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Nov. 6, 2015 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:39
November 6, 2015, Friday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of The Rush 24-7 Podcast.
Yeah, well, we were just poking along here about 10 minutes ago.
It looked like it was actually going to be kind of a slow day.
And then everything blew up here, and there was live from the Southern Command in sunny South Florida.
It's open line Friday.
Yeah, and I still don't know what to make of this.
There's something that smells about this still, and I can't put my fingers on it, but we're gonna have to get into it.
Anyway, welcome to Open Line Friday.
Whatever you want to talk about's fine and handy, folks.
That's the rule.
That's not the way it is Monday through Thursday.
If you don't talk about what you said you're gonna talk about, it's Sayanara.
We do it nicely, but it's still Sayanara.
But on Friday, hardly any restrictions.
Telephone number 800 282882 in the email address L Rushbow at EIB net.com.
I was sitting here, it was literally 15 minutes ago.
And I was going through the final assembly stages of the program in the show prep today, the stack and this stack.
And then I'm going through the stacks.
You know what?
There isn't anything, I don't know what the heck I would lead with today.
I have literally no idea what would be the first thing that would come out of my mouth today.
There's two or three contenders, but there's nothing really stands out.
And then my um my iPhone rang.
I looked at it and I had a eye message over this.
Okay, so I looked at that.
And it said, There goes Carson.
Oh no, what now?
So I I went to the internet, nothing.
I I I went to email nothing.
So what this there goes Carson.
So I wrote back, what what are you talking about?
What have I missed?
And before I had a chance to get a reply, my drudge page reloaded.
And it says, Carson admits fabricating West Point Scholarship.
Oh no.
What in the name of Sam Hill is this?
So I clicked on the link, and it's a political story here.
And the uh the first impression, and I'm telling you this is key.
If you if you are unfamiliar with Carson and his book, uh, and if you if you're not up to speed with the day-to-day details of the Carson campaign, the headline here, Ben Carson admits fabricating West Point Scholarship.
What you end up after reading the just the headline, the subhead, is that Ben Carson must have written a book in which he says that he was granted a scholarship to West Point and attended, and now we learn the whole thing's not true.
And so at first glance, you're like, I should he made up the fact that he went to West Point.
How in the world does all this time go by?
And the people at West Point, he's got it in his book that he attended West Point.
How come nobody up to now has said no he didn't?
But that's not what the allegation is.
You've got to read further, and it's let's just do that here.
Because the first impressions a lot of people are going to make here are going to have is that Carson has really made up, totally fabricated a story that has no element of truth in it.
Which is exactly what the drive-by's want.
There's also a key factor here in the campaign is who admitted this.
But let's just take it as we got it.
Politico Ben Carson admits fabricating West Point Scholarship.
Okay.
Ben Carson's campaign on Friday admitted in response to an inquiry from Politico that a central point in his inspirational personal story was fabricated.
His application and acceptance into the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.
The Academy has occupied a central place In Carson's tale for years, it says here.
Well, I know if it's as bad as it looks, all is not lost.
At least he could work at NBC.
They let you make things up there.
In fact, in some places they promote you for making things up like that.
But that we're getting ahead of ourselves here.
Let me go back here to the headline, Carson admits fabricating West Point scholarship.
By the way, let me just take a survey.
No wrong answer.
Do you have any idea that Carson had a scholarship or has a certain you didn't know that West Point was part of his life?
Of course you haven't read the book.
What about you?
Did you know that West Point was a part of what it?
Okay, you didn't.
Three people here had no knowledge of the West Point aspect of the Carson story.
It's in his book, but that just means that the people here haven't read the survey.
It doesn't mean anything here, it's just anecdotal.
Ben Carson's campaign admitted in response to an inquiry from Politico that a central point in his inspirational story was made up.
His application and acceptance to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.
The academies occupied a central place, Carson's tale for years, according to a story in Carson's book, Gifted Hands.
The then seventeen-year-old was introduced in 1969 to General William Westmoreland, who had just ended his command of U.S. forces in Vietnam, and the two dined together.
That meeting, according to Carson's telling, was followed by a full scholarship to the military academy.
West Point, however, has no record of Carson applying, much less being extended admission.
