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Aug. 27, 2012 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:43
August 27, 2012, Monday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of The Rush 24 7 Podcast.
Folks, I uh I don't know.
I uh what I have to tell you today, what I have I don't look at it as reporting, I guess that's what I do, but I'm what I have to tell you is not gonna make you not gonna make you happy, but beyond that it might really tick you off.
But it's what's happening, and therefore we gotta deal with it as it is, and that's what we're here for in one situation or another, and for one reason or another, other reasons we're here as well, but it's great to have you.
We are here at 800-282-2882, the email address, Lrushbo at EIBNet.com.
Let me let me just give you a brief overview.
Neil Armstrong.
Um NBC Wall Street Journal poll, brace yourselves.
This is Keith understanding what will follow.
Question of the NBC Wall Street Journal poll.
It's about five days old, just dug it up.
Question.
He cares about you.
Obama up twenty-two points over Romney.
He cares about you.
And that is an improvement over April.
April, it was 52 to 20 something.
Now in the same poll, only 31% think that uh uh Obama is what doing a good job or or what have you, but in he cares about you.
It's Obama up 22.
Uh along those lines, Mitt Romney has told the uh politico what the convention theme is gonna be.
Convention theme is gonna be Obama's a nice guy.
He's just incompetent.
That's the theme of the Republican convention.
Obama's up twenty-two points, and he cares about you.
What?
That is the theme.
That's that's exactly the thing.
I mean, that's almost word for word what the theme of the convention is gonna be.
Obama's a nice guy, but he's in common.
The theory.
The theory is that uh the convention will attract people paying attention to politics for the first time all year.
And the people who are already paying attention already know what a slime ball Obama is, so they don't have to be told.
The theory is that people tuning in for the first time don't want to hear a negative tone.
So uh it is apparent to me that the Republican establishment running this show does not think that we are in a defining moment in America.
This is just another election cycle.
The Democrat National Convention theme is Romney killed the guy's wife.
Our theme is Obama's a nice guy.
He's just incompetent.
And Romney says, look, I I'm who I am.
I'm I don't rip into people.
And I'm not gonna start ripping into people now.
I uh I am who I am.
So there's there's there's that.
Then uh, ladies and gentlemen, this hurricane.
I have a little story to tell you about this hurricane and to tell you, show you my presence on this.
So all of that is coming up.
I want to get Neil Armstrong first.
Uh Neil Armstrong walked on the moon in 1969, and I will never forget the uh the moment.
1969 was my second year.
It was 18.
It's my second year in uh in radio.
It was summertime, and by quirk of fate.
My air shift ended an hour before the scheduled walk on the moon.
I never got out of the radio station faster than I did that day.
Normally you had to kick me out of the radio station.
I slept there.
Uh but in this case, there wasn't a TV in the radio station.
And at the time I was a space program groupie.
I was I was as absorbed in it as any 18-year-old was.
And I was blown away by something I had learned that made me forever think about the kind of men that ended up being astronauts and the things that the fears and the things of that nature that they faced.
I learned that William Sapphire, who was then a speech writer for Richard Nixon, had written a speech that Nixon was to give in the event that Armstrong and Aldrin were stranded on the moon and couldn't get home.
Michael Collins was in the command module orbiting the moon, and these guys were going to join him after the moon walk and the rover trips, they have the whole mission.
They were going to then launch from the moon and rendezvous with Collins, and then they were going to head home.
What if the rocket didn't fire to get off the moon?
If the rocket didn't fire, they're stranded.
There's no possibility for a rescue mission.
There's no way.
What do you do?
You know that they're going to die on the moon.
NASA had plans for the last communication, what it was going to be, when it was going to be.
Long before either Aldrin or Armstrong would have passed away.
There wouldn't be constant communication up until the time they were unable to anymore.
They were going to say that it was all laid out.
And the Sapphire speech for Nixon was very brief, wasn't very long, but it was well done.
I don't have it here in front of me.
I can get it if you want to read it to you later.
But it's it was a really well-done speech.
I got to thinking uh what if I were Armstrong or Aldrin, and I've walked on the moon, the first place I've gotten there, and I've I've done the mission, I've walked on the moon, I've driven the rover around.
