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Sept. 26, 2011 - Rush Limbaugh Program
37:36
September 26, 2011, Monday, Hour #2
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Starting a million conversations, Rush Limbaugh from the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Ideological Purity.
I am America's real anchorman, America's truth detector, the doctor of democracy, general all-round good guy.
Great to have you here.
Telephone number if you want to be on the program 800-282-2882 and the email address Elrushbo at EIBnet.com So President Obama telling blacks to stop complaining and take off the bedroom slippers.
Start marching.
Get out there.
Get out there and fight.
We're going to press on.
We have work to do.
Actually, Mr. President, the problem is there is no work to do.
Thanks to you and your ideas, your leadership and your policies.
But putting that detail aside for a moment, according to President Obama, life is no more complicated than our choice of footwear.
If jobs are a problem, take off your bedroom slippers, put on some marching shoes.
Now, let's talk about marching for just a second.
A lot of people have built careers around marching.
But seriously, are there any instances in the history of the world where a country has improved its economy by marching?
The only way I can think of is if one country's marching into another to take it over, to conquer it, to take their wealth.
But what is this?
Put on your marching shoes?
March?
Get out there and protest?
That's the way to economic revival?
That's not, that's, I mean, we're seeing what this guy's expertise is now.
Community organizing, agitating.
Last week at the United Nations, the president told the Palestinians, look, if you just put on a pair of anti-Semitic shoes, you're wearing anti-Semitic shoes.
Take those off and put on some Jewish shoes.
The shoe exchange idea, if everybody, if you just walk around in each other's shoes, you'll have a better idea what the problems are.
It's like if you're Dorothy and the Wizard of Oz, take off the farm shoes in favor of the red slippers.
This is what we get, disguised as presidential leadership.
You imagine, again, if any Republican president, black or white, told black people to stop complaining and take off their bedroom slippers.
I have a question for the official Obama criticizer.
Is there something, is that code for something bedroom slippers in popular parlance?
Not that I've heard.
Not that you've heard.
And you would have heard it.
There's no question.
I just wanted to make sure here.
Bedroom slippers.
But maybe in the other circles that Obama travels in.
Well, that's the thing.
You know, that's what I'm thinking in the other circles that he travels in.
Let me take a little survey.
Just here amongst my own staff.
Mr. Snirkly, do you wear bedroom slippers?
Rachel, you wear bedroom slippers?
Brian?
I have never owned a pair.
Even, you know, when you go to a hotel, sometimes they have, well, cheap invitations.
I mean, I don't even wear those.
Who wears these things?
Anyway, it's fascinating here to get a window on this guy.
But when has marching ever done anything for an economy?
Look at what he's telling these people.
They're facing massive unemployment.
They're upset about it.
They're upset because he hasn't done enough for them, which that's what they thought all this meant.
And he's mad right back at them.
And he's basically telling them, look, get out of bed and start doing something instead of sitting in there in your bedroom slippers all day complaining about me.
You led any Republican president say that to, well, any group, but primarily blacks in this country, that's all she wrote.
A government shutdown is pending because of FEMA.
FEMA needs their budget increased.
And the Republicans are saying, well, fine, but there better be some, if we're going to expand the budget, we need some budget cuts somewhere along the line that we don't have the money.
There's breaking news from the Associated Press.
A Senate aide says that the government's disaster aid fund has enough money to last until Thursday, two days longer than earlier predicted.
The change might point the way out of a standoff that's holding up passage of legislation to prevent a partial government shutdown.
Robert Sewicki, a spokesman for Mary Landrieu, Democrat Senator New Orleans, Louisiana, said the latest estimate from FEMA is that they have $114 million left in their account.
Landrew chairs a subcommittee, told reporters last week that FEMA estimated the money would run out as early as Tuesday.
Now stop and think of this.
Here we're going through, once again, all these silly gyrations, another continuing resolution, all because the Democrats have not submitted a budget.
And Gotha is all rigamarole again starting last week.
Might be a government shutdown.
Harry Reid talking about one.
Republicans won't compromise.
Democrats won't compromise.
