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Aug. 23, 2013 - Rush Limbaugh Program
32:46
August 23, 2013, Friday, Hour #3
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And greetings and welcome back, folks.
Great to have you.
Rush Limbaugh having more fun any human being should be allowed to have.
Happy to have you with us today on Friday.
Live from the Southern Command in sunny South Florida.
It's Open Line Friday.
And one big, exciting, busy broadcast hour to go.
And whatever you want to talk about is fair game.
800-282-2882.
Well, it looks like we have guilty on all counts or Hassan.
Verdict was announced about 10 minutes ago.
I don't know if the jury ruled whether it was workplace violence or terrorism, but the Fort Hood shooter has been found guilty on all counts.
Normally, there wouldn't be any doubt, but I just wanted to mention it.
I want to go back to Jen in Kennewick, Washington.
And she said that she's the one last caller that we had, that her husband worked with a guy, 24-year-old, African-American, and they're having trouble finding good jobs.
And she was describing how the 24-year-old friend of her husband really thinks Obama's working really hard.
It's hard out there.
Obama's doing everything he can to try to create jobs.
And she said it was the Limbaugh Theorem on display.
I mean, right there, her husband ran straight into it.
His friend, his co-worker, complaining about how hard it was to find work.
And boy, it's just, if anybody can fix it, Obama can see he's working so hard on it.
Now, Saul Olinski, the radical that Obama admires, patterns himself after.
Saul Olinski said that if the revolution that he longed for, that he advocated, that he taught, if it were ever to become reality, it would happen without anybody noticing it.
That's how subtle it was supposed to be.
That's how successful it was supposed to be.
A giant, feral revolution that nobody would notice while it's happening.
Now, the Limbaugh theorem, however, demonstrates to people how it's happening.
And so this revolution, whatever, Obama-ism, call it that.
People are now beginning to see it.
Not everybody, of course.
Many people think that what Obama is doing must be unintentional.
By the way, this is also very smart on Obama's part, the Democrat Party part, because most people would never believe that all of this damage that's being done to the country is intentional.
Presidents wouldn't do that.
No president would, especially Obama, who, oh my gosh, he was such a great guy.
Great speeches.
I mean, all this respect.
No, it can't be intentional.
So they then retreat into the belief that Obama's working really hard to fix it.
It can't be intentional because it's so unthinkable.
You wouldn't, nobody can process.
We're talking about low-information voters here.
People just can't process that somebody they elect president could actually intend to do all this.
And that makes it really tough to convince people or to persuade them because they don't want to believe it.
Most people who are not already politically attuned and conservative don't want to believe because this kind of thing being done on purpose is unthinkable.
It's totally believable that a foreign enemy would try to do this, but not somebody we elect president.
Come on.
It's not even thinkable.
And so it can't be intentional.
It's unintentional.
It's so unthinkable.
So while it's unintentional, Obama is seen as working really hard to fix it.
When in fact, the truth is that he's the architect of all this.
But it's a tough sell to people, as we know.
They don't want to believe it.
You give them incontrovertible proof.
They don't want to believe it.
Most people reject it.
Such is the respect and reverence and aura that people have for the presidency.
Yet facts are facts.
And reality is reality.
And I want to go back to this.
Weekly Standard story.
Incomes have dropped twice as much during Obama's recovery as they did during the so-called Bush recession.
Here's a pull quote from the story.
Perhaps it's just a coincidence, but the span of time over which the typical American household's income has dropped by about $2,400 a year during the recovery corresponds almost exactly with the span of time that we've been living with the looming specter of Obamacare.
So here are the relevant facts.
Incomes, personal income, take-home pay has dropped twice as much as it did during the recession.
So the recovery began in June of 2009, we're told by the officials.
So we've been in a recovery.
Now, you and I both know that there is no recovery going on, but the American people have been told we're in a recovery.
And they read AP every week and the jobs report and they read right there, and it's right there on Yahoo News that the recovery chugging along, the jobs aren't coming quite as fast, but they read that the recoveries and they see it on CNN and they see it wherever they watch it.
The recovery is happening, but it's sluggish.
There is no recovery.
You know it as well as I know it.
The truth of the matter is that Obama's recovery has done more harm to personal income than the recession we are recovering from.
This is unprecedented.
There has never in this country been anything like this where people's personal income fell twice as fast during a recovery as it fell during the recession that preceded it.
