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May 30, 2014 - Rush Limbaugh Program
35:35
May 30, 2014, Friday, Hour #3
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Yes, America's anchorman is away for a few days.
This is your undocumented anchor man.
Happy to be with you, coming to you live from Ice Station EIB in far northern New Hampshire, just south of the Quebec border.
If you're fleeing the country, do stop in and say hi.
We always like to see you.
You can't miss us.
We've got a big sign on the highway saying last rush guest host before the border.
So we're easy to spot and love seeing you.
It is the end of the week, and you know what that means.
Live from Ice Station EIB, it's open live Friday.
Yes, 1-800-282-2882 is the number to call.
If you want to get in on the program, don't forget that Monday to Thursday, we are in the tight, ruthless grip of a broadcast specialist determining the content of the program as only he can, because uncredentialed, unqualified persons just blundering in and introducing all kinds of topics just would send the whole show to hell.
So we do not have that Monday to Thursday.
But there is no highly trained broadcast specialist here today.
He's gone on holiday for a week.
And so anything goes.
1-800-282-2882, call me up, talk about anything you want.
If you think, by the way, if you think this president, if you like that West Point speech, if you like the president's foreign policy, if you think it's all going swimmingly, if you think the 1% contraction in the economy was really just an unfortunate case of shrinkage due to the cold weather, then call up and by all means defend what's going on because I love to hear from liberals.
We're all about the bipartisan outreach on this show.
1-800-282-2882.
Looking forward to hearing from you.
A couple of other things in the news today that are small things, but actually not small.
A judge in Hawaii has sentenced a father to one year of probation and a $200 fine for making his son walk a mile home from school.
Robert De Monde of Kilawea in Hawaii said he picked up his son from school and asked about a matter that had been brought to his attention going on at the school and the son was unresponsive and Mr. De Monde pulled over and made the son walk a mile home in order to think about his actions and possibly revise his position by the time he got home.
So he gave the kid like a 20-25 minute walk or whatever it was.
And he said when he was called into court for endangering the welfare of a minor, he said that he didn't think the punishment was morally wrong or criminal and that it was a common form of punishment when he was growing up.
And the judge, Kathleen Watanabe, said the punishment was old school and no longer appropriate.
And that's interesting to me that the state can presume to punish a parent for punishing a child by making him walk a mile home from school.
And that's really of a piece with Michelle Obama's thing on school nutrition, her editorial in the New York Times.
By the way, if the New York Times is going to hire political editorialists, I found Vladimir Putin's editorial far more readable than Michelle Obama's.
But Michelle Obama's presumption that the commissar of school lunches, she's the commissar of school lunches, as Carol Costello at CNN said, she signed the school lunch bill into law.
So she is the commissar of school lunches somewhere in Washington, and she decides what the schools are going to give your children to eat from Maine all the way to Hawaii.
Maybe this guy, Robert DeMond, maybe his son was in a bad mood because he'd only had Michelle Obama's school lunch for lunch.
I don't know.
But once you accept that a commissar of school lunches in Washington has the right to set school lunches for the children of 320 million people, it's not actually a big step to then saying that the children are ultimately not in the care of their parents, but in the care of the state.
And in fact, it's entirely reasonable if you decide to make your kid walk a mile home or half a mile home for him then to then you to find yourself up in court, fined $200, giving you a one-year probation.
I don't even know whether that's what is that, a felony he's got there?
Maybe he no longer has the right to own a gun or run for public office because he made his kid walk a mile home from school.
By the way, that used to be thought of as a character building thing.
I'm so, the judge, this judge, Kathleen Wadanabe, who dismissed it as old school, I'm so old school and so old that I remember when that was thought of as character building.
Sir Richard Branson, the guy who owns Virgin Airlines, and in fact, he's built this private sector rocket ship to the moon.
He's going to be offering space tourism flights soon.
So it's not just flying from Boston to Heathrow anymore.
He's actually, you're going to be able to get into a rocket ship owned by Richard Branson, and he'll fly you up into space and you can explore undiscovered planets with Sir Richard Branson.
When he was something like five, his parents were driving home from Scotland and they just booted out of the car 200 miles from home and as an initiative test, told him to find his own way home with three pence halfpenny in his pocket.