The precious independents are getting nervous, we're told, because nobody's compromising and nobody's getting along.
And the reason is FEMA is demanding a whole lot more money and they're going to run out of money.
And now all of a sudden, FEMA discovers they've got plenty.
All of this has been for nothing.
FEMA's got enough money to go beyond September 30th.
So all this has been a dog and pony show.
And as the AP points out, the difference is significant.
If the most recent estimate is accurate, it's possible that the agency won't need any additional money until the new budget year begins, and the cause for the current outbreak of gridlock will disappear.
All because FEMA didn't know that they actually had enough money when they've had enough money all along.
Every time this stuff comes up, I feel played, you know, for a sap or a sucker of some kind.
The Republican debate.
By the way, these things are increasingly not debates.
They are, and they haven't been, I guess, for actually a long time.
They're more like extended press conferences or expanded Sunday morning shows with a few tweaks in the rules that allow people to respond if for 30 seconds if their names happen to be mentioned in the course, somebody else speaking.
But it was a disappointing night for Rick Perry.
Actually, it was a disappointing night.
I thought Santorum did well, and Herman Kane did well.
The rest of the folks, it was to me sort of pathetic and sadly disappointing.
As rich as the target is, with as many things that are happening in this country and around the world, financial circumstances, the world financial circumstances, the situation with Europe is a shining example of where we ought not go, but yet we're on that path.
A great opportunity to draw a profound contrast between our position and that of Obama and the regime.
And I just thought it was disappointing.
A lot of people were expecting much more out of Rick Perry.
And he didn't come through.
So now here's what I've learned.
That Rick Perry, this is the, I guess, the spin or the explanation.
Rick Perry just never does well in debates.
He never has.
He doesn't win debates, but boy, does he win elections?
In fact, the last debate Perry was in before this series began was in 2005.
It's just not one of the things that he does well.
Okay, look, I totally understand spin, but these are not debates.
This is QA.
You got to have some facts at your command.
You have to be able to parry.
And I'll go back P-A-R-R-Y.
You have to be able to go back and forth.
But if you're going to go out and try to illustrate Romney's flip-flops, rehearse it or know it.
I don't know about you.
I just, I thought it was a little disappointing.
And in fact, I made an observation about Perry week before last that after about an hour, he seems to get tired.
Seems to wear down.
Sentences get slower.
The words get put together slower.
And in fact, the Perry campaign has said that he was a product of being tired in these debates.
In fact, last Thursday, this is in Orlando.
Here is Perry responding to Romney's defense of Romney care.
I think Americans just don't know sometimes which Mitt Romney they're dealing with.
Is it the Mitt Romney that was on the side of against the Second Amendment before he was for the Second Amendment?
Was it before he was before the social programs from the standpoint of he was for standing out for Roe versus Wade before he was against Roe versus Wade?
He was for race to the top.
He's for Obamacare, and now he's against it.
I mean, we'll wait until tomorrow and see which Mitt Romney we're really talking to tonight.
And so they say, he was just tired.
He had a long day out there, long day of fundraising, long day of campaigning, a bunch of speech buying, and he was just a little tired out there.
And I'll tell you why this matters.
I'll tell you why it matters.
It's because within the conservative base, call it the Tea Party base, what have you, just do not want Romney.
There is an active anti-Romney sentiment, and Perry represented somebody, represented the perhaps somebody that could wrest all this away from Romney.
Romney's the presumptive nominee based on money and media trying to make this into a two-man race and so forth.
It's getting late for anybody else to get in.
All this talk about Christie maybe getting in knots.
I don't know that I believe that.
But if Christie did get in, I'll tell you what, you know what would happen?
It wouldn't hurt Perry.
It would hurt Romney.
If Christie gets in this race, he's going to split the Romney vote because they're going after the same vote.
You might not understand it, and you might not agree with me, but don't doubt me on this.
Actually, one of the best things that could happen to Perry is if Chris Christie decided to get in this because he would take support away from Romney.
That's where it come from.
Got to take a break.
We'll get to your phone calls when we come back here as we kick off a brand new week of broadcast excellence.
El Rushbo, serving humanity, simply by showing up.
