All Episodes
Previous Next
May 12, 2016 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:38
May 12, 2016, Thursday, Hour #1
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Welcome to today's edition of the Rush twenty four seven podcast.
I actually don't think I've won any awards.
I think I won an amount I won a Marconi Award eight hundred and fifty two years ago, but I guess I uh I don't enter in award competitions anymore.
The whole process is biased.
Anyway, let's get down to business.
I know this is a day that we need Rush.
The big summit.
Paul Ryan and Donald Trump met.
Well, Rush isn't here, I'm here.
I want to address this thing head on.
First of all, let's cover the breaking news.
This is the statement that was issued about thirty five minutes ago, a little bit longer than that, a joint statement from House Speaker Paul Ryan and Donald J. Trump.
The United States cannot afford another four years of the Obama White House, which is what Hillary Clinton represents.
That is why it's critical that Republicans unite around our shared principles, advance a conservative agenda, and do all we can to win this fall.
With that focus, we had a great conversation this morning.
While we were honest about our few differences, we recognize that there are also many important areas of common ground.
We will be having additional discussions, but remain confident there's a great opportunity to unify our party and win this fall, and we are totally committed to working together to achieve that goal.
We are extremely proud of the fact that many millions of new voters have entered the primary system, far more than ever before in the Republican Party's history.
This was our first meeting, but it was a very positive step toward unification.
Again, that's a joint statement from Paul Ryan and Donald Trump.
When I was asked to step in and host the Rush program today by the EIB staff, I was initially reluctant to do so.
And here's why.
More so than at any point in my career as a talk show host, which is now nearly thirty years.
You have a conservative, I wouldn't say movement, but a conservative population in America that is divided.
Everybody's mad at each other.
When you think about that meeting that went on this morning between Ryan and Trump, this is the same meeting that's going on all over the country.
You have a lot of people, and trust me, it's a lot of people.
Look at the election results.
Who not only support Donald Trump, they're passionate about it.
And they've got no time for all of this talk that's been coming.
From conservative activists, Republican leaders that Trump's a buffoon, they've got no time for this talk that Trump isn't really a conservative.
They like Trump and they like what he represents.
On the other hand, you have people who deeply care about their country.
They are conservative, and they've always been Republicans.
And they look at Trump and they say this guy doesn't believe in the things I believe in.
And he doesn't conduct himself the way I want a leader to conduct himself.
So you've got this enormous divide and everybody is mad at each other.
Can this be healed?
Well, I think that the meeting that went on today between Ryan and Trump, their own attempt to heal that divide, their own attempt to get Republicans, the majority, if not all of the members of the House, the Senate as well, on the same page as Donald Trump is the same thing that probably has to happen within the conservative movement.
I don't think you're going to be able to make everyone happy.
This has been as polarizing.
A period as I can imagine.
For those of you who don't know where I've been coming from on this on my show in Milwaukee.
I've been a Trump critic.
I've criticized Trump.
I've said I don't want him to be the Republican nominee.
I've said I don't believe that he's a conservative.
This has gotten me tremendous support from the members of my audience who agree with me.
And in my state, Wisconsin, we voted overwhelmingly against Trump.
Ted Cruz got more than 50% of the vote in the Wisconsin primary last month.
But it is also really, really angered.
A lot of people who've been listening to me for better than two decades, they're furious with me for that stand.
Likewise, while I would certainly never speak for Rush, I'm aware that some people have criticized Russia's approach because they talk to me and they say, Mark, why is Rush saying this?
Or they give me the opposite.
Why aren't you more even-handed about this situation as Rush is?
There's no way to make everybody happy.
You can only be true to yourself and speak in a way that you're comfortable with speaking.
Everybody's got a different point of view here.
However, and this is where I get into my can't we all get along phase of the program?
The fact of the matter is, Trump and his approach aside.
There are still more areas of agreement here than disagreement.
What the people critical of Trump have to realize, and I'm one of them, is that there is something about Donald Trump's message that deeply resonated with millions and millions of Americans.
And I've been reflecting about that in the several days that I've had to prepare to come and do the program today.
That slogan he has, it's the best slogan that I've seen a politician come up with, maybe ever.
Make America great again.
There's so much in there.
Make America great again.
