All Episodes
Previous Next
Aug. 13, 2012 - Rush Limbaugh Program
37:47
August 13, 2012, Monday, Hour #1
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
No, no, I was not surprised.
I actually wasn't surprised by this.
Folks, I got to tell you something.
I've been trying to think, honestly, objectively think the whole weekend.
And I'm going to ask you, maybe I'm forgetting something.
I don't recall a vice presidential pick which has so energized the party.
I don't remember a vice presidential pick that has so energized a campaign as this choice of Paul Ryan.
Hi, folks.
Great to have you here.
Rush Limbaugh, the EIB network.
We are at 800-282-2882.
And the email address, if you want to get hold of us that way, El Rushbo at EIBnet.com.
These crowds, these standing-only, standing room-only crowds, the enthusiasm at these rallies, it's something about this.
It's just a gut feeling I have.
And I don't want to attach too much to it because it was going to happen anyway, a vice presidential pick.
But I've been thinking about this all weekend long.
And I go back and forth, the positives, the negatives, the strict political science analysis of it.
Then you compare that with just the gut feel.
And you come away with, at least I have come away with the following conclusion.
This is it.
This election, we've said it before and others have said it, but this is ballgame.
If Barack Obama gets four more years, I really don't think that the American people have any idea what's in store for them.
I don't think, particularly a lot of Obama supporters, I don't think they have any idea what's in store.
I don't think they have any idea what's going to become of this country if Obama gets another four years.
In fact, I think there are probably a lot of Republican voters who don't really understand.
Now, they're closer to understanding it than, say, Democrat voters and people that are not paying much attention.
I think that's one of the reasons for all the enthusiasm.
And so we're going to face this head on.
I was praying.
You know, you've been listening.
I was praying that at some point this campaign become one of ideology, one of ideas, one of principles.
Not just policy analysis, not just electoral college analysis, but principles and ideas.
I think they work.
I think they are they have the ability properly articulated to be persuasive.
And we've got perhaps the best Republican to do that in Paul Ryan.
I think the pick signals that a decision was made somewhere that we're going to go headfirst up against it.
We're not going to skirt it with a traditional campaign.
We're going to take it straight to them.
And we're going to win or we're going to lose articulating exactly who we are and exactly what we believe and exactly what our vision for America is.
Ryan can do that.
And I don't know how much you paid attention over the weekend, but it's the presence of Paul Ryan on a stage with Romney has elevated Romney.
It has energized Romney.
Romney's a new guy.
Romney is a different guy.
Ryan with Romney, what, 60 Minutes Last Night, Ryan chomping at the bit to answer every question.
Ryan wanted in because he's got the answer.
He had the answer for everything Bob Schieffer threw.
He's got the answer for every objection the Obama team is going to make.
All the lies, all the distortions, all the smears.
Ryan has the answers.
Ryan knows how to react to these things because he is an ideological conservative.
He is from the camp of Ronaldus Magnus.
And I've read all this analysis too.
Well, you know, Rush, and I've had people email him.
You can't believe the amount of email I've had from members of the media wanting to know what I thought about it.
And of course, I didn't say anything to anybody, saving it for now.
And I tried not to expose myself to a whole lot of it because I knew what I'm going to get from the Democrats and the media.
But I nevertheless, I pulled the trigger and did it anyway.
And for example, you know, this pick is going to, this ends it for Romney.
It's over.
Romney's admitting he can't win.
And he wants the reason for his loss shoveled off to the conservative.
He wants to conservatives be blamed again for the defeat.
That's why he picked Ryan.
His internal polling is so bad he knows he can't win.
So rather than him taking the blame, it'll be the fact that he puts an extreme right-winger on the ticket.
Conservatives are writing this stuff.
Some conservative bloggers are writing.
Others are saying that, well, that's it for Florida.
You know, putting Ryan on the ticket, that's it for Florida.
Go bye-bye, Florida, because of Ryan's Medicare.
We have a chance to get the truth about all this stuff out now.
Somebody who knows how to tell the truth.
And the whole discussion about Florida being in trouble is, of course, the demagoguery over Ryan's Medicare proposal and his budget.
Ryan saves Medicare.
Medicare is on the way to being destroyed.
Ryan's budget, Ryan's Medicare proposal saves it.
