All Episodes
Previous Next
July 23, 2012 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:50
July 23, 2012, Monday, Hour #1
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
Folks, I'd just like to remind you, and by the way, greetings, great to have you, Rush Limbaugh, the Excellence and Broadcasting Network.
Here we are, three straight hours, broadcast excellence, straight ahead.
Happy to be back.
I know that you're happy that I'm back.
I'm happy to be back.
We're in it together.
And as always, a sheer delight to be with you.
Telephone number 800-282-2882, the email address lrushbaugh at eibnet.com.
Little statistic for you.
Since the beginning of 2012, we're almost now to August, so we've got seven months in, pretty much seven months in.
Since the start of 2012, the death count in Chicago is 274.
In seven months, the death count in Chicago, 274.
And they have some of the strictest gun laws in the county, just as they do in the country, just as they do in Colorado.
You know, all of us have certain traits that reflect upon our character.
And when those characteristics, when those traits cluster in a manner that causes a person to function in a socially reprehensible or irresponsible manner, then that person is said to have a character disorder or a mental disease or disorder of some kind.
So early Friday morning, I get up preparing for the day of qualifying for a weekend member guest golf tournament up in Connecticut.
And I learned what everybody else knew at the time that a mentally ill kid, young man, engaged in the mass murder of innocents the night before in a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado.
His minutes of pure unspeakable evil and depravity took a great deal of planning and a lot of cowardice.
I was talking to some people last night.
Why would somebody do it?
Knowing full well they're going to get caught.
Why would somebody do this?
You know, everybody looks for the rational explanation for the irrational.
Who can know?
Who can possibly relate or understand it?
The vast majority of people in the world can't relate to or understand this.
So yet we can try to psychoanalyze it.
And everybody has their opinion.
But the question I got was, he knew he was going to get caught, knew he's going to spend the rest of his life in jail, knew he might be put to death.
Why do it?
The first thing that came to my mind as an answer, that like everybody else flailing away trying to explain this, first thing came to my mind was fame.
Charles Manson, still very famous.
Charles Manson, solitary confinement, still very famous, gets to live with the idea that everybody knows who he is.
We know that young people in our culture are consumed with fame.
We know that young people in our culture are consumed with being known.
They literally vomit every detail about themselves, every opportunity they have, be it websites, places they go, it doesn't matter.
They literally want everybody to know everything about them.
Pop culture in this country rewards fame for the sake of fame.
You don't even have to do anything.
You don't have to be accomplished anymore to have fame or to be famous.
You just have to be famous.
And people think that there is glamour and wealth and fun and uniqueness attached to fame.
And so more and more people are pursuing it.
And whatever you want to say about this guy, what's his name, Thorpe?
Holmes Holmes, James Holmes.
I forgot I should have called Brian Ross to find out his name.
Should have called Brian Ross to find out where the guy grew up and what he did.
You know, it's amazing.
The first people, I mean, fact didn't even cross my mind politicizing this.
But that's the first thing that crossed the minds of supposedly reputable journalists.
The ABC Investigative Unit did a Google search.
All right, back to the event that the shock upon learning of nearly incomprehensible mayhem ruthlessly inflicted against living, breathing, caring fellow human beings was interrupted by opportunistic, politically ill leftists.
Politically ill leftists.
I mean, before anybody could absorb the loss, before anybody could comprehend the loss of friends and relatives of those who were murdered in cold blood,
before anybody could really begin to grieve for those that we didn't even know, Brian Ross and George Stephanopoulos on ABC have breathless breaking news that turned out to be as wrong as anything in media has ever been wrong.
Everybody talking about Brian Ross.
What about Stephanopoulos and set him up?
Can you imagine how that went?
This guy show up for work Friday morning at Good Morning America.
Stephanopoulos is, hey, hey, Brian, why don't you see if you can find some link to the tea party with this guy?
Maybe he listens to Limbaugh.
