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Feb. 15, 2013 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:38
February 15, 2013, Friday, Hour #2
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Time Text
Okay, folks, the time has gone by too fast.
It's Friday.
Let's just keep it rolling here.
From the Southern Command in sunny South Florida.
It's open live Friday.
One of our favorite busy days of the broadcast week.
You get to talk about whatever you want to talk about when we go to the phones, and we're going to go to the phones in this hour, I promise.
The telephone number is 800-282-288-2, the email address L Rushbow at EIB net.com.
I really folks, I need to apologize to you.
I'm just talking too fast.
I'm trying to say too much too quickly.
Because what I'm trying to do is get calls in here, and I haven't even gotten to one.
There is so much in the stacks of stuff here, and I'm trying to get it all covered.
I'm trying to get it all done before the three hours have have gone by.
And so in the first hour, I mean, I would just lick it y split.
I mean, my tongue was really clicking in there in my mouth.
It's not that you couldn't understand it, but it's I'm sure it sounded it can sound nerve-wracking to have somebody just rat tat tat speaking so quickly as I was.
But I assure you, you know what it's like.
You got a lot to say.
You don't think you're gonna get it all in the time you've got.
So you just start chugging away, and sometimes you lose the organized presentation that you're known for.
And I ended up spending far more time on Dorner and Mark Lamont Hill than I wanted to, because I misread the stupid cue sheet here on the on the uh apology he made on O'Reilly last night.
But at any rate, I do want to go back and cover something here, and we've talked about it all week, but based on the reaction that I'm getting from Snerdley, who's twenty-five feet away from me.
I don't think now admittedly he's been screening calls while I've been doing the program, but I don't know that Snerdley fully comprehends, and he's right here, and if he doesn't fully comprehend what I've been trying to say, you may not.
And it is profoundly important.
And I want to go back to uh the 12th of February.
That would have been uh, I guess, well actually uh.
Well, the twelfth, I'm trying to figure out what day of the week it was and of a calendar doesn't matter.
There was a story in the New York Times, and the headline is all it took.
The headline Tuesday, okay, that the headline.
I have been trying to understand something for four plus years, just like you have.
And I have and actually I've been trying to understand it longer than that.
I've been trying to understand it since the Clinton years.
I have been trying to understand how it is that Democrats in the White House are never tied to the performance of the country's economy or anything else.
How it is they are never linked to it.
Yet every Republican is.
Whatever happened economically during George Bush's eight years, he and he alone was responsible for it.
Whatever has gone wrong in this economy since 2009, Barack Obama has had nothing to do with it.
As far as voters are concerned.
And I have been pulling my hair out, trying to figure out why.
And in the process, I've been pulling my hair out, trying to figure out ways to connect with those people who we've now named low information voters to try in some way to open their eyes and have them understand what they don't understand now, or have them see what they don't see now.
And persuasion, that is a huge task.
There are not very many people that can do it on a mass basis, and even fewer on an individual basis.
It's a very hard thing to really talk somebody out of what they think they know.
That become almost core beliefs, but I must tell you, just like you, I have sat here since the Clinton years, and I have I've I've I've been Alternately shocked, stunned, depressed, angry, you name it, over how Democrats are never ever linked to the effect their policies have on people.
I've wondered how in the world have they made people believe that not responsible when they hold all the power when it is their policies that are causing jobs to be lost, their policies causing taxes to go up, their policies resulting in the loss of liberty and freedom, their policies that are responsible for gas prices going up, housing values plummeting.
How is it that they have never been held accountable?
And Obama is the king.
Well, I saw this headline in the New York Times.
There were two things.
And the dominant one was this headline in the New York Times.
So we've had polling data from Gallup the day before on Monday.
And the Gallup polls showed that on every issue...
Except for one, which was the economy at large, or no, national defense was the exception.
On every issue, a majority of people disagree with Obama's policies.
And it's not even close.
52% here, 57% there, 64% there disagree with Obama's policies.
And yet he was re-elected, and yet people do not hold him accountable for what's happening.
