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Aug. 20, 2013 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:28
August 20, 2013, Tuesday, Hour #3
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And here we are back at it.
Rush Limbaugh, the EIB network, Limbaugh Institute, Advanced Conservative Studies, Talent on Loan from God.
We are here at 800-282-2882.
And if you want to send an email, it's LrushbaughEibnet.com.
Hey, some things have happened.
So I'm not going to get right to the millennial stuff because the regime is now denying that they cut off aid to the Egyptian military.
Now, this is fascinating stuff.
It may be the Middle East, and you may not care about it.
You may think, come on, Rush, stick with the millennials.
Earlier today, yesterday, whenever it was, Pat Leahy leaked that the regime, the United States, had pulled our aid funding away from Egypt because of the military takeover in Egypt, military kicking out Obama's preferred Muslim Brotherhood.
And the regime was very, very cautious not to call this a coup d'état because you can't walk that back.
So all morning long, everybody's been thinking, and by the way, but the State Department was denying it.
The spokesman over there, Jen Pasaki, was saying, well, no, no, wait a minute, we haven't done that.
But still, Leahy is believed because he's a liberal Democrat.
Media believes him, and he's leaked before.
And now the regime is denying it.
Somebody has hung Leahy out to dry here.
That's one thing that I find a little fascinating.
Somebody had to leak it to Leahy that we'd yanked the funding, and he ran with it.
But at the White House, at the press briefing, Kearney's not around.
I guess he's a vacation or whatever.
They've got this backup spokeskid by the name of Josh Ernest.
And during the Q ⁇ A today, the White House correspondent for AP, Julie Pace, said Senator Leahy's office told the AP earlier today that the regime informed his subcommittee that the U.S. has stopped military aid to Egypt.
The Daily Beast has a similar report.
Is this what the regime has told lawmakers?
What I said yesterday is true today, which is that in early July, the President of the United States directed his national security team to conduct a review of the assistance and aid that we provide to Egypt.
This is part of a complex and broad relationship that we have with the Egyptians.
That review that the President ordered in early July has not concluded.
And published reports to the contrary that suggest that assistance to Egypt has been cut off are not accurate.
Oh, oh, no.
I don't know.
Leahy is a loyal Democrat, and he may bend over and grab the ankles and take the hit on this one.
I don't know, but they leaked it to him.
Somebody told him we had pulled aid from Egypt.
It's a big deal.
Egypt is our biggest ally there.
We send Egypt more money than anybody there outside of Israel.
So the White House spokesperson said, no, no, no, we haven't cut any aid off.
What are you talking about?
Oh, there's Obama, by the way.
Obama's welcoming the 1972 Miami Dolphins to the White House.
They never went when they won the suit.
The only undefeated team in the NFL, three Dolphins did not go.
Three members of that team did not go because they disagree with Obama's policies.
And I can't think that one of them is Manny Fernandez, who was, I think, offensive tackle.
Bob Kuchenberg, offensive guard didn't go.
And I forget who the third one is.
But they all three said that they just didn't feel comfortable going with the occupant of the White House being so far away from them on policy.
That's kind of an amazing thing.
So anyway, one more soundbite here.
This is Pace, the AP reporter at now back at Josh Ernest.
So you're not saying that what Senator Leahy is wrong.
I mean, Senator Leahy's saying that the aid is stopped.
And one of his aides told us that this is current practice, not necessarily official policy.
I'm just trying to understand, Josh, is what Senator Leahy said correct?
He said the U.S. military aid to Egypt has stopped current practice, not necessarily official policy, no indication of how long it will last.
I think if I were trying to make the same case that you were making here, you would be suggesting that I was engaged in a game of semantics here.
I'm trying to be as candid as possible with you about what exactly our policy has been.
We announced publicly the delay in the F-16s.
The president himself announced publicly the cancellation of the joint military exercises.
The president himself publicly directed his administration to conduct a broader review of our aid and assistance to Egypt.
And that aid and assistance is ongoing.
And no determination or conclusion of that review has been reached at this point.
They want it both ways.
I mean, this is fascinating.
