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May 15, 2015 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:28
May 15, 2015, Friday, Hour #2
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Time Text
I know that.
I know that.
I just had to light the cigar.
I'm running a little late, but I'm just making sure the one o'clock cigar is lit properly.
And it is.
Live from the Southern Command in Sunny South Florida.
It's open line Friday.
Yes, sir.
Open line Friday, Rush Limbaugh behind the golden EIB microphone.
Executing assigned because I do the assigning.
Host duties flawlessly.
Zero mistakes.
Telephone number 800-282-288-2, the email address, L Rushmow at EIB net.com.
Thomas Sowell has an absolutely great column about the racial problems in America.
It's the kind of column.
It's the kind of column that spells out everything that you think about it, but have been unable to say.
Not because you're afraid to, you've been unable to form the thoughts.
It's the best kind of opinion column there is.
The column that when you read it, yeah, yeah.
That is exactly what I've been trying to tell people.
That's exactly what I think.
I mean, it hits the button.
Home run, coming up in mere moments.
First, I want to play a couple sound bites.
Because there is a Republican fighting back on this silly Amtrak stuff about the Republicans being to blame because of lack of funding or lack of compassion, not caring about infrastructure.
This this is another one of these episodes that is just utterly irresponsible.
The way the Democrats and the media are handling this.
And it is classic in its illustration that they do not really care about people.
Here we have a tragedy, and they don't even see, they see an opportunity, they see a golden opportunity to rip Republicans and advance their agenda of growing government when big government is the cause.
Big government is the reason that train derailed.
Big government is one of the factors.
Big government out of control, incompetent, unaccountable bureaucracies.
It's not lack of funding.
There isn't anything that's ever cut.
We're $18 trillion in debt.
That ought to be automatically rejected whenever anybody cites it as a reason for anything happening.
Lack of money, that's the last thing that is relevant.
We're $18 trillion in debt.
We've spent money that we don't have and that we're never going to get back.
And yet the Democrats keep talking about budget cuts.
And they keep talking about Republicans not caring.
It's just the exact opposite.
John Micah, who is a uh Republican from Florida, is finally fed up.
And I think this is great.
This is what every Republican should be out there doing.
This happened this morning on C-SPAN with the clueless Carol Costello.
She said, You yourself, you called Amtrak a third world passenger operator.
What do you mean third world?
How dare you say she didn't say that, but that's what she's thinking.
You know, she rides Amtrak.
She rides Amtrak from Washington to Boston to see her husband.
And she was complaining yesterday about doors and windows that don't close and engines that stop working and break down.
And heating and cooling systems that don't work and delays.
And so he c yeah, we basically have a third world.
What do you mean third world trip?
Because she is not going to sit idly by and let her precious government be insulted.
Here's what he said.
The United States has a third world rail system.
It's a monopoly, run in a Soviet-style operation, Amtrak.
Almost every country in the world is bringing in the private sector to invest to create high-speed rail.
The Obama administration took $10 billion, put most of it into California, where cows and vegetables are the only thing that are going to be served between Bakersfield And Fresno doesn't even connect into a major metropolitan area.
So it's not how much money you spend, it's where you spend the money, and we're spending billions.
And then the government's chief defender here, Carol Costello said the House Appropriations Committee voted down a Democrat amendment that would have offered $825 million for the technology known as positive train control.
And according to the NTSB, that technology, if it had been in place, this accident wouldn't have happened.
So here she is, just blindly.
$825 billion?
Why it would have been magic.
If we would have just spent $825 billion, why this wouldn't have happened.
Just totally clueless.
And still gets hired.
Anyway, here's what Micah said to that.
We've given Amtrak between a billion and a billion and a half almost every one of the years I've been in Congress.
They're spending money on bonuses for executives.
They're spending money to subsidize losing food service.
And about a dozen years, they've lost a billion dollars in captive food service operation.
The entire world is now opening state-supported rail to competition.
Not Japan or China or Europe.
The government pays for their systems.
See, you're wrong.
You don't know what you're talking about.
And England, a virgin rail, China is privately operated.
In Russia, they've actually brought in public-private partners.
