All Episodes
Previous Next
Oct. 10, 2014 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:22
October 10, 2014, Friday, Hour #2
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
The views expressed by the host on this program, documented to be almost always right, 99.7% of the time.
You know why?
Because the views expressed by the host of this program are the result of a daily, relentless, unstoppable quest for the truth.
Live from the Southern Command in sunny South Florida, it's Open Line Friday!
Open Line Friday, one of the greatest career risks taken by a major media figure in the world today.
And that's because when we go to the phones, pretty much whatever people want to talk about is fine.
Don't screen it that tightly.
800-282-2882.
If you want to be on the program, email address, lrushbo at eibnet.com.
The president of Liberia is a woman by the name of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf.
She became internationally known last week discussing one of her own citizens, Thomas Duncan.
It was revealed that Thomas Duncan, who has since died, got on an airplane in Monrovia for the United States, knowing he was sick with Ebola.
And he traveled to the United States, and he has subsequently passed away.
She said that she had immediately changed his classification from citizen to refugee and would never let him back in the country.
Because, according to what she said, she thought what he did was reprehensible.
Knowing that he carried the virus, he got on an airplane, exposing others, and took it to a country where there were no reported cases, United States.
The world was shocked.
The president of a nation criticizing and ostracizing one of her own citizens.
Well, the reason I mentioned this is because she back in the news.
Liberian lawmakers debated today whether to grant the president, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, more power to restrict movement and public gatherings in the fight against Ebola.
One parliamentarian warned that the country could turn into a police state if they weren't vigilant.
State media said the House of Representatives would convene a special session today to discuss the proposed measures outlined in a letter back on October 1st.
The contentious proposals include the power to restrict public gatherings and appropriate property without payment of any kind or any further judicial process to combat Ebola.
The letter also says that Sirleaf, the president, can limit the right to assemble for any reason.
And they're now arguing about this in Liberia.
And I'm just throwing it out.
This is a natural tendency for bureaucracies and governments to do in fighting the spread of something that apparently is uncontrollable.
And I'm just throwing it out.
I'm not saying it's going to happen anywhere else.
I'm not leveling any warnings or allegations or accusations.
But we had a couple of phone calls yesterday from people who think this is right around the corner here And that it's going to be seized as an opportunity whether it's justified, warranted, or not.
Well, it says it.
They can take your property without payment of any kind or any further judicial process.
They can combat your right to assemble, limit the right to assemble, and restrict your movement.
This is what she wants to do.
It hasn't, well, they're hours ahead of us, so I don't know what action was taken, but they were debating this.
Now, back here on our own shores, we have a story from the Cybercast News Service speaking in a video message to residents of West African countries currently experiencing outbreaks of Ebola.
President Barack Obama dispensed advice on how residents can avoid the disease, including, quote, you cannot get it through casual contact like sitting next to someone on a bus.
Do you think the residents of Sierra Leone and Liberia are excited to see a message from Barack Obama on how to deal with Ebola?
You don't?
You don't?
You don't think they're excited that the President of the United States cares enough about them to sit down and do a message?
Really?
Well, okay.
Anyway, so the president did that.
He recorded a video message for the citizens of West African countries experiencing the outbreak.
And again, in the video message, the president told the citizens you cannot get Ebola through casual contact like sitting next to somebody on a bus.
At the same time, this wizard that runs the CDC, Dr. Thomas Friedan, is advising Americans who travel to these Ebola-stricken nations to avoid public transportation.
I'm sorry, I can't help but laugh.
I know it isn't funny.
I'm sorry.
I really am.
Folks, I'm sorry, but I can't.
I can't.
I mean, imagine, here's Obama on TV in Liberia, Sierra Leone.
Hey, you know what?
It's perfectly fine.
Get on a bus, sit next to someone.
You cannot get the disease that way.
That's casual contact.
It will not happen.
And Americans, way the Liberians hear about this, Americans are being advised by their own CDC guy.
If they travel, don't get on a bus with anybody.
Sorry.
This is not confidence-inspiring.
This, I mean, here you have the president and his director of the CDC.
They're clearly not on the same page.
They clearly do not have the same set of guidelines or instructions or what have you.
