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Aug. 8, 2014 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:47
August 8, 2014, Friday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
And greetings to you, music lovers, thrill seekers, conversationalists on across the fruited plain, Rush Limbaugh, and taking the path of greatest resistance.
That's what we do here each and every day on the EIB network.
You know, I've been noting lately how crazy everything is, how upside down.
Nothing makes sense.
It's all surreal.
I mean, what's next?
Is Obama going to start talking about the need to bomb Iraq?
Oh, wait.
Live from the Southern Command in sunny South Florida.
It's Open Line Friday.
He did that.
You ought to see it, too.
The drive-bys, man, they're so upset.
It might not look good to go on vacation without poor Obama.
The damn Yazidis or whatever they are in Iraq, they're screwing up Martha's Vineyard.
It's amazing.
Poor Obama, he's just trying so hard, but he may not be able to go on vacation because of this.
And if he does, it may not look good.
Oh, well.
As is always the case, great to have you here, folks.
It's Open Line Friday.
And very briefly, that means that there are few, if any, restrictions placed on callers in the program.
Whatever you wish to talk about is pretty much okay.
That's not the case Monday through Thursday, but on Friday, I extend that little change of pace.
You never know.
It can lead to even more unpredictability.
If you want to send an email address, lrushbow at EIBnet.com.
CNN, another poll.
Trust in government is at an all-time low.
What'd you say?
Great news.
Trust in government.
It's maybe not great news.
Well, this is why I'm bringing it up first.
It may not be good news.
Trust in government, if that's what it remains.
But what if, as we have seen is the case with a lot of young people who voted for Obama, they're not blaming him.
They're blaming America.
The American dream is over.
Solid days are behind this.
It's not faith in government, really, that's being questioned or falling.
It's the country.
That's what worries me.
That's why this cannot be allowed to result in a distrust of America and its founding principles.
And that's, believe me, there are all kinds of people who want to take advantage of a poll like that or like this.
Trust in government at an all-time low.
Well, see, America is just not, it's not made for life in 2014.
America needs to change.
The poll indicates the public's trust in government's at an all-time low.
Just 13% of Americans say the government can be trusted to do what's right, either always or most of the time, just over 75% saying only some of the time, and only 10% say that they never trust the government, according to the poll.
The number who trust the government all or most of the time has sunk so low that it is hard to remember that there was ever a time when Americans routinely trusted the government, said the CNN polling director.
Now, as I say, there's both opportunity and danger here.
An opposition party grounded by conservative principles would be a good thing, presenting an alternative.
Make sure that this distrust in government does not become distrust or disbelief in the country.
But believe me, there are people that are out there going to be making that happen.
Did you hear what, or trying to make that happen?
Did you hear what Michelle Obama said at a women's empowerment lunch at the White House on Wednesday?
Well, she did.
She said that women are smarter than men.
And I think not just halfway joking.
You know, she said that.
But that's it.
She also said, and I quote, you know, I tease my kids.
I tell them I want them to use Instagram to take a picture of something really important rather than their food.
I mean, really, no one really cares what you have for lunch.
You know, yeah, she said that her kids are out there apparently taking pictures of their lunch and posting it on Instagram.
And Michelle said to a women's empowerment lunch, she told the kids, nobody cares what you had for lunch.
You don't need to send pictures of that stuff out.
Now, wait just a second here.
Has Michelle Obama been body-snatched by aliens or something?
I mean, care about what you had for lunch is all she does.
She is dictating what people have for lunch in the public school system.
I thought we were all supposed to care what kids had for lunch.
In fact, she cared so much that she had to turn a whole school lunch program upside down.
Well, and by the way, there is some vegan revenge taking place out there, folks.
You know, I have to tell you, even on this program, as you know, I have tried to call your attention to the militant vegetarians.
And even this is a great example.
All week long, I have been discussing the need to teach, particularly young people, that everything is politics.
You know, these young people, or not even young people, just people that you know around, I hate politics.
I don't like the arguing.
I don't like the disrupts me wrong.
