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Sept. 4, 2012 - Rush Limbaugh Program
35:23
September 4, 2012, Tuesday, Hour #3
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Half my brain tied behind my back just to make it fair, El Rushbo of the EIB Network.
Happy to have you with us today, folks.
The Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.
You can count on it every day.
Our telephone number, if you want to be on the program, is 800-282-2882 at the email address lrushbow at EIBNet.com.
By the way, it has just been announced that John Burton is the guy in California, he's a California Democrat Party leader who accused Paul Ryan of big lies, like Joseph Goebbels, essentially calling the Republicans Nazis.
It has just been announced that John Burton has had to leave the convention to return to California for a pre-scheduled root canal.
Kid you not.
Now, does anybody believe that this guy scheduled a dental appointment during the Democrat convention?
Root canals, my experience with them is that they're sort of like a merchant.
They just pop up.
You need it.
You don't schedule a root canal for three weeks down the road.
But that's what they want us to believe.
They obviously don't want Burton at the convention.
Something else, as is always the case, talk radio show hosts take their shows on the road to the conventions.
They were at Tampa and they are in Charlotte.
The word has gone out from the Democrats.
They are not to appear.
No Democrat, delegate, or official or celebrity, what have you, is to appear on any conservative talk show.
I'm not making that up.
It's a blackout.
No Democrat is being allowed to appear on a conservative show on Radio Row at the convention.
Now, here's another way of looking.
Are you better off now than you were four years ago?
Here's some numbers from four years ago compared to today.
Unemployment, 7.8% when Obama is immaculated, 8.3% now.
The median family income, four years ago, $54,983.
Today, it's $50,964.
Basically, median family income down $4,000.
That's not insignificant.
Gasoline prices, $1.85 a gallon four years ago, $3.78 a gallon, national average now.
In some places, it's over $4.
The national debt four years ago, $10.6 trillion.
It's $15.9 trillion today and will surpass $16 trillion during the Democrat convention.
So the national debt is up over $5 trillion in four years.
And that's because Obama has had deficits in excess of a trillion dollars every year.
Now, here's Obama grading himself.
Isn't this rich?
The drive-bys ask the president to grade himself.
He gives himself an incomplete.
I wonder what his college transcripts would show.
We've never seen them.
I wonder if they're incomplete.
Is this what people talk about?
Grades?
Doesn't that kind of open the door to the question?
But then, ladies and gentlemen, since when is an incomplete something to brag about?
What are we doing here?
We are choosing leaders.
That's what presidential elections are about.
Choosing leaders.
This country needs new leadership.
This country is absent leadership right now.
It hasn't had any real leadership in a while.
People want leaders.
Most people are not self-starters.
Most people like being inspired.
That's what leaders do.
Obama is not a leader.
And I'm going to tell you, an incomplete grade is, is this how we choose leaders?
$5 trillion spent, over $5 trillion spent, and his grade is incomplete.
We nationalize healthcare, and his grade is incomplete.
We have a $1 trillion stimulus, and his grade is incomplete.
We have corporate cronyism all over the place in the so-called green energy sector led by Solyndra, but there are countless other examples.
The grade is incomplete.
We have a takeover, a nationalization of General Motors and Chrysler, and then the majority of the company of General Motors given to the United Autoworkers.
Incomplete?
The president dares talk about one of his achievements is that college tuition is now cheaper?
Are you graduates hearing this?
Did you know after you have amassed anywhere from $20,000 to $200,000 in student loans that college has gotten cheaper?
Obama just said so.
We just played the soundbite.
And his grade is incomplete.
Unemployment, 8.3%.
Grade incomplete.
Median family income off $4,000 in four years.
Grade incomplete.
Gasoline price of $1.85 four years ago, $3.78 now.
Grade incomplete.
$5 trillion in new spending, a trillion-dollar stimulus.
Grade incomplete.
This is how we choose our leaders?
I don't think so.
This president isn't a leader.
I mentioned earlier the guy at Forbes magazine, Rich Carl Gard.
He's on the Forbes staff.
He saw a New York Times piece on Sunday written by Jody Cantor.
And so he posted a piece on Forbes.
New York Times proves Clint Eastwood correct.
Obama is lousy, CEO.
A New York Times front page story.
Might have been yesterday.
This is Tuesday.
Yeah, it was yesterday.
New York Times story was yesterday.
New York Times front, take it back.
It was Sunday, because the date of Carl Gard's story is yesterday, so he's talking about Sunday.
New York Times front page story might have killed Obama's reelection hopes.
Story is called The Competitor-in-Chief.
Obama plays to win in politics and everything else, and it is devastating.