It implies that right now we're not great.
And I think whether you support Trump or oppose Trump, if you're a conservative, you have to agree with that.
What has made us great has been taken from us.
The left and this disastrous presidency, the media, and so many others are making America something other than the nation that we want to be.
You've got Obama now running off, he's gonna run off to Japan to apologize for our winning World War II.
That's sickening.
And I think most of us can agree on that.
We aren't allowed to talk if you're right of center.
Kurt Schilling gets run off of ESPN for daring to express his point of view on a divisive social issue.
It's not America.
You're supposed to be able to talk.
That statement that Trump has make America great again.
It resonates and it resonates for a reason.
Clearly, the people who support Trump aren't all that concerned about dotting every I and crossing every T on policy.
Because some of Trump's statements in the past are not conservative.
And some of the statements that he makes now rubs them the wrong way.
I think the Trump supporters see in Trump someone who is proud to be an American.
Somebody who isn't going to apologize for all of our mistakes because he doesn't believe we make a lot of them.
Somebody who's going to stand up for the people in this country who still believe in the American dream.
What the Trump supporters, though, have to recognize is that Trump seems to have bent over backwards to hack us off.
He says things about some of the people we admire, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, and so many others, that are galling to us.
I'm in Wisconsin, he criticized my governor Scott Walker for not raising taxes, and instead standing up to the public employee unions that were bankrupting my state.
Well, that drives us crazy.
We're angered by it.
So that's why we have this divide right now.
But there are areas of common ground.
So my goal is by the time we get to the third hour of today's program, everybody's going to be singing kumbaya.
We're all going to be walking hand in hand and all considered that it's not going to happen.
At the meeting that they had today, Paul Ryan and Donald Trump came out and came out in.
There's no agreement, there's no endorsement, there isn't any of that.
What they said is that we are moving toward unification.
We're making progress.
We're trying to come together.
It's going to take a while for those people who are passionately supporting Trump, who want all the rest of us to suddenly endorse him right now because he won.
He won, and you better get down there and you better say that you support him now.
Well, it isn't that easy for a lot of us, and maybe it isn't going to happen.
But in the meantime, there are a lot of things over which we do agree, and I want to explore some of them on today's program.
So here's my battle plan for the show.
I want to talk about several issues out there.
Really good stuff, good topical material.
And then in the third hour of today's program, I'm going to circle back and come to this whole matter of Trump and whether or not he can unite conservatives behind him.
I don't know if he can or he can't, but I want to have a frank and open discussion about it, and we're going to do that as I say in hour number three today.
We've got a lot of good material on today's show to come up uh to come up before that, including discussion with a very interesting lady.
Her name is Star Parker, and she's got a lot to say about the suggestion by the Attorney General of the United States that the whole transgender bathroom issue is one of the great civil rights issues of our time.
My name is Mark Belling, and I'm sitting in for Rush Limbaugh.
Mark Bellingham for Rush Limbaugh.
Everybody knows about the dispute going on between the federal government, the government of the United States, and the state of North Carolina over transgender rights as they relate to bathroom access.
I'm joined right now by Starr Parker.
Starr is the founder and president of the Center for Urban Renewal and Education.
Her website is Urban Cure.org.
Starr, good afternoon.
Good afternoon.
It's good to be with you.
Who chose that song?
I'm wondering.
It reminded me of back in the day when I believed the lives of the left and ended up in all types of distorted living patterns.
Well, I'm much younger than you, Starr, so I wouldn't know that back in the day, Stuff.
That by the way is an absolute lie.
Tell me what Loretta Lynch, the Attorney General of the United States is suggesting that this issue of transgender rights, bathroom access is a civil rights issue akin to the struggles in the past that African Americans and others have dealt with.
Your reaction to that.
This is what happens when you let progressives and liberals out of the closet.
They come into the public square and distort reality, and then they distort law.
On the civil rights question, this movement that led us to the Civil Rights Act, there was not one eternal truth that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. moved to upset.
And in fact, he went the opposite direction.
His movement was one to move our nation towards its fine founding principles, toward truths.
I mean the truth that found that founded us, biblical values, limited government, free markets, eperbus unum, where we all many become one.
And what we are seeing in progressives like Loretta Lynch is the exact opposite.
