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Oct. 7, 2014 - Rush Limbaugh Program
37:27
October 7, 2014, Tuesday, Hour #2
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And I tell you what, folks, there's another problem that we have in this country, and that is there's way too much dependence on experts presented to us in the media.
I give you the greatest example of experts who never get it right.
Economists.
Every month when the unemployment number comes out, I don't care what the number is, experts are surprised.
The experts always say the news is unexpected, no matter what the news is.
I don't think they even write these pieces anymore.
They're a template and they just copy and paste it and they fill it in the first two paragraphs.
Experts, economists said the results this month were unexpected, as experts were expecting, blah, blah, blah.
And everybody depends on this.
Experts on global warming, experts on economics.
We don't have any experts on anything in this regime.
Obama's not an expert on anything.
He's not qualified.
Well, that's not altogether true.
For what he wants to do, he is qualified.
He's an agitator.
He's a community organizer.
He doesn't like status quo and he wants to upend the country.
And he is qualified to do that.
He's not qualified as we traditionally examine people who want to serve as president, look at their qualifications.
He hasn't done anything.
He has no track record.
He's got no resume.
The only resume he's got, college transcripts, nobody lets us see.
So we don't really know.
We have to take the media's word for it.
And so we get people who are other experts, like New York Times columnist David Brooks telling us he's qualified because of the crease in his slacks.
And everybody buys hook, line, and sinker what these experts say if they're presented in the media, if they're members of the administration, if they're members of the political class.
If the media says somebody's an expert, if they're a scientist, if they wear a white lab coat, they are experts.
And their credibility is never questioned.
And we always assume that everybody's smarter than we are.
That's another thing that is a real bugaboo of mine.
And I'm going to have trouble expressing this.
It may take me two or three times.
By the way, welcome back.
Great to have you.
Rush Limbaugh again at 800-282-2882.
Steve Jobs had this as a philosophy, too.
And I don't remember exactly how he said it, but I do know that when I read the quote, it resonated with me.
And it starts, it's understandable how it happens.
It starts when we're very young, and we're surrounded by people older than we are.
And so it is natural to assume they know more than we do.
Now, a lot of people never grow out of that attitude, always assuming somebody else is smarter.
If they have more money, they're smarter.
If they have a bigger house, they're smarter.
It's amazing how people willingly subordinate themselves in order to conform.
And I admit that it takes guts, gumption, or whatever, to really believe in yourself.
It takes a lot of effort to do that.
Most people don't.
Standard human nature 101.
But everybody, a lot of people fall prey to this notion that everybody is smarter than they are.
I don't care if it's in the business they want to go into or if it is in politics or if it's in science, global warming or whatever.
And all we're dealing with here is people in politics at every level of it.
We're not dealing with experts except in politics.
Science has been politicized.
Everything's been politicized now.
NFL's on its way to being politicized, for example.
But the idea that people will so readily accept the testimony of a Hollywood actor as an expert because they played, they pretended to be somebody in a movie.
People have been asking me, and I haven't addressed this, hey, Rush, did you see the knockdown drag out between Ben Affleck and Bill Maher Friday night?
No, I've seen tape of it now, but I wasn't watching.
What do you think, Rush?
What do you think?
I mean, who was right?
Classic illustration.
Just because it was on TV, somebody in that had to be right.
Why do both of them have to?
Why can't both of them be totally wrong?
Why does one of them have to be right?
Affleck clearly doesn't know what he's talking about, I don't think ever.
But he looks good, and people wish women wish they were married to him, so that's covered.
Maher, agitator.
But in this case, if you want to know the truth, Bill Maher was closer to being right than Ben Affleck was.
Ben Affleck literally is absumed with, consumed with other needs or desires when expressing his opinion.
He's the kind of guy who tells you what he thinks because he's really concerned what you think of him afterwards.
And a lot of people are that way.
A lot of people will tell you what they think, not because it's really what they think, it's because they think it's what you want to hear or what they want to hear or whatever it is that'll make you seem what you think they demand, either nice or not be a troublemaker or smarter agreeing with them or what have you.
