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May 3, 2013 - Rush Limbaugh Program
34:59
May 3, 2013, Friday, Hour #3
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Greetings to you music lovers, thrill seekers, and conversationalists all across the fruited plain.
You are tuned to the most listened to radio talk show in America.
You are tuned to the most popular radio talk show in America.
And as such, there are a lot of people very angry at that, not happy about it.
From the Southern Command in sunny South Florida.
It's open line Friday.
Tiptoe around this early, and I said, What the hell am I tiptoeing for?
Let me just explain it.
And you know it as well as I do.
Folks, I've even told you about it.
The Republican Party can't win presidential elections anymore.
They don't think they can.
And there's one reason why in their mind.
People like me and people like you.
The Republican Party thinks that its big problems right now are people like Ted Cruz, Mike Lee, Tea Party Republicans.
They also think their big problem is conservative media people who are preventing the party from modernizing.
People like me are keeping the party too conservative, and they can't win being conservative.
That's what they think.
And I'm just this isn't new, been talking about this for a number of years.
You remember, I've told you, the Republican Party establishment never did really like Ronald Reagan.
They're embarrassed at pro-lifers and all this kind of thing.
I just all the only thing that I was trying to say when I was tiptoing around with the uh the guy earlier who called about this, is that there are people who can't win, and they're not going to blame themselves.
They're gonna look for scapegoats and excuses.
And they're gonna point fingers at me, and people like Ted Cruz and others, uh, other people on talk radio and so forth, as the scapegoat, as the cop-out reason.
And it's just it's gonna happen.
It already does now and then.
Uh but it's this is the way of the world.
Anyway, I want to expand on something, and I said right before the top of the hour ended.
Walter Williams, who uh occasionally still guest hosts the program, once said, prior to capitalism, the way people amassed great wealth was by looting, plundering, and enslaving their fellow man.
Capitalism made it possible to become wealthy by serving your fellow man.
Nothing could be closer to the truth than that.
In a communist socialist society where nobody has any freedom, nobody has any liberty.
How do you get anything?
You either you have to be a member of the party, what are they doing?
They're stealing from people.
They're imprisoning people.
They're looting, they're taking what other people have.
You would have you had to go out and steal things to have anything.
Capitalism frees people to provide services and products that people are willing to pay for.
And if you hit it big, you get really wealthy.
If you don't hit it big but do reasonably well, you do reasonably well.
But capitalism is made up of people who are forever dreaming about coming up with ways to make life better.
Capitalism is about improving the quality of life, improving the standard of living for as many people as possible.
And that takes us back to it's not possible for everybody to be the same.
So the socialists play on this class envy business.
Well, it's not fair that X should have all of that.
Not everybody does, it isn't fair.
So we need to what the left always does, what socialists always do to equalize society.
They never elevate the people at the bottom.
They always try to penalize the people at the top and take away from them and blame them for the inequities and the problems in society.
But it doesn't stop with economics, and they go after with what people say.
And they go after the way certain people live.
They have to make sure that anything that creates human triumph is discredited.
Because that sends the wrong signal to a socialist or communist government.
You can't.
You can't have exceptions.
On the plus side.
You simply can't.
The whole system is defeated once people see that.
You know what brought down the Soviet Union?
I mean, it was it was no question it was it was the strategic defense initiative, and the Soviets realizing that there's no way they could keep up.
But what was also a factor.
Reruns of Dallas and Dynasty showing up on television, black market Soviet Union, and they found out their government lying to them all those years about what life in America was all about.
Literally lying to them.
The stories that were told about Americans and the hell that their lives were.
Soviet citizens had no way of knowing any different.
They believed it.
All of a sudden, they started seeing American TV.
There became a uh a run in the Soviet Union on Blue Jean.
Blue jeans became one of the biggest black market items in the 70s.
Blue jeans.
At that point, it was only a matter of time.
Now, had the Soviets been willing to do what they had done in previous years and simply murder their own citizens in the millions, they could have controlled it.
But they weren't able to get away with that anymore.
Stalin could do it via a famine, but there wasn't any television to see the results, and there weren't any networks that cared to show it.
And the New York Times was willing to deny it, and the writer get a Pulitzer prize for it.
But in today's media, you'd have a tough time getting away with that.
Never mind the sympathy that leftists have for communists, you'd still have a tough time getting away with that.
So it's it's it's it's getting tougher and tougher on the leftists.
