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March 17, 2015 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:42
March 17, 2015, Tuesday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
Okay, folks, I want you to keep an eye on it.
This represents the sea change in the National Football League.
The retirement of linebacker Chris Moreland of the Fortiners represents, this is big, of all the things that have happened with concussions in it.
This is the biggest, and I'm not going to lead with this today, but I wanted to put it out there and let you know we're going to get to it before the program ends today.
Great to have you, Rush Limbaugh, the Excellence in Broadcasting Network and the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.
The telephone number, yeah, it's Chris Moreland.
Quit the 49ers after one year because it's just too dangerous.
It's just a little too risky.
Shoulder injuries in college, by the way, that's not being discussed.
But anyway, I just want to give you a heads up on this because I, your host, way back December 14, 2011, predicted that this trend was going to increase and end up being enhanced.
And this is the big one.
I mean, this one shocked a lot of people in the league.
He's a star.
He's just played his rookie year last year.
The world is his, or was his oyster in terms of the NFL.
Anyway, there's lots going on out there today.
The Mrs. Clinton email thing doesn't go away.
And in fact, it even intensifies now.
CNN with polling data that they're very troubled in reporting.
Mrs. Clinton has a problem here.
And as such, the Democrat Party has a problem, and it continues to metastasize out there.
In addition to that, the Israeli election is today.
And they had a kind of a shocking thing happen yesterday.
Here's what's going on.
Arabs are being bussed into the polls to vote.
Israel is surrounded by people that don't want it to exist.
Surrounded by people that would just as soon obliterate not just the real estate, but the people who live there.
And I would think everybody in Israel knows it.
I don't see in a sane world how Netanyahu's opposition in any way even gets close to winning, but they might.
And it just goes to show, I don't know whether you're following the Israeli elections or not.
The polls will close in Israel 5 o'clock our time.
They're open till 10 o'clock in Israel.
Maybe it's 4 o'clock.
Israel, 5 or 6 hours ahead.
I'm not sure what they do on daylight time.
But it's either 9 or 10 o'clock tonight.
The polls close in Israel.
And I don't think there are any exit polls per se.
You know, Obama has been helping Netanyahu's opponent.
Obama officials have been over in Israel helping to run and maybe even finance to some extent Netanyahu's opposition.
And the opposition to Netanyahu are people who believe it's okay that Iran gets the nuke and it's okay that Obama negotiate the deal and we got nothing to fear if that happens.
And in fact, the Palestinians ought to have their state and whatever anybody else wants us to do, we're going to do.
And that side may actually win.
It's not just in this country where the world seems upside down.
It's not just in the United States where things seem insane.
As you can readily tell, what happened in Israel and what is happening.
Netanyahu, Absent ideology.
Netanyahu ought to be a slam dunk landslide winner, even without taking ideology into account.
I mean, just a vote on the security and future of Israel.
There's only one choice here: Netanyahu.
And the fact that this is even close boggles my mind.
Actually, it doesn't because I've been around long enough to know the dangers of the left, and they're everywhere.
They're not just here, they are everywhere, and they are as loony everywhere around the world as they are here.
Now, the opposition to Netanyahu, made up by Isaac Herzog, and he had created a weird candidacy with another Israeli leftist by the name of Zippy Livny.
And they form an opposition party, and they made a deal with each other that if they win, Herzog would serve two years and then quit, and Zippy would serve two years as prime minister.
They would rotate it.
Sort of a rotation-type plan.
The equivalent would be if Obama and Biden had promised that the first two years Obama will be president and the next two years Biden would do it.
The reason they did this was to try to coalesce opposition votes to Netanyahu.
Rather than tear each other apart in a quasi-primary like, they joined forces for the express purpose of defeating Netanyahu.
Well, something happened last night.
Herzog dropped Zippy Livny.
She is gone.
He dropped her from the ticket.
They've been running for the last number of months as a team in this, what's called a rotation agreement.
And they actually have been running around calling it buy one, get one free.
And if you ended up voting for the combined faction, they make up two political parties, and they would win the most seats in the Knesset.
