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Aug. 12, 2014 - Rush Limbaugh Program
37:41
August 12, 2014, Tuesday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
Ladies and gentlemen, you may have noticed it already.
If not, I think it's safe to say that the worm has turned in Washington.
I think behind the scenes, a formal decision has been made on the part of the media, and that is to focus on their treatment of Hillary while casting Obama aside.
Obama is over.
He's yesterday's news.
There's nothing positive to report.
It's time to build Hillary up.
And I think I can make the case for that today in a couple of instances, which we will do.
Great to have you as we head on down the tracks here of truth, the Rush Limbaugh program, and the EIB network.
The telephone number, if you want to be on the program 800-282-2882, the email address, Lrushbo at EIBNet.com, our affiliate in St. Louis, Camo X,
has just reported that the Ferguson police chief, Tom Jackson, has told them at Cam OX that the name of the officer who shot and killed 18-year-old Michael Brown will not be released for the foreseeable future.
I think there was a press conference that was scheduled for 2 o'clock this afternoon where they were going to announce the name of the officer.
And they have changed their minds.
They will not announce the name of the officer who shot Michael Brown for the foreseeable future, at least until he is either compelled to by a judge, this is the police chief, or if there are charges filed against the cop, in which case they will release the name.
The police chief, Tom Jackson, says this is due to death threats being called into the police department, posted on social media.
The chief also says there are social media rumors swirling with a name of a Ferguson police officer, but this is not the name of the officer involved.
The name that is circulating on social media is not accurate.
Some commentators and online news stories are posting photos claiming that they are the children of the Ferguson cop, and the chief says that they are not.
This will probably further exacerbate tensions in Ferguson and the entire St. Louis area.
Just it, this kind of thing is just so sad when this happens.
It's so unnecessary, and it's such a setback.
It is such a tragedy.
It's so, I don't know, folks.
I don't quite know how to describe the feeling I have over this incident.
And it had nothing to do with the fact that I'm from Missouri and near St. Louis, two hours away is where I grew up.
It's just that these kind of circumstances, and I am perhaps a genuinely colorblind person.
And I resent, as you know, politics of identity, racial politics, group identity, victim politics, all this.
I just despise it.
We're all human beings and we're all Americans, and we all ought to be treated and approached and dealt with that way.
Instead, we are divided or we divide ourselves into groups.
The Democrat Party has come along, which runs this town, by the way.
There is, I don't know, may not want to hear it.
St. Louis is run by Democrats.
So are a lot of other cities with these kinds of urban problems.
And it's just a shame while all this is going on, the president's busy vacationing in Martha's Vineyard because otherwise he'd be able to solve this.
I mean, he was elected to make sure this kind of thing didn't happen.
This is what so many people voted for Obama figured would be the result.
It's what they hoped.
A lot of people voted for Obama, thinking that his election, the election of the first black president, would bring an end to this.
And sadly, it has not.
So we will keep a sharp eye on this.
The looting is going on.
So much of it doesn't, in one sense, it's understandable.
You have people fanning the flames of this to keep it alive because the race business is profitable and it makes people very powerful and it keeps them in the public eye.
And that's another sad element to this.
So we'll just have to wait and see.
The FBI is in the Attorney General Eric Holders getting involved in this, which is, well, we'll just wait and see.
It's just a tragedy, just like this thing that happened on a racetrack in upstate New York.
Tony Stewart, by the way, it's been reported that he will not face criminal charges for running down the other driver on the track, the dirt track, on Saturday night.
Authorities investigating the Tony Stewart racing accident that killed a fellow driver said today that at this time there are no facts to support any criminal behavior.
That's the Ontario County Sheriff Philip Povero.
Investigators are looking at two videos of the crash and looking for additional recordings and eyewitness testimony, now known as crowdsourcing.
For those of you not in the tech lingo business, you're looking for crowdsourcing data that might be other people with their phones and other tech devices that might have videoed the incident from an angle that the authorities do not have.
They're talking to other drivers.
Kevin Ward Jr., 20, killed Saturday after he got out of his car in what looked like an attempt to confront Tony Stewart.
