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July 18, 2012 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:25
July 18, 2012, Wednesday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of The Rush 24-7 Podcast.
It has been quite instructive.
This has been very, very illustrative, ladies and gentlemen.
Yesterday on this program, I uttered some words about the new Batman movie and the evil villain named Ben.
I made some comments about it.
Doesn't matter what.
I have had more reaction to that than anything, including the fluck thing.
It has been, I've had my brother telling me that Twitter has been going nuts.
I've been getting hateful emails, supportive email.
It is more people are concerned about whatever I might have said or didn't say about a Batman villain than they are about their own jobs.
It's incredible.
But as I say it's quite instructive and it's quite illustrative.
Hi folks, how are you, Rush Limbo?
Yes, details coming up, of course.
Telephone number, you ought to be on the program today, 800-282-288.
I never said that the that the villain was created by the comic book character creator to be part of the 2012 campaign.
I never said that at all.
Everybody's out there running around thinking I got this giant conspiracy theory that the Batman people, the creators, the comic book creators, created this thing to campaign against Romney with a Batman.
I never said that.
I didn't say there was a conspiracy.
I said the Democrats were going to use it.
Which they are.
John Stewart's harping on it.
Anyway, more on that in just a moment.
Yesterday, ladies and gentlemen, um, a friend of this program passed away, William Raspberry.
He was a longtime columnist for the Washington Post.
He passed away at 876, and he's survived by his mother, who is 104.
He also has a couple kids and his wife of 45 years.
But he's survived by his mother, who's 104 years old.
William Raspberry in 1993, very famous columnist for the Washington Post, very famous, uh highly respected liberal.
He was one of the last of the breed of liberals that can still be reasoned with.
You can't reason with liberals.
These are these are just they're revolutionary radicals.
They don't have a moral core today.
They have no belief except in their own indignant righteousness.
You can't reason with them.
Same reason you don't negotiate with Al-Qaeda.
You can't reason which you know, I don't want to get on a tangent here, but I I know that there's been this ongoing discussion of whether or not Romney ought to release more tax returns.
I got home yesterday afternoon and I saw practically the entire Republican establishment thinks he should.
What an asinine thing to suggest that he did a national review a big long editorial explaining why Romney should do this.
It was it was it was silly.
I I'm I'm convinced people on our side in the establishment don't know who we're up against.
This is not commonplace politics as usual.
You can't reason with these people.
So Obama and the Democrats are demanding that Romney release more tax returns than people in our say, well, I think he should.
I think you get the issue off the table.
It's not gonna get the issue off the table.
The the the Obama people don't want Romney's tax returns released so they can find out if they're above board.
Doesn't matter what they say.
They're going to be mischaracterized and used to hurt Romney.
Romney's right to hang in tough on this.
I couldn't believe this was even a matter that people would think about for longer than five or ten seconds.
Till I saw all these names of people on our side, National Review, George Will.
I mean, the list is long.
Bill Crystal, people think it Romney ought to do this.
You can't reason with these people.
They're not.
Why would we want to acquiesce to their demands?
Why would we want to please them?
Why would we want to get their approval?
We ought to be the ones making demands that Obama release things and come clean.
We ought to be making the demands and media.
Finally go vet the guy and tell us all who he really is.
Well, we already know.
They continue to try to hide it.
I that's right.
I even said yesterday at the end of my whole Batman discussion, said that Batman is more like Romney.
Made the point that the wet the rich, wealthy hero in the Batman movie is is more like Romney.
And that the Bane guy seems more like an Occupy Wall Street guy.
And yet here I am, supposedly articulating a conspiracy between a comic book creators and the Obama campaign that somehow they created this villain with the same name as Romney's venture capital company.
Private equity company, so as no, I all I said yesterday was that the Democrats are going to try to make that linkage.
And I got an old buddy John Stewart here, in fact, doing the same thing.
We got sound bites out the wazoo on this.
Snerdley came in here to say people were calling him at three o'clock in the morning.
You better tell Russia got this all wrong.
You know, these guys are very conservative.
These Batman creators, they're very conservative.
Russia got this wrong.
I didn't.
This thing spread like wildfire.
A comic book character, a com Dawn, look at me, a comic book villain.
I don't know what she's doing in there.
