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Dec. 3, 2014 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:46
December 3, 2014, Wednesday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24 7 Podcast.
And greetings to you once again, music lovers, drill seekers, conversationalists all across the fruited plane.
I am Hall of Fame broadcaster Rush Limbaugh, and I've been doing this a long time.
Which means that I know what I am doing.
You can trust that.
Telephone number 800 28282 and the email address, Lrushbo at EIBNet.com.
Well, right on schedule, the drive-by media has decided it's time to hit Charles Barclay.
And right on schedule, Charles Barclay has decided he's not gonna take it.
Charles Barclay has doubled down on his original comments, demonstrating once again how it is done.
And we will get to the audio soundbites of all of this in uh in due course.
We have uh we have NFL, uh play by playman, Greg Gumble, uh, color commentators all saying they can't believe more teams didn't do what the Rams did on Sunday.
They can't believe more teams didn't come out and imitate the hands up, don't shoot uh maneuver that I guess they believe the gentle giant did.
Is that possible?
That there are still educated people in foreign people still think that the gentle giant put his hands up and surrender?
Do they do they do they really think this?
It it it must be the case or else it has become symbolic, obviously this is the case for uh for something else.
Uh and of course the controversy, well, controversy, but the opinion over whether or not the Republicans ought to quote unquote shut down the government again is heating up.
This time in the Washington Post.
The Washington Post.
Now, the Washington Post has the Republican Party's best interests in mind, right?
The Washington Post and the drive-by media, when they tell the Republican Party what to do, they really want the Republican Party to do well, right?
When the Democrat Party, such as Chuck Hugh Schumer, or the Washington Post in this case, or Luis Gutierrez, when any of them tell the Republican press, you guys had better come out for amnesty.
You had better support us on this, you had better support comprehensive immigration, or you're never going to win another election.
They have the Republicans' best interest in heart, don't they?
Of course they do.
And did the Republicans just win an election?
It's getting harder and harder to tell.
As you observe things happening in Washington, it's harder and harder to tell who won that election.
The Republicans are acting like losers.
They're acting like they're going to continue to lose unless they continue to do what the Democrats want.
It's stunning.
It's amazing to watch this.
So here's the Washington Post.
Here's why Republicans really shouldn't want a government shutdown in one chart.
And the chart is not the election returns.
No, no, no.
The chart is the latest polling data.
Yes.
You see, we shouldn't shut down the government because there's polling data that says the American people will really hate the Republican.
The guys they just elected in a landslide victory.
Independents, and moderate voters as well as Republican voters mandated the Republican victory.
The mandate is to stop Obama, is to stop this.
There can be no other conclusion.
And yet we've got a poll here from the Washington Post saying these same people don't want the Republicans to do anything to actually stop Obama, including a government shutdown.
And the Washington Post.
We'd have to conclude as the best interests of the Republican Party in mind, right?
Now the Republican Party didn't follow the Democrats' advice leading up to the 2014 midterms, and they won a huge landslide.
Congressional Republicans are brainstorming ways to punish President Obama for unilaterally deferring deportation for millions of immigrants.
That's not what this is about.
Punishing President Obama.
That's not those of us who do not want amnesty for millions of years.
It's had nothing to do with punishing Obama.
It's all about the country.
But you see, even Republicans inside the beltway going to read this story, and they're going to be obviously influenced by it, which is why it's written the way it is.
By the way, the writer here's a guy named Scott Clement.
And he get he begins the story, congressional Republicans are brainstorming ways to punish President Obama for unilaterally deferring deportation for millions of illegal immigrants.
But GOP leaders seem to have ruled out a partial government shutdown a la last year, according to the Washington Post's Robert Costa and Ed O'Keefe.
They write the House GOP was still considering several possible funding bills as discussions continued.
The leadership's favored Hill response to Obama's immigration moves, according to senior Republican aides familiar with the process, a strategy that would demonstrate the party's defiance while avoiding the shutdown theatrics and public disapproval that plagued it last year.
Yeah, that shut down last year.
Does anybody remember that shutdown?
Do you remember when the government shut down last December, folks?
I mean, we were all alive.
And we were all paying attention.
No, I'm serious.
Do you remember when?
No, no, I want to.
