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July 9, 2012 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:46
July 9, 2012, Monday, Hour #3
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Talent on lawn from God.
That's me, Rush Limbaugh behind the golden EIB microphone, broadcast excellence for yet another hour, the fastest three hours in media, by the way.
And as always, a thrill and a delight to have you here.
The telephone number is 800 282-2882, and the email address, Lrushbow at EIBNet.com.
Okay, so John Boehner says that nobody's going to fall in love with Romney.
Nobody's clamoring for Romney.
Well, the bottom line, nobody's clamoring for John Boehner.
But by the same token, did Wisconsin voters fall in love with Scott Walker?
Now stick with me on this.
Walker has accomplished something profoundly great for the state of Wisconsin and potentially for this country if it has legs.
But are people in love with Scott Walker?
No.
People out there clamoring for Scott Walker to run for president.
Not many.
Some people may be.
I have a story here.
Unemployment rate dropped in every state that elected a Republican governor in 2010.
There are 17 of them.
The states are Kansas, Maine, Michigan, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Wisconsin, Wyoming, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, South Dakota, Florida, Nevada, Iowa, Ohio.
All elected Republican governors.
All have unemployment rates dropping.
I know media is what it is.
Not focusing this, making a story out of it.
But the people that live in these states know it.
And yet, does it indicate that a movement's underway?
Or is it just a coincidence?
See, I think it portends disaster for Obama.
I think it portends disaster for the Democrats.
But there's no way of having that emotion or that idea shared because the media is what it is.
And I'm not complaining.
I'm just I'm trying to make a point here.
How when Republicans are elected, good things genuinely happen.
Not always, of course.
I mean, this $16 billion national debt, the Republicans spent their share of it.
There's no question about that whatsoever.
But what is clearly obvious is that in order to reverse the direction this country is headed, Democrats have to lose in as many elections as possible.
That's what has to happen.
And how do you bring this about?
Since my theory today that the economy is not that big a deal.
The unemployment rate is not that big a rallying point as a campaign idea because it's not that painful for the people who are unemployed.
It's not the way it used to be.
And so simply running for election on the economy, as the Republicans are doing, is not enough.
It isn't going to get it done.
Particularly when Obama's going to be running a kind of campaign, he has to run.
He cannot run a positive campaign.
Obama can't run on anything positive.
He has to totally destroy Romney.
Obama's task is to make people think that the reason things are bad now is because Republicans have held power in the past, and it's going to get even worse if they get back in.
That's what the Republicans are up against.
And they're going to have to answer that.
And people don't have to fall in love with our candidates, and they don't have to be media darlings in order to win, as has been demonstrated.
Just have to be responsive.
And uh loyal To their own traditions and policies.
They have to be confident and willing to fight for them.
And at the same time willing to tell the American people the truth about the circumstances we're in now and why.
That must happen.
It has to be part of the campaign.
In other words, being critical of the Obama administration of Obama must be a major element in the campaign.
We live in a different age.
The country is transforming in ways that Obama really has nothing to do with.
He's responsible for enough of them, but there are other transformations taking place that he's simply capitalizing on, taking advantage of, which is another thing that infuriates me.
Because he's willing to see, he's willing to preside over the decline of this country.
For whatever reason, whether he believes we deserve to decline or whether it's his ticket to power.
I don't care what the reason is.
All I know is he's willing to do it.
He sees a direct route to power in presiding over the decline of the country.
What bothers me is why the decline's possible.
What's making it possible?
Why are Americans so accepting of this decline?
And we have to admit that there are far many more of them who are than we'd like to admit.
We don't know if it's a majority yet.
Indications are in past elections that it's not.
2010 being the most recent one, and Scott Walker, election of Wisconsin, the indications are that the majority of Americans are not comfortable with decline.
But an increasing number are.
And the reasons they're ordering their lives around that decline.
They're fashioning lifestyles based on that decline.
