All Episodes
Previous Next
May 31, 2012 - Rush Limbaugh Program
37:53
May 31, 2012, Thursday, Hour #2
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
How are you, folks?
Are you okay?
You ought to be.
Every reason to be optimistic here.
It seems like a day-to-day ebb and flow.
Today's an up day.
And there should be and will be many more of those than the other.
Great to have you here.
Rush Limbaugh behind the golden EIB microphone.
There are only three of them.
Maybe only two.
Golden Electro-Voice microphones in the whole world.
Made especially for the EIB network and me, El Rushbo, your guiding light.
Telephone number if you want to appear on the program, 800-282-2882 and the email address El Rushbo at EIBnet.com.
I'll tell you what's happening in Wisconsin.
I may as well stick with this.
If the outcome next Tuesday is close to what the polling data indicates that it will be, the Democrats are giving every bit of evidence that they think it's over.
I mean, they're pulling money out of there.
They're not actively campaigning.
They're down in the dumps.
I don't think that's psychological strategy.
It could be, just have to wait and see.
The primary fear, I think, now is that Walker voters might get complacent.
This is a fear that others have.
I don't.
I think that there is so much energy and passion, pent-up frustration.
You look at the primary in Wisconsin, Walker, who didn't need a single vote when the Democrats were determining his opponent.
Walker got more votes than the two Democrats combined in Wisconsin.
And that's only because the Republicans in Wisconsin are sick and tired.
They want to be heard.
And this is their best way of being heard is to go to the ballot box.
I don't think that there's going to be a relaxation or a suppression of enthusiasm, but that appears to be a major concern.
And what's the lesson there?
There are really a lot of them, but the big umbrella lesson is that conservatism works.
And almost as important, if not more important, is the fact you need a guts-filled, courageous, unafraid conservative doing it.
And that's Walker.
The whole Democrat apparatus has been after this guy for two years.
From the White House on down, there have been efforts to politically and personally destroy this guy.
And he's not whimpered and he hasn't caved and he hasn't backed out.
His supporters have hung in with him.
He's raised more money than the Democrats have.
He has not made excuses for conservatism.
He's not moderated it, modified it.
He has his policies.
He is explicit in explaining them.
He has implemented as many of them as have been possible to implement, and they're working.
And the way to put it in proper context and perspective is to say that Governor Scott Walker in Wisconsin has done everything Obama says is not possible.
Everything Obama is campaigning against, Walker has done and proved that it works.
Obama is out saying America has never worked.
The free market, capitalism, it doesn't work.
Supply-side economics, lower tax rates, doesn't work.
Obama says it's never worked.
Well, we have a little laboratory here.
Scott Walker has done what he promised to do.
We had a caller the last hour pointed out.
Scott Walker's running on his record proudly, happily.
He's not lying about it, doesn't have to lie about it, doesn't have to cover it up, and doesn't have to amplify it.
Speaks for itself.
People are living it.
Unemployment rate in Wisconsin way below the national average.
Scott Walker has cut spending.
He has grown, expanded the economy while lowering taxes.
Nobody has been laid off.
Remember the cat calls?
The Democrats in the union said that all Walker wanted to do was bust the union and get rid of thousands of public sector employees, public sector union employees, that his was a stealth campaign to fire people and to close schools and all of that rot gut.
And that's never what his campaign was about.
Walker always said, I'm trying to save your job.
We can't go on this way.
We can't continue to ask the taxpayers to pay taxes sufficiently high enough that you end up being paid more than they are earning.
It just, it's not sustainable.
And the unions didn't want to hear that.
There's a sense of entitlement that they have.
And it doesn't matter the economic circumstances of the taxpayers who pay them.
They're owed.
They're union people.
They've been giving the shaft ever since the country was founded, just like Obama believes.
They've been victimized by evil corporate bosses, evil conservatives.
They're going to get their pensions and they're going to get their health care and they're not going to have to work a day for it, maybe not more than a day for it.
And they don't care who's paying for it.
And Walker said there isn't going to be the money if we don't institute these changes.
So he cut spending.
He lowered taxes.
The economy grew.
He didn't lay off anybody.
During a press conference with the Democrat candidate, Tom Barrett, Barrett was asked to name one school that had been hurt by Walker's collective bargaining contract.
