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Jan. 11, 2013 - Rush Limbaugh Program
33:30
January 11, 2013, Friday, Hour #3
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Half my brain tied behind my back just to make it fair because that's the kind of guy I am.
El Rushbo, Rush Limbaugh, the all-knowing, all-caring, all-sensing, all-feeling maha-rushy on Friday.
Yes, sir, Rebob.
Rado, Rado, Reb, from the Sun to 800-282-2882.
If you want to be on the program, Friday.
And on Friday, you get to talk about whatever you want to talk about.
You don't have to talk about what I demand that you're talking about.
Well, it's not the way to put it.
Monday through Thursday, you have to talk about things I care about.
But Friday, you don't.
You get anything at all.
It's a golden opportunity for callers to ask questions and make comments about things that they think need to be discussed that haven't been.
A great low information voter day, for example.
So it's 800-282-2882 and the email address, El Rushbo at EIBNet.com.
Now, it's very simple the way this works.
We had a caller that really made a good point back in October of 2004, ABC News.
And here's the headline to their story.
Poll, voters concerned with flu vaccine.
Six in 10 likely voters are concerned about the vaccine shortage.
27% blame the Bush administration.
John Kerry, who once served in Vietnam, has been trying to boost that blame and tie the shortage to health care more broadly.
His best major issue.
So we had a flu outbreak in 2004, and the news then was shortage of vaccine.
Why?
Bush doesn't care about people.
It's the same thing with Hurricane Katrina.
We had stories about Bush not caring.
The government didn't properly warn.
Never mind, the mayor and the governor didn't do anything to evacuate people.
They didn't get any blame at all.
They were Democrats.
But the news media is oriented towards stories that offer the angle to criticize Republicans and to effectively eliminate any opposition to Democrats.
In this case, Obama, but back then it was John Kerry.
Fast forward to today, CNBC has a story on the flu epidemic.
And you know what the story is?
Not that Obama doesn't care.
Not that there's a vaccine shortage.
Not that, in fact, there's any problem at all with it.
In fact, the story is that this flu might stall the economic recovery.
Oh, my God, poor Obama is trying so hard.
He's doing everything.
He's worked harder than anybody ever has.
He's just now got this economy roaring again.
And now here comes the flu.
And it threatens to take us back into recession.
And before, it ain't going to be Obama's fault.
It's not going to be...
You take a look at Hurricane Sandy.
Do you realize that relief to people in the Northeast is running behind in terms of the length of time it took to get relief to Katrina?
Relief to Mississippi and Louisiana got there much faster than relief has got Northeast.
That's why Chris Christie's on the warpath.
But even Christie's blaming the Republicans for it, not Obama.
The media blaming Republicans for it, not Obama.
But with Katrina, it was Bush.
Folks, this is one of the reasons why it's not hard to predict what liberals are going to do.
It's not hard to predict what the media is going to do.
It's not difficult at all to predict what stories next week in the media are going to be, nor is it hard at all to predict how they're going to be covered.
There is no media in the sense, there is no journalism going on anymore.
There's no reporting news.
You tune in at 6:30 to find out what happened today.
That's not what you're going to get when you tune in.
What you're going to get is why you ought not vote for Republicans, why you ought not support conservatives or Republicans.
That's what you're going to get.
Each and every story that offers that opportunity.
By the same token, now we got here's Obama.
He's meeting with Hamid Karzai today at the White House.
Karzai is the grand poobah of Afghanistan.
And Obama and Karzai just announced that they've agreed to allowing a Taliban office in Qatar.
The President of the United States has agreed to the expansion of the Taliban beyond Afghanistan to Qatar.
Now, Qatar happens to be run by the same emir who runs Al Jazeera, which just bought Al Gore's network, which now just bought Al Gore as a lobbyist for their network.
Because Al Gore remains in a consultancy role, which means Al Gore will now lobby for Al Jazeera, the new cable news network, in the United States.
