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Feb. 11, 2013 - Rush Limbaugh Program
33:13
February 11, 2013, Monday, Hour #3
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And it is the fastest three hours in media.
I'm in charge and we're back and we've got broadcast excellence for you, my friends.
Thrilled and delighted each day to be with you as we are now celebrating into our 25th year behind the golden EIB microphone.
Telephone number, if you want to be on the program, is 800-282-2882, the email address El Rushbo at EIBnet.com.
It was really a great question.
Our last caller said that when he talks to his liberal buddies, he says, what are your limits?
At what point do you say enough is enough?
At what point, say, in the culture, will you say, no, no, we can't do that.
And he says they avoid answering.
And the answer to the question, folks, is it's a great question, but it's not the right one.
Because there are no limits.
They are not happy with whatever they accomplish because there's always opposition to it.
Now, I know there's opposition to everything, but remember, they don't want to deal with that.
I'm telling you that liberals are like fans, if you will.
I mean, their team live or die.
Team can't do anything wrong no matter what, and you hate the opposition.
Pure and simple.
And I just, I think that where they are is that what they resent is any opposition.
They say they want to do something.
There's always somebody judging them.
There's always saying, no, you can't.
No, that's wrong.
They don't want to hear that.
And so it's not that there are limits to even what their desires are.
It is that there's opposition to it.
And they're not going to stop pushing the boundaries until there is no opposition.
And that's really what's underway here.
Look at what Obama is going to push for in his State of the Union show tomorrow night.
In all honesty, who would have ever thought that these would be the goals of the Democrat Party just 30 years ago?
Another push for amnesty.
Same-sex marriage.
Total gun control.
Cap and trade.
Global warming regulations.
Reducing nuclear warheads to a token number.
Outside of amnesty and immigration, none of that would have been imaginable 30 years ago, even within the Democrat Party.
None of it would have been considered mainstream.
All of those items were kook, fringe, far out, extreme items.
Would you not agree with me?
Maybe you disagree with me.
I've been doing this 25 years.
And before those 25 years, there were four years in Sacramento.
So let's make that an even 30.
I've been essentially doing this radio show for 30 years.
And even though, you know, it's like I've learned when the liberals come out and start targeting SUVs, I know what it means.
Then they're not going to stop till they get rid of them, one way or the other.
Same-sex marriage, same thing.
Once it starts, they're not going to stop till they get it.
Then there's going to be something to come along to replace it that you're going to say, my gosh, I never would have believed this.
So the Democrat Party's president is going to go out there with a State of the Union agenda that 30 years ago was close to unimaginable.
Certainly, somebody with this agenda 30 years ago wouldn't be making State of the Union addresses because somebody with this agenda 30 years ago would not have won the presidency.
And I think we can all agree with that.
It's arguable, and I know some of you may disagree with me on this, but it's arguable that Obama would be president today if he ran on that agenda.
Clearly, in 2008, this was not his agenda.
In 2008, it was unity.
It was getting rid of the old politics.
It was everybody getting along.
It was the country loving each other and being loved by the rest of the world.
It was an end of rancor, all of these messianic things.
Now, that's now out the window because it was never really reality.
It was just what everybody wanted.
Now we're four years in.
We had a re-election campaign, which was all about Mitt Romney.
It was all about what a piece of scum Mitt Romney was.
That was the essence of Obama's campaign.
Now, he did same-sex, he evolved on same-sex marriage only last summer.
But there was another, that was not about winning the election in November.
Well, partly, but it was about fundraising.
I guess you could say it was about winning the election.
But there was something, there was some other reason for it.
And I forget what it was.
I forget why all of us he was forced or pressured into because he's always been opposed to it.
Well, yeah, but gay activists were saying they were voting, I know, but was it that he feared losing the election if they revoke?
Withhold the money, okay.
Campaign donation.
Yeah, yeah, okay.
But it's only last summer that Obama, quote-unquote, evolved.
Prior to that, he wouldn't get anywhere near gay marriage.
He was always opposed to it.
In fact, it was Bitme who went out there and forced him into it.
If you recall, Biden went out there, made a speech, and forced Obama into same-sex marriage.
But, I mean, unless the left is beating up the opposition, they aren't happy.
They are addicted to the struggle.
That's why slavery will never really be solved.
That's why racism will never, ever be solved.
It is why there's always going to be a global warming or something because they are down for the struggle.
