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March 18, 2015 - Rush Limbaugh Program
31:54
March 18, 2015, Wednesday, Hour #3
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And welcome back, ladies and gentlemen, to the fastest three hours in media.
Otherwise known as the Rush Limbaugh program.
Great to have you here.
As we execute a signed host duties flawlessly.
Zero mistakes.
And as always, half my brain tied behind my back just to make it fair.
The telephone number, if you want to be on the program, is 800-282-288 to an email address.
LRushbow at EIBnet.com.
I was not, of course I was not kidding.
I firmly believe a conservative candidate can beat whoever the Democrats nominate.
In 2016.
We just do you realize, folks, there's a there's a I think a pretty hard cold reality out there.
You were talking about lineators a lot, people 18 to 34, 18 to maybe even up to 40.
Do you realize people in that age group have never had the chance to vote for a conservative Republican candidate?
Reagan was it.
If you didn't vote for Reagan, uh I know George W. Bush in 2000 ran as a as a quasi Reaganite.
But in 2004, that kind of off the table because events had taken over the Bush presidency, and it wasn't in any way known ideologically.
The fact of the matter is conservatism is just it's a it's waiting to explode here.
Right in front of and as part of a new generation of people.
And I think if it happened, I think if we get a conservative candidate who can articulate it, who has a policy record of implementation that can show success.
I think it's Katie Bar the Dore.
I uh a lot of people are pessimistic about Republican Party chances, understandably.
The Republicans haven't nominated conservatives.
It's not to say conservatives haven't tried.
There have been a lot of them.
They've watered down the field, they've divided the vote, and the uh the centrist or rhino Rockefeller Republican candidate ends up getting a nomination.
In some cases, the uh conservative nominee is aced out by virtue of uh chicanery with with other nominees.
But it could happen, and if it did, I think just as Netanyahu won a landslide, I think a conservative candidate in this country would do the 20,000 2010, 2014 midterms illustrate it to me.
They show the possibility.
I know those are not presidential turnout years.
By that I mean the the full scope of a Democrat candidate turnout doesn't show up in midterm elections.
I'm not living under any illusions.
Right?
One of the reasons that the left is so discombobulated today, and in general, look, Obama is a failure in a major humongous way.
He does not have massive approval numbers.
He does not have overwhelming popularity.
He may be succeeding implementing his agenda, but people don't want it.
The left has to be happy with the fact that Obama's found a way to do it without public support, but believe me, they would rather have the well, not rather, but they would love to have public support for this.
They don't have it, and they know it.
They know they're they're against the grain.
They know they're constantly governing, campaigning, implementing against the grain of the American population.
Now that's not always going to be.
The American population is undergoing massive demographic change.
That's why the Democrats are so eager for amnesty.
They are this is this is one way, one of many ways, that they can eventually, in their minds, anyway, get to the point where they have a genuine majority of support for what they're doing.
Right now and up till now, they've always had to govern for the most part when they get in gear against the will of the American people.
Now I know yours, well, how do they keep winning elections?
Well, you know as well as I do.
They don't campaign, honestly.
They don't tell people what they're going to do.
You think if Obama had been honest about his intentions, he would have won.
There's no way, folks.
And I'm not living in fantasy land with this.
There's simply No way.
Otherwise Obama would have been honest.
They can't be yet.
They haven't gotten there yet.
There is still time to beat this back.
It's one of the reasons I remain optimistic about it.
Now I want to go back to this Barney Frank, these two sound bites.
He's on a Huffing and Puffington Post.
And uh he was asked, they're worried about Scott Walker.
Why are they worried about Scott Walker?
Why here's an obscure governor from Wisconsin.
It's in the middle, you know, the northern middle part of the country.
They look at him as kind of a geek.
He's a nerd.
Well, who the hell is eyes?
Why, why, why what's happening?
Why Scott Walker, who is he?
They're discombobulated by it because the guy has handed their hat to them.
Three out of four elections.
Big time.
And they are worried about it.
And so that's why Barney Frank is being asked about it and about Walker's candidacy.
And are we worried, Barney?
Should be we worried about about Scott Walker.
Scott Walker is dangerous.
We talk a lot about diminishing inequality.
That will not happen if we do not strengthen labor union.
Scott Walker is bragging about his assault on uh on unions.
In fact, he preposterously claimed that the fact that he's been so tough on unions will intimidate uh the Islamic State and Putin.
Hey, I said I didn't take any crap from these janitors, so you better get out of Ukraine.
Uh ludicrous intellectually, but dangerous politically.
