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Jan. 22, 2014 - Rush Limbaugh Program
37:37
January 22, 2014, Wednesday, Hour #2
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Time Text
You know, I should have known when I brought this up that I shouldn't have brought it up.
I should have known.
But no.
I went ahead and brought up the marriage school, and now I'm hearing how valuable it can be.
Oh, geez.
Let me print something out.
Hang on here a second.
I'm printing something out.
I'm just, I'm printing something out here.
I've got to paste it.
I've got to expand it.
Hang on just a second.
And there it comes.
I'm hearing from people who have attended them, the marriage schools.
Church-sponsored, in some cases, state-sponsored.
I'll give you an example.
By the way, greetings and welcome back.
Rush Limbaugh, the EIB network.
See, this is, I'm always surprised I shouldn't be.
I'm kind of like Richard Sherman.
I think all of you see things the exact way I do.
And if I think something is sophistry, that you do.
But no, there are people who think that this is actually a good idea.
For example, Rush, when I went to marriage school required by the church, it was really entertaining.
At least two couples canceled their weddings.
What it was, was a group session, 10 to 12 couples in there, a lot of young couples.
And they give you different scenarios to see what you would do.
Such as husband wants you to go for Christmas to Maine and not bring your brother, your mother.
So the prospective couple discusses that.
Or it's Christmas and the in-laws want to see you and your parents want to see you and you can't be both places at once.
How do you resolve it?
How about the wife goes to her parents and the husband goes to his parents and they get together a couple of days.
These kinds of scenarios are put forth and these couples then start debating what they would do in these circumstances as they're presented.
And apparently a bunch of couples canceled their wedding plans based on these scenarios that were given.
Wife wants you to stop every Friday night with the boys.
Meaning, don't spend every Friday night with a gang that once you're getting married, you stop seeing your gang of friends every Friday.
What do you do?
Wife knows you'll stop smoking when she gets pregnant.
Will you?
No, I have no intention of stopping smoking.
Divorce city, they don't get married.
Husband wants you to do the grocery shopping and plan meals.
Are you prepared to do that?
Wife says, what does he think?
I'm not going to be a slave.
There's no way.
They don't get married.
This is what marriage school is.
At least in the circumstances that have been presented to me here in the various emails.
Husband, they talk about raising kids and money.
And people say the amount of fighting that was going on among people not yet married over possible scenarios resulted in people happily thinking about getting married, screaming at each other and breaking up right there at wedding school.
Man, what kind of school is that?
You go to a wedding school and when you're there, you break up.
You break the engagement.
I should have known.
I don't know if you get a refund on how much it costs.
I think this is obviously it's going to cost something.
There's something fascinating happening with Obamacare out there, ladies and gentlemen.
There's a story here in the New Republic.
And the New Republic, of course, is a liberal left-wing journal of opinion.
And the headline in this story, Obamacare in Red and Blue America.
And the upshot of this is, And the New Republic is mad as they can be about this.
People that live in red states are not signing up.
People that live in red states are doing everything they can to avoid Obamacare.
They're not signing up.
People in red states refuse to expand Medicare.
And both of these refusals are thwarting and foiling Obamacare.
On the contrary, people that live in blue states are embracing it to a degree.
I mean, nobody really is fully embracing Obamacare, and that is the dirty little secret.
But I just love this.
I hadn't stopped.
This kind of thing encourages me, and it gives me faith that the people in this country, and particularly the states, are going to be our salvation.
The states are going to be the break.
It used to be that the Senate put the brakes on things.
And the Senate is now just, under Harry Reid's leadership, the Senate is an embarrassment.
The Senate is a total dereliction of its constitutional role and responsibility now.
Well, not total, but I mean, it's embarrassing what Harry Reid's done.
But the states, the people in the states are where the breaks are going to be applied as much as they can be anyway.
Here's a poll quote.
The end result will almost surely be fewer people in Republican-leaning states getting health insurance.
And this is a familiar pattern.
As a general rule, income supports and public services in red states are a lot less generous than they are in blue states.
Conservatives consider this a virtue because, among other things, it means those states can get away with lower taxes, and that's certainly true.
But exposing more people to financial hardship because of illness and making it harder for them to get medical care, those things exact a price too.
