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May 27, 2014 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:51
May 27, 2014, Tuesday, Hour #2
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Greetings, my friends, and welcome back.
It's great to have you with us.
It's Rush Limbaugh, the EIB network and the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.
Telephone number if you want to be on the program, 800-282-2882, and the email address, lrushbo at eibnet.com.
So the this amnesty business, this illegal immigration, dealing with it with amnesty, is just an absolutely disastrous way of solving the problem.
For those of you who are concerned, and there is, folks, there's a battle for the heart and soul of America.
There is a battle for the kind of country we're going to be.
It's being waged by the people we elected in 2008 to lead this country.
They are populated.
That regime is populated with people who believe this country is intrinsically flawed from the founding, that this country is the problem in the world.
This country needs to be brought down a couple pegs.
The people of this country need to find out what it's like to live elsewhere in the world.
We are not legitimately a superpower.
We only became a superpower because we were able to take things from other people around the world.
We didn't build them.
We simply marched around the world and took things and impoverished people in the process.
I mean, this is what they believe.
I love America.
I wish everybody did, and I hope everybody will, but we're not there now.
We're dealing with a fairly large, but still a significant minority.
We're being governed and led by a minority, which has the media on its side, which helps to create the impression that they're the majority.
And they are still in the midst of tactics, strategic tactics designed to overtake the country, hopefully with no resistance.
And the way they can do that, secure no resistance, is to guilt their opponents into basically letting them have what they want to have and do what they want to do under the guise that this is only fair.
And the Republicans are falling for this hookline and sinker.
You've got the Chamber of Commerce and the business lobby, and they see nothing but low-skilled labor, low-wage labor, cheap labor being brought in to do work Americans won't do, that old saw.
And that's as far as it goes.
There is no ideology as far as they're concerned.
This is strictly dollars and cents.
And it's a shame that that's the case.
So many people associate the Republican Party with big business and capitalism, and that's not the case anymore.
It's crony socialism or crony capitalism, however you wish to define it, but it involves corporate interests getting close to whoever is in power and having success be determined by that close proximity and that degree of support and association, rather than standing for a set of principles.
Now, conservatism is a set of principles.
And I believe that the vast majority of this country still is populated by people who live those principles and raise their kids with those principles.
But a lot of them have been made to feel guilty over this constant barrage of allegations and accusations of all the rotten things that America has done to the poor and the disadvantaged, and we need to make amends.
And hello, affirmative action, and never-ending affirmative action if we get amnesty.
This never-ending influx of poor, uneducated, or low-educated people, the minute they get here, they immediately fall into that category or those categories for which the left points fingers of blame at America.
America's the reason they're uneducated.
America is the reason they're poor because of income inequality or prejudice and bigotry.
And so we need more affirmative action.
We need to shift the scales.
We need to rebalance the scales in favor of the disadvantaged.
And they all get added to whatever victim group the left wants them to be members of.
And in this way, the blame America crowd grows, and they claim to have more evidence backing up the charge that America is responsible for these poor people.
That the American dream is an illusion.
And it never was real.
It was just a freak, sort of like a fad for a while.
It was a quirk of fate, but that wasn't real.
What's happening now under Democrat rule, that's what's normal.
We're defining down, and we're in the midst of decline that we're trying to imagine, manage, and we're now calling it the new normal.
And the more poor we import and the more uneducated we import, the greater the need for a big government to defend and protect those people from the ravages of bigotry and discrimination and racism.
That is the United States.
That's the belief system of the left.
The only way to fight that is with competing principles, a fearless defense of this nation's founding, a fearless defense of this nation's greatness and why it became great.
A fearless, factual defense of why this country became the world's lone superpower in less than 200 years.
There are specific reasons for it.
But a powerful United States with the identifying factor, the differentiating factor between us and the rest of the world is freedom and liberty and individualism and entrepreneurism.
The left can't peacefully coexist with that.
Stamp it out, make it the minority, and then blame it.
Blame all of that.
Entrepreneurism, rugged individualism, freedom, liberty.
Governments and businesses with no regulations will run roughshod over the poor and the disadvantaged, meaning we need Democrats to protect them.
And the more poor and disadvantaged we can get here, the better the case the Democrats have for what a rotten place this country is.
And that's what the purpose of amnesty is.
In addition to creating or providing a never-ending permanent underclass for the Democrats, People who will vote for Democrats as the stewards of big government, redistributing wealth to the poor and so forth.
