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Nov. 22, 2013 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:34
November 22, 2013, Friday, Hour #2
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Greetings, my friends.
Welcome back, Rush Limbo, the EIB Network.
Great to have you here.
It's open line Friday, so let's keep rolling.
Live from the Southern Command in Sunny South Florida.
It's open line Friday.
Oh, is that what you mean?
I mean somebody just asked me if I thought the city of Washington.
And I didn't know that was the city.
George Washington.
Does the city of Washington care that Lincoln was assassinated there?
No, because now there are the Ford Theater Awards every year.
Wheleftist Hollywood types get ribbons and medals and so forth.
Anyway, welcome back, folks.
It's great to have you with us open line Friday, Rush Limbaugh, the Excellence in Broadcasting Network 800 282-288-2, the email address.com.
And it is the 50th anniversary today of the assassination of President Kennedy.
And again, the whole purpose of today is to blame conservatives.
I'm not kidding you.
It's amazing.
No matter what network you watch, they've got people on who claim to have been there that day.
Reporters, editors, assignment editors.
And yet people who uh were there in the aftermath of the assassination.
Well, I've been there in the aftermath.
I was there last year.
I've been to Dealey Plaza.
I looked, I've been to the window at the school book depository.
I did a radio commentary from there when I was in Kansas City.
I've I've been there.
I've been to the aftermath of the Kennedy assassinate.
And all these people, it's amazing to listen to talk about what kind of place Dallas was.
Hotbed of anti-black bigotry, anti-civil rights, mad cap extreme conservative right-wingerism.
And all this time, it was a communist that killed the president.
And they're doing everything they can to ignore that and erase Southern Democrats with a hotbed of racism in that year.
Southern Democrats, the old Dixiecrats, they were the racist.
The Democrats ran the South back then.
They didn't run Dallas, which is what has everybody in the left ticked off.
But I remember I was I was there during the Republican convention.
The Reagan would have been 84.
I worked for a radio station in Kansas City that sent crews to both San Francisco for the Democrat Convention and to Dallas for the Republican convention.
In fact, that can that's where I met George Will for the first time in the massive media complex underneath the convention hall where I forget where it even was in uh in Dallas.
But the thing is, I knew that I was getting fired.
When I was uh well, I just knew it.
I knew it was gonna happen.
I can't tell you why.
I mean, I know it was not something I surmised.
I knew it.
It was in the cards.
In fact, I was shocked that they that they sent me.
When I went down there with uh the morning crew, a couple other people, I was there to do commentary each day, which is eventually what got me fired, and I decided to um to go to the Texas School Book Depository.
And I got together with a couple of guys who were at the time were with KIRO in Seattle, Cairo.
They were there to cover Slade Gorton, who was the senator from Washington.
That's all they cared about was what Slade Gorton was doing.
Of course, it figures they were from Seattle and doing provincial coverage, and I went with those three guys, and what I decided to do was walk the steps up there.
It's an eerie, I'll tell you it was really eerie.
Um I walked the steps, and I had my little cassette tape recorder going the whole time.
As I did the commentary I did attempted to replicate in a 90-second, two-minute format, retrace Oswald steps that day, and I ended at the window, which they did have set aside.
It was a it was a makeshift museum at the time.
But there it is.
It's amazing, you know, when you see something on TV for years and then you go and see it in person, its perspective is all different.
And it was a much smaller, really tiny area.
And they make a big deal of what a great marksman, whoever shot would have to have been, because the limo was moving away from and downward at an angle, and for the shot with the old rifle that was being used, and it had to have been really a great marksman, which Oswald was.
But it was an eerie thing to walk up those steps, and they were backsteps.
They were dark in this building.
And then get out on the sixth floor and walk to that corner window, which they had set up as though it were Oswald had just left.
They tried to preserve it as it was as soon as Oswald left.
And it was, there's no question that you couldn't help, I couldn't help uh pausing, because everybody remembers where they were when they first heard that that it had happened.
But the thing that, you know, people forget, Kennedy went to Dallas to shore up what was a hostile anti-Kennedy Democrat faction in Tex.
Kennedy was in real trouble, re-election-wise.
Like Obama, if he had to run it, Obama Obama just get guess what?
Gallup just hit 39%.
41% CNN.
The swing in the Gallup number just out today for Obama is 15.
It's 30, 39 approved and 44 disapprove.
But Kennedy was in real trouble.
