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June 1, 2015 - Rush Limbaugh Program
30:48
June 1, 2015, Monday, Hour #3
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Having more fun than a human being should be allowed to have your guiding light through times of trouble and confusion, murkiness, tumult, chaos, and despair.
And yes, even the good times, L. Rushbo.
Rush Limbaugh.
Mehind this.
A golden EIB microphone at the distinguished and prestigious Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.
Okay, Forbes magazine Society's Lottery Winners.
Now, and the story starts out with something that's near and dear to my heart.
I remember way back when this program first started.
I forget why I made the point, but I uttered what has come to be acknowledged as a profundity.
Words mean things.
And I made the point that this is a program that is substance over style.
Whereas most of politics, sadly, most of our culture these days is style over substance.
I called it something else, just different terminology, but uh you know, symbolism over substance, style over substance, same thing.
Words mean things.
I'm the mayor of Realville.
I believe in the substance of things, not the phoniness.
I mean, I, as an example, when I was establishing goals for this program, one of them was to be a real number one, meaning the actual most listened to program, not one that was said to be.
You wouldn't believe how many radio and TV shows have really a pittance of an audience, but because of the guests they have, and those guests constantly talk about that show or that host, the impression is created that show is much more popular and bigger than it is.
We don't do any of that here.
We don't have a PR firm, a PR agency.
We sink or swim day to day on the substance and the quality of what happens here, the product.
So to me, words mean things.
Words matter.
And this has, in fact, it it got to the point where that became such a profundity that the Democrat Party began to go out and hire wordsmiths.
Remember this guy named uh uh yeah.
Yeah, George Lackoff rhymes with, and it was his job to give the Democrats different words and phrases other than the real words and real phrases in order to convey a false meaning.
It was a way to lie and to build Democrats and their agenda items up, which could not stand on their own.
And so the Forbes story starts with these words.
Words matter.
Same thing as saying words mean things.
Take the phrase, if we can't ask from society's winners to make an investment, dot dot dot dot dot.
It's a familiar plea from preachers and fundraisers, it's a particularly American approach.
The United States happily is a country that mints many winners who then traditionally give lots of money to charities, churches, scrubles, and nonprofits.
Now change this with the addition of a single word.
If we can't ask from society's lottery winners to make an investment, well now it has an altogether different meaning now.
That one word lottery changes the entire meaning of we ask from society's winners.
A good-hearted plea to society's successful to head their or heed their better angels and give something back becomes by inserting lottery, sarcastic and cutting and demeaning.
And the first politician that I know of, and I'm sure he wasn't the first, but in in in our era, the first politician I'm aware that monkeyed around with this was our old buddy Dick Gephardt, who was uh Democrat leader in the House for a while, was gonna be speaker, except Newt became speaker, and they never got over that.
Gephardt, when he had to give Newt the gabble in 1993, just or 1995, just practically had a cow.
But it was Gephardt that kept running around talking about winners of life's lottery.
And what it conveyed was that success is random and accidental, and it's not fair, because success has nothing to do with something a lucky sperm club.
Or you gotta you stepped into an accidental discovery or some such thing.
But the Democrats attempted, and they still do, to stigmatize success by delegitimizing it, which is what Obama did.
Obama is the one who is throwing in the word lottery when talking about America's winners.
Obama's use of the words lottery winners instead of winners is in poor taste.
And Forbes started story makes the point that Bill Gates and Paul Allen, oh yeah, they were lucky to be endowed with the IQs that they didn't choose.
But they each devoted tens of thousands of hours in applying their smarts to learning about software.
Gates forfeited great opportunities by dropping out of an elite college.
He quit Harvard, both risked potentially lucrative careers to start Microsoft.
Larry Page, grandson of a Michigan auto worker and the son of a professor of computer science.
His dad was an academic.
And an instructor of computer programming.
His business partner, Sergey Brin, born into a Jewish family in the anti-Semitic Soviet Union, both were lucky to be endowed with native intelligence to grow up in families that love learning, but millions of children around the world are similarly endowed and didn't start Google.
Or Microsoft or Apple or what have you.
It's actually, it's not all that great a story because it's obvious that, I mean it's important.
I'm glad they did it, and they're going after Obama for trying to stigmatize success.
