All Episodes
Previous Next
Sept. 27, 2013 - Rush Limbaugh Program
35:52
September 27, 2013, Friday, Hour #3
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Now look, I've got a lot to do after the program today.
If I have time before Coco leaves, or Coco and the website staff leave for the day, they leave about 10 after 3.
No, I'm just kidding.
I'll try to get a couple of pictures of our new kitten up there to them.
But I've got, I've got Boku stuff I have to do.
High-tech stuff I have to do after the program today.
But I'll try to get a couple up there.
Anyway, folks, great to have you back Friday.
It is the EIB Network.
Live from the Southern Command in sunny South Florida.
It's open line Friday.
One big, exciting broadcast hour to go.
And we are here.
I am here serving humanity as America's real anchorman.
The talent on loan from God.
800-282-2882.
The email address, ilrushbow at eibnet.com.
Okay, Yahoo News.
Yahoo News, the annual SAT scores have been released to the public, and they show a continued decline in math and writing scores.
Such a shame.
Even worse, as CBS Money Watch reports, more than half of incoming college freshmen are not ready for the academic challenges of college.
Oh, no.
Now they tell us.
It says here, college board president David Coleman, in a statement, said, we must dramatically increase the number of students in K-12 who are prepared for college and careers.
Only by transforming the daily work that students do can we achieve excellence and equity.
Equity?
The president of the college board said that?
by transforming the daily work that students do, can we achieve excellence and equity?
Did he mean equality?
And if he did, well, okay, anyway, in the data released by the college board, 57% of graduating seniors are not ready to transition to college coursework based on the SAT results.
So how are they graduating?
So what are we going to do about this?
How are we going to fix this?
This is kind of like Detroit in a way.
Maybe I have a solution.
I know how to fix this.
Let us look at the problem.
The college board says that 57% of incoming freshmen are not ready for college.
And that only by transforming the daily work that students do can we achieve excellence and equity.
Okay.
Here's what we need to do.
I have learned.
I have paid attention.
What we need to do is raise the salaries of high school teachers.
That's right.
We need to pour more money into the system.
That's the problem.
We're not spending enough money, Rachel.
The teachers need to make more money.
The school administrators need to make more money.
This is a shame.
57% of graduates aren't ready for college.
It's obviously a problem of money.
We're not paying people enough.
And let's rewrite some of the textbooks.
How about that?
Let's change the tests.
Let's make it easier.
Let's let the teachers cheat on the tests, too.
And let's give local school boards even more money to build luxury buildings for these young skulls full of mush.
Look, the only answer here is more money.
How does that sound, folks?
That's the only answer.
Barack Obama claims no widespread evidence that his health care law has hurt jobs or cutbacks in jobs.
President Obama, in a heavily partisan speech defending Obamacare, claimed yesterday that there's no widespread evidence that Obamacare is hurting jobs, despite widespread reports that businesses are cutting back worker hours in order to avoid extra costs tied to the law.
Most of the stories that you'll hear about how Obamacare just can't work, they're just not based on fact, Obama said.
He said, they said this would be a disaster in terms of jobs.
There's no widespread evidence that Obamacare is hurting jobs.
Reforming health care is going to help the economy over the long term.
Wow.
There's not hurting.
Did you know that?
It's not, President says it's not hurting jobs.
There's no widespread evidence.
Well, see, our calls are not widespread evidence.
And the news apparently is not widespread evidence.
This is just a rehash.
Look at these headlines.
Obama, no negotiation.
I am not negotiating with Boehner.
I'm not negotiating with anybody.
Dingy Harry from the Hill.
I'm not talking to Boehner.
I'm not going to negotiate with anybody.
White House delays Obamacare enrollment for small businesses because of jobs.
But Obama said it is no evidence that it's hurting jobs.
What an absolute mess.
By the way, in regards to education, this story from the AP, administration, colleges should seek diversity.
