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Oct. 10, 2011 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:38
October 10, 2011, Monday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
It is Columbus Day, and that's really all you need to know.
I think Rush had mentioned, as last week came to a close, doggone it.
I'm going to paraphrase now.
I'm tired of everyone getting Columbus Day off.
I'm taking Columbus Day off.
And I believe historians will note perhaps the first Columbus Day off ever for Rush Limbaugh.
So from the Texas adjunct chair of the EIB network, Mark Davis, hi from WBAP, Dallas-Fort Worth, proud Rush Limbaugh affiliate since 1993.
Glad, so glad to be here with you.
These are amazing times.
What an interesting weekend.
Values voters summit.
Another big Republican debate is tomorrow night.
We've got the Occupy movement still doing whatever it is that they in fact are doing.
And I'll tell you something.
If we discuss this to any length today, and you certainly may, you certainly are welcome to give us a shout, 1-800-282-2882.
Have you had an Occupy thing in your city?
Having essentially two major cities right here on either side of me here in Arlington, Texas, between Dallas and Fort Worth, we had Occupy Dallas a few days ago.
They had about 500 people show up.
Cool.
It's not huge, but it's not small either.
500, nothing to necessarily sneeze at.
We have just received the close of my local show that I've just finished here mere moments ago.
We had a special correspondent phone in from Occupy Fort Worth.
It was a guy with a rolled-up newspaper serving as a megaphone.
They had about 20 people.
And God love them.
I just don't know if these folks know exactly what they're doing.
If you are part of this, give us a shout.
I mean, I know it has something to do with Wall Street, has something to do with the largesse, the greed, the excesses of the underpinnings of our investment world.
And you know what's weird?
And maybe this is worth examining a little bit because maybe we can actually help these people achieve something they sorely lack, coherency.
Because in there somewhere in this Occupy movement, there might be a couple of things I kind of sort of agree with.
You know, I'm a total free market guy.
I'm a complete laissez-faire economics guy.
Let people do what they wish to do within laws that we craft to prevent things that are, you know, stone cold illegal because we dislike them so much.
But within the law, go do what you want to do.
Invest how you wish to invest.
The freedom to succeed, the freedom to fail, all of this, all of this.
And yet, are there practices that we might want to keep an eye on in some way or things that we may wish to just do a better job of finding real fraud?
As with so many other things, it may not be that we need a whole new level of laws or a whole new level of government overreach, but how about like immigration?
How about paying attention to the laws we actually have?
Maybe we're not doing a good enough job of that.
And here's what's weird.
I have a feeling that out here in this crowd of folks who one presumes are left of center, they might dislike Dodd-Frank as much as I do.
They almost certainly dislike the bailouts as much as I do.
There may be in this entire Occupy movement room for something that I suggest almost never exists between left and right.
Common ground.
I've spent a lifetime dissuading people from searching for common ground because usually when you find it, it's phony.
There are a lot of ways to look at the world, but it generally falls down into the way the left views the world and the right views the world.
I say let both sides bring their best arguments on every issue, every issue.
Economics, abortion, wars.
Let the left and right bring their best arguments and best efforts.
Let the winners win.
Let the losers lose.
Let the winners win with grace.
Let the losers learn from their loss, dust themselves off, and live to fight another day, rather than this absurd and usually useless, baseless search for common ground.
So I don't know.
I'm probably less interested in the actual Occupy movement than I am in the strategic embrace of it by some Democrats.
I'm sure you've heard in these last few days, there are those who have said, wishful thinking is an amazing thing.
Oh, here we go, man.
It's the Tea Party of the left.
We got our act together now.
Woohoo!
We got people in the streets.
Wah!
Well, first of all, can you imagine if Tea Party people actually took to the streets in a manner that some of these folks have?
It would be met with the most severe consternation by the dominant media culture.
It would be made out to be some type of bug-eyed rabble.
But the thing that's interesting about this, and there's not much that is, is that imitation truly is the sincerest form of flattery.
That for many of the folks who have said, oh, this is it, we got our Tea Party now.
Well, we got our act together now.
Woohoo, look out.
We got it going now and just in time to achieve success in 2012.
Yeah, right.
