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May 4, 2016 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:06
May 4, 2016, Wednesday, Hour #2
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The views expressed by the host of this program, documented to be almost always right, 99.8% of the time.
That's the latest opinion audit from the Sullivan Group, official opinion auditing firm in Rancho, Cordova, California.
Great to have you with us, 800-282-2882 if you want to be on the program.
And the email address, lrushbo at EIBNet.com.
So it apparently is the case that Ted Cruz decided between midnight and 2 a.m.
Monday, well, Tuesday morning, early Tuesday morning, late Monday night, before the voting began in Indiana, Ted Cruz decided to get out if he didn't do well in Indiana.
Didn't tell very many people, limited number of staff.
They tried to talk him out of it.
His mind was made up.
Now, interestingly, that's before Trump on Fox and Friends yesterday accused Cruz's dad of consorting with Lee Harvey Oswald.
But even without that, I wonder.
I have not spoken to Senator Cruz, and I probably could get through if I picked up the phone.
But there are just some things here that I assume.
I know a lot of you in the audience were very sad when Cruz announced that he was not going to continue.
That many of you had unbelievably high hopes and a lot invested.
Because on paper, here we had somebody that was a Republican, who was actually conservative, who actually could implement the things that you and I all believe and wasn't the establishment and so forth.
I don't, the thing I don't know, and I could, as I say, I could find out, but I'm just going to surmise some things with the caveat proviso that I could be wrong here.
Many people sent me notes last night saying, Russia, are you finally going to admit that conservatism is dead now?
Rush, are you finally going to come to grips with the fact that conservatism has never been the big majority way of thinking in this country?
How can you look at what's coming of this country?
What's become of it in the last 10, 15 years and say that conservatism dominates anything?
And I know that there are many people running around saying similar things to that today.
But I don't think conservatism died last night.
I don't think conservatism is being buried in Indiana.
I think what happened is that another conservative messenger was systematically, piece by piece, destroyed, which is the normal course of things.
For all of you who think that conservatism is dead and on its last legs, why does it remain the single greatest threat feared by the Democrat Party and the American left?
Now, there are many reasons.
I mean, I mean, the answers to that question, but one of them surely is they fear conservatism.
They know how many Americans are conservative, and they know what percentage of the country is.
The left and people I'm talking about know full well they are a small minority.
I'm talking about the committed activist types are a small minority.
They have succeeded in governing against the will of the American people for I don't know how long now.
They fear conservatism more than they fear any foreign enemy.
They are far more mobilized and animated and intent on destroying conservatives and conservatism than they are any other foreign threat.
That would not be the case if it were insignificant.
Now, understandably, too, I have to admit that one of the aspects of the thought process, the American left, is they don't like opposition, period, no matter who it is.
And they don't believe in debating and they don't believe in a debate in the arena of ideas and triumphing that way.
They snuff out opposition.
They eliminate it.
There is no such thing as a level playing field.
Their opponents don't even get on the field.
That's the strategy.
Don't even let them on the field.
Now, I'm sure that Cruz was prepared, as prepared as he could be, and I'm sure his family was as prepared as they could be for what was going to happen, given how he had arrived at his prominent position in the Republican nominee field.
He knew he had made enemies of the Republican establishment, and he knew that the media and the Democrat Party are automatic enemies.
But here's what I don't know: I don't know just how equipped anybody is to cheerfully, happily live each and every day with the kind of garbage,
lies, filth spewed about you and your family multiple times a day.
And yet we're told that the conservative must be cheerful and must be happy and must be a happy warrior.
Well, how does that work?
You know, when they're out there saying you're the zodiac killer, stop and think of that for just a second.
Put yourself in Ted Cruz's shoes and let's establish some givens.
A. Ted Cruz loves America as much as anybody.
Ted Cruz desperately fears America's on the wrong track and desperately wants to stop it and turn it around and save it.
Ted Cruz reveres the Constitution of the United States, knows it backwards and forwards.
Ted Cruz reveres the founding.
Ted Cruz is religious.
