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May 12, 2016 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:14
May 12, 2016, Thursday, Hour #2
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Time Text
Yeah, Russia's gone for just one day.
He's going to be back tomorrow.
So I'm here.
And a lot of news is breaking today, and we're going to cover some of it.
In the next hour of the program, I want to take head on.
This rift isn't the right word, this tremendous divide among Republicans and conservatives over Donald Trump.
The Ryan Trump meeting was held today.
They issued a statement that indicated that they're moving toward unity.
And so on, and I think that this needs to be addressed, and for those of you who aren't familiar with my position, I've been a critic on my radio program in Milwaukee of Donald Trump.
But one thing that I think the Trump critics, myself and others have to acknowledge, is that he has tapped into a deeply felt belief by millions of Americans that our country is being changed into something that it never was before.
That you have a cultural elite that looks down its nose at America and what America has stood for.
And I found some stories in the news today that I think address that.
We've been talking about President Obama's decision to go to Hiroshima.
Now I'm calling it an apology.
The White House is making it very, very loud and clear that it's not an apology.
But it is.
Otherwise, why go?
Of all the cities in Japan to go to, why there?
The symbolism is powerful and overwhelming.
And the message, without being spoken orally, is, we feel badly that we did this terrible thing to you.
And a lot of Americans love that.
They love hearing that we were wrong.
They admire Obama for being big enough to say we were wrong.
Except we weren't wrong.
And historically, usually we haven't been wrong.
For heaven's sakes, we all know the mistakes that we've made as a nation.
We all know that the problems and the denial of rights and liberties that have occurred.
A lot of mistakes have made in the last seven years, for heaven's sakes.
We know what our problems are.
But this wasn't one of them.
This was an act at the end of World War II of heroism and morality.
There are some of you listening to me right now who would not be alive were it not for what we did.
Because your fathers would have been killed.
Some mothers, but primarily fathers.
We had hospital ships that were stationed just off the coast of Japan.
The Japanese had suicide bombers, the kamikaze pilots that were targeting them.
They were going after every American that they could find.
They told their people to fight in the streets.
They said that the Americans, once they came into Japan, would do horrible things to them.
The Japanese people were pre were prepared to fight guerrilla warfare on the streets of not only the Japanese outer islands, but the mainland of Japan.
The war might have gone on for two or three more years.
Millions of Japanese would have been killed.
The American death toll would have exploded.
We were able to use nuclear weapons then because we were the only ones who had them.
Confronted with that decision, the President of the United States did what needed to be done to show the kind of nation we were.
We didn't then, after winning the war, go in as conquerors of Japan.
We helped rebuild Japan.
They became one of our most important trading partners.
The Japanese economy may have may stinked the last twenty years, but the affluence that occurred there was largely because of the United States and the influx of money that we put in.
We didn't go in there and rule Japan after winning.
We allowed Japan to continue to self-govern.
So what are we supposedly feeling badly about?
The dropping of those two bombs, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, was necessitated by the barbarianism of the leadership at the time of Japan.
Unfortunately, the take on this, the accurate take you're getting from me is not the narrative that's presented to Americans, which is why so many younger Americans think we somehow did something wrong.
And Obama plays to that.
The World War II generation is almost all gone now.
Those people who served are almost all dead.
There's a few of them hanging on.
What a terrible betrayal of them.
If we don't tell the accurate story about the war they fought in.
1-800-282-2882 is the phone number on the Rush program.
Let's go to Charleston, South Carolina.
Ken, it's your turn on EIB with Mark Belling.
Hey, thank you, Mark.
I appreciate you uh taking my phone call.
Um, yes, uh the dropping of those two bombs was absolutely a necessity, and it was more of a necessity to save Japanese civilian lives, and all anybody has to do is go back and look at the battle of Saipan, Iwo Jima, Okinawa.
The civilians were told, you were right, the civilians were told that the Americans are gonna come in and they're gonna rape you women, they're gonna kill you babies, and thousands, tens of thousands of Japanese civilians committed suicide.
It was horrible.
But what everybody doesn't still know is that why doesn't President Obama go to Dresden, Germany.
Yeah, I mean, there are a lot there are a lot more civilians, well, I shouldn't say a lot more.
They the the the carnage there was virtually all civilian.