This is why they did it.
They came together on a unity ticket just to beat Netanyahu.
They couldn't do it by themselves.
They had the combined forces.
They would have the most seats in the Knesset.
And what happened was that Herzog had promised to serve as prime minister for two years, Zippy Livny for the second two years.
But Zippy Livny is very unpopular.
I'm not clearly up to speed as to the specifics of why Zippy Livny is unpopular, but she is.
And this whole rotation thing within the two parties was not something unanimously agreed upon and accepted.
It was with clenched teeth that the opposition parties went along with this thing.
And as time has gone on and as the election remained in doubt, pressure was brought to bear to get rid of Zippy Livny because she could end up being a drag on the ticket and a drag on turnout because of her unpopularity.
But the problem is they've done this the day before the election.
And there are allegations coming forth that this looks paranoid, that it looks like it lacks judgment, it looks like they're not serious.
Charges are going back and forth.
Netanyahu is accusing them of all those things that I have mentioned, and then they're back and forth and accusing Netanyahu of the same thing.
And what's at stake here is the United States' deal with Iran, which would permit them to have a nuclear weapon.
And the Iranians have said that they hope and someday want to obliterate Israel and wipe it off the map.
They've been very upfront and honest about this.
And I think it's a, to me, it is an indication of just how precariously civilization is balanced and is teetering here.
And I realize it may be somewhat controversial to suggest that this election ought not even be close.
I'm just using, to me, that's not common sense.
I'm not even thinking of Netanyahu as conservative and these other people as leftist liberal socialists.
I'm looking at this strictly from a security of Israel standpoint.
I don't know how anybody that lives over there could vote for anybody that might want to make a deal with Iran.
That would permit them to have a nuclear weapon.
But they exist, and there are lots of them.
Maybe.
We'll find out.
Also, a separate Palestinian state is part of this.
And that's something Netanyahu reaffirmed last night that if he's re-elected, there will not be on his watch a separate entity, Palestinian state.
Now, this is in the Israeli media, this is being characterized as a last-minute Hail Mary to rally fringe right-wingers in Israel who are obviously only fringe lunatics or opposed to a Palestinian state, you see.
But this whole Middle East argument, I just watched a television series about this.
It was called The Honorable Woman.
I don't know how many of you have seen it.
It starts Maggie Gyllenhole.
And it was, you know, it's a drama, and it's a spy series, and it's nothing more than entertainment.
I'm not drawing any, hey, man, this happened in this movie, and it's reminding me of what's happening in the U.S. None of that.
I don't do that.
I don't.
Movies are total fiction to me, and TV shows are total fiction.
And I try to avoid the trap of relating what I see on a TV show to real life, especially in terms of predicting what might happen in real life.
But what this show ends up, the point that it ends up making is that no matter what anybody does, this mess never gets solved.
No matter the best efforts that anybody has ever undertaken, the best plans anybody has ever come up with, the greatest negotiators, whatever.
You make it the best talkers, the best negotiators, the best plan.
It never ever works.
And it hasn't worked in a thousand years.
You could have, this story is about an Israeli family that very industrially lay cable, high-fiber cable, try to link the West Bank to the Palestinian territories to show that they love the Palestinians and they want them to learn.
They want them to be educated.
And it doesn't work.
It all falls apart.
Everything gets undermined, as everything over there always does in the negotiated peace process.
There'd never been a negotiated peace over there, and there never will be.
And this, to me, it's more common sense.
It's been thousands of years there have been negotiated settlements have been attempted.
I'll never forget when Clinton was desperate.
You know, the Lewinsky thing had totally taken over and had become the central theme of the Clinton presidency.
And he was desperate for anything that would outshine that, make people forget that.
He brought Yasser Arafat over Camp David, White House, whatever, and ended up giving Yasser Arafat.
And I think Ehud Barak was the Israeli prime minister at the time.
It doesn't matter who it was.
Yasser Arafat was given everything the PLO demanded.
Everything that Fatad, everything Arafat said he wanted, Clinton gave them.
