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Feb. 22, 2013 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:33
February 22, 2013, Friday, Hour #2
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Meeting and surpassing all audience expectations every day.
Rush Limbaugh the Golden EIB microphone wrapping up a busy broadcast week on Friday.
Live from the Southern Command in sunny South Florida.
It's open line Friday.
The day of the week where you run the program when we go to the phones.
That's exactly right.
That's the best way to put it.
When we go to the phones, whatever we talk about is totally up to you.
You want to talk about a TV show.
You want to talk about it doesn't have to be a social issue.
It doesn't have to be anything I have brought up.
Whatever you think needs to be discussed.
Or if you need an answer to something, if you have a question, that's what open line Friday is for.
Mr. Snerdley eagerly standing by to screen your call and determine your fitness.
And of course, on Friday, your fitness is gradually actually greatly relaxed.
Many of you who would be permitted to get on the air on Friday would not be Monday through Thursday.
It's a benevolent dictatorship here.
And I am the benevolent dictator, the all-knowing, all caring, all sensing, all feeling Maha Rushi.
Forbes telephone number 800 28282.
Forbes magazine is out with their 2013 list of America's most miserable cities.
Yeah, it's a no-brainer that Detroit is number one.
It's an You know, and we uh we love Detroit.
We have a great radio station in Detroit, WJR.
And we've uh I've been to Detroit a number of times, and it's a shame.
We love the place.
Oh, we hate to see what's happened to it.
Here are the other nine in order.
Detroit number one, the second most miserable place in the country to live is Flint, Michigan.
The third most miserable place to live is Rockford, Illinois.
The fourth most miserable place to live in the country is Chicago.
The fifth most miserable place to live in the country is Modesto, California.
The sixth most miserable place to live is Vallejo, California.
The seventh most miserable place to live in America is Warren, Michigan.
Wow, that's three in Michigan.
Detroit, Flint, and Warren in a top seven.
The eighth most miserable place to live in America is Stockton, California.
That's how they say it on the PBS station in Sacramento.
Stockton.
Because the TV station that serves Sacramento, Stockton area.
And it's whatever to call it is our KPPB, Sacramento Stockton.
Lake County, Illinois, the ninth worst city most miserable in America.
And number 10 is New York City.
So you get three in Michigan.
You have three in California, and you've got one in New York.
And there is something that all ten of these places have in common.
Every one of them not only is run by liberal Democrats, but has been run by Liberal Democrats.
As far back as anybody can see, with one exception, it would be New York and Mayor Giuliani.
But in addition to all of them being run by Liberal Democrats, they have all featured unions with unchecked power.
So the combination of Liberal Democrats and unions.
A Harbinger, if you will.
Now I want to go back.
The soundbite of me from this program, the portion of the program where I threw up my hands in frustration and just said that for the first time I'm ashamed of my country.
Now I realize that many of you tuned in today wanting to hear more of this because you didn't hear it at all yesterday.
You weren't here, but you heard about it.
So you you made an appointment, joined this program at the beginning.
You wanted to hear what this is all about.
You wanted to hear more about it and I haven't yet really discussed it.
And you're probably angry and I want to tell you why a I didn't say this yesterday to generate attention, interest or whatever.
I don't do the I don't that's not the reason I say anything any day.
The second thing is I'm really serious when I when I say I don't want this program to be about me.
So I did the first hour sticking to the issues so forth.
And of course the third reason was the old broadcast trick of hook you in and keep you waiting the old entertainers creed always keep them wanting more.
You never ever satisfy the audience that's but that was that's third on the list.
So let's just get to it in case anybody missed yesterday's program or if you heard about it and you heard it discussed and you're curious here essentially I spent more time than this but this is two minutes and it's a pretty good summary of what I said yesterday.
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 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 going to 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 inspection no cops no teachers no firefighters no air traffic control I'm sorry I my days of getting roped into all this are over 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 25th year I can't tell you the number of times 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.
this.
Just one slight error.
Worthless Jim Wright was the speaker when I started And Tom Foley came after Fort Worthless Jim after he was forced to resign.
You remember why he had to resign well it was new but but but what did Fort Worthless do Fort Worthless Jim well i just in addition to being Fort Worthless Jim he published a book that was a rehash of floor speeches, public speeches some pages had one word just to get it up to 200 pages.
The book nobody ever bought it except the unions the unions bought the books in bulk but never took delivery they stayed in the basement of the publisher Fort Worthless Jim was a shifty guy.
