All Episodes
Previous Next
June 16, 2014 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:52
June 16, 2014, Monday, Hour #1
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 Podcast.
Hey folks, how are you?
Greetings.
Welcome back.
It's great to have you.
The EIB Network Rush Limbaugh, a brand new week of broadcast excellence, firmly ensconced here behind a golden EIB microphone.
Here at the distinguished and prestigious Limbo Institute.
For advanced conservative studies, the telephone number if you want to be on the program, 800-282-288-2.
And the email address L Rushbow at EIB net.com.
Well, quite an active weekend.
A lot of stuff happening out there over the weekend.
Big news continued from its beginnings late last week.
There were new events that occurred over the weekend, and of course, we're here to address all of it.
Want to start with the death of the Steelers coach Chuck Knoll.
Died in his sleep.
Natural causes Friday night.
He was 82 years old.
And Chuck Knoll was a throwback.
Even during his life, he was a throwback.
He was from a different era even when he was alive.
The man coached entirely with the Pittsburgh Steelers.
His entire head coach career was with one team, the Pittsburgh Steelers.
It's fascinating, too, by the way, to listen to his players talk about him.
It um it's amazing.
I one of the things that I realized uh early on in life is that no matter all of us think back to a period of time in our lives, there was always somebody.
If we were lucky, more than one, but there was always somebody.
There was somebody who pushed us beyond that which we thought we were capable of.
We might have hated that person, or we might have revered that person, but there was always somebody, a teacher, a parent, a coach.
There was always somebody who showed you that you were capable of more than you thought you were, pushed you beyond where you would ordinarily stop in expending effort in trying to do something.
And for me, it was a coach, actually, uh, who made me realize that about myself.
But something everybody has somebody, and I was fascinated to listen to all of Chuck Knoll's players talk about him.
Um it was nothing new.
I mean, they've said these things about him even before he passed away on Friday.
They all referred to him as not just a coach, he was a teacher, he was a manager, he was uh he was an inspiration.
To them, he was much more just an X's and O's uh football guy.
He was uh fluent in a couple of languages, he he was omnivorous in what he read in his interests.
Uh he didn't sleep on the couch, he went home at five o'clock every night.
Instead of staying till midnight, let the coaches have their own lives.
Football was not all-consuming, and yet is the only coach to win four Super Bowls.
He also entirely shunned the limelight.
He did not want any part of it.
He re turned down every endorsement deal that was offered him, and instead steered all of that to the players.
They didn't make as much money then as they do now, and he wanted the players to get the money, but it wasn't just that.
He did not want fame of any kind.
He did not want to be noticed.
He did not ever put himself out there in front of or try to be the face of anything.
He always wanted to be.
He hated having to do the weekly press conference.
He hated it, he hated to have to tell divulge people what he thought.
He didn't like suffering fools.
He thought reporters were something you had to suffer.
And he just but it's a throwback is somebody that that just is an ephema to the kind of uh public personality we have today, who can't get enough fame, who can't get enough attention.
Chuck Noel wanted none of it.
Uh and after he left the Steelers, he retired in the Steelers, I think, 91 or 92.
Uh he never entertained any other offers.
I don't think he got any.
He was so tied to the Steelers.
He was so well known.
That was his period of time in football, and it was time to do other things.
And I don't even think he was offered.
He didn't get coach of the year until 1989.
He won those four Super Bowls.
He only coach to ever win four.
He won those in the 70s.
Well, the last one was in 1980, but it was a 79th season.
Got coach of the year in 1989, kind of like the way that they gave John Wayne the Academy Award for Rooster Cogburn in true grit, because they had overlooked him all those years where he should have gotten an Oscar.
They finally gave him one.
It's the same thing with Chuck Nolan coaching.
It was it's it's a fascinating case study when you compare the way people jockey today to get noticed.
And it it all comes down to this.
I know it may sound like I'm obsessed with this, and maybe I am, I don't know.
But this whole notion of reality versus buzz and PR and image, he had no time for it.
He wasn't interested in it.
