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Sept. 9, 2013 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:50
September 9, 2013, Monday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
Well, I hope everybody had a great weekend.
We certainly did.
And it's great to be back now.
And a brand new week of broadcast excellence, straight ahead, right in front of all of us.
Gee, it's great to be with you, folks.
I can't tell you what a pleasure and thrill and fun this is.
Telephone number, if you want to be on the program, is 800-282-2882 and the email address, LRushbo at EIBnet.com.
There are a couple of columns today on the Syria business.
One of them is by Conrad Black, who we recently interviewed for the Limbaugh Letter.
He's got a great book out called Flight of the Eagle.
And it is a great historical recounting of the transformation of this country from its founding to a world power, superpower.
It's really done well.
And Conrad had a piece yesterday in the New York Sun that is just devastating.
It's about Syria, but about this administration and its, well, you could call it incompetence or its level of deceit or what have you.
And the paragraph on John Kerry, which I'll get to in just a second.
I don't mean to be teasing you, but it's going to go with some soundbinds I've got.
The paragraph on John Kerry is just one of my favorite aspects or parts of the column.
There's another piece, The Wall Street Journal today, by Norman Pedoritz, a man I've gotten to know over the years via my friendship with Mr. Buckley.
And this one warms my heart, not because I'm mentioned in it, because I'm mentioned in practically everything these days.
This warms my heart because Mr. Pedoritz basic point is that what we're not looking at here is incompetence.
He says, go back to what Obama said five days before the 2008 election, when he said that we're five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.
And I took him at his word, just like Mr. Pedoritz apparently has.
His point is that none of this is really due to incompetence, that all of this is happening on purpose.
That Barack Obama had a desire to downsize the United States, particularly on the world stage, and to preside over the decline of the United States of America, because he thought that was what this country needed.
That we had been unjust immoral.
These are my words, not Norman's.
But the point is that everything was going along just fine.
Obama is very good.
Where Obama is crafty is he never gives away what he's doing.
It's the Limbaugh theorem.
He's always able to convince people he's trying to build this country.
He's trying to save this country.
He's trying to revitalize it while he's doing just the exact opposite.
His point is that what's happened in Syria and in Libya has given Obama opportunities to speed the decline of America that he didn't anticipate.
And so these events, while everybody is looking at them from the standpoint of Obama incoherence and incompetence, everybody needs to stop and just listen to what Obama said himself before the 2008 election and realize that what is being done here is by design, which is why this is close to my heart, because I have made the same claim both to you on this program.
And I remember I mentioned it to Chris Wallace when I sat for a rare, wide-ranging interview on the Fox News Channel's Fox News Sunday program.
And at the time, the discussion was about the economy.
And Chris, I think it's all being done on purpose.
You can tell, you know, he takes me seriously, but he wondered, the look on his face, what are you trying to do?
And I said, I'm being totally honest with you here.
I'm not trying to stir anything up.
I happen to be able to do that by breathing.
I'm not saying anything I don't believe here.
I really believe it.
And Obama's not the only one.
This is what the left has desired since the days of Woodrow Wilson.
It's right out there.
Everybody, you see, it's as plain as day.
It's as easy to understand what the Soviet Union was all about.
They were very honest about it.
The American left didn't want to accept it or didn't want it known.
Others thought that it was ragtag extremists to believe it.
But I do.
I mean, they telegraph what they stand for.
They tell us every day what they stand for.
They make no bones about their opinion of this country.
They don't like it.
They don't like it as a superpower.
They don't like it when its economy is governed and dominated by capitalism.
They just don't like it for a whole host of reasons.
And you have Woodrow Wilson and FDR.
This is the third major, well, LBJ threw him in there.
This is the fourth major attempt the left has made to fundamentally transform this country.
That's what Pedoritz's piece is about.
And I'm going to share with you excerpts of both of both these pieces.
Now, I mentioned Conrad Black's book, folks.
I have to tell you, we are with my upcoming book, Rush Revere and the Brave Pilgrims, Time Travel Adventures with Exceptional Americans.
