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Dec. 30, 2013 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:01
December 30, 2013, Monday, Hour #3
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Yes, America's anchorman is away and this is your undocumented anchorman sitting in.
As the year draws to a close, I'll be here to ring out the old, as President Obama likes to say about your health plan, and ring in the new for tomorrow's New Year's Eve show.
New Year's Day, it's a best of rush.
And then the indispensable man returns for a brand new year of excellence in broadcasting on Thursday, January the 2nd.
If you like your year, you can keep your year, period.
I wish it were that way, Mr. Snurdy.
I'd like to, you know, I don't know, because it'd be Calvin Coolidge's 47th term or whatever, it'd be up to by now.
That's what I'd be, if I could pick my year.
I had a bit, a lady wanted to slam me for going on about Ted Cruz's decision to renounce his Canadian-ness.
And she wanted to know why I was slamming Ted Cruz for it.
Well, of course, I'll tell you why.
The Phil Robertson comparison wasn't an idle one.
She hung up, so I can't talk to her.
But the Phil Robertson comparison wasn't entirely an idle one, you know.
Under the 1977 Canadian nationality law, Ted Cruz has an unactivated Canadian citizenship.
He hasn't done anything to be Canadian.
He hasn't lived in Canada since he was four years old.
He hasn't stood anywhere and pledged his oath of allegiance to Her Majesty the Queen or anything like that.
It is an entirely inactive Canadian citizenship.
And so in that sense, there shouldn't be anything to renounce.
Just to take, for example, I don't want to go a full berth or anything, but under British, the 1981 British Nationality Act, Barack Obama is what they call a British overseas citizen.
That's a fact.
It's what he is.
He hasn't done anything to activate that.
He has not attempted to go and live on any British sovereign territory.
He's never stood for Parliament in Westminster or stood for the legislature in Bermuda or anything like that.
It's entirely inactive.
Nobody, but do you begin to see where I'm going with this?
The way it works.
No, he didn't.
But if you look at it this way, you know, no one's asking him to renounce his British nationality acquired through a quirk of his background.
Nobody, likewise, nobody, but suddenly it's critical for Ted Cruz to and Obama is British because he's the son of a British subject, which is what his father was in colonial Kenya.
And yeah, that's right.
Well, that's the same way it works here.
I mean, I don't see, by the way, if Ted Cruz, Mr. Snurdley, has to renounce his Canadian citizenship because he was born in Calgary, why doesn't he have to renounce his Cuban citizenship, which he has because his father was born in Cuba?
But you know, so this lady was, so again, this is the way it goes both ways.
Nobody is on at Barack Obama to say you have to renounce your British overseas citizenship, but they're on at Ted Cruz to say he has to forswear Canada and all her works as the work of the devil.
And the he did he Obama renounced his British citizenship, did he?
Oh, by giving back the bust of Winston Churchill, right.
Okay, that's great.
So, according to Mr. Snerdley, I want you to follow this because this is complicated nationality law that can get very technical.
But the way that Obama renounces British citizenship is to hand back the bust of Winston Churchill.
So, by the same measure, the way to renounce Canadian citizenship is for Ted Cruz to hand back his bust of Leslie Nielsen.
Okay, that's how it works.
That's how it works.
Moose and Squirrel, I think this is from the Moose and Squirrel website, which, as the name might suggest, is actually a Canadian website.
It says, I kind of think Canadians are the new red scare.
Are you now or have you ever been a Canadian?
And I think it's getting.
I mean, don't forget, already the New York Times is using this against him.
They call Ted Cruz the senator from Canada.
So, they're hinting at divided loyalties, you know.
And in fact, the guy who accused him for being the senator from Canada, this is how you know the New York Times has totally jumped the moose on this stuff.
The guy who accused him of being the senator from Canada is a fellow called David Brooks, who the one who admired Obama's pant legs so much.
And David Brooks was born in Take a Wild Guess.
Where was he born?
He's accusing people of being covertly Canadian.
Where was he born?
Chicago, Atlanta, Detroit, St. Louis?
No, he was born in Toronto.
David Brooks, born in Toronto, accuses Ted Cruz from being the senator from Canada.
That's how bad it's become.
