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Feb. 13, 2015 - Rush Limbaugh Program
32:16
February 13, 2015, Friday, Hour #3
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Let me ask you a quick question.
Where do you go to buy your freedom?
No, no, no, I want you to think of it.
Where do you go to buy your freedom?
Greetings, my friends.
Rush Limbaugh, Open Line Friday.
Let's continue.
Now, I want you to think about this.
Where do you go to buy your freedom?
Where do you go to buy your food?
Where do you go to buy your health care?
Where do you go to buy your liberty?
Live from the Southern Command in sunny South Florida.
It's open line Friday.
800-282-288-2.
If you want to be on the program, the email address, ilrushbow at EIBnet.com.
Thomas Jefferson said.
I ought to wait for the music to fade out here.
Thomas Jefferson said, God, who gave us life gave us liberty.
Can the liberties of a nation be secure when we have removed a conviction that these liberties are the gift of God?
Now, to me, that makes perfect sense.
To some, it might be confusing.
But Jefferson is a founding father.
Jefferson is one who acknowledged and agreed that we are all created equal and endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights, among them life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
So Jefferson was one of those who acknowledged that God is the source.
And he asked, Jefferson was obsessed.
Jefferson was really concerned about making sure that this freedom and liberty maintained, even to the point of throwing the government over now and then if necessary.
He called it the tree of liberty.
Sometimes blood has to be shed.
The point is Jefferson thought about all this a lot, and he said, among other things, God who gave us life gave us liberty.
Can the liberties of a nation, people, be secure when we have removed a conviction that these liberties are the gift of God?
In other words, how secure is the nation when people like Chris Cuomo are running around thinking that freedom is a gift of Obama or a gift of a human being?
How damn secure?
We're not very secure because if our freedom comes from the good graces of a human being, what happens if we elect a bad guy and takes our freedom away?
Oh my God, that would be horrible.
How secure could our freedom be if a country believes that its freedom comes from other men?
Human beings.
I don't mean to leave women out here, but I talk just in the generic sense.
How can this be?
But if your freedom comes from God, that's who you are.
The only thing that can happen to that is evil men come along and encroach on it.
You ever tell you the story about Natan Sharansky?
I interviewed him for a long ago issue of the Limbaugh letter.
He was imprisoned.
He's an Israeli Jew.
He's a Soviet Jew, and he was imprisoned in a Soviet jail.
And he loved to tell the story of taunting his guards by telling them that he was more free than they were.
Every time he got a new guard, he'd get into a conference.
You know, I'm more free than you are.
And the guard would look at him like this.
What do you mean?
You're behind bars.
I'm on the free side here.
You have to do what I tell you.
You're the prisoner.
And Charansky said, Yeah, but I can sit in here and I can tell jokes about Brezhnev and Dropov and Khrushchev and all those guys all day long.
And I can sit here and laugh at them.
You can't.
Or they'll throw you out of here.
And it was a brilliant point about what is really freedom and what's liberty and how freedom exists in prison.
You know, I don't mean to get too deep with this, but it's important because it isn't taught anymore.
This is, again, this is all why we are doing the Rush Revere children's books, folks.
All of this, particularly the stuff we focused on today.
This is exactly why we are doing these books.
Now, my question about where do you go to buy your freedom?
It's not as simple as you may think.
You might say, nowhere.
I wake up in America and I'm free.
Yeah, that's true as far as it goes.
But the point is, if you wake up in Cuba, you are not.
And you can't buy your freedom in Cuba unless you have what no Cuban has, either a lot of money and can become part of the regime, in which case you're still not really free, or enough money to get out of there.
Same thing with any oppressive socialist or communist country.
You can't go anywhere to buy your freedom.
You're born with it, but if you live in a regime that tyrannizes people and you're not allowed to exercise it, you still have it.
It's just being denied you.
But when it comes to where do you go to buy your food, well, McDonald's, grocery store, whatever.
The point is, you have to go buy it.
It's not given to you.
You're not born with an endless supply of food in the cupboard.
You have to go buy that.
Same thing with a car.
Same thing with your house, with your shelter.
You have to go buy that.
Where do you go to buy your health care?
It's not a right.
If it was a right, it wouldn't be even a question of affording it.
It wouldn't need health care.
It wouldn't need national health care.
It wouldn't need insurance companies.
It's a right.
But it isn't.
Same with the job.
If everybody has a right to a job, why are 92 million Americans not working?
Now, we assume that some of those 92 million want to.
But you know, your freedom is actually not free.
You may not get up every day and have to go buy it.
But there have been people from the beginning of time who've given their lives or put their lives on the line for your freedom and mine.
