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Feb. 20, 2012 - Rush Limbaugh Program
34:23
February 20, 2012, Monday, Hour #3
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And snurtly shocked and stunned with my last comment, doesn't believe that I actually said it.
And I said it again.
If Romney has trouble in Michigan.
Now, pub public policy polling is uh a very liberal polling group out of North Carolina.
They say that Romney's gaining ground, and he he could well be.
A slew of negative ads are being run against Santorum in Michigan, and they work.
Negative ads have always been shown to work, and uh Romney's gaining down back in Michigan.
Of course, the Republican establishment be turned upside down if he loses in Michigan, because that's his what second or third home state.
And his dad was governor there, and of course, I don't know how long he's.
Yeah, I read something, by the way.
Welcome back, Rush Limbaugh behind the golden EIB microphone, telephone number 800-282-2882.
I read something over the weekend about all of this stuff going on in Michigan, and it was a just a little offhand allusion to the problems that that uh any Republican candidate has in Michigan, a presidential candidate, and that is that both Republicans and Democrats in Michigan supported Obama's bailout of General Motors.
And I read that as the first time I'd actually seen it, stated so bluntly.
I had never given, I just assumed naively so that your average Republican anywhere will oppose a bailout of anything, anywhere.
I course I know intellectuals not true, but I was kind of surprised that a majority of Republicans in Michigan were all supportive of the bailout.
And then none of us are mind of Iowa.
How many calls have I gotten here from Republicans in Iowa over the years?
Don't you want to win elections?
Don't you understand that we have to support ethanol?
I was just surprised to see it, nevertheless.
And it's a it's a minefield for a Republican presidential candidate in a primary because you you you can't be for bailouts, but if you go to Michigan, you have to say, well, the Republicans are, yeah, yeah, I kind of supported the bailout, then you've got to support the vault, and you're gonna do all this stuff.
And it's um it's a and that's where principle needs to rear its head.
Now, one of the things I was reading about about Romney, and I if if Romney falters in Michigan, the the guy to look at as perhaps having a chance to get back in this big time is Newt Gingrich.
You realize there hadn't been in a debate in a month.
There has not been a debate and look at what impact that could be having on the polls, because there haven't been any primaries either, but look at the impact no debates are having.
So if Romney doesn't do as expected, of course, the Republican establishment's gonna panic and think, oh my gosh, we need somebody new now because none of the others are suitable to them, uh, including Newt.
Newt's not suitable to them either.
But the debates are gonna kick back up again once we get uh close to Michigan, then we get to uh our Michigan, then we have Super Tuesday, the debates will kick back up, and if if Newt has a stellar performance, given the roller coaster nature of the results of these primaries, anything can still happen.
And I read a piece by uh guy named Ben Dominic over the weekend called A Trouble with Mitt.
And it's got a couple points here that are worthy of pointing.
Actually, there they belong to Jim Pethacoukas, who uh writes at Reuters and is also, I think, a uh sitting fellow as opposed to a standing fellow at uh AEI.
And this was Pethacoukas point.
Mitt Romney wants to be the next president of a country in need of serious and sweeping economic reform, and here are the first two points in his 59-point economic plan.
Number one, maintain current tax rates on personal income.
Number two, maintain current tax rates on interest dividends and capital gains.
Maintain in an era where vast reform is necessary, where rolling things back is a must.
And Dominic says he now imagine private equity boss Romney back in the Bain Capitol days, sitting down to read his team's 59 point turnaround plan for some troubled widget maker.
And imagine if the first two action items started with the phrase maintain current.
Dot dot dot.
Romney probably wouldn't bother reading any further before tossing the report in the trash.
And it's a good point.
Here we're in the need for vast reform, and the first two items in Romney's 59-point economic overhaul are maintained.
Current tax rates.
I should have thought of this one myself, by the way.
Mm-hmm.
Being unemployed for too long, longer than unemployment benefits last, has led to a whole bunch of creativity out there.
The New York Post reported yesterday, as unemployment checks run out, a lot of the unemployed are declaring themselves disabled and unhealthy.
