I've got I told everybody at the beginning that we go back and play some of the highlights of my CPAC speech because CNN did.
Everybody says if I do it, that I'm trying to upstage the current CPAC, which is not the case at all.
But CNN went ahead and did it.
I almost forgot that I promised you to do that.
In fact, we've got we're going to load you up with CPAC soundbites coming up right now, folks.
Live from the Southern Command in sunny South Florida, it's Open Line Friday.
Right now, we got one big, exciting, busy broadcast hour to go, Open Line Friday.
And that's where you get to choose whatever you want to talk about.
I have nothing to say about it.
If I don't care about what you want to talk about, that's okay.
I'll either fake my way through it or act like I don't care and leave it up to you to entertain the audience.
Telephone number 800-282-2882, the email address El Rushbo at EIBnet.com.
I was talking to my trusty chief of staff during the break, H.R.
And he said, you know, the guy that called Indiana from, what was he, Hastings, Nebraska?
Yeah.
He wanted to know, you know, what's the difference in the Democrats of today and way back long time ago.
And H.R. said, and this is a good point.
In olden times, gosh, I like saying that.
And not that long ago, the Democrat Party also knew that there were things in life bigger than themselves.
The country.
Country was under attack.
Country was under assault.
There were things worth holding on to here.
There were things bigger.
I remember Mrs. Clinton, in fact, sometime back during the 90s, talking about how she learned in her 40s that life was about more than just herself.
And she wanted applause for that.
And my point was, my parents had to learn that at 18.
They went through the Great Depression, then World War II, then Korea, and then Khrushchev came and banged a shoe at the UN saying, you're going to kill our grandkids.
And they took it seriously.
The Soviet threat was real.
And so when they were 18, they learned there was a lot more to life than just themselves.
And there was a time back then where the Democrats, now some of them were Soviet sympathizers, didn't think that communism was a big threat, didn't think the Soviets were, but some did.
But today, that's out the window.
Today, America is all about what you can get from it, what you can score.
Santa Claus.
And I think that's an excellent point.
The entitlement mentality, country owes you, simply because you were born here.
Okay, let's, I've got a lot of CPAC sound bites here, and a lot of the people that have spoken have really been great, raised the roof.
I mentioned Rick Perry in the opening of the program.
Let's actually listen.
He, among other things, made the point, everybody says conservatism's dead.
Everybody thinks conservatism is gone by the wayside.
How do we know?
We haven't nominated any conservatives.
McCain wasn't conservative.
Romney wasn't a conservative.
And of course, the CPAC audience loved hearing that.
So I think we got three bites here from Rick Perry.
Here's the first.
He's decided to shut down White House tours.
Apparently, now the only folks who can get a tour of the White House are those that contribute half a million dollars or more.
It'd be laughable if he hadn't taken it one step too far.
Dangerously releasing criminals onto our streets to make a political point.
When you have a federally sponsored jailbreak, and don't get confused, that's exactly what this is, a federally sponsored jailbreak, you cross the line from politics as spin to politics as a craven form of cynicism where everything goes, everything goes in order to win the next election.
Now, for you low-information voters out there, what he's talking about is that the regime, and they admitted this yesterday, they've been denying this.
The regime admitted that they have released over 2,000 illegal aliens from jail.
They weren't in jail because they're illegal.
They were in jail because they've committed genuine crimes.
And the regime said, well, we got to sequester.
We're out of money.
We haven't got the money to keep in jail.
They let them go.
And they first try to say, no, we didn't.
And then they tried to say, well, Janet Napolitano did that.
I didn't have anything to do with that.
Like Clinton during the Waco invasion back in the 90s.
The press shows up to ask Clinton about it.
I mean, Branch Davidian complex burning to the ground.
There's tanks.
I mean, people are getting killed in there.
They asked Clinton about it.
Clinton said, hey, don't ask me.
Janet Reno's thing.
Janet's probably, go ask Janet.
And they did the same thing here.
They tried to pass it off on Big Sis, and she said, no, I didn't do it.
The ICE guy did it.
And the ICE guy said, no, no, no, it's just a couple hundred.
So yesterday they admitted the director of ICE is the fall guy is taking full responsibility, thousands, not hundreds, as Napolitano said.
Hardened, illegal alien criminals released.
And of course, this is all about inflicting pain.
This is all about Obama winning the political point.
Perry is right about it.
Here's the comment about popular narrative being that conservatism's dead.