Hey, does anybody in there have Gwyneth Paltrow's number?
I'd like to call her and ask her if the president of Liberia has enough power.
I'd like to ask Gwyneth Paltrow if we should give Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf all the power she needs to pass this stuff that she wants to pass.
The powers that she would give to Obama.
I know.
Never, never have him.
You just can't forget that story, can you?
Snerdley keeps asking me about the dwarf.
It's a sad story, ladies and gentlemen, from the first hour.
What happened was that a bride to be became pregnant after having sex with a dwarf stripper at her bachelorette party.
And she gave birth to a baby that her husband thought was his until he saw the baby and saw that it had dwarf characteristics that he knew something had happened that he wasn't a part of.
And so now there's trouble in paradise.
This thirdly keeps asking me, like, he just said, well, does the Ebola virus hang around in dwarf semen 90 days?
It doesn't know the difference.
Yes, Ebola hangs around in semen for 90 days.
That's what we learned yesterday.
No, not serious.
The Ebola virus remains in male semen for 90 days after a patient has recovered.
I mean, that's pretty serious stuff.
Now let's talk, ladies and gentlemen, about this woman, Allison Lundergren Grimes, Lundergan Grimes.
She appeared before the Lowell Courier Journal newspaper editorial board yesterday to make her pitch for their endorsement.
She's running for the Senate against Mitch McConnell.
She's a lifelong Democrat.
Her family has been in politics at various levels for quite a while.
Her father represented Kentucky, Democrat Party, in the state House of Representatives.
She has been on the ballot in the state on a Democrat ticket previous times.
She was asked a simple question, did she vote for President Obama in 2008 and 2012?
Now, I first heard about this during show prep last night's Washington Post story written by a guy named Philip Bump.
And I'm telling you, this story, it is the most, well, I guess it's the most incredible thing.
But this writer is so in the tank for Allison Lundergan-Grimes.
He desperately wants to speak to her.
He desperately wants to advise her what to do here.
The headline to his story is 40 painful seconds of Allison Lundergan-Grimes refusing to say whether she voted for Obama.
And he's wringing his hands.
Why did she do this?
Why couldn't she have said yes, but she regrets it now?
And she's looking forward to Hillary.
Why could—and it's filled with advice.
And it is clear that this guy has written this piece in pain over her performance.
He thinks, oh, he wants her to beat McConnell so bad that he really thinks that she stepped in.
And it's the farthest thing from a news story that you can see that is presented as one.
Anyway, we have a tape of how it sounded.
This is yesterday at the Lowell Courier Journal website, newspapers editorial board, interviewed the Senate candidate Allison Lundergan-Grimes.
And during the Q ⁇ A, one of the members of the editorial board said, did you vote for Obama in 2008, 2012?
You know, this election isn't about the president.
It's about making sure we put Kentuckians back to work.
And I was actually in a way to delegate for Hillary Clinton.
And I think that Kentuckians know I'm a Clinton Democrat through and through.
I respect the sanctity of the ballot box.
And I know that the members of this editorial board do as well.
So you're not going to answer.
Again, I don't think that the president is on the ballot as much as Mitch McConnell might want him to be.
It's my name, and it's going to be me who's holding him accountable for the failed decisions and votes that he has made against the people of Kentucky.
And you might be saying, why does it matter?
It matters because Obama's approval number, he's never won the state.
His approval numbers there are in the tank.
I mean, they're as low there as you'll find them anywhere.
In some cases, some polls, high 20s in the 30s.
And so she's not going to say she voted.
She did.
She won't say so because the Senate candidates, both incumbent and challengers, are doing everything they can to distance themselves from Obama.
And the message has gone out to do so.
And so she won't go anywhere near it.
And of course, this guy named Philip Bump, he wrote the Washington Post piece, and a lot of others are saying, how hard would it have been?
I mean, can this woman not think on her feet?
How hard would it have been to simply say, yeah, I did, and I'm feeling disappointed.
Yeah, I did.
I'm a little let down.
Yeah, I did, and I had hoped for more.
And that's why I'm going to be supporting Hillary Clinton.
And that's why, and yeah, she could have said this.
She could have said, yeah, I did, but I voted for Hillary in the primaries in 2000.
