Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
So Donna Brazil is out there saying that we are going to cheat.
The Republicans, only chance we have is voter fraud.
Turns out that this guy, DSK, the French, the IMF guy, is on suicide watch at Rikers Island.
There's a lot of people to watch him out there.
Like 7,000 guards and others.
A lot of people to watch him commit suicide if he does because the housekeeper that has accused him lives in an HIV apartment.
She lives in a place where people with AIDS live.
That's got a, that's got a, yeah, I mean, there's got to be a little bit of a rude awakening for her.
Hi, folks.
How are you?
Great to have you.
Rush Limbaugh, the EIB Network, the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.
Do you remember back in the 90s when every other sentence from Bill Clinton was a lie?
It wasn't long.
The AP and member news agencies came out with stories telling us that that was actually cool, that lying was good.
Little white lies were fine.
Spared people hurt feelings.
It kept things running smoothly.
White lies actually good for society.
Well, now Time magazine is out with something pretty close.
We'll spend a little time on this today when we get to it.
That all of these men dropping their seed all over the place is actually pretty good.
It's explicable.
It makes perfect evolutionary sense.
It's an amazing, it is an amazing piece.
It doesn't quite excuse it, but it gets as close as possible to excusing the behavior of, and by the way, most of the guys in this story who are reported on happen to be Democrats.
John Edwards, Schwarzenegger, Clinton, Caligula.
And we know that Caligula was a Democrat.
It could be nothing else.
They asked for cheating on the election.
I don't know if you saw this or not.
Mexican authorities found two trucks.
Two.
You saw this.
Found two trucks on the way to the United States, which were crammed with 513 illegal aliens.
513 illegal aliens in two trucks.
So the Democrat get out the vote campaign has already begun in earnest.
Might not sound like a lot when it's put in that context, but 513 in two trucks, that's pretty efficient.
As you're attempting to get out the vote, Newt Gingrich has racked up huge bill at Tiffany's.
The jeweler, $500,000.
Our ever-attentive media is on the case.
Frankly, folks, do I care what a former politician and his wife do with their money or what a current politician is doing with mine?
I frankly couldn't care less that Gingrich has a $500,000 bill at Tiffany.
More power to him if his wife likes stuff at Tiffany and Newt wants to buy stuff from Tiffany for his wife and has an account there.
So be it.
Should I care about Newt and his wife's jewelry purchases or should I care that Obama sat in a bigoted church for 20 years and probably did hear what was being said?
Should we care about the lies and distortions being told of us by this regime about our financial circumstance?
So Newt has an account with Tiffany, $500,000.
You know the point of this rich Republican.
It's the same old template out there.
And it's just the takedowns of Newt yesterday and Andrea Mitchell and B.C. News, Washington with a huge hit piece on Newt.
A lot of people are pointing out that nobody on the Republican side is rallying to Newt's defense here.
We get into all of this stuff as the program unfolds, but I want to take you back, just demonstrate to you, when you're here, you are at the right place.
You are on the cutting edge by listening to this program.
Let me take you back to one week ago, last Wednesday, on this program where I told you what the Obama re-elect campaign for 2012 was going to be.
It's all becoming very clear now.
It's taking a lot longer than we thought.
But if there's a bumper sticker that could sum up the campaign, it's taking a lot longer than we thought.
The mess was even worse than we knew.
In fact, I predicted this before Obama was even immaculated.
They would use that as a means for passing really draconian legislation like the stimulus bill, the porculus.
Oh my God, they didn't tell us how bad it was.
Folks, this economy is horrible.
We had no idea it's this bad.
They're going to revive that.
Not even we realized until we got here, rolled our sleeves of just how bad this was.
And it's taking a lot longer, but we're starting to see signs of it.
They'll lie about it.
Starting to see signs.
And they'll say, see, 244,000 jobs were created last month.
We're going in the right direction.
Do we really want to change horses in the middle of the stream?
That really is going to be the campaign.
That was one week ago today.
Last night on CNN, Piers Morgan tonight, a dwindling audience.
Therefore, nobody heard of this.
This is why I am going to replay it for you here.
Piers Morgan tonight on CNN talked to David Axelrod, Obama's re-elect chief strategerist.
