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June 30, 2011 - Rush Limbaugh Program
37:50
June 30, 2011, Thursday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
And greetings to you once again, music lovers, thrill seekers, conversationalists all across the fruited plane.
We've got broadcast excellence for you right here from the distinguished and prestigious Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies, the center of the media universe.
Heck, for that matter, we are the center of the center.
Great to have you here, my friends, as always.
Looking forward to chatting with you on the phones in about two hours.
No, just kidding.
Man, was that way rolling through everything yesterday?
It was an hour and a half before we got to the phones.
I always do.
I really appreciate the patience that is shown by people who call.
People be lined up here for some cases, people wait two and a half hours to appear on the program, and I really appreciate it.
I really do.
Telephone number is 800-282-2882.
The email address LRushbo at EIBnet.com.
Well, well, you go on that.
Yeah, you go on MSNBC.
Mark Halperin went on the Scarborough show.
You heard about this?
You've not heard about this?
Stock market loves it.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average is up 145 points because of this.
In the seven-second delay today, I wanted to characterize how I thought the president behaved.
I thought he was kind of a dick yesterday.
Mark Halperin on MSNBC this morning on the Scarborough Show.
Everybody's digging this, folks.
Dow Jones Industrial Average is up.
I mean, it's climbing.
It's up on NASDAQ is up 33.
The DJI is up 145.
The S ⁇ P is up 12.
Everybody's out there.
143 now for the Dow Jones Industrial Average.
Play it again.
Everybody's talking it because everybody thought the same thing.
The president was posturing.
What Republicans have on their side now is they think if the deadline doesn't get met, that the president's going to get the blame.
The economy will be in chaos, perhaps.
The president will get the blame.
He went out yesterday and I don't think did anything to encourage a deal.
He might think by having more leverage, making his case for why the shutdown default should be blamed on Republicans.
Maybe he thinks in the long term that'll get him more leverage.
After they stopped giggling at the Scarborough show, Halperin made a good point.
Obama does not want a deal.
He really doesn't want a deal.
He wants the chaos.
He wants all this to continue.
And that's what generates happiness for him.
Here, I meant Audio Soundbite 1 to be played again here.
This is just, you know, Cookie called me today.
Should we edit it out?
I said, well, no.
I mean, they said it.
I didn't.
Everybody's thinking it, but they said it.
So here it is again.
Was in the seven-second delay today?
I wanted to characterize how I thought the president behaved.
I thought he was kind of a dick yesterday.
Mark Halperin, formerly of Time Magazine.
Now, he has apologized.
This is audio soundbite number three.
What I said was disrespectful to the president in the office, but it also lowers our discourse, not appropriate on any level.
I'm sorry.
Yeah, terribly sorry, ladies and gentlemen, calling the president what he called him.
And the Scarborough crew, I mean, they were panicking.
They were tripping over themselves to apologize to Obama, led off here by Mika Zzezhinsky.
We laughed because we did not think it was on the air.
This was a mistake on a variety of levels.
We all share it and we all apologize.
Today there was a slip by Mark Halpern.
He's a great reporter.
He didn't intend to say it on television.
We apologize.
We had a little technical glitch and mistake and a couple of mistakes were made.
Technical glitch?
He didn't intend to say it on television.
He was on television.
He was sitting there on television.
He didn't intend to say it on television.
They're just bending over backwards, bending over forwards.
Here.
Now, to show you that he intended to say it, go back to Soundbite 1.
He's asking if they have a seven-second delay.
And they do.
MSNBC has a seven-second delay, but they got a new tech board up who didn't know how to do it.
That's the excuse that their producer did not know how to deploy the seven-second delay.
Listen to Halperin again.
And what preceded this, Scarborough had a little bit of a question.
He said, hey, what was the president's strategy yesterday?
We're coming up on a deadline.
The president decided to please his base, push back against the Republicans.
I guess the question is, is this showmanship?
A lot of times you go up there, both sides, they act tough, so their base will be appeased, and then they quietly work the deal behind the scenes.
