Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
Well, Merry Christmas, everybody.
Merry Christmas.
The latest reports are that Santa Claus is just about to leave the North Pole.
He's about to travel the world giving gifts to kitties all over the place.
The latest report is that Queen Elizabeth is asleep in Buckingham Palace, and the latest report is that Barack Obama is in Hawaii playing golf.
So all is right with the world.
Greetings and welcome.
Ladies and gentlemen, Douglas Rabansky filling in for Rush Limbaugh today on the Rush Limbaugh Show, the supersonically successful Rush Limbaugh show.
The phone number here is 1-800-28282.
Once again, 1-800-282-2882.
I welcome your telephone calls.
I'm going preparing to be on this show today, and I I just check in with Drudge as I do in the moments preceding the microphone being turned on, and there is Piers Morgan.
I hate using the word idiot to describe people, but if there's an idiot, Piers Morgan is the guy.
He's fit, as you know, he is the guy who replaced Lucky Larry, and there is now this petition to see him deported.
I love this.
We'll keep an eye on that.
Ladies and gentlemen, it will come as no surprise to you.
It will come as no surprise to anyone who listens to the Rush Limbaugh Show, because now the story is being reported that Mitt Romney did not, did not want to run for president.
Two of the most bizarre stories out there.
Now we knew he did not want to run.
We knew he did not want to win when I visited with you here behind this microphone back and um one month ago today, in fact.
I said to you then the man did not want to win.
He did not run a campaign to win.
He ran a campaign to govern.
Now we've got this strange interview that his son Tag has given to the Boston Globe explaining that his father was a reluctant candidate.
I got news for you, folks.
If you are in any way, shape, or form reluctant, don't do it.
Don't go run for the office.
The Republic hangs on this.
It's just like getting married to someone.
If you have any shadow of a doubt as you walk down that aisle, don't do it unless you know with certainty in every fiber of your being that this is the right thing to do.
Romney apparently was very, very bummed out after the 2008 nomination was lost to John McCain.
I mean John McCain is one of the characters in today's little tale that I'll be telling, by the way.
Don't want to get ahead of myself.
They're saying Romney was a private person.
He wanted to be with his family, didn't want to win, didn't want to run.
Well then why do it?
He didn't behave as a man who wanted to win.
Never for a second.
Never for a second.
Um they're saying that the campaign strategist feared that highlighting Romney's amazing biography would open him up to personal attacks, that he was wealthy, out of touch, and belonged to a minority faith.
Ladies and gentlemen, that is he wasn't opened up to it.
That's what happened.
He was attacked because he was wealthy.
He was attacked because he was out of they said he was out of they cast him in a mold that was out of touch, that was wealthy.
And it stuck.
It stuck.
It stuck.
He never pushed back.
Now we've got a companion story that's rather interesting.
A few days after the election, a friend of mine, a computer expert, tipped me off to something.
He said, you know, one of the reasons that the Romney campaign lost the presidency was that they had a terrible computer glitch in their get out the vote on the get out the vote day.
And I printed out the story, and I had it here in my stack when I visited you with one month ago today, and I didn't really get to it, and I don't have it here today because I have many more important things to talk about.
But lo and behold, fascinating little uh phrase is used here in today's Boston Globe story.
Story appears.
It says it was two weeks before election day when Mitt Romney's political director signed a memo that all but ridiculed the notion that the Republican presidential nominee with his better ground game could lose the key state of Ohio in the election.
The race is unmistakably moving in Romney's direction, says the memo.
The globe goes on, however, with this very curious sentence, but the claims proved wildly off the mark, a fact embarrassingly underscored when the high tech voter turnout system that Romney himself called state of the art crashed at the worst moment on election day.
Now the story goes on.
I'm not going to bore you with it, but the story does not address what it was, this thing that it talks about in paragraph two, the state of the art high-tech voter turnout system that crashed at the worst moment on election day.
No one has talked about this.
No one has talked about this at all.
When I was here talking to you in November, we talked about this idea about going negative, how Romney didn't want to run a campaign to win.
Now it's coming out that they were worried that unless the candidate opened up, he would be easily reduced to a caricature, that they would put that he would be reduced to a man of outstanding wealth, a man unable to relate to average people.
Well, he succeeded.
They succeeded as making him those things.
