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Feb. 25, 2013 - Rush Limbaugh Program
37:01
February 25, 2013, Monday, Hour #2
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The views, the opinions, the thoughts expressed by the host on this program are documented to be almost always right.
99.7% of the time.
That is an accuracy rate to which no one comes close.
We own it.
Great to have you here, El Rushbo at the Distinguished Limbo Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.
Telephone number if you want to be on the program 800 282-2882, the email address L Rushbo at EIBNet.com.
So just a year ago, just a year ago, President Obama actually almost to the day, February 23rd, 2009.
President Obama said, quote, and that's why today I am pledging to cut the deficit we inherited by half at the end of my first term in office.
This will not be easy.
It'll require us to make difficult decisions and face challenges that we have long neglected.
But I refuse to leave our children with a debt that they cannot repay.
And that means taking responsibility right now in this administration for getting our spending under control.
That was Barack Obama on February 23rd, 2009.
Now, when you hear that, what is your reaction?
Your reaction is, boy, Rush, I'm glad you're mentioning it because people find out what a liar Obama is.
And people are finding out what a failure Obama is.
He promised to cut the deficit in half, but he hasn't done it.
And in normal times, that would be a perfectly logical reaction.
And in fact, if this were normal times, I would bring this story to your attention.
I would have let off the program with it today.
And I would have tried to convince people, see, this guy told you a bunch of stuff he didn't mean back in 2009.
But that's sadly not the way this is perceived.
The vice presidents at the White House today.
Now we already played the sound by the vice president.
American people are tired of being tired.
They just want to get up and get moving.
They're tired of being tired.
Well, tired of being tired of what?
No job to go to, no prosperity to get.
Well what are they tired of?
He didn't say.
So just as a general malaise, people are fed up.
They want to get up, they want to go out, they don't want to do something.
They're tired of being tired.
Which in normal times would be a huge indictment of this administration.
But these are not normal times.
In addition to the vice president saying, People are tired of being tired, the vice president said that Americans no longer worry about the economy.
He said there are no longer, they are no longer traumatized by what was a traumatizing event, the great collapse of 2008.
They're no longer worried, I think, about our economy being overwhelmed either by Europe, writ large, the EU, or China somehow swallowing up every bit of innovation that exists in the world.
And I don't think there's very little doubt in any circles out there that America's ability to be in position to lead the world 21st century, but not only in terms of our foreign policy, our incredible defense establishment economically.
There's no doubt in the world about our ability to lead the world.
The American people are tired of being tired, and they no longer worry about the economy.
Four years ago, Obama pledged to cut the deficit in half at the end of his first term, said he refused to leave our children with a debt that they can't repay, and that means taking responsibility right now.
But he hasn't taken responsibility.
See, that's the key.
He has remained an outsider.
Even while Occupying the oval orifice.
Obama remains in campaign mode.
And so what the low information voter makes of all this is that Obama has been trying for four years.
The point that we haven't yet arrived at, and I don't know that we ever will with Obama.
People do not question his motives, and they do not question his intent.
They have swallowed all of that whole.
They believe Obama really intended to cut the deficit in half.
The reason he hasn't is that there are people who don't want the deficit cut in half, and who are they?
They're the rich.
And they somehow benefit from a big deficit.
Because as far as the low information voters concerned, the rich got rich off the government.
The government allowed them or gave them the money, or there was some sort of arrangement, and that's how the rich got rich.
And what Obama is about is now taking it back.
And when you take money from the rich, you lower the deficit.
As far as the low information voters concerned, you lowered the deficit when you raise taxes on the rich, because the reason we have a deficit is the rich have too much money.
I know this doesn't make any sense to you.
It's not logical.
But we're not dealing with logic.
We're dealing with emotion.
So the people who voted for Obama, a majority of the voting public, by the way, low information voters, they don't have any problem with hearing Obama intended four years ago to cut the deficit in half.
They think he's still trying.
They think he's been trying for four years.
There are just some mean people standing in his way.
Mean people stopping him.
Selfish people who don't want to give up what they have unfairly and illegitimately received.
