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Nov. 15, 2013 - Rush Limbaugh Program
34:26
November 15, 2013, Friday, Hour #3
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Sam, I got a question here.
Ladies and gentlemen, bouncing off of the Obamacare website and the way they're counting enrollees.
Okay?
Shouldn't Amazon and the New York Times bestsellers list, shouldn't they count as a book sale if somebody puts a copy of Rush Revere in the shopping cart?
I mean, that's how they're counting enrollees at healthcare.gov.
Whether they buy a policy or not, they're counting them as enrolled.
So if you go to Amazon or anywhere else and you put Rush Revere and the Brave Pilgrims in the shopping cart, it ought to count as a sale, right?
Live from the Southern Command in sunny South Florida.
It's Open Line Friday.
Welcome back, folks.
It's great to have you.
Rushland Baugh and Open Line Friday.
Whatever you want to talk about, it's fine.
And this hour, as again, I have had diarrhea of the mouth because there's been a lot of important stuff out there.
But this hour, I'm going to focus on phone calls.
I may even snirtily stand by in there.
I may even take a couple here in the monologue segment.
Got an explanation for why Obama is going to veto the Upton Bill.
Passed in the House, 261 to 157.
39 Democrats voted with Republicans to reinstate your canceled health policy.
The House voted to give insurers one more year to offer health plans due to be canceled under Obamacare.
A bunch of Democrats voted with Republicans in what is said to be here a rebuff to the regime.
The vote came one day after Obama said that he would let insurers, he would allow.
I can't, you know, I don't guess it's not that big a deal.
It just offends me.
Presidents don't permit or allow people to do things not in our system.
All right, here it is in the media.
After the president said he would let insurers re-enroll consumers for one year.
Oh.
This deeply offends me.
Anyway, here's the crux of this.
The White House said that Obama is going to veto this bill, the Upton bill.
And here's why.
It would allow insurance companies to sell substandard plans to new customers.
So this plan that you like and you were told you could keep is substandard.
It's inferior.
It's not any good anyway.
And it was going to be canceled no matter what he said he knew and didn't know.
It was going to be canceled.
But he's going to allow you to keep your plan for one more year.
But the Upton bill would allow new ones to be sold, apparently.
And Obama is not going to permit that.
No.
No, no.
The President of the United States will not permit the insurance companies to sell substandard plans to new customers.
He also says the regime says that the Upton bill omits coverage for people with pre-existing conditions.
And are you ready for this?
The president says he's vetoing the bill.
And this is the biggie, because the Upton bill charges women more than men.
That's what he says.
That's what the regime puts out.
Again, you have to understand the truth is irrelevant.
It's whatever Obama says.
And Obama is telling the women of America that the Upton bill would permit the insurers to charge women more than men.
And he's not going to put up with that.
He's not going to let these Republicans continue to savage, ravage, and discriminate against women.
Not going to let it happen.
Well, it is proof the Republicans shouldn't try to fix it, but they're damn lucky he vetoed it.
I'm just going to tell you, they don't know how lucky they are that he's going to veto this.
I hope he holds firm and does.
Okay, get that out of the way.
One more thing about the press conference yesterday.
Well, a couple more things about the press conference yesterday that I didn't know until a program was over yesterday.
He actually, I've alluded to a couple of these today already.
The President of the United States actually said yesterday, okay, on the website, I was not informed directly that the website would not be working the way it was supposed to.
Had I been informed, I wouldn't be going out saying, boy, this is going to be great.
You know, I'm accused of a lot of things, but I don't think I'm stupid enough to go around saying this is going to be like shopping on Amazon or Travelocity a week before the website opens if I thought it wasn't going to work.
So this is the example where he uses his own ignorance as a sign of brilliance.
His own stupidity or ignorance is a sign of how smart he is.
He actually wanted people to believe yesterday that he wasn't told that the website wasn't ready.
Now, that simply isn't true.
That has to be a lie.
It has to be a lie.
There's no way he didn't know.
The real answer is he didn't care.
It didn't matter whether it was ready to go or not.
Didn't matter.
That's not the website, the exchanges, they are necessary distractions for what he wants.
In fact, the more they don't work, the faster he thinks he's going to get where he wants to go.
But here's a guy, on one hand, everybody thinks he's the smartest guy in the room.
Why, this guy knows everything.
You ever listen to him talk?
You ever heard him talk on policy?
This guy can talk about policy like nobody's business.
This guy knows everything.
