Rush Limbaugh, the Excellence in Broadcasting Network.
We are in Los Angeles this week.
The telephone number, if you want to be on the program, is 800-282-2882 and the email address, LRushbaugh at EIBNet.com.
Ladies and gentlemen, there's another thing that Flyover Country learned today, and this one is being totally missed inside the Beltway.
It is being missed by everybody.
I mean, practically everybody.
And especially it's being missed by Republicans.
But this isn't new, folks.
Way back in 19 in the late 50s, early 60s, I forget the exact date that William F. Buckley Jr. started National Review.
He wrote then of his conservative buddies who were the purebreds, the thoroughbreds, versus the he called them the well-fed Republicans.
We call them the Republican establishment.
That well-fed is exactly right.
And he talks about how the well-fed Republicans referred to Buckley and the gang at National Review as extremists and they were dangerous and they were going to destroy the party.
I know this may be a shock to some of you to think that this battle in the Republican Party establishment versus conservative has been going on this long.
It has been.
And it really is not just the Republican Party.
It is the Washington establishment.
That word's getting overdone, overused, including by me.
But Washington is its own field.
And for the longest time, Washington has existed at odds with the American people, other than at election time.
At election time, everybody in Washington goes out and makes the people think that they're number one.
And what they want is what's going to happen.
Vote for me, and that's what's going to happen.
Vote for me, that's what you're going to get.
Vote for me, and it's what I'm going to campaign on.
I'm going to campaign, and I'm going to implement this.
I'm going to govern this way.
And it never happens.
They get to Washington.
The culture takes over.
Establishment takes over.
And for the longest time, it's been the Washington establishment versus the people.
It's a natural outgrowth of power.
Inside the Beltway is the seat of power.
It's where all the money is.
And there's all kinds of hands trying to grab the money.
And it's a lot of money.
It's trillions, trillions produced by you, trillions of dollars produced by you every year that these people are trying to get their hands on.
Many of them don't work.
They run think tanks.
They run nonprofits, whatever.
They get grants.
Everybody's trying to get their hands on the money.
And people outside the beltway resent that.
We send the money to Washington for efficient use in running the government.
Don't waste it.
Don't make people dependent.
Don't create a bunch of serfs.
And the exact opposite has happened.
So they inside the Beltway miss a lot that they don't have any idea they miss.
And one of the things that we learned out here in flyover country, and actually something we already knew, we learned that one guy with some supporters, one guy standing up can change everything.
We learned that one guy standing up can stop the status quo in its tracks.
Can you imagine in this last fight if we would have had five or ten Ted Cruzes?
Can you imagine the different dynamic?
Can you imagine if we had five or ten Ted Cruises, we'd win a lot of debates.
If we had 45 Ted Cruises in the Senate, we'd come close to winning every vote.
And that's what everybody outside the Beltway sees.
And I'm telling you, and particularly the Republicans inside the Beltway do not.
They look at Cruz and they're embarrassed.
And they hope nobody thinks that they like Cruz.
They hope nobody thinks, and I'm talking about inside the Beltway conservative media types.
It's almost like Palin.
Go, God, don't associate me with her.
Don't think I like Palin.
No, no.
I agree with you.
Palin's an absolute ditz.
I agree with you.
Cruz is a lunatic.
I agree with you.
Cruz is insane.
I agree with you.
Cruz is a downfall of America.
This is what they all say to each other.
And they believe it.
But what do we see?
We see something totally.
We're told the Republican establishment tells us that they don't go to the media and make their case because the media won't cover them.
Common excuse that I hear, well, Rush, we could call a press conference every day.
They're not going to cover it.
Or if they do, they're just going to distort it, misrepresent it, and lie about it.
Well, I've always said Reagan was able to get past him, and so was Ted Cruz.
And Ted Cruz, by the way, got covered.
Now, by the media, now I imagine if I said this to an inside the Beltway conservative, yeah, he got covered by being a kook.
Yeah, he got covered because the media saw an opportunity to destroy the Republican brand with him.
Of course, Cruz can get covered, but we smart people can't.
We substantive people can't.
But sure, the media will cover every Republican kook that comes along.
That's not how we see it.