That's why he went to Texas.
And he was scheduled to make a speech at the trademark about free trade.
And the Democrats were afraid that he was going to lose Texas unless the Democrats in Dallas came around.
And that was even despite LBJ being on the ticket.
There wasn't really no love lost between those two guys, by the way.
That's another that's a little bit more well-known than other aspects of this.
But if you if you try to run around today and say that the Kennedy presidency was nothing to write home about in historical and in real terms, you will get slaughtered.
Because the poor man has been martyred, and he's now in surveys of historians, he's either number one or two, greatest president ever.
And I'm telling you, not even close, but you can't say that.
It's one of those the Bay of Pigs.
Well, I could talk about the Bay of Pigs, and it's an outright utter disaster.
What was the signature achievement of Jay?
I'll tell you what his signature achievement was.
Jackie.
His signature achievement was the family and the pictures and the photo ops and his press conferences.
He had, he made the press feel like they were on the inside.
He laughed with them, he joked with them.
That's why the Camelot PR campaign was able to work so well.
This singular real achievement.
It happened posthumously.
I would say that those massive tax cuts that he proposed and that were passed later after he died.
You can't say the Cuban Missile Crisis, that was that was we got we got our clocks cleaned on that deal, uh particularly in Turkey.
What?
Well, that's I know.
This one I'm I know I've just stepped in it.
I've just blasphemed because the Hollywood portrayal of the six-day missile crisis is that JFK single-handedly averted a nuclear war.
The legend is that JFK in his studly manliness stood down, stood up, stared down the brute, the bully Nikita Khrushchev, and sent Khrushchev running back to Russia with his tail between his legs and the nuclear missiles that never got to Cuba.
That's the legend that can't deny it.
That's the legend, the truth is something else.
But what's the point in this situation?
Nobody wants to hear the truth.
Uh it's there for people that want to study it.
It's been written about the Kennedy president presidency's written about accurately.
But it it is safe to say that there were serious questions about him being re-elected.
It was it was not it was at his re-election was at grave risk.
What people who uh who only know Camelot, what people don't realize is during the time of his life, and during his time in the White House, there was no Camelot.
Camelot was created after his death as a massive PR campaign that was led by Jackie and Arthur Swessinger, Jr.
And Ted Sorensen and uh all the others that that was surrounded Kennedy in a slavish, sycophantish way in the in the White House.
Vietnam War, just to show you, the Vietnam War, which the 60s generation, that's the formative event in their lives.
The Vietnam War is JFK.
LBJ gets all the blame for it because he he did ratchet it up, but it was JFK that took us there.
JFK got the whole Vietnam War thing started.
He was a fervent anti-communist, and he he was trying to stop the domino effect, but he has nothing to do with Vietnam and history.
Nothing to do with it.
There is no soil in the legacy of JFK.
But the truth, you know, is another matter.
But it it it the truth is never going to permeate.
People, it's one of these situations where the manufactured legacy satisfies everybody, makes them feel good.
Uh it's almost as though he was deserving of that, given that he gave his life for the country being assassinated and so forth.
So why nitpick it, Rush?
Why tell people what really happened in the Cuban Missile Crisis?
Why, why blaspheme?
Why can't you just leave it alone?
And if if it if the American people want to have a hero that stood up and stared down the Russians, don't take it away from them.
that's pretty much what it is.
But that's not what's happening.
What's happening today is no is this an extension of what happens every day.
The right wing's responsible.
Conservatives did it.
And if they didn't do it, they wanted to do it.
And if they didn't do it, they might have paid for it.
And if they didn't pay for it, they were applauding it when it happened.
Whatever they have to do to connect conservatives to this assassination is what many in the drive-by has been doing all week.
The New York Times just I shared with you a story from a couple days ago yesterday.
It's one of those things that can be very frustrating.
The truth is out there, but it is nowhere near the surface.
And it's a truth that a lot of people don't want to be bothered with.
I gotta take a break.
You know what?
I still can't get over that.
I kind of sloughed this off or just slid past this, but this former lineman for the Eagles accusing McNabb of being a bully.
Six years ago or something.
No, nine four years ago.
McNabb out defending himself.
Not a bull.
What?
Okay, it's open line Friday.
We always try to take uh a few more calls on Friday than usual.
So where are we going?
Ben to Oregon.
This is Andy.
Welcome.
Great to have you on the program.