Karzai said the Taliban office in Doha or Doha, Qatar, will engage with Afghan High Council for Peace, will seek regional help from Pakistan.
Obama said next year, this long war will come to a responsible end.
Now, remember, Obama once said that Afghanistan was the good war.
That was the war we had to win.
We should never have gone to Iraq.
Now, we're going to lose in Afghanistan.
We're allowing the Taliban to expand, and everything's fine.
If this were happening under Bush, if Bush were agreeing with Karzai to open a Taliban office in Qatar, hell to pay.
So that's all you have to do.
If you want to know the media like I do, just understand the reason why they target any and all conservative, either Republican individuals or conservative individuals.
Any body on the right they judge to be effective, opposing them, has to be destroyed, has to be discredited, impugned, maligned, or what have you.
And any opportunity they get, they'll do it.
No news.
There's no telling you what you missed today.
Virtually every Newtown, Connecticut, opportunity to advance a leftist agenda, opportunity to criticize Republicans, gun control, get guns out of the hands of people, blame the NRA, big political opponent of Democrats.
That's all Newtown.
It's not based on their love for kids.
It's not based on their concern with kids killing each other.
If they were concerned about that, they'd ban the car.
If they were concerned about that, they'd go to Chicago.
They start talking about banning handguns.
In fact, if they were serious about this, they would talk about banning guns.
If they were dead serious about it, they'd be honest about wanting everybody to have to give their guns up.
That is what they want.
But they know they'll never get anywhere with that position.
And as such, as Dr. Krauthammer pointed out on Fox, when the left will not tell you what they really want, you can't have a legitimate debate.
You cannot have an honest debate with anybody who will not accurately represent their own position.
And the left will not on gun control.
In fact, you come up with somebody like me.
This is so simple.
It's first-grade stuff.
You have the president, you have the vice president Biden.
They're Democrats.
They don't like the Second Amendment.
They've said so.
Everybody knows what the Democrat view of the ownership of guns is.
Everybody knows what the Democrat view of the Constitution is.
Newtown happens.
Liberals start pulling their hair out.
Oh, woe is us.
How are we going to get rid of guns?
Biden says, well, we're going to look at executive orders.
We're going to look at this.
We're going to look at, oh, executive orders.
They're obviously going to look at executive orders as a way, perhaps, of trumping the Constitution.
That resulted in me being literally bombarded with criticism from people on the left.
How dare I be so stupid?
Everybody knows that a presidential executive order doesn't trump the Constitution.
They can't do that.
Well, the reason they came after me is because I was more honest than they about their own position.
The reason they came after me is because I told people what they really want to do.
They never do.
They can't.
They would never get a majority of votes if they were really honest about what they want to do.
So you can't have an honest and open debate with them about anything because they will not honestly, accurately represent their position.
What they do is attempt to destroy their opponents in the minds and hearts of low-information voters rather than tout their own positions.
Now, the fact of the matter is, you know it and I know it, that if the modern-day Democrat today could, he would eliminate the Second Amendment.
You accuse them of that and they have a cow, they go bonkers, and they accuse you of lying about them and being stupid and silly.
Of course they don't want to do that.
In fact, they do.
They're the ones who will not be honest about it.
Now, back to Pelosi.
I said we have the sound bites of her quotes on unemployment insurance and all of the economic benefits that result from them.
Here is what she said is two years ago.
It was July 1st, 2010, it was in Washington at a weekly press briefing that she held, and a reporter asked her a question.
Congress is going to leave again with unemployment insurance not extended, madam leader.
This is the second time y'all have recessed.
What do you say to those poor people out there going to be losing their benefits?
How do you respond to the argument that maybe Congress shouldn't be extending unemployment benefits because it's a disincentive to people look for work?
Maybe you should stop giving these benefits away because as long as people get them, they're not going to look for work.
What do you say to that?
When we say about unemployment insurance, we talk about it as a safety net and the rest.
This is one of the biggest stimuluses to our economy.
