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May 23, 2012 - Rush Limbaugh Program
32:07
May 23, 2012, Wednesday, Hour #3
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Time Text
I just saw, I just printed it out.
I'm gonna have to New York GOP congressional candidate embraces limbaugh despite recent controversy.
Limbaugh rule invoked in New York.
I'll get the details in a just second.
I don't know what that's about.
I just now got the email.
It's obviously a courageous Republican.
Anyway, great to have you back, folks.
Rush Limbaugh and the EIB Network.
Happy to have you with us as we are in service to humanity.
Telephone number 800-282-2882 if you want to be on the program.
The news media does not know who to blame on this Facebook thing.
It's still a little confused.
They go back and forth.
They want to blame the banks, but then sometimes they swerve back to blaming Facebook and Zuckerberg.
But Wall Street Journal had it.
Facebook insiders had told prospective shareholders of their plans to sell some of their shares in an S1 filing last week.
So Zuckerberg selling a billion dollars worth of shares right after the IPO was something they had said they were going to do in an official filing.
It was investors, everybody was entitled to know this.
They didn't keep him.
There was no scam being run here.
This is why these guys do IPOs.
Now get this.
This is from the New York Post.
It's about Mayor Doomberg.
The mayor of New York, Mike Doomberg, says he's got a plan to save cities.
Mayor Doomberg yesterday suggested that the federal government deliberately force large municipalities, that'd be cities for those of you in Rio Linda.
You're not one.
Large municipalities to take in immigrants as the only hope for salvaging battered economies.
For those of you who live in New York City, that is the solution to your economic woes, according to your mayor.
Having the federal government deliberately force large cities to take in immigrants, that's the only hope for salvaging battered economies.
Doomberg spoke at a forum where he was joined by Mexican billionaire Ricardo Salinas, whose company helped underwrite the research that this idea is based on.
Doomberg said the federal government should deliberately force some places that don't want immigrants to take them because that's the only solution for these big, hollowed-out cities where industry is left, is never going to come back unless you get some people to move there.
Now, Doomberg is talking here about illegal aliens.
That's what he's talking about.
And Doomberg, at the same time, has been blasting Obama for deporting illegal aliens.
So the mayor of New York City thinks the only way to get these industries back who are leaving is not lower their taxes and not make it a more productive business environment.
No, no, no, no.
deliberately force large cities to allow illegals in to work.
Brent Bozell, been running the Media Research Center for 25 years.
The Media Research Center is an organization that documents not just the bias of the left-wing media, the mainstream media, but virtually every characteristic and example of unfairness, bias, agenda movement, whatever it is.
There's nobody better at what they do than Bozel and the Media Research Center.
Now, when the President of the United States closes speeches with, God bless America and God bless the United States, what does that mean if we have no religious freedom?
What does it mean when a president who doesn't believe in religious freedom says, God bless America, God bless the United States of America?
Bozell has written a column about this.
Let me read to you portions of it.
He said, you'd think the largest legal action in American history in defense of religious liberty would be a major news story.
But ABC, CBS, NBC don't judge news events by their inherent importance as relates to the future of our freedom.
They deliver the news according to a simple formula.
Does it or doesn't it advance the reelection of Barack Obama?
And if it doesn't, it isn't news.
On May 21st, 43 Catholic dioceses and organizations sued the Obama administration over its ridiculously narrow idea of how a religious institution can be defined under their Obamacare law.
Never has the Catholic Church or any other, any order for that matter, undertaken something of this magnitude.
It is truly jaw-dropping that ABC and NBC completely ignored this action on their evening newscasts, while the CBS Evening News devoted just 19 seconds to this historic event.
Now, let's be blunt.
They spiked the news.
This is, writes Bozell, the worst example of shameless bias by omission that I have seen in the 25-year history of the Media Research Center.
We recall the CHICOMs withholding from its citizenry for 20 years the news that the U.S. had landed on the moon because it reflected poorly on their government.
Never, never would the United States news media behave thusly, but they just did.
And it's not an honest mistake.
It was not an editorial oversight by the broadcast networks.
It did not occur too late for the evening deadline.
This was a deliberate and insidious withholding of national news to protect the chosen one who ABC, CBS, and NBC have worked so hard to elect and for whom they are now abusing their journalistic influence.
Even when CBS mentioned the suit ever so briefly, like so many others, they deliberately distorted the issue by framing it as a contraception lawsuit when it is much broader.
It's a religious freedom issue, and they know it.
