I don't think people are making the right point about this.
That's why I'm here, of course, to make the right point about most everything.
Great.
That's not.
Now, don't confuse the.
That's not bombast, and it's not even braggadocio.
It just happens to be the truth.
Hang on, I got the hiccups.
A little chug of water here.
Yeah, I'm smoking a cigar down to the nub, and sometimes that causes hiccups.
That should do it.
Okay, back we are.
Rush Limbaugh, the Limbaugh Institute, here at 800-282-2882.
If you want to be on the program, David Axelrod was on Fox News Sunday.
And here's what he said.
Everybody's, oh, he just misspoke.
No.
Well, yeah, he misspoke.
But what was actually given away by this comment, I think, is quite illustrative of something.
Chris Wallace said in one paragraph, two or three sentences, what's the choice in this election?
The choice in this election is between an economy that produces a growing middle class and that gives people a chance to get ahead and their kids a chance to get ahead and an economy that continues down the road we're on where a fewer and fewer number of people do very well and everybody else is running faster and faster just to keep pace.
Now, the road that we're on is Obama Boulevard.
The road that we are on, where fewer and fewer do very well, everybody else running faster and faster is Obama Boulevard.
That's the road.
It may not be a boulevard, probably a county road or some such thing.
Axelrod said this because their mindset is that this is 2008.
There is no incumbent president right now.
We're running against George W. Bush.
We are not going to, well, we're going to pretend that the last three and a half years didn't happen.
We're not in office.
There is no Barack Obama who's incumbent.
I don't believe, and nobody else does either, by the way, that he really meant to characterize the Obama economy the way he did, but he did describe it accurately.
He didn't mean to.
That's the point of this.
He really screwed this up.
Now, the White House is claiming Axelrod's statement was an accident.
And they're actually correct.
It's always an accident when a Democrat speaks the truth.
It's never intended.
Now, we're on a toll road, by the way.
Obama Boulevard's a toll road, and that's the road that we're all on.
And he spoke the truth, and that's the accident.
It's always an accident when a Democrat speaks the truth.
They're stuck in this 2008 mindset.
They're stuck with it's all Bush's economy.
They haven't done anything yet.
It all boils down.
It all goes back, folks, to Obama's personal belief that this country was founded in an immoral, unjust way, including economically.
That the founding fathers were the equivalent of today's 1%, and they set everything up to benefit them and their families and their friends and people like them and forever sentenced the 99% to essential, well, slavery and poverty and discrimination, racism, sexism, bigotry, homophobia, all of that rotgut stuff that they, in a cliched way, assigned to their political enemies.
But here he comes And just happens to tell the god-awful truth about his guy.
The choice in this election is between an economy that produces a growing middle class, gives people a chance to get ahead and their kids.
There's nothing in the Obama economy that's doing that or that will do that.
There's nothing in the Obama economy that can do that because Obama is shrinking the private sector where all of that happens.
The private sector is where the middle class grows.
The middle class is not in the government sector.
It can't possibly grow there.
The middle class, well, the private sector is where people have a chance to get ahead and where their kids have a chance to get ahead.
And Obama's shrinking it.
There are 2 million fewer jobs plus now since Obama took office.
The government has grown from 18% of GDP to 21 or 23 on its way to 25% of our total economy.
That's where the Obama economy is headed.
The government is getting bigger and bigger.
And that's, you know, if healthcare is fully implemented, then those numbers change.
And when the Democrats start talking about choice, you can be sure that they're lying because choice is not what they want you to have.
Pro-choice doesn't even mean pro-choice.
Try telling them, as I did once, as an experiment, spearmint for those of you in Rio Linda.
I said, I'm pro-choice, I choose abortion.
You can't say that.
Why not?
I choose life.
I'm pro-choice.
I choose life.
You can't do that.
Why?
I said, well, because that's not what it means.
Well, what does choice mean?
Well, I mean, choice means that we stand in opposition to the oppression of Republican Nazis.
Oh, but so choice doesn't really mean I have a choice.