I don't know if they had a rover on the first one.
Well, whatever.
Gotta get off.
They test fired this rocket that lifts the lunar module back up to orbit to rendezvous with the command module 250 times on Earth.
They fired it, fired it, and it worked every time.
But it was the kind of engine, if I remember it, it was the kind of assembly that if it didn't work the first time, that was it.
Because of the atmosphere or the lack of one on the moon.
I could be wrong about this, but I my memory is that they had one chance, and if the rocket didn't fire, then that was it.
And they were, of course, perfectly healthy at that time.
I don't know how long it would have taken for their lives to end.
But it would have happened.
We don't know if there would have been suicides or what have just to bring it about quicker.
But the reason for even mentioning all this is uh these are the kind of people they were.
These are the kind of risks they took.
These are the real pioneers, uh brave uh bravery like we don't see much very often.
And it's something that now is so taken for granted.
But then, 1969, I it that was one of the biggest crapshoots of the whole mission was was that rocket gonna fire?
And they had a camera.
They had put a camera to witness the liftoff of a lunar module back off the surface.
And when it worked, that thing, I mean, it's it was out of sight.
The camera was incapable of following it, obviously.
Nobody there.
The electronics were not such that they could remote control A camera to follow the lift off.
It just rocket fired and that thing shot up and it was out of view and off the screen in less than a second.
I got to thinking when I remembered that there was a speech that Nixon had ready to go.
They didn't get back, just what these guys faced.
The unknown of everything that they faced.
These are really incredible people.
They they they were and Armstrong was incredible in many.
You know, when when he found out people were selling, he didn't sign autographs.
When he found out people were selling his autographs, he stopped signing.
He did not allow himself to personally profit a penny from what had happened.
Imagine that today.
Not a penny.
Whenever anything similar to uh Neil Armstrong autograph, when he discovered stuff like that was being sold, he shut it down.
He ran the risk of people thinking that he was uh insincere or uppity or arrogant.
It wasn't that at all.
He didn't, he had no desire to commercialize in any way, shape, manner, or form what he had done.
And he didn't run around, he made speeches, but he didn't run around trumpeting himself as the greatest thing that had ever happened, the bravest guy.
He just he went back and lived his small town life outside Cincinnati for the uh for the rest of his life.
Uh luck of the draw, first man on the moon, uh but uh just an amazing story, and he passed away over the weekend to some fanfan.
What was it, Huffington Post or something?
Um I I forget some some modern day blog, their original headline, Neil Young passes away.
And they had to be No, no, no, no, no, Neil Young's still alive.
He's a singer.
This is Neil Armstrong, first guy on the moon.
Oh, oh, that that Neil.
Oh, okay.
And then they corrected it.
Here is the beginning of Sapphire's speech that he wrote for Nixon.
Should they be stranded, Armstrong and Aldrin.
Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace.
These brave men, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin, know that there is no hope for their recovery.
But they also know that there is hope for mankind in their sacrifice.
These two men are laying down their lives in mankind's most noble goal, the search for truth and understanding.
They will be mourned by their families and friends.
They will be mourned by their nation, they will be mourned by the people of the world, they will be mourned by a Mother Earth that dared send two of her sons into the unknown.
In their exploration, they stirred the people of the world to feel as one.
In their sacrifice, they bind more tightly the Brotherhood of Man.
That was it.
It was NBC, they said Neil Young.
Yeah, it was NBC on their on their website.
It was not the Huffing and Puffington Post.
I thought it was a Huffington Puff.
NBC.
The former news network NBC.
Right.
In ancient days, men looked at stars and saw their heroes in the constellations.
In modern times, we do much the same, but our heroes are epic men of flesh and blood.
Others will follow and surely find their way home.
Man's search will not be denied.
But these men were the first.
And they will remain the foremost in our hearts.
For every human being who looks up at the moon in the nights to come will know that there is some corner of another world that is forever mankind.
It was July 18, 1969, Sapphire wrote that.
For Nixon to deliver, should that rocket have failed to fire.
And it's a tiny rocket, just a tiny little thing.
I I remember enough.
And it was Cronkite that I watched explain all of this, how what kind of rocket it was, how often it had been tested and fired, and it had it had just enough Fuel for the right length of burn.