And yet they disagree.
They're informed enough to know what his policies are, and they're informed enough to know that they're not good, but they don't connect those policies to him in terms of how the country's functioning.
So this headline in the New York Times polls show dissatisfaction with country's direction but support for Obama's agenda.
Now I can't tell you what it was, but that headline shone the light on 20 years of frustration, and I finally got it.
It finally made sense.
And the only way it can make sense to you is if you, as I did, totally abandoned yourself from the requirement that common sense be part of any equation.
How in the world can poll after poll show massive disagreement with Obama's policies?
And poll after poll show dissatisfaction with the direction the country is going, but support for Obama's agenda?
The first reaction you have is this country has got to be populated by a bunch of genuine, absolute morons.
That's the first reaction you have.
But then you have to throw that out because there has to be something more than that.
And I finally cracked it.
He is not associated with his policies, or better stated, his agenda, his policies that people disagree with are not associated.
There's no causal relationship to Obama's policies and what's happening in the country.
How does that happen?
How does how does anybody get away with that?
And then the second light went off.
And it was this.
He's never, ever seen as governing.
He's always campaigning against the very things he's causing.
He's out there promising to create jobs while destroying the market.
But people don't see him destroying the market.
We've got to face it.
What they hear is Obama's working hard to create jobs.
He had the job summit.
He says we're not going to do anything that's going to add a dime to the deficit, yet the deficit keeps going up.
What I had to come to grips with is a majority of people who vote think somebody else is doing all this.
Now, how does that happen?
How does Obama make that happen?
And it it goes back again to the fact that he is not seen as in charge of this.
It's not so much that he's an outsider, but the constant campaign mode allows him to constantly be seen as running against everything that's happening.
If he ever assumed the role of governing, and that includes if he ever say compromised and made an agreement with the Republicans, and that would end the idea that he is not attached to what happens.
That's why there will never be any compromise with the Republicans.
That's why there will not be any bipartisanship.
No matter what happens on any issue, legislatively or otherwise, when it's all done, Obama is going to run around the country after whatever sign and start campaigning against the dastardly mean stuff that was just done to him.
With a slavish, supportive, compliant, involved media, he's able to create this illusion and to continue to present it and sell it.
So Megan Kelly did a story on this yesterday.
She had a couple people in, and I want to replay soundbite from one of her guests, a Democrat strategist by the name of Tara Dowdell.
And Meghan Kelly said, at what point do the voters of this country finally look at Obama and say, you know what?
It is your fault.
Or you know what, Mr. President, you are running the country.
You are accountable.
Because we're five years into his presidency.
He's not accountable to anything, folks, as far as the people of his country are concerned.
She's asking this Democrat strategist, when's that going to happen?
When is he going to be held accountable?
I go back further than George W. Bush.
I think our economy has been in decline for 30 years.
We've had a huge gap between people who have money in the United States and people who don't.
That's been going on far beyond George Bush.
But I think that people recognize that dynamic, but at the same time, of course they want the president to be out there fighting.
But where I disagree with Tony is what's wrong with taking your message and pushing your agenda to the people?
If we're saying government is about the people, then why not ask the people to get involved and get engaged in our democracy?
Now that answer is an entire disconnect from reality, just as Obama's presidency is a disconnect from reality.
Obama's presidency has no relationship to reality whatsoever.
But this woman has really made my point.
The way Obama has made it, and I believe this is true.
The way Obama looks at this country is it was unjustly founded.
It was immorally founded.
It was a racist country.
It favored the few privileged.
They happened to be white.
And those people set up a system, the founding fathers, to make sure that they got to keep most of what was produced.
The precious few got most of it.
And then the rest, everybody else just got the crumbs.
And so this country's been a 200-plus year mistake.
And he's out trying to fix it now.
And that's what his perpetual presidency, which is what campaign is all about, trying to right those injustices, trying to correct all these wrongs that have been going on for 200 years.
But the focus point in the modern era is the Reagan years.
That's that's that's when everything went south.
That's when it got worse than ever.