She probably she's not paying attention because she knows I'm not going to take a call for an hour.
She's here to transcribe calls, so what's she doing?
nails?
Well, anyway.
Uh a comic book villain.
A discussion of a comic book villain gets people more irritated and agitated than Obama's assault on the private sector, that Obama's assault on jobs, then Obama call all, all.
And now the left is out there saying we took Obama out of context on this on it.
You're not you're not reporting on a sentence he said before that.
He was talking about you didn't build a road yourself.
You got a successful factory of successful business.
You didn't do it.
You didn't build a road.
Okay, fine, if you want to make that claim, can somebody tell me is having a road in front of your business what makes it a success?
If having a road in front of your business, every business would be a roaring success.
No matter how you leftist try to spin it, you've got a guy who deeply resents...
The private sector, uh deeply resents capitalism, he's campaigning against capitalism.
The president of the United States campaigning for re-election is running against capitalism, and you can try to mask that and deflect that all you want, but the truth is the truth and it can't be denied.
Now back to Bill Raspberry.
Because he was.
He was the last of a breed of liberal who could still be reasoned with.
He was one of the last of the liberals with an open mind.
And I...
I don't say that just because way back in 1993, he admitted that he was wrong about me.
We even created a term to describe it.
It's called a raspberry effect.
But it's a good example.
I'm probably the um.
Well, he's probably the last liberal would ever admit being wrong about anything.
I think it probably the last liberal to admit ever having been wrong.
Now he wrote a column back in 1993 in which he implied I was a bigot.
He had not listened to me.
He had heard comments, well, he said he'd heard snippets when he was driving around in other people's cars, but he had not sat down and actually listened.
Instead, his buddies had told him that I was a bigot.
This served to rile up a lot of his regular readers around the fruited plane, who actually listened to the show and they knew better.
They knew that I wasn't a bigot, and they they wrote him.
A number of his regular readers wrote him mail letters to tell him that he was wrong.
And so to his Credit, Raspberry wrote another column where he admitted he had never heard the program except accidentally.
He had based his column on what other people had told him about me.
And to his infinite credit, he decided to listen to the show and decide for himself.
And naturally enough, after listening a while, he realized he'd been misinformed.
And he even apologized.
Now he didn't say he liked me, and he didn't say he'd accurately described me.
But he said, this sounds to me more like a guy having fun on the radio that's uh uh poking holes in sacred cows that uh nobody else pokes holes at.
And he never admitted that he would be a fan.
He didn't he didn't say that he agreed with me or anything, but he had to conclude that I wasn't a bigot.
I wasn't a racist, there wasn't any of these rotten things that were being said about me.
Now, this phenomenon having your mind changed by actually listening to the show is what we have called ever since the Raspberry Effect in honor of William Raspberry.
So maybe today might be a good day for people in the audience who know people who think they hate me to ask them to listen to the show for a week or so so they can make up their own minds and give the Raspberry Effect an opportunity to work on these otherwise closed-minded ignorantly righteous revolutionary radicals who cannot be reasoned with.
Anyway.
So I would like to think that Bill Raspberry was not, and his friends called him Bill.
I'd like to think that Bill Raspberry was not the last liberal who was willing to open his mind and admit that he could be wrong.
But he maybe was.
Almost 20 years ago.
That's right, we may have to go back 20 years to find the last liberal who could admit that he was wrong.
In any case, the world of politics is a um is a worse place without him.
I think what we'll do, we'll probably we'll probably post his column that led to us calling it the Raspberry Faith.
We'll posted it at uh rushlimbaugh.com.
Romn uh Raspberry's mom is 106.
I thought I read yesterday she's 104.
Anyway, he survived by his mother.
So our uh our condolences to the family of William Raspberry.
Yes, I I I know, Snerdley, the um the Batman thing, it is quite indicative, is it not?
Snerdley said it on glue.
He's getting calls at two or three in the morning.
You tell Rush that he's got this wrong.
You know, even the creator, Chuck um Mike, what's the Chuck?
I'm having a minute.
Yeah, Chuck Dixon.
Chuck Dixon, I even had a story in the stack yesterday I didn't get to it.
One of creative Chuck Dixon's oh no.
Oh no, now Russia gonna call me a liberal again.
Hell I'm not a liberal.
He called me this at the last Batman movie.
