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Nov. 27, 2013 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:52
November 27, 2013, Wednesday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
And greetings, my friends, and welcome.
It is absolutely great to be with you today.
It is just a thrill and a delight as we enter the annual Christmas season.
And we can say that that's probably true.
Thanksgiving coming very late this year.
And this kicks it off.
And it's weather appropriate.
Change of seasons is taking place.
The opportunity for the attitudinal mind shift into the holiday season.
And I, El Rushbo, your beloved host, I mean, we really get into it here, and we enjoy it immensely.
And Thanksgiving, of course, is a season I take very seriously because I am deeply thankful.
And I try to take the occasion of this day, the day before Thanksgiving, to share some of that with you.
Extend wishes from the highly overrated staff who wish you the same.
And realize that many of you are in transit on the way to wherever you're going.
And some of you believe CNN and thought you couldn't get there, so you're hunkered down at home.
Some of you are trying to get there and having big dinner.
I mean, there are cancellations.
It's Thanksgiving.
This happens every year.
You can make a book on it.
And so we'll be here getting you through the day, at least our portion of it, with some traditions.
We are going to share with you once again, as we always do every year, the real, true story of Thanksgiving.
And I must tell you, folks, it is gratifying to see more and more instances of that popping up.
For example, John Stossel today has a piece.
Somebody sent it to me on the real story of Thanksgiving.
And he makes an additional point in his piece that the federal government and the way it administers Indian reservations and Indian lands today outside of the casinos haven't learned anything.
The Indians are still governed the way that pilgrims originally attempted to govern themselves.
That didn't work.
And I don't know about you, but when I went to school, the public school system had not been corrupted, at least not to the extent that it has been today, and I don't think at all.
And even I did not get the full story of Thanksgiving when I was a kid.
I didn't learn what it was until I started doing research for my book, one of my first two books in which the original story appears.
Now, also, we have a little bit of a change for tomorrow.
Normally on Thanksgiving Day, we go back and find a best of program.
And since they're all best ofs, we could just choose one.
But we try to get something relatively timely and relevant that's somewhat recent so as to have a continuing impact.
But tomorrow on the program, what we're going to do is air just a portion, not nearly the whole thing, because the whole thing takes four and a half hours.
But we are going to air a portion of the audio version of my latest standout bestseller, Rush Revere and the Brave Pilgrims.
And we've put it together in a pretty good production way.
And we mixed in with segments of best of programs from the past.
And it will have from the book, the actual real story of Thanksgiving as portrayed in the book.
Do you know that we have hit?
Now, what are you laughing at?
Well, I haven't said one thing funny yet.
Mm-hmm.
Oh, well, what, you have the phones today?
If liberals want equal time to rag on American.
You know, I live in their heads.
Folks, I'm sitting here and I get an email from a friend that says, look at the impact you're having.
You are living free in their heads.
And I've got here a Democrat fundraiser email that was sent out.
And it says, this time of year, the only thing more annoying than holiday traffic is an awkward conversation with family about politics.
Don't get me wrong.
I love the Republicans in my life, but nothing ruins a slice of pecan pie faster than talking through immigration reform with a cousin who spends too much time listening to Rush Limbaugh.
That's why we're launching your RepublicanUnc.com.
And if you want to make sure that the political debates around your dinner table this Thanksgiving stay tethered to reality, you should check it out.
And if you keep reading this email, you eventually get to the begging and the pleading for money.
And the move was Action for America, or Organizing for Action, which is an offshoot of Obama's Organizing for America website.
They have put out talking points for rabid left-wingers' guidance on how to take over and dominate Thanksgiving dinner so as to propagandize Obamacare.
So at the same time, they're sending out a fundraising letter lamenting that Democrats might have to spend time with somebody that listens to me, they're also trying to propagandize your and everybody else's Thanksgiving dinner by making sure that the subject matter occurs in a propaganda form that they support.
So they leave nothing to chance.
