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Jan. 24, 2012 - Rush Limbaugh Program
35:52
January 24, 2012, Tuesday, Hour #3
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Yes, America's Anchorman is away, and this is your undocumented anchor man sitting in.
I will be attempting self-deportation before the end of the hour.
In compliance, it's the pilot program for Mitt Romney's new scheme.
I'm going to be attempting self-deportation.
They're dropping like flies here.
H.R. bailed after the first hour.
He couldn't take it any longer.
He's he he couldn't take it.
Now uh now Mr. Snerdley is on his feet.
He's uh he's getting he's getting to uh it's uh I I spoke too much about Brian Williams.
Brian Williams, if you have difficulty with your loved one, by the way, if they're having difficulty sleeping, just uh just say the words, Brian Williams.
You don't need to watch the debate.
Just say the words Brian Williams in that kind of uh big uh anchor man lantern jawed way of his, Brian Williams, and and they will be out like a light.
Uh we were talking about the debate, uh also looking forward to the State of the Union.
By the way, I hope Brian Willi I would love it if Brian Williams were to do to the State of the Union what he did to the Republican debate last night.
Uh that would be great.
Why doesn't he just sit there and say, uh, Mr. President, uh it's great to uh it's great to have you with us.
Uh can you tell us uh what uh you would have done in the Elian Gonzalez case.
Do you think we should send you you managed to take out uh Osama bin Laden?
Do you think we should send uh the Navy SEALs into Cuba to take out Elian Gonzalez's dad?
Uh let's talk about this for twenty minutes.
These are the issues that the American people care about.
Uh he's gonna be, given his State of the Union tonight.
We were talking earlier about the difficulty you have.
Uh Mitt Mitt Romney and Mr. Snardley made this point very well, that we didn't we talk about people being natural politicians now.
Uh ever since the age of Bill Bill Clinton.
Bill Clinton was a natural politician.
What that meant is he touched you a lot.
If you ever saw Bill Clinton on the stump, uh and uh and people would go up to him and say, Well, what's your favorite uh uh what's what's your favorite kind of music?
And he would he would place one hand on their elbow and one hand on the small of their back, which was very r very restrained by Bill Clinton's standards, and he would say, Well, what's your favorite kind of music?
And then they would go, Well, you know, I like country or whatever.
And he'd go, Well, that's my favorite too, amazingly enough.
And then he'd be it's like when he was with uh when it w Hillary, what what chilled Hillary to the bone was when uh w was that piece in the Star Report where Monica Lewinsky said, Oh, whenever I hear I'll be seeing you, Billy Holiday singing I'll be seeing you.
I always remember that's our song.
And Hillary and Hillary was chilled to the boat because that had been their song too.
But that's that's what people mean when they say he can make a connection with people.
He's he was he was an object less at Bill Clinton in how you can be almost too human.
Uh Mitt Romney is has the opposite problem, and that he's a he's very convincing.
I don't know what lab in China they developed this for.
I think it was Japanese, actually, this form of highly advanced android with very flesh-like skin.
It's a superb model in many ways, but it's it just falls down a little bit on the human interaction thing.
And it's very difficult to fake that.
But Mr. Snadley made a point that until Clinton came along, we didn't used to think about people in these terms.
Uh we didn't nobody nobody thought, oh Nixon, he really he really connects with people.
Nobody thought uh, you know, Warren Harding connected with people.
Nobody thought Taft connected with people.
If he if he tried to connect with people, he'd have fallen on them and crushed them.
We didn't expect it until Bill Clinton came along.
And uh and I think I think this is the i i fascinating thing, what's gone wrong in election year so far.
These are critical times.
We're not looking for a healer in chief.
With in the Bill Clinton years, Bill Clinton presented himself as the guy who felt your pain.
And actually there wasn't a lot of pain to feel back in the nineteen nineties.
Uh so it was a kind of indulgence.
We could have the sort of soft focus opera fide thing.
Now there's a hell of a lot of pain.