No, pro-choice.
You can't say you're pro-choice and be pro-life.
I can't tell you the number of liberals that called me and tried to tell me, you can't say that.
Because that's not what pro-choice means.
Little did they know how they were tripping themselves up.
It's quite fascinating that Axelrod utters the truth, which the Democrats only do when they make a mistake, and gives away the mindset.
It's 2008 again.
They're not going to run on their record.
They can't.
Not one aspect of it.
Dick Cheney, heart transplant and all, back on stage, a Wyoming Republican convention or gathering of some kind.
He and his daughter Liz are up there on stage.
He spoke for an hour and 15 minutes, and the media said, without getting tired, damn it.
Well, they didn't say, damn it, I added that in there because I know that that's what they think.
It was Saturday in Cheyenne.
It was a Republican state convention.
Here is the vice president.
I can't think of a time when I felt it was more important for us to defeat an incumbent president than today with respect to Barack Obama.
I think he has been an unmitigated disaster for the country.
To be in a position where he gets four more years in the White House to continue the policies he has, both with respect to the economy and tax policy and defense and so many other areas, would be a huge, huge disappointment.
Yeah, it'd be worse than that.
But he was being politic.
It'd be a disaster, like he said at first, an unmitigated disaster continued.
So you can always count on Dick Cheney.
Fearless, just right in there.
And he said this about Romney.
I think it's very important that we get together and gather together and get behind our likely nominee.
Mitt Romney.
I've known him for a long time.
I've got a lot of confidence in him.
Byron York, speaking of Mitt Romney, Byron York posted at his blog, Beltway Confidential this morning, at a closed to the press Florida fundraiser Sunday night.
By the way, folks, I know where this thing took place because I was asked to go.
I shot 78 Saturday in a member-member tournament.
I had five birdies.
I had too many double bogeys that I shot even better, but I had five birdies.
One of the birdies was a chip-in for 10 feet off the green.
But the other four birdies, I didn't sink long putts.
My approach shots were within four and five feet, and I sank those putts.
But I mean, I was striping it.
I changed my stance, but I used, I sent Hank Haney a note.
Hank, I just shot a real 78 here.
It wasn't, it was a tournament.
Everything counts.
None of this, no give me puts or any of that.
Like when you're just horsing around.
And he wrote back, that's the greatest news I've had all week.
And so anyway, the guy who hosted the thing was playing in the tournament on Saturday.
And I can't go to these things.
It was $50,000.
That's, you know, I'm a powerful, influential member of the media.
I don't go to fundraisers or contribute to them.
No, no, no.
Not that the price is too high.
I'm telling you what the price was.
It was the largest, it was $3 plus million dollars they raised with something 90 people.
It was 50 grand to get it.
Anyway, I know the guy and his wife who hosted the thing.
They're nice people.
And Jerry Jordan, his wife, his wife has worked for Romney for a long time.
Anyway, anyway, the point is here, I shot 78.
And I didn't know it until the round was over.
No, it wasn't in the zone.
We're just caught up in the score of the tournament and how the team was doing.
It was two-man best ball.
And it was a member-member tournament.
And I thought I was going to be close to 80, but I thought I had too many double bogeys to be under 80.
But I'd forgotten to count the impact of the five birdies.
And in fact, three of the birdies happened in the first five holes.
I mean, I was striping a dang thing.
Any rate, at any rate, at a close to the press Florida fundraiser Sunday night here in Palm Beach, at which his remarks were overheard by some reporters standing outside, Romney was asked about his media strategy for the general election campaign.
And according to reports in the Wall Street Journal and PMS NBC, Romney said his campaign's been treated well by Fox News, but that he needs to expand his audience beyond Fox.
He says, Fox is watched by the true believers.
We need to get the independence and the women.
We need to move beyond Fox's true believers.
Romney said.
Now, that may well be the case.
That's standard procedure, by the way.
You secure the nomination with the so-called base.
But that's not what Romney's done.
Romney has not secured this with the Republican base, with the Conservative.
That's not how he's got that.
