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May 23, 2013 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:12
May 23, 2013, Thursday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
Greetings to you, music lovers, drill seekers, conversationalists all across.
The fruited playing Rush Limboy and the fastest week in media.
Here we are already at Thursday.
Which I find just incredible.
But that's what happens, folks, when you're doing what you were born to do.
Great to have you here.
Rush Limbaugh, telephone number if you want to be on the program 800-282-2882.
And the email address, L Rushbaugh at EIBNet.com.
Boy, folks, I have to tell you it's a uh this has been a hectic morning.
It has just been, I mean, I've nothing wrong.
It's just fast and furious.
Everything has been coming at me.
Plus, I've had some stuff unrelated to the program that I've wanted to do uh that I have done, so I've been mixing and matching it.
I am just sitting here wired.
And I'm trying to tell myself just ratchet it down, because if I don't, I'm gonna end up speaking lickety split, and my uh my mouth isn't gonna be able to keep up with my brain, which probably the case every day anyway.
So I'm just I'm I'm just exhale.
Just slow it down.
So much that I want to get into today.
Let's uh let's start with polling data.
Just just to keep you keep you up to speed on things because it's a little bit conflicting.
This is a Pew Center, the Pew Research Center.
Uh they surveyed more than a thousand people, and they asked them if they are following the scandal stories very closely.
And the Pew Center poll shows that most Americans are not paying attention to the scandals.
According to this, 26% said that they are very closely following the IRS story.
Twenty-five percent say they are closely following the Benghazi investigation, and just sixteen percent are very closely following the news about the Justice Department subpoenaing AP reporters phone records and and Fox and uh all the other things.
Now let's see if there's uh very cl- Yeah, it's just very closely, not somewhat closely, not moderately closely, just very closely.
Now, I I I've learned I'm gonna go with the polling data.
I'm not gonna sit here, this can't possibly be true.
I I now, knowing what I know about how Obama is is managing all this and how he's appearing to be.
I mean, is have you noticed folks a common theme in all these scandals?
I don't care.
It's a fast and furious, Benghazi, the IRS.
There's a common theme, and it is that none of the people who were supposed to be in charge knew anything about what was going on.
Not just Obama.
None of the people.
Hillary didn't know what was going on in Benghazi, Panetta didn't know what was going on in Benghazi.
Fast and Furious, nobody knew anything, what was going on there.
In the IRS scandal, literally, be it be it Shulman, be it Lois Lerner, be it uh what is this other babe's name, uh Kathy Oh, whatever.
Well, Ingram, but it's not Ullman or Ummanman or something like that, whatever, whoever it is, she doesn't know anything going on.
And at the top of the list, Obama doesn't know what's going on.
Now I recall there was a newsweek cover back three years ago in 2010, and it was a picture of Obama, big bright yellow background, a picture of Obama with five or six arms juggling all the things that were going on in the healthcare, uh, whatever the issue was, deficit, jobs, unemployment.
And the the headline was this, it was it was it was a precursor of what of what Axelrod's been saying.
This government is just too big for one man to handle anymore, including Obama.
Now, the people at Newsweek thought that they were uh making a point that the presidency needs to become more powerful.
That Obama needs more power to deal with all this.
The government's gotten so big that when we have a great president like Obama, he needs more power.
We've got a president like Bush, of course, that would not apply.
Of course, the real interpretation is that the government is too big.
It is out of control.
It is unmanageable.
It's got its own inertia that nobody can stop.
And that's the truth of it.
And the government needs to get smaller.
It needs to become more efficient.
It needs to be starved of money, and the people of this country need to be weaned off of their entitlement mentality.
So none of the principles in any of these scandals know anything about what's going on.
In Obama's case, that ends up being a plus, he has managed for that to be something that benefits him within the universe of low information voters that vote for the guy.
Because the the way Obama is seen, as it's just so big, man.
Look at all this stuff going on that he can't possibly.
This wouldn't be happening if Obama could had enough power to deal with this.
Wouldn't be happening if Obama really could spend time on it.
And nobody says, well, maybe you should come off the golf course.
Maybe he should stop doing concerts for whoever at the White House.