Do you want a guy who's gonna feel it or claim to feel it?
Because Bill Clinton doesn't feel it.
Bill Clinton's off giving speeches to the Saudis for huge uh six figure sums.
Bill Clinton's got a beach house uh where is it on the Sunshine Coast in Australia, uh near um Noose uh Noosa in Queensland.
He's got some place on the west coast of Ireland, wherever you are, wherever you are, Bill Clinton isn't gonna be feeling your pain because he's on the other side of the planet.
So there's uh th there's no point going for the guy who feels your pain.
You want a guy who's gonna fix your pain, who's gonna end the pain, who's gonna make the pain go away.
And if I was Mitt, uh I that's the case I would make.
I would say, sure, there's you know, I know I'm a rich guy.
I know I I I have a hard time, you know, ps pretending uh that I like the same things as you, you know, go Bruins or whatever he said when they won the Stanley Cup, I'm sure he knew enough to do that.
Uh but there's no point him pretending that he's a guy who likes uh nothing better to than to be uh up country and appalachia uh face down in the uh still and enjoying a jigger of moonshine before having a bunk up with his cousin or whatever, there's no point in him pretending to be a man of the people like that.
He should say, I'm a rich guy, uh I've got a Cayman Islands bank account, uh, but I can f I can't f I can't feel your pain because of my Cayman Islands bank account.
When the pain gets really bad, I'm gonna be off to the Cayman Islands, uh emptying the bank account and flying off somewhere else.
Uh but I can fix the pain.
I can fix the pain.
And in serious times, it's time to st th the the whole fraudulent therapeutic nature of the campaign uh is pathetic.
It's not where we need to be.
Uh you know, when when they have recruitment ads, a brilliant recruitment ad attracts the five or six people who are qualified for the job.
The five or six people who can do the job when you put in a recruitment ad.
If it goes slightly screwy, uh you open the door on Monday morning and there's twelve hundred people there uh applying for the job.
And the trick then uh is to uh in the audition to to find out who's got the skills needed to do the job.
And that's what's wrong.
That's what's gone wrong uh with the with the system this time.
The system does not set the tests needed to figure out who can do the job in critical times.
If you just want some fraudulent twerp who'll claim to feel your pain when in fact uh he's gonna be jetting off to Martha's Vineyard uh and uh and running his uh hands up and down Carly Simon's uh glowing back like uh Bill Clinton did every summer vacation, uh that's fine.
But we're not we're way beyond that.
We've got massive problems.
And the case that these guys ought to make, Newt ought to say, you know, Newt ought to say, yeah, sure I shouldn't have taken the Freddie Mac thing, yeah, sure uh I wore out my welcome as speaker, yeah, sure my ex-wife uh loathes me.
Big deal.
Uh this country's broke, it's broker than anyone's ever been.
Do you want a guy who can fix it even if he's got a lousy ex-wife and uh even if he's got a uh and even if he's uh g taken money from Freddie Mac.
Mitt Romney's case ought to be, yeah, sure, I'm not the warmest most guy in the room.
I'm not gonna pretend that I'm gonna be coming to the sports bar uh out on Route 142 uh for a mud wrestling night and we're gonna have a great time uh while we uh ra uh ra raise a beer and we watch the gals roll around, so what?
I'm not one of the boys.
Uh I can fix this problem.
And that's that is really uh the case that these these guys have to make.
And again, I say this as a foreigner.
Most countries divide the head of state from the head of government, right?
So if you go like to Canada, uh they've got a queen and then they've got a prime minister.
And if you go to Germany, they've got a president and then they've got a chancellor.
They divide the job from the fellow who embodies the state, the head of state, from the guy who runs the government.
The United States, for historical reasons, combine both roles in the Constitution.
And that means in a media age that there's a tendency to look at the guy who's president as somehow uh he shouldn't just be an effective uh uh political leader, but he should somehow embody the values of the state.
