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Dec. 19, 2012 - Rush Limbaugh Program
30:24
December 19, 2012, Wednesday, Hour #3
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So as always, I checked the email during the top of the hour break here.
And it's surprising, surprising number of people.
Rush, why don't you why don't you ever talk about the things people say about you?
You are criticized all the time.
You are lied about.
Why don't you ever complain?
Um I've had to evolve my own life lessons.
And when I started this program in 1988, not one person who knew me thought I hated anybody or thought I was a racist or a sexist or a bigot, and within six months of this program started, I was all those.
And it was reported daily all over the country.
Newspaper racist, sexist big, and homophobe.
And I didn't know how to deal with it.
And I didn't know what to do about it.
I sought advice and remember there wasn't one person that could tell me the way to deal with stuff.
I mean, people literally lying about you.
And so what I had to do was, and it took me four years.
I tried a whole bunch of different ways.
And no matter what I did, it just made it worse.
Any reaction to any criticism delighted the critics.
And all they did was pile it on.
And to learn early on that where conservatives are concerned, the truth about them is the last thing anybody wants to report.
It's the lies and distortions, the mischaracterizations, the character assassinations that people want to report.
I would do media interviews and I would attempt, you know, tell them, no, you're wrong about me.
There was no convincing them.
Their point of the interview was to get me to confirm for everybody that I was what they were saying.
I was.
So I'm I'm not the one to provide lessons on this, because I would never advocate anybody do what I've had to do.
And that is I've had to learn to take being hated and despised as a measure of success.
Nobody is raised that way.
Hitler may have been, but nobody is raised wanting to be hated.
Nobody is raised, running smiling, talking about how much they're disliked.
It's just the exact everybody wants to be loved by everybody, and they'll do everything they can to be loved, including not be who they really are, from person to person.
So I don't in those rare moments early on, back in the early 90s when I would confide with friends.
This is really hurting my feelings as well.
They said, Oh, come on.
That's why you were in the big bucks.
I said, Oh, earning a lot of money, there's that's the price to be lied about every day, Miss Kurt.
Yep, yep.
That's that's what people who had not experienced it.
That was their theory.
And others say, hey, this is what you signed up for.
You're gonna go out there and tell people what you think, you're gonna irritate half the people here, and that's true.
But through all of what I've experienced, I do I do really believe that it would be a benefit to everybody.
The more people who could learn to be unaffected by what people think of them, uh, the better off those people would be.
But again, nobody's raised that way.
Uh people grew up in prominent families, have it especially bad.
From the moment they're born, they're told how they're supposed to act and how they're supposed to be perceived, and can't dishonor the family name.
And the Kennedys did it anyway.
But there's all kinds of pressure like that brought to bear on certain people.
It just it's uh I only saying this because the we we had a couple of callers who say well, it's understandable that some people might crack, go get a gun and start killing people if they're rejected and laughed at and isolated and made fun of, and my belief that everybody is either all of their lives or at some point in their lives, and not everybody cracks that way.
I just don't think that is a valid excuse.
There has to be some underlying mental illness that promotes some some instability first before the cracking takes place.
But this is I I'm even uncomfortable talking about it at the risk of sounding like I'm complaining.
I'm not.
Another thing I believe is reality.
I'm the mayor of Realville.
It is what it is.
And we live in a country right now where an increasing number of people do not care about the truth and don't want to be anywhere near reality, and they live in cocoons.
And if you if you puncture the cocoon and force them to face things they don't want to face, they're going to lash out.
And that's uh that's just uh part and parcel.
What's it what's happened.
What happens?
But uh like I say, I I'm uh it's I I don't want I wouldn't want everybody to have to uh learn to take being hated as a sign of success, although you've heard the phrase, I'm honored by my enemies.
That's true, too.
Depending on your uh metal and so forth.
Some people just can't handle being disliked.
Some people just can't know no matter what uh they can't handle it, and it really bothers them.