Because that's what Reagan really let it be known that all he cared about was the rich people.
This is what this is what history revisionists have written.
Of course, none of this is true.
That doesn't matter for this discussion.
The history revisionists have seen to it that Reagan was the exact opposite of what he was.
For example, it was Ronald Reagan when he took off his top marginal tax rate was 70%.
By the time he left office, it was 28%.
Revenues to the Treasury had doubled.
Ronald Reagan did more to elevate lower middle income people than anything had been done prior.
But what is written about him is just the exact opposite.
And this woman, this Democrat strategist, I don't think knows the truth.
I think she'd been educated and formed whatever.
She's living the lie, and now she's out talking about the lie.
But to her, it isn't one.
She really believes Ronald Reagan's the focus of modern evil, and before him the founding fathers were.
This country's been unjust and immoral from the beginning.
Capitalist never been the fair way to do it.
And so Obama is seen as the first president to really come along seriously to try to fix all this.
And that's why he's apologizing for the country.
And that's why he's running around at every step he can, pointing out the problems, the injustices.
And he's seen as fixing it.
At the same time, he's made himself out to be Santa Claus.
By the do you see Boehner.
When did we say that Obama was what was the day after the election?
You can't beat Santa Claus.
The Speaker of the House figured this out yesterday.
John Boehner actually said that Obama's trying to make himself out to be Santa Claus.
So at some point, it all clicks for people.
Eventually they will get it.
But poll showed dispatch dissatisfaction with the country's direction, support for Obama's agenda.
The only way to understand this, and it defies common sense, you have to set that aside.
The only way to understand it is people do not hold him accountable.
He will never be seen as governing.
Now you may think, how's that Russia not possible?
He's president.
Look at what he does.
He's constantly campaigning.
He's constantly running against something.
He's constantly warning people of the danger and the evil that's lurking out there unless he does something, unless we come together to do something.
I'll give you another example.
Audio soundbite number three.
Tony Kushner.
This less than Charlie Rhodes, PBS.
Now, Tony Kushner was the screenwriter for the movie Lincoln.
This guy is heralded as the best at what he does in Hollywood.
And as such, he's considered to be the smartest.
He's the most brilliant screenwriter.
This guy, nobody can touch him.
And they were talking about his screenplay.
Charlie Rose says, at the end of the line, when you finished and you made the movie, what did you think you knew about Lincoln that you really didn't know before?
Obama faced in 08 situation, you know, as bad as any president since the Great Depression.
What Obama inherited from the Bush administration is, you know, we all remember is just a absolute global catastrophe on every level.
And uh I think he's done an astonishing job beginning to turn that around.
And uh, like Lincoln, there's been an enormous amount of criticism of our president that comes from an impatience with uh you said that you were, you know, going to do this, and you said you were gonna do that, and why hasn't it happened?
And uh the fact of the matter is that when you're elected president of the United States rather than king of the United States, you have to work with a very cumbrous, unwieldy machinery.
Say the Hollywood intellectual.
Uh yeah, uh uh well Obama faced it in a way situation, you know, as bad as any president since the Great Depression, uh, Charlie.
And eh, what Obama inherited from the Bush administration is, as you know, as we all remember, the absolute global catastrophe on every level.
And I I think he's done an astonishing job of beginning to turn it around.
These guys are all making my point.
They don't even know it.
I gotta take a break here, though, so set tight.
Okay, I got one more Tony.
Well, I have two more Tony Kushner bites, but time for one.
The Lincoln movie screenwriter, totally wrong in everything he thinks, but you'll never talk about him.
But it is intellectual.
George Bush.
I mean, it was just horrible.
It was uh global catastrophe.
Now here's the next soundbite of Kushner talking Charlie Rose about Obama.
What I think he's done, that Lincoln did, was to constantly articulate for the people while making sausages, while making these compromises, the place that we're ultimately headed for.
He's been very careful to say that he rejects the idea that government is evil.
There's a rejection of the sort of basic idea of human community behind the Reagan uh behind Reagan era ideology that is really frightening and that leads us to terrible, terrible places.