I mean he was he he did the I'll never forget he did a a response to the State of the Union one year after uh that would have been it would have been George H.W. Bush.
And it was just it led into the House Bank scandal, the House Post Office scandal.
This is when the bottom fell out of the Democrats, right in the early 90s over all of this stuff.
Anyway, my my point with all this is that for 25 years, folks, we've been dealing with the same premise.
Unless we spend another dime, the country is going to cease to exist.
And for 25 years, I have responded to each premise on a what I call an intellectual point-by-point basis, refuting every claim.
The purpose of this program has been to create as large a body of informed voting citizens as possible.
And while we've been largely, we've been profoundly successful at that, the left has beaten us.
They have created far more low information, unaware, uneducated people than we've been able to keep up with.
We've had a profound impact here in improving, increasing that universe of people, citizens who are in the arena of ideas now, who are informed and educated.
As I've always had a civics 101 view of the country.
People get what they want, they vote what they want, they get the way they vote.
And if a majority of people are educated and informed and know what's going on, liberalism and these powerful forces that have ill intent in the country can be defeated.
And despite overwhelming success in creating more and more people who are informed and active and involve the left with control of the education system, control of the pop culture, movies, TVs, books, music.
We've just been outnumbered.
And the way they've done it is to create more and more dependency, and then every so often tell those people that they're about to lose it all because of the Republicans.
And that's what we're going through now with the sequester business, which was an idea of the president of the United States.
This guy gets away with not even being seen as governing.
He's seen as a campaigning outsider on the side of the low information voters, trying to help them, protect them, save them from the ravages of people like me, supposedly, who want to take everything away from them.
And I'm just tired of having to defend this.
It's absurd.
And it makes me ashamed.
It makes me ashamed that we have sunk and descended to this level in our politics in order for the left to have to or be able to advance.
They they require ignorance.
And as much ignorance, I don't mean stupidity, genuine real ignorance.
People don't know what's going on.
They require more and more of that in order to be successful.
The left does not want an informed participating block of people.
They want people that don't know what's going on.
They want people that can be frightened.
They want people that can be scared to death.
And they do it.
And it's gotten to the point where it's it's just the first time it was ridiculous to actually have to spend time here and tell people, no, the Republicans do not want your kids to starve.
It's insulting.
Back during the budget battle of 1995, that was the battle cry.
Republicans want to starve our kids.
And the Republicans, like anybody else, said nobody's going to believe this, and they didn't actively refute it.
People believed it.
It makes me ashamed that the Democrats can get away with this.
It makes me embarrassed and ashamed of this country.
Now normally the left would love this.
The left doesn't like America.
They would think, oh wow, limbows on our side.
The only problem for them is I'm saying this while one of theirs is president.
Back during the 1995 budget battle, folks, they actually had students from New Orleans and other Louisiana cities actually sit down in class and write letters to Republican members of Congress, begging not to be starved.
Please, Mr. Republican Congress and don't take away my school lunch I can't learn when I'm hungry.
The utter futility of dealing with this.
Let's say that for real, and of course it never will happen, but let's just hypothetically say, let's say that the school lunch program is terminated.
Are America's parents just gonna sit idly by and let their kids go hungry?
At what point do the parents enter the scene here?
At what point do people rise up and say, well, I don't care.
My kid's not gonna go hungry.
I'll feed the kid lunch.
I'll pack a lunch or what.
But to have to spend time refuting such things as air traffic control will shut down, the military will shut down, there won't be any firefighters, there won't be any cops, and not once, folks.
We're now into the seventh or eighth episode of this in the last two years.
Be it this, the sequester, be it the fiscal cliff argument, be it one of the many arguments over raising the debt limit.
In each case, we've been forced to refute a bunch of out and out ridiculous lies and assertions.
And it finally hit me that accepting the premise and arguing that stuff on the merits is to be a fool.
If it really, if we've gotten to the point in my mind where we have to take time and tell adults in this country, no, the Republicans don't want your son to starve.
If we actually have to take time and say that.
And then whether or not they believe it is an open question.
Then what's there to be proud of?
If hundreds of thousands or thousands or millions, whatever, adults actually believe that there are people who want their kids to starve in this country.
Then not only is that shameful, it's just downright embarrassing.
And it's beneath the dignity of any of us here to even have to try and defend it and to even take on the task of defending it, is to accept the premise, which is to be foolish.
And I just I'm fed up with it.