You know, if you're looking for somebody to embody the national character, Mitt Romney is a bit insufficient.
If you're looking for someone to embody uh the values of America, uh Newt is a uh a wild ride, uh trailing more baggage than the Hindenburg.
There's no point to that now.
We're in a serious we are in a serious situation.
Either of these guys would be better than Barack Obama.
And uh we we we had all the great slogans last time.
Hope and change.
Change you can believe in.
If it's a choice between hope and change or hope and marriage, if it's a choice between Obama's hope and change or Gingrich's hope and marriage, well, forget about the hope and marriage and uh just figure out he may be able to do something about the mess we're in at some point.
This is the critical term.
Rush what Rush was saying I was not only gonna Rush said yesterday I was not only gonna hammer Newt and hammer Mitt, he also said uh I was gonna say we're all doomed.
Well we're not all doomed.
We're not all doomed quite yet.
But if by the end of this presidential term we have had either another four years of Obama, or we have had four years of drift by a doesn't quite mean it mildly right of left of right of center uh squishy type guy who's just keeping the seat warm for the next Democrat to win, uh then we really will be doomed.
Then we really will be doomed.
Once China becomes the world's dominant economic power, once the world starts operating to China's convenience, once the Russians and the Malers in Tehran and the Politburo and Beijing figure out that they may not agree on much, but they all agree that uh it's it's easiest just to stick it to America as America goes down the tubes, then we will be all doomed.
So the so the question then is whether you want to run on a vapid empty slogan, an airhead slogan, a valley girl slogan, like, oh, change you can believe in, because I believe in change because change is full of hope and and I I think change makes me more hopeful, and the more hopeful I am the more I want to change.
Or you want to actually have a have a guy who's gonna roll this stuff back, uh who's gonna drive a stake through the four trillion dollar budget and reduce it to something closer to what this country can afford.
Uh then you know, maybe in the scheme of things, the the fact that one guy has an open marriage or however many open marriages he's had by now, and the other guy uh is uh has problems connecting with people and hasn't got a lot of human war warmth, maybe these are peripheral.
Nobody looked at uh uh m Mr. Snerdley made the point that uh the George Washington, these were these were like wealthy moneyed landowners.
They didn't need Cayman Island's bank accounts in those days because America uh had such a reasonable rate of taxation that you could keep leave your money in uh in continental onshore bank accounts.
But i if they'd got to the point where they needed ba offshore bank accounts, those guys would have been the kind with the ca Cayman Island bank accounts.
They didn't pretend.
They didn't pretend uh that uh that that it was all about hope and change and vapid slogans.
It's not that it's more important than that this time.
It's more important.
And the test for the American electorate here is whether it's mature enough to understand that it cannot afford another four years either of accelerating the present insanity or another four years of seat warming drift uh by by some milk toast Republican.
Uh whoever wins in November has got to get real about this stuff, or as uh as Rush warned up be saying yesterday, we are all doomed.
We'll take your calls straight ahead on the EIB network.
Yeah, we're in a sugar beat groove on the Rush Limbaugh Show today.
Cane sugar hides behind beet sugar.
That's what Newt says.
Let's go to Bob in Auburn, Massachusetts.
Bob, you are live on the Rush Limbaugh Show.
Great to have you with us.
Hey, uh Bob, is Auburn anywhere near Lynn, Massachusetts, about which we were talking about?
Probably uh twenty-five miles.
Okay, so but you're not uh like stealing food stamps, buying uh sixty-four bucks worth of coke and then feeding it into the uh the the uh the the the can return nickel dispenser, are you?
I'm just outside, about five miles outside that uh that that stuff, you know.
Okay, so Auburn hasn't been reduced to the pitiful state of Lynn, Massachusetts.
I don't think so.
Good for you.
Let's keep it that way.
What's on your mind, Bob?
Mark, you know, I um I got another outrageous Obama job killer here, okay.
Now um the Air Force just awarded a big contract to Brazil, okay?
Right.
Now on the surface you say what else is new?