These Batman movies thematically, if you look at it open-mindedly, tend to be conservative in terms of right and wrong, good and evil.
But like I said, like I pointed out yesterday, Batman is Romney, the good guy's Romney.
Don, you heard it.
You were listening, weren't you?
Listening yesterday, you heard me say that.
I did toward the end, and that this Bane character, and I pointed out the spelling is uh is different.
Anyway, we'll get some of the audio sound bites on this, and of course, uh the uh audio sound bites on the liberal Democrats trying to say that all of us took their beloved president out of context on the You didn't do that, you didn't bill it.
You didn't make that happen, you didn't do that by yourself, you did.
We're taking it all out of context.
So we've got that.
We got a lot here, folks.
We are loaded for bears, so let's take a first obscene profit timeout, and we will come back and get started with all the rest of it.
Yeah, even my brother was was getting uh tweets all night long.
He calls me.
By the way, my brother's book, I got to say the Great Destroyer, is uh five or six weeks now in the New York Times uh bestseller list.
And it's uh it's it's it's far exceeded his goal, and it's still out there, it's still being purchased in droves.
The Great Destroyer, it's about it documents everything up until the time it was published.
Everything Obama has done, everything he said, it is a handbook.
You get in an argument with a liberal or you're trying to persuade anybody, doesn't matter.
It's all right there.
In fact, he's a the best line he had about his own book, so when he went back to start reading it from cover to cover to get ready for his interviews.
He said he was shocked at how much was in it, and it's his own book.
No, it's called The Great Destroyer.
Okay, um to start audio soundbite number five.
Oh, before we start with audio soundbite number five.
I have here, what is this?
This is um comic book.com.
Rush Limbaugh, five reasons he is wrong about Bain in The Dark Night Rises.
Today, Rush Limbaugh became the second talk show host to make some controversial comments regarding the upcoming summer blockbuster of Dark Night Rises.
Of course, the first with David Letterman, who may or may not have spoiled the ending of the Dark Knight Rises.
Limbaugh didn't drop any spoilers, but he did lay out a possible political conspiracy theory revolving around the villain Bain.
Limbaugh asked, Do you think it's an accident?
That the name of the really vicious fire-breathing four-eyed four-eyed whatever it is villainous movie is named Bain.
Went on to suggest that Bain might have been chosen as the villain as a political agenda against Romney, who ran a venture capital company called Bain.
Here are five reasons.
Rush Limbaugh's wrong about Bain and the Dark Knight Rises, and his talk about Bain created 1993.
My point yesterday was that I wasn't talking about the comic book creators.
I was talking about Hollywood.
The people who market the movie who determine when it's going to be released.
So you've got the villain named Bain.
We know that Obama is doing everything he can to discredit, but for crying out loud, folks, get this.
The Democrats are attacking Mitt Romney over layoffs made by an Obama bundler.
A steel company, Kansas City laid off a bunch of people in 2001.
Bain ran the place.
Romney was not there in 2001.
He left in 1999 to Democrats and Obama running around claiming that Romney laid off all these people.
Romney wasn't there.
The irony is that the guy running Bain Capitol at the time in 2001 who laid off all these people is now a bundler and fundraiser for Obama.
So they're blaming Romney for something that happened when he wasn't there that was done by an Obama fundraiser.
So they will do anything to keep Bain in the news.
And all I was trying to say yesterday was that the Democrats are going to take the occasion of this movie.
Well, by the way, this did not occur to me in independent thought.
I read stories about two nights ago about how this was a plan the Democrats had was an attempt to link the character in the movie to Romney.
Because the same name phonetically, Bain, it's spelled differently in the movie, B-A-N-E.
And the Democrats are going to try to do that.
Independently of the comic book creators, independently of the movie people, but the movie people, I mean, what are the odds that they're liberal Democrats and plan on doing whatever they can to elect Obama?
Pretty good.
You can't find conservatives in Hollywood that either come out of the closet or in positions of power anywhere.
So anyway, the controversy erupted.
Here's the soundbite.
We have time to squeeze this in.
It's last night, it's a montage.
Media comments about all this.
Rush Limbaugh fired up.
Do you think that it is accidental that the name of the really vicious fire breathing, four-eyed, whatever it is, villain in this movie is named Bain.