I just think a lot of assumptions exist and are made and they're understandable, but it's unfortunate.
And it all, you can trace it.
It all descends here from this notion that there are experts.
And media routinely gives us experts, and I would contend to you that they're always wrong by virtue of the reporting.
The economic experts are always surprised at whatever the monthly unemployment number is or the economic growth.
They're always surprised.
Well, an expert wouldn't be surprised.
An expert would be confirmed.
But every month, AP, writers, whoever, and they never name them.
A wide swath of experts expressed shock and surprise over the unemployment numbers today.
I just, I don't think there is enough, and I'm not talking about insubordination.
I don't think there's enough questioning of whatever is said by people who are thought to be experts or smarter.
I'm safe, I think, in saying that most people, not all, of course, most people think everybody is smarter than they are.
And therefore, they must conform to, or must subordinate themselves to whoever they think is smarter than they are.
And it's not necessarily the case.
It's not a conspiracy of anything.
There's nobody making this happen.
This is human nature.
And I just wish there were a way to spiral out of it.
I wish it all gets traced back to how much confidence in yourself you have.
It all traced back to how much you care, how much passion you have about something or anything.
But we're being done in by experts, and we're being done in by this notion that we have no right to challenge what the experts say, like this guy that called me.
We lay people, we need to denial it, but we lay.
It's a classic example of what I'm talking about.
This guy was perfectly willing to assume that everybody knows more than he does.
And what that leads to, additionally, is a feeling of illegitimacy about your own opinion, an illegitimacy of your own existence.
And then, if that's the case, then you're always going to end up being subservient or subordinate to somebody.
You're always going to end up granting somebody authority over you.
Now, in your job, you have to.
Everybody has a boss.
If you're a lawyer, a judge, so forth.
But I'm talking about just in everyday life and the way people see themselves.
And I think it's directly relatable to how much subservience there is in our country now, how much dependence there is on the government or other institutions for your wants and needs.
And it's a, I don't, I just, I think a lot of people are selling themselves short, not meeting, realizing their full potential.
And in many cases, because they think they're exercising humility.
You know, humility is taught, and it's a good thing to be humble.
Humility is a very good thing, but it can also be deadly.
Not deadly.
It can be punitive.
False humility.
The unnecessarily putting yourself down in order to be seen as polite or wicked that can hold you back.
You know, you can, none of this is to say that people have to be mean or confrontational or whatever.
That's not what believing in yourself is.
It's a tough subject.
As I told you, it may take me a couple of attempts here.
Well, you know what I've found in my limited, because I haven't really spent a whole lot of time researching this.
But as we all know, there are a few people out there who don't like me.
Not many, but there are a few.
Now, I'm not one of these people obsessed with that.
If I'm in a room and, say, 95 people like me, I don't care about the other five.
Somebody like Bill Clinton will focus on the other five or Obama in order to switch them and make them friends or fans.
But what I found, if I've really dug deep some of these people, you know what they resent is that I'm so sure of myself.
That intimidates them.
Nobody's that sure of themselves.
And it leads them to think that I have a confrontational or pugnacious manner or behavioral pattern.
And I'm nothing of the sort.
Confidence, confidence can be like, confidence can be assumed to be arrogance or conceit because nobody is supposed to be that sure of themselves.
Nobody is supposed to really, I can't tell the number of people.
How do you know?
How are you so sure?
And I say, because to me, it's obvious.
I don't see the benefit in running around saying before everything I say, now I could be wrong about this.
Sometimes I do that, depending on who I'm speaking to, because that'll open them up.
It's a science.
But the routine of putting yourself down to other people in order to not threaten them or to whatever, I just don't think in the long run serves anybody, particularly the individual who's engaged in that kind of behavior.
And it's such a sense, it leads us to where we are now.
We're going to get calling, don't speak.
You have no business.
We need to defer to the experts.
We lay people.
We don't have enough people speaking up about what they think the degree of anger, fright, outrage over what's happened in this country is palpable.
I think it's almost incalculable.
People are afraid to say people, even in the private privacy of a ballot box, won't vote what they really think for fear somebody's going to find out.