Like the first, Ted Cruz would be the first Hispanic, but has to go around pretending he'll be the first Hispanic president because if word got out that, in fact, he'll be the first Canadian president, the canuckophobia of this country would just go totally, totally rampant.
And, you know, at some point, at some point, you just have to relax about it.
You know, Elizabeth Warren, you notice she boasts about the senator from Massachusetts supposedly running against Hillary.
She boasts about being 132nd Cherokee, right?
No evidence she is 132nd Cherokee, but you notice she's not boasting about being 132nd Manitoban.
You know, it's like the last prejudice.
And at some point, you just have to call a hold to it.
know i well mr snurdly is now talking about canadian infiltration of america right so we need a house non-canadian activities committee i think mr snurdly uh to to call in all these people and see how deep the you know i don't want it to be like this mr snurdly i don't I don't want to.
I have a dream that one day my children will live in an America where they're judged not on the color of their skin, but on whether they've got an aunt in Saskatoon.
That's the kind of truly free society I want people to live in.
So when I see Ted Cruz being railroaded into forswearing Canada and all her works, you know, I'd like a bit of the old Duck Dynasty spirit there.
I think he should go full Phil Robertson and tell these guys to take a high.
He hasn't activated his, it's just latent.
It's like some people are carrying, you know, it's like inbred European royal families where some of them are carrying the hemophilia gene or whatever.
He's only carrying the sinister Canadian gene.
He doesn't actually have to go out there and renounce it.
Stephen Foulard emails me to say, my dad was born in Manitoba.
Stephen Foulard, he's an American.
He's a red-blooded American, or so, or so all his neighbors think.
But he says now, he emails me, he says, my dad was born in Manitoba.
How soon before the United States government makes me go around with a red maple leaf sewed to my coat to identify me?
This is the way it's.
I don't know where this Ted Cruz thing renouncing his Canadianness is going.
And as I said, my line is this.
You Americans have been running the joint, and look at the state of it.
I want an all-Canadian ticket.
That's why I'm going to be the next senator from Massachusetts, from New Hampshire.
Sorry, I got confused there.
Scott Brown from Massachusetts wants to be senator in New Hampshire.
So I may go down and become the senator from Massachusetts.
I want an all-Canadian ticket.
I'll be the senator.
We'll get Ted Cruz to be president.
We'll get William Shatner to be vice president.
This country is riddled with Canadians, and it's time for us to come out of the closet.
That's all I'm saying.
Mark Steid in for Russia.
On a more serious note, we have also been looking back at the year and at the year to come.
And the question is whether some of these scandals, and this was a bad year for Obama, in the sense that everything, scandal upon scandal upon scandal came on.
And some of them were not scandals that affected people.
Obviously, Obamacare actually, that's real lives it touches.
Benghazi isn't.
But Benghazi is part of a pattern.
The IRS is part of a pattern.
And it's interesting, we're already seeing, I think, this big New York Times story over the weekend on Benghazi is part of an attempt to come up with a narrative for Benghazi that makes it a non-problem for Hillary Clinton.
So in other words, Hillary Clinton can say, well, the New York Times reported that blah, blah, blah.
The latest story of the New York Times, which is attempting to argue that in fact it is to do with this video that Hillary Clinton blamed it on, this video maker for some parole, technical parole violation, is still sitting in jail in California.
They dispatched more people.
Bear this in mind.
The United States government, your government, dispatched more people to get this video maker in California than they did to try and help those guys in Benghazi through that long, long, long night where they were waiting for the biggest military power on the planet to send the help that never came.
The New York Times is now saying, well, yeah, that video, it turns out it's all to do with that video.
They ran a story last October saying that in fact it was nothing to do with that video.
They're now in this story over the weekend, they're now contradicting their own narrative on this story.
And you should always listen very carefully to the small calibrations that the mainstream media are trying to do.
They understand that at the moment, what is Hillary running on?
She accomplished nothing as Secretary of State.
She was a complete waste of time as Secretary of State.
America's influence in the world declined while she was Secretary of State, starting with that stupid reset button, the thing she got from Staples, the big, yeah, we got that button that she took to give her Russian counterpart that turned out not because the translator had mistranslated it, turned out not to mean what it meant.
From that moment on, she had a complete waste of space time as Secretary of State.