So they have to be trickier and trickier in order to succeed.
And one of the fastest ways to take away people's freedom, one of the fastest ways to do it is to take away their money.
You limit people's financial resources and you limit their freedom.
You limit people's availability or access to energy and you limit their freedom.
It's no wonder the left attacks the things they attack.
The things that leftists attack are the things that provide the most opportunity for wealth and freedom.
Now you take a look at their enemies list, and that's what you'll see.
That's why they have those enemies.
Prior to capitalism, the way people amassed great wealth was by looting, plundering, and enslaving their fellow man.
Capitalism may uh capitalism made it possible to become wealthy by serving your fellow man.
And serving doesn't mean slavery or servitude.
It means making an iPhone.
It means building a car that a lot of people want.
It means having a service.
For people that want a butler.
Somebody provides a butler service.
That's what people want.
Something can make it work.
Whatever the service is.
You make people happily pay for what they're getting.
It ratchets up everybody's wealth and creativity, or the vast majority of people.
And that's the real source of prosperity.
All of that taking place.
It's called commerce.
Too many people now think the source of prosperity is government.
All government does is take away prosperity.
All government does is destroy wealth.
It doesn't create it, and it certainly doesn't reward it.
Unless there are exceptions to everything.
Government will reward your wealth if you're one of them.
They'll share the wealth with you.
There's any number of ways that can happen.
But those are corrupt things, folks.
All of that is corruption.
Corporate cronyism is corruption.
It's not genuine.
Level playing field kind of stuff.
Anyway, Clarence Thomas was uh.
Do we have audio sound bites of this?
I can't think.
Don't know if I've seen it.
It was on C SPAN.
Yeah, we do.
Grab grab soundbite uh 18.
This is Justice Thomas.
They aired this Tuesday night.
He was uh in Pittsburgh at Duquesne University doing uh an interview or a symposium.
And the the one of the co-moderators was the Duquesne University School of Law professor, Ken Gormley.
And he said to Obama, did you ever expect to see I said that the Clarence Thomas, I'm sorry, did you ever expect to see an African American president during your lifetime?
The thing that I always knew that it would have to be a black president who was approved by the elites, uh the media, because anybody they didn't agree with they would take apart.
And that will happen with virtually you pick your person, any black person who says something that is not a prescribed things that they expect from a black person will be picked apart.
You can pick anybody, don't pick me, pick anyone who's decided not to go along with it as a price to pay.
So I always assumed it would be somebody the media had to agree with.
Basically, it had to be a leftist.
You had to be a leftist socialist democrat.
No other black could foreseeably possibly be elected president.
That's what he was saying.
It had to be an Obama.
It had to be as somebody comes out of the same enclaves as white elites.
His whole point was a black president wasn't going to ever be present, a black man never going to be president unless the white elitist structure approved.
That was his whole point.
That's what he thought for most of his life.
He he he ripped the media in this uh in this appearance uh as as well, in in a sense, with uh with what he was talking about because the uh the media is also from the same elite enclaves of the of the Ivy League, I mean the successful ones, are you'd have to say he's got a point that take a look at Dr. Benjamin Carson.
He doesn't have a pre well.
He doesn't have a prayer of being supported by the meat media, and he is and will be taken apart if he does want to go down that road.
President Obama said today that he was comfortable with his regime's decision to allow over-the-counter purchases of a morning after pill for anybody 50 and older, 15 and older.
Now, if you recall, the history of this is is that it used to be 17 was the was the age limit to be able to go into a drugstore and get the after morning after birth control pill.
The FDA wanted to have the age lowered to 15.
A federal judge said they oh well, then anybody can go get it.
And the FDA said, no, no, we're gonna limit to 15.
That became the law earlier this week.
That created a lot of controversy.
There was a lot said about it the next day, actually later the same afternoon, it was Wednesday.
The Justice Department announced that they were going to appeal this judge's ruling.
And they were going to try to keep it at 17.
That's the point.
Obama in Mako City said he's okay with it being 15.
He said it's okay, but he also said it's not his business, and he's got nothing to do with it.
The FDA on Tuesday had lowered the age at which people can buy the plan B one step morning after pill without a prescription to 15, younger than the current limit of 17.
The FDA decided that the bill could be sold on drugs.
The pill could be sold on uh drugstore shelves, uh, near condoms instead of locked behind pharmacy counters.
Obama at his news conference in Mako said that the FDA's decision, based on solid scientific evidence.
