All Episodes
Previous Next
Sept. 1, 2011 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:52
September 1, 2011, Thursday, Hour #1
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24 7 podcast.
It is interesting to go through the uh drive-by media headlines on what happened regarding John Boehner's refusal to agree to the date September the 7th for Obama's political speech and campaign speech before joint session of no one a job speech.
There's never going to be a job speech.
We already know what his jobs plan is.
Jim Dement had the best idea on this.
You know, here what Jim Demint said.
He made a great point in the in the middle of all this uh scheduling nonsense, DeMintz said, Look, if Obama has a jobs proposal, put it in writing and give us a cost estimate.
Send it up here.
I want to read the bill.
I don't want to listen to talking points off a teleprompter.
Now that's the way a serious job proposal will be presented, but this isn't a serious job proposal, just another political stunt from Obama and the opticians.
But look at this.
By the way, greetings, Rush Limbaugh.
Reason radio was invented here at 800 282-2882 from the AP Obama bows to Boehner.
Job's speech will be September 8th.
And that was one of the eight dates that I suggested to Boehner that he offered Obama.
Washington Post editorial, Obama Boehner speech spat should worry Democrats.
This attempt to make Republicans look unreasonable failed.
Spectacularly.
That's the Washington Post.
They're not happy out there.
There's only one guy.
There's only one guy, Chris Saliza at the Washington Post, why Obama was smart to reschedule his job speech.
He gives three reasons.
Obama and his political team were smart to reschedule the event for at least three reasons.
One, nobody wants a process fight.
Number two, get the last word.
And three, pick your audience.
Now, Crowdhammer, Charles Krauthammer's out there saying the tactical mistake here by Boehner.
That Boehner should have gone ahead and said yes to September 7th because it would have made Obama look petty and small.
And again, I with with with uh the most profound respect must disagree with it.
I don't think a president looks small in a joint session of Congress.
I don't care what he's saying.
I don't think he looks small, and I don't think he looks petty.
The other element to the argument that Boehner should have gone ahead and said, okay, you want September 7th, you got it, is that later, the Republicans during their debate could have ripped Obama's jobs plan to smithereens.
Now you want to talk about the press talking about people looking petty.
Here you have the president who's going to automatically look big doing his joint session uh kabuki dance.
And then there, by the way, Obama could have timed this thing so that it was up against the debate.
They're ahead of move the debate or what have you.
There's no guarantee that the Republican uh candidates would have been able to hear the whole speech and thus been able to prepare remarks about it.
But even if they had Obama joint session, let's look at the optics here.
Obama joint session speech on jobs.
The imagery, the optics are here's a guy who cares in the media and the hype leading up to it.
Obama cares about jobs.
He's desperate.
He wants America back to work.
He cared enough to request a joint session of Congress.
So he goes up there and he makes a speech, and whatever the speech is, it's gonna be hailed as a great speech.
And then, moments later, we shift to the Reagan library in Simi Valley, any seven or eight Republican presidential candidates start ankle biting, and that's how they would be portrayed.
There's no way Obama looks smaller petty.
The Republicans would look small or petty in this scenario, if you ask me.
And that's why I think Boehner did the right thing in saying no.
Besides, it logistically turns out not to be possible to do on the 7th.
That's their first day back.
And they're not scheduling any votes till 6 30 on the night of the 7th.
Obama would want to go in there and speak about eight.
So now as it works out, Obama's up against the National Football League.
Now the Thursday night National Football League opener is a big deal.
Because the NFL schedules music concerts and all kinds of stuff for hours leading up to the kickoff.
The kickoff is either 8.20 or 8.30 Eastern time.
So now at some point during NBC's pregame, Obama's going to do the joint session.
NBC has the game.
NBC has already sold all of their advertising availabilities for all the pregame stuff.
Much less the game.
NBC is also 49% owned by Jeff Immelt.
So what are they going to do?
Now they've got to figure out.
They have to figure out how they're going to cover Obama and still carry the football game and still get all their reveils in for the pregame.
Well, you know, the pregame, they've got they've got musical acts, bands.
They go.
It's a big thing that at least in the city of the game in Green Bay, if this stuff's going to be going on all day.
