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Jan. 14, 2013 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:50
January 14, 2013, Monday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24 7 podcast.
Well, it doesn't happen often here, folks, but I have to tell you that I am totally confused now.
I am thoroughly pretzeled.
I'm tied into knots after having listened to President Obama explain the debt limit.
He's got his press conference going on.
It was supposed to start at 11.15.
I knew it wasn't going to start at 11.15.
It started closer to 12 noon, which is when this program starts.
Greetings, folks.
Hope you had a great weekend.
Rush Limbaugh, the EIB network, and the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.
Folks, I have to I I got so many uh uh congratulatory emails over the weekend from from friends and and listeners wishing me a happy birthday.
I mean, it was a record.
It was it was I d I can't I can't respond to them all unless I prepared a stock canned answer to everybody, which wouldn't be good because compare notes and see it's the same thing and a form answer.
So I I just want to thank everybody, friends and and uh even foes and listeners alike.
I mean, I'm we're in a thousands here of people who sent me happy birthday wishes, and I I just want to thank you.
It's it's it's never happened to uh to this degree.
Here's the telephone number if you want to be on the program.
It's 800-282-2882 and the email address lrushbow at EIB net.com.
Okay.
Listening to President Obama today with press conference talk about the the debt ceiling.
You would almost think that raising the debt limit is is not spending.
It does not require any new spending.
Raising the debt limit has nothing to do with new spending.
And not only that, raising the debt limit is fiscally responsible, and not only that, it takes great courage.
And the Republicans don't have any.
Courage.
And the solution here is for the Republicans to just punt.
If they don't want the hard work of raising the courageous hard work of raising the debt limit, which has nothing to do with spending, then Obama will do it.
He just said, look, I could coast in my second term, but I am willing to take on even more responsibilities.
If they if they want, if they can't make the tough choices, and if they can't make the tough votes, the Republicans in the House primarily, but also in the Senate, then go ahead and give me the authority on a debt limit, and I'll take care of it.
And I'll do it in a in a balanced and responsible way, uh, which is what the American people said they wanted last uh last November.
Uh this this caused Chuck Todd, NBC to stand up and say, well, why not just use a 14th Amendment?
Uh even Obama realizes how laughable that is.
It'd be very easy to say, okay, I'll use the 14th Amendment to do this.
Welosi and Reed want him to do.
The um that would be bypassing Congress.
That would be basically usurping the control of the debt limit, which is spending, which constitutionally, all spending has to come from the House of Representatives.
What Obama's actually asking the Republicans to do is say, you know, change the constitution.
Just write a law and say that all spending bills but but we're not really talking.
Sorry.
See, that's why I'm confused.
We're not talking about spending.
The debt limit is not about spending.
Let me see.
Are you confused too?
Let me try this way.
The president said, and he said this many times today, been very repetitive in this in order to make his point.
He said that raising the debt ceiling does not authorize us to spend any more money.
All it does is allow us to pay our bills.
And we're not gonna be a deadbeat nation.
By God by gosh.
We're not.
And by gum, by the way, we're not gonna be a deadbeat nation.
We're gonna we're we're gonna pay our bills.
So we have to raise the debt limit to pay our bills.
Now, what correct me if I'm wrong here.
I could be, I'm so confused, I don't know anymore.
The debt Limit is essentially equal to the national debt, is it not?
When you reach the debt limit, what it says is that you can't borrow anymore without a law being passed authorizing it.
But we've already spent the money.
So we have to raise the debt limit to accommodate what we've already spent, but it doesn't have any do with spending.
The debt limit doesn't have to do with spending.
But Congress is a bunch of deadbeats because they've already spent the money.
It doesn't have to do with spending.
But they've already spent the money.
Now we've got to pay our bills.
And so they're going to raise the debt limit to pay our bills.
That's all it does.
That's all we're talking about here, is allowing us to pay our bills, which of course means your Social Security check, your Medicare check, your food stamps, your uh your other entitlements.
But isn't that previous spending?
We've spent it, but we're no, because the debt limit does not authorize us to spend more.
Yet the deficits keep getting bigger.
Why?
We're spending more.
