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March 8, 2016 - Rush Limbaugh Program
32:22
March 8, 2016, Tuesday, Hour #3
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By the way, an acknowledgement that you on the phones have been holding for a while, and I. I get it.
I appreciate it.
I'm sorry, there's just so much here.
I'm going to get the phones as soon as I can in this hour.
I cannot tell you how much I appreciate all your patience.
800-282-2882, you want to be on the program.
We're back here in the EIB network, El Rushbo, executing assigned host duties flawlessly while meeting and surpassing all audience expectations every day.
You know, there's something that Trump says, and every time he says it, I start shouting at the TV.
It usually brings it up during debates.
It happened in the last Fox debate when they had all these videos and slides that they showed candidates to try to, well, back then you said, well, whatever our slide here says, or listen to what you said here in this video.
This is what you said last week in our last debate.
How do you square these two candidate X or whatever?
The way that they went after Trump, Trump is out there saying he's going to get rid of all this excessive spending with eliminating weighed fraud, waste, fraud, and abuse, which doesn't cut it.
I mean, this has been, you know, every candidate under the sun has been promising to get rid of waste, fraud, and abuse.
But what Trump cites is the elimination of certain agencies.
In addition to Common Core, we're going to get rid of the Department of Education.
And he says, we're going to close the EPA.
And a couple other bureaucracies are just going to shut them down.
So the Fox moderators had a bunch of slides prepared to show how little money we're talking about in terms of a $19 trillion national debt or a $300, $400 billion deficit.
And I think they showed $8 billion would be saved if you cut the EPA, if you eliminate the EPA.
And I'm watching it, and I'm just, I get frustrated.
$8 billion?
That doesn't get anywhere near describing a damage the agency does.
The answer to the question, and by the way, it's an important point, which is why I'm bringing it up.
I'm all for getting rid of the EPA.
I think the EPA has been totally taken over by a bunch of leftist, unelected bureaucrats who are issuing punitive regulations, and they are implementing a radical leftist agenda without Congress being involved.
And they're doing it under the rubric, if you will, of man-made global warming is happening.
And so all their regulations end up being punishments for anybody in the fossil fuel industry or your average citizen who lives somewhere who might be going about his life in a way they disapprove of.
And the point is this.
It's not the money you save by eliminating the agency that you have to calculate.
You have to calculate the damage to the economy done by these agencies.
All of these punitive regulations.
Look at how much money it costs now and time and legal fees and whoever knows whatever else is involved in an environmental impact study to build a freaking outhouse.
The environmental impact study can eliminate, can prevent a house being built, a development being built, an office building or a factory being built.
If the EPA had been in charge and if we had had OSHA, we might not have been able to build a Golden Gate Bridge.
It was too dangerous and it was exploitative.
It used workers during the Depression and didn't pay them much.
And same thing with the Bay Bridge, the Hoover Dam.
And yet, you look at what happened.
We built the Golden Gate Bridge in four years.
At the same time, we built the Bay Bridge in San Francisco, connecting to Oakland and Berkeley, and the Hoover Dam, all in the same decade.
During the Great Depression, we couldn't come anywhere close.
How many years was there a hole in the ground at 9-11's Ground Zero?
And look at the hoops people had to jump through in order to get the Freedom Tower built.
We had to build monuments to every frigging multicultural group that's ever put foot on this soil.
We had to make sure that people who had been victims of something or other were recognized with a plaque or what have you.
How much money do you think it costs this economy?
How much money do you think it costs the economy, the American people, just in these EPA regulations?
How much do you think the price of a car is impacted by the EPA?
Now, I can hear some of you, what are you against clean air?
No, I'm not against clean air, but let's face it, we've cleaned up ourselves, clean up after our messes on our own much better and thoroughly with all these regulations coming down the pike.
But I know people who bow down and treat government as God and government as religion, who think nothing good would ever happen without government.
And, you know, that, by the way, pretty much identifies these Republican establishment types who believe in an active, energetic executive.
