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Sept. 6, 2011 - Rush Limbaugh Program
37:48
September 6, 2011, Tuesday, Hour #2
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You know, there's a little irony, folks, in James Hoffa being such a brown shirt for the Democrats when it was they, especially Bobby Kennedy, spent years trying to put his dad behind bars.
And they eventually succeeded.
And here's James Hoffa in bed with the party that targeted his dad.
Welcome back.
Rush Limbaugh documented to be almost always right, 99.6% of the time here on the EIB network.
Our telephone number, if you want to join us, 800-282-2882 and the email address, LRushbaugh at EIBnet.com.
All right, some of the typical shameless, dishonest, left-wing blogs are accusing people of taking the James Hoffa SOB sound bite out of context.
So here is the whole thing.
Our original, in fact, let's play sound bite one first.
Let's play our edited version.
And that would be soundbite number one that runs 35 segundos.
We got to keep an eye on the battle that we face, a war on workers.
And you see it everywhere.
It is the Tea Party.
And you know, there's only one way to beat and win that war.
The one thing about working people is we like a good fight.
And you know what?
They got a war.
They got a war with us.
And there's only going to be one winner.
It's going to be the workers of a Michigan and America.
We're going to win that war.
President Obama, this is your army.
We are ready to march.
Let's take these son of a bitches out and give America back to America where we belong.
Okay, now that's our edited version for time.
And you must understand that Cookie, who does the audio soundbites here, lives in daily fear of me because I have put upon her a 60-second limit for all of these sound bites.
And that's simply a professional judgment made by me.
So she tries to edit this stuff down to the essence.
Get it in, you know, the brevity being the salt of witness.
Here's the whole bite, which takes 58 seconds, and you see if there's any difference.
We got to keep an eye on the battle that we face, a war on workers.
And you see it everywhere.
It is the Tea Party.
And you know, there's only one way to beat and win that war.
The one thing about working people is we like a good fight.
And you know what?
They got a war.
They got a war with us.
And there's only going to be one winner.
It's going to be the workers of a Michigan and America.
We're going to win that war.
President Obama, this is your army.
We are ready to march.
And President Obama, we want one thing.
Jobs, jobs, jobs.
That's what we're going to tell him.
He's going to be, and when he sees what we're doing here, he will be inspired.
But he needs help.
And you know what?
Everybody here has got to vote.
If we go back and we keep the eye on the prize, let's take these son of a bitches out.
Okay, so what's different?
What's different?
I submit there's nothing different at all.
Do you suppose, let me put it to you this way.
Do you suppose the mobsters who Took his dad out, misunderstood, and they were just supposed to vote him out?
You think the mobsters that took James Hoffa's father, Jimmy Hoff, out, misunderstood the orders when they were giving, you take him out.
All they were supposed to do was vote him out.
Instead, they took him to Giant Stadium or wherever.
Hell, I don't know.
The joke.
Anyway, there's the whole soundbite.
I don't care.
How you define it, the language is the same, and the intention is the same.
Jimmy Hoffa, James Hoffa wants jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs.
You're talking to the wrong guy, Mr. Hoffa.
This guy wouldn't know how to create a job.
Well, not a private sector union job.
This guy wouldn't know how to create a private sector union job.
His life depended on it.
It's not what he's interested in anyway.
I can't, this story from the AP is unbelievable.
It's unbelievable.
The job market is even worse than the 9.1% unemployment rate suggests.
AP America's 14 million unemployed aren't competing just with each other.
They must also contend with 8.8 million other people, not counted as unemployed, part-timers who also want full-time work.
When consumer demand picks up, companies will likely boost the hours of their part-timers before they add jobs, economists say means that they have room to expand without hiring.
And the unemployed will face another source of competition once the economy approves.
Roughly 2.6 million people who aren't counted as unemployed because they've stopped looking for work.
Once they start looking again, they will be classified as unemployed and the unemployment rate could rise.
