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May 13, 2013 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:50
May 13, 2013, Monday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
You notice I'm watching Obama's press conference here, and the reporter after Obama and the British Prime Minister give their opening statements about whatever it is that they're trying to distract everybody with.
A reporter stands up and Mr. President, I want to ask you about the IRS problem, and I want to ask you about Benghazi, and then Mr. Prime Minister, I want to ask you about Syria.
And I was surprised the British Prime Minister didn't take the IRS question.
Because Obama's not president at times like this.
Well, IRS, I didn't know about it any sooner than you did.
I didn't know about it until I read it in the papers on Friday.
I found out about it the same time we dumped that scandal to overcloud Benghazi.
I didn't know about it, and it's reprehensible.
And I don't support it, and I don't think anybody ought to support it.
You know, there's going to be a Republican presidency someday, and we don't want them having this kind of power.
Greetings, folks.
Great to have you, Rush Limbaugh here, back behind the golden EIB microphone at the distinguished and prestigious Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.
The telephone number, if you want to be on the program, 800-282-2882, and the email address, illrushboat EIBnet.com.
I got to tell you, I've had, well, over the weekend, I was in Kansas City, George Brett, my good friend, surprise 60th birthday celebration all weekend long.
He's actually going to be 60 on the 15th of May on Wednesday, but his wife, Leslie, put together this grand surprise weekend.
And it was at a Country Club Plaza section of Kansas City.
There was a restaurant there, a restaurant bar called Cole Vines, and the place was Sardine City.
It must have been 200 or 300 people in there.
And I'm stunned.
George didn't find out about it.
They kept the secret.
They kept the surprise.
He walked in there at 7.30 and was totally taken aback.
I stayed in one spot for four and a half hours.
Fortunately, it was outside on the little patio, so I could light up my cigar.
And all kinds of people.
You know what the question I got more than anything?
Why is the media all of a sudden defending conservatives?
The question that most people wanted to know from me was, why in the world is the media defending conservatives on this IRS business?
You know, the IRS story breaks Thursday or Friday, and the media event immediately jumps on the IRS and Obama as well.
You would not believe the collection of drive-by stories that I have today quoting prominent drive-by, I mean, Tom Brokaw, Joe Klein, they are all comparing Obama to Nixon.
Why, folks, that's the worst comparison a president can have as levied by the drive-by media.
And I must admit for a while that I, too, was a little confused by this.
There were some people who theorized, well, they dropped this IRS thing because what they really want to do is hide Benghazi.
The thing they're really worried about is Benghazi.
And so they dropped this IRS business on Friday in order to distract everybody from Benghazi.
Now, the president just addressed Benghazi, too, and it was like we live in an alternative universe.
So there's no there.
There's no cover-up.
There's no those talking points.
We didn't rewrite those.
Those talking points were everything I was getting in my daily brief five days after the event.
Susan Rice didn't say anything that I wasn't being told by the intelligence.
Outright utter denial.
No, they're there, he said.
There's nothing to see in Benghazi.
Nothing happened except four Americans died, and we're outraged by it.
We're going to make sure it doesn't happen again.
Next question.
That's going to be interesting to me to see just how eagerly the media follow up on any of this.
I can guarantee you: if it were a Republican president and this IRS story had broken, or Benghazi, they wouldn't be using sanitized terms in the question, sanitized language.
They'd be going for the jugular.
And there's a little bit of a cushion here because the British prime minister is standing next to Obama, and he's got to be included in all of this, so they can't really focus everything on Obama, which is part of the structure, I'm sure.
But let me give you my theory, because it is a good question.
Let me also remind you that when any number of events have taken place that you thought might be the tipping point that would cause low-information people to alter their thinking on Obama, maybe the bloom is off the rose.
I said, folks, it isn't going to be a major event.
It's going to be something like Obama dissing Justin Timberlake's latest CD and ticking off the low information crowd.
This IRS thing may be it.
I don't know.
It's too soon to tell.
But I'm going to tell you, I was as amazed as you were that, because look, you know, and I know that the objective of the Democrat Party, the objective of the Republican establishment, the objective of the media is to wipe us out in a political sense.