All right, now let's let me go through this for just a second here, because Barney meant to say every word he said here.
We talk a lot about diminishing inequality, but that will not happen if we don't strengthen labor unions.
Well, there's there's the first myth right there.
Labor unions don't hold nearly the percentage of jobs in America that they used to.
They're at an all-time low and they're losing even more.
And now with right to work Walker just signed into law, right to work law in in uh Wisconsin, which means that union workers' dues are not automatically dispersed in ways the union member doesn't approve of.
In a number of other factors, of course, in right to work.
Walker has been extremely effective in eliminating the political chokehold on Wisconsin that unions had, even with their deteriorating numbers.
Now, the private sector union membership is way down.
Government sector is huge.
That's where unions today still maintain a stranglehold, if you will.
But he has dealt serious blows to both segments of unions.
And here's so here's Barney saying, well, we talk a lot about diminishing inequality, meaning getting rid of the inequality in income and uh wealth and all that.
And he says it won't happen if we don't strengthen unions.
Well, that's a myth.
People who are members of unions do not.
Well, I've got to be very careful here because I'm I'm a free choice game.
You want to work for a union, be a member fine and dandy.
I am not the guy to tell anybody you can't, shouldn't, don't want to do anything.
But that's not the route to getting rich unless you run the union and you have your hands on all the money before it gets dispersed.
But as a unionized employee, unionizing people is not going to change the gap between the rich and the poor.
Entrepreneurism is gonna do that.
Productivity's gonna do that, not unions.
But Barney has to be loyal to unions because they send so much money to Democrats.
That's what the real fear is with the reduction of union power and the reduction of a union workforce, the amount of money that uh you can make a beeline to the Democrat Party is gonna sure look.
Unions are just a money laundering operation of Democrat Party, it's really what it is, and that's what's threatened.
And I don't mean it's a criminal enterprise.
It's just the the union money ending up in Democrat campaigns, it's a money laundering operation in effect.
Works this way.
Let's say you're Barack Obama.
You can't yet go to the Treasury and just write yourself a check.
You can't just go to the Treasury and write a check to the Democrat Party for campaign money.
That day may come, but it isn't there yet.
So how do they do it?
Well, Obama comes up with something called stimulus.
$700, $800 billion, almost a trillion dollars.
And he lies.
It tells everybody the money is going to be used on rebuilding roads and bridges and schools, infrastructure, and it's going to create jobs and it's going to help us come out of our recession.
So people go, yay, yay!
Stimulus baby, Raymond, dude.
But no schools get built, no roads get repaired, no bridges get repaired, and no jobs are created.
So what happens to the money?
Ah, where does it go?
It went to the unions.
It went to state employees, members of unions.
It kept them employed during the recession.
Those union people needed to remain employed so that they would continue to pay dues.
How much of that 700, $800 billion stimulus actually came back to the Democrat Party in the form of union contributions?
That's what I mean by money laundering.
I don't mean a criminal enterprise.
It's just Democrats need some campaign money, funnel it to the unions under the guise of a stimulus program.
And that's what it was.
And it's not new.
They've been doing it forever.
And if the day ever comes where a majority of people figure that out, then the Democrat Party is going to be in trouble.
And that's why they're so protective of unions, and that's why they're so loyal to them.
It has nothing to do with people ending up staying employed for the good.
It's all about Democrats getting money.
Free money.
It's all about how it's essentially the way the Democrats raid the Treasury.
So Scott Walker comes along and implements a whole bunch of policies in Wisconsin that strip unions public and private of a lot of power.
And that sends chills up the spines of Democrats.
And that's why they're scared of him.
Because they tried to take him out any which way they knew, three different times.
They attacked him, his family, you know the drill, and he hung in there.
He won every election, and after winning election, he had the audacity to actually implement his agenda.
And then to add insult to injury, his agenda actually did what he said it was going to do.
He cut taxes, he created a state surplus, and he ended up cutting taxes for people all the while expanding the number of people with jobs.
Conservatism works every time it's tried.
Therefore, Scott Walker is somebody they really, really are afraid of.
Because, among many other things, they've discovered they cannot intimidate him.
Now, I don't know if Scott Walker actually is running around saying that he's been so tough on unions that it will intimidate the Islamic State and Putin.
But I wouldn't mind if he were.
I think it'd be hilarious.
And Barney's reaction, hey, I didn't take any crap from these janitors, so you better get out of Ukraine.
That's his interpretation of what Scott Walker means.
Is a union job a janitor, Barney?
Is that what you really meant?
It sounds like you're kind of cutting down that line of work.
I thought union members were God's gift.