Uh and the national debt keeps getting bigger.
That's in fact that's that's what everybody's asking for here.
Would you please raise a debt limit so the national debt can get bigger?
But it doesn't have to do with spending.
We're just talking about paying our bills here, but avoiding being a deadbeat nation.
Why is the national debt going up if we're not spending?
Well, what no.
Why is the national debt going up if we're not doing any new spending?
Because we're paying our bills.
But what is paying our bills?
When you pay your bills, what are you doing?
You have you have you it's spending, right?
But it's not about spending.
Uh not about new spending.
So I guess Obama's talking he wants to freeze the budget after we pay our bills.
He wants to freeze the budget.
Is that what he's talking about?
No, I don't believe so.
Now, um I also, I'm also confused because of this.
I've I've heard, I mean, I've I've saw it on television.
How many pieces of legislation over the past four years had a promise in there to lower the deficit?
Obamacare was going to lower the deficit a lot, as well as your premiums.
Uh the stimulus, that was going to lower the deficit.
Um there's, I mean, there's been deficit reduction in practically every piece of legislation.
So it seems to me there wouldn't be any need to raise a debt limit because we've been lower.
I know the deficit has been going up, but that's, you know, that's that's just a technicality.
I mean, the reality is that we've had all this deficit reduction in all of this legislation, and yet somehow uh we need to raise the national debt limit so that we can pay our bills.
So we've had a bunch of spend thrifts.
Apparently, what's happened here, folks, while we weren't looking, is these Republicans in Congress have been spending money like never before.
They've been spending money, and now they don't want to pay the bills.
The Republicans don't want to pay the bills.
They spent the money, your typical deadbeats.
The Republicans spent all of this money.
And now they don't want to pay the bill, so we've got to raise the national debt to accommodate the irresponsibility of the Republicans.
If the Republicans don't want to face the consequences of their responsibility, then Obama will gladly take the chore over himself.
The 14th Amendment, I'm not sure I even understand this.
But the 14th Amendment, the passage in question in the 14th Amendment, is about making the South, the Confederacy, have to help pay for debts incurred by the Federal Government during the Civil War.
The South objected to that.
They didn't think they, as part of their defeat, you have to pay any of the bills the North incurred.
Fourteenth Amendment said yep.
So press Chuck Todd and Major Garrett said, Why don't you just use the 14th Amendment?
That clearly authorizes the federal government to do some things.
And Obama for some reason doesn't want to use the 14th Amendment.
And then Major Garrett stood up, former Fox reporter, I don't know where he is now, National Journal, I forget which, but Major Garrett stood up and said, Look, the reason Chuck and I are hounding you about this, dear leader, I is that you're making it very clear that you're not going to negotiate.
And that's just not how things get done in this country.
You're laying out a line in the sand.
You're not even willing to negotiate on this, and that's, I mean, you even yourself have negotiated in the past.
Now I know Obama's standing there looking at Major Garrett and says, You think I'm in it?
What do I have to negotiate for?
Did I lose or win?
What do I have to negotiate for?
I'm in a position to get everything I want here, and that's what I'm in the process of doing.
If you guys just shut up and let me take it where it's going, then it's just what's going to happen.
Now, Obama gave an example.
And I have to, I used a variation of this example last week, at which point Ali Velshi of CNN told me that I was wrong and didn't know what I was talking about.
But Obama said, in his attempt here to explain what the debt limit's all about.
He said, you don't go out to dinner and leave after eating everything you want without paying a check.
Well, now what is paying the check?
Spending, isn't it?
But Obama says that raising a debt limit isn't about spending.
He's been adamant about this.
Raising the debt limit on the national debt is not spending.
And yet he uses an example.
You don't go out to dinner and leave after eating everything you want without paying a check.
Not new spending.
And the Republicans want to go out and gorge and be gluttons, but they don't want to pay the bill now.
So this is this the way this is all being positioned.
The guy who took oh, by the way, Obama opened by saying he's open to changes in Medicare to preserve it.
He's the guy who took $700 billion out of Medicare and shifted it over to Obamacare.
This is the guy who's actively doing damage to Obama.