This should be seen as a very dark cloud on Obama's political horizon.
The Catholic Church, 60 million Americans describing themselves as Catholic.
The Catholic Church has unleashed legal Armageddon on the administration, promising we will not comply with a health care law that strips Catholics of their religious liberty.
If that isn't news, then there's no such thing as news.
This should be leading newscasts and the subject of special in-depth reports.
So what trumped this story?
What took its place?
Well, ABC led their evening broadcast and devoted an incredible three minutes and 30 seconds to the sentencing of the Rutgers student who spied on his gay roommate with a web camera.
NBC aired an entire story on a lunar eclipse.
Both CBS and NBC devoted their first three and a half minutes to prostate cancer screening.
Catholic taxpayers who helped fund national public radio were also ignored on the evening newscast with that sad joke of a title, All Things Considered.
The print press isn't much better for the Washington Post, a little one-column story buried on page A6.
The fish rap known as USA Today had a really tiny headline, a 128-word item at the very bottom of A2.
The New York Times had a perfunctory 419-word dispatch on page A17.
Two pages later, the Times defined as news what it prefers to report on Catholics.
Quote, two Philadelphia priests punished in sexual abuse cases.
The paper noted one priest has been suspended from ministry for two years.
The other had been placed on leave in December based on abuse that occurred about 40 years ago.
This wasn't really news as a current matter, but this is always and everywhere the bigoted narrative that Times prefers to perpetuate.
Cardinal Timothy Dalton of New York, the head of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, used the word horror to describe what Obama is mandating.
On the only broadcast show to give Catholics some coverage, CBS This Morning anchor Charlie Rose asked Dolan if the White House misled him on the issue.
Dolan began by saying he hesitated to question the president's sincerity, even though anyone who heard Obama's 2009 commencement speech at Notre Dame about honoring the conscience of his opponents on abortion has proven that he's completely insincere.
Cardinal Dolan said, I worry, Charlie, members of Obama's team might not particularly understand our horror at the restrictive nature of this exemption that they are giving us.
That for the first time that we can remember, a bureau of the federal government seems to be radically intruding into the internal definition of what a church is.
We can't seem to get that across.
And he's not finding much help getting anything across from the supposed mediators of the National Press Corps.
And Boselle's exactly right about this.
This is a huge story.
43 Catholic dioceses and organizations sue the regime over Obamacare.
Religious freedom, First Amendment.
It's unprecedented.
And narrow a mention on most of the networks.
It's a great illustration, folks, of the not just the bias, but something else about the news.
It's what they don't report that is oftentimes as instructive about what they do as what they do report and how.
All right, a brief timeout.
We'll get to your phone calls when we come back.
Sit tight, much more straight ahead.
Okay, we are back.
Let's go to line two, Tom and Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.
Great to have you on the program, sir.
Hello.
How are you doing, Rush?
Very well.
Thank you.
Thank you for all the service you've done for this.
Appreciate that, sir.
Thank you very much.
I listened to you since you came on the scene in New York.
In fact, I didn't listen to you.
I listened to people talking about you, and I thought, I got to listen to this guy myself.
And from that point on, I was pretty damn impressed with what you've done.
Even through Clinton single-handedly attacking you as if you created the Murtaugh bombing.
And I said, holy cow, something skewed it in our society.
And yet you lived through that.
My question to you is: how do you deal with the animus towards you that you encounter?
I don't understand it.
I never did understand it.
How do I deal with it?
You have a point of view.
Okay, that's fine.
But why engender this kind of animus?
I don't get it.
Well, there's a good reason for the media hating me.
And once I came to grips with that fact, that there's a reason they should hate me, then it makes sense.
One of the toughest things I had to do was learn to psychologically accept the fact that being hated was a sign of success.
Most people aren't raised to be hated.
We're all raised to be loved.
We want to be loved.
We're told to do things to be loved and appreciated and liked.
We're raised, don't offend anybody, be nice.
Everybody wants total acceptance.
Everybody wants respect.
Everybody wants to be loved.
And so when you learn that what you do is going to engender hatred, you have to learn to accept that as a sign of success.
That was a tough psychological thing for me.
I didn't understand it at first because I've never been in my life.
Nobody who knows me has ever thought I was a racist, bigot, any of this stuff.
All of a sudden, I'm on the radio and I become one.
If you listen to liberal critics, all of them, I'm a racist, sexist, bigot, I'm a hater and all this stuff.