Listen to Rush Limbaugh from yesterday.
This evil villain in the new Batman movie is named Bain.
Conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh is talking conspiracy.
Do you think that it is accidental?
Rush Limbaugh says Batman's new movie could impact the election.
This evil villain in the new Batman is named Bain.
And there's now discussion out there as whether or not this was purposeful and it'll influence voters.
Okay, so that's how the montage went.
There are a couple of people in this whole thing that actually thought I had a point.
So we'll be back in just a second.
In an exclusive interview with our Blowtorch affiliate in Phoenix, KFYI yesterday, the creator of Batman, Chuck Dixon, pointed out that he and the collaborator Graham Nolan created this Bane character back in 1992.
He said that Graham and I are both staunch conservatives, so from our angle, there's no liberal agenda.
I'm a lifelong right-wing extremist.
That's KFYI Phoenix.
Now, let's put this in perspective.
The news media laughs and yawns, and then after they laugh and yawn, then they decide, you know what, we'll run with this.
Obama, deputy campaign manager, calls Romney a felon.
They laugh at it, they yawn, and then they say, you know, You know what?
Let's run.
It's not true, but let's run with it anyway.
They're having kittens.
And that some Democrats are going to try to connect the evil character to Bain Capitol and Mitt Romney.
As I said yesterday, that it was the Democrats who first made the comparison between the villain's name and Bain, not me.
I was just reporting the news that I had read a couple of nights ago.
I even read a couple of conservative people.
If they think they're going to be able to pull that off, they're crazy.
If they think people go watch a Batman movie, and with an evil character in the name Bain are going to associate the guy with Mitt Romney, they're crazy.
This idea was out there long before I was just commenting on it.
Again, the instructive thing here is it's a comic book character and it's caused all this hubbub.
Here's a guy named Michael Meehan.
He is uh guy who worked for John Kerry, the haughty John Kerry, who, by the way, John Kerry served in Vietnam.
And on CBS this morning, they're doing a uh a story on this connection between the Batman villain named Bain and uh Romney's old company Bain Capitol.
Democrat strategist Michael Meehan said.
I would agree with Rush Limbaugh.
If the Bain attack becomes a Bane caricature in a cartoon in a popular movie, the Obama campaign couldn't be happier.
What duh?
So here you have a major Democrat strategist suggesting that I'm on to something that they would love for you movie goers to compare or think of Mitt Romney and Bane Capitol when you watch this new Batman villain.
Irregardless.
Not sorry, irregardless as of the word.
Regardless, the intention of the creators of the comic book characters.
Now we move on to the view.
I thought the view was on hiatus so that all these babes could read Fifty Shades of Gray.
I had heard that the view had gone into reruns so that the hosts could all read that mommy porn book, Fifty Shades of Gray.
Snerdley, did you go out and get the book?
You know, we posted what I said on the Rush Babes Facebook page.
We got twenty-six pages of comments.
And you ought to see them.
Everybody the the mindless twit critics of this program say that everybody in this audience is a bunch of mind-numb robots.
You ought to read the diversity of opinion of Rush Babes posting their thoughts on this book at our Rush Babes Facebook page.
Well, some of them hate the book.
Some of them can't believe I talked about it.
Some of them are mad at me I talked about it.
Some of them love it.
Some of them think, good, I'm not going to read it, just like Catherine said.
I don't do what the crowd does.
I agree with Catherine.
The opinion runs a gamut on the book.
And there is some, yeah, there were some comments that people asked me, some of the rush babes wanted me to read passages on the air.
No, I could not do that.
And I'm not recommending the book, and I'm I'm, but I did.
The view babes, I thought they were on hiatus, so they could all read the book.
It's as close as any of them are gonna get.
But then I'm told, no, no, no, they're reading fifty shades of gray hair.
Not fifty shades of gray.
So they're still there.
And Whoopi Goldberg, she had to chime in on this Batman business.
Fresh Limbaugh is claiming that the new Batman movie, The Dark Knight Rises, has a hidden agenda.
A liberal plot to run Mitt Romney, to ruin Mitt Romney.
To clear the record.
Bain first appeared in Batman in January 1993.
The rough story outline was completed in 2008, which is quite before Romney got the nomination.
So they would have to be pretty deep.