Do you remember when Congress closed?
Do you remember when the DMV was?
Do you remember when you couldn't get your welfare check?
Do you remember when Social Security checks didn't show up?
Do you remember where Medicare and Medicaid weren't working?
Do you remember?
Do you remember you couldn't get on the um the uh the uh sleigh right concession out at Yellowstone Park?
It that's my memory, it's all of it happened.
There wasn't any government shutdown.
Uh then they're calling it a partial shutdown now, they're calling it a partial shutdown then.
17% of government operations were shut down.
The government this whole notion of a government shutdown is language that is being used once again to negatively impact the Republican Party and its fortunes.
I ask any, do you remember when the government was shut down last December?
Do you remember when whatever you need from government wasn't available?
Do you remember a government office closed?
No, what you remember is the incompetence of Obamacare in that rollout.
What you remember is the usual incompetence of government bureaucracies, but you don't remember them being shut because they weren't.
All of these supposed the government was shut down in 1995.
Wow, man, that really hurt us.
You can still feel the impact today, can't you?
Right.
What impact do you feel from now?
That was a real shutdown in 1995.
That one lasted a couple of months, and Clinton worked with the government employees union to stack the deck on that.
When they ended up getting their Thanksgiving turkeys, they got their back pay, nobody lost a dime on that government shut.
Even the even the Yellowstone Park Sleigh Bell Commission concession, whatever got reimbursed for whatever it was he lost.
But I'm just asking you, I want seriously want you to think back and ask yourself, do you remember?
I want has your life been so impacted, so affected by government shutdown that you remember every moment of it.
And it was so bad that you do not ever want to experience it again.
I would maintain that not a single one of you outside of the occasional government employee can even remember the government shutdown from last December, and you can't remember being affected by it.
You don't even, if you had to face an open question today about what part of the government was shut down and what happened, as a result, you are clueless.
I would wager nobody can answer this question.
The only thing that you can remember about it is that the Republicans shut down the government.
And the next thing you remember about it is the Republicans shut down the government because they hate government and they hate everybody depending on government.
That's probably what you remember, if even you remember that.
And the only reason you remember that is because that was the media template.
That was the narrative.
But in terms of real life, how many of you remember the government shutdown last year?
My contention to you is that nobody does.
If the government shutdown last year were as dramatic and negative and punitive and destructive, and all those other descriptions you can come up with.
If they were all of that and more.
Somebody explained to me how the Republicans, who got blamed for it, won a huge landslide last month.
How did this happen?
The polling data a year ago is identical to what the polling data is today.
The polls say, don't you dare do it.
The polls say don't you shut down the gun.
No way.
Independents are gonna hate you.
Democrats are gonna hate you.
I mean, the media's gonna hate you, you're gonna get ripped to shreds for shutting down the gun.
You better not do it, you Republicans, every time you do it, it never ever works.
You never accomplish what you want to accomplish.
You always end up getting blamed for it.
It's a hell to recover from, right?
Can anybody remember any of that from a year ago?
You may have some wonks in Washington to be able to say, oh, yeah, man, I remember.
I remember I tried to get to the Congressional Committee hearing on the offshore uh ging bat drill system that was set up for the anti-fracking forces.
I remember that hearing got shut down.
But seriously.
It's just mind-boggling to me.
It's not, we're not even talking real shut down.
But before you even get there, do elections have meaning?
Do elections have consequences?
They used to.
And what just happened last month was an utter shellacking.
The Democrat Party got beat up.
The Democrat Party had the floor wiped with them.
The president's approval numbers are hovering in the 30s now.
The only logical interpretation of the meaning of the election is that people are not happy with the status quo, and they certainly don't want more of it.
The only logical interpretation of the election results is the people who voted in mass landslide numbers for Republicans want all of this stopped.
And therefore, in the middle of all of it, in the middle of this massive landslide election victory for the Republicans.
So let's let's characterize it differently.
In the midst of this massive landslide election loss, for President Obama and the Democrats.
We have a poll published by the Washington Post, which says that the absolute worst thing the Republicans could do would be to shut down the government.
Just like they did last year.
Something doesn't work here in the logical progression.
If the Republicans got so much blame for such a drastic maneuver of shutting down the government last year, how in the hell did they win anything this year?