He uh uh he he was not caught up in in any aspect of attention getting holding fame, any of that.
Um and actually went out of his way to uh to avoid it.
And as such, there aren't too many people who know who the guy is outside of the Pittsburgh Steelers and their fans.
Uh I used to, I don't any longer.
I used to use his name when I checked into hotels.
I admired Chuck Knoll like you came.
I only met him one time after he had retired in Pittsburgh.
He's very nice guy.
And I I I used his name.
I just was, and it whenever I used nobody knew who I was.
I mean, Chuck Knoll oftentimes they'd spell it with a K. And it wasn't spelled with a K. He just and he was totally comfortable with that.
He was somebody who was comfortable in his own skin, knew who he was, knew where he was going, knew what he wanted to do when he got there, uh, and was totally satisfied.
It was it w the meeting, what was the meeting like?
Um, well, he knew that I used his name.
And he sent me an autograph picture.
Actually, the way that happened was Howard Slusher, I I I met Howard Slusher on a on a fishing trip.
No, before the fishing.
I met Howard Slusher through my friendship with Paul Westfall.
Howard Slusher was an agent for athletes at the time, his big client was Dan Fouts.
And after that, he started working at Nike.
He was in the uh the upper executive tier at Nike.
And uh I don't know.
I mean, he knew Noel from his days as an agent in the NFL, and he knew I told him that I checked in as Chuck Noel when he went to Hotel, so he told Noel about it, and I got an autograph picture one day.
It's still on my library desk at home.
And it says Rush Ditto Ditto Ditto.
Uh do you mind if I use your name when I check into hotels from now on?
It's just it just I don't even know if he knew who I was.
Now, I want to be very clear that when he did that, I don't know that he knew who I was.
He could have just been doing a favor for Slusher.
And I am not trying to insert myself in anything here.
Um I don't I don't use the name any more, haven't in a in a long time.
And and I've I'm not uh I'm not trying to insert myself in this three in any way, shape, manner, or form.
But I do have that it's a it's uh it's a treasured item of mine that I that I have.
I just I'm not expressing this properly, folks, but here was a guy who's the best at what he did, and that was enough.
He had an interesting uh philosophy.
I understand why all of his old players uh are are talking about him with such reverence.
He said, you know, you used these old uh new age things from the 70s, these posters that young people would put on the wall, life is a journey, not a destination, and so forth.
He heard about that, and he said, Well, yeah, life is a journey.
The thing is, if you do it right, you never arrive.
And what he meant was you're always learning, you're always growing, and you never reach your potential.
Never.
He also had a phrase for his players.
Okay, you're gonna you're you're not gonna last long here, even if you last a long time.
You're gonna have to the longest you're gonna make it here by virtue of statistics is age 35 to 40.
And at that point, it's time for you to get serious about your life's work.
That's something that he drilled into them.
That football was not their life's work.
It was just a phase, and after that is when they got serious about life.
Not that it wasn't important or anything.
He was just a throwback, even when he was alive, he was a throwback to an earlier time where he was uh just it's so absent self, and it's so uncommon today to encounter people like this.
He didn't care that he never got coach of the year.
He didn't care that he didn't get offers for jobs after he retired from the Steelers.
He didn't care that he was um uh not on television or talked about every day.
Didn't care about any of that, didn't have any PR people per se, manufacturing an image.
He was just uh a solid guy, very happy with who he was, and it's uh it's quite obvious that he had a profound impact on uh the vast majority of players who uh came in contact with him.
You can see it in videos, the public viewing they had in Pittsburgh over the weekend, or even some of the stories where players have been quoted in things that they have said, but they all talk about life lessons they learn.
And that's something you find in football a lot, by the way.
But with uh with Coach Noel, apparently it was even more so than uh your standard ordinary everyday coach.
So it's uh it's the it's the it's the passing of an era.
He was the Steelers, he was Pittsburgh, he was a unifying force in the early 70s at a time when Pittsburgh was falling apart economically.
Steel mills were closing.
I lived there then.