Theresa Brinkerhoff, spokeswoman for the Academy, said in 1969, those who would have completed the entire process, would have received their acceptance letters from the Army Adjutant General.
If he chose to pursue the application process, then we would have records indicating such.
But she said that West Point has no records that indicate Carson even began the application process.
When presented with this evidence, Carson's campaign conceded the story was false.
Now you know what started all of this.
There are these stories in his book about how he used to be violent and filled with rage, but that he overcame it, used to bully people, so CNN and others in the drive-by have been out there trying to find these people that Carson says he beat up or bullied or mistreated, and they can't find anybody.
What they're basically trying to do is establish that Carson's making things up, building his resume, building his character, expanding his uh his personality.
Uh well, no, this the book, Gifted Hands, it's been out for quite a while.
It's not the movie was made of this many, many, many years ago.
When presented with the evidence, Carson's campaign conceded the story was false.
Campaign manager Barry Bennett, quote, in an email to Politico said Dr. Carson was the top ROTC student in the city of Detroit.
In that role, he was invited to meet General Westmoreland.
He believes it was at a banquet.
He can't remember with specificity their brief conversation, but it centered around Dr. Carson's performance as ROTC city executive officer.
He was introduced, campaign spokesman Barry Bennett continuing here, he was introduced to folks from West Point by his ROTC supervisors.
They told him they could help him get an appointment to West Point based on his grades and performance in ROTC.
He considered it, but in the end did not seek admission.
This admission, back to the politico now.
This admission comes as serious questions about other points of fact in Carson's personal narrative are questioned, Including the seminal episode in which he claimed to have attempted to stab a close friend.
Seminarly, details have emerged that cast doubt on the nature of Carson's encounter with one of the most prominent military men of that era back now to Westmoreland.
The West Point spokeswoman said that it is certainly possible that Carson talked with Westmoreland.
And perhaps the general even encouraged him to apply to West Point.
However, she said the general would have explained the benefits of a West Point education without guaranteeing him entry.
An application to West Point begins with a nomination by a member of Congress or another prominent government or military official in the state that you live in.
After that, a rigorous vetting process begins.
It if offered admission, all costs are covered.
Indeed, there are no full scholarships.
There's no such thing.
In his popular book, Gifted Hands, Carson says he excelled in his ROTC program at Detroit Southwestern Haskell, earning the respect of his superiors.
Just a couple years after anger problems led him to try to murder a friend.
He attained the rank of second lieutenant by his senior year of high school and became a student leader of the city's ROTC programs.
In May of his senior year, he was chosen to march in the city's Memorial Day parade.
He wrote that he felt so proud, my chest bursting with ribbons and braids of every kind, to make it more wonderful.
We had important visitors that day.
Two soldiers who had won the Congressional Medal of Honor in Vietnam were present, but more exciting to me, General William Westmoreland.
Very prominent in the Vietnam War, attended with an impressive entourage.
Afterward, Sergeant Hunt, his high school ROTC director, introduced me to General Westmoreland.
I had dinner with him and the Congressional Medal winners.
And later I was offered a full scholarship to West Point.
But according to records of Westmoreland's schedule that were provided by the U.S. Army, the general did not visit Detroit around Memorial Day, 1969, nor did the general have dinner with Carson.
In fact, the general's records suggest he was in Washington that day and played tennis at 6.45 p.m.
There are, however, several reports of an event similar to the one Carson described in February that year.
Then Westmoreland was the featured guest at a 1,500-person banquet to celebrate Medal of Honor winner Dwight Johnson.
The event drew prominent guests, including the governor at the time, the mayor of Detroit, the president of Ford Motor Company, and nine previous Medal of Honor recipients, according to an AP account of the event.
Carson, a leader of the city's ROTC program at the time, may have been among the invited guests at the $10 a plate dinner.
Carson's later retelling of the events in this period of his life downplays his meeting with Westmoreland.
And that events linked to a West Point acceptance in his January 2015 book, Have You a Brain, which is a book geared toward teenagers, Carson again recalls his rapid rise through his high school's ROTC program to become the top student officer in the city.
And he wrote in his recent book, that position allowed me the chance to meet four-star General William Westmoreland.
