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Aug. 27, 2012 - Rush Limbaugh Program
33:56
August 27, 2012, Monday, Hour #3
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And greetings once again to you, music lovers, thrillseekers, conversationalists all across the fruited plane.
Great to have you here.
A busy broadcast week staring a straight ahead telephone number if you want to be on the program 800-282-2882 and the email address.com.
From the from the politico story, as some people are telling me, wait a minute, I read that story.
There's nothing in there about Romney saying Obama's a nice guy.
He's just incompetent.
Here's here's the reference.
This is this what the article says.
To press the point.
It's a quote of a Republican official, unnamed.
To press the point.
He said the GOP would even try to turn Obama's still high personal favorability numbers back on him at the convention this week by making the simple case to voters nice guy failed president.
Now Romney is not the one quoted as saying that, but a high-ranking official describing the convention theme is describing what the intent of the convention is.
And Bob Dole out there with all this uh Republicans need to get more mainstream.
They need to do what I did, which was lose.
Well, make no mistake.
I mean, that the the people running the show do not want to love to bring Obama's personal likability numbers now, but they don't know how to do it.
They are um uh I mean it is they don't quote Romney that that's their characterization of what Romney said, but they don't quote Romney as saying that, but Romney has said it on at least two occasions in the campaign, that Obama's a nice guy.
He's just in over his head, and he's made it plain that that's going to be the way he's going to go after Obama.
For the the re he does the Romney, the Republican establishment, whatever, they don't think there's anything to be won by being critical of Obama.
They just don't.
And so they're not going to be.
And they're going to tackle this mess we're in by just saying he doesn't know what he's doing.
He's wrecking the country.
I hope they don't go so far as to say he's trying his best.
I hope they don't say that.
But what they're gonna say is he just doesn't, he doesn't get it.
Now Romney has said, in addition to this, that Obama's experience is not the American experience.
And that's true.
And boy, if there's one point that Dinesh de Seuss's movie makes, it's that.
This really is a uh uh the 2016 movie that played in a thousand theaters, and it's it's it shocked the Hollywood media because it's doing so well.
I get came in number three over the weekend, maybe four, right in the area where I thought it would, and so predicted.
The uh great thing about the movie is one of one of Dinesh D'Souza's best lines in the movie is that he made the mistake when he was initially assessing Obama is that we try to look at Obama within the context of American history, and he doesn't have one.
Obama doesn't have an American history to be compared against.
And by that, D'Souza means that the people who have influenced and mentored and taught Obama have had a global view of this country, which is that it's unfairly large, unjustly a superpower, that it has cheated and stolen its way, the nation has, to its status.
And uh some of this needs to be given back.
Some of what we've taken from around the world needs to be given back, and by the way, the same thing applies to the successful in this country.
They have not acquired their wealth in a just and fair quote-unquote manner, and it needs to be given back too.
So the way to understand Obama is to understand The way people really not too crazy about this country around the rest of the world look at it.
And once you understand that, then you'll understand Obama.
Now, I should also point out that in the movie, D'Souza does not expressly criticize Obama, but the conclusion that any viewer would draw is inescapable.
It's not that he's in over his head, and it's not that he may be a nice guy.
It's that he does have a different world view.
He has a totally different impression of what this country is and what it should be.
I don't know what's so hard.
We've got the worst economy we've had since the Depression.
We've got people out of work.
We've got natural disasters all over.
Look at the droughts and the floods and the fires and everything, and and uh Obama hadn't done jack about any of it.
And yet he supposedly gets automatically all this credit for compassion.
Tell that to all these millions of people without jobs and with no hope for jobs and jobs with the with decent wages and payroll.
It's it everything is out of phase by 180 degrees.
So I I really think that it's a it's a mistake here to try to kid glove this, because the damage that's uh that's that's happening to the country, the damage being incurred here is real.
And there are ways out of this.