Economists will tell you this money is spent quickly.
It injects demand into the economy and is job creating.
It creates jobs faster than almost any other initiative you can name.
Because again, it is money that is needed for families to survive and it is spent.
So it has a double benefit.
It helps those who've lost their jobs, but it also is a job creator.
Now, look, as Hamilton Berger, the old Perry Mason show would say, that's incompetent, irrelevant, and material.
It's also insane.
Here you had the Speaker of the House actually making the case that paying people not to work was an economic stimulus.
And perhaps paying people not to work created jobs faster than anything else we could do.
Paying people not to work creates jobs.
Well, then let's make everybody quit.
Let's fire everybody and put everybody on unemployment then and let's test the theory.
It's absurd.
And this is why so many people concerned, low information voters eat that up.
They lap it up.
Believe it because they haven't been taught anything differently.
Their education experience.
Which takes me back to one of the big bugaboos I have, and that is the the woeful ignorance in our country about the roots and the sources of prosperity.
If people don't know where prosperity comes from, then all the rest of it is academic and doesn't matter.
If people think that prosperity comes from not working and receiving unemployment benefits, then we're finished.
If a majority of people who vote really believe that, or can be swayed by that, that prosperity comes from government providing for people who can't work, then pretty close to over.
In truth, prosperity comes.
Prosperity is created by people doing useful things for each other.
In fact, you could say, if you wanted to make a really literal point, that prosperity doesn't even have to deal with money, could be accomplished with bartering.
But money just makes the process more efficient.
Bartering okay, you don't use money, you.
Barter means you um uh.
You offer to change the tires on the butcher's car and he gives you a steak.
That's barter.
But instead of that, people pay each other for doing useful things for them.
People pay other people for performing useful things.
People pay other people for inventing useful things.
People pay other people for making useful things.
People buy useful things because they want them.
This is how prosperity is created.
Therefore, what is required for prosperity?
As many people as possible doing useful and desired things for each other.
At its root level, this is so simple, but economics is taught as this very complex, intricately woven web of deceitful, hard to understand things.
But economic commerce happens when people engage in economic activity, i.e.
You buy something that somebody's made because you want it and they sell it for profit.
That's their incentive to make it.
If they're only going to get back what it cost them, there won't be any reason outside of passion, which doesn't feed you.
To make it simple as that, as many people as possible working, producing and offering as many things and services as people need and want equals prosperity.
Therefore, people sitting at home destroys it.
People sitting at home doing nothing for anybody not only doesn't create prosperity, it destroys it.
And people like Nancy Pelosi is this is near criminally incompetent on basic economics.
She says this.
Now, I don't know whether she's that dumb and really believes it, or if this is simply the result of some strategic thinking and knowing their voters and knowing their audience and saying silly things to justify stupid government policy.
It doesn't really matter outside of the point of curiosity.
But she said it.
It couldn't be more wrong.
It is irresponsible for political leadership to be speaking this way, but she does, and they're winning right now.
Open Line Friday.
Your phone calls are next so we get back.
Don't go away.
Open Line Friday to Seattle.
We go.
Peter, thank you for calling, sir.
Great to have you with us.
Great to be with you, Rush.
Happy birthday to the Surgeon General of Democracy.
Thank you.
I appreciate that.
They don't hate you because you're on the right.
They hate you because you're correct.
Effective.
Yeah, that's sadly the case.
Every time, every time you see me ripped to shreds in the media, folks, understand I've just been effective, and that's why I'm being ripped.
Or anybody else on the right.
Same theory applies.
Absolutely.
Couldn't agree more.
But I just wanted to call in and thank the voters of California for passing Proposition 30, the Soak the Rich tax amendment, and helping move the Sacramento Kings to Seattle.
Looks like they're going to be making 13% more on their $60 million payroll, and that would more than cover their losses last year.
Now, wait, is this a done deal?
No, it's not a done deal.