Well, these people saying that were the same people who have derided and condemned the Tea Party since its inception, speaking of it in the darkest of terms.
And now we learn that when their heads hit the pillows at night, they dream of having something just like it.
That is the flip side of the coin, that is the leftist counterpart to the Tea Party movement.
Well, guys, here's some free advice.
First, taking to the streets doesn't make you the Tea Party.
Just complaining and fussing and moaning about something in the status quo doesn't make you the Tea Party.
Having some folks deliver some impassioned speeches about the need for some ill-defined change doesn't make you the Tea Party.
What makes you the Tea Party is having a message that resonates so widely that almost every room full of Republicans has at least a smattering of Tea Party people in it.
If you tell me I got 100 Republicans in a room, I'll go find you seven or twenty or thirty or eighteen or fourteen folks who are hardcore Tea Party and proud of it.
Find me a room full of Democrats or populists or moderates or whatever.
What's my likelihood today of walking in and finding somebody who has even been to or even identifies with or even understands the Occupy Wall Street, Occupy Dallas, Occupy Sheboygan, Occupy Fort Lauderdale, Occupy Pocatello, whatever the latest targeted city is.
It is but a sliver of what the Tea Party was and is.
But so here's the free advice: get smarter, get concise, focus like a laser beam on something, then see if it resonates with a lot of people.
If it doesn't, then it was a trial balloon that went nowhere.
If it does, then maybe you got something.
But the first thing you have to do is know what you're talking about.
Be coherent.
Don't have your, if you go, listen, even those of you who hate the Tea Party's guts, I mean hate it, disagree with it on every platform, or who even, and this kills me, and it's not just black actors, because I'm sure most of the white actors in Hollywood think it's racist as well.
First, Morgan Freeman throws down the Tea Party is racist BS.
And then I went and saw Dolphin Tail the other day.
And of course, he's great.
Took my son to see Dolphin Tail.
It's a lovely movie, Harry Connick Jr.
And it's great.
Story of a dolphin without a tail.
They make the thing a tail.
It's great.
And Morgan Freeman is in there.
It's the first time I've seen Morgan Freeman since his moment with Piers Morgan on CNN, in which he threw down the incredibly hateful statement that the Tea Party is racist.
It is racist to say the Tea Party is racist.
It is racist to say the Tea Party is racist.
Why?
What does Morgan Freeman see?
Sees a group that's probably about 98% white and thus presumes the worst about them.
It's probably more of a political bigotry than a racial bigotry.
But if it were just political bigotry, he'd insult them for their political views.
He'd say they hate the planet or they, you know, some other, the usual slanders thrown toward conservatives just for being conservative.
But oh, no, no, no.
Morgan Freeman, one of the greatest of our actors, and who was later joined by, and this one even killed me more, Samuel L. Jackson.
Sam, what are you doing?
What are you doing?
Don't make me snap my pulp fiction C D V D in half, please, threw down the Tea Party as racist.
It is racist to say the Tea Party is racist because basically it's looking out at a big bunch of white folks and presuming the worst of them because of it.
Anyway, though, even if you hate the Tea Party, politically, racially, whatever, you know, quick, describe a Tea Party meeting.
What are the big themes going to be?
Taxes need to be lower.
Government needs to be smaller.
Got to obey the Constitution.
Now, you may like or not like those things, but you'll know what a Tea Party meeting is.
What's this Occupy thing about?
Quick, what is it?
What's their main theme?
Yeah.
Okay, many of you may have actually crafted a small sentence there.
But it's, oh, it's just all over the place.
So get concise.
See if you can resonate.
And then what you've got to do in order to be for real, develop an electoral strategy.
Have what do you want to call them?
Occupy candidates, the Occupy Party.
You need a verb, you need a noun, you need something, so that people are instantly recognizable.
When you see a Tea Party candidate, you know what that guy or gal stands for.
What would a candidate stand for who is of this ilk, this whole Occupy rigmarole?
Who are those people?
So once you have all that together and have actually fashioned an electoral strategy, oh, and there is one more thing.
Then go win a bunch of seats in an actual national election like Tea Party Passions did in 2010.
Go do that.
Then, then we can talk about this little Occupy thing as being some remote counterpart on the left to what the Tea Party is on the right.
