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Aug. 17, 2015 - Rush Limbaugh Program
32:51
August 17, 2015, Monday, Hour #3
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Look, folks, let me just tell you, the Republican establishment learns the wrong lessons of everything.
It has become obvious to me, whatever large or small issues happen, they learn the wrong lessons from it, such as they lose an election.
Oh, my God, we better shore up the Hispanic vote.
We better agree with the Democrats on amnesty.
Wrong.
Just as an example, the Republican establishment, if they're trying to figure out Donald Trump, they need to stop looking at Donald Trump.
Donald Trump does not explain Donald Trump.
They explain Donald Trump.
There's a reason Donald Trump's doing what he's doing, and it's because nobody else in the Republican establishment is.
Republican, forget, political parties have always been responsive to their voters until now.
Now we've reached what I think is a real seminal moment.
And that is the Republican Party establishment has joined the Democrat Party establishment in looking down on its own voters.
I know it's not new, folks.
Nothing's new.
Just different degrees.
I know I'm the one that's told you, and I haven't forgotten how the Republican establishment came up, poked me in the chest, asked me what I was going to do about the Christians because of the pro-life movement and abortion.
I understand all that.
But this, I mean, they're trying to figure out what, you know, what explains Trump?
Low information voters.
No, what explains Trump is the Republican establishment.
I'll have more detail if you want as the program unfolds.
I really do want to move on to other things here.
But I just, you know, George Will's talk about James Madison's separation of powers business.
That continues to perplex me.
The separation of powers isn't stopping Obama.
The separation of powers does not stop the Democrats.
But somehow we seek refuge in it.
When we don't have the desire or the ability or combination of the two to take on the Democrats and Obama and stop them, we take refuge in, well, James Madison, separation of powers.
We simply don't have the White House.
There's nothing we can do.
It's not stopping them.
But I wonder what George Will would say about this.
James Madison gave us the treaty clause in the Constitution.
Did you know that, Mr. Snirdley?
Well, James Madison is considered by some to be the father of the Constitution in terms of actual actually writing it.
And he gave us the treaty clause.
What the Republicans give us?
The Corker Bill.
James Madison gives us the treaty clause, and what Obama has done is actually negotiate a treaty with the Iranians.
But here come the Republicans to the rescue and say, nope, we're going to do the Corker Bill, which is going to help Obama get his deal done by reversing the treaty process.
By putting the onus on us to stop him rather than the treaty process putting the onus on the president to get support.
180 degrees out of phase.
The Corker Bill puts the onus on his own party to stop Obama.
And Obama says, treaty, what treaty?
Screw you.
Screw the Constitution.
This treaty here.
This is an executive agreement.
I have the rest of the world on my side.
I won.
And we've got the Corker Bill.
And thanks to that, Obama's going to get his Iran deal.
And James Madison's treaty clause is just wafting away over there, vaporizing right before our very eyes and ears.
I can honestly tell you, back when I was 16 years old and I was imagining a career in radio, this was not it.
I'm just, I will guarantee it to you, this is not what it was.
I meant that my dreams were I was going to be number one and I was going to reach my goals and I was going to accomplish my objectives.
It was not this.
I'm not complaining.
I'm just making an observation.
Anyway, to Hillary Clinton, because we've got to start on this stuff.
There's still a lot of Trump stuff left here.
Not a lot.
There's still some stuff.
And interesting, sounds like John Harbaugh, the coach of the Baltimore Ravens, came out for Trump.
In a way, by endorsing Trump's immigration plan.
Anyway, Chuck Todd, F. Chuck Todd, meet the press yesterday.
F. Chuck, he went to Iowa, went to the Iowa State Fair, which is where all the candidates were last week and over the weekend.
And Chuck Todd admitted that he was stunned at how he was stunned at how easy it was to find Democrats.
willing to criticize Hillary Clinton over her email scandal.
Here's the audio soundbite.
