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Aug. 1, 2013 - Rush Limbaugh Program
37:31
August 1, 2013, Thursday, Hour #2
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Greetings and welcome back folks.
The 25th anniversary broadcast of the Rush Limbaugh Program and the Excellence in Broadcasting Network.
Today marks the first day of our 26th year.
And it's a thrill and a delight to be with you.
We're going back looking at things that have happened in the past, melding them with things happening today in an unpredictable fashion.
I have no idea what's coming when other than what's coming next.
By the way, Vladimir Putin and the Russians have just granted Edward Snowden amnesty.
Jay Carney, White House spokesman, just told the White House press corps that Obama is extremely disappointed.
I think Obama just jealous.
And my message to the president would be, be patient.
The Soviets will give you amnesty in due course.
Your time is coming.
Don't be jealous of Snowden because he got there before you did.
You put in the other three years you got here and then the world will open up to you.
You'll get amnesty or whatever else you want from the Russians.
Be patient.
My grandfather, Rush Limbaugh Sr., was 100 years old in 1991.
My first book, I dedicated it to him, and I mentioned that he is the limbaugh that everybody should have had the chance to know.
Every family has a renowned mythological patriarch who was a guiding influence.
And a lot of that in many families is mythological.
In our family, it was real.
My grandfather, when it was said that he never smoked or drank, he never did.
When it was said that he never uttered a curse word, he never did.
When it was said he put a coat and tie on seven days a week, he did.
He was indescribably, in our view, all of us in the family, he was the embodiment of perfection.
And we were all raised hoping, please him, satisfy him, make him happy, meet his expectations.
He was renowned and respected in the law in the state of Missouri.
He was sent to India by the State Department during the Eisenhower administration in 1958 on some kind of goodwill exploratory mission.
And I remember we'd go to their house on the appointed nights because he and my grandmother were going to call, tell us what was going on.
And after that, it wasn't long before people from India were trooping through his house, people he had met.
I mean, that scratches the surface.
I can't begin to describe for you his character other than to say it was unassailable.
He and my mother, the only two people I've known, everybody liked him.
Not one person.
I mean, that's not possible.
I don't, in my experience, I don't know how that's possible.
My mother and my grandfather, everybody, not just liked them, but revered them.
So anyway, just a brief setup.
Was being awarded a service award by the Missouri Bar Association in 1991 at their convention.
So I took the radio show to Kansas City and interviewed him on that day.
And we thought it was lost.
I mean, for the last couple years, really, we thought that the tape was lost.
The cookie has found.
We've got the whole thing.
And I just have some soundbites from it here because the people have heard it, have requested it over and over again over the years.
So here's the first installment of some.
I can play the whole thing here.
It went almost an hour.
Just some highlights.
And we start with this.
Greetings to you, conversationalists all across the fruited plain from Kansas City today.
This is the Rush Limbaugh program on the excellence in broadcasting network, and we welcome you to a special edition of the program today.
I am opening the program today with an amount of pride that is difficult to describe.
Today, ladies and gentlemen, my grandfather, Rush H. Limbaugh, I am actually Rush H. Limbaugh III, turns 100.
In fact, the time of his birth, he doesn't exactly remember, but it is sometime in the afternoon.
So he will turn 100 years of age during this program today.
And I'm going to be selfish.
I mean, the whole family is in town.
The Missouri Bar Association meeting is here, and we call him Pop, by the way, ladies and gentlemen.
So I will refer to him today as Pop, affectionately so.
The entire Missouri Bar meeting this year is practically devoted to his achievements as a lawyer celebrating his 75th anniversary in the practice of law today.
And he is sitting just to my left.
I can't tell you how proud we all are, Pop.
I don't want to start off by praising you to the point that you become embarrassed, but I want to.
I thought about this on the airplane flying out here yesterday.
What would be the most descriptive yet brief introduction to the people of America that listen to this program of you that I could make?
And this is it.
If you had been born earlier, you would have been one of this country's founding fathers.
This man has set an example for those of us in his family to live up to that we'll never achieve, but our efforts have all made us better people than we would have otherwise been.
It is impossible to describe his achievements, his character, his temperament, his devotion to family and himself.
I'll just let that be evident as he speaks to you today and as we do the first hour of the program.
Welcome, and I'm glad to see you on your 100th birthday.
This is an amazing, I've got tingles, chills running up my back.
I am the one that I should think is more like you have described in your own condition.
I'm delighted to be here.
Thank you for your introduction.
You have expressed praise that's beyond what you should have said.
No, no, no, no, no.
