I said the Giants at Redskins, just wanted to say Redskins.
And I know it irritates the left.
Now, the Giants play the Iggles tonight on Monday Night Football.
And you know what the big draw of Monday Night Football is tonight?
It's not the game.
Tonight, the first official Star Wars trailer will air.
That's what's going to draw a bunch of people to watch the game.
Yep, the first official.
We called them previews when I was a kid.
They call them trailers now, but it was always the previews.
Anyway, the first Star Wars trailer airs tonight.
They are already selling tickets to this movie two months before its debut at the movie theaters.
They're selling tickets in advance two months in advance.
It is thought that the new Star Wars movie is going to be the biggest movie ever of all time, bar none.
Greetings, my friends.
Welcome back.
Great to have you, Rush Limbaugh here at the EIB Network and the prestigious and distinguished Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.
Donald Trump continues to double down here on George W. Bush having culpability and responsibility during 9-11.
And look at this.
It's fascinating to me.
See how easy this happens.
9-11 was what year?
Right.
How many years ago was that?
14 years?
We are in the midst of this current president botching everything we're doing in the Middle East.
And what are we talking about?
George W. Bush to blame for 9-11.
Look at how easy this is.
And got it started with Trump.
And Trump's making the case that, hey, you know, people weren't paying attention.
He's blaming the wall.
He's blaming the lack of intelligence being shared.
He's blaming immigration policy.
Fact of the matter is, I think 16, you have to double check me on this.
I think 16 to the 19 here were on legal visas.
I think they were here legally.
They had gone to the trouble and taken the time to get here legally.
They had not violated any immigration law in order to get into the United States.
Anyway, we have more on that coming up.
I've got some other things I want to touch on here before we get back to this, and a lot of people want to weigh in on that and other things as well.
In the last couple of three days, I have been reading more and more stories about how much trouble McDonald's is in.
That they may not make it.
It's gotten a point now where McDonald's may not make it.
And the latest story that I have here is from Business Insider, and the headline is, McDonald's franchisees say the brand is in a deep depression and is facing its final days.
And everybody's trying to figure out what happened.
You know, McDonald's dates back to the, well, in its current iteration, the mid-60s, Ray, not Ray, it was Ray McDonald's.
Ray Croc started at California, maybe late 50s, early 60s, and it became what it's known to be today.
But the thing about McDonald's was that a McDonald's franchise was one of the tickets to upper middle class success.
If you could get a McDonald's franchise, when that was expanding and growing, you could get a McDonald's franchise in your little town, or if you get two or three of them in a moderately sized American city, you could get rich.
It was almost, not quite, but it was almost like getting an Anheuser-Busch distributorship.
People that got Anheuser-Busch distributorships back in the 60s and 70s were some of the richest people in town.
And it was the same thing with McDonald's franchisees.
And it was a distinctly American dream way for middle-class people to own something, to have equity in something, and rise and rise the ladder of success in the United States.
Now McDonald's is said to be in big trouble.
One of the problems in this story, one of the problems this story alludes to after quoting a bunch of franchisees, is that the corporate leadership in Oak Brook, Illinois, has no idea what it's doing.
Now, by the way, I'm not joining the fray one way or the other.
I hope this doesn't happen, needless to say.
But I have my own theory is the point here.
I have my own theory, what happened here.
And I know my theory is right, by the way.
I know it's 100% right, and I know because of that, it's going to be poo-pooed, it's going to be belittled, it's going to be mocked, laughed at, and made fun of as, oh, that's easy.
That's exactly what Limbaugh would say.
And it's not just McDonald's that is in trouble in the fast food business.
To give you an idea of my theory, I would like to take you back to Berkeley, California, home of the University of California at Berkeley, and a hotbed of radical leftism.
The Berkeley City Council some years ago now, might be as many as 20 years ago, demanded that Burger King, Burger Chef, what was it?
Burger King was killing people with its menu.
The Whopper, the Double Whopper, the Triple Whopper.
Remember all the calculations of calories and fat.
They did the same thing with the Big Mac and the quarter pound of a cheese, but the Berkeley radicals demanded that if they were going to continue to be a viable business, if they were going to get permission to stay in business, they had to start selling veggie burgers and salads and a bunch of other stuff that the customers of Burger King do not, did not, do not, will not want.
You do not go to Burger King for a veggie burger.
You go there for a freaking juicy double or triple whopper with all the stuff on it you want.
Ergo, when the left comes in under whatever guise of health or cleanliness or whatever and tries to make other people do things their way, what happens?