Chuck Todd, stunned at how openly Democrats are criticizing Mrs. Clinton.
I was stunned at how many, how easily it was to find these Democrats willing to say these things.
That was on camera.
Molly Ball, this morning's Washington Post, blind quote central from Democratic hand-wringers.
A lot of people who were hired by the campaign were new to the Clintons.
I kind of assumed it would be different, but it hasn't changed.
Another strategist.
I don't think there's a big smoking gun, but it's hard to explain why you had a private server, why you just now turned it over.
Shouldn't you have had better judgment?
No, that didn't sound like Chuck Todd to me.
Maybe my co-clear, it did sound like Chuck Todd to you, did it?
It sounded like Mark Halperin to me.
But it was Chuck.
I'm just, you know why Chuck is surprised?
NBC hasn't reported it.
You know, these people in the drive-by media have not talked about this email server.
They maybe have spent seconds on it.
Aggregate, maybe minutes, but they haven't dug deep into this at all.
They've buried the story.
That's why they're shocked when they go out to Iowa and find people easily willing to criticize Mrs. Clinton over it.
I'm telling you, folks, this is not an exaggeration.
These people, I don't care who they are, if they're lobbyists, if they're case readers, if they are politicians, if they're media, if they are corporate executives, if they are inside that beltway and if they are in the establishment, I'm telling you, they are clueless what's happening outside it.
And it's really kind of striking because it's their business to at least have the pulse of the people, whether they disdain it or not, they at least have always known what it is.
They have become so contemptuous of non-elites that they're not even endeavoring to understand what's going on out there.
So in a sense, they sit there inside their studios inside the beltway, the New York-Washington corridor, and they report the news.
If they leave out the Hillary email scandal, then they get a visa and they go to Iowa and they find out that they can easily find people to criticize it.
Well, what's this?
We're not even talking about how these people know.
And then after that realization, then the fact that there are Democrats willing to criticize Hillary, they can't believe it because they're not criticizing Hillary.
How easily they seem to have forgotten 2008.
We are up now, by the way, ladies and gentlemen.
Let me check the latest number.
305 emails classified as secret one way or the other now.
Washington Times, while media coverage is focused on a half dozen of Hillary Clinton's personal emails containing sensitive intelligence, the total number of her private emails identified by an ongoing State Department review has now reached 305 and counting.
And the question, I'm going to ask this question again.
Is Hillary the only member of this administration to have had a private at-home server?
Everybody's acting like she's the now.
We know that Lisa Jackson did.
Lois Lerner was doing some magic from home.
But I'm just, you know, I'm genuinely curious here.
The obvious efforts that existed to cover this up and to ignore it and to say there's nothing there.
I originally thought the reason for that was, I mean, there was even reticence in Congress, the Republican-run Congress.
There was slow motion getting into Benghazi, slow motion getting into this.
And I said, maybe there's something about them on these emails.
I mean, who knows what she's collected here?
Maybe there's something about Obama.
There's something on this server she's got that a whole lot of people in Washington don't want anybody to get wind of maybe what she's done is going to impact a lot of that that is the Clinton M.O. So I just Look at her poller number.
She continues to lose ground to Bernie Sanders in New Hampshire.
Chris Steyerwalt at Fox News, Hillary Clinton outrunning her own privilege.
For now, the answer would appear to be yes.
Can Hillary Clinton be this bad at running for president and still get away with it?
For now, the answer would appear to be yes.
But we are starting to see her reaching the tether of the privileges associated with being a president's wife, associated with being her party's 2008 runner-up, and the beneficiary of a $2 billion campaign apparatus.
It's still her turn on the Democrat side, but an awful lot of Democrats are coming to wish there was another way.
The latest Fox News poll that shows Trump up at 25% shows Hillary Clinton losing 10 points of her lead since last month on Vermont socialist Bernie Sanders.
Chris Saliza in the Washington Post, it is too late for Democrats to start rethinking Hillary's 2016 viability.