He can't do it.
He's horrible at policy, but he plays the talk game really well.
He sounds smart.
He sounds like he knows everything.
And he's got these details down like nobody other than Clinton had them down.
And he's this great academic.
He's a professor of law at Chicago University or some such thing.
But then being the all-knowing master of detail, he doesn't know anything.
On the other hand.
So this guy holds up his fact he didn't know about his website as proof of how smart he is.
You think I'd be dumb enough to go out and sell this thing as ready to go as good as Amazon if I thought it wasn't ready to go?
So on the one hand, he wants us to think, boy, this guy's so brilliant, so hands-on, so masterful of details.
And on the other hand, he's an absolute ignoramus.
There are a couple other things that he said.
Get this now.
And again, I apologize.
I should have had this stuff yesterday, but I just didn't have a chance to get it.
What is true is that, as I said before, our IT systems, how we purchase technology in the federal government is cumbersome, complicated, outdated.
And so this isn't a situation where, I mean, on my campaign, I could simply say, who are the best folks out there?
Let's get them around the table.
Let's figure out what we're doing.
And we're just going to continue to improve it and refine it and work on our goals.
But if you're doing that at the federal government level, you know, you're going through 40 pages of specs and this and that and the other, and there's all kinds of law involved.
It makes it more difficult.
It's part of the reason why chronically federal IT programs are over budgeted behind schedule.
Okay, do you understand what he just said here?
He just indicted bureaucracy as one of the reasons why his healthcare plan is failing and why the website's bad.
And he says he knew that going in, except he didn't know the website wasn't working.
If you know the federal government can't do something, then why did you do it?
It's not like my campaign.
I'll get to sit there and I can issue orders.
I say, go get the best people.
He said, you can't get the best people in the federal bureaucracy.
You can't get the best people and you can't send around and get them mortars because there's 40 pages of rules and regulations that you've got to go through.
So the guy indicts the very means of implementation of his dream.
And then, folks, this was the biggie.
The president said, even if we get the hardware and software working exactly the way it's supposed to, with relatively minor glitches, what we're also discovering is that insurance is complicated to buy.
And another mistake we made, I think, was underestimating the difficulties of people purchasing insurance online and shopping for a lot of options with a lot of costs and a lot of different benefits and plans, and somehow expecting that that would be very smooth.
And then they'd also go try to apply for tax credits on the website.
We discovered that insurance is complicated to buy.
You had the president of the United States.
You remember when George Bush was said not to know what a supermarket scanner was and how they portrayed him as out of touch, a wealthy aristocrat who never had to go to work.
Here's a guy who claims he didn't know until his website rolled out that buying insurance is complicated.
He didn't know that?
You know, I can see where he wouldn't know.
He doesn't do this stuff.
This is so beneath him.
He doesn't have to mess around with this kind of stuff.
But I'm going to tell you why this website bombed out is because they purposely hid the most important things from people.
You go on a website, you're going to buy something.
The first thing you want to know is what it costs.
You could not find that until you had sworn to give them everything you own plus your two kids.
They demanded so much personal data from you, and you couldn't find the price.
You couldn't find the terms.
And the reason they were hidden was because they didn't want people to not sign up.
They knew people wouldn't sign up when they found out their premiums were going to triple or double and the deductible was going to triple.
So they put that stuff at the back end where nobody could stay on long enough to get to it.
But my point is, the president of the United States to stand up in a nationally televised press conference and say as though it's a new discovery for him, they didn't know how complicated it was to buy insurance.
This guy, this guy constantly reaches out to the lowest common denominator in our society and connects with them.
The low information voter hears that, yeah, man, he's one of us, man.
It is complicated.
I'm glad he found he knows it, Mabel.
He knows how hard it is.
What's the latest on Kimmy and Kanye?
They had no compunction about saying any of these things.
He had no problem admitting that he didn't know his website wasn't working.
He had no problem turning that into an example of how smart he is.
He didn't have any problem whatsoever saying, well, you know, dealing with the government, that's really a pain in the rear end.
All these regulations and things, and you can't get the best people.
It's not like my campaign.
And then he had no compunction, no problem at all telling people he didn't know until this all started.
Buying insurance is complicated.
And still, he's held out as smartest, brightest, most brilliant.
It just wears me out.
This just wears me out.
I got to take a break.
Sit tight, folks.
Back with more.
And back to the phones, as promised, to Hershey, Pennsylvania.
Hi, Dan.