I can't do it anymore.
I'm I'm there there's after twenty-five years of same allegations.
And while all this is happening, while all these allegations of austerity are what we're actually doing is ruining the country.
We're actually spending more than we ever have.
We're actually creating more dependence.
We're not we're not nobody.
It it's just it's the whole thing is shamefully absurd.
I don't know how else to say it.
I've got to take a break back after this.
Right here in my formerly nicotine stained fingers, I've got a story fifty-seven terrible consequences of the sequester.
Now we got a break coming up here at the bottom of the hour, and I'm gonna take that obviously.
Uh come back.
I'm gonna go through some of these.
The people who write such stories ought to be ashamed, but I they are beneath shame.
They're incapable of it.
Fifty-seven terrible content, none of which are going to happen, none of which can happen.
We're not talking about cutting enough money.
We're not spending less money than we spent last year.
Anyway, drive-by media.
Something happened yesterday.
They've changed their tune on these cuts somewhat.
Listen to this montage.
The spending cuts represent only a fraction of total federal spending.
With the cuts, the federal government will spend about $15 billion more this year than it spent last year.
Their impact won't be felt right away.
The government must give employees 30 days' notice before they can force them to take that one unpaid day off.
That means you're really going to see the impact sometime in April.
People here admit that it could take several months for the public to really feel the pain.
Those terrible things, should they occur, won't happen rapidly.
The public could say maybe the president cried wolf.
What happened yesterday to make these people all of a sudden, you know what ain't gonna be that bad.
We're actually gonna be spending more money.
I wonder what could have happened yesterday that made these media people actually start telling the truth about this.
Anyone have any ideas?
What happened?
Once again, if you are on the phone, if you're on hold, please be patient.
I'm gonna get to you sooner rather than later.
Here's another example of what has me ashamed, embarrassed that some of the smartest people in our country, some uh our leadership sees fit to insult the people of this country to scare them, to lie to them, to fear monger in this way.
And again, you heard it in that audio semi.
We're spending fifteen billion with the sequester with these so-called draconian cuts.
We're gonna spend fifteen billion dollars more this year than last with the sequester.
Why will anybody be laid off?
Why will anything be cut?
If we froze every item in the budget, if we froze every department and kept it at the same level, we could do everything this year that we did last year.
And if we don't start doing things like that, all of these predictions that these people are making are gonna happen.
The dirty little secret is this stuff is going to happen someday.
If they get their way, these calamities, these crises will all happen somewhere down the road.
The lie is that doing what they want now will stop them.
When the truth is letting them continue to operate as they have been will cause these calamities to all happen.
And the truth of the matter is, is that everybody, Republicans and Democrats alike, know it.
They all know this.
It's another thing to have the courage to tell you.
But they're all kicking the can down the road with all of this.
And it's to the point now of being insultingly infantile and ridiculous.
Here has the president back on Tuesday of this week.
This is how the president weighed in on this.
This was the president's attempt to scare, to frighten, to panic the people of this country.
Emergency responders, like the ones who are here today, their ability to help communities respond to and recover from disasters will be degraded.
Border patrol agents will see their hours reduced.
FBI agents will be furloughed.
Federal prosecutors will have to close cases and let criminals go.
Air traffic controllers and airport security will see cutbacks, which means more delays at airports across the country.
Thousands of teachers and educators will be laid off.
Tens of thousands of parents will have to scramble to find child care for their kids.
Hundreds of thousands of Americans will lose access to primary care and preventive care, like flu vaccinations and cancer screenings.
This is not an abstraction.
People will lose their jobs.
The unemployment rate might tick up again.
Might tick up.
People lose their jobs.
All of that, folks.
No cancer screenings.
Everybody's going to get cancer.
No meat inspections.
Teachers, educators laid off, even though the federal government doesn't pay them.
Look it.
Here I'm doing what I swore I wouldn't do.
do.
I'm reacting to it.
I want to go back and play you again the media montage of mere moments ago.
Something happened yesterday and a bunch of media people started changing their tune.
Bunch of media people say, you know, this isn't anywhere near as bad.
People aren't even gonna feel this.
There is a shift taking place away from the president on this ever so slightly.
Members of the media are beginning to ask, is this is the president saying the sky's falling too often now too many times?
Because none of this is gonna happen because of the sequester, but it all will happen if we don't do the opposite of what they're suggesting here.
But this is media montage again.
The spending cuts represent only a fraction of total federal spending.