Well, gosh, I didn't intend for that to run that long.
But welcome to shows I host, whether locally here in Texas or when given the great honor of filling in for Rush.
Rush is back tomorrow.
I know we're all thrilled about that.
In the meantime, let me see.
There's just one thing I want to throw down before we just go to the phones.
I got a bunch of political news from the weekend, some audio to hear, just some things to have a good time with here on this Monday, the 10th of October.
Phone number, as you know, is 1-800-282-2882.
But first, as we get into our first commercial break, a brief closed circuit message, okay?
This is a great day.
I get to walk in here and do my own show here in Dallas-Fort Worth, the community I love.
And then it just keeps getting better.
Then I get the thrill of sitting right here in the very same room, hitting a few buttons differently, and all of a sudden I am, metaphorically at least, at the golden EIB microphone, filling in for Rush.
It doesn't get any better than that.
But the day does not end when we're done at 3 o'clock Eastern Time.
Nope.
After this, I get to hop out of this building, drive about a half a mile, and go to ALCS Game 2.
The Texas Rangers attempting to win their second.
So I want to throw some love up to my brothers and sisters in Detroit listening at WJR.
I know you guys love those Tigers.
And I'll tell you something.
Listen, all I want to do is beat the Tigers.
That's all I want to do.
But I got to throw some love to Detroit.
WJR is a great station.
Detroit's a great city.
And oh, by the way, what are those Lions doing?
What is going on there?
Detroit, I mean, the automotive industry is back.
Some companies even doing it without your tax money.
The Tigers are in the postseason.
The Lions may be Super Bowl bound.
So they are having good times in Detroit.
So a big, big, big, big shout out to the people at WJR in Detroit.
Now, I'm guessing that as we engage in postseason baseball Smack Talk, that if Belling is hosting today, another of the marks on the Rush Limbaugh bench stable of hosts up there, WISN in Milwaukee, there's an enormous amount of Brewers' love and KMOX and enormous amount of Cardinals' love.
I will tell you, and I don't think I'll have a lot of contradiction on this nationally, I fear the Brewers.
I want to thank the Cardinals for getting rid of the Phillies for us, but I think I'm looking at a Texas-Milwaukee World Series.
And since I'm here, I'm saying the Rangers win it all.
But, you know, that's my personal baseball jingoism, which I suppose I'm entitled to.
But to everybody in Milwaukee, everybody in St. Louis, everybody in Detroit.
And now, now with all love to the people of, let's say, New York and Philadelphia who are bummed out because their teams aren't playing anymore, let me just share you a little love letter from Middle America.
We love this.
There will be no team from the East Coast and no team from the West Coast.
And God bless New York and Los Angeles and Philadelphia and Boston, these iconic baseball cities.
Yeah, guess what?
This one's ours.
This one's ours in flyover country.
The people of Detroit, the people of Milwaukee, the people of St. Louis, the people of Texas just want the rest of America to know that we're still playing baseball.
Scoreboard.
What do you think about that?
And yes, we're proud.
All righty.
1-800-282-2882.
Good.
Done with that.
Had to get that in.
Now we've got a lot of political stuff from over the weekend.
A lot of things I've got to bring up.
A lot of things you may want to bring up.
So do it.
It's the Rush Limbaugh Show.
I'm Mark Davis filling in on the EIB Network.
And happy Columbus Day off, Rush.
He will be back before the EIB microphone tomorrow.
Okay, let's do some calls.
As we work our way into a couple of these, there's some things that I've run across.
And one of the things that's really cool about Twitter and just websites and stuff in general is it used to be on the radio.
They had invented radio and the internet, but not the whole Twitter social networking thing.
I remember I used to have to engage in the most mind-numbing exercise ever on radio, and that is giving long URL addresses, long websites.
It's like, okay, everybody, get something to write with.
And you could just see people wrecking their cars, go to www.
And then it'd be just like 14 minutes before I'd get to the end.
Now, of course, you just got Twitter.
So here's what you do.
In fact, after one of these calls, I'm going to invoke something that someone wrote at National Review Online.
But rather than torture you with how to find it, Twitter, hello, if you choose to and want me to bother you every once in a while, Mark Davis, M-A-R-K Davis, all one word on Twitter.