That means he is a person who does his best each and every day to live according to the morality that he believes.
And then he has to get up every day and read stories in the media about how he is so mean and he is so vicious and so Hitler-like that his daughters will not even be in the same room with him because he scares them so much.
I mean, the stuff that was said about Cruz and his family long before the Raphael Cruz, Lee Harvey Oswald stuff started, long before the Zodiac killer stuff started.
It's nothing that any other conservative had to put up with.
Don't misunderstand.
I'm just, my question is, how does anybody go through that?
I mean, you're running for president.
You have these desperately held beliefs.
You think that we're in a national crisis.
You're frustrated because so many people don't see it that way.
You're hell-bent on convincing them.
You're hell-bent on trying to explain to them why you're doing what you're doing.
You're very earnest about it.
You care about it so much that you're doing everything you can to get people to listen to you.
And every time you open your mouth, some fool is out making fun of you, destroying you with lies and innuendo and so forth.
And do you not at some point say this can't be done if 38% of the people of Florida can be convinced that I am the zodiac killer?
How do you stay cheerful?
At some point, do you not just say to yourself, and again, I don't know.
I may be putting myself in Cruz's shoes and imagining how I would react to things that have been said about him.
They're demonstrably not true, that everybody laughs about.
It would be, yeah, but I can't snur to you.
You've gone through much worse than that.
No, I haven't gone through much worse.
I've gone through similar.
Yes, I know, I know I've gone through, the staff here say you've gone through 27 years.
Well, yes, I'm still cheerful, and the audience here still is here and so forth.
All true.
But see, unlike in politics, I can take all that, as I've told you, I had to make a big psychological adjustment very early on in this one.
Nobody's raised to want to be hated.
Nobody's raised to want to be disliked and laughed at and reviled and made fun of every day and have some of the most outrageous things said about them.
I had to, in order to put up with that for 20, I had to learn how to take it as a sign of success, which that's try that psychologically.
Try trying to tell yourself that being hated by 30% of the people that hear you means you're succeeding.
Nobody's raised that way.
But in politics, you can't get anywhere with people hating you.
I mean, I could have 30% of the people thinking I'm the Zodiac killer, and it's not going to stop them from listening.
May even make them want to listen more.
But in politics, you're running for president and they tell people that you're the Zodiac killer, that your dad was there with Lee Harvey Oswald.
There's no way to make that, to transfer that into some measure of success in a political campaign.
So I just wonder if at some point Cruz said, I love my family too much.
I mean, I know they agreed.
I know that family understood what we're getting into here, but there's always a but.
Well, here's the, here's the, look, the point.
I don't know.
Maybe ask Senator Cruz about it sometime.
But the point is that along with Cruz's defeat comes the cheerful hammering of nails into the coffin that will bury conservatism.
And I'm sorry, conservatism is not buried after that.
Conservatism didn't die.
How many people supporting Donald Trump think that he is in one way or another?
There are a lot of conservatives supporting Trump.
A lot of people that participated in those 2010, 2014 midterms that gave Republicans landslide victories are supporting Trump.
Some of them know he's not one of them.
That call that we got from the guy in Philadelphia, that call has resonated through the drive-by media like you can't believe.
Where have been whole columns written on that call and what it means in terms of the Republican establishment.
The guy's name was Sean.
He's a lifetime listener of the program.
He's calling from Philadelphia.
And the upshot of it was that he admitted 80% of what Trump says he disagrees with, but he's voting for him anyway because Trump is going to fight.
You know, this business of a Republican Party, like the Boston Globe, the Republicans commit suicide.
The Republicans were committing suicide by signing on to amnesty.
This is what you and I all understand that they don't.
Every Democrat issue they sign on with, every Chamber of Commerce issue that they sign on to may as well be a gun, a bullet in the suicide gun that the Republican Party's using.
And this guy calling, he's pretty much saying the same thing.
Look, I'm fed up with they don't fight back.
They say they're going to, but they don't.
They ask us for money.
They ask us for votes.
He was well spoken, and he said, what matters with Trump is going to fight him.
