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March 4, 2014 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:42
March 4, 2014, Tuesday, Hour #2
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The views expressed by the host of this program, documented to be almost always right, 99.7% of the time.
It's a thrill and a delight to be with you every day, folks.
It's such an honor, and it's great to have you here.
Phone number, if you'd like, join us, 800-282-2882.
And the email address, LRushbo at EIBNet.com.
Let me find one other thing.
I thought I'd put it at the top, and I didn't.
Hang on just a second.
I got, here we go.
I got started late today.
I was here on time, but I didn't start putting everything together until two minutes before showtime, and that's why because I got distracted.
I had things to do, but we're here now.
Okay, now, before we get back into this Ukraine business and Obama, we got some great soundbites of John Kerry continuing to talk in ways the Washington Post now admits embarrasses them.
And we've got Obama sound bites in which he's sick and tired of the media making it look like Putin is outsmarting him.
But first, some electoral news that dovetails with the Obama decision, and it's a prediction, actually, and I don't doubt it, that they're going to announce an additional three-year delay and allow you to keep your plan that you liked, that you were lied to about.
You said you were told 24 different times over three years by the president you could keep it if you liked it, and then they took it away from you.
And then they gave it back to you when they found out how much you liked it, because there was an election coming up.
And they extended your illegal plan that you liked, that you were promised you could keep until this year.
Then they realized that the cancellation notice that would go out telling you that this year was going to be it would be 90 days before cancellation date.
That's the law.
That would mean people would get cancellation notices in the two weeks leading up to the November elections.
The regime said that'll kill us.
If people get notices two weeks before they go vote in the midterms that their plans canceled again, so they just are going to extend it three years, even beyond the 2016 elections.
But that alone is not going to solve a lot of problems they've got.
From the Washington Post again today, this is a piece by Dan Balls and Scott Clement.
And they've got a poll they're reporting on here.
It's a Washington Post-ABC news poll.
And they are frustrated, these two guys, because headline says it all.
Democrats' advantage on key issues is not translating to a midterm election advantage.
The American people trust Democrats more than Republicans on some of the key issues of the day, but that has not translated into any political advantage in the battle for control of the House and the Senate in this year's midterms, according to the new Washington Post-ABC poll.
Well, that's pretty handy, isn't it?
You know what that means?
It means that even if the Republican wins in another landslide, they won't be able to claim a mandate because the ABC Washington Post poll says that people still hate the Republicans.
Yep, they got a poll.
More people trust the Democrats than Republicans on a lot of issues, but damn it, they're not going to vote for the Democrats.
And so the media people will take that if the Republicans have a 2010-type landslide, which is entirely possible.
And we're already getting the setup here for, well, they may win, but they don't have a mandate because our poll shows that people don't trust them.
So that's the setup here.
And the midterm elections always favor the party out of power, which is even worse news for the regime.
But even that, they mention this in the story.
And the point of mentioning that is the only reason Republicans are leading in these polls is because of tradition.
It has nothing to do with anything else.
It has nothing to do with the fact that people don't like Obama anymore.
It has nothing to do with the fact people don't like Obamacare.
Oh, no, no, no.
It has nothing to do with the way people are going to vote.
I actually think that this story is a variation on the limb theorem for Congress.
So what we're supposed to believe here, I'm not kidding.
This is why I am host.
I can take an innocuous story like this, which is really filled with deceitful stuff, strip away all of Falderole, and tell you what this thing really is trying to say, what they really want the reader to conclude, and it is this.
You read this piece.
You're supposed to believe most Americans back the Democrat agenda, lockstock and barrel.
Most Americans trust the Democrats much more than they trust the Republicans, but they're not going to vote for the Democrats in the midterm.
How does that work?
Washington Post even says that despite how much the House Republicans are hated, that doesn't mean the fall elections will mean defeat for significant numbers of House members.
So it shows how, A, worthless a poll is, but B, how it can be politically manipulated to mean something that it doesn't really mean.
But they're worried is the bottom line.
They are, and it's, you've got this foreign policy business all collapsing now, Obamacare collapsing, and then Jackie Kalmas in the New York Times, Democrats try wooing the ones who got away, white men.
Let me take you back to November of 2011.
And there was an op-ed piece, former Washington Post columnist, I'm having a mental block on his name.
He's in the Dan Balls school, same era.
And he wrote a piece in November of 2011 saying that the Democrats were writing off working white families.
Just writing them off.