She could have said anything, but she stuck to the script.
She wouldn't veer off the script.
This is what you call consultant prep.
And she was prepped, and obviously had it drilled into her head.
If they ask you if you voted for Obama, no matter what else you do, you do not say yes.
No matter what.
Because that is the only thing anybody's going to remember about this interview with the editorial board.
And they're going to use that to crucify your judgment and to criticize you all over the board.
And so she dutifully followed consultant instructions.
I know that's what happened.
She followed consultant instructions.
Well, I guess it's possible she could have devised this strategy on her own, too.
It's not that hard to figure out Obama's not popular where she's running.
But people are looking at this, saying it would have been so easy to answer that and then move it off the table.
Yeah, I voted for Obama after I voted for Hillary in the primary.
That's all she would have had to say.
But you know what she sounded like here?
Remember the first congressional hearing with all those ball players up there about steroids?
And Mark McGuire, I'm not here to talk about the past.
I only want to talk about the future.
And all these congressmen from St. Louis and from Missouri were going bad because McGuire had been such a hero, such a role model.
Here he wouldn't answer their question.
He wouldn't talk about it.
He said, I don't want to talk about the past.
I'm not here to talk about it.
That's exactly what she sounded like.
Well, you know, I was actually a delegate for Hillary.
I don't want to talk about the past.
I'm looking forward.
I'm looking forward.
It's my opponent.
He's worried about mine.
Not at all.
And I think, I think it's kind of fascinating.
You compare today to 2008 where everybody wanted to be around Barack Obama.
Everybody wanted to be in that light.
Everybody wanted to be in that group.
Everybody wanted to be part of that happening.
Everybody wanted to be in that story.
Everybody wanted to think they mattered in that story.
Everybody wanted to think everybody knew they knew Obama.
Everybody was hoping that they thought that they were intimately involved in the Obama campaign and were somehow involved in making it all happen.
But everybody in the Democrat Party was doing, except for the Hillary Company, doing everything they could to get close and to have some of that positive vibe bounce off on them.
It's human nature.
Everybody gravitates to the big news story today, and Obama was a big, and now look at it six years later, and none of them want anywhere near the guy.
That's the story.
Jay Carney, CNN last night, Don Lemon says, you know, midterms are coming up.
What does it do to Democrats who are really keeping the president at arm's length last night like this babe in Kentucky?
I think the Democratic candidates have to sort of thread this needle very carefully because it is true that when you have an unpopular president of your party, you don't want to be associated with him.
You know, your opponents are probably running ads linking him to you, and you want to keep your distance.
But the fact is, President Obama, like incumbent presidents usually are, remains very popular with his base and with the base of the Democratic Party.
So in some states and in some places, those candidates have to be careful about going too far and distancing themselves.
That's a bunch of gobbledygook, but baby, basically, he's doing what he can to stay loyal to Obama.
He's saying, you know, these better be careful.
They better not go too far from Obama.
It's not going to stand them in good stand all that kind of stuff.
It still doesn't change there.
Back to the phones open line Friday, Adrian in San Francisco.
Great to have you.
Hello.
All right, Raj.
Listen, I don't know how I'm going to follow the stripper dwarf, but I'm going to try.
I talked to your call screener.
I'm calling about conservative comedy.
I want to say that it's more probably comedy that lampoons the left.
And if anybody has called your show and it's been on old nose, you know, I just listened to a battery of your bits that were just outstanding, witty, well-written, funny as all get out.
And I'm kind of wondering why there are no TV shows that would, let's say, put the visual medium to work utilizing the kind of humor that I hear on your show, not only from when you speak, but also from the little bits that I hear when I'm on hold.
I just kind of want to get your sense of why there's not anything out there like that.
Well, in the first place, Hollywood's dominated by people who would not hire conservatives.
But there's a reason before you get there.
The way liberalism has set things up, there's nothing about it that's funny.
If you make fun, if you make jokes of liberalism, you are racist, sexist, bigoted, homophobe.
You're mean.
You're insensitive.
You're extremist.
And the arbiters of comedy do not permit conservative comedy to be tagged or thought of as comedy.