We have no hope for survival as a species if we continue down the path of this kind of psychotic individualism.
Now, this is just that's blubber.
It's pure gobbledygook and gibberish.
But these guys think they're the smartest people in the room, and they believe all this.
What this means is I'll have to tell you we get back, and we'll get to your phone calls.
Please hang on.
Okay, those of you on the hole, please indulge me as I play two more bites.
I want to replay Soundbite number four.
We just aired it.
Tony Kushner articulating where we're headed.
They're talking about Obama doing that.
What Obama's, he's telling us where we are headed.
Obama's not causing anything.
He's telling us where we're headed.
Obama's policies aren't responsible for.
We're still living with the residue of Reagan.
We're living with the residue of Bush, the global catastrophe that Bush was on every level.
Now, I have to tell you, I'm sitting here listening to this, and I am incredulous.
This guy is supposedly one of the smartest screenwriters ever.
Tony Kushner, screenwriter for Lincoln.
Now you and I know that the Bush administration was entirely lied about, mischaracterized, miscaricatured from the supposed early days of the recession.
I mean, with the Bush presidency, we had unemployment at an all-time low of 4.7%.
Economic growth was through the roof.
We came out of two recessions, including that caused by the big 9-11 attack.
We had a robust, roaring economy.
But what was lurking in the midst of it that some people knew and didn't tell us about, but most people didn't know, was the subprime mortgage crisis that was about ready to blow up and undermine everything.
And even that.
Bush's relationship to it was to try to stop it via regulation, and he was shot down by the Democrats.
But what has been done in revising the truth of the Reagan years and what was done during the Bush years to mischaracterize what was happening at the time was an amazing feat of political lying and propaganda.
To the point that this guy Tony Kushner actually believes with his 140 Mensa IQ, that the Bush administration was a global catastrophe.
Obama campaigned on the fact it was a global catastrophe, that the world hated us.
And worse.
And so Obama, all he's trying to do is fix all of this.
It's a job that no one man can do in four years.
Here's Kushner drawing comparisons between Obama and Lincoln, and again detailing just how deeply rooted the problems of Reaganism are and how much work still ahead in correcting all of that.
What I think he's done that Lincoln did was to constantly articulate for the people while making sausages, while making these compromises.
The place that we're ultimately headed for.
He's been very careful to say that he rejects the idea that government is evil.
There's a rejection of the sort of basic idea of human community behind the Reagan uh behind Reagan era ideology that is really frightening and that leads us to terrible, terrible places.
We have no hope for survival as a species if we continue down the path of this kind of psychotic individualism.
Psychotic individualist.
We have no hope for survival as a species with this Reagan era psychotic individualism.
And that's what Obama's fixing.
That's where we're headed.
We're headed away from all that.
And he's working hard.
And yeah, it's it's causing a lot of pain, but the pain's being caused actually by Reagan policies and Bush polic policies.
Man, he's just it's a yeoman's effort he's engaging here to try to correct all of this.
And then he sees Obama as a as a revolutionary.
Listen to this next bite, Snerdly, listen.
Tony Kushner, screenwriter Lincoln says that Obama is not to be judged based on the results of his presidency or on the conditions in which people live.
Which I don't know how better you could make my point than this one.
I know so many people that woke up on election morning.
Where I live on the upper west side at any rate, woke up thinking, oh my God, what if at the end of the night we have Mitt Romney as president?
And you know, what does that say about the American people and what are you know, is democracy a bad idea?
It's still a question.
I'm also really interested in change and the question of time and change.
When Lincoln signed the emancipation proclamation, Karl Marx of all people in England said Abraham Lincoln has now changed this conflict from a civil war to a revolution.
There's a deep, deep place in the popular imagination, especially the left imagination for revolution.
It's uh Walter Benjamin likens it to the anticipation of the Messiah coming.
Yeah, well, there he's got him.
You got Barack Obama.
You got the the anticipation of the Messiah coming.
And what does it say about the American people?
We might have elected Romney.
