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July 23, 2012 - Rush Limbaugh Program
35:42
July 23, 2012, Monday, Hour #3
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No, the Penn State, no, the Penn State guy, the NCAA guy.
And by the way, to show you how out of it I am, I didn't know till this thing all came up.
The NCAA had left Kansas City.
I thought they were in Overland Park.
Well, they used to be there back when I lived in Kansas City.
But not everything, I guess, happens out of Indianapolis.
Anyway, Mark Emmert, the NCAA president, announced the penalties against Penn State today.
And he said they got to vacate all the victories.
They didn't want the death penalty, which would have meant canceling the football season because that would have penalized people who had nothing to do with what Sandusky did and what they say Paterno looked the other way and allowed to happen.
So they're not going to cancel a season, but they're going to let any player that wants transfer with no penalty as long as he meets other requirements.
So basically, the message was they can't go to a bowl game for four years.
They can't participate in any championship of any kind for four years.
So the coach, the head coach, Bill O'Brien, I guess he's a new head coach.
He had a meeting with a team today.
What does he use?
How does he sell the team on the season?
They can't go to a ball.
What's there to play for?
No, there are things.
The job he's got is pretty difficult.
Can't go to a bowl game.
Basically, all you can do is select tradition of Penn State.
What's that now?
Maybe participate in the rebuilding of a great program that once was.
But when you vacate all of the victories and then you tell the existing team that you can't go to a bowl game for four years and there's no championship for you, how are you not punishing the people that didn't have anything to do with it?
$60 million fine is about what they say the Penn State football program generates every year.
They've got to take that one-year revenue of $60 million.
They're going to set up basically a charity for abused kids to deal with those who are and to prevent it from ever happening again.
It's kind of like tobacco settlement, yeah.
Well, yeah, getting rid of Joe Campbell really made the difference.
But I'm just stuck here on the fact that they don't want to punish the players that had nothing to do with this by canceling the season.
Yet they are punishing them in a way by telling them that nothing they do can result in a bowl game or a championship.
Nothing they do can amount to anything other than playing football for the sake of which I'm just asking a simple question, and maybe somebody's got the answer that I'm not thinking of.
But I don't know how this isn't punishing the people.
I had nothing to do with it.
This is guilt by association for the players that are currently playing.
They had nothing to do with it.
And besides, to what extent, you know, you want to vacate the victories that Paterno had.
Okay, I understand that.
But then as mayor of Rioville, another question emerges, and that is, well, how did what Sandusky did help them win?
If you're going to vacate the victories because of what Sandusky did, what Paterno knew was going on, it looked the other way, then how did what happened there with Sandusky contribute to victories?
And I don't think anybody would say that it did.
So they had to come down.
They had to come down hard.
No, I'm not.
Look, it would be really easy to politicize this, but I'm not going to.
I'm not.
Oh, snurdly don't even want to go there.
Doing this after Paterno has passed away where he can't defend him.
Yeah, but it's easy.
But I don't want to try to politicize this.
I mean, it would be very easy to call these, but I'm not going to.
I just have these questions about it.
I wonder how many players are now going to try to transfer out of there since they've been told there's no...
You go to Penn State because there's always a ball that you go to.
You go to Penn State because it's a linebacker factory for the NFL.
You go to Penn State because it has a pedigree.
You go there as opposed to other universities because it does go to bowl games, because it does contend for championships.
It does contend for the national championship.
It always is in the top 10, top 15.
Now none of that can happen.
And these guys chose Penn State because of Paterno or because of whatever other reason.
Now the NCAA is saying what we've done here might make it seem like there's no reason anymore for you to be there.
So if you want to transfer out, go ahead.
And I think that's its own form of punishment, too.
Obviously, it is.
Anyway, welcome back, folks.
800-282-2882.
If you want to be on the program, the email address, lrushbo at EIBNet.com.
Look, they're going to ban football anyway because of concussions in our lifetime.
So all this is academic.
It's just a matter of time.
That process is already in place.