Candidate Romney, it was a disaster, and now we learn no surprise that he didn't want to win.
Now, about a year ago, about a year ago, we commented that this campaign that Obama was going to run to win the presidency a second time was going to be aimed at, this is my words, that it was a campaign aimed solely at the naive and uninformed.
I think Rush said, oh, maybe a year, maybe two years ago, Rush himself said that the most expensive thing, the thing that cost us more than anything in this country, was the ignorant voter.
Now, when I was here in November, we talked about this, and we talked about, and I opined to you then, and I'll opine to you again now, that anyone can run for president who believes anything at all.
If you doubt it, look at who we've just elected.
Don't doubt it.
Running as a conservative is not enough.
You've got to know how to speak, how to message, how to how to get your message across in a very good articulate way, and you've got to be strong, and you've got to admit you've got a desire to win.
You gotta pummel the other side down.
Well, now we are stuck with a reality.
The reality is that we have what Rush has called superbly the low information voter.
We talked back in November, Rush and others have talked about, I told you there was no such thing as a swing voter, there was no such thing as a swing state, that you could never win an election by appealing to those things, that those things were complete inventions of the political advisor class.
I call them the pink tie advisor class.
And now we learn that it is the no surprise, because many of us saw this coming.
The low information voter.
Ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, do you ask yourself about this question?
What do we do about the low information voter?
You say, well, the media is with the Democrats, the media's with the libs, the media is with Obama every which way, and I told you back in November, I said you gotta speak over the heads of the media, and it's quite easy to do.
And I used some examples back on that day, and if you need to be to repeat them to you today, I will.
But but you gotta speak over the heads of the media.
You've got to speak in bold, big, strong colors and concepts that they understand.
Reagan did this, by the way.
He didn't just preach conservatism.
He didn't he he articulated it well.
Conservatism, well established fact, I've repeated it before, Rush said it first, conservatism, when well articulated, always wins.
Big bold colors, big ideas, tinkering around the margins of things is not enough.
It is not enough.
Two percent tax, equity, uh, capital gains, oh, all this little stuff that's deliberately designed to bore you, to confuse you.
Look, ladies and gentlemen, we have a class system in this country, but we don't have a middle class, we don't have an upper class.
I can do three hours about why we don't and why we shouldn't, and how I resent when people use those words.
But we do have one class, we have the political class, we have the government class, The government employee class.
I get very worried.
In the day and age of the low information voter, in the day and age when the media is monolithically one direction.
I get very I start asking myself, what do we do about the low information voter?
How do we speak to them?
How do we get their attention?
There are ways.
There are very good ways.
And I used as an example when I was here the other day that uh Herman Kane did it very effectively.
It's one of the reasons the people on the left feared Herman Cain more than any other candidate in the race.
And if you doubt it, he spoke way over the heads of the media.
He introduced his plan 999, and what did the country talk about for six, eight, ten weeks?
999?
Is it a good idea?
Is it a bad idea?
But we were talking about something dramatic and big.
Not tinkering around the margins of what already exists.
Now, when it comes to tinkering around the margins of what already exists, we are told that we are about to go over a physical cliff.
Well, ladies and gentlemen, it is not being reported in the media at all that the president has made a proposal.
The president has a proposal before us as we sit here.
The president's proposal is the physical cliff.
Do you hear anybody on our side referring it to it that way?
The president's proposal is the physical cliff.
And there's only one person in Washington, one one one person, who can go across the street and bring all the parties together and negotiate.
That's the job of the president.
It's not the job of the Speaker of the House.
It's not the job of the Senate majority leader.
It's not the it's the job of the president.
This is one of the reasons Reagan was so successful.
He understood what the power of the presidency could do and where the where the real lever of negotiation could come from.
It could only come from one place, and that was the presidency.
But now, ladies and gentlemen, we are stuck with the physical cliff conversation.
And the word is a very um sanitized word, and I'll be going into why those words are there in a few moments.
I got a lot to get to today.
We're going to get to the story of Susan Rice that you haven't heard.
You may be aware that John Kerry is now nominated to be Secretary of State.
There's a lot of questions that should be asked of him.
Will they be asked of him?
I don't think so.
And then the big question before us.
What do we do?
What do we do about the low information voter?