The popular media narrative is that this country has shifted away from conservative ideals as evidenced by the last two presidential elections.
That's what they think.
That's what they say.
That might be true if Republicans had actually nominated conservative candidates in 2008 and 2012.
Right now, right now, we edited the applause here in the interest of time.
Here's the final Rick Perry bite.
We're not the people of equal outcomes, of quotas, of race-based appeals, or the cradle-to-the-grave nanny state.
We're the people who say everyone, everyone deserves a shot.
But success is only the product of hard work and innovation.
We're the ideology that is blind to color and solely grounded in the merit system.
These ideals are as old as America, and they will live on as the prevailing sentiment long after we're gone because they're what make America unique.
We will never bend to the social and economic agenda of Western Europe.
Yes, it's an interesting place to vacation, but it is a sorry example of governance.
Whoa.
So there's Perry launching both barrels.
Now we move on to the Trumpster, Donald Trump.
Now, I got a note from a friend of mine this morning before the program who said, you know, this is kind of fascinating.
The media seems to be more excited about Trump than the audience.
I don't know if that's true or not.
It was just somebody's observation.
But Trump was given a lot of airtime, speech time.
The CPAC people decide who gets to speak and for how long.
And how many Trumpsters do we have here?
We got a couple, and then Wayne Lapierre after that.
I like Mitt Romney a lot.
But if he made one mistake, it's that he didn't talk enough about his success.
Because honestly, people really want success.
They want a leader who's successful.
And Mitt has done a great job.
And I just feel that the Republicans and Mitt, and I told him this, didn't speak enough about the things he did, the great things.
They were on the defensive instead of taking that offensive.
Except at the convention.
At the Republican convention, it was a parade of people with glowing testimonials about the charitable nature of the Romneys, the genuine acts of charity that they have engaged in that nobody knew about.
But I have to tell you, I know Trump, I know what he means here.
You've got to go tell your story.
You can't count on other people to do it, and you can't count on people to learn it.
But at the same time, when you tell your own story, if you don't know how to do it, like I do, if you don't know how to do it, it comes off as defensive and whining.
And why don't you notice me?
Why haven't I gotten any credit for this?
How come I'm not being heard?
How come look at all the wonderful?
It's a really, really tough thing to do.
And people who have been raised to be humble find it incredibly difficult to go out and sing their own praises, which is why they hire PR people.
And you know, when you hire the PR people, you know what they tell you?
Well, go have a meeting with the New York Times.
Well, I don't need you to tell me to go have a meeting.
Well, that's why you're hiring me for my expertise.
I go have an interview with the New York Times and have them tell your story.
Well, that's very helpful.
But look, I understand Trump's point.
You know, take away the politics for just a second.
I don't think that you're going to find a more decent, genuine, just plain old, nice, solid citizen human being than Mitt Romney.
And that was, to me, what was so outrageous about Romney doesn't care if this guy's wife dies with cancer.
Romney hates dogs or whatever.
You know, we're sitting around thinking nobody's going to believe that.
And low-information voters did because that's all they heard about Romney for months is what Caddell was talking.
Why didn't Romney buy some ads?
See, he couldn't spend money that he had raised for his campaign because this was before the convention.
The law says you can't spend that money until after the convention.
And he didn't have any money unless he would have spent his own.
He didn't.
So Obama, Obama couldn't run for re-election on his records.
He had to go out and demonize Romney, which he did.
And there was no retort to it.
There was no response to it.
Everybody says, nobody's going to believe that Romney hates dogs.
But you can make low-information people believe anything if you hit them enough with it, which is what happened.
Now, Trump next was firing both barrels here about how we are being run.
This country is being governed by a bunch of genuinely stupid fools.
Now, I buy all my televisions from South Korea.
I'm sorry to say.
I just ordered 3,000 units, 3,000 televisions, South Korea, LGs, et cetera.
We don't make them in our country anymore.
I get criticized.
Oh, why didn't you buy them here?
You can't buy them here.
We don't make televisions in this country.
So North Korea, as it always does, gets frisky.
And then we pay them off and they get less frisky, right?
North Korea gets frisky.
What do we get out of it?
We're run by either very foolish or very stupid people.
What's going on in this country is unbelievable.
Our country is a total mess, a total and complete mess.
And what we need is leadership.
Wow, who else would walk up to the microphone and podium and tell you how many TVs they just bought?
I wouldn't, snurder.
What are you pointing at me for?
I would tell them how big the one TV I just bought is, but I wouldn't.
