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July 26, 2012 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:04
July 26, 2012, Thursday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
You see all the smoke?
That means it's a fabulous cigar.
That's what that means.
And I got to tell you, it is.
Oh.
Hiya, folks.
How are you?
Rush.
Rushlin Boy here, the Excellence at Broadcasting Network.
And we got three hours straight ahead for you.
Happy to be with you.
Told you we'd be back revved and ready.
Here we are.
Our telephone number.
You want to be on the program.
800-282-2882.
The email address, LRushball at EIBnet.com.
Something happened that got me thinking about my mother.
What kind of crazy world is it where a crazy person can abduct the mother of Cal Ripken Jr. and drive around in his car with her tied up in the back seat?
Cal Ripkins Jr., Cal Ripken Jr.'s mom was abducted.
And this guy that took her didn't know who she was.
He went and got her fast food, and he also got her cigarettes.
And if they ever find him, that's what they're going to charge him for, no doubt, is giving her cigarettes.
Her name is Violet, and she was, her husband, Cal Ripken Sr., labored forever in the minor leagues and then finally got his promotion to coach and manager finally in the major leagues of the Baltimore Orioles.
And she served as a surrogate mother to all those minor league players that came through when her husband was a manager.
Now, the reason this struck home to me, it's a different world.
Those of you who have been listening to this program since the beginning will no doubt remember my mother and her numerous appearances on this program and on the television show.
And she was the queen of the blue-haired bloody merry gang, as I called her and her friends.
But I lived in mortal fear that something like that would happen to her all the time.
Now, we grew up, little town in Missouri, and when this program first started, it was just building, and it was the kind of white, hot, popular associated with something new, unique, everybody glomming onto it.
And people driving through Southeast Missouri would pull off I-55, drive into Cape Girardeau, and look up my mother.
And they'd go by the house, and she'd let them in.
And thankfully, every one of them was a solid, upstanding citizen fan.
Folks, I'll tell you, I got so mad one day.
It got to the point where I'd go home to visit my mother, and I'd get there to be 150 books stacked up on the table in the dining room that she'd collected from people and been sending them in.
And I said, Mother, I'm coming here to get away from you.
No, son, these people love you.
They've sent me those books, and you've got to sign them so I can send them back.
I said, I'm not going to have time to talk to you.
That's okay.
You have to pay attention to these people.
She just, the fact that people all over the country loved her little boy just was the greatest thing that ever happened to her.
And everybody who met Millie loved her too.
But I just to stop it, well, they tried to see my grandfather.
He was a little bit, he was a little bit more difficult to reach.
Folks, my mother invited the National Inquirer in to have coffee when they came by.
Son, we don't have any.
We're limbos.
We got nothing to hide.
If they want to see your draft records, I'll be glad to show them to you.
She did that.
And the inquirer reporter said, I can't believe this.
Of course, I don't know about any of this until it's over.
And I said, Mother, look, this is my business.
You can't, you can't be injecting yourself.
No, no, son.
You don't.
I was always a son.
I never knew what was good for me.
I never knew the right thing to do.
I was, I was, I remember I got so mad one day when I when I finally had to start flying privately just for the privacy and the security of it.
Um, she'd pick me up at the airport and I'd spend the weekend, and on Sunday, she'd take me back to the airport.
Well, so one Sunday, she was behaving extremely differently, eager for me to leave.
Normally wasn't the case.
Kept reminding me I had to get to the airport.
And I said, Well, I'm just standing by at noon.
We'll go, no, no, you just really should get there a little earlier because you never know whether and I says, No, the weather's fine.
I've checked it.
Well, you still, you should.
She said, By the way, I'll meet you out there.
I've got to go do some things.
So I'll just meet you at the airport.
David can take you.
Oh, okay.
So David came pick me up.
We drive to the airport.
We drive up to the airplane.
And I can see, I mean, there's her car, and there's another car.