We see it entirely differently.
We see how one guy, unflappable, courageous, standing up against that machine, can, in fact, stop it.
We also learn it's going to take more than one.
Can't do it all with one.
But as I say, imagine if there were five or ten of them, Ted Cruz and Mike Lee, imagine that.
Imagine 45 of them.
And that, of course, is the objective outside the Beltway.
That's the objective with Tea Party people who are not giving up and not going away and not slinking away, cowering in the corner.
They're not.
They're energized.
No, people involved in this know that you never win forever and you don't lose forever either.
Some people get depressed that they have to continue the fight every day.
I understand that.
It's easy to slip.
I always said, after eight years of Reagan, why in the world did the American people not realize?
I mean, it was a booming economy.
People were going back to work.
The country was, no doubt, the world's lone superpower brought down the Soviet Union.
What in the world, how in the world did people forget that and start voting Democrat again?
And the answer is very simple.
The minute Reagan was gone, actually while he was there, but the minute he was gone, even the Republican Party started revising the history of the 80s.
And it became a depression, a recession, a decade of greed, a decade of selfishness, racism, bigotry.
Reagan hated gay people.
That's why they got AIDS.
I mean, it was a full court press because the left cannot permit the people to see on their own how liberalism fails.
They must not allow that.
And when liberalism is defeated, whoever engineers that defeat, i.e. whoever wins, must be destroyed.
That's why it's an ongoing battle.
It never ends.
You never win it forever.
Now, you can win it for a long time, as the Democrats have shown, something that we haven't perfected.
Now, I got one more story here.
I shared with you the Beinart story.
After this, I'm going to get to your phone calls.
The Beinart story is, well, yeah, we learned also that we have just gone into debt another trillion dollars.
That's how much the debt limit was raised, $986 billion.
$14 billion shy of a trillion dollars.
And that'll just take us through whatever till the next continuing resolution because we don't have a budget.
And the Democrats don't want a budget because a political reason.
They don't want to lock in their agenda.
Don't want people to see what it is.
And with the sequester, remember now, with the sequester spending, discretionary spending has been taken back to 2008 levels, which lowers the baseline.
I can't tell you how that frosts them.
The baseline is where the guaranteed 5% to 10% annual increases occur without a single vote.
The budget, whatever, 1974, where they instituted a new way of budgeting, baseline budgeting, and they just automatically wrote that every year every budget line item baseline is elevated 5% to 10%, whether it's needed or not, regardless how much or how little it was spent in that budget area the year before, automatic increase, without a single vote.
That's how you get a spending increase called a cut.
If the budget baseline says that health and human services are going to go up 8% next year, and in the budget deal, it actually only goes up 4%.
They call it a cut.
Yet there's 4% brand new money through baseline budgeting.
Well, the baseline here, because of the sequester, has been taken to 2008 levels on discretionary spending.
And this frosts everybody.
And they can't see the stimulus.
One of the great things for Obama and the Democrats with the stimulus was that it was going to raise the baseline by whatever that amount, $800 billion, forever.
Once you spend it, the baseline goes up forever.
But the sequester took it back prior to.
And as long as there are continuing resolutions, you cannot, this is the double-edged sword that the Democrats are faced with.
Because they won't do a budget, because they're simply relying on continuing resolutions.
It's kind of convoluted.
But they can't do anything about the sequester taking the baseline back to 2008 on discretionary spending.
All continuing resolutions do is approve the current services budget for the next year.
The current services baseline is not part of the continuing resolution, I don't think.
Pretty sure.
Continuing resolutions do not mean the same money will be spent next year as this year, but that the same level of services will be maintained, which is worse.
That means entitlements, pay increases, inflation adjustments, government programs still get their built-in increases based on population growth, but not on the baseline budget.
And that's why this raising of the debt limit had to have a specific rider raising government worker salaries next January.
In a budget, that would be automatic.
It would be part of the baseline.
When you go to continuing resolution, the automatic doesn't happen.
Everything has to be negotiated and kicked in, but not for a full year.
So the continuing resolution locked in the 2012 budget, which included the sequester cut, which took the discretionary spending back to 2008 levels.