People lie to pollsters for fear somebody's going to find out.
There's a fear of being found out if your opinions don't meet political correctness or whatever the order of the day is.
It's less confrontational that way.
It doesn't offend people.
It doesn't hurt people's feelings and all that.
And, you know, I've always thought that's their problem.
Anyway, I got to take a break here, folks.
A little long in this segment, as always happens in the first one, but we will be back.
Don't go away.
You're guiding light through times of trouble, confusion, murkiness, tumult, chaos, despair, depression, rampant disease.
Yes, and even the good times.
Rush Limbaugh.
Look, folks, let me say it another way.
I just happen to think that more people are much smarter than they think they are.
It really isn't any more complicated than that.
And for whatever reasons they tell themselves they're not, for whatever reasons they defer to others who they think are smarter because of a whole bunch of different variables and reasons.
And I just don't, I don't think there's anything wrong with believing in yourself.
I don't think there's anything wrong with believing in your ideas.
There's more than one way to do things.
Anyway, here's Lisa in Austin, Texas as we head back to the phones.
Great to have you, Lisa.
Hello.
Hi, Rush.
Hi.
You know, it's been pretty interesting waiting on hold and listening to everything that you said in the last segment.
I called about the guy who was talking about, I first turned on the radio, and that was the guy that was on was talking about, his hot young wife.
Well, okay, let me tell you what preceded it.
He was referring.
There's a Stan Greenberg and James Carville have a polling company, and they just released a poll yesterday that shows that unmarried women, this could be, it's not just single, it's divorced women, widows, but unmarried women in 12 battleground races in the Senate favor the Democrats by 18, 58 to 32.
It's a 22-point lead in unmarried women.
He was calling to respond to that.
His basic reason, his theory was that those women, because they're unmarried, for whatever reasons, they don't ever come in contact with conservatives.
Right.
So I would propose to you, and in everything that you've been talking about for the last half hour, about people not having confidence in themselves, about being subordinate to somebody who else is an expert, that that starts in grade school, like you said, and people learn that they're never going to reach their goals or their best person.
And what happens, I think the reason why unmarried, uneducated people tend to vote Democrat is a victim consciousness.
They're victims.
They can never be the hot young wife.
They can never be, you know, and I think that has a lot to do with why women go to a butcher feminist.
They're trying to gain some kind of power.
And, you know, they just end up being angry, unhappy people.
So they've end up being victims.
They're unhappy.
Their potential is not realized.
And so they end up being resentful.
I hear you say that.
So they either get angry and find some other way to express that anger, which the liberal issue.
Well, let me ask you a reason.
Let me ask you a question that might offend people.
I don't intend it to offend anybody.
I'm just asking the question.
They're unmarried.
How many of them is it simply a matter of economics?
There's no second income in their house, and the government will readily, and Democrats will readily assume that role for them with benefits here, benefits there, benefits over here.
Right.
Well, it's easy play.
You get them while they're down, hook them into the government pit, if you will, and they got them.
Well, there's a lot of things.
If somebody willingly makes themselves a victim, then that's tough to counter.
Once you already decide you are a victim, then you add to that, here comes a political party which will happily have you think that of yourself.
And then they will go further and tell you who it is that's victimizing you.
In this case, it is the Republicans.
And what are they doing?
Why, they're running a war on women.
And what do the Republicans want?
They don't want you women to be happy.
They don't want you to have sex.
They don't want you to have birth control pills.
They don't want you to be able to get abortions.
They don't want you to be free.
They don't want you, they don't understand.
And if you're already thinking of yourself as a victim of an unfair, unjust society and you're resentful for whatever human nature did not give to you, whatever's going on, you have a political party coming along and affirming all that for you and then promising to make up the difference.
We'll look out for you.
And if they don't have a second income, if they're unmarried, if they don't have a second income in the House, and the government comes along and offers it, it's almost when we get to economics in this economy with as, I don't care if you're a Republican or Democrat.
The fact of the matter remains, you don't think very positively of your economic future.
Not the way it's being run.
There's no, nobody's inspiring confidence in anybody about our economy.
