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Oct. 15, 2014 - Rush Limbaugh Program
37:28
October 15, 2014, Wednesday, Hour #2
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Greetings, welcome back, Rush Lynn Ball, the cutting edge of societal evolution, documented to be almost always right, 99.7% of the time.
Great to have you on the most listened to radio talk show in the country, 800-282-2882, if you want to be on the program.
And if you want to send an email, it's L Rushboard, IBNet.com.
Obama has announced a well, the White House has announced that Obama is going to have a press conference or a statement, I guess, a statement, 3 30 this afternoon.
After his meeting on Ebola, he's canceled a fundraising trip, which is a major cancellation.
For Obama to cancel a fundraiser, he didn't cancel fundraising trip for uh Benghazi.
Got on a plane for Vegas.
After telling everybody else not to go there, he got on a plane for Vegas and another fundraiser, and that's all he's been doing lately, but he's canceled fundraising trip to have an Ebola meeting.
The Ebola meeting happening right now.
And there are going to be a statement that he's going to make after that meeting at 3 30.
Which means 4 o'clock.
Because he's always late.
And 4 o'clock is when the Royals and Orioles.
4 07, actually, game 4.
American League Championship series.
I got a note during the break from uh sometime host, guest host of this program, Douglas Urbanski.
And he said, you're absolutely right, never let a crisis go to waste is applicable here, but there's a part two rush, don't forget part two, and he's dead on right about this.
It was Rom Emanuel who famously said, never let a crisis go to waste.
Meaning, whatever crisis happens, we're going to politicize the damn thing, and we're going to use it to our advantage.
But then he also said, this is part two, the reason you never let a crisis go to waste is because you get to do things you otherwise would not be able to do.
Thank you.
And that is the real key to never letting a crisis go to waste.
And we've got a crisis, and we've got people who like to utilize crises for political purposes, because they get to do things they otherwise would not be able to do.
Just a little heads up.
Also some breaking news.
One of the Dallas Health Worker Ebola patients will be transferred to Emory University Hospital in Atlanta for treatment.
Emory is one of those four hospitals with a real isolation unit.
There are only four in the country, and they have a grand total of eleven beds.
Did you know that?
We've got four hospitals with real isolation units.
And in those four hospitals, a grand total of 11 beds.
Now, Mr. Duncan wasn't taken there.
here.
Thomas Duncan wasn't taken to taken to Emory.
No, no, Thomas Duncan, they left him in Dallas.
Well, that's for others to answer, Mr. Snerdley, why.
And I'm sure the Reverend Jackson will at uh at some point.
Don't you?
Aren't you?
Aren't you fairly certainly uh Reverend Zach will have an answer.
Why is this worker being taken to Ebola to uh Emery, but Thomas Duncan was not.
Now I uh nothing to do with having a better health plan.
Nobody has a better health plan.
That's that's okay.
Let's let's get into what I mentioned at the top of the program, which I assured you then, and I repeat now was not a tease.
I just decided Ebola was the most or the more pressing matter of the two.
I have been trying to understand uh the American people in the electorate for most of my aware adult life.
Best explained by, and I've asked this of many people, but I've never gotten an answer to it.
Not one that satisfied me.
And I've never until last night been able to answer it myself.
I keep asking myself why, after years and years of demonstrable conservative triumph and success, such as the eight years of Reagan, when we reduced deficits, we reduced unemployment.
We grew this economy like it hasn't grown since.
We were producing jobs.
We were producing careers.
We took down the Soviet Union.
We were advancing technologically.
We were just...
We were just rolling.
And Reagan won in two landslides.
And I've asked myself why, or how does it happen that after eight years?
And Reagan was demonstrably conservative, and Reagan made no bones about being conservative, and Reagan better than anybody else, articulated conservatism as he was executing it.
So why after eight years?
Were people able to so easily forget it and return to voting for liberal Democrats?
Something that has amazed me and made me curious for years, many years.
It's happened a lot of times.
Happened again in 1994.
The Republicans win the House of Representatives for the first time in 40 years.