I just can't we all just get along.
I just hate politics.
These are the people, especially we need to get to because everything is political.
And particularly, look, the Republicans are not immune from that.
But the Republicans get political in a defensive sense.
The Republicans get up every day and just look at what they believe in is being attacked.
And sometimes they decide to defend it.
I do every day.
Sometimes the Republicans will defend what they believe.
But the point, the Democrats are on offense every hour of every day.
And it is all political.
And it's all for the purpose of advancing an agenda.
And the agenda is big government and as much control over people and the country and life as possible.
But the people that don't see that are people that hate politics.
They tune it out.
They don't want any part of it.
It's too much acrimony.
There's not enough getting along.
And so to them, global warming, it's not politics.
It's science.
Well, imagine me trying to come along and convince people that vegetarianism is political.
What?
Are you crazy?
Do everything have to be political to you?
I can imagine people listening, you know, scanning by young people and me on a rant.
They catch it in the middle about militant vegetarians.
And they say, what?
This is absolutely absurd.
And if they stop and listen, fine, we'll get them.
But if they keep going, we'll lose them.
But imagine the difficulty in trying to explain that vegetarianism is part of a political agenda.
And it is with some people.
Not all vegetarians.
Most of them are dupes.
Most of them just think they're eating healthier.
Ruin what?
Yeah, most of them are dupes in the sense that they don't understand they're part of a political agenda.
I'm not insulting them.
I'm actually exempting them from being part of the political movement.
You're a dupe.
If you're a vegetarian and you don't realize there's a political agenda attached to what you're doing, you're being duped.
You're a dupe.
Yes.
Because vegetarianism is political.
And you know how I know?
And this is the challenge.
The challenge is to persuade, convince people of this.
How can that possibly be, Mr. Lindbaugh?
You know, I want to give it the benefit of the doubt.
But, you know, my mom always said you were an extreme, stream, really way out there kind of guy.
And this kind of proves vegetarians are political.
Yes, they are.
They don't know it, many of them.
That's my point.
They're dupes.
The very idea that militant vegetarians demand everybody do what they do is all the proof you need that it's political.
Because how do they intend to enforce you doing what they want you to do?
They're going to make the government do it if they have half a chance.
And that circles us back to Michelle Obama, who kind of stepped in it when she said, come on, kids, nobody cares what you had for lunch.
Because her entire identity as first lady has been to dictate the school lunch menu for kids all over the country.
And Michelle Obama is political.
And the politics of it is not the food.
The politics is not vegetarianism.
The politics is that it is a way of expanding government control over people's life, of guilt-tripping you, of stigmatizing certain things, of changing, coercing your behavior.
If there were no political agenda attached to it, the militant vegetarians wouldn't care what you ate.
They would be satisfied with their own diet and leave it alone.
But the fact that they have to push it on you, the fact that they want government power with regulations from the agriculture department to push it on you is all the proof you need that it's political.
Now, you might say, well, I don't care, Rush, because that's healthy.
Vegetarianism is healthy stuff, and if it takes that to make people healthy, fine.
All right.
If that's your attitude, one of these days, they're going to come for something you really do care about, and they're going to make you do the opposite or not permit you to do it or otherwise force you to do something you really hate and then you're going to get it, but it may be too late by then.
It's really better if you understand now the entire political identity and nature and agenda of the Democrat Party.
So veggie revenge, what is it?
Well, in Texas, Texas, of all places, they have discovered a bug that can turn you into a vegetarian or at least make you swear off of red meat.
Doctors across the nation are seeing a surge of sudden meat allergies in people bitten by a certain kind of tick.
Oh, yes, we're going to get to Ebola.
Are we going to get to fall?
Man, are we going to, and we're going to get to Iraq, yes.
Look, it's Open Line Friday, folks, and even I need a break from the dead weight serious stuff every day.
Give me a little time here.
If I want to talk about a tick that turns people into vegetarians, I promise it won't take long.
The bizarre problem discovered a few years ago, but it's growing, as the ticks spread from the southwest and the east to more parts of the U.S. Some cases eating a burger or a steak has landed people in a hospital with severe allergic reactions.
