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Feb. 19, 2016 - Rush Limbaugh Program
34:50
February 19, 2016, Friday, Hour #3
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Making the complex understandable.
Rush Limbaugh meeting and surpassing all audience expectations every day.
It's Friday, that means live from the Southern Command in sunny South Florida.
It's open line Friday.
Open line Friday.
One hour remains, whatever you want to talk about, have at it, 80082-2882 in the email address.
Ill Rushmore at EIB netcom.
So yesterday at this time, we were all under the impression that the Pope had said that Donald Trump's not a Christian because the Pope thinks the people that build walls instead of bridges are not Christians.
Trump reacted, thought he was a disgrace, and the Pope was disgraceful.
What he had said was disgraceful and said that he was a Christian, and it went on from there.
And then as time went on, the Pope via Vatican spokesman sort of backed away, which happens all.
The Pope ventures outside church matters.
Seems like every time he does, he says something that the Vatican has to walk back.
And Trump, for his part, has also moderated his tone, saying that he's not comfortable with, I mean, he gets a lot of publicity, but he's not comfortable with this publicity.
And he's not excited here about being in this uh knockdown drag out with the Pope.
So both people have backed amendment backed away.
Here's Trump from uh I guess this is last night Columbia, South Carolina.
You might want to say this is one guy that Trump will not double down on is the Pope.
So it is during the uh part two of their Republican Town Hall event.
And Anderson Cooper said, Mr. Trump, how surprised were you by what the Pope said?
For those who don't know, part of what he said was a person who thinks only about building walls wherever they may be and not a building bridges is not Christian.
This is not the gospel.
What do you what do you say that, Mr. Trump?
I didn't think it was a good thing for him to say, frankly.
The Pope made the statement, and I think it was probably a little bit nicer statement than it was reported by you folks in the media, because after I read it, it was a little bit softer.
He also talked about having a wall is not Christian, and he's got an awfully big wall at the Vatican, I will tell you.
And then Cooper said, but look, I remember you said to me you tried not to do things wrong, so that you don't have to ask for forgiveness.
Was there a moment when you first heard the Pope had said something about you that you thought maybe I'm gonna have to ask for forgiveness?
No.
No, look, I I have a lot of respect for the Pope.
I think he's got a lot of personalities, very different.
He's a very different kind of a guy, and I think he's doing a very good job.
He's a lot of energy, but I would say that I think he was very much misinterpreted.
And I also think he was given false information.
People that live in the United States.
Would you like to meet with him and talk to him about it?
I'll do it any time he wants.
I mean, I think it would be very interesting.
No, I like him.
I mean, I like him as a personality, I like what he represents, and I certainly have great respect for the position.
Well, there you go, see.
Great respect for the position of Pope.
Well, from the Vatican side of things, spokesperson as pardon me, spokesperson for Pope Francis clarified the pontiff's criticism of Trump's plan to build a border wall, saying that the remark was not a personal attack.
On Thursday, the Pope told reporters on his plane that building walls is not Christian.
But the pontiff's spokesman, said sorry, spokesperson, said that it's a comment he's made before, adding that the Pope wants to avoid weighing in on American politics.
Now, I sorry, folks, that's that's a little hard to He he does weigh in.
The Pope said what we already know.
If we followed his teaching and positions, that we shouldn't build walls, but bridges, the Spokesperson said in a statement according to CNBC.
It's his generic view, coherent with the nature of solidarity from the gospel.
Spokesperson then said this wasn't in any way a personal attack or an indication on who to vote for.
The Pope has clearly said that he didn't want to get involved in the electoral campaign in the U.S. And also said that he said what he said on the basis of what he was told about Trump.
And he gave him the benefit of the doubt on this.
So let's go to Bill Donahue.
Bill Donahue, the Catholic League was on special report with Brett Bayer last night at uh at 6 o'clock.
And Brett Baer read the uh the actual uh statement here, all that was said.
He said, Let's read it out.
It's obviously in Italian, but here is what it is.
Donald Trump in a recent interview said you, the Pope, are a political man, and maybe you're a pawn of the Mexican government as far as immigration policy is concerned.