Grab audio soundbite number 26.
This is actually kind of, this is funny.
This afternoon on PMS NBC Live, the fill-in host Craig Melvin was interviewing the national political reporter for the Washington Post, a guy by the name of Perry Bacon.
And the question was this, I enjoyed the piece that you wrote.
Perry, you identified three tactics that work for partisan politics and could also work for moderate politics.
So what we've had here is that, I guess, I haven't seen the story, and I don't need to see it.
If it's in the Washington Post, I don't need to see it.
All I need to know is what this question is.
So you've got a national political reporter.
He's being asked a question.
Hey, Perry, you know what?
You wrote a piece here.
You identify three tactics that work for partisan politics.
Could also work for moderate politics.
Now, by definition, moderate and partisan don't go together, right?
Yet this guy has apparently written a piece that says the moderates could take a lesson from the partisans.
There are three things the partisans do as tactics that the moderates could use.
What are they?
And here's Perry with his answer.
You know what Democrat is for when you vote for them.
You know what a conservative Republican is too.
People talk about centrism in the middle, but I kind of laid out how you might define a real sort of centrist agenda.
And then once you had that, you could support candidates who are centrists.
You know, in general, in America right now, if you're a centrist candidate, it's hard to win the primary.
And I was talking about the way they do that.
The third thing I said was in some ways, the centrists need their own Rush Limbaugh.
How can that happen?
The centrists need their own Rush Limbo.
This is like the no-labels group.
And here we have the people obsessed with being centrists.
What is a centrist?
I mean, I know by definition that somebody's not a liberal and not a conservative, but why don't they want to be either one?
It's because they don't want to have a point of view.
They don't want to have an opinion.
That's precisely what moderates are.
Now, they'll try to tell you that, no, no, no, no, we issue by issue.
Mr. Limboard, we're not guided by party politics or partisanship.
Reasonably issue, whatever is the most sensible to us.
Okay, what's the core of it?
What is the centrist moderate core?
Because without that, you can't have your version of Rush Limbaugh.
And I don't know of anybody who can define for me the moderate core or the centrist core.
What is it?
And these centrists, yet they desperately want people to think they've got a core, you know, a set of core beliefs.
But what are they?
By the way, if you're a moderate or centrist, don't take this personally.
I'm simply being accurate.
If you think you're a moderate or a centrist and you think you've got a core, call here and tell me what it is because I really want to know.
I want to know what the core beliefs are for moderates or the core beliefs are for centrists.
Could be interesting.
Doubt it, but it could be.
Okay, where we started.
Kevin in Oklahoma City.
Great to have you on the program.
Kevin, welcome.
Hey, how are you doing?
I'm a first-time caller from Oklahoma City.
Thank you, sir.
You said earlier that if Herman Cain is elected, that he will be the first black president.
What did you mean by that?
I said the first authentically black president.
What does that mean?
Well, during the campaign of 2008, there were a number of liberal newspaper columnists and even Reverend Sharpton who were challenging Barack Obama's authenticity, that he wasn't an authentic black because he didn't have any family history traced to slavery, that his mother was white,
father from Kenya, you know, it's a different, was not really down for the struggle.
But it was them who said that.
Now, I'm simply bouncing off of them.
Herman Cain, I never get into debates over who's an authentic black and who isn't.
It's the left that does that.
It's a Democrat Party and their media that does that.
But bouncing off what they said, Herman Kaine would be more authentically black to me than Obama is.
Oh, so it's what they say, and then you're just repeating it.
I'm just bouncing off of it.
Oh, okay.
And there's another thing you said.
You said that Obama was worse, is worse than Bush.
Yeah.
Well.
And I'm trying to figure out how you came to that conclusion.
Well, I actually didn't say it.
I agree with it.
I agree with you, right?
But it was a poll in a magazine, The Economist, which is a British magazine, and they had a poll here with something called YouGov.
And the majority in this poll rate Obama the same or worse than Bush.
A majority said Obama is as bad or worse than Bush in this poll.
I was just citing the poll.
But you agree with it as well, right?
Yeah, I don't think it's even close.