Hi.
Hey, Rush, great to talk to you.
What I wanted to say, Rush, was that we need to stop spending our political capital during uh political campaigns and start using that money and those funds now.
Do a move on dot org type campaign, except use humor like I've been listening to while I'm on hold to educate the electorate.
If we can't educate them, we can't win them.
Well, yeah, I know.
And that there's they're they're raising money left and right all year round, and they're not spending it.
I know exactly what you mean.
There is no accompanying year-long campaign, issue by issue, or in generic form about even attack ads, or if you want to run ads that are that are that are supportive of your side.
Um you're right.
Uh the party reserves all of its spending for actual campaign times.
And the uh the Democrats do conduct this kind of operation year round.
They just, you know, I I don't know.
I I don't know how to tell you or how to explain to you the difference of strategies.
To me, to the outside um the outward appearance is that the the Democrats just want it more.
They just seem to want it more.
I wish I had an answer for you.
I know, but I know what you mean.
Uh that there is no ongoing effort to inform people about who they've never has been.
They've yet to tell the story of who Obama is.
They're afraid to.
I don't look, we've been through this.
I don't know how many.
I'm I'm getting blue in the face.
Uh trying to offer speculation or answers as to why the Republicans don't do what everybody thinks they should do.
I'm not one of them.
I don't have the answers.
Just like you.
All I could do is guess.
And I'm telling you, the thing that handcuffs them is they think they can't win anyway because of the media.
Like many of you, by the way.
I hear from enough of you.
I we had a couple of people this week call, Rush.
You need don't get all excited about Obama's polling numbers.
They got the media, nothing's gonna change.
I think you may just be describing the Republican attitude as well.
They don't think they can prevail, because they don't have the media.
They think that probably the lowest profile, uh, meaning the smallest target they can make of themselves is probably the best way to go.
Again, just guessing, but I do know many of you think it's hopeless, and nothing is ever going to change, and we're not gonna seriously win anything with the media the way it is.
I don't happen to subscribe to that, but I know a lot of people do.
I mean, that to me is a recipe for just quitting.
If you've got some force out there you think can't be beat, then why even engage?
Uh Julio in Tacoma, Washington.
Great to have you on the program.
Hello.
Hello, Mr. Lumbo.
How's it going?
Uh going very well.
Thank you.
Excellent.
Um, I'm really concerned about the the sociopathic, you know, Democratic administration using the nuclear option to stack the 2014 congressional elections against Republicans all all over the country.
I wanted to know, you know, if you think that's a real possibility.
No, I I don't think the nuclear option per se can do the nuclear option will allow the Democrats to not be affected by Republican victory.
Um the nuclear option is a Senate thing uh in terms of you know how that impacts Republicans winning elections across the country, it's not a good thing, you're right, but the the nuclear option is it is for a different purpose.
And we are back.
Great to have you, Rush Limbaugh and the excellence in broadcasting network.
The last caller was uh curious about whether the nuclear option can ensure that Republicans don't win elections.
No, the nuclear option means that Republican votes in the Senate are irrelevant.
This is strictly the Senate.
There are 45 Republicans in the Senate, and they may as well not ever show up for work anymore.
There is n it doesn't matter.
The the filibuster rule required 60 votes to pass anything, including a presidential nominee to a court or a cabinet post or even pieces of legislation.
And this is this is hundreds of years of Senate tradition and rules.
In the five years that Barack Obama has been president, he has nominated genuinely extreme people who are out of the American mainstream to sit on courts to be cabinet secretaries to sit over at the EPA, you name really genuinely radical leftist extremists who are not part of the American mainstream.
The Republicans have filibustered a number of these nominees in order to keep genuine radical leftists out.
The Democrats are fit to be tight over this because their view is Obama won, and he gets should be able to nominate whoever he wants.
Now this happens to both parties.
I mean, how many times have you heard Chuck Schumer characterize every Republican nominee as out of the mainstream?
Well, he's wrong when he says it.
What he means is they're not extreme liberals, and anybody who's not an extreme leftist is out of the mainstream in Chuck Schumer's world.
But out of the mainstream for us means they're socialist, communists, whatever.
And we're not a country of socialists and communists.
Obama wants to make us one.
So the Republicans were using age-old powers in the Senate to block those nominees.
And the Democrats just Obama just got fed up.
And so they have, as the majority, enacted a rules change.
