All Episodes
Previous Next
Aug. 20, 2015 - Rush Limbaugh Program
33:48
August 20, 2015, Thursday, Hour #3
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Okay, so who said it first?
Whoever will not work should not eat.
Somebody did say it first.
Snerdley, you are on a roll today.
It is in the Bible somewhere, quote unquote.
St. Paul said it to the Thessalonians.
And it is not whoever will not work will not eat.
It is whoever will not work should not eat.
Of course, here in the United States, we have 94 million not working, and they are all eating.
Greetings.
And no, by the way, I don't have a problem with that per se.
Don't misunderstand what I'm saying here.
You people, you know, I get emails.
Every time I make that claim, I get these snarky emails from people who think, you really think people should starve, Mr. Limbo.
Come on, you people know better than that.
You little nattering nabobs.
The fact of the matter is, 94 million Americans are not working and they're all eating.
It means they don't have to work.
And that's not good for them.
And it's not good for us.
It's not good for the country.
It's not good for the future.
It's not good for their families.
It's not good for their self-esteem.
It's what everybody was talking about when they were acting to James Harrison saying these boys are not going to get participation trophies.
Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh.
Speaking of which, you knew it was coming.
There's an op-ed in USA today.
I have it here in the stack from somebody who thinks that James Harrison is all wet.
That that's just all wrong.
That there's nothing at all wrong with kids getting performance trophies.
Because kids are smarter than we know.
They know.
They're smart.
They know who wins.
They know who's losing.
They don't need this kind of education.
They're fully capable of understanding they're getting trophies for nothing, and it doesn't hurt them.
Anyway, great to have you back here, folks.
As the fastest three hours a movie plows on, it's 800.
What Steam's on, actually, 800-282-2882.
If you want to be on the program, the email address, illrushbo at EIBNet.com.
In his weekly Angelus message on Wednesday, Pope Francis praised the value of hard work and a willingness to do one's part for the common good rather than freeloading off society.
Citing St. Paul, Francis said that anyone unwilling to work should not eat and added that being called a hard worker is the highest form of praise for a serious, honest person.
Now, quite understandably, the left is going to have problems with this, given that these cited sources of the Bible, because that's for religious fanatics and pro-lifers and southerners.
And therefore, it's, you know, it's kookery, it's quackery.
To call somebody a worker, Pope Francis said, means that he is a member of the community who does his part and doesn't live off of others.
This lesson has been taught so many times in the course of human history, it's amazing that it never is learned.
If it were learned, the Democrat Party wouldn't be nearly the success that it is.
But even though it's understood, even though philosophically people, oh yeah, yeah, everybody should work.
Oh, yeah, everybody should participate.
Oh, yeah, everybody needs to control.
Oh, yeah, universal agreement with that.
And then it all breaks down and falls apart.
When you've got 94 million Americans not working, many of whom want to.
A slew of them want to.
94 million Americans not working, but they're all eating.
And let's not just stop there.
They probably all have transportation.
Many of them, we know, have air conditioning.
Many of them have big screen or some kind of TV.
Many of them have cable.
Oh, yeah, well, Obama phones, yeah.
A lot of Obama phones out there.
Many of them may now be cord cutters.
You know, there is a, speaking of cord cutting, there is a serious and dramatic cultural shift taking place in the American pop culture.
And it is this.
The numbers of people who are abandoning traditional sources for television is rapidly increasing.
It is pretty soon it's going to change the face of entertainment, the way content is delivered.
Cable TV subscriptions are down.
Satellite subscriptions are down.
It's, in some cases, it's at a pretty rapid clip.
And people are more and more so content-oriented, they don't even know or care, for example, what network the shows they like are on.
They just want the shows wherever they have to go to get the shows.
And among the millennials, stands to reason, they don't want to pay for it.
Somebody offers this stuff for nothing, they are there, even piracy.
As you know, I study the tech blogs.
I don't just read them.
I study them.
There is an abject hatred for cable companies.
There's an abject hatred for telecoms.
Now, the tech blogs are a bunch of leftists.
They're a bunch of high-tech nerd geek leftists.
It's understandable to be anti-corporate.
But it's really pronounced and it's almost universal.
And whenever there is a story of a cable company here or a cable company or telecom over there getting punished, losing customers, losing money, they are happy.
They love it.
There's a resentment along with the hatred.
And I think it's like many things are, it's rooted in money and the fact that these people just, they're not making much.
They're not earning very much money.
It's the Obama economy, after all.
And they just are on a quest to find as much as they can for nothing.