And Piers Morgan tonight said the average American, when they come to vote, the big question for them will be, has Barack Obama done enough to repair the horrific damage in the financial crisis?
Do I have an expectation that he will continue that process?
The president's done a great job of turning around what was a catastrophic situation, but that's not the project that he was running to assume.
He ran for a larger reason, which is to reinvigorate the American dream in the 21st century.
And for many, many years before the crisis, people have been struggling, kind of running in place.
Their paychecks have been flat.
Their expenses have been going up, harder to educate their kids, harder to retire.
And those are the projects that he's been working on, and it's going to take some time to achieve them.
The question is whether people say, you know what, I want to keep on going down that path.
That's the right vision.
There you have it.
I mean, Axelrod confirming last night on CNN, yep, yep, it's worse than we thought.
It's going to take longer than we thought.
And the question is, do we want to stay on this path of the right vision?
Do we want to change horses in the middle of the stream?
There, you heard it from the horse's mouth.
Don't doubt me, folks.
Don't doubt me.
Now we move on to the newt soundbites.
Last night on Greta on the Fox News channel, she spoke with Newt at the start of the interview.
She played a soundbite of me, which I said, I'm not going to justify this.
The attack on Paul Ryan, the support for a mandate in health care.
Folks, don't ask me to explain this.
There's no explanation for it.
First off, it cuts Paul Ryan off at the knees.
supports the regime in the lawsuits that the 26 states have filed over the mandate.
I guess way back in 1993, Newt supported an individual mandate that everybody should buy insurance.
So I told the audience, you know, I'm befuddled as anybody else is.
Greta said, I go out of the country for a week, I come back, and you've blown up the Republican Party.
What happened, Newt?
In Russia's case, he had two things.
One of them was just plain wrong.
I do not support a mandate.
I am opposed to Obamacare.
I'm in support of the 26 attorney generals who have filed suit.
The Center for Health Transformation that I helped found has been actively opposed to Obamacare for two and a half years.
That was a clip from 1993 when, in fact, the conservative position was to have individual insurance in opposition to Hillary care.
All right.
Now, these confusing two things.
I was simply saying all the way back to 1993, Newt had come out in favor of an individual mandate, suggesting that his statement someday with David Gregory was not new.
That he supports an individual mandate.
Now, he said in the soundbite here that I was just plain wrong, that Newt did not support an individual mandate.
You heard him say this.
You heard him say it, right?
Newt just said, in Russia's case, he had two things.
One of them was just plain wrong.
I don't support a mandate.
Okay, let's go back to Sunday, Meet the Depressed with David Gregory, who says, back in 1993 on this program, you said, I am for people, exactly like automobile insurance, individuals having health insurance and being required to have it.
And I'm prepared to vote for a voucher system that will give individuals on a sliding scale a government subsidy so to ensure that everyone as individuals has health insurance.
What you advocate there is precisely what Obama did with his health care legislation.
Is it not?
That was the question from Gregory.
Here's the answer.
I believe all of us, and this is going to be a big debate, I believe all of us have a responsibility to help pay for health care.
I've said consistently, we ought to have some requirement that you either have health insurance or you post a bond, or in some way you indicate you're going to be held accountable.
I don't know what I got wrong.
What am I?
We slicing this too thin here?
What I don't know.
I don't know what I got wrong.
He's come out for the mandate, and he is, by the way, apologized to Ryan.
The next bite, Van Sustran continued the discussion after he said that I was wrong.
He then continued with this.
I made a mistake.
And I called Paul Ryan today, who's a very close personal friend.
And I said that.
The fact is that I have supported what Ryan's tried to do on the budget.
The fact is that my newsletter strongly praised the budget when he brought it out.
And the budget vote is one that I'm happy to say I would have voted for, I will defend, and I would be glad to answer any Democrat who attempts to distort what I said.
Those words were inaccurate and unfortunate.
And I'm prepared to stand up.
When I make a mistake, and I'm going to on occasion, I'm going to stand up and share with the American people that was a mistake.
Okay, so he called Ryan.
Ryan accepted the apology.
Now, I'm trying to figure out what I got wrong.
In June of 2007, op-ed in the Des Moines Register, Newt wrote, quote, personal responsibility extends to the purchase of health insurance.