They were going to focus the presidential election on turnout in the poor minority communities of America.
They were just seeding the working class white vote.
And now the New York Times says the Democrats want those voters back.
You, in essence, is who they want back.
Thomas B. Edsel, that's exactly Thomas B. Edsel that wrote the piece.
Democrats says here, are working to deploy new data-driven targeting tools to get the message to white men that the Democrat Party is more in sync with them than they might think.
We can tell you to the number how many we need and where they live, said Matt Cantor, deputy executive director to Democrat Senatorial Campaign Committee.
Sounds like he's got a pipeline to the NSA.
No Democrat presidential candidate has won a majority of white men since Lyndon Johnson in 1964.
What in the world does that tell you?
No Democrat presidential candidate has won a majority of white men since LBJ in 1964.
Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama all prevailed with support of the so-called rising electorate of women, especially single women and minorities.
But fewer of those voters typically turn out in midterms, making the votes of white men more potent and the struggle of Democrats for 2014 clear.
As a little side note, I have had conversations recently with ranking Republicans, elected Republicans.
No names, not necessary.
One of them recently told me, we were discussing electoral politics, and I was open.
I was up front and I said, look, you know, I'm asking my thoughts, and I said, I must be honest, I don't know your business.
I don't know how to get votes.
I think I do, but I've never done it.
That's your business.
You know much better than I what it takes.
I said, one of the big differences is that you cannot survive with people that don't like you.
I can.
The people that survive on votes, people that hate you or dislike you are not going to vote for you, but they will listen to you.
As long as you keep giving them reason to hate you each day.
Anyway, I said, for that reason, that aside, I'm telling this guy, what I've always said, if I'm fantasizing about running, is that I would not go after people in groups.
I'd just simply go after Americans as people, as human beings, and that we are all Americans and we all have the same basic desires and values.
And sort of build on that.
And he said, in response, Rush, the sad reality is the Republican Party can no longer win simply by turning out its base.
He said, the American people are organizing themselves in groups.
They have to be approached and appealed to in that way.
I still, even admit up front, I don't know the first thing about getting votes as a practical matter, as a business matter, something I've never done and I have no desire to try.
So that's why, you know, I don't sit here and tell these people they don't know what they're talking about.
However, I still reject this notion that we've got to go after this group and that group with a different policy for this group and a different policy for that group.
Why can't we have a single identity and then come up with ways to get people's attention maybe based on their groups?
As the problem I said to this guy was that it's not just these people are organizing themselves in groups.
They're organizing themselves as victims of the country.
They've been told the country's unfair and unjust and has victimized them.
And the Republican Party is never going to become that.
I said, but all that aside, for one of this business about, it really caught me up short when he said that the Republican Party can't win by turning out its base anymore.
But the Democrats can't.
The Democrats can win with if that's all they do, is turn out their base.
And I said, what about 2010 and what we all think is going to happen in 2014?
He said, well, those turnouts are much different than presidential election turnouts.
And he said, you know why?
And I said, no, why?
Because the strength, he said, you've seen the map of the counties, not the states, but the county by county national map, whether it's red or blue.
This whole country is 99% red until you get to the inner cities.
You get to New York, Philadelphia, Washington, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, L.A., and they're all blue.
But everything else is red.
And he said, in the midterms, most of those people in those blue places don't turn out.
They turn out in presidential years.
So you've got a different turnout in midterms than you do in a presidential election.
I had to acknowledge that because that actually was borne out.
The 2010 turnout was not duplicated in 2012.
But what about the 2012 turnout stands out to you?
What stands out to me is that 4 million Republicans didn't vote in 2012.
4 million stayed home for whatever reason.
I said, it seems to me that if those 4 million had shown up, we would have won.
And we would have won by turning out our base.
But it's a fascinating, don't you think that the Republican Party might believe that they can't win if all they do is turn out their base?
That is, if they really believe that, folks, that is a, this is a seminal moment that we're in.
Because remember, the old rule of thumb is, and this is the credentials or the consultants' creed.
Every political consultant goes to the candidate and says, look, we know that the Republicans are going to get their base.
That's 40%.
We know Democrats are going to get their base.
That's 40%.
At leaves 20% undecided.
20% independents.
And I, consultant A, I'm the guy that can get you a majority of that 20%.
And so what has happened is that the Republican presidential candidate essentially runs a campaign aimed at 20% of the population.
How smart is that?
That's dumb.