Somebody comes along and is willing to offer to make up for you what you don't have because you're single, then you can't afford not to do it.
It's like seniors.
I never forget this woman that called from near the moss turnpike who was, she was demanding.
She was so mad at me for arguing for tax cuts.
She wanted her own kids to be hit with massive tax increases because that's the only way her Social Security would go up in her mind.
And if somebody came along and told her the Republicans wanted to cut her Social Security, she didn't, she wasn't even going to take the chance it was a lie.
She was never going to vote for a Republican simply to be, what if that's true?
She had to just stick with the old, reliable, the Kennedys in the Democrat Party promising to take care of her until she died.
It's in large part matter of economics and other things, obviously.
Oh yeah, I always take the path of greatest resistance.
I never take the path of least resistance, meaning when conversing with people.
And we're back.
Great to have you.
Now speak.
Speaking of experts, look what I just found, ladies and gentlemen.
Right here in my formerly nicotine-stained fingers.
It's from the Los Angeles Times today.
Here's the headline.
Some Ebola experts worry virus may spread more easily than assumed.
Now, some might say, they're experts.
Some might think I'm fear-mongering here.
Some might think I should not mention this because I'm a lay person.
Oh, wait, I guess I can mention this because these are experts and they're in the newspaper.
They must be experts.
U.S. officials leading the fight against history's worst outbreak of Ebola have said they know the ways the virus is spread and how to stop it.
They say that unless an air traveler from West Africa has a fever of at least 100.5, 101.5 degrees or other symptoms, other passengers are not at risk.
So you get on an airplane, people have Ebola, but if they don't have a fever of at least 101.5, no sweat, no problem.
Other public health officials have voiced similar assurances, saying that Ebola is spread only through physical contact with a symptomatic individual or other bodily fluids.
Dr. Edward Goodman of the Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas, where the Liberian patient remains a critical condition, said Ebola is not transmitted by the air.
It is not an airborne infection.
Now, here comes the money paragraph, which immediately follows that one.
Yet, some scientists who have long studied Ebola say such assurances are premature, and they are concerned about what is not known about the strain now on the loose.
It is an Ebola outbreak like none seen ever before, jumping from the bush, that would be Africa, jumping from the bush to urban areas, giving the virus more opportunities to evolve as it passes through multiple human hosts.
Well, now, what are we supposed to do now?
Because the experts are in conflict.
The experts are saying different things.
U.S. officials have said they know the ways the virus is spread and they know how to stop it.
That's what it says right here.
U.S. officials leading the fight have said they know, and they say U.S. officials, that be regime officials, say that unless an air traveler from West Africa has a fever of at least 101.5 or other symptoms, other passengers on that flight are not at risk.
Other public health officials have voiced similar assurances, saying Ebola is spread only through physical contact.
Okay, so U.S. officials, no sweat, nothing to see here.
Obama's part of this group.
Yet, some scientists who have long studied Ebola, these are the people, for those of you in Riolinda, that wear the white coats, the automatic experts.
Some scientists who have long studied Ebola say such assurances are premature.
They're concerned about what's not known about the current strain that's on the loose, because it's an Ebola outbreak like there's never been before.
It has jumped from the bush to urban areas, which has given the virus more opportunities to evolve.
Dr. C.J. Peters, who battled a 1989 outbreak of Ebola among research monkeys housed in Virginia, and who later led the CDC's most far-reaching study of Ebola's transmissibility in humans.
Dr. C.J. Peters said he would not rule out the possibility that it spreads through the air in tight quarters, which would be an airplane fuselage.
We just don't have the data to exclude it, said Dr. C.J. Peters, who continues to research viral diseases at the University of Texas in Galveston.
We just don't have the data to exclude the possibility that it does spread through the air in tight quarters.
Dr. Philip K. Russell, a virologist who oversaw Ebola research while heading the U.S. Army's Medical Research and Development Command, and who later led the government's massive stockpiling of smallpox vaccine after the 9-11 terror attacks, also said that much still has to be learned.
Being dogmatic is, I think, ill-advised because there are just too many unknowns here.