But there's no guarantee those things are going to happen.
This is, let me break this down.
What is happening in the red states where conservatives live, they are, if you want to use the word, living or imposing their values.
And they are not supporting subsidies, income supports, and public services.
They're being a lot less generous.
There's a lot less welfare to able-bodied people than is taking place in the blue states.
And the people in Republican states, red states, are happy.
They think this is smart.
They think this is politically virtuous.
And it is.
They're right.
Reducing the role of government, reducing the size of government, empowering individuals, enhancing individual freedom.
This is, and of course, you're not reading about this because this is not favorable to the whole concept of Obamacare.
So the drive-bys are not reading about it.
The New Republic, for however they did it and whatever made them aware of it, is reporting on it, and they're not happy about it because they view it as conservatives, red states, Republicans undermining our young, courageous president trying to bring health care to the masses.
Now, what's happening is that people in red states and red districts, even in blue states, but in Republican areas, they are simply living their values, and they're not signing up for this.
And they're not signing up, they're making political, ideological decisions not to sign up.
And they are not supporting the vast increase in subsidy type spending and so forth.
And again, conservatives consider this a virtue because, among other things, it means those states can get away with lower taxes.
And that's that, folks, that's showing Dracula the cross.
The left knows it can't compete.
They either have to force everybody onto Obamacare, or failing that, they have got to demonize the people who refuse to and who find a better way.
And if that better way involves lower taxes, that's the greatest thing.
Well, it's hard to say it's the greatest.
It's one of the most powerful ways to undermine creeping liberalism, socialism is finding a way to cut taxes for some because that provides an alternative illustration of what life could be outside the bounds of control of the left or a Democrat state or what have you.
And the New Republic acknowledges that that's certainly true.
States can get away with lower taxes, but and this is where it gets serious for them.
Exposing more people to financial hardship because of illness or making it harder for them to get medical care, those things extract a price too.
So the New Republic is saying, okay, you conservatives, you're not subsidizing people and you're not signing up for Obamacare.
Well, you're just putting yourselves at greater risk for bankruptcy.
When you do get sick, you're exposing more people to financial hardship, bankruptcy, because of illness.
And that's the price you're going to pay.
And that's not how these people look at it.
They're obviously not obsessed with pessimism every day.
They're not running around living their lives like the left wants them to in palpable fear that they're one illness away from bankruptcy.
They're outliving their lives.
They're trying to maintain control over their lives.
And they're doing what they can to resist this onslaught from Washington.
And as I say, drive-by media, it's a non-story.
Even if they're aware of it, they wouldn't report it, not this way.
The New Republic is trying to report it as really mean, really unfair, really selfish of these people in the red states.
Let me give you some, another pull quote.
Of the 10 states that have the higher percentages as people who have signed up for Obamacare, eight are solidly blue in the sense they voted for the Democrat president in the last three presidential elections.
Of the 10 states that have the lowest percentages, six are solidly red.
What does it mean?
Well, technology would appear to be the big factor.
States running their own exchanges, i.e. the red states that didn't sign up for Obamacare.
They don't have Obamacare exchanges.
They're doing it themselves.
They're running it an entirely different way.
States running their own exchanges tended to be more successful at signing people up than states that are relying on healthcare.gov, which had so many problems for the first two months.
And the states running their own exchanges have tended to be blue states because those are the states where officials were eager to implement the program.
The one red state that's gotten high enrollment is Kentucky, which has a Democrat governor who has been outspoken.
So the red state story is that they're not signing up.
They're not signing on to the whole concept of Obamacare.
And as such, their taxes are lower, their subsidies are lower, and this is what has the left irritated.
A red-blue state divide in health insurance coverage is going to remain thanks to a more familiar and ultimately more significant distinction between the states.
The architects of Obamacare assumed that all states would expand their Medicare programs so that all people with incomes below or just above the poverty line would qualify.
But remember, the Supreme Court in 2012 made it easier for states to opt out of this expansion of Medicare, and about half the states have done that.
And then they've got a map here showing the states, as you can see the pattern, which comes from the advisory board.
And you'll notice it looks pretty similar to a map of the last presidential election.
The end result will almost surely be fewer people in Republican-leaning states getting health insurance.
No, getting Obamacare health insurance.