They're paying the price.
They're called the U.S. military and other similar type organizations.
There are all kinds of people who'd buy our freedom for us.
But it's not something you have to go to the store and buy every day.
You're born with it.
You come out of the womb with it.
If you're lucky to come out of the womb.
Because some people think there's a right to kill you in the womb.
That's not a right either.
That is another man-made law.
Denying What has already been codified in our founding documents, the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
So you've got a guy like Chris Cuomo on CNN talking about things he literally has no idea about, and he's in a seat of authority because people look at news networks as places of authority.
And you have idiots and people that are genuinely ignorant and haven't the slightest idea what they're talking about, and yet automatically have conveyed upon them credibility because of authority, because of where they work.
It can lead to a really screwed up country, society, and population because it can really lead to a totally miss and uninformed population.
Thank you, CNN.
And it isn't just CNN.
It's practically everywhere you look in the big media.
The things we've been talking about today are utterly common sense.
They are not, you know, not require a three-figure IQ to understand this stuff.
It just isn't taught anymore.
It just isn't explained.
And the reason for that is that there's not as much reverence for the founding of this country as there once was.
In fact, the reverence is kind of dwindling.
No, the founders now have become slave owners, racists, thugs, sexists, bigots, environmental destroyers.
Sad thing.
It's a sad thing to see, sad thing to watch when it's all demonstrably BS.
But none of this stuff is uniquely hard to understand.
I'd venture to say that every one of you who've been tuned in the last hour and a half have understood what I've said.
It probably makes perfect sense to you.
May not have ever been explained that way to you before.
But the notion of rights versus laws, when people use the word rights today, they're not even talking about rights.
What they really mean is things they think they are entitled to.
I mean, it's descended even that far off the bullseye of what it really means.
Okay, I got to take a break here.
I must, and I'm going to spend the rest of the time knock on what is this, granite, onyx, whatever this is.
Granite, knock on granite.
Spend the rest of the time on the phones.
Here, Jeff in Utica, New York, as we head back to the phones, keeping my promise to do so.
Great to have you, Jeff.
Welcome to the EIB Network.
Greetings, Maha Rushi, Super Mega Diddles from the People's Republic of New York.
How are you today, sir?
Fine, sir.
Thank you very much.
Reason I'm calling, originally, well, when you started the last segment, you're talking about Jefferson.
You can't have one without the other.
So when they knock out, and I say they, the liberals and the Obama administration and all the people that buy into it, they knock out that brick of the foundation.
It's going to be there for a little while, but then they're going to knock out another one.
They've been doing it for the last 50, 60 years.
Just look at their actions.
Everything they say is all fine and dandy.
Just look at their actions anywhere.
Which brings me to my point on executive action for immigration.
Yeah.
There's my question.
You look at the unions.
Now they're going to see all these people coming over the border that are already here.
This excludes the 2012 DREAMers Act.
He just made $5 million, maybe $6 million, who knows the actual number.
They're all going to be working in the workforce.
The unions, if the average union due per worker per week is $10, that's, what, $240 a year?
Or excuse me, $520 a year.
You do the math at $2.5 million.
You're looking at $1.3 billion in union dues.
No, wait, hold it, hold it, hold it.
It's not $520 a year.
Oh, you're talking about, you're talking about dues, not salary.
Yeah, yeah.
I thought you said hourly, $10, I thought you said hour.
I'm sorry, $10.
No, I'm sorry, Rush.
I wasn't clear enough.
No, no, I misheard.
So they pay $520 a year in union dues, $2.5 million illegals.
That comes to $1.3 billion a year.
That's a conservative estimate because the union bosses and the liberals and politicians all want that money.
My question is, what happens to the union guy?
You, me, the little guy.
I'm not a union member.
I've never been a fan of unions.
But what happens to the average union guy who's been paying into this union his whole life?
And now all of a sudden, not only is he getting competition, but he's getting competition from somebody who's here illegally.
He's going to be getting the same benefits from the unions, and the guy has no skin in the game.
Not only that, he's going to be working for a lesser wage, so it cuts out the competition.
And these people, and I see these people, the union members, are doing, they listen to them.
They tell them union members, they tell them where to shop, where to vote, who to vote for, where not to shop.
Are they going to continue to follow this administration blindly and see just another pillar of this great American country just knocked apart?
Well, I've always been confused about this because it wasn't that long ago where your average rank and file union guy was dead set against this, dead set against flooding the American job market with ill-educated, low-skilled poor workers.
I mean, what was the point?
Because obviously, because they're cheaper, they're going to be competitors against union jobs, and it might, in fact, impact union employment negatively.