And that's the battle.
The battle, I remember so many of people on my side of the aisle think this class envy stuff stopped working a long time ago.
And there may be an interval where it did, but it's back, and it's roaringly successful for Obama now.
To the point that the low information voter is literally clueless about the source of prosperity.
Low information voter, I'm convinced believes government is the source.
And that's why it's not fair that the rich have so much money, because the rich run the government and the rich have been taken care of themselves, and it was the rich who founded the country.
And Obama, four years ago, he pledged to cut the deficit, and he meant it, and he's been trying.
But these people, you know, not going to give away their money.
There's not going to give it a he's going to have to go take it.
He's he's going to have to take even more.
What the low information voter doesn't realize is by the way, I happen to think, correct me if I'm wrong, people, you want to call me on the phone, correct me if I'm wrong.
I think within a certain segment of the population, I think it's rather large.
I think Biden happens to have waited into the truth.
I think there are, and I don't know if it's a majority or not, but I think there are millions of Americans who aren't worried about the economy.
Now, there are millions who are, and there are millions who are more than worried.
They're petrified.
They're petrified what it means to their kids and grandkids.
I had an interesting conference.
I played golf yesterday for the first time since July.
And I had this frozen shoulder thing.
I don't even know what that was.
But starting last August in my left shoulder, I began to experience an increasing amount of pain with a decreasing range of motion, and it just kept getting worse.
It's one of these things that was nagging, and it didn't hurt all the time, just with certain types of movements, but it kept getting worse.
It's one of those things you think it'll just get better, leave it alone.
This didn't.
So finding my golf buddies, who amazingly were sad that I wasn't able to play with them, forced me to see a doctor.
One of them actually arranged a doctor coming to me.
That's how much I was missed on the golf course and my airplane.
Anyway, so I got a shot of cortisone and it's working.
And so I was able to play golf yesterday for the first time since July.
And I had a fascinating talk with one of my golf buddies, who is semi-retired, has been very successful.
He said to me, you know, Rush, I got the usual expressions of concern about the future for his kids, but more importantly, his grandkids.
And this man is petrified that if things don't change, his grandkids are never ever going to even have the chance at prosperity because nobody will.
There won't be enough money circulating in the private sector.
That the government is just going to grow and grow and grow, and then the debt is going to pile up and pile up, and this is going to collapse at some point.
And the United States collapse would be much different than a Greece collapse.
Greece can collapse and there's a ripple.
We collapse the world feels it.
But then he said this to me.
He said, it's gotten to the point, you know, Rush, I don't care about the social issues right now.
I just don't care.
Gay marriage, I don't care.
He's a devout Catholic, you know, six months ago, was adamantly opposed to it.
Abortion, I don't want him to, but I don't care what that's not.
I don't care.
I am 100% focused on fiscal things.
This country is out of control.
I would suspect that there are millions of you feel exactly the same way.
And the concern over the economic future.
I don't I don't know about the social issues.
I just, in this guy's case, it was interesting he phrased it that way to me.
I'm not endorsing it or disagreeing with it.
I'm just passing it on to something I was told.
I suspect that a lot of people are like that at this point.
I don't want to get, I don't want to hit his whole point was look, I'm I I care about that stuff, but I don't want to lose focus here.
I don't want anybody to dilute the energy that we put into saving the economy.
That was really his point.
If we got if the amount of energy we've got to fight for the economy is 100%, I don't want 30% of it off on some social issue, another 10% off on another social issue, and we're down to 60% of our energy on the economy.
I want 100% of it on the economy.
saving the economy.
And I said, well, in many ways, the morality that is incumbent in social issues can't be divorced from fiscal matters.
But I didn't get much into that because this was before we hit the links and we're wrapping up a quick bite before we went out.
I suspect, though, that there are a lot of people who feel the same way.
At the same time, the vice president's right, folks.
I and this is just a sense.
I mean, it's I can't swear to this, and I could be wrong.