It's the same concept, though, as eating.
I mean, there's no free lunch, somebody's paying for it.
You know, if you're accessing cable TV, satellite TV, or whatever, and you're not paying for it because you don't think you should, somebody is.
The idea that you can continue to get it, if you don't pay for it and nobody pays for it, how can it survive?
But people who look at the federal government is never ending no matter what happens to it.
People believe in big government.
They have this belief that the golden goose never dies.
The golden goose, the producers, they're always going to be there.
They're never going to get you.
They're never going to have any real harm come to them.
Don't fool you.
This is what they believe.
But this shift in television content, particularly, it's not just Netflix, although Netflix is big.
You've got the Amazon and Roku and all these things.
It's getting significant now.
And there's always massive change in every culture, every generation, every society.
But there are so many systems in place, deeply embedded in terms of the operational structure, that this change is profound.
It's going to catch a lot of these corporate entities flat-footed.
ESPN, ESPN is in some serious, I don't know, they're not serious financial trouble, but ESPN is probably the richest cable company because they are paid the most per subscriber by cable companies.
ESPN was just rolling in money.
They were priving it.
Can you imagine whatever number of people subscribe to cable?
And imagine every one of those people paying ESPN $5 a month through the cable company.
Cable company pays it.
You pay the cable company.
You're paying ESPN that much, even though your bill goes to the cable company.
And all of that is dependent on the number of subscribers.
And if the cable companies, satellite companies start losing subscribers, so do all of these networks and content providers.
And it is going to change the way content's produced and provided, paid for, delivered.
And it's, I mean, it's exciting in one sense.
And where it looks like it's headed is a la carte, way down the road, meaning you turn on your TV and you'll be able to tell Siri, I want to watch cheers.
And you're given a list of episodes and you pick the one you want to watch.
You haven't accessed the network.
You don't know that it's NBC.
You don't know that it's CBS.
It may not be either one.
You're just going someplace that you're paying for that has this content.
You tell Siri you want to watch this and there it is on the screen.
Choose the episode you want to watch.
Hit the play button and you're off.
This is the dream and has been the dream for a lot of people.
At the root of this is the tiered structure of cable bills, people being forced to pay for 250 channels when they watch five.
And therein lies some of the resentment and where this robust change is taking place.
To me, it's fascinating to watch.
I'm a content believer, content, content, content.
I've always, you know, people say to me and have been saying to me for the 28th year, Rush, are you worried?
What's going to happen to AM radio?
Nothing as long as I'm on it.
Well, that's really a bregadocia.
No, no, no, no.
I'm speaking pure business.
I believe in content, content, kind.
If people like what they like, they'll go wherever it is to get it.
Even if it's a couple of tin cans and a piece of string.
That's why I've always believed in content as the way to cut through all the noise.
You know, so much to choose from.
Radio, television, online, you name it.
Where do customers' loyalty lies?
Viewers, listeners, where does the loyalty lie?
To the network that broadcasts it or to the content itself?
And it's obviously to the content.
I think there's lessons there for people in politics.
Is loyalty to the party or to a particular candidate in the party?
How far does it go?
The Republicans have learned that party loyalty can't be counted on.
They learned it in 2012 when 4 million people stayed home, according to the statistics.
But content to me has always been king, and it's not to many people.
There are other factors that are just as important, but I don't think there's any question now.
And content, content, content is always going to be the determining factor in whether something's popular or not.
I don't know how it can be otherwise.
Rare exceptions, loss leader type programming, but as I say, that's not a profit-setter anyway, so it's not included in the equation.
Now, back to Il Papa.
Pope Francis is all over the place.
One day, he sounds like a standard, ordinary, right-down-the-middle conservative.
The next day, you would swear the guy's got ties to the deepest socialism in the world.
Here he is standing up for work and talking about the value of work and the value of work to a person's psyche, not just to the community.
And you don't hear this much.
You hear it in the context of jobs.
We need to provide jobs this, jobs, that.
But actual work and the idea of self-worth that comes from a job well done.
You know, these people that prosthetize on self-esteem could learn a lot about the kind of self-esteem that results from doing good work, doing great work, and not work acknowledged by others that's great.
You know whether you've done a good job or not.
The Pope said that work is needed to support one's family.
Work is needed to raise children.
Work is needed to ensure a decent life to loved ones.
This habit of hard work, the Pope added, is learned in the home from one's parents who support their family and in this way contribute to the common good.
Christians can find a great example of industriousness in the life of Jesus himself, the Pope said.