And I look in the windows of the airplane.
There's a bunch of people in there.
And I am, David will tell you, I slammed the door on his car so loud I nearly broke it.
I got on the airplane and she had four people she didn't know who had stopped in the week prior to say hello and she'd invited them back to meet me and hadn't told their big fans and she hadn't told me any of this and they're on the airplane.
I get on the airplane and there's these four people that I don't know and I'm if there's no way that this could happen today, but this is I did when I see that Cal Ripken's mother was abducted, I lived in mortal fear that that was going to happen to my mother every day.
I mean, people would stop in from all parts of the country.
My grandfather's funeral, she invited people that stopped in that day to go to the funeral.
No, not his funeral, it's 102nd birthday or something.
And I see Cal Ripken's mother's kidnapping or abduction.
And I just got me thinking how fortunate it was that never happened.
And it's a testament to the people in this audience, too, because there aren't people in this audience of the type who would go abduct somebody's mother, which was very, very, very fortunate.
But she was just so proud that the people of this country loved her little boy.
She was just that if they called her or if they wrote her a letter or if they sent her a book of mine to sign, they were king and queen.
And she wanted to make sure that they knew that our family appreciated them.
So I think a couple of them even spent the night with her once in a guest room.
A couple from St. Louis.
Well, no, when I got on the airplane, I could not cover my anger.
I mean, that's a breach.
That was that I remember I didn't talk to her for two months after that on purpose.
I had to send a message.
That's exactly right.
Yo, I had to stop.
I had to put a stop to that.
No, it didn't work.
It didn't work.
Even then, I didn't know what I was doing.
And I was always, the little boy didn't know what he was doing.
I didn't know what was best for me.
I knew what I was.
Anyway, she, whoa, she was a total class act.
I just think about how, as I say, I say Cal Ripken's mother abducted by some wacko driving around with her tied up in the backseat of the car.
And because my mother made herself so accessible, so desirously so, just a stroke of luck that something like that didn't happen.
And it's a, you know, we grew up in an age where we didn't lock the doors.
We didn't have suspicion of the neighbors.
And there's still pockets of the country where people can live like that, but they're not very men.
I think that's the kind of world that Cal Ripken's mom grew up in.
And that's why she probably this happened to her in a way.
She just doesn't, because of the era in which she grew up, mentoring and being a surrogate mother to all these minor league players that came through town, she probably somebody saw the best in everybody.
I mean, that's what was, I guess, the characteristic about my mom.
She saw the best in everybody, except me as her son.
I'm just kidding.
It just, it was just, it was quaint, you know, how no matter what I did, I still at times in certain things didn't know what was best for me.
Jobless numbers are out, folks.
Do you care?
Do you want to know what the jobless numbers are?
Here we are.
Jobless claims revision Thursday.
Government and their media minions are trumpeting a supposed 35,000 drop in new unemployment claims.
But even the AP admits that this figure may be distorted by seasonal factors.
Now, in reality, the weekly claims figure is distorted by seasonal factors every week.
It's probably due to the campaign season factor rather than a climate season.
The AP says that its application, that applications fell to a seasonally adjusted 353,000.
That's the biggest drop since February of 2011, but it was only such a big drop because last week's uptick was so much.
AP says that unemployment benefit applications are a measure of the pace of layoffs.
It doesn't really fundamentally change anything.
And there's nothing, I don't think that's going to fundamentally change economics between now and Election Day, Professor.
People say that any number of things probably can happen, but the economy is such a slow-moving thing that's another, it's been, it's bad so long.
It's another reason why some people think it's not enough in and of itself as a campaign issue for Romney to run on.
USDA newsletter encourages employees not to eat meat.
This story has been unearthed by Caroline May at the Daily Caller.
And, you know, she deserves a shout out.
Caroline May at the Daily Caller seems to be making a career out of exposing the information being passed out or pulled out, put out on the USDA website.
