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Feb. 20, 2012 - Rush Limbaugh Program
37:13
February 20, 2012, Monday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 Podcast.
Well, how about this, ladies and gentlemen?
It looks like the establishment Republicans are very worried that Romney cannot win even if he is nominated.
They're very, very worried that even if Romney is nominated, he can't win, yet they continue to push him.
There is a bunch of pieces.
By the way, Grievies, great to have you here on President's Day.
Yes, I know it's a holiday.
I did not get lied to or, well, deceived by the staff, as I announced on Friday.
I was given the option.
I was told that today was going to be President's Day, and I said, I'm coming in anyway.
Because there are going to be a couple of days next month that I've got to take off for charity things.
So I figured I'll show up today.
Because when we get to around July or August, it's going to be intense.
What would he election and everything?
But at any rate, at any rate, it was fascinating to read blog after blog and news story after news story.
The establishment Republicans are scared to death.
If Romney loses Michigan, his so-called home state, if Romney loses Michigan, in fact, one, I don't know if it's a blogger or actual news network, talked to a unidentified Republican leader, might have been a Republican senator, might have been somebody in the upper ranks of the party, not sure which, one of the two,
actually said that if Romney loses Michigan, the party is going to have to get in gear and try to find somebody else that they can nominate at the convention because they don't want Santorum and they don't want Newt and they don't want Ron Paul and they don't want anybody else.
They don't want Rick Perry.
They don't want anybody else that's come before.
I mean, folks, nothing could be, oh, they're salivating.
Are they salivating Mitch Daniels?
They're salivating over trying to change Jeb Bush's mind.
Oh, yeah.
But no, look, here's, folks, this is the, well, I mean, in the mood I'm in, it's funny, but it's actually very irritating.
Here you have the Republican establishment, which, by virtue of this admission, that if Romney loses Michigan, they think he's going to lose the nomination.
And that means it's time to ditch everybody and go find somebody else.
That is a tantamount admission that they don't care what their own voters are saying in all of these primaries, in all of these elections.
We are seeing the Republican establishment force a candidate down the throats of the Republican base that the Republican base is obviously saying from primary to primary to primary, they're not really sure, really not all that sold on Romney.
And so the establishment is, oh, well, okay, well, we've got to find somebody else you don't like that might be able to win it, which is what it boils down to.
They are saying, depending on where you go, certain bloggers, certain Republican party officials, high-ranking elected Republicans are saying that the reason this is happening, the reason that Romney doesn't catch hold, the reason Romney's not getting any traction, the reason Romney's not running away with this is because of the conservatives who have been challenging him.
And they think none of these conservatives can win.
Santorum can't win because he's too conservative.
Santorum can't win because he's too big a spender, according to Romney and Paul.
Tea Party needs to stop making demands of Boehner and company.
The conservatives are screwing everything up.
The Republican establishment is essentially saying that the conservatives are screwing everything up, making a Mess of this.
That if it weren't for the conservatives, which is just the party, if it weren't for the conservatives, Romney would have had the nomination sewn up by now, damn it.
If it weren't for the conservatives, all this would be done and everything would be hunky-dory.
It's funny.
It is breathtaking to watch.
There was a piece over the weekend, and I wish I'd printed it out.
I didn't because there were many, and they all said the same thing, but I wish I had that one piece in front of me to go verbatim.
Don't anybody try to find it.
It's not necessary.
But it was hilarious, this official of the Republican Party, unnamed, blatantly saying that if Romney loses Michigan, that they're going to have to go back to the drawing board and find somebody else and not broker a convention.
It can't really broker one, but try to manage what happens at the convention to stop all this.
And you know what's really scaring them?
It's so predictable.
What's scaring them is that Santorum is coming out and he is unabashed, being honest and truthful about his beliefs when it comes to so-called social conservative issues.
And they are in a panic.
This is the ever since 2008, the Republican establishment, well, before that, actually, but I mean, in this modern incarnation, since 2008, the Republican establishment has had as its primary objective to rid the party of the dominant influence of social conservatives.
And look what's happened.
Look at what's happened.
The base of the party is basically telling the establishment, sorry, we don't hear you.
