Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
Yes, sorry, Bob, greetings to you music lovers, thrill seekers, conversationalists all across a fruited plane.
I am your highway trained broadcast specialist Rush Limbaugh, and I've been doing this a long time, ladies and gentlemen.
Live from the Southern Command in sunny South Florida, it's Open Line Friday!
Open Line Friday here on the EIB Network and the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.
Open Line Friday differs from Monday through Thursday in one way.
On Friday, callers can talk about pretty much whatever they want.
They don't have to be focused on the things that I'm interested in that day.
That's why it's a great career risk, because rank amateurs do not know a thing about connecting with the audience.
But I do, because I've been doing this for a long time.
Anyway, here's the number 800-282-2882 and the email address, lrushbo at eibnet.com.
As you all know, those of you who regularly listen to this program, I am not a big fan of television.
I've had my own TV show.
I don't know why.
I know that television has a lot of impact.
However, this program has a larger audience than most, if not all, but most cable news programs.
Maybe not combined network day-to-day.
I mean, if you take their 24 hours and add them up, but anyway, I don't know what it is.
It's just I've the whole thing, it just, it's all, to me, it is not natural.
Now, you know, I think I finally figured out what it is.
Honestly, I think I figured I'm too self-conscious.
I'm too famous.
I am.
You know what?
The primary ingredient, I'm convinced now, having done this too, the primary ingredient to be a successful or even great actor is you have to be absolutely zero self-conscious.
You cannot be self-conscious at all.
And if anybody is self-conscious to one degree or another, they're going to do badly on television or in front of cameras.
You know, the whole thing about cameras changed the way things would be if the camera wasn't there.
But anyway, I got a call, an email this week from Chris Wallace and his staff at Fox News Sunday.
And they had heard a couple of things discussed on this program, but the government shut down some things I'd said.
And they asked me if I would be the guest on Fox News Sunday.
And my initial reaction, like every request I get, is to say no and move on.
And I don't know how many of these a week, HR, do we turn down?
There must be three or four requests.
I mean, from all the different networks.
And just standard operating procedures is to say no.
But for some reason, for some reason, I didn't say no.
And I paused and I thought about it for a day, and I decided to do it.
So I'm going to be the lead guest.
And I'll show you how, give you an idea of how rare me being on TV is.
Listen to the first four soundbites that we have in the audio soundbite roster.
Here's the first on Channel 5, New York this morning.
We're going to have a fascinating person to talk about all of this, Rush Limbaugh, exclusive guest, rare TV appearance.
We're going to talk to him about this.
We're going to talk about the possibility of a government shutdown as Republicans figure out how they're going to oppose the president on the executive action on immigration.
But I'm sure we're going to talk a lot about this question of the police.
And, you know, when you can argue whether Rush is right or wrong, he talks about the race industry.
Although, on the other hand, Rush also said that he was very troubled by what he had seen in the video in the Eric Garner case.
I don't see how anybody can watch that video and not think that there was an unnecessary escalation of force by the police.
And then, mere moments later on Fox Washington.
We're going to be talking about it with a very interesting observer, Rush Limbaugh, who is going to have one of his rare TV appearances exclusively here on Fox News Sunday this week.
And we're going to talk to him.
He's one of the hardliners who says, no way that they should fund 99% of the government, everything except DHS, for the whole year.
They have the power of the purse and they should use it.
And later on Fox Philadelphia.
You can agree with him or disagree with him, but I can't think of anybody more interesting to talk to than Rush Limbaugh live exclusive Sunday morning.
And Fox and Friends on the Fox News channel this morning after all that.
No, I'd love to go to Palm Beach, but thank you for offering.
If I could take your private jet, Steve, I'd love to do it.
We're going to do it live.
He's going to be in his EIB studios live on Sunday morning, and we'll be up here.
So I'm going to do it.
Fox News Sunday, leave guest at 9 a.m. Eastern Time on the Fox News channel.
And I mention all this because it is.
I can't.
The last time I did, I haven't done a Sunday show.
My gosh, I think since Tim Russert.
Well, no, the last time I did a Fox show, oh, you know what?
The last time I did a Sunday show was Chris Wallace.
And it was here in Palm.
It was over at the Breakers.
And I remember this now.
Oh, this is going to be good.