I'm just a country boy.
Here we go.
That came up from the country when there wasn't anything else to do where I lived.
Well, I was going to ask you about your boyhood.
You grew up, you're born in Sedgwickville, Missouri, which is southeastern Missouri, in 1891.
What was your boyhood like?
You were growing up, and when did you leave home?
Start out on your career.
Well, I was born not in Sedgwickville.
Sedgwickville was our post office.
It was four miles away from the place of my birth.
I was born in a farm home on a little creek called Muddy Creek.
And I was the last of eight children and the family into which I came when I was born.
And we lived in the usual farm home at that time, all of us working together.
Let's just keep it going here.
You followed a horse on a plow, right?
I mean, you plowed fields, as you say.
Oh, yes.
For how long did you do that?
Well, I was at home regularly until I left home to go to Millerville High School when I was 14.
Up to that time, I had spent all my life on the farm where I was born, with the exception of the time I was at school.
I went to a one-room school about a mile from our home when school time was on and we had a six-month school period.
The rest of the time, I was working on the farm, did all kinds of farm work.
I plowed.
Do you think that has contributed to your longevity?
I mean, to what do you assign the fact that you've lived to be 100?
I have no formula to suggest to anybody about that.
That's unique.
I really don't know.
I've lived one day at a time, taking things as they were at the time.
Now, folks, at a time when the president and a lot of other people going on and on about government growing the middle class, middle class can't do anything on their own.
Middle class can't accomplish anything unless government is out there doing things for them.
Government provides upward mobility for people.
You should not work for yourself.
You should not invest in yourself because it's a rigged game.
The powerful will screw you.
You should rely on government to do it for you.
It's what people are being told from their earliest moments today.
The government will provide benefits.
And in fact, benefits should be your focus.
Make sure you get benefits at your job and make sure you get benefits when you're dealing with the government.
The word benefits is thrown out by the president, the Democrat Party, left and right.
And when you listen to my grandfather, 100 years of age in September 1991, the entire concept, benefits from government to guide you through life, it was foreign.
It was incomprehensible.
Given the time you were born, 1891, not even 30 years after the Civil War, that's less than 30 years after the Civil War ended, at the time you were born and for the first 50 years of your life, 40 years of your life, you had more in common with people who lived in terms of technology.
You had more in common with people who lived 500 years ago than with people born in 1960 or 1970.
Yet you've lived through all of these years and you have remained prominent at what you do, which is no mean feat to remain prominent through the years as you have to keep up with things is another testament to you.
Are you conscious of the majestic ways this country has changed?
Do you remember them frequently in your mind?
Oh, indeed.
Indeed, I do.
And one of the main things I remember in my childhood in our home, as in the rural area where I live, times were hard.
Money was the last thing we could get hold of.
We had to provide for our living with things that we grew on the farm, vegetables and livestock for our pork that was generally used for meat on the farm.
I was regularly working with a team.
If a team was required for the work that was on at the time, like the breaking of ground, I always drove a team from the time I was 10 years of age.
They drove a team, you mean of horses or mules?
A team of horses and mules.
Two horses and two mules constituted the team, and they would pull a plow, and I would hold the handles to the plow to keep the plow in the ground to break it.
Then after the ground was broken, we would go through the process of getting the ground in order by running a harrow over it.
How many acres did you have to till?
Well, we had actually on the home farm 458 acres.
How much of this did you have to cover on that?
Not quite half of it was in cultivation.
200 acres.
20 acres.
I think you may have one of the reasons as to how and why you've lived 100 years.
Yeah, it was hard work.
Well, yeah.
You built up a constitution.
Oh, yes.
At that time, we considered that it was a disgrace if we didn't beat the sun to the field to where we worked, and we stayed there longer than the sun stayed.
Yes, and during that time, we didn't take time out for a half-hour break between.
There was no union.
There was no union, and there were no coffee breaks.
That's right.
This September 27, 1991, my grandfather Rush Limbaugh Sr. on his 100th birthday.
We've just got one soundbite remaining from that, and we'll get to that when we get back.
Don't go away.
And we're back at the 25th anniversary.
By the way, my grandfather lived to be 108 years old.
One final soundbite clip from that interview of September 22nd, 1991.
I asked him what it was that made him wanted to go into the law.
My father said, in what to me has been a kind of a motto of life, if he can't keep order, he can't teach school.
And that struck me, and I've always thought about the truth of that statement.
Order.
If a collection of people can't live orderly, there is all kinds of difficulty as we experienced at that time.