Maybe he listens to Beckerhan.
And Ross already have, already found a George Tea Party.
Oh, good.
Good.
We'll go with it.
Something like that.
So there was Brian Ross desperate to find, here we have an unspeakable human tragedy.
And people who tell us that they are the last reservoirs of compassion in America.
They are the truly sensitive, caring, thoughtful ones.
First instinct they had was to what?
Try to find a way to help Barack Obama with this unspeakable tragedy.
Try to find a way to help Barack Obama.
Try to find a way to help the Democrat Party.
Brian Ross, desperate to find a link that would help Barack Obama.
Obama, how despicably partisan do you have to be to have this knee-jerk suspicion?
Brian Ross said in the air, there's a Jim Holmes of Aurora, Colorado, page on the Colorado Tea Party site as well, talking about him joining a tea party last year.
We can't say for sure, but we're going to say anyway.
We can't say for sure, but we're going to say anyway.
And say they did.
Then they said, we'll retract it.
Then they apologized for it some hours later.
Nothing like a little mass murder to bring out leftists who suffer political illness.
Here we have, yeah, this could be his Oklahoma City.
I'm just getting this could be.
This could be Barack Obama's Oklahoma City.
That's right.
This could be Gabby Giffords.
This could be Obama's chance to redo the Gabby Giffords circumstance.
This could be Timothy McVeigh's Oklahoma City bombing.
Yeah, yeah.
That's not the first time they tried this.
Clinton tried blaming me for the Oklahoma City bombing.
They tried to blame Sarah Palin for the Gabby Gibbard shooting.
And of course, then when all that bombs out, then they go blame the guns.
They'll never blame the movies because they're not going to ban movies.
It's easier to talk about banning guns.
They got folks in this horrible Colorado thing, what they were hoping to get out of Fast and Furious.
I think this is what they wanted out of Fast and Furious.
I think this is what is in the documents that Holder and the boys won't release to Darrell ICE's committee.
But it's just an unspeakable shame something like this happened from somebody apparently has no remorse.
And that's why I wonder about the relevance of fame in this.
And there may be none.
It may be impossible to know.
It might likely be that we won't ever know what the real reason why they say they found a Batman comic book back in 1986 that's got some relevance to this.
That's a problem with looking at this politically.
It's a problem with trying to politicize everything.
All for the sake of trying to help Barack Obama in an election.
From people who tell us that they have the lion's share of compassion, sensitivity, feeling, understanding in our country.
Meanwhile, in Chicago, the death count since the start of the year is 274.
Some of the strictest gun laws in the country.
If all 274 had happened on one day, we'd have a whole different perspective.
As it was, what?
35 happened in a weekend.
And the mayor came out and said to the gangbangers, leave the kids alone.
Go take your stuff to the alley, but leave the kids alone.
Now, a friend of mine sent me some interesting stuff here.
It's a good way to understand what happened in Aurora, Colorado, and the anti-gun reactions.
It's an interesting timeline of things.
Let me run through it fairly quickly here.
The time since the introduction of relatively useful long-barreled weapons, approximately 600 years.
600 years, the rifle has been around.
600 years, give or take.
The time since the introduction of pistols using more than one bullet, at least 150 years.
The time since the enactment of the Second Amendment, 221 years.
And that's an important number to remember because now, since the effort to blame this on the Tea Party failed, now it's time to go for the Second Amendment.
So it's been 221 years since the enactment of the Second Amendment.
600 years since the introduction of the rifle, the long-barreled weapon, and 150 years of a pistol that's able to use more than one bullet.
The time since Tim Burton took a charming, funny, and wholesome 1960s kids show.
I was thinking about this over the weekend.
I remember watching Batman on television.
And it was a cartoon show with human characters.
I forget the guy who played Batman, Adam something or other.
Adam West, that's right.
And every time Batman punched somebody, the word pow in a comic book bubble came up.
