All Episodes
Previous Next
Feb. 15, 2016 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:26
February 15, 2016, Monday, Hour #2
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
And greetings and welcome back.
It's great to have you, Rush Limboy, here in the cutting edge of societal evolution.
The telephone number is 800-282-2882 and the email address, L. Rushbo at EIBNet.com.
I'm just looking at the audio soundbite.
I can't believe this.
One, two, three, four, five.
You got to be eight and I are kidding me.
13 of these soundbites are about me.
And some of them have to do with the debate and all that.
Well, we will.
We will.
We're going to hear them and so forth.
But these other things on the debate, I've got to figure out what I've got here that supports what I think this debate was all about.
Let's get started.
Oh, one quick thing.
I saw a very telling comment.
It's not a very, that's the wrong way to hype it.
The owner of the ranch in Texas, where Justice Scalia passed away.
In the interviews that he gave the media, he described that Scalia had arrived on Friday, and Scalia said it had been a long day and a long week and wanted to go to bed at 9 o'clock after dinner and did.
Traveling party of 35.
They'd gone out.
They'd hunted a little bit.
Scalia had not actually got out of the truck much.
He was just looking at the property.
He had not actually done any hunting on the day of arrival.
The owner, Mr. Poindexter, I think his name was, made it a point.
He wasn't asked.
When describing dinner, he made it a point to say that Scalia had not had steak.
Now, that stood out for me as an illustration of how easily people are able to create mindsets.
Scalia passed away.
Everybody thinks natural causes equals heart attack.
Oh, and the latest is that he was found with a pillow on his face or head.
Now, you know, even before that, that the conspiracy theorists were alive and they were multiplying geometric proportions on Twitter and on Facebook.
And you probably don't even need to hear from me what the various conspiracy theories are.
I'm sure you can dream them up yourself.
But this just struck me.
Everybody assumes natural causes equals a heart attack.
Hey, hey, he didn't have steak.
He didn't have steak.
Which means steak equals heart attack.
In America today, eating steak equals heart disease.
Eating steak equals high cholesterol.
Just what people think.
No evidence for it.
People have eaten nothing but beef all their lives, have normal cholesterol, below normal triglycerides, and it ticks the doctors off, but I'm one of them.
It just struck me how easy it is to create these public conceptions, which are often misconceptions.
He didn't have any steak.
And I don't think the guy was worried about liability.
I don't think he was trying to ward off any legal action against him.
He was just, he believes, like everybody else does, like aspects of global warming or aspects of diet or whatever, that something you eat can kill you.
Yeah, you know, Scalia had steak the night before he died.
Well, probably had peas last week or maybe a month before.
We go through this argument like we have.
Everybody who has ever eaten carrots is either dead or will be dead.
What percentage of people do you think have eaten carrots have been in automobile accidents?
It's very, very high.
Or will be involved in an automobile accident.
You can play games at this stuff.
Just struck me at how easy it is to make people believe wives' tales.
So on the Scalia thing, as far as the replacement battle, I just, I want to keep my powder dry and hold back and wait and follow this because I don't think, just if you're just joining us and just to close the loop here, I don't think there's going to be any serious attempt by Obama to come up with a compromise candidate.
Now, he'll say he's doing that.
I'm not saying no, this won't be said.
I'm saying that he's not going to seriously put somebody up for this seat that is not Saul Olinski Jr. wearing some disguise.
That's what it's going to be.
It's too big an opportunity.
It isn't going to be somebody Obama's not sure of.
It isn't going to be somebody that Obama only likes half of or 75% of.
That's not the way they operate.
They get all or nothing, and they keep coming back and coming back until they get it.
But a Supreme Court nomination is it for life.
You get one chance at it.
You don't appoint somebody that's half of what you want, or 60% of what you want, and say, I'll get the rest on the next appointment.
And here's another thing.
Litmus tests.
All these people say, no, no, no, both parties.
No, I will not insulting a nominee.
I will not ask him what he's going to do issue by issue.
The hell they won't.
Every potential nominee, one way or the other, Obama may not do it.
Jay Christian Adams has explained how all this happens.
For example, he told us in an interview to Limbaugh Letter.
I asked him, how does Obama let Eric Holder know what he wants?
