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May 22, 2014 - Rush Limbaugh Program
31:38
May 22, 2014, Thursday, Hour #3
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Hi folks and welcome back.
Great to have you with us, Rush Limbaugh, half my brain tied behind my back just to make it fair.
Telephone number if you want to be on the program.
800-282-2882, the email address, lrushbow at eibnet.com.
When you grab that last Pelosi soundbite, I just threw the transcript away and I can't find it.
It's in a mess.
It's soundbite number 24.
And it was, it's Pelosi.
This is what they're setting up, folks, in terms of this VA scan.
It's why Obama announced his investigation yesterday.
And by the way, before we get to number 24, while you find number 24, grab numbers 11 and 12, because this is somewhat interesting.
CNN, they didn't get the memo on how to deal with this.
It's actually somewhat amazing.
Last night, Anderson Cooper 360, the correspondent Drew Griffin, this guy's already made news for not understanding how Obama could go out there yesterday and act mad.
This guy doesn't get it.
How do you not know your president?
We had that soundbite yesterday.
How does he not know what's going on?
So last night after the press conference, and I want you to hear the shock in this guy's voice, Drew Griffin interviewed the medical director of the Phoenix VA post-deployment clinic.
Her name is Dr. Catherine Mitchell, about the VA hospital medical treatment.
During this discussion about wait lines for veterans to receive treatment, this is what the, well, this is the conversation took place.
You are telling me that our troops coming back from war, now separated from active service, coming to the Phoenix VA for follow-up care for war injuries, are being put on a waiting list and made to wait six to ten months?
Yes, or longer.
You're kidding.
No, but it's the same for everyone.
Everyone is made to wait.
That's now?
That's happening now.
Yeah.
Can you tell me what type of person we're talking about?
We're talking about people that were injured by being blown up by IEDs.
We're talking about people who had a mental breakdown and have severe PTSD and are having trouble functioning.
We're talking about veterans that were severely injured.
Now, the CNN guy can't really, he can't believe what he's hearing.
He can't believe this.
It doesn't make sense.
It doesn't compute.
Now, somehow, they have got to get from this to it being Bush's fault.
See, because this guy, Drew Griffin, this is the normal reaction to have.
We're six years into the Obama administration.
We're still in Afghanistan because of Obama.
He's got his drawdown, but he's not pulled everybody out yet.
We're still there.
Gitmo's still open.
And we're still capturing bad guys around the planet.
And so this guy learns about all these delays, people not being treated and worse, and he can't believe it.
That's the normal reaction.
And this follows, you'll have to remember, we had a sound wave from the same reporter yesterday who couldn't believe that Obama would go out yesterday and act like he didn't know about any of this and be mad at the bottom of it.
So after this little exchange, Anderson Cooper weighed in with his two cents.
I mean, it's really incredible.
You know, we all hear about delays and stuff, but I mean, somebody who's recently returned with a war injury, with an IED injury, lost a limb, severe PTSD, is told to wait 10 months.
I mean, that's insane.
No, it's insane.
Now, what they're going to have to do is transfer this incredulity and anger to it being the fault of George W. Bush.
Because right now, the normal reaction, and this is six years, we're into the Obama administration.
We're in a second term.
How can Shinseki or Obama or whoever allow this to happen?
That's the normal reaction.
So let's re-listen to Pelosi from earlier today as she sets the stage for how all of this at the VA is going to end up being blamed on George Bush.
Maybe when we go into war, we should be thinking about its consequences and its ramifications.
You would think that would be a given, but maybe it wasn't.
And so we go into a war in Iraq, going to Afghanistan, leave Afghanistan for Iraq with unfinished business in Afghanistan.
10 years later, we have all of these additional veterans.
In the past five years, 2 million more veterans needing benefits from the VA.
That's a huge, huge increase.
So you see, Bush, 10 years later, we have all these additional veterans.
So this anger that you just heard seeing this incredulity, they're going to blame it on Bush, unnecessary wars.
We didn't need a war to get bin Laden.
Osama was killed by Obama without a war.
We didn't need a war.
Bush, these two wars, they were wasted, and now all of these wounded vets are coming back.
And poor Obama, he can't handle the load.
And nobody could because it was Bush's fault.
This is where they're going to take this.
That's what this investigation.
And, folks, they're getting away with blaming Bush on everything else, for everything else.
I mean, the public, 5149, still blames Bush for the economy, not Obama.