What the uh Gulf oil and all the rest of the stuff.
Yeah.
But three intriguing points here.
Uh Soros owns twenty percent of the company.
So you've kind of figured out.
But um Beechcraft uh who worked with the United States Air Force and and spent a hundred million dollars on this project and they're based in Florida, fifteen hundred jobs.
Right.
Uh were shut out of the bill uh bidding completely.
They didn't even get a chance to bid after they invested all that money for Air Force specs.
Now the real outrageous part of this is this Brazilian company and Briar Umbrera.
Embraer, right?
Something like that.
Is it's under investigations by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the Justice Department for Violations of the US uh foreign corrupt practices act.
Right.
And they just got the contract.
Now uh you know, the thing bothering me is well, we're worried about what Romney's taxes are, which is a joke.
What what's Obama doing behind the scenes?
I mean, this is probably just the tip of the iceberg.
This has been going on these Republican debates for three months.
It's all it's all smokescreen on what's really going on, because no one's paying attention now.
This is troubling.
M Embraer is uh a lot of people will know Embraer because they they build a lot of the small commuter planes that fly around uh the country.
So if you fly out of Massachusetts on a little commuter plane uh down to uh Pennsylvania or whatever, you you you're either going to be on an uh Embraer or uh something from up in Canada.
Uh but but y this is not a small contract, it's about a third of a billion dollars.
Well, I I I it says a billion, but you know, it's a billion dollars.
So I mean it's not it's not what it whatever it is, and it's to build uh I think uh uh light attack uh Yeah, it's uh it's uh it's light easier support plane.
Right, right.
But the thing here is I mean, there's a lot of jobs involved here.
Yeah.
And uh you know, uh another th you know, Obama's cause he's uh he's eyes like a laser on jobs across the pipeline, I'll tell you that.
But you're you're you imply, because as you say, Soros is money in this company that this is this is one of those insider things we were talking about earlier, that if you know uh it's like the Cylinder guys were well uh they were well connected enough to to get uh fellows in the administration to say uh to the other guys, well we don't care whether it passes the process or whatever, we want you to go back, take another look at it, and this time come back with the correct answer.
And your suggestion here is that somebody on the inside made an insider's decision.
A suggestion that that somebody spent a hundred billion dollars uh in conjunction with the Air Force, and they don't even get a chance to bid.
No, no.
You're gonna be kidding me.
And they don't get a chance to appeal the decision either.
But you know something?
Uh there isn't gonna be a lot more of this in the in the years ahead, Bob, because you you you talk about this.
You say it's a let's say you're right, and it's a billion dollar contract.
And uh where where is that billion dollars cu uh coming from?
Uh the United States government is borrowing that uh b uh billion dollars to give to a uh Brazilian company that will uh create uh jobs for Brazilians to make a plane in Brazil uh that the United States government will then buy with borrowed money from China.
Eventually this sort of thing catches up with you, and China uh China down the line is not going to be continuing to loan money to the United States government to uh expand its uh to to to give to Brazilian companies to improve the state of its military.
In a sense, this is this is the kind of he'll be able to do this for another time.
If he's reelected in November, we'll get another four years of this stuff.
But at a certain point this drives it over the cliff.
And this gets back to the pipeline thing.
That in the end he keeps talking about being the jobs president, the jobs president, he's focused like a laser on jobs, and yet every opportunity he gets uh to create jobs, real jobs, as opposed to phony baloney green jobs like at Cylindra, every opportunity he gets, uh he says no.
And as as you said before, we know that with Brazil with the oil, where he congratulates the Brazilians on doing something off their shores uh that he doesn't want to happen off our shores.
Uh every time he gets a chance and he won't talk about this tonight.
He'll have some guy sitting there who represents uh you know, ecologically friendly window treatment sitting next to Warren Buffett's secretary.
But he's not gonna he's not gonna address uh real jobs for real Americans, Bob.
Yeah.
They should be hammering the pipeline every single debate and don't get off it because that's a huge point.