And it'll intensify by four o'clock in the afternoon, leading up to kickoff.
In the middle of this, here comes Obama.
That's where he's going to look small.
And I guarantee you, with the lockout and the NFL and the doubt throughout the summer that there might not be a season, the status of the economy and the real existence for sports, and that is to distract people, give them three hours of fantasy time away from their reality.
The last thing that anybody looking forward to watching this game wants to see is a president interrupted for a job speech that doesn't have anything new in it, that is going to be politically critical of Republicans.
These guys, people watching the football game, are not going to want any part of this.
And yet NBC is going to feel obligated to carry some of it.
So the White House is going to have to get together with NBC to coordinate a timing for Obama's speech.
Now normally Obama would like to go eight or nine o'clock.
Can't do that.
Kick off Eastern Time 8.20 or 8.30.
Now we're talking 520 or 5.30 on the left coast.
If Obama goes 7.30, they don't even want to go.
He can't go 8 o'clock.
That's the official pregame.
That's that's when Al Michaels and Costas and Collinsworth and the whole game.
That's when they start the official pregames.
That's 8 o'clock Eastern 5 on the left coast.
So Obama's got to be finished by then, which means he's got to start at 7.30 or 7.15, which is 4.15 to 4.30 on the left coast, which means he's blowing that entire audience.
So this was a great move.
Obama should have selected Friday night the 9th.
But they don't want to do Friday night because that's document dump day.
That's when they let go of all the bad news late in the afternoon, nobody wants to hear about.
Congress doesn't want to be there on a Friday night.
I mean, they want a day, I just come back from six weeks of recess.
Friday night's a big long weekend for Labor Day, they go back home.
So I frankly, folks, I uh I like this.
I've if if in fact if we're up to me, if it were up to me, and the media, when you hear the soundbice, thinks that it is.
Media think I made this call.
If it were up to me, Boehner would have refused to let Obama address a joint session of Congress at all.
Now I know it's not gonna happen.
That's why I say if it were up to me, because it's a campaign speech.
We're not gonna hear anything new.
This is not, we haven't been attacked other than by Obama.
I mean, there's no national urgency, no, no hurricanes gonna have hit and destroyed anything.
And even if one does, presidents generally don't do joint session speeches after hurricanes or natural disasters.
But Obama's not gonna say anything uh important.
He's not gonna say anything new.
He's not even gonna say anything helpful.
And he certainly is not gonna be bipartisan, which is usually what joint session addresses are supposed to be.
Now, some people think that by agreeing to put the uh move the speech back by a day, that Obama gets to look magnanimous and bipartisan, and then that allows the Republicans to say, look how Obama's always bending over backward to accommodate the Republicans.
He willingly compromise Republicans aren't.
That's not the way this is going to play.
And even if it does, it still isn't the truth, and that's that's uh it's too late for that now because too much of the press.
You got AP Obama bows to Boehner.
Washington Post, Obama Boehner's speech spat should worry Democrats.
This attempt to make Republicans look unreasonable failed spectacularly.
So how can the Washington Post now go back and say, well, this guy really succeeded in making a Republicans look unreasonable?
Oh, it's gonna be tougher than not say they they couldn't do it.
Uh the audio sound bites to illustrate here, this is um I'm I'm back now to running the Republican Party.
A few days ago I was irrelevant uh satirist, jokester, entertainer.
Now back to being a titular head of the Republican Party, we have a montage from PMS NBC, the uh Reverend Al Sharpter and uh some radio host Mike uh Papollonio and Lawrence O'Donnell.
Is Rush Lumbach calling the shots here?
Did Rush go on radio and Baehner respond, Boehner?
Who is the voice of the Republican Party?
He's part of that echo chamber.
Rush Limbaugh wants this president to fail.
Speaker Boehner ultimately took the advice Rush Limbaugh gave him.
I say to you, ladies and gentlemen.
I once again have become a titular head of a Republican Party calling the shots.
Sharped Rush Lumbar.
Was it wasn't finished there on NBC, uh, MSNBC, the last word of Lawrence O'Donnell speaking to the author Richard Wolfe, who just if there's ever they ever do a colonoscopy on Obama, they're gonna find Richard Wolfe's head there.