We're profound now, who was it?
This uh Susanna Baruch of the uh reproductive health technologies project, so we're profoundly disappointed.
This appeal takes away the promise of all women having timely access to emergency contraception.
The feminists are livid over this rule.
They don't want there to be an age limit.
Obama did come out and say that that it's fine with him, age 15, but he wanted people to know that he'd have any do with the ruling.
Again, he's a bystander.
He's a spectator weighing in on this.
Limbaugh theorem.
Byron York winning the Hispanic vote would not be enough for the GOP.
This is a fascinating examination of the electoral results in 2012.
And let me take a brief time out.
We'll come back and tell you about them when we get back.
Music Before we get to Byron York, one more observation here on Walter Williams and his.
This is from a column that he wrote, by the way, prior to capitalism.
And the way people amassed great wealth was by looting, plundering, and enslaving their fellow men.
Capitalism made it possible to become wealthy by serving your fellow man.
Now you might say to yourself, that's so obvious.
Why, why, why do we have these arguments?
There's a very good reason why we have these arguments.
Capitalism is always evaluated against dreams.
Utopia is a dream.
It's a fantasy.
Where everything's perfect.
Where there's no pain, where there's no suffering, where everybody has whatever the socialists think is important today.
Everybody's got health care, everybody has a house, everybody has an electric car, but it's a dream.
It doesn't exist.
Capitalism is hard cold reality.
There's no question, it is by far and away the best economic organizing system of human beings there's ever been.
But it is said to be a failure because it's evaluated against fantasies.
There never has been a successful socialist country.
There's never been a successful communist country.
So the people that promote that suffer always talking to you on the come.
They're always telling you about what can be.
And they're always telling you, well, yeah, it may have failed, but the right people are finally in charge now.
That was Obama's sales pitch.
We're the ones you've been waiting for.
We're the ones we've been waiting for.
What that meant was, okay, it may never have worked in the past, but finally the right people are in charge.
But it never has worked.
It never will.
So capitalism, which is a proven demonstrable, there hasn't been any other legitimate world superpower, economic and everything combined except the United States of America.
Now, we might have created military superpowers in a psychological sense, or there might have been military superpowers with the uh with the Soviets, and the Chicoms might, because of the numbers of people they can send into a battle and lose.
They got billion people in their in their population.
But there isn't another United States, or there wasn't.
We're in the process of throwing it away.
We're in the process of transferring it to other places.
But in the history of the world, there has never been anything close.
There have been wealthy societies, but very few people participated in that.
The rest were slaves or common ordinary, everyday nothings who made all the wealth possible, but never shared in it.
They've been wealthy places, but there's never been a wealthy superpower.
The United States developed, fed, clothed, protected, defended, provided for, took care of disasters the world over.
There's no other country ever been able to do that.
And yet there's this constant battle in this country.
It's unjust.
It's immoral.
It's racist, sexist, bigoted, homophobic.
It's immoral.
It's run by white guys.
None of that has ever been true.
But let me ask you a question.
What else has a chance when evaluated against a fantasy or a dream?
Let's say, guys, you have this fantasy of the perfect woman.
And you really think she exists.
I mean, every aspect of your dream, every aspect of your fantasy, you hold out for it.
Guess what?
Your life is going to be miserable because it doesn't exist.
Take any other fantasy, any other dream, any other figment of your imagination where there is perfection.
And then evaluate that against reality.
I guarantee you, reality's gonna lose every time.
Capitalism is reality, and it's got more to recommend it than any other way or system.
But compared to the utopian dreams of socialism and communism, it is always going to come up short with the dreamers or with the fantasizers.
And when those people end up in power, like now, then you end up with real problems.
And we have them.
We'll come out of it.
Back after this.
Mentioned it yesterday because I don't imagine it's a big deal to you.
But I'm gonna go ahead and mention it.
The media, the inside the baseball media, the narcissistic, the media loves talking about itself, is just beside itself today.
Because Tina Brown at the Daily Beast fired Howard Kurtz.
Now, Howard Kurtz used to be the media columnist at the Washington Post.
What that means is Howard Kurtz would write about what's happening in the media when they did something wrong, but they did something right, is a media analyst.
And he was at one time considered one of the most powerful and in some cases popular media figures.
A Washington Post byline, and some of his stuff was front page, can do that for you.
