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April 18, 2013 - Rush Limbaugh Program
32:48
April 18, 2013, Thursday, Hour #3
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Having more fun than a human being should be allowed to have.
That's me, Rush Limbaugh, every day behind the Golden EIB microphone.
Happy to be with you, folks.
It's always a thrill, always a delight.
The phone number, if you want to be on the program, 800-282-2882.
I mentioned at the top of the program when President Obama began speaking at the memorial for the Boston Marathon, I didn't know how many EIB affiliates had cut away from this program in order to carry or cover the president's remarks.
And I still don't know.
And I assured everybody then that if it were necessary, that I repeat a little bit of what happened in the opening monologue.
I'm going to do that now.
Just one particular thing, and that is the gun control bill going down to defeat yesterday.
Now, as we played soundbites, maybe grab 708.
Grab soundbite 708 again.
May as well do this.
The president was never angrier.
It's really unique to see him this angry.
He was livid.
In fact, even the AP rights, a visibly infuriated President Barack Hussein Obama, surrounded himself with tear-stained parents of Connecticut school shooting victims on Wednesday after the Senate voted down a measure designed to keep guns out of the hands of criminals and declared it a pretty shameful day for Washington.
Well, we've already got countless laws that keep the guns out of the hands of criminals.
I'm sorry, folks, but every gun control law proposed by any Democrat is going to do nothing but take guns away from law-abiding people.
We already have countless gun laws, just like immigration laws, that are not being enforced either properly or at all.
And the whole point of this yesterday was for the Senate to pass this so that it could fail in the House.
Now, I know that many people can't understand that the president would want something to fail, but he did.
The president and the Democrats are doing everything they're doing for the 2014 midterm elections.
They want to win the House of Representatives.
That's the objective.
Everything is about that.
The gun control bill was proposed.
It's a punitive gun control bill.
It will take guns away from law-abiding people.
It will serve as a national gun registry, or would have.
Not directly.
It would have happened incidentally, but by design.
It was supposed to pass the Senate.
The Democrats run the Senate.
It was supposed to pass there.
You bring the parents in from Newtown, you fly them out on Air Force One.
You do the appropriate quote-unquote lobbying with the parents of the victims.
They meet with a Democrat Party lobbyist who then introduces them to senators.
That alone is supposed to pressure Democrats into voting for the bill, and that didn't happen.
Four Democrats voted against it, and that's why Obama is livid.
This was supposed to pass the Senate and then go to the House where it was to lose, because the Republicans outnumbered the Democrats.
It was guaranteed to lose in the House.
Obama wanted that so that he could then campaign on the idea that Republicans don't care about people getting shot.
Republicans don't care about kids losing their lives.
Republicans don't care about families.
All Republicans care about is Wayne LaPierre and the NRA.
All the Republicans care about is guns.
The Republicans want people to have guns, guns, and more guns.
The Republican Party, actually horrible.
That's all they wanted.
Guns.
They care about guns.
They care about war on women.
Republican Party doesn't care about people.
That's what Obama wanted.
He didn't get it, and that's why he's mad.
That's why he's livid.
He's not livid because he didn't get his bill.
Folks, if you're in the low-information voter community out there and you're listening to this, I've got no reason to make anything up.
It doesn't serve my purpose to lie to you.
I don't gain anything by it.
I'm telling you, he wanted this to lose in the House so that he could make up, continue to lie about how mean, cold-hearted, unfeeling the Republicans are, so that he could have the Democrats win the House because winning the House, keeping the Senate, means the Democrats would have one-party control of government, and he could do whatever he wants practically with simple implementation.
He wouldn't even need legislation to be voted on.
He would be rubber-stamped.
And the last two years of the Obama presidency would be where, I mean, balls to the wall socialism would happen.
Whatever.
Nobody could stop him.
And this is a giant wrench in the works.
And up next is the immigration bill.
And I'm going to tell you, the polling data on that is identical to the polling data in Gallup on gun control.
Only 4% of the American people want legalization for people who are healed illegally but voluntarily.
There is not a mass sentiment for amnesty.
There is no mass sentiment for legalizing people who are here because they've broken the law.
So you have a two-pronged stool, if you will, here, gun control and immigration, and half of it's gone down the tubes now.
Here's the president, Rosegarden.
You have two sound bites.
You can hear how angry he was.
I've heard folks say that having the families of victims lobby for this legislation was somehow misplaced.