When we would go to picnics, there would be men who would meet there with old grudges who would fight, fight in the presence of the crowd.
Sometimes they would hurt each other badly.
And one time I remember there was a murder.
One man came to another and confronted him in the crowd and shot him and killed him.
Well, that made another further impression on me.
There is something wrong when things like this happen in our situation.
And then another last day of school entertainment came, and when we were in the program that was given that day at school, there was a fight that broke out outside the schoolroom, and everybody left the schoolroom because of the fight.
And then at that time, the ladies in the area had brought their food and they served lunch on the ground outside.
When the lunch was on, a man dropped in from I never knew where.
But as we would have said at that time, he was three axe handles high, and he wore a big black broad-brimmed hat.
And he started his conversation in this way.
He says, I have come here representing the law.
I've understood that there are certain men in this area that say they're going to have trouble here and fight it out.
I came to tell you there's not going to be any trouble here.
If any trouble begins, those who started are going to first whip me.
And there's not going to be any trouble because none of you are going to take that.
I undertake that, I promise you.
Well, now that gave me an idea that, well, here is someone representing the law.
What an enormous thing this is in a community.
A man comes in and says, I'm the law.
Well, I was interested in that, and I began reading about what it meant to be a lawyer.
And I had my sister bought for me a book of speeches, we call them, recitations.
And in that book, I read the speech that Patrick Henry made to the Virginia Assembly, give me liberty or give me death.
And I committed that speech to memory.
And on the last day of school, I spoke it to the crowd.
And they listened to me.
And I thought, well, here, I believe maybe I can do something like that.
I believe I'd better be a lawyer.
I was 12 years old at that time.
Then when I went to Millerville High School, I saw at the home of the Justice of the Peace, I saw the statutes of Missouri, two enormous volumes.
That was the law.
That was a challenge to me.
Maybe I ought to be a lawyer.
Now, imagine, folks, having the opportunity to speak to this man every day about what you wanted to do.
Imagine having that person's brain to pick and to learn from it.
We all did.
And we were all anytime he spoke and got serious about something, captivated the room and mesmerized us all.
Or whoever was in the room.
He grew up from this point.
He ended up idolizing Abraham Lincoln.
He became a Lincoln expert.
But what I was referenced this in a question to him earlier.
At the time he was born, he had more in common.
He was born in 1891.
He had more in common with people who had lived 500 years ago.
Economically, lifestyle culture.
He had more in common.
There was no electricity.
There was no creature comforts.
More in common with people that far back than he would have in common with people born in 1950 or even 1940.
And it seen it seen quite a bit.
So there's much more to this.
Maybe play it someday.
What his opinion is of when the United States actually became a great nation.
He pinpointed it briefly to the creation of the Navy and the ability to spread our message to the world.
At any rate, we'll come back and continue after this.
It's a 25th anniversary of the Excellence in Broadcasting Network.
I heard a moment ago, my grandfather lived 104, not 108.
I don't know.
I was thinking of something that made me think 108.
He lived to be 104 and he worked productively until he was, I think, 102, if I'm not mistaken.
My family, by the way, I mean, they were all.
Not all.
I mean, the vast majority of my family went into the law.
Such was the profound influence that he had.
I mean, all of us growing up, there was this imagined or dreamed of humongous law firm, Limbaugh, Limbaugh.
And we're going to throw somebody else in there just to break it up.
In fact, we did.
Limbaugh, and Russell.
And a lot of family went into law.
Someone in banking.
I'm the only one that didn't.
Well, not quite accurate to say the family has expanded now that there are others who haven't.
But at the time I was coming of age, go to college and so forth, I was the only one that didn't.
And furthermore, none of my family understood radio.
And they were very worried that it wasn't going to lead to anything.
They didn't understand the social value or relevance because at the time I was playing records, introducing Donnie Osmond songs.
And they were profoundly worried.
And I've told you before, my father came out of his formative life experience for him was the Great Depression.
And there are just certain things that you had to do to get work in that time.
And one of them was have a college education.
So it was at that time, as it is today, by the way, drilled into all of us.
Got to go to college.
It's not even discussable.
And I didn't.
I don't want any part of it.
I knew what I wanted to do.
And because I had quit everything prior to that, I was a Boy Scout Tinderfoot for a year before they drummed me out at Tenderfoot just for joining.
I mean, I didn't even achieve anything.
And this was the first thing that I had never quit.
And so they were kind of stuck.
And they ended up encouraging me, even though they never understood it, go home and talk to my grandfather and ask me how my career was going.
And to him, the media was Walter Cronkite.