The jobs crisis has led Obama to schedule a major speech on Thursday night to propose steps to stimulate hiring.
And they go on and on, and then they get to this paragraph.
Combine the 14 million officially unemployed, the underemployed part-timers who want full-time work, and discouraged people who have stopped looking make up 16.2% of working-age Americans.
So the state-controlled AP has actually come out with a story saying that the unemployment rate's actually 16.2%.
Got to hurt.
Got to hurt the White House.
I don't know why they would do this to him.
After last week's AP efforts here to totally mask this, to cover this, why come out with this story?
And this was Sunday.
They came out with a story on Sunday.
In a healthy economy, this broader measure of unemployment stays below 10%.
Since the Great Recession officially ended more than two years ago, the rate has been 15% or more.
That's fascinating.
I can't explain it.
But it's out there.
16.2% unemployment rate, according to state control, Associated Press, just two days before Obama's eagerly anticipated big jobs speech.
You know, this is another thing.
Everybody's worn out on this big job speech.
I mean, how many big job speeches have there been?
How many laser-like focuses have there been on jobs?
The guy doesn't know.
He doesn't care.
He's not interested in.
Well, I mean, even if you say that they came out with a story on Sunday when they didn't think anybody would notice, still, why come out with it at all?
Because they know at AP that I, El Rushball, eagle-eye them.
They know they're not going to get away with that story being buried on a Sunday.
They know it's going to get reported.
And it was.
Let's see here.
You know, you can't make this stuff up.
The only thing I can think of, the only thing I can, why come out?
This is important.
This is not haphazard, folks.
Why come out with a story on Sunday, truthfully reporting the unemployment rate in this country at 16.2%?
Why do that?
And I think I know.
You want to know why?
Make the push for more stimulus easier to make.
Play the crisis of unemployment up.
Make it sound worse than they have been making it sound in the AP so Obama can demand more government spending.
So Obama can demand more stimulus.
Let's get truthful with how bad it really is as a prelude to Obama's big speech.
Play up the crisis of unemployment so Obama can demand more government spending.
Manufacture a crisis that won't go to waste.
I think that's what they're going to do.
I think they're not doing this to make Obama look bad.
That's the big mistake that people would think, think that AP might have turned on him.
No, no, no, no, no.
There's a reason to help Obama with this.
That's the only reason AP exists.
The only reason any of the state control media organizations exist is to help Obama.
So they come out with this story, 16.2% unemployment.
It's obviously a prelude to the speech.
Because how many people outside this audience and a couple others really know that the unemployment rate's higher than 9.1%?
All of a sudden now it gets reported, you really talk about everybody and everything.
I mean, they're really bad, 16.2%.
We've really got to do something big here.
And I think that's the purpose of this.
And clearly they're rolling the dice.
Obama's approval rating numbers are down.
Everybody in Obama's team is floundering.
The stories are out there.
And I don't like these stories, by the way.
The stories are out there about Obama being a one-termer and how this is all bad.
Well, because it's too soon for these stories.
Too much can happen.
It's too soon to write the guy off.
And if we get stories from the left about how they're writing him off, then, you know, I don't know what kind of reverberation effect that has on everybody else, but it's too soon to write the guy off.
We are 14 months away.
Victor Davis Hansen.
Let me find this here.
I think I kept it.
Victor Davis Hansen had a piece in which he postulates a, here it is, a possibility.
And it is this.
Anatomy of Democrat angst over Obama.
This ran yesterday at National Review Online.
Three questions for the Democrats to answer.
Strange indeed is the sudden Democrat furor at Obama.
Strange indeed.
And it is.
Almost in unison, everybody on the left has turned against the guy, right?
On the domestic front, for example, we forget that Obama went big on the stimulus, giving a number of speeches about the historic size of his investments and why we shouldn't worry about the timid naysayers.
And he was widely praised for his audacity when he did it.
He went big on Obamacare despite worries from party centrists.
Again, he was praised for forcing through such a radically new program.