Burgess Meredith played the penguin.
I forget who was the joker.
Maybe Cesar Romero was the joker.
It was a comedy show.
It was a cartoon show.
It was a charming, funny, wholesome 1960s kids' show that was on at 7.30 Eastern Time.
But how long has it been since Hollywood metastasized that show with sick, dystopian, and occasionally anti-American world views?
You know what dystopian, for those of you in Rioland, is the opposite of utopia.
Utopia is perfection on earth.
Dystopia is utter, total failure and chaos.
Dark, dank, colorless, finished.
It's over.
So Batman in the 60s on TV metastasizes to a sick, dystopian, hyper-violent Batman movie in 23 years.
23 years since Batman on TV to the first Batman movie.
And the birth of the modern Batman series of films with which the killer in Aurora explicitly identified by his own admission.
What are you frowning at me with, Snerdley?
But on the television, I'm talking about the television show Popular Media.
It was a kids' show.
It was hard for a family-oriented funny.
You laughed at that show.
Batman in the Comics was not so much that, but it was still a comic book.
Anyway, 23 years since the Batman TV show, it's become what this guy explicitly identified with.
And then you can bring up Oliver Stone if you want to.
He made a movie called Natural Born Killers.
It was a love story.
Woody Harrelson was in it.
It was a love story about mass murder.
Natural-born killers.
That's the movie the Columbine Killers identified with.
Took 18 years.
They also kind of dug the Matrix movies.
The time in which the prevalence of spectacular, multiple murders for no obvious point other than celebrity has accelerated approximately the past 20 years.
We've had long-barreled rifles 600 years.
We've had multi-bullet pistols over 150 years.
We had the Second Amendment, 221 years.
We have had spectacular, multiple murders for no obvious point other than celebrity accelerated like crazy the past 20 years.
My point is, how do you blame the Second Amendment?
How do you blame the guns for that?
The guns to do this kind of have been around for all kinds of time, but you can peg other elements in our culture that have been around a lot less time and have a much more, if you want to start arguing, influence.
I didn't bring this up.
I'm simply reacting to it, like I always do.
You want to start blaming the Second Amendment?
You want to start blaming guns?
Then let's talk about it.
What are you shaking your head in there for?
I'm not blaming anybody.
I'm reacting.
I'm not blaming anybody.
The guy who did this is who gets the blame.
Look, I'm just not going to sit here and listen to the Constitution of this country be blamed for this.
I'm not going to let that go.
Pure and simple.
They start the game.
I'm going to finish the game.
I'm Mr. Moneybags in Monopoly, and I'm winning the cash in the middle of the board with the roll of snake eyes.
I got to take a break now.
Even though I wasn't through because I was distracted by Snerdley, don't go away.
Folks, there's lots of stuff going on out there today.
The penalties that were announced this morning on Penn State University, all of the victories from what was it, 1998, been vacated.
So Bobby Bowden is now the winningest coach in college football history.
All those wins are just vacated.
That takes away something from a lot of people who had nothing to do with what went on at Penn State.
I get an email.
People are up in arms about aspects of the penalty.
Other people are totally fine with it.
Also, I'm going to spend some time on two things today.
Andy McCarthy has a very long piece at pjmedia.com reacting to John McCain and others attempting to impugn Michelle Bachman and others who have written the State Department asking for some understanding on what role, if any, Huma Abadin, Hillary's number one aide, might have in regards to national security because of her parents, particularly her mother's involvement with the Muslim Brotherhood.
And it's a powerful piece that McCarthy has written.
And it's obvious that Republican establishment types in Washington are trying to take Michelle Bachman out with Senator McCain apparently the lead role.
Also, there's a guy named Dylan Matthews at the Washington Post blog called Wonk Blog.
One of the most unbelievable pieces I have ever read in my life about anything attempting to excuse Obama when he said in Roanoke, you didn't build that business.
You didn't do that.