I'm glad you waited.
Great to have you here.
Hello.
Hey, Rush, great to speak with you.
We've been fans in my household for over 10 years now.
We're huge, loyal fans of yours.
I just wanted to call him to make two points to you, sir.
This is the greatest honor of my life.
Thank you.
I just wanted to say, you know, it's funny.
If you get pulled over for so much of the speeding ticket, you say to the officer, you know, I didn't know I was going that fast.
They tell you, and this is such a slogan, you know, ignorance is no excuse for the law.
That's all you ever hear is ignorance is no excuse for the law.
This is very true.
Because the president needs to be told over and over again that, you know, and have that really drilled into his head because it's funny.
What's good for the goose is good for the gander.
You know what I mean, Rush?
Sort of.
What is specifically you're referring to?
Well, I'm just basically saying, you know, you always hear that ignorance is no excuse for the law.
Well, it's funny because the president is out there claiming all this ignorance, and it's all you ever hear.
I didn't know, I didn't know.
But if it's good for us, it should be good for him that ignorance is no excuse for.
Well, that's true.
I get your point.
You've got a different way of illustrating the hypocrisy.
I mean, basically, nobody gets away with, I didn't know, but in his case, we're not talking about breaking the law so much as, I didn't know the website wasn't working.
I didn't know that people weren't going to be able to keep their policies.
I didn't know any of these details when he is also portrayed as the smartest, the most detail-oriented, the most connected, the most compassionate, the most caring.
These are the kinds of things that frustrate you and me that make no impression on low-information voters.
They make no impression on a lot of people.
Well, I didn't know the website was going to be that bad.
The guy has, let's face it, because of the first term and the campaign, he's got a lot of goodwill built up with people.
I mean, the guy was a messiah.
He's going to unify everybody.
His poll numbers are in the toilet now.
His approval numbers are down.
But I don't really know how many people, when he says he didn't know about the website, my real feeling is that most people don't even know that he said it because most people are not watching a presidential press conference at 1 o'clock or 12 o'clock.
They're doing other things, particularly the low information crowd.
So the media not making a big deal out of that so much.
So it's just a huge disconnect.
I have found over the course of the years, folks, and one of the really big frustrations associated with this program is the daily realization of how little people in the country actually are aware of, hear about, or care about within the political arena.
And there is also most people have this protective view of the presidency.
They just, anybody who holds the office is always going to get the benefit of the doubt unless the media spends four years destroying them like they did Bush.
And with Bush not returning fire or any of that.
But I'd have to say that's one of the most frustrating things is the overall level of detachment that a lot of people have.
Jeff in Enon, Ohio, you're next on Open Line Friday.
Hi.
Hi, Rush.
Yes, I just wanted to point out something.
I watch all the political pundits and hear you talk.
And by the way, I loved your show for 20-something years or more.
And no one's making the point that Obama and his regime have brought our country down to the level of, you know, the highest office of the land has become an insurance salesman.
And at that, a hack of an insurance salesman, it's embarrassing, and it's insulting, Rush.
I know.
I know.
It's not, by the way, we don't want to insult insurance salesmen here.
That's not your point, is it?
That's not at all my point.
And that's why I said the word hack.
An insurance salesman worth his salt would have solved this insurance problem in just mere hours and got it out the door and been on to the next issue.
Is that not true?
Well, yeah, but not the way Obama wants to solve it.
That's the difference.
The thing about what really cuts to the quick with what you're talking about is Obama thinks he knows more than insurance people do about insurance.
He knows more than doctors do about medicine.
He knows more than generals do about the military.
He knows more than Steve Jobs or anybody in Silicon Valley about high-tech.
He knows more than Exxon about oil.
He knows more about everybody, about everything, than everybody else doing it.
And he hasn't done.
Welcome back.
Great to have you.
Rush Limbaugh here and the EIB Network.
Folks, I have a stack here I printed out of fan mail that I would love to read all of it to you.
It is from parents and children who've written in about the book, Rush Revere and the Brave Pilgrims.
And people are sending pictures of their kids standing in front of the bookshelf, happily reading the book after happily buying the book.
The cutest, cutest pictures that you've seen.
But I do want to share one with you here quickly.
Dear Mr. Limbaugh, I pre-ordered your book.
I've been anxiously awaiting its arrival.
I couldn't wait to read it to my six and eight-year-old boys.
Then I heard you mention how one family who had kids similar ages really liked the audio version and that it was four and a half hours long and that you did it.
