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Aug. 8, 2013 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:42
August 8, 2013, Thursday, Hour #2
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Greetings, my friends, and welcome back.
Most listened to radio talk show in the country, hosted by me, America's real anchorman, America's truth detector and the doctor of democracy, serving humanity while executing assigned host duties flawlessly.
Zero mistakes.
Telephone number, and we are going to get to phone calls in this hour, is 800-282-2882.
And if you want to send an email, it's illrushbow at EIBnet.com.
We do check the email.
But I mean, it's like 12,000.
Well, it's in less than a day.
Yeah, it says 12,000 a day, something like that.
It's impossible to go through all of them.
That does include the spam, but it's not a whole lot because we have good filters.
So a couple of polling data bits of news here before we get to the healthcare stack, which is voluminous today.
The healthcare stack is voluminous.
And none of it's good.
And I think all of it's by design.
Fox News, latest poll, among all the data that Fox reports presidential approval and all of that, they've got a number.
74% of the American people think that too many people are relying on government.
Now, this is another one of these polls.
It doesn't make any sense when you compare it to the way people vote.
When you compare it to what Washington's getting away with, it doesn't make any sense.
And aside from the limbaugh theorem, I don't know that there is any other explanation.
74% think people are relying too much on government.
Well, they're right.
I would, that number is actually pretty strong.
I wouldn't mind it being a little higher.
But then this other poll, I just got this from Paul Beddard at the Washington Examiner.
And this is a, let's see, who did the poll?
It's a YouGov poll, Y-O-U-G-O-V, U-Gov.
This is about people's attitudes on the American dream.
And the headline of the story is that more Democrats than Republicans say the American Dream is dead.
53% of Democrats think the American Dream is dead.
27% of Republicans think it's dead.
Now, I'm not surprised that 53% of Democrats think the American Dream is dead.
I don't know how many Democrats ever really believed in it outside of their fortunes tied to unions.
I'm serious.
You know, many lifelong Democrats have union roots that explain their lifelong devotion to the Democrat Party.
But there are some interesting things here.
Almost five years into Obama's transformation of this country, 53% of Democrats say the American Dream is dead, not coming back.
I mean, American Dream's dead, it's dead.
It's not the American Dream is becoming out of reach.
It's dead.
Obama is not a savior for Democrats in the American Dream.
And once again, hello Limbaugh Theorem.
But I don't want to focus on that.
I want to focus on the pessimism.
53% of Democrats think the American Dream is dead.
27% of Republicans think it's dead.
Now, in a political context, this is another glorious opening for a sensible conservative message.
Some people, you know them and I know them, some people are so immersed in fatalism and negativity that they can't be salvaged.
I don't know what percentage, but there's some people just hopelessly, no matter what evidence or inspiration you provide them, they're lost.
But not, I don't believe at all of this 53% has given up.
I think an uplifting, positive, can-do message, if delivered not out of false optimism and not sugar-coated, syrupy, sweet, unrealistic, but it's a genuine, optimistic, we are Americans.
We can do whatever we want.
Whatever obstacles are in our way, we can find our way around them.
That's been the history of our country.
It's been the history of greatness, the greatness of our people.
Life has never had the road paved to riches other than for the Kennedys and others who inherited.
But the vast majority of people have had to work hard to make it.
And there have always been obstacles.
From the days of the founding of this country for the next 150 years, I mean, it was brutal out there.
Maybe even longer than that.
For some people, it was brutal in the 20s and 30s during the Depression.
But we've always come out of it.
The thing is, we've always come out of it because we've always had leaders who wanted to come out of it and who wanted to lead people out of it.
One of the problems we have today is we have leadership that doesn't really believe we can come out of it.
Well, I don't, I'm not inspired when I hear Obama talk about the formulaic things that he does.
We believe in the Mercury work hard and everybody gets a job and they work hard and it pays off and it is fair, fair.
That's not inspiration.
He's just spouting things that he thinks certain people want to hear.
But Obama's not inspiring greatness.
Obama's not inspiring people to go beyond themselves.
Barack Obama does not have it in him to make people think that they're better than they are.
You know, I don't care who you are.
We all need a little boost.
And I don't mean somebody giving us assistance, opening doors and that kind of thing.
I mean, none of us, very few of us, are self-starters.
You think back to the best teacher that you had.
You might have hated whoever it was at the time.
But when you look back on it, more than likely, the person that you remember as being the best teacher is somebody that demonstrated or allowed you to demonstrate that you were better than you thought you were, that you were more capable of things than you thought you were.