And Arafat backed out.
Precisely because why?
Arafat didn't want a solution.
What's in it for anybody after there's a solution here?
The road to riches is paved with no solutions.
The road to fame, riches, notoriety, all of that comes from the struggle.
If there is no more struggle, if there's no more disagreement, if there's quote-unquote peace, that's another elusive concept, then all these people fighting for it all of a sudden have nothing to do.
It was very instructive.
Clinton offered Arafat everything.
And I think he even threw in some goodies that Arafat hadn't asked for.
And Arafat ran away, didn't want any part of it.
And so we're left with what is the inescapable reality.
And that is that Israel is surrounded by people who want it gone.
Israel is surrounded by people who want the Jews marched into the Mediterranean or nuked or in some other fashion destroyed.
That hasn't changed.
And how the people who live there, I don't.
I've only been there five days.
I may be speaking out of school.
But the idea of the Israeli election is even close.
I understand how elections go.
I understand elections may not at all represent public opinion.
I mean, they're bussing people to the polling places.
The leftist candidates are bussing people into voting.
I have no idea what they're voting on.
I probably never voted before.
I understand how this works.
Don't miss this.
I'm not being naive here.
I'm just still stunned.
It's this, according to pre-election polling data, that it is, that it's this close.
I mean, I try to think, what if the United States were the size of New Jersey and every other state surrounding us hated our guts just because we are alive and had hated our guts for the last 230 years and had made no bones about the fact that they wish we weren't there and that they want New Jersey for themselves because it's theirs.
We don't even have any right to it.
They gave us New Jersey way back when because they said we were entitled to our own state.
But the people that disagreed with that have disagreed with it ever since it happened and they want to wipe us out.
So we got an election in New Jersey for whoever's going to run the show.
And one of the candidates thinks we can make peace with the 47 other states that want to wipe us out.
I don't think that candidate would have a prayer, but he would.
Because the left lives in eternal devotion to the never and impossible dream of utopia.
And they believe that if the right people come along, good people like them, and simply treat these hate mongers the right way, that they can rid the haters of their hate and turn them into massive amounts of love and appreciation, and it just never happens.
Conflicts such as this have never been solved with words.
Ours is a world governed by the aggressive use of force.
So we will see.
It's quite interesting.
It's fascinating.
It does have ramifications for U.S. policy.
And also, don't forget, the regime, the Obama administration, has been over there campaigning for Netanyahu's opponent.
Take a quick time out.
We'll be back.
Roll right on with the rest of the program.
After this, don't go away.
No, no, the TV show is the honorable woman.
This is a great spy thriller.
It happens to be about the Middle East, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
But I'm not recommending it because there's anything to learn about that other than the utter futility of trying to solve this conflict with good works.
Ain't going to happen.
Movie or the TV series illustrates that.
But it's just a great, great, it's a spy thriller, BBC.
And the story's fascinating.
If you want to try to relate it to real-world events, feel free if you watch for that.
I'm just telling you that the conclusion that the program came to, which is the common sense one, that no matter what you do, the good works, all the effort in the world, all the sabotage, everybody that tries great things ends up being undermined, and it always fails.
And not because of lack of effort, not because the people involved aren't good people.
It's just that this kind of conflict is never, ever going to be solved with an agreement.
Just like World War II was not going to be solved with an agreement.
You get the agreement after one side surrenders.
And there's only way, only one way to make that happen is if you beat them in war.
And that, of course, can't even have that on the table.
No, no, no, no, no.
We're not even going to go there.
So the utter futility, I'm just amazed at everything and how it keeps repeating itself.
Different people saying the same things.
Different people doing the same things.
Different people proposing the same things.
Different people, depending on the year, the generation, different people concocting a new variation of an old idea.
It never works.
And it's not even based in reality.
The reality over here is Iran and what their intentions are with their nuclear weapons.
And they've said so.
So the decision, I guess, is do you believe them or do you roll the dice and say they're just huffing and puffing?
At any rate, Reuters has a story on this today in the headline, King Bibi's reign challenged in Israeli election.