I was so excited to hear this.
See, I drive my boys 25 miles to Scroole one way every day so that they can attend a private school.
25 miles a day.
Wonder how many of you do that?
That it would surprise us.
We spent a lot of time in the car.
My two boys usually eat two meals a day in the car.
So we enjoy listening to audiobooks.
Well, I downloaded Rush Revere yesterday morning and I started to play it as we left the driveway.
My boys listened intently the whole way there.
And as we got out of the car, they said, rush, rush, rush into school.
It doesn't stop there.
I was a driver that day for my eight-year-old's class for a field trip to a planetarium.
As soon as we got in my car with two other boys from my son's class, my son said that we have to listen to Rush Revere.
I turned it on, and I didn't hear a peep out of those three boys for 45 minutes until we got to our location.
Now, think about that.
A car with three eight-year-old boys and not a sound, Rush.
It was glorious.
As they got out of my car, they were all saying, rush, rush, rush into history.
We walked inside.
We took our seat in the planetarium.
We were waiting for the program to start.
My eight-year-old said, you have your phone.
Please play Rush Revere.
I told him that they wouldn't be able to hear it on the phone and that we wouldn't have much time.
But he still begged me to play it anyway.
After the planetarium program was over and we were walking back to my car, my son started singing Rush Revere, I like it, to the tune of That's the Way I Like It by KC and the Sunshine Band.
And we headed back to school.
Again, another peaceful car ride as the boys intently listened the whole way.
When I picked up my boys from Scroole, they get out every day at 12, 10 or so.
So I always listen to you on the way home.
They immediately said, can we listen to Rush Revere?
And I said, no, I want to listen to Rush.
They said, I don't want to listen to the regular Rush.
I want to listen to Rush Revere.
Later that day, we stopped at the grocery store.
I happened to be walking down the book aisle.
My son spotted your book, was so excited to see it, so that may be a place that your audience should check if they're unable to find your book at a regular bookstore.
It was in the grocery store.
So, anyway, P.S., if you have a moment, take a look at the Veterans Day program my boy school puts out every year.
This is just a sample, folks, of the mail that we are getting from people who are really getting into this.
It is so gratifying.
And it just, I can't thank you enough.
This is a whole new pathway for me.
And it's a whole new entree to an audience demo that there'd be otherwise no way we would have on this program.
So you parents are fabulous.
And I will admit, you know, I'm not jealous.
If the kids would rather listen to Rush Revere than me, I mean, that's just the way it is.
They like Rush Revere.
Rush Revere is a likable guy.
Made sure of it.
What, Snerdley?
What?
Well, I've not been told if we've been sent any videos or not.
But you're right.
That will be the next thing to come.
Anyway, a whole stack of this stuff.
I mean, it's just literally pouring in.
And if you, folks, by the way, if you haven't done this, you ought to show, if you have a kid or two who likes the book, make sure that you take them to the 2ifbyt.com website.
And by the way, we're going to post some of these pictures at the rushlimbaugh.com website.
We've both covered.
But take the kids to the 2ifbyt.com site because that's where the Rush Revere pain is or the portal.
And you can see where Rush Revere and Liberty live.
And the 2FIT factory is there, the mailbox to send email.
And we finally have installed the EIB broadcast tower and complex in the map.
It's an actual drawing of where they live.
And I'm not going to say there's a little surprise if you click on the EIB broadcast tower that the kids will like.
They'll get a big charge out of it.
Now, moving on, as you people know, I have been highly attuned and very sensitive to the ongoing assault on football that is taking place in our culture and has been going on for a while.
And if you recall, I have made mention numerous times that this game is under assault in subtle ways, and the assault is being conducted partially by the media who cover the sport.
And you can tell how they've been raised and brought up and educated at journalism school by virtue of the way they are covering the sport.
They don't know it, but they are presiding over the sport's demise as it exists, and they think they're helping.
And they're easy to punk.
What has settled in now, and I think a lot, if you stop and think about this, you'll know I'm right.
There is now, when the NFL is mentioned, what football is talked about, when the subject comes up, one of the first thoughts that people have is how dangerous it is.
It's now scary dangerous.
People suffer serious brain injuries and may commit suicide later in life.
And it's now become a sport that people associate with maiming serious, serious head and brain injury.
And these are often the first thoughts people have about it.
It really now is not becoming a sport.
In a lot of people's minds, it's becoming a question mark.
