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Oct. 7, 2013 - Rush Limbaugh Program
31:55
October 7, 2013, Monday, Hour #3
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And greetings to you, music lovers, thrill seekers, conversationalists all across the fruited plane.
It's Rush Limbaugh.
We're back.
Happy to have you here.
The telephone number is 800-282-288-2.
If you want to be on the program, the AP had a story back on September 27th.
And they were ecstatic.
The AP was as joyous and happy as they could be.
Obama's no negotiation stance setting new tone.
September 27th.
So he's out there today and say, I'll negotiate any day.
I'll negotiate any day, anytime, anywhere.
As long as they're going to agree with me.
If they're not going to agree with me, why should I negotiate?
And that's, in essence, his position.
And I'm telling you, folks, look, I don't want to make too much of it because it could all change overnight, but as we sit here now, with this confluence of events, the unrolling uh the well, the the uh rolling out of Obamacare, the the disaster that's happening at the exchanges, people sign up, finding out what their premium expenses are skyrocketing too, uh, and the government shut down because the Republicans appear to be on people's side for the first time in their minds.
And Republicans appear eagle to talk.
Somehow the news has gotten out that Republicans are offering to fund efforts to help kids get cancer treatment, and the Democrats aren't.
And one of the ways that happened was Harry Reid said, Why should I care about those kids?
And it is all about the polling data is all about the the fact that it's the Democrats.
You've got to remember how Obama got elected.
You have to remember what people thought his election would mean.
No more partisanship.
No more bickering.
Obama was going to end that.
Obama was magic.
Obama was something that had never before graced American politics.
Obama was gonna end all this chump change infantile stuff.
And all it's done has gotten worse.
And so Jay Carney today and Obama himself today have gone, oh, we're willing to negotiate every day.
We've said that.
No, you did back on September 27th, AP, Obama's no negotiation stance setting new tone, and they were happy about it.
Let me read to you from the article.
This time, President Obama says he's not budging.
This is the confrontational Obama, the make my day president, betting Republicans blink to avoid a government shutdown or a first ever default on the nation's debts.
The entire world looks to us to make sure the world economy is stable.
You don't mess with that, Obama said Thursday, and that's why I will not negotiate on anything.
When it comes to the full faith and credit of the United States, and the AP was ecstatic reporting this.
I will not negotiate on anything.
Mike, if you would grab the last audio sound by number 21.
Obama, September 27th, AP.
I will not negotiate on anything.
I heard a lot of talk over the weekend that uh the real problem is that uh the president will not negotiate.
Well, let me tell you something.
Uh I have said from the start of the year that I'm happy to talk to Republicans about anything related to the budget.
There's not a subject that I am not willing to engage in, work on, negotiate, and come up with common sense compromises on.
What I've said is that I cannot do that under the threat that if Republicans don't get 100% of their way, they're gonna either shut down the government or they are going to default on America's debt, so that America for the first time in history does not pay its bills.
That is not something I will do.
So when he's saying, I'll negotiate as long as they come to the table ready to agree with me.
And again, there's no way we won't pay the bills, even if we don't raise the debt ceiling.
There's enough tax revenue coming in every month to more than pay our bills.
Shared that with you last Friday, Thomas Solved of the Peace, but it's been widely known.
Again, I I don't want to make too big a deal because any of this stuff can change on a dime.
But their polling data must be pretty bad for Obama and Jay Carney to both go out there within minutes of each other.
Oh, yeah, we're willing to talk any day.
All year we've been ready to talk.
Except we're only gonna talk when they let us have what we want.
But so we'll talk to them if that's what they want.
But back on September 27, I'm not gonna talk to them.
What the hell?
And just last week he reiterated it.
What Obama wants is a GOP default, and that's when he'll talk to.
That's what he's trying to engender.
And so's the drive-by.
Let's go back.
Audio soundbite seven.
We've got a uh uh a couple of sound bites here.
First up is Jim Vandehai, the executive editor of the Politico.
This is on Slay the Nation on CBS, Sunday during the round table.