And if you import people who believe that's the purpose of government, and that's exactly what amnesty is.
And I really believe the only way to stop this is with the principles of this nation's founding people, whoever we get, wherever we get them, whoever they are, but we've got to be able to proudly explain them, infectiously do so, defend them.
It used to be what the Republican Party was.
It used to be what it was known for.
And now the left has successfully made establishment Republicans feel guilty about that.
So establishment Republicans want to end the guilt.
They want to stop feeling that way.
And they want to, in their minds, get rid of the reasons the left can accuse them of that.
So they go along with amnesty.
And the one thing I can't get through their heads is that no matter what they do, the Democrats are going to continue to portray them as racists and sexists and bigots and who, no matter what they do, they're having too much success.
They're never going to stand.
They don't want the Republicans to really change is the bottom line.
I think it's a crucial point.
And amnesty gets talked about in the economic sense, but I think this other aspect of it is even poses even greater harm.
This idea that affirmative action never ends, the idea that a country is, by virtue of its founding, unjust and immoral, this is what they're trying to codify.
They are trying to establish it as fact, which will give them open season on redoing, restructuring this country in their eyes, to make it something over which they have never-ending total power.
And that means a loss of individual liberty and freedom.
And this is where we are headed.
In the meantime, how about, do you remember Valerie Plame?
Do you remember how you heard about her?
Do you really remember how you first heard about Valerie Plame?
Robert Novak, the late Robert Novak, wrote a column in which he casually mentioned that he'd been told that Valerie Plame, wife of Joe Wilson, had been over there supposedly on a mission assessing Iranian and other Middle Eastern nuclear capabilities.
His wife supposedly Novak outed her as a CIA agent and thus destroyed her career and ruined her life and made her a target.
This begot a special prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, to dig deep to find out who it was that told Novak.
Except by the time Fitzgerald got in gear, we already knew it was a guy named Richard Armitage who worked with Colin Powell at the State Department who had outed Valerie Plame.
Novak did not reveal his source at first, but it came to be known that it was Armitage who did it.
A man by the name of Scooter Libby was found guilty of it in a witch hunt.
And for years, the media was obsessed with who in the world went out this woman.
Why, what kind of ignorance and lack of attention?
What kind of arrogance could lead to people simply outing the identity of a very brilliant, it was said, very effective, just totally valuable CIA agent, Valerie Plame.
Meanwhile, she and her husband were on the covers of magazines in Washington driving around town in convertibles, not doing a thing to keep her identity secret.
Richard Armitage, who was the original leaker, was never made to pay a single price for this.
Scooter Libby was the target of a witch hunt, special counsel.
Scooter Libby, who worked for Dick Cheney, which is what made him an excitable or exciting target.
They tried to get Karl Rove as well.
So for, what was it, two years, the media couldn't let go of this.
And we told what a dangerous, reckless bunch of incompetents were at the Bush presidency, the Bush administration, and outing this poor woman because her husband did something that Bush didn't like, came back and said that the Iranians weren't doing nukes or somebody wasn't.
It was all about this yellow cake trip to Niger.
And so it was said that the Bush administration purposely outed her name to get back at her husband, and they're both kind of the elevator doesn't go all the way to the top.
Oh, you had the movie and everything.
Naomi Watts starred as Valerie Plame in the movie.
And it was an absolute media frenzy.
And the guy who leaked her, first thing, the leak was not that big a deal anyway.
But secondly, the guy who leaked her name to Novak never, when people found out he did it, they left him alone.
Because he was with Colin Powell, and they were both anti-George W. Bush.
So they were on the right side as far as the media was concerned.
So what happens this past weekend?
Obama, in trouble with the VA, has to make a super secret trip to Afghanistan to prove his bona fides with the military.
And the White House leaks accidentally, quote unquote, accidentally, the name of the CIA station chief in Kabul.
Not some analyst at Langley protected by security there, but the CIA station chief in Afghanistan, in Kabul, twice.
And they were told by somebody at the Washington Post who somehow knew that the name that there was supposedly on the guest list appearing with Bush at Bagram Air Force Base.
And somebody at Washington Post recognized, that's a CIA station chief, and told the regime about it.
And the regime goes, oh, and now you want, there's no, the media, why, it's just unfortunate.
It's just a momentary lapse.
This leak, the CIA station chief, this is a death warrant making his name public.
And the same media that couldn't get enough of the Valerie Plame leak is treating this as just another Unfortunate thing, just another unfortunate incident in a terrible year for Obama.
