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June 9, 2014 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:44
June 9, 2014, Monday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
Now, I'm telling you, it was all over the international media that we had the United States had recovered every job lost since Obama was elected.
There wasn't any pre-recession 2007 stuff about it.
That's why I'm sitting.
I can't believe this.
Greetings, folks.
When the show happened to begin where I'm in the middle of expressing my incredulity over things, Bergdahl Schmergdahl will get to that.
Great to be back, by the way, folks.
As always, telephone number 800-282-2882, if you want to be on the program, the email address, illrushbo at EIBNet.com.
Catherine and I were out of the country, and I'm telling you, it was late in the week, and I did something that I rarely do while on vacation.
I literally didn't start paying attention to any news until, well, I couldn't avoid it the first couple of days were gone.
And I'm I'll be honest with you.
I leave here.
I just, I can't believe this, but it's every time I leave here, man, do things blow up.
It is just incredible.
Carney quits.
This Bergdahl thing happened.
I mean, I don't know if it's a coincidence or not.
Well, it just, it was striking to me.
And I'll tell you the Bergdahl thing.
Let me get this out of the way real fast.
I'm trying to compress four days of stuff here to 10 minutes, and that's not going to work.
So let me just back off here a second.
Because you see, folks, I know that while you may have been keeping up with all the news, and you may think you know everything that happened, you still are waiting for what I think about it.
And I'm trying to satisfy what I know is a burning desire that all of you have for that.
And I'm trying to cram it all in here because I know each of you probably have different interests.
Like I've been saying, it may take all three hours today to get to your favorite story and my take on it.
But it was mind-boggling.
Two things hit me.
A, really, coincidence or not, I leave here and things blow up.
And then when all of this stuff did hit, I'm going to be very selfish and admit to you, I started, I asked Catherine, I turned to Catherine, I said, how long is it going to be, if ever,
before people finally go back to 2009, January 16th, when I said, I hope Obama fails, how long is it going to take for people to finally own up and admit what they knew all along?
That is what I meant when I said that.
How many of them are going to pipe up and say, we should have listened?
And I know it's a pipe dream.
That kind of thing is never going to happen.
But the question comes down to, and people are asking this, are we looking at just sheer incompetence and ignorance on the part of the regime, the president, or are we looking at something worse?
But the thing about Bergdahl, I don't know if, again, I don't know what you might have heard about this.
But this Bergdahl thing, I don't think it's about him.
Family, a lot of odd stuff happened here.
But what at the end of the day happened?
Obama replenished the enemy.
I don't care if it's Bergdahl, Schmergdahl, or Smorgasbord that we traded.
It's a five-to-one deal, and we've sent five enemy combatants, terrorists, back to the battlefield.
All for the express purpose of what?
Now, I'm reading all this stuff that the regime was totally blindsided by the reaction that they thought they were going to be feted.
They thought they were going to be heralded.
They thought they were going to get all kinds of praise.
And they were just stunned when the American people didn't see it this way.
That's why the question is: is this just incompetence or ignorance, or is it worse?
What it is, is closing Gitmo.
I think what we're looking at is somebody who has already expressed a lack of concern for the Constitution, a lack of concern for the separation of powers.
We're looking at somebody who now is aware, the president, that he has two and a half years and it's time to get it all done.
It's time to get as much done that he set out to do in 2009.
It's time to get it done.
However, he can get it done.
Closing Guantanamo is one of those things.
But at the root of it is making sure that this country gets its comeuppance.
None of this surprises me.
None of it particularly, well, I can't say it doesn't agitate me or outrage me or make me mad, but when it doesn't surprise you, then there is a limiting factor on how angry it can make you.
The frustration, I'm just going to be point blank here.
The frustration is that so many other people seem surprised by what's happening.
You name it.
In fact, it's funny.
I have two things to share with you here.
One, an email from a friend.
Welcome home.
A boring week.