We all need to be inspired.
There are a precious few who can do it themselves.
Most people need the push.
Most people need to be told.
Most people need the atta boy.
Nothing wrong with that, by the way.
It's crucial.
Now, Obama does sing this song about a brighter tomorrow and a better future and all that, but doesn't.
His message is for dreamers, not doers.
Dreamers generally don't do anything.
They sit around and dream and they wait and they hope things align and happen.
The doers need to be inspired.
And I guarantee you, I will never forget back in the 90s, white-collar people were laid off for the first time in the modern era at greater numbers than blue-collar people were.
And at the time, the media and others were running around, well, it's about time, dammit.
Let them white-collar management executives, let them find out what it's like for the rest of us.
They were happy about it.
Some people are made to feel better when others are in misery.
That's a fact, too.
A lot of the people that were being laid off back then, the white-collar executive management types, were in their 40s and 50s, and there wasn't, well, the odds were not too great that they were going to be able to replace what they lost by simply going out looking for another job.
During a recession, particularly, I mean, they had reached a high point after years and years and years of trying to get there.
Then they had to take it away from them.
The idea that they were going to be able to go out and get a new job and replace what they had was doubtful.
And yet, we came out of the recession, and those people, a lot of them, ended up doing okay.
We did a three-day series of programs focusing on those people and asked them to call and tell us how they dealt with it.
And it was fascinating.
There were exceptions, but the vast majority of them took the opportunity of being laid off or fired of finally doing what they'd always wanted to do with their lives.
They had been employee prisoners.
They went to school, they came out, they had their degrees, they went to work where they went to work, and the job was a job.
And they worked hard at it, but they always had things they really would rather have done.
It's just there wasn't a way to get paid for it.
So the career path that they took out of college was the route.
Now that was taken away.
They had to do something.
And many of them took the risk of starting their own business, becoming their own bosses.
Never forget that calls that we got in those three days.
People have never been happier, they said.
They never felt more satisfied.
They may not be earning any money yet, but they were doing what they loved.
And they enjoyed getting up every day.
They felt like they'd been reborn.
Well, this can still happen.
You don't have to be laid off for it.
We're in circumstances, more people out of work than ever before, fewer jobs available than ever before.
Obstacles exist.
Although we've had periods of time in our past where the obstacles were just as bad.
Great Depression would be one, the Civil War.
There have been other times.
I think the time is ripe for a political message of optimism, personal optimism, coupled with the fact that you live in the best place on earth to be successful.
You live in the best place on earth.
If you want opportunities to overcome, if you want opportunities to prosper, however, that is defined by you, you live in the best place on earth for that to happen.
Still, to this day, you still live in the best place on earth.
53% of Democrats say the American dream is dead.
Well, who do they listen to?
The Democrat Party, liberalism itself is the embodiment of pessimism and defeat.
Liberalism and the Democrat Party exist by telling people they can't make it.
The deck is stacked against them.
Life is unfair.
It isn't their fault.
There is discrimination.
There is racism.
There is bigotry.
You name it.
Every reason in the world to fail is there.
And by the way, totally understandable.
The Democrat Party, because they need a permanent underclass of low-skilled, low-information people depending on government, fosters pessimism.
And the optimism those people have is what government's going to do for them and having the right people in government who understand their plight and are going to do something versus people who would rather teach them how to take care of themselves,
how to be the best they can be, how to not listen to naysayers who say it can't be done and simply take advantage of the one life we're all ever going to have and make the most of it.
Now, the message of can do and optimism is magic, precisely because most people do not possess the ability to feel that way on their own.
Like I said yesterday, you don't have to go to the library to find a series of books on how to fail because we all already know how to do that.
But the people who have written how to succeed books, how to think positive books, have become millionaires because it apparently is not something that comes naturally to people.
The double whammy is the existence of a powerful political party reinforcing the notion of failure, reinforcing the notion of it's not possible.
And these people, it is really a shame.
The Democrat Party, they tell their voters it's not possible because capitalism is unfair.
Capitalism's unfair.
The game is rigged.
The rich have everything.
You don't have a chance.
They're stealing it all from you.
And they also tell people that they can't succeed because they really don't have any faith in them anyway.
That's why Bloomberg feels the need to be in control of what every New Yorker eats and drinks because he doesn't think they have the ability to do the right thing for themselves.
And he's just like every other liberal.
Now, we conservatives, on the other hand, we don't want to be in charge of how people live.
We don't want to even have to worry about it.