In other words, they're accepting it.
And that bothers me as much as anything.
It really does.
I think that may be one of the most fundamental sources of my bad moods.
Why are so many people accepting this?
Because it leads to questions.
What's happened to the country?
Now I want to tell this story, and if you've been with me for a long time, you've heard it, and I beg your indulgence.
Understand we got gazillions of new audience members who may not have heard this.
I was having a conversation 15 years ago with a broadcast engineer friend of mine at WABC in New York, Frank DeLia.
We're the same age, basically.
I'm 61.
Frank's, I think, 84.
Well, he looks it.
Is he not, is he not that old?
How old is he?
He's about Frank's 61, too?
Really?
Okay.
Now we were sitting around discussing why we didn't feel our age.
Well, we're 50 at the time this is happening.
Why we didn't feel our age.
I've always said that I love getting older.
I look back at when I was a kid, the old people the ones having fun.
They're the ones that were in control of their lives.
They're the ones that had power over themselves.
They're the ones that had self-determination.
They're the ones who had freedom.
They were self-reliant.
It's what I wanted for me.
And I figured I had to get older for that to happen.
And I thought every year that my life occurred every year I got older, of course, my life did improve.
Still is the case.
We were talking, why don't we feel 50%?
When my father was 40, he looked it, he lived it.
When he was 40, that was it.
Well, Frank and I began to throw theories around back and forth as to why we still felt 20 in terms of how much life is still ahead of us.
Well, my dad was 40.
His life was, you know, whatever he was at 40 was what he was going to be the rest of his life.
This is not a criticism.
It Is just the way it was.
And he was not unhappy about it.
Not in the slightest.
It's just, it's just the way it was.
So we started comparing our lives to those of our parents and grandparents, and even great grandparents.
Let me start with my grandfather.
Grandfather born in the 1890s.
Grew up on a farm in Missouri.
They didn't have running water electricity from many of his early years.
They ate what they grew, what they raised.
And he was the first in his family to go off to school, all the way up to college, law school, and so forth.
Look at the things he saw.
He died at age 102.
He's born into a world where there are no automobiles, there are no telephones, there's no electricity.
And at the time of his death, we'd been to the moon, the space shuttle was common.
Computer technology and communications technology were what they were.
I mean, you look at the things that he saw and experienced in terms of invention, technological advancement, lifestyle improvement were profound.
But then look at what he and my father and people their age went through.
Why was my father at age 40 settled?
Well, my father was born in 1918.
And the most formative event in his early life was the depression.
He was too young to be sent off to the Great War in World War I, but World War II.
He joined the Army Air Force, Army Air Corps, and was assigned to China Burma Theater.
He flew P-51s, he was an instructor on B-25s, I think in Alabama.
But World War II was major, major event in his life where he met my mother.
And the existence of the United States of America was on the line.
The country was hanging in the balance.
We had two enemies.
One to the west, one to the east, which sought to wipe us out.
And that threat was treated as real because it was and it was dealt with.
After World War II, because of the post-war agreements drawn up, the Soviet Union came into existence.
The next thing, after the Depression and World War II, the next thing that happened was Nikita Khrushchev showing up, United Nations banging his shoe on the podium and promising to bury everybody's grandchildren.
We will bury you.
Now my grandparents, my father's parents, my grandparents, did not take that lightly.
That was another call to arms.
That was the creation of the Cold War.
And that again, citizens of this country were asked to fork over a lot of their money and earnings in order to fight that.
So the Great Depression and World War II, then the Soviet threat.
So by the time my dad was 40, he had he grew up and became 40 at age 18 in terms of the responsibilities that his life demanded of him.
Everybody in that age.
They had no choice.
They didn't have time to think about or worry about themselves and their creature comforts and their hedonism.
Because the country was on the line.
And all of those things were profoundly formative.
And my brother and I, growing up, we kept hearing about the Great Depression, what we had to do to avoid it, if there ever was another one.
