Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
I have to admit it, folks.
I have to admit it.
Last night was the first night in years.
I mean, more than five or six, maybe ten years.
Last night was the first time I have watched the Oscars front to back in I don't know how long.
I really did.
Great to have you here, Rushlin Boy, the EIB Net.
And I have, of course, a little bit different take than some people on some things.
I wouldn't be me if I didn't.
Telephone number, if you want to be on the program 800-282-2882, the email address, LRushboy at EIBNet.com.
Now, a lot of people are saying Michelle Obama hijacked the Academy Awards last night, that shock surprise being introduced at the end of the show by Jack Nicholson to announce the best movie of the year.
I think they had to throw her a crumb.
I think they had to throw the Obamas a crumb because I think, in truth, folks, the Obamas got snubbed the Academy Awards last night.
Not only did his campaign ad, Zero Dark 30, not win, but his semi-autobiography lost out too, Lincoln.
So Obama was 04-2 last night, and the Academy would have known this in advance.
Well, the movie Lincoln, that's about Obama.
Everybody knew that.
Who won the best movie?
Argo.
Ben Effek movie.
And I'll tell you why it won.
It won because Hollywood was portrayed as heroes.
About the 1979 Iran hostage crisis, there were some embassy people got out before the Iranians took over, and the Canadians successfully got them out of there.
And they worked with Hollywood to create a fake movie called Argo that Canadians were essentially ostensibly in Iran to scout shooting locations.
It was actually CIA people in there trying to find a way to get these people out.
They were holed up in a safe house.
These embassy personnel.
And the Argo Rooster, they worked with Hollywood to come up with a fake movie, fake script, fake everything.
Fake business cards, fake phone number.
Well, real phone number, so that if the Iranians happened to call Hollywood to check it out, yeah, it was a real movie being made.
And that actually happened.
And so Hollywood was portrayed as patriotic.
How often does that happen?
And so that was a no-brainer that Argo was going to win.
And see, this was a snub for Obama because his campaign ad was Zero Dark 30.
How he got Bin Laden.
It didn't win.
And since for some reason, Hollywood's mad at Steven Spielberg, I ain't get Steve Jobs syndrome.
From what I've been able to gather, folks, Hollywood really down on Spielberg because he's won too much and he's too rich and he's arrogant and all that.
And so nobody likes Spielberg as a scuttlebud.
So Obama's semi-autobiographical movie, Lincoln, didn't win.
That's two snubs.
So they threw him a crumb and they let Michelle out there.
You know what that reminded me?
I'm going to tell you something, folks.
Honest to God now, and I don't know how many of you are going to remember this.
1984 Super Bowl.
Apple Computer ran what may be, and you can't find this ad on the internet, I'm told, you can't.
I'm sure somebody's got it.
If we can find a link to it, we will.
Maybe one of the, well, if not the best, one of the most impactful Super Bowl ads ever called 1984.
And this was the year that Apple introduced the Macintosh computer.
And this ad, black and white ad, featured a dear leader in front of robotic people on a giant screen in a big room with a single revolutionary person running through the crowd, throwing some kind of weapon at the screen and obliterating dear leader.
And it ends with think different.
And when I saw Muchell Obama and that giant, I mean, she dwarfed Nicholson.
If you look at that, if you saw that screen on that stage, Muchel and the military people, gosh, they weren't even referenced, those military people.
I don't know what that was.
Was it a cocktail party?
Was it, I think they were props.
Anyway, she looked bigger than, I mean, much more bigger than bigger than life.
I mean, she looked like anybody would have.
Don't misunderstand it.
Just one bite and swallow that whole room.
That's how big.
And the optics, of course, are what matters.
And I thought, I thought of 1984, I thought that Obama, the Macintosh ad from the Super Bowl in 1984, were exact type of scenario, except Michelle Obama was actually the dear leader of this, obviously a totalitarian state.
And the dear leader was making some giant speech and fist pounding and robotic citizens are sitting there nodding, everybody in total agreement, and a lone person runs down the center aisle and obliterates and destroys the screen.
Now, a lot of people, a lot of people, and I've said emails, and of course, check Twitter, think that this was a giant propaganda effort by the White House to put Moochell up there,
either to have an optic for low-information voters who watched this event last night, set up the 2014 Olympics, maybe some people even telling me that this was the opening salvo of a Michelle Obama for president effort.