A prop, somebody called them.
It was.
Emotional blackmail, some outlet said.
Are they serious?
Do we really think that thousands of families whose lives have been shattered by gun violence don't have a right to weigh in on this issue?
Do we think their emotions, their loss, is not relevant to this?
Wait a minute.
Wait, hold it a minute.
Hold it.
Stop the tape.
They can weigh in on it all day long, but they are not guaranteed to prevail.
They can lobby all day long.
They can go to Washington all day long and fly on Air Force One all day long.
They can ask for what they want all day long, but there's no guarantee they get to win.
Mr. President, you expect people just to lay down and let you have what you want.
There have been too much of that.
The country hangs in the balance.
You getting what you want is not good for this country.
Certainly not the way it was founded.
So they can do everything they want.
You can do everything with them that you want.
But you're not guaranteed winning.
Here's the next soundbite: the gun lobby and its allies willfully lied about the bill.
No, they're not.
They claimed that it would create some sort of big brother gun registry, even though the bill did the opposite.
Wrong.
This legislation, in fact, outlawed any registry.
Plain and simple, right there in the text.
Right.
But that didn't matter.
And unfortunately, this pattern of spreading untruths about this legislation served a purpose.
Oh.
Because those lies upset an intense minority of gun owners.
And that, in turn, intimidated a lot of senators.
You ever lied about Obamacare, Mr. President?
You ever lie about your immigration plans?
You ever lie about the stimulus?
Anyway, he was upset.
He's really mad.
And the Politico, looking here at the headline, Gun Control, President Obama's biggest loss.
See, everything's about Obama.
This was not about the Sandy Hook parents, folks.
This wasn't about the Sandy Hook kids.
This wasn't about future gun violence.
This was about Obama's agenda.
Everything is always and only about Obama's agenda.
And that's what this was about.
And Obama's agenda took a hit, and that's why Obama's mad, and that's why the media is upset.
It wasn't about the children.
Politico headlines says are right.
Never before had President Obama put the moral force and political muscle of his presidency behind an issue quite this big and lost quite this badly.
Wow, I didn't see a word in here about the parents or the children.
I see how it affects Obama.
And that's what the media is focused on on practically every issue.
How does it affect Obama?
How does it help Obama?
How does it hurt Obama?
From the Daily Caller, Obama lashes out a GOP NRA after gun bill fails.
Story spells out how Obama hoped to use gun control as a wedge issue.
That is exactly right.
It wasn't about the kids.
Mr. Lumbaugh, this is actually a simple performance by you today.
This is the voice of New Castrode, folks, the liberals that listen.
I can't believe you'll be so insensitive and so outrageous to say that this was not about the children.
It was none about the parents.
It was none about the safety of the American people.
No, it's not.
It's about the Obama agenda.
This was indeed a wedge issue.
This was to drive a wedge between the Republican Party.
This was to go down in defeat in the House.
The defeat, reading here from Daily Caller, the defeat also curbed Obama's efforts to use gun control as a wedge issue against House members in swing districts in the 2014 midterms.
If the Senate had passed this bill, Democrats could have lashed House members for not supporting what the president calls common sense gun reforms.
Never mind that we never hear about common sense abortion reforms.
But there's a second article here that I have attached, and it's by the Politico.
And it actually may be a little bit more interesting than the Daily Caller piece.
Reading from the article in the Politico, David Axelrod is looking for gun control advocates like Mayor Doomberg to stick with the cause and seek retribution through the midterm elections.
A bunch of suburban swing district Republicans in the House are probably deeply relieved that the Senate appears poised to kill background checks, he tweets.
That's Axelrod.
In other words, Axelrod is revealing that this issue was all about defeating House Republicans and nothing else.
It wasn't about the children.
It wasn't about the parents.
Mr. Limbaugh, that is outrageous.
I can't believe that you would dare say that Mr. President Obama took a commitment.
This is not about the children.
It was made to look like it, but it was about Obama's agenda in a news media.
It's not me telling you.
It's the news media.
Diane Feinstein, Senator California was angry.
They don't like to lose.
Here she is on the Senate floor yesterday, last night.
I am really chagrined and concerned.
If anybody cares, vote at least to prospectively ban the manufacture, the sale, the importation of military-style assault weapons.
Show some guts.
There is no such thing as an assault weapon.
I say it again.