When the seven-second delay today, I wanted to characterize how I thought the president behaved.
I thought he was kind of a dick yesterday.
So he wanted to say it, and he wanted it said.
And he wanted those people on the crew to know that he said it.
He wanted them to hear it, but he also didn't want the audience to hear it.
That's why he asked, are we on a seven-second delay?
He expected it to be bleeped as it were.
And think of the grief that I got for calling Obama a jackass back in the day.
Remember that?
Now, let me ask you a question.
If Mark Halperin had said this about, say, George W. Bush, would they be falling all over themselves to apologize?
Nope.
He would be, my guess is that new ground had been broken.
Finally, finally, they would say, a reporter has had the courage and the guts to tell the nation just exactly the kind of president we have.
A gutsy move.
It might have been over the line.
It might have been a little bit risky.
And it might be something he would never do again.
But by golly, my gosh, the current, that's how they would play it.
Had Mark Halperin said it about George W. Bush.
Mistakes were made.
Scarborough's mistakes were made.
Scarborough went on to talk about this producer and apparently scolded the producer on it.
Hey, look, you got to get it right here.
Where do we do things?
No, you don't.
This is MSNBC we're talking about.
So they're blaming the producer.
Blaming the, they never, you know, they never had trouble and the media never had trouble calling Nixon a dick.
I mean, they call him Dick Nixon all the time.
Nobody ever said a word about it.
Tricky dick, Dick Nixon all over the place.
Now, now it's, you know, Dick Obama.
We got Joe Biden.
We got Dick Obama.
We got mistakes having been made.
There was a seven-second delay that wasn't deployed.
You know, the media never had any problem calling Cheney a dick.
Dick Cheney here, Dick Cheney over there.
I mean, it's just selective.
Well, I mean, Dick Hussein Obama.
Well, you get Tricky Dick Nix, you get Dick Nixon, you get Dick Cheney.
Dick Obama.
And, well, Wiener, I'll tell you what, Wiener fits into all this.
Weiner's gone for two weeks now.
He's into intense rehab.
Wiener's a dick rehab.
And, oh, and Huma.
Huma has vanished.
Huma has gone on a, what is it?
What would you call it?
Huma's out there.
She's a sabbatical.
That's right.
A retreat.
Huma has, she's retreated.
She's retreated from Hillary.
She's retreated from Wiener.
She's somewhere where her family is said to be watching her like a hawk.
You know, she's 35 and she's pregnant.
She's carrying Wiener's child.
No, there's no reaction yet from the White House on Mark Halperin referring to the president as Tricky Dick Obama.
Folks, they give us grief.
They give us grief here at the EIB now.
How about Michelle Bachman?
Michelle, you know, there's a fascinating piece, by the way.
I have it here in the stick.
Fascinating piece from the left.
A guy in Brooklyn, a bar in Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, a bunch of lib journalists sitting there writing about Bachman, and they are worried.
One of them thinks that she doesn't have a prayer.
The others are very, very worried.
I think the White House is very, very worried about Michelle Bachman.
And, you know, yesterday, Michelle Bachman complained that the news media just want to see two girls come together and have a mud wrestling fight.
Did you see that?
I assume that she was talking about a showdown between herself and Obama.
Freshman Republican Senator Marco Rubio has had his, has his own name for Barack Obama, and this is classic as well.
Now, this is from National Review Online at their corner blog.
Rubio tells us that he will respond to Obama's recent press conference where the president reveled in class warfare bluster.
Quite frankly, Marco Rubio said, I am both disappointed for our country and shocked at some of the rhetoric I heard.
It was rhetoric I thought that was more appropriate for some left-wing strongman than for the president of the United States talking about corporate jets and oil companies.
Missed the point.
Everybody here agrees our tax code's broken, and he's open to discussing tax reform, but don't go around telling people the reason you're not doing well is because some rich guy's in a corporate jet, some oil company's making too much money.
Well, that's all Obama's got.
All he's got is class warfare.
You know, Obama's out there.
