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Jan. 11, 2012 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:45
January 11, 2012, Wednesday, Hour #2
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Time Text
Standby sound bites 22-23 before we go back to the top.
If I can find the top, where the hell is the top?
Get these things out of order.
There it is.
Okay.
Hi.
Hi, folks.
Howard, welcome back.
It's wonderful.
It's a great day.
I want to have this wonderful time here.
Oh, couldn't be better.
The EIB network, Rush Limbaugh.
Hi, how are you?
800-282-2882 if you want to be on the program.
Email address, lrushbaugh at eibnet.com.
I'm sorry, I can't let this go.
There's a teachable moment here.
You must understand I am trying to help.
I'm not trying to be destructive.
Trying to help.
That's all I want to do.
All I want is for Barack Obama to lose.
That is what I want.
It is probably what I care about more than anything.
Outside of family, I'm talking about, you know, you've got the normal things outside of my personal.
The thing I want most is this man to be defeated.
Okay, so I just got this.
I just literally got what?
No, it's Romney.
I just got this 30 seconds.
I was going to start this hour with something.
Well, I was going to start with the sound bites and I got a little stack here, but the establishment started to get queasy.
But then I got this.
And maybe I'm going to make too big a deal out of this.
I don't know.
But I just, I tell you here that my desires and my motivations are pure.
And that is the triumph of this country.
The return to greatness.
At least the return to the path.
Okay, so the review.
What's the soundbite?
What's the summit?
We just Romney on CBS.
21.
Grab 21.
This was a big point the first hour.
This is Mint on CBS today with Charlie Rose.
And a question.
Okay, you know the outlines of what the Democrats are going to say about and Newt and Perry.
That you were a destructive force.
You went in there at Bay and Capital.
You took over these companies and laid people off scorched earth.
What do you say to that?
Well, of course, they tried the same line here in New Hampshire and it fell extraordinarily flat.
People here in the state know that in the work that I had, we started a number of businesses, invested in many others, and that overall created tens of thousands of jobs.
So I'm pretty proud of that record.
By the way, in the general election, I'll be pointing out that the president took the reins of General Motors and Chrysler, closed factories, closed dealerships, laid off thousands and thousands of workers.
He did it to try and save the business.
We also have had an occasion to do things that are tough to try and save a business.
I'm going to go to Washington and cut it down to size.
Washington is simply too big.
Anti-capitalist president who shut down Republican-owned dealerships, who screwed the legitimate investors, the bondholders.
There was nothing capitalistic about what Obama did.
And yet, well, yeah, I'll accept the premise.
Newton Perry out there saying that I did scorched earth stuff at Bay and we laid people up.
Yeah, yeah, just like Obama.
No, no, not just like Obama.
Sorry.
We went through that in the first hour.
Okay, dealt with it.
Fine and dandy.
Move on.
And then from CNN, headline, Romney feels sorry for Wasserman Schultz for having to defend Obama.
Now, hang on.
Hang on.
Presidential candidate Mitt Romney said today, this morning, he feels very sorry for Democrat National Committee Chairman Debbie Blabbermouth Schultz for having to defend Obama's economic record.
She's got to stand up for the president's record, and it's pretty bad.
Mitt, you just did that yourself.
Why help her apologize?
Mitt just, he just equated.
Am I making too big a deal out of this?
He just equated.
I don't think I am.
For two days, Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry have scorched the earth on how Romney burns people.
And Romney today said, yeah, just like Obama to save the company.
Oh, no, not just.
So if I'm Newton Perry, I go out, I borrow money, I start running new ads that say, Governor Romney accepted our premise and admitted that we are right and that he's no different than Obama.
Do you realize what Newton and Perry have at their disposal now with this?
I'm not making too big.
And now he feels sorry.
And I don't care.
It's not that he, I don't, I don't, it's not, I don't care what he feels about Debbie Blabbermouth Schultz.
That's another point.
But when you go out and equate your own actions in the private sector with what Obama did at General Motors, you are defending Obama.
So he's, this is my whole point.
I guess this is, this crystallizes the problem I had, and I didn't quite say it accurately properly last hour.
