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March 20, 2012 - Rush Limbaugh Program
34:50
March 20, 2012, Tuesday, Hour #3
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You know, speaking of contests, the New York Times is asking for reader input.
They're actually running a contest.
Tell us why it's ethical to eat meat.
It's from the New York Times magazine, which is out today, calling all carnivores, tell us why it's ethical to eat meat, a contest.
Today, we announce a nationwide contest for the omnivorous readers of the New York Times.
We invite you to make the strongest possible case for this most basic of daily practices.
If you can make it past our judges, we will put your name in lights, or at least in print.
And that seems to be the big prize, that you get your name in print if you come up with a good answer here.
Getting your name printed in the New York Times.
Second prize is a trip to Philadelphia.
The prize, best essay, or essays will be published in an upcoming issue of the New York Times for the best submission, tell us why it's ethical to eat meat.
What a premise.
So the premise is obviously that it's not ethical to eat meat.
And the contest, okay, Neanderthal, tell us why it is so that we can beat you up to shreds and make a joke out of you.
Hi, and welcome back, Rush Limbaugh, here behind the golden EIB microphone, the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.
Largest free education institution in the free world.
There are no graduates and there aren't any degrees because the learning never stops.
Telephone number is 800-282-2882.
The email address LRushbaugh at EIBnet.com.
Jim Garrity today, National Review Online, do wavering Obama voters think the man they voted for is naive?
In the Tuesday edition of the Morning Jolt, an examination of a key question before Republicans and conservatives this year.
Do wavering Obama voters think the man they voted for is naive?
How do you persuade somebody who voted for Obama to vote for the Republican option in 2012?
It's bigger than the million-dollar question.
Republican turnout may or may not be higher than in 2008.
Some Obama voters in 2008 will stay home in 2012, but in the end, Obama had 69.4 million votes in 2008.
Palin had 59.9.
To get to 270 electoral votes, the Republican nominee will need some of those 69.4 million votes to swing into his column.
Not long ago, our great managing editor Kevin Williamson noted the most acute division on the right, the one that'll give Romney the most trouble, is not between moderates and hardcore right-wingers, but between electability-minded pragmatists and ideologues, or between the Tea Party and the Republican establishment.
It's between those Republicans who disagree with Obama, believing his policies to be mistaken, and those who hate Obama, believing him to be wicked.
Romney's the candidate of the former, but is regarded with suspicion by the latter.
The former group of Republicans, and that's those who disagree with Obama, the former group would be happy merely to win the presidential election, but the latter group, the ones they say here who hate Obama, it's not about hate, but that's, I'll get to that in a minute.
The latter are after something more, a national repudiation of Obama, of his government overreach, and of managerial progressivism, mainly as practiced by Democrats, but also practiced by some Republicans.
That's some truth to that.
But the right way to say this is, we don't hate Obama.
We despise what he's doing to the country.
And yeah, it does require a massive turnaround.
And it does require a massive repudiation of his policies.
The American people have to know how destructive and bad they are and have been.
And by the way, I'm in that group and I make no apology for it.
I make no, this is a teachable moment.
And it's the most important teachable moment for the people of this country that we've had in my lifetime.
And this is one of the problems that people on my side have with Romney.
They don't think Romney or the Republican establishment cares that much about repudiating what Obama is.
They just want to beat him.
They want back in control.
They want to be in charge of the spending.
They want the committee chairmanships.
We don't want to win for that reason.
We don't want to win so we can run government.
We want to win so that we can get rid of people who are trying to destroy it as founded.
And there's nothing wrong with that.
Anyway, this piece is all about how do you persuade these Obama voters to vote for the Republican next time.
Because, generally speaking, people hate admitting they made a mistake, particularly over a decision that is culturally regarded as important.
That was a presidential election, and it was the first black president.
And a lot of people are going to be emotionally attached to that as the right thing to have done regardless.
Because that says I'm a big person.
I am an open-minded person.
So persuading that group of people that they made a mistake, that's a toughie.