They have high-speed rail between St. Petersburg and Moscow.
Amtrak blocks any competition.
And let me give you one other thing to ponder here.
How is it possible that Amtrak cannot make any money when terrorists and TSA have made flying such a pain in the rear?
And the last we looked, a terrorist event has not occurred on a train, has it?
Nope.
Amtrak has record ridership, and they still can't make any money.
You would think that railroads would be enjoying a golden age here just on the safety aspect alone.
Taxpayers have given Amtrak more than 46 billion dollars.
Amtrak gets a billion and a half a year on top of their outrageous prices they get from the wildly expensive tickets.
And what he said here about captive food service, how do you lose a billion dollars on catering in food service when your customers cannot go anywhere else?
You think they lose catering operations concessions at ballparks?
I think they lose money there.
And you know who's running those outfits, don't you?
Ha ha.
You know who's running those.
I'm telling you, it is just outright.
And here come these defenders.
These but it's a government.
And the government can only make it right.
The government can make it fair.
Well, whatever they come up with to justify the government doing it's the government's the problem.
And remember, the system that she's up here talking about $825 billion, why it was authorized and the Republicans opposed it.
And if they hadn't, and the fail-safe system would have the fail-safe, whatever the system is, is in.
The system that would slow down a renegade runaway train is in.
It just hasn't been turned on.
You know why it hasn't been turned on?
Because the FCC, too busy out there worrying about net neutrality, which is another misnomer, has not gotten around to approving and finding the spectrum for bandwidth for GPS for the system.
Because there's no hurry.
That's Amtrak.
Here's you want to Amtrak's losing money, as Carol Costello points out.
The windows and doors stick open or stick closed.
The engines shut down.
It's basically a mess.
It's probably not the cleanest bunch of trains you can get on, and they have no competition.
And precisely because they have no competition.
It's just.
This is what's so frustrating to us conservative folks.
I have to, because the evidence of government failure is everywhere.
The evidence of government incompetence, government waste is everywhere.
Not just Amtrak, I'm talking about everywhere.
Whatever government takes over gets worse.
The people that run it at government would never be hired for the same job in the private sector.
That's why they're in government.
And it's a very frustrating thing because people still turn to government to fix things.
For some reason, government's fair.
For some reason, government is this or that when government.
And it's just the nature of bureaucracies.
Anyway, Ben Flear had done that.
I mentioned Thomas Sowell, and I want I want to share a couple of points that he makes in this uh in this column.
It's called the inconvenient truth about ghetto communities social breakdown.
Among the many painful ironies in the current turmoil is that communities scattered across the country were disrupted by riots and looting because of the demonstrable lie that Michael Brown was shot in the back by a white cop in Missouri.
But there was not nearly as much turmoil created by the demonstrable fact that a fleeing black man was shot dead by a white cop in South Carolina.
His point is something that did not happen in St. Louis ended up captivating the country, ended up captivating the media, ended up causing riots in cities all over the country.
Something that did not happen caused all that.
Where the exact same thing that did not happen did happen in South Carolina, nobody cared.
That's what this opening paragraph says.
Among the many painful ironies in the current racial turmoil is that communities scattered across the country were disrupted and riots and all that by something that didn't happen.
Stand up, don't shoot, did not happen.
White cop shoots innocent black citizens, did not happen.
Where it did happen a few short weeks later in South Carolina, facts are in, there wasn't any news.
Media didn't go there.
Civil rights activists didn't go there.
It was a two-day story, if that.
And that is amazing irony, is it not?
How do you how do you figure that, folks?
The very thing that did not happen that caused all these riots did happen shortly after, and nobody cared.
Media didn't care.
Jesse Jackson, the Reverend Sharpton didn't care.
Totally ignored, writes Dr. Sowell, totally ignored was the fact that a black cop in Alabama fatally shot an unarmed white teenager and was cleared of any charges at about the same time that a white policeman was cleared of charges in the fatal shooting of Michael Brown.
Totally ignored.
Black cop in Alabama fatally shoots an unarmed white teenager cleared of any charges.
Ho hum, yawn, no news.