Whoa, this, this, it's six.
It's six here because I remember now.
I remember now.
And I ought to remind, we're sitting there and we're talking about the upcoming Obama regime.
And I predicted to him what was going to happen.
I said, Chris, the thing that scares me is I think it's on purpose.
I think it's all by design.
And he was very polite.
He didn't think I was, you know, he didn't think I was right about that.
He was incredulous.
Well, he was moderately incredulous.
He was moderately incredulous.
But he was, it was kind of over now, Rush.
You just exaggerated.
No, I'm not.
I actually think that's what saddens me.
I think all of this is being, I think it's all on purpose.
I think it's by design.
And now we're six years later.
But that's not all, folks.
That's not the only audio soundbite series in which I, your beloved host, was mentioned.
We're going to go, let's see.
This was, we're up to number five now.
Yesterday in Washington, the Christian Science Monitor breakfast.
You know what's coming?
Senator Trent Lott, former Senator Trident Lott, Republican, Mississippi, was the guest.
And he was speaking about immigration reform and told a story about immigration reform and the Republicans' attempt to do it in 2007.
My phones were jammed for a week or two.
Rush Limbaugh gave out my phone number.
We lost that vote in 2007 on a procedural vote.
I thought we were going to be able to win that.
But over the weekend, Rush Limbaugh labeled it amnesty, and Labor got a hold of Democrats and said, no, we don't want these workers coming in with these visas.
So Democrats were coming in voting no because of Labor.
Republicans were coming in voting no because of amnesty from Rush Limbaugh.
And I'm in the well of the Senate with John Kyle and Lindsey Graham, not two notorious liberals, but also Ted Kennedy, Dianne Feinstein, and Harry Reid.
The six of us are working the boat, and we've lost.
You know, that was one of the most mind-boggling things.
Look at that.
And it's all being chalked up to me because I called it what it was.
Because I call it what it was.
And here it is seven years later.
And he's at a Christian Science Monitor breakfast and blaming your beloved host, blaming me, Rush Limbaugh.
I didn't give out his phone number.
I don't do that.
I don't give out people's phone numbers.
I've done it two or maybe three times to make a point to prove something.
Anybody's phone number was ever given out would have been the switchboard number.
As a policy, I don't give phone numbers because I know what's going to happen when I do that, and I don't do it.
I've never been into that kind of thing.
I've never given out numbers other than a couple of times to demonstrate to the media what would happen if I did and have a switchboard shut down.
But look at this.
Yeah, I was in the well of the Senate.
John Kyle, Lindsey Graham, Ted Kennedy, Dianne Feinstein, Harry.
See, that group means it must have been a good bill.
Why, look at all of us assembled here.
We got two Republicans and me, and then we got Feinstein and Harry Reed and Ted Kennedy.
And Rush Limbaugh is out there calling amnesty and nobody wants.
And I'm going to tell you, folks, it wasn't me.
It was you.
You, without any prompting, I didn't have to give out any phone numbers.
You people, I'll never forget 2007.
It was summertime and they were trying to sneak this in.
If you want a history of this, let me briefly remind you, we're coming up on the end of the Bush administration.
They had been shooting for this since 2003, 2004.
They'd been trying to get some version of amnesty because remember, the early stages of this, Karl Rove and the Republican establishment thought that if they could secure the Hispanic vote, they could eliminate the Democrat Party as a viable existing political machine.
They really thought that if they could get the credit for immigration reform, they would wipe out the Democrat Party.
And that was their objective.
Now, they wouldn't admit that to me up front in so many words.
But they tried and tried, and they finally, in 2007, the House of Representatives, if you recall, had opposed Bush at every turn.
And I'll never forget that this was a problem, because I had people calling here asking me to explain why don't the Republicans do this and why don't I say we got a problem here in that a lot of House Republicans do not support the White House agenda and it happens to be the president in the White House is their party and it's.
This is not good for party loyalty.
These members of the House opposing this.
This is a.
This is a.
It's not common, but in 2007, there was a desire to relent and join Bush on this, because we were nearing the end of his term and the presidential campaign for 2008 was about to gear up, and so they made one last push for it in the summer of 2007, and what Trent Lott's talking about wasn't Me,
all of you, I mean people all over this country were barraging Washington, just melting the phone lines there.
