All Episodes
Previous Next
Aug. 23, 2013 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:42
August 23, 2013, Friday, Hour #1
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
I don't think anybody is listening to the guy anymore.
I, hey, somebody needs to shut the studio door in there.
Who knows who could get in here?
Crying out loud, we got all kinds of...
Well, I'm not going to tell you what we got, or you might act on them.
Live from the Southern Command in sunny South Florida, it's Open Line Friday.
That's right, my friends.
Here we are at the end of another busy broadcast week.
The end of a busy broadcast week hosted by me, Rush Lindbaugh, documented to be almost always right 99.7% of the time.
Happy to have you here on Friday.
It's a golden opportunity for you.
And I have to admit, a lot of people, most callers don't take advantage of this, but that's okay.
Because whatever happens on Open Line Friday is what it is.
But it's a chance for you to expand the boundaries, go outside the norm.
You don't have to talk about traditional things you think I might be interested in.
Now, I know that the fact of the matter is that pretty much anything you bring up, I'm interested in because I'm a genuinely curious person.
But regardless, whatever you want to talk about is fine.
That's the deal on Friday.
That's not the way it works, Monday through Thursdays.
Again, the phone number is 800-282-2882, the email address, lrushboateibnet.com.
So I got in here at the usual time after working very early this morning, late into last night on show prep and stuff.
And I get it about, I don't know, 10 o'clock.
I got an email from Greta Van Sustrin.
And I thought, no, no, no, no.
I just did her show.
She can't be asking me back.
And it wasn't that.
Her email was, man, oh man, do you live rent-free in Obama's head?
And I said, what's this?
So I read further, and she just assumed that I knew what she was talking about.
And I didn't.
But I kept scrolling her email, and she'd finally attached a media story in which President Obama, in an interview this morning on CNN with Chris Cuomo, had once again blamed me for the gridlock in Washington.
I am the reason he can't move his agenda forward, which of course is silly because he's getting everything he wants.
He blamed me again.
I mean, it's like a broken record.
You know what I think's happening?
I think that nobody's listening to Obama anymore.
I don't think he commands nearly the attention or the interest that he does.
And so what he's doing is going back to the greatest hits.
Kind of like if you're at a radio station and losing audience, go play the hits.
You know, stop the new age stuff and go play the hits.
Well, he's going back and he recycled this idea that the Republicans are not cooperating with him because they're afraid of what I'm going to say about them.
The Republicans are not listening to me.
The true irony here is the Republicans are not listening to me.
I don't know who the Republicans are listening to outside of their consultants, but they're not listening to me.
But he's out there telling everybody.
He's got to blame somebody.
But for what?
I mean, from his standpoint, hell, he just made a move.
Did you hear what Chuck Wrangell said?
Charles Wrangell on MSNBC said that nobody should ever, no student ought to ever have to pay to go to college.
Now, there's more to this than meets the eye, because you have to couple that with the fact that the government runs the student alone program.
So I'm going to explain that as their program.
I did not even intend to mention that right now, so I'm going to reserve that and then push it back later.
But his reasoning is: hey, look, we're not competing with ourselves.
We're competing with China.
Why should we pay, have our students have to pay to educate themselves when it's our best interest that they be educated?
I mean, it's a total statist view of everything.
The idea that a student would not be competing with other students is totally foreign to him, that the idea that the only reason the student is being educated is to compete against China.
It's really silly, but the point was put forth, and the millennials are going to eat this up.
Because how many people have you heard New Castradians say, it's immoral that we should have to pay to be educated, just like it's immoral we have to pay for healthcare?
So anyway, blame me.
The president of the United States seems to think that I'm something more than relevant.
It was just two weeks ago.
Let's review, shall we?
Two weeks, three weeks, a month ago, you couldn't turn on the drive-by media without reading it.
I was finished.
And let me tell you what you had read.
I have an announcement to make here.
I wasn't going to do this either.