They campaign on, they target 20% of the population trying to get 12% or 15% of it, ignoring and taking for granted that the 40% is going to be there.
Well, the 40% wasn't in 2012, for whatever reason.
But if the party really believes that they can't win if they turn out every voter in the base, then that explains a lot to us.
Or to me anyway, about why they're going on the way they are at amnesty and other of these social issues.
In addition to the fact that they may not like the Republican base, you add to that that they may not think that they can even win with it.
Well, hello, this explains why they're branching out into Democrat areas.
And would explain why, well, Rush Americans are organizing themselves in groups, and we have to approach them that way.
But if you look at the 2010 and what's going to happen this year, we can win by shutting up and having people vote against Democrats.
I just, I found it really interesting to listen to some of the strategy here and some of the beliefs that, I guess you'd say, party elders have and compare that to what the Democrats are doing, trying to get white voters back.
They're losing their shirts here with Obamacare.
Democrats don't want to appear next to Obama anywhere on the campaign trail.
And then I said, you know, there's something that really, I think back to 2010, and I just, again, sir, do not understand the way you guys do business because it seems to me that that turnout in 2010 was just begging to be connected with.
And if the Republican Party had connected with that turnout, which is anti-Obamacare and anti-big debt and spending, that you would have had a coalition that Democrats couldn't even touch.
And instead, that turnout, Tea Party, was ignored and treated as though it had leprosy.
And nothing you can say can make me understand that.
Grab a quick phone call here.
This is Anthony, Colorado Springs, Colorado.
Hello, sir.
Welcome to the EIB Network.
Hi.
Thank you, sir.
I'd like to say that Putin is not invading Ukraine.
He's ensuring that his 20% pro-Russian supporter base is not dissolved or dismantled before the Ukrainian elections.
That way he can ensure that he gets a neutral, non-pro-EU government in this presidential election.
He can grow his 20% supporter base to 35% for the next election and get a pro-Russian government.
And in that election, every great strategist knows that you first build one's defenses before you move to take the battlefield.
I'd like to compare this to our involvement in Egypt, where Obama sent money and guns to radicals in his minority supporter base before the Egyptian presidential election.
Or compare this to the United States crushing Cuba, its economy just for being a Russian supporter so close to our border.
We don't have the moral ground to stand on and point fingers, sir.
And we have national interest pipeline flow to Europe.
Here is the problem.
And this is exactly who Obama really is.
A moral equivalence.
This guy from Colorado Springs claims that what Putin is doing in Ukraine is what we have done, Cuba and everywhere else in the world.
And why can't they do it if we do it?
But we don't do what Putin is doing.
That's not who we are.
Another note to seminar callers.
You see why we don't permit people to read from prepared scripts on the program.
We want you to tell us what you really think, not read something that you found interesting or influential.
Because nobody outside a trained professional can read something somebody else wrote and make it sound compelling.
I am one of the few who can do it.
I do it each and every day.
That's why I say don't try this at home.
But nevertheless, that caller, Anthony from Colorado Springs, is exactly what I am talking about in terms of who it is that's running this country.
That is exactly what the American left believes, that we have plundered the world, that we have run around the world and we have imposed our view and we have imposed our freedom.
We have imposed our system on people.
And in the process, we have stolen their natural resources in some cases.
We've taken their oil.
We've taken their diamonds.
We've taken their minerals and we have enslaved their people.
This is what they believe.
And so, when the KGB decides to rebuild Russia into the Soviet Union again, takes over Georgia and now threatens to make a move in Ukraine, all of a sudden, hey, well, we do it.
Why are we telling them they can't?
We don't do it.
That's the difference.
We don't conquer.
Okay.
The...
Okay, so if you want to ask the question, doesn't Russia have the right to go in and squash a bunch of little bugs who border them, who are engaging in behavior that they don't like, that they might consider threatening, have you forgotten that the Ukrainians disarmed?
They disarmed after we promised to defend them.
The Ukrainians do not have a military per se.
Let me find that in the stack here.
Well, they trusted us.
They trusted Bill Clinton.
They trusted, let me find the story here.
Damn it, I put this at the bottom of the stack someplace.
I may have to dig it out.
I may have already used it and I didn't get to that part of it.
But let's here we go.
This is it.
It's in a story that the French news agency, Ukraine soldiers vowed defiance as bases surrounded.
Nobody is telling you that Ukraine cannot defend itself.
It gutted its army and did away.
