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May 27, 2014 - Rush Limbaugh Program
34:13
May 27, 2014, Tuesday, Hour #3
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Views expressed by the host on this program documented to be almost always right, 99.7% of the time.
It's a delight to have you here.
Ladies and gentlemen, the one and only Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.
Now, let me ask you a question.
Let's take a look at Star Wars.
Do you think that young people when they watched Star Wars, the first three of them back in the had to be the 70s and I guess some into the 80s,
you had Darth Vader, the evil emperor, you had their Death Star, and they were out to wipe out everybody who stood in their way, from little Yoda to Luke Skywalker to Princess Leia and all of those, you know, oddball little freedom fighter guys.
Now, do you think that young people saw the Democrat Party in Darth Vader and the evil emperor and the Death Star and that they saw Reagan conservatism in Luke Skywalker, Yoda, Obi-Wan Kenobi?
I don't.
If they did, then the Democrats wouldn't be having such an easy time.
My only point is, I finally found out who wrote these Hunger Game books and movies, Suzanne Collins.
And she admits to being a far-left liberal, concerned with the environment, concerned with too much war and economic deprivation.
And so I've told somebody, well, she made a mistake then because her movies are real Republicans.
No, they're not.
That's my point.
They can't possibly be.
Anyway, I told Snerdley, I said, it's amazing that you can, Snerdley said to me during the break, it's amazing that you can, you know, you turn 60, 63, and keep an open mind and not turn in an old fuddy-duddy.
But does that mean you're not going to be honest and say that the music in the movies today is absolute garbage?
Some of this stuff?
And I said, well, go back and look at your era.
Look at Psycho and Alfie.
There were all kinds of Forest Day, which was just as depraved and shocking as this stuff is today.
It's just relative to what your baseline is.
The difference to me today, it really does boil down to optimism and pessimism to me.
Even, you know, back when I was a young people, eating up whatever the media that I liked back then was, be it entertainment, books, movies, TV shows, it was all, for the most part, at the end of the day, at the end of the movie, optimism triumphed.
There was no such thing as a dystopian.
That didn't happen until the left got totally concerned with nuclear weapons in the 70s and the 80s and the Phil Donahue show and so forth.
And then you had the Mad Max movies, which were a post-apocalyptic world where there was no gasoline except what you could steal.
Dystopia, the opposite of utopia.
Dystopia is just absolute disaster.
And that's the difference to me.
And if you check, if you be open-minded, if you check attitudes today, take a look at the millennials.
What are they telling you?
They've lost faith.
American dreams over.
No chance for them.
Those days are just, those are long gone as far as they're concerned.
All they face it is $200,000 minimum student loan debt, no job.
And they're not blaming Obama.
They're just down on America.
The old promise of America doesn't exist for them.
And I think a never-ending barrage of pessimism and dystopianism has to have played a role in that attitudinal thing.
You can, look, anybody well-adjusted and go watch anything, come out of it fine and dandy.
If you're well-adjusted, you can go watch the biggest horror slasher movie in the world and come out of there not wanting to go do that kind of thing to people.
If you're not well-adjusted, if it fits your worldview, it's just going to confirm the pessimism, the uselessness, and so forth.
That's the difference to me today.
In fact, folks, this is one of the reasons why the whole notion of writing children's books on American history appealed to me because it was an opportunity to restore.
I mean, the story of this country is a fascinating story in human history.
It is one of, it doesn't need any embellishment, doesn't need any exaggeration.
What happened in founding this country is an absolute miracle when it comes to human history on this planet.
It is just an amazing story.
But you and I all know that what's happened, and not just in the education system, is the whole idea of what America stands for has been under assault for a long time when the multiculturals came and got control of things.
And it's worked.
All you need to do is look at polling data of attitudes and measure how much optimism versus pessimism there is out there.
And you'll know exactly what I'm talking about.
These Hunger Games books are for kids 14 to 16.