Their objective is to neuter all conservative opposition.
And anything that does that is okay.
Any lie, any smear is fine.
Anything, anything goes.
In this world of politics, their objective, Obama's particularly, is to eliminate all opposition.
You know, as well as I do that they consider conservative opposition the thing that animates them the most.
They are more animated in getting rid of us than they are any terrorist group out there.
They literally despise us.
I'm talking about this political sense.
And so it would be logical to assume that when the IRS story breaks and you find out that the IRS is targeting Tea Party groups and conservative groups, the natural conclusion is that the media would support that and that would encourage that.
And instead of looking at the IRS, would take the ball and run with it and start examining the Tea Party groups.
Are they, in fact, not tax exempt?
Should they be disqualified?
And the normal ebb and flow of things, that's what would happen.
IRS says, well, these groups, we're not sure if they're legit, these conservative Tea Party groups and these anti-pro-Constitution groups and these pro-limited government groups.
Normally, the media would take that run with it, follow the lead, and start examining all of these Tea Party groups to find out if indeed they were legit or illegitimate.
And they would find they're illegitimate and seek and destroy.
The exact opposite thing happened.
The IRS is under assault now.
And here, I think, is the reason why.
I really think in this case, the media and the left have no choice.
The public, of all government groups, agencies, bureaucracies, the IRS is the most feared and arguably it's the most hated.
But the left needs it.
They need the IRS.
They need the IRS collecting the revenue and the money to fund big government.
They need the IRS and the tax code.
They need to save the IRS.
They need to save the tax code.
In addition to that, don't forget the IRS is now the collecting agency, the collection agency for Obamacare, which they're entirely invested in.
So I think what this is, is a concerted effort to clean this up and sweep it away and get rid of it as quickly as possible.
So as the I, you have the collection agency of the regime, the collection agency of socialism, the collection agency of big government.
It's got to remain intact.
It has to remain functioning.
It cannot proceed wounded.
It has to be at full strength.
And so when something like this happens, there's no point in trying to defend it.
That's just, that's not going to work because the public is simply too oriented against it, even the low information crowd.
Now, from our perspective, folks, what this does, I think, is prove just how rotten big government is.
And none of this should be expected.
None of it should be expanded.
The idea that the IRS does this doesn't surprise anybody, does it?
When you get down to the brass tacks of things, nobody is really surprised the IRS does this.
Nobody is surprised when they hear that presidents use the IRS.
Everybody's heard of the political audit.
In my stack of stuff, I've got two or three examples of Obama administration targeted audience audits of Romney donors, which I will share with you as the program unfolds before your very eyes and ears today.
Now, as to the idea that the IRS information was released on Friday to take the heat off of Benghazi, that's Michelle Bachman's theory.
And it could be correct.
But I think what, again, is fascinating to me is Obama in answering the question, he wasn't president.
The IRS, well, that's some other organization.
I got nothing to do with that.
And I'm just like you.
I'm just outraged.
The fact of the matter, the IRS has heard Joe Biden liken Tea Partiers to terrorists.
We've got the soundbite.
Well, I'm not the soundbite, but I've got the quote.
Joe Biden at a Democrat fundraiser a year ago, two years ago, called Tea Partiers terrorists.
You know, as well as I do, all of the defamatory rhetoric that's been aimed at Tea Partiers by Obama administration people.
They've been called a Taliban wing of the Republican Party.
Now, the IRS, they've got people in there.
They want to please their bosses.
Have you noticed also, by the way, the whole notion here of low-level workers, have you noticed how they're trying to blame the IRS scandal on low-level workers?
It's like they tried to blame Benghazi on low-level workers.
Like they tried to blame low-level workers for the immigration people, releasing all those thousands of illegal alien criminals.
The Obama regime really looks out for the little guy, doesn't it?
They're always blaming the low-level people.
They're always blaming the little guy, the people they claim to champion.
And I wouldn't want to be a low-level worker for this regime because you're always going to be the fall guy if anything goes wrong.
