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Feb. 15, 2016 - Rush Limbaugh Program
33:40
February 15, 2016, Monday, Hour #3
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And greetings and welcome back, my friends.
Great to have you here, Rush Limboh at a frenetic pace.
The energy is palpable here behind a golden EIB microphones.
Events are happening as rapidly as we can keep up with them, but they can't outpace us, folks.
Because we are on top of everything.
We're in a cutting edge of societal evolution.
Not only do you find out what's going on out there by being here, you find out what to think about it and what other people are thinking about it.
Don't doubt me.
Snerdley staring at me with his mouth wide open.
800 two eight two, totally dazzled in there.
Are you 800 two eight two-2882 if you want to be on the program?
Listen to Ronald Brownstein here on CNN today, Chris Cuomo said, I want your thoughts, Ron, on Trump's attack on George W. Bush.
In this debate, Trump was as kind of unbound as we have seen him in any debate.
He was as intemperate, unpresidential, belligerent, and iconoclastic in denouncing Bush in language usually heard from Democrats.
If he can hold his piece of the coalition after this, it is really an indication of how deep that connection is, how difficult it is to shake it.
He really pushed the boundaries of acceptability for Republican.
If he holds it after this, I think that's going to be a big statement.
Right.
But it's the statement, if he if he holds his people after this, the statement will be just how livid Republican voters are at the Washington establishment.
Now, you may come on, Russia knows that.
I'm not sure that the establishment yet has an accurate idea of how deep this resentment is.
And here's another thing.
The more they learn it, the more they resolve to say, screw you.
There is no there is no you it used to be in, and it's not that long ago.
I go back in 2002 and give you an example of this.
When the voters rejected a party, the party tried in a ways, at any rate, to tell voters they were going to change, and they heard, we hear you, we hear you, we understand.
There's none of that anymore.
Voters don't vote the way the party wants.
The party says, screw you.
And they dig their heels in it.
Democrats especially, but I think the Republican establishment over amnesty and a couple other things.
Um, if if Trump gains support here, it's not just about the solid nature of Trump's support.
I'm not trying to diminish that, but it's it's also about just how angry people are at Washington, and Trump is the best vessel to display that of all the other Republicans running.
Crew is a close second.
Now, grab somebody 26 again.
Something else could be going on, however.
Here is Trump again this afternoon, Mount Pleasant, South Carolina.
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 should have apologized to me also, because frankly, it would have won, but doesn't matter.
But he apologized, he said, I'd like to apologize to you, Ben.
The election's over.
Now, what they should do, if Iowa had any guts to 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.
Now, what is this really all about?
That's about Cruz.
Why?
Why still be going after Cruz?
Just Saturday night, you go after George W. Bush, which Trump has walked back a little bit.
I should point that out.
He has walked back a tad, his criticism of Bush, but he has not walked back his criticism of Cruz on this Ben Carson business at all.
Well, I the more I think about it, folks, I am more convinced that what Trump did Saturday night was a politically strategic thing.
And that was to go after the fringe leftists in South Carolina who can cross over and vote in the Republican primary.
Now, why would Trump want to do that?
He's running in a Republican primary.
Why would he want, other than, you know, broadening the base or what have you, but I don't think that's what Trump's thinking.
I I th what's he doing?
He he I think he one of two things.
He either wants to smoke the field here, he just wants this over.
He wants such a sweeping domineering win Saturday that it sends the signal this is over.
Or something else is happening.
And the something else that's happening is something that you won't know about it because if it is happening, the media isn't going to want to tell you.
Conservative or liberal media isn't going to want to tell you.
And that could be that Ted Cruz is gaining ground.
And with Trump continuing to focus on Cruz, it tells me that maybe this is indeed happening.
I mean, he's still going after Cruz on this supposed fraud that happened with Ben Carson.
The effort there, obviously, the purpose of that is to de-legitimize Cruz as a candidate.
