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Sept. 12, 2013 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:55
September 12, 2013, Thursday, Hour #1
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Time Text
Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
So on Tuesday, I was right here behind a golden EIB microphone.
And I said, what is Obama doing addressing the people?
It ought to be Putin addressing the people United States.
Putnick came up with a deal.
It's Putin.
Putin who accepted John Kerry's insincere suggestion that it ended up being a gaff.
Lo and behold, Putin has done it.
Putin has addressed the American people.
Vladimir Putin of the KGB.
And let me tell you something, folks.
No one ever leaves the KGB.
Vladimir Putin has an op-ed in the New York Times today.
For those of you who are, what do you think, Snerdley?
35 or younger.
If you're 35 years old or younger, I need for you to understand how this would have been received.
If this were to have happened in the 80s or the 70s or the 60s.
The leader of the Soviet Union, it's now called the Russian Federation, still Russia.
They just don't have the satellite nations like they did with the Soviet Union.
Had the New York Times opened its op-ed pages to Michael Gorbachev to lecture the United States and lecture the president of the United States, had they given him a forum to basically say there's nothing special about you people, and the quicker you realize it, the better off the world's going to be, there would have been outrage, bipartisan outrage, all over this country.
Now it barely even registers with people.
It's just a ho-hummer.
It doesn't really matter.
And in fact, if I may be so bold, ladies and gentlemen, Vladimir Putin, in his op-ed in the New York Times, writes this.
Well, now I don't have the exact quote.
I've got somebody's in that.
Where's the damn he he he basically said that we're not exceptional, that you shouldn't talk about being exceptional, and there's no such thing as exceptional, and you're and you're bad people when you start talking about that.
That's just that's just nobody's supposed to talk that way.
We're all equal, nothing special, and if you run around and start talking about yourselves as exceptional, then you're not a nice guy.
You're you're basically you're you're you're wrong, you're bad person, and and all of that.
Um I thought I had the peace here, and I don't.
I've got some idiots' analysis of it, which is the last thing that I need.
At any, I'm gonna find it.
I thought I had it here at the top.
My bad here, folks.
Um at any rate, uh it's an outrage.
It is an it is a simple outrage on so many levels, but it's also scary because Vladimir Putin basically echoes our own president on the concept of American exceptionalism.
Let me go back, grab audio sound by number three.
This this is Obama back in 2009 in Strasbourg, France, at the conclusion of a NATO summit.
He held a press conference and there was a QA.
The Financial Times correspondent by the by the name of Ed Luce says, Could I ask you whether you subscribe as many of your predecessors have to the school of American exceptionalism that sees America as uniquely qualified to lead the world, or do you have a slightly different philosophy?
And if so, would you be able to elaborate on it?
I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.
The fact is they don't.
They don't believe in it, not the way we believe it, and not the way we mean it.
And this kind of cuts to the quick for me because I've gone to great lengths to properly define what American exceptionalism means.
And it does not mean that we're better people.
And it does not mean that we're that we're uh special, more qualified, smarter, any of that than anybody else in the world.
It doesn't mean that at all.
But most half-thinkers, surface individuals hear the phrase, and they think it equals bragging.
And that's what Obama thought it meant.
I'm sure he thinks it means bragging, and that's why it's, well, you know, the British, they think exceptional and uh Greek and so forth.
What he was saying in that quote is, look, yeah, there's nothing special about us.
And I know that Obama thinks that.
Why else would he want to transform this country into something?
He doesn't, he thinks this country's flawed.
He thinks this country was founded in error.
And he is about transforming it.
He doesn't even use the phrase, so I don't know what Putin is responding to.
The only person in this country that talks about American exceptionalism anymore is me.
On a routine basis.
Here is Putin's reference to it in his op-ed in the New York Times today.
I appreciate this.
I carefully studied his address to the nation on Tuesday, and I would rather disagree with a case he made on American exceptionalism, stating that the U.S. policy is what makes America different.
It's what makes us exceptional.
It's extremely dangerous, writes Vladimir Putin.
It's extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional, whatever the motivation.
Of course he would say that he's a communist.
He has always been a communist.
The White House doesn't disagree with much of this, I'm sure.
The American left doesn't disagree with much of what Putin said.
In fact, the White House, the White House is happily accepting that Putin wrote this.
They're happily Obama and the White House today are happily dumping Syria into Putin's lap, and now they're running around saying, hey, he owns it.