And unlike everybody else, it did for the longest time to me, too.
I mean, even before uh I started my national radio show.
We're all disliked or envied or whatever.
That that's my point.
Everybody experiences this.
And they deal with it in their own ways, but not everybody grabs a gun and starts mowing people down.
It's not an excuse.
At Obama's press conference today, Jake Tapper got the last question, and the one did not like it.
And we have the exchange for you, Jake Tapper.
You you want a guy can't deal with criticism?
By the way, it's our president, who I don't think could could live a day in my shoes, actually, but I can't even say that.
That sounds like I'm complaining, and I'm not.
Anyway, Jake Tapper basically said, Look, you've been talking about doing something on guns for four years, and you haven't done diddly squat.
Why not?
That's the essence of the question.
Here's how Jacob Tacker Tapper asked it.
It seems to a lot of observers that you made the political calculation in 2008 in your first term in 2012 not to talk about gun violence.
You had your position on renewing the ban on semi-automatic rifles that then Senator Biden put into place.
But you didn't do much about it.
This is not the first incident of horrific gun violence of your four years.
Where have you been?
In fact, this is Obama's fourth.
This is the fourth violent mass death incident.
One per year is how it's averaging out for Obama.
And see, here's Obama up there.
What what does he do?
Obama gets to live in this phony world where he's Mr. Perfect, and he's never criticized.
And whatever he says is treated as though it's near biblical.
And so Obama has lived off this notion that he's wor doing everything he can to stop these things.
And he was gonna make sure they didn't happen in the first place.
We're all gonna love each other.
We were all gonna be unified, and and we're gonna get a different country, and we were gonna be a political.
There wasn't gonna be any partisanship.
There weren't gonna be any disagreement.
That's what Obama promised people 2008.
That's what they thought he meant.
He did not dissuade people from thinking that about him.
When they wanted to treat him like a messiah, he accepted it and told them they were right.
He is a Messiah.
Whatever people wanted him to be, that's what he allowed himself to be.
So Jake Tapp, you know, here you are, you're up here pontificating every day about how much you care, and you're working hard on this, and where you've been the last four years.
And here was Barry's answer.
Well, uh here's where I've been, Jake.
Uh I've been president of the United States dealing with the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.
An auto industry on the verge of collapse.
Two wars.
I don't think I've been on vacation.
And so I think all of us have to do some reflection on how we prioritize what we do here in Washington.
You know, uh, if all of that, he keeps talking in virtually everything he says, be the economy or the his job or that what is this two wars business.
This guy couldn't have put up with World War II.
Can you imagine this guy being president during Vietnam?
Can you imagine this guy?
Can you imagine excuses he would be making for himself if Pearl Harbor happened?
Or if 9-11 had happened when he was president.
Oh, I think it did in Benghazi.
And he was perfect there, by the way.
The report's out.
Obama was perfect.
See, Obama's one of these guys, he lives in this bubble the media creates for him.
He accepts it.
He walks around believing he's special.
He's it.
He's loved and adored by everybody.
He's special.
There's nobody like him.
I have a gift, Harry.
And when he's confronted most presidents get questions like this 25 times a day.
Sam Donaldson lived off of questions like this to Ronald Reagan.
Reagan's answer was to smile and look at Sam uh, Sam.
That's just Sam being Sam.
And he'd laugh it off.
I guarantee you, Jacob Tapper is in some crosshairs now for this insolence and this disrespect.
And there might even be a phone call from the White House to ABC today.
So what the hell was that?
And the purpose of that phone call will be to make sure that kind of question is never asked again.
You don't ask dictators.
I be president's questions like that.
Disrespect.
So here's what do you mean?
I've been dealing with worst economy, Great Depression.
Yep.
And I've been working hard to make it worse.
You think it's you think it's easy to make an economy worse than what it found it?
I mean, I've been working hard.
You think you're tough keeping people out of work in this economy is real hard.