And if you do that, in fact, I'll tell you what it is right now.
It was a piece written in National Review Online about what the death of Steve Jobs, or what the life of Steve Jobs, taught us about where government belongs and where it doesn't, and how some of the greatest successes are the ones that exist without the guiding hand or suffocating boot of government.
It's just a great piece, one of the best I've ever shared.
And that's back a couple of days on the old Twitter feed there at Mark DavisAll One Word, if you choose to follow me around.
Let's see who is on the phone.
Now, this is kind of neat.
This is an Occupy movement observation.
And Juan seeks the geographic vagueness of being only on the West Coast.
We will afford him that stealth.
Hey, Juan, welcome to the Rush Limbaugh Show.
Mark Davis filling in.
How are you?
Hi.
I'm an economics student at a major university, and one of my professors is leading an Occupy movement here in town.
Right.
And I think it's the most insane thing because I got into economics because of people like Thomas Soule and Walter Williams.
And now I hear this insane labor economics professor who has control over my grades trying to indoctrinate me into their socialist party.
Well, there are a lot of ways to feel economically.
One could be conservative, one can be liberal.
If one is a professor, one hopes there comes with that the objectivity of sort of respecting both sides of all the basic debates.
How does he conduct that class?
Has he brought his Occupy politics into the classroom much?
Yeah, the professor's pretty militant.
And I mean, like, the professor's very, very good advocate, I think, for their cause because there's sufficient vagueness and ideas that so that when the outline of labor economics is challenged, it says, oh, well, that's because labor is devalued in the capitalist system and things like that.
But then also, the professor is very charming, very intelligent, very polite person.
But then the response is very, very, very anti-capitalist, very angry.
You know, if you don't believe in what they believe in, then you must be a capitalist.
Well, that never happens in modern academia.
Juan, are you telling me there's a professor who brings his liberalism into the classroom and offers it up as the only plausible way to look at life?
I'm aghast.
Well, actually, it's even worse than that.
This professor is actively a leader in the local socialist party.
You know, and I'm prepared to not even care about that.
If the guy says, you know what, I'm a socialist.
I'm a radical leftist.
But if you're different than me, you'll get your say in here.
I won't punish you for views that differ from mine.
I mean, I'd say the same about a conservative professor.
Welcome all views, but you know what?
That whole welcome all views thing just doesn't happen so very, very much.
Well, navigate those waters with skill, Juan, and thanks for the report.
Mark Davis in for Rush on the EIB Network.
It is a Monday.
It is Columbus Day, and dog on it, Rush wanted the day off.
That's it.
That's why I'm here.
Thanks for hanging out with me.
Rush is back tomorrow.
Meantime, let's see who else is here on the phone lines: 1-800-282-2882.
I want to give credit where credit is due.
I mentioned the genius piece in National Review Online about Steve Jobs, and it was on the occasion of his death to just learn a little lesson about what success, unfettered by government, really looks like.
If you go to the Twitter feed there at Mark Davis, Kevin Williamson, it's about 10 tweets back.
See, some days I'll tweet 40 things a day, and then I'll go two weeks and totally leave you alone.
Such is the nature of my world.
So if that's what you want to do, then knock yourself out.
But Kevin Williamson was the guy who deserves all the credit for that great piece.
I think he called it a jobs agenda.
Get it?
As in Steve Jobs.
And you know, hey, while we're talking about people, and pardon this common thread, but it is common.
People who you knew weren't doing well, but when they died, you were surprised anyway.
Well, Steve Jobs was one.
I mean, he was just starting to look very frail.
And so when he died, it's like, well, okay, I guess we saw that coming, but it was still a big shock.
And this one over the weekend, I mean, the last 10 times I've seen this guy, at one point I thought he might have passed away already.
And I'm sorry, don't need to be flippant because I love this guy.
Al Davis, owner of the Raiders, passed away at 82, and then the Raiders turned around and actually won, beating Houston 25-20.
Nice.
And listen, maybe the Raiders are actually good again.
Who knows?
But Al Davis, I know that as big an NFL fan as Rush is, he probably would have had a couple of things to say about Al Davis.
So let's throw Al and his family some love.
So, alrighty, 1-800-282-2882.
