details of it.
What some of the things that we got, which I have a list of them here, some of the things we lost, have a list of them here.
And then I started thinking about this program Friday night at midnight.
Because there are a lot of factors here to be discussed.
One thing, and that's why I opened the program the way I did.
Talking about the budget was the last thing.
I mean, if you wanted to get fired as a radio talk show host, you would talk about the budget and you'd bring in expert guests on it.
You would die.
Nobody would listen.
I have experience.
I've gotten canned seven times.
Well, but I didn't get canned seven times.
I don't even want to get back into that, but I've I've I've I've got experience.
In fact, I had a I had a great opening.
Dr. Arne, Dr. Larry Arne of uh Hillsdale College introduced me.
And I'm backstage, I'm listening to the introduction, and Dr. Arne is uh discussing Cass Sunstein, member of the Obama regime, fairness doctrine, and all of the efforts that the left and the Democrat Party are at this moment attempting to hatch to destroy me.
So I make a mental note of that.
I walk out as part of my introduction.
I said, I I recalled moments ago, Dr. Arne uh discussing Cass Sunstein, a Democrats' efforts to destroy me.
I said, folks, it can't be done.
I've already tried it twice.
And I have survived it.
And so I've been thinking about this this program all weekend long.
And one thing that's clear is you know, the the the deal's the deal.
I I don't want to sit here and whine about the past.
There are uh I mean we've got to move forward here.
So the deal is done.
The debate has shifted from spending to cutting.
As we sit here today.
$38 billion.
I'm sorry I can't start throwing parties over it.
But it's a first step.
I mean, it didn't take overnight for the Democrats to get us here, and it's not gonna happen overnight, shifting us out of here.
So this is a this is a first step.
I wish they'd have kept their promise.
I wish it had been 100 billion.
I wish it had been 61 billion.
But even those numbers, as you and I both know, are we talking pennies?
Which is something else I told the Heritage people.
I met Scott Walker, by the way, the governor of Wisconsin.
He was in the audience.
I met him in the green room prior to the great, great, great.
Here's a guy who's fearless.
Here's a guy who is uh tackling his problems as promised, Governor Wisconsin, a lot of admiration for him.
But here we are, and I here's here's I'll give you the short version here.
We got a commercial break, of course, and we'll come back and get into this in much greater detail.
We'll we'll meld some of the audio sound bites into it.
But here's where the pitfall lies.
I am I'm sorry, folks, but I don't buy all this press.
I got stacks of them.
I'm gonna share it with you.
It's it's it's almost a ruse.
No matter where you go, politico, New York Times, Washington Post, Obama got snookered.
Boehner, great, great victory, masterful strategic win, and so forth.
And I said, 38 billion dollars?
What is this?
I've got stories of the Democrats are fretting, the Democrats are depressed, the Democrats.
I got the most ludicrous funny piece.
Where is it from?
The Huffington Post, I think it is.
Seven pages this thing printed out to be.
I I swear I I don't know how to.
Yeah, it's from some guy named Richard R.J. Escal.
I I when I read it to you, it's it's so.
I don't know if there's a giant ruse going on here, but if it's tough for me to believe a Democrats are really feeling defeated over 38 billion dollars of cuts.
So I think what's going on, they got Obama's plummeting numbers.
Obama races to the Lincoln Memorial on Saturday to say, hey, it's still open.
See what I did?
He didn't do diddly squat.
There's no leadership from Obama here.
He stayed out of it till the last minute, and we got all the stories about the things he did at the last minute to make it happen.
But I think a lot of this uh reporting about about how the Democrats took it on the chin, the Democrats are nervous, the Democrats are depressed.
What a great strategic move.
You know, I know these people in the media.
I know liberals like every square inch of my glorious naked body, and I'm telling you that my instinct tells me that most of this is structured in such a way as to fire up the Democrat base because Obama's numbers are plummeting.
Because you and I both know that to the American left, the Democrat Party, we conservatives are the number one enemy they face, not the Taliban, not Al Qaeda, not uh Mahmood Ahmedinizad, none of these real threats to the country.
We are the biggest threat.
I mean, what do they do when they try to fire up the base?
They come after me or they come after Sarah Palin or whoever.
Well, what better way to frighten the Democrat base than a massive weekend full of stories about how the Republicans just ate the Democrats' lunch here.