We are who we are and we are this party.
If Romney cannot win Michigan, we need a new candidate, said the unnamed Republican senator who hadn't endorsed anybody, who requested anonymity.
If he can't, because it's ostensibly his home state, dad was governor there and all of that.
So as the program unfolds, we will be talking about this in great detail.
Audio sunned by Santorum yesterday on Face the Nation with Bob Schieffer.
James Taranto at Best of the Web Today, Wall Street Journal, the blog, has a really good post on social conservatism and what it means in terms of winning to the Republican Party.
The regime now, the Obama regime, is in the middle of thinking they'd better retool for Santorum as opposed to gearing up for Romney.
And of course, they think they're going to be sitting pretty because of the social issues.
But let's not forget it was their guy, Barack Hussein Obama, who tied Jesus Christ to his policies a couple weeks ago.
Do not forget, where was he?
Obama was out making, it was the prayer breakfast, the national prayer breakfast.
He equated Obamaism with Christianity and said, basically, what he's doing is what Jesus would do.
So there's that.
We'll get to that in due course as the program unfolds.
Washington Post, Dan.
In fact, I'll tell you how big this is.
When I did show prep, putting it all together this morning, it just evolved.
There is a Santorum stack here based on all this.
So much that I had to separate it from the primary stack.
And Dan Balls had a piece Saturday in the Washington Post: Is Rick Santorum too conservative to win in November?
And what that headline really means in the Washington Post is this: Is Santorum conservative enough to actually win?
They're getting scared.
They know the left knows, as I've told you from the get-go, the left will always tell us what they fear.
They'll show us.
They'll demonstrate what they fear loud and clear.
So this headline is Santorum too conservative to win in November.
You could actually make two headlines out of it, a headline and a subhead.
The headline would be, is Santorum conservative enough to actually win?
The subhead would be, uh-oh, we never saw this coming.
They thought the establishments of both parties thought that they had dispatched the bitter clingers into a state of permanent irrelevance.
And this is the exact opposite has happened.
Now, ladies and gentlemen, I'm sure you are also aware, you have undoubtedly heard about ESPN using a racial slur in two separate stories about the new basketball sensation, Jeremy Lynn of the New York Knicks.
ESPN on their website early in the morning on Saturday put a headline or subheadline, Lynn had not had a good game.
And they actually, somebody at ESPN, who's been fired for this now, wrote a headline.
I don't even think I should say the word in the headline, even though I'm quoting them.
Well, actually, no.
Actually, I have used the word, but not the way I use it all the time.
Their headline said about Jeremy Lynn, who is Asian American.
The headline said, a chink in the Knicks' armor.
Who said he didn't know it was offensive?
Oh, come on.
The reporter, the headline writer said he didn't know that was offensive.
What a crock.
Said he didn't know it was a racial slur.
Anyway, what happened is they fired the guy who wrote the headline.
An anchor on ESPN actually read the headline, but because he didn't write it, he only got suspended for 30 days.
So the headline writer at ESPN canned the anchor who read it suspended for 30 days.
Now, here's where ESPN blew it.
I'll give you people at ESPN a little guidance here, a little lesson.
If you would have just mocked his Christianity, everything would have been fine.
And the headline writer might have been promoted.
But if you would have come up with the word devout or failing faith or some such thing in your headline, you would have been celebrated as a hero inside ESPN.
You took a shot at the wrong thing.
You took a shot at the ethnicity where you should have taken a shot at his Christianity if you could take a shot at the guy.
I know these people at ESPN.
I know how they think, but nobody would have blinked an eye if they would have made fun of him for being a Christian and made some headline about how his Christian faith failed him during the game.
And I hope you people at ESPN, we want the best for everybody here at the EIB network.
I really hope you've learned a lesson here.
It's perfectly fine to make fun of anyone's religious beliefs as long as they're Christian, but you can never mock their ethnicity unless they're white.
Now, I also was reading, I read most Mondays, I read Peter King's web column at SportsIllustrated.com called Monday Morning Quarterback.
And Peter King has a hilarious entry about this, and it's quite telling.
Why don't I do it?
Oh, here it is.
