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Dec. 3, 2012 - Rush Limbaugh Program
37:51
December 3, 2012, Monday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of The Rush 24-7 Podcast.
Okay, folks, I got I I'm confused.
I'm going to admit being confused to you here.
I'm I'm listening to all of the learned analysis and reaction to the murder suicide in Kans City on Saturday, Joe Van Belcher and his uh girlfriend.
And the reason I'm confused is because I don't I don't know if Belcher playing football caused him to murder his girlfriend or if the gun caused him to murder his football girlfriend.
Um because we're hearing from um uh leftist social reformers that both situations are possible, that it was the game of football that led to brain concussions, which led to all kinds of irrationality and oddities.
There's a big lawsuit going on, former NFL players against the league.
Uh and and then uh in and it's the same people.
The same people are telling us it's the gun that caused the problem.
That it's not the in fact, there's sympathy.
You know, I I was watching the game last night, like a lot of people were, and I and even during the day, even pre-game coverage, there was sympathy.
There was a tad of sympathy for Joe Van Belcher.
He murdered his girlfriend.
You know, that didn't get a whole lot of play during the day.
What got a play was his suicide.
And he went to the Chiefs practice facility on Saturday morning and and wanted to thank everybody there for giving him a shot.
What a good guy.
After murdering his girlfriend, he still wanted to go over and thank people.
The fact that he murdered his girlfriend, a mother of his child a boot, sort of got second tier display.
And then, of course, last night, during halftime, Bob Costus devoted 90 seconds to the NBC slash HBO official political position on guns.
And I had people sending me questions.
By the way, phone number, I'm Rushland Boy, you know that if you want to be on the program, 800-282-2882, the email address, Lrushboard EIBNet.com.
A lot of people sent me um emails and texts and something it was flying.
And and they wow, how how come Costas gets to express his opinion during halftime of Sunday Night Football?
And I said, answer simple because that's the opinion of his bosses.
He gets to express the opinion because it's what NBC thinks.
It's what his friends at HBO think.
It's what it's what the uh the left believes.
And so wherever the commentary is given is perfectly fine.
It's not a it's only when commentary that does not comport with the leftist view of things is offered, say in a football game, that it's not permissible.
But if you're gonna offer liberal opinion anywhere is fine.
Anywhere, no limits to where you can do it.
But opinion that differs from the traditional liberal viewpoint is not only frowned upon, it is snuffed out.
And it is not permitted.
So that's the easy explanation for that.
You know, there is a, you know, what do you keep mentioning HBO for?
Well, uh this is just a uh this is inside baseball, admittedly, but uh NBC HBO, they're they're my own observation here, nothing official, but the people involved go back and forth Saturday night live back and forth HBO.
They're all in the same people, they have the same political view.
If you want to work at either place, you have to be a certain political type person.
That's just the best way to explain it.
Just the way it is.
I mean, you can count on the fact any time you see anybody anything on HBO, you're gonna know what they are.
And now that's the same thing with NBC.
It's all I mean.
But I also watched last night uh the season finale of Boardwalk Empire.
It must have been a hundred people get shot to death in some of the goriest bloodiest violent crime scenes ever depicted on television by the same people who can't wait to take guns out of everybody's hands.
So, you know, I I really where are we headed here?
Um where we want to ban guns because the gun kills the person, not not the person pulling the trigger.
And of course, have you heard Costa cited in his commentary last night, Jason Whitlock, who uh has a column at Foxsports.com, and Whitlock basically said, Look, all I know is this.
If the guy didn't have a gun, he and the girl would be alive today.
No, we don't know that, sadly.
Uh I'm sure there are knives in this guy's house.
And I'm sure that if he wanted to strangle her, he could have.
And he clearly was irrational.
Uh the the gun, the gun and the even the availability of it is not why he killed her.
And the gun and the availability of it is not why he killed himself.
But that's, you know, to say that, ladies and gentlemen, is totally unacceptable.
To say what I just said is to be blind and to ignore the reality staring at us, because there were no gun.
