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May 9, 2016 - Rush Limbaugh Program
37:35
May 9, 2016, Monday, Hour #2
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Meeting and surpassing all audience expectations every day.
Great to have you.
The Excellence in Broadcasting Network, Rush Limbaugh, here behind a golden EIB microphone.
Telephone number if you want to be on the program.
800-282-2882 and the email address, lrushbo at EIBnet.com.
During the break at the top of the hour, I came across the latest piece by Victor Davis Hansen, writing at National Review.
It is a long piece.
It prints out to six pages.
That pretty much makes it bordering on impossible for me to share the whole thing.
I mean, I mean, I could do it.
I mean, I could read all six pages and I could have you transfixed.
But it's still long.
I haven't had a chance to highlight it, which I always do, pick pull quotes, excerpts, and so forth.
But let me tell you what it's about.
It's about Trump and Hillary and where principled conservatives find themselves, which is not a good place.
Principled conservatives are having a real tough time with all of this.
And principled conservatives are worried that the ultimate end of this is the elimination of conservatism as a, I don't want to say nominant, maybe even relevant force in American politics.
In fact, there's a piece here by Josh Barrow, writing at Business Insider, that deals with that very thing.
The crisis in the Republican Party is even worse than it looks.
I'll share that with you in a minute here.
But the VDH thing, I'm going to read this.
I'm going to summarize it when I have time to do it.
But his basic premise is that it's kind of, he thinks it's kind of strange that we're worried about Armageddon being brought on by Trump when we're living the apocalypse of Obama and Clinton.
Now, this is something I think Trump supporters have already figured out.
And I think a lot of people instinctively have come across it or had it reflected in their minds as they ponder all of this.
It certainly spells it out for me.
In fact, I wasn't going to grab soundbite number five.
I was going to skip past this because I couldn't find any reason for it to relate to anything other than me being discussed in the media.
But actually, that now plays off of the VDH thing really well.
You will remember this because it's by no means the first time I've expressed it.
Whenever I run across Republicans out there just belly aching about Obama and going, Trump and bellyaching about Trump and losing their minds over Trump.
And like last Friday, when I summarized for you the genuine, fatalistic it's over-ism out there in so many different sectors of American conservatism.
And I read excerpts of some of these pieces to illustrate.
And I asked, where was all this during Obama?
Where's all this rage?
Where's all this anger at stuff that actually is happening and has been happening for seven and a half years?
We haven't had any anger of the sort from the Republican establishment that's being directed at Trump.
This is not a defense of Trump, by the way.
I'm not saying any of this from a pro-Trump position here.
I'm simply observing.
And it has amazed me.
To this day, folks, to be bluntly honest with you, I remain really surprised I had nobody joining sides with me on January 16th of 2009 when I said I hope he fails.
When I was telling the story about the Wall Street Journal wanting 400-word op-ed from a bunch of people on their hopes and expectations of Obama's presidency and my side, I don't need all that.
I can do it in four words.
I hope he fails.
And I got nobody joining me.
I got some on my side attempting to explain it, but they wouldn't join me.
And I had a cacophony of people saying, that's outrageous.
You don't say that.
We should all unify behind our president.
We should all come together.
Nobody wants our president to fail because nobody wants our country to fail.
And I said, you're missing the point.
I want Obama to fail because I want America to survive.
I want Obama to fail because I don't want progressivism and liberalism to win.
What's so hard about this?
I got no joiners.
As I say, I had some who defended me on it, but I didn't have, there wasn't an echo.
And there wasn't a court.
And I, to this day, remain surprised because I thought that it was a very principled, conservative position to have, to hope liberalism fails.
I mean, to me, that's what this is all about.
Meaning, this program, what this program has been all about is attempting to educate, inform people of the pitfalls and the dangers of liberalism, progressivism, socialism, the left, or what have you.
And we knew enough about Obama weeks before he was inaugurated to know exactly what was going to happen with his administration because he had told us.
For example, he told us he was going to shut down the coal industry by making it impossibly expensive to stay in it.
He told us that he was going to slither his way to single-payer health care.
He told us that he was going to do what he could to transform the very identity and makeup of this country.