We want a great country.
We want people prospering.
We want people experiencing all that life has to offer, or at least giving a shot, giving it a shot.
We want the bounty of this country exploited and captured and experienced and used.
It is quite honest to say that we want the best for everybody.
Sadly, this message does not come from any political party today.
The Republican Party doesn't feel like saying everybody's.
This doom and gloom is everywhere.
This pessimism is everywhere.
And we've gotten to the point now more and more people just resigned to it.
That just, to me, is unacceptable.
53% of Democrats, American Dreams dead, but only 27% of Republicans.
That's a stark difference right there.
Poll question.
Some 63 agreed with the statement.
Anyone with talent who is willing to work hard and put the effort in can have a successful career and rise to the top regardless of their background.
63% agree with that.
23% agreed with this.
Success in America today is mostly reserved for those from privileged backgrounds who know the right people.
Talented people from poor backgrounds don't have a chance.
I mean, folks, only 23% of people agreed with that.
The Democrat Party has not convinced a majority of Americans that life is over for them.
There is still a grand opportunity to reach people here.
We did this story on our morning update.
By the way, promise, we're going to get the phone calls.
We get back at the break here at the bottom of the hour.
And then after a few phone calls, we'll get into the healthcare stack.
There was actually news story this week that we did on our morning update that murder rate and crime rate was actually tied to warmer temperature, global warming.
Kid you not.
Crime rate, murder rate was all due to the rising temperature, climate change.
If that's true, why is the murder rate in Detroit or Chicago many times higher than it is in a place like Scottsdale or Phoenix, Arizona?
I mean, it has gotten to the point now of absurdity.
Well, we've been to the point of absurdity for a long time.
But that's how desperate the climate change global warming crowd is.
And note that everything they say, once again, aimed at low-information voters.
Okay, promise your phone calls are coming next.
Okay, we're back, as promised, Rush Lindbaugh on the most listened-to radio talk show in America.
To the phones, to James in Las Vegas.
Great to have you, sir.
Hi.
Hi, Rush.
Mega, 25th anniversary from the city that Obama doesn't want you to visit unless it's for Democratic National Fundraising Dittos.
Thank you, sir, very much.
Really appreciate that.
You're welcome.
I've listened to you my entire adult life, and I appreciate it all the way from the beginning, even when you had to appear on the Phil Donahue show when you began.
And I thought that was great.
It was like a Christian going into the Colosseum with the Romans.
That was a great appearance that you made, and it was wonderful to see you convert people there on his show.
I remember Donahue saying, let me get a word in here.
It's my show.
Let me say something.
That was wonderful.
That was great, Rush.
Thank you for remembering that.
And I just wanted to mention about the incredible shrinking presidency that you discussed with the media appearances of our current president as well as past presidents and how it diminishes the dignity of the office, as you said.
You couldn't imagine JFK appearing on Jack Parr talking about the Cuba Missile Crisis.
You couldn't imagine Ronald Reagan doing anything like that, even though the liberal media portrayed him as an amiable dunce and he was a professional actor.
He was amazing in his respect for the office.
And it's amazing how the Democrats like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, Bill Clinton's on MTV Rock the Vote, telling people prophetically and reflectively that he wore boxers or briefs.
Did you remember that?
Oh, yeah, absolutely.
That was unbelievable.
He answered the question.
I mean, some teenager in the audience at MTV boxes of briefs, and he answered the thing.
And they went into detail about why.
Well, he told them that because he thought that would be a hip way to relate to the low information at the time, although the phrase was a coin-type voter that would rock the vote and come out and put him into the presidency.
No question about it.
It's unbelievable.
It just goes back to the whole diminishing of the presidency and how they don't understand the basic phrase that familiarity breeds contempt.
And the more they come on the media, the more the American people tune it out.
And the entrepreneurs, the doers, as you said, the makers move on with life, shut this stuff out.
Well, that's one of these things traditionally has been true.
I don't know if it is with Obama.
I don't know if there have been times where I have TV all the time doing campaign appearances there.
And after a while, it appeared to be that the crowds were diminishingly small, less boisterous.
And we were just talking it up to the fact, well, it's no big surprise anymore.
It's not anything special for Obama to be on TV.
But it doesn't seem to have diminished his fortunes in any way.
Whether it's diminishing the office, I don't think there's any question it is.
I don't think there's any question that the office of the presidency is being diminished here and started before Obama.
Whether he is being it's another thing.
But I appreciate the call.
I really do.
John in Miami, you're next.