And this is something a Democrat Party has done for as long as I've been alive.
Stigmatize it, delegitimize it, in fact, in some places criminalize it in order to create class envy, resentment, hate, and disgust.
And it's it's it's it's how we've evolved to this sick situation now where middle class people are told to be happy when the rich have their taxes increased.
It doesn't change the middle class person's life at all, but they're supposed to sit there and be happy that the rich are somehow getting screwed.
In fact, when the rich get screwed, the middle class does too, because where does the middle class go to get hired?
Well, we now take this, and Forbes goes on with a whole segment here on luck or hard work, and Obama's using the word lottery winner, uh winners in life's lottery.
And now we go on to this story, and this is actually announcing Martin O'Malley's entrance into the presidential sweepstakes.
The Financial Times does a story here on American Socialism's Day in the Sun.
Left-wing politicians are in electoral retreat across most of the Western world.
The one exception is here in the United States.
And by the way, that happens to be true.
Look at the conservative, the massive conservative victory in the U.K. Conservatives are rising and starting to win in France.
But in the U.S., we're going the exact opposite direction.
As at 15% in the Democrat polls, Bernie Sanders, the avowed socialist senator from Vermont, is riding higher than any U.S. socialist since Eugene Debs ran for the White House 100 years ago.
Now, the fact that Bernie Sanders has very little chance of unseating Hillary Clinton's beside the point.
His popularity, it says here, is dragging her leftward.
We can debate that later.
It's not the point here.
Now, if Bernie's, well, it is a little bit of a point, but not the main one.
If Bernie Sanders flames out, other left wingers such as Martin O'Malley are ready to pick up the baton and keep moving the Democrat Party further and further.
I don't know how I can get further left than Obama.
And I mean that.
I don't know how you get further left than Obama without just openly admitting what's going on.
Elizabeth Warren, the populist Massachusetts Senator, will continue to prod Mrs. Clinton from outside the field.
The more Mrs. Clinton adopts their language, the harder it'll be for her to reclaim the center next year.
Yet she's only following the crowd.
A surprisingly large chunk of Democrats are happy to break the U.S. taboo against socialism.
That's the real nub of this story.
The real point of this story, even if the Financial Times doesn't get it, is the Democrat Party, more and more, rank and file, not just Democrat politicians, actual Democrat citizens, the great unwashed, are happy to move openly towards socialism.
There's a reason for it, rooted in economics.
Now to most students of U.S. politics, the phrase American socialism is an oxymoron, like clean coal or the Bolivian Navy.
A century ago, Werner Sombart, a German scholar, asked, why is there no socialism in America?
It was a question that confounded Marxists.
As the most advanced capitalistic society, the U.S. was most ripe for a proletarian revolution according to their theology.
So why didn't it happen?
You know, Marxism believes that every culture eventually is going to shed capitalism because of the so-called inherent unfairness and inequality and inequity and disparities, mean spiritedness, extremism, racism rejection, bogatory, and go socialist, where everything is sweetness and light and utopia and fair and equal and uh no pay.
And yet the U.S. was going the opposite direction.
After over a hundred years in existence, they were they were shocked that it had not, the U.S. had not turned toward socialism.
U.S. refused to move in that direction.
Okay, so here are a couple of pull quotes from the story that make my point.
The first one is how the American dream was knocked down.
A quote from the Financial Times article, this one on Bernie Sanders.
Socialism found no audience in the U.S. because most Americans felt they were already middle class.
Remember, socialism is attractive to people who were poor with no hope.
Socialism looks good to people who think they're stuck, who think all the rules of hard work and self-reliance aren't gonna matter.
The deck is stacked against them for whatever reason, whether they're right or wrong, their attitudes are what count, perception in politics is reality, and they think they're stuck.
And the old rules of hard work and self-reliance and uh steadfastness, all that they lose faith in and don't believe.
Socialism becomes attractive.
High rates of social mobility gave most Americans the sense that their society was exceptional, and rightly so.
And here's this term American exceptionalism again, which the left hates.
They don't like it whatsoever for a whole host of reasons not going to go into here, but the point is.
All of this is now in question as recently as 2008.
These numbers actually make me sad.
Because it means that the efforts, the agenda, the ideas of the current Democrat Party are working.
