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May 13, 2013 - Rush Limbaugh Program
37:45
May 13, 2013, Monday, Hour #2
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Greetings, folks, and welcome back, Rush Limbaugh, America's real anchor man and truth detector and doctor of democracy.
And once again meeting and surpassing all audience expectations every day.
It's great to have you here.
Another full week of broadcast excellence.
Telephone number 800-282-2882.
And we'll get to your phone calls ill quico.
You know, folks on this IRS business.
I think the 2010 midterms really shocked the Democrats.
I think they might have expected to maybe lose some seats.
Although actually, my memory, no, no, no, no.
My memory is that they thought the overwhelming popularity of Obama, it might be the first time that a sitting president's party increased seats.
Well, it wouldn't be the first time, I think Bush did it, but I think we're clearly hoping for at least a draw.
The 2010 midterms, they got shellac.
The Democrats, it's one of the reasons I got the 2012 presidential race so wrong.
I was expecting a similar kind of turnout that we got in 2010.
I goofed up.
Midterms are not presidential turnout years.
And I admit I was hoping.
I was hoping the turnout 2012 would duplicate 2010, but there were a lot of factors that mitigated against that.
We now know what they are.
And among them the Republican candidate just wasn't that thrilling to the Republican base.
Be that as it may, the 2010 midterms, this IRS targeting of Tea Party groups predated the midterms.
But I think the midterms really intensified it.
And I think it was at that point that the Democrats and the IRS began to seriously harass Tea Party groups who were applying for tax exempt status.
Now, we know also that they weren't just targeting Tea Party groups for tax exempt status.
On January 15th of 2012, the IRS decided to target political action type organizations involved in limiting or expanding government, educating on the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, Socio Economic Reform Movement, any of those things that a group said it was about, red flag the IRS, and they started harassing.
So if you're a Tea Party group and you're applying for tax exempt status, say you want to be 501c3, and you say that you want to educate people on the Constitution and Bill of Rights, that was a red flag.
And the IRS started targeting you because to them that meant you were conservative.
If you said that you were an organization that was interested in limited government, that red flagged your group to the IRS.
It was it was an in really uh insidious thing.
So it it it wasn't just certain terms like Tea Party that would get you flagged by the IRS, but any and all criticism of government.
It it also turns out the IRS scrutiny had been going on since at least 2010.
And you remember how the a bunch of conservative groups were mocked as paranoid by the media and the administration for claiming this was going on at the time.
I had all kinds of things flowing back to me from my memory when this story broke.
Republican congressman even wrote to the head of the IRS tax exempt organization division, Lois Lerner, to raise questions about this, but no one in the media ever bothered to investigate any of it.
Think about how this kind of news and Benghazi could have changed the elections.
Just last November.
Just like the full disclosure of Benghazi might have changed the elections, but in both cases, the one-party media didn't want to investigate anything that might hurt Obama's re-election.
So meanwhile, we're supposed to believe Lois Lerner, who said that she just found out about what was going on this week.
Even though it's now clear that she knew about this at least as early as July of 2011.
But the scandal dates back to 2010.
Lois Lerner is also claiming no one outside of the IRS ordered this scrutiny.
She says it was done by low-level workers in Cincinnati in the IRS office there, even though complaints have been registered by at least 27 conservative groups from all over the country.
And if it weren't for the persistence of those groups and legal foundations that were assisting them, continually writing the inspector general's office of the IRS asking them to look into this because this was beyond the pale.
And finally they did, and the story broke, and it was the dam broke actually on Friday, and now everybody's in CYA mode.
And the question is how how long is this going to last?
What kind of legs is it going to have?
And my uh my theory, as I told you Friday night, the most often asked question I got at a party was why now?
Why all of a sudden is the media on this IRS store?
Why is the media giving Obama trouble on uh on the IRS?
And I told you what I thought in the last hour.
The IRS is crucial to them.
They cannot afford the IRS to be damaged.
If there's something like this happens, they gotta get in there, get it, fix it quick, and get out.
Because the IRS is the tax collection agency, the money collection agency of big government of socialism, of Obamacare, 16,000 brand new IRS agents for Obamacare alone.