And on none of those things and never have been.
And it's all because of my political views.
As far as the media is concerned, they ought to hate me, Tom.
Before I came along, they had a monopoly.
Before I came along, nationally, all there was was the three networks, the big newspapers, and CNN.
When I started in 88, that was it.
And now look, that monopoly they had is gone.
Now there is Fox News from 1997.
That was nine years after I started.
Got all kinds of conservative talk radio out there now.
And that's done nothing but grow.
I have not lost a single listener because of all the other shows.
We've grown the pie, so to speak.
So the conservative media, which did not exist except in magazines, it's basically where it was.
And maybe the Washington Times, that would nationally, that was it.
But now it's all different, and the media has lost its monopoly.
They have lost the monopoly effort or opportunity they had to define what's news and what isn't news, as Bozell just wrote about.
They have lost the monopoly on telling people what to think, as in commentary and this kind of thing.
And in the process of this program's evolution, the media have been frequent targets of mine and pointing out how they do run their businesses and the stories they are ignored.
So it makes total sense that they would not like me, both personally and professionally.
Now, dealing with it, I don't know, when I first started, I tell you, I didn't understand it.
And there was nobody that I knew who could tell me how to deal with it.
I had nobody around me that could advise.
For example, a TV report would come out that I'm something I'm not, racist, sexist, whatever.
And I would have people say, you can't let that stand.
You've got to respond to that.
So I would respond to it, and all it did was make the accusers happy because I had reacted to it.
Oh, we must have hit a sore spot.
Limbaugh must be defensive about this.
So they piled on even more.
Other people said, ignore it.
If you acknowledge it, they're just going to make their day.
You just have to ignore it.
And people said, if you ignore it, then you're letting it stand.
You're letting all these accusations stand.
And nobody was around to tell me what the right way to deal with this stuff is.
And even to this day, most people in public life don't know either how to deal with it.
Because we do not, on our side of the aisle, attempt to rid the world of our enemies by personally impugning them or destroying them or shutting them down.
Like I was saying last week, or actually on Monday.
If we don't like a radio or TV show, we turn it off.
If they don't like it, they try to shut it down.
If we don't want to eat vegetables, we don't eat them.
If they want to eat, they want everybody else to do what they do and not do what they don't do.
And so a lot of people on our side have no idea how to deal with this.
But I'll tell you, one thing that happened.
I was at dinner one night at a restaurant in New York, 21.
And my host said, the restroom attendant is a huge fan of yours and has a copy of your book.
Would you go in and sign it?
And I said, I'd be happy to.
So I went in there.
The restroom attendant was a guy named Rev. He was a reverend from Westchester County.
And when I walked in, he saw me and I didn't say a word.
Did have a chance.
He started talking how much he admired my program.
Would I sign his book?
And he said to me, this is the second biggest day of my life.
The first was when I met President Reagan.
And he just, he looked at me and said, you know what, Mr. Limbaugh, he just laughed at him.
All he ever did.
We just laughed at him.
And this comes out at me out of the blue.
I had not said a word.
So I figured, well, here's some divine intervention.
I've got a reverend at 21 just out of the blue telling me Ronald Reagan just laughed at him.
So that's what I started doing.
I just laugh at him.
And coming up on 24 years, you can argue pro or con whether or not their attacks and assaults on me on these years have hurt and have been harmful.
I mean, you could probably make a case for the fact that it has.
And then on the other hand, I'm still here and I'm still prospering and larger than ever.
So you can say it hasn't.
So who knows?
All I know is the one thing I was told in all this was that success is the sweetest revenge.
When they try to wipe you out, when they try to shut you down, just like this last time they tried to, they thought they had me.
They thought that it was nirvana.
They thought the day had finally come.
And they are now so discombobulated that they failed, that they don't understand it.
Their days were ruined.
And of course, take satisfaction in that.
But, and then there's another way I deal with it.
Well, I chose to do this.
I chose to be public about what I believe and who I am.
And statistically, when you say something, half the people who hear it are going to disagree with you.
So another thing I tell myself is this is the league I play in, and this is just the way it is for conservatives versus liberals.
And once you realize that's the way it is and you can't change it and you have to live with it, everything's fine.
Hey, folks, look, I don't want to minimize this.
I mean, I don't want to try to appear too cavalier about this.
I mean, it's tough.
I'm not going to lie to you.
It can get really tough to deal with sometimes.
I'm a very, very sensitive guy.
A lot of people don't know that about me, but I am.
