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May 12, 2015 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:24
May 12, 2015, Tuesday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
Greetings, my good friends, and welcome back.
Great to have you here on the Rush Libar program and the EIB network.
One of the, if not the most intelligent radio programs and all media endeavors in the country.
Great to have you here, 800 282-2882, if you want to be on the program.
Will you pardon me here for just a second, but could we could we get some decent Windex in there?
I am sick and tired of Windex that is scented with ammonia for crying out.
Who wants to clean their glasses with Windex and have you smell ammonia running around for the next 10 minutes?
And so I had two choices ammonia or vinegar.
Vinegar scented Windex.
Big whoops.
I just wipe off the desk here because the cleaning crew didn't do it last night.
There's a bunch of crud here.
I go in there under the kitchen counter, look at Windex flavored with with with ammonia and vinegar.
Well, whatever.
But I mean, it's got how about just a regular standard blue Windex?
You know, it just smells like whatever it does.
Doesn't smell like anything.
You put it on, you wipe it off, it's gone.
How are you doing, folks?
Hi, Rachel.
Great to have you here.
Well, the NFL came down hard on Tom Brady yesterday.
Uh four-game suspension, million-dollar fine for the club, and the loss of two draft choices.
And it's, well, yeah, it's it's uh it's hard.
I've I've been, it's this been it's fascinating to me to watch all the response to this.
And we have a slew of sound bites about this, folks, from all kinds of people all over the sporting and media world reacting to the suspension that Brady got four games.
You are the theories that people are coming up with to explain this.
I was uh last week, I was I was uh emailing back and forth with Drudge about this, and he made a prediction I thought was excessive.
I said, No, it's gonna be four games, and then there's gonna be an appeal, and it'll be reduced to two.
The end of the day, Brady's gonna get a two-game suspension.
That's what's what I said last week.
Well, the first half of it's come true, four games.
And as I say, the the the body of thought, the analytical opinions that people have weighed in uh over this is just fascinating.
It it it can't be what it is, is my point.
Okay, Brady, preponderance of the evidence suggests he was involved in deflating footballs.
There's enough circumstantial evidence here to draw that conclusion.
The game's worried about the league's worried about the integrity of the game.
Okay, so we're gonna give him four games, a million-dollar fine to the ticket.
It can't be that.
There's gotta be all kinds of other things.
Oh, yeah.
Million dollars for the team.
That's gotta be they're still getting even for spygate.
And they're showing favoritism.
Are they not showing favoritism?
Either one.
There are even some people claiming there's a racial component in this snurkly, that he had to get a significant number of games because previous suspensions of African American players have been have been pre-f if Godell had gone easy on Brady, then the African American crowd would be upset.
I mean, all of this has been thrown into the mix.
Analyzing it.
No, no, I didn't say that.
I'm just telling you, I've heard it.
You know, it's all over the place out there.
And there's their shock and surprise.
I mean, here's the marquee player of the league.
Four-game suspension portrayed as a black hat guy now.
Instead of a white hat savior of the league, they have gone ahead and they've tarnished the league by acknowledging what happened here via this suspension.
It's uh it's and you know something.
Here's here's the overall point I guess I want to make about this, and I'm I know I've mentioned this on previous occasions.
I am of the opinion, I've been I've been convinced for a while that the sports media wittingly or unwittingly, and it could be unwittingly.
I mean, because remember, all these people are liberals first.
No matter what else.
They cover sports, they cover news, they cover politics, they're uh Jewish, and you would think that they would support it.
They're liberals first.
It doesn't matter.
Maybe feminism, maybe this animal rights, a global warm, they're liberals first, and the causes then second, okay.
Therefore, the the sports drive-bys have been, I think, covering this league in a way that does not promote it.
It's their livelihood.
These sports drive-bys need a successful NFL to have jobs and cover it, and the way it got started with the concussion business and the uh uh injuries, the lawsuits, the danger, the calls for the game to be eliminated, banned at younger ages.
The drive-by's all got on board all of this stuff, because to them it's still a corporate entity.