That's actually how they call it.
That's actually the words they use to describe an activist president.
Yes, we need an energetic executive managing a large government.
The American people have clearly stated they want in a responsible and efficient way.
Translation, we believe in big government now because we're in charge of it.
We benefit from it.
So shut up about small government.
But limited government equals freedom.
Limited government equals liberty.
Limited government equals enhanced economic opportunity for abuse.
So when this subject comes up, anytime, you can't let them get away with just talking about the EPA only being an $8 billion agency.
And you want some poof from the Daily Signal.
As Michigan voters head to polls today, they should ask candidates whether they will leave in place costly regulations that have added thousands of dollars to the price of new cars and depressed sales for Michigan's auto industry.
The fuel economy regulations alone in an automobile made in 2016 are nearly $4,000.
And that's just the EPA regulations that require certain aspects in the manufacture of a car.
There are all kinds of other agencies that have their fingers in this pile, too.
The cost of a home, the cost of a car, the cost of building anything is way more than it would be without these redundant, punitive, unrealistic, and unnecessary regulations.
No, I'm not saying, I'm not advocating an unregulated.
Don't even, you know, that's what they always do.
Oh, so you're for unfettered capitalism.
Whoever's, no.
I'm just saying markets work.
Just let them work and they will work.
By definition, markets work.
Charlatans are discovered and they go broke.
Yeah, but what about the damage they do in the president?
Yeah, okay.
Try to micromanage every crook.
Try to micromanage every time something is taken advantage of.
And all you end up with is people investing more and more control over their lives in a bunch of people in government who couldn't do what they're regulating if their lives depended on it.
And that's another thing about it that bugs me.
How many of them could build an iPhone?
How many of them could design one?
Or a car or a rocket or whatever else it is they're regulating?
That's the answer to it.
Same thing with the Department of Education.
In fact, even worse.
Forget Common Core.
Look at the dilapidated state of public education, and you tell me it has no impact on what people are able to do with their lives.
If you put garbage in, you're going to be garbage out and you're going to graduate.
How in the world can you graduate and not be able to read your diploma?
How in the world can that happen?
But it does.
Well, what's that person prepared to do?
What's the cost to the economy of graduating somebody can't read?
What is the cost of the economy of graduating a whole bunch of people who can't read and who do not know because they have not been taught the bare essentials of their own country?
You start calculating costs like that, and the actual cost of maintaining these agencies is dwarfed by the economic damage they cause.
That to me has always been, and it's not just Trump.
Nobody comes back at it from this angle.
Now to the audio soundbites, and when this happened, I got a couple of emails.
And I never turn on the TV when this is got a couple of, hey, they're getting ready to savage you on CNN, Friedza Carrier GPS.
Don't worry, I'm fine.
I don't care.
Sunday morning, Fareed Zakaria GPS, speaking Wall Street Journal columnist Brett Stevens about the presidential primary race, Republican side, Farid Zakarius GPS, said, Brett, you wrote a very powerful political column this week in which you said that this is now the Republican presidential campaign is kind of conservative gutter, the conservative gutter.
The question is, who is to blame, Brett, for the conservative gutter?
And how did it happen?
I put the sort of immediate blame on the failure of people like Rush Limbaugh to call out Trump.
A lot of people in the conservative media who sort of made a guy whose politics aren't really aligned with much of the Republican Party or the conservative movement make him seem like a respectable, plausible presidential candidate when I wish back in the summer when he was sort of a soap bubble that they might have popped him.
All right.
Now, I could react to this one or two ways.
I could be flattered.
Hey, they think I could have stopped the guy.
Hey, they think I should have stopped the guy.
Hey, they wish I would have stopped the guy.
But I come back at this with, well, why haven't you been able to?
I mean, the journal has been editorializing against Trump at least twice a week.
That's just the editorial page, and they've had op-eds, news stories.