Vladimir Putin, I I I just I'm folks, those of you of a certain age will understand my grave concern here.
Vladimir Putin has just asserted that he has a moral superiority to the president of the United States.
And the President of the United States apparently is willing to allow that perception because the White House is out saying, well, if it's Putin, he owns it, it's his policy.
Now Obama's happy to dump this, he thinks.
I thought it was a brilliant plan.
I thought he and Putin talked about it last week.
If it's such a great plan, why didn't Obama want credit for it?
Why is he happily dumping it off on Putin?
And better questioning that, why does Putin want it?
And there are answers to these, and they're not good.
But let me finish the paragraph here that Putin wrote on American exceptionalism.
And by the way, he's right, Obama did talk about it in his little 15-minute speech.
But because Obama doesn't know what it is and doesn't have a proper understanding of it, he misused it.
I carefully studied his address to the nation on Tuesday, and I would rather disagree with the case he made on American exceptionalism, stating that the United States policy is what makes America difference, what makes us exceptional.
And folks, it doesn't.
Not in and of itself.
Out of context, our policies are not what make us exceptional.
It is in the past anyway, It is the foundation and the basis for those policies where you'll find the exceptionalism.
And I'll explain this in a minute.
Putin writes, it's extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional, whatever the motivation.
There are big countries and small countries, rich and poor, those with long democratic traditions and those still finding their way to democracy.
Written as a good communist can.
Their policies differ too.
We're different.
We're all different.
But when we ask for the Lord's blessings, we must not forget that God created us equal.
My God, we got the we got the communist leader of Russia more proudly quoting the Declaration of Independence than our own president does.
We got Vladimir Putin asserting a moral superiority to the president of the United States.
Vladimir Putin.
Do you people of the White House not know what's happened here?
Vladimir Putin has positioned himself as a mature adult who stopped your immature child from messing around in somebody else's sandbox that he had no right being in and didn't know what he was doing.
Vladimir Putin is the guy who's gonna stop the killing, not Barack Obama.
Vladimir Putin is the guy who's gonna get rid of these evil chemical weapons.
Except he's not.
He's gonna make sure they're in a safe place for his buddy Assad, and they'll be in the hands of other anti-American forces somewhere in the Middle East.
And Obama happily washes his hands of it.
And we've got the leader of the Russian Federation, a former case.
This is why if you're if you're under 35, maybe even 40, what I'm saying sounds Greek to you, and I'm sorry.
You just don't know.
In your world, the Berlin Wall came down, and the Russians have been one of our allies, and this Soviet Union, that's it's old, that's that's old-styled communism doesn't exist anymore, and that's for the grand folks to be concerned about.
But this is a profound thing that happened today.
It's extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional.
Well, that must be why I am the most dangerous man in America, because I do that every day.
I want everybody in this country to think of themselves as exceptional in the sense that they are capable of far more than they know.
So...
What is ordinary people doing extraordinary things?
It's exceptionalism.
But let me give you once again, since I have your attention.
Let me tell you what American exceptionalism is.
And please bear with me, those of you who've heard this, because it needs to be repeated, particularly now.
Our president doesn't understand what it is.
Vladimir Putin may know what it really is, but he's taking the occasion of Obama's lack of understanding to use Obama's definition and then spank Obama with it.
No, I look, the fact the New York Times will give Putin space, that's not the surprise here.
That I that's not something that surprises me at all.
No, New York Times do anything they can here to advance a agenda that in their minds might save Obama.
Remember, the Soviet Union has had dreams about Russia and the U.S. being in a permanent embrace, sharing bedrooms and so forth.
Anyway, what American exceptionalism is not.
It is not that we are better people.
It is not that we are superior people.
It is not that we are smarter people.
It is not that God loves us and hates everybody else.
It is not that God prefers us.
It is not that God doesn't prefer anybody else.
American exceptionalism has nothing to do With anything but freedom and liberty.
Here is what American exceptionalism is.
By the way, this is one of the fundamental reasons why I got so excited when presented with the idea of writing a book about the truth of American history in stages and various elements for young people.
My book, Rush Revere and the Brave Pilgrims is all about the exceptionalism of those people.
So what is it?
Well, if you know the history of the world, read your Bible.
Read whatever historical account of humanity you hold dear.
And what you'll read about is human tyranny.
You'll read of bondage.
You'll read of slavery.
The vast majority of the people, the vast majority of the human beings who have lived and breathed and walked this planet have lived under the tyranny of despots.