And welcome to the EIB Network.
Hi.
Rush, regarding the series of shows you were talking from the early 90s, I guess I only caught one of them.
I didn't realize it was a series.
But to this day, I vividly remember the program.
And it basically charged my batteries up for the last 20 years.
I remember the calls.
One thing you didn't point out was that a lot of the people had not recovered by any means.
And you served as motivator in chief for those people.
And based on the effect that it had on me, I imagine it had a similar effect on a lot of people.
You know, that's actually a good point.
When we did this program, these people who called were in the midst of starting over.
They had by no means replaced what they lost.
That's very clear.
It was very painful, and I'm getting choked up talking about it because it was so motivational, the job you did.
And I've always thought for, you know, this is going on 20 years ago, as we've dipped into different crises and stuff, that, you know, come on, Rush, have another one of those shows because it's been so apropos from.
It's truly, truly your calling.
The Bible calls it the gift of exhortation, and it is your niche.
The gift of exhortation.
Well, I'll tell you, it's interesting that you say this because when I'll tell you what started this pessimism thing with me was recent.
I ran across a couple of stories about and by people in the millennial generation, which I'm going to ballpark it, those people between 18 and 29, 18 and 28 right now.
They call themselves millennials.
That's their generation.
And many of them are really pessimistic.
A lot of them are recently graduated students with profound amounts of student loans, no job prospects.
A third of them are still living at home with mom and dad.
And there was a general pessimism that they were expressing and talking about.
And I kind of got mad when I was reading this stuff.
And sometimes I react out loud.
And I said, but you voted for what happened.
You voted for what we're getting here.
I don't feel sorry for you.
I'm saying this to myself as I'm reading this stuff.
I said, oh, boo-hoo.
You're the ones that fell for all of this.
You thought that you were going to get this utopia.
You thought we were going to get this nirvana.
You listen to some guy who's a dreamer talking about the better tomorrow and you fell for it.
And I said, why don't you recognize now that you voted for it?
Why don't you change your once you realize here you've made a mistake and you've invested in things that can't possibly be true?
You were bought hookline sinker.
And I mentioned this.
I happened to share this with a guy.
He said, he kind of shamed me.
And he said, why are you mad at them for being pessimistic?
I said, because why don't they realize that they voted for that?
Rush, they're not going to blame themselves.
And then he cited all of these other groups that have voted for Democrats for 50 years, who've had lives of continuing misery and sadness and disappointment.
And they keep voting for the people who promised them they're going to fix that, that they're going to help them to escape all that.
He said, why should the millennials be any different, Rush?
He said, these millennials, and he might have been a little sexist because he threw women in the mix.
He said, they're dreamers.
They fall hookline and sinker for some slickster that comes along and promises a better tomorrow.
He'd have to be specific about anything.
All he's got to do is sound touchy, feely, and dreaming about a better tomorrow.
And young people are automatically going to fall for that.
That's part and parcel of being young.
And I said, yeah, I know, I know.
All that made sense.
But at the same time, I tell myself, these are not stupid people.
They're not, but they are emotional.
And it is a source of continued frustration to me that people continue to vote against their best interest, the things that they fall for.
I understand why.
I understand how that program here, 25 years of explaining all that, so I get it.
But the point of this all is that John here says, you need to do these positive attitude shows more often.
You need, you know, you use what you did in that show 20 years ago.
And my point was, we're surrounded by it.
This pessimism is like a blanket or a layer of fog all over the country.
And what amazes me about it, and I hate to keep touting the Limbaugh theorem, but it's indisputable with a growing number of people.
And sometimes, I'll be honest, I fall into it too.
I sit around and I get down in the dumps about where we're headed, where the country's going, just like everybody else does.
And I've to grab myself figuratively by the shoulders and give myself a shake to snap out of it, which teaches me how easy it is to succumb to it.
I mean, being pessimistic is easy.
You know, being a fatalist is easy.
Giving up is easy.
Being resigned to something dismal, it's easy.
It's just easy in a human nature sense.
And it even entraps me at times.
But in this instance, I think back to the campaign of 2008, and I remember what people were promised.
I remember what they thought.
Here we had a candidate who was, by even the admission of political science experts, a black, sorry, blank canvas.
People could paint and make Obama whatever they wanted him to be by virtue of the way he was campaigning.
Whatever, if you thought the country was headed to destruction economic, Obama was going to fix it.
If you thought the country was inherently racist and sexy, he was going to fix it.