And they've gotten rid of the 60 vote requirement because they're not getting their way.
And so the end result of it is that any Obama appointee or any piece of legislation now only needs 51 votes in the Senate.
There is no filibuster permitted anymore.
Well, the Democrats have what is it?
55, 54.
I don't know the exact number.
Republic it's 55.
There's 54 and one quasi-independent but socialist.
But it's a total of 55 people voting the Democrat side.
The Republicans have 45.
And the Democrats now only need 51 votes for everything.
And they've got 55.
So the Republicans Can't stop a thing.
The Republican senators may as well not show up.
There's nothing they can do.
I mean, they can participate in committee hearings and they can ask questions and they can go through all this, but they can't stop anything.
Now, the folks, the simple fact is, when the majority in any group of people, when the majority can change the rules at any time, then there aren't any rules.
This is a point that I've been making repeatedly all week long.
Senator Who.
The debt Carl Levin, the democracy that made the he's Carl Levin said that.
I didn't even pay attention.
Carl Levin voted again.
There are three Democrats that voted against it.
I knew he was one of them.
Because he recognizes this is bad.
And it is.
Let's forget the Senate for a minute.
Let's say, let's take 10 people in a room in their group.
And the room is made up of six men and four women.
Okay?
The group has a rule that the men cannot rape the women.
The group also has a rule that says any rule that will be changed must require six votes.
Okay?
Of the ten to change the rule.
Every now and then some lunatic in the group proposes to change the rule to allow women to be raped.
But they never were able to get six votes for it.
There were always the four women voting against it, and I always found two guys.
Well, the guy that kept proposing that women be raped, finally got tired of it, and he was in the majority.
He was one of them, you know what?
We're going to change the rule.
Now all we need is five.
And the women you can't do that.
Yes, we are.
We're the majority, we're changing the rule.
And then they vote.
Can the women be raped?
Well, all it would take then is half the room.
You can change the rule to say three.
You can change the rule and say three people want it, it's going to happen.
There's no rule.
When the majority can change the rules, there aren't any.
I have to think if Sheetz Bird were still alive...
Of course, Sheets Byrd was senile in the old days, so I don't know how he'd come down on this.
But you know, he was, you know, for everything else he was.
This guy was the Senate was church to him.
It was inviolate, at least for a while.
But it really is a it it's it's a fundamental discarding of hundreds of years of tradition, and for one reason only, Barack Obama can't get what he wants democratically.
It's there's no other reason for this.
Barack Obama cannot get his nominees.
He can't pack the D.C. Court of Appeals.
He wants three additional judges, and he wants to be able to appoint Democrats and to be a permanent Democrat majority on that court.
He's been denied here, has been denied there.
His um labor secretary was denied, his EPA secretaries have been denied, and he's fit to be tied.
So he can't win by appointing people that appeal to a majority.
So got together with Dingy Harry and they just changed the rule.
And the rule now is it the practical meaning of the rule is that there are no rules, and the Republicans' votes mean nothing.
Whatever is proposed, the Republicans, if they stay unified, 45 votes against it means nothing.
There's nothing they can do.
Unless they can convince some Democrats to join them and deny the Democrats 51 votes.
And if that happens, Dingy Harry might change the rule again to say, okay, well, we need 50 on this particular issue.
Once you start changing the rules as the majority, there it and the founders were terrified of the tyranny of the majority.
One of the reasons that the Senate was structured and founded the way it is, as opposed to the House.
It was designed for gridlock.
It was designed to stop massive new laws being passed and voted on daily.
It was designed to stop the growth of government.
A number of checks and balances were built in to prevent a tyranny from forming.
And the only way a tyranny can form is if the majority throws the rules out.
And it is a Democrat majority who has chosen tyranny here.
Now the people in the media love it, and the people on the left love it because they don't care how they win.
They're not worried if they only have 20% of the people behind them.
They don't care.
They have no concern whatsoever for the democratic process, obviously not.
So that but in terms of the nuclear option impacting Republican elections elsewhere, no.
But the nuclear option gives the Senate the power to mean.
Whoever is elected to the Senate as a Republican doesn't matter if they're in the minority.
God could be a Republican senator and not matter.
In a just illustrative way here.
My point is, it doesn't matter.
The Republicans may as well not vote.
Their votes mean nothing.
The people that elected them have absolutely no representation in the Senate at all.