In his case, what he's saying to me, being too dogmatic, is, you know, all these government officials assuring everybody that you can get on a plane if nobody's got a fever over 101.5.
No sweat, no problem.
That's being done.
They don't know that, he's saying.
We don't know this yet.
What are you laughing at?
I know I'm a naturally funny guy, but what are you laughing at?
Oh, you've got a...
Oh, he's laughing at a caller.
Thank goodness, because I was wondering what in the world in here is funny about this.
Snerdley is out of control in there.
He's totally lost his composure.
Snerdley's black and his face is turning red.
He's laughing so far, so hard.
Well, now you have me a trend.
You've got to let me in on this.
What?
What?
Oh, no, that's an interesting.
Snerdley has a caller on the phone.
It says, look, Obama likes to travel.
He does it a lot.
He should fly to Africa, personally research this, and come back and tell us what he found.
That's not going to happen, obviously.
Anyway, if Ebola were to mutate on its path from human to human, said Dr. Philip K. Russell and other scientists, its virulence might wane or it might spread in ways not observed during past outbreaks, which were stopped after transmission among just two or three people because the virus had a greater chance to evolve.
The current outbreak in Africa has killed approximately 3,400 people.
This disease was only discovered in 1976.
It was named after a river, the Ebola River.
That's how it got its name.
My point here, what are we to do with this?
We now have a piece in the L.A. Times, which is almost directly contradictory to what we are hearing from the experts at the CDC and the experts at the Obama administration.
These guys are holding out the possibility it can be spread through the air in close quarters.
We don't know enough yet to say that's not true.
In the past, it hasn't been, but they're worried this could be new.
The rapidity with which it has spread has some people concerned.
Ron in Penn Valley, California, you're next.
It's great to have you on the program, sir.
Really glad you waited, too.
I appreciate your patience.
Hello.
Well, thank you, Rush.
Glad to talk to you today.
You bet, sir.
Hey, I just got a cancellation notice from my health insurance.
I've been with them for over 25 years, haven't had any claims hardly at all, never been in the hospital.
And all of a sudden, they're going to quit California completely.
Then the second part of the message was you have to get new insurance by March of next year, is that under your current insurance, we're going to raise the rate also.
So I got a rate increase, and they're going to drop me by next March.
So.
Why did they bother raising your rate?
Oh, to cover you until next March.
That's right.
Cover me until next March.
I got a rate increase also.
So I decided to, I was very displeased with that, and I know why, because of what I believe it is, but I called both senators, both Feinstein and Boxer.
And I got absolutely no help there except I got a phone number that if you dialed it and hit one and then four, you could wait 45 minutes due to uncertainty.
What did you expect?
Don't misread a tone in my voice here that's not there.
Seriously, what did you expect Boxer or Feinstein to do?
Nothing because even on their websites, they don't even have anything about health care.
It's all about saving Lake Tahoe and helping some chickens out somewhere in California.
I don't know what they have on there.
But I wanted to voice my opinion.
You're telling people you don't speak up enough.
You all rely on the experts.
Well, I've called my district supervisor here.
I called them and I write them.
But I expect that by the outcry that everybody else is going to have, because their rates are going to be upped, they're going to have no.
Oh, yeah, this is just starting.
You're the second call we've had two days on this.
These cancellations are just starting.
And the employer mandate kicks in in a very short period of time.
That's something else unexpected that people have no idea is coming their way.
But Rush, that's not the real point.
The real point is they've ruined my health care.
My doctors don't want to accept that rate here.
My hospital doesn't want to accept this.
I'm going to have to travel to go to get my health care somewhere else.
Doctors that I do not want, and they're going to pay a substandard rate to these doctors.
I don't want that type of doctor.
I want what I had as a health care that I got to choose.
And I don't want to have to go to Healthcare Government, California, and wait 45 minutes for somebody to tell me something.
I'm sorry to be the one to tell you, but you have lost those freedoms in Obamacare.
You've lost the freedom to choose your doctor and your insurance company.
And it's exactly unplanned.
This chaos that you are now experiencing is going to multiply.
And it's going to end up being geometric.