We are.
Let's head next.
Let's roll down to Orlando.
Gary.
Hey, Mark Davis, you're on the Rush Limbaugh Show.
How are you?
Hey, Mark.
I'm fine.
How are you?
Doing great.
I heard your opening monologue comparing the rabble gathered around our cities with the Tea Party.
And I was a little surprised that you were expecting some standard of rationality to be applied.
Oh, no, I didn't really expect that.
Yeah, I don't think that they have any intention of engaging the political process, but rather undermining it.
And I think most of them are incoherent and not very conscious about a reality of any sort, but there are certainly sprinkled among them those who are.
And you may recall that the Bolsheviks were a tiny minority and were able easily to manipulate the rabble.
Down the country a little ways, you'll recall that when Hitler came to power, the Nazis were a minority.
What propelled them into real authority was a national emergency, the burning of the Reichstags, the parliament building.
Yep.
And all of a sudden, civil rights were shut down.
For a couple of years, I have sensed that the present administration, since it has no agenda to speak of, is ginning up an emergency or is willing for one to be ginned up.
I don't know that they have planned this one, but I would not be surprised, project 12 months up the road what these demonstrations will be looking like, particularly as the poll numbers continue to plummet for the president.
What do you think?
Let's pause on that for a moment.
Do you really expect this Occupy nonsense to still be going on 12 months from now?
I think this is forgotten.
I think it's forgotten by Christmas.
Well, if so, but I think if it's not, that is the political significance of it, is that this is a tool to be used.
But the tool has to have, I mean, the tool metaphor is a good one.
The tool has to be useful, and it has to be well crafted.
This is incoherent, diffuse nonsense, and even about the Bolsheviks or the Third Reich or any other daunting example from history, the one thing they were able to achieve is it resonated.
It was a spark that became a flame.
There's nothing in this that shows any evidence of that actually happening.
This is an early fall fad.
Well, possibly it's early fall.
I guess, and I don't think it'll be a spring fad.
All right.
Or even a winter fad, maybe.
I hope you're right.
But I would say again, strategically, that there is no other option for the current administration to regain power and authority in the public view apart from some crisis.
That's how it came in, and that's how it must continue.
Well, there's the ram the manual quote is never let a good crisis go to waste.
But the thing is, in order to have a crisis have electoral significance, it has to be a real crisis.
Go ahead.
I'm sorry.
Another crisis would preempt the electoral process, and that's what I'm wondering about.
No, the chance of that is absolutely zero.
Look what happened to poor Governor Bev Perdue in North Carolina.
Maybe she was kidding.
Maybe she wasn't.
Maybe she was sleepwalking.
I have no idea.
But she was just absolutely kicked to the curb for even speaking that weird paragraph about, you know, things are so messy and just so many important things going on that maybe we just don't have the elections.
Look what happened to her.
Now, that having been said, never say never.
We should always be vigilant about any sign.
There's an actual spark becoming even a tiny flame.
But let's wait for that to actually happen.
Gary, thank you very, very much.
I will tell you this.
Here's, yeah, before we, you know, there's just take your martial law narratives and just keep them, keep them in the novels that you're currently reading.
This is not going to happen here right now.
Never say never, as they say, but please, let's pay attention to what we have.
And here's what it seems we have, is an American left that is starting to feel a certain amount of desperation.
Here's what's weird, and Rush has pointed this out, and this creates genuine strangeness and the strangest of bedfellows, is when the left begins to bail on Barack Obama.
Now, the Michael Moore Sean Penn left has been hostile toward Obama because he hasn't stopped the war yet.
He hasn't closed Guantanamo yet.
But there are, how could I phrase this, more on what we might call the mainstream left, the not Hollywood, wacky, bug-eyed, crazy, certifiable left, but folks who just, you know, happen to be liberal.
They just are.
And they look at the Obama presidency and what they see is someone who has given their ideology a horrible name.
Someone who has said, you know, I'll bring you more big government.
See, oh, yeah, I like this.
And nobody likes it.
It's brutal.
Let's have government-owning car companies.
Let's have one stimulus that was just a complete bust, and now let's try to give you another one.
This is these are hard times for your liberal friends and family members.