And as liberals and a corporate entity, the corporate entity is always going to be wrong.
The corporate entity is always going to be guilty within the liberal mindset.
The corporate entity is always going to be impersonal.
The corporate entity isn't going to care.
In other words, it'll be perfectly fine for its employees, i.e.
players, to incur irreparable brain damage, all for the mighty profit.
This is the view of many in the drive-by sports media about the game.
So they've been chipping away at it.
And I have this is kind of hard to explain.
It's not hard.
No, it isn't it's hard to explain, not hard to understand.
The trick for me is going to be explain this.
In other words, verbalize it an opinion I have or thought I have here, it's it's still kind of muddled in my head.
But all of these suspensions, it it has occurred to me long before we get to Brady, that the sports drive-bys have really reveled in these suspensions.
They have they have uh enthusiastically supported the meeting out, the handing out of punishments and fines,
uh, which in and of itself is not one thing or another, but in the context of making what happens in the game look bad, the sports drive-bys have been advancing that notion that there is and are things terribly wrong in this game.
And liberals also, as you know, tend to support and idolize central authority.
I mean, many of the sports drive-bys, if you could pigeonhole them, uh, would probably happily agree with the idea that there needs to be federal government oversight of what's happening in the NFL because of all the off-field and some on field stuff.
That the people in the game themselves can't be trusted to get it right, to police themselves, to regulate themselves.
And I've this is the part that's hard for me to verbalize.
It's it's not it's not difficult to understand if I can explain this properly.
It's it's it's as though the the media is more excited, some of them, not all, but some of them more excited in reporting the flaws and the foibles of humanity in the game in instead of promoting the greatness that occurs in the game.
They have been eager to glom on to the stuff that is going to, in some cases, irreparably harm the reputation of the league and the game and the people who play it.
And it's all it's it's occurred to me within the past three seasons, there has been a, I think, a noticeable, If you pay close attention, transformational shift.
The game is now a suspect rather than a national pastime that we can be totally proud of.
You know my Harvard sociologist story.
Great thing about sports, the thing that makes it different from anything else, is that it's something you can invest total passion without consequence, which is a good thing.
Now the way this game is being covered, the way it's being reported on, it's risky to invest your passion in this game because you might end up being disappointed.
You might learn that the game and the people who play it are not worthy of being on pedestals.
Not that they ever were, but there was that aspecting, but now with social media, and there's no there's no difference now in the stage and the stands.
Now I've always I've always thought that wherever there are performances involved, be it movies or live theater or radio show like this, or a concert sports event, what happens on the stage is special, it's unique, it's separate and apart from what goes on in the stands, precisely because the people in the stands can't do what's on stage.
Social media has blurred the lines, and as more and more athletes and media get involved in day-to-day contact with fans and each other, the foibles become more uh well known and reported.
There is there's a gradual reduction, lessening, if you will, of the mystique that was always present in professional sports.
You only knew what was written about them athletically in the newspapers, sports pages, some cases TV, but now you know when they have a hot dog.
You know what they think about their CO2 levels of their hybrids as they drive to practice, all this stuff, and it's changed, I think, the relationship between fan and player in some instances.
And I think one of the downsides of this is given the it's almost it's almost like a uh just a soft tsunami of liberal ideology taking control of the way the game is reported and in some cases played now, i.e., all pink month.
Liberalism is invading every nook and cranny of the sport, and what liberalism does is wring its hands and whine and complain.
You know, liberalism doesn't inspire, it doesn't promote, it tears down.
And I just there's there's been this just it's microscopic from the days it started, but there's been this little chipping away, the eagerness to report suspensions, the eagerness to report the foibbles, the eagerness, the happiness when somebody gets suspension, the hand for off-field things, the eagerness with which sports writers will now support a lifetime ban or a two-season ban or a full season ban.
One day, Adrian Peterson was the greatest running back in the league.
The next day he doesn't deserve to breathe because of what they found out about the way he raises his kid.
It's that kind of stuff I'm talking about.
