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Jan. 27, 2015 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:43
January 27, 2015, Tuesday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
Greetings to you music lovers, thrill seekers, conversationalists all across the fruited plane.
Here we are alive to tell the tale.
Nobody perished.
Nobody died despite Mayor de Blasio's warning that few would survive this historic snowfall.
Told you yesterday.
You know, and by the way, I hope everybody, I hope everybody listens to the way I'm going to analyze this today because this is a key thing people are going to have to realize.
They're going to have to learn why this happened.
Why was this presented this for you?
And even at its worst, it was going to be 24 inches, which New York has survived countless times.
Yet this was presented as a life-threatening crisis.
And look what they did.
Look at the economy, the economic commerce that these people from the National Weather Service and all these politicians collectively ganged up on and destroyed.
Look at all the stores that closed unnecessarily.
Look at all the flights that were canceled unnecessarily.
Now, the weather guy's apologizing and blaming his models.
The same people that tell us their models 50 to 100 years out on climate change can be trusted.
Anyway, I mean, I could, I could sit here and do a giant see I told you so, predicted this yesterday.
And I know what you're going to retort.
Hey, Rush, they didn't miss it.
They just missed where?
Boston, New England are getting pounded.
That's all true.
That's all true.
But folks, 24 hours out, they're forecasting that this is going to be massive and they still miss it in the nation's number one city.
So just hang on for that.
I mean, this is such a teachable moment.
It is such a teachable moment about government, the relationship that citizens have to and with government.
It's a lesson about how liberals do things and why and why there will not be an apology from them and why you got de Blasio saying, hey, better safe than sorry.
They can never make a mistake.
They never screw up.
It's everybody else that screws up and has to apologize.
Anyway, before I get into all of that and all of the rest of the program, such as, even despite this, I have a couple global warming stories that are going to blow your mind.
One of them, the state, let me say what both of them are.
The State Department now wants to use Disney's Frozen series to teach kids about global warming.
The State Department.
It's a hoax.
Man-made global warming is a fraud.
There isn't any.
The second story involves, we're back to polar bears.
And this time, the polar bears are threatened, but in a very unique and, well, shall we say, tertiary way.
In the old days, the polar bears were threatened when Al Gore was running around talking to everybody.
The polar bears were threatened because all the ice was melting at the North Pole, where these cute, lovable, huggable little things live, right?
They got these fraudulent, lying pictures of little polar bears, big polar bears on small sheets of ice.
And we were told that they were barely surviving as the giant North Pole was melting.
And it was a fraudulent photo.
It was the people that took the photo knew it was fraudulent.
Al Gore knew it was fraudulent.
Nothing was melting.
Those are ice flows that the polar bears play on and seek refuge on.
Can swim 60 freaking miles in the ocean at the North Pole.
They can swim 60 miles in water that is technically below freezing every day.
And sometimes they need to rest, you know, like Mark Spitz did or whoever, so they get on one of these ice flows.
And an environmentalist will take a picture.
Look at that!
Look at that!
Poor Eric here is about to perish because the ice of the North Pole.
The kids go home and get on their parents for driving the wrong kind of cars and so forth.
Well, second story in the stack is now global warming, I kid you not, is threatening polar bear penises.
Yep, yep, got it right here coming up before your very eyes and ears on today's program.
That's exactly it.
Global warming threatens polar bear penis.
And of course, if polar bear penises go extinct, then of course there's what that's exactly right.
No more polar bears unless Planned Parenthood gets involved.
And some liberal organs that save their polar bears decides to start.
Don't laugh.
Now, before we get into that and all the rest of today's program, and not to belabor the point, but I speak for everybody here at the EIB network when I say that there's just, we feel an overwhelming absence.
We feel an overwhelming hole in the normal ebb and flow of energy and presence at our network because of the passing yesterday morning of chief of staff Christopher Kit Carson.
And it's going to take a while.
He was relevant member of the staff, chief of staff, chiefs of staff are.
Been with me longer than anybody.
And he was 27 years.
