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July 4, 2011 - Rush Limbaugh Program
31:30
July 4, 2011, Monday, Hour #3
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Come on, it's 30.
That's more like 40.
We don't have that time to waste.
It's Friday.
Let's go.
Live from the Southern Command in sunny South Florida.
It's open live.
Yip, yip, yip, yip, yip, yip.
Yahoo, great to have you back.
Open line Friday, Rush Limbaugh Frantic Friday it is.
For me, the big voice on the right, America's Anchorman, America's Truth Detector, and the Doctor of Democracy.
All combined into one harmless, lovable, little fuzzball bundle.
Telephone number, if you want to be on the program, 800-282-2882, the email address, illrushball at EIBNet.com.
The Palin emails are now online.
I just read my first very damaging Sarah Palin email.
Dear Mindy, Joel and your family are in our prayers.
Signed, Todd and Sarah Palin.
That's the first damning Palin email.
And by the way, all of the email addresses that Palin is writing to are unredacted.
Everybody she's sending an email to, the New York Times, the Washington Post have not redacted the addresses people she's communicating with.
Hey, folks, I want you to meet somebody.
I spoke to David, sorry, yesterday, interviewing him for the next issue of the Limbaugh Letter, and I asked him if he could give me five or ten minutes today to come on the program, and I'm happy to welcome him here to the program.
David, welcome to EIB Network.
Thanks for having me, Rush.
David has a book.
I don't want to overdo this, but his new book is The Secret Knowledge on the Dismantling of American Culture.
David Mammet for the economy of time here, traditional Hollywood liberal who is no longer, has written a book about his conversion and transformation, and it is fascinating.
I spent close to 45 minutes with him yesterday afternoon after the program discussing this conversion and how it happened and what inspired it and who the people were.
And it is a wonderful book because those of us, for those of us who are conservative, and we look at liberals and have a question about, how can they A, think the way they do?
How can they B think the way of us that they do?
This is just a wonderful work in the conversion process.
Mr. Mamet did it on his own.
He was, well, I mean, influenced by people who did the work.
Who were the people?
What were the catalysts that made you even question your liberalism?
Well, I think the first one was it was around the 2004 election, and I went to a synagogue as I do regularly, and the rabbi was talking about political civility, and he said it's in the Judeo-Christian tradition that before you criticize someone, you have to sit down with them and restate their position to them such that they'll say, yes, that's what I mean.
And then they have to state your position to you so that you say yes.
So you both agree that you understand what the positions are.
Then you each induce your facts.
So I wanted to, I took the advice to heart.
I thought, well, as a good liberal, I better be able to state the conservative position.
So I started researching and I started reading.
And it dawned on me that I was not a liberal, but I couldn't, that although I could state the position of who I thought were my enemies, the conservatives, I could not rationally state the position of the liberals.
Okay.
Let me tell you something.
My cochlear implant battery is something that just died, David, and I'm totally deaf, but it will not affect this.
Might be helpful to you.
I have a transcribe.
They're Rebecca.
I'm able to see what you're saying because I've got a court reporter here transcribing.
I wanted to make sure people understood who you are and who we're talking to.
Mr. Mammets, a playwright, screenwriter, Glengarry Glenn Ross, among his works, Wag the Dog, Oscar nominated the verdict, Speed the Plow Postman always rings twice.
I wanted to point this out at the beginning, and I failed to do so.
So you've undergone the process.
You've written the book, again, Secret Knowledge on the Dismantling of American Culture.
And by the way, the title's kind of, there is no secret knowledge, correct?
Yeah, the secret knowledge is that there's nobody home but us chickens, that the Constitution was written by a bunch of regular guys who tried to get together and thrash out a compact under which they could get together that would keep people together as it has for 230 years.
And that when the experts come in claiming to be messiahs or saviors, or indeed even experts and politicians, what they are is they're either deluded for the most part, or they're duplicitous.
Because they should be there serving our interests, and there is no knowledge greater than that of the citizen.
What was it like?
Was there a moment where the light went off and you said to yourself, everything I've believed for so much of my life, I've been wrong about?
Yes, I think I just started reading Milton Friedman and I felt, as the phrase says, the scales fell from my eyes because he took what I thought was an impenetrable subject, economics, which was susceptible only to intellectuals and people who had...
What did you think was impenetrable about economics?
Oh, I...
I don't know.
It's just kind of, because I'd never looked at it.
I knew that it was called the Dismal Science, and I knew that there were books full of graphs.
But you have earned your living in capitalism and science and economics and so forth.
It's made you financially who you are.
Exactly so.