But I think we got to the point where a lot of people, if you've got your TV, if you got your food stamps, if you have your cell phone coverage, uh, as long as you can get a pitcher of beer and a and a pizza, which not for long if you live in New York, by the way.
Uh if you don't have much ambition to begin with, then the economy may not matter to you.
And it certainly may not matter enough that you would fight or join a fight.
I don't know what the percentages are, but I suspect that Biden's got a point.
I think he's also right, which is contradictory, that people are tired of being tired.
And by the I think there are also some people tired of waiting for the cycle to fix this.
Some people just instinctively think, okay, recession, but we gotta come out of it sometime.
And those people are totally clueless that this recession was created by Obama policies.
This recession is sustained by Obama policies.
They're totally clueless.
I think the people Biden's talking about who's not worried about the economy are also clueless as to why the economy is stagnant.
But it's clear that this regime wants that perception of this economy that there's nothing to worry about.
Unemployment's cool.
7.8, 7.9%.
That's cool.
This is the new norm.
Everything's fine.
Because it's going to get worse.
So there are a lot of individual parts of the engine here that appear to be working, some in agreement and in sync, and others in total opposition to themselves.
And something's got to give at some point.
But the one thing that we don't have anywhere, as far as the eye can see, is policies that engineer or make possible economic growth.
That's the sad reality.
Not only do we not have that, we have a president who promised four years ago to cut the deficit in half, who's done nothing but grow it faster than any president in history, not just a deficit with a national debt, who is not tied to it.
In fact, the view is he's trying to stop that.
He said that's right, Muthor Limbaugh.
He promised four years they're going to cut the deficit in heaven, he fully intend to, and he's still trying to, but it's people like you and others that are stopping him.
Because you don't want him to succeed.
And then you add one final thing there.
Look at Bob McDonald at the governor of Virginia.
Look at Governor Rick Scott in Florida.
McDonnell, what did he do to get elected?
I mean, he had everybody thinking this guy was a movement conservative, right?
He's totally caved now.
He has totally caved.
He is thrown in with the Democrats, he's thrown in with Obama, he's thrown in with expanding Medicaid because of two things.
He's up for re-election, and there's this big pile of money Obama's promising, along with all the other governors.
And the one thing that I know that irritates you as much, if not more than anything, is it just appears the people on our side, way too many of them, not all, but way too many of them, don't know how to govern when they're in power and don't like to fight when they're out of power.
And or either don't know how.
I suspect they don't like to.
Easier to go along.
Less friction.
Take a quick timeout here, my friends.
We will be back and continue after this with much more.
Okay, back to the phones we go here as we kick off brand new week of broadcast excellence, and uh we go to Paul in Leesburg, Virginia.
Hi, and welcome to the EIB network.
Thank you, sir.
Pleasure to speak with you.
Um just want to let you guys know that everybody's talking about how these layoffs and things are in the future happening after the first month.
Well, Dick started.
I I've been a contractor to one of our three-letter agencies, and I was laid off last week because of budget cuts.
You were laid off already?
Yes, sir.
Every day of the week or just four days.
Oh, my job is gone.
I was defunded was the term that was used.
Why'd they do that?
I mean, the sequester hadn't even happened yet.
Well, they said it was uh budgetary constraints in preparation for possible sequestration.
Budgetary constraints in preparation for possible sequestration.
That's uh what my manager may be a manager.
What did they tell you?
How long are you laid off now?
Oh, how long?
I'm I'm sorry, I'm I'm my job's gone.
I have to find a new job.
And you are a did you say you're a contractor for the Intel community?
So you're not actually a you're not a general services administration employee, you're not a government employer contract.
I'm not a federal employees, sir.
I'm I'm a contractor to the to one of our agencies.
Was until last week.
And they just waved goodbye to you.
Yeah, they well, they gave me two weeks, which is uh more than they typically do, but uh yeah, there was myself and another gentleman uh both of us were uh subject matter experts in our field.
Uh and uh basically we're just called in and told, thank you for your work.
We love what you do, but well, your position's been defunded, so uh 28 February is your last day.
How does that make you feel?