And plus, it makes it look like here, if you listen to Obama and people in his regime, and it's all these low-level workers out of control.
All these low-level workers that are creating the havoc and doing all this dirty partisan stuff.
And of course, these low-level workers, they're just rogue.
They're just on their own.
They've got no guidance.
They have no bosses.
You and I know exactly what goes on.
You know as well as I do what it feels like to be targeted as a conservative.
And you know as well as I do that there are little liberals in every bureaucracy who are in it for the cause and don't need to be told by Obama to target Tea Party groups.
They hate them independently.
They hate them regardless what Obama says or what Biden says.
So none of this is unbelievable.
None of it's outrageous from that standpoint.
The problem is it's totally believable.
The problem is it's entirely understandable that this kind of thing goes on.
This is what people think presidents can do with the IRS.
And in fact, it's what people think does happen.
That political enemies are targeted for harassment via this agency.
So when we get a news story about it, there's anger, of course.
Not a whole lot of surprise.
The big surprise has been the media joining our side in this story.
And that's what people have been scratching their heads about.
So that sets the table.
We've got a lot to discuss on the program today.
Benghazi, IRS, the Obama press conference, we rolled tape on it.
You'll be able to hear the president himself and all the detail.
This IRS thing is big, and there are so many things that have happened in the past that we went back to the archives and have dragged out to remind you of, to show you that this is not uncommon, to show you that this is not really anything new.
It's just a real concentrated, undiluted, easy-to-understand example of it, which is always helpful.
So sit tight, folks.
We'll be back and we'll continue with all the rest of today's exciting excursion into broadcast excellence right after this.
So here's the soundbite, folks.
This is the president.
After his opening statement, after the opening statement by the British Prime Minister David Cameron, it was a joint press conference today.
It was the AP, White House correspondent Julie Pace, who said, Mr. President, I wanted to ask about the IRS and Benghazi.
When did you first learn that the IRS was targeting conservative political groups?
Do you feel the IRS has betrayed the public's trust?
And what do you think the repercussions for these actions should be?
And here's Obama.
I want you to keep in mind a limbo theorem.
He's not president when things like this happen.
He's against things like this.
He's trying to stop things like this.
What his policies are have no relationship to what is happening in the country.
I first learned about it from the same news reports that I think most people learned about this.
I think it was on Friday.
And this is pretty straightforward.
If, in fact, IRS personnel engaged in the kind of practices that have been reported on and were intentionally targeting conservative groups, then that's outrageous.
And there's no place for it.
If you've got the IRS operating in anything less than a neutral and nonpartisan way, then that is outrageous.
It is contrary to our traditions.
And people have to be held accountable, and it's got to be fixed.
So we'll wait and see what exactly all the details and the facts are.
But I've got no patience with it.
I will not tolerate it.
And we'll make sure that we find out exactly what happened on this.
Right.
So we'll keep a sharp eye on this and for his lack of patience with it and his lack of tolerance.
And we'll see how quickly it is that he finds out exactly what happened, even though we already know what happened.
Here's the thing about this.
The media, practically everybody had to be dragged, kicking, and screaming to this.
Don't forget now that it was persistent Tea Party people who were making noise about the unfair requests being made to them.
And folks, it's not just money that the IRS is collecting.
Now, the IRS is out collecting information on people.
I want you to hang with me for the whole program.
It's going to take a while to unravel all of this.
And I'm going to try to use the old Shakespeare bromide brevity as a solo wit.
I don't want to take an unnecessary length of time to do it.
But there's a lot to glean here.
But if it hadn't been for Tea Party groups persistently say, hey, hey, look at what's happening to us over here.
The Republican Party didn't get into gear on this.
There were Landmark Legal Foundation and some other legal groups that persisted in sending letters to the inspector general of the IRS demanding that this be looked into.
This is not something, it has not been easy to get to this point.
It was like extracting teeth.
And however you want to characterize it, I don't want to make the mistake of saying the media is on our side.
The media is not on our side.
The media is always going to be in the side of the Democrats, always going to be in the side of Obama.
