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Jan. 1, 2014 - Rush Limbaugh Program
37:50
January 1, 2014, Wednesday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
And greetings to you, music lovers, thrill seekers, and conversationalists, everybody, all across the fruited plain, El Rushball back here at the EIB Southern Command a day later than planned, but nevertheless here.
And I want to thank Mark Stein for being able and agreeing to do the program yesterday on short notice.
It was a tough day Sunday, and I kept holding out hope that it would pass.
It's one of these 24-hour intestinal things.
And it eventuated that late Sunday night I couldn't get in here, and Mark was able to do it.
So I sincerely appreciate that.
I was still able, ladies and gentlemen, I figured I was sick.
Why not watch Obama?
What more damage could be done?
So I watched that silly rose garden thing yesterday.
I said the limbo theorem was right there.
And even the politico in a random act of journalism gets close to calling Obama on it.
They've got a headline on their story here, Barack Obama's passive voice.
It's almost a random act of journalism.
But I mean, this was classic.
There's Obama standing there in the Rose Garden, and he's got, what, people, he's got 13 people behind him.
There's only three sign-ups of the props.
Only three sign-ups.
Now, I have a question.
And I'll bet you that many of you are asking the same thing.
Where's the Republican Party yesterday and today?
No, no, no.
Seriously, forget Tea Party establishment stuff.
Where is pushback from the Republican Party?
Here you have – look, I know it's a rhetorical question, but I'm going to mention it anyway.
You've got the President of the United States.
His signature piece of legislation is a bomb.
It is an abject failure.
He has to sound like he's selling, what's that guy, the infomercial guy, Ron Popiel and the Ginzu knife?
It's like Obama's out selling bamboo steamers yesterday.
And it would seem to me that the Republicans could easily call a press conference or some kind of an appearance and bring out a bunch of people who tried to sign up, haven't been able to sign up, get them to tell their stories, and then in the same thing, let it be known that the Republican Party is looking out for you, people of the country, and so forth.
I mean, in the old days, this might have been done.
I don't know how old the days would have to be for the Republican Party to have done something like that.
But clearly, the establishment of the Republican Party doesn't want to do anything to incur the wrath of the media.
Now, it could also be, see what you think of this.
It could also be, and we know the active theory, the Republican consultant class is that Obamacare is going to go ahead and implode.
So just stand aside and let it.
Don't get in the way when your opponent is making a fool of himself or when your opponent's committing suicide, political suicide.
Just get out of the way and let it happen.
But in this case, you know, a little nudge.
The fact that it isn't being done, the fact that there aren't ads on TV, does raise questions to me that are not new.
It just sort of illustrates the point where we are.
You know what the Republican Party could do?
I mean, if you want to talk about unity, Republican Party could have some Republicans up there and some conservatives up there and Tea Party people, establishment people, all unified in an appearance designed to let people know that they would do anything they can to help them and to see to it that this thing doesn't go any further and get embedded into our culture as an absolute disaster.
Marco Rubio has introduced, says he's going to introduce a bill to delay the individual mandate until healthcare.gov is up and running normally and for six months.
Now, it'll never be signed into law, obviously, but Marco Rubio is attempting to make a statement and use the legislative effort here as an illustration of the absolute mess that this thing.
I mean, even the drive-by media, my Obamacare stack today is littered with drive-by media criticism.
I mean, they're really worried about this.
They're really worried about Obama for this.
And most of them are really surprised.
Most of them really thought that this was going to be better than anything.
Most of them are shocked.
Most of them can't believe it's this bad.
That's how much faith they've got in Obama.
That's how much faith they've got in government.
Jay Carney yesterday said Obama is frustrated with the rollout.
Yep, right in line with the Limbaugh theorem.
Obama himself said that he's very, very distressed about this.
Nobody, nobody madder than me about the fact the website isn't working as well as it should.
It's his website.
It's his stupid health care plan.
It is his signature healthcare plan.
It's called Obama.
Can nobody matter than he is?