I've done it.
Auto industry on the verge of collab.
What's the news today?
There's something about GM in the news today.
Buying back stock.
We're gonna the taxpayers screwed multiple billions again.
There's no saving the auto industry, not in reality.
His chosen vehicle is one that nobody wants.
Save the auto industry.
And I haven't been on vacation.
This guy taking more vacation time and his wife more vacation.
If you add their vacation time, they've probably been on vacation more than they've been working.
So I don't think I've been on vacation.
So Tapper's basically saying, okay, these things keep happening, they keep getting worse, but you keep telling us you're working hard to fix all this.
Where are you?
I love the question.
It's one of the rare times Obama gets called out on this little false bubble in which he lives.
I gotta take a quick time out, folks.
We'll be back much more straight ahead.
Here is Joyce in Pittsburgh.
Joyce, I'm glad you called.
It's great to have you on the Rush Limbaugh program.
Well, gosh, Merry Christmas to you, and it's great to be on a song with you as well.
Thank you.
Please don't change.
Stay bitter and clinging.
We love you that way.
I can't change.
I can't change who I am.
I don't want to change who I love me.
Well, so do we.
So for Christmas, don't change.
Um thing I want to say today was as I listened to all the folks, and I am a gun advocate.
So listening to all the folks that are talking about, you know, what's wrong and you know, taking away the guns, and first of all, the left is a culture of death.
This is what they love me, from from abhorted children to Dr. Cavorkian to all the individuals that they want to put out of our ministry as we get older thanks to Obamacare.
But we we basically abort 4100 kids a day in this country.
Wait just a second.
This is I want you to hang on.
This is an interest this is a fascinating point that you're making because you're right.
The Democrat Party is a party of death.
They're they're obsessed with it.
Abortion, uh uh euthanasia, cavorkian, Obamacare death panels, but at the same time, and and this is what's difficult for people.
You know, you all you have to do is say that the Democrat Party is party of death, and you realize we're not persuading anybody to agree with us when we put it that way.
You understand that.
Because people believe in my life that the Democrat Party doesn't want you to die.
They don't want you drinking anything over sixteen ounces.
They don't want you eating trans fat.
They want you to eat all the stuff they say to eat, don't eat all the stuff, don't eat.
You can live forever.
You'll never get sick.
The Democrat Party is perceived as a as a bunch of people that that uh can save you from death.
But they are the culture of death, and then again, they're only gone for our uh you know, our best mental well-being, and that's why, you know, heaven forbid you can't have a cigarette commercial on television because you'll be so influenced that you might smoke.
But heaven forbid look at the movies, look at the video games.
And the same people who want to help us have now closed all of this.
We used to have a lot of state mental hospitals in Western Pennsylvania based in Pittsburgh, you probably know.
We had a lot that really did take care of the folks that a family could not.
I mean, just could not take care of them.
And they closed them all.
They mainstreamed the children into the schools, they forced them into group homes in the neighborhood, and therefore these poor folks have been forced to to, you know, basically uh I'm missing the word, cope.
They're being forced to cope in a culture which is not wr in their best interest.
They're trying to pigeonhole these poor folks, and I have no doubt that, you know, Adam Lance's mother was coping with a lot of that.
I have no doubt that the lady that wrote the the uh article the other day, I am Adam Lance's mother.
These folks don't have the ability to cope with what they with what they're dealing with every day.
It's harming the other children in the family because of what they have to go through to protect the one youngster who can't function.
And we're trying to force these kids to be normal, and because of things beyond their control, they were born and they will not be normal.
They've got issues.
What's happened to a a Western uh, you know, a Western center or in Pitts Pittsburgh area with Mayview and all sorts of folks that were there where they were cared for by folks that understood for their own safety what needed to be done.
I just rush I just don't understand.
Well, these people have rights.
Uh and they can't they can't be uh institutionalized or given medicine without their consent because they have rights.
