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April 14, 2011 - Rush Limbaugh Program
35:35
April 14, 2011, Thursday, Hour #2
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Now what?
This is just too rich.
Okay, so Obama's out there now saying, time to stop debating and time to work together.
After that debacle, after that embarrassing event that they're calling a speech yesterday, he has asked Biden, who fell asleep yesterday.
O'Biden has asked the vice president Joe Biteme to work out a bipartisan deal in two months while Obama heads out to Chicago to campaign.
Now, this is the same Biden who took a foreign trip after he was appointed to work out the latest continuing resolution.
He was given that job once before.
Isn't he also the point man on the porculus?
Right, but he also heads up the middle-class task force, right?
So Obama, he's really spreading Bite Me a little thin.
He's got the middle-class task force.
He is the point man on Porkulus.
And he's been put in charge here of seeing that two continuing resolutions end up being done.
After the first one, after being appointed to the first one, he did fly off to meet Bashir Assad and go bowling in Syria.
These are not honest or serious people.
It's another reason why we're, I'll just speak for myself.
And I get so frustrated here over our apparent willingness to take them on.
They are, they're not.
You've heard the old phrase.
I remember playing high school football.
And we were playing a team in our conference, and we could have sworn there were three or four guys that were 21 on the other team that had been in jail a couple years for murder.
I mean, this was the story that that team put out.
You know, so we're sitting there, and we're a little frightened, and our coach says, no, no, no.
He even said it back then.
He said, that team, just like Hillary Clinton, they put on their pants one leg at a time.
They're no different than you guys are.
We end up believing all these stories of invincibility about, particularly about Obama, but they're paper tigers.
They really are not serious or honest people.
And the positions that they have staked out for themselves are not that hard because we have the truth on our side in any debate with them.
Anyway, great to have you back, folks.
El Rushbo, the fastest.
Three hours in media.
Telephone number here if you want to be on the program 800-282-2882 and the email address lrushbow at EIBnet.com.
The regime is flummoxed.
I can't believe this.
New claims for unemployment benefits unexpectedly rose last week, bouncing back above the all-important 400,000 level.
Unexpectedly is now back in the news reports.
The initial claims for state unemployment benefits went up 27,000 to a seasonally adjusted 412,000, according to the Labor Department.
The economists polled by Reuters had forecast claims slipping to 380,000.
Gallup is out there.
Gallup is out there with two polls.
Gallup says, really, the inflation rate is at 10% right now.
It's not 5%.
And Gallup says, really, the unemployment rate is at 10%, not 8.8.
It isn't rebounding.
It isn't recovering.
And here is evidence.
And then there's this from USA Today.
Americans are leaving the workforce.
Only 45.4% of Americans had jobs in 2010.
Now, let's keep a couple of things in mind here.
One of the ways the regime has been able to get an 8.8% unemployment rate is to simply say that there are fewer jobs available.
The universe of jobs has shrunk, I think, by 2.2 million.
And everybody asks, well, where did they go?
Well, they just disappeared.
Oh, okay, they're gone.
Yeah, yeah, they're gone.
So with 2.2 million fewer jobs to fill, obviously the unemployment rate is going to not quite be as high because the universe is lower.
Okay, so they monkey around with that maybe.
They jimmy the number.
But let's get to the meat and potatoes of this story because this is not good for our country, folks.
The share of the population that's working fell to its lowest level since last year, since women started entering the workforce in large numbers three decades ago, actually.
The share of the population that's working fell to its lowest level since women started entering the workforce.
Only 45.4% of Americans had jobs in 2010.
That's the lowest rate since 1983 and down from a peak of 49.3% in 2000.
Now, the good news is, as I just explained, fewer people in the workforce lowers the rate of unemployment, at least according to the way the Department of Labor figures these things.
However, folks, bye-bye greatness.
Bye-bye, superpower.
Bye-bye, world economic leader.
45.4% of Americans had jobs.
A majority of Americans do not work.
And let's also be honest about something else.
The vast majority of those not working are being paid, nevertheless.
They are being paid not to work.
They are getting unemployment compensation.
Probably multiple benefit programs they are able to tap into.
So over half the country is not working and yet being paid.
This is exactly what people like Obama want, by the way.
This is how you turn the United States into a European, Western European socialist quasi-democracy.
And it's how you get your unemployment rate up to 14%.
And it's how you use your unions as money laundering operations.
And it's how you cut your country down to size.
It is how you take away status of superpower from the country.
Last year, just as the USA Today survey, last year 66.8% of men had jobs.