She traveled more.
She traveled more than any other Secretary of State and accomplished less.
She traveled while Rome burned.
She traveled while Benghazi burned.
She accomplished nothing.
There's no positive record.
The only thing out there is a potential negative.
And that's the point of this Benghazi recalibration by the New York Times is to neutralize Benghazi and make it safe, not for Americans to set foot in Benghazi, but for Mrs. Clinton to set foot in the Iowa Caucasus and the New Hampshire primary.
Markstein for Rush, 1-800-282-2882.
Mark Stein infra rush on the EIB network.
What's that song?
Da doo doo doo da da da da.
That's pretty much my comment on the year.
Let's go to Mike in Sylvania, Ohio.
Mike, you're alive on America's number one radio show.
Great to have you with us.
Yeah, happy to you.
Thanks for having me on.
That gentleman that called in earlier about the buffalo, he kind of stole my thunder.
I was going to talk about white-tailed deer and that the greatest predator of white-tailed deer in the United States is a four-wheeled vehicle.
You add in all the muley deer, the elk, the antelope, the moose, etc., that the biomass in the wild has got to be at least as great as the biomass of cattle.
Yet they never mention it.
But I'd also like to make a point that you hopefully could have some fun with.
I think the Republican Party over the last 50 years has compromised us all the way to communism.
And then they wonder why compromise is a cuss word.
What do you think on that for the mantra for the Tea Party?
Well, so you're basically saying the problem with, I mean, the Democratic Party is under no illusions about this thing.
They say we see that cliff edge and we want to floor it and go over the cliff in fifth gear at 112 miles an hour.
And the Republican Party say, no, no, no, we'd much rather, we'll meet you halfway and we'll go over the cliff and plummet into the abyss at third gear, in third gear at 23 miles an hour.
But they're not seriously interested in actually changing direction.
Is that your problem, Mike?
Well, yeah, but I mean, once they've compromised us all the way to communism, you know, we're already there.
Hopefully they're grasping the concept.
We do need to try to reverse things.
No, I think here's the issue is that Republicans do no more than basically hold.
When I was at an English boys' school, and at an English boys' school, they used to make the sick formers, the prefects, the guys who were at the, if you know you, Harry Potter, who were at the top of the school, used to make the young boys at the bottom of the school go and warm the seat in the toilet before they went in there because it was like a chilly, unheated toilet.
And so they'd send the young boys in there to warm the seat for the prefects who would then come in 10 minutes later.
And when Republicans take power, too often they seem like they're just warming the toilet seat until the Democrats return to power and resume their rightful place, Mike.
And that's why when you look at government spending across the last half century, it doesn't make any difference whether you've got a whether you've got a Republican Congress, Republican president, Democrat Congress, Democrat president, Republican Congress, Democrat president, Democrat Congress, Republican president.
The line is one way.
It's until Obama put his foot on the pedal and decided to floor it for the cliff.
The line is basically one continuous straight line, regardless of who's in power.
And I'm sorry, but at some point that reflects on the Republicans.
At some point, John Boehner and all his predecessors, all the decent stiffs like Bob Dole, who know how to give terrific concession speeches on late on Tuesday nights in November, all those decent old sticks need to realize that they've brought us to this problem too.
Particularly the spending, Mike, that they basically have helped.
Even, you know, Paul Ryan is regarded as crazy because he submitted a plan that proposed balancing the budget by 2030 or 2025 or whenever the hell it was.
If you were really crazy, you'd want to try balancing this stinking, awful, rotten carcass of a budget within your term of office.
Paul Ryan, you know, Paul Ryan's term of office ends in, what is it, January 2015.
So he's not actually the idea of him legislating a balanced budget for 2030 or 2040 or 2087 or wherever it is.
He's only elected for a two-year term, and you've got to do it.
If it's serious, it ought to start happening during the term you've been elected to, Mike.
And that's where the Republicans have been useless, too.
Are you still there, Mike?
Yes, I am.
Very good points.
And it adds to it.
I just wish that they could really understand that it's not the time to compromise even one inch anymore.
Yeah, no, I think that's a fair point.
And that's why this year will be interesting because 2010 was an amazing year.
2010 was an amazing year.
A Republican Party that was supposedly leaderless, rudderless, all the rest of it.