And it just something that I have noted, and so now we've got the Brady suspension, and it's fascinating to me to watch the reaction to it.
Within the or through through the prism of uh liberal sports media, which is undeniable now, and maybe what I'm saying will become a little bit more clear as we get into these audio sound bites.
Uh, switching gears for a second, Eric Holder, the former attorney general, when he was either being confirmed or his confirmation hearings in 2009, or shortly after he had been confirmed, made a statement.
You remember?
He said that the United States was cowardly.
When it comes to the subject of race, that we need to have a real discussion of race, but the American people are afraid to do it.
You remember the reaction to that?
The reaction to that was quite spontaneous and vociferous.
Reaction on this program, what do you mean, afraid to talk about?
That's all we do in our country anymore.
Everything that happens is reported on one way or another.
From a racial standpoint, what do you mean afraid to talk about it?
That's all people do.
The problem with talking about it is that you'd better say the right thing, or Eric Holder and his representatives are going to come along and try to destroy you.
They will love to have conversations about race, but only in ways they permit.
Well, I took and take the attorney general at his word, and I do not fear discussing race on this program.
I don't run from talking about it.
And I do not do so in an incendiary way.
And each time I do, I get raked across the calls.
I get ripped to shreds in the drive-by media.
I am purposely misunderstood, purposely misreported upon, and yet I continue to talk about it.
The comments I made to you following Michelle Obama's little remarks at the Whitney Museum, which I found sad and disappointing and depressing, much as I found her remarks at the graduation ceremony at Tuskegee University.
Well, CNN spent a lot of time raking me over the coals yesterday and last night.
And it got ridiculous.
Do you know why the Obamas are permitted to talk about race?
Because it's their expertise.
Wait till you hear these sound bites.
Well, why shouldn't they talk?
It's their expertise.
Well, uh Well, everybody.
Everybody has a race, then and everybody has racial expertise.
Don Lemon suggested that race is Obama's particular expertise, as though it's a talent or a developed skill.
It isn't.
So anyway, when you do try to talk about it honestly, when anybody does, not just me, and it varies from what the drive-by's or the Democrat Party wants to hear, then they come at Richard Cohen in the Washington Post remarks on it.
His headline today, Michelle Obama criticized for the sin of being black.
No, she wasn't.
I didn't criticize her for being black, and I didn't say being black is a sin.
I didn't get anywhere near saying that.
These people don't even listen.
The problem with the conversation on race, whenever you engage in it, is that liberals don't listen to what you say.
They knee-jerk react, as we all know.
You know, I'm kinda I'm torn even talking about this because I don't want to give these people any amplification what they said, because right now they're sitting there in their small universe of CNN, small universe of Washington Post, so I'll think about it.
Come back after this.
Don't go away.
Here's a modified version of the point I was making about what happens when you speak about something that the left claims they want to hear people talk about.
It happened last night on the O'Reilly factor with the Juan Williams.
And they were talking about Pam Geller and the cartoon contest and freedom of speech and who is permitted to have freedom of speech and who isn't.
And uh O'Reilly said to Juan Williams, the liberal fallback position is ah, the right does it too.
The right does not have access to the New York Times or the LA Times or Yahoo or Google, O'Reilly said.
They don't.
It's the left that pours this crap in there.
What we're going through here in the country is it's difficult to have an honest discussion where people listen to each other.
If people get on Rush Limbaugh, if they're on the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal, if they are on a lot of these blogs and right-wing sites, they are all talking to each other, and guess what?
They are making fun of the left and mocking The left.
Now, I'm not quite sure what Juan's point is here, because what what O'Reilly is saying is that there's all kinds of hypocrisy and the left can get away with all kinds of things.
The right can't.
And Williams starts out by saying, well, you know, it's difficult to have an honest discussion where people listen to each other.
And then he starts lamb-basting me in the Wall Street Journal is basically preaching to the choir, and then all we do is mock and make fun of the left.
Has he never heard of John Stewart?
See, he never heard of Saturday Night Live.
Never heard of the Colbert Report.