And it was regarded as character building.
And he went then on from that first character building test to go on to build his multinational global music trains, planes, cell phone empire.
And the idea now that a parent does not, in fact, even have the right to make their child walk home from school is a little bit problematic to me.
And again, we get to this thing.
What kind of people, what kind of people, when you raise everybody in a cocoon, when parents have no say over their children, when their children's lunch has been personally designed for them by Chief Commissar Michelle Obama of the Commissariat of School Lunches, when you raise them in that kind of world, what kind of people ultimately do you wind up with when they're adults?
The state senate in California is currently considering SB 967, a bill that would make all schools in the state that receive public funds, among them the University of California, California State, community colleges, include a, quote, affirmative consent standard, unquote, as part of their sexual assault policy.
So in other words, it's not enough now.
In California schools, it will not be enough to say, what part of no don't you understand, no means no, and all the rest of it.
You actually affirmatively have to answer yes to something called this affirmative consent standard.
Now in California, I don't really have much to do with the government of California, except if you spend two hours in the state, if I land there and get driven 20 minutes from the airport and give a speech and then 20 minutes back, it's an incredibly complicated tax thing just to get the payment for giving a speech there.
So there's always tons of paperwork involved in California, and I wouldn't be surprised now if this affirmative consent standard becomes part of it.
So in other words, if you're at a California school, you won't be able to ask that cutie for a date and take her to a bar.
And if the evening pans out for you, it will be an illegitimate encounter unless she has first signed an affirmative consent standard to whatever it is you're planning to get up to with her.
This is like that, the bureaucratization of dating.
The bureaucratization.
We've had it.
I mean, this is all we talk about.
Everything comes back to it.
The bureaucratization of veterans' health care, the bureaucratization of your kids' lunch, the bureaucratization of walking home from school.
Now we have the bureaucratization of dating in California.
Do you think anything good is likely to come from that?
I mean, I'm not just talking about it takes a lot of the romance out of it.
You know, you must remember this.
A kiss is still a kiss.
An affirmative consent standard is mandatory in this state.
It's not just that.
It's not just that.
You're actually now the state, the state is inserting itself into what functioning societies would regard as routine social encounters.
And you have to give some thought as to what will materialize after someone's been in that environment for four or five years.
And Rush has talked a lot about the fella at Santa Barbara who killed six people.
He's talked a lot about that this week.
And the guy was socially dysfunctional, but had been in therapy all his life and thought he was the greatest thing out because he had the BMW and all the rest of it.
And he couldn't understand why no chicks wanted to hang around with him.
Now, you know, not everybody is going to go and gun down six people over that issue.
But what we're doing here, we're adding to the normal complications of what in the 19th century they would have called courtship rituals.
We're now actually having government-regulated courtship rituals.
Do you think that is going to...
Now, you've seen, anybody who's seen any movie from the last 20 years, let's say there's something about Mary, which is whatever it is now, 15 years old, and is like, was like a huge hit at the time.
You remember the scene in there where he's told he ought to be relaxed when he gets the big date with Cameron Diaz and all the rest of it?
Because it's the most important thing when you go out on a date is to be completely relaxed.
Do you think in a million years it's going to relax you on a date if you're thinking, oh, let's catch a movie and then maybe go out for dinner afterwards?
I know this great little Mexican place.
And all the time, you're thinking there, you know, say, well, we seem to be getting, oh, yeah, suddenly I'll have what she's having.
It's like all going great.
But you have to think, oh, gosh, gosh, it's like we're getting to dessert now and she hasn't signed the affirmative consent paperwork yet.
Oh, my God, it's all going horribly wrong.
Is that going to diminish your stress?
Is it going to make the evening more relaxed?
This is what it has come down to now: the bureaucratization of dating.
Mark Stein infraush on Open Line Friday.
We will take more of your calls straight ahead.
Mark Stein Infra Rush, I just want to pick up on something I was talking about earlier regarding this guy given a year's probation and a $200 fine for making his kid walk a mile home from school.
And this judge, Judge Watanabe, this Hawaiian judge, told him, you know, it wasn't old school anymore, and you can't ill-treat children like this by making them walk one mile.
You can't do that.