And that's how you claim your authenticity.
But I'm just telling you, I mean, it's mind-boggling.
Two of the most powerful Democrats in the country are just willing to lie and claim with Pelosi that we've already cut $1.6 trillion in non-defense spending, or with Reed, we've cut $2.6 trillion, when we've cut nothing from non-defense spending.
We haven't cut anything anywhere.
And here's the Washington Post.
The job of debt reduction is done.
Once the sequester hits, that's done.
Now, some of you may know how to deal with this.
The only thing I know to do is to defeat it.
You can't compromise with it.
There is no common ground.
I don't care.
There is no point in negotiating with this.
We need to have the same attitude about them they have with us in the political realm, and that is defeating them.
We're scared to do that because when we do that, we're told that the independents are getting mad and not like us.
And then they'll run and make fast tracks for the Democrats.
It's all just mind-boggling.
But I'm telling you, this agenda that he's going to announce, and you couple it with the State of the Union address, with the inaugural address, and you have the most left-wing manifesto, undisguised that there has ever openly been presented to the people of this country, and without fear of any retribution.
So same-sex marriage, total gun control, cap and trade, global warming, right?
These are subjects for a state of the union getting rid of nuclear warheads other than for a token number.
The signs were all there in the past 30 years.
I mean, the fact that this is who they are, it's always been there.
And the fact that these are desires has always been there.
But they were always fringe.
They were always the kook fringe.
Now it's the Democrat mainstream.
Dick Turbin was on Meet the Press yesterday, and they were talking about the economy and the sequester.
David Gregory, the host, said to Dick Durbin, hey, buddy, how's all this going to end?
You can tell me where does it end?
How does it end?
Tell me, Senator.
Sequestration was designed as a budget threat, not as a budget strategy.
And I think all of us understand if it goes forward in less than three weeks, it's going to have a dramatic negative impact on many agencies, equally important on the economy.
So we need to come together.
What the president's proposing for the rest of this year, at least, is that we deal with the sequester the same way we have the first two months, evenly split between revenue and cuts.
Now, the argument about the sequester is being obscured as well.
The sequester, and Bob Woodward, if you need proof, Bob Woodward has the proof in one of his books.
The sequester was an Obama idea.
But as usual, Obama is acting as though it's a Republican idea that has him imprisoned, so to speak.
It's a dastardly trick that was played on him, and the Republicans are up to their usual tricks because all they want to do is take things away from people.
That's all the Republicans ever want to do.
They want to take away your gay rights.
They want to take away your gay marriage.
They want to take away your food stamps.
They want to take away your dog.
They want to take away your Social Security.
They want to take away your Medicare.
They want to take away your health care.
They want to take away your house.
And sequestration is the dirty trick that they fooled Obama into agreeing with.
And now that we're about to get it, we can't have it.
Well, the fact of the matter is it was Obama's idea.
And one more time, I'm going to explain what it is.
A year and a half ago, there was another one of these phony, artificial crises because we're about to reach the end of our limit of our ability to borrow money to pay for what we've spent, called the debt limit.
And so we had to raise it.
Well, the Republicans were saying, look, we've got to get some discipline here.
We're just spending money left and right that we don't have.
There's got to be some limit.
So they wanted a promise of some spending cuts from Obama if he agreed, if they agreed, to raise the debt limit, allowing us to borrow even more money.
And the way those negotiations ended up was sequestration.
Okay, we'll solve it, but the debt limit's going to come up again in a year and a half, everybody knew.
And the next time it comes up, which is in March, if a deal isn't struck, then what happens is sequestration.
Sequestration is about $1.2 trillion in cuts, half of them from defense, to punish the Republicans.
Theoretically, Republicans don't want any defense cuts.
Why?
Because illicit Democrats in the media, Republicans like the military because they love being able to launch missiles and kill people.
The Democrats would be faced with cuts in Medicare.
And the Democrats don't like cuts in Medicare because the Democrats like saving people.
I'm just telling you, these are the images that have been put out.
Republicans are supposedly unalterably opposed to cutting the defense budget.
Democrats unalterably opposed to cutting social programs.
But both cuts would happen if there isn't a negotiated agreement to extend the debt limit or to raise it.
So that's where we are.
Sequestration hits in a couple of months, if no agreement is made on the next round of negotiations.
So the Republican position is: what the hell?
Just let the sequester happen.
We're going to get some spending cuts sometime.