He's chiding the Republicans for not acting like grown-ups.
So when's he going to go answer questions about jobs and the economy?
He just, I don't know.
White House says they're going to host a Twitter town hall with President Obama on July 6th.
And that's where the president will answer questions submitted via Twitter, which limits messages to 140 characters.
The town hall will focus on jobs and the economy, and a video feed of Obama's answers will be streamed online.
So He's going to go answer questions about jobs and the economy on Twitter.
Now, let's examine Obama a little bit from yesterday, folks.
There's only one reason to play the fear, the race, the sick children, the homophobe card.
And that is when you have a losing hand.
You have to examine Obama here in the context of his life.
He's never been in this position in his entire life.
He's finally had to make decisions as an executive, not as a voting senator.
And those decisions that he's made have produced results.
And the results are disastrous.
The results are horrible.
And what he's going to do is parade those horribles in front of the country and try to say that the Republicans are to blame for all this.
But these results have come back to haunt him.
They are worried in the White House.
They are terrified.
They're not happy with his performance in that press conference yesterday.
Liberals have been running this.
As I said yesterday, we've had 29 months of liberalism here, folks.
29 months of unabated socialism, and we see what we get from it.
It doesn't work.
And one of the reasons the libs in this country are so angry, they're perpetually angry, one of the reasons, imagine if you're a lib and you've got your panacea here.
You've got your utopia.
You've got your guy, and he's given you pretty much everything you want, and your country's falling apart.
You're no better off.
The people flying in corporate jets are still flying in corporate jets.
The people going to Vegas are still going to Vegas.
You know, your enemies, you know, they're still out there and they're still, they're triumphing despite the odds.
The only thing is, you're no better off.
You're supposed to have all this largesse redistributed to you, and it hasn't happened.
All that's happening is that your future's down the drain.
You have no job.
Your house is worthless.
You voted for the guy.
But imagine him.
You know, it's bad enough to be a narcissist, but to be a failing narcissist in the public eye, this is intolerable.
I'm not a professional psychologist or psychiatrist, but I have to think that we're dealing with a guy here, folks, who may not quite know how to handle all this.
This is a guy, every mistake he's made has been covered.
Here's a guy, every C in school was turned into a B or an A.
The road was paved.
There were no lows.
Everything was rosy.
The future was bright.
All he had to do was get up every day.
Told Harry Reid, Harry, I have a gift, meaning his ability to speak.
So it's understandable that he's in love with himself.
Understandable, he's a full-fledged narcissist, but now he's a failed narcissist and a failed narcissist in the public eye.
And that is intolerable.
This carefully crafted image is to be protected at all costs.
I really, I hate to do this.
I hate, but I need to illustrate the point.
As you may know, I play golf.
And I play golf with other people who play golf.
And those other people who play golf with me, we talk about others who play golf.
And in the course of playing golf with people who play golf and talking about people who play golf, the name Tiger Woods comes up.
And invariably, I, the renowned expert in every group which I find myself, am asked, do you think Tiger will ever be the golfer he was?
And my answer is, I don't know, but I can't imagine what it's like to be Tiger Woods.
Because we now know that everything that was presented to us image-wise was not true.
It wasn't perfect father, wasn't perfect husband, wasn't perfect this, wasn't perfect that.
I mean, all of that was manufactured.
All of it was manufactured corporate imagery.
And now we all know that none of it was true.
But here's the thing.
And this is, this is, I have so much admiration for Tiger Woods' talent and his steely resolve.
And his, folks, there's nobody that faced performance pressure any better at any time than Tiger Woods.
Jack Nicholas, of course.
But trust me, I'm not talking about golf.
I'm talking about just the pressure to perform meet and surpass expectations.
And he did that.
But now every time he goes on the golf course, he knows that everybody looking at him, and they are in the millions, he knows that everybody else knows that all of what was was fabricated.
I don't, I can't imagine what that must be like.
But I have to tell you, I think Barack Obama is going through much the same thing.
Mr. Perfect.