It's child endangerment.
There's a story out of Georgia this morning.
A Wisconsin mother visiting her sister-in-law in Atlanta, Georgia.
A family is in shock after a SWAT team threw a stun grenade into their 19-month-old son's crib during a midnight drugs raid, leaving the baby in a medically induced coma with severe burns.
Wisconsin mother Alicia Fonasavan, her husband Boonkam, and their children, including Toddler Boo Jr., were visiting her sister-in-law in Atlanta when police raided the home early Wednesday.
Fonasavan said officers threw a stun grenade which landed in the sleeping child's crib.
It landed in his playpen and exploded on his pillow right in his face.
The distraught mother told WSB-TV.
I'm reading this story from the Daily Mail.
They've got a picture here.
Most of these pictures, by the way, are too shocking to look at of this little baby in intensive care.
They've got a before and after picture before visiting Georgia and after visiting Georgia.
Before visiting Georgia, this cute little, cute little toddler with a big smile on his face.
No big smile on his face now because his lips have been blown off and his nose has been blown off and he's got burns, severe burns all over his head.
And his whole face is ripped open, the mother said, and he has a big cut in his chest.
He's in critical condition in a medically induced coma.
He's only 19 months old.
He didn't do anything.
A picture shows the charred portable crib.
And Cornelia police chief Rick Darby, who said that a multi-jurisdictional drug unit issued a warrant and organized the SWAT operation.
It's not clear if any drugs were found in the home during the raid.
But the official position is that this SWAT team did everything by the book.
By the book.
So in other words, nobody, whether this kid lives or dies, this kid's life is wrecked now.
This kid's had his face blown away.
He's going to require, by the way, this family is trying to raise money for reconstructive surgery because whatever version of Obamacare on, it doesn't cover when the SWAT team lobs a grenade into your baby's crib and blows his face off.
That's not covered by Bomacare, apparently.
So these guys, it's by the book when you're having a SWAT raid to lob the grenade into the kid's crib.
There's no child endangerment here.
Whether this kid lives or dies, his life is ruined.
He's going to go around looking like a freak and a misfit for the rest of his life.
His life has changed forever, forever, forever.
And they did things by the book, so nobody has to worry about child endangerment there.
Whereas a parent, a parent who makes their child walk home a mile from school is given a suspended sentence for a year and a $200 fine.
What's the mismatch here?
Because again, it's the same story as in the Veterans Administration and all the other news that is covered on this show day in, day out.
The rules of our rulers apply to us, but not to them.
And that is increasingly the way it is on all these issues.
We're not allowed to tell our kid, you've got to walk home a mile from school today because you didn't tell me the truth.
But they're allowed to lob a grenade in through the window and blow the face off the kid.
By the way, by the way, the rules of engagement in Afghanistan wouldn't permit NATO troops to do this to a push-toon baby.
In other words, the rules Of engagement in Afghanistan are tightly circumscribed that if someone's firing on you from the rooftop of a house, you have to establish whether he's on a list of whatever it is, 200 strong Taliban targets before you're even allowed to fire back at him.
And you're certainly not allowed to lob hand grenades in and blow his kid up in the crib.
So you can't do it to a Pushtun warlord, but you can do it to an American baby sleeping in his crib in Atlanta, Georgia.
And it's exactly the same.
The principle here is the principle increasingly underlying American life in the second decade of the 21st century: that the regulatory bureaucracy has a free hand in what it wants to do to you, and it does not have to live by the rules it imposes on you.
That's true of everything.
That's true of the IRS scandal.
The IRS has been asked to provide certain emails to the House Investigative Committee, and they've said we can't do that.
It would take us eight years.
Well, the next time the IRS asks you for paperwork and you say to them, Oh, I can't do that.
It would take me eight years to put it all together.
You try that when the IRS are wanting to audit you and see how far it will get you.
And this is how a republic decays.
Because unless our rulers abound by the same rules, then there is no republic.
We do not have a self-governing society any longer.
And the idea that it is by the book in a police raid just to lobby.
This was the standard children's house, apparently, where there's like kids' toys lying around everywhere.
I don't understand, for example, let us say that the police are right on this and this is some minor drugs bust, why it involves lobbing a grenade in anyway.