In the eyes of voters, there's no question that that's what Trump's appealing to here.
But why?
Why worry about Cruz after you go after George W. Bush and Iraq at weapons of mass destruction and 9-11 and all that than the circle back to Cruz still.
Well, I have this story here from the Daily Beast, not the Daily Caller.
That's Chatsworth Oswar Jr. site.
The Daily Beast is a hard left site.
The Secret Army stumping for Ted Cruz is the headline here.
And the story, this point, or the point this story makes is that Ted Cruz keeps out performing his polling.
And he's getting no press on it.
In fact, if you I challenge you, like I did, go read any of the standard operating procedure analysis of the Saturday night debate of Cruz.
I don't care who it is.
I'm not calling names here.
Just go anywhere you want in conservative media that has an establishment bent, and you will read Rubio made people forget his slip-ups in the previous debate.
Trump did whatever he did, and they talk about Carson.
And when they get Ted Cruz, they say Cruz mostly turned in a solid but unnoticeable performance yet again.
Ted Cruz didn't stand out on Wednesday or Saturday night.
Ted Cruz had an off-night.
Ted Cruz never, ever is Cruz credited for being the great debater that he is.
Rubio is chided for blowing his chance by that constant repetition to uh Christie's questioning.
But then the focus Saturday night, after people stopped talking about Trump, they went to Rubio and they said, and this was on Fox and CNN, the other places.
Yeah, yeah, you know, we're all wondering here if Marco Rubio could make people forget that horrible performance in New Hampshire, and we think Joe that he did.
Well, thank you, Ted.
Appreciate your analysis.
What do you think, Jane?
Yeah, I'd have to agree with you.
I think Marco was so damn strong tonight, he actually did make people forget.
And what do you think of Ted Cruz?
Well, you know, he was there tonight.
But here we have the Daily Beast, Secret Army stumping for Ted Cruz.
Cruz keeps out performing his polling.
He's getting very little credit or press for it.
It's very much under the radar.
And of all places, for it to be noticed here, a left-wing website.
I'll give you a pull quote as an example.
South Carolina politicos describe it as an effective, relentless operation.
This is Cruz and his PACs.
And it has some of Cruz's opponents feeling a little jittery.
An operative for a rival campaign unnamed, said, I'll be very shocked, honestly, if Ted Cruz doesn't win South Carolina.
Trump is led by double digits in all the recent uh South Carolina polls, but some are skeptical that his lead is really that commanding, and they point to the different ground games, particularly Cruz's and others as evidence for their doubt.
The keep the promise packed.
Their staff explain that the group has been door knocking across the state in a few targeted regions and counties since last November.
In every or in early January, those door knockers started focusing on persuasion, identifying likely Republican primary voters who favor an evangelical Christian candidate, knocking on their doors and having conversations aimed at persuading them to back Cruz.
Another poll quote, Matt Moore, the chairman of South Carolina Republican Party said the PAC may have an even farther reach than the campaign proper, since keep the promise of the PAC supporting Cruz is the first and only long-term large-scale super PAC canvassing operation in the state.
No other candidate has one like this.
Then he added, Matt Moore did, chairman South Carolina Republican Party that keep the promise is the only super PAC he knows of that has any sort of ground game in South Carolina.
Paul Lindsey, a representative for Rise to Wright, said his pack also has a professional canvassing operation.
It recently moved down from New Hampshire, but it hasn't made nearly the splash with locals that Cruz has had.
And the Keep the Promises team, Cruises, is pretty confident that their ground game tops that of Trump.
Trump's team has sent RVs of volunteers around the upstate door knocking, but those efforts are more about marketing than anything else.
And then there is internal polling out there for the Bush campaign and others, which shows that Cruz is slowly steadily closing in.
So here is a possible scenario to explain what happened Saturday night.
And by the way, don't underestimate the political infrastructure Trump has in his inner circle.
He has a lot of professional, experienced political operatives, consultants, and advisors.