And I said, why isn't there any not just outrage?
Why aren't people frightened by this?
I was.
I was scared to death of what Obama intended to do.
And it wasn't just because I know who liberals are and what they're going to do.
He had said so in numerous interviews going all the way back to the early 2000s.
Not to mention the things he had said in the campaign, not to mention the Jeremiah Wrights and the Bill Ayers and the people that were his friends.
And it was all there.
Every bit of it was foretold.
So to me, it was only natural to say, I hope he fails.
So, likewise, I have been amazed throughout these entire seven and a half years that there's been all kinds of outrage that members of the Republican Party express for other Republicans or conservatives,
but I haven't heard anything in any kind of proportion whatsoever aimed at Obama and now Hillary or anything, even during the IRS scandal, even during Obamacare, even from the establishment.
Sure, there was a conservative media that was all over all this stuff, but from the standpoint of anybody else, where was the outrage?
And this outrage, Trump to me, has always been out of proportion.
This fear, this shouting of the dangers Trump represents.
What the hell do you think we're living through is?
Anyway, that's the point of Victor Davis Hansen's long piece here at National Review.
We're worried about Armageddon on the Trump horizon while we're living amid the apocalypse of Obama and Clinton.
It's a brilliant piece.
And you know why you'll say it's brilliant?
It's because it's so obvious.
It's once again somebody cutting through all the noise and getting to the meat and potatoes of what's actually happening.
There's another great piece today I have.
The great British historian, Paul Paul Paul, don't fail me now.
Brain Paul, what's anyway?
He has a piece that praises Trump, that talks about how important Trump is for one reason, And that is Trump's single-handed assault on political Paul Johnson.
Paul Johnson thinks that political correctness is something a lot of people laugh at, a lot of people joke at, a lot of people reference, but that it is hideous, that it is responsible for more of the cultural upheaval that has taken place, that it is nothing more than official/slash unofficial censorship.
And he's happy for Trump for just that reason, that the whole idea of political correctness has been shown to be penetrable and survivable.
And frankly, this is one of the things about the Trump campaign that also I was hoping would be learned from.
I was hoping all kinds of things Trump was doing back last summer and fall would serve as lessons for the other Republicans in the field, that you can criticize Obama, that you can violate political correctness, that you can say what you really think, and not only survive, you can thrive.
So I have a lot.
I marked up the Paul Johnson piece to share with you during the course of the program today as well, which I will.
But here's the business insider piece: the crisis in the Republican Party is even worse than it looks.
Now, this guy's not a conservative.
He's just a business insider.
I'm a blogger, I guess, runs a website, writes for one.
Donald Trump is going to be the Republican nominee, and this alarms ideological conservatives for several reasons.
Is there any other kind of conservative?
I mean, real conservatives are ideological by definition.
Anyway, here are three reasons why Trump alarms ideological conservatives.
Number one, they think that he will lose badly to Hillary, perhaps so badly that Republicans lose both houses.
Number two, ideological conservatives are afraid that Trump will damage the brand of the Republican Party, making it harder to win future elections.
This is the lament from last week.
Somebody had a column on how much damage Herbert Hoover did to the Republican Party, and they think Trump's going to be the next one that defaces and bastardizes the image and the brand for 50 more years.
And the third thing, they believe, ideological conservatives believe that Trump lacks the temperament and character to serve as president.
Now, this guy, Josh Barrow, he says these are all good reasons to be alarmed, but there's a fourth reason for alarm that is perhaps the most alarming for all conservatives, and that is that Trump's nomination could signal the death of orthodox conservatism as one of the two main forces in American public policy,
since Trump is running away with the nomination despite being exposed as a non-conservative.
I may have a point here.
I, frankly, as an ideological conservative, am not worried about that, but I know a lot of people on my side are.
I know there are a lot of ideological conservatives who are worried this could be the end of everything.
As we discussed on Friday, here's why Mr. Barrow thinks so.
Trump is the candidate who finally figured out how to exploit the fact that much of the Republican voter base does not share the policy preferences of the Republican donor class, and that it is therefore possible to win the nomination without being saddled with the donor base unpopular policy.
Now, I think that's a little overstated.