Obama doesn't want any spending cuts, not a penny's worth.
None.
That's not the agenda.
There is no.
It will be no cut in spending.
And so the usual scare tactics are being employed now as to what sequestration means.
The Democrats are running around saying, you're going to lose your food stamps.
Kids will be starved.
We're taking food out of the mouths of babies.
It's the same thing that they always do.
They've been doing since 1995.
And it's all designed to scare the Republicans into not letting it happen because they're going to fear the American people will believe that they want kids to starve.
American people will believe they want old people to not have health care.
The American people will believe that they don't want anybody to have food stamps.
The American people will believe at all this.
And the Republicans usually do cave in light of such pressure.
So now Durbin, the point of this comment that he made was, come on, sequestration.
It was never really meant to be the budget.
It was just a budget strategy.
It's just out there as a really bad thing that nobody wants.
And because nobody wants it, we'll come to a deal first.
That's what he's saying.
Sequestration was designed as a budget threat, not a budget strategy.
And that's true.
It was designed to be so toxic to both Democrats and Republicans that neither of them would let this happen and they would agree to a deal.
Well, Obama's not agreeing to any kind of compromise.
He's not agreeing to any spending cuts whatsoever.
So there's no reason for the Republicans to make a deal.
And they're saying, well, look, we want spending cuts.
There's going to have to be some.
We can't continue with this.
So let's just let sequestration happen.
Hell with it.
He's president.
Let him live with it.
It's his idea anyway.
And that's why now the Democrats, the Washington Post and Pelosi and Reid are out.
So, well, the debt's been fixed.
There isn't a problem.
We've had all this debt reduction.
Pelosi and Reed are lying through their teeth.
And Obama's going to go out with State of the Union and promote all this Silly social issue stuff.
And don't forget about that.
Even the Republican establishment, Republicans, you need to drop your opposition to social stuff.
You got to get that off the table.
Just get that off.
We'll just stay focused on the fiscal stuff, but this abortion stuff is just killing us.
Now it's gay marriage that's killing us.
And now it's all gun control, all these immigration that's killing us.
So one by one, the Republicans are caving and throwing away every core belief that they have, trying to make sure that nobody dislikes them.
I have no idea where the sequestration thing is going to end up.
All I know is the Democrats are lying through their teeth about spending cuts that haven't happened, debt reduction that hadn't happened, debt fixes that haven't happened.
And as to what to do about it, I haven't the slightest idea, folks.
I don't know how you deal with liars.
Doug in Charleston, South Carolina.
Hello, sir.
Great to have you here.
Today, and my question for you simply is this: in light of the state of the union tomorrow and the state of the conservative movement, my question is: what do you believe your father would say if he were to be able to reflect back and see what has transpired with the conservative movement over the last 20 to 30 years?
Oh, my dad would, he'd be devastated.
He would be devastated from the standpoint that he'd be scared to death that his sons were going to end up being slaves to a government.
And he would be mad, I think, as hell over the watering down of the conservative movement.
I think he would be stunned and shocked by it.
He wouldn't understand it.
And he would be profoundly distressed by it, without question.
Hang on a minute.
I know you want to comment, and I got to take a time out.
So don't go away.
We'll be right back.
Hey, we're back.
Great to have you.
El Rushbo here on the cutting edge of societal evolution.
Back to Doug in Charleston, South Carolina.
My father, to answer your question, would be devastated by what has happened to the conservative movement.
And I think the thing that would perplex him the most is why so many brave and fearless conservatives in years gone by have become afraid to be conservative.
That's what he wouldn't understand.
And that's so problematic, and so many people, of course, are speaking up about it.
And, you know, not just from the standpoint of Republicans losing their conservative voice, but too many have lost their conservative values.
And if they don't espouse the conservative values, then certainly they can't give voice to it.
And for more than 25 years, that's what you've been doing.
And that's the consistency of it.
And that's what so many of us appreciate about what you did on the program.
And part of the reason why I was wanting to ask you this question, Rush, was because back in the early days of listening to your program, and I've been listening since 91, several times you recall the story of early on the success of the program starting out and your dad asking you where you had learned the conservative principles that you were giving voice to.
Right.
And you replied back to him, you know, from my recollection of the story was that you had learned it from him.
And I always thought that was such a touching tribute to him, but that's why I was just curious to know or to get a feel from you, Rush, what he would think of the conservative movement now and especially where it's gone these last 20 or 30 years.
