Yes, sir, Rebob, greetings and welcome back, my friends.
Rushlinboy, your guiding light through times of trouble.
There are times of confusion when things don't seem to be making any sense whatsoever.
When times of depression and despair overcome everyone, I remain your guiding light as well as during the good times.
And there will be the good times.
Again.
In fact, sometimes they happen now.
Depends on how lucky you get at night.
Telephone numbers 800-282-2882.
And the email address, lrushbow at EIBnet.com.
So the funniest thing over the weekend during showfriend, what was this?
It was on, I guess it's Saturday.
Here we have this major blizzard that has stormed the Northeast.
Two years ago, the New York Times has a story in which they're serious about the end of snow because climate change and global warming, at the time they wrote it, the ski slopes were empty and bare or way, way, way below normal.
And so capitalizing and politicizing everything, which the New York Times does, here came a big story essentially saying that we're looking here at the end of snow very soon.
Next 20 years could be the end of it.
It might not be any more snow.
Well, which is absolutely flat out ridiculous.
It's worse than journalistic malpractice.
Just flat out ridiculous.
But like every other one of their global warming predictions, it's years, decades down the road.
It's not tomorrow or next year.
So the snowfall, this blizzard of this past weekend cannot be said to have discredited their story.
But in the meantime, in an effort to save the planet, these truly wacko leftists have invested in solar power and wind power and all these supposed renewables, which there really isn't, I mean, not really possible.
But it sounds good and it sounds clean.
And one of the things that the wacko environmental left has done in the pursuit of wind power is to build these gigantic windmills that need turbine engines to move them in case the wind doesn't.
What do you do if there isn't any wind?
And if that's all you're relying on, it's what do you do for electricity?
Well, you have to have a little turbine up there, relying on what?
Fossil fuels in order to turn the windmill, the propeller.
They look like giant, giant airplane propellers.
I'm not even going to get into how many birds die with these things.
I have a picture here of one of these windmills that was frozen solid during a recent winter blast.
What to do?
You know what they had to do to get it was iced up?
There was ice all over the blades.
There was ice all over the motor.
The blades had been rendered so heavy because of all the additional ice that had frozen on them that the wind, even strong wind, could not touch.
You know what they had to do?
They had to gas up a helicopter.
Then they had to turn on a giant water heater.
Then they had to load hundreds of gallons of hot water in a giant pot, a helicopter big enough to get the thing off the ground.
They had to fly over the windmills and dump the hot water from the giant pot being towed by the helicopter on the propellers of the windmill farms to get the ice off of them so that they could once again begin.
Do you realize how much, according to the wacko left, wasted energy was involved in making their precious windmills work again?
And I have here a picture of it.
And it's got a quote from Albert Einstein imposed over the picture.
The Einstein quote is, only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity.
And he is exactly right.
So you have a helicopter that's burning aviation fuel.
It's hated.
It's just, oh, God, it's fossil fuel and gasoline.
Yuck.
Hot water.
It required a massive heater to heat the water.
I mean, we're talking about what was the temperature, 25, 26 degrees.
Had to heat the water and keep it hot enough that it would remain hot while being lifted by the helicopter high enough.
And then they had that somebody good aim on the helicopter dumping the water on the frozen windmill.
And this is just one bad.
Actually, it's a spray.
They have a fire hose up there that's connected to the hot water container that they control from the cockpit helicopter.
But just absurd, just literally absurd stuff.
And if there were no fossil fuels, if they leftists like Obama had succeeded, and there wasn't any way to get a helicopter off the ground, and there wasn't a way to heat the water because we had not used those sources anymore, then people who depend on wind power for their electricity would have been frozen to death.
And this is called innovation and forward thinking.
The New Yorker has a cover story on Donald Trump.
I have not seen the New Yorker story, so I don't know if the New Yorker is for Trump or not.
I can't tell because this is actually a Mother Jones story, a leftist publication, a bunch of wackos themselves.
And they're talking about the cover of the New Yorker magazine, which has got George Washington on it, Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, and FDR.
And the point that Mother Jones is making is what is distasteful about Trump is not that he offends old-fashioned American values.
Trump is distasteful.
This is to the leftists at Mother Jones.
Trump is distasteful because he taps into certain old-fashioned American values, like nativism, brash, tough talk, slow-burning authoritarianism, and family dynasties that have played a very consequential role throughout American history.
And Trump embodies all of it.
