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Jan. 23, 2014 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:48
January 23, 2014, Thursday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
Well, ladies and gentlemen, it looks like I continue to live rent free in the head of the president, Barack Obama.
Seems that the New Yorker has just posted more from their 18-page Obama interview.
Now I don't know if the whole thing has been on the internet.
I didn't read the whole thing.
So this is it may have been up there all the time.
But here is what the president said in a New Yorker interview with David Remnick that they have just posted.
Another way of putting it, I guess, is that the issue has been the inability of my message to penetrate the Republican base so that they feel persuaded that I'm not the caricature that you see on Fox News or Rush Limbaugh.
But I'm somebody who is interested in solving problems and pretty practical.
And actually, a lot of things that we put in place worked better than people might think.
And as long as there's that gap between perceptions of me within the average Republican primary voter and the reality, it's hard for folks like John Boehner to move too far in my direction.
So it's it's me again.
And Fox News.
We are the reason Obama can't advance his agenda.
Because Boehner is afraid to move too close to Obama because I have made you, along with Fox News, have made you think Obama is something that he isn't.
And it's such a shame.
I have so distorted who the real Obama is in your mind that it is paralyzing our government.
It is paralyzing the Speaker of the House, who is really, really, really, really wants to go in there and really, really work with uh Obama, but he just can't.
It's hard for people like Boehner to move too far in my direction because of the misperception of me.
Obama says, created by Fox News.
And Rush Limbaugh.
And greetings, my friends.
Welcome.
Great to have you.
We're here for another three hours of broadcast excellence here at the Distinguished and Special Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.
The telephone number, if you'd like to be on the program, is 800-282-2882, the email address, Ilrushbo at EIBNet.com.
We have polling news all over the place today, and we have some some data, some actual data that is not polling news, actual results.
For example, Quinnipiac poll has Obama way under 50% all over the place.
And by the way, this is a poll that's sympathetic to the president.
They've got to have a job approval at 40%.
Economic policy approval at 39%.
Obama care approval at 36%.
In the Quinnipia Act poll, 77% say the economy is not so good or poor.
49% say that Obama is dishonest, and that is the majority in that category.
53% say that the Obama regime is incompetent.
So I guess Fox News and I are having a robust time here in getting the truth out about the regime and the president.
You'll get that poll.
And it looks like we've succeeded here.
In what?
Having the truth finally understood.
It's only taken five years.
Five years of study effort.
The Washington Post has a story today.
Yeah, by the way, folks, I meant to get to this yesterday.
It just slipped my mind because I never got to the backup stack.
Actually, it's not the backup stack, it's it's a holdover stack.
I mean, the stuff I don't go to one day, I put it in a stack that is uh for use potentially the next day or the day after, and I'm gonna get to it today.
The latest science proving that modern mothers are lazy and lazier.
I meant to do it yesterday.
Slipped my mind.
I've got it at the top of the do-over stack.
Uh today at a holdover stack.
Anyway, Washington Post, the American dream has actually been dead 50 years.
Washington Post has a story that says the economic mobility hasn't changed in 50 years.
And that would include the Clinton, it means the economic mobility was dead during the Clinton years.
I don't know if the Washington Post realizes that they are acknowledging that.
No, no, no, no.
Of course it's bogus.
But it's it's it's all part look at the news for Obama, the health care news folks.
Jim Angle at Fox News ran across some internal regime documents.
And he reported on this.
The regime on the TV and public and uh the public face, anybody from the regime talking about health care is, oh yeah, yeah, I got their website up and running, uh all the problems ironed out.
And we're just humming along now.
And that's apparently not true.
The regime, according to the documents that Jim Engel came across, the regime is really worried that the whole thing is going to collapse.
And one of the reasons why is that the so-called back end of healthcare.gov, which is where all the data collected then gets sent on to the regime and to insurance companies, has yet to function.
The whole purpose, pardon me here.
The entire reason you do a website.