You just heard this guy from Cranberry, New Jersey.
His insurance premiums are $16,000 a year precisely because of Obamacare.
He's blaming Bush.
And he's applauding Obama because he thinks Obama is sticking it to the insurance companies, getting even with them, because everybody hates the insurance companies.
Obama does too, and he's getting even with them for us.
Wait till this guy finds out Obama's going to bail him out so they can continue to charge him $16,000 a year.
But I remember, ladies and gentlemen, when the Democrats used to pretend we had to fight in Afghanistan.
Remember, the whole time we're in Iraq, the Democrats said, this is a wrong war.
We don't need to be here.
We need to be in Afghanistan.
Afghanistan is where that war was launched.
Afghanistan is where bin Laden is.
Afghanistan.
They couldn't wait to get into Afghanistan.
But the wars are irrelevant.
The problem is the covering up, the lying, the hidden waiting list, people dying because of the lying.
They're not dying because of the wars.
They're not dying because of Obama or Bush.
They're dying because the VA can't handle it.
And so they're coming up with hidden waiting lists and any number of other things to cover up the inability to handle treatment.
And the people at the VA wanted to keep getting their bonuses.
And the bonuses were rooted in numbers of people treated.
So they had to doctor the waiting list to make it look like more people were moving off the waiting lists and getting treated, which is why they set up the secret waiting lists.
They transferred people to those to get them off the main waiting list to make it look like they'd been processed.
That's why the waiting lists were secret, so nobody could find them.
But the lid blew, and people have found out about it now because of a whistleblower who has told everybody what was going on.
And Bush didn't do any of this.
The Republicans didn't do any of this.
The Democrats own the Veterans Administration right now.
Shinseki and these guys have been running it since Obama was immaculated.
But nevertheless, we now know that there are plenty of really, really ignorant, gullible people who are just they want to blame Bush for all this.
So much has their hatred been ginned up.
So much do they hate Bush.
I mean, it took the media six years to make it happen or five, but they pulled it off.
Now, let's may as well stick with the same basic overall theme.
It's an AP story today, and the headline, nearly half don't care who controls Congress.
Isn't this fascinating?
It was just last week we had two polls, and they were devastating for the Democrats.
One poll said that by 65 to 30, the American people want people in Congress who are going to oppose and roll back Obama policy, 65 to 30.
There was another poll that was similar to that.
The margin was 60 to 30.
People wanted a different party from the president running the show in Congress.
So today, a week or two later, nearly half don't care who controls Congress.
Isn't it amazing?
This is a push poll, and I think what this poll has as its purpose is to lay the groundwork to deny the Republicans a mandate if they happen to win big in the midterms.
Who cares?
This is how the story begins.
It's by Connie Cass and Jennifer Gesta.
Who cares what party controls Congress?
Only about half of Americans, the other 46, 46%, they don't care.
And nearly half of the American people don't care who controls Congress.
See, the midterms don't matter, folks.
Even if the Republicans win in a landslide, they're not going to have a mandate because nobody cares.
Half the country doesn't care who wins.
Now, according to the polling data, the AP asked the question, generally speaking, would you say that you personally care a good deal which party controls control of Congress in the elections this fall, or don't you care very much which party wins?
And the results for that were 53% care a good deal and 46% don't.
And the media is hyping the 46% as being almost half.
But it's a weird question.
It sounds as if you have a personal stake in which party would win.
So there's that.
An effort here to make it look like nobody cares who wins the midterms.
So if the Republicans do win, they have no mandate.
Then, of course, the New York Times story, Democrats seek issues to lure midterm voters after races boy the GOP.
And again, this story is all about how the Democrats win big when they portray Republicans as uncaring toward working class Americans.
So we see where all of this is headed.
Blame Bush.
Nobody cares who runs Congress.
There really, therefore, isn't any need for any major change.
And Bush is responsible for the VA scandal.
Take quick time out.
We'll come back.
We'll resume before you know it.
Don't go away.
Heading back to the Fonzel Rush Bowl, we're at 800-282-2882.
This is Jones in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
Hi, great to have you with us.
Hey, Rush Jones, I've been listening to you since the Ross Perot days.
It's been a great 20 years.
To get into it, you know, with this VA fiasco, I would say that all these pundits are trying to frame up the administration as being incompetent.
And then they might go so far as to say they don't care.
But I just think it's a conscious decision to ignore this problem.