At the same time, a white cop was cleared of charges in the fatal shooting of Michael Brown, and man was there news and were there riots, and was it all over the place, city after city after city.
In a world where the truth means so little, and headstrong preconceptions seem to be all that matter.
What hope is there for rational words or rational behavior?
Much less mutual understanding across racial lines.
When the recorded fatal shooting of a fleeing man in South Carolina brought instant condemnation by whites and blacks alike, and by the most conservative as well as the most liberal commentators, that moment of mutual understanding was fleeting.
As if mutual understanding were something to be avoided, there's no news there.
And that he's exactly right.
You know why that event in South Carolina was not news?
Because they dealt with it the minute it happened.
There was not any doubt about it.
You had a black guy shot by a white cop.
Everybody knew it.
They arrested the white cop, charged him with murder.
There wasn't enough time for people to come in and raise hell.
Everybody agreed the media left it alone.
Nothing to see here.
And Sowell's point is everybody getting along and the system working is not even news in America.
And nobody can look at that and take any positives from it.
No, no, we have to focus on something that did not happen.
And lie about it and create Riots.
And that's what excites the media.
And that's what excites the Democrat Party.
That vision is nowhere more clearly expressed than in attempts to automatically depict whatever social problems exist in ghetto communities as being caused by the sins of whites.
Whether racism in general or a legacy of slavery in particular.
Like most emotionally powerful visions, it is seldom, if ever, subjected to the test of evidence.
The legacy of slavery arguments, not just an excuse for inexcusable behavior in the ghettos.
In a larger sense, the legacy of slavery is an evasion of responsibility for the disastrous consequences of the prevailing social vision of our times and the political policies based on that vision over the past 50 years.
Anyone who is serious about evidence need only compare black communities as they evolved in the first 100 years after slavery with black communities as they evolved in the first 50 years after the explosive growth of the welfare state beginning in the 60s.
And you would be hard-pressed to find as many ghetto riots prior to the 60s as we have seen in just the past year, much less in the 50 years since a wave of such riots swept the creature.
The point is, in the hundred years post-slavery, before 60s and welfare, there weren't any riots.
You could hardly find any.
Day slavery ended all the way up to the welfare state.
There weren't any riots.
The slavery period pretty docile.
Then the welfare state kicks in.
Then the Great War on Poverty.
And the black family is torn apart, and voila, hello riots.
A hundred years after slavery ended, the legacy of slavery, but the first hundred years, no riots.
And then there's this.
This is to me the full quote of the story.
You cannot take any people of any color and exempt them from the requirements of civilization without ruinous consequences to them and to society at large.
Non-judgmental subsidies of counterproductive lifestyles are treating people as if they are livestock, to be fed and tended by others in a welfare state, and yet expecting them to develop as human beings when they're not being raised to know-how.
His point is that all of this sympathy and all of this welfare and the promotion of the grievance industry is exempting a large number of the American population from the requirements of civilization, not just citizenship, but civilization.
We are exempting people.
We are not even expecting people to behave in responsible ways.
That's how low our expectations.
He nails it for me.
That's exactly what I have always thought the problem was, and I've never been able to express it that way.
I've got to take a break right now, but I'll continue when we get back.
I'm telling you, this line from Sowell just nails it.
You cannot take any people of any color and exempt them from the requirements of civilization without ruinous consequences to them and society at large.
This has been the thing that's bugged me whenever I've run into some just a knee-jerk liberal.
And race comes up.
There's this automatic knee-jerk reaction to feeling sorry for whoever is involved in whatever stories about if it's an African American, we automatically feel sorry.
And we exempt, this liberal exempts them from any responsibility for anything because of the legacy of slavery, or because of the history of discrimination.
And it's always bugged me.
I've always, I've I've never been able to express what it is about that liberal action and and uh those words that have always bothered me, and it's it.
You are exempting them from responsibility.
You're giving them a pass because you feel guilty over what was done to their ancestors.
You're not helping them.
You're exempting them from any responsibility.
You're exempting them from civilization, you're exempting them from citizenship.
And you're destroying them.
And you all the while you're doing this, you think you're being compassionate.