Now, it's interesting, the guys on the cover, Teddy Roosevelt, Teddy Roosevelt considered by many to be one of our great presidents, Mr. Snerdley.
My grandfather loved Teddy Roosevelt.
My grandfather loved, and he was a down-the-middle Republican like nobody else ever was.
He loved Teddy Roosevelt.
He loved Teddy.
I mean, I interviewed him on his 100th birthday in Kansas City.
It was an American Bar Association.
Went on and on and on.
He said, Teddy Roosevelt, greatest president ever, because of the innovation that Roosevelt brought to the country, among them the Navy.
But he did, there was a thing about Teddy Roosevelt was a get-it-done kind of guy.
Today, it would be called slow-burner or slow-burning authoritarianism.
And, of course, Roosevelt's family dynasty and so forth.
But Teddy Roosevelt was big pro-America.
I mean, going down there, building the Panama Canal, nativism, so forth.
I mean, expanding federal lands, creating national parks, and so forth.
Many people looking back on Teddy Roosevelt think of him as the first big government president, but people back then loved him because he was pro-America, unabashed, America first always.
And so we have this New Yorker cover here.
And again, I don't know what the New Yorker story is because the story here about the New Yorker cover is from Mother Jones.
And it's Mother Jones analyzing Trump, not the New Yorker.
So it's just the cover picture that I have here.
I don't have any idea what the New Yorker says.
Give you a flavor of this, as written by Mother Jones.
My gosh, where to start?
Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, George Washington, John Kennedy, Abraham Lincoln.
Those are the guys on the cover, actually.
Looking on in belief, disbelief at the mess Trump is making of the presidential election, Teddy Roosevelt backed a racist imperial war and said white women using birth control were committing race suicide by turning their country over to less fair-skinned people.
I don't know that Rose Old ever said this.
Mother Jones quoting him on this.
FDR, the architect of Japanese internment.
JFK, other than his personal life, makes Trump look like Ned Flanders, started a land war in Asia we're still recovering from.
And George Washington owned people and bought an election by getting people drunk.
So this is who Mother Jones is comparing Trump to, these interpretations of some of the greatest Americans who've ever lived.
Now, I don't know how many Trump supporters are going to run into the New Yorker or Mother Jones, but if they do, it's just going to reaffirm their support for Trump to have him insulted this way, because this is not how people see Trump.
You know, one of the ways people see Trump and Ted Cruz, and even to a lesser extent Marco Rubio, one of the identifying characteristics of the American electorate, and I think this would probably be true even of some on the Democrat side, is fear.
What is that?
I must be the printer behind me, stupid facts machine.
There is genuine fear in this country, but the question is fear of what?
For some people, the fear is they're out of work and they can't find a job.
So the fear is economic.
But even people who have jobs, even people who have careers, they're afraid.
What are they afraid of?
They're afraid they're going to lose their jobs.
They're afraid they're going to lose their 401ks.
They are afraid they're going to lose everything because they look at trends in the country and they see everything going in the wrong direction.
The Democrats are afraid, some of the Democrat base is afraid that the Republicans are going to win and roll back gay marriage and roll back Obamacare and roll back all this liberal socialism that they think they've got.
It still hasn't made them happy.
But there's another fear that isn't much spoken of that I think these other fears are legitimate, but there's a fear greater, maybe even be the umbrella under which all these other fears fall.
And that fear, and it's big, is of the government.
And this fear of government runs pretty much throughout the Republican base.
It's a legitimate fear.
It's embodied by every time Obama and the Democrats start bellyaching about guns.
You know, that's constitutional.
That's the Second Amendment.
They know that if Obama's serious, he's going to do something that violates the Constitution and that the Constitution won't stop him.
It's a fear.
Others are fearful of the unstoppable growth of the federal government and what that means.
Others are afraid of the endless regulation coming out of Washington that's not backed up by legislation that is nothing but punitive.
People do not feel joined with their government, and they certainly don't feel that there is a unified sense of purpose from citizen to government.
The fear is government versus citizen.
The Republican Party has no way of relating to that.
They poo-poo it.
They make fun of people afraid of government.
To them, that strain of the Republican base or conservatism, those are the real cooks.
What do you mean, afraid of government?
You tinfoil head conspiracy theorist.
That's what they think.
But the fear of government's real.
The fear of government's justified.
You look at the IRS and the Tea Party groups, which were denied tax-exempt funding.