I mean, it had to be precise, down to milliseconds.
The time, the the the the launch period, it was just it was amazing.
And had it not fired, that speech would have been given.
There wasn't a second try.
There wasn't a second chance.
And to think they're sitting there knowing this.
I mean, these are the kind of people that uh that they were.
They've they face things that imagine going to sleep every night pondering this.
This is these are just I'm I'm in awe.
People like like Neil Armstrong and Aldrin, Mike Collins, these uh first to actually touch down on another celestial body in return.
And of course, at 18, this is a highly impressionable, uh, highly impressionable age, and ten years later, everybody's taking it for granted.
Now NASA is Muslim outreach.
That's what it is.
What do you mean people aren't going to understand why I said it?
NASA is Muslim outreach.
The Obama has decided we're not gonna explore man-made trips back to the moon or to Mars or to uh anywhere else.
There is no manned space program in cutback, and the purpose of NASA is Muslim outreach.
I saw the video soundbite of the current NASA administrator, make the point again.
I forget I was watching so much TV over the weekend.
So that's that.
When we come back, uh we're tie this all together.
Because F Chuck Todd, I warned you people, I warned you on Friday.
I might have even warned you on Thursday.
And on Saturday and Saturday night, I'm warning my friends, and lo and behold, it is F. Chuck Todd, NBC.
The memory of Hurricane Katrina and Bush's failure to deal with it has cast a pall over Tampa.
Because this hurricane Isaac is headed right for New Orleans and as a Cat 3, and it's now being written about the track why it's almost, and it's the seven-year anniversary.
It's the same track.
The media's going nuts with how history is repeating itself almost verbatim.
And I discovered that this was happening Saturday night.
I'll tell you this story when we get back, and we'll discuss the theme of the Republican convention.
Obama's a nice guy, uh is just incompetent.
Nice guy, just incompetent.
And Obama leading in uh the NBC Wall Street Journal Paul questioned, cares about you, Obama plus 22 over Romney.
By the way, I sh I need to correct myself on one thing involving Neil Armstrong.
April 14th of 2010, Neil Armstrong lashed out at President Obama's decision to axe NASA's plans to return to the moon and described it as devastating to the U.S. space program.
Buzz Aldrin's in favor of it, but Armstrong, this is according to um Australian News.com, but Armstrong was unhappy with Obama's decisions on NASA, turn it into Muslim outreach and to suspend the So he did he point is he spoke rarely.
He he did not capitalize at all personally, did not even try on his uh fame.
He refused to be turned into a pop culture figure.
He refused all attempts to uh make him famous in the in the modern way people get famous in our pop culture.
Uh he had just done his job.
And he preferred to stay behind the scenes and not act as though it was uh it didn't spike football.
It didn't call attention to himself.
I'm also old enough to remember that uh, you know, all the concerns that the NASA had at the time that they picked just the right man to be the first one to walk on the moon.
Think of that process.
Think of the lobbying that went on there.
Think of the attempts at manipulation.
Obviously, whatever the stories are, the attempts at manipulation to be the first.
And I'm old enough to remember this, the concerns that NASA had at the time that they picked just the right guy.
And it's safe to uh safe to say that they did pick exactly the right man to be first on the moon, Neil Armstrong.
He was a hero in every meaning of the word, and we need and could use a lot more Neil Armstrong's now more than ever.
Armstrong, he wrote an open letter to Obama about his plans for the space program.
And he didn't call MSNBC or the news networks when he did it.
He just wrote it in the Senate.
Okay, we'll come back to convention stuff and the hurricane all coming up.
Your guiding life through times of trouble, confusion, murkiness, tumult, chaos, lies, distortions, and even the good times.
We're here.
At the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.
Okay, uh, it is required that we talk about this hurricane.
And I'm going to walk you through Saturday, keeping in mind I pay close attention, as does everybody who lives here.
We were never originally targeted by the eye of this hurricane, but we were going to be close enough to it that we did have to consider whether or not to decamp to be able to do the program today.
Would there be power failures?
Would there be loss of satellite uplinks and so we're making it impossible to the program?