Caroline May is the reporter who broke all the stories about the USDA's various campaigns to enroll more people in food stamps.
She's the one that found that.
And in this report today, she tells us that the USDA has been telling its employees via their newsletter to start participating in the so-called Meatless Monday initiative.
Were you aware that there was such a thing?
Well, yeah, you would be, militant vegan that you are.
Meatless Monday.
USDA's newsletter said that going meatless is good for the environment because animal agriculture is a major source of greenhouse gases and climate change.
What a bunch.
What a crock.
Okay, from now on, folks, on Monday, it's all beef all the time.
That's all you eat on.
What the hell is this?
Meatless Mondays from the government, from the USDA, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which is supposed to be supportive of agriculture, single out the beef industry and tell people to avoid it on Monday.
Here we go, picking winners and losers.
Oh, speaking of that, guess what has been learned?
You know, Obama's speech in Roanoke was, you didn't do that.
You didn't make that happen.
Guess whose idea this is?
Lackoffs.
George Lackoff rhymes with some years ago, he wrote a position paper for the Democrats advising them how to discuss these things.
And Elizabeth Warren and Obama are both plagiarizing.
Well, I don't like plagiarizing because they use Lakoff to advise them.
But it was Lackoff who came up with this, at least in the modern era.
This is something that Marx thought too.
This is nothing new.
But the modern incarnation of this, the usage of it purposefully by both Elizabeth Warren and Obama comes from George Lakoff.
I have the details of that.
And lots of stuff, folks.
So sit tight, buckle up.
The rest of the program resumes after this.
Great to have you, folks.
800-282-2882.
If you want to be on the program, no, the Meatless Monday.
You know, the thing about this is just another illustration that radicals have taken over these departments of government, these bureaucracies, and politicized them.
This Department of Agriculture.
You know, this is all the fact that eating meat leads to global warming is absurd.
It's patently ridiculous.
It's an insult to common intelligence.
But even if it were true, and I don't even like making that acknowledgement, even if these wacko claims were true, and they are not, this is not good for this country's agriculture environment.
You know, Meatless Monday, don't eat meat, save the planet.
Look, we raise livestock.
We also raise the grains to feed livestock.
The Department of Agriculture is ostensibly there to assist, to promote, to build up American agriculture.
Supposed to help the farmer.
USDA is supposed to help the ranch.
I know, I know what you farmers and ranchers are saying.
I know, I know, but you know, in an ideal civics 101 world, that's what's supposed to happen.
They're not supposed to crucify them.
The USDA is not supposed to crucify agriculture and treat them like the EPA does.
Now, this little blurb appears in greening headquarters updates, been removed from the USDA website.
And a USDA spokesman is now claiming the USDA does not endorse Meatless Monday.
But they did.
But they do.
Meatless Monday.
Then Snerdley, of course, militant vegan that he is in there smiling.
Every day is a meatless Monday for you.
There was Meatless Fridays during Lent.
Well, there was Meatless Friday every Friday when I was growing up, but it had nothing to do with the environment.
That was all religious.
All right, George Lackoff rhymes with.
Bill Jacobson has the details at legalinsurrection.com.
We've heard Obama.
We've heard Elizabeth Warren's speeches about how nobody got rich on his or her own.
And this whole narrative was put together almost verbatim by George Lackoff.
He is a progressive or liberal linguistics activist.
He's a professor at University of California, Berkeley.
And he has been advising the Democrats on how to change and use language in order to hide who they really are.
That's what it boils down to.
Lackoff advises Democrats on how to say things that mask and cover up who they really are.
Lackoff, in fact, one of the academics who helped frame how the Occupy Wall Street movement presented itself.
His writings and theories seek to transform liberal politics.
He's a frequent speaker on how progressives can reframe the political debate.
And he developed a linguistic narrative that liberals needed to counter conservatives by focusing on the role of government in making individuals successful.
A narrative in which no person became successful on his or her own.