No, no, no, no, no, not with this ruling, not with the Penn State.
I'm just saying football-wide.
Economic news.
U.S. poverty on track to reach highest levels since the 1960s from the AP.
The ranks of America's poor are on track to climb to levels unseen in nearly 50 years.
Erasing gains from the war on poverty in the 60s amid a weak economy and a fraying government hammock.
Census, well, that's a hammock.
It's a safety net, but we all know it's a hammock.
Census figures for 2011 will be released this fall in the critical weeks ahead of the November elections.
Now, folks, erasing gains from the war on poverty?
Hmm.
There weren't really that many gains.
One of the greatest things that happened to poverty was welfare reform with the work requirements, which were gutted last week by Barack Hussein Obama.
The work requirements just stripped out of there by executive Fiat.
So what we have here is the AP putting out a new poverty report based on census figures that will be released this fall in the critical weeks ahead of the November elections, which seems odd because you would think that that would be bad PR for Obama.
But I think what they're doing, I think they're putting this out in time for the upcoming debt ceiling debate.
Some people might dare to call for cuts to welfare spending.
And so the AP probably thinks that all of this will help Obama.
I mean, these are his voters, the people in poverty.
More people in poverty equals more Obama voters.
That's the way these people think.
Don't forget Dan Balls in the New York Times.
No, Thomas Edsel, New York Times last November.
November 27, 2011, Thomas Edsel wrote a piece, said the Obama campaigner written off the non-college degreed white voter, white working-class voters.
Obama writing them off.
Wasn't even going to try to campaign for him.
So here we have a report on U.S. poverty on track to reach highest level since the 60s.
They're going to try to turn this into a plus for Obama.
Because remember, all this is Bush's fault.
Obama hasn't been president for three and a half years.
The Obama campaign is as though he hadn't done anything yet.
It's still a big mess that he was saddled with, that he had no idea how bad it was.
Been working really, really hard to fix it.
Worse than anybody knew.
You add to it, my God, look at poverty.
It's worse than we, oh my God.
Poor Obama.
But there are just more votes for him.
And then here comes the debt ceiling debate.
And they're going to say, well, why can you cut spending?
Look at the numbers in poverty.
And Obama will be their big defenders.
That's who his voting block is.
People in poverty and similar economic circumstances.
The AP claims that they have surveyed more than a dozen economists and think tanks and academics.
And they found a broad consensus, just like in global warming.
The official poverty rate will rise from 15.1% in 2010 to as high as 15.7%.
And several of these eggheads predicted a more modest gain, but even a 0.1 percentage point increase would put poverty at its highest level since 1965, which actually isn't true, but that's too esoteric to go into that.
So U.S. poverty on track to reach highest level since the 1960s.
And I think this is just a setup to create more voters for Obama.
I mean, why would the AP put out what would be bad news for Obama?
They wouldn't.
No way.
So they're not thinking in the long haul that this is bad for Obama.
They're going to try to turn it into a positive.
Now you move on to theHill.com.
A startling story.
A story some of you may say you have been dreaming of.
A story you might say you've been hoping to see all of these years.
And the headline says it all.
The Hill poll.
Majority of voters blame president for bad economy.
Two-thirds of likely voters say the weak economy is Washington's fault, and more people blame Obama than anybody else, according to this new poll from The Hill.
This poll found that 66% believe paltry job growth and slow economic recovery is the result of bad policy.
34% say Obama is the most to blame.
23% who say Congress is the culprit.
20% point the finger at Wall Street.
Only 18% blame Bush.
Only 18%.
34% say it's Obama.
And theHill.com here says the results highlight the reelection challenge Obama faces amid dissatisfaction with his first term performance on the economy.
So according to this poll, the buck no longer stops with George W. Bush.
It stops with President Kardashian.
I want to see how they try to massage this.
By the way, Thomas B. Edsel is back with a new column at the New York Times.
The politics of anything goes.
And what this story is about is Obama seeking to suppress the white blue-collar vote again.