He's defending what Obama did with General Motors and Chrysler in the process of trying to justify what he did at Bain, which is not what he did at Bain.
All right, I'll move on.
I just, if you're going to feel bad at Debbie Blabbermouth Schultz, have to apologize or defend Obama, then don't help her do it.
She's got to stand up for the president's record, and it's pretty bad, Romney said.
You just equated yourself to a pretty large part of his record.
I don't think he knows that.
I'm sure to his team, it doesn't.
They don't see it the way I do.
And he goes on to say, you've got almost 2 million people that have lost their jobs under this president.
You have median income dropped by 10% over the last four years.
You got 24 million people out of work or who've stopped looking for work.
It's a failed presidency.
People know that.
And Wasserman Schultz has to go out there and defend it.
So what I want to Shiva said?
Okay, here's what she said.
Debbie Blabbermouth Schultz dismissed Romney's victory by saying he only won by 39% at a state next door to where he used to govern.
He only won by 39%.
He only won 39%, not by.
He only won 39%.
He should have won bigger.
He's got a family home in New Hampshire.
He was governor of the state next door.
So to not crack 40% of the primary, which you have droves of Republicans coming to the polls to vote for you, it's a problem.
I mean, did Obama enjoy firing those people at General Motors, the dealerships?
You asking me, my staff does not want me to let this go.
Sending me that question.
Did Obama enjoy?
What's that got to do with Romney?
Oh, oh, oh.
Oh, yeah.
I forgot that.
Romney enjoys firing people.
No, I'm sure that that's in fact.
Since Obama has never said that he likes firing people, the press says, Well, yeah, maybe Obama did have a streamlined general motor, but he hated it.
He hated every layoff.
He hated every lost job.
He hated it.
He didn't enjoy firing people like Romney admits that he likes doing.
That's so silly, take out a content.
Of course, you fire an insurance company for not doing a job, or you fire whatever.
Okay.
Folks, I know you think I've gotten stracked.
I've not.
I am as focused as ever.
What I'm doing here is really biting my tongue.
But play a couple sound bites here.
Harry Belafonte, day oh, day midnight come and me one go home.
Harry Belafonte is not happy with Obama.
Well, this is Sunday, and the syndicated Smiley and West.
Don't tell me they've got a radio show now.
Smiley and Cornell West have a radio show.
I thought they had their poverty tour.
When did these guys get a radio show?
Actually, who doesn't have a radio show anymore?
So, okay, Sunday on the syndicated Smiley and West radio show hosted by PBS Tavis Smiley and retired Princeton professor Cornell West.
I saw Cornell on TV the other day, and he's got that afro going, man.
It is.
I mean, it's right out of talk about the barbershop movie.
I mean, he's right out of that.
He's looking cool.
Cornell's on, and he was revved up.
So they have Belafonte on as their guest Sunday.
And here's the first two soundbites.
When I think of Barack Obama and I think about all that is at stake here, I really long since left talking about how many terms will he be as a president.
I am very cautious of the fact that those who think that he has some hidden agenda and that if only he could be given a second term for us to see the new light, new things will be revealed.
Okay, so, well, very upset that Obama has not raised a hammer and sickle flag.
He just wants to go all communist all the time.
And he's being told that they have to wait till the second term.
They can't do it now or he'd never get re-elected.
And Belafonte is saying, I don't believe the second term.
Crap.
He doesn't have a moral compass.
He's not going to go communist.
He's not going to wait till the second term.
We're being lied to.
Everybody lying about everybody.
Obama's lying, Michelle lying to us.
Ron's lying.
Everybody's lying.
The only people not lying is Jeremiah Wright, and they got it muzzled.
That's what Belafonte said.
So he didn't even pause for a question.
He just kept going.
I think if there was the kind of moral compass serving Barack Obama in the way we all had hoped, the moral force would have helped him make choices.
The absence of that force in his equations, the absence of that barometer to guide him when he has to make these decisions, which are hugely complicated, especially from the political perspective, he should have come to the table with things that I think would have helped us at this moment in crisis.
No, that's pretty much what I said.
He doesn't have the moral ability to go forward.
It's too complicated.
And he didn't know what to do when.
And he hadn't been doing it.
And so, I'm going to vote Romney, right?