It made no difference.
It didn't have a leader.
And as a result, Republicans swept the House of Representatives.
And even before the election night parties had finished clearing up from, we were back to the same old situation where the Republicans were in office but not in power.
And at some point, if you look at this mess with Obamacare, Obama wants this because Obama knows that government health care, when the citizen depends on government for his healthcare, fundamentally changes the relationship between the citizen and the state.
So he didn't care.
He wasn't reading polls in 2008, 2009, 2010.
I mean, he was reading the polls, and the polls all said you're insane to do this.
People don't want to do it.
You can't get any bipartisan support for it.
Even the nice ladies from Maine, Susan Collins and Olympia Snow, want no part of this.
And he said, I don't care.
This is my moment.
This is my moment.
And I'm going to take my mallet and peg and hammer this down the gullet of the American people, whether they want it or not.
And whatever you feel about Democrats, they use their moment.
They don't waste time.
They don't waste time.
And Obama figured, that's what he figures with Obamacare.
Nobody wants it, but so what?
They didn't want it three years ago.
They didn't want it four years ago.
He can ride that out.
And when you've all elected your Republican House and all the rest of it and the swings and roundabouts of politics, Obamacare will still be there like a giant toxic mushroom growing in the basement, ready for Democrats to use when all this passing political flim flam is over.
And too often, too often, Republicans are content to be in office rather than to be in power.
Hey, great to be with you.
Rush returns live Thursday after the New Year festivities.
Let's go to Debbie in Kansas City, Missouri.
Debbie is the lady I spoke to, I think it was on last Thursday's child.
And the mother of the transgender child.
My pleasure, Debbie.
And we were talking last week, and you said that you had a six-year-old who was a transgender child.
Yeah.
And I came in just in time to hear you and the caller at the end of that last hour say that you have doubts can know their gender at that young age.
And I know we didn't get to really talk about that last week.
The caller.
No, no, no, just to be clear, just to be clear here.
When a child is a minor, a minor is in the care of their parents.
And increasingly in the Western world, they're also in the care at one remove or another of various state agencies and school districts and other government bodies that presume certain rights over them.
And it is important to me that the decisions we make about children, about minors who are in our care, are in their best interest, Debbie.
And that's the question here.
Now, you said to me that your child is six.
Is that correct?
Yes.
And it's a six-year, just to make sure we're going the right way on this.
You have a six-year-old boy who identifies as a girl.
Is that correct?
Yes, a daughter, yes.
Okay, now you call her your daughter now.
She was born as your son.
When did it become plain to you that she was not a son?
At the age of three, she started to show interest in some girl things.
And like the other lady said, we thought it was just going to be an interest.
Didn't think much of it.
She occasionally liked pink.
She kind of identified with girl characters and, you know, might play with a doll.
So just to throw out, we have, she has an older brother.
I know you said it could be like the influence of an older sister.
She has an older brother, and I did not want girls.
I wanted to raise boys.
Raising a girl with their teenage hormones absolutely terrifies me.
And I'm not really a feminine girl myself.
I did not own a stitch of pink clothes.
I rarely wear makeup.
I never polished my nails.
I have very short hair, not long, beautiful, flowing hair.
So where did, Debbie, just clear this up for me then.
So she's got an older brother.
Where did she find the girls' dolls and dresses and things to play with then?
She was at a daycare, a Christian daycare, in a church.
They certainly were not influencing her.
She was one of 10 boys in her class, and there were two girls.
She played with the boys all the time.
The girls really didn't want much with her.
But every once in a while, she would pick up a doll.
And then if we watched something like Scooby-Doo, she identified with the girl characters, not with the boy characters that most kids do.
But what really got it is that she said very directly, you know, I'm really a girl.
I'm a girl on the inside.
And that's a huge difference from saying, I want to be a girl.
I like girl things.
I like pink, and it's a girl color.
Kids learn about gender when we point out boys and girls.
We have boys in baseball caps and overalls.
We have girls in pigtails.
We don't show toddlers genitals to explain boys and girls.
They don't equate their genitals with their gender.
They see examples based on more of the superficial, stereotypical things that we as adults show them, our boy things and girl things.
And that's how they start to understand gender, and that's how they understand who they are.