And that's why you still see cars with Dole Kemp and Gore Lieberman and Kerry Edwards stickers in some parts.
Very few Obama voters will express their vote for the GOP nomination in 2012 as an explicit act of personal penance for bad judgment.
There aren't that many Obama voters that are going to admit they made a mistake.
And so the theory is don't go after them that way.
Don't tell them they made a mistake.
That's like telling somebody you're wrong, and that's never a good way to persuade people.
You know as well as I do.
You get in somebody's face, even if they're making horrendous mistakes in their life, you get in their face and you tell them that, and they just steal their resolve against you for the sake of it.
You could be right as nails, but they're going to still stand up to you.
I myself have learned about the art of persuasion.
So going after these Obama voters as having made a mistake is a practical matter.
If that's the primary thing you're going to do or use to persuade them to vote Republican, it probably won't work.
Although Garrity says here, I stand by my position that anyone who voted for John Edwards for president should sit out the next two presidential elections examining their spectacularly wrong assessment of his character in quiet contemplation.
Good point.
But, Jim, I'll tell you, you really can't blame these people.
The media wouldn't take the story up.
You knew about it because you follow inside baseball stuff.
The drive-bys didn't pick this stuff up long after the story was old.
I know a lot of people, when the truth came out about Edwards, they were shocked.
They could not believe it.
I know people have fundraised for Edwards.
They're lawyers.
They're trial lawyers, but they still did it.
They were stunned when they found out all that stuff.
But even now, you get Clinton.
Here's Clinton who destroyed the life of a 19-year-old girl, ruined her life.
Who knows how many other women's lives?
Yet the war on women is supposedly a Republican thing.
But Clinton, despite that, is the biggest hero the Democrat Party has.
He's the most in-demand speaker on any subject.
These emotional attachments are tough, tough things.
So a lot of Obama voters must be persuaded that they made the wrong choice in 2008, but that it wasn't their fault.
Those who voted for Obama won't call him stupid, and they will not accept that he's evil, but they have seen grandiose promises on the stimulus fail to materialize.
They've seen Obamacare touted as the answer to all their health care needs, turn out to be nothing of the sort.
They've seen pledges of amazing, imminent advances in alternative energy and so on, and none of it's happened.
They seem to think that reaching out to the Iranians would lead to a change in the regime's behavior and attitudes.
People are surprised to learn that shovel-ready projects were not, in fact, shovel-read.
But let me go through this list.
In fact, the best way to do this: here's what we're up against.
A lot of people who thought Obama was the smartest president ever, because that's what they were told.
There had been nobody like him before.
Great unifier.
The rest of the world was going to love us when the rest of the world didn't hate us.
There were so many false premises.
It was all predicated on the fact the media drummed up hatred against Bush and convinced everybody the world hated us.
The world never did hate us.
We weren't hated and despised by the rest of the world, but the media said so.
There's Obama.
This game change movie.
They have footage of Obama's Berlin speech.
I literally wanted to throw up watching some of this stuff.
But all this talk of Obama being the smartest president ever, unlike anybody else, great unifier.
The world was going to love us.
It was fake conventional wisdom brought to us by the drive-bys, but a lot of people believed it.
So these people have to be convinced they made a mistake, but it wasn't their fault.
They were tricked.
They had the wool pulled over their eyes.
Because the truth here is Obama's not smart.
But at the same time, whereas you had a lot of people, this is key, folks, listen to me very carefully.
This is very key.
Where you had a lot of people who thought they were making history voting for the first black to run for the presidency.
By the same token, these people don't want to admit that the first black president's a failure.
They don't have the guts to say it.
They don't want to think it.
They don't want to believe it because of the racial component.
So an intervention is called for.
And these voters are going to need a trip back to Rielville.
It's going to be very tricky convincing them that they did all this, but it wasn't their fault.
Here's a profile of an average Obama voter.
He seemed to think that reaching out to the Iranians would lead to a change in their behavior and attitudes.
He was surprised to learn that shovel-ready projects weren't, in fact, shovel-ready.
In fact, you could say this about Obama, too.