You think you're being understanding.
And this just nails it.
He's exempt.
I don't care if it's if it's African Americans or Hispanics or anybody.
It could be your own kid.
If you exempt them from the responsibilities of civilization citizenship, you're gonna get a mess.
Now, one more point about this uh the the collar from Dr. Thomas Sowell.
Let me go back to this poll quote.
You cannot take any people of color, minority, you take you you cannot exempt anybody from the requirements of civilization without ruinous consequences to them and to society at large.
And I maintain that's what the left does with every group of minorities that supports them.
They exempt them from any requirements.
The welfare state takes over, providing for them, and they end up having their lives destroyed.
Why is it that minority groups of people not born here, but who immigrate here end up running rings around Americans that are born here.
And the answer is they're not caught up in the Democrat Party's welfare state.
They have an entirely different work ethic.
Now, Sowell makes the point that these this this fact, these trends, are not unique to blacks, and they're not even unique to the United States.
The welfare state has led to remarkably similar trends among the white underclass in England over the same period.
Just read Life at the Bottom by Theodore Dalrymple, a British doctor who worked in a hospital in a white slum neighborhood.
It's true of human beings.
If you exempt them from the responsibilities and requirements of just living civilized, responsible lives, if you exempt them from the responsibilities of citizenship, then you're gonna get what we get.
You're gonna exempt them, it also means you're gonna excuse them.
And then when they act that way, you're gonna excuse that, and you're gonna blame other people for it because it furthers your political agenda.
That's exactly where we are.
I'm telling the modern incarnation of Democrat Party is doing more to destroy the basic foundations of this country than I would have ever thought possible 25, 30 years ago.
Anyway, back to the phones because it is open line Friday.
Here's Caleb in Huntington, West Virginia.
Great to have you on the program.
Hi.
Hi, Rush.
It's an honor to speak to you today.
Thank you very much, sir.
Uh my point is on the uh soundbite that you played earlier from the East Band regarding uh George Stephanopoulos.
Um caller mentioned that uh he listened to your show regularly to uh to uh know what his enemy is doing.
Uh if he listened to his show, you would uh he would know that you had had actually told him that um George Stephanopoulos was not a true journalist, so it was not a conflict of interest anyway.
The guy's been uh likely in the pocket of the Clintons since he was uh an advisor for them.
So it wasn't a conflict of interest because he's not a journalist.
And uh my second point was um when was the last time a liberal apologized for anything unless it furthered their agenda or uh they were out getting in front of something to uh to create damage control.
So uh either they felt that it was uh a conflict of interest or they believed that their viewers saw it as a conflict of interest.
Well, that you're talking about Stephanopoulos' apology.
Yes.
Yeah.
Well, I have that here.
Grab grab sound but number four.
I have that hand to standing by here in just a second.
Uh we there's a different bunch of different ways you can hear this apology.
And the way I hear it is, okay, you wanna you want me to apologize for helping people with eggs, I will.
You want me to apologize for donating to people who are poor, then by God I will.
You want me to apologize for donating to people whose lives have been destroyed by hurricanes, then by God I will.
That's how I heard the apology.
I think it's a smug and it's designed not to be heard that way.
But if you listen to it, which I'm gonna play it coming up, you you'll you when you hear my interpretation of it, you'll have no choice but then to agree with me.
He resents having to apologize.
Because, by the way, there isn't a conflict.
He isn't a journalist.
The only reason that there is a stated conflict is because we're all living under a ruse.
And that is that ABC News is journalism.
And it isn't.
ABC News is the Democrat Party.
You know, when you compare Brian Williams to George Stephanopoulos, you know which of those two is actually the greater transgression, don't you don't you?
Stephanopoulos.
Brian Williams is like a kindergartner bragging to his friends that he's the guest star on Bonanza.
He just lives in a fantasy world.
Brian Williams thinks he's everywhere and told and tells everybody.
For some reason, Brian Williams, I guess because he didn't go to college, and he's around a bunch of people that did, needs to constantly tell people how great he is and how thorough and how all this, and he ends up making things up that he ends up believing himself.
I'm sure he thinks he was in a helicopter shot down.
