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Nov. 23, 2011 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:36
November 23, 2011, Wednesday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
Hi, folks.
How are you?
Great to have you with us.
It's Rush Limboy, and I guess we're going to do Open Line Friday on Wednesday today.
It's always a loosey-goosey kind of day, regardless how much sleep I got the night before.
It's the official beginning of the Christmas season here at the EIB network.
Thanksgiving is tomorrow.
Always get sentimental starting about this time of year.
But since we've got the next couple of days off, what we're going to do here is pretend that it's Friday in terms of calls.
So whatever you wish to talk about today pretty much will be okay as we do it on Friday.
General rule of thumb is that in order for you to get on this program, you have to talk about something I care about because I'm the reason people listen.
And if I get bored, nobody's going to listen.
So Monday through Thursday, you've got to talk about something I care about.
But on Friday, I fake it.
If you bring things up I don't care about, I fake it.
Or I just act like I'm not involved and it's totally up to you.
And we're going to do that today.
Telephone number 800-282-2882 and the email address lrushbawdeibnet.com.
Another good debate last night.
Every one of these candidates last night was on even Huntsman.
Everybody was on top of their game last night.
There were no major gaffes.
There were no flub-ups.
I'll tell you, I was jazzed watching this thing.
We'll have some specific comments about particular candidates as the program unfolds before your very eyes and ears.
One of the things, and I knew this is going to happen, you probably did too when you were watching it, when Newt out of the blue announced his new immigration policy.
Now that's the focus of a lot of people's attention.
Newt Gingrich may now have a Rick Perry problem is the politico headline because he and but well, here's the thing about it.
Newt's position on illegal aliens, it was a little odd, and I'll tell you why.
Because it came out of nowhere.
He had not built a foundation for it.
This was the first that we had heard of it last night.
And that's not how major policy positions are adopted.
Now, basically what Newt said was that somebody been here 20, 25 years, not a citizen.
They're illegal for 20, 25 years.
They've had kids.
Family are here.
They're rooted.
They're involved.
They're participating here in the American system.
And this is to uproot them.
He says, no American's going to want to send somebody home that's been here 25 years.
That's not what we're going to do.
No American's really going to be in favor of that.
Now, I understand what he's saying about somebody here with roots and family and all that.
I've been here for a long period of time.
But how exactly would this work?
What if somebody's been here not 25 years, but 22?
What if somebody's been here 20?
17.
Pick a number less than 25, but longer than 5.
What's the cutoff here?
He said 25 years.
What if it's 14?
What if it's 13?
What if they don't have a family, but they have been hardworking and taxpaying for 24 years?
And just because somebody is here 25 years does not mean that they have assimilated into our society.
It doesn't necessarily mean that.
could be rabble-rousing for La Raza out there for 24 of the 25 years.
Do they have to speak English, for example?
What is the test here to determine that they have assimilated into our distinct American culture?
This is a bold proposal.
There's no question, but it was snuck in there.
A bold proposal that trickled into the debate.
And if you want it accepted, now this is just me.
You might disagree with me.
I doubt it.
Few of you ever do, but you might disagree with me here.
If you want something like this to be accepted by the public, I don't think that you just throw it out there.
You have to take some time and build a rational case around it and do so over time.
Build support for it.
As I said at the beginning, you build a foundation for it.
You don't just come up with idea after idea and throw your ideas out as policy.
There's a big difference in having an idea and having the idea become official policy.
This is what got Newt in trouble with the individual mandate.
Out of the blue, oh, yeah, I think everybody ought to be forced to have skin in again.
Everybody else forced to buy.
Probably hadn't even thought about it.
Just off top of his head, bamo.
But it assumed it was official Newt policy.
Same thing with global warming on the couch with Pelosi.
Whatever the calculation was, it was of the moment.
We're talking about immigration.
The fact is, and we've been over this countless times, you must first and foremost secure the border.
Any non-enforcement approach is going to be a magnet.
So how would Newt do that?
And by the way, I don't want anybody to misunderstand here.
I'm just having an off-the-top my head reaction to this.
As I say, understand what Newt's saying.
I understand the thinking that goes into this.
I'm simply talking about, if you really believe this, if you want this to be policy, throwing it out there like this, it's turning itself into big, big target now.