The culprit is the lone star tick, named for Texas, a state famous for meaty barbecue, of all things, a tick that can make people swear off beef, found smack dab in the middle of cattle country.
Now, let's just see.
It never may never get any news on this, but this is the kind of thing that militant vegetarians will find and make a big deal out of.
What do you think?
The whole effort to ban beef and burgers in McDonald's because of global warming is if you think that's not political?
There are any number of ways to illustrate how everything the left does is political.
what radical vegetarians now now that's a bit of that's yes i know I don't think you're kidding.
I think you're just the radicals are going to.
All right.
All right.
I'll remember you said it.
Snurdley thinks the radicals are going to try to get hold of these ticks and mass produce them, mass grow them, and spread all over the country in order to get people to stop eating beef.
Well, let's just put it this way.
If that happens, I wouldn't be surprised.
That's how committed they are to making everybody do what they do.
Because remember now, it's all about global warming and saving the planet, folks.
Eating beef, not eating beef, vegetarianism, all of this.
It's all political.
Yesterday, if you were here, you remember me really tearing into Obama.
I think one of the most outrageous, unconscionable things I've heard him say, he was asked by a reporter in why we haven't shared this magical anti-Ebola serum with the three countries in Africa where it's really spreading.
And as is typical, Obama created a straw man.
He said, even those countries, they'd be the first to tell you they don't want that serum.
They're not ready for it.
It's not, it's just, only in advanced cultures are we capable of.
And here's the whole point of that was he didn't have the guts to stand up there and say, no, we're not giving it to them because we don't have enough or what it knows.
He had to lay it off on them.
He said, no, no, as they would be the first to put words in their mouths.
He didn't even ask them.
And as I'm sure they would be the first to agree, they don't even want this.
Well, it turns out they do.
That's the news.
A bunch of these leaders who yesterday, Obama, assured us, no, no, as they would be the first to tell us, don't even want, they do.
They want it, which we knew yesterday.
So hang in there and be tough, my friends.
Soap of Mind Friday resumes right after this.
Don't go anywhere.
Hey, folks, this is great.
This happened this morning on television on the ABC network.
It used to be live with Regis and Kathy Lee.
They left.
It's now live with Kelly and Michael, i.e. Kelly Rippa and Michael Strahan.
But Ripa wasn't there today.
She's on vacation.
So they had Kate Upton, well-known swimsuit model and other kind of model in, guest hosting for RIPA.
So it was live with Kate and Michael today.
Shortly after the program began, ABC, which syndicates the show, broke away from Kate Upton and Michael Strahan to do a report, a breaking news emergency report on Obama and Iraq.
And apparently, the viewing audience went nuts, blew their gaskets, started melting phone lines at ABC, sending in tweets and emails and texts demanding to get Obama off the screen and put Kate Upton back on.
They didn't care about the news.
They didn't care about whatever was going on in Iraq.
They didn't care about what Obama was doing.
All they wanted was their soap opera type program back on the air.
They didn't care less, couldn't care less.
I mean, it's, you know, it used to be revenge of the nerds to heck with that.
It's rise of the low information population.
Does anybody remember how Barack Obama first achieved national attention?
These are always intriguing questions to me, because I, of course, know the answer.
Well, yes.
Yes, that was the occasion, the speech.
But what did he do in this speech?
What did he say?
What did Obama say?
How does anybody, do you remember how Obama first achieved national attention?
And if you're shouting at me, it was that convention speech, Rush, in 2004 to Democrat.
Yes, that's correct.
That was the occasion.
But what did he do in this speech?
2004, Barack Obama condemned the war in Iraq.
Speech was in 20, actually, there was a speech before that in 2002.
And he, yeah, because he never voted for it.
In the speech in 2002, he accused Bush of wanting to invade Iraq to distract us from a bad economy.
That's before he made any speech at the Democrat Convention.
And I think that's noteworthy.
And then, of course, he made his speech in 2004 at the convention.