The regime is telling colleges and universities that they can continue to use admissions to increase diversity among their students, even in the wake of a Supreme Court ruling that could potentially open the door to more challenges.
Racially diverse educational environments help to prepare students to succeed in our diverse nation, said the regime in a Friday letter to the school.
That's this.
I don't know why I didn't think of that.
Diversity.
That's why 57% of students graduating Haskell are not ready for college.
They're not hanging around enough minorities.
That's so simple.
So if we just flood the zone with more minorities and more diversity and more money, problem solved.
Oh, and equity.
Yeah, we have to, we have to get equity.
Speaking of, let's go back to audio sound lights.
Grab number eight.
This is Dan Pfeiffer.
He's the second in command, White House spokesman.
He's behind Jay Carney.
You keep hearing that Republicans are extremists, mean-spirited, all of this stuff.
I want you to listen to this.
Last night on CNN's The Lead, the host Jacob Tapper, is interviewing the senior advisor, communications advisor Dan Pfeiffer.
And Tapper said, let's talk about the default because the Treasury Secretary said it could be catastrophic if we defaulted on our debts.
Why isn't Obama negotiating as he had in the past?
I mean, in the past, he negotiated on the debt ceiling, and now he's refusing to.
If it's going to be catastrophic, why not get in there and roll up your sleeves and try to negotiate?
It's a negotiation if I'm trying to sell you my house and we are debating the price of it.
It is not a negotiation if I show up at your house and say, give me everything inside or I'm going to burn it down.
The Republicans have provided a laundry list of essentially ransom demands of things that were essentially the Rodney agenda that was rejected by voters that they know can't pass in normal circumstances.
They say, give us these things or we'll blow up the economy.
Is that right?
The Republicans are threatening to blow up the economy.
I'd like to see that.
They might end up getting some support.
Give us these things are going to blow up the economy.
So then Tapper said, well, look, this is the final question.
You saw today a Bloomberg news poll indicating that the American people support by a two-to-one margin its right to require spending cuts when negotiating the debt ceiling.
I understand that Keystone pipeline other provisions the Republicans are talking about attaching to the debt ceiling are not related, but why not cut some spending, Mr. Pfeiffer?
What we're not for is negotiating with people who have a bomb strapped to their chest.
We're not going to do that.
We cannot live in a world where one half of one branch of government can extract their demands that have been rejected by voters and can't pass under normal circumstances, or they're going to blow up the economy.
Well, I said it again.
The Republicans, they've got bombs strapped to themselves.
They want to blow up the economy.
But we can't do what the Republicans want because they lost.
Does that ever stop the Democrats?
When they lose elections, do Republican judicial nominees just sail through under the theory that the Democrats were rejected by the people?
When Republicans win elections, do their tax cut ideas just sail through under the guise, under the theory that, well, they won the election.
We can't let the Democrats do what they want.
They lost.
This is condescending arrogance that's not pushed back against.
And maybe somebody said, well, look, these guys are just a bunch of creeps and let them keep talking.
And just like the healthcare law is going to collapse, these guys are going to be seen for the real mean people they are.
Okay.
So Dan Pfeiffer here, low-information voters, if they even watch CNN, they're going to realize, well, this Pfeiffer guy is a mean guy.
We can't vote for Democrats.
Is that how this is going to work?
I take a break.
And your phone calls because it's Open Line Friday when we get back.
Okay, so this Dan Pfeiffer guy, who is the, he's in charge of White House Communications, senior advisor to the President for Strategy and Communications.
He says the Republicans are running around with a bomb in their vests, and then they want to blow up the economy and defund Obamacare and government shutdown and all that kind of stuff.
Don't forget, back in 2006, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Harry Reid, Pelosi, the rest of the Democrat Party demanded that we defund our troops or they would vote against raising the debt ceiling.
You remember this?
And Obama was asked, and Pfeiffer was asked about this.
Oh, wait a minute now.
How come Obama said that it was purely political?
He voted was raising the debt limit.