And it was it was uh it could be dark and uh and and dank place, but man, the Steelers that was my first cognizant awareness of uh what a winning sports team can actually mean to the self-esteem of an entire city.
Was it um it was cool.
That's why I became a Steelers fan.
You you you couldn't escape it.
Uh I went to Pittsburgh, got there in 1971, and I was uh the first job away from home.
I couldn't have cared less about anything other than me and my career and getting you got caught up in it, everybody did.
I wasn't even particularly a football fan.
Uh I had quit the Haskell football team in order to get a radio show after school every day.
So, I mean, I was not nearly the rabid fan then that I am now, and that's that happened to me in Pittsburgh during the 70s with the Steelers dynasty uh forming.
It's you know, look at it this way.
The percentage of human beings, let's say percentage of Americans, but even it's even bigger if you say percentage of human beings, the percentage of Americans who will ever know what it's like to be on a Super Bowl winning football team is infinitesimal.
There are 53 players on a roster, there are 300 million people in the country.
The number of people who will ever know what that feels like is infinitesimal.
The percentage of people who will ever be able to have that kind of championship, we are the best experience in their lives is infinite.
I think this is one of the draws of sports.
I think it's it's the lure, it's the ability to imagine and dream what it's like to be one of those players to be on that good a team.
And the Steelers, arguably the best ever, certainly the best of their era.
Hands down.
Sorry, your cowboys, but if you look at wins and losses and the other factors is no comparison.
And if you put that winning team in Pittsburgh at the time it all came together, Pittsburgh was in trouble economically.
And a number of steel mills were closing.
It was it was uh uh not the best of times.
The Steelers brought the town together, united them, made people forget about that other stuff.
It was uh it was all good.
And I just the players on those championship teams, that's their job.
They're doing it.
Sometimes they don't have time to stop and reflect about what's really happening to them because it's their job.
They're fighting for survival and success in their job.
They're not observing it like we are.
And I only, you know, I hope that they all are able to take time and reflect just how special all that.
Not just the Steelers, but any Super Bowl winning team or World Series one.
It really, really, really is something special.
Something that vast amount of people will never ever be able to do anything other than dream of.
And Chuck Knoll was able to bring that dream or take that dream to millions and millions of people and make them feel a part of it.
That was the beauty of the Steelers back then, and it endures to a certain extent today.
Okay, brief time out.
We'll be back.
We will oh, let me show you something on the ditto cam.
If you're watching the Ditto Cam at Rush Limbaugh Doug, I'm zooming in here, and you see this picture I'm holding up here, my formerly nicotine stained fingers.
Do you see that?
That is the official flag day photo distributed by the Democrat Party.
What do you see in that picture?
It's not a flag.
It is a cute, adorable young Hispanic-looking child peering over what looks to be bunting, but it is not a flag.
And I have a we're gonna do a think piece today, folks.
Peter Beinhart has written a piece explaining what the Republican Party is going to have to do to survive and win.
Nothing you haven't heard before, but it is pretty point blank.
And it is very seductive, and it explains, I think, why the Republican leadership in uh Washington is falling for it.
So we got that coming up.
We got all kinds of stuff.
I just want you to buckle in, hang on tight.
Do you oh I gotta turn the diddle cam off to zoom out?
One other thing.
The regime, and this could have ramifications for the regime among its oops.
I just saw the clock.
I don't have time to finish right now.
Can you believe it?
The Rush Revere books got dissed on C-SPAN 2 last night.
Yeah, book TV.
C-Span 2 didn't actually do it.
One of their guests did.
It's it's it's funny.
I got the sound bites coming up.
We'll get to those in the uh uh next segment after the break at the bottom of the hour.
Uh how many of you use the maps application and your cell phones?
A lot of young people do, particularly young people that don't have cars and therefore don't have nav systems built in.
Use the maps app for transit directions, walking directions, driving directions.
You name it, the maps app is a huge thing.
And guess what?
The New York Times has a story that the regime, the transportation department, wants to regulate their use in the car.
The same theory that you can't text or do this or that With your phone while driving, they want to try to eliminate people using the maps app in their cell phones while they are in the car.