The ACLU is right in there.
So I know it's a mess.
It's a total mess.
We are back.
Great to have you, Rush Limbaugh.
Christmas time, the EIB network and the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.
A um really great man died this morning.
Robert Bork passed away.
Complications from um heart disease.
He became a rhythmic last night, took him to hospital in Virginia.
They thought they had it stabilized, and uh early this morning his heart started beating wildly and uh finally passed away.
Robert Bork lived in Realville as well.
He was a brilliant author and judge, jurist, solicitor general for Richard Nixon, he was the man who did the so-called Saturday night massacre for Nixon during uh Watergate.
Nixon ordered a bunch of people fired, attorney general refused to do it, Bork stood up and did it, wrote some books.
I remember after he had um he was nominated at Supreme Court by Ronald Reagan, and nobody was prepared For what happened.
And I believe that what happened to Bork was what began the modern era of character assassination in American politics via the reprobate Ted Kennedy and what he said about Bork on the Senate floor.
The Reagan administration wasn't prepared for it.
Nobody, Bork, nobody was prepared for out and out lies to be told.
Nobody knew how to counter it.
Most people assumed that it would be seen as the rantings of a lunatic partisan Democrat and forgotten.
It wasn't.
It became Kennedy's rant became what shaped Bork's entire nomination.
And he was not confirmed.
And he was devastated by it.
Being on the Supreme Court to him was the pinnacle of life in his chosen field.
And he deserved to be there as much as anybody who's ever been nominated.
Brilliant mind, a devoted believer in the Constitution, believed in the concept of original intent.
But they lied about him.
In fact, he was maybe one of the first victims, the first victim of the so-called war on women.
Manufactured war on women.
I got to know him after that happened.
Early on in the history of this program, we did a series of seminars called the National Conservative Forum at various parts of the country, and I put together various conservative media people and professionals to show up and basically speeches,
lectures, take questions from the audience, two-hour seminar, and at the end of each one, all the guests would sit at a round table, which I would moderate.
And they were quite interesting and fun.
And I'll I'll Judge Bork came to a couple of them.
I always uh always introduced him by pointing out what I thought were his supreme qualifications, his attributes and his great character, and how I wished that he was unavailable for these events because he would be sitting on the Supreme Court.
The first time I met Bork was to interview him.
I was still working in Sacramento, and I went to Washington for a week, took my show there for a week, and one of the reasons why the powers that be were insistent that I do guests.
They thought you can't do a talk show without guests.
So they dangled this carrot, sending me to Washington for a week, as long as I would secure guests, which I did, uh help from a lot of people in putting together pretty good guest roster that week.
People like George Will had Vitali Cherkin, who was then a popular Soviet communist spy appearing unthreateningly on nightline every other week.
I remember, in fact, the night before Cherkin was to show up, I'm in my hotel room at the Mayflower, which is right across the street from the ABC studios on to Sale Street.
And I'm figuring that they've had to do a background check on me at the Soviet embassy to figure out before they accepted the invitation.
So I'm sitting in the room and I'm speaking.
I went to every lampshade and I said, please, Mr. Churkin, don't back out, thinking the room was bugged.
And if it is, I'm gonna make one last shot to make sure the guy shows up.
He shows up, great interview, but then Bork came, and I forget, I forget what the interview was about.
It was a little bit about his nomination, but there were other things that had happened.
It might have been the culture war.
He had written a book, slouching toward Gamor, although I think that came after this interview.
I asked him to hit, and his son was with him on the other side of the glass.
And I forget what the question was.
I asked him a pretty pointed question that he didn't want to answer.
And he danced around it.
The interview ended, went to commercial break, he left the studio, shook hands, he's standing on the other side of the glass, and I made one of the few errors that I have ever made as a radio host.
I stated something to the effect that, well, even though Judge Bork didn't answer the question, I think we all know what he meant.
And then I assumed and or presumed to answer it for him.