That seems to me somewhat of an excessive reaction.
But the idea that you have no responsibility to determine who's in the house, you're not expected to pay any attention to the children's toys lying around the floor or on the porch or any of this, and you can just lob a grenade into the crib and pay no consequences.
But a father who wants to make his child walk a mile home from school is a criminal.
And a school district in Maine that wants to dissent from what Commissar Obama, Commissar Michelle Obama, chief commissar of the Commissariat of School Lunches in Washington, a democratically elected school board in a township in Maine has no right to opt out of the Commissar Obama's mandated school lunch program.
This is a divergence in basically between the ruling class and everybody else that will absolutely end up destroying and consuming America if it is not reversed.
Our rulers ought to live by the same rules they presume to impose on us.
Mark Stein, Infra Rush, it's Open Line Friday, and Rush will be back in about a week's time.
Buck Sexton is going to be here live on Monday.
I will be back on Tuesday, and we will take your calls straight ahead.
Yes, Rush isn't here.
Rush isn't here.
And that's a problem.
So what can you do about it?
Rush, I think, just about this time, 24 hours ago, was revealing to the world that he was not going to be here for a few days.
He was taking a vacation.
He said, I don't want to mention it because it depresses people.
But I don't want to leave them in shock, too.
I don't want to just go away and then everybody tunes in on the next day, and there's some guy with some wacky accent talking at you for three hours.
So he decided, he broke the news gently about 24 hours ago that he wasn't going to be here for a few days.
And if you think that's a problem, if you think that's a crisis, if you think, oh, no, what am I going to do?
It needn't be a problem.
It needn't be a crisis.
All you need to do is go to rushlimbore.com, and it's like he's still here.
It's like he's here 24-7.
He'll be here more often than when he is here.
If you subscribe to Rush 24-7, you can get Rush in any format you want him.
You can get the radio show at any time of the day you want it.
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And by the way, if you've never seen the Ditto cam, people, when you put it like that, Ditto Cam, you think of it's like the security camera in my old apartment building in the lobby.
You think it's just going to be some murky, blurry thing in which everybody looks as if they're wearing a hoodie, even when they're not.
That it's just some low-tech thing.
It's not.
It's actually brilliant, crisp, high-definition footage, and you can watch live Rush on the DittoCam in real time.
So if you go to RushLimbore.com and subscribe to Rush 24-7, you need not be discombobulated by sinister foreign guest hosts.
That's rushlimbore.com and do sign up to Rush 24-7.
Let's go to Grady in, is that Destin, Florida, Grady, or is it Destin?
Destin or Destin?
Destin, great to have you with us, Grady.
It's been a pleasure listening to you.
Thanks.
Y'all been talking about the VA and you've been talking about the bonuses and you've been talking about the waiting list.
And you did bring out a little while ago that the VA is socialized medicine at its very best.
And, you know, my question is: why is there a waiting list?
Do you not realize or understand that the bonuses are related to saving money, not necessarily productivity?
If it was related to productivity, there would be no waiting list.
They would go out and hire the doctors and the nurses and the staff to take care of these people where they wouldn't be on a list.
It wouldn't be waiting.
Yeah, I worked at the VA for 16 years.
You got some great people at the VA.
But at the same time, it's socialized medicine.
The incentives are not there.
People do not realize that there is a huge union, huge union within the VA.
The union president has his own private office, his own parking spot, and he's paid by my tax dollar as president of the union to do nothing but deal with the union.
Right.
And, you know, and the union actually works against the administrative part of the hospital because you can't do anything within the hospital Without getting a union steward to come walk through and deal with it or okay it right it's it's just unreal.
I still don't understand ever who signed that off that where the unions could control things.
Well, the guy the guy who signed off on it was President Kennedy Grady.
He's the guy who enabled the federal bureaucracy to become unionized.
And you're right, there's a if there's any point for unions, it's because if you work in the mill on the south side of Main Street and the mill's competitor on the north side of Main Street decides to undercut wages and your wages are undercut, then you want to be able to have a union so you can organize and keep your wages up.
There's no need for that in the federal government.
There's no other federal government that can, people don't, it doesn't work, you know, the government of the United States can't be undercut by some rival government three blocks down the street.