Now, naturally, the automobile manufacturers support this because they want people using the built-in navigation systems in the uh in the automobiles.
Um, but federal regulators are going to make a big pitch here.
And while this may not matter much to you, as I just did a little brief test, and the guys on the other side of glass, I don't use the map, but what do I know where I'm going?
What the hell do I need that for?
But young people use them daily.
You would not believe, and when they find out that their president wants to eliminate them using their maps in their cars on their phones.
There could be hell to pay for this.
Well, a tiny little thing like spying.
It may not go over well.
Greetings, welcome back.
Rush Limbaugh, the Excellence and Broadcasting Network and the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.
Okay, military times.
Security at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad was bolstered.
Some staff members are being moved out of Baghdad as it was threatened by the advance of an Al-Qaeda-inspired insurgency.
Would you believe there's even a hashtag?
This group's called ISIS.
And there's a hashtag, stop ISIS now.
And that was the one thing Obama didn't try last week was the hashtag.
In his speech on Friday before leaving to play golf.
Man, I'll tell you what a weekend this guy had with his anti-global warming commencement address and going to play golf in Palm Springs and while all this is going on.
I mean, a lot of people are fit to be tied.
And I, you know, it's it's it's folks, I'm gonna tell you it's very hard for me to sit here.
But I'm checking the email during the break, and there's so many people outraged over what's going on in Iraq, understandably, but you know, there's a part of me that says, look at what what did you think was going to happen with people like this in charge of it?
This has been, I don't know.
I don't know how to say this anymore.
This has been my point ever since January of 2009.
I am saddened and outraged and angry about all this that's happening, but I am not surprised by any of it.
Okay, so about a hundred Marines and soldiers sent to Baghdad to help with embassy security.
All you need to know is that we might end up having to rely on Iran to deal with this ISIS Al-Qaeda insurgency in Iraq.
And I don't I don't care what anybody tries to do, you know, the regime and some of the media are going to continue to try to blame this on Bush, but this is owned by Obama.
He's the one who got out of there.
And there's a by the way, a misconception going around.
It's been going around since Friday.
The misconception is that we got out of there in 2011 and the Iraqis demanded that we sign an exit letter claiming to get everybody out and that we weren't going to be coming back.
And that is not true.
Malachi asked us to maintain a force in Iraq from 2011 on.
Not a combat force, not a force that's at engaged, but one that would be at the ready should something happen.
This is the result of Obama's foreign policy.
What's happening in Iraq today is not because George Bush went in there.
It's not because we didn't find weapons of mass destruction or any of that.
That's ancient history.
What's happening in Iraq today is owned exclusively by the Obama administration.
Whether the media wants to say this or not.
It's just I don't know.
The whole thing, all of this to me, is so frustrating.
Here's the AP.
The Islamic militants who overran cities and towns in Iraq Last week posted graphic photos that appeared to show their gunmen massacring scores of captured Iraqi soldiers while the Prime Minister vowed Sunday to liberate every inch of captured territory.
The pictures on a militant website appear to show masked fighters of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant ISIL actually loading the captives onto flatbed trucks before forcing them to lie down face down a shallow ditch.
The final images show the bodies of the captives soaked in blood after being shot at several locations.
AP really soft peddling this.
The photos are horrifying, and they're all too authentic.
If not for the long war journal posting the photos, the media would have loved to ignore them entirely.
And speaking of which, where is the New York Times?
Why aren't these photos on its front page above the fold?
Apparently, these photos of Iraqi soldiers being executed in trenches by the hundreds, they're not as horrible to the news media as the Abu Ghraib pictures.
The Abu Ghraib prisoner with a pair of women's panties on it.
Now that was an outrage.
That was unacceptable.
That picture had to be seen.
And all of the Abu Ghraib pictures had to be seen, must be seen.
And the New York Times and the rest of the drive-bys couldn't wait to publish them.
These are not interested in any way, shape, manner, which is proof positive that they fully understand in the media that Obama owns this.
That this is his foreign policy.
That is resulting in what's happening in Iraq.