It's a dumb war.
It's a pointless war.
And so forth and so on.
I got to take a break, but that's a good time to do it because you ponder that.
We'll come back and pick it up right at that point.
October 2002, Barack Obama, B. Hussein O makes a speech, accuses George W. Bush of wanting to invade Iraq to distract us from a bad economy.
We had not gone into Iraq yet.
That happened in 2003.
Bush was out trying to marshal all kinds of support for it.
I mean, he spent a year and a half making speeches, sending Colin Powell to the U.N. Spent a lot of time putting together a massive coalition for this and dredging up public opinion support for it.
He just didn't do this.
Bush didn't willy-nilly overnight.
But Obama was out there in 2002, and this is how he came to be known.
This is how he first achieved national attention.
And he never voted for the Iraq war.
So he had some credibility with the Democrats because all the rest of them did.
I don't want to review this whole thing because I've done it so many times, but there were two votes on the use of force authorization that Bush asked for.
And the first one, none of the Democrats voted for it.
Then they saw a public opinion poll on it and they demanded a revote.
Bush did not have to have the Republicans resubmit it, but he did because he wanted the Democrats on record supporting it so that a unified country would appear to be the case.
It made sense in that way.
I mean, why go to war with all the Democrats opposing it?
They asked for a second vote after they saw public opinion, and Bush granted the second vote so we could create the, turns out, the illusion of national unity on the use of force in Iraq.
So Obama was one of the holdouts.
He didn't vote for it, made a speech before it even happened condemning it.
That Bush was just dredging it up as a distraction.
He makes a speech at the Democrat Convention 2004, called it a dumb war, continued with that theme.
And now look where we are.
Would it be too cynical to suggest that Obama might be bombing Iraq to distract us from some of his numerous problems?
I mean, we've got an immigration disaster taking place.
Our economy is a disaster.
Obamacare is a disaster.
By the way, there is, you know, the fines and penalties that people were going to have to pay if they didn't have insurance.
Either having insurance or paying a fine mandate was one of the primary funding mechanisms of Obamacare.
Well, guess what?
It turns out that very few people are actually going to have to pay a penalty for not having insurance because they qualify as hardship cases and are not going to have either.
And it's well over 50%.
I mean, it's another financial hit.
One of the primary revenue sources is not going to happen.
It's not going to step up.
So this is even a bigger mess than people thought it was going to be.
That was bad enough.
But would it be cynical to suggest that maybe Obama's bombing here to distract everybody?
I mean, think of how bad things must be for Obama if he thinks his best PR move at this point is to ratchet up the war in Iraq.
Can you imagine how bad things must be?
My friends, my point is this is what put him on the map opposing this.
And he opposed every aspect of it.
He even challenged the legitimacy of it.
We had no business.
It was phony.
It was Bush distracting us from a bad economy.
Or it was Bush trying to avenge an assassination attempt that Saddam had hatched on his father.
And now things have gotten so bad that the best move Obama can make, there's a genocide going on over there.
And it's not just the Christians.
It is, it's, you know, ISIS is committing genocide, and they're trying to wipe out the Yazidi.
Now, they've been trying to wipe out the Christians for a long time, months.
So clearly, Obama's not concerned about that genocide, but something about wiping out the Yazidi makes it intolerable.
Let's go to the audio soundbites.
December 14th, 2011, Fort Bragg, North Carolina.
We're leaving behind a sovereign, stable, and self-reliant Iraq with a representative government that was elected by its people.
We're building a new partnership between our nations.
And we are ending a war, not with a final battle, but with a final march toward home.
This is an extraordinary achievement, nearly nine years in the making.
So the Iraq war was won, and there's Obama trying to take credit for it.
He opposed it at every turn.
He campaigned against it for president in 2008.
He said there was nothing noteworthy of any value in the Iraq war except that we learned how bad we torture people.
There was not one positive.
I don't think Obama even voted for the surge.
I think he was voted, I think he voted against every aspect of this.
It could be wrong in the surge.
I'd have to check.
So there he was in 2011.