Dear Democrats, it's too late to start over.
As in, there's no replacing Hillary Clinton as your party's frontrunner for the presidential nomination.
Not with Biden, even if he runs.
Not with Al Gore.
I mean, come on.
Not with your ideal rich person with no record in a fresh-faced appeal like Tom Steyer, the environmentalist wacko from California.
Saliza says this may come as a shock to some of you Democrats.
After all, you argue it's only August.
The hawkeye cauckey won't be till February.
Yeah, but modern presidential politics isn't as simple as announcing that you've decided to run and watching yourself soar to the top of the polls.
Unless, of course, you're Donald Trump, who appears entirely immune to every political law of gravity.
Saliza throws that in his piece.
You think it's not bothering them?
You think it's not bothering them that Donald Trump is immune to every political law of gravity?
What that means is he should have been toast by now two or three times.
And Selizza goes on to recount why Biden doesn't have a prayer, why Gore is not even in the picture, and no fresh face never heard of or seen before Democrat in California has a chance.
The idea of a late entrant, reshaping the race, and unseating Hillary might make sense to doubting Democrats, but the nature of the modern presidential contest makes it more fantasy than reality.
Democrats threw their lot in with Clinton more than a year ago, and now they have to try to ride it out.
They don't have any choice.
Not, really.
Back to the audio sound bites.
Eugene Robinson on Meet the Press.
He's still with the Washington.
Yep.
He's a columnist there at the Washington Post.
And they're talking about Hillary and her private during the roundtable of Meet the Press.
They're talking about Hillary and her private email scandal.
It's hard to claim this is all just a partisan witch hunt when the Justice Department under a Democratic administration is looking into the whole email mess.
So that doesn't ring so true.
And it is not going to have an impact on people the way she wants it to.
And clearly, a lot of Democrats are worried.
Jeff Greenfield on the Meet the Press roundtable.
It's the tinier quality of so much of what the Clinton, Mrs. Clinton, has exhibited this campaign, the 2008 campaign.
The distinction between her and her husband is monumental in terms of a kind of natural ability to deal with this.
Right.
Did you see the pictures of Bill playing golf with Obama?
There's a picture here, the Drudge Report homepage, Clinton and Obama playing golf.
And it sure looks like this is a still shot, and it surely, they could be talking about how Clinton, whatnot, bounds, you idiots right there, right on the line.
I didn't hear that about it.
Screw you.
But it looks like Clinton is warning Obama and telling him off, waving his arm around there, got a plaintive look on his face.
But a lot of people are wondering, okay, what was this about?
These two guys go out and play golf, and Clinton's wife is under investigation by Obama's DOJ.
So who knows what about who?
Who has the leverage in that meeting?
Who can threaten who the most?
What kind of conversation was that?
And of course, was it about Hillary?
And was Obama making threats?
Was Clinton making threats?
Did any of this come up?
It's speculation at this point.
Now, William Jacobson, Legal Insurrection, confirms here that ABC News reports there may be a backup server.
That Hillary Clinton may have had, and that is an ABC News report that Hillary had a backup server.
And if that's true, and the odds are she, if we could look at it, she doesn't know any of this stuff, but she hired professionals to put this together for her.
And folks, we, as you know, on this program routinely talk about and advising everybody to back up everything on your computer because you're going to lose it in a moment's notice.
Well, don't think for a minute that whoever was running Hillary's server didn't also know that.
It's the rigor, if you will, in high-tech.
You back up everything multiple times.
Nothing languishes on its own out there.
So the idea that there's a backup server, meaning if there's a backup server, it's somewhere and it hadn't been wiped.
And by backup server, I don't mean other servers in a rate array in the same shell.
I'm talking about a separate server, separate drives, maybe off-site, backed up with every bit of data on it.
And if that's true, this email scandal could still be picking up steam.
We'll just have to wait and see.
