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Feb. 24, 2014 - Rush Limbaugh Program
37:31
February 24, 2014, Monday, Hour #2
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Meeting and surpassing all audience expectations every day.
Rush Limbaugh, the EIB network.
Happy to have you with us, my friends.
Still documented to be almost always right, 99.7% of the time.
Our phone number, and we'll get to the phones in this hour.
Promise 800-282-2882.
And the email address, ilrushbow at eibnet.com.
National Football League to adopt penalty for use of racial slur.
The idea for this, by the way, comes from the Fritz Pollard Alliance.
Fritz Pollard was the first African-American coach in the NFL many, many, many moons ago.
And the Fritz Pollard Alliance monitors diversity in the NFL.
And the head of the Fritz Pollard Alliance is a man named John Wooten, W-O-O-T-E-N.
And he says he fully expects the league's competition committee to enact a rule that would make it an automatic 15-yard penalty if a player uses the N word on the field.
A second infraction, and you are thrown out of the game.
According to CBS Sports, Wooten spoke about his desire to eradicate the word completely from the NFL workplace at the Fritz Pollard event during the scouting combine last week and over the weekend in Indianapolis.
Wooten said, I'll be totally shocked if the committee does not uphold us on what we're trying to do.
We want this word to be policed from the parking lot to the equipment room to the locker room.
Secretaries, PR people, whoever.
We want it eliminated completely and we want it policed everywhere.
Wooten said he's extremely hopeful it'll pass at the owners meeting next month in Orlando.
I think I think they're going to do what needs to be done here.
There's just too much disrespect in the game.
Let's go to the audio sound bites.
First up, ESPN's Outside the Lines special report the N-word.
That was the title of the program.
Kid you not, folks.
You know, I'm not.
I'm not kidding.
It's just, I don't know.
I am.
It just, that's what they're calling it.
It's just inanity.
No matter where you look, you just can't find any intelligence anywhere you look anywhere in the media anymore.
Anyway, as it's ESPN's Outside the Lines Special Report, the N-word.
Bob Lee was the host.
He's a good guy, too, by the way.
Bob Lee, I can't say too much.
He's undercover.
I can't say too much.
But if you just, Bob Lee's a good guy.
And he spoke with ESPN.com columnist Jason Whitlock about the N-word in the NFL.
And Bob Leigh said, what is this statement, Jason?
What is the league trying to say here?
The people that love the N-word and love to use it are part of a culture that is still hostile towards black people, still anti-education, and still very violent towards black people.
And I'm talking about the black people that are in love with this word.
If you examine the culture that the N-word represents, it represents a culture that is anti-black.
This symbol is more powerful than the Confederate flag or any other symbol we have from racism.
It's the most powerful.
It's the longest standing.
And it still stands today, and it's embraced by the very people who it was intended to destroy.
And that's what's sad.
And I'm glad the NFL is taking the stand.
Now, let me translate that for you because you might be scratching your head.
If you think you heard Whitlock say that the N-word is being used by black people in an anti-black way, you heard right.
That is what he's saying.
The people that love the N-word and love to use it are a part of a culture still hostile towards black people, anti-education, still very violent towards black people.
And I'm talking about the black people that are in love with this word.
Ryan Clark in the story in the Pittsburgh media that I talked about in the last hour made a point about the NFL penalizing the N-word.
And he actually touches on the subject that there aren't that many white guys using the word.
The word is being used predominantly by black guys.
And he said, we got rid of it at the Steelers for a while, but it came back.
It's just part of these young guys, rookies and 20-year-old guys.
It's their culture.
They come into the league.
It's part of their vernacular vocabulary.
It's just part of the way they talk.
You can't get rid of it.
It's a black-on-black word.
He said, you'd have riots if a bunch of white guys are out there using this word all the time.
It's not what's going on.
And up next on ESPN's Outside the Line special report, the N-word, Ryan Clark, the safety for the Pittsburgh Steelers, Bob Lee said, how political or practical, Ryan, how practical would it be for the league to enact this?