You know, folks, I do not watch.
I haven't watched a network nightly news show in years.
I kid you not.
I haven't done so in years.
And I found out over the weekend why.
Last night.
I found out why.
Or I reacquainted myself with why.
For some reason, what was it?
What would it have been?
When I turned on the tube last, I came on to the NBC affiliate here, Channel 5.
So I must have been watching football on Sunday.
That's what it was.
And I must have gave up on the day.
And yeah, even before halftime, I said, I can't, I got to go to bed.
Of the Broncos and Colts game, I didn't make it halftime.
So I turned off to you.
I turned it on.
And I write at the beginning, Brian Williams introducing F. Chuck Todd on the White House lawn with an update and a story on what had happened with Obama in the press conference.
I'll watch this.
And as Brian, and now we take you to our man on the scene, Chuck Todd, White House correspondent, NBC News political director, and a couple of other resume points.
So, Chuck, what's going on there at the White House?
Of course, it's dark.
Chuck's on the White House lawn, some lights there.
Well, Brian, there's some problems up here.
And I have to, well, Brian in his intro said, Chuck, we've got to admit, if something this bad had happened in the private sector, either the CEO would go or the company would fall to be out of business.
I mean, this really wouldn't be tough.
And so, Chuck, what's the scoop with it?
And Chuck said, well, Brian, everybody up here knows that they've got a problem and they're working hard on it.
And Kathleen Sebelius' job is safe.
Don't worry about this.
Who's worried about Kathleen Sebelius' job?
But I felt reassured.
I was deathly afraid that Kathleen Sebelius is going to be canned.
And I was comforted to know that Chuck Todd told everybody that she was safe, her job's safe.
And he went on to describe how the White House is working very hard.
They know they don't have much time to get this right, Brian.
They know they don't have much time.
They're going to be putting in the midnight oil.
They're going to be working hard on this.
They figure they've got about three weeks, Brian.
And I'm sitting there and I'm watching this.
And this is not verbatim by any means.
But this is Chuck Todd knows exactly what he's not saying and what he is.
He knows what he's reporting.
It's a bunch of it, just nothing but line crap.
L-I-N-E, just here's the latest line of the day.
This is the narrative.
This is the template.
And this is what's going to be reported.
White House knows they've got a problem.
They're working hard on it.
The president's told wants 150% effort from the IT team.
What the hell is that?
Who talks that way?
Hey, you give me 150% effort.
IT team, you get them in here.
And 150% effort.
That's what I want on this.
Who talks this way in the real world?
Anyway, my whole point was that it was just propaganda.
It was just a report designed to carry forth the notion that Obama's a bystander and he found out it wasn't going well.
He's really mad.
But Kathleen Sebelius is safe.
Don't have any fears about that.
She's cool.
Everybody's safe, but everybody knows that they've got.
Do you know this company, this IT company that they hired?
I have this is from Joel Pollack.
I think this is Breitbart.
Obamacare tech firm tried and failed to build a gun registry in Canada.
You think this might be why they got hired?
CGI, the Canadian company whose U.S. subsidiary built the failed Obamacare website, was once contracted to build a federal gun registry for the Canadian government, Breitbart News has learned.
CGI's contract was canceled in 2007 after a report by the Auditor General found the Canadian firearms information system being built by CGI significantly over budget and that it had been plagued by delays.
The failed gun registry was only one of CGI's many Canadian failures, which included canceled contracts to build healthcare databases in the provinces of Ontario and New Brunswick.
Despite CGI's checkered record, the regime, Obama, awarded the U.S. subsidiary, CGI Federal, the $93.7 million contract to build healthcare.gov, part of the $678 million in healthcare services contracts awarded to the company for crying out loud.
Not only did they waste a bunch of money, they hired a firm which had a track record of failure.
This is exactly what happens.
As long as you are trying to do something to advance and further the agenda, and you're right in line with the cause, doesn't matter how much you fail, you're going to get promoted.