It's a term created by the wordsmiths at the Democrat Party to get everybody, as many people as possible, opposed to guns, period.
And when you get right down to it, every gun's an assault weapon.
I mean, you don't make popsicles with the things.
It's a loaded term.
It's designed to gin up opposition.
They just can't do anything about the Second Amendment.
That's their problem.
That's what they really need to do.
Just erase it, find a way to get it out of Constitution.
But they can't do that, so they've got to try their back door.
Dingy Harry on the Senate floor yesterday in Washington during the debate on gun control.
I'll vote for the ban because maintaining a law and order is more important than satisfying conspiracy theories who believe in black helicopters and false flags.
And I'll vote for the ban because saving the lives of police officers, young and old, and innocent civilians, young and old, is more important than preventing imagined tyranny.
See, they want you to think that the forces defeated this think they need guns to hold back the helicopters of the federal government.
The federal government's coming for everybody, and that's why we can't give up our guns.
A bunch of conspiracy kooks, weirdos, tenfoil head people.
What you need to know, low-information people, we've already got so many gun laws.
There are already so many restrictions.
In fact, the states with the most restrictive gun laws have the highest crime rates with guns.
New York, Washington, two of the hardest places in the world to get a gun, and they are ravaged by gun crime.
We've got more gun law than you can imagine.
And we don't enforce existing law to make it look like we don't have enough law so that we can get more.
Everything is political.
Everything with the Democrat Party, everything is political, disguised as compassion.
A brief time out.
We'll be back.
Don't go away.
How are you?
Meeting and surpassing all audience expectations every day.
Every day, you get more than you expect.
And you expect it all.
And here's Yvonne in El Paso.
I'm glad you waited.
Welcome to the program.
Well, thank you, Rush.
You know, I know a lot of callers like me call and tell you that we love you, and it sounds like we're kissing your ass.
But if it wasn't for you, I would feel like the lone crazy person in the wilderness watching, you know, TV and reading papers online.
It's just exhausting.
I know what you mean.
I know exactly.
Am I the only one who thinks what I think?
Am I an odd girl?
I know what you mean.
That's what it feels like.
But my point was that, you know, Senator Rubio wasn't hearing you, Rush.
He was saying that if he had his brothers, he would be talking about the economy and the deficit and jobs.
But here you spent your whole show talking about immigration and gun control because the Republicans allow the Democrats to forward their agenda.
I pointedly asked him about that.
And I said, why is it that they set the agenda and we respond by saying, okay, well, we'll do that, but we'll do it better.
We'll do it smarter.
We'll do it with some reforms and so forth.
Why can't we just say no when they say they want something?
Because he's a good man.
And when he hears, you know, it is a problem.
Immigration is a problem and he has good ideas.
And as a good man, he wants to forward those.
But what he doesn't understand is that he's being played by the Democrats.
They don't want to hear his better ideas.
The media doesn't want to hear his better ideas.
And they control things right now.
And so his better ideas just go down the tubes.
You know, the bill will not be enforced.
I'm sorry.
They'll change it along the way.
Let me tell you something about that.
You've raised an interesting point.
You are essentially saying that Senator Rubio, because of his relative youth and the fact that he's a freshman, has a little naivete.
And maybe so.
But he does, at the same time, and it may be hard for you to understand, but I welcome this kind of just fresh on-the-scene enthusiasm, the idea that he thinks that because he's involved, because he has these persuasive powers, he thinks he can be the one that can finally bring these people to heal and change them and force them to do what they promised to do.
Look, I admire that.
That's why I fare to focus on the bill.
I was that way my first five years of this program.
I thought it was going to change America.
I thought it was going to change the world.
I thought because there was no other conservative media.
I thought, finally, we're going to beat this back.
Well, we did.
We did blow up their monopoly, but we just woke them up.
They're angrier and they're meaner than they've ever been.
And they're more politically focused than they've ever been as a result of losing a monopoly and having to compete for it each and every day.
I'm not saying I've become jaundiced and don't think it's possible to beat him back.
If I thought that, I wouldn't show up here anymore.
I still have that attitude about this program.
And all of you, all of us together, can end up being a force.
It wakes everybody up in this country.
And he thinks, and I know him, he thinks that he can do that in the Senate.
And he may have higher office ambition.
And I don't want to do anything that would curb the enthusiasm, the vigor, and even the idealism he has.
Because one thing about Senator Rubio, do not doubt, he is a genuine, legitimate conservative.
