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April 25, 2014 - Rush Limbaugh Program
37:29
April 25, 2014, Friday, Hour #2
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Hi, folks, and welcome back.
Great to have you with us, El Rushmo behind the Golden EIB microphone, somewhere in parts unknown on the left coast.
It is Friday.
Let's hit it live from the left coast at our satellite studios in Los Angeles.
It's open line from Sen OH Studios in Los Angeles.
Johnny Donovan gets the hour.
Going into the proper tempo.
Great to be with you, my friends.
Open Line Friday means, of course, that when we go to the phones, the content of the program is all up to you.
Whatever you wish to talk about, fair game.
Have at it.
It's a golden opportunity.
Telephone number is hang on, cough button.
Telephone numbers 800-282-2882.
The email address, lrushmo at EIBnet.com.
Earlier in the program, in context, I cited Marlo Thomas' book that she's come out with about improving her life at age, whatever she is, 90.
Trying to start over, do it all over again, have happy life.
Yip, yip, yip, yip, yahoo!
She had Diane Sawyer there, a couple of other Kumbaya buddies, and they're all doing great things.
And it was interpreted by a caller that it could be seen as criticism of women, and that I might not want women to do well, and that the media could once again start harping on me for this.
And when a caller here named Pat from Tucson, who wants to take me to task for this, so I want to get back to Pat on the phone now.
What was it I said, Pat, that makes you think I have put myself at risk to be criticized by the feminazis and the left again?
What did I do?
I do believe that you're being a bit, well, incorrect on this issue, how you're interpreting it.
I think that the left is going to come down on you, and I think that Ms. Thomas's book might be encouraging to women.
Which is fine.
What I'm pointing out, maybe you didn't hear me say this.
Maybe you didn't hear yesterday's program.
We are living in a moment, Pat, where the president of the United States is unhappy that some people are earning more than other people.
In other words, the president's unhappy that some people are more successful than other people.
That isn't fair.
The president is urging income equality.
We must all have the same amount of money.
Therefore, what is Marlowe Thomas doing trying to improve herself?
That's not what the president is all about.
I'm trying to point out the hypocrisy of the left.
And Marlo Thomas and her buds, they're all Democrats.
They're all feminists.
And they're all carving out lives for themselves.
They're free to live and free to grow and they're free to expand and they're free to earn more money and grow all they want.
But the president is trying to force everybody else into the same mold with the same life, the same income, and so forth.
And I said, why isn't Marlowe playing along with it?
Why does Marlowe need to write a new book?
Why isn't she happy with what she has?
Why does Marlowe need more?
I'm speaking facetiously here.
I'm trying to ram it down the throats of the Democrats who are telling us that people like Marlo Thomas, if they're Republicans, are somehow cheaters, liars.
They're unfair.
They're mean-spirited.
And they're stealing everybody else's money.
But since Marlo's a Democrat, I guess it's okay.
She can do it.
I hope I'm not talking over you this time.
No.
I understand your point completely.
I'm just asking you to look at the other side of the issue.
It's going to be taken incorrectly that you are attacking women who want other women to succeed.
Okay, so how should I have done this?
Or should I have just not even brought it up?
Well, it might have been better if you hadn't brought it up or if you had mentioned the book and said, yes, we as conservative people agree that women can and do all the time reinvent themselves and become successful.
And most of those women also love their men.
So I don't think it's an equality, income inequality issue.
And I just, oh, I just got so uncomfortable.
My finger started hitting redial, and here we are.
Well, you may not think that it's X, Y, and Z, but the Democrats do, and the media does.
And all I'm trying to point out is the glaring and blatant hypocrisy.
Actually, the Marlowe Thomas story was an ancillary.
It was an illustration of what I was talking about in a much larger scheme regarding the Thomas Piketty book.
Now, I don't deny that there are small-minded neophytes who live in a world of utter distortion and lies, who try to take things that I don't say and repackage them and make it look like I am anti-woman.
And look at what your solution to that was.
Well, just don't talk about it.
And I'm sorry, I'm never going to do that.
I'm not going to let them shut me up.
I'm not ever going to back down and have these people silence me from expressing what I really think about who they are and what they're doing.
They are the new fascists, and that's how they live.
They stifle dissent.
They try to intimidate anybody from speaking out of fear that somebody might get offended.
And look at you.
I mean, it's working on you.
You're worried about me getting in trouble because of what I was going to say here, what I did say, that somebody might mischaracterize it and so forth.
Not that it would be right about it, that they would mischaracterize it, and I would be once again portrayed as anti-woman.