So here's a group tried to put together a gun registry in Canada.
Oh, yeah, we love those kinds of people.
Oh, yeah.
Gun registry, that's the kind of people we need.
And while we're working on healthcare, they can, in a stealth way, be establishing one of those here, maybe.
Just ruminating here, don't know anything about that.
But still, not one success on the resume.
Not one, nothing but failure after failure.
Then Obama says he's going to call Verizon and ask them to help fix this.
Well, the reason you wouldn't call a successful company in the first place is because there's nobody better than government.
That's why you wouldn't.
This is what's ironic about this.
Every one of these drive-by stories I've got, they're really worried.
You ought to read Ron Fournier's piece today at National Journal.
I mean, he's a big Obama guy.
He's scared to death that this thing is an absolute disaster, and he can't believe it.
These people all think Obama is Harvard, he's Harvard Law, he's whatever their silly resume is.
His qualifications are just far and above, way better than anybody else's.
No real world expert doesn't matter.
He's just so smart.
He knows how to do these things.
And we love government, and government does this better than anybody, except they don't.
And so when that's illustrated, oh, no, they're really let down.
You can see it.
I'll share this with you as the program unfolds today.
USA Today, Health and Human Services, brings in Verizon to help healthcare.gov.
The international telecommunications company Verizon has been tasked with helping the government fix the federal health exchange, which, at first blush, here, folks, that's very peculiar because we all thought the government could do anything and especially better than the private sector.
Of course, there's less private sector now, thanks to the overreach of the Obama administration.
This article acts, by the way, this USA Today piece, it acts as if Verizon writes as if Verizon is not a government contractor, even though they later quote somebody who says it is a government contractor.
And one of the experts that they quote only gives Verizon a 50-50 chance of fixing the problems, which is still better odds than one would give the government for fixing it.
So here's Verizon.
You could have called anybody.
You could have called Jeff Bezos.
You could have called people at Apple or people that run websites.
All you call them left and right.
Get this thing fixed if you wanted to.
No, nothing is Verizon.
I'm just saying it's this is what a come down to have to call the private sector to fix your healthcare website.
For $98 million, I would have set up the website.
I would have set it up for $50 million.
And it would work, and I'd have it up running a lot sooner than these clowns did.
Of course, if I'd set it up, nah, if I'd set it up, it would have backfired on them without them knowing it.
But nevertheless, that's just it's and I No, three years.
Three years?
And Obama's been a bystander.
He only now learned of the trouble, only last week.
And then he had to blame it.
He blamed it on the shutdown, and he blamed it on the Republicans.
And meanwhile, in Low Informationville, the big news today is that Kanye West proposed to Kim Kardashian.
Did you know that?
That's a bit that last bit, and CeeLo Green gave some babe ecstasy.
Of course, in his case, it might have been an essay.
I don't know.
And greetings and welcome back.
Rush Limbaugh meeting and surpassing all audience expectations every day.
Folks, just I don't offer this as an excuse, but if it takes me a few seconds longer to come up with a word or thought that I'm looking for, just want to still got a low-grade fever in here.
Sometimes, you know, hot flashes or chills.
I don't offer that as an excuse, just as an explanation.
In the event things sound strange or slow to you, that would be the only reason.
Grab audio soundbite 12 and 13.
You got to hear this if you missed it.
This is Obama at the Rose Garden yesterday morning talking about Obamacare, the ongoing problems with the website, Tucson Bites.
There's number one.
Here's the bottom line: the product, the health insurance, is good.
The prices are good.
It is a good deal.
No, it's not.
People don't just want it.
They're showing up to buy it.
They're not.
Nobody's madder than me about the fact that the website isn't working as well as it should.
Nobody's madder than me.
Limbaugh Theorem.
He's got nothing to do with it.
He's a bystander.
In fact, the politico, I kid you not.
The politico's all over the board with this.
Depends on who's writing about it.
Because Edward Isaac Dovere, if he still has a job there, has a piece running today called Obama's Passive Voice.