And if Obama gets four more years, we're finished.
Yeah, well, I would agree with you on that, Bob.
And and that's why, by the way, just to return to this debate last night, you should say at some point a moder at some point these guys are presidential candidates.
This election isn't about Brian Williams.
Nothing's about Brian Williams.
Brian Williams is entirely unimportant unless you're the stylist who gets to do his hair.
Uh in which case he's very lucrative.
But other than that, Brian Williams is not in the least bit important uh to what is facing the United States of America.
So if you're if you ask some stupid question about something that doesn't matter, you should say to him, Well, Brian, this is great.
This is a fantastic game of trivial pursuit.
Uh next time why don't you invite us over to your place?
But are we going to get to talk about the pipeline?
The pipeline, the pipeline, is the embodiment of everything that is wrong with the Obama economy.
It's uh it's uh it embodies the way this guy says, well, uh Republicans have to stop playing politics.
The pipeline is pure politics, pure politics.
And it doesn't come up in the debate.
What is wrong?
What is what is wrong with all four of these candidates that they want to let a guy like Brian Williams frame the terms of the debate so they can portray Republicans as out of touch and obsessed on a lot of freaky deekey issues, and then the twenty-four hours later, Obama stands up there in uh in the well of uh Congress and he delivers a speech that shows how in tune he is with the real concerns and the real pain of the American people.
The pipeline should be hung around Obama's neck every day between now and November.
Great to be with you.
Rush returns alive tomorrow for full strength, all American.
Excellence in broadcasting to take you through the end of the week.
Salt Lake City, a University of Utah professor charged with viewing child pornography on a plane has resigned.
Uh university spokesman Remy Barron says 47-year-old Grant Smith stepped down last month several weeks after he was arrested, November 26th, following a flight from Salt Lake City to Boston.
Uh prosecutors say a fellow first class passenger saw Smith viewing the images and took a cell phone photo before alerting a flight attendant.
It's it's not a good idea.
If you have got a serious child porn habit, it's not a good idea to watch it on a flight uh from Boston to Salt Lakes.
I know the in-flight movies can get a little boring, but honestly, don't fire up the laptop and start watching your child porn.
Uh it's best to wait till you land in uh in Salt Lake City.
Uh this guy, by the way, it's fascinating glimpse of the kind of people uh who uh who get tenure at universities.
This guy, I've never heard of him, 47-year-old Grant Smith, he's a professor of at the University of Utah.
Uh he's viewing child porn in first class.
Why is a a like a forty-seven-year-old University of Utah professor uh fly able to fly first first class to view it?
Shouldn't he be viewing the child porn back and coach?
There's something very weird about that story.
Uh speaking spiking uh about about the uh the people who uh they they make yeah.
Mr. Snerdley uh points out that we live in an age where why why wouldn't you watch the child porn on the f uh on the flight?
Because like we live in an age where people go and beat up Granny in the street, they go and mug little old ladies in the street, and then they post it on YouTube and it goes viral, and uh everybody goes, look, that's great, that's little Jimmy who lives next door, uh kicking the walker out from under the old lady.
Well, isn't that great?
It's like next thing you know he'll be on TV.
Uh we we live at a very strange age.
I want to get to one other, uh by the way, uh air travel story.
United States Senator ran ball uh at Nashville International Airport.
He missed the March for Life in Washington, the pro-life march, the March for Life in Washington on Monday, uh, because he refused a pat down at a security checkpoint.
He went through a scanner at the airport and it set off the alarm.
This one, these full body scanners.
And by the way, they are very twitchy.
You know, the the he he he said, well, it's obviously a malfunction.
He showed him he's got nothing under he rolled up his trouser legs, showed up he's got nothing under his socks.
Uh they still they wanted to subject him to a physical pat down.
He said no, he was happy to go through the scanner again uh because it was obviously what they call a false positive.
Uh all every every piece of junk that the government uh installs is full of false positives.