That's the lowest on record.
Again, we're afraid of debating this guy.
We are afraid to take this guy on.
Is there somebody that wants to defend this?
Bring him on.
Somebody want to defend 45.4% of Americans having jobs?
Or a majority of Americans not?
Somebody want to defend the fact that just 66% of men in this country have jobs.
Bring forth the regime people that want to defend that.
Let's debate this.
They want to defend this economy.
They want to defend the tax increases they now propose that is going to further erode.
Folks, let there be no doubt this is being done purposefully.
This is not good intentions gone awry.
This is not faculty lounge theory not quite working out.
This we're witnessing a destruction.
And here are the numbers: 45.4% of Americans had jobs in 2010.
USA Today says, well, the bad economy, an aging population, and a plateau in women working are contributing to changes that pose serious challenges for financing the nation's social programs.
Oh, that's what this is about?
That's what this is about.
How are we going to pay the people who don't work if so few of us are working?
This is it.
That's right.
And this is what Obama said yesterday in this despicable example of a speech that what made us great, I hope you remember this.
If you don't, I do, and I'm telling you now.
He said yesterday that this country finally achieved greatness with the invention, creation, what have you, of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.
That's when we became a great country.
So did I reel you in USA Today wringing their hands?
Oh, woe is us.
Only 45.4% of people have jobs.
Only 66% of men have jobs.
Oh, my God, what are we going to do?
And the reason this is a problem?
Because it poses serious challenges for financing the nation's social programs.
That's what's important, you see.
Financing the nation's social programs.
That's it.
There's no other concern that we have here.
That's why we want more people working so more people can pay taxes to pay for other people not to work.
Because after all, where are the Democrats going to get their voters?
Here is Chris, Sioux Falls, South Dakota.
Great to have you on the EIB network.
Hello.
Hello, Rush.
Thank you for taking my call.
I wanted to second what your first caller said, Jason.
I think we totally screwed ourselves when we sat back and allowed John Boehner to be elected Speaker of the House after we elected all these great Tea Party people in there.
And what is this we?
We Republicans.
I mean, but what do we have to do with it?
Well, we just allowed it to happen.
How would you have stopped it?
You're not there.
You have to be a member of the House to nominate somebody to be Speaker or to seek it.
I mean, that's pretty much the House did that, not us.
Right, but we didn't protest it.
I mean, we came out and drove for all these other things.
And then when they it was just kind of a, I don't know, I just feel like we just sat back and allowed it to happen.
Well, did you, did you have your doubts?
I did, and I regret not saying anything earlier.
You had your doubts about Speaker Boehner before he became Speaker.
Yeah.
And I just want to make sure that we don't do this come 2012 and elect an oldie-moldie senator like we did with McCain and Dole and get Trumps together.
Well, let me tell you what we're up against here.
I mean, I'm probably not going to tell you anything you don't know.
up against an entrenched Republican establishment, the old guard that in many ways is just happy to be there.
And they're happy to have the power of the leadership.
But in terms of taking these guys on and actually rolling some of this back, they don't have stomach for it.
I don't think a lot of them really have a stomach for it.
They have the desire to win pieces of legislation day to day and week to week.
But in terms of being revolutionaries, I don't think that that's who we've got here.
Now, I'm talking about current leadership.
You've got, obviously, some freshmen and some of the Tea Party people.
That's why they think they're there, obviously.
Yeah.
But I'm interested to know what your doubts were about Speaker Boehner before the election.
What did you know about him?
That he cried a lot.
Well, and he seemed like a nice guy, but he seemed like a George Bush nice guy.
But you knew that.
What I'm getting at is that you knew that or suspected that long before the Republicans even won the election.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's that's I don't know that many people thought that.
Now, just take you back, though.
You remember there were people that wanted to be Speaker, that did run against Boehner.
One of them was Michelle Bachman.
And I forget there were a couple others, but do you remember how everybody just laughed at them?
Oh, come on, peace.
Everybody just laughed when they said, did you want to be speaker?
No, that's, come on.
You're not even in line yet.
There was laughter.
I bet you, how many people in your life are there examples like this?
Something that you poo-pooed months later, you wish it had really happened.
You wish you had taken something seriously that you poo-pooed.
It happens to a lot of people all the time, very rarely to me, but it happens to a lot of people all the time.
And it sounds like you are going through this circumstance even now.
Patrick, in Posen, Michigan, I'm glad you waited.
You're up next, sir.
Hello.
Hello, Raj.
Glad to talk to you.
Thank you, sir.