It bothers you because you know I'm not, but you don't want other people to think I'm not.
And I understand you're doing this out of a position of total support for me.
I appreciate it, and I love it.
I thank you very much.
But I'm going to stand by this.
I think the point is worth being made, although I'm not planting a flag here on Marlowe Thomas, and I'm going to go over that hill and make her break here.
She's just an example here.
Let me try it again.
Here we have the Piketi book.
The Democrats are eating it up.
The President and his Treasury Secretary are reading it, and they're inviting a guy in for conversations.
Policy is going to be made from this book.
This book has as its economic theory that social and economic mobility do not exist.
And yet, social and economic mobility, and yet right here is Marlowe Thomas, who's just published a new book, and she is attempting to elevate her social and economic level.
She wants more money.
She is attempting to upgrade her impact and influence on people.
This guy's got a book that says it's not possible in capitalism.
So we've got a bunch of hypocrites.
We've got a bunch of liberals writing what isn't possible in America while they're out doing it, which is my point.
If Marlo Thomas were the true liberal she is, she would believe Pikini.
Well, she wouldn't even bother writing the book because she would realize it's unfair.
But not everybody can write a book, and it's not fair because not everybody can upgrade their mobility, and not everybody can afford lunch at Michael's.
I mean, if we're going to have income equality for crying out loud, are we going to make it so everybody can afford lunch at Michael's?
Because I guarantee you right now, not everybody can.
Are we only going to have certain people be able to go to lunch at Michaels?
I mean, this is how silly this is.
And the idea that this can be reduced to me attacking women, I know that's how the left is going to portray it because that's the best they've got.
They can't deal with me on the substance of what I'm saying on any of this.
So they have to mischaracterize me as some brute, predator, misogynist, sexist, bunch of lies.
Does anybody who has listened to this program for any length of time knows that I and every one of you in this audience, all we want is the best for everybody.
We want the greatest country there's ever been.
We want our kids and grandparents, grandkids living better than we ever did.
We want our own lives to be constantly growing and expanding.
We want every day to be a new adventure.
We want every day to be an adult Christmas.
This is what we want.
This is our birthright as Americans.
And it's not unjust.
This is something that we pursue.
It's called happiness.
United States of America is the one place on earth which is codified in its founding documents that this is the place this happens.
That this is one of the many facets of the purposes of humanity, the pursuit of happiness.
And we want it for everybody.
I want everybody.
I hope Marlo Thomas's book goes through the she realizes every dream with it she wants.
My only point is she's a hypocrite.
If she's at the same time going to sign up with Obama on this income equality business, then what business does she have improving her own?
I'm trying to persuade people that they're a bunch of liars, Pat.
I'm trying to show people that if you follow them, you're going to end up miserably unhappy.
They're going to be great.
They're going to be doing fat city.
They're going to be going to Michael's.
They're going to be writing books.
They're going to be hanging around with each other.
And you are going to be eating Skittles bought with food stamps.
And you're going to be told to be happy about it.
This stuff really concerns me.
I believe everybody in this country is better than they know they are.
I think everybody in this country is capable of doing more than they think they can.
I believe everybody's capable of accomplishing more than they think they can.
I think everybody in this country is capable of greatness to degrees they can't even imagine in themselves because most people are beat down by life.
They're beat down by family.
They're beat down by peer groups.
They're laughed at, made fun of.
People are told jokes about.
It's tough.
And it has to be tough to overcome this stuff.
And this is a place where it can be done.
And you have to have the full access to liberty and freedom and the understanding of what those concepts are to utilize them, to make them work for you.
People born to them take them for granted.
I'm simply trying to remind people daily here of their value.
You see, this is not a country where social and economic mobility don't exist.
The Obamas would love you to believe that's true.
They would love you to believe the salad days of America are behind us.
They would love you to believe that the new normal is a stagnating decline in the American economy, not unbridled growth.
They would love for you to accept the idea that you were allowed to have money and property as the state determines is fair to have.
They would love for you to accept that notion.
They think they're the arbiters of fair.
They're the arbiters of who needs what, who doesn't need any more than whatever.
And it's just been tried, folks.
It's dismal failure.
And these last five years have been so unnecessary.
We need not have elected this man.
We need not have done it.
And I'm eventually going to get to these two stories, which got all this started today because we now got two stories from prominent people talking about the failure that is Barack Obama.
I said on January 16, 2009, I hope he fails in what he wants to do.
And everybody knew that I meant that I hoped he failed.
Not a soul in the world thought that I was hoping the country failed.
Not me.