But the realization I came to is that each citizen for himself or herself understands the economics, which is I better make more than I spend, and I better put something aside for a rainy day, and I want to get a good idea about what to do with the surplus so that perhaps it can grow while I'm sleeping, period.
And that that's capitalism.
Everybody practices it, but half of the country, those on the left, deny that it's true.
Right.
And that's a fascinating thing.
People live their lives that way.
Most people do.
But when it comes time to vote, they'll vote the exact opposite of their interests in that regard.
In other words, people, they're charitable and they'll donate to causes, but they will not walk down the street and give money from their pockets to everybody that lives on the street.
But they'll vote for people who will do it for them.
Exactly.
So, and the question that they won't ask is, where does all that money end up?
Where does the aid to Africa end up?
You know, most of it ends up diverted into the pockets either of the politicians or the crooks.
Some of it may get words going, but just a little bit of it.
And I'll tell you a story.
I was an old friend of mine who's now in her 90s, and she's a German immigrant.
She and her husband came here after the war with absolutely nothing, not a penny, not a word of the language.
And their patron, their sponsor, deserted them.
So they arrive in this little town.
They spent 40 years there and became fixtures of the town.
And after September 11th, she was knitting sweaters to send to the rescue workers and the relief workers.
And I said, that's such a great charitable act.
But don't you, sweaters are magnificent.
They're handmade woolen sweaters, great works of art.
I said, most of these, I said, most of them, they aren't going to get to the people they're intended to.
They're going to disappear along the way.
And she nodded and she said, well, maybe some of them will get through.
You know, she'd seen much more of life than I had.
And she felt it was her duty to do something personal in spite of the fact that it might not work.
And that's kind of how we feel about us citizens.
Rather than saying, oh, it's not going to work or we can't get together.
We have to do what we can in spite of the fact that failure is always possible.
Do you have the belief that people on the left are less desirous of getting together?
We always hear about civility.
We hear about we have to get along.
People don't like all this partisanship and so forth.
But then the burden always seems to fall on conservatives.
We seem to have to be the first ones that are told we must compromise what we believe in order to get this mutual adoration society going.
And there seems to be an arrogance and a condescension attitudinally among people on the left that seems to prevent them from having any desire to actually commingle.
Well, you know, like Lincoln said, if slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.
And I feel the same way about the leftist dismantling of the West.
If that's not wrong, then nothing is wrong.
And I've got a good model for people saying perhaps the truth lies somewhere in between.
And that's the state of Israel, which has been defending itself daily against constant attack for 60 years from people whose avowed purpose is to kill every Jew in Israel and then to kill the rest of the Jews in the world.
And people on the left say, yes, but obviously if there's two parties to a dispute, the truth must lie somewhere in between.
And I don't see where the truth lies in between in Israel.
And I really don't see where the truth lies in between the liberals and the conservatives.
The liberals say, are you arguing there must be no government?
Of course not.
I'm arguing that the government should be representative of the people's interest.
Well, now that has to be for you to say from where you've come from, and you're exactly right.
I mean, how do you negotiate with evil?
How do you compromise with people who want to wipe you out?
Where's the middle ground?
But the same talking, to compare liberals in the way they look at things and conservatives, that's what we ask ourselves.
How in the world do we compromise whatever the issue happens to be?
Abortion, crime, you name it, where do we compromise?
And so that's a great point that you're making, that just because somebody has a side makes it legitimate.
It could be totally illegitimate.
That's right.
As Dennis Prague says, he prefers a clarity to agreement.
I think it's a great phrase to live one's life by.
But, you know, Woodrow Wilson, who did a lot towards screwing up the world, said a couple of smart things.
One is, he said you can vote for freedom and you'll probably lose, or you can vote for slavery and you'll absolutely win.
Well, that's just, what continues to strike me, how long have you known that?
Is it something you've just come across that's part of your conversion?
Or how long have you held the beliefs that you're sharing with us now that you didn't act on for so many years?
Well, I was a liberal, which meant that I voted for the liberal team.
It meant that I was, you know, that meant that I was excused from things.
Were you born liberal?
Were you and then confirmed?
Did you just question the way you were?
Sure.
You know, my dad was an immigrant kid and a Democrat and a Jew, and we didn't know any Republicans in our group.
And so I grew up Democratic.
My dad was a labor lawyer, very hardworking guy, one-horse labor lawyer, and then I went to hippie college, and I lived in the bubble.
And I didn't knowingly meet a conservative until I was 6, until, to my shame, until I was 60 years old and sat down and said, wow, I don't understand what this guy's talking about, but he has a great civility about him.
Perhaps I'd better investigate this thing.