If he couldn't have gotten a gun, then she'd be alive and he'd be alive, and the baby wouldn't be an orphan, and everything would be hunky-dory, and the Chiefs might have even lost.
Everything would have been as it should have been.
And I just live in Realville, and my problem is that I am governed by logic.
And some of the claims that are made by people on the left just don't hold up.
I mean, look where we are now.
If if we could just ban guns, if we could just ban soda pop, if we could ban sugar, if we could ban salt, if we could ban trans fats, if we could ban private health insurance, if we could ban oil, if we could if we could ban me, we'd have a perfect world.
If we could ban all these things where there wouldn't be any global warming, there wouldn't be any suicide, there wouldn't be any obesity, and uh there'd be no high blood pressure, and there'd be no need for national health care, and then nobody would die.
How many of these murder suicides you think take place a year in America?
Did you hear that number?
Six hundred.
And you hear about one because it involves a uh a football player, but the other 599 go by and you and you don't hear about them, and so there's not uh a lot of emotion ratcheted up.
But I think folks, uh I've been talking about here how I sense a move uh to radically alter the way the game of football is played, and I fully expect someday it's actually happened.
There have been serious proposals to ban it high school, and pretty close to serious proposals to ban it in college because it's the concussions, you see, that lead to the altered brain activity, which then lead to the irrationality, which then leads to the events like we had in Saturday.
Uh in addition, we're gonna stop eating meat.
We're gonna have to stop sitting for long periods of time.
You hear about that now.
If you uh there's a new study out that says sitting has just absolutely dire health consequences.
If you're sitting stand up, or you're going to die.
I have the story in the stack here.
Incandescent light bulbs.
What we gotta get rid of the incandescent light bulb and go with the the the uh compact fluorescent because the incandescent is is causing global warming, which is causing the sea levels to rise, which means that we're gonna have floods.
Uh like we did have, except it was from a hurricane, which of course also came from global warming and oil and the incandescent light bulb uh and all of that.
I mean, it's there are bad people, and there are ill people, and there are irrational people, and there is nothing that can be done about it.
Certain things are just going to happen.
But I uh you you you look at the go-to liberal reaction.
Every highly publicized death In America is to blame the Second Amendment, to blame American gun laws, which are constitutionally granted.
And it seems to me that that's the cop-out, that is an easy, almost lazy way to approach this.
Because the real root of such things that happen Saturday are never explored because we can't.
What we might discover and what we might then have to reveal about our discoveries would make everybody too uncomfortable to hear.
And it might lead to charges of racism and discrimination, and we can't have that.
So we're never going to get to the root causes of events like that.
And by the way, this is I'll never forget.
Shortly after my TV show started, 1992, or actually shortly before it, there was the most senseless.
It was in Chicago.
Remember, three year olds or five-year-olds were killing three-year-olds with guns and so forth.
And I did a little commentary on the radio and then on TV.
Have we lost our soul?
And it was about kids that were getting hold of guns and killing kids.
And I said, you know, the gun's one thing, but what what what in the world is happening to the culture where such a thing is even possible?
And I wondered what has happened to our national soul.
I'm curious about getting to the root of all this, which we can't do, folks.
We just have to admit it.
It's not politically correct to go there.
But there are root causes for behavior like this.
There are societal issues that surround events like what happened in Kansas City over the weekend.
You can ask some questions.
I'll go ahead.
What have I got to lose?
They're going to ban me anyway.
Okay.
They've been trying.
Might there have been a better outcome if there had been a marriage involved between Mr. Belcher and his girlfriend?
I don't know.
All I know is that I look at all the statistics on single parenthood and uh children out of wedlock and what happens to kids in those circumstances, what happens to the fathers in those circuits is not good.
Just isn't good.
Might there have been a different outcome had somebody been able to recognize that this guy, Javon Belcher, was not right.
Was he depressed?
You read the news accounts, I think they're all over the place.
It was the ideal relationship.
No, it wasn't.
He was a drunk and he was on prescription medication and he was suffering from concussions and brain damage.
Then no, the team has no record of any brain damage or injury.
So we don't know what to believe.
I mean, the stories are all over the ballpark.