With such a title and from such a friendly organ, at first I thought that Jody Cantor's piece would be a collection of Obama's greatest political wins.
His rapid rise in Illinois, his win over Hillary, passage of health care, and all that.
But the New York Times piece is not about any of that.
Instead, it's a deep look into the two outstanding flaws in Obama's executive leadership.
Number one, how he vastly overrates his capabilities.
And here's a pool quote from the New York Times story: Even those loyal to Mr. Obama say that his quest for excellence can bleed into cockiness and that he tends to overestimate his capabilities.
The cloistered nature of the White House amplifies those tendencies, said Matthew Dowd, a former advisor to Bush, adding the same thing happen to his former boss.
There's a reinforcing quality, a tendency for presidents to think I'm the best at this.
And number two, how he spends extraordinary amounts of time and energy to compete in trivialities.
And again, from the New York Times piece, for someone dealing with the world's weightiest matters, Obama spends surprising energy perfecting even less consequential pursuits.
He's played golf 104 times since becoming president.
He asks superior players for tips.
He decompresses with card games on Air Force One, but players who don't concentrate risk a reprimand.
His idea of birthday relaxation is competing in an Olympic-style athletic tournament with friends, keeping close score.
The 2009 version ended with a bowling event.
Guess who won?
Despite his history of embarrassingly low scores, the president, turned out, had been practicing in the White House alley.
The story goes on to quote from the New York Times about how Obama is devoted to inconsequential things, highly competitive in all kinds of inconsequential things, and runs around telling about nobody.
In fact, there's a quote in the story that two weeks into the presidency, he's telling people that he's really good at it.
Two weeks into office.
He was running around telling people how much he likes being president and how good at it he is.
So Rich Carlgard here, I guess, is theorizing that the people that read the New York Times are Obama voters.
I mean, they are in the tank for Obama, and they're going to read this, and they're going to see that Obama's devoted to all these trivialities and inconsequential things and not spending any time whatsoever on things that truly affect the country.
While everybody thinks he's got his sleeves rolled up and is working hard on this stuff, this story in the New York Times actually does convey the impression he doesn't care much.
And my friends, this is why I have feared that many of Obama's policies are oriented purposely for the outcome that we've got.
He started the ball rolling.
Unemployment getting worse, family income dropping, spending up.
He started that ball rolling.
All he's got to do is get out of the way.
Healthcare reform is massive government expansion, massive government spending, massive tax increases that we haven't even seen yet.
If that isn't repealed, he doesn't have to do much else to be totally destructive of the foundations of this country as founded.
Incomplete.
Breitbart even has a story, Ezra Dulles, on this New York Times story.
Democrats air their frustrations with Obama's cockiness.
The New York Times Jody Cantor airs complaints from loyal Obama associates.
He has mentioned more than once in recent weeks that he cooks a really mean chili.
He has impressive musical pitch, he told an Iowa audience.
He's a surprisingly good pool player, he told an interviewer, not to mention that he's a doodler of unusual skill.
These are the things he's telling people in the White House.
And they told Jody Cantor at the New York Times.
He's bragging about how good he is at all of these trivial things.
The article reports Obama's associates in the White House characterizing this bluster and political zeal as cockiness.
Washington Democrats in this story say he's all too eager to offer unsolicited advice on how to shake hands, on how to write, on how to parent.
Well, that follows, doesn't it?
Mr. and Mrs. Nanny thinking nobody knows how to do anything.
Obama reportedly dedicates considerable time to practice, no matter how trivial the pastime.
It talks about the golf and the card playing and the bowling.
And that Obama even rates and ranks others around him, always elevating himself to the position of superiority.
And here's how, this is how the Breitbart piece ends, despite a strong push to negatively define Mitt Romney.
Obama finds himself neck and neck with Romney two months before the election and even falling behind in some polls.
As the election draws nearer, Obama will need to rely heavily on his personal likability to draw independent voters.
The New York Times and allied Democrats airing these grievances is a serious problem for somebody who needs to rely on likability because, as the story points out, he's not all that likable.
You've got his own so-called associates in the White House talking about how irritated they are at the way Obama conducts himself inside the White House in this hyper-competitiveness in trivial things.
Rubs people the wrong way.
Not likable.
Not cool, but rather kind of chilly, kind of cold.
Hubba hubba, dooba-duba, back we are on the EIB network.
So here we have a guy bragging about all of these things.
After two weeks, I like being president.
I'm good at it.
This is an example.
H.R. asked me during the break, is there anything in that story about people in the White House liking the guy?
I said, no, there's only a reference to Obama's likability in the polls, but there's nothing about Obama being liked inside the White House.
But what kind of people do these things?