Somebody else made that happen.
It is the most incredible thing I've ever read to you.
If there's any political lesson to be learned, and I frankly shy away from trying to politicize things like this in Aurora, Colorado, but folks, I think it's undeniable that our culture is a shame.
Our culture is sending messages, a lot of terrible messages To really weak, I want to say dumb, maybe mentally impaired people.
Most people are able to handle it, compartmentalize it, and deal with it as what it is.
It's entertainment, it's over there, and it's self-contained, and it's not real.
Other people aren't able to make those distinctions.
Jared Lochner, Gabby Gifford shooting, was one who was unable to.
You note that nobody's calling for the banning of violent Hollywood movies or rap music.
They're too heavily invested in the Democrat Party.
Nobody's going to call for the banning of comic books.
But they will call and use this crisis to call for more gun control, even though Colorado, after the Columbine shootings a few years ago, Colorado already has some of the strictest gun control laws in the nation.
And the truth of the matter is that criminals and lunatics never have any problems breaking a law.
They never have any problem finding guns or explosives.
The laws only stop other people from being able to defend themselves.
Law only stops the law abiding, by definition.
I remember being in the fashionable salons of Fifth Avenue early on in my broadcast career in New York when I was essentially being vetted for membership in these salons.
And I would be going to these high-elite types, invite me over for dinner, it'd be the circus act.
And they'd start in with their traditional beliefs.
I never, some of the smartest people around, by reputation, start railing, for example, on an issue.
And one night it was gun control.
And all I said to him said, well, we're right on Fifth Avenue.
Central Park is right across the street.
And I said, well, look, if you can guarantee me that after you take everybody else's guns, people over across the street in the park are not going to have their guns, then maybe we can talk.
Until you can tell me that your plan will take guns out of the hands of criminals, then I'll listen to you.
But if you can't guarantee, and of course they shut up, there was no way that they could make that claim.
Blaming guns for murder is like blaming forks for obesity.
Someone misused a gun, therefore no one's allowed to have one.
This is what passes for logic among the left.
I think the mayor out there even said, a governor, this guy would have found ways to do what he did in that theater, whether he could have gotten guns or not.
The Democrat, local political official, said as much, and he's right.
Let's do a quick audio soundbite review of this.
As I wasn't here Friday, had no chance to weigh in.
I want to do this, get it over with, move on to the other things, because I'm not going to be distracted by this, but it does deserve a little time and some commentary.
Let's go back Friday morning on Good Morning America, George Stephanopoulos talking to Brian Ross about the alleged shooter in Aurora, Colorado.
I want to go to Brian Ross here because Ryan, you've been looking at investigating the background of Jim Holmes here.
He found something that might be significant.
There is a Jim Holmes of Aurora, Colorado page on the Colorado Tea Party site as well, talking about him joining the Tea Party last year.
Now, we don't know if this is the same Jim Holmes, but this Jim Holmes of Aurora, Colorado.
Okay, we'll keep looking at that.
Why do you go on the air with it if you don't know?
You're journalists.
Well, one of you is a political hack.
Both of you are political hacks, disguised as journalists.
But at least play the game.
At least know before you go on the air.
But see, they didn't care whether it was true or not.
I maintain to you that they didn't care whether it was true.
They know the power they've got.
They know the power that they wield.
They wanted it out there that the Tea Party might have.
It's all they wanted to do, somehow find some way to associate the Tea Party where you have no acts of violence on record.
Remember the claim as Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats were marching with the giant gavel to the Capitol in Washington after having passed health care.
Maybe they were walking to the vote, and the Tea Party and other Americans opposed to it flanked them on both sides of the street.
When it was all over, a bunch of Democrat congressmen say that they heard Tea Party people shouting the N-word.
So Andrew Breitbart offered $100,000 to anybody who could prove it.
$100,000 to anybody who could prove that it had happened.
And nobody could because it didn't.