I got his age wrong yesterday.
He was 56, not 58.
Anyway, I want to, I can't possibly personally respond to everyone who is sending me email condolences, but they are, they're beautiful.
And the people who are writing me, who knew Kit are telling me stories that I didn't know.
Things that had happened when they had interacted with Kit.
Funny, funny stories.
They were descriptions of his magnanimous and gracious and hilarious personality.
And it's, it's not, don't misunderstand.
It's not that I didn't know of the aspects of his personality.
I didn't know the specific details of these particular stories.
I mean, he never told me, yeah, I went out last night with such and such, and here's what I told him, and here's what they said back.
That only happened when I wanted to know what happened with certain things.
And most of these stories, they're just fabulous in their grade.
And Eric Bowling at Fox News yesterday at 5 o'clock on their show did a wonderful trip.
A lot of people have.
Eric Erickson at Red State.
I mean, a lot of people in their blogs and on their own radio or TV shows have made mention of it.
I got the nicest note from Mike Allen at the Politico about it.
Everybody's just being really, really gracious.
And it's a testament.
I mean, Kit knew all these people.
He interacted with them In the course of the business day.
And they all loved him.
And he was unthreatening, even though his job was to tell all of them no.
And by the way, let me explain that again.
Because I also got some emails.
I got some emails from people.
What does this mean?
Tell no.
I mean, people don't understand that.
And I thought I explained it yesterday, but let me tackle it again.
And then I got a number of emails from people.
Why haven't we heard about this guy before?
And didn't put it that way.
But why don't you talk about these people more during?
Why can't we hear these people during the program when you're talking to them?
Why are they always silent?
This kind of thing.
And there's understandable questions that an audience would have of a pioneering radio show wondering how it's done, why it's done that way.
What are you, you're shaking your head in there, Snurdy?
What are you?
I always joke that it was too dangerous to give these people a microphone, folks.
I mean, they say things to me that if they ended up, if they, if the things they say to me in the intercom here, the IFB, like if Kit would talk to me right now, if something popped into his head and I'm saying something about it, he would interject a comment or an opinion.
And I'm telling you, if he had a microphone that went out, you think I've put this program in jeopardy.
And they're free, by the way, knowing nobody's ever going to hear them.
They are free to be totally forthcoming.
Believe me, it's an advantage.
But there's another reason, too, folks.
And I imagine this one's going to be hard to understand, too.
Back when the program started in 1988, I mentioned Kit Carson all the time.
When he'd first joined, the radio show was growing.
His hire was an example of the growth and talked about the things that he was doing.
And it was only later that he acquired the nickname HR.
And he wasn't immediately the chief of staff.
I mean, he had to work up to that, get promoted to that.
It took a number of years.
But the reason why, folks, that you don't hear these people, the reason why you may not know their real names is, honest to gosh, it's for their privacy.
And the desire on my part that they not become targets.
As you know, this program is hated and reviled by the left and many in the media.
And they take every opportunity they can to take shots at it and destroy it.
And in most cases, they are taking shots at me.
Sometimes, granted, I've earned it, but most of the time, it's totally made up.
It's unfair.
But it's the league that I'm in.
I understand it.
I talked about it countless times.
It's just, I chose to do this.
Being successful at it is going to cause various reactions on the left.
Remember, my success equals victory and defeat for them.
They don't like it.
I have not held back in what I think of them, so it's natural that they would come at me with any number of ways.
And you and this audience have become pretty sophisticated.
You understand, which is why I love you so much.
We have this bond, you and I, you and me.
You know when they're launching BS.
You know when they're lying and making things up, and you know how that works.
But I just have always been kind of protective of the people who work here and not mentioning their names and not attaching them to – I own the controversy.
They don't.
And there's no reason why they should end up being targets.
And believe me, folks, some of the stuff that happens, I mean, look at Sarah Palin, look at any number of people.
It gets vicious, what they've done to her kids, versus you're supposed to leave the children of Democrat presidents and candidates alone, but the children, what they did to Romney, his dog.