Citizens should not be able to cheat their neighbors by not buying insurance, particularly when they can afford it, and expect others to pay for their care when they need it.
An individual mandate, he added, should be applied when the larger healthcare system has been fundamentally changed.
In his book, Real Change, Newt wrote, finally, we should insist that everyone above a certain level buy coverage, or if they're opposed to insurance, post a bond.
Meanwhile, we should provide tax credits or subsidized private insurance for the poor.
So here's the thing.
This is really tough because I have so much admiration for Newt Gingrich.
You know, the people probably don't remember this, but I have to tell you, back in the 1980s, I was laboring away in Kansas City.
I had just left the Kansas City Royals after five years there.
I had figured out that corporate life wasn't for me.
I just, I couldn't be fit into those kinds of rigorous structural environments.
But it was probably the best five years I'd ever spent.
It was the first five years of my working career outside of radio.
And I met people I otherwise wouldn't have met.
And I learned that highly structured business models just weren't for me.
So I went back to radio.
And I wanted to go back to spoken word radio.
I'd been a disc jockey, and I wanted to go back to spoken word radio because that seemed to offer more freedom, a greater chance for creativity.
Plus, you know, I'd had my fling with playing Donnie Osmond Records, and I was over that.
Got past that.
Cowsills and so forth.
I'd been there, done that.
And it was 1984, and that was a presidential campaign year.
Of course, the Reverend Jackson running for orifice, the Gary Hartpence running for office, the radio station I worked for, which now carries the program, gave me a commentary because I could not keep my opinions out of the news.
I was doing news in the afternoon, and I'd throw in my opinions.
And they'd call me and say, you can't put your opinion in the news.
I said, why not?
Peter Jennings does it every day.
No, he doesn't.
Yes, he does.
All he's got to do is raise an eyebrow.
He throws his opinion in there.
Don't tell me that Peter Jennings doesn't put his opinion there.
Well, we don't care about Peter Jennings.
He doesn't work here.
You can't put your opinion in there.
I just couldn't keep my opinion out of it.
So they gave me a commentary, 90-second commentary every day, sometimes twice a day, ran in the morning and the afternoon.
During this time, Newt Gingrich was conducting special orders on the floor of the House of Representatives every night.
Newt and what was called the, well, they had a, I forget what they, they had out, the Wall Street Journal, Conservative Opportunity Society or some sort of thing.
It was Newton and a bunch of guys.
Robert Walker was part of Vin Weber, you know, all those guys.
And I, folks, I'm telling you, Newt Gingrich was defending.
He was the only person in Washington defending Ronald Reagan.
He was excoriating, decimating Tip O'Neill and the Democrats.
And back then, it was as vitriolic as it is today.
The hatred for Ronald Reagan and the things that were being said about him and his policies were no different than what was said about George W. Bush or even said about Newt today.
And there was no question, I mean, Newt Gingrich was defining conservatism right along with Reagan, both in the social issues and cultural issues, fiscal issues.
It was dramatic.
Those special orders were called a C-SPAN revolution at the time.
There was nobody in the house.
The house had ceased business for the day.
It got to be so effective that Tip O'Neill shut him down.
Now, that's when I first became familiar with Newt Gingrich.
And I was desperate to talk to the guy.
And I leaned on a station that I worked for was owned by Bonneville Broadcasting.
They had some connections.
So I finally had a chance to speak with Newt for a while.
Back in those days, I have to tell you, Newt Gingrich was Mr. Conservative.
There was not even a sign.
There was no indication that there would be public service announcements with Nancy Pelosi on the couch or joint health care appearances where Hillary Clinton.
And when the Republican freshman class was sworn into office in 1995 and Newt was the speaker, folks, I got to tell you, the potential there and the mood was so upbeat and optimistic because we a genuine, the kind of conservative we are still looking for today.
Newt was it.
So all of this stuff that's happening today, this is not making me happy or comfortable.
This is this, I don't understand this.
I don't know what happened.
I don't know what changed, but I'm getting into these little puke fights here over who said what when.
This is not the hey, we're back, Rush Lindborg.
Great to have you with us on the EIB network.
Now, one of the reasons that everybody's all tied up in this mandate business is there are two kinds of mandates.
