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Nov. 19, 2012 - Rush Limbaugh Program
35:28
November 19, 2012, Monday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of The Rush 247 podcast.
Okay, folks, so there's a there's a uh a headline that is attached to a column that ran yesterday in the New York Times, I guess in the week in review section.
And here's the headline.
Is Rush Limbaugh's country gone?
New York Times.
Is Rush Limbaugh's country gone?
It's by Thomas B. Edsell.
Let me give you the quick answer.
Apparently it is.
Apparently the country's gone, but guess what?
I'm the reason why.
I am to blame for the country being lost.
I am to blame for the Republican Party losing election after election after election.
I am responsible for whoever hates Republicans hating them.
It was all over television yesterday.
It's been all over television since the election.
It's my fault, folks.
I haven't run a single election.
I haven't picked a single candidate.
I have not written one word of Republican policy.
I have not had one conversation with any highfalutin Republican about policy or campaign strategy or anything of the sort.
And yet I, El Rushbow, your host, your radio guy.
I have lost the country.
And not only have I lost the country, I have destroyed the Republican Party.
And the people saying this are the Republican consultants.
Look, and I don't like this program being about me.
I really don't.
Contrary to what some of you people think, and I'm an egomaniac.
Yes, I have a healthy ego, but I'm not maniacal about it.
I know I'm going to come up anyway.
I don't have to bring me up.
I don't like being the focus of things here, but sadly, it's the case.
800 282-2882, the email address L Rushball at EIBNet.com.
What is this all about?
Well, obviously it's about losing the election to Barack Obama.
And it's also about Santa Claus.
And it's there's a real division that has uh been created now sprung up.
There are people who hate this character characterization of Democrat voters as people voting for Santa Claus, and they uh include Newt Gingrich and Bobby Gendal, and uh uh who uh uh who else uh well George will a number of people and then there are people on the other side who say that it is the Democrat Party is Santa Claus, and that's why people are voting.
I have been doing a lot of thinking about this, independent of all these allegations and accusations of me.
I've been doing a lot of thinking about it.
By the way, I uh I have been to a lot of places since the election, and nobody's blamed me to my face.
Yet they're all asking me, what do we do now?
No, nobody's asked, nobody's pointing at me.
You blew it, you blew it, get out of my face.
What are you doing here?
Get out of here.
Nobody's saying that.
They'll say, what do we do now?
Big dinner Saturday night in Pittsburgh.
What do we do now?
They want me fix it.
They they want me to explain it, and then they want me to fit can I why is the Santa Claus?
Um Snurley wants to, why has the Santa Claus thing caused so much angst?
I've been thinking about this.
I I'm gonna attempt to explain it during the the whole course of the program today and do it some chronological order here.
Uh but one of the things that I was thinking about let's review a couple things that I observed last week.
One of them was that I was really moved by Ron Paul's farewell speech to Congress.
He said something that you and I instinctively feel we may not even have voiced it to ourselves or friends, but it's the it's really the nut of it.
It's really it's what's been bothering me.
So why is freedom such a hard sell?
Why is freedom and liberty such a hard sell?
And then prior to that, When I heard that we failed because we didn't do enough demographic outreach to Hispanics and women under 30, single women and the rest of the groups, African Americans.
I said rhetorically, well, look at our convention.
We had the we had a parade of some of the most achieved, accomplished, Hispanics, women, African Americans, and I pointed out, and this is salient, they all had a common theme.
Every speech had a common theme, and what was it?
It was conservatism.
It was that they all came from nothing.
They came up from nothing.
Their parents, in many cases, emigrated to this country.
Marco Rubio was one of them from Cuba.
And Rubio, by the way, is one of the people on the war path against the Santa Claus business.
And they all had this up from nothing story, which featured hard work.
And I asked why didn't that I'll use the word sell, Ron Paul of freedom.
Why doesn't freedom and the opportunity for unlimited great prosperity, why doesn't that sell?
And then I asked, maybe we've lost the definition of how prosperity happens.
I know we have.
A majority of Americans think prosperity comes from the government now, not themselves, not hard work.
But what I've concluded is that the Republican convention probably scared the heck out of people.
The very people that we thought, well, I'm not going to say we, because I had nothing to do with that convention either.
I didn't even go.
I had literally nothing to do with any aspect of the convention.
So maybe I shouldn't say we.
I know what the Republicans were trying to do.
And what they did turned out probably scared the very people that we hoped to persuade with that convention.
Probably scared the devil out of them.
