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May 15, 2012 - Rush Limbaugh Program
37:03
May 15, 2012, Tuesday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
Well, folks, I have to tell you, what red-blooded American kid growing up in the Midwest doesn't dream of being in the Hall of Fame someday.
And yesterday I made it into the Hall of Fame in the state of Missouri with a bust.
And it's a great bust.
It is an awesome-looking bust.
What a fun day it was yesterday.
And of course, the libs are deranged.
The Democrats are beside themselves.
This is not the way this is supposed to be happening.
Anyway, great to have you here as we kick off another partial week of broadcast excellence.
I hope now you understand why on Friday I didn't say, I'll see you Monday, I said next week, and why I didn't say specifically where I was going to go.
And I have full details for you about the day and the event that it was.
It was a great honor for our family, really, is what this really was.
And so many of my family showed up, drove from all over the Midwest to be there for this event.
And everybody, we got the state capitol, everybody was, I must have posed for 200 pictures and signed a bunch of autographs.
It was just, everybody was just fabulous.
It could not have been greater.
From the moment we got off the airplane until we left, everybody we ran into was just as sweet, nice as they could be.
Telephone number here if you want to be on the program, 800-282-2882, the email address, LRushbo at EIBNet.com.
A teachable moment here.
And many of them on the program, we are loaded.
But have you noticed how the media and Democrats are going nuts over Jamie Dimon and what was it, $2 billion, $2 billion trade loss at J.P. Morgan Chase?
You know, I really do believe because capitalism has not been taught, so many people do not understand that winning and losing is part of the deal.
When you have freedom, winning and losing is part of the deal.
J.P. Morgan Chase still made a profit despite the $2 billion loss in that one unit.
But everybody now wants to get rid of Diamond and they want more regulation.
And this all happened after Dodd-Frank.
This all happened after a bunch of brand new federal regulation.
But I really think that what this shows is that people of a certain age don't understand that in freedom you win and lose.
And when you lose, you come back.
You try again.
But so many people in our culture seem to want to take any chance of loss out of the equation, even if it means that everybody is simply living a life of mediocrity, that there is no excellence, because you can't get to excellence without failure along the way.
And failure simply doesn't want to be tolerated.
The moment there is failure in an institution or in an individual, here comes a bunch of leftists saying, well, we got to get the government involved.
And I know people say, well, they haven't done it in sports yet.
They are doing it in sports.
They are doing it in National Football League.
That's what this really is all about when you get down to brass tacks.
And one of the reasons that sports is in some disfavor right now because it is totally merit-based and there are wins and losses and there's personal failure and there's recovery, redemption, and triumph and all these things that are part of freedom that people want to take out of the equation now.
As though somehow it's intolerable, unaccepted because of the pain and suffering and the risk.
And the idea that life can be painless, the idea that life can exist without suffering is ridiculous.
It's absurd, but there are people with those motivations and they do not have one foot, one toe grounded in reality.
In my case, I mean, you would never make it to the Hall of Fame if you're afraid of failure.
You would never make it to any Hall of Fame if you're afraid of failure.
I'm next, Harry Truman, Mark Twain.
Of course, what's funny is the governor of the state of Missouri is a Democrat, Jay Nixon.
And honestly, there's a statement from the governor's office yesterday.
Because they run the rotunda, the speaker, Steve Tilly, is the guy who suggested that I join the Hall of Fame.
He's the guy who spearheaded it.
He's the one who made it happen.
He's the one that took the arrows.
This guy was being fired on from the moment he suggested this.
Never once did he waver.
And there's also something that happened yesterday Democrats don't know about yet.
Wasn't part of the ceremony.
I mean the National Demerit, not just the Missouri Democrats.
Anyway, Steve was a real trooper.
He loves life.
This guy's having more fun.
He's term limited.
He's leaving.
He's an eye doctor.
This is his last term as a member of the Missouri House of Representatives.
This is right there in the House chamber where this happened.
And so much my life has happened.
None of it was ever expected.
And certainly in my family, this kind of thing, I was the last one anybody thought would receive this kind of accolade or honor, as I mentioned yesterday in my remarks.