It's on the second page.
Here's the entry by Peter King.
It's in the 10 things he thinks, the very last page of his web piece.
Great job with your cover story on SI this week, Pablo Torre, telling America lots it didn't know about Jeremy Lynn.
Amazing in this day and age that in college, in the Ivy League for Crying Out Loud, Lynn got peppered with slurs like chink and sweet and sour pork on the road.
So Peter King, we would expect these kind of slurs in Hickville, but not in the Ivy League.
Oh my God, what is happening?
He got slurred in the Ivy League.
How can that be?
That's funny to me.
The Ivy League can't believe that there would be this kind of political incorrectness in the Ivy League.
This is the kind of stuff that happens, you know, Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina, what have you.
So anyway, Jeremy Lynn, I heard him.
What you think about this?
No, I don't care.
Don't worry about it.
I've heard it before.
Guy apologized.
No big deal.
He's not caught up in it.
Oh, you know what?
Let me tell you something.
Just a second here.
Let me tell you something.
The Whitney Houston funeral.
I did not watch it because I was playing golf, but I saw highlights of it.
And I'm going to tell you something.
That Whitney Houston funeral, if the whole thing, it went five hours, right?
If the whole thing was what I saw, that funeral should scare the Democrat Party to its core.
Do you realize nothing that happened, nothing that was said from the pulpit inside that church at the Whitney Houston funeral could ever be uttered from the podium at the Democrat National Convention?
What do I mean?
Oh, well, okay, then I'll have to tell you about this as the program unfolds.
You didn't see it?
You're chiding me for watching highlights of it.
You didn't even see it for crying out.
It's my job to know about this stuff.
And you're making fun of me.
What am I, Jeremy Lynn here?
Well, I wasn't going to watch five hours of it, but I saw enough of it.
And I had a lot of emails about it, too.
About what?
Drudge's headline, America Goes to Church.
All day Saturday, America goes to church.
This was a five-hour Christian worship service.
And I'm telling you, none of this that happened could ever be said anywhere near the Democrat Party or their convention or what it had to scare them to the core.
I'll explain all this.
I can't do it all right now.
That's why there's three hours here every day.
So we got a lot to do, as you can tell.
I'll take a brief obscene profit time out here, and we'll come back and get started with all of it after this.
And this is great, too, folks.
This is fabulous.
Welcome back, Rush Lindbaugh.
By the way, telephone number 800-282-2882 if you want to be on the program.
Politico.
Here's the headline.
2012, the year of birth control moms.
First came the soccer moms, then the security moms.
Will 2012 be the year of the birth control mobs or moms?
Maybe it's a good faux pas.
Democrat strategerist and pollsterette Celinda Lake says it's enough to really irritate independent suburban mothers and re-engage young single women who haven't tuned into the campaign so far.
Meaning, Santorum and all this talk about contraception, which as you and I know is totally trumped up.
Nobody, even now, after all that happened over the weekend, including Santorum, nobody is suggesting that we ban contraception, particularly at the federal level.
That's a totally manufactured issue.
If you are a regular listener to this program, you know that this all began on February or January 7th in a debate.
Stephanopoulos, the moderator, asking Romney if he believes in contraception.
And Romney, what the hell is this?
Why are you asking me that?
That's not an issue.
I don't care, says Stephanopoulos.
Would you support the states or banning contraception?
George, it's silly.
Nobody's talking about.
But it was on there.
It's on the record as asked and answered.
And of course, Santorum had previously answered that he thought the states could if they wanted to.
He's a state's rights guy.
It was reacting to the question more in a state's rights context than he was a contraception context.
So they've ginned this up because they do not have an issue they can run on.
They do not have the economy.
They do not have one thing in Obama's record they can point to and say, you want four more years of this vote for us.
So they have to gin something up and they have done it here.
And so now they're going to drum up this birth control moms?
Isn't that kind of contradictory?
A birth control mom?
How do you become a mom if you're into birth control?
No, no, no.
I know that after you become a mom and you don't want to do it anymore, fine, but it's all trumped up.
There aren't any birth control moms out there.
You know, the soccer moms, if you recall, there really weren't any soccer moms either.