As recently as 2008, just seven years ago, 63% of the American people identified as upper middle or middle class.
And 2008, that's the campaign year.
2000 before Obama's done anything.
Americans are optimistic.
They think they still can get where they want to get with a little hard work, a little self-reliance, the old formulas, they still believe in them.
Now it's seven years into the Obama regime.
And no longer do 63% of Americans identify as upper middle class or middle class.
Only 51% do, and it's falling.
In the greatest nation on earth, the greatest economic engine ever created by humanity, created and sustained, the greatest economic engine for the force of good ever in the history of mankind.
The attitudes of people that live in this country are plummeting.
Attitudes related to their ability to advance up the economic ladder.
In 2008, before Obama was immaculated again, 63% of Americans thought they were already upper middle class or middle class.
Today it's 51% and falling.
Meanwhile, the share of Americans who self-identify as working and lower class, I mean the people who admit it, according to Gallup, has gone up from 35% to 48%.
So 51% identify as upper middle class or middle, 48% working in lower class again since 2008.
The share of Americans who self-identify as upper class is 1%.
That happens to work out to be correct.
The number hasn't changed.
But the belief that they are rigging the system is now mainstream.
And folks, that is the single biggest problem that we really have.
The Democrats have run around for I don't know how many before Obama have been running around trying to tell the middle class and even the upper middle class that they were worse off than they were.
And it was getting worse.
I remember in the height of the Bush economy, 4.7% unemployment.
I mean, practically everybody wanted a job, had one.
We're coming out of two recessions in 9-11, we're going gangbusters before the housing thing hit.
And the Democrats are out every day, and the media trying to convince people we're really in a recession.
And we're losing ground fast.
Yeah, I'm doing fine, but I have the news.
I guess my neighbors not, because I look at the news and they say everybody's in dire straits, but I'm doing great.
I feel bad.
Callers were calling.
They felt guilty.
Admitting they were doing okay because they believed everybody else was not.
Democrat Party and the media working to convince people the economy was in the tank when it wasn't.
And furthermore, there was another component.
The Democrats actually, and they still do this, told people that the rich got rich by taking money from the middle class and the poor and then not giving it back.
And that's how they distorted the whole definition of trickle-down supply-side economics.
They totally distorted it, and they they apparently have succeeded in making people believe that the 1% are the 1% because they have stolen money or found a way to get the money belonging to everybody else.
They've rigged the game and they're hoarding it.
They're not giving it back or sharing it or trickling it down.
And accordingly, people are becoming bleak about their future, at which point socialism is beginning to look good to them.
That is horrible.
Okay, now, folks, I want to add one more thing to this.
Um the rise of the Democrat left, it says this is from the Financial Times article.
The rise of the Democrat left is every bit as real as the Tea Party's surge among Republicans.
Now, this is not Occupy.
That was phony.
Occupy Wall Street was totally manufactured and made up.
But this bunch of Democrats, the American Democratic Party is the party of the poor.
They need a permanent underclass, and they've succeeded in creating one, and it's gotten so bad under Obama that they don't even see themselves as upwardly mobile now.
That's the point.
You hear it expressed by the millennials, is saying they've lost faith in the country.
It's it's now seems to be rampant all across the Democrat Party.
Upward mobility just seems out of their reach.
Hence, socialism looks good.
It's terrible.
And I want to add one more thing to this.
You know this talk that we had last week about millennials not caring to own anything?
Now you might think, come on, Frush, no big deal.
This is a bunch of little kids, and they're going to grow up and they're going to change their minds about that.
Well, maybe they won't.
But let me add a point to this.
Not caring about owning private property is bad news because that feeds right into people like the modern Democrat Party's effort to establish socialism, because I'm going to tell you something.
Whether you believe this or not, the right to own property is as important or close to it as the right to free speech or any of the others in the Bill of Rights.
The right to own property and do with it what you want.
And the EPA is now telling you that a puddle in your backyard is theirs and that they can regulate your house and your property.
You might have a puddle after a rain, standing water.
It's obscene.
But when millennials come along saying, I don't care, I don't want to own a house with too much trouble.
I don't want to own a car.
That is music to the ears of Obama and people like him.
Socialism requires.
It feeds off of, it advances off the notion that people don't care about owning anything.