I mean, I'm the, you know how after a championship sporting event, they talk to the star of the game.
Inevitably, the star of the game says, yeah, I'm the first member of my family to go to college.
Well, I'm the first member of my family not to.
I'm the only member of my family not to.
And I didn't follow the family path in life, which was the law.
And that was my whole point of my remarks.
Despite all that, everybody in the family was always supportive and always has been.
In fact, let's I've got some soundbites, some excerpts of this yesterday, the acceptance.
Peter Kinder is a family friend as lieutenant governor.
He made some introductory remarks and went through all the things that have happened of note in my career.
And I was listening to, I heard some of them.
It was tough hearing in there with the echo chamber and everything, but I was surprised I had forgotten so much of the stuff that had happened in my career and the way he put it in context.
It'd be unseemly for me to mention it.
It would be bragging because I'm not going to do that.
I mean, look at Mark Twain.
Samuel Clemens was a financial failure all of his life because he took risks.
He's in the Missouri Hall of Fame.
No, I'm not an ⁇ what I was going to say, the governor of the state, Jay Nixon, his office put a statement yesterday saying that they're not going to put my bust in the Capitol Rotunda.
Or they're asking for it not.
Somebody's asking for the bust not to be put there because I say controversial things.
And I don't deserve to be there, which fine.
That's the way things are today.
But let's, I have one of me have one tooth, and not the whole thing.
They asked me to go eight to 10 minutes, and that's a cough for me.
I went 14.
Nobody complained.
So we have three soundbites.
Let's just, here's the first one starting at the top.
Well, I thought we have the sound bites.
Do we have the sound bites?
Do we have soundbite number one?
I'm stunned.
I'm not speechless.
Close to it.
I'm literally quite unable to comprehend what's happening to me today.
This is something I never ever considered that would happen to me as I'm listening to this list of qualifications or resume recitation.
I'm reminded of why I'm here.
We're all products of our families.
Families define us, determine so much about us.
And there are so many in my family that far more deserve to be standing up here today than I do.
They have then supported throughout every aspect of my life when it veered away from what the family direction was.
Family direction was law.
My family had a very, very domineering, positively so, influential patriarch, our grandfather, Pop, Rush H. Limbaugh Sr.
Everybody wanted to be like him.
You know, every family has a mythological character.
Every business has a mythological figure about whom the most incredibly positive things are said.
Of course, that legend grows and it's expanded in time.
But all the things that were said about my grandfather were true.
He never smoked, never drank.
He was the epitome of dignity and sophistication and so forth.
And he was a role model.
Everybody wanted to be like him.
And there was this vision of a giant law firm, Limbaugh, Limbaugh.
And then go hire somebody else just to have another name on the door.
And a lot of the family went into it.
A lot of my cousins, my brother, and so forth.
But I was never interested.
I told him yesterday I hated school.
The time I was eight years old, I found out I wanted to be on the radio.
School to me was prison.
And throughout, I explained to him that my father reluctantly supported me as I embarked on my radio career only because it was the only thing in my life I'd never quit up till that time.
Made me join the Boy Scouts.
I was a tenderfoot for a year.
You know what you have to do to be a tenderfoot?
Nothing.
You just join.
Now, one merit badge, nothing.
Tenderfoot for a year.
So doing so many things everybody else wanted me.
I just wasn't interested because I knew what I wanted to do.
And I knew also school couldn't help me.
Well, the wrong way to put it, what I mean to say is that I had a talent.
There was no school to go to for talent.
And I knew what I wanted to do.
And so everything that prevented me from doing it was an obstacle.
And school was an obstacle in my immature view at the time.
But because the family, I mean, here I am playing Donnie Osland Records on the radio, and they're looking, where is this going to lead?
And of course, nowhere.
Age 28, this jockey day is over, fired for the sixth or seventh time.
And so I quit and went to work for the Kansas City Royals, went back to radio.
I mean, I've told you all this story, but I spoke of it in brief yesterday as a means of expressing just how much throughout all of this the family, everybody in the family was 100% totally supportive and have been since day one.
Here's the second soundbite.
My family has supported me through every up and down, you know, through no fault of their own.
I have brought all kinds of attention to them that I'm sure they never intended or planned on.