He said that if elected, he'd build a 25 kilometer long wall along the border.
I'd like to ask you, this is a reporter asking the Pope.
I'd like to ask you, what do you think of these accusations against you?
And if an American Catholic can vote for somebody like this, Pope Francis said, thank God he said I was a politician because Aristotle defined a human person as animal politics.
So at least I'm a human person.
As to whether I'm a pawn, maybe, said the Pope.
I don't know.
I'll leave that up to your judgment and the and that of the people.
And then a person who thinks only about building walls wherever they may be and not building bridges is not Christian.
This is not in the gospel.
As far as what you said about whether I would advise to vote or not to vote, I'm not getting involved in that.
I say this man is not Christian if he has said things like that.
We must see if he said things in that way.
In this, I give the benefit of the doubt.
That's the transcription, and then Bill Donahue weighed in.
That's exactly the way it should be.
What I find striking, because the Pope laid down conditions, didn't he?
He used the word if, he used the word only.
But in fact, what we have here is the reporter trying to say, well, should Catholics really vote for a person like this?
Now we've been told odd nausea that Catholics should not listen to the Pope about anything, that we're going to exercise their independence.
Now we're supposed to line up single file.
This was a setup on the Pope.
They misrepresented what Trump has said, and now the media are misrepresenting, except what you did.
You accurately reported what the Pope said.
A lot of people are not.
And there's a point to this.
I mean, the Pope's answer to that question was rather lengthy.
It was detailed, and it did contain a bunch of ifs, and I'm not sure I'll have to rely on your judgment.
And Donahue said that was a set up question.
The guy set the Pope up hoping for an answer so he could run around saying Pope doesn't like Trump or whatever.
And then take it to Trump and Trump doesn't like Pope and have a back and forth going.
So Brett Baer said, Well, look, the Vatican has a giant wall that surrounds it, and many conservatives have a problem with some of the things the Pope said beyond what you're talking about here.
Because somebody says building a wall along the southern border, a person who thinks only about building a wall is not Christian, that's going to be a problem for some conservatives, Mr. Donahue.
There's nothing that either this Pope or any other Pope has ever said, nor will you find it in the Catholic Catechism.
Anything where the Catholic Church says a nation does not have a right to defend its own borders.
The Catholic Church is solidly in favor of that.
What it is simply saying is this.
That's not the end of the conversation.
If somebody comes into another country illegally, can you deport him?
Yes.
But if that person has needs that he must be tended to, you can't act immorally and say, get out of here.
You've got to take care of that person, treat him humanely.
So I think what happens is that a lot of people want to make it an either-or, and that's where the misrepresentation takes place.
I'm sympathetic too.
I don't want people crashing through our borders, and I think those people are right.
So but he's obviously going to defend the Pope and the Catholic Church here.
That's what the mission of the Catholic League is.
But the point of this is to illustrate that the question the Pope was asked was a really long question, and the Pope's answer was a really long answer.
And the question wasn't specifically about Trump except Uh as somebody who might build a wall.
It was theoretical here, theoretical there, and the Pope did give himself plenty of outs, but the reporter got enough to be able to say Pope says Trump not Christian.
Trump doesn't knowing, none of us knowing from Chinola what went on.
Oh, really?
Pope says Trump not Christian.
Well, and then Trump goes, Well, I've really that's disgraceful.
How do you say a private citizen and it all got going?
And then when all of this came out, everybody started backtracking.
Marco Rubio yesterday in uh Anderson, South Carolina, had a press conference, and during the QA, he had this to say about the battle between a Pope and the Trumpster.
There's no nation on earth that's more compassionate on immigration than we are.
We accept a million people a year in the United States, legally.
Every year.
Mexico doesn't do that.
No other country in the world does that.
But we're a sovereign country.
And we have a right to control who comes in, when they come in, and how they come in.
Vatican City controls who comes in, when they come in, and how they come in as a nation state or as a city-state.
And as a result, the United States has the right to do that as well.
Now that was Rubio answering before all of the context had been presented and uh and broadcast.
But nevertheless, he's exactly right here.