And not because there was any racism or sexism or bigotry or homophobia, none of that.
What was it about that convention that wouldn't sell?
What is it about freedom and liberty that don't sell?
Well, let's review.
What is freedom to you and me?
Freedom to you and me is the absence of government in our lives.
Freedom to you and me is getting for small business people, get the regulations out of the way.
We'd uh lower tax rates.
We want to benefit from our hard work.
We want to share that wealth.
We want to hire additional people.
We want to pay the people that work for us increasing wages.
We we want to grow our businesses, we want to grow our private sector, we want to grow the economy.
We want freedom in the sense that this nation was founded, limited government.
The Bill of Rights limits what government can do to people.
But to the Santa Claus crowd, and I'm saying that just to identify them, but to the people that vote for Obama, let's put it that way.
That's not at all what freedom is.
In fact, where you and I look at government as the great object in the road to freedom and regulations and stifling uh rules and its ever expanding size and taking money out of the private sector of Obamacare and all this, where we look at government as the impediment to freedom.
The people who voted for Obama look at us as the impediment to freedom.
We're the ones standing in the way of freedom.
And why?
Well, to them, we are against gay marriage and gay rights.
And so we are against their freedom.
We, in their view, stand in the way of what they want to do.
So they look at us, not the government, and they look at the government, by the way, as the place to turn to fix what's wrong that we are in charge of.
They turn to government for relief from us.
Government is their great benefactor.
Government is their provider.
Government's their protector.
We are the threat, in their view.
I can tell you that this gay marriage business with college-age kids and young people, it's again because we've lost the education system for the last 30, 40, whatever it is, years because we've lost the definition of prosperity.
With young people, it's it gay marriages.
I mean, it's at the top of the list of things that matters to them.
Really, a gay rights second, and then abortion whenever you want it, and contraception.
Then I saw something in the exit polls that I, again, I think if the Republicans really want to find out what their problem is, they'll take note of this.
I saw it the first wave, 5 o'clock exit polls.
I said, if this is true, if this is true, then all the rest of this is academic.
Over 50% of the people that voted still blame Bush for the economy.
They just lived through four years of an absolute economic disaster, made worse by every policy put in place by this president, this administration, every economic factor was made worse, and yet Bush got the blame.
How is that possible?
You know, when Obama's sitting around blaming Bush all these years, we're laughing.
And we're assuming the American people are going to hear that and think that he's a baby.
That he's childish.
That, like we are saying, that they're going to say, come on, man, grow up, man up.
You don't blame somebody else for your problems.
You tackle them.
They agreed with him.
So the Republican Party better figure out, you brilliant consultants had better figure out how that happened.
You had better figure out how it is that George Bush, who, by the way, on balance, had a roaring economy for most of his administration.
A story you guys never seem to be able to tell.
He overcame 9-11 and a recession, and he put together a pretty robust economic recovery.
There were years in a row where we were at 4.7% unemployment.
How in the world?
And then 2008 happens, and I'm not exonerating Bush or his administration from all culpability, but for crying out loud, people lived through a disastrous four years of a plunging United States economy with every attempt to fix it, making it worse.
And your guy, George Bush, gets blamed for it in an election.
You guys need to start asking yourselves some questions.
You pit the candidates and you're getting the candidates that you want.
And you're getting the issues that you want.
I'm not in charge of any Republican Party platform.
I'm not in charge of anybody's campaign.
I have nothing to say, officially or unofficially, about what the Republican Party does as it tries to win elections.
Zilch Zero Nada.
I am simply a powerful, influential member of the media commenting on such things.
But I can tell you that very little of what I thought should have happened in the campaign, very little of what I thought should have happened actually did.
You wouldn't find my fingerprints on much of this at all, because not much of it is stuff I would have done had I had the authority or power, which I didn't.
I wouldn't run.
Well, I don't spilt milk on this on hindsight, but the bottom line here is there's some serious things.
And this is Rush Limbaugh's country gone.
Yeah, this guy concludes that it is, by the way.
That young people, polling data prefer socialism to capitalism.
It's it's narrow, but they do.
Young people prefer socialism during this four-year economic disaster.
And it was.
I mean, we're we're we're looking at a second downturn even now.
Everybody that was unemployed ate.
They had their cars, they were driving around, they had gasoline.
They were taken care of.
And in fact, what's the top story of my stack here?
From the Hill.com, groups backing an extension of unemployment benefits have launched a new round of lobbying to convince Congress to extend federal benefits to the long term jobless.