I said, well, what about Cruz?
He said, well, I'll vote for Cruz if he's nomineed, but Cruz isn't going to fight him like Trump is.
Cruz just isn't going to fight him.
He says, I don't want to hear how a guy's conservative for day.
That's not what matters to me.
I know this guy's the biggest conservative in the race.
Big deal.
What are you going to do with it?
What are you going to do about it?
He was thoroughly convinced that Trump is going to fight back against everything that he thinks, the caller thinks is going wrong.
That's the faith that he has invested in Trump.
And he's a conservative.
He's one of us.
There are a lot of them.
Conservatism didn't die.
Conservatism not being buried.
Conservatism, whether people know it or not, is still how most people, dare I say, productive people, live their lives today.
It's how most people wish and hope they can raise their kids.
They may not even know it.
Many of them are not ideological conservatives.
They don't run around saying I'm conservative and then tell you what they are.
In fact, some of them who are conservative don't want to use that word because they don't want to get snickered at.
They don't want to be laughed at.
But conservatism didn't die.
And I don't want anybody out there thinking that it did.
Now, back to Justin, our caller in the previous hour, who said that he believes if Trump's going to win, he's got to reach out to conservatives.
And I'm going to tell you, there's a grain of truth to that in this sense.
Every four years, it's conservatives who are told they have to unify.
It's conservatives who are told they have to bite the bullet.
And I think in this circumstance, right now, Trump could help himself immensely if he surrounded himself with, say, cabinet appointments or announced cabinet appointments or some genuine conservative people that are in his immediate orb would send a signal to people.
Whether he listens to them or not, we'll never know.
Well, we will know at some point, but it's a good point.
Here's another thing to remember, though, folks.
It is true to say that we're all always the ones that have to bite the bullet and unify.
Well, that does sadly go along with Trump is under no compunction to move to the losing side or what he might perceive to be the losing side.
Now, if he has grace and if he really wants to unify, be inclusive, he'll do that on his own.
But he's not required to.
Nobody is.
No winner is required to reach out to the losers and say, come on in.
It's the losers that have to get with the program.
That's just, I know some of you have not been taught losing in school.
What are you shaking your head?
Do you think is that too coarse to say?
All right.
Well, look, I have to take a break anyway.
Hang in there, folks.
Your phone calls.
More of them are coming up.
Don't go away.
Back to the phones.
Who's next?
Sharon, Tucson, Arizona.
Great to have you.
I'm glad you waited.
Welcome to the EIB Network.
Hi.
Hey, Rush.
Thanks for taking my call.
Yes, sir.
Ma'am.
I'm sorry.
Yes, ma'am.
Well, I'm just devastated that Senator Cruz dropped out.
I was a Cruz supporter, but I will say that I will vote for Donald Trump.
I will support him and vote him.
I think, I think, I don't believe what the polls say that he can't beat Hillary.
I think he can beat her.
Why do you think so?
Because everybody I talk to, a lot of my friends are Trump supporters.
And the thing they like about him is that he's cutthroat.
He takes it to the media.
He takes it to the Democrats.
And they're hoping he'll take it to Hillary.
Because Donald Trump is a winner no matter what.
He doesn't want to debate you.
He doesn't want to work with you.
He's going to do whatever it takes for him to win and get whatever he wants done.
Did you?
That's what they like.
Pardon me just a second.
I'm going to talk about you in third person for a minute.
Do you mind?
No.
Folks, did you hear that?
Did you hear what this woman just said?
Here we have a woman who is devastated that Ted Cruz dropped out and she can make the case for Donald Trump as well as ardent Trump supporters.
You're conservative, I'm assuming.
Yes, I am.
That's why I supported Ted Cruz.
Exactly.
And yet you think Hillary Clinton should be the focus.
Yes, I do.
She's the one.
We know what's going to happen if she gets elected.
Well, I want to share something with you.
I'm glad you call because one of the things I have potential to use in the program today is a piece in the Daily Caller by a young conservative named Jamie Weinstein.
