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Feb. 13, 2012 - Rush Limbaugh Program
32:35
February 13, 2012, Monday, Hour #3
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Hey, views expressed by the host on this program documented to be almost always right, 99.7% at a time.
Great to have you here as broadcast excellence rolls on unimpeded.
From the Limbo Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies, our telephone number 800-282882, the email address L Rushbow at EIB net.com.
I want to continue here and wrap up with the Paul Rahe piece that appeared on Friday, February 10th at Ricochet.com, which again is a relatively new website started by Peter Robinson, who is a friend of mine, Peter Robinson took over firing line for William F. Buckley.
It's not called the same thing, but took over the time slot on PBS.
And he's now out at Stanford at the Hoover Institute in Palo Alto.
And this Ricochet site, it's uh it's a great conservative highbrow site, and it's conservative.
It's not watered down, and it's not made up of a bunch of people who are trying to be the smartest in the room, and so they already are.
And they already know it.
And so they're confident in their superiority.
They have to prove it to anybody, they're not intimidated, they're not inferior, uh, and and trying to mask it.
Now, I had to race through because of the constraints of time, an excerpt that Mr. Rahe published here from Joseph Cardinal Bernadon when he gave a lecture, the famous Gannon lecture at Fordham University in 1983.
And it's a two-paragraph excerpt, and here it is.
Those who defend the right to life of the weakest among us, this is a Catholic cardinal here.
Those who defend the right to life of the weakest among us must be equally visible in support of the quality of life of the powerless among us.
So he was, Mr. Rahi makes the point, abortion was just one of a potpourri of issues.
That all must be viewed the same way.
That you can't have a single view on abortion and have it not touch other things.
He continued.
Well, those who defend the right to life of the weakest among us must be equally visible in support of the quality of life of the powerless among us, the old and the young, the hungry and the homeless, the undocumented immigrant, the unemployed worker.
Consistency means that we can't have it both ways.
We can't urge a compassionate society and vigorous public policy to protect the rights of the unborn, and then argue that compassion and significant public programs on behalf of the needy undermine the moral fiber of the society or are beyond the proper scope of government responsibilities.
If you're going to say that if you're going to oppose abortion, uh you have to you you have to then argue that the government should take care of the poor needed.
Remember what the root of all of this is.
That the Mr. Rahey's point is the church sold its soul when it began to accept the notion that government redistribution of wealth equals charity.
By the way, that has ensnared a lot of groups, not just the Catholic Church.
That notion has ensnared a lot of and individuals, as supporters of the notion that it equals charity.
When it doesn't equal, it's destruction, it's destroying lives.
The redistribution of wealth and the silly notion that the government can provide meaningful, solid lives morally and economically for people, is absurd.
It destroys dignity, it destroys humanity, it destroys the family.
But as long as people think of it as charity, it gets them off the hook.
It's why Gore and Biden can get away with giving away 200 bucks.
Well, the government's doing it.
I don't need to.
Now, Mr. Rahe, you In responding to Cardinal Bernadette, this statement, which came to be taken as authoritative throughout the American Church proved, as Joseph Sobrin, National Review observed seven years ago, to be nothing but a loophole for hypocritical Catholic politicians.
Nothing but a loophole.
If anything, it has actually made it easier for Catholic politicians than for non-Catholics to give their effective support to legalized abortion.
That is, it has allowed them to be inconsistent and unprincipled about the very issues that Cardinal Bernadin said demand consistency in principle.
In practice, this meant that insofar as anybody pressed the case against Roe versus Wade, it was the laity.
The church wasn't so much.
Mr. Rahe says I was reared at Catholic.
I wandered out of the church.
I stumbled back in more than 13 years.
I've been a regular attendee at Mass since that time.
I travel a great deal, frequently find myself in a diocese not my own.
In these years, I have heard sermons articulating the case against abortion three times in 13 years.
Once in Louisiana at a mass said by the retired archbishop there, once at the cathedral in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and two weeks ago in our parish in Hillsdale, Michigan.
The truth is that the priests in the United States are far more likely to push the social justice agenda of the church from the pulpit than to instruct the faithful in the evils of abortion.
And there's more.
I have not once in these years heard the argument against contraception articulated from the pulpit, and I have not once heard the argument for chastity articulated.
In face of the sexual revolution, the bishops, priests, and nuns of the American church have by and large fallen silent.