There are state mandates, and this is what I frankly expect Newt and even Romney to fall back on.
There's a state mandate such as auto insurance, but a federal mandate violates the U.S. Constitution.
Now, I'm not sure, but I think way, way back when the Heritage Foundation came out in support of some form of a mandate.
Yeah, they worked on Romney Care.
And look, when Romney Care was first signed into law, I remember there were a lot of conservatives that were really enthused by it.
I mean, when Romney Care was made official in Massachusetts, there were a lot of conservatives singing its praises precisely because it mandated that people pay for their health insurance.
And this theoretically was going to lower prices.
But it never worked out.
You can mandate all day long.
It's like every law you come up with, people are going to violate it.
So I think now both Romney and Newt are kind of tied to this mandate business because heritage was tied to it way, way back.
But they were talking state mandates at this point.
But even in the auto insurance example, if you don't have a car, you don't have to buy insurance.
It's not a thorough and complete analogy on this, but it's twisting everybody up here.
And of course, it's up to me to untangle all of this, which, of course, I shall do, happily so.
We'll be back and continue down this path right after all of this.
They'll go away.
Let me take this in some kind of chronological order here to set the table and try to untangle this web of deceit that exists on the mandate and whose idea it was originally and where we are now.
Now, one thing I want to go back to Newt Gingrich, the Conservative Opportunity Society, and those special orders on the floor of the House of Representatives.
You know, I really wish that I had some tape.
Maybe all of C-SPAN's archives have been digitized and made available.
It's perhaps possible to find some of these things.
I mean, they went on for hours, folks.
Why didn't they just show up for five minutes and say something?
Newt and his gang, and it was Bob Walker, Jack Kemp, Duncan Hunter, Connie Mack, Dick Army.
There were a bunch of them.
And I got to tell you, they were inspirational.
I mean, they were the living offspring of Ronald Reagan.
It was as inspirational as anything that I've ever seen in politics.
And you must understand, even though Reagan was winning landslides and was having his way, he was being demonized and hated the rhetoric.
It was just vile, just as it is today.
And these guys, Newt and the boys, would not abide it.
And they were on the floor of the house every night, special orders, and there wasn't a soul in the gallery.
There wasn't a soul.
They were it.
The only people that saw this were the C-SPAN audience.
And it became known as the C-SPAN Revolution.
And I remember, what am I?
I'm in my, see, 51, 33, 31st, I'm watching this stuff.
And I'm saying to myself, Reagan has to love this.
Reagan has to be watching this in the White House.
Does Reagan know what these guys are doing?
Gosh, I hope he does.
I mean, it was just, as I say, as inspirational as anything at the time that wasn't Reagan.
And they were killing the Democrats on substance.
They were nuking every.
I mean, what Newt was doing, in addition to all this, was illustrating and highlighting the corruption of the House Speaker at the time, Jim Wright, who affectionately became known as Fort Worthless Jim Wright on this program.
Jim Wright, Speaker of the House, he was Fort Worth.
He once released a book.
And to get it up to something like 200 pages, there were a number of pages that had one word on them.
Triple spaced, double-spaced.
And the vast majority of the books were sold, bought in bulk, actually, by unions of people who never read them.
Jim Wright and Jim Jones, some of those Democrats of the day, Barney Frank was there.
They were just excoriating Reagan.
They were running down to Nicaragua and they were sideling up to the Soviet communists down there.
I mean, folks, it was a genuine war for the country.
And here you had the Conservative Opportunity Society, and they were the bulwark.
And remember, we're talking the House of Representatives.
The Democrats owned it.
Reagan never had a House majority to work with.
So it was an amazing thing.
Jeff Lord, who writes The American Spectator, was in the Reagan White House at the time.
He was the Reagan White House liaison with the Conservative Opportunity Society.
So they knew in the White House, obviously, what was going on, and they had a connection.
But Newt didn't need anybody to write what he was saying.
I mean, you could tell.
And nothing was written.
Folks, really, there hasn't been anything like it from anybody elected to office in this country since.
And I think for those of us who were alive then, maturing then, coming of age then, one of the great disappointments today is what happened to all of that.
We had Reagan in the White House.
We had these guys on the floor of the House during their special orders.
What happened to it?