Because let's, folks, that really didn't happen.
Nobody's lunch was eaten here.
And the and if this is the pitfall.
If the lesson learned from this is that the way to go is compromise with the left, then it's going to be a disaster.
The left is not going to compromise on redistribution of wealth or income.
The left is not going to compromise on tax increases for the wealthy.
The left is not going to compromise on Keynesian spending.
The left is not going to compromise on their core beliefs.
They have to be defeated.
And of course I speak within the realm of politically defeated.
And I'm reading a lot about here a great compromise was.
And that, folks, is the biggest red flag out of the.
And by the way, the left is not happy with it.
They're the ones that always push in this business that we got to compromise.
We must compromise for the independence, compromise here, compromise there.
They don't like it when there's genuine compromise where they seem to lose.
And I think that if if the lesson, I'm not sure it is yet, but if the lesson here is compromise, and that's the way to go to get, we're not gonna ever reverse this Leviathan with compromise.
We can only reverse it with defeat.
And by defeat, I mean more and more massive shellacking election victories like we had in November.
Not just federally, but all the way down to the state level, 635 legislative seats.
Now, unlike all of you, I wish I wish our side had gotten more cuts out of this deal, but remember it took years for the Democrats to get us in this mess.
It's gonna take years to get us out.
I just, I hope that we have the time.
Even if John Boehner were, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Rinaldo Magnus rolled into one, it still wouldn't happen overnight.
Thank you.
So one thing that we have to keep in mind, especially since right now we only control one house of one branch of government.
However, about that, another red flag that I'm seeing, and the speaker himself is saying it.
He says, look, we have to temper our expectations.
We are only one half of one third of the legislative branch here.
Or one half of one half, meaning we only control the House, the Democrats have the White House and the Senate.
However, folks, there's something crucially missing in that analysis.
And that is that not a dime can be spent unless it originates in the House of Representatives.
We have far more power than just being one third of one half or whatever the ratios are.
Not a dime gets spent before the House of Representatives authorizes it or appropriates it, and that's us.
So we have a lot more real power.
Now that's obviously going to be tempered with other political realities, what can be expected to be signed into law by Obama and vetoed and so forth.
But it doesn't mean we can't have the fight.
It doesn't mean we can't throw our spear in the ground and stake out our territory and say this is it.
I know the next fight's the debt limit.
And they're saying, yeah, this was jump change, this was billions, the next one's over trillions.
But we've shown that we'll cave.
We have demonstrated that we will cave if they threaten something like government shutdown.
That's May 14th, I think, is the deadline, May 14th.
That does offer greater opportunities.
Because that is actually much more of a government shutdown than what this would have been if the debt limit is not raised.
So we'll see.
We'll see what transpires.
But what really drove these negotiations was the 2012 elections.
Despite my theory that a lot of the media coverage all weekend has been a ruse designed to scare Democrat voters back to life.
The Democrats are scared spitless.
They know the public wants cuts, and they know the Tea Party's not a bunch of fringe kook oddballs.
They know that many Democrat voters are members of the Tea Party.
The November elections, despite their public posturing, the Democrats know from the November elections what the mood of this country is.
And they know inside their own cloakrooms or private conversations, not what they're going to say publicly, but they know privately that there has not been a big shift in public opinion since November.
The Tea Party has changed the terms of the debate, possibly for a long time, which is why the Democrats and their media minions hate them so, why they continually try to impugn them, mischaracterize them, and so forth and so on.
All right, brief time out here.
Stage set.
Also get your thoughts on this as the program unfolds today when we come back after this.
And we're back, Rush Limbohr.
On the cutting edge of societal evolution, telephone number 800-282-2882 and the email address L Rushbow at EIVNet.com.
What I don't want to happen here, folks, as I just said, is for our side to believe that any of these big issues can ultimately be worked out through compromise.
Democrats don't want to solve any of these problems.
They do not want cuts in spending.
They do not they don't care about the debt crisis.
They are incapable of ultimately agreeing to policies that would solve any of these problems.
That's what everybody involved here has to know.
They don't care.
They are addicted to the redistribution of wealth.
They are addicted to Keynesian economics and government spending.
There's a ridiculous story here today about trying to point out hypocrisy among the right by shutting down or limiting government spending, even though so much of the current economic recovery is because of government spending.
If that's true, there is no economic recovery.
But this is my point.