In effect, they have abandoned the moral teaching of the Roman Catholic Church in order to articulate a defense of the administrative entitlement state and its progressive expansion.
They've become socialists.
There's another dimension to the failure of the American Church in the face of the sexual revolution, as by now, everybody knows 1980s, when Cardinal Bernadon was the chief leader of the American Church and the man most closely consulted when the Vatican selected its bishops, became evident to the American prelates that they had a problem.
Pederists inclined to take advantage of young boys.
There were priests of homoerotic orientation who were just sexual predators.
Now the church could have faced up to the problem at that time.
They could have turned in the malefactors to the secular authorities.
They could have prevented their further contact with the young instead.
Almost certainly at the instigation of Cardinal Bernadon, they opted for another policy.
They hushed everything up.
They sent the priests off for psychological counseling.
They reassigned them to other parishes or even dioceses, where they continued to prey on young boys.
In the same period, a number of the seminaries in which young men were trained for the priesthood became, in effect, brothels.
And nothing was done about any of this until the newspapers broke the story and the lawsuits began.
There is, I would suggest rights, Mr. Rahe, a connection between the heretical doctrine propagated by Cardinal Bernadon in the Gannon lecture and the difficulties that the American church now faces.
Those who seek to create heaven on earth, and who to this end subvert the liberty of others and embrace the administrative entitlement state will sooner or later become its victims.
And that is precisely what has happened to the church here.
And that's why he wrote the piece.
And I'll tell you something else you should read in this regard.
Those who seek to create heaven on earth.
There's a book I mentioned because this book is out.
I don't have to write a book right now.
Mark Levin has a book out called A Meritopia, and it's about just this very thing.
Those who seek to create heaven on earth, the utopians, and who they are, and who their forebears are.
Plato, Montesquieu.
They all believed it was possible to create heaven on earth, and that's what the modern Democrat Party consists of.
It remains an effort to create heaven on earth.
Total equality, no suffering, no pain, no risk.
Government providing equally for all.
Charity here, charity there.
And everybody who subscribes to this, everybody who falls prey to it, doesn't matter if it's a Catholic church or general electric.
They're gonna get bit, just like the church has.
Because the church is by no means, this just absolutely the focus of Mr. Rahe because of what happened last week, but how many other institutions have sacrificed their own identity for this notion that government redistribution of wealth equals charity, and therefore they support it.
It isn't charity.
The word charity comes from the Latin word.
Which in the Bible means Christian love.
There can be no Christian love when you are forced by the government to give some of your hard-earned income to the government to give to others at the effective point of a gun that is not charity.
And yet, look at the number of people who simply take the easy way out.
And say, you know what?
In addition to taxes, I look at all the charity take.
It's the simplest cop-out.
It's a path of least resistance.
To equate socialism with charity, and yet look around the world at socialism and what happens to people who live under it.
There's nothing charitable about it.
Socialism does not improve people's lives.
It does not make stronger the family.
It does not inculcate a moral code, a virtue that sustains a society or a culture.
A church used to do that.
But the church doesn't even do it anymore.
The church has become progressive.
Not just the Catholic Church either.
I grew up a Methodist.
Gee, they've gone off the rails too, and they all have.
It's all about left-wing liberalism, socialism, so-called compassion, when that's the last thing it is.
The redistribution of wealth ends up being compassionate to one group of people, and that's the people in charge of it.
And the compassion that they get is the credit for having big hearts.
But they don't live under it.
You'll notice that the people who believe in redistribution are not on the receiving end.
No, no, the redistribution of wealth is not for them.
There wouldn't be enough.
They couldn't get rich.
They couldn't get wealthy.
They couldn't get the import duty on every bottle of scotch sold in America.
If they've lived the philosophy they enforce on so many others.
Back in 1932, FDR, in his campaign, praised churches for standing ready to lead in a new war of peace.
The war of social justice.
The war for social justice.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt insisted that government is seeking through social and economic means the same goal the churches are seeking.
Through social and spiritual means to achieve for every American a more abundant life.
FDR also said the churches, while they remain wholly free from even the suggestion of interference in government, can at the same time teach their millions of followers that they have the right to demand of the government, of their own choosing, the maintenance and furtherance of a more abundant life.
So FDR was encouraging not the separation of church and state, but the government.
He was encouraging religion and the churches to join him in government in propelling his agenda.
This country was founded by people who were escaping religious tyranny.
And now look what Obama's doing.
He's attacking The Constitution at its very root.