More than 10.5 million people, 5.3% of the population, between 25 and 64, received disability checks in January from the federal government.
That's an 18% jump from before the recession.
So the creative unemployed are simply saying, hey, I'm disabled, and they're getting substitute unemployment checks in that regard.
Michael Barone had a piece, National Review Online that I saw posted late last night.
It's entitled Reversing Obama's Soft Despotism.
And what intrigued me or what caught my attention about this piece was references to Alexis at Tokville as it relates to our democracy and the Republicans.
And let me just paraphrase a little bit here about what Barone says.
They want to turn back the Obama Democrats' advance into what Alexis de Tokville characterized as soft despotism.
Tocqueville, after describing in his book Democracy in America, how Americans avoided the perils of equality.
That right there caught me.
The perils of equality.
Now just stop and think for a moment.
Our culture right now is based on the flawed premise that we can all be equal, particularly that we can all enjoy equal outcomes in life.
The left has inculcated in as many people as possible that the definition of fairness equals equal.
And that everybody can be equal, and that everybody can end up being the same, and that we should, and that that will lead to heaven on earth.
Tocqueville, his book is written in 1830.
He traveled around America and studied what was it that makes this place special.
We haven't even been in existence a hundred years.
And Tocqueville comes over and wants to get to the root of what is unique about America.
And thus the book, Democracy in America.
And in that book, he described how Americans avoided the perils of equality, not inequality.
And what he described Americans as doing to avoid the perils of equality was form voluntary associations, engage in local government, and believing in religions that disciplined the pursuit of self-interest into a pursuit of virtue.
Now stop and think of that for a moment.
The perils of equality can't everybody can't be.
They knew in 1830 that that would be the death of the country if the concept of everybody was equal in terms of outcomes.
Everybody had the same thing, everybody was the same thing, everybody did the same thing, everybody earned the that kind of equality.
They engaged in local government.
They believed in religions to discipline their pursuit of self-interest.
Self-interest was a good thing.
Self-interest was the pursuit of happiness.
But where were the guardrails?
They didn't come from the government.
The guardrails Were provided by religion.
That's where the morality came from.
The morality that tamed the pursuit of self-interest into a pursuit of virtue, which takes me back to Foster Freeze and the static he got for simply describing virtue.
I'm still, I still get a biggest kick out of a magic and aspirin tablet between Andrew Mitchell's knees.
I mean he was just describing virtue.
It was not, it's even wrong to say he was making a bad joke.
It was just a way of describing a virtuous woman back 30, 40 years ago, in a lighthearted, humorous way.
But the point here that Tocqueville says that the pursuit of self-interest was disciplined by a morality that came from religion that turned it all into a pursuit of virtue.
And of course, all of these things are laughed at now.
That's old fashioned, funny duddy.
That doesn't apply.
Mr. Limboy, that that's that's old fashioned.
Virtue that doesn't go well with this non-judgmental society that we have today.
And then Tocqueville wrote this an immense tutelary power is elevated, which alone takes charge of assuring their enjoyments and watching over their fate.
It's absolute, it's detailed, it's rigid, far-seeing and mild.
It would resemble paternal power if, like that, it had for its objective to prepare men for manhood.
But on the contrary, it seeks only to keep them fixed irrevocably in childhood.
This is describing government.
The way a government seeks, a totalitarian government seeks in a soft despotism or a soft tyranny, is to take charge of providing people's enjoyments and take charge over their fate.
We'll protect you, we'll make sure everything goes well and you don't get hurt.
And if you do get hurt, you can sue for a gazillion dollars, and we'll take our cut.
It would resemble, he said, paternal power if its objective was to prepare us, the citizenry for manhood.
But on the contrary, that's not what government does with its attempt to assure us our enjoyments and watch over our fate.
Government seeks only to keep everybody irrevocably in childhood.
This is Tocqueville in 1830, only to keep people irrevocably in childhood.
That nails it.
That's exactly what the left tries to do.
Everybody remains a child, in need, immature, childish.
It willingly works for their happiness, but it wants to be the unique agent and sole arbiter of that happiness, i.e., totalitarian state, soft despotism.