This folks, this would be like going on Amazon and ordering whatever you order in it stopping there.
What's in your shopping cart, never leaving your cart, nobody at Amazon ever finding out what's in your cart.
That is the essential reality here.
And the back end isn't done.
And this it is another companion story.
Aetna insurance company might be totally forced out of Obamacare.
It's a companion story.
And now they've they brought in some experts from Accenture.
Now, those of you who watch golf may have heard of Accenture.
They sponsor the World Golf Championship.
Or they did.
I don't know.
I haven't watched a golf tournament on TV so long, I don't know if they still do, but but they were prominent as sponsors of golf tournaments.
And they used to be called something else.
I forget what they used to be called, and I still don't know what they do now.
I guess they're an auditing firm of some kind, but they have been given the charge of fixing this thing by March.
And if they don't get it fixed by March, then supposedly we're looking at an utter collapse.
You know, I guess that's true.
I've been flashing a note here that I am uh this is, by the way, remember, folks, this is true.
Forbes magazine did this first ever top ten most influential uh personalitieslash celebrity poll, and it was not reported on in this country.
It was reported on in the UK independent, I believe.
We had it last week.
And it showed that I am in the top ten most influential.
Most everybody else was in Hollywood, and all of the top ten except me are involved in pictures, either movies or television.
I'm the only person that is not involved in pictures in the top ten, and I was ahead of Hillary.
Remember that?
Hillary was at number 10, and I was uh I was ahead of her in the list.
So you could say Hillary wasn't able to change people's thinking about Obamacare during the campaign of 2007-2008, but it looks like I, along with Fox News, Have been able to do so.
So I guess that poll might have had some accuracy to it.
Or that, yeah, that ranking.
But back to the Washington Post.
We have not had any upward mobility.
The American dream, in other words, according to the Washington Post, has been dead for 50 years.
And this conveniently coincides with a stagnant economy that we find ourselves in after five years of Obama.
Obama's out there said 44 straight months of job growth, and we got an economic rescue, and people are going back to work, and the economy's starting to hum, and it does.
It sounds like a dream come true, except it isn't happening.
And now the Washington Post, in order to make sure that that is not linked exclusively to Obama, has just decided to tell us that there hasn't really been any upward mobility in 50 years.
USA Today and the pew center for people in the press, have another poll teeing it up for Obama's State of the Union speech on the wealth gap.
60 plus percent of everybody thinks that inequality in America is growing.
Was Elizabeth Warren right that the game is rigged?
38% agree with Elizabeth Warren that the economic game in America is rigged.
The thinking is that uh hard work and determination are no guarantee of success.
And that coincides, does it not, with the Washington Post?
We haven't had any upward mobility in 50 years, and by the way, it's got nothing to do with Obama.
This happened long before Obama.
Obama is trying to fix it.
Obama's trying to reverse this.
By the way, when did this country come with a guarantee of success?
Well, I'm just bouncing off this USA Today Pew center poll, where a sizable number of people proclaim that hard work and determination are no guarantee of success.
I missed that guarantee of success.
Have you heard of that yarn too?
What guarantee of success?
Hard work or any what where is that guarantee?
Yeah, and security, too.
Where's that guarantee?
And for anybody, for any in the world, but particularly here in the U.S., where is that?
Europe.
Environmentalist wackos in Europe say that climate rules in order to head off global warming are causing economic pain.
And even at that, we're not keeping pace with the dire warnings.
We're not keeping pace.
We're not doing what we need to do to stave off climate change and even falling short of what we should be doing, what we're supposed to do, we are nevertheless causing economic pain.
It's just disastrous.
In addition to that.
Have you heard CNN?
This is, folks, you know, I know this is inside baseball.
And normally I don't talk about ratings of other people in this business.
Because the vagaries are just too volatile.
The whole rating system is too volatile.
And if you live by it, you can die by it.
And everybody's ratings, depending on when you take the snapshot, are going to go up and down, and sometimes you're going to fluctuate greatly.