I know nobody believes that, and it's very racist and partisan to say it that way, but Obama is the one took $700 billion out of Medicare, shifted it over to Obamacare, and then claimed the Republicans were destroying Medicare.
But since low information voters don't know that Obama took $700 billion out of Medicare, the truth is that the Republicans are destroying Medicare.
The Republicans don't want to pay the bills on what they've already spent.
The Republicans have spent wildly, irresponsibly and crazily the last four years, and now they don't want to pay for it.
And they're trying to shift the blame to Obama, and he's not going to take it because he hasn't done anything.
It's not his fault.
Obama hasn't done anything.
He's been very responsible.
He's been balanced.
He's been very fair.
He's made the rich pay their fair share.
Man, they're just, they're insane.
And Obama was talking about the debt ceiling as if Congress is responsible for all the legislation he jammed through and signed.
I mean, we've only got Obamacare because he wanted it.
Very few people in the country really wanted it.
We've got it.
The Republicans didn't spend on Obamacare, but technically, legally they did because all spending bills originate in the House.
So if Obama wants to say Obamacare is the Republican spending, he can technically be correct, but it wouldn't have happened had Obama not suggested it.
And that's what's happening with every dime of spending.
Obama's laying it off on the Republicans.
He's talking about the debt ceiling today, as if Congress has been wildly irresponsible for all of this spending, and now they got to pay the bill.
That's all he wants.
He just wants the Republicans to own up to what they've spent and pay the bill so that we're not a deadbeat country.
He said we might not be able to pay our troops.
That happens every time this debt limit comes up.
We might not be able to pay the troops, and social security checks might not go out.
Oh, oh, oh God.
Well, then pay the bill, raise the debt limit.
That's all that matters.
That's all that matters.
All that means winning the argument again with the low information voter.
Obama has no interest in stopping any spending.
He just wants the Republicans to be blamed for it and for the Republicans to be seen as paying for it.
Essentially, Obama at his press conference today is saying that the Republicans are threatening to bring down the economy while he's on his way to a $17 trillion dollar national debt.
That is what he's asking for.
But there's no spending in this.
See, this is why I'm confused.
We're going to increase the national debt from 16.1 trillion to 17 trillion.
But that's not there's no new spending in there.
That's just stuff we've already committed to.
We got to raise a debt limit to a handle that we've already spent, but there isn't any spending in this.
And Obama won re-election on this.
I don't see anybody inside the beltway refuting any of this.
Now these what Obama's doing today is tossing hanging curveballs for home run hitters.
We just don't happen to have any home run hitters.
We got a bunch of slow pitched guys, but we don't have any home run hitters.
So Obama says if the Republicans want to surrender me on the debt ceiling, I'm willing to accept their surrender.
So, just to just a rephrase, raising the debt ceiling does not authorize us to spend more.
All it does is allow us to pay our bills, which is previous spending.
But we have a national debt of 16 plus trillion dollars, which we've reached.
We've got, we're already, well, we're technically already there.
We can't legally spend anymore without raising a debt limit, but raising a debt limit has nothing to do with authorizing us to spend more.
It's all about paying for previous spending.
In other words, in other words, I don't know.
In other words, I I can't keep up with demagoguery like this.
After a while it all falls apart on me.
But what I do know is that it makes perfect sense to the low information voter crowd up there.
Let me tell you what I think, and I'm gonna tell you this in a balanced uh uh way, a balanced and fair way.
What I think is really going on here.
Our president Barack Obama, if you'll note, really never talks about plans and proposals to solve problems.
What he does is position his political opponents as the enemy.
Everything he did today in the debt limit QA in his press conference and even the setup was about the enemy.
The Republicans are the enemy.
He's not proposing solutions to anything.
He's not interested in solutions.
As far as Obama is concerned, there isn't a problem other than the existence of opposition to him.
And I mean this from the bottom of my heart.
The biggest problem to Obama is the existence of opposition.
And I'm telling you, I firmly believe everything going on in Washington today, everything inside the beltway, in the media, think tanks, calls of Congress, everything is oriented toward eliminating a viable opposition.
Be it on the radio, be it on television, be it in Congress, uh, wherever.