I'm 59 years old.
Right now, today, I would gladly give up any claims to my future Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid if the government interned would stop taxing me on that stuff today.
So every penny I make from this going forward is all mine to keep, not theirs.
Well, here's the problem.
You're going to also pledge to take care of your retirement.
That is correct.
You are.
Okay, what happens when you don't?
I guess I become somebody living in the streets.
No, because you see, our society is not going to let that happen.
Well, we're a.
I understand what you're saying there, but perhaps we have to take responsibility and change our society because what we're doing today isn't really going to be working ahead in another 50 years.
Do you really realize how revolutionary an idea you're proposing?
You're actually suggesting.
Oh, many people have suggested before.
Give us the opt out of Social Security.
Let us take care of ourselves.
It's been said before.
Nobody felt that.
Do you realize how radical that is?
You are suggesting, you are asking, in fact, the opportunity to take care of yourself.
That is correct.
Well, easy for you to say.
Well, yeah, that's true.
But, well, somebody's got to do it.
That's what people always say to me when I suggest the homeless go get a job.
Well, easy for you to say.
We let, I know Snerdley is arguing with me here, but we let people live in the streets.
Democrat regimes do allow people to live in the streets.
They'll take, kick them out of the shelters, kick them out of the institutions, and move them into the gutters.
Democrat regimes do.
That's called fairness.
But as a compassionate society, I would plan on taking care of myself.
Don't smirk, snerdly.
It has been a career objective.
I get really bummed out.
Okay, so I've call me lucky.
I don't know if you want to call me lucky, fine.
But I have achieved it.
I think, and by the way, who knows?
I could lose everything.
You never know.
But my career objective has been that I don't want to have to depend on anybody for anything I need and most of what I want.
Certainly not.
And I've been able to pull it off.
And I mentioned this to people.
Well, yeah, well, you're not very typical.
Okay, maybe not very typical, but why impugn that?
Well, easy for you.
But it's been a long road.
This guy wants to take care of himself if we'll let him opt out.
But you see, here's the thing, Patrick.
As far as the left is concerned, it really isn't about you taking care of yourself.
Otherwise, they'd let you out.
If that's what this were all about, if this were really about putting less strain on government agencies, government resources, they'd gladly let you opt out.
But no, it's not about that.
It's about control and the transfer of wealth, the redistribution of income.
They are not about.
And every person that becomes self-sufficient and self-reliant is a huge threat to the Democrat Party.
They're not going to let you do it.
And we're back, Rush Limbaugh, having more fun than a human being should be allowed to have here behind the golden EIB microphone.
Now, as you know, folks, all politicians are on the public payroll.
Most of them need the salary and pension and medical benefits.
Too many of them have minimal private sector experience of the kind that involves the creation of wealth and jobs.
In fact, a lot of politicians, a lot of elected officials think more like a welfare recipient than a self-sufficient individual.
So most of them pander.
Too many of them lie.
They want to keep what they have.
They want to stay on the payroll.
But the difference between many of them and welfare recipients is they use their positions in power to attack our way of life, to steal from us, to control us, to demean us.
While they are the ones that are doing the theft, they're the ones living off the public dole.
This is why, by the way, the founding fathers never thought about career politicians.
They thought about citizen legislators, particularly in the House of Representatives.
People who've done something.
People who, after a bit, will chuck it all and go back home and return to their life's work.
People who would return to their communities, live among the same people they represented.
But today, too many of these politicians are career-oriented, well, career politicians, and their constituency is not where they're elected from, but where they operate from.
And it's a big difference.
Most of them have no intention of putting in a short career as a politician and then returning home.
There's simply too much access to a huge pile of money.
And there's so much power available by having access to it and the way that it is spent.
And so the real divide in this country is between those who are paying in to the government and those who are being paid by the government.
And that's the divide.
And that's why, when I see this USA Today story, only 45.4% of Americans had jobs in 2010.
It just does not bode well.
And from the hill.com, left angst grows over Obama's shift.
Spoke about this earlier.
This, I think, is one of the reasons why Obama was so petulant, childish, immature, and disastrous in his so-called speech yesterday.
Anxiety over President Obama's shift to the political center is threatening to alienate the White House liberal base.
As Obama prepares Wednesday to outline his deficit reductions, that was the story from yesterday, but this is what led up to it.
It's one of many stories like this that's in the stack.
And let's take a review.
Let's look at some of Obama's great speeches.
During the campaign, we had the race speech.
What did he do during the race speech?
He threw his grandmother overboard.
What did he say about her?