Soccer mom was the invented voting group.
And if you recall, the soccer moms were average, ordinary, middle-class women who drove SUVs and vans.
And they just did it all.
Oh, my God.
They got up, and the moment, five minutes later, they're fatigued and ready to go back to bed.
They had to do whatever.
They kicked breakfast, get the kids off school, pick them up from school, go to the school play, and then take them to soccer practice, then take them home, then feed them, then go to the play, and then go to bed.
And Bill Clinton cared more about them than their own lousy husbands did.
That was the soccer mom contingent.
Their own husbands took them for granted.
Own husbands couldn't have cared less, but Bill Clinton cared.
He cared more about them.
Anybody in their whole lives did.
And then the security moms, same kind of creation now, birth control moms.
It's going to be an interesting week for Rick Santorum because the kitchen sink and the devil are going to be thrown at him.
And how he deals with it will be fascinating to watch.
I have my own suggestions and my own ideas, which I, of course, will share with you and thus with him through you as the program unfolds today.
Public policy polling, very liberal polling group out of North Carolina.
Latest polling data out of Michigan shows Romney catching back up.
How many, by the way, they told us that Romney had to win New Hampshire because that's his home state.
That's next door to Massachusetts.
Michigan is his home state.
How many home states does Romney have?
So now Michigan's his home state, and Romney went back to Michigan and he does.
He's got some vacation homes.
Nothing wrong with that.
Nothing wrong with multiple vacation homes and nothing wrong with having multiple home states.
I do not have two home states.
Okay, then you're going to count Saccharid.
I have three.
I've got Missouri, where I was born and raised, and then I've got Sacramento, an adopted hometown.
And of course, I lived in New York.
You can say that, so maybe four plus Florida.
Yeah, I divorced New York, but they won't get the message.
They keep auditing me every year.
New York's trying to collect alimony from me every year.
I just had to submit to them the last three years of airplane records because they don't believe what I'm telling them the number of days I didn't work there, which was zero.
Don't get me, don't, don't, don't get me distracted on that.
I'm well focused here.
We're going to get to Santorum and the culture war and the devil and all the stuff that's going to be thrown at Santorum this week.
But first, let me discuss the Whitney Houston funeral and get that out of the way.
We can move on.
Forbes magazine, maybe it was a blog.
I'm not sure which.
But they apologized by warning readers that they were going to be talking a lot about Christianity in their reporting of the story.
They even brought up Whitney Houston's dog-eared Bible.
The Forbes article on her funeral, no offense, kids, but everyone talked about Whitney's passion for the Bible.
No offense, kids.
That's Forbes magazine.
Jesse Jackson was there.
I don't know if you saw it, I think you watched it.
The Reverend Jackson did not look comfortable with the way this was going down.
This was a five-hour church service, unabashed, no apologies.
It was Christianity 101 with no excuses made from top to bottom.
It had an unwavering Christian theme, which it should have.
She was a Christian.
Her church was a Christian church.
It was a Baptist church.
And from the stuff I saw and what I've read about it, none of it could have happened.
None of it could be said.
None of this kind of thing could go on, say, for example, at the Democrat convention in North Carolina coming up this summer.
The Democrats and the media want to take the ability to publicly express our faith away from us.
Suddenly, the presidential campaign is all about social issues, which is really code for religious issues.
When we talk about contraception or when they do, what they're trying to do is impugn Christians.
They're trying to scare everybody that if Santorum gets the nomination and is elected, that we're going to have a theocracy.
We're going to have a Bible thumper in the White House who's going to be forcing his judgmental religion on everybody.
And they want to scare everybody.
And in the midst of that, here comes the Whitney Houston funeral, which is black America, which is Christianity 101 in celebration, five hours of it.
The pastor, guy named Marvin Winans, said, Jesus is saying, I don't want you to become anxious about life.
I don't want you to feel that life has happened without purpose.
God works all things after the counsel of his own will.
You are not a mistake.
You are not a mishap.
God had a purpose before he ever created a person.
Do you think somebody going to say that at the Democrat Convention is going to get away with it?
Because there is no God there.