How many times in a game do you hear the word?
I think it's going to be really tough to just legislate this rule, to find a way to penalize everyone who uses this word.
And it's not going to be white players using it toward black players.
Most of the time you hear it, it is black players using the word.
Legislating this on the field is going to be tough.
You know, you hear black players say it to each other, or you hear guys talking to each other who are on the same team and using the word.
And which way are you trying to legislate?
Are you trying to stop people from saying it in a demeaning way?
Are you trying to stop it from being a combative word?
Or are you just trying to legislate the word totally out of the game?
And I think that'll be tough to impossible.
Well, now let's throw some wrinkles into this now.
As Ryan Clark puts forth some interesting questions.
Are you trying to stop people from saying it in a demeaning way?
Or are you trying to stop it from being a combative word?
Or do you just want to legislate the word totally out of the game?
Now, what he undoubtedly means here and what Whitlock was talking about, sometimes black guys call other black guys that word insultingly.
Other times it's a term of endearment.
Am I right about that?
Other times it's a term of endearment.
Other times it's an insult.
Other times it doesn't mean anything.
It's just a word that's being thrown out.
It's like saying, hey, brother, hey, guy, hey, how are you?
But you've got to be you have to be accredited in order to be able to use it.
He said, the white guys are not using the word.
So what's not being said here by either Whitlock or Ryan Clark, at least in the two bites.
Now, they might have said it in the show, and I didn't see the show, so I've just got these two sound bites.
And if they didn't say, somebody's going to say, wait a minute, man.
Well, I just, folks, I'm going to, let's go back to the NBA.
Because there was, you know, the fans hear much more of what's said on a court at a basketball game than football fans are ever going to hear on a football field.
And the, you may not have, you may not remember the NBA commissioner, the NBA, tried to eliminate the use of the, I can't say it.
I don't even know how, I can't even abbreviate this.
I just, it's, but I just, the first words mother, it was just all over the place.
In the heat of battle, it was all over the place.
The NBA tried to shut it, and the players got mad.
They said, we don't mean what it means to you.
It's just the way we insult guys, it's just the way we talk.
And so what Woodlock and Ryan Clark, and they may have said it on the program, but it's very possible that the people who are targeted here are going to protest and say that the league is engaging in unfair, punitive action by trying to rid a word from their language.
In other words, their freedom is being assaulted here.
The league is simply saying, we don't, well, I don't, the Fritz Pollard Association, we don't want the word anywhere.
We just don't, we're not going to tolerate it.
I don't care what excuse you have for using it.
I don't care how you use it.
A word is reprehensible.
It's demeaning.
And we are not going to permit it.
And these guys are there's going to be some pushback.
There's going to be some pushback.
Stop it.
Now stop and think.
15-yard penalty is it.
That's all.
Second time you get tossed out.
Yes, what's the question?
Oh, come on, dude.
Of course they know when they draft these guys how they talk.
This is political.
Let me tell you something.
The league can do this.
Mr. Rooney, he didn't want the word.
Rooney also said, I don't want to hear it in the music you're playing in here.
I don't want to hear it coming out of the speakers in the locker room.
I don't want to hear it on the field.
So, you know, that how much of the rap library are you canceling by not permitting the N-word to be played musically in the locker room?
How much of the rap catalog is going to the dustbin with that rule?
So, yeah, bitch hoe, that stuff's fine.
But the N-word zero tolerance, NFL.
Okay, we're back.
Rush Limbaugh, the EIB network, phones coming.
I just have, folks, a couple of questions here.
You ever stop and think, why now?
Where'd this come from?
The behavior that they wish now to eliminate.
It's been going on for 20 years, 25, longer than that.
Why now the Redskins got to go?
Why now?
I mean, is it out of nowhere?
I mean, it's always been there, a little bitty thing here, but the major cause celebrity.
Of course, the media hears about it.
Everybody signs on to it.
And everybody is applauding and celebrating the banning of the N-word.
Why now?
Could be the Dolphins.