I'm sure he believes it.
You know, that's just a most of the stuff that Brian Williams made up was off the air.
Some of it was on the Stephanopoulos, what Stephanopoulos did, folks.
This, in the old days of Walter Cronkite and Edward Murrow, Stephanopoulos would be gone.
They wouldn't want what they do tainted by this, even though they were really not any different, particularly Cronkite.
Don't get me started.
This whole thing's been a joke on the American people for the last 50 years.
But the point is of the two, Brian Williams and Stephanopolis, Stephanopoulos is by far the more serious injurious thing about journalism for those who still believe that's what's going on here.
There I remind you, you know, a friend of mine is a guy named Cyrus Nerastin.
Cyrus wrote a movie that aired on ABC called A Path to 9-11.
Do you remember about that?
The Path to 9-11 was an historical entertaining documentary put together on the basis of facts and intelligence that was known.
And it laid the blame for bin Laden not having been dealt with before 9-11 to the Clinton administration.
Well, when it came time to broadcast it, Clinton raised holy hell.
And he called Bob Iger or whoever at Disney.
And he got them to change.
He got them to edit a full minute and 10 seconds.
Out of that DVD.
I happened to have the full version pre-edited.
But that's only half the story.
The other half the story is that ABC did not put that movie on DVD.
They were sitting on a gold mine.
At the time the Path to 9-11 came out, they could have sold gazillion copies of it.
Precisely because of the controversy over what Clinton had succeeded in getting ABC to edit out of it.
But they shelved it.
Old buddies at ABC.
Clinton gets mad, gore's over there doing the same thing, and they shut it down.
Try this.
I don't know how many of you remember this.
This is an American spectator story.
October of 1994.
It's a very, very, very long story, and I'm not going to give you the highlights.
It was written by, certainly, you'll remember this when I get in.
Matt Labash.
In May of 1994, with the help of a $668,000 loan from Nations Bank Mortgage Corporation, George Stephanopoulos bought an $835,000 Washington, D.C. building containing a posh apartment above an IWARE retail store.
Gossips, realtors, and all manner of investigative reporters immediately began to ask how can somebody who makes just $125,000 working for Bill Clinton in the White House, with a net worth of between $30,000 and $100,000 on the public forms afford an $835,000 building.
Furthermore, how does somebody with a net worth of $30,000 to $100,000 and an income of $125,000 get a mortgage for $668,000?
Well, the American Spectator story shed light on it.
The article goes on for another 60 paragraphs to explain how it happened.
But in a nutshell, in 1994, the columnist Jack Anderson reported Stephanopoulos got this way below market loan rate from a bank that was owned by Hugh McCall.
Hugh McCall had been called by President Clinton the most enlightened banker in America.
A nation bank commercial loan officer said at the time that this loan didn't fit the way they do loans.
It didn't fit the product matrix.
Because banks typically only offer such loans to customers with deep pockets.
And on a short-term adjustable rate basis.
Stephanopoulos real estate agent even said nobody making $125,000 could qualify for this property without the commercial property lease.
A former senior bank regulator told Jack Anderson, if his name were George Smith and he didn't work in the White House, this loan wouldn't have been made.
One Nations Bank source stated that such a residential loan on mixed use properties is such a rarity that it was not even addressed in the Nations Bank Mortgage Corporation's program summary or the credit policy manual.
The bottom line is Stephanopoulos gives 75 grand to the Clinton Crime Family Foundation, and perhaps its payback for the help he got way back in 1994 and getting a sweetheart, practically no interest mortgage on $668,000 to buy a dual-use property.
I wear store on the bottom and a posh apartment on top in Washington, D.C. on $125,000 a year.
Now, before you start launching, I know connections and networking enables a lot of people to get a lot of things.
Fine and dandy.
There's no question that Clinton's interceded here.
There's no question, just the public acknowledgement by Clinton that this Hugh McCall guy is a this guy, this guy's what banker's all about.
You call him up, you tell him to give your friend half a million dollars, and he does it.
That's my kind of banker.
We need to put that guy over to House Bank, in fact.
That'd be the perfect place for him.