I announced this book on Thursday.
The book hits on October 29th.
It has been number one, everything Amazon since.
It still is.
I don't know if this is unprecedented or not.
Maybe the announcement of Harry Potter books stays at number one.
Pre-order.
This book's pre-orders are higher than sales of other books.
It's astounding.
I went to a little, my first book, The Way Things Ought to Be, a publisher, which was the same publisher, Steimen und Schuster.
And they threw a book party for me at the famous New York eatery 21.
And I was meeting people in the publishing industry that I didn't know, and they didn't know me.
And I'd been in New York four years, and I was still trying to get my feet wet in that market and city and so forth.
And so a guy from Time Life, I wish I could remember, he was a ranking, very ranking senior executive, been there a long time, white-haired guy, came up to me and asked me how it felt.
Because at the time of the book party, the sales had already taken off, and it was number one on the New York Timelist.
That book stayed at number one for 24 weeks.
This guy comes up to me and asks me how I felt about it, and I said, I'm humbled.
He said, you're what?
I said, I'm humbled.
You've got a book at the top of the Times list and you're humbled?
And he really was incredulous.
I mean, almost just this side of angry incredulous.
I said, yeah, I'm humbled.
He said, what do you mean by that?
He hadn't the slightest idea what I was talking about.
I said, Well, I'm this is my first book.
This is something I never thought I would do in my entire life.
Imagining whatever a success track would be if I ever got on one in radio.
I never thought it would include writing a book.
And the fact that people are buying it, I'm deeply appreciative.
I'm totally humbled by it.
And he did not understand that.
I couldn't make him under.
He thought I was a nut.
And I said, Well, how should I feel?
He said, Well, you ought to feel on top of the world, great.
Well, I do, but I mean, I'm really humbled by it.
He didn't understand how I could understand the idea of appreciating people who were buying it didn't you know, and I should have that should have been a big red flag to me because I mean, the guy's obviously New York publishing world, he's a leftist in his politics.
That should have been a huge learning experience.
It wasn't, I mean, it was at the time, but it wasn't until sometime later that I actually realized what that meant in terms of the way those people look at their audiences.
Remember, they're news people, and their audiences don't know what they're talking about, they're never doing.
I mean, news audiences, time-life guy, news audiences, let them complain.
And the people in the news business will tell them it's the only business where the customer is always wrong.
Well, you don't understand what we do.
Well, you're not quite smart enough to understand.
And I feel the same way.
I am just overwhelmingly humbled by this.
It's inexplicable how we feel here.
Now, we did slip to number two at Barnes and Noble, but we'll fix that today.
And what else we've done here, we have posted on my Facebook page a short little video, a behind-the-scenes video, 40 seconds is what it is, 39 seconds, of a portion of the recording session to do the audio version of the book, which a couple of weeks ago did that over three consecutive nights.
And the video is actually taken from the control room.
What you see in the upper right-hand of the video frame is me on a TV monitor, the DittoCam, and the back of the broadcast engineer's head, Brian Johnson, which is as close to fame as Brian says he wants to get.
And so it was taken from the control room, and it's just a little bit behind the scenes, and we've got some more that we might post.
But the audio version, that too is doing phenomenally well in its own category in pre-orders.
And the audio version, I've never done anything like this.
The audio version was a real challenge.
I still love professional challenges, folks.
I still get jazzed by doing something I haven't done.
And I'd read my other two books, but nothing like that.
I mean, this is a dramatic reading.
Very many voice inflections, some impersonations, some accents, storytelling.
And it was a real challenge.
I had not done it before.
And I'm really proud of it because it's some of the, in my mind, some of the best work I've done, the audio version of this book.
So anyway, by this time, you know the drill.
And I can't do the feedback we continue to get from people.
It thrilled people.
I guess the number one thing we're hearing, it's about time.
People wanted me to do something beside the radio program.
And a lot of them wanted me to do a book.
And it just didn't excite me.
And if I'm not excited, I'm not going to do it.
And then Catherine said, look, why don't you do a book for kids?
That's something I had not thought of.