I know it's kind of hard to follow all these numbers on the radio, but that's why the Democrats and the media are now hell-bent on getting rid of the sequester because they're stuck.
Now, the continuing resolutions are a detriment in that sense, but on the other hand, they have their positives, positive aspects.
That is, they get to redo the budget every number of months, and they don't have to spell out what their agenda items are budget-wise.
And they get to constantly have a crisis every three or four months, debt limit crisis, government shutdown crisis, and unbalanced.
They think they're winning on this, but they're frustrated they don't have it all.
And they really, the sequester has screwed up a lot of things.
Now, Ron Fournier used to be the head honcho at AP, now writes for the National Journal.
And he says, oh, yeah, yeah, no question, Obama won.
Big whoop.
He won.
He always does.
Big deal.
Can Obama lead now?
And Fournier is afraid that Obama isn't serious about victory.
Fournier is concerned that Obama likes the win for the sake of it as a notch in the belt.
But after that, let's go play golf.
He really wants Obama to use this victory to do the rest of his agenda, which is what Beinart wrote that is stuck.
Beinard wrote, Obama's agenda is stuck because the Republicans on policy have had some success here.
But Fournier, there's already, he writes here, there's already a lack of seriousness in the air.
On Tuesday, the president declared immigration reform now to be his top priority after the fiscal crisis.
It's a curious choice, given the magnitude of the debt and the durability of the same size of government debate.
Does Obama really think immigration is a more serious problem?
Or is it merely the best political issue for Democrats?
Really, what he's upset about here, he thinks, and this is where, folks, I'll never forget.
I wish I could remember the specific instance.
Let's say a journalist questioned another journalist, a journalist questioning an analyst.
And the assumption in one question, well, of course, now the president must do something about the debt levels.
He's got to do something about the debt levels.
He's got to do something about the deficit.
What do you think the president's policy is going to be?
And I'm watching this.
I'm in incredulous disbelief.
What do you mean?
He doesn't care about the debt.
He doesn't care about the deficit.
He's trying to raise it.
It's part of his transformation of the country.
He's trying to grow the government, shrink the private sector.
The guy, as we said yesterday, considers himself a victim of this country, and it's time this country paid him back.
You're a victim if you're a minority, and it's time the country paid you back.
This country has victimized way too many people.
Obama's not concerned with lowering the debt, and that is what bothers Fournier.
Fournier, apparently, is one of these guys who believes that Obama should be and is concerned about the debt.
How can anybody think that?
He just authored six, now, seven trillion dollars of it.
Seven trillion dollars added national debt in less than five years with this deal yesterday.
So here's one man, $7 trillion of the $17 trillion national debt tied to one guy, and reporters are saying, now, is Obama serious about debt reduction?
I mean, the mind boggles.
Anyway, Fournier is all concerned that Obama's not going to do entitlement reform and raise taxes.
And as such, he's not serious in his victory.
And as such, he may not make this win worth anything.
So it's not sweetness and light and hunky-dory and everything happy as a clam out there on the left either.
And don't think for a minute that it is.
Hi, folks, and welcome back.
El Rushbo, having more fun than a human being should be allowed to have.
Back to the phones.
We now go to Jerry, and we have a trucker here on the way to Oakland.
Jerry, I'm glad you called.
How are you, sir?
I'm doing great.
My point was that the sequester put a spotlight on how incompetent Obama is.
And this last thing put a spotlight on how absolutely mean-spirited he is, that he would literally let people die to get his own way.
And the people could see it because we know who shut down Trevor, who shut down the ball.
Okay.
I'm glad.
Jerry, thanks for the call.
I appreciate it.
We've got a little bit of a bad line, but I'm going to continue talking to you here on the radio.
This takes me back to something I said in the first of the program.
What he's saying is, look, we out here see what's going on.
We see a guy who's incompetent talking about Obama.
We see a guy literally letting people die to get his own way.
He said, we know who shut down the government.
And it wasn't Ted Cruz, and it wasn't the Republicans.
And it's like I was sharing, and I interrupted myself.
I'm glad Jerry called and reminded me.
At dinner last night, the conversation was a typical, why don't the Republicans do X?