The vast majority, it isn't even close.
The vast majority of the people of this world since the beginning of time have never known the kind of liberty and freedom that's taken for granted every day in this country.
Most people have lived in abject fear of their leaders.
Most people have lived in abject fear of whoever held power over them.
Most people in the world have not had plentiful access to food and clean water.
It was a major daily undertaking for most people to come up with just those two basic things.
Just surviving was the primary occupation of most people in the world.
The history of the world is dictatorship.
Tyranny, whatever you want to call it, subjugation of populations.
And then along came the United States of America.
Pilgrims were the first to come here seeking freedom from all of that.
They were oppressed because of their religion.
They were told they had to believe in the king and his God, whatever it was, or they would be imprisoned.
They led an exodus from Europe to this country of people of the same mindset.
They simply wanted to escape the tyranny of their ordinary lives.
This country was founded for the first time in human history, a government and country was founded on the belief that leaders serve the population.
This fun country, the first in history, and this is the exception, EXCEPT, except the exception to the rule is what American exceptionalism is.
And because of this liberty and freedom that our country exists because the founders recognized it comes from God.
It's part of the natural yearning of the human spirit.
It is not granted by a government, it's not granted by Putin.
It's not granted by Obama or any other human being.
We are created with the natural yearning to be free.
And it is other men and leaders throughout human history who have suppressed that and imprisoned people for seeking it.
The U.S. is the first time in the history of the world where a government was organized with a constitution laying out the rules that the individual was supreme and dominant.
And that is what led to the U.S. becoming the greatest country ever because it unleashed people to be the best they could be, unlike it had ever happened.
That's American exceptionalism.
Putin doesn't know what it is, Obama doesn't know what it is, and it just got trashed in the New York Times.
It's just unacceptable to me.
I'm sorry.
Millions of Americans understand exactly and precisely what American exceptionalism is, and that is why they are so appalled by this administration.
That is why they so appalled and opposed to Obamacare, Obama's economic policies, amnesty, illegal immigration with impunity, because it is a direct assault on the very foundation and fundamentals of the creation and the founding of this country.
That is why there's such opposition to Obama.
It has nothing to do with his black, it has nothing to do with he's inexperienced, it's because he is conducting an assault on the founding of this country for the purposes of transforming it in ways that will turn us into just like every other person in this planet, subjects to government.
An email that I received during the break.
Dear Rush, were you taught American exceptionalism as you explained it when you were in school?
No.
No.
I never heard of the phrase until much later in life.
And when I first heard the phrase, I misunderstood it.
The way it was being used.
Now it was being used by people I admired and respected.
But I it's natural to assume when you hear American exceptionalism that you're thinking, or you're hearing people say that we're better than other people.
Took me a little while to figure it out, but I was able to figure this is the key.
I was able to figure it out because of the grounded education I did get.
When I was in junior high, when I was in grade school, I was not propagandized with lies about the greatness of the country.
I was told the truth about it.
I was taught the history of the founding.
I was taught the history of George Washington and Paul Revere and Jefferson and so forth.
And I absorbed it and I learned it.
Now, I didn't associate any of that with something called American exceptionalism.
But I was able to explain it to myself that way because of the foundational education I've got.
That's not out there today, folks.
This is what troubles me.
Somebody the product of the public education system today will never ever, on their own, figure out what American exceptionalism means.
They will go through life thinking it means that we're a bunch of braggarts.
And then they will think that's bad and that their country is bad.
And it liberalism takes over, and they think we're no better than anybody else, we're no smarter.
This is what Putin said.
You're no smarter, you're not better, and you you shouldn't brag like that.
That's not nice.
That's not cool.
And so we have a bunch of people running around who think that it is virtuous to think there is nothing special about this country.
And what's special about it is the liberty and freedom with which we had acknowledged in our founding documents.
I've told the story, my first trips to Europe, Italy, Great Britain, if If I can just be basic about it, and I don't, this is not in I don't mean to be insulting anybody, but it's my learning process.
I know that the time I'm making my first trips to Europe and Hong Kong, China.
I'm late 20s, early 30s, and I'm aware that the United States is young compared to countries in Europe and Asia that have been around for hundreds, thousand-year-old civilizations.
And I go to Europe and say, wait a minute, why is this bathroom so damned old-fashioned and doesn't work?
What the hell is this?
What they call this a toilet?
So I started asking myself, how is it that we only been around 200 years, are light years ahead of people who've been alive a thousand?