Do you know how many Arabs live and vote in Israel?
Be back in just a sec.
I was in Israel in 1993 for five days.
I've not been back, but I'll tell you, one of the things that surprised me was the high population percentage of Arabs that live and vote in Israel.
I don't know why that surprised me, but it did.
And as of January this year, just a couple of months ago, the number of Arabs living in Israel is 1.7 million.
That's 20% of the country's population.
And the women can vote and the women can drive.
The women, the Arab females in Israel have much more freedom than they have in their own native countries.
But that's where the anti-Netanyahu vote is.
I don't know what percentage of that 1.7 million Arab population is of voting age.
But it's sizable, and that's the constituency that's being busted to polls today to vote against Netanyahu.
So we'll just have to see.
Netanyahu, of course, as a conservative, is hated and reviled as this piece in Reuters so clearly illustrates King Beebe's reign challenged in Israeli election.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's march towards becoming the longest-serving leader of Israel could be halted on Tuesday in an election that has exposed public fatigue with his stress on national security rather than socioeconomic problems.
What an unbiased headline and lead paragraph that is.
King Bibi.
Imagine the uproar if Obama were referred to as a king by Reuters in a domestic.
King Obama.
King Obama's reign challenged by senators' letter to Iranian mullahs.
Can you imagine what the reaction would be to a headline like that?
King Obama's reign challenged by traitorous 47 Republican senators and their letter to the Iranian mullahs.
Speaking of which, we have a ban on what happens on MSNBC, and I'm not yet prepared to lift that ban.
By the way, I should tell you that there is a lot of soul-searching going on over at NBC about what to do now with MSNBC.
They finally have figured out that the garbage and trash on that network, and they admit, by the way, that it was a direct result of Fox, that they did their own version of Air America trying to take this program out.
Well, they tried to do their version of Fox News on MSNBC, thinking that would be the way to compete and beat Fox, because they think there are many more liberals in America than there are conservatives.
And if conservatives are watching Fox, we'll go get to liberals and we'll smoke them.
And just as the people running Air America had no idea what they were doing, they had no idea why conservative talk radio succeeds.
The liberals at NBC have no idea why Fox succeeds.
They have no idea.
Even the liberals who work at Fox, like the analysts and the commentators, and there are lots of them, even they do not know why Fox succeeds.
They know Fox is number one, but they can't figure out why.
And the reason they can't figure it out, I probably shouldn't give up the ghost here.
The reason they can't figure it out is they do not understand connecting to an audience.
They literally have no concept of what that even means.
The whole idea of connecting with an audience to liberals is beneath them.
But the audience is not worth connecting to.
They're not smart.
Otherwise, they'd be here on the air, not watching us.
There's a general contempt for audiences, particularly the audience of Fox News, but even their own audience, there's a contempt for it or for them.
And they have no idea how to connect.
So they make the assumption Fox succeeds because it's conservative.
They have no idea why Fox succeeds.
That has maybe something to do with it.
I can't deny that.
But that's not the sole reason.
And it's not even the majority reason Fox succeeds.
But you'll never persuade a leftist of that.
You'll never persuade, I mean, and some of the highest paid, supposedly most qualified broadcast news executives in the world work at NBC, and they do not know how to compete with Fox News.
The first thing they do is look at it, they look at its success, and then they ignore it, and they say, well, you know, it's a bunch of kooks and freaks, it's a sideshow, and it really isn't representative of America, so we don't really need to worry about it.
And they live in a state of utter and total denial.
But then they realize they have to compete with it, so they do what they think Fox does only on the left side, and that's just go wall to wall, total, extreme, radical, leftist ideology, which is what they think Fox is on the right.
And that's not what Fox is, but that's what they think it is.
And the evidence is clear.
They don't have any audience.
MSNBC is one of the greatest failures of all time in media.
What I was going to say is that Ted Cruz was on Fox, and I think it was this morning with Mika Zhuzhinsky and Joe Scarborough.
And he just took Mika to school on this whole subject of the letter sent to the Iranian mullahs by 47 Republican senators.