I who had commanded all American forces Vietnam before being promoted to the Army Chief of Staff at the Pentagon in Washington.
also represented the junior ROTC at a dinner for Congressional Medal of Honor winners, marched at the front of Detroit's Memorial Day Parade as head of an ROTC contingent and was offered a full scholarship at West Point.
Carson said he turned down the offer of admission because he knew he wanted to be a doctor, and attending West Point would have required four years of military service after graduation.
Cecil Murphy, who ghostwrote gifted hands, told Politico that his memory of Carson's exchange with Westmoreland was hazy.
My good response is that it was not a private meeting, but there were others there.
The general took a liking to Ben and opened doors.
So Carson never said he went to West Point.
This story wants to make you think that.
look, I'm I'm I'm just zeroing in here on what I'm not trying to downplay what did happen, but there's there's also some exaggeration going on.
Actually, it's an attempt to uh imply the way it's written.
They want you to believe it.
Carson said he got a full scholarship.
He went to West Point, and none of that was true.
And he never went to West Point, never said that he went to West Point.
The contention is that he met Westmoreland.
Westmoreland offered him a four-year scholarship in West Point, which there are none.
So the media is convinced they've found Carson out to be here in a big big lie.
And not a big, big exaggeration, but a big big lie.
Anyway, that's that, and that's what blew up here right before the program started.
If not for this, it was going to be well, nothing's ever humdrum here.
But by the standards of the last two or three days, it was not going to be as rocking and rolling, but of course that's out the window now.
So it is open line Friday.
This is the Rush Limbaugh program here behind the Golden EIB microphone at a distinguished and prestigious limbaugh institute for advanced conservative studies.
Okay.
Having set the table on this, I think I have a pretty good idea what happened here.
But first I want to conclude for I want to tell you something.
There is nothing in this article that demonstrates that Ben Carson did not meet with General Westmoreland.
He says he met with General Westmoreland, and he did.
There's nothing in the article that says that didn't happen.
There is nothing in the article that demonstrates Westmoreland offered him a scholarship.
Nothing in this article demonstrates that he was offered a scholarship.
Meaning I to help him Carson may have assumed it was a scholarship.
He's a teenager, he's a kid.
He doesn't know West Point works.
There are no scholarships because everybody, everybody's expenses are paid.
That's part of the drill.
You it getting into West Point is a bit of an honor, but it's also a commitment to the U.S. military.
You owe them years of service after you graduate.
I have a cousin who attended West Point, ended up being a professor for a time there.
And we all in our family were just busting buttons with pride.
He was from Illinois.
His name is Dan.
And uh, we were so proud we couldn't see straight.
And I I was young at the time, but I remember enough about the process and what it what it required, the nomination, uh climbing the ladder to prove you were qualified and so forth.
But look, let me get sidetracked here.
Carson did not lie about meeting Westmoreland.
And when you're a young kid and you've got you're talking to Westmoreland, and he's talking about, and you're the top-ranking ROTC kid in your town, and you're talking to General William Westmoreland, who's the Army Chief of Staff, and he starts singing the virtues of West Point,
and informing you and telling you how West Point works, somebody like Ben Carson might have assumed that a scholarship was what was being discussed.
I mean, folks, it's not what are we dealing with here?
It's not like he doesn't remember what happened the night of Benghazi.
It's not like Ben Carson has lied about any number of things from the cost of health care premiums.
Like Obama just again rejected the Keystone pipeline and told a couple of big whoppers, said it will not be a factor on gasoline prices, and it won't have a won't be a factor on the oil supply, Or the nation's economy.
Both of those are big fat whoppers.
If we want to start talking about whoppers, it's always fascinating how the only people ever get called on it and accused of it are Republicans.
Has the media ever gone through Obama's books and tracked down his assertions?
Because I mean, there are some whoppers.
See, the alternative media has done that.
The conservative media has tracked down Obama's assertions, many of them.
And how about the idea that Obama literally made up boyfriends and girlfriends and so forth, and then combined various people into one fictitious character?
And I remember the media praising that as a brilliant literary creation or usage.
Anyway, I'm up against it on time.
Another break here.
We will continue after this.
Don't go away.
Open line Friday.
Welcome back.
Great to have you, Rush Limbaugh and the Excellence and Broadcasting Network.