And I predicted this.
I hate reaching around, patting myself on the back.
But all during the Bush presidency, when the Iraq war was going on, people would say to me, you know, the Democrats, they're trying to secure defeat.
I mean, they actually want us to, if the Democrat wins the White House, we're going to get kicked.
I said, no, no.
You don't understand something, I said.
The Democrats would love for us to lose the war in Iraq if Bush is president when it happens.
If they can saddle the loss with Bush, they'd be more than happy for us to lose.
But they are not going to lose a war when they control the White House.
They will not.
They will take credit for victory.
They may despise the military and all that, but they are not going to allow themselves to be seen as the reason we lose a war.
And again, that's because of the political nature.
And lo and behold, that prediction was borne out because there's Obama, December 14, 2011, thinking the Iraq war is over.
And the most noteworthy thing is the long march home.
It's a big victory, nine years in the making, an extraordinary achievement that it took Barack Obama to pull off.
Three years later, and last night at the White House, President Obama addressed the nation about actions he has authorized in Iraq.
In recent days, Yazidi women, men, and children from the area of Sinjar have fled for their lives.
And thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, are now hiding high up on the mountain with little but the clothe on their backs.
They're without food.
They're without water.
People are starving.
And children are dying of thirst.
Meanwhile, ISIL forces below have called for the systematic destruction of the entire Yazidi people, which would constitute genocide.
So these innocent families are faced with a horrible choice.
Descend the mountain and be slaughtered or stay and slowly die of thirst and hunger.
And that's because the ISIS gang has control of a dam now.
And with control of the dam, they can flood Baghdad, for example, if they wanted to.
But they can also deny water to the pot growers and to people who want to drink it in Iraq.
So look, it is what it is.
ISIS has been going after Christians for months.
And we had no business going back in there.
But all of a sudden, now we got a genocide on the Yazidi, and we have to move back in.
So that was Obama describing the desperate situation, which, by the way, is entirely of his making.
And the reason it's entirely of his making is because he just assumed that this war was over.
He proclaimed victory and got out, but did not leave anything behind that would enforce the circumstances on the ground that we were calling a victory.
We pulled out of there.
We had no military might anywhere near.
We got out.
It's what his party wanted him to do.
It's what his base wanted him to do.
We got out.
And everything went pot real quick.
It was entirely of his making.
This all could have been prevented.
But see, Obama doesn't think no, no, no, no, it's in his view, we caused all this by going there in the first place.
So the only thing to do to make it fair and to fix that original problem was to get out.
So next, same speech last night, White House.
Next, he explained how the military solutions that he has authorized to fix the problem that he created will actually not work.
I know that many of you are rightly concerned about any American military action in Iraq, even limited strikes like these.
I understand that.
I ran for this office in part to end our war in Iraq and welcome our troops home.
And that's what we've done.
As commander-in-chief, I will not allow the United States to be dragged into fighting another war in Iraq.
And so even as we support Iraqis as they take the fight to these terrorists, American combat troops will not be returning to fight in Iraq because there is no American military solution to the larger crisis in Iraq.
then what are we doing here?
There is no...
Did you hear that?
This is another one.
It zips right by, but that's the kind of thing that is outrageous.
Then what are we doing with even limited airstrikes?
And we're not going to call that a military air.
Oh, no, no, no, because apparently there aren't boots on the ground.
American combat troops are not returning, and so this is not military action, and therefore it's not going to work.
That's essentially what he was saying is explaining these military solutions that he has authored to fix the problem that aren't going to work.
American combat troops will not be returning to fight in Iraq because there is no American military solution to the larger crisis in Iraq.
So I guess what he thinks is we can stop the genocide of the Yazidi with a couple of airplane strikes and bombs and get out of there, and it'll be all done.
Quick timeout, my friends.
This is incompetence, Ronnie.
Always try to get telephone calls in the first hour in Open Line Friday, and I'm going to do that.
I got one more soundbite I want to play.
And just to give you an illustration of something I mentioned early in the program, this is the media all fretting.