I thought talk radio was just this little entertaining thing over here.
wasn't anything to take seriously is it my job to take candidates out if if if they want If they want a candidate taken out, why is it my job to do what they want?
Well, now I know what he's saying.
No, if I'm true to myself, if I'm being honest about who I am, Trump should repel me, and as such, I should do everything I can to get rid of Trump and harm Trump and so forth.
You know, this is the difference.
I don't think that my audience is a bunch of brain-dead robot sponges.
I don't think there's a single one of you out there for Trump that I could talk out of it.
The only guy, the only person that can separate you from Trump is Trump.
I mean, nobody else made the connection.
You're not gloming on to Trump because somebody's telling you how great he is.
You're not supporting Trump because somebody's told you how you've decided on your own.
You like what Trump's doing.
You like what he's saying, and you're willing to give it a chance because everything else you've tried the last 25 years hasn't worked out.
Why not try an outsider?
Why not?
I know how the drill goes.
But this is why I don't endorse.
Well, you take out Hillary.
Be careful.
All I've done is try to point out that the nominee over there is not going to be Bernie Sanders.
Although, I'm not going to have time to get into it today, but what's going on with this guy who set up her server and who has been granted immunity, there's more to that than I think we know.
And I think my problem with the Hillary thing is I've been telling people, I came up in the golf course yesterday, hey, you think we're going to get Hillary this time?
It never fails, folks.
And I always say, well, how many times have we thought that since 1992?
That we finally got him.
That they've been exposed and this is it.
And it's never happened, has it?
So why is this year going to be any different?
But Rush, this is the FBI.
This is a justice.
Yeah, exactly.
It's the Justice Department.
Who runs it?
Barack Hussein.
Oh, I'll tell you what I tell them.
I told a bunch of guys, we had a backlog at number 16 yesterday, par three.
So a bunch of people come, what do I think's going to happen to Hillary?
I'll tell you what I know has already happened.
And that is Bill Clinton called Obama and said, let's go play around the golf.
And they did.
And at some point during that round of golf, Bill Clinton puts his arm around Obama and says, okay, look, bud, let's hit this story down, shall we?
You think you got goods on Iraq?
Well, you think you're cleaning pierce the wind driving snow, buddy?
Let me tell you, we got more on you.
And if you unload on her, you think you're going to get away with it.
How do you think I've survived as far as I have?
How come I've gotten away with everything I've gotten away with?
You cannot take her out without taking yourself down power.
And don't you ever damn well forget it.
Something like that has happened.
Now, whether Obama's intimidated by it or not, we don't know.
But I guarantee you.
I can't guarantee you, but I mean.
By the way, should I have repudiated McCain?
Should I have repudiated Romney?
Are they close to the ideals that I support in a candidate?
Should I have repudiated them?
That's an interesting question.
Here's Jeffrey Lloyd.
Jeffrey Lloyd on CNN was asked about what Brett Stevens at the Wall Street Journal had said on Anderson Cooper 360 last night.
It just strikes me, if the people in the establishment had been listening to Rush Limbaugh for the last X number of years, they would have seen this coming.
But they don't see this coming because, you know, they were too busy writing articles for Newsweek that David Frum wrote there, the former Bush aide, that enough and stop Rush Limbaugh and don't listen and all this sort of stuff.
All they had to do was listen to Rush's show, listen to what his callers are saying to him, and they would have understood perfectly well long before Donald Trump that they had a real problem on their hands, but they didn't pay attention.
That's pretty right on the money.
He's simply saying if these guys had listened to you, if they'd been paying attention, that Trump didn't happen in a vacuum, that it's been coming, and they should have known it.
And instead, they send people like From out there to write Newsweek cover pieces saying it's enough of Rush Limbaugh.
We've got to get rid of Rush Limbaugh.
We've got to stop listening to Rush Limbaugh.
Just get rid of Limbaugh.
Stop paying attention to him instead of listening to what's happening on his program.
That was Jeffrey Lord's point.