She's by no means in the clear on this, despite the efforts of some of the media to make it look like she is.
There's always Democrat public opinion about this.
You cannot erase or take away what Bernie Sanders is doing out there.
Whether he's going to end up being the nominee or not, it sends a message of discontent that there still is with Hillary.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Let me find it real quick here.
There's a piece.
I put it at the bottom of the stack, and I'm going to find it.
One reporter, here it is.
It's from the UK Telegraph.
And I forget the woman's name.
It was a British paper.
And the story.
Hillary Clinton steals the show at Iowa County Fair, a state fair the Democrats meet.
Standing before a giant American flag, her arms outstretched before the cheering crowd.
She broke into a anyway.
This woman goes on to say that Hillary's speech and her appearance on Saturday in Iowa was the best political speech so far in this campaign.
That she's back, that she owned it.
And it's the only place I saw it.
Every other place I consulted that reported on it said that Hillary was stiff, unfamiliar with her own material, self-conscious, uncomfortable looking.
And she tried cracking a joke.
Now, I haven't, I didn't see the speech yet.
I'm going to listen to this soundbite, and I'm going to see if the UK Telegraph is right or if the critics are.
It was in Clear Lake, Iowa, at a campaign event.
And this is how Hillary chose to defuse this whole email scandal, server scandal.
I recently launched a Snapchat account.
I love it.
I love it.
Those messages disappear all by themselves.
All right.
All right.
You know what this means?
This is a stage of a campaign that is not in good shape.
And this stage is known as the laugh about it stage, make a joke about it stage.
I don't think Mrs. Clinton has the foggiest idea what Snapchat is, even after that joke.
They might have told her about it when she sees that they wrote it for her.
But that line does not come.
That's a written line or a memorized line.
It's certainly not delivered by somebody that knows what Snapchat is.
Listen to it again.
I recently launched a Snapchat account.
Yay!
I love it.
I love it.
Those messages disappear all by themselves.
That's not how you'd tell people about Snapchat.
Listen again.
Number 18, Friday.
Listen again.
18, repeat it.
Same thing over again.
Let's go.
I recently launched a Snapchat account.
I love it.
I love it.
Those messages disappear all by themselves.
Those messages disappear.
That's not how somebody advocating Snapchat, even somebody who recently discovered it, would talk about it.
I don't think it was a great.
That sounds like the usual stiff Hillary to me.
Look, Snapchat, Snapchat is for videos and pictures primarily.
Snapchat is not a good analogy to her email problem because Snapchat, the idea behind it is to capture spontaneous, unstaged situations, something Hillary would never do.
Everything she does is choreographed.
There's no spontaneity with Hillary.
Hell, I mean, she even schedules dancing on the beach in the Virgin Islands with her husband when there's no music just for the photo op.
But Snapchat is not videos and photos.
It's not just an instant message service like she seems to think.
Anyway, to the phones, quickly, John Fort Wayne, Indiana, really glad you waited.
I appreciate your patience.
Hello, sir.
Well, hello.
Hello, Rush, my hero.
Rush, when I hear good speeches and good talk, I always put your teaching as a grid over it so I can adjudicate between the fluff and the good.
And where I'm nowhere a political scientist, you have trained me pretty well.
Now, on the Sean Hannity show, I thought Trump was answering, and he would ask important questions in distinction terms of what he would do when he was president.
And what he said, though, that I found interesting is one of the things that he does so that he can make these good decisions is that he studies contracts.
He reads voraciously, like you do, but he reads voraciously contracts so that he can get on the stage of politics and his business and make tremendous decisions.
I was wondering if you could, there's two parts to this question.
If you could tell me and your audience, what is it that when you study contracts, I mean, what's the motif?
I know you can't go with each one.
I mean, each one has its own particulars, but what is the concept of reading and studying contracts?
In fact, he said he liked it so much, Rush, and I don't understand this because I'm not a golfer.