She's a typical white person, scared of black people, typical white person.
That's who raised me.
He also made a show of throwing his man of the cloth overboard, the Reverend Wright.
Then we got the Cairo speech.
The Cairo speech, outreach to Islam.
Stage one, stage two was turning NASA over to an outreach to Islam.
Then we got the Tucson speech.
And we know that that was a campaign appearance.
They printed t-shirts.
They had an agenda.
They had a slogan.
And then we have a demagogue speech.
The demagogue speech is what we got yesterday.
Now, problem solvers do not behave this way.
Leaders don't speak the way Obama's speaking.
And everybody is now raising questions about his leadership ability and does he even have any.
Even people on the Democrat side, I know, had a couple of soundbites.
I think it was from yesterday, but I didn't get to them.
David Rodham Gergen openly concerned about the lack of leadership that we're getting from Obama.
So, okay, leaders don't speak this way.
Problem solvers don't, but community organizers do.
Community agitators speak the way Obama did yesterday.
Obama's mission is to wreak havoc on the U.S. private sector and the individual.
He's hell-bent on doing it.
Nobody can convince me otherwise.
Too much time has gone by.
There's too much evidence in the evidence that his way of fixing it, which is what he claims he wants to do, makes it worse.
The evidence is clear it makes it worse.
He's doubling down on it.
And now promising a trillion dollars in tax increases That does not fit with reviving an economy which is at the precipice of recession.
He's doing it with demagoguery.
He's doing it with threats, intimidation.
He knows what he is doing.
He invited Ryan and those Republicans to sit in the front row and be humiliated and insulted.
He knew.
He has chosen a, you know, for lack of a better word, folks, he has chosen a thuggish approach to achieve his ends.
But there's no reason to be afraid of it.
You keep looking at me like I'm strange when I say, are you afraid of it?
I don't understand how we lose these debates.
Is there anybody?
I know the Democrats can bring an endless parade of people, but who in their right mind really wants to defend what's happened?
The Democrats cannot defend their policies.
They do not, in fact, when they're brought forth to do so, they don't defend what Obama's done.
They keep talking about nefarious things like we can't afford to stop or we've got to keep plugging away for the future.
They never, ever defend what they've done.
In truth, what they do is besmirch and impugn us and our ideas.
They ignore, and they're not held accountable by the president.
They can't defend this.
There's nobody that can defend what they've done.
Not intellectually, and certainly not in a way that would win a debate.
I mean, this guy's been in office barely two years.
He's an outsider.
Anyway, let's grab a quall here before we have to go to the break.
Lynchburg, Virginia.
Peter, I appreciate your patience.
Thank you for waiting, sir.
Hello.
Thank you, sir.
That AP story yesterday or today about the speech that Obama had to tiptoe around the tax increase.
Yes, isn't that amazing?
AP, he had to tiptoe around the tax increase.
I think perhaps he was doing that to keep from waking up Joe Biden.
Necessarily, he looked like he was trying out for an air traffic controlling job yesterday.
Well, he is in charge of maybe doing some research on the job and Biden did.
You know, I heard you say that Obama could not have given that speech at a prime time venue.
And I think you're absolutely right about that.
Most of the working class people at 2 o'clock in the afternoon yesterday were doing their jobs, I'm sure, and had little, if no time to at least digest what he had said.
No, that's not what I meant.
I didn't mean it in terms of available audience.
If that were true, we know that the available audience between noon and 3 Eastern, for example, is...
This is one of the...
In fact, if I might go a little inside baseball, this was one of the things that shocked the early critics of this program.
One of the, you know, radio is like any of their business.
Television has its prime time, and radio has its prime time.
Sturdley, let's see how much you know.
What is radio's prime time?
What is radio's prime time?
Morning drive, 6 to 9 a.m.
That's prime time in radio.
Theoretically.
On the stations I'm on, prime time is noon to 3 Eastern.
Afternoon drives number two, afternoon drives is second prime time.
In television, prime time is 8 to 11 p.m. Eastern, 7 to 10 Central.
That's just the way it is.
In the early days of this program, and in fact, even before this program, it was thought that the middle of the day was the absolute worst time to be an advertiser on radio because the only people listening were people who had no jobs.
And what could they afford to buy?
You know, what sponsor could they frequent?
Well, that's just another of the bits of conventional wisdom that we have stood on its head.
Obviously, that's not the case.
Otherwise, this program wouldn't be the success that it is.
So I wasn't talking about available audience.
I'm talking about attitude and tone.
A president making a primetime speech that's serious.