And it has all kinds of options in it for people.
If they're over 55 to not even have to play ball in it, they can keep what they've got and forget it.
So we know the Democrats are going to lie and demagogue and smear.
And we've got a guy who can bear up under it all and respond to it substantively, accurately, and correctly.
You know where I first met Paul Ryan?
Way, way back, this has to be sometime in the early 90s.
And I forget the year, but I'm thinking it's got to be before 1995.
And there was some celebratory thing happening at Bill Bennett's house.
Might have been one of his birthdays.
I'm not sure.
In Washington on a Saturday.
And I flew up there for it.
And I landed at Dulles at the same time that Bennett was arriving on a United flight from California.
So I got in my car and I went over to the United Terminal.
I picked Bennett up and we drove into town and he said, I need to stop at Empower America first.
Now, Empower America was a thing set up by Steve Forbes.
It was a miniature conservative think tank.
It was a place where Bennett and Jack Kemp hung around and thought things and they wrote things and then they did things based on what they thought and what they wrote.
And we walked, it was a Saturday afternoon, on every freaking, we walked into Empower America and was introduced to this young, energetic go-getter, looked like somebody spent 24-7 at the place.
It was Paul Ryan.
And he was there doing work at Empower America for Bill Bennett and Jack Kemp.
He was also there with a guy named Pete Wayner.
Pete also worked for Karl Rove in the Bush 43 White House.
The people that came out of Empower America had a profound conservative pedigree, a profound conservative indoctrination.
Ryan, as it turns out, didn't need it.
He was born into it and had it when he arrived there.
But he learned a tremendous amount.
I remember talking to Ryan, I think I interviewed him for the newsletter or else he called here.
We were discussing something within the last year and a half.
He reminded me, do you remember where I first met you?
And yeah, you came in with Bill Bennett one Saturday afternoon at Empower America.
And he said, yeah, big day.
I couldn't believe I had a chance to meet you.
He's a, you know, I look at the Democrats trying to tar and feather this guy as they're going.
Have you noticed, for example, three days, we already know more about Paul Ryan's life than we've learned about Obama's and Biden's in more than four years.
And Ryan hasn't even written two biographies.
Ryan hadn't written one biography.
We know more about Paul Ryan and his wife and his kids than we know today about Barack Obama.
And I have to laugh.
It's as predictable as the sun coming up in the morning.
News media carrying the Obama campaign's water, immediately labeling Ryan radical extreme.
There was Andrea Mitchell on Saturday afternoon saying, this is a horrible pick for women.
It just, this is the kind of stuff that needs to be defeated with a big-time thumping.
And I just am of the belief that Ryan can do it.
And I think Romney has been energized by this.
I'm looking at the crowds.
There's a story here of the Orlando Sentinel.
Hundreds turned away from Romney event.
Hundreds of people turned away Monday morning at a St. Augustine campaign stop featuring Romney, who defended Paul Ryan's Medicare proposal.
People were not admitted to the event after security screeners couldn't clear them fast enough.
Ryan wasn't even there.
This was people to show up and see Romney.
This wouldn't have happened.
There's an energy, there's an expectation, there's a, I don't know quite how to characterize it, but a feeling of excitement resulting from this pick.
I frankly was surprised when I saw it on Saturday afternoon.
Then after I thought about it, it all made sense.
Tea Party finally acknowledging that one of us is now part of the campaign and is going to be an important part of the campaign.
He's going to be an important part of governance.
But I mean, here you had Barack Obama, who was a street agitator, a Saul Alinsky disciple, a man who called Jeremiah Wright his spiritual mentor.
He was never called radical or extreme by the news media, but Paul Ryan, who may well be the last Boy Scout, who may well be the last Boy Scout.
Paul Ryan's called radical and extreme and anathema to women.
Well, do women only care about contraception and abortion?
And every woman thinks of, well, we know this is all a crock.
I've also heard the theory: well, you know, this is a problem.
The pick of Ryan now turns the focus of the campaign to Ryan's Medicare proposal and takes the focus off Obama's record.
Wrong.
It's the exact opposite.
This pick turns the focus right on Obama's record.
It puts it right on.
Obama's now going to have to discuss substance.
We've got ideology in the campaign now.