I have here my formerly nicotine-stained fingers.
A New York Times story by It's a Kalama Maureen Down, the infamous Modo from June 15th of 1994.
So this is a bit what is it?
21 years ago.
Hillary Clinton says she once tried to be a Marine.
Yes.
First lady has offered a kaleidoscope of images to the public, but today she added the most curious one yet.
Speaking of a lunch on Capitol Hill honoring military women, Hillary Clinton said that she once visited a recruiting office in Arkansas to inquire about joining the Marines.
Are you kidding me?
She was married to Bill Clinton in Arkansas.
She wasn't in Arkansas before she met Clinton or married him.
Why in the world would she want to join the Marines be?
Well, wait a minute now.
Wait.
Wait.
Yes.
She told the group gathered for lunch in the Dirksen office building, according to AP, that she became interested in the military in 1975, the year she married Clinton, and the year she was teaching at the University of Arkansas Law School in Fayetteville.
Oh, okay.
She was 27 then.
She wanted to become a Marine at age 27.
And she uh she said the Marine recruiter was about 21.
She wanted to either join the active forces or the reserves, but she was swiftly rebuffed by the recruiter who took a dim view of her age and her thick glasses.
She said that the recruiter, some 21-year-old punk kid, said, You're too old.
You can't see, and you're a woman.
Maybe the dogs would take you, she recalled the recruiter saying.
It was not a very encouraging conversation.
I decided maybe I'll look for another way to serve my country.
Everybody lapped that up.
Everybody believed that story.
Mrs. Clinton's gotten mileage out of that story like you can't believe.
Here's a woman who claims she's married after Sir Edmund Hillary.
The only problem with that is nobody knew who he was when she was born because he had not yet climbed Mount Everest.
So nobody knew who St. Sir Edmund Hillary was.
But she meets the guy, yeah.
You know what?
I was named after you.
He lied.
She lied rather to him.
And of course, there's all the other.
I mean, we could go down the list of things here.
Like Joe Biden lying about his academic record.
We don't even know what Obama's academic record is.
But look, uh these are efforts here to illustrate media bias.
But the fact remains the media hit Ben Carson today, and the Ben Carson campaign sort of gave them what they wanted by admitting that there was a fabrication here.
The problem is this story, remember first impressions.
This story tries to Make the reader believe that Ben Carson never went to West Point when he wrote that he did.
And he never attended West Point.
Believe me, the way this is written is to convey the possibility that Ben, well, I didn't know he went to West Point.
Well, nobody did because he's never said so, but this story implies, or he wants you to infer, that Carson has made up something totally here.
And he didn't.
He didn't make up talking to Westmoreland.
And West needs a he's a top ROTC kid in his town in Detroit, and there's no question if he talks to Westmoreland.
Westmoreland's going to talk about the army to a number one ROTC kid, going to build it up, is probably going to explain West Point, explaining future options for this young ROTC candidate.
Talks about how it works.
Ben Carson comes from poverty, doesn't understand things, and the way Westmoreland describes it sounds like a scholarship to Carson, so he writes about it.
It's to me it's understandable how he would think that he had been offered an opportunity, or at least had an opportunity presented to him.
He could have understood it to have been exactly that.
Now what we have today in this political story is an effort to make it look like Carson lied and made things up, exaggerated.
And if he did it about this, then what else has he lied and made up?
And they're off to the races.
Let me grab the phones.
We start on this in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Bob, great to have you on the program, sir.
Hello.
Good afternoon, Rush.
First time caller, long time listener.
Thank you very much.
Great to have you here.
So I'm a uh Naval Academy graduate, a little bit better institution in the West Point.
And uh my son graduated there, and there's an illustrious alumni that recruit qualified candidates all the time.
And it is a formal process.
You have to have a nomination, congressional or presidential, as well as there's other uh ways to get a uh foundation scholarship.
So that term scholarship is often misunderstood by the uh young people.
Uh it's very rare to get a full-time scholarship anywhere, let alone an appointment to a military service academy.
So it's easy that there's a uh misunderstanding, and uh anybody who's a professional would understand how a young man can make that misrepresentation.
So it sounds to me like you don't think there's a whole lot here in in terms of the uh attempt by politico to characterize Carson as a Clinton-like uh figure.