And I think both parties.
I think the Republican establishment is of the same frame of mind as Obama is, and as the opposition is conservatives.
The opposition is conservatism.
And that's why what was Colin Powell doing?
Colin Powell was was on Meet the Press yesterday was doing what Scarborough did on MSNBC this morning, which is what a lot of Republicans doing, and that is criticizing conservatives, blaming every problem we've got, from the gridlock to intransigence to spending, it's all the fault of conservatives.
And even the Republican establishment agrees with this.
Conservatives nominate losers like Christine O'Donnell and Sharon Engel.
We gotta stop the conservatives.
New York magazine.
New Yorker has a piece.
Now the Democrats are not trying to isolate the South again.
Geographically, isolate the South.
That's where a lot of conservatives are.
So the Democrats clearly, and I think some of the Republican establishment, the in to understand everything happening in Washington, understand that the objective is the elimination of any serious potentially viable political opposition to Barack Obama and the Democrats.
A little history might be worthwhile.
Do you remember that back in the Bush administration in the Iraq War, it was uh perfectly fine.
Obama, when he was a senator, Harry Reed, Nancy Pelosi all said that we should not raise the debt limit.
We shouldn't raise the debt.
They were trying to stop funding the Iraq war.
The Democrats were pretty insistent that we lose that war in a balanced uh fair way with a balanced approach.
They wanted us to lose the Iraq War.
They wanted to hang that around uh Bush's neck.
And so they voted against raising the debt limit under Bush in order to defund it.
This is another reason I'm confused is because back then in 2005 and 2006, they were in they were asking to freeze the debt limit so that we couldn't engage any new spending.
And if we couldn't raise the debt limit and therefore spend more, then they would have to get out of a rock.
They actually did do this, if you recall.
Obama as a senator, Harry Reed Pelosi all suggest, and they voted against raising a debt limit for that reason.
Now today Obama told us a debt limit has nothing to do with new spending.
It's all about paying bills.
Previous spending.
Again, I want to reiterate, folks, I'm dead serious about this.
I um Obama does not fix the problem.
Obama fixes the blame.
And right now, I just I'm trying to come up with an easy way for everybody to understand what's going on.
For example, when a colon Powell, and I've got these sound bites, and I've had so many emails from people, what in the world?
I mean, here you have the titular head of the Republican Party going on Meet the Press, accusing the conservatives being racist, new racist, using racist lingo and so forth, and people scratching their heads.
They know that Powell endorsed Obama, but why is he still a Republican?
People asking me, would you explain what Powell's doing?
It's not just Powell.
It's every other moderate Republican and the Democrats.
And I'm I'm telling you that the way to understand this death limit thing, for example, the way to understand the fiscal cliff deal, the way to understand anything going on in Washington right now, meanness from the bottom of my heart, is to understand that the objective, the political objective inside the beltway, is to eliminate any effective opposition to the Democrat Party.
And yes, Republican moderates are complicit in this because they too dislike conservatives.
Republican moderates hold out hope that the Republicans will win the White House again someday, and they will be in charge of all the money.
Doesn't talk about reducing spending.
They just say they're smarter and better at it, but and they won't go into his debt uh into debt as fast.
But the conservatives Are the problem.
The conservatives, and they the latest example is uh Richard Murdoch.
See, if you let the Tea Party and the Conservatives handle this, they're going to nominate losers in the primaries and don't have any prayer winning.
We we had a seat there, the the Luger seat, we lost it because the Tea Party conservatives are a bunch of neophytes and idiots, plus they're conservatives.
So the objective, the moderate Republicans, and this isn't new, I've mentioned this to you on previous occasions, really want to eliminate the conservative wing of the Republican Party.
Don't like them, pro-lifers, churchgoers, that sort of thing.
The Democrats don't like them for different reasons, but they don't like them, don't like conservatives, and they just and Obama modus operandi is to not have any opposition.
The only remaining serious opposition to what's happening in the country today resides in the minds and hearts of conservatives.
Nowhere else is there any opposition to this.
And therefore it is the conservatives, wherever they are found, who are the objectives.