It'd be too obvious to bring Holder up there and have a conversation.
All this stuff gets logged.
Well, theoretically, it does.
And he laid out the procedure for the way these things happen.
But he also made the point that there's not much Obama needs to tell Holder.
That's the point.
There wasn't much he needed to tell Lois Larner.
You put people in there who don't need a memo.
You put people in there who don't need instructions.
You put people in there who are going to do what you want because that's who they are.
And it's going to be the same thing here.
And they're not going to go for 60 or 70% of it.
And they will ask whoever it is.
Abortion comes up, what are you going to do?
Gun control comes up.
What are you going to do?
It may not be direct, and they may not even have to do that because they already know if the nominee is already sitting on some circuit district appellate court somewhere else.
So they already know.
But don't believe this, that there isn't a litmus test.
Bernie Sanders even admitted that there would be.
You know what I learned about Bernie Sanders?
He didn't earn a paycheck till age 40.
Bernie Sanders is actually a bum.
Bernie Sanders, here it is, it's in the Investor's Business Daily editorial.
Bernie Sanders, the bum who wants your money.
Democrat presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders said Monday his parents would never have thought their son would end up in the Senate and running for president.
No kidding, he was a ne'er-do-well into his late 30s.
It's certainly something I don't think they ever believed would have happened, said the unabashed socialist during CNN's Democrat Town Hall forum.
He explained his family couldn't imagine his success because my brother and I and mom and dad, we grew up in a three-and-a-half-room rent-controlled apartment in Brooklyn.
We never had a whole lot of money.
But he said it wasn't as bad, or IBD says it wasn't as bad as he says.
His family managed to send him to the University of Chicago.
Despite a prestigious degree, however, Sanders failed to earn a living even as an adult.
It took him 40 years to collect his first steady paycheck, and it was a government paycheck.
Sanders told Vermont Public TV in 1985, I never had any money in my life after settling into his first real job as mayor of Burlington.
Sanders spent most of his life as an angry radical and agitator who never accomplished much of anything.
And yet now he thinks he deserves the power to run your life and your finances.
He said, we will raise taxes on Monday.
He said, yes, we will.
One of his first jobs, Bernie Sanders, one of his first jobs was registering people for food stamps.
He took his first bride to live in a maple sugar shack with a dirt floor, and she soon left him.
Penniless, he went on unemployment from a dirt floor shack to unemployment.
Then he had a child out of wedlock.
Desperate, he tried carpentry, but could barely stick a nail.
He was a horrible carpenter, said a friend to Politico magazine.
His carpentry was not going to support him, and it didn't.
Then he tried his hand freelance writing for leftist rags, writing about masturbation and rape and other crudities for $50 a story.
He drove around in a rusted-out, bondo-covered VW bug with no working windshield wipers.
Friends said he was always poor, and his electricity was turned off a lot.
They described him as a slob who kept a messy apartment, and this is what his friends are saying about him.
The only thing he was good at was talking non-stop about socialism and how the rich were ripping everybody off.
The whole quality of life in America is based on greed, they remember him saying, I believe in the redistribution of wealth of this nation.
Finally, he wormed his way into the Senate 2006, where he still ranks as one of the poorest members of Congress, save for a municipal pension.
Sanders lists no assets.
Save for a municipal pension, Bernie Sanders lists no assets in his name.
All the assets provided in his financial disclosure form are his second wife's.
He does, however, have $65,000, at least as much as $65,000 in credit card debt.
And his first job was government paycheck.
40 years.
It's a bum.
Investors Business Daily.
Dirt Florschak and his wife amazingly, strangely left him.
I mean, that's kind of cruel, right?
Anyway, there's your.
And then Victor Davis Hansen's out with a piece today.
Actually, two devastating pieces on Hillary today.
Pat Cadell on Hillary Clinton's email scandal, claiming it is worse than Watergate.
He says this is the greatest scandal in the history of the U.S. They all ought to be indicted.
This is worse than Watergate.
Details coming up.
In addition, Victor Davis Hansen writing at PJ Media, Hillary Clinton's dead end campaign.
He is writing that for a number of email scandal and Bill Clinton surfacing now.
He thinks it's incredible.