No, I don't think Carson's anything close to what uh Hillary misrepresents herself.
I thought there was a helicopter she got attacked in but anyway.
Oh, yeah, that that oh yeah, when she was landing in Afghanistan, had the cork screwed down because of snipper fire.
And no, I know it's sniper, but snipper was the way it was written in the story, and I've always stuck to it that way.
Just like the uh Reverend Dax pronounces it kumo instead of Cuomo.
Anyway, yeah, she was at the corkscrew down the landing, uh void uh snipper fire, and then had to run uh getting off the airplane to avoid further sniffer fire.
And turns out it was all made up.
And it's um it it folks, what we have on display here is a clear illustration of the double standard.
The Clintons not only have their lies not been investigated, they have been applauded.
The Clinton, particularly Bill Clinton's lies, have been heralded as brilliant politics, and the media has marveled at them.
Ben Carson represents, they hate Ben Carson.
There's a CNN op-ed today, just mean as anything you'll ever read about anybody, referring to him as a safe Negro for conservative evangelicals, uh magic Negro, that he is the kind of black candidate you evangelicals can support to cover up your latent racism.
You can support Carson publicly, and thereby you can convince people that you're not the racists and bigots that you are, and that's the value he serves.
That's the purpose he serves.
It's just a mean vicious Despicable little column runs on the CNN.com website.
And the Double Standard, as I say, is on full display.
They are out now to take Ben Carson out, doing everything they can to make him look like he's crazy, like he's a lunatic.
Um a big, if not liar, a fabulist and exaggerator.
Anyway, gotta take a break.
We'll do that, come back and continue after this.
No, I'll tell you how I know.
I tell the reason I know is because the first note I got was there goes Carson.
So no, what's that mean?
I mean, at first Bush, okay, Carson, something's happened that he's finished, whatever he's gone, what did he say?
What happened?
I didn't know.
I found it.
The first impression here, I'm telling you, is that Ben Carson didn't go to West Point, lied about everything.
It's in his book, he made it all up.
And the inference is that he attended that he maintains he went to West Point.
He never did go to West Point, never said that he went to West Point.
The only exaggeration here that I can find, but it's too late for that now.
I mean, the the the the die is cast here.
The only exaggeration that I can find is what Westmoreland told, or what Carson heard Westmoreland say.
Here's here's Jim in Cincinnati.
We have a West Point graduate on the phone.
Great to have you from the same era, by the way.
Great to have you on the program, sir.
Hi.
Good afternoon, Rush.
It's an honor to talk to you.
Thank you very much.
I I attended from 68 to 72.
And I if I were to explain to anybody today, just like you said, and the guy from Canoe You that preceded me, said no scholarships, but that's I would tell a a non-informed person that we have a scholarship.
They not only paid for everything that you did there, they actually paid you a stipend every month.
And to add to that, this was during Vietnam, and this was at the time when they started the EEO affirmative action stuff.
In my class, there were eight out of eight hundred grads that were black.
Two years later they tried to take it up to ten percent.
So if you had a bright guy like Dr. Carson, who is already involved with ROTC, there's no way they that Westmoreland wouldn't have encouraged him to go.
And there's no way that he would not have been pursued trying to up the percentage of blacks at West Point.
So I would believe what he said.
He's just misinterpreted it because he wasn't familiar with the lingo.
Yeah.
Um probably in terms of and we'll pay for it equals they're offering me a scholarship.
Right.
When in fact everybody is paid their way because you're making a commitment beyond your graduation there and so forth.
So just to clarify, put yourself in his shoes.
You're in Detroit immediately post-Vietnam, and all of a sudden you're ranking ROTC in your town, and you are talking to General Westmoreland, and he starts extolling the virtues of West Point to you.
You think it's entirely feasible that you might think, hey, he's he's offering me, he's encouraging me to go and look at.
He told me that they're gonna cover the cost.
It's a scholarship in my world.
You can see this happening.
Oh, most definitely.
I mean, that's that's what I if I were talking to any anybody that that area, and even today, I would tell them that I would call it a scholarship because they that's what they would understand if they were pursuing college.
And I'm sure Westmoreland was a very bright man.
He he put it down in language where where uh Dr. Carson could understand it, and and that's the way I would explain it.
