All Episodes
Previous Next
Feb. 21, 2013 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:42
February 21, 2013, Thursday, Hour #1
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
I I folks, I'm sorry here.
I I just I can't help but think that we are all being played for a bunch of fools, bunch of suckers on this sequester business.
I don't know.
Are you like me?
Do you really think 800,000 people are gonna lose their jobs in the Pentagon because we cut 22 billion dollars?
Do you really think air traffic control's gonna shut down?
Do you really think there aren't going to be any meat inspectors?
Do you really think it all of these horror stories are going to happen?
I don't.
I think it and I've I feel like I've been here.
This is deja vu all over again.
I remember the 1995 budget battle.
That involved a legitimate government shutdown.
It wasn't just twenty-two billion dollars we were not gonna spend.
We're still gonna spend three and a half trillion, we're just not gonna spend twenty-two billion if it happens.
And all of this hell is gonna descend on the government shutdown in 1995.
Yeah, we were gonna starve kids.
That was the plan then.
I'm just kidding.
I'm sorry, it's all ridiculous to me.
Every bit of this.
I've I've been doing this, you know, get new perspective.
I've been doing this for into my twenty-fifth year.
And I think I mentioned to you last week and maybe the week before.
I've been doing this long enough now to start seeing the repeat cycles on everything.
I don't care whether it's a debt limit or the fiscal cliff, or a continuing resolution, or the budget crisis of 2008, or TARP or the auto bailouts, and now the sequester, it's the same playbook.
It is the same threats, it's the same danger, it's the same crisis.
It's identical.
There's nothing about it that changes.
Over and over, and everybody gets sucked into it.
I try to escape, I try to get out of it, I try to leave it aside, I try to move on, but it just sucks me back in too until I realize that I have been sucked back in.
And then there's there's a part of me that says, Oh, wait a minute now, you got not just Panetta, but now a military uh a uniform military general, general, or don't are, or darn, or don't or don't know, or or durno.
He's saying that he could lose 600,000 uniformed people.
And I the common sense of this, as it add up.
Now we've got a guy comparing this to the Oklahoma City bombing.
I have that story, let's see.
What's uh Yeah, I've got that story on women talk more than men and how they discovered why.
I'll get to that in a minute.
Did you see that?
Didn't see that.
It's from um Science World Report, Why Women Talk More Than Men.
They've just uh it's a government study.
What isn't a government study?
What what what happens here that isn't related to government anymore?
Uh it's a language protein that they've uncovered out there.
You know, this is the Catherine Griffin writing for something called Science World Report.
And I think this is hate research.
Hate science.
I mean this is beating up on women.
It's all part of the war on women.
Now we're doing a science survey on why women talk more than men.
Hate science, hate research.
You know all the times that men complain about women talking too much?
Well, apparently there is a biological explanation for the reason why women are chattier than men.
Scientists have discovered that women possess higher levels of a language protein in their brains.
And that could explain why women are so talkative.
Previous research has shown that women talk almost Three times as much as men.
In fact, an average woman.
There is no such thing, by the way, but we'll go along with this there.
The average woman notches up 20,000 words in a day, which is about 13,000 more words than the average man speaks.
In addition, women generally speak more quickly and devote more brain power to speaking.
This thing had me until we got to that point.
Yet before now, researchers haven't been able to biologically explain why this is the case.
Now we've all had our theories about why women talk more.
And it's because we upset them so much.
We're constantly in trouble.
We men are constantly on the edge.
But now scientists can explain it.
New findings conducted by researchers at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, published in the Journal of Neuroscience, show that a certain protein may be the culprit.
See, that's why this is hate science and hate research.
Culprit indicates criminal.
Culprit indicates bad person.
So here we have a culprit explaining why women talk so much.
In 2001, a gene called Fox P2 appeared to be essential for the production of speech.
In order to test the protein, the team led by J. Michael Bowers and Margaret McCarthy looked at young rat pups.
Did you know that baby rats were called pups?
I didn't know that rats talk too much either, but that's why this is all hate research, hate speech.
I've learned that.
I know about every battle.
Anyway, these uh animals, these rat pups, what they do is they emit cries in the ultrasonic range when separated from their mothers.
The team recorded the cries over five minutes in groups of four-day-old male and female rat pups that had been separated from their mothers.
They found that male rat pups had up to twice as much of the protein Fox P2 in regions of the brain known to be involved in vocalization.
Perhaps an unsurprising finding since researchers noted that male rat pups made twice as many cries as female.
Do you want to hear the rest of this?
You're kidding.
Next, the researchers wanted to test their findings in humans.
So they conducted a small study on human children aged four to five years old, the closest they could get to the rat pups.