They eventually fail.
And I will contend to you without knowing firsthand, and I will admit that I don't, that some of the stuff that's accumulated over the years, some of the things the franchisees are being forced to do by McDonald's Corporate is the result of leftists becoming subsumed with this notion of healthy this and healthy that.
And they have accepted the phony premise that their food's poison.
They've accepted the phony liberal prison premise that their food is not good.
It's not healthy.
It's not healthful.
It's damaging to children.
And they have to do something to straighten out.
Hello, happy meal.
Whatever the strategy has been.
And in effect, the effort to either please the left or react to their demands because you don't feel like fighting them, which is a typical corporate reaction to any pressure, has been to basically destroy their business.
If all this is right, I mean, if these franchisees, they're saying it's facing its final days.
What happened?
The original menu at McDonald's was going to stay in good grace.
Now, I understand there's all kinds of pressure culturally throughout the country for healthful eating, but look at all the myths that are being exposed.
The supposed dangers of fat turn out to be a bunch of lies.
The shouldn't eat butter, shouldn't eat whole milk, drink whole milk, all of this stuff.
It's just a bunch of wives' tales bugaboo that was never true in the first place.
Made popular by just two skeletal people at something called Center for the Science and Public Interest.
They had a logo and a fax machine, and they started faxing out whatever it was that was going to kill you.
And the media repeats it.
It becomes popularly believed.
And so these restaurants have to react to it one way or the other.
But I'm telling you, you don't go to McDonald's for a salad.
You don't go to McDonald's for a veggie burger or Burger King or anything of the sort.
And there's any number of other businesses, not just McDonald's.
The left got their hooks into ESPN.
Look what's happening to them.
The left got their hooks into the NFL.
Look what's happening there.
The left has gotten their hooks or has had some sort of influence on the Republican Party.
Look what's happening there.
Women's colleges.
I mean, you go throughout American life in corporate culture, private sector, wherever you want to go, and wherever the left has been allowed to come in, either as a result of their demand or pressure or what have you.
And all these other institutions and companies that were sailing along just fine have been demanded to make changes in how they do what they do.
They're all maybe not all in trouble, but they certainly are facing challenges they never used to.
And it's all predicated on another mispremise, if I may use the term.
And to illustrate this, I want to go back to the passage of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act in Indiana.
After that was signed into law, all it did was reinforce the already existing clause in the U.S. Constitution.
What happened?
The American media, the American left, immediately went out and tried to find any fast food or any other restaurant or business that would not serve a gay couple on their wedding day.
And they went shopping.
They went knocking on doors and they found this pizza joint, some small town in Indiana, and the young woman, member of the family that runs the little pizza joints on TV.
Now, our religious beliefs, I think that we would not serve that couple.
And we do not believe in how much longer blow up.
The media goes nuts.
That little business is shut down.
All the efforts are focused on just embarrassing that little business and anybody who thinks like they do.
What happened?
Governor caves a little bit.
Everybody starts back.
We're sorry.
We didn't mean to offend anybody.
No, we love everybody.
Oh, my God.
Oh, no.
But the one thing that was included in this was the assumption that a vast majority of American people agreed that that pizza shop is a bunch of little bigots.
And all the baker shops, a bunch of little bigots.
And the Photoshops, all these people that wouldn't serve or service a gay marriage, a gay wedding or whatever.
And that's always included in the story that's never really true.
The media tries to make it look like their point of view is the popular point of view by a vast majority.
And it's the same thing with all of these menus at fast food restaurants or at Walmart or what have you.
The media and the left bring pressure on these companies with the implied belief that a majority of the American people and a majority of these businesses' customers also think the menu should change and think this should change when it's never the case.
We don't know that a majority of American people believe it, but we can learn probably that it isn't because after making all of these changes, the businesses end up in trouble.
And if popular opinion were on the side of the changes, the businesses would be thriving, would they not?
Stands to reason.
I don't know, you McDonald's franchisees who are listening today, you know whether I have a point on this or not.
But it's, as I say, it's not just McDonald's.
We are in the middle.
We still are in the middle of a recession in this country, and yet these cultural preferences and demands continue to be made on these companies, and they are not demands shared by a majority of the customers of these businesses.
And so when the changes are made, the customers go somewhere else.
How else can you conclude anything else?
If the changes were rapidly accepted by customers, and this is what needed in the McDonald's, there wouldn't be a story here quoting franchisees, saying McDonald's is facing its final days.
And hell, you know, McDonald's is a great American success story, tradition.