If you've ever driven through the border where they're supposed to scan your uh license plate, the license plate scanner is uh a uh a border guard told me that the license plate scanners are inaccurate forty percent of the time.
Um these this so this guy goes through the scanner, Rand Paul, he's a United States Senator, and then he says he doesn't want to have a full body pat down.
He doesn't want to have uh government commissars uh getting into his underwear without probable cause.
Uh so he says he's happy to go through the thing again.
They say, no, you've got to have you gotta have the TSA guy has got to be able to get his hand into your crotch.
He's gotta be there in the underwear.
Federal regulations say he has got to have his hand on your upper thigh.
And so uh Rand Paul refuses and he's dragged away and by the time the situation's resolved he misses his flight and he has to get a later flight.
And so he doesn't get to appear at the March for Life.
This goes on all over the country every day.
Now Rand Paul's dad is using this.
What does he say?
Old Ron Paul says uh this this is just an example of how this country's degenerating into a police state and uh and uh a police state in this country that's out of control.
Ron Paul is using it to fundraise on.
One of the ultimate embodiments of this police state is the TSA that gropes and grabs our children, our seniors and our loved ones and neighbors with disabilities.
The TSA does all of this while doing nothing to keep us safe.
Now he's absolutely right on that part.
The Transport Security and man administration has never caught a single terrorist.
Nobody has ever been caught by the TSA.
And when you look at them that shouldn't really surprise you.
Do they look like the guy who d who who's gonna who's gonna spot the jihadist?
No they don't at all.
But they're very good.
It's it's great by the way, if you're if you this University of Utah professor charged with viewing child pornography on a plane from Salt Lake City to Boston uh and uh he's now lost his job, if you need a job go for the TSA.
You can stick your hand in the uh panties of underage kids all you want and the government will thank you for it.
They say well it's keeping us much safer.
Go go for it, man.
Go for it.
It's it's your heart's delight.
It's a perfect job.
It's the dream job.
Rand Paul is not just the embodiment of the incompetent Transport Security Administration system.
He is the embodiment of the deformed relationship between the citizenry and the state in America at this pivotal time in our history.
Think of Rand Paul not just as the cranky libertarian son of the cranky libertarian candidate.
Think of Rand Paul as representing the mass of the citizenry and think of the Transport Security administration as representing the broader United States government.
This guy is going to get a plane, he's gonna hop on a plane, he's going to appear for professional reasons at an event in Washington.
He's on business.
He's on business, he's doing his job and in sorting out the little whatever it is, the TSA's got one story and Rand Paul's got another version, whoever's right, doesn't matter.
He missed the flight, he wasn't able to get there and do the job.
What when they factor in the cost of the TSA, do they factor in uh the cost of all the people who are pulled erroneously aside, who are made to uh an un uh un uh the the uh the the woman in Florida who is made to uh remove an adult diaper uh and uh missed her flight and had to be picked up at an uh airport two hundred miles away from where she was supposed to be landing.
When they do all this stuff, do they factor in that cost to the economy?
Because th the broader way to look at what the TSA's doing is the micro regulation of the citizenry and the cost it imposes on the economy.
Every time your plane uh you you get pulled out of line by the TSA, uh it it's a liberty issue as Ron Paul says uh and he's absolutely right that if they uh if they can get away with it at the airport, they'll be doing it at railway stations, they'll be doing it at bus stations, they'll be doing it at interstate ramps.
Uh if they if you accept the right of uh minor state officials to stick their hand in the gusset of your briefs without probable cause the idea that it will be confined to the airport is preposterous.
It's a liberty issue and these guys are right on that.
But it also exemplifies the loss to a productive economy, the transfer, the remorseless transfer uh of wealth uh uh from the uh productive class to the state bureaucracy.
Uh Rand Paul was unable to fulfill the engagement in Washington for which he'd been booked.
That happens across the country to hundreds, thousands of business people uh whose names you don't even know because they're not United States Senators.