And, you know, you've always been a voice of conservatism, but you've also been a voice of optimism.
And going forward, you know, where do you see the optimism, but I can't specify it for you.
I can't do any more than tell you it is an overall feeling that I have.
And it is a feeling that I have.
And I've examined it, and I've asked myself, am I just engaging in wishful thinking?
Am I lying to myself?
Am I lying to you?
Because I know that's what you want to hear.
I've asked myself, been very introspective about all this.
Pardon Sniffles.
And try to be as honest with myself as I can.
Now, we're in the midst of an utter devastation taking place to this country right in front of us, right before our very eyes.
And we are confronted every day with the apparent reality that a majority of the people who vote support it.
A majority of the people who vote.
And that's an important distinction.
There are a lot of people who oppose what's going on who did not bother to vote against it in November.
They didn't bother to vote, period.
And why we think we have the answers to, but they're not satisfying.
They are merely explanatory.
And those answers do not provide much comfort either.
All I can tell you is, and I guess it's rooted in a general undying faith in the founding of the country.
I believe in it so much.
I believe in the brilliance and the miraculous nature of the founding, even though it's very substantive and it was brilliant.
People who built this country and founded it, I also don't believe it was an accident or coincidence, and I believe it was blessed.
And I just think we're better than this.
And at some point, more and more people are going to reach their saturation level.
There's no daily evidence of that, or very little.
There's no evidence or very little evidence to support my optimism.
All I can tell you is that I still believe it.
Now, even with all of that, even if that turnaround does happen, it's going to be a massive effort to roll back, say, for example, Obamacare.
We've never rolled back an entitlement.
We've never totally defunded or taken back, taken away an entitlement.
Becomes an expectation, becomes a demand.
Entitlement has a specific definition.
So it's going to be very hard.
But we've done it before.
Woodrow Wilson, FDR.
There have been events which occurred which essentially sufficed to cause a reversal in our direction.
We survived HDR, or FDR.
We survived Woodrow Wilson.
We have survived any number of Similar type politicians and their desires.
And I think the cyclical nature of things is such that we will again.
I don't know when.
I don't know if it's going to be in my lifetime.
I don't pretend to understand how such a reversal is going to take.
All I can tell you is, and I'm not saying just sit on your butt and let it happen either.
That's not going to happen without effort.
I do know that there are millions of people devoted to reversing what's happening every day.
They are working grassroots levels.
They're raising money.
They're doing their best to find decent candidates to run.
They're doing their best to elect them.
There are just plenty of average people you've never heard of and never will, people who are not seeking fame.
Oh, reminds us: a great, great story in the Washington Post: a giant see, I told you so about, yep, right here.
If I don't get to this today, I got to do it tomorrow.
That's the best I can tell you.
I mean, it's the most honest way I can answer your question about optimism.
I mean, I'm still laughing.
I'm still smiling.
I'm still having fun making fun of all this, while at the same time understanding how dangerously serious it is.
Now, I want the story that you told about my father and so forth.
Let me get to the correct version of that.
And the key to understanding it is that my dad thought for all of his life until two years before he died, maybe a year before he died, that he was a failure as a parent because he couldn't convince me to go to college.
I hated school.
I despised it.
To this day, the thought of being in a classroom will send me into a cold sweat and panic.
I hated it.
It was prison.
I didn't want to be there.
I knew what I wanted to do when I was eight years old.
And as far as I was concerned, there was nothing in a classroom that was going to teach me how to do what I wanted to do.
And I was right about that, insofar as it went.
But my dad came out of the Great Depression.
And if you didn't have an education, you had no hope of getting a job.
And you had no hope of becoming a vice president.
You had no hope of becoming a vice president with a company car.
You had no hope of earning $50,000 a year if you didn't have a college degree.
My brother and everybody else in my family went to school, went into the law, went into banking, whatever, but I didn't.
I'm out there playing records as a DJ.
My dad was never happier than when I quit radio and went to work for the Kansas City Royals at $12,000 a year when I was 28.
Finally, I had a real job and a real company with real people.
He didn't understand the people in radio, and he was right not to.
And, well, he didn't.
It was never going to understand him.
Anyway, I went back to radio.
He was devastated.
Quit the baseball team, went back to radio.
He was devastated.
Oh, no, because if I'd have just stuck with that for 30 years, I'd have made $50,000.