It was Lackoff rhymes with who got this started.
And Warren and Obama are using what he said.
Details coming up.
No, it's not checking the email during the break.
What does it matter who came up with this rush, Lakoff?
No, you're right.
It's just here's the point about this.
Obama is now really getting under skin about this.
We have gotten under his skin.
They've putting out memos all over DNC websites on how to fight back on this.
They have announced.
In fact, I got an email just to show you.
I got an email from a friend with a story attached to it about how the Democrats are now prepared.
They're going to go after Romney on this.
They're going to go after Romney for going after Obama on Obama's attacks on people that didn't make anything happen on their own.
And there was just one little note attached to the story that said, here they come.
Meaning, well, here comes this gauntlet.
Here comes the Democrat machine.
We have no prayer.
We have no hope.
We can't stop them.
Here they go.
Run for your lives.
Here they come.
The Democrats are going after Romney.
Here they come.
We enjoyed it while it lasted, but now they're on the case.
And I'm thinking, why do we have to feel defensive about that?
We're not the ones that said something stupid.
We're not the ones on defense.
We're not the ones that have to worry.
These people stepped in it big time, and they stepped in it big time for two reasons.
One, Lakoff gave them what they thought was a safe way to say what they really believe.
Both Warren and Obama.
My contention is that neither of them, but particularly Obama.
Obama didn't need Lakoff to come up with this.
Obama has believed this all his life.
And most liberals believe this.
Most liberals run around daily with a resentment for those who have achieved success and have acquired some wealth.
Well, no, that's Lakoff didn't give it.
The confrontational tone is the route to the true feelings Obama has about these people.
Lackoff didn't give them the confrontational tone or the what's the word? The condescending tone.
Obama already feels that.
That's my real point.
They didn't need Lakoff.
The reason that they rely on Lakoff is because they think it gives them a layer of security.
And they trust Lakoff to tell them how to say what they really believe in ways they think won't offend him.
I'm sure Obama thought he was hitting a home run the moment that he was saying all that.
In fact, let's grab the bite.
We keep talking about this.
Where is it somewhere in the stair?
What number is it?
Hang on.
Sorry, folks.
Let me find this.
I can't find it.
I don't know what number it is.
I know it's in here somewhere.
What number is it?
1513.
Yeah, that is 13.
Here, this is what we're talking about again.
Just rather than have to sit here and paraphrase Obama, roll it.
If you've been successful, you didn't get there on your own.
You didn't get there on your own.
I'm always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart.
There are a lot of smart people out there.
It must be because I worked harder than everybody else.
Let me tell you something.
There are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there.
If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help.
There was a great teacher somewhere in your life.
Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we had that allowed you to thrive.
Somebody invested in roads and bridges.
If you got a business, you didn't build that.
Somebody else made that happen.
The internet didn't get invented on its own.
Government research created the internet.
So then all the companies could make money off the internet.
Now, my contention is Obama thought he's hitting a home run when he says this.
I think Obama, I am nailing it.
When he finishes it, I think he thinks he has just nailed it.
Crowd was cheering him on.
Here was no indication that he'd stepped in it.
He didn't think for a moment he stepped in it.
One of the reasons why is Lakoff said it was okay.
Lackoff's the linguistics expert.
So Lackoff says, say it this way.
They trust Lackoff to come up with ways for them to say stuff that will appeal to their base, but that will not offend anybody else.
Well, this is the problem when you deviate from being who you are, when you try to cover up who you are, when you try to hide your genuineness.
That's when you become phony.
But Obama was unable to keep the condescension out of this or the snarkiness or even the anger because he believes it on his own.
He didn't need Lackoff.
The only reason Lakoff is relevant here is because Lakoff saying it made Obama think it was okay to say it.
Now, Bill Jacobson came up with this at Legal Insurrection.
And this is basically what Lakoff said.
Nobody makes a dollar in this country in business without using the common wealth.