The Republican establishment kicked this whole primary off wanting to secure the nomination for a moderate with moderate votes from the get-go.
They wanted to de-emphasize the conservative vote, and they lucked out with so many conservatives running that the conservative vote throughout all those early primaries was split seven or eight different ways.
So a lot of people, well, a good friend of mine heard about this.
He said, what do you mean?
Time to move beyond Fox's true believers.
He hadn't hit the true believers yet.
I mean, there's some real, not felt by me, there's still some real animosity out there.
And that's why Cheney is saying it's time to unify.
It's time for everybody to get together now.
You know, it would help if Romney would reach out to Santorum and get Santorum.
It would help if Romney would reach out to Mr. Newt.
The whole unity thing.
I don't know if it's going to happen.
Don't ask me.
I suspect that it will because I think when we get to the point where the pedal hits the metal and the rubber hits the road, I think the whole specter of Obama will be a unifying characteristic or aspect of the campaign.
But who said that before about having to widen the base beyond conservatives?
Somebody said that.
I can't remember who.
Who said you got to widen the base beyond the conservatives?
Some establishment guy.
So there's a way to say this, but to move beyond Fox's true believers, people, true believers is not a complimentary characterization, would you say?
Or is it?
True believers, I guess you go either way on it.
A question before we go to the break and get to your phone calls.
And by the way, we still got some funny audio sound bites from the Sunday shows about the women on these panels talking about Hillary Rosen and who's allowed to say what and what whoever is allowed to say should say and all that.
But I have a question before we get there.
I meant to ask this last week, but given that George Zimmerman turned himself into the police, shouldn't he collect a million-dollar bounty reward from the new Black Panther Party?
Calypso Louie, ladies and gentlemen, was in Memphis, Tennessee Saturday at Le Moyne Owens College, the Nation of Islam leader.
And we have a brief portion of the remarks of Minister Farrakhan.
Leadership is nothing to play with.
Because people tomorrow, maybe in a few days, are going to kill their leaders who've been selling them out.
That's why we're in the shape that we're in right now, because we had corrupt people or people who started off good and got corrupted.
Now, who is Calypso Louis referring to here when he warns that people in a few days are going to kill their leaders who've been selling them out?
That's Minister Farrakhan.
Will the Secret Service leave Cartagena and come home to investigate this?
Well, is the whole Secret Service down there?
Well, I mean, this is serious stuff.
This is the Nation of Islam leader is in Memphis on Saturday, and he's saying, cause people tomorrow, maybe in a few days, are going to kill their leaders who've been selling them out.
He doesn't identify which leaders have been selling out who.
But I just wanted to hear it.
Back to the phones or to the phones.
We're going to start Raleigh, North Carolina with Paul.
Great to have you on the program, sir.
Hello.
Maha, Rush here.
It's a pleasure to speak with you.
Thank you, sir, very much.
Before I offer my theory on the Secret Service, I'd like to say I hope Dick Cheney with his new heart outlives Sergeant Schultz.
But to my theory with the Secret Service, these guys go ahead of the president, and then they have to report to his team when they show up.
So that means I'm a little nervous, Rush.
Just take it easy and pretend you're talking to the second most important person in your life.
Okay.
So when President Obama arrives, they debrief the agents that come in, and then they move on to the next location.
So that means for the last three years, they haven't been home.
So they have needs.
Well, I don't say what he's saying is this is the advanced team.
They go in a week or so before the president arrives, and they secure the hotels and the routes and all that.
And his belief is these guys are constantly on the road doing advanced work, and therefore they have needs.
And as we've learned, all of the attractive women are not working.
They're available.
And I think the problem with the theory there, Paul, is that it's not the same guys.
I think they rotate them.
I don't think people are away from home for years with the Secret Service.
But this is the point.
Everybody has their needs.
There's also discipline.
There's also propriety.
There are all kinds of things.
But look, I still think a lot of the people in the Secret Service, with Obama's constant travel, I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of these guys are really overworked.
People, I mean, they're female agents, too.