It's an opportunity for people to enjoy the American dream by becoming franchise.
I hope this isn't true.
But if it is, I think somewhere in the mix, you're going to find the fingerprints of a bunch of liberals.
San Francisco Middle School principal is withholding the results of a student election due to the lack of diversity among the candidates who won.
Although Everett Middle School is 80% non-white, the principal claims the results were not representative of that fact.
That is concerning to me, she said, because as principal, I want to make sure that all voices are heard from all backgrounds.
She said that one of her priorities as an educator was to see her students become agents of change.
Really?
That's agents of change.
I mean, change is going to happen anyway.
Change happens, there's nothing you can do about it.
But they want to be little activists, you know, little hell raisers out here.
So the principal, the students voted, and the results did not jibe with the overall population of the school.
So the principal, that threw it out.
Can't accept it.
It's not right.
Therefore, freedom, it doesn't exist.
Now, I mentioned earlier an object lesson on the media, Mary Mapes, Dan Rather, and the way they're out promoting their movie called Truth.
And this is a great, great object lesson in how the media operates.
As Mary Mapes and Dan Rather now try to, they're actually trying to rewrite what happened and rewrite their objective and their purpose.
And what they are essentially doing now is claiming that CBS would not permit them to ask the question about George Bush and the National Guard, and they would not permit the process of asking the question to go forth, which is a total rewrite of what happened.
But still, when the time comes, I will explain what this really is and how to see it in other news stories, which is the objective I have.
In the meantime, got to take an obscene profit break and continue after that.
So hang in there, be tough.
Be right back.
Okay, back to the phones now.
This is Jim and Corona, California.
Glad you waited, sir.
Hello.
Yeah, hi, Rush.
It's a pleasure to talk to you.
Thank you.
I think what a lot of people are missing in this whole blame game scenario that's going on is that before 9-11, it was the airlines that were in charge of security.
And I can tell you, I was a senior analyst for a major airline.
I won't mention the name, but we tried to implement through technology and so forth to get the agencies, the government agencies, to talk to each other because we were responsible for the security.
Depending on how many flights a certain airline had into a certain airport, that was determined who was in charge of the security.
And people are missing that, and it's driving me crazy.
Well, I'm kind of confused by myself.
What were you actually responsible for that the government wasn't?
Before 9-11, each airline, depending on who had the most flights into a given airport, was responsible for the security of that airport, including the information and international flights.
Wait, the security of the airport or the flight?
Both.
They're virtually one and the same.
Security starts at the airport.
Right when these people check in, right when the passengers check in, all the way to the gate process to the time they board the aircraft.
It is the airport's responsibility.
Well, no, I get that.
I mean, I've been through the check-in process for International.
Anybody give you anything before you packed that?
I've been through all of that.
I'm not saying the airlines are not and haven't had a role or been responsible, but you're making it sound like the government wasn't involved at all in learning about potential security threats.
It was all on you guys.
Listen, Rush, and I can tell you again, firsthand, as a senior analyst in charge of, or responsible for security at the time, I can tell you the government agencies would not talk to each other.
And Trump is right about that, in one of his points.
It was so frustrating.
Yeah, but why was that?
I'll tell you why.
At the time you're talking, but the time Trump is talking about, the reason agencies could not talk to each other was Jamie Gorelic, Clinton's babe over to the Attorney General's office.
She had erected what is known as the wall.
The CIA was not permitted to talk to the FBI and vice versa about what either of them had learned because they were prosecuting these cases in court rather than treating them as acts of war.
And it was feared that sharing information might compromise it.
And so it was an idiotic policy that you guys were caught in the middle of, too.
Exactly.
And so what happened was we actually, a year leading up to 9-11, and our airline didn't get hit, not to say that we prevented that, but we were actually implementing technology that didn't even exist yet.
So as people would board the aircraft near the gate, we would set up these dummy passport scanners and document scanners.
Wait, look, I've got 15 seconds.
Are you saying Trump's right that somehow this is Bush's fault or that he's...
No, not at all.
Not at all.
And it's not.
Trump is not blaming Bush.
I think Ben White pointed that out on CNBC this morning.
It's the essential blame.
He's threading a needle on it.
That's true.
Well, we've got the soundbites.
We'll listen to them.
See what's up.
Springfield, Ohio, Lacey, you're next.
Appreciate your patience.
Hello.
Thank you, Rush.
How are you today?
Pretty good.
Pretty good.
Thank you.
Well, I just wanted to talk to you about your Rush Revere series.
We went out, me and my wife went out and bought all three of them.