I wish we had been talking about tax reform, this and the other thing.
That was my point.
The Democrats are leading this agenda.
They should be shut down.
And we're back.
Great to have you here, folks.
Each and every day.
Eric, Lexington, Kentucky.
Great to have you, sir.
Hi.
Well, actually, Rush, it's Lexington, Texas.
I'm sorry, you're right.
I misread that up there out of force of habit.
You can blame Snerdley.
Well, I would, except Snerdley isn't here.
Oh.
Well, Ditto's from the Lone Star State, and my comment was: the GOP needs to take a big, long look at the NRA and figure out and see if the NRA is showing the GOP how to defeat these liberty-destroying policies.
Yeah, this is true.
And I think every conservative needs to take heart because the NRA and all the pro-Second Amendment friends we have out there are showing just how it's done.
You stand up.
You don't give up.
You fight.
And I wish Rubio would see that.
It's called pushback.
That's right, brother.
And there isn't any.
I'll tell you what's happened.
The Republican Party, this is a wild guess.
I mean, I really don't know.
I'm just an educated guess.
But they're scared.
They want to do things on Monday that the media will not hate them for on Tuesday.
They've bought into what's said about them.
They believe that the image that's been created of them is real, and therefore they have to react based on that.
And the image is they're racist, they're sexist, they're bigots, and they're homophobes.
Now, they know they're not.
So they look to the people they think are responsible for creating that image about them.
So they might blame people on talk radio.
They might blame activist groups like the evangelicals.
They might blame the pro-lifers.
And they get sick and tired of being mischaracterized, lied about.
And so they want people to think that what's said about them isn't true.
And they think pushing back on these issues will not accomplish that objective of being liked.
And I don't care whether it's conservative media in Washington or whether it's elected Republicans in many cases, that's what they're after, is being lied.
Now, the NRA is a special interest group that has one purpose.
And they are not going to let anybody wipe them out.
They have a core set of principles and beliefs, and they do not waver from it.
And if they are attacked, they stand right up and fight back.
They don't just defend themselves.
They go out on the assault path themselves.
They go out and characterize their accusers.
They don't sit around and defend themselves alone.
They do do that.
And as such, there is guidance there.
There is a demonstration of how to do it.
But boy, you've got to be made of something special to do that.
Because once it starts, it never stops.
Look at Wayne Lapierre.
Just for example, look at what's said about him.
It's been said about him from the first day he took that job.
To the low-information crowd, Wayne Lapierre is the modern incarnation of the devil.
Well, if Wayne LaPierre cared more about that than he does about his cause, he would cave.
He wouldn't do the pushback because he wouldn't want that kind of thing to be said about him.
But his objective is not to be liked.
His objective is to defend his organization and to maintain its existence and to grow it.
And he believes, as is everybody at the NRA, they believe in what they're about.
They believe their purpose.
They believe in those things they hold dear.
And they know they're under assault.
They're under attack.
And they're not going to be chipped away.
And they know they can't survive by becoming what their critics want them to become.
So the NRA also doesn't have to get any votes.
Now, they do have to attract members, and they do very much appreciate the membership fee and any other donations they get, but they don't have to get votes.
The Republican Party has to get votes.
The Republican Party has consultants, and the consultants are out there saying, here's what you have to do to get votes to the elected Republicans.
Getting votes is a whole different matter than getting an audience, for example.
Getting votes is a whole different thing from getting members.
It's tougher.
And the theory is that you cannot get votes being disliked, being disliked.
But you can run the NRA being disliked.
In fact, you can triumph being disliked.
Being disliked, a badge of honor, depending on who it is that dislikes you.
Politicians don't look at it that way.
They don't see anything in it to be disliked by anybody.
They don't see how that's going to get them any votes.
And standing up for and supporting people who are disliked, they don't see anything in that for them either.
There are exceptions, of course.
Grab audio soundbites 11 and 12.
Senator Ted Cruz.
Yesterday in Washington, Republican senators, including Senator Cruz, held a press conference about gun control legislation.
And here's a couple of sound bites from Senator Cruz and what he had to say.
In 2010, roughly 48,000 felons and fugitives attempted to illegally purchase firearms.
Out of those 48,000, the Obama Justice Department prosecuted only 44.
Let me repeat those numbers because those numbers, in my opinion, are quite staggering.
