All Episodes
Previous Next
Dec. 21, 2012 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:39
December 21, 2012, Friday, Hour #1
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
And greetings to you, music lovers, thrill seekers, and conversationalists all across the fruited plane, El Rushball on Friday.
Let's roll.
Live from the Southern Command in sunny South Florida, it's open line.
Yes, Sir Ebon, this is it, folks.
Open Line Friday, and it is the last day of this busy broadcast year that I will be behind the Golden EIB microphone.
After the program today, winging my way westward to parts unknown.
Well, I know where I'm going, but nobody else does.
We're going to be back here on January 3rd.
Is that right?
That's what I told you.
I'll be back January 3rd.
It was originally going to be January the 7th.
I said, no, that's just too long.
So we're going to be back on January 3rd.
Anyway, since this is it, we've got some Obama Christmas music that we're going to treat you to today and some other stuff.
We also have Open Line Friday, which is where the audience callers get to choose what it is that we talk about.
That's not the case Monday through Thursday.
Monday through Thursday, this is a benevolent dictatorship.
On Friday, we open it up to full-fledged democracy.
Well, not quite, but it's as close as it ever gets.
Monday through Thursday, you have to talk about what I care about.
Friday, doesn't matter.
Whatever you want to talk about.
Whatever you comment, question, remark is, for the most part, fair game.
So have at it.
Phone number 800-282-2882.
The email address ilrushball at EIBnet.com.
We'll get to Plan B here in just a second.
I was up very late last night.
I was up exceedingly late consuming adult beverage.
We actually only had one.
But I didn't get to bed about 2.30.
And I was getting ready to go to bed long before that.
And I started getting emails from people blaming me that the vote on Plan B failed in the House.
I kid you not, Snerdley.
Blaming me for riling this audience up and threatening members of Congress via phone call and facts that I didn't take a position on Plan B. If you have been listening carefully and closely, you know that I believe this whole thing went up in smoke weeks ago when Boehner agreed to raise taxes on the rich.
That's what Obama's been after.
He got it.
You can't put that genie back in the bottle.
We lost the election.
I mean, the idea that I actually had somebody send me a note.
Would you please explain to me how and by the before that part of the note, this person practically was quoting me verbatim unknowingly.
I apparently had not listened to me.
It was telling me strategically about how Obama wants to go over to Cliff and he's going to get credit for cutting taxes after we go over the cliff and so forth and so on.
You know, so I'm reading what I have said already.
Somebody has written me this.
And then, would you please explain to me how this is going to end up with Obama getting blamed?
I just don't see it.
And a little red light went off.
Somebody is out there telling the inside the Beltway conservative intelligentsia that I have some strategy that I'm telling you about that guarantees Obama is going to get blamed for this.
Excuse me, I'm the guy who's been telling you from the get-go, if we can't make Obama own the first four years of his term, what makes us think we can make him own a weekend or one day of going over the cliff.
I have never been under the impression we're going to be able to blame Obama for this, and I don't have a strategy to blame Obama for.
We lost the election.
I spent a lot of time yesterday explaining, and we now have a better idea, an excellent idea of why we lost, but we know why we lost.
And it's not that we didn't move to the center enough, and it's not we got all the independents.
We didn't get our base out.
We could have won this election by a pretty big margin if the Republican Party weren't so skittish of conservatives.
Anyway, that's, I don't want to rehash all that.
That's from yesterday.
But if anybody is under false impression out that I don't have a strategy for blaming Obama for this, I'm not an idiot.
I can see the polling data.
Only 24% of people blame Obama.
The rest blame the Republicans.
And the bottom line is this, no matter what the Republicans do, they're going to get the blame.
That's written, etched in stone.
The media templates and narratives are written.
Whatever they're saying about Plan B failing is what they were going to say, regardless what happens.
Wayne Lapierre went out today.
Wayne Lapierre called a press conference to announce what the NRA is going to do on this.
And he was disrespected, shouted down.