It had a nuclear weapon, did away with its nuclear deterrent based on assurances by Russia and the U.S., as well as the U.K., France, and China, that their territory would be inviolate, including Crimea.
Bill Clinton signed those assurances for the U.S., and they were reaffirmed in 2009 by Obama.
So the Ukraine military doesn't exist for one thing.
They were promised this wouldn't happen.
That's why we're doing what we're doing.
Well, we're not doing anything just like we didn't do anything in Syria and just like we didn't do anything.
And we've just told the Israelis, hey, you know what?
You're on your own now.
Let me repeat this to you because nobody in the news media ever mentions Ukraine cannot defend itself.
They gutted their army.
They even did away with, they had a formidable nuclear deterrent.
They did this on the basis of promises, assurances by leftists, people running Russia and the United States, Bill Clinton and later Barack Obama, along with leftists in the UK and France and the CHICOMs.
They believed promises made by those people.
And one of the why else would they get rid of their military?
They had been assured that they would not be invaded if they would simply gut the military.
They were assured that their territory would be inviolate.
And this included Crimea.
And these assurances were signed for the United States by Bill Clinton and reaffirmed in 2009 by the Obama administration.
So if you want to, even if that exists, if you want to say, well, look, the Russians don't like what these clowns are doing in Ukraine and they want to take it back and rebuild the Soviet Union, there is this thing called history.
We fought for years to dismantle Soviet communism because of its threat to us and what it was doing to people was the ultimate human rights campaign to get rid of the Soviet Union, to bust it up.
There has to be an agent for good in the world.
There has to be an agent for the influence of what is good and just and right.
We've always been that.
Contrary to seminar callers and American leftists, we do not conquer.
We liberate people.
We liberate people from tyranny, bondage, authoritarianism.
And then we pay to have their countries rebuilt, as in the case of the Marshall Plan in Europe and Japan after World War II.
Putin knows exactly what he's doing, and he's doing it because he knows exactly he's not going to be stopped.
He knows exactly who he's up against.
He knows exactly what kind of opposition he's going to have.
He knows he's basically got an ally.
He tells Medvedev, Obama goes, Tell Vlad to just be flexible until I win re-election, and then I'll really start downgrading nuclear capability in the United States, and he can follow suit like I know he wants to do.
It was the joint declaration by the Russian Federation and the United States of America December 4th, 2009, confirmed their commitment.
You want me to read it?
Number one, the Russian Federation, the United Kingdom of Great Britain, Northern Ireland, the United States of America reaffirmed their commitment to Ukraine in accordance with the principles of the final act of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe to respect the independence and sovereignty and the existing borders of Ukraine.
Number two, the Russian Federation, the United Kingdom Of Great Britain And Northern Ireland, the United States Of America reaffirmed their obligation to refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine, and that none of their weapons will ever be used against Ukraine,
except in self-defense or otherwise, in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations.
Number three, the Russian Federation, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and the United States of America reaffirmed their commitment to Ukraine in accordance with the principles of the final act of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe to refrain from economic coercion designed to subordinate to their own interest the exercise by Ukraine of the rights inherent in its sovereignty.
And the.
thus to secure advantages of any kind.
And I've got the signatories that were signed by Boris Yeltsin, the originally.
John Major, United Kingdom, William J. Clinton, United States, Leonid D. Kuchma for Ukraine.
That's the original.
That was what was reaffirmed in 2009.
Now, the seminar caller also said that we did to Cuba exactly what Putin is doing to Ukraine.
We destroyed the Cuban economy with our embargo because they were a satellite of the Russians, of the Soviets.
It was our embargo that destroyed Cuba.
No, ladies and gentlemen, you see, this is another predictable lament of the left.
The United States is the problem in the world.
United States is the destabilizing agent in the world.
Do you know who destroyed Cuba?
His name happens to be Fidel Castro.
And the way he did it was to install communism throughout Cuba.
It happened when I was a young child, but I remember all the appearances that Castro made.
There was a time Castro had the U.S. dangling at the end of a string.
He had actually convinced us that he didn't know which way he was going to go.
He could have picked us, or he could have gone with the Soviets.
I remember he'd show up on Face a Nation.
He'd show up on Meet the Press with his cigar and his military hat and his uniform on.
It went up to heart.
But I remember watching some black and white TV when I'm nine or ten years old.
I remember watching this stuff.
Eight or nine, I remember watching.
I remember being afraid of the guy.