And of course, it was all empty talk to us.
We'd known nothing like that.
All we had known was prosperity.
The results of all of this commitment to seriousness on the part of our parents and grandparents.
Of course, when we were young, we didn't look at it that way.
We weren't old enough to understand.
It's why Frank and I were talking about it at age 50.
And why we still felt 20 on Friday nights.
Why we still do.
And what it all boils down to is that they had our parents and grandparents had to grow up with no choice in the matter at a much earlier age than Frank and I had to grow up.
In fact, if we wanted to, we never had to grow up.
About the only thing in our lives that was remotely similar was the Vietnam War.
That was about it.
Yeah, we had oil embargoes.
Yeah, we had wage and price.
Yeah, we had.
I remember Nixon slapped wage and price controls when inflation was at 3%, which got up to 14, 15% with Jimmy Carter.
But the point is it wasn't that bad.
A crisis was not that bad then compared to what a crisis today is, in a sense.
But still, we didn't have any of these tough mountains to climb.
We didn't have, we didn't have any of these hardships.
We didn't even have to take seriously the country was in peril.
They did all that for us.
They took it seriously during World War II.
They took it seriously during the Depression, they took it seriously during the Cold War, but we, just by the accident of our birth, never had to take any of that stuff really seriously.
They did it all for us.
So we had all kinds of freedom.
We could focus on ourselves.
The baby boom generation could become me, me, me.
And guess what?
We had to invent our hardships in order to tell ourselves how tough our life was.
Because everybody wants to think they're overcoming great obstacles.
Everybody wants to think that.
And there things that we invented were real.
I mean, it's it's everything's a relative.
Stress is stress, no matter how it comes to be.
But you need a sense of proportion and perspective in looking back and making these comparisons.
And my point is that my generation has had it so easy compared to my parents and grandparents, and of course, every generation prior to them.
People that tamed this country discovered it.
I must take a break here, folks, because of the constraints of the programming format, but we'll be back and continue in a moment.
Yep, we had to invent our traumas, and guess what?
For every trauma we invented, or for most of them, there's a pill.
To get rid of the stress.
There's a pill to get rid of the problem.
Whatever we've had to invent.
Thing is, my parents and grandparents, they knew when they were teenagers that life was about much more than them.
And things were much bigger than they were individually.
There are people my age alive today who still haven't figured that out.
They have had it so comparatively easy.
They don't think so, by the way.
They're invented stress is real.
But they've had it so comparatively easy in real terms that they still have time to make themselves the center of the universe.
They have not learned that there are things bigger than themselves.
Self-important, Never had to grow up.
It's patently obvious.
And I think these are all factors that to one degree or another explain various political realities today.
Obama, Obama's not technically a boomer, but he has all the worst characteristics of the boomer generation.
All of the worst.
But he's technically not one.
He doesn't have the excuse of being a boomer at the other things that created it, led to it.
But these people think the world revolves around them and that everybody's thinking about them.
And that everybody cares about them.
And of course, if you look at Obama, the press, everything is about him.
He almost has an excuse.
Can't change any of this, and I wouldn't want to.
That's not that's not the point.
And by the way, uh don't don't don't misunderstand me here.
I'm not denying that there are real hardships in life today.
They're just not the same ones.
I I, for example, I don't think.
I don't know how many, I wouldn't want to put a percentage on it.
But well, look at 9-11.
Look at 9-11.
There were more people killed 9-11 at Pearl Harbor.
What do we do after Pearl Harbor?
We all mobilized and we we didn't stop until those people surrendered.
Now what do we the difference we want to build a mosque at 9-11 and let the people who participated in that destruction build a mosque there?
A lot of our citizens think that's a good idea.
It is profoundly different in in a lot of ways that are not helpful.
Okay, back to the phones.
We go to Gainesville, Florida.
This is Jerry.
I'm glad you waited.
Jerry, great to have you here.