I mean, work with somebody or somebody in your neighborhood brags all the time.
Doesn't this rub you raw?
Here's a guy bragging about everything, insisting he can win at anything, knowledgeable about all things, gives you advice on how to properly shake hands.
What kind of people have this kind of personality?
Look around the world.
Look at the so-called leaders who hold themselves out this way and ask yourself: do they lead democracies or do they lead tyrannies?
You don't hear Romney described this way by anybody.
You ever heard Reagan, George W. Bush described this way by anybody that knew him.
And further, this is a guy who's good at nothing.
He stinks at golf.
Have you ever seen him throw a first pitch at a baseball game?
It's embarrassing, folks.
You want to give him a shopping cart and say, here, go pick up the groceries.
He's actually good at nothing.
He's not good at being president either.
All right, let's hit the phones.
We're going to go to Auradel, New Jersey.
This is Marvin, and I'm glad you waited, sir.
Great to have you on the program.
Hi.
Thank you, sir.
Your program is more enjoyable on the phone than on the radio because you can hear all of the promos and the different skits.
Oh, yes, all of the parodies that we've used over the years.
Yeah, really great.
Sir, I wanted your view on something.
I didn't think it was appropriate for the President of the United States to use coded racist comments to describe the Republican Convention as black and white TV.
I was wondering how you thought about that.
Yes.
I knew exactly what he meant, though.
I don't automatically assume this racism stuff like they do.
But let me take your question seriously because I think there's something serious that can be said about this, or at least something pointed about it.
You are of the belief that talking about their convention, black and white TV, clearly a dog whistle, right?
You think Obama was trying to subtly say that these guys are a bunch of racists.
Oh, we're a bunch of old white guys.
Yeah, well, but they're not.
They weren't a bunch of old white guys.
That's the point.
There are more elected Hispanic Republicans than there are Democrat Hispanics, for one thing.
But what they're really saying is black and white TV business.
What Obama's really saying is the Republican Convention was old-fashioned, out of date, 50 years ago kind of stuff that we can't go back to.
We can't go back to those times.
Well, all of the symbols and all the ideals that this country's had forever, this is what I loved about this convention.
They were on display.
The greatness of this country was embodied in that convention.
Faith, proudly.
Family, proudly talked about.
Freedom, proudly talked about.
Patriotism, proudly discussed.
Hard work.
It was recommended.
It was advocated.
It was rewarded.
Success, entrepreneurism, legal immigration.
Those are great things.
They were on full display.
But according to Obama and the Democrats, faith, family, freedom, patriotism, hard work, success, entrepreneurism, legal immigration are now obsolete, outmoded, passe.
Charming, sweet things of the past that we can't go back.
That America doesn't exist anymore.
What do you mean, father knows?
Don't give me that crap.
They're scared to death by that stuff.
They are scared to death.
They have no role in a country where those values are prominent, and they know it.
A casual perusal of the cable networks shows that they are still occupied with this whole question of, are you better off now than you were four years ago?
So I'm going to stick with the audio soundbites on this because the Democrats are over a barrel on this.
Let's go to Fox News Sunday.
It's audio soundbite number eight.
David Axelrod, he wouldn't say.
He wouldn't answer the question.
Chris Wallace said, David, can you honestly say the average American's better off today than four years ago?
Here's what I can say, Chris.
I can say that we're in a better position than we were four years ago in our economy in the sense that when this president took office, we were losing 800,000 jobs a month.
The quarter before he took office was the worst quarter that this country has had economically since the Great Depression.
And we are in a different place.
29 straight months of job growth, 4.5 million private sector jobs.
Are we where we need to be?
No.
These people really are delusional, and they think everybody's morons.
And that 800,000 jobs lost in the fourth quarter of 2008, most of that was after Obama was elected and everybody knew what the hell was coming.
That's when unemployment started skyrocketing was after he was elected, after he won the election.
So Wallace then ticks off all the ways we're not better off to Axira.
He said, you keep talking about Romney.
I want to talk about the Obama record.
And I want to put statistics up on the screen.
Unemployment was 7.8%.
It's now 8.3%.
Median household income, almost $55,000, now $51, less than that.
Gas, $1.85, a gallon, now it's $3.78, almost doubled.
National debt, $10.6 trillion.
May go past $16 trillion this week.
So just looking at the president's record and those stats, David, is the average American better off than four years ago?
Chris, as I said to you before, I think the average American recognizes that it took years to create the crisis that erupted in 2008 and peaked in January of 2009, and it's going to take some time to work through it.
The average American sees nothing of the sort.
The average American says, this is not how this country works.
This is not how we get out of trouble.