People are pathetic.
But you've been warned.
This is something that they have planned.
So anyway, we're going to do just a little portion of the audio version of Rush Revere and the Brave Pilgrims.
And I started to say before Snerdley started laughing in there.
We have, I think, no, no, I'm forgetting.
I'm going to have to ask Catherine.
I think we've hit on that Amazon list of top-selling books of the year, top 25, I think we hit number six yesterday or seven.
Now I can't remember.
I'm going to have to look it up, but it just keeps climbing that list.
I mean, it's getting to point now the only people ahead of us are the fiction guys.
And so that's great.
It's absolutely fabulous.
And so we're just going to try to have a little fun today, as well as, as we always do, we combine everything we do here, the irreverent, satirical sense of humor with the serious discussion of issues, with credibility from the host on both sides.
It is very rare you find in major media today somebody that does both.
You either have a comedian or you have somebody dead serious, but you don't have a combination of the two.
For example, if Letterman ever came out and did a dead serious monologue for his show, his audience wouldn't want to hear it and they'd get nervous and say, what are we watching here?
And if Koppel during the Nightline days came out started with a joke monologue, that's not what it wouldn't work.
We do both on this program.
And today we will feature such combinations.
For example, we got a real dilemma on our hands, folks.
The Iranians say that our regime is lying about the nuke deal.
Now, what are we to do?
Oh, by the way, Rush Limbaugh, the EIB network.
I forgot to intro the show.
Here we are at 800-282-2882.
It's number six.
It's number six on Amazon's bestsellers of 2013.
And of course, folks, that's all due to you.
And that is just one of the countless reasons that I am so thankful.
Oh, one other thing.
I actually got a couple of emails from people thanking me for something yesterday.
You remember the story we had yesterday on the latest health news that alcohol is not fattening.
Despite everything you've heard about it, despite the fact that it triggers the release of insulin, it's a big myth.
Alcohol isn't fattening.
They studied 20,000 women over 13,000 years or something.
It's a long time with a lot of women.
And they found that the women that consumed moderate amounts of adult beverage actually lost weight and were the skinniest of the bunch.
And the women who did not consume adult beverages happened to be the chunkiest, the more full-sized, say, diplomatic way.
And something like, who knows?
My reaction to that, and this is what people were thanking me for.
You know, folks, and I may be redundant in saying this, but I think it's important.
And it's not a cliche.
It may sound like one.
We all only get one life.
And I really, I think not enough people really are cognizant of that.
I mean, you've heard the old cliché, live every day like it's the last.
And, of course, not everybody can or will or even wants to do that.
But still, the point of it is pretty good.
There aren't any real do-overs.
When you've lost the day, you've lost the day.
You don't get it back, and you can't go to the bank and borrow another one.
It's gone.
And my only point with all this stuff is you've only got one life.
Live it.
Enjoy it.
Stop, you know, do not let all of these different agencies, be they government or special interest or funder, whatever they are, medical group, don't let them paralyze you with fear over if you have that peanut, you're going to die 20 years from now.
If you're in a room where people are smoking, you're going to die and get sick.
None of it's true.
We're all going to die of something someday, somehow for some reason and so forth.
But in the meantime, just avoid this sheep business.
You've got one life, live it.
Life really is meant to be lived.
You know, William F. Buckley birthday was Sunday.
And I was really disappointed.
The people at National Review sent me a note on Saturday that I missed asking, they were doing a little symposium, people at New Buckley.
What do you remember most?
What do you miss most about William F. Buckley?
And I missed it.
And I didn't get a chance to participate.
What I would have said was I don't know very many people who got as much out of life as Bill Buckley did.
The guy really lived his life.
He just did.
Sailing, writing, expert on countless things, intellectual, brilliant, formally, overwhelmingly educated, television star, all of these things.
It just was incredible.
The energy level that it took is mind-boggling.
And he was, that's what Renaissance men are, people that are called Renaissance men.