And they make up stories about how Romney didn't care that some employee's wife died and all of that.
It's just the way it is.
99% of it's totally made up.
It's vitriol and anger.
And since the staff here doesn't do anything to earn it, they don't cause it.
I've always tried to shield them from it.
And not just them, but their families.
I mean, it's tough.
My family's been through hell because of what I do.
Not because of what I do, but because of the way what I do is reacted to.
And I've been blessed, by the way, with a totally supportive and understanding family.
But it's not, it's just not something I thought that people on my staff ought to have to put up with.
And I didn't want them going home and having their names and their reputations ripped to shreds in the media because they work with me and have their wives and their kids see that.
So that's why one of the reasons why HR, it's a funny thing, it's a nickname instead of Kit.
I can't help it.
I'm protective in this way.
And it's something I learned.
First six months of this program, you know, my whole life, nobody ever thought I hated anybody or anything.
And six months after being on this radio show, I was a racist.
I was a bigot.
I was a hate monger, a war monger, all these other things, just because I'm conservative on the radio.
So it wasn't for any reason other than to make sure they didn't get in the line of fire since they're not doing anything to cause it.
Pure and simple.
But it's a dual-edged sword, too, because some of the contributions, some of them, some of the contributions are really noteworthy and profound.
Like all staff, some of them are worthless.
Just kidding.
I'm trying to lighten the moment here.
You know, Mark Stein had a great comment.
He had a great piece, by the way, on Kit at his website.
It was really sweet.
It was really, really, really good, Mark Stein.
And he pointed out this is, you know, people join EIB and they never leave.
And that's one of the reasons why this show works so well.
It's because we've been a team here.
27 years, folks, that we've either completed or we just started.
I get these anniversaries all screwed up in the odd years, but it's a lot of years.
And everybody on the staff contributes in their own way.
But I just have decided that based on the things I've learned on my little success track here, they don't need to go home and have their families scream at them about, why are they saying that about you?
Why doesn't Rush protect you?
It's just better and safer for them if they remain out of the line of fire, pure and simple.
That's why you haven't heard a whole bunch of names mentioned all the time.
There are other reasons too, of course, strategic programming reasons as well.
Anyway, let me take a break here, folks, because our first segment has breezed by, and we are, at that point, have to take a break.
We'll do that and be right back after this.
Don't go away.
And we are back.
Rush Limbaugh behind the Golden EIB microphone here at the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.
A couple of more things.
Kit Carson's family, his wife Teresa, and his kids, have asked if there are any remembrances that they be donations to one of two places, Leukemia Lymphoma Society of America or Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, which is where Kit was treated.
They loved him there.
I've never seen this before.
Doctor cried when he was released to go home on this was Tuesday of last week.
Doctor cried.
She had really grown attached to him.
One of the reasons why, well, it was an engaging personality, was how courageously and good-naturedly he fought it.
None of us ever saw, I'm sure he, in his private moments, was mad, cursing himself for whatever rotten luck.
But as far as we were concerned, it was just he was always in an upbeat, engaging mood.
He was a very infectious, uplifting personality.
And every day or every other day, whenever, however often he had to go get a treatment, it was like, yep, got to go doctor.
Just got a doctor appointment.
There was no attempt to garner any sympathy.
It was the other way around.
It was to not cause a distraction.
It was just the most amazing thing, folks.
The way he fought this is a lesson in itself in character.
It's why so many people, including the medical staff treating him, were pulling for him.
The doctor actually cried.
I've not seen that.
I'm sure it's happened, but it was really touching.
So Leukemia Lymphoma Society of America or the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.
I think it's Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer will get it done.
Anyway, just a couple more things here.
What did I promise?
Oh, I need to elaborate on this on the no business?
Need to elaborate on that?
All right.
Okay.
But then, you know, he'd be about embarrassed now to be the focal point here.
So we'll move on after that.
But we'll be right back.
Don't go away.
Talent on lawn from God.
Rush Limbaugh, America's real anchor man, meeting and surpassing all audience expectations every day.