I this is why, you know, I blanch when when I when I hear people say we're gonna stop people dying in the streets.
Nobody's dying in the streets here.
We we don't, we've spent more money.
We have been more compassionate, no matter how you define it, with disaster relief, with taking immigrants into our country, legal and illegal, our foreign aid budget.
I mean, it it's it's laughable to attack the United States as being a nation without compassion or selfish and greedy or what have you.
And that's what Rubio is responding to.
And he's right, there hasn't, there's no no shit nation on earth that can hold a candle to us when it comes to immigration.
We accept more immigrants in a year than most than most of the rest of the world combined.
It's uh it it really isn't Mexico, 1,500 immigrants permitted a year.
We have anywhere between a million and a million six.
So it's ended up with uh with Trump saying that he doesn't like fighting with folk.
He uh did he did not double down, went nowhere near there, and it seems like that it has leveled off and has now become uh pretty much a non-issue.
I mentioned before the break at the top of the hour that I couldn't believe what the president of ESPN said.
And here it is.
His name is John Skipper.
He was one of the featured guests at a tech conference out in Dana Point, California.
It was called the Code slash Media Conference.
It was on a Wednesday, and he talked about a lot of things.
And one of the subjects he talked about was the inclusion of black writers at ESPN.
And he said, he essentially scolded other media outlets for their failure to hire African Americans.
The president of ESPN said there's not enough black media in this country.
There's not enough black-owned media in this country.
There are not enough sites, websites run by people of color.
That is how he promoted a new website that ESPN is launching called the Undefeated.
Uh or I don't know, maybe it has been launched.
I'm not sure.
The way this is written, this is, and that led into Skipper discussing the launch of the undefeated, the one-time vehicle for Jason Whitlock that will, yeah, here it is, start operation later this year.
We're gonna have a site run by people of color, by black Americans who are gonna curate the site.
They're gonna create the content for that site.
ESPN's gonna own it, but that's as far as they're gonna be involved in it.
Skipper pointed out that of the 85 women or African Americans hired by national outlets, ESPN has 74 of them under its employee.
He said it was important to cater to the African American community because they watch sports too.
He said African Americans are a very important part of our constituency.
They watch a lot of sports.
And I believe that we have to be their home.
And they have to believe that we represent their interests.
Fine and dandy, ESPN can do whatever they want.
And Skipper can say whatever he wants.
But it sure sounds like segregation to me.
It doesn't sound like what Dr. King talked about.
You know, I remember when I was growing up, the subject was integration.
When I was growing up, the complaint was that, well, even before I was growing up, that certain, you know the drill, certain parts of the lunch counter, white only.
Restrooms, white only.
Buses, white only.
And so the civil rights movement was about integrating.
Was about breaking down barriers, was about integrating the races, getting rid of it with the ultimate objective, I always believe was a colorblind society.
I don't think that's the actual objective.
I think if we ever got there, too many in the race business would be out of business and they don't want to go there.
So a colorblind society, while I think would be absolutely wonderful and fabulous, I don't think we're ever going to be allowed to get there.
But my point is, back in the 50s, when I was growing up, 60s, integration.
That's what the entire civil rights movement was about.
And it seems, it's not just recently, like last 20 years.
Seems like after succeeding at integrating so much of our society, the desire all of a sudden to separate popped up again.
And then on college campus need black dorms, black studies, black classes, African American studies, uh, black history month as opposed to American history month.
And now ESPN with their website uh the undefeated, which is 100% African American in content, as though that's the only way the African American audience at ESPN can be properly served.
just doesn't seem like it's going in the right direction to me.
I know the word empowerment is used a lot, and this will be seen as empowering the people who are employed to work on this website, and it'll probably be said that it's empowering the African American audience to be SPN, but it's still segregating, isn't it?
And is that what we're out to do now?
Is that the objective?
Segregation.
And it's not just African Americans.
The longest time militant feminism.
Remember all these women saying that only women can adequately represent women in the Senate.
Only women can possibly understand women's issues, and we don't have enough elected women, we're not enough elected women in the Senate in the House, as though it was everybody else's fault.