And the plan down the road is for people like you to be so scared because you can't get insurance for whatever reason.
You can't afford it.
It isn't offered.
And here comes the IRS wanting a penalty payment from you that you're going to have one place to go when this is all said and done, and that's going to be the federal exchange.
And that is how they plan to get this greatest healthcare system in the world transformed into single payer.
And I don't even like that term.
Some people like that.
That's how they're going to get this transformed to national socialized medicine.
I'm dealing with the bureaucracy now, and I'm getting nowhere.
When they make the bureaucracy bigger, I'm going to get more.
The bureaucracy exists to get bigger.
The bureaucracy exists to support itself.
The bureaucracy is not there to help you.
By its definition, bureaucracies exist to exist, and they will do whatever they have to to exist.
Bureaucracies never get smaller.
They never get more efficient.
By definition, they can't because they grow, which is the objective.
Bureaucracies are like base life forms.
A nuclear bomb might wipe out everything but the cockroaches, but there would be life left.
Ditto bureaucracies.
Whatever happens, there's always going to be one somewhere, and it'll be expawning and growing.
Here's the Walmart story, by the way.
It's an AP story.
Walmart Stores Inc. plans to eliminate health insurance coverage for most of its part-time employees in a move aimed at, wait for it, controlling rising health care costs of the nation's largest private employers.
Starting on January 1st, Walmart told the AP it'll no longer offer health insurance to employees who work less than an average of 30 hours a week.
The move, which would affect 30,000 people, follows similar decisions by Target, Home Depot, and others to eliminate health insurance benefits for part-time employees.
Sally Welborne, Walmart's senior vice president of benefits, told the AP we had to make some tough decisions here.
She says the company will use a third-party organization to help part-time workers find alternatives.
We're trying to balance the needs of workers as well as the costs of workers, as well as the costs to Walmart.
Now, this is nothing new.
I mean, everybody knew that because of Obamacare, if you have part-time workers, you don't have to insure them.
Part-time defined as anything under 30 hours a week.
In other words, Walmart can do this because of Obamacare, and that's one of the reasons why they supported it.
Which a lot of people at the time said, wait a minute, scratch your heads.
Wait a minute, wait a minute, what's that?
Walmart big business getting in bed with this administration?
How does that work?
Normally, everybody thinks American corporations want as much distance between themselves and the government as they can get.
We're free enterprise.
Stay away from us.
In this case, we saw a number of major American corporations sidling up to the regime.
A whole host of reasons.
Obamacare, corporate cronyism, any number of reasons why.
It's a pretty recent major shift.
And now they've got the law to follow back up.
Well, it says right there in Obamacare that we don't have to provide insurance.
Now, remember what the premise of Obamacare was, folks.
As Obama's out there telling you about it and selling it to you, and the Democrat Party's doing the same thing, what are they telling you?
If you like your plan, you can keep it.
If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor.
You're not going to be subject to any changes if you like them.
And then they said, oh, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
If you change your policy, then that deal is off.
Well, you had no choice but then to change your policy because your provider changed it.
All it took is change one tiny little term in your coverage, and that constitutes bye-bye grandfathered clause where you can keep what you had.
So the fix was built in that you weren't going to be able to keep what you had.
But beyond that, what else was Obamacare going to do?
In addition to letting you keep your doctor and your insurance plan, Obamacare was going to insure the poor.
Remember, Obamacare was going to insure the uninsured.
Obamacare was going to provide coverage for the people in our country who really need it, the victims of all of this capitalism over these years, the left out, the needy, the hungry, the thirsty, the forgotten.
Obamacare was going to see to it that they were not forgotten.
And now, what's going to happen?
The number of people who do not have health insurance is going to rise, and it's going to rise a lot.
It's going to increase a lot.
The very premise under which most people were lied to to support this thing, and most people didn't support it, by the way, and they never have, turns out to be sadly very untrue.
It is the fastest three hours in media.
The first two already in the can on the way over to Limbaugh Broadcast Museum.
It's a fabulous thing.
One of many great things you can see and experience and learn from it, rushlimbaugh.com.
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