And then the added fact here is that incomes falling in this recovery correspond almost exactly with the span of time we've been living with the looming specter of Obamacare.
The looming specter of Obamacare began to be debated in earnest in June of 2009.
That is when we are told that the recovery began.
So the Obamacare debate, the Obamacare vote, and now the Obamacare implementation happens to coincide with a period of time where people's incomes are going down at a rapid, rapid rate.
Unintentional, of course.
Most people, it's totally unintentional.
Obama's out there.
You hear him.
We hear him.
He opposes this rush.
I don't know what you're talking about.
I heard him.
I heard him the other day.
He made a speech where he said, we got to creating jobs.
We should do everything we can.
This is like his 19th speech.
He really wants to create jobs, Rush.
I don't know what you're talking about.
And this is why people are losing faith in America, not him.
And my God, this guy's trying.
In fact, some people think if Obama can't create jobs, nobody can.
I mean, such is the misplaced adoration people have.
Single-family homes, Commerce Department, the regime reports that the sale of new single-family homes dropped 13.5%.
Widely missing expectations.
New home sales, biggest drop since 2010.
The lowest reading since October of 2012.
The biggest drop since May of 2010.
And yet they tell us we're in a recovery.
And people say, but Obama's, he's got all these programs to help people recover from their mortgages and their underwater status.
Obama's really working hard to get people back into their homes and get their home value up.
Isn't it amazing how everything Obama's working really hard on is getting worse?
But it is, and people just can't be made to believe that Obama's got anything to do with it.
Now, again, he can't do this alone.
He needs a slavish, sycophantic media and a basically silent Republican Party.
You put those two things together, and whatever Obama does is going to stand.
Whatever he says is going to stand.
It's going to be the reality.
When the media doesn't challenge his power, when the Republicans do not tell people what Obama's policies are really doing, then you can't blame people for not figuring it out.
And you add to it, most people do not want to believe that their president would purposely damage the health care.
I mean, this is Obama.
He wants everybody to have health care.
Obama wants everybody to never die.
Obama, he's just working really hard.
He's got kids too, Rush.
He doesn't want the health care system.
Yeah, right, right, right.
Just can't persuade him.
But sad thing, there's no reason to lose faith in America.
But these policies that are in place that are dictating all this are left-wing.
Again, folks, I want to ask you again.
I used cities in the previous example.
Everybody thinks that healthcare is a mess.
Would somebody tell me what conservative idea is being implemented in the healthcare system right now?
That would explain it.
You can't because there isn't one.
Could you explain to me what conservative policy or idea explains the job market?
You can't.
There aren't any.
Could somebody explain to me the conservative ideas and philosophies which are affecting home price?
You can't because there.
And yet the American people are told that conservatism is going to destroy the country.
The conservatives don't care about him.
Conservatives hate him.
Conservatives support the rich.
There isn't any conservatism being implemented here.
It's all liberalism.
It's all the Democrat Party.
And while their lives crumble, the American people live in fear of the Republicans maybe winning an election.
This is a headline from the Investors Business Daily.
Obama's economy, we've fallen and we can't get up.
Household incomes are still down 4.4% since the recession ended four years ago.
Meanwhile, the unemployment picture may be even worse than we think.
The Obama recovery continues to, quote unquote, impress.
According to a report released this week by Center Research, the inflation-adjusted median household income remains $2,300 below where it stood when the Obama recovery began.
So the investors.com, same story on income dropping faster during our recovery than it did during the recession.
Anybody who doubts that there are reasons for Obama to distract from his failed economic policies doesn't understand him.
But all of this is designed to distract people.
Now, in one area, in one area, it's falling apart for Obama, and that is Obamacare.
The latest Gallup poll, only 41% of the American people approve of Obamacare.
But you want to hear a shocking stat from the Gallup poll.
32, 31, 32% of the respondents in the Gallup poll say they're still unfamiliar with Obamacare.
So let's take that at faith.
Let's say we accept that.
33, 32, a third of the American people don't know what it is.
These are the people urging Obama to sign a petition to throw Ben Affleck off the Batman movie.
People that have never heard Obamacare, if you missed the first hour of the program, what really has the people of this country upset today is Ben Affleck has been cast as the next Batman, and people are outraged, and they've gone to the White House website demanding in petitions that Obama do something about it.