You got to say, it's pretty astute.
The National Review devoted an entire issue to the attempt to take out Trump.
And I think all it did was solidify his support.
Anyway, St. Augustine, Florida.
Brenda, thank you for waiting and welcome to the EIB Network.
Hi.
Yeah, thanks, Rush.
Just briefly, you've been really important in my life and my late husband's life, so thank you for what you do.
Thank you very much.
But now I'm going to have to disagree with you.
Not totally, but I agree that the purpose way back when in the conversation is to defeat the Democrats.
Assuming someone believes that Donald Trump can't do that or may only be a Democrat under the hood, Florida's kind of in a dilemma with who to choose.
Now, the establishment people want us to pick Marco Rubio, and he is close to Trump.
He's like five away.
I personally would like to see Ted Cruz win, but, you know, if I vote my conscience, I'd vote for Ted Cruz.
But should someone who's anti-establishment be going against their orders and voting for their guy, or if...
Wait a minute.
This is not hard.
Unless I'm missing something.
If you want to stop Trump, then it won't matter who you vote for.
If you're for Cruz, vote for Cruz.
He's actively campaigning this week in Florida.
But he may not win Florida, which means Trump will.
Any vote that Trump doesn't get, whether it goes for Rubio or Cruz, is still a vote that Trump doesn't get.
True, but...
By the way, I wouldn't believe that poll that shows Rubio five behind.
That's only one poll that shows that.
It's an ARG poll.
It's kind of a strange sample.
It's more a poll that might be designed to shape public opinion and reflect it.
He could be that close.
I don't think there's reason to believe he's gained that kind of ground, but...
Well, Cruz was quite far behind in that poll.
So if I vote for Cruz and other people are doing, following the establishment and voting for Rubio or following their conscience or whatever, and Rubio doesn't quite get to Trump, Cruz has a long way to go to get to Trump down here.
Does that mean that there's the automatic thing that they talked about where, you know, I mean, it sounds like if he gets Florida and Ohio, it's a shoe-in for him.
Pretty much, because they're winner-take-all.
So, yeah.
It's an uphill battle for any one person to stop Trump.
The battle is to have a bunch of people get enough delegates to deny Trump the 1,237 going into the convention.
I know you've got one more question.
We'll hang on and get to it after the break here.
Don't go away.
Brenda, St. Augustine, let's go back to your issue.
Here's what you really ought to do.
If you believe the poll that shows Rubio's within five, the only way to stop Trump is whoever wins Florida gets all the delegates.
It's a winner-take-all.
So that means if you think that poll's right, that Rubio's only five behind, then you've got to vote Rubio.
Okay.
You've got to vote for whoever you think is going to beat Trump because that's what it's going to take to deny Trump those delegates.
If that's what your objective is, then you've got to vote for whoever you think has the best chance, including with your vote among those tallied, to defeat Trump.
That's kind of what I thought was about the answer.
And what bothers you about that is you're voting with the establishment.
Well, but just this one time.
Right, right.
And you're really, that's not why you're doing it.
Right?
No, not at all.
So you can have a free conscience on this one.
Okay.
I've been, I was a liberal back in the day when I was growing up in New York.
See, I can understand why you still feel guilty.
And I never voted for Democrat.
So I finally figured out after God got a hold of me and then you that I was actually not a liberal.
So I've always voted Republican, and obviously Rubio is a Republican, but the establishment is getting so Democrat that it's pretty hard to tell the difference.
It's not that the establishment is getting Democrat.
The establishment is anti-anybody that wants to take what they've got, which is totally understandable.
It's their turf.
They ought to be defended.
Look at, there ought not to be any complaints.
It's not fair.
They are the establishment.
They are the power.
They're going to do whatever they can.
This is ballgame, folks.
This is not beanbag here.
This is not Civics 101 in your seventh grade history book.
This is for keeps.
And the people that own all the stuff, the people who have the ball, the people whose hands and departments control the money, they're not just going to sit there and let anybody come take it, no matter who they are.