Now, I gave out his phone number.
I didn't have to give out his phone number.
People look it up on their own.
They were so opposed to what was going on.
But even the same thing is happening today.
I'm going to get a little bit ahead of myself here in terms of what I intended to get to when, but let me just wet your whistle a little bit on this immigration business, so-called government shutdown.
I'm going to say it again: this whole government shutdown thing is an excuse that the Republicans are hiding by, or hiding behind.
They're using the government shutdown and the disaster that will result for them if they do this as an explanation for why they can't stop the president.
Oh, no, that would require defunding.
That would require a shutdown.
We would get creamed.
And so Obama will have smooth sailing.
Now, the conclusion, you go back, here's Trent Lott.
You may not know this, but earlier this week, Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential nominee in 2012, said that the Republicans need to swallow hard and just go all in on comprehensive immigration reform and beat Obama to the punch, not this piecemeal stuff like Obama's doing, but just do them all.
So here's, you know what the Republicans wanted to do in 2007?
Mitt Romney earlier this week encouraging full-fledged pedal of the metal comprehensive immigration reform.
The obvious conclusion is the Republicans favor it.
We know the chamber does, and that's a source of donor money for them.
They favor it.
They favor comprehensive, the Republican establishment does.
And the government shutdown and the threat of damage in the polls and how the public, you know, here's, look at it this way, folks.
In 2010, the Democrats got shellacked in the midterm elections.
Now, follow me on this.
In 2010, the Democrats got shellacked.
They lost 700 seats down the ballot.
House, Senate, state, House, governorship, down to local town and council, all those races, 700 seats.
The Republicans would have won the presidency in 2012 if 4 million of their voters had not decided to stay home.
2014, the Democrats get shellacked again.
So in 2010 and 2014, the Democrats have lost over 1,300 seats.
Over 1,000 seats at least.
It's a disaster what's happened.
Mary Landrieu is going to get shellacked by 24 points.
You've got two Democrats coming out now, Schumer and Harkin admitting that Obamacare was a big mistake.
The Democrat Party is falling apart.
That, to me, is the real secret of all.
The Democrat Party is imploding.
Not to say that they're not having success implementing their agenda.
They have the White House.
But I'm terms of just a political machine.
They are imploding.
And the Republicans are afraid of a poll if they are accused of shutting down the government.
None of this makes any sense.
Unless you conclude that the Republicans actually favor the Republican establishment, actually favor, say, comprehensive immigration reform.
And we've got enough evidence here to suggest that they do.
I mean, even the situation of Ferguson, the situation in New York, that's bad for the Democrats.
And I can spell out a number of ways for you.
Charlie Wrangell's admitting, my God, the election of Obama didn't matter.
It might have made things worse.
Can you imagine what the expectations were?
Election, first black president now where they are.
And here's how this little contradiction.
I was thinking about this last night.
What do the Democrats believe in?
Big government.
And what do you get with big government?
You get power.
And what do you get with power and big government?
You get force.
And so here come the cops.
And what do the liberals hate?
Why, they hate the cops using force.
But yet, on the other hand, they're all for the state.
They're all for big government.
They want the government using whatever force it is to take our taxes.
They want the government using whatever force is required to make sure the Tea Party doesn't get tax-exempt status.
They want the government to use power everywhere they can.
And then when the cops come along as representatives of the state and basically behave in ways the left says they support big state, big power, look, I'm telling you folks, the Democrat Party could be put on the ropes if the Republican Party had any sense of what was going on and any desire to wipe them out.
They could be put on the ropes here.
Nobody favors what has happened.
Obamacare, amnesty, you name it, any Obama policy.
There isn't public approval in a majority sense for any of it.
And the Republicans are afraid that if they stop Obama, that they're going to be accused of shutting down the government and they're going to be hated.
2010, landslide lost Democrat.
2014, landslide lost Democrat.
And it went to shut down the government last year and won in a landslide this year.
Snirdley said that Chris Wallace should just take the opening monologue of this program and rerun it on Sunday morning and then open it up for discussion.
I can see that.
Anyway, great to have you back, Rush Limbauts.
Open Line Friday.