And my son has dyslexia, and he just, I've never been able to get him to read anything.
So I kind of bribed him.
I made him a deal.
If he read just one, then I would get him an iPod or an iPhone or a pad or whatever I could find for, you know.
How old is your son?
He's 11.
And you probably, you get, wow.
An 11-year-old.
That's cool.
Yeah, he doesn't, it's like prying teeth at getting to read anything.
So, you know, but he wants that.
So he read the book.
And what's great about it is I never asked him to read another one.
I never bribed him to read another one.
I never, anything about another book.
I never mentioned it.
And he's actually reading them on his own.
Just he goes to his room, spends an hour or two a day.
Is that right?
That is just while you're tugging at my heartstrings here.
It's actually, it tugs at mine.
I get goosebumps when I even think about it.
He's just, it's amazing that something has got him interested enough to actually want to do it because it's, it gives them a headache to even read.
So it just, okay.
What was the primary manifestation problem for him with dyslexia?
What was it about reading that frustrated him?
It just takes too long.
You know what I'm saying?
It just takes him too long.
Too long, too much patience, too much concentration.
Exactly.
He's got to read.
The way he explains it to me is he's got to read the same sentence two or three times to understand it.
Well, you tell him I have to do that every day with half the stuff I read, and I don't have dyslexia.
I have to just make sure I understand it.
Yeah.
No, I'm not kidding.
I read an essay by Henry Kissinger.
I had to read every paragraph four times yesterday.
Wow.
Well, not every paragraph, but pretty much.
Pretty much.
No, no, you.
Anyway, that's one of the greatest compliments that we have received.
Yeah, I just wanted to thank you for helping me figure out how to get him interested.
Has he now read all three?
No, he's actually in the middle of the second one right now, but we have the third one waiting on him.
Well, let me tell you, we've got the fourth one that's in pre-order right now, Rush Revere and the Star Spangled Banner.
And it's rivaling Star Wars out there for pre-order.
I'm not making it up.
It's rivaling Star Wars of Interest Factor.
And it actually hits the streets on the 27th of October.
But I would like to send him one when it comes out.
And also the audio version.
I record the audio version.
So you tell him that for those moments when he just gets exhausted reading, he can plug in a CD and listen to me read it.
And they can take a break from reading and he can stop whenever he wants to go back to it.
Oh, I most definitely will.
Yeah, what kind of iPhone did he get?
Well, actually, I'm in the process.
I'm still looking for the best deal.
But that's a big for a kid to get an 11-year-old to get an iPhone.
I have a line, but he doesn't have a phone.
My wife's been on me.
She wants him to have one.
I'm not a big fan, but I have an extra line.
So I kind of made him a deal.
So I'm going to go with the deal.
Obviously, there'll be restrictions.
Let me tell you what to get.
Let me tell you what to get.
I'll help you here.
You can get an iPhone 5S probably for no money down on a contract.
And it's a four-inch screen.
It's small.
He's 11.
It'd be perfect for him.
It runs the latest operating system, and it's a great, great phone.
It was top of the line when it was out.
It's a couple years old now.
But it would be ideal, and it wouldn't cost you any money up front.
I think it's their zero, it's their free phone when you buy it on contract.
I think that's right.
But anyway, I want you to hang on here because I want to send you the fourth book the minute I have it in my hands.
Well, I do have one in my hands, but I only have one.
I meant to bring it in today and wave it in front of the ditto cam, and I just got in a hurry.
I didn't bring it in.
It's a great, great cover.
We're just so excited about these things.
And your story about dyslexic who actually has been made to like reading because of these, I can't tell you how that makes our heart sing.
Well, I feel the same way.
I just wanted to call in and give you a big old thanks.
Well, now the thanks is from us to you.
And hang on here so Mr. Snerdley can get an address where we can get you the Rush Revere and the Star-Spangled Banner when it hits.
As I say, it's in pre-order even as we speak.
And there's an important aspect about pre-order, and it's cheaper.
It's like $12.
The retail list is $19.99, and it's $12, I think.
It floats maybe, but last time I looked, it was $12.
Amazon, Barnes ⁇ Noble, and Books a Million pre-order.
So anyway, thank you again.
I really appreciate that.
One more here.
Bill in Charlotte, North Carolina.
You're next.
Great to have you here.
Hello.
Hey, Rush, thanks for taking my call.
You bet.
Hey, listen, the Democrats really don't have anybody but themselves to blame for the rise of Donald Trump because the Democrats' strategy back in 07 was to overcome Obama's community organizer background they experienced by promoting him as a celebrity and not a politician.