Regulation sucks money from the productive class to the dead hand of the state.
And that's uh that's where Newt fell down last night when he got the stupid question from Little Miss Lefty uh journalist from the Miami Herald auditioning for her gig on MSNBC and uh and she asked him why the Bush cuts didn't tax cuts didn't work and Newt gave a very one answer.
But at the heart of it he was absolutely right that the regulatory burden is too late.
You know, Rand Paul couldn't attend that rally because the state commissar demanded that he comply with the state regulatory bureaucracy.
There's too much of that in America.
The TSA, it's not just that the TSA is entirely superfluous to American security.
It's not just that it's pointless, wasteful, meaningless theater.
It's not just that it's disgusting, absolutely disgusting, uh that uh minor state officials should have the right uh to put their hands in the underwear of your f grade school children uh uh and your sick dying mom in the wheelchair.
It's not just uh objectively disgusting on that sense, it also represents the sheer total numbing waste of time uh of the bureaucracy uh and that it's sucking all the time, it's sucking wealth and time uh out of the productive class in this country.
So this Rand Paul thing is not a small b thing.
Uh we all know it it's nothing for the United States security, nothing to do with that at all.
Uh it makes no difference to the United States.
It gets back to this whole stupid business uh where we profile things rather than people.
Uh and the more and the and the more inventive the jihadists get the more things we're gonna people are you're not gonna be able to board a plane with gel breast implants soon, which is going to be hell on women in certain jurisdictions in this country.
Uh there's going to be more and more and more of this stuff.
But what it is in the bigger sense is it's the bureaucracy's right uh to interfere in small ways, add costs to the conduct of your business.
Uh that is what went on when Rand Paul was prevented, prevented by the bureaucracy from speaking at the uh pro life rally in Washington yesterday.
Mark Stein in for rush, more straight ahead.
Mark Stein in for rush on the EIB network.
Uh Warren Buffett's secretary is going to be the guest of honor at the State of the Union tonight.
I uh I don't know how many secretaries get to go to the State of the Union.
I hope she's like uh Nixon's secretary, and she can maybe delete fifteen minutes in the middle of the speech and do us all a favor.
Let's go to Linda in Spring, Texas.
Linda, you're live on the Rush Limbaugh Show.
Great to have you with us.
Thank you, Mark.
It's a pleasure to speak with you.
I enjoy you when when Russia's out.
I just have one statement to make, but it is so important, and you are making it very well.
It is the what, not the who.
And that's what we need to focus on.
It's the statement of the candidates.
It's their stand on the issues.
That's why the debates are so important, and that's why last night was such a waste of time.
Yeah, you yeah, I think I think you're you're right.
I didn't explain it very well, Linda, but uh so I'll let me sort of come at it a different way.
Like those of us from parliamentary systems, you often get uh it winds up in a parliamentary system.
The guy who heads the party is a bit of a stiff.
Uh John Howard, the great Australian uh prime minister in the first decade of this century uh fell into that category.
Stephen Harper, Conservative Prime Minister up in Canada.
They're often accused of being cold, they don't have the human touch and all the rest of it.
But what what's better than big charisma is big ideas.
What's what's that that is actually more important.
If a guy's got the right ideas, you can take a pass on the charisma.
Uh if he's got charisma but no ideas, what do you what do you got?
Or if he's got charisma and the wrong ideas, then you're really in trouble in a.
Well, and that's why Newt is the flavor of the week because of the statement he made at last week's debate.
He was the flavor of the week, and that's all.
He is not the right candidate, neither is Romney.
No, but but the the at this stage, you know, and per in personal in in the personality sense, we're not going to get the right candidate.
So what Rush was talking about is what mat what matters is who can advance the ball on conservatism.
Who can uh articulate conservative ideas and who's likely to get the scale of the challenge when they take office next January.
That's exactly right.
And that's why the good old boy network in the Republican Party is not giving their backing to Rick Santorum.