VA scandal already solved by bipartisan committee.
More money to the agency.
Prisoner exchange.
No big deal.
He's going to let them loose at some point anyway.
Why not now?
Still have a Marine in prison in Mexico.
Many suggestions on an exchange program.
You'll see them as you catch up.
Stock market setting highs when we finally got out to play golf.
That's one friend's assessment of last week.
Another friend sent me 10 pages of what went on the last two weeks.
A summary of virtually every news story.
And every one of these news stories is a story that would serve to irritate and agitate many of you and many of us.
And it's just fascinating to me to study the different takes, the different reactions that people have to what all is going on.
One of the things I was talking about here when the program began, when we were in Europe, I will not divulge where it's irrelevant.
Was not an English-speaking country, well, not native English-speaking country, but they did speak English.
And toward the end of the week, when I started paying attention to sort of get myself back in a frame of mind for today, there was a news story, a series of them, I really couldn't believe.
And the crux of it was that every job lost since Obama had been elected has been replaced and recovered.
And I looked at that, and I was just in stunned disbelief.
I said, well, I haven't seen the jobs report that came out Friday.
This is international news.
I even took the time to comment on it.
It turns out, by the way, that was the way it was reported internationally.
It's not true, obviously.
The pre-recession level of jobs has been replaced, but it's not with high-paying.
There's no change.
The job market's still bad.
There's no end in sight to it.
But the stories that I saw made it sound like there has been a full-fledged, total U.S. job recovery.
Which turned out not to be the case.
So we had while I was going, let's just review some of the things that are on tap.
The 70th anniversary of D-Denberg.
Last year, Katherine and I went there.
It was the bordering on the 69th anniversary.
Just before I left, the CIA station chief in charge of search and destroy the Taliban had been outed by the regime.
Shinseki resigned the day I left, a day after Shinseki quits, predicted that.
Jay Carney quit.
Christian Gillibrand has admitted that the Democrats knew that Obama was lying through his teeth when he was promising people they could keep their doctor, keep their plan.
More and more Democrats are, oh, yeah, we knew, we knew, everybody knew that that wasn't the case.
We had to go along with it.
There are a lot of stories in the stack today about how Democrats are just getting more and more fed up with Obama at every turn, but they still respect and admire him.
Then, of course, we have the Bergdahl swap, which, again, no mystery, and it's really frustrating.
We're just replenishing the enemy.
That's the thing.
That's the only takeaway from that that is important to me.
I mean, you could analyze it further and try to get a bead on who Obama is, but see, you and I already know that.
So we don't need to waste any time.
I just again, I'm surprised that there is so much surprise when any of this happens.
Do you realize the president's flooding this country with refugees?
Now, we're not even talking about illegal immigrants.
We're being flooded on purpose with refugees.
Anybody think that's accidental?
Anybody think that's due to incompetence?
Anybody think that's due to misplaced good intentions?
There is no substantive positive reason whatsoever for any of that going on.
Flooding the country's borders with illegal immigrants who are now the equivalent of refugees.
They're not even people who we can say under the guise of seeking a better life or coming here for the opportunities which exist.
This is just something entirely different.
The VA story.
Some people say it's disappearing.
It's not.
There are more and more examples of absolute incompetence and horror and disaster at more and more VA centers.
White House stunned by the harsh reaction to the release of Bergdahl.
How about the pictures of Obama pumping iron, the secret, the security breach of Obama pumping iron at a gym in Poland?
If that's pumping iron.
Have you seen those pictures, Mr. Snerdley?
You haven't?
He's played around with five-pound dumbbells and they're calling it pumping iron.
Five-pound little dumbbell.
Five-pound, five-pound, ten-pound little...
Doing curls with the...
Pumping iron.
They're featherweights.
And of course, the question, how did those pictures get taken?
Who snuck in there?
Who violated Secret Service security?
Nobody did.
