Rush Limbaugh Program - May 18, 2015, Monday, Hour #3

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May 18, 2015 - Rush Limbaugh Program

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May 18, 2015, Monday, Hour #3

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	Hi, folks, welcome back.
	Great to have you.
	Rush Limbaugh, the EIB Network and the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies and is always meeting and surpassing all audience expectations every day.
	Great to have you here.
	It always is.
	Telephone numbers 800-282-2882.
	By the way, there's a little interesting side twist to all of this Stephanopoulos news at ABC News.
	And it is this.
	The Washington Free Beacon is who broke the news that Stephanopoulos had originally contributed 50 grand, 50 large, to the Clinton Crime Family Foundation.
	It was later learned that it's 75,000.
	Well, ABC News sent a spokesperson out there who uh rebuffed the Washington Free Beacons request for comment on Stephanopoulos' undisclosed donations to the Clinton Crime Family Foundation.
	The ABC spokesperson also worked in the Clinton administration.
	Name is Heather Riley.
	Heather Riley, who is the spokesbabe for Good Morning America and This Week, you know, whole TV shows.
	You would let me give you inside baseball just to show you the differences.
	I have never worked at a radio station that had a public relations department.
	I have never worked for a radio network that had a public relations department.
	Anytime such was needed, PR, what have you, radio stations would find somebody to give it away and do it for free, otherwise they wouldn't do it.
	Radio networks, whenever the need arises, will hire an independent agency for a specific small, usually period of time, to deal with an issue or crisis of the moment.
	In other words, radio doesn't have PR.
	The people that run radio say, hey, it's up to the host.
	The host has to be loved or adored.
	And if if the host can't pull it off to hell with PR.
	We're not doing buzz.
	If you can't get your name in the paper, screw you.
	If you can't get names uh people discussing you, that's your problem.
	It's unstated, but it's the way it's always been.
	Radio is just it's it's always been amazing to me.
	Television, individual shows have PR departments.
	I will never for what when I was first interviewed for a network, I don't remember what show it was, but it was, I don't mean CNN or crossfire, but I mean an actual sit-down interview.
	I was blown away by the number of people it took to have that little interview segment done.
	Yet all the camera people, and people running around with clipboards, I don't know what they did.
	And then there were directors, and there were producers, and then there was the talent and the makeup artists and the lighting experts, and and then there were the uh the caterers.
	It was incomprehensible.
	Those of us in radio do it all.
	So there aren't any produ well, I don't have a producer because I don't I don't need one, but I don't have guests, so I don't need a booker.
	Uh but even beyond that, it's the the differences is stark.
	Whole television shows have PR department.
	Like this week has its own PR department in above whatever ABC has for the network.
	And you know what those people do?
	A publicist for Good Morning America or this week, after every show, will call entertainment writers at newspapers and magazines and tell them what happened on the show that day.
	They don't leave it to chance that the entertainment journalists will actually watch the shows, which is smart.
	They don't.
	The journalists wait for the phone call or the facts to tell them what happened.
	But this is what they do.
	This week has one, ABC's uh Good Morning America has one.
	The Today Show has maybe two or three.
	Every show has its own public relations staff.
	And their job is, of course, to deal with crises, but they also they'll call ahead of some show happening, alerting the media, hey, we're going to have such and such on, and it may be fireworks.
	And radio, nothing of the sort.
	There's nothing like it whatsoever.
	I just think of the uh the money that those TV people spend on all of that and the buzz.
	They're just not content to let these shows speak for themselves.
	They have to call these reporters before and after and tell them what they say or what happened on the show and hype it.
	Anyway, that's just an inside baseball sightlight.
	The ABC spokesperson for Good Morning America and this week also worked in the Clinton White House.
	It's not just Stephanopoulos, folks.
	Her name is Heather Riley.
	She worked in the White House press office for four years, 1997 to 2000, according to her LinkedIn profile.
	She's a member of the Facebook group Clinton administration alumni.
	White House records show that Heather Riley's duties included serving as a press contact for Hillary Clinton.
	And she's a PR spokesman for ABC News for Good Morning America, and this week another Clintonista at ABC.
	Which means she's not a PR person.
	She's a spokesman for Hillary and Bill Clinton working in ABC.
	They're calling her a spokesman for ABC.
	And she does do something, but she's a hack.
	She comes from the Clinton White House.
	And it says here that it's not the first time that Heather Riley has defended ABC News against allegations of favoritism toward the Clintons.