But this CNN now has had enough steady erosion here that it ought to be panic time.
Listen to this.
CNN's Nielsen ratings for the key important demographic which remains 2554.
I've always thought that strange, though, if I may make a brief departure.
The assumption, the reason why you want 2554 in an advertising demographic, is twofold.
A, youth, Young.
B, they're climbing.
They are growing economically.
They are acquiring wealth.
They're advancing professionally.
And they are.
And they're in an increasingly consumerist and acquisition mode.
Well, I know it's tough to balance this with the fact that the American dream is dead.
And that there isn't any upward mobility in the last 50 years.
But we'll work all that out here on the program today.
You know that that's not true.
That's just that's just BS that's put out by the drive-bys.
The 25 to 54 demographic has forever, for as long as they've been around, has been the target demographic because that's what advertisers want, because that's where it is theorized that the majority of disposable income is.
And disposable income is what advertisers seek to separate people from.
And the real money is in 55 plus.
By definition, the real money, the people that really have disposable income are people largely over 54.
However, the reason advertisers don't target them is that their decisions are made.
They have established buying habits.
It would cost too much money to engage in advertising to change their minds.
That's why you don't see, for example, beer advertised for anybody older than 20.
They will advertise beer for people under 21, under 18, trying to forge that buying habit that will stay with that customer for a year or for a lifetime, actually.
And that's what all advertisers are trying.
So even though, especially the way the economy is now, you know, it's tougher and tougher for millennials and the Obama economy, young people come out and find careers rather than just jobs, and now we've got full-time work being converted to part-time because of Obamacare.
The whole notion that disposable income in the 2554 bracket is uh is rising, it's a maybe not be true, but those are still impressionable people.
And it is viewed that the people 55 plus if they're if they're buying Miller Light, they're not gonna be persuaded not to.
If they're using Gillette fusion razors, and that's what they're gonna use.
For the rest, you're not gonna convince them to go shick.
So that's why the demographic is important.
And in that demographic, CNN just hit their lowest level since May of 2012, and May of 2012 was the lowest level since May of 2011.
And May of 2011 was the lowest level since May of 2010.
I mean, they have been in a steady nosedive.
They are now averaging 78,000 viewers for the whole day.
78,000.
I would think that they would have that many captive in airports around the country, who have no choice but then to watch CNN.
Their prime time number in the demo is 98,000.
We have more than that in a city block in New York City.
This is the one-year anniversary of Jeff Zucker, the mastermind of the Today Show at NBC coming in to fix this.
Just they continue to stick.
They assume they're not ideological.
They're not liberals in the media.
Oh no, they are in the center.
MSNBC, they're gonna freak left.
Fox has the freak right, and we at CNN are right in the middle.
We've got the independence, we've got the the genuine, really smart consumers of news.
And that's what they've been telling themselves.
The fact is they're just like anybody else in the liberal media, and they are celebrated.
They are honored, Zucker, and these guys are a hero for sticking with the cause, even though they're losing their shirts.
Oh, yeah.
I'm sorry.
I'm telling you, folks, this is stunning.
98,000 Viewers in prime time on a national cable news network that, by the way, used to have a monopoly on cable news up until 1996 or 7, they were it.
And they they just sit there and and their audience, they just keep losing it and losing it.
And to those of us on the outside, it's clear why.
And apparently it is not clear to them.
It's just stunning.
I in the old days of broadcasting and media, this wouldn't have been allowed to get to this degree.
There'd have been heads rolled and massive changes years ago.
Not even permitting this.
And there certainly wouldn't be anybody remaining at that place called a star, and there wouldn't be an exec that was considered at the top of his game.
It's just the corruption of everything achievement-wise that the left touches to me is just remarkable.
Now, in addition to the numbers at CNN, and I must tell you, as a highly trained broadcast specialist, and as somebody this is aside from five years working at a professional baseball team, this is all I've ever done.
I mean, this is my business in my life.