The government doesn't recover the economy.
The government cannot become the economy.
If the government becomes the economy, the country's over, as we know it.
And the Democrats want the government to be the economy of the country.
And that must be defeated.
That cannot be compromised with.
But man, that compromise, that whole thing is seductive.
Everybody, the DC culture.
And that's really what we're up against here.
The ruling class Washington culture.
This word compromise.
I can't, these people feel orgasmic at the end of the day when they think they've compromised for the public good, and when everybody praises them for compromise.
And I'm telling you, when it comes to this and the future of the country, compromise is nothing more than our defeat.
And the left knows it.
So this $38 billion.
It doesn't matter.
During the campaign, already getting emails from people demanding that I explained myself.
I'm glad to explain myself.
During the campaign for the November elections, the pledge was to cut 100 billion dollars.
And when that pledge was made, folks, I have to tell you that's largely symbolic.
Good step, I guess, but 100 billion, we're still talking pennies.
This was not an election that was eked out in the final moments.
This was a tsunami, and it's going to take a whole bunch of tsunamis to continue to roll this.
We're not, we're not we're not going to roll this back with baby steps.
We need a series of tsunamis, like the November election.
Okay, anyway, during the November election, the pledge was to cut 100 billion.
And then when there wasn't a budget and we went a continuing resolution uh format, that got reduced to 61 billion on a prorated basis because we lost five months there.
And then 61 billion became too much, and we ended up at 38 billion.
And my question is, why promise 100 billion?
And then why reduce the 100 billion to 61 billion and reduce that to 38 and a half billion?
What changed during all of this?
Where did we start losing leverage?
Where did we start losing ground?
Obama's poll numbers didn't start skyrocketing upward.
What happened?
This is what I don't understand.
Why?
Why even promise 100 billion if you don't mean it?
And then reduce it to 61 billion, okay, we'll go for that on a prorated basis, but then that's too much.
So we're down to 38 billion.
What changed?
There was a great opportunity here because of leverage.
And these opportunities don't come along very often.
Democrats and the left didn't get us to where we are today by compromising.
Pelosi never compromised.
Tip O'Neill never compromised.
It's not even a word in their vocabulary.
Thanks to the uh the Rhinos, other wishy washy politicians, the Republican Party has almost been compromised out of existence.
The Tea Party is what's given them new life.
But Republican Party can't go back to its old ways.
I just don't know what changed.
And if 100 billion dollars was too much to actually promise to pledge to cut, then why promise it in the first place?
Now, I understand some people are saying, hey, Rush, don't get caught up in all this because the Ryan budget, now that's that's where the uh rubber's gonna meet the road.
Now we're gonna be talking trillions.
That's that's right.
And the Republican leadership is suggesting that, yep, that's where it's gonna get really serious.
This was really serious.
The Democrats have been on defense since the election.
They're the ones that didn't do a budget.
They are why we are in this position in the first place.
The opportunity was great.
It's like I told the uh audience at my heritage speech, never in my lifetime, and this has been the case for a couple of years now, never in my lifetime has the opportunity for contrast been so great.
To tell the American people to demonstrate the difference.
Because the American people already by half understand it.
Why did the independents abandon Obama the Democrats in the first place?
It wasn't, and I mentioned this Friday night too.
There's a lot of Republicans in the audience.
Republicans didn't do zip to attract the independence.
They just happened to be the only place to go.
Obama and the Democrats drove them away.
Now I want to know what has changed to make everybody fearfully independents are going to somehow go back to the Democrats.
The only thing I can think of was or is this talk of a government shutdown.
Somehow, these independents, when they hear talk of a government shutdown, immediately run back to the Democrat Party.
I don't intellectually understand that.
I don't, I don't see how that happens.
This is not 1995.
The circumstances are entirely different.
You have a far greater impactful conservative media, a much more informed and caring and invested public in this.
So I'm at I I don't understand what has had.
I also, well, you know me.
I'm really not all that caught up in being fearful every day what the independents are going to do.
This notion that 20% of the American people determine the electoral outcome in the country.
That just, if that's true, that's got to change.
Meaning 20%, I mean the standard operating theory is okay, 40% of the voters are going to go Democrat, 40% are going to go Republican, and then you have the undecided.
The independents.
And who wouldn't like to be an independent?
Hell, everybody talks about them as the smartest people in the world, the most open-minded people in the world.