Hello, sir.
Hi, Rush.
Thank you for everything that you do.
You know, you asked a question earlier, why with all of the foals uh that people are responding negative to the numbers of policies, but why the popularity of Obama is still there.
And you've been answering that question all day long.
What it is, is that the majority of your voters don't even think about the questions of the details until the home takers ask that specific question, and then they come up, oh, yeah, well, here's what I think about that.
But when they go to the voting booth rush, they're looking at it's a beauty contest, and they're looking at, oh, this guy's got charisma, he seems nice, he's had a nice smile, he speaks well, and uh the like, and that's the way they vote.
So it's just it's a beauty contest in a voting boom, and uh no thought given to the policies, and you've been answering that all day long.
Well, I think that's true of some people.
The question remains how many are we talking about?
This is um uh what we don't know.
Although I maintain that we do know.
We've we've got into case every election that has happened, every meaningful election that's happened since Obama was elected, has gone against Democrats.
Now, I'm not forget health care of the Supreme Court, and I'm sorry.
You look at the governors that have won, you look at the 2010 medterms, uh, vast majority of people oppose Obamacare and don't want it.
I think we still have clear majorities with us on our side.
Scott Walker in Wisconsin that that election was huge, and people uh forget the 2010 midterms.
Democrats got shellacked all the way down the ballot to local elections, dog catcher and stuff.
It was uh it was huge, and all that's happened since then is things have gotten worse.
But there's no question there is an entitlement mentality that has gained a foothold in this country.
Now we used to call that childishness.
We used to call entitlement, the entitlement mentality childish.
The expectation that you should be given something.
That was children did that.
Today it's adults.
They've been convinced it's okay to be that way.
They've been political leaders that have, and educators that have convinced them it's okay.
And in fact, in some uh some ways it's it's honorable.
And there's no question that Obama is looked at as the celebrity of the United States.
But look at you talk about beauty contest.
That's just the reality of television world now.
There's nothing we can do about that.
That's just another one of those things that is that has to be accommodated and has to be has to be dealt with.
Never forget one of the first sponsors on this program, way, way back in 1988, was uh I forget the name of a verbal advantage verbal advantage.
You know what they sold?
It was a technique for expanding your vocabulary.
And the sales pitch was you can make yourself sound smarter than you really are if you learn to use the language.
Well, here's Obama.
I'd under what definition is the man smart.
He's wrong about everything.
Every policy has been destructive.
Everything.
If we take him at his word that he wants to create jobs and that he wants to grow the economy, then he's dumb.
Now, I maintain he doesn't really want to accomplish all that, but just in the in the realm of this reality here.
I've always maintained we need a new definition for smart.
But you can fool people to thinking you're brilliant just by how you sound.
Look at all the people who think Bush is an idiot.
He's at Harvard MBA for crying out loud.
They don't give those away, and you can't buy them.
He's a Harvard MBA.
He's not stupid.
Everybody who's met it will tell you that.
But how many people think he is just simply because of the way he spoke on camera?
These are realities that that uh have to be dealt with.
And everybody wants leaders that appear to be smarter than they think them think of themselves, smarter than uh than they are.
But no, no, but I I I don't think that we're anywhere near the point of no return here.
But we're on the way.
I mean, the we're we're clearly headed in that direction.
It's got to be turned back.
And that's the theme of the day.
But as is the case with every problem, you have to be honest in defining it before you can solve it.
You know, Scott Walker wasn't a beauty contest.
There is no way you can tell me that Scott Walker, that mayoral race was a beauty contest.
That race was about pure substance.
Governor, Governor Wisconsin.
What did I say, mayor?
Everybody knew what I meant.
This is the kind of stuff that Media Matters does, thirdly, focusing it.
It's not a mistake, it's a faux part.
Everybody knew I was talking about the governor.
Anyway, that was not a beauty.
That beauty Reagan was not a beauty contest.
Those were substantive elections about policy.