God's the earth or God is the president or God is some inanimate object.
He said, when people look at the Bible, they look at it from the wrong perspective.
The Bible is the owner's manual, said Winans.
He held it up.
And then he said that the anecdotes in the Bible have been provided, quote, so that you can get the best out of your life.
He said, come on Sunday.
I do this every Sunday.
Come to my church on Sunday.
You'll see.
Sometimes we have believers behaving badly.
But Jesus says that I'm going to give you the order of how this should go.
In that same text, he says, seek ye first.
I want us to recognize that our faith in God is not something we attach to the end of our lives, but that we must prioritize, said the minister.
You make your decision based on your faith.
You walk according to what you believe.
You can never say yes to God and have God make you a stranger.
You can never put God first and think that God will forget you and leave you.
Now, the thing about this to me was that people who go to church hear this or something like it almost every Sunday.
Forbes magazine has to basically apologize for what's coming in their coverage.
They have to basically apologize.
Sorry, kids.
No offense, kids, but everybody talked about Whitney's passion for the Bible.
So while the regime is out there trying to scare everybody about Christianity, you had five hours of this.
And it was joyous.
It was sad.
I mean, it had all the emotions that you would expect in a funeral, but it was uplifting.
And I started getting emails about this.
I was in a golf course, and I started getting emails about it from people who are watching it.
So that's why I wanted to catch some highlights of it.
One of the emails I got, shocking Christianity on display on CNN right now.
How can this happen?
People trying to be funny.
As I watch this, I'm going to be point-blank honest with you.
As I watch this, I watched a five-hour black American church service that was uplifting and inspirational.
It was, as I say, it had all the emotions you would expect from a funeral.
But at the end, in the end, it was all about greatness, how great you can be, how great you are, how great God intends you to be.
All the things that we're not allowed to hear or pray about at a football game in high school anymore, all these things that just sent the Democrats running.
And here was happening at a black church.
And I was thinking, How often do African Americans have to hold their nose and look the other way on things like abortion and gay marriage and so forth when they listen to the Democrat Party talk about it?
Because there was no evidence of the Democrat Party in this funeral service or very little.
And the fact that they vote uniformly Democrat when it comes to Election Day every four years.
You watch that church service, you went, how can that happen?
How can these same people who are singing and agreeing, shouting and so forth, how can they leave this place and go out and vote for Democrat?
Well, we all know the answer.
I mean, these are rhetorical questions.
It was still fascinating to me.
You just, you don't see this.
It used to be commonplace to have Christian devotion in the public square.
It was well known.
It was frequent.
It was common.
It was inoffensive.
It didn't bother anybody that we knew.
Of course, we now know it was bothering all kinds of people.
Nobody, there wasn't, no, there was no reverend right in this thing.
There was no cursing America.
There were no GD America.
There was no America's chickens are coming home to none of that.
There was none of the kind of stuff that goes on in Obama's church.
For example, anyway, run the risk of attaching too much meaning to this, but it had such a stark, it was such a stark contrast to me to what we get in the public square every day.
And the kind of thing that went on in this church service is what the Obama regime, the Democrat Party, are trying to gin up fear for just that very thing in order to get people to vote against Republicans.
They want people to fear exactly what happened in that funeral service.
That's a disconnect because clearly the people at church were not afraid.
They were celebrating.
They were joyous.
There was nothing being said from the pulpit that scared them, that made them nervous.
And yet their own party is trying to make them and everybody else think that stuff like happened, what happened at her funeral, they said, We better be can't allow anybody who believes like this in elective office anywhere.
Nobody.
And that's why the Reverend Jackson looks on, because he ought to have been leading something like this.
If the Reverend Jackson were really irreverent, he would have been leading the thing.
Let me take a break.
That's that.
Much more straight ahead when we come back here on the EIB network.
Don't go away.
Hi, welcome back.
Great to have you here.
Rush Limbaugh, half my brain tied behind my back, just to make it fair.
We got the audio.
Somebody's coming up.
Santorum showed up yesterday on Face the Nation with Bob Schieffer.
And folks, it was like Bob Schieffer, who's what, 90, 92?