And it's because this problem concerns a voting group that votes statistically as Republicans or conservatives.
And I think that's backed up by the point that Rush, well, I think it's backed up by the point that Obama even said in a speech to a Latino group that he was talking to about one of their issues, a left-wing issue that either that, you know, we're going to reward our friends or punish our enemies.
And I just don't see, I think that, you know, Obama will come out to the national stage and give speeches about how a single woman who's 30 years old in law school should get $5 worth of birth control every month, but he can't come out in his six years of his presidency and say, our veterans are waiting six months for treatment and they're dying.
That shows me that he's caring about different groups of people based on their political leanings.
Based on their, well, of course.
I'm not sure what your point is.
I think my point is that veterans in the military and any other group that doesn't statistically vote for Obama, he considers their enemies.
Yeah, but the Obama is purposely ignoring the vets in their health care because they didn't vote for him in the first place.
And so he's not going to spend a lot of time or effort on them.
Instead, he's going to spend his time on the women who want birth control paid for everybody.
Yes, he purposely ignored them because he already recognized that it was a problem six years ago when he was campaigning for his administration.
Yeah, but as I said, look, one of the reasons, see, one of the reasons he had to ignore this, there's this thing called practicality.
He's out there trying to sell Obamacare.
He's working hard on this.
He's not going to get one Republican vote for it.
They're having to rewrite the rules.
They're lying to people like Bart Stupak and any number of things about abortion and whatever they can do to get every Democrat to vote for this thing because not one Republican will.
And they remember the Scott Brown race in Massachusetts.
I mean, it was nip and tuck here.
And Obama could not afford during this high sell period for Obamacare for any of this VA scandal to come up because it would illustrate, it would just make it all that much harder to get Obamacare signed or passed before he could sign it.
So they had to bury this VA story.
Now, you think they're buried because Obama doesn't care about vets and this kind of thing.
I know what you're saying.
If you're a Republican and you're in line, you're going to remain at the end of the line.
If you're a Democrat, they'll move you to the front and take care of you, whatever it is.
But in this case, I mean, we had the news from CBS today.
They've gone out and pulled veterans and veterans, and they're not blaming Obama for this, Jones.
CBS made a big deal of it this morning.
They went out, they surveyed some veterans overnight about Obama's speech yesterday, and they're not blaming him.
They're blaming Shinseki.
There's no reason for Obama to be mad at the vets and so forth.
But again, here again, I remind you of something else that came up earlier on the program.
Let's call Ralph from Ralph who remembered, and I didn't, that Obama, in March of his first year in office, 2009, actually suggested that wounded veterans pay for their own medical care.
We had to get rid of TRICARE.
He wanted them, since they volunteered, since they weren't drafted, since they volunteered, they should pay for their own health insurance for injuries and wounds incurred in battle.
Now, I don't know that anybody remembers that.
Our caller did.
But I know your point is that Obama doesn't care about veterans and they won't vote for him.
And so because they're not going to vote for him, he's not going to devote a lot of time.
I don't deny that that factors in the way Obama does things.
I don't think that's so much as what is going on here.
Remember, he's not on the ballot anymore, but the Democrat Party is.
Glenn in Fort Worth, Texas.
Great to have you.
Thank you for waiting.
You're on the EIB network.
Hi.
Hi, Rush.
Thanks for taking the call.
You're battling.
Thank you for your ears, your voice, and your enthusiasm sounds a whole lot better.
The reason why I'm calling is my dad retired from the Army.
He was in the Battle of the Bulge, driving a tank.
He was involved with the VA.
I was there as a youngster, and he didn't get good treatment at all.
And I've gone into the Air Force.
I have retired from the military, and I have issues dealing with servers connected.
And I chose not to go to the VA for help.
I used my insurance from the company in the TRICARE to go to civilian doctors that I knew and hospitals that I knew that would take care of me.
And they did.
I did not trust the VA.
And I saw a movie dealing with 4th of July with Tom Cruise.
And that was a pretty bad movie to come out.
And it kind of put a real bad taste into a lot of people.
But anyway, I want to let you know that I've told my family, if anything comes where I cannot do anything, do not take me to a VA hospital.
And this has been a wish of yours for how long?
For as long as I have been married, which is over 38 years.
So you're essentially saying that what's going on at the VA here, there's nothing new here.
It's always been someplace you'd rather not go if you didn't have to?