	When Hillary appeared on Good Morning America in May of 2014, just days after Vanity Fair published Monica Lewinsky's detailed account of her relationship with Bill Clinton, Robin Roberts declined to bring it up in the interview.
	When Hillary appeared on Good Morning America days after Monica Lewinsky's Vanity Fair story on her relationship with Bill, ABC did not ask Hillary about it.
	Now, again, the old standard reversal.
	If Republicans were involved, let's say it's uh let's say it's uh Laura Bush, just to pick it up.
	Laura Bush is going to go on Good Morning America.
	And days prior, George W. Bush had written a story detailing the mistakes that he made in Iraq.
	Do you think they would ask Laura Bush about that?
	Damn straight they would.
	But here comes Hillary on GMA, days after Lewinsky publishes her details of the relationship with Bill, and the ABC spokespeople see to it that she's not asked.
	So don't tell me that they're ABCs, but they're Clinton.
	They're Clinton partisan hacks that her n that are working at ABC News.
	And it just isn't Stephanopoulos.
	Now, this economic story, this is uh from Yahoo Finance, and again, this is important because that means the low information crowd is gonna see it.
	I mean, I hate to tell you, but Yahoo Yahoo News is big with millennials and particularly the low information crowd.
	The reason is it's not because they go there to get news, is that Yahoo couples the news with the entertainment news, the celebrity and all that stuff.
	So the same page where you go find out what Jay-Z's doing or Beyonce or Jennifer Lopez and her butt, whatever you're going to find out, you'll also see the biggest news story today on the same page.
	And that's where this is.
	The economy might stink for a while.
	Now, Yahoo Finance is simply reprinting what's in the New York Times, but the low information crowd isn't gonna go there.
	But they will see it because it's at Yahoo.
	Writing in the New York Times this weekend, economist, author, and blogger Tyler Cowen says that we might need to get used to the idea the economy will continue to underperform our expectations.
	Cowan says that right now there are two core outlooks on the economy, both of which are inherently optimistic.
	One says that things like low wage growth and low interest rates are phases that'll pass.
	The other is that we merely didn't appreciate how long it would take to recover from the financial crisis.
	Everything is being done to cover Obama.
	Look at these supposed two inherently optimistic core outlooks.
	One is low wage growth and low interest rates are phases that'll pass, and all of a sudden people are going to start earning more, and interest rates are going to be better, and it's going to be fine.
	And the second part of it is we didn't know how bad the financial crisis was.
	In other words, we didn't know how bad it was when Obama took over.
	And poor Obama, he didn't know how bad it was.
	The Bush people lied to him.
	The Bush people didn't tell him all that they knew about the economy.
	When Obama got in there and saw how bad it really was, why it was worse than he ever imagined.
	And we had to do the stimulus and Obamacare and all this stuff.
	But is it a foregone conclusion things will get back to normal?
	It's not.
	This is the new normal.
	That's the bottom line of the story.
	Cowan says there's some nuggets of truth in these arguments that wages are going to get better and that the financial crisis was worse than we thought, but there's a much more disturbing possibility that could turn out to be more accurate, namely that the recession was a learning experience that we haven't fully absorbed.
	And from this perspective, the radical and sudden changes of the financial crisis were early indicators of deep fragility and dysfunctionality.
	So you can forget about the roaring economy of the 80s, and you can forget that the roaring economy of the 80s sustained itself and continued to roar into the 90s.
	And you can forget that even after 9-11, the Bush economic policies of tax cuts and so forth led us out of two recessions.
	You can forget all of that.
	Because the truth is all of that was a mirage.
	All of that was really fragile and dysfunctional.
	And what we have now with Obama and the Democrats in charge, this is it, baby.
	This is as good as it gets for this is the new norm.
	Welcome to it.
	Slowly but surely, we may be responding to these difficult revelations by scaling back our ambitions for the economy.
	You see how this works.
	Don't aspire.
	Don't try to overcome.
	Don't do all the things traditionally you've been advised to do, because you can't.
	It won't work.
	This is it.
	This is as good as it's going to be for a while.
	And Obama's done his best, and if it hadn't been for Obama, it'd be even worse than it is.
	But this is it.
	You must scale back your ambitions.
	Who wants to hear that?
	But this is what the millennials will read today when they go to Yahoo News to find out the latest about Jay-Z's streaming music service.
	In this troubling view, we have finally begun to discover some unpleasant truths, Cowan says.
	Borrowing a phrase from the University of Toronto economist Richard Florida, it's possible that we are experiencing a great reset.