I mean, my broadcast partners do not know I'm going to do this, but I'm going to go ahead and do this.
What?
You think I shouldn't do this?
You don't think I should?
All right, here we go.
Okay.
The last month, if you read Politico or anything that linked to Politico or CNN or ABC or anywhere else, you were reading that it was over for me, that I was bad news for broadcast stations, that they could not sell advertising.
And all of this was because of me and the controversy I engender.
And therefore, I wasn't going to be gone overnight, but three to four years, and that's it.
Fini, total la completa, out of there, gone.
Once and for all, the left would be rid of me.
And the way this was going to happen was that we're on 600 radio stations.
The way that was going to happen was that a group owner, Cumulus Broadcasting, was going to cancel their contract with me on 35 of their radio stations.
And that was going to end my career because one of those 35 is WABC in New York and WLS in Chicago and WMAL in Washington and WBAP in Dallas and WJR in Detroit and other such large markets.
Once that happened, Thayonara, I'm in everybody's rearview mirror.
And this has been going on for a year.
We have negotiations with every radio station that carries the program, every group owner.
These negotiations just happen to end up in the public.
But the media believed everything that was being said because they wanted to.
And the image, I guess, that was created was that my heyday was gone and it was over with.
And if you listen to me now, you better like it while you can because you're not going to be able to at the end of the year because I'm going to be gone.
Well, let's see.
On this is Friday on it's either Wednesday night or Thursday.
Completed our negotiations with the Cumulus Broadcasting Company, and there will not be any changes.
I will continue to be on their radio stations for the next three years.
It was really never in doubt, but I don't want to do my own version of negotiating here.
But the only change that's going to happen is that on January 1st, we are going to leave WABC and move to WOR in New York.
My syndication partner is Clear Channel Communications, and they own WOR.
And so we're going to go to our own radio station in New York.
And this has been mutually agreed to.
The bottom line is: no change for you.
Wherever you're listening to this radio show today, you're going to be able to hear it on January 2nd, 3rd, whenever I get back from the traditional Christmas break.
There will be no interruption to you.
There will be no change.
The radio program is as strong or stronger than ever.
It will be everywhere you are used to listening to it now.
If you like this station, you get to keep this station.
I am not going to take this station away from you and force you to go to a new one.
As Obama's doing with your healthcare, he said, if you like your doctor, you like your plan, you get to keep it.
No, you don't.
You're going to lose your doctor.
You're going to lose your plan.
But I am the doctor of democracy.
I'm America's truth detector.
And as the doctor of democracy, the deal you have with your doctor isn't changing.
You get to keep your doctor.
You get to keep your plan.
You get to keep your station.
Nothing's changing.
And it really never was going to change.
These were just public negotiations, which normally don't occur in public.
But the media got involved and everyone.
So the point is that the past month in the drive-by media, I was over.
It was finished.
You better listen while you can because I was gone.
I was ineffective.
I was a has-been.
It was old news, whatever happened on this program.
Then this morning on CNN, here comes, you know what else President Obama did?
We've got the tape.
Wasn't it this interview when the Miami Dolphins, the 72 Dolphins, went to the White House to celebrate their undefeated season?
You know what Obama did?
One of the teams that the Dolphins beat, I think it was in a Stuper Bowl that year, was the Redskins, and he actually said the name.
He actually uttered a racist, bigoted, mean-spirited name when talking about the team from Washington.
He actually called them the Redskins.
This had to tick off a bunch of people on the left, the multiculturalist goons and so forth.
At any rate, this interview today, he blamed me after a month of being irrelevant, after a month of being almost over, after a month of being a has-been, after a month of salad days are behind me.
The president of the United States, who if anybody is not being listened to anymore, it's him.
If anybody is tiring people out, it's him.
If anybody who, at least making speeches, has become irrelevant, he's done it too much.
He's been out there too often.
He's been saying the same old thing over and over.
Nothing is changing.
Everything is getting worse.