Because that they allow him to make his statement of conservatism and constitutional bases, they know he will resonate with the voters, and they can't have that.
He'll knock them all out.
Well, you know, Linda, I like I I bumped into uh Rick Santorum at an event in New Hampshire a couple of weeks ago.
I just had a little conversation with him on oddly enough about his Habsburg Empire grandfather uh fighting on the Russian front, is what we wound up talking about.
He's a very pleasant, he was a very pleasant fellow.
He gave a very good speech, by the way, that night in New Hampshire.
Uh but what he didn't do last night was seize the opportunity when when when Mitt and Newt were going back and forth like uh uh uh uh uh a couple of uh you know highly strung drama queens uh snipping back and forth at each other, he should have stepped in and delivered the big message, conservative uh big big big picture conservative message.
But he didn't quite seize that moment, Linda.
That's right.
And what a shame that was.
Do you think he's got time to do it?
I yes.
Yes, this is not over.
Texas hasn't voted yet.
That's true.
How many delegates do you have?
Oh, about five hundred.
Yeah, that's right.
I think we've got what what do we got in New Hampshire?
Six or something?
I don't know.
Yeah, you uh you you count way more uh in the numbers.
I think just to get that in perspective, by the way.
I think at the moment, uh uh Newt has thirty-two delegates and Mitt has thirty-one.
So nobody's been chosen out of the whatever it is, however many you need to become the nominee.
Uh so b so people people shouldn't let uh people shouldn't let this uh this this thing be curtailed too early.
But do you think Rick I mean that at a certain level, Linda, I take your point, but nobody's shutting up Rink Samtorum.
In a format like last night, you've got to you've got to seize your moment, you've got to take it, uh, and you've got to be on your game and and uh and position yourself.
And I couldn't honestly say Rick Santorum did that last night.
Right.
He didn't do it last night.
I was so disappointed in that because I saw it.
And I saw where he could have stepped in.
He needs to jump in with both feet, and that's exactly what the American people, the voters waiting for.
They know Newt is not it.
They know Mitt is not it.
Rick is Ron Paul.
Oh my goodness.
No, no, no, no worries.
We we we haven't got time to get into Rod Paul at this stage.
But look, uh th thanks for your call, uh, Linda.
And look, here's the here's the thing.
Realistically, uh Rick Santorum and Newt and Mitt and even Ron Paul are gonna be uh are gonna be way better than uh than Barack Obama.
And and the point is we we can have a lot of fun uh at this stage of the process.
But it's important not that we don't just uh in a sense give the other guys uh the arguments they're gonna be using after the nomination uh process.
I'm I'm all in favor of let's let's grant everything bad that's ever been said about these guys and say, okay, that's a given, that's a wash.
It's the famous cartoon of Nixon in January 1969.
Okay, now one free shave.
In other words, we're starting from fresh at this point.
Uh and and let's say, what are you gonna do about the future?
What are you gonna do about America now?
Let's not relitigate the past and all the rest of it.
And Rick Santorum, if he can articulate that message, he's in the game.
If he lets another debate like that one last night slide by, I don't think Florida's gonna shape up so well for him.
He needs these debates for the oxygen uh and he's got some uh and he so he needs to seize his moment.
Thanks for your call, Linda.
More to come on the EIB network.
Mark Stein in for Rush.
Uh in the Oscar nominations, best actress, it's Mrs. Thatcher versus Marilyn Monroe.
That would have made a hell of a that would have made a hell of a nominating debate, by the way.
Why couldn't we get uh Brian Williams would probably be able to kill that stone dead too?
But uh looks like Mrs. Thatcher, Merrill Streep as Mrs. Thatcher, may be getting an Academy Award.
I don't I think she'll she'll win out of a Michelle uh Williams as Marilyn Munro.
But it's uh a sad comment that uh there may be a better uh light up in the uh uh president of uh political heavyweights in the best actress category of the Oscars.
That is it.
I'm gonna take Mitt Romney's advice and submit myself to self-deportation.
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