I'm the guy that wants this country to triumph.
I'm the guy that wants the people in this country to triumph.
I'm the guy that wants everybody in this country to be happy as they can be, to be as achieved and as accomplished as they can be.
I'm the guy that thinks I know how most people do that.
Self-reliance, investing in themselves, finding what they love, going and doing it, finding what they love and doing it so much that it's not work to them.
It's their life.
And as they go through life and improve their lot in life, they bring along a lot of people with them, their family per se.
The rising tide lifts all boats things that John F. Kennedy once espoused as a belief that the modern-day Democrat Party has long ago thrown away.
Let me put it another way.
Why should Marlowe Thomas have $30 million for writing a book and some guy who flipped hamburgers all of his life doesn't?
Barack Obama, if Marlo Thomas were a Republican or her last name was Coke, she'd be on his enemies list.
Why should Jaza Huvington have $50 million and some guy who flipped hamburgers all of his life doesn't?
Why should Diane Sawyer have $60 million because she reads a teleprompter and some guy who flipped hamburgers all of his life doesn't?
That's what Obama's asking everybody.
That's income inequality.
Who's more valuable, a guy that feeds you hamburgers or Diane Sawyer reading the news?
Look, recycling at the Japanese nuclear plant.
Who's more valuable to you?
guy that shows you the video of Obama bowing to a Japanese robot or the guy feeding you at a price you can afford Well, the point is none of anybody's business.
The market decides that.
But no no no, Obama wants to be in charge of that.
It's been tried.
Let me take a break.
When we come back I'm going to get to Mark Rank and this research data.
He's done with Census Bureau data on what this country really is and who's really in this country and how they live, and it's such a marked contrast and difference from the way the left sees this country.
Don't go away folks, we'll be right back as usual, half my brain tied behind my back.
Just to make it fair.
Mark Rank of Washington University is the co-author of Chasing The American Dream understanding what shapes our fortunes, and his book tells a different story than this Thomas Piquitti book from friends.
In a review of his own and others research, he had a piece in last sunday's NEW YORK TIME.
And far from having the 21st century equivalent of an Edwardian class system, which is which is how the, the Obamas and the socialists view America today.
The United States rather, is characterized by a great deal of variation in income.
We're all over the place.
Here are some stats and these are Census Bureau numbers.
More than half of all adult Americans will be at or near the poverty line at some point over the course of their lives more than half.
Now, I don't know about you, but I have been three times.
I have been broke three times.
In the 1970s and 80s I was at whatever the poverty line was and according to the research here, more than half of us will be either at the poverty line or near it at some point over the course of our lives.
I've been there three times.
73 percent of Americans will also find themselves in the top 20 percent at some point in their lives.
Not forever.
They're gonna have good years, bad years, a couple of good years in a row three, four good years in a row.
Bottom will fall out, but 73 percent of Americans will find themselves the top 20 percent of income earners.
39 of Americans.
These are important numbers.
These are not insignificant.
39 percent of Americans will make it to the top five percent for at least one year.
39 percent.
That is a large number of people to make it to the top five percent for at least a year.
What does that mean?
It means that people who get there don't stay, that many of them fall out of it because income is not something that's steady.
You don't earn the same amount every year.
It's it's tough to get people to agree to pay you amount of money that's big.
In many cases to earn that kind of money you have to be in business for yourself or you have to be surviving on commissioned sales of some sort.
There's more to this, folks, too.
It gets even better.
Sit right where you are.
Meeting and surpassing all audience expectations every day.
El Rushbo behind the golden EIB microphone here out on the left coast.
Okay, 73% of us will find ourselves in the top 20%.
39% of us will make it into the top 5% for at least one year.
And perhaps even most remarkable, 12% of Americans will be in the top 1% for at least one year of their working lives.
Now, if you listen to people like take or pick any Democrat, Barack Obama, Dick Gephardt, this is not possible because the only people that end up in the top 5%, top 1% are called the winners of life's lottery.
And that means the lucky.
They were born to it.
Or they got lucky with some invention.
Or they got lucky with never is it hard work.
Never is it industriousness.
Never is it creativity or entrepreneurism unless it happens to be one of them.
But as a political matter, as they make policy, it simply is not possible to work from nothing.
You've got to go to Yale.
You've got to go to Harvard.
You've got to have the right connections.
You've got to know the right people.
You have to be in the right network if you even have a chance of making $100,000 a year.
And right here, 12% of Americans will be in the top 1%.
Now, NBC went on and hired a psychological executive or psychological to profile David Gregory to figure out why it is his ratings are falling and meet the press.