They've got to do what they can to make it appear that that agency is being brought to heel.
So a lot of this, I think, is for show, and it's going to be real interesting.
Obama got a question about at his press conference today.
He said, well, you know, this is outrageous.
I'm going to look into it.
We can't accept this.
Media will probably accept that answer and move on.
We'll see if it has any legs.
Same thing with Benghazi.
Let's go to the audio sound bites.
Obama got questions about Benghazi at the press conference today.
Julie Pace, again from the administration press, she had the first question, and she threw the kitchen sink at Obama in this question.
She asked about the IRS.
She asked the British Prime Minister about Syria, and she asked Obama the following.
On Benghazi, newly public emails showed it to White House, State Department, appeared to have been more closely involved with the crafting of the talking points on the attack than first acknowledged.
You think the White House misled the public about its role in shaping the talking points, Mr. President?
And do you stand by your assertion that the talking points were not purposely changed to downplay the prospects of terrorism?
Now you know what you know about Benghazi.
You know that the administration knew that night it was an act of terrorism.
You know that the administration knew in advance that this act was going to happen, this terrorist act.
In fact, I want to take you back to Cairo before I play for you the president's answer.
I want to take you back September 11th last year.
Do you remember the apology that the Cairo Embassy released before anything had happened?
The Cairo Embassy, I I folks, I'm I really I'm kicking myself for not figuring this out until over the weekend.
I really am.
There are there are days when I figure something out and I get really mad at myself for having had it taken so long.
And it's about the video.
The U.S. Embassy in Cairo, before anything had happened, apologized in advance for any protest that might happen.
And that apology cited that video, if you recall.
And that's the first we'd heard of it.
What the hell is this?
And we were told that that apology, you remember the White House came out and condemned it, and we were told, again, a low-level worker in the embassy was uh zealous, overzealous, and was just too caring and was trying to take preemptive action To stop a protest by apologizing for America in advance of it.
Remember all that?
And in that apology and that statement, which came from the U.S. Embassy in Cairo before anything happened, they mention a video.
This reprehensible video that's upset people.
I went back and I found out that two days earlier, the grand mufti of Egypt, in a speech in his little mosque, sermon in his mosque, had actually referenced that video in passing.
I mean, it was a casual throwaway line.
And I now I am convinced that the administration concocted this video excuse before anything happened.
Because they knew they knew that Ansar al-Sharia in Benghazi was planning an attack.
This is what we've learned.
We know that this regime knew something was going to happen before it did.
We know at least that they knew who it was when it was happening.
We know that Susan Rice was sent out with phony talking points.
We know that those talking points were written and edited.
We also know that siblings and spouses of mainstream media people work in the administration.
Somebody, the news director at ABC's sister, is involved at the administration, and the brother of some guy at some network, I've got it here.
I'll find it in just a second to give you the names, is actually involved in the Benghazi summary.
I mean, it's worse than the revolving door of incest.
Individual works at a congressman's office, then goes to the media, then goes back to a senator's office and goes back to the media, then goes to the administration like Jay Carney did, then back to the media.
Now it's worse.
Now we've got news directors, family members working in the administration.
And in one instance, working at national security on framing the Benghazi story.
So anyway, that that apology that came from Cairo was not a rogue apology.
It was not from a low-level staffer acting without supervision.
It was not from some person in the lower levels of the embassy acting as a lone wolf acting PC.
We know that that apology, the stated purpose of the apology was to stop and prevent any protests.
Because we knew some were coming.
We did.
We knew in in Cairo, we knew some protests were coming, so this apology is issued before anything happens.
The State Department said, in a way, maybe if we apologize in advance, they'll they'll not attack.
They'll not protest.
I mean, that's the polluted, converted, perverted thinking.
And they did mention the video.
Now, everything flows from that.
They first tried to say that Benghazi was the result of the protest in Cairo.
None of that was true.
My point is, you're going to hear the president deny everything you know.
In these next three sound bites, he's going to deny everything you know to be factual.
Stephen Hayes, the Weekly Standard, Jonathan Carl ABC, the 12 edits of the talking point Susan Rice sent out there, everybody know what she says was not true.