And uh it's a conversation here between Vande High and Dana Milbank, and I think Gwen Eiffel's even part of this.
What's different this time around that in the if you think back to that 96 debate, there were actually moderates in Washington.
Even today when you talk about a Republican moderate in the House, we need to find a new word.
They're not moderates, they're not pro-life, they're not pro-environment, they're not pro-labor.
That's what a Republican moderate used to be.
You could say slightly less conservative Republican who might be willing to wheel in deal, but it's just a different world in Washington.
Yeah, damn it.
There aren't any liberal Republicans.
There aren't enough of them that'll cave with us anymore.
It's not like in 1995, and we can scare their pants off.
Now they won't cave.
Now they won't agree with us.
Not enough squeamish linguini-spined Republicans left.
That's what they're saying.
And Helen Thomas, if she were alive, would know I'm right about this.
Just like I was right about JFK.
JFK tried, I'm telling you.
Don't doubt me on this stuff.
I don't know what she did, but I'm telling you, there wasn't any dating.
Now, uh it was it was get in, get it, and get out.
Folks.
Come on, what are we talking about here?
And I know you're thinking Rush's not possible, Helen Thomas.
Media, folks, media.
It's called influence buying, whatever you want to call it.
I mean, it blindfolds, I don't know.
Eyes wide shut.
There's any number of ways this because this can happen.
So anyway, they're they're bemoaning the fact that there just aren't enough Republicans weak and scare.
There just aren't enough moderate liberal Republicans.
And then uh that that then became there weren't enough reasonable Republicans willing to lose for the good of the Democrats.
That's really what they mean.
There aren't enough reasonable Republicans willing to lose for the good of the Democrats.
Here's Dana Milbank.
I think that's the dynamic, and that's a difference from 95 and 96, is you're not necessarily dealing with reasonable people.
They're rational because they're following their political self-interest.
But you've got, you know, maybe 50 die-hard conservatives in the House, and you've got 150 Republicans who are terrified of being primaried by one of those, and they have no reason to budge, even if it's doing something bad to their own party into the country.
This is folks, I can't tell you how perfect this is to illustrate the way this town thinks.
There aren't any good Republicans anymore.
And what is a good Republican?
One who'll compromise and give away his own side to help the Democrats.
That's a reasonable Republican.
A reasonable Republican is one who agrees with the Democrats at the moment of truth.
And there just aren't enough of those anymore.
And then he's a fifty Republicans, these holdouts, these Tea Party people, and they're extremists, they're nutcases or wackos, and the real reasonable Republicans are afraid of being primaried by these people.
So most Republicans are cowards.
The 50 other Republicans holding them hostage are raving lunatics.
And in that group of 200, there isn't any of them willing to compromise to make the Democrats look good.
And so Congress and Washington suck.
As far as these people are concerned.
Moving on, Dana Milbank again, this is we're still in face the nation, and Bob Schiefer's moderating this.
You haven't heard him here yet, but he said, well, talk to me about Ted Cruz.
This is really unusual in this town.
It's built on seniority.
Here you have a freshman senator, not only emerged as a leader of this in the Senate, but is actually leading the House Republicans, sometimes against their own leader.
He's a complete phony.
Um I met Ted Cruz fifteen years ago.
He wasn't some Tea Party guy.
He was an ambitious uh kid working for the Bush campaign, uh Ivy League debater, and uh basically what he saw is hey, Sarah Palin can do that in 2010.
I can ride this Tea Party.
I can take it to town, and I can get really famous really fast.
He's absolutely right.
He's a real smart guy.
He's playing this game very well.
He's a phony, it's Dana Milbank of the Washington Post.
Ted Cruz is a phony, he doesn't really mean it.
He's using us.
He's using us using all he wants to do is be famous like everybody on Facebook and Twitter.
You know what really bugs him about Ted Cruz?
He is one of them.
He went to Harvard, he went to Yale.
He did win the debate contest.
His grades are better than theirs.
He is.