I mean, why wasn't there hell to pay?
Why wasn't there a price to pay?
By the way, along the same lines, the Republicans did not come out and support Amnesty before the election.
How the hell they win the election?
Because the Democrats and the media were telling them and everybody else that they never had a prayer.
Remember Chuck Schumer, you guys have a prayer with a Hispanic community.
You're never going to win beans, especially not going to win the White House again.
If you don't get on board Amnesty right now, comprehensive immigration reform.
If you don't do that, you'll have a prayer.
Here come the elections, it's a landslide loss for the guys telling us what we got to do to win.
So now here we are.
And what's really happening is a Democrat Party, a branch office of which is the drive-by media is doing everything they can to intimidate the Republicans from acting on their victory.
That's what this is.
And they're using years and years of fear Of the media, fear of media polls, and fear generally.
You better not act like you won.
You better not do anything that's based on your victory because you're going to be hated for it by the people that elected you.
That makes a lot of sense, doesn't it?
You better not do anything with this victory.
You better not stop President Obama.
You better give him what he wants.
You better sign on to all of this, otherwise you're gonna pay the price, and you're gonna be hell to pay.
Really?
This is the winning?
I can understand all this if the Republicans got shellac themselves, but that didn't happen.
So the Washington Post, and they come out openly in this story and they say it's not about who won the election.
This this is all about the polling data.
It's about the poll here, the poll there, the poll over there.
And they remind the Republican Party their disapproval climbed to 74% after the government shutdown last year.
Let's put that in perspective.
It wasn't a government shutdown.
Once again, you have a poll stacked, questions structured to get the desired result, so the media runs around and asks people who don't even know the government's been shut down.
They're not even affected by it.
And they ask them a loaded question about the government shutdown.
And of course, what does that mean to people?
Well, it means hell, Washington's closed.
It means nothing's happening.
Of course, that's not what it means.
But you go ask people this, particularly the low information crowd.
Well, yeah, Republicans have, did they do it?
Well, I strongly oppose it if a Republican, and so the blame is set up, the poll comes out to affirm the blame, the Republicans look at the poll.
Oh my God, we shut down the government, oh, look at we're getting beat.
Oh my God.
And then they think it took them a year to recover.
When in fact it's bogus from the get-go.
What government shutdown?
I defy anybody to tell me how it affected you.
How it affected the country.
We're still here, aren't we?
Country still, well, it's still there.
What has done more damage to the U.S. economy?
Shutting down the government or Barack Obama and his policy.
What has done more damage to your job prospects, shutting down the government or whatever they're calling it, or Barack Obama's economic policies.
What has done more damage to your future job prospects?
Shutting down the government or Obama's amnesty, opening the doors and the floodgates to illegal immigrants from all over Central America to come in here and take your job for much less.
Who is doing more damage to you and your kids and your future?
A misnamed hard-defined government shutdown or Barack Obama.
The people that voted in November answered that.
And it wasn't anything other than stop Obama.
Okay, ladies and young welcome back.
Great to have you.
I remember two things of last year's government shutdown.
And I think both of them, both of them ended up in outrage at President Obama and the Democrats.
The first thing I remember was World War II vets finally had a memorial in Washington, and a number of them had planned a trip from all over the country to visit the memorial to them.
Given their age, it was going to be the only time most likely they would ever be able to visit it.
President Barack Obama shut down.
It was his decision.
It was his discretionary move, shut down the area where the World War II memorial was, and therefore those veterans were not allowed to go.
But that's only half the story.
You know what, you know who was allowed to use that area?
A bunch of protesters demanding amnesty.
Immigration reform groups were allowed during the government shutdown to access areas close to the area World War II vets were denied.
Now I'm here to tell you that if there was any lasting memory that held political Consequence after those two events, it would have been the American people angry at Barack Obama and the Democrats for the government shutdown and the tricks they employed politically during that period of time.
And yet everybody wants to run around and assume, because of mainstream media polling data, that the Republicans always pay the price, and they never recover from it.
And it's just silly to engage in this kind of activity.
It's stupid.
Nobody wants a government shutdown, and Republicans always get blamed.
They just won a landslide election.