And not everybody can do that.
And I understand that everybody is a self-starter.
Most people aren't.
That's why leadership is so crucial.
Why leadership is so rare, in fact, is most people are, in fact, followers, but nobody has to be sheep.
Not everybody has to be sheep.
And I just, if I could wish anything for anybody, you could break out of the daily narrative of the media, which is filled with nothing but negative, fatalistic, apocalyptic news, no matter what it's about.
And expose yourself to it enough, and it can't help but affect you and turn you into someone who always sees the negative or who is always at least pessimistic.
And yeah, there are things that need fixing and there are things that are terribly wrong and there are things to be greatly alarmed about.
But at the same time, it doesn't mean you give up.
And it doesn't mean that you allow all that stuff to really get in the way of you living your life.
So if you want to have an adult beverage, have it, unless you're medically predisposed to not.
We all have our own instincts.
We all have our own intuition.
We all know what's right and wrong.
We all have that voice.
Most don't listen to it, but we've all got a voice called conscience.
We all know.
Well, again, that's not true.
Some people are not raised with right and wrong, but the vast majority of us are.
And if you're one of those people, you know, you know when you're overdoing something.
You don't need to be told and you don't need to be hemmed in and have your life parameters shrunken by a bunch of busybodies who really aren't interested in anything other than controlling your life and making you live the way they want you to live.
So I got a couple of notes from people thanking me for that perspective.
So they're going to do that.
And if it just means you see a piece of pecan pine, you want to have it for crying out loud and then don't have one the next day.
Whatever.
The idea that life is meant to be spent in suffering, that there's some valorous payoff for that, it's nonsense.
Self-induced suffering, I mean.
I mean, there's enough suffering anyway without inducing additional amounts.
And that was my only point.
And I'm thankful.
I don't know when, how it happened, but I am thankful that I somehow, someday, learned to see people on the left as they are and learned how not to be affected by them, how not to be offended every day and every minute.
It all affects one's attitude.
And what we all need here is a little optimism and positive tempered with reality because everything can be fixed and everything can be improved and much needs to be.
And we are Americans.
And that makes us blessed.
That makes us exceptional.
Not because we're better than anybody else.
Not because we have been given favorable treatment by God.
None of that.
What's exceptional about the United States of America is simply that the history of the world is one of tyranny and bondage.
Most people not having the freedom, say what they want, to do what they want, to own property, to enter into contracts.
That stuff, it was foreign to everybody.
Nobody even contemplated such things.
Most people, from the beginning of time, most people had to spend all their waking moments on staying alive.
We don't now.
We have been liberated from the daily pursuits of finding food and staying alive and warding off attackers.
But the primary point about American exceptionalism is that this is the first country that was created and enshrined formally with documents acknowledging the human spirit as created by God, as one that yearns to be free.
And that enshrinement of the way we have been created by God is what has, simple freedom is what has turned the people who have lived in this country loose to become the most powerful, the most productive, the most technologically advanced people in just 250 years in all of human history.
And it's all due to our founding.
And that's why so many people are devoted to it.
That's why so many people are just devoted to saving this country and preventing its transformation into something that it was never intended to be.
So there's a lot to be thankful for here.
And there's a lot to get your arms around and realize that we're all in this together to improve it daily, not just for ourselves, but kids and grandkids.
I have to take a break.
Sit tight.
We'll be back and continue with much more after this.
Don't go away.
So American exceptionalism, really no more complicated than the root word, exceptional, except we are not in any way like, or we are not forced to live, is the better way to say this.
We are not forced to live the way the vast majority of human beings since the beginning of time have lived on this earth.
We're free.
We have had it officially established that we are primary in our country, not our government, not our leaders, not our king.
We don't have a king.
We have a document that for the first time in the world limited the role of government in everybody's life.
You know, the Pope, Pope Francis, this is astounding, has issued an official papal proclamation.
And it is, it's sad.
It's unbelievable.