Look at what we were told.
A politician unlike any other, a human being unlike any other.
This man himself said, by virtue of his election, we would slow the rise of the oceans.
The world would come together as one.
There would be, when you remember, all of that tripe, he believed it.
And the people around him believed it.
And the people that voted for him thought the exact opposite of what has happened would happen.
We were going to be loved.
We were going to be powerful.
We were going to be rich.
We were going to be wealthy.
People are going to have all kinds of opportunity.
That'd be new homes, new cars, new kitchens, all of whatever people wanted in their lives, he was going to provide.
And he fed that.
He fed that image.
He and his handlers and the media built up that image and they made it real.
And he is a narcissist, believes, and now he is the architect of one of the biggest disasters to ever strike this country, including Hurricane Katrina or any other hurricane.
What has happened to this country in the last 29 months is unprecedented in the sense that it can be explained by the policies of one individual and a party acting in unison with him.
What has happened to this country is a direct result of policy implementation by Barack Obama.
Here you have this Messiah, this self-believing Messiah, the one as an architect of disaster.
His decisions have been disastrous.
What does he do?
How does he behave?
We saw a sense of it yesterday.
Yeah, I'm using it and I love it.
I'm using a beta of the new Mac OS X Lion.
The new operating system, it's fabulous, Snirdly.
The things they've done in the mail app are just fabulous.
And I tell you what they've done.
They've brought so much of the mobile operating system from the iPhone, the iPad over now to the computer.
Oh, no, I got a developer release.
I'm an official registered developer out there.
You know, I'm one of the testers here.
Everything's aboard.
The latest is it's going to release via the Mac App Store, not DVD.
No DVD release.
Well, it's four gigabytes.
It's going to depend on what your connection speed is.
But July 6th, I think, did I see?
July 5th or July 6th at noon.
But no, it's fabulous.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
Everything integrates.
It's ill perfecto.
It's, yeah, it's, I look at it.
I don't want to spend a lot of time talking about it now.
It's something you have to see.
But I'm just telling you, I like it.
It's a significant increase.
Now, I want to finish my thought here because this is, it's a little serious, folks.
Where we are here right, we've got the president of the United States who's taking vacation after vacation after vacation, chiding Congress for not doing anything in this debt limit business.
He hasn't led on anything.
He hasn't produced a budget.
He hasn't produced a program for anything in terms of specifics.
There's really one group of people working to try to bring this country out of the mess it's in, and it's the Republicans in the House and the Senate.
And I don't say that as a partisan.
They're the ones working, and the other party is simply reacting and ankle biting.
Obama's playing golf, going on vacation.
What happened yesterday in that press conference, I almost came to you today, ladies and gentlemen, wanting to apologize for treating his press conference yesterday as if it were a serious event, an attempt to lead the nation, because it wasn't.
There he was, Obama appearing after presidential buildup.
He's got two teleprompters.
He's got one voice reverberator.
He's got a stack of political talking points and cheap shots and meaningless claims.
He can say with equal passion, the debt limit should not be increased.
In 2006, he said that and should be increased now.
And nobody calls him on it.
I mean, how do you take this guy?
The only reason you take this guy seriously because of the power he's got, but you don't take him seriously because of his intellect.
He can make fun of, he can mock 535 members of Congress for not showing leadership while he refuses to lead.
How do you take that seriously?
He can brag that his pre-teenage daughters don't wait till the last minute to finish their homework while he hadn't even turned in last year's budget, and he gets their ages wrong.
He doesn't even know how old his daughters are.
So on the one hand, you have to take it seriously.
On the other hand, you feel like a fool for doing so.
Honestly.
So we've got this carefully crafted image of Obama, and it is to be protected at all costs.
So in the course of that protection, there'd be blame, rationalization, straw men, distortions, lies.
You see, Barack Obama's never had to take responsibility for the phony arguments that he has presented.
He's always been able to vote present or get lost in a crowd of legislators, and in so doing, has been able to maintain a phony credibility.