And the Democrat Party itself put that out there.
They project, folks, they are.
This is the easiest way to understand them.
I've been laughed at for this explanation for years.
They are what they accuse us of being.
They do what they accuse us of doing.
They are the ones who do all of it.
They are the ones who say all these things that they accuse us of doing and saying.
Tea Party has no criminal acts in its history.
There's no violent history in the Tea Party.
There is an Occupy Wall Street, the Democrat version, but there isn't with the Tea Party.
So why put it on the air?
Why say it?
How did you find this out?
What did you do?
Google it, Brian?
You Google the name and you come up?
It later was discovered there are 25 people of this name in this area.
25.
How do you automatically associate?
And then what?
The guy who's misidentified, now he becomes a target.
The guy who's incorrectly identified, he becomes a target.
He didn't do anything.
Minding his own business, he joins the Tea Party, and all of a sudden, a bunch of lunatics are on prowl.
And I'm getting ready to go out to the golf course, and I get an email.
Guess what, Rush?
On Twitter, they're calling for you to be arrested.
There was a whole Twitter thread on how I should be arrested.
And I said, for what?
Well, you're the one that got everybody all worked up in this Baying business.
And I had to laugh.
I said, okay, history keeps repeating.
And they keep trying.
They tried to blame me for the Oklahoma City bombing.
Try to blame me and Sarah Palin for Gabby Giffords.
And now this is pathetic.
These people don't even deserve to have jobs anymore.
Everybody talks about Brian Ross, but what about Stephanopoulos, who set him up?
So you can imagine how this happened.
They're sitting in there getting ready to go on the air prior to the show starting, got this event, and they're salivating.
And they can't wait.
They can't wait to get on the air and make this association of this guy and the Tea Party.
Why?
Do they actually, in their hearts, believe that's what the Tea Party is?
Or do they hope that it's the Tea Party that did this?
And they're rolling the dice and will take the risk in case they're right.
Do they hope it?
Do they actually think that's what the Tea Party is?
I will not rule out that that's what they actually think.
I will not rule it out that I think you talk about political illness as opposed to mental illness.
The left is filled with people who are politically ill and their minds are poisoned and they are demented.
And I will not rule out the fact that they actually think it.
They have fought it so long that it's become pathological with them.
They believe all the things that they believe but can't prove April 24th, 1995, Minneapolis, President Clinton.
We hear so many loud and angry voices in America today whose sole goal seems to be to try to keep some people as paranoid as possible and the rest of us all torn up and upset with each other.
They spread hate.
They leave the impression that by their very words that violence is acceptable.
You ought to see, I'm sure you are now seeing the reports of some things that are regularly said over the airwaves in America today.
It is time we all stood up and spoke against that kind of reckless speech and behavior.
So the Oklahoma City bombing in the aftermath provided Bill Clinton with a political opportunity to write his sinking ship.
That is shortly after the House had been won by the Republicans for the first time in 40 years.
And of course, back in 1995, folks, there wasn't a Fox News.
There wasn't anybody else on the radio except me in 1995.
Loud, angry voices on the airwaves.
Well, we didn't sit still for it, and we demanded a clarification.
What did he mean?
Or an apology.
And eventually Mike McCurry went out and said, no, no.
Because the media, the media was eager for them to speak my name.
The media wanted the White House to speak my name.
And when Push came to shove, they wouldn't do it.
And their fallback was, no, we were talking about the Michigan militia and their shortwave radio communications.
That's what Mike McCurry said.
He was the White House spokesman at the time.
The Michigan militia and their shortwave radio communications, which nobody heard.
Nobody was monitoring the Michigan militia and their shortwave radio.
So when Push came to shove and they were asked by the eager media, come on, please say it.
Please say Lil Boy's name.
They wouldn't do it.
Okay, that's 1995.
That's 12 years ago.
Is that my right?
Maybe as long as 10, 17 years ago.