Maybe you ought to stop going on vacation.
Maybe you ought to start working a little bit.
They don't think of it that way.
Poor guy's just overworked.
He's got these mean Republicans biting at him all the time and so forth.
So anyway, the latest polling data is that most people, and this does not include you, because all of you, by definition, are in touch with this stuff wall to wall.
So the next poll is a Rasmussen reports poll.
It's the daily presidential tracking poll.
And this is the first poll that shows Obama's approval number starting to slip.
Forty-seven percent of likely voters approve of Obama's performance.
51% do not.
Today's figures include 25% who strongly approve of the way Obama's performing, and 41% who strongly disapprove.
Now, we'll have to see if if that poll is reflected in other polls, such as Gallup and CNN and the other polling data that is out that's been showing Obama with a steady or maybe even a slow uptick in approval.
Stuart Rothenburg, a Washington establishment, well-known Rothenburg Report.
He's uh he's an analyst, he's a polster, he's a consultant, uh, is uh liberal Democrat, he's all of those things.
He's got a piece in roll call.
Senate ratings change, the political environment is starting to turn on the Democrats, he says.
While national polls haven't shown a shift in the public's opinion of Obama's performance, recent controversies have in Rothan uh Rothenberg's view significantly changed the political landscape and changes in the landscape have led the Rothenburg political report to change its Senate ratings.
The new focus on the Obama regime puts it on the defensive and should boost enthusiasm on the political right throughout this year and into next year.
While we don't know how long the focus will stay on the regime or whether the Republicans will stumble over the investigations or matters of public speaking of which, have you heard that the the word is out in Washington,
somebody I've got it here, I just want to top of my mind, but somebody is whispering that Boehner and the Republican leadership don't want to go anywhere near Benghazi in terms of an investigation or hearings.
Have you heard that?
Yeah, I've got it here.
I'll get to it as the program unfolds.
Don't really want to touch that for some.
Don't know why.
Don't know why, and Don't know that it's totally true.
It's just some scuttle, but in addition to that, we had breaking news at the end of yesterday's big broadcast that Daryl Issa, after having consulted with legal counsel, said that he was going to recall Lois Lerner before his committee.
As you know, she showed up yesterday.
And didn't do it.
I didn't do it.
Nobody saw me do anything.
He can't prove anything.
I didn't do it.
I had nothing to do with it.
And then refused to say anything more under questioning, claiming invoking her Fifth Amendment.
Which point Trey Gowdy, South Carolina says, You can't do that.
You can't show up here and issue your denials and make a statement and then shut it down.
That's not what the Fifth Amendment is for.
No less a legal mind and Professor Dershowitz at Harvard agrees.
She can't use the Fifth Amendment that way.
So the latest new we had at the end of the program yesterday was that ISA was going to recall her.
But he hasn't yet.
I looked, tried to find the latest bit of news on this before the program, and as far as I've been able to tell, Darrell Issa has not called Lois Stonewall Lerner back to his committee to testify.
This woman, we mentioned uh yesterday, this woman really, really had it out for the Christian coalition back in the 1990s.
I mean, she was the only way to describe it is hatred.
Under the direction of Lois Stonewall Lerner, the Federal Election Commission, that's where she worked in the 90s, sued the Christian coalition.
She harassed them for three election cycles.
She lost the case.
She even asked one conservative during during the case if Pat Robertson prayed over him.
I mentioned this yesterday that it was Oli North.
She wanted to know, well, what did Robertson pray over you?
What did he say?
And Norsa, what the hell is this?
I'm not answering that nothing to do with anything here.
But she was hellbent on finding out.
She's got she got Christianity and Christians on the on the brain here, folks.
She's got a she's got a there's no other way to call it.
She's got a hatred.
Anyway, that performance led her to being promoted to the IRS, where she used the same kind of behavior in hassling and delaying the tax exempt authorizations for Tea Party groups, uh, including pro-life and conservative 501c3, the uh various tax exempt status.
500 conservative and Christian groups illegally targeted by the Obama IRS during her tenure.
Of course, she doesn't know anything about it.
She didn't do anything wrong.
Obama doesn't know anything about it.
