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Sept. 26, 2013 - Rush Limbaugh Program
37:13
September 26, 2013, Thursday, Hour #2
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And we are back.
It's great to have you, Rush Limbaugh, the EIB network and the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.
Telephone numbers 800 282-2882, the email address L Rushmore at EIBNet.com.
So and this is I think it not only is it predictable in a way it is understandable.
I get an email.
During the break rush, the drive buys are doing what today?
They're telling everybody how bad this is looking to be, meaning Obamacare.
Where do the drive-bys get their information rush?
They get their information from the regime.
So the regime is flooding the zone yesterday and today with how bad and how expensive and how shocking and how whatever other term that's negative you conjure up Obamacare is going to be next week when it's implemented.
But rate rush, wait a minute, Rush, what if they're flooding the zone knowing that it isn't going to be anywhere near this bad, so that people end up being pleasantly surprised.
In other words, what if the regime is really lowering expectations by design and on purpose?
Now this has happened before.
Let me dig deep into my memory.
During the Clinton Lewinsky saga.
One day, Bill Clinton was forced to testify under oath.
The interviewed, interrogated by the special prosecutor.
At the end of Clinton's testimony, a story filtered out that a particular question had really upset Clinton.
And he had really gone nuts answering this.
His eyes got wide and he was just beside himself.
And they set everybody up.
Everybody was waiting to see this.
They're going to release the tape, the audio and the video tape of the interview.
And this went on for a day, maybe a day and a half.
And we were all expecting, you remember this, snerdly?
We were all expecting to witness Clinton losing it.
And we watched it and there was nothing.
There was one moment with one question where his eyes got real big for like a half a second, and then he gathered himself and went on.
And it turns out everybody had been set up to believe that Clinton had gone off the deep end in a question about cigars and oral sex or whatever, and he didn't.
And so now since you know people remember that are beginning to wonder, could the same thing be happening here?
Lower expectations so much that when it all starts next week, and half of this doesn't happen, then everybody who's been ripping it to shreds and highly critical of it is fully discredited.
This is the degree of distrust that people have for the regime.
Now, if that scenario is the case, I wouldn't be surprised.
Um they have they've been floating all these very high premium estimates.
So that they'll be able to say that premiums aren't as high as it was estimated they would be if that turns out to be the case.
I mean the regime is talking about these premiums are gonna be rock uh through the roof and so forth.
But there's this one thing that mitigates this.
The uh the story about the high deductibles had to be put out before next week because the exchange sites are going to actually spell all that out.
The the high deductibles are real.
Those are not exaggerated.
They are not amplified.
The high deductibles are real, and people are gonna be very shocked to see how high the deductibles are.
That is going to happen.
Now we've already had a couple of callers who have checked out the new rates in their states, and they were complaining about the premiums and the copays and the deductible.
So we know that that is going to happen.
And even the Obamacare caps, if they are ever implemented, are still many times higher than the average deductions now.
And people are going to be surprised to see how small the tax subsidies turn out to be.
If you make over $47,000, you're not going to get one red cent of subsidies.
And $47,000 is the average income in the U.S. So while it is totally rational to think that the regime would be setting us all up with their media partners, there are certain things that are going to happen that are going to surprise people.
And we also know that they're telling us that the software isn't ready to go at the exchanges.
Right.
That the software glitches are just monumental.
Now, are they lying about that?
And is the software just going to be smooth as silk?
On late time will tell.
But I find it fascinating that there are people worried that we're all being set up.
And it's actually going to go compared to what we're hearing pretty smooth.
And people aren't going to have a problem with it at all.
And it wouldn't, as I say, surprise me if the regime is trying some of that.
But as I say, there are some really shocks, some big shocks that are heading for people.
The deductibles are just one.
Now we had a caller talk about media reaction to Ted Cruz's speech or filibuster and how it angered her.
Let's listen to some of that because we uh we have our share of it just as an illustration.
This is yesterday, the Atlantic magazine had a women of Washington Forum series.
Snerdley, don't you wish you'd been able to go to that?
Washington women of uh women of Washington.
I mean, how many how many testicle lock boxes do you think were at this forum?
Washington women?
Ha!
Anyway, the Atlantic put this thing on.