He said he's a five, like in golf with contracts.
I was thinking a par five, no.
So I didn't know what he meant by that.
And then the second part of the question is, after this tremendous show, the Sean Hannity program was on during the week.
They played it again on Sunday morning, and I watched it for the second time.
Later that afternoon, they had Rich Lowery on, who I'm not positive, but I think he took over the business of William Buckley, which I know is one of your favorite politicians.
Buckley named him the editor of National Review long before he passed away.
He didn't take over anything.
Well, anyway, Rich Lowery was very, very unkind.
And I'm sure he didn't mean to be.
I mean, he wasn't doing a cutthroat thing.
But in his way he says he saw and hears Trump, it is ridiculous.
He's a blowhard.
He's a woman abuser.
And he never makes a good point.
I thought, how could Rich Lowry spending any time with William Buckley?
Can he say that?
And then the last part of this question is, what would Henry Kissinger do if he was thrown in the middle of this situation?
Gosh, in Vietnam, he made a tremendous...
What would Kissinger do if he was thrown in the middle of what situation?
I have lost track of what we're talking about here.
Okay, we're talking about two things.
What happens when Trump reads a contract?
What is he reading?
What is he looking at?
Oh, okay.
Yeah, Trump and contracts.
I didn't hear the interview.
I didn't see the Hannity interview with Trump on Fox.
So I've just got to take your word for it that he said I don't know the context.
Did you hear it, Snerdly?
You didn't.
All right, so we're told here that Trump said that the most important thing to him is understanding contracts.
I just have to take a wild guess.
Man, I don't know.
No, no, no, no, no.
I mean, I just have to answer this in a generic way, like anybody would about contracts.
I mean, why do you have contracts?
Why do you have them?
Why do they exist?
Right.
It's to keep people honest.
It's to have a record of what's been agreed to because the presumption is that some people are going to cheat.
The presumption is that some people are going to be dishonest.
The presumption is that some people are going to take advantage.
The presumption is that you have to have something on record to keep people true to their word.
I don't know why Trump said that contracts are the most important thing to him.
I wouldn't even want to try to without hearing what he said because he might have been talking about a specific business deal or he might have been talking about a contract in the terms of a treaty with a country.
I don't know.
Maybe to him, contracts are educational in terms you learn what are important to other people when they insist on things.
The concept of throwaways.
You learn what's important, what's not important to people when you do a contract with them.
Contracts there to be enforced.
Maybe he's rigidly tough.
Trump being called stupid or whatever, joke by Lowry.
I mean, he's not the only one calling him a joke.
So I don't know.
Let me find the quote, the whole quote, and get it in context, and I may be able to answer that.
I mean, I could give you an answer, but it'd be generic, just entirely generic.
And I don't want to presume things I don't know about it.
Anyway, John, I appreciate the call.
I still don't know Henry Kissinger.
Henry Kissinger, Trump contracts.
Henry Kissinger do with Richard Lowry.
What Henry Kissinger do with Buckley and Trump and contracts and so forth.
I don't know.
We'll have to find Kissinger probably lesser.
Go find him and ask him.
Trump was talking about Iran.
He was talking about the Iran deal with Hannity.
He said, I study contracts.
I mean, you know, in golf, I say I'm a plus five at contracts, okay?
Our caller wanted to know what that meant.
He's talking about handicaps.
You have an 18 handicap, it means you're given 18 shots per round.
If you have a zero handicap, you're scratch.
If you're a plus five, it means you are giving shots away.
It means, par 72, you have to shoot 67 in order to be your handicap.
A plus pros are plus three, plus four, plus.
Trump is saying he is better than anybody at reading contracts.
He's a plus five.
He says, I study contracts.
No matter how bad this contract is, I will make it be enforced to such an extent they will not be able to do it, and then I will do things that you won't believe.
So he's merely saying, whatever Obama does with this deal, Trump will go in and find out what's wrong with it and fix it, is what he's saying, because he's an expert at contracts.