Trump's not the only guy to come along and figure that out.
He's the first candidate to act on it.
But Hills Bells, this has been the reason for the rift in the Republican Party, is that the donor class is not conservative, and therefore the establishment isn't.
But his point is that Trump is the candidate who has finally figured how to exploit the difference for his benefit.
And by the way, to the detriment of the donor class, he said conservatives haven't been able to do it.
This is why he thinks conservatives are worried they're going to be aced out, because Trump is a non-conservative, and he's come along and he's shown how to just rip to shreds the donor class.
Conservatives could never figure it out, but Trump as a candidate has done it, and that scares the heck out of them.
And then Mr. Barrow says, because Trump has shown how to do it, all kinds of copycat Trumps are going to come along in years to come and do the same thing, continuing to ace out conservatism.
Because what he says, his basic theory is, is that Orthodox conservatives are worried that Trump is exposing the fact that they were unable, that conservatism was unable to defeat the establishment,
whereas Trump, as a non-conservative, has shown how to do it, which means the copycat nature of things pretty much guarantees that future people will emulate Trump and not conservatism in beating the Republican establishment.
And that will then relegate Orthodox conservatism to a minor, minor position way over there that nobody pays any attention to anymore.
In his words, future candidates will seek to rebuild Trump's coalition and they'll follow his footsteps by opposing free trade, by promising to protect entitlements from cuts, by questioning the value of America's commitment to military alliances, and shrugging at social changes like the growing acceptance of transgender people and abortion as Planned Parenthood comments and so forth.
But Mr. Barrow says, hey, that's not even a half of it.
It gets worse.
It's easy to find examples of parties where ideologically orthodox members felt sold out by moderate leaders.
Tony Blair's a great example.
But at least those moderate leaders tend to be broadly popular with the public and win elections.
But this guy doesn't think Trump has a chance.
He's popular, but he's going to win anything, which means he's going to take every movement with him.
He's going to take it all with him down the tubes.
Because here's the payoff quote: Trump has somehow found a way to throw away the ideological extreme ideas that Orthodox conservatives cared about while actually making the party less popular.
Trump's recipe, therefore, is a recipe for conservatives to sell out and lose anyway.
And the key here is, by the way, ideologically extreme ideas, there's no Orthodox conservative that thinks what he believes is extreme.
An Orthodox conservative knows that what he believes is mainstream.
It's portrayed as extreme, but it isn't.
But the point is, his theory, Trump has found a way to get rid of conservatism while making the party less popular.
He said that couldn't, that's a double whammy on Orthodox conservatives.
They may never recover from it.
That's his theory, just sharing it with you.
Okay, between now and the end of the next break, I'm going to have some summary of the VDH piece, Victor Davis Hans, just to give you an idea what he's talking about here.
But in the meantime, back to the phones.
This is Tim in St. Louis.
Great to have you on the program, sir.
Hi.
First time caller.
Oh, thank you, sir.
Great to have you here.
I think that there's going to be a big surprise in the election with the number of crossover Democrats like myself that are going to vote for Trump.
Well, you know, it won't surprise Trump.
Trump's out there saying he doesn't need to unify the Republican Party because of guys like you.
Well, you've talked about it before.
Moderate and conservative guys that, you know, our fathers and uncles were the Reagan Democrats that in the last seven years have said, what in the heck has happened to this party?
We've been asking that for more than seven years, Tim.
Well, you know, my best friend in college who's now the Republican Speaker of the North Carolina House, shout out to Tim Moore.
We would listen to the radio, and I'd always go, man, why do you listen to that guy?
I mean, he was right.
And now you're here.
Well, so let me tell you, ask you something.
What is it about the last seven and a half years that has you saying, what the hell are we doing here?
What's happened to us in the meeting of the Democrats?
I mean, because frankly, Tim, there's a lot of us been asking this for a lot longer than seven and a half years.
Just the priorities of the party.
You know, it seems more important that, you know, letting somebody that wants to call themselves a boy or a girl go to whatever bathroom they want to is more important than job security and national security.
That's exactly right.
Exactly.
All those things seem who wants to marry who and who wants to use what bathroom matters more than jobs, standard of living, the economy.