One final quote from Tocqueville, thus taking each individual by turns in its powerful hands and needing him as it likes, the sovereign extends its arms over society as a whole.
It covers its surface with a network of small, complicated, painstaking, uniform rules through which the most original minds and the most vigorous souls cannot clear a way to surpass the crowd.
It doesn't break wills, but it softens them.
It bends people's wills and directs them.
It rarely forces anybody to act, but it constantly opposes itself to one's acting.
It does not destroy, this is the key to this passage.
It doesn't destroy, but it prevents things from being born.
Totalitarian government, soft despotism, well-intentioned, you can't take care of yourself, we'll do it for you.
It kills the spirit.
It prevents things from being born.
It kills off entrepreneurism, creativity, ingenuity.
It doesn't really tyrannize, it hinders, it compromises, it extinguishes, dazes, finally reduces each nation to being nothing more than a herd of timid industrial animals of which the government is the shepherd.
That's what he was saying America was not.
But he wrote that it could easily become that if the perils of equality were, were the ability to fight equality was lost.
Now, this isn't a Barone piece.
I have to tell you that if, like I've I've recommended to you in the past, Mark Levin's book, Ameritopia, uh, makes a star out of Tokville.
Practically every relevant thing Tocqueville wrote has been explained, written about in Levin's book.
Barone just takes a couple pieces here.
But I wanted to, I wanted to share it with you because we're in the midst of a culture war, whether you want to admit it or not, we always have been.
It is at times prominent, sometimes it uh it fades away to below the surface, but it's always there because the problems in the culture and the seeming perversion and rot that's taking place eat away at people, uh, either consciously and subconsciously at the same time.
And so when somebody like Santorum surfaces and brings all this to the forefront, uh by just simple quirk of fate, people end up discussing it, and we see where people fall out.
And we can see that the Democrats and the Libs and Obama are scared to death of this topic.
They claim to be happy as they can be.
Oh, wow, this is our ticket to victory.
These hazyed hick conservative pro-lifers, good lord, they're rising up in prominence, and we couldn't have anything but they're scared to death of them.
Because they're millions of them.
If they're inspired, they vote, and not one of them vote Democrat.
And they know this.
Hence, Obama and everybody on the left's attempt to scare everybody with Santorum, and probably every other Republican too, wants to deny women contraception, wants to deny them abortion, wants to deny them all of this.
It's a campaign of pure negativity and scaremongering because there's not one thing Obama has in his record.
He can say, you want four more years of this vote for me.
There's not one aspect of Obama's term so far that anybody wants any more of it, or a majority of people do, and they know it.
So it's back to the usual tactics of lying and impugning the opposition, discrediting them and scaring everybody.
But not going to work this.
There is no alternative.
You want more of Obama?
We want more loss of liberty and freedom.
Do we want Obamacare fully implemented?
The polling data on every Obama issue, majority oppose it, still in the 60s, opposing Obamacare's full implementation.
Gotta take a break, sit tight, we'll be back.
More of your phone calls are coming up, and we're not through with Bob Schaefer.
We gave him a break.
Let him catch his breath.
Because remember, he thinks he's talking to somebody from Mars when he's talking to Santora.
More coming up right after this.
The Supreme Court has a fascinating case that they will be reviewing soon.
From the Fox News website, Xavier Alvarez was in good company when he stood up at a public meeting and called himself a wounded war vet who had received the top military award, the Medal of Honor.
The problem was Alvarez was lying about his medal.
Is lying about his wounds, is lying about his military service.
But he wasn't the first man to invent war exploits.
You remember the phony soldier guy?
And the Harry Reed letter.
Well, Alvarez was one of the first people prosecuted under a 2006 federal law aimed at curbing false claims of military valor.
This case is now before the Supreme Court.
And there are concerns that the law improperly limits speech and turns people into criminals for things they say rather than the things they do.
And that's at the heart of the review of the case.
It's called the Stolen Valor Act.
Veterans groups have actually come to the aid of the Obama regime, which calls the law a narrowly crafted effort to protect the system of military awards that was established during the Revolutionary War by George Washington.