You're going to hear him deny it all.
And so the question is on both the IRS and the Benghazi, the press has had their chance now to ask him about it.
One question on both issues from one reporter this morning.
And let's just see if that's it.
Let's just see if both scandals are dropped like hot potatoes, now that the president has addressed both.
So her question, Julie Pace, on Benghazi, newly public emails show that the White House and the State Department appear to have been more closely involved with the crafting of the talking points on the attack than first acknowledged, do you think the White House misled the public about its role in shaping the talking points?
And do you stand by your administration's assertions that not your assertions, your administration's assertions, that the talking points were not purposely changed to downplay the prospects of terrorism?
The whole issue of this of talking points, frankly, throughout this process has been a sideshow.
Immediately after this event happened, we were not clear who exactly had carried it out, how it had occurred, what the motivations were.
It happened at the same time as we had seen uh attacks on U.S. embassies in Cairo as a consequence of this film.
The emails that you allude to were provided by us to congressional committees.
They reviewed them several months ago, concluded that, in fact, there was nothing a foul in terms of the process that we had used.
And suddenly, three days ago, this gets spun up as if there's something new to the story.
There's no there.
See?
It was the video.
It started in Cairo.
We didn't redo the talking points except after the Republicans in Congress demanded new talking points.
The only reason we did the talking points again is because the Republicans were demanding it.
But there's no there.
You know, we we we we we weren't clear who exactly carried it out, how it had occurred, what the motivations were.
It happened at the same time as we had seen attacks on embassies in Cairo as a consequence of the film.
See, that's the key to this.
The grand mufny of Egypt did mention a video two days before this.
Then the State Department sees we're gonna seize on.
They knew all this was coming.
But none of this changes what they didn't do in Benghazi when they knew what was happening and when four Americans died.
The President's reaction is still there's no there.
There no weren't any talking points that were rewritten except the conve Republicans in Congress made us do new ones.
They want they're the ones that wanted new talking points.
These emails that you allude to, they were provided to us by congressional committees.
He wasn't through.
He kept answering the question.
If this was some effort on our part to try to downplay what had happened or tamp it down, that would be a pretty odd thing that three days later we end up putting out all the information that in fact has now served as the basis for everybody recognizing that this was a terrorist attack, who executes some sort of cover-up or effort to tamp things down for three days.
So the whole thing defies logic.
Frankly, has a lot to do with political motivations.
We've had folks who have challenged Hillary Clinton's integrity, Susan Rice's integrity, Mike Mullen and Tom Pickering's integrity.
It's a given that mine gets challenged by these same folks.
This this whole thing, he defies logic.
There's no logic to what people are saying about this.
I've got to take a break, but there's more when we get back.
Don't go away.
Okay, I want you to listen to Soundbite Again, number 25.
We just played it.
And the key here is Obama saying, hey, three days after the fact we told everybody what this was.
I don't know, everybody says we try to tamp it down.
We told people three days later, we put out all the information.
And it was a terrorist attack.
Here, listen to him say it again.
If this was some effort on our part to try to downplay what had happened or tamp it down, that would be a pretty odd thing that three days later we end up putting out all the information that in fact has now served as the basis for everybody recognizing that this was a terrorist attack, who executes some sort of cover-up or effort to tamp things down.
All right, stop the tape.
So he wants you to believe that three days later, he and his administration told everybody, hey, this is a terror attack.
Seven days later, Susan Rice is on five TV shows, not calling it a terror attack, denying it, blaming it on the video.
Why did Obama go to the United Nations two weeks Later and blame the video.
In that video or audio clip that we just played, you just heard Obama say he laid everything out three days later it was a terror attack.
And we're the ones that told you it was.
My administration told you it was a terror attack.
And we proved it was a terrorist attack.
So why two weeks later was he still blaming the video at the United Nations?
Why did he and Hillary record a television commercial for jihadists in Pakistan, telling them that it was a video.
Obama and everybody in his administration, not just Susan Rice, Hillary Clinton, Obama, anybody that spoke about this, Biden, for two weeks or more after the event was still blaming the video.