Jay Carney said Obama doesn't know anything about it.
It's a good thing that Obama doesn't know.
Um nobody knows anything about it.
And we Trey Gowdy just took this this Shulman guy, Douglas Schulman, just took him apart yesterday on all the in fact.
Let's grab those sound bites because this is a Trey Gowdy is the is the is the guy who stood up yesterday, Lois Stonewall Lerner.
You can't do that.
Mr. Chairman, she can't just come in here and invoke the Fifth Amendment after testifying.
And he was right.
And there was even a smattering of applause in the room.
So later yesterday, Gowdy, during the House Oversight Government Reform Committee hearing on the IRS scandal, was talking and interviewing, questioning Douglas Shulman, the former IRS commissioner.
We have looks like three sound bites here, and here's the first.
Can you give me the name of a single person who was involved in the original decision to target conservative groups for disparate treatment?
I'm I'm not aware of those names.
Why can't you give me a name?
So at the same time that I learned and that it was being stopped, I was also told that the Inspector General was aware of it.
Mr. Schulman, is the Inspector General the only person who can investigate wrongdoing within the IRS?
My uh general practice.
If there's someone wielding a knife in the parking lot, are you going to call the Inspector General?
Are you going to wait until his or her investigation is over before you stop it?
It continued.
That wasn't the end of it.
Did you do anything to verify that the practice, as insidious as it was, was stopped?
The uh inspector general was going to be looking into it, and that's what the President is.
Is it that you can't say yes or no, or you're just choosing not to say yes or no?
Can you answer the question?
Did you do anything personally to make sure that this insidious discriminatory practice was stopped?
Yes or no?
At the time that I learned about it, I also learned two things.
The first was that it was being stopped, and the second was that the And what did you do to verify that it was stopped?
The responsible deputy of the Internal Revenue Service told me it was being stopped.
What does this sound like to you?
This it sounds like a parody.
Sounds like numerous parodies that we have produced of congressional hearings in the past.
It sounds like an absolute can you give me yes?
I'm telling you what I saw with the inspector.
Yes, but can't just give me a name.
Yes or no?
Who was it that allowed this to con Mr. Chairman?
I looked at this every which way, frontwards and backwards, and as an inspector general, just gonna tell you the way this is going to go.
I I'm just gonna make a prediction here, folks.
Hope that I'm wrong, but I have intelligence guided by experience on my side.
As this pressure mounts from Republicans on these committees investigating the architects of these scandals.
For example, Lois Stonewall Lerner.
If she does end up back before the committee, if ISA does officially bring her back up there.
What will happen is he'll ask her question after question after question, and she'll say Fifth Amendment, Fifth Amendment, Fifth Amendment.
And if ISA does it the right way, it'll go on for hours.
Just ask her every question you've got and make her invoke the fifth for every question.
I'll tell you what the media is gonna do.
The media will say that she just fell prey to a trap that was set by these evil House Republicans.
They forced her into pleading the Fifth Amendment in the first place, and they're gonna end up making her the victim.
That's probably being tossed around now strategically within the media.
How to how to how to make her look like a victim?
And that's gonna be a tough sell because of the last thing this woman looks like is a victim.
This woman looks like she'd be right at home with some whips and chains in your Here's the final sound by Trey Gowdy and Doug Shulman.
By the way, everybody making a big deal out of the fact that Shulman was a Bush appointee.
All right.
Let me let me deal with that.
I we must.
Yeah, he was a Bush appointee, but he's a Democrat.
Douglas Shulman is a Democrat.
He gave the Democrat National Committee $250 a month before Bush appointed him to his job.
You know what?
You know what Shulman is?
Shulman is one of countless Bush appointees who were put there by Bush, Democrats, in order to show bipartisanship.
In order remember, you had that Florida aftermath, all this acrimony, hatred and partisanship, and Bush put a lot of Democrats in positions, and he left a lot of Democrats in positions.
As a show of good faith, in an attempt to show compassionate conservative, in an attempt to mend fences with the Democrats.
Didn't matter.
It never will work that way.
It never does matter, but that's what Bush was trying to do.
Shulman's a Democrat, he's a lifelong Democrat, he's a Democrat partisan.