And you have to put yourself in my shoes.
How can a sensitive human being like me, for example, handle seven women showing up to protest you?
That actually happened to me last week.
Seven women showed up in Washington, D.C.
It can get tough sometimes.
I don't know how many people could bear up under this.
Seven women showing up.
Now, imagine that was the nags.
And they planned that for like a month.
Can you imagine if they'd had some real time to organize that protest?
I don't know how many of you could bear up under seven women wanting you gone, but I have to do it.
Somebody has to.
But I'll tell you, for me, it really doesn't.
I'll tell you the honesty truth.
It does not bother me at all anymore, but it does my family.
It eats them pretty good.
Sometimes, not all the time.
Some of the stuff really, and that's what when I was inducted in the Missouri Hall of Famous Missourians, that's why I spent so much time thanking my family because they didn't ask for any of this.
I do.
I ask for it every day.
They don't.
And not once has anybody in the family put pressure on me to stop what I'm doing so it would make it easier on them.
Not one time.
And that's that kind of loyalty and support, you cannot, you just cannot buy.
I love them for it.
I appreciate it because they really, they didn't ask and they don't ask for any of this.
And I do.
And I get it.
Yes, sir.
Okay.
Sparta, Tennessee, back to the phones.
This is Will, and I'm glad you waited.
Great to have you on the program.
Howdy, Rush.
How you doing?
Very well, sir.
Thank you.
How are you?
Pretty good.
Been working busy lately.
Been busy?
Yep.
That's better than being bored.
I know it.
You're 17, it says here.
Is that right?
Yes, sir.
It is.
17 years old.
Well, I'm flattered that you are listening to the program at age 17.
That's cool.
Yeah, I've been listening since I was nine.
I just wanted to call you and tell you what an impact you've made on my life.
I've been into politics since I was probably about 12.
What was it your parents listened and you heard it that way?
Yep.
They've been listening since as long as I can remember, but I started really listening and comprehending at nine.
Wow.
Well, I started comprehending him on in nine or ten, the Kennedy campaign, Kennedy in 60.
I was nine years old, and that's my first real active memory of comprehending what was going on, or at least being at the outset of it.
So I know exactly how you feel.
It's exciting, isn't it?
When you understand this stuff and get a feel for what's happening and can explain it to people.
Yeah.
Yeah, I've got a lot of friends, you know, and sometimes, you know, they're kind of toward more of the Republican establishment slang, and I try to keep them back on the conservative trail using a lot of your arguments, and you just really help in all your things you say on the radio.
Well, that's cool.
I can't thank you.
That's awesome.
Yeah.
But do you succeed?
Generally, sometimes.
There's a few who don't like to listen all the time.
Where is this?
At school where this happens?
Well, actually, I'm homeschooled, but there's a lot of friends I have outside of, you know, just.
How many of your friends, you're 17, how many of your friends are interested in politics, affairs of state, that kind of thing?
There's a couple in particular, but actually, there's a few.
I brought some limba letters that I've got, and I let them read through those.
And I actually read those, and they got a lot more interested in it.
And I've, you know.
I need to hire you as a PR agent.
Are you making copies of the Limball letter?
Are you giving them yours?
No, actually, what I do is my grandpa gets him, and then he gives them to me, and I give them out to them, you know, loan them out.
Well, I mean, that is, that's.
You are the kind of guy, believe me, that people in this audience love hearing because you're the future.
You know, and when people like you call it your age, what we all hope is that you are able to maintain your interest in this, and we all hope that by the time you go away to college, some professor's not going to get a hold of you and turn you into a commie guy.
Oh, yeah.
I actually, I'd like to go to Hillsdale.
I just took their course on the Constitution, their free Constitution course.
Wow, my gosh, you are a devotee.
I don't think the left can get you if you've done that.
If you took the Hillsdale course, we own you.
That's cool.
Yeah, I don't intend to turn.
That's good.
That's good.
Well, okay, look, I want to make you a subscriber so you have your own copy of the Limbaugh letter.
Okay.
So you don't have to wait for grandpa.
Do you have a computer?
Do you surf the web?
I do.
Okay, then I want to also make you a complimentary member of my website, Rush24-7.
This is the least I could do.
What kind of computer do you have?
It's just a regular computer.
Yeah, you're not proud of that computer, I can tell.
Yeah.
Well, if you had your drothers, would you want a laptop computer or, say, an iPad?
I know it's a tough call.
I know it's a tough decision.