	Yep.
	Meaning in all the economic good times that you've heard about before you were born, you millennials, all that robust economic growth, all of just a mirage.
	It really wasn't real.
	It was an illusion.
	It was all built on phony foundations, and it's just sad, but the reality is you happen to have been born at a time when we've had to embrace the reality that the U.S. economy has never ever really been as good as people thought what it is now is the way it always was intended to be, should have been, and the great reset and correction has Made it what it is, the new norm.
	A great reset, Cowan says, is basically a period in which workers, employers, and policymakers slowly recalibrate what they can expect from the economic engine.
	Translated.
	A great reset, as Cowan lays out, is basically a period in which workers, employers, and policymakers slowly come to realize that the American economy was never as good as everybody thought, and it isn't going to get any better than it is.
	This is the new reality.
	This is what it should have been all along.
	But Reagan and Bush, Nixon, they were all playing games of the economy.
	They were creating falsehoods and fakery everywhere.
	But now this is the new You think millennials want to hear this.
	You think anybody wants to hear this?
	So the economic news is now I get and by the way, I think this is also a setup for the presidential campaign.
	And remember how this this works now.
	Don't forget this is a key.
	I was talking about this with some friends on Saturday night.
	Um one of the people I was talking to has children in the millennial generation.
	And he was telling me how sad and distressed they are about their future.
	And I said, Why are they sad and distressed?
	And he said the magic words, what's been reported, we've told you about it previously.
	They think the country's best days are behind it.
	They just don't think that they can do as well as their parents did.
	Well, who they blaming for that?
	He said the country.
	So the country's just not what it once was.
	I said, You mean they're they're not, they don't even try to compare or to make some association between current administration economic policies and today's economy.
	No, it doesn't even occur to them to think Obama's getting to do with this.
	They think Obama inherited a mess, and he's done the best with it he can.
	So I said, your kids are losing faith in the country.
	Yeah, and the political process.
	Oh, the political process, too.
	He said, Yeah, but not Obama.
	No, not really.
	He's frustrated by it.
	But no, they don't.
	So here you have it.
	Great reset, great economic reset.
	This is it.
	This is the new norm.
	This is what it is.
	And the unspoken part of this is when you hear the Republicans in the presidential campaign telling you how much better it can be and how much better they can do, don't believe them.
	They're lying to you.
	That's what this is.
	Okay, back to the phones we go here on the Rush Limbaugh program.
	It's Josh in Williamsburg, Virginia.
	Great to have you, sir.
	Hello.
	Appreciate your patience.
	Hey, Rush, thanks for taking my call.
	Um, so I want to do two things.
	The first is to say that Jeb Bush's answer to Megan Kelly's initial question was not necessarily wrong.
	He could validly have the that answer to her question.
	The second is to reveal it.
	Wait a minute, Josh.
	What just refresh people's what did he say?
	What was his answer to that first question?
	He would do it all over again, right?
	Yeah.
	So the the question was that knowing what you know now, would you do what was done then?
	He answered yes, but he answered it to a question of with the same facts then, would you do the same thing?
	So that's basically what he said.
	My argument is that his answer is not necessarily incorrect, regardless of the question.
	It would be valid.
	It would have been, it could have been just as valid and just as justified, knowing what we know now, to go into Iraq back then.
	Except, see, here's the thing.
	There is Republican candidates are gonna have to figure this out.
	And I think Jeb sooner than the rep the others.
	He's got to figure out that no matter what he says to this to this question, the media has already concluded that Iraq was a mistake.
	It was a debacle, it was a total mistake.
	The media thinks everybody else thinks that.
	Andrew, but let me but but but let me address that point and address the collar that you had a couple uh callers ago who neocon guy blaming everything on neocons, right?
	Yeah.
	Number one, I don't think he knows what neocon you know really means as a as a you know international relations paradigm.
	Number two, um Saddam Hussein was not a good man.
	He was not, as you you know, caricatured the opposition, he was not a bumbling dolph, he was not a bumbling idiot.
	He was a murderer, he was a psychopath, he repressed his people politically and physically, he uh committed genocide against his own people.
	And you know, that caller is falling into the same trap as Rand Paul did when he criticized Jeb Bush.
	And that's the trap of time travel.
	Just because we say that hindsight is 2020, it doesn't mean that if we change some facts in the past, that we will get a different result.
	No question about it.
	No question about it.
	But that's what everybody that's the fallacy that everybody falls into.