The telephone number again, if you want to be on the program's 800-282-2882, try, always try on Open Line Friday to get into the calls in the first hour, since the purpose of Open Line Friday, ostensibly, is to focus more attention on callers by giving them a little bit more latitude in the content of the program.
Now, let's get to New York here in this de Blasio situation.
And there's a, by the way, Jim Garrity, our buddy at National Review Online, I think his blog is called a campaign spot.
He's come up with an interesting way of describing what has happened in the drive-by media.
And he's calling it, narrative journalism.
I described this on Monday in my long dissertation on power, not truth.
That to powerful people, in this case, and people that think they're powerful, left, the media, Democrats, the truth, everything is a relative matter.
Everything's relative.
There is no truth.
That power is much more important than truth.
And with power, you can make the truth whatever you want it to be.
And that's my version of what's happening right now in the media.
He calls it narrative journalism.
And it's the same thing.
You pick an outcome.
You pick a take a story like the gentle giant in Ferguson or Eric Garner.
And the narrative is racist cops out of control, targeting young black men, and you run with it.
You just assume that's what happened.
That's the explanation.
And then everything follows on that.
Every guest, every story, every premise.
And that is what's going on.
Now, what's happened with this now is the mayor of New York has thrown in on this.
He has thrown in with, he's thrown his own cops under the bus now.
Sit tight, my friends.
Details coming up.
All right, Jim Garrity, it's an interesting take on this, the modern manifestation of media.
You know, my description is that the truth is irrelevant.
The truth is relative.
The news now, this is the arm of the Democrat Party.
The drive-by media is simply an element of the Democrat Party that advances the agenda.
I don't think there's any question about it.
I don't even think it's an arguable point, even though many would, but it just, it's so abundantly clear.
It's right out in the open in front of us.
And the evidence here, Ferguson and the Eric Garner case in New York, you have a story, and you create the agenda.
You create the end result that you want.
You create the details of the story.
In Ferguson, hands up, don't shoot.
In Ferguson, racist white cop went hunting, found young black gentle giant, looked for any excuse whatsoever to kill him and did so.
And then grand jury lets him get away with it.
Therefore, it's understandable the community would be outraged.
Never mind that none of that happened.
The media, particularly CNN and the New York Times and MSNBC, that's the story.
They have not deviated from that story.
That has been the story.
And all of their guests have come on and confirmed and acted as though that's the details.
Those are the stories that make up the entire event.
And so the people that watch those networks, that's what they think happened.
That's what they get.
There is no truth.
Only powerful people defining the truth.
Garrity calls it narrative journalism.
Same thing in New York, Eric Garner.
What happened?
A bunch of racist cops saw a big, heavyset black guy selling something he shouldn't be selling in front of a store.
Store owner had called, and the cops are fed up and went in there, saw a black guy, said, aha, and killed him.
Put a chokehold on the guy, and he's dead, and the grand jury let him get away with it yet again, proving once again that it's open season on blacks in America.
And that's the story.
That story on CNN, that story of the New York Times, that's the story on MSNBC, and there's not a deviation from it.
All the guests come on and confirm that that's the story and opine on it that way.
The only problem is it's not what happened.
Now, Garrity's theory, as he writes it here, is not a theory.
He asks a question.
He calls this narrative journalism as opposed to factual journalism.
The mistake, this isn't journalism.
Journalism's long gone.
What CNN's doing most of the time on most everything, ditto New York Times, ditto MSNBC, ABC, CBS, NBC.
It isn't journalism anymore.
That went away long ago.
It's not the news.
You think you're getting the news?
You turn on CNN and you get a storyline of falsehood after falsehood after falsehood, and they call that the news.
And then they have a roundtable of guests and the guests opine and they call that news.
There's no news.
News is somebody telling you what happened that you don't know about.
News is somebody going someplace where something's happening and they look at it and they make notes or they film it and then they show you because you weren't there.
That's news.
That's not what they're doing.
They are creating.
They are bending, flaking, framing, forming conclusions based on a political agenda, a cultural agenda.
And they're just flat out lying.
There is no journalism taking place here whatsoever.
And there is an entire political element that is properly positioned to take advantage of all of it.
That's known as the Democrat Party.
And it has various coalitions in it, including the race industry headed up by the Reverend Zach and, of course, Reverend Sharpton, and anybody else who can muscle in on it, the Congressional Black Caucasian.