A war against eplerbus unim, a war against traditional values, a war against limited government, and a war against free markets.
When you think about North Carolina on this North Carolina question, the people have spoken in North Carolina through their representatives that they don't want men going into women's restrooms, that there are birth certificates for a purpose.
We are not a gender neutral society.
We are gender specific for all types of reasons moral, spiritual, biological.
You know, I agree with the governor 100% that it's time for the Congress to bring clarity to our national anti-discrimination provisions.
Because we've been at this stuck corner for the last fifty years about what is or isn't in the Civil Rights Act.
It's unfortunate that the black community decided to take a turn from Dr. King to go to big government, which has now collapsed their communities, and so the only ones speaking on their behalf are horrible progressives like Loretta Lynch.
But it is a moment In time we have to revisit so that all of us can live free, all of us can live in peace, and all of us can live without government right in our back.
If I didn't make it clear in my introduction, I think most people uh can assume that Starr is a national black conservative leader.
The battle that we had in America in the 50s, 60s, and continuing really into the 70s over racial equality was fundamental to America.
It seems to me now that a lot of people want to have in on the same kind of movement.
But what they're trying to do is equate skin color with almost everything else.
Some discrimination is wrong, but not all discrimination is wrong.
You can't I can't sit here and claim that I'm an African American, that I'm black.
I'm not.
The people in North Carolina are d are suggesting that they ought to be able to claim that their agenda other than what they are.
There's a difference there, and I think what people are doing, and when Laretta Lynch talks about this as being equivalent to Jim Crow, she's minimizing the victims of Jim Crow.
Right.
Well, two two things.
One, when you think about Jim Crow, uh this was law.
This was government.
This is what happens when you have a a view for big government.
And what the country said was you got this is government overreach.
You can't do this.
And unfortunately it took the federal government to say you cannot do this.
You cannot overreach as governments and discriminate against people because of an innate characteristics.
That said, now what we've seen is an expansion of the Civil Rights Act to include gender, f um sex, all types of other uh uh hijacks, if you will, to get to the place to where as a secularized society, we have people confused about who should go into which restroom.
Now, let's get to this question of transgender.
Are there people who are who are not sure how their emotions should play out in the public square?
Yeah, perhaps there are.
But should the rest of society now uh move into this place where we're putting others at risk because some may just take advantage of it and go into girls' rooms uh and locker rooms.
Don't forget this that's not about bathrooms.
This is a locker room, showers, uh places where we change uh in in in department stores to get dressed.
So this is now in the public square.
So you have to get down to what is the real agenda driving this.
Some of the questions uh on the table during the time that North Carolina was having this discussion in Charlotte was well, why can't you just make a whole nother bathroom?
I mean, we do already have those.
You got girls, boy, family, or you know, you can put the two symbols on there if you want to, and then you have your choices.
But the force all to come be complicit to this uh violation and attack on, as you're mentioning, what the Civil Rights Act is really about, we need to revisit that time.
The Congress is going to have to revisit the Civil Rights Act and and it start scrubbing away all of the challenges, all of the hijacks, all of those um uh the the the I guess you could call them the continuums uh that led us to the place that now government is in every part of our lives.
We are a nation that did deny individual human rights to Americans because of their skin color.
Not the whole country.
I know, but but we are a nation that did do it, and we sanctioned it and we said it was legal.
That was a profound error that we rectified.
It just seems to me now that everybody wants to be in on that and they want to get their moment, but it's not the same.
These this discrimination, no, you can't use that bathroom is not akin to what we did to blacks.
Yet people yet for Loretta Lynch who herself is black to say that and to put it on that same platform, I think diminishes what we did as a nation to blacks.
It does.
And not only diminishes it, it it it it changes the narrative, it changes the story, it shuts down dialogue on this really serious question about the role of government when it comes to private affairs.
Uh and that's what we're looking at.
Uh, this attack on the Tenth Amendment right now, where the states, the people of that state have a right to say, here's how we want to govern.
We want protections that were already in place for the majority of our population to be able to have privacy in the restroom.
This is the the left that has brought this debate to public square and asked for more overreach from the federal government.
Where Lored Lynch sees an opportunity is because we did have the challenges in some of our states where they were discriminating through government practices, and now uh, as you're saying, we c we corrected those mistakes.
