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Nov. 26, 2014 - Rush Limbaugh Program
35:23
November 26, 2014, Wednesday, Hour #3
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Time Text
And I'll tell you something else, Snerdley.
I'm going to give you even more evidence here in this busy broadcast hour that this oddball way of thinking as typified by this Georgetown student is not a one-off.
I'm going to give you another example of how it's permeated everything.
It's the Rush Limbaugh program, our final busy broadcast hour of the week, folks, with a live one anyway.
I'm going to cram a lot of stuff into this hour, folks.
So you have to listen fast because I may end up speaking faster than I should.
My mind is going to be going much faster than my oral cavity can keep up with.
You know, Thanksgiving.
Christmas.
It must be one of the times of year when you especially feel the absence of the men and women serving in the military stationed far away.
It's a tough time of year for military families.
It uh it really is.
And that's why I want to spend some time today.
Because I always do.
It's a tradition on the day before Thanksgiving, to recount for you the real story, the true story of Thanksgiving.
How it happened, what it is, how it came to be.
And you'll you'll then learn how it's been distorted.
Uh all of that coming up.
I do need to do one thing.
Yesterday, folks, I was uh telling about Al Michaels' new book, You Can't Make This Up.
Great, great new book.
And in the process of describing and talking about Al, I talked about how he's at the pinnacle of what he does.
Sports play by play.
And when called on, such as the earthquake during uh Sam Cisco earthquake during the uh baseball world series, he was immediately uh transformed to a news reporter to describe actual earthquake circumstances and did it flawlessly.
He's got this great book out.
It is just, if you're a sports fan, I can't tell you how good it is, because it's a way that you get to know Al Michaels.
I know Al Michaels.
He's uh I'm very fortunate to become a good friend of mine.
And he's just one of the greatest guys that you would ever you go to a ball game with, have a beer whip, play around the golf with, you would love Al Michaels.
And you know him on TV, he does games, does play by play, and that's the extent of it, because the game's the event, he doesn't intrude on it.
And he keeps the game and the event that he's televising and and commenting upon in perspective and keeps himself out of it.
He does not become the story.
What's interesting about that is if he's there, the game is the biggest one of the week.
You can put Al Michaels on a cheap little Sunday afternoon NFL game that doesn't matter with Hill of Beans, and if Al was there, it'd be the biggest game of the week.
He just has that kind of aura and presence.
And he has the ability to make the event he's covering the biggest one of the week.
If he's there, that's the one to watch.
And you'll learn why.
When you read this book, it's just it's it's filled with stories.
Some of them are funny, some of them are eye-opening, some of the some of them are things you can't believe he would reveal about people that he's worked with over the course of his career.
Uh Al Michaels, he there's even some political comments, just slight little political commentary.
Even gets into the whole business of print journalism versus television sports journalism and fascinating points of view.
Things you're gonna love, a point of view that you never hear expressed.
And he's got it.
It's eye-opening and it's it's it's a terrific book.
And even if you're not a sports fan, you're gonna be entertained by it.
The book could turn you into a sports fan if you're not.
Most people are anyway.
But in the process of talking about Al's book, again, it's uh you can't make this up.
I mentioned Jim Nance in the conversation with Al Michaels as people at the pinnacle.
And I left out Joe Buck, and I did not mean to do that.
You run the risk when you start mentioning names.
Like people sometimes will always include me when they start talking about people at the pinnacle of success in broadcast meeting.
They will forget other people.
I am never forgotten.
Just the way it is.
But I I did not mean to leave Joe Buck.
Nobody said anything to me.
I didn't get any caustic email.
What do you mean?
What do you think?
Joe Bookson, none of that.
HR didn't say anything to me.
Hey, you forgot no.
I just realized it when I got home yesterday.
Um We're fortunate to have such such good people.
It's uh they're rare now.
There are so much, I'll tell you so much sports on TV today that it is.
Oh there's a dearth, I think, of real quality broadcasters.
You got plenty of people that played the game that they put on TV to do commentary.
But it's so vanilla now.
It's so devoid of personality, and it's become so cliched with things like a fumble's no longer a fumble.
The player put the ball on the ground.
Wide receiver is not open anymore.
A wide receiver got separation.