With his ruling last week that the church, and then okay, sorry you don't like that insurance companies will provide abortion, contraception, morning after pills, whatever.
Gotta take a break.
Sit tight, my friends.
We'll be back with more after this.
Now, one hopes, and Mr. Rahe makes this point as you continue to read the piece.
He said they finally came to understanding.
The church finally came to grips with the reality when it came to the priest problem.
And he hopes that the same thing happens here.
He hopes that there is a reawakening of the Catholic leadership.
Because of what happened last week.
And if there is that, then can we dream that there would be a reawakening among other institutions who have been seduced, like the church was.
And I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and say they were seduced.
And look, liberalism is very seductive.
It's the easiest, most gutless choice you can make.
Because basically, what does it do?
It absolves you of any responsibility.
It absolves you of any responsibility for charity for good works.
Let the government do it.
Your taxes are paying for it to boot a double whammy.
Boy, what a great citizen you are.
All you have to do is become a good liberal.
Look at what happened.
You care, you have compassion, you're understanding, you're open.
Look at all the wonderful things said about liberals, and all you've got to do is see somebody suffering and say, gosh, I hate that.
That's horrible.
And then you have to learn how to criticize Republicans for causing it, and you're home-free.
And then you come out and you support high taxes on people that make more money than you do to fulfill the charitable aspects of liberalism.
And so there you go.
That's all it takes to be a liberal, and you don't have to know Jack anything.
You don't have to know diddly squat about anything.
So we finally got to the point where being a good Christian today is calling for higher taxes on the rich.
How easy is that?
Doesn't matter.
That says everything about how you live your life.
That says everything about your virtue.
You call for higher taxes on the rich.
You wail and moan about how the rich cause the poor, the rich don't care about the poor, that you're willing to do even more to help.
You're willing to go out and demand that more people pay higher taxes.
Not you, of course, but other people.
And look at you.
You're accepted, you're loved, you're thought to be smart and brilliant.
Paul Rahe, I said, R-A-H, I hope I'm pronouncing that right.
I think uh Warren Buffett's got to be up for sainthood by now.
That's how that's how this happens.
I guarantee it's some diocese, somebody suggesting Warren Buffett for sainthood, even if he's not a Catholic.
The uh NAROL, Pro-Choice America, this is the NAGs formerly known as the National Abortion Rights Action League.
They are running radio ads in Colorado, Florida, Virginia, and Wisconsin, thanking Obama for requiring private insurers to provide free coverage of contraception and abortion drugs.
The ad features a woman being told by her pharmacist that her birth control pills require no copay and have no charge.
Thanks to President Obama, the 99% of women who use birth control in America could now hear this same message.
You see, we scored an important victory when the president stood up for our health care and guaranteed insurance coverage of birth control at no cost.
That's in the ad.
That's on the radio.
The Nayral gang all over the Obama agenda of giving free stuff to people.
And everybody thought at first that Obama got beaten back last week.
And Obama had his plate handed to him.
Uh-uh.
Big time win.
The Republican leader in the Senate, Mitch McConnell said he's so confident the Democrats will not support Obama's budget.
He's going to introduce the bill himself.
He's going to put it up for a vote.
Obama rolled out his budget today, includes 1.39 trillion deficit.
Anyway, McConnell plans to take what he's doing.
It's a campaign document.
He claims not a budget.
Force the Democrats to give it their endorsement or their rejection.
We'll see if he does it.
I hope he does.
it's the last thing Dingy Harry wants.
They do not want to vote on it.
This budget is not ever meant to see a vote.
It's McConnell's right.
It's a campaign document.
It's no way this thing will ever be voted on.
Last time Obama had a budget it was voted on, and it went down 97 to nothing.
And McConnell introduced that one, and it went down 97 to zip.
Bloomington, Indiana.
Let's head back to the phones.
This is Dan.
Thank you for waiting, sir.
It's great to have you on the program.
Rush, what a tremendous thrill up my leg it is to speak with you.
Um it was one of the momentous events that you always remember where you were when I first listened to you in 1988.
I was on Highway 70, east of Indianapolis when you came on, and I heard you for the first time, and it was like a bolt out of the sky.
I couldn't believe somebody was on the radio saying the things that you were saying.
And uh, and I remember exactly where I was.
Uh it was it was quite a thrill, and and and I remember telling people, you've got to hear this guy.
I cannot believe that this guy's on the radio.