Eliminating them, reducing their numbers, depressing them, dispiriting them, getting them out of office, humiliating, embarrassing them, caricaturing them, characteristics, whatever it takes.
The primary focus is to make sure that whenever a conservative speaks, everybody laughs at him.
Whenever a conservative speaks, the reaction is, oh, listen to that extremist.
Whenever a conservative says anything, ah, listen to that racist, that sexist, that bigot, this, and it's been set up for quite a while, but the there's a real full court press on this now.
And that's what was happening here in Obama's presser at the debt limit.
He was blaming the Republicans, and he means conservatives for this, but he'll be glad.
If he can get rid of the Republican Party, too.
The one thing the Republican moderates don't get is who this guy is.
The Republican moderates are really sadly a clueless bunch, as they, I don't think have the slightest idea of what is happening and what's not just headed their way, but has hit them already.
They don't see it because they too are focused on eliminating as much conservative influence in the party as Obama.
I mean, you you you got Colin Powell on TV yesterday saying Republicans did not used to speak this way.
The GOP looks down on blacks, minorities.
Look at the Senate.
The only black senators are Republican, the only two Hispanic senators are Republicans.
But here's Colin Powell saying Republicans look down on minorities, and they're racists.
And they're using code, dog whistle language now.
The titular head of the Republican Party, the Republican that everybody in the media says we all should emulate, Colin Powell.
That's what he went on TV to say yesterday.
There's a real concentrated dislike for conservatism and conservatives.
And it's, you know, the why is easy to understand as well.
We're talking about people that are devoted in their lives to the concept of big government, living in it, working it and controlling it.
Conservatives want to eliminate as much government from people's daily lives as possible.
That makes them the enemy.
Makes them the political enemy.
They've got to be nullified.
And that is what is happening.
If that is the way to understand everything.
It's not about policy, it's not triumphing on policy right now.
It's not finding solutions to problems.
It's not about fair and balanced negotiation or any of that.
It's about eliminating any serious, viable conservative opposition.
Now, I I've got this story here.
It's not just in Washington.
I have a story here from the New Yorker by George Packer, Southern Discomfort.
The political isolation of the American South is the title of this piece.
And what this is about is a very approving story from the New Yorker about the attempt here to isolate the South to make the South an island unto itself made up of oddballs and kooks and weirdos who have to be ignored, who also have to be defeated.
Here's a pull quote.
Now the South is becoming isolated again.
Every demographic and political trend that helped to re-elect Obama runs counter to the South's self-definition, which is the emergence of a younger, more diverse, more secular electorate, a libertarian bias on social issues and immigration,
the decline of the exurban lifestyle, following the housing bust, then you got class politics, uh a nephew to pro-business Southerners that rose with the recession, the end of America's protracted wars with cuts in military spending bound to come, the solid South speaks less and less for America, and more and more for itself alone.
That's a pull quote.
The solid South speaks less and less for America and more and more for itself alone.
And this is being done by design.
And they're trying to isolate the South again because the South is conservative.
And it's not just the New Yorker.
Last week, Salon.com had a story called Welcome to the New Civil War.
Lincoln's unfinished war rages on as the neo Confederacy tries to turn back the clock on women, gays, gods, and guns.
Have you asked yourself, why is Hollywood so gaga over Lincoln, the movie?
All of a sudden, why is Bill Clinton out there at the Golden Globes last night being brought on stage to thunder his standing ovations to talk about Lincoln and what he did during this?
What did Lincoln do?
As far as these people are concerned, he wiped out the South.
But he didn't finish.
According to Salon, he did not finish Lincoln's unfinished war rages on.
So what the left is admitting today that they are doing is once again trying to just finish it off.
Lincoln did not fully finish.
The South is trying to go back to the old America which doesn't exist anymore.
They're turning back the clock on women.
They're turning back the clock on gays and gay marriage.
They love both of them.
And so the South has to be wiped out again.
I'm telling you, essentially, there is an all-out effort being made to marginalize conservatism because it's the last remaining shred of opposition to what most who live in Washington want.
both Republicans and Democrats.
There is no effort to solve a problem.
There's no effort to get the deficit under control.
There's no real effort to control spending.