As though there was some sort of institutional bias or racism.
No, we're not going to elect a bunch of women.
We don't want them in this way.
When in truth there weren't that many running.
But somebody decided there aren't enough women here, there aren't enough African Americans here, and somehow that so-called fact ended up being blamed on people that had nothing to do with it.
And then that led to the whole concept of integration, I guess failing.
Because the majority was still putting up roadblocks and not permitting it, so we have to resegregate here.
And as we resegregate, people are being applauded and thinking they're doing great things.
And I don't know how this is advancing anything.
I fully expect to hear about this.
I'm fully aware I'm going to catch hell.
I'm going to be misrepresented, and people are going to accuse Me of whatever that's not going to be anywhere near accurate.
But as I watch ESPN, I don't know how anybody, any sports fan, gets short changed.
They cover everything.
And they've got, he's right, Skipper's right, they have a lot of ex jocks.
African American coach.
Oh, gosh, I just saw the clock after.
I'm sorry, this is going to be.
Yeah, I'm just looking at the clock.
I went long in that segment.
There's not enough time to be fair with uh with it with another caller.
Um, but I think there's a good point what's going on.
This is not just segregation that's setting in again, as exemplified here by what ESPN's doing.
I'm gonna take it further.
It's not only integration bring being brought to screeching halt and segregation resurfacing.
I think this is also about assimilation.
I think this is about the whole concept of what it is to be an American.
I think that's under siege, and I think it's in the process of being redefined.
And that's what the Democrat Party is all about now.
The attack on the founding, the belief that America has founded unjust and immoral.
There's a whole bunch of things happening out there that are really aimed at restructuring and redefining the whole country and breaking down the concepts that were established, what this country is since our founding.
Okay, calls when we get back.
Hang in there.
Having more fun than a human being should be allowed to have El Rushbow, your guiding light.
Here behind the golden EIB microphone.
A couple things here before we head back to the phones.
For the Washington Free Beacon, I just want to read you the headline.
You ready?
In three, two, one, CIA has dedicated program to recruit transgender individuals.
I will read more.
The Central Intelligence Agency Three-Year Diversity and Inclusion Strategy I'm sorry.
Includes a dedicated program to recruit transgender individuals and agency-wide unconscious bias training.
The plan released by the CIA's diversity and inclusion office last week, lays out several goals for weaving diversity and inclusion throughout the talent cycle.
Well, I don't know if they would count as double agents.
You could count a double agent, you can count, you could count them as double blind.
But really, diversity, diversity, and inclusion in the CIA?
That's the purpose.
This is exactly how it's done.
This is how you tear down what are we talking here?
One half of one percent of the population.
Maybe let's be generous.
Let's say one percent, even that is a stretch.
And we're going to.
Never mind.
It speaks for itself.
Also, this next one, I have warned you people about this.
I have cautioned you to be on the lookout.
I've told you this is coming.
And I'll tell you the quirks of fate sometimes just seem to be conspiratorial.
What just happened?
The greatest living conservative justice, longest serving justice on the Supreme Court, passed away, Antonin Scalia.
Which, theoretically on paper, eliminates the so-called five, four, so-called conservative majority that we had joined on the court.
And now we have a vacancy.
We have a vacancy on the Court that is highly politicized, and we are deathly afraid of what's going to happen here.
Because we have Barack Hussein, oh we know what kind of justices he has already picked.
We know what kind of justices he wants.
He wants Solalinsky types on the court.
He wants the court.
You know what his big complaint about the Warren Court was?
Think of the Warren Court, the Euro Warren Court.
Look at how disastrous a court that was.
Obama, do you know what his biggest complaint about?
Every liberal alive should be should be thanking the Warren Court from now to the end of time if it's so great for him.
But he's not happy.
You know why?
Because the Warren Court didn't go far enough in redistributing wealth.
The Warren Court didn't go far enough in balancing the scales to minorities.
Over here we have the Republicans in the Senate, who, depending on the day, assure us that they are going to do everything they can to prevent Obama from getting that kind of justice to replace Scalia.
It's his last term he's a lame duck.