In other words, few Democrats have tried so eagerly to advance the liberal Democrat agenda.
His appointments, the politics of the Department of Justice, the EPA, and his use of executive fiat to circumvent bothersome laws bear that out.
Now, if Obama were enjoying a 60% approval rating and the economy were humming at 5% annual growth and 5% unemployment, the Democrats would be singing his praises, right?
The problem Obama poses to Democrats is not his policy, but his popularity.
In their minds, in their what-if minds, Obama is sinking because he didn't do enough rather than too much.
And we all know this is true.
Many of the left wing believe that Obama's timid.
He didn't spend enough.
He hasn't been radical enough.
He didn't get out of Gitmo.
He didn't get out of Iraq.
He ramped up in Afghanistan and he took us into Libya.
This is not what they elected him to do.
In other words, the furor at Obama comes not so much because he's embarrassed them on national security and seems increasingly detached from the job, but rather because he nearly destroyed the congressional Democrats in 2010.
He's hovering below 40% in popularity, has the potential to really do some big-time damage to the party in 2012.
But why is that?
Rather than suddenly blaming Obama's self-introspection seems in order.
Here are the three questions.
Why and how did an obviously inexperienced senator with no record of past achievement soar past a gritty and hardworking Hillary Clinton who, with her husband, would have brought years of political savvy and success to the presidency?
Number two, why did Obama for years embrace and then as president reject the liberal critique of the war on terror?
Is there some chance that he and millions of his adherents saw it as politically opportune to embrace it when running for president, but essential to national security to abandon it when invested with it?
It's exactly what I said.
When they're out of power in no way, I mean, they don't guarantee the loss of every military entanglement we get in.
But when they're in power, they are not going to settle that defeat around their own necks.
And that's what his base didn't understand.
And I tried to warn him.
You think Obama is going to lose all these wars when he's Hillary going to lose all happen?
And number three, is it possible that both the 2010 midterm disaster and the president's current dismal polling are precisely because of his Keynesian policies, which delighted many at their inception, but have since disappointed most after their enactment.
Again, as I. L. Rushboat pointed out, the left is faced with the failures of their own beliefs and policies.
So they're depressed and downhearted.
Blaming too much on not enough is not an old or is an old logical fallacy.
So Victor Davis Hansen has a big question at the end of all this.
I've got to take a break here, but I'll come back and I'll tell you what the question is or the observation in terms of his reelection.
If it were today, he'd lose in a landslide, there's no question.
But it's too soon to write him off 14 months from now, back after this.
Okay, so here's the point.
And I think Victor Davis Hanson is overthinking this when I first saw this.
I thought that.
But I'm going to mention it to you.
I'm going to mention it to you anyway.
Were Obama to show the same flexibility on the economy as he has on the war on terror, he still might revitalize the economy a bit.
For example, if he would junk his Keynesian model, if he would radically revise and simplify the tax code, if he would address entitlements, if he would get rid of a lot of regulations, compromise and spending cuts, he still might revitalize the economy a bit.
It's hard to destroy the greatest economy in history in three years, Victor Davis Hanson writes, although I'd say Obama's done better at it than anybody would have thought.
And then when his numbers improved, he'd win the Democrat adulation for his Clinton-like savvy.
Now, let's look at this.
I think this is way over to think that Obama is going to change this radically on his economic policies.
A bit of a stretch.
And you know of my profound respect for Victor Davis Hanson.
We've interviewed him for the Limbaugh Letter, and I've spoken to him a number of times.
While he didn't close Gitmo and while he expanded Afghanistan and while he did go to war in Libya, while we're still in Iraq, that's just the continuation of what was.
That really wasn't the repudiation of anything.
But for Obama to pull similar moves on his own economic policies is something I can't see.
And I think Obama's not going to junk his Keynesian approach.
Obama's not going to junk this whole business of growing the economy by growing government spending.
He's not going to lower taxes on producers and the wealth creators.