He has their pedigree, and he's not one of them, and they can't stand him.
They literally can't stand him.
Sort of the same way they hated Bush.
You know, Bush with a Harvard MBA and uh Yale and all this skull and bones, but he wasn't one of them.
Yeah, just couldn't handle it.
So now Cruz, yeah, he's just an ambition.
Complete phony.
He saw what Sarah Palin did.
You know, i we've all heard of uh Ted Cruz's father, too.
I guess Ted Cruz's father's a phony.
You know, Ted sounds just like his father, if you ask me.
His father's a great orator as well.
Anyway, these are great illustrations.
You they can't handle this.
They don't.
They don't know how to absorb this.
And so it's time for the personal destruction to begin.
Yeah, he's a phony.
He doesn't believe any of this.
He's just he's a smart guy.
He's just trying to get famous.
Here's Jim Van Dee from the political reacting to that.
Cruz is a political genius to some extent.
Like he is one of the few people who's recognized that politics today is so different than it was ten years ago.
Nobody cares what leadership has to say.
We have lots of weak leaders, and the grassroots, if you're clever about intervening in primaries, if you're clever about exploiting campaign finance laws, which very much work to the favor of outside groups at the expense of the establishment.
Well, then thewesome power.
We don't know what Gwen's question is.
The guys interrupted her and didn't let her finish.
Well, then the question is, and we never heard from her anymore.
The guys didn't care, apparently what her question was.
So Van De Hey, oh, he's a genius.
He's a political genius.
And Millbanks, oh, yeah, absolutely.
He's a phony, but he's a genius.
He's like one of the uh few people who's recognized that politics today is so different than it was ten years ago.
Anyway, I I know they fawned over Obama who had done nothing, but you know why they fawned over Obama?
Come on.
What why did they fawn over Obama?
You tell me.
Well, so's Cruz.
They said he was clean and articulate.
Cruz is every bit as clean and every bit as articulate as Obama is.
Why'd they fawn over Obama?
Gave us gave us speech.
He gave us speech.
He had Mario Cuomo Itis.
They fawned over Cuomo on this thing that Cuomo never was able to capitalize or parlay it, but Obama did.
He gave a speech at what was it, 2004 convention.
And then somebody, somebody came along, the Democrats haven't realized, you know, this guy is immune to criticism.
We can't lose if this guy gets the nomination.
Because nobody can ever criticize anything he does.
We can destroy anybody who tries and call them racists.
They could No, but Cruz Cruz, they can't do the same with Cruz, even though he's Hispanic because Cruz is Canadian.
And the rap on Cruz is he really isn't even qualified.
He really isn't Hispanic.
He's not a minority.
He's a conservative.
There's no such thing as a conservative minority.
Just not Possible.
Here's Cruz.
This is uh Sunday morning, the State of the Union on CNN, Candy Crowley said, You think that uh some facet of the President's health care plan should be attached to an increase in the debt ceiling?
The debt ceiling historically has been among the best leverage that Congress has to reign in the executive.
So yes.
Yes.
Yes.
There's great historical precedent.
Since 1978, we've raised the debt ceiling 55 times.
A majority of those times 28 times, Congress has attached very specific and stringent requirements.
Many of the most significant spending restraints, things like Graham Rudman, things like sequestration came through the debt ceiling.
And so the President's demand jack up the nation's credit card with no limits, no constraints.
It's not a reasonable demand.
This is this is why he ticks them off.
He knows what Graham Rudman is.
He can talk about Graham Rudman in a sentence as though he was there.
And the guys like Vande High and Millbank, he's not supposed to be able to do that.
He's an idiot.
He's a phony.
However, I gotta say something.
I'm not so sure I agree with combining these two things.
Now, Ted Cruz knows far more what he's doing in this than I do because he's there and this is his job and I'm uh I'm but a mere pawn commentator in the game of life.
But the debt limit thing, if not done right, we could squander all of the positives we have picked up on Obamacare.
Because this business of uh Republicans refuse to pay the debts.
That that's that people care about that as much as they do about negotiation.