You might want to just offer them a little bit of a shoulder to rest their heads on because these are tough times.
And again, I'm not going to sit here right now in October of 2011 and tell you that President Obama goes down in a landslide.
There's way too much yet to happen.
Way too much could happen economically.
Way too much could happen.
Hey, we're Republicans.
We can still mess this up.
Okay, please.
So we'll have some 2012 talk here just a little bit because a big debate tomorrow night.
And I've got some, hey, the last time you and I spoke, Governor Perry was riding high.
My governor, guy I've known for a decade and a half.
I like him.
And I'd be very pleased if he were the nominee.
Is he my favorite, favorite, favorite, favorite guy?
I'll answer that question for you here in a little bit, too.
But what the heck happened to Rick Perry?
I've got a couple of theories on that.
But I'm not going to sit here in October of 11 and tell you that it's a definite 10-point Republican win in 2012.
But that having been said, right now, this president who did us the favor, did us the favor of telling us what he was going to do and then did it.
I have to tell you, you can blister President Obama for a lot of things, but the usual politician thing of campaigning one way and governing another, that's the problem with this guy.
He's governing exactly as he campaigned.
His ideas were bad in the campaign, and they're horrible in actual practice.
And there are tons of voters, independent voters who gave him the presidency who now have an enormous case of buyer's remorse.
These voters are there to be lured back into the Republican camp.
And it seems that every day of actual Obama governance makes that job a little easier.
But we can never be lazy.
We can never be overconfident.
We've got to put up a good candidate, an upbeat, unapologetic conservative who can take it to this president on a debate stage and return him to private life.
That's what it's about.
And the road between now and then is filled with all kinds of adventures.
Thank God the Rush Limbaugh Show exists to help chronicle them.
And I'm grateful to be in here every once in a while when Rush ain't here.
So it's tremendous.
And back with you on the phones in just a moment.
Mark Davis in for Rush on the EIB network.
It is the Monday Rush Limbaugh Show, the Columbus Day Rush Limbaugh Show.
Rush is off.
So it is guest host time, Mark Davis from Dallas-Fort Worth.
Hope all is well with you.
You know, as we work our way into the final segments here of the first hour, we've had a lot of discussion of the Occupy movement.
Were you aware of the truly bizarre thing that happened at Occupy Atlanta?
And this is what's weird ideologically about these folks.
And listen, not everybody has to be instantly ideologically recognizable.
You know what I mean?
If you have libertarian friends and they perplex you because they're just so hardcore about the Constitution in a wonderful way, and they want government so, I mean, the average libertarian makes a Republican look like a wimp in terms of how much they want to cut taxes and how much they want to reduce the size of government.
But often they are cavalier about abortion.
Hey, it's between a woman and her doctor.
And a lot of them are just isolationist on foreign policy and stuff like that.
So it's like, what the heck is that?
Not everybody has to fit into a particular pigeonhole.
And in fact, I'll offer one other thing as a preface.
I have MC'd a lot of Tea Party things, and we're in Texas, so we have a lot of Tea Party things.
There have been powerful Republican politicians who have wanted to speak at some of the Tea Party things.
And early on in particular, the answer was sometimes a respectful no.
Not because, you know, and listen, thank God I never made that judgment call.
I show up, I MC stuff, I leave.
I am not on the board.
I'm not in the loop with the logic of who gets invited and who doesn't.
I come lend whatever meager gifts I have and then I go talk about it on the radio the next day.
That's my gig.
That's it.
And I'm happy.
But the organizers have told me that the rationale for that, there may be some member of Congress or some high-level so-and-so who wants to come by.
And they say, look, we don't want it to be about elected officials.
We want it to be about grassroots.
We want it to be a bottom-up kind of movement.
This is an 09 early 10.
Ultimately, I remember telling some of these folks, at some point, it's got to be about elected officials, keeping the ones you want to keep and replacing the ones you want to replace.
And that's why, even though the Tea Party folks will tell you that they're not necessarily partisan, if you want to get some love at a Tea Party meeting, show up, tell them you're a Democrat, tell them you probably disagree with them on a couple of issues, maybe even, you know, some of the social ones, but that even you recognize that spending is out of control.
Even you recognize that taxes are way too high and punitive for people when they succeed.