You know, all this these little tricks that guys come up with trying to dress it up and be unique.
They all end up stealing from each other and all become skull.
That's another thing these guys, Al doesn't do, you'll never hear him say a fumble is oh no, so and so put the ball on the ground.
A fumble's a fumble.
The basics are the basics and the fundamentals are the fundamentals.
And he'd been doing he's Al Michaels is in his 70s, and you look at him, he's not a day over 50.
And it just it's it's amazing.
It's just such it's such a good book, uh, an eye-opening book, but I wanted to make sure, you know, Jim Nance is in a class his own as well, and and Buck, these guys are all really good at what they do.
And I didn't mean to leave anybody out.
Uh when I was when I was touting Al, so I wanted to make sure that I I made that point.
Now, uh Snerdley keeps trying to assure me.
Oh, oh, oh.
Uh also, I gave out the um web address if you wanted to donate a little bit of money to Natalie Dubois, whose cake store was destroyed in the riots in Ferguson, Missouri this week.
It's GoFundMe.com, Natalie's Cakes, and more.
And apparently a number of you have found your way to that website and have made some donations, and I just want to thank you.
Because I'll tell you what you're doing.
There are a lot of people, and I'm not, I'm not exaggerating this.
I there are a lot of people right now wondering what's happening to the country, wondering if there's any goodness left.
Because the news every day is all about everything going wrong and everything being undermined, and gosh, is this being sabotaged?
Is that being corrupted?
And here's some good old-fashioned, just decent American goodness that is taking place right before our eyes.
A poor woman saved up everything to open her cake store in Ferguson.
She's African American.
And she had nothing to do with any of this that went down, but her store got destroyed.
And some people set up uh a couple of web links for Americans to donate to give her a chance to rebuild, and she's collected now.
I don't even know if she had anything to do with it.
I think others set it up for her.
Not sure about that.
Anyway, so many of you are coming through on this that it's just it's really heartwarming to see.
Did you go check it out?
Is that what yeah uh had a couple people tell me that a lot of you are logging in and and donating.
I think it's great, and and you're you're renewing people's faith.
Or you're solidifying it in some case, which is also what I'm gonna do later in the program with a true story of Thanksgiving.
And by the way, some of the stuff we've talked about today may be like this idiot, sorry, the student at Georgetown with his column on how he understands his mugger and thinks his mugger would like him and understands the mugger and income inequality, and he's never been in the mugger's shoes, so we shouldn't condemn the mugger and call him a thug because that's otherization and just perpetuates the problem.
Guys like that are at the State Department negotiating with the Iranians.
Guys like those thugs, guys like that are at the Pentagon now.
Guys like that are conducting seminars on why Al Qaeda hates us.
This is not this guy's not a one off.
Uh, Snerdley keeps trying to, these guys, come on, Rush, these guys aren't everywhere.
Like I mentioned earlier in the week that I've been I've two television shows I've been watching recently, which have been totally oriented about America torture.
And let me tell you what they are.
The first one I accidentally stumbled into on iTunes, it's called the Warwicker Trilogy.
It's three 90-minute TV episodes, mini-movies, starring Bill Nye, bunch of Brits.
He's at MI6 and his buddies are at MI6, and there's a controversy.
You know what the con the and the Prime Minister is played by Rafe Fine.
You know what the controversy is?
The con three four and a half hour TV movie, three episodes.
The controversy is that the Prime Minister of Great Britain knew about American black site torture centers during the Iraq War and didn't tell anybody.
And for that, the whole show is about how Bill Nye, as an agent at MI6 and others try to engineer everybody finding out what the Prime Minister did and how to get rid of him.
Torture.
How long ago?
How old is this story?
Torture, waterboarding.
You you and I think, okay, we remember Jose 60 Minutes, the guy that did the waterboarding, Leslie Stahl had him.
She couldn't believe what he was saying.
But we don't do this.
Oh, but we do, we do.
And he described it, how it happened, and how it worked.
And you think, well, okay, these people that speak out against torture and the people that blew up at Abu Grab, they're few and far between.
They're not.
They're everywhere.
Here we have a British.
Yeah, Jose Rodriguez.
Here we have a British and the Worker Trilogy, by the way, it's a good show.
If you if you can separate out what this is about, it's actually well acted.
