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June 16, 2014 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:52
June 16, 2014, Monday, Hour #1
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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 Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.
The telephone number, if you want to be on the program, 800-282-2882.
And the email address, lrushbo at eibnet.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 Noll.
Died in his sleep, natural causes Friday night.
He was 82 years old.
And Chuck Noll 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's amazing.
One of the things that I realized 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, who made me realize that about myself.
But everybody has somebody, and I was fascinated to listen to all of Chuck Noll's players talk about him.
And 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 an inspiration.
To them, he was much more just an X's and O's football guy.
He was fluent in a couple of languages.
He was omnivorous in what he read in his interests.
He didn't sleep on the couch.
He went home at 5 o'clock every night instead of staying till midnight.
He 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 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 divulge people what he thought.
He didn't like suffering fools.
He thought reporters were something you had to suffer.
And he just, the throwback is somebody that just is anathema to the kind of public personality we have today who can't get enough fame, who can't get enough attention.
Chuck Noel wanted none of it.
And after he left the Steelers, he retired in the Steelers, I think, 91 or 92.
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.
The only coach to ever win four.
He won those in the 70s.
Well, the last one was in 1980, but it was the 79th season.
Got coach of the year in 1989.
Kind of like 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's a fascinating case study when you compare the way people jockey today to get noticed.
And 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 was not caught up in any aspect of attention getting, holding, fame, any of that.
And actually went out of his way 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.
I used to, I don't any longer.
I used to use his name when I checked into hotels.
I admired Chuck Noel like you came.
I only met him one time after he had retired in Pittsburgh.
He's a very nice guy.
And I used his name.
I just was, and whenever I used, nobody knew who I was.
I mean, Chuck Nolan, 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, and was totally satisfied.
It was the meeting, what was the meeting like?
Well, he knew that I used his name, and he sent me an autograph picture.
Actually, the way that happened was Howard Slusher, I met Howard Slusher 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 upper executive tier at Nike.
And I don't know.
I mean, he knew Noel from his days as an agent in the NFL.
And he knew, and I told him that I checked in as Chuck Noel when he went to hotels.
So he told Noel about it, and I got an autographed picture one day.
And it's still on my library desk at home.
And it says, Rush, ditto, ditto, ditto.
Do you mind if I use your name when I check into hotels from now on?
It's just, it's 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.
I don't use the name anymore.
I haven't in a long time.
And I'm not trying to insert myself in this three in any way, shape, man, or form.
But I do have that.
It's a treasured item of mine that I have.
I'm not expressing this properly, folks, but here was the guy who's the best at what he did, and that was enough.
He had an interesting philosophy.
I understand why all of his old players are talking about him with such reverence.
He said, you've seen these old 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 not going to last long here, even if you last a long time.
You're going to have to, the longest you're going to 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 just 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 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 a solid guy, very happy with who he was.
And it's quite obvious that he had a profound impact on the vast majority of players who 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 and 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 Coach Noel, apparently it was even more so than your standard, ordinary, everyday coach.
So 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 could be a dark and dank place.
But man, the Steelers, that was my first cognizant awareness of what a winning sports team can actually mean to the self-esteem of an entire city.
It was cool.
That's why I became a Steelers fan.
You couldn't escape it.
I went to Pittsburgh, got there in 1971, and I was first job away from home.
I couldn't have cared less about anything other than me and my career.
You got caught up in it.
Everybody did.
I wasn't even particularly a football fan.
I had quit the Haskerlo 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 happened to me in Pittsburgh during the 70s with the Steelers dynasty forming.
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 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, you're cowboys, but if you look at wins and losses and the other factors, there's 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 not the best of times.
The Steelers brought the town together, united them, made people forget about that other stuff.
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 how special all that, not just the Steelers, but any Super Bowl winning team or World Series winning.
It really, really, really is something special.
Something that a 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 timeout.
We'll be back.
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 steam 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 going to 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 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 got to turn the ditto 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 funny.
I got the soundbites coming up.
We'll get to those in the next segment after the break at the bottom of the hour.
How many of you use the MAPS application in 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 automobiles.
But federal regulators are going to make a big pitch here.
And while this may not matter much to you, because I just did a little brief test and the guys in the inside of the glass, I don't use a maps app.
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 and welcome back, Rush Limbaugh, the Excellence in Broadcasting Network and the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.
Okay, military time.
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, a lot of people are fit to be tied.
And I, you know, it's, folks, I'm going to tell you, it's very hard for me to sit here.
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.
I said, look, 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'm not surprised by any of it.
Okay, so about 100 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-A-Qaeda insurgency in Iraq.
And I don't care what anybody tries to do.
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, 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 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 someday 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, eh?
They're 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.
He 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.
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 could 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.
Not in 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 mention 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 wanted to get out of there 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 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 time out, my friends.
Be right.
And if you think, by the way, that the Lois Lerner 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 documents.
I don't have them.
My hard drive crashed.
See how far it gets you.
Hi, welcome back.
Rush Limbaugh, the Excellence in Broadcasting Network.
Yeah, they were supposed to believe it.
Lois Lerner'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, folks, 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 Commission, are you going to comply with a subpoena?
This is a story about the request for these emails a 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 her 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 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 COOP plan requires that they make and store duplicates of everything.
These duplicates are maintained in another safe location in the event records are destroyed by fire or natural disaster or nuclear attack.
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 what to redact.
Top of that, Congress was assured by the IRS commissioner under oath that Lois Lerner'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 has been under investigation for more than a year.
But two years now?
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 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 Lerner's emails.
By the way, who was it that said, oh, it was Ron Fournier.
He said 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 Lerner's emails were lost at a computer crash, that came 10 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, they've been offloaded, archived, and stored on a server.
Okay, that was back in March.
Back in March, I 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 going to try to stop them.
Nobody's going to push back.
Nobody's going to call them on it.
It's just the way that they're going to deal with it.
One hand, you look at the regime and we see it falling apart.
Approval numbers way down.
Obama behaving as though, okay, I can't even make a pretense of going through the democratic process anymore.
I'm just going to do whatever I can get away with executive power-wise and start doing it.
And with the full confidence that nobody's going to 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?
Lois' computer crashed.
You know what?
All of her emails are gone.
Sorry.
What are you going to do about it?
And they're pretty confident nobody's going to do anything about it.
I didn't flap their gums, tell them how mad they are, but that's going to 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.
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