Could we maybe get the feminists of this country to honestly address the subject of violence against women?
Instead of making it a political issue to go after conservatives, how about actually looking at it and who is involved in it and why it happens?
Rather than simply using it as a political football to advance liberalism.
Could we talk about the damage that decades of liberalism have done to the American family, particularly minority families, busted them up?
The federal government has provide has been the breadwinners, but now it wasn't in this case, but it's nevertheless there is a social disintegration taking place in way too many parts of this country.
And there are reasons why it is happening.
And this deterioration and this cultural rot is often glorified.
And it's it's it's held up as something to emulate and be part of because it's cool because it's different, because it isn't traditional.
And Of course, tradition is old fashioned and stodgy and is therefore the enemy.
For example, if if if we if we hadn't taken religion out of as many lives as we apparently have, uh would the situation have been I don't know.
I'm I'm just throwing out some possibilities other than the gun because a really disturbed individual was disturbed long before he got the gun.
A really disturbed individual was really disturbed or snapped long before he got the gun.
I'd like to know how long he had the gun before he used it.
Why didn't he use it the minute he got it if the gun is what causes this to happen?
But never, folks, this will not this is the probably the last will be said of this point of view on this, because this is not politically correct and it's not sensitive and so forth.
So we've got to get rid of the gun.
The gun otherwise everybody still be alive.
Everybody that's dead in this country because of a gun would be alive if there were no guns.
I take a break.
I mean, that's the theory, among many others.
Right back after this.
And we're back.
El Rush Bow the cutting edge of societal evolution in his halftime commentary last night, Bob Costus quoted Jason Whidlock.
And one of the things that he quoted Jason Whitlock is saying is handguns do not enhance our safety.
They exacerbate our flaws, they tempt us to escalate arguments and bait us into embracing confrontation rather than avoiding it.
Now, let me respectfully dissent from this.
How many places do we know where the citizenry is allowed to carry guns, the crime rate has gone down.
The crime rate.
How many places do we know with the strictest gun control laws, which also have the highest crime rates in the country?
I give you two off the top of my head.
One would be Washington, D.C., and the next would be New York City.
Both places have among the most stringent, the tightest gun control laws in the country, and yet gun crime is through the roof in both places.
And yet, I'll do a Google search on it and I'll find it for you, the number of towns, communities where citizens are allowed to carry.
And you'll see that crime goes down.
When the bad guys know that the that the good guys are also armed, crime goes down.
And what troubles me, folks, is that in all of these scenarios, it's always the good guys who were blamed.
Javon Belcher was not a good guy.
He murdered his girlfriend, the mother of his child.
Now there will be, mark my words, an attempt to have this blamed on football and concussions and head injury and because that's the trend.
That's where we're headed.
This has been the trend in the NFL for quite a while now.
And so it's a convenient way to explain what happened.
I mean, I it was kind of surreal, almost surreal, watching the NFL yesterday as you list people talk about this.
You couldn't, as I mentioned, you you you had to really listen closely to be reminded that Mr. Belcher killed murdered his girlfriend.
The story that was told was how he went to the Practice facility and ran into the general manager Scott Pioli and asked him to get the head coach and an assistant coach, Romeo Cronnell and Gary Gibbs to come out.
And he spent time thanking them for his shot.
He was free agent, was not drafted, small school in Maine, not considered a football factory, yet he made it.
He's thanking these guys.
And they're try the story is that they failed to reach him.
They're doing everything they can to talk him out of killing himself.
But the the overall tone of this is well a great guy.
Shows up and he wants to thank.
You had to really search for the first part of this story, and that is that he murdered his girlfriend.
It was there.
It's not that they hit it, but that it it that didn't comport with the picture that they wanted to paint about this.
So I think it's I think it's pretty safe to assume that a number of cliches, which are untrue, will now gain even more agreement, and that is that handguns do not enhance safety.
You can show where they do.
And I'm sorry if it offends you.
You can show where the strictest gun laws in the country have no impact on crime.
In fact, the highest crime rates in the country are in those places.
You don't hear about it because it doesn't fit the narrative.