Because there's local groups in Sacramento that want to buy that team, right?
And they can get it for cheaper than what the Seattle group can get.
If the Seattle group's going to have to pay, what, $125 million more than a local group would have to pay simply for relocation fees, actual moving expenses, a number of other things.
Of course, then you got the owners of the team, the Maloofs, are aloof.
Nobody knows what they're going to do.
They change their minds on a dime.
I guess for you guys, Prop 30 is a factor.
There's no question.
But it also depends on how active the local Sacramento groups are, how desirous they are keeping the team there.
Very true.
But I think the main thing is, is you talk about that moderate Republicans are going to soon be talking about guns as an issue that they need to compromise on.
It's already happened.
Some Republican from Georgia having a metal block on his name.
Johnny Isaacson, I don't know.
I shouldn't say that because I don't know.
I don't remember.
But some moderate Republican from Georgia has already made my prediction come true yesterday that we need to get serious about gun control.
Well, I think the thing is they could say every time they want to say something like that, say they've tried it already in California.
California right now has an assault weapons ban.
They have a ban on 10-round magazines.
With all due respect, I've been doing this 25 years.
The one thing I've learned that does not win these arguments or debates with people is logic.
Facts and logic don't win.
Real-world examples are irrelevant because we're dealing here with pure, unadulterated emotion.
On the Republican side, fear.
The Republicans who are going to buckle on this are the same moderate Republicans, and they're largely from the Northeast, but not all.
But they are largely moderate Republicans, they're the same Republicans who think that abortion is killing the party, that immigration stance is killing the party, that pro-lifers are killing the party, and now they're going to think that this gun business is killing the party, and we're going to have to moderate on this.
We got to distance ourselves from the NRA because the NRA is a bunch of wild-eyed freaks and kooks and hayseeds.
This made this prediction.
A lot of people think this is going to be the case.
Some Republican New Jersey or in Georgia, I think, already crossed the line.
I wish I could remember who it was.
It was a maybe I can find it during the break.
But pointing out how this doesn't work is not going to matter a hill of beans because it's not about policy that works.
All right, here it is, folks.
It was Phil Gingry, the Republican from Georgia, from Marietta, Georgia.
He was speaking at the Smyrna Area Council of the Cobb Chamber of Commerce breakfast.
Took place yesterday at the Smyrna Community Center.
Phil Gingry said there are some problems, and maybe these huge magazines, even for somebody who says, look, I just use an AR-15 for target practice.
Do you really need to be standing there shooting at a silhouette a shot a second or even quicker with that kind of weapon?
For what purpose? Gingry asked.
I'd be willing to listen to the possibility of the capacity of a magazine, meaning being limited.
It was only yesterday, I did not know he said this at breakfast, so he had already said this by the time we offered the postulation yesterday afternoon, but I didn't know that.
But I'd heard rumblings.
Then I'd gotten an Eric Erickson at Red State Senate notes.
You mark my words, the Republicans are going to start fading on this just like they have on abortion and immigration.
And by the way, just for what it's worth, Gingry, after saying he's open to discussion on the limits of the capacity of a magazine, went on to say that Todd Aiken was partly right in what he said about rape.
And he'll be forgiven for that since he had the right position on magazine capacity.
If Gingry had just gone out and said, you know, if Todd Aiken, that's the same would happen to him because he's partly right, then today he would have been taken out.
But since he got it right, as far as the media and the left is concerned on magazine capacity, he's reported objectively and fairly, ostensibly, in the various places he's been reported.
Folks, I have a story here.
This is uncanny.
Do you remember the story I've told a couple of times when I lived in Sacramento, 1984 to 1987?
Wait a minute, it was 87 or it was 88, 84 to 88, October of 88 to June of 84 to June of 88, right?
Anyway, first real house.
I mean, I had a shack in Overland Park, Kansas.
I don't really count that.
The first real house was in Sacramento.
And shortly after moving in, I heard a noise that I just knew was not a good noise back in the days where I could hear.