They're not for adults, but adults go watch the movies and books.
And I do think that there is a real craving, sad though this may be, I think there's a real craving among many conservatives to see their values reflected in popular culture because we've lost it.
Admittedly, everybody admits we've lost it.
Even Frank Rich had a piece over the weekend in the Atlantic, or I think, or New York, wherever he writes, that there's no such thing as conservative comedy.
Conservatives aren't funny.
Well, we've been doing comedy and humor here for 25 years.
The left is who doesn't find it funny because you can't make fun of them.
See, here's the left view of comedy.
Comedy can only legitimately be done if the powerless are making fun of the powerful.
Therefore, the left is filled with powerless people who need a big government looking out for them.
So if you start, like in my case, a homeless update, that's not humor, that's cruelty in their worldview.
All these things that we did that you thought were the funniest stuff you've ever heard, nobody ever came on, nobody made fun of liberals.
They don't find that funny because they look at themselves as downtrodden, the disadvantaged.
They need a big government protecting them.
They're all Julias or these pajama-clad metro-sexuals running around, and everybody's out to get them except Obama, who's there to protect them, and other Democrats.
So to the left, if you're sitting around waiting, if you are a conservative and you're sitting around waiting for your values and all be reflected in popular culture, as long as it's owned by the left, it ain't going to happen.
But if you're desperate to see it, you might go watch a movie and think, aha, it's a secret conservative message.
Look at that.
And you're being fooled.
Well, when the producer, the writer, the director, and everybody in it is a staunch ultra-liberal, then you.
Yes, it is.
It damn well is the intent.
It's no, it's for people to figure out that it's Obama, it's fine, but it's not just Obama.
It's liberalism, totalitarianism, authoritarianism.
George III represents tyranny.
And so if you put modern words, modern words uttered by liberals in the mouth of George III, the message is to convey what tyranny is to young readers.
Well, I don't know President Snow from President Frost because I haven't seen these movies.
And now you're making me so mad about this, I don't care that I want to.
But I'm almost obligated to now.
What does hunger games have to do with it?
Why did they call it hunger games?
It's obviously not about games and it's not about hunger.
They don't.
Oh, they don't have enough food to eat.
Oh, so they kill people in order to have enough food to eat.
They don't kill people?
Oh, see, they do kill people, but that's not the point, Russ.
That's not the point.
They kill people.
Kids kill kids, but that's not the point.
You can't look at it.
Apparently, no food stamps in Hunger Game Dystopia.
No food stamps.
You got to kill.
You got to kill to eat.
That's the way it was in the caveman days.
Fred Flintstone and the boys.
They didn't have food stamps.
They didn't have social security disability.
Hell, they had to conquer dinosaurs and ride the things to be able to move stones around.
But no, seriously, the reason the history books seem so just the natural to me.
I am an optimist.
I always have been.
And there's no earthly reason, if you look at my life, why I shouldn't be.
If I were a pessimist, boy, what a mistake that would be, given the blessed life that I've had.
So I'm an optimist.
I believe in optimism and happy endings and stuff.
They're possible.
But I don't think there's a whole lot of that now.
I think because the modern definition of reality is dystopia.
The modern definition of reality is how everything sucks.
I'm telling you, it wasn't that way when I was growing up.
And I am not being a fuddy duddy.
I'm just trying to chronicle some of the differences.
And I, you know, how much impact they have on people.
I still may, if you're self-adjusted, well-adjusted, all this crap in the world is not going to affect you.
But look at this kid.
Kid and his $40,000 beamer.
He was not bad looking.
There's a lot of this stuff I don't understand.
It didn't look like they said he had Asperger's disease or whatever it is.
I've known some people with that.
That can't function.
That's worse than, it's similar to autism, but I mean, you've got to be kid gloves around people who have that disease.
It doesn't take much to have them just go off.
And so you have to kid glove everybody.