A coalition of advocates, including the National Employment Law Project, held more than 40 meetings with lawmakers on Capitol Hill during the first week of the lame duck session to make their pitch for 30 billion dollars to extend the unemployment benefit program.
Well, see the natural reaction to that.
Here comes Santa Claus.
Here comes Santa Claus.
Right down Santa.
Here comes Santa Claus.
Okay, we're back.
El Rushbo and Thanksgiving Week here at the Excellence in Broadcasting Network, and of course the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.
This is going to be this this whole theme today is probably going to be ongoing throughout the program, folks.
It's not really possible for me to touch on everything here in the uh opening couple of monologues.
But I just want to read to you a little section here of Thomas B. Edsell's piece.
Remember who he is?
It's the guy who a year ago wrote in the New York Times that the Obama campaign was simply going to write off the white working class vote, the Reagan Democrats.
It's going to write them off the bitter clingers.
They figured they'd lost them just a year ago.
Obama had lost those people.
The whole, and Ed Sol, the Huffington Post was writing a piece as a as a knowledgeable person, the Obama campaign.
And in his piece in New York Times yesterday is Rush Limbaugh's country gone.
I think he agrees with me essentially.
He says, and I quote, in broader terms, the political confrontation today, pits taxpayers who now form the core of the center right coalition against tax consumers who form the core of the center left.
Well, now, what is that?
What is a what is a confrontation between taxpayers and tax consumers?
Mr. Edsel himself is acknowledging the existence of the fact that a huge number of Americans look at the at the government as their protector, as their defender.
They look at the government as their provider.
They look to government as dependents.
They believe they're victims.
They believe the government has a responsibility to care for them.
They believe that they're entitled to health care, to food, to housing, you name it.
He's acknowledging this when he describes the confrontation as between taxpayers and tax consumers.
And the tax consumers are on the left, the taxpayers are on the right.
You know what puzzles me about this?
I mean, all of my life, it has been well understood that the Democrat Party was the party of the welfare state.
*chewing*
People today, Republicans today, who just this past weekend went on a tirade over this Santa Claus characterization, condemning it, are themselves the people who have addressed this circumstance as the Democrat Party equals the welfare state.
The Republican Party has always been the party of the self-reliant.
The Democrat Party has been the party of the aggrieved, the angry, the hungry, the thirsty, what have you.
I don't know what's new about this.
But apparently, this quite innocent usage of the term Santa Claus has really hit a nerve with some people.
Why?
Is it because it's too effective?
Is it because it's too descriptive?
And how is it, if it is reality, how is it an insult?
I gather from the Republicans upset about this that it is insulting.
You see, the see the problem I have with all this is that the Democrats just won an election.
Barack Obama just won an election that to me was won because America is in decline.
We are in decline.
We have fewer of our citizens able to provide for themselves.
Fewer and fewer able to provide more and more who cannot, or who do not, or who will not.
I don't care about the subdivisions.
But clearly the Democrats are happy as clams.
I mean, they're running around happy as they can be.
They have just won an election, and they've done so in the midst of the decline of the country.
A decline on which they have capitalized, by the way.
I don't know what is even arguable about that.
The End Snerdley says, What do you mean Ed Sell agrees with me?
He does.
Thomas B. Ed Sol in this New York Times he agrees with me that it is Rush Limbaugh's country gone?
Yes.
The difference is he's happy about it.
I'm not.
But he agrees that it's gone.
You know this Santa Claus business.
It really, I came in the day after the election, it's a little throwaway line.
I said it's tough to beat Santa Claus, and all hell broke loose on our side, on the Republican side.
Folks, I am here to tell you there isn't a Republican alive who has not looked at the Democrat Party as the party promising goodies to people.
That's been a fact of life for as long as I've been alive.
And all of a sudden we're acting like to say so is it inside.
Why?
Why would somebody be that?
Whatever.
Why would why would somebody why would so many Republicans be upset about this?
Unless maybe the strategy is to get in on that game, and they think I'm standing in the way of it.
Yeah, the only reason that I can think that all of these Republicans are so upset over my description of all this in Santa Claus is that they want in on the game.
And because look at what's happening here.
There's a fight on to define the meaning of the election and its outcome.
We here are fighting the drive-bys.
The drive-by is in the Democrat National Committee, the party want to say that Obama has a mandate now to expand the government, to raise taxes, to expand the welfare state.
I am saying we've lost the country.