Pretty quick, pretty fast ways out of this, too.
But not four more years of this.
Four more years of this, and who knows uh the length of time it's gonna take to rebuild or recover.
It's gonna have to happen at some of the if if if this country is to ever be what it was.
And that remains the large question.
But I was I'm still getting grief, Snerdley.
Still getting grief from people.
Even Greta, Greta played this on her TV show Thursday night, Carl Rove disagreed with it.
When I said, we can handle four more years of Obama.
The thing we can't handle is four year more years of people that would elect him.
And Carl Russell, I would have a little bit more nuanced view of it than that.
Uh I just think it is that Obama has not announced the second term agenda.
He doesn't dare announce his second term agenda.
That's why he hasn't announced it.
He doesn't dare.
This guy told us what his plans are for the second term.
It would be Sayonara.
He didn't announce the first term agenda.
Did he tell us any of this?
Well, I take it back.
He did he did warn the coal industry.
They just didn't listen to him.
Not in the campaign.
He in private meetings that were on videotape with the union guys.
He told us what is going to happen to health care.
But he didn't, as part of his campaign, you're right.
It's part of his campaign.
Obama didn't tell us any of this.
That's a uh that's a good observation.
Our last caller, the guy from Fort Myers, whose mother got in the autograph newspaper story of uh of Neil Armstrong.
He said that the riveting part of the speech, Neil Armstrong told the crowd at the Chamber of Commerce years ago now, that they didn't think they're going to get back.
They didn't think they were going to get off the moon.
That doesn't surprise me in the least.
For those of you who weren't alive then or were too young to really get into it, it was that the whole process of getting to the moon, the way gravity, well, there's not enough fuel to get there.
That was strictly great mathematical calculation using the Earth and Moon's gravity to get there.
Then you've got this, the lunar module orbiting.
It doesn't have it's got enough fuel to get it out of moon lunar orbit and and back into the Earth's gravity, but it doesn't have enough fuel to um uh uh make major course alterations to go get a lunar module that launches off target.
It really was astounding.
And this Tiny little rocket that was to launch the lunar module back into orbit to rendezvous with the uh the uh command module up there uh that was the real dicey thing.
If that didn't launch, if that rocket didn't fire, then they were stranded, they would be there forever.
But I hadn't I don't I I had not heard Neil Armstrong ever say.
I'd never heard anybody say that he had said that they didn't think they'd get back.
That makes it even more chilling to me.
As I told you in the first hour, William Sapphire had a speech all written for Nixon in the event they were unable to get off the lunar surface and get back.
I have been to the Air and Space Museum.
Oh those the Mercury, the Gemini of the Apollo castle.
Oh, the the Mercury cap in fact, you know the Mercury capsule, the original design didn't even have a window.
They were afraid to put a window in it structurally, and the astronauts insisted on it.
They insisted on a window just to be able to see.
They had to have they wanted some visual ability to pilot that thing in case they had to, rather than just rely totally on instruments.
So they went back and they put a window in it, but the window is tiny.
And I remember when John Glenn was his first man to orbit, when Glenn re-entered the atmosphere, outside that window, he saw the fireball that is re-entry, and they didn't know what it was, and he thought the capsule was coming apart.
He thought he was dead.
And all it was was the normal fireball of the of the heat shield throwing off sparks and a giant red glow and material falling off the thing and flying by.
But they so many things for the first time they saw didn't really they they knew about the heat of re-entry, but they had no idea what it was going to look like, and that was the only way they did, was with that window.
But yeah, that stuff was tiny.
Even the three-man Apollo capsule was tiny.
It had to be for the uh for the weight, just to get it off the ground here and in orbit.
It's all fascinating.
Space program that was just had me riveted.
As a young kid, the space program uh had had me had me rivet.
No, I never wanted to be an astronaut, but it just the the whole thing, how it happened, the way they made things work, had me totally captivated.
I gotta take a tree a brief timeout here, my friends.