Name one school, Mr. Barrett.
Name one school that's been harmed.
And he couldn't.
Tom Barrett could not name a single school that was hurt.
Now, the Wall Street Journal, again, the headline, Wisconsin unions see their ranks drop ahead of the recall vote.
Walker's ouster, I'll pick this up in the middle of it.
Walker's ouster would derail the political career of a rising Republican star, send a warning to other elected officials who are battling unions.
That's what they wanted.
They wanted Walker to lose and lose this big, and that's a national message.
The Democrats now saying it, well, this is a local election.
This state of Wisconsin, there aren't any coattails here.
There are no ramifications for Obama.
What are you, silly?
Don't be.
Yeah, red says what they say now.
When this all started, Wisconsin was going to be a lesson to everybody.
Wisconsin was going to be a lesson to the Republicans.
Wisconsin was going to be a lesson to all you people who don't want to embrace and give the unions everything you want.
They were going to get rid of Walker.
They were going to destroy his career.
And in so doing, empower the unions and send a message all across this country that this will happen to you if you oppose us.
But on the other hand, a win by Walker would amount to an endorsement of an effort to curtail public sector unions.
And that's going to be the message that comes out of Wisconsin.
Wisconsin membership in the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, which is Wisconsin's second largest public sector union, fell 28,745 in February from 62,818 in March.
This is according to a person who has access to the membership records of this union.
A union spokesman declined to comment on this.
Now, this is before the election.
The ranks, the membership in this union has dropped precipitously.
There is no momentum for the pro-Democrat view of things in Wisconsin.
And this is a blue state.
The University of Wisconsin at Madison may as well be UC Berkeley.
It's profound what is happening there, and it's been a teachable moment.
And people are living the results of this.
Now, having said that, people lived the 80s as well.
And the media was able to revise what the 80s were all about in people's minds.
And the people who lived it, many of them somehow were convinced that what actually happened didn't happen.
And we could never go back to that.
Bill Clinton was elected.
Obama was elected after George W. Bush.
So you got another chance here.
You have another chance here to etch in stone the great results of implemented properly conservatism.
That brings up the question of the Republican establishment.
Oh, yeah, they're going to be happy as they can be.
They're going to be celebratory as they can be, but this is a Tea Party victory in Wisconsin.
Not saying the Republican Party has no role in it, but this is a Tea Party campaign.
This is a Tea Party enterprise, if you will, Tea Party concepts.
The Republican establishment, yeah, they'll be happy.
They'll take this.
But this also refutes some of what they believe: that you have to be moderate, you have to cross the aisle, have to compromise.
Walker hasn't done any of that.
He stood fast.
He stood tall.
You've been following this sex selection abortion business.
My sense here is that this is off people's radar a bit.
Now, I could be wrong.
I utilize empathy.
It's a primary characteristic of a successful media figure: empathy with the audience.
Well, no, what I mean by that is, in real terms, the host knows when the audience has their finger poised to change the channel in the car and does something to make sure it doesn't happen.
That's empathy.
I know you never change stations here.
Once you start here, you're hooked here.
This abortion story, it's a social issue story.
There's some people obviously very interested in it, but it's not old enough yet to have taken deep root, but it should because it's profound.
Now, my version of the story is from LifeNews.com.
President Barack Obama appears to oppose the ban on sex selection abortions at the House of Representatives debated yesterday and will be voting on today.
Now, it's pretty self-explanatory, self-selection abortion.
To explain this, I want to go back to the late 80s or early 90s.
I can remember back in the early days of this program's history discussing abortion.
Yeah, some people liked it, but a lot of people and a majority of the audience got nervous.
I remember I went back to Sacramento, did a rush to excellence appearance there, and I'm trucking along and I'm doing great and I'm doing wonderful.
And I wrap it up with something on abortion as it related to the issue at that time.
And I can sense a cooling in the audience.
It just was an uncomfortable thing.
I mean, they were passionate about it, but it made people uncomfortable to discuss something that people thought was a very personal and private issue, and they considered it proselytizing.
I remember I got in the car to head back to the hotel wherever I was going, and the driver said, but they ate that up, except the abortion stuff.
So my instincts were right on this.