If you were worried the country was hated around the world and we're going to get blown, he was going to whatever you wanted him to be, you could make him out to be.
Meaning you could invest every hope and dream and desire you had in Obama.
He's going to fix it.
Okay, people did that.
The people that voted for him did it.
After five years, four and a half years, it's done nothing but get worse.
And what really amazes me, even though I have come up with the Limbaugh theorem to explain it, I will admit to you, it still amazes me that we have all these people actively depressed and pessimistic and admitting it who do not even associate Obama with any of it.
If I had not come up with the Limbaugh theorem, I might have literally gone insane and needed a padded cell by now in trying to understand it.
Any other president presiding over a dismal economy has always been held accountable for it.
I know what you're shouting at the radio, but Russian media does, I know all that.
But it's still, nevertheless, the media doesn't affect the way I think about things.
And I assume that a lot of other people could be immune to the media if they wanted to be.
But this, it's worse than middle ais.
I mean, there is a pessimism and it's like a big fog bank that settled in.
And there's a resignation like these 57% or 53% Democrats have given up on the American dream.
It's given up.
It sort of still shocks me that the people that voted for it don't get it and are not clamoring for some kind of change.
Independent of political parties, just change for the sake of it.
They think they got it.
And it's left them hopeless.
And it just, even though I've come up with the way to explain it that makes perfect sense, it still boggles my mind that it works.
Still boggles my mind.
So this guy said to me, you need to write them off.
You need to write off the millennials, and you need to write off women.
You're never going to get them to change their mind.
They're never going to drop the Democrat Party.
It's not going to happen.
Never going to happen.
And I just, that's an idea.
I refuse to accept that.
I refuse to accept the idea that those people can't be reached.
Anyway, I have to take a break because I'm a little long here, which seems to be a pattern.
Next segment's going to be a little shorter than usual, so I apologize in advance.
Okay, back to the funds.
Moscow Mill, Missouri.
It's Rich, and thank you for holding.
Sir, it's great to have you on the program.
Hey, Rush, it's been many years you and I have been together.
I thought, you know, Moscow Mills, and there are not too many people here to call.
There might not be too many people that live there besides you.
So I know that you've called here before.
Yes, sir, I did.
I was in California and looked for houses on a computer, and you were kind of concerned how I bought a house under the computer.
Yeah, well, how many years ago was that, though?
Well, I got here after a year of trying to sell my house in 07.
I retired in 06.
Yeah.
Well, I remember doing it.
I was recently, I got to Sacramento in 89, and you had just left, and some young man told me, you got to listen to this guy.
Yeah.
And you found me in Moscow Mills.
Well, my wife stayed at home.
She had MS at the time, and thankfully, all that's behind us.
But she would record every show at home so that when I was out, I'd gotten promoted to regional manager.
And while I was out, she would record, and then I would listen to you the next day between stops.
I'd stop it and come back and start it up again.
Well, I'm very flattered, sir.
Thank you very much.
So her and I became ditto heads within six months, and we've been there ever since.
And you're like a member of the family.
Thank you, sir.
I really appreciate it.
That's the way I look at it.
But the reason I called the humor.
Great humor.
For the humor, I would never have listened.
Right.
And now you're not hearing any?
Is there a complaint?
No, sir.
The thing I wanted to mention, the reason I spurred into trying to get through, was when President Obama referred to Mrs. Joe Biden, Dr. Joe Biden.
And I thought, you know, we're being a little harsh on the guy because he did ballpark it.
What do you mean being harsh on the guy?
I mean, they buddy-buddy.
They go to conventions, they stand on their floors.
Even this guy could not think of her name.
The wife, he could not think of her name.
Well, I'm being.
It's more than a brain freeze that people talk about.
That was – look, he did it.
And that's fine and dandy.
You can say that, well, we're making a little bit too much of it because he was in the ballpark or whatever.
The only point with all this is that the media tries to destroy Republicans who make little faux pas like that, and they start telling everybody how dumb and stupid or uncaring they are.
So self-absorbed, so selfish.
With Obama, it's always nothing to see here because he's a dream of a guy to begin with.
You missed the Gulf of Mexico.
So he thinks there's 57 states.
Big deal.
At least he's trying.
At least he cares, is the way it goes.
Ladies and gentlemen, Obama's non-GAFs are just as bad.
Remember when he said he would not add one dime to the deficit, or he wouldn't raise taxes on anybody making less than $200,000?
Or if you like your insurance plan, you can keep it?
Or that Obamacare was going to drive premiums down?
The private sector is doing fine?
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