No.
I remember once, folks, this was funny.
Shortly after I had moved to New York in 1988 or 89, somebody invited me to a Whitney Houston concert at Madison Square Garden.
That might have been two or three years.
And I don't know.
It was before she'd had all of her problems.
She's big.
And we were sitting in Madison Garden near the front row, and they had the place laid out basically hockey style.
They had a little bit larger than the basketball ring for seats on the floor.
And all of a sudden, I hear people start shouting, get out of here.
What are you doing here?
You had nothing to do with her.
You freeloader.
Who the hell?
And I went looking around.
And I saw Harry Belafonte walking toward the stage that the show had not started.
This is a pre-show.
All the lights are up.
And Harry Belafonte was walking around down there.
And this crowd just started, I mean, mocking him.
I couldn't believe it.
You freeloader, you got nothing to do with her success.
What are you doing here?
De-O Dish!
It was uncanny.
It was all over the place.
Anybody saw him?
I thought, wow, this is a learning experience for me.
Anyway, we're going to go back to the phones.
Here is Peter in Lynchburg, Virginia.
I'm glad you waited.
Welcome to the EIB Network.
Hello.
Thank you, Rush.
I think there's a very fatal flaw in Governor Romney's agreement with failed policy, and that is Ford.
Ford did it without bailout money and has survived.
That's right.
And actually has made a profit.
That's right.
Look, I got people emailing me trying to defend mid on this.
Look at your misunderstanding, Rush.
It's actually a brilliant comment, Rush.
It's really brilliant.
He just didn't go far enough.
He didn't close the loop.
He should have made the point that was about private sector versus public sector.
And I'm thinking, look at he was in full-on defense mode.
He was defending what Obama had done in the process of defending himself.
He wasn't, they didn't look at us a teachable moment at all.
That's what bothers me about it.
I agree with him.
I just totally disagree with him.
trying to be too nice well I think that's nice to I do I I think that is a factor, too.
I think that's why he says he feels sorry for Debbie Blabbermouth Schultz.
He has no gravitas.
Oh, no, no, no, no.
He's got gravitas.
That's the thing.
This guy's got gravitas.
This guy cut your heart out.
I don't mean that pejoratively.
You fire your butt.
Absolutely right.
They just got, you know, the handlers say, don't be critical.
Don't be can't go anywhere to enhance.
Don't call him a socialist to say he's in over his head.
It's not in over his head.
It's where his head is.
Obama's, that's the problem.
He's not in over his head at all.
He's doing this.
He's breaking the law right in front of our faces, and we don't have the guts to call him on it.
All we do is write pieces in our magazine saying, wow.
You believe this?
He's actually recess appointing people when there's no recess.
End of story.
Yeah, yeah, he's doing that.
Yeah, he's suing Arizona because they're trying to enforce immigration law.
He's doing all kinds of lawless stuff.
And our great chroniclers of the deeds of the day sit around and Obama's, but there's no action orientation or action planned after the criticism is leveled.
It's very simple where Obama's head's in.
White man's greed runs a world at need.
Jeremiah Wright.
Obama's preacher, white man's greed runs a world in need.
That's the whole animating premise here.
It's in the audacity of hope or dreams of my father, whatever book it's in.
He's written it.
He said it in interviews.
There's no mystery where Obama's head's at.
There's no mystery how he's been educated.
There's no mystery what he believes.
This is an inherently immoral and unjust nation as founded because the 1% founded it and has been running it since it was founded.
It's not even really so much racial, although I know you can't take the racial component out of it.
Yes, I see Michelle Obama's mad while saying she's not.
She's tired of the angry black woman image that she's got.
She's mad at the New York Times reporter for stereotyping her as an angry black woman.
Imagine that.
She's mad at somebody for portraying her as mad.
Who's next?
Pat St. Charles, Illinois.
Hi, and welcome to the EIB Network.
Welcome.
Oh, Rush, and congratulations.
Well, you turned everybody from Britt Hume to Rachel Maddow into a doodlehead yesterday.
Well, is that how you interpreted it?
That they all agreed with me?
They couldn't start a sentence without saying even Rush.
Yeah.