The Pope has written in part about the utter evils of capitalism.
And I have to tell you, I've got parts of it here I can share with you.
It is, it's sad because this Pope makes it very clear he doesn't know what he's talking about when it comes to capitalism and socialism and so forth.
Wait, will you hear it?
Hell, here we are, folks, on November 27th.
And the Rio Turkey is nowhere near ready yet.
That's the Obamacare website.
In fact, it isn't going to be ready on November 30th.
They said it would be.
They said it'd be fixed.
And then they said it'd be ready for 80% load.
And now they are saying that it's not going to be ready on November 30th.
And Kathleen Sebelius is now saying that she never said it would be.
So we just dreamed all that.
It's kind of like Mark Halperin of Time Magazine.
One of these guys that goes on campaigns with candidates, gets a lot of information and saves it all for a book after the election.
He learns things that could have impact on elections, but he saves them.
And then he publishes them with his buddy John Heileman in books that follow the election.
And Mark Halperin was on with Steve Mollsberg the other day at NewsMaxRadio.com, in which he said that Obamacare has death panels.
And there are people that are going to determine who gets treated and who doesn't, that there will be rationing.
And everybody picked up on that because, of course, the regime has been denying from day one that there were death panels.
And Sarah Palin, of course, coined the phrase.
So now Halperin is listening.
No, I never said that.
I never said death panels.
I never said, I never said that.
But he did.
And he clearly implied it.
And he's a highly reputed journalist within the realm of reputed journalists.
And we all heard the regime say their website was going to be ready on November 30th.
We all heard it.
We heard Sebelius say it.
We heard Obama say it after he said he didn't know it wasn't working.
The fact of the matter is, and there's even more documentation of this today.
Cheryl Atkinson, CBS News, the regime knew in 2010 that everything that's happening was going to happen.
Yeah, Mollsberg said to Halperin, he said, okay, so you believe there will be rationing, aka death panels.
And Halperin said, yeah, it's built into the plan.
It's not like a guess or like a judgment.
That's going to be part of how costs are controlled.
Well, we've all known this from the beginning.
It's right in the plan for anybody that's read it.
And Obama even admitted it, if you recall, that woman at the ABC primetime special from the White House who stood up and asked the president if it'd be okay for her mom to get a pacemaker or a hearing aid or some such thing is 100 years old.
And the woman wanted to know if Obamacare would pay for it because of her mother's spirit and will to live.
And Obama said, nope, nope, we can't take things like that into account.
We can't accommodate for will to live or spirit.
At some point, we're just going to paraphrasing.
This is at some point we're just going to have to give them the pain pill and tell them to enjoy the rest of their lives.
I've said this over and over.
I was literally stunned that in the United States of America, a citizen was even asking anybody in government, but much less the president, if her mother would be treated medically.
A citizen of the United States was actually asking the president if her mother would get a pacemaker at 100 years of age under Obama's plan.
I don't care what, folks, no president ought to ever be involved in that kind of a family decision.
The government's got no business being there, but boy, there was Obama just eager as he could be to say, nope, can't take that into account.
Will to live, spirit, too nebulous, too hard to measure.
We'll just give them a pain pill.
What he meant was we can't afford to give 100-year-old people pacemakers, and that's the death panel.
That's the rationing.
And it clearly is there.
And there's this board called the IPAB, IPAB.
And it's a bunch of people assigned by the Healthcare Act to actually make these decisions.
So after confirming, yeah, death panels, yeah, it's built into the plan.
It's not like a guess or like a judgment.
That's going to be part of how costs are controlled.
Now, Halperin knew this when the bill was being debated.
This is my, all these people in the media knew this.
This is one of the many ways they shielded Obama from any vetting or any scrutiny or his bill.
They knew.
Don't doubt me on this, folks.
The media knew all this stuff is happening now.
They knew.
They knew all these cancellations were going to occur.
They knew people were not going to keep their policies.
All of this was known.
It was just covered up.