And he's right about this.
The Democrat Party, when it comes to women's issues, has really broadened the scope of what now constitutes sexism.
I mean, it's a much broader scope than it was even back in the 90s.
Now you don't even have to have a rape on a college campus and they can write a story about a rape epidemic on college campus and everybody believes it.
But the point is that since, and Hillary has been part of the feminist movement that has expanded this scope of what can now be called sexual harassment and so forth, and to have her husband, who's the king of that hill, now enter the fray publicly for her.
Hansen thinks that there's no way she gets this.
But again, Victor Davis Hansen is writing from the sensibilities of 10 or 20 years ago.
And I think it's, you know, all bets are off.
You know, what used to doom people, what used to be public shame, what used to ruin careers or really damage them, doesn't seem to as much today for a whole host of reasons.
Now, let's move on to the Republican debate on Saturday night.
Let me cut to the chase and tell you, and again, I've talked to nobody.
Nobody's called me.
I haven't called anybody.
I don't ever call anybody.
I don't reach out.
I don't try to get to know people on campaign staffs and ask them questions.
I don't want to be spun.
So I may hear from them now and then.
It isn't very often.
So my point is that what I'm about to tell you is the result of conversation with nobody, or more properly said, is the result of no conversation with anybody.
If you look at South Carolina, it is an open primary, meaning Democrats can vote.
We took advantage of this, Operation Chaos, the Democrat side back in 2008.
Democrats can vote, Independents can vote.
And the things that Trump said and did Saturday night came out of nowhere.
They didn't make any sense.
Here we are in a Republican primary, and Donald Trump out of the blue starts blaming the Bush family for 9-11 for knowing that the intelligence was made up, that there never were any weapons of mass destruction, and they knew it, Trump said.
Michael Moore doesn't even say that.
That the World Trade Center came down when George W. Bush was president, so don't anybody tell me Trump said he kept us safe.
He jumped all over the Bush family and the Iraq war, and claim that he was on record way, way back as always being opposed to the Iraq war, that it was going to muddy up the Middle East and cause a quagmire.
Nobody can find any record of Trump having opposed the Iraq war in 2008.
They asked him in 2001, 2002, they asked him about that.
And he said, Well, I wasn't a politician then, so the things I was saying weren't getting noted like they would be had I been a politician, but I said it on the stage at a Republican debate.
Donald Trump defended planned parenthood, not the abortion stuff, he said, but the fact that they do great things for women's health.
Folks, there were a number of occasions where Donald Trump sounded like the Daily Cause blog, where Donald Trump sounded like Democrat Underground, sounded like any average host on MSNBC.
And I said now to myself, I said, wait a minute, what's going on?
Trump is not, I don't care what any of you think, he's not stupid.
He has political advisors.
He has a lot of people who are conservatives who are there to tell him where the boundaries are.
And he crossed those boundaries on Saturday.
I don't know how many people in his circle knew where he was going Saturday night and if he was going to go there and how far.
But on a Republican debates day, defending Planned Parenthood in language used by the left, going after George W. Bush and Jeb Bush and the entire Bush family for the most part, using the terminology of Democrats.
Now, there's the clock again.
People think that Trump was out of control, that he had emotional incontinence that night.
You like that term?
Emotional incontinence.
Lost control, was out of control.
Well, maybe, but I still think there was a strategy going into this.
I'll explain when we get back.
Okay, short version.
I think Trump strategically was making a move on independence and Democrats in South Carolina since it's open.
And I think that he wants to wrap this up ASAP.
I think he wants a blow-im-out going away win in South Carolina.
I think he just wants to wrap this up.
I think he thinks he can.
I think the audience booing him ticked him off.
It's been happening the last couple, three debates.
The donors have gotten a majority of the tickets.
I don't recall, I don't recall a Republican debate with, or any Republican debate, with the amount of booing that I heard on Saturday night.
I just don't, like, I remember debates with very little applause, but not outright booing.
And it wasn't just Trump, it was Cruz as well.
The establishment was in the establishment's trying to rig these debates as they are seen on TV.
The establishment was trying to humiliate and embarrass Ted Cruz and Trump.
And I think it really ticked Trump off and may have been, I'm wild guessing here, may have been one of the reasons why he was a victim of emotional incontinence.