They did it with a substantive agenda, the contract for America.
It was made up of 10 agenda points that they intended to do, and they were substantive, balanced the budget, reduced the deficit, reduced spending, all those things, and they set out to do them.
But it wasn't too many years later that voters went right back to voting Democrat, embraced Bill Clinton all over again, and I was left scratching my head.
Now I know, and don't think I'm ignoring something here.
I know what the media's role in this is.
I'm not downplaying that.
The media, even during those eight years, was telling people it wasn't real.
And during the first term of George W. Bush, they were telling people it wasn't real.
The media's out there trying to create as much negativism as they can, and they're beating up these conservative Republicans.
But nevertheless, people lived it.
And yet it didn't seem to have much impact, not lasting.
The words of the media, the smears, the lies, the distortions, carried more weight than actual real life.
At least when it came to voting results at the ballot box.
Here's some headlines today.
Politico.com.
Paul Obama hits lowest approval ever.
ABC News Washington Post poll.
Obama hits lowest approval.
He's down around 40 in this poll, and that's lower than he has ever been.
From the Hill.com as well.
Where did it go wrong for Obama?
They just can't figure out where Obama went wrong.
He's such a great guy.
He's so smart.
He's so articulate.
He's the first black president.
How did it go so wrong?
What happened?
And of course, they it can't be the state of the country.
It can't be the economy.
It can't be Obama.
It can't be anything substantive.
What is it?
Where did Obama go wrong?
can't figure it out.
And then we have this Democrat Party hits a new low, a 30-year low.
Washington Post, Democrat Party hits a 30-year low.
Now, the Republicans are even lower in this poll, but that doesn't obviate my point.
Democrat Party, 30-year low.
Obama, lowest approval ever.
Where did Obama go wrong?
Democrats pulling out of the Kentucky Senate race.
Democrat Senatorial Campaign Committee is no longer going to be spending any money to help Allison Lundergan Grimes.
They're ceding the election to Mitch McConnell.
The Democrat Senatorial Committee has decided that they only have enough resources to fund incumbents.
They are not going to help challengers.
So they're making the calculation decision that Mitch McConnell is going to win re-election and they're bowing out, so she is on her own.
Then we've got a soundbite from John Harwood on CNBC, in which he claims that Obamacare, despite how bad it is, despite the absolute mess, despite premiums rising,
despite coverage being canceled, policies being canceled, despite copay is going up, despite the mess that's healthcare.gov, it has fizzled as a campaign issue for the Republicans.
Now, when Snerdley heard that today, he said, no, it hasn't.
No, it hasn't.
Yes, and yes, it has.
It may end up being something people vote against Democrats for, but they're not voting for Republicans on it.
Now, in the midst of all this, I get a note last night from a famous, nationally known and acclaimed writer.
It says Rush just positing here.
I'm at least a column or more away from verbalizing it.
But listening to Dr. Tom Frieden on Megan Kelly tonight, I'm wondering if we're not at some 21st century version of Lexington Concord, Fort Sumter, or the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand in 1914, or Hitler's invasion of Poland, or Reagan defeating Carter.
In other words, Russia, are we on the cuspier of an event or events that abruptly tips the balance of something that's in fact been long in the works?
And he was just thinking out loud, sending me his thoughts, and what he was saying was are we on the verge of a tipping point where finally the American people wake up once and for all and understand?
What a demonstrable failure liberalism is and how bad it is for the country.
That's what he sees.
That's what he thinks is going on.
He thinks that we're on the verge of that tipping point.
And this note from him kind of crystallized this for me because, like I just mentioned, I have been asking myself left and right, how in the world can people live eight years and arguably twelve, because the Bush, well, I was going to say Bush 41, he campaigned as the third term of Ronald Reagan.
And he got elected on that basis.
He got it got elected on the basis that he was going to be the third term of Ronald Reagan.
It didn't last but two years.
So let's say ten years.
And the Reagan Revolution, the Reagan economy, continued and boomed all the way through the Clinton administration.