Obama and his voters, same profile.
Surprised to learn that shovel-ready projects weren't shovel-ready.
Surprised to learn that large-scale investment in infrastructure and clean energy products wouldn't create enormous numbers of new jobs.
Obama thought there was magic.
We've got the book out from a liberal Democrat that Obama's sitting in the Oval Office, stupefied when they tell him that only 3,500 new green jobs have been created.
Well, what about all the money I spent?
All that investment and infrastructure.
He's stunned.
He doesn't understand.
Throw money is supposed to happen.
Didn't.
Voters, same way.
Surprised that his past housing policies have not helped struggling homeowners, like was promised.
Surprised that the health care policy has become as controversial as it is.
It isn't working.
Everybody's none of it's working.
They all realize Obama's been a giant mistake, but there's too much emotional investment in the vote.
Recession turned out to be a lot deeper than any of us realized.
Some people are sympathetic to that.
But the point is, they have to be convinced they made a mistake, but that it's not their fault.
Now, I'm not so sure I agree with this.
This is just the opinion espoused here at Garrity's blog, linking to somewhere else.
But I do know that persuasion often does not happen by getting in somebody's face, wagging a finger at them, and tell them they're wrong.
When a woman says her semiconductor engineer husband can't find a job, Obama says he's surprised to hear it because he often hears business leaders in that field talk of a scarcity of skilled workers, but he can't believe it because semiconductors, why, we've invested in that.
Why aren't there any jobs?
So if we're seeking to persuade Obama voters it's okay to vote for somebody else this time, we need to reinforce the notion that he just doesn't quite understand how things work in the real world.
He understands theory, but not practice.
He talks about a future of algae-powered cars while rejecting pipeline.
Basically, you have to try to convince people we've got somebody here that just isn't up to the job.
That may be why Romney's saying what he's saying.
You know, Romney's making a big point of saying, oh, look, he's a nice guy, just an over his head.
This is practically the same thing.
So there's probably some oppo research going around and some focus group research saying this is how you have to go about it.
We'll see.
Just wanted to share that with you.
You've got to take a brief time out now, folks.
Be right back.
Don't go away.
Back to the phones.
Where are we going?
Albuquerque, New Mexico.
This is Mike.
Thank you for calling, sir.
Great to have you with us on the program.
Yes, sir, Rush.
I was calling because I really loved your topic about why people have such a difficult time admitting that they voted for Obama.
And I go, I'm 72 years old.
I go all the way back to my first exposure to a campaign with Goldwater.
And I was a Republican, voted Republican all the way to Obama.
And then, under what I felt sort of was a weakness with Talin and McCain, and then being a minority here in New Mexico, I thought, well, let's break the minority ceiling and I'll go ahead and vote for Obama.
Well, I woke up the next morning like I'd had a hangover, sorry that I did it and sorrier every day since.
But at least I wanted to confess before the world that I made a mistake and that you can go back to being loyal to our party and our platform.
Mike, why again did you vote for Obama?
I missed that.
You missed what?
What you said about why you voted for Obama?
Well, because as a minority here, I was trying to support the idea that we needed to break this minority ceiling and get somebody in there that could represent maybe the minority community.
And like I said, there was a lot of weakness in McCain-Palin.
This guy's not even on a cell phone, he can't hear me.
And woke up the next day.
Sorry.
What did you expect?
Mike, by the way, our phone system here isn't working.
So try to make your answers short because I've been trying to interrupt and ask you a question.
You can't hear me.
It's not your fault.
Oh, no, okay.
But try to make your answers short.
Why did you, I'm just, I'm fascinated by this.
Why did you think that electing a minority would improve minority relations throughout the country?
Because I think it's something that's just within a minority that you think that Sotomayor is going to have some influence from her background, her childhood, or Obama's or whoever that might affect.
What minority are you a member of?
I am Hispanic, going to the world as Mexican-American.
Mexican-American, but I consider myself Mexican-American.
Do you consider yourself, you've said, you describe yourself that way today, but in your everyday life, do you consider yourself a minority first and an American second?