They're going to do what they can to defend it, including go far outside any acceptable boundary if they have to.
That's what we're up against here.
There is no fairness here.
There is no.
Well, they can't do that.
You've got to be prepared for them to do anything, including try to destroy by reputation or career the people trying to take what they've got.
You'd be no different if a horde in a neighborhood wanted to take your house away from you.
Well, anyway, a horde, H-O-A-R-D-E.
What do you think I say?
Said, oh, no.
You talk prostitute?
No, no, no.
Some people would welcome that, but most wouldn't.
Here's Kathy in Scotts Valley, California.
It's great to have you on the program.
Hi.
Hey, Rush.
Long, long time, sorry, go back to about 89, and you did a lot to help me define my own core values.
But on this parallel that you have drawn between Goldwater and 64 and Trump, I think you're all wet.
Trump is not a conservative.
The parallel to Reagan and Goldwater completely breaks down and fails.
No, no, no, no.
You're right.
I was not making no ideological component here.
I didn't mean that.
I'm simply drawing, I'm drawing a pattern of behavior by the establishment to whoever is trying to take over.
That's the core of the problem.
That's the core of the problem.
You keep presenting the opposition to Trump as this monolithic establishment thing.
I am not establishment.
I never have been.
I never will be.
And I am absolutely anti-Trump.
I call myself a constitutional conservative, a principled conservative.
And there's a whole lot of us out there that also don't want Trump.
And we may be temporarily aligned with the quote-unquote establishment, but that doesn't mean I back them either.
I'm not saying that you are.
I hate the idea that you're presenting anti-Trump as all monolithic establishment.
I'm not.
No.
You are inferring that.
I'm not saying anything of this.
It really.
But you weren't at Sea Island, Georgia this weekend meeting with those people plotting to stop Trump, were you?
That's who I was talking about.
They aren't all an establishment either.
Are you trying to say Ben Saf is established?
They are all establishment.
That's the whole point.
Ben Saf is establishment?
In this instance, he is.
He was with them.
What are you talking about?
He's aligned with these.
Like I said, there are aligned objectives of beating Trump without them necessarily being the same.
Okay, so what really is your grievance with me here?
You don't like being lumped up?
It felt like you were using that parallel to say that it's exactly the same, and this is what the establishment's doing, but the opposition to Trump is not all establishment.
And there may even be some teaming up between the anti-Trump not establishment and the establishment to deceive him, but that doesn't mean they're bad with each other and everything else.
I'm going to guess that who you're for is Ted Cruz.
Cruz or Rubio.
I could pick either one.
I think Rubio gets short shrift.
And I find the people who say, I can never vote for Rubio, therefore I vote for Trump complete hypocrites.
They can't ignore one thing Rubio did.
Everything else he did was conservative, but they'll ignore all of Trump's past.
How do you do that?
Okay.
I could vote for either Rubio or Cruz.
Okay, cool.
All right.
Fine.
But you have, look, don't take this personally.
was not trying to lump all opponents of Trump in with the establishment of the people with the power and are steering there.
Look at Kathy.
The point is, the people I'm talking about are trying to deny you too.
They're trying to stop you too, as well as they're trying to stop Trump.
Well, maybe so, but there's a lot of people who are not.
Conservatives who don't want Trump, I think he's going to do every bit as much damage as Clinton would do.
Okay, fine.
And you make it sound like a lot, very often, not always.
Every now and then I get a little nugget the other way, and I think, thank you for finally saying that.
But most of the time, I'm thinking it really, really does come across that you're supporting Trump because of the anti-establishment as if the opposition to him is monolithic, and it's not.
There we go.
Okay.
That's part of why this is so emotional for so many people.
I understand.
Well, you know what my answer is.
I've told you today and any previous day that anybody was here listening.