Now, Victor Davis Hanson's saying, what if he does, though?
What if he did do that?
And what if it revived him?
Victor Davis Hansen's point is then his approval numbers would rise and even his Democrat opposition right now would revel in how he's outfoxed us the same way they reveled in how Clinton outfoxed us.
Remember, I've said this, I don't know how many times.
I think one of the big reasons for Clinton's popularity was how he outfoxed Newt and how he outfoxed us.
Not what Clinton did, but that he defeated us.
Remember, we are hated more than al-Qaeda is hated by these people.
So if Obama can come up with, it is Victor Davis Hanson's point.
If Obama can come up with a way to pull a rabbit out of his hat here and really outfox us and use our own ideas as his and they work, that he can turn this all around and resume being adored and adulated by people who are now angry at him.
But if he were to do that, I just don't see him doing it.
I can't see him repudiating himself this way.
I think that this notion, and it might even be a fear expressed by Victor Davis Hanson, Obama could totally, what would be the word, reject his own economic policy, is rooted in the fact that Obama is just your normal everyday run-of-the-mill Washington politician.
And he's not.
He is a committed leftist who has a grievance against this country.
And he is insistent on cutting this country down to size.
He is a leftist.
He would rather be left than president.
For Obama at this stage, everybody says, do anything to get re-elected, Russia, it's all just about maintaining power.
I think everybody would know it's hocus-pocus.
Anyway, it's not going to happen.
And even if he did it, the fact that it would be so much doubt about Obama, it wouldn't cause this kind of upswelling confidence that if, say, one of the Republican candidates were president and proposed the same kind of policies, nobody's going to believe Obama really means it.
That after the election, he'd throw it all away.
But he's not your average run-of-the-mill, everyday politician.
Pure and simple.
But anyway, this is what people are thinking.
I mean, and it's the result of the shock and the surprise that exists out there at how angry people on the left have become at Obama and how he can reverse that.
But Obama's not, he's not a triangulator.
He is a movement liberal.
He is a movement socialist.
Pure and simple.
Okay, back to the phone.
Sanford, Michigan.
This is Randy.
I'm glad you waited, sir.
Welcome to the EIB Network.
Great to have you here.
Hey, thanks for taking my call, Rob.
You bet, sir.
Hey, I'd just like to make a comment on the unions and the Democrats as a former UAW, as a former Democrat.
This name-calling is getting to be disgusting.
I personally am sick of it.
You know, we pass laws in our schools now to stop the bullying.
Yep.
But yet we continuously allow the Democratic Party to go out and call Americans names.
Excellent point.
Disgustful and uncalled for.
My point is as a former Democrat and a former UAW person, I will never, ever, for the rest of my life, vote for another Democrat in this country.
You know, it's an excellent point that you're making.
The point of hypocrisy.
These are the people that are authoring all the anti-bully legislation.
These are the people that are responsible for all the anti-bullying stuff in school.
And who are they?
What are they, but a bunch of bullies themselves?
Proudly so.
They applaud themselves for their bullying-like tactics.
Excellent point out there, Cynthia in Tucson, Arizona.
Great to have you on the EIB network.
Hello.
Oh, thank you, Rush.
Dittos.
I just wanted to say that, in my opinion, Hoffa's rhetoric shows how scared he is of his own thugs.
I think he was pressured into this.
Hoffa scared of his own thugs.
Well, in my opinion, I think he well remembers what happened to his father.
Oh, yeah.
I don't think he's a good man.
You know, it's entirely possible.
You have to understand out here, Cynthia.
It's entirely possible that the people who rubbed out Hoffa's father simply misunderstood take the son of a bitch out.
They thought that the message was to take him out, not vote against him.
Well, I'm glad that's made clear now.
Well, I don't know.
I've often wondered about James Hoffa.
As I mentioned, it was the Democrat Party, Bobby Kennedy, who targeted his dad.