Richard Wolf, uh big uh author and and uh just a big Obama apologist.
Anyway, he's talking to Lawrence O'Donnell about me saying yesterday that Boehner should tell Obama that he can't have September 7th to speak before joint session.
O'Donnell says, Look, is this the night I have to begin this program by saying Rush Limbaugh's right?
The president was trying to upstage a Republican debate.
Is there any real working theory to the contrary?
No, you don't have to say the Rush Limbaugh is right.
Uh this is obviously a campaign season, and the next day was a football game, and and who really cares anyway?
You can schedule both on the same day.
It doesn't have to be the same time.
The interesting question is, what is it about this president that has stripped away the veneer of respect that normally accompanies the office of the president?
Why do Republicans think this president is unpresidential and shouldn't dare to request this kind of thing?
It strikes me that it could be the economic times, it could be that he won so big in 2008, or it could be, let's face it, the color of his skin.
Now, Mr. Wolfe, if you hang in there be tough, if you listen, I I've got a great piece by Shelby Steele here that explains this, and I love the piece because it expands on things that I have said, Obama and the burden of exceptionalism.
And basically what he says, Mr. Wolf, is that Obama as a child of the 60s views this country as um sinful.
That its exceptionalism was ill-gotten, that it didn't deserve this country, never deserved its exceptionalism, and that it's Obama's job to preside happily over the decline of this country.
That is the answer to your question, Mr. Wolf.
What is it about this president that has stripped away the veneer of respect?
We don't respect him because he doesn't respect the country.
We don't respect him because he's trying to reverse centuries of greatness in this country.
And I you know, I I I said yesterday they would never ask Bush or Clinton any of these questions.
Because Bush or Clinton would not have suggested a joint session on the night of either a Democrat or Republican debate, respectively.
So there's your answer, Mr. Wolf, although I'll have more detail for you as the program unfolds.
But basically, the people of this country understand that they have elected a president who doesn't believe in its greatness, who doesn't believe in its exceptionalism, who thinks this country deserves to be in decline because our exceptionalism was ill-gotten.
That's why.
I don't expect you to understand that.
Continuing now with a last word on PMSNBC, the host Lawrence O'Donnell, this time speaking with New York magazine National Affairs Editor John Heileman about me saying yesterday that Boehner should tell Obama that he can't have September 7th for his joint session.
O'Connell says, how would uh Democrats react if we had a Republican incumbent president, if he announced the re-election campaign, and the campaign was underway, being funded as this one is, and he wanted to give a speech.
How would Democrats have reacted if we just reversed this whole thing?
Rush Limbaugh was right.
In one respect at least, the White House clearly was playing politics here, clearly intended to upstage the Republican debate, thought that it was doing something smart and clever and tough politically, thought that Boehner would fold, and now is in the middle of this fight.
Yeah, and I remember what I told you yesterday.
After this all happened, and we learned about it, I said that in the White House they are yucking it up and slapping each other on the back, and they're popping champagne quarks and they're having a grand old time because they think they've pulled a great stunt here.
They think they've really pulled something.
Oh, hey, we're gonna schedule a joint session.
Who could turn us down?
Nobody's gonna turn down the president of a joint session.
Never happened.
So we're gonna do it the night of that Republican debate, the first debate, Rick Perry's in, and we're gonna upstage it.
And they're slapping themselves on the back and laughing.
And I said, I gave him credit.
This is a great, great stunt.
This is something that you know you do in high school and college, and it's a great thing.
It's not presidential.
But as a as a practical joker, I love this from the is looking at this as a practical joke.
Unfortunately, this is not the kind of behavior you want from the president of the United States and his staff.
And it is nevertheless what we got.
All right, brief time out, much more as always in the first hour.
We'll be back and continue here in mere moments.
Let's stick with the audio sound bites here for just a second.
This is um a media montage.
You know, it's interesting, the only place we get media montages are MSNBC.
It's the only place anymore.
The only place that reliable left-wing socialism is MSNBC.
At any rate, um, this is a uh montage of how what Boehner did is unprecedented.
John Boehner makes this unprecedented move.
Speaker Boehner's refusal to grant the request for the joint session by the president on the day that he won it is unprecedented.