I thought union members were the backbone of America.
Why do you call them janitors here, Barney?
At least call them custodial engineers.
Vision control coordinators or something.
And then get this.
Next question from the host on the Huffing and Puffington Post, Alyona Minkowski.
Would you support Barney?
Would you support Elizabeth Warren if she ran for president 2016?
I do support Elizabeth Warren in 2016.
That is, I support her very intelligent decision not to run for president.
And I think they do her a disservice because she is in tremendous force for good.
If she were a presidential candidate, she would lose a lot of the credibility that she now has.
People in the media and others would be discounting her as just one more self seeking politician.
At this point, she's a very independent voice occupying that important position.
Really, is the institution of the presidency now so damaged that it's a step down?
I mean, old Barney here said that if she were a presidential candidate, she would lose a lot of the credibility she now has because people in the media would be discounting her as just one more self-seeking politician.
At this point, she's a very independent voice, occupying an important in other words, Elizabeth, don't run.
We don't want to lose you, babe.
Don't run.
Does this make sense to you?
Running for president will diminish her.
Running for president will reduce her impact.
Lessen her impact in power?
Hmm.
No, I've not forgotten, and I'm not teasing anybody.
I just have to feel it.
We'll get to the NFL when I feel it.
Okay, we'll do the NFL stuff coming out of break at the bottom of the hour.
In about five or six minutes, eight or minutes or so, whatever.
Hang in there and be tough.
In the meantime, Bill and Tyler, Texas.
Great to have you with us, sir.
Hello.
Pleasure to be on.
Hey, uh, you were talking about the uh perception which the liberal media looks at the uh Mid East Peace Process.
Yes.
Late 90s, I saw an interview on CNN with Larry King and Benjamin Netanyahu.
There had just been a bombing in Israel, I think uh 12 people perished on a bus.
And Larry King asked the following question.
He says, Do you think that this latest bombing will hinder the peace process?
And it looked like Benjamin Netanyahu was just caught in the crosshairs for a second.
He's like, excuse me.
He says, Well, do you think that this uh latest bombing will hinder the peace process?
And and Netanyahu picks up his face again, he says, Yes, I I definitely think 12 people being blown up is going to hinder the peace process.
Yeah, that's interesting because your your your memory there of Larry King's question makes the exact point.
The Middle East peace process, it's its own world.
The Middle East peace process is like a location.
It's like a it's like a state.
And it has certain realities.
It has job opportunities, it has objectives, none of which are publicly stated, and it has its own inertia, and it is immune to actual real-world events.
It has no relationship to reality.
It is its it's a career.
It's a major at various universities, or could be.
When you're 10 years old and your parents say, Little Johnny, what do you want to be when you grow up?
Well, Dad, I want to go to the Middle East Peace Process.
And I want to work there.
You want to work at the Middle East Peace Process?
Why is that, Little Johnny?
Well, because it seems like it's going to be around forever, Dad.
And there's a lot of money there.
And I'll be on TV a lot.
By God, Little Johnny, you know you've got a point there.
Well, what happens in the Middle East Peace Process, Little Johnny?
Oh, nothing, Dad.
That's the great thing.
Nothing ever happens.
It just is.
It just it just is, Dad.
It's just there.
I mean, nobody ever fails there, and nobody ever succeeds.
It's just always.
Everything's on the cum, Dad.
Little Johnny, how do you know the term on the cum?
Where did you?
Never mind, Dad.
I just want to go to the Middle East peace project.
And that's pretty much what it is.
So here's here's Larry King, uh a genuine, a genuine.
Be very careful here, Rush.
Um.
Let's just say that Larry has been seduced by the daily media soap opera.
In fact, Larry thinks he's one of the stars.
So here he has Prime Minister of Israel, Ben Yamin Netanyel.
And on a day, a number of Israelis are wiped out a suicide bomb on a bus in Jerusalem.
Larry King's sitting there all hunched up, shoulders hunched up, shoulder the braces, they're the suspenders.
So I minister Netanyahu.
You think this explosion today.
You think it might hamper the peace process.
And that's, oh no, not at all, Larry.
We fully expect our people to be blown up in the peace process.
That's part of the peace process, Larry.
No, it's not going to deter us at all.
We'll continue to work in the peace process, and we'll continue to show up every day.
And we'll do everything we can to make sure that the peace process is there tomorrow.
There are just certain things that happen.
Well, that's good to hear.
Good hey, it can blow you up, but it's not going to change your mind about it.
That's exactly right, Larry, because we know what the peace process is.
There's a forward-thinking man here, folks.