It's terrible.
I don't know that this kid supposedly had that.
And then, folks, it's also true that there's just plain bad people out there, no matter what you do.
It's just evil is out there.
And no amount of gun control or caring or concern, no number of hashtags is going to stop it.
But see, that reality is overlooked.
And these events like this are all rolled into the dystopian nature the left presents everybody, this overall pessimistic view.
And they benefit from it is the point.
Things are so bad, you need your big government run by us to protect you from all of this horror that's out there that this country has become.
It's insidious to me.
And I think this country story is amazing.
I think it's optimism, optimistic.
I think it's uplifting the story of this country and our founding fathers as some of the greatest inspiration people can expose themselves to.
Now it's time for an obscene profit break here at the EIB Network.
So sit tight.
We'll be back and continue right after this.
Hey, we're back, El Rushbon at Cutting Edge of Societal Evolution.
So you know what I thought I'd do?
I thought I'd go to some popular liberal website and just put in a search term hunger games, see what I got.
And that's what I did.
I went to the Huffing and Puffington Post and I entered Hunger Games as a search term.
And I found a headline to a post, a story on the Hunger Games movies at the Huffing and Puffington Post.
You want to know what it says?
The Hunger Games and the death of winner take all capitalism.
So at the Huffing and Puffington Post, they clearly watched the Hunger Games and they were cheering it.
This is the greatest thing for socialism we've ever seen.
Why this thing destroys free market capitalism?
Now, again, I haven't seen these flicks, haven't read these books, so I'm a little bit of a disadvantage.
I could fake it like many hosts would lie to you and claim they've seen it.
Just keep not, I haven't, don't care that I haven't seen them yet.
I can still discuss it.
I just think it's fascinating.
I got all these people telling me today, Rush, this is a secret message, the conservatives.
Boy, this is Hollywood really ripping into big government.
And here's a big government website saying it's the best movie for their view that they've ever seen.
And how about this winner take the death of winner take all capitalism?
Capitalism is not winner take all.
Liberalism is.
Liberalism is where everybody's poor except the Fidel Castros of the world.
It's just the exact opposite.
Anyway, back to the phones, people patiently waiting.
Jeremy, Seattle, Washington, great to have you on the EIB network.
Hello.
Hey, Rush.
Good to talk to you.
So my point is I think the media just love to take their lobs and hit them out of the park.
They can ask the easiest questions of all, which is, if there was no gun, could he have committed this crime with a gun?
Of course you can ask tough questions like, what kind of money?
No, no, no, whoa, whoa.
Yes, he could have.
He did commit this crime with machetes and knives.
No, I understand that, but he didn't commit the gun part of it with it.
All I'm saying is they don't ask the questions about the person, about what's actually going on inside.
They don't ask, what if he would have been taught abstinence and that abstinence could have led to a really fulfilling relationship with a wife or partner?
How much pornography did he have on his laptop on his computer?
How much time would his parents actually spend with him growing up?
How much time did he spend with a nanny, somebody that didn't really care for him, was just paid to be with him?
They ask no questions that actually get to the heart of why somebody would make a decision to devalue human life the way this person does.
If I were a liberal host and you were just called at that very point, you know, I would say to you, who gives you the right to judge?
How do you know he was messed up?
How do you know he wasn't justified?
How do you know that this isn't what he thought was best?
How do you know?
What gives you the right to judge everybody?
And then hang up on you.
And I wouldn't have anything to say to that.
I would just say that I'm just asking why don't they even ask the question?
Well, they don't care.
And everything that you were just talking about, the dystopian society, why these people are calling and saying, oh, no, I see something conservative in it, leads to exactly what it is.
They don't care.
Everybody sees whatever they want to see in it.
People used to talk about C.S. Lewis's Lion Witch in the Wardrobe and say, oh, no, it's a picture of God and this.
And C.S. Lewis himself said, no, that's not what I wrote it.