At 800-282-2882, we'll get to your phone calls.
Yeah, they're going to get to all the news here today, folks, including this.
And this is not the first time they've blown a weather forecast like this.
By no means is it the first time they've blown the severity of either a hurricane forecast or a thunderstorm forecast, now a winter storm forecast.
I knew when they started naming these winter storms, it was all over.
And you know, I've often said that when you talk about either the event or the movie Selma, you can't just say Selma.
You have to say Selma.
You have to put a tinge of sadness.
It's getting to the point where you have to talk about Katrina that way.
Katrina.
Because it was such an utterly devastating and disastrous thing for some people.
But there's so much involved here, the relationship of citizens to their government and how, you know, there's three kinds of people.
They're wolves and they prey on you.
There are sheep, allow themselves to be preyed on.
Think the wolf's the greatest guy in the world as long as the wolf leaves him alone.
Then there's the sheepdog.
And the sheepdog keeps the wolf away from the sheep.
The sheepdog can oftentimes end up being hated and despised by the sheep.
Because the sheepdog is asking the sheep to get with it and understand the threat posed by the wolf.
And most of the sheep say, screw you, sheepdog.
Leave me the hell alone.
Go bug somebody else.
Well, a sniper is a sheepdog.
For example, I am a sheepdog.
The people that buy into all this stupid disaster crisis forecasts from government and think government's part of community, they're sheep.
Government's the wolf.
It's not part of the community.
You want to look at it that way.
Somebody, I can't remember who had that analogy, but I liked it.
I ran across it yesterday.
If I think who it was, I will, of course, properly credit them.
It's not mine, but it's really a good analogy.
Because everybody understands sheep.
Everybody understands wolves.
Everybody understands sheepdog.
The sheepdog even looks like a sheep to fool a wolf.
I know.
I've got three of them.
And boy, you had better be on their good side.
I am telling you.
Anyhow, on this business of having kids say no to everybody, the overriding reason for it was to buy time.
And you must understand, in order for all this to be understood, I've got to go back in time where these policies began and why.
And most all of this is traceable to the beginning of this program when it was a rocket ship.
We went from 56 radio stations to 500 in a couple of years.
And we were doing something that every expert in radio with all, I mean, there was no vitriol about it.
They all said, it didn't work.
It's been tried.
You can't do this in the daytime.
You can only succeed with a national radio show at night.
It never's going to work.
It has never worked in the daytime.
And they all applauded my effort, but nobody expected it to work.
When it took off, it just shook everything up.
It caused generational theories to be blown up.
And this created enemies because these generational theories had been developed by the experts called consultants.
And so here was this one little radio show hosted by a guy nobody had ever heard of blowing up all of these supposed theories and truths.
And I mean, even to this day, this program is a target in the radio business because it presents a threat to certain people in it.
Well, when this rocket ship-type growth was happening, every television network, every magazine, every, you name it, was calling, wanting an interview, wanting to bring their camera crews in.
And I learned very quickly that they were not doing this to help me, that it was not for my benefit.
This was a bunch of people curious as to what the hell was going on.
They wanted to come in and see it and take a measure so they could see how they could do it harm.
But it took me years to figure that out.
I used to have a very open mind about the intention of journalism and the intent of journalists.
And I used to think that they arrived at things open-minded and that you could persuade them or get them to see your side of something.
I found out that that's not possible.
They show up with their attitude and opinion and take on the story intact.
They show up with the story written.
There are exceptions.
But for the most part, especially people I'm seeing for the first time, they show up just out of curiosity's sake and they want some of their own.
I mean, I even had people that appeared regularly as guests on other radio shows try to get in to see me just to find out who I was and what was going on because it was a threat.
I quickly found out the best way to deal with this was to say no to every one of these requests and then study them later and figure out who they were, what they wanted, and how to deal with it and so forth.
So Kit's job was to tell everybody no.
After a while, the no was because I just didn't want to do it.
After a while, it wasn't helpful.