Tell you something else.
I don't know you African Americans out there who believed that the election of Barack Hussein O was going to mean, and I addressed this last week too, was going to mean substantive improvements.
And I don't mean welfare.
I don't mean more goodies and benefits.
I mean, the election of Obama was going to genuinely improve life circumstances for African Americans.
Obama's at Howard University say, hey, I was never about that.
Other people said that I was into this post-racial America.
I was never into that.
I never said that.
And he's right.
He never did, but a lot of people thought it.
Grab audio soundbite number seven.
I just want, in case somebody wants to doubt me, this is Obama.
This is Saturday at Washington, Howard University.
This goes by fast.
There's just eight seconds.
Here it comes in three, two, one.
My election did not create a post-racial society.
I don't know who was propagating that notion.
That was not mine.
Well, I don't know how many people know what a post-racial society is.
Let me tell you what it means.
It means colorblind society.
Post-racial means race ends as a factor in America.
A lot of people voted for Obama hoping that's what their vote meant.
You know this as well as I do.
There were people that voted, white people voted for Obama hoping to end this.
They think it's tearing the country apart.
They think there's been a lot of progress, still some to go, but there's no reason for the country to be further divided by it.
They were hoping that a black president would send such a message and that it would mean substantive improvement for African Americans in this country.
And again, I want to reiterate, nobody thought that meant more welfare or more benefits or more dependence, but that actual quality and standard of living improvements would take place.
And there haven't been any at large.
And here's Obama said, that was never what I was about.
Other people out there saying that, but that was not mine.
So he's admitting it.
Post-racial, post-he was also supposed to be post-partisan.
If you know what that means, how many of you remember during the campaign, Obama was going to end all of the division?
We were going to unify.
We were going to come together.
We were going to be a nation at one with each other.
Yeah, no red states, no blue states, no Democrats, no Republicans.
That's from his convention speech, Democrat Convention, what, in 2004.
So postpartisan was, that means that partisan America, the divide, is gone, that Obama was going to do all this.
And he's telling the students at Howard University, hey, I never said that.
That was not me.
I never said, because he doesn't want it to end.
He thinks there's so much payback still needed.
This country has committed unforgivable sins, and there's no way the people who committed them are going to get away this easily.
No way, Jose.
So I wonder how many people shocked, if any, to actually hear Obama say it.
Here's another one.
Try this.
You're at Howard.
You can grab number eight.
You're at Howard University.
Here comes the President of the United States, the first African-American president.
Keep in mind, again, why so many white people voted for him.
Believe me, a lot of Republicans voted for Obama hoping to end all this racial strife, hoping that the symbolism of it would send such a message to black people.
Hey, there's not any racism anymore.
How can there be racism when there's a black president?
We got Oprah.
We got a black woman.
You got to stop thinking this way.
But Obama says, no, that's not what I was about.
Now, you think you voted for Obama because he was about improving the circumstances for African Americans.
Listen to this little bite.
Be confident in your heritage.
Be confident in your blackness.
Remember the tie that does bind us as African Americans.
And that is our particular awareness of injustice and unfairness and struggle.
We have cousins and uncles and brothers and sisters who we remember were just as smart and just as talented as we were, but somehow got ground down by structures that are unfair and unjust.
And that means we have to not only question the world as it is and stand up for those African Americans who haven't been so lucky.
Because yes, you've worked hard, but you've also been lucky.
That's a pet peeve of mine.
People who've been successful and don't realize they've been lucky.
That God may have blessed them.
It wasn't nothing you did.
What was that?
What was that?
Was he reverting there to ethnic?
That's his version of Hillary.
I ain't no ways tired.
God may have blessed them.
It wasn't nothing you did.
All right, so you're out there.
You've just graduated Howard University, and you got the president saying, hey, you've been lucky.
Nobody gets it.
You know, this is an offshoot of Elizabeth Warren.
You didn't build that.
You didn't make that happen, meaning your business or whatever else that you have built up.
You didn't do that.
Everybody else did that for you.
Without what everybody we did, you couldn't have done diddly squat.
Here's Obama.
People have been successful and don't realize they've been lucky.