So Halperin, after a trip to the Corey Booker Lara Logan Memorial Woodshed, has suddenly changed his tune.
He tweeted out last night, in Monday interview, I did not say death panels, nor do I believe that the Affordable Care Act contains them.
Was speaking of political policy challenge of IPAB cuts.
My bad.
So obviously, somebody got to say, what in the hell are you doing to us, pal?
You can't tell people that.
And he did a 180, just like Sebelius.
We all heard November 30th, website fixed.
Nope.
Not going to be.
But that's okay, folks, because the regime is now warning people not to go to the website.
I kid you not.
They are telling their foot soldiers not to send people to healthcare.gov because it's going to get too crowded and it'll crash again.
And never mind, they have spent, they've spent over a billion dollars in advertising, trying to get people to go to the website.
They spent $600 million in three years.
Do you realize, folks, do you realize in the same amount of time, and I'm not making this up, in the same amount of time this administration was unable with $600 plus million dollars to get a website up and running, back in the 1940s, this country defeated Germany and defeated Japan and was victorious in World War II.
The same amount of time that it took this country in the 40s to win World War II in the Pacific and the European theaters.
Today, same amount of time, this government can't even build a website.
That is not insignificant.
Go back to the 1930s, the Great Great Depression.
Look at the building that occurred.
The Golden Gate Bridge, the Bay Bridge, the Hoover Dam.
Today, the same amount of time all those bridges were built, we haven't finished the environmental impact study of whatever it is somebody wants to build somewhere.
We've handcuffed ourselves with overbearing government regulations at all levels, federal, state, local.
It's a crying shame.
But now, after telling everybody it's going to be fixed November 30th, after spending over a billion dollars advertising people to get there, now Obama is telling his foot soldiers to tell people not to go to the website because it's not ready and too many people will crash it.
You're talking about sending a mixed message.
Messaging was supposed to be the one thing that this regime was good at.
Remember the Yogi Berra quote about a restaurant?
No, no, nobody goes there.
It's too crowded.
On the Obamacare website, nobody goes there.
It's too crowded.
Well, if nobody goes there, why is it crowded?
I love Yogi Berra.
I met Yogi Barra once at a golf tournament in an elevator.
He was great.
I have to, Yogi Berra was, I think, was it the Bob Hope Chrysler Classic that I met Yogi Berra?
And he was, he was everything that you would want him to be.
He was just, he was great.
Some of these yogiisms, and they're true, by the way.
They're legit.
They're not manufactured for him by a PR firm.
Anyway, nobody's signing up for Obamacare because the website's too crowded.
So the White House has come up with a solution for the crowds.
They're going to make people wait in line.
They're essentially going to ask people to take a number at healthcare.gov, which they are expert at having people wait in line.
Post office, DMV, they know exactly how to make people wait in lines.
Investors Business Daily, credible source, it's now investors.com, has written an editorial asking that we take another look at the well-documented theory that Bill Ayers co-wrote Obama's big biography, Dreams from My Father.
Obama is on tape, many times asserting that he wrote it without any help whatsoever.
But Ayers, on three separate occasions, has claimed that he wrote it.
One time was at an airport outside check-in with the Skycaps, and he was taunting some right-winger who had followed him around, and nobody believed him.
But the theory had been put forth by a number of analysts that, and it was, by the way, well known that Obama was not a good writer, that he was late turning in manuscripts and chapters and everything for his books.
And the word started spreading that it was Bill Ayers who actually wrote Dreams of My Father.
And people started comparing other Ayers books to that when they found almost identical writing styles.
And so today, Investors.com is out claiming that Ayers has now confessed to writing Obama's book.
Now, if this is true, folks, can you imagine what a betrayal this is?
Why would Ayers do this now?
Why would Ayers come out unless he's just toying with the right wing and making it up?
But now people don't believe that.
Here's how the editorial from IBD goes.
We know that Obamacare was sold on a lie, but what about the Obama presidency itself?