Oh, yeah.
These people are not extreme fringe ideologues.
They're not hardcore, closed-minded people.
No, no, no.
They are the open-minded among us, and that's who everybody fights for in elections.
Okay, fine.
Well, let's go fight for them instead of being afraid of them.
Let's go out and persuade them.
Let's go out and tell them, guess what?
You know what you really are?
You're conservatives.
You just don't know it.
You live your life that way.
You've been making the mistake of voting people who won't let you live your life that way, but you're conservatives.
You know how we know you're conservatives?
Because of the way you voted in November.
We know you're conservatives because you can't pallot what the Obama regime is doing.
Why be afraid of it?
It's a golden opportunity here.
Tremendous.
Golden opportunity.
And I just um I've uh I don't know what to be here, folks, other than than honest with you and I. I just, if if we're gonna start throwing giant celebratory parties over 38 billion dollars in cuts when that much amounts every two or three days in debt in interest, huh?
Uh I could pretend to be falsely optimistic.
Well, no, I if no, no.
If I am I am optimistic, not falsely so.
I wouldn't have to pretend to be.
Like I said, the debate has switched now.
I mean, even Obama Obama's out there talking.
He's gonna give a speech on Wednesday night.
And he's going to talk about cutting Medicare and Medicaid.
Now, they won't be real cuts, but he's gonna talk about it.
He's gonna use the language.
I mean, these people, they are the Democrats are talking cuts.
Now we know they don't mean it.
It's just like what was it, the 2002 election, the midterms when they got shellacked after the Wellstone memorial, and the exit polls that might have been 2006, I forget which one whichever midterm it was, the exit polls showed that values voters were the difference.
And so for two weeks after the election, the Democrats, yeah, well, you know what?
We kind of missed this.
So we're gonna have to go out and uh we're gonna make our appeal known, and uh, we have values too, and it lasted for two weeks.
You know, so Obama's gonna go out there Wednesday night, he's gonna talk about more cuts in Medicare and Medicaid.
They're not gonna be real cuts.
To cut Medicare is to cut Obamacare.
They're one and the same.
He's not gonna cut it, but he's gonna talk about it.
Just like he goes up to the Lincoln Memorial.
By the way, the Lincoln Memorial could not be shut down.
He goes up there, tries to take credit for saving it, keeping it open.
It's outside.
They couldn't shut the Lincoln Memorial if they wanted to.
We borrow close to what?
$4.5 billion a day.
So we borrow $31.3 billion a week.
And according to an article of Cybercast News Service, the federal debt increased $54.1 billion during the week before the budget negotiation.
So the debt, federal debt goes up $54 billion.
We announce this massive and and and I also heard for the first time ever, real cuts of $38 billion.
And it just here's the the fact of the matter is that the Tea Party people, the American voters, are way ahead of uh the commentariat, and they're way ahead of elected officials in Washington on where the country is.
It used to be the other way around.
It used to be that spin could work and convince people of it.
The Tea Party's way ahead of it.
The Tea Party immune to the spin.
They're not buying this.
I'm not going to mention any names.
I've I've I've talked to um four or five freshman Republicans in the house, they're devastated.
It's not at all what they thought they were company.
They thought they were jumping into a united effort to really get serious about reversing all aspects of the Obama regime.
And they find out that that's not what the agenda is.
At least not right now.
And it's the same thing that happened in 1994 with that freshman class.
Wasn't long before most of that freshman class, or at least over half of it just quit.
You know, they weren't professional politicians.
They were just all fired up.
They got there and they found out that it wasn't going to be what they thought it was.
And that was with the Newton bunch.
And the new bunch was truly a bunch of revolutionaries.
This bunch isn't.
Well, they're not revolutionaries.
This the House leadership today is not revolutionaries, although some of them are holdovers.
At any rate, let me take another brief obscene profit timeout.
We'll be back before you know it and continue.
And we got a full boat of calls, as we always do.
We had a full boat of calls before the show even starts every day.
Welcome back, Rush Limboss, serving humanity, executing assigned host duties flawlessly simply by being here.
And we start in Carthage, Missouri.
This is uh Gordy.
Gordy, welcome to the EIB network.
It's great to have you here.
Yeah, Ditto's rush.
Uh, this deal on the surface, it's actually worse than what it appears because included in that $38 billion worth of cuts is the $12 billion that they've already cut out of the continuing resolution.