Obama was a beauty contest election because people were had been convinced to be fed up with Bush.
Iraq.
Well, it wasn't a contest, of course.
McCain didn't even really go through these elections election by election, you can analyze them individually as as they as they should be.
But not every election is won by the best looking person or the smartest sounding person or what have you.
These are these are traps that we fall into that end up limiting us in uh in our choices, who we nominate, who we support.
The Tea Party that they don't care about any of that.
The Tea Party candidates have they haven't won because of beauty contest characteristics in their election.
They're winning because of policy.
They're winning because of substance.
And that's why all the substance of this race is going to have to be put on the table.
And the substance that needs to be put on the table is Obama and his failings.
Obama and his shortcomings.
Obama equals why.
We are in the condition that we're in.
That's simple.
I appreciate the call.
Nevertheless, this is Vinny.
Vinny in uh Opelusis What?
Louisiana.
Hi, Vinny.
Great to have you on the program.
Hey, Rush, thanks for taking my call.
Yes, sir.
I've been listening since uh the early 90s, my college days.
Long time listener.
Oh, you are.
You're almost a lifer.
Almost.
Look, there's a whole.
Hello, Testing.
Hello, dude.
Did we lose you too?
Did we lose you?
Hello, can you hear me?
Are you he's on a cell phone, he's going in and out.
I'm gonna stick with it for just a couple minutes.
Vinny, are you there?
Yeah, can you hear me?
Yeah, I can hear you.
Don't move.
Okay.
Uh I could talk to you about all kinds all kind of things, but I want to hit on one point today.
Thank you for finally saying the economy is not the issue.
Where I live, that is not the issue at all.
The citizens of my town have no concern about going to work.
They haven't worked in years and don't plan on looking for a job.
So I think we're gonna have to focus on some other issues here than the economy.
You're absolutely right.
Well, that's a sad reality.
He's make he's making my point.
You know, you go back, I uh uh go back to the the story about my father.
I remember the first time I got fired.
Oh, folks.
You would have thought that I had in perpetuity dishonored the family name.
That's just something that you didn't allow to happen.
You just didn't get fired.
That was because of his conditioning coming out of the Great Depression.
My father, in teaching me about life, told me that I should figuratively kiss my boss's feet every day, that I should make it a point to have a meeting with my boss every day to thank him for employing me.
And that I should make that my number one objective is to let my boss know how appreciative I was for the job.
Now, in my day, that's how you became a slave at work.
If the in my day, if you if you spent all your time telling the boss how grateful you were, the boss, if I got a sap here, I'll never have to give this guy a raise.
This guy's so happy to be here, he'll clean the floors and do whatever.
You know, things changed, generally.
But got fired, and it was the worst.
Because once you got fired, nobody would ever hire you again.
You were forever stigmatized.
You got fired, and you may as well read the scarlet letter on your forehead.
You that was it.
I'll never forget when I had the call and tell him that I got fired.
All he could say, you got fired, you're fired.
It was like fired was uh a title.
It's not you you were fi you're fired.
It was he spat it out.
It was the absolute worst news he could have had, the worst thing could have happened.
It proved everything he always thought in telling me I was gonna be a failure because I didn't go to college.
And then I had to tell him six other times.
I had to tell him a total of seven times.
But the point is there was um my mom was not happy about it, but she thought he was being a little mean in the way he was dealing with me about it, that I needed to be pep talked and uh and inspired rather rather than than beat down.
But that this is just child rearing philosophical differences.
Anyway, point is that um back in the Great Depression, you know, there by definitely there wasn't any wealthy.
You got fired and there wasn't anywhere to go.
It was painful.
It was painful psychologically, it was painful.
If you cared what people thought about you, it was one of the worst things that could happen to you.
And of course, economically, you had to depend on family, church or or what have you for survival.
It's my only point is not that way today.
And that's all this guy's saying.
Most of the people where he lives don't work.