They label it immediately as mean-spirited or extremist, and therefore they stigmatize the person, such as if you wanted to go into conservative stand-up or something like that.
You would immediately be tagged as mean and bitter, and the reviews on you will be, what's up, your butt?
Why are you so unhappy?
What do you make?
Because one thing that you do not do, I found this over, you just don't make fun of the left, and you don't make jokes.
You don't make jokes about the feminazis.
You don't make jokes.
You just, you, they will not, they don't have a sense of humor.
Now, hang on, because Adrian, this is actually a very good subject.
Go away.
And we are back with Adrian in San Francisco.
He wants to know why there is no conservative comedy.
Let me ask you, Adrian, are you thinking about trying to do any kind of comedy as a conservative?
Are you looking into that?
Or are you just curious about the subject?
Well, yeah, I actually told your call screener that I probably in the next couple of weeks or a month or so, I'm going to pitch an idea to an agency in L.A.
And it's, you know, I don't know if you would call it conservative.
It certainly has a conservative note.
Whatever you do, don't.
That's the point that I was going to make to you.
Well, I really have no place else because this is a TV show.
No, no, don't.
No, no.
Don't label it.
Don't label yourself.
Oh, I see.
Don't call it conservative comedy.
The left doesn't.
The left, hey, they don't say, hey, here's the latest liberal take up.
Here's the latest liberal funny line.
They're just the comedians of the day, right?
We have to assume they're liberal by virtue of their material, but they never talk about it.
They never label themselves.
In fact, some of them, not all by all stretch, but some of them try to avoid labels.
What they try to do is portray themselves as representative of the culture at large.
They're not liberal.
They're not leftists.
They're just funny people.
The problem that conservatives make, I once tell you a little story to illustrate.
One of the first things that ever happened to me, the first meetings I ever attended in Washington shortly after this story started, was a convention of religious broadcasters.
And they were having trouble getting their programs on standard radio stations, not Christian stations.
And they asked me what I thought.
And I said, you're eliminating 80% of the stations by calling yourself Christian radio.
Just do what you want to do.
Don't label it anything.
You're making yourself targets.
Well, it's not right.
It isn't fair.
I know it isn't fair.
I know it's not right, but you're looking at people that are afraid of religion, afraid of Christianity.
Just do what you do.
Don't label it.
And I think the same thing is true of conservative comedy.
Don't position yourself as an alternative to liberal comedy.
Don't position yourself as something newer.
You're just a funny guy.
And you've got an idea you want to pitch.
Now, if your idea does involve a conservative take on things, find some other word than conservative to use.
Yeah, you know, that's true.
I mean, the reason I would probably, I mean, obviously they're going to ask me basically what, you know, they'll find out anyway.
But the reason I'm pitching it to this particular agency is I'm trying to get to Joel Cernow because I think he would really get this.
And knowing the fact that he had tried that comedy show that I think it was called the Half Hour News Hour.
Half-Hour News Hour, that's right.
Yeah.
And I think it was a gallant try, although I think that, you know, the fake news stuff is a little bit of a tired forum, at least from my personal perspective.
And I mean, I've got a completely unexpected fresh take on comedy.
And I'm putting together Republicans and rock and roll.
And I, you know, it's a lot more than that, but I'm trying to, I have to say, all I'm trying to tell you is that if you label it, you are, by virtue of that, limiting yourself.
You are limiting your appeal.
You have a new revolution of comedy for that country.
You don't say of Republicans and rock and roll.
The people you're going to be talking to think Republicans are hate-filled, extremist bigots who are conducting a war on women.
And worse than everything, they think the Republicans hate homosexuals.
And that you're going to be dealing with a lot of gay people in the world that you're going to be working in.
You if you maybe you're just going to what I have found, you know, my television show, my television show was was so-called conservative comedy.
We didn't call it that.
I'm obviously conservative, but that's not the way we positioned it.
It was just our take on the news every day.
And by the way, it's what the Daily Show is today, except they're doing it with a liberal take.
And you see the difference.
It's vastly appreciated.
It is thought to be brilliant comedy, even though we didn't have any writers.
They have got 33.
It's a cultural thing, and you're just up against it.
You can lament it.
You can say it's not fair, but it's what you're up against.