Uh it's like getting hit in the stomach with a baseball bat.
I have to go home to my my two young kids.
And when I walk in, they look at me and my my my older son says, Dad, did you get hired today?
And I have to try to Were you blindsided by this, or did you have some indication?
Because I I have to think you would have had some indication.
We've been hearing for a month about how the bottom's gonna fall out for everybody.
Well, we we all we all everybody in in this environment understands that there are cuts coming, and yes, we knew that there were things coming.
Um, if the sequest if the sequestration doesn't happen, they're not gonna hire you back.
No, sir.
My job is gone.
Well, then it may not have to do with the sequestration.
Well, they they again they said it was budget constraints.
Well, yeah, they said that, but um there might be something else going on here.
The sequestration hasn't happened yet.
And you're you're a contractor, you're not actually a government employee.
And if you're not gonna get hired back, even if the sequester doesn't happen, then obviously it's not related to the sequester.
There's something else happening here.
Gee, feel bad for you.
800-282-2882.
If you want to be on the program, our last caller, I did some research here during the break.
We had an Intel contractor.
It's a 1099.
He's a contract hire.
He's not a government employee.
He's just been laid off.
He's not going to be hired back, no matter what happens, sequester.
But they told him it was in preparation or budget constraints due to the possible sequester.
So here's what we found.
We found an AP story in August of 2010.
So basically, what, two and a half years ago?
The defense intelligence community, that's what the guy who called did.
Contract Intel guy.
The defense intelligence community is combing its budgets to figure out where to cut 10% of its contractors as part of Defense Secretary Robert Gates drive to reduce costs in the Pentagon.
Here's more from the story.
Overall government spending on contractors doubled from 2000 to 2008, exceeding 500 billion in 2008, according to the Office of Management and Budget.
The Obama regime had already set a goal of reducing overall use of contractors by seven percent or forty billion dollars by 2011.
So Obama started cutting Intel contractors by 10% back in August of 2010, because they're winding down the war on terror.
And as part of trimming the cost, the regime has cut spending on Intel contracting by 15%.
So this guy just lost his contractor job.
He called us, he told us that they told him that it was related to the sequester.
Here's uh that there are two things going on here.
A, the guy gets laid off.
He's told his job is gone.
He calls here.
They told him it's part of the sequester, so he's out there.
So now what's happening, folks?
Here's the again, you got to deal with the optics.
What's happening now is why we're even laying people off before the sequester, Mabel?
Mabel, it's gonna be really bad.
It's gonna be really bad because now people lose their jobs even before the sequester.
So this is designed to create a picture of genuine pain and suffering.
Even before the sequester.
Now, may I inject a little uh reality here?
Would it be safe to assert that non government related private sector people have been dealing with this for years?
Have you seen the private sector unemployment rate?
We have lost eight and a half million jobs since Obama took office.
There are that many fewer jobs to fill.
There are that many fewer jobs to be had.
It's not eight and a half million people looking for jobs.
There's that's how many jobs that the labor force has been reduced by that many jobs.
My point is for five years now, four and a half years, this has been happening in the private sector.
But now that it's happening in the government sector, now we're getting the uh no.
I'm not I'm really not trying to stir things up, but now we start hearing the complaints.
Now we start getting the sob stories.
We're being massaged, manipulated.
Our emotions are feel sorry for people working in government or government-related jobs, losing theirs.
Oh, no.
No.
But this has been going on for four years in the private sector.
And there hasn't.
It's just been what's happening.
Just been the reality.
Deal with it.
Obama's trying to fix it.
Be patient.
But now, all of a sudden, now it's serious.
Four and a half years of people losing their jobs in the private sector, ho-hum.
But now government-related workers losing their jobs and panic city.
Unfair.
Mean.
How can this happen?
When in truth, this is unrelated to the sequester.
They just told him.
They just told him it's the sequester.
It made it easier for them.
But there haven't been any sequester cuts yet.
Now I have no doubt Obama wants defense budget cuts in the sequester.
He's salivating over them, in fact.