So I started thinking about this.
It was a matter of genuine curiosity to me.
Not from a braggadocia standpoint.
I was Literally interested in how that happened.
And then I started to think all the other things that we led the world in manufacturing technology, innovation, invention, creation.
And it all led back to liberty and freedom and the pursuit of happiness and dreams coming true, and working hard for whatever you want and being able to do what you love, not just have to dream about it.
But that wouldn't have been possible if I had not been inculcated, if I may say, educated with a basic foundational, truthful understanding of this country's founding.
It's not it's just not there today.
Instead, what's being taught is we are nothing special.
And it's wrong to think that's exactly what Putin said.
And there's virtue in understanding that we're all the same.
And that's why I get so frustrated at the definition of American exceptionalism being misunderstood.
Because nobody's saying we're better than anybody else.
Our DNA is identical.
It's what we've been able to do.
To me, it's just simple as pie.
It's a simple logic.
But you have to have the building blocks for the logic to come from.
Logic is based only on your knowledge base.
So that's...
I mean, look at put it right here on the title of book, Time Travel Adventures with Exceptional Americans, and what made them exceptional.
This book that still number one at Amazon in pre-orders, Rush Revere and the Brave Pilgrim.
There again is the uh is the cover.
I want to play an audio soundbite for you.
Barack Obama, during his speech to the nation on Tuesday night, and here he is with just a really sad quasi definition of American exceptionalism.
America's not the world's policeman.
Terrible things happen across the globe, and it is beyond our means to right every wrong.
But when, with modest effort and risk, we can stop children from being gassed to death and thereby make our own children safer over the long run.
I believe we should act.
That's what makes America different.
That's what makes us exceptional.
No, no.
Here's a guy who wants to be selective in his morality.
We're not the world's policemen, except we are when he wants us to be.
Terrible things happen across the globe, and it's beyond our means to fix them, except when I think they should be.
And with modest effort and risk, we're going to do something that isn't going to be very big, not going to offend anybody.
And there's not a whole lot of risk, otherwise I wouldn't do it because I'm risk-averse.
And when children are being gassed, never mind RU486 and abortion, because that's my buddies.
That's what makes America great.
That's what makes us exceptional.
No.
What makes us exceptional is what we used to have in situations like this, and that was a moral authority.
And we had the moral authority because of what we stood for.
And we stood for what I just explained.
We stood for the absolute primacy of the individual.
We stood for the concept, concepts that are in our Declaration of Independence.
Right to life, liberty, pursuit of happiness.
We stood for that, and we were the beacon for it, and to this day, that is why the oppressed of the world still seek to come into this country.
And it is that which Barack Obama and his party seek to change.
Because in Barack Obama's view, the Constitution of the United States does not empower government.
And therefore, in his view, and they've said this, my friends, and we have played various audio sound bites over the years of them saying this.
The Constitution is a flawed document.
They call it a charter of negative liberties.
Can I tell you what I first thought when I heard that?
Negative liberties.
To me didn't make any sense.
How in the world can there be any such thing as negative liberty?
That doesn't make any sense to me.
I had to ask what the hell is that?
I first heard it uttered by one of Obama's great buddies, a lawyer of great renown on the left, his name is Cass Sunstein, happens to be the husband of this inept ambassador to the UN that Obama just appointed, uh Samantha Power.
Stop and think about Charter of Negative Liberties.
The Bill of Rights, first Ten Amendments, Charter of Negative Liberties.
I said, What?
This is only in the last 15 years, folks, that I heard them, maybe 20.
And I said, What in the world?
They're talking about the Constitution.
To me, I revere it, the Declaration.
And nothing negative about it, what in the world were they talking about?
I had to ask.
I had to ask constitutional scholars on my side of the aisle what it meant.
Because it made no common sense.
Negative liberty.
And then when I heard what it meant, I was aghast.
I was appalled.
I was shocked.
I couldn't believe there were educated Americans who believed it.
That's how naive I am.
A charter of negative liberties translates to the Constitution is insufficient because it tells government what it can't do.
Those are the negative liberties.
The First Amendment is a negative liberty because it says what the government can't do.
The second amendment is a negative liberty because it says what the government can't do, which is the sole reason for our exceptionalism, limiting government.
Maintaining the primacy of the individual human being, regardless of race, sex, creed, fake womb, or what have you.
Primacy of the individual.
pool.
The government is what's limited.
The Constitution is written to tell people in government what they cannot do.
