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Aug. 23, 2013 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:30
August 23, 2013, Friday, Hour #2
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And greetings to you.
Welcome back, Rushland Boy, the EIB Network.
Great to have you with us, my friends, on Friday, live from the Southern Command in sunny South Florida.
It's Open Line Friday.
Coming on, yip, yip, yip, yip, ya, whoo, Open Line Friday.
This is where you get to ask the questions.
You get to make the comments.
And whatever you want to talk about is fine.
That's not the way it usually goes Monday through Thursday.
The phone number, if you want to be on the program, 800-282-2882, and the email address, El Rushbo at EIBNet.com.
There are a couple of more aspects.
I think in the answer to the question we got from, what was it?
It was in Brooklyn.
I forget his name.
But it was a really good question.
He's starting his own business, thinking of opening his own business.
And he is, he wanted to know how it is that after 25 years, with all the competition and with all of the organized media and PR efforts to destroy this program, why is it still here?
And not only that, why is it still number one?
Why is it still triumphing and championing over all these efforts to shut it down?
The media succeeds in shutting down things they want to shut down, destroying things they want to destroy.
Ask Romney.
Ask any number.
Ask McCain.
I mean, ask any number of people.
The media wants to shut them down, destroy them, they can.
And he wanted to know why that hasn't happened, despite a 25-year concerted effort to.
Now, let me build on the answer.
The answer, I think the fundamental answer to it is, and I mean this from the bottom of my heart.
I have always described the relationship that I have with all of you in the audience as almost being like a familial, a family relationship.
And I don't look down on the audience, and I don't think I'm better than anybody in the audience, but I'm eternally grateful for everybody in the audience being here every day.
And I convey that.
This sense of appreciation is obvious.
I have a lot of people.
My friends say, you know, you've been doing this 25 years.
You could quit or you could phone it in.
You could take it easy.
Why do you still get so intense?
And that's because I do this for the audience.
I know that people show up here with really high expectations.
And even today, after 25 years, if I think at the end of a program that it was not as good as it could have been, or if I goofed up or just anything, I will fret about it for hours.
And I'll think about fixing it the next day.
It is the most important aspect here.
You know, I say that the business purpose of the program is to build the largest audience possible and hold it for as long as possible to charge confiscatory advertising aids.
What that really means is this program would not exist without the audience patronizing sponsors.
It's just that simple.
If that doesn't happen, none of the other will happen for very long.
And so what makes that happen?
Well, there has to be a level of credibility and trust.
The audience, I'm going to speak of you all in third person for a second, if you mind.
I'm going to pretend I've still got this guy on the phone.
The audience believes me when I tell them I like something, I believe in something, or I don't like something, or don't believe in it, and they trust that I'm telling them the truth.
They don't think I am manipulating them.
They don't think I'm lying to them.
That kind of thing, customer service, is another word for this.
And it is at the top of the list of things that matter.
On my mind, every day when I do this program, empathy, absolutely, empathy is actually maybe the number one required ingredient.
I have to be able to sense how you are receiving things.
I have to be able to sense, if you're driving around and your fingers poised to change stations, I have to be able to sense that and do something to make you stop.
That wouldn't be good if you did that.
And I'm, I wouldn't say I'm obsessed with it, but it's a constant focus.
It's like my almost 100% of my energy is focused on the audience of the program, meeting their expectations, servicing, whatever term you want to use.
But then the other element is this.
When I started in 1988, I was it.
What also must be factored is there was a hunger for a national media conservative voice in this country, and there wasn't one forever.
Not broadcast.
There are some magazines and stuff, but not broadcast.
And from 1988 until the mid-90s, I was it.
And so there's a, I think, a little bit of a bond of loyalty simply because that void was being filled.
And what's crucial about that void is, and if you want to talk about this bond of loyalty that exists between me and the audience, and it's the one thing the critics have never understood about this show and never will understand about it, and it's this.