It's a it's a good show.
Um it's three one and a half hour or hour and a half episodes.
I got it at iTunes.
I'm sure it's everywhere.
I don't know where it's been broadcast, maybe PBS.
But it's all about you would not believe the the scandal.
The prime minister knew America was engaging in torture.
And he may have even invested financially in a company that helped build the black sites where it happened.
And it was the most out.
You you would it was scandal like no other.
And the other example is one of the other TV shows I watch periodically is uh Tia Leone's Madam's Secretary, which everybody thinks is a setup for Hillary Clinton to be president.
Tia Leone plays the Secretary of State, gets the gig after the Secretary of State prior to her is killed in a plane crash.
Well, in the last episode, she, and by the way, she used to be a CIA agent.
This is all in the story.
Used to be a CIA agent stationed in Iraq where she what do you think she did?
She interrogated prisoners.
Her daughter, her college age daughter, just in the last episode, found out that her mom knew that the CIA was torturing Iraqi insurgents when her mom was at the CIA, and so she moves out of the house in shame.
She's ashamed of what her mother can't believe.
Now you think the attitudes like this guy at Georgetown are one-off.
They're everywhere.
Here, torture is a how many years old story?
Seven or eight, and it's still a prominent centerpiece plot line for primetime in America TV shows and this thing in Great Britain, torture.
Now, who do you what?
No, don't misunderstand.
I'm not I'm not, I'm not I'm not a torture advocate, but the the idea that this doesn't happen is just the idea that you do what you have to do to win this isn't boggles my mind.
I just does.
But anyway, my only point is that the the this thinking that we're to blame, that all of this we've caused, that if we only understood our episodes, if we only walked a mile in their shoes and understood that we created them, this is not oddball.
Well, it's oddball thinking, but it's it's everywhere it ought not be.
It is in positions of authority and power in our present government.
It is permanently ensconced in the bureaucracy now.
I mean, next Republican president's going to have people like this in the State Department.
They're going to have people like this at the Defense Department.
And who knows what they might do to undermine a Republican president, but nobody would ever know it's happening.
The Iranians are now running around talking about how we've surrendered.
They can't believe we're not insisting that they don't do a nuclear weapon.
We've extended this current negotiating session.
Seven more months, which gives them time to do whatever they want to do.
They're bragging.
They're over in Vienna.
They're writing pieces about how it looks like the Americans have surrendered.
Why wouldn't they?
The obvious attitude we are projecting is that Well, we don't have any right to tell them they can't have one if we do.
And here you have the president out of Chicago yesterday saying, hey, you don't have the right, meaning us, you don't have the right to favor Americans in immigration.
You can't tell these people they can't.
Come here, you came here once.
Who are you to tell them they can't?
The only people that can legitimately intellectually legitimately oppose illegal immigration are Native Americans.
The first to be overrun by it.
But you people out here in Chicago, and you people in New York and you and uh in Texas, the screw you.
You can't you have no right to tell them they can't come because you came.
Your ancestors came.
Who do you think you are?
So it's not sadly contained in Cookville.
Cookville has become mainstream.
Glenn Reynolds runs a website called Instapundit, is a law professor at University of Tennessee, has got a theory on why Ferguson happened post-election.
You can understand Trayvon Martin, understand all these other things about black turnout, but he thinks that Ferguson, Missouri has nothing to do with any of that.
It's not about swing voters.
In this case, he thinks these riots and all of this scripted soap opera protests is about the base and not the Democrat Party's base, but certain leaders of the Democrat Party's base.
He says this may be best understood as an intra-party struggle, Ferguson.
Obama is the champion of the urban black wing of the party, and because of him, the urban black wing has been on top.
But Obama's star is fading.
And black voters are beginning to realize they haven't benefited at all from Obama being president.
So the next Democrat nominee, whether it's Hillary Clinton, whether it's James Webb, whether it's Elizabeth Warren, will be not from the urban black wing of the party.
They will be from the white gentry liberal wing of the Democrat Party.
So he's talking about the different uh factions within the Democrat Party.