He never heard of Take Your Pick of any left wing broadcast.
MSNBC CNN.
Mock, make fun of.
If that's where the left stopped, it might be okay, but they don't even stop at that.
Anyway, O'Reilly's reaction to this, uh coming up after the break.
Sadly, I didn't get it in before then.
Just hang tough, folks.
Be back.
You know, I gotta play this one Williams son by the end.
I don't even know what he's saying here.
Because I'm really not sure what the question is.
I didn't see the show.
So let me see if I can put this together.
Because I think it it dovetails with what I'm talked about moments ago about, you know, everybody wants us to have these conversations.
Attorney General calls us cowards if we don't.
Then when we engage in conversations about things they want us to talk about, i.e.
race, the minute that happens, they shut it down, call your racist or a bigot or whatever.
If you don't hear what they if you don't say what they want to hear.
So with that in mind, O'Reilly, in talking about uh the Pam Geller cartoon contest shooting, says to his guest Juan Williams, the liberal fallback position is, oh, the right does it too.
The right does not have access to the New York Times or the LA Times or Yahoo or Google, O'Reilly points out.
They don't.
It's the left that pours this crap in.
Now here's Williams' response.
What we're going through here in the country is it's difficult to have an honest discussion where people listen to each other.
If people get on Rush Limbaugh, if they're on the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal, if they are on a lot of these blogs and right-wing sites, they are all talking to each other, and guess what?
They are making fun of the left and mocking the left.
Okay, now I look, I'm sorry, I don't know what that answer has to do with O'Reilly's question, but it doesn't matter because it serves its purpose as a standalone.
Juan Williams starts out by worrying that we don't listen to each other.
We don't listen to each other.
So if a caller like one of you in this audience, you get on this program, or somebody writes an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, they end up just saying what everybody else in the group thinks.
There's no difference, there's no variance, and they start making fun of liberals.
And they start mocking the left.
You know, I sit here in amused wonderment over this.
You know, liberalism is nothing more than comedy today.
Liberals' most respected public figures are comedians.
Did you know that?
According to a recent Reuters online poll, the most respected liberal public figures are comedians and actors.
Other than Obama, of course, he's at the top there because he's president, president always wins in these things.
People like Letterman and Colbert and and and uh Stewart, and they're all at the at the top of the most respected, most admired, most trusted list.
They're comedians.
What do they do?
Mock, make fun of, laugh, distort, lie about, you name it.
And O'Reilly's point, what do you mean the right wing don't have any elements here?
New York Times makes fun of and mocks the right wing, Yahoo News, you name it.
The right doesn't have access to any of these mainstream media monoliths.
Anyway, O'Reilly uh responded to it curiously, said this.
Limbaugh is the least of it.
Limbaugh puts out his case in a pretty persuasive way.
Because I've been listening to him lately.
He does.
And he doesn't do a lot of personal attacks anymore.
I don't think he ever did a lot of them.
Well, I'm saying, look, I enjoy him too.
I think he's humorous, but I'm saying you said it's not available to me.
That's what I'm talking about.
The Nazis.
He's not doing that as much anymore.
All right.
He's putting forth his point of view in a very streamlined way.
See, You see what bothers that feminazi that goes back to the I mean the first day of this program, 1988, and even further back.
And I think they're worried about it because it works, you know, it perfectly.
It nails them.
It identifies who they are and and how they act, you know, in in one word.
I mean I don't know when the last time Juan Williams listened to this show.
But that's my point.
They don't listen.
They don't and Richard Cohen obviously doesn't listen, and CNN, they don't listen.
They get clips.
They get excerpts based on the left-wing watchdog websites they monitor.
They don't go to my show.
They don't go to my website.
They don't read my transcripts.
They read the interpretation of what happened here, and then they run to town with it.
And I know why.
I equal ratings.
I equal clicks.
I equal hits.
All CN has to do is put a picture of me up there with next to Obama, and they think their audience is going to be riveted because they're going to think that I once again am behaving in the typical way CNN portrays me.