Video has shown that Ward was gesturing towards Stewart's car as he walked out of his own car and towards the center of the track where he was run over by Stewart's car.
A lot of other cars missed Kevin Ward, drove right by the guy, but Tony Stewart's car did not.
But it's a race.
There are people, ladies, and you get this.
If you haven't heard this, stand by.
You will.
There are people speculating that the root cause of the Tony Stewart incident is southern culture.
Southern machismo culture is at the root of this.
So we'll keep a sharp eye on this for any late developments that might take place.
A fascinating story here by Dr. Jeremy Dean, a psychologist and the author of Cyblog, P-S-Y-B-L-O-G.
And it's about the Dunning-Kruger effect, why the incompetent do not know they're incompetent.
And here again, yet another sterling example of you being on the cutting edge.
We have been talking in recent weeks about the phenomenon of the low-information voter not knowing he or she is low information because they don't know enough to know that they are low information.
Can talk about the low information voter all day long and everybody in the audience can hear me talking about them and never once think I'm talking about them, because nobody thinks they are low information.
Everybody thinks you're talking about somebody else.
That's stupid or ignorant or uninformed, and this piece attempts to delve into why or what the phenomenon is.
They use the word incompetent here And I want to share this with you, as the program unfolds before your very eyes.
However, ladies and gentlemen, there's been a shift in the media in Washington, and it's characterized by two different things that I have noticed.
One of them was yesterday.
We pointed out that David Gregory and Andrea Mitchell, NBC News Washington, were both taking shots at Obama.
Remember, we played the sound bites from yesterday, where Gregory and Andrea Mitchell both openly stated that Obama's statements about what he's doing in Iraq and why and when don't pass the smell test.
And coupled with a column that is out there by Dana Milbank in the Washington Post, which is, what did I do with it?
I had it right here.
It's, it's, there's got to be.
Oh, come on.
I just had it right in the top of the stack here.
And now somehow it's ended up in the bottom of.
Oh, well, Milbank has a piece in which he basically says that Obama's out to lunch.
The world is on fire and Obama is on vacation.
The world's on fire and Obama has checked out.
The world is on fire and Obama doesn't care.
It is a, it's the second of two treatments in BC News and the Washington Post.
And I think what both signal is that the media has decided it's time to focus now on Hillary.
And remember, Hillary came out and said that she totally disagreed with Obama's policy on the rebels in Syria.
Talked about this yesterday.
And how we had armed the wrong people.
And Obama's response to that, somebody asked him about it, and he said, that's horse bleep.
So Hillary is distancing herself from Obama.
See, if she runs for president, she can't run as the next Obama because it's so bad.
Hillary has to distance herself.
There's a story in the stack today about Obamacare.
This continues to just be an absolute, total, maybe unsalvageable disaster.
The point is that there is nothing about the Obama administration that whoever the next Democrat nominee is wants to glom onto and wants to campaign on the basis, if you like the last eight years, then vote for me because we're going to give you another four.
They're going to have to do the exact opposite.
They're going to have to run against Obama, but also against Republicans or whoever the Republican nominee is.
They're still going to have to satisfy the Democrat base, which is far left and extreme whackup, but at the same time, distance themselves from Obama.
And I believe that distancing has officially begun by Mrs. Clinton and officially sanctioned now by both NBC News and the Washington Post, which of course are just adjuncts of the Democrat Party.
And they exist to further the Democrat Party's agenda.
Up till now, it's been they exist to advance the Obama agenda.
The Obama presidency is beginning to embarrass them and probably has for longer than we know.
But now we're getting close to 2016, and now Mrs. Clinton appears to be getting serious, and now there's somebody to focus on in a positive way.
And when I run you through these two details, you'll see what I'm talking about.
There's no doubt that this is what is happening.
Let me take a brief time out.
We'll come back and get started with all of this and more when we get back.
Don't go away, folks.
It's the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.
Great to have you here.
Telemotion is 800-282-2882.
A couple of soundbites.
I meant to get to these in the opening segment about what's going on in Ferguson, Missouri.
First up, from Anderson Cooper 290.
Wolf Blitzer was filling in last night.