We don't make excuses for what happened four or five years ago.
We do something about it.
And this bunch is doing things that are making it worse.
On ABC's this week, George Stephanopoulos talked to David Fluff.
This is the guy, by the way, who picked Charlotte.
David Fluff is the guy who picked Charlotte for the convention site because they need North Carolina and they thought it would help.
It turns out it isn't helping.
Stephanopoulos says, can the president argue that Americans are better off today than they were four years ago?
Listen, George, I think the American people understand that we got into a terrible economic situation, a recession only that the Great Depression is the only thing the country's ever seen like it.
So they know we had a deep hole.
It took us a long time to get into that hole.
It's going to take us a long time to get out of it.
What is this?
It took us a long time to get into the hole.
We were fine in 2007.
The thing that blew up was the subprime mortgage crisis brought to us by Democrats and the government.
There wasn't a long build-up to this.
Well, take that back.
There was a long build-up to it.
The subprime mortgage crisis started in 1999.
Making loans to people can't pay it back.
It did take a while for that to finally bubble up and show that there was nothing there.
But that's what it was.
It wasn't Bush.
It wasn't Bush economic policies.
Gosh, these people tick me off.
I cannot tell you how these people tick me off.
So their excuse now is, well, it took a long time for this mess, and it just happened to coincide when our wonderful president was elected.
That's a bunch of crap, folks.
He has exacerbated what was wrong, and he epitomizes what was wrong in all those years that led up to this.
So they continue talking about it.
Stephanopoulos essentially asks him three times about this.
Yes or no?
Are Americans better off today than they were four years ago?
Listen, George, you know, they did a good job of reciting all the statistics everyone's familiar with.
I think everybody understands we were this close to a Great Depression because of the leadership of this president.
We staved that off.
We're beginning to recover.
We have a lot more work to do.
We need to grow jobs more quickly.
We need to grow middle-class incomes more quickly.
Stephanopoulos, again.
So it sounds like, you know, a year ago, the president told me, I don't think Americans are better off than they were four years ago.
You still can't say yes.
We've made a lot of progress from the depths of the recession.
We have a lot more work to do.
And that's the question we're going to lay out for the American people is the Romney path would be the wrong path for the middle class, the wrong path for this country.
We've got to continue to recover, not just from the recession, but again, how do we build an economy from the middle out so that we have an economy, tax policy all centered on how do we make the middle class more secure in this country?
Lenny, the bottom line is this.
You guys, pluff Axelrod, you can talk all you want about what led up to this, but the bottom line is this.
We are having the worst recovery in the history of the country.
Now, we've had recessions, and this recession is no different than any other recession.
What's different is this recovery.
And that's you guys.
You guys are pathetic.
Am I ticking off the independents?
Should I dial this back, Mr. Sterdley?
Am I sending the independence running?
Well, you know, I just get ticked off about this.
Oh, they want these bunch of crybabies.
You know, real leaders inherit problems.
And the measure of a leader is what you do moving forward.
You guys have sat there and you've done nothing.
This is the worst recovery in the history of the country.
And there's no excuse for it.
There is simply no excuse for this other than you guys are dead wrong, philosophically, economically.
That's the only measure that we ought to be talking about here, is this recovery.
And it's pathetic.
It is embarrassing.
This is a third world dictatorship, tinhorn type recovery.
This is embarrassing.
You can talk all you want.
You can lie to yourselves and the rest of us.
And you can cry and whine and moan about Bush and whatever the hell you think led to this.
But people are measuring your leadership by virtue of this recovery, and you are failing big time.
There isn't a worse recovery that anybody can point to.
This is the worst recovery since the Great Depression.
And that recovery was exacerbated by another Democrat, FDR.
And that's the only measure the American voter is going to be looking at.
The American voter is not going to go.
The American voter is going to go on a voting booth and they're going to ask, are the people running a show competent to get us out of the mess?
They're not going to go in there blaming the mess on somebody and voting for who they think is responsible.
That was four years ago.
They're going to be voting on leadership and who's better qualified to get this fixed.
There might be some stragglers who can't get past the fact Obama's first black president, poor guy, can't vote against him because of that.
That's not fair, blow.
Maybe some of that.
These people are not growing the middle class at all.
Pluff and these guys want to talk about the middle class.
They're not growing it at all.
How can they grow it more quickly when it isn't growing?
Median family income is down five grand in four years.
There is no growth.
And if there's no growth, how can you grow it more quickly?
Median income has gone down.
That is the middle class.
55 to 50 is the middle class.
And once again, incomes for all income levels declined more during this recovery than during the recession.
These guys haven't got anything to stand.
They're in quicksand.
