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May 1, 2012 - Rush Limbaugh Program
34:52
May 1, 2012, Tuesday, Hour #3
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Hey, way to smile there, Rudy.
Rudy Giuliani at a firehouse in New York, standing next to Romney.
Big smile on Rudy's face.
I say where Governor Christie saw that he could be talked into being the Veep by Mitt Romney.
Is it a 180 did Ron?
Is that right?
Christie said he wasn't interested.
Way back, well, it's politics.
Things change.
They asked Christie how he felt about Jimmy Kimmel making fat jokes.
And he said, hey, I had Sophie Vergara, is that how she pronounces her name?
Vergara, I don't watch.
Sony, anyway, she's the actress.
I had her here comforting me, consoling me.
I mean, I'd just as soon sit next to her as listen to Jimmy Kimmel any day.
I don't care what Jimmy Kimmel's talking about when I'm sitting next to Sophie Vergara.
Anyway, welcome back, Rushlinbaugh.
Happy to have you with us, my friends.
We head on down the highway of truth in a choo-choo train.
Truth, 800-282.
Wait, yeah, that's right.
800-282-2822.
2882.
Forget it.
Starting again.
800-282-2882.
That's the number if you want to be on the program.
They're having doubts about choosing North Carolina as the site of the Democrat Convention.
I have here a story in Roll Call by Stuart Rothenberg, a contributing writer for Roll Call.
Headline is, on second thought, maybe North Carolina was a mistake.
In the piece, Rothenberg outlines a challenge faced by Obama's reelection campaign if they hope to put North Carolina in its column again.
Now, you, as regular listeners here, are on the cutting edge.
You have known for about a month now of the problems facing Obama and the Democrats in North Carolina.
Not just the Edwards and the other sex scandal, but you got the governor there, Dumplins, who's not running for re-election.
They're in heap big trouble, the Democrats are.
And they chose North Carolina because they need it.
And four years ago, who would have ever thought?
By the way, not meant as a slight to North Carolina, but four years ago, who would have thought that North Carolina would be a crucial state as opposed to Florida or Ohio or Michigan, some of the other battleground states?
Rothenberg claims that it's not likely.
The challenge faced by Obama's reelection campaign, if they hope to put North Carolina in his column, Rothenberg, this piece, I don't think Obama's going to win North Carolina.
If National Democrat strategists chose Charlotte, North Carolina for the party's national convention because they like the facilities, the hotel accommodations, or the weather in early September, then I guess I can't yet quibble with the choice.
But if David Axelrod and the president's other political advisors picked North Carolina to make some broader political point than they goofed, simply put, North Carolina looks like a mess for Democrats.
Stuart Rothenberg, who doesn't want things to look like a mess for the Democrats.
North Carolina looks like a mess.
So if they chose it for political reasons, they botched it.
Are you trying to get me to say something that get me in trouble?
Okay, I no longer have MSNBC on one of my two TV monitors here.
What I have up there is the Fox Business Channel or a soap opera and Fox News on the bottom.
But I've taken MSNBC off.
I refuse.
We don't play any soundbites from them anymore, and I don't watch them.
It's irrelevant.
They don't have a large enough audience.
They don't deserve to be talked about.
So I haven't been talking about them.
Snerdley, they watch it in there.
They have it on in there.
Snerdley just said they ran a breaking news crawl at the bottom of the screen.
Oh, it's not a crawl.
It's a static Chiron.
Big covered the screen.
How big?
Okay, like the lower third of the screen, lower one-fourth of the screen.
A static Chiron.
Breaking news, Bin Laden killed one year ago today.
That was just on MSNBC.
We're not lying.
Breaking news.
What is breaking news to you?
Stuff that just happened, right?
A second ago, you didn't know it until some network news guy found out about it and put a breaking news bulletin up, right?
Breaking news.
Bin Laden killed one year ago today.
That's called in the tank.
That's who do you think they think their audience is to put up something like that and mean it?
To be serious about, I would no more, it would never occur to me to say anything like that to you in this audience and try to pass it off as being serious.