Dresden, Germany was not even a military target.
General Curtis LeMay firebombed Dresden to the ground.
He completely razed town.
Yeah, what you don't want to do though, Ken is give Obama uh suggestions on more apologies.
He's still got seven months left.
I mean, he's gonna milk this for all it's worth, and I'm telling you, every month that goes by, he's going to take a bolder and bolder step to insult the integrity of America.
This is his what he perceives as his legacy, the bringing America down and making it clear that our country isn't any better than anybody else, that we're not a force for good in the world, that it wasn't until he, the noble great Obama came in, that America actually became an enlightened nation.
That's how he views things, and that's why this trip is occurring.
It's all part of his emergence as a contemporary and compassionate leader to lift us from the horrible, horrible past that we have.
He wants to liberate us from our legacy, whereas in fact our legacy is one of greatness for which we should be proud.
Thank you for the call.
Madison, Wisconsin.
Wayne, it's your turn on the Rush Limbaugh program with Mark Belling.
Hey, Mark, thanks for taking my call.
I was stationed over there in Okinawa and um uh for four and a half years.
And here when uh we dropped the bombs on 'em.
Yeah.
But they never remember that they came over and uh bombed Hawaii.
You know.
So and they've never apologized for coming over and bombing Hawaii, or all the other places that we've been, you know, Iwo Jima, Quadline, Wake, all those islands out there in the Pacific.
Well, it's a historical fact.
It's a historical fact that Japan started the war with the United States.
You can go back and debate why the attack on Pearl Harbor occurred.
The Japanese believed that it was inevitable that the United States was going to enter the war and they wanted to cripple our air power by hitting Pearl Harbor first, but the fact is they did it.
They did attack us first, and the war that was fought in the Pacific was unbelievably brutal.
I mean, you watch you watch any of the thank you for the call, Wayne.
You watch any of these uh history channels and their coverage of World War II is almost entirely on the European war.
Part of that is there was just more footage.
Everybody knows about Hitler, everybody knows about Mussolini.
The story of the war in the Pacific isn't told as much.
And people don't know about it.
They don't know about the viciousness and brutality.
How many Americans under the age of thirty-five have ever even heard of the Bataan Death March?
They're not aware of these things.
The United States, after all we had Been through in this war, a war in which we initially went over, we went part of our war was going over and saving Europe.
The other portion of our war in the Pacific.
Something that we did that helped save the world.
We suffered a terrible toll in that war.
In the Pacific, where the war was largely fought by the Navy and the Marines, the death toll was massive.
We had great opportunities for vengeance.
Truman could have dropped five nukes.
He didn't.
We didn't even hold a grudge after the war was over.
The rebuilding of the nation.
So what's Obama trying to accomplish?
Josh Ernest, his spokesman.
If they interpret it that as an apology, they'll be interpreting it wrongly.
Well, then what is the interpretation?
That we need to have a post-nuclear age where these types of weapons will never be used.
Is that the message?
Well, then could you pick a more inappropriate place?
The one place in the world where their use was not only justified but was moral and was right.
Let's go to Houston and Lucas.
Lucas, it's your turn on the Rush program with Mark Belling.
Hey, Mark, how's it going?
I'm great.
Okay, so if Obama is wanting to apologize for everything America did, why the heck isn't he going to every Native American reservation and apologizing to the people that owned America before the people came across the ships and started killing and slaughtering and raping and destroying us?
I am Native American, but I'm also United States Marine.
You know what?
If Obama wanted to come and apologize to the Native Americans, we're gonna laugh at him just like the world laughed at Obama.
They don't give a crap about his stupid apologies, because what's an apology?
It's nothing.
Action speak more than words.
Do something about action, not oh, I'm so sorry we bombed you, I'm so sorry we killed you.
You know what?
We did as Americans, we did what we had to do to save the American people, the people that came over on the ships to kill the Native Americans.
I'm sorry, but I am Native American, but I understand that the people did what they had to do to get away from where they were coming from.
So there's a policy.
Well, what you've done, what you've done, Lucas, is you've managed to move beyond your past and you're choosing to live as a proud American rather than a victim, which is I think why you're a positive why you're a positive person.
What President Obama has tried to do is redefine America historically as the bad guy.
And I think our nation more than any other has acknowledged its sins.
