All Episodes
Previous Next
Nov. 23, 2012 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:39
November 23, 2012, Friday, Hour #1
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24 7 Podcast.
Yes, it is, ladies and gentlemen.
It's Doug Arbanski, the mayor of Realville is not here today.
The Doctor of Democracy is not here.
He's no doubt enjoying his Thanksgiving holiday, but we are here.
The phone number, you know it is Friday, by the way.
It is Friday.
It is Friday.
The telephone Friday is the day, as you know, where Rush takes the biggest risk in broadcasting, where he lets amateurs guide the show.
Today is a special Friday where he takes an even bigger risk by allowing me to be here running the show.
The phone number, if you'd like to be part of the broadcast is 1-800-28282, 1-800-282-2882.
Did you all have a um very nice Thanksgiving?
I hope you did.
We had a wonderful Thanksgiving here.
I did something yesterday that I don't normally do.
I was cooking for the gang of fourteen or twelve that were coming over.
And whilst I was cooking early in the I think the turkey had to be in for about eight or nine hours or something, well whilst I was cooking, I had on the morning news shows.
And if you've seen these themes, I mean the one question.
The what everyone's talking about Susan Rice yesterday.
Susan Rice, Susan, what why did she do it?
What did why was she on those Sunday shows saying what she's saying?
Has it struck any of you that the main question is the one not being asked by our side?
That the main question is the one look, here's what I mean.
We're talking about Susan Rice.
The administration comes out and says to us, you can't criticize her.
You mustn't everyone, but not just the administration, everyone on the left.
You can't criticize first off, she's a woman.
Secondly, she's black.
And you mustn't criticize anyone who's a woman and who's black.
Is this their way of saying that the from here on in, the only people that should appoint it to any of these jobs should be white people?
Because obviously we need to scrutinize and criticize people who aren't doing their jobs well.
I mean, I I don't know, is it sort of reverse racism?
Anyway, the theme here is what did she know?
Why was she on these shows?
Who altered the memo?
Have we forgotten, ladies and gentlemen, what the president himself was saying.
He went in front of the UN and he made that speech, and he said, you know, 743 times in that talk.
It was the video, it was the video.
I'm less interested in what they what they told Susan Rice and what Susan Rice said and who she is in the story.
I'm very interested in the president.
What did he know?
Is the president not getting accurate information?
I mean, conven and now conventional wisdom is telling us that Susan Rice, she oh, they want her to be the Secretary of State.
He's going to.
There's a there's a line of reasoning out here, ladies and gentlemen, that says, well, he he he doesn't want to really appoint her as Secretary of State.
He doesn't want to nominate her for that job because if he does, he's opening a can of worms and a lot of questions will be asked.
But with this bunch, we we learned that we mustn't always follow conventional wisdom because in this time in this instance, he's the sort of he's the sort of president that will say, I don't care if questions are asked, I'm a pointer anyway, because no matter what questions are asked, we have a way of steamrolling, steamrolling right over them all.
The other theme I noticed yesterday morning, by the way, as I'm cooking Thanksgiving dinner, was this, as we're talking about the physical cliff and new taxes and all this stuff.
We're seeing this theme come from the left, which is I'll put it very simply.
The theme is this.
The voters have spoken.
The voters want taxes raised, they want revenues raised.
Ladies and gentlemen, the voters spoke.
I think that something fifty, sixty million of you spoke and said we don't want that.
But this idea that they're just drilling it in with the their marching orders, the left drum beat, that there is a mandate, that taxes must go up, and that you want them to go up.
Just like you love, just like you love Obamacare.
Now, ladies and gentlemen, when I was coming, let's see, it's About two weeks, just a couple of days over two weeks since the fateful day of November the 6th, 2012.
And it is just over two weeks since that election.
And I'm telling you something you already know, conservatives are raw.
We're still bleeding.
We're still bleeding as a result of that election.
Every place I go, anyone I talk to, I say the words, how are you doing?
How are you?
Oh, I'm really bummed.
I'm bummed because of the election.
I hear this again and again.
I raised it yesterday at our Thanksgiving dinner.
Everyone around that table.
They're still bummed because of the election.
Now, here we are.
It's just over two weeks since that day, and yet the idea is we shouldn't be talking about it.