North Carolina, it's a right-to-work state.
And that's, you know what I think breaking news is on MSNBC?
It's news that's been damaged somehow.
It's breaking.
It's falling apart.
News that's not working.
That's what they must mean by breaking news.
The news of falling apart.
Here's the latest falling apart story.
Bin Laden killed one year ago today.
Breaking news at MSNBC doesn't mean something brand new that you've not heard of yet.
Breaking news means damaged in some way.
More properly, broken news would be what they should call it now.
MSNBC broken news.
So Stuart Rothenberg, big mistake, a mess for Democrats.
Here's another quote.
Unless the president wins re-election nationally by seven or eight points about what he won in 2008, his chances of carrying North Carolina are not very good.
And if he wins nationally by a large margin, he won't need North Carolina.
Obama won North Carolina by three-tenths of a point four years ago, almost seven points worse than his national margin of 7.2.
North Carolina doesn't look particularly hospitable to Obama's reelection or to Democrats in general.
This election is about economic policies, plain and simple.
The president's challenge is to convince voters to give him another four years to lead the country back to fiscal health.
Will the nearly 10% of North Carolinians currently without a job think that's a reasonable request?
And again, the title of this piece on Second Thought North Carolina was a mistake.
Maybe North Carolina was a mistake.
Mr. Rothenberg, here's the problem.
President's challenge is to convince voters to give him another four years to lead the country back to fiscal health.
That's not what he's trying to do.
This is why it's so important for people to understand this stuff ideologically, that Obama's not trying to lead the country back to fiscal health.
He is trying to fundamentally transform this nation.
Mr. Rothenberg, please, I know I'm just a dork talk show host of you, but I'm telling you, Obama views this country as unjust in its founding.
And for 200 plus whatever years, this country's been a mistake.
This country's flawed morally, economically, in the way it was founded, the way it was put together.
These last three years are just the beginning of the transformation, Mr. Rothenberg.
Obama's not trying to take us back to any prosperity.
This is what all of you need to understand.
Obama's not trying to return this nation to prosperity.
He's transforming it into a, at best, a Western European socialist country.
At best, that's what he's trying to turn it into.
14% unemployment, everybody with free health care till they can't afford it, which is now bankrupt government, no military.
There's no attempt here to return to prosperity.
We know how to do that.
We've had three years of Obama's attempts at what he says he's trying to do is reignite the economy.
But anybody with any honesty assessing Obama's policies in three years has to admit that they're not about prosperity.
His policies are not about fiscal health.
Fiscal health, that's to suggest that Obama's wants four more years and is trying to persuade people for four more years to lead the country back to fiscal health.
He's destroying the country's fiscal health.
He's racked up more debt by himself than every previous president combined, all the previous presidents combined.
And that's a true statistic.
Obama doesn't want to return to prosperity.
That campaign slogan is forward from here, not backward.
Seriously, Mr. Rothenberg, Obama's challenge is to convince him.
See, Rothenberg is looking at Obama as a standard traditional Democrat who is simply trying to use Democrat policies to rebuild an economist.
That's not what this guy's doing.
There's no return to anything.
Obama thinks nothing in this country's past has been right.
He doesn't believe anything in this country.
Well, certain things have been good, union risings, uprisings, union membership, growing, powerful union bosses.
There have been little things, but he's not about returning to anything here.
I would think that an esteemed political scientist like Mr. Rothenberg would understand that Obama's not like any president we've ever had.
He's not even LBJ.
He's not FDR.
He's not trying to return the country anywhere or to lead us back to fiscal health.
That's almost insulting, the guy who's single-handedly destroying every day.
And wait a little health care, if it is, fully implement by, by fiscal health, it's not even a possibility.
There's no chance of fiscal health.
If that thing survives, Obama's moving forward from where we are.
He is trying, in his mind, Mr. Rothenberg, to fix 200-plus years of immorality, unjust social justice.
You name it.
He's not your traditional Democrat.