He happened to be the boyfriend of Michelle Fields, the reporter that had the dust up the Trump campaign with Corey Lewandowski.
I want to read this paragraph to you from his piece in the Daily Caller today.
But as bad as Hillary would be as president, there is little threat another Clinton presidency would end the American system as we know it.
But you can't be so sure with Trump.
What are the odds a President Trump would attempt to become honest to God American dictator?
5%, 10%?
No one can say for sure.
But certainly greater than any other presidential contender in my lifetime.
So here we have a conservative journalist, the Daily Caller, who, admittedly, his girlfriend had a dust up with the Trump campaign.
And he mentions that at the end of the piece.
But he's saying he's going to vote for Hillary.
At least she won't ruin the country.
But Trump could become dictator.
Meanwhile, we're living in a near dictatorship.
If you ask me.
And if you let these clowns get one more Supreme Court appointment, whether we call it a dictatorship or not, we've got a generational domination, liberal domination for two or three generations here.
But this is he's not alone either.
I don't mean harping on him.
He just had the gust to write it.
There's a lot of young, idealistic, conservative journalists, bloggers that think the same thing.
They have so much hatred for Trump.
Trump could turn America into a dictatorship.
Hillary, she's not going to do anything bad.
Not nearly as bad as Trump will.
Wow.
Everbat, great to have you with us.
Russell Rushmore behind the golden EIB microphone.
That's enough of the Weinstein piece, but you get the flavor.
Hillary's a known quantity.
She's established, man.
know what we're going to get.
She's not going to...
I want to get the exact phrase.
Bad as Hillary would be, there is little threat another Clinton presidency would end the American system as we know it.
What in the world is happening now?
You know, you talk about disconnects.
What in the world is happening now?
The America, as founded, is under direct attack.
It's under direct assault.
Up until seven years ago, it was disguised.
But ever since Obama, it's right out in the open.
There's no doubt about it.
There's nothing going on that you can't see.
You can see the reason they're telling us we're going to put the coal business out of business.
We've got 30 Democrat attorney generals filing a lawsuit that would essentially strip the First Amendment's free speech clause away from anybody who disagrees with man-made global warming and subject them to prison.
And you want to talk about Trump becoming a dictator?
We've already got people who want to be dictators.
They're called the Democrats.
And they are well on their way.
I know how frustrating it is that articulating conservatism as an antidote, as a fix or as a new direction to go.
There were, geez, I don't know.
There were times in the campaign that I cringed.
I'm sure you did too, over how certain things were said.
But we're not in the arena.
We're not running Cruz and some of the other guys were.
And it's the most frustrating thing is to see what is happening that other people supposedly don't and don't know what to make of it when it's happening right in front of their faces each and every day.
But this statement, and Jamie Weinstein, he's a millennial, he's a young guy.
No evidence that Clinton would end America.
What in the world is already underway?
The open borders, the quest here for amnesty, not to mention the refugee.
I mean, the entire structure of American society is under assault.
So is the whole concept of Western civilization.
And I really remain convinced that an activist minority is making all this happen.
I know some of you say, how can you say it's a minority when they win the White House?
Because I don't think Obama could have gotten elected telling anybody he was going to do this.
He'd have gotten some votes.
Don't misunderstand it.
He wouldn't have won the landslide he won by announcing this as his agenda.
What would happen to federal spending?
What he's going to do to the immigration system, what he's going to do to the health care system.
If Obama had told you your health care costs were going up as much as they have, if Obama told you that everything, every aspect of Obamacare, if they were honest about it from the get-go, about their rationing and all that, how many people do you think actually would have voted it?
What did they think Obamacare was?
In fact, they thought it was going to be free health care for a lot of people, mostly for the uninsured, the poor.
And they thought it was going to become more affordable because they were lied to about it.
They wanted to believe the lies, but nevertheless they did.
Anyway, here's Jennifer Spokane, Washington.
You're next.
Great to have you with us on the program.
Hi.
Hi.
Thank you so much for taking my call today.
You bet.
I've been listening to you since 1989, and I'm just a big fan.