They were not calling it a terrorist attack.
Obama said today that that next day he called it a terrorist attack.
He did not.
We've been through that the day after he said that.
We've already put that soundbite through the mill.
He did not call it a terrorist attack.
He used the word terror in a general sense, but not specifically tied to this event because they were blaming the video.
And even in the first soundbite that we played for you just now, he once again blamed the film.
So he wants it both ways.
They blame the film, and then three days after they told they're the ones that told us it was a terrorist.
No, they weren't.
It had to be learned.
It had to be deciphered.
It had to be investigated.
They were in outright denial.
And they still are, and it's going to be fascinating to me to see whether or not this today satisfied the media.
I mean, give me the bottom line here, folks.
So far, the Obama administration has called the effort to understand what happened in causing the death of four Americans in Benghazi, a bump in the road, and now a side show.
The effort to understand why four Americans unnecessarily died at a U.S. consulate in Benghazi.
He has called by this administration a bump on the road and a side show.
Here's the final thing the president said in answer to the question by Julie Pace today from the AP at his press conference.
We don't have time to be playing these kinds of political games here in Washington.
We've got a whole bunch of people in the State Department who consistently say, you know what, I'm willing to step up.
I'm willing to to put myself in harm's way, because I think that this mission is important in terms of serving the United States and advancing our interests around the globe.
And so we we dishonor them when we turn things like this into a political circus.
Greg Hicks, you're a political circus.
Republicans bringing up these whistleblowers to testify you're doing nothing more than creating a political circus.
So all this is a bump in the road, side show, and a political circus.
I wonder how the families of the four dead Americans react when they hear the President of the United States refer to this whole sordid affair as a bump in the road, a side show, and now a political circus.
So the real question, well, not the real question, but an interesting question to me.
The media got their question.
Julie Pace asked about the IRS, asked about Benghazi.
The president answered both, saying there's no there.
I don't know what everybody's talking about.
This is political circus, side show, IRS, I condemn it.
Let's see if that's enough to satisfy him.
Well, the president said uh Mr. Limbaugh, what he said.
I mean, there's there's there's nothing left to do.
The President said what he said, and uh it's over.
We'll see.
Uh To the phones.
People have been waiting patiently as always.
And up first, John in Philadelphia.
Hello, sir.
Thank you for the call.
Oh, thank you very much.
Yeah, I think this is a very important issue.
This isn't the first time that the Obama administration has abused the IRS's powers.
In 2010, at the same time they were going after the Tea Party, uh Austin Gouldsby, the chairman of the council, President's Council of Economic Advisor, was using the IRS to go after the Koch brothers, probably somebody that they hated as much as the Tea Party.
There was uh a press briefing where Goolsby told the press how much money the Koch brothers had been paying in taxes.
And uh, you know, at first they said that the information was publicly available, and when that turned out not to be the case, the the administration said, well, you know, he simply accidentally guessed what the exact amount of the remote.
You know, that's exactly I had forgotten that, but you're exactly right.
Austin Gouldsby did tell the press how little the Koch brothers were paying in taxes, in his perspective, how little.
Uh and there was no way he could have known that.
Right.
Unless the somebody at the IRS had shared the data with him.
Right.
There was supposed to be uh this is cover up by the Obama inspiration.
There the inspector general for the IRS was supposed to release a report on Gouldsby, and after the Fuhrer died down, they kept on delaying it.
And eventually they just never released the report on Gouldsby.
So this is one thing.
If you want to go and show that this is a pattern, not just, you know, Gouldsby's not some low-level staff person.
He was chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors.
And the Obama administration should finally be forced to release the Inspector General report on uh on what Gouldsby how he how he released that information.
Well, technically not how he released it, how he got it.
There's only one way he could know it, and that is if he was able to pick up the IRS or pick up the phone, call the IRS and say, give me the numbers on the on the tax return for the Koch brothers for Coke Industries.
And if the IRS gave him the information, bam okay, major violation.
And you're right, they've tried to let the passage of time cause everybody to forget about it because there have been events take place, subsequent days which have taken precedence, caused everybody to forget about it.
You didn't.