We've got documentation in the form of news stories today about how the economy is literally getting worse and it's bad.
Home starts, any other number of things.
Today, I am back to being his number one obstacle.
Your host, the doctor of democracy, El Rushbo, for the past month, has been, and I should just go ahead and resign while I'm at the top, they all said.
Now I'm back to being the number one obstacle.
The president of the United States seems to think that I'm something more than relevant.
Seems to think that I'm something more than an entertainer.
The president has blamed me more than he blames Boehner or McConnell or anybody else in the Republican organizational chart.
The president says the excellence in broadcasting network is single most powerful force in Republican slash conservative politics today.
The media narrative a few weeks ago was that I was over and irrelevant.
Now, who do I sue for whiplash?
Who do you sue for whiplash?
Do you realize what happened today here?
I just leapfrogged over George W. Bush, over the Republican Party, over the Speaker of the House.
I leapfrogged over the rich.
I am at the top of the enemies list.
Anyway, welcome, folks.
Great to have you here.
And yeah, that'll suffice as an official announcement for what's going to happen.
I was talking to my broadcast partners about, say, how do you want to announce this?
I said, I don't know.
Because it's the only thing making it worth announcing is the lies that have been told about it in public.
So I said, we got three choices.
We could put on a press release.
I could do it on the radio, or we could just wait for it to leak.
And I said, let me just, it'll happen the way it's supposed to happen, the way everything else does.
It'll happen by virtue of improv.
I will know when the right time is to make hay out of this.
And so today appears to be the day.
So yes, that suffices as an official announcement.
I suspect now elements and members of drive-by media are feverishly scurrying around trying to find evidence I'm lying about it.
If you wait, it's almost in the cards.
But let me, for all of that, for all of that, can I tell you with everything going on out there?
For example, you know, if I had a father, he would look like Shorty Delbert Belton.
And if I had a son, he'd look like Chris Lane.
Nobody's going to say that.
Obama has not called the parents of Chris Lane.
I don't know if Obama has called anybody related to Shorty Delbert Belton, but these two people killed by bored, thug wannabe African Americans.
And there still has been more outrage over a rodeo clown wearing an Obama mask than either of these two events combined.
This kind of thing, this cultural rot, this decay that you can't even address without being called a racist.
The economic news, incomes have dropped.
Get this now.
This is from the Weekly Standard.
Listen carefully to this.
Incomes have dropped twice as much during the recovery as during the recession.
Obama's recession, according to Obama and the official recession agency out there, claimed that the recession ended in 2009.
And that's when the recovery began.
But as you know, and I know there hasn't been a recovery, but in official Washington vernacular, the recovery from the Bush recession began in June of 2009.
This is a powerful statistic.
Incomes have dropped twice as much during Obama's recovery as they dropped during the Bush recession.
It's bad out there.
New home sales have taken their biggest plunge since 2010.
New home sales hammered, prompting doubts about recovery.
That's the CNBC headline.
But this, my friends, is the real state of the nation.
This right here.
Have you heard that Ben Affleck has gotten the role as the next Batman, the movie to debut in theaters in 2015?
That's the news that has really upset Americans.
Of everything going on, that's the news.
I kid you not.
Thousands and thousands and thousands of people have signed petitions to remove Ben Affleck from the role.
And there is a petition at the White House calling for Obama to denounce the selection of Ben Affleck.
I'm not making, I'm not kidding you.
I've got to take a break.
There is a petition presented to the White House by the American people demanding that Obama denounce the selection of Ben Affleck.
Snardley still thinks I'm lying about this.
I'm not.
The White House set up these petitions for the little people.
It is to create the illusion that Obama's in touch with the little guy.
And the rule is that if any petition gets 100,000 signatures or more, Obama will make a ruling on it.
Right now, the petition asking Obama to dump Ben Affleck as Batman from the next movie in 2015, and that is a petition.
You can't believe that.
Remember, if people are calling 9-11, calling 9-1-1 because they can't get McNuggets, they're calling 9-1-1 when their cable system goes out.