I think there are a lot of Democrats that don't understand that.
I really do.
I think there are a lot of wealthy, rich Democrats, even consultants who don't understand.
Now, I may be pie in the sky there.
They may be all gone.
They may be all of the same belief that this country is unjust and immorally founded.
It was a mistake.
Maybe so.
But whatever.
That's irrelevant.
Obama is not about returning to anything.
We're moving forward.
That's his slogan.
On the same path that we are on.
He's not proposing any changes.
He wants four more years, Mr. Rothenberg, to finish the job.
We'll be back.
All right, I found it.
I thought I printed out a Dana Milbank's story.
Well, I know I printed out a Dana Milbank story.
I can't find it, but I just did find it.
So I'm printing it out again.
I promised some Jose Rodriguez sounds.
Here we go.
April 23rd, 2009, Washington Capitol Hill press conference, Pelosi.
Reporter says it's been said that in the fall of 2002, key members of the intelligence committee, including you, Ms. Pelosi, were briefed on interrogation methods, including waterboarding.
At the time you were briefed, did you raise any objections?
At that or any other briefing, and that was the only briefing that I was briefed on in that regard.
We were not, I repeat, not told that waterboarding or any of these other enhanced interrogation methods were used.
Last night on Hannity, Jose Rodriguez's profiled on 60 Minutes Sunday Night when Leslie Stalder couldn't believe that we gave terrorists insure.
Hannity said, you personally briefed Pelosi about enhanced interrogation.
So Pelosi lied to the American people.
We briefed her on 4th September 2002 about the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah.
So we went through the techniques that were used on him, including waterboarding.
She is either confused or is lying.
It's a toss-up.
It's a genuine toss-up with Pelosi confused or lying.
So here's the guy briefed her.
Jose Rodriguez, he briefed her.
She's denying it.
She has to deny it because the Democrats made such a big deal out of America being a torturing country under George W. Bush.
Also on Hannity, Jose Rodriguez.
Hannity said, president's now taking credit for getting bin Laden.
If he'd had his way closing Gitmo, ending enhanced interrogations, which, you know, calling people like yourself torturers, would we have gotten bin Laden?
We got a lot of information from the detainees that eventually led us to bin Laden.
And that is there.
What concerns me is that there is still doubt out there that people are doubting, you know, the amounts of information that we got from this program that gave us the basis to go after Al-Qaeda and destroy al-Qaeda.
The al-Qaeda that attacked us on 9-11 is just amazing.
There's a clear trail.
There was someone that we captured, a facilitator that we captured in 2004, that told us about bin Laden's career and gave us a pseudonym, Ahmed al-Kuwaiti.
And eventually we got the true name of Uncle Aidie.
This is the thing I was telling you in the first hour.
If Obama's policies, Pelosis, had been in place, they would have not gotten that name.
They would not have gotten the pseudonym of Ahmed Al-Kuwahi.
This was the one guy taking messages to Osama and then taking his responses back out to the field.
And it was through the dire techniques, the enhanced dire techniques that they got this guy's name, who he really was, were able to track him and find that Obama was in Pakistan.
Osama was in Pakistan.
And the irony is that had the Democrats powder puff policies been in place, we would not have learned that.
Now, we had a caller who referenced this next book.
We've got to play this one of the greatest hits ever of all time in our Soundbite roster.
This Sunday night, 60 Minutes.
Leslie Stahl talking to Jose Rodriguez, clandestine services director for George W. Bush, lead interrogator, Club Gitmo, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and other bad guys, Ramzi bin al-Shib, the whole crew.
Leslie Stahl said, so what happens after you waterboarded Khalid Sheikh Muhammad 183 times?
What happened?
Did he break down?
Did he weep?
That's cry for those of you, Rhiolinda.
Did he weep?
Did he fall apart?
No, he gets a good night's sleep.
He gets his insure.
By the way, he was very heavy when he came to us and he lost 50 pounds.
What, his insure?
You mean like people in the hospital who drink that stuff?