It's not a shoot from the hip operation per se.
By that I mean there are strategic political objectives that are formed and executed.
And it could well be that the reason Trump made his appeal to the left wing to the Democrats in South Carolina with his approach on Saturday night, is because he knows that the South Carolina Republican base is so evangelical,
so oriented to somebody like Cruz that he may not think that he can win a majority of that base.
And so to offset that, he has made his appeal via his statement Saturday night to these Democrats and Independents who can cross over.
I don't have any doubt that that's what he did.
Now the why, that's up for grabs.
We don't know.
I mean, well, we know that he was he's trying to attract them, and we know that he wants them.
It is it because he's his is his own internal polling shows that he's not doing all that well with Republican conservatives in South Carolina, or is it that he is and just wants to smoke the field and be done with this and move on into the SEC primaries with it all a formality?
Could it be that he just wants he's tired of seeing Jeb Bush on the stage and wants him gone?
Could it be this was somebody else's theory, and I don't think this is right, but this will show you what some people think of Trump.
Some people think that he went telling me they think that he went after Bush simply because Bush is showing up today to campaign for Jeb, and that that offends Trump.
Okay, I got a guy coming in here who's gonna be ripping me.
I got a guy coming in here this is Saturday night, Trump's frame of mind.
I got a guy showing up, ex-president to support this lackey.
I got a guy, his brother coming in because this guy can't handle it himself.
Jeb can't get above five points on his own, so he's got to bring in big brother.
Well, hell with that.
If Bush is coming in here and not supporting me, I'm gonna make him pay for it.
That's what some people have told me that is the way Trump's mind works.
If you're not supporting him, if you're coming in to try to get him, he's gonna preempt you, head you off at the pass, and Butch Cassidy and Sundance the kida.
And everybody asking, have everybody, who are those guys?
And just keep coming.
It's Trump.
So there's all kinds of theories that are all over the board, but there's no question in my mind now that he did not lose control.
Wrong way to say it.
There's no question in my mind that he meant to say what he said.
Maybe he didn't mean to say it as he said it, the emotional incontinence.
But he intended to do it.
There's no question he made a play for crossovers.
He's got a hardcore bunch of supporters.
There's no doubt it's the biggest group of hardcore supporters any candidate has out there.
But in South Carolina, it may not be enough.
We just won't know, folks.
His the thing that George Will and and others think that, okay, this may be critical mass, not the straw that broke the back.
Critical mass.
This may be the one time too much where Trump has gone off this time on a revered Republican.
And this is going to cause Trump supporters to waver.
I don't think that's the case.
And if I'm right, and if they don't waiver, if Trump doesn't lose anything because of this, it's going to be the explanation is it's a testament to how deep the rage is toward the Republican establishment.
So we shall see as the week progresses, but it's clear that Trump is targeting Cruz.
It's clear that some people are noticing that Cruz in every one of these things is outperforming his polling numbers, even winning Iowa.
It's clear that nobody's reporting this or talking about it.
It's happening totally under the radar.
And the reason nobody's reporting it, because they don't want to see it.
Remember, the establishment may hate Cruz more than they hate Trump.
Even after Saturday night.
Their hatred for Cruz is institutional.
Their hatred for Trump is situational.
Big difference.
Be right back.
Don't go away.
Back to the phones.
We go to Oldsmar, Florida.
This is Ann.
It's great to have you on the EIB network.
Hi.
Hi, boys.
Thank you very much for taking my call.
You bet it's great.
It's great to have you with us.
Are you still there?
I am.
Yeah, I know.
I know.
Welcome.
You're on the air.
It's your big showbiz break.
Good.
Thank you.
I have two comments regarding the appointment of the judge.
First of all, I don't believe that our senators and particularly our candidates need to announce to everybody that they are going to filibuster.
I think that's a closed hand.
They should do what they know is right, but not advertise it.
Right now, why ire the voters?