But uh Obama is to be judged as a revolutionary, not based on the results of his presidency, the conditions in which people live.
That's that's so beneath.
Obama as a person judge people, that would have judge people based on the results of Obama's presidency or the conditions in which they live.
Obama is so much more than that.
He's messianic.
He's leading a revolution.
Now Tony Kushner's best known work is something called Angels in America.
Angels in America is a seven-hour epic about the AIDS epidemic in the Reagan era in New York, in which Reagan is blamed for AIDS.
If you recall, Reagan was blamed for AIDS.
And you know why?
Because he never talked about it.
When I heard this talk, and I'm honest, folks, uh when I began to hear all this talk that Reagan was responsible for the AIDS epidemic, I said, Wow, has Reagan been making love of that many people?
I didn't know that.
Has Reagan been out there messing around with people at night over in Lafayette Park like nobody knew.
And it w no, it wasn't that.
He just never talked about it.
Reagan didn't care about it.
That's why he was responsible for AIDS.
Tony Kushner's newest completed work is a play called The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a key to the scriptures.
Tony Kushner's socialist spectacular.
So uh that's one explanation for the w way he thinks.
Well, he's Hollywood is successful because he's in Hollywood.
He is a perfect reflection of the current uh makeup of Hollywood.
Anyway, I've it's time to go to the phones.
I've been intending to do this since the program started, and we are gonna start Greensburg, Pennsylvania with me, and I'm glad you waited.
Thank you so much.
Thank you for taking my call.
I've been a big fan and have listened to you actually since I was ten years old.
Thank you so much.
Thank you very much.
Appreciate that.
Uh I want to make a comment on your first half hour when you were playing the clips from uh the cruise lines not being regulated by the U.S. government, and I just thought maybe they could do a bang-up job with it like they've done with regulating the airlines.
So you're you're drawing a comparison of how well the airlines are run when they're regulated or unregulated, right?
Absolutely.
You know, they've just done such a great uh great job with the the TSA that maybe they could impart that on the cruise lines as well.
Well, you remember now this that was a bunch of media people.
That was a soundbite that was a montage if you're just joining us.
We had a montage of basically CNN people talking about carnival cruise lines, and that they came to a conclusion that the pursuit of profit was at the root of this problem of this cruise ship basically falling apart and drifting aimlessly out there in the Gulf of Mexico.
The pursuit of profit, the lack of federal regulation, the fact that Barack Obama was not there to tell them how to do it.
Honest to God, folks.
The fact that Barack Obama or some federal bureaucracy was not there to tell the cruise ship how to run its ship and to run its business is why this happened.
That's what the people on CNN said.
And there were a couple of um derogatory comments about profit uh and uh so forth.
And then they were they were complaining that these uh cruise ships are not registered in the U.S. so as to avoid taxes and to avoid unions, and that's why this happened.
Let me tell you why this happened.
It's one very simple reason.
The cruise ship lost electricity.
If you want to see entire cities become what happened on that cruise ship, then you stand by idly and you let the environmentalist wackos have their way and encroach very gradually on your freedom to use the electricity that you pay for.
They are opposed to carbon fuels, which means they are opposed to the generation of electricity, which is done predominantly with you know the the hypocrisy of these people.
They're out there there's a there's a big big dispute going on between the manufacturers of the Tesla electric car and the New York Times.
Some guy named Broder drove one in the middle of the winter, and it broke down.
He needed a tow.
He wrote a very unfavorable review.
The manufacturer, the CEO of Tesla, a guy by the name of Elon Musk, is in a big battle with the New York Times, claiming they lied and misrepresented a truth about his state-of-the-art electric car.
It's not it's not pleasant, folks.
You have this this battle going on between liberal giants on the one side an environmentalist guy concerned with his electric car, and on the other side, the New York Times, which is all for this kind of stuff, but this one they claim didn't work.
Anyway, to me, the utter stupidity.
Uh I gotta dial that back.
That's gonna make people nervous when I talk that way.
It makes young women nervous.
It makes them feel threatened when I say things like stupid.