Clinton's out there taking credit for it, but he didn't do anything but slow down what was already roaring, slowing it down with his tax increases and everything.
So I got, again, how does this happen where people live through the horrors of liberalism like now, live through the demonstrable prosperity and successes of conservatism, and yet predictably returned to voting liberal democrat.
How does it happen?
And I this is what I wrote my friend back.
I said, here's the problem.
Liberalism has been rejected many, many times.
The Democrat Party has been rejected many, many times.
But the mistake we all make is thinking that conservatism is being affirmed in the same time.
Here's my theory, folks, and you may have stumbled across this yourself years ago.
If so, I apologize.
It just hit me.
Conservatism, even this election that we've got coming up is a great illustration.
Conservatism is a protest vote, not an affirmative vote.
If the Republicans win big in this election, it's for one reason.
People are fed up with the Democrats.
They're fed up with Obamacare, they're fed up with foreign policy, fed up with everything, just fed up.
They're not voting for conservatives.
By necessity they're voting Republican, but they're not voting ideologically.
I've been doing a lot of thinking about this.
Eight years of Reagan, and yet the voters easily fooled to returning to liberalism.
There was no protest when the liberals came along and started raising taxes and making everything worse and destroying jobs, what they always do, wrecking the culture.
There were no protests.
People voted for it.
And my conclusion is that voters never, other than Reagan, the lone example, never affirmatively vote for conservatism because it's never really presented to them.
It's presented to them by me and Fox News on some occasions and others in the so-called new media, but it's not presented to voters by the Republican Party.
It's not presented to voters.
There are a few now and then.
Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio come to mind, but not the party.
Voters never affirmatively vote for conservatism because it's never really presented to them.
What happens is liberals, Democrats are rejected for a time because people are fed up and they're mad like they are now.
But after a certain passage of time, they feel it's safe to go back.
So they're fed up now, they've had it, they're up to their gills with it.
Nobody likes what Obama's done.
Nobody likes the job situation.
Nobody likes the economy, Obama and we'll see any of it.
And the Democrats are going to be swept aside.
Republicans are going to win elections, but not for anything they've done except be the other guys.
Liberals will be rejected, but people down the road will feel maybe in 2016 when Hillary's back up and running, people get safe to go back and try liberals again.
Maybe it's safe to go home to the Democrat Party.
Democrat defeats are not really rejections of liberalism.
you Not substantively anyway.
Voters never actually reject liberalism in their minds.
They just reject the liberals or the Democrats of the day because they're mad, or they get tired and they simply want to change.
Now, I would love to be wrong about this, but I don't see any genuine conservative alternative represented by a party.
I'd see Ted Cruz and some individual.
I know I've got to take a break here, folks.
I'm way longer than me.
You remember Peter Jennings, the late ABC News anchor.
Do you remember what he said in a radio commentary that he did after the 1994 House victory, Republican victory over the Democrats taking back the House represent.
He said American voters had a temper tantrum.
And we mocked it.
We ripped it, and we criticized it, but I have to say he was right.
That's what happens.
Now, the 90 maybe not in total.
That election is a different thing of them talking about because they really had an agenda.
The Republicans, conservatives have a conservative agenda, contract with America, people affirmatively voted for that, but they were also tired of the Democrats throwing them out and so forth.
But even with that conservative agenda and even implementing it, voters went back to the Democrats when they felt it was safe to do so.
Now I know why this happens, by the way.
I know what you're thinking.
Okay, Rush, well, all right, that makes sense, but so what?
Well, I think what I said is exactly right.
I think I know the reason for it.
Even conservatives who are good at making our case are afraid to declare victory when we show the monumental failings of liberalism.
And I have this election is going to present us another opportunity.
This campaign presents us an opportunity, and we're not doing it.
We are not utilizing the opportunity that's been handed to us on a silver platter.
People are fed up, they are mad, they are angry, and it's time we told them why.
It's time we told them why the country's in the dumps, why they can't get a job, why their health care is being screwed up royally.
It's time that we told them it's because of liberalism, and we name names.
And then when we win, we declare victory, and we explain why the American people voted the way they did.