And it's not enough that I know how to put up with it.
It's not something they bargain for, but they've been right there supporting me throughout all of this.
Never once have I heard one critical thing asking me to stop or change what I'm doing because of any damage I might be encouraged to family.
My family is singularly responsible for me being here today, being so honored as I am today.
And I really, my hope, my dream has always been that throughout my life that many more members of my family become known.
And if understood about them, that they are as deserving, if not more so than I am, of this.
Because I couldn't, you know, you can't replace your family.
You can't change them.
And my family, the best family being from Missouri, I know somebody once asked me, what do you think would have happened to you from your radio show if you'd have been born in the Northeast or the West Coast?
And I actually think being born in Missouri, there is something to Midwestern cultural values.
There's something to it.
Something really substantive about having it.
And I went on to point out that I think being from the Midwest with those particular values at the time I was born and growing up was instrumental in helping me be able to acquire a national audience on radio, not just a regional one.
And I can't emphasize enough how much the support of everybody in my family has meant throughout this.
They have never, not one of them ever has sent a note or made a phone call.
Could you think you could maybe tone it down a little?
That's never, ever happened.
It's been just the exact opposite.
And that you can't replace.
That kind of love you can't replace.
And the gratitude that I feel for is practically impossible to express.
Now, at the end of the, this is by no means all of it.
This is these two soundbites that synthesize it.
But at the end, I remembered that I had forgotten to expressly thank the speaker, Steve Tilley, for singularly making this happen.
Well, in the Republican caucus, for making this happen.
And by the way, it would have been easy.
Tilly could have done this without me being there.
I mean, there was opposition to it.
The moment it was announced, it happened to coincide with something in the news about free contraceptives.
And so there was all kinds of opposition to it.
And Tilly, if he wanted to, could have done this without me being there.
They could have, I didn't have to be there.
They could have done this with just a short little ceremony in his office and the chambers and so forth.
And it's okay.
Well, Limbaugh is now a member of the famous Hall of Famous Missourians and so forth.
But he wasn't going to do it until I could be there, whenever that was.
And knowing full well that he was inviting all kinds of flack and attention.
So I thanked him at the end of my remarks this way.
And this is why, folks, if you've read some of the media and think the comments in them is somewhat snarky about this is what did it.
The speaker himself have been under assault for wanting to do this.
And believe me, it's easy to say, you know what?
Fresh, you better off be trying this some other year.
He didn't do that.
He hung in.
It was tough.
He did not give them any quarter.
Laughed at them when they call his office, which is what you have to do because they're deranged.
Well, that's now why the governor's office is suggesting the bus not be put in the rotunda and all that, because I characterize them as deranged in their in their singular opposition to me.
They're deranged.
I mean, there's, I don't think there's any question about it.
But he was.
He was getting phone calls in his office from not just the general public, but mostly from most of the general public was supportive of this.
But elected Democrats were trying to hassle him and so forth.
Essentially, folks, I fought the law.
The law lost on this.
And now I'm in the Hall of Famous Missourians, and I'm deeply gratified for the honor.
I wish everybody could have seen this.
I had no idea what a big deal it was going to be.
I really didn't.
I've got to take a brief break because we're long.
I'll be back here in just a second.
No, no, no.
I say this a lot.
My parents would not believe my life.
My mother and dad would not believe.
Well, my mom might because she saw enough of what had happened to me before she passed away.
My father saw very little of it.
He wouldn't believe it.
Anything it was possible without going to college.
I mean, his formative years of the Great Depression, if you didn't get a college degree, you'd have a chance.
That was it.
No chance, no prayer whatsoever.
You were forever going to be an outcast in every which way.
Socially, intellectually, employment-wise, you didn't have a chance.
And for that, my dad thought he was a failure his whole life.
His whole life, because he couldn't convince me to go to college.
And some of the ways he tried, he tried everything.
And I mean, he even took away my car to make sure.
And my mother was driving me to school at college.
How many college students their parents take them to make sure they get there when they found out I was skipping ballroom dance?
So it was really a momentous day.
And as I say, for our entire family, not just for me.