You mentioned that you're a Native American.
There is certainly introspection over what happened when the settlers came here and fought with the Indians.
We've acknowledged that it was land that was taken.
We've acknowledged all of that.
Nobody's more honest with regard to its sins than the United States of America.
What this guy wants to do is take our great deeds and make them sins too because of his own agenda.
People suggest that Trump is a little bit too much in love with himself, and I'm certainly not going to argue with that.
But you want to find a narcissist, it's this guy.
He's the one leader we've had that rises above everything else and is willing to acknowledge that everybody who came before him, they had it all wrong.
That's his true message and his true agenda.
This is really more about Obama than anything else.
Thank you for the call, and I appreciate your service.
Mark Belling in for Rush Limbaugh.
Mark Bellingham for Rush.
It's a trivia question.
Don't call in and try to answer it, though.
I have no prizes.
I'm not authorized to give anything away.
Something happened on today's program that doesn't happen when Rush is here.
I suppose there's a lot of things you could say.
How about we had an interview?
Rush generally doesn't do interviews on the program.
Star Parker was with me in the first hour of the program.
But I didn't say Rush doesn't do interviews at all.
Limbaugh letter.
The May issue features Russia's conversation with, there's a guy who has a lot to say right now, Newt Gingrich, one of the, I don't know that you'd say that Newt is a member of the Republican establishment, but one of the first prominent Republicans to warm up to the notion of Donald Trump.
Anyway, Russia's interviewing him.
May edition of the Limbaugh letter.
In the previous segment I was talking about.
The need by President Obama and many liberals to almost really repudiate America and Americanism, thus explaining the uh decision to go to Hiroshima.
What there is on the left is an unwillingness to get your hands dirty with the problems of the world.
Life has a lot of choices in which none of them are that good.
An example of this is the handwriting going on in the administration right now about what to do with the so-called foot soldiers of Islamic State.
Story in the New York Times, they're called Ingamasi.
Zealous foot soldiers who intend to fight to their deaths, and they're fighting on behalf of ISIS in Iraq and Syria.
See a capture them.
What do you do with them?
What do you do with them?
The State Department, the United States government, they don't want us to hold them.
They don't want to once again have the United States sitting there with all sorts of detainees on our hands.
The president doesn't even like the fact that we're detaining people in Guantanamo.
Well, here's the thing about this.
We don't want to hold them because we think that we're denying civil liberties.
We believe that anything bad that happens while they're being detained is on us.
Well, as the story points out, it gets a little bit more problematic than that.
If not us, who does detain them?
Let's suppose they're released into Iraq.
We tell the Iraqis that they're in charge of these detainees.
What do you think is going to happen?
Or release them in Syria to the forces that are opposed to Islamic state.
Those detainees are going to have it a lot worse than than they're going to have it with the United States of America.
Guantanamo Bay is a resort in comparison to what would happen if any other nation that's fighting Islamic State got its hands on these detainees.
As the story points out, the great likelihood is the majority of them will be shot if we don't detain them.
I don't have a real problem with that eventuality.
The point that I make is once again, the good intentions of the left backfire on them.
All they care about is that it's not us that's doing it.
If they aren't our detainees out of sight, out of mind.
So Obama doesn't have to get his hands dirty by detaining them.
Because he believes that he's too much of a humanitarian to do that.
But he's humanitarian humanitarianism is probably just going to get those people killed.
Another story that deals with how good intentions often don't work.
Interesting report, National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.
Zero tolerance policies on bullying in the schools don't work.
When people of my generation were raised, there were bullies.
They were obnoxious, and they made life miserable for the kids that were bullied.
Somehow we coped.
We were able to deal with it.
Bullying today has been raised to another creation of a class of victims, those that are bullied.
I don't want to be misinterpreted here.
Bullies shouldn't be condoned.
And kids that are bullied have life miserable.
There's nothing worse than having to be afraid to go to school, to be beaten up, having your lunch money taken away, to be ostracized because a bunch of kids have just decided to make themselves the self-appointed goons.
Bullying is wrong and it needs to be confronted.
By simply kicking the bullies out of school, however, according to the study, all we've done is we make it less likely for kids to report having been bullied.
That they're intimidated because they know that the bully will really come after them if they do something like that.