The first thing that may happen is your Democrat status may be questioned, but you will be shown probably a great deal of hugging.
But I offer that as the really wordy entrance ramp to what happened to Congressman John Lewis.
Of this is, let's see, foxnews.com.
This is just a good piece of writing, and I don't even see who did it, so I'm giving credit to somebody because this is very, very well read.
Representative John Lewis is one of 435 members of the House interminably frustrated by the arcane ways of the Senate.
At an Occupy Atlanta protest, he encountered a process arguably worse.
A lengthy video posted online over the weekend showed what happened when the Democrat congressman tried to address an assembly of protesters in his home state.
Instead of giving the floor to a man who is not just a longtime U.S. representative, but a revered civil rights icon, the protesters employed a tangle of parliamentary procedures to ultimately prevent him from speaking.
A stunned John Lewis could be seen watching the whole thing unfold before ambling away.
Asked about the incident Monday, a Lewis spokeswoman told Foxnews.com, the only comment we're going to give is the comments already made.
In a prior interview about the matter with the Atlanta Journal Constitution, Lewis said, it's okay.
They didn't really deny me.
Oh, really?
The end result was that he did not get to speak to the protesters.
The procedures they used, or rather invented, would make the Senate blush.
Imagine some combination of a high school model UN, Lord of the Flies, and a fish concert.
The central premise, it appeared, was that no one person is inherently more valuable than anyone else.
So when the group's leader, a bespectacled man with a bullhorn, said anything, he spoke in clipped fragments so the rest of the crowd could repeat what he was saying back to him.
Another rule, no clapping, because, quote, clapping can prevent someone else who is addressing the assembly from being heard.
Instead, the leader urged everyone to use effusive hand signals to show approval.
I mean, come on.
Okay, so John Lewis, Congressman John Lewis, not allowed to talk to the Occupy Atlanta horde.
So these folks, these folks, and it's kind of interesting, the conversation we just had with the gentleman, even if you don't envision that this becomes some widespread, sinister thing all designed to mobilize to cancel the elections of 2012, even if you don't have that Tom Clancy narrative running through your head.
I don't even think Tom Clancy would go there.
It is interesting to wonder that even though this is nothing, nothing compared to the impact, clarity, appeal of the Tea Party movement, will this be around in the summer of next year?
Will there be, oh, Lord.
I'll tell you what, I've suggested this is probably going to dwindle by Christmas.
I'm going to stay with that.
I don't think we'll be having a lot of Occupy protests in the dead of winter because I'm going to guess that a lot of these folks are not fond of the cold.
But I'll give you two cities come summertime.
Give you two cities that might have a little resurgence of it because there'll be a lot of attention, a lot of TV cameras.
Yeah, don't get ahead of me.
Occupy Tampa, Occupy Charlotte.
The Republican and Democrat conventions.
Can't wait.
All righty.
It is the Rush Lib Boss Show.
Mark Davis filling in.
One more segment this hour.
Stick around.
A lot more to come.
Got some 2012 talk.
We'll talk a little bit about what the individual candidate, what the frontrunners need to do in the debate tomorrow night and what the other folks need to do to get to inch a little closer to the frontrunners.
All this and more coming up.
Mark Davis in for Rush on the EIB Network.
It is the Monday Rush Limbaugh Show.
And as we close out the hour, I'll tell you what.
Let's go to Bremerton, Washington.
Let's put Chad on because he's got an interesting point.
He kind of hopes that the Occupy protests are around next summer.
Tell everybody why, Chad, welcome.
Well, absolutely.
I know when the president endorsed them, as well as Speaker Pelosi, I thought, well, wow, what a brilliant thing that really for the right and what a stroke of luck.
If these guys continue their Occupy protests and defecate on police cars and get arrested and have no message that resonates with the American public at large, then we can only be so lucky if they stay around until the election.
Chad, that is some genius analysis.
Thanks a lot.
Best to everybody out there in Bremerton Wash.
Excellent.
And, you know, and part of this makes me think that as Republicans and conservatives, I don't want to say really much about them at all.
Just kind of let them hang themselves in the public spotlight.
All right.
I'm Mark Davis in for Rush.
Stick around.
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