And this is a general familiar pattern.
Income supports and public services in red states are a lot less generous.
I've read that pull quote already.
So just a nice little surprise, something a little uppity newsier, uplifting news, that people in the red states, Republican states, are simply refusing to play.
And in the process, showing a different way while thwarting Obamacare, which, in order for it to really succeed as the dream holds, has got to encompass everybody.
Everybody has to be under the foot of Obamacare.
If there are people who aren't, who escape it, who take care of themselves, handle it themselves in a way that is much more attractive to what Obamacare is, that's what the regime can't afford.
Quick timeout, my friends.
Don't go away.
To the phones we go.
And starting at Seattle, this is Larry.
Welcome to the EIB Network.
Great to have you, Larry.
Hi.
Good morning, sir.
I just want to maybe give a different perspective on Mr. Sherman's rant.
All right.
You say your perspective is going to be different.
What is what do you think the popular perception is that you are going to offer something different from?
Well, that he was.
I think that he was being misunderstood.
I think really excited.
And what he was trying to point out was that he was insulted that they were talking about him in the huddle and Craftree was talking about him.
He was insulted that they believed that he was the weak link in the defense and that Crabtree could beat him.
And that he proved, when it was all over, he proved that he was not the weak link.
And I think that's pretty much what he was saying.
Okay, well, let's look at that.
In the game, the 49ers threw at Richard Sherman twice.
That does not sound like disrespect to me.
That sounds like fear.
Sounds to me like the Fortiners were afraid of throwing to Sherman.
The first time they threw, they got a holding call on him.
Defensive holding prior to pass interference.
There was no pass interference.
It would have been ball was not in the air yet.
The only other time they threw was that last play of the game.
And on that play, they simply thought they were going to their hot receiver.
I mean, it was the play, and they think Crabtree is their hands receiver, so they were throwing to him.
It didn't matter Sherman was on him or not.
But this kind of makes my point, is that Sherman, maybe he was being bad-mouthed on the field, and maybe Crabtree was running his mouth, and maybe the 49ers were insulting him, but nobody knew it.
This actually is my whole point.
Now, I happen to have learned subsequently that Crabtree and Sherman have a long history of rivalry opposition, and that Crabtree is, in fact, a motor mouth.
He does trash talk, as does Sherman.
But I don't understand.
Here you are, you're playing football.
22 guys on the field.
It's the championship game.
I don't understand the mentality of a defensive back who feels insulted because they throw to the receiver he's covering.
If a defensive back is insulted when they try to complete a pass on him, that, I'm sorry, does not compute with me.
If that...
If the ultimate sign of respect is that the player is so good, he's constantly avoided, except on the one play where it really matters, they're going to go, I think they were showing fear and respect for Sherman by virtue of the play calling.
Now, I don't know what Crabtree was saying.
I have no idea the trash talking.
That's the point.
Nobody else did either.
But when Sherman was interviewed post-game with the testosterone and the adrenaline and the thrill of victory, and I maintain the vast majority of the American people have no idea what that feeling is like.
We've never had it.
We've never won an NFL championship game or a World Series game.
We don't know.
We haven't spent our lives preparing for it.
We've not dreamed of it.
It's always a fantasy.
We don't know what that's like.
We would love to know what it's like.
We'd love to know what it's like to be on a Super Bowl team.
We'd love to know what that kind of camaraderie is like, but we don't.
So Crabtree is in the midst of total ecstatic joy and glory.
And obviously, something about this Crabtree guy has rubbed him wrong for who knows how long.
So he goes into his rant after the game.
And if what you say is true, it wouldn't have been a problem.
Everybody watching that game had known that Crabtree had been insulting Sherman all day and all season, and even in the offseason.
And if everybody had known that Crabtree was the motormouth that Sherman says he is, and if everybody had known all that trash talking was going on, then Sherman, after thwarting Crabtree's attempt to win the game, everybody would have understood Sherman going off on the guy.
But precisely because they didn't know any of that is why they looked at it and said, What the hell?
This doesn't, it doesn't make any sense.
This guy ought to be happy.
This got to be jumping for joy.
Why is he ticked off at this game?
Because people didn't know.
Now, you Seahawks fans might have, but the nation didn't.