And I remember being afraid of the guy because of the way the media was covering him.
I didn't know Cuba from anything, but I was told that what was going on down there was very, very important.
And then I remember when Castro supposedly made his decision and threw in with the communists as though that were possibly not going to happen.
Turns out it was always going to happen.
Fidel Castro, communism destroyed and keeps the destruction in place.
Cuba, we didn't.
Our embargo didn't.
The Cubans can trade with anybody.
You can go to France, U.K., you go to Canada, go anywhere.
You can get a Cuban cigar.
You get Cuban rum, Cuban sugar.
You can visit Cuba if you live in anywhere of those countries.
Our embargo destroyed Cuba.
That's what Castro tells his people.
He calls it the blockade, by the way.
Half of Cuban people think there's an actual military blockade in the Straits of Florida.
They don't know any different.
I think the U.S. Navy's deployed with a blockade in the ocean.
But this is my point.
This guy was reading from some script, and there's a column in the Washington Post today by the esteemed Eugene Robinson.
In the Ukraine crisis, the U.S. has a credibility problem.
Let's be real, he says.
It's one thing to say that Russia's takeover of the Crimean Peninsula cannot be allowed to stand.
It's quite another to do something about it.
Is it just me?
You see, by the way, how I am reading interpretively and making this dull peace sound compelling.
That's what I mean by you can't do it.
I can.
Leave it to me.
Pick it up here again.
Is it just me?
Or does the rhetoric about the crisis in Ukraine sound as if all of Washington is suffering from amnesia?
We're supposed to be shocked, shocked, that a great military power would cook up a pretext to invade a smaller, weaker nation.
I'm sorry.
Has anyone forgotten or everyone forgotten the unfortunate events in Iraq a few years ago?
Oh, Iraq.
See, we doing, we did to Iraq exactly what Putin's doing to Ukraine, and so we don't have any leg to stand on.
Who the hell do we think we are?
So they immediately establish a moral equivalence, which is we're no different than the worst bad guy in the world.
In fact, we're worse than the worst bad guy because we've got more power.
We are the destabilizing.
Who the hell do we think we are?
And that's the kind of people that populate the Obama administration.
Do not doubt me.
Who else can but us?
The Brits?
Then I get, no, nobody's going to do anything.
Yeah, it always does bounce back to us when things go awry in the world, but why not?
That's what being a superpower is.
That's what leadership is.
That's what being looked up to is.
That's what being looked to for guidance means.
That's why it matters who's elected president.
That's why what they believe matters.
It's the reason, well, build coalitions.
To go into Iraq and why they have to build a coalition if it's up to us to do so, that's strictly just a concession to political correctness and the media.
Remember, there are U.S. opponents everywhere, including in this country, and they believe that we are the problem in the world, not the solution.
Now, I am not, nor have I, advocated military action in Ukraine.
That's not at all my position here.
Never has been.
All I'm doing is pointing out the reason this is happening is because Putin knows full well he can get away with it.
It matters who leads this country and what they believe matters.
Kerry can sit there and whine and moan about how it's the 21st century and it's unfair that Putin is pretending it's the 19th century, but welcome to reality.
These guys honestly believe, and nobody will convince me otherwise, people like Kerry and Obama believe their own PR.
They really believe that their presence alone sends a signal to the bad guys of the world that we're not your enemy anymore.
You don't have to engage in the kind of activity you're known for.
They have no real under.
We know Kerry doesn't.
There's days of Vietnam forward.
We know Obama has no experience whatsoever in any of this, ever doing anything.
But we know that there are some universal truths.
That bad guys are bad guys.
And we know that people who run countries want to control more and they will invade.
It's the way of the world.
Ours is a world governed by the aggressive use of force.
Since you don't want to be at war all the time, what do you do?
You have policies and stature that just shout deterrence.
We build the B-2 bomber, for example, hoping we never have to use it.
Now, a leftist will never understand that.
We build the Strategic Defense Initiative, hoping we never have to use it.
We hope that its existence alone prevents bad guy aggression.
That's how you deal with this.
You deal with it by preventing it from happening.
And even then, you know it's going to now and then.
I take a break.
It's a sad thing, too, because I'm on a good roll here.
You're making a lot of sense.
I want you to think about something during the break.
When Kerry says, this is the 21st century and Putin's behaving like it's the 19th century.
What does Kerry really mean or believe when he says that?
And I got some sound bites with him saying it.
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