Private sector unemployment is twice as high as federal worker unemployment in terms of the unemployment rate.
I think what Obama's going to do, he's going to try to blame all of his massive defense cuts on the Republican sequester.
And he's got a little problem.
Bob Woodward is out there reminding everybody this was Obama's idea.
And journalists are now conflicted because Woodward is Mr. Journalist Emeritus.
And what that means, Woodward ought to be leading the defense of Obama.
And he's not.
Obama, or Woodward, is saying it's Obama's fault.
It was Obama's idea.
So these young buck journalists go, gee, well, an anti-war.
And they're turning on Woodward.
Journalists are turning his own newspaper.
Ezra Klein, the young wonder kind of the uh Washington Post, is writing he thinks Woodward's wrong.
At Woodward's own paper.
Other journalists are conflicted.
Bill Plant.
Oh, speaking, I gotta find this.
If you know somebody knows what soundbite is Bill Plant talking about state control media, it's here somewhere.
Hang on, number 26.
Number 26, maybe sure it's not 27 on the next page.
Just a second.
Here we go.
Audio soundbite 26.
Uh is this what I think it is?
Uh it is.
This is during reliable sources.
Howard Kurtz yesterday, CNN.
Kurtz said, Bill Plant, you've been patrolling the buildings since Ronaldus Magnus, meaning the White House.
Does the White House press look a little self-involved, a little whiny, complaining about this tiger incident?
We've gotten used to being called whiny lapdogs.
I've heard it For 30 years, but this is not about a picture of Tiger Woods.
This is about access to the president.
And access to the president has been cut and pushed and curtailed over every administration I've covered.
And here's the nub of it, Howie.
This administration has the tools to reach people on their own.
They don't need us as much.
And to the extent that they're able to do that, they're undercutting the First Amendment, which guarantees a free press through many voices.
If they put out their own material, it's state-run media.
Now, that's a good question.
How would we know the difference between what Obama puts out and what the press puts up?
Bill Plant's right.
They don't need them.
The White House doesn't need them, but they've got them anyway.
The White House got its own Twitter account.
They've still got all the campaign websites up.
They're still out fundraising, but they also have the press.
He just said state-run media.
Where have you heard that before?
So here's a guy in the state-run media now complaining.
See what what Plant's thinking, not we're in the same run media.
There ought to be some kind of loyalty here, but but he's he's not including us anymore.
He doesn't need us.
So now to so Plant is calling these other propagandists state-run media.
When they all are.
But since Obama is not giving them any love.
All this over no picture, Tiger Woods.
I this just to show you.
You talk about petty and hurt feelings of man.
I mean, this is like not being in the click in high school.
Not being among the group passing the notes and feeling left out.
Casper Wyoming, as we head back to the phones, Rush Limbaugh to Brian.
Great to have you, sir.
Hello.
Hey, Rush.
I watched the uh Oscars last night, and I was struck by the number of award recipients that they excuse me, thank their Canadian crew, therefore admitting that they don't pay their fair share, that they're using loopholes and moving jobs outside the United States.
Now that is interesting.
You know what?
I didn't hear much of that.
I'll tell you why.
Um we decided to start watching late.
We DVR it so that we could zip through the awards we weren't interested in and the commercials.
And we zipped through practically every acceptance.
So I didn't hear these guys thank their Canadian crews.
But you're right.
A lot of TV shows and movies are shot in Canada, not union up there.
And therefore they're not paying their fair share.
That's okay.
Uh what they're saving, they're donating to Obama to help him get re-elected.
Seriously.
Yeah.
But I noticed also they started using the word winner again instead of the Oscar goes to, and uh there was no complaints about the Well, you know, I have my I have a little bit different.
This this is you we're never gonna nail the left on hypocrisy.
This isn't gonna happen.
It just I mean, there's I've got a story here in the stack, I'm not gonna go there.
There are 20 things that have happened over the over recent, you know, decades that all happened with Democrats in control, and they were never held accountable for it, and they never were hurt by it.
It was Democrats that were fire hosing and beating up blacks during a civil rights era.