That it is a victory for the tax consumers over the taxpayers.
The bizarre thing is we're actually agreeing, they just don't like the terms that I'm using.
We're both defining the outcome of this election the same way.
They just don't like the terminology I'm using.
I guess it's too direct or too descriptive.
Now I asked a question moments ago.
What is it?
And you should have seen Snerdley frowned when I have, because I made the point, our convention, let me review this again.
This is, folks, I think this is really, in terms of understanding all of this, please bear with me.
Forgive me if I if I'm redundant and repetitive here, but I for some reason I find this crucially important.
Ron Paul's farewell speech, asking bluntly, why is selling freedom so hard to do?
I mean, it's the the the the freedom of the founding, freedom from government, constitution, the bill of rights limits what government can do.
It celebrates the God given freedom and liberty of each human being.
And that's what we stand for.
But of course, we also believe there needs to be guardrails on our culture and society.
We call it morality.
But what is so hard about selling freedom?
And it is, it is a tough sell.
Because to the people we're trying to sell freedom, they look at us as their main impediment to freedom.
We stand in the way of the way they define it.
Their definition of freedom doesn't involve government being in their way at all.
We're the ones in their way.
They want gay rights, gay marriage, they want uh redefine marriage any way they want, redefine the family anyway they want, they want to legalize dope, they want um uh what you name it.
They look at us as the obstacle.
We deny them a good time.
We deny them their fun, we deny them their freedom.
Government, therefore, is to where they turn for action against us.
Now we go to our convention, and we had speaker after speaker of achieved and dynamic and articulate, the best among those in their business minorities, African Americans, women, Hispanics.
We have more Hispanic elected officials in the Republican Party than the Democrats do.
And that convention did not sell.
It did not win any converts, is what I mean.
Apparently it did not.
I didn't have anything to do with that convention, just a stress again.
But what was what why why wouldn't that convention work?
I mean, we here we have Marco Rubio, and he told a story up from nothing, Susanna Martinez ditto, Mia Love Ditto, Marco Rubio ditto, Condoleza Rice ditto.
I mean, it would the list is endless.
It didn't work.
I think, on the other hand, our convention probably scared the people we were trying to convert.
And Snerdly Shaggy, what do you mean?
How could that convention possibly just think about it?
Don't make me provide the answer.
Think about it in terms of just what we've discussed so far today in the first 40 minutes of the program.
What in the world?
Here groups backing an extension of unemployment benefits have launched a new round of lobbying to convince Congress to expand unemployment benefits $30 billion worth.
I thought we had a recovering economy.
I thought jobs were being created.
This was the news before the election.
Why do we need unemployment extension?
I thought the objective was jobs.
I even the president I thought was talking about creating jobs.
Now we've got people who want unemployment benefits extended.
What about our convention?
Scared people.
What do you think, Snurley?
Now that you okay, what is it?
Mm-hmm.
No, no, no, no, no, no.
No, no, no, no, no.
There was nothing in our convention that said anybody's benefits are going to get cut.
There were that's the answer.
That is the answer.
What did people we hope to convert see when they watched our convention?
They heard testimonials to hard work, stick to it, family, sacrifice, not quitting, not giving up.
That's speaker after speaker after speaker.
And then with our nominee, we had testimonial after testimonial of his charity and of his good works.
And this Republican convention touched every base.
But what the Republican Convention didn't do apparently is let these groups that we're trying to convert know that we understand their insecurities, their economic insecurities,
and we did not have a presence or a uh optics or an image of understanding their insecurities about what so they decided when it came time to vote in the election, even though I mean I've seen this analysis.
They voted for a honest to God, folks.
I read this yesterday.
I didn't was on the airplane, I had it, didn't have a chance to print it out.
I don't know, I can't remember, but they don't oh this is 71% Hispanic vote voted for Obama.
And it was some Hispanic leader think and they don't even like him.
They don't even like Obama.
The Hispanics, this is was, I forget where it was.
They don't even like him.
It's just they hate the Republicans even more because they don't think the Republicans understand them or care about them or trust them or what have you.
It was another assault on my my question back, you know, two or three days after the election, I'm gonna ask it again.
So if our problem is demographic, and if we lost the election because we're not for contraceptives, or that that's the perception that we want to deny people.
Now they can be further from the truth, by the way.
Uh abortion, it it it are we to do?
Are we to now before amnesty?
Are we to as a party officially proclaim that free contraception is what we believe for any woman that wants it?
Is this how we is this what we're to do?