Hi, welcome back.
If you are on the hold, please hang in there and be tough.
I'm going to get to you as soon as I can.
I really want to take the opportunity here of this last call, this Richard Sherman thing, to make a couple of other points.
Football as a game is under assault, and it's under assault by people that don't have the slightest bit of knowledge about it.
The people who play it, the kind of people they are, how tough they are, their motivations.
Then you combine all of that with championship athlete or athletic talent, and the rest of us are left in the dust.
And we really have no way to relate to these guys.
Zilch Zero Nada.
All we can do is, you know, wonder what happened when the athlete genes are being passed out when it was our turn.
It's one of the reasons we watch.
There's a little Walter Midi in all of us, fantasizing we could do it.
Oh, wouldn't it be fun to do it?
You only see the good things, too.
You only see the fun, the camaraderie, the single-minded purposeness, the championship team.
You sit around and imagine what that might be like in the locker room and on the team playing.
And you think, my God, what a party.
What a great time.
You just naturally associate or attach positive things to it.
And in light of this, now all these people coming along said, we've got to ban the game.
There's another woman that writes for ESPN now who was apparently, she was a VP at ESP and not columnist and appears on CNN.
And she says, I'm through with the NFL.
Ban the game.
Just out yesterday, I saw it.
Forget her name.
I've got it here in the stack.
But she's just one of many who are now saying the game's brutal.
It's unconscionable.
It's irresponsible.
We as a society are barbaric.
How dare we do this?
Blah, blah, blah.
And she hasn't the slightest idea what she's talking about.
She hasn't played the game.
You can only get so close to it watching it.
And you can only get so close to it coaching it.
Now, let me talk about cornerbacks.
Every job in a country, every job in America has its own unique characteristics.
I don't care what the job is.
If it is sanitation, if it's mechanical engineering, if it's computer science, if it's media, every job has its own unique aspects and its own unique requirements for success and top-level performance.
And every job has different elements to it.
Now, cornerback in football, and let's just stick with the NFL.
We're talking about professional and championship level.
Cornerbacks, successful ones, have to be, they have to have a little Muhammad Ali in them.
They have to.
They must.
There is no if, and, or, but about this.
They must believe there's nobody better.
They have to believe they are the best because they get burned too much.
They get burned too many times.
I remember when I was a kid, and my dad took my brother and I to a St. Louis Cardinals L.A. Dodgers baseball game.
And I wanted to go to the door where the players exited the stadium after the game just to see them up close.
And I was a Dodgers fan.
And after the game, the Dodgers lost.
I said, Dad, I don't want to go.
They're going to be too mad.
I don't want to see it.
He says, son, they lose too many games.
They're not going to be mad.
They lose too many games.
I didn't understand it then.
But a quarterback is going to have passes completed against him.
And the rules in the NFL now are all in favor of the offense because the fans want to see scoring.
The fans want to see a ping-pong game.
So it's tougher and tougher and tougher on the defense now.
And the cornerbacks are out there all by themselves.
Sometimes they get some help in pass coverage, but they're the last line.
They're out there.
They are on their own.
And they have to believe they're the best.
One of the great cornerbacks that played in the NFL is again Mike Haynes.
He played for the New England Patriots and the Oakland Raiders.
This is somewhat Sherman-esque what happened here.
I think it was a Super Bowl game.
It might have been a playoff game.
But the winning pass was completed against Mike Haynes.
And he was reputed to be when he played top dog.
His view on what happened at the end of the game was that he had been humiliated by the offense.
And all that had happened was they had completed a pass against him.
And he's talking about how they humiliated him.
Now, people that have not played the game are not going to understand what that, what do you mean, humiliated, dude?
Are they not supposed to compete against you?
Are they not supposed to succeed against you?
That's humiliating.
And I'm telling you, that's the way Sherman looks at his job, too.
So you and I will look at the fact that in that whole game, the 49ers only threw at Richard Sherman twice.
Now, to me, that is the epitome of respect.
That's the epitome of fear.
The 49ers, we're not throwing to the guy.
He's too risky.
And they didn't.
They only threw on Sherman twice.
In the last play, they threw to Crabtree, which is their hands receiver.
Harbaugh said there's no better hands.
Jerry Rice said, really?