Bob Schieffer talking to Rick Santorum actually appeared as though Schieffer thought Santorum was from Mars.
It was a space alien.
What he thought, the things he had said, Schieffer could not believe that there was a human being alive on this planet who could think that way, who believed these things.
He was shocked.
He was stunned.
And it just, it goes to show, I think the Republican establishment, clearly the Democrat Party establishment, Do not have the slightest ability to relate to even half the country, probably more.
Don't understand us.
Don't know us have mischaracterized us and have lived under these mischaracterizations for so long now that they have just assumed that it's all true.
And a guy like Santorum comes along, who is simply a devout Catholic, and he's nothing other than that, may as well be a three-eyed monster.
This Marvin Winans, the pastor at the church of the Whitney Houston funeral, to these guys, he probably sounded as scary as Santorum sounds to them.
Now, I mentioned James Taranto, best of the web, today has a feature called Weekend Interview.
And he talked to a guy named Jeff Bell, who is a well-known and accomplished, achieved social commentator.
Social Issues and the Santorum Surge is the title of piece.
Now, I can't share the whole thing with you because it prints out to over four pages.
Starts this way: if you are a Republican in New York or another big city, you may be anxious or even terrified at the prospect that Rick Santorum, the supposedly unelectable social conservative, may win the Republican nomination.
Jeffrey Bell would like to set your mind at ease.
Social conservatism, Mr. Bell argues in his forthcoming book, The Case for Polarized Politics, The Case for Polarized Politics.
He points out, as we have on this program, before I read this to you, I'm going to remind you of a story.
It's the early 90s, and I'm a guest at one of these dinner parties out in the Hamptons.
And after dinner, out on the deck of the host's home, a guy comes, and it's all Republicans here, and many of them huge donors.
This is not if it's 90 or 91, it was before the 92 campaign began.
And one of these donors comes up to me, pokes me in the chest.
What are you going to do about Christians?
Totally taken aback.
I'm still very young.
I haven't even been doing a radio program for four years, and I'm frankly a little bit intimidated being in this group of people in the first place.
What are you going to do about the Christians?
What do you mean what I'm going to do with the Christian?
Well, hell, they're embarrassing us, man.
We're not going to win anything with them.
This abortion, I'm telling you, is going to kill the party.
We're never going to get women to vote for us.
Independence, you can kiss them goodbye.
And they listen to you.
And I said, well, there are only 24 million votes.
Do you realize you wouldn't have been winning anything from Reagan on if it weren't for those people?
We don't need them.
We don't need them.
They're going to end up destroying the party.
So, Mr. Bell, Jeffrey Bell, the case for polarized politics, argues in this book that social conservatism has a winning track record for the GOP.
Social issues were non-existent in the period from 1932 to 1964.
The Republican Party won two presidential elections out of nine during that period, and they had the Congress for all of four years in that entire period, 32 to 64, basically 30 some-odd years.
When social issues came into the mix, and Mr. Bell would date it from the 1968 election, the Republican Party won seven out of 11 presidential elections.
Another pull quote from Taranto's piece.
In Mr. Bell's telling, social conservatism is both relatively new and uniquely American, and it is a response to aggression, not an initiation of it.
And he's exactly right.
The left has said, quote, its center of gravity and social issues since the French Revolution.
The left has had its center of gravity.
Yes, the left at that time with people like Robespierre was interested in overthrowing the monarchy and the French aristocracy, but they were even more vehemently in favor of bringing down institutions like the family and organized religion.
In that regard, the left has never changed.
I think we've had a good illustration of it the last month or so.
This is Mr. Bell.
It goes all the way back to the French Revolution.
The left vehemently in favor of bringing down institutions like the family and organized religion, and they're doing it.
One other pool quote, American social conservatism, he says, began in response to the sexual revolution, which since the 60s has been the biggest agenda item and the biggest success story of the left.
It was true in Western Europe and Japan too.
But only in America did a socially conservative opposition arise and its party win elections.
I mentioned it last week.
Look around, folks, at the abysmal state of our culture.
How on earth could reasonable people not win any debate on social issues?
The left is intent on destroying every institution out there except for the state.
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