Is it what happened with Incognito and Jonathan Martin and the bullying?
If you recall about that, Richie Incognito, I forget the exact terminology, but it was learned that Incognito was made an honorary brother by the black guys on the Dolphins.
And when that news leaked out, they went and talked to Terry Bradshaw about it.
So I didn't have a leagues changed.
I didn't know there was such a thing.
I didn't know you could be an honorary brother.
I didn't know locker rooms that Chris Collinsworth said the same thing.
What the hell is this?
I never heard about this.
Bomer Asia, what in the world are they talking about?
Honorary brother.
Last week, if you recall, on this program, we reported a story about how school discipline was racist.
The black kids were being disciplined out of proportion, and the regime was establishing new disciplinary guidelines.
Remember this?
And we knew what the solution was going to be.
It was not going to be to punish the people that needed it.
They're going to leave that alone because it was judged to be unfair and unequal.
There was inequality the way discipline was being passed out.
Man, it was racist.
Now, look at this.
I mean, you got a league in which 75% of the players are black, and here comes in effect a disciplinary penalty that affects 75%, well, 100%, but it's really going to impact 75% of the players.
Could there be somebody down there?
So, wait a minute, this is racist.
You are targeting 75%.
We're the majority.
What do you mean?
We're being government.
We like the word.
We want to use it.
It doesn't mean what you think it means.
It's got its own connotations.
It's our culture.
But now they want to criminalize speech, policy, anything else that they can.
And can they actually do this?
Well, they could.
I think they could.
Referee is going to have to call it every time they hear the word.
Can you imagine how shocked the fans might end up being if they literally do that?
Let's go to the phones.
People have been patiently waiting.
We'll start Orange, New Jersey with John.
Welcome, sir.
Great to have you on the program.
Hi.
Hey, Rush.
Thanks for having me.
My pleasure.
You bet.
When I saw this over the weekend, I didn't know whether A, to laugh that it was funny or B, to just shake my head at the absurdity of it.
Because if you think about it, let's say you just are going to penalize that one word.
How can you do that with a straight face where, say, I, as an Italian American, I may be offended by the G word, the D word, or the W word.
Or you, as an Irish American, not that you're Irish, but as an Irish American, the M word.
No, I'm a Kraut American.
There you go.
The K, oh, God forbid, the K word.
So, how do you, how, how, how do you do that with a straight face?
Or if you're going to say, okay, we'll penalize all the words, is there going to be a list?
So when the players come in in training camp, do they get the playbook on one hand and a list of words in the other hand?
It'd say, okay.
Yeah, this is never the end of it.
It's always the starting point with the letter.
It's never the solution to a problem.
So after you ban the N-word, then are you going to ban the word hoe?
Are you going to ban other kinds of what is considered to be profanity?
Exactly.
You know, what if somebody uses the GD word?
What if somebody calls you a female anatomy?
That's a real insult on a football field.
Where does this stuff stop?
And of course, and then the targets of this, the guys using the N-word, are going to say, wait a minute, that's not half as bad as some of the other stuff you should hear out here.
But I'm just fascinated, the origin.
Why now?
What happened?
This isn't new.
The use of this word on the field by black players to other black players isn't new.
So what is it that got the Fritz Pollard Association on the warpath about this?
Or the NFL?
There is an answer.
I don't know what it is.
There is an explanation here.
Shannon in Concord, North Carolina.
Great to have you on the EIB network.
Hello.
Hi, Ross.
How are you?
I'm good.
Thank you.
Well, now that the Olympics have finished, I was waiting with bated breath and wanted to ask you if you think the Dutch government is going to issue an apology for what their skating coach said about our football.
Somewhat like what, you know, the Swiss government issued an apology after the store clerk offended Oprah over a purse.
Oh, oh, oh, yeah.
That's right.
The sales clerk insulted the Oprah by assuming she couldn't afford the purse she was looking at because she was African American.
What, I forgot, what did the Swedish coach say that our skaters are lousy because we're playing a sport that kills people?
Foolish sport to kill people?