In the Gospel, the Holy Family of Nazareth appears as a working family, and Jesus himself is called a carpenter's son, or even the carpenter.
St. Paul's injunction that people who don't want to work shouldn't eat is a good recipe for losing weight, the Pope said.
Little stab at humor there.
St. Paul's denunciation of idleness, the Pope said, refers explicitly to a false spiritualism of some who lived off the backs of their brothers and sisters while doing nothing.
In the Christian outlook, a commitment of hard work is not opposed to a deep spiritual life, Francis said, referencing the example of St. Benedict, who taught that prayer and work can and should be found together in harmony.
A lack of work is bad for the spirit, the Pope said.
Work, he said, expresses the dignity of being created in the image of God.
And that is why it is said that work is sacred.
Okay.
Next time you run into a homeless guy, the odds are that are good in New York City near the United Nations.
Make sure you encounter this homeless person with a liberal buddy.
Encounter the homeless person, stand there, study the situation, and say, boy, man, this guy just needs to get a job.
And watch what happens to you.
Gauge the reaction from your liberal buddy.
He will react to your express desire, the homeless person, get a job and start working with disdain, and will say something easy for you to say as though it's discriminatory and bigoted to suggest that there are roots out of idleness that one can take themselves without any assistance.
That's like the Pope.
I mean, this is as down the middle.
I mean, I don't even want to call it conservative.
It's just plain old, good-fashioned common sense.
But it isn't at all compatible with socialism because socialism is created around the common denominator of sameness and failure and accommodating it and treating it and being nice to it and being understanding of it.
And some days the Pope gives off that impression.
This day he didn't.
Yesterday, ladies and gentlemen, I got an email.
It had nothing to do with anything we've been talking about on this program for weeks.
Person wanted to know why I thought college tuition kept rising and is it ever ever going to come down?
And I said, no, as long as there is a student alone program, there's no way college tuition is ever going to come down.
It's like war.
War is a great investment.
Well, it is.
Stop and think of it.
War is a great investment.
The student alone program is one of the greatest investments you can make.
Why would anybody at a university start thinking about cutting costs when there's a student alone program to provide whatever the tuition is?
There's no incentive to cut.
I got to take a break here because I'm way up against it on time.
We'll be back.
Hey, I was just asked a good question.
All these cord cutters, they're cutting cable, cutting satellite.
Where do they get their news if you're not watching TV?
A great question.
You know where they're getting their news?
They're getting well, you're getting on their mobile devices, but not from TV.
They're not getting Facebook, the news digest, their Twitter.
You know, whatever the people they're retweeting or posting on their own news feeds or what have you.
Some people get their news from advertising.
It's going to, in time, it's going to have a profound difference.
I think this is the root of many low-information voters, by the way.
I think this is the cause.
I think it's the if you want to trace back where did they come from?
I think this is one of the places that's creating low information, cord cutting.
On the tuition business, in the next half hour, there is a place in America where college tuition is lowering.
College tuition is getting cheaper.
And it was and is the result of legislation by Republicans.
Now, admittedly, it's state universities.
It's in the state of Washington.
And Republican legislators have pulled this off.
And they do not hold the office of governor.
They hold one branch.
And they've pulled it off in state schools.
So it can be done.
One example: I'll give you the evidence of it and get back to your phone calls after this brief obscene profit timeout.
Hang in there, folks.
Be tough.
The saga continues with a man, a legend, a way of life.
Great to have you back.
Check the email again.
Email's interesting today.
Rush.
I kind of understand.
I agree with you.
Why in the world is the NFL seemed so insistent on punishing its marquee player?
Let me tell you something you may not know that may give you some insight into what is going on here.
As you know, there are different factions on all sides of this thing.
On the one side, I have the New England Patriots and Spygate, and then this Deflate Gate.
Over here, we have the NFL.
And within the NFL, you have factions there that love the Patriots, suspect the Patriots, don't like the league is competitive.
It's a fraternity, but don't think that these people don't want to just cream each other.
I mean, it's big money, it's big business, it's big ego bragging rights.
And these are the kind of people that are not satisfied just getting in the club.
They want to dominate it and own it.
Okay?
To give you some idea of what might be propelling this, Tony Dungy, the former coach of the Indianapolis Colts, was on the radio recently, and he said that when the Colts traveled to play in New England, they would not conduct any serious discussions in the locker room because they thought the Patriots bugged it.