Everybody's just taking pot shots at it.
And there's a way to avoid that if you want to actually have this become something of yours that is a policy.
I just think you have to build popular support to secure the border first.
That's the first thing.
It has to happen.
Before we start talking about deportation or what to do with the people that are here and however long they've been, you've got to secure the border.
That remains the sieve.
That remains the ongoing problem.
National security problem, immigration problem.
And so securing the border also means dealing with the pro-illegal alien lobby, and they're big out there.
A bunch of people who are pro-illegal alien who don't want to secure the border.
So this has become now something that people are shooting at Newt at, which stands to reason.
And I'm not criticizing anybody shooting at him for it.
He's put it out there and he's done it in a debate.
First time anybody's ever heard of it now as a policy statement rather than an idea.
Maybe I could say it this way.
If Newt had said, I have been thinking about this.
One of the things I'm thinking about is, and then mention this, we have to think about it a little further.
It'd be reacted to an entirely different way last night and today.
But the way he threw it out there as full-fledged policy, okay, that means we can shoot at it.
Well, yeah, he is.
I think he's ready to take the heat for it.
Now, interestingly, a month ago or so, we touted on this program a column written by Daniel Henninger in the Wall Street Journal about Romney.
And his piece basically was: this race is nowhere near decided.
It's nowhere near over.
And Romney, according to Daniel Henninger, is obviously going to have to be pushed to the right.
He's not going to get there on his own.
And that's the value of the debates.
And that's the value of the campaign and the primaries that Romney, a lot of people fear that Romney's just the establishment candidate, you know, the McCain of 2012.
And you got to be pushed to the right.
And I think you watch the debates and you see that it's happening.
Romney's being pushed to the right.
Henninger was right about this.
But we have found here, ladies and gentlemen, via YouTube, this might surprise some of you.
Mitt Romney back in 2007, he was on Meet the Press, 2007.
My own view is consistent with what you saw in the Lowell Sun, the newspaper, that those people who have come here illegally and are in the country, the 12 million or so that are here illegally, should be able to sign up for permanent residency or citizenship.
So Romney said the same thing in 2007, but he did it on Meet the Press.
He didn't do it.
He didn't do it in the form of a debate, didn't do it in the form of policy.
We have the bite.
It's audio sound by 27.
Right?
So Romney's, I know he jumped all over Newt for it last night, but that's because Romney probably forgot he said this in 2007.
Romney no doubt forgot he said it in 2007.
He said it on Meet the Press.
He didn't say it in a debate.
He was just answering a question and he was posing it as an idea as opposed to presenting it as policy.
Here's Romney for Meet the Press in, I forget, I'm not sure the month, but it's in 2007.
My own view is, consistent with what you saw in the Lowell Sun, that those people who have come here illegally and are in this country, the 12 million or so that are here illegally, should be able to sign up for permanent residency or citizenship.
So 12 million was the number back then.
He said something no different than what Newt said last night.
In fact, he went further because Newt did not say citizenship.
Newt purposely didn't mention citizenship for these people.
And the reason for that is they can't vote if they're not citizens.
So Newt obviously has thought about this to a certain extent because he knows that if you grant amnesty, amnesty is citizenship.
And Newt insists this is not amnesty because I'm not talking about making them citizens.
And if they're not citizens, they can't vote.
What Newt says, I'm prepared to take the heat for saying let's be humane in enforcing the law without giving them citizenship, but by finding a way to create legality so that they are not separated from their families.
So Newt can say today, as he is saying, my program's not amnesty because I'm not talking citizenship.
Therefore, these people are not going to become automatic Democrat voters.
Newt's just going down the humane road.
Newt says, hey, look, I have a heart.
We care about these people.
By the way, that's something that really ticked me.
Well, because in the aftermath, you know, I watched the post-game.
Catherine and I were watching it.
I said, you want to watch the post-game, meaning the analysis.
And then we did.
And just as predictable as the sun coming up, that Gloria Borger and all these CNN people, you know, you know, Newt was really good.
We saw the human side of Newt.
Newt actually cares about people as though it's the same old thing.
The standard template for conservatives is heartless, cold, cruel, mean-spirited, all of that rotgut.
But Newt's proposal last night showed these CNN people and these mainstream news media people that maybe there is a heart somewhere in conservatism.