I don't think that's what was going on at all.
I really don't.
I have done exhaustive research into this, and I have also spoken to people who know.
Well, I didn't check Twitter.
I have people who check Twitter tell me what they found.
I didn't check Twitter.
I can't figure Twitter out.
When I go there, the way Twitter is formatted, I can't tell who is saying something and who's replying to something.
I still can't figure it out.
I don't know who the tweeter is and who's responding to the tweet is.
I have no idea.
I can't know formatically.
And folks, that's embarrassing because I'm a power user of this stuff.
My brother tried to explain Twitter to me in 30 minutes when I did it.
I couldn't.
I couldn't, visually, I can't grasp it.
And then you start throwing in the hashtags and I, you totally, and I'm embarrassed to admit this.
I really am embarrassed to admit.
I've tried and I visually, it's unlike anywhere else where you have a, somebody posts a comment and somebody replies.
With Twitter, for me, I can't tell who started something and who's replying to it.
In fact, in a whole list of things, I don't, I can't figure out, well, I just can't figure it out.
I can't follow it.
So that's why I have other people snirdly who can figure this stuff out.
Tell me what's on Twitter.
And a lot of people on Twitter and Facebook think that this is an opening salvo for Muchel and her 2016 presidential bid.
I don't think that's what was going on.
I say, I did exhaustive research.
I did some other to talk to some people.
And usually the first instinctive reaction to something like this, particularly if it leans to the conspiratorial, is not what's right.
And there's always something else going on.
And in this case, what's going on is a private behind-the-scenes battle between Harvey Weinstein and Steven Spielberg.
Now, there was an earlier awards event this year.
I don't know what the People's Choice, the Golden Club, whatever.
I don't know what it was.
It's the one that Clinton showed up at.
And Spielberg arranged that.
Now, one thing we do know is that Muchel's appearance, her hijacking the epidemic awards last night, was Harvey Weinstein's idea.
So the consensus is that Weinstein wanted to show everybody that he's bigger and more powerful than Spielberg.
Spielberg got Clinton, but Clinton's a has-been, Clinton's yesterday.
Harvey was able to get Muchel.
So Harvey called the White House.
They planned it.
The White House agreed to it.
And I think one of the reasons is, again, they got snubbed.
They got snubbed.
Obama's campaign ad didn't win, and his autobiographical movie didn't win.
And Seth McFarlane, Seth McFarlane, the host of the program, as you know, I have appeared three times, and one time was the focal point of Family Guy TV show.
And I've been in the recording studio with Seth, and I don't care what you think of him.
The man is profoundly, supremely talented.
Now, there are a lot of characterizations about how he uses it and what direction he takes it, but there's no denying his talent.
And he is a profoundly hard worker.
And I sent him an Ada Boy note yesterday morning.
Sent him a wish-you-well kind of note.
And he wrote back and he said, you know what?
I kind of understand how you conservatives feel about the media now because they were already proclaiming him the worst host ever before the show had even, I mean, 12 hours before the show.
So he, you know, McFarlane, here's the way to understand this.
In one of the press conferences before this thing happened, McFarlane is telling the media, I'm going to have to paraphrase this, but his line was, Hi, I'm Seth McFarlane, and I'm hosting the Oscars.
And if you don't understand what that means, go ask your kids.
Meaning, I own the Young Demographic.
And that's what they were trying to do here.
Young Demographic, he owns the 18 to 40.
That's what his Family Guy show is targeted at.
Not commenting on, you know, whether you like it or not in terms of culturally.
And there's some stuff that rubbed people the wrong way.
The John Wilkes Booth joke.
Did you hear about that snurder?
Oh, you didn't watch that.
Well, this one got everybody kind of tizzy.
He was talking about the first actor to ever actually play Lincoln was not Daniel Day Lewis.
Or the first movie that was made of it was somebody back in the 40s, some obscure actor.
But he said the real, the only actors really gotten inside the head of Lincoln is John Wilkes Booth.
And there was, you can sense there was a nervousness and a pause.
And when the joke bombed, McFarlane said, well, wait a minute.
It's been 150 years.