But he is on the road constantly.
You ever know George W. Bush on Thanksgiving and most Christmases would stay in the White House so the agents could spend time with their families.
And then shortly after is when he would split the scene.
Not always, but as often as he could.
So, anyway, interesting theory.
Janice, Shiloh, Illinois, great to have you on the EIB network.
Hello.
Hello, last man standing.
It's wonderful to talk to you again.
And ask your wife to give me a really give you a really big kiss for me for what you've been through since you've taken President on.
All right, I will do.
I wanted to talk about Hillary Rosen because she said this truth too, Rush.
Her words, she was correct when she says her words were poorly chosen.
The mistake she made was she made that comment about Ann Rodney.
If she take the whole thing that she said and remove that one line, she was going after the single white, the white single mother vote of Fishtown in Charles Murray's new book.
Oh, yeah.
Because see, the thing is, stay-at-home moms are not unionized.
They can speak out, and that's why the left has been so gobshipping.
Well, I'll tell you, there's another thing.
And this is a, you have a good point here.
But there's another reason, too, why stay-at-home moms, and I shared this earlier.
There's a reason why stay-at-home moms are a threat, and that is the essence of independence.
The essence of rugged individualists.
They do not need the state.
They're not asking the state for anything.
They're not asking the government to pay for this and to pay for that.
They're not putting any stress on the federal budget, for example.
And as such, they're not controllable.
And they're not dependent.
And that, to any statist, is a huge threat.
And we will be back.
Hit the wrong button there, folks.
Sorry.
Greetings and welcome back, Rush Limbaugh, the cutting edge of societal evolution.
There's another reason why stay-at-home moms actually, I think, are a threat to women like Hillary Rosen and other leftist pundits who want the state paying for school lunch, school breakfast, school dinner, food stamps, contracepts, you name it.
Every aspect of life as much as the state needs to be about what they want.
And a stay-at-home mother doesn't involve the government.
Married, stay-at-home moms.
That super attacked and Romney married, stay-at-home.
He never had to work a day in her life.
You know what really irritates them?
In addition to stay-at-home moms being the flip side of a welfare mom, a stay-at-home mom, look at me talking to you now.
Instead of having the government, stay-at-home moms have a husband to support them.
And you don't think that irritates some of these leftist women?
Remember the early days of feminism?
Women were to ignore, put aside relationships as one of the reasons for happiness in life.
Now, I realize some of you are new to the program, and some of you are maybe too young to remember what was going on in the late 60s and 70s.
I lived it.
Don't doubt me on this.
The dawning era of this current age of feminism.
Women were told all kinds of things.
A relationship, a man, that was shackles.
That was holding you back.
It was denying you your full potential.
Being a mother, staying at home, you're letting the sisterhood down, but you're letting yourself down too.
It was a full court press to throw away as many traditions in male-female relationships, both at home and at work, as possible.
I kid you not on this.
And it was not hidden.
There was nothing subliminal about this message.
It was dead on right between the eyes.
There were books, lectures.
The feminists went on TV, made remarks about it.
And having a life that depended on a man for any amount of your happiness was a sin.
And if you don't like it that way, depending on a relationship for any part of your happiness, you were missing the boat.
You were falling prey to the old traps that had been set by the patriarchal-dominated society from the get-go.
Because all it was was slave work.
It was vacuuming and ironing and cleaning up the messes of the kids.
This was the liberation of women's lib.
It was liberating women from all of these traditions.
And you cannot have women's lib without also requiring liberation from men and relationships and marriage and so forth.
The feminists would say back then, for you young ladies in the audience, the feminists would say, I mean, Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan and Molly Yard and a whole bunch of them, Eleanor Smeal would constantly say that women need men like a fish needs a bicycle.
That was one of the statements.
Women need men like a fish.
And it was militant.
This was not advice that they were given.
These were demands.
Now, the reason I remember this stuff for those of you young ladies and young men in the audience too is because I was just turning in 1971, I was just turning 20 and 21.