3,000 TVs?
And he didn't say for his hotels or his casinos.
So you got some people.
Whoa, 3,000 TVs for his house, Mabel.
Whoa, whoa.
Anyway, one more from Trump, I think.
No, no, no.
Yep, one more from the Trumpster.
The fact is, 11 million people will be voting Democratic.
You can be out front.
You can be the spearhead.
You can do whatever you want to do.
But every one of those 11 million people will be voting Democratic.
It's just the way it works.
And you have to be very, very careful.
Because you could say that to a certain extent, the odds aren't looking so great right now for Republicans that you're on a suicide mission.
You're just not going to get those votes.
That's Trump talking about amnesty.
Republicans making a move here trying to agree with immigration reform.
And his point is that whatever number it is, they're going to vote Democrat.
And it's silly.
Even if you get one million of them, big whoop.
What are you doing to the other members of your base that you're ticking off in the process?
But this is what happens when a party gets shellacked.
They lose confidence.
And they believe.
The thing about this that amazes me.
Who is telling us that we need to moderate our position on immigration?
Who's telling us this?
Democrats.
The people that beat us.
You know what you need to do?
You guys, you need to moderate your tone on illegals.
You need to lighten up.
You know, be for amnesty.
I've always said, do they really want to help us?
They really feel so bad for us.
They want to share some of their votes with us.
What's amazing to me is that we have people on our side who believe it.
It's a trick.
It's a trap.
It's no different than when the Democrats say, you better stop criticizing Obama.
You're going to really tick off the independents.
And we say, yeah, you know, we better stop criticizing the independents, Obama.
They're going to tick off the independent.
And so they neuter us.
Well, not me, but I mean, the Republican leadership.
Wayne Lapierre, National Rifle Association, could not believe when the Vice President of the United States, Joe Bitemee, actually told women, just grab a shotgun if somebody's trying to get you and fire the shotgun through the door.
That's all you need.
It's what he said about it.
I'm going to quote him directly.
Just walk out, walk out and put that double-barreled shotgun and fire two blasts outside the house.
The vice president, I know you're smiling, but gosh, the vice president of the United States actually told women facing an attack to just empty their shotguns into the air.
Honestly, have they lost their minds over at the White House?
When it comes to that right, sir, you keep your advice.
We'll keep our guns.
Red meat for the Sea Packers.
Oh, bite me, such an easy.
You know, they're doing a video on what are they doing?
A video on Biden.
A day with Biden at the White House or some such thing?
And he's narrating it?
Some such thing?
A day with plugs?
Anyway, one more from La Pierre to commercial break, and then we'll get some calls and then excerpts from my CPAC speech.
This is, well, here, I don't need to explain this.
This is self-explanatory.
Some members of the Colorado legislature think women are too emotional to deal with violent attack.
Senators, listen to this.
Senator Jesse Uli Bari said that instead of using a firearm, you'd be better off using ballpoint pens to stab an attacker when he stops to reload.
A ballpoint pen?
At the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, officials recommend that women defend themselves against a rapist with passive resistance.
Passive resistance?
The one thing a violent rapist deserves to face is a good woman with a gun.
More red meat for the Sea Packers.
Wayne LaPierre of the NRA.
Rush Limbaugh Open Line Friday.
Damon in Fort Bragg, North Carolina.
Hello, sir.
Great to have you here.
Hey, Megadoodles, Rush.
Thank you very much.
Hey, I've actually, funny enough, I've been listening to you for more than half my life.
I remember sneaking up at night to watch your TV show, and that was kind of the genesis of my listening to you speak the truth.
Thank you, sir, very much.
What happened the other half?
Well, I was, let's see, 1992, I was 17, so that's when I first started watching, I believe that was when your TV show came out.
I was a junior in high school.
Well, I appreciate that.
I really do.
Thank you very much.
Well, the reason I'm calling Rush is you were speaking about a memo that was passed down.
I believe it was to the USDA folks here in North Carolina.
The memo passed down to the Department of Agriculture.
It was the one that spoke about, you know, that they didn't want him to redistribute the money that was being cut.
Oh, oh, oh, yeah.
They wanted to get the story straight on who was being harmed by the sequester, right?
Right, right.
Well, a lot of people, and I know they've seen it in Congress is supposedly acting, but a lot of people don't realize there's a lot of cuts to the military right now.
And a lot of it takes a lot of time.
People do realize it.
They do realize it, Damon, and it's being done on purpose.