You're exactly right.
I'll tell you something else, folks.
If you want to know, and this is a wild guess.
Everybody has their theories, and I, of course, L. Rushbow have mine.
But I think this intense IRS focus on Tea Party groups.
Now we know that it started in 2010.
And you could say that it might have some relationship in time to the passage of Obamacare, which was signed into law on September twenty or March 21st of 2010.
But do you remember when the Citizens United case was handed down by the Supreme Court?
Do you remember how that decision just sent them into conniption fits?
It upset them so much that Obama called out the Supreme Court while justices were sitting in the front row at one of his State of the Union addresses.
He challenged them on that ruling.
He told them they were wrong.
Remember Samuel Lolito sitting there nodding no, no, no, because Obama was totally mischaracterizing the decision.
Now, what was that decision?
Citizens United was a group led by Dave Bossy.
And essentially the court said that corporations are people too, and they can make political donations.
And that sent them through the roof.
Because up till then, corporations, which are, among other things, large repositories of money, were prevented from entering the political process by way of contributions and donations to issues, causes, and candidates.
And the Supreme Court said it was unconstitutional because money is speech.
When you are donating to a cause, you're speaking about a cause.
You're advocating for a cause.
It's the same as free speech.
That Ruling sent them up the wall.
Corporations aren't people, they say.
And they thought that that decision was the that may have been the thing at the time that angered them and frightened them the most.
And so that decision could also have a heck of a lot to do with the IRS, which this low-level staffer business, I don't buy it for a second.
I don't buy this notion that you've got some rogue players there, young, low-level ideologues taking it upon themselves to do this kind of thing.
I know and you know leftists are all activists.
None of them are passive, particularly those in government in any bureaucracy.
They are not passive.
They are there for activist reasons.
And they are there to sabotage the right wing and Republicans and conservatives every which way they can.
It is why they want to be in these bureaucracies.
It is why they want to populate them.
It's what they're trained to do, by the way, when they come out of the various schools they graduate from, particularly in the Ivy League.
And by the way, this is not just in politics.
In my business, I don't want to go into detail, but we've got the same problem.
I'll tell you a little story.
Let me just illustrate it this way.
This is the best analogy I could give you off the top of my head.
Fox News hits the air in 1997.
Takes a while, but eventually Fox News becomes number one.
It has more viewers in the target demographic than any other cable news network.
And they were still not being purchased by media buyers in the basements of advertising agencies, the media buyers, the people buying bodies.
There are a whole bunch of different kinds of advertising.
And the kind of advertising I'm talking about is what's called CPM cost per thousandth, where you just you buy advertising, and your message is going to be seen by the largest number of bodies, as opposed to results-oriented, where you run a commercial with a phone number or something that is used to measure immediate result.
The kind of advertising I'm talking about, they're not measuring immediate result, they're just being told by the agency that's making the buy that your commercial is going to be seen by X numbers of millions of people.
Fox was not on those buys because the activist liberal people in the basements of these agencies doing the cost per thousand buys were purposely sending money to CNN to prop them up when they had no audience.
This is the same thing.
Same kind of people, same basement activists doing whatever they can to promote what they believe and harm their opponents.
Same exact kind of thing.
And what Obama and the regime want you to believe is that these were some out-of-control people that were acting without orders, who were out of control, and we're going to find them, and we're going to punish them, and we're going to make sure it doesn't happen again, when in fact it happened by design.
it.
That's the dirty little secret to use an overused phrase.
Let me take a brief time out.
Sit tight, we'll be back and continue with more after this.
Don't go away.
About citizens united.
We know Obama and his campaign were obsessed trying to find out who the donors to conservative groups were.
And that was at the center of Citizens United.
And what we now know, the IRS was asking Tea Party groups about their donors.
Obama and his people were obsessed trying to find out who the donors to conservative groups were.
That was the center of Citizens United.
And now we know that that's what the IRS was asking Tea Party groups about who were their donors.
You remember the name Higginlooper?
Does the name Higgin Looper mean anything to you?
How about Frank Vandersloot?
Does that name mean anything to you?