Here's the last soundbite.
Did you investigate why conservative groups were being targeted?
Excuse me.
Did you investigate?
So you can't give me a single name.
You can't answer the who.
Can you tell me the why?
Why were conservative groups?
Why was the culture such under your watch that an employee felt comfortable targeting conservative groups?
Did you investigate that?
You know, from my reading of the report, I can't tell if it was political motivation or if it was tone-deaf, somebody trying to expedite away.
You still don't know that this was political.
Excuse me.
You still don't know that this was political.
I'd defer to the inspector general.
Well, I'll tell you this, Mr. Shulman.
Your predecessor said that he wasn't sure if it was partisan, and that requires the listener to be as stupid as the speaker to utter a comment like that.
We'll be back, folks.
That sums it up.
Don't go away.
Little bit of a change of direction for just a second.
As you know, ladies and gentlemen, I constantly use the phrase on the cutting edge of societal evolution.
One of the things I mean by that is that if you are a regular listener to this program, in many cases, you will hear things discussed long before they reach the mainstream.
Long before they reach the popular culture.
One of those areas that I have been, I don't know the word warning is correct, but at least I've been highlighting, is the phenomenon of social media.
And one of the things that always bothered me about it was the pop culture's uh oh it's it's it's temptations.
People, young kids, desperately wanting fame, doing anything they can to get noticed or to become famous, thinking that it's glamorous, that it's fun, that it will make them rich, and it has in fact given rise to all kinds of gossip networks, television, newspaper columns, you name it.
It has even the gossip's been around for a long time.
It's now become mainstream.
Uh and uh entertainment programs, uh, starting with actually entertainment tonight and the lifestyles of the rich and famous.
Uh these were these were programs that created an impression that if you became famous, that the world was your oyster, and young people, you know, everybody wants to be noticed, and everybody wants their life to matter, and everybody wants to be cool, everybody wants to be hip.
So with the advent of social networks on computers and mobile devices, it became possible for young people to start connecting in any which way they wanted to, and it was a phenomenon I noticed.
Many years ago, young people were just giving up every bit of information about themselves they could.
They were they were violating their own privacy, seeking fame, wanting everybody to know everything about themselves, publishing nude photos of themselves, lewd photos, you name it.
And as someone who's just concerned about the overall culture, I happen to believe that a society's culture is a harbinger of what kind of country you're going to be.
Now, I've always had to avoid and be cognizant of the fact that as people grow older and then you look at younger generations, they they think, oh my God, this is horrible.
It's never been this bad, this raunchy, this this debauched country's finished.
You have to avoid that because every generation looking back at young people thinks that.
So you have to be constantly vigilant that you don't become an old fuddy duddy when looking at these things.
At the same time, you have to be honest about it.
And I really am governed here as I do this show each and every day.
You know, I when I say these things, I mean them.
I want a great country.
I want people.
This has got to be a great country if if we are to continue to provide the opportunity, both uh uh economic and spiritual for freedom that this country is always provided, more so than any other country ever.
And a great country is only as great as its people.
And at some point, people have to get serious.
At some point, when they grow older and immature, they have to get serious.
And certain things have to be revered, including certain cultural things.
There have to be guardrails, if you would to borrow a term that I once saw in a Wall Street Journal editorial about just out of control pop culture.
Morality, the sense of right and wrong, personal responsibility, all of those things are fundamental.
And who teaches that?
The schools are not.
Social media is, of course, obliterating those concepts.
It's just the exact opposite.
The role is more important now than ever, and it's really up to parents.
If you happen to believe, for example, that the culture is out of control...
And if you would phrase it in a way so the genie's out of the bottle, and then you would then how do you put the genie back in the bottle?
You don't.
You never can put the genie back in the bottle.
But what you can do is start anew with a certain generation and try to raise them and educate them in in ways that send them in different directions than the temptations that exist now.
And they're always there, and it's it's don't want to be misunderstood.
This kind of thing is gone on as long as the country is.
But however, there are factors now that exist that didn't.
And I've always been, without being able to put my finger on it, I've been worried about what happened to people who just dive head first into this, anything goes.