George Bush didn't destroy the country.
George Bush didn't destroy our economy.
And George Bush didn't want to.
George Bush did not declare war against this country.
George Bush doesn't run around and think that this country is populated with people who have to be gotten even with.
He doesn't run around apologizing for America all over the world.
It's not even close.
Yeah, I mean, I understand.
I didn't vote.
I didn't vote for Obama.
And the economic, our economic troubles, it's partly his fault, but I do believe that a lot of the blame or half of the blame could go to Bush.
Well, maybe at one point, but right now, Obama owns it, bro.
Great to be back here, folks.
El Rushball and the Excellence in Broadcasting Network, where we have more fun than a human being should be allowed to have.
You know, Barack Obama has been in office now almost as long as JFK was in his entire presidency.
And yet, Obama's still running around blaming George W. Bush, and we'll still get callers who will blame George W. Bush.
And yet, here is Obama in office now almost as long as JFK was.
He's just two months shy.
Just two months shy.
So by the logic of people who still want to blame Bush, you'd almost have to say that JFK really never had a presidency.
JFK never was president.
He was in office two months longer than Obama has been in office.
And Obama's still dealing with all the garbage that Bush left him.
It really hadn't even gotten started yet.
What Bush left Obama was so bad, and nobody told Obama how bad it was, is worse than anybody thought.
They've had to do all these cleanup policies and so forth.
Gee, it's so unfair.
It's so unfortunate.
I guess JFK never even really was president.
He just left that big Eisenhower mess.
That's the kind of folly that people want us to accept.
Mike in South Florida, hi, and welcome to the EIB Network.
Great to have you here.
Hi, Russian, it's my pleasure to speak with you today.
Thank you, sir.
I just wanted to make an observation of something that I saw in the now famous video of the president telling his audience to take off their slippers and put on their marching boots.
That's right, yeah.
To go back in history, one of my all-time idols was Muhammad Ali.
And I just loved the time, the era when he was in boxing and when he fooled around with Howard Kosell, when you could see that something was just theater, when he was, you know, talking forcefully, but yet you could see it in his face how he was smirking.
And in this speech, from my observation, in my opinion, when the president is talking to his audience, you can see him smirking at the same time if you look at that video closely, where it really seems like the whole thing is just a bunch of theater.
Okay, so does that mean, as far as your interpretation goes, that he doesn't really believe this?
He's just engaging here in a little performance art just to get him fired up.
I think so.
And I think if you look at that video a little closer, and I think if some of your listeners look at that video a little closer, you can see that smirkiness.
And it appears to me to be that type of theater.
Okay, so he doesn't.
He didn't even really mean it.
That's how I saw it.
Didn't even mean it.
I saw that it's stage.
Now, do you think a Republican president, say, in a similar circumstance, let's say, went out to speak to a pro-life group and spoke to them in theatrics, would be excused for it?
Or would the Republican president be held to account for what he had said?
Rush, I don't think in all of my years of being on this planet that I've ever seen a president engage in this type of theatrics or what appears to be theatrics.
As opposed to substance.
As opposed to going out and giving a speech rather than a rally.
Yeah.
Well, I think that's a great observation, and this is exactly who he is.
He's an agitator.
And the people, what is a community organizer?
This is it.
A community organizer sits around and gets people all agitated.
It gets them worked up.
It's always somebody else's fault, the circumstances they find themselves in.
And they got to go out there and they got to march or make themselves felt or heard somehow to redress their grievances.
Well, you got to go out.
You got to make people mad.
You have to tell them they're getting the shaft.
You have to tell them they're getting screwed.
You have to go out there and that's what a community organizer does.
And you sit around and you plot ways of doing that.
Now, interestingly, I'm holding here, ladies and gentlemen, my formerly nicotine-stained finger.
A Washington Post story from a couple of days ago.
Obama 2012 campaign's Operation Vote focuses on ethnic minorities and core liberals.
President Obama's campaign, developing an aggressive new program to expand support from ethnic minority groups and other traditional Democrat voters as his team studies an increasingly narrow path to victory in next year's reelection.
That means he's lost this bunch, right?