I don't know whether they did it on person.
I have no idea.
It doesn't matter.
They're just totally inept and incompetent.
And it just goes to show, if you ask me, in the final analysis, they don't care that much.
They really just don't care.
I got to take a break, and we're going to get some of your phone calls.
It's time for that.
People have been patiently waiting, but we'll get to the sound bites on this too.
And we got VA stuff coming up as well.
That's not over yet, so don't go away.
You know, actually, as I remember it, it was Richard Armitage outed Valerie Plame to Bob Woodward first, a month before Robert Novak found out about it.
And Armitage said, yeah, Wilson, he's mad about all kinds of stuff.
And, you know, his wife is over at the agency.
It was Wilson that was telling people when you get right down to it.
But the whole thing was outrageous.
Scooter Libby didn't do anything.
It was just, it was just, but the, forget that.
The media couldn't let go of it.
It was so bad.
It was life-threatening.
It destroyed this woman's life and her marriage and her world.
And oh my God, it was horrible, horrible.
And they let go of the name of the station chief at Kabul.
And it's just, well, an accident.
It's not intentional.
I just didn't mean anything by it.
And it's unfortunate the name got posted in the list.
It wasn't supposed to.
He didn't mean anything by it.
Blah, blah, blah.
It's sickening.
This double standard that exists because it's destructive.
Here's Doug in Tampa driving.
Great to have you on the program, sir.
Hello.
Hello.
Thank you.
Thanks for taking my call.
Yes, sir.
You bet.
I want to tie maybe a comment into what you were discussing earlier in your program with regard to everybody putting their life out for everyone to see.
Years ago, the whole cliche was the male would have a midlife crisis.
I think that's kind of changed.
Public media, Facebook, Twitter, different things like that.
If you look at, I've seen people that have had four, five, 600 friends, and they visit that every day.
And by the numbers, if you look at some of the people that are going on vacation, enjoying life, if you're just an average person, and it would appear that everyone is having a ball, everyone's doing it.
That's exactly right.
Everybody's out there living this life of luxury and fame and fun, and you're not.
And that's the impact social media has on you.
It is a factor.
We have a couple people here who want to talk about the Hunger Games.
And we'll start with Debbie in Gardnerville, Nevada.
Hi, Debbie.
Great to have you here.
Hello.
Hi, Wash.
It's good to talk to you.
Thank you.
Thanks for your time.
I'm doing well.
Thank you.
Good.
So I got a little upset at what you said because I think 99.999% of the time, you are right that the Hunger Games is not just about kids killing kids who lose a whole series.
It's about a revolution.
It's about people, excuse me, people mad at their government who's been oppressing them and who take over and attack their government.
And I actually can't be.
Hollywood wouldn't produce something like that.
You got to be.
Do kids kill each other in these movies?
I'm going to do, but that's not the point of the book.
That's not the point of the series.
The point of the series is that they finally get tired of being oppressed and they attack the government.
When you read the third book, it all comes to light, but you have to read all three.
Otherwise, people get the impression it's just kids killing kids.
And that's just not what it's really about.
All right.
Well, that's cool.
If that's how you see it, I'm not going to sit here and argue with you about it.
Well, did you read the third book?
Because you have to read the third book to get that.
If you don't read the third book, it is just kids killing kids.
No, in fact, I'll be honest.
I haven't seen one minute of the movie or read a book.
I had somebody tell me about it.
So I'm not surprised.
You know, when people tell you things, what you get is their impersonation or impression of it.
And I was just passing on what I had heard.
I haven't seen one minute of either of the movies, and I have not read any of the books.
Well, typical of any movie.
Here's the point.
Wait a second, though.
All this came up in context of this kid running amok and what his dad does.
And what did this kid do?
This kid was at killing people.
Do kids kill people in this movie or in the books?
Do kids kill kids?
Well, they do, but the reason they do it is they're forced to do it to keep their district alive.
If they don't go and do what they need to do, if they win, then their district gets goodies for the next year.
And if they don't win, then they're not just in the back.
Okay, okay, look, I cannot understand a word you're saying because of the cell phone connection.
But I gathered that you said before it all started jamming up was that they killed, yes, but because they were forced to, in order to save their districts, which is fine and dandy.
But, Debbie, thanks.
Call.
Appreciate it.
Another Debbie, McLean, Virginia.
Hello.
Hi, Raj.
How are you?
Good, thank you.
I've got a third-time caller dittos for you from a brush, babe.