Obviously, political.
There are a lot of people with a legitimate fear of government.
If you have a job and are afraid of losing your job, what's the real fear?
The government's going to mess things up, or they're going to purposely do it, or something's going to happen, but somebody not responsible is in charge of the economy and is making a mess of it.
The umbrella fear is fear of government.
Well, who out there happens to be talking about the incompetence and incapability of the government louder than anybody else is?
That would be the Donald and Cruz as well.
But with the Donald, it's an identifying characteristic.
He never even utters the words.
A caller moment is like, I never hear Trump talk about big government.
He does all the time.
He just doesn't use the words.
He talks about liberals all the time, doesn't use the word.
He talks about conservatives, doesn't use the word.
Exactly the advice Pat Buchanan was given back in 1996.
Go ahead, do everything.
Do not call yourself a conservative, Pat.
It'll narrow your identity.
You don't need any help from other conservatives.
Pat couldn't do it.
He was so tied to the conservative movement in the party, he couldn't do it.
But Trump can, since he's never really been associated with either political party.
It's an open question.
But everything Trump talks about, much of what he talks about, is rooted in opposition in one way or another to things happening in government to people from government.
And that is if the media would go out and start interviewing people about this and delving into why do you support Cruz or why do you support Trump or what if they kept digging and the media won't because they don't understand it either.
All these people, the government is loved by the Democrats.
The media loves government.
My God, it's where they all make their money.
It's where they all make their living.
The idea of government getting smaller, unacceptable.
Not possible.
Will not happen.
Same thing with the Republican establishment.
Their jobs depend upon a big, thriving, active government.
But one of the primary tenets of conservatism, small government, out-of-the-way government, it's as much a part of this campaign as if somebody were mentioning the words each and every day.
The difference is the words are not being mentioned, but the message is getting through.
And back to the phones we go.
This is Jonathan in Naples, Florida.
Great to have you on the program.
How are you doing?
Good.
Thank you.
Just calling.
I just wanted to say, I mean, I'm feeling the same way I did back in about 2008 when I was in school in Tallahassee.
I ended up leaving the country after the BP oil spill.
I got a settlement from them, and I ended up leaving to go down to Honduras.
Spent a couple of years down there because I couldn't handle what was going on here.
Wait a minute.
Why did you leave after the BP oil spill?
Well, after Obama got elected and I was going to, I was going all to college.
I was going to college in Tallahassee.
And after all that, and I couldn't, you know, all this craziness that was going on with that.
You mean it was Obama's election and all that to drop you out?
Yeah, yeah, just bummed me out.
And then after the BP oil spill, I was living down in Naples, Florida, and I got a $10,000 settlement.
I took that and started Central America.
Okay, okay, gotcha.
And after that, you know, I came back after about three years down there.
And now with this election, I'm feeling the same way.
I feel a little bit of hope, though, with Trump running.
You feel a little bit of hope about Trump.
A little bit of hope.
I feel like he'll actually go in there and clean a little bit of house and get some new people that aren't career politicians in there.
So you wouldn't mind a little authoritarianism in that way.
I guess you could put it that way.
Just someone who will let people know that we're not going to put up with some of the same BS that's been going on.
One of the fears that I have seen people register on our side is they oppose Obama and his executive actions, his executive orders.
But the fear is that they would support one of their own acting in the same way, but to erase what Obama has done.
And then they say that would be very bad.
We can't have people on our side also supporting authority, even for good, no matter what the purpose.
We can't have people who think that's how Washington works.
But we might have, folks, given the degree of frustration people have with the country hanging in the balance.
And we are back.
Your guiding light, Rush Limbaugh, half my brain tied behind my back just to make it fair.
Yeah, I've got this immigration stack I've got to get to.
A couple things here, folks.
Ben Shapiro, recent interviewee, Limbaugh Letter, young, brilliant conservative, located many places, has a piece on the Daily Wire here, three reasons the Iowa polls might not predict a Trump win.
Now, there are a lot of people.
I had somebody say to me last night, Rush, I don't believe these Iowa polls.
I just, it's, I was different.
You got to show up in caucus.
It's just not vote.
You've got to actually go there.
And this person cited what is in the drive-by media.
You know, Trump doesn't have a ground game.
He really doesn't have a ground game.
It's a big different thing in Iowa.
But you can't just fly in there and make speeches and fly out.
You've got to have an organization.
So there are a lot of people.
