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Nov. 27, 2012 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:04
November 27, 2012, Tuesday, Hour #2
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All right, now they had this big meeting this morning between several Republican senators and Susan Rice, the United Nations ambassador.
You all know Susan Rice, she's the one that went on every talk show under the sun after the Benghazi attack and told a story that wasn't true.
Despite all of this, she's being talked about to succeed Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State.
Succeed Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State.
Why, those are big army boots to fill.
Anyway, Susan Rice is one of the people whose name is being thrown around.
John Carey is another.
Susan Rice is being objected to by a lot of Republicans because of what happened after the Benghaz after the attack at the consulate in Benghazi.
She had a meeting this morning with Senator McCain, Senator Graham, and Senator Iatt, who appear to be the only remaining Republican senators left are involved in everything right now.
And apparently it didn't go well.
Senator McCain, a couple of weeks ago was very, very critical of Susan Rice.
Then in comments yesterday, he said, well, you know, we ought to give her a chance to hear her, you know, we ought to hear her out.
She has a right to express her point of view, we need to hear what she has to say.
They talked to her this morning and they didn't like the answers.
Now I want to get into this for just a minute because it's important.
One to me, one of the most disappointing things about the election result earlier this month was the number of Americans who didn't seem to care that they were lied to about an awful incident in our country.
We had United States government employees, Americans, attacked under siege in an American consulate, and later at a CIA annex, and we didn't do anything to save them.
And after that happened, rather than be truthful about it, we were given a pack of lies.
I know that many of you are deeply bothered by that.
Sadly, a lot of Americans aren't.
But those of us who are have every right to try to get to the bottom of this and find out who lied to us and why.
One of the advantages that we do have here is that even though that the president won, we still do have a two-party system in the United States.
The Republicans in the Congress aren't just sofas.
They're there and they have power and they have ability.
They also have the ability to put people under oath.
And if the president indeed is serious about putting Susan Rice forward as Secretary of State, they have the ability to ask her questions.
Well, some people would just as soon forget about this.
I don't think it can be forgotten about.
We're saying to ourselves that we don't care if when an act of terror is committed against our country, that we're not told the truth about it.
We're also telling ourselves that we don't care how or why those people died.
Now, I don't think Susan Rice went out on all the Sunday talk shows and did interviews for three days after the Benghazi incident and lied.
I don't think that she went out there and made all of this up.
She's only the ambassador to the United Nations.
Here's what we do know.
We know that there was real-time video being sent back to the situation room in the White House the night that the attack occurred in Benghazi.
We also know that from the CIA Annex, a former Navy SEAL who was later killed the same night, requested permission to go in and assist at the consulate, and he was told to stand down.
We also know that he requested military assistance and was told that none would be forthcoming.
We know that in the situation room they were watching video of what happened there.
And we now know that there was no protest at all, that while there were protests in other cities in the Middle East about the YouTube trailer about a movie that was not favorable to the Prophet Muhammad, there was no protest going on at that consulate.
Instead, an arm of Al Qaeda, the North African arm of Al Qaeda, a group affiliated with Al Qaeda, launched a terrorist attack.
They had heavy artillery, it was planned and it was coordinated.
Rather than tell the truth about what was known that night, the story was put out for days after that there was a protest there, and out of this protest it got violent and chaos ensued, and some Americans were killed.
They knew from the beginning that that story wasn't true.
I have my own theory as to what happened here.
President Obama running for re-election.
One of his lines was that he had defanged Al Qaeda.
Obama got bin Laden.
There's even bumper stickers that liberals have had in their cars for the last year about how Obama got bin Laden.
The suggestion is that in getting bin Laden, Al Qaeda had been tamed and we don't have to worry about it anymore.
Well, that story, that campaign theme, that's undercut.
If an arm of this group that supposedly isn't a problem anymore, has just committed an act of terror and took out several Americans.
They didn't want the campaign line to be trumped, even though this incident occurred.
So somewhere in there, they needed to offer an explanation up that wasn't the truth.