And again, I really don't have the words, which is a strange circumstance for me, to adequately express my appreciation and gratitude to Steve Tilley and all of the Republicans in the Missouri House of Representatives for hanging tough.
I mean, they brought a lot of controversy.
Not controversy.
They brought a lot of attention to themselves that normally politicians don't like.
It's like I told them, you know, I can survive being hated.
In fact, I can even thrive being hated, but you can't.
There's a big difference in getting votes and getting audience.
And I was truly humbled and gratified by what they did for me yesterday and how they stood behind it from the first moment they were attacked.
Back in a sec.
Hey, folks, it's tea season, and we've got a huge new to-if-by-tea sweepstakes promotion contest, whatever you want to call it, that I will be announcing shortly on the program today.
Stand by for that.
You remember that Time magazine cover?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Look, look, look, I've got three hours here.
We're really jammed.
The New York Times CBS poll is so bad for Obama.
They are really worried in the White House, and it's not new.
They have been worried for a long time.
This is not the first CBS New York Times poll that's got bad news for Obama.
People have forgotten.
Two months ago, at least now, on the same day, the Washington Post and the New York Times both came out with polls and Obama was at 41% approval in one of them.
And he was not doing well with women, I think, in the Washington Post poll two months ago.
And this was right in the middle of the contrived war on women, and it wasn't working.
The gay marriage thing isn't working.
Just 7% of the American people of likely voters see gay marriage as a top issue in November.
He's raising money with it, but he's not garnering support.
He's losing support over this.
He's losing support everywhere.
There is serious talk now about getting Biden off the ticket and replacing him.
The re-elect campaign is not at all going the way the professionals, the Obama administration, thought it was going to go.
And there is genuine discord and upset within all levels of the campaign.
And even now that you're starting to see in various places in the drive-by media, they can't hide this anymore.
They can't even paper over it very well.
So they're having to allude to it.
In fact, the New York Times story today on their own poll is so bad that the White House is saying it's biased, that the sample is not correct.
The White House is ripping their own House Organ poll today.
If the New York Times poll is as bad as they're reporting, the odds are it's much worse than that.
So we'll get into the details of this here shortly.
I want to play you a soundbite first, though.
The Time magazine cover with the 28-year-old mother and the three-year-old baby, well, three-year-old boy.
She was breastfeeding in this Time magazine cover.
And by the way, we here at the EIB network were the first with the parody covers of Time magazine.
We had the boy breastfeeding off the breast of the Statue of Liberty.
And now there have been others.
Obama breastfeeding from George Clooney is a very popular one out there.
Obama as the young boy.
But here, you have to hear this soundbite.
This is Melinda Henneberg.
Now, Minda Henneberg, I think, used to be at Newsweek.
Maybe it was Time, one of the two.
Does it really matter?
She was on CBS Sunday morning yesterday.
She's a columnist for the Washington Post now, and I think she's going back and forth at the Huffing and Puffington Post.
During the roundtable of Face the Nation yesterday, Bob Schieffer asked Melinda Henneberg, who, Melinda Henneberg, classic inside the Beltway feminist, classic professional feminist.
You know what that means.
So Schieffer said, I just want to ask you all about something because it's just what everybody's talking about.
And the cover of Time magazine with the young mother breastfeeding her three-year-old boy.
Melinda, what do you think of that?
It's not a Mother's Day gift to most of us to have another message that says, you're not mom enough if you don't look like this terrific looking woman.
And the story's not even about breastfeeding.
It's about a 72-year-old doctor.
And I'm sure they were right that this woman looks far better than he.
But the story is about this doctor who has many more views on how to be the right kind of mom versus the wrong kind of mom.
And I think the timing of it was odd.
It's not working with these feminist women.
It's at Time magazine blew it.
You know why it's not working with the feminist women?
Because the woman on the cover of Time magazine was too pretty.
I call your attention once again to Undeniable Truth of Life, number 24.
Dare I speak it again?
Brian's nodding his head.
Yes.
Feminism was established so as to allow unattractive women easier access to the mainstream.
Melinda Henneberger, who's, I mean, somewhat trying to be funny here, but in all comedy, there is a grain of truth, and she's quite upset.