And what else have we achieved?
We've not given the kids who have been bullied an opportunity to try to work it out.
You wonder why we have so many millennials who are poor at plot problem solving.
You wonder why we have this situation in which people under the age of 30 don't know how to do any conflict resolution because we're not giving them a chance to work things out on their own.
So we now find out that simply saying zero tolerance are going to kick all the bullies out doesn't really do anything to help those being bullied and doesn't stop the bullying.
In fact, it might make it worse.
Mark Belling in for Rush.
You want to know why this big split is going on among conservatives?
Why we're at war with one another over Trump?
Why Trump and Ryan and now Trump and the members of the US Republican members of the U.S. Senate are meeting today.
You know why?
It's because our side cares.
There are passionate beliefs here, and some of them are in conflict.
There's a deep concern, I think, from the Trump supporters and the conservative Trump critics about the direction of our nation.
And there are disagreements about the approach, and there's disagreements about Trump's style.
But it's not because we're apathetic.
It's not because we're not listening to the nation, it's not because we don't care.
Which leads to this segment.
I'm going to start with a story that the Daily News reported on.
And then I'm going to launch into a longer piece that bows nerdly suggested that I deal with here on today's program about something going on in our country that I think a lot of people aren't aware of.
But first this story.
Because I want to tie the two together.
You all know who Gwyneth Paltrow is.
The increasingly liberal and increasingly loony blonde actress.
On our website, where she recommends products.
One of her recommended products is a fifteen thousand dollar sex toy.
You can imagine what kind of a sex toy it is.
It's fifteen thousand dollars, and on her website she recommends it.
She says it's wonderful.
Now aside from the fact that that seems kind of loony.
Who does she think is on her website?
Who is she trying to connect with there?
Which brings me to this story.
It's gotten a lot of reaction in America among the people who've read it.
There's been a lot of internet talk about it.
It's in the current issue of The Atlantic magazine.
It's written by a guy named Neil Gabler.
He's a writer, he's written for television, movie critic, written some books.
He writes the story in The Atlantic under the headline The Secret Shame of Middle Class Americans.
He says he's broke, and he says a lot more Americans than we're aware of are broke.
And he doesn't mean low income Americans.
I want to quote from a few paragraphs in that story.
Because it's touched a nerve here.
And he's drawing attention to something that he contends most people on the right, on the left are not aware of.
The secret shame of middle class Americans.
He refers to a Federal Reserve Board survey.
And he writes the answer to one question was astonishing.
The Fed asked respondents how they would pay for a $400 emergency.
The answer, 47% of respondents said that either they would cover the expense by borrowing or selling something.
Or they would not be able to come up with the four hundred dollars at all.
Four hundred dollars.
Who knew?
Well, I knew.
I knew because I am in that forty seven percent.
And again, this is Neil Gabler writing.
I know what it is like to have to juggle creditors to make it through a week.
I know what it is like to have to swallow my pride and constantly dun people to pay me so that I can pay others.
I know what it is like to have lean slapped on me and to have my bank account levied by creditors.
I know what it is like to be down to my last five dollars, literally.
Well, I wait for a paycheck to arrive.
And I know what It is like to subsist for days on a diet of eggs.
I know what it is like to dread going to the mailbox because there will always be new bills to pay but seldom a check with which to pay them.
I know what it is like to have to tell my daughter that I didn't know if I would be able to pay for her wedding.
It all depended on whether something good happened.
And I know what it is like to have to borrow money from my adult daughters because my wife and I ran out of heating oil.
You wouldn't know it to look at my tax return.
I am nowhere near rich, but I have typically made a solid middle or even at times upper middle class income, which is about all a writer could expect can expect, even a writer who also teaches and lectures and writes television scripts, as I do.
He goes on to tell a story about how he got into financial trouble, in which spent more money than he could have afforded, borrowed money, put his daughters through college, and he's at this point where he says he has nothing,
and he draws attention to the fact that according to the survey from the Federal Reserve, there are a lot of other Americans in the exact same situation that find themselves broke and without money.
Do we know that's going on?
Is there a general awareness of it or not?
I don't know.
Gabler goes on to write, two reports published last year by the Pew Charitable Trusts found, respectively that 55% of households didn't have enough liquid savings to replace a month's worth of lost income, and that of the 56% of people who said they'd worried about their finances in the previous year, 71% were concerned about having enough money to cover every day expenses.