Governments say, fine, wonderful, we'll own it.
We'll control it.
You don't want it?
Perfect.
Not good.
Not good.
If you're focused on the greater good, which, of course, we all are here at the EIB network.
Be right back again.
Stay where you are.
Meeting and surpassing all audience expectations every day.
Rush Limbaugh doing what millions can only dream of doing.
800 282-2882, if you want to be on the program.
Here's Ken in Miami.
I'm glad you waited, sir.
Great to have you on the program.
Hi, Rush.
Hey.
The ball that takes you was the father, the son, and the Holy Ghost.
Not quite.
And they even had eye drive on Doctor Who.
Anyway, reading the D. I'm sorry, I'm having to read what you're saying because I'm having trouble understanding.
That's why the delay.
They had eye.
I don't watch Doctor Who, so I'm you know I tried and I couldn't get into it.
The phone booth.
I didn't get it.
The reason I called was that Republicans were elected to stop Obama.
Obama publicly endorsed the USA Freedom Act.
So shouldn't that be enough for the Republicans to be against it?
Uh yeah.
I feel your pain.
Um the Republicans even acknowledged that they were elected to stop Obama, but then when they have the chance they don't.
Like in the trade deal, this trans-Pacific partnership that still remains a big mystery.
It's the Republicans that are going to pull Obama.
It's caused me to be on the same page as Elizabeth Warren on this.
Imagine how bad this thing must be.
Well, yeah, actually, Elizabeth Warren's on the same page with me on this thing.
This is bad news.
It's bad news because we don't know what's in it.
It may be okay, but they're really making that look doubtful because they won't let anybody read it, take notes about it.
I mean, the people voting on it had to go to some secret room in the basement of the Capitol to read the damn thing.
And they were not allowed to tell anybody about it.
Why support that just on the basis of that alone?
But this the this Patriot Act business and the Freedom Act and what have you, the renewal of the Patriot Act, the sweeping, the hoovering, if you will, of phone metadata.
You know, I haven't talked about that today because I let off with it, and I just I think it's all academic.
I mean, it's going to be reinstituted at some point if it even really has been canceled.
I, for one, remain dubious that the NSA actually stopped collecting the data.
It's a little bit more than just flipping a switch.
This is a massive undertaking To be able to vacuum up all of that data.
So my guess is they're still collecting it, but somehow not accessing it.
They're doing something or not doing something with it to be in compliance.
But I don't believe they've stopped sweeping the data up.
And you know, you've got Rand Paul out there now starting to allege conspiracy theories left and right to the point that other Republicans are accusing him of uh fundraising and electioneering with with insincerity.
Uh here, in fact, let me find the soundbites of the grab uh grab uh start with number 13.
This is last night, Washington, the Senate floor, debating extending the surveillance of telephone and other electronic data, the NSA.
Rand Paul speaking.
This is a debate over the Bill of Rights.
This is a debate over the Fourth Amendment.
This is a debate over your right to be left alone.
We are not collecting the information of terrorists, we are collecting all American citizens' records all of the time.
This is what we fought the revolution over.
Are we going to so blithely give up our freedom?
Are we going to so blithely go along and just say, take it?
Well, I'm not gonna take it anymore.
I don't think the American people are gonna take it anymore.
Now he went on to say that in his belief there are some Republicans rooting for an attack now, so that they can blame it on him.
Meaning he thinks that that since we've stopped sweeping the data, stopped hoovering it up, that means that in the next couple of days some terrorists are going to be able to make phone calls and plan an attack, and we won't know it because we've stopped listening, which is not what this program is.
This is not a listening program.
It's simply collection of meditation.
Anyway, that he may have jumped a shark with that.
Because he started to walk that uh back.
Here's what he said about it late last night.
People here in town think I'm making a huge mistake.
Some of them, I think, secretly want there to be an attack on the United States so they can blame it on me.
All right.
Now uh didn't sit well.
You can imagine some of the Republicans thought that that was a little bit over the top, other presidential candidates.
So Rand Paul went back on the Fox News channel America's newsroom today with Bill Hammer, who said, uh, look, some of them I think secretly want there to be an attack in the U.S. Who do you talking about here, Senator Paul?
Who what are you really referring to there?