How do we how do we protect the Republic and save ourselves from the low information voter?
And I've got four things listed here.
I'll throw at you today.
But I'll give you a hint.
The answer has to do with the political class that has been created.
The levers of money, the levers of power that these people control.
Anyway, ladies and gentlemen, the phone number once again is 1-800-282-2882.
It's Duggar Bansky filling in for Rush Limbo.
Short break, we'll be right back.
Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen of the Rush Limbaugh Show.
Doug Rabansky filling in Merry Christmas to you all.
The words physical cliff, I just want to deal with this.
It's a little bit like Y2K.
Y2K came and it went, and you woke up the next day and you didn't feel much different.
And this is the same thing is going to be with the physical cliff.
We'll go over it.
We may not go over it.
They'll kick the can down the road.
But basically, you'll wake up the next day and you'll say, Well, I don't feel too much different.
I guess it wasn't that bad.
It's over now.
We went over the cliff, didn't even break our ankle.
Ladies and gentlemen, these words are words that are there that chosen our side falls into using the language of the left.
They're meant to make you feel hypnotized.
They're meant to make you feel dumbed down.
We'll go over the cliff or not, but you'll wake up the next day and you'll be you'll be fine.
Now let's ask a question.
Who is the author of the physical cliff?
Well, you know who the answer.
The answer to that is that John Boehner was the author of it.
Ladies and gentlemen, oh, just over a year and a half ago, when we were engaging in the debt ceiling crisis, and a few commentators rush amongst them, talked about the fact that all they were doing was kicking the can down the road and eventually it would have To be dealt with.
The calculation was made both by Obama and by Boehner and the Republicans back in the autumn of 2011, when they were dealing with the physical cliff then and the debt ceiling limit.
The decision was made, oh my goodness.
The calculation was made, well, we're going into election year, and we don't want to be dealing with this right now.
The Republicans thinking this will cost us votes.
Obama thinking this will cost me votes.
Obama was there with his rotten economy, poised going into 2012 election with a rotten economy, and the Republicans were there saying, wow, this rotten economy is going to cost him the election.
Of course, Republicans didn't count on the fact that they had a candidate that didn't want to win.
But the Republicans were counting on the fact that this bad economy was going to cost Obama the election.
Ladies and gentlemen, over in Obama's house, they were counting on the bad economy to help him win the election a second time.
Very hard for conservatives to understand.
So they kicked the can down the road, and thereby at that moment, they authored what we're now calling the physical cliff.
That was John Boehner, who had the ability to not author it then.
But they did offer it.
There's a very famous chef.
One of these star celebrity chefs.
And I love the cooking shows.
And this famous chef went to a slaughterhouse, and he said seeing what he saw on the slaughterhouse was enough to make him almost become a vegetarian.
And I'm a bit like that too.
I love hamburgers, and I love steaks, and I love all the things that come from beef.
But if I went to a slaughterhouse, I wouldn't I I wouldn't like it.
I wouldn't be able to handle it.
I'm not born in 1870 or 1920, where if I want a pork chop, you know, we send the 14-year-old out to go slaughter the pig and we have we have roast pork for dinner.
We don't go down to Mrs. O'Leary's farm for some steaks from the cow.
We go to a supermarket, and when we walk down that aisle, the steaks are called sirloin, and they're called filet mignon, and they're called hamburger.
And they're packaged beautifully and they're lit beautifully.
Nothing to do with a slaughterhouse.
Ladies and gentlemen, the words physical cliff are the hamburger wrapping over the sausage factory over the slaughterhouse.
It's a disaster, and it's what Obama wishes.
We know it's what Obama wishes.
I mean, we had we had the story.
John, excuse me, Howard Dean.
Howard Dean went out there, and he made these extraordinary remarks.
He gave an interview, I think it was at MSNBC, oh, a week or two ago.
Dean said then that he wants across the board income tax increases that are in the current what we call the physical cliff scenario.
And he he was welcoming the rest of the outcome.
He says, Will it cause a problem?
Dean said this.
This guy was at one time touted highly to be the presidential candidate of his party.
He said, Will it cause a problem?
Dean Howard Dean says, yes, there will be a short recession, and it will be painful.
Howard Dean is there talking wanting a painful recession because he believes, he believes that if you do that, they're all giddy about higher tax rates, they're all giddy about cuts in military spending.