Got all these people out there successful thinking they actually done something.
You ain't done nothing.
You nothing but luck.
He's not criticizing that.
He wants people to realize that.
Because what Obama wants people to realize is that without government and without bettors and without people in command and control authority, you're not going to have diddly squat.
It's the people that got connections who get lucky.
It determines whether or not they're successful or not.
You did nothing.
That's a hell of a commencement speech, isn't it?
That's a hell of an inspirational message.
I'd be really motivated.
Okay, so I've spent four years or however many years here in this university trying to equip myself for success, and now I'm told that's not a factor.
I got to go out and learn luck.
Where do I go to study luck?
Where do I go to get my degree in luck?
And the unspoken message is, if you're black, you aren't going to have any because the people in charge of luck aren't going to pass it out to you.
This is hideous, folks.
This is.
But anyway, he's admitting it.
Post-racial, it wasn't about that.
Victor Davis Hanson, let me briefly summarize this for you.
And this is the first pass, so we'll have more detail later.
And at first glance, I'm telling you, the thing appeared brilliant to me.
I haven't had a chance to really read and study it as I do most things.
But here's a basic summary.
And his point is that, you know, we're worried about Armageddon with Trump because Trump's clueless and Trump doesn't know anything and Trump's a neophyte.
And we're worried about Armageddon when we're living the apocalypse right now with Obama and Hillary, who don't know anything either.
Everything they do is wrong and dangerous.
So what VDH is saying here is that Trump's cluelessness, and he's acknowledging that Trump is clueless on some things.
I will get into detail of specifically what, but, you know, all these flip-flops on the minimum wage and tax increases and no tax increases on the rich or not on the rich.
Trump's just rolling the dice as he goes.
Trump's cluelessness about the nuclear triad, and that is from a debate.
He got a question from Hugh Hewitt about the nuclear triad.
And Trump didn't know what it was.
You could tell he didn't know what it was.
And Hugh Hewitt could tell he didn't know what it was.
Hugh Hewitt kind of let him off easy, respecting the fact that a guy was running for president, didn't expose him because I'm sure Hugh thought that he had exposed him.
He didn't know what the nuclear triad was.
But he was being asked to comment on it.
And to anybody who knows what the triad is, it was, I don't know, embarrassing or disquieting or a little concerning.
You know what the nuclear triad is?
You do.
Yes, you do.
What do you mean you don't know what the nuclear triad is?
The nuclear triad refers to the three different ways you're going to launch the SOBs.
You're going to launch them from the Trident submarines under the ocean.
You're going to launch them from ground-based silos.
And you're going to launch them from airborne aircraft, the triad, three different ways of delivering nukes.
Trump didn't know.
So Victor Davis Hansen says Trump's cluelessness about the nuclear triad is nothing but a lowbrow version of Obama's ignorance, whether seeking to Hispanicize the Falklands into the Maldives.
The Falklands are referred to by Argentines as the Malvinas, not as Obama said the Maldives, or mispronouncing corpsmen or riffing about Austrian-speaking Austrians or the 57 states.
I mean, his point is that all these things that you are worried that Trump doesn't know, Obama is it in spades.
Obama's just as clueless about a lot of things, happily and proudly so.
So all these people getting upset that Trump didn't know about the nuclear triad, how about Obama not knowing how to pronounce Corman or thinking they're 57 states or riffing about Austrian-speaking Austrians or Hillary's flat-out lie about the causes of Benghazi hours after she had learned the truth.
It's easy to be appalled by crude ignorance, but in some ways it's more appalling to hear ignorance layered and veneered with liberal pieties and snobbery.
The choice in 2016 is not just between Trump, the supposed foreign policy dunce, and an untruthful former Secretary of State.
It's also a matter of how you prefer your obtuseness, raw or crooked, or cooked, I should say.
Who has done the greater damage to the nation?
Would-be novelist and Obama insider Ben Rhodes, who boasted about out-conning the Washington media, or Corey Lewandowski?
Now, Hansen's point is Lewandowski has this dust up with a reporter it.
And everybody goes ape and wants to put the guy in jail, wants charges, wants a criminal trial, wants the guy fired, wants the guy strung up.