Yes, they have.
No, they haven't.
It was Jim Langer who was the other Miami Dolphin.
He said, I don't want to be in a room with those people and pretend I'm having a good time.
I can't do that.
If it angers people, so be it.
Jim Langer, the other, the third player of the Dolphins that did not make the trip to the White House today.
So that means that there's Larry Zonka there, and I see Mercury Morris, Bob Greasy.
Nick Monacanti has to be there somewhere because he's not one of the three that pulled out.
Anyway, no big deal.
Just wanted to mention it.
Here's news that affects millennials, AP, workers, another socialist word to describe employees or associates.
Workers saw a modest rise in the average cost of employer-sponsored health insurance this year, but they're probably not overwhelmed with relief.
Coverage costs still are climbing faster than wages, and that means, in many cases, a bigger portion of the average paycheck is sliced off for health insurance instead of being deposited as salary into employee bank accounts.
Health insurance costs outpace wage increases.
But wait, but wait.
Obamacare was going to reduce premiums, I thought.
Obamacare was going to reduce the cost of premiums by an average of $2,500.
See, all of this, when you think of the millennials, think of target the age group 18 to 29.
Many of them were young in the Reagan 80s.
Now, they were not formed yet.
I mean, they were tykes.
But they have memories.
And I will tell you, unless you're just a die-hard liberal Democrat, life in America in the 80s was robust and it was filled with optimism for the vast majority of people.
Not for everybody.
It never is, which is my point.
But 500,000 jobs a month were being created.
Inflation was dramatically coming down while unemployment was being reduced.
Those two things had never happened before at the same time.
Normally, if unemployment is coming down, more people working, inflation goes up.
It wasn't happening.
I mean, every all because of marginal tax rate cuts, it really was.
Reagan, then the second-term campaign commercial morning in America.
You know, nostalgia, you always look back and accentuate the positive.
I don't want to overdo it.
But it was true.
You talked people back then that Reagan coming out of a period much like today, the Carter years in the 70s.
And Reagan, that whole period, people just felt better about their country.
They felt better at being Americas.
They felt better about themselves.
It wasn't a tangible thing.
It was an energy and it was a vibe, if you will.
And there was all kinds of can-do optimism.
A lot of innovation was taking place, technological invention taking place.
It was really a wonderful thing.
So that's why the left and the media have spent so much time trying to rewrite the history of the 80s.
Because the history of the 80s proves the worthlessness of liberalism.
So it couldn't be allowed to be remembered as it was.
And more and more people don't.
But the millennials were growing up.
They were in their homes.
Their parents were working or whatever.
And they were going to school.
And wanton, needless crime was not rampant.
I mean, there's been a ton of cultural deterioration from the mid-90s on, and particularly in this decade, well, this century, it has really deteriorated.
So they have some really upbeat and positive, let's say, memories of stability.
Things were stable.
There were things you could count on.
None of that exists for them today.
Now they're on their own.
A record number of them are still living at home or moving back home.
And even though it may be, in one sense, cool, it's still, they know this is not the way it's supposed to be.
When you are approaching 30, you're supposed to have been out on your own already starting to make your mark on the world.
And that just isn't happening.
And they don't see it even possible.
We had a call from a millennial last week who made a great point.
Not only are they mired in stagnation, they have been made to feel they don't have any choices.
And they have been led to believe that their parents' lifestyle created all of the messes that we have.
Their parents caused global warming.
Their parents caused all this stuff.
The excesses, the earning too much money, the excessive lifestyles.
They've been guilt-tripped all over the place.
And they've been led to believe that anything that they do that's enjoyable is punishing somebody else or destroying the planet or what have you.
I mean, folks, it is really, I don't know, it's horrible what has been done to these minds.
I mean, these are young skulls full of mush.
Just by virtue of their age, they have been polluted and perverted with the idea that enjoying life and succeeding is a betrayal, that it's unfair, that it's unjust.
And so they've just got guilt all over the place.
And then even when they do want to strike out, they don't see that they've got any choice left.
And they're hearing all this talk about their generation being the first one that will not do better than their parents.