I would say that I don't believe so.
I served 32 years in the military.
No, no, there's no wrong answer.
There's no wrong answer.
I'm just trying to understand your mindset and the way you, because it's fascinating to me, you thought, I'm sure a lot of other people did too, electing the first black president would erase some of the problems this country's had with discrimination against minorities in the past.
You thought that was, but you didn't take you long to figure out that wasn't the case, and you made a mistake.
Well, I guess part of the mistake was not knowing enough about the background of Barack Obama.
So therefore, you know, if you're, you know, ignorant and it wasn't Bliss, I didn't know enough about him to have just set that aside.
But I did have a real strong feeling that we were kind of weak in McCain Palin, and so that had an effect.
Okay.
So basically, you, well, I don't like to use the term fell for, but it's actually what happened.
You fell for the media portrayal of Obama versus their portrayal of Palin primarily and McCain second.
But you said you didn't know anything about Obama because the press never vetted him.
They didn't tell you who he was.
So to you, he was a magic elixir because he was a minority.
Well, I figured that, you know, that we'd come a long way since the beginnings of this nation and that we were ready to give that its chance, that maybe that would work out and we could go on from there and then maybe that would kind of, you know.
Okay, what have you learned now?
Well, I've learned to pay much attention to the background of the candidates so that we do have people that just sort of come out of the night that, you know, we've kind of investigated where they came from, what they represent, who's backing them, where's the money coming from?
Well, that's exactly right.
The thing to take away from this is, when you're talking about people who are going to lead the country, it doesn't matter what their skin color is.
It doesn't matter what their national origin is.
It doesn't matter what their orientation, gender.
All that matters is their ideas.
All that matters is who they are, not what they look like.
And way too many people fell for the what he looks like and thought that made a big statement about them.
And in the process, we got an incompetent, Huge mistake that is going to take a long time to undo.
Appreciate the call, Mike.
Thanks much.
We'll be back.
Don't go away.
Back to the phones we go.
We have a frustrated 15-year-old named Nathan from Floyd, Virginia on the phone.
Hi, Nathan.
I'm glad you called us.
Hi, thanks.
I'm glad to be on the show.
Well, I wanted to say, sorry, did you say something?
I was just going to say it's our honor to have you here.
Oh, okay.
I wanted to say, you know, back in the beginning of the show, you said that, you know, the government was out of control.
And, you know, it is.
I totally agree with you.
I mean, spending is completely out of control.
I cannot believe how much we have spent, you know, and we are, it's scary.
We are on the way to being like Greece.
This is, we're on the path to where Greece is right now.
And it's a scary thing.
You know, the government keeps putting down all these regulations.
And, you know, I don't understand why people think we need all of these regulations when all we need is the free market.
That's all we need.
The free market.
The government needs to get out of our way and let the free market adjust itself.
And problems, I think, can be solved just by the simplistic free market.
Let me tell you something, Nathan, that I wish somebody had told me when I was 15.
And my father might have, and I just might not have clicked, and I missed it.
But you are going, when you're 65, 50 years from now, you're going to be talking the identical way to somebody else about the rest of the people or other people.
My point is that you're wise beyond your years, and you're going to become a target because if you go further through school.
So I hope that you're able to hang tough and not be intimidated out of what you instinctively, with your own God-given IQ, understand and believe.
But the point is, people that you don't understand, who believe and say things that you don't think make any sense at all, like you don't understand how people can't appreciate that the private sector is where the greatness in this country has occurred.
They're going to be with you for the rest of your life.
Absolutely.
I will never get intimidated by anybody else.
My dad and my mom and you have taught me well, and I know where this country needs to go.
And we are definitely not on the right path.
I'm worried that I'm not going to be able to grow up.
Oh, no, you will.
You will.
You will because people like you are going to make it so.
The history of this country is that every third or fourth generation is probably going to be yours, comes along and simply refuses to put up with the mess made by their parents and grandparents and great-grandparents.
Nothing against your parents.
I've just talked about previous generations.