The idea that there is a self-made man, that there is a self-made millionaire is false.
It's absolutely false.
And that's the thing that Obama missed.
Without this, you don't have those roads.
You don't have that internet.
You don't have the banking system, blah, blah, blah.
If Obama had simply said there's no self-made man, he'd have been okay.
But he blew it by not saying that.
Now, Lakoff actually framed the issue several years ago.
There's no such thing as a self-made man.
Every businessman has used the vast American infrastructure, which the taxpayers paid for to make his money.
He didn't make his money alone.
He used taxpayer infrastructure.
He got rich on what other taxpayers paid for.
The banking system, the Federal Reserve, Treasury, Commerce Departments, the judicial system, where nine-tenths of cases involved corporate law, the taxpayer investments support companies and wealthy investors.
There are no self-made men.
The wealthy have gotten rich using what previous taxpayers have paid for.
They owe the taxpayers of this country a great deal and should be paying it back.
So that's what Lakoff says.
That's the guidepost.
So Obama goes out, puts it in his own words because he was off-prompter.
It's in his heart.
He believes it anyway.
The anger that was in his voice, the snarkiness, is evidence that he believes it and that there's a lot of resentment.
So there's no self-made man.
And it's always previous taxpayers.
Now, here again, wasn't that long ago, folks?
Wasn't that long ago that successful people were role models?
Successful people was what everybody wanted.
Everybody wanted to be a millionaire.
And I don't mean to cheapen this.
There was even a television show back growing up called The Millionaire.
And it was about some philanthropist who picked somebody every week, gave them a million bucks because they deserved it.
But the point is that a million was the magic number.
And it was something people shot for, and it was something okay.
It was something people admired.
And look what the left is doing to it.
They do all of achievement.
They are impugning it.
They are turning successful people into suspects.
And they are trying to rob from people the fact that they worked hard to get where they are.
There's a lot of things in this that are bad.
But what Obama is doing is promoting the idea that people who've sat around and done nothing are the real success stories.
They're the victims.
They're the ones who really made it all possible for these so-called self-made people to do what they did.
It is sort of a reverse self-esteem movement, and it's offensive to the sensibilities of anybody who understands basic human nature combined with liberty and freedom and the pursuit of happiness.
There's no happiness in the Obama campaign.
There's no happiness in the Obama White House.
There's no happiness.
There's no pursuit of happiness anywhere on the left.
He has to have a bunch of angry, victimized people who sit around in resentment, various forms of it, various stages of anger.
And then they come up with this, and they have their linguistic specialist massage it in such a way that it will sound plausible to people.
And of course, the real objective, as I said so brilliantly earlier in the week, what Obama really, let's turn this into policy now, because that's where this really matters.
You lay the foundation here for a fact that nobody who is successful deserves to be.
Nobody who has achieved anything really did achieve anything.
Everything they have is thus illegitimate, maybe even unjust, maybe even immoral.
Why, just like the founding of this country was.
So Obama's rolling a dice that he's got a majority of people that vote in this country he can convince to believe him on this.
Then he wants to what I describe as socialize profit.
Profit's the evil that's attached to the bogeyman of a corporation or a successful individual.
Profit.
It's like, why should a doctor profit from treating somebody who's sick?
Why should there be profit in that?
Why should there be profit in selling people food while we all have to eat?
Why isn't that some sort of communal store where you get it for what it costs?
Why should anybody make money?
Isn't that immoral?
He's setting all of this up so that profit, the pursuit of profit and the securing of profit is evil.
And he will thus have a moral claim to it.
Socialize profit, claim that it's actually his in the name of all these Americans who were used and taken advantage of, stolen from, whatever, that didn't get their just rewards from their contributions to Mr. Husit's over their success.
And this is how Obama will have, in his hope and dream, here is to have popular support for simply taking money from people, imminent domain of capital.