That's all through.
Harbaugh's out there saying after the game against the Packers, Harbaugh said there is no better hands receiver that's ever played this game.
And Michael Crabtree.
And Jerry Rice said, what?
Talk to me in 15,000 yards.
So Harbaugh's trying to jack up his guy and give him confidence and so forth.
But Sherman is insulted that they tried to win the game on him.
He takes that as an insult.
Do you understand that?
Some people probably don't.
But Richard Sherman, A, he's insulted because of whatever he's got going with Crabtree, which, again, until this all happened, nobody really knew about it unless they're 49er or Seahawks fans.
But he's thinking, all right, they think they can win the game on me.
You know, let me tell you, what's going to happen?
You try to win the game on me, that's going to be resolved.
You send some schlub up against me.
That's the way he looks at his job.
Quarterback in the National Football League is, and I'm not trying to disparage any other position.
They all have these characteristics, whatever they are.
They differ.
A quarterback has the same kind of mentality.
They're intercepted.
They throw incompletions.
They lose games.
These people have to be mentally tough in ways like we all do in different areas.
But they're defeated too much.
They lose too much to be affected by it and remain great.
So whatever Sherman did in the post-game, it's characterized as ragged docious or whatever it was, whatever people said.
I maintain the vast majority of it is due to the fact that most people didn't know of the running back and forth rivalry, hatred, whatever it is that exists between Sherman and Crabtree.
I'm not excusing it.
Classless.
People have all these descriptions of what it was.
But I was most struck by the fact that Sherman felt insulted that the team would try to win the game on him.
To me, that would be, oh, wow, they're coming after me.
That's how important a game is.
But he felt insulted by it.
And so he foils their attempt.
He foils the attempt against the hated Crabtree.
He assumes that everybody knows he hates Crabtree.
And he also assumes that everybody agrees with him that Crabtree sucks.
Go back and look at it.
He starts off on Aaron Andrews, and she doesn't know who he's talking about.
She has to ask, who you mean? Crabtree.
Like, he can't believe she doesn't know what he's talking about.
And that's all I meant by ego.
I think ego is healthy.
Another thing people sometimes misunderstand.
Let's listen to some Sherman soundbites real quick here.
This is last night on Piers Morgan Live, correspondent Rachel Nichols is interviewing Sherman.
Rush, bite your lip here.
Let's go to commercial break.
Let's just go to commercial, right?
All right, so Sherman's on Piers Morgan Live last night.
It's a question.
There was this, there was a moment on the field when he made the play the choke sign.
There's an interview on the field post-game, and there's the post, there's a press conference interview.
What do you regret about all that?
What do you not regret about all that, Richard?
There isn't much about it.
I regret, you know, mostly I regret, I guess, the storm afterwards.
You know, the way it was covered, the way it was perceived, and the attention that it took away from the fantastic performances from my teammates.
You know, I regret doing that.
But I just felt like my teammates deserve better.
And, you know, I have to apologize to them, and I have.
Next question.
Your brother has said that Michael Crabtree was rude to you at an event this past summer, and that's the Larry Fitzgerald event in Arizona.
He's a wide receiver for the Arizona Cardinals.
And that's, I guess, Crabtree and Sherman got into something there.
And reporter here says that your brother said that Crabtree was rude to you at that event, that he shunned you, that he wouldn't talk to you.
And you said at the time, all right, I'm going to show him on the field.
Is that the background for all this?
That's the short version.
Is that the clean version?
I said I would keep it on the field.
On the field, we're playing a very barbaric sport.
That's when I take all my animosity and all my anger and all my frustrations out on the field.
It takes a different kind of person to be able to turn that switch on and off and be the intense, incredible, focused, and kind of, you know, I guess, angry human being that you have to be to be successful in those atmospheres.
If you catch me in the moment on the field when I'm still in that zone, when I'm still as competitive as I can be, and I'm trying to be in the place where I have to be to do everything I can to be successful on the football field and help my team win, then it's not going to come out as articulate, as smart, as charismatic because on the field, I'm not all those things.
That's pretty much.
He just told you what it is to be a cornerback in the NFL and what that circumstance was and what it takes to succeed.
And then the microphone gets stuck in his face, and he hasn't cooled down and he's still livid.