But I think the answer to your question is in the dues and the money, and the union leadership is more concerned with maintaining its seat at the table of power of the Democrat Party than anything else.
Look, union membership is dwindling.
I think we're almost down to just 10% of the workforce is unionized in the private sector.
Now, in the government sector, it's half of it.
Well, the reason in the private sector it's only 10% is because government does nothing with the exception of the military.
It functions nowhere reasonably or economically.
It just doesn't.
The private sector does that because people have to be held accountable.
Government unions, they don't, listen, you can go postal and never go to jail.
You shoot somebody, you stole a postal member, or as the old joke goes.
They just, it's absolutely sad and embarrassing that the people will sit there and say one thing, and that's the union bosses.
They'll take that money and they'll just crap all over their members.
And it's the people, and I say that.
Well, that's my point.
I thought the private sector union membership is plummeting.
So it's, and the reasons for it basically are rooted in prosperity and freedom.
If you work for a union, you're giving up.
I mean, this is just the way it is.
If you work for a union, you're giving up your individuality.
What you get paid is negotiated for you, and you're lumped into a group, and you get paid what everybody else gets paid in whatever union you're in.
The only way you can do better is to work overtime.
Maybe become a shop steward, you know, climb the ladder within the union, but in terms of getting more money where you work, you're not going to get paid anymore if you do twice the work, if you do a better job, because your contract has been negotiated in the collective bargaining agreement.
And a lot of people are saying, you know what, I can do better than that on my own.
And they've struck out.
That's why the peak of private sector union membership, way back in the glory days of Walter Luther and Jimmy Hoffman, was like 35%.
It's been hovering at 15% and falling for the last 20 years.
But the union bosses are just as powerful as ever.
But this is going to have an impact on the amount of money that they can raise via dues and other things.
That's why the government's throwing money back at them in the form of letting them buy General Motors when Obama took it over and so forth.
As far as the illegal aliens flooding the job market, you're making the assumption that all of them are going to be working.
And not all of them are, by definition.
I mean, statistically, they're not all going to find jobs.
They're all going to eat.
And they're all going to vote.
And that's what this is all about.
The illegal immigrant, this influx, is simply the Democrat Party guaranteeing that it has a never-ending permanent underclass that is uneducated and totally dependent and therefore subservient to the government.
That is from where the Democrat Party derives its power.
This is Danny in Miami.
Hi, Danny.
Glad you waited.
Great to have you on Open Line Friday.
Hello.
You rushed.
I appreciate it.
Listen, yesterday I spoke, and I wanted to appreciate you calling me back.
Basically, what I wanted to say was, look, the last two years of Obama, all he's going to end up doing is trying to pass laws as if he've ever cared anything about the minorities.
He's going to try to pass the laws just like he's trying to do with the free colleges for two years so that the Republicans will reject it and he's going to make us look bad.
Well, now you called yesterday.
What I wanted to continue talking with you about was your suggestion that the Republican candidates.
Right.
Right.
And that's what I was just going to get to right now in reference to basically going with that.
Well, now, hang on, hang on.
Hang on.
We're not going to have time to get to it before the break.
I'm going to hold you to the break.
So let me react to what you just said about Obama not having been all that great for minorities.
Do you happen to watch the new series on Fox called Empire?
I have not.
No.
You have not seen Empire.
I saw the previews, but no, no, I have not.
Well, you need to watch it.
It's just, it's a good show.
It is Nashville for the hip-hop crowd.
Okay.
And it is entertaining as it can be.
It's really, really good.
I mean, it's got its share of, I mean, there's no cultural surprises in it.
It gets through the gutter like every other show does.
But it had a fascinating segment in it.
I didn't watch it from the beginning, so I had to binge watch the first five episodes.
So I forget which episode this happened.
I think it was episode three.
It's about the founder of a record company and his estranged wife who goes to jail for him for 18 years on a drug charge.
And as the series starts, she's getting out.
And she comes back.
The record company has grown and it's become this massive thing while she's been in jail.
She gets out.
She wants her share, which she thinks is half of it.
So they set up a battle between it, and they're no longer married.
The founder, Lucius Lyons, his name, and his wife coming out of prison.
But they have kids.
And they're both, well, two of them are performer stars.
The other's an executive.
And one of them is a budding up-and-coming thug type rapper.
And I have to stop there, but I will tell you what is noteworthy about this.
We come back from the break and then get into your theory about what the Republicans have to do.
Okay, back to Danny here in Miami.
Very quickly, Danny, one of these sons of the mom-and-pop entrepreneurs who founded this huge music company is got a new song going.
And it comes up, he ends up singing this song impromptu at a place, a club that event there is being televised.