Supreme Court will hear the case Wednesday, which is Washington's 280th birthday.
Pam Stirner, who is a college term paper, calling for the law, wound up in the hands of members of Congress.
They're committing fraud.
These guys are committing fraud.
They're impersonating somebody else.
They take on attributes of somebody else, attributes of a hero who served honorably.
When you do that, impersonating someone else, that's fraud, not freedom of speech.
Civil liberties groups, writers, publishers, and news media outlets, including state-controlled associated press have told the justices that they worry that the law and especially the administration's defense of it could lead to more attempts by government to regulate speech.
Really?
AP is worried that the regime wants to regulate speech all of a sudden.
Still, this is why my dad once told me he was a lawyer.
And that's why I know the law.
And my dad once told me this is why you need incredible people, really top shelf people as judges.
Something like this comes along.
I mean, this is not an easy call.
Freedom of speech is not absolute, uh, as we know, but to narrow it to this, because once this is codified, you can't impersonate a military hero.
Well, who next could you not impersonate that thought they were filled with valor as well in whatever field they had?
This is this is gonna be fascinating to watch.
Because there are what was the what?
Well, yes, there is in politics.
You can lie every day.
That's political speech was what the First Amendment first dealt with.
You can lie all day long in politics.
That was the point of the First Amendment.
You can, yes, you can't.
Well, no, perjury, but that's under oath.
That's in court.
These guys are just out there on the stump trying to collect money for claiming to be people they're not.
This is why it's going to be interesting.
Music.
I'm still stuck on and amazed by the Tocqueville phrase, the perils of equality, and how the original Americans fought the perils of equality.
Back in the early 1800s, our population, our country, our culture was hellbent on making sure there was no such thing as equal in terms of equality of outcome.
And they actually looked at that as a peril, and they formed associations in various ways to make sure that that didn't happen.
Now, contrast that with today.
As a Supreme Court, I can't, I just can't see the Supreme Court upholding this law.
I just I'll make a prediction.
I see them striking down this law in the name of protecting free speech.
Now I know it's all it's already against the law to impersonate a government official, but I also find it fascinating.
The news media, AP, hot on the case, under the premise that liars must be protected.
Because the people they propose and support are liars.
They lie in the course of doing their jobs each and every day.
Of course they would want the Supreme Court not to do anything about that.
But I just I think a can of worms would be opened if they uphold this law, uh, the likes of which we haven't seen.
And get this from Cleveland.com, the Cleveland Plain Dealer.
Snurdly sent me this over the weekend.
It was called Operation Chaos.
It was called Operation Chaos in 2008, a strategy among some Republicans to switch parties and disrupt Democrat primaries by voting for Hillary instead of Obama.
Obama was the front runner, and the logic went a vote for Clinton would string out the Democrat nomination process and disrupt Obama's campaign.
Now, with Obama entrenched as the presidential nominee, Republicans face the prospect of meddling crossover voters the Democrat side.
But such a threat has not emerged here in Ohio as the March 6th primary nears, even though Ohioans generally can vote in whichever primary they choose, regardless of their party affiliation.
Ohio Republican officials recalled the 2008 primary election tactic, spearheaded by.
I didn't spearhead it, spearheaded by talk show host Rush Limbo.
I didn't know he spearheaded it.
I created it.
Spearheaded means it was assigned to me.
And I carried it out.
No way.
I invented Operation Chaos, much to the consternation of the Republican Party.
This was this was unseemly meddling.
This is this is this we would never miss in presidential politics, even though it was going on left and right before we gave it a name.
Anyway, uh Angela in Fortley, New Jersey.
I'm glad you waited.
You're next to have you on the program.
Great to have you with us.
Hi.
Testing one through three.
Angela, are you there?
She's not there.
Las Vegas next.
This is Mark.
Great to have you, sir.
Hello.
Rush, half-hearted dittoes from Battleground Central.
I I listened to you on the top of the hour go out and misrepresent um Governor Romney and just about drove off the road.
And my complaint is my complaint is that you're doing a better job with Operation Chaos and our own primary than Andrea Mitchell.