I myself used to be one of these guys.
Ah, the polls can't.
I've been forced to bite the bullet every time.
I thought the polls weren't right.
There's been maybe one or two occasions.
But I wanted to share this with you anyway from Ben Shapiro.
He says, over the weekend, Trump took commanding leads in a bunch of new polls out of Iowa.
Fox News leads Ted Cruz by 11 points.
According to CBS, he's up by five points.
CNN, he's up by 11 points as well.
The only poll in which Ted Cruz holds a lead is something called a KBUR poll.
And in that poll, Cruz leads by two points.
The only poll Cruz leads, and it's within margin of error.
That's a significant swing in Trump's favor just in the past few days.
And part of it, Shapiro writes here, is surely driven by Sarah Palin's endorsement of Trump.
If that's true, folks, you do not know.
Well, maybe you do know.
The manifest frustration with Sarah Palin among many conservatives and some Republicans.
And the fact that Trump's doing well is bad enough.
If Palin is helping him, that's, you know, keep away from sharp objects time.
That's call of little men in white coats.
That'll drive them over the edge.
That Palin would be a thing.
Oh, no.
They would be of the mind that Palin would hurt Trump because they think Palin hurt them.
They don't think it was McCain that was the problem.
But anyway, Shapiro says there are three reasons that the Iowa polls might be all wet.
Gravely exaggerated, predicting a Trump win.
The first is that polls in Iowa are historically bad.
For example, at this point, Rick Santorum, the eventual Iowa winner, was polling at 7% in the Real Clear Politics Average poll when he won it back in.
Santorum won it in 08 or 200.
I forget what Santorum.
Somebody, the last two winners of the Iowa caucus, the Republicans, Santorum, before that, it was somebody that also didn't go anywhere.
But anyway, his point is that Santorum, who won it, was at seven points one week out.
He was sixth in the field after Ron Paul, Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Rick Perry, and Michelle Bachmann.
He eventually ended up winning the caucuses with 24% of the vote.
Oh, yes, it was Huckabee in 08.
In 2008, one week ago, Mike Huckabee was leading by three and ended up winning by nearly 10.
In 2008, the Real Clear Politics poll, Average, placed Obama at 31%, Hillary at 29%, John Edwards at 26.
They ended up 38, 30, and 29 for Clinton, meaning there's a lot of variability.
So that's one bit of evidence.
The second reason that Shapiro cites why the polls in Iowa might be wrong is that they are quite broad.
After 2012's poll-doubting debacle, I have vowed not to doubt polling data as a general rule, he writes.
But I'm not the one doing the doubting.
NateSilver of 538.com, probably America's leading polling guru, at least by reputation, says a lot of differences in these polls are based on how tightly polls are screening voters.
And then the third reason to doubt the polls is that in Iowa, endorsements matter.
Because Iowa is a caucus state.
It means that candidates' representatives lobby voters before the voters raise their hands.
And endorsements matter an awful lot.
On-the-ground organization does too.
That's why Nate Silver site still has Cruz with a 48% chance of winning the Hawkeye Caucy and Trump at 41%.
So we'll see.
You know, Nate Silver is the guru.
Everybody, the left loved Nate Silver until he left the Times and went to ESP, and then he was a sellout.
But the 538 site gives Cruz a 48% chance of winning Iowa and Trump 41.
Yet here's the Fox News poll with Trump up to an 11-point lead.
Another thing I wanted to share with you, I have a good friend who loves this country dearly, along with his friends.
And he has put together a website that probably was a little bit more relevant in previous elections, this one being an outlier.
But what this website does, and I'm just touting this as an interesting thing for you to go look at, because it's an indication of the cross-section of interest that there is in the presidential race.
What this site chooses to do, it's one of these sites where you go, and all the candidates on the Republican side, Democrat 2, are listed, and everything they believe policy-wise has been recorded.
The website is leadershipprojectforamerica.org.
And it is current.
It's comprehensive information on all the presidential candidates.
It has probably the most detailed objective grading of the candidates and a whole bunch of people involved in it that put it together.
The idea behind this website is let's say that you believe in small government, low taxes, but you believe there should be Medicare and all that.
You're able to input this and it finds the candidate for you.
That's its objective.
The theory is that it's impossible for every citizen to know everything about every candidate because the news media treats them differently.
You would have to go to each candidate's website and then wade through all the policy statements that they publish about themselves, and then you'd have to believe it.