So we pay close to, and I do anyway, whether or not to put up the hurricane shutters, what steps to take to protect the property, all these things.
So I'm eagle-eyeing this thing.
And I'm not just like everybody else does here, too.
I'm not just paying attention to whatever the hurricane center says.
I try to get hold of as much data as I can.
With the internet, there's a plethora of it.
The model runs, for example.
Uh other analysts besides those at the Hurricane Center trying to tell you what they think might happen, because nobody knows.
There's worlds of data, trend lines, this kind of thing can show you uh uh the likelihood where it's going to end up uh six hours from now, twelve hours, twelve twenty-four forty-eight, but nobody really knows.
So you eagle eye it.
And once you maybe Friday night.
Let's move to Saturday, because that's when this really all started happening.
And keep in mind, the reason I'm taking you through this is because the media is now out there saying that Hurricane Katrina is now hanging like a pall over the Republican convention in Tampa.
So this whole thing's been politicized as the Democrats politicize everything, and that's why we are talking about it.
Now, all last week, I want to remind you, all last week, and no it at no time here am I alleging a conspiracy.
At no time, and with none of this am I alleging conspiracy.
All last week, what was the target?
Tampa.
What was going on in Tampa this week?
Republican National Convention.
Pretty important one, too.
Introducing the nominee, Mitt Romney.
It's only after the convention that Romney can actually start spending all of this money that he's raised.
So this convention's very important.
It's a chance to introduce Romney to a lot of people who don't know him yet.
And I noticed that the hurricane center's track and the hurricane center is, and I'm not alleging conspiracies here.
The hurricane center is the regime.
The hurricane center is the commerce department.
It's the government, it's Obama.
And I'm noticing that that track stays zeroed in on Tampa day after day after day.
And the Republicans react to it accordingly.
Over the weekend canceling The first day of the convention.
What could be better for the Democrats than the Republicans to cancel a day of this?
Even though the media wasn't going to televise a lot of it anyway, they can't televise it if it isn't happening.
And the GOP Brain Trust decides, well, you know what?
Looking at this forecast track, we don't want to have this thing on Monday.
Delegates flying into town here, port may be closed, too dangerous.
We don't want people put at risk trying to get there, so we'll shut it down.
We'll gavel it to order on Monday, we'll do 10 minutes worth of pro forma stuff, but we actually won't do anything seriously till Tuesday.
And they made this announcement Saturday or Sunday, I forget which uh which day.
Now, Saturday night, all day Saturday, I'm looking the model runs.
And the model runs come out every three to five hours, depending on which model, 2 p.m., 5 p.m., 8 p.m.
And at 8 p.m.
Saturday night, I see one of the biggest, one of the largest shifts in model forecast I have seen since 1997 when I moved down here and started caring about this stuff and started studying it.
Up until Saturday night's 8 p.m. model runs, this hurricane was going to either hit Pensacola or someplace a little further south, never Tampa.
They had moved it away from Tampa by Friday, but they had hit the Florida panhandle, but close enough to Tampa, and the primary wind field is on the right side of this thing.
So even if it's uh 50 miles offshore, there's still 25, the bulk of the wind is right there over Tampa.
Don't need a direct hit.
In other words.
So Pensacola, Saturday at 5 o'clock, Pensacola, every model agrees.
8 o'clock, I look at the model runs, folks, only one of them out of about 12 15 models, only one of them still had it going to Pensacola.
Every model had it at 8 o'clock Saturday night at either New Orleans or Mobile, Alabama, or something in Mississippi.
I looked at that.
That is a huge spread.
That is a huge change in a three-hour period for the models to move hundreds of miles.
And not once in all the model runs of the days prior, had New Orleans been in the picture.
Maybe a stray model had it going there, maybe a stray model or two over to uh the Houston area, but outliers.
Nowhere near the model consensus.
Model consensus was always Pensacola, someplace in the Florida panhandle.
Affectionately known here as the Redneck Riviera.
Until eight o'clock Saturday night.
Eight o'clock Saturday night, Tampa wasn't even in the picture anymore.
These did, and there wasn't a curve to the north or even back to the Northeast.
This was a B line.
It's going to follow the coast of Cuba right up to New Orleans.
Every model.