Yes, dietary manipulation was part of these techniques.
So sleep deprivation, dietary manipulation.
I mean, this is Orwellian stuff.
The United States doesn't do that.
Well, we do.
Well, we do.
What country has Leslie Stahl been living in?
Does she have no clue what happened in World War II with Japanese and German prisoners that we kept?
What in the world?
Orwellian?
Sleep deprivation and insure?
And I see, these people get caught up in this torture business, and it just amazes me how absent from reality these people are.
Everything is a cocktail party to them.
I don't know.
Lynn in Meredith, New Hampshire, as we quickly and unexpectedly go back to the phones.
Hello.
Hi, Russ.
Hi.
Oh, my goodness.
This is a great day for me.
Thank you.
I was wondering what you thought of the childish and unprofessional remarks that the president gave at the correspondence center about the Secret Service.
And my thought on that is that I, I don't know, here are these wonderful men and women willing to put down their lives for this president, and here he is mocking them about the scandal.
And I haven't heard too many people talking about that.
In the old days, the White House Correspondence Dinner, the purpose of the presidential speech was to be self-deprecating.
It's where the president showed up and laughed at himself.
That's what they were.
Obama shows up at the, this is a place to settle scores, to strike back, what have you.
This night is supposed to be a night off.
It hasn't been for the longest time, which is why I don't go.
It's not a night off.
It's the left continuing to be who they are with all the Republicans in there as willing dupes and circus acts.
So I wasn't surprised by what Obama said about that.
Here's the money quote, now money quote, money excerpt from Dana Milbank's piece.
Danny Milbank, state control media, big Obama fan, thinks Keith Oberman is one of the most talented people on TV kind of guy.
He's the Washington Post.
And he's got this piece out, President Obama, campaigner-in-chief.
And here's the money excerpt.
I'm not troubled by Obama's slowjam with Jimmy Fallon, who dubbed the commander-in-chief Prezy, because during Obama's appearance on late night TV, no Preezy making me queasy because his nonstop campaigning is looking, well, sleazy.
And his ad suggesting that Romney wouldn't have killed Obama, Osama is just the beginning of it.
By the way, having Bill Clinton be the voice in that ad added to it.
In a political culture that long ago surrendered to the permanent campaign, Obama has managed to take things to a whole new level.
According to statistics compiled for a book to be published this summer, the president's already set a record for total first-term fundraisers, 191, and that's only through March 6th.
Measured in terms of events that benefit his reelection bid, Obama's total exceeds the combined total of fundraisers, first-term fundraisers, of George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George H.W. Bush, Ronaldos Magnus, and Jimmy Carter.
That's amazing.
That's an incredible stat.
Obama's already done more fundraisers than those other presidents combined.
And that's why Dana Milbank, not happy with the Prezi, who he thinks is sleazy.
Ladies and gentlemen, the last time I played a soundbite featuring all female anchors at CNN, I referred to it as the clucking hens.
This did not sit well with a young blogger at the Washington Post who had never heard the term and thought that it, I don't remember the exact word, thought it was despicable of me so soon after the Sandra Fluck thing to refer to achieved accredited female anchors as waterfowl.
Domestic foul.
Domestic foul chickens.
My mother and her friends were known affectionately to me as the blue-haired bloody merry gang.
And I referred to them as clucking hens.
This is a term of endearment that husbands since the cave days have used to describe it when their wives or girlfriends get together clucking hens.
They sit there and they chat and they talk and so forth.
But this guy, it was instructive for me because this guy had to be young, never heard the term, thought it was outrageous, thought it was insulting, and it just violated every tenet, political correctness.
How dare anybody say something like that?
Here are achieved women.
They've reached the pinnacle of something.
They're anchors at CNN.
And they're better than clucking hens.
So I'm going to try to learn here.
I will not call them clucking hens.
But we do have another soundbite of these women.
Who is it?
It's Carol Costello, who it has been said CNN is designed to stalk me, journalistically, and Poppy Harlow.
Now, that's a new name.