And start squaring history.
You know it's not being taught properly.
It's one of your big bugaboos.
And so here we go.
This is it.
The true story of the pilgrims.
True story of Thanksgiving.
Although there's much more in it than just the real story of Thanksgiving, I've seen some critics pan that.
Our press coverage has been awesome, actually.
There's nothing yet to criticize, other than me, but there hasn't been any of that.
I mean, it's some snarky comments on blogs, but the Drive-By Media have been pretty fair, accurate in their reporting of the existence of the book.
But I really, I'm humbled by it.
I don't find that odd.
This guy at Time Life thought that was the oddest thing.
You know what I mean, Dawn, when I say I'm humbled by it?
This guy could not understand that.
Of all things to feel.
That's the last thing.
I mean, he walked away, shaking his head.
Not quite getting it.
So, you know, we created this vehicle here, folks, that is so much fun.
We've brought to life the icon from our iced tea company, TwoIFBITT.com, old Rush Revere.
Who is me, dressed up as Paul Revere?
And he's got this smart aleck-talking horse that can time travel.
Well, once you do that, boy, you can go anywhere.
And that's Rush Revere and the Horse Liberty can go anywhere in American history, and we're going to.
And we can take students with us, and we've got smartphones.
We can record what happens in history, bring it back to the classroom and show the students on a projector using airplay technology.
Oh, folks.
I mean, this has been, it's a rush.
It's huge fun.
And I just look, I couldn't start the program today without once again telling you how appreciative I am and humbled I am that you have five days.
Was it Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday?
Yep, five days.
And I know that it's going to continue.
And they've, you know, it's written for 10 to 13 year olds, but it's for everybody.
Grandparents and parents to give, read with, homeschoolers.
I mean, it's just, it's for everybody.
And it is, you know, it was so much fun because it's just, it's fun to have a chance to correct what's happening in public education today.
Just as the American left, as typified by the president, sadly, doesn't think much of this country the way it was founded.
That's the way this country is being taught, sadly.
You know it as well as I do.
And to have an opportunity to correct that and do the real story of this country, because it's a great story.
And it is a once in a lifetime of the planet story, this country.
It really is exceptional.
And I have a chance to explain that and have a shot at these young skulls full of mush with their parents and grandparents.
It fills the bill when you ask yourself, what else can I do?
And for me, this is fabulous.
And the book is a way of teaching what's not being taught.
We have an amazing free country here founded by people that had an unwavering spirit and determination to triumph.
And they had hardships and they had obstacles that we try to bring to life that people today don't have.
We have our own, but not the kind they had.
Nowhere near it.
And you get people thinking that exceptional Americans are rare.
Ordinary people doing extraordinary things is rare.
It's not.
It's not rare.
It's why this country is what it is.
People coming from nothing to make the most of their lives.
This is the one place on earth where that can happen, the one place on earth where dreams are promoted and can come true.
And so that's all of this book and those which follow come under that umbrella.
And I thank you again.
I really do.
And I want to just let you know there's a little video posted at their Facebook page, and I think that links back to the homepage.
And it's also at 2fbit.com.
If not, it will be, but it's all over there.
A little video of a behind-the-scenes recording session for the audio version.
Now, we take a break.
I'm going to come back and get into these two columns.
John Kerry, also, we've got audio soundbites.
They've drawn a new red line.
They've given Assad a week.
Assad was on CBS with Charlie Rose saying, well, I didn't do it.
You don't have any evidence that I did it.
Meaning, let go of the nerve gas.
Some theories now that Obama really doesn't want to do this, looking for a way out of it.
It's just a balancing act.
Are we really looking at incoherent incompetence or is this the continuing decline of America by design?
We'll be back and continue.
Don't go away.
Hi, and welcome back.
Your guiding light, Rush Limbaugh, serving humanity behind a golden EIB microphone.
Norman Pedoritz, Obama's successful foreign failure.
And this is in the Wall Street Journal.
It is entirely understandable that Barack Obama's way of dealing with Syria in recent weeks should have elicited responses ranging from puzzlement to disgust.