So I started sending out emails to people, politically flavored emails that said, uh-oh, folks, I've been worried about this.
I have been concerned every model now says New Orleans.
And the next hurricane report would be at 11 p.m. three hours later, Saturday night.
Let's see what they do with it.
Let's see what the Hurricane Center does, because this is huge shift.
At 11 o'clock Saturday night, the hurricane center had not changed.
It was still Pensacola, maybe a little left of Pensacola.
So I read the discussion, which is where they tell you how they arrived at their forecast track and other data.
And they acknowledge that the model data had moved precipitously to the West.
But for the purposes Of continuity with the previous forecast, and it's almost a quote.
For the purposes of continuity with the previous forecast, they're going to leave the track unchanged.
And I said, okay, well, again, I'm alleging no conspiracy.
I don't want anybody thinking I'm going somewhere with it.
I'm just telling you what happened, and I'm sharing with you my thought process.
Because I know full well that if you give these people the slightest chance and they're going to turn this into Katrina and they're going to scare the hell out of New Orleans, and they're going to revive Bush doesn't care about people, and Bush isn't going to revive all of it.
They're going to politicize everything because they do it.
And now they had the model runs allowing them to do it.
Now they had these model runs allowing them to start scaring the hell out of people in New Orleans and make political connections to Bush.
It was all there.
The Republicans had not canceled Monday yet.
I don't believe.
Find out for me when they officially cancel Monday.
My thinking is it's Sunday afternoon or Sunday morning, but I they could have done it Saturday night.
I don't want to be wrong about that.
Or anything else.
So went to bed Saturday night.
Okay, let's see what they do at the 5 a.m.
Hurricane Center track on Sunday.
I got up Sunday morning.
I had my iPhone set on the track.
All I had to do was hit up and hit up and hit reload.
And lo and behold, I guess they figured out that they didn't need the continuity with the previous track because now the official hurricane center track on Sunday morning at 5 o'clock was anywhere from New Orleans to Biloxi to Mobile, Alabama, but clearly nowhere near Pensacola anymore.
And with each hurricane center track since 5 a.m.
Sunday, it's inched closer and closer to New Orleans.
Now I've continued to watch the models.
The models are now many of them west of New Orleans.
They're not dead center New Orleans.
Keep moving west.
The forecast track, National Hurricane Center, is right at New Orleans.
And let's go to end to mean that the Republicans cancel the first day of the convention.
Today, it isn't happening.
And there's nothing going on in Tampa.
There's no reason not to do anything in Tampa today.
They're probably getting weather not as bad as we had on Sunday.
And it was cool.
I didn't fly the airplane out, kept everything here, knew it was going to be okay.
I wanted to live through it.
It was going to be cool.
Big storms we got prepared for it.
Lots of rain and wind.
You know, the wind never got on the beach, never got any higher 35 or 40 miles an hour.
Yeah, I had to take dogs out.
Horsing went out.
Not a wuss, of course it went out there.
Well, damn straight to take the dogs out.
Well, you're going to what are you going to do?
Just say, oh, here dogs use the garage?
No, then the dogs went out there, then the towels came in.
Yeah, that was, it was, it was cool.
Anyway, let's go to the audio sound.
Last night on NBC Nightly News, the anchor Lester Holt is speaking with the chief White House correspondent F. Chuck Todd about Tropical Storm Isaac and the Republican convention.
And Lester Holt said, F Chuck, you have this storm churning offshore.
May not be a big deal in Tampa now, but is there some concern about the tone of the convention if we are seeing communities along the Gulf Coast suffering some heavy damage?
Now, why would that have anything to do with the Republican convention?
In the real world, why would a hurricane striking anywhere in the goof have anything to do with the Republican convention?
With the tone of the Republican convention.
You realize how loaded that question is, or you go to the NBC Wall Street Journal poll, he cares about you, Obama plus 22.
So Republicans are cold, heartless, mean spirited, they kill guys' wives and they don't care about it.
Meanwhile, all this is being alleged about the Republicans.
What do they say?
Obama's one of the nicest guys in the world.
He just incompetent.
And so now the Republicans cancel their first day, and still we get a news story on how the poll of Hurricane Katrina hangs as a tone over the Republican convention.