He spoke to the attorney Benjamin Crump, who is representing the family of Michael Brown, the teenager shot and killed by the cop in Ferguson.
And Wolf Blitzer said, Benjamin, I know earlier today you said that Michael's parents deserve a fair, transparent, and efficient investigation.
Are you satisfied with the way this case is being handled, at least so far?
We think there's a lot more to be desired.
I've talked to many of my colleagues in the National Bar Association, even the president, Pamela Means, who lives here in St. Louis, Missouri.
And what they believe over and over again is that we need a complete independent investigation by the Justice Department because there's such distrust by the community to the local law enforcement, and this situation has just exacerbated that, Wolf.
It may well be.
May well be.
You know what strikes me about this, folks?
The real sad thing aside from, and in addition to the fact that this young man was shot and killed, is that this sounds like any soundbite that we would play from the last 50 years.
And so will the next soundbite sound, exactly like any soundbite on any situation or story like this for the last 50 years.
There hasn't been any change.
There hasn't been any improvement.
And this is not just a slap at Obama, although I don't think that it's irrelevant to point out so many people voted with such hope for Barack Obama specifically believing that things like this would no longer happen.
Well, if you doubt me, you remember you've heard the term post-racial.
What do you think it means?
Who invented it?
Well, in the modern usage, the media invented the phrase post-racial to describe what the election of Obama would be.
And Obama supporters were out saying the same thing during the campaign.
We're looking forward to a post-racial, post-partisan.
We're going to end partisanship.
Post meaning after Obama partisanship goes away.
Post-racial means racial strife in America is going to finally be in our past.
The election of Barack Obama is going to bring about an end to this because that election alone will make a statement that says this country has moved beyond the racial strife that has plagued us since our founding.
And that's the sad thing.
Nothing's changed despite this apparent historic election.
And the man who campaigned on the basis that he was the agent of this change, and he had this phrase, hope and change, that people genuinely bought into.
A lot of people, millions of people voted for one reason to end the racial strife that exists in this country.
And they believed.
They believed that the election of the first black president would facilitate this move to a post-racial society, and it hasn't happened.
And of course, it couldn't happen.
No single election is going to fix problems like this.
An election of someone of a specific race is mere symbolism when stacked up against problems that are entrenched as deeply as this one is in this country.
But yet so many people hoped.
And the recipient of that hope knew very well that millions of people were investing that hope in him.
And he parlayed that.
He used it.
He told them they were right to make that investment.
He told them that hope and change was real, that it was going to happen.
They're going to get rid of all of this horrible stuff in the past.
No more Iraq wars.
No more recessions.
No more world hatings.
No more rising sea levels.
You know the drill.
No more hatred.
People were going to come together in a new commonality.
Wrote it all the way to victory.
And it turned out that this president's no different than any other in this regard, and maybe somewhat worse.
Here is another soundbite.
It's from CNN last night.
Don Lemon on CNN Tonight, different show, not Anderson Cooper 290.
He's speaking with a CNN correspondent, Jason Carroll, about the unrest in Ferguson, Missouri.
And Lemon says, take us inside, if you will, Jason, take us right there.
Take us, if you will, to the crime scene.
I understand that you went there today to the crime scene.
What did you learn, Jason?
I was speaking to one young man.
He said, I go to school, I obey the law, and yet when I come in and out of my community, I'm constantly stopped by the police.
And this is a theme that I heard over and over again.
And basically what everyone was telling me is that what happened to Michael Brown was really the tipping point for many members of this community.
When this happened to him, that is why you saw so much anger, which had been bubbling for quite some period of time.
What I really got a sense of is this feeling of distrust between the police department and the community here.
Well, I mean, we heard that during the OJ trial.
We heard that during the Rodney King trial and event.
We heard that back in 1967 with Watts.
We've heard soundbites like this, complaints like this, all of our lives.
You can take that soundbite from last night.
You could put it back in 1967.
It would sound right on the dime.
You can take that soundbite, put it back in 1992-93, Rodney King, same thing.
You wouldn't know.
Nothing has changed.
We have not gotten this post-racial America we were promised after the election in 2008.
And we're not finished hearing this report.