And um uh it's uh it's uh it's uh had let's see, got we got Karen Finney, who is a Democrat strategist and an MSNBC info babe, interviewing Democrat Senator Patty Murray.
Now, this is the Brit Hume talking point, which is the Republican Party's run completely on fear of me.
And here's how this soundbite goes.
No, oh, we can't do that.
We can't speak out against Rush, right?
But but he's not a leader in our party.
But don't think that.
It's not that, it's just we can't say anything.
And similarly, you know, you hear that kind of conversation about the Tea Party people.
That's leading from a point of fear, and people don't support fear.
They want whether you're a CEO of a company or whether you are a legislator or you know, whatever role you have, they want to be confident in their leader.
If you're confident in yourself, people will be confident in you.
And they need to take him on.
They do.
Who are they talking about?
Me or Cruz.
I don't know who they're talking about here, because in my name, well, I can't do that.
We can't speak out against Rush, right?
He's not a leader, but don't think that.
It's not that we just can't say anything.
They're talking about me.
They need to take me on.
This is the Brit Hume talking point.
The Republican Party, this is what they're saying.
Republican Party is run completely on fear of rush limbaugh.
If if if if I asked Cruz yesterday, you might have heard you have said, Senator, are you afraid of me?
Do you realize that did not get snerdily and everybody thought that's that's gonna be the poor quote of that interview?
No, no, no, they didn't.
Because Cruz laughed at it and swatted it away.
So, of course, nobody in the drive-by's is mentioning it.
I asked Cruz that question.
But this is what got me.
This is a Democrat talking point, and here it is on Fox News.
That all these Republicans are afraid of me, and that their fear of me is what's standing in the way of them doing the right thing.
He's on O'Reilly's show.
Britt Hume's on O'Reilly show.
Okay, here's another one.
This is the situation room on CNN with uh Jessica Yellen reporting about Ted Cruz's filibuster.
Now get this one.
Carl Rove called it an ill-conceived and self-defeating strategy.
Guess what?
Cruz loves the hate.
He told Rush Limbaugh.
The single biggest surprise on arriving to the Senate is the defeatist attitude here.
You know who else does?
Conservatives in a crucial primary state?
Iowa.
I I read the transcript here, and I just listened to this, and I don't know what she's talking about.
And she is an info babe at CNN.
Can I run this by you?
Okay, I don't know the question.
There may not have been just her report.
Carl Rove called it what Cruz did, his filibuster.
Carl Rove called it an ill-conceived and self-defeating strategy.
And guess what?
Cruz loves the hate.
What?
So Carl Rove hates Cruz, is what this means, and Cruz loves the fact that he's hated by the Republican Party.
That's what she's saying here.
Cruz loves the hate.
Did Cruz say anything about hate?
These people have to use the word hate and associate it with conservatives every chance they get.
The truth is they're the ones that hate us.
It's the media that's afraid of me, not Ted Cruz.
It's the Democrats who are afraid of me, not Ted Cruz.
And maybe some Republicans, but that's silly.
And then they quote Cruz, the single biggest surprise on arriving to the Senate is the defeatist attitude here.
I thought that was huge news yesterday.
Ted Cruz said at every luncheon that the of the Republican senators, they never talk about how to win.
He said they never talk about winning anything.
He said, Rush, if you had to attend one of these lunches, you'd be in therapy for a year.
Okay, so Cruz is quoted in this piece as saying the single biggest surprise on arriving to the Senate is the defeatist attitude here.
And Jessica Yellen reacts to that by saying, you know who else does?
Conservatives in a crucial primary state.
I who what what what is that about?
Cruz's single biggest surprise on arriving to the Senate is the defeatist attitude.
You know who else does?
Conservatives in a crucial primary state.
I guess she's saying that conservatives in Iowa have a defeatist attitude.
That is that what she's saying.
No, the single biggest surprise on arriving to the Senate is a defeatist attitude here.
That's Cruz.
Then she says, you know who else does?
Who else does what?
Well, maybe it's they enjoy the hate.
Oh, maybe she's saying that the conservatives in Iowa also enjoy the hate.
Conservatives and a it's impossible to decipher.
I have no idea.
This is a reporter for CNN, and we have no idea what she's saying.
No idea what well, I know the words.