And I remember all of the early days in talking about this issue, explaining what might happen down the line.
And I'll never forget using two examples.
So let's take a look at medical ethics and genetics and where that eventually might intersect.
What happens someday if, and we're there, or we're very close.
What happens if a couple is told by the doctor that their child has a great likelihood of becoming red-headed, freckle-faced, and tending to obese?
What if those genes are dominant?
What if that couple says or is, you know what, I don't want to bring a child into the world that's going to be freckle-faced and overweight.
Let's abort it.
And people thought, how dare you?
How dare you?
I mean, I said, well, don't blame me.
I'm saying this is going to happen if we, because to me, it was a cultural and moral issue as much as it was political.
And I said, the way the arguments of this, the whole issue shape up, personal choice can do with your body whatever you want, and nobody else can tell you you can't.
Husband has no role, husband has no rights.
I said, wait until it happens.
If it does, that they're able to tell you that the baby in your womb has the gene that predisposes to homosexuality.
I said, what's going to happen?
Then you're going to see the biggest 180-degree shift from pro-choice to pro-life you've ever seen.
The entire gay community is going to become pro-life like you've never seen before.
And as usual, I was on the cutting edge, societal evolution, a little bit ahead of my time, saying things that people didn't want to hear because they didn't want to confront them.
They wanted it kept in the little cocoon of just a woman's choice and no more.
But I said, look, we're making advances in biogenetics and medical ethics are clearly going to enter the picture here at some point in our lifetimes.
And now, lo and behold, I don't know, there's not much here that separates us from China on this.
This is abortion taking place because couples don't want a little girl.
How many of these sex selection abortions do you think take place because couples don't want a little boy?
If I had to guess, don't think there's any documentation on this, but if I had to guess, I would say this is the real war on women.
That's what I would say.
If the sex selection abortion becomes commonplace in our culture, well, yeah, okay, little baby's a little girl, we don't want a little girl right now.
So they asked Obama, where do you come down on this?
Well, that's where he said life news.com said Obama appears to oppose a ban on sex selection abortion.
Now, some people don't think we should have a ban on it at all.
It's constitutional.
Let me take a break.
I just saw the clock.
We'll do that and be back and continue here in just a minute.
Now, for what it's worth, folks, Planned Parenthood told a Huffington Puffing Post the other day that they provide confidential, non-judgmental care and that they would not deny a woman a sex selection abortion except in states where it's explicitly illegal.
And it's only illegal right now, sex selection abortion, illegal in Arizona, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, and Illinois.
And Planned Parenthood's also denounced an undercover video that showed one of their workers helping a woman set up a gender-based abortion as part of a hoax campaign.
Now, this is really an issue that has primarily moral ramifications.
If you think that abortion has a causal link to societal decline, cultural decline, then the story is of interest to you.
If you don't, it's none of your business and you don't want to hear any part of it and it's something that should be left alone and not really talked about and so forth.
But it's just one of the things I worried about was the cheapening of life at both ends of the spectrum.
And if abortion and euthanasia both occur primarily as convenience items for the living, then there are a lot of people going to be at risk in our culture and society down the road.
If there's no stigma attached to this, and if abortion is considered like turning on a spigot to get a drink of water for any reason, then we're cheapening life, and we're doing so at the end of life in that spectrum too.
And of course, you introduced Obamacare with death panels.
I just, I find it fascinating.
The president of the United States, same guy who as an Illinois state senator advocated legal protection for doctors who botched abortions.
It's why some people claim that Obama is a supporter of infanticide because the law was that if a doctor performs an abortion and the baby survives, then another doctor can be drawn in and finished the job since the original intent was to abort the child.
Well, that's a different thing.
The child has been born now.
It's outside the womb.
Yet Obama still supported terminating it.
And now it's actually Jake Tapper on the ABC News website saying that the White House got back to him because he asked him about this and the president opposes a bill to ban sex selection abortion.
Now, it's naturally wood.
It's a campaign year, and they're not raising anywhere near the money they thought they would.
That's another problem they've got.
This billion-dollar campaign, that was hocus-pocus from the get-go.
All right, you got to take a brief time out.
Sit tight.
We're coming back much more straight ahead before you know it, folks.