He was against raising the debt limit, funding the troops and all that.
And they said, well, that wasn't political like the Republicans are doing now.
But these guys, Obama, Biden, Pelosi, Reed, they all threatened, demanded that they wanted Bush to lose.
They wanted America to lose the Iraq war.
They threatened to defund the military operation in Iraq.
Or they'd vote against the debt ceiling, raising it.
Here's Rich in Columbia, Maryland.
Hi, Rich.
Great to have you on the program, sir.
Hello.
Hi, Rush.
I'm glad you could take my call today.
I've been listening for probably close to 20 years now, and the thing I've always enjoyed most about you is what a great teacher you are.
And that sort of leads to my open-line question.
My son is an eighth grader here in Columbia, and he's doing a National History Day project, and it sort of ties in, I think, with your new book on the brave pilgrims.
And what he's doing is, and the theme of the subject is rights and responsibility.
And he came up with the idea that the story that you often tell at Thanksgiving time, that the Pilgrims' first Thanksgiving really wasn't a bountiful time, but rather there was several years of hard going for the pilgrims, and that it wasn't until William Bradford reorganized the way they did their farming before they really started to produce an ample amount of food for themselves to the point that they could begin selling it.
True, it wasn't just their farming, though.
It was everything.
Building the plantation, the village, the first town, with the buildings, it was everything.
But it was largely agricultural, right?
That's all there was.
They were all farmers.
But that's absolutely true.
And it's all in William Bradford's journal.
I mean, that's what is so amazing about how this story has been rewritten.
William Bradford's journal is the source for the entire pilgrim experience from the Mayflower forward, even prior to the Mayflower, everything.
He wrote extensively about the experience.
And it was William Bradford who explained how they wanted to be fair and they wanted everybody to have the same.
It was a new place.
I mean, they were scared to death.
We can't relate to this.
They have no idea what they faced.
They had this arduous journey.
Do you know they had to live on the Mayflower?
A lot of them had to live on the Mayflower for months after they arrived because there was no place to live.
And it was a small ship, conditions that people today, even in poverty, would not tolerate.
And they tried to do it where everybody had the same because they thought there would be less acrimony and fewer rivalries if everybody got the same amount of what was produced.
And they quickly learned, and William Bradford's the suite wrote about it.
They learned that half the place took every day off.
If they ended up getting the same everybody else got, regardless how much work they did, human nature took over.
And so he's been reading a lot of Bradford's journal called A History of Plymouth Plantation.
And there are very good and very clear passages where Bradford describes the situation before they privatized farming and allowed people to keep the fruits of their labor, and where he clearly states that prior to this, when everybody was working for the common stock, that they were sort of a lot of malingerers within the colony, that even able-bodied men wouldn't go out and work,
let alone women and children.
Whereas after they reorganized and made it where you could farm and keep the benefits of your work, that now women and young children who would have been considered previously too weak or unable to work were now out in the fields and they were putting a lot more corn in the ground and planting and also, I guess, instinctively harvesting more.
The challenge is in finding primary source raw data because Bradford doesn't talk about, you know, prior to 1623.
And even my son's teacher, when he brought this idea to her, said, well, it was really that first winter because, you know, they landed in November and they weren't provisioned properly for the whole winter.
So that was their very most difficult time.
But after the harvest of 1621, sort of everything was hunky-dory after that.
But Bradford's journal, as you know, really indicates that up through 1623 was still sort of a starving time for many of the pilgrims.
And the Thanksgivings that they had at the end of the year, I think one historian said that it was not so much a feast as it was what you would do at your Last Supper.
And so the challenge for my son right now is finding these primary sources and data to show where that is.
And I was calling to see if you had access to that kind of data or could put me in touch with your historians who helped you in researching this book.
Well, it's kind of an index of, well, not actually an index in the book, but we have I went to great lengths to source this and primarily used Bradford's journal.
And it was a hot, it's a whole nother, I don't have at my fingertips here, everything that I used for this.