So this is very exciting for me.
Thank you.
I appreciate that.
I just wanted to say that Ted Cruz is an honest, godly, awesome man.
And the only reason that I think that he lost that he had to drop out and that he lost, that he's not won as many states as projected is because of the lies that have been perpetrated about him.
Donald Trump goes to the media and gets way more airtime than Ted Cruz ever gets.
And when he says outrageous lies about Ted Cruz, they're not, nobody says anything.
It's so the lie is out there, and it's assumed to be truth, and it's not.
And that's you can't, it's almost impossible to fight that.
Donald Trump has completely taken Ted Cruz's honor and his name, his good name.
And because of that, I cannot vote.
In good conscience, I cannot vote for Donald Trump.
Wasn't just Trump, though, and it's not just Cruz.
They do it to Republicans.
It happens to every Republican, no matter how conservative they are or not.
Jennifer, this is important now because they did it to Reagan, too, but he was able.
These are things we're going to have to figure out and learn.
And by the way, well, we'll stick with that.
Reagan was reviled and hated.
You might not remember.
You might not have been old enough back then, but trust me, Reagan was as hated as Cruz is.
They accused Ronald Reagan of sneaking into Lafayette Park at night and stealing cans of pork and beans from the homeless.
They blamed AIDS on Ronald Reagan because he never said the word.
They blamed AIDS.
They accused Reagan of wanting people to get AIDS and die.
They accused Reagan of being responsible for all of that because he wouldn't talk about it.
He had no compassion for it or any of that.
So he was anti-gay.
He was anti-this.
It was vicious.
And yet Reagan won two landslides.
Now, there's a reason why.
And it's not just conservatism.
There have to be other things at play.
Now, I'm not, you're right about Cruz was destroyed, but every Republican always is.
You start out that way.
I'm not excusing it.
I'm with you on it.
I have great empathy for Senator Cruz and his family having to go through some of this stuff, especially, you know, when you start out in your cruise, you're on almost a crusade, a mission, save America.
No greater calling.
You're going to give everything about your life to it.
You're going to give your entire existence.
You're going to put your family through it.
You've gotten their permission.
They've signed on for it.
They're helping out and so forth.
And then every day to see yourself disfigured this way and then to see people laughing about it.
But it happened to Rubio.
And it wasn't just Trump, but the lie and Ted stuff stuck.
I'll tell you, I was here every day saying Cruz is not a liar.
I was chastising Trump for saying that.
Whatever you want to say about Ted Cruz, he's not a liar.
Then let's not even get into the idea that they were able to convince people that Ted Cruz was stealing delegates.
It just became too much to overcome.
That's the kind of thing that in the normal everyday ebb and flow of politics, you get a gold star.
That was brilliant maneuvering what Cruz was doing.
It was the only option open to him.
It was right aligned with the rules.
It's how Abraham Lincoln became president, by the way.
And they're out there hammering Cruz with it.
And he didn't explain it when given the chance.
I mean, he could have taken any number of questions and made a turn into a teachable moment about the American political system.
And he was trying to do that with that Trump supporter he crossed the street on Monday to go talk to in India.
This is why my point, conservatism hasn't died.
Conservatism, by the way, it can't.
I've made that.
You cannot kill off conservatism.
You can have dictatorships and you can set them, but you're still going to, you cannot kill off conservatives because it's in the heart.
But everything conservatism holds dear is under assault right now, including attacks on Western civilization.
This country is under assault from all over the world.
But for the first time, we've got a genuine force inside the borders also as part of the attack.
Disguised, disguised, by the way, as trying to correct all the flaws that America was founded with.
Anyway, I've taken a break.
I'm glad you called, Jennifer.
Thank you so much.
Back in just a sec.
Your guiding light, Rushland Boehm, meeting and surpassing all audience expectations every day.
This is Louis in Edison, New Jersey.
It's great to have you with us.
Hi.
Hi, thank you for taking my cold rush.
Just before I make my point and ask you my question, you've said on your show many times that you listen for a week, you know, let a liberal listen for a week and they'll be committed.