The shutdown last year, if anybody got mad, it was people being mad at Obama and the Democrats.
And it was probably lasting anger as well.
1995 budget shutdown, or government shutdown, we only lost nine congressional seats after that shutdown.
All of this is a big myth, folks.
After the government shutdown in 1995, which was a big one, I mean it really was.
The Republicans lost nine seats in the House, but picked up two seats in the Senate.
Net loss of seven in the Congress.
Now that's not.
I mean, nothing you want to advocate for, but that's not huge.
That's nowhere near what happened to Democrats this time, right?
Democrats lost control of the Senate.
They lost 12 more seats in the Senate to go with the ones they'd lost previously.
The idea of these government by the way, well, let me stress something here because Snerdley asked me during the break, why are you agitated for government shutdown?
I'm not.
It's not about a government shutdown.
That's another thing.
It's a it's a diversionary move, this this whole label to describe legislative, legitimate constitutional legislative action that the executive branch can take to stop an out-of-control president is not shutting down the government.
It's a loaded term.
It is an incendiary term.
It is not apt, it is not a legitimate description of what happens.
83 to 85 percent of the government continues to operate.
It is not a government shutdown.
But I'm not advocating for that anyway.
What everybody simply wants to happen here is the Republicans against the gonads and act like they won this and understand what they were elected to do.
They were elected to stop the policies of the Democrat Party and President Obama.
Plain and simple.
Not kick the can down the road every time they get together and promise to deal with it later.
And it's become apparent that that desire doesn't exist.
It doesn't look like the Republicans want to actually do what it would take to stop Obama.
And that's the frustrating thing.
But nobody, certainly not myself, and nobody I know is actually advocating for a quote-unquote government shutdown.
That's what the media is going to call it.
What we're advocating here is that the Republicans stand up and avail themselves of every opportunity presents itself to stop the implementation extra-constitutionally of the Barack Obama agenda.
Betsy McCoy is out today in the New York Post with yet another ream of examples of Obama wantonly changing Obamacare while nobody's looking in ways he is not constitutionally empowered to do.
He's just making changes here, changes there that affect who's available, who qualifies, who doesn't, what government and business must do to make health care available.
It's a never-ending list of things.
That while everybody's arguing about Ferguson or this, more executive orders or slash executive actions are written and implemented.
Nobody finds out till after it's done.
So get sidetracked on this construct here of a government shutdown, which really isn't a government shutdown.
The things that happened a year ago were all because Obama took specific action, like closing the World War II memorial, specifically to World War II vets, but yet allowing the area to be used.
I mean, this was a purposeful slap in the face, which is how Obama operates.
Oh, you're going to shut down Mount Government on me.
All right.
Is that what you're going to do?
Okay, well Then take this.
And he denies while the area is still functioning, it's not shut down by virtue of what happened.
He closes the World War II memorial.
He and he alone decides to shut it down, making it impossible for people to visit.
And then he decided randomly to open it up for illegal immigrant activists.
He also, if you'll recall, shut down tours of the White House.
Even though the Secret Service was still fully staffed, the Secret Service was still fully functioning.
But he closed down the White House tours, but there was no need for it.
Secret Service fully funded.
It was just done to punish people, which is how Obama and people like him behave when they don't get their way.
Poll after poll after poll shows that it is President Obama who is unpopular.
Poll after poll after poll shows that it is the Democrat Party that is a little more unpopular right now than the Republican Party.
It is just incredible the way real public opinion is being massaged and bent and flaked and formed here to bend the will of the Democrats and their allies in the drive-by media.
But the piece de resistance is the Washington Post story telling us ignore the election results.
They don't tell you the story.
The election results don't mean anything.
The only counts is our poll here.
Here's what it says.
Disapproval of Republicans grew from 63% immediately before the shutdown last year to 70% during the shutdown's first week and 74% the following week already.
Oh my God, do you remember that?
74% disapproval for the Republicans during the shutdown.
And they don't want to go through that.
Oh my God, no.
Oh, oh no, what's the chamber going to say about us?
Oh my God.
What are our big donors going to do?
They're going to kick our butts for being so unpopular.
Oh my God.
Oh my.
Then they come back and they win a landslide election.
My contention to you is, and I ask you in the last half hour, search your memory bank.