We were talking with the playwright and screenwriter David Mamet, Who's the author of the new book, The Secret Knowledge on the Dismantling of American Cultures, about his conversion from Hollywood and theater liberalism to conservatism?
Are you able now to, since the book has come out, and you've been public, you're doing interviews, and you've been very clear about this.
You've had some very clear writing on this.
Are you able to talk to liberal friends now that you've, quote-unquote, come out?
What's the impact been on your friendships?
Well, that's a good question.
I have a lot of friends.
I don't socialize a lot because I've got a family, so I go home at night and I don't socialize a lot, but I see my friends occasionally.
We all work together.
And my definition of a friend coming from Chicago is someone who says, yeah, sure, you know what?
Let's talk about what we can't talk about.
Let's help each other out.
Politics are none of my business.
And that's how we work in the workplace.
But you now, you feel the need to proselytize.
I mean, you've written the book.
You are attempting to convert others, correct?
Well, I don't know.
That's a very good question.
I wrote the book to try to figure out what I thought.
I said, I got to sit down with a pencil and paper.
And it's like taking the car apart.
You don't have to learn how the internal combustion engine works.
See, it's not enough to just take it to the garage and give the guy a couple bucks.
I want to know how the car works.
So that's what I was doing with my own thought processes, attempting to do.
And that's what I was doing with attempting to understand what democracy actually is.
And so, as I said at the end of the book, I wrote this in sympathy with anyone who's ever been oppressed by big government.
That's all of us.
Yeah.
And then the hope of drawing the attention of this terror to the fair-minded.
Well, look, I appreciate your time.
And thank you again.
Thank you again for yesterday for the hit on the newsletter.
And the best of luck with your book.
And we'll chat soon.
Testify, brother.
Testify.
Okay, you're welcome.
Thank you very much.
All right, that's David Mammot, noted screenwriter and playwright.
And there's much more of that in obvious some different directions and even a little bit more depth in the upcoming issue of the Limbaugh Letter newsletter, the most widely read political newsletter in the country.
We will be right back.
Have you seen the movie Wag the Dog?
David Mamet wrote that movie.
It is a great political movie.
And it was during the Clinton years, and it was ⁇ I don't know what basically it's, I don't want to give it away because you should go watch it, but they fake a war.
They use television to fake the creation of a war to distract the country's attention away from a president who's deedling Monica Lewinsky.
I mean, it's the Libs put that movie together, but it was a direct slam to Clinton and Carville and Dick Morris.
It was all about Hollywood saving a pervert with spin and glitzy lies.
But it was so obvious what it was doing, it had the opposite effect.
It was Al Pacino, I believe, who starred in DeFlick.
You disagree with me on that, snurdle?
It was Al Pacino who was in it.
Might have been Dustin Hoffman.
Yeah, Dustin Hoffman and Robert De Niro.
That's right.
I'm confusing Pacino with something else.
So it's Dustin Hoffman and De Niro in Wag the Dog.
Anyway, David Mammet wrote it.
The guy we just talked to.
And again, Glenn Gary going Ross.
I have seen, you know, I Glen Gary Glenn Ross, that's Glenn Ford.
I mean, that is way, way back.
That's about selling siding in Baltimore back in the 50s and 60s.
That's a dark movie.
That is, it is good.
In fact, I should have asked him, where in the heck do you get a title, Glenn Gary Glenn Ross?
Just the title reeks liberalism to me.
Glenn Gary Glenn Ross, you can't, from that title, you have no clue what the movie is about.
Selling aluminum siding, real estate, so selling property and real estate.
Okay.
Then there's 10.
Okay, okay.
Yeah, 10 men.
Danny DeVito.
That's what I'm going to do.
10 men.
10 men was Danny DeVito selling siding.
Right.
This is real estate.
Real estate.
Glenn Gary Glenn Ross.
We've had an incredible book week.
Coulter's book is out this week, Demonic, and that is great.
Mammoth's book is superb.
This is really a great week for conservative books.
I'm not working on a book, but the title of Mammoth's book, Secret Knowledge on the Dismantling of American Culture.
Okay, I got to get brief time out, and I promise, folks, we're going to work hard.
Squeeze as many of your phone calls in in our remaining half hour of the EIB network's open line Friday.
We come back.
Yeah, you can say it's been our great books week.
We had more interviews in this week than we do in a year.
We had Santorum on, what, Tuesday?
Wednesday.
They're all running ahead.
Coulter here, David Mammet.
John in Occupied Chicago.
Great to have you on the EIB network, sir.
Hello.
Bun Rushi.
It's a pleasure to talk to you again.
Thank you very much, sir.