And you know how he took her to school?
He simply explained the Constitution.
She didn't know what he was talking about.
He just simply explained to her the ways things become law in America.
And whenever he got to pointing out Congress either has to pass a law that gets signed into the sent to the president for signature or they have to ratify a treaty, which is what we'd be talking about here with this Iranian nuke deal.
She couldn't get past the idea that the Senate has any right to participate.
What gives them the right to participate?
This is the president's negotiating this deal.
And if a Republican, if the Senate gets involved, they're undermining him.
And Cruz said, no, no, no, no.
She was lost.
I don't want to say she had no clue.
I mean, she knows that Congress, when he started talking about the system of checks and balances and how that separates us from tyrannies and dictatorships, she got lost.
I mean, it was amazing to watch.
I tell you how I watched.
A friend of mine sent me this clip.
Say, you're going to watch this.
You're going to watch this.
Ted Cruz just mops the floor with Mika Business.
Okay, my expectations were he's going to make mince meetup, but that's not what happened.
It was a reasonable, no-shouting discussion that ended up being a little seminar on the U.S. Constitution from a guy who understands it to somebody who doesn't.
She was not rude or any of that.
The discussion was civil.
It was just striking that he was explaining two plus two equals four.
Zbigniew Zhezhinsky's daughter.
Yeah.
And I don't mean to be ripping her.
Don't misunderstand here.
But because this is instructive, her basic point of view was: well, Obama's the president, and he gets to do whatever he wants to do, and anybody standing in his way is undermining him.
And Cruz explained, no, we're not undermining.
We are protecting American foreign policy.
We are using our legitimate constitutional role to be participants in this process.
This cannot become law without us.
And since Obama's doing it, people on the left think, oh, yes, it can, because you are the dreaded evil Republicans.
And what right do you have?
You people are the problem.
Obama has to go around your back or over your head because you do nothing but sabotage him.
It was that kind of she didn't use those exact words.
Anyway, I got sidetracked.
The point here is that whenever the leftists are left to their own devices, they bomb royally, such as on the MSNBC trying to compete with Fox or in defending actions that Obama is taking here.
And Reuters, King Beebe's reign challenged in Israeli election.
Surging rhetoric against Iran and the Palestinians has apparently done little to close Netanyahu's lag behind the center-left opponent, Isaiah.
There's nothing center about Isaac Herzog.
He's as leftist as Obama is.
There's nothing centrist about the opposition candidate in Israel.
So anyway, we just keep a sharp eye on this here, folks.
And what I'm thinking, my sincere hope, and it is a hope, is that the polling data on this is so skewed and that we're going to have a result tonight that really isn't even close.
But since we got representatives of the Obama administration over there, and since a large percentage of the Arab population is being bused to the polls, it's impossible to tell and to get a good read on it.
But it does matter because what's at stake here is the American nuclear deal with Iran.
Well, more than that's at stake.
The actual, I think, future of Israel's on the table here, too, which is this is, that's what actually boggles me.
I don't even understand why it's close, but.
Well, now look, I've got some people asking me about this TV show I recommended, The Honorable Woman.
And let me just say a couple of things about it, because if you're going to go watch it, and I don't want you to be confused by the way I've said it, oftentimes you can have a program recommended to you, and expectations are created, and you watch it, and you end up being disappointed by it, because the person that told you about it blew it.
And I don't want to blow it for you.
It's a great spy series, eight episodes, one season, one season only.
It's from 2014, BBC.
It is about a woman who sees her father, a Jewish, mega-powerful industrialist, killed right in front of her at the lunch table in a fashionable place.
Her brother is there.
He's stabbed to death by an angry Arab or Palestinian or what have you.
Bleeds out.
You see it all.
She has a brother.
He runs the company.
It's a mega-industrial company, and he runs it for seven years, but we don't know much about that when the program starts because the program starts with her running the business.
Nessa Stein is the lead character's name, played by Maggie Gillenhall.
And her intention is to promote conciliation between the Israelis and Palestinians by not taking a side either way.