We'll come back and can you we got some more sound bites to weave in to the magic that is today's program, as well as more phone calls from you.
Right on, back to the phones we go as we have more fun than a human being, should be allowed to have Mike and Redondo Beach, California High.
Great to have you here.
Hello.
Thanks, Rosh.
And uh thank you for keeping me sane during this election.
Um, this supposed unidentified Republican operative, if I even believe he exists, and that's a whole other call, I realize.
But this operative is saying Romney can't win so long as uh Republicans refuse to subvert U.S. immigration laws by supporting amnesty like Obama's done.
I'd like to ask this guy, how big was John McCain's win in 2008, the GOP's chief advocate for amnesty?
I mean, McCain won even less of the Hispanic vote than Bush did.
And if Amnesty's the path to victory, why isn't Obama running away with this election?
Well, uh excellent points.
Excellent points to which, of course, I have responses.
As to McCain, yes, it is obvious.
It's very clear McCain was pro-amnesty.
He didn't like the word, but McCain was identified with wanting it.
He was, as far as the Hispanic community was concerned, uh McCain was okay.
He was all for relaxing immigration law, whether it was amnesty or not, it was McCain who was all for it.
What the establishment guys will tell you is that the conservative wing of the party undermined McCain by making sure that the Republican Party did not succeed in joining the Democrats in that policy.
So while while the Hispanics, this is what they would tell you.
While the Hispanic vote would look at McCain and say, yeah, he's one of us, he's for us, they still couldn't vote for him because the party wasn't.
And remember it was the conservatives who finally got a fire lit under House Republicans in the summer of 2007 to kill it.
They were on the road to immigration amnesty.
They were on the road, Democrats and Republicans in Congress, and finally it was brought to a screeching halt.
So the consultants would tell you that McCain could not overcome the fact that his party undermined him.
Therefore he it was not worth voting for him.
Your point is valid.
I'm just I'm giving you what they would say as their answer to it.
You're exactly right.
If if if Amnesty was it, McCain should have won big, and Obama should be running away with this by now.
You're exactly right.
Thanks, Ross.
All right.
So McCain lost Hispanic vote by 36 points, by the way, in uh in 2008.
And would somebody want to try to explain to me, you know, if I say it, there's nothing left to be said.
We all know that.
That's why sometimes I hold back, give you people on the phones something to contribute.
So let me put it out there.
Instead of answering my own question, I'm just going to put it out there, and oh uh over the course of the next day or two, somebody wants to, while you call in, try to answer it, I'd be more than welcome, appreciative to hear it, and that is why is the Republican establishment so invested in amnesty?
Why is it whenever you hear references to Republican establishment types, their gloom?
Every presidential race, we're gonna lose because of our position on immigration, which means we oppose Amnesty.
Why?
Of all the issues out there that the party might uh unify on all the issues there are to run a campaign on, why is immigration the number one issue the establishment cares about?
Why are they so obsessed with it to the point of wanting Hispanic voters to believe that we will relax immigration law as the Democrats will do?
Why?
Why that over the economy?
Why that over anything else?
What is it about immigration that seems to be the most important and one and only issue the Republican establishment thinks explains our loss or our defeats.
While you think about it, here's Paul in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.
Great to have you on the program.
Hello.
Thanks, Rush.
My uh I had a question, and it's it kind of delves into what you were talking there.
I I can't, I want to ask you what your opinion was, your professional opinion of what percentage of the elector electorate out there is even wavering one way or the other uh about who they're going to choose.
Uh there should it's my opinion that whether we go into this uh party down there and with the uh D'Souza tone, or if we go in there with a Charlie Chris tone, as it seems like you're telling us that's what they're gonna do.
It sounds like it's not gonna make one difference or the other.
I don't think there's that there's a high percentage of the electoral electorate out there that's that's wavering one way or the other.
They know who they're going to vote for.