What do you remember about this shutdown?
I bet you remember the World War II shutdown.
I bet you remember the same area being opened up for illegal immigrant activists.
I'll bet you remember the White House tours.
I'll bet you Obama acting petulantly is what you remember.
But you don't remember being personally affected.
You don't remember your life being damaged.
You don't remember being harmed beyond your ability to recover because of whatever government shutdown happened.
And yet, that is the story that is presented.
After the shutdown, by the way, a separate ABC Washington Post poll found 53% saying the Republicans in Congress were mainly responsible for the shutdown.
So in the second week of the shutdown, 74% disapproved of Republicans.
After the shutdown, 53% blamed the Republicans for it.
And then 10 months later, the Republicans won an electoral landslide, the premise of which was to stop President Barack Obama and his implementation of his agenda extra-constitutionally and legislatively, and the Democrat Party as well.
That's what happened.
And yet we're we're being told today here the big lesson.
The big lesson of last year is not the election.
Oh no, don't be infantile, Mr. Limbo.
This Mr. Limbaugh, this illustrates why you are not ever going to be an accepted member of the establishment.
You're not uh you're just not an advanced thinker.
Mr. Limboy, you just you don't exhibit the traits necessary to be a member of the establishment.
You have to know what's important.
What's important is the polling data.
Because the polling data is what we raise money off of, and the polling data is what our consultants devise our campaigns over.
And what you have to understand, Mr. Limbaugh, is that the media is able to make the public hate us.
And you're not helping, Mr. Limbaugh when you don't.
Well, right.
There's so much hate for the Republicans they won in a landslide.
And even if you acknowledge that the election was an anti Democrat anti Obama election, which it was, the Republicans are still the guys that got the votes.
If they were so hated and so despised, that wouldn't have happened.
And I don't care how you want to look at this election, but there is not a single shred of intelligent analysts or analysis or evidence anywhere that says, well, what the voters really want now, they they want Republicans to help Obama and work with him on the implementation of his agenda.
They are tired of the gridlock.
That's why the Republicans wanted a landslide to help Obama and stop gridlock.
Why didn't they just throw the Republicans out then?
Because the media has been telling everybody that the problem with gridlock and the reason Obama's in such trouble because the Republicans are mean and extremist Tea Party people that don't want him to succeed and so forth.
Well, why not get rid of those guys if that's the correct portrayal?
Why not just vote against all the Republicans, give Obama every Democrat he wants, like he had the first two years of his term, and then let's all just sit back and enjoy our trip to Utopia.
Why didn't that happen?
It's from afar, I'm not inside the Beltway, and I don't know how many of you are, but uh it's it's really fascinating to watch all this from afar and to observe the almost monolithic for all of the brilliance that exists inside the conservative movement and all the brilliance that is said to exist in the Republican Party to watch the monolithic political analysis.
It's stunning to me.
Everybody, everybody there says, oh no, no, we can't shut down the government.
Why can't one person stand up?
Besides Ted Cruz, why can't somebody stand up?
No, we're not even talking a government shutdown, Mr. and Miss America.
Ladies and gentlemen of America, this is not even a government shutdown.
That's not what's being discussed here.
I the reasons why things aren't done continue to befuddle me as much as the reasons things are done.
Meanwhile, Mitch McConnell.
Grab audio soundbite number um.
Yeah, number 22.
I'm getting that point.
I got papers scattered all over my desk.
I don't know what's where now.
So I'm lucky that an obscene profit timeout's coming up where I get back to some semblance here of uh of structure, at least in what's coming.
Mitch McConnell, yesterday, this is the 214, 2014, Wall Street Journal CEO Council, annual meeting.
Uh this is the thing Boehner.
Wait a minute now.
Ah, I had a soundbite from somebody that went to this thing yesterday and said something might have been, I don't remember.
Anyway, McConnell's at it.
It's a bunch of CEOs, many Democrats, by the way.
A lot of Democrat CEOs.
In fact, they probably more Democrat CEOs than Republican CEOs today.
And the Wall Street Journal has a an annual confab for them.
I guess these are the people who get left out of Herbie Allen's thing at Sun Valley every year, so they do their own thing because they don't invite it to the big clicks party.