I don't know what the point she's making is.
Let's see.
We have a Democrat hate montage here, calling Republicans arsonists, terrorists, rapists, hostage takers.
You don't want to talk about who hates?
Listen to this.
You can't have someone put a gun to your head.
You can only put the gun to your head so many times.
We're not going to bow to Tea Party anarchists.
Republican fanatics.
I call them legislative arsonist.
The fringe of their party.
They are raping the American people.
It is a blatant act of hostage taking.
Holding the entire Congress hostage.
Republicans hold the affordable care act hostage.
The Affordable Care Act would be held hostage.
Hold the running of government hostage.
We are not going to be held hostage by Mr. Cruz.
The House Republicans are holding hostage.
A bunch of terrorists who will have taken the country hostage or they're holding the whole country hostage.
That is a standard Democrat line on every issue that comes down the pike.
The Republicans are holding Congress or whoever, whatever, whenever hostage.
But they're not haters, folks.
People who talk like this accuse us of being anarchists and bomb throwers and hostage takers and terrorists.
But they are never described as haters.
Here's Peter King, Congressman from New York.
I thought he was a Fox News commentator.
I didn't know he was a Congressman from New York.
When does he have time to be a Congress?
He's always on Fox.
Every time I turn around and look at Fox, there's Peter King there.
Anyway, he uh uh uh I d I've never heard him attack Harry Reed or or Pelosi or any of that, but listen to what he said about Ted Cruz.
Now to me, this is like the charge of the light brigade, or it's like Gallipoli, or it's uh kamikaze pilot, and he's not standing on principle.
First, I don't know what he's standing on, but he's standing for a strategy that can't work.
It's gonna personally help him as far as his political status, but it's going to be bad for the country, bad for the Republican Party.
If I ask my constituents and those I've spoken to think he's crazy, they know what's real and what's not, and they know a guy who's being basically a uh almost like a medicine man here selling goods that he knows of phony goods.
Peter, seriously now.
D do you really mean that?
You ever have you ever described Obama as a medicine man selling goods that he knows are phony goods?
You ever have you ever once thought about describing your real political opponents that way?
So while here you've got this dreadful, this awful thing called Obamacare, and you've got one guy trying to stop it, and the Republican Party goes after that guy.
Not the awful thing Obamacare, and not the people who are responsible for it, the Democrats.
And if the Republicans want to know why four million of them sat home on election day and why their campaign donations are down, it's this kind of thing.
Where is this kind of combativeness against the real political opponents of the Republicans, the Democrats?
Ted Cruz?
A medicine man?
This guy says I talk to my constituents, everybody else thinks he's crazy.
So I guess as Anderson Cooper was interviewing, oh, King wasn't on Fox, he found it's on CNN.
Oh, it gets around.
Anderson Cooper then said to Peter King, it's an unusual for a member of Congress to be so tough on a member of his own party, Peter.
I mean, saying that he's a fraud.
Why are you speaking out like this?
I don't think we owe any loyalty to Ted Cruz.
He spent you know the last month of the summer trying to put Republicans on the spot, trying to uh force uh basically intimidate Republican members of Congress to vote his way with the implicit threats of primaries.
Uh he had no regard or respect for uh uh us, so why should we be concerned about him at all?
I mean, I've never seen anyone as unpopular in Republican circles as Ted Cruz, but he continues to do, and it's just uh creating real, again, real problems for the Republican Party.
These people, they don't see it.
They have no idea what they're date.
Back to the phone swinging.
Let's say this is uh where are we headed?
Hi, Russ, thanks for taking the call.
Uh, I want to talk about the process of lumping all of government spending into one big giant miscellaneous spending bill.
And how grandma is not gonna get her social security check unless we spend uh unless we fund all these other programs.
And every year, Grandma's check uh is gonna be held unless we fund whatever else they want.
And I think this process is an iron grip over the entire economy and it's completely government manufactured.
Yeah, because you know why?
Even when there's a government shutdown, grandma gets her check.
Right.
Even when that happens, grandma gets but what you're saying is, if I understood what you're saying, uh-huh, and I might not have, which would not be your fault, it would be mine.
If you what you're saying is that what the government does is essentially hold hostage every bit of spending to the concerns of the elderly and whether or not they're going to get their social security.