It doesn't fit the template.
Uh template.
Jerome Belcher shot his girlfriend nine times.
There's something more going on here than just the fact that he had a gun.
And you watch before it's all said and done, it'll it's it'll be football.
Concussions, brain injury, so forth.
I got to take a quick time out.
There's much more straight ahead, don't go away.
There's a there's a woman by the name of Nicole Brown Simpson.
She was at one time alive, but now she's dead.
And you know what killed her?
No, a man.
I don't care.
A human being killed her.
I knew it's not it's a trick question.
The answer is a knife.
But the knife didn't kill her.
It was the instrument of death.
The knife is an inanimate object incapable of doing anything without being in somebody's hands.
Somebody using the knife killed Nicole Brown.
So it didn't matter.
Two points here.
There wasn't a gun, and Nicole Brown Simpson's still dead.
It was a knife.
But the question is, who killed or what killed Nicole Brown Simpson?
The answer is not a knife.
Knife of the end.
Yeah, she died knife wounds, but somebody had to pick up the knife and use it as my point.
Same thing with guns.
You know, folks, I was um well, okay.
Let me give you some of these statistics quickly before I run on to make another point here.
Um a bunch of websites, facts fact checks and stuff that I checked during the uh during the break.
Uh here's a stat for you.
The 31 states that have shall issue laws allowing private citizens to carry concealed weapons have, on average, a 24% lower violent crime rate, a 19% lower murder rate, and a 39% lower robbery rate than states that forbid concealed weapons.
States with concealed weapon laws allowing the law-abiding to carry, experience much less of the kind of crime it happened Saturday in Kansas City than states which do not allow concealed carry laws.
Mr. Whitlock is just wrong.
But he's wrong in a cliched way that has become standard operating procedure belief for the left.
Guns kill people, people don't kill people.
All people are good.
It's just external forces and influences usually brought on by Republicans, cause them to do bad things.
Or policies brought on by Republicans, cause them to do bad things.
This is from the Cato Institute, by the way, in case you want the source.
31 states have concealed carry laws.
24% lower violent crime rate, 19% lower murder rate, 39% lower robbery rate than states that forbid concealed carried weapons.
In fact, the nine states with the lowest violent crime rates, every one of them are all right to carry weapon states.
Right to conceal.
The nine states with the lowest violent because the bad guys know the good guy is likely armed.
And if the bad guys are the aggressors who set the rules.
It's the good guys who have to defend themselves.
The good guys are not responsible for this.
The good guys, by definition, they're good guys.
They don't commit crimes.
It's another thing.
You can have all the gun laws in the world you want.
Somebody wants a gun, they're gonna go get one.
It's called crime, and it's there.
And again, New York watched Chicago.
Chicago has some of the most stringent gun control laws in this country.
How many people are being killed every day in that city?
How many.
This is just a truth that people do not really want to delve into.
It's a truth that many people don't want to accept because it's very hard.
It's very easy to blame the gun, and you can score a lot of points by doing what cost us.
You score a lot of points by doing what Whitlock did.
Score a lot of points with your bosses, score a lot of points with uh the people you want to score points with.
Just come out against the gun.
Just come out for gun control.
That's why I said being a liberal is one of the easiest choices in life in the world.
You don't have to tackle anything hard, you don't have to really do anything.
You just have to make people think that you follow the pop culture conventional wisdom on whatever the issue happens to be.
I was watching a um another television show that I've I kind of like it.
It's a British show, it's on the BBC, it's called the Hour.
And season two just began.
Episode one of season two, there's a guy, one of the lead characters in the show.
Between the season finale of season one and the first episode of season two has apparently gone on sabbatical and traveled the world, and part of his travels were to America.
1956, 1957 is when the show is set.
And it's about the BBC, by the way.
The show's about the BBC and a television program called The Hour.
Sort of a forerunner to 60 minutes, if you in the early days of black and white television.
It's this lead character.
In one of the one of his first scenes in season one, episode two, is telling his female best friend and boss.
No, take it back.
He's telling the lead anchor who's a typical dolt of this show, you know.
I just got back from America.