So there's a petition asking Obama to get rid of Ben Affleck.
Right now, that petition has 5,000 signatures, but I think after this, we'll be at 100,000 by about 3 o'clock.
Because I want a ruling on this.
I want Obama to have to weigh in on Ben Affleck as Batman.
It's about time Obama went to work.
And we're back open line Friday.
Rush Limbaugh, the EIB network, and the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.
Now, I just want to straighten some of this out because there appears to be some confusion.
The petition that's out there that asks Obama to dump Ben Affleck is not a White House petition.
Obama set up this program where anybody can submit a petition at something called change.org, but that is not run by the White House.
It's not part of the WhiteHouse.gov website.
It's independent of the White House.
And that is where these petitions are.
And if any of these petitions are signed by 100,000 or more people, a deal is made by Obama that he will react to it and do whatever the petitioners want or try to.
And it is there that the AFLEC petition is.
And it has about 5,000 signatures now.
There was a petition in March 2012 entitled Prosecute the Killer of Our Son.
17-year-old Trayvon Martin.
It got 2.2 million signatures.
It's a private operation, but the White House follows it.
The White House petition doesn't seem to have anything on AFLEC yet on the AFLEC petition yet, but the effort is still there, and there are people still calling for this.
There are two petitions.
There is one at the White House website too, or there was, but it was just removed.
Coincidentally, isn't that strange?
As soon as it's mentioned on this program, it's taken down.
According to CBS News in Detroit, the petition was quickly removed from the White House website with a message that it violated the terms of service.
Now, the petition that's out there, the change.org petition demanding that Obama remove Ben Affleck from the role of Batman says his acting skill is not even close to being believable as Bruce Wayne, and he won't do the role justice.
He's not built nor is he intimidating enough for the role of Batman.
His portrayal of Daredevil was atrocious.
He's not remotely close to an action star.
Please find somebody else.
I'm not kidding you.
This is a petition at change.org asking Obama to remove Ben Affleck.
That's what's on the minds of the American people today.
I told you, you know, everybody's looking for some earth-shattering political event going to wake the American people up.
And it could well be if Obama comes out and supports Ben Affleck in this role, it could be his undoing.
Not destroying everybody's economy, not destroying paychecks, not destroying home values.
No, no, none of that matters.
But if Obama comes out and defends Affleck, he could be in deep doo-doo with the low information credit.
Now, the White House petition, there were two Affleck petitions.
There was one at the White House, and it has been removed.
But the change.org petition is addressed to Warner Brothers.
The White House petition was addressed to Obama, the wording pretty much the same.
The bottom line here, folks, is don't doubt me.
Two petitions asking Obama to get rid of Ben Affleck.
That is the state of the nation.
Here we are on Open Line Friday.
Grab audio soundbite number three.
You know, to give you an idea, to show you what old news it is that Obama is criticizing me.
It used to be that if that happened, that was the number one item on the soundbite roster for the day.
But today, it's number three.
The producers of the audio soundbite roster put it at number three and didn't even put it at the top.
My own staff didn't think it was that big a deal.
That's how.
I know we've seen it all before.
We've heard it all before.
Obama blamed me the first two weeks in office to John Boehner and the Republicans.
I told you that story.
And in Boehner, I had a meeting with him, and he told me about it.
And he says, Rush, why would Obama blame you to us?
Why would he even bring you up to us?
And I had to tell him what was going on.
I said, I said, Mr. Speaker, what he's hoping would happen is after that meeting where he says, you can't listen to me and get things done in Washington, he's hoping that you or somebody in the Republican Party go to a microphone and denounce me to agree with him.
He's in the process of trying to discredit all conservative opposition.
And the speaker was, oh, oh, okay, I get it now.
He didn't understand why it was being mentioned.
But here it is, Chris Cuomo interviewing Obama on CNN's New Day Today, the question of Syria.
You've seen the images, Mr. President.