And then it all Came to fruition when we won the House in 1994, and all these guys are sworn in, and they're in the leadership of the House of Representatives.
And all of us familiar with what had gone on in the 80s, the special orders.
Then we'd blown the place up with the House Bank and the House Post Office.
We had exposed that.
Some of the most profound corruption around on the Democrat side.
And it seemed like there would be nothing stopping this conservative advance.
And then, fast forward to a couple, three years ago, and Newt Gingrich is among those saying the era of Reagan is over.
And I can't tell you how that devastated me.
The one man who was single-handedly leading a movement to defend Reagan to the American people, who understood Reaganism as much as Reagan did.
The economics of it, the social issue side, the cultural side.
Somebody who, like Newt, who had once been able to articulate from the heart all those things he was saying, to say that the era of Reagan was over, it did not compute with me.
Because it's never been over as far as I'm concerned.
It's worth reviving.
It's worth emulating, reestablishing.
It's a shining moment of American history in my lifetime, those eight years of Reagan and the promise they ushered in, the reality that sprung from it.
And that's, I say, Newt was rising to power via all of this.
He was criticizing the corruption of Jim Wright, Speaker of the House.
But Jim Wright himself couldn't even hold a candle the corruption of the Democrat Party of today.
Jim Wright was chump change compared.
The Democrats back then were chump change.
They were bad.
They were typical, but man, they were even back then, just 25, 30 years ago.
The Democrats, believe me, have marched even further to the left than they were back then.
So we all know what's happened, and the Speaker of the House Newt became in budget battle in 95.
All the promise just didn't pan out.
Let's fast forward to today, where there seems to be this giant argument over the individual mandate.
Back in 1993, Newt absolutely supported an individual mandate.
The Heritage Foundation to this day says they are being impugned and misrepresented in terms of their advocacy for such a thing.
There's a post today, the Volokh Conspiracy.
Jonathan Adler has a post.
This actually March 29th, a little over a year ago.
Many commentators, and the headline of this piece was the individual mandate, a Republican idea.
Many commentators have noted the individual mandate's an idea that some Republican politicians and right-of-center thinkers used to support.
Over the week, NEAP reported many on the right once championed an individual mandate as part of a broader health care overhaul.
Not only does the Massachusetts healthcare reform championed by Romney include an individual mandate, but back in the 90s, the Heritage Foundation and many Republican office holders called for an individual mandate as part of a Republican alternative to the Clinton administration's proposed health care reforms.
In 1993, for example, Heritage's Steward Butler testified before Congress in support of a new, more rational social contract under which government would provide greater assistance to those lacking health care in return for greater individual responsibility.
Now, the Heritage Foundation, I think both Newt and Mitt are tied to this mandate business because, believe me, there is profound, as I've told you countless times, respect for heritage.
Heritage is the gold standard.
Heritage was every bit as involved in Reaganism as Reagan was.
I mean, and nothing's changed.
Heritage is who they are.
They've just, they're a bulwark themselves.
The difference is Heritage has never written a piece.
Nobody at Heritage has ever said the era of Reagan is over.
But this mandate business is something that Heritage is insisting to this day they were misunderstood about.
Here's just a brief excerpt from a Heritage piece.
Yes, in the early 90s, we, along with other prominent conservative economists, supported the idea of such a mandate.
It seemed the only way to solve the free rider problem, in which individuals can, under federal law, walk into any hospital emergency room nationwide and rack up big bills at taxpayer expense.
Our research in the ensuing 20 years has led us to realize that our initial idea was operationally ineffective and legally defective.
So they abandoned the idea once they saw it implemented.
And it's been implemented in Massachusetts.
And we can see that it doesn't work.
Heritage has admitted that it was flawed.
That's from a Washington Post editorial posted back in April of 2010 by Robert Moffat of the Heritage Foundation.
Here's more from that piece.
For the record, we think that the law's federal mandate's unconstitutional.
Our legal center, led by former Attorney General Edwin Meese III, notes that Congress has no authority to force an American to buy any good or service merely as a requirement of being alive.
Our research in the ensuing two decades has led us to realize our initial idea was operationally ineffective and legally defective.
Well before Obama was elected, we dropped it.
But they are still cited.