Just months after being slimed by Obama's re-election campaign, Mitt Romney supporter and businessman Frank Vandersloot was informed that he was going to be audited not only by the IRS, but by the labor department as well.
Vandersloot's saga was told by columnist Kimberly Strassell, a Wall Street Journal last July.
In April of 2012, Frank Vandersloot, who served as the national co-chair of Romney's uh presidential finance committee, was one of eight Romney backers to be defamed as quote, wealthy individuals with less than reputable records in a post on the Obama campaign website.
That post, titled Behind the Curtain, A Brief History of Romney's Donors, singled out Frank Vandersloot for being a litigious, combative and bitter foe of the gay rights movement.
Two months later, the IRS informed Vandersloot that he and his wife were going to be audited.
Two weeks after that, Vandersloot was notified by the labor department that it was going to audit workers he employs on his Idaho-based cattle ranch under the federal visa program for temporary agriculture workers.
In her column, Strassel raised the specter that the IRS targeted Vandersloot for his political activism.
Did the White House use Romney's tax returns against him?
Was Harry Reed getting his crazy allegations about Romney's taxes from the IRS?
You remember when Harry Reed's on Mitt Romney hasn't paid taxes.
How do you know?
Well, good friends that told me.
I've had who?
I'm not going to tell you who's told me.
But it is clear, Austin Goolsby demonstrated you could pick up the IRS from the Obama administration, pick up the phone, call the IRS, and they'd tell you what you wanted to know.
Somebody at the IRS, it had to be the IRS, told Goolsby about the Koch's tax returns.
How did Harry Reed find out about Mitt Romney's taxes?
And we know that all of these Romney donors were targeted for audits by the IRS.
We know that.
What's her face?
Janet Napolitano.
In a memo to the Department of Homeland Security warned law enforcement officials to be on the lookout for right wing extremist groups who were concerned about illegal immigration, abortion, increasing federal power, and restrictions on firearms.
Folks, the fact of the matter is, this administration has targeted right wing groups from practically every bureaucracy in the government.
The idea that it's something new and uncommon from the IRS is ludicrous.
Clinton did it.
Clinton had targeted audits of conservative groups.
It isn't anything new.
But for some reason, the media has joined the chorus of criticism on this one.
And I'm convinced it's because they have to save the IRS.
And so it's a little bit of uh damage control, among other things.
Look, let me grab phones again, go back to it.
Coronado, California.
Bob, thank you for waiting.
Great to have you on the program.
Hi.
Hi, Russ.
Um a question that I think Hillary or Obama needs to answer, and it's regarding Benghazi.
And that is.
In the uh there's there's two things that happened.
There was the events of the 9-11 during the attack.
And the second event is uh the multiple revisions of the talking points.
And I would like to ask them.
Which of those two events did they invest more man hours in?
Well, the president answered that today.
And essentially, your question is wrong.
Everything that you're asking about didn't happen.
There's nothing to answer because every everything posed by your question is some fictitious creation as a result of the political circus.
They didn't do anything to protect Hillary.
Hillary's integrity's been attacked.
That's all that's happened here.
And they didn't rewrite the talking points except when the Republicans in Congress demanded it.
They said it was a terror attack three days after the fact.
And everything else is just a bunch of uh no there, there BS.
That's how your question would be answered.
Your question's premise is entirely flawed.
None of what you're asking about actually happened.
We didn't spend any man hours defending Hillary.
What's happened is her integrity's under attack.
And so's General Pickering or Thomas Pickering.
His integrity's under attack.
The whole State Department's under attack.
And these people are willing to put their lives on the line for this country.
And how dare this circus go on and make politics out of this?
That's the answer to your question.
Next question.
What is your next question?
See?
You don't have another question.
Your first question's bogus, so you're shut down.
That's how it works.
Under Clinton, the IRS went after the NRA, the Heritage Foundation, the National Review, the American Spectator, Freedom Alliance, American Policy Center, Citizens for Honest Government, The Progress and Freedom Foundation concerned women for America, and on and on and on.
But just remember, folks, what Elijah Cummings said during the whistleblower hearings on Benghazi.
There is death in life.
And that's all you need to know about Benghazi.
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