And if you weren't Walter Cronkite or if you weren't trying to be, then it didn't click.
Disc jockey was tolerable, but it really wasn't understood.
But the point of all this is that despite that, everybody that knew us assumed that there was this great pressure on all of the grandkids to be lawyers.
There was no pressure, just a desire.
But I've never had anything other than full, total support from everybody in the family, including during times that have been challenging for everybody.
And I pardon the sniffles here, by the way.
It's cigar smoke.
When the cigar gets short and the smoke drifts up into the nostrils, it unleashes.
And that's the snibbles.
So anyway, I guess that pretty much sums that aspect up.
I didn't do anything that the family prescribed, and they were worried about it, but didn't say anything because it was the first thing I had stuck to.
But I will forget, this is when I thought I had failed at radio when I got fired, I don't know, the second or third time, and I went to work for the Kansas City Royals, making $12,000 a year.
My father, it's age 27, my father finally thought that I had gotten serious, finally thought that I might amount to something.
Because that was a real job.
He said, son, if you behave and you work hard in 40 years, you might be a vice president.
That was the career path.
That's how hard success was.
That's how much work it took.
And that's what it was back in those days.
And what I was doing didn't compute.
And when five years later I left the baseball team, went back to radio, there was a collective sigh and a bit of, oh, no.
But throughout all of it, there was nothing but total support for which I've always been grateful, always will be.
So the phones to Kansas City.
Hey, Mark, I'm glad you waited.
Great to have you on the program.
Hello, sir.
Thank you, Rush.
Hello.
What an honor to actually be able to talk to you on this great anniversary.
Congratulations on that.
I just wanted to say I graduated high school in 1992, and my job at the time was at a tool and dye company where I had to sweep metal shavings from one side of the warehouse to the other pretty much all day.
Once you were done, it was just filled up again, so that's all I did.
And this was before iPods and all that stuff, so I didn't really have anything other than music, and there's only so much music you can listen to.
I don't even know what else was on AM radio at the time, but I was flipping through dials and I heard you.
And I wish I could put into words, you know, what you've done for my life.
I mean, I just, I love you, man.
You're just your insight and, you know, your whole attitude about life.
Basically, all day, every day, I just listened to you three hours a day.
And I remember when your books came out, you know, I got your books on hardcover and read them.
And then on audio, you know, on cassette because we didn't have podcasts or anything like that.
So I couldn't hear you other than at work.
And so then basically I was able to get your tapes and listen to you over and over again on your books.
The Rush TV show searching TV stations at like one in the morning on whatever night it was that they stuck you.
Loved the show and watched that as long as it was on and just have listened to you all the way up until today.
You've just been an incredible influence on how I've looked at the world and how I am today as a person.
It's actually kind of sad in a way because now today I'm a little down on the Republican Party and where we've ended up as a country, as a people.
I got laid off a couple of years ago from a job that I loved and had been at for years.
And now I have a daughter going to college and I'm cannibalizing like an old laptop Dell laptop to try to get her to have some kind of computer to go to school.
And it's just kind of depressing that this is where I've ended up, you know, after being so bright-eyed and happy in the 90s and listening to you and taking what you were teaching and, you know, being successful for a time outside of Kansas City, which, you know, you're in Cape Girarda.
So, you know, being in Kansas City, in my mind, wasn't much different.
We're kind of out here in the booties, you know, compared to all the great big cities out there.
But I was able to move to Chicago and get a great job.
This was all due to you.
I mean, this was all due to what you were teaching and, you know, what we were listening to.
And I've pretty much grown up with you.
I just, I think you're an awesome person.
You're just an excellent influence.
And I've just never understood the hatred.
You know, I mean, today with the internet, of course, it's all over the place.
You know, you're just speaking your mind.
You're speaking what you've learned.
You listen to your grandfather there.
He was a great person, and you can obviously tell that you were influenced by that.
And just, you know, the crop out there of people and what they say about you and what they say about what you believe and what we believe, it's just, I just don't understand it.
I don't believe it.
But it is, I share with you the sense of great unease about it, about the country, about where it's going, how it's happened.
Everything seems upside down, and there doesn't seem to be any pushback to it.
And there doesn't, in fact, you know, outside of you and others like you in the way you think, there doesn't even seem to be that many people upset by it.
They're just adapting to it.
Now, I've had the struggle myself to try to explain this to myself and to others.
And you talk about the hatred for me out there.
I'll tell you why I think it is.
It isn't personal.
None of these people know me.
There is and has been in this country longer than you and I have been alive.
There has been a battle for who is going to define this country.