Well, the conventional wisdom on this is that right now there are between three and five percent of the people are gonna vote who don't know yet how they're gonna vote.
In other words, ninety-seven to ninety-six percent of voters already know how they're gonna vote.
So your question is uh why all this rig and roll over so few people?
Yes, sir, and not only that, I don't believe that That we can win that win that that group in the first place because they'd have to nearly be uh mentally ill.
What the three to four percent that don't.
Well, I mean, i in today in today's technology with social media and and twenty-four hours and news cycles and all this, if you are that far out of the leap, you're not going to vote for a conservative or Republican anyway.
Why?
Why even pander to them?
Why do you think I'm just interested in your thought process?
Why would you think that the three to four percent would never vote conservative Republican?
Because if if they are that that out of touch with with all the available media that's out there, and and obviously they had no education because they they wouldn't vote for, they would vote conservative if they did, if they were.
Ah, okay, okay.
And and so it's the moral why even pander to them.
And I also think I have an answer for your last question, and I think that question is fear.
They they do not want to be labeled, these establishment types in DC that hang around D.C. And in the beltweight crowd, they do not wish to be labeled as a racist.
It's just fear of being called racist.
And that's the reason that they put immigration higher than anything else.
They're so scared to be called racist.
Really most important thing to them in the entire world.
So it's no, it's no more complicated than that.
They just they want amnesty and they want immigration to be uh liberalized simply so that people won't think of them as uh bigots.
That's the only reason.
That's the only reason they have they have no core.
All right, all right.
We'll throw that one, we'll throw that one in the hopper.
And uh the three to five percent have made up their minds that that's it, that's the max.
Okay, so why even campaign then?
Okay, to the audio sound bites.
Grab audio soundbite number four.
We've got Wolf Blitzer, uh, ladies and gentlemen, explaining why he uh uh treated Debbie Blabbermouth Schultz the way he did.
You know, he was pretty hard on it.
Well, uh relatively speaking.
Uh he kept challenging her with what she was saying of being untrue.
And before we play Wolf, I would play a little soundbite from me.
This was Friday.
Uh I was attempting to explain uh Anderson Cooper and Wolf Blitzer challenging Debbie Blabbermouth Schultz on their programs.
Both random acts of journalism have involved Wolf Blitzer and Anderson Cooper attempting to protect themselves.
I'll tell you what I think it is.
I think what it is is strictly their own reaction to Debbie Blabbermouth Schultz.
I think it is so obvious that she's a partisan hack.
It is so blatantly obvious that she is nothing but a robotic partisan hack that they cannot afford to let the woman go by unchallenged.
That's basically I was because people were asking, well, why do you because see the thing is why was it random?
Random act of journalism.
Why?
I made the point this ought to be happening every day.
Why do Democrats never get challenged?
And when they do get challenged, we stop the press and go looky, looky, looky, woo.
Which is itself is a sign of just how miserably biased and out of whack the mainstream media is.
So I was trying to explain it.
She is so over the top, they don't even want to be associated with that kind of hackery.
Well, let's listen to Wolf explain it.
He was on reliable sources with Howard Kurtz on Sunday morning.
And Kurtz said, You've been getting a lot of attention lately, Wolf, for some pretty aggressive interviews.
You did one with Debbie Blabbermouth Schultz, the Democrat chairwoman pressing her on a tax that she's made on Medicare.
If you hear something that clearly is wrong, all the years of your journalistic experience should come to the table and you should point that out.
As you get older, you say to yourself, you know what, if I hear a guest, and I'm going to be polite to that guest and respectful, but if I hear a guest just dissemble and make stuff up and really uh say something that's wrong, I think we should at least point that out to our viewers and let them know that I'm not dumb enough to just go along with it or whatever.
That's exactly right.
It was so obviously over the top that Wolf had to draw the line.
Yeah, that's right.
It's right.
When he was younger, When he was younger, it would have been okay.