Yeah, I heard that.
The whole deal makes me sick.
I mean, uh they talk a good game, but when it comes down to it, nothing really has changed up there in D.C. So, just to be clear, let's take away this $12 billion for the 38, and let's make it 26.
There's not one part of you, not one part of you that thinks, okay, at least it's 26 billion, at least we're going in the right direction.
Uh well.
I'm not trying to lead you anywhere.
I'm not looking for the right or wrong answer.
There's no wrong answer.
I want to know what you really think.
No, I think this is nothing.
As you pointed out, this is this might be two or three days worth of uh deaths that we've racked up.
And uh the whole deal just makes me want to puke.
Why do you think all the big celebration about it?
PR.
And I agree with you 100% on it's a snow job as far as uh the news media telling everybody how the Democrats really took it on the chin on this one.
Uh Basically, if you use the Democratic or the Liberal playbook, whatever they say, they do the opposite of, and it's the same thing with the news media.
Whatever they say, you can bet it's the opposite.
Well, I don't disagree with that.
But I'm just sitting here thinking if if the Democrats and the press are gonna tell each other that they really got rolled with 38 billion dollars.
They they have they know I know they're committed to spending, and I know they're they're admitted to Keynesian economics, but you just know that in uh privacy of closed doors, they are high-fiving each other and they're slapping each other on the back.
Given what happened in November and they got out of this with thirty-eight billion dollars of cuts, which is we're talking pennies.
Now, at the same time, they are here here's the this is the sort of the dichotomy or the dilemma.
They are scared because they the election results in November were real.
If the Washington GOP were acting as though they understood what that election meant, then it would be real hell of it.
Democrats would have a real fight on their hands.
They know full well they would have lost the PR of a government shutdown.
They know.
And somehow they convinced they can well, didn't I don't think they had to convince anybody.
The Republicans thought they would pay the big PR price for it.
It wouldn't have.
The Democrats would have.
The Democrats would have paid the price for it.
So my gut tells me that the Democrats are thinking they they dodged a major bullet here.
Especially given the November results.
Now there's some argument and there's some disagreement over whether the $38 billion includes $10 billion in the previous continuing resolution.
There's a lot we still really don't know about this.
In fact, some of the details still haven't been worked out.
All that notwithstanding.
Let's just you know, let's not even monkey around with it.
$38 billion is bad enough.
We don't have to make it worse.
Uh well, I know Obama said we spent $70 billion less than we were gonna spend.
He's out there trying to get in on this, too.
I mean, that's what I mean.
The debate's been shifted.
There well, who's next?
Where are we going next?
Jenny, Seattle, Washington.
You're next on the EIB network.
Hi.
Hey Rush, you are my daily vitamins.
Thanks for all your data.
Thank you very much.
Um your previous caller pretty much set it all for me.
I was so furious the other night, listening to the news media's response, and Fox News is called Carl Cameron.
It was so evident that he was just blowing smoke and talking about how the Democrats had really lost and how great a job Boehner did, and it just didn't smell right.
It stunk so bad to think that they have gotten this paltry sum of money uh cut back, and it was just counterfeit, false.
It was just I think the only honest response I feel we heard was from Michelle Bachmann afterwards, who boldly said she would vote no.
Yeah, Mike Pence has said so since too, that he's likely gonna vote no.
It looks like, and this is as of last night, so things might have changed, but it looks like 218 votes to pass anything in the House, and it looks like they're gonna have to have some Democrat votes to make this thing pass because enough Tea Party Republicans are gonna vote no.
That's what it looks like.
Rush, just a last point.
I got something on the email yesterday that said uh March madness U.S. government spent more than eight times its monthly revenue in this March, that it spent 8.2 times the net federal tax revenue for the month of March.
Yeah.
Doesn't matter.
We cut 38 billion.
Very scary.
Yeah.
Jenny, thanks very much.
Jenny, one of my all-time top ten favorite female names will be back after this.
I'm still trying to find out for sure if the thirty-eight billion dollars contains ten billion dollars in previous continuing resolutions.
It's proving hard to nail down, uh, which is an indication here of just how terrible the news media is that we don't even uh know this.
But regardless, it's only $20 billion in savings, anyway, which I don't know, folks.
I can't do jumping jacks over this.
Just can't.
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