But anyway, what I want to talk about, and because Newt is horrible at this, but this whole thing with Freddie Mac, everybody jumped all over him for his association.
But the fact is, all he did was have a business.
He had four offices.
He had professional staff.
And he gave advice to Freddie Mac whenever they needed it.
And he had the misfortune of sending them invoices between 1999 and 2007 or 8, which is before everything happened.
There's no evidence that he did any lobbying.
I know.
It's the whole Guilt by Association thing.
It's the double standard that exists for conservatives.
I know, but the thing is, everybody started out, even Rush said.
And I don't know why Newt isn't out there defending himself.
He keeps telling us about these four Pinocchios, but nobody knows what the Pinocchios are or what the truth is.
Wait a minute.
What if I said he's not defending himself about what?
Well, like Freddie Mac.
Oh.
I thought he has been.
No, no.
I think he has been defending himself.
I think Newt has been.
I guess one of the things he has been doing is defending himself, trying to.
Anyway, appreciate the call out there, Pat.
We'll be back.
Welcome back, Talent on Lawn, from God, America's real anchorman.
Real anchor man.
We actually do news here.
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All right, I'm going to get to the soundbites of Rush cable TV last night.
In a moment, one more phone call.
Hudson, New York.
Frank, thank you for waiting, sir.
You're welcome, Rush.
I think you're doing a great job with this teachable moment, but I think we ought to insist that the Republican candidates seize this teachable moment and not be moderate in defending capitalism.
If Mitt Romney did nothing wrong, let's have the details of how he dissolved the company, how it would have been dissolved otherwise, because it's important for capitalists to understand businesses failed, jobs were lost, but it's an accidental unfairness that results in government deliberate unfairness and injustice by trying to intervene.
If the capital and labor that's being deployed inefficiently is not redeployed, it just breeds more inefficiency and more unproductive productivity.
And you can't stimulate the economy.
You can only refrain from ciphling it.
And if you feed government money into weak enterprises to the detriment of viable enterprises, you shouldn't be surprised if not only the company that's failing finally goes under because it's unsustainable, other companies as well who had their markets undercut artificially.
Yeah, but see, in that circumstance, you would be, the liberals would be surprised because they haven't the slightest idea what you're talking about.
There's not a liberal, there's not a liberal breathing that understands a syllable of what you just said here.
Matthew Cannon said yesterday, most American people, when they hear those sound bites, they associate Mitt Romney now with Gordon Gecko, with somebody who deceives people to take over companies.
I know.
They don't look at it as the capitalist process working even.
Well, we're dealing with a hard and cold reality, and that is that capitalism not only hasn't been taught for generations, it has been maligned.
The only reason Gordon Gecko's stuff sticks is because that's what people have been taught.
Gordon Gecko just confirms what they've been taught in class about capitalists.
Gordon Gecko's not teaching anything.
He's confirming these movies.
It's just like the movie The China Syndrome.
China Syndrome did not really create a whole bunch of people who are opposed and afraid of nuclear power.
It confirmed for people, it validated what they'd already been taught.
This is an intricate web of deceit that has been woven by the left throughout every strata of our culture.
Movies, books, music, television shows, you name it.
So when you say teachable moment, yeah, teachable moment, but there's a you can do more damage trying to teach something when you don't know how to explain it.
And if what you're doing in your teachable moment simply defends something that people already hate, you've lost them.
You have got to first tell them that what they believe is wrong.
And you have to convince them what they believe is wrong.
And then you start with the examples.
But I don't know that a presidential campaign is where this happens anyway.
It can with the right communicator.
But Reagan was, you know, yeah, Reagan had multiple talents at teaching.
What assisted Reagan was he was likable.
You got to remember, Reagan did not have a media.
He didn't have a talk radio network or blogs.
Reagan dealt with three networks, the two newspapers, the magazines.
That was it.
Reagan was so good that he was able to go over all those heads and establish a bond of likability and trust with the American people despite what was being said about him.
And very few people have that ability.
Reagan was one who did, and therefore, the things that he taught, and Reagan defended conservatism.
This is the thing that people forget.
Reagan taught conservatism.
He explained it as he went along.