He then branched out, ended up on a media analysis show on CNN called Inside Sources, where Howard and his guests, other liberal medium media liberal types would analyze what's good and bad about the media, and routinely they'd rip the conservative media and excuse the liberal media and chalk their excesses up to people trying to do a good job and just being overzealous.
Anyway.
Short version of the story is that earlier this week, Howard Kurtz made a mistake in reporting about Jason Collins.
The NBA player came out as gay.
Howard Kurtz reported that, if I got this right, Howard Kurtz reported that he had not either told anybody or was keeping hidden the fact that he was straight for a while and was engaged to a woman for a number of years.
Whatever he reported about that was wrong.
Jason Collins had indeed not hidden that he had a fiance, not hidden that he had dated a woman for a number of years.
And Tina Brown announced very short period of time that Kurtz is gone.
Gone from the Daily Beast and everything else that he was doing while in her employee.
And the media jumped to this to see, see this what I I made a point to uh friend I was in email conversation.
I said, This is what happens when you make a mistake reporting on a homosexual.
Even in the in the in the drive-by media, they're gonna they're gonna hang you up to dry.
And that's the popular version of what happened.
In truth, folks, I think what people ought to look at is that the Daily Beast may not have enough money to pay Howard Kurtz.
It could well be that Tina Brown's media empire is not doing all that well financially.
Kurtz is saying, no, this is not because of Jason Collins.
We discussed my leaving the Daily Beast many, many weeks before this came up.
But doesn't matter.
The consensus is that Kurtz got canned because he purposely or even accidentally got something wrong about the latest leftist hero of the week.
And when the left anoints a hero, you do not say anything critical or you do not get anything wrong.
If you do, even if you are another card-carrying liberal, you're gone.
So the media is all a Twitter with this over what happened to poor Howie.
And the consensus is it was because he got it wrong on Jason Collins.
Just made a mistake.
Now, Byron York, in the Washington examiner, after six months of mulling over November's election results, many Republicans remain convinced that the party's only path to future victory is to improve their appeal to Hispanic voters.
But how many Hispanic voters do Republicans need to attract before the party can win the White House?
Well, they need a lot.
Let's start with the 2012 exit polls.
The New York Times Nate Silver has created an interactive tool in which one can look at the presidential election results and calculate what would have happened if the racial and ethnic mix of voters had been different.
Now, what Silver's tool allows you to do is to project future results based on any number of scenarios that you want, in which the country's demographic profile and voting patterns change.
Now, in 2012, Obama won 71% of the Hispanic vote.
Romney got 27%.
However, the Hispanic vote was 7% of the electorate.
This is not talked about much, but I see I think it's kind of important.
Obama and Romney split 7% of the electorate.
Obama got 71% of it, Romney got 27% of it.
Now, if all the other factors remained the same, how large a percentage of the Hispanic vote would Romney have had to win to capture the White House?
What if Romney had won 44% of the Hispanic vote?
Which is the high water mark?
George W. Bush in 2004 got 44% of the Hispanic vote.
No Republican has ever, in a presidential race, got more.
So plug that number in.
What if Romney gets 44% of the Hispanic vote, which again is 7% of the electorate?
Turns out Romney would have lost with 240 electoral votes to 298 for Obama.
But what if Romney had been able to make history and attract 50% of the Hispanic vote?
What then?
Well, he still would have lost.
283 electoral votes, 255.
Okay, so let's really get big here.
What if Romney had been able to do something absolutely astonishing for a Republican and win 60% of the Hispanic vote?
He would have lost by the same margin.
283 electoral votes to 255.
Okay, so let's go all in.
Let's give Romney 70% of the Hispanic vote.
It'll never happen.
That's what Obama got.
Let's give Romney the Obama percentage of the Hispanic vote.
Let's give Romney 70%.
Surely, surely he would have won, right?
No.
Romney would have lost.
The margin narrows.
It would have been 270 electoral votes to 268.
Now, under that scenario, Romney would have won the popular vote.
If he'd gotten 70% of the Hispanic vote, he would have won the popular vote.
But he would have lost in the electoral college.
Now, according to Nate Silver's calculator, Romney would have had to win 73% of the Hispanic vote in order to win in 2012.
What does this tell you?
It tells me that the Hispanic vote's not the problem.
And I never have thought it's the problem.
You and I know what the Republican problem was in 2012.
We just heard late last week, it was a pew center poll.
