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Oct. 10, 2013 - Rush Limbaugh Program
31:17
October 10, 2013, Thursday, Hour #3
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Hi, how are you?
Great to have you back here, folks.
Great to be back.
Rush Limbaugh.
Talent on loan from God.
Non-transferable, subject to recall.
Great to have you.
Telephone number if you want to be on the program today, 800-282-2882.
An email address.
lrushbo at eibnet.com.
Apparently, the stock market loves this Republican idea of temporarily raising a debt limit through Thanksgiving, basically, six weeks.
Would it be six?
I think it's November 22nd is what they're saying.
And the market's up like 242.
If it's attributable to that, and the White House saying, well, wait a minute now, we haven't seen a deal.
But Jay Carney says, well, the president's happy that cooler heads are prevailing, which means I hope really that Boehner is getting rid of the Tea Party.
That's what that means.
That's what they want in the White House.
And it's ought to tell a Republican something.
The White House wants the Tea Party done away with.
If I ran the Republican Party, I'd think I was onto something with a Tea Party.
but I'm not running it, even though I'm said to.
Okay, George Will and his column from a couple...
Oops, sorry.
Well, it's published today in the New York Post.
Who the heck knows when it really first ran?
It's within a day or two, obviously.
Now, before I share with you the details of it, I found this little blurb on George Will.
Apparently, he was on NPR yesterday.
National Public Radio.
George Will compared Obamacare to segregation and the Fugitive Slave Act in an interview with NPR on Wednesday, noting that just because it's a law doesn't mean it should continue to be one.
Gee, you know, one of George Will's best friends is Dr. Grema.
They used to play chess together at George Will's house.
I don't know if that meant it was many, many, many moons ago.
But this means that the Republican establishment would never say this.
George Will also criticized what he called the untidy, utterly Democratic process of changing laws.
When he was asked what he thought about Obama's argument that Republicans are short-circuiting the system rather than appealing the law, George Will said the Republicans aren't doing any such thing.
How does this short-circuit the system, he said?
I hear Democrats say the Affordable Care Act is the law, as though we're supposed to genuflect at that sunburst of insight and move on.
George Will added the Fugitive Slave Act had once been a law, but lots of things are the law until the American people decide to change them.
While he appears to support Republican efforts to dismantle Obamacare, Will noted that using the debt ceiling as leverage is not novel, that it is unlikely to work.
Again, that's not the point to me, but it's a my gosh, if you did things because they wouldn't work, nobody would do half of what they've done or more.
But I don't want to reprosecute that.
I want to move on here.
I'm not trying to leave you hanging.
George Will's piece today is on a book written by James Pearson of the Manhattan Institute.
His book was published in 2007.
And it's called Camelot and the Cultural Revolution: How the Assassination of JFK Shattered American Liberalism.
And it begins with a quote from Jackie Kennedy on the day her husband was murdered, November 22nd, 1963.
She's quoted as saying he didn't even have the satisfaction of being killed for civil rights.
It had to be some silly little communist.
Jackie Kennedy thought that her husband's death had been robbed of any meaning because he was killed by some silly little communist, Lee Harvey Oswald.
This reminds me of the Democrats being jealous that 9-11 did not happen on Clinton's watch because he was robbed of a chance for greatness.
They really said that, folks, if you doubt me, not Clinton, but his friends, associates, people in his administration actually lamented that if that was going to happen, why couldn't it have happened when Clinton was president?
Why does Bush get the chance for greatness?
So Jackie Kennedy, I did not know that, by the way.
I didn't know that she had said he didn't even have the satisfaction of being killed for civil rights.
It had to be some silly little communist.
Jackie Kennedy thought her husband being murdered by Oswald robbed his death of any meaning.
But a meaning would be quickly manufactured to serve a new politics.
First, however, an inconvenient fact, Oswald had to be expunged from the story.
So just 24 months after the assassination, two years, just two years after the assassination, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., the Kennedy's kept historian, I love that phrase.
Kept historian, like kept woman, meaning Arthur Schlesinger Jr., the guy we're paying to write the history we want.