Right.
It could be, I mean, I just use that as an example.
It could be the military, it could be whatever program.
And if Boehner was actually serious, I mean, I have my doubts about that vote because he could have sent something over that he knew was going to just get get shot down.
But if he were truly serious, he can send over separate bills to fund the military, separate bill to fund Social Security, whatever it is, and just don't send a bill over to fund Obamacare.
You know, and then what what is Obama gonna say about a government shutdown if he's sitting there looking at a pure clean bill to fund each of these programs?
Well, um it's it's the the the problem with your look at your exactly right.
The problem um from from like Boehner's perspective is that no matter what he does, the media is going to say he and the Republicans are denying Grandma herch.
No matter what he does, no matter what trick, no matter what smart thing he does, and this is what they're afraid of.
Okay, we're up to audio soundbite number six.
The unbridled hate for Ted Cruz is striking.
I um I think back to the Watergate days, the Nixon days.
Those of you who were not alive then or were too young in the 70s and 80s to care, pay any attention to this kind of thing.
I can't describe for you how utterly despised Richard Nixon was by the Democrats of the day and the media.
You think that they hated George W. Bush, or name anybody today that you think they hate, and you're not even getting close to the almost rabid hatred for Richard Nixon.
Now you might be asking, well, what was it about?
There is an answer to this that engenders almost as much hate, but it is about a man by the name of Alger Hiss.
Two things here.
Alger Hiss was proven to be a communist spy back during the 40s and 50s.
The Democrat Party and the left of the day loved Alger Hiss, and they hated Nixon for exposing him.
To this day, Nixon is hated for having exposed, successfully exposed Alger Hiss as a communist spy working in the State Department.
He was at the high levels, and Nixon got him, and they hated Nixon for it.
Nixon also had the audacity to defeat a woman, a woman for public office by the name of Helen Douglas.
Helen Gehagen Douglas.
For some reason, they just hated Nixon for the campaign he ran against this angelic, peaceful little librarian woman.
She was not that, but that's how she was portrayed.
Nixon didn't like being hated.
So Nixon attempted to curry favor with his enemies, and he grew government like no Republican ever has, and it bought him nothing.
And I don't know why that lesson is not learned today.
Nixon gave them OSHA.
Nixon gave them the environmental protection agency.
Nixon gave them wage and price controls.
Nixon gave them.
I don't know how many bureaucracies new affirmative action Nixon gave him.
He gave him everything.
He was did everything he could to not be hated.
Nixon was a guy.
You know what?
Richard Nixon, his wife was named Pat.
He loved that woman from teenage days.
He would drive her on her dates with other guys just so he could be with her.
He drove her, I don't know how that was arranged, but maybe he was the only one who had a car and he offered to drive her and her dates.
He was uh considered socially awkward.
This is a brilliant politician, but they hated him.
I mean, he literally despised him.
But my point is, even in those days of Watergate, the Republicans then went to the White House and privately, they were led by Howard Baker, and they went to the White House,
and behind closed doors, they let Nixon have it, and they told him they don't support him and that he was destroying the party, but they didn't do it publicly for the longest time at the end.
I mean, everybody joined in.
But what they're doing to Ted Cruz, my point is what the Republican Party and its associates are doing to Ted Cruz wasn't even done to Nixon.
And Nixon was despised.
I cannot emphasize enough how despised he was and is to this day.
They thought they had sent Nixon away forever, and he comes back and he wins the presidency in 68 in the midst of the Vietnam War.
It just and then he brought Kissinger in and they opened the doors to China.
They hated everything about him.
But the Republicans, during the Watergate era, very privately, went up to the White House and told Nixon that they couldn't support him.
They didn't go in public until the last days of it all, like is happening with Ted Cruz.
There was no Peter King of the Nixon era going on television trashing Nixon in the midst of it.
Now, Ted Cruz spoke for 21 hours.
And everybody talks about all the hate and this and all the craziness, but nobody's quoted anything.
Twenty-one hours.
Ted Cruz spoke and nobody's quoted craziness.
Nobody's pointed to what he said is nuts, mean-spirited, extremist, mean, hateful, or what have you.
Twenty-one hours straight.
And for his part, Ted Cruz didn't personally attack anybody in his 21 hours.