We've got ideas in the campaign.
That means substance is in the campaign.
This has the chance, if these guys do it right, to force the Obama camp's record to the fore rather than the smears and the other things that they want to spend time talking about.
There's a lot of great potential here.
I don't want to overdo this, but I think that there's a tremendous opportunity, great potential here.
And you know me in conventional wisdom, and I say so many people inside the beltway are saying the same thing.
Yeah, this is going to hurt Rounding Florida.
Well, this is just going to take the focus off Obama's record.
I think it's exactly wrong.
Raven Sturdley, what are you frowning at?
How?
I don't...
Ron, Snerdley's asking me how you better explain how they're not going to have to talk about this Medicare.
I want them to talk about the Medicare.
It's Obama that's cut $700 billion in Medicare, not Ryan.
We got a guy who knows the truth.
Paul Ryan doesn't cut Medicare.
He saves it.
It's Obama that's destroying Medicare.
That's going to come out now.
That has the chance to come out.
It's Obama that cut $700 billion in Medicare with Obamacare.
It's not Ryan.
Obama's budget, how many votes has he got?
Zero.
Ryan got over 200 votes for his budget.
We want to start comparing budgets.
Obama doesn't get a single vote for any budget he's ever presented.
In Rioville, this is a golden opportunity.
You know, the guy who has run up more debt than all previous presidents combined in less than four years and who has bypassed Congress constantly is not called radical or extreme.
But a guy who wants fiscal responsibility, a more limited government, he's called radical and extreme.
This is all the Democrats have.
We know their playbook.
We've got a guy on the ticket now who knows how to deal with that playbook.
We have a guy in the ticket now who knows how to answer the playbook ideologically.
This is why I'm a little jazzed by this.
There is a conservative on the ticket, a proud, bold, unashamed, unapologetic conservative, and not just a fiscal conservative, a small government conservative.
Not all fiscal conservatives equal small government conservative.
This guy's a small government conservative.
I'll take a break.
Sit tight.
We'll be back.
Of course, your thoughts will be requested at some point in the program.
Be patient.
Sit tight.
We'll be back and continue with all the rest after this.
No, I'm not trying to take anything away from Sarah Palin.
She excited the campaign, the McCain campaign, like wildfire.
I think, don't misunderstand.
Think they're a little bit different.
They don't have McCain on the ticket.
A lot of people think there's not much difference in Romney and McCain.
I happen to think there is, but no, no, no, no.
Not by any stretch am I trying to diminish the enthusiasm Sarah Palin brought.
Maybe what I should better say is I was surprised.
Conventional wisdom is that vice presidential picks do not really matter in November when people go in to vote.
They really don't matter.
That's the conventional wisdom.
And I expected whoever Romney's pick to be to be a perfunctory thing that happens in a campaign and accepted as such.
The outpouring of energy and enthusiasm for Ryan everywhere those guys went on Saturday, North Carolina, in Norfolk, Virginia.
By the way, how in the world did Romney secure the USS Wisconsin for a political event?
It's Obama's Navy.
In Norfolk, they got the USS Wisconsin to do their Ryan announcement.
I thought that was cool.
But the reaction that people had was a huge, pleasant surprise for me.
So it was something that I marveled at over the weekend.
And it's got tremendous potential.
Remember now, I've been on this kick for I can't tell you how long that particularly in presidential campaigns, we have got to talk about our ideology.
We have got to talk about our principles.
We have got to talk about our ideas.
I think that's how you get the Hispanic vote.
I think that's how you get positions of the minority vote.
I do believe, and I may be a Pollyanna, and my time may be past, but I still believe that a clear majority of people live in this country want this country to be what it was as founded.
They want it to be made up of those first principles.
They don't want the Obama transformation.
They don't want what Obama's doing now.
Our task, the task that Romney and Ryan have is a delicate one.
Many Americans think that this economic situation that we're in is just part of a cycle.
And that it's just different.
And they probably believe that Obama and the Democrats are working hard to try to bring us out of it.
That's the challenge.
The challenge here is for Romney and Ryan to convince people that are not supportive of them right now that this is not a cycle, that this results from ideas which are bad.
That this economy, and they're doing this, by the way, Ryan's out there doing it.
We can turn this around.
We will turn it.
He's doing it.