We're going to leave this up to the American people, they say.
Yep, we're going to use this election to determine who wins the election, and then that president will get to choose the next Supreme Court nominee.
Obama is privately to hell with you.
You think you think I'm just going to sit on the sidelines here and let you people run this as my nomination.
This is my court.
This is my pick, and I'll be damned if I'm going to sit on a sideline.
I'm going to pick who I want, and you're going to confirm them.
That's what Obama's saying in his buddies in the White House.
You remember me telling you that HBO was working on a movie about the confirmation hearings of Clarence Thomas.
That movie is now scheduled to air on April, what is it?
The fourth.
Sometime in April, I think it's the fourth.
The name of this movie is called Confirmation.
Many of the players involved in this movie have seen scripts.
They don't know if it's final scripts.
They don't know if it was the actual script used.
It was early script or whatever.
But some of the people we're talking about here are Alan Simpson, Republican Senator Wyoming, John Danforth, former Republican Senator, Missouri, sponsor of Clarence Thomas.
He employed Clarence Thomas.
He loved Clarence Thomas, had the highest respect for Clarence Thomas.
And a White House lawyer at the time in the George H.W. Bush administration, Mark Polletta, who worked on Thomas's confirmation.
They have seen the script and they are scared to death.
They are outraged.
They are angry at what they have seen in this script.
They say that this movie is making things up.
They say this movie is taking events that never happened and making them big.
They also say, in fairness, that Joe Biden is destroyed in this movie.
Biden was the chairman of the Judiciary Committee and led the charge in conducting the hearings.
But we all know how this went.
I mean, it was they tried to take Thomas out with a late allegation from Anita Hill that he had sexually harassed her, and she was so irritated and upset by it that she followed Justice Thomas, job to job to job, so that he could continue to harass her.
Wherever he went, she followed, despite the fact that was the old pubicare on a coke can.
Remember, they were, it was just obscene.
It was a high-tech lynching.
And here comes in the midst of the scalia vacancy.
Confirmation.
And HBO is admitting, they're admitting why they're doing this.
I told you why they're doing it, because there's a whole generation of people who do not know what happened.
The millennials were not alive in 1992.
They do not know what happened.
And it's time they were brought up to speed.
Well, with HBO in charge of this, folks, you have better be prepared.
Because by the time this thing airs and the media gets hold of it and promotes It clips, highlights.
Who knows however they're going to promote it.
The idea of a conservative nominee to the court is going to become so repulsive to people.
And I have no doubt that one of the basic primary efforts that will be made in conjunction with HBO airing this movie on the Clarence Thomas and Eita Hill hearings.
I'll guarantee you one of the purposes here is to put pressure on the Mitch McConnells of the world to cave to Obama.
Look at how we're portraying your party back in the days in 1992, Mitch.
See what we're doing to your senators back then.
You want us to do this to you now?
You better cave, Mitch.
That'll be the unwritten message.
You see how we just got through destroying Simpson and Dan Ford.
We can destroy you, Mitch.
We here at HBO, we in the Hollywood community.
So brace yourselves.
This is what I mean by the quirks of fate.
Cursed.
And even conspiratorial.
Sylvania is up next from San Diego.
Hi, Sylvania.
I'm glad you waited.
You're next on the EIB network.
Yeah, I was a big Trumpster from the get-go.
Um and the way he caught my attention was when he started saying, Make America great again, and we're gonna win again.
For me, that was the key word, winning.
Because, you know, I I'm I was just absolutely exhausted and tired of losing seven years.
I wanted to win.
So I was with Ryan uh I was with uh uh Donald Trump from the beginning, but then also Ted Cruz kind of started, you know, getting my attention.
And I was kind of thinking and looking at both guys and you know, debating, and then Iowa happened.
And what we saw in Iowa was that Ted Cruz took on ethanol uh lobby, and he said no subsidies, and he was the only candidate that did that.
Donald Trump actually caved there.
And and and um and ethanol lobby spent a lot of money against Ted Cruz, and the governor in in Iowa actually said, please vote for anybody but Cruz.
And Cruz held firm and he won.