They wanted those pictures out, just like of Hillary and Clinton dancing to no music on the beach.
I mean, there is a flood of children illegally entering the U.S.
These are refugees.
They're coming here.
So it's a lot to make sense of, folks.
And just a brief setting of the table here.
We'll come back and take a brief time out here and come back and get started with all the rest of it.
Again, your phone calls will be mixed in.
The telephone numbers 800-282-2882 don't go away because as you obviously can conclude, there is much more.
Sit tight.
Okay, let's take these one at a time.
Let's do Bergdahl here first.
I'm going to get to the jobs numbers.
The news media is trying to make this and has been trying to make this all about Bergdahl and Bergdahl's parents and so forth.
That's a distraction.
It was never about Bergdahl.
He's the excuse.
The thing that is noteworthy here, Obama has always wanted to close Guantanamo Bay.
He's promised to shut down Gitmo.
The left is irritated at him.
It's cost him some money, in fact, in donations, but Gitmo is still open.
To do that, to close Gitmo, he's got to get rid of the remaining terrorists somehow.
And he's been itching to find an excuse to do so.
Some way to make it seem like it's something else besides letting these terrorists go free.
So he does it in the form of a prisoner swap, and he thinks he's going to get heralded and get credited and thought of as a great guy.
We're going to get back an American soldier.
This man has never worn the uniform.
He disdains people who do.
He doesn't understand the culture.
He and his Susan Rice is as tone deaf now as she was down during Benghazi.
These people are embarrassing.
They literally are embarrassing.
They have no idea about military culture, military tradition.
And if indeed they were blindsided by this and if they even care about being blindsided, that was why.
But the point here is to empty Guantanamo.
And when you empty Guantanamo, everything has consequences.
When you empty Guantanamo, you are replenishing the enemy in a war on terror that is still underway.
These people might want you to think they vanquished Al-Qaeda because they got bin Laden, bin Laden.
They might want you to think the war on terror is over and we moved on to other things, but it isn't.
It's still underway.
And the Taliban reaction to this is proof positive.
So Obama's wanted an excuse, some way to make it look like something else, something other than letting the terrorists run free from Guantanamo.
Now, nobody in the drive-bys seems to remember that Obama tried to pull this off, this swap, back in March of 2012.
And back then, he even, this may be reported, if this is being redundant, I'm sorry, but he even briefed some in Congress about it.
And that's the only reason we ever heard about it, because Dianne Feinstein leaked the story to Foreign Policy Magazine.
And there was outrage, at least from some in the conservative media, so Obama had to drop the plan.
He wanted to do this two years ago.
And now you know why he didn't notify Congress this time around.
Even though he's required to do so by law, he didn't do so because, A, he loves snubbing them and he knows they're not going to do anything about it.
But he didn't want to have his plans dashed again this time.
He is weaker than he was two years ago.
Tries to do this, goes through channels.
Congress shuts him down.
Can't have that.
So just do it.
And know full well that nothing is going to happen to you.
Now, he has to lie about that too.
First, claiming that the Taliban would kill Bergdahl if this whole thing had been leaked.
And then when that was laughed at, they claimed that Bergdahl was at death's door.
And that's why we had to do that.
And we now know that that's not the case.
But again, ladies and gentlemen, this was never about Bo Bergdahl.
It's never about Bergdahl's parents.
Obama wants to close Club Gitmo.
It's one of his biggest campaign promises.
But there's something else.
He also wants to negotiate with the Taliban.
And by negotiate, he wants to give them power in the Afghan government.
This is called appeasement.
This is called citizen of the world kind of stuff.
This is called the new United States, where we bring our enemies in and acknowledge them and respect them.
So he wants the Taliban to have power in the Afghan government.
The Taliban have refused to negotiate seriously until Obama released their top five lieutenants.
So Obama's been chomping at the bid to let them loose ever since March of 2012, maybe even before that.