Benjamin Netanyahu, they can blow up his people when the peace process goes on.
That's what we like here.
See you then.
I Pretty much it.
Folks, that's pretty dead-on portrayal of what the whole thing's about.
Hey, was it ISIS that wiped out the museum in Tunisia?
Because if it was, they're going to be really ticked off at CNN.
Because you remember when ISIS overran some uh museums in Iraq and uh wrecked some some artifacts.
Wolf Blitzer was beside himself.
He called he called those ISIS people real siccos.
Never after they beheaded anybody were they called siccos, and never after they committed horrible crimes against humanity were they called siccos.
But when they destroyed some museum artifacts, well, that was the last straw at CNN.
And then ISIS became sicko's.
And 19 people have been killed in Tunisia in a museum terror attack.
Okay, yesterday when I opened the program, I talked about the announced retirement of Chris Borland of the San Francisco Fortners as perhaps.
I don't know if it's a tipping point, but we've been we've been leading up to this the reaction to his retirement after just one year in the league as a star with limitless potential, earning power, he quits, and he quits because he says he wants to have a life.
He doesn't want to run the risk of head damage, brain damage.
He's already had a couple shoulder injuries, one in college, one with the Fordiners last year, and he said, you know what?
I've been paying attention to what's happening to people in this league, and I don't want to be like them.
I don't want to shorten my life, and this has caused, up until now, up until Borland.
This has been an academic uh exercise.
It's it's been a discussion point.
It's been something people in football sit around and talk about as a what if.
A maybe.
But this brings home the Borland retirement announcement brings home where the powers that be are leading this game anyway.
This is what's phenomenally fascinating about this to me is that Borland has done this precisely because of what he has learned.
Watching the media cover the National Football League.
I think it's kind of stunning.
And I want to take you back.
One of my very first ever comments about this.
December 14th, 2011.
And it I think the attack on football was predictable.
I did predict it, and I was I made no bones about who was going to lead this attack on football.
It's going to be leftists who want to control everything, take The danger, take the risk, take the pain out of life.
And just to set this up, this is what I said.
It's about a little less than a minute and a half here.
The left trying to take the risk out of everything.
That's where this is rooted.
It's too risky.
And playing football is going to end up being too risky.
They're doing studies on what players are like at age 40, 50, how many of them are dying and all this from probably head injuries.
There's no scientific evidence that that's the reason, but they're all making these assumptions that playing football kills you 20 years earlier than your lifespan.
In the national football, I'm just telling you that these panty wastes who want to try to take the risk out of everything in life are going to focus on football at some point and they're gonna they're gonna try to get it banned.
Well, the players take the field knowing all this can happen.
They're willing to take the risk.
But now they're being told that they don't know what's good for them.
They're the last people that we should listen to.
They get their bell rung and they want to go back in, they don't want to lose their jobs, but no, we need independent neurologists on the sidelines that are not related to the team.
We need independent neurologists on the sideline to make sure somebody hasn't suffered a concussion and can't go back in, can't be put back in by a coach that doesn't care if he injures a player.
I guarantee you, I know who I'm talking about.
I know who the liberals are, I know how they want to control things and take the risk out of everything in life.
And under the premise that nobody will ever die.
Guaranteed.
That was just one of the many prognostications that I made.
Early on, again, that's 2011, folks.
I mean, that's that's uh that's four years ago.
Well, three and a half, that was December.
So three and a half years ago that I made this prediction.
That this is where the NFL is uh is headed.
And I I was stunned when it began to happen.
There were there were calls for banning the game.
There were in pockets of the country, high schools and other places that did say they were going to ban the playing of the game.
Uh, then there were further university studies, and the media, the media was carrying all this, the media was reporting all this, and the media, which also earns its living by covering football, the National Football League, was doing stories on how the game kills, on how the game maims, on how the game injures.
It was clear where this was headed.
And now we've gotten there.
Chris Borland announced his retirement from the San Francisco Fortners after one year.
Comes out of Wisconsin.
He had a shoulder injury in Wisconsin.
He injured his shoulder pretty badly late in the season, maybe a playoff game last year, I think.
It might have been against Seahawks.
And uh he was one of these players that uh they could have built a defense around.
He's a great, great, great linebacker, tough as nails, uh, almost indestructible.
But he's not an idiot.
He can read the news, he can watch ESPN.
He has seen all this stuff.
As he has gone out of college, uh, come out of college, gone to the NFL.
He's been watching and reading all the stuff in the sports media about how the game maims and the game kills, and you might kill yourself.