We should move on.
We should talk about other things.
Well, my friends, we've got stuff to talk about.
I'm in fact going to talk about something today, some painful medicine that ultimately I will tell you has an optimistic ending, even though the medicine is painful.
I'm going to eventually, in a little while, get into something that is unsaid.
I call it the eleventh thing, the eleventh thing.
Where do I come up with that?
The 11th thing is, well, there's a very, very famous you know, ladies and gentlemen, I'm a Hollywood insider.
I produce motion pictures.
I have a sense of things that is not from the Beltway, that is not from that is not from the traditional world political conservatism.
Now don't hate me because I'm a Hollywood insider because my conservative bona fides are just fine.
But I'm here to tell you something, ladies and gentlemen, a motion picture.
If you stop and think about it, what is a motion picture?
Well, a motion picture is the sum total of emotional information.
And we're living in an age where modern communication is very different from anything that has ever existed before.
I don't want to get ahead of myself.
But I was thinking, knowing I would be here today, I knew I was going to be here for a few weeks, knowing I was going to be here today.
I want to give you the eleventh reason.
A very famous motion picture director said, Well, when we try out a motion picture, when we test it, or a Broadway show when you're out of town, you invite ten of your friends to tell you what's wrong with your show.
And all ten of your friends will give you ten fabulous different answers.
But it is your job to figure out the eleventh thing that they are all trying to say.
So today, in today's broadcast, I will get into the eleventh thing.
All these things are part of it, but uh obviously Obama clause is a big big part of it.
The Latino vote, the this, the that, we've heard every size and shape.
But there is one eleventh thing that I'm going to get into.
And in my preparation for this, I was reminding myself about a dinner that I had with Margaret and Dennis Thatcher.
And this dinner was in April of 1986.
And it was at this a little private dinner that we went and had.
She the evening was a simple one.
Uh Mr. and Mrs. Thatcher were going to join me for the theater in London one night.
She was prime minister.
She was one of the giants on the world stage at that moment in history, perhaps ever.
And Mr. and Mrs. Thatcher came by and we had drinks before going to the theater.
We then went to the theater, and after the theater, we went out to dinner.
Little private dinner party, about six of us.
The dinner party didn't end.
We didn't get up from that dinner table until about 2 30 in the morning.
And one of the things about Mrs. Thatcher, she was famous for needing very little sleep.
Because I was barely stumbling around in my hotel room, you know, at seven in the morning.
She had already opened, sliced the ribbon, opening two bridges already, you know, outside of London.
She was already up doing stuff.
That night that we had this dinner, she was predicting, because you know, in London in England, they the Prime Minister can call when the next election will take place.
And they always try and call it at a moment that is to their political advantage.
And she was telling us very privately at that dinner when she was going to call the next election, the hows, the whys, by what margins she would win it.
Incidentally, this is something you may not know.
Mrs. Thatcher never ever lost an election.
As not once, When she left office, she resigned.
Because of the political dynamics that were in place then.
And when she went, when she left office, her successor, John Major, lasted an additional seven years.
That's almost two terms in American, American political electoral leadership life.
So Mrs. Thatcher, Mr. Mrs. Thatcher and I are having this dinner.
There's a couple of other people present, and it occurred to me as I was thinking about this, because I was going to go into the lessons that we learned from Mrs. Thatcher about how you win elections.
And part of that had to do with how you size up your opponent and how you speak to and about your opponent and how you speak over the heads of the media.
Because everyone in the recent election cycle, there's the media is against Romney, the media is against Republicans.
This is the this is not only the theme, it's also true.
What are we going to do about the media?
What are we going to do?
There's answers.
There's answers.
Stick with me, folks.
They're all here going to get them today.
They're all here.
But the night that Mr. and Mrs. Thatcher and I had our dinner, in that April night of 1986, a little bell went off in my brain yesterday.
Wait a minute, there was something very special about that night.
And here's what it was.
Because we had an extra security detail with us.
That night in 1986.
Now many of you won't remember this, and I'm going to go through the history of it because it I mean, ladies and gentlemen, the word Libya comes up.