And in the song, he ends up ripping Obama to shreds as a fraud and a sellout to black people.
The next day, the owner of the record company is depicted on the phone with Obama.
The scene starts with Lucius Lyon, the head honcho of the outfit here.
He's on the phone.
He says, I know, Barack, I know.
He's young.
He didn't mean it.
He'd been drinking.
He didn't know.
He loves you, Barack.
Please.
And then there's a pause, and he looks at the Barack, you do not have to use that kind of language to me.
And anyway, so Obama's on the phone, cussing out and yelling at the entrepreneur creator of this record company and hangs up on him.
And I thought, wow, I couldn't believe that that was depicted in this show because clearly the impact you're left with is not that the kid was wrong.
It was that Obama was called to sell out to black people and got really mad about it, calls the entrepreneur head honcho and hangs up on him.
It's not refuted.
There is no apology.
There is no, sorry, I got it wrong.
Barack Obama is the best thing in the world ever happened to the African American community.
And I was just reminded of it when you made the point.
You basically said the same thing here: that for African Americans, Obama has not been what everybody thought he was going to be.
Yeah, well, my point yesterday, and I appreciate you letting me say about it, was that in order for the Republicans to win the election in 2016, whoever the candidate is has to speak directly to the African-American as well as the Hispanic population.
And by that, I mean, too many times we, the perception is that the Democrats are the only ones that care about them.
I know.
So, what's he got to say?
Let's cut to the chase here, Danny.
What's the Republican nominee got to say to the black community or the Hispanic community?
They got to speak directly to the camera every time they have to speak, and they speak directly to them so that they know that they're actually listening to them.
Because just like my wife, my wife knows I love her, but she needs to hear it.
The African American Hispanics need to hear that we're actually care about them, not just all Americans, but specifically to them.
We need their vote.
Okay.
And then after we give the perception that we don't care anymore is thrown out, then we can approach them and hold it now.
I got a little problem.
I don't think the Republicans are guilty of that.
I don't think the Republicans are guilty of conveying that they don't care.
I think the media and the Democrat Party has told African Americans Republicans don't like them and are racist.
But the Republicans, if you ask me, have bent over backwards, not just with African Americans, but with the Hispanics.
And that's so my question: what is this candidate, whoever he is?
Let's pick, let's say, Mortimer Snerd is the GOP nominee.
And you think every time Mortimer's on TV, he's got to address the black community.
I do.
And say what?
We love you?
Well, by talking about the education, by talking about jobs that we want to do for them, get them out of the poverty, not just to mention it in generalized terms.
They need to hear it.
Oh, wait, he's talking to me.
I'm African-American.
He's talking to me.
They'll listen.
Will they?
That was my next question.
What do you do if they don't want to listen?
You know, after a while, I think we have to remove that perception that the liberal media has been giving.
And if we continue to talk to them and they continue to listen, at one point they're going to say, wait, I'm not going to listen to this until the liberal medium.
They are actually talking to me.
But then we can actually go to have a town hall meeting.
Like you said yesterday, now you understand that there could be a, you know, it could be backfired.
But if we remove that perception that we're not being listened to, then we can go to a town hall meeting.
I understand what you're saying conceptually, but we're still not getting to the chase here.
And that is what does the candidates say?
So let's actually pretend to do this here.
You are the African-American audience, and I'm the GOP nominee, and I'm talking to you right now.
And I don't know what you want me to say to you.
What do you want to hear?
Do you want me to say, and for those of you in the African-American community, do not believe what you have been told about me or my party?
We think you are just as valuable as any other citizen.
And we want for you what we want for everybody in this country.
I am not a racist.
I do not dislike black people.
Is that what?
I don't think they have to go to the, I'm not a racist, I don't dislike black people, but I think the other parts where you were saying, yes, I think they can address those issues, saying, you know, and then also for the jobs, I want to get you guys out of poverty.
I understand that there's more, you know, that you guys are the minorities for whatever reason.
Okay, now wait a second.
Now let's take that one.
You want me as the GOP nominee to tell an African-American audience, and I want you to get out of poverty.
And well, how do you want me to tell them to do that?
Because I know what the way out of poverty is, but I don't know that it would work if I said so.
The way out of poverty is jobs.
Jobs.
Right.
All right.
And I would say the quickest route, the quickest escape of poverty in this country is work and a job.
And I am going to do everything I can to revive the economy of this country so there are jobs for anybody and everybody who wants one.
Now, I haven't touched on what they're all screaming at me out there.
Yeah, but I won't be hired because there's racism in America and I'm never going to be hired.
The white guys are going to be hired.
I haven't touched on that yet.
So how do I deal with that?