I'm not kidding you.
I don't know who's playing a love interest.
I haven't gotten that far.
Batman doesn't have a love interest.
Bruce Wayne does, but Batman does.
It's one of the same, I guess.
Hell, I don't know.
But all I know is that what the American people today really are upset about is Ben Affleck cast as Batman, and they're so mad about it that they're signing petitions at the White House demanding Obama get rid of him.
I kid you not.
Meanwhile, our intellectual eyebrows are debating the commas and the semicolons and the capital letters in the policy papers of Obamacare.
Got to take a quick time out, my friends.
You sit tight.
We'll be back and roll right on.
Get back to your phone calls after this.
Open Line Friday, Rush Lynn Boss, serving humanity simply by being here.
Leonard in San Bernardino, California.
I'm glad you called.
Great to have you here.
Hi, Rush.
How are you today?
Very well, sir.
Thanks very much.
First off, I wanted to compliment you on two things about your show that I like, that I enjoy every day.
Before I get to my question or request for opinion, actually, uh, sarcastic humor.
I love it, I absolutely enjoy it.
Thank you.
So do I be a little bit people tend to be a little too offended these days.
And my response to that is, well, your sensitivity offends me.
So, um, music, I enjoy the music that you put on just before and after the break.
That's always a nice little tidbit to add in.
But to get to my point of line, Colin, uh, the Jobs movie that Ashley Kutcher was in, I recently went and saw that and walked into the theater and saw a ton of teenage girls.
I'm thinking, great, what am I going to experience in this theater while watching this movie?
And what I seem to get out of the movie is they seem to portray Steve Jobs, the guy that created Apple.
You're always talking about Apple.
I've never owned anything from Apple, but I figured I'd give it a shot, see what it's all about.
And they gave a bad portrayal, I think, of Steve Jobs in the sense of walking over people, doing whatever it took to get the task done.
And no matter who he's offending or who he's crossing, or it seemed like I had that sort of feel to it, where from my background and upbringing, it seemed more of having work ethic and desire to not let anything get in his way and stop him of you know being a perfectionist and going after and creating something that his heart was in 100%.
And I just thought I'd ask you about your opinion on the movie.
I don't know if you've seen it.
No, of course any saw us.
I've seen it.
I saw it before the public.
I got my powerful, influential member of the media DVD the week before it came out.
Jobs was a jerk.
There's no two ways about that.
He admitted it.
He was a jerk.
He was hard on people and admitted it.
And he was asked about it.
He said, well, look at the results.
Look at what I got out of them.
When he wasn't happy with people's work, he had a word for it.
That's crap.
Start it over.
But he had personality.
People really wanted to please him.
Because when you did, there was a reward for it.
But he was a jerk.
But there are two phases of Jobs.
There's a major transformation that happened to Steve Jobs that even Walter Isaacson's biography didn't get to.
There is a really important part of Steve Jobs's life that I don't know about that I would like to know about.
I don't know what happened to him after he left Apple and then went to Next, which is his next computer company, that made him turn into this incredible leader because he was just a punk kid employee at Apple the first stage.
And something happened.
And I don't know what it is, and I would love to know.
Okay, Steve Jobs.
The stories are legion, particularly in his early days at Apple.
There's two stints at Apple.
The first stint, but even the second stint, he was an admitted mean person to the people that worked for him.
One story, somebody on his high-ranking executive team walked in to tell him that he had a job offer and was thinking of leaving.
And Jobs said, Why?
You're barely cutting it here.
And this is a guy been with him forever.
Why?
You're barely cutting it here.
This guy, this high-ranking, almost a right-hand man executive.
In the early stages of Jobs and Apple, when they finished, when he and Wozniak finished the Apple II and all that, and they started working on the Macintosh and ran into traditional problems.
They needed $150 million from Microsoft to keep going.
And it was in Microsoft's best interest because they wanted their word processing software, their Office software on Mac machines.
So Gates gave $150 million, kept it going.
And when they brought in John Scully, you know, Jobs recruited him.
Jobs said, What do you want to do?
You want to spend the rest of your life selling sugar water to kids?
You want to change the world?
Scully was CEO Pepsi.
So Scully comes on board and they have a culture clash and it all falls apart and Jobs leaves.
And all during this era, the stories of, I mean, he was a renegade, malcontent, worked, even though it was his company, he refused to behave according to corporate structure and so forth.