I'm just, I'm sitting here in total stunned dismay.
98,000, average prime time for a national cable news network that used to have a monopoly.
It's just almost indescribable in a professional sense, how it survives.
And how no heads roll.
And I know why.
I know exactly why.
And it is the primacy of the of the uh ideology.
The ideology must be protected at all costs.
Liberalism can never be seen as a failure.
Liberalism can never be seen as a drag financially on any liberalism can never be seen in a negative light.
And so, as far as C and is concerned, there's nothing wrong.
This news gets reported, but that's it, as far as it goes.
They don't react to it, they don't act on it, uh, and they'll be used by Time Warner as a lost leader, and the losses that they incur will be made up uh elsewhere in the company.
Now, in addition to that, they're laying people off left and right.
We just learned that uh uh forty senior journalists have been laid off at CNN, including a pregnant producer who is due to give birth, I think to twins in two weeks.
It may not be twins, but it's uh the birth is uh two weeks.
And they've actually been laying people off since November.
So it's stunning to me.
Truly is.
Let's go to phones.
TJ in Sierra Vista, Arizona, where you're up first today, sir.
Great to have you and welcome.
Hello, Rush.
How are you today, sir?
I'm fine.
Thank you for calling.
Great to have you here.
Well, it is a privilege to talk to you.
Listen, I am not a mathematician.
I am a Baptist preacher.
I have the privilege of pastoring the teenagers of our men and women that serve the armed forces out here at Fort Wachuca.
But uh, best as I can tell, if the president is right, and you are the reason that his approval rating is somewhere at 38, 39, 40 percent.
Yeah, that's right.
Then that would mean, Rush, that you have a listenership of roughly 150 to 175 million a day.
So I just wanted to call and tell you congratulations on being easily the most influential person in media.
That means you've got more listeners than people who will watch the Super Bowl next week.
Well, it wouldn't quite uh wouldn't quite go that far because I'll tell you, it's I appreciate your sentiment.
But uh I've always said uh that one must never lose perspective.
You don't get lost in your success, and you don't get depressed about failure, and you keep it all at an even keel.
And the fact of the matter is that Obama's approval rating at 38, 39, 40 percent is not this is the thing.
It's not all due to outside influence.
The idea that people are incapable of making up their own minds about people is something that Obama and his party live with every day.
So in Obama's world, it is Fox News and me.
That's what he told a New Yorker.
It's Fox News and me.
That are the reason the Republican base doesn't like him.
It can't possibly be that those people actually pay attention.
They're actually intelligent.
They're actually informed, and they actually disagree with what he's doing.
It can't be that.
Oh no, it can't be that.
Because you people are not that smart, and you're not that independently thinkable.
You're not that independently intelligent.
You're like the Democrat base.
You're a bunch of idiots, and you only know and do and believe what you're told.
And do not doubt me.
There may be a degree of exaggeration in there, but that is exactly how the left looks at their voters, and that's how they look at the whole population.
How else do you explain that everything to them is group and victim related?
They, in fact, the left can't survive with independently self-sufficient, self-reliant people.
They're unneeded if that ever happens, or within groups of people like that.
So they have to assume that people are mind-numbed robots.
And they've assumed that about me from the get-go.
Now, Mr. Snerdley just said to me during the break.
So what do you mean?
He said, Well, this is no big deal to you.
You you've had presidents calling you out ever since you've been doing this show.
You've had presidents and presidential candidates calling you out, and you're used to it.
It ain't a big deal to you.
But he said, you gotta, you gotta to the average American, the president calling out a single individual citizen isn't done.
Unless that citizen happens to be an elected member of the opposition party.
This just isn't done.
But it's it's happened to you so often you just take it for granted, and it ain't big deal, you just mention it and you go on.
And he said, there's a reason you're in that top ten most influential poll.
It's because it's exactly stuff like this.
And he's right.
I have to admit, it isn't any big deal anymore when I see what I saw today in the New Yorker.