This is the one that's an almost random act of journalism.
He walks right up to the Limbaugh theorem, but then they fall a little short.
They don't quite make the connection.
In another Politico story, they say that Obama was so busy negotiating the continuing resolution and the debt ceiling that he was blindsided by these website problems.
I kid you not.
Now, apparently, the Politico missed all the times Obama said he wouldn't negotiate.
Now, think about something.
Who can take the fall for these glitches?
Now, on Sunday, F. Chuck Todd said that they're going to have to have a fall person.
He actually said that.
Fall person, not a fall guy.
And that Sebelius was very nervous.
He said that on Sunday.
And then it was last night that he said, everything's okay.
She, cool.
Don't worry about her.
But who can take the fall for these glitches?
It can't be Obama because it would be racist.
And he didn't know because he was so busy trying to save the government during the middle of the Republican-inspired shutdown.
So it can't be Obama.
And it can't be Sebelius because she's a woman.
That would make it sexist.
So who can they blame this on?
Maybe somebody who's no longer there, who had something to do.
Blame Van Jones or somebody.
They're going to need a fall person for this if they go that route.
Anyway, let's take a brief time out here at the bottom.
11 sound bites about me today.
Hi, how are you?
Great to have you.
Welcome back, Rush Limbaugh, the EIB Network.
I want to go back to something that I've said repeatedly in the past few months, but I think Obama's press conference yesterday adds some weight to this.
My belief is that the details, the minutiae of any of this do not interest Obama.
I don't think he really cares.
I don't think he cares if people are going to have trouble signing up.
I don't think he cares what it's going to end up costing anybody.
That's not what this is about.
Oh, he'll act like it.
But one of the reasons why, I mean, let's be honest.
I don't know how many of you have, I would assume almost all of you have real-world business experience to one degree or another.
And in every circumstance, let's take Obama at his word and let's say that this is the thing that he really loves.
I mean, that's the impression he's given.
This is his signature deal.
This is what he's really wanted.
This universal single-payer health care.
This is what he's really wanted.
The Democrat Party has wanted it forever for 50 years, but he's the guy that really wanted it.
Now, in a circumstance like that, when you have the president or the CEO, whatever the top dog is called, that person's passion for it lights the fires under everybody else to make it happen.
This is how Steve Jobs worked.
Any successful CEO, a CEO cannot have hands-on on every project that is going on in a business.
But the one thing at the moment, at the time, that matters most to that CEO, everybody knows about it.
Everybody working there wants to impress the boss.
Everybody working there knows how, but you add the liberal political aspect to this, the true believer, big government's the solution, everything aspect of this.
And there's no reason why this should have happened except one thing.
And that is these people are genuinely incompetent.
They haven't the slightest idea what they're doing.
They don't know what to do.
And their arrogance and their condescending view of people outside of government makes it, they're only going to hire people to work for other governments.
They're not going to go out and get, you know, they'll use private sector people as props, bring them in for photo ops, buffet in now and then whenever you need him, get a photo op, having lunch with Steve Jobs, or what, but that's as far as it goes.
Now, the fact that this thing is an utter disaster is evidence.
Obama doesn't care about this beyond the day it was signed into law.
Because all the only thing that matters about this to Obama is that one day the government's going to be in charge of everybody's health care.
And whatever happens between now and then is simply what has to happen.
Good or bad, that's the price.
It doesn't matter.
He doesn't care about individuals and their problems with insurance, availability, cost, actual treatment.
Doesn't care.
Doesn't matter.
Not what this is about.
All that is nothing more than salesmanship.
That's nothing more than a photo op itself, like yesterday.
All that is, you go out and act like you're Billy Mays or whoever the latest Ron Popil is with the Genzu knife, and you go sell it and you're wrapping it up and then ratchet it up and you make sure everybody understands that you're upset with it too, which continues to just amaze me that he gets away with this, this limbaugh theory, that he gets away with this.
It's his plan.