Well, what we saw yesterday in that press conference is Obama's best hand.
When asked how many cards, Mr. President, he said four.
He's got nothing, folks.
He's got nothing.
Now, in this game of debt-sealing poker, Obama kept the one card he's bluffed his way through life with, the emotional ploy card.
It's a wild card, can be used to evoke fear, phony racial, sexual, gender, class accusations, whatever it takes to defeat the reality of his decisions.
He is playing cheap emotional games, and he knows, like all the rest of us now know, that what he was presented as is a lie.
He has to face those cameras and he has to face every audience, knowing full well that everybody in that audience, including Democrats in the audience, now know that he is not the Messiah.
He is not magic.
He is not unique.
What makes him historic is not the color of his skin.
What makes him historic is his contempt for this country, his desire to transform it and destroy it, convert it to a European socialist country.
You know how a coward speaks before a scheduled fight?
I can't fight you.
I can't fight you because it might upset your sick grandmother.
Now, whenever there's an emotional component to an argument, it's worth parsing.
So you have Obama's false choice here, kids or corporate jets.
That is a classic means, classic attempt to avoid the intellectual arguments regarding spending cuts.
It's undeniable.
The federal government under Barack Obama's direction has spent trillions of dollars beyond our means to repay.
It has not created any jobs.
It has not worked.
It has done the opposite of what it was intended.
And then to accuse Republicans of standing in the way of a debt ceiling agreement due to their preference of corporate jets over children is an emotional ploy designed to escape responsibility.
It's a coward's way out.
Corporate jets or children, that's offered up to cloud the real problem.
Barack Obama is afraid to face facts.
He is afraid to face the consequence of his choices.
And he's good at this coward's game because he's had so much practice.
He claims to be worried about our kids and our sick grandmothers, but in reality, he's worried about having to have an adult discussion of a serious problem that's covered with his fingerprints.
All of this, folks, is, in my mind, it's unhealthy.
You have somebody who believed all this, and the exact opposite now is revealed to be the truth.
You got a reelection coming up.
Can't run on your record.
What do you do?
You got to get, I'm sure he's seething with rage and anger over any number of things.
And when you have that as the foundation of your behavior, your policymaking, it's, I don't know, it's a scary thing.
Grab soundbite number seven first.
I told the broadcast engineer I wanted to play Mitch McConnell, but I set it up with number seven.
This is from the press conference yesterday.
This is Obama scolding Congress.
Malia and Sasha generally finish their homework a day ahead of time.
Malia's 13, Sasha's 10.
They don't wait until the night before.
They're not pulling all-nighters.
Congress can do the same thing.
If you know you've got to do something, just do it.
They're in one week.
They're out one week.
And then they're saying Obama's got to step in.
You need to be here.
I've been here.
I've been doing Afghanistan and bin Laden and the Greek crisis.
And you stay here.
Let's get it done.
Everybody knows.
I mean, that's so childish and immature that even the left-wing media is in chagrin over this.
But despite that, they're trying to cover for him.
I'm not going to play you the bites.
We've got sound bites here of the immediate people.
Oh, man, he was Harry Truman-esque.
Oh, yeah.
Obama in that press conference, he was Truman-esque.
Really?
Let's go back to July 15th, 1948, in Philadelphia.
The Democrat National Convention, Harry Truman nominated as the Democrat candidate for president.
We have a bit of his acceptance speech here.
My duty as president requires that I use every means within my power to get the laws the people need on matters of such importance and urgency.
I am therefore calling this Congress back into session on the 26th of July.
On the 26th day of July, which out in Missouri we call Turnip Day.
I'm going to call that Congress back.
So that's what they claim Obama sounds like.
They claim Obama's Truman-esque in their dreams.
There was a lot of audience laughter yesterday in that press conference.
I don't know if you're laughing at him or laughing with him.
Here's Mitch McConnell this morning on the Senate floor.
Now you just heard Obama say, hey, I'm here.
I'm here.
You guys, you're not showing up.