Obama runs the urban black wing, which would be the Congressional Black Caucus and people that are conservative inner city, and that Hillary or Elizabeth Warren, Jim Webb, they're from the white gentry liberal wing of the Democrat Party, and the riots,
the marches, the traffic blocking are a way of telling them, the Hillaries, the Elizabeth Warrens, and the Jim Webbs, that the Sharpton and Jackson wing is still a force to be reckoned with,
and that this is all about the Sharpton wing of the Democrat Party demonstrating its power and strength to the Hillary Clintons, the Elizabeth Warrens, as a means Of bargaining for power between now and 2016.
And Reynolds says that's the only way this not at all spontaneous.
Street theater makes sense.
And that, folks, that's, you know, this was scripted.
Everybody knew it was coming.
Nobody made an effort to stop it.
It was portrayed as spontaneous, but it wasn't.
And there's politics at the end of the rope on it anyway, so there you go.
Salt Lake City, Utah next.
Open line Friday on Wednesday.
This is Steve.
Thank you for calling, sir.
Hi.
Rush, what a pleasure it is to talk to you.
What a Thanksgiving blessing it is to talk with you.
I uh I happened to be doing something yesterday I don't normally do.
I was uh in the background, I had uh one of the one of the big three news stations going on.
And um I noticed that uh and that's a question I've wanted to ask you for months.
Uh but that there was another example happened yesterday.
Uh Obama was heckled when he was given uh a speech, and something happened, and it always happened.
He's only always, I don't know if you've ever noticed this, but he's only heckled from the left.
Have you ever noticed that, Rush?
Yeah, I that that is something that has uh that I have observed.
Uh I've never put a lot of stock in it, uh, because it doesn't matter.
And I'm not trying to be pessimistic about it, but I have noticed.
In fact, he was heckled yesterday by some of his supporters that are genuine idiots.
He was heckled yesterday by people demanding that he do amnesty.
And he couldn't believe it.
He turned around.
Some woman behind him is holding up this stupid sign, Obama stop deportations now.
He he turned around, he said, What?
You pay attention?
I did.
I already changed the law.
I changed the law.
He got so frustrated, he finally gave up the game.
He admitted he blew up the Constitution.
He said, You're not paying attention.
I just took action to change the law.
He said it.
He just admitted he did what he doesn't have the constitutional authority to do.
Up until that time, he had denied that that's what he had done.
He said the office of legal counsel said, no, no, no, no, this is nothing.
And previous presidents have done he changed the law.
I have the picture of the woman's holding a sign up.
Obama stop deportations now.
He can't believe it.
But up until, you know, uh somebody called him a liar once.
He can't believe this.
Um until this week, the president and the White House staff insisted Obama didn't change the law.
And couldn't.
They said that he can't do that without cooperation of Congress, so Obama didn't do that.
It was just a revision of executive branch enforcement priorities.
We didn't change the law.
We just we just told the whatever the border patrol to stand down.
No more deportations.
He got so frustrated yesterday, he admitted that he just took action to change the law.
But until then, he'd been very disciplined in how he had described what he had done.
But he got so frustrated being heckled.
Hey, what do you think?
You've not been paying to And I know how he feels, by the way.
I know exactly how I'll I'll do a 25-minute brilliant monologue and a call ten minutes later will say the same thing as though they didn't hear me.
You know, and I want to do what do you mean?
Well, you're not even listening.
What am I doing this for?
But I don't do that because I'm polite.
But Obama literally turned around.
It kind of blew up at the babe.
Anyways, pardoning the turkey.
That's a that's a that's a joke, too.
The turkey doesn't get pardoned, it's all a crock.
But I think now, ladies and gentlemen, it is nothing's real anymore.
All of this is showbiz.
It's all fake.
Plastic banana, phony, good time rock and roll garbage.
Pardon the snippels.
Actually, I'm not coming down with a cold.
I don't know what that tickle in the throat was prior to program, but it's not developing into bad things, so that's good.
Uh it's a tradition to tell the truth about Thanksgiving on this program.
And I did it first in a book called See, I Told You So.
Chapter Six, Dead White Guys, or What The History Books Never Told You, The True Story of Thanksgiving.
And we expanded on it and made a whole book out of it, not just a chapter, for the children, in the first Rush Revere book, Rush Revere and the Brave Pilgrims.
It had the true story of Thanksgiving in there, plus a bunch of other things about the pilgrims.