When I started this program and started telling everybody what I think about things in the unique ways I chose to tell you what I think, the realization was that finally you had somebody on the radio saying what you already thought.
You were being validated.
Your ideas, your political opinions were being validated.
Okay, here's somebody on the radio who thinks just like I do.
Now, the media portrays me as a Svengali.
You're a bunch of mind-numb robots, and I come here every day and I fill your endless empty brains with propaganda.
That's what they think happens.
The truth of the matter is, you already thought what you thought.
You already believed what you believed.
I came along and validated it.
And so there was an appreciation there.
But it really, I think, it boils down to trust.
When I tell you, for example, that you're not going to lose this show, I'm the Doctor of Democracy.
I'm not going to lose this show.
It's going to be on the station you're always expecting it to be on.
That's true.
Unlike Obama, who tells you you're never going to lose your doctor and you will.
Now, this is not to say I don't challenge this relationship and disappoint people because I have.
But the fact that people have stuck with it is a testament to the strength of the bond.
And I think it's just due to the fact I just, I'll wrap this up.
I think the audience, you, I'll get back to you.
I think you understand how very much I love and appreciate you.
I think you understand how much I treasure and appreciate your being there.
And I treat everybody in this audience as though we're all good friends.
There's no talking down to, there's no contempt or any of that.
And it's just fun.
Plus, it's a good show.
I got to throw that in there too.
It's just a good show.
We get the same comments from people when we deal with the customers either at the rushlimbaugh.com website or the 2FIT website.
You ought to see the emails we get.
Customer services, people say, used to being treated this way by companies and so forth.
It's just, you just have a profound amount of respect for you.
You know what?
And I think it comes from the family.
Tell you a little bit about my mother.
One quick thing before we go to the break.
For the longest time, first five, 10 years of this program, I'd go home to Missouri to see her.
And I would be greeted with stacks and stacks of my books that members of the audience had sent her, hoping I would sign and that she would send back.
And it got to be, I mean, oppressive.
It got, I'd go home and there were hundreds and hundreds of these books that she'd been saving up for my next trip in.
And I was, Mother, could you put that aside?
I came here to see you.
You sign these.
These people went to the trouble of sending these here.
You sign these so I can send them back.
Sometimes it'd take me a whole weekend to do it.
My mother was just so ecstatic that so many people liked her son.
She just, I mean, people would pull off the highway in Cape Girardo and drive by her house, and she'd let them in.
And one of the people she let in was some national inquirer one day.
And she gave them a bunch of family secrets.
She said, we limbos have nothing to hide.
What do you worry?
She said, mother, it's my business.
I'm in charge of what they get seeing it.
Well, no, no, no.
You don't know.
I know what's better for you because we got nothing to hide.
I said, oh, yes, we do with those people.
Anyway, so that's a rather long answer, but it just all boils down to just be grateful for every customer you've got if you're starting a business and make them know.
Let them know that you are grateful and you appreciate them.
Got to take a brief time out.
We'll come back.
I know the stick-to-the-issues crowds going nuts out there about now, but this is Open Line Friday, and that's what that's for.
And we've got, well, a couple other interesting such calls coming as I look at the call roster.
So sit tight.
We'll be back and roll on right after this.
Open Line Friday, Rush Limbaugh having more fun than a human being should be allowed to have.
Michael Birmingham, Alabama.
Great to have you, sir.
Hello.
Hey, Rush.
Thanks a lot for having me on your show.
You bet.
I've been listening to you for a year this month.
My brother Patrick got me to listen to you.
I've been hooked ever since.
But I have two Open Line Friday questions for you.
Question one is, I know you've been on Family Guy a few different times, and I just wanted to like working with Seth and his crew.
Did it feel a little hostile?
I could imagine Seth was probably pretty professional, but I just didn't know if you got glares going in or if they would always give you a hard time or anything, or was it a friendly atmosphere?
It's always been much more than professional.
It's always been extremely friendly and really respectful.