I wrote it as a fun book.
And yeah, maybe it pulls from things, but I didn't write it as that.
And I think these, when people try to see what they want to see in something and then imagine that everybody else is going to see it, it removes from them a responsibility to talk to somebody about it the real things.
They just think that somebody's going to watch a movie and all of a sudden become conservative is ridiculous.
I get your point, but in this era, those questions are never going to be asked.
They're considered too controversial.
They're irrelevant.
They're judgmental.
And especially your point about abstinence.
I mean, the thing about abstinence, let's say, in preventing AIDS or unwanted pregnancy, abstinence works every time it's tried.
Every damn time.
It works.
It prevents unwanted pregnancy.
It prevents sexually transmitted diseases.
It prevents HIV.
But you don't dare say so.
And you know why you don't dare say so?
Because it's silly, it's stupid, it's old-fashioned, and it's unrealistic.
What do you mean, abstinence?
Kids are going to have sex, and we can't stop it.
We better find a way to make it as safe as we can.
So you take that cucumber to school and get a balloon and show them how to use a condom.
And then most boys are going to say, cucumber, what's that supposed to be?
Because it doesn't look like a cucumber to them.
I wish it did, but it doesn't.
Well, you know, I'm the mayor of Realville.
Now, that's the point.
He was abstinent.
What Jeremy's point here is it's real simple.
If he had been raised with the idea that not being promiscuous was good for him, then he wouldn't be jealous of all these people saying how much they're getting every day and night.
But you can't, that's just so old-fashioned and unrealistic.
I mean, abstinence is no, kids are going to do it.
You can't stop them.
And just like when Nancy Reagan's just saying no with drugs, I mean, that was laughed out of town.
And so is abstinence laughter.
His only point was if he'd had a couple of parents that said, you know, son, you're going to be better off in the long run.
It's going to have more meaning to you later on.
Maybe he wouldn't have gone off the deep end.
Who knows?
How are you?
Welcome back.
This is Rushlin Boy.
Half my brain tied behind my back, just to make it fair.
This is Tommy in Knoxville, Tennessee.
Great to have you on the program.
Hi.
Hey, Rush, thanks for taking my call.
I'll be as quick as I possibly can.
I just want to make a comment on all of this VA crap that's going around.
You know, question I have is, why now, after all of these years, you know, this kind of stuff has been going on with the VA since Moby Dick was a minute, and nothing's been done about it.
You recall several years ago when it came out the conditions that soldiers were subjected to in the VA hospitals, and on both sides of the aisle, you had Republicans and Democrats alike.
Well, we have never seen such conditions, yada, yada, yada.
Are you telling me that you, as a congressman or an elected official, have never received on behalf of a soldier or from a soldier himself a letter or a phone call requesting assistance because they can't get anything done through the VA and that you have never visited soldiers from your district that are wounded and in these hospitals?
Now, what this country needs is somebody like me that's an average guy that's going to stand up for what he believes in and not be influenced by some lobbyist in Washington and by somebody else's influence.
You're going to do what you feel is right.
I honestly believe what they need to do in Washington, two things.
In a session of Congress, what I would like to do is walk in, walk up to my congressman, and say, get up, you're in my seat.
What they need to do is when these guys get them all in Congress, get them all accounted for, lock the doors and put them under oath so they don't have time for you to say, look, you can ask me questions.
Here are the questions that you're allowed to ask me because I have prepared responses for these.
Because such as the Affordable Care Act, there are about four or five questions they need to put these jokers under oath and ask them.
Number one, when you voted for this to vote it in, did you vote your conscience?
Number two, did you vote the general consensus of the people that you represent in Washington?
Number three, did you vote because you were under duress?
Did you understand what you were voting for when you voted for it?
And number two, or number five, if you had the opportunity, would you change your vote and retract your vote from voting it in?
And you know what the answer to every one of those questions would be, whether you put them under oath or not.