We demonstrate and point out the monumental failings of liberalism.
This is what we do not do.
Look at Bush 41.
Look at how Bush 41 treated the fall of the Soviet Union.
Now, I know he was not very conservative, but but he he was still with a lot of Reaganites around him at the time.
He went out of his way not to humiliate Gorbachev.
He went out of his way to say that this was an evolution of democracy, not a final defeat of an evil totalitarian system.
We had to be nice, we had to accommodate, we had to be polite, we had to show that we weren't mean, and we never hammer home the final nail.
Now look, folks, don't misunderstand here.
There's nothing wrong with a protest vote, but that but that's my point is here that the protest votes they're not part of it in any affirmative.
You know, voting for Republicans this time around means nothing about the Republicans.
This means people are tired of the Democrats.
They're worn out of Obama.
I'll tell you what's happening here, folks.
This is even more troubling to me.
What is happening with this Ebola business?
We are witnessing the breaking of the illusions of government competence.
That's what's I just looked at the stock market.
It's down 444, and it may be lower than that now.
That was a minute ago.
There's a reason that is that all of a sudden people are waking up and realizing that nobody in charge knows what they're doing.
People are losing trust, losing faith.
Now, the millennials have been losing faith ever since they got out of college with all the debt and no jobs.
The problem was they were losing faith in the country and not with the right people, the people responsible for it, and that would be the people they're voting for, the Democrat Party and the left.
Those same people are now causing the breaking of the illusion of government competence.
It isn't.
We don't have anybody that knows what to do or how to deal with the Zebola, and that I can't tell you how big a deal that is.
The one thing about this country that people have always felt is that the best and brightest, no matter what party, are in charge and running it, and there's implicit trust in these institutions.
And the problem is these institutions and these traditions have been under assault for decades by the very people running them now, because they don't have any respect for them.
And they don't have any belief in America as founded.
And it may well be, as hard as it is to believe and understand, it may well be that for the first time some people, my friend last night may have been right about one thing.
It may well be that people, after six years are finally waking up and realizing what they elected.
Maybe Obamacare wasn't enough to do it.
Maybe it was maybe maybe the job situation, the economy, all that, but this, this rampant incompetence on how to deal with a killer disease.
It's just perfectly obvious that we don't have competent people in charge here.
ISIS add that on top of it.
We got this big plan here to wipe out these terrorists, and all they're doing is getting stronger.
Supposedly on the verge of taking Baghdad for Crying out loud.
There probably is a lot of awakening going on.
And the awakening is because people are breaking through the illusion of government competence.
But now back to my point here.
Nothing wrong with a protest vote.
But the protest vote is not like the protest vote that founded America.
The protest vote this time around is just people fed up with the Democrats.
They tried them for six years.
They were fed up with Bush.
Fed up with Democrats if it's not working.
But they don't know what they're voting for.
They're just voting for the other guys here.
And they don't know what they're voting for because the Republican Party's strategy is not to define themselves.
Because they're almost like they're ashamed.
They're afraid of defining themselves for fear people won't like them.
And so don't upset the ample cart.
Just take advantage of people voting against Democrats.
But I mean it.
I know why this is happening.
It's happening for a reason.
And I can I can name names, I'm not going to here, but they're even conservatives, as I said, who are good at making our case, are afraid to declare victory.
They're afraid to hurt feelings.
They are afraid to appear partisan.
They are afraid to gloat.
They are afraid to behave in triumph.
And a great example is Bush 41 when the when the Berlin Wall came down, the Soviet Union fell.
He went out of his way not to humiliate Gorbachev, not to humiliate communism.
He said instead that it was a an evolution of democracy.
He didn't portray it as a resounding final defeat of an evil totalitarian dictatorship system.
And he did not call for an accounting of the millions of lives ruined, the millions killed.
He did not define why the Soviet Union imploded.
He just called the evolution of democracy.
The good vibes of freedom finally overcame.
Reagan to Reagan said, Soviet Union will eventually implode because of the weight of its own immorality.