Okay, so what we have here, but uh Jim, thanks for the call.
What we have here is a political story essentially saying that Ben Carson was never offered a scholarship at West Point and never applied for admission.
Well, Carson never said he applied for admission.
It seems that what this is all circling around is is Carson's assertion that the Army saw him.
Here's Westmoreland.
Hey man, you're great.
We want you to come to Westport.
Uh West Point, four-year scholarship, man.
Well, you're the best we want you.
He writes about that experience.
And then they go to West No, no, we can't find a record of Ben Carson here.
Uh in fact, he never applied.
Uh it was never extended uh invitation.
So the exaggeration is I guess that Carson writes he was extended an invitation, never accepted it, never acted on it, but that they offered him a scholarship.
And so what we're discussing here is okay, how could he have been talking to Westmoreland and maybe understood that to be what Miss Moreland's saying?
We have two people Naval Academy grad and the West Point grad have said they can believe exactly Carson Carson's version of the story.
And if you don't know that everybody gets a scholarship at the naval or military academies, then it might sound like a huge deal to you.
So I can go through the political story again.
It's clear what they're trying to do.
By the way, this is not appearing in a vacuum today.
Grab audio soundbite number three.
This is a montage just this morning from ABC, CBS, NBC, and their attempts here to undermine Ben Carson, his character, his personality, and the assertions he's made in his book.
New accusations claiming he made up part of his compelling life story.
He is taking hits about whether he's made up part of his life story.
Carson acknowledges using fictitious names and the stories he told about his past.
Meanwhile, Carson's coming under new scrutiny for views of history, defending these past comments on the pyramids of Egypt.
He still believes what he said in this 1998 speech that the pyramids were built to house grain.
His 1998 remarks that the Egyptian pyramids were built by Joseph to store grain.
Carson defended his lack of political experience, claiming every signer of the Declaration of Independence had no elected office experience.
Not true.
Another unorthodox move.
His campaign releasing this rap ad, launching a radio ad complete with a rap.
It's pretty catchy, but that's not actually Carson rapping right there.
And Carson fired back, calling this a garbage smear campaign.
This is last night on the Kelly file.
Meghan Kelly said, Look, I know you've said this feels like a witch hunt, what's happening over at CNN, but let me ask you, flat out, whether you stand by the claim as a young man as a 14-year-old boy that you attempted to stab another boy and attacked your mother with a hammer.
Those claims are absolutely true.
I never use the true names of people in books, you know, to protect the innocent.
That's something that people have done for decades for centuries.
The person that I tried to stab, you know, I talked to today, said would they want to be revealed?
They were not anxious to be revealed.
And it was a close relative of mine, and I didn't want to put their lives under the spotlight.
This is something that I've decided to do.
None of those people decided that they wanted to do this, and the media is ruthless.
So I would say to the people of America, do you think I'm a pathological liar like CNN does?
Next question, just to clarify, you're revealing tonight that the person you attempted to stab unsuccessfully, a story you've told many, many times, was a close relative in your family.
It was a close relative in my family.
You know, I really don't want to get into the details of who that person was.
But also I want to point out how silly the CNN investigation is.
When I would have flashes of temper, it would only be the people uh who were directly involved.
And as far as the episode and uh junior high is concerned, none of those people that they talked to knew about what was going on at Hunter Junior High School.
It's a smear campaign.
But you know, I'm not going to play that game with them.
They can do it all they want.
This is just garbage.
And uh there's another bite that I don't have time to squeeze in now, but uh, it's Carson really reading the Riot Act, Alison Camarata at CNN this morning on new day.
So this political story about the fabrication exaggeration of the whole West Point story is not happening in a vacuum, which adds even more uh evidence to my charge that what we have here is a coordinated effort,
and the political story clearly attempting to convince people that Carson has lied about much Much more than he has ever asserted or even exaggerated.
Take a quick time out and be back and continue.
Let me ask you a question.
Folks, does any of this with Ben Carson amount to anything at all like Bill and Hillary and their abuse of their library foundation?
And their personal enrichment?
Multimillionaires outselling influence on the cum to foreign governments?
Hillary's involvement in the Keystone Pipeline deal and Bill's as well, where they enrich from the decision?
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