Mexicans will definitely vote for Sarah Palin.
Why?
Because she's got more testosterone in her pinky than most of the Republican Party does.
And I regretfully say that, because believe you me, there's a lot of old white Republican men that I admire, and I appreciate that they keep me and my family safe.
In these dark times, that's what I need who have men standing there in those offices with principal.
And again, I'm sorry to say that Sarah Palin has more testosterone in her pinky than most of the Republican Party does.
And she's not the only one.
Michelle Bachman, also a good person.
We can talk about Leanna Rosenthal over there in your district or in your state.
These are the people that I admire.
The shame is that the only ones speaking out are the women.
What's up with the men?
We've asked.
Meanwhile, Anthony Weiner is telling a New York Post that he's going to stick it out.
That's actually their headline, the New York Post.
Weiner, I'll stick it out.
He's not going to resign.
We've been asking that question, John, and pointing out that the gonads and the Republican side are with the women.
Palin, Bachman, some of the Tea Party women.
It is, I think, I really do believe that there has been a chickification of our culture, political culture, particularly Washington, D.C.
I just, I believe it.
I think it's been a steady, albeit slow, encroachment since the modern era of feminism began, traceable to the late 60s, early 70s.
There's a sitcom that's starting in the fall.
I'll have to go out here and find it on the computer.
I didn't bother printing it out because I didn't think it would come up.
Sitcom is about a guy who's the best way to put this.
I don't have to paraphrase it, but totally, totally henpecked.
Yeah, and it's it's but it's it supposedly represents the way things are.
It's not making a statement against it.
It's supposed to be reflective of the way things are in culture today.
So it's, I don't know, it is a phenomenon.
It really is.
I'm glad you called from Occupied Chicago, John Ron, Birmingham, Alabama, the free side.
Great to have you on the program.
Thank you, Rush, and God bless you.
You bet, sir.
What I'm calling about today, and I don't hear anybody talking about it in Congress or the president, with all the upheaval in the Middle East and all the Islamists taking over the areas over there.
What do you think is going to happen?
Will they tell us $500 a barrel for oil or no oil?
Yeah, you know, that's I'm glad you brought that up because OPEC has basically said we're doing nothing right now to change our production quotas.
We're not, so we're guaranteed $100 a barrel for the foreseeable future.
And you're right, if they wanted to say $300, the OPEC guys, now, the problem with doing that, Ron, is that somebody, the minute OPEC comes along, any other cartel comes along and says oil is 500 bucks a barrel, somebody's going to come along and say, oh, no, here it is for 300.
OPEC is not the entire oil market.
They do not, their cartel does not run all of the oil markets.
There would be people who come in and try to take advantage of that, but they do control a lot of the supply.
But the question's relevant in the sense that it could be used as a weapon, as an economic weapon.
And if you couple that with the ammunition that this regime is already using on the U.S. economy, I mean, these are serious times.
It really, people instinctively know it, but there's still, in most people, there's a grain of, it can't happen here.
This is the United States of America.
It really is.
It's going to get better.
It's going to bottom out.
We're going to start rebounding.
It's going to happen.
There are a lot of policies in place, folks, the purpose of which is to see to it that our economy doesn't rebound.
This is the sad, scary reality.
There are policies and more to come.
Once Obamacare implements with all the massive new tax increases there, when the Bush tax cuts expire in 2013, we're looking at it just with that, a top marginal tax rate of 62%.
You can kiss job creation goodbye.
It really is frightening and serious stuff.
Look at this now.
You've got 24,000 emails being released by the state of Alaska about Sarah Palin and the New York Times, the Washington Post.
Hell, all of them.
They got camera crews.
They got trucks.
They got reporters.
They've solicited members of the public to pour through all of these emails, desperate to find something that they can use that will finally once and for all destroy Sarah Palin.
And yet not one bit of curiosity about who is Barack Obama.
Not one shred of energy is being deployed to tell us who this guy really is, nor has there been The same media out to destroy Sarah Palin and Bachman, any other Republican that surfaces.
Not at all interested in who Obama really is.
And then those of us who want information on Obama, we end up being mocked.
We end up being laughed at, made, and called racist or what have you.
Come on, Rush, let it go.
Can't just accept it.
The guy was elected.
We sit here and we watch a search and destroy mission.
And this is what really makes me mad when I hear people on our side sit here and say, well, you know, Rush, she's damaged good, so she can't get anybody.
Okay, here, let it happen.
Let it happen.
The media's dreaded, Russia.
Not much we can do about it.
We've got to move on next.
I had my annual spring fling, which is a combination political golf weekend over five days.