Maybe a conservative here or there does have a heart.
That ticked me off at all.
It's like when Al Gore complimented Kemp.
Remember back in, what was that, 1996?
Yeah, I was at vice presidential debate, and Gore basically praised Kemp for not being like all the other Republicans, not being a racist pig.
And Kemp said, thank you, Mr. Vice President, thereby acknowledging that they're a bunch of racist pigs, but he's not one.
So it was the same thing last night.
I made a note to myself.
I got my iPhone 4S out and I got to remind my, I said, remind me to tee off on this.
I got it right there on my iPhone so I would not forget because it really, it really ticked me off.
Anyway, back to, so in truth, folks, and we just played the audio, Mitt Romney went further four years ago than Newt did last night.
Romney talked about citizenship for them.
Newt's the one taking the heavy fire today, but Romney mentioned citizenship on Meet the Press in 2007.
Okay, I got to take a brief time out.
We'll be back on a roll on the day before Thanksgiving here on the EIB network.
Sit tight.
I'll tell you who else.
They all did very well last night.
Everybody on that panel did well last night.
It's tough to single any of them out over another, but I have to tell you, I do want to single out Michelle Bachman for a couple of reasons.
In the first place, she was excellent last night.
And she has been said to have fallen out of the top tier.
You know, she won the Iowa straw poll.
And the next thing that happened was she went overboard on Rick Perry on the vaccine business down in Texas.
And then she quoted somebody in the audience at one of the debates as an expert.
And that began a bit of a downward slide.
But I don't think that was justified.
I think she's top draw.
I don't have any doubt that Michelle Bachman would fight for this country every second she is awake.
Were she to be elected president of the United States?
I have no doubt whatsoever she would fight for the traditions and institutions that have defined this country's greatness.
I thought she was superb last night.
And I want to mention something else.
I meant to get to this yesterday, and it just didn't pan out.
You probably have heard by now, Michelle Bachman was a guest on Jimmy Fallon's very low-rated NBC late, late, late-night show, comedy show.
When she was introduced and came out to assume her seat, the house band played a song.
They didn't sing the lyrics, but the title of the song, Lying Assed B.I. Itch.
So here comes the only female candidate for president of the United States, a Republican, introduced.
She doesn't know what's going on.
She didn't pay attention to the song being played.
The drummer in the group tweets the next day that they had done this, laughing about it, yucking it up.
Fallon sends out a tweet later saying the drummer's been grounded, but clearly they were having a great time with it.
It was disrespectful, a 100% diss lying ass BIH.
And to put this in perspective, Hillary wasn't even on the show, and they have this song, Lying Ass B.I.H. Now, you watch.
I'm going to get in trouble for equating Hillary with this.
Meanwhile, a major television network, NBC, a major television network does this to the only woman candidate for president.
And it is either totally ignored or laughed off as good, clean fun.
Can you imagine if Hillary Clinton were a guest on Huckabee's show on Saturday night on Fox?
Huckabee is musical guests.
Can you imagine if Huckabee's band played lying ass BI Itch as Hillary is walking out after being can you imagine the eruption in the media, particularly if Hillary was running for president?
I also checked out the NAGS website, the National Association of Gals.
They have nothing up on their site about this, even though the story is now two days old.
However, one of their top articles at the NAG website is Kane, Sexual Harassment, and the Campaign Against Women in Public Life.
But the women in public life are so concerned with at the NAG website is Nancy Pelosi because they're upset that Herman Kane called her Princess Nancy.
I kid you not, that's the lead story at the NAG website about what a rotten SOB Herman Kane is for calling Nancy Pelosi Princess Pelosi for which he apologized.
Meanwhile, NBC asks Michelle Bachman to appear on the Jimmy Fallon show.
She walks out, they play that song.
Not a word said other than how clever!
Oh, isn't that cool?
A major American television network.
And Bachman was asked about her appearance on the show the day after.
So she had a great time.
She thought it was a wonderful appearance.
It was nothing remarkable, nothing good nor bad, nothing stand out, but she had a good time.
But they played that song when she got not one comment about it.
We'll be back.
Don't go away.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
We're going to do the real story of Thanksgiving again today.
We always do that the day before Thanksgiving.
It's an EIB tradition.