Code Pink is there calling him a hater and a killer and a gun nut and a wacko.
No matter what he said, Wayne Lapierre sounded like an adult looking for real solutions, but that's not what this country's interested in right now.
Sorry, the adults are not running this show.
Pierre sounded like a guy looking for real solutions.
He said the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.
It happens to be true.
But you just can't say it.
Look at the you call it a stack deck or rig game, whatever, but the fix is in.
The NRA is the enemy.
The NRA is hated.
Go to Twitter.
Go to Facebook.
Go to ABC, CBS, NBC.
Go to any of the blogs.
Go to any of the newspapers.
The NRA is to blame for this.
And there's no way we're going to be able to turn that around.
Lapierre tried.
Code Pink shows up.
Have you ever noticed that the left never interrupts hearings about Fast and Furious?
Where hundreds of people died because of U.S. policy.
Ever noticed that Code Pink never interrupts a hearing on Benghazi, shouting, there's blood on your hands.
The Democrats can get away.
They run the show here.
The Democrats and the Liberals own the media.
They own Twitter.
They own Facebook.
This, I mean, the idea that I think somehow there's a strategy to make, what I think is going on, I think that there are some delusional conservatives who believe that there is some policy the Republicans could adopt in the House that's going to guarantee the American people see the truth about Obama.
Sorry, if we couldn't pull that off in four years, what makes us think there were going to be the only thing we can do is stand by our principles so that we've got that going down the road.
But when we agreed to raise taxes on the rich, that's when I thought it was over.
I know I'm still, in terms of the Inside the Beltway intelligence conservative media, I'm still a lone voice in this belief.
People are writing in refutation without mentioning my name, but I know they're reacting to me because I'm the only one saying this.
But I'm as convinced now as ever have been that Obama's objective is to wipe out the Republican Party.
Political sense.
Just because we don't view the Democrats that way doesn't mean they don't look at us that way.
While we're preoccupied with showing we can be bipartisan and get it along, what are they doing?
They're in all-out destroy mode.
And if you don't understand who Obama is, why he thinks he's where he is, and what he thinks his job is, and what his desire is, if you don't understand that, then you're never going to understand anything I say about it.
If you don't accept the fact that Obama believes this country was unjustly, incorrectly, immorally, unfairly founded, and that for 230-plus years, this country's been a stack deck and a rigged game in favor of 2% of the population.
They've taken all the money from everybody, and they've made sure nobody else ever gets any.
It ran around the world, and they plundered the rest of the world, stole this, stole that.
We don't deserve to be a superpower.
The U.S. military focus of evil in the world with torture.
And Obama has arrived in his messianic way to fix this finally.
After 236 years, it's not time to fix it.
It's time to make it fair.
It's time to address all these grievances that have been in place for 200 plus years.
Why do you think we're drifting further apart racially again?
And don't tell me that we're not.
We are.
The war between men and women is heating up.
This country is drifting apart, more divided than it's ever been in my lifetime.
And all of this is the result of policies taking place in the last four years.
So you've got a guy who thinks that it's time now to fix this country, make it what it should have been in the first place.
And the first thing that has to happen here is that the guys in charge of the rigged deck, stack decked, rigged game, pay the price.
Time for them.
So hello, tax increases on the rich.
It's time to punish them.
And even if they don't get punished, it's time to make everybody else think they're being punished.
It's time to make everybody think we're getting even now.
We're finally fixing this.
It's much easier to tell failures and unsuccessful people that none of it's been their fault.
It's always been them or they, the people who really run the show.
They've been in charge and they've managed to arrange things so that they have all the stuff and that their families and friends and so forth get all the stuff and their networks of.
And you've been shot.
Well, now here comes Obama in a Robin Hood sort of way as far as they're concerned.
And the real danger that I think we face, and I mentioned this earlier, is that Ronald Reagan is a transformative president, in the sense that he genuinely changed the trajectory of the country, genuinely changed the direction the country was going.
And Obama knows that.
He admires Reagan in that sense.