Arthur Schlesinger Jr., the Kennedy's kept historian, published a 1,000-page history of the 1,000-day presidency without mentioning the assassin.
The transformation of a murder by a marginal man into a killing by a sick culture began instantly.
Before Kennedy was buried, the afternoon of the assassination, the Chief Justice Earl Warren ascribed Kennedy's martyrdom to the hatred and the bitterness that has been injected into the life of our nation by bigots.
The next day, James Scotty Reston, the New York Times luminary, wrote in a front-page story that JFK was a victim of a streak of violence in the American character, especially of the violence of the extremists on the right.
The day after, folks, this is exactly right.
I think this analysis is dead on.
The Kennedy media machine moved immediately to expunge Oswald from having had anything to do with this, and Kennedy was shot.
And you've probably remembered growing up hearing not long after the assassination what a bunch of rabid, conspiratorial, nutcase conservatives had taken over Texas and Dallas, and that that's why Kennedy even had to go there because he was in danger of losing the electoral votes from Texas.
He had to go down there because it was being taken over a bunch of right-wing kooks.
And before long, the Kennedy media machine had moved into action to make everybody think that Oswald, he didn't even exist anymore.
It was mean, extremist right-wingers who had created the atmosphere, the culture in which Oswald was able and inspired to act.
Now, adjacent to James Reston's article in the New York Times, again, front-page story, the day after the assassination, JFK was a victim of a streak of violence in the American character, especially of the violence of the extremists on the right.
Never mind that adjacent to Reston's article was a Times report on Oswald's communist convictions and associations.
Folks, this theory really is dead on right.
And we've talked about this on the program before, although not quite in this detail.
But I forget who did it.
It might have been a caller, but somebody that I spoke to postulated that the left, and it was somebody had the theory that modern liberalism could be explained by the Kennedy assassination.
And it was that they could not possibly allow for it to stand that he'd been killed by communists.
Because the Democrat Party, even then, was sympathetic to communists.
It just didn't work.
So it had to be, they had to come up with a substitute.
They had to come up with some other reason why Oswald did it, why he was able to do it.
How he was able to get away with it.
And so they came up with this extremist, radical, right-wing, bigot culture in Texas.
Three days after the assassination, a New York Times editorial called Spiral of Hate identified JFK's killer as a spirit.
The New York Times deplored, quote, the shame all Americans must bear for the spirit of madness and hate that struck down Kennedy.
The editorialists were presumably immune to this spirit.
The new liberalism as paternalism would be about correcting other people's defects.
So the modern era of liberalism was born because America's imperfections had risen to the surface, and they were so great.
The imperfections were so profound that they had led to the assassination of the most beloved president ever.
And therefore, liberalism must begin to immediately correct the defects of this country.
And that's how it began.
Hitherto, a doctrine of American celebration and optimism, liberalism would become a scowling indictment.
Kennedy was killed by America's social climate, whose sickness required punitive liberalism.
And so they expunge Oswald.
Now, not from the historical record, everybody knows Oswald did it.
But the successful thing they did was create this mythical, bigot, racist, hateful culture that gave birth to a guy like Oswald.
Not communism.
Oswald came back from Soviet Union to do this.
That phrase, punitive liberalism, is from James Pearson of the Manhattan Institute, 2007 book, Camelot, The Cultural Revolution, How the Assassination of JFK Shattered American Liberalism is a profound meditation on the reverberations of the rifle shots in Daly Plaza.
The bullets of November 22, 1963 altered the nation's trajectory less by killing a president than by giving birth to a destructive narrative about America.
Fittingly, the narrative was most injurious to the narrators.
Their recasting of the tragedy to validate their curdled conception of the country marked a ruinous turn for liberalism.
Now, some of you might be, what ruinous?
They're running the show.
Obama's the president.
Liberals are running everything.
But in the classical sense, classic liberalism used to be pretty good.
It is a despicable, corrupted mess, and we're living it.
Punitive liberalism preached the necessity of national repentance for a history of crimes and misdeeds that had produced a present so poisonous that it murdered a president.
And that's what they created.
Punitive liberalism, punish.