It was that night in 1986, that day, that Ronald Reagan had asked Margaret Thatcher if we could use British air bases, American bases in Britain, to launch an attack on Libya, on Moamar Qaddafi.
The French had decided that we could not fly over French airspace.
The Spanish, the Portuguese had decided we could not.
But Ronald Reagan had made a huge decision that it was time for Qaddafi to be attacked militarily.
And the reasons for this, I've got to take a break in a moment, but the reasons for this had to do with a terrorist event against Americans, in which we had, now in 1986, mind you, in which we had almost immediate,
real-time intelligence, that the President of the United States then shared to one or another extent, certainly with his military commanders, certainly with our allies to one extent or another, certainly with Mrs. Thatcher, and took decisive world stage action.
I'm going to go through the details of this because you'll, well, you'll be able to draw on your own conclusions from the way grown-ups behave and the way this mess has been handled during the past, you know, it's September 11th is now over two months away.
It's two months past.
And we're still talking about Susan Rice.
Ladies and gentlemen, the phone number is 1800-282-2882.
It's Doug Rbanski filling in for Rush Limbaugh.
Gonna take a short break.
We'll be right back.
*music*
All right, ladies and gentlemen, Ms. Doug Ranski back filling in for Marshall Limbaugh today, open line Friday.
The phone numbers 1-800-282-2882.
We're so very happy you're with us this day after Thanksgiving 2012.
We're going through the story of Mrs. Thatcher and Ronald Reagan's bombing of Libya in the year 1986.
I was having dinner with Mr. and Mrs. Thatcher, Margaret and Dennis Thatcher.
On the very night this occurred, we had an extra security detail with us.
And I was just going to go through some things.
Because I got captivated by this idea of understanding what was happening that night.
And I went, we I got up late, late into the night I went into this.
George Schultz, in his memoirs, writes about that day.
And he writes, he says, on April the 2nd, mark these dates in your mind as I tell the story.
On April the 2nd, a bomb was placed by a terrorist under the seat of a TWA flight.
It was Flight 840 on route from Rome to Athens and exploded.
It blew four Americans, including a nine-month-old baby out through the fuselage.
I remember when this happened.
I remember I was sitting in the TWA lounge at Los Angeles Airport when this happened, getting ready to go to London.
And the important point about what George Schultz is making is they knew almost immediately, he writes, that Qaddafi had nothing to do with this.
Now, do you think, I mean, let me interrupt myself here.
Do you think our intelligence abilities are better today than they were in 1986?
We've got all the technology today.
We actually have people on the ground in Libya today.
In 1986, Libya is a very hostile place to us.
But after that plane explosion, Bill Casey, who was the CIA director, he calls up Schultz on a secure phone line and he says that our intelligence system was picking up indications that Libyans were targeting U.S. diplomatic missions and other facilities used by Americans in Europe and elsewhere.
Now, ladies and gentlemen, this is way pre-9-11, let alone the anniversary of 9 11.
The director of the CIA in 1986 was telling National Security Advisor, Secretary of State, George Schultz, excuse me, Secretary of State, that Libyans were targeting American embassies.
And a couple of days later, on April the 5th, the reports came in that a bomb had gone off in a discotheque in West Berlin.
The name of the place was called La Belle.
Two people were killed.
A hundred and fifty five were injured, including 50 to 60 Americans, and many of these people were maimed for the rest of their life.
Within hours, our CIA knew, this is 1986.
April the 5th.
Within hours, our CIA and intelligence community back then knew who was responsible.
They had the smoking gun.
Isn't it funny?
Not funny, but isn't it sort of coincidental that all these things seem to be going back to Libya?
Now today we've got we've got actual people on the ground there.
We had an ambassador there, CIA there.
And we don't seem to have any coordinated sense as to what was happening.
In 86 they did this.
So Schultz says, well, we've got a smoking gun.
He immediately informs the other European heads of government.
He tells them all that we have a clear link to Qaddafi.
He says that we had that it was terrorism.
They used that word back then.
And Bill Casey, in a very unusual move, felt, well, we should release some of this intelligence.
He didn't like releasing intelligence.
He was a great CIA director.
And they release it to some of our allies.
And Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan himself, makes the decision that we approach England and that we approach France to allow our F-11 flights from a British base to fly over France.