And believe me, she speaks for the Maureen Dowds of the world and the rest of the Gloria Borgers and the whole crowd.
That Time magazine cover, you're not mom enough if you don't look like this terrific looking woman.
Upset that the woman on the cover of Time was too pretty, was too attractive.
Not the concept, but that she was too pretty.
Embarrassed all these other women by having a woman on the cover that's too pretty.
Should have had somebody not as pretty on the cover, and then it would have been more effective.
I'm dead serious.
Now, who is it among us that makes these kinds of judgments?
You know, we get criticized for being sexists and bigots, misogynists, or whatever.
But you listen to these women talk about each other and themselves, and it is hilarious.
But even then, she goes on to attack the whole story.
And this was a story designed to appeal to women on behalf of Obama and the war on women, and a thing apparently has totally backfired.
You talk about campaign problems.
Number one problem, and Obama has had two times the number of fundraisers that George Bush had at this time, and he didn't raise anywhere near as much money.
Obama has hung twice the fundraisers as the hated and the reviled George W. Bush, and he hasn't raised anywhere near as much money as Bush has.
Now, today's New York Times CBS poll is bad, but there's something in it that even CBS and the New York Times are burying.
It turns out, buried in the numbers, is the fact: not only is Romney ahead of Obama by three points across the board.
Oh, let me interrupt myself.
I don't have it in front of me.
I forget where I saw it.
It was over the weekend.
I've been cramming show prep.
I didn't get any done yesterday.
It was up to three in the morning when I got home last night prepping the program today.
And I can't remember where I saw this, but it was an electoral college tabulation with Romney over 300 electoral votes as it looks now.
Now, it's the only place I've seen that.
I can't recall where it was.
It's an analysis of current polling data.
It's not somebody's wild guess.
It's not somebody's expressed hope.
But it is right along the lines of what Dick Morris is saying: that Romney could win in a landslide.
I have said that I think it's possible that Romney could win big.
Just using common sense and looking how everything is falling apart for Obama.
I'll go through a list of some things here in just a second that will remind you just how bad things are for Obama.
But in this New York Times poll, which the Obama White House now says is biased, Romney is up by three.
But if you dig deep, buried in the numbers that the New York Times CBS doesn't report, Romney is leading Obama among women.
49 to 43.
After the contrived war on women, after the contrived Sandra Fluck thing, after all of these efforts that have been expended to make Obama look like the first female president, the first gay president, the first Jewish president, and they're doing all of that, by the way.
The Democrats are actually trying to build on Clinton being the first black president.
Now Obama's the first every minority president.
The Atlantic is a story on this.
There's a somewhat of a parody, but it's because the Democrats are trying to make that case.
They look at America, they see groups of people, they see victims, they see oppressed millions.
They don't see people living free, prosperous lives with ambition and desire.
They don't see happiness and contentment.
They see people in misery.
They see people in poverty.
They see people in oppression.
They see people being discriminated against.
They see people at the risk of dying.
They see people at the risk of being injured.
And those are the people they're gumming for in the campaign.
They're trying to make Obama out as the guy who's going to save them from their misery, whatever the misery is.
And one of the groups that they have attempted to make believe is miserable is women.
Well, guess what?
Our Rush Babes for America Facebook page now has over 62,000 female friends, almost two and a half times the total membership at the Now Gang Facebook page.
But in this New York Times CBS poll, Obama, let me read this again.
Romney is ahead of Obama by three points.
He's leading Obama among women.
It's now 46, 44.
Obama had a 49, 43% lead among women.
And now it's flipped 46 to 44 women prefer Romney.
That's an 8% decrease in support for Obama.
So Obama's war on women has backfired big time.
I can't think of a war that's backfired more since the Arabs said to each other back in 1967, hey, let's wipe Israel off the map.
That didn't go too well, and neither is Obama's war on women.
And our Rush Babes for America page at Facebook, I mean, I knew it was going to be powerful, but I had no idea it'd be this powerful this soon.
Over 61,000 friends, we mention this once a day where people can go and sign up.
But for some reason, neither the New York Times nor CBS News seems to have noticed the breakdown of the women's vote in their poll.
They're not reporting it.
They're burying it.