We're going to punish people.
We need, as a nation, to repent for our sordid history of crimes and misdeeds that had been so bad and so noxious that they created an aura and a universe and an atmosphere, a culture capable of killing the most popular beloved president ever.
To be a liberal would mean being a scold.
Liberalism would become the doctrine of grievance groups owed redress for cumulative inherited injuries inflicted by the nation's tawdry history, toxic present, and ominous future.
And lo and behold, that's exactly what it is.
Now, I believe that while this is true, I think people like Obama, their opinion of America predates the Kennedy assassination.
I think his roots go all the way back to the founding.
But essentially, so does this too.
I mean, if you're going to take the Kennedy assassination and claim that the founding of the country gave us this noxious and offensive, poisonous country capable of killing the most beloved popular president ever, that something was wrong with it from the start.
To reread Robert Frost's banal poem written for JFK's inauguration is to wince at its clunky attempt to conjure an Augustan age from the melding of politics and celebrity.
The Kennedys used to pioneer the presidency as entertainment.
Under Kennedy, liberalism began to become more stylistic than programmatic.
After Kennedy, and especially after his successor, Lyndon Johnson, drove to enactment the Civil Rights Act, Medicare, and Medicaid, liberalism became less concerned with material well-being than with lifestyle and cultural issues such as feminism, abortion, sexual freedom, and the like.
The bullets fired on November 22nd, 1963 could shatter the social consensus that characterized the 1950s only because powerful new forces of an adversario culture, adversarial culture, were about to erupt through society's crust.
Foremost among these forces was the college-bound population bulge, baby boomers, with their sense of entitlement and moral superiority, vanities encouraged by an intelligentsia bored by peace and prosperity and hungry for heroic politics.
Liberalism's disarray during the late 60s, combined with Americans' recoil from liberal hectoring, catalyzed the revival of conservatism in the 1970s.
And as the author of the book in 2007 writes, the retreat of liberalism from a doctrine of American affirmation left a void that would be filled by Ronald Reagan 17 years after the assassination.
The moral of liberalism's explanation of Kennedy's murder is that there is a human instinct to reject the fact that large events can have small, squalid causes.
There is an intellectual itch to discern large hidden meanings in events.
And political opportunism is perennial.
Well, that's just a long way around claiming that people at the moment of Kennedy's assassination realized they had an opportunity to blame America for it and specifically the right.
I had to expunge Oswald, had to explain Oswald's existence by virtue of a corrupt, polluted American culture traceable to our founding.
And liberals then gave themselves the power and the excuse to fix it all with punitive liberalism.
And folks, what we have in the government shutdown is punitive liberalism.
In fact, the entire Obama administration could be called that.
Got to take a break back after this.
Okay, back to the phones we go.
And people have been waiting patiently.
I appreciate that.
Martinsburg, West Virginia.
Hi, Ray.
Great to have you with us, sir.
Hello.
Hello, Rush.
It's an honor to speak with you.
I appreciate it.
Thank you, sir.
I just wanted to make a comment.
I think there's been a demographic shift in the political parties that either people have ignored or haven't identified.
What's that?
Women running everything?
Well, part of that.
But what I believe happened is during the Clinton years, you had a group known that everybody referred to as the conservative Democrats.
And what happened was during the Clinton years, they became disenfranchised with the Clintons' policies, and they shifted to the Republican Party.
And what has happened now is the Republican Party has become more center of the race.
Now, wait, wait, wait, wait, just a second.
Wait, wait, I want to be historical accurate.
You're right, but we've got to explain why.
It was a phenomenon.
If you recall, after the Republicans won the House in the 94 elections, there were massive numbers of Democrats quitting the Democrat Party.
But why do you think that was, Ray?
You think it was ideological?
You think it was policy?
What was it?
That the Republicans won the House?
Yeah, it was they want to be winners.
They thought it was the end of their party.
Remember, these people don't have a long view about anything.
If you remember the House, your world is two years.
Right.
But what I see are there are a lot of Democrats out there who are Christians.
They have strong faith.
But they, for whatever reason, vote Democrat consistently all the time.