This report's going to happen over and over again.
Because the sad thing is that I think these situations have actually been exacerbated, made even more tense.
We'll be back.
Hell Rush Ball, brand new week of broadcast excellence.
Happy to have you along.
It really, you know, it's therapeutic for me, and I hope for you too to be able to talk about all this stuff each and every day.
It does help.
And as such, I've got a couple of calls I want to get to.
Now, normally, I would continue on with the program and get to the calls next hour.
These calls are about Ferguson, Missouri, and I want to take them now since they are very close in proximity to when we discussed it rather than an hour from now or whatever it would be when so much time has passed.
And we'll start in St. Louis with Susan.
Great to have you, and welcome to the EIB Network.
Hello.
Hello, Rush.
Thank you for having me on.
You bet.
I just, first of all, I want to say by no means am I condoning what happened with the shooting.
I think, you know, that this has gotten so pushed in front of the media, and it's, you know, an isolated incident to come back.
And now we have Trayvon Martin's attorney over here.
And this rioting and everything, what you were just saying about President Obama and what you have said so many times about the entitlement, these rioters and these people that are inciting the riots and are loitering and robbing and stealing and pillaging their entire community in which they live, they live in this community.
They are stealing from the community.
They are stealing from the people that employ them.
And they are burning down their own communities because they feel they are so angry and they are entitled to this.
They have a right to go crash through windows and steal.
They have a right to crash through more windows and steal phones.
And then they're putting it on Facebook.
They're putting it on Twitter, on Craigslist.
They're proud of what they're doing.
They're proud of themselves, and they have absolutely – two weeks ago or a week ago, the big news here in St. Louis was a mother or a grandmother who was gunned down in the road with random bullets, a drive-by shooting.
And she was walking back with her grandchildren.
The NAACP didn't come then.
It was a shooting against...
Well, the NAACP has yet to show up Chicago either.
Right.
I mean, they're just here.
And I was so appalled yesterday because they showed the mother of this child, you know, and everyone.
And when it first happened, Saturday, the news was there.
Everyone's so upset because this boy was left in the road for four hours.
Well, they couldn't get to him.
They couldn't process the crime scene because people were rioting then.
The police came in and were trying to do their job, and they wouldn't let them.
You know, it's a matter of respect.
Until people respect themselves and what they're doing and want to work to better themselves, it's not going to change no matter who's in the middle of the day.
Do you believe the old adage that behavior is learned?
Yes.
You do.
Yes, I do.
And this is a learned behavior.
This is a learned behavior.
Yesterday on my way home, I was listening to the KMOX person there.
That's good.
That's good.
CMOX Great Station.
Exactly.
And I was listening to the speech from I believe it was the lawyer that is now representing them, the family of Michael Brown.
And they were talking about the angry black man.
And I'm like, you're angry.
I'm like, you know, I get angry too.
I get angry sometimes a lot.
Here's the thing, though.
The reason I asked you if you believe in learned behavior, because there are two ways to look at this.
And if you look at this, I wish I could get, I don't want to pick any left-wing, well-known person in the world that you know, and have them sitting here next to me.
Just whoever you want to name.
And I can tell you what they would say to me in explaining this.
They would say it's justified because this is the tradition that they have known since this country was founded.
And they trace it all the way back to slavery.
And they would say that this is one of the original sins of this country.
And we're just going to have to understand the rage.
We're going to have to understand it that this kind of thing is, what do you expect?
That would be the liberal argument here because the country is flawed inherently, which is what leads to this.
And therefore, there is an excuse.
There is an excuse that they accept to explain this.
And I think that's terrible.
That's disrespectful.
I mean, I think these people deserve more than that.
And then excuses.
They deserve more.
You know, don't make excuses for your poor choices, for your poor judgment calls.
They don't think they have any other choices.
That's what I'm saying.
They have choices.
They choose to go and improve their lives.
And no one is going to make that happen until they decide to make that happen.
They don't think it's possible.
It is possible.
That's what happens when you put people in a group and then call them victims.
And they're not victims.
They're victims of themselves.
It doesn't matter.
They think Obama victimized by every day, sitting there accepting his care.