And I don't know, folks, you ever had been in the midst of a personal rivalry with a bully or just with somebody's not your friend, it's at work or whatever, and a moment came where you finally vanquished them.
And it's for all the marbles, and you probably would be jumping for joy yourself.
Somebody threw a microphone in your face at that moment.
You might have some things to say about the bully that you've been holding in.
Maybe.
Again, I'm not trying to excuse Sherman here because what he did is not normal.
I mean, most players in that situation turn into PR experts and they don't say anything except what they think is the right thing to say.
And he didn't.
It was unbridled.
So the next question is finally.
So we've seen guys get excited in a moment, make big pronouncements.
What interested me so much about what happened to you was the reaction afterward, the way it mushroomed, and the fact that race so quickly became involved.
It was really mind-boggling.
It was kind of sad that the way the world reacted for the people who did react that way and throw the racial slurs and things like that out there.
It's really sad, especially that close to Martin Luther King Day.
You're not judging a guy.
I'm not out there beating on people or committing crimes or getting arrested or doing anything.
I'm playing a football game at a high level.
And I got excited.
But what I did was within the lines of a football field.
What they did was an actual reality.
They showed their true character.
They had time to think about it.
They were sitting at a computer and they expressed themselves in a true way.
And I thought society had moved past that.
You know, that's true and all that.
But let me tell you something.
Excuse me.
Are we now all of a sudden going to start paying attention to comments posted on blogs by anonymous twerps?
Go take a look at what is said about your average Republican politician on those blogs.
And I don't see anybody getting all upset about that.
I don't see anybody getting upset about the insults and whatever else they are aimed at conservatives or aimed at Republicans.
These anonymous twerps on these never-ending websites and blogs.
I don't think that's any big deal.
A lot of people want to make that a big deal.
Nobody, anybody responsible.
There's no racial component to this at all.
Okay, back to the phones.
I told people to be patient, and now time to follow through.
We'll go back to Arcadia, California.
This is Joyce, and I really appreciate your waiting.
Thank you.
Hello.
Rush, it's a pleasure to have you as a longtime listener, and I'm grateful to have you as a point of common sense and reason.
Well, thank you.
Thank you very much.
I'm a retired marriage family therapist, and I have often facetiously said, I wish that premarital therapy or testing or evaluation was a requirement to get a marriage license.
Really?
It's the one thing in life that is critical to our lives and is one of the most important decisions we ever make.
And the only thing most people know about it is what they've learned in their own childhood, which may be very unhealthy.
Take it back.
They learn a lot about it on TV.
Don't think.
Oh, yes, they do.
They see a lot of marriages on TV.
Every aspect of it.
They see happy marriages.
They see.
But anyway, I would like to.
There is a test called Prepare and Enrich, which is a standardized, highly evaluated test for accuracy.
And it goes into every aspect of life.
And it is administered by a trained professional, two couples, who individually computer score a test.
It is computer scored, returned to the therapist and to the couple for evaluation.
It points out their strengths and weaknesses.
Does it advise them not to get married or to get married?
It doesn't advise them.
They have to make their own decisions.
However, they may decide, based upon that, that they do not want to be or that they do want to be.
But it helps them to explore their strengths and weaknesses so that when they encounter them, they will know how to deal with them and to be aware of them.
It makes them aware more than anything.
And they explore aspects that they have not discussed, although everyone nearly will come into therapy saying, oh, we have discussed everything.
Well, but you know what amazes me about this is that people are in relationships before they get married and they face many of the same conflicts, such as, well, where do we go at Christmas?
That's right.
This teaches them how to resolve those issues, not each individual issue, although examples may well come up.
And I have often said rather facetiously, I wish that it were a requirement because when you are under the influence of romantic love, your prefrontal lobe, which is a rational decision-making portion of your brain, has been proven to be fairly inoperative because the emotions overpower it.
And this test explores absolutely every aspect of your life, things you would never even think about bringing up, and there are different versions of it for different phases of marriage.
Now, I don't know about the Colorado law.
It sounded like it was a little overkill.
It sounds to me like nobody would want to get married after going through something like this.
Time for a brief break here at the top, ladies and gentlemen.
Come back here with still lots to do and cover today's excursion into broadcast excellence.
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