And the fact that it is bollocksed up like this can be traced right back to him.
As I'm just, I'm telling you, whoever is the leader of people in a group, be it a business, any organization, once that leader comes up with something, and if there are true believers in that organization, and there are throughout this regime, they are all true believers.
They're true believers blinded by reality.
They haven't the slightest idea what they're doing, but they believe that only they are equipped to do this, that only they care enough, that only they are compassionate enough, that only they are the ones that can make this work.
They're the only ones.
And the fact that this thing had three years and is an utter disaster goes right to the top and shows absent leadership.
Now, when I say that Obama doesn't care, I don't want you to misunderstand me.
It's not that he doesn't care whether it works or not.
He's not worried about it not working.
He's not worried about it being repealed.
He's not worried about it being defunded or delayed.
He got it signed into law.
He signed it.
His signature's on it.
It's going to happen.
The Supreme Court's backed him up.
Whatever goes on between now and that magic day of single payer, he doesn't care about.
There are going to be times he has to go out and act like he does.
Yesterday was one of those.
But he doesn't care.
The irony of this is that this guy's supporters think he cares more about them than anybody ever has.
And the people that voted for him ditto.
But you know as well as I do.
If you are a CEO or if you're a general manager, if you're a leader of a group and you have true believers, people that love you and want to look good to you, want to impress you, and also want you to succeed because they go along with you.
They're going to bust their rear ends to get what you want done.
The fact that that didn't happen here is a testament to so many things.
A, you've got nothing but glaring incompetence.
People are just incapable of doing this.
And there's no evidence anywhere that the people involved know how to do this.
Kathleen Sebilius doesn't know how to do this.
She doesn't even know how to do one thing that she's doing.
Not one.
Neither does Obama.
They didn't, I bet you they didn't know they had a problem until it went live.
They think magic happens because they did it.
They might have been aware that it was going to glitches.
I don't know.
But I think they're so incompetent that I believe they love themselves so much.
They have such a vaunted self-image and self-view of themselves that whatever they touch is going to turn to gold.
Now, our old buddy, let me see if I can find this, Jim Pethakukis.
I gotta figure out what stack I put this in.
I wish I could remember it.
I wouldn't have to look it up.
Jim Pethikukas.
We interviewed him, by the way, for the Limbaugh Letter, the upcoming next issue of the Limbaugh Letter.
And he had a great observation about what Sebelius said last week when these problems erupted.
And I don't know what stack I put it in.
It was when she said, let me see, I can paraphrase it.
She said, I got hold of the IT team and I told them to double down and give us 150% effort to fix this.
And his point was, who in the world, here it is, who in the world talks that way?
In other words, in fact, his exact quote, how people who've never run anything talk.
And they quote Sebelius, I called on the contractor to get its A team here and give us 150%.
And he says, Democrats speak this way.
Obama speaks this way.
Sometimes it's due to the fact they haven't run anything.
Sometimes it's because they know the audience has never run anything.
It's the difference between a young, wild-eyed Buffalo Bills fan saying, we're going to beat the 49ers by 30, and Vegas Oddsmakers favoring the 49ers by 13.
This is, that's one way of looking at it.
But they don't know what they're doing, folks.
There's not one of them that does.
I use Steve Jobs as an example.
Apple at one time had this Internet Services division called Mobile Me.
It was the forerunner to what they now call iCloud.
I was a customer.
And what it was was basically, it was many things.
It was a sync service for all of your contacts, calendars, email addresses, and account settings that would keep them synced from device to device to computer to computer.
Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't.
It mostly never reached its full potential.
One day, Jobs called a whole team in, and they think they're in there to get some praise and a couple of atta boys.
And Jobs is, can somebody in this room tell me what Mobile Me is supposed to do?
And one of these bright-eyed team members raises his hand.
Jobs calls on him.
And the guy spells out exactly what it's supposed to do.
And Jobs says, can you tell me why the hell it doesn't do any of that?
And he let everybody go.