Bergdahl was the convenient excuse, and that's why all of this happened.
And two things are the takeaway: closing Club Guitmo.
And by virtue of that, I cannot emphasize this too much, restocking the enemy with their frontline people.
Okay, on the jobs numbers, I was told by a number of people that the media did not make a big deal of the jobs numbers and their portrayal when the jobs report was released on Friday.
Not true if you were international, like I was.
The news internationally was that this country had recovered every job lost since Obama was elected.
Turns out that all the jobs are back if you stop at pre-recession levels.
In other words, we're 7 million jobs short of where we are for a total job recovery.
And that's why the drive-bys are not making a big deal out of this.
But you can imagine how livid I was when I heard the international reporting on this, because I knew it couldn't be true.
And yet, there it was, just front and center for international public consumption.
The National Journal headline, don't get too excited about the new jobs report.
The economy hit a milestone Friday after the latest jobs report shows that the U.S. recovered all the jobs lost during the Great Recession.
But people shouldn't celebrate too much just yet.
Now, why not?
In my experience, this kind of news would be celebratory.
Recovering all the jobs lost during a recession, that would be big news.
Even if they were not top-drawer jobs, that would be big news.
That would signal some kind of policy and some kind of economic activity that was worth citing.
It would be positive.
And yet here are the drive-bys saying, nah, no big deal.
The drive-bys, the state-controlled media saying, nah, no big deal.
Don't get excited about it.
On Friday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said the U.S. economy added 217,000 jobs in May.
The unemployment rate unchanged, 6.3%.
The economy needed to add 113,000 jobs to pass the pre-recession peak number of jobs from January of 2008.
U.S. lost 8.7 million jobs in the recession, but this overlooks the simple fact that there are more working-age people in the U.S. now than there were six years ago.
So while on its face it looks like the U.S. regained all the jobs lost over the past six years, that perspective doesn't take into account the number of new people in the labor force or address the labor market gap created by those new people.
That's not even the nub of it.
There are close now to 93 million Americans not working.
The labor force participation rate is as small as it has been since the 1970s.
One of the things that nobody can talk about new people entering the job market and there aren't any jobs for them.
The bottom line is that all of that is irrelevant since Obama was re-elected.
They can tout all these jobs that were created that got us back to pre-recession levels.
That also happens to be pre-Obama.
And that's why the drive-bys don't want to make a big deal about it.
All we've done is replenish the job market where it was when Bush left office.
But if you talk any more about it, then you have to get into how many more jobs have been lost since and with the recovery engineered by Obama.
It's not a happy story.
It's not a good story.
There's nothing upbeat or positive about it.
And so the focus remains on the 6.3% unemployment rate, really, really good.
And nothing really exciting about it.
A lot of people in the market.
USA Today, job market recovers losses, yet appears weaker.
Even with the new peak of jobs, there's a great deal of slack.
There are 1.49 million construction jobs that are missing.
The Urban Institute says we need 7 million jobs.
We need to create 7 million to keep up with the population growth.
That's the point they're making here: that all of these high school graduates, college graduates in the last seven years entering the job market, there are any jobs for them, despite replenishing ourselves up to pre-recession level.
There's nothing good here is the bottom line.
And that's why the drive-bys are saying, don't get too excited about it, which is somewhat noteworthy in and of itself.
Normally, if they had a headline like this, they'd be running with it like the European media did.
But in this case, there really isn't anything.
There's nothing positive anywhere.
In the job market, there's nothing positive anywhere.
There's nothing inspirational, nothing hopeful.
Unless you happen to be already wealthy and are heavily invested in Wall Street, nothing's changed.
We're still on the same lackadaisical melee cycle.
We're still just flittering along.
College graduates, more and more of them are living at home.
One in five are in poverty.
There's nothing good.
And it's all the result of policy.
It's not the Bush economy.
It's not that we fought two wars.
It's not that we didn't have to fight.