So if there's one place that shouldn't have shouldn't have unions, it's actually government.
Government should not have unions.
And Grady's right too in that the incentives in a government system are entirely different because he says, why is there a waiting list?
Why is there a waiting list?
Because there's always a waiting list in a government system.
And the funny thing about listening to people horrified that you have to wait four months to see anyone at the VA is that actually to some of us who've lived under socialized healthcare systems, that sounds actually not bad.
You know, when you hear reports out of the United Kingdom where people wait two years for a hip operation or whatever.
And again, Grady goes, well, why is there a waiting list?
Why is there a waiting list?
Because that's the only way you control costs.
Because everybody else, in a private hospital, you'd take on some extra doctors, you'd take on some extra nurses, you'd build some new operating rooms because you've got more operations than you can handle, so you need to have greater capacity.
You've got to have more operating rooms, more doctors, more nurses.
And that's why they don't want waiting lists.
In a government system, the waiting list is essential because it's the only point at which you can control costs.
Everybody else, the doctors, the nurses, the janitors, the administrators have to be paid on the 30th day of the month.
The only person who can be kicked down the road is the patient.
Every other cost, the doctors, nurses, administrators, parking lot attendant, every other cost is fixed.
The only way you can control costs is through the patient by kicking him down the road.
And that is the problem with this system.
And that is why America's veterans, of all people, should not be the ones stuck in it.
And it's not a tragedy.
It's actually a great evil that has been inflicted upon them.
And I said this the last time I was here, and it's a difficult thing to talk about, but I didn't choose my words as carefully as I might have when I was here, whatever it was, 10 days ago.
But America treats its veterans appallingly, absolutely appallingly.
I'm not saying that any other country, other countries particularly treat them well or are particularly lavish in their treatment of them.
And often the way you treat your veterans doesn't connect with how efficient a military you have.
The Belgian army, for example, has terrific benefits and perks.
And those guys are living high off the hog and they're not actually sent into combat terribly often.
So there's no correlation necessarily between the effectiveness of a military and how you treat them.
But when you have the biggest military on the planet, when you are responsible for 44% of the planet's military budget, as the United States is, you should not be treating your veterans as if they're charity cases.
And I find it slightly, a lot of people do a lot of good things for America's veterans.
For those wounded warriors and all the rest of it.
But there's something wrong about the way veterans are coming to be seen as somehow victims, as if they're like transgendered people who can't find a transgendered bathroom.
They're just like the sort of uniformed version of that.
They're just another American victim group.
And if you look at General Shinseki this morning, he was speaking at a conference for homeless veterans.
Why are there so many homeless veterans that it becomes an identifiable demographic group all on its own?
There is something wrong about the way the United States, with the most lavishly funded military on the planet, treats the human capital that is the sharp end.
Because a military in the end isn't about the fancy tanks and the fancy warships.
It's about the people who are prepared to go to some god-awful spot on the other side of the planet that they never heard of, up against an enemy that will strap on bombs around its waist and send children and women to blow themselves up in front of you.
It's about those guys taking that risk on your behalf, on your behalf.
And then when they come back, then suddenly we're to treat them like they're confused hobos and they're homeless and they're mentally ill and we need to provide shelters and we need to treat them like charity cases and we need to treat them like victim groups.
And there's something wrong with the way we, the whole conception of the way we treat our veterans in this country.
And the VA, which is actually set up to help them and instead is killing them, is killing them in order to get performance bonuses because it's like the military at home.
It's like in Afghanistan, they'll give you the silver star if you're an exceptionally good sniper.
And back on the home front, they'll give you a performance bonus likewise if you rack up a high kill rate.
That's what's happened to the Veterans Administration.
Mark's time for Rush.
More to come.
The White House press secretary, Jay Carney, has resigned.
He's gone.
He's out of there.
He's finding it too hard juggling Benghazi and Obamacare and the IRS and the VA day in, day out.
And he has gone.
I was hoping he would be replaced by the pajama boy who said, dude, that was like two years ago.
Tommy Vita, Tommy Vita.
But Tommy Vita, intriguingly, has gone to work for Hillary Clinton and is helping with the rollout of her new book with its fascinating chapter on Benghazi.