They want Trump disqualified for having such a thug.
Meanwhile, we learn that we've got a guy lying to the American media about who we are negotiating a nuclear deal with with Iran.
Speaking of which, we've got a guy, Lewandowski, supposedly should be prosecuted, put in jail for grabbing a reporter by the arm.
Meanwhile, we just got an administration here who's seen to it that the Iranians are going to have a nuclear bomb.
So Hansen, where's the sense of proportion?
You think Trump's an idiot?
You think he's got thugs working for him and it's going to be bad?
What about what we have had to endure the last seven and a half years?
And where has been the proportionate outrage?
Exactly my point.
And then he points out here in his piece that over the next six months, Trump could, not necessarily will, but could reinvent himself into something more responsible, could promise solid conservative appointments like Cruz to the Supreme Court, John Bolton to state, Larry Arne of Hillsdale as education secretary.
Things like this are things that Republicans ought to be working with Trump on to try to make happen.
And even if we think if Trump does it, that it's a naked ploy to get our votes, we still have to ask, isn't a naked ploy from Trump better than Hillary Clinton?
See, Victor Davis Hansen's coming from the exact place I am.
Hillary Clinton, you can't do worse.
You're not even on the same field.
This lesser of two evils thing doesn't even apply because nobody gets close to the depths of incompetence and depravity and danger posed by another four years of the same crap that we've had the last seven and a half.
Anyway, I take a break here, folks.
We'll be back.
We will continue after this.
And we go back to the phones here at the Rush Limbaugh program at a one and only EIB network.
This is Michael in Caseville, Michigan.
Great to have you.
Hi.
Hi, how are you doing?
My name is Mike, a contractor from Caseville.
Just really worried about this election.
We got these two candidates.
And, you know, just because Trump has GOP next to his name, I'm very conservative, but why should I settle for him?
I mean, we got the libertarians hitting 11%.
They're way closer to my values.
Yeah.
I mean, why should we settle for Trump when we don't have to?
The older generations have messed this up by allowing this, by selecting the lesser of two evils.
Keep telling me, well, Hillary's going to win.
Hillary's going to win.
See, that's the thing, though, Michael.
For the last, I don't know, for the last many presidential elections, the GOP establishment has told us when we've been upset with the nominee, screw that.
You have a duty to hold your nose and support our nominee.
You have a duty to unify.
You have a duty to put all that aside and come together.
And now that the shoes are near foot, they have no interest in doing the same thing.
So I don't disagree with you that there's been this counterbalance, but you know the old saw about third parties.
They're not win anything.
When's the last one that was victorious?
The point is, is we need to fire these people.
We need to get them out of there.
I mean, look at all the on both sides.
How are you going to do it losing an election?
You got to make strides.
I mean, little by little, you got to make strides.
You got to do it somehow.
If Trump got in when nobody else said he could, why can't we get a nominee in there that holds our values?
Well, where is he?
Well, like I said, the libertarians have enough support where I think they will actually make the debates this time.
And I think we need to go that way.
There isn't going to be a Libertarian candidate that is on the ballots that is.
I'm going to hold an 11% national support.
Who?
Gary Johnson.
Oh, Gary.
Oh, Gary Johnson.
We're talking right.
How did I fail to comprehend where you were going?
My bad.
Gary Johnson.
Well, he doesn't hold every single value I have, but at least he's not flip-flopping to the, going after Bernie's supporters.
I mean, that's where Trump's going.
You know, I mean, he's just everywhere.
He doesn't care about grabbing the conservative vote.
He's made that clear.
You know, I was firmly, firmly with Cruz.
I would have gone Cruz all the way.
Right.
But this guy, I cannot be accountable for this.
I just can't do it.
I got five kids, you know, and I'm happy to do it.
Look, I hear you.
Guys like you, I can't tell you how I think you guys are the backbone of America.
You've just been forgotten and all that.
But a third party, you're not going to win anything.
You're just going to guarantee that what you don't want ends up victorious if you go that way.
Donald Trump is once again ripped into Hillary as a nasty, mean enabler of her husband's affairs.
That'd be sexual affairs, peccadillos.
And there's other stuff out there as well, folks.
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