That was unprecedented rejecting the president's original request.
Literally unprecedented.
There's never been a request for a president to hold a joint session of congressional speech and be refused in effect by Congress.
An unprecedented public conflict between the president and the speaker.
It is unprecedented that Boehner, as Speaker of the House, has refused the president his request.
We know it's unprecedented.
If it's so unprecedented, why did Obama cave?
Why did Obama fight for it?
Why didn't Obama stand up and say, I'm not going to tolerate this?
This is unprecedented.
I want this date.
This is important.
Jobs are at stake.
Why didn't he do that?
You seen Boehner's letter.
Dear Mr. President, thank you for your letter requesting time to address a joint session of Congress next week.
I agree that creating a better environment must be our most urgent Priority.
As your spokesperson today said, there are considerations about the congressional calendar that must be made prior to scheduling such an extraordinary event, as you know.
The House and Senate are each required to adopt a concurrent resolution to allow for a joint session, and the majority leader announced more than a month ago the House will not be in session until Wednesday, September 7th and votes at 6 30.
With the significant amount of time that's required to allow for security sweep of the House Chamber before receiving your presence, my recommendation that your address be held the following night when we can ensure that there'll be no parliamentary or logistical impediments that might detract from your remarks.
As such, on behalf of the bipartisan leadership, membership of both the House and the Senate, I respectfully invite you to address a joint session on Thursday, September the 8th, at a time that works best for your schedule.
So that's what's very respectful, and it was uh very business like to the point, and Obama caved.
This would be an appropriate time to share with you, uh, ladies and gentlemen, the Shelby Steele piece.
And again, I I I love this piece, and I've quoted Shelby Steele I don't know how many times over the years.
White guilt, uh great, great book.
Uh he's at the Hoover Institution out in Palo Alto, California.
But this is not even a joint session.
Let me just say one more thing about this.
This is not even a joint session speech.
This is nothing more than a political ploy, and it has now backfired.
The focus this week has been on whether or not Obama speaks before Congress on Wednesday or Thursday.
That's the focus.
The media is focused on.
Is he going to speak on Wednesday or Thursday?
This contributes to the view of Obama as a lightweight who plays political games.
I mean, he supposedly has this grand jobs plan.
And this grand jobs plan, remember, could wait until after his vacation.
No, look at me.
For the second year in a row, he goes on vacation and says when he comes back from vacation, Martha's Vineyard both years, he's gonna have his major jobs plan.
So the jobs plan could wait for his vacation.
He only came off that vacation one day early to lead his nation in the response to Hurricane Irene.
Big whoop, because he didn't lead anybody in anything.
But the important thing to remember is that he kept that jobs plan under wraps and gave precedence to his vacation.
So his jobs plan can wait for two weeks.
Can wait for ten days till his vacation.
But now it can't wait until the day after a long scheduled Republican candidate debate.
Got to go that night.
Or had to be September 7th.
After being able to wait two weeks for Obama to come off the vacation.
This is the reason.
Obama is the reason.
People cannot stand Washington or politics right now.
United States of America is in serious trouble.
Thanks to him.
He's playing scheduling games.
He's got this massive jobs plan.
Country can't wait for this.
We gotta get it done now.
Uh sorry, it can wait for 10 days for my vacation.
So I don't care how you people at MSNBC or AP or anywhere else, how you want to try to characterize this, Obama just got smacked down.
In the process, Obama looks stupid and he looks childish.
His supporters Can keep whining about how this is unprecedented, but the people of this country get it.
The polling data indicate the people of this country finally get it where Obama is concerned.
So now Obama has to compete with the National Football League opener.
And he can't win that fight.
Because the National Football League opener is going to be on NBC, and it is going to outrate every other network carrying Obama by a factor of five.
Simple mathematics.
The president's doing his joint session speech, and six or seven networks are going to cover it, so people have a choice.
Or they can watch the football game.
And I guarantee you, when it comes to the Super Bowl champion Green Bay Packers, playing the two years ago Super Bowl champion New Orleans Saints, when people thought there might not be any football.
I have no doubt who's going to be watching what.
I will be watching football.
I will be watching football.
I will make well move the joint session to the afternoon.
Hmm.
