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March 20, 2012 - Rush Limbaugh Program
34:52
March 20, 2012, Tuesday, Hour #3
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You know, speaking of contests...
Ha!
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 obvious 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 numbers 800 282-2882, the email address L Rushball at EIBNet.com.
Jim Garrett 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 of 2008 will stay home in 2012, but in the end, Obama had 69.4 million votes in 2008.
McCain had fifth uh 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 what the right way to say this is you 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 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.
They just want to beat him.
They just 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 Carrie 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 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 Gardy 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 that 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-by's didn't pick this stuff up long after the story was old.
I I you should 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 Edward.
They're lawyers.
They're trial lawyers, but they still did it, and they were stunned when they found out all that stuff.
But even now, you get Clinton.
I mean, 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.
It's 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.
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.
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.
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.
It's 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 then intervention is called for.
And these voters are going to need a trip back to Realville.
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 the 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?
Uh 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.
It's no people.
Everybody's really 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.
I'm just, it's just the opinion espoused here at Garrity's blog with the linking to somewhere else.
But I do know that persuasion often does not happen by getting in somebody's face and 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 uh 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 pop pipelines.
Basically have to kind of 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, look, he's a nice guy, just an over his head.
This is practically the same thing.
So there's probably some op or 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.
Got to take a brief time out now, folks.
Be right back.
Don't call it.
Don't call it.
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 uh you know people have such a difficult time admitting that they voted for Obama.
And uh I go I'm seventy-two years old.
I go all the way back to my first exposure to a campaign was 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 Palin 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 uh the the world that I made a mistake and that you can go back to being loyal to our party and our platform after you meet.
Mike, why again did you vote for Obama?
I missed that.
You missed what?
What you said about why you voted for Obama.
Well, uh, because as a 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 uh could represent, you know, maybe the minority community, and uh, like I say, what did you think was gonna happen with weakness in McCain Palin?
I uh and woke up the next day sorry.
What did you expect?
Uh 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 answer short.
Why did you I'm just I'm I'm fascinated by this.
Why did you think that electing a minority would improve minority relations throughout the country?
Because I I think it's something that's just uh within a minority that you think that Sotomayor is gonna have some uh influence from her background, her childhood, or Obama's or whoever that might affect what minority are you a member of?
I am Hispanic, known to the world as Mexican American, Mexican hyphen American, but I consider myself Mexican, no hyphen American.
Do you consider yourself you and uh you've said you describe yourself that way today, but in in your everyday life, you consider yourself a minority first and American second.
Uh I would say that uh uh I I don't believe so.
I I uh I served 32 years in in the military.
No, though there's no wrong answer.
That's the don't miss it.
There's no wrong answer.
I'm just trying to understand your mindset in the way you 'cause 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 uh uh 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 uh Barack Obama.
So uh therefore, you know, if you're uh you know ignorant and it wasn't bliss, I didn't know enough about him to uh have uh just set that aside, but I did have a real strong feeling that we were kind of weak in uh in uh McCain Palin, and so that had an effect.
Okay.
So basically you you um well I don't like to use the term fell for, but it's actually what happened.
You you you fell for the media portrayal of Obama versus their portrayal of Palin primarily and pay 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 you know 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 uh you know we've uh uh kind of investigated, you know, 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 that 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, doesn't matter what their orientation, gender, it 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 gonna take a long time to undo.
Appreciate the call, Mike.
Thanks much.
We'll be back.
Don't go away.
Don't go away.
Back to the phones we go.
We have a frustrated fifteen-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, did you say something?
I was just gonna say it's our honor to have you here.
Oh, okay.
Uh I uh I wanted to say, you know, uh back in uh the beginning of the show, you said that you know uh the government was out of control.
And uh, you know, it is.
I I totally agree with you.
I mean, spending is completely out of control.
I I cannot believe how much we have spent, you know, and we are our it's scary.
We are on our on the way to being like Greece.
This is we're we're on the path to where Greece is right now.