And it's still in most people's subconscious, but it's going to become something forefront of people's minds before very long.
And the question that will be asked that will represent the mindset is: why are we playing this game?
That's what people are.
Now you have the Richie Incognito Jonathan Martin business.
You got bullying.
You got post-traumatic stress disorder.
You've got mean hazing.
You've got all the ills in America, which is a fraudulent place anyway.
Now encapsulated in the NFL.
So, the other day, a story, you might remember this, Snerdley.
A story was circulated that Tony Dorset is suffering.
You remember the story?
Right, right, right.
The story, Tony Dorset, Joe DeLamalier, and six other players had been diagnosed with a disease, CTE, which is chronic traumatic encephalopathy.
All right.
You saw it.
You think you saw Dorcet complaining about it?
The media wrote story.
ESPN wrote a story on how, oh, this is so.
Oh, no, Tony Dorset has got CTE Pro Football Talk, the website, the sporting news, the New York Times, the Atlantic, ABC, NBC, CBS, and they all got punked.
Because CTE can only be diagnosed in an autopsy.
There is no way of knowing if a player or anybody has chronic traumatic encephalopathy until they have died and you do an autopsy on the brain.
That is the only way.
There is no way at present to know if anybody is suffering from this while they're alive.
And there was a near-phony fake think tank that put out phony.
They played a hoax.
And all of these sports people got punked.
They all fell for it.
Hook liners, even though it is well known.
It is, it's not a mystery.
CTE, chronic traumatic encephalopathy, is not known until you're dead.
You can't find it in somebody alive.
These guys have all reported it, but all it took was the name Tony Dorset.
Suffering memory loss.
Oh, no, not Dorset.
And they all reported it.
They are written about it.
And of course, why?
Football.
The whole thing was a hoax.
This is the kind of thing that the way journalists are setting a sport up cover this stuff now.
Now, Frank DeFord, standby audio sound number two.
Frank DeFord used to be Sports Illustrated, may still be.
I remember watching Frank DeFord back in the 70s and 80s on the NBC Sunday morning pregame show Bryant Gumbel hosted when they had the AFC.
This is back before they gave it up and Fox took over and CBS got the AFC, Fox got the NFC.
This is way, way back.
I work in the 70s or 30s.
And Frank DeFord wrote about football, loved football, worked with Pete Axdelm, did a piece on the Steelers Last Stand in the early 80s for Sports Illustrated.
And he had a great line when I met him once and I told him how much I liked the line.
He was nice.
Turns out he's big lib.
They all are in sports media.
Sports media folks, worse libs than the news media people.
It's just, it's astounding.
Anyway, Frank DeFord was making a comment about how they talk about Chicago fans being the best sports fans in the world.
And DeFord said, what in the world makes them great sports fans?
They support losers.
Cubs fans, best fans?
What?
Is Chicago the best laundry town because they got laundries that don't clean your clothes?
Well, you know, it calls Chicago the best laundry town.
He went on and on and on about it.
But anyway, he was, he just, he covered football like any other sport.
Reverence, respect for the people that played it.
I want you to listen to what's happened to him.
Frank DeFord was on NPR Morning Edition yesterday, and they were talking about a new poll on what Americans think about the game of football in light of recent scandals about the head injury controversy and the Dolphins bullying story.
Here's Frank DeFord.
An HBO Real Sports Maris College poll shows that the danger of football concussions would make a third of Americans less likely to let their boys play.
But now the view that has emerged from the Dolphins locker room goes beyond that and suggests that modern football is so violent, even thuggish, that it can damage your soul as well as your brain.
How many more parents will keep their sons out of the football locker room under the assumption that there are better ways to learn to be manly?
So now, because of a poll, football damages your soul.
Football damages your soul.
Can I take you back to November 4th on this program?
The Dolphins bullying scandal.
This is quickly, this is what I said.
It's audio soundbite number one.
Listen, it just takes 20 seconds.
This thing going on with the Miami Dolphins.
I'm going to be very, very, very careful here because I think we are looking at an example of the changing culture of masculinity in this country.
What did DeFord just say?
Got to keep our sons out of the football locker room.
There are better ways to learn to be manly.
Football now damages your soul as well as your brain because look what it did to Richie Incognito.
I remember all the trouble I got into when I said that a football game looked like the Crips and Bloods one day to me.
Now these guys are out talking about how football robs you of your soul and destroys your life and ruins your brain.
Have a great weekend, folks.
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