These children who had died in accidents less than 24 hours previously.
That's what it says.
They conducted a small study on human children aged four to five who had died in accidents less than twenty-four hours previously.
They then analyzed the amount of fox P2 protein in the brains of these children.
And in the end, the researchers found 30% more protein in the brains of the girls.
All of this, rat pups and all, to find out why women talk more.
Once again, I don't know what these guys were paid, but I would have blown the whistle on this for a dime.
The research shows that the protein is a key molecule for communication in mammals.
In fact, it could allow researchers to better understand other species that may or not possess the protein, such as Neanderthals.
So Neanderthal women didn't speak as much.
Anyway, with this new biological link, scientists could possibly trace back the evolutionary origin of speech.
Wow.
How exciting.
So anyway, there's that that that stuff is out there.
But I I back back to the sequester here business.
I just everything gets repeated.
The cycle, the claims, the threats, the crisis, Armageddon, it's the same.
And we're talking 22 billion dollars.
It's not as though we're not going to spend anything.
If the sequester happens, the first year is 44 billion dollars, Half of that's defense.
We're still going to spend three and a half trillion or three point three trillion dollars.
Even if we don't spend the twenty-two.
And then there's this guy mentioned that blames all of this draws an analogy to the uh Oklahoma City bombing.
And we got our our old buddy Ron Fournier, used to be at AP, not the National Journal.
This is quite instructive, actually.
Let me just read a portion of this to you.
Mr. President, this is crazy, is the headline of his piece.
Your federal government's almost certain to blow past the March deadline for averting 1.2 trillion in haphazard budget cuts that could cost 700,000 jobs.
But see, it's not 1.2 trillion.
It is over 10 years, but it's not next year, not this year.
This year's portion of it's 22 billion.
And does somebody really think that even if the sequester happens, it's not going to get fixed for 10 years.
Anyway.
But don't worry over the loss of these 700,000 budget cut jobs.
We know who to blame.
President Obama makes a credible case that he's reached farther toward compromise than the House Republicans have.
He has?
Well, I guess he has since the media says so.
President Obama makes a credible case that he has reached farther toward compromise.
But knowing who's at fault, right, Mr. Fournier, doesn't fix the problem.
To loosely quote Billy Joel, you may be right, Mr. President, but this is crazy.
Is this fiscal standoff, this is the fifth such standoff since Republicans took control of the House in 2011?
Is that not an interesting perspective, by the way?
It's not the fifth standoff since Obama was immaculated.
No, no.
It's the fifth standoff since Republicans took control of the House two years ago.
Is this standoff just about scoring political points, or is it about governing?
And unknown to Mr. Fournier, he has swerved right into my theory now.
Political points versus governing.
And he says it's all about politics.
If it's all about politics, then bully for Obama.
A majority of voters will likely side with the president over Republicans in a budget dispute because of his popularity and the Republicans'pathetic approval speech.
Speaking of that, I don't want to depress you out there, but Obama's approval rating is as high as it's been since 2009.
55%.
The Republicans' approval is as low as it's been since 2009.
Chris Christie was on a letterman, eats a donut, and he's at 74% approval.
Christie is at 74%.
Obama 55% highest approval in in well since four years.
But then Mr. Fournier said, after writing, if this is all about politics, then bully for Obama, but if it's about governing, the story changes.
Yes, sorry, Bob, that's my whole point.
You see, as Mr. Fournier writes totally unaware that he totally confirming my brilliant theorem of last week.
If it's about governing, then the story changes for Obama because in any enterprise, the chief executive is ultimately accountable for success and failure.
Yeah, blame Congress.
Go ahead and castigate all 535 of them.
But there's only one president.
Even if he's right on the merits, he may be on the wrong side of history.
Fair or not, the president owns this mess.
Mr. Fournier, I disagree with you, he doesn't.
That is the whole point.
The president does not own this mess.
His approval rating wouldn't be at 55% if he owned this mess.
He is not governing, Mr. Fournier.
You you've you've stumbled into this and I'm here to alert you how right you are, you don't even know it.
He's not governing.
It's all about politics.
Congress is being blamed for this.
The Republicans are being blamed.
Obama's just the outsider trying to fix it all.
He's the guy trying to compromise.
He even went out and played golf to try to compromise.
He even went out and played golf with Tiger Woods to try to compromise.
And still the Republicans resist.
Fair or not, the president owns this mess.
He doesn't own this mess.
Even though it was his idea.
Even though he will choose if the sequester happens, where there are cuts, he will choose it.
But as far as the low information voter population's country, he does not own this mess, Mr. Fournier, and he will not own it.