17 years ago, if I'm doing, I don't do numbers rapidly in my head well.
A long time ago.
Let's move forward to yesterday.
Meet the depressed David Gregory.
Weighed in with this while interviewing guests about the mass shooting in Aurora, Colorado.
I was thinking, hearkening back to President Obama's words after Gabby Giffords was shot, and then to Bill Clinton back in 1995 after Oklahoma City.
And I'll put something he said up on the screen.
He said back then, President Clinton, we hear so many loud and angry voices in America today whose sole goal seems to be to try to keep some people as paranoid as possible and the rest of us all torn out and upset with each other.
They spread hate.
They leave the impression that by their very words that violence is acceptable.
Let me emphasize, as we sit here today, we know nothing about motivation in this particular case, political or otherwise.
But President Clinton's words back in 1995 could be true today, couldn't they, about how some of the public discourse can fall on more vulnerable ears?
Desperate, aren't they?
Desperate as they can be, still want to tie it to conservatives.
Even though Clinton bombed out and would not use my name back in 1995, here's David Gregory resurrecting this and trying to use Clinton words 17, whatever number of years later to do his own imitation of Brian Ross.
Two days after Brian Ross was humiliated and had to apologize, Gregory decides to get in on the action himself.
And these people are said to be among the smartest in the world.
What about the messages in the movies, David?
Well, the messages in the comic books, David.
What about being interested in fast and furious, David?
That's where you're supposed to be looking.
It's transparent and it is pathetic.
And these are the people who try to politicize everything.
Question, do they really believe it or are they just hoping it?
It's actually a combination of the two.
They would love nothing more.
Problem is, at the end of every one of these events or episodes, it looks like the bad guys in question have a closer association with the pop culture of the left than they do.
Anything to be found on conservative media.
We'll be back, folks.
Don't go away.
By the way, folks, the only thing we know about this guy out in Colorado is as far as his politics is that he described himself as a middle-of-the-roader on his match.com profile.
No, he's a moderate.
He's a middle-of-the-roader.
He is not a conservative.
And his match.com, TMZ's got a screen grab of his profile.
And his profile included political views, Colin, middle-of-the-road.
So what are we supposed to do?
Is they supposed to start attacking independents now?
Are we supposed to blame moderates who, by definition, don't care enough about anything?
By the way, can somebody tell me the guns that Timothy McVay used to carry out the Oklahoma City bombing?
Can somebody tell me the guns that were used by the fallen intellectual Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber?
The LA Times profile of Aurora shooting suspect keeps getting murkier.
Was he a brilliant loner?
A nice guy with circles of friends, a stubborn near-dropout, an online profile, a gun range application raise further questions.
These people are actually going to trying to, so they're getting a little worried here that they can't tie him to the right wing.
So if he's not a right-winger, he's going to have been a brilliant, at some point in his life, fallen liberal.
Like the Unibomber was.
The New York Times published the Unibombers Manifesto.
He had Al Gore's book in his little shack there, which is not much bigger than the shack Obama's brother lives in in Kenya.
You've seen the Unabomber Shack among his worldly possessions, one of Al Gore's books, Fallen Liberal.
He was an intellectual.
What is an intellectual, by the way?
It's a great, great, great story on why intellectuals are anti-capitalist.
I can boil it down.
They're anti-capitalist because they're ragingly angry.
As intellectuals, they think they're smarter than anybody in the world and they therefore ought to be richer than anybody else.
But because they're not, they hate capitalism.
Really, no more complicated than that.
Anyway, folks, lots still ahead.
As you know, don't vanish.
U.S. poverty on track to reach highest level since the 1960s.
Majority of voters blame president for bad economy.
There are other headlines.
Majority of voters blame president for bad economy.
Falling fortunes of the 1%.
There's a lot of economic news out there.
Not good.
Not good for Obama.
We'll focus on it when we get back, folks.
▲
Export Selection