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Feb. 10, 2014 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:44
February 10, 2014, Monday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
And greetings to you, music lovers, drill seekers, conversationalists, and good listeners all across the fruited plain, back at it.
We are Rush Limbaugh, the EIB network.
That's excellence in broadcasting, and the distinguished and prestigious Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.
All here in one exciting bundle.
Great to have you.
Telephone number 800-282-2882, the email address L Rushbo at EIB net.com.
Okay, so we've got some big news about Hillary Clinton.
Yada yada yada yada.
And we've got some big the first gay player, well, not yet player, the first gay admitted gay prospect from my home state, actually, University of Missouri, Mizzou, Michael Sam is his name.
And the sports media, the drive-by's are all a Twitter over this.
They just can barely contain themselves.
And of course, I will explain to you why as the program unfolds before your very eyes and ease ears today.
Senator Schumer, remember last week was frustrated when John Boehner, the Speaker of the House, said, you know what?
We're not going to do immigration reform.
It doesn't matter what we do.
The President of the United States isn't trustworthy.
We can't count on him to enforce whatever law we passed.
We can't count on him to enforce the laws of the land now.
He's out making his own laws up, so to heck with it.
Which became Boehner is a coward, doesn't have the guts to stand up to talk radio.
That's how they analyze that.
But anyway, Chuck Hugh Schumer has come along now with an idea.
He said, well, hey, no problem.
You don't trust Obama.
Just delay it till 2017 when he's gone.
Go and pass it now, pass amnesty right now.
And just don't implement it until Obama's gone to the great uh Obama Library for Social Justice, wherever it is, in 2017.
Problem solved.
And meanwhile, we just sort of run right by the idea that the Speaker of the House of the United States of America says the president of the United States can't be trusted because he makes his own law.
It's just as commonplace as getting water from the faucet.
And it isn't.
It's an impeachable offense, and it's of course doesn't matter.
Now, ladies and gentlemen.
I sit here today.
I am, I don't I'm I'm I will, yeah, I guess I'll admit it.
I am somewhat amazed.
Last week, even though I knew this was coming, and even though on Friday I predicted it to you, and I'll let you hear the prediction again in a moment, just to refresh your memory.
When the CBO report came out, the revised CBO report.
They have now additional years of Obamacare to plug into the formula.
And they learned that Obamacare is gonna kill even more jobs than originally thought.
Two and a half million additional jobs killed by 2017 or 2018.
Now, in your old standard America, that would have been devastating news for everybody.
But the spokesman for the president, Jay Carney came out and praised it.
It's a good thing.
These people are now liberated from the pressures of having to find a job in order to get health care.
And then Nancy Pelosi came out and repeated her philosophy that this is one of the greatest bits of news that's happened in her professional lifetime.
Finally, people are not gonna have to work in order to have health care in America.
And then the New York Times picked up On it and endorsed the concept and said this is a liberating thing.
Finally, this country has been too pressure-packed.
This country has been forcing choices on its population that they'd rather not make.
And now Obamacare, the Affordable Care Act has liberated people from the necessity of working.
And it in one day, one day's worth of stories.
Folks, that's the biggest stack of news that I have today.
The biggest stack of stuff in all the show prep is all the stories and all of the people and all of the sound bites who are endorsing this concept that work is punishment.
Work is a holdover punishment from the founding of this country that is punitive and it is discriminatory because it leads to unequal outcomes.
And it forces people to do things that they would rather not do, which is not what a free society should be about.
Even a conservative columnist in the New York Times writes approvingly of this new mindset.
If I'm understanding his peace right, and I'll run it by you as the uh as the program unfolds.
But it's stunning.
It is literally stunning.
Not too long ago, the entire notion of being liberated from pressure-packed choices means not having to work would have would have laughed whoever made that statement out of existence.
They would have been laughed, they've been ridiculed, they would have been mocked and made fun of, and instead now they're praised as forward thinkers.
So Snerdley walked in here today about an hour ago.
He delivers his uh his own show prep stack of stuff.
And I start telling about it.
Yeah, this is crazy, it's never gonna happen.
No, no, no, no.
That means we guaranteed win the election in 2014.
We guaranteed win the election.
I said, What do you mean?
They're actually going to push the concept of no work.
They're actually gonna say that's beneficial, they're gonna say that's good for America, that's gonna say that we're gonna smoke them.
No, no, no, you look at it the wrong way.
I used to think that too.
For the last 25 years, every I mean let me give you a break the pattern, another example.