But they're eating.
These are transformations that have been slow and coming, and they're occurring uh so slowly that they're not causing a national outrage.
In fact, I've got a some guy at National Review wrote about this too over the week.
I'm gonna I gotta take a break anyway here.
Let me find this little piece.
And I'll be back and share it with you because it makes that point pretty well.
Don't go away.
Hey you welcome back.
So over the weekend, Mark Stein, guest host of this program, wrote a piece, National Review, on the Twilight of America.
He thinks we're finished.
So a guy responded to it.
Uh on the corner, which is the blog, one of the blogs at National Review, Michael Oslin, I think is what is.
He says, Mike, Mark, uh, I'm one of those hundreds of thousands of unfortunate to live in Montgomery County, Maryland.
I've been blessed with a return to lonesome dove experience last week.
Temperatures in the triple digits.
Your story on America's Twilight's spot on.
Anyone knows who drives through miles of crumbling inner city, watches growing paralytic incompetence on the part of local, state, federal government.
The only problem with our descent into civilizational breakdown is that it isn't quite efficient enough.
It's happening too slowly.
It's speed over too wide or spread over too wide a canvas for much of the population that cares to make a last stand at Fort Freedom.
Our collapse is real, but in a vast country of 300 million people, the long, agonizing shuffle up to lover's leap is hard to grasp.
It happens in drips and drabs while all of us instinctively know that we're soon going to be walking hand in hand at a tipping point of no return.
Daily life offers us myriad opportunities to just adapt and acquiesce ever so slightly.
So if the power company, after not having been able to turn on my power for five days, wants to jack up my monthly bill by five bucks, so what?
Just another sixty-six dollars.
I can handle that.
My Maryland taxes went up 4.75% to 5.25% while my lights went out.
Well, I don't even really know how much extra that costs, but say another $300, okay, I'll just tighten the belt a bit.
It's just a little tax increase.
Each retreat, each step backwards seems so small, and so much the better if I can take care of it by changing my own behavior.
But we get numb to the cumulative effect, and we wind up making larger and larger compromises.
I guess we won't redo the kitchen this year.
Maybe we won't do the vacation.
But that's just the way things are.
Now we're headed there as a country.
Can't intervene to stop Iran from getting a nuke.
Well, maybe we can contain them.
After all, we kept the Ruskies in their boxer 45 years.
Not enough airplanes to ensure we can protect American ground troops somewhere.
Well, maybe that overseas contingency operation.
Maybe it isn't all that important.
We know nobody's going to attack us, it's no big deal.
So what if Iran gets a nuke?
It's nothing we can do.
If we have to start raising interest rates to attract more buyers for U.S. bonds, well, well, I just won't think about the effect that has on business.
It ain't gonna affect me directly.
So by the time enough of us see how diminished our lives become, and then demand some real hope and change, it may be too late.
His point here is that this deterioration is not universal.
It's happening in pockets, and when it does happen to you, like you lose your job, well, there's disability, or there's unemployment, or there's uh there are ways to deal with it.
And you don't look at it as a loss of freedom.
Most people don't.
They just look at, well, have to deal with it.
I have to make adjustments.
I have to adapt.
Rather than see it for what it is.
Because that's hard.
That's When you make a commitment to really stop all this and defend it, protect it, and take it the other way, that's really hard.
And you say to yourself, I may not have to.
It may fix itself on its own.
We we rely on the people of country.
People of this country are gonna finally figure it out.
And the next they're gonna get rid of Obama.
You wait and see.
And they don't.
And so that's his retort.
And sadly, we have to continue this tomorrow.
Back in just a second.
Now to answer a question, no, I haven't given up.
That's what this whole show's about today, folks.
If I'd give it up, well, I don't even want to think about it.
I'm not going to.
That's not who I am.
That's not what I do.
Anyway, we'll see you tomorrow.
We'll continue then.
Thanks for being with us.
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