My preference, my requirement, the thing that I think must happen, or all this is academic, is the Democrats have to be beaten.
the democrats have to lose and the difference is why if it came down to trump or clinton i would have a lot of soul searching to do Yeah.
It would not be an automatic.
And I've never missed an election to do that.
Well, then, what would you do?
If it comes down to Trump versus Hillary, if somebody runs third party, would you go for him?
That would be really hard.
I would have a lot of soul searching to do.
I would probably end up voting for Trump, but I would have to hold my nose harder than I did for Romney.
I hear you.
I hear you.
Well, I understand I would be praying that he doesn't do what I expect he will.
Well, what's that?
What do you think?
I think he's going to be just as bad as Obama in terms of working to make the presidency more imperial, that it's going to be all about him.
It's going to be all about he'll try to do things he can't do constitutionally, and there'll be all kinds of levels.
Kathy, can I help you with that for just a second?
Let's play a little hypothetical here.
Let's say Trump's elected, and we're still going to have Democrats in the House and Senate, and we're going to have Republican establishment types in the House and Senate.
Now, the reason Obama has been able to get away with his authoritarianism is that the Republicans have basically checked out of the game, and they have said they're not going to do one thing to stop Obama, and impeachment's been taken off the table, and they're not even going to oppose.
Mitch McConnell said we're not going to even oppose anything in this year because it might affect our presidential campaign.
And that's wrong, but I don't think all Republicans have stepped out.
I just think they're too small of a minority.
I don't care.
They run.
They run the places, and so they set the agenda, and the agenda is no stopping Obama.
Therefore, Obama is unsure.
You think they're going to stop Trump when he's their guy?
I am telling you that if Trump gets elected, you're going to see more unity between the Republicans and Democrats in stopping any Trump authoritarianism than you have ever seen in your life.
Because they're going to hate it.
They're going to despise the guy.
And they're going to align together to stop him if he tries executive orders.
If he tries.
They'll take the same position that a lot of the Trump supporters have today, that he's a bully, but he's our bully, so it's okay.
Well, his supporters might, but his supporters are not going to be in Congress.
I'm asking, get past your anger at me.
I'm setting up a hypothetical here.
I'm trying to comfort you.
Trump is not going to be able to get away with Obamaism because Obama has a compliant Republican Party.
Trump is going to have a Democrat Party that's not going to say, you know what?
We can't stop him.
We're afraid of offending people.
They'll be talking impeachment on day two after the first Trump executive order.
In fact, Trump winning may be exactly what you want.
You might finally get to see unified opposition to the guy.
You got to think about all this stuff, folks.
You have to, you really, you have to understand all these comparisons, Trump and Obama, I understand them, but Obama would only be getting away with it, is only getting away with it because the Republican Party is non-existent.
Well, I'm telling you, the Democrats don't play that way.
Trump, if he wins, will be a Republican.
And if he does authoritarian stuff that the Democrats want, then I guarantee you the Republicans will stand up and stop him.
He's not African American.
He's not a minority.
Don't be worried about any of that.
I have to take a break.
But just follow the thinking here, folks, and chill out.
Brett Baer, Fox News Channel, said that he knows a lot of Republicans, Washington Republicans, saying privately they'll vote Hillary if they have to.
They will not vote Trump.
A lot of Washington.
I've heard that too.
Some of them have even been quoted as saying that they will do that.
But I'm going to expand this hypothetical.
I'm afraid this might have gone over Kathy's head because she was so focused on what I'm doing wrong.
But I want you to imagine Trump, if you're worried about Trump as nothing more than an authoritarian Obama and may do either similar things or different things, but still he poses that threat.
I want you to stop and think of how it'll be different than it is under Obama in our hypothetical.
Because the Democrats are not going to sit down and just let it happen unless he's doing their agenda.
And I know some of you fear that that's what's on tap.
But we'll play this out tomorrow.
The only way Obama has gotten away with all this authoritative, authoritarian executive order stuff is the Republican Party hasn't stopped him.
You want to see an opposition party in action?
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