But yet the long knives are out, and this is not just the Republicans.
This is the Washington establishment circling the wagons and making sure that any outsider is head off, cut off at the pass.
There's no outsiders going to come in here and upset the Apple cart and destroy what they have going.
So we go back to the sound bites in this context in uh CBS this morning today, Charlie Rose, speaking with the political director of CBS News, John Dickerson about Cruz's filibuster.
Charlie Rose says, So, John, old buddy old pal, what did Ted Cruz achieve?
Talking to senators, Republican senators.
Uh they have very dark feelings about Senator Cruz.
They think he wasted time.
They think he uh gave the party a black eye in fighting among Republicans instead of uh uh keeping them together so they could fight the president.
Uh so he's got some enemies now.
They thought this was so foolish.
Yes, be against Obamacare, but don't do it in this dumb way.
That was what other Republican senators were saying.
Oh, are they against it too?
I didn't I didn't know.
Are there other Republican senators against Obamacare other than Mike Lee?
I didn't know there were.
Be against it how?
What is the smart way to be against Obamacare?
Hmm?
What is that?
Yeah, don't do it in this dumb way.
Well, what's the smart way?
They think he wasted time?
He gave the party a black eye.
In fighting among the Republicans, this is all because he didn't tell them in advance what he was going to do.
That it all goes back.
And I asked him about that.
Here's David Rodham Gergen, who's the architect of conventional wisdom in Washington last night on CNN.
His comments on Cruz and the filibuster.
For the vast majority of Americans looking to us, they're shaking their heads again, saying, what is going wrong in the Republican Party?
Why are we being treated like this?
Is this guy really ready for prime time?
From my point of view, yes, the Republican Party has to fight.
But if it strikes people that the base has moved so far as to become extreme, the growing opportunity for Republicans to take back the Senate next year and to take back the White House in 2016 is going to be blown if people think the party has been taken hostage by extremists.
And the Republican Party has been winning the Senate lately by doing what?
Oh, excuse me, I'm they're not they they haven't won in the Senate in a long time.
Never mind.
Okay, so the the throat.
That's what I call David Rodham Gurgen.
It sounds like he's speaking right from the throat to Adam's Apple.
David Rodham Gurgen says that Republican Party is coming off as just way too extreme.
This Obamacare detachment, but it's too extreme.
What's wrong with the Republican Party, people are asking?
Wait a minute.
Last I looked, 80% of the country opposes Obamacare in one poll.
In one poll, 12% support it.
In another poll, 40% support it.
Most of the country, vast clear majority must be extremists because they don't want Obamacare.
Pole after poll, I don't care which one.
So really, with with whom is Ted Cruz aligned here?
The vast majority of Americans are vehemently opposed to Obamacare.
So what is extreme about that?
The extremists, by this definition, are the minority that support it.
I mean, it really is a new day when being for smaller government, more limited government, being for the Constitution is now called extremism.
Terrorism.
Defending the Constitution, standing for the things the founders stood for is called extremism and terrorism, according to the Washington establishment now.
God knows.
What would what would have David Gergen call the founders?
If he'd have been around doing commentary, what would he have called the founders?
These guys would have all been defending King George the Third.
These guys would have been on the sides of the redcoats.
And Jefferson and Washington and the boys would have been the malcontents and the extremists, and they'd be upsetting the apple cart.
The founders who actually took up arms for liberty and for a smaller, less intrusive government in the eyes of our current pundit class would have been nuts and bitter clingers.
Hanging on to their guns and so forth.
Let's go back to the audio sound bites.
Here is Senator Cruz.
We're going to do this now.
In light of all this hatred that you're hearing expressed for Cruz, here is during his filibuster various excerpts of his reading of a speech my father gave on the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence.
Fans of Rush Limbaugh know that every year he reads something that his father wrote about the true story of the price paid by the signers of the Declaration of Independence.
comments.
I think it's fitting to read this morning.
It's called The Americans Who Risked Everything.
Our Lives, Our Fortunes, Our Sacred Honor.
What kind of men were the 56 signers who adopted the Declaration and who, by their signing, committed an act of treason Against the Crown.
To each of you, the names Franklin Adams, Hancock, and Jefferson are almost as familiar as household words.