So I'm guessing it only took you five minutes to come to this conclusion.
Oh, it not even that long.
Yeah, I was gonna say it didn't take anywhere near a whole show.
You ought to see the crease in my pants if you like.
You gotta tingle up your leg.
You ought to see the crease in my pants.
I've got friends listening to this.
I hope they know what I was talking about, the Chris Matthew thing.
But uh I I want to say regarding the church, uh, before I get to my point about Centorum, uh, the Bible is very specific.
The conservatism is from God.
Ecclesiastes chapter 10, verse 2 says a wise man's heart directs him towards the right, but the foolish man's heart directs him toward the left.
Straight out of the Bible.
Uh but uh I just I wanted to say that um uh uh I think Rick Santorum, I I'm feeling good about him, and I believe that he's ultimately going to be the nominee.
I think the process is working, and the longer we look at all these candidates, uh the the more we see and understand who the true conservative is.
And I think Santorum, you've said this before, he speaks it.
It comes, it pours out of him.
He's fluent in conservatism, and Romney's protesting that he is one.
And I think he's a very good thing.
Well, I agree.
I agree with you.
I I think conservatism is in Santorum's bodily fluids, and I and I think because of that he's he's able to articulate it without thinking about it.
And Obama wants Romney as the candidate, not just because of Obamacare, but because uh Romney, I think, is going to be the candidate that he can uh run his class warfare campaign off of much easier.
Him versus the haves, the haves versus the have nots.
I think that's what Occupy Wall Street was all about.
I I I think you're right about that.
You reminded me here, Dan.
I've got something else in this stack today that is big.
It is from the Daily Caller.
Folks, I want you to listen to this.
Dan, thanks very much for the call.
You I appreciate all of your your your thoughts, nice words, I really do.
A lot of people, most everybody, does remember where they were when they first heard this show.
Medical insurance premiums in the U.S. are on the rise.
The chief architect of Obama's health care overhaul has told the Daily Caller website.
MIT economist Jonathan Gruber.
Listen to this, folks.
You've heard this before, you've heard it from me, but it's out there now.
MIT economist Jonathan Gruber, who devised Romney's health care reform, is backtracking on an analysis he provided the White House provided the White House in support of Obamacare in 2010.
He has informed officials in three states that the price of insurance premiums will dramatically increase under Obamacare.
In an email to the Daily Caller, Mr. Gruber framed this new reality in terms of the same human self-interest that some conservatives had warned in 2010 would ultimately rule the marketplace.
Gruber, whom the Obama regime hired to provide an independent analysis of health care reform, was widely criticized for failing to disclose the conflict of interest created by $392,600 in no bid contracts.
The Department of Health and Human Services had awarded him while he was advising the president's policy advisors.
Gruber also received over a half million dollars in 2008 and 2009 from the NIH to conduct a study on Medicare Part D. Let me cut to the chase here.
Mr. Gruber, who wrote Romney Care, wrote Obamacare and is out today saying that everything he believed about premiums going down as a result is wrong.
As I have been trying to pound home for three years, Obamacare will break the back of the middle class and the country financially.
And that was part of the plan.
The way Obamacare is going to work is that employers will drop health care coverage.
It becomes too expensive.
You will not be able to keep your plan or your doctor.
Health care will be made so unaffordable in the private sector that it's out of reach for people to pay for.
The middle class will have no choice, and this is not going to happen overnight.
It's going to take some years, but ultimately, and Obama's even said that.
Ultimately, the middle class will be forced to sign up for government insurance that they would have never considered before.
It's either that or go without.
Premiums will skyrocket.
Middle class workers forced to carry the uninsured on their backs.
This is all in this story.
So now we hear from one of the writers of Obamacare, an economist from MIT, that he got it wrong.
Everything you've heard said on this program is now happening.
Everything Gruber has been saying is wrong now by his own admission.
It turns out that Gruber, the infallible go-to guy, the media quoted exhaustively during the marginal BAM care debate, wasn't an impartial source.
He was bribed with $392,000 in no bid contracts with the Department of Health and Human Services awarded him while he was advising Obama on the so-called Affordable Health Care Act.
And he also got half a million dollars during 2008 and 2009 for NIH or from NIH to conduct a study on Medicare Part D. So while being paid by the federal government, he advised them that Obamacare, they could say on his authority, premiums would go down.
And now he's out today in the Daily Caller saying, uh, sorry, uh, isn't gonna happen.