We have the high ground in this election.
Let's keep it.
Their response should be that they are going to do the right thing for the country.
Period.
My other comment is I do believe that senators ought to take uh and postpone their winter recess.
And they are the stewards of this country, and they need to stay in Washington to make sure that there are no more executive orders until the White House keys are turned over.
Well, that that wait no, no, just a second.
That that two things.
I know you're also headed down the line here on recess appointments.
You can keep the Senate in session with the dog catcher in there.
There's any number of procedural ways to keep the Senate in session without keeping everybody in town.
The Democrats have done it.
Look at Dingy Harry has shown in every which way possible how to bend, break, and shape the rules.
Now the Republicans didn't do Anything to stop him when he did it, there's no doubt that Dingy Harry will call McConnell on whatever maneuvers he tries to make.
As to executive orders, that's not going to stop Obama.
If as long as the Senate can't agree to anything, he can say, well, you know what?
There's nothing going on there.
And I told my voters, if they don't do it, I'm going to do it.
I'm going to do it.
Why should he not?
He has been promised that his agenda will not be opposed this year.
Don't tell me you have forgotten that.
Why?
That was just a mere three weeks ago.
Mitch McConnell weighing in on the presidential campaign said it would not be wise to oppose or obstruct the president's agenda this year, because that might reflect poorly on the Republican presidential campaign and portray us as obstructionists and so forth when the voters want us to work with the Democrats.
When the voters want us to make Washington work.
You better hope and pray, folks, that that does not become operative on this Supreme Court choice.
Well, you can sit there and shake your head snurd and say, no way it would...
You realize, what does experience tell us?
What has been happening the past six years?
And you're going to say that, well, but a Supreme Court nomination is a different thing, Russia.
They'll pull their pants up on this one, Russia, and they'll hang it.
Well, we'll hope.
We hope it would be one of the few times.
Anyway, and thank you.
Elmucha.
I got him.
They're coming up.
Okay, Trump called a press conference a few minutes ago.
The press conference is underway.
And he is basically reiterating his debate points from Saturday night.
He is just tearing into Ted Cruz.
Ted Cruz is the biggest liar Trump's ever known.
He's not qualified to be president.
Ted Cruz is a fraud.
He may not even be legitimately an American because he was born in Canada.
He just really laid it on.
He is now back on the Middle East.
We shouldn't be taking people from Syria.
He's doing his greatest hits.
He hit he hit Bush on Iraq yet again.
He has, he's basically restating what were the controversial statements of the performance on Saturday night in the debate with the additional Ted Cruz stuff.
That tells me and my highly tuned antenna that Cruz is moving.
That there is internal polling data somewhere that somebody has that shows Cruz moving up.
Now, the right scoop has a story.
That internal Bush polling is showing this.
Just so you know, I'm not making it up out of, well, I don't make anything up, but I mean I'm just speculating here.
The right scoop has a story that internal Bush polling is showing uh Cruz making a serious move in South Carolina.
Serious move.
And apparently Trump and his team believe it because this was an all-out hit job just now on uh on on Cruz.
I'm sure Cookie is rolling.
And hopefully we'll have some uh sound bites of this before the program ends.
It's been going on actually before I knew it was a press conference.
We could have jipped some of it.
I I thought it was uh taped interview.
But it's actually the presser.
He's in Hannahan, South Carolina.
Um, and he's he's reliving his Middle East and how he prognosticated that.
He talked about bin Laden being a bad guy that we should have killed bin Laden.
Oh, that's not he blame Bush for not killing bin Laden.
That's that's Clinton, folks.
And uh Rubio got that right.
Now, Bush has arrived in South Carolina, and he's signing books and making appearances for Jeb, which no doubt I know I'm right about this.
This doesn't sit right with Trump, and so he's there are all kinds of explanations for this that are political.
My my My point to you is Trump is not insane.