I can't think of any other explanation as to how this misinformation came out there.
And all this other talk.
Well, we had intelligence that said this and we had intelligence that said that.
They were looking at video.
They were getting requests from people on the ground for military assistance.
There was never any notion of any kind of protest going on.
Within a day of the attack, this arm of Al Qaeda claimed responsibility for it.
So how did Susan Rice start giving all of these interviews, going from one program to another to another to another, saying that, well, it seems as though there was a protest there and things got out of hand.
And she de-emphasized any notion that this was a terrorist attack.
Let's understand how this stuff happens.
You don't just automatically walk into the studios of all of these networks and be guests on the Sunday morning talk shows.
The bookers for the talk shows call the White House and say, we'd like to get the administration's position on this.
Susan Rice was the person they offered up.
If we are told now by the defenders of Susan Rice that Susan was just working with the information she was given, who gave her that information, and why was she the person they trotted out?
I do think she was set up to be a Patsy here.
I think she was told this is what you ought to tell all of these people, Susan, and she went out and told those people.
That's what a cover up is.
Send somebody out to give out misinformation.
The defenders of Susan Rice are saying it's racist to even criticize Susan.
It's wrong to demonize her and claim that she's somehow responsible for the misinformation that came out.
Maybe so.
But she was the conduit that passed along that misinformation, along with the President of the United States who showed up on the View and showed up on the Daily Show with John Stewart and was yakking about the terror about this protest angle himself.
Well, we had our chance to defeat President Obama.
Didn't happen.
He won.
But if Susan Rice is going to be put up to be Secretary of State of the United States, it is an opportunity to ask her questions under oath about who told her this story that turned out to be a pack of lies.
I'll be honest about something here.
I don't know that there's a whole lot of chance that I can get my fellow Americans to care.
There are a lot of people who are far more interested in whether or not they're going to keep getting their candy from the government than whether or not our country sold those people out in Libya and then Lied about it.
I can't make them care about something that they don't care about.
But I care.
Many of you care.
We have a moral obligation to get to the bottom of this.
And I think when we do get to the bottom of it, it's going to reflect terribly on the people who decided to go out and spread lies about an awful incident.
I think those lies were spread for political reasons.
This almost reminds me of Watergate.
Watergate occurred in 1972.
June of 1972.
Woodward and Bernstein report were reporting on this in September and October of 1972.
Richard Nixon carried 49 states anyway.
No one cared.
Eventually the truth came out.
The economy turned really bad on Nixon in his second term.
The more people found out, the more they were appalled.
Maybe that can happen here, maybe it won't.
Whether or not Susan Rice is the Secretary of State of the United States or not, she needs to come clean and tell and tell us who gave you this information?
Who did you talk to in the administration?
Did you talk to the president about the stories that you were going to tell?
Did you talk to the Secretary of State?
Did you talk to the vice president?
Did you talk to Axelrod?
Who gave you this information?
What questions did you ask about it?
But most importantly, why did they choose you?
The people who are defending Rice can't at the same time defend the president.
If Susan Rice was the person that they sent out to answer all of these questions, there was a reason they chose her, and there was a reason they gave her the information that she had.
Getting to the bottom of this story is a moral imperative.
I can't change that CBS and NBC and ABC and CNN and the New York Times and the Washington Post have a remarkable amount of incuriosity about this.
There's no Woodward and Bernstein there chasing this story.
They almost are putting their fingers in their ears hoping there's nothing for them that they have to report.
That doesn't mean that those of us who do care shouldn't press for answers.
I think it's pretty clear Susan Rice doesn't want to offer those answers up.
I also think it's highly unlikely she's going to be nominated for Secretary of State because I don't think President Obama wants Susan Rice under oath, having to answer questions about how it just happened to come about that she went on all of these nationally televised programs and told the American public a pack of lies about a terror attack that killed Americans.
The telephone number at the Rush Limbaugh program is 1800-282-2882.
My name is Mark Belling, and I am today's guest host.