If they're having to sit around and strategerize and develop an aggressive new program to expand support from ethnic minority groups, didn't he get 90% of the ethnic vote in 2008?
At least in the black community, what was the Hispanic percentage that he got?
It was pretty high.
Could have been the 60s, which tells me that he's lost it.
At least they think that he's lost it.
If they have to embark now on what is called here an aggressive new program to expand support, the operation, the program is called Operation Vote.
It underscores how the tide has turned for Obama, whose 2008 brand was built on calls to unite red and blue America.
And then he presented himself as a politician who could transcend traditional partisan divisions.
And many white centrists were drawn to the coalition that helped elect the country's first black president.
And that's right.
Remember, folks, we were told that Obama would be the first post-racial president, post-partisan president.
Instead, what do we get?
He's not a post-racial.
He is our most racial president that we've ever had.
He's the most partisan president we've ever had.
There's nothing post about him.
He's most in all of these categories.
But stop and think of this.
Here's a story.
You notice how easily here the Washington Post forgives Obama for doing a 180 for what he promised as a candidate less than three years ago.
He was going to unify everybody.
He's going to bring black and white and brown and red and green, alien, UFO, all of it.
We're going to come together.
We're going to be at one with our country, at one with nature.
The world will once again love us.
Everybody's going to get along.
Politics, as it had always been practiced and known, would end.
There would be no disagreements.
There would be no partisanship.
Nothing but love.
Nothing but agreement for the good of all who walk and breathe, including the animals.
And of course, it's just the exact opposite.
We've got not a unifier.
We've got a man who in truth came to divide and who has succeeded in his quest to divide.
And so now, in order to win reelection, Obama has to segregate the voting public.
And he is going to pander to minorities.
That's what Operation Vote is.
And it's right here in the Washington Post headline.
Obama 2012 campaign Operation Vote focuses on ethnic minorities, core liberals.
Well, this is, as I say, this is a flip-flop.
This is a total 180 from what Obama promised.
Now, he's never been what he promised.
No misunderstanding.
He's never been anything but the most partisan hack politician out there.
Except, of course, in his high-sounding speeches with the god-like reverb.
But the Post is so forgiving.
For example, today, the political realities of a sputtering economy, a more polarized Washington, and fast-sinking presidential job approval ratings, particularly among white independents, are forcing Obama to campaign the Obama campaign to adjust its tactics.
He's lost the white moderates.
He's lost the white centrists.
He's lost the white independents.
And to add insult to injury, Maxine Waters is mad at him.
So he has to go out there to the black congressional Caucasians and try to make amends and speechify them up.
Get them out there marching out of their bedroom slippers.
But here the Post is totally sanguine, totally accepting.
Okay, in order to win reelection, Obama is going to have to punt the fake image that we crafted for him in 2008.
Unifier, all this, he's going to have to roll up sleeves, going to have to get down and dirty, fine and dandy, whatever it takes to save liberalism.
Because that's what's at stake here.
That's what the New York Times is worried about.
That's what the Washington Post is worried about.
That's what all the Washington establishment types are worried about, saving the ideology.
Obama doing great harm and great damage to it.
But all this post-partisan, all this post-racial stuff, most partisan, most racial president we've ever had, and pretty much now confirming it.
The Washington Post even admitting in this story, I kind of glossed over this.
His team studies an increasingly narrow path to victory.
An increasingly narrow path to victory, meaning it's going to be tough and tough, tough, tougher for this guy to win.
And right now, if he, all it would take is losing 10% of black vote, and he's done.
And that's why he's focusing purely right now on the base.
He's lost that too.
Quick timeout.
We'll be back.
We'll continue after this.
Don't go away.
Grab audio soundbite number 10.
In light of this Washington Post story, Obama 2012 campaign Operation Vote focusing on ethnic minorities.
Listen to this soundbite.
This is where Obama confuses the Jew and the janitor.
And what I can't figure out, and this really gets to the nub of it, what I can't figure out when I listen to this bite is who he's pandering, if he's pandering to the Jewish janitor vote or if he's ripping them.
Here, you listen to this and see what you think.