The Republicans own this lock, stock and barrel.
But Mr. Fournier writes, what can Obama do about it?
Well, for starters, and he says he could read an op ed piece published a couple months ago in a Midwestern newspaper, and Fournier highlights an op-ed written by a Republican who blames everybody on both sides for it, and we all got to get together and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
That's what Fournier thinks Obama needs to read.
With a few weeks, Obama could make it a presidential address.
A few tweaks, I'm sorry.
This column is so good it can make it a presidential address.
Americans are fed up with the jousting.
There's a lot of public posturing, but apparently not much genuine conversation.
That gets to the root of what's bothering me here.
The jousting never ends.
And there's there's I just I just feel like I'm being played for a fool here to get sucked into this narrative and this template every day.
The way all this stuff plays is I think this whole episode is a big joke.
On the country, I think this is an insulting joke to everybody.
This is an embarrassing spectacle.
And after 1995, 1993, it I'm getting tired of it.
I'm warned, it's this it's it's history repeating itself over and over and over and almost verbatim from taking food out of the mouths of children to their coming for our children to we're gonna no meat inspectors.
Even they're even saying we have to close down the sleigh rides in Jellystone Park has come up again.
Like it did in the 1995 budget belt.
Let me take a time out here, folks.
We'll come back and continue with all of this and much more right after this.
Ladies and gentlemen, for the first time in my life, I am ashamed of my country to be watching all of this to be treated, to have my intelligence, all of us, to have our common sense and intelligence insulted the way it's being.
is...
It just makes me ashamed.
Seriously, man, and here we get worked up over 44 billion dollars, that's the total amount of money that will not be spent that was scheduled to be spent this year.
And in truth, we're gonna spend more this year than we spent last year.
We're just not gonna spend as much as was projected.
It's all baseline budgeting.
There is no real cut below a baseline of zero.
There just isn't.
And yet, here they come.
Sucking this in, roping us in, panic here, fear there, crisis, destruction, no meat inspection, no cops, no teachers, no firefighters, no air traffic control.
I'm sorry, my days of getting roped into all this are over.
We have the media play along with all this.
The ruling class, both parties play along with all this.
It's insulting.
I don't know how else to describe it.
I'm into my twenty-fifth year.
I can't tell you the number of times it this hit me yesterday.
I've said the same things over and over for 25 years.
That whether the Clinton presidency or the Obama presidency, whether it's a Pelosi speakership or Tom Foley, who was speaker when I started, it's the same stuff.
It's the same threats, it's the same arguments over and over.
Nothing ever changes.
We just keep spending more money.
We create more dependency.
We get more and more irresponsible, one crisis to the next, all of them manufactured except for the real crisis, which nobody ever addresses, and that is we can't afford any of this.
Sadly, my friends, right as I reach the peak, I have to take a break.
What's happening here, folks, is we are being played for fools, being suckered, suckered into supporting the never-ending expansion of government, the wholesale destruction of the private economy.
And everybody who joins in this debate under the premise that Obama puts forth.
As well as debating the politics of this nonsense, just being used to cover up what's actually going on.
Now what's going on's no great conspiracy, it's no mystery.
We're spending much more money than we have.
The government is getting inexorably larger, it's less and less efficient at accomplishing anything.
We're creating more and more dependence, we're robbing people of their own dignity and humanity and their own opportunity to realize their own dreams as they turn their lives over to the government.
It's a never-ending cycle.
The government makes the private sector smaller, there are fewer job opportunities, there's less money in the private sector, less opportunity to accrue wealth, income taxes and others threaten to go higher, they do go higher, it all adds up to the government growing, the private sector shrinking, freedom being lost ever so slowly.
And nobody ever talks about stopping this.
Everybody gets sucked into debating the crisis of the moment.
According to the terms of the moment, without any context and relationship to the past and a knowable future, and a relevant perusal of the present.
These little debates take place within their own little universe.
As though they're unaffected by things that have happened in the past.
It's just and we hear the most outrageous things.
The government's gonna shut down.
Life can't go on as we know it if we don't spend twenty-two billion dollars this year.
For 15 to 20 years, I have been behind this microphone, and I've actually been defending the accusation that Republicans want to starve children.
It comes up repeatedly.
Predictably regularly.
And for 15 or 20 years, I have been trying to tell people in this country via this radio show, no, the Republicans are not trying to starve children.
The allegation itself ought to disqualify the people who make it.
Because it's patently absurd.
There's nobody trying to starve anybody.
In terms of food.
But particularly Republicans trying to starve children.
Republicans trying to deny people health care.
The Republicans want big business to be able to pollute the air.