You know what I liked about America?
I was a nobody.
I was a nobody in a country filled with people who think they can be somebody.
They all think they can be somebody in America.
And you know what that was infectious?
Made me want that.
So I'm back here, he says to this character.
And I want to be the best I can be.
Now the implication was not lost on me.
British culture at the time is the waning days of the British Empire.
But the obvious implication or inference, that the British population, the idea of being the best you can be is not something that was part of life in Great Britain, like it was in America.
Distinctive American exceptionalism.
A Brit sees America for the first time and is blown away by how people that are nobody think they can someday be somebody.
And I heard that line go by and I hit pause and I grabbed my iPhone and I made a note.
So that I would remember to talk about it today.
Because that to me is all part of American exceptionalism.
The idea that You can be whatever you want in this country.
The idea that the sky is the limit for you want to be somebody you can.
Now, what I fear is there's less and less of that thinking in this country.
And it's been replaced by more and more defeatism.
More and more fatalism.
And to the extent that there are still people who run around saying, I want to be the best I can be.
I want to be somebody.
They want to be on TMZ every night.
They want to be on Bachelorette.
Or they want to be featured in their house on Crib of the Week on MTV 8.
Yeah, of course I know about Cribble.
Look, and I know all about pop culture.
How can I talk about it if I didn't know about it?
Absolutely I know about Crib of the Week.
Crib of the Month, too.
My point is, and I'm going to circle back here to Joe Van Belcher and the crime rate in Chicago and all of the social rot that's occurring in this country.
And I'm going to tell you folks that what we are discussing here in trying to explain why Joe Van Belcher did what he did.
For those seriously interested in finding the answer, just don't want to take the easy route and blame guns.
If you really want to find the answer, in the process, you have to admit that you and I have is one of the primary fears that we have in this country.
One of the primary motivations for us to go out and vote, excuse me, was in virtually every walk of life, political, cultural, social, we are concerned about the rot that's taking place across our culture, from the highest levels of politics to the highest levels of corporate business, to the highest levels of any industry, to the lowest levels of society.
There is a corporate.
There is a not corporate, there's a cultural rot, an evaporation, a blurring of the lines which defined morality.
Right, wrong, good or bad.
Now it's a it's risky territory to wade into the water and say something's wrong.
Because that means you're judging and you don't have that right.
And I would submit that the thing that has all of us uneasy, those of us who are uneasy.
It's not the fiscal cliff.
It's a symptom.
It's not four more years of Obama.
It's four years of the people who elected him.
It's what has happened.
Have we really reached the tipping point where?
We're now like Great Britain in the 50s, where there's no real thought that you can be somebody in this country.
It's over.
Kids are not going to do better than their parents.
All of these things, I mean, don't care what issue you're talking about, be it political, social, cultural, this is this is what's bothering us is what is happening to however you want to def label it, the sense of propriety,
the sense of right and wrong, the moral code, our soul, however you wish to characterize it, we're all uneasy because the things that seem to use to hold the culture together, the population together, seem to unify us, they're all been blown to smithereens.
And it's very hard to identify them.
It's very hard to point out because it seems so everywhere.
It seems like you can't count on any institution to be what you always thought it was.
I mean, we've got the commanding officer in Afghanistan with hundreds, thousands of whatever tweets to a socialite in Tampa who is in her mind an actual consulate to South Korea.
Asking for diplomatic.
It's absurd.
We got General Petraeus, four stars, the most respected.
Of course, there's Obama.
I mean, they're all over The place.
And it seems like that the more outrageous, the more disgusting, the more rewarded.
And then I was thinking, okay, but isn't this happen all the time?
And is this is this maybe those of us that feel this way, is this maybe a sign that we've become what we vowed we would never become, and that is our parents.
I mean, when I was growing up, the Beatles were to my parents what the cultural rot today is.
No, it's certainly it was to them.
And I'm saying, is it is it no different today than it was then?
Well, you think it's a lot different.
You think it does seem to me that there's a lot less glue.
There's a lot less agreement, the population at large over what the good things in life are, how to achieve them and how to acquire them and how to live your life and so forth.