How do I say, and I know some of you think you're never going to get hired because you're African-American and there's latent racism in the country.
And here's what I intend to do about it.
It seems to me that all of this is going to happen on the defensive and it's never, it doesn't stand a prayer of working.
I understand the need to reach out, but I've been hearing Republicans talk about it and doing it ever since Jack Kemp in the 1980s.
And I don't see it working.
I'm not opposed to it at all.
I just, I don't know that there's any desire for outreach.
I don't think in the 95%, 93% of the African community, African-American community, that's going to vote for the Democrat every presidential election, I don't know how many of them even want to hear from the Republican.
Yeah, I understand.
I just, I don't know.
I don't know.
I guess I don't know the exact answer.
But I think we got to do something more.
I mean, we need their votes.
We need the Hispanic vote more.
And I know, I understand that we're doing everything possible.
Look at George W. Bush.
He had the first African-American Secretary of State female.
He had more African minorities in his administration than Obama has or Clinton combined.
And last I looked, Bush was still the biggest idiot on earth, biggest racist, biggest dumb cowboy.
He did everything he could according to what the left says.
He was diversity on stage in terms of the way people looked.
And it didn't buy him anything.
Very true.
Very true.
So don't misunderstand.
I'm not rejecting your premise.
I'm telling you that there has been a desire on the part of Republicans, conservatives, for as long as I've been alive to dispel the lies and the myth that the Democrat Party has gotten away with setting in for 50 years about racism and bigotry and the Republican Party and all that.
And I know people that have been trying to figure this out as their job, as their profession.
And what I've concluded is you could have the most brilliant outreach program in the world, but if nobody wants to hear it, or if they're not open to it, then it isn't going to matter.
So maybe everybody's putting the horse or the cart before the horse, because maybe what needs to happen here is to figure out how to actually open the door first.
And then there's another thing about this.
I'm not certain that I agree with the whole premise that's contained here, which is essentially identity politics.
I've often said that if I were a candidate, I wouldn't even address whether I'm talking to women or men or blacks or whites or whatever, that I'm talking to Americans.
And everybody in politics that I've told that says, you don't have a chance because Americans live in groups, Rush.
And if you don't learn how to address them as groups, we're not individuals anymore.
What every Republican consultant or any consultant, period, tells me we don't live as individuals anymore.
You can't talk to people.
You've got to talk to them as the member of a group they are in or that they think they're in.
And if you don't know how to do that, then you don't have a prayer.
A couple of Republican candidates now seeking the presidency have told me that.
They've come down here wanting to kiss the ring.
And in the conversations, that's what they've all said to me.
I said, why are you having to reach out pregnant for the blacks?
Why don't you just talk to everybody?
We're all Americans.
No, we're not anymore, Rush.
That's the thing.
And then they say, and Rush, it's now to the point the Republican Party can no longer win the presidency with Republican votes alone.
And I'm sorry, I don't believe that either.
But they all do, which is what counts, because that's going to dictate the way they campaign.
Anyway, Danny, you lit a big fire here.
You made the host look good.
That means you're a good caller.
And I'm glad you let us call you back today.
Got to be back after this, folks.
Don't go away.
Okay, a couple of people pestering me here.
Why aren't you talking about the Obama selfie?
I'll tell you exactly why.
A, it's a picture and this is radio.
B, I already know it isn't going to matter.
Obama already took the primo selfie and that was himself flirting with whoever that head of state was at Mandela's funeral.
And that didn't bother anybody.
And didn't certainly harm Obama's reputation.
Okay, so he's taking selfies with his tongue sticking out on the same day we hear about the death of the American by ISIS.
You understand?
Selfies are among the most popular things going.
All that does is make Obama look hip.
Well, Reagan would have never done it.
Reagan.
But see, that's the thing.
As far as the left is concerned, Reagan was worse than when Reagan started joking that the bombing starts in five minutes and the Soviet Union.
Or when Reagan told a joke about a big evil empire, that was worse than any Obama selfie ever, as far as they were concerned.
That was so undignified and that was dangerous.
That could have really made those communist men, they could have nuked us after Reagan did that.
This selfie stuff, look, we know enough to know that there's nothing like that Obama can do that's going to damage his reputation with anybody.
Sure, it's unbecoming the office, but what that he does isn't.
Now, that's it, my friends.
We got to get out of here for the weekend.
Second weekend without the National Football League.
The withdrawal will get a little easier from here on out.
For those of you that are missing it deeply.
Hope you have a great weekend.
We'll be back on Monday.
Yes, we will be here.
It's a Monday, three-day holiday, Monday, but weekend, but I will be here.
We all will.
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