It was all the years of your journalistic experience should come to the table and you should point that out as you get older.
You know what?
If I hear a guest, I'm gonna be polite, but if I hear a guest just dissemble and make stuff up as I get older, then I'm gonna call her on it.
Because I'm getting better and I'm learning more stuff as I get older.
When I'm young, I'm more eager to be a hack.
But as I get older, I realize I have to cover it up a little bit, because people are going to think that I'm older and mature enough.
So pretty much pretty much uh nailed it.
The LA Times, by the way, has an article today.
Is CNN looking for its own game change?
And the subheadline, with the Republican and Democrat national conventions approaching, the news network's in a quandary about the direction it needs to take to regain its declining viewership, which some might say might involve dropping its refusal to take sides in the political debate.
Uh new thinking, not take sides.
New thinking with the conventions coming up, the news networks in a quandary about the direction it needs to take to regain its viewership.
When has CNN refused to take sides is the point.
That's not their problem.
Anyway, back to the phones.
Ginny in Lake Ontario, New York.
Great to have you on the EIB network.
Hello.
Hi, Ross.
It's so nice to talk to you.
Thank you very much.
What a pleasure.
Well, my point was is if they want to hand um the hurricane and uh that on Bush and the Republicans and oh dear, it's all their fault and ruining everything.
They should some Republicans could stand up and say, hey, what about all the fires and the drought out in the Midwest and out on the coast?
Isn't that Obama's fault?
And look how he's handled.
Look at all the houses that have burned up.
We've never had such things happen before.
Well, but see, here's the problem with that, and you're exactly right.
But the problem with it is that there's 50 years of uh theme making that we're dealing with.
And there are overall themes.
One of the themes is Republicans kill people.
Another theme is Republicans poison the air and water.
Another theme is Republicans want to cut social security.
Another one is Republicans want to cut Medicare.
Uh, another one is Republicans only want the rich to have money.
Another one is the Republicans hate poor people and will take everything they've got.
So and that's been out there for 50 years.
So a hurricane shows up and devastates a Democrat town with a Republican president.
Well, it's obvious the Republican president doesn't care.
They're poor people or Democrats in there.
And that hurricane, nobody tried to stop it.
And then when it came time to bring FEMA in there, the trailers got in there late, and Bush was drumming the guitar.
See, he doesn't care.
But along with that 50-year theme, Republicans hate people, is the theme Democrats love people and want to give them everything.
And so when genuine Democrat destruction takes place, uh, it's just not believable that the Democrats would do that.
It's like Howard Dean said on TV recently to the Republicans.
You go ahead.
Every day, you go ahead and tell people Obama cut 716 billion dollars in Medicare.
Nobody's gonna believe it.
Nobody's gonna believe Democrats would cut Medicare.
But Howard, they did.
It's right there.
The CBO, everybody says it.
We could read from the bill.
We could read from Obama's speeches.
$716 billion in Medicare.
Yeah, he said, go ahead.
You and I both know that Obama cut $700 billion in Medicare.
But the people aren't gonna believe it.
Nobody's gonna believe Democrats cut anything.
But everybody will believe that you did.
And that's it's what do you call it?
Branding?
PR image.
I mean, that stuff's gonna have to change, or else you do one other thing.
You sit the sit there and wait for people to realize it on their own, which is what the Republicans do.
Well, I had people at Bush White House tell me that the reason they didn't respond is because they didn't want to make the story last any longer than it otherwise would, and they figured by responding it gives life to the story.
And the second thing is people aren't going to believe that.
Not going to believe that we want people to get harmed and get hurt.
Nobody's going to believe that.
They think that at some point, and they've thought this for 30 years, that average Americans are going to finally stand up and say, come on, who are you kidding?
Republicans want old people lose their social security.
We know it.
Even after 30 years of allegations that Republicans want to cut Social Security, and there have never been any, no senior citizens ever lost Social Security.