And then came Rush Revere and the First Patriots in Rush Revere and the American Revolution, a current book just released in October.
But I want to read to you from the first book, chapter six, Dead White Guys, or what the history books never told you, true story of Thanksgiving from, see I told you so.
The story of the pilgrims begins in the early part of the 17th century.
Church of England under King James I was persecuting anyone and everyone who did not recognize its absolute civil and spiritual authority.
Those who challenged ecclesiastical authority and those who believed strongly in freedom of worship were hunted down, imprisoned, and sometimes executed for their beliefs.
A group of separatists first fled to Holland and established a community.
If I may pause there, and I may, because I can I learned when we wrote Rush Revere and the Brave Pilgrims that the uh a lot of people didn't know about Holland.
So inadequate has public education been on the pilgrims' Thanksgiving founding of the country.
I couldn't believe that adults did not know that Holland was a factor in the pilgrims.
Just a little aside, we're getting more email, more reaction from adults telling us that the children's books are teaching them things they didn't know because they weren't taught when they were kids in school.
It's it would stun you if you saw this stuff.
And we post some of it on the Rush Revere website in the Rush Revere Facebook page.
Anyway, a group of separatists first fled to Holland and established a community.
And after 11 years, about 40 of them agreed to make a perilous journey to the new world, where they would certainly face hardships, but they could live and worship God according to the dictates of their own consciences.
On August 1st, 1620, the Mayflower set sail, a total of 102 passengers, including 40 pilgrims led by William Bradford.
On the journey, Bradford set up an agreement, a contract that established just and equal laws for all members of this new community, irrespective of their religious beliefs.
Now, where did the ideas expressed in the Mayflower Compact come from?
They came from the Bible.
You see, the pilgrims were a people completely steeped in the lessons of the old and new testaments.
They looked to the ancient Israelites for their example, and because of the biblical precedence set forth in Scripture, they never doubted that their experiment would work.
But it was no pleasure cruise, folks.
The journey to the New World was long and it was arduous.
And when the pilgrims landed in New England in November, they found, according to Bradford's detailed journal, a cold, barren, desolate wilderness.
There were no friends to greet them, he wrote.
There were no houses to shelter them.
There were no inns where they could refresh themselves.
And the sacrifice they had made for freedom was just beginning.
During the first winter, half the pilgrims, including Bradford's own wife, died of starvation, sickness, or exposure.
For a long time, many of them continued to live on the Mayflower.
There was no place else to live.
When spring finally came, Indians, Native Americans, taught the settlers how to plant corn, fish for cod, and skin beavers for coats.
And so life improved for the pilgrims, but they didn't prosper at this point.
And this is an important thing to understand because this is where modern American history lessons often end.
Thanksgiving is actually explained in some textbooks as a holiday for which the pilgrims gave thanks to the Indians for saving their lives and teaching them how to grow food and eat and all that.
Rather, what it was.
Thanksgiving was a devout expression of gratitude grounded in traditions in the Bible.
Remember, these were religious people.
They set out on a journey to a place that they had no idea of.
And they just found barren wilderness.
And the very idea that they survived, even before they began to prosper, the very idea that they just survived was what gave them pause to thank God.
That was the original Thanksgiving.
And that's not taught.
The original Thanksgiving is taught as if it weren't for the Indians, pilgrims would have died.
The Indians save their bacon, the Indians saved this, and it's understandable effort here, but that's not what happened, is the point.
Here's the part that's been omitted.
In fact, I got to take a break.
Take a break here.
I'll come back with the part that is omitted from modern day textbooks for young children in the schools.
And we are back with the original.
The truth story of Thanksgiving is written by me.
See I told you so.
Chapter 6, Dead White Guys.
What the history books never told you the true story of Thanksgiving.
Here's the part that's been omitted from what's taught about Thanksgiving.
The original contract that the pilgrims entered into with their sponsors in in London.
There were people that paid for them to make this trip.
They had to get funded, and they were they were sponsored.
And that contract called for everything they produced to go into a common store.
And every member of the community, all forty of the people.
They were entitled to one common share.
All the land they cleared, all the houses they built belonged to the community as well.
It was a commune.
It was socialism, because it was thought to be fair.
They were going to distribute everything equally.