When he talked about cutting taxes, he explained how it benefited the middle class, how it benefited everybody.
And everything Reagan taught was oriented around reducing the size and role of government and freedom, government's role in people's lives, which equals more and more freedom.
This is, and there's just, there's nobody out there now that is, I don't know, capable, willing to do it, or what have you.
But there's no question, every day of politics is a teachable moment when you've got liberals as your opponents.
But we've got our side so scared to be critical of it because of what's going to happen to independence.
This takes me, by the way, to my stack of queasiness.
Not a whole lot yet, but it's starting to efferves out there.
If you know where to look, the first example is the American Spectator.
Now, the American Spectator, I would never lump them in with the establishment or the establishment media.
Nevertheless, this piece by Matt Thomas could be written by one of them.
It's called Mitt's Masquerade.
During the election season of 2010, there was a schism in the Republican Party between populist Tea Partiers and the more politically sensitive establishmentarians.
Today, those two factions have been reshuffled into the Romney voters and the anybody but Romney voters.
The media is still gawking at the volatile Hawkeye Coke, where the two camps did battle for the first time, resulting in a hairbreadth victory for Romney over Santorum.
But in New Hampshire, it's a much steadier affair.
Pauls have consistently crowned Romney.
He ended up winning.
New Hampshire is the Mitt Romney show.
This does not mean that he's going to win the nomination, though.
A quirky, occasionally eccentric alloy of libertarian and moderate politics that is New Hampshire and the Republican primary there has produced presidential candidates and has runs, but it will give Romney significant velocity going into the other states.
What happens if he gets a nomination?
This is where this gets good.
What happens?
And this is where the queasiness is starting to come in these other two pieces I have in the stand.
And this, by the way, is a stack that's going to grow.
Let me explain at the outset what is happening here within the sacred hollows of the establishment, the ruling class.
Their objective since this campaign began was to make sure a conservative nominee did not get the Republican nomination.
That has been the number one objective of the Republican establishment inside the belt with a whole Northeastern corridor, to make sure not to beat Obama, not come up with somebody that can beat Obama despite all this electability talk.
The main objective of the establishment has been to see to it that once again, a conservative does not get the nomination.
After New Hampshire and after Iowa, the establishment, now you hear them, they're out there touting this notion.
Why, this is historic.
Why, this hasn't happened since 1976.
Why, the Republicans never won the Hawkeye Caucasian New Hampshire primary back, this never happened in 1976.
That's power.
So now, that is being used to solidify Romney's inevitability.
So they think they're disclose to have successfully vanquished any possibility of a conservative nominee, which was their number one objective.
When that happens, they then really for the first time face what they have given themselves.
For the first time, they then start examining the genuine chances of Romney's electability.
Up till now, they have just been trumpeting the notion that he's the only guy that can win just as a rhetorical device, just as a campaign strategiery.
He's the only guy.
His purpose has been to vanquish all the conservatives, split that vote so that a conservative did not get the Republican nomination.
But now, now that they believe that Romney's the guy, now for the first time, they're gulping and they're looking at what they've wrought.
And now they are examining, oh, okay, what do we have to do now?
Because their objective, don't doubt me on this.
Their objective up till now has not been to win the election.
It's not been to come up with the best candidate to beat Obama.
It has not been that.
I don't care what they say.
The purpose, the objective has been to see to it that a conservative doesn't get the nomination.
They think they're there now.
And you will see more and more pieces being written, and there will be more and more commentary and pundit punditry on the cable networks.
And for the first time, the very people who have been hawking Romney and singing his praises, you're now going to hear them start to discuss his shortcomings in terms of their fears.
They haven't looked at that before because that has not been the objective.
Brief time out, my friends.
Come back and I will give you examples of that which I have just said after this.
Okay, American Spectator Piece, MIT's masquerade, Matt Thomas, the problem with our likely frontrunner.
What happens if Romney gets the nomination?
That question has been stubbornly elusive in media coverage, exactly as I said.
They haven't even been talking about that.
The coverage instead has focused on the innuendos surrounding Herman Kaine and Newton Gingrich's grandiosity.
Meanwhile, Romney slips by relatively unscathed, the beneficiary of the perfunctory conventional wisdom of political strategists, which is, hey, he looks good on TV.