For them, for the Democrat mindset, a small recession or any recession is acceptable, provided it gets them the control of private wealth that they want.
They don't care what families are affected or hurt, what jobs, what careers, what homes get affected.
The goal is government control over all the economy.
Over there, then you had Obama taking, threatening the high profile charity groups in this country, either publicly support the president's tax hike plan, or face the possibility that the president's going to seek a to reduce tax deductions for charitable contributions.
And this was the rumor that was out there for two, three weeks.
So the physical cliff exists because the House, Senate, the President didn't have did not have the courage to make the cuts intelligently the first time around, and why should they?
Why should they?
Now, this is going to bring me to what I'll deal with when we come back from the break.
The four things, the four things to save the republic.
These are just ideas, I'll toss them out there to you.
Food for thought.
The four things to save the Republic, to protect you and I from the low information voter, from the political class, from the levers of power, from these people who are addicted to their positions of power and taxation, and who like to make everything deliberately confusing as possible.
Look no further than the United States tax code if you doubt me.
All right, ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the broadcast Doug Robansky filling in for Rush 1800-282-2882 is the phone number.
I want to get right to the big topic, the big topic.
Because when we talk in a little while about Susan Rice, and when we talk about Benghazi and the left is out there all weekend saying, well, let's put the discussion of Benghazi behind us.
No one's interested in us talking about Benghazi anymore.
When we talk about John Kerry, when we talk about Susan Rice, when we talk about Michael Dukakis, who's back in the news, when we talk about all the things that are going on, I want to bring it all back to the low information voter, the low information voter.
I've been troubled for a very long time, and I'm going to say things here.
I'm not going to go way off the reservation, but I'm going to put some food for thought out in the atmosphere.
I've been very troubled by the political class, by their power.
They're addicted to it, these folks in Washington.
The political class pulling the levers of power, the levers of taxation.
You can't even follow what's going on.
Complicated matters are distilled down to two words like physical cliff.
And whether you jump off it or not, you won't really notice it the next day.
You'll feel the same as he did after Y2K.
They love you being hypnotized, anesthetized.
They love it.
They love holding on to their power.
So fantasy item number one.
I have never been, ladies and gentlemen, a person who believed in term limits for elected office.
I've never believed in them until recently.
It's taken two, three, four years to come around to this, but really that's been rationed up a lot in the past year.
I am very tired of the career class politician not working for my vote.
I am tired of John McCain deciding what works for me in California.
I am tired of being a resident of California and having no one work for my vote at all.
The entrenched political class, the favoritism that they cause, the power they're addicted to, the taxation rules that you can't even follow, this endless tinkering around the margins to the point that your eyes glaze over, and radio hosts and conservative commentators are talking about capital gains and the rich and what is success to the point that you don't care.
And Obama ends up winning the conversation at every turn because the low information voter is thoroughly confused.
And who can follow it, by the way?
Who can follow it?
It's a full-time job.
And who can listen to talk radio all day?
You can't.
Nobody can.
That's a full-time job, too.
So the world is stressful, the world is complicated.
Things need to be simplified.
If you talk about term limits for every elected office in the land, particularly at the federal level, meaning our senators and our congressmen.
Think of who would not be there.
Barney Frank, Diane Feinstein, John McCain, Nancy Pelosi.
Go down the list.
No one is working hard to get anyone's vote.
These characters stay there long time.
I mean, someone said to me once, well, but Doug, they're professional politicians.
You want people of experience.
I'm not so sure.
My friends, I'm not so sure that I want people of experience anymore.
The only thing they seem to become experienced at is how to hold on to their power.
How to tax you.
How to keep things confusing.
We talk about taxation.
I actually did some research over the weekend.
I wanted to know exactly how long, how many pages are in the IRS tax code.
You go find it out.
Because it's very hard to find out.
I don't even trust the numbers that I found, but it's a lot.
The one I trusted most is this one.
That in 2010, the United States tax code was 71,000 plus pages in length.
In 2006, it was about 16,000 pages in length.
What is this?
What is this complicated tax code that these politicians seem so in love with?
What is it?
Ladies and gentlemen, this tax code means that it's a tax designed for every special interest in the country.
That there's a tax form for every special interest in the country.