If asking a billionaire to pay the same tax rate as a janitor makes me a warrior for the working class, I wear that with a badge of honor.
Okay, if asking a billionaire to pay the same tax rate as a Jew janitor, now is he attacking Jew janitors or is he pandering to them?
Well, no.
Listen, I'm serious about this.
Everybody's in there laughing themselves silly.
And I understand.
I'm a naturally funny guy.
But I'm serious about this.
I think this is an unguarded moment.
If asking a billionaire to pay the same tax as a Jew, a janitor, who thinks of, folks, whoever is, when you mean to say janitor, who in the world says Jew?
I don't know how many of them there are, but if there are some Jewish janitors out there, they're not a huge voting block.
Now, the point here is, is he pandering to him or is he attacking them?
Is there some victory all here?
Because remember, we know he's got victory all against billionaires, particularly those that don't donate to him.
So if asking a billionaire to pay the same tax rate as a Jew, Jew what?
Remember what the Washington Post is telling us he's doing here.
So here, listen to it one more time.
If asking a billionaire to pay the same tax rate as a janitor makes me a warrior for the working class, I wear that with a badge of honor.
What word could pop, I mean, you heard the inflection, folks.
We got to be honest.
I mean, you heard it as a Jew.
A janitor.
Oh, yeah.
Janitor.
That's what I meant to say.
I don't know why in the world I said Jew.
I've been thinking janitors all day.
Janitors, billionaires?
Yeah, two go together.
Anyway, who's next?
Debbie, Naples, Florida.
Great to have you on the EIB network.
Hi.
Hi, Rush.
I wanted to speak with you about the comment you had made earlier that you felt that the Tea Party was unhappy with Romney as the candidate.
And then you went on to say that there's some pressure being put on Chris Christie to come into the race.
There is, but not by Tea Party people.
Not by Tea Party people.
Okay, then I misunderstood you because I consider myself to be a Tea Party person.
I'm a very staunch conservative, and I think that Chris Christie is not electable in a general election, and I think his demeanor would be very off-putting to a lot of people.
Yeah, no, the people pushing Christie are the same people who push McCain.
Right.
Exactly.
He's another Northeastern kind of quasi-conservative liberal person.
Ideology I don't, I'm not really clear on, to be honest.
Right.
The Republican establishment.
That he's anti-gun and a lot of other things that are concerning to me.
Yeah.
No, no, no.
I did not mean to say that Tea Party people are pushing Christie.
Far from it.
Okay, because I like Romney as a candidate.
I do think he would clean Obama's clothes.
You know, everywhere I go, people ask me about this, and sometimes, just to get a conversation started, I'll come up with the weirdest answer I can, because that's really sometimes a great technique for drawing people out, finding what they really think about something.
What I've learned is from people I talk to who like Romney, it's not really that they like him, they just think he can win.
It is so much about beating Obama, and I find that a lot of people don't think very many people on that Republican debate stage can beat Obama.
And that's why it's come down to this two-man race business.
It's either Perry or Romney.
I think Perry is terrible.
I don't like what he believes in.
I think his performances have been getting worse.
It was so embarrassing to watch him.
That clip that you played where he was trying to come up with these flip-flop things that Romney has said, that was so uncomfortable and embarrassing, I almost couldn't watch it.
Right.
So, but you like Romney?
Why?
Well, I'll be honest with you.
I had an opportunity to meet him and speak with him at quite some length, and he came across to me in a personal situation as a lot more conservative, a lot more down-to-earth, and very, very warm, friendly person.
For whatever reason, I don't think that's coming across in his public performances.
It never does.
That's one of the things that you can say that about every one of those.
If you met Rick Perry in person, I guarantee you, you'd have an entirely different opinion of him.
It's just the way life is.
I got to run.
We'll be right back.
Don't go away.
Hey, I just got an email.
There's a new group apparently that's forming.
You might be getting an email blast from them.
Jewish Janitors for Cain is apparently the name of the group.
Keep a sharp eye out for it.
We've got to take another obscene profit time out here at the top of the hour.
We'll regroup.
We'll come back and resume shortly.
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