The first time they called and asked me to lend my voice to the program, and I was able to do it with a high-speed phone connection.
And they were on the other end of the phone doing the direction.
And they were just as it was Seth and one of his assistants, and it was just as complimentary and appreciative as anybody, maybe even more so.
The last time that I appeared on Family Guy, I actually spent a whole day in the studio with Seth.
He was doing the other voices, and I was doing mine.
And the first time I met him, there's a little standoff curiosity, but that melted away.
And there was no friction, there was no stress.
He was entirely complimentary.
He probably tells everybody this, but he said, This is some great work.
You wouldn't believe what we get coming in here.
People want to get in here and get it out of here and don't spend much time.
But we, you, you, we, this is just a great body of work.
I can't tell you how much we appreciate it.
And then we went over and did a video interview that would be used to promote the episode a year later when it ran.
When I had my foe heart attack, which was not a heart attack, but that's what it was reported being in Hawaii.
I mean, one of the first five people I heard from was Seth McFarland.
He was, in fact, the day I was out there actually doing the work for the episode that was about me, he was a little late coming in because he bought a house and it was being remodeled.
And we were sharing stories about the pain and suffering everybody goes through doing that.
I gathered it was his first time in a major construction project.
And when he did the Academy Awards this past year, he was getting all kinds of grief.
And I sent him a couple of notes, a couple of attaboy notes.
He wrote right back.
I mean, I got a note back from him while they were going on.
I sent him a quick text during the Academy Awards and during a commercial break, he got back to me.
So I haven't spoken to him since, but every time I have been around Seth McFarland, it has been entirely professional and much more than that.
Well, that's great.
I can always tell.
It always seems like you have such a great time.
And he just never seemed like one of those foaming-at-the-mouth liberals or anything.
It's like, you know, he's liberal, but I can still respect him.
No, I think he thinks I'm a nut.
I think he thinks I'm one of them.
I'm one of those.
But for the time we were working, he was a professional.
The time we were working, we had a mutual objective, and he put it aside.
It didn't matter.
And he doesn't hold it against me.
And I don't, you know, the fact that he's a comie bastard doesn't bother me either.
It really doesn't.
I mean, it's, it's, I listen to these people talk about getting along and compromise.
And so I do it every day with people on the left.
Like, I could write a book on how it's done.
And the people I deal with, because not very many of them, but the ones that I've got some decent relationships with them.
But we don't talk politics.
We've never, ever talked politics.
Never.
Not once.
Just a couple of aside jokes.
You know, like I gave him grief.
How could you write this thinking what you think?
How could you possibly make me look good in this show?
Don't you realize what's going to happen to you?
And he said, let it happen.
I love stirring it up.
So it was fun.
That's great.
I have one more quick Open Life Friday question.
I've always noticed that whenever I always laugh when you do this, you always happen to refer to the Reverend Jack that certain way.
And I love it every time you do that.
I was curious why you say it like that.
That's the way Mr. Buckley, William F. Buckley Jr., interviewed Jesse Jackson on Firing Line, his old PBS show one time, multiple times.
But the one time I saw it, Buckley sat in an office chair that it leaned back so far you thought he was going to fall over backwards on it.
And he had a clipboard.
He had his legs crossed.
He had a clipboard.
And in order to see his guest, he had to look down his nose at him.
His head's so high in the air.
And he's looking, and you just know that he knows he's talking to a buffoon.
But he's William F. Buckley, and so he's treating this guy with respect.
And his normal speech pattern, oh, well, tell me, Reverend Dax.
And of course, he'd ask the question at erudite way, and Jackson would come back with some of his rhyme mumbo-jumbo.
It was just classically funny to me.
And I never knew whether or not Buckley was trying to be funny with the way he pronounced everybody's names that way.
I remember when I got in an argument when I appeared on Firing Line.
Women in Combat was the issue.
And I made some joke that I thought was going to make him laugh uproariously.
And he looked at me and he upbraided, come on now, Rush.