And with my predecessor, Debbie, I like to agree with her that it's not glorifying the killing, it's criticizing it.
And the whole point.
Wait a minute.
Are we talking about the movies or the books here?
Both.
In the books, it is there because it is kind of to show you how bad this government is forcing their people, their citizens, to compromise their personal beliefs and devalue life the way they do for entertainment for the bourgeoisie capital people.
And the command and control government doesn't give the people in the districts, to put it in your terms, the ruling class versus the country class.
Let me try this.
Let me ask you a question.
Okay.
No wrong answer.
I just want to know what you think.
As you watch these movies or read the books, and you imagine young people who vote Democrat and think Obama's great and love big government, as they watch these movies, are they going to be inclined to be more in favor of Democrats and big government?
Or are they going to think, wow, this is not good.
I don't want to support government if it does this kind of thing.
Well, unfortunately, because of our education system, I don't think that they're getting the metaphor.
They're seeing that, oh, President Snow, he's a bad guy.
He's the villain.
And he's forcing these kids to go into this arena and kill each other while he and his friends in power, the ruling class, get to reap all the resources from each of the districts, be it coal mining, technology, farming, livestock, textiles, lumber.
You know, they're basically take the hard work of the citizens for themselves.
They never have to work a day in their life.
All they have to worry about is what color their hair is going to be or how much they can eat at the party and stuff.
And they watch it for entertainment, kind of like Running Man, where the government controls the media.
And to the citizens of the capital, the ruling class, it's entertainment.
It's a country class.
It's a threat and a warning for troublemakers.
I haven't seen what is it running either.
But let me ask you, would you describe the movie, the books, the movies, as anti-government?
Well, like I said, I think with anything you read, you get out of it what you put into it.
Just like people who read your books are looking for you to be the bad guy.
I look, you know, I mean, my personal conservative core beliefs, that's what I see.
I see anti-government, you know, the hero trying to overthrow this government.
And so that way the killing can stop and they can stop the hunger games.
Yeah, who is the hero?
Well, the main heroes are Cadnus Everdeen and Peter Malark, who are, as you mentioned before, are the, spoiler alert, two survivors of the first, in the first book.
And they go on and they have to kind of become a part of this system that they don't agree with.
And then they, you know, basically from the inside out, try to, you know, have their own personal statement, own personal protest.
Cadnus sort of becomes a beacon of the revolution, the symbol of hope that things can change.
Let's back up.
What?
You said people that read my books want to look for me to be the bad guy?
Well, I mean, even with your recent books, you know, people say they're appalled of, oh, Rush Limbaugh wrote a children's book, and he's going to, I've read some, you know, very biased reviews, which are obvious that people, you know, haven't read the books.
They claim that you and Sean Handy go back to change history, and that's not what you do.
Obviously, I've read the books.
My nephews have read the books, and you're trying to teach them the truth about what has been misinterpreted.
We're not trying.
We are.
Yes, you're succeeding very well.
You know, frankly, the reviews have been somewhat surprisingly good to me.
We've got a stack and collection.
They've been amazingly good.
Yeah, there's a...
Wait, you got an Amazon email that mentioned?
Yeah, that's true.
That's true.
Amazon's pitching them.
Go figure.
But I even read a review by some guy who just despises me.
Those books are actually quite good.
I have to admit it.
They've got to be hard to write.
I've not seen too many of these bad reviews.
But I get your point.
People have preconceived notions and they plug what they see into what they want to believe.
I haven't seen any of these books or movies and I haven't read any of the books.
And I'll tell you why.
The title is The Hunger Games.
And then when I first heard what these movies are about, I didn't get the connection between the title.
And then when I saw everybody in it winning awards, well, the hell with that.
And I can't.
Yeah.
See, I mean, I mean, no, it's really, really good.
The kids killing kids, that's just a minor part.
It doesn't, it's not the right, right?
They don't.
If everything I've heard so far about it, we ought to have legions of teenagers marching to the polls, voting every Democrat out of office if the movies and books are that good.
And we don't, do we?
What's that?
Oh, well, that's just, you know, it's fascinating.
Take a look at what people see.
It always is amazing to me.
That's why I try to keep an open mind about everybody's perception of things.
I mean, here, kids are killing kids?
It's not a big deal.
Okay.
Yeah.
They have to because they're being told to, and then they eventually rebel against it and they get rid of the oppressive government while they vote for one to live under themselves over and over again.
Well, I look at polling data and millennials are openly telling pollsters how much they hate big government.