But whenever the Clintons took office and they tried to push through the health care Reform or whatever you wanted to call it back then, Hillary Kerr.
I think that was part of the start of it.
And then there were other things that came to light in the Clinton administration, I think, that pushed a lot of them to change to the Republican Party.
And what's happened now is the Republican Party's now, they've become the center of the road.
And as a result, it's created the Tea Party because people that are truly conservative.
Hold your thought.
Hold your thought.
He can't hear me, folks, because of our incompetent phone system.
Hang on out there, Ray.
I got to take a break.
We'll be back here in just a second and continue.
Okay, we're back to Ray in Martinsburg, West Virginia.
Ray, I wanted to hold you over because I'm fascinated here by your theory, and I want to see where you're going to take it.
And as I understand it, what you're doing, going back to the 90s, the Republicans win the House.
You've got Clinton and Hillary trying to take over the country with Hillary Kerr.
It's not wanted.
A bunch of Democrats leave the party, join the Republican Party for whatever reason.
And now take that to the point you're making about today.
What is it?
Well, I think what the problem is is you have a number of elected officials who are card-carrying Republicans who are conservatives, true conservatives.
They live a conservative lifestyle.
They have conservative beliefs, but they're still trying to function within a party that has actually become a moderate party.
I think really what's happened is you've got the Democrats, which are really an extreme left version of a political party.
The Republican Party has actually become a moderate party.
And then you have the Tea Party, which is the true conservatives, people that live a conservative lifestyle and vote conservatively.
And you think this is because of a demographic shift?
Well, I think during the Clinton years, whenever they initially tried to do the universal health care, it scared a lot of people.
And that's why the Republicans won in the 94 race.
It woke everybody up to what the extreme left update.
That really wasn't the case.
That was to come later.
It was a factor, but the primary reason for Republicans winning in 1994, number one was me.
Number two was the House Bank scandal.
Number three was the House post office.
40 years of Democrats.
Number four was the contract with America.
Number five was the fact they nationalized House races for the first time in history instead of running them as 435 local elections.
And Hillary, they tried Hillary Carroll, Hillary Carr and the forerunner of Obamacare, and that was a factor.
But they didn't need just that.
All of Clinton, what Clinton ran, he was called a conservative Democrat, a moderate.
He gets into office, and he proved to be what everybody before this was trying to warn people of.
This guy's a card-carrying leftist, just like Obama.
And people finally saw that.
But the Republicans back then, the reason they won, it wasn't just by the American people decided that there was a reason.
The Republicans gave people a reason to vote against Clinton and to vote for them.
Contract with America, any number, and the House Bank and Post Office scandal, and a bunch of dislikable Democrats like Jim Wright, who was the Speaker.
Now, the real question is for me, and why your point here is interesting to me is in a demographic shift or whatever you want to call it, how do you go?
1995, 1996, that's not that long ago in real terms.
It's 18 years ago.
How do you go from there to the outhouse as the Republican Party has?
Now, they still run the House of Representatives.
They won it back in the 2010 midterms, much the same way they won it the first time in 1994, 1995, by being conservative and by offering an alternative.
And in that case, it was Obamacare that gave birth to the Tea Party.
So the lesson here, what you're saying is that the Tea Party is the right-wing.
The party itself has become moderate.
I think in a broad-based sense, what's happened here is that the entire Washington establishment has never liked conservatism, didn't like the fact the Republicans won, didn't like the fact that Reagan won both Republicans and Democrats.
But the reason we're where we are is the most amazing thing to me because the 2010 midterms were a recipe for victory, and so were the 94 elections, a recipe for victory.
And the Republican Party refused to follow the recipe.
Mind-bogglingly so.
Not only did they not follow the recipe, the Republican Party today seems to believe its future is in Democrat light.
Mind-bogglingly so.
I'm not disagreeing profoundly.
I don't think demographics has as much to do with it as ideology.
The fact that the Washington establishment never has been conservative.
And when the Republican Party has been victorious is when it was unabashedly conservative.
But the forces of the establishment are such that they make it painful, uncomfortable, miserable to be a conservative.