We're talking about declared hostilities in one sense versus whatever.
But he was, he was, I think he was dead serious with everybody he ever spoke to.
And I don't know that he was making fun of Buckley, or Jackson, but I interpreted it that way.
And I just, you know, I'm a mimic.
When I hear things that amuse me, I try to copycat them.
And the way he said the Reverend Jackson was just, to me, hilarious.
And part of the deal was that Jackson didn't react to it, just answered with his mumbo-jumbo rhyme stuff.
While Buckley is Mr. Erudite classic communicator, and I thought the contrast of that could not have been greater.
I don't think Jesse Jackson understood one question that Buckley asked him by virtue of his answers.
Okay, let's get back to a little news here, folks.
This is from the, let's see.
Well, I know the writer, Avique Roy.
I don't know which website that is.
It doesn't actually, it's a Forbes website.
All right.
Okay, that didn't print.
It doesn't matter.
It's real.
Delta Airlines says that next year, because of Obamacare, their health care costs are going to increase by nearly $100 million.
Now, as Avique Roy writes here, this person is a contributor at National Review Online as well.
We know that Obamacare will significantly increase the cost of individually purchased health insurance in nearly every part of the country, but we've generally assumed that disruptions in the market for employer-sponsored health insurance would be less severe.
No, we haven't.
Now, this is where, gosh, I got to be real careful here.
I don't want to insult anybody, but why in the world did anybody think that employer-provided health care disruptions would be less?
The whole point has been to destroy them.
The whole point of Obamacare is to get rid of employer-provided or privately held insurance and force people to either a state exchange or ultimately to the federal government single payer.
The whole point of Obamacare has been to disrupt everybody's relationship that they currently have.
And Obama went out there all of those times literally lying to you and me about if you like your doctor, you get to keep it.
If you like your plan, you get to keep it.
You aren't going to be able to keep it.
And if you do keep it, it's going to cost you or your employer or both of you through the nose.
But the whole point of this is to disrupt the status quo.
The whole point of Obamacare is to make such a mess.
If I can just cut to the quick and be the simplest explanation, the whole point of this is to create such a mess that the only place people want to go to get health insurance is the government.
And this is so outrageous.
Remember, how many times have I detailed for you how much money I save not using insurance?
Just go to the doctor, go to hospital, negotiate the price, and walk out of there and pay for it.
And a lot of people can do this.
You don't have to have tons of money to be able to do this.
Take installment plan payments like anybody else does.
But everybody's so conditioned that they can't get treated unless they've got health insurance.
Everybody's like sheep in this country.
We can't even just average doctor visit without insurance.
I think it is a crying shame.
I think it is literally a disservice to the people of this country what's been done attitudinally.
There are, I would say, easily a huge majority, the vast majority of people who believe that without health insurance, they're going to die.
That's why it's such a big deal to people.
You're talking about PR campaigns and scare campaigns.
People really think that they can't go through life without a health insurance policy.
Stop and think of that.
Think of the prison that puts people in.
When the odds are most people could go through life and only need a catastrophic insurance policy.
You don't need to go to the doctor every time something doesn't feel right.
You don't have to go to the doctor every time you got sniffles.
You don't have to go to the, but it's become, people of this country have been so bombarded with this is going to kill you and that's going to make you sick or this genetic trait's going to kill you or whatever.
The people of this country have been so bombarded with the fact that they're going to die tomorrow that they think the only way to stay alive is to have health insurance.
This has been one of the biggest scams that's ever been perpetrated on the people of this country.
I am not kidding you.
I honestly believe this.
Now, I know some of you are shouting, hey, Rush, don't downplay this.
Health is a big thing.
I know it is, but, you know, it's hard to die.
It takes a long time, and it's not easy to get killed.
When it happens, those are rare criminal examples, but they're not the result of lifestyle choices.
There's no insurance policy.
Go talk to this poor kid in Duncan, Oklahoma.