We historians don't give away all of our tricks, obviously, because there's so much conflict.
And you can read historical accounts that totally try to blast the Bradford account to Smithereens simply because there's a political agenda attached to everything.
So part of it is knowing what to reject, and part of it's knowing what to reject based on who and their motivations and so forth.
But it's a remember now the Thanksgiving story is only part of the story, but the real Thanksgiving was thanks to God.
These were religious people, and Bradford was their leader, and they were thanking God for having survived and found a way to prosper.
Okay, we're back, El Rushbo.
It's Open Line Friday.
Our last caller, Rich, his eighth grade son.
And as I say, we historians who go to great lengths and spend many countless hours researching things sometimes get very protective of things that we have discovered, found, written about, what have you.
By the way, he was talking about this.
We just got the book, folks.
It's not available yet, but we just got the actual book.
I'm holding it up now for people on the Ditto Cam to see.
And it's, yeah, people said, well, Rob are so excited about it.
You've done this before.
I said, yeah, but I haven't, not this.
This is a whole new thing.
Never done anything like this before in terms of target audience and objective.
It's always been my objective to teach and instruct, but this is something that's so passionate in me, and that is, you just have this story.
57% of high school graduates are not prepared to go to college.
They're not prepared to learn in college.
Well, part of that is what they're being taught.
And they're not even being inspired to want to learn.
And in addition, what they are learning, in many cases, about American history, is just wrong.
And it's being taught by people who don't like this country for a whole host of reasons.
And so the purpose of Rush Revere and the Brave Pilgrims is to set this story straight.
Now, the primary source for what happened to Pilgrims is their leader, William Bradford.
He wrote a journal.
There's also the Mayflower Compact, which was rich in its meaning.
But for our caller, Rich, where was he from Maryland somewhere?
Columbia, Maryland, the Plymouth Colony Archive Project is something that you might want to examine.
But the amount of information that there is about the Mayflower and the people on it from their families and ancestors is plentiful.
It was a job of synthesis here and trying to stay focused, again, with the target audience in mind.
There are just countless places to go for this, but the Plymouth Colony Archive Project, the Mayflower Compact, laws of the colony of New Plymouth in New England, 1620 to 1636, would probably help your son.
If you can do, you know, all this stuff's on the web, or most of it is.
But the real problem here is that most of the public schools today are not really teaching American history.
If I can be blunt, in too many places, and by no means is it everywhere.
I mean, there are still kids learning the truth about this country, but there's an all-out assault on the truth of the history of this country.
And in many places, anti-American history is being taught.
And it's taught by people who have a chip on their shoulder about this country.
And they have a curriculum produced by people who have a chip on their shoulder about this country.
And they are deeply resentful of what they think is lies about the greatness of this country.
And I'm sorry, but I don't think that should stand.
So the book here is an effort to do something about that.
And it's written for 10 to 13 year olds, but it's intended for everybody.
It's a way for parents and grandparents to connect with their kids.
And it's a real book, as you can see.
It's not some little Dr. Seuss pamphlet.
Nothing against Dr. Seuss.
I shouldn't say it's not some little 10-page, thick paper, turn it, be done with it in 10 minutes kind of thing.
It's 221 pages.
It's in there.
And by the way, you pre-order it, Amazon, iBooks, Barnes ⁇ Noble, it's like $10.99 or something.
The retail price is in the $19 range.
And it was the number one pre-order book for, what was it, 12 days?
It's something unprecedented.
Almost two weeks.
It was the number one in the pre-orders.
It was just incredible.
We have a debt of gratitude to all of you for that.
But now the book's here.
The book's out on October 29th.
The audio version is hot, too.
I did it.
It's hot.
And then, of course, the e-book.
So all three made available on October 29th.
Okay, back to the phone.
Steve in Sioux Center, Iowa.
Great to have you with us, sir.
Hello.
Hi, Rush.
Thanks for having me.
You bet.