Out of 48,000 felons and fugitives who in a single year tried to illegally purchase firearms, the Justice Department prosecuted just 44 of them.
In our judgment, that's unacceptable.
That's what Cruz is doing here is called pushback.
And he's a freshman, won election, his Tea Party.
He's got a great future.
People very much appreciate what Cruz is willing to stand up to say.
But did you know the specifics here, the nut of what he said here?
It proved the point.
44 prosecutions out of 48,000 felons and fugitives who tried to illegally purchase firearms.
We've already got plenty of law.
We only prosecuted 44 of them in 2010.
Why?
Because we don't want to create the impression we have enough gun laws.
In fact, let's look at it, turn it around 180 degrees.
Democrats want the impression created we don't have enough law.
So you have all of these fugitives, all of these felons committing these horrendous crimes, and we're not pursuing them, we're not prosecuting them.
And the reason, we need more law, Mr. Limbaugh, we don't have enough law to go after these people.
The gun control laws are woefully enough.
We need more.
That's what they want everybody to conclude.
Just like we don't have the laws necessary to deal with immigration.
Yes, we do.
All we would have to do is enforce current law, and we could reform the immigration problem without anything new.
Ditto gun control, we had plenty of existing gun law.
That's the question that needs to be asked of Mayor Emmanuel in Chicago and of President Obama, because there is a runaway murder rate in Chicago, and it's mostly young black children who are being murdered in Chicago.
And I, by the way, I don't see their parents being flown to Washington.
As an aside, I don't see a whole lot of attention being paid to the murder rate in Chicago because it happens two or three a day rather than 25 or 30 at one time with the media on site for a week or 10 days in a row.
So the murder rate in Chicago is kind of a ho-hum thing.
Yeah, it happens every day.
No big deal.
So you don't take their parents to Washington.
You don't put them in touch with members of the House or the Senate seeking new gun control bill.
Why?
Because you want the picture painted that there aren't enough gun laws.
We can't possibly prosecute Rush.
We don't have enough law.
It's all BS.
Folks, look, everything the Democrat Party does is political.
Everything they do is aimed at advancing their political agenda.
All of their so-called compassion, all of their so-called love, all of their so-called concern for this group or that group or that person.
It's all about advancing their agenda.
And their agenda is a never-ending, growing government, pure and simple, with more and more amassed power.
And there's going to have to be some pushback eventually to stop that.
Brief timeout.
Much more straight ahead.
Don't go away.
Liz in Maine.
I'm glad you called.
Great to have you on the program.
Hi, Rush.
Thanks so much for taking my call.
I have three quick points to make with what you were just saying before the break, that with Democrats, whenever they invoke the children, it's either about furthering their agenda or furthering their money fundraising.
My first point is I believe there were at least a few parents from the Connecticut massacre that wanted armed guards in the school and weren't for more strict gun control laws.
There were some parents from Sandy Hook who did not support Obama's gun control policy.
Did he bring them to Washington so that their points could be heard?
I don't believe so.
No.
So that's my first point.
If he was outraged that lawmakers did not want to hear from these grief-stricken parents, why did he not think it was valid to bring all of them, whether they were for or against his agenda?
And my second point is, with his mandatory preschool or Head Start, which I can't even believe, even the government reports on Head Start have deemed it a complete failure.
They've been following it for decades now, and by the third grade, it's negligible, the difference.
But what it would do is hire a whole new rash of teachers, a whole new rash of school janitors, a whole new rash of cafeteria workers, all of whom pay union dues.
And the other point with that, I believe they're pushing weekend meals for children, which is absurd in the face of EBT card explosions and whatnot, that parents aren't feeding their children.
But again, that would entail school cafeteria workers, school janitors, again, union-paying dues.
Dues-paying union members that enrich the Democrats.
Right.
You know, if it's just every time they talk about children and doing something for children, just look under the covers.
And there's nothing to do with that.
It's not about the children at all.
It's never about the children.
It's about the Democrat Party.
It always is.
And you're right, Liz.
You're absolutely right.
I'm glad you called.
Be back in just a second.
The Gang of Eight immigration bill is being unveiled as we speak.
So we will see.
Anyway, Mark Stein will be here tomorrow.
Again, a reminder, I will be out tomorrow attending a funeral and memorial service.
Stein here tomorrow, and I'll be back on Monday, and we'll look forward to it.
As always, thanks much for being with us.
Really appreciate it each and every day.
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