I'm sorry again, folks.
I went long in the first segment.
I habitually do this, makes this segment short.
I know that's bad.
I apologize.
We'll be back soon, though.
Right, grab soundbite 21.
And let's grab number 28, 2122.
Anyway, greetings, welcome back, folks.
Rushlin Boy, the EIB network.
So Trump, literally with Democrat lingo, liberal Democrat lingo in the debate on Planned Parenthood on the Iraq war on 9-11 on weapons of mass destruction.
Never before has he said it, but never before have we had an open primary yet.
This is an open primary.
Democrats and independents can cross and vote.
If there's something else going on here that Trump lost control and who he really is surfaced, Then it was going to happen at some point, and it happened on Saturday night if that's what really happened.
If this was strategic, as I have described, coupled with, I don't think that you can overestimate how angry.
Did you see, by the way, this moderate, John Dickerson, you can't get more Democrat operative.
This guy's George Stephanopoulos without the job at the Clinton War Room.
John Dickerson is the son of a drive-by media person.
He has lived in Washington his whole life.
He grew up in Washington.
That is all he knows.
He is a Democrat Party hack.
He's liberal through and through.
Did you see when he was asking at the first of the debate when he's going through a series of questions with Ted Cruz and started correcting Cruz?
And did you see the stare that Ted Cruz Cruz was a millimeter away from launching on this guy and kept it back?
He did not do it.
But this guy went Candy Crowley on him.
This guy went Candy Crowley on Cruz the way Candy Crowley did on Romney.
And it was about statistics and so forth about certain things.
And this guy said, I just want to make sure you're factually correct.
And this guy cannot hold an intellectual candle to Ted Cruz.
Ted Cruz says what he means, means what he says, likes saying what he says and is right about it, is a great debater and is not taken off his game.
And this is like the fourth debate in a row I've read where Cruz really didn't stand out.
Cruz didn't do too.
Ted Cruz remains the guy that continues to climb in the polls.
Ted Cruz is the guy who continues to outperform the polls.
Ted Cruz is the guy lurking around out there while everybody else is watching the fireworks in other places.
But the Republican National Committee stacking that audience with people who were there to disrupt a debate taking place within their own party.
And it wasn't the first time, but it was the loudest.
This was the most obvious that the audience was stacked.
And Trump made the point again, he couldn't get any tickets for his people.
He got a maximum of 20 or 24.
Cruz couldn't get any tickets.
These guys are in there cheering Jeb, cheering the guy with three or four points in the polls, cheering Rubio, cheering John Kasich.
Don't get me started on that.
Oh, let me tell you that was you talk.
No, I didn't.
You talk about operative.
No.
What positives?
Yeah, let's all be.
No, that's, that's, that's, yeah, let's, the old Rodney King, can't we all just get along here?
You know, if that kind of stuff worked, I mean, this is the exact, it's no different.
I'm the guy across the aisle.
I'm the guy to work with Democrats.
That's like saying I'm the guy that can talk Obama out of his judicial nominee and nominate somebody that we approve of.
I'm the guy.
B.S. Nobody's going to talk Obama out of being a radical president and putting a radical judge on the court.
Nobody's going to talk him out of it with behavior and being nice and all this other malarkey.
Now, again, I don't know if the booing finally got to Trump, but it looked like it did to me.
It looked like he was getting ticked off.
He didn't even have to say anything.
He just opened his mouth a couple syllables and here came the booze.
And it did appear to distract him off the point that he was getting ready to make a number of times.
I don't remember specific points.
They did the same thing to Cruz.
I've never seen anything like that that I can recall watching intra-party debates.
I've never seen it on the Democrat side.
I mean, I've heard a smattering of booze here, but I've not seen the whole audience stacked for the express purpose.
And it was done specifically to make it look like no Republicans in South on TV, like no Republicans like Trump.
They didn't tell you the audience was a bunch of donors.
They didn't tell you the audience was a bunch of people that support amnesty.
They didn't tell us going in the audience was a bunch of people that are basically rhinos.
No, the audience was supposed to assume that in South Carolina, the Republican Party hates Trump.
That's what they were trying to create.
He knew it.