But my only piece of advice to you, if it's funny, it'll work.
But keep in mind that if the humor is at all thought of as mocking liberals, they're going to object to it because they don't think what they do is mockable.
They don't think what they believe is in any way funny.
It's deadly serious.
It's civil rights.
It's human rights.
It's racism.
It's dignity.
And you start making fun of that stuff and telling them up front that's what you're going to do.
And you're not going to get to first base.
You are going to have to sneak it in.
And you're going to have to figure out what your purpose is here.
If your purpose is to have everybody know that you are a conservative doing comedy, it's going to be that much harder on you.
If all you want to do is be a successful comedian and you think you've got a new way to go, just do it.
Don't announce your marketing plan.
Just execute it.
Let your work speak for you, but don't label it.
Now, the danger there is that somebody else will, but you're going to run into that no matter what you do.
But you can certainly define yourself without labeling yourself.
And by the way, I'm not against labels.
I just know what you're going to be up against if you do it.
That's all.
I'm not advocating cowardice.
I'm advocating stealth brilliance.
You're going to have to find your way into this world via a back door.
You're going to have to sneak up on these people because they're waiting for you at the front door and they don't want you coming in once they find out what you're going to do.
It's just the way it is.
I hate to use myself, but it works.
This radio show.
Never once, never once did we ever state, here we are, finally, conservatism in the media.
We just did it.
And we let it find its audience.
We just did it.
And it spoke for itself.
We didn't hide it, but we didn't label it or announce it.
And we didn't position it because, well, the rest of the media is this, so we're going to do that.
We just did it.
When I worked for the Kansas City Royals, sales and market, we never, we had a marketing plan every year.
It was designed to separate people and their money.
We never told them how we were going to do it.
We just did it.
And some of the plans worked and some of them didn't.
But in this day, the liberals own the culture, and they're very proud of that ownership, and they think they own it, and they don't want any interlopers.
And they're not prepared to like you, and they don't think you're funny if you're making fun of them.
You start telling jokes about feminists.
The feminists are going to be the first on your case.
They're not because they don't think they're funny.
And they're not funny.
They're mockable.
You can make fun of them.
We do it here every day.
And they don't like it.
They cannot laugh at themselves.
They do not know the definition of self-deprecation.
They do not know it.
They actually are the most unfunny group that you'll ever run into.
They're singularly angry all the time.
I've imagined what it'd be like to get up every day being a liberal and knowing I'm never going to be happy because there's never going to be perfection.
There's never going to be utopia.
And no matter what I get, I'm never going to be satisfied.
I don't know how they get through the day.
They do it by continuing to be enraged all the time.
And that's what they feed off of.
And they'll chew you up and spit you out if they think you're coming at them.
I'm not telling you not to do it.
I'm just, and by the way, this advice is worth what it costs you, which is a phone call, which is nothing, which is free because we paid for it.
Do what you want.
But those are just my thoughts.
Okay, we're back.
Great to have you.
El Rushbo and the EIB Network and the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.
So I checked the email during the break.
And I got Dear Rush, what books are you reading right now besides your own?
I don't read my own books because I wrote them.
I know what's in them.
Now, I do the audio for them, and I read them in that regard.
I read them out loud.
They're really good, by the way.
This next one, the one we just announced, the pre-order for Rush Revere and the American Revolution.
The audio of this, Brian will tell you, he was dazzled by it.
It took us four days, and he was so dazzled, he couldn't leave for a half hour after we finished every night.
He couldn't believe what he just heard.
And it's just, it's on CD.
It's not out yet, October 28th, the 29th.
But my brother's book, Jesus on Trial.
My brother, for the longest time, has been attempting to prove to himself what there really is only faith for.
He's Christian, and he has sought any number of ways to prove to himself that the resurrection took place, that the Bible is the truth.
And he's written about it.
He's written about his quest.
It's a personal quest that I've obviously know my brother a long time, and it's been decades that he has been, I don't know what, fascinated, not obsessed, but it almost is, in terms of trying to reach for himself an answer that will get him beyond his faith.
Many people in religion do this.
They want something more than just their faith.
And so he's written about it.