You know the situation very well.
Do you believe at this point that you need to investigate in order to say what seems obvious, which is the U.S. needs to do more in Syria?
Republicans, after having taken 40 votes to try to get rid of Obamacare, see this as their last gasp.
Nobody thinks that's good for the middle class.
And I've made this argument to my Republican friends privately.
And by the way, sometimes they say to me privately, I agree with you, but I'm worried about a primary from somebody in the Tea Party back in my district.
Or I'm worried about what Rush Limbaugh is going to say about me on the radio.
And so you got to understand that it's really difficult.
I can't force these folks to do what's right for the American people.
But what I sure as that can do is stay focused on what I know will be good for the American people.
I mean, that is embarrassing.
I mean, that is so cliched and predictable.
That's embarrassing.
Here he gets a question about Syria.
And isn't it obvious we need to do more?
And he starts beating up on the Republicans and basically calls them a bunch of cowards.
They're either afraid of the Tea Party or they're afraid of me.
And what Obama's doing there, you know this as well as I do, what Obama is doing there is actually focusing on the people he considers his biggest threat.
And believe me, that's the Tea Party.
And I'm going to tell you something.
These people, the Democrats, they do not want to debate anybody.
They do not want to sit down in the arena of ideas and have a talk, debate, compromise.
They want to eliminate opposition.
And their way of doing that is discrediting it with people.
The way they eliminate opposition is to try to convince as many people the Tea Party is racist, a bunch of old rich white bigots.
And of course, you know what they say about me.
That's what he's trying to do here.
He doesn't.
And this idea that Republicans tell him privately that they agree.
What Republican can ever go to the microphone and say, well, that's not true.
He's making that up.
A lot of Republicans told me privately they agree with me.
Although, it may well be that some of them do, based on what they support.
But anyway, there you have it.
I mean, it's the third soundbite in the roster.
Now, later on CNN, let's move to number four.
Jake Tapper.
Actually says yesterday.
Jake Tapper's talking to the anchor Don Lemon and talking about me and my praise of the actor Ashton Kutcher.
Don Lemon says prominent conservatives like Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee, they're singing the praises of Ashton Kutcher.
But when did working hard or having a solid work ethic become only a conservative value?
So now these guys are trying to co-opt.
I'll answer that.
Can somebody explain to me the last liberal who talked like Ashton Kutcher did in those soundbites?
Can somebody find for me where Obama said anything similar to it?
Can you find any liberal who talks about taking any job, working hard, who doesn't talk about benefits, who doesn't talk about entitlements, who doesn't talk about what you're owed?
It is what Kutcher said, conservative values.
And this exposes the bankruptcy of the left and the media on these values, that they're all worried now that I went in there and co-opted an actor and ended up placing him on our side.
Here's what Jacob Tapper said in response.
I don't think it is, but conservatives are saying, like the aforementioned Rush Lembaugh, are talking about Ashton Kutcher as somebody who is preaching conservative values.
This often happens, Don.
You see somebody say something that seems like common sense, and one political side or the other says, this is exactly what we stand for.
I think in this case, conservatives did a very good job of pouncing on it and making it co-opting it as their own.
We didn't have to pounce on it and we didn't have to co-opt it.
The reason that no leftist made a move on this, Ashton Kutcher, Kutcher said this on a Sunday, I heard about it on Tuesday, and that's when we talked about it.
There wasn't one Democrat, there wasn't one person on the media, and you know they had to be watching.
I mean, it was a teen choice awards.
Not one of them, not one leftist anywhere, big or small, cited what Ashton Kutcher said.
Say, man, that's right on, that's good, that's on the money.
Cool, way to keep talking.
Nobody on the left did that.
I'll guarantee you that most people on the left hearing Kutcher were shocked, couldn't believe he was talking that way, precisely because he sounded like me.
I'll guarantee you it had to bother them.
Those are, unfortunately, exclusive conservative values.
Okay, let me see.