At some point, you're going to, I'm not paying this tax rate.
I'm not going to live with this little freedom.
And some generation will come along and do something about it.
But my point is, you're always going to have these enemies, Nathan.
You're always going to have people try to stop you.
And the more effective you are, the more they're going to come after you.
And you are entering a very important phase in your life because you are about to get out of high school.
And I assume you're going to go to college.
And you are going to be surrounded by an artificially high number of people who disagree with you.
Absolutely.
College.
But when you get out, understand, never forget this.
The people who are on the other side of what you believe are a distinct minority in this country.
You and people like you outnumber them the rest of your life.
Don't forget I told you this because it's going to affect and contribute to your confidence.
The media, if it doesn't change, is going to try to make you feel like you're the oddball and the genuine minority.
But you will be in the vast majority of people who believe what you believe.
The problem you're going to encounter is that most of the people who believe what you believe are afraid to say it.
It's going to be up to people like you to lead the effort against the very vocal opposition that you know is there.
Absolutely.
I will remember that.
I'm not going to forget that.
Try not to forget it because it's my wife.
I'm 61, and I think about this all the time.
My whole life, my whole professional career, there have been people who, to me, just don't get it.
How can they not see it?
How can they not?
And they think the same thing about us.
Except they live lies.
They believe lies.
They have to artificially create public opinion to agree.
Don't ever doubt that most Americans are like you.
The thing you'll encounter is that most won't say so because they don't want the hassle, the argument, the confrontation that comes with it.
Because the media aligned against you is a very powerful force.
Absolutely.
Well, thank you very much, Mr. Limbaugh.
I really appreciate the advice.
Thank you.
Gosh, people like you who give all the rest of us hope.
Thank you.
I really appreciate that.
Figure out how to vote 10 or 12 times.
Just kidding.
Just kidding.
Nathan, thanks for the call.
Great to have you in the audience.
Rob in Louisville, Kentucky.
Great to have you on the EIB network.
Hello.
Oh, hello.
How are you?
Great to see you.
Good, sir.
Thank you, sir, very much.
Well, I just wanted to say that I'm one of those people that you referred to in the beginning of the show.
I'm really focused on the economy now.
So when you start talking about budget, I'm totally okay with that.
Yeah, it's a major shift.
It used to be death to start to even bring the budget up or to talk about how it works on a talk show, but now it's something that is of paramount interest to people.
It's an indication of a profound shift.
What is it?
Well, obviously, I don't need to ask you.
You're very much concerned what's happening to ours.
Well, yeah, I mean, it's been mostly in the past like five years.
You know, I've bought my own house, got married, had my second baby just three months ago, started my own business while I'm still working just to try to help make ends meet, you know, while the wife's in school.
And everything matters a lot more now than it did, say, six or eight or ten years ago in my life.
Yeah.
I totally understand that.
Yeah, everything that they do really, really has an impact on my life.
And it shouldn't.
That's the important.
It should not have such a big impact on your life, but it does.
That's exactly right.
Yeah.
Oh, I'm a firearms manufacturer on the side.
That's what I do.
And that, what's going on now is just ridiculous.
But aside from that, it's the national debt.
If somebody could actually say, okay, what I want to do, not necessarily make a promise like I'm going to cut the debt in half, you know, that's ridiculous.
But if they could just say, hey, you know, I want to see the debt clock stop going up, or maybe even make it go in the other direction.
Yeah.
Man, that would seal the deal, wouldn't it?
I think.
It would.
I think people realize, like you have, that the budget and the U.S. economy, that's your pocketbook now.
That's your bank account.
It's your job.
It's your income.
It's your house.
It's whether you can afford to have kids.
Right.
And let me tell you, it's expensive as hell.
Well, I wouldn't know, but I've heard.
I paid $9,600 in the pick here last year.
Yeah, I know.
No, no.
Well, you're at the right place.
If you want to hear about this stuff, you don't have to go anywhere because we are going to continue to try to inform people, open their eyes about it.