It was harming.
It was bothering me.
It was an irritation.
It was something I actively grew to dislike, was doing interviews.
And then there was always the attitude, why should I take what I have on radio and give it to somebody else?
Why not save what I believe about things?
Why not save and then make people come to the radio show to hear it, which is what my business is.
And then I got people.
No, no, you got to go out there.
You got to promote it.
You got to get your name in the paper.
You got to get the call letters in the paper.
You got to go out there and you got to do interviews and promote it and so forth.
And, you know, I bought into that for a while, but it was never fun.
It was always pain in the rear.
And so Kit's job was to say no to all of it.
And then at a certain point, we would sit down with all the requests and we would go through them.
And some of them got called back.
And Kit was instructed, I want you to ask them this.
I want you to find out that.
I want you to just dig deep.
I want you to find out who this guy or woman really is.
What do they really want?
I mean, he was invaluable in this.
I mean, it was his job to call them back and to scope them out as best he could and come back and give me a report on what they really wanted with this interview.
Was it on the level?
Was there something else going on?
And it was easy to determine at times.
Sometimes it was hard, but you can identify SNARK.
You can identify somebody who's been assigned the job of interviewing the EIB network.
They really don't want to.
So it was a way to weed out and confirm my instincts.
And he had a crucial, crucial role in that.
And as I told you yesterday, I had total trust.
And I want to say one more thing one more because this is, to me, this is a life lesson.
Do you know how easy it is to say yes to everybody?
It's the easiest thing in the world because there's no conflict there and there's no confrontation.
And people will like you more if you say yes to them.
Saying no, that's hard.
You know, go back and study Steve Jobs.
Steve Jobs will tell you, or would have told you, he did say the biggest challenge they had at Apple was saying no to this project, that project.
There's all kinds of stuff they would have loved to have done, but they couldn't do it all well.
The best, most important discipline they had at Apple when Steve Jobs was there was what they said no to.
Well, saying no, and look at somebody like Kit.
Okay, so you've got XYZ people calling from the top programs, the world, some of the top business people calling wanting something.
He could have said yes to all of them, become their friends and become tight with them and so forth.
And he could have, like so many people in his job do, then come and try to sell me on doing something I don't want to do in order for him to further his relationship with whoever it was that he never did that.
He never did it.
All kinds of people did and still do.
Not on the staff, but all kinds of, I've still hit this kind of request happens all the time.
And every one of them, you know, when I was, if I'm on a golf course and somebody wanted me to, here's the guy you calls Kit Carson.
Kit Carson.
If somebody wanted an autograph, call Kit Carson.
Or an autograph, call Kit Carson.
That's just one of the many jobs.
He took all kinds of pressure off of me so I could stay focused on this.
But there were other things that he did.
In addition to all that, Kit was our liaison with advertisers on the copy for their commercials.
That's key too.
You would not believe.
And I don't want to get anybody in trouble.
Copywriting is one of the most, apparently, it's one of the most difficult things in the world to do.
60-second piece of copy come in at 75 seconds.
Advertiser once so much said, it's not written in my voice.
Kit's job was to pare it down to 50 seconds.
So there was enough time for me to be me, inject my personality in the commercial.
He rewrote all the copy.
And he was able to do this, getting to know me and studying the program.
He could do it in his sleep after a while.
That's why this is going to be such a big void.
And he knew.
When the program is over, this is tough to explain.
When the program's over, it's over.
I don't want to do anything related to the program for at least three hours.
I am rung out.
But I'm not allowed.
I've often said other things.
I've gotten to a point where I don't have to do what I don't want to do.
That's not true where Kit was involved because he had responsibilities to others that I had to accede to.
So the program would end every day at 3 o'clock, and I would record the morning update for both audio and the video version of it.
Morning commentary runs on 600 of our radio stations early in the morning, and it's on our website, the video version of the morning update.
And it's also sent out, rush in a hurry.