Well, okay, let's look at it this way, Debbie.
You said that she watched Scooby-Doo, and she identified with the female characters rather than the male characters.
Now, you're noting that.
You're thinking maybe this is a phase.
You presumably did not decide that your child was, in fact, a girl and not a boy based on that.
You must have sought some professional, at some point, what forced the need to get professional advice on this, Debbie?
When she started pushing down on her genitals and started trying to tuck them away, and she asked if all girls were born with APP that needed to be cut off.
And I have no idea where she got that idea because she had never seen me on dress at the daycare.
They didn't change diapers in front of each other.
As far as I know, she had never seen someone else's genitals to have any idea there was a difference between boys and girls, but she was very obviously under distress physically.
So we called her pediatrician, and I took her in, and I said, this is what she's saying to us.
What do we do?
Is this normal?
And she said, no, it's absolutely not.
And she sent us to a couple of psychologists and an endocrinologist at a children's hospital so that we could have all of those tests and we could find out if she was intersex or something else, kind of like you mentioned, born with ambiguous genitals or something.
And she's not.
Everything comes out of the path.
No, no, no.
Okay, so she's not.
She's not.
She's not one of, I mentioned people who'd had botched deliveries in the 1920s and had had malformed genitals and a doctor had made a decision for them to live one life because it would be easier rather than the other and whatever.
And so we're not talking about that here.
We're talking about a child who is perfectly straightforwardly, biologically male, but has chosen to identify as female.
And you think that at the age of three, four, five, six, that choice, that choice is so forcefully made that presumably at some point you will put her on hormones to prevent the development to you will you will give her hormones to so that she grows breasts when she's an adolescent and all the rest of it.
If that is what she feels she needs to be comfortable with her body.
We don't cross that bridge until puberty and when we get there.
But I just wanted to say it's not a choice.
And like I said last week, we're a Christian conservative family.
I have never heard about transgender until all of this started happening with our child.
Okay, but Debbie, the reason you didn't hear of it is because as I said last hour, this whole thing is within living memory.
There have always been people who have preferred to identify as male or identify as female.
There are Paris nightclubs that in the last century were devoted to this.
There is the British pantomime tradition where people made entire careers.
Women made entire careers dressing up as pandemic boys and guys made entire careers dressing up as pandemic dames.
But the idea of people actually changing sex dates from basically the 1950s and began at the edge of the map in clinics in Casablanca and the like.
And if you went to, and so if you had gone to a doctor, for example, 40 years ago and proposed to do, propose to raise your son as a daughter, those doctors 40 years ago, 1970s, to a man would have been far less supportive of it because they would have regarded it as a form of sort of psychological railroading that could do immense damage to the child.
So that's really the question here, Debbie.
This is something that started the day before yesterday.
And that's why you hadn't heard a lot about it.
There's not a lot of history about this, not a lot of history about the effects of it.
What if the fashion of the day on this subject is wrong?
All across the globe.
We haven't had the ability medically to stop the development of puberty and the effects on the body, but Native Americans have people they call two spirits.
I'm well aware of that.
There are people in Thailand.
There are people in Poland that it goes back centuries.
You can do a quick little search.
I think PBS has a gender variance map or something.
But that's exactly the point, Debbie.
There have always been places on the spectrum where people reach their own accommodations between biology and social norms.
I was talking about this with a mutual friend a couple of weeks ago.
There was a British Army officer in the Second World War called Bunny Roger, who liked to go into battle wearing makeup and with a rolled-up copy of Vogue under his arm.
And he was a great commander of his men, and he killed a bunch of Germans.
And that just happened to be where he was more comfortable on the spectrum.
There are all kinds, similarly with two-spirited, similarly with the equivalents in India.
These are people who naturally, as I said, reach an accommodation with biology.
When you're proposing to use the medical system to steer them in one direction or another, you've got to be pretty damn confident you're heading in the right direction, Debbie.
Right.
And you're confident because to be considered transgender, you have to meet three qualifications.
You have to be insistent.
You're at a moment about which gender you are.
You're consistent.
It's that you're not wavering about it no matter what anyone else says to you.
And you're persistent.
You declare yourself to be that gender for at least a year or more.
No one enters into this lightly.