Now, if if Cruz can find a way to combine these two and make both of them pay off, fine.
I would love for that to be the case, but I would just soon kick this debt ceiling thing down the down the road a month or two.
Just you know, give us a little spending bill, pay the bills, here Obama, here's your bill for and make him veto it as piecemeal.
Just like they've made him veto every other little so-called piecemeal thing.
I'd keep the pressure on myself.
But again, I don't know what I'm doing.
I'm so pathetic anyway.
I you still wouldn't know what grabs number 23, John Boehner.
John Boehner, speaking of the House, went right to the House floor.
Right after Obama said, Hey, I'll negotiate anytime, anywhere, anywhere, any day, as long as you agree with me.
Boehner went right to the House floor, and it looks like he responded to Obama by ignoring what he said.
I'm gonna say this again.
A senior White House staffer this morning said that the president would rather default on our debt than to sit down and negotiate.
Now the American people expect when they're leaders, uh have differences, and we're in a time of crisis, that we'll sit down and at least have a conversation.
Really, Mr. President, it's time to have that conversation before our economy is put further at risk.
And I yield back.
Oh, that's Boehner.
Yeah, I want to say this again.
A senior White House staffer this morning said the president would rather default on the debt than to sit down and negotiate.
Then that yeah, but then this afternoon, Obama said, I'll negotiate.
I'm just not gonna negotiate on a debt.
I'm not gonna negotiate on Obama care.
I'll negotiate.
Uh they're playing this the right way.
They're playing this the right way.
They look like the ones willing to talk.
You know, folks, if you are a regular listener, you probably rush.
Why do you you you know you don't believe in negotiation, you believe in beating them.
I know that's true.
But sometimes that's how you do it.
We'll see how this plays out.
Back to the phones we go.
Who's next?
Atlanta.
This is Chris.
Great to have you on the uh EI.
You go on the football game tonight, Chris, the Jets and the uh I am I'm not rushed.
I'm working, I'm not sure.
Ah, too bad.
You're gonna miss the pink penalty flags that they are using in the NFL this month.
Yes, they are.
I kid you not, folks, pink penalty flags.
If you have to look twice to make sure they're penalty flags.
Anyway, what was it, Chris, that you dialed us about?
Well, Rush, I wanted to talk to you about two things.
One was about the 60 minutes piece yesterday about the Social Security disability uh fraud that's going on that 60 minutes did.
And the the second was I wanted to give you something.
But uh I don't know if you saw the Social Security piece, but basically it speaks right to your uh gap between rich and poor because people are running out of unemployment insurance, they're getting on the Social Security disability uh Social Security disability payments and they're they're taking advantage of the system.
And at no point in the piece was that talked about.
It was just about how destitute these people were and how they had no other options.
You know, this is amazing to me.
Did they make any connection here to who's president?
No, of course not.
And they had they didn't make any connection to who's been president for almost five years?
Not at all.
Not at all.
So on whom did they blame this?
Just the country at large?
Um the lawyers that are taking advantage of the system.
Lawyers.
Oh, it's a fault of lawyers.
Yes.
Otherwise known as Democrat donors.
Right.
Really?
They were blaming this on lawyers gaming the system for clients?
They were they they it was the Steve Croft piece, and he tried to interview a couple lawyers, and yes, they were blaming it on a couple of the lawyers.
I thought the Steve Croft piece was some Republican businessman being destroyed.
That must have been a different 60 minutes.
No, it was it was it had um Senator uh Coburn on there talking about uh his investigation into Social Security disability fraud.
Yeah.
Well, and then you've got you've had judges that approve it.
But uh so basically what was going on, they they they were alarmed at the financial state of the federal disability program and and the cost that it was gonna be on the American taxpayers for years to come because all these people were automatically getting rubber stamp approval.
Well, see that that raises another another question.
Let's take a look at all this debt.
Depending on who you listen to, the national debt is either 17 trillion or 83 trillion.