I mean, he and his team relocated to a building off-site and they raised the pirate flag when they're working in secret on the Macintosh, I believe.
Anyway, here's the point.
All this is well known.
In the first stage, Jobs was not a leader.
He was not charismatic.
He was not infectious.
He was able to laud this power over people because it was his company.
But after he left Apple and he went to the wilderness, essentially, in terms of his career, he ended up doing two things.
He started the Next computer company, which was to be a very high-priced computer for education, state of the art.
It didn't do well because it was priced too high, but it was state-of-the-art.
And he joined Pixar, the animation company.
And he turned that around, ended up selling it to Disney.
And now his wife is the single largest stockholder in the Walt Disney company because of Pixar when they bought it.
But something happened to Jobs in the period of time he was not at Apple.
He left Apple.
He goes to Next and Pixar.
And Apple was weeks away from bankruptcy and closing down in 19, I think it was 1997.
And they bought Next, Jobs' company, and they bought Jobs.
And within a year or year and a half, Jobs had engineered the ouster of the then CEO, a guy named Gil Emilio, and Jobs took over the company.
And at that point, there was a whole different Steve Jobs.
I mean, he still was a tyrant, and he still was very difficult to please.
But in that phase, he became the Steve Jobs that everybody now knows.
The great inventor, the creator, the charismatic leader, the guy who motivated people, got more out of people and they thought they had all the whatever mythological or real things people think about jobs.
This is the story I don't know.
There's no book that I've read.
There's no article that I've read.
A lot of guys have written books that knew Jobs that worked with him.
And a lot of, you know, Aaron Sorkin's working on a movie, but there's something happened when Jobs was away from Apple that totally turned him into a different kind of leader, somebody who was actually capable of being a great CEO, great organizational, motivational, all of that, whatever it took, putting the right people in the right place.
Now, this current CEO, Tim Cook, was the operations guy.
Jobs didn't care about the supply chain.
He didn't care about it.
He was a total creative inventor type gene.
So he brings in Cook to fix all that.
Their manufacturing process was an absolute mess.
They had no way of making any money.
It was totally, brings in Cook to fix it.
And basically, Cook did all of the stuff to run the company Jobs didn't want to do.
Everything a good executive should.
He didn't try to claim things that he didn't know how to do or didn't want to do for power.
He delegated them.
I want to know what happened.
I don't know that it's knowable.
I mean, I don't know that anybody does know.
But if we're going to look at Steve Jobs' life and examine his traits, great qualities as a CEO, he did not have them when he first founded Apple.
And I mean, go look at what Wozniak says about those days.
It was not pleasant.
I mean, Jobs went for weeks without taking a shower because he thought it was filthy.
He only ate the weirdest stuff.
He was on his god-awful screw left-wing new age behavioral.
He took a sabbatical trip to India and all that stuff.
But all that went by the wayside when he came back to Apple in 1997, started the iPod era, the iPhone era.
I don't know whether he even knew it, but when he talked about the education system, he sounded like a conservative.
When he talked about American business, he sounded like a conservative.
He hated Fox News.
He hated conservatives, but his wife really does.
But all that irrelevant.
I just, there's a biography stilling, waiting to be written about, you know, did Jobs go to somebody and was taught how to be a good CEO, how to become what he became?
Or, you know, did it just happen by virtue of maturity?
That's the story that nobody, it's not even in the Walter Isaacson's book is fabulous, too.
It's good.
I sent him a note telling him so.
But there's a lot of Jobs life left out of that book, even.
Maybe nobody knows.
But I would be fascinated to know what happened because there were two Steve Jobs.
Here's Heather in Williamsburg, Virginia.
Great to have you on the program.
Heather, hi.
Hi, I just wanted to tell you I had a little experience of millennial outreach this week because you encouraged me to do that.
Well, cool.
I can't wait to hear this.
Well, I managed to get myself elected to the school board a year and a half ago, and I'm having fun with that.
And I had an Open Donnet's appointment, and I always have a bunch of paper to review, and I brought it because I would have to wait.
And the 20-something assistant said to me, Wow, that's a lot of paper.
And I said, Yeah, I have a meeting tonight.
And I said, But the great thing is that paper's a renewable resource.
And she looked at me and she said, Are you kidding?
I said, No, I'm not kidding.