	That if you know that that if we wouldn't have gone into Iraq in 2003, then today's facts would be as if it was 2003, and that's not that's not true at all.
	In fact, if you look at the toppling of Saddam that led directly to the Arab Spring, to probably one of the weakest moments in Iran's history, uh, which was the Green Revolution in 2009, you can't blame Iranian strength on us going into Iraq.
	You can blame that squarely on us not intervening in 2009 with the same thing.
	Yeah, but here's the weakest.
	Right.
	Okay.
	Now I've got to reserve my comment for after the break here because we've just reached it.
	But I appreciate the call, and I acknowledge your points with a but.
	Yeah, so Jeb Bush is between a rock and a hard place.
	So here comes the totality of the drive-by media with a single question.
	Would you invade Iraq like your brother did, knowing what you know now, knowing what you know now, would you invade Iraq like your brother did?
	And Jeb says, I'm I can't throw my brother overboard.
	I can't throw my brother under the bus.
	So he says, yes.
	But he means yes for a whole host of reasons, as those outlined by our previous caller.
	But the reasons are not the the fact that they're factual kind of misses the point because that's not why the question was asked.
	The question was not asked to elucidate a thorough foreign policy explanation answer.
	The question was asked to trip up and disqualify Jeb Bush.
	The question was asked once again, caricature George W. Bush as a failure.
	And I just think this I I think the Republican establishment is the last bunch of people to realize that the mainstream media is not necessary and certainly is not going to work to get their message out.
	Because I think the establishment of the Republican Party, we when you believe that you can't criticize Obama because the independents will like it.
	When you believe that you've got to be for amnesty to get the Hispanics on your side, when you believe that you have to say things like you want to be bipartisan, you want to work together with the Democrats to get things, if you believe that that's what you have to say, then you're also going to believe that you can convince the mainstream media that you are worth supporting.
	And that's what I don't think is possible.
	And I think they're living an illusion.
	And they are not coming to grips, maybe because they don't want to, with the fact that the media is every bit the enemy, as is any Democrat candidate.
	Whoever, well, Megan Kelly, but but let's get to it gets picked up, and he's asked this question by a lot of people.
	The the the the reason for asking the question is not to produce an enlightened foreign policy answer.
	There were a whole lot of reasons beyond weapons of mass destruction that we went into Iraq, but nobody remembers them.
	And nobody's talking about them.
	And if you're not going to bring them up in that answer, they may as well not have been relevant.
	I mean, there are ways of doing this.
	As I said, look, and I outlined it a moment ago.
	I would simply refuse to accept the premise of the question.
	That to me seems like the number one thing to teach.
	Every Republican officeholder and candidate.
	I don't care if it's for the town council.
	You simply, you learn to identify the premise of the question, and you instinctively, you learn to instinctively reject the premise.
	And in this case, in this question, knowing what you don't know, would you do it again?
	Was it a mistake?
	You refuse to accept the premise.
	The premise is Iraq was a total Bush failure.
	Iraq was a total Republican failure.
	And you have to not accept that and turn it around if you're going to answer the question.
	Well, had I known that the Democrat Party was going to attempt to divide this country by sabotaging the war effort.
	Had I known the lengths to which Harry Reid would proclaim the Iraq war a loss, then I might have rethought it.
	If I had known that the Democrat Party was going to be every bit the enemy in the war in Iraq that Saddam was, then yeah, I might get it out there.
	Get it out there that these things we're living with today are the result of Democrat Party policy.
	They are the result of the Barack Obama presidency.
	Takes two to tango.
	Bush hasn't been president in six years.
	Iraq was stable.
	Obama took credit for it.
	Remind them of that.
	Remind them of Barack Obama and Joe Biden claimed credit for a successful Iraq war policy.
	Back in the days when it was stable and there were elections pre-ISIS.
	There's any number of ways of doing this.
	If you're going to do it from the from the standpoint of giving an enlightened foreign policy answer, then you better give all of the enlightened aspects of the answer in the answer.
	I know, look, it's easy to sit here and suggest how to do things when you're not in the fire itself.
	And I understand that.
	All of this is hindsight, and hindsight makes everything much easier.
	Be right back after this, folks.
	I went back to the archives of the Grooveyard of forgotten soundbite favorites.
	And I want you to hear Bill Clinton talking about Saddam Hussein.
	I mentioned this earlier in the program, and I just wanted to give you the backup.
	Bill Clinton in 1998, trying to make everybody forget about Lewinsky, was threatening to go to war with Iraq.