I don't watch CNN, so I don't know who Poppy Harlow is.
But anyway, it happened on CNN's newsroom this morning.
And we have a montage here of Carol Costello and correspondent Poppy Harlow.
Not to be confused with the actress Poppy Montgomery of some primetime TV show, Poppy Harlow in this case.
And they are in crisis over the Occupy protests fizzling out.
They're devastated.
They're terribly upset that they're not working.
And here is that montage.
They're back.
This was their show of strength less than six months ago.
And this is their fizzled fury today.
This is a live picture of a modest turnout in New York City.
CNN's Poppy Harlow is in New York's Bryant Park.
Not many people there.
Not many people here.
It's early.
They tell me it's going to get a lot busier this afternoon.
A very small turnout.
40 people representing the movement.
It's raining and it's cold.
And maybe later on in the day, more people will gather.
If there's not a huge turnout in these 135 cities across the United States, what will that say about the movement itself?
It hurts them.
I think they need this to be a day when they really are visual all over the media.
These are news reporters advising this group what they need to do in order to be taken seriously.
They need this day to be a day.
They really are visual.
Now, this reminds me of the old days, the now gang, the nags.
Probably a lot of people don't appreciate that nomenclature.
But the nags would call a march or something, and 10 of them would show up, and every network would be there.
10 women marching against every network would be there covering it.
Now, the responsible view of this is: okay, if Occupy, this giant big Occupy movement calls a protest today and only 40 people, is it worth sending your news van is it worth sending your news van and your satellite uplink and your reporter to cover this thing?
Of course not.
It's a non-event that they want to be a bigger event.
And so Poppy Harlow was telling Carol Costello what Occupy needs to do to be taken seriously by CNN this afternoon because this morning was an embarrassing fizzle.
Who's next on the phones?
Mike in Cleveland.
Thank you for waiting.
Mike, great to have you on the program.
Hi.
Rush, thank you very much for the call.
You've been actually a really good source of motivation, so I'm really glad I got through today.
Thank you, sir.
Yeah, I just want to here in Cleveland, obviously you've heard about the group of people trying to blow up the bridge here.
Yeah, they're being characterized in the media that we're seeing as right-wingers.
No, they were actual members of the Occupy movement.
Of course, they're leftist anarchists.
Yeah, and that has been verified.
Our local news reported on it, and someone actually from the Occupy Cleveland movement head of it confirmed that they were a member of it, but that they said, of course, that their actions were in no way representative of their beliefs or the way that they do things.
How many were there?
It was five total.
They bought these fake explosives for one of the undercover FBI agents.
Some of them were confirmed members of the Occupy movement.
So I don't know what these other two.
I don't know if you've seen their pictures.
Well, we looked at their Facebook pages, and on their Facebook pages, they say that they were at Occupy Cleveland.
Yeah, so so when your definition of breaking news for MSNBC, because if these guys were actually a member of an extreme right-wing terror or an extreme right-wing group, that would be MSNBC's version of breaking news.
Well, what would happen in that case is that MSNBC would blow up the bridge and then claim that the Occupy guys did it if they were right-wingers.
So, yeah, I've been watching, and no, they're conveniently leaving out that they are, in fact, members of the Occupied Movement.
Well, I'm thinking here that Poppy Harlow at CNN's got to be disappointed.
She gets dispatched to Bryant Park, where there are 40 occupiers not doing anything.
Yet in Cleveland, five of them get close to blowing up a bridge.
That's where the real news was, and Poppy's in Bryant Park.
Yep.
Chatting with Carol Costello about what they have to do to get noticed.
The Bryant Park people forgot to blow something up.
Yep.
Now, they are sending cornstarch, however, to banks and buildings, trying to make it look like it's anthrax or something, but they're sending cornstarch out there.
By the way, his reference to MSNBC, in case you missed it, about 40 minutes ago, MSNBC had a Chiron on the bottom 25% of the screen, the bottom fourth of the screen.
Honestly, folks, we couldn't make this up.
I doubt some of the best satirical writers at The Onion could have done this.