He then writes about what happened with the Great Recession, the housing collapse.
Both developments affected savings.
With the rise of credit in particular, many Americans didn't feel as much need to save, and put simply, when debt goes up, savings go down.
As Bruce McLary, the vice president of communications for the National Foundation for Credit Counseling says, during the initial phase of the Great Recession, there was a spike in credit use because people were using credit in place of emergency savings.
They were using credit as a life raft.
Not that Americans or at least those born after World War II had ever been, especially fifty.
When you combine high debt with low savings, what you get is a large swath of the population that can't afford a financial emergency.
So who is at fault?
Some economists say that although banks may have been pushing credit, people nonetheless chose to run up debt, to save too little, to leave no cushion for emergencies, much less retirement.
Choice often in the face of ignorance is certainly part of the story.
Take me, and again, this is Neil Gabler writing.
I plead guilty.
I am a financial illiterate or worse an ignoramus.
I don't offer that as an excuse just as a fact.
I made choices without thinking through the financial implications, in part because I didn't know about those implications and in part because I assumed I would always overcome any adversity should it arrive.
I chose to become a writer, which is a financially perilous profession rather than do something more lucrative.
I chose to live in New York rather than a place with a lower cost of living.
I chose to have two children, I chose to write long books that required years of work, even though my advances would be stretched at the breaking point and it turned out beyond.
We all make those sorts of choices, and they obviously affect even determine our bottom line.
But without getting too metaphysical about it, these are the choices that define who we are.
We don't make them with our financial well being in mind, though maybe we should.
We make them with our lives in mind.
The alternative is to be another person.
Now he goes on.
In reading this story, and it's long, some thoughts occur to me.
Many of the conservative critics of Trump, and I've been one of them, have been frustrated over his refusal to even talk about cutting the entitlement program, Social Security and Medicare.
People like myself believe that those programs are going to go bust if we don't address the fact that they're a demographic time bomb.
Trump's position is that that's the best way to lose an election to talk about cutting those programs.
I think when you read this article, you understand where Trump is coming from.
If we indeed have people in the middle part of the income bracket, people making forty, fifty, sixty, seventy, eighty thousand dollars a year, who not only haven't saved a penny, are scrimping.
These are people that look upon Social Security and Medicare as their lifelines.
They see them as necessary for survival.
Now, in Gabler's story, he writes, he uses the term financial impotence.
People that are literally unable to do anything right now to make ends meet.
And people that have a much higher income than you'd think, these aren't unemployed people, these aren't even underemployed people.
They're people who, for whatever reason, spent more than they had, and now they are really, really strapped.
He writes that people who are in this situation never talk about it.
And that's why people aren't aware that the situation is as bad as it is.
We can look at these economic numbers.
This is the amount of debt that individual Americans have.
This is the average amount of debt per citizen.
This is where people's income are, incomes are, what's the savings rate.
But his position is, his contention is that people are simply not aware of how many people are not only living paycheck to paycheck, but are scrounging to pay every bill that they have.
If indeed this is a big chunk of the middle class, you can see where the appeal of someone like Trump would come in.
If the financial, not anxiety, but angst is that profound, maybe you can start to understand some of the political reactions we have, not just Trump, but why some people are willing to buy into as toxic a philosophy as the socialism that Bernie Sanders is peddling.
For all of Obama's presiding over this attempt to bring us together, demean the rich.
The reality in America is that the wealthy have gotten wealthier under Obama.
His low interest rates resulted in a stock market boom and a housing boom that was very, very good for people who had assets in the first place, the affluent.
I think my side, the conservative side, needs to be aware that a lot of people in the middle have not gained at all the last five to ten to fifteen years, and those who have messed up by not saving or taking on too much debt, see no light at the end of the tunnel.
That shouldn't be a liberal issue.
It should be a conservative issue.
The fact that now, seven and a half years into the Obama presidency, we seem to, if anything, be headed toward a new recession, retail sales appear to be plummeting.
That ought to be on them.
It ought to be on the left.
Now, I don't know if Trump's the right vehicle to tap into it, and I don't know that Trump is offering any solutions to it.
He certainly doesn't seem to have an economic policy that you can follow.