With the cuts, the federal government will spend about fifteen billion dollars more this year than it spent last year.
Stop their impact point.
That's Jonathan Carl of ABC News.
With the cuts, the federal government will spend fifteen billion more this year than it spent last year.
So why does anybody get laid off?
Why does anybody need to not get tested for cancer?
It's absurd, folks.
This is utterly infantile and ridiculous.
Here's the rest of the montage.
It won't be felt right away.
The government must give employees 30 days notice before they can force them to take that one unpaid day off.
That means you're really going to see the impact sometime in April.
People here admit that it could take several months for the public to really feel the pain.
Those terrible things, should they occur won't happen rapidly.
The public could say, maybe the president cried wolf.
They're not gonna happen at all.
So something happened yesterday.
The media started changing their tune.
Now here's this ABC story.
Fifty seven terrible consequences of the sequester.
Now I wish I had time.
I wish I had the ability to go through all 57.
I'm not gonna bore you.
But I want you to listen to some of this.
This is ABC News, same place Jonathan Carl works.
They're not even on the same page.
Jonathan Carl's out there saying, Well, we're gonna spend fifteen billion dollars more.
The public isn't even gonna really feel this.
Oh over here, elsewhere at ABC, the full Monty Babe, full scare tactic, one hundred percent fearmonger, fifty-seven terrible consequences, air travel disruption, longer security lines at airports,
slower extreme weather forecasts, slower extreme weather forecasts, greater risk of wildfires, a greater risk of wildfires because the federal government is only spending fifteen billion dollars more than it spent last year.
Do you realize how absurd this has gotten now?
No longer do these crises occur if we spend less.
Now they occur even if we don't spend enough more.
Pest infested crops will increase.
There'll be a shortage nationwide of meat and poultry, prison lockdowns, a furlough of nearly thirty seven thousand Bureau of Prisons staff, slower gun background checks, fewer FBI agents, immigration backlog, the inability to hire immigration judges, longer waits for passports and visas, neglect for the mentally ill, the homeless, and the substance addicted.
125,000 would be at risk of homelessness.
Thank you.
Housing vouchers, shelter programs would be on the chopping block.
Six hundred thousand women and children thrown off of wick.
Women's infants and children program.
Four hundred twenty-four thousand fewer AIDS tests.
Seventy, four hundred fewer patients could get HIV medications.
No rent assistance for 7300 AIDS patients.
87,000 fewer hospital visits for Native Americans.
That's right.
If we only spend $15 billion more next year or this year than last year, 807,000 fewer Native Americans will be able to visit hospitals.
Dilapidated low income housing will stay dilapidated.
Some will shut down.
No child care for 30,000 kids, no head start for 70,000.
All of this, because we're only going to spend fifteen billion more.
We're still going to spend three point seven trillion dollars, and all this is going to happen.
Longer waits for disability payments.
$125 million in cuts for low income special needs students.
Cuts to schools on Indian reservations.
Native American tribes would lose about $130 million.
There'd be a higher risk of terrorism.
Untranslated wiretaps.
There'd be less surveillance.
Classified information would be vulnerable to foreign spies.
We would have an even more porous border.
There would be uninter or untended nuclear weapons.
If people are getting nuclear weapons silos, people just walk away from them.
The U.S. would be less prepared for a weapons of mass destruction incident.
The FBI would be using broken equipment, could have trouble tracking fingerprints.
There'd be one third cutback in the Pacific naval presence.
There'd be reduced army readiness.
No maintenance for some ships and airplanes.
Forty six thousand defense jobs could be lost.
I thought it was eight hundred thousand.
Some Air Force planes couldn't fly.
There'd be less cybersecurity, one billion dollars cut from disaster relief.
There isn't any disaster relief taking place if you see the Jersey shore.
Governor Christie saying, Where the hell's FEMA?
Doesn't matter, his approval number 74%.
All you gotta do is eat a donut, be a fat guy, eat a donut on Letterman, and your approval number skyrockets.
Coast Guard operations be cut by twenty-five percent.
Drugs would be flowing into the country on boats.
Five hundred million dollars cut from the foreign economic military aid program.
Three hundred eighty million dollars cut from the global AIDS funding program.
There'd be less security at U.S. facilities abroad, less protection for Americans abroad.
That might be another Benghazi.
Less opportunity to put filmmakers in jail.
Freed up terror money, U.S. attorneys would take two thousand six hundred fewer cases.