Over all of this happening, right when Obama is supposed to go to Martha's Vineyard, and it just, it just, this stupid stuff in Iraq, damn it.
It just puts Obama in a really tough spot.
Damn it, it just, nothing's easy for the poor guy.
He's working as hard as he tries as hard.
He's really on the golf course a lot, doing everything he can.
And all these events are conspiring against him.
He just wants to just figure, just stop the hating over there, at least until after the end of August, because he's got this Martha's Vineyard thing.
It's just so sad.
This example is Jim Acosta on CNN last night with Wolf Blitzer after Obama addressed the nation about how the military action he's taking isn't going to matter.
What they did not anticipate is this humanitarian crisis that is unfolding and potentially getting much, much worse by the hour in northern Iraq with the Yazidis taking shelter in those mountains with absolutely no protection from those ISIS militants, Wolf.
It is a very dire situation, and it puts the president in a very tough spot as he's about to go on a vacation to Martha's Vineyard in a few days, Wolf.
Yeah, it certainly does.
Yeah, it certainly does.
Oh, yeah, it's a tough spot for Obama.
You got people dying.
You've got people being bombed to smithereens in northern Iraq.
It's such a tough situation for poor old Barack.
B. Hussein O is really in a tight spot here.
Wants to get away to Martha's Vineyard.
These damn ISIS guys decide to attack the Yazidi.
Why couldn't they have stuck with the Christians?
And then they had to move on to Yazidi.
And now the Yazidi, it may be a genocide.
And I thought the Iraq war was over.
We won the Iraq war.
And America can't fix these things anyway.
So I'm going to send a couple of bombs over there with a couple of fighter jets.
But that's it.
It isn't going to matter.
America still turns to us.
But there's no victory possible here because we're not going to really secure one.
But I got to make people think that I care about the Yazidi being wiped out.
But the real important thing is Martha's Vineyard.
And how am I going to get there?
And now to the phones we go.
This is Leanne in Olney, Illinois, your first on Open Line Friday.
Great to have you.
Hi.
Thank you, Rush.
Longtime listener, first time caller.
Thank you.
I just wanted to say, too, you know, to your point, with the convention speech, he also talked about how the pundits like to slice and dice our country up and separate us into red or blue.
And so he was the purple America.
He was bringing the purple message and we were all going to unite.
But it just doesn't happen.
So people need to stop listening to what he says and start looking at what he does because that will paint the true picture.
I'm beginning to think that some of the low-information people have actually tuned him out.
That doesn't mean they've tuned in somewhere else.
They've just tuned out.
They've just, they're fed up with him, fed up with government, fed up with America.
That's what worries me.
And so what he does is, in many cases, largely going unnoticed now.
And I think it's one of the reasons his approval numbers are down.
But despite that, I'll never forget that, I mean, you're right, that's exactly what he said.
That's where this whole notion that he could unify everybody really began, was that speech at the Democrat convention in 2004.
And people did respond to it then.
But anybody that knows that is paying constant attention, well, not even constant, we've never stopped arguing since before the country was founded.
There's never going to be a day where there's total unity.
And so the desire for that's almost a desire for utopia, desire for stop the arguing and bipartisan, can't we all get along?
To me is just an illustration of how much ignorance there is in the general population about the real nature of politics.
People look at politics as solving problems, and that's not what solves problems.
Victory in politics solves problems.
Politics does not involve fixing things by sitting down and agreeing and compromising on a mutually agreed purpose because that common ground is more and more unattainable because it doesn't exist.
There is, and this is a striking truth, but there is less and less the warring factions, political factions in this country have in common.
Now, I would say to anybody who thinks politics is about solving problems.
No, no, no, no.
Politics is how we try to manage our affairs, but victory in politics is how you solve problems.
Not compromise in politics.
Politics by itself doesn't solve anything.
Victory in politics is what fixes things.
It is the fastest three hours in media.
Open line Friday, Rush Limbaugh, the Excellence in Broadcasting Network.
Only two more to go, folks.
We'll come back and resume with whatever.
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