They don't like it.
They think it's ineffective.
And they're voting for it at the same time.
Which I also understand because I understand why they're doing it.
And it all comes down to Republican branding when you get down to basics.
Anyway, Debbie, I appreciate the call.
Really do.
Got to take a brief time out, my friend.
Sit tight back after this.
Don't go away.
Okay, so I just got an email from somebody I know who is 60.
Don't believe what these two callers have told you.
These movies are sick.
They are about socialism and government control of food, and they are dystopian.
Now, I think I understand this.
Follow me on this.
We've had two women call today who praised these books to the hilt.
They're really, really good.
I don't know how old those women were.
I couldn't tell.
It's really tough to guess based on voices.
So I'm not going to.
But you take somebody who was nine or ten years old in the 50s and take them through the 60s or teenage years.
You put this movie in front of them back then, and it's a horror story.
Kids killing kids just was not portrayed.
War movies were.
But even the war movies back then, nowhere near the realism that you get today in terms of the gore.
But the idea of a movie that is entertaining, that has good in it, that shows a government making kids kill each other, unheard of.
So you take somebody who grew up, their formative years were the 50s and 60s.
You plug this movie, you put this movie in front of them, and I guarantee you're going to get sick.
But you put the movie in front of kids today, it's just no big deal.
It's just, I mean, compared to what else they've seen, what else they've heard, what else they've been exposed to, it's no big deal.
Maybe even can see themselves in it.
And I find all this fascinating.
It's why I have vowed that I was never going to become a fuddy dubby.
When I was 60, I was not going to look at what was going on with young people when I'm 60 and immediately put it down as trash or whatever.
But I can honestly tell you that something like this would never even gotten made back in the 50s or 60s.
Would you agree with that?
Something like this couldn't even get made.
Why?
Because it's rotten.
It's an absolutely horrible, worthless premise.
And yet today, it's award-winning.
Now, is that so hard to understand in an era where abortion occurs for the convenience of the living?
I think not.
There are reasons why what used to be considered coarse and taboo and not or intolerable today is considered art.
I remember the outrage when Piss Christ happened, Andre Serrano, the crucifix, piece of art submerged in a jar of urine.
And we were told we had to learn to appreciate.
Here's the difference, folks.
One of the differences, you put the Hunger Games or something like it, mathematically, dystopian movies.
What is troubling to me is the dystopian nature of these things.
That there's no good in the world anymore.
That everything's right.
Everybody's corrupt and everything's sick.
And no, I'm not talking about just this movie.
I'm talking about if I had somebody from the current drive-by media here explaining why the hunger games or movies like them are winning awards, it's because this is the world people live in today, Rush.
This is what life is about to them.
This is what they're scared.
This is what they see as possibly their future.
To which I would say, why?
How has that happened?
It wasn't all that long ago that the future was an optimistic thing, not a pessimistic thing.
It wasn't that long ago that the future, I mean, wasn't that long ago that young people couldn't wait to get out of the house, couldn't wait to strike out on their own, couldn't wait to make their own way in the world.
And the reason for that was bubbling, effusive optimism, eagerness.
But today there's not so much of that.
There's a lot of pessimism, fear, and even dystopianism in the media that defenders of it are, well, This is what the world is to them today.
This is what – well, then I would say, how did that happen?
That's not – That's a shame.
I mean, I know pessimism's easy.
I know anybody can do it.
I know optimism takes work.
Optimism has always been an applied discipline.
But it used to be natural.
It used to be a defining characteristic of leaders and people who were otherwise inspirational.
Today, it seems like People who can see the evil ahead and who can see the horrors.
They seem to carry a lot of weight, the pessimists.
I don't know that that's, I mean, I would much rather have everything in life be optimistic or as much, you know, tempered with reality.
I mean, not everything is.
I'm not talking about rose-colored glasses or anything here, but a dystopian.
So many movies are dystopian.
End of the world destruction.
You know, L.A. is nothing more than a giant landfill dump of people flying around in space machines and all kinds of human debris are involved and selling them this and that.
And the whole idea is to escape it.
And L.A. is not going to be that.
Well, no, it's not.
It's not going to be that.
I'll tell you what I think some of this also shows, and I'm going to get in trouble for this, but I'm going to say that I think it shows how desperate some people are to find their ideas and beliefs validated by Hollywood.
I really do.
On our side, I mean, on our side.
Got to take a quick, just like people hope one day the news media will see things our way.
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