It still isn't long enough.
We still haven't had enough time go by.
Anyway, folks, there were a lot of things.
Since I watched this from front to back for the first time, and I've read some of the reviews.
I get this, according to some reports, you know, for example, you know what they did last night, Snarterly?
The Los Angeles Gay Men's Chorus, the Los Angeles Gay Men's Chorus sang and danced to a tune called We Saw Your Boobs.
And it was aimed at women who have shown their boobs in the movies.
And Seth joined them.
Now stop and think of this for a second.
One typical quote from last night was, L.A. Gay Men's Chorus Singing with Adele.
This is a gay boy's wet dream.
And of all people to be singing about I Saw Your Boobs, the gay, LA Gay Men's Chorus, of all people to sing that.
But if you want a bunch of guys complaining about seeing beautiful women's breasts, you're going to have to get some group like the Gay Men's Chorus to do it.
And that's what it was.
The song was funny for the low-information young guy who looks at pictures all day in dreams.
If you understand the audience that this thing was being targeted to, it was if you're able to take yourself out of your contextual morality and place yourself in the target audience, it's like people who laugh at fard jokes.
Well, they didn't show the boobs.
What they did, they cut to the women in the audience whose boobs had been shown, and some of them were laughing and some of them were ticked.
Didn't like the bit.
Didn't like the bit at all.
Anyway, I don't think, I don't think that this had anything to do with Michelle's future political perspirations or anything of the sort, folks.
But it clearly, you know, here's another thing.
You know, I'm going to leave this up to you.
I turned to Catherine.
Catherine disagreed with me on.
I turned to Catherine.
I said, you know, they might be jumping the shark here.
I mean, because Michelle Obama showing up, well, this was the last minute of the telecast.
It was out of place.
It was unnecessary.
It was unneeded.
She's got nothing to do with Hollywood.
And I was wondering, at some point, even with the cult-like, low-information voters, can these people wear out their welcome?
Can they show up in places where even the low-information who might think of them as celebrity of the United States get tired of seeing them every because we can't escape?
We turn on our TVs.
They're there all the time.
Those low-information people, and Captain, no, no, no.
They low-information voter rush going to eat this up.
You better get used to it.
They're going to love this.
They're going to eat it up.
I think the Obama's perfectly sensible that they would be at the Oscars.
They're celebrities too.
And I said, I don't know.
I'm thinking maybe they're jumping the shark here.
That at some point somebody says, you know, we don't want to see you everywhere.
Time will tell.
The sequester.
Ladies and gentlemen, have you stocked up your food?
Have you bought all your water?
Have you got all the batteries that you're going to need?
Have you made plans to do without for months and months and months?
I'm telling you, it's going to be brutal out there.
And the reason I heard a media person today saying the reason why, get this now, the reason why this time they think the sequester is going to happen.
The reason why there will not be a last-minute solution like there always is is because there are no talks.
Nobody is talking about.
There are no negotiations going on, which I don't think means anything.
Guess what happens at the end of the month, folks?
We run out of money for real government-wide.
That's right.
The continuing resolution under which we're now operating that funds the government runs out in total the end of March.
This sequester is nothing compared to what's coming to the end of the month.
The next crisis is within five weeks, and it's going to make this sequester look like romper room.
It's an entire government shutdown that we're going to get hit with for four weeks.
We can't get a break.
It's like we're drowning in this stuff.
We cannot reach the surface.
Here is the Seth McFarlane quote that I paraphrased.
This was at his press conference where he's announced he's going to be the host.
He says, hi, I'm Seth McFarlane.
Ask your kids.
And I'll be hosting the Academy Awards.
Ask your parents.
And that was the way he positioned himself.
Now, one other thing, folks, there was some real irony last night that zipped by and blew by a lot of people.
It might not have blown by you in this audience.
The best picture award last night went to a movie named Argo, which was about what?
The rescue of embassy personnel under attack in Iran.
The wife of the commander-in-chief who failed to rescue four Americans at an embassy consulate in Benghazi presented it and talked about how important it was and how necessary it is and the great it was and all that.
Now, I don't know how many people, but this bunch, this administration failed in rescuing Americans under attack.