It was at the end of April.
And I don't mention the names of the guests because privacy and all that.
But I would love to be able to tell you who was there because I'll tell you what we talked about and it would matter.
But one of the subjects that came up one night at dinner was precisely this lack of unity on the right to circle the wagons and protect our own when any of us or them are under assault.
If the media targets somebody for any kind of transgression, you can bet your bottom dollar that somebody on our side is going to join them.
Yeah, we've got to get rid of this person.
This person is not fit to be one of us, not fit to be a conservative.
This person is going to bring us all down.
And all of that is oriented in trying to be loved and respected by the left.
You said the left comes out and says X is a reprobate.
Look at what X did.
Republican candidate or elected official or whatever.
You look at what's happening.
Even liberal women are circling the wagons around Wiener.
Liberal women are doing everything they can to not pile on the guy.
Conservative women, and not just women, a lot of conservatives and Republicans are on the bandwagon trying to destroy Sarah Palin, as they did try to destroy Christine O'Donnell.
And it was a major discussion point one night at dinner.
It was one of these phenomena.
Let me, you can see it happening right here.
The Sarah Palin emails.
Massive interest.
Gosh, can we find some dirt?
Let's get rid of her.
Yes, yes, yes.
And enlisting the public to do so.
And yet not one ounce of energy spent on finding out exactly who Obama is or anything about his policies.
We have a scientist on the phone from Delaware, Seaford, Delaware.
This is Jack.
Great to have you, sir, on Open Line Friday.
Hi.
Thank you, Rush.
It's just great to be able to talk to you.
Appreciate that.
My subject is the so-called consensus on global warming.
Right.
And I am really qualified to talk about this.
I studied weather in the Air Force.
I studied weather in college.
I really studied weather as a combat pilot in special operations in Korea, where I had to land in North Korea repeatedly.
So weather was very important to me.
And when I started hearing about this global warming, as a scientist, the one thing we are, we are curious.
And so I dug into it.
And let me tell you, I've got two documents in my hands.
Wait a minute.
First thing, weather and climate, do you mean them interchangeably?
Well, weather is short-term.
That's like tactical.
Yeah.
And climatology is long-term.
That's strategic.
Okay.
So what the weather is is short-term.
And where it's going is what you better know about.
Okay.
And when I returned from Korea, I went to work.
I was assigned to headquarters, first weather group for the Strategic Air Command, and our job was to monitor and predict the weather during the Cold War over Russia.
And so I'm the recipient of a National Service Medal for my work in climatology.
Wow, that's impressive.
Well, you know, they give you medals instead of money when you're in the Air Force.
Well, I don't have any medals except the ones I've given to myself.
But anyway, the one document I got, which is a press release from February 2009 by the UN Secretary General Ben Ki-moon.
And he says, we have just four months to secure the future of our planet.
I remember that.
What a croc.
Yeah, and he claims to have an international panel of 113 climate scientists who concluded that human activities are heating the planet.
I checked on some of the names and followed up, and like 27 of them have ever studied weather out of 113.
On my other hand, I've got a petition signed by 31,000.
Well, get this.
Now, I mentioned six points, actually seven points that my own climatologist sent me.
And he said the seven things he handles, he answers people with seven different points.
The seventh point is there has been virtually no research into the role of natural cycles in recent warming.
Almost every century in the last 2,000 years has had substantial warming or cooling naturally.
That's never been studied.
They don't want to know the answer to what's happening naturally because.
It has been studied because I've studied it.
Okay.
Let me tell you about this petition.
It's signed by 31,478 American scientists, including 9,000 PhDs, which says that global warming is a croc.
And I'm one of them.
And I'm not sure if you're not found.
That sounds like a consensus to me.
That's a real consensus.
And are you familiar with the hockey stick curve?
Yes, and that's what's been totally debunked as a hoax.
Yep.
Well, the UN even pulled it out of their data because they were so embarrassed by it.
Exactly.
And that's what happened.
That was one of the results of the email dump from Hadley, the climate center at the University of East Anglia.
Well, I'm glad you got through there, Jack.
I appreciate it.
And I've sadly got to take another brief time out here because the constraints of time up against the programming format means that I've got to go.
It's a good question.
I got an email.
How do I get this newsletter of yours?
And, you know, I never do give that phone number out to order the Limbaugh letter.
Here it is.
888-395-RUSH.
888-395-7874.
That's the Limbaugh Letter, the most widely read political newsletter in the country.
You can also get it at rushlimbaugh.com.
888-395-7874 in the numeral call.
And you have, folks, a terrific and wonderful weekend.
I will always do.
See you back there on Monday.
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