Peyton Manning, specifically, when he needed to have strategy sessions with receivers, the offensive coordinator would go outside the locker room and in the tunnel in the bowels of Gillette Stadium.
And Dungy was asked, did you think this was the well, you know, Peyton, he's competitive, and we just, we didn't want to take any chances.
When we went to New England in the locker room there, we did not discuss anything seriously.
Well, now, if you have, who knows?
I'm just saying, if you have teams that think the locker room is bugged, or worse, I mean, folks, what Al Davis and the raider, like Kenny Stabler, I went to one of his golf targets, the stuff that he admitted that they did.
It was funny to talk about it, but everything you'd heard they did deflated the balls, muddied the field to slow down the opposing team's running game, all that and more.
But back that was golden era, just the beginning of big TV money, and it was a different era.
Now, this is huge, big stakes, year-round business popularity for a game that basically occupies six months of the year in terms of its real product.
So I'm just saying, if you have a star quarterback, Peyton Manning, who thinks that a team is bugging the locker room in order to gain a competitive, and that same team as the team that was in Spygate, then you might be able to conclude there might be some owners in this Brady fight that are urging the commissioner not to waver and a hammer, because there's still a lot of people who think the Patriots got off lightly, punishment-wise, with Spygate.
I don't know, folks.
I don't have a dog in the fight.
But people ask me questions, and I answer them to the best of my ability using intelligence guided by experience mixed in with common sense.
From the Wall Street Journal, Hillary Clinton's campaign said last night that emails on the private server she used when she was Secretary of State did contain material that is now classified.
This is the clearest explanation thus far of an issue that has roiled her bid for the presidency.
So the campaign, not Hillary, the campaign is saying that classified mails were on the server.
Hillary's, no, no, no, there was never anything marked.
That's always been the exception was nothing marked.
It didn't say it is on there.
I mean, I wouldn't have known it was classified.
It didn't say it was.
I didn't see any classified material.
Nothing was so designated.
Well, here comes the campaigns.
Things must be getting bad.
The evidence must be piling up.
There's no question, folks, Obama's running this show, in my mind.
No question whatsoever.
This drip, drip, drip, I first proffered this possible Obama strategy weeks ago.
Rather than drop the hammer of full-fledged investigation and just the drip, drip, drip, drip every day, something new to raise doubts, all kinds of doubts about Mrs. Clinton, her honesty, her integrity, her competency.
And that is indeed what is happening.
Okay, so yesterday, make the point that there's no reason college tuition would come down when the student alone program exists.
I mean, if, and put everything else in the mix, too.
Universities are indoctrination centers for young skulls full of mush to become liberal.
That is where they go, to have liberalism and everything else inculcated, hammered into their young skulls full of mush.
It's important that these universities are staffed by people who can do this, the right kind of professors, right kind of college professors.
You have to pay them.
It's not a big, high-paying profession.
They write some books here, some papers, outside income.
So you make sure you pay them.
Student loan program now run by the regime.
The regime's in total control of the student loan program.
There's no reason for tuition to come.
If you run a college and there's a company out there called a government that's going to loan any student money to go to college, and given what everybody thinks you can't get ahead if you don't go to college, it's worth whatever it costs you.
And if the money is going to be made available, it doesn't matter if somebody's going to spend the rest of their life paying it back.
That doesn't matter.
What matters is there's no reason to cut tuition.
Well, I learned after the program yesterday that in Washington state, Republicans have actually cut college tuition at state-run schools.
The long and short of it is that Republicans, with the help of one conservative Democrat, have control of the Senate, just the Senate in Washington.
That's all they've got.
Now, you hear McConnell, for example, say, well, can't do anything here.
All we have is the House.
You give us the Senate.
Now we're talking.
Okay, we gave him the Senate.
Well, you know what?
Obama's still in the White House.
Separation of powers.
I mean, we really, we put up a good fight, but there's nothing we can do to stop him.
And they'll probably say if we win the White House and have the House in the Senate, we'll probably get another reason why we can't win.
We don't have the media.
We don't have the media rush.
We got everything.
We got the House.
We got the White House.
We got the Senate.
But we don't have the court and we don't have the media.
We're giving it our best rush.
You can count on us.
Anyway, the Democrats in the state of Washington were using ever-increasing tuition to pay for a whole bunch of other social programs.
There's a senator, Andy Hill, who said that it amounted to a hidden tax increase on the middle class, this rising tuition, exactly what it was, because nobody has the money for it anymore.
Even at state-run schools, the odds are most people are going to have to get a loan.
The tuition hike money was taken from the schools and spent elsewhere.