I can't avoid those discussions.
And one of the guys at dinner said, look, they don't have to warn people Obama's a socialist.
They don't have to talk about Obama trashing the Constitution.
Why don't they just say the guy's incompetent and then point to Obamacare right here in the middle of an absolute disaster of a rollout?
All they got to do is say he doesn't know how to do this.
You know, even if you behave under the premise that Obama's a series, he wants to do good and he's really trying, do it that way.
He's failing big time because he doesn't know how.
He doesn't.
Look at our foreign policy, the guy said.
It's an absolute embarrassment.
What has happened in Egypt, what's happened throughout the Middle East, what's happened in Syria, this reset with Russia, it is embarrassing.
Obama's a national embarrassment, and he's incompetent.
Nothing that he has said he wants to do is working.
He said, Why don't they go at it that way?
And I gave him the usual answers that suffice every time the question is asked, and you know what they are.
Be right back.
Hi, welcome back.
I give an example here, ladies and gentlemen, of once again, what I think is conventional wisdom in Washington missing it on Ted Cruz and Mike Lee, the shutdown.
And I don't mean to be picking on Ross Doubt that here.
He just happens to have a piece in the New York Times today that fills the bill.
So does John Pedoritz in the New York Post today.
And this portion of a paragraph from Douth That today sums up well the Inside the Beltway thinking about what just happened.
And in his opening paragraph, he acknowledges that they're good people and they're decent and they're nice and that they do respect.
You need to respect their philosophy and their strategy and thinking about what they're trying to do.
But then after you do that, after you accord them the proper respect, then, however, you slice and dice the history, the strategy, the underlying issues, the decision to live with a government shutdown for an extended period of time inflicted modest but real harm on the economy, needlessly disrupting the lives and paychecks of many thousands of hardworking people who are now going to get a raise in January,
and further tarnishing the Republican Party's already not exactly shining image in pursuit of obviously, obviously unattainable goals was not a normal political blunder by a normally functioning political party.
It was an irresponsible, dysfunctional, deeply pointless act carried out by a party that, on the evidence of the last few weeks, should not be trusted with the management of a banana stand, let alone the House of Representatives.
That excerpt is fairly representative, I think, of the Mr. Dalthatt considers himself a conservative, by the way.
The conservative inside the Beltway, the New York, Boston, Washington corridor, if you will.
That establishment thinking is exemplified here.
Okay, look, we've analyzed what you did.
We've listened to your explanation of it, but my God, you guys are stupid.
And you're not qualified to do anything.
And don't you ever try this again.
That comes later in the peak.
Don't you ever do this again as though you would speak to your kid who broke a window by accident at first, then did the second one on purpose.
And that's when you took him seriously.
And then you sat him down.
Don't you ever, ever do it again, little Billy, or then I'll get really mad.
Or whatever parents today say when their kids act like absolute reprobate heathens.
I wouldn't know.
And here's what they're missing.
Not only did we in Flyoverland learn that one guy could bring all this to a screeching halt, one guy can get media coverage, one guy can draw attention, one guy can draw the media off of Obama.
One guy could do it, the right guy.
And then we say to ourselves, what if there are five or ten of them?
What if there are 45 of these?
Now, that makes the Inside the Beltway types just shudder in fear, that concept.
But we've not learned our lessons.
Here's the thing.
And Mr. Dothett says, man, if you listen to Red State, it's Erickson.
Talk radio.
What's his actual line here?
I didn't highlight it, so I'm having – ah, here it is.
The mentality that drove the shutdown, a toxic combination of tactical irrationality and the elevation of that irrationality into a conservative litmus test, may have less influence in next year's Beltway negotiations than it did this time around, thanks to the way this has ended for the defunders after Boehner gave them pretty much all the rope that they had been asking for.
But just turn on talk radio or browse Red State or look at Ted Cruz's approval ratings with Tea Partiers, and you'll see how potent their mentality or this mentality remains, how quickly it could resurface, and how it means that, yeah, they might not actually go away, even though we're telling them to go away.
It could resurface and how easily Republican politics and American governance alike could be warped by it again.
So, Mr. Doubtette, typifying the Beltway thinking inside conservative mainstreams, we respect you.