Now, whatever that means, he knows how people cheat.
He knows what the fine print means and where to find the fine print.
Who knows?
He's just saying nobody's going to out-negotiate him.
He's a plus-five at negotiating.
He is the art of the deal.
He defines the deal.
He's the one who gets the deal done.
And if somebody does a deal that screws us, Trump's going to be the guy that turns it around and screws them.
That's what he was saying.
This is why I didn't presume to answer it until I found out what it was that he was talking about.
Mary in Greensville, South Carolina, great to have you on the EIB network.
Hello.
Hi.
Thank you so much for taking my call.
What an honor to speak with you.
Welcome.
Thank you.
Well, what I wanted to say is what the low-information media needs to understand is Donald Trump already has all the specifics he needs.
We have 200 years of American exceptionalism.
We don't need a new plan.
We just need to do what has already worked for us.
It's the best country on the planet.
You don't need to make up a bunch of new stuff.
You should read your book, study a little bit of history, the media, and then they would know what we need to do to turn this around.
Just get back to what we've been doing so well.
So you interview when Trump says he's going to make America great again, he's just going to take us back to doing what we did that got us where we are.
Well, and repeal so many of the Bergstrom regulations and get back to capitalism and secure the borders.
I mean, all the things, the tenants of America, that's all we need to do is get rid of the other stuff and go back to what we did for so long, so well.
Okay, now, don't get mad at me.
Don't get mad at me.
Trump's never said that.
But that's what you've interpreted, which is my point.
And there's but the key to what she said here, she said, we don't need any specifics.
We already know what those are.
We know what made this country great, and she thinks Trump knows, and she thinks Trump stands for that, and she thinks Trump is going to do that.
She doesn't need, so what she's saying is, all of you Beltway media people, take your specifics and stuff it.
We don't need specifics.
We already know what makes this country great, and we know who's been doing it and who's trying to undermine it.
We know who believes in it and who doesn't.
And she's saying we believe Trump stands for and wants greatness in America.
And anybody that does knows what it is.
It's the specifics of policy and legislation that nobody can read that's getting us in trouble.
It's the specifics of policy and legislation that nobody does read before they vote on it that's getting us in trouble.
That's my word.
She didn't say that.
And Trump hasn't said that.
I'm saying it.
I don't, what, what greater indictment could there be?
We got a 2,200-page health care bill, and we are told by the Democrat leader we have to pass it to find out what's in it.
And people go, oh, okay.
Well, screw that.
And then the same thing with Obama's Pacific Pan's Pacific, whatever it is, trade deal.
That was so secret the people voting on it were not even allowed to read it first unless they went to a secret room in the Capitol and they weren't allowed to take any notes that they could leave with.
Specifics?
This is not hard to figure out, folks.
It's not hard to figure out why Trump's resonating with people.
It's not hard to understand why Perot resonated with people.
It isn't hard.
The more contemptuous that the inside of Beltway people continue to be about the people I say make this country work, the more support they're going to engender for Trump.
I mean, Trump exists because of them.
You get right down to it.
Anyway, we've run out of time.
I just, I'm sad about this because they're just, I mean, you see the stuff I'm leaving on the table here.
I mean, the, like James Harrison not letting his kids get a performance trophy, participation trophy.
I can't wait to get it in the table.
And other things.
And we still have stuff in the Trump stack I didn't get to today, but there's always tomorrow.
Michael Sam quit for, yeah, but the media is not a replacement.
Some other team somewhere, Michael Sam.
He's going to come back after he gets some help.
But I didn't even have that story in the stack.
That's it, folks.
Sadly, we are out of busy broadcast time today, but there's always tomorrow, and it'll be here.
It'll be on us before you know it.
Really appreciate your being with us.
Appreciate the tolerance of the frenetic pace today.
More of the same tomorrow, no doubt.
Be here.
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