And they believe it.
They hear this.
They believe it because people of authority are saying it.
People in the media, guests in the media, members of the administration, these are people, these are authority figures.
They've been educated, trained to believe them.
So there is a general disgust.
Now they find out their health insurance costs are skyrocketing to pay for health care coverage, treatment of the elderly, and they are resentful of that.
They voted for Obama thinking they were going to get this massive utopia, and it didn't work.
They may not even blame Obama for it, but what they're saying is it doesn't make any difference.
60% of millennials voted for this stuff.
Remember, what started all this with me was when I saw a story about how depressed they are.
And I reacted what I thought was a very appropriate way.
Well, you voted for it.
What do you expect?
Why don't you learn from it and realize that you voted for people that misled you?
You voted for a panacea that's not possible.
You voted for things that were tangential.
I mean, you couldn't even put your arms around them.
Hope and change, all this other wonderful, feely, touchy, goody stuff that none of it was real.
So wake up and don't make that mistake again.
But you have to be very careful how you say that to them.
Let me go to audio soundbites.
This also is illustrated.
Pat Cadell, last night on Cavuto on the Fox News channel, Cavuto said, do you sense this?
He's talking about the NSA spying scandal.
That's another thing, by the way, that has millennials bamboozled.
I mean, that's got everybody.
These NSA excesses and the warrantless searching and monitoring and all the things Obama said wasn't happening.
They were happening and over and over and just countless times.
And so there's, you add to all this the fact that government's spying.
This is not what they thought they were voting for.
And so Cavuto says to Pat Cadell, you sense that what we're getting here now is the same thing.
It's akin to when Democrats started turning on Jimmy Carter.
Yes, when they turned on us, the same sort of thing.
They finally remembered there's some things they believe in.
For now, almost five years, the bulk of the Democratic Party has suppressed its own belief in its own values to we have to be for Obama, we have to roll over and play dead.
He's got a danger.
Young people who are part of his base are saying, no, thank you on this.
This is a new paradigm.
I'm sorry.
They've lost this.
And when the president gets up and he's either this clueless or disingenuous.
This is right on the money.
He's essentially, in his own words, saying what I've been saying the whole program.
We're now five years in, almost five years in the regime.
And the bulk of the Democrat Party has suppressed its own belief in its own values.
They've subordinated that to, we have to be for Obama.
We have to support Obama, no matter what happens.
We have to roll over and play dead.
We have to support Obama.
We voted for Obama.
Everybody hates Obama.
There's a bunch of racists and sexists and so forth that hit Obama, and they want to get rid of Obama.
And we've got to protect Obama.
We have to do everything we can to protect Obama, even if it means doing things not in our own best interests.
And I'm sure some of them buy into that, but Cadell's point is that they're starting to say, wait a minute, what's in it for us?
Which is a legitimate question, by the way.
What's in it for us to roll over and play dead and make sure that Obama doesn't get hurt?
Oh, what's Obama getting hurt by?
He's flying around on Air Force One, vacationing every other week.
He's spending more money on travel than even Clinton is.
Obama's not hurting.
Obama's not suffering.
Obama's not unhappy.
Obama's not getting away with everything.
Why should we roll over and play dead for that?
What's that getting us?
So Cavuto said, you don't think it dies on the vine or that this sort of peters out as other scandals have, given the mainstream media attention.
Again, this is about the NSA scandal.
Public knows the IRS is dangerous.
They know Benghazi.
But this, when you see, what you have is the other Democrats who hold their nose on that.
This is too scary to them.
And for the first, and look, I think the people should behave on their principles.
And if that happens, you could shatter that Democratic coalition.
It's already happening, young people.
That's why the president tried to have that phony press conference.
I take it.
You're past being a fan then here.
I guess I've lost my fandom.
Yeah, and I got to take a quick time out here, folks.
But you get the point.
That's right.
We're back having more fun than a human being should be allowed to have.
I got one more millennial piece here.
Take me a little bit more time than I have.
Now, let me go back to the phones.
It's coming up.
Sit tight.