There's not one insurance plan he could have had that would have kept him alive because the culture killed him.
And the same thing with Shorty.
There wasn't one health insurance plan that would have kept those people alive.
That's a whole different problem.
And I'm not talking about those.
That's a different problem, and that's something else that needs to be addressed, by the way.
And Pat Buchanan, by the way, does a great job.
He's got a great paragraph in a column that ran at World Net Daily.
Let me find it since I'm mentioning it.
Hang in here, folks.
It won't take me long.
I don't have a big stack today because everything in the stack is great.
So I didn't have to put a bunch of crap, a BS in here as fillers.
Coming up, coming up.
Ah!
Teenagers can shoot and kill a man out of summertime boredom.
Teenagers who do that are moral barbarians.
They are dead souls.
But who created these monsters?
Where did they come from?
Surely one explanation lies in the fact that the old conscience-forming, character-forming institutions, home, church, school, and a moral and healthy culture fortifying basic truths, have collapsed.
And the community hardest hit is Black America.
I love that paragraph.
And I love this paragraph because I love brevity.
The fewer number of words to make a point, the more powerful the point.
The old conscience-forming, character-forming, character-building institutions, home, church, school, have collapsed.
There's no argument about that.
It's gotten so bad, you can't talk about morality to people because it's not your business.
You can't talk about right and wrong to people.
It's not your business to tell somebody else what's right or wrong because you don't understand their socioeconomic circumstances and you don't understand their rage and you don't understand the culture they come from.
So you take your morality and you stuff it.
And this is the result of that.
No souls.
They're nothing bigger than yourself.
Nothing more important than you.
You are the biggest thing out there, the center of the universe.
And whatever you want to do is fine.
This is the kind of stuff that exists now.
But this is exactly right.
The Wall Street Journal had a column long ago that described morality as the guardrails on a highway.
And ours are down.
There aren't any guardrails and we're off the road.
And there is no right or wrong because nobody's got the right to proclaim it.
And if you do want to insist on a common morality or a common right and wrong, what are you?
You are a heathen Christian pro-life hick is what you are in America today.
If you want to stand for a common morality, a common decency, a common sense, ordinary, everyday definition of right and wrong, you are public enemy number one.
Is it any wonder then that churches are public enemy number one?
Is it any wonder that the schools have been co-opted by the left and all these institutions that used to form character and build character and morality are under assault and have been for years?
Buchanan's right on the money here.
There's no health insurance policy that would have saved Chris Lane.
There's no health insurance policy that would have saved Shorty Belton.
But everybody in this country is of the opinion that they can't get through the day without a health insurance policy.
It's just amazing to me.
It really is.
I describe a lot of what I do as participating in life by observing it.
And I do.
And you know me, I've told you, I never go with the flow, and I am never part of the conventional wisdom.
And I studiously avoid it.
And I watch with a mixture of amazement, sadness, and disappointment as people get grouped like sheep.
Easily so.
I can't, I don't know what it's like to be conscious every day.
And my foremost fear being my health insurance and whether or not I've got it and are going to keep it or what have you.
But for a lot of people, it's everything.
It's the only thing.
And that exists.
The reason people think that way, you can't really blame them because every day of their lives, they're told that that food or that beverage is going to kill them or give them this disease or that disease, or their genetics incline them to alcoholism or Parkinson's or what have you.
Every day, multiple times a day, the people of this country are inundated with what's going to kill them, what's going to make them sick.
And they believe it all.
Otherwise, this fad food stuff wouldn't get started and have a life.
But it does.
And so health insurance, I mean, it's such a big thing.
It can determine who wins and loses elections.
And the answer to it is right there in the free market, like that Wall Street Journal piece said yesterday, and I've commented on several times.
Get rid of the third-party payer.
Reestablish a relationship between the product or service and the consumer, the customer paying for it.
And if there's no third party, I'll guarantee you it'll be priced in such a way that people can afford it.
A business will not stay in business if it charges prices nobody can pay.