The only thing they're growing is government and government dependence.
That's it.
Latest food stamp numbers show it.
What are we supposed to believe?
Obama's lying flax here are our own lying eyes.
No, these people tick me off.
And I don't, I don't, if this is too strident for the independents, I'm sorry.
This is, I'm simply passionate about the country.
This is unacceptable to find median income wealth creation plummeting like this in this country when it isn't necessary.
There's no reason this has to happen.
But to some people, it does have to happen.
Some people think this country's had an unfair advantage since the beginning of time, since its founding.
Some people think this country has unfairly, unjustly come by all of its wealth.
It's time that we found out what the rest of the world has to live like.
And meanwhile, Obama's out playing golf 100 four times, shooting pool, playing, going bowling and this kind of stuff, and bragging, apparently, about how better he is at that stuff than anybody else.
Right, there it was in the New York Times.
Be right back, folks.
So I checked the email during the break and I got an interesting rush.
Why doesn't the Romney campaign detail Obama's record like you just did?
Folks, I don't know.
I can't answer questions about why.
I just have one guess.
I think they are afraid.
That's why I sort of was being facetious, asking sturdily, am I offending the independents?
Republicans, consultants, whoever they are, think that reciting, be critical of Obama is going to tick off the independents.
They think there's too much attachment to his race, black presidency, first one.
You got to give people permission to vote against him.
You got to gently guide them.
This is what I think they believe.
You have to gently nudge them to the point where they think it's okay.
Remember, we played those sound bites of Reagan hammering Jimmy Carter.
Now the Republican consultants say, yeah, but it's a different electorate now.
It was 80-some-odd percent white back in Reagan's year.
It's only 74% white now, Mr. Limbaugh.
You can't run a Reagan campaign in 2012.
Bullsh.
Of course you can.
I said, B.S., of course you can run a Reagan campaign.
Obama's the political opponent.
He's got a record.
It's dismal.
And there's nothing unfair or mean about pointing it out.
For crying out loud, the mainstream media said that Ann Romney's speech was too vicious.
I don't know.
They're going to say it about you anyway.
Might as well get the truth out there.
By the way, it seems that Doug Band, Clinton's aide who said he's going to vote for Romney, got his own personal tour of the Corey Booker Memorial Woodshed.
He reportedly said today that the idea he would vote for Romney was preposterous.
Now, he supposedly made the comment that he was going to vote for Romney to the National Memo website as he got aboard a plane to Charlotte with Bill Clinton.
So he and Clinton were getting on planes.
Somebody's there.
And Doug Band said, I'm going to vote for Romney.
And so they run the story.
And now, a couple days later, oh, no, no, no, it's preposterous.
Whoever said I was going to vote for Romney, that's utterly preposterous.
There shouldn't be any doubt that I'm going to vote for Obama, Band said.
The National Memo is a left-wing fringe Democrat front site, if you've never heard of it.
So he's had to walk it back, but I don't know.
I still say he said it on purpose.
And he's happy to walk it back.
What the hell?
Confuse people.
But there's nothing with the Clintons that is coincidence.
Don't doubt me.
Nothing.
But I wish Romney and Ryan.
Ryan got close to detailing the Obama record at the convention.
But I don't think these guys are going to hurt themselves by doing that.
It's the truth.
Unemployment, gas price, family wealth, national debt, deficits.
It's right there.
Deborah Jackson, Mississippi, welcome to the program.
I wanted to get you on with 45 seconds.
Hi.
Oh, thank you so much for taking my call.
I just wanted to know if you liked the prayer that Cardinal Dolan gave at the end of the convention.
You know what I thought when I saw that prayer?
I thought Democrats are watching Getting Mad.
And then I thought there's no way we will see this at a Democrat convention.
And, you know, when he was asked, he let the Democratic Party know that he was going to appear because he didn't want to come off as being partisan.
Yeah.
Well, I just read that the Democrat Party stripped the word God from their platform.
I was surprised it was in there.
You know, he used a lot of excerpts from the Declaration.
Yeah.
And I think that really, in order to be nonpartisan, he should say the exact same prayer.
Well, they won't let the thing that this administration is at war with the Catholic Church.
Her name's Sandra Fluck.
They are at war with the Catholic Church.
We will be back.
Now, I'm told, and I don't know that I believe this, but I'm told that Reverend Wright, Jeremiah Wright's going to give the benediction at the Democrat convention.
He's a spiritual mentor of Obama.
And I think after this convention, everybody's going to understand why.
There'd be no doubt about it.
No, that's what I'm told.
That Reverend Wright, the benediction.
Gosh, I hope that's true.
Oh, let it be.
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