And he and his son were standing on the other side of that guy, and they were fuming.
Because what I had just done was not very professional.
It was harmless.
I should not have presumed to tell people what I had hoped he really meant or thought he really meant.
So later that afternoon, uh I was informed how angry and upset Judge Bork was, and I tried to get hold of him and apologize, they would not take the call.
And I fretted over this for a long time.
And shortly after my program, I got the uh opportunity to take the Sacramento to New York of August of 88 started it, and shortly after, I mean maybe my first year, there was a an event at the Pierre Hotel.
I remember what it was.
I'm not sure it was the Tom Wolf lecture.
Whatever.
Somewhere Bork was.
Might have been this, Pierre Hotel.
Tom Wolf was awarded the the Riston lecture on something or other, and he had talking about Bonfire the Vanity is the book he had written.
Bork was there, and I ran up to him, and I profusely apologized.
And he acted like he had no idea who I was.
And then remembered and said, Well, it's no big deal.
I'm I'm if this apology has helped you purge your guilt, I'm happy to participate or some such thing.
And after that, uh, we were on good terms for the uh for the rest of his life.
He was one of the funniest speakers that I've ever heard.
One year in Washington.
He just had people rolling and talking about the Kennedy event.
And it clearly something that that bother I mean, let me play what Kennedy said.
He had to live with this for the rest, knowing full well that a pack of absolute had had Kennedy not been protected by his Senate membership, Bork could have sued the Kennedy family into poverty.
Over these slanderous comments, here's what that it was July or June 23rd of 1987.
I think this is the beginning of the present era, which features the politics of personal destruction.
This is the first time that it worked in a major prominent way.
And it showed the Democrats the way forever after.
And the feature of this is that everything Ted Kennedy says here is an out and out lie, a misstatement, a mischaracterization, w however you want to term it.
It's his description of what will happen in America and to America and to women in America, if Robert Bork were to ever be confirmed to the Supreme Court.
Robert Bork's America is a land in which women would be forced into back alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens' doors and midnight raids, and school children could not be taught about evolution.
Writers and artists would be censured at the whim of government.
And the doors of the federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens for whom the judiciary is and is often the only protector of the individual rights that are the heart of our democracy.
That was so outrageous that at the time people were questioning Kennedy's purpose and sanity.
None of that is even close to true.
Insulting and slanderous.
Bork had to live with this the rest of his life and full will that a reprobate like Ted Kennedy was responsible.
And then he had to live with the Democrats celebrating it.
Then he had to live with the Democrats capitalizing on it, using this style against other people.
He had to listen to Democrats and the media applaud the tactic.
Kennedy was not through.
Here's uh it's it's this is one of the great moments in our history, and it's disgusting as it can be.
Here's here's one more from that Kennedy rant on the Senate floor.
America is a better and freer nation than Robert Bork thinks.
Yet in the current delicate balance of the Supreme Court, his rigid ideology will tip the scales of justice against the kind of country America is and ought to be.
The damage that President Reagan will do through this nomination, if it is not rejected by the Senate, could live on far beyond the end of his presidential term.
President Reagan is still our president, but he should not be able to reach out from the muck of Orangate, reach into the muck of Watergate, and impose his reactionary vision of the Constitution on the Supreme Court and on the next generation of Americans.
No justice would be better than this injustice.
And so was codified the description of conservatives and how to deal with them.
Robert Bork passed away today, and it's an utter shame that he did not realize his dream sitting on the U.S. Supreme Court.
He would have been one of the premier justices to have ever sat on a bench.
Let me give you a timely quote from Judge Bork.
He said a society deadened by a smothering network of laws while finding release in moral chaos is not likely to be either happy or stable.
Judge Bork, it was 80 summon, 87, regardless.
He's passed away, and it's uh it's a great loss.
And it's the fastest week in media, so it's tomorrow's Thursday already.
So we'll take a brief 21 hour break and see you then.
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