Since this is my first opportunity to sit here at EIV after the election, one of the things that I want to do in the second half of today's program is offer up my thoughts on why in a country with the problems that we have, the President of the United States was re-elected.
And I don't want to pull any punches about it.
And I'm going to do that a little bit later on in the program.
But right now I'm talking about the fact that Susan Rice is still being put out there, potentially as the next Secretary of State, despite the fact that she was the person who went five days after what happened in Benghazi on Sunday morning talk shows, making the rounds, offering up this explanation that there was a protest and out of that protest that there was a lot of disorganization and somehow the security at the consulate was breached, all of which turned out not to be true.
And now she just wasn't.
Well, this is just the information I was given.
I didn't know how did I I didn't know.
Well, if you didn't know, why were you the one that they trotted out on all these programs?
I think that's a pretty doggone good question.
Can you imagine?
Can you just imagine if all of this happened in 2007?
If President Bush was still in office and we trotted out somebody to go on the TV talk shows and lie about a terror attack, do you think for a minute the media would let this thing lie?
Do you think the Democrats wouldn't be all over it for an answer?
And I'll tell you something else.
Even Republicans would be pressing for that answer.
Because we all, as Americans, have a right to know what happened here.
And we have a right to know why we were lied to.
Let's go to Trout Lake Washington.
William, it's your turn on the Rush Limbaugh program with Mark Belling.
Yeah, Mark, uh, first off, let me say, I've been listening to Rush since uh wow, I think it was 88, 89, and uh eighty nine is a ball when it started.
Um I uh as a retired soldier who served for over twenty-six years with a son and a daughter who served in forward areas a brother who served in forward areas, and uh personally looked the Taliban and Hamas in the face.
Um it is absolutely undescribable and it it cuts very deep into the morale of those of us who have and still serve when we see a lack of integrity and morality, uh, specifically in this issue of Benghazi, and one of the Navy SEALs who was killed, um, actually his family lives just down the road about an hour and a half from us here.
It's very close and personal to home, and we are we are stunned, all of us who are serving and and who have served to believe that the people who are supposed to be calling the shots about how we will conduct our business under fire and look us right in the face and have no qualm whatsoever.
And it leads me to believe in the end that it really comes down to um it's okay for them to lie because they believe in what they're doing.
They believe in the basic tenets that were taught even in London School of Warfare.
I think I think what what you hit it, they believe in what they're doing.
And you know, if in order to be re-elected, they needed to put out a phony story about Benghazi, and we needed a little bit of re-election assurance, we couldn't insurance, we couldn't allow this to turn into a bigger deal.
So we'll find a sap, we'll find a Patsy, Susan Rice, to go out and tell this story, and if she does it, if she puts herself in the line and she goes out and tells these lies, we'll reward her with Secretary of State because we've got a greater good, we've got Obamacare, we've got to keep the gravy train going.
I think that's probably it, and I also think it's probably what motivates the people who don't really care about getting to the bot getting to the bottom of this story.
I think that all of that is true, and it's just shameful if that's the case, that we are willing in the context of a political campaign to be dishonest about this.
We all know that politicians, when running for re-election or election, will spin the truth on taxes or they'll spin the truth on some bill that they propose somewhere.
This is an attack that occurred on American soil, a consulate is American soil.
Americans died.
There was a request for military assistance, it was turned down all in the context of being in the shadow of an election campaign, and then before Americans voted, we were not told the truth.
They created this phony story about outrage over a video that was on YouTube for a coordinated attack in which heavy artillery was used by armed people that are part of a terror organization, and they succeeded in killing Americans, and they went out and they told that lie.
If Susan Rice was the person that was made the conduit to lie to the American public, and they have the audacity to turn around and then say we're going to reward her for her lying by making her the Secretary of State of the United States, the very least we can do is get her under oath and make her start answering some questions about who gave her that information, who was the source of the story.
I suspect that the source of the story was at the very top of the administration because we know that in the situation room, the night of the attack in Benghazi, the people at the highest levels of the administration, although we're still not sure about the president, were watching this.