Their effort here is to essentially limit the damage to the IRS as much as they can.
There are just certain things they know the media, that the public is not going to accept, no matter how the media treats it.
So get in there and limit the damage as much as possible because the IRS has to remain functioning and dominant in their world.
So I was back in Kansas City for the weekend, George Brett's 60th birthday celebration.
It was a massive surprise.
And on Sunday, it featured a trip to the ball game, the New York Yankees and the Royals.
And I was able to go for the first half of the game, and I had to split and come home and take care of some things here.
But folks, I have to tell you, you know, I worked there from 1979 to 83.
And I really, I'd been back a couple times, but I hadn't been back to the bowels of the stadium.
I hadn't been back to the locker room.
And that stadium has been renovated and expanded.
And when I got there on Sunday, George met me and took me into the locker room, meet some people.
I was stunned by what I saw.
I still don't believe this.
And it's simply based on the way it was when I was there.
There is a full-fledged restaurant in the locker room.
If the starting pitcher wants burger and fries or a cheese omelette 10 minutes before the first pitch, he can get it.
Back when I worked there, they had a couple of beer tabs or beer kegs that were locked until after the game and a little cheese and cracker spread beforehand.
And maybe they catered a meal after a game as the team was leaving on a road trip.
This was unbelievable.
The lounge with the computers and televisions and full-time masuses and so forth, it's just mind-boggling to me.
The way the game has changed.
It was fascinating.
And of course, what they've done to Coffin Stadium is impressive with the renovation and everything.
I mean, it's just, it's amazing.
I haven't been back in so long.
It looked like something I'd never seen before.
At this party, the surprise party on Friday night at the restaurant on the plaza, I'm standing on where I stood in one place.
I got there and I immediately saw the place where I could smoke a cigar, which had to be a little patio.
But I mean, it was Sardine City.
I couldn't have moved in there if I'd have wanted to.
So I stayed in this one place.
And I happened when I got there, Bobby Brett, George's brother, was talking to a young guy from Japan.
His name is Yoshi Okamoto.
And he's from Rawlings, Japan.
And so Bobby started telling me about this guy.
And he started telling this guy who I was.
And Yoshi lives in Tokyo.
He had no idea who I was.
So Bobby starts telling this guy all about me.
And Yoshi is trying to take it all in and be polite, but he's clueless.
Instead, he starts telling me of his vast marketing plans for Rawlings.
And at first, he thinks I'm a baseball play-by-play guy.
And he's giving me a couple slogans that I can use.
He said, next time a ball player hits a home run, you say, Mr. Rawlings has left the yard.
I said, wait a minute, I don't do sports play-by-play.
Oh, okay.
But he thought he had a great idea.
And so anyway, I got his business card and I told him that I would, I said, you turn on Camo X AM 1120.
Monday morning, he had to go to St. Louis for some meetings with Rawlings, their corporate headquarters there before going back to Japan.
So I told him that I would give him a shout out to let him know who I was.
So I'm following through here on my promise to give Yoshi Okamoto of Rawlings, Japan, a shout.
Because it was funny.
Bobby's trying to tell this guy all about me.
He's entirely clueless.
He's from Tokyo.
And he thinks I do baseball play-by-play.
And he's telling me things I should say.
By the way, it was Mother's Day.
I have to mention it was Mother's Day, of course, yesterday.
And it was Mother's Day at the ballpark.
And the players were all wearing pink something or other, pink shoes or pink sleeves.
There was one guy with a pink bat.
And I'm talking about this.
And George said, have you seen the official ball for today?
I said, no.
So he went and grabbed the official Rawlings game ball yesterday was printed with pink ink.
So anyway, it was a great weekend.
It was a great time.
And I had a, I mean, it's like a twilight, not Twilight Zone, but it was like a time capsule visit for me.
And it was just a blast.
Al Zeke, the old equipment manager, he's the guy I had to go get first pitch baseballs from.
And I was in charge of ceremonial first pitches.
And I mean, these guys ragged me like you can't believe.
I had to beg Zeke for a ceremonial first pitch baseball.