So the dude that was like two years ago, dude, has gone to help Hillary Clinton, which probably means that he's going to be Secretary of State in three years' time.
But White House Press Secretary Jay Carney has resigned.
And he is going to be replaced by Josh Ernest.
Do you know Josh Ernest H.R.?
I like to pretend.
I don't know Josh Ernest.
Like to pretend to be expert on everything here.
Josh Ernest does mean well.
But he is, Josh Ernest is the, that is great.
That is actually a great pajama boy name.
I may be doing him an injustice.
He may be 63 and bald and a stout fellow and a hail fellow, well met.
But it is a perfect pajama boy name, Josh Ernest.
So I will be interested to see whether he does actually.
Actually, I'm going to Google him now.
Let's see if I can do this because I'm so intrigued by seeing what this Josh Ernest looks like.
Seeing if he is, but he's the new replacement for, oh no, he doesn't look that too much of a pajama boy.
He looks like he could be playing a minor supporting role in Mad Man, actually.
He's okay.
He's okay.
Josh Ernest, Deputy Press Secretary, will now be taking over from Jay Cardi, who is out of there, who's gone.
It's odd the things that people get tickled by or ticked off by.
When I mentioned that my kid is graduating from the eighth grade and had won the Obama Award, and I was actually planning on making him walk home from school today, but they'd probably cancel his Obama Award if I was to do that to him.
People said, oh, this is ridiculous.
There should only be one graduation.
There should be 12th grade, this eighth grade graduation.
It's like somebody tweeted to me that they just had to endure their kids' kindergarten graduation.
Not first grade, even, not second grade, not third, just kindergarten graduation.
And when my daughter was in nursery school, she had a nursery school graduation, which I remember having to sit through.
And what I remember about it is that it was all relatively normal.
Like they handed out an award for best art and best music.
And there was even a best arithmetic, I think, which I thought was rather impressive for the age of four or five or whatever they were, that my daughter's friend Philip got.
He got the arithmetic award, and then he came to my daughter, who got the spunky award.
And I knew right then, it's like, it's over.
It's nursery school, but already it's over.
Somebody gets the art award, somebody gets the music award, somebody gets the arithmetic award, but she got the spunky award.
And that was it.
So, I mean, I just would have put her in therapy.
Actually, I remember going into the parking lot and trying to see if I could sell her to Angelina Jolie or Madonna at that point, but it didn't work out for me.
Well, yeah, spunky is better than congeniality.
Maybe.
Maybe you're right.
But by the way, while I'm moaning about school awards, they had the drama award, right?
Which is Showbiz.
It's like my kids' grade school's equivalent of the Tony Awards or the Oscars.
And it's supposed to go to the best actor or the best actress.
And instead, they did one of these things where everyone was so good that they gave it to the whole eighth grade.
So they turned it into just another lousy participation award.
Which, by the way, just to tie it all back to where we came in with Obama's West Point speech, is what he defined American exceptionalism as.
He said, what makes America exceptional is that we recognize international norms, just like all the other countries do.
So he turned American exceptionalism into a participation award.
Just like all the other 200 nations, we're all exceptional, and we all get the American Exceptionalism Participation Award.
And that's all it comes down to now.
Participation awards, whether you're at the Obama at West Point level or at my kids' grade school with the eighth grade drama awards.
Mark Stein for Rush, we'll close it out in just a moment.
Hey, I mentioned that California is passing a law to make affirmative consent necessary for anything more than a little bit of light petting at California state schools.
And I see that Rahm Emmanuel in Chicago is now proposing that all gun purchases be videotaped.
And obviously, this is a good start.
But if you look at what's happening in California, I think all affirmative consent interactions in the state of California ought also to be videotaped in case one gets into liability issues later.
Somebody only signed the first two pages of the affirmative consent heavy petting form and they didn't sign all the paperwork.
They didn't sign it in triplicate or whatever.
And I think we should videotape those encounters too.
Mark Stein, Infra Rush.
Don't forget, by the way, that Buck Sexton is going to be here on Monday.
And I will be here on Tuesday for another week of great live broadcasting from the Excellence in Broadcasting Network.
Have a terrific weekend.
See you Tuesday.
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