That's why I'm jazzed.
But this is not part of a cycle.
This situation that Americans are in, out of work, hopelessly out of work, hopelessly in debt, is the result of bad ideas.
Bad ideas and bad principles held and believed by Obama and the Democrats.
It's not simply part of a cycle.
This is not just a really, really bad economy that longer to come out of this thing than anybody knew, but everybody's working hard to try.
No, they're not working hard to try to reverse this.
We are where we are because the ideas, the beliefs, the so-called principles of Barack Obama are anathema to the United States of America as founded.
And when properly explained, they are anathema to a majority of the American people.
It's ideas ideology that facilitates this explanation and ultimate persuasion.
Sit tight, coming right back.
I checked the email during the break and I got a couple people.
Would you explain to me?
I can sense the snarkiness in the email.
Would you explain to me how the choice of Ryan forces Obama to discuss issues?
Yeah, I'll give it a shot.
Snerdley already showed the way.
He didn't even know what he was doing.
Snerdley comes at me, well, what about Medicare?
Ryan's going to destroy Medicare.
See, well, it doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter what you said.
Fact of the matter is that to refute Ryan, these guys are going to have to do what?
They can call him extreme and do all that, but they're going to have to explain why his plan will cause grandma to be eating dog food.
And when they are forced to explain that, what are they doing?
They are discussing specifics and they will be lying, which opens up the opportunity for it to be refuted.
And in the process, that brings Obama's record to the fore.
The very idea that Ryan will be criticized substantively, they're going to have to criticize him.
Look, you're not going to be able to get away with making this guy out to be Darth Fader.
They're not going to be able to pull out.
They're going to try.
They are trying.
But he's perhaps, as I said, our last Boy Scout.
No, the Bain Ryan can explain the Bain Capital crap.
Ryan explained it over the weekend when, you know, Bob Schieffer, in that 60 Minutes interview, Ryan was chomping at the bit to explain the Bain Capital.
We have the truth on our side.
Bain Capital, and Ryan said this, saved businesses.
It saved jobs.
And we've got the greatest opportunity to contrast who we are and what we believe with the demonstrable failure of liberalism, Marxism, socialism, or whatever.
We don't have to tell people what will happen if Obama's elected.
All we have to do is point out what has happened.
But you need the right guy to be able to explain it.
Ryan is the guy.
And I see Romney now even being energized.
Romney had a crowd in Florida, which the conventional wisdom says he can't win now because he picked Ryan.
They had such a big crowd in Florida, they had to turn him away because they couldn't security screen him fast enough in a state that Romney now is guaranteed to lose if you listen to the right pundits because he picked Paul Ryan.
I don't even know that Obama and Axel Rod and this crowd has realized yet what's happened to him.
I think this is one of those things.
Be careful what you wish for.
They have the ability to lie to themselves.
They have the ability to lie to everybody else.
They create this false universe and a cocoon of reality in which they live.
Ryan's going to force them out of that.
I know.
I'm talking about the vice presidential picks.
One of the things I was asking myself, I'm listening to all the analysts and all the pundits.
And one of the things I said, how's a vice presidential pick going to do all this?
Who reacts to a vice presidential pick?
Well, when the vice presidential pick, I don't care who it is, and this is Ryan, when the vice presidential pick starts dismantling the president of the United States and his policies and his ideas and what they have wrought, that's something they're going to have to react to.
They're going to have to come back at some point with some substance.
And when they do that, they don't have the substance on their side.
When they do that, that brings Obama's record to the fore.
This takes, they're not going to give up on the Bayne Capital stuff.
I don't think they're going to give up on Romney murders guys' wives and stuff like that, but it's going to be made to look all the more foolish.
Now, I've got an answer.
It makes perfect sense because I was wondering over the weekend, how in the world did they secure from Obama's Navy the USS Wisconsin for a campaign?
It's a museum.
It's not an active ship anymore.
So it's open to anybody.
It's a museum.
I have, you know, Paul Ryan with the second most famous CPAC speech either, ever.
Well, take it back.
Paul Ryan with the third most famous CPAC speech either.
First or ever was Ronald Reagan's, then mine, and then Ryan's.
Third most famous CPAC speech ever.
And I want to read to you the opening of his CPAC speech.