I mean, hell, the guy is promised a date certain to be out of Afghanistan.
He rang the bells and proclaimed victory and success when we got out of Iraq.
signals when we are going to be at our weakest.
I still maintain, by the way, as I said last week, that Iraq falling fits right into the Obama playbook.
And They do not think the media is going to hold them accountable.
And why would they?
They're very confident, very comfortable the media is going to continue to blame all of this on George W. Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld.
And that's the point.
If they can engineer that, the worst news possible out of Iraq is good news for them.
Don't forget who we're dealing with here.
We're dealing here with people who revel in military failure.
We're dealing with people here who have a big chip on their shoulder where this country is concerned.
You can hear it in Obama's remarks over the weekend.
He went to an Indian reservation, once again apologized, told the people there what a rotten place this country is.
on so many words, but the implication was clear.
So they calculate political benefit with Iraq falling apart.
They may even calculate political benefit with Iran having to move in and so-called stabilize it.
Now there's a Wall Street Journal piece, Iraq militants claim soldier massacre, U.S. Iran talks near.
Now, the bulk of this story in a Wall Street Journal is devoted to discussing the photos that ISIS posted online showing how they summarily executed over 1,700 Iraqi soldiers.
But the news that the regime is going to discuss working with Iran in Iraq, that to me is almost as appalling as the pictures.
And they practically mentioned this in passing, as if it's the most natural thing in the world that we would be working with Iran to stabilize Iraq.
If we're going to work with Iran to stabilize Iraq, we may as well be sending engraved invitations to Iran to take over Iraq, which has been one of Iraq's goals for decades.
The radical Sunni militia that has plunged Iraq into chaos bragged yesterday that it had executed hundreds of Shiite Iraqi soldiers, even as the Obama regime said it's preparing to open direct talks with Iran on how the two longtime foes can counter the insurgents.
Are you kidding me?
We are going to be working with the mullahs of Iran in order to find out ways we can counter Al Qaeda insurgents in Iraq.
Lord help us.
I don't know what to say.
But I am going to tell you, I'm going to repeat again, Obama owns this.
It is the direct failure.
What's happening in Iraq is a.
I mean, it's straight on failure of Obama to keep any kind of an American presence there.
Military presence.
Now there are going to be plenty of people.
Well, wait a minute, Rush Obama couldn't keep military troops everywhere, and the Iraqi government kicked us out, and we didn't want to, we wanted to get out of there in the uh in the first place.
Look at doing something like that is a commitment of whatever it takes.
Otherwise, it was pointless.
And I'm sure you've seen stories from some of the uh soldiers, special ops people who tell us that their guts are being wrenched out watching this happen.
They're asking themselves, what in the world did they sacrifice all of that for?
We're the only nation that can stop this kind of stuff if we've got a leadership willing to do it and committed to do it.
And apparently that's up for grabs.
Quick timeout, my friends, be right in.
And if you think, by the way, that the lowest learner emails are lost.
You need to wake up.
There is no way those emails are gone.
There's no way a hard drive crash at the IRS or DOJ, a single crash has resulted in those emails being lost.
There are backups every which way from Sunday.
This is a document dump late Friday afternoon, and it's a stalling technique.
It's embarrassing.
You try it.
Next time you get audited with the IRS and they want you to produce doc.
I don't have them.
My hard drive crashed.
See how far it gets you.
Welcome back.
Rush Limbaugh, the excellence in broadcasting network.
Yeah, like we're supposed to believe it.
Lois learner's computer crashed.
It wasn't even a system crash, it was just her computer and all of her emails are gone.
And I'm telling you, uh, folks, that that's in fact, before that, there was a request for her emails way back long time ago, and the IRS said, you know, there's so much data that it would take us way, way, way too long to redact secret information before we could release these emails.
Jacob Chaffetz asked the IRS commissioner, are you gonna comply with a subpoena?
This is um uh a story about the request for these emails long time ago.
The IRS told Congress last Friday it's lost a trove of emails to and from Lois Lerner, sparking outrage from congressional investigators who have been probing the agency for more than a year.