We won the House 1992, the midterm elections there.
It didn't glow.
No, no, no.
I had to be very polite in the meanwhile.
Similar treatment does not come our way.
The point is that there was never an accounting of the Soviet atrocities their system made inevitable.
There was never an education for the American people of the rot gut that is communism.
There was never a detailed explanation.
Complete with body counts, deaths, numbering in the millions, the imprisonment of free people for doing nothing more than thinking their own thoughts.
None of that was explained.
And so to this day, communism is not considered to be that big a deal.
It's just another way of organizing government.
So David Horowitz, former leftist, saw the light.
He points out you have you have this new left now that pushes the same statist policies as the Soviet Union.
The same statist dictatorial government getting bigger and bigger, exercising more and more control over people.
And it doesn't even have to explain its own concrete failure in the Soviet Union.
This drives me crazy.
We have people, we have Democrats in this country doing their best to emulate a statist, government-centered control.
They don't like the Constitution.
They want to rewrite it or ignore it if they can, and they're not even forced to explain it.
Not one Republican stands up and says, Why are you doing this?
And you not see what's happening in Cuba.
Why are you doing this?
Why do you want to try what failed in the Soviet Union?
They're not made to explain it.
They just go on their merry way implementing this stuff.
While we worry about demographics and diversity, And we let them define what we ought to care about.
It's the same, my friends, with failing social welfare programs.
Republicans, even lots of conservatives are the same way.
As these programs implode one after another after they fail, one on top of another.
What do we do?
We seem more interested in conceding the good intentions of the people who tried than in demonstrating that these programs will inevitably fail.
There hasn't been a one of them that has worked from Lyndon Johnson's Great Society.
The war on poverty has seen a transfer of 22 trillion dollars, and the poor are still poor in the same percentages they were when the program began.
We never hammer that home other than at our think tanks.
All we do is we talk about the good intentions of the people who tried, and we grant that they have compassion and love for their fellow men and so forth.
In the meantime, these programs are doing great damage to people.
They require high taxes that are preventing the accumulation of wealth.
They are slowly but surely eroding individual liberty and freedom, and I haven't even gotten to immigration yet.
But it's the same thing there.
We've already done this in 1986.
We know what's going to happen.
Instead, we have to talk about not offending various ethnic groups.
We have to make sure that they know that we love them.
Instead of standing up and preventing failure after failure after failure because we refuse to document it, teach it, and explain it.
We then clear the decks for it to continue and fail and fail and fail again as the people who try it get more powerful and more powerful and more powerful even with their failures.
The people on our side want to show that we are right while not insisting that the country take note that the other side is dangerously wrong.
If we are right, then somebody has to be wrong.
But if we're not going to point out their failures, if we're not going to illustrate how what they have tried for 50, 75 years never has worked, if we're not going to point it out, then it's no wonder that they're going to keep voting Democrat and keep giving them a chance, because those are the guys that look like they're trying.
They just haven't gotten it right yet.
But eventually a messiah will come along, yep, we're the one we've been waiting for or whatever, and we'll give it another go.
Despite people living through failure after failure after failure, because they're just not told.
We want to show what nice guys we are by conceding that our opposition, like we, only wants what's best for the country.
But they don't, not as we define it.
The way we define what's best for the country has nothing in common with the Democrat Party or the left, nothing for very little.
You'd have to hunt a long time to find the commonalities.
The point is, of all this, the ideas, the policies of the left, of the Democrat Party, never really get discredited.
And that's why they never go away.
They never get discredited.
So after getting tired of Obama and the Democrats for a while here, okay, we'll vote for the Republicans, and then after two or three years, it'll feel safe again and go back to the Democrats.
Why?
Because these six years of Obama are never going to be discredited by the opposition.
We're going to leave it to the American people to figure it out on their own.
Just like we left it to the American people to figure out how great things were in the 1980s.
How did that work for us?
And the Mistake that the Newt Republicans made in 1995 was assuming that that election meant that the country had turned conservative and they needn't teach it anymore.
So while they were implementing the contract, they didn't explain why they were doing what they were doing.