Most of us, however, know nothing of the other signers.
Who were they?
What happened to them?
I imagine that many of you are somewhat surprised at the names that are not there.
George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, Patrick Henry.
All were elsewhere.
Ben Franklin was the only really old men.
Eighteen were under forty.
Three were in their twenties.
Of the fifty-six, almost half, twenty-four were judges and lawyers.
Eleven were merchants, nine were landowners and farmers, and the remaining twelve were doctors, ministers, and politicians.
These men knew what they risked.
The penalty for treason was death by hanging.
And remember, a great British fleet was already at anchor in New York Harbor.
They were sober men.
There were no dreamy-eyed intellectuals or draft card burners here.
They were far from hot-eyed fanatics yammering for an explosion.
They simply asked for the status quo.
It was change they resisted.
It was equality with the mother country they desired.
It was taxation with representation they desired.
They were all conservatives, yet they rebelled.
It was principle, not property that brought these men to Philadelphia.
Two of them became presidents of the United States.
Seven of them became state governors.
One died in office as vice president of the United States.
Several would go on to be U.S. Senators.
One, the richest man in America, in 1828, founded the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad.
One, a delegate from Philadelphia, was the only real poet, musician, and philosopher of the signers.
It was he, Francis Hopkinson, not Betsy Ross, who designed the United States flag.
Francis Lewis, New York delegate, saw his home plundered.
His estate in what is now Harlem completely destroyed by British soldiers.
Mrs. Lewis was captured and treated with great brutality.
Though she was later exchanged for two British prisoners through the efforts of Congress, she died from the effects of her abuse.
William Floyd, another New York delegate, was able to escape with his wife and children across Long Island Sound to Connecticut, where they lived as refugees without income for seven years.
When they came home, they found a devastated ruin.
Phillips Livingston had all his great holdings in New York confiscated and his family driven out of their home.
Livingston died in 1778, still working in Congress for the cause.
Lewis Morris, the fourth New York delegate, saw all of his timber, crops, and livestock taken.
For seven years he was barred from his home and family.
John Hart of Trenton, New Jersey, risked his life to return home to see his dying wife.
Hessian soldiers rode after him and he escaped in the woods.
While his wife lay on her deathbed, the soldiers ruined his farm and wrecked his homestead.
Hart, 65, slept in caves and the woods as he was hunted across the countryside.
When at long last, emaciated by hardship, he was able to sneak home.
He found his wife had already been buried and his thirteen children taken away.
He never saw them again.
He died a broken man in 1779, without ever finding his family.
And finally, there is the New Jersey signer, Abraham Clark.
He gave two sons to the officer corps in the Revolutionary Army.
They were captured and sent to that infamous British Hulk afloat in New York Harbor, known as the Hell Ship Jersey, where eleven thousand American captives were to die.
The younger clerks were treated with a special brutality because of their father.
One was put in solitary and given no food.
With the end almost in sight, with the war almost won, no one could have blamed Abraham Clark for acceding to the British request when they offered him his sons' lives if he would recant and come out for the king in Parliament.
The utter despair in this man's heart, the anguish in his very soul, must reach out to each one of us down through two hundred years with his answer.
No.
The fifty-six signers of the Declaration of Independence proved by their every deed that they made no idle boast when they composed the most magnificent curtain line in history.
And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine providence, we mutually pledge to each other.
Our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.
I don't know about you.
I I I Get I get a tingling up my spine every time I uh I hear this read by someone else.
That, again, he was quoting from a speech that my father prepared.
I was a teenager when this happened.
Maybe a single digits.
It might have been the 1950s or early 60s.
Forget which.
But it was the Americans who risked everything.
Our lives, our fortunes, our sacred honor.
What happened to the 56 men who signed the Declaration of Independence?
Probably not taught.
I didn't learn this in school.
Even back then.
You learn the big names.
Oh, we didn't learn about everyone.
But anyway, this is what part of what Ted Cruz did during his filibuster.
A lot of hate there, folks.
A lot of anger there, right?
A lot of extremism.
You could just hear it, couldn't you, in his voice.
I think there is something the Republican Party is either ignoring or maybe they don't understand about all of this Obamacare business and the Republican base attitude about it.
And you know what?
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