Well, the health industry charges prices nobody can pay, but that's okay because somebody makes the payment.
And they get it back in your health insurance policy.
You're paying for it one way or the other.
You're just not paying it directly.
You're going through a third party.
We all are.
Everybody is paying whatever the band-aid in the hospital is, $60, I forget.
You're paying that because somebody's willing to pay it.
The government, an insurance company, somebody's willing to pay it.
And the reason they're willing to pay it is because they're able to get it back from you.
Except you don't think you're buying a $60 band-aid.
You think you're buying your life with your health insurance policy.
So Obama comes along, takes something that was already broken and has decided to destroy it under the guise while telling people they're going to keep whatever they like and they're going to get rid of whatever they don't like.
And what he's doing is doing nothing but totally creating chaos and anxiety Because this is a left-winger wet dream, health insurance.
That equals total control over people's lives.
Paying for their health care treatment.
Paying for their health gives you total control over the way they live.
You own them.
They will do whatever you tell them to do, and they won't do whatever you tell them not to do.
And that's how totalitarians routinely attempt to gain total control over the behavior of their populations.
Nationalized health care.
You go look.
Every despot in the world has had some version of nationalized health care as a means of gaining control over his population.
Hitler did it.
They all do it.
Idiamin Dada.
Mao Zeitung.
They all do it.
Castro.
Best healthcare system in the world?
Cuba?
They all do it.
Then you got that buffoon, Michael Moore, going down there making a movie actually trying to validate the idea that Cuba has the best healthcare system in the world.
We do, and there's nobody even close to it, or we did.
So here's Delta Airlines.
Next year, their health care costs are going to increase by nearly $100 million.
Now, they're already losing money left and right.
Where in the world are they going to get that?
The answer is they aren't.
Hello, part-time conversion.
Hello, something.
Hello, you're on your own.
See you at the state exchange.
This is on purpose.
The idea that Obamacare was going to be the least disruptive with the employer-employee relationship, that was what was in the crosshairs.
That's what had to be turned upside down because that's where everybody was happy.
Vladimir Lenin, socialized medicine is the keystone to the arch of the socialist state.
I know.
Lenin was the first to say it.
Kennewick, Washington, we go back to the phones.
This is Jen.
Great to have you on the EIB Network.
Hi.
Hi, it's great to talk to you, Rush.
Thank you very much.
I was just calling to give you a very pertinent example of the Rush, the Limbaugh theorem.
Oh, cool.
My husband has a coworker, nice guy.
He's 24, African-American, and they were discussing the difficulties of finding a job and doing the things that need to be done, providing for their families, that type of thing.
And his coworker was just like, and poor Obama is just trying.
He's like, he's doing everything he can, like out there, and he's out there and he's working, and there's just nothing that he can do.
And my husband was like, isn't it amazing?
This is I think this phenomenon is part and parcel of slavish, idolized media coverage of Obama.
I think part and parcel of it is hangover from the 08 campaign where Obama was whatever great thing you wanted him to be.
And the ongoing criticism that the Republicans are mean-spirited hate-mongers who only care about the rich.
And Obama's constant campaigning.
He's out there always campaigning 19 different jobs programs.
There aren't any new jobs, but your husband's coworker thinks Obama's working really hard to try to fix it.
He's working.
Your husband's co-worker is clueless.
Your husband's coworker doesn't have the slightest idea that the economic circumstances in America today are a direct result of President Barack Obama's policies.
Because they don't see the guy governing.
They see him campaigning, trying to fix things that they also think need to be fixed.
And I, you know, the Republicans do not engage in any pushback.
And so there's no opposite contravailing point of view.
Nobody is pointing out to these people what Obama has done, what his policies mean, what they do, and what he's actually causing to happen.
It's as fast as three hours in media.
Two of them already in the can on the way over to Limbaugh Broadcast Museum, which you can see at rushlimbaugh.com.
And we'll be back much more straight ahead when we get here.
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