Those are just, I moved out of the house, I'd moved to Pittsburgh, I was on my own.
It was new, fresh, exciting times.
And this feminism stuff hit, and it was a mess because it turned women angry.
They even if you went out and had a date, the whole there was no fun to it.
And it wasn't every woman, of course.
They all didn't fall into it, but a whole lot did.
I'm simply trying to give you backup for the assertion here that women like Hillary Rosen, these leftist, feminist, liberate women from all these traditional shackles, the fact that Ann Romney had a husband supporting her and not the government, that is as irritating a factor as anything else in this.
More so than, I mean, it's the reason Ann Romney, quote unquote, never had to work a day in her life.
Or as Bill Maher so eloquently said on Friday, it's why Ann Romney never had to get up at 7 o'clock in the morning to get her ass out of the house, quote unquote, Bill Maher.
It's because there was a husband there who provided for her and the kids.
And that, see, the women were not supposed to depend on that.
It was okay if the government ended up providing for you.
That was cool.
But not a husband, not a man.
You're supposed to do that yourself.
And if you couldn't do it yourself, then you turn to government programs.
Now, today's Ann Romney's birthday.
Did you know that?
Ann Romney's birthday.
Democrats actually a couple days early with their gifts last week.
Well, it's probably a happy birthday.
I'm just telling you, I'm not making these statements to be provocative.
I'm not trying to make anybody mad.
I'm just telling you what is.
And I lived it.
Grew up in an era where more women than you can count were told the worst thing could happen to you is to have your happiness derived from a relationship or a man.
Now, they still needed men, they wanted, but it was not pleasant.
It really was true.
Compliment her appearance, and it was an insult.
It was sexist.
It was objectifying.
You know, open the card.
I can do that myself.
I'm not some weakling.
This stuff really happened.
And it was commonplace.
Let's go to the audio soundbites.
We're going to go now to ABC's this week, George Stephanopoulos.
This is the roundtable.
And they're talking about Bill Maher's remarks on Friday night about Ann Romney.
And the guess that this is Melanie Barnes, if the former, no, yeah, former White House domestic policy advisor for Obama.
So this is Stephanopoulos and Melody Barnes talking about Bill Maher.
I wonder if the president has a continuing problem with Bill Maher.
You know, you saw those comments he made on Friday now.
He's given a million dollars.
He's the biggest single contributor to the super PAC aligned with the president.
This has now happened a couple of times.
Do you think the president's going to have to cut ties?
The language, the sentiment are problematic.
And the campaign has, and the president has said, look, the civility is, it matters.
The way we talk to each other matters.
I saw David Axelrod in earlier situations when comments have been made by Bill Maher say, I'm not going on your show.
I'm backing away.
I'm distancing myself.
Okay, so that's, I don't think they solved anything there.
Is Melody Barnes, you know, struggling in vain for a cogent thought to answer the question?
Because what she didn't want to say is, yeah, the president ought to throw him overboard because they don't want to get rid of his money.
They do not want to give back the million dollars.
So they've got to say, well, Maher is not one of us.
It's like Hillary Rose.
She's not one of us.
She works at CNN.
So later during the roundtable, talking about Maher's remarks, they got Kokie Roberts of ABC News, Stephanopoulos, and Hurricane Katrina Vandenhoe from The Nation magazine.
What Maher does and what Rosen did, even though I know, certainly know that you're just talking on television.
Sometimes you say it would have come out a different way.
We've all got it.
But the fact is, is that it plays into an image of the Democrats as this out of touch with regular people and an elitist and kind of snooty.
To pick up on what Cokie says, I think these discussions about Bill Maher and the Hillary Rosenann Romney, much of that plays into a view that our politics are failing to deal with the massive deep-seated problems this country has.
There are people in this country who are looking perhaps at us right now on this roundtable and saying, you're not connecting to my problems or my life.
Let's get with it.
Forget Bill Maher.
Right, right, Rez.
Forget Bill Maher, but if it's Rush Limbaugh, we'll sit here for a month and talk about it and try to connect with your life.