And it's Obama and the Democrat Party who find that to be unacceptable.
And that scares me.
And it scares a lot of people in this country, and they're called the Tea Party.
And it scares a lot of other people who are called conservatives.
They don't hate government, they just don't want to be subordinated to it or subjected to it.
Dominated by it.
You've heard that people elected serve the consent of the governed.
What does it mean?
It doesn't mean that we behave according to how they allow us to behave.
That's what Obama wants.
He wants the government to have the power to determine how we behave.
His wife wants the government to have the power determine what we eat, as does the mayor of New York.
And how much we should exercise.
And ultimately, what kind of car we drive, and ultimately where we can drive it.
And the kind of fuel we can put in it.
And they do all this under the guise of compassion and love and trying to help everybody.
It's not about that.
It's their insatiable, by the way, appetite for power.
They can never get enough, no matter how much they get, it's never enough.
Well, to me, the Constitution isn't negative, and liberty isn't negative.
But the people running this country believe both to be true.
And I think both of those are stupid.
They're not smart, not brilliant, it's not intellectual, it's just wrong.
FDR was the first to come up with a notion of a second Bill of Rights.
You know what they would do?
Obama believes in it, by the way.
Second Bill of Rights would spell out exactly what's wrong with the first ten and then allow the government.
They'd rewrite the Constitution.
The government could do whatever it wanted to do, whatever they put in the amendment.
So if they don't like the second amendment, write the 12th amendment, which allows them to overrule the second.
And sometimes they just got frustrated saying, hell with rewriting it.
We'll just issue an executive order and ignore it, which is another thing happening.
Be right back.
Don't go away.
Rush Limbaugh, have my brain time behind my back just to make it fair.
Let me read to you from Obama's second autobiography thrice removed.
The title of the book, The Audacity of Hope.
Quote, this is Obama in his own book, quote, at its most elemental level.
We understand our liberty in a negative sense.
I don't.
I don't.
That doesn't even make any sense to me.
As a general rule, writes Obama, we believe in the right to be left alone and are suspicious of those, whether big brother or nosy neighbors who want to meddle in our business.
But we understand our liberty in a more positive sense as well, in the idea of opportunity and the subsidiary values that help realize our opportunity.
And he goes on to talk about this.
He understand our liberty in a negative sense.
I don't, but he does.
Because he's a statist.
He doesn't understand liberty from the position of citizenship like you and I do.
He understands liberty as a despot, as a leader.
And it's negative to him.
We have too much, and he doesn't have enough power.
That can be the only thing negative liberty is to somebody who wants to have power over others.
Jim in Saratoga Springs, New York, as we uh get to the phones.
Great to have you on the EIB network.
Hello.
Well, hi, Rush.
It's an honor talking to you.
Your monologue this morning or this afternoon was just one of many that I've heard over the past 20 years, of which I thought would be great to have uh Congress of the United States to be listening to, but unfortunately that'll never happen, probably.
It was just brilliant.
I just want to go back to the your comments, you know, and I about the show today about American exceptionalism.
You know, being uh on home for so long and also never been able to get through to you.
I just want to dedicate this to my dad who's 91, who's a World War II vet who fought behind enemy lines for the OFF, and who was married to my mom and then went to war to fight the enemy and saw hell.
And uh, we don't even know half the story that he came back home with, but it's an honor to have him as a dad at 91 and what he told me about what he did and what our family knows is just despicable about what the enemy did and what Americans did to save this country.
And I just want to, you know, basically honor him in the fact that I'm talking to you also.
He's not a talk show guy, he's an old JFK Democrat, and I try to convince him about conservatism, and he thinks I'm a kook for listening to some of the talk creatives, and I try to educate him on what's going on.
He thinks the world is going crazy and everything's upside down, but he's 91, so he's not going to really know American exceptionalism like you know what we're talking about in a sense, but he lived it.
And he did it because that was his upbringing.
Well, I understand it's probably a little frustrating, but um you um you you you it's great the way you honor your dad, nevertheless.
That's the difference.
Umway, I uh Jim, I appreciate the call.
I really do.
I've I've I've got to stop because I'm out of busy broadcast time here.
But thank you again very much.
We'll be right back after this.
Don't go away.
Let me uh close the hour by making this point.
The Declaration of Independence, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are an attempt to provide a political framework to facilitate God's will that each of us are born and remain free.
And read the founders, and you can conclude nothing other than that.
I'll repeat this and expand on it.
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