The idea of physically transforming yourself is something that transgender people go through counseling for years to be able to do.
Parents have a very hard time with it.
It's terrifying to think of your child being bullied for being transgender.
It would be so much easier to convince them to just go along with the biological genitals that they have.
And it isn't a liberal thing.
I know a lesbian social worker who's a self-proclaimed socialist.
She has a trans son, but she is struggling with the idea of him starting on hormone blockers and transitioning.
And it's because she would be comfortable with a lesbian daughter.
She understands that.
And she doesn't really get being transgender.
She's struggling with it.
Yeah, but that's because, Debbie, it's new.
It's not the comparisons you've made, the two-spirited in the native communities and all the rest of it, who've been sort of co-opted to the general LGBT banner.
But there's a contradiction.
There's a contradiction here, for example, in the general LGBT cosmos, in that they say gay people, for example, that's immutable.
You can't change.
If you're gay, you're gay.
That's just the way it is.
Whereas sex, your basic biological sex now, our age presumes to be able to change.
That's new.
That's new.
As I said, we've only even had these operations since the 1950s.
And what is disturbing to me, for example, an Australian court, there was a girl who was identified as a boy, and she took her parents to court in order that a judge would give her the right to amputate her breasts.
Now, they might be right.
They might be right.
But if they're wrong, if they're wrong, it's the state and the medical system basically ganging up to go along with a form of, to go along with self-mutilation.
And we don't know, because there isn't a lot of medical literature on this.
We don't know how this Australian girl who thinks who identifies as a boy called Alex, we don't know how this Australian is going to feel about it in 20 years' time when she or he is middle-aged and maybe regrets the self-mutilation that was ordered by a court when she was an adolescent.
This is uncharted territory for Western societies, Debbie.
But you don't know how someone who gets the nose job is going to feel about it in 20 years.
The suicide rate among transgender people is over 40%.
The general population, it's less than 2%.
Yeah, Debbie, Debbie, I got to take a break in a minute.
So we're going to have to leave this for another day.
But I will just say this quickly on the suicide rate.
That, yeah, that gets to the heart of it.
That this is a horrible, that this kind of identity confusion is a terrible thing for anybody to find themselves in the middle of.
But as many, for as many of those suicides as there are, there are cases, there was, I think he was a guy, he was a sports writer for the LA Times or one of the papers out in California.
And he announced a couple of years ago that he decided to become a woman and he was switching from writing his sports to writing a column about transitioning to a woman.
And then he came back rather sheepishly and said he regretted transitioning to becoming a woman and he was going to go back to being a man.
The suicide rates are high because identity confusion is about as basic a kind of confusion as you can get.
But we are in uncharted territory here.
And as I said, as with, we now look back on things they did a century ago, we look back on eugenics as a terrible thing.
But when we're talking here about courts ordering the medical system to go along with the self-mutilation of adolescents who may be confused and suicidal, we're in dark territory.
We got a break.
We'll be back in a moment.
Mark Stein on the Rush Limbaugh show.
By the way, just to go back to, I think on Thursday, this is how we got into this whole topic.
Phil Robertson, Duck Dynasty, ANE have now backed down completely.
It was never a commercial decision.
One of the most pathetic arguments people said, well, you guys, you're just talking about a commercial, A and E and making a commercial decision.
No, they made an ideological decision to bounce him and then a commercial decision to run a marathon of Duck Dynasty shows.
And he showed, Phil Robertson taught him an important lesson that if you stand up to these guys, they cave.
Don't apologize.
Don't do what Bob Newhart did, which was to get yourself talked into making some groveling apology and pulling out of a gig that you as a freeborn human being selected to do.
Don't be a Bob Newhart on this stuff.
Be like Phil Robertson.
Mark Stein in Farush.
We're going to wrap things up in just a moment.
Hey, the last three hours have flown, flown by.
I forget what we saw.
Oh yeah, Ted Cruz.
Ted Cruz is transitioning from Canadian to American.
Apparently, that's a relatively painless procedure.
But Ted Cruz, the hormone treatment is apparently nearing its completion.
Now, this has been Mark Stein.
Honoured as a foreigner to be sitting here on the Rush Limbaugh Show behind the Golden EIB microphone.
Rush Returns Thursday.
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