I haven't seen it mentioned.
Not even over at PMS NBC are they talking about this.
They're not interested in how Obama is faring with women.
Just isn't newsworthy anymore because he's losing.
Romney is ahead, up three overall, up two 46-44 with women, but just in the last month, Obama was up 49.43 with women.
And these people live and die by these polls.
They are their reality.
They use these polls to make news.
They use these polls to influence public opinion, not reflect it.
And that means that all this is a double whammy.
For two months or longer now, and the time is flying by, this war on women was designed to get every woman in America hating Republicans and hating Romney, loving Obama.
Obama's the guy's going to protect their birth control pills, going to protect their right to abortion, going to protect them against these predatory men, which is every man.
And they have had polls.
They've done news stories.
They've done television reports.
Everything is designed to shape public opinion the way Obama wants it.
Then they go out and do a poll to see how successfully they have shaped opinion.
They find out they failed.
So it makes sense that they don't report it.
You have to dig deep in the New York Times CBS poll in turtles to find these numbers.
Now take a quick time out as time races on.
Sit tight.
Hi, welcome back.
Great to have you.
Rush Limbaugh, the Excellence in Broadcasting Network, the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Study.
No, we all certainly just want to know what if we had a party yesterday.
We flew to St. Louis.
A lot of my family live in St. Louis.
We went to Mike Shannon's steakhouse.
He's the play-by-play for the St. Louis Cardinals, baseball.
Used to play third base.
And it's got a great restaurant.
And we went there.
And I forgot something that was very important.
My driver, a great guy named Victor, went all the way back to the airport to get it for me.
And Victor's.
You get off the plane and there's your driver.
And Victor is a cross between Warren Sapp, looked almost a dead ringer for Warren Sapp, and he's got a James Earl Jones voice.
Just he's got a great set of pipes.
And I got off the plane, introduced myself, Rush Limbaugh.
Oh, I know.
I know who you are, sir.
And I said, okay, cool.
Victor knows who I am.
This is good.
So, you know, we had a caravan.
We had three SUVs.
It was like, well, it was just a hoot.
That's where we went.
And we got there and everybody went their own separate ways.
And Catherine and I flew home and got home about midnight and it was time for show prep.
And here we are.
Now, the New York Times headline on their poll story, Obama's switch on same-sex marriage stirs skepticism.
That is one of the biggest understatements.
Obama's switch on same-sex marriage stirs skepticism.
Most Americans, this is how they begin the story.
Most Americans suspect that President Obama was motivated by politics, not policy, when he declared his support for same-sex marriage, according to a new poll released today, suggesting that the unplanned way it was announced shaped public attitudes.
The unplanned way it was announced made these people skeptical?
I think it was the all-too obvious way it was planned that shaped public attitudes.
That's what the poll says, that people thought this whole thing was a political game, that it didn't reflect Obama's real views on gay marriage because the people in the pay attention.
He's been all over the board on this.
He's been for it and he was against it.
And nobody evolves to a position and certainly doesn't take hours, days, and weeks to do it.
And then when they come to a position, Obama's evolving is complete.
The media was actually reporting.
Obama has evolved.
And all of a sudden now Obama is for gay marriage.
Even supporters of gay marriage know that what Obama said didn't change anything.
But the respondents in the New York Times poll have concluded that it was all politics.
None of it was real.
None of it represented what Obama really believed.
And this is what they focus on.
Now, in this is, see, 7% of registered voters see gay marriage as a top issue in November.
7%.
7% is single digit is all.
Only 7% see it that way.
This poll, the CBS New York Times poll, shows it's the economy that is far and away the most important issue for American voters.
And this is what Obama can't escape.
He can try to escape it with gay marriage.
He can try to escape it with all these other distractions, but he can't escape it.
And he can't blame it on Bush because people are living it.
Be right back, folks.
62% in the New York Times poll lists the economy as the most important issue in the upcoming elections.
And most of those say the economy is in bad shape.
7% say they care about gay marriage as the top issue.
7%.
Now admit it, folks.
You're not surprised at that, are you?
Are you?
You are.
I'm see, I'm not.
No, no, I'm not surprised at all.
I know this country.
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