And it was in my laundry room.
And it sounded like something behind a wall.
And you know, when there's something moving behind a wall, it isn't good.
First time homeowner, oh no, Panic City.
So I walked there and looked around, and the last thing I did was look in the trash can.
It was a white, you know, waist-high trash can.
Maybe a little shorter than that.
It hadn't no garbage bag in it.
There was a mouse in there.
Little mouse trying to get out, jumping up, and that's what I was hearing.
So, oh, geez, oh, no.
Because I figured if there's one of these, there's got to be more.
And no, no, not this, not in my first beloved house.
So I said, I have to get rid of this, but I don't want to just take it out there and dump it.
It'll come back in.
And I was also concerned about what other people thought of me in those days.
I also didn't want to go out in the daytime holding a trash can and dumping it in the yard, thereby showing the neighbors I had a mouse.
I didn't want the neighbors knowing I had a mouse nose because I, back then, as I said, I cared what people thought.
So I said, I'm going to have to kill it.
And I mean, I'm not a violent person.
I didn't really know how.
I didn't have a gun.
I didn't think a gun would be appropriate for a mouse anyway.
So the mouse was trying to get out of there.
The first thing I did, I went and got a can of Pam kitchen spray and I soaked the mouse.
I thought it would die, being poisoned with all.
And it liked it.
It started licking itself like crazy.
It's pure fat.
It loved it.
The mouse started licking itself.
This is as it was in heaven.
So then I took the wastebasket and I just shook it as hard as I could side to side with the mouse banging around inside.
And that didn't quite do it.
Anyway, you've heard the story.
It eventually waited for nightfall, took the mouse outside, dumped it right next to the driveway, went out a few hours later, and it was gone.
So I figured nature had taken its course.
Something came along.
So guess what is a story today?
Here in the UK Daily Mail.
Man releases trapped mouse into the wild rather than exterminate it, only to see a hawk swoop in and kill it within seconds.
Do you realize the number of stories told on this program encompassed by this one story?
Remember the oil spill at Prince William Sound?
Joseph, what's his name?
The captain got drunk.
Yeah, that's right, Hazelton.
And it was the Exxon Valdez, and it went aground, it ripped open the holly, oil spilled out of there.
And remember, there are people with dawn dishwashing detergent wiping off rocks?
Anyway, they grabbed up the otters and a number of animals and they tried to clean them.
And they did grab up an otter or two and they took them and they cleaned them.
And they were ready to release them back into the wild after the oil had gone.
And nature took care of it pretty quickly.
Prince William Sound got back to normal pretty quickly, surprised everybody, including the environmentalist wackos.
And they had a big release ceremony for these two otters.
They rolled them down in a cage, and the kids were out of school, and a band was playing.
And they're very proud that saved a couple of otters.
And they released it.
They opened the gates of the cage.
And the otters jump out and they swim and they rolled over on their backs and waved at people.
And people, ooh, isn't that cute?
They're waving at it.
They're thanking us for saving them.
And it wasn't long, and a killer whale came up and ate them.
With the kids watching, the band stopped playing.
The kids looked at, Mommy, mommy, what?
What?
What happened?
And the only thing mom could do was, oh, well, it's nature.
Shamu came along and ate the otters.
Here you have everything is right there.
The mouse in the trash can.
Here's a guy.
A man carefully released a mouse he had captured in his house back into the wild rather than kill it, only to see a hawk swoop down and kill it within seconds of him having saved it.
The unfortunate series of events was captured on camera by a friend who witnessed the doomed release.
It's a YouTube clip.
It begins with a man who's not identified as he takes the mouse to a park in a bin to release it back into the wild.
He reaches into the plastic dustbin, coaxes the mouse out and onto the ground.
There's patches of snow.
The mouse seems reluctant to move, so he tilts the bin and the mouse slides out.
He had named the mouse Whiskers.
He said, come on, Whiskers, you're free.