The Democrat Party is going to vote to advance its agenda no matter what, whether there's a lobbyist involved or not.
Anything that happens in the news, even crime, is a way to advance their agenda.
You're not going to get them to admit they made a mistake.
You're not going to put them under oath or not.
Now, what changed about the VA?
Obviously, the Hunger Games has heightened people's attention to what's happened there.
Obviously, it's had a dramatic impact, much more than I ever knew.
No, I'm just kidding.
But he's got a good question.
Let me try to answer his question legitimately.
Why now?
Why all of a sudden now?
Because everything he said is true.
For the longest time, there were horror stories about the VA for decades.
So what is happening now has to be demonstrably even worse than the status quo.
Everything has a baseline.
Moynihan called it defining deviancy down.
You try to fix something that's going wrong and you fail, you give up, you just declare that it's normal and move on now.
Okay, so the VA, what was normal was it was lousy.
Then it got so bad that it was even worse than what it was accepted to be.
And how did that happen?
Do you remember, ladies and gentlemen, at the early days of Obama trying to sell Obamacare, he went out and blasphemed doctors, particularly surgeons.
He accused private sector doctors, surgeons, of putting their pocketbooks before the health of their patients.
They did unnecessary amputations because they could pocket 30 grand.
Remember all that?
He went through a litany of things.
People that did amputations or took out an appendix unnecessarily or what have it.
He really ripped into private sector doctors as just evil profiteers performing unnecessary medical procedures because they could get a lot more money for those.
Well, isn't that exactly what the bureaucrats at the VA did here that's got everybody up in arms?
I mean, they didn't amputate limbs or take out tonsils to line their pockets, but they let human beings die and monkeyed around with waiting lists in order to earn their bonuses.
It may have been bad forever at the VA, but you didn't have 40 people on a special waiting list dying.
And why did they die and why were they on a waiting list?
It's because the VA was overwhelmed and they had to do something to show that the names had been moved through the system.
So they came up with super secret waiting lists that they put people on.
And those people never got seen.
They were never, they didn't get in to see a doctor.
This greedy, heartless doctor narrative was used very effectively by Obama to get Obamacare passed.
He ginned up a bunch of hatred and suspicion of private sector doctors.
It was deliberate.
It was vicious.
It was just as bad as if you like your policy, if you like your doctor, you can keep them.
That was a huge lie.
So the greedy, heartless bureaucrat narrative is what happened here at the VA.
And I find it fascinating that exactly what he accused private sector doctors of doing was happening in his own bureaucracy.
And I think when news of this hit, it was so bad, so below what had been normal.
You know, VA might have been bad in the past, but they didn't lie about massive numbers of deaths, and they didn't keep separate sets of books, all for the purposes of securing bonuses.
And I'm not saying this to excuse what had gone on in the past, but I mean, Caller had a legitimate question.
Why now?
Why all of a sudden now?
You can ask that about pretty much anything going on in the country.
Why not?
Because it is such now.
These six years have been a horror story for this country, for the economy, foreign policy.
I mean, it really is starting to add up now.
The media just chalks this stuff up.
Well, you know, it's just an accident that we outed the CIA station chief in Kabul.
Here, grab soundbite number three.
We have a little montage here.
You know, poor Scooter Libby, Valerie Plame was sitting at a desk in Virginia.
Her husband outed her, and then Armitage outed her to Bob Woodward, who couldn't believe what he was hearing.
And then Novak ends up outing her in his column, and she ends up being famous and having movies and books written about her and so forth.
And Scooter Libby gets found guilty for leaking her when he didn't have anything to do with it.
The regime comes along and outs the station chief, the CIA station chief in Afghanistan.
The media treats it like a little side note.
The White House accidentally blowing the cover of the CIA's top officer.
The CIA's top officer had his cover blown accidentally.
The White House mistakenly identified the CIA's top officer.