Remember on Friday, we had sound bites of Leslie Stahl and Charlie Rose and Nora O'Donnell at CBS openly expressing shock and dismay that men and women are different,
and wondering if we've learned in time, people do something, and uh that that to me is just the height of ignorance.
I mean, I don't know where that comes from.
The notion that men and women are the same.
Where does I mean I know where it comes from, and it all it all derives from liberalism.
Well, anyway, I got beat up over the weekend for calling them stupid.
I got criticized for calling them ignorant, but now they're back.
My point is that every time that there's a there's something else that happened to CBS Morning.
Let me just find it here.
Very quickly, where is it?
Um today on the CBS Morning Show, they're worried that global warming is going to lead to human extinction.
And a serious discussion about this.
And the last soundbite, Nora O'Donnell asks if this extinction is reversible, or is it too late?
Now, granted, we're sort of laughing ourselves.
Silly, what they really believe it.
For 25 years, I have been mocking, laughing, making fun Of all of these crazy uh just nonsensical, totally 180 degrees out of phase, factual and philosophical beliefs, and yet here we are.
Those people are in power, and they are implementing all of these things, and they are shaping the country.
They are shaping the culture, they're shaping the political ground.
It is just absolutely stunning to me that we're now the conventional wisdom, and more and more people are picking up on this idea that not working is somehow liberating, that not being productive is somehow positive.
And one thing that I looked for in every one of these stories, I looked for somebody who believes that if you don't want to work, you shouldn't have to.
And if if if you want that that, by the way, pursuit of happiness in the Constitution, what the founders meant was leisure.
That really should have been written pursuit of leisure, not pursuit of happiness.
Because everybody knows that happiness is the opposite of work.
Happiness is what you do when you don't work.
Happiness is what you're doing when you're not forced to do what some boss makes you do.
That's not happiness.
Leisure time pursuits, sibiic pursuits, that's happiness.
And that's what this country is all about.
And finally we're getting there where people can do that.
And in none of these stories have any of the proponents ever discussed.
How is this paid for?
How do people who do not work live?
It's just assumed that we are a rich country, and that as a rich society, we can choose for a sizable percentage of our population not to work and happily pay them not to, if that's what they want to do.
And we can and we can be, and yeah, and beyond, we shouldn't care if they don't want to work.
And it's also, by the way, a mistake now to assume that people on welfare want to get off of it.
It's a mistake to assume that there should be any association with work or a requirement to work with welfare.
Who are we to condemn people that don't want to work?
Who are we to condemn that?
It's their choice.
It's their choice.
No, if that we're all Americans, and as a society, as a population as a country, if some of us don't want to work, that should be fine.
We shouldn't condemn that.
Remember, folks, the modern liberal will inevitably side with evil over good, wrong over right, the lesser over the better, the ugly over the beautiful, the profane over the profound, and the behaviors that lead to failure over those that lead to success.
They will always do that.
Because remember now on the electoral side, the people that benefit the most when people fail are elected Democrats.
And so they're all for it.
I'm going to come back.
I want you to do some of the sound bites.
I want to go through this stack.
And I know some of you are going to still say, Rush, come on, you're overreacting.
This is never gonna really become the norm in this country.
It may not.
Simple necessity may dictate that, but nevertheless, I want you to be as up to speed and informed as possible that this is a very fast moving movement now, if you will, that is being used to win elections.
Quick timeout.
Sit tight.
We'll be back with more after this.
Don't go away.
Now you might think this stuff just springs out of nowhere.
Like this new phenomenon that a job is passe, that working is punitive and limiting choices, and not working, being fired, but still being paid your health care.
That's liberating.
And you might think that wow, this just came out of nowhere.
It didn't.
This is the kind of thing liberals contemplate, right about, dream of all the time.
Let me take you back to June of 2005.
New York Times.
New York Times did a review of a book nine years ago called How to Be Idle, A Loafer's Manifesto.
That was the title of the book.
Now the book described as being about the freedom and the fine art of doing nothing.
It says that it's not simply a book, but an antidote to our work-obsessed culture.
The book's description continues in How to Be Idle, Tom Hodgkinson is the author of the book, presents his learned argument for a new universal standard of living, being happy, doing nothing.
He covers a whole spectrum of issues affecting the modern idlers, sleep, work, pleasure, relationships, and in the book, Hodgkinson claims that jobs are relatively new invention.
They were a creation of the industrial revolution.
So in effect, jobs are unnatural.
Jobs, if they were a product of the industrial revolution, well, we hate that, right?
Because the industrial revolution gave birth to what?
Pollution.
No, no.
Now you were you might have said prosperity, but no, no, no, no.