And so here is what McConnell said.
And I get this.
If you look at the way the presidents reacted to what could only be described as a butt-kicking election by any objective standard, the president got crushed in this election.
So I've been perplexed by the reaction since the election, a sort of in your face dramatic move uh to the left.
That's the second time that Senator McConnell has told us he can't believe what Obama's doing.
He can't believe Obama's movement to the left after such a huge defeat.
Just can't believe it.
Why can't he, if he really means this, that's another thing.
He really means this if he's just saying that for consumption, we don't really know.
But if he really means it, and I have such a tough time believing he really means this, because I can't believe.
Just can't believe he means.
I can't believe McConnell doesn't get what's going on, but I guess it's possible.
But if it does, if it means he doesn't know what's going on, it means it's an illustration of how our guys are stuck in a bygone era.
When elections mattered in this way, elections were the people speaking, what the people thought mattered.
Politicians, political parties were deferential to public opinion.
Those days did exist.
McConnell remembers them.
In in it wasn't that long ago, this bygone era, an election loss like this, the losers would at least talk about the need to move to the center, or we even fake everybody out and do it with a couple of things.
I think what's going on here is once again the Republicans are relying on a force that no longer exists to do their work for them.
In this case, they're thinking that this expression of popular opinion alone will be enough to stop Obama, that Obama will see this degree of disapproval and it will shock him into stopping the things he's doing.
Meaning the Republicans won't have to, because public opinion will be enough.
But that's not the case with Obama because they view the general population with contempt.
They view the general population as a bunch of dunces that uh basically ignorant, don't understand how things really work in a big show.
Washington politics.
No way they could ever understand it.
And they don't even know how to live their lives the right way, don't even know how to do what's best for them.
That's why we need Democrats to do that for them.
So the opinion, the collective opinion of the general population, matters not a whit any longer.
Gotta take a break, folks.
We'll be back try to squeeze a call in the first hour.
Always new policy trying to do that here.
So okay, let me now, since I have explained all this logically, and the and the end result of explaining this logically is to illustrate the on the surface ill logic of all of these people afraid of a government shutdown.
It simply is illogical.
Everybody bleating about, no, no, no, no.
Oh, no, shut down the government.
Oh my God, shut down the government, we're gonna get blamed, we're gonna get cream.
No, no.
They don't really mean that.
Here's what what it all means.
I mean, they may mean that.
But what when you strip all this away, what it really means is, and batting down the hatches here.
It means that the vast majority of the membership of the Republican establishment and their donors want amnesty.
I mean, that's what all this means.
We gotta cut through the noise here, which is one of the things I always try to do, not get distracted.
Because all of this talk about a government shutdown is a side show.
I mean, these people are smart enough to know.
Hell if I can figure it out, they can.
Government shutdown, so devastating that we can't recover.
Oh my god, and we only won a landslide election.
What this is about is the establishment concocting an excuse where they don't have to stop Obama because they don't want to.
Folks.
That's the only logical interpretation for all of this.
The election results are clear.
The voters don't want any more of what Obama is promising, implementing, or offering.
They don't want to the election was the only way people in this country have of saying stop.
Well, the people they elected to stop it, at least in the case of Amnesty, don't want to stop it.
But they can't come out and say that.
They can't come after all of this and act like they are as eager for amnesty.
But they are, we know it to be true.
We know the Republican established, we know the Chamber of Commerce, we know that many of the donors want amnesty.
They want all of these low skilled and low-educated workers because they're low wage.
They're not even denied this in in recent months, years.
So what this is really all about, it's just easier for these people to hide behind the dangers of a government shutdown as the excuse for not stopping Obama.
That's all this really is.
Because they're not this short-sighted.
They don't really think we can't shut down the government and stop Obama because of a poll in the Washington Post about being blamed for a shutdown.
It's that they don't want to.
And the polling data is a convenient.
Hey, look, if we do, we're going to get cream.
We just won.
You want us to throw away this victory by ticking off the people just elected?
It's a sideshow.
Uh, excuse me, that's what it is.
Gotta face it.
And by the way, the same answer, the same answer holds for why the Republicans want to go ahead and let the Democrats write the entire next year budget.
This month, same answer.
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