The Republicans want their children living in an In an economic and environmental sewer.
It's an insult to my intelligence to have to even try to defend this to people.
The idea that there are people who believe it is bad enough.
But I can understand it once or twice, but for 20 years this cycle has been repeating.
And it's ridiculous.
It's a distraction.
And one of two things is either happening.
Either more and more people believe this idiocy or more and more people are just saying, you know what?
I don't want any part of this, and they're not paying attention to it.
National Journal has a piece today by Matt Cooper, Matthew Cooper.
Just when you thought the drive-bys could not top themselves with sequesteria.
We get this.
Matthew Cooper is comparing the 2.2% reduction in the rate of spending increase to the Oklahoma City bombing.
Now, he immediately says that he's not making that comparison.
But if he's not, why did he bring it up?
In relationship to sequestration.
Seems to be the point of his article.
He says in the piece that sequestration has a good side, that it'll show the American public that the government is important.
That the American people will learn that we should not demonize the government.
He says the sequester cuts are going to stop air traffic control.
Well, you know that's happened before.
Ronaldus Magnus fired the air traffic controllers when they went on strike in the early 80s, and the airplanes still flew.
And the airports remained open.
The schools remained open, and the military was still out there firing weapons at bad guys.
But we need to live through this sequester.
So people will find out just how important and relevant government is to their life and how we should not demonize it.
Not only will this sequester stop air traffic control, Mr. Cooper says it'll end meat inspections.
It'll close Yellowstone.
And this is exactly what I mean.
The budget battle of 1995 was going to end the sleigh rides at Jellystone National Park.
And CNN Larry King actually got the sleigh ride concessionaire on his TV show.
And the sleigh ride concessionaire, who ended up being a conservative, we ended up talking to that guy.
He called here, but he was playing it for all its worth.
Yeah, he went on and he talked about how tough it was going to be.
Nobody was going to be able to go on a sleigh rides because the government wasn't going to be paying him to do it.
Remember, all the federal employees were going to lose their Thanksgiving turkeys because of the government shutdown.
Oh, folks, if you weren't around then it was Armageddon.
And so is this.
But never mind the world didn't end when Reagan fired the air traffic controllers, and never mind that the states have their own meat inspectors and they pay teachers and cops and firefighters.
The federal government doesn't.
Never mind that there has to be enough money remaining in the 3.7 trillion dollar budget after the 44 billion dollars in cuts to keep the national parks open and everything else operating.
Look at it this way.
How much money do you earn a year?
100,000, not just pick around.
You earn a hundred thousand dollars a year, and every now and then a government comes to you and says, we need to raise taxes.
You can afford to do without as much as you're earning.
You don't really need that much.
We're going to raise taxes because we need to invest in education here.
And we need to invest in research and development.
And we need to invest in uh in jobs, and we we need to invest in infrastructure.
So we're going to raise your taxes, and you're expected to not complain and get along with less.
Now the federal government earns a lot more than 100,000 a year.
The federal government has 3.7 trillion dollars.
And whereas you are not supposed to complain, and you're supposed to be able to get along just fine with a little tax increase if you make a hundred thousand.
The government can't be expected to continue to operate if twenty-two billion dollars is subtracted from their three point seven trillion.
This is the equivalent of the government being asked to do without a penny and a half, ladies and gentlemen.
And they can't do it.
A penny and a half closes airports, shuts down air traffic control, shuts down meat inspection.
Shuts down the military civilian personnel.
A penny and a half out of our Dudit not being spent.
Whereas you are expected to happily pay more and get by just as you have been on a little less next year.
The government never ever is supposed to be able to get by with a little less.
Can you imagine if the government came along and said we want to raise your taxes ten percent?
Well, no, I I won't be able to afford food.
I won't be able to afford clothes for my kids.
I might not be able to pay my mortgage.
If you use the same arguments on them that they use on you, you know what they do?
until you deal with it.
But here we are, over and over again.
And Mr. Cooper, the American public needs to learn that the sun will still...
No, no, th that's what we need to learn, that the sun will still rise and the sky will still be blue, and the birds are still gonna chirp after this sequester if it happens.
Now here's Mr. Cooper.
The last time I can think of such an educational moment was not the short-lived government shutdown in the nineties, but the Oklahoma City bombing.
In 2001, looking back on the bombing, President Clinton said I had, like like every other politician, on occasion I I had gotten upset by some example of government waste or something that we all do, you know, referred derisively to government bureaucrats.
But after that bombing of the mirror building, I promised myself I would never ever use those two words together for the rest of my life.
Government bureaucrats, never ever again.