Scott Ott might have been able to get close.
MSNBC actually ran a giant headline at the bottom of the screen.
It said, breaking news.
Osama bin Laden killed one year ago today.
Breaking news at MSNBC was something that happened one year ago.
I'm told that Ronaldus Magnus in 1984 did not do a single fundraiser.
Sounds hard to believe, but that's what I'm told.
And we can probably confirm that.
But he won in an historic landslide in 1984, didn't do one fundraiser.
Now, let's shake the Republican Convention.
Got to go to that.
But anyway, that's what I'm saying.
I just got an email.
This is how many times have we talked on this program about the Fox show, The Five?
Quite a bit.
I just got an email from somebody in the subscriber inbox, Rush 24-7.
Rush, have you ever watched a Five?
What do you think of that show?
We love The Five here on the EIB.
I mean, it's a fascinating concept.
There's not a single host.
Although I'll tell you this.
I think the way it works out, Dana Perino is essentially the way I watch that show.
Dana Perino, look at her eyes when they show her on camera when any of the others are speaking.
She's got this piano teacher look in her eyes, waiting for a mistake.
And she's going to pull out that ruler and wrap their knuckles if they get it wrong.
She's looking around.
She's almost like the controlling, but the dominant entity there that's there to keep order and to make sure the kids behave.
And, you know, Gutfeld is her biggest challenge, keep him in line.
And then Beckle.
And then Andrea Tarantula.
But it's a fascinating show, the way this thing gets put together, the way they put it together.
I'm fascinated by it.
So, yes, we watch.
Okay, Dick Morris, where was he last night?
He was on, it's gotta be Fox.
Yeah, Hannity, former Clinton advisor.
Hannity said, look, Romney wouldn't attack Obama.
They're taking all this out of context, Dick.
Obama is.
The president with a smirk on his face is taking Romney out of context.
Obama is digging himself into a gigantic hole here for the last four or five or six weeks, maybe the last two or three months.
This class warfare, such an obvious distortion of a negative as this, his trying to divide the country along ethnic lines as well.
I know that he's paying a price for it.
In the polling that I've seen, Obama's personal positives were always about 20 points higher than his job approval.
In the polling I've seen lately, they're even.
In other words, his approval has always been in the mid or low 40s.
Now his personal favorability has dropped to that.
I think that the hope and change from the public's mind has been replaced with a nasty, surly, visceral figure.
Whoa, Dick Morris, class warfare not working.
But he wasn't finished.
Hannity then said, well, when you look at Karl Rove's electoral map, it becomes more difficult for Romney.
That has some people I know concerned because Karl Rove's electoral map right now has Obama way almost insurmountably ahead in the Electoral College.
So Hannity's asking Morris about that.
Does that concern you, Dick?
The electoral map?
Or is this the type of thing that it's way too early to tell?
I went back to 1964 and I tested how every incumbent president polled on Election Day as opposed to the final Gallup poll.
I found that six of the eight not only didn't get a single undecided vote, they lost some of the support that the last poll gave them.
So when I see a poll that shows Romney ahead of Obama by 47-46, which I think is the last Rasmussen poll, as far as I'm concerned, that is a 54-46 defeat for Obama and more likely a 55-45 defeat.
Whoo, Dick Morris predicting a landslide right there last night on Hannity.
On Fox, Romney 55-45 victory is what, according to polling data analysis.
Now, we are six months away from the election.
And as I said earlier, it is an election of real importance.
I don't need to tell you this election is not about economic policy alone.
It's about what kind of country and society we're going to be going forward.
Here is the quote from the book, The Rise of the President's Permanent Campaign by Brendan J. Doherty.
Carter held four re-election fundraisers in the 1980 campaign, Reagan Zero in 1984.
It's from a book.
People wanted to know.
That doesn't sound right, Rush.
From a book by Brendan J. Doherty, The Rise of the President's Permanent Campaign.
Don't doubt me.
See you tomorrow, folks.
It'll be Wednesday already.
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