And they did it to Cruz as well.
Now, I want you to listen to George Will.
This was on Fox News Sunday yesterday with Chris Wallace, who said, George, what's your reaction to the debate to Trump's apparent search and destroy mission against Jeb Bush and George W. Bush?
The proverbial straw that broke the camel's back didn't break the camel's back.
It was the critical mass, the accumulation of straws.
Last night, I think he may have passed the frontier.
The man who has supported partial birth abortion and gun control and eminent domain and all the rest last night adopted the most vicious line of the hard left in this country.
Bush lied, people died.
I think that if there is such a thing as a critical mass, he's approaching it.
So not necessarily saying that it's happened yet, but we're closer now to people abandoning Trump is what he's talking about.
It's getting harder and harder, in his view, for supporters of Trump to stay with him.
It's getting harder and harder for Trump supporters to defend Trump.
It's getting harder and harder for people to stay with him.
And while they might publicly say, if people know they're already Trump supporters, say they continue to be, they might in private not support Trump when we get to the election on Saturday.
Trump is continuing to hit Ted Cruz.
What is, I just had the latest soundbite thrown my way, and I know I put it.
Grab number 26.
This is what tells me that it might be much closer in South Carolina.
We don't have a lot of polling data out of South Carolina.
I don't think we have a valid post-debate poll yet, do we?
We don't.
We have pre-debate polls where Trump was skyrocketing way ahead of everybody.
I haven't seen a post-debate poll yet.
Trump's in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina this afternoon, and this is among the things he said about Ted Cruz.
He is a liar.
He apologized to Carson after the event.
What good does it do?
Carson said, yeah, but I lost all those votes.
And he apologized to him after the event.
He should have apologized to me also, because frankly, it would have won, but it doesn't matter.
But he apologized.
He said, I'd like to apologize to you, Ben.
The election's over.
And what they should do, if Iowa had any guts, the people from the Republican Party, which they don't, they should disqualify him from winning Iowa.
I really mean it.
Because what he did was a fraud.
All right.
Now, this is clearly clearly an exaggeration of what not only what happened there, but it's also an exaggeration of the impact on Ben Carson.
I mean, Ben Carson is not a factor at this point.
And I imagine people like Rand Paul are looking at the debate Saturday night and asking themselves, why is Ben Carson still on that stage?
And I bet Carly Fiorina is, why is Ben Carson still on that stage?
Because we got bumped off about the same time Ben's reached his status.
But going after Trump's still on the Iowa business, some people say that that means that Trump's internal polling shows that Cruz is gaining ground.
Well, here's what we're going to find out, folks.
One of two things.
Well, there are three things going to happen.
One of three.
On Saturday, the South Carolina primary happens.
And one of the three things is that Trump's going to win it according to the polling data, which means he's going to be in the mid-30s.
He's going to win it handily and with no doubt.
The second thing that could happen is that Trump could, which has been the pattern throughout this entire campaign, expand his lead after this Saturday debate.
This is by no means the first time that Donald Trump has been off the reservation in this campaign.
By no means.
Now, this is new ground off the reservation that he went to.
I mean, he went to Liberal Democratville.
But in terms of saying shockingly outrageous things, this is by no means the first.
And each time that he's done that, he has gained popularity.
So that's the second part.
The third possibility is that he loses ground in this debate and ends up with a smaller percentage of the vote in the South Carolina primary.
And we won't know, of course, which of these three scenarios happen to be true until the votes are counted.
But let's take them one by one.
If Trump gains support, there is only one conclusion that you...
Well, no, there's two, actually.
But let's stick with the solid conclusion you could draw is that the anger at the Washington establishment is even greater than we know.
And we already know it's intense.
We already know that the disgust and the lack of respect and the total loss of confidence in the Republican Party in Washington is deep.
But if Trump gains support after this, it will mean that that degree of disgust, lack of respect, and intense anger is greater than anyone knows.
And people want the people in Washington to know it.
It'll also be interesting to see how many Democrats actually cross, if any do, and vote for Trump.
There's actually another thing, an offshoot, if Trump gains ground here.
And even if he doesn't, but let's say if he does, if he even holds steady or gains ground, do you realize how this turns upside down the electoral map?