Yes.
Yes.
The Dutch coach.
And honestly, they did an awesome job.
And I don't know why he started picking on us and was saying that for some reason we're throwing all of our money into a, I won't use his word.
Let me tell you something.
I think this has to do with Obama, to tell you the truth.
If you recall, one of the selling points of Obama in 2008 was that America at the time was hated and despised.
And that was because of that cowboy Bush.
But here comes the Messiah.
And Obama was going to make everybody love us.
The U.S. was immediately going to win back its love and respect, the love and respect of the world.
And then Obama goes with the U.S. Olympic Committee somewhere wherever they, to pitch the games, going to Chicago, and he gets slapped down inside of 30 minutes.
And there's a survey out today.
53% of the American people believe that we are not respected by other nations of the world because of Obama.
And I think this Swiss coach and others, Vladimir Putin, I think they've got a free run at us.
I think they think they can insult us all they want, and nothing's going to happen to them.
They can build a nuclear bomb in Iran and nothing's going to happen to them.
They can talk about us, to us, whatever they want to do with impunity because they know Obama isn't going to do diddly squat about it.
Well, I mean, we still haven't really seen what's happened with Benghazi, but that coach, I saw the video, he was so angry.
And I was really thrown back because I couldn't understand why he's so mad at us.
I don't know what we did.
And I know we were supposed to, Obama was supposed to part the seas, and everyone is supposed to love us, but obviously that hasn't happened.
No, it's gone just the opposite.
There's less respect.
I mean, Putin is laughing at us.
Vladimir Putin, who, by the way, is in the process of reassembling the Soviet Union.
Make no mistake about that.
Thanks for the call, Shannon.
Be right back.
You know, speaking of reassembling the Soviet Union, don't doubt me.
Ladies and gentlemen, in fact, Vladimir Putin began reassembling the Soviet Union when he invaded Georgia and wanted to get rid of our ally there, Shelley Kashvili.
And of course, Obama led him.
If you recall, Obama ended up praising Putin for invading Georgia.
And Putin has done the same thing.
And he's done it without troops.
He's done it in Belarus, doing it now in Ukraine.
And you remember when Putin kept cutting off the gas and oil to Ukraine before they installed his puppet.
And there's stuff going on in Ukraine.
Now, Putin is not going to let Ukraine get away.
You watch.
You've got the Ukrainian people standing up.
They're protesting or demanding their freedom.
They've got this former female president released from prison.
Current president is gone.
In fact, there's a story here that the people of Ukraine.
Here's the headline.
Yeah, warrant for his arrest.
But here's from Reuters.
Very surprised, seemingly.
It says here.
Ukrainians gawp at Yanukovych's luxury estate open to the public.
A sprawling forested estate of graceful waterways and summer houses, half the size of Monaco, but just one hour's drive from Kiev, stands as a symbol of the folly of Ukraine's fugitive president.
Even the most cynical Ukrainians who on Saturday streamed to see Viktor Yanukovych's luxury estate rubbed their eyes in disbelief when they were confronted by the scale of the opulence he built around him and kept secret from the outside world.
There were Australian and African ostriches stretching their legs.
There were hares darting around people's feet.
Deer and billy goats, their cages neatly labeled, were hunkered down, slightly alarmed at the numbers of sudden visitors.
All this in a country where the average salary is less than $500 a month.
As visitors poured in by the thousands, by foot and by car, onto the 346-acre grounds for a first glimpse at a luxury they could only suspect, Ukrainians gawked in wonderment at the fairy tale surroundings.
So as usual, the leader of the people surrounds himself in abject luxury, basically hijacks the wealth of the nation, gives it to himself and his friends, lives in ways that his people can't even dream of living.
And now his people have seen it.
And this is the story of liberalism around the world.
It's the story of socialism and communism around the world.
And throughout world history, you've got exalted leaders claiming to do everything for the little guy, claiming to stand up for the little guy, claiming to protect the little guy from the hordes.
And who are the hordes?