A president talking to the country at night, even if it is from the University of George Washington University or some other venue other than the Oval Orifice.
It's serious.
And what I meant by he couldn't have given that speech at night was it wasn't serious.
It had no gravitas.
It was a campaign speech.
And the networks are not going to give up prime time for a campaign speech.
Not now.
They will later on, depending on how close the Republican nominee is getting to Obama.
Well, I was simply talking about the speech itself, how unserious it was.
Obama did not want to give that speech at night.
Obama did not even want to give that speech yesterday to adults.
He chose to give it to a bunch of young skulls full of mush at an institution for higher learning.
And he relied on the drive-by media to report it by virtue of sound bites or YouTube clips, snips, what have you.
He never, that was not a serious.
In fact, there was another little hidden purpose of that speech.
The invitations to Ryan and the other Republicans, that was a personal bitch slap, that speech yesterday.
To have Ryan up there sitting in the front row and to give that speech, that was primo, primo insult.
And that was another reason for it.
But a serious speech, no, it wasn't.
The views expressed by the host of this program, documented to be almost always right, 99.6% of the time, a lot, my friends, I must tell you, a lot of vitriol, a lot of anger, and some of you are actually being quite impolite in your emails to me today.
I made reference to the fact that I've played golf with John Boehner.
Okay, strike one.
And number two, I said, look, before we get off down the path, he's a fine guy.
He's a good guy.
You don't want to hear that, apparently.
And the fact that I played golf with him has compounded my assessment.
Some of you think I'm ready to sell out.
I kid you not, Snerdley.
The emails accuse me of almost now I'm carrying Boehner's water.
Let me tell you, folks, I'm going to tell you something right now.
I can't tell you how I know this, but if you think I'm carrying the water, you ought to know that my name is being bandied about up there in Washington by certain Republicans and it ain't pretty.
And they are complaining about me to themselves, and they are telling members not to appear on this and other show.
If you think I'm carrying Boehner's water, you need to understand they don't think anybody's carrying their water and they're upset about it.
Just so you know, you know, I love analogies.
And you and I, you know, one of the things we've said about the leadership here is that it just may, you know, we're all in the now to us.
This is 2011 on into 2012.
But some of the people representing us may still be in 2000, and they may just not have the stomach for this.
They may not just have the desire to, as part of their leadership role, take on Obama, take on the Democrats, and literally roll back some of this stuff.
They may look at the Tea Party as something to be managed and massaged rather than used as a weapon.
So Obama goes out and makes speech like he does yesterday to you and I.
Well, he's thrown down the gauntlet.
That's a full-fledged, that's an insult.
That is a come on.
It is an invitation.
It is, all right, pal, if that's how you look at us, and if that's how you look at the country, battle on.
Is that what you want?
But that's not how they're doing it.
They don't see the speech though.
Now, Ryan is a different guy.
He's in the leadership, but I'm exempting him.
But obviously, that speech yesterday that Obama gave, here's the analogy.
To us, that was in-your-face hostility.
That was the president of the United States being hostile to us, to what we believe, and thus toward our country.
But to rhinos, to country club Republicans, to ruling class Republicans, it was no more offensive than Obama showing up at 21 without a tie.
So they ran back and they got him a tie and they let him in the dining room.
Not a big deal.
Not a real big affront to anything.
You know, Mater D can handle a problem.
Oh, look, there's our, damn it, he forgot his tie.
We don't look at it that way.
This is an entirely different way of looking at the circumstance or the situation.
Here, and it's not, by the way, just in our leadership.
I mean, there's certain places in our media.
Where is this?
This is the Weekly Standard.
A journal of opinion.
It's in the same family as National Review, American Spectator, New Republic.
It's a journal of opinion conservative.
And here's a headline.
Calm down.
The budget deal isn't as bad as you think.
Now, we just found out that the actual amount of dollars cut is not 38.5 billion, not 20 billion.
It's 352 million.
That's how much has actually been cut.
And yet here's a headline.
Calm down.
The budget deal isn't as bad as you think.
Got to start someplace.
So there's a disconnect with rhinos, ruling class Republicans, and us throughout the spectrum.
We'll be back.
Don't go away.
Fastest.
Three hours of the media two already in a can, but one exciting hour of broadcast excellence yet to go.
Remember, tomorrow, is it first or 22nd?
I keep forgetting annual.
21st annual curathon on the radio for leukemia and lymphoma.
Third decade.
That's all right.
The third decade.
Than Donald Trump in the second hour.
Kick it off tomorrow.
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