But the loyalty that exists, the unions in the Democrat Party, it's a giant money laundering operation.
Just follow the money.
It's always about the money.
And when Hoffa's out there thinking about jobs, it really isn't.
They're not concerned with the jobs specifically.
Their power derives from Democrats being in office, not from people having jobs.
It's just that simple.
Appreciate the call.
Glenn Cove in Long Island.
This is Rob.
Great to have you on the EIB network.
Hello, sir.
Hey, Rush, how are you?
Good.
Good.
You know, I'm very concerned about the employment levels.
And, you know, we talk about fixing entitlements, Medicare, and Social Security.
But my point I wanted to address to you is, isn't it time that we really expose all these promises that local politicians over generations have made to the local county workers, day workers, with respect to health benefits and defined benefit pensions that are nowhere near unlocked to the private sector?
That in my mind, here in New York, where our manufacturing index is way down, almost 2 million New Yorkers left in the last 10 years, it's going to maintain the inability for there to be a real multiplier to really create job growth where anybody with, you know, anyone who saved $200,000, $300,000 who wants to come and start a business is hit with these overhead costs.
That isn't it high time we really open up the discussion about these kind of benefits that are born to the local taxpayers that I think prohibit these small businesses from really flowering.
What do you think?
Well, no, I think you're exactly right.
When you say the time to start talking about it, I don't mean to take this personally, please.
But we have on this program discussed the burden of all of these pensions and lifetime health care benefits.
We illustrated it great detail during the Wisconsin debate.
And we pointed out, I pointed out, and I'll take the occasion of your call to do it again, you're talking about all this on the local level.
Guess who it is that's paying that?
It's the citizens.
And that's why this is untenable.
You have citizens who are at a just unacceptably high rate, unemployed, paying not just the salaries of all these local and state employees, regulators, bureaucrats, but also their pensions and their health care benefits for the rest of their lives.
And you're exactly right.
The people paying them have no such program.
The people paying them have no such pension or anything of the sort.
It's a scheme that's been going on for a long, long, and we've caught up to it now.
We've gotten to the point now where the latest recipients no longer get paid because there aren't enough investors.
The early investors get paid by the subsequent investors.
And now we've gotten to the point where there's no money to pay the investors that came along, meaning these employees, state, local employees who are expecting all these pensions that are now underfunded, unfunded.
All these liabilities are sky high.
Obama will not even mention problems with unions and pensions and regulations, not one time in his Thursday speech.
Not once.
There's an article over the weekend that said nowadays only 21% of companies even offer pensions.
Only 21% of companies, private sector companies, offer pensions.
Yet, practically everybody in the public sector has one.
And they expect it, and they can retire at age 40 or 50 and get 80% of their top salary for the rest of their life, including healthcare, paid for by who?
By the citizens.
And so the point here that Rob is making is that all of those costs and the power invested in those people make it difficult, if not impossible, for some average ordinary person to come and start a small business because of all the money it's going to cost them to pay for all of this.
And he's exactly right.
And it surfaced in Wisconsin.
They ran out of money.
It wasn't there.
It simply wasn't there.
It's not there in California for the public employees.
It's not there for the state teachers.
There are two retirement systems in California, two big ones, STERS and PERS.
The public employee retirement system and the state teachers retirement system.
I had a friend who ran PERS way back in, well, when I was in Sacramento in the 80s and shortly after when I moved to New York.
And the stories this guy told me about dealing with the state treasurer on this stuff.
It was his job to invest the fund and the battles he had investing the fund so that it would grow and have the money there when all these teachers, well, the public employees in his case, retired.
But you look at the unfunded pension plans for the state teachers and the public employees in California, it's in the trillions or high triple billions, 100 billions.
It's just, it's unmanageable.
And nothing's real in that regard.
And the money just isn't there.
There's a story, let's see, June 1st, 2009, jobs that offer traditional pensions.
And it was this story.
It's U.S. News and World Report.
21% of companies offer pensions.