And the wife of the president who failed presented the Oscar to the movie who won the Best Picture Award about a successful rescue of embassy personnel from Iran in 1979, thereby maybe claiming credit.
And we have a treat for you at rushlimbaugh.com.
We have posted a link to YouTube and the 1984 Apple Macintosh commercial during the Super Bowl that I talked about.
It's there.
We have put another version of that ad made with Hillary Clinton as the dear leader.
It's a parody of the Apple Macintosh ad.
And Hillary is there as the dear leader whose giant appearance on the screen gets smashed.
And we put a still shot.
We not have the video.
We've linked to the video.
Put a still shot of the dear leader in the Apple ad right next to the still shot of Muchell Obama at the Oscars last night on the big screen.
All of that.
Now, if you want to go check it out, find out what I'm talking about at rushlimbaugh.com.
So, for those of you that did not hear this, we have audio soundbite here of the Seth McFarlane Abraham Lincoln John Wilkes Booth joke that many were shocked and offended by and found tasteless.
Snerdley, you want to hear this.
Snerdley saying, My gosh, if I'd have had you telling me what this was about last night, I'd have watched this.
What he meant was that even I could make something he has no interest in watching interesting.
But here is the McFarlane joke last night during the Epidemic Awards.
I would argue, however, that the actor who really got inside Lincoln's head was John Wilkes Booth.
Really, 150 years and it's still too soon, huh?
I got some Napoleon jokes coming up.
You guys are going to be so mad.
And he brought it back with that.
I mean, yeah, that's kind of.
I can't get over.
Folks, again, one more time here.
Argo, rescue of six embassy personnel, Iran, 1979.
Obama, failure to rescue four embassy personnel.
Michelle Obama presents an award for best movie to Argo.
I'm telling you, if you want to look for a conspiracy in any of this, you focus on that.
You talk about irony.
This regime still hasn't come clean of what happened to Benghazi.
They've tried to paper that over and cover that up and blame that all on a video.
There hasn't been anything courageous in one aspect of Benghazi.
And certainly not from the standpoint of the regime.
But Argo is a movie about the rescue of six embassy/slash CIA personnel from Iran in 1979 under the watchful eyes of the Ayatollah Khomeini.
And there's Michelle Obama presenting the award, best movie, Argo.
And her husband didn't do diddly squat saving embassy personnel in Benghazi.
But again, just to wrap this up, I mean, I think the bottom line here is that, again, the Obamas have been snubbed.
They still haven't won an Oscar.
They've won everything else.
They've won Grammys.
They have won a Nobel Prize.
The Obamas have won lifetime achievement awards for things.
The Obamas have won awards that haven't even been created.
But they haven't won an Oscar.
And there were two chances for them last night.
Campaign ad, Zero Dark30 and semi-autobiography Lincoln.
Snubbed.
So Mitchell shows up and takes a shot at it, presenting the award.
John Kerry, as you know, is the new Secretary of State.
Last Wednesday, it's his first gaffe, has been recorded.
Last Wednesday, Charlottesville, Virginia, University of Virginia, Kerry delivered his first major foreign policy address, and he invented a country that does not exist.
They fight corruption in Nigeria.
They support the rule of law in Burma.
They support democratic institutions in Kyrgyzstan and Georgia.
There is no Kyrzakstan.
There is no Kyrzakstan.
I think he was thinking of Kyrgyzstan.
In Vince, can you imagine if George W. Bush had done this?
Here, it's Monday.
We're just now finding out about this.
This happened five days ago.
And this morning in Washington at the White House during the National Governors Association meeting.
Oh, speaking of that, we have audio soundbites of that with Obama talking to the governors, and he's laying out for them.
We're not going to get to right now, but it's coming up.
Obama laying out what's coming their way during the sequester, how they can avoid it, how they can be his partner.
Had a big dinner for the governors, and I think it was Saturday night, somewhere, maybe the White House.
And the preferred seat, the seat of honor, is always the seat to the right of the president.
Who do you think, National Governors Association, dinner?
Who do you think was in the seat of honor next to Barack Obama?
It was New Jersey Governor Chris Christie.
Seat of honor.
Here's Biden.
Biden said this morning that Americans are just tired of being tired.
I think the American people are ready to get up.