I mean, it's classic.
She's a good person.
She wants her company to thrive.
She wants her company to be responsible for the two sides getting along.
She's under no illusion she can solve it.
That's not what she's trying to do.
But she doesn't want to be a problem.
So her company is in the process of laying fiber optic cable from the West Bank to the Palestinian authorities for the purpose of increasing access to the World Wide Web and worldwide communications to downtrodden Palestinians.
And she is undermined every step of the way, although she doesn't know it.
And I'm starting to get into spoiler territory here.
When I told you that ultimately the program concludes that no matter what happens, it's all futile.
That is true.
But it's just, it's a great fictional story.
This woman who does everything in the world, to be fair, gets sabotaged by both sides.
In this program, the United States president is working behind the scenes to create a Palestinian state, undermining Israel and undermining this company and undermining MI6.
And interestingly, it happens from the Secretary of State's office, who is in this show, a woman.
But it's not about her.
The program is about the woman that runs this giant conglomerate.
It's just a good show.
That's all.
And it chooses as its subject matter the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
I watched it for liberal bias.
I watched it for conservative bias.
I watched, okay, is somebody preaching to me here?
I mean, it aired originally on the Sundance channel here.
It's uh-oh, something on the Sundance channel, Moscow West, Robert Redford, and all that.
But it's pretty fair.
It's not one-sided by any stretch of the imagination.
And there's not a good guy or bad guy here in terms of the sides.
They're both bad and they're both good, depending on the people involved.
But it's one of these, if you have all these episodes, you'll binge-watch it.
My guess is, if you like spy intrigue, it's kind of slow and plodding.
There's a lot of back flashes when you get into future episodes.
So if you're watching something, the first two episodes that doesn't make sense, be patient.
It'll all be explained in a later episode.
Here's Karen in Canton, Georgia, as we start on the phone.
It's great to have you on the EIB network.
Hello.
Hello, Rush.
Thank you for taking my call.
You bet.
Glad you're here.
Okay, thank you.
Longtime listener, I think BB is going to win because rational people are going to come out and vote for him.
The conservatives are going to march to the polls.
Anybody that's 25 and older that knows what's been going on there are going to go into that booth like we all do.
And at times we change our mind and say, hey, this may not be the right way to go, so we're going to vote conservative.
So that's just what your heart is telling you.
Yes.
Yeah, my heart told me the same thing in 2008 and 2012.
It did.
Especially 2012.
2012, I believed it all.
I thought we had won that.
I thought we were going to win that election.
My heart told me that the country had awakened and seen the foibles of Obama, that Romney's appearances were drawing mega crowds, overflow crowds.
I thought we're in the tank.
I thought it was over.
And I didn't believe the polls that showed Romney losing by six points because my heart said not possible.
Well, with this situation, though, Rush, you know, the people are going to have to understand that their very survival is on the line.
That's what I just, I'm telling you.
Half of that country doesn't seem to think that.
Half of that country either doesn't agree with that, doesn't think that, or isn't worried about it.
Same thing here.
This is my point.
Leftists, you're making a fatal mistake here.
Not your fault.
You are attacking this rationally, and you are talking about irrational people.
It's impossible to predict irrational people.
You just can't do it.
Well, not true.
You actually can. predict irrational people if you have enough data on their irrationality.
But no, that's what I'm telling you.
I agree.
It ought to be a slam dunk.
The leftist candidate ought not even have a prayer in the world of common sense and sanity.
But we don't live in that world anymore.
At least not right now.
I'm sure Mr. Snerdley knows this, but even this was misunderstood this morning in MSNBC.
That letter signed by the 47 rep. It was never sent to anybody.
It was just posted.
It was an open letter.
It was posted on Senator Cotton's website.
And then it got reposted all over the place on social media.
It wasn't sent to the Mullahs.
Would they FedEx it over there?
They didn't do any of that.
Does FedEx go to Tehran?
DSL?
No, of course not.
I'm just joking.
But you would think that the letter was actually delivered and it was insulting?
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