The IRS said it can't locate many of Lerner's emails prior to 2011 because their computer crashed during the summer of that year.
Why are we just hearing about this now?
But these emails would have been on other servers and other commuters, computers that did not crash.
So you have here a classic late Friday evening news dump, and the IRS is claiming they can't locate many of her emails prior to 2011 because her computer crashed during the summer of that year, which is preposterous.
The regime may not know that I know this.
But since the Eisenhower administration, every federal agency is required to have a continuation of operation plan.
COOP is the acronym.
And the COP plan requires that they make and store duplicates of everything.
These duplicates are maintained in another safe location in the event records of destroyed by fire or natural disaster or nuclear attack.
I mean, if you stop and think about this, this is common sense.
There's more than one copy of all of the everything the government's doing.
In fact, it's so massive, they then say, well, that's why we can't find it.
I mean, there's so much out there that we don't know what to redact.
It'd take us too long to go through all these emails to figure out through what to redact.
Top of that, uh, Congress was assured by the IRS commissioner under oath that Lois Learner's emails were all archived.
This was last summer, when all of this was going down.
So this is just another example of the White House insulting our intelligence with their in-your face lies is what this is.
But the cherry on top of all of this is that we're just being told about these missing emails after the IRS scandal's been under investigation for more than a year.
Could it be?
And we're just now hearing that they claim her computer crashed.
And again, during a prior request for her emails, they said, Well, there's so much data that it would take us too long to uh to find and redact things that we didn't want to release.
And get this.
The revelation on Friday that the IRS quote unquote lost Lois Learner's emails.
Do you know by the way?
Who was it that said uh Well, it was Ron Fournier.
He's a special prosecutor could find them.
That's right, independent counsel special prosecutor could find these.
A darling of the drive-by media suggesting Fournier is a little ticked, the regime is even proving too much for him lately.
But this revelation on Friday that Lois Learner's emails were lost at a computer crash, that came ten months after Congress first requested them.
Seven months after they were first subpoenaed by the House Oversight Committee.
The IRS commissioner testified about the emails at a hearing in March.
What he said then appears to be at odds with the newer claims that the emails are irretrievable.
Under questioning by Jason Chaffetz, Jason Chaffetz of the House Oversight Committee, the IRS commissioner said, well, you know, the emails they get taken off and stored in servers.
That was part of the reason he said it was so difficult to provide them in timely fashion.
We have to go back, we don't know what's where.
All her emails and everybody else's emails have been offloaded, archived, and stored on a server.
Okay, that was back in March.
Back in March, they said we archived them.
We took them off, we got on a server.
Now they tell us Friday her computer crashed, not the server.
Her computer crashed, and lo and behold, oh, we feel horrible about this, but all of her emails have been lost.
Nobody's buying this.
It's an insult to our intelligence, and it's a challenge is what it is, to the Republicans to do something about it.
It's a challenge to anybody to call them on it.
Right now, they're really feeling their oats.
They're thinking nobody's gonna try to stop them, nobody's gonna push back.
Nobody's gonna call them on it.
It's just the way that they're gonna deal with it.
I've I one hand you look at the regime and we see it falling apart.
Approval numbers weigh down.
Uh Obama behaving as though, okay, I can't even make a pretense of going through the democratic process anymore.
I'm just gonna do whatever I can get away with executive power-wise and start doing it.
And with the full confidence that nobody's gonna stop him for whatever reasons, the fear, the paranoia, the reluctance to stand up to him, he's very aware that it exists.
So guess what?
Uh Lois' computer crashed.
You know what?
All of our all of her all of her emails are gone.
Sorry.
What are you gonna do about it?
And they're pretty confident nobody's gonna do anything about it.
Other than flap their gums, don't know how mad they are, but that's gonna be the end of it.
Yes, if only Lois Lerner had had iDrive.com, then she wouldn't have lost anything.
And she did have some kind of a backup.
Every government computer does.
Sit tight, my friends.
The fastest three hours in media just got a little shorter.
Two hours left.
▲
Export Selection