This is personally, and I guess this is the way I was brought up, I never once in my life have expected to be paid by a place when I no longer work there.
Common sense told me that it wouldn't work.
And Never once did somebody try to tell me that that should be the case.
Well, but you grew up in the Northeast, though.
What was normal?
It was normal that you would be paid.
You went to work for some place, you'd be paid even after you stopped working.
You work 20 years, you get paid the rest of your life.
That was something that was never part of my growing up.
Being paid for not doing anything was never part of my growing up.
A pension.
There was no such thing.
All of this, I was raised at all.
That was my responsibility.
It's just the way it was.
So that has always been my mindset.
So I've grown and heard about all this pension stuff.
And it's always been a big surprise to me.
I know they feel betrayed.
Some of these people feel genuinely by the country.
They feel betrayed by their country.
Our system was supposed to pay them 80% of what they made after they worked for 20 or 25 years and their health care.
And now that the money's not there to pay them, they feel betrayed by the country.
By the system.
Kid capitalist system has failed them.
Right.
So they want to go.
Well, you can see this in Europe.
Here's the problem.
The problem with all this is that that is supposed to produce a genteel society.
Right?
If the theory is that if you're paid while you're working and then you get a pension and healthcare benefits, you're supposed to be a pretty peaceful person.
Instead, look at it's not that way.
Look at the anger.
Look at the savagery.
Look at the barbarianism in all these countries where that plan exists.
And you know why?
Because it's not financially possible.
It's not financially possible to earn money while you're not producing anything.
It's not possible to be paid while you don't do anything.
But rush, but rush, they were promised.
Yeah, okay, they were promised.
They're promised by a bunch of scum.
Right.
It worked for the first few generations.
Right.
It's a Ponzi scheme.
And now we've caught up to the fact that there's no money for it anymore.
It was all a Ponzi scheme.
It's common sense.
Who pays you to not do anything unless you're so good at what you do and you retire that they don't want you competing against them.
Then they'll pay you to retire.
I have a lot of friends who do that.
So good at what they did that when they retired, they were paid by their companies not to go to work for anybody else, just so they wouldn't be a threat.
But I've never heard.
Well, I have heard.
I just hadn't when I was growing up.
At any rate, I got to take a break here, folks.
A little long once again in this segment.
We have all these stories out there today about the post office may shut down by the end of the year.
You've seen those stories.
Now, they've closed 3,200 post offices.
They've talked about, they still haven't done this.
They've talked about ending Saturday delivery.
They have let go of some employees and still they're what five billion trillion for what they're insolvent.
You want to know why?
What?
It's their pensions.
Exactly.
It's their pensions.
It's paying people that no longer work there.
Yes, that's exactly what it is.
That's not all of it, but I mean, it's, I mean, it is the lion's share of it.
Folks, I hate to tell you if you're got a pension.
I don't know how to break this to you, but I don't have the heart to break it to you.
I just, I do not have the heart to break it to you.
They're not going to see all of it.
It's going to be taken over, all these unfunded pensions taken over by the government at what, 10 or 20%.
Well, we're going to still be paying it.
Yeah, but they're not going to see all of it.
That's not my heartbreaking point.
I just don't know how to tell people you don't get paid for not working.
I just, I'm sorry to break it to you.
This is GM and Chrysler all over again.
Why the hell do you think the country owns, why does Obama own General Motors?
Why did the bondholders at Chrysler get screwed?
Why is the post office insolvent?
Take it into your household.
Imagine paying 10 people who don't work for you the rest of their lives enough that they don't have to work.
And then put yourself in the opposite position and expect it's a deal you would never make on the payment side.
Got to take a break.
I wish I had more time to elaborate here, but I don't.
But we'll continue because the program actually never ends.
Okay, I got to take a break here at the top of the hour.
Rush Limbaugh, the fastest moving program in America, the fastest three hours in media, and also the most productive show prep for the rest of the media as well.
Sit tight.
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