It's none of these extraneous excuses offered by the regime.
We are in the economic circumstances, the immigration circumstances, whatever circumstances, we're in them because of specific policies implemented by this administration.
Obamacare, healthcare is a mess.
The VA is a mess.
And here's this from CBS St. Louis.
Managers of the VA Medical Center, Kansas City, confirmed they kept a secret waiting list of veterans who needed care.
The admission comes after Senator Roy Blunt, Republican Missouri, revealed the existence of at least 37 heart patients who were not entered into the VA's appointment system but kept in a secret file.
Again, sad to say, we can trace all of this back to this administration having literally no way of relating to or understanding military culture.
I mean, let's face it, the American left has looked at the American military as a problem.
The American military has been the focus of evil.
I mean, if you're part of the blame America first crowd, if this country's guilty, if this country has become what it has become because it has stolen everything, and believe me, that is precisely what is taught.
What is taught to young kids in this country today is that this nation's wealth is the result of theft from other nations and other peoples of the world.
Now, what do you need to pull that off?
You need an imperialistic military.
And so if you are inclined to think this country is unjust and immoral and has become a superpower on the basis of crimes committed, such as theft, then you also have to be very upset.
It's people who made it possible, i.e., those who project power.
That would be the military.
And this administration, John Kerry, throwing the medals, Vietnam.
I mean, it runs throughout this party.
Blame America first, blame the military.
They don't appreciate the traditions.
They don't understand or relate to the military culture.
The reaction to Bergdolfing proves that.
I mean, I've had a number of people tell me that Obama really thought he was going to get lots of praise, tons and tons of cheers and praise for getting an American prisoner of war back.
And the story is that the regime was literally, honestly, blindsided by the public reaction to it.
Now, if that's true, how can that be?
Well, there isn't anybody in this administration, aside the Joint Chiefs who've worn the uniform.
There isn't anybody in this administration that has really an overawed respect for people to wear the uniform.
In fact, it's just the opposite.
So the VA languishes and this kind of prisoner swap takes place and closing Gitmo is looked at as a positive for U.S. foreign policy.
The only way replenishing the enemy with its combatants is considered a positive is if you believe we somehow are to blame for why they do what they do.
And there's no question that this regime does indeed harbor precisely those feelings.
Another brief time out.
As time rolls on, fastest three hours in media, Obamacare remains a mess.
The CBO has as much as said it's so bad, it's so off the rails, it's so incomprehensible, they can't even calculate the costs any longer.
Back after this.
Yeah, so look at here.
Roll call magazine, fiscal diagnosis only gets tougher for health care law.
It's no longer possible to assess the overall fiscal impact of the law.
That, again, is by design.
Of course it's by design.
This is the thing I've been waiting for people to wake up and realize.
Look, I'm not trying to brag here.
I don't have to.
Like Babe Roots said, it isn't bragging if you can do it.
I knew exactly what I was saying when I said I hope he feels.
I knew this kind of stuff was going to happen.
I knew that there was going to be this kind of assault on this country.
I knew there was going to be an effort to expand the size and the role and scope of government in everybody's life.
And I know what that means also.
That means less and less liberty and freedom for individuals.
This was in the cards.
There was no debating it.
It was not arguable.
Now, if you are on the Obama side of this, if you're on the Democrats, the brilliance in quotes of this is that every problem you create is a problem that the American people are going to demand be fixed.
By who?
By government.
So government is going to continue to grow.
It's going to continue to be incompetent.
It's going to continue to be inefficient.
It's going to continue to make messes out of everything that it does.
And it's all going to happen with the American people demanding that it happen.
This is what they knew.
They're simply flooding the system.
They are ensuring that the system, whatever it is, the VA, the welfare system, the Medicare system, the healthcare system, they're ensuring that they do not work.
There are too many demands.
We don't have any money.
And as these things continue to fail, become more and more inefficient, i.e. Work, the American people are going to demand they be fixed.