By the way, you heard a latest on that.
They want the parents.
Have you heard this?
Congressional Black Caucasians have demanded that the parents of the gentle giant and the parents and the family of Eric Garner be Obama's guests as a state of the union.
Again, narrative journalism, power, not truth, you name it.
Now, Garrity has a theory.
He asks, could all of this actually be harmful to the causes they seek to advance?
We've seen the media's narrative.
I'm rereading from Garrity here.
We've seen the media's narrative journalism, insisting that Darren Wilson's fatal shooting of the gentle giant represented a vivid, awful example of racist police forces, blah, blah, recklessly using deadly force.
The grand jury, however, living in the real world, remained unconvinced.
They saw too many pieces of evidence and witness testimonies that contradicted everything that journalism is telling us.
Same thing with Trayvon Martin.
Narrative journalism contended that George Zimmerman, a white Hispanic, shot Trayvon Martin, and that represented a brutal crime that revealed a reckless, gun-toting vigilante loose on the streets of America and many streets of vigilante-ism preying upon innocent young men.
And the jury said no and acquitted Zimmerman.
And Garrity writes here that all of this one-side, all these lies, it's not journalism, it's narrative.
Telling your audience the exact opposite of the truth creates expectations.
And when the expectations come down and are not met, and you've been watching CNN and you are convinced that the gentle giant had his hands up and said, don't shoot, was trying to surrender.
And then the grand jury and the facts come out and you are not prepared to deal with it because you have yet to hear the facts because you've been watching CNN.
What do you do?
It's contrary to everything that you've been told.
So what do you do?
You get mad, you get ticked off.
And Garrity's point is that the left is actually hurting their own causes.
I disagree with him on this, by the way, because I think they want this chaos.
I think they need all of this.
They need to be victims.
They need the perception to be that the government is a majority white government stacked deck against African Americans and Hispanics.
They need that.
That's what fuels them.
That's what propels people to the polls.
What is playing the race card on election day?
What is playing the race card?
It's the same thing we're getting here in so-called reporting out of Ferguson or Staten Island with Eric Garner.
So the idea that they're hurting their own cause, I mean, in one sense, yeah.
They're hurting their own cause because they're not right, and it's being vividly demonstrated that they're not right.
But they're misleading.
I mean, they don't look good at the end of the day.
And so, well, I'm going to get to that.
I'm going to get to that.
But the only way that they can then survive being wrong is to place themselves as victims as well.
Victims of an unfair country, victims of an unfair society.
The thing that nobody's talking about in all this, I think it really, really, really needs to be talked about here is what is all of this doing to our country.
This is tearing up our country.
This is tearing up our society and our culture.
It is tearing up, it is on the verge of destroying the things that provide order and respect.
What they are doing is creating a bunch of people who are going to end up having no respect for anything or anybody, are going to be constantly, perpetually angry and on the verge of blowing up.
They are destroying the fabric of our culture with this.
And to what end?
The thing about the left is they're never happy even when they get what they want.
It's never enough.
Somebody called a program yesterday, said, do you think if the grand jury in Ferguson had indicted Darren Wilson that there would have been riots?
Yeah.
There are going to be riots no matter what.
And the reason there would have been riots is because then the anger would have been legitimate.
See, we told you.
We told you this guy did what he did and the gentle giant was innocent and grand jury.
And they would riot in anger, not stand down because the system worked.
They would riot out of anger.
We found guys trying to find the ingredients to pipe bombs to blow up the arch in St. Louis.
Those guys are going to do that no matter what happened in a grand jury.
So all of this, call it narrative journalism, call it power over truth, whatever you want to call it, it's ripping this country apart.
And that is a concern I don't know that too many people are really focused on because all of this is so local in both cases.
But who's at the root of it?
I'm sorry to say Democrat Party's at the root of it.
Liberalism, the left, whatever you want to call it, they're at the root of it.
And of course, most of the media.
None of this could happen without them.
And they've all thrown in.
But it isn't journalism.
Now, in New York, the mayor, predictably, I mean, this guy is an admitted socialist.
I don't think anybody should be surprised when this guy throws his own police force under the bus.
And the way he threw his own police force under the bus, you realize that New York City policemen are the bodyguards for his kids.