He disbanded the team.
And it was working 150% better than what this is.
I'm just, those of you, again, who have led groups of people who know they're working on your baby, this is your deal.
This is your life.
This is what you want more than anything in the world right now.
And I'm talking about people loyal to you.
Not everybody is, but the people that are loyal to you want you to look good.
They want to look good in your eyes.
They want you to succeed because they will go with you as that happens.
They might also make a name for themselves.
It's an all-in for a great potential positive outcome.
Everybody is humping to please.
They're just working overtime, whatever it takes.
And that's how greatness happens.
That's hard work and people busting their butts with passion on things they really that could not have been present here Or this wouldn't have happened.
If all of that was present, if there was everything I just described, then the only explanation is glaring incompetence, which is entirely possible and is probably the real cause.
There just isn't anybody.
They are the equivalent of people in the faculty lounge at Harvard sitting around theorizing on how the private sector screws up and cheats everybody and lies to everybody and rips everybody off.
And if they ran the show, this ought to be better.
And they find they're running the show and they don't know what they're doing.
There's nobody in this regime's got any private sector experience because they hate the private sector.
They despise it.
They think it's the problem.
Just like the United States is the problem in the world, the private sector is the problem in the U.S. economy.
The private sector is the root of inequality.
The private sector is the root of unfairness and racism and sexism and inequality in income.
It's where all the bad stuff is, is the private sector.
So why would you get anybody from there?
You know better anyway, because you have a bigger heart.
You have more compassion.
And the private sector would never try to give insurance to everybody.
And the private sector would never try to make it affordable.
And the private sector, they don't do anything but kill our customers anyway.
We're better people.
They don't know what they're doing.
But don't you find it strange that after three years of this, there's not, you can't find one person, not one person who apparently cared enough about this to make Obama look good?
Not one person.
One person wanting to make Obama look might have, but that's not even possible either because bureaucracies just split things up into so many different groups.
It's just not, it's not possible to achieve what they're trying to accomplish here.
Now let me, ladies and gentlemen, offer a counter theory to my just explained flawless theory, because there is another possibility.
Do you remember in the debates when Romney said to Obama, why do you always pick losers?
And he was talking about Obama's green tech choices like Solyndra, you know, all of the wind and solar energy companies that Obama chose to give money to that went belly up.
And they all did.
They all went belly up.
And Obama, as a side note, ended up getting some of that money back because those people then became donors.
They all got rich, but the companies went belly up.
And Romney was talking about Obama's green tech choices.
But you know what's true about everything Obama does.
Now with incompetence, this is just a counter theory, a contravailing theory.
With incompetence, every now and then you would get something right, but Obama never does.
No, I'm not talking about legislation.
I'm talking about when Obama attempts to take over something in the private sector on the theory that he knows better or that he's in touch with the future and he's going to move us forward, everything he picks goes belly up.
Obama, Sebelius, Pelosi, Reed, they have all talked about their desire to go to a single-payer system.
And I'm telling you, that's where Obama is confident this is going to end up.
That's why he doesn't care about any of this minutia.
It is why he doesn't give a darn about it because he knows where it's going to end up.
And what if that, as I've even said so myself on previous programs, is not the plan?
Now that the government is legally in charge of health care, what's so bad about it screwing up?
So bad, so much that people demand it be simplified.
And what would simplify it?
Get rid of these insurance companies.
For God's sakes, that's where all the confusion is.
Got this company here and that policy there and this deductible over here.
And just get rid of that.
Did the government do it?
What if that's what's going on?
Could very well be because you know they all want single payer.
And Obama has told his union buddies it's going to take 5, 10, maybe 15 years to get there.
That the American people wouldn't accept it if it were just legislating on them.
But if they end up demanding it out of a mess like this, that's what they're coming for.
So great to be back, folks.
And isn't it for you too?
Yes.
What would I do if I were, I'll be glad to answer how I want to handle this.
That's no-brainer.
We got a lot still.
11 soundbites about me.
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