And they're not going to demand that the Koch brothers fix it.
They're not going to demand that the private sector fix it.
They have been doodly told the private sector is to blame for all this.
They're going to demand that the compassionate, tolerant, ever-loving government fix the problem.
And so we have a snowball heading down the hill.
It's growing and growing and growing, feeding off its own incompetence, evil, stupidity, whatever.
Was all in the cards.
So the CBO is giving up trying to predict any costs.
Now, under normal circumstances, this would be bad news.
Oh, no.
Normal circumstances, 20 years ago, the reaction would have been, all right, then we've got to tighten this down.
We have got to stop spending.
We have got to get this put back in order.
That's not the reaction today.
When the CBO says, oh, my God, it's gotten so out of control, we can't even calculate the costs.
The demand is for government to do something about it.
And the only way government does anything is get bigger, become more involved in things.
Fiscal diagnosis only gets tougher for healthcare law, Roll Call Magazine, ABC News, Obamacare error puts 2 million enrollees in jeopardy.
Bottom line of this one is they can't square the information they think they've got from 2 million people who have enrolled for Obamacare.
2 million people.
Honor system failed.
Everything in the system failed.
2 million people.
They don't know whether they've paid.
They don't know who they are.
They don't know anything.
What's the solution?
Government's got to fix it.
Just reading my tech blogs.
Get this.
These little bloggers are all excited.
Somebody put a news story out late last week that healthcare.gov is about to get fixed.
And they're just thrilled beyond their ability to keep their underwear up.
You can just see them dropping trout out there.
They're so excited over this.
You can just see it as you read the words.
And they wrote, as they write about healthcare.gov is about to get finally slow.
It's a very, very quiet news story.
But healthcare.gov has been undergoing major revisions and it's about to go back online, totally fixed.
Let me grab some calls because if I don't, folks, I go three hours a day without them.
There's that much here and more.
So we're going to start with Norm in Cleveland.
Norm, thank you.
Great to have you on the program.
Hi.
Yeah, thanks, Rush.
Real quick, I got to ask you this question.
It's been bugging me forever since he's been the since the counterfeit commander and chief's been in office.
Is Obama brilliant or lucky?
Which is it?
Well, which is it?
By that, you mean what?
Do you mean he happens to become president at a time the American people have been so dumbed down they don't know anything enough to stop him?
That's part of the deal.
Or is he so brilliant that he's able to talk them into being so stupid?
It's a combination of both from my perspective because the right fights like your Sonny listed against Cassius Clay.
You know, I don't understand everything that you articulate about every day in America, and yet the people, and you call them low information voters, I mean, they're lower than, I can't say the word on the air, but my God, is he brilliant or lucky?
Or is it a combination of both?
Well, see, here's the thing.
We got two more years, Rush.
Norm, what you have to understand, I know it's frustrating.
This is for me, too.
Well, you have to understand that...
I want to wake up and do assisted suicide myself.
Oh.
I want to wake up.
No!
No, no, no, no, no.
Norm, you don't mean that.
You don't mean that.
I understand.
You're not talking to America.
We're all going to die.
For those of us that know, we die in alphabetical order under the Affordable Care Act.
I mean, this guy could harvest body parts right now.
I know.
Let's sell them.
Norm, I get it.
How in the world has this amount of destruction happened in six years with no pushback?
How in the world has this happened?
So you're asking, have the American people just been on this trajectory for total stupidity and he happened to get elected when they got there?
Or did he make them stupid?
Norm, no low-information voter realizes he is low information.
That's number one.
The stupid don't know that they're stupid.
They have to be told.
They don't.
The low-information people do not know that they're low information.
The stupid do not know, do not realize they're stupid.
Most of them.
You have to tell them.
And they will argue with you about that.
So that doesn't even sometimes accomplish it.
We've got more folks.
Sit tight.
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