And they ensure that his kids get wherever they have to go to school or wherever it is safely and then back home safely.
And he threw them under the bus yesterday.
He admitted that he's had to take his son aside and warn him about the cops.
This is the mayor.
This is the mayor who is protected daily by the cops, admitting that he's taking his kid aside and said, look, and he's not saying when a cop stops you, say yes or yes, sir.
That's not what he's warning.
He's warning them about the cops want to hurt you because you're a black cop.
And the police, Benevolent Police Association, well, they are just outraged.
They've been thrown under the bus.
This is unprecedented.
I mean, there have been mayors that have had problems with an incident here or there, but you've never had a mayor throw the entire police force and its motivation under the bus like de Blasio did.
And then de Blasio announced three days of re-education camp for the cops.
Remember, de Blasio said yesterday, he has his press conference and he talked about the fatal flaw since the founding of our country, and it's finally time to deal with it.
This country was flawed from its founding.
I have been trying to get people to understand that this is what the left thinks for six years, because that's what Obama thinks.
This country was illegitimately founded.
It was unjustly founded.
It was immoral.
The way it was founded.
And no matter what's happened since the founding to deal with whatever injustices there doesn't count, Civil Rights Act 64 doesn't matter.
None of it matters.
There isn't a thing anybody's done to improve it.
Flaw is still there.
And de Blasio has suggested that the cops get three days to learn non-judgmental posture.
Can I ask a simple question here, ladies and gentlemen?
Why is it that the police are the ones who have to get training to change their behavior?
What about the thugs?
What about the lawbreakers?
What about people in their communities who are breaking the law and causing the trouble?
Why do they get a pass?
Why is it not politic?
Why is it prejudicial?
Why is it racist to suggest that maybe they should get some retraining too?
Why do the thugs never have to adjust?
Why is it it's the cops?
Why is it in liberal places like New York, why is it the onus on the cops to adjust to the thugs?
And are you kidding me?
The families of these people as honored guests of the president at the State of the Union?
Quick timeout, my friends.
A little long here, so the next segment's going to be shorter than usual.
Just warning you.
I'm going to try to get a phone call in too when we get back.
So don't go away.
Meeting and surpassing all audience expectations every day.
Rush Limbaugh.
Having more fun than a human being should be allowed to have.
This is Laurie in Houston.
Hi, Lori.
I'm glad you called.
You're up first today on Open Line Friday.
Hello.
Hey, Rush.
Hey.
So, so good to talk to you.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
I've always thought it was so strange when people call and say that they're nervous.
You've been in my house almost every day for 20-something years.
You're no friend.
How could I be nervous?
Well, that's a good point.
That's a good point.
But it's, you know what it is?
The nervousness derives from self-consciousness.
People, instead of just losing themselves and getting outside themselves, they start thinking, okay, how am I going to sound?
Does my voice sound this?
And they start, once you start thinking about yourself, then you're not who you are.
That's true.
That's all.
That's true.
Well, I had just a little bit different take on what you said about television at the opening of your show.
I have long thought that people who are comfortable in their own skin and competent in themselves find it uncomfortable to try to play someone else.
And people who are uncomfortable in their skin love an opportunity to play someone else.
Well, now you're getting into the psychology of it, and you can't, I mean, you can't be disagreed with.
On the psychological side of it, you're exactly right.
But acting, for example, acting is a profession.
And I know some people say that actors are really good playing other people because they don't like themselves.
They're unhappy with themselves.
They love to pretend to be other people.
I don't know.
That could be true.
But there's also something that you have to be able.
You can spot an amateur actor.
You can just spot one as opposed to somebody who's a professional.
And the key to it is, and this is applicable to people who appear nervous on TV.
It is, I'm not trying to simplify it, but it is self-consciousness.
You have to be able to totally get outside yourself.
You can't worry about how you sound, how you look, anything of the, you can't worry about what people are going to think.
If any of that's in your head, you're going to look nervous.
You're going to be distracted, and it's not going to go well.
People that can do that are the best.
I got to take a break.
Laurie, thanks, and I appreciate your right.
As far as it went.
Oh, so much to do today.
Hillary Clinton says that we need to, what the hell did she say, empathize with our enemies?