I mean, you she was going off on on at 10 o'clock.
And now you continue it, and it's disingenuous for somebody who who I grew up with telling me how um we should be rewarded as a meritocracy.
That's who that guy is.
What when did we when did we say the you know the the the phrase is it's not the economy stupid anymore, right?
Wait a minute.
Well, hold hold on just a second.
Just a second.
I am so unused to it, unaccustomed to people disagreeing with me that I need to ask you to start again.
What is it you are upset with me about?
The the way that you are uh mischaracterizing Governor Romney.
How did I do that?
You said, you know, a 59-point plan, which I was by the way, that they rolled that out in North Las Vegas, which is devastated by the Oh, I I read from a blog post by a guy named uh uh uh Ben Dominic or Dominic, and I happen to think he made a good point.
He talked about the first two points of Romney's 59 point plan, which are to maintain current tax rates.
And if you were and Rush, and if and if and if you were uh going to play it straight, you'd say, well, what is what is that saying?
What's that saying is he's what does Obama want to do with the with the tax structure?
He wants to increase the rates on everything.
Right?
And so because he uses the word maintain instead of um taxes.
You're really you're you're Romney supporter, and you really want to think about what you're saying.
No, Rush, no, I am a conservative.
Don't label me.
I am a conservative and I want to beat Obama.
That's who I am.
All right, then let me tell you something.
A Republican seeking the presidential primary who doesn't propose tax cuts has got a problem.
Plain and simple.
And it's not a tax cut if you're gonna say, well, Obama's gonna raise taxes, maintaining them.
That's not a tax cut.
That does not taxation that does not do anything to change the economic climate whatsoever.
I'm simply saying we're in an era where massive reform is going to be needed if we're gonna reverse the direction we're already headed and maintaining the status quo is not gonna do that.
I agree with that.
Are we gonna get massive reform from a guy who has done nothing in his adult life other than suck at the tit of government?
And then when he left, he became a multimillionaire, quote unquote consulting.
Well, who never had an executive in his life.
I need names.
Who is it?
And Newt as well.
Okay, so Newt and Santorum suck on the teeth of government.
Hey, look at how they make the money.
And I love you, Rush.
I love you.
I'm upset with myself that I'm getting upset.
Don't worry about getting upset.
Don't worry, I can handle it.
I'm I'm not used to it, but I can handle it.
When did we But you are for Romney?
Why can't you just say you're for Romney?
I'm for Romney.
So so so now I'm being attacked because I'm for Romney.
No, you're not being attacked.
You're not being attacked, and I didn't say I was opposed to Romney.
Well, you you you you you don't have to be Dr. Dominist to to make the the inference.
Well that you are opposed to.
The thing is uh I know, for example, what's in my mind, and nobody else does, and I know what my next words are going to be, and you don't.
Well, I wouldn't you are you are you're assuming here just with a casual observation of a guy on a blog, and I said, you know, I think this is a good point.
Pure and was not meant to crucify Romney, was not meant to end his candidacy.
If anything, it might have been meant, who knows, as some advice.
Anyway, Rush, we love I love you.
I always have.
You know, all I no question.
But let's not the argument here is it's about are we gonna have an entitlement society or a meritocracy society, right?
Being rewarded for excellence.
And the one candidate on our side who's actually lived it and has that has lived excellence and has made something out of it is Mitt Romney.
You know, greed for lack of a better word is good.
Um look at that.
All of that's Newt will not win Florida.
All that's fine.
Well, you know how many.
I told you you were not gonna want to go down this road.
How many primaries has Romney won?
How many we have he's won?
Just tell me how many has he won.
Which one says he won?
But it aside from that.
No, you're assuming you're assuming you're assuming he's the front runner.
You're assuming a whole lot of things here.
You're assuming he's the only guy that can when you're assuming he's the only conservative, you're assuming that he's the only guy that understands the free market.
Rush, he's the only leader.
Okay, so we got a new one at it here.
New leader.
Okay.
It's leadership stupid.
What have those guys ever done?
They left government and they made money.
Here's the this I I said last week, this Republican primary is causing people to lose friendships.