As a civil rights leader, when I was coming up as a kid, the American people are tired of being tired.
I think they're ready to get up and move.
Why aren't they?
Where is there for them to go?
If they're tired of being tired and getting up, where is there a job for them to go get?
No.
What are they supposed to do?
American people are just tired of being tired.
They're ready to get up and move.
What is this an admission of, by the way?
American people are tired of being tired.
They're ready to get up.
What does he think you're all doing?
Just lounging around out there?
You're finally fed up with lounging around and now you want to get up and move.
I know.
The Kerry thing is confusing because I thought he said that the biggest threat facing our country wasn't China or Russia, but was climate change.
And now he's talking about the great things happening in Kirzakhstan.
And there, of course, is no Kirzakstan.
Audio soundbites 13 and 14.
Ladies and gentlemen, do you remember?
I forget the specific issue.
It might have been, I think I know what it was.
It was the fiscal cliff.
As we neared the end of last year, the fiscal cliff.
Remember that?
If we didn't come to some kind of agreement on taxes and tax rates, then we're going to go over the cliff.
The country was going to be forever changed.
People were going to die.
They were going to lose their jobs.
They're going to be Pentagon jobs.
No more firefighters.
No more cops.
First responders, severely impacted.
Remember all of that?
Same stuff you've been hearing last week, week before.
We heard all of that the last two weeks of December.
And there were people on our side who said, you know what?
Let's just punt on this fiscal clip.
Let's let Obama have money.
Let's go ahead and just get the tax issue off the table so that we can move on and deal with what really matters in that spending cuts.
Do you remember that?
It was, there were many people who offered that advice, among them Bill Crystal, the Weekly Standard.
They said, look, we can't win this tax bill.
Let's just get taxes off the end.
And we did him in Mitch McConnell running around.
Okay, now taxes are off the table.
I might be confusing this with the debt and whatever came next in January.
How these things are all running together.
Now, I know the fiscal cliff at the end of the year.
And then what was next?
Debt limit?
No.
Fiscal cliff.
Well, now we're sequester, whatever.
See, there's so many of these crises, and they happen with such regularity that you get them confused.
But the point here is: back in December, Bill Crystal and others don't want to lay it off totally on him.
That's just punt.
Come on, let's move on.
We'll move and we'll really fight the next battle on spending.
That's where we'll take Obama to the cleaners.
Well, guess what?
Yesterday on Fox News Sunday, during the Sunday group, the all-star panel at the end of the program, Bill Crystal urged the Republicans to go ahead and cave on the sequester.
And we just move on to the next thing and really fight Obama on that.
So they're doing it again.
The inside the Beltway Washington elites doing it again.
Here's how it went down.
Chris Wallace said a top White House official was so sensitive about the history, or sorry, about the Woodward column.
Top White House officials, see, Woodward is out there saying to sequester is Clinton's idea.
Do you realize, by the way, I hate to keep interrupting myself, but Bob Woodward continues, because it's in his book to remind everybody sequester was Clinton's idea.
And now you've got some Obama's idea.
Yeah, Obama's idea.
And you've got young whippersnapper journalists at the Washington Post, one of them, Ezra Klein, the new wunderkind is the future of the news business, saying, I don't know what Bob's doing.
I don't know why Bob—in the old days, when you had a journalist emeritus like this, like Woodward, you wouldn't disagree with the guy.
You wouldn't throw Woodward overboard.
You'd bite the bullet.
You would show respect.
I mean, Woodward is the reason you got into journalism.
Woodward brought down Nixon.
You don't publicly disrespect Woodward, but a bunch of young whippersnapper journalists are getting all over Woodward's case because Woodward is blaming Obama for the sequester.
And they want to blame the Republicans for it.
Now, it was Obama's idea.
Woodward's just being truthful.
Woodward's just being a good reporter.
The new state-controlled media is at odds with Woodward over this.
And we have details of that.
Anyway, Chris Wallace said a top White House official was so sensitive about the Woodward column blaming Obama for the sequester that he called me last night and he said it's a complete revisionist history.
We accepted this, all the custom sequestration, just as a way to get the trigger.
So this is Chris Wallace in the White House.
So it wasn't our idea, but we accepted it.
Nobody expected this to happen.