Yes.
It has been like you've been talking about is the culture.
And there's a lot of things going on in there.
It's a bureaucracy.
And, you know, this saying that is good enough for government work.
That is a saying that's been going on for a long time.
No, but, you know, you were, I guess you were, see, it always comes down to this.
You were fortunate.
You didn't have to.
You apparently had means to go elsewhere.
And some vets don't.
They're trapped and have to go there and have no choice.
And, you know, now I got to take a break here.
You hear the ear-splitting tone.
Be right back.
Don't go away.
And we're back.
Great to have you.
El Rushbo, as usual, talent on loan from God.
I want to go back for just a second to this AP story on how nobody cares about who wins the midterms.
It's a predicate, if you will, to deny the Republicans a mandate if they happen to win and win big.
The Associated Press is attempting to set up the fact that people don't care for the midterms.
It really doesn't matter.
And half of them, you know, nearly half don't care who wins or anything.
But that's not the point.
Because this poll is about something we already know.
And what we already know is that voter participation rates in midterm elections traditionally is way down when compared to presidential election years.
That, in fact, is what was noteworthy about 2010.
That turnout was through the roof.
And it was through the roof because of the Tea Party.
And that even needs to be said.
There is no Tea Party.
You know, the media loves to talk about how the Tea Party is dead.
There isn't really a Tea Party.
There is no leader.
There are nobody running for the Congress or the Senate on the Tea Party ticket.
There is no Tea Party building.
It is a mindset.
It's average Americans fed up with professional politicians.
And it's people who oppose runaway government spending, runaway expansion of government.
They're worried about their kids and grandkids' future financially.
They're worried about freedom and liberty.
And they want to maintain the principles that founded the country.
But there is no Tea Party per se.
But what happened in 2010 was that a lot of people who had never formally organized, they had voted, but they'd never formally organized in terms of opposing or supporting something did.
And it only was called a Tea Party because of the Rick Santelli on CNBC referred to the Tea Party and throwing a tea in the Boston Harbor and people objecting here in the here and now in a way similar to what happened during the days of the founding.
But the traditional midterm election turnout, we already know that voter participation rates are around 40%.
We know that 50 to 60 percent of the public doesn't care enough in midterms to go vote.
So they're taking a story there's nothing new about and nothing new in that 56 percent of the people or 46 percent don't care who wins because 46 percent don't vote.
But that does not tell us anything because what you have to look at and what you have to survey, what you have to poll is the percentage who do care and who are going to vote and what they think and what's animating and motivating them.
And that's what the AP is not doing.
The AP is ignoring them and taking the 46%, I'm not care enough, I'm not going to go vote.
It doesn't matter.
And they're using that 46% to say Republicans, if they win, aren't going to have a mandate.
It's done purposefully.
The only relevant thing here is what do people who are actually going to vote think?
And I don't care if it's 10% or 20% or 30.
They are the ones who matter.
And how they vote matters.
And the AP is studiously, purposely ignoring them and focusing, as far as their news story is concerned, for low information consumption.
And the headline is supposed to be, nobody cares.
This midterm is no big deal, anybody.
Look at it.
46% don't even care who wins.
That's because they're not going to vote.
They never do.
Unless it's something outrageously unique that drives them like 2010 did.
And this could be as big as 2010, I think.
But the fact that 46% aren't going to vote is immaterial.
Doesn't matter, except it can be used by the media to spin a story that things aren't bad for the Democrats when they really are.
And that's what that story was trying to do.
Plain and simple.
You have to know how to analyze this stuff.
That's why I say don't try this at home.
And don't leave it up to the professional analysts on cable TV because half of them are not.
They're going to totally miss the trick in that story.
I guarantee you, if that story happens to find its way to cable TV, you're going to hear it reported.
Hey, you know what?
In all this talk that we've done about the midterms, it turns out that 46% don't even care who wins.
And that's going to be the focal point, meaning nobody's really fired up about Obama.
Nobody cares.
It's not that much concern.
And it's going to be used to dispirit those of you who do care and plan to show up.
Purposefully done.
Don't let it bother you because it doesn't matter.
What matters is who is going to vote and how they're going to vote and what they think.
And that is going to have impact because it's going to be 56%.
Still a majority according to their own story.
Mike in Washington, you're next.
Great to have you here, sir, on the EIB network.
Hello.
Thanks, Rush.
How are you?
I'm great.