I mean, in their personal lives.
It is it is I I get well you it probably happening the same to you uh out there.
But this is a this is a uh uh I think a good illustration of just how royal the whole Republican side is.
Now I can sit here if I could refute everything you're saying here by telling you what people who are opposed to Romney say.
That you know where they say, how do you know any of this?
He flip-flops on so many things.
That's not me saying it.
That's what the book on him is.
I am the one guy who hasn't chosen anybody.
I'm the one guy who has said whoever wins this thing, I'm in them 100%.
I am the one guy who has said the objective here is to get rid of Obama.
I'm the one guy who has said when this is all over, I'm gonna make sure I have not put myself in a situation where I cannot with credibility support whoever it is that wins it.
And that is the position that I'm taking on all of this.
But you know, look.
Well, it's very simple.
He's for Romney, and he loves me, and he wants me to be for Romney.
And since I'm not for Romney, he's upset with me.
It's I didn't say I'm not for Romney.
Since he thinks I'm not for his words, I'm not for Romney.
He thinks I'm not for Romney because of the criticism of So he's upset, he loves me, he likes me, he wants to be on the same page I'm on.
But he feels so strong about it that if I if I told him to get on the Newt page, that would end it.
If I said, you know, buddy, I'm on the Newt page.
You ought to just No, no, he's got his mind made up.
That's why the opposition to all these candidates is what is remarkable about this primary.
There isn't I talked about this last week, and maybe it was the week before.
But there is the the opposition to each of these guys is so strong that there's no way.
For example, this guy is is he's so much for Romney, there's nothing that he could be persuaded with to abandon Romney and go support anybody else because the negatives that he's attached to everybody else overweigh or outweigh uh whatever his positive attachment to Romney is.
It's pretty close.
Well, you know, that's uh that's always the case.
I have to unify the party when it's all over, and that's another reason why I have to occupy the position here that that uh that I that I occupy.
But you know, it's it's it's part of the territory.
I look at I appreciate the call.
I'm sorry that you got so upset uh out there, uh, Mark.
You might want to.
I just saw that Elton John had to cancel a couple of performances at Caesar's Palace over the weekend for food poisoning.
And Mark, you might want to see if that might not have happened to you.
Andy in St. Louis, great to have you, sir.
Thank you for waiting.
Hello.
Yeah, Rush.
Thanks you.
Uh longtime listener and uh first time caller.
Uh, you had a caller previously who called about uh one of their uh congregation walking out of church when they heard a uh homily from the pulpit.
Uh I also belong to a Catholic church here in St. Louis, uh studied less uh uh member of the church, been there for many, many years, and uh we also received a homily uh based on the uh First Amendment freedom of choice.
And uh when the when the uh priest was finished giving the homily, there was a spontaneous applause from the whole congregation.
Yeah, I'm gonna tell you that I this is the second such call today, which means this probably happened frequently over this past weekend.
I think Obama is gonna rue the day that he took this on.
He had the Catholic Church right where he wanted it.
He had it in the palm of his hand.
He had the Catholic Church believing the notion that government benefits equal charity.
That's what they went along with.
That's how the church was able to fall into this uh slide into this notion that uh uh welfare, liberalism, socialism was good because it equaled charity.
And he had them, and now he has awakened what is potentially a sleeping giant.
These priests have not really been talking about this kind of thing too often, and now they are.
And I think all of this is in the process of backfiring on the regime big time.
Thanks, Andy, for the call.
Be right back, folks.
Don't go away.
Don't go away.
Well, that's it, folks.
Another exciting excursion into broadcast excellence in the can.
Soon to be headed over to the warehouse, which houses artifacts for the future Limbaugh Broadcast Museum.
The virtual version is up and running at Rushlinbaugh.com.
It's amazing.
If you haven't seen it, it's worth the click at rushlimbaugh.com just to see it.
Um look, we'll get to more Bob Schiefer tomorrow.
I had to decide.
Phone calls are chiefer, and it wasn't too tough.
But we have 'em and we'll carry them over to tomorrow, plus some other stuff I didn't get to today.
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