The liberal mindset, the industrial revolution gave way to child labor, slave labor, uh cheap labor, forced labor, no wages, pollution, global warming, planetary discussion, and now uh destruction, and now jobs.
So if no, no, no, that stuff came after and with the industrial revolution, before the industrial revolution, the world was pristine and it was at peace, and there were no mean robber baron CEO companies that were punishing employees and mistreating them, and there was no steel, and there was no heat, and there were no blast furnaces, and there was no polluted rivers, and there was no nothing of that.
I mean, it was just it was it was a gloriously peaceful, quiet uh undisturbed time in the industrial.
Doctor would come to your house, the industrial, and not charge you.
And the matter what the life expectancy was.
If you if a life expectancy was 30 years, it was 30 years lived in peace.
There was no stress, there was no pressure, there was no, there were no forced choices that people had to make.
Everybody was liberated.
And then the industrial revolution came along, and with it, jobs.
I'm just telling you what this clown in the book is associating jobs with.
The Industrial Revolution.
Jobs are a relatively recent invention.
So this clown, nine years ago, in a book seriously reviewed by the New York Times, attempts to equate work with jobs, and therefore jobs are bad because work is bad.
It's assumed that nobody did any work before the Industrial Revolution, that, that, That only, you know, you worked when you wanted to, you worked as you needed to, you worked as you had to, but nobody made you.
And uh you you worked when you wanted to.
You plowed your own field or you plowed the neighbor's field or whatever.
It's totally up to you with total leisure.
But then that kind of work was fine, but this forced labor business and the creation of the job that's and by the way, all of that is associated with Republicans.
There is a professor of leisure studies at the University of Iowa.
And he has written an essay.
The title of the essay, Why Do Republicans Want Us to Work All the Time?
Why do Republicans want us to work all the time?
So now work is going to be plugged into the war on women.
It's going to be plugged into the pro-life movement.
It's going to become part of the punitive moralistic, forceful life you must lead if we are governed by Republicans who are going to make you do one thing after another that you don't want to do, and then they're going to judge you.
And we can't have that.
And we're back.
Rush Limbaugh on the cutting edge of societal evolution and trying to keep you there.
Let's go back to this program.
Here is me on Friday.
Should better say here I am on Friday, trying to get you up to speed.
I can think all the all the things in the past 25 years.
1997, I warned you they were going to be coming after your SUV.
You poo-pooed me.
Come on, Rush, that's that's ridiculous.
Nobody's gonna ever try to take away they drive them too.
Countless examples of that, yet it continues to happen.
If I would have told you three weeks ago that in three weeks, a major movement on the Democrat Party's behalf to encourage people not to work and yet be able to live a life of leisure would become popular and widespread.
Would you have laughed at me?
You probably would have laughed at me and you would have thought, Rush, you know, can you get focused on what's really important here, like the latest on Hillary?
Well, you keep talking about these liberals.
You would have laughed it off.
You would have thought that uh once again, I was seeing bogey men where there aren't any bogey men and so forth.
And yet every one of these occasions, it turns out that I am for the most part right on the money.
And here's a reminder what I said on Friday.
This is not their new spin.
This is an attempt to redefine what work is, what unemployment is.
It's no different than their attempt to redefine the relationship men and women feminism.
It's no different than their attempt to divide the country, however, they're going to do climate change and science and all of that.
For the past 25 years, every time I've reacted, these people, we've had our peace updates, we've had the feminist updates, we just laughed at these people left and right for saying things that were just outrageous.
And here we are 25 years later.
They are in power and implementing these things.
Now, some of you might be saying, Rush, wait a minute.
Maybe the Democrats are promoting uh leisure time and not working and but it can't happen.
The country can't survive.
Look, you may know that and I may know that, but remember what this is about.
This is about getting voters.
This is about attracting voters, about winning elections.
And remember on Friday, made the point that the Democrats in both 2014 and 2016 have essentially said to hell with ideas, to hell with winning in the arena of ideas.
We're simply going to win a demographics.
We are going to go out and we're going to put together a coalition of people who will vote for us, take care of them.
Plain and simple.
We don't care to get into policy debates with the Republicans.
We're not going to get into ideological debates.
We're not going to defend what we believe.
None of that.
We're just going to win the elections, and then we're going to implement what we believe.
We're not going to tell people what we're going to do.
They can't, actually.
And so they have decided that they are going to continue to win elections by growing what I refer to as their permanent underclass, a permanent and growing group of totally dependent people.
And what they're trying to do now is take away the stigma of not working, the stigma of being unemployed, the stigma of being on welfare, the stigma of being a sloucher, a sloucher, the stigma of being lazy.
They're trying to remove all of that.