No judgment culture where there is no more privacy and there is no concern for it, and people just want everybody to know everything about them every minute of the day.
What they're doing, what they're thinking, where they're going, when they got there, how long they're going to be there, when they're leaving.
There are apps for such things for people's mobile devices.
And one of the things that has been around for a while, I first heard of it way back in the 90s, was the notion of hooking up.
Something that scared particularly mothers, like crazy.
Just the notion of having meaningless sex, and not even for the sex, not even for the injun just to say you'd done it just to be able to brag about it and so forth, and taking meaning out of it.
And these kind of things take place when you're young.
And as you get older and grow up, everybody looks back on things when they were younger, and they some people get embarrassed, some things I wish that didn't happen.
I wish I wish nobody knew that.
That's going to be tougher and tougher for people to pull off because as young kids get exposed to all this social media, they're telling everybody everything they're doing.
Well, I mean, we're getting to the point now where I think it's going to be common that candidates for political office will have posted nude photos of themselves, or worse, on social websites.
The first known example of that that I can recall was a woman that's now a co-host at on MSNBC, her name is Crystal Ball.
She may not be the first, but she's the one that comes to mind.
She ran for office, she lost, but there were nude photos of her that she had posted, and her opponent decided to use them, and she was outraged that such things would be used.
Anthony Wiener, who, by the way, is going to run for office or run for mayor of New York, and you ought to see, but the New York Post, the web app, if you have an iPad, and you get the New York Post, because it's not on their website, and I don't know that it's in the newspaper.
I don't read newspapers, it may be in the printed edition, but I know it's in the iPad version.
There's a column by Anthony or uh uh Andrea Pizer on on Wiener, who is the husband of Huma Wiener, Hillary's Huma.
And she just rakes him over the calls, as most everybody's doing, and then there's a sidebar called the Twitter responds, and it's people on Twitter issuing comments about the potential re-emergence of Wiener.
And it's hilarious, some of these comments.
I didn't print it out.
I'll do it.
I'll share some of them with you.
Why is the reception, it's all over Cross the Gambit.
He's getting a warm reception in some places, every happy wiener rising again.
All the typical things.
But he may he the mayor, I'm sorry, governor of New York, uh, Andrew Kumo is lamenting.
Oh my God, woe is us if this guy runs.
Oh, it's it's uh it's our bad if this guy wins.
Why is he saying that what Anthony Weiner is a perfect liberal?
Anthony Wiener is an ideal.
He's a combative liberal.
He will take conservatives to the to the back alley and beat them up every day.
If he hadn't posted the nude photos of himself and his member with the with with the babes, he'd be right in there.
He'd be in the uh on the ladder cruising to the top of liberalism.
So, but why do they care?
This is the kind of thing normally that launches liberals to the heights.
This kind of embarrassment or failure is a resume enhancement for these people, but it isn't, you see, this is my point.
Even for liberals, it isn't.
He's gonna have his problems here.
Crystal ball had hers, and it's it's gonna be coming uh it's gonna become uh more and more frequent.
And it just, folks, look, I'm not an old fuddy duddy.
It just concerns me only from the standpoint you want serious people.
You want at least 5% of the population being serious.
5, 6% of the population carries the rest of the people.
You've heard that old axiom, 5% of the people pull a wagon, 95% are in it.
You need 5 or 6% of the population serious about things, their jobs, their careers, the country understanding the you need that.
And I'm just all for anything that continues to teach that and cause people to respect it and to revere it.
I cringe.
I really I mean I laugh too, but I I cringe when I see videos of just these man on the street interviews that Leno does.
And people are clueless.
They don't know diddly squat about things.
Anyway, I've got to take a break here.
I've got a couple of sound bites I want to play because this is finally now reached mainstream media.
My point about cutting edge of societal evolution.
I've been warning, talking about this since almost for at least 20 of the 25 years that I've been doing this program here at the at the EIB network.
But and I I bring to it a certain uh experience.
I have lost my anonymity.
I know what it's like to lose your inner, and I know I know what it's like to have no privacy.
I I know what it's like to not be able to go anywhere and do anything anonymously.