And he is John Pedoritz wrote a column on Sunday in the New York Post saying that Trump was out of control.
And I know it looked like it, but I don't think Trump's out of control.
I think it's strategic.
I think the booing that he received from people he thought were a stack deck, Jeb donors, and Rubio donors might have caused him to uh get angrier than he intended to be.
And I know you could be saying, well, hey, you know, Russia got to get used to that.
I mean, presidents have to be able to control their temperament.
You know what I would say to that?
I'm telling you, his supporters want more of this.
His supporters are dying to say to the established what Trump is saying to them.
Do not doubt me on this.
They've got seven years of being ticked off, and maybe even more than that, but seven years of no pushback on Obama.
Our people think that Obama's destroying this country, destroying the future for their kids and grandkids, and they can't get the Republican Party's ear on this.
The Republican Party will not hear them.
Republican Party will not react that way.
The Republican Party doesn't act like it has anything to defend.
And these people are frustrated beyond their ability to express it.
Their anger is palpable and it's real.
And that's why that's why Trump uh is not, I don't think, in serious danger of losing his supporters.
I don't know how to say it any differently than I have.
I just I I think this intense.
It's a combination of emotions, too.
It's anger, it's fear, it's uh it's rage over what Obama and the Democrats have been doing to this country with no pushback.
And you know, Trump uh has become the vessel for that outrage.
I mean, I could I can sit here and say to you that uh Ted Cruz would be just as legitimate a candidate to support Trump uh and Cruz are are pretty equal on the I mean the establishment hates Crows more than they hate Trump.
And that should tell you something.
They genuinely fear what Cruz is going to do in terms of rewinding and stopping and stop the transformation and doing things the establishment doesn't want to do.
So it's a fascinating thing to watch go on here, because I've never seen a Republican candidate make this direct and broad appeal to Democrats by ripping into what is assumed to be a revered former Republican president, George W. Bush, and in South Carolina he is.
Now, I mentioned earlier that half of the sound bites today are about me, despite all that's happened over the weekend.
Half of these things are about me.
And you know me, folks, I never want to make this show about me.
Snerdley keeps saying, where are the sound bites on you?
I'll give you an example of what's here.
We will start audio soundbite number one.
We're gonna skip, by the way, uh Mike, we're gonna skip uh four and five.
Here is Farid Zakaria GPS, Farid Zakaria, a global positioning satellite on his Farid's take commentary on Farid Zakaria GPS Sunday morning on CNN.
The charge that President Obama is attempting to change America fundamentally is a staple of right-wing talk shows.
Rush Limbaugh and others routinely assert that Obama's policies are intentionally designed to transform America and dull its distinctive edge.
This rhetoric does raise an important question.
What makes America exceptional?
Now wait, wait, here's the second part of it.
America is a nation created on the basis of diversity of race.
No, it's not.
No, it's not.
And there are efforts to change America.
No, it's There are plans for religious and ethnic tests to bar immigrants and even visitors, and also to track immigrants and visitors when they are in the U.S. There have been calls to deport people, even American citizens.
There are proposals to monitor houses of worship.
These ideas would fundamentally change America, tearing at its founding DNA.
Who is proposing these changes?
Last time I checked, it was not Barack Obama.
As Farid Zakari GPS is in a tank for Obama.
Now this is absurd.
This is totally absurd.
Who in the world Obama has said he wants to transform America.
And here comes Farid Zakari and GPS to deny that it's happening.
It's fundamentally a staple of right-wing talk shows.
Rush Limbaugh routinely asserts Obama's policies are intentionally designed to ransom.
He said so, Farid.
He has said so.
Can there be any doubt?
All you gotta do is look at what he's doing.
And then the PSD is his thoughts.
America is a nation created on the basis of diversity of race, religion, national origin.
The hell it is.
It's a nation created uniquely on the basis of individual liberty and freedom.
It's not based on diversity.
It's not based on quotas.
It wasn't put together based on the color of people's skin.