Psychic to know that Romney was going to run, and so that they should send the subliminal message of Bain being the bad guy.
But to me, it's kind of like the teletubby.
Remember when they said that the teletubby was gay?
It's Batman fool.
Right.
And we've got it for Michael Meehan, whoopee.
The Democrats are gonna do everything they can to link this character to Romney.
Why?
They have no moral core whatsoever.
They are they're nothing more than radical ideologues who are unread that and that's all they've got.
The only thing they've got is to try to politically kill Romney.
Here's Maud Behar.
She had to get her two cents in.
Rush Limbaugh is a very right-wing, extreme right-wing Republican.
He wants to distract people from the fact that Romney will not release his taxes.
That's what he's doing.
Right, right.
So I'm talking about madman to distract people from Romney's tax returns.
I don't think Romney ought to release his tax returns.
Quite honestly.
And I'm st as I say, I am, I'm, I'm I saw, you know, I love these guys.
This is this is really hard.
National Review, I have uh National Review was was crucially important to my conservative education.
And as you all know, is it one of the biggest thrills of my life to to have been able to meet William F. Buckley Jr.
And sometimes they do things over there that I just don't understand, and yes, they had this big editorial where they joined the chorus with the Democrats, demanding that Romney release all of his tax returns back to the day he was born, probably before.
Uh I I re I hope Romney is keeping track of who on our side is caving to Obama's demands.
I hope he understands it's the Tea Party sticking by him and not the establishment of Republicans.
I hope Romney understands that it's the Tea Party and the conservative base that is supporting him on this tax return issue, that it's the Republican establishment and their associated media allies which are trying to acquiesce to demands from the Obama campaign from the White House.
This is not commonplace politics.
This is not going to make the issue go away.
All these guys want the issue to go away.
They want the issue of Romney's tax returns to go.
It's almost as though the tax returns are their own, and they just wanted to go away.
And how they don't understand that all it'll do is amplify the tax issue, the wealth issue, and give Obama the Democrats hundreds of thousands of pages of stuff to lie about, to distort.
How this is not understood is is peculiar to me.
But I guess it shouldn't be.
I I I I do think that it's it's an indication there are still people on our side who do not understand who these people are.
They're not just the Democrats of the day.
This is not the Democrat Party of Joe Lieberman.
Joe Lieberman, who was uh Al Gore's running mate in 2000, has been drummed out of this party.
He had to run as an independent for his own Senate seat.
When in 2006 or eight, whenever the last time he ran.
This is not.
The polit the Democrat Party of Bob Strauss, all these old guys that go out and have a cocktail with at the end of the day and talk about how wonderful it is to run Washington and so forth.
It's not it's these are radical.
Monothematic ideologues.
Who have no desire to be reasoned with.
They have no desire to be treated reasonably.
That's a sucker bet.
And it really does.
I guess it shouldn't after these many years, but it did it's it still surprises me that so many.
I guess, you know, the realization to the Republican establishment that a full-fledged conservative nominee is a guaranteed loss.
Because to them, a full-fledged conservative nominee equals a gold water landslide defeat.
For some reason, they don't associate full-fledged conservatism with Reagan landslide wins.
They see Goldwater.
They see independents getting nervous and not liking conservative.
They see the same things the liberals see in many cases.
It's it's I think the result of never getting out of Washington, living in that place where there is definitely there's a political culture, a social culture that is insulated from the uh from the rest of the country.
We're in a war here with no rules.
We're in a political war with no rules, where truth and being reasonable and taking the high road doesn't get you anything.
With the other side.
Taking the high road, trying to reason with these people is not going to get their respect.
Why would you want it anyway?
Where did I put it?
I've got it here somewhere.
Did I throw it out of the way?
I can't.
That's a problem with 300 pieces of paper that equal a radio show every day.
Here, here yep, yep, yep, here it is.
John Stewart likens Batman villain Bain to Romney's Bain Capital firm.
So here you have John Stewart.
And were the hens on the view mocking him.
John Stewart likens Batman villain Bain to Romney and Bain Capitol.
So I just, I told you this is going to happen.
Democrats are trying to get it done.
They're trying to make this linkage.
And Romney auto-releases taxes.
I Romney gave a great speech yesterday.
I tell you, I was doing show prep yesterday afternoon, about 4.30.