We've had calls from women who are being denied military health care, being done to hurt people, to make a point.
Having more fun than a human being should be allowed to have El Rushbo behind the golden EIB microphone here at the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.
Do you remember?
I think this was in 2008, the presidential campaign.
Might have been a debate.
Not totally sure about that.
President Obama, candidate Obama, Senator Obama, said, Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, these countries, they're tiny compared to the Soviet Union.
North Korea, they don't pose a serious threat to us the way the Soviet Union did.
They don't need to worry about either.
This is silly.
And he mentioned Cuba, Venezuela, Iran, North Korea.
You might like to know that NBC News reporting that the United States is deploying additional ground-based missile interceptors as the Norcs are stepping up their threats.
I guess Dennis Rodman failed in his diplomacy efforts with Kim Jong-un or whatever his name is.
From the NBC article, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel either has announced or will announce today that United States deploying 14 new ground-based missile interceptors, probably in Alaska.
It's no big deal.
The Norcs, they're not a big threat.
I don't have to worry about them.
By the way, where are we getting the money for this?
In a sequester.
One more thing to Damon from Fort Bragg, North Carolina.
I think what a lot of people don't realize is that many, and in fact, probably most of the cuts that we're now seeing in the military are not due to the sequester.
People forget Obama's already cut the military budget by $700 some-odd billion dollars just in previous years.
The sequester's chump change on top of that, at least this year.
It's not chump change over the course of 10 years, but it's chump change in one year.
But most of these defense cuts now are Obama's earlier defense cuts.
But see, Obama's not going to blame all of them on Republicans for the sequester.
And that's why Chuck Hagel's a defense secretary is a Republican.
So Obama is able to blame all of this on the sequester and on the Republicans when most of these cuts happened pre-sequester.
If Obama's putting missiles in Alaska and they're telling us they're aimed at North Korea, if I lived where Palin lives, I'd be a little worried.
Maybe aimed at her, using it as an excuse.
Okay, we've got more of your phone calls coming up, and I must tell you, I'm a little queasy about doing this.
A couple of years ago during CPAC, we had some people call and say, why don't you play some excerpts of your great speech?
In fact, I've had people say, Rush, why do they even do CPAC anymore?
I mean, what's left to be said after your speech?
And I can understand that.
But the kids still need a place to party in Washington in March.
What else are you going to do?
So, I've always felt queasy because people accuse me of trying to upstage.
We had calls from people.
What do you do?
I mean, you just have to, even though you're not there, you just have to pretend you're there and you just have to act like you're just, no, no, no.
I was requested.
Well, in this instance, this year, CNN did it.
CNN went back to their archives and played some bites of my CPAC speech four years ago.
It was their Info Bay, Brooke Baldwin, actually late yesterday afternoon, and this is how she introduced it.
Here's an image you may remember.
This takes you back a couple of years.
This was CPAC 2009.
Rush Limbaugh.
Remember this speech?
He fired them up.
What you get at CPAC, you get a lot of talk about conservative principles, lower taxes, faith to the Constitution, never bending to the winds of change.
See, never bending to the winds of change, which is a crock.
But That's the agenda.
So let's go back.
I just, in all honesty, I did not pick these excerpts of my CPAC speech.
Cookie did it.
I got the soundbite roster, and let me say how many there are.
One, two, three, four.
Let me add them to two and a half to four and a half, four and a half, five, six.
It's just seven and a half minutes.
That's nothing.
The whole speech at an hour.
I was scheduled to finish, and it was going so well.
They said, the guy on stage came up, can you keep going for a while?
They had another half hour to fill.
I said, sure, no problem.
So it's only seven and a half minutes out of what was 90 minutes.
So, I mean, I know what she chose.
I have the transcripts in front of me.
But here we go, first of four.
Let me tell you who we conservatives are.
We love people.
When we look out over the United States of America, when we are anywhere, when we see a group of people such as this or anywhere, we see Americans.
We see human beings.
We don't see groups.
We don't see victims.
We don't see people we want to exploit.
What we see, what we see is potential.
We do not look out across the country and see the average American, the person that makes this country work.
We do not see that person with contempt.
We don't think that person doesn't have what it takes.
We believe that person can be the best he or she wants to be if certain things are just removed from their path, like onerous taxes, regulations, and too much government.
We want every American to be the best he or she chooses to be.
We recognize, we recognize that we are all individuals.
We love and revere our founding documents, the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.
We believe that the preamble of the Constitution contains an inarguable truth, that we are all endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights, among them life.