It wasn't put together on the basis of their sexual orientation.
It wasn't assembled and put together on the basis of their gender.
None of that.
This is this is classic example of these clowns and their pollution and corruption of the Constitution is a living, breathing document.
America's a nation created the base of diversity of race, religion, national origin, and there are efforts to change America plans.
Religious freedom is being blown to smithereens in the name of socialism and liberalism.
That's not how this country was created.
Now I can blame Farid Zakaria for not knowing it.
He's not from here.
He's on a global positioning satellite.
But this is just dead wrong.
And to come along here and try to save Obama by discrediting me and I guess alternatively, Rubio.
This is classic, folks.
This is cla this is exactly how this country is being corrupted and bastardized is to say that it was put together.
It's it's it's crazy wacko leftist liberals that look at the world this way.
America was colorblind.
America was, well, the intention was colorblind.
The whole slavery thing is uh black mark, there's no question, can't erase it, but it was our own constitution which established the basis for eliminating it.
And we became the first country in the history of the world to abolish it.
But no credits given.
As far as these clowns are concerned, we're still in slavery.
And it's not just blacks that are in slavery, women are in slavery.
Gays are enslaved, LGBT people are enslaved.
That's what they believe.
And then the Constitution in the country was assembled so that they wouldn't be slaves, and their objective here is to free everybody from the stupid shackles they live in when nobody's in shackles.
Moving on.
Jacob Weisberg at Slate.com was on C-Span's book TV Saturday night.
And they played a talk by him.
He was uh he's got a book called Ronald Reagan, the American President series, the 40th President, 81 to 89.
If you really want to get a sense of how Reagan thought these uh transcripts of his radio commentaries from the late 70s are the most interesting thing.
And they're really good, and they're written out in long hand with very few scratch outs.
And they're good.
They're cogent, they're somewhat different, they're pretty far out there sometimes, but they were original and interesting, and it has that quality, you know, a little bit the Rush Limbaugh quality.
You may violent disagree with it, but it's kind of compelling.
You kind of want to keep listening or keep creating.
There you have it.
So the Reagan commentaries.
My station where I worked at in the 60s played those Reagan commentaries.
I've I remember them.
So now I'm I'll take that.
I mean, that's I've been I've been lumped in there with the commentaries were limbaugh-like.
Uh Limbaugh quality.
I I I would say that's kind of a it's the other way around.
I am Reagan like.
Uh Brief uh brief brief timeout.
Frank Luntz also agrees with me on um on the Ted Cruz office space ad that's coming up and more, so sit tight, and don't go.
Yeah, and here it is in even more detail.
An internal poll for the Jeb Bush campaign supporting the Super PAC right to rise shows that Trump is in first place 26% and Cruz is at 24.
So margin of error.
Cruz has moved into a tie with Trump in South Carolina that's an internal poll of the Bush campaign.
It's reported at redstate.com.
It's reported at the right scoop.com.
And so this would explain a lot of what happened on Saturday night and what happened today.
And we will have the uh the Trump sound bites from the presser from his uh press conference tomorrow.
Here, just I'll give you a flavor.
We have excerpt, one bite from the Trump press conference this afternoon in Hanaghan, South Carolina, talking about Ted Cruz.
He just comes out and boom, boom, boom.
Absolute lies.
Now, he'll apologize, but I don't want an apology after the election.
If he doesn't, I'm gonna bring a lawsuit because, in my opinion, based on what I've learned over the last two, three days from very top lawyers, he doesn't even have the right to serve as president or even run as president.
So we will bring a lawsuit if he doesn't straighten his act out.
He's a lying guy, a really lying guy.
Some people misrepresent this guy's just a plain outlier.
So that's that was a prime focus of Trump's presser today.
He focused on uh other items as well.
And just to repeat, internal Bush polling has Trump at 26 and Cruz at 24 in South Carolina.
Have a wonderful rest of the day.
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