Where do we go from here?
We limit the role of government.
We we make sure that the Congress puts laws in place that say you cannot violate as a Justice Department state's rights either.
This is a constitutional question.
I want to thank you for joining us at Star Parker.
The name of her website is Urbancure.org.
She's the president of the Center for Urban Renewal and Education.
I appreciate her joining us on the program today.
When you consider the struggles and the problems that African Americans faced in this country, not allowed to vote prior to that being enslaved, being sent to lousy schools in the South.
When you try to say that that is on the same level as somebody who is describing themselves as being of a new gender, not being able to use the bathroom, it's an indication that our we're a country that has really, really gone off beam.
I thought having Star Parker on the show was a good idea because it allowed us to contrast true discrimination, true victimization, which happened in America with this constant whining and crying and demanding respect and demanding almost victim status.
The people are now you have people who want to be victims.
They want to be able to look upon themselves as somebody that is put upon.
They want to be somebody who feels as though they're not being given a fair shake.
Instead of trying to overcome, they don't want to overcome.
They want to suggest that there be accommodation, which is why this story is beautiful.
Winner of the national handwriting contest.
A seven-year-old girl from Virginia who attends Greenbrier Christian Academy, won the national handwriting contest.
She's a first grader.
And the national handwriting contest is just that.
They have different levels for different levels of achievement.
She's in the first grade, so she's to be judged on her printing.
She doesn't have any hands.
She was born without hands.
Her name is Anaya Ellick.
This is from people.com.
She's learned how to write, or in this case, print, by holding the pencil between her two wrists.
She was born with a birth defect, and she doesn't have hands.
Her arms stop at her wrists.
And she's learned how to use her pencil by balancing it between her wrists and the story on people.com as an example of her penmanship handwriting, which is perfect.
Wow, what a story.
Here's a little girl who obviously has parents that told her that you've got this situation in your life.
But you can still do everything that everyone else can do.
Isn't this the exact opposite of the message that we seem to give to everyone?
You don't have a chance.
We have to accommodate.
Today's liberals were in charge.
She never would have had an opportunity to demonstrate that she could use a pencil.
They would have done it for her because after all, there's no way she'd be able to do it.
Here's a little girl who's facing a lot more difficulties in life than all the people that are running around claiming that they're victims.
And she's able to achieve at this level.
You just know from this story, she's going to make a difference.
She's going to be somebody.
Until I suppose somebody tries to convince her that she can't achieve, that the odds are set that the deck is stacked against her, that the world isn't fair, that you have no chance, that you have no opportunity.
This brings me to the Hiroshima story.
The president is going to Hiroshima, Japan.
No American president has done so since World War II.
We all know why he's going.
He says it's not to apologize.
The visit itself is the apology.
That's why he's going.
It's the last year of his presidency.
This is his last chance to one more time say the United States of America is sorry for what it did.
What we did was terrible.
He doesn't Have to say that aloud, everybody knows that's what the meaning of this is.
Why Hiroshima?
People argue that this is a generational divide, America being the only nation to use nuclear weapons against another people, that older people support the decision, and younger people think that it is a national shame.
Well, if younger people think it's a national shame, it's because they don't know what happened.
We've got nothing to apologize for.
And the decision to use nuclear weapons in Hiroshima was moral.
Obama going there is simply one more attempt by him to send a message to the rest of the world that we're bad guys.
I don't believe Barack Obama is proud to be an American.
I made some comments earlier on the program about Donald Trump and why he resonates, and whether you support Trump or not.
Clearly, one of the things that his admirers like about him is that he's not embarrassed to be an American.
He talks about making America great again because he believes we were great.
Barack Obama doesn't.
He thinks we are a bunch of imperialists.
He thinks that we're a nation that did all sorts of terrible things.
He believes that we're a country that has run around the world throwing our weight around when we've had no rights to do so.
He thinks that we haven't been a force for good in the world.
So now he goes to Hiroshima.
The crowning achievement of the United States of America in the twentieth century was winning World War II.
And now he wants to take that away from us and say that that was a bad thing too.
Consider what would have happened had we not won World War II.
Who knows where the world would be right now?
Hitler and the Germans certainly would have dominated Europe.