Even members of his own party are despairingly echoing in private the public denunciations of Obama as incompetent, bungling, feckless, amateurish, and in over his head, coming from his political opponents on the right as well.
How else to characterize a president who declares war against what he calls a great evil, demanding immediate extirpation, and the next breath announces that he'll postpone taking action for at least 10 days, then goes off to play golf before embarking on a trip to another part of the world.
As if this were not enough, he also assures the perpetrator of that great evil that the military action he will eventually take will last a very short time and will do hardly any damage.
Unless, that is, he fails to get the unnecessary permissions he sought from Congress, in which he might not even take any military action at all.
That is a great paragraph.
That summarizes exactly where we are.
Draws the red line against a great evil.
Then in the next breath, he says he's going to postpone taking any action until Congress gets back, despite people being nerve-gassed that he goes out and plays golf and plans another trip, then comes back, then says, by the way, I'm not going to do this unless Congress goes along with me, and then goes and plays golf.
There's more.
Don't go away.
Yeah, you people in this audience are amazing.
So I casually mentioned mere moments ago that we had slipped to number two in pre-orders at Barnes and Noble.
So check during the break, and we're back up to number one.
You guys, you all are great.
I just, I can't describe how all this makes us feel.
And I just can't.
Anyway, I could talk about this next half hour and I'm not going to do that.
Back to Mr. Pedoritz's piece.
And let me go through this graph again.
He opens by detailing some of the descriptions of Obama coming even from his party.
Incompetent, bungling, feckless, amateurish, in over his head.
And then says, well, how else would you characterize a guy, a president, who declares war against what he calls a great evil?
That'd be Basher Assad, demanding immediate extirpation, and then in the next breath announced that he's going to postpone taking any action for at least 10 days and then goes off to play golf before embarking on a trip to another part of the world.
And if that weren't enough, he assures Assad that the military action he will eventually take will last a very short time and hardly do any damage, which has been echoed by John Kerry.
Unless, by the way, he fails to get the unnecessary permission from Congress, in which case he might not take any action at all.
After all of this bluster, after all of the descriptions of the horrors and the evil, he might not do anything at all.
Depends on whether Congress goes along.
Summing up the net effect of all this, Conrad Black, whose piece I also mentioned to you and I have here, Conrad Black in the New York Sun yesterday, not since the disintegration, listen to this paragraph, folks.
Not since the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991 and before the fall of France in 1940, has there been so swift an erosion of the world influence of a great power as we are witnessing with the United States?
Bingo, right on the money.
Does anybody really think it's due to incompetence?
Five years of incompetence?
Five years of incoherence?
Five years of bungling, feckless, amateurish, in over his head behavior.
Five years of it now, almost, four, a little over four and a half.
Really?
All this being done on purpose?
I mean, all this, just this happening accidentally?
I mean, Obama really wants this to be the strongest country in the world.
He really does.
He really, really, it's like he really, really wants to create jobs.
You know what that number is, by the way?
There are 90 million Americans not working, folks.
90 million adult human beings in the United States, a record number not in the labor force.
10 million of them Obamas.
2 million people a year have left the labor force under Obama while he's had 19 different efforts at creating jobs and growing the economy.
And I'm going to tell you, smart people are starting to ask this question: is this really incompetence or is something else at work here?
I have thought this was going to happen by design because I know who liberals are, and that's why I said I hope he fails.
Now back to Mr. Pedoris, Pedoritz.
Yet if this is indeed the path to which Mr. Obama has led us, and I think it is, let me suggest that it signifies not how incompetent and amateurish he is, but how skillful his foreign policy, far from a dismal failure, is a brilliant success as measured by what he intended all along to accomplish.
The accomplishment would not have been possible if the intention had been too obvious, meaning he couldn't have gotten elected by telling everybody what he intended to do.
The country is not populated, the majority of people who want us in a constant state of decline.
Americans love being number one.
You think if Obama had, in his 2008 campaign, said, we've been number one too long, it's time to let somebody else do it.
We've been number one and we've done it in an immoral way.