I don't know.
Probably an iPad.
That'd be fine.
I've never had one of them.
Have you ever used one?
I have not, but I know a friend who does.
I've seen it.
Well, we'll fix that.
All right.
So you want a black one?
Well, wait a minute.
We have any black ones left back there?
Engraved?
I don't think we do.
I think the only engraved ones we've got are white, but that's okay.
You're a beggar.
You can't be a chooser.
Yeah.
So I'm just teasing.
You haven't begged for anything.
I want you to hang on after we go to the break here, and Mr. Snirdly will get your address and we'll send you an iPad.
We'll make you a subscriber to the other stuff, too.
Okay.
I can't thank you enough, sir.
This is.
No, I appreciate that.
You've made my day here.
We hear get calls like this from 17-year-olds, and it's how do you put up with it?
It's stuff like this.
Like Will here in Sparta Tennis.
It makes it all worth it.
There's nothing better than this.
Will, thanks very much, and hold on.
Do not hang up the phone.
Hi, welcome back.
We move on down the line, Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
This is Dan.
Thank you for calling, sir.
Nice to have you on the program.
Thank you, Rush.
I heard your whole first hour about the private equity situation.
Yes, sir.
And went to a news conference, just left it a half hour ago, where Governor Jendel down here announced a $30 million feasibility study that's going to grow into an $800 million investment in a chemical plant.
And the company that owns this plant is a private equity company.
And it's going to team up with a multinational to build a huge $800 million ammonia plant down in Louisiana.
Now, that's going to be saving or helping save 400 jobs that are already at the plant.
And it's going to mean another 40 permanent jobs that pay $60,000 a year just in salary, no benefits, okay?
So what you have here is you have a chemical company, a petrochemical plant, you know, the industry that wants to be crucified by the DPA using natural gas, which is a fossil fuel, for heaven's sake, being funded by private equity firms.
So you have the three things that are demonized by the Obama administration still rising to the payment.
This is why Corey Booker of New Jersey, of Newark, likes private capital.
Private equity.
This is why Governor Patrick in Massachusetts likes it.
Why Governor Rindell of Pennsylvania is speaking out for us, why Steve Ratner likes it.
These guys better not make a profit, though, or Obama will be after them.
Well, it is a metaphor for the type of arrangements that these private firms can do because they have the ability and they have the maneuverability to do it.
And it's going to mean a tremendous investment in South Louisiana.
It is.
But here's the thing.
It's private money.
It's not government, and that's why Obama doesn't like it.
It's private money.
It's people taking a risk.
But look at all the benefits that will accrue if it pays off, if it works.
I'm telling you, Obama's in trouble on this, folks.
He's running against capitalism.
It can't end well for him on doing stuff like this.
And this Bain thing is backfiring.
All he sees is Romney when he sees Bain.
He doesn't even know what these private equity people do.
All he knows is they earn a profit equals bad.
Dan, thanks for the call.
Faye, Jefferson City, Missouri.
Welcome to the program.
Hello.
Hey, hello.
Hi.
I told the screener that yesterday was my birthday, my 61st birthday.
My husband asked me what I wanted to do, and I said, I want to go to Jeff City, and I want to see Rush, and I want to have my picture taken with him.
So that's what we did.
On your birthday, so you went to State Capitol.
State Capitol.
They did.
I lived in Columbia.
They posted, they put my bust in the Missouri Hall of Famous Missourians on display.
After all the brouhaha, the bust is right outside the entry to the House chamber, I believe, right?
Well, you know, I don't know.
It's on the third floor, and you're right across from Warren Hearn's and right down the way from Stan Musual.
Okay.
I didn't notice that.
I think I read that they put it.
They sent me a picture of it.
So my bust is on display.
Well, that's for your birthday.
That's what you wanted to do?
That's what I wanted to do.
God bless you.
God bless you.
Thank you.
Look, thank you very much.
That's that's um you know if don't hang up snerdly ask her if she can email a picture that she took and we'll put it at rushlimbaugh.com or tweet it out or something like that.
That's cool.
So don't don't go away, Faye.
If you got a picture, we'll get your private email address.
You can send it to Snerdley.
You got to still know.
Cool.
All right.
So we ought to maybe get that later today or if she knows how to email pictures, certainly by tomorrow.
Citigroup has just issued its new economic forecast.
Rest of the year, they predict economic growth of 1.7%.
Isn't that wonderful?
Citigroup, they're in the business of knowing.
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