Al Sharpton tells them they're victims, and Jesse Jackson's told him his whole life they're victims.
And the Trayvon Martin attorney is telling they're victims, and the Trayvon Martin story tells them they're victims.
And that's why I asked you about learned behavior.
And it is.
It is a very learned behavior.
It is a cycle that has continued for generations of, you know, oh, you know, we can't walk.
Precisely.
And this is why I'm, you know, I know a lot of people.
Come on, Rush, can't you do any better than talk about it?
No, no, no.
Don't say that to me.
We had a presidential race in 2008 where we were assured that if we elected the right guy, this kind of stuff wasn't going to be happening anymore.
Or it would happen much, much less because we were going to go to post-racial.
And we were finally going to make a statement that we're no longer racist because we had the ability in this country to elect with a majority white population a black president.
That was supposed to say something.
And look at, it hadn't made anybody happier.
It hasn't made anybody less victimized.
It hasn't changed anybody's outlook on their future at all.
No, and I think it's created a lot more social distress and unrest amongst these black communities because their lives are not better.
What has happened has not improved their lives, and they're still stuck in the same cycle.
Look, I know what you're saying.
What you're saying is very close to the point, and I've tried to make it many times, and I really tried to zone in on it when I made that speech at CPAC, when I defined for people in what I consider to be my first address to the nation, what we as conservatives are, who we as conservatives are.
And it's the truth.
We don't see people as members of groups, and we don't want to.
We don't want to be forced to.
We don't want to have to.
We don't want to be told the first thing we have to notice about somebody is what makes them different.
We don't want to be told that what makes America great is its diversity, and that's defined by skin color.
We don't want to believe that.
We're all human beings.
We're all people.
And I can speak for every conservative I know.
We want the best for everybody, and we want this kind of stuff brought to a screeching halt.
This isn't good for anybody.
It's certainly these, the problem is incidents like this are good for some people.
And that's the problem.
And we all know who we're talking about here.
There are some people who do not want these kinds of incidences to ever go away because that means a problem solved.
And if the problem solved, there's no need for these people anymore.
And that's just a crying shame.
The root out of poverty or disadvantage, the root out is hard work.
The root out is self-belief.
The root out is self-respect, all these things, but these are learned behaviors as well.
And when you mention things like this, when I mention things like this, liberals and Democrats get very snarky and say, well, that's easy for you to say.
I said, why is it easy for me to say?
What's wrong with what I'm saying?
Stop trying to characterize.
You know, what's wrong with what I'm saying?
What's wrong with having some self-respect?
What's wrong with loving yourself?
What's wrong for realizing you live in America, the land of great, free opportunity, whatever, and go.
What's wrong with everybody realizing we've all got obstacles we have to overcome, some worse than others, but people from every group in this country have shown it can be done.
It's possible.
I think what we're dealing with here ultimately is what's been called the soft bigotry of low expectations.
We as conservatives want the best for everybody, and we have the expectation that it's possible.
And that's not pie in the sky.
We believe it because we're Americans.
And in America, that's possible.
And that's why, by the way, so many of us are so distressed with the election of Obama, because Obama does not see America that way.
Obama sees America where only 1% have a chance and the game's rigged for the other 99%.
It's not true.
The soft bigotry of low expectations, when you tell people from the youngest age that the deck is stacked against them and that they don't have a chance because the game's rigged, because the power structure is such that people like them will never be admitted, then you are, it's a sad thing to tell people you don't expect them to mount anything.
That's horrible.
It's an absolute, it's a near crime.
We all ought to have the highest expectations of ourselves and each other.
That is far more rooted in reality.
I cringe at the modern definition of reality as doom and gloom and pessimism because that's easy.
Anybody can be a pessimist.
You don't have to work at it.
Anybody can be negative.
Problem is that we have way too many people that profit personally and exploit low expectations and doom and misery rather than using the power they've acquired to try to inspire.
We as conservatives try to inspire on the basis of human characteristics and expectations and traits, not surface characteristics like skin color, sexual gender or orientation or any of these things that end up dividing us.
The very people that claim to be able to unite us because they are the ones that have all the tolerance, have the least tolerance and the lowest expectations, and in no way know how to unify anybody.