He wants to emulate him.
But his transformation is not Reagan-esque.
His transformation, he wants to be Reagan, but he hopes to transform this country back to or into a quasi-European socialist so-called democracy.
That's what Obama wants is for the majority of people to think that him, his policies, that liberalism and socialism are the great hope, the great salvation.
That's the transformation he's seeking to make here.
Now, if you don't believe that about Obama, or if you don't accept that about Obama, then you're going to have a tough time agreeing with anything else I say about it.
So here comes Obama and his class warfare plan, and that's not being executed because it's traditional Democrat Party policy.
This is being done because Obama genuinely believes this stuff and wants other people to believe it.
This country is a mess.
We have a bad economy.
We have an unfair job situation.
We have unfair this discrimination there because government has bestowed too much on the rich.
And it's time to take it back now.
It's time the rich paid the price.
So tax increases on the rich is a small part of it.
But in terms of perception, in Obama's voting constituents, it's big.
He's got a lot of people that are really champing here.
I mean, they love the fact.
Obama's finally going after these people, going after Lapierre.
Going after all these people that have created this mess.
And so if you establish as the premise that our economy and every other problem we're having is directly traceable, let's just stick with the economy.
If you're able to make the connection that unemployment, housing prices, values, house market, whatever, every economic problem is because the rich haven't been paying their fair share.
How many people really think we're going to balance the budget?
If we raise taxes on the rich, you'd be shocked.
How many people really believe that?
No matter how many years they've been told it'll only run the government 11 days, doesn't matter.
They believe, and Obama is helping facilitate this.
They're low information voters.
Low information voter means a high liberal information voter.
You know, people can only absorb so much information.
Most brains have a limit.
Mine, of course, larger than most, but most people's brains have a limit.
And if most of your brain's filled up with liberal gobbledygook, there's not much room left for reason.
Anyway, so what Obama wants is a confession, a concession that he's right, that the rich, the elites, the 1%, 2%, whatever you call them, have an unfair advantage.
The government's given them too much.
The government hadn't taken enough from it, whatever.
They're the reason that there's poverty.
They're the reason that people's incomes are down.
Because they're taking all the money, and they've always taken all the money, and they have all the money.
Obama's going and getting it now.
So when the Republicans come along, it's okay, we'll see that.
We'll raise tax on the rich a million and above.
I guarantee you they pop champagne corks to the White House when that happened because that's the Republicans agreeing.
But that's the generic view of this.
I'll get specific after a brief time out here in the plan B circumstance of what happened there and what's being said about it and how I think that's incorrect in some places.
But I'll tell you this, from what I've been told, and if I want to be, I'm connected.
And if I want to call somebody in the house and get some information, I can.
I don't a lot, but if I want to, I can.
And in this situation, I did.
And what I have been told by a bunch of people is that the speaker was never even close to having the votes for plan B, folks.
That this whole thing was a giant roll of the dice.
He was never even close because most of the Republicans do not want to cave in.
You realize Republicans have not agreed to an income tax rate increase since 1990.
George Bush, read my lips.
It was the last time it's happened.
And this current crop in the House doesn't want to be the one to break the record.
They weren't even close here.
Plan B wasn't even close.
It was really risky even calling the vote.
Anyway, anyway, I take a brief timeout.
Also, today we're going to introduce our new, just to give you a taste of what's coming in the new year, our attempt here to expand this audience even more and attract the low-information voters.
It's going to be great, folks.
You don't want to miss it.
Great to have you here.
It is Open Line Friday, Rush Limboy, and the Excellence in Broadcasting Network.
Wayne LaPierre went out today, and I just, this has been a very, you know, it took me an hour to send two checks today.
It took me an hour to arrange for two people to have money transferred to him.
It's been, we have, for two days in a row, we have lost our primary ATT service here.
Two days in a row.
We're running on backup now, and not every device will receive email.
Not every device will send it.
And if you don't, it's just a mess.
It's amazing.
And so a lot of distractions we're fighting through.