There are those who say, oh, and by the way, Cookie, you should get me this.
Because this snerdly, you got me ticked off here.
What about Ryan destroying Medicare?
Yesterday on Meet the Press, Rachel Maddow, you know who Rachel Maddow is?
She's the queen bee of MSNBC.
She is said to be the most articulate, the most brilliant spokesman, commentator, analyst that the left has on cable TV.
So she was on Meet the Press with Rich Lowry of National Review, who destroyed her on Medicare cuts.
She had no answer for the fact that it's Obama who cuts Medicare $710 billion in Obamacare.
She was literally nothing.
It was a demonstration of how this can go.
Anyway, back to Ryan CPAC speech.
There are those who say that modern society is too complicated for the average man or woman to deal with.
And that is being said.
That's the whole premise of liberalism.
You're incompetent.
You can't manage your own life.
You're not smart enough.
You're not able enough.
You're not competent enough to make the right decisions in your life.
There are those who say modern society too complicated for the average man or woman to deal with.
This is a long-standing argument, but we heard it more frequently after the mortgage credit collapse and the financial meltdown in 2008.
They say that we need more experts and technocrats making more of our economic decisions for us.
And they argue for less political interference with the enlightened bureaucrats, by which they mean less objection by the people to the over-regulation of society.
Now, if we choose to have a federal government that tries to solve every problem, then as long as society keeps growing more complex, a government must keep on growing right along with it.
The rule of law by the people must be reduced and the arbitrary discretion of experts expanded.
So you buy into this complexity argument.
Are automatically buying into only government can fix it?
And as the complexity increases and it gets tougher and tougher, do I eat trans fat or not?
Now they're saying buttered popcorn, microwave buttered popcorn causes cancer.
Well, that's complex.
I mean, all of these threats that exist to staying alive, we need competent people to make these regulations and decisions because you can't.
And all that means is that government must continue growing right along with the complexity.
And so therefore, the advocates of complexity of this argument are advocates of bigger government.
Now, here's the payoff.
If the average American cannot handle complexity in his or her own life, only government experts can, then government must direct the average American about how to live his or her life.
Freedom becomes a diminishing good.
But there's a major flaw in this progressive argument, and it's this.
It assumes that there must be someone or some few who do have all the knowledge and information.
We just have to find, train, and hire them to run government agencies.
Friedrich von Hayek called this liberalism's fatal conceit.
The idea that a few bureaucrats know what's best for all of society or possess more information about human wants and needs than millions of free individuals interacting in a free market is both false and arrogant.
It has guided collectivists for 200 years down the road to serfdom, and the road is littered with their wrecked utopias.
The plan always fails.
It always has failed.
And yet there are a lot of Americans, we talk about this a lot, government comes up with a program, it's a debacle, it's a mess.
So what's the fix?
Government, another program.
We continue to go back to the architects of failure to fix what they broke in the first place.
And Ryan simply argues that we are all capable of living our lives in freedom much more productively, much more capably, than being told how to live by a bunch of people who can't even manage their own lives.
Where are these magicians who know how to live their own lives?
Who are they?
And how do they magically end up in government?
Well, they don't exist, and they aren't in government.
And this is the ultimate argument, small government conservatism, turning your life back over to you.
This then raises the question that we all are asking ourselves, how many Americans want that responsibility anymore?
How many takers are there just to soon punt all the responsibility and accept whatever little things they get and they're happy versus how many people really want the opportunity to be the best they can be with as few obstacles in their way.
Thomas Jefferson, in his first inaugural address, was actually one of the first people to articulate this whole point that Ryan made at CPAC.
Sometimes it's said that man can't be trusted with the government of himself.
Well, can he then be trusted with the government of others?
Or have we found angels in the form of kings to govern us?
Let history answer the question.
And again, even when Jefferson said, there has never been a time in history where a government-run, top-to-down country has prospered.
The greatest example of human prosperity is the United States of America, and it was not made up of the way Barack Obama sees it or wants it to be seen, wants it to exist.
This is the challenge that these guys face.
This is the challenge that they have.
You know, let's face it, folks, one of the reasons that so many conservatives, all during the Republican primary process, were so forlorn was that there wasn't anybody that could articulate what we believe.
They were all on the radio.