I think sometimes in the heat of battle, hyperbole can get the better of anyone, and that may be the problem there.
Um going after people's motives and impugning people's motives is a mistake.
And in the heat of battle, I think sometimes hyperbole can get the better of all of us.
Are you standing by that or not?
I'm just trying to nail that down.
Do you retract that?
I think by calling it hyperbole, that means that uh may well have exaggerated the case.
So do you pull it back or not?
He pulled it back.
All right.
Well, Senator McCain, not happy.
Uh yeah.
I know.
This is the kind of stuff the Maverick got the nickname for, doing this kind of stuff.
The Maverick.
John McCain last night, back to the Senate floor.
Rand Paul and McCain have this little uh t-a-te.
I was here for 30 minutes of uh the Republican side speaking.
I sat in my seat for 30 minutes, and it was not 23 minutes of equally divided time.
President, obviously, people don't know the rules of the Senate.
Maybe they should learn auto.
Mr. President, I request the remaining five minutes of time on the opposite side.
Is there objection to the request of the Senator from Kentucky?
I object.
I object.
I'm shaking terrible.
I mean, he's talking about sit down.
What do you mean opposite side?
It's what I do, not you.
Washington Post, why don't Americans feel better about the economy?
If there was any Washington Post, if there was any time for American consumers to feel good, it would be at this moment.
How in the hell can you write that?
We just were told last week that the first quarter growth was negative.
That the American economy is contracting, shrinking, for those of you in real India.
How in the world can you write this?
If there was any time for American, what do they think this is?
The 80s?
This is incredible.
This is Bob Schaefer news.
If there was any time for American consumers to feel good, it'd be this moment.
Job growth is brisk.
Bullshit.
BS.
Paychecks are finally nudging up.
Where?
And a surprise drop in gas prices has given the average household an extra 700.
Yeah, why aren't they spending it?
You ever stop to think?
How do you write this with 93 million Americans not working?
Why don't Americans feel better about the economy?
You people of Washington need to get out of town.
You need to get out there.
You need to get a visa.
You need to go to some states in the Midwest.
Go to Detroit.
Go to places the Democrat Party has ruled a roost for decades.
And see if you can find all this economic prosperity you see out there.
And then scratch your heads and wonder why people don't see it.
When it's invisible.
Why don't Americans feel better about the economy?
Six years after the end of the Great Recession, it hasn't ended.
We're still in it.
Americans are startlingly anxious about their economic prospects.
They're sitting on their money in a way that suggests that consumer psychology may have fundamentally changed, with people less willing to spend than they were during other periods of economic prosperity.
What does that tell you?
See, when you believe that people are idiots and when you believe that people are wrong, that's how you write crap like this.
I know you doesn't take much of an I key IQ or to know.
You don't have to be endowed with a great intelligence here to know that things are not normal economically.
That this is not people admitting they're losing faith in the country.
You know, there's a theory, David David Horowitz, I didn't just found this out, I didn't know this.
See what you think of it.
David Horowitz, front page news is a theory that the end of the Soviet Union was actually bad in one sense.
With the Soviet Union, we had an ongoing daily example of the debacle that is socialism communism.
We had an ongoing everyday example we could point to and say this is what's wrong with it.
This is what happens.
Socialism becomes now that it's gone.
There's nothing to point to.
There's nobody for the young generation of millennials that don't remember the Soviet Union.
Can't point to Cuba, think the health care is great.
Can't point to China, they make the iPhones.
So you can't point anywhere to educate people how rotten socialism is.
So it becomes acceptable.
That's a valid point.
Not to say that we should still let the Soviet Union exist, we shouldn't have taken them out, but not saying that at all.
But it it is valid.
In a sense, when you've got young people that do not know about the Soviet Union, there's nothing to point to to give them an example of, okay, you want socialism?
Well, let me tell you what it's going to be.
Look at the Soviet Union.
We don't have anywhere to point to now.
All we've got is theory.
All we can do is say, well, I tell you what's going to happen.
But if they don't believe you to start with, you're up creek.
A quick question before we get out of here, folks.
If we can change the definition of marriage, and we can with a snap of our fingers, then why can't we change the definition of motherhood?
And if we can change the definition of marriage, why can't we change the definition of fatherhood?
And why can't Bruce Jenner be a babe?
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