If you add up all the unfunded liabilities on pensions and social security, Medicare, and any number of the uh last week I saw it that the somebody's claiming that the real debt, I wish I could remember who is $83 trillion in in in terms of what if you have what the Feds printed and done with QE, whatever and all this, it's just added up with the interest payments and everything.
But once you get to $17 trillion, $83 trillion is we're not gonna pay back $17 trillion.
How are we gonna do that?
How are we ever going to pay back $17 trillion?
So these guys on 60 Minutes all worried about the uh the system and the straying on tax pay.
What's gonna happen here is the claim of the necessity to reduce this debt will be used to justify massive tax increases on people.
But that money is just gonna be recycled and respent.
It's we don't have any debt reduction uh plans in process.
We're always talking again about raising the debt limit on October 17th.
So just off top of your head, and I don't mean to put you on the spot, if you'd rather not take a stab at it, feel free.
I'm just I'm just speaking off top of my head here.
How are we going to retire any of this debt?
Be disability or any otherwise.
There's no way, is there?
Nobody's in Washington is nobody in Washington's getting serious about that.
There's there's no discussion about that.
Even if they were, what would we do?
That's a good question, Rush.
I I uh there's no there's no trigger.
I like to call it the trigger that propelled the American economy forward.
In the f in the 40s it was the World War II, in the 80s it was the Cold War.
What's the trigger this time?
I don't know.
Yeah, I don't know.
I just uh you know that when they can't zero it out.
I mean, there's there's all kinds of scare talk about well, let's just zero it out.
Let's just let's just uh wipe it out.
Let's just say we've paid it.
Well but it ain't gonna happen.
Snerdley is saying cut entitlements in half.
Okay, let's do that.
Let let's let's actually say we propose it, members of Congress talk about it, they debate it.
Half of them get shot.
They're assassinations left and right of the people who are talking about doing this.
Uh I'm I'm speaking euphemistically here.
I mean, if if a bunch of old people are gonna r uh drag Dan Rostinkowski out of his car over a hundred bucks, then eliminating half of the entitlement benefits that are out there.
Who meet okay, means test it, there aren't enough rich people to exempt from it that make a dent in it.
Now the budget deficit is a different thing.
You could you could freeze the budget for five years and maybe balance it in seven or eight if you just spending increases of no more than inflation.
But it's a vexing question because there's no way to pay it back.
However, there is a lot of value in making it look like you're trying for other investors in the debt credit markets, if you make it look like you're trying to, the optics.
If it appears to be a policy objective to reduce the debt, then oftentimes that would be enough.
But the idea of actually retiring $17 trillion.
Stop and think about that.
Um how how in the world, you know, when you could look, let's waste and fraud.
How about identifying all the fraud, which 60 minutes piece last night was focused on that, and just eliminate that?
You have the same reaction.
We've created such dependency.
There are so many people literally living off of a government check that if you take it away from them, you have.
Do you even want to think what you would have?
Do you think, L snerdbo, that the recipients are just gonna sit there and say, we are happy to help.
We'll gladly only accept half of what we have been getting.
Oh.
Some will work, but what if there aren't any jobs in the economy to absorb them?
What what if there's no place for them to go work because Obamacare policies are in effect?
You take their bennies away, forcing them into the job market, but there aren't any jobs to be had, and there aren't any careers anymore because everybody's downsizing to part-time to handle Obamacare.
What are we gonna do?
How would we absorb these people who are gonna, if they're eating because they're getting government check and the government check stops and they then starve without committing crime, what are they gonna do?
You're still gonna have economic growth.
You might have economic growth because of the lack of entitlement spending, but if you've not raised a couple generations of people who understand work and appreciate work and patient hard work that pays off, you'd have a panic.
You would have an abject panic if you announced this is gonna happen.
Even if you just gradually implement this.
Uh I'm not saying that would stop me, but just we've got 90 million Americans not working.
Ninety million not working.
Some of them are lying about disability, which is what this guy's talking about.
They're faking a disability because they've run through their unemployment.
We have made it profitable and productive to not work.
The Democrat Party has.