Their alliance with the Japanese probably would have meant that hateful racists would have dominated Asia.
The United States might be forced to kowtow to them.
Millions and millions of people would have been enslaved or killed for disagreeing.
None of that happened.
Because we intervened in World War II.
And we intervened after we were bombed by the Japanese.
I don't see Obama making any grand visit to Pearl Harbor.
You'd think he'd be sensitive to Pearl Harbor given the fact that he says he was born in Hawaii.
I couldn't resist that.
I think we need to talk for a moment about why President Truman bombed Hiroshima By the way, why isn't he going to Nagasaki?
Nobody ever remembers Nagasaki.
It's always Hiroshima.
The United States and the Allies won the European war.
It was over.
The Germans surrendered.
The concentration camps were discovered.
The process of trying to rebuild Europe was underway.
But the war in the Pacific was continuing.
Russia had entered the war, declared war against Japan, which they had not done prior to the conclusion of the European war.
It was apparent that the Japanese were going to lose.
But they wouldn't stop fighting.
And the fighting was remarkably brutal.
Because they wouldn't stop fighting, and because they were telling their people that they literally had to fight in the streets and fight in their homes.
They were condemning their own people to death.
Had we not intervened with a nuclear weapon that forced Japan to say uncle, it would have meant a land invasion of Japan that would have slaughtered far more people than were ever killed by that atomic bomb, and it would have meant tremendous loss of life for American fighting men.
They would have had to go into that country and fight a war that would have lasted maybe another year, maybe two more years, and for what?
Simply because Japan wouldn't accept reality and surrender.
The only message They were going to accept was the one that President Truman delivered to them.
That was not an act of barbarism, and it was not something for which we should apologize.
It was an act of heroism by President Truman.
Obama going there is one more flipping off of the United States, flipping off of the World War II generation, and one more attempt by him to rewrite history and make us the global bad guy.
We didn't do anything wrong there.
Our intentions were moral.
Truman wanted to end the war, and he wanted to end the suffering that was going on.
There are a lot of people who are glad that Obama's going to do it.
And he's going to get a lot of praise in the media for going over there for healing the wounds.
Whatever wounds may exist should have long since been healed by the fact that the United States of America helped rebuild the Japanese economy.
We become an ally of Japan, and we've pledged to defend them.
After the war was over, instead of us going in and using imperialism to make Japan a state of the United States, a toady to us, we helped rebuild their economy.
We've got nothing to account for here.
And the suggestion here that we need to apologize, and people who want to say that Obama's not going over there to apologize, everybody knows why he's going there.
The appearance itself is an apology.
We have nothing to apologize for.
And it's long past time that we end this nonsense of being ashamed of being the great nation that we are.
As I say, there's a Trump theme running through today's program, and I say that as somebody who's not exactly the biggest backer of Donald Trump.
But he struck a nerve when he suggested to Americans that we are a great nation.
And it's the exact opposite message that this president has sent.
If you'd like to react to this and the visit of Obama to Hiroshima and this notion that we were somehow immoral and depraved by using nuclear weapons in that situation.
We're going to open up the phone lines here, the Rush number is and always has been.
I think it always has been.
1-800-282-2882.
1-800-282-2882.
My name is Mark Belling, and you're listening to the Rush Limbaugh program.
Mark Belling in for Rush Limbaugh.
There's an interesting column in today's Wall Street Journal from Wilson McCampbell, who deals with the actual history of what happened at the end of World War II.
In reference to President Truman, he writes, his goal was to avoid an invasion of Japan's home islands, which Truman knew would mean, in his words, and Okinawa from one end of Japan to the other.
For those who need reminding, the Battle of Okinawa was one of the bloodiest, most ferocious engagements of World War II with Allied forces, most of them American, suffering more than 65,000 casualties, including 14,000 dead.
Truman's intentions and assumptions were legitimate.
Can you imagine if there was a ground war in first the islands of Japan and then the Japanese mainland?
And it would have happened because Japan wasn't going to surrender.
So what did we do that demands an apology?
I'll contend.
Nothing.
Let's go to Ian in Oceanside New York.
Ian, you're on the Rush Limbaugh program with Mark Belling.
Yeah, I'd like to show you the difference between Obama and his policies, and this is what you get with Hillary.