It does seem that it's entirely different than...
cultural and societal structure that exists today.
And the reason it has me alarmed, the reason it makes me think that it is different than it was today, You know, when uh parents were scared to death of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.
If you look at the lyrics of Beatles songs, they're all about love.
You look at the lyrics of pop music, and they're talking about killing cops.
Or worse, or what have you.
My only point is that this Javon Belcher thing highlights, for a lot of us, something that really, really concerns us.
And it's not it's not just that the politics of the day seems so screwed up.
It just seems everywhere you look in the country.
The majority don't look like what you all thought America was not too many years ago.
I have to take a brief time out because of the constraints of the programming format.
We'll be right back.
Don't go away.
Okay, to the phones we go now as we kick off a brand new week of broadcast excellence hosted by me, L. Rushball, uh, behind a golden EIB microphone, Alex in High Point, North Carolina, 23 years old.
Great to have you on the program, sir.
Hi.
Hey Rush, how's it going?
First of all, love the show today, very deep, a lot deeper than the usual shows.
And uh, this is the type of core stuff that we all need to be talking about.
And uh, I was going to talk about the American dream.
You were.
Alex, do me a favor, slow down just a little bit so that I can hear you.
It's not your fault.
It's it's me.
I just need you to slow down a little so I can hear you.
I'm just enthusiastic.
Um I was going to talk about the American dream, and that used to be for some reason, and I don't know where it changed, but it used to be the opportunity.
The American dream was not a white picket fence and a dog in the yard.
It was the opportunity to be a nobody and become someone.
And now I feel, and I don't know where it changed, I feel like it's become it's become something to obtain.
It's the it is the white uh it is the white that could fence and the dog in the yard, and and you know, the grill and the whole the big house and whatever, what whatever.
It was never really that.
Um because it's not something everyone gets.
It's the opportunity to have that.
You can have that if you work hard.
Yeah, but uh let me tell you what's going on.
There has a you're 23.
There's been I'm I'm 60, whatever it is, one.
And for longer than that, uh there has been an effort to attack the whole concept of the American dream because it's rooted in capitalism, and not everybody does attain it.
You're right.
You're exactly right.
The American dream was about freedom of opportunity.
You have the chance.
It has now morphed into an expectation.
And if it isn't provided, or if it doesn't happen, then people feel cheated.
They are told that the country's unfair and unjust, and so they join the people who protest the capitalist nature of the country in favor of somebody's promise that everybody can have everything they want.
Yes, sir.
They want they want the iPhone, they want they want a check, they want to work a minimal minimum wage job.
Well, no, wait.
and pay rent.
No, everybody's always that's always been the case.
They want it now.
And since they if they can't have it now, somebody should buy it for 'em.
That's what's changed.
I I totally agree.
I think I think I think on in part it's the generation before me, uh, that wanted to give more to their children, uh as baby b baby boomers, wanted to give more to their children, and they did because America was so great.
And and a lot of my generation, and hopefully not the generation after me, but a lot of my generation feels entitled to things.
And it's and it's sad.
Well, yeah, I I I I I too have my problems with the baby boom generation.
I, of course, am a member.
And the baby boom generation made up a whole bunch of people, including the sixties radicals who are now running the country.
Or people like them.
But there were other factions of uh of boomers.
But I'd say the boomers, I've had a theory for the longest time the baby boo generation had life so easy compared to their parents and grandparents that they had to invent their traumas to tell themselves that life was tough.
Compared to their parents and grandparents, life has been a piece of cake.
And yet these are the people that complain the most, the boomers.
Uh my generation.
No question about it.
Look at that's a great uh call, a great point, Alex.
Spe Alex, hang on just a second, hold on for like five or six, do not go away.
Be back here in just a second.
Alex, are you still there?
Alex, are you there?
Yes, can you hear me?
Do you want an iPhone, Alex?
You want an iPhone 5?
No, no, I paid for mine, actually.
Uh, you paid for mine.
Well I did, what a shame.
It is.
How about an iPad mini?
You want an iPad mini?
Uh that'd be great.
Okay, cool.
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