We've examined what you did, but you're fools.
Don't ever do this again, but we know that you might.
And then it's going to be all over.
Well, here's the truth.
And yeah, I'm on talk radio telling you this.
I don't know about you folks.
I'll speak to myself, for myself, but I think I'm speaking for a lot of you.
What do you mean, learn our lesson?
We haven't learned the lesson the establishment hopes that we have learned.
The lesson they hope we have learned is that we are not qualified to play in this arena, that we really don't know what we're doing.
We're not qualified to run a banana stand, much less the House.
And we hope we've learned that.
They hope we've learned.
They hope we've seen what a mess we made.
They hope we have seen how dangerously close to the end of the world we brought people.
And they hope that we see this and will never, ever do it again, that we will leave this to the adults next time.
Them.
But we, instead of learning that lesson, what we have learned is we've got to come back stronger next time.
We've got to come back with more than just one Ted Cruz.
Instead of never, never doing it again, the answer is coming back stronger.
And I sense, by the way, in talking to people, that there's a mindset for that, a positive mindset.
Speaking of Ted Cruz's poll numbers, how about Obama's?
You know, this is, you know, with all due respect for those of you inside the Beltway, those of us out here don't understand why you look at Ted Cruz as your number one enemy and not Obama.
And why you look at Mike Lee and Cruz and maybe even Sarah Palignette or talk radio or Red State or whoever.
Why are we the enemy?
We're not doing anything.
Barack Obama has got the wrecking ball.
Why can't you people focus on Obama?
That's the question we ask.
Like my friend at dinner said last night, if for no other reason the guy's incompetent, can you not even say that?
Can you not say he's incompetent because of his pedigree?
Well, he came from Harvard.
He was law review.
So he can't be incompetent as ever.
So the fact that he doesn't know what he's doing on foreign policy, abject embarrassment.
The fact he has no clue about websites, building them, maintaining them, operating health care.
What else does this guy want to run that he's totally unqualified for?
But are you not even prepared to go that route because, well, he's the first black president.
We can't go.
I mean, charges of racism would flow.
Call the first black president incompetent?
No way.
We're not going to do that.
Besides, the guy went to Harvard.
He's one of us.
He's got the same pedigree education as we've got.
We're not incompetent, so how can he be?
But he is in the real world.
If you don't want to go after Obama on ideological grounds, go after him on the fact that he's simply overwhelmed by the job, outmatched by it, and hasn't the slightest clue.
Now, I don't have to believe that, but it would be a way.
I mean, we out here are wondering why you're so afraid of us and Ted Cruz.
And you don't, I mean, you don't even get anywhere near criticizing Obama the way you do Ted Cruz and Sarah Palin and other upstarts.
And we scratch our heads over this because we don't look at ourselves as the enemy.
We think we want the same things you do.
Maybe we don't.
Maybe you do want a big government with yourselves in charge.
But we don't.
But as I say, speaking of polling data, Ted Cruz's numbers, yeah, whoopee.
What would you expect?
A Ted Cruz poll is irrelevant.
For six weeks, we get nothing but news stories.
Ted Cruz is an idiot.
Ted Cruz is mean.
Ted Cruz is selfish.
Ted Cruz is dumb.
Ted Cruz is anti-what?
And then we're going to do a poll on Ted Cruz.
And then the poll is going to show that his approval numbers are way down.
Well, big whoop.
Why don't you do six weeks of anti-Obama news and then take a poll of him and see what you get instead of five years of fawning hero worship.
And even with five years of hero worship, five years of fawning, five years of being practically news, Obama groupies.
Obama's Gallup daily approval poll after the deal was reached.
Obama dropped a point.
42% approval rating in Gallup.
Their daily tracking poll, October 14th through the 16th.
So it would include yesterday when the magic of the deal was done.
And Obama's approval dropped a point.
And they want to tell us what Ted Cruz's numbers did after they and everybody else in the media beat Ted Cruz up for six weeks or longer and then take a poll and think you've made news with it.
This is news.
You build up Obama, you fawn over Obama, you're groupie over Obama, and you can't get him up a point instead of down a point.
42% approval.