But he's hit on something that's out there.
That there are a lot more people, I think, that are struggling than maybe most of us are aware of.
Anyway, I'm Mark Belling in for Rush Limbaugh.
Mark Bellingham for Rush Limbaugh.
For those of you who are just coming into the program, the great summit was held this morning.
Donald Trump met with Speaker of the House, Paul Ryan, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, Ryan Sprevus is in there.
A few others, they came out and everybody uh talk nice.
Trump has not yet spoken.
He's in meeting with Republicans in the United States Senate.
Ryan came out and uh said that a process is begun and we hope to unify the Republican Party, uh, etc.
A joint statement was issued by Ryan and Donald Trump saying they felt that they had a very good conversation and they were working toward unifying the party and so forth and so on.
There wasn't any endorsement by Ryan of Trump, but they talked about finding common ground, working together and moving forward.
I want to talk about the whole fact that we seem to need this in the third hour of today's program.
We've been covering a lot of topics, though, today that I think speak to some of the issues That result in Trump's message resonating.
That there are a lot of people who feel as though the country is simply leaving them behind.
That we aren't what we once were.
And that's why Trump's message, his slogan, Make America Great Again, I think has struck the nerve that it has.
This story now.
The director of the FBI, James Comey, is saying he believes this is Obama's FBI.
The director of the FBI, James Coming is saying that perhaps the reason for the national spike in the murder rate is that police officers aren't being as aggressive as they were before in encountering suspects, shady characters, individuals that they felt ought to be questioned.
Now, this concern's been raised by law enforcement officers.
It's been raised by people on the right.
This is now coming from the director of the FBI.
Let me quote from the New York Times.
James Comey, the director said that while he could offer no statistical proof, he believed after speaking with a number of police officers that a viral video effect, with officers wary of confronting suspects for fear of ending up on a video, could well be at the heart of a spike in violent crime in some cities.
Quote, there's a perception that police are less likely to do the marginal additional policing that suppresses crime, the getting out of your car at two in the morning and saying to a group of guys, hey, what are you doing here?
Now I'm guessing he's going to be smacked down by the White House for daring say this.
But Comey's suggesting that what we've done by constantly second guessing officers, what the Black Lives Matter movement has done, what the suggestions that every police officer's a bad guy out there abusing people is leading police officers to say, why take a chance?
Why do this?
Why do that?
I'm gonna do the minimum.
And maybe that's one of the things that's at the root of the spike in crime.
Once again, we've had the tail wagging the dog.
Law enforcement officers confront criminals.
Every now and again, a bad shooting takes place.
National furor erupts, a new movement is created, and police officers see themselves caught in the middle.
And who ends up being victimized?
The very people that the protesters say that they're looking out for.
We all know who the likeliest victims of murders in the African American community are.
African Americans.
If indeed the murder rate is increasing, because police officers now feel paralyzed for fear that if they confront a troublesome suspect and they have to be aggressive with him, that they're going to show up in a video and they're going to be the person that is ostracized.
What have we really accomplished?
Once again, the tactics of the left, when put in practice, make things worse rather than making them better.
I'm Mark Belling sitting in for Rush Limbaugh.
Mark Bellingham for Rush.
I've had this opinion all year that when all is said and done, San Antonio's going to beat Golden State and be the NBA champion.
That might turn out to be right.
They might get knocked out by Oklahoma City tonight.
Steph Curry named MVP unanimously first, unanimous most valuable player in NBA history.
Probably deservedly so.
Guy's a freak.
I want to tell you what I want to do in the final hour of the program, and this is Mark Belling sitting in for Rush Limbaugh.
A lot of us who are doing talk radio programs across the country have been in the crosshairs because of the civil war going on, not just among Republicans, but conservatives over Donald Trump.
There's very, very little gray area here.
People either love him or really dislike him.
Guess what?
He's won.
And people are being forced to reconcile themselves to this situation.
Are they going to back him or not?
Trump is in Washington today.
He met with Speaker Ryan.
They issued a statement that seemed to be were getting to kind of like each other or put up with one another type of statement.
I want to address this topic, address where people on the right go from here, whether or not Donald Trump is someone the conservatives in good conscience can accept, and why it's so difficult for so many of us.
That's coming up next.
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