And somehow, after this occurred, including the separate attack that occurred over at the CIA Annex, after this occurred, there was a desire to Put out this story.
Hillary Clinton herself even said, we're going to make sure that we get to the we're we're going to get to that guy who put that video on YouTube.
They created that invented truth to distract attention away from the fact that there was a terror attack.
And the only motivation for that invention, the only motivation for that lie, is they didn't want the American public to think that Al Qaeda wasn't the same threat as it was a few years ago.
They wanted to create the impression that when we killed bin Laden, that problem went away.
They lied for the sake of Obama's reelection.
I'm Mark Bellingham for Rush.
All right, I'm going to do something here and in my grand plan for the program, and I get to make grand plans when you only do the show every few months or so.
In my grand plan for the program, I didn't want to do this until now.
Because it's going to come across to some of you as too harsh, too judgmental.
Well, I'm given this platform, and I'm planning to take advantage of it here.
One of the things that Rush allows his guest hosts to do is call things as we see them.
Not er nobody sees none of us see things exactly the same.
If you read all the postmortems and all the analyses and you listen to Rush and other talk show hosts talking about what happened, everybody's got a slightly different take.
The one thing that I think is a common denominator here is that many people are truly shocked that Obama won.
Doing my own program in Milwaukee, I think it's fair to say that most people in my audience thought that Romney was going to win the election.
I know that Romney and his running mate Paul Ryan both thought they were going to win.
A lot of the analysts who predicted a Romney win looked at things like the enthusiasm gap, the Romney the Romney crowds throughout the campaign were more enthusiastic and larger than the Obama crowds.
The magic of the Obama campaign of 2008 seemed to be gone.
Remember that inspiring campaign and the rhetoric and people crying when they heard his words.
You didn't see any of that in 2012.
There was nothing inspirational at all about this.
Instead, it was just a nasty campaign where he demonized his opponents and told people that if the Republicans were in power, they were going to take fill in the blank away from you.
It was a different campaign, and I think it led to a lot of optimism on the part of Republicans that they were going to win.
Also, 2010 occurred.
After Obama came into power and put in place the stimulus bill and followed it up with Obamacare.
We had a real revolution in this country.
The Tea Party movement happened.
Millions of people who had never been politically active before got involved.
They were scared by the spending.
They were scared by the level of debt.
They were scared by this tremendous expansion of the dependency class.
It wasn't the country that they were living in.
They fought back.
The 2010 elections occurred.
Republicans won everywhere.
They even won in Massachusetts when Scott Brown won that scene in Massachusetts.
It was the harbinger for what happened in the rest of the elections in 2010 where the Republicans pretty much won everywhere.
There was therefore a lot of confidence that that was going to carry over to 2012.
And then you had history.
History tells us that when the economy stinks, the incumbent president loses.
When the economy is okay, so so or better, the incumbent president wins.
You can go back throughout the last 100 years and that pretty much is held.
The economy was in poor shape.
We were adrift.
Most Americans were pessimistic about the future.
All of those are signs.
For those of you who follow what all of us guest hosts have to say, I predicted that Obama was going to lose.
I thought Romney would win the election.
But it didn't happen.
And I think it's important to understand why it didn't happen.
The easiest way to find out why it didn't happen is to listen to people who are on the other side.
So let's start with understanding this.
Obama didn't win by that much.
The electoral college margin is a little misleading here.
Sure.
Almost all of these swing states, the ones that decide the election, virtually every battleground state went to Obama, and almost every one of them went by less than five points.
The national popular vote was what?
About three percentage points somewhere in that range.
I think that's close.
Well, when they do polls, three percentage points is considered the margin of error.
We're still a country that was divided pretty much right down the middle.
A few more people, one and a half, two, three out of every one hundred were on the other side.
But they did win.
Why?
I looked at the exit polls.
I looked at what people were saying.
I listened to people in my audience who would call up and say, Mark, you know, I talked to my brother in law or I talked to my sister, I talked to my friends, they're all voting for Obama, and they say this.