Here's Dan in Warwick, Rhode Island.
Great to have you on the program.
Hello.
Oh, great to be here, Rush.
This is amazing.
It's great to talk to you.
I appreciate that.
Thank you very much.
I'm just calling because I heard you at the beginning of the program saying that millennials, and earlier this morning, I've been thinking, I was like, I got to call Rush.
And I've been meaning to call you since the first day I heard you back in 2008.
And it was 2008, right about this time, because we were in the climax of the campaign.
And I'm from Rhode Island, so I am the little blue state, and I was trapped in that liberal Democratic mind.
And my friend Dan actually said to me, he's like, God, you know, Dan, I know your family's a whole bunch of Democrats, but you got your thinking all wrong.
And I know, I think it's Reagan that said, you know, it's not that liberals are stupid.
It's just that so much that they know is wrong.
And I can say honestly now that I was that kind of person, so much that I knew was wrong.
And I started listening to you, and I've listened to you every day since.
And right after I started listening to you, the RNC was on.
Well, the DNC came on first, and I remember you saying that he's going to, you know, Senator Obama at the time was going to blame everything on Bush.
And it wasn't even like two minutes into his speech.
He started blaming everything on Bush.
So I turned that speech off and I waited until the RNC and Governor Palin came out and my fire just got lit for conservatism.
And I changed my party right away.
I joined the McCain and Palin campaign.
And, you know, I knew I was late getting on bus, but, you know, like you always say, you know, you got to get up and do, you got to do something.
You got to act.
You just can't sit around.
Doesn't matter when you got here.
The fact is, you got here.
You arrived and you stayed.
See, that's key.
And you're a classic example.
You keep doing it the way you're doing it, and you're going to influence others along the way.
Okay, folks, I'm holding here in my formerly nicotine-stained fingers a piece at Forbes magazine by a millennial.
Her name is Mara Pennington.
Mara Pennington, and she's a contributor at Forbes.
And it says here, I write about my lost generation and liberty.
And her piece is quite good.
It's a further amplification of pretty much what I've been talking about recently about this generation.
It's a funny piece in places.
And I think it illustrates this fog I described, this fog of depression that has drifted in.
It's making everybody feel just not right.
Things just, something wrong.
Hard to put your finger on it, but things just aren't right.
Millions of millennials live at home and support the policies that keep them there.
Now, she's not in favor of that, Mr. Snergley.
That's the point here.
Let me, the real nut of this is toward the end of it, but let me share with you how Mara Pennington begins the piece.
In the book, Man's Search for Meaning, the Austrian psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor and founder of logotherapy, Viktor Frankl, discusses the existential vacuum.
The existential vacuum is an internal emptiness and a lack of purpose.
In a life with logos or a meaning, life of meaning, anything can be endured.
Without it, a person is lost.
Frankl watched men in the German camps succumb who might otherwise have survived simply because they had nothing to hold on to.
Without meaning.
Now, we all know everybody wants their life to have meaning.
This is why, well, this explains many things.
Everybody wants to matter.
And liberals use that to ensnare or entrap people.
For example, a person who thinks like they're nothing or nobody because they're not on television, because they're not followed by a lot of people on Twitter, or because nobody cares about them like they care about the Kardashians or whatever.
They want to matter too.
So what do they do?
Well, they hear that they can save the world from global warming by all buying a hybrid car or not eating meat.
And they become evangelists for this.
And it really is, in the case of young people, not so much that they've adopted liberalism as an ideology.
It's more that they're trying to grab onto something to give their lives meaning.
They don't want to wander aimlessly through life.
Most people derive their meaning, particularly men.
Most people derive their meaning or their self-worth from their work.
They can call it their job, but most people derive their self-worth from what they do, because what they do is where there are achievements.
And what they do is where there are accomplishments.
Now, some people derive their self-worth from being parents.
You've heard many people say, best thing I ever did with my daughter, best thing I ever did with my son.
I mean, people will grasp onto anything in order to think that they are important, that they stand out from the crowd, that they're not just a faceless statistic.