The White House mistakenly blew the cover.
The White House accidentally revealed the identity.
The White House inadvertently released the name.
Accidentally revealing the identity of the top CIA officer.
The White House accidentally leaked the identity.
That is a big blunder.
Big intelligence blunder.
This was a colossal one.
The White House quickly fixed its error and a big oops from the White House.
You can't fix the error.
What's this poor guy going to do?
He's just been outed.
And there are pictures of him now in addition to his name.
He was up there with Obama.
Here's Jonathan Martin.
We'll see the New York Times talking with John King at CNN this morning on CNN's New Day, the inside politics segment.
And here's the conversation they had.
Keystone Cops element to this.
Is this just a second-term mistake?
Is it some tired military person in Afghanistan?
It does strike me as when it rains, it pours that these guys are just going through a rough patch.
And even a sort of feel-good event to go and support the troops, they can't even do that without something going wrong.
Oh, it's such a shame.
It's just, you know, when it rains, it pours.
Man, it's just so unfortunate.
It's so sad.
Poor Obama.
He's trying so hard.
He's so smart.
Oh, God, he's so smart.
Yeah, man, victimized once again by stupid idiot underlings.
Wow, it's just, man, when it rains, it pours.
Here's John Bolton.
He was on Fox this morning.
Bill Hammer said, look, others contend the Valerie Plame incident was similar when she sent her husband to Africa to investigate some claims of evidence that Saddam was doing something nefarious.
So her name goes public.
Is it a fair comparison, John?
No, I don't think so.
I mean, Valerie Plame's name was made public by Rich Armitage, Secretary Colin Powell's deputy, and then resulted in some very unfair treatment of a lot of other people in the Bush administration, like Scooter Libby.
But that was just a malicious piece of gossip.
This is utter incompetence.
There is no justification for this.
There's no explanation for it.
It's like there's nobody in charge at the White House.
I think it's a problem that runs through Obama's administration.
Who is in charge on these things?
They don't care is the bottom line.
This is so beneath them, all this CIA station chief secrecy stuff.
Hell, I'm only over here because I'm in trouble in the VA anyway.
I don't care about this.
This is Dave in Carriesburg, Ohio.
Great to have you on the program, sir.
Hi.
Hi, Rush.
Hey, I was listening to what you've been hearing about the Hunger Games being anti-conservative, and I thought, man, I had the exact opposite reaction.
I got dragged there.
I had no interest in it, and I was bored, and then I just became very depressed because it was as if I was watching the evening news with this administration and liberalism just run amok.
There was no hope, and it was just big government.
I mean, I saw the exact opposite.
It was I didn't see anything anti-conservative.
It seemed almost anti-big government.
See, this is fascinating to me.
How old are you?
Do you mind my asking?
46.
46.
Who dragged you to this movie?
Who wanted you to see it?
An acquaintance, a girlfriend, took me to it.
Oh, my gosh, I don't want to go there.
Well, that's all right.
But somebody same age as you, pretty close.
Yeah, yeah.
Was this supposed to be a date, and the content of the movie was so bad that it ruined the night?
It didn't ruin the night, but I was a little down afterwards.
But yeah, it was a date.
She had read the books and said, I want to go see it.
And, you know, we did discuss it afterwards, and I said, my gosh, this is.
I wonder if this is a male.
Did your quote-unquote date like the movie, think it was great and all that?
She enjoyed it.
She liked the stars, and I didn't know who some of them were.
Well, look, this is really minimal data that we have here today.
I mean, it's really minimal.
It's tough to make this statement, but it's because it's all anecdotal.
But every woman that's called here and talked about this just raves about it and loves it.
And this guy didn't see it that way at all, which is not surprising in the least.
That's it, my friends.
Sadly, we are out of busy broadcast moments.
Busy broadcast time come to a screeching halt.
But we'll be back tomorrow.
Thank you so much for being with us today.
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