And if we had wanted all these spending cuts, we would have made that deal with the House Republicans back in August of 2011.
There wouldn't have been any sequestration.
So Crystal didn't respond to that.
The White House was being misleading recently when they denied that.
On the other hand, a majority of Republicans in Congress voted for it.
So they both accepted it as a trigger, as a kind of fail-safe mechanism.
It would be too horrible to contemplate.
And now it's happening.
We are, how many months are we from the next election?
Kind of a long way.
Really?
In February, right after a national election, people can't rise above this sniping.
The Republicans in the House sit around saying, oh, hey, let it go in.
We're tough guys.
We're going to stand up to think.
What about the military?
What about the military?
Serious operational cuts in the military.
So Wallace said, well, let me ask one question about what we will henceforth call the crystal scenario, which is that they end up passing this halfway cave, a limited cave on tax rates.
This is back, this is December 9th in 2012.
I'm sorry, I'm not.
I thought this.
Never mind.
I thought this was the next fight.
Anyway, what Crystal was doing here was urging the Republicans to just cave on the sequester, which is what happened in December, and move on to the next thing.
And by saying, look, they voted for it.
Fail-safe mechanism designed to prevent that which is now happening.
Here is Crystal.
This is what he said back this December 9th, 2012 on Fox News Sunday.
There'll be plenty of other opportunities to debate all these spending, defense, and entitlement issues next year.
My view is get the tax issue off the table.
It's the weakest one for Republicans' risks.
Let the president own it.
Yeah, let the president stop fighting him on taxes.
Let him have it.
Now, let's just stop on the sequester.
We'll move on to the next thing, which is the government shut down the end of March, by the way, back after this.
And we are back.
El Rushbox serving humanity, kicking off a brand new busy broadcast week here at the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.
And to the phones, we go to Santa Cruz, California.
This is Larry.
Hey, Larry, great to have you here from Santa Cruz.
We had a listener there.
Larry?
Can you hear me?
Yeah, yeah, I hear you, Lair.
How are you out there?
I'm going to.
Lair, are you there?
Yeah.
Movie.
There was a scene in that movie.
Ladies and gentlemen, I think you would agree that I have been more than fair.
I've done everything possible to have Larry here understood.
He's from Santa Cruz.
And the reason I asked, the reason I said I'm surprised that we have a listener there, Santa Cruz?
You know what Santa Santa?
In fact, I think I know what's happening here.
If he is the lone conservative here, they've already found out.
Jamming his signal or something of the sort.
Santa Cruz is Moscow by the bay, but it's even worse than that.
Santa Cruz is a beautiful place.
Don't misunderstand.
Yeah, we have, in terms of radio performance, we own it, but it's still, I mean, it's this leftist enclave that is really far out.
That's why I'm surprised to get a call from there.
But he was going to point out that Carter had nothing to do with rescuing these embassy people in the movie Argo, just as Obama failed to rescue the Americans in Benghazi.
And the movie Argo doesn't say that Carter had anything to do with it.
The movie Argo is basically about Canadians working with Hollywood.
The Hollywood contribution was the creation of a totally fictitious production that they were working on, and that the Canadians were working with them on this production.
And the reason that Canadians were in Iran was to scout movie locations, shooting locations for the movie.
And the Hollywood people gave him cover so that if Iranian security got suspicious and called Hollywood to check the veracity of the claims, there'd be somebody there to answer the phone.
Argo Productions, greetings, hello, whatever, and be able to answer any questions.
That did happen a couple of times.
See, when the Iranians took over the U.S. Embassy in 1979, six Americans, I believe it was six, got out before the Iranians totally took control of the place.
And they were in what was the equivalent of a safe house.
But they were at risk because the Iranians knew the names of people in there.
They had to.
And when they essentially called the role, when they checked on the people they had captured, they learned that six people were there that were not there who should have been.
So they began a search for them.
So the pressure was on to get those six out of the country before they were found.
And that's what the movie's about and how that successfully happened.
Okay, brief time out.
Don't go away.
Well, that's it for us.
The first exciting excursion into broadcast excellence hour is now in the can and on the way over to the Limbaugh Broadcast Museum, which you can see at rushlimbaugh.com.
But sit tight, there's much more straight ahead than I promise.