I mean, I go home and I just dig into stuff for the next day's show.
Life is show prep for me.
And I start reading things about a knockdown drag out best of his career speech that Romney gave in Irwin, Pennsylvania.
I kind of sat up on that because I used to live in Irwin.
I lived it's right.
Irwin is close to McKeesport.
That's the first place I work, a suburb of Pittsburgh.
W uh, what was the name of W. That was an oldies format.
They called it solid rock and gold.
I called it salted rotten mold, because it is an oldie station, a playlist of about 75 records.
And that's all it was.
I got sick of playing this.
That's why I got fired playing over over uh under my thumb too many times.
First time.
That's the first time I got fired.
Called my dad.
You what?
I got fired.
Why?
I played a song too many times.
Well, I he was never gonna understand that.
He wouldn't understand playing a song too many times, A, and why one would get fired for doing it.
Other than the bosses said no, the bosses were always right.
The authority figures are all the teacher was always right, principal's always right, the boss was always right.
But anyway, Irwin is where I lived, and Romney was there, and this speech of his apparently.
We got soundbite from it.
Let's listen to a little bit of it when we come back.
Don't go away, folks.
We revved up and ready for everything today here on the EIB network.
All right, here we go.
Mitt Romney, Irwin, Pennsylvania.
By the way, you know this was a good speech because you haven't seen anything about it anywhere, have you?
Have you?
Drive-by's aren't covering this.
Drive-by's aren't covering it.
It's not anywhere to be found in the uh state control media.
Here's Romney, Irwin, Pennsylvania.
It's a campaign event.
We have several sound bites.
The idea to say that Steve Jobs didn't build Apple, that Henry Ford didn't build Ford Motor, that Papa John didn't build Papa John Pizza, that Ray Kroc didn't build McDonald's, that Bill Gates didn't build Microsoft.
You go on the list to say something like that is not just foolishness, it's insulting to every entrepreneur, every innovator in America.
That's wrong.
Whoa!
Whoa, he is fired up out there.
By the way, I was thinking of movie villains.
Harry Reed is the thing.
Since since every you want a conspiracy, how about how about that comic book figure, the thing, named after Harry Reed?
A perfect description of Harry Reid.
He's just a thing, takes up space in the Senate, obstructing all the reforms the House passes.
Not an action hero, just an inaction hack.
Harry Reid, the thing, dingy Harry.
Here's Moore Romney, fired up, obviously.
I don't think anyone could have said what he said who would actually started a business or been in the business.
And my own view is that what the president said was both startling and revealing.
I find it extraordinary that a philosophy of that nature would be spoken by a president of the United States.
It goes to something I've spoken about from the beginning of the campaign.
That this election is to a great degree about the soul of America.
Do we believe in an America that is great because of government, or do we believe in an America that's great because of free people allowed to pursue their dreams and build our future?
You know, folks, I think this actually made Romney mad.
I actually think that what Obama said finally ticked Romney.
I think Romney's now realized he's not a nice guy who's just befuddled and wrong.
That was Romney's prior description of Obama.
He's a nice guy.
He just doesn't know what he's doing.
I think this really got too Romney.
Let's squeeze one more in here.
I'm convinced he wants Americans to be ashamed of success.
I want Americans to welcome and to celebrate success and to encourage people to reach as high as they can, and in some cases to build enterprises.
I don't want government to take credit for what the individuals of America accomplish, whether they work in government or work in the private sector, it's the people of America that make America the unique nation, the exceptional nation it is.
I want to encourage economic freedom.
Our economy is driven by free people pursuing their ideas and their dreams.
It is not driven by government.
And what the president's doing is crushing economic freedom.
Yes, sir, Rebobb, something lit a fire.
I am convinced that what Obama said actually has made Romney mad.
Not in an insulting way, has made him mad.
Over what we're up against now.
And of course, as I say, the Obamaites are saying that their guy was uh was taken out of context.
Right.
Okay, well, we'll deal with that as the program unfolds.
In the meantime, a brief time out before we get back here.
You remember last week Obama was too busy to go to the NAA LCP convention.
They looked at the White House schedule and there was nothing on it.
You know what he was doing?
He was being interviewed by Oprah on the day he was supposed to be the NAA LCP.
And the thing is Oprah doesn't have a show that anybody watches anymore.
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