That's where the increased tuition costs went, was to embed people in social programs.
So in 2013, the first thing they did was freeze tuition increases.
And then this year, they actually cut it.
Not just a reduction in the rate of growth.
They actually cut it.
A quarter billion dollar tax cut is the effect for the middle class, was the impact of this.
So it can be done.
It can be done with the right people, the right initiative, desire, and salesmanship.
Because everybody is interested in costs for everything coming down.
I mean, nobody ever celebrates the cost of anything getting higher.
Yet college tuition never does anything but raise.
It just skyrockets every year, no matter what.
And the same people are out there telling you they're going to lower the price for this, they're going to make this more affordable for you, are the same people that make sure college tuition always goes up.
The point is that one body of the Washington state government was able to actually affect a tuition decrease in state-run schools, even an AP story about it.
The AP story doesn't hit all the details, but it gets enough of the story to make a decent point here for the Republic.
But the point is it can happen if people simply try and have it as an objective.
And they did get, they got one Democrat, a conservative Democrat to go along with them, and that made the difference.
I can't get a quick break.
We're going to come back, and we've got some calls I want to get to, so sit tight.
That's coming next.
To Lincoln, Nebraska, we return to the phones.
It's Lynn.
It's great to have you here.
Hi.
Hi, Mr. Limbaugh.
I need you to put ideas on this.
I'd really like to hear what you think.
The gentleman who called earlier said that he doesn't think Trump should be in these debates.
And I got to thinking about it, and I thought, you know, Trump comes across in interviews with Hannity and those guys really, really well in Trump Towers, but they made him look like an ass.
Fox News did.
Megan Kelly, I'm never watching her again after that.
Now, wait, wait, wait, wait.
Hold it a minute now.
I'm not being facetious here.
I really.
You think they made, did Trump look like an ass or did they make him look like an ass?
It's an important thing.
They asked him terrible questions.
I wanted to hear his intellect.
He's a very smart man.
And they asked him stupid things like, you know, you've been known to, I don't know, about women or something.
But what I really want to know is, is what if he just puts on his own conferences after they do the debates and answers every single debate question and then maybe even starts inviting Ben Carson on with him.
Okay, this is interesting.
If I understand what you're saying, Lynn, they have the debate.
Trump doesn't go.
Or he does, either one.
Let's say he goes.
He goes to the debate and the questions are the questions.
And after the debate, Trump does his own post-debate follow-up in which he brings Ben Carson, whoever else he wants on, with no moderators, or maybe somebody to police the thing.
And then he takes the time to answer the questions that were asked without any time limits and without any interruptions.
He pays for the time.
They would cover it.
And in that way, he gets his message across without having it shaded, shaped, flaked, formed, whatever, corrupted by other participants or media opinion or what have you.
I think if he did something like that, I'll tell you this.
This debate coming up, where's it, the Reagan Library in September, it's going to have an even bigger audience than the Fox debate had because of the Fox debate.
There's so much talk about what happened in that debate.
And because they're happening rarely, you get two debates in 30 days.
This next debate, the build-up to it, is going to be such that it'll probably have a bigger audience.
Now, Trump, I thought Trump would actually not play ball in the first debate.
I thought he would do his own rules, but he decided to conform.
We saw what happened.
So you're the second caller here with an idea that Trump ought to do something to continue what he's doing as an outsider, to differentiate himself.
If he goes to the debate, then do a debate follow-up where he and maybe another candidate correct every mistake made.
And then guess what?
I can see that just going through the roof, frankly.
That's not a bad idea you've got out there, Lynn.
And he can either do that participating in the debate or not.
He said, I'm not going to go to this debate.
I'm not going to lower myself.
These people are pretenders.
These people are idiots.
Why should I be there?
But I'll show up after the debate and I'll answer every question these guys asked.
I'll answer it.
I won't miss anything, but I'm going to do it on my terms in my timeframe.
The network that fought to televise that.
Or maybe Trump would do it himself.
Anyway, I wish I had more time right now to explore that, but I don't.
But that, Lynn, is conceptually intriguing.
And who knows where all this is going?
I mean, that's one of the great unknowns.
The one thing we do know is that it's going in a direction a lot of us have wanted it to go for years, but it hasn't.
Now it is.
It's an opportunity, I think.
I told you it's going to be a scorcher today, and I told you it's going to go by like that.
Lickety splits over.
When it's never really over, we just take longer pauses than usual.
It's been great having you with us today, folks.
▲
Export Selection