I don't know what I should call this.
The electric car is supposed to save us from global warming and climate change, and how is it to do that?
Well, uh driving the electric car, we will not use as much gasoline.
Gasoline comes from oil, gasoline, therefore is a fossil fuel.
Fossil fuels pollute and destroy and change the climate, and the less we use, the better off we are.
Except where do they think the power comes from to charge the batteries in the electric car?
It comes from power plants, which are coal fired, and coal is every bit the fossil fuel and oil is.
Driving an electric car is not reducing fossil fuel usage in IOTA.
Driving an electric car is making not one shred of difference in the use of fossil fuels.
But it makes liberals feel better about themselves.
It makes them think they're actually doing something meaningful, that their lives have meaning, and they're actually making a difference.
And they're not.
If you want your city to become that cruise ship, it's not don't hire the CEO as the mayor.
It's don't let the environmentalist wackos get anywhere near your power plant.
Because it was the lack of electricity that caused that cruise ship to totally decompose the way it did.
That's a sole thing.
They lost their power plant, something went wrong, and that's when everything blew apart.
As it will in your house or your city before long after you lose electricity.
And then keep in mind the environmentalist wackos, the Democrat Party, that's the direction they want to go.
Electricity from fossil fuels is one of the modern evils of the world.
And so you could safely say that if those people get their way, most people's lives could end up looking very much like what happened to that cruise ship, as opposed to what life looks like today.
Okay, and back to the phones we go because it's open line Friday, and this is uh Bill and Sierra Vista, Arizona.
Great to have you here, sir.
Hi.
Thank you very much, Rush, for taking my call.
You bet.
I just wanted to say that I don't share your optimism for our future.
I believe in the next thirty six months that the Supreme Court will uphold whatever invasive gun laws that Obama seeks to uh to push upon us.
I believe that we will lose the House of Representatives in 2014, and I honestly believe that uh Obama is going to be reelected in 2016.
If uh if if Obama is still the dear leader in 2016, I will venture to say it will not be an election that makes that possible.
Well, I would have to agree, but I as I say, I uh the um I wish I could share your optimism, but I feel like it's uh akin to telling the passengers on the Titanic that it's just the bow that sank.
Um I just uh I think there's too many people who uh are are too gullible as you have been speaking of before.
I believe that too many people have too much invested in their personal lives, and they don't want to believe that there is uh a critical uh situation existing in our country, and to admit it means that wait a minute, I want to know what that means.
When you say too many people um uh are are too much invested in their personal lives.
Well then they don't I have a great uh many friends who have um who are doing well personally.
Um I don't have a great many friends.
I have friends who are doing well personally, and to admit that the future is bleak uh means that they would have to admit to themselves that there is a chance for loss of their personal achievements.
You mean to tell wait a second now, wait a second.
This is a new one.
I don't I know a lot of profoundly successful people who have worked for it.
I also know some people who've inherited it, and those people are not worried.
They could.
But everybody I know, and I'm not exaggerating, everybody I know who has worked and has earned a considerable amount is scared to death it's gonna be taken from them.
I don't know anybody who isn't.
I find it fascinating you know such people and it and that they're they're so invested that they don't think anything can happen to it, and they're uh that blows my mind, quite honestly.
It really does.
I'm not arguing with you, I'm just telling you, it really stuns me.
I it is I have a great many friends who say, Oh, they're never gonna take the guns away, and it'll never happen.
We'll lose the house in 2014, and and it's impossible for him to be re elected.
And I believe that this is just one of those issues where it's easier to bury your head in the sand and say no, it couldn't happen.
Now that's fascinating.
Can you can you hang on for a for a while here, Bill?
Sure.
if you can't then have to hang up, understand.
But if you can, and appreciate it.
We gotta take a time out here back after this.
No, no, no.
I I know not personally, I know there are people who are doing okay who don't even fathom the possibility of losing it.
But I'm saying the people I know who are doing well, they all fear it.
They fear it being taken with a wealth tax or some other drastic uh procedure.
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