Leave him alone.
He doesn't say outlandish, extremist, conservative stuff.
He's the only guy that can be elected.
He's the best candidate.
Leave him alone.
He's the flag carrier for hard-headed realists who will compromise generously for a win over Obama.
But he's also a patrician flip-flopper from Massachusetts.
And the rest of this piece goes on to compare Romney to John Kerry, who served in Vietnam.
It does.
When Kerry won the Democrat nomination in 2004, the historical moment was rooted in the tumult of the Middle East, its smoldering memories of 9-11, but Kerry's political genealogy traced back to the 1960s counterculture, found in war medals chucked over the White House fence, accusations of monstrous crimes against his fellow soldiers in faux committee rooms.
Kerry's political life wasn't any more helpful.
They go on to describe that.
Thus, Kerry was transformed into a barrel-chested war hero who retook Boston Harbor on the night he went to the convention.
I never forget that.
Got his old swift boat buddies, and they sailed across the Boston Harbor and conveniently conquered it again.
And then he shows up, hey, John F. Kerry reporting for duty.
When everybody knew the guy hated the military through his, this is the point that they're making here.
He was a flip-flopper.
He was, and no prayer.
Wasn't genuine.
This piece goes on to draw some comparisons for Kerry and Romney in the flip-flopping what's real and what isn't.
Just, and that's one of our guys.
Next, Jonah Goldberg.
What's pretty slick?
Yeah, I'm going to get to the soundbites.
I'm going to get to the soundbites.
I promise I'll lead the next hour off of soundbites.
I'm doing what I think is more important first.
The soundbites happened last night.
This is the now.
I live in Littoralville.
Next up, Jonah Goldberg and his column in the Los Angeles Times, Jonah Goldberg at National Review, which has many, many people there who aspire to be in the establishment.
It's a great desire they have there.
Some of them, not all, but some of them do.
Romney's authenticity problem is the headline that the LA Times has assigned to this piece.
It feels less guaranteed every day that rank-and-file Republicans would vote for their nominee in huge numbers no matter what.
Now, National Review has been for Romney.
I don't know about Jonah personally, but National Review, his magazine, has been for Romney.
Here we are on what everybody thinks is the eve of Romney wrapping it up.
And now a columnist at National Review worries may not be electable.
It feels less guaranteed every day that Republicans will vote for this guy in large numbers, no matter what.
Mitt Romney is the most improbable of presidential candidates, a weak juggernaut.
He's poised to sweep every primary contest, a first for a non-incumbent, and yet in Republican ranks, there's an abiding sense that he should be beatable and beaten.
It's not that Romney doesn't have fans.
His events in New Hampshire are packed to the raptors and feel like general election rallies.
He's surging in polls in South Carolina, Florida, and yet the non-Mitt mood just won't go away.
In fact, it's intensifying, writes Jonah.
One reason is that people are starting to doubt whether he is, in fact, the best candidate to beat Obama.
When did this doubt begin at National Review?
My only point here is, and again, I do not know where Jonah Goldberg comes down for Romney, against Romney.
I don't know where he's been up till this piece.
All I know is where National Review has been.
And they did have an unsigned editorial that just raked Gingrich over the cold.
Else it was obvious to conclude that by a process of elimination Romney was the guy.
Now Joan is not writing for National Review here.
I should say this is his syndicated column, so there may be nothing to link this piece with the editorial position at National Review.
Now he goes on to say he thinks that Romney's unelectability is a little overdone.
He's got his faults But he's non-threatening.
He seems more like a super helpful manager at a rental car company than a Bible thumper.
The White House would love the opportunity to run against a culture warrior.
Seems that many in the media would like the same thing, hence the absurd grilling of the candidates in Saturday night's ABC TV debate about contraception and so forth.
The bottom line is, here you have some, wait a minute, wait a minute.
Now on the verge of getting a nomination, all of a sudden, now we're starting to hear a piece.
And it did appear in that, I know it appeared in National Review, but not.
Got to take a break at time here.
But it's just saying, I'm just saying, if you look at the right places in the wannabe or real establishment, Republican establishment media and other places, you're going to find,
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