I'd have had a company car.
I mean, that's the kind of thinking that you had when you lived through the Great Depression.
But I didn't like it.
I learned in three years I wasn't cut out for corporate conformity.
It just wasn't for me.
So I went back to radio.
And the short version of the story is that he had very much difficulty hearing.
He could not listen to the radio.
It irritated him.
So he never heard me on the radio.
And he died before my television show started.
But he did see me on Nightline one night, and I was discussing the environment with Al Gore, the soon-to-be vice president of the United States.
There I am on Nightline.
And he can't believe it.
I didn't go to college.
How in the world would somebody like Ted Coppel ask me to be on his show?
I didn't go to college.
And to discuss this.
So he watched the show.
My mother's telling the story.
My mother's telling me the story.
And after the second commercial break, she said, when they went to commercial for the third time in the show, my mother said that he hit the mute button and looked at her and was dumbfounded and said, Millie, where did he learn all of this?
It was impossible for me to know this stuff.
I didn't go to college.
All I was doing was playing Donnie Osmond records.
And my mother told me that she looked at him and said, from you, silly.
And he was totally taken aback by it.
But it's true.
True.
I mean, growing up in our family, in our house, was to be buried in politics and current events and all that every day, not just at the dinner table, but every day, every morning.
And I had friends of mine on Friday night in the high school who, instead of going out and trying to score a six-pack of Budweiser, would come over and they'd try to take turns getting my dad all riled up.
So he'd start pontificating for an hour without stopping and telling us how we're all going to be slaves and what all was going wrong and problem with liberals and communists and the Democrats and so forth.
And it was amazing.
So he was totally unaware of the impact that he had had on me.
It's why I've always said that the way you live your life and the people you come in contact with, just you never know who you're influencing.
You never know who you are inspiring.
You never know who you're shaping.
I mean, he had no clue.
He thought that just because I didn't go to college, that old belief from the Depression that I was destined to fail, he never stopped to consider whatever influence he might have had.
He thought he had failed at that.
So that's why I say be very trusting of what you believe, very confident about it.
Don't let anybody talk you out of it.
And when the stuff comes up, subject matter comes up, be confident about what you believe.
People very seldom will tell you to your face, you know what?
You're really smart.
You know what?
You've changed my mind.
Nobody's going to admit to your face that they didn't know something.
You just have to take comfort in the fact that that will happen.
You may never get the credit for it, but it's undeniable that we all influence and inspire people in ways that we'll never know.
I got to take a brief time out.
Don't go away.
We'll be right back.
We have on the phone Holly from somewhere in Ohio.
Holly, welcome to the EIB network.
Mr. Snurdley told me that you are the woman who was in a newspaper story we talked about last week.
Your purse was stolen.
Is that right?
Yeah, that's correct.
I'm hoping I'm the right one.
You are, well, I thought this was from, you live somewhere near a town named Brunswick?
Close by, yeah.
Okay.
It was a little, it's a news story that you lost your purse and you lost some cash and you lost this and that and the purse's value was $400.
The cash was $200.
And it ended up by saying that you also lost your food stamps, your food stamp cards.
And It seemed odd because the purse seemed like it was pretty pricey and a lot of cash in there was pretty pricey.
Whoever wrote the story made it look like it was kind of odd you were on food stamps.
Well, ironically, it was a like a, I call it a wallet, but then if you see it inside my purse, you would call it a purse.
But it's, it had that, it had $800 in cash in it.
But I'd like for everyone to number one, know, before I was a single mom, I was married and had a job, and my husband, ex-husband had a job, and I could afford that kind of stuff.
Now I'm a single mom, and unfortunately, I have no other choice but to be on welfare because if I do get a job, they're going to take everything away from me.
I've tried it.
So welfare is more financially responsible than getting a job.
Well, I've tried it before, and every time I do, the very first thing they do is take away my insurance and my medical or my food card.
And unfortunately, I can't make a job making enough to cover the medical insurance.
Let me tell you something, folks.
I totally believe this.
I think we have arrived at this point for a lot of people.
You're not the first person to have told this tale.
Holly, thanks for calling.
I have to run.
See if she'll let us talk to her tomorrow because I want to explore this further.
I got to go now.
Okay, this Washington Post story that I want to get to tomorrow is about the dangers of the attraction of fame to young people.
And as you know, that is something I have been warning about for months, if not years.
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