Let me let me see now.
Let me see now.
Let's see now.
A joint session on jobs at 12.05 p.m., Thursday, September the 8th, one week from today.
A joint session at about now.
A week from now.
Well, I don't know what the wizards of smart in this regime are going to do, but now they're up against the NFL, and now they've got to somehow finagle and massage this with NBC.
Don't doubt me on this.
NBC has sold every commercial availability for three to four hours prior to the kickoff of this game.
Well, not three to four.
NBC can probably start at seven, so in that hour they've sold every avail.
Their nightly news will no doubt take place from there.
Or will it now with Obama doing his joint session?
Where will they send Brian Williams?
He can't win this.
He literally can't win it.
This was a bully.
You know, we got all this anti-bullying legislation being proposed.
It needs to be aimed at Obama.
Because Obama's the bully who attempted to force his way into the front of the line at the U.S. House of Representative Chamber.
And they got smacked down.
His advisors blew it.
And they blew it big.
Especially, especially after you know they're sitting up there yesterday afternoon after they announced this laughing and just having a grand old time thinking, boy, how they screwed everybody.
Yeah, we screwed Banner here, we screwed the Republicans, man, we screwed that debate, and now look.
Obama didn't even fight for the date.
So now maybe he could say, well, I'll do my joint session speech at halftime.
Halftime is ten minutes.
That's not even enough time for the teleprompter to get up to full speed.
So maybe they do a joint session in the afternoon.
Remember it's the optics that he wants.
He knows he's not going to have an audience now.
He knows his chance for an audience is finished.
Not like he thought and hoped he was going to have on the 7th.
Now here's Shelby Steele.
And you will recognize that you've heard much of this on this program.
But I love this.
It's in the Wall Street Journal.
And as you know, I every time Shelby Steele writes on this subject, I trumpet it.
Share it with you almost verbatim.
He writes, I've I've heard it once.
If I've heard it once, I've heard it a hundred times.
President Obama is destroying a country.
Some say that this destructiveness is intended.
Most say it's inadvertent, an outgrowth of inexperience, ideological wrong headedness, and oddly undefined character.
Indeed, on the matter of Mr. Obama's character, today's left now sounds like the right of three years ago.
They have begun to see through the man and are surprised at how little is there.
That shelby steel describing the American left.
Yet there is something more than inexperience or lack of character that defines the Obama presidency.
Mr. Obama came of age in a bubble of post-60s liberalism that conditioned him to be an adversary of American exceptionalism.
In this liberalism, America's exceptional status in the world follows from a bargain with the devil, an indulgence in militarism, racism, sexism, corporate greed, and environmental disregard as the means to a broad economic, military, even cultural supremacy in the world, and therefore America's greatness is as much the fruit of evil as of a devotion to freedom.
This is so right on the money.
Just another way of saying Obama's got a chip on his shoulder because of the way he was educated.
This country has gotten where it is via immoral acts.
Stealing the world's resources as our own, impoverishing people around the world.
This is what he believes.
Mr. Obama did not explicitly run on an anti-exceptionalism platform, yet.
Once he was elected, it became clear that his idea of how and where to apply presidential power was shaped precisely by this brand of liberalism.
There was his devotion to big government, his passion for redistribution, and his scolding and scapegoating of Wall Street, as if his mandate was somehow to overcome American capitalism itself.
Right on.
Dead right on.
Anti-exceptionalism has clearly shaped Obama's leading from behind profile abroad.
An offer of self-effacement to offset the presumed American evil of swaggering cowboysism.
Once in office, his hope and change campaign slogan came to look like the hope of overcoming American exceptionalism and change away from it, dead on again.
So in Mr. Obama, America gained a president with ambivalence, if not some antipathy, toward the singular greatness of the nation he had been elected to lead.
Every paragraph here is a grand slam home run.
But then again, the American people did elect him.
Clearly, Americans were looking for a new kind of exceptionalism in him, a black president, would show America to have achieved near perfect social mobility.
But were they also looking for in Mr. Obama an assault on America's bedrock exceptionalism of military, economic, and cultural preeminence?
You see, ladies and gentlemen, American exceptionalism is among other things the result of a difficult rigor.