There isn't any profit in it.
There is profit in promising it.
There's profit in suggesting you can do it or that you're going to try, but there's no profit in actually accomplishing it.
That's why incidents like this trouble me because they happen and they're going to continue to happen no matter how perfect or how good everything gets.
Human behavior is such that you're going to have examples of all kinds of the good and the bad in any population or circumstance, no matter how advanced, educated, or what have you.
But it's just the whole notion that I've got to loot because that's the only way I can pay back the discrimination.
I've got to loot because the only way I can show how angry I am at the way I'm treated.
I've got to do this and do that because the only way I can get notice is just sad to me.
And it's pointless and doesn't do anybody any good, and it never accomplishes anything at the end.
Anyway, Susan, I appreciate the call.
I really do.
I understand your frustration.
I feel it myself.
Back with more after this.
Don't go away.
Well, I wish you could have been here during the commercial break.
Ladies and gentlemen, the official Obama criticizer bo snerdly jumped in my chili.
And I am the boss.
And as soon as that segment was over, my IFB came to life.
That's the inter-office interstaff intercom.
He said, they're not looting because of any profound thoughts.
They're not looting because they're saying, hey, notice me and I'm angry.
They're looting because it's a chance to get free stuff.
Is that what you said?
They want to steal and they're taking advantage of the situation to go steal things they'd like to have.
And that's all it is.
That's all the looting.
The looting is not.
See how angry I am.
The looting is not.
This is how I feel disenfranchised.
And this is why I, this is nothing to do with anything like that.
This is pure.
Okay.
So the looting, according to the official Obama criticizer, is simply, hey, there's a riot out there.
Let's go steal a phone.
We got a great opportunity because they already busted down the windows to the store.
So let's go steal one.
Okay, then I misspoke.
Then what I meant to say was that the anger, forget the looting.
I think the anger, the looting or the civil disobedience, what have you, is the mechanism by which to learn behavior.
I mean, who leads marches?
Who does this kind of stuff?
Folks, it all looks there's an explanation for everything.
It's just that many people do not want to hear the actual real explanation for many things.
Here's David in North Miami Beach.
You're next on the Rush Limbaugh program.
Hello.
Rush, good afternoon.
Why are they stealing anyway?
I mean, I get maybe Obama hasn't come through.
So they've got to take me.
David, I'm sorry.
Welcome back to the program.
Thank you.
Tremendous message today.
Like always, Rush, and the parodies are cracking me up.
So we appreciate that.
Need a little humor in the day.
He's talking about what he hears on hold, folks.
Callers on the we play all the parodies that we've aired in the past down the line on hold.
That's the humory story.
If you're thinking you missed some humor here, it's everybody else.
I didn't realize those weren't on air.
Hey, I just want to mention, you know, the dissatisfaction, it's really surprising to me because I don't know what a community could want.
They've got the FBI there, the Justice Department there.
I mean, what more can be done to ensure rights?
I mean, here in North Miami.
Well, now, wait a minute.
This is another point.
They can bring Eric Holder himself in there, and it's not going to reduce any anger.
Right.
But by comparison, Rush, I'm trying to say we have a situation here.
Recently, there was an anti-Semitic graffiti on a couple of shuls in the neighborhood.
Schwastikas, Hamas was written.
And in that same neighborhood, last weekend, a rabbi was approached on the street and murdered and called blood, shot dead.
And you don't hear a word from the Justice Department.
I mean, such an obvious hate crime.
And not only that, it's being treated, get this, Rush, as a robbery.
Now, here, not even the suggestion that there might be a hate element involved when a rabbi gets gunned down on his way to synagogue on Shabbos.
Look, you're a smart guy.
I know the incident that you're talking about.
You know why they're different.
You know why nothing happens when the rabbi got shot.
And why something happens when an 18-year-old kid gets shot in St. Louis.
You understand why.
I got to take a break.
We'll be back, folks.
Don't go away.
Out of time.
Have to take a brief.
Obscene prophet.
Yes, obscene prophet timeout.
Here at the top of the hour.
And hang in there, be tough.
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