And not only that, they're trying to attach virtue to it, folks.
Now, the reason this concerns me, I love the country.
This is destructive to the country.
And once again, it's the Democrat Party destroying the lives of people.
They promise to help.
They're destroying the human capacity, the human dignity of the very people they claim to be looking out for.
It really makes me outrageous, to tell you the truth about it.
But then on the other side of this, like this leisure studies professor at the University of Iowa.
Why do Republicans want us to work all the time?
So now work, punishing, hard, uncompensated or insufficiently compensated.
You have to do it, you don't really want to.
It's a choice you're forced into.
It's dirty, it's filthy.
You don't get to spend time with your kids, and it's what the Republicans want.
Republicans don't want you to be happy.
Republicans don't want you to spend time with the family.
Republicans don't want you pursuing happiness.
They don't want you pursuing leisure.
It's all political, is the point.
And that's what gets my hackles up.
So I'm simply trying to alert people to it.
Let's go to the audio sound bites.
Our old buddy Keith Ellison.
Member of Congress, Democrat Minnesota was on uh ABC's This Week yesterday.
And the fill-in host with Jonathan Carl.
And they were talking about the CBO report.
Carl said this CBO report showed the equivalent two million plus workers coming out of the economy.
But the CBO report didn't say that it was going to result in two million fewer jobs.
Of course now.
Who would make that connection?
Right.
Uh two million plus workers are going to leave the economy, but don't anybody think that that means we're going to have two million fewer jobs.
Why wouldn't we think that?
Anyway, not the point.
This is what your Democrat congressman from Minnesota had to say.
What the Congressional Budget Office is saying is that we're going to discourage kids having to have latchkey.
We're going to have parents being able to come home working reasonable hours.
People are going to be able to retire.
People might be able to actually cook dinner rather than have to order out and get some takeout.
Americans work way more than the average of industrialized countries around the world.
We need a better work-life balance.
Ask a working mother, okay, if she could use a few more hours in a day to take care of her family.
Now he's dead serious here.
So finally, parents are going to be able to come home.
They're going to be able to work, even be able to retire.
Might actually be able to cook dinner rather than have to order out takeout.
And you know, being an American is really hard.
I mean, it's so much harder than being a citizen in an other industrialized country.
It works so hard here.
In Europe, they don't work nearly as hard.
They don't get nearly the benefits.
Of course they're poor, and they don't have the GNP, the GDP, they do not have the economic output, they don't have air conditioning, they don't have plumbing that works, they don't have deadly.
But none of that's a concern to Congressman Ellison.
Who's going to pay for these people's retirement for crying out loud?
Doesn't bring it up.
It's not a problem right now.
That's not the point.
This is all about getting more and more people to sign up and on to the notion they don't have to work, and the Democrats are going to take care of, they're still going to have their health care, and they're still going to be able to eat, maybe even cook it themselves instead of takeout.
But I don't think they want to work that hard.
I think they still opt for the takeout, if you ask me.
In fact, these people probably panacea would be if Mickey D's delivered.
E.J. Dion Jr., a columnist, a scholar, we're told.
At the Washington Post was on Meet the Press at a round table on Sunday, and they're talking about the CBO report, the impact of Obamacare on the economy.
David Gregory said these were congressional researchers who issued this report, E.J., and you wrote about it strongly this week.
Just think about the money put in people's pockets when they're saving on their insurance from subsidies.
Think of two people.
We're supposed to be for family values.
You have a couple where somebody wants to leave the labor force for a couple of years to take care of their kids.
Under the old system, if that person carried the health insurance, they didn't have the option to leave.
Now they can.
What you're doing is expanding people's choices.
So it's, I mean, even now at the upper so-called upper levels of Democrat Party scholarship, the entire premise that work results in fewer choices, that people need to be liberated from work has taken hold.
And that the Republicans ought to be for it because they're the ones that talk about family values.
Chuck Yu Schumer also on Meet the Press.
David Gregory said for Democrats who thought that Obamacare was going to be a plus this year, this election year.
Are you on the defensive again, Senator Chuck Yu?
What CBO said is that many American workers would have freedom.
Now that's a good word.
Freedom to do things that they couldn't do.
The single mom who's raising three kids has to keep a job because of health care, can now spend some time raising those kids.
That's a family value.
The student, 27 years old, wants to finish school quickly so he can get a great job, can't because he needs health care is now free.
To not have to get the job.
He's free now not to have to go get the job because he's going to have Obamacare regardless.
So he doesn't have to have the stress of getting a job.