Good luck.
Tiny brown mouse darts out of the bin, scampers across the leaves.
The person filming the video asks the captor how he feels.
The man says, I feel relieved.
He's not going to wake me up in my bed anymore.
I kind of feel sad.
I got to know him.
And they actually captured on video the hawk dive bombing on the mouse, and that was the end of it.
And I saw this story.
I said, how many stories have we told on this program?
They're encapsulated by this one.
Who knew?
This was from, what's a UK Daily Mail?
It prints out the five pages.
I don't know, a lot of pictures.
I don't know what town doesn't matter.
But it's all about how the guy feels very sad.
He just saved the mouse's life.
Whiskers.
And in the background, a hawk is seen swooping down, getting his claws into the newly released animal.
And as he flies off with the mouse, the man turns around in shock and says, oh no.
And the voice filming it, the guy videoing, starts to laugh.
And it says, no, no, are you kidding?
He didn't last five minutes.
Oh, my God.
I'm a terrible person.
Oh, my gosh.
Let's get out of here.
The guy was devastated when he saw the hawk kill his mouse.
He thought he was being humane.
What a sad, sad story.
By the way, for those of you that don't know, a house mouse like the one I had will usually only live a year in the wild.
And that number is even lower if the mouse is around guns.
But it will live five years in captivity.
A house mouse will live five years in your house, only one year outside your house.
Of course, the five years in your house goes down if you have guns.
Just something to keep in mind.
Paul in Gainesville, Florida, thank you for waiting.
You're next on Open Line Friday.
Hi.
Hey, Rush.
Hey.
I'm a telecommunications student at the University of Florida, and it kind of goes hand in hand with the journalism school there.
Right.
And one of the things they teach us early on is that the people that we tell the news to and the stories, they're not very smart.
They're not as smart as us.
So we got to dumb down the stories for them.
Do they say things like most people read at a seventh or sixth grade level, things like that?
Yep, things exactly like that.
So they tell you that you have to dumb yourself down in order to relate to your audience.
Yeah, exactly.
Now, how does that make you feel?
You're a journalism student.
You're in telecommunications.
How does it make you feel when they tell you that the people you're going to be informing or talking to are basically idiots?
That seems like I'm not going to be able to tell them a lot of the stories that I want to.
But what's incorporated isn't part and parcel of that, you've got to have a little contempt for people who are not very smart.
I mean, if you run around, if you start your day thinking you're doing your job for dumb people, you're going to be arrogant.
You're going to be condescending toward them.
You're going to hold them in a little bit of contempt.
You're going to resent them a little bit.
And I maintain that this is the root of one of the many roots of the problems of journalism is their audience doesn't know anything.
Yeah.
The audience doesn't know anything and they're not capable.
That's why when the audience complains, you know, this is the only business, Paul.
It is the only business where the customer is always wrong.
You complain to a newspaper or a television station and they'll say, well, you know, you just don't really know how we operate here.
You don't know how we put the news together.
You just don't know.
Customer is always wrong.
You accuse them of bias.
You don't know what you're talking about.
We're not biased.
You're an idiot.
You're stupid.
They don't say that to them, but you're being taught that that's how you have to relate to them.
I, El Rushbo, on the other hand, I'm just the ops.
When I'm talking about the media, I make the mistake that they're smart.
They're not.
They are actually, I think, their audience.
I think they're dumber than their audience, to be frankly frank with you.
But I, on the other hand, I treat everybody listening to this program as though they know exactly what I'm talking about every time I open my mouth.
They may not know the information I'm going to impart, but I assume you're capable of learning everything I am.
They don't.
And that's a great, great point.
By the way, the journalism student, Paul from Gainesville, Florida, was also going to say that part of his education in telecommunications is that people are inherently not good people.
He was going to make my point for me, that they have to be protected from themselves and from everybody else, that that's how he's being taught.
He was going to back me up on that.
We'll see you Monday, folks.
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