And over and over and over and over you heard the same things come up.
Among single women you kept hearing.
Romney was going to take away my right to have an abortion.
Or Romney was going to take away this.
Remember the famous video we saw of the woman who said, Well, the Obama phone, Obama gave us the Obama phones.
I'm gonna lose my food stamps if Romney wins.
Romney's gonna take this away or that away, and some of these things weren't all that significant.
He's gonna end a program in which some people are getting free phones.
This is what you're basing your vote on.
Free contraceptives, free this, free that.
This shocks many people who would have hoped that people would cast their vote on something other than self-interest.
What free Benny we're gonna get.
But it is what happened.
For years, many people have worried that the Democrats' attempt to get everybody dependent upon government would be their lock on power.
Once they could make the middle class as dependent as lower income people and senior citizens are on government programs, so the thinking went, then you lose the middle class as well.
I think that's what's happening.
I think that Obama is hooking people on government programs.
The problem, and I think for that matter, the mistake that many people make in analyzing the election is to blame Obama for that.
Now I do think there are looking back, and everything's easy to understand after it occurred, there are things that were unique about this election.
Without a doubt, the black vote for Obama was overwhelming.
Exit polls what, 95, 96%?
The black voter turnout in 2012 was as strong as it was in 2008.
Many people didn't see that coming.
The so-called enthusiasm gap in which people were convinced Republicans would turn out in higher numbers than Democrats, that did not occur.
The Democrats did get their people out to vote.
And I do think certainly there was a matter of real pride for many blacks to re-elect a black president of the United States.
I don't know that a white liberal who would have screwed things up as badly as Obama did have had the same loyalty from black voters.
You also had the fact that Republicans are being tuned out by virtually all minority groups right now.
Asian Americans went for Obama, Hispanic Americans went for Obama.
We know the problems with the black vote.
The Republicans are having a hard time communicating to really all minority group members.
That's true as well.
Still, the Democrats have dominated most of those groups in most elections, but they haven't always won.
Something happened this time around.
When you listen to some of the reasons that people gave for voting, you understand what the problem is.
The problem isn't Obama.
The problem is the people who voted for Obama.
Never mind sixteen trillion dollars in national debt.
How about eighty-six trillion dollars in unfunded liability?
An economy that's going nowhere, loathing of the private sector, despising virtually every industry he can think of, including the except for the handful that he bailed out, looking down his nose at the notion of an energy independence in America, looking down his nose at manufacturing, looking down his nose at anybody who tries to make money, looking down his nose at anyone who starts up a small business.
These are things that in the past would have been prescriptions for losing.
Usually when you make a mess of things, the public turns on you.
But that's when the majority of the public voted for something other than their simple self-interest.
If government was always as simple as, I'll give each voter something and say the other guy will take it away, every politician would have always done that.
That never worked until now.
I can prove this point.
Any Democrat over 40 years old, you ask him which Democrat they most admire, they still all say John F. Kennedy.
This is so far removed from John F. Kennedy.
We are the comp the Democratic Party, and for that matter, maybe the majority of Americans are so far removed from the soaring rhetoric of Kennedy's inaugural address.
Ask not what your country can do for you.
Ask what you can do for your country.
Now, what can I get out of my country?
Can I get free contraceptives?
Can I get the free Obama phone?
Can I we're proud of the fact that we have more people on food stamps now than ever before?
I think people are voting out of selfish interest.
That's what happens when they become dependent.
We've all seen this.
Think of any kind of dependency that you can that you've seen in your life, be it alcoholism, drug addiction, the family member who never seems to have a job and is always borrowing money from the relatives, the losers that are among us.
Once you become dependent on someone else or something else, some drug, some gambling, some other high, it's hard to shake.
People have become dependent upon government.
If you look at the single at the exit polls, the single women vote for Obama was overwhelming.
Romney actually did very, very well among married women.
Single women vote though was just extreme.
Obama directly appealed to single women, implying that they needed him and all of the programs the government was going to create.