So it only standard reason it.
Stephanopoulos would remain loyal to Clinton even when he crosses over to journalism in ABC on Good Morning America, and interviewing Mitt Romney and Republican presidential candidates and trying to smear them in debate.
Yeah.
And then donating money to the Clinton Crime Family Foundation, maybe a little payback for the loan, who knows what?
But cronyism's alive and well here.
The idea that there's any objective journalism going on is absurd.
The point is, and the caller's exactly right what I said yesterday.
There really isn't any conflict of interest because Stephanopoulos is not a journalist.
He is not objective, and he's never made any pretense of being.
That's the bottom line here.
That's right, open line Friday, Rush Limboss, saying what I say.
Loving, hearing myself say it.
And an added bonus, you get to hear it too.
Here is uh Dan in Muskegon, Michigan.
Great to have you, sir.
Thank you for waiting.
You're up next to the EIB network, hi.
Former mailman ditto you.
I'm I'm wondering where is the outrage for the independent and uh the Democrats bringing against uh the damn track train that that failed, even as people were drawing their last breath.
How come the uh independents aren't outraged at the uh Democrats for doing that?
Uh this is an excellent question, and a question that is born of superior perception and listening skills of the caller.
Let me explain.
One of the tricks that the Republican, I'm convinced it's a trick.
If it's not a trick, if we as willingly signed on to this, then our consultants are morons.
But he's asking about something the Republicans have been brought to believe that the independents do not like bickering.
The independents do not like arguing.
The independents do not like yelling.
The independents do not like raised voices.
The independents do not like partisanship.
The independents do not like people who are highly opinionated.
The independents do not like people who are confrontational.
And the minute any Republican expresses an opinion, the independents don't like it and run right back to the Democrat Party.
See, for some reason the independents are sitting out there undecided.
We don't know why, but it's just because they're independents.
But it doesn't take much to send them racing back to the Democrat Party.
If a Republican comes along and criticizes Obama, the independents we're told, harumph and say, enough of this, and they run right back to the Democrat Party.
If a Republican comes along and questions a Democrat, uh independents don't like it.
The bottom line is the Republican Party's been made to believe that when Republicans act like Republicans, the independents who are willing to support them for some other reason, will willingly abandon them and go running right back to the Democrat Party.
And the theory is that the independents do not like bickering, and they do not like anger, and they do not like this and that.
So the question is, well then why do the independents put up with all of that from Democrats?
Why do the independents put up with riots?
Why does that not bother them?
Why does the media and the Democrat Party immediately criticize the Republicans as a cause of a train derailment not bother the independents?
And of course it's a great question.
That's why I think this is all a trick.
And it's it's an age-old trick.
I mean, Republicans have believed this.
What do you if you if you doubt me?
Have you ever heard a Republican candidate, particularly presidential candidate, in 2008 or 2012, say something like this.
Well, yeah.
But if we go after Obama, we have to go after his policy, Roosh.
We can't go after him personally.
You know what I mean?
We go after his policy, but not him.
You got it, Roush.
What do you think that's rooted in?
Because if we go after Obama personally, independents aren't going to like it.
Somehow the independence will put up with us if we only go after his policies.
But then we gotta be careful after we go after his policies, because we can't criticize him while we criticize his policies.
And I think that's that is why the Republican establishment is hell-bent on being seen as uh pro-amnesty.
I think it's responsible for a lot of Republican behavior, uh, thinking that behaving in a reasonable and well spoken and non-confrontational, non-conservative, non-argumentative way, as the world's C-SPAN hosts and NPR hosts.
This is the way that we will steal uh votes from Democrats if we just approach the electorate this way and assure them that we don't Want to kill them, and we don't want to harm them, and we don't want to starve them, and we don't want to take their money.
We just assure them that that's all BS.
And speaking to them like this, they should vote for us in Groves.
That's the theory.
Yeah, yeah.
I'm glad you reminded me.
The Stephanopoulos apology.
Yeah, I set that up and then I got distracted.
So we'll do that when we get back, and uh some other stuff too, folks.
It's open line Friday.
You actually never know where we're headed until we get there.
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