Where are they in the Republican Party?
Admit it.
Well, we now have somebody on a ticket who's us.
Somebody's on the ticket who can explain all of this, believes all of this in his heart and in his soul.
His name is Paul Ryan.
And he can do it with optimism and a smile on his face and no bitterness and so forth.
So I like it because we're tackling this head on.
You know, if he'd have chosen, say, Rubio, the accusation would have been that he was pandering to a group, Romney.
If he'd have chosen Condi, same accusation, pandering to a group.
This pick told me that Romney is not just serious about winning, but governing.
That's what it told me.
I could be proven wrong.
Who knows?
But I like the fact that there's somebody who's going to be on the news every day that can talk like I do.
And I don't mean to make this about me.
Don't mean to make this about me.
That's not the point.
We've got somebody who can articulate what we believe.
It's in his heart.
He doesn't need crib notes.
He doesn't need briefings.
He doesn't need a consultant to tell him what to think or how to answer a question.
He knows it.
He's lived it.
It's his soul.
That's why I'm jazzed.
I said microwave-buttered popcorn causes cancer, as does Alzheimer's.
That's one of those times when my brain couldn't keep up with, or my mouth couldn't keep up with my brain.
It doesn't matter.
Cancer, Alzheimer's, now buttered popcorn.
So the complexities of life, not just the DMV, but what do you eat?
What should you not eat?
I don't know.
Government's got to tell me.
Personal responsibility.
Obama, the Democrats, not yours.
Government's role is your responsibility.
Government will tell you what you're responsible for.
Government will tell you what you're not responsible for and what they'll take care of.
What Obama and Biden and the Democrats represent are their own ideas.
And they have to be met with the competing ideas.
And we have the winning ideas.
This is a battle of ideas, ideology.
Our chances are that much better.
Make no mistake.
Here's Joe in Richmond, Virginia, as we kick off on the phones.
Welcome, sir.
Great to have you here.
Hi.
Hey, Rush.
How you doing, big guy?
Very well, sir.
Do you have any idea how hard it is to get in touch with you?
I've been calling for about three or four years and always getting a busy signal.
Well, you know what?
I'm impressed that you kept trying, though.
I know how hard it is.
I almost left the mess in my pants when the phone started ringing, though.
Jesus, I'm getting in.
All right.
Well, I'm glad that you didn't.
Oh, I am too, believe me.
When you look at Paul Ryan's record from 1998 when he came into office, I think he's going to be more of a liability than a benefit.
1999, he voted for the Graham-Leech-Bliley Act.
2000, he voted for the 2000 Securities Monetization Act.
Both of those actual bills allowed Wall Street firms, Goldman, Lehman, Bear Stearns, to leverage themselves up, start buying these mortgages without regard to their value, sell them all across the world, which created a global...
Joe, where are you reading this from?
This is my...
These are my words, dude.
I've been speaking to local radio shows for a long time.
You sound like you're reading this stuff.
I'm not reading them.
I've been practicing a long time.
I've been speaking because that's what I want to say.
You've been practicing detecting me about Paul Ryan for a long time?
No.
About the issues.
What really caused the global financial Armageddon?
It wasn't Sandy May or Freddie Mac.
You and I can have a conversation about that later.
Right now we're talking about Paul Ryan.
What caused the global financial crash was the subprime mortgage program brought to you by Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter and the Democrat Party, forcing these evil banks to make loans to people.
No, Joe, Joe, look.
Joe, Joe, what I just told you the truth, I have no, I have nothing to gain by lying to you.
I'm trying to help you.
You sound like a smart guy.
I'm trying.
I'm desperate for people like you to learn the truth.
Ryan had nothing to do with it.
Romney had nothing to do with it.
The subprime mortgage crisis is the foundation of the economic collapse, and it was brought to us by the Democrat Party in race-based errors.
Think it was unfair that people who couldn't afford to buy a house shouldn't have one.
And it was a disaster, and we're still paying the price.
Pure and simple.
Nothing complicated about it.
Having more fun than a human being should be allowed to have Rush Limbaugh behind the golden EIB microphone.
It's the fastest three hours in media.
And one of them is already in the can on the way over to the Limbaugh Broadcast Museum, which you can see at rushlimbaugh.com.
▲
Export Selection