We're going to grant amnesty, We're going to open the border, we're going to do all these things that the left and big government types have wanted to do for the longest time.
We're going to we're going to make moves on guns.
We're going to finally we got health care done and now we're on the march.
And so wherever there's opposition to it, we're going to take it out.
Yeah, well, they're not, oh, of course not by the argument.
They can't take us out via argument.
They'll never win an argument with us on ideas.
That's what they're taking us out via smear.
We're racist, we're sexists, we're bigots, we're whatever.
The effort to take conservatives out is being done in the media by caricature.
Character assassination.
Impugning the integrity of conservatives.
Same thing they did to Romney, folks.
And he's not even a conservative, but he was a Republican who could have won.
So when they finished with Romney of the people who voted, that's an important subgroup of the population, of the people who voted, 81% thought Barack Obama cared about them, only 19% thought Romney did.
They thought Romney didn't have a problem with a guy's wife dying from cancer.
They thought Romney was perfectly fine to subject his dog to pain and suffering in the roof of his car on vacation.
They thought Romney was a felon, that he was hiding money, that he was not sharing money, that he was selfish as a reprobate.
That was the focus of the Obama ad campaign.
Obama wasn't running ads or running a campaign on the on the supremacy of his ideas.
So that's what's underway now.
You see, if you have any prominent conservative you admire, either an elective officer in the media, just telling you the next time you see them being taken to the woodshed or roundly criticized on the media, I want you to understand why.
And by the way, none of it's based in truth.
There is, you know, not racist sex as big, it's home of all this garbage.
But again, truth is irrelevant.
It's whatever they can make people believe.
They just want people to basically be scared of conservatives and their ideas.
And not so much the ideas, they want to accomplish that by making people afraid of conservatives because of who they are.
They're old fashioned.
They don't want you to have a good time.
They're judgmental.
They're like strict parents that you try to get away from.
Brief timeout will continue right after this.
Don't go away.
Isolating the South is also a greased path to the claims of racism.
And that is a fundamental aspect of the current ongoing effort to discredit any conservative opposition.
It's all a bunch of racism, and they, conservatives, are a bunch of racists.
And of course, if you isolate the South as a bunch of old-fashioned footy-duty conservative racists, it's easier for you to make the case.
But the truth, as always, with Democrat politics is irrelevant.
Great example, Bill Clinton has been claiming in speeches lately that he didn't mention the Golden Globes, but he's been claiming that half of all mass killings in the U.S. have occurred since the assault weapons ban was overturned in 2005.
Even the Washington Post had to admit in a fact check that what Clinton claimed is not true.
And by the way, none of the legislation that would deal with guns post Sandy Hook would have stopped it from happening.
None of it.
Not one piece of legislation.
But where did I put it?
Did I not pull it out of the printer today?
Walmart has decided, I think I have it here.
Yep.
Walmart.
Cybercast news service story.
Walmart has reportedly stopped selling ammo ahead of the Obama administration's anticipated gun control recommendation recommendations to Congress, and also uncertainty over what new laws may be coming.
According to the investment watch blog, Walmart Corporation will no longer place new ammunition orders pending the upcoming decision on the Second Amendment.
As of right now, this is Walmart Headquarters told an employee the following.
As of right now, Walmart is not going to be making any new orders of ammunition because of the upcoming decision on the Second Amendment.
As of right now, we're unsure what the new legislation might be coming, and because of this, we are suspending new orders.
Under the theory that a gun isn't worth much without any ammo.
So people are buying guns left and right all over the country.
But now this just Walmart, but What if others fall in line?
Well, we don't know.
We're going to suspend ammo orders because we don't know what Obama's going to do in a Second Amendment.
And what they're not saying is, and we don't want Obama coming after us.
One of our callers coming up is from sm uh see uh Richmond, Washington, and he is shocked at how much smaller his paycheck is.
He knew it was going to be smaller.
He knew, but he's he's stunned by how much smaller it is.
And I have a story here, my formerly nicotine-stained fingers, the headline: millions are noticing how much smaller their paychecks are.
And this is a number of people that's only going to grow as uh each new day creeps by in the new year.
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