And I'm telling you, what when you lose that and you can't get it, but that's that's a huge regret, and there are a lot of people that are that that want that.
And I just I don't think it's healthy, and I think it it leads to distorted values and distorted decisions that people make about their lives and a number of other things that are not healthy for them and the country at large.
Now, again, do not confuse me with an old fuddy duty like my parents who thought the world was coming to an end because the Beatles had long hair.
That's not where I'm coming from here.
I gotta take a break, however.
Sit tight, we'll be back and continue with this in just a second.
Don't go away.
A minor correction.
And this, by the way, feeds into my point.
I got it wrong about Crystal Ball.
She did not pose nude.
The crystal ball photos were not nude.
The photos depicted her doing sexually suggestive things at a party.
Well, but a see here.
I my memory was that the controversy was over nude photos.
This is how things get wrong or made run.
They and they amplify as wrong, and then no, no!
It wasn't a nude photo, gosh, can't anybody get it right?
Get used to it.
You people don't want all this fame, get used to everybody being wrong about you.
At any rate, it was not just not just the correction here is there were not nude photos at Crystal uh of Crystal Ball on her website or her blog, whatever it was.
They were just photos of her doing sexually suggestive things.
I have no idea if they're still online.
Literally no idea.
And you know what?
I'm not interested.
This is this is my point.
What are you sitting in there all excited now to find a picture?
Well, I'm I'm not I'm not the least bit uh inspired to go try to find.
At any rate.
This morning on Fox, uh Martha McCallum had a guest who has written a book about this phenomenon called Hooking Up.
And the guest is Donna Fritis.
Uh I and I think that's how she pronounces her name.
I didn't hear it.
F R E I T A S. Ah, Freitas is how it is.
And her book is The End of Sex, How the Hookup Culture is Leaving a Generation Unhappy, sexually unfulfilled, and confused about intimacy.
And Martha McCallum said, where do we go from here?
You know, how does this affect or does it affect these kids' relationships as they go through life?
One of the things that I think we really need to talk about as a as a culture is what is the meaning of sex given hookup culture.
You showed those words that students will use regretful and empty and ashamed.
You know, that 41% of students, you know, and how they respond hooking up.
But there's another middle group, about 30% of students who are really ambivalent.
And I think that group is getting bigger because I think students are getting much better at hooking up, which means they're getting better at having ambivalent sex.
So sex isn't isn't about fun or even really about pleasure, it's about getting it done and being able to say that you did it.
That's right.
That last part is the key.
What are you frowning at?
What are you frightening?
So what?
What's wrong with this?
People having sex.
Who in the world's but could be upset with that?
Is that what you're well she went out there and she did surveys of these students.
She talked to the students.
I guess.
Well, I don't she did a book on it, Snurda.
She talked to the students, and they and the students told her, and that's what she based her book on.
And here's what Martha McCallum said in response to it.
That's the whole thing.
Just documenting, because we live in this media culture where it's like, you know, the numbers and just doing something just to say you did it or to take pictures of the event and then put it out there online so you can prove to everybody that you're having a great time.
They're getting better at hooking up.
You know, when they're when they're better at being able to walk away and say, you know what, I don't feel a thing.
Like I don't want to see that person again, it didn't really mean anything to me.
Now, this has been going as hookup business for years, folks.
And it is meaningless, and it it is just a belt notching me.
But I'm gonna re- You know what one of the most dangerous things about all this social media is, and I think it's gonna be a big challenge for anybody who has to deal with kids and young adults.
It's not just this quest for fame and giving up all the privacy that they're doing.
Most kids are insecure, safe to say.
And when they read all of this social media, what they are really seeing is all the stuff they are not doing.
They see all this stuff other people are doing, and they see I'm not doing all that, and they're gonna think they're gonna get inferiority complexes over this.
Which creates its own set of problems.
They're gonna set out trying to fix this.
It it's gonna, it's a snowball effect.
Damn it, I'm out of time here.
I there's one more couple more things I want to add, but I don't have time right now.
So I'll tell you, all this this this stuff is not good, folks.
I mean, look at what feminism has done for women.
Look at what feminism's done for everybody.
It's just confused everybody.
And made most people miserable.
We got more.
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