Now, sadly, that desire is capitalized on by the left in ways that actually end up demeaning people, as opposed to the conservative approach to those people, which inspires them to find out what it is they love and then get all the obstacles out of their way so that they can go give it a shot.
That's what we believe.
We don't look at people with contempt and say, well, you know, they're just hoi polloy.
They can't do anything without us.
They can't do it without our help.
We don't treat people that way, and we don't view people with contempt.
We look at them and see their potential, and we want them to maximize it.
We want people to be happy.
We want people to be what they were born to be, whatever it is.
But if there's no meaning, then there's nothing solid.
If you don't have a religious belief, if you don't have a faith in something larger than yourself, if you haven't learned that life is about much more than just you, you're going to be miserable because you're going to be constantly searching for something that's solid.
A lot of people then glom on to gaia, global warming religion, a tree or a bush or some such thing, Mother Earth in total.
The greatest excitement today, back to Mara Pennington here, when the greatest excitement today for 20-somethings are hybrid baked goods, a list of 37 random tokens of nostalgia going on an endless string of meaningless internet-facilitated dates, I found myself surrounded by nihilists.
Those who are married or finished medical school already may exempt themselves.
Anybody with a legal partner or a life in service of others may wait until middle age to experience the solitary struggle of a crisis of meaning.
The lost ones instead are those approaching 30 with no savings, no interest in anything but the near-term future, and no profitable outlet for creativity besides solipsistic online forums, meaning posting comments to blogs.
And she says the lost ones are smart.
They pay attention to what goes on in the world.
They read the news along with everybody else.
Yet what can they do?
They have minimal discretionary income.
Their free time is spent unwinding from occupations that make them look at backlit words for eight hours, computer screen, or deal with whining strangers.
They're fully adults.
They can't boast of anything their parents had at this age besides better means of communication, meaning they're not doing as well as their parents.
I hear my peers say, she writes, I hear my peers say, I'm lost.
I say, yeah, of course you are.
Almost 22 million 20-somethings live with their parents.
Myself, for the second time, currently included.
Though economists tell us that this is technically a recovery from a recession and not just one long dragging depression of next to no growth.
See what she's saying here.
She and her cohorts are being told that we're in a recovery, and they know they're not.
They know this isn't a recovery.
They're in a long, dragging depression of next to no growth for our country and for the development of individuals who thought for sure they would have had an apartment by now.
All these expectations they had, they haven't realized them.
The economy is not there for them.
They all voted, or 60% of them voted for Obama, thinking that this magic was going to happen.
They bought the hype, they bought the lies, they bought the salesmanship of the Obama campaign.
Empty canvas, paint him be, whatever you want him to be, he is.
Whatever problem you've got, he's going to solve.
Whatever problem there is, his existence is going to fix it.
And they've grown up to realize that they're waiting around for other people to do this magic and it hasn't happened.
And rather than lose faith in Obama, they're losing faith in the country.
And that's a little bit of the Limbaugh theorem.
And she even gets close to my heart by talking about: you know, my parents never had an allergy to bread, but now all of a sudden everybody can't eat gluten for crying out loud.
So basically, what she's saying there is that her generation is creating their own set of traumas to deal with.
But there wasn't this rash of gluten-free products that their parents couldn't have or needed to have.
Listen to this paragraph.
They could visit Disneyland without timed tickets.
Well, let me get the previous here.
It's not that this lost generation or segment of a generation made themselves willfully nihilists.
Life is crowded and getting stricter.
Whereas other generations might have persevered, they enjoyed less traffic and fewer regulations.
They could visit Disneyland without time tickets for rides.
They could climb Yosemite's half dome without a permit.
They could smoke cigarettes on their campuses without nanny classmates and university bureaucrats shaming them into special areas.
They lived in an era where vaccinations for lethal diseases were not up for debate and no one was allergic to bread.
We, on the other hand, exist in an age in which the state explains booster seats at safercar.gov and female bullying at girlshealth.gov.
She's making the point that previous generations, if you wanted to smoke, you smoked.
Now you got a bunch of people saying, you know, you can't do that.
You got to go here, you got to go there.