If the white vote had shown up in the same percentage and voted for Romney in 2012 as it voted for McCain in 2008, Romney would have won.
Obama got many fewer votes in 2012 than he got in 2008.
The difference maker was a lot of white voters stayed home.
Why?
Well, I'll tell you.
A lot of Republicans think that white voters stayed home because conservative talk radio during the primary season demanded that Romney be a rigid, card-carrying conservative.
And because the right wing conservative talk radio host demanded it Romney be something that he wasn't, it turned off a bunch of moderate Republicans.
That's not what happened.
What happened was, I'll tell you exactly what well.
Who can know for certain?
My best guess what happened was why the white vote stayed home.
They didn't think the Republican Party was conservative enough, but there was also a disgust.
Who are these people?
They're the bitter clingers.
It's one thing to hear Obama denouncing him.
It's another thing to hear the Republican Party going after everybody but them.
They're listening to both candidates' campaign, and we're making appeals here and appeals there, we're making a generic economic appeal.
And I think there was just a general sense of disgust or resignation.
Just throw their hands up in residence.
This isn't none of this relates to me.
But the point is the Republicans are now accepting what the Democrats and the media are telling them.
That they lost because the Hispanics don't like them.
The Hispanics think that you Republicans want them to go away.
The Hispanics think that you Republicans want them to self-deport.
And if you don't self-deport, they think you want to kick them out of the country.
So you Republicans, you better get with it, and you better make the Hispanics understand that you like them.
So their party's doing that.
They've got this new pathway to citizenship immigration bill.
They're saying all the right things.
But again, remember, the Hispanic, the percentage of the electorate that was Hispanic in 2012 was 7%.
Obama got 71% of it, Romney got 27%.
And if you reverse that, Romney gets 70% of he still loses.
And the highest percentage of the Hispanic vote any Republican president ever got was Bush at 44.
So the point of saying that even if Romney got 70%, he would still lose.
It tells you that the Republican Party's problem is not the Hispanic vote.
It goes far deeper or is far more diversified than that.
No doubt about it.
How else would you read this?
If you if you give Romney 70% of the Hispanic vote and he still loses, with everything else in 2012 being the same.
Then what are they doing?
They're following the advice of their consultant class.
They're following what the media is telling them.
They're following what the Democrats are telling them, what the conventional wisdom inside the beltway is.
I found it fascinating.
Quick time out.
We'll be back and continue after this.
We'll be back and continue after this.
Here's uh uh Faye Alicio in Fayetteville, Arkansas.
Hi, great to have you on the program.
Uh, how are you doing, Rush?
Glad to be on.
Thank you, sir.
I've been listening for about 10 months.
And uh, I just want to get straight to it.
Um, you were talking uh a couple days ago about um feminist, and uh, you know, I know a lot of the issue is that they think they don't have the same opportunities as men.
Well, I think they do, and another another one of my issues is that they don't know how to go about it.
For instance, I would love to be a stay-at-home dad and get uh as much time as I can with my son.
And I would love it if uh if it wasn't so frowned upon in society.
No, it's not.
Why can't you do it?
Because if uh, for instance, if I'm a stay-at-home dad, then I'm a scumbag and I'm lazy and I don't I don't have a job.
They're not gonna think you're a scumbag, but they might think you're a predator with your kids.
Oh, yeah, of course, yeah.
Yeah.
Well, me and my wife.
Look, I know what he said.
Here's the deal.
Everybody talks about how unfair our society is to women.
And I've always thought that women have much more flexibility.
A woman can say she wants a career.
Go for it.
A woman can say, you know, I want to be a mother.
Okay, that's even better.
I need maternity.
Fine, you got it.
Uh I don't want to come back maybe three days ago.
Okay, fine.
Your job will be held for you at full pay.
Let a man try one of those steps.
I want to be a stay-at-home mom.
Well, fine, but you're not going to do it here.
I want six months' maternity lease.
Sorry, only for women.
I want you to hold my job for me at full pay for six months till I get back, and I only want to work three days.
Sorry.
Doesn't work that way for a man.
He's got a point, folks.
you Sadly, my friends, that's it.
The fastest three hours in media is in the can.
Total la completa.
It's over.
But we'll be back on Monday.
I hope you have a uh a great weekend, a great time out there, whatever you just do what you want.
We'll pay attention to what happens over the weekend.
And uh, as an added bonus on Monday, tell you what happened and what to think about it.
So you don't have to do anything.
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