And what they were trying to figure out, why is it that David Gregory doesn't relate?
Why do massive numbers of millions of Americans not relate to David Gregory?
And I'll guarantee the answer can be found right here.
You throw these numbers at him.
He would not believe one word of this.
If you don't have this view of America, if I didn't have, this is the exact view of America I have.
When I read these stats, this is you, you in this audience.
Some of you in the top 1%, some of you in the bottom 30, some of you flirting with poverty now and then, you're in and out of it.
You're active.
You're living.
You're taking chances.
You're doing things.
You are on the go.
You're trying to make the most of the one life that you have.
Things happen.
Good things, bad things.
You adapt as the bad things happen.
You celebrate when the good things happen.
When the good things happen, you try to sustain them.
We all do.
Okay, what happened?
What made this good thing happen so I can keep doing it?
We all do these things.
But if you are an American liberal today, you disdain all this.
None of this is real.
None of this is possible.
The state makes this possible for people.
People are not this competent.
People are not this capable.
People can't do this on their own.
If they do, they're cheating or they're stealing or they're not paying enough in taxes or whatever convoluted explanation leftists come up with to explain prosperity.
But in their worldview, prosperity isn't genuine.
It's an accident.
It's luck.
And that is, folks, I'm telling you, that is the worst possible person to have lead the country who thinks that prosperity is an accident, who thinks that prosperity and good fortune is luck.
Luck is where preparation meets opportunity.
That's all it is.
Luck, some say it's the residue of hard work meeting opportunity.
But you can't have people who do not believe in this leading this country and have this country remain what it has always been.
It just can't happen.
And we do now have people who do not believe this, that are running this country.
And they think this is all lies.
It's unjust.
It's monkeyed numbers.
It's unfair.
And it's, because they don't think it's possible.
And they look at their own lives.
The wealthy left.
Now, forget the Hollywood left and forget the pop culture left.
But look at the people that are wealthy on the left who really don't work for it.
They feed off others.
They feed off the donations to the think tanks they run.
They feed off of the donations from George Soros.
They feed off of the ancillary dollars that government hands out and grants and so forth.
That would be scary to depend on.
That would require connections.
That would require sucking up to people.
That would requiring knowing the right people.
That would have nothing to do with being good at anything.
That would have everything in the world to do with being artificial and phony.
And that's what they are.
Have we got an audio problem in there?
Oh, okay.
Don't worry.
I'm not anywhere near taking calls.
The screener computer just died, they told me.
And there's a panicked look in there.
And anyway, if we don't have leaders who believe in this being possible, and we don't right now, that's the problem.
We need people who are in leadership position, who believe this, who can inspire it in others.
If you're a young millennial and you're coming out of school and you've got your degree and it's in some worthless liberal arts major or what have you, because that's what you were told to do, and your future is looking pretty bleak, and then you've got a leader who tells you, yeah, it is pretty bleak.
Leave it to me.
That's no good.
Great leaders inspire people by telling people what they are capable of, what is possible, what needs to be done, what can be done.
It's happening in little enclaves all over this country, small companies, large companies.
It's happening in a lot of places.
It is not happening at government and it is not being inspired by government or from government.
Government doesn't create wealth.
All government can do is redistribute it or destroy it.
What young people today need is what young people in this country have always had.
And that is optimistic role models.
People willing to inspire them.
People willing to tell them what's possible.
People willing to remind them they live in the greatest country on earth and what's possible here.
And who have enough knowledge you can cite examples?
People who came from all walks of life, born in all kinds of socioeconomic circumstances, who made the most of their lives, not by virtue of luck, although there's luck in everybody needs help, everybody gets assistance, there's luck in everything.
Nobody is totally self-reliant, and nobody ever makes a claim anybody is.
But the Democrat Party is hell-bent on convincing as many people as possible that no success is really earned.
Their lifeblood depends on as many people believing that there is no real success.
That everything is a rigged game.
Comes from connections, who you know, who you've greased, to whatever, however you network to get where you are.
That hard work and industriousness and creativity and coming up with something new, ingenuity, none of those things matter.
That's just claptrap.
You can't do that.
We don't need all this negativism.
We don't need all of this malaise, this cloud, this overcast, this mist of despair all over the country that we are being led by now.
And the solution is income equality.
That is the big answer to everybody's economic dreams.
You know, I ask football coaches, NFL coaches, as I get older, I wonder if the game is going to change.
Everybody does.
I remember I talked to Bill Parcels.