Barack Obama first captured the national spotlight with a speech at the 204 Democrat Convention in Boston, in which he called for an end to the politics of division.
The audience roared back its applause at the end of almost every line.
Americans, Obama said, are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the Stars and Stripes, all of us defending the U.S. In the end, that's what this election is about.
Do we participate in a politics of cynicism or do we participate in a politics of hope?
That's 2004.
And now writes Thomas B. Edsel, now faced with a tough re-election fight.
Obama has, in fundamental respects, adopted the strategy he denounced eight years ago.
He's running a two-track campaign.
One track seeks to boost turnout among core liberal groups.
The other aims to suppress turnout and minimize his margin of defeat in the most hostile segment of the electorate, whites without college degrees.
This is the second Thomas B. Edsel column on this premise.
The first one again, November 27th, 2011, in which Edsel claimed the campaign had written off the non-college-degreed white voter.
This column is about how Obama's now going to try to suppress their vote.
Yep, this approach assumes a highly polarized electorate and tries to make the best of it.
On his campaign website, Obama singles out 16 specific target constituencies under groups.
Some are listed because it would be politically damaging to fail to include them, such as people of faith, veterans and military families, rural Americans, seniors, small business operators.
Look at, no, I could read the whole thing.
Here's all you have to know.
Edsel is not criticizing Obama for this.
He does point out how it contradicts Obama's high-minded rhetoric in 2004, 2008.
But he says, hey, you know, Obama tried to create one America.
He tried to unify us, but it didn't work.
He doesn't specify why, but sadly, he tried.
He tried to be the great unifier, tried to be post-partisan, post-racial, post-bit, didn't work.
And so now, since there's this highly polarized electorate out there, all our precious Obama can do is try to make the best of it.
So see, it's not his fault.
He wanted to unify everybody, but he didn't.
So now, not his fault, he tried.
Now we've got this divided electorate, and Obama's got no choice but to suppress the voters that don't like him.
He's got to find a way to demoralize them.
He's got to find a way to make sure that they don't vote.
Got to find a way to make it so that they have no desire to vote.
He's got to make it appear hopeless to the they have to give up.
He has to make it appear hopeless that the people oppose Obama can win.
That's what he has to do.
And what does that mean?
It means that Obama, Edsel is fully supportive of this.
Obama now, as a campaign tactic, has to go out and try to poison the blue-collar white vote about Romney.
And how are they doing that?
Folks, they are spending a fortune trying to convince these people that Romney hates them.
They are trying to suppress the non-college-educated white vote.
They're trying to convince them that Romney hates them, that he sneers at them, that he looks down his nose at them, that he resents them, hates them.
He doesn't have any use for them.
That's the tone of Obama's campaign where these voters are concerned.
He's trying to take all their hope away.
He's trying to tell they have no chance.
They're defeated.
You may as well not even show up and vote.
You don't have a chance.
So that's quite a leap from November 2011 saying, well, you know, we've lost these people.
We're not going to campaign for them.
Now we're going to do everything we can to depress them.
And this is written of as though it's a brilliant campaign tactic because it deals with the reality of what is.
And Obama is very, very smart to do this.
They want you people who are white, who don't have college degrees, to hate Romney so much that you'll just stay home, sit on your hands, because you don't think it'll matter anyway.
Back after this.
By the way, quickly, Rasmussen polls.
72% believe small business owners are primarily responsible for their own success.
72%, ought to be 99%, but we'll take it.
72% believe it's going to make it tough for Obama.
Obama, as I say, is trying to do just the opposite.
He's trying to tell people that they don't earn what they earn.
They don't own what they earn.
It isn't theirs.
It's governments.
It's all governments.
He wants to socialize profit and wages.
The premise being that it wouldn't have happened without government.
Government owns it all.
And by the way, there's your wealth tax.
There's the institutional framework for your wealth tax.
Where is Eric Holder on this voter suppression business?
I mean, the Attorney General, here you got the president admitting, is one of his guys admitting in the New York Times that their objective is to suppress a portion of the electorate vote.