This is former player commits suicide, has to be the game that did it.
He's been subjected to all this, and as such, he said, you know what?
I don't want to put my life at risk anymore.
I'm retiring.
So now all of this has become not just theoretical and maybe something that might happen.
Now it's become real.
Now somebody who could have earned enough money to set themselves up for the rest of their lives has retired from the game before doing that.
Totally cast aside that massive financial opportunity.
So now the drive-bys in sports are buzzing about it.
Everybody's buzzing about it.
What is this going to mean for the future of the league?
Will other players follow suit?
I'll tell you what it's going to mean.
There's always going to be an NFL.
Always.
But I don't know what the quality is going to be.
The one thing they always worry about, I'll never tell you this, the one thing they worry about the National Football League is the quality of The talent pool.
The assumption always has been, and it's been accurate.
If you're watching an NFL game, you're watching the people in America who are best at it.
Best in the world.
I'm not, I don't mean to limit it to Americans.
You're watching college football, you're not watching the best on every team.
Nowhere near it high school, junior high.
You get to the NFL, you're watching the best.
It's a small percentage.
230, 300 million people in this country, and how many of them play in the NFL?
Less than 1%, less than one tenth of 1%.
They're the cream of the crop.
They are the best.
That's why you will pay hundreds, thousands of dollars for season tickets.
It's why you will pay hundreds of thousands of dollars over the course of your life to watch games on TV.
Because you're watching the best.
But what if the best begin to retire?
And the product that the NFL puts on does not represent the best of the talent pool.
That's what they're all worried about with this.
Not tomorrow, not next season, but the trend has begun now.
And the Borland retirement announcement is like cold water slap in the face to hey.
You know what?
We've got a problem.
And some of them might even realize they created it themselves.
In a host of ways.
Take a timeout.
Other sound bites with this, too.
We got some Borland actually here when he was on Outside the Lines on ESPN.
Don't go away.
We'll be right back.
And you need to call it the Middle East Peace.
Not the Middle East peace process.
By the way, Politico says that the United States is going to reevaluate the peace process now that Netanyahu has won.
Obama's going to call him, he's going to uh congratulate him.
And the spokesman suggested that the conversation is likely to go downhill after the Mazatov.
Obama's spokesman is saying that.
His spokesman is saying the conversation is going to go downhill.
Going to reevaluate the peace process.
I know I'm telling you, I know what's going to happen here.
I predicted it earlier.
Don't have time to repeat it.
Got these sound bites.
Would you get this guy on hold the next caller?
Get his number.
I'm not going to have time to get to him today.
But I want to talk to him tomorrow.
Ask him if we can call him back.
Here's Chris Borland speaking.
Football wasn't worth the risk.
I can relate.
I mean, from the outside looking in, that it wouldn't make sense.
I just don't want to get in a situation where I'm negotiating my health for money.
I'm not willing to sacrifice 15 to 20 years of my life, even if I die healthy, but younger.
You know, I want to live a long, healthy life.
And I could be wrong.
I hope I am.
But um for me, just personally, I don't think the risks were worth what I could gain from football.
This guy was a star, was going to be a big star, the kind of linebacker the foreigners could build a defense around, and he's saying, I don't want to live 15 or 20 years less than my life expectancy.
Folks, this is huge.
You got a guy throwing away the chance to make a lifetime's worth of money, financial security for life, because he's been told, he's been told a game could shorten his life by 15 to 20 years.
They've done this to themselves.
In their desire to be good liberals and compassionate and self-conscious and all that.
Now they got this guy thinking playing a game is going to reduce his life, maybe 15-20 years.
He's not going to take the risk.
Who can blame him?
You look at all the the scaremongering coverage.
That's part of football these days.
Here's one more from Chris Borland.
I don't want the message to be uh absolutely don't play football.
I think the thing that I can convey to youth and to parents, they just make an informed decision.
If you weigh the risks and you decide this is something you want to partake in, it's a free country.
And NFL, you know, will exist for a long time.
They make a lot of money.
So you have the freedom to do what you want, and I think that's important.
If I could relay a message to kids to their parents, it'd be twofold.
One, just make an informed decision, and two, don't play through concussions.
There you have it.
Hey, I'm l you you want to keep playing, risk your life, fine, do what you want.
I'm and I'm not going to do so myself.
He's just a product of the culture in which he's been brought up.
He's been able to read and watch the media like any of the rest of us.
There's never enough time.
In one day.
But that doesn't matter because we'll be back tomorrow.
Which is already Thursday.
I still can't believe that.
But thanks so much for being with us today, folks.
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