Liberty, freedom, and the pursuit of happiness.
Now, those of you watching at home may wonder why this is being applauded.
We conservatives think all three are under assault.
Oh, I see it.
Cookie has not edited the applause here.
Not tell you.
I'll tell you a little truth, as is the case in all of my speeches.
I had barely thought about it.
That's why I don't like speeches.
I don't plan them.
I don't write them.
And I live in perpetual fear that when it's time, I'm going to have a brain freeze.
But I can't write a speech.
My mind doesn't, it's not nearly as fluid, fluent.
So I have to add Libdy's things.
So we're driving in.
We land at the airplane at Dulles and we're driving in.
It's about an hour before, maybe an hour and a half before I'm supposed to go on.
And something, Catherine said something to me.
I forget what it was, and I got a little light exploded.
I said, you know what?
I'm going to treat this as my first ever address to the nation, as though I'm doing a State of the Union speech or whatever.
And that's where I got the idea to approach it this way.
I had no idea what I was just, I really didn't.
I really don't at any one of these speeches.
I think about it day in and day out, but I never commit to anything.
I wait until I hit the stage or right before it, and then maybe jot some notes of things that are on my mind in an outline and then go for it.
And that's why I live in perpetual fear of doing speeches because I'm scared to death that when the light goes on, I'm going to have a brain freeze and have nothing to say.
Hasn't ever happened, by the way.
Anyway, the next bite is everybody was all caught up back then.
This is February 28th.
And it was six weeks prior that I had said about President Obama, I hope he fails, which had caused a big excrement storm.
So I thought that I would address it again.
For those of you just tuning in on the Fox News channel with C-SPAN, I am Rush Limbaugh, and I want everyone in this room and every one of you around the country to succeed.
I want anyone who believes in life, liberty, pursuit of happiness to succeed.
And I want any force, any person, any element of an overarching big government that would stop your success.
I want that organization, that element, or that person to fail.
I want you to succeed.
Also, for those of you in the drive-by media watching, I have not needed a teleprompter for anything I've said.
And nor do any of us need a teleprompter because our beliefs are not the result of calculations and contrivances.
Our beliefs are not the result of a deranged psychology.
Our beliefs are our core.
Our beliefs are our hearts.
We don't have to make notes about what we believe.
We don't have to write down, oh, geez, do I believe?
We can tell people what we believe off the top of our heads, and we can do it with passion, and we can do it with clarity, and we can do it persuasively.
Some of us just haven't had the inspiration or motivation to do so in a number of years, but that's about to change.
Okay.
I got to go.
I got to take a quick commercial break.
There's two more of these.
This is from my CPEC speech from 2009, four years ago.
Back in just a sec.
Okay, one more.
It's really got one more time, time for one more bite here.
And it's a continuation of the whole business of failing and success.
I know what's going on.
I know what's going on.
We're in the aspects here of an historic presidency.
I know that.
But let me be honest again.
I got over the historical aspects of this in November.
President Obama is our president.
President Obama stands for certain things.
I don't care.
He could be a Martian.
He could be from Michigan.
I don't know.
It doesn't matter to me what his race is.
It doesn't matter.
He's liberal is what matters to me.
And his articulated, his articulated plans scare me.
Now, I understand, okay, we can't say we want the president to fail.
Mr. Limbaugh, that's like saying, this is the voice of the new Castrati, by the way, guys that have lost their guts.
You can't say, Mr. Limbaugh, that you want the president to fail, because that's like saying you want the country to fail.
No, it's the opposite.
I want the country to survive.
It was the CPAC Olympics.
And look, I intended to squeeze some phone calls in here, but I'd forgotten how fascinating I was.
And so anyway, again, not trying to do anything with this year's CPAC, but I'm really inundated with requests every year to play segments of it.
We always wait to the last of the show to do it.
Try to cause as little offense as we can.
I got to take another brief time out, but sit tight, folks.
We'll be back.
Don't go away.
My friends, when I tell you it's a thrill and a delight to be with you every day, I really mean it.
It's just a golden opportunity.
I'm so lucky.
I'm going to be able to do what I was born to do.
And it's never work other than a couple of calls now and then.
But everybody has obstacles they have to get past.
I'm just kidding about that.
Really, I enjoy this so much, and I'm so grateful that you're here each and every day with us.
Look forward to each next day, which will be Monday.
So I hope you all have a great weekend.
And go out and try to play football with a duck in your head.