He'd make me sign out for the things, as though I had to bring them back.
And he was in there.
He's retired long ago.
It was just, it was a great weekend.
It was a tremendous amount of fun.
Now, folks, this IRS business, things that we went back in our archives and found, as usual, Obama's trying to make it look like he knew nothing about it.
He had no knowledge of it.
It's reprehensible.
It's outrageous.
He's going to get to the bottom of it.
He's going to find out who did this.
If they did it, he's going to take appropriate action.
How come he didn't issue a statement over the weekend?
I'm telling you, everybody involved here had to be dragged, kicking, and screaming.
In fact, the New York Times knew about what the IRS was doing back in March of 2012, over a year ago.
The IRS knew about this, and guess what?
They were applauding it.
There's an editorial in the New York Times, the IRS does its job.
March 7th, 2012.
And from the editorial, taxpayers should be encouraged by complaints from Tea Party chapters applying for nonprofit tax status at being asked by the IRS to prove that they're social welfare organizations and not the political activists that they so obviously are.
Such IRS inquiries are long overdue, should be applied across the board to the growing number of organizations allied with major political parties that are also ludicrously posing as social welfare groups.
Now, you note, the New York Times never writes things like this about such groups as Media Matters.
There's no way Media Matters qualifies as a nonpartisan tax-exempt group.
But the New York Times knew about this in March of 2012.
They knew about it because Tea Party people were complaining about it, and the IRS was encouraging, or the New York Times was encouraging the IRS in this.
Chief among these groups, this is again from the New York Times editorial in 2012, chief among these groups are American Crossroads, the campaign machine created by Republican guru Karl Rove and Priorities USA, the Democratic counterpart founded by former White House aides, now openly encouraged by Obama as he runs for reelection.
That line above shows that this was targeting American Crossroads and Priorities USA, and the New York Times was all for it.
And there was just four days ago, four or five days ago, the New York Times had an editorial mocking the Republican efforts in Benghazi.
Just four or five days ago.
Now that's blown wide open.
So the idea that this Tea Party targeting by the IRS is something somebody just discovered and only recently learned about is silly.
This was known years ago.
And in fact, the IRS commissioner now, Commissioner Lois Lerner, has admitted that all this was going on as far back as 2011.
But I got back to our archives here and I found some things that will jog your memory.
This is a BrightBart.com story from April 3rd of this year.
Obama, government tyranny is impossible because government is us.
He was in Colorado.
Obama was not pushing gun control.
He made an astonishing statement about gun rights advocates' fears of government gun seizures.
He said that such worries would just feed into fears about government.
You hear some of these folks, I need a gun to protect myself from the government.
We can't do background checks because the government's going to come take my guns away.
Well, Obama said the government's us.
These officials are elected by you.
I am constrained as they are constrained by the system that our founders put into place.
No, friends, that's the problem.
The government is not us anymore.
The government is governing against the will of the people.
You go issue by issue by issue, whatever it is, gun control.
Vast majority don't want what the government is doing.
Obamacare, vast majority don't want what the government is doing.
Issue by issue by issue.
This has been the whole bugaboo.
Every Obama issue is opposed by a majority, sometimes big majority of the American people, yet every Obama initiative is being implemented.
And in polling data, this is what gave birth to the Limbaugh theorem.
In polling data, people in poll after poll after poll by majorities of sometimes into the 60 percentiles oppose Obama's agenda, oppose his policies, but yet the same people give Obama soaring approval ratings.
They don't associate his policies with his or with the direction of the country.
That's what had me doing circles to figure out how does this, how does this work?
How is it that people oppose everything Obama's doing, but yet they don't associate Obama's policies with what's happening in the country?
And it's because Obama is seen as constantly campaigning and not governing and therefore not really being in charge of everything.
And that's why his answer today to the question about the IRS is right out of the Limbaugh Theorem.
It's the well, I didn't know what's going on.
I was this rogue group over there, low-level workers.
If it's happening, we're going to find out about it.
As though he's got no fingerprints on it, he's nothing to do with it.
When in fact, he's behind everything that's happening in this government.