You think he would have gotten elected?
No way, Jose.
No chance.
Far from a dismal failure, he's a brilliant success measured by what he intended all along to accomplish.
The accomplishment would not have been possible if the intention had been too obvious.
The skill lies in how effectively he has used rhetorical tricks to disguise it.
The key to understanding what Obama has pulled off is the astonishing statement he made the week before being elected president.
We're five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.
I remember that, and I took him at his word.
It was easy to.
He'd said enough in his past to give a clear indication of what that meant.
Now, to those of us, as Mr. Pedoritz writing, to those of us who took this declaration seriously, it meant that Mr. Obama really was the left-wing radical he seemed to be, given his associations with the likes of Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers, not to mention the intellectual influence over him of Soltolinsky, the original community organizers.
So far as domestic affairs were concerned, it soon became clear that the fundamental transformation he had in mind was to turn this country into as close a replica of the social democratic countries of Europe as the constraints of our political system allowed.
Since he had enough support for the policies that this objective entailed, those constraints were fairly loose, and so he only needed a minimum of rhetorical deception in pursuing it.
All it took was to deny that he was doing what he was doing by frequently singing the praises of the free enterprise system he was working to undermine, by avoiding the word socialism, by invoking the word fairness as an overriding ideal and by playing on resentment of the rich.
Bingo, bingo, bingo.
1,000% right.
But, Mr. Pedoritz writes, foreign policy was another matter.
As a left-wing radical, Obama believed the United States had almost always been a retrograde and destructive force in world affairs.
Bingo again.
United States is the problem in the world, not the solution.
That's what he was raised believing.
That's what he was taught everywhere he went.
Accordingly, folks, this is important for you to understand and know as this Syria thing plays out.
It's important to understand what the real objectives are.
The inside the Beltway conventional wisdom formula followers are treating this as though it's any other event in the Middle East with any other president competing with or dealing with the usual forces opposing each other there.
And this is not what's going on.
We're outside the formula.
We're outside the conventional wisdom.
We're outside the box here.
Standard inside the Beltway analysis is not going to tell anybody anything about what's really happening in this situation.
You can turn on TV, you can look at any Middle East analyst, you can listen to anybody from a past administration or what have you.
And if they're talking about this in any way other than what we're discussing today, they're just following the formula.
They are not getting at the truth.
It may be that they know it and purposely want to avoid it.
You know, there's a story here in the stack.
Hollywood leftists led by Ed Asner and Mike Farrell.
Now, there are a couple of relics, but they are the leaders of the anti-war movement in Hollywood, and they're still influencing young actors and actresses.
And they are admitting they don't like this at all.
They don't like the Syria business.
They don't like what's going on in Libya.
They don't like Obama's foreign policy at all, but they will not go public with it.
And Asner admitted why.
They don't want to be seen as anti-black.
Bingo again.
It's the same reason the Republicans are not standing up and stopping this or opposing it.
Nobody wants to be seen as anti-black.
And so opposing Obama is not seen as opposing Obama.
It is racism.
It is perceived as being against black people.
Because of the nature of this nation's past in terms of slavery, whenever a black person reaches a position of power, we've got to relax all the standards because of the soft bigotry of low expectations, because of all the sympathy, because we feel so bad for what happened that they can't do anything wrong.
We're not going to permit that.
It's just not that it would be so unfair.
It'd be so unfair.
First black president to get there and then be subject to criticism.
It's not fair.
It's not fair.
We've got a long way to go before we level the playing field of what happened during the days of slavery.
And so even the most virulent anti-war protesters in Hollywood are afraid to speak up.
Because even more important to them than their anti-war position is their position on race.
And don't doubt that for a minute.
The civil rights movement is why Hollywood is liberal.
80% of it, minimum, maybe 90%.
Do not doubt me.
The civil rights movement, the marches in the 60s, all of that is exactly why Hollywood's liberal and everything else.
When you throw in the first African-American president, you shut them up on anything else that they disagree with.
Not even Ed Asner and Mike Farrell or anybody else out there wants to even get close to being thought of as anti-black.