From that point on, I'm gonna treat those people who serve our country with respect, whether in uniform law enforcement, firefighter, nurse or any other thing, it doesn't matter.
And then he says, Now I'm not comparing the tragedy of Oklahoma City to sequestration.
Of course not, they just compared them.
So we can't even think about cutting federal spending by twenty-two billion dollars without being accused of disrespecting law enforcement, firefighters, nurses, none of whom are paid for by the federal government.
Anyway, this is the predictable course this takes every time such crisis.
We just live through this with the fiscal quiff.
We just went through this with the expansion of the debt limit.
If it all sounds familiar to you, it's because it is.
We haven't had a federal budget in four years, and because of that we have these never-ending budget crises.
Funding crises.
A brief timeout.
Your phone calls are coming up as well as some audio sound bites, which further illustrate all of this.
Let's grab a telephone call as we uh we m move on down the line.
Fastest three hours in media rush limbo, we're already at Thursday, by the way.
And one third of this program already gone.
I'd say it's amazing how fast this program goes by.
Particularly when I'm the only one talking.
And it just zips by.
Here's Mindy in West Valley, Utah.
She says that she used to be a low-information voter.
And we're glad to have you with us.
Hi, Ras.
It's such an honor to get to speak to you.
Um I was a low information voter before the 2008 election and I didn't even know that Fox News existed.
I went to CNN for all of my news coverage.
And I'm not uneducated.
I just kind of just didn't get involved in politics.
Now wait, wait, wait, just I need to uh point of clarification.
You didn't even know it existed or you just didn't bother to click to it.
You know what?
I I don't think I even rec realize that it was a news station that was that's interesting.
That's that's fascinating.
I'm you know I I can understand this actually Yeah I always went to CNN because you know I grew up with my parents watching CNN that's where I went for my news.
And I remember um the first time I heard your talk show you changed my life as far as politics how did you end up hearing this program as a CNN devotee.
Okay.
So I was driving in my car and I was flipping through the radio stations and I came to a stoplight and I had a stop for a moment and it stopped on mine is 105.7 and I heard your voice.
And I'll never forget you were talking about how um at the time Senator Obama was talking about how we could bring the gas prices down and it was you know by rotating our tires and silly silly things.
It was checking tire pressure.
He wanted to give everybody a tire gauge yes and it was so so stupid and you said something so amazing you said you know that's not going to take a dollar off at the pump.
And I'm like yes this guy is so awesome I love what he's saying.
So I listened to everything that you had to say and I realized where I have gone wrong.
I did not I was not getting my information from a place that spoke truth and when I heard you talking I knew that it was truth and I'm like oh my gosh I've got to get the word out people have got to start listening to your program because that is where we're going to make a difference.
All they need to do is just listen and that is where we're going to get some of these independent voters to change their mind and know that hearing isn't truth.
You have lived an interesting experience you are an admitted acknowledged low information voter whose only source was CNN then you had an enlightenment you know better than most what the life the news life and so forth the awareness of a low information voter is.
Mm-hmm.
I do so I know where they're coming from when they don't know what's going on and because of your teachings and all of these things that I've heard I'm now a state delegate.
I'm a member of the Tea Party I took Constitution 101 through Hillsdale which was amazing and I have three sons.
Man you are all in you are all in all in I'm teaching my kids I'm like I I want my kids to know because I know I live in Utah we're mostly Republican state my sons go to school you will not believe how many of these kids are brainwashed.
My kids will come home and say these guys are all on board for taking away our guns or just anything and they all see no we're we do believe we do know how they're propagandized and it's something that needs to change.
It does the the left has total control over the over the public education all the way up to um university level.
It's it's something they own and it's going to have to change.
It's gonna have to change and you know I think it needs to change in the home my gosh we have to somehow I have my family now listening to you they all listen to you my sister my brother we all listen.
Mike if we can get more people aware because you know honestly I wonder if some of these people don't even know that this you even exist.
No they do they do but but um they know things they think they know things that aren't true because of what they've heard about this for Reagan had an interesting phrase that I remember this probably going to get it wrong as I try to paraphrase it.
Reagan said it's not what people don't know that's the problem it's what they think they know that's not true that's the problem.
That's that's the paraphrase.
A lot of people think they know things are dead wrong about but you can't convince them.
Anyway Mindy I'm so happy that you called that that's it's just great.
See folks just a few minutes of my voice can change a life I know I know it's even though I've been doing this for twenty twenty five years, fact of the matter is that no matter how many times we rebut all of these Democrat lies, there are always going to be people in the audience hearing it for the first time.
That's why you always need to have a balance between repeating things in the past and mixing and melding with the new stuff.
▲
Export Selection