Anyway, it's going to see if the soundbite roster has got LaPierre on it.
And not okay.
Nobody does.
I don't really.
Well, maybe I will use it if we get it down to.
Anyway, he went out, sat low, lied low for a couple weeks.
NRA, of course, is to blame for what happened, Sandy Hook.
Oh, yeah.
NRA is to blame.
CNN has been ginning up hatred for the NRA for a week.
The rest of the drive-by media has been ginning up hatred for the NRA for a week.
The NRA, very classy, laid back for two weeks, didn't say anything, didn't get involved, didn't attempt to exploit it one way or the other.
They are the greatest, the largest gun safety organization in the country.
So LaPierre goes out today, gets heckled, shout it down.
And when he gets to the meat of what he's saying, CNN goes to a commercial break.
We'll be back.
Hi, how are you?
Welcome back.
Ill Rushboy, the cutting edge of societal evolution, not the cutting edge of tech.
I've got two emails that I need to print from my iPhone, but because our system is down here, it won't work.
So I'll work around, forward the emails to another email address that I can print from, but that's not working because we're on backups and triple backups and so forth.
And it's amazing that we're even here today with all of this.
Two days in a row, this is exactly the same time, 11 a.m. both days.
Well, we're on plan B and plan B isn't working.
Speaking of Plan B, Let me tell you why conservatives and the like are upset over Plan B not passing.
There is, and I, folk, I'm going to admit here, I may be in a very small minority of people who think this.
I just, as you know, mayor of Rielville, we lost the election.
Elections have consequences.
We also do not have very many conservatives in elective office who can articulate it.
We just don't.
We also have a Republican Party in paralysis, paralyzed with fear.
And this paralysis is becoming a self realization, self-fulfilling prophecy.
Fear of being blamed is leading people to behave in such a way as to guarantee that that happens.
So Plan B, just to refresh your memory of what Plan B was.
And the House, by the way, has already, this is what's maddening.
The Republicans in the House have passed two pieces of legislation going back to last August that have dealt with the fiscal cliff.
Obama just won't agree to any of it.
And the Senate will not support it.
The House has already, the House is negotiating with itself.
The House is voting against itself.
In August, and one other vote after August, the House has already passed legislation that would give Obama what he says he wants other than raising taxes on people.
The Republicans are adamant that that's not a problem.
But we've dealt with the fiscal cliff in two pieces of legislation, but Obama's rejecting it.
So the Republicans go back and try to come up with something else.
He rejects that.
He's going to reject everything.
Now, there are some conservative media types, some elected Republicans and others who think that there is a way to expose the president in the fiscal cliff negotiations.
And by expose the president, what they mean is that there is a way to see to it that the American people blame him.
The polling data on that right now, where we are, to the extent that people are paying attention to this and understand it, 24% think Obama is to blame.
67% think Republicans are to blame.
And the rest don't know, don't care, but probably think that Obama is the innocent party.
So there is no blaming Obama here.
There's no strategy that's going to result in the American people thinking the guy they just reelected, the guy they're not holding accountable for anything, the guy who's not responsible for anything going wrong.
There's no magic bullet here or no magic piece of legislation that results in Obama getting blamed.
But we have people on our side in delusions who think that that's possible.
So now they're wringing their hands that Plan B went down to defeat.
They're mad at people like me because they think I ginned up all the opposition to it when I didn't take a position on Plan B.
I didn't urge you to do anything.
I didn't tell you to call Washington.
I didn't, you know me.
I thought this was all over when we agreed to raise taxes on the rich.
This has been, we went over the cliff.
I said a long time ago, actually, economically, we went over the cliff in this country.
I don't know how long.
But in terms of over the cliff in the current vernacular, when we agreed to raise taxes on the rich, that's all Obama needed.
So I'm hearing a fairly consistent argument out there that by stopping the Boehner vote on tax increases, it's a foolish victory because now the Democrats are capitalizing on this by saying the Republicans just voted to increase taxes.