Let's see.
Let's take New York City.
Can somebody tell me what conservative policies are in place in New York City that are causing a 50% dropout rate?
All of the economic problems.
You can't eat here.
You can't smoke there.
You can't drive that.
Somebody tell me what conservative values or policies, if you will, are being implemented in New York City.
Can somebody explain to me what the conservative values in San Francisco are?
Can anybody explain to me what conservatism has had to do with Philadelphia or Detroit?
Can somebody explain this to me?
Does anybody have an answer for this?
Show me the conservative values that are being implemented that are being used in all of these failing blue cities and blue states.
And the answer is you can't.
But you go to places where conservative values are being implemented and policies.
One of the places where that's happening right now is North Carolina.
North Carolina in all kinds of areas, voting, voting ID, voting registration, voting rights, the economic policies that are taking place in North Carolina.
And the left is livid about what's happening in North Carolina.
And they're mounting efforts to criticize it, to reverse it, shut it down.
North Carolina has become a huge enemy of the Democrat Party.
You take a look at what's happening in North Carolina.
There you will find the implementation of conservative values and policies.
Elected Republicans are actually doing what they said they would do when they were campaigning for the office, whatever office it was.
Wherever you go in this country and you find liberal policies and liberal values, what are you going to find?
Destruction, despair, unemployment, economic malaise, houses being bulldozed, you name it.
And you will not find one conservative policy in place at any of those places.
And yet, what does the left spend all day doing?
Telling everybody that conservatism is the ruination of the individual, the ruination of our country.
And yet, everywhere the left has a total lock on whatever it is they're running, it's a disaster.
No liberalism, no conservatism can be found in any of these places.
You know it as well as I do.
Got to take a break here, folks.
Sit tight.
We'll be back.
Don't go away.
Open Line Friday.
We're going to start on the phones in Brooklyn.
This is Gary.
Great to have you, sir, on the EIB Network.
Hello.
Hi, how are you doing?
Very good.
Thank you.
Great.
I just wanted to say that I've noticed your career.
You've had an intense PR, anti-PR campaign against you throughout the media.
You've been on the radio for decades.
You have translated that fame into going into another business or your tea business.
And all the while you seem to be able to come out on top.
I was just wondering how you forged that relationship because, you know, personally, after I start a business, I just want to know how you do it from the beginning.
Well, I want to make sure I understand the question.
I've been doing this 25 years.
You're wondering, despite all of the organized, never-ending PR and media attacks against me, how does the show stay highly rated and we open a second successful business?
Yeah, I mean, you're currently number one in your field, despite everything said.
I mean, I know growing up, especially in Brooklyn, I heard that you were the worst person possible.
But, you know, you're still here.
You're still number one.
You still get nice people listening to you.
Well, you know, we here do not run PR campaigns.
We do not run image campaigns.
We don't do anything like that.
I'll tell you what it is, as best I can figure out.
And it's going to sound syrupy to you, but I think it's right on the money.
I think this is the greatest and the most loyal audience in media today.
And now the question then becomes: why is that?
How did that happen?
And, you know, I don't really know for sure.
In answering that one, I'm going to sound a little raggedocious, but I think it has to do with the fact that they know, I don't look down on them, they know that I sincerely appreciate them listening every day.
They know that I sincerely appreciate and understand their patronizing of my sponsors.
They know that I don't lie to them.
They know that I don't say outrageous things just to get noticed.
They know that I'm not out trying to trump and build myself up.
And they just, they trust me.
There's a familial type bond with this audience.
They believe me.
And I have never, ever trampled on that.
And I have never even gotten close to trying to discard it.
This program every day is done for the audience, not for the media, not for my friends.
It's done for the audience.
And every day I try to do it better and meet their expectations in the day before.
So translate that to customer service into whatever you're going to do.
And the same thing will happen to you.
And I kind of ran out of time on that answer, but I may try to answer him a little bit more detail when we come back.
▲
Export Selection