So, you know, when you had that caller before saying, Well, I'm with Donald Trump because he's a fighter and he fights, and Ted Cruz, I'm not sure that he can fight.
I say you really need to look at the things the way they are, not the way you want them to be.
Because right now I see Ted Cruz standing firm and strong.
You know, you're one of the powers.
You um you're you're one of the I'm trying to remember how many, it's not very many.
You're one of the few committed Trumpsters that I have ever encountered who has decided to leave and go somewhere else, in your case for Cruz.
It was really ethanol that did it for you.
Well, d there are some of the things, but definitely with an ethanol, you know, the statements that he were making that kind of made me think that perhaps he doesn't really understand separation of powers between judicial, legislative, executive branch.
Um then, you know, I really don't think that he understands, you know, I like to have a separation between the states.
For example, that 911 moment in a debate in Iowa, when Ted Cruz said that he has New York.
Um here.
Yeah, uh when when he said that Donald Trump has New York values, I really Donald Trump said, uh, well, nine-eleven are our values.
To me, it was almost an equivalent uh equivalent of Barack Obama using a race cart to stop the conversation.
All right.
I gotcha.
I got you.
I think you had call waiting if somebody's calling you, and you thought I was hanging up on you.
By the way, if we still have our dental cam signal, because I've lost my feed on my monitor here, says no, we're up and running.
Okay.
Um, now that's that's that's interesting.
Uh I have not talked to too many Trumpsters who have seen the light or abandoned Trump or whatever, but she's got two different reasons there, ethanol.
And I I never said separation.
I think she's talking about observation that the Donald is not particularly ideological.
In other words, who's liberal and who conservative that doesn't register with him, he sees things in different ways.
Not a criticism, not a criticism and observation.
Um, I gotta take a break.
I'm long here, folks.
I've I uh didn't have any time left.
I gotta take a break now.
So sit tight.
Back up.
And welcome back.
I had a different audio source on it here.
I thought we were still in uh in commercial break.
Because I've I've I was almost paralyzed here a moment ago.
You know what I just saw?
One of the Koch brothers has come out and agreed with Bernie Sanders.
Charles Koch of the hated and despised Koch brothers has said that he agrees with Bernie Sanders on the rigged nature of the U.S. economy when it comes to inequality as it relates to corporate welfare.
Charles Koch thinks he doesn't like corporate cronyism.
He doesn't like cronyism between government and business.
And if when that happens at the expense of uh average Americans, he hates it.
And he thinks Bernie Sanders does too.
So Charles Koch has come out with a fairly detailed explanation of what.
Now, Charles Koch's a libertarian.
He's a libertarian and Republican.
And he's very, very much opposed to government involvement in business.
He hates cronyism.
He hates government getting admitted to say with GE or any other corporation.
And so does Bernie Sanders.
But but agreeing with Bernie, the Koch brother, this guy, he and his brother give $25 million to a hospital and the hospital nurses protest because they don't think he means it.
So it's going to be interesting to see what happens with the left.
They probably won't believe Koch here.
They think Koch is just trying to suck up to them and fake them out again like he was donating money to the hospital.
Well, his brother did that.
But anyway, keep a sharp eye.
Watching the debates this winter, probably uh gut checking your own knowledge of the right answers on public policy questions being asked to the candidates.
In fact, that's a is that happening to you.
When you watch the debates, and these guys get questions, do you think you know the answer better than what you're hearing some of the candidates answer?
I don't know about you, but but I have that sensation sometimes.
And what I always tell myself is, well, wait a minute, they're the ones under the lights.
They're the ones under the time limit of 60 seconds, and all the pressure and so forth.
So maybe their bronze their brains are not as relaxed and free firing as those of us watching.
No shortage of topics being discussed.
Health care reform, national security issues of trade, each of them make up subject matter in these debates.
And it's fascinating that how many in the audience think they might know at least as much, if not more, than what some of the candidates are saying.
The Charles Koch comments are an op ed that he wrote in the Washington Post.
And I'll have uh this is worth a bunch of thoughts here on Monday, so in addition to whatever happens to South Carolina over the weekend.
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