And we also asked Italy and other places.
Schultz goes and he consults, he tells De Brynn, the Russian ambassador, what we're going to do.
The whole world knows what we're going to do.
Ronald Reagan decides to carry out a military operation.
Mrs. Thatcher is requested permission to use the bases, and she grants it.
She comes out under great criticism at home.
I have in front of me the Associated Press story from a few days after our dinner.
Libya bombing could cost Mrs. Thatcher next election.
Of course, it doesn't end up costing her the election.
Mrs. Thatcher ends up staying there.
This is 1986.
She stays there till 1990.
And her hand picked successor, her Chancellor, John Major, stays on as prime minister until uh till um 1997.
Now, here's the point, ladies and gentlemen.
We had intelligence back then that was reliable intelligence.
We had a decisive leader who said we're going to do something about this intelligence.
We had the ability to summon up a really strong ally.
There was no talk about videotapes, and all of this happens in a very very tightly compressed time window.
In other words, from the time of the discotheque bombing to the time of uh Ronald Reagan's defensive response to Libya was only a question of under two weeks, ladies and gentlemen.
And ladies and gentlemen, here we are two and a half months later.
We're still talking about Susan Rice video tapes and who changed intelligence memos.
Very bizarre.
Very bizarre stuff.
Back after this.
Happy to have you along, folks, on Open Line Friday, the day after Thanksgiving 2012.
The phone number here is 1-800-282-2882, Doug Rabansky, fill-in host for the great Rush Limbaugh, who will be back soon.
I'm before I get to the main course of what I wanted to speak to you about, which is the 11th thing, the hard medicine and the ultimately optimistic medicine, which, if we take it, explains why the Romney campaign was very badly run.
And I do not want to turn you off.
I'm going to talk about the 11th reason that they lost from a media guy, from a motion picture producer.
But I must finish because once I dug into the Mrs. Thatcher story about the bombing, Ronald Reagan's bombing of Libya after the discotheque.
Now, in the discotheque, I'll just point out to the obvious things that you already know as you've been paying attention.
In the discotheque bombing, there was no American ambassador killed.
There was no one deliberately targeted on American embassy soil.
There were assets nearby that were unused in our Libya situation, the one in this recent September.
The discotheque bombing was an act of pure terrorism to scare Americans at a discotheque in Berlin, a place that was frequented.
Now, ramp that up.
And you attack an American embassy.
You ramp that up.
And that's what I mean.
What is what is bigger than attacking an American embassy?
It is nothing.
Killing an American ambassador.
There's nothing.
They knew.
They knew that Americans were being followed in 1986, that American embassies were targeted way pre-9-11.
Mrs. Thatcher became a great, great, great ally, again, of this country.
And she was really called on the carpet.
I've got some of her comments in front of me.
She's called on the carpet because women and children are killed in this bombing.
And she says this is a matter of great sorrow.
She says we also remember with sadness all those men, women, and children who've lost their lives as a result of terrorist acts over the years, many of them performed at the Libyan government's behest.
And then she's taken on the carpet.
People say, well, two wrongs don't make a right.
And she says that, and she she goes into answering this with another long talk about terrorism.
She says in our country we have to be alert to the possibility of further terrorist attacks.
She says so too our British communities abroad.
She talks about the need.
She says the terrorist uses the feelings in a free society, the feelings in a free society to sap the will of civilization to resist.
If the terrorist succeeds, he has won, and the whole of free society is lost.
Now, why am I telling you this, ladies and gentlemen?
We've we have seen this entire story, which is ramped Way up from a discotheque bombing because it was American soil, American embassy, American ambassador killed.
And we won't even talk about terrorism.
I mean, heck, ladies and gentlemen, the word terror was not is not still being used in connection with the Fort Hood shooting, the massacre.
Just mentioning it.
So we informed the Soviet Union.
They have absolute evidence that this occurs.
And she says, she says to Parliament, she says, this evidence was derived from secret intelligence.
Now, that's secret intelligence.
In a world that did not have the internet, in a world that did not have YouTube, that secret intelligence was known almost immediately and decisively acted upon by President Ronald Reagan.
And she goes through.
She says on April the 6th, an attempt to attack the United States embassy in Beirut was meant to have been undertaken by the Libyan government.