Somehow it's Republicans who are the racists.
Uh it was FDR who interned Japanese citizens and violated their constitutional rights.
Somehow it's Republicans who oppose civil liberties.
So we're we're never gonna nail these people on hypocrisy, and the main reason for that is uh the media.
But what amused me was these actors, they make me laugh.
They're actually pretending To be people, but they end up thinking they are these people.
I heard Christopher Plummer, I think, I don't care who it was, somebody introducing the nominees, best actress or supporting actress, talked about an exceptional number of brave performances this year.
I said, brave performances.
And then somebody else said, and this roster of nominees featured harrowing performances.
What is it?
Brave and harrowing performances.
They're acting.
They didn't do the real brave stuff.
They're pretending.
They're acting the brave stuff that other people actually did.
But they get so immersed in it that they think they really did it.
And so they have these awards every year where they do acknowledge their bravery, their heroism, their harrowingness or whatever.
I think I I just I find it amusing to tell you it's like when I first noticed this.
Jessica, what's it, Jessica Lang, and some other babe were brought up to Capitol Hill Senate hearing to testify on an agriculture bill.
And they were brought up, I think, by Senator Cranston, Democrat California.
Now, we all become aware of things for the first time at some point in our lives.
That was it for me.
I said, wait a minute now.
They're actresses.
They've never lived on farms.
They've never lived in a dust bowl.
They've never had to go out and plow a field.
What are they doing testifying?
You see, it wasn't about their actual experience.
It was just a bunch of celebrity intercoursers that happened to be senators who wanted to have these actresses up close and personal, have a chance to meet them.
What better way than to invite them to some hearing on an agriculture bill?
And of course they know everything about it because they portrayed farm wives in a movie.
And they end up at the at the Oscars every year, they do.
I mean, these this bunch takes themselves very seriously.
I I bet you there's some people on the Argo staff who actually think they rescued some hostages.
Well, maybe not really, but I'll bet you could you could compliment them on doing it and they they'd they'd take it seriously.
Here's uh who's next?
Give me a green dot.
Show me where we're going next.
Doug in Edama, Wisconsin, great to have you on the EIB network.
Hi.
Hi, Rush.
Uh I think I know how Obama can maximize what what he's going to do for greatest hurt, and that's local governments through through hidden revenue shares and block grants.
He can knock out deputy sheriffs, highway projects, all kinds of stuff that will hit the local TV, the local evening news, and people will see what bit them right in their own backyard.
It proves to me, if he does it, that Obama really doesn't care.
What he really wants to do is to is to provide maximum hurts so he can centralize and control government all the bigger.
Now, about that, I think you're exactly right.
I think the chaos and the pain, uh especially when he skates along having the Republicans blamed for it.
I mean, in a political sense, wouldn't you do it?
If you had Obama's objectives, not that you ever would, but if you had his objectives, and your success was directly tied to people suffering, and you could make sure your political opponents get blamed for that, wouldn't you do it?
Yeah, and at the local level where people see it on the local news and see their neighbor going.
Not some national news thing which they don't even know, and low information voters don't even care about the national that's exactly you are so right.
That's why Obama, well, he they have a he has a dinner with the governors, all presidents do every year when the governors gather for a convention.
But that's why it called him in to threaten them.
That's exactly I've got one, two, three, Three sound bites here.
As of Obama this morning, during the National Governor Association meeting, uh, telling these governors he's got he provided them with a convenient list of cuts that'll happen in their states.
Exactly what you're saying.
This is why he calls them in there and and frightens them and scares them into support because he knows what he's telling them is look, pal, you think I'm gonna take the hit for this?
Wrong oh.
You are there, these cuts are gonna happen in your state, and you're gonna take the hit, and that's what he's threatening them with.
You're you're exactly right.
1.4% leveraged into a big whopper for everybody.
Yep, that's exactly how that's how they play the game.
You're exactly right.
Great call.
Be back after this.
Don't go away.
Ladies and gentlemen, it looks like the federal government is looking at all of our 401ks as a source of revenue.
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