The electoral map right now, whoever the Democrat nominee is, goes in with 200 electoral votes automatically.
You give New York, you give them California, you give them Wisconsin and Michigan, you give them Pennsylvania.
And it's possible that Trump could turn that upside down.
It's possible that if Trump gets the nomination, that New York could be in play.
I mean, it's unlikely.
Pennsylvania could be in play.
Wisconsin could be in play.
Michigan could be in play.
If any of these things happen, do you realize what happens to the Democrat coalition?
If any of these states, which are automatically deadlocked blue, end up going Republican for Trump.
And even if before the election, the polling indicates that this is happening.
And I think that there are a lot of people who think this could happen anyway, regardless what happened Saturday night, that the electoral map could be blown, because the anger at Washington is palpable on both sides.
And it could well be that there are some Democrats and independents out there fed up with Hillary, don't like Bernie.
And Trump comes out, says some of the things he says, and it doesn't take much, and maybe some of them go in for him.
Who knows?
I think this is part of Trump's strategy, actually.
We'll see if it pays off.
If he loses ground, then that changes the dynamic.
That means there's going to be more volcanic eruptions down the road like we haven't seen yet.
There is new polling then after South Carolina.
Well, Trump up by 22, but is that up or down from where he was in the same poll before South Carolina?
Okay, well, fine.
Trump's up by 22 after the debate, but we don't know what he was before the debate, but still up 22 in a CBS poll.
Is that CBS YouGov?
Okay.
I don't know that that's new.
That might be a poll Sunday, but I don't know that it has the debate results in it.
Anyway, I got to take a break again, folks.
Your phone calls are coming next, so hang in there.
And we're back to the phones we go on the EIB network.
Shane in West Palm Beach, Florida.
Great to have you with us, sir.
Hello.
Hey, Rush.
I wanted to tell you why I don't think Trump's going to lose any support over this at all.
And it's two reasons.
Number one, the establishment turned their back on the working people in this country a long time ago.
And when you turn your back on somebody, don't expect them to come to your defense when you're attacked.
Okay, now I understand that.
We've got to get specific here.
Trump went after a revered Republican, we assume revered, and in South Carolina, George W. Bush has an 80% approval rating still.
He went after George W. Bush on the Iraq War on weapons of mass destruction, accused him of lying about the WMD and knowing about it, accused him of blowing up the Middle East and creating ISIS because of the Iraq War, went after Jeb Bush for being related to him.
That's different than going after the establishment for amnesty or whatever.
Do you think going after a, is Bush not that revered by people?
No, no, Bush has not been revered by people.
And here's why.
He had control of the Senate.
He had control of the House.
He had control of the presidency.
And he didn't do a damn thing to secure that border.
I don't think that a lot of people who had their communities invaded by illegal aliens feel that Bush kept them safe.
I mean, this notion that Bush kept us safe, he didn't secure the border, so he didn't keep us safe from, you know, people coming into our country from the Middle East.
And, you know, look, I don't think it's so much what Trump said, it's who he said it to.
And you could say the same thing about John McCain.
John McCain, war hero, right?
He's revered as a war hero.
Right, but John McCain turned his back on the people of this country.
And I think that John McCain and the Bushes would much rather be revered by the New York media than the majority of this country.
And I think that Donald Trump is the opposite.
I think Donald Trump would rather be liked by a majority of the American people than the New York media or the Washington establishment.
So it's not so much what he said or what he attacked him for, it's who he attacked.
And he attacked Bush, who I don't think is that revered.
A big reason why, I think, is the same reason people don't like Jeb, illegal immigration.
Yeah, okay.
That's a deep issue.
There's no question that they don't get it in the establishment on this immigrant.
They don't get it.
And the donors who are in their booing on Saturday night.
Don't discount that in people cutting Trump some slack in this.
I'm telling you, they don't get the disconnect.
I've never seen it this wide.
They don't under no matter how much they think they do.
They still know you.
Shane, I appreciate the call.
We will continue in Miramo.
This afternoon in South Carolina, Trump just said the RNC better get its act together because, you know, I signed a pledge, but the pledge isn't being honored by them.
As far as I'm concerned, they're in default of their pledge.
▲
Export Selection