More important to them than anything else.
They could sit by and watch Obama launch a massive attack and not say anything because to be critical of it was to be anti-black.
And that's practically a quote from Asner himself.
And he wasn't just talking about himself.
His full quote is: a lot of people here in Hollywood, a lot of people don't want to feel anti-black by being opposed to Obama.
That's the Republican Party as well.
And that's inside the Beltway formula.
They're just, they're not going to analyze this.
Honestly, even if they know what it is, they're just not going to go there, folks.
Nobody's got the guts.
Everybody is afraid of being called anti-black.
And make no mistake, the Democrats and Obama and his advisors know it.
They love it and they use it.
I would too if I were them.
But here's Pedoris.
Finish this one paragraph here on foreign policy.
As a left-wing radical, Obama believed the U.S. had almost always been a retrograde and destructive force in world affairs.
Accordingly, the fundamental transformation he wished to achieve here was to reduce this country's power and influence.
And just as he had to fend off the still toxic socialist label at home, so he had to take care not to be stuck with the equally toxic isolationist label abroad.
And he goes on to describe the fortuitous events taking place now that are actually facilitating and helping Obama reduce America's power and influence.
Back after this.
So I checked the email during the break, and a couple of more which said, Rush, the pre-order success of your book shows how much your revered audience loves you.
Fuck, that's not, that's not what this is about, I don't think.
And this is what I mean by makes me feel humble.
The greatest thing about this is that I think this is, we're all on a team here, family.
This is Team Rush showing that there are a lot of Americans who still love this country.
People running out, making this book number one pre-order on Amazon and all these places.
This is just people wanting to be heard.
They have not given up on this country.
They don't buy into what's happening to this country.
This is their way of making a statement.
It isn't about me.
It really isn't.
It's an opportunity.
This is America, a vast majority of this country, showing that they still love this country and that they care about what's being taught to young people.
That's what it really means when you get down to it.
Now, let me finish with Pedoris' piece because the conclusion here, this is not all bad.
He said, the problem for Obama, after detailing all of Obama's successes in deception here, the problem for Obama is that at least since the end of World War II, Americans have taken pride in being number one.
And that is true.
Patton said it.
Americans love a winner.
We do not want to be number two or three or four in the world.
We want to remain number one.
Now, unless the American people have been as fundamentally transformed as their country is quickly becoming, America's decline will not sit well with them.
That's another thing.
People do not want this decline.
And any opportunity they have to speak up and say so, they'll do it.
They would vote for somebody who stood up and articulated all this and said it was going to stop, it must stop.
They opposed it.
They would vote for somebody.
The American people are hungry to show anybody and everybody that they do not want to live in a country in decline.
They don't have any desire for this.
With more than three years in office to go, will Obama be willing and able to endure the continuing erosion of his popularity that will almost certainly come with the erosion of the country's power and influence?
And that is a great question.
The state of the economy leading into the 2012 election didn't matter.
It was his, but remember, he was not associated with it.
But now, unlike the first term, his approval numbers are coming down.
And this is a fascinating question to me that Mr. Pedoritz raises here.
Will his popularity in decline allow him to continue eroding the country and transforming it.
Now, no doubt, Obama will deny that anything has gone wrong.
He's still working hard to fix everything.
He's working hard to over Bush.
My gosh, they brought Bush back out and blame this in Syria on Bush.
He will resort to his favorite tactic of blaming others, Congress, the Republicans, or me.
But what is almost certain is that he will refuse to change course and do the things necessary to restore U.S. power and influence.
Those are the things he will not do.
And so we can only pray that the hole he will go on digging won't be too deep for his successor to pull us out of, much like Reagan had to do after four years of Jimmy Carter.
Check the email again.
Rush!
You've been saying this for five years.
Why are you quoting these guys?
I like being joined, folks.
I like being joined.
I like other people finally being able to come forth and say it.
What we've been saying here for five years.
And Podoritz and black are a couple of mental giants.
And it's great to be joined.
You know how that feels.
Okay, sit tight.
Much more straight ahead, folks.
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