Where's the Attorney General?
Who's next?
This is Loretta in Flint, Michigan.
Great to have you on the program.
Hi.
Rush, what an honor.
I am almost speechless.
Well, I'm glad you're not.
I have been wondering why someone hasn't brought up the fact that why do they have to do anything about this tax?
Because they've been saying for 10 years, it's only for the rich, only for the rich, for the rich.
So why do they have to do anything?
The rest of us don't count anyhow.
You mean the Bush tax rate?
That's what they're talking about, the Bush tax cuts.
Well, it's a good point.
The Bush tax cuts, the Democrats want you to believe, were only for the rich.
And so if the Bush tax cuts are only for the rich, why do we have to extend them?
Why don't we just eliminate them?
Well, the genie's out of the bottle on this.
Obama himself and the Democrats have admitted that the Bush tax cuts were tax cuts for everybody.
But they're no longer the Bush tax cuts.
Like you said, they're 10 or 11 years old.
They're now the current rates.
They're not tax cuts.
Anything Obama does to them will then be an increase or a cut.
But they long ago ceased being tax cuts.
I only say that because they always thought they were going to be temporary.
And every chance they've had to get rid of them, the Democrats have not.
Every chance they've had to get rid of them, the Democrats have instead chosen to extend them because they don't want to do too much damage to the economy in election years.
Making the complex understandable.
Rush Limbaugh, the Excellence in Broadcasting Network, and the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.
Now, I mentioned at the beginning of the program that Andrew McCarthy has a piece at pjmedia.com.
Andy's a new columnist there, having moved over from National Review.
Now, to refresh your memory, Andy McCarthy was the man who, along with Patrick Fitzgerald, incidentally, prosecuted Omar Abdel-Rahman, the blind sheikh, who was the first guy to engineer the first blowing up of the World Trade Center in 1993.
The blind sheikh and his buddies had massive plans to blow up bridges and tunnels and many of Obama's precious roads in Manhattan, New Jersey.
And McCarthy prosecuted Omar Abdel-Rahman and won the conviction.
In the process, he boned up on Islam, became an expert on Islam and Sharia law.
And he loves to tell the story.
Excuse me just a second here, folks.
He loves to tell the story how he started out believing that Rahman and his acolytes were fringe kook derivatives of Islam.
And the more he studied it, the more he found that they were not kooks and they were not fringe.
They were mainstream.
That Omar Abdel-Rahman and his acolytes who believe in Sharia law everywhere, anytime, everywhere, are academics.
They are trained and educated at the leading universities in Egypt on the subject.
Far from being kooks, they are the defining elites on the subject.
He tried to find evidence in the Quran that these guys were making it up, but it wasn't really there.
He found just the opposite.
So Andy's become an expert in this.
It's become one of his passions in terms of what he speaks of and writes about.
Well, recently, Michelle Bachman and other Republicans sent a letter to the State Department expressing concern, and I'm really summarizing this part of it, expressing concern over the presence of Huma Abaddon, so close to the powers that be in our government.
She's Hillary Clinton's one of her top-level aides.
Huma Abaddon also married to Weiner.
Her name is Huma Weiner, really.
She's married to Anthony Weiner, the disgraced, sex-crazed, sextist congressman from New York.
So her real name is Huma Weiner.
But Huma's mother is best friends with the wife of the new Muslim Brotherhood President Egypt.
And there is a essentially a Muslim sisterhood that she's a member of.
And Huma's father was also likewise involved.
So Michelle Bachman and others have written a letter to the State Department wanting some clarification and wanting an investigation to find out if, because the Muslim Brotherhood is not what they are portrayed to be.
The Muslim Brotherhood is not the best way to put this.
They're not the good mafia.
The Muslim Brotherhood is being portrayed as much as secularist, mainstream, non-radical.
And Andy says, no, they're not.
They are right down the middle, as radical as anybody else in jihad.
And so it's a legitimate request from Michelle Bachman.