In other words, we have commentators and media types who claim to be conservatives attacking other conservatives because of the Democrats' attacks on Republicans.
It is as though Democrat attacks on Republicans are brand new and they're only happening because of the intransigence of certain conservatives in the media.
Now, I don't know how this pretzel logic works, but do people in Washington, my question, do they really not know what is actually happening in Washington?
They really not understand what Obama is doing here?
Not with just the fiscal cliff, but his whole agenda.
Obama was always going to blame Republicans for tax increases.
That is what Obama and the Democrats and the media want.
Tax increases.
They want to be able to get the Republicans to agree that that's been the problem all along tax cuts for the rich.
And so Obama wants any he wants tax increases.
He wants the Republicans to get to blame for it.
And no matter what happens, that's what's going to happen, what will happen.
And by passing Plan B, which was a tax increase, wouldn't have changed anything.
It's giving Obama exactly what he wants, in my view.
Obama had already said that the Speaker's proposal would result in tax increases because Obama couldn't sign a bill that wasn't supposedly balanced.
And Plan B, Republicans were voting for the first time in decades, since 1990, to raise income tax rates.
That's what had been maneuvered here.
I don't know how that gets construed as victory.
Now, some people say, well, you're getting it off the table, Russia.
They're moving on to spending cuts, and the media isn't going to go to the Democrats and say, okay, what are you going to put?
It's not going to happen.
The media is not going to go to the Democrats and say, okay, Republicans have done their part.
Now, what are you going to do?
It's not going to happen.
The story is going to be Republicans agree to raise taxes.
And the champagne corks are going to pop.
So the Republicans would have not had a leg up politically.
They would have been on record supporting tax increases.
That somehow wins.
So I know by agreeing to raise taxes on 1 or 2% of the people and keeping tax rates the same for everybody else, Republicans hope to get credit for not raising taxes on 99% of the country.
And then when their taxes do go up, that Obama gets to blame for it.
But what's always going to happen, what was always going to happen here is that taxes are going up and then Obama's going to ride in later as the white knight and offer to cut them.
Now, I think the way to do this, and again, I don't do their job, and it's easy to be critical of these people when you don't know their job and I'm not in their shoes, and it's easy in the armchair being a quarterback, it's easy from a distance to say what they ought to be doing is this or what they ought to be doing is that.
I understand all of that, but you know what would have been great?
Pass a bill that cuts taxes.
If Obama's going to veto something, make it a bill that cuts taxes for middle-class people or go ahead and pass Simpson Bowles or some version of it, Obama's own deficit reduction panel that he totally rejected.
But if you want to put the onus on Obama, if your objective here is see that he gets blamed for something, if that's your objective, then pass a bill that cuts taxes.
Be Republican and be conservative and pass a bill that cuts tax.
Mr. Limbaugh, that is absolutely absurd because everybody knows with the deficit and the national debt that people are not paying enough in taxes.
Now, what we need to do is increase taxes underrates their clothes.
This is my whole point.
That's just Washington speak.
That's narrative stuff.
That's right out of the template.
That's what everybody inside the Beltway thinks.
So think outside the box.
The objective is to put Obama in a hole.
If the objective is put the onus on him, then pass something he doesn't like.
He's going to reject and veto everything he likes.
What is that, Mr. Lamont?
Do you really mean to say that?
Yes.
The Republicans have offered him everything he wants.
They've had some spending cuts in there that he doesn't really want, but they've offered tax increases on the rich.
Major.
They've offered him the rates on the rich.
They've offered to leave the tax rates on the middle class the same.
He says, no way.
He wants to go over the cliff.
I'll tell you this.
I was telling Mr. Snerdley this morning, this theory could be cockeyed.
See what you think.
There are some people who believe that Obama doesn't want to go over the cliff.
I happen to know that Speaker Boehner is one of them.
Speaker Boehner is confident that Obama doesn't want to go over the cliff.
That's why Speaker Boehner has been writing legislation as he has.