The Democrats still make the charge.
The Republicans still deny it.
And to a certain extent, but in Florida, I think the emptiness of the Democrat position finally is known now.
I don't think the charge is as effective as it used to be.
But the problem is that the Republicans are just waiting for time to take care of this.
It would be like if you had a retail business or a product and it was thought of in a certain way.
It was characterized by your competitors as a product that kills people.
Except it doesn't.
You just say, well, I'm going to keep making the product and I'm going to keep selling the product and I'm going to rely on people realizing that people aren't dying from using it.
And eventually people reel out, realize that my competitors are lying.
That's the Republican strategy is to leave it up to the people to figure out that the Democrats are making it all up.
Admit it, isn't that another reason why you get frustrated?
You don't want to spend the 150 years it'll take.
Oh, reminds me.
I meant to weigh in on this undecided business.
The caller right before the end of the half hour, who wanted to know why, if there's uh only three to five percent of people who are gonna vote who haven't made up their minds yet, his theory is they're obviously morons, because as easy as it is to know what Obama is and what Romney is, if there are three to five percent of people are gonna vote who have made up their mind yet, they have to be morons.
So why even try for them?
Okay.
If you believe that number, three to five percent, and Gallup, by the way, and their polling data says it's between eight and ten percent.
But what's interesting, it's not the 20% that everybody usually uses.
The standard operating theory is 40% vote Republican automatically, 40% vote Democrat automatically, 20% wait to make up their mind.
Those are the independents.
Oh yeah, 20%.
And that's who the consultants tell the candidates they can get the votes for you.
I'm a consultant, I'm the best guy at getting votes of the independents.
I know how to do it.
So the candidates hire them, and every election is or every campaign is oriented toward that 20%.
Everybody else is taken for granted.
Now the number is, depending on where you look, anywhere between four and ten percent undecided.
But if you believe that whatever the number is, that it's impossible to be undecided with as much media, social media, 24-hour media as there is, why bother even campaigning?
Because if you haven't got them by now, you don't have a prayer.
Well, by definition, the Democrats don't have them either.
But if you believe that, why even campaign?
What's the point of a campaign if it's not to persuade well, I know you want to uh Affirm your base.
I mean, you've got to turn them out.
But really, what's the purpose of the campaign if the undecided are unwinnable?
If that's your attitude.
I, by the way, am not sure that that 3-5% number is accurate.
What do you think, Snerdly?
What do you think the percentages of people have not made up their minds that this election right now on August 27th of the people are going to vote?
I know it's a just 5%.
You think it is small.
It's just 5%.
See, I think it's a lot higher than that.
I think it's a lot higher.
And it's not that people can't stand Obama.
I think it's that people can't stand politics, period.
I think they don't like any answer.
The people that haven't made up their minds that people aren't paying attention aren't because they don't like it.
It ticks them off.
They don't think the people in it are honest or it bores them, or but pick your reason.
They just, it doesn't interest them.
Everybody in it's a liar.
Everybody in it's a crook.
Their vote doesn't matter, whatever the reason is.
I think it's a lot higher than 5% have made up their minds.
Just my gut instinct.
I think it's a lot higher.
And whatever the number is, it directly correlates to the number of people who aren't paying attention.
And so the question then becomes well, if they're not paying attention, how the hell do you reach them?
And therein lies the key to victory.
People aren't going to start paying attention to all this, folks, till a new iPhone comes out.
Everybody knows that.
But nobody knows when that's going to be.
Everybody in the blog community thinks they know when it's going to be.
Apple's going to announce it on September 12th and put it on sale on September 21st.
Apple hasn't said anything.
But it's etched in stone.
All these tech bloggers think so.
Apple, by the way, they won their patent suit against Samsung for the most part.
Now they just asked for a ban on the sale of eight Samsung products.
Eight Samsung devices.
It's amazing to me.
Be back tomorrow.
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