Now, all of a sudden, on a dime, you turn around and say to these people, guess what?
Your only hope is to go get a job.
Uh well.
I just wonder if it can be done.
If the debt can ever be repaid, I don't think it can.
But I don't think there's any, I don't think there's there's I don't think There's one person, responsible position, who would ever tell you, oh yeah, we can repay this debt.
Here's how we do it.
But making it look like we're trying might accomplish much of the uh the same thing.
Anyway, I appreciate the call.
I gotta take a quick time out here, folks, but uh sit tight, be patient.
We'll be back.
Don't go away.
Okay, here's next.
Uh this is Tom in uh in Glan Blanc, Michigan.
Great to have you on the EIB network.
Hello.
Thanks, Rush.
Uh glad to talk to you.
Thank you for having me.
And uh I'm surrounded by Democrats, and I just want to say that the only way I can uh can combat this is to try to give facts, and I'm I'm sorry to see that the Republicans are losing because they're not spending enough time educating the population.
And give you an example.
Obama said that this was the worst recession since the Great Depression.
Now that's a lie.
It's the worst recession since the Carter administration.
Um we've had twenty recessions over the last hundred years.
And uh these um they last about a year and a half.
The only two that didn't last a year and a half were the Great Recession and now.
What happened between those uh amongst those two?
Both had money thrown at them.
Does it make sense what I'm trying to say, Rush?
Um, yeah, you think the Republicans are losing because they're not telling people that the recession is bad.
Well, the facts, uh not just the recession, all the facts.
Um I I being around a bunch of Democrats, I have to loan myself with facts.
And um, so we're being lied to.
Um Detroit hasn't had a Republican in since nineteen um eighty-three and or nineteen fifty-four, I should say, but it's all the Republicans' fault that the Detroit has gone downhill.
Uh these facts.
That's why I'm trying to say that we need to re-educate the population.
Well, I don't disagree with that.
Uh, can I give you one more, real quick?
Uh yeah, you're on a roll.
Firewall.
The Democrats pushed Grandma over the the cliff, and then said the Republicans don't care about the seniors.
Prior to that, about six months prior to that, the Democrats had a bill in the House uh wanting to take money from Social Security and give it to the illegal immigrants for their health care.
Did you ever hear anybody talk about what was the truth?
But you asked my my neighbors, and they said, Oh, yeah, the Republicans don't care about Granny, they're pushing her over the cliff.
That so we we're not getting the facts, the truth.
Well, you need to call Boehner and tell him this, because I'm not I'm not in charge of the Republicans.
I've tried calling everybody, I've written everybody.
Um I I'm I'm just saying I've that's only a couple things.
I actually think to tell you the truth, I actually think right now that it's the Democrats who are seen pushing Grammy over the cliff.
I know you don't want to hear that.
Uh but I think that's the perception is out there right now that it's the Democrats causing this problem on the shutdown and Obamacare.
Look, they told us that the country is gonna come to a screeching halt and end with Y2K.
It didn't.
They told us the sequester was gonna be the end of Medicare and close down the defense department are gonna be ripe for military takeover.
Not none of the none of the uh disaster predictions take place.
And right now it is the Democrats who are seen as intractable and unwilling to compromise and negotiate.
So whether it's been the result of strategy or just grand good luck, the Republicans are winning this one.
Now I know that doesn't satisfy you because they're not satisfying you on a PR uh issue, Democrat commercial by Democrat commercial.
And I understand people being frustrated at that.
For 25 years, people have been calling here.
Why don't the Republicans do X?
I don't know.
I'm not one of them.
Um maybe they you usually should apply for a job with them to help them get the facts out.
Uh if that's what needs to happen.
They think they do get the facts out, but they'll tell you the media just won't cover it.
So they've got their built-in excuses.
Well, here we are, folks, making our mark each and every day.
The distinguished Limboy Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.
And we gotta go.
Thanks so much for being with us.
Back tomorrow in 21 hours to do it all over again.
And as always, really appreciate your being here, folks.
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