Rumors that Obama's violent leftist pal, Bill Ayers, ghost wrote the memoir that launched his political career may actually be true.
Obama's always claimed authorship of the book, Dreams from My Father, but Ayers is telling a different story.
He's got a book out now called Public Enemy.
And Ayers publisher, Beacon Press, has written a blurb at Amazon.com that says Ayers finally confesses that he did write Dreams from My Father.
The boast appears in other promotions for the book as well.
So Ayers is out on the Amazon.com standing away, promoting his latest book by claiming he wrote Obama's.
A Baltimore bookstore, Red Emmas, last week posted a similar claim that Ayers wrote Obama's memoir as part of an announcement for a book signing event at this bookstore coffee house, Red Emmas.
Well, that's a perfect name for a place, a guy like Ayers to go.
The reprehensible former terrorist, it says here, twice before laid claim to Obama's book, once during a post-election interview and again during a speech two years ago.
In October 2009, Ayers told an interview at Reagan National Airport in Washington that he wrote Dreams of My Father.
Asked if he meant he heavily edited the book for his friend, Ayers insisted no, I wrote it.
He added that Michelle Obama asked him to help Barack because Obama had blown deadlines struggling with delivering the manuscript.
So if this is true, and look, investors.com is not a cook website.
This is a huge betrayal.
And it also would prove that Obama is lying about his relationship with Ayers, because if Ayers wrote his book, that means they go way back.
And that means they're pretty tight.
For Ayers to be able to get Obama's voice, they've got to know each other far better than Obama has ever admitted.
Ha, how are you?
El Rushbaugh and the Excellence in Broadcasting Getwork.
Great to have you here, folks, on the day before Thanksgiving.
And we're going to start in Pittsburgh.
This is Lynn.
Great to have you.
Hi.
Hi there, Rush.
Thanks a lot for taking my call today.
I wanted to mention something that's been bothering me from the very start of the Affordable Care Act.
Anyone who knows about charitable foundations or has done work with charitable foundations or even has given to charitable foundations realizes that the people in this country are so willing to give that generally these places can handle the children with the pre-existing conditions,
the extra money that it takes, you know, to handle certain disease or something.
I mean, we have been giving for years and years and years.
And I would like for those foundations to step forward and at least let everybody know that that money didn't get down a sinkhole.
Yes, they have taken care of a lot of these people.
But they haven't been, you know, the country hasn't turned their back on the poor.
Well, this is an excellent, excellent point.
And I, as I want to do, in my own inimitable fashion, I want to build on this because you have really nailed it.
We are a compassionate country, and I'm like you.
I just blanch when I hear members of this administration talk about cold-heartedness or mean-spiritedness or the rich and others don't care about the poor.
It's the exact opposite.
The people of this country give more money in charity.
And in fact, if I can, I have to do this, folks.
The percentage charitable contributions by party is not even close.
You look at Joe Biden, Al Gore, charitable donations are less than $500 a year.
They give other people's money.
They take other people's money and then they give it away, acting as though it's their own and claim credit for it.
But people in general in this country have been more charitable than any other people in the world.
And we do take care of the people who are unable to take care of themselves.
What we blanch at is the notion that nobody can take care of themselves.
The Democrats and the liberals wanted to assume that everybody's helpless and everybody's hopeless because a select few are ripping them off or cheating them or stealing from them.
And so the government has to come in and basically provide and take care of everybody to make it fair and equitable.
And that's just wrong.
You're exactly right.
Americans have been propping up charities, creating charities, giving their time, giving their money to help those in need.
And we do it in record levels and in record amounts.
And you're exactly right.
Great, great point.
Back with much more after this.
Don't go away.
By the way, folks, one thing about private charities.
They are great, there is no question.
But they can't hold a candle to capitalism.
They cannot, and it's nothing against charities, but the number of people lifted out of poverty by capitalism in the course of the history of the world is incalculable.
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