I would say I'm a big-time fan, but I'm only 18 and a college student, but I like to stay active in politics.
And I like listening to your show every once in a while.
So thanks.
The issue I wanted to talk about was just the way my generation kind of sees the world, or at least the way I do, after watching the news.
Okay, cool.
I'd like to hear this.
There's always kind of like a fear or pessimism and like kind of uncertainty.
And it seems like every issue that comes up nowadays is sort of like it's going to be the end of the world or it's just that this, we're not going to be able to survive any longer.
Can you give me some examples of the when you say that there's always kind of a fear or pessimism?
Can you give me just an issue or two example of that?
Sure.
I mean, you see it on the left with like global warming, and then you see it on the right with Obamacare.
And I mean, some of these things kind of scare me.
And I mean, I talked with my dad about it.
He introduced me to the book Atlas Shrugged.
And after reading that, it kind of scared the crap out of me, honestly.
You've read Atlas Shrugged?
Yeah, I wasn't.
You read that whole book?
That's incredible.
Well, thanks.
But I encourage other people to read it.
I don't know.
It's quite the book.
Some people takes a lifetime to finish that book.
Yeah, I mean, I just got into it, couldn't put it down.
And I mean, it's scary, but it's okay.
So I know you're speaking for yourself, but you're also extrapolating it to your generation.
And you say there's a pessimism because no matter what the issue, it's always presented as fatalistic.
So your age group is growing up afraid of things.
Yeah, and I guess that's the way I kind of see it.
But what I kind of wanted to ask, too, is, I mean, what was the perspective like for your generation growing up and maybe other generations in like the 70s or 80s?
I mean, was there all this?
I come from that famous generation that grew up in the 60s.
And I don't know how much you know about that, but the baby boom generation that grew up in the 60s, there were many different groups that comprised the baby boomers.
And the 60s were popularized by anti-American, anti-war, anti-establishment radicals who engaged in a lot of destructiveness and violence over the Vietnam War.
It was a formative event in the draft that exists in the Vietnam War.
And it was, we just kept sending troops over 500,000 soldiers.
I mean, people go nuts today over, you know, 3,000 dead in Iraq.
50,000 died in Vietnam, and there were 500,000 18 and 19-year-olds drafted and sent over there.
And it was a really tumultuous time.
And the radical leftists of that era are those who are running the country today.
Now, for me, I didn't want any part of that.
There were a lot of people of baby boom generation didn't want any part of it.
In fact, Steve, you'll laugh at me on this, but for the longest time, I didn't wear blue jeans because I didn't want to be identified with them.
I didn't wear t-shirts.
I didn't wear blue jeans.
I didn't wear my hair long.
I did not want to be associated with the radicals.
I wanted to be in the establishment.
Now, I'll tell you something else.
I'm speaking for me and the people that I knew growing up.
We grew up bursting with optimism.
We grew up, I mean, I knew I was going to be a success.
I knew it was going to work out.
I knew that whatever I did, I just knew it.
I had that optimism, even though I got fired seven or whatever it is times.
But I always, I had this, this, there was this, it wasn't a voice or anything.
I just, there was just a sense.
I just knew it was going to happen.
I was not afraid of growing up.
I was not afraid of political issues of the day.
Now, when I was growing up, there wasn't anybody running around telling me that I was destroying the planet because of the car I drove, like you are hearing.
I was not told that my existence was threatening this animal or that animal.
And I was not told that my very existence or my parents was destructive and the multicultural curricula had not happened.
And my generation, at least my friend, we were not taught that America was unjust or immoral.
I was raised with the ultimate can-do.
It's out there.
Go get it.
Everybody else is.
You better join the crowd.
It's highly competitive and you better work hard and do whatever you can to get your piece of it.
Now, the radicals of my generation, they totally tuned out of that.
They didn't want any part of it.
They were upset over a number of other things.
And it was a divided country then, just like it is today, over different things.