We are also going to set you straight on another bit of history that you've probably been taught that isn't true.
And that is that we stuck it to the Indians when we bought Manhattan from them.
We really screwed them.
And that's not true.
We got screwed.
We got shafted.
We paid for Manhattan twice.
The first people we bought Manhattan from, the Canarsie tribe, didn't have the right to sell it.
We gave the Canarsie tribe the 26, 24 bucks worth of trinkets, but We bought the Brooklyn Bridge first.
The Canarsie tribe did not have the right to sell Manahattan, which is what it was called back then, Mana-Hatton.
So we gave the Canarsie tribe the money, but they headed back to Brooklyn with it.
We had, I know, there's a whole section of town called Canarsi, but the Canarsi tribe, they're back in Brooklyn.
Anyway, they screwed Peter Minuet out of that 26 bucks, or 24 bucks, trinkets, whatever it was.
24.
We had to buy Manahattan twice.
But they don't teach kids that.
What they teach is that we screwed the Indians and we screwed them at Thanksgiving and screwed them at Thanksgiving dinner.
Took the modified Ponzi.
They did a modified Ponzi on us.
It was a two-stage Ponzi.
But the Canarsi tribe came along and they said, hey, you want Manahattan?
We own it.
And this one is going to cost you.
So we came up with this worthless price, and the Canarsi tribe took it and fled.
Went back to Brooklyn.
No paperwork, fake paperwork.
I kid you not.
Let me grab, let's start on the phones.
Let's start on the phones.
It's open line Friday and Wednesday.
Thanksgiving is Lucy-Goosey.
I got all kinds of stuff I could continue here for two hours without taking a call, but that's not good today.
So we'll start with Vinny in Manhattan.
Vinny, welcome to the EIB Network.
Hello, sir.
Hey, Rush.
Happy Thanksgiving first off to you and your family.
Thank you very much.
Same to you, Vinny.
Thank you.
Listen, Newt's really made a believer out of me the past month.
And I do agree with you.
I know Newt has put some thought into his immigration policy.
I heard him specifically say that he was off for enforcing the borders and policing them.
I also heard him say his immigration policy wasn't an amnesty policy.
And I did not hear him say the word citizenship.
He referred to a program or a website or an organization, some kind of plan, and my mind is failing me as to what it was.
But, you know, you had mentioned a few years ago, and you're absolutely right, no Canada is going to come into office and throw 11 million people out of the country if just for the pictures alone that the mainstream media would provide at the border as they're going over to the other side.
To me, Newt has presented one of the more realistic plans of what exactly is going to happen with illegal immigration in this country.
We're not going to throw all these people out.
Yes, some of them are going to go, but the majority of them are going to be made citizens eventually.
Vinny, I want to dig deeper with you here.
What is it that Newt's done in the past month that's caused you to reassess?
Because I have a friend who lives in Hawaii who, I mean, the last two years has been Palin, Palin, Palin, Palin, Palin.
If Palin doesn't run, country's finished.
Nobody else has got the guts.
Nobody else has got their gonads, Palin, Palin.
Now, I got a note from my friend late last night.
Who would have thought?
I can't believe it.
I'm starting to see that Newt looks good.
What's happening, Rush?
He wanted me to explain to him why he likes Newt.
What's happened in the past month that's caused you to reassess Newt here?
I'm not challenging.
I'm just curious.
There's no wrong answer here.
Don't misinterpret my tone on my interrogating like Perry Mason.
I just want to know.
Sure.
It's going to take me a minute or so to tell you, but first off, Newt's been consistently brilliant with his answers.
He knows government.
Quite frankly, Newt's made it almost fashionable in a way to say, hey, guess what?
I am a government insider.
Look what I know.
And it shines every time he opens his mouth on that debate platform.
He has a plan.
He has history.
And he's dealt with the problems in the past.
He has the knowledge, and it shows.
Number two, certain candidates, if you remember, I was a Rick Perry fan before he came into the debate and showed that he's just falling apart at the CD.
Yeah, I thought even Perry did well last night.
Well, he did last night, but he's not consistent like Newt.
He basically has put his foot in his mouth so many times in the last month and a half that it's hard to see him as president.
And so goes it for all of them to some degree.
Romney, for the most part, most of us conservatives don't trust him.