The use of individual initiative as the engine of development within a society that strives to ensure individual freedom through the rule of law.
Over time, a society like this will become great.
This is how America evolved into an exceptional nation.
Yet today America's fighting a number, fighting in a number of Muslim countries.
That number's likely to rise as to fall.
Our exceptionalism saddles us with overwhelming burdens.
The entire world comes to our door when there's real trouble, and every day we spill blood and treasure in foreign lands, even as anti-Americanism plays around the world like a hit record.
At home, the values that made us exceptional have been smeared with derision.
Individual initiative, individual responsibility, the very engines of our exceptionalism now carry a stigma Of hypocrisy.
For centuries, America made sure that no amount of initiative would lift minorities and women, so in liberal quarters today, these values are seen as little more than the cynical remnants of a bygone era.
Talk of merit or a competition of excellence in the admissions office of any Ivy League university today, and then stand by for the howls of incredulous laughter.
Our national exceptionalism both burdens and defames us, yet it remains our fate.
We make others anxious, envious, resentful, admiring, sometimes hate driven.
There's a reason Al Qaeda operatives targeted us and not Buenos Aires.
They wanted to enrich their act of evil with the gravitas of American exceptionalism.
They wanted to steal our thunder.
So we Americans can't help but feel some ambivalence toward our singularity in the world, with its draining entanglements abroad, the selfish demands it makes on both our military and taxpayers, all the false charges of imperial hubris it incurs.
Therefore it's not surprising that America developed a liberalism, a political left that took issue with our exceptionalism.
It's a left that has no more fervent mission than to recast our greatness as the product of racism, imperialism, and unbridled capitalism.
A man.
But this leaves us mired in an absurdity.
It seeks to trade the burdens of greatness for the relief of mediocrity.
When greatness fades, when a nation contracts to a middling place in the world, and the world in fact no longer knocks on its door.
To civilize America to redeem the nation from its supposed avarice and hubris, the American left effectively makes a virtue of decline, as if we can redeem America only by making her indistinguishable from lesser nations.
As I tell you, Shelby Steele, Wall Street Journal, every paragraph of Grand Slam, and I got more.
I just love reading learned people who agree with me.
And this is just Shelby Steele Peace, folks, nearly orgasmic.
Here's more.
Since the 1960s, we have enfeebled our public education system even as our wealth has expanded.
Moral and cultural relativism now obscure individual responsibility.
We're uninspired in the wars we fight.
We calculate our withdrawal even before we begin.
And then we fight with a self-conscious, almost bureaucratic minimalism that makes the war as interminable.
America seems to be facing a pivotal moment.
Do we move ahead by advancing or by receding?
By reaffirming the values that made us exceptional or by letting go of those values so that a creeping mediocrity begins to spare us the burdens of greatness.
As a president, Barack Obama has been a force for mediocrity.
He has banked more on the hopeless interventions of government than on the exceptionalism of the people.
His greatest weakness as a president is a limp confidence in his countrymen.
He's afraid to ask difficult things of them.
No, he's not afraid to ask.
He doesn't want greatness in the individual would overshadow government.
He is an obstacle to greatness.
By design.
Continuing now with the Professor Steele, like me, Obama is black.
And it was the government that in part saved us from the ignorances of the people.
So the concept of the exceptionalism, the genius for freedom of the American people may still be a stretch for Obama.
But in fact, he was elected to make that stretch.
It should be held against him that he has failed to do so.
Shelby Steele, senior fellow Stanford's University Hoover institution.
Among his books is White Guilt, that book quoted extensively on this program.
As President Obama has been a force for mediocrity, doesn't believe in American exceptionalism.
Believes American greatness is illegitimate.
must now be paid for.
We must be a nation in decline.
and So that we end up being no better than any other nation.
It came from theft and other things.
That's what we're faced with.
The people of this country would rather watch millionaires playing football on teams owned by billionaires than watch a president going on and on with class warfare in the House chamber.
If you know that, you know America.
Gallup finds U.S. unemployment up in August.
Underemployment, a measure that combines a percentage of workers unemployed with those working part-time but wanting full-time work is at 18.5% the end of August, which is up from 18% at the end of July.
The news continues to worsen.
▲
Export Selection