He has people in positions in this bureaucracy that are picked and chosen by him or people anointed by him, and he's got like-minded people everywhere.
And some of them predate him, some of these career appointees.
You know, the left infests government.
So the idea here that all of this is happening in a vacuum and Obama does nothing about it, not true.
And this government is not us.
That's the big problem.
This no longer is a government of, by, and for the people.
This is a government governing against the will of the people.
We pay the government to protect the liberties that we are guaranteed by the Constitution.
They are working to undermine them.
The Obama regime uses government to punish people.
The Obama regime is using government to investigate people.
The Obama administration is using government to intimidate people, to mislead people.
The IRS is not just collecting money, it's collecting information.
You ought to see the questionnaire that these Tea Party groups were given.
Not questionnaire, I mean, the form they were given to fill out.
They had to define family members' political preferences, issues they cared about, actual life experiences they had engaged in.
I mean, it was one of the biggest information grabs I have ever seen.
A Tea Party group applying for tax exempt status.
I'd never seen anything like it, and I still haven't seen anything like it.
And look at Obama in this statement in Denver: I am constrained as they are constrained by the system that our founders put in place.
That is an unwitting statement of truth.
He is constrained.
What does it constrain mean?
It means things I can't do.
Why is he even thinking about things he can't do?
There are things he wants to do.
There are all kinds of executive orders and waving of the presidential wand to make it happen.
He would love to do.
But the Constitution's in his way, and he wishes it weren't.
Be wary, folks, of any politician who talks about the Constitution and uses things like, I am constrained.
Don't worry, we're not tracking your guns away.
I'm constrained from doing that.
Even if I wanted to, I can't because of the Constitution.
The fact that he admits I am constrained, as are all government officials, constrained by the system.
I don't look at this system as constraining.
I look at this system as liberating.
I look at the U.S. Constitution, the Declaration, our founding documents as liberating.
Obama doesn't.
The Democrats don't.
They look at them as limiting them.
Liberating individual liberty and freedom.
That's the problem, as far as Obama and his gang are concerned.
The Internal Revenue Service began targeting Tea Party groups in March of 2010.
Do you remember what happened in March of 2010?
Think now.
What happened in March of 2010?
I'll give you, in fact, the exact date.
March 21st, 2010, Obamacare was signed into law.
And immediately, the Tea Party groups began to be harassed and investigated by the IRS.
And 2010, this was before the 2010 midterms, which we now know were a Republican blowout, or better stated, a Tea Party blowout.
It was March 21st that Obamacare was signed into law.
And that same month is when the IRS began targeting Tea Party groups.
Here's a story from the Politico that is at least this is a couple years old.
Joe Biden was agreeing with a line of argument made by Representative Mike Doyle, Democrat Pennsylvania, at a two-hour closed-door Democrat caucus meeting.
And angry Doyle said, according to sources in the room, we've negotiated with terrorists, and this small group of terrorists have made it impossible to spend any money.
Biden, driven by his Democrat allies' misgivings about the debt limit deal, responded, they have acted like terrorists.
They were talking about the Tea Party.
They have acted like terrorists.
How about big cis?
Does anybody remember big cis?
Janet Napolitano had to apologize for offending veterans after the Department of Homeland Security targeted them for right-wing extremism.
Shortly after, I think it was again 2010, maybe late in 2009, the Department of Homeland Security issued a report warning law enforcement groups to be very wary of certain groups who were likely to commit domestic terrorism.
And the groups that she named included veterans returning home from combat, various right-wing groups, right-wing extremists concerned about illegal immigration, abortion, increasing federal power, and restriction on firearms.
Janet Reno's successor, well, in spirit anyway, Janet Napolitano issued this report from Homeland Security, labeling veterans and Tea Parties as right-wing extremists, prime suspects for future terrorism.
Is it any wonder the IRS would follow suit?
That's it, my friends.
The fastest three hours in media, the first one is already yi soi on its way for documentation via the printed word at rushlimbaugh.com, the official website.
We'll be back and continue with much more.
Don't go away.
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