Well, the hordes are conservatives and Christians and pro-lifers and so forth.
And the little guys continue to support the state because they believe the state's looking out for them.
The state's going to protect them.
The state is going to keep those mean people from taking everything away from them while the esteemed socialist leadership robs them blind.
Doesn't matter where you go.
Cuba, China, Venezuela, Ukraine, Moscow.
Doesn't matter where you go.
It's the same old story.
And even in this country where this opulent housing is provided for whoever the leader of the free world happens to be, you get an idea that the current occupant kind of likes all this lavishness.
Kind of really gets into it.
Kind of really likes lauding it over other people.
A guy who couldn't afford one 100th of it if he had to pay for it himself.
And it doesn't change.
It's exactly.
Let's look at this NFL thing, all right?
Let's look who is it?
Can you get right out of brass tags?
This effort to police the N-word.
You have a league here, 75% African-American.
All of a sudden, apparently out of the clear blue of the Western sky, comes the edict that no longer shall the word be permitted to be uttered.
And if it is, the first infraction is 15 yards.
The second infraction, you are kicked out of the game.
Who's doing this?
Who is imposing this rule on a majority of African-American players?
Is it conservatives?
Is it Christians?
Is it pro-lifers?
Is it the moral majority?
No.
It's rich, white, liberal elites who are telling black players in the NFL what they can't say.
When will we hear from the Reverend Dax pointing fingers at the people responsible for this repression and for this censorship?
Well, I'm just the point here is who is considered the best friend to these guys?
White liberal elites, right?
They're looking out for.
Who is it that's attempting to enact this punitive behavior and punishment on them?
It's not the people that they've been told to fear.
It's not the people who they've been told are their enemies.
It's not the people.
And who was it that sick the dogs and the fire hoses in Selima Autumn?
It wasn't a bunch of Republicans.
It wasn't a bunch of conservatives.
It wasn't a bunch of Christians.
It was Bull Connor and the Democrat Party who were the segregationists.
Who founded the KKK?
It was not some old Republican senator.
Nope.
A famous Democrat senator, Robert Sheets Byrd, former Grand Kliegal wizard of the KKK, who was in the KKK.
Just, it's fascinating to me to watch all this.
All these minorities have been told to keep a sharp eye out for this group and that group and that guy and this guy because they're enemies.
And while they're looking at these supposed enemies, their supposed friends are the ones that want to now criminalize their speech and penalize aspects of their culture, in their view anyway, and their behavior.
Here's Ethan in Binghamton, New York.
Great to have you on the program.
Hello.
Ethan.
Testing.
Ethan, are you there?
I am.
Oh, great.
I am, yes.
Thanks for taking my call.
It's an honor to talk to you.
You bet, sir.
Thank you for waiting.
No problem.
I was wondering if this whole thing, a couple weeks back, a couple of U.S. Democratic senators announced that they were going to write letters to Roger Goodell, commissioner of the NFL, to pressure the Redskins into changing their name.
And the Redskins wrote a letter back to these senators saying, why don't you do your real job?
And I was wondering if this rule that they're instituting in the NFL now might be a back door to try and get the NFL to make the Redskins' name illegal.
It could be part of it, but it's not the whole thing because the, believe me, the N-word, that's a bigger deal than the Redskins.
The Redskins, there might be somebody thinking if we can get the N-word banned, then we can finally get the Redskins to dump their name.
But no, no, no.
There's something else behind this.
There's something else that is the impetus for this right now.
And I would have to say, if anything, it would have to be what went on at the Dolphins locker room and the Ted Wells report and the bullying and the insulting and all that and the reactive nature of people to try to get a handle on what they think is a budding, effervescing problem.
And it could well be that this has been something the league's been concerned about for the longest time, but never thought they had reason to implement it, that now they do because of what happened in the Dolphins locker room.
Remember, this is a multi-billion dollar business.
It may be a sport, but to the people, it's a multi-billion dollar business.
And it survives by being loved and adored by the public.
And there are PR people throughout this business who are constantly in a defensive mode about anything that could change the people's view of the game.