What are mainstream media polls but echo chambers?
You go out, you do six weeks of trashing Ted Cruz, and then you take a poll.
And the poll says 27% like Cruz, and the rest think he's an absolute total lunatic insane.
Then you publish the poll, and oh, no, my God, Cruz is destroying the Republican Party.
No, he's not.
You guys are sitting around, let the media do that for you.
So obvious to those of us out here.
Another timeout, back right into your phone calls when we get back.
Calispel, Montana, as we head back to the phones, this is Bob.
Thank you for waiting, sir.
Great to have you on the program.
Yeah, hello, Rush.
Yeah, my story here is that I just got noticed that my health care coverage is going to be terminated.
And it looks like the option I have to go to is to go on Medicaid.
Why is your health insurance being terminated?
They're canceling here in Montana all high-risk policies.
Who sent you the cancellation notice?
It's a third party from Blue Shield.
Oh, it's an insurance company.
Yeah.
They told you that they're canceling you.
Yeah.
You're in a high-risk pool pre-existing condition?
Correct.
Uh-huh.
That's not supposed to happen.
Obamacare, you're supposed to be able, you're supposed to be fat city.
I mean, you're supposed to be in there.
They give you some options, and one of them is you should go to Medicaid first, and then whatever bronze, silver, or gold things they offer on those plans.
So anyway, it sounded like I went to an insurance agent that's supposed to represent the exchanges for Medicare.
Yeah.
Not Medicare, Obamacare.
And they said, yeah, it looks like you have to go to Medicaid first.
Do you mind if I ask you, Bob, how old you are?
I'm 57 years old.
57 years old.
On Medicare at age 57.
Well, I'm not on it.
Did they suggest in any of this cancellations?
Did they...
Did they suggest these gold, silver, bronze plans?
They tell you to go to exchange, healthcare.gov?
No, they just said, you know, as of January 1st, we're canceling all policies.
Oh, so you've got January 1st.
Well, you ought to go out and get healthcare every day and stoke it up, you know, get a bunch of healthcare and put it in the bank.
Yeah, that's definitely an option I was playing with.
But anyway, I'd like to carry my own load and pay for it.
But it doesn't look like it's going to go that way.
Why?
Because you don't have the money?
Well, I mean, I have to do something at the beginning of the year.
And so I just, you know, what else can I do?
I mean, hopefully nothing happens to me by the first of the year.
And so I'll, you know, go on Medicaid and, you know, go that route.
So you're going to sponge off all the rest of us.
That's why I'm calling.
I'm not an ingrate.
I want to thank you and the other producers in this country to allow me to sponge off you.
Well, at least you're thanking us.
That never happens.
We never, ever going to thank, at least you had, at least you had the gonads to do that.
I mean, that's worth something.
I appreciate that.
Okay, and that's all I wanted to say.
Okay, Rush?
Okay.
Pleasure talking to you.
Yeah, I'm sure.
I'm sure, Bob.
Thanks very much.
So Bob kicked off his policy.
They told him to go to taxpayer-paid health care, and he just called to thank us.
It took him a while to get there, but he eventually got there.
It must have been hard to do.
Well, it is.
It's got to be hard to do.
I don't know about you.
I never thank people doing things for me.
And it's got to be tough for people like Bob to call in here and thank us.
Take what seriously?
I know I'm being facetious.
I thank people all the time.
I go overboard thanking people.
It's the way I was raised.
But that's why I'm being facetious.
I figure nobody would believe it if I say I never thank anybody for doing things for me.
Anyway, but he did.
He called thank us.
He's at least, that man has character.
I mean, he gets a note from his insurance company saying, we're offloading you.
Go freeload somewhere.
And the regime gave him some freeloader ideas, and he just called to thank us.
I don't know about you, but I kind of feel better about it.
I don't know where the time is going.
And we're zipping by here.
We're already finishing here the second hour.
You know, I got a note from somebody who has a perspective on this, the deal that ended the government shutdown.
And basically, you know, big business, big business sat on the sidelines during all this as conservatives fought for the little guy.
Big business got their Obamacare care waiver.
Big business no longer, there is no employer mandate delayed for a year.