Other than their senator maybe getting to participate in hearings and ask questions of witnesses in a whoop-de-doo.
It just means that the Senate no longer does advice and consent.
It's simply consent.
This is a rubber stamp for Barack Obama, is what has happened.
Whatever Obama wants that requires Senate approval has now just been rubber stamped.
And the Senate.
It's not the House where all these judges have to be interviewed and pass muster and so forth or cabinet appointees.
It's the it's the Senate.
You know, I've been thinking too about this question.
Was it you who asked me what was Kennedy's biggest legacy?
I've been thinking about it.
And here, this is really it.
This really, if you stop and think about it, this is the signature achievement of JFK.
The establishment of the modern day partisan celebrity worshiping media.
That is the signature achievement of.
The establishment of the modern day partisan celebrity worshiping Democrat media.
Back after this.
The United States Army is making a PR push for average-looking women.
The Army should use photos of average-looking women when it needs to illustrate stories about female soldiers.
This, according to a specialist who has recommended that image of women, images of women who are too pretty undermine the communications strategy about introducing them into combat roles.
That's the gist of an internal army email, an army source shared with the political.
In general, it says this is in general, ugly women are perceived as competent, while pretty women are perceived as having used their looks to get ahead, wrote Colonel Lynette Arnhart, who is leading a team of analysts studying how best to integrate women into combat roles that have previously been closed off to them.
She sent her message to give guidance to Army spokesmen and spokeswomen about how they should tell the press and the public about the Army's integration of women.
Yeah, she says there's a general tendency to select nice looking women when we select a photo to go with an article about women in combat.
And it might behoove us to select more average-looking women, ugly women for our communication strategy.
For example, the attached article shows a pretty woman wearing makeup.
While on deployed duty, that wouldn't happen.
Such photos undermine the rest of the message and may even make people ask if breaking a nail is considered hazardous duty, Arnhart said.
She wrote that a photo of a female soldier with mud on her face that news agencies used last spring sends a much different message.
One of women willing to do the dirty work necessary in combat in order to get the job done.
Now you have a colonel in the Army, a woman suggesting that ugly women, she used the word ugly and average.
Ugly and average women only be used in PR campaigns to get women recruited.
Once again, it's nerdly, you can shake your head in there, but it was once again I, El Rushbow and the cutting edge.
Way, way back, folks, in 1990, it was I who suggested the all-American First Cavalry Amazon battalion.
And I suggested that what we would want to do is put you know all female barracks so that they menstrual cycle uh what's the word that uh synchronizes so that we'd be guaranteed at all times a combat-ready battalion of women ready to be banshees.
I mean, I was on the cutting edge.
Now you've got here it is in 1990, 23 years later, a female army lieutenant is basically suggesting pictures of average-looking or ugly women in recruitment messages would be more effective when trying to recruit women for combat.
It's not I. This is a politico story.
Here's Steve in Akron, Ohio.
Hi, Steve.
I'm uh glad you waited.
Welcome to the program.
Hi, Rock.
Thank you.
Great to have you, sir.
Thank you.
I lifelong fan.
Hey, just uh I'm in and out of the car today.
I'm working, and I heard something earlier about uh de chicfication in the NFL.
Uh loved the word, and I didn't know what you were referring to because I was out of the car, but I said, Well, how about the chickification in the court system?
That's what drives me crazy are the liberal female judges who don't impose serious punishment on these offenders, and I'm thinking, when are the good old days of men getting back in the courtroom who impose punishment going to happen again?
Now, this this you've just given me a project.
You know, that I'm gonna tell you, well, I'm not I'm not gonna respond to that specifically.
I mean, the caller can live with that one on his own.
But that's this guy, he's driving around, he's not heard a whole lot of the program in and out, and all of a sudden he started chicken of the culture in the NFL.
He's not sure what it means.
That's why he added his two cents.
Wants me to explain it.
This is one of those things I think everybody understands the moment I say it.
And see, this is it's an interesting point because it shows how you have to listen to this program regularly for long periods of time to understand the context.
Otherwise, if you just tune in randomly and hear me talking about the chicken occasion of the NFL, you might be discombobulated, not knowing what the heck is going on.
Yeah, I'm gonna get into it.
Uh Daniel Horowitz at redstate.com has a piece on what the Republicans could do to retaliate against the nuclear option.
I get it a little bit of that, and more of your phone calls coming up, obviously, as Open Line Friday rolls right on.
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