There are people, and I've shared with you, I've intellectually, way I was raised, what I was taught about this country, I literally, it's a conflict because intellectually, I understand it, but in my heart, I don't understand how anybody can hate this country today.
I don't understand it, but they do.
So I've given up trying to figure out what their problems are.
But what they're, you have to understand where the country is today, you have to understand that the left is not just an opposition.
They're not just opponents.
The left has designs on the country.
They don't believe in the Constitution as founded, the country is founded.
They don't believe in the concept of individual liberty.
They don't trust it.
They don't trust that people will do what they want them to do if left alone.
So they must control everything or as much of everyone's life as possible in order to create what they want.
That leads to an all-out assault on individual liberty and freedom.
And that's the battle that has been waging in this country since the day it was founded.
There are some people threatened by it.
There are some people opposed to it.
Even the rank and file left.
I mean, the people you've never met, just the average, ordinary, non-elected, non-leadership, these people that post comments in an anonymous fashion on all these websites, they simply, it's really, it's almost, it's hard to explain.
They just, They do not trust that the country can survive.
They don't trust that you're going to behave the way they want you to, and they're not content to let you behave the way you want.
You must conform to the way they want you to live.
You must conform to the way they want you to believe.
Now, you and I are not like that.
You and I are laissez-faire.
We're content for everybody to live the life they want to live, and then we'll enter the arena of ideas, and we'll try to persuade them to join us in the way we view life and the way we view liberty and freedom.
But it's not in our Constitution to force anybody to do anything, to punish anybody for the way they think or live, but it's not that way with them.
Any person or thing that they perceive as a threat, and they perceive me this way, must be destroyed.
It must be reputation, character, must be impugned, credibility.
It's all about their ideology.
This is why I have this fervent desire that I could make everybody in this country understand what liberalism really is, that it is not a way of thinking.
Liberalism is the denial of liberty.
It's the denial of freedom.
It is the imposition of restrictions on people.
And they are not content to simply live the way they want to.
You must do everything they want, think the way they think.
And if you don't, you're either going to be punished or they'll try to relegate you to incident because you represent an enemy.
You represent a threat to them.
And that's what I am.
It really isn't personal, as I say, because they don't know me.
They don't want competition for your mind.
They don't want anybody convincing you that they're wrong.
They don't want anybody convincing you that they don't want anybody telling you who they really are.
And when anybody pops up that effectively does that, here come the long knives.
Anyway, a short version of it.
It's much more complicated and complex than that, but that's the best I can do in a short period of time in a nutshell.
I appreciate the call.
This man's call folks, exactly what I was talking about in the first hour when I talked about the intimate connection that can be made with an audience on radio.
Just everything he said is what's beautiful about radio and what's possible with it.
And I appreciate the call.
Thank you very much.
We'll be back after this.
Don't go away.
For 25 years, I've been trying to explain liberalism to people.
I've come up with as many different ways to explain it as I've engaged in.
Let's put it this way.
And by no means is this the best of the final.
I'm going to be struggling with this for as long as I do this.
What liberals want will never happen on its own.
People will not live the way liberals want if left to their own devices because people will not build walls to keep themselves in places that they don't want to be, such as the Soviet Union, such as China, such as Cuba.
Those places are all run by liberals.
You call them communists or socialists or whatever.
Left to their own devices in a free country, people will not choose liberalism.
They want to eat salt, they'll eat it.
If they want to eat trans fats, they'll eat it.
If they want to eat beef, they'll eat it.
The only way liberals can get you to live the way they want you to is to deny you freedom to do what you want to do.
And they're not happy with you living and thinking in ways other than the way they live and think.
You must conform.
If you dare speak outside the acceptable liberal norms, they're going to come after you.
They're going to do their best to destroy whoever does that so that that person or group of people will not persuade others.
Liberals cannot survive in an unrigged contest in the arena of ideas.
They are not about ideas.
Liberals are not about choice.
They are about imposition.
The way they live, the way they believe, must be imposed on people, otherwise they won't do it on their own.
It's taken them 50, 60 years to get to this point of conditioning people, of taking a whole education system, the university academia system, the media.
It's taken a long time to condition people not to stand up for themselves, not to exercise freedom, not to speak outside the acceptable norms.
After what is political correctness, but speech censorship is all it is.
Folks, there's much more.
Do not go away.
We'll be right back and continue.
At rushlimbaugh.com, we have had a major upgrade in the Limbaugh Museum.
I'll have details.
We've also got a special deal today from 2IFBIT on that website.
Boy, have we got things for you?
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