Well, they're unveiling the portraits of President Bush and Laura Bush right now at the White House in the East Room, President Obama doing the honors.
People have been anticipating this because Obama has made it clear that every problem we face in this country is because of the guy in the room whose portrait's being unveiled today.
And this today is kind of, to me, a miniature version of White House correspondence dinner where everybody fakes it for a while in interests of decorum.
And also, it's worth it.
But Obama doesn't believe a word he's saying.
He just talked about Bush, great job, cares about America, did what he thought best.
Everybody, every president wants a country to succeed.
Every president works together.
This is, you know, he's having to bite his lips.
Not literally.
I remember when the Clinton unveiling took place and George Bush was eloquent and respectful, and the audience was full of Clinton donors and friends and family.
And it's the same situation today.
I wouldn't expect Obama to turn this into some sort of a political.
I wouldn't be surprised if he did.
Got a couple of digs in.
We'll find out.
We're rolling on it.
We're not going to jip it.
But the events taking place, and it's a tradition.
So if any fireworks do happen, we will let you know about it.
Just one last comment on this same-sex abortion, or not same-sex, the sex selection abortion.
The fact of the matter is that it is women, little girls, who are being aborted in greater numbers than boys.
And that's a real war on women.
That is a real war on women.
And you notice that Obama won't stand up against a real war on women.
I know that abortion is a touchy subject for a lot of people.
The one thing, though, the pro-choicers, which is pro-abort, believe me, tell them you're pro-choice, but you choose life and they won't let you win.
I tried it once.
Fact of the matter is, they don't want any exceptions to this.
Any exceptions weakens the political nature of what abortion is.
So they're presented with an option to say, you know what?
Yeah, I'm pro-choice, but I don't think we ought to be aborting babies on the basis of their sex.
Well, that's too dangerous for anybody, particularly a president to say, a leftist Democrat president to say.
They're not going to open the door to other restrictions on it.
The Planned Parenthood people wouldn't put up with it.
The NAGs wouldn't put up with it.
And Obama would run himself out of money.
He's got no choice.
I don't think it is a choice for him.
I don't think he's got a problem with this.
But even if he did, he wouldn't have the freedom and the ability to stand up here in defense of life in this circumstance because it would kill him politically.
Because the pro-aborts demand abortion on demand for whatever reason, anytime, anyway, anyhow.
They even lobby for it, as we all know.
Back to the phones, Anthony in Cleveland.
I'm glad you called, sir.
Great to have you on the EIB network.
Hello.
Hi, Rush.
Pleasure to talk to you.
Thank you, sir, very much.
I wanted to make some comments about exercise.
In my younger year, I was an exercise trainer.
The types of people that have trouble with exercise are a lot of them are vegans.
They don't get enough fat in their system to rebuild back up the muscle.
And you can literally rip your joints up with exercise.
If you are a vegan.
Well, even if you're not a vegan, you still can rip your joints up.
I mean, you can get injured if you.
Well, yeah, you can.
But this report, maybe I didn't make it clear enough.
I think I probably sped through this because my stacks so thick today.
But this was cardiovascular stuff.
The assumption about exercise is that it makes the cardiovascular system stronger, that it enhances your endurance, that it helps you lose weight, that it burns more calories.
What they found is that, okay, they've unveiled the portrait.
Those are damn good.
You know, the big question at Portrait Day is just how much like the president is going to look.
That looks just like him.
That is an excellent portrait.
I know you can't see it right now.
I'm not trying to tease you, but it's an excellent, and the same with Laura Bush.
They're really, really well done.
They're getting standing O's right now.
This report on exercise mentioned that for as many as 10% of the 1,700 respondents, their cardiovascular system worsened.
It did not help.
It hurt.
And everybody's scratching their head.
They can't figure out why.
And the only reason they're scratching their head and figuring out why, trying to figure out why, is they all live under a false premise.
And the premise is, exercise is good for you.
Exercise is good for everybody.
See, as a rugged individualist and as a resident of Rielville, one of the things that I, as mayor, realize is that no two people are alike.
And in something which is medical or health related, you simply can't say that something is true for everybody.
I mean, look at me.
I defy so many premises out there in medicine that it makes my doctors mad.
My cholesterol is normal.
My blood pressure is normal.
My triglycerides are normal.