Just over the weekend, I was, a buddy of mine from Maryland came over and I was discussing what you said, and he told me, interestingly so, he knows a friend of his that's a prosecutor in Silver Spring, Maryland, who was a flaming liberal, and his wife was somewhat of a conservative and told him to listen to you for a week.
And he is a passionate conservative now.
Really?
Normally, it takes six weeks, but this happened in one week, you say?
One week.
Wow.
Fascinating.
See, folks, there's reason here to be cheerful and optimistic.
I appreciate that story.
Thank you for telling me that.
Thank you.
My question is: I don't think at all, and I want to know what you think about this.
I don't think at all conservatism died at all.
I think morality died.
Just the way the media, which is the face of the cultural rot in this country, destroyed Cruz.
They never destroyed him on the conservative issues, so conservatism did not die.
Morality, right and wrong, died.
But at the same time, and my question to you is: can you have a conservative movement when right and wrong, when there is no distinction between right and wrong?
And what worries me is I will support Donald Trump, even though I was a Ted Cruz supporter.
You know, I will support Trump because I'm worried about the Supreme Court, etc., and I think he'll be under pressure to put right-wing justices on.
But my question to you is: how can there be a conservative vision for the country when, to a certain extent, he represents, he's synonymous with that cultural rot of the media?
Interesting question.
You know, you're asking me basically to combine morality with conservatism, and you think that you can't have one without the other.
The first thing I want to address is your terminology.
I've been thinking about this.
Conservative movement.
I'm not so sure there is one.
And by that, I mean this campaign has exposed the fact that there isn't one.
I mean, so many people that I'm sure a lot of you thought were part of the conservative movement wanted no part of Ted Cruz.
And you're out there scratching your heads.
And admittedly, some of them wanted no part of Trump, but there was a lot of the terms of media, individual commentators, certain elected Republicans.
I'm going to give you probably, you can think of examples on your own of people that you thought if there was a conservative movement, they're in it.
And when you think of conservative movement, you think of a unified, like-minded bunch of people.
I don't think it exists anymore.
I don't know that it has for quite a while.
Conservatism's been at war with itself almost as much as it has been at war with liberalism in the recent years.
How many recent years?
I'd have to really apply myself and think about it to give you concrete examples.
But tell me this, if there is a conservative movement, who is the leader?
No, I am not because, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
There isn't one is the point.
There isn't a singular conservative figure that every other conservative goes to for guidance, inspiration, motivation, definition.
Now, you can, well, there ever was one of those?
Well, yeah, I mean, back there was a conservative movement once.
And you would say that, and this is some years ago now, William F. Buckley could be said to have been the intellectual engine and head of the conservative movement.
And it was Buckley to whom people back then looked.
But William Buckley passed away.
There became, and it was going on before he died too, but there was internal competitions within the conservative movement for that position.
Leader of the conservative movement.
Who is it that personifies, embodies, and defines the movement?
There isn't such a person today.
Conservatism has erected litmus tests and happily, happily wants to excommunicate people from the so-called movement.
But it clearly, if there's a movement, somebody show me where it's unified and show me where it has a purpose.
Show me where you can find, in fact, unified definitions or explanations of positions conservatives hold issue to issue to issue.
How many conservatives do you know who would just assume everybody that's a social conservative get broomed away and silenced?
You know, you talk about our caller, morality and conservatism, and how can you erase the whole concept of right and wrong and still have conservatism?
Yeah.
But morality's always been a bugaboo for people.
Morality always has.
Because nobody's perfect.
It's impossible.
Nobody is morally pure.
And so it's very, very difficult to stand in judgment of other people morally.
But there are those who do and those who try.
And they offend people, particularly leftists.
But I agree with you.
I think our culture is rotting away before our eyes.
The thing about that is that there's no changing it.
There's no president that's going to change it.
Cultural changes are generationally evolutionary.
And I don't think the generation that is going to be born and refuses to accept the garbage they inherit from their parents and grandparents has been born yet.
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