And he has convinced, he's been able to convince himself that the Bible alone is all you need to prove the stories in the Bible, that the Bible itself offers its own proof, if you're willing to accept it and if you know how.
And that's what he shared with readers.
And he's been out there.
He's doing television and radio interviews all over the place.
He's just, he really, he's a lawyer, so he applied his legal training to this.
And you've probably seen him talking about it on TV with Hannity, and he's been all over the radio, but it's a fascinating book.
And then there are two novels that I'm reading.
Doug Brunt has a book called The Means.
And it is, it's great.
It's about the mixture of television news and politics.
And it's salacious.
And it's, you know, Doug's wife is Megan Kelly.
It's not autobiographical, but he knows lots of, this is insider kind of stuff, not writing about people that you know.
These are fictional characters.
But it is, it's fascinating stuff about the news business and politics and beautiful women and all that.
And then there's a book called I Am Pilgrim.
And it's by a guy named Terry Hayes.
It's a real long novel, and it is about one of the world's best forensic criminal investigators of Islamic terrorism.
And his quest, by the way, this book has some relatability to today because this book is about a militant Islamist who does not look like one.
He's an educated doctor, Saudi Arabia, who hates the Saudi regime because they beheaded his father.
He hates everybody, but he's a doctor, and he's found a vaccine, or he's found a way to genetically destroy the vaccine to smallpox.
He's found a way to infect the world with smallpox.
And in it, he's found a way to genetically alter the vaccine so that it's useless.
And it's the job of this investigator to track this guy down after they've learned what he's done.
So those are the three.
Remember my brother's book, Jesus on Trial, Douglas Brunt, B-R-U-N-T, which is The Means, and I Am Pilgrim by Terry Hayes.
And they're, of course, obviously all different.
Yeah, I do read them all at the same time.
I read them on my iPads or now on my iPhone 6 Plus.
And just like a Kindle, wherever you leave off is where it automatically picks up if you want to read it on an iPad next or even on the computer.
I haven't had an actual book in my hand to read.
I mean, I get them, but I haven't read from an actual book probably in a couple of years.
I read everything electronically.
So those are the things.
And then there's a couple others.
I mean, there's a, let me look at the list.
Oh, well, I won't bother you with that.
Well, yeah, James Patterson has a series called Private, and it's about the super duper private investigator guy in L.A. who's expanding to all over the world, London, and the raidest is down under Australia or whatever.
Private down under.
But I've set that aside for now.
Basically, just didn't even really start it in the first two pages.
But those are the books.
So one more time, Jesus on Trial by My Brother, which this, I think that would be, is valuable for anybody who's fascinated by the story of Jesus Christ and Christianity.
And by the way, it's not presented in legalese.
It's not a court case.
It's just to use legal analytical ability.
The Means by Douglas Brunt and I Am Pilgrim by Terry Hayes.
And here we go back to the phones with Kevin in Boston.
Kevin, I'm glad you waited.
Welcome to the EIB Network.
Hello.
Hey, Rush, how you doing, brother?
I'm great.
Thank you very much.
I'm working to pay my fair share of Obama's next vacation.
Well, I want to respond to you were talking about asking for a raise.
Right, right.
And I found two ways that it really worked well.
Well, first way it really worked well for me is that I go to my employer and I ask him, what do I need to do to earn a raise?
So that's a positive conversation.
It's always worked well for me.
And the second way is to start my own business, which I will do next year.
Now, see, that, not everybody's going to do that, but, and that's not a guaranteed raise, but it is, you are in charge.
You start your own business.
If you're the only employee, of course you're paying yourself, but you have employees, you're paying them first.
They and their benefits get paid first.
There is a, if you've got a passion, there's nothing that can replace it.
But boy, that's a big leap.
But your other method, ask the employer what you have to do to get a raise.
What he's saying is, if you get an answer, go do it.
And he's gotten the raise by doing what the boss told him.
That didn't work for me once.
I tried that.
I'll tell you what happened when we get back.
I was working for the Kansas City Royals, making $15,000 a year.
I went in and I said, what do I have to do to earn $16,000 a year?
And he said, you need to do $1,000 more work.
And I said, what's that?
He said, you figure it out.
▲
Export Selection