And the same thing with Richard Cohen.
Although Richard Cohen may not remember this.
But we could we could search this probably the Washington Post database or certainly Lexus Nexus.
Richard Cohen's first column on me, way back in the late 80s or early 90s.
You're smiling like you remember this.
Richard Cohen's first column on me had some, I mean this is this is not verbatim.
It's paraphrased.
But he compared me to Reagan, and he alluded to the possibility that the left should not be surprised if one day I come out of nowhere and run for president.
And it was halfway, halfway adulatory, not all the way, but this piece of history.
It's just, it's it's simpleton, it is short-sighted, it misses the point almost on purpose.
So when they tell you they want to have a conversation, they really don't.
They certainly don't want to have a debate.
That's the last thing the left wants to have with anybody.
They really don't want there to be any opposition.
The objective they have is to clear the playing field of uh of any opposition.
And I still don't know whether I'm going to get into this in detail.
I've got more into this than I thought I would before the program started, but I'm back to the same old dilemma that I have.
You people know the truth, and you are whom I care about.
You and this audience know exactly what happens on this program and what doesn't.
And you know what I am and what I'm not, despite what the drive-by say.
So tackling this simply will amplify the baseless, mean-spirited, totally over-the-top mindless criticism that right now is just sitting in the small little universe of the Washington Post and CNN.
So since there's no there's no persuading them, either Richard Cohen or Don Lemon or Mark Lamont Hill.
There's no persuading them that they're wrong.
It's pointless to even uh really engage in them.
The only reason I would do it would be for your benefit.
I mean, those of you in the audience would not be, try to reach them, wouldn't happen.
So what I'm thinking about that, let's do Brady.
Right?
Let's do Brady.
That's what everybody cares about right now anyway.
So we'll come back, take a brief obscene profit timeout, and uh discuss what it all means and what's gonna happen.
The best analysis, well, the wide and a raid analysis that's all over the place, and some predictions.
Sit tight, don't go away.
Back after.
You're guiding light through times of trouble, confusion, murkiness, tumult, chaos, and despair.
And even the good times.
Rush Limbaugh behind the golden EIB microphone.
Some of the other things coming up on the program later on.
Elderly man with prostitute under bed loses housing subsidy.
Norrestown, Pennsylvania outside Philadelphia.
Authorities say a guy living in a suburban Philadelphia assisted living Facility has lost his housing subsidy after officials found a prostitute underneath his bed.
That's only half of it.
There's a lot of news out there today, ladies and gentlemen, about a study on religion and Christianity.
Here it is right here.
It's from uh, let's see, the Pew Center.
The Pew Center New U.S. religious landscape study.
And here's the nuts and bolts of this.
In 2007, 78.4% of Americans were Christian.
In 2014, only 70.6.
So essentially an 8% drop in people who identify as Christian since Obama became president.
The study on religion finds that under the Obama years we have this dramatic drop.
And even after this dramatic drop of 8% Christians still comprise 70% of the population.
Even after a dramatic, almost 10%, let's round it up.
It's a 10% drop in people who identify as Christians.
That's key.
They may still be, they're just not admitting it.
But even at that, yet 70% of the country identifies as Christian, less than 1% of the country identifies as Muslim.
In the Pew Research paper here, it's 0.9%.
Now let me make an additional point about this about the drop from 78%, 78.4% down to 70.6% in the last eight years.
The last eight years have not been static.
They have been dynamic.
There have been a lot of things happening in various denominations around the country that might explain this drop.
The Methodists, the Lutherans, the Presbyterians, the Episcopalians, the American version of the Church of England, have had dramatic changes in their structure and their organization.
Many of these churches within these denominations now perform homosexual marriage.
They ordain gay pastors and ministers, and in some cases, female and lesbian pastors and ministers, which you might think would cause some people to leave those churches if they disagreed with the decisions made.
Those denominations, the Methodists, the Lutherans and Presbyterians dropped a lot of members.