And what this site seeks to do is synthesize all of that for you.
Now, I told my friend, you realize Trump throws this all out of kilter.
I mean, because none of these things that you have as factors matter in terms of Trump's support.
I mean, Trump, I do think Trump has more issue-related support than people acknowledge.
But there's also a whole lot of other reasons that Trump, I actually think that this guy that called us last week, the 28-year-old millennial, who offered the explanation for why none of this stuff that Trump says, like stepping in it or making a faux pas statement or a politically incorrect statement,
the reason those things don't matter to him is because most of the people supporting Trump, not really personally invested in Trump, but rather invested in what the Trump campaign is and what it represents.
And it's outside the establishment.
It's, you know, all these things about outsider versus insider.
That it's not strictly focused, issue-based, although for some people it is.
You get the immigration.
I think people who think Trump is not issue-based really sell short the importance of the immigration issue in launching Trump's whole campaign and the fact that he has not been contradictory about that.
He hasn't changed his original statement.
Still keeps talking about building the wall or Mexico paying for it or what have you.
It was the thing that put him on the map, and I think it's the glue for his support base.
There are other things, too, that Trump supporters, I'm sure, are issue-oriented about and supporting.
But in many cases, it's even beyond that.
My point is, I think people, some people support Trump even when they know that he might be inclined to do something, one or two things that they disagree with.
Their attitude is, I don't care.
You know what?
I'm not single issue.
I'll take the best deal I can.
This is the best guy I know of to shake something up.
I need it.
Shake it up.
I don't like the insiders.
I don't like the establishments of either party.
But anyway, this site, it may include Trump too.
I haven't checked it lately, but I promised the guy that I would mention it to you.
And it does provide ⁇ I mean, if you really are interested in finding out, you start out with your set of things that are important to you.
And this website is supposed to produce the candidate closest to the issues you identify as you visit the site that are important to you.
So if you have time, check it out.
It's an interesting exercise.
And then you can also judge how good a job they've done at actually assembling this data.
Again, LeadershipProject4America.org.
And I have a brief timeout we have to take.
We'll be back and continue after this.
Hi, how are you?
Welcome back, Rush Limbaugh Talent on loan from God.
This is Derek in Houston.
It's great to have you, sir.
Hello.
Yes, sir.
Thank you.
The problem I have with Trump.
The problem you have with Trump.
No, sir, I'm saying the problem I have with Trump, my apologies, the problem I have with Trump is that when you have a candidate that builds his support based on the cult of personality and has blind followers who love him because of that instead of his ideas, and even worse, when that personality is so different from his past personality, you set up a president just like Obama who will bend to the establishment party leaders instead of leading himself.
We don't need a celebrity Republican president as much as we didn't need a celebrity Democrat president.
We need a president with a proven record of being who he is and doing what he says.
I think we need a man like Ted Cruz who did what he said he would do in Texas and did what he said he would do in the Senate.
Yeah, that's true.
He did.
I don't disagree with you that he ⁇ I mean, Ted Cruz does not vacillate.
He doesn't disappoint, doesn't say one thing and go do the other.
You asked the previous caller, sir, why it doesn't matter to most voters.
And my answer to that would be, Eleanor Roosevelt once said, small minds discuss people.
Average minds discuss events, and great minds discuss ideas.
That's why this show is so successful.
That's exactly right.
I think most voters just go for the personality they see at the debate and they don't go further.
So you, no wrong answer here.
Don't infer a tone here in my question.
So you think that most of Trump's support is not related to issues or substance that he has mentioned, but rather that he's the celebrity apprentice host.
I agree, sir.
I do.
And I believe that Trump kind of verified that himself recently by saying if he shot somebody in Times Square or whatever, that no one would care.
That's because they love him because of his persona, which he's developed to be a candidate.
It's not who he truly is.
I think if Trump thought it was more profitable to be a Democrat and he could gain more power as a Democrat, he would.
And he tried that.
But today, being as smart as he is, he sees a better chance as a Republican.
Okay, well, let's see if your criticism hurts Trump at all.
It happened on the Rush Limbaugh program.
You just took a pretty good swipe of Trump.
Let's see if you're able to bring his poll numbers down tomorrow.
Back after that.
Would you say, let me just quick question here going out to think of this?
Would you say that Trump is conservative on immigration, national security, and jobs?
You would?
You think Trump's conservative on all three of those?