And that's why Romney doesn't get over 30%, and he's not going to get over 30% unless and until it becomes obvious that he is the only game in town.
Vinny, I got to tell you something.
One minor disagreement, including Santorum.
I thought Santorum was good last night.
Santorum kicked.
I could see, and I'm not doing this in a vacuum.
We have an obvious comparison.
Obama is in the White House.
I would take any of these people, any of these people look presidential compared to Obama.
Any of them would be a 100% improvement, any of them, over Obama.
Well, wait.
What are you reacting for?
Oh, well, yes, of course, but I mean, there's a couple of people who don't have a prayer.
You get my drift here.
When you say, and Vinny, again, don't take this personally, when you say you can't see Perry in the White House, I can, if the choice is Obama-Perry, I can see Perry in the White House.
I can see them all there.
I know these people's hearts are all in the right place.
And I know that they are all patriots.
And I know that they appreciate and love the Constitution and swear to defend and protect it.
I know they do not want to transform this country into something it's not.
I know that they don't look at this country as guilty.
I know that they don't look at this country as a suspect.
I know that none of them look at this country as something that needs to be cut down to size.
I know that none of them look at this country and see it as immoral.
Not like the current occupant and not like his party.
He's not the only one.
There's a bunch of people, his party, have this negative view of this country.
In fact, way too many of them.
And talking about, Vinny, thanks for the call.
Talking about Newt, there was another moment in the debate last night when I Newt has his moments of brilliance.
You have to admit it.
You can't deny it.
And one of those moments was the discussion of the defense budget and the obligatory left-wing question, how much of defense would you cut, so forth and so on, and then energy.
And Newt said, and I forget the exact question.
Newt said it takes 15 to 20 years to develop a weapons system when it takes Apple nine months to update technology.
He was exactly right in terms of what the private sector can do versus the obliterated and bogged down public sector.
And then the whole subject of energy independence, this was even better.
Wolf Blitz, who, by the way, did you hear Herman Kane call him Blitz?
I love that.
I absolutely loved it.
I had to stop and rewind it, make sure I had heard that.
Did he just call him Blitzer Blitz?
I was hoping it was Blitzed.
So I rewound it and I found out it was Blitz.
And Wolf, to his credit, came back and called him Kane a couple times.
But the matter of energy independence and Blitzer had this tired and worn-out lament that it would just take too many years to develop U.S. energy resources that we don't have those kinds of years.
And Gingrich said, well, the question you just asked is perfect because the fact is we ought to have a massive all-sources energy program in this country designed to once again create a surplus of energy here so that we could say to the Europeans perfectly cheerfully that all the various sources of oil we have in the United States, we could literally replace the Iranian oil if we had sanctions on it.
The whole subject of what to do with Iran came up.
And you can't sanction Iran where the world needs the Europeans need their oil.
If you sanction their central bank, then the Europeans are not going to have any oil.
And Newt said, so let them get it from us.
That's how we won World War II.
We didn't have to go to anybody else for our oil.
He made a good point.
He said, I'm tired of all of the tactical discussions that we're having here.
What we need is a grand strategy.
And our strategy where energy is concerned is to develop our own.
Do you realize what we could do with our economy if we just opened up drilling everywhere there's oil in this country?
We wouldn't need to worry about what the Iranians are doing with theirs or what OPEC is doing with it.
We've got more oil than we know what to do with if we would just go get it.
We're getting bogged down here in tactics.
What we need is an overarching strategy.
How we won World War II.
We weren't dependent on anybody else.
We had seen to it that we had what we needed and that if any of our allies got shortchanged, we were able to supply them.
Now, the reason that it sounds so brilliant and so intelligent is because what we're doing now, our energy policy now is frankly absurd.
Killing off our own energy sector.
Shutting down our own production.
Shutting down our own discovery.
Shutting down our own drilling for a host of reasons, chief among them a hoax.
Global warming and pollution.
Making ourselves vulnerable to world supplies, political circumstances, price variations, all of these things.
We're not acting like a superpower.
We're acting like a needy, defensive, no-confidence little child because we don't have the right strategies.
We don't think enough of ourselves as a country at the highest levels.
He was exactly right about it.
The question you asked is perfect because the fact is we ought to have a massive all-sources energy program in the U.S. designed to once again create a surplus of energy here.