It was at a Wayne Heisinger golf tournament, Wayne Heisinger's course in Palm City, Florida.
This must have been 10 years ago, and maybe longer.
And I remember once I talked to Harry Carey, one of my childhood heroes, baseball play-by-play for the St. Louis Cardinals.
And after I outgrew baseball, the baseball players that were my heroes growing up, when I became older and got, and when I got to be older, then the players, they stopped being the same kind of heroes to me.
And so I would ask these experts, I asked Harry Carrie, I said, is the game the same, Harry?
Is this good when Musil played?
Is it the stars as good?
Shane Deents at second base, Dick Gross, or Dick Grode at shortstop, Kurt Flood in the center field.
And he said to me, oh my God, the game's never been better.
Rush, I'm in Chicago.
I got Ryan Sandberg at second base.
I've got some of the best pitching I've ever seen in baseball.
Games better than ever.
Which I was happy to hear.
Don't misunderstand.
When I talked to Parcels and I worried socioeconomic conditions, is the game changing, coach?
Is it being played by different people?
I said, no, Rush, they've all got their dreams just like we had when we started.
They all want to be in the Hall of Fame.
They all want to be the best.
They all want to be the best they can be.
The names change and maybe the styles, but the caliber of player may be better than in the past.
I was happy to hear it.
You want that for every walk of life in the country.
You want every generation being better.
This is the country where this is possible.
It breaks my heart that we are being led by a bunch of people to whom all of what I'm saying to you is foreign.
They don't understand it.
They think it's impossible.
They think it's never been real.
In fact, the United States has never really been this great country.
It's always had what it's had because it's stolen from others or it's committed genocide around the world or it maimed Native Americans.
It enslaved black people and so forth.
But they live in this historical backwater where they are unable to get past what they see as genuine horrors that are definitive.
They're unable to see past the days where those were erased, dealt with, prices paid, and we moved on.
But man, some of these, these economic numbers of where people end up, I know a guy who has passed away.
He made and lost a $200 million fortune twice in a period of 10 years.
I can't relate to that.
He did it in commodities.
His first name was Ned.
He was a World War II veteran.
He's a World War II hero, and nobody knew until his funeral the extent of his heroics because he never talked about them.
But he was just constantly on the go, and he always had things in play.
Things were always in motion.
And there is no way that this man, Ned, that I knew, would in any way even understand the president of the United States trying to establish as a national policy something called income equality.
You don't know what it is.
Based on what?
Family size, based on, well, income equality to buy what, to live how.
He would have understood exactly what it is: nothing more than a political ploy right out of the class envy playbook.
But what all of this Democrat Party politics is doing is destroying people's dreams.
It is destroying people's belief in themselves.
It is creating envy and jealousy of people who have genuinely succeeded rather than creating role models and curiosities out of people.
Speaking for myself, I don't recall ever resenting anybody who having had more than did.
I often ask myself why they did, but I never resented it.
I knew there was no future in that.
But I always wanted to know how, why, how did they do it?
And these statistics, 12% of Americans will be in the top 1% for at least one year of their lives.
And then there's more.
The top 1% is such an unstable group of people.
It changes so much every year.
It makes no sense to write about what's happened to the income of the 1% over the past 10 or 20 years because it doesn't contain the same group of people from year to year.
It's ridiculous to study the 1%.
Are not the same people year in and year out.
Yet you listen to the Democrat Party talk about them, and they are this collected group of evil people.
They belong to this club and that club.
It's time we got our arms around all this and realized that we live in the greatest place on earth where the greatest things possible still are.
And that's what we have to strive to save.
And remind everybody younger than we are that it is indeed possible.
We got to get inspirational, motivational.
Yeah, I know, I know, I know.
I'm sorry.
I got that in a brief, brief obscene profit time out here, folks.
Hey, I've just been informed, ladies and gentlemen, we got our call screener computer fixed, which may not mean anything.
I don't know if I'm going to have time to.
I'm just kidding.
I'm just, I promise I'll get some calls in in the next hour.
I just got two more things I want to do.
I want to finish the stats here on mobility in and out of income levels.
There's still a couple of more things.
The two stories on people now acknowledging what a failure Obama is, and then it'll be your turn and back to you and the phones.
And that'll probably be most of the next hour.
So you just sit tight, hang in there, and be tough.
We'll get right to it.
Oman 9 Friday, Rush Limbaugh executing assigned host duties flawlessly with zero mistakes.
There's also some audio sound bites here.
It's a few that we got to get into.
So we've got a jam-packed hour coming up.
I would really urge you to stay glued to where you are.
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