Now, I think he does want to go over the cliff, but Speaker Boehner and others think that he doesn't, that this is all a big bluff.
Okay.
Plan B being defeated.
In fact, beat so soundly that it wasn't even called for a vote.
Do you realize what that means, that they were nowhere near having the votes?
And it raises another question.
Why even call for the vote when you're in that bad a shape on it?
But this may flush Obama out.
Okay, so the Republicans have demonstrated they aren't going anywhere near where Obama wants.
The Republicans in the House are not going to cave.
They're not going to give him what he wants, the admission, the confession, the concession that their policies are to blame for this.
So he knows that if Boehner is now going to have, for Boehner to get anything out of the House, and to avoid the cliff, the House is going to have to pass something that the Senate will pass that Obama will sign.
And the Republicans have just put their foot down that this isn't the way to do it.
Now, if Obama does not want to go over the cliff, this might flush that out.
It's a long shot, and I'm just thinking off the top of my head.
But if he doesn't want to go over the cliff, he really doesn't.
He just has everybody thinking he does want to, but he really doesn't want to go over the cliff.
This failure of Plan B, this dramatic giant failure is going to tell him he's going to have to make some movement in the Republicans' direction.
Now, I happen to think he wants to go over the cliff.
I happen to think that he's salivating to go over the cliff.
It's a Democrat wet dream, folks, going over the cliff.
I mean, it is stuff they've been dreaming of all their lives, like getting health care.
Got to take a break, be right back with much more.
Don't go away.
Still trying to print something here.
Okay, greetings and welcome back.
El Rushbo and the excellence in broadcasting network.
So my point is here, folks, when some people argue that Plan B, the tax increase on the rich, over a million dollars, when some people argue that that would have put the onus on Obama, that that would have exposed Obama, would have somehow won the political argument, they're wrong.
The Republicans supposedly going to have big talking points, expose the president.
We've given him what he wants.
The president's had what he wants since August.
The president won the election.
There isn't anything.
I'm not one of the group that thinks there's a strategy, a miraculous strategy, where the end result is Obama gets to blame.
But if you want to put the onus on him, if that's what your objective is, if you're sick and tired of getting blamed for everything when you're not responsible, if you're sick and tired of media hating your gun, send him a tax cut, not a tax increase, and make him go wailing and moaning about that.
Mr. Limbaugh, that is absolutely silly.
The Republicans would be tarred and feathered for tax cuts for the rich in the midst of it.
No, these should be tax cuts for everybody.
Because that's what Obama is going to end up proposing himself if we go over the cliff.
I just, I don't know.
Being asked to vote against your own principles for some specious argument that won't put the onus on Obama.
It was like deja vu, been there, done this.
I don't know.
Every budget deal.
I don't know one that we've won.
I can't think of any one of these that we've won.
And now it is apparent that the objective is to see to it that we don't get blamed to hell with what we do in terms of substance.
Let's just make sure we don't get blamed.
And I just think for the long haul, you stick to your principle and what you know is right, policy-wise, and that's what you propose.
Knowing full well it may well be defeated, but we lost the election.
And again, I don't mean to sound like a broken record here, but we haven't been able to have these first four years stick to Obama.
He's somehow not at all responsible.
He's not even present.
He's not even involved.
This is all Bush's fault still.
The idea there's some magic bullet out there that all of a sudden the fiscal cliff, the American people, the Obama phone people, the low-information people that made him person of the year are going to all of a sudden say, oh, this is Obama's fault.
It just, it isn't there yet.
So if he really doesn't want to go over the cliff, if he really doesn't, this Plan B blowing up may actually flush that out.
Just to illustrate my point, the White House has a graphic posted at their website.
And you know what it says?
It says that Boehner's Plan B raises taxes on the middle class.
It doesn't.
It leaves middle class taxes exactly where they are.
There's no tax increase for anybody except the rich in Boehner's plan.
The White House is lying through their teeth.
The media is repeating the lie.
Republicans raise taxes on the middle class.
▲
Export Selection