Glad you called.
Listen, I want to talk about this VAD fiasco.
I lay the whole thing right at Obama's and the Democrat Party's feet.
Obama for six years has been cutting budget, cutting budget, and it sure as heck hasn't been this food stamp budget he's been cutting.
And if you want to go back even further, sometime in the early 90s, early in the Clinton administration, there's a big move on to convert VA beds to AIDS beds.
may remember it we wanted to uh the clinton administration wanted to close down va hospitals because i was gonna what do you think would be the case if if if uh well never mind i did i do I'm going to answer that question.
Yeah, if AIDS were involved in this VA scandal, what do you think would be ⁇ you think there'd be any delays, a secret waiting list and all that?
There wouldn't be any delays.
No, not at all.
The idea is to take it away from people who earned the right to the bed and give it to people who didn't earn the right to the bed.
Well, it didn't, but I mean, it's clear that Democrats are going to pander to donors and constituency groups here.
And, you know, the last guy that called, or one of the most recent callers, said, look, Obama doesn't like military people.
They don't vote for him, and so they're not going to be at the top of his list.
Like you say, food stamp recipients will be.
And there's not that many of us anymore.
Veterans, you mean.
Yeah.
I mean, World War II had 15 million people in uniform.
Vietnam.
Wait a minute.
Wait a minute.
You heard her, Nancy Pelosi, today saying that we got two wars, two unnecessary wars worth of wounded veterans.
Yeah, right.
And that they're flooding the VA.
She's so full of it, you won't even want to talk about it.
Well, you don't have to convince me.
But she did.
She's out there saying that these two unnecessary wars have flooded the VA with wounded that we wouldn't otherwise have had.
And yet you're saying that this number pales in comparison to World War II.
That's obviously true.
Well, yeah, and it's like the fire department.
You don't close down the fire department because you have a couple of good years with no fires.
You don't close down the VA because you have a couple of good administrations with not many veterans needing the facilities.
But you've got to be there when it's needed.
And the Democrat Party keeps squeezing, squeezing.
When we have a time of relative peace, they squeeze it down and then they scream and holler when there's not enough when something gets hot.
It's mindless.
It's insane.
They don't mean it.
This screaming and hollering, though, it's phony baloney plastic banana good time rocket roll anyway.
I mean, I can't, Gary.
They're complaining about it because it's a scandal.
I mean, they've got to, I think Obama had to go out and act mad about it.
If he really was mad, it wouldn't have taken him all these years to show it.
But look, he's got a point here, folks.
Mike does, because World War II vets, this is going to shock you.
World War II veterans were 11% of the American population back then.
We're nowhere near that number, percentage-wise, today, with Afghanistan and Iraq and whatever other deployments there have been in the war on terror.
11% of the population.
World War II vets.
Nowhere near that now.
But I do think, you know, we'll find out soon enough.
But the Democrats, there's still gold in blaming George W. Bush for whatever.
And Pelosi's little press conference this morning sets the stage for what I think Obama's unnecessary investigation.
It's like this Drew Griffin guy at CNN said yesterday when Obama announced the investigation.
He actually went on CNN.
I'm surprised he was back today.
He went on CNN and said, what do you mean, investigate?
We already know what happened here.
We know about the secret lists.
We know about the deaths.
We know that people aren't being treated.
What do we mean investigate?
Well, Pelosi's little pressure today told us why.
They're going to do an investigation.
They're going to find out the VA has been flooded with injured and wounded vets because of two unnecessary wars started by George W. Bush.
And that's all they're going to have to say.
They're into turnout here, folks.
They've got to find something to turn people out.
They can't turn people out in November saying, vote for us so you can keep on getting more of this because nobody wants more of what they've offered.
So they've got to scare everybody about the Republicans and what they're going to do and how bad and mean they are.
And Bush works magic in that regard.
So just keep a shirt.
was your question, certainly, because it's veterans.
The reason they're worried that this could really hurt because it's veterans.
Veterans being wounded.
Veterans dying.
Veterans not being treated.
That crosses party lines in most parts of the country.
Okay, folks, that's it.
Sadly, the fastest three hours in media have to come to a screeching halt.
And that doesn't mean we're finished.
We never are.
And there's much more tomorrow.
Open Line Friday, which we'll be back at it in 21 hours.
So hope you have a nice rest of the day.
And we will be back revved up and ready to go all over again tomorrow.
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