It failed.
She says it's equally clear that Libya was planning yet more attacks.
The Americans have evidence that United States citizens are being followed.
This is Margaret Thatcher, 1986.
She says we have evidence that United States citizens are being followed and American embassies are being watched by Libyan intelligence agents in a number of countries across the world.
You've heard it asked.
You've heard the question asked numerous times during the past two months.
Why wasn't security higher?
At the Libyan embassy?
Why wasn't security higher?
Forget merely that it was the anniversary of 9-11, but on any normal day, because this is stuff that we knew for a very long time.
She went on, she said there is specific evidence of Libyan involvement in past acts of terrorism and in plans of future attacks of terrorism.
She says I cannot give details because that would endanger lives and make it more difficult to apprehend the terrorists.
And yet here we are, ladies and gentlemen, 2012, and we're asking who told Susan Rice to go on television shows and talk about a video?
Who who gave the president the information?
Why was the president of the United States, Barack Obama, and the Secretary of State Hillary Clinton?
Why were they making a video, a commercial to be aired, apologizing about a video?
Do you remember that tape of Hillary Clinton saying such video should never be made?
She looked like she's medicated heavily.
Where was the president talking about freedom of speech, depend defending American values?
All seemed very strange to me.
And yet, when a different bunch was in charge, it took a discotheque bombing for a decisive president to gather up an important ally with intelligence that was in real time accurate and act on it.
Now she was asked, she was asked, you know, she Mrs. Thatcher kept being questioned, you know, well, Mrs. Thatcher, is is well, is the United States action going to be effective in stopping terrorism, or instead will it have the effect of quickening the cycle of violence?
These people always ask the same questions.
She responded.
She said, let us remember that the violence began long ago.
She said it has taken a great many lives.
She said it has not been so much a cycle of violence as a one-sided campaign of killing and maiming by ruthless terrorists, many with close connections with Libya.
The response of the countries whose citizens have been attacked has not so far stopped the campaign.
Have you heard anything like that from anybody in a position Of leadership in today's world, where a United States ambassador and four men are killed and three others are killed.
From our president from a Secretary of State.
Mrs. Thatcher says, she says, the United States is our greatest ally.
It is, listen to these words, how beautiful they are.
She says it is the foundation of the alliance which has preserved our security and peace for more than a generation.
She said the growing threat of international terrorism is not directed solely at the United States.
We in the United Kingdom have also long been in the front line.
To overcome the threat is in the vital interest of all countries founded upon freedom and the rule of law.
Is anybody saying anything similar to this as a result of an American embassy being attacked?
I just finished with this.
She says, she finishes by saying terrorism exploits the natural reluctance of a free society to defend itself in the last resort with arms.
Terrorism thrives on appeasement.
Say that again.
Terrorism thrives on appeasement.
She said the time had come for action.
The United States took it, its decision was justified, and as friends and allies we support it.
I honestly I honestly think, ladies and gentlemen, that this that this little tale I've been telling you for the past 45 minutes or so, I don't I honestly think this doesn't require much more comment or much more analysis.
Because we all know the era we're in.
We all have watched it all unfold over these past two months, and they get away with it.
This is going to tie us in beautifully to the conversation about how to run a campaign, how to run a winning campaign.
I'm going to give you some tough medicine that has an optimistic message at the end of it.
I've got to take a quick break, ladies and gentlemen.
The phone number is 1-800-282-2882.
It's open line Friday.
We'll be right back.
We'll be right back.
I mean, I guess the question, ladies and gentlemen, is what kind of active intel did we have.
I don't understand this deflection.
Susan Rice, Susan Rice, who changed the memo?
Why did she go out and talk on those Sunday morning shows?
I mean, I'm just asking the question, because I mean, isn't it something?
We've been here exactly here.
Exactly here.
We've been here before.
The year is 1986.
And of course, typical, you know, that I'm that I'm typical and part of my own weird story that I'm having dinner with Margaret and Dennis Thatcher on the very night, where we have to carry an extra security detail because it's the very night this event that we're bombing Qaddafi.
She came under great, great fire.
Oh, yes, yes, no, no.
They said she'll never, oh no, she got withstand, she was elected again strong.