And I think that's why there's so much focus on the violence and the barbarism and the maiming and all that.
Now the language.
But that could be all wet.
There could be other things.
It could just be liberals in their natural element.
Policing speech.
They don't want to hear.
Could be nothing more complicated than that.
When did the concept of hate speech arrive?
Can you remember when the whole idea of hate crimes and hate speech As an accepted phenomenon, think back in your life.
When did you first hear about it?
When did you first hear about hate crimes?
Okay, you have an assault on somebody.
Bad.
Assault's very bad.
All of a sudden now, we're going to call it a hate crime because the victim was gay.
When did that first start?
When did the concept of hate crimes and hate speech?
When did all of that start?
And I think once you answer that, many other vistas will open up and become clear to you.
Okay, back to the audio sound bites, ladies.
Yeah, I know when it began, but I'm going to wait and see if people figure it out.
Hate speech, hate crimes.
I can peg it.
I know exactly when it began.
The left's decision to start characterizing things that way.
Not, I mean, crime's always been around.
I don't think this hate crime crap is just a leftist creation to politicize it.
I'm not talking about when crime began.
When did the left start characterizing crime as hate crime and speech as hate speech?
It was in the late 80s, actually, 1988.
It's when it began.
The arrival of this program.
And if you want to say the early 90s with the explosion of talk radio into the mainstream culture, all of a sudden, hate speech began to be popularized.
And from that, hate crimes started happening.
Once conservatism achieved prominence in popular mainstream culture, all of a sudden it was hate-filled.
The left began to characterize it that way as a way of diminishing it, impugning it, and discrediting it.
It's talk radio game.
I'm telling you, it's not because it's me doing it.
I'm telling you, talk radio has these people burning upside-down fits of rage.
I think talk radio, I think that's when the media threw in.
I think the media surrendered their constitutional freedom and threw in officially with the left with the rise of talk radio.
I believe that with every fiber of my sizable soul and beating heart.
Let's go to New York City last night.
This is on the Yes Network, the Yankees sports network, cable network.
And what we have here is a portion of the play-by-play of the Brooklyn Nets Center, Jason Collins, the first openly gay player to actually play in a professional sports game.
It happened last night.
The Brooklyn Nets against the Los Angeles Lakers.
This is the Nets play-by-play announcer, Ryan Rucco, as Jason Kyle, who, by the way, took the number 98 in solidarity with Matthew Shepherd, who was, it's now been proven didn't happen, but reputed to have been beaten up by a bunch of anti-gay bigots.
Anyway, here's how it sounded.
See, I haven't heard this.
Let's see how it sounds.
You begin to hear a little bit of a buzz in the crowd as Collins gets ready.
Here it is.
Defense number 46, Jason Collins.
You hear the applause.
A historic moment at Staples Center as Jason Collins becomes the first openly gay athlete to play in any of this country's four major professional sports.
Now, you're going to have to help me out here because my guidance on the soundbite says that the fans applauded mildly.
I can't tell.
Was that a standing ovation?
Was it raucous, big-time applause, or was it just mild?
Which was it?
Could you tell?
All right, so it wasn't triumphant standing ovation, this kind of stuff.
It was just polite applause.
Okay, cool.
And here's Jason Collins after the game.
This makes Michael Sam number two now.
So Jason Collins is number one because he's actually played in a game as a gay athlete.
Yeah, we got time for this.
What he said after the game.
The most important things on my team, Lauren.
That's all I've ever cared about is just going out there and making pays to help my team win.
My role is to be a mentor and to be that example and try to help the people who come after me.
And there you have it.
His job is to be a mentor and help the people that come after him.
Oh, oh, and win games too.
That's big.
Oh, this is too good.
I just found out that there was a guest on ESPN's outside the line special report, the N-Word show last night, who made my point that a bunch of white guys don't get to decide what the black guys can say.
Yes, sir, Reba.
So we've got that coming up.
And there are other things in the news.
I might try to explain this security thing.
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