Heritage is still being cited.
This is, it's a trick.
It is part and parcel American left.
Obama comes up with this unconstitutional idea to sell it.
They say, wait, wait a minute.
It was a Republican idea.
Well, no.
It was a Republican idea to deal with the free riders, but then it was deemed to be ineffective and Heritage withdrew it, which nobody reports.
But Romney and Mitt, Romney and Gingrich, hang on to it.
And I think they're hanging on to it, perhaps because of Heritage's original support for the idea.
Now, let's go back to Newt.
Leaving aside that he absolutely supported a mandate in 1993.
He did.
One of those David Gregory clips that we played, Newt said, this is going to be a very important debate.
The whole notion of a mandate in healthcare, the whole notion of an individual mandate, this is going to be a very important debate.
He said, I believe everybody has a responsibility to pay for healthcare.
Fine.
Write down a very conservative personal responsibility.
Everybody should pay for what they get.
But that's the problem in the end, because we don't believe that everybody has a responsibility to pay for everybody in the country to be insured.
You know, it's not A's responsibility to make sure that B is covered.
It's up to A and B to take care of it themselves as they choose.
The only collective responsibility we have is that there are no unfair restrictions that prevent someone who chooses to insure himself can do so.
But those restrictions exist in Obamacare.
There aren't any choices in Obamacare.
There are nothing but mandates and jail terms, fines and penalties.
But it's Newt's first premise here that's killing us.
Health care is not a corporate asset.
We do not have a responsibility to pay for everybody else's health care.
Posting a bond, all that.
We do not have that responsibility.
Our responsibility is to ourselves.
You know, some people would prefer to send their kid to a private school than pay for some mooching stranger's health insurance.
You know, why are you going to have a guilty conscience about that?
If we could just turn the clock back to the 80s, and this would not be a bad thing, and scrub all this malarkey that the era of Reagan is over.
And if everybody in the conservative movement could remember their roots and go back to them, none of this, none of these internecine battles that we're having, all of these personality conflicts and all this fight for primacy, who's the smartest guy in the room, none of this would be happening if it was simple a general adherence to genuine conservatism, which is what you get here on this program.
And we'll be back.
Don't go away.
It never hurts to do a little history.
Never hurts to do a little history of conservatism, a little reminder.
This whole notion that the era of Reagan is over, and we all know who the people were who said it.
And those very people want now to be considered the grand poobahs of conservatism.
Let me tell you something, folks.
If the era of Reagan is over, then the era of conservatism is over.
You cannot separate the two.
You can't claim to be a conservative and on the other side of your mouth say the era of Reagan is over.
You just can't do it.
I don't know why.
Intellectually, I don't know why there's been such a mad dash away from Reaganism.
Well, I have my ideas, you know, the power of the social structure of D.C. inside the beltway, the desire to be in the click.
I understand all that.
Frankly, it infuriates me and bores me at the same time.
Let's cut to the chase here.
The only reason, the only reason Barack Obama and the Democrats used the individual mandate is because they did want to massively increase taxes to force people to pay into Obamacare.
They wanted to say that they were saving money while covering everybody, but forcing you to buy a health care plan that they wanted to impose on you.
It was a sleazy political move to try to hide the cost of the mandate imposed by the government.
Look, if the federal government tells the states they have to offer mandate, that's still unconstitutional.
Some people are going to say, well, Rush, the states can mandate it all at once.
Not if Obama directs the states to do it.
It's as unconstitutional as if Obama's doing it himself.
But the only reason, and don't forget this, the only reason Obama used that individual mandate is because they wanted to massively increase taxes to force people to pay into Obamacare.
They wanted to say they were saving money while insuring more people.
That's why stupid big insurance went along with it.
They saw 32 million new customers overnight.
But those of us with brains understood there's no way mandating coverage for 32 million people that don't have it, if that's the number, is going to lower anybody's costs, nor is it going to expand coverage.
This has all been a dog and pony show from the get-go.
It's all been a shell game designed to distract us from the real agenda, which is to take the government in charge of every aspect of your health care, single payer, and you lose your liberty and freedom in the process.
Time magazine almost gives you guys the green light.
Start planting your seed all over the country, just like Schwarzenegger and Clinton and all the others are doing.