The whole idea of the political class is to keep the tax code complex.
To grow the tax code, electronic vehicle credits, gas guzzler taxes, credits for alcohol used as fuel.
The political class love the complicated tax code.
I can do your show after show after show, and we can talk about the all the negative sides of progressive taxation, which is what we have in this country.
But what we have most importantly is a disaster of complication.
So I'm throwing out there in my fantasy here, term limits.
And someone said, well, then how do you how do you advance in political life?
There's lots of ways, but you gotta keep working at it.
If you're my congressman and you've served out your term limits, nothing stops you from running for governor of my state and winning and earning my vote.
And you serve out those term limits, nothing stops you from running for senator and working for and earning my vote.
Heaven knows there's a lot of ways to serve the country.
That's the key word, serve, not be served by.
I do not think our founding fathers, if it's important to you as it is to me, I don't think that they envisioned a political class that would be entrenched with reams of complications, reams of laws, reams of tax codes.
Item one, term limits.
Item two, devise a flat or a fair tax.
Have the conversation.
This'll get the attention of the low income, the low information voter.
Both of those items will get the attention of the low information voter.
When they have to work for our votes, these politicians will travel to the places where the voters are and frame the simple, big broad questions of the day that you can follow and you can understand.
And even places like the LA Times and the New York Times will have to write about on the cover pages.
Does 999 work?
Does a flat tax work?
What are the pros and cons of term limits?
Give the people something they can chew on, something they can understand.
That's bold, purple, orange.
Don't keep giving them the same old, same old.
Item three.
Item three.
Take away the power from regulatory agencies, take away from them the power of law.
Take away from them the power of law.
Make it so that every thing that the regulatory agencies want to do with the power of law must be debated in sunlight and voted upon as law by your elected representatives.
We've gone insane.
We're insane.
I'll throw one last one at you before the break, and then I promise I'll get to your calls.
We've gone insane, though.
Do you know that there are countries in the world whose constitution prohibits immediate relatives of someone who is president from ever running for president.
There are countries, and I have often fantasized that because you see, Mr. Surdley, I hear you.
We are creating a political class for the presidency also.
And it's a very dangerous thing.
Dynasties, family dynasties.
Imagine for a moment that if we had such an amendment, that your husband or wife or son or daughter or brother or sister, that no immediate member of the family of someone who's been president would be eligible to run for president.
Let us just look in recent history.
If that were the case, we would never have had George W. Bush elected because he would have been ineligible.
I'm not commenting here if that's a good or a bad thing, but I'm just telling you, he would have been ineligible.
Let's look at Hillary Clinton.
Hillary's presence on the political scene sucked an awful lot of energy from someone who was absolutely unprepared, unqualified to run for president.
We are told by various experts today that she is a shoe in.
She is going to be the next president, we are told by people.
Don't get me started about her today.
But she would have been ineligible.
Her presence on the scene sucked the energy out of finding real competitive candidates fighting for the votes of their constituents of their party.
We hear about Jeb Bush.
Ladies and gentlemen, we may one day hear, I wouldn't be surprised at all if Michelle Obama decided that she would follow the Hillary Clinton path, but that she would do it in the Obama style, which is to win.
That she would go on and run for senator from Illinois, and that she would go on and become Secretary of State.
Oh, I can see it, ladies and gentlemen.
We we've we are not designed as a third world country, so that political dynasties can vacuum up with no experience, no real life connection to American people, but oh my goodness, those airplanes are addictive.
The power of being in government, of being like these Chinese mandarins of old with their long fingernails making rules over you over me.
How much money of yours they will let you keep, how hard you've got to work, and on and on and on.
More to say on these four things and much else.
Dougarbansky filling in for Rush Limbaugh, we'll be right back.
We all remember um the Rahm Emanuel quote, I'm sure by the way, it's Dugger Bansky filling in for Rush Limbaugh.
The Ram Emanuel quote that everyone remembers is never let a crisis go to waste.
And of course, I there's another half of that quote.
The other half of the quote is he says, never let a crisis go to waste because it's an opportunity to do things that you otherwise wouldn't be able to do.
And one starts to wonder, have they even kicked that up a notch?
In other words, don't solve any crisis.
Let's keep us in a state of perpetual crisis and chaos so that you can do anything that you want to do along the way.