They send planes out to do a job against ISIS.
They come back to civilians are driving oil trucks.
And this O'Morell with the CIA thing that's gonna, you know, it'll pollute the groundsville, an oil truck, or we need it, like it's it's something we need to save that oil truck for when we win the war.
They give all excuses, and only and the boxcar had one job to do, and these men went out and they did that job.
There were tons of civilians, I'm sure, but they did what needed doing and getting to what you were just saying.
It would have been the bloodiest war if we didn't do it.
And Hillary's grandfather and father, and and how many more people would have died instead of saying, you know, like let the history rest.
We did what we had to do, it needed doing we didn't, they did what they did.
And it needed doing because of the Japanese.
The Jap Japan militarily was in the process of being beaten.
Once the European war was over, we had the ability, and the Allies had the ability to direct all of our resources at Japan.
We were going to win, but if we were compelled to win by continuing to fight a ground war and an air war, who knows how many Americans would have been killed, and for that matter, how many Japanese would have been killed.
Certainly.
The devastation in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was real.
But this was only because Japan refused to surrender.
They were committing their own population to death.
So what were we supposed to do?
Simply meet mindlessly having our sailors and marines go in and get slaughtered, make every single city the equivalent of Guadalcanal and Okinawa make everything Iwo Jima, or ended.
Japan the fact that after the first bomb was dropped, Japan still didn't surrender, just shows you the irrationality that was in existence there.
We did the only right and moral thing.
And that's what offends me about Obama and his visit, the strong implication that what we did somehow was wrong and requires healing.
We saved Japanese lives and we saved American lives by what we did.
The war is the world is a very, very evil place.
There are all sorts of hateful people in it.
Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama don't want to accept that.
The Japanese people and their actions and their leadership at the end of World War II showed it was they that lacked morality.
Truman felt terrible when he saw the devastation that the bombs brought.
He didn't do it out of glee.
There was no bloodlust.
He did it because he felt it was the right and moral thing to do.
And it is sad that a president of his own party only 60 years later now feels the need to go over there and bow and scrape and suggest that we did something wrong.
We not only didn't do anything wrong, it was a tremendous moment in world history.
We had the power to do something that indeed would kill a lot of people, but in the process save more, and we did it.
We shouldn't be spitting upon the sacrifices that the World War II generation made and the heroism of our nation at that moment in time.
And it is sad that President Obama can't even respect the good that we did then.
Ian, thank you for the call.
My name is Mark Belling, and I'm in for Rush.
Mark Belling in for Rush.
Let's go to Fort Campbell, Kentucky.
Andrew, it's your turn on the Rush Limbaugh program.
Ah, yes, sir, yes, sir.
Uh good talking.
Thanks for taking my call.
Thank you.
Um I just uh want to let you know I agree with you a hundred percent of what you've been saying about President Obama going to Hiroshima to you know state these wounds that we supposedly healed or did and uh honestly the youth of the Japanese, they don't even know that the atomic bombs existed.
I've done my research, it was a very surprising fact that I found.
I wasn't expecting to find it, but they did interviews to our generation, and they have no idea.
They don't care.
There was a rebuilding of Japan for a lot of reasons, including the acceptance by the contemporary leadership, and I mean the leadership of the last 50 years that what they had before was wrong.
Japan's current leadership and the citizens of Japan know that what happened in World War II from their side was wrong in the same way that most Germans have accepted that Hitler and Nazism was wrong.
There's been an acceptance by Japan that what they did was wrong.
They have moved on as a nation.
It's us that wants to go back and revisit all of these things.
We are the ones that keep stirring it up because you've got an agenda here from people, and sadly the president of the United States is one of them to blame the United States for everything.
Thank you for the call, Andrew.
He mentions that a lot of young people in Japan don't even know about the atomic bombs.
There are a lot of Americans who don't know the side of the story that I'm presenting.
You've got in a generation of Americans that have been presented the story of World War II by liberal educators.
And all they know is the only nation to use nuclear weapons was the United States.
They don't know the context that we're talking about.
There's been an agenda that's been jammed down people's throats.
And that agenda is one that is in direct conflict with what happened, with reality.
Leadership requires making very, very difficult decisions.
▲
Export Selection