All the land they cleared, all the houses they built belonged to the community.
Nobody owned anything.
They just had a share in it.
It was a commune, folks.
It was the forerunner to the communes we saw in the 60s and 70s out in California.
It was complete with organic vegetables, by the way, in case you'd like to know.
William Bradford, who had become the new governor of the colony, recognized that this collectivism was costly and destructive.
Because that first harsh winter had taken so many lives, and half the people weren't carrying their weight, didn't have to.
So he took some bold action.
He assigned a plot of land to each family to work and manage.
And they got to keep the bulk of what they produced.
That turned loose the power of the market.
Long before Karl Marx was even born, the pilgrims had discovered and experimented with what could only be described as socialism, and it didn't work.
What Bradford and his community found was that the most creative and industrious people had no incentive to work any harder than anybody else, unless they could utilize the power of personal motivation.
While most of the rest of the world has been experimenting with socialism for well over a hundred years, the pilgrims decided to scrap it early on.
What Bradford wrote about his social experiment should be in every history lesson in school.
And if it were, we might prevent much needless suffering in the future.
Here's what he wrote.
The experience we had in this common course and condition tried sundry years.
It was tough for a long time.
That by taking away property and bringing community into a commonwealth would make them happy and flourishing as if they were wiser than God.
We thought we knew it, but we were wrong.
For this community, so far as it was, was found to breed much confusion and discontent.
It retarded much employment that would have been to their benefit and comfort.
For young men that were most able and fit for labor and service did repine that they should spend their time and strength to work for other men's wives and children without any recompense.
That was thought injustice.
So what happened was the hard workers began to see a bunch of slackers, even in the first pilgrims.
It's all a bunch of slackers, so what the hell are we doing?
If everybody's getting an equal share here, and half of these people aren't working the hell with this.
And they threw it out.
And William Bradford wrote about it in the journal.
The pilgrims found that people couldn't be expected to do their best work without incentives.
So what Bradford's community tried next was to unharness the power of good old free enterprise.
They invoked the undergirding capitalistic principle of private property.
Every family was assigned its own plot of land.
And they were able to work it as they saw fit, and they were permitted to market everything they grew, crops, products, whatever.
And the result, well, Bradford wrote this had very good success, for it made all hands industrious.
So as much more corn was planted and otherwise would have been.
They had surpluses.
You know what they did with the surpluses?
They shared it with the Indians.
Capitalism, as opposed to socialism, produced abundance, the likes of which they had never experienced.
They remembered the help they got when they first landed from the Indians.
They shared their abundance.
That's the first Thanksgiving.
A thanks to God for their safety.
A thanks to God for their discovery.
And a thanks to the Indians by sharing the abundance that they themselves produced after first trying what could only be called today Obamaism or Clintonism, or socialism.
That, my friends, is the real story of Thanksgiving.
It's not taught.
The original story of Thanksgiving stops, where the Indians saw these newly arrived struggling Europeans to know what to do, and showed them how to plant corn and all that.
Meaning the first Thanksgiving is, if it weren't for the Indians.
So that has led us to today where Obama says the Indians are the only ones that have any real right to be offended at immigration.
I try to tell this story ado.
It's a tradition every day before Thanksgiving on the EIB network.
And as I say, we've written an entire book for children about this, featuring time travel with Rush Revere and his talking horse liberty to take children back to Holland.
They make the journey with the pilgrims across the Atlantic Ocean.
They're there and get to know Bradford and so forth.
That's the way we decided to teach history by actually taking these young readers to these events and making them part of them.
And Catherine and I are abundantly thankful for all of you for making our lives and the lives of our families so rich and rewarding.
The true story of Thanksgiving for us is how fortunate we all are to have people like you in our lives and comprising this audience.
We hope you have a great Thanksgiving with your family.
We hope that it's everything that you want it to be.
Hope you're able to get there if you intend to go.
But regardless, if you're able to make it or not, we hope that your Thanksgiving gives you time to pause and give thanks for the great fortune we all have to be Americans.
We had a best of show tomorrow, and in Mark Stein will be here on Friday.
And we'll all be back here on Monday, revd and ready, as we always are, ready to meet surpass all of your expectations.
Happy Thanksgiving once again.
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