I ought to be off the charts.
I don't exercise.
My lung capacity ought to be zero.
Something's going to get me like it gets everybody, but I don't fit the plugged in norm.
And they get mad.
And I've had doctors even try to get me.
What is it?
The cholesterol medicine, Lipitor?
I've had doctors try to get me to take that stuff because I'm going to need it someday.
I'm not kidding.
Well, you're going to need it someday.
You just, you fit the profile.
Well, okay, well, wait till I do, if I ever do.
And it's the same thing with exercise.
It's the same thing with global warming.
It's the same thing with every cause championed by the left where everybody ends up being the same.
It permeates their politics.
They can command and control an economy made up of hundreds of millions of unique individuals on their belief that everybody is going to behave identically when certain policies are implemented.
And it's not possible.
No two people are the same.
You cannot legislate outcomes.
You cannot have, there's no system in the world that can provide or dictate identical outcomes, economic or otherwise, educational, you name it, between two people, much less hundreds of millions.
So they're scratching their heads because they've had this lifelong, ages-old premise.
Exercise is good.
Exercise is good.
What we found out actually hurts some people.
It doesn't compute.
Can't figure it out.
Now they have no reason to explain it.
They've got no way.
They're totally befuddled.
And it's not that hard.
Not everybody's the same.
That's all you need to know.
And then the next tough thing to do is to admit that the premise is flawed, which is the toughest thing for know-it-alls to do.
It's not complicated.
It's easy.
All you have to do is accept it.
Now, your little add-on here, vegans, that's interesting.
Vegans are supposed to be the pictures of health.
They don't digest any fat.
They're not putting anything in their bodies that's just not processed.
Everything is totally auto-rale.
It's organic.
It's normal or what have you.
Then you find out that vegans go out and eat fried cheese and other things.
And they potato chips.
Yeah, vegan, it's soda.
They drink all that stuff.
But they're not having anything that's got a face on it, as Paul McCartney said.
Don't eat anything with a face on it.
That's his rule.
That's how he defines veganism.
I don't eat anything that has a face.
Well, fine and dandy.
This guy is saying that vegans do not have proper nutrition.
They start exercising and they can literally rip tendons away from bones because they've got no other points of resistance.
He's a professional trainer, Snurgy.
He knows.
We can't doubt him.
I must confess, I was disappointed at just one thing.
At the unveiling of the portrait of George W. Bush.
I was hoping, because it's in the room there.
Everybody's in the room and it's hidden behind a drape, have a drape over it.
And they have the unveiling and they lift the drape and everybody looks at the patriot.
Oh, the portrait goes, ah, ooh, and they applaud and so forth.
And I was just hoping that somebody would have put a cartoon bubble on Bush's face or near Bush's face and inside the bubble said, Miss Me Yet.
I would have loved.
In fact, we may do a mock-up of the portrait at rushlimbaugh.com and have that.
That would have been, I know it never happened.
But folks, something like that has happened before.
I'll tell you a little secret.
Well, it's not a secret because I have mentioned it before.
I have spent the night in a Lincoln bedroom, and I got to know the stewards in the White House.
They're great people.
And after the 1992 election, I used the connections that I had made, and I asked if it would be possible for a note to be placed on the pillow in the bedroom, the Lincoln bedroom, when Linda Bloodworth Thomason and her husband Harry slept there the night of the inauguration.
I knew they were going to because they were bragging about it.
They were talking about how they're going to sleep in Lincoln's bed.
Of course, Lincoln never slept.
The Lincoln bedroom, by the way, was Lincoln's office.
It's on the residential floor.
There was no West Wing.
There was no oval office at the time.
The Lincoln bedroom, what's the Lincoln bedroom now, was actually Lincoln's office as president.
They've turned it into a bedroom right across the hall is what's called the Queen's bedroom.
And when you're there, it's like a hotel in a way.
I mean, the president, first lady, are right down the hall.
It's the residents' quarters.
But you need coffee, you buzz, and they'll bring you coffee in the morning, wake you up in the morning or whatever.
I mean, I actually did not want to go to sleep.
It's a museum room.
I called my mom.
I said, mom, you're not going to believe where I am.
And she didn't.
And there were no cell phones with cameras built into them at the time.