Now, the difference that I see is that I think in your generation, you're a millennial, there probably are more of you who do not look at your future the way I looked at mine.
Because you're hearing you don't have one from everywhere.
You're hearing all over the place that it's over.
America's great days are behind.
Just you're not going to do as well as your parents did.
You're inundated with a constant negativism.
You're inundated with a pessimism each and every day when you turn on the news for crying out loud.
And we, you know, I was not, as I think back on when I was 18, 19, I was, man, I couldn't wait to get away from home.
I couldn't wait.
I hated school.
It was holding me back.
I knew what I wanted to do, and I loved it, and I couldn't wait to get out there and start doing it.
I think that's interesting because the way I see it is, I mean, you knew you could go get it.
You knew it was there, and you knew you were going to be successful.
But I mean, I'm confident in myself that I'm going to be successful, but I think it's a little more uncertain, and it's not always sure, like, are there going to be jobs there?
What about other people who are maybe not as confident in this job market?
Yeah, but you know, here's the thing: it's never guaranteed for anybody except the Kennedys.
It's never Garrett.
It wasn't guaranteed for me.
And by the way, there were a lot of people when I was growing up who never thought I was had a prayer, but it didn't stop them.
They didn't feel so sorry for me that they stopped trying it themselves.
Don't get caught up.
You can't control what other people do.
Don't get caught up in feeling sorry because others may not make it.
That's their job.
That's their responsibility.
You can't ever subordinate yourself or make yourself secondary or a prisoner to your sympathy for others who you may not even be right about.
As I say, most of the people growing up, because I didn't go to college, family, friends, really worried.
They thought I was going to blow the greatest opportunity I'd ever had.
My family, they thought, I was never going to amount to anything.
But it didn't stop them from trying to.
So don't get caught up in what you're hearing about life for other people.
That'll slow you down.
Sympathy is fine when it's placed in the right place.
But after so much sympathy, then what do you do?
I mean, you still have to live.
You still have to move on and you still have to take care of yourself.
And there's nobody, even now, there's nobody who is as interested in you and your life as you are, no matter what they might tell you.
There isn't a politician alive who cares anywhere near as much about your future as you do.
Nor is there anybody else other than your parents.
So I think.
I agree too.
And I always think I control my own destiny.
And my dad's always supported me.
My mom's always supported me.
You do, but I have to tell you, I probably shouldn't say this, Steve, but I'm kind of when I encounter young people, I'm amazed at how many of them don't think there's anything out there for them.
I am amazed at how many think that they're owed something, or I'm amazed at how many people think that it's just going to come to them.
I don't know where this happened.
Not everybody, but the way to look at that is it's just less competition for you.
If more people are going to sit around and stay at home and live with their parents, it's just less competition for you to get what you want.
But I agree.
I think you're pummeled with much more negatism every day.
Even in the pop culture stuff that you, even the music you listen to, people are probably mad instead of happy.
There aren't love songs anymore.
There's all kinds of songs.
It's just, it's a, it's.
I know.
I got to take a break.
Steve, I'm way long.
I've got to go.
I'm sorry here.
This segment's going to be real short, folks, because I went so long in the previous one.
I apologize for that.
But I just want to think that one of the reasons for the pessimism that is out there today in young people is the way history is taught, particularly the history of this country.
If people from the youngest age are raised to believe horrible things about the place they live and how unfair and unjust and racist and sexist and bigoted and homophobic and all that is, they're going to grow up certainly not eager to be a part of it.
And I think that you can trace a lot of the pessimism in young people today to what they're being taught, particularly about history and most specifically about American history.
And I mean that from the bottom of my heart.
It's where they live.
What do you think the reaction is going to be to growing up and becoming an adult in a place that's taught to be such a rotten hellhole?
So unfair, so unjust, so immoral.
Okay, folks, that's it.
Another exciting edition of Open Line Friday in the Can, and on the way over to the Limbaugh Broadcast Museum at rushlimbaugh.com.
▲
Export Selection