You got to go to a government website to learn how to take care of your kid in a car.
You got to go to a government website to keep yourself from being bullied by girls.
You're helpless.
You're dependent.
You can't do anything without government.
That's what this generation is being told.
She doesn't like it.
Perhaps people could find purpose on the day they stop buying multiple bicycles and instead go buy a car.
I couldn't agree with that.
We got way too many damn bicycles on the streets.
But that's just a personal preference.
The problem then, though, if you buy a car, then the problem becomes parking.
And then you have guilt about the environment.
And then you have deeper existential angst.
I'll tell you she's right on the money here, folks.
They have been guilt-tripped by a car.
They're destroying the planet.
Buy a car.
Can't find a parking place.
Buy a car.
You're congesting the planet.
Buy a car, you're destroying the environment, and you feel guilty as a result.
And who wants that?
So you go buy a bicycle, you peddle around to nowhere.
People could start an affinity group of some kind since one in four millennials has no religious affiliation.
No religious affiliation means no meaning in life.
No religious affiliation, meaning no faith in something larger than yourself.
That's unhealthy.
Americans could stop supporting anti-growth politicians, pushing agendas that strangle the economy, weaken the dollar, and erode civil liberties.
But let's be serious.
60% of these people, 18 to 29, elected Obama.
So what's left?
Frankl would tell the lost ones to find a will to meaning in this world, but finding purpose can be put off.
Even if the abyss persists and they pester the rest of the world as impotently self-involved non-starters for lack of ever finding a self or a start.
So she says at the ending paragraph, come on, be somebody who solves the harder puzzle we've been given.
Consider that this isn't the first time young people have faced a sluggish economy.
And then investigate what made growth possible in the past.
And there is where I would say, Maura, you direct them in your next column in Forbes to the 1980s.
Because this is right on the money.
You know, every young generation thinks it's doing things that other generations never had to face.
It's harder than you had it, mom and dad.
You just don't understand.
And yet mom and dad do.
And so Mara here is suggesting, maybe you realize, you millennials, this is not the first time young people have had it tough.
And maybe go back into history and find out what made economic growth possible in the past.
And I'd give you a hint.
There's something about the 80s that led to economic growth.
And it was so powerful that it continued into the 90s.
So Mara, will your follow-up piece here?
Pick up on this, where you ended this piece, and direct them to the 1980s.
And give them the stats.
Give them the tax rate reductions and give them the rate of growth and give them the number of jobs being created and give them all of it.
I have to take a break.
I've done as much as I can.
Now, folks, I want to reiterate something here that I said.
I kind of glossed over it, but I think it's pretty important if I say so myself.
And it's even for me.
I've been trying to figure out why don't these millennials, I mean, they voted for Obama.
Why do they not associate Obama beyond the Limbaugh theorem?
Why do they not associate him with the malaise and the depression?
Here's the answer to it, and it is devastating.
People are losing faith in the country, not Obama.
And if, folks, if you find yourself talking to a millennial or anybody else who's down in the dumps and depressed about the country, understand they may just be have lost faith in the country, when in fact it's Obama that's causing this.
The country's fine if we get rid of the people that are running it right now.
That has got to be reinforced.
We can't allow people to sit and have lost faith in the country, but that's what I fear is happening.
This is too important.
And I think it's something I glossed over it in previous commentary about the millennials here and thought about it during the break.
And Obama, in fact, even trying to convince people that this level of unemployment, the lack of a future, this is the new normal.
That the past, when America was robust and great, that was fake.
That was unjust.
That was brought about by an unjust, immoral founding.
Now we're getting, this is the way it was always intended to be.
And you're going to have to deal with it.
And that's just not so.
This cannot be allowed to be the new normal.
They're not going to put up with it.
It cannot allow people to have lost faith in America.
That's a little bit of an expansion on the Limbaugh theorem.
They're still not holding Obama accountable for it.
And that has to change.
Okay, got to get out of here, folks.
Make way for the following media.
And we'll be back here in 21 hours once again with more show prep for the rest of the media to follow.
Thanks for being with us today so much.
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