Bill Maher, why don't we?
Katrina, what do you want to talk about on your roundtable?
What problems do people have that you don't think you're connecting with here?
Is it Obama's economy?
So, you know, see, they're eager to just, they want to sweep Bill Maher away.
Women are from Venus.
Democrat women are from Bill Maher.
That's the problem that they have here.
They don't quite know what to do.
See, secretly, they love Mike.
I think Laura, the funniest guy, when he comes out and he zings a gaw, nobody, but they love Bill Maher.
When he does this, you know, they sit there and, ah, jealous.
They have to defend him.
They can't throw him overboard because to them, he's way too valuable when you measure it on balance.
So this kept up.
So here what we have.
We have Melody Barnes answering saying nothing.
Cokie Roberts, Katrina Vandenhoe, step in to say, everybody says things come out wrong.
It's no big deal.
Let's move on to the real issues.
They said Koki thinks, you know, this is, by the way, who thinks, this is a quasi-important point too.
Cokie Roberts says that this plays into the image of the Democrats as this out of touch with regular people, elitist kind of snooty.
Who has that image of Democrats?
Isn't that the image of Republicans that the Democrats put forth?
Isn't elite and out of touch with regular people and snooty?
Isn't that Romney?
Isn't that what Obama and Axel?
Isn't that what they say of Romney?
Did Kokie let another cat out of the bag here inadvertently?
Now, these people live and die on polls, and particularly internal polls.
And who knows what they've got there at ABC News and the Washington Post.
But I will guarantee you, there is polling data that shows that people think it's the Democrats who are out of touch, that it's the Democrats who are elitist and snooty.
And I think she's blown it big time by mentioning because that's what the Democrats try to say about Republicans.
All of a sudden, she said that this Marr thing plays into that and makes the Democrats look that way.
Everybody says things that are wrong sometimes.
Let's move on.
Really?
Let's not create a phony media feeding frenzy for a month?
No, no, we're outraged out.
Everybody knew what's going on.
Nothing to see here.
Let's move on.
Which takes us to the next bite.
And this is Cokie Roberts.
And Stephanopoulos says, look, this issue of Romney being very, very rich.
This issue seems to hobble the campaign a little bit.
They had some trouble putting out the first returns, tax returns earlier this year.
Now they're putting off the release, Romney.
How big a deal do you think this is?
And should we expect to see those 12 years of tax returns that Obama's demanding to see of Romney's?
Romney has to find a narrative about his wealth.
I mean, that's really where he is.
We're not talking about his taxes.
We're talking about how much money he has.
And he's very, very, very rich.
And he needs to find a way to talk about that so that voters aren't turned off.
Really?
He does?
Why doesn't Warren Buffett have to?
And why doesn't Bill Gates have to?
I know they're not running for office, but doesn't it go back to the point that those guys are excused because they're liberals and they sit there and they say their taxes ought to be increased?
And they sit there and say they've got too much money.
Well, let's, you know, Obama wants Romney's tax returns last 12 years.
Let's see Obama's school records.
How about his transcripts from Harvard and from Columbia?
There's a lot of stuff Obama hasn't released about him.
So how about we see that stuff?
Anyway, Romney filed an extension to his taxes.
Did you know that?
Well, he did.
You have to pay what you owe on April 15th or 17th.
You have to pay what you owe, but you can get an extension to file the return to all the paperwork and so forth.
And I think it's October 15th is the day.
Does that ring a bell on October 15th?
Mitt Romney is going to be filing his tax return, not in April, where there's six months to forget it.
Any time between, yeah, you can file anytime now.
You don't have to wait till October, but that is the limit.
That's exactly right.
An emailer wants to know: why does Mitt Romney have to explain his wealth when John Kerry didn't have to explain his?
Well, that's easy.
It wasn't John Kerry's, it was his wife's.
Teresa Hines, she did not work, in fact.
Nope, she clipped coupons.
She inherited.
But it wasn't careful.
But Obama had made millions from his books, and he wasn't forced to explain his wealth.