And they didn't juxtapose what they were doing against the failure of 40 years of the Democrats preceding them.
So they allowed themselves to be defined as racist, mean-spirited, extremists, whatever, school lunch cutters, you know, you know the drill.
By contrast, our opposition, Democrats, they always paint us as monsters.
They want to wipe us out.
And they make no apologies for wanting to wipe us out.
We are a bigger enemy to them than ISIS.
We're a bigger enemy to them than militant Islamists.
Beating us, eliminating us as an opposition animates them, energizes them more than taking care of a real threat to this country.
And they make no apologies.
And since some of the character assassination is bound to stick, the brand gets damaged, even when we prove to be right about things.
I have to take a break.
Sit tight, my friends.
We'll be back with uh with much.
This is just a long way around saying if the Republican Party doesn't start teaching, if it doesn't start becoming demonstrably conservative and doesn't start actively taking an advantage, taking advantage of these dramatic incompetent failures of the Democrat Party.
Audio sound by time, CNBC Squawk Bucks, uh John Harwood, Chief Washington correspondent, was talking about the NBC News Wall Street Journal poll on the 2014 midterm elections.
this.
A look at Obamacare, which Republicans wanted to be a huge weapon for them in this election.
It hasn't turned out to be the case.
Among all of the issues that voters rank most important to their vote, health care is only And when you ask them, do you want a candidate who will give Obamacare a chance to work with changes or repeal and start over?
You see a significant majority here saying, I want somebody who will give it a chance to work.
The Obamacare news is worse than ever.
People are losing their plans.
Premiums are going up.
Healthcare.gov doesn't work.
The employer mandate kicks in after the election, and a whole bunch of really bad elements kick in after the election by design.
Obamacare has not fizzled as a mobilizing, motivating issue.
But the Republicans are not using it.
They gave voice to repeal, they gave voice to this or that, but it's just another example of something squandered, which leads to the inevitable question do they really oppose any of this stuff?
Or are they just small L-liberals who believe in their own version of big government?
Which I think is the case.
Anyway, back to the phones.
We have uh we had Tom at Columbia, Missouri.
Hi, Tom.
Uh, great to have you on the program.
Hello.
Thanks, Rush.
I will say uh fellow former Overland Park, Kansas resident did of you.
I used to live there, and you did too, obviously.
Yes, sir.
Rush, there's a hundred things I'd like to talk to you about, but um I will tell you that I am a grandson of Patrick Henry.
And uh a great, great, a lot of great grandsons.
Wait, wait, wait, wait, well, whoa, you are the great grandson of give me the liberty or give me death, Patrick.
No kidding.
No kidding.
And that's correct, Rush.
I my wife and I, we don't have any kids.
So your your children's books, uh, you know, we listened to the first one on a road trip.
We really enjoyed it.
Um the Rush Revere and the first Patriots was in my Kendall queue for quite a while for several weeks.
I finally got around to reading it a couple days ago.
Rush, I know this is a children's Book, but this book had a profound impact on me.
Really?
Your conversations with Patrick Henry were you brought him to life.
If there's one person that I could go back and talk to in history, it would be him.
And the way you brought him to life in this book, Rush, it made me feel like I was sitting there listening to your conversation, and you made him exactly how I thought he would be.
Oh, wow.
You do not know that you I I've got chills and tingles going up my spine here.
This is just you you you can't possibly know how you've made my day here.
Well, Rush, my day when I read that.
So I just wanted to tell you that.
I I'm glad I was able to get through to tell you that it was seriously rushed.
You don't know, it was just a profound impact.
I had to go back and read through it again.
And just my body.
And you that conversation, that meeting was done.
And I was like, no, this can't be all.
And then when you were back with him in the look, hang on.
I w I want to send you the new book when it comes out.
Mr. Snerdley needs to get your address.
Do not hang up, Tom.
We'll be right back, folks.
Yeah, take a brief pause here at the top of the hour in our busy broadcast will resume one final hour in the fastest three hours in media.
Be back before you know it, folks.
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