The Democrats knew that celebrities are treated different than politicians, and they're always given the benefit of the doubt when trouble comes along, and they usually come out better than before when everything dies down.
So Trump's celebrity status is actually what insulates him from any repercussions for whatever he says and does.
You know, you may be on to something there.
Meaning, celebrity status insulates you from the traditional criticism that political people get.
Obama was immune to it, but I, you know, I never considered that the Democrats put forth Obama as a celebrity.
I always had analyzed it that Obama could be whatever you wanted him to be.
He was campaigning basically as an empty chart, and you could paint or write on that chart whatever you wanted him to be.
And some people are doing that with Trump, just like they did with Perot.
But see, I always recognized what Obama was.
Obama was might have been a celebrity within the confines of politics, but he was a radical, leftist, chip on his shoulder, angry community organizer.
And there wasn't anything other than that, as far as I saw.
And that's why I was so adamant when I said in January 2009, I hope he failed.
You know, I was thinking about that when I wrote my essay for National Review.
They asked me to write an essay for their 60th anniversary issue.
And they wanted some personal highlights.
And I forgot to put that in.
And I still have time because I'm going to send it back to the edited version.
I still have, and it's important.
That should be in it.
Anyway, still an interesting theory that Trump's celebrity status insulates him from traditional criticism.
I don't think the Democrats are actually lamenting Trump being in the race.
It's actually the Republicans who are.
It's the Republicans who are shell-shocked over Trump.
The Democrats, I don't think they've yet thought far enough ahead to who they're going to be facing.
I'll tell you what's on the immediate horizon for the Democrats is Biden.
I mean, all the indications are he's going to go.
I mean, there was even a leak today that he's already made up his mind.
Fox News had a leak earlier.
They've backed off of it.
Well, I say backed off.
I haven't seen it since.
But that it's all but official.
And in the next, what, 36 hours, we're going to find out.
And I happen to send that when I saw that little blurb, I sent it to a friend.
Of course he's getting in.
What do you mean?
No, no, no, there's no doubt he's getting in.
Which violates every tenet of conventional wisdom.
Remember the media said after the debate last week, well, Hillary scorched the earth on this one.
If there was ever a signal to Biden to stay out, this was it.
There's no opening.
Hillary owned it.
Hillary won the debate.
Going away.
There's no reason for Biden to get in.
Except when you look at the polling data that occurred after the debate, for all the talk about Hillary winning it, it's Bernie Sanders who showed upward movement.
Not Hillary.
Hillary did not gain any ground after the debate in which she was declared by the drive-bys the runaway winner.
A couple of soundbites on this Trump business.
Now, on Friday is when it was on Bloomberg, and it was essentially where he blamed Bush for 9-11 by saying, hey, you can't disguise the fact that George Bush was president when it happened.
Okay?
That's what Trump's point.
And as usual, here came the criticism.
He doubled down on it.
Fox News Sunday, Chris Wallace.
He said, Jeb Bush responded to your comments with a tweet.
He said, How pathetic.
Do you blame George Bush for 9-11, Mr. Trump?
Look, look, Jeb said, We were safe with my brother.
We were safe.
Well, the World Trade Center just fell down.
Now, am I trying to blame him?
I'm not blaming anybody.
But the World Trade Center came down.
So when he said we were safe, that's not safe.
We lost 3,000 people.
It was one of the greatest, probably the greatest catastrophe ever in this country, if you think about it.
All right, now Jeb is talking about after that that there wasn't another attack and so forth.
Wallace then said, Well, what would you have done if you'd been president?
I'm extremely tough on people coming into this country.
I believe that if I were running things, I doubt those families would have, I doubt that those people would have been in the country.
There's a good chance that those people would not have been in our country.
With that being said, I'm not blaming George Bush, but I don't want Jeb Bush to say my brother kept us safe because September 11th was one of the worst days in the history of this country.
Okay, so semantic battle is raging here.
And I should point out that I've checked it 16 of the 1900s, and maybe all of it, certainly 16 were here on legal thesis.
That was one of the problems, that they had gone to the trouble and taken the time and patience to follow our laws in bringing us down.
That was one of the things that was very scary about it.
I know I didn't get to it today.
Well, I touched on it, but I didn't get into the actual nitty-gritty.
I'll do it tomorrow.
The object lesson media sausage making Dan Rather Mary Mapes promoting their movie Truth.
That and a few other things they didn't get to.
Plus, whatever happens between now and the next time we're together, it's 21 hours.