It's a very, very long story.
But it adds up.
Everything that we've instinctively known about Obamacare is now being documented to happen by the people who put it together.
Be right back, folks.
Don't go away.
Sit tight.
Ha.
How are you?
Welcome back, Rush Limbaugh, meeting and surpassing all audience expectations.
Every day.
David in Scranton, Pennsylvania, has been holding on for over two hours.
Nothing we could do could force him to hang up.
So we thought we'd better take the call.
Hi, David.
How are you?
Excellent, Rush.
How are you?
Very well.
Thank you very much for holding on.
I would wait a lot longer than that for you.
Here you here we go.
Uh, two main things I've learned from you over the years, uh, two decades of listening to a student, uh lit liberals, when they propose something which is supposed to be the best for the people, or the best for their constituents, it's the exact opposite, which is the thing that would work the best.
We've seen it many times.
That's exactly, and that they lie.
The two go hand in hand, but you're exactly right.
Correct.
The second thing, Rush, is that whatever they blame the Republicans, the conservatives of, no matter how outlandish, no matter how ridiculous.
It is that very thing that they themselves are guilty of.
Correct?
In many cases, in many cases, that's exactly right.
With that being said, Rush.
Harry Reed says the Republicans are putting arsenic and mercury into the water stream.
The water system.
Doesn't that mean that we should ask the logical question?
What the hell does Harry Reed know about arsenic and mercury into our water supply?
Well, let me tell you what's going on here.
The the the simple fact of the matter here is that this is uh it is absurd.
This this mercury in the water, this this dates back to 2001, when George W. Bush was inaugurated, and the Democrats came along and said that Bush is not in favor of changing the standards that are for the permissible levels of arsenic in the water.
There is arsenic in the water supply.
It's there, it's uh arsenic's a trace elements in much places.
And the Democrats, here's the important point to me.
Let's say that you're an average American and your day consists of getting up and watching the Today Show.
Then you switch off to MTV.
After that, you watch a couple soap operas, and then you read Us Weekly and People Magazine, and your day consists of living for entertainment tonight, and whatever those other entertainment shows are at 6:30.
You live and breathe for it, and you can't wait for the Grammys to come on.
Then Winley Houston dies, and you absorb twenty three straight hours of it without going to bed.
And in the middle of all that, you happen to hear Harry Reed say Republicans are poisoning the water in the air.
They want more arsenic in the water, uh and and so forth, and you believe it.
Harry Reed was talking about the Keystone Pipeline as a means of trying to convince people that what the Republicans were going to end up doing is there's they love oil so much they were going to look the other way at all the toxins and poisons that would end up in the water supply.
And his point was Republicans don't get they love oil more than you.
They don't care if you die.
Have you ever noticed Republican CEOs want to kill their customers?
The drug companies want their customers to die.
Big oil wants their customers to die.
Well, if you listen to them, that's the logical conclusion that you have to make after listening to Democrats describe what they do.
The Reed Reed brought it up because the Republicans are trying to get Keystone in exchange for a payroll tax cut continuance, and he's trying to scare the half-brains who pay attention now and then.
He knows this is the scary thing.
He knows that there are going to be some people who believe Republicans want to poison the air and water.
I mean, folks, that's that is the entire foundation for environmental wackoism.
Republicans like pollution.
Republicans want dirtier water and dirty air.
Somehow they're going to see to it that only you have to breathe it or drink it.
We think that it's outrageous that Reed would say it, and it is, but there's something worse.
The scary thing is that there are some people who believe him.
Don't doubt me.
It's a Democrat Party refrain.
Republicans want to kill the environment.
Republicans love pollution and poison.
Republicans want to kill people.
The Nazis used to accuse the Jews of poisoning the wells.
It's a common leftist tactic.
Harry Reed might think he is original.
But uh but he's not.
Okay, folks, that's uh just about it for the busy broadcast.
It's a good thing.
Voice is on its last legs today.
Has it sounded that way to you?
Good.
Good, because I've been performing uh uh vocal cord tricks uh in order to mask it, but just a little cold in the throat, not a big deal.
But we'll uh no, it's not jet lag.
I got uh no, no, no, no.
Jet lag West Coast jet lag is no such thing.
Not for veteran travelers like me.
Three hours, no, no, no, it's not not at all.
Anyway, folks, it's been fun.
Sit tight, and we will be back tomorrow.
Valentine's Day, every day.
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