So we could say to the Europeans pretty cheerfully that all the various sources of oil we have here, we could literally replace the Iranian oil if you get cut off because we impose sanctions on their central bank.
That's how we won World War II.
He's a throwaway line.
Not a whole lot of people heard it, but it was a great close.
That's how we won World War II.
And of course, that's something that we were very serious about.
All right, a little long, so I got to take a brief time out.
We'll do it.
We'll come back and be back before you know it.
And back to the phones where you go.
This is Greg, somewhere in Indianapolis or Indiana on the way to Missouri.
Is that right?
That's right, Rush.
Well, great to have you with us.
Thanks very much.
I appreciate that.
We are just wanted to call you because we're engaged in one of those all-American traditions that the Democratic Party would like to put at risk.
We got the whole family together, loaded down the minivan, and we're driving to Grandma's for Thanksgiving.
I just love that.
Just the over the river and through the woods to grandmother's house we go.
Yeah, and no doubt you've got the EIB network on the car radio.
Well, absolutely, because, you know, the kids are out of school today, so we wanted to make sure that they were listening to the Lindbaugh Institute for Conservative Studies.
Well, that's why I spelled out the word BI when talking about Michelle Bopper.
I knew their kids would be listening today.
Oh, thank you.
They absolutely appreciate that.
And I'll tell you, my daughter was very offended that the Jimmy Fallon program did that to Congressman Bachman.
That's incredibly disrespectful.
Does your daughter watch Jimmy Fallon when she has a chance?
No, she doesn't stay up that late, and that's not particularly her taste.
She has better tastes than that, Rush.
Well, but there's always, there's always, I'm glad to hear that, of course, but there's always TiVo.
Are you sure she's not watching it?
I'm not sure.
With the grace that she has, she's putting in a couple extra hours there.
Well, where are you headed in Missouri?
Where are you on your way to in Missouri?
We're going to St. Louis, right downtown, St. Louis.
Oh, congratulations.
That's cool.
And what are your Black Friday plans?
Where are you going to go shopping?
We're probably going to hang out with the family, play a little touch football, and maybe go to a movie.
That's our tradition on York.
We're not going to go shopping?
Oh.
No, the drills will probably go, but the boys are going to hang out, watch a little football, and play a little touch football.
I'll tell you what, tomorrow's going to be a great football day.
Tomorrow, an unusual, unusual, two out of three guaranteed good games, and maybe the Dolphins Cowboys game is going to be good too with the way the Dolphins are playing.
Normally, this game would be a Cowboys walk.
Normally, this game is when you turn off the TV, go have Thanksgiving, get ready for the Fortraners and Ravens at night.
But now this game is going to have got great potential.
Yeah, talking about Black Friday, I had a couple stories in the stack yesterday I didn't get to.
Forget Black Friday.
Do you realize that there are certain stores opening at midnight Thursday?
I think Target is one of them.
It is Best Buy and some others, and their employees are not happy about it.
And I must tell you, I wouldn't want to have to go to work at midnight in a retail outlet.
All of these people in food comas, we did the story yesterday.
I know it's Obamaville, and they should be thankful they've got jobs.
I understand it.
And when the boss says the doors are open, I understand it.
I'm just telling you that some employees are resisting it.
They're protein.
The whole, you know, Black Friday is melding into Black Thursday.
And there's another thing.
There's a, I forget where I read this this morning.
That was the New York Post business section.
That while they are expecting record sales across the fruited plain on Black Friday, they're not expecting much profit because they have had to lower prices so much for a bunch of reasons.
A, not everybody has a lot of money.
B, competitors are lowering prices to attract the crowd.
And a lot of people say we're just basically here at break even in our pricing, but that they've got no.
So it's a buying opportunity for people because they're not expecting price supports that would indicate profit.
Anyway, just thought I'd throw that out in case that might change your mind on shopping.
We've got a break.
We'll be back.
Don't go away.
Okay, first to three hours of our day before Thanksgiving program is in the can on the way over to the Limbaugh Broadcast Museum warehouse.
If you haven't seen the Limbaugh Broadcast Museum, you should visit it.
The virtual museum, it's amazing.
It is viewable at rushlimbaugh.com.
Brief time out here, folks.
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