I promise I'd go to your calls.
Cameron in Hartford, Connecticut, you've been holding there, sir.
How are you today?
Good day, Doug.
I'm bringing you big tidings of no joy based on your theories of uh uh uh underinformed voters, uninformed voters.
The uninformed of the Republican Party is comprised entirely of uninformed voters, as is the Democrat Party, as is the Independent Party.
The only ones that I think are informed are libertarians, of which I am not.
But uh I I see no uh way whatsoever that there can ever be a free and fair election again of anybody who is a right-thinking individual.
Uh and I would cite a couple books, Doug.
May I do that?
Well, uh if they're family-oriented books, sir, sure.
Well, yeah, sure they are.
One is just how stupid are we is the title by a man named uh Chankman or something like that.
But the title is what's important.
Just how stupid are we?
And it has to do with the coverage of the last election and how very few people, including me and Robert Chicothe of New York, knew in fact what the outcome would be a year and a half before the vote.
We had to listen to all this business on all kinds of media about how Romney was close and Rodney was one point behind and one point ahead.
And it's all a shaman again.
Cameron, it was worse than that.
We were told that you could feel a gut instinct, you could feel a momentum.
We were told that the polls were wrong, and of course it turned out that the polls were spot on right.
Well, that's because the outcome is determined a year in advance, and they tell the poll makers, you see, so then the poll makers will be right because they're told what the outcome is.
They know the outcome in advance.
And and that's where we are.
And because you you talk about uninformed voters, everybody's uninformed, and they can play with us at their will.
We're we're nothing more than sheeple.
And and there's nobody that understands this other than, as I say, Robert Gicante of New York and and myself and and maybe a few others.
Maybe a few.
One other book, though, Doug, if I may.
Yeah, sure.
There's another book that's even more devastating uh and the reason why there is no hope for our future.
And that is uh published by Simon and Schuster, who is the publisher of Rush Limbaugh's excellent books.
And that title is called The Closing of the American Mind, written by Alan Bloom, published in 1987.
But but Cameron, Cameron Cameron, we're going right to the heart of the problem.
I'm not expecting listeners to go out and read all these books.
People are stressed, people are busy, people have problems.
This is what has led to the low information voter.
And this is why I am saying that speaking over the heads of the media in broad, bold and very important and very easy to understand uh concepts, will have a dual purpose.
It not only will bring information to the low information voter, it will also fix the country.
You've heard me here for the past uh half an hour talking about four fantasy ideas.
I'm throwing big fantasy ideas on the table to say we've got to do something that is proactively uh thought out that helps save the republic from the low information voter.
And uh if we don't do it, I don't think people have a lot of time to go read.
Listen, I want to recommend that everyone go read a book that's about eight hundred pages long.
I think it can save the country.
It's not gonna it's not gonna do it, Cameron.
It's not it's not going to cut it.
Um that's that's all I can say.
Look, we now are in the age where we've got a political class that love crisis.
They're figuring out that the perpetual and never ending crisis is better than than just an occasional crisis.
Emmanuel's slogan is an acted.
We've got a tax code that is out of control and undecipherable by a norman hu normal human being.
We've got a politically entrenched class of people with no sign of getting rid of these characters.
Because they're so entrenched in there.
Someone said to me a little while ago that I sounds like I have real resentment towards the voter.
Um I have a kind of resentment towards the low information voter.
But I can't fix that.
What I can do is fix how we get them to respond.
What I can do is say, let's put some rules in place to help protect us from the low information voter.
Doug Rebasky, I gotta scoop be right there.
Yeah, that was Cameron in Connecticut, a member of the higher order.
I I am I I love f hearing the people who have the book lists for you to read and and all this stuff.
This is much simpler than that, ladies and gentlemen.
And I do not think look, there's no conspiracy of the poll companies to decide the election, you know, a year in advance.
The poll companies, as I pointed out to you back in November of the 23rd, they have a scientific method, and nothing on earth beats a really good and they're really good at it.
That's why the polls were so accurate on election day.
That's why they were accurate on election day.
Now the low information voter does not get it.
And even though I'm going to talk about Susan Rice and John Kerry when we come back, I want you to think long and hard about some of these fantasy ideas I've thrown up there.