And I don't know whether they have picked up another church or they don't go to church at all, but they have they have left their churches because of social issues and the evolution of their churches to social areas they didn't want to go and don't feel comfortable being in.
And I don't think, I don't even say that to be controversial.
It's just what it is.
But again, those are probably words that the left doesn't want to hear.
Words like that the left would tag as intolerant.
I'm not tolerating or intolerating anything.
I'm just telling you, I'm guessing why the numbers are what they are.
Because if you look at the evangelical churches, they haven't lost anything.
Their membership is holding pretty steady, where the message has remained the same, where the mission has remained the same, where the members of the church don't think any corruption is taking place.
They're still hanging in there.
Thank you.
Some might say the churches that haven't fallen prey to the dark side.
All of this silly social evolution.
But even with this drop, 70% of the country still identify as Christians.
And yet it gets you back to the question I raised the other day.
How is it possible that less than One million gay activists are able to bully and steamroll an entire country on the subject of marriage.
By the same token, how is it that 70% of the population can be bullied and silenced and coerced into accepting societal evolution with which they disagree because of their religious beliefs.
It's not just the Republican Party caving, folks.
It's not just the Republican Party not engaging in pushback.
There's a whole lot of groups that make up the majority in this country, one way or the other, who are not pushing back.
Okay, the Tom Brady circumstance.
Let me find the uh place to start here with the audio sound bites, and I guess that's number eight, as I set these aside.
Okay, we've got four games.
A lot of people are focusing on a phrase in the Ted Wells report, and I fear that they are not understanding its meaning legally.
The Wells report does not say conclusively that anything happened.
In fact, they make a point on page.
Oh, forget the page number, but they sp they they lay out that they admit that they don't have any specific incontrovertible evidence.
It's all circumstantial.
And so there's this phrase, a greater than likelihood or probability than not that X, Y, or Z happened.
And people who are not familiar with that phrase are zeroing in on it, and they're applying the same meaning to it that they would if it was the U.S. criminal justice system.
Uh nobody would be convicted in the criminal justice system with that as the basis forming the evidence.
But this is not the criminal justice system.
There's another area, I think a lot of people are right about this.
The excessive aspects of the penalty, one million dollars for the Patriots is a fine, and maybe even the four games to Brady, and the loss of two draft picks.
There's a bunch of facets of this investigation, and I think the fact that Brady did not fully cooperate, and McNally, the locker room attendant of Ball Boy, did not fully cooperate.
The investigators made one final request of him, the Patriots would not produce him.
And I think that a lot of this penalty contains anger at that, and with the league attempting to send the message that look, if we're going to investigate, you help us.
If you're going to, if we're going to investigate, you participate, because what we want to do is get to the bottom of these things, and if you stonewall us, then we're going to tack on penalties for that.
Others think that there are lingering aspects of spy gate.
In other words, there are some who who say that the commissioner and the league regret that the penalties in Spygate were not greater.
Belichick with a $500,000 fine or draft choice losses or whatever.
And some of the sports writer community are saying the league knows that they didn't go far enough in spy gate.
And so this is making up for that.
Now that's a stretch, if you ask me.
Combining two separate and distinct investigations, even though the same theme may be running through both of them, i.e.
cheating.
But there's a lot of rumors also curious.
If Sean Payton got a full year as coach of the New Orleans Saints for not knowing about the bounty program in his locker room, well, then how did Belichick escape any penalty here for not knowing about deflate gate?
And you want to hear the scuttlebutt rumor for that?
Scuttlebutt rumor for that is that the reason the NFL destroyed all the video tapes that the Patriots produced after Skygate or Spygate was because the tapes and Belichick demonstrated to the league, hey, it's not just us doing this stuff.
There's all kinds of teams in this league doing all kinds of illegal stuff.
And if you come after me, I'm gonna blow the whistle on everybody instead of just taking this.
That's what Belichick rumored to say to the league after the spygate penalties.
So the theory is that they leave him alone here so that he doesn't launch.
I don't think that plays because this is enough to make him launch anyway.
That's the kind of fasting stuff that's going around out there.
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