We'll take care of you.
The Republicans are going to leave you adrift.
People voted off of that basis.
I think there's real selfishness there.
Do you not care about our debt?
Do you not care about whether or not we're going to have viable private sector again?
Do you not care about whether or not our manufacturing industry will recover?
Do you not care about the fact that we don't have enough energy that we've got all these energy resources here in our own country that we're not taking advantage of?
Do you not care about the fact that we are spending 40% more than we are taking in and that that can't go on?
I think they put their hands over their ears when people like me make that point.
They don't want to hear it.
Because they need their thing now, and I do think deep down they know this can't go on.
It's going to end more quickly than even they realize.
But they know it isn't going to go on forever.
But when you become dependent, you lose all rationality.
The reason so many of us didn't see any of this coming is because we're not like that.
We believe in an America in which your response, you make your own bed.
You want the opportunity to succeed, but if you don't succeed, you realize it's on you, and it's up to you to dust yourself off and get up and move forward again.
That's what I think the Tea Party movement was about.
I think it's what the entrepreneurial spirit that made America great was about, and I still think it's what the basic American value and American dream is.
But a lot of people aren't buying into it.
The problem with this election wasn't just in my mind Obama.
It was people who voted for him for the worst of all reasons.
They just wanted to keep living off the rest of us.
I know that sounds harsh, but it is how I see it.
1-800-282-2882 is the phone number if you'd like to react to any of this.
My name is Mark Belling, and I'm sitting in for Rush.
As we move along here, I'm going to tell you the story of the West Point GOAT and how it's the antithesis of the dependency mentality that many in America have succumbed to.
There's a column in today's Wall Street Journal, though, by William McGurn, in which he addresses what I'm speaking to here, how the Democrats deliberately use this as a tactic, the dependency mentality.
Let me quote a couple of paragraphs.
During the 2012 campaign, we conservatives had great sport at the expense of the Obama administration's Life of Julia, a cartoon explaining the cradle to grave government programs that provided for Julia's happy and successful life.
Remember that thing?
They put this on this website.
They had this Julia who was a single single woman, and she was the beneficiary of this program when she was going to school and this program, and now she gets this and that and the other thing.
That was mocked and made fun of this notion that you're going to run for re-election, campaigning on giving stuff away to someone, and some would vote so selfishly that they would simply vote to keep getting all of those programs.
Well the reality is it worked.
Back to McGurn.
The president, alas, had the last laugh.
For the voting blocks that went so disproportionately for the president's re-election, notably Latinos and single women, the Julia view of government clearly resonates.
To put it another way, maybe Americans who have reason to feel insecure about their futures don't find a government that promises to be there for them when they needed all that menacing.
That was their strategy.
Here's my point.
I believe in a weird way, Obama benefited from the miserable economy he gave us.
Some people were so fearful about their futures and so pessimistic about whether or not things will ever get better.
That they decided that they needed that safety net that Obama was promising them, which wasn't just a safety net.
He was going to keep giving them all of this stuff.
If times had been better, maybe so many people wouldn't have felt that they need the federal government, i.e.
their fellow man, i.e.
the rich or whatever demon is created to leech off of Mark Belling and for Rush.
I'm Mark Belling sitting in for Rush Limbaugh, offering up my theory that dependency has become a far greater problem than we understand.
We've got so many people that are dependent that it is very, very hard to persuade them to vote against politicians who keep feeding them the things that they are dependent upon.
You know, one of the things that conservatives have been mystified forever about is how socialists keep getting re-elected in European nations.
Socialism fails everywhere it's been tried.
Why do they keep voting for socialists?
I think we see the answer here in the United States.
Look at what's happened in grace.
Grace is broke, they're out of money.
They're being told that in order to get a bailout they have to have some austerity program.
They're rioting over that.
When you become dependent on big brother government, when that becomes your daddy, when you are beholden to him rather than yourself, you're going to keep voting for all of those programs, even if in the end, you're voting for your own destruction.
It's not going to end well.
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