And it's it's it's a scary thing.
You know, the government keeps putting down all of these regulations and 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 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 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 fifteen.
And my father might have, and I just might it might not have clicked and I missed it.
But you are going when you're f 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, right?
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 uh 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's occurred.
They're gonna be with you for the rest of your life.
Absolutely.
I will never get intimidated by anybody else.
My my uh dad and my mom and you have uh taught me well, and I I know where this country needs to go, and we are definitely not on the right path.
It's it's I'm worried then I'm not gonna be able to grow up.
Well no you will you will you will because people like you are going to make it so you're ever i 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 talk about previous generations.
At some point you're gonna I'm not paying this tax rate I'm not going to live with this little freedom and s and and some generation will come along and do something about it.
Absolutely Nathan there you're always going to have people try to stop you and the more effective you are the more they're gonna 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 gonna go to college and you are going to be surrounded by an artificially high number of people 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 plea the rest of your life don't forget I told you this because it's gonna 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 and the 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.
And it's gonna be up to people like you to to lead the effort against the very vocal opposition that you know is there.
Absolutely I will I remember that I'm not gonna forget that try not to forget try not to forget it because it's it's my life it's my I'm sixty one 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 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 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 ten or twelve times there.
Nathan thanks for the call great to have you in the audio really Robin Louisville, Kentucky great to have you on the EIB network.
Hello.
Oh hello how are you?
Great to talk to you.
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.
Um 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 it's a it's an indication of a profound shift.
What what is it well obviously I don't need to ask you you you're very much concerned what's happening to ours.
Well yeah I mean it's it's been mostly in the past like five years.
You know I bought my own house, got married, have my second baby just three months ago started my own business while I'm still working um just to try to help make ends meet, you know, while the wife's in school and um everything matters a lot more now than it did say six or eight or ten years ago in my life.
Yeah.
So I totally understand that.
Yeah everything that they do 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 uh I'm a firearms manufacturer and on the side that's what I do and that what's going on now is just ridiculous.
But aside from that I it's the national debt that If somebody could actually say, okay, what I what I want to do, not necessarily make a promise like I'm gonna 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, the U.S. economy, that's your pocketbook now.
That's your bank account.
That that that's your it's your 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 particular last year.
Yeah, I know.
No, no.
Well, uh, you're at the right place.
If you if you want to hear about this stuff, uh, you don't have to go anywhere because we are going to continue to try to inform people, open their eyes about it.
I I just saw that number that uh Apple's cash horde that they're trying to figure out what to do with is a hundred 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 five trillion.
Well, you whatever number.
You can't see that.
Five trillion or for worth of dollar bill stacked of 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.
Uh but this one, for some reason, got through.
Because a million dollars is a magical number.
People, most people think a millionaire, that's a big that's a big thing.
And a hundred thousand 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 at the federal budget, which is three trillion.
It's absurd.
It can't possibly cost three trillion dollars to actually constitutionally run this country.
The only way we spend three trillion dollars is if we make welfare recipients out of an increasing number of people each and every, which is what we're doing.
Uh these entitlement programs, these giveaway programs.
People think Obama's gonna fill our gas tank every week or buy them a new car, what have you.
But in terms of what is constitutionally required of this government, there's no way, even today, that it costs three trillion dollars.
But a hundred thousand 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 a hundred billion, one hundred thousand million, and you would be happy with one million.
A hundred thousand million, you'd be happy with a hundred thousand dollars.
So this is to me, it's it's it's uh it's relatable.
Anyway, Rob in Louisville, thanks for the call.
Appreciate it.
So Romney was in Illinois, and he took a question from a Democrat woman, a plant.
The uh 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 Midster 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 we were told by establishment Republican strategists not to attack or campaign against the president of personal way.
We 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, Mama sells Obamacare by saying his poor mother never is 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 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 Janny 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 signature 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 strategists is how do you sub- 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?
The End 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.
Thanks for being with us today, and we'll see you then.
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