So if any of these people we'd previously said no to, Kit had talked to and wanted to tell me what they wanted to get my final verdict on whether I wanted to do it or not, or to tell me which commercial copy was coming up, which had to be done, when it had to be done.
He knew that's the last thing I wanted to hear after the program.
But that was the only time.
So what he would routinely do, I would do the two updates.
You usually can get them both done in one take, audio and video at the same time.
And Kit would routinely say, well, that's it.
That's it.
I got nothing here.
And I'd say, fine, that's cool.
Except, and then he'd launch into 10 things or five or whatever it was.
But he always prefaced it by saying, look, I got nothing.
There's nothing here.
I'm free and clear.
Oh, wait.
It always softened my reaction.
He had it down to a science.
That's why all of that stuff, folks.
And that's as much inside baseball as we need to bore you with.
Now, a brief time out.
We'll come back and get started with all the rest of today's program.
But again, we just feel a giant, we just miss him.
There's a void and emptiness here.
It's going to be a long time to get used to.
But we hope God blesses Kit and his family back after this.
Don't go away.
It was the father in American Sniper who had the wolves, sheep, and sheepdog analogy.
And it's right on.
It is an excellent, it's an excellent analogy.
Okay, not the first time this has happened.
That's why I reserved yesterday the right to believe that this snowstorm was not going to be anywhere near what they were saying it was going to be in New York City.
Because it's happened before.
In fact, almost every major storm in recent years, be it a hurricane or a thunderstorm or a winter storm, they're all oversold.
They're all overpredicted.
And they're overpredicted from the standpoint of crisis.
They are overpredicted by people.
The underwriting, the umbrella thing here is that what everything falls underneath, liberalism has corrupted.
People who are liberals are now at the National Weather Service.
And they can't separate your liberalism from the job.
And so they're nannies, and they think most people are incompetent, unable to take care of themselves, not competent, capable to make reasonable, correct judgments when they hear information.
So they have to be babied.
They have to be steered and so forth.
Liberals also love crisis.
They love crisis and chaos.
Crisis and chaos afford liberals yet another opportunity to exert control over people, over the sheep.
Crisis and chaos are made to order.
You'll note that narrow a storm goes by, isn't predicted, and isn't also related to man-made global warming.
You've got people out there saying that this major ice and snowstorm has been brought about by global warming.
And they don't have, they apparently have no irony whatsoever that they're blaming global warming on massive winter storms.
We've got more snow.
We've got more winter storms happening in this country.
The years are not getting warmer.
And yet they continue to hit everybody with global warming.
You might say, well, why do so many people buy into it, Rush?
Why just so because there are a lot of sheep?
Government has had an amazing transformation in our lives.
Government's not part of the community.
It's perceived to be part of the community.
And it's not.
Government never can be.
It just isn't part of the community, but it's seen that way.
Government is seen as the referee.
Government's seen as the place where you go to get fairness.
Government's seen as the place where you go to get protected.
Government's seen or the place you go to get food or whatever.
Even though, if that's who you're depending on, guaranteed your life is shrouded in misery.
It's just one of these quirks of human nature.
So you have this massive forecast, and it can't just be a big snowstorm.
It's got to be historic.
Before the first flake falls, it's going to be historic.
You have a dangerously loony-tuned liberal mayor who literally made it sound as though a number of people may not survive this.
It's going to be that bad.
Get off the streets by 9 o'clock.
So the streets were shut down.
Airlines canceled flights.
Hotels canceled room service.
Some hotels closed down.
Businesses shut down.
And there are the drive-bys.
Standing in Times Square at 10 o'clock last night, an hour after curfew, and you can't even see any snow falling.
And there go the snowplows, plowing concrete.
Plowing asphalt.
I'm watching this last night, and I'm just shaking my head.
And the reporters, they're doing their jobs.
They're waiting for this massive snowfall.
It's been forecast.
The government says so.
It must be coming.
But it never came.
Not in the city.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
We've got some funny examples of the drive-bys in the middle of the most historic snowfall in New York City ever.
Oh, yeah.
And the latest on DeflateGate.
And you name it.
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