And here's what F. Chuck Todd said.
There are folks with the Romney campaign who think, boy, Romney can't catch a break ever since he named Paul Ryan, got a little bit of momentum after the Ryan pick, and then he's disrupted by two storms.
One, a political storm in Todd Aiken, which we just brought up, but now an actual storm.
And when you think as this storm moves to and closer to Louisiana, the specter, the sort of shadow of Bush and Katrina, does hang over this convention.
It is something organizers are concerned about.
And I don't be surprised if Tuesday gets changed again.
Basically out of sensitivity.
Okay, so the move is on now to force the Republicans to cancel Tuesday in order to be sensitive to whoever might get pounded by Hurricane Isaac.
What do you think that is?
What do you think that here's F. Chucky?
If something organizers are concerned about, don't be surprised if Tuesday gets changed again.
Basically out of sensitivity.
So the Republicans, you better think about canceling Tuesday of your convention because you don't want to be reveling it up and having a great old time in there while people are being destroyed in a gulf.
So on Saturday night, I'm telling people this is exactly where this is headed.
And nobody, by the way, I should nobody's listening to me.
They they think I'm full of it.
What are you drinking?
Nothing.
I'm trying to warn you what's coming.
Oh, come on, Rush.
And they started emailing me about well, let's have some funny now.
Okay, then let's call it Hurricane Hussein.
Anyway.
I gotta take a break.
We're way won't.
We'll be right back.
Don't go away.
Okay.
6 45 p.m.
Saturday night.
The Republicans announced that they're canceling Monday.
At 6 45 p.m.
Saturday night, everybody is still under the impression that Isaac making a beeline for very close to Tampa.
It was an hour and 15 minutes later that the 8 p.m. model runs showed New Orleans.
An hour and I'm alleging no conspiracy.
I'm just telling you, folks, when you put this all together in this timeline, I'm telling you it's unbelievable.
You know, total coincidence.
And since the Clintons aren't involved, I believe in coincidence.
When the Clintons are involved, there is no coincidence.
I'm teasing.
You put this in this timeline like I've just described.
It's incredible.
An hour and 15 minutes before the 8 o'clock.
Now the 8 o'clock model runs, that's when they're published.
I don't know when they're actually run.
Eight o'clock is when they're released.
They could run them at 7.30, he could run them at 6.
Hell, I don't know.
That's one thing I don't know.
They just publish them at 8 o'clock, then at 11 o'clock, and then 2 a.m.
So basically every three hours.
Not every model, but there's enough, you know, the the models are being run frequently enough so that every three hours, enough of them have been run that you can publish uh any noticeable changes.
Here's CNN.
This is this morning on Starting Point.
We've got uh Ron Brownstein from the National Journal and a uh Florida Republican Party Chairman Lenny Curry, who said I think the important thing to remind people is this is about nominating having Mitt Romney as the official nominee so that we can uh go go on with uh with spending our money and campaigning.
We're now in a split screen mode.
Our top story is understandably, justifiably, is a hurricane perhaps uh hitting the Gulf.
So this convention already has been affected enormously by the storm and will be the rest of the week.
Test for the president, too, if it is New Orleans seven years after President Bush failed that test.
A test where we've seen a track record before, as much to compare and contrast to.
So you got the Florida Republican guy talking about the convention.
And he says, yeah, we want to get going here.
We want to be able to spend the money we've raised, want to get going, explaining Romney and our and our agenda and our and these guys all respond to it.
Oh no.
Look, pal, you may not get it yet, but the rest of this week, we've just we've just guaranteed it's gonna be about Hurricane Katrina.
And Bush.
And how you Republicans didn't care about anybody.
And FEMA didn't get there on.
Oh, we can't, we're gonna relive this whole thing.
And say, show you how it's just not guys with wives of cancer that die.
It's whole communities that die when Republicans are in charge.
That's what they're telling the guy from the Florida Republican Party.
Meanwhile, if you want to look at people who've really damaged the Gulf, it's Obama with drilling moratoriums and so forth.
I gotta run.
Be back in a second.
It was Ronald Brownstein in that clip on CNN who said that Bush failed the test of Hurricane Katrina.
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