What's the answer?
I just asked it open-endedly.
Quick couple of sound bites.
First, Mike Murphy.
He is a um Republican consultant he was on Meet the Press yesterday, and among other things, he said this.
The biggest problem that Romney had was the Republican primary.
That's what's driving the Republican brand right now to a disaster.
And we've got to get a kind of a party view of America that's not right out of Rush Limbaugh's dream journal.
So we gotta get a view of the Republican Party that is not right out of my dream journal.
What folks did I or any of you have to do with the Republican primary?
Did not Murphy get the candidate he wanted.
All these consultants, do you realize they get rich no matter who wins or loses?
Little known secret.
They get rich no matter who wins or loses.
But the Republican primary.
What was wrong with the Republican?
As far as he's concerned, there were too many conservatives in it saying too many stupid things.
We need to get rid of conservatism, is what he's saying.
We need to get rid of all these people shouting stupid conservative stuff.
And that's where it happened at the primary, and that's where Romney lost the election because all the conservatives branding the party.
Now, Romney was not able to recover from that.
Steve Schmidt, he's back.
He can't let go of me.
This is the University of Delaware panel discussion last Wednesday.
We would have been much better off running against the real President Obama as opposed to the sinister pretend President Obama.
And the total lack of credibility with some of this stuff, I think it's just absolutely repellent to the middle of the electorate.
And then when you look at the demographics, who is Rush Limbaugh talking to?
He is talking to a demographic that's white, 65 plus in rural.
That's not what the country looks like anymore.
So you have these talk radio hosts making millions and millions and millions of dollars a year, driving a message of complete and total ludicrous nonsense into the electorate, a lot of it poisonous.
Okay, so you you people are all white, 65 and over, and you live in the sticks.
And you are screwing up the Republican Party because you are believing what I say.
This is their explanation for having lost.
Steve Schmidt was the architect of McCain's defeat.
He was McCain's guy.
Steve Schmidt ran the McCain campaign.
Yeah.
Talk to.
I don't know where Schmidt has a victory to hang his head on.
I may somewhere, but I don't know.
But anyway, this is it was all predictable, folks, that this was going to happen.
Told you right here.
I gotta take a break because I'm way long.
I'll be right back.
By the way, if you're running, if you're wondering who Mike Murphy is, Mike Murphy ran Meg Whitman's campaign for governor of California.
She lost.
He spent a hundred million dollars.
Speaking of millions and millions of dollars.
Steve Schmidt, in addition to running the losing campaign of John McCain.
Steve Schmidt managed the losing campaign for Kentucky Attorney General Will T. Scott.
Schmidt also ran California State Senator Tim Leslie's unsuccessful race for lieutenant governor of California.
Steve Schmidt was the communications director for California State Treasurer Matt Fong's unsuccessful campaign to one seat Barbara Boxer.
And in 1999, he was the communications director for Lamar Alexander's unsuccessful presidential run.
So, I don't know if there are any victories in there.
This is just what I have found.
We know Schmidt knows how to lose.
And we know that Murphy knows how to lose.
And so it's quite natural blame somebody else.
Obama got away with it.
Obama blamed Bush and he got away with it.
People bought it.
So now these guys want to blame me.
Should I change my name?
I'm so disgraced now.
Should I change my name to Lance Armstrong or Petraeus?
Which which is more applicable today.
And by the way, folks, let me tell you something.
From the get-go, I warned everybody.
January 16, 2009, before Obama was immaculated, I warned everybody.
You know what this one?
I hope he failed.
I warned everybody that what we were in store for was an attack on free market capitalism.
That Obama was out to destroy the very engine that had generated overwhelming prosperity and greatness, superpower status for this country.
This is what alarmed me about the guy.
He was to attack every tradition and institution that made this country great, and he did so.
And he did it on purpose.
And now let's look back.
Did he not succeed?
I think he did.
At 8% unemployment, people are thinking I can't make it in this economy.
At 8% unemployment, people are saying, I don't have time for hard work.
I need to eat.
I need food.
I need unemployment benefits.
Obama's policies undermined private sector jobs.
Obama has discredited the private sector.
Obama has made the private sector an enemy to people and the government their friend.
And look.
And much to my great distress, look at how successful he's been at it.
So successful that now the Republican Party wants in on the game.
And that's why they're so upset over this Santa Claus stuff.
Santa Claus.
I don't know, folks.
How long has it been that I've been telling you these Republican consultants claimed fame and they don't have any?
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