My daughters don't wait the last minute to do their homework.
Here's Mitch McConnell.
I'd like to invite the president to come to the Capitol today to meet with Senate Republicans.
Anytime this afternoon, he's available to come on up to the Capitol and meet with Senate Republicans.
President says he wants us to get working.
I can't think of a better way than to have him come right on over today.
We're waiting and hear directly from our conference about the legislative realities in Congress right now.
Any bets on whether he shows up, ladies and gentlemen.
You're guiding light through times of trouble, confusion, murkiness, tumult, chaos, and even the good times, having more fun than a human being should be allowed to have.
Wall Street Journal, Obama calls people earning $250,000 a year jet owners.
In his news conference yesterday, the president said, I think it's only fair to ask an oil company or a corporate jet owner that's doing so well to give up that tax break.
I don't think that's real radical.
Asking private jet owners to give up tax breaks may not be radical, and it probably would be supported by most everybody who doesn't own a corporate jet.
But the problem is that most of the people who would be subjected to the higher taxes the president wants aren't likely to be private jet owners.
Somebody earning $250,000 a year among those scheduled for a tax increase in 2012 is unlikely to afford a jet or even a few charter trips on a jet.
And the story has a little bit of the economics of owning a jet, buying a jet, chartering a jet.
For example, a Cessna Citation CJ, it's an entry-level jet, costs $5 million.
The annual operating costs, which, believe me, these are rounded and averaged fuel, hangar space, pilots, all that, about $500,000 a year to operate the thing.
The cost of chartering a jet, the average charter is $3,000 an hour.
Now, it might be possible that somebody earning $250,000 a year might spend 5% to 10% of their annual income on a single flight by chartering, in which case, they could be called corporate jet flyers.
But I don't know how many people who earn $250,000 a year are chartering jets, much less owning them.
But they would be subject to the tax increase that Obama is talking about.
Now, there's a specific tax or tax break associated with corporate jets that deals with depreciation, accelerated depreciation.
And that's what Obama wants to get rid of.
It's a five-year appreciated depreciation schedule.
And that's a pretty good tax advantage.
Obama wants to get rid of it.
Okay, fine, get rid of it.
You know how much money that will raise?
$3 billion.
If you get rid of the five-year appreciated or accelerated depreciation schedule, just wipe it out, and don't allow corporate jet owners to depreciate the value of the jet, take tax advantage of it, you'll raise $3 billion.
Do you know how much is spent, how much will be spent this year on student financial assistance alone?
$42 billion.
Now, we can come up with any number of comparisons to put this into context.
This happens to be my favorite because it deals with education.
And everybody thinks that we're never spending enough on education.
And we just spend more on education that magic would happen.
We're going to spend $42 billion alone on student financial assistance this year.
Wiping out the depreciation schedule for corporate jet owners would raise $3 billion.
It's a non-starter.
It has nothing to do with revenue generation at all.
All it is, is a classic class warfare tactic being exploited by the president because he's got nowhere else to go.
He cannot hang his hat on one policy he's done that is working as he advertised it to work.
His stimulus did not create jobs.
His mortgage assistance plan didn't save the housing industry.
It's ridiculous to even detail this again.
We know everything's spiraling downward.
We are in a state of decline.
And a very business insider story here, this is sad.
39% of Americans believe the United States economy has now entered permanent decline, according to a new poll from the CBS New York Times poll.
39% of Americans believe the U.S. economy has now entered permanent decline.
That's 39% of the voting public is not going to vote for Barack Obama right there.
This is unprecedented.
We've never had this many Americans think this poorly, this dismally, this apocalyptically about this country, but they do.
In this poll, Obama's approval is down to 47%.
That's CBS New York Times.
That means it's actually about 40 in the real world.
Don't doubt me.
In that same CBS New York Times poll, 63% of the country believe it is headed in the wrong direction.
Only 28% think it's headed in the right direction.
If the election were tomorrow, this is a slam-dunk landslide of historic proportions.
That's how bad it is.
And in the White House, they know it.
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