Look at what happens to any prominent conservative in that town.
Look what's happening to Ted Cruz right now.
Look what's happening to Mike Lee.
Any of them that rise up, they get shot down by their own party included.
And that's just the power of the Washington ruling class.
Pure and similar.
This doesn't even include the role the media plays, which is rather significant.
By the way, no, I haven't seen that.
Snerdley just said that Wall Street is ticked off because they've got no influence in the Tea Party.
I haven't heard that.
I didn't think Wall Street wanted any influence of the Tea Party.
I thought Wall Street hated the Tea Party like they hated Christine O'Donnell.
I didn't know they wanted any influence of the Tea Party.
But I'm not denying that that exists.
I just haven't seen it.
Anyway, Ray, I appreciate the call.
I really do.
I'm glad you took the time.
I don't mean to be disrespectful when I say I don't think demographics is the reason.
We may be saying the same thing with just different terminology.
I just don't think it's complicated.
Republican Party, when it abandons conservatism, is a non-factor.
I have no idea what's going to happen in 2014.
All I know for sure is that the Democrats and the media are going to launch everything.
Let me tell you something.
Barack Obama hates this crap, what's going on.
The fact that there's opposition, that just frosts him, ruins his day.
Opposition to deal with these little gnats?
The deal with these creeps?
He wants 20, the whole modus operandi of Barack Obama is to get rid of opposition, not beat them, but get rid of them.
That's what he despised.
They want 2014 so bad because there won't be any opposition.
There won't be any lame duck.
They can do whatever they want to do, and nobody can do anything about it.
Nobody will be able to stop them.
So they're going to be loaded for Baird.
That 2014 for them is their next credit.
That's why they've been delaying all the bad things as many as they can about Obamacare.
Anyway, again, Ray, thanks for the call.
I appreciate it.
Back after this.
Don't go away.
All right, we go back to the phones to where I used to live in a shack.
Overland Park, Kansas.
Hi, Rick.
Great to have you here.
Hello, sir.
Mr. Limbaugh, it's an honor and a thrill to speak with you.
I can't believe I got through.
I'm glad you did, sir.
Well, I just real quick wanted to expand on what Ray said, your last caller, and there's a term for what's happening to the Republican Party, and it's called velocitized.
It happens with morals.
The analogy is you come off of the highway going 75, and you all of a sudden realize, holy cow, I'm driving way too fast.
And you jam on the brakes, and you go back to the Tea Party.
And I think that's what's happened.
But that's just besides the point.
I've had a lot of time to think here in the last hour.
But the reason I called was because of the Republican donor issue that you talked about, where they're getting nervous about the Ted Cruz and the Mike Lees, and they want them gone before they're going to start donating.
Well, I think that the opposite is actually true.
And I know I can speak for a number of people because both my brother and I have been longtime donors.
We own a company here in Kansas, Hardcore Hammers, that we're a small manufacturer of hammers, and we are conservatives.
And the Republican Party constantly called us and called us and called us for donations.
And it finally got fed up with them.
And I said, look, until you guys can make a principled stand on conservative values that you ran on to be elected in office, we are withholding any future funds.
You know, you're not alone.
You are not alone.
There are a lot like you.
But the story that's out there is that it is donors that are demanding an end to the Tea Party influence in the party that are holding out.
And money is the driving force in pretty much everything.
And it is here.
And I need to spend some time explaining this tomorrow, what really is going on here, because it really is this battle between the Tea Party and the mainstream.
It really does, in many ways, boil down to how the ancillary players are going to get rich.
The ancillary players.
The bundlers, the consultants, not the candidates, not the elected officials.
They're a different world.
There's a lot of different things driving this.
And it probably would be worth our time to delve in it or into it.
And Rick, thanks for the call.
Sadly, my friends, we are out of busy broadcast moments for the day.
But tomorrow's Friday, isn't it?
Unbelievable.
Okay, so we have Open Line Friday tomorrow.
And I got a bunch of stuff in the stack today that I never even got to on the healthcare rollout, on how bullying programs are backfiring.
There's some good stuff there.
So I'll just save that for tomorrow.
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