Not just their property, but eminent domain of their capital eventually.
Why mess around with raising taxes to get this money?
If it's truly unjust and immoral, if somebody has that money and it essentially came from theft, which is what these guys are saying, they used all this taxpayer money.
They used all the roads and bridges.
They used all this.
They didn't do it on their own.
They stole it.
Well, what do you do from thieves?
You don't raise their taxes.
You go take it back if you find it.
And you find them.
And this is where he's headed with this.
And of course, he's using class envy and class warfare and all that.
But it's just the latest in the orientation toward bigger government that is benevolent.
It's thinking of the little guy, and it's going to think of the little guy not by raising him up because the little guy is not going to get any of the money.
Even Obama does either raise taxes or somehow confiscate all this money.
He says, immoral, unjust.
He's not going to give it away.
They'll parcel it out, maybe more food stamps, maybe more Obama phones, but he's not going to give people money.
So, if it's undeserved, Obama says, we can take it.
You didn't build it, we did.
You didn't earn it, they did.
You don't deserve it.
Therefore, we're taking it.
They wanted Lakoff to come up with something and make all this sound reasonable.
Lakoff comes up with it.
Obama goes off prompter, steps in it, and now they're making tracks to run an anti-Romney campaign because he has the guts or the audacity to point all this out.
So, here's the point: there are no self-made men.
The individual is subservient to the state.
This is what Lakoff was trying to conceive that others could take out the public domain other Democrats.
They're not talking about roads.
This isn't about roads and bridges.
Obama, the Democrats are engaged in what I would call a determined philosophical takedown of the individual at the expense of the total empowerment of the state.
If you read a sentence of this in a whole paragraph, what Obama's saying is there is no self-made man.
The individual is nobody.
There is no such thing.
The state makes all this happen.
The nameless, faceless state made up of all the nameless, faceless people.
The idea of government serving at the consent of the governed is stood on its head.
It's about the justification for higher and higher taxes.
Obama was not taken out of context.
He said exactly what he intended to say.
The context is that there's no such thing as a self-made man.
There's no such thing.
No such thing as a successful individual.
Pure and simple.
He's attacking success.
Here's Matt Freeland, Pennsylvania, as we get to the phones in the first hour.
Hello, sir.
Hello, Rush.
How are you?
Very well, sir.
Thank you.
I just wanted to say that, you know, I think the president might have somewhat of a point because of my experience.
I worked for the state of Pennsylvania taking care of intellectually disabled individuals for 26 years.
One of the guys that I took care of, his mom and dad, ran a family restaurant, a very successful restaurant.
And, you know, they told me many times that if it wasn't for the state and for people like me that helped take care of their son, they wouldn't be able to work 14, 16 hours a day in a restaurant business.
And, you know, I don't think it's right to minimize public employees and the vital services that we provide.
You know, I was told by these people.
Nobody's minimizing.
Nobody's minimizing what you do.
What we're not going to do is give you credit for what you didn't do.
You can sit out there and say all you want that you help these two restaurant owners focus on their business by taking care of whatever.
You got paid for it.
That wasn't sweat labor.
You got paid for it.
You chose to do what you did.
Nobody made you do it.
Unless your parents thought you weren't going anywhere and made you do something you had to take it.
But for all intents and purposes, you chose to do what you did.
The restaurant people chose to do what they did.
Everybody goes into this knowing full well what's involved.
You didn't run the restaurant.
You didn't invest in the restaurant.
You didn't have anything to do with running the restaurant.
Might have gone there and eaten, but that was it.
You do not get credit for that.
You get credit for what you did.
Your own choice.
But nothing more.
Okay, I checked the email and a couple people said, Rush, I understand what you're trying to say to the poor guy from Pennsylvania, but why did you have to sound so mean?
Folks, I could have sounded a lot meaner.
I'm just kidding.
I didn't intend to sound mean.
I was being passionate.
I guess I will elaborate.
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