It isn't.
I don't.
Certainly it's not as big a deal as the first time it happened.
I'll never forget that one.
Bill Clinton flying into St. Louis, Air Force One.
I don't even know if that was the first, the first time might have been when he called me out at the White House Correspondents there's one of the two.
But he's flying into St. Louis on Air Force One, and he's talking to the morning guys on our affiliate there, Camel X. He starts complaining about me.
He says, No truth detector.
He said Limbaugh's gonna go on for three hours.
There's gonna be nobody to challenge what the guy says.
The president was complaining.
Now that was big, but it's happened every year.
That was 1993, and it's happened every year since.
And Snurtley's right.
It isn't that big a deal.
The fact that I am living free, rent-free, and Obama said, if you're just joining us, here's what he said.
It's uh from a New Yorker interview just posted more from that interview.
And Obama's complaining about why the Republican base doesn't like him.
Another way of putting it, I guess, is that the issue has been the inability of my message to penetrate the Republican base, so that they feel persuaded that I'm not the caricature that you see on Fox News or Rush Limbaugh.
But I'm somebody who's interested in solving problems, and it's pretty practical.
And actually, a lot of the things that we put in place work better than people might think.
And as long as there's that gap between the perceptions of me within the average Republican primary voter, and the reality, it's going to be hard for people like John Boehner to move too far in my direction.
Why is it incumbent on Boehner to move in Obama's direction?
Why shouldn't Obama have to move in Maynard's direction?
Or our direction.
But you see, folks, the subtext of this is is that you, if it weren't for me or Fox News, you'd love Obama.
But you are Nothing but sponges.
You are incapable, in other words, of seeing the truth.
You believe the lies about Obama that you hear from me and on Fox News.
That's what the president's telling David Remnick here.
And I'm telling you, does it that to me, if I were you, I'd be insulted.
You don't have a mind of your own.
In other words, you're not capable of looking at 92 million Americans out of work and thinking Obama's doing a great job.
You're not capable of looking at the takeover of health care and the resulting disaster and not liking Obama.
You are incapable of hearing him promise you three years in a row that you get to keep your doctor and keep your plan, except you can't and still like Obama.
You are incapable of hearing the president promise you that your premium is going to be reduced by $2,500 a year.
And then you learn that it isn't, but you're still supposed to like Obama.
If it weren't for me, you are perhaps unable to find a career job.
You're unable to find a job that will pay you for working more than 29 hours a week, but you are sub you're still supposed to think Obama's doing a great job, and you would if it weren't for me.
You're incapable of seeing the disaster that has happened to this country.
And if it weren't for me and Fox News, you would be loving on Obama like his voters are.
And again, all that means is you can't think for yourself.
My numbrobot.
And so we got to do something about me and Fox News.
What are we going to do?
Obama's got to find a way to reach you, because you know he's really doing a good job, and the stuff that he's put in place is working better than people might think.
We have 44 straight months of job growth.
Well, and we've had an economic rescue.
Now, who is delusional?
Who is absent reality, you or Obama?
Imagine seriously now.
Imagine that you were president and you purposely put in place policies that caused all of this debt, poverty, unemployment, the total debacle that is health care.
Imagine that you are president, you've done it all, you've done it on purpose, and then imagine you're surprised that people disagree with you.
What kind of person would you have to be?
Wouldn't it make more sense that if you were in Obama's shoes that you would understand why certain people don't like you and disagree with you?
I'm telling you, I this is.
Now, here, on the other end of the spectrum, does the name Scott Walker mean anything to you?
You know him well.
Scott Walker is the Republican conservative governor of the state of Washington.
Wisconsin, Wisconsin, Wisconsin.
Everybody knew I meant Wisconsin.
Everybody knows that I know he's from Wisconsin.
I just got screwed up on the syllabic alliteration.
I know he's governor of Wisconsin.
Anyway, he has survived numerous efforts by the left, by the regime, and by union buddies to destroy him, to take him out of office, to recall him from office twice to ruin his reputation.