I just saw that number, Apple's cash hoard that they're trying to figure out what to do with is $100 billion, and that that's $100,000 million.
I think that may be the most effective translation of size I've seen.
Everybody's constantly looking like you could stack a dollar bill from here to the moon and that's $5 trillion.
Whatever number.
You can't see that.
$5 trillion worth of dollar bills stacked.
You can't visualize it because the moon doesn't really look that far away.
It's 240,000 miles away, but it doesn't look it.
So those analogies leave me cold.
But this one, for some reason, got through because $1,000 is a magical number.
People, most people think a millionaire, that's a big thing.
And $100,000 million dollars.
Gosh, that's a lot of money.
That is more money than anybody can comprehend having or spending.
And then when you realize that is 0.006% of the national debt, that puts in perspective just how much money we are spending.
And it also reinforces the notion that just look annually at the federal budget, which is $3 trillion.
It's absurd.
It can't possibly cost $3 trillion to actually constitutionally run this country.
The only way we spend $3 trillion is if we make welfare recipients out of an increasing number of people each and every, which is what we're doing.
These entitlement programs, these giveaway programs.
People think Obama is going to fill our gas tank every week or buy him a new car or what have you.
But in terms of what is constitutionally required of this government, there's no way, even today, that it costs $3 trillion.
But $100,000 million, that was the first expression of an amount of money that I thought everybody could understand just how big it is.
And then the next step, how insignificant it is compared to what all we're spending.
That's $100,100,000 million.
And you would be happy with $1 million.
$100,000 million?
You'd be happy with $100,000.
So this is, to me, it's relatable.
Anyway, Rob in Lowell, thanks for the call.
appreciate it.
So Romney was in Illinois and he took a question from a Democrat woman, a plant.
The woman asked Romney, so you're all for like yay freedom and all this stuff and yay like pursuit of happiness.
You know what would make me happy?
Free birth control.
Romney said, if you want free stuff, go vote for the other guy.
Not bad.
The mitsteer comes.
If you want free stuff, go vote for the other guy.
There's a piece at Commentary Magazine, Jonathan Tobin, an extraordinary job of unpacking an extraordinary lie advanced by the President of the United States.
Obama still lying about mother's health insurance problem.
It seems that Obama has an ongoing war on the truth, whether it involves Obamacare or debt ceiling negotiations, fast and furious, the circumstances surrounding his mother's death.
Now, we were told by establishment Republican strategists not to attack our campaign against the president in a personal way.
They had to focus on the issues.
My problem with that advice is what happens if Obama lies to advance policies?
What if he is, in fact, a liar?
How do you separate the two?
How does one stick to the issues when phony narratives are advanced to deceive?
You know, Obama sells Obamacare by saying his poor mother never was denied health insurance and she almost died.
You know, you've heard the story.
And I'm running out of time here.
I'll fill you in on the details tomorrow.
But what Tobin has done here is discover that it is willful, that it's not the subject of telling the same story over and over again and having it be exaggerated, that the whole thing is a lie.
The whole story is untrue.
Last summer, a brief stir was caused when a book published by the New York Times, Jani Scott, uncovered an uncomfortable fact about Obama.
He'd been lying about his mother's health insurance problems during the 08 campaign and throughout the subsequent debate over his health care problem or issue.
The president used his mother's experience as a cancer patient fighting to get coverage to pay for treatment for what her insurer said was a preexisting condition.
But as Scott discovered during the course of writing her biography of Ann Dunham, his mother, it turned out that her correspondence showed that the 1995 dispute concerned a signal disability insurance policy.
Her actual health insurer had reimbursed most of her medical expenses without argument.
She got covered.
She was treated.
He's totally lying about.
So my question to all of you strategerists is: how do you separate, if we're supposed to stick to the issues, what if the issues are lies?
What if the sales technique for each issue is a series of lies?
Now what would you have us do?
Well, that's it, folks.
Another excursion into broadcast excellence comes to a screeching, not halt, a timeout.
Program actually never ends.
This just a long 21-hour break, but we'll be back, ready and raring to go same time tomorrow.
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