Listen, this is this is a way of getting into the next area that I'm going to spend the next two hours, I think, talking about, which is this idea.
As a movie guy, I'm going to share with you the 11th thing.
I call it the 11th thing.
The reasons that Romney lost, the reason, the 11th reason, the reason why if we don't understand what I'm about to tell you, we may never ever win as conservatives or republicans again.
This is not merely that the oh, the swing states exist.
I'll get into that in the political advisor class soon enough.
This is not merely about, oh my goodness, California has is lost, and we have all those electoral voice votes, you know, they're they're no longer in the game.
Let me give you a clue.
Let me give you a clue before I give the whole story away.
Many of you think that Gandhi was a man of peace.
I mean, tell you something about Gandhi.
He was better than a man of peace.
What Gandhi accomplished in India was because he was able to accurately take the measure of the British Character.
And when you take the measure of the character of your opponents, you're able to understand them and meet them on a certain playing field that allows you to have the chance to win.
I am now of the belief, and this is the controversial thing I'm going to say.
Look, I'm of the belief, this will cause a lot of heads to spin, and a lot of anger to come my way from various Republican and conservative people.
But I'm going to tell you, I am now of the belief that we are at a point where anyone can be elected president whose campaign has the message and marketing that they have figured out the most voters want to hear.
And you you heard, yes, you heard me say it right, that anyone can be elected pre I've got proof of it.
I've got evidentiary proof that anyone can be elected.
Look, we have just elected a man who is sending this country in who has been sending this country off a financial cliff, destroying our presence on the world stage.
We have just elected a man, ladies and gentlemen, who supported partial birth abortions.
We elected a man who's who believed that babies who are meant to be aborted that were born alive should be left in a storage closet to die.
Do not doubt me when I tell you that with anyone can be elected.
If you have the right messaging and the right marketing, which makes it all the more frustrating when our side refuses to embrace the modern techniques that even a mouthwash company knows when they have a product.
It is not, it is not just enough to campaign as conservatives.
It's very important.
Rush has said it perfectly here.
I quote, I quote the doctor of democracy, being his attentive student that I am.
The doctor says conservatism, when well articulated, always wins.
The Doctor of Democratsine did not say conservatism always wins.
He said conservatism, when well articulated, always wins.
That's the second part of that is the part that my friends who are the conservative fundamentalists always leave out of the conversation.
I'm not going to tell you if I'm a conservative fundamentalist or not.
I'm no, no, I don't care that we I'm I'm I'm practical in the need to win.
Let's start with that.
The need to win is the is the very first thing I'm dealing with.
Not the need to explain how we're going to govern.
The need to win.
So that we then have the opportunity to govern.
Because all of it's academic, it's all of it is utterly meaningless if you're not going to uh if you're not going to win, if you're not going to go in to win.
And this requires taking a measure of your opponent, understanding your opponent.
I'm don't want to give away where I'm going with all this over the next two hours, but you'll you'll you'll hear it in short enough time.
Anyway, it's open line Friday, 1800.
Well, open line Friday, of course, I haven't even taken a phone call, but I will get to it.
It's 1800, 282-2882.
Your calls will be coming up soon enough, ladies and gentlemen.
Duggar Bansky filling in for Rush.
be right back.
All right, we're back, ladies and gentlemen.
Guest host filling in Dugarbanske filling in for Rush Limbaugh.
Thank you so much for being along with us today.
I'm wondering I have a question I want to throw out there.
Um has it occurred to anyone that we may, and I use the word may, that we may be entering an era where it is almost impossible to beat an incumbent.
Have you heard anyone mention this at all?
I got to thinking about this.
When you go back and you think of Bill Clinton, there was a disgraced president on the verge of being impeached, won a second term.
Won a second term.
You had George W. Bush, who by all accounts was very unpopular in many uh quarters of the country.
Second term.
Here you've got Barack Obama presiding over this terrible economy, the lack of America's standing in the world.
Second term.
I mean I'm just I'm just throwing out there, not really for discussion, just more or less for consideration, because I'll get to the big part of the conversation when we return from the break.
I'm just throwing out there for conversation the idea that we may have entered the age where you simply cannot beat an incumbent.
▲
Export Selection