Well, McCain took to the floor of the Senate last week to have at Bachman and these other Republicans.
So Andy has written a piece here chronicling 1995 to the present of how our government has changed in its view of the terrorists who seek to wipe us out.
Here are the salient facts as he writes them in his piece.
And by the way, he's written a book about this too.
Willful Blindness.
It's his memoir about the start of our confrontation with Islamic supremacism as a domestic threat back in the early 90s when he led the prosecution of Blind Sheikh's New York jihadist cell.
They carried out the 93 World Trade Center bombing.
And now he's got a column, The Wages of Willful Blindness.
Is it time for defenders of liberty to abandon the GOP?
Because his point here is that the GOP mainstream is no different than the Democrats on this in terms of refusing to see the enemy as the enemy.
Now here are two salient facts Andy writes.
And once you grasp them, you'll know everything you need to know to understand the rest of the dispute.
A, not all Islamic supremacists are violent.
But the goal of all Islamic supremacists is the same, to coerce the acceptance of Sharia.
The methods of pursuing that goal vary.
Sometimes terrorism is used.
Sometimes nonviolent avenues are exploited, meaning Islamic supremacists co-opt legal processes, the media, educational institutions, and or government agencies.
But regardless of what methods an Islamic supremacist uses, his goal never changes.
He aims to implement Sharia law.
In Islamic supremacist ideology, Sharia is regarded as the mandatory, non-negotiable foundation that must be laid before a society can be Islamized.
Sharia is not moderate.
Therefore, you are not a moderate if you want it, no matter what method you use to implement it.
For example, if you are an Islamic supremacist and you want to repeal the First Amendment in order to prohibit speech that casts Islam in a negative light, you're not a moderate, even if you wouldn't blow up buildings to pressure point.
A second thing to understand is this.
Islamic supremacism is not a fringe interpretation of Islam.
It is probably still the minority interpretation in North America, but nevertheless, it is the predominant interpretation of Islam in the Middle East.
Poll after poll shows that upwards of two-thirds of Muslims in countries like Egypt and Pakistan want their governments to adopt and strictly enforce Sharia.
That's why the Islamic supremacist parties in the Arab Spring countries are currently enjoying such success in elections.
Now, with that background, understand that in the aforementioned 1995 trial, we proved that the reason the blind sheikh was able to run his organization was his globally renowned mastery of Islamic law.
Omar Abd al-Rahman is not a nut.
suffering from a psychological disorder.
He has a doctorate in Islamic jurisprudence earned by graduating with distinction from Al-Azhar University in Cairo, the legendary seat of Sharia scholarship since the 10th century.
Now, we seem to understand all this 20 years ago.
The government now would have you believe that Obama or Bush or Hillary or McCain or Condi Rice or Janet Reno knows more about Islam and its Sharia than Omar Abdel Rahman does.
In other words, they say he's a kook, he's a fringe nutcase, he's not.
Well, now observe the measure of how far off course we've drifted.
In 1995, we demonstrated that, one, the blind sheikh was attempting to impose Sharia.
This is all demonstrated in court, by the way.
Number two, he drew directly and accurately from Islamic scripture.
Three, his Muslim followers were animated by these instructions to push for the imposition of Sharia standards.
For proving this in federal court, the Clinton Justice Department honored Andrew McCarthy and his colleagues with the Attorney General's highest reward.
Today, by contrast, for doing exactly the same thing, namely for arguing that an authoritative interpretation of Islam directs adherents to impose Sharia by violence if necessary, in order to lay the groundwork for changing a non-Islamic society into one, McCarthy is routinely accused of promoting hatred and Islamophobia.
Such accusations applied to assertions of what used to be seen as fact don't come just from the Obama left.
The smears are echoed by prominent members of the Republican establishment.
Now, McCarthy says, I haven't changed.
The threat against this hasn't changed.
What's changed is the U.S. government.
The Obama regime and the Republican establishment would have us live a lie, a lie that endangers our liberties and security.
The lie is this, that there is a difference between mainstream Islamic ideology and what they call violent extremism.