So the Democrat Party is in the process of impugning, trashing, and tarnishing the whole concept of work as a Republican idea that imprisons people into lives of great suffering, disappointment, and economic disparity, all while being denied the pursuit of leisure.
And it's all the Republicans' fault because they gave us this concept, and they don't oppose.
I mean, they don't support a pregnant mother being able to stay home with her kids.
They don't support that at all.
The Republicans don't want any part of that.
They don't want people being liberated from the punitive jobs that they've got.
So you have to ask yourself, how's the low information voter gonna receive all this?
Twick time out here, my friends.
Look, there's economic data.
Kyle Smith had a column in the uh New York Post yesterday that is bouncing off of a new book called a Demographic Cliff.
And the the point of this book is that there's nothing we can do.
The demographics of our society, demographics, our population, are such that it's going to be impossible to have economic growth for the next generation or two at least.
We just don't have the bodies.
We just haven't had enough population.
We haven't had a birth rate, replacement level is haven't been there.
Immigration won't even fix it because they're not the kind of people they're going to grow the economy.
They're not high school workers.
We're stuck.
There's nothing we can do.
We are trapped demographically.
That's the theory.
And so the Democrats may be onto this, okay.
Well, let's turn this into a positive for us.
Let's make it look like we made it happen, and it's a good thing, and it's liberating, and politically it's just another thing that the Republicans are going to come up with a way, campaigning against.
Quick time out, much more after this.
Don't go away.
Now, this modern incarnation of work being a very punishing entrapment, orchestrated by mean white power brokers, members of the majority, i.e., Republicans.
I think the modern incarnation of this attack really is all about Obamacare.
Because one of the things that is Obamacare must survive.
No matter what else, Obamacare must survive because that's Obama surviving.
That's liberalism surviving.
Obamacare surviving is the transformation of the United States.
Obamacare is under assault justifiably.
It isn't working.
It is an absolute disaster.
Obamacare has a number of false promises that were made for three years running.
It does not have the popular support of the people in this country.
It's an absolute disaster.
Yet it must survive.
It must survive.
The good things, whether something is good or bad for the American people, doesn't matter.
It's whether or not it's good or bad for the Democrat Party and for the left.
And one of the things that happened, people were unable to qualify for subsidies for Obamacare because of the formula, because of the various levels of income they were earning.
Many people were earning too much money to get a subsidy for Obamacare, which means they were losing it.
They couldn't afford it otherwise.
Nobody can, really.
Vast majority of American people cannot afford Obamacare without a subsidy.
And yet many people were losing it, can't have that.
So people were being forced, you know, in one area, people were losing hours, employers cutting people back to 29 and a half hours so they wouldn't have to provide Obamacare.
That had to be turned into a positive.
And then other people's incomes had to be brought down somehow in order to qualify for the subsidy.
And so what has manifested itself now, folks, is that people are leaving their jobs in order to qualify for subsidies for Obamacare.
And that has to be turned into something good.
In the normal ebb and flow of the United States, the normal ebb and flow of our culture and population, people leaving the workforce in order to comply with a federal program would be political disaster for the party that designed it.
Okay, so you've got Obamacare.
It's the brain child of Barack Obama, the Democrat Party.
It's sold for five years of the greatest thing on earth.
It's going to make sure you get your health care and the doctor, and it's going to be much cheaper, and for some of you is going to be free, and it turns out none of that's true.
Massive disaster.
So people have to leave their jobs in order to qualify for Obamacare.
In some cases, they are asking for their hours to be reduced, and the employer saying, sorry, that didn't help me.
So under normal circumstances, a government program forcing people on unemployment in order to be legally compliant would destroy that political party.
However, in this climate, the media and the Democrats have got to act fast and turn it into a positive.
And So that the party is not hurt by it.
Common sense says, new law.
You have to do this.
And the only way you can afford to do it is to not work and go on welfare and get it.
That would kill the party that came up with that plan.
And the Democrats know it.
So they did a quick turn on a dime, and it turns out that this is the best thing it's ever happened, people leaving their jobs.
Finally, we're liberating people from choices that they rather didn't want to make and don't have to make.
And now the Democrat Party has made it possible for people to have their health, not just health care.
It's possible for the American people to stay healthy and not have to work.
And that's being sold as one of the greatest ever benefits offered by government.
So just the Democrats doing a 180 here.
Trying to take credit and turn into a positive something that should have, by all rights, wiped them out.
That's exactly right.
This is a great example of how stupid the Democrats think their voters are.
This is simply this no work business, liberating no work, simply a way of taking the disaster that is Obamacare and turning it into something that will not hurt them at the ballot box.
We'll see if they can make this work.
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