	Saddam Hussein was preparing weapons of mass destruction at UN, everybody knew about it, all the intelligence services knew about it, because the Democrats that they led by Maureen Dowd yesterday are trying to create a new narrative, which is that all the world's intelligence services knew Saddam did not have WMD.
	And they all tried to warn Bush, but Cheney wouldn't listen.
	Because Cheney's bloodthirsty dart feeder.
	He wanted to go in there just to be Mr. Tough Guy.
	And he walked and talked Bush into it.
	And it's a lie.
	All the Intel services told us, along with our own Saddam was building and developing WMD.
	He had gassed the Kurds previously.
	The story today is that that wasn't true.
	They're coming up with a new narrative that the intel services of the world knew Saddam had nothing and tried to warn us that we wouldn't listen.
	So if the Intel services were lying to Bush in 2001 and 2002, then why were they telling Clinton the truth in 1998?
	Here's Bill Clinton, February 17, 1998, speaking to the chief joints of staff at the Pentagon about Saddam Hussein.
	His regime threatens the safety of his people, the stability of his region, and the security of all the rest of us.
	Someday, Some way, I guarantee you, he'll use the arsenal.
	Let there be no doubt we are prepared to act.
	I know that the people we may call upon in uniform are ready.
	The American people have to be ready as well.
	1998, the thick of Lewinsky stuff, and he's trying to get the world prepared.
	We might have to go take out Saddam.
	And you should hear the Democrats supporting this.
	Every Democrat senator is echoing this and more.
	Diane Feinstein, they're all.
	They're all John Kerry, they're all beaten up on Saddam like you've never heard anybody beat up on Saddam.
	Here's more from Clinton.
	It's February 20th.
	This is three days later, in a video message to Saddam entitled, We'll do What We Have to Do.
	Nobody wants to use force.
	But if Saddam refuses to keep his commitments to the international community, we must be prepared to deal directly with the threat these weapons pose to the Iraqi people, to Iraq's neighbors, and to the rest of the world.
	Either Saddam acts or we will have to.
	That's a video message Clinton made to the Iraqi people and Saddam.
	We'll do what we have to do.
	We'll take you out.
	This is all about his weapons of mass destruction.
	1998.
	When you heard Bush talk about it three, four years later, same words, practically, it was uncanny, in fact.
	But people forget this.
	Now our Intel services were lying to Bush.
	But apparently they were telling the truth to Clinton back in 1998.
	Just wanted you to hear it.
	Just wanted you to hear this.
	I've got a transcript here of Clinton's remarks on December 16th, 1998, when he was facing impeachment for perjury and stuff.
	Let me just read this to you very quickly.
	This is Clinton.
	Remarks on Wednesday, December 16th, 1998.
	Good evening.
	Earlier today, I ordered America's armed forces to strike military as security targets in Iraq.
	They're joined today by British forces.
	Their mission is to attack Iraq's nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons programs and its military capacity to threaten its neighbors.
	Their purpose is to protect the national interest of the United States and indeed the interests of people throughout the Middle East and around the world.
	Saddam Hussein must not be allowed to threaten his neighbors or the world with nuclear arms, poison gas, or biological weapons.
	That's a Clinton address to the nation, December 1998.
	And he launched an attack.
	Killed a janitor.
	No, that was in the Sudan.
	The aspirin factory, the Tylenol factory he blew up was in Sudan.
	This was a Saturday bombing run into Baghdad.
	He attacked a central office building there and killed a janitor.
	Not making that up.
	He sent a warning shot into Iraq and a janitor died a custodian.
	A vision control coordinator, a window washer, is what it was.
	Vision control coordinator.
	1998.
	That address that I just quoted went on for 10 minutes.
	Clinton warning everybody.
	How bad Hussein was.
	The weapons and man.
	Nuclear, he said.
	Did you just hear that?
	Nuclear.
	And they say Cheney lied.
	And Bush lied.
	There were no WMD.
	But somehow Clinton was telling the truth.
	And again, the Democrats of that era in the Senate and the House, oh man, you should have heard them run into the microphones to say they'd be the first in line to vote to authorize Clinton to do this.
	And then a five short years later, there they are trying to undermine it when George W. Bush is doing it.
	Yeah, I didn't get to it today, but I promise, I promise I will tomorrow.
	Women of today in New York City who wish it were the 60s, wish they could have guys like we're in mad men, and a great story in the New York Times about a woman named Wednesday something or moves from the village to the Upper East Side and can't believe the kinds of women happily married that she finds there.

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