This is what he learned in prepping for the trial against the Brian Sheikh, blind sheikh.
There is no difference.
It's all the same.
Omar Abdel Rahman is mainstream.
Osama bin Laden mainstream.
Al-Zawahiri, mainstream.
All of these are mainstream.
They're not the kooks.
Now, the vogue term violent extremism is chosen very deliberately.
To be sure, we've always been over backwards to be politically correct.
Until Obama came to power, we used to use terms like violent jihadism or Islamic extremism in order to make sure everybody knew that we were not condemning all of Islam, that we were distinguishing Muslim terrorists from other Muslims.
At a more sensible time, we didn't say German Nazis.
We said Germans or Nazis and put the burden on non-Nazi Germans rather than ourselves to separate them.
Anyway, he says here at the end, when Senator McCain and his lemmings rebuke House conservatives like Michelle Bachman because they purportedly attacked Huma Weiner and her patriotism, there are two things at work.
First, when the facts are against you, as they usually are against Senator McCain, demagoguery and character assassination are the most effective response.
The compliant Islamophobic media will help intimidate your opponents into silence.
We all are very familiar with this, but we often miss the second tactic, which is more important because it goes directly to our conception of patriotism, and it's this.
The Obama left and the Republican establishment would have you accept the following premise.
Anti-American Islamic supremacists are not an ideological threat.
They're just a political movement.
And therefore, government officials want to treat them as a mere political movement to negotiate with them and accommodate them are not endangering America.
In fact, they're strengthening America.
Consequently, if you dare suggest this is a lunatic way of looking at things, then you're a McCarthyite demagogue.
Anyway, he goes on to defend what Bachman and the Republicans in the House are asking.
The Muslim Brotherhood is not a harmless little offshoot here.
They're not the mainstream or the others of the kooks.
They're all together.
Bachman's inquiry is justified.
And there's no reason to tar and feather her.
It's a legitimate question to want to know if one of Hillary Clinton's top aides poses a national security threat because of her parents' close ties to Muslim Brotherhood.
That's all they're asking.
And McCain and the Republican establishment and the Senate went to the floor to trash Bachman.
And one of the things I'll just add, I think there's an effort by the Republican establishment to take Bachman out.
I think they're lining up to campaign against her in her reelection effort, but that's another subject.
Anyway, I mentioned this top of the program, and I wanted to make sure that I had this mentioned.
I think Andy's going to be on Hannity's TV show tonight if this interests you and you want to see and hear more about it.
I got to take quick time out right now.
Sit tight.
Back with more right after this.
Don't go away.
Now, folks, one other thing here.
Michelle Bachman, Louie Gomert is one of the other Republicans.
They wrote private letters to select individuals asking questions about the security clearance process, and they used Huma Weiner as an illustration.
It was not Michelle Bachman who decided to go public with the letters.
Now, isn't this what congressmen on the Intelligence Committee ought to be asking?
If there are national security violations or problems involved in a security clearance for somebody with such close ties to avowed enemies, by the way, the new Egypt president, this Morsi guy, one of the first things he did upon being elected was demand the release of Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind sheikh.
No doubt, bring him home to honor him.
It wasn't Bachman who went public with this.
She's simply doing her constitutional duty.
She's on the intelligence committee, along with Louis Gomert and the others.
It was McCain that took this public.
And now the Democrats are in Minnesota seeing if Bachman is vulnerable because of what McCain's done.
It's not good.
Yeah, we'll talk to the Penn State people tomorrow.
Get their numbers and we'll call them back.
You had a lot of Penn State people, well, a few, wanted to weigh in on this, and I do want to talk to them.
So we'll do that tomorrow.
By the way, People for the American Way is tweeting, we call on Speaker Boehner to remove Michelle Bachman from the Intelligence Committee for privately asking about background checks and procedures.
They claim Bachman's on a witch hunt.
She's simply doing her job along with all of her colleagues.
This is brewing.
We'll see you tomorrow, folks.
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