This is 1992.
But I had a note written, and it was promised me that they would leave the note for the Thomasons on the pillow of the Lincoln bedroom on the night Clinton was inaugurated.
And I had to wait for months to find out if it actually happened.
And I found out that it did when Harry Thomason was on C-SPAN some months later talking about how when they came back from all the parties in the revelry and they went to bed in the Lincoln bedroom, they had a note from Rush Limbaugh on the pillow.
So a bubble off of Bush's face saying, miss me yet.
I know it never happened.
Oh, the note was because I knew the Thomases.
They're from Southeast Missouri.
Linda is.
She's from a town called Poplar Bluff, which is a little south of Cape Girardeau where I'm from.
And they have TV producers.
And the note simply said, I don't even remember it exactly, something like, remember I was here first and I will be back.
Have a great night, Rush.
And I never knew.
It was months after that till Harry Thomason was on C-SPAN and was laughing about it.
All right, who's next?
Robert Effingham, Illinois.
Great to have you on the EIB network, sir.
Hello.
Rush.
Hey, Mega Dittos, and it's an honor to talk to you.
Thank you, sir, very much.
Hey, hey, listen, my wife and I, which she says hello to you, have been talking and listening to you for years.
And what's going on with the election right now in Obama, what I think is that I don't think he wants to be re-elected.
By everything that we listen to on the news and from you, I don't think the guy wants to be re-elected.
I think with his failing presidency now, that he's afraid to be the president that lets everything crash, which is, it looks like that's what he's doing anyway.
Well, I find that a fascinating theorem.
Well, I don't want everybody to think, okay, we can relax.
You know, Obama's going to throw the election.
No, no, I'm not interpreting it that way.
I'm, you're...
You're theorizing on the way Obama strategizes and things.
And you think that Obama wants to lose because he knows there's an economic crash coming and he doesn't want his name attached to it in legacy or history books, right?
Exactly, exactly.
He doesn't want, by the way, the blueberry tea, excellent stuff.
It is.
Isn't it that good stuff?
That was the best thing I'd ever drinked.
I'm going to tell you, two if by tea, it is the best bottled iced tea.
It was the best iced.
It was the best bottled iced tea in the country.
It just is.
And I don't say that lightly, and I'm not saying it because it's mine.
I wouldn't say if it wasn't true, because it couldn't be backed up.
Credibility is on the line when you claim like that.
Look, it's an interesting theory, and a lot of people like to theorize these kind of things.
Your theory is based on another faulty premise.
Well, the false premise here is that the Democrats are almost unbeatable.
That they never make any mistakes.
That they're so far ahead of us in strategy.
They run rings around us.
And now it's gotten so bad that there's no way they want their names attached to this.
Your premise requires for it to be true for the Obama, the Democrats to be light years ahead of everybody else, smarter, shiftier, all these kinds of things.
And they're not.
They're not smarter.
They're not greater strategically.
There are other factors here in my making that assessment.
And one of them is the media constantly furthers that notion.
And of course, the Republican establishment, sometimes there is some cowardice there.
And we don't want to bite back full strength because they're going to call us racists or whatever.
So we do.
But they're not smarter.
They don't do everything right.
And my only point here is that they don't constantly succeed.
They make mistakes all the time.
But I disagree with your theory primarily because where we're headed is exactly where Obama wants to go.
And I don't think they want to trust an economic crash that's not complete to somebody else.
If your objective, I'm just going by what he has said, his own words.
America's never worked.
It's time to transform it.
For 210 years, this country has been a failure.
But for the last three and a half, we're finally turning it around.
It's going to be a while.
But we're transforming this country.
Capitalism has never worked.
It doesn't work.
It's unfair.
It's inequitable.
It's unjust, all this.
It's going to be 10, 15 years before we have single-payer health.
You can't trust that happening if you got Republicans in the White House.
So, no, I think Obama don't by the, Obama wants this as bad as he's ever wanted anything.
And his ego is such losing, it's not possible.
Incomprehensible.
Not going to happen.
By the way, why would Obama worry about history?
Why would he Democrat?
Democrats have escaped the consequences of their actions for over 100 years.
History doesn't record them accurately when it comes to destroying things.
Be right back.
▲
Export Selection