There'd be smaller unemployment checks, twelve hundred fewer OSHA inspections.
That would mean the potential for more workplace deaths, like at Fort Hood.
It'd be fewer inspections of mines, no job training for hundreds of thousands of people, one thousand nine hundred and twenty-eight fewer small business loans, slower reporting on economic data.
Parks can't use them.
Refugees, or refugees, I'm sorry, could close.
There'd be less drilling and exploration offshore and onshore.
There isn't any now.
Fewer air quality forecasts, one thousand fewer environmental compliance inspections, and less nuclear cleanup.
Now what a list.
We might as well just start killing ourselves now and get it over with.
We ought to all just commit mass suicide because if this sequester happens, if we only spend fifteen billion dollars more this year than next, these fifty-seven things are gonna happen.
And ABC News needs to be ashamed of itself for even having the audacity to publish this bunch of gibberish.
That's how the Democrat Party gets things done today.
That's the kind of inspiration we that's the kind of leadership we get.
That's the kind of motivational, uplifting you can be, anything you want to be kind of inspiration we get from them.
I'm telling you, folks, it is a sad day.
I I I cannot I cannot emphasize how just disappointed in my own country I am.
How ashamed of all this is a a level to which we've sunk I never thought possible.
Now, ladies and gentlemen, I have uh I have a question.
If cutting forty billion dollars put it a different way, if only spending fifteen billion dollars more this year than last year is gonna is gonna cause the government to stop doing practically everything it does.
And that's that's what that list well, I mean that pretty much covers it.
If we cut 40 billion dollars is gonna keep the government from doing everything it does, what are they gonna do with the rest of the 3.7 trillion dollars that they are gonna spend?
What are they gonna do with the $3700 billion they're going to spend?
If all that stuff's gonna stop, all these fifty-seven things and others are gonna stop because of a cutback of 40 billion dollars.
Then what are they gonna do with the rest of the three point seven trillion?
And by the way, that fifty-seven, that list of fifty-seven, that's not everything.
There's some other things that will not happen because of the sequester.
There will be two fewer hours in the day if the sequester goes through.
Cloud cover will be cut back to ten percent.
Sanitation engineers will only pick up garbage one bag per week.
People will not be able to use the bathroom between the hours of eight PM and six AM.
Boys will have to shoot twenty fewer baskets a day.
Girls will have to send fifteen fewer texts a day.
And the movies will stop matinees.
I mean, this list of things, they're not telling you everything.
They're not telling you everything that's gonna happen because of this.
Okay.
Bucks County, Pennsylvania.
Hi, Jim.
Open line Friday, and you are next.
Hi.
Rush, thanks for taking my call.
This is sure a thrill.
And I'll I'll get right to it.
You know the famous quote about the first time as an adult I was proud of my country.
Oh, yeah.
Well, when the f when I heard that, I guess it was in 08.
I mean, I was angry.
And then I got to thinking about answering it for myself, and it didn't take very long.
I uh I found the first time I was proud as an adult, and I thought of it within seconds.
When was it?
Oh, in fact, it was on this date, and I've been waiting for this call on this very date to tell you it was 1980.
I was about twenty, and it was when the U.S. Olympic team beat the Russians in the Olympics.
Oh, yeah.
Do you believe in miracles?
That's the one.
Al Michael's doing the call.
That's right, our amateurs beat the Soviet Red Army thugs.
And man, just just talk about being proud to be an American.
It was I I still got I'd be just telling you about it.
I'm getting chills.
And that was that was for you the the the proudest moment of your adult life as an American.
Well, it was the first time.
As an adult, I was proud to be an American.
That's fascinating.
Yeah, because what he's doing, he's bouncing off Michelle Obama said in uh 2008 sometime that the first time she was proud of this country was when it looked like her husband might actually have a chance to win the uh the presidency.
Well, look, uh Jim, I appreciate the call.
Thank you much.
Thank you.
You bet that this is the date.
That's exactly right.
It's also George Washington's birthday.
Who are in the midst here of Open Line Friday.
It's the fastest three hours in media, and already at Friday, obviously, it's the fastest week in media.
And I I make this pledge.
We get back and we'll get Well, we'll focus on taking phone calls in the next hour.
It's just the right thing to do.
Make a big deal about Open Line Friday.
You gotta take calls.
We'll do that.
800-282-2882 if you want to be on the program.
All the lines are always all busy, but you never know.
Keep trying.
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