He has survived it all.
And he has survived it not afraid.
He has not been compromised in surviving this.
He did not become one of them in order to survive.
He remained who he was.
He remained a conservative, fast, solid, and true, and triumphed over them.
And it turns out now, see, conservatism works every time it's tried.
Because it turns out, folks, there is a 912 million dollar budget surplus in the state of Wisconsin because of the reforms that Scott Walker implemented and stood by while every Democrat from Washington to Wisconsin tried to kick him out of office.
He withstood the onslaught of the unions, and he reformed the public schools and many of the public union payment plans.
And this has resulted in a $912 million budget surplus.
And you know what he's going to do next?
He is going to cut taxes one billion dollars.
Now, this is the other end of the Obama spectrum.
This is courage.
This is belief.
This is triumphing over the odds.
I mean, here's the thing.
He could have survived by becoming one of them.
He could have survived by saying things like, we must stop the partisanship.
And we must stop the partisan rancor.
And we must learn to cooperate.
And we must learn to be bipartisan.
And we must learn to cross the aisle.
And we must learn to get along with the we must learn that the people of America want us to work to.
He could have done that.
And he could have sent the left away, and he could have stayed in office, but he would have become one of them.
He didn't.
I got a brief timeout.
We'll be back.
Got some audio sound bites on this when we get back.
Look, as you know, folks, I'm really uncomfortable talking about myself.
Unlike Richard Sherman, I really am uncomfortable talking about my.
And that's not a slam on Richard Sherman.
As you people know, I like Richard Sherman.
And I told you, I said the more people get to know this guy, the more they're going to like him.
And the more impressed by him they're going to be.
Anyway, I'm going to tell you what.
The reason that Obama, this is actually not about me, it's about you.
The reason that Obama, media, the rest of the left, what it is about me they really, really don't like, is that you think for yourselves.
And they know it.
They may they may say that you are, and they may try to insult you by telling you and others imply you're just my numb robots, and if it weren't for me, you would be thinking straight.
But I've corrupted you.
They say that, but they know because they're they're I mean, politically afraid of it.
They're afraid of independent thinkers.
They are afraid of people who are able to reason and think on their own.
And that's that's the main beef with me that they have is that this program inspires curiosity.
It inspires thought and critical thinking.
And they know they're never going to be able to control that.
They're never going to be able to make you a mind them robot.
And you know, their modus operandi, they don't want to have a level playing field.
They want to get rid of all opposition.
They don't want to debate the opposition.
They don't want to argue.
They just don't want there to be any.
And they look at you and me and don't see a way they can make that happen.
Not within the normal flow of things in the arena of ideas.
So it's going to require drastic, such as the IRS penalizing and harassing the Tea Party, for example.
That's exactly why that kind of thing happens.
Now, here's a Scott Walker soundbite.
This is uh yesterday in Madison, state of the state address, a portion of what he said.
The days of double-digit tax increases, billion-dollar budget deficits, and major job loss are gone.
We replace them with massive tax cuts, growing budget surpluses, and a significant job growth.
Tonight we have some really great news about the economy and our fiscal situation.
The state will have $911 million more than previously projected.
These new revenues are not a one-time windfall or budget gimmick, but come from a strong economic recovery where more people are working, more employers are hiring, and personal income is going up.
And then he goes on to say, what do you do with the surplus?
You give it back to the people who earned it.
It's your money, and he's going to have a one billion dollar tax cut.
Scott Walker has shown you don't have to be afraid of these people.
You don't have to start talking like them.
You don't have to start going after their voters to survive.
All you have in Wisconsin.
This is not some red state that Scott Walker's triumphing in.
This is Wisconsin.
Blue state with conservatism works every time it's tried.
Fastest three hours in media.
One of them is already gone, but I did squeeze a phone call in there.
Even if the phone call was about me.
We've got much more straight ahead, folks, so sit tight.
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