I said, Imagine if you guys did something to mess up everybody's piece.
Would you have repeat customers?
And she said, No.
And I said, Well, foresters wouldn't either.
We can't make oil or coal or natural gas overnight, but we grow trees, we harvest them, we plant new ones, and we grow trees and we harvest them.
And she said, Lily, that's not what they told us in school.
I never thought of that before.
Isn't that amazing when you run into that?
Yep.
And she's right.
People are taught that trees are not a renewable resource.
And of course, if you look, you know what one of the biggest lumber tree companies is, is Weyerhaeuser.
Or they were.
I don't know if they've been eaten by some other company or merged, but Weyerhauser or anybody, they plant 10 times the number of trees that they cut down for paper.
Right.
It's their business.
It's their product.
See, it seems to me common sense.
So much of economics is common sense, but it's so complicated and confusing to people.
The idea that people would believe that trees or wood is not renewable.
They see it growing every day of their lives.
And we export a lot of paper from Virginia.
Not only that, but we can recycle the paper, and we do.
It's one of the few things that actually makes sense.
And so, I mean, that's how I raised my kids.
I have three millennials, and I've talked to them.
They're all conservative, and they get it.
But I realize that in every situation, I have to start a conversation, and I have to get people thinking.
And that's my mission.
Thanks to you.
I've told you that.
You know what?
Heather, you're exactly right.
And here's the other thing you have to do: when you're talking to a millennial or somebody that's rather youthful, assume when you start out that they know the exact opposite of the truth about most things because that's what they've been taught.
There might be exceptions to that, but just like this person you encountered, that it was earth-shattering news to her that paper is a renewable resource, that trees can grow again.
She never considered the opposite because she never taught the opposite.
She'd been taught about how this country is evil and destroying its environment and causing global warming and so forth.
So you've got to assume, you're right, you're going to have to initiate the conversation or manipulate it so that they do whatever.
You've got to get the conversation going.
And then it's a sad thing to have to do, but you have to assume that you have to assume that they don't know the basics because they haven't been taught the basics.
That's a great call.
Heather, I'm glad you got through.
We'll take a brief time out and be back and continue, folks, after this.
Chris in South Bend, Indiana.
It's great to have you.
I'm glad you called.
Welcome.
Hey, Rush.
Love you, man.
Hey, I noticed at the beginning of class, he played a sound bite of Jake Tapper talking about Ashton Coocher's speech from the Team Indoctrination Awards.
Right.
And I noticed at the end of that bite, he said the conservatives seem to try to co-opt anything that makes anything that's common sense.
And I thought it was interesting in that little comment, it seems like he inadvertently admitted that they know.
Let me read to you what he said.
Let me read to you what he said.
He said, this often happens.
You hear somebody say something that sounds like common sense, and one political side or the other says that's exactly what we stand for.
In this case, the conservatives did a very good job of pouncing on it and making it or co-opting it as their own.
Right.
Yeah, so it sounds like he's admitting that what, you know, because Coocher sounded just like you, just like any good conservative.
So it sounds like he's admitting that we're espousing common sense.
I don't think he meant to do that, but you have a good point.
Right.
Inadvertently he did it.
And it reminds me, my wife and I have friends, a married couple, and they are just so proud to be liberals.
You know, make them feel good about themselves.
Oh, yeah.
And we'll have conversations with them, and I'll make a bunch of conservative points without letting them know, without announcing their conservative points.
And they agree with them.
They're all in.
They think it's great.
And then I'll let them know, you know, this is basic conservative philosophy.
And then all of a sudden they're, you know, shuts them off.
Why do you think that is?
That's what I can't figure out.
They agree with it.
Well, it's branding.
Part of it is branding.
But there's another part of it, too.
Another part of it is they live in their little cocoon.
They're walled off and they've got their own egoistic orientation of what's good, bad, and not.
And if something is said or happens, it upsets that precious balance in their cocoon.
They can't deal with it.
Wait a minute.
You mean I – that's what conservatives think?
No, no, no.
Then that can't be good.
That can't be good.
You've just destroyed their, you've eaten away their security blanket that makes them feel good.
Sadly, my friends, that's it.
Another busy open line Friday is in the can and finished.
Hope you really have a great weekend, and we'll be back on Monday.
Whatever happens between now and then, we will know about it.
And as a bonus, we will tell you what to think about it.
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