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July 20, 2016 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:50
July 20, 2016, Wednesday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
There's just something about it.
When you link these people, when you link these people with Satan, they go absolutely bonkers.
They go nuts.
I think Ben Carson last night, all he did was mention the dedication of Sololinsky's book to the devil.
And I've got five stories here from the drive-by media about how horrible that is.
Because Ben Carson was linking Hillary Clinton to the devil.
I remember one time we called Tom Dashell, a Senate majority leader back of the year.
We called him El Diablo here in a in a parody song.
They went nuts.
They went nuts almost as mad as when you revert God.
Anyway, greetings, my uh my friends.
Great to have you with us, Rush Limbaugh back here in action at the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.
The telephone numbers 800 282-2882 and the email address, Lrushbow at EIBNet.com.
You know what's fascinating to me about this convention?
And I'll tell you what I'm having to do here, folks.
I'm having to make a conscious effort to watch this convention with a different set of expectations and a different mindset from what I would normally use in judging and analyzing a convention.
Because this one's different.
And it's not readily apparent that it's different.
I mean, it looks the same.
There's a big convention center, there's a stage, there's delegates out there all over the floor, there's media running around pockmarking everything.
Uh there are speakers on stage.
So it has all the trappings, but it's not the same.
And the differences are subtle.
And if you don't know, I'll give you an example.
And Trump just sent a tweet out.
Well, I don't know if it was just sent out, but it was it's recent.
And it's right on the money.
He says the media is spending more time doing forensic analysis of Melania's speech than the FBI did with Hillary's emails.
That happens to be true.
And the reason they're doing it is because this is the standard operating procedure of the drive-by media, and that is to focus on anything that they think they can use to blow up the Republicans, the conservatives, their convention, or what have you.
And bring nothing but negative attention to it.
And the primary objective is to chop down anything that appears to have been a home run.
Anything appears to have been successful.
And so they are zeroing and they're still zeroing, they're still focusing here, in addition to things last night.
They're still focusing in on Melania's speech and the dire consequences that she should face.
And the party should face over her plagiarism of the lovely and gracious Much Hill, my but uh uh my Belle Obama.
And I don't think that the vast majority of people care.
I don't think they care.
I think the media thinks they should care.
I think the media thinks they may care.
The media knows they care, but in terms of I think it's a disconnect.
I don't think that's what people remember from Melania Trump speech, no matter how many times the media try to associate plagiarism with Melania Trump speech.
I don't think that's what most people watching the convention or even hearing about it after the fact are going to think about it, remember from it, or take away from it.
It's it's it's and that's just one example.
There are countless other, I think, disconnects here because the media doesn't know how to analyze this convention except one way, and that's through the standard political insider playbook method, which is to take anything that happens on this stage and assign it to the racist sexist big is bigotry and bo uh and and homophobia of the Republican Party, report it from that sphere, or through that prism.
And that's Not how the people who have ended up making Trump the nominee.
That's not how they look at all of this.
And I guess the simplest way to say this is that the drive-bys are practicing the time-honored art that they have perfected of destroying the connection that Republican supporters have for their candidates and their elected officeholders.
And in this case, they can't, no matter what they do, they are not going to be able to separate Trump supporters from Trump.
They just aren't going to be able to do it.
And they're going to continue to try, and the effort is going to amount to a giant flailing.
Now, I'm not saying that there are things here that could be done better, and that there are not things here that are maybe harmful.
My point is that the media analysts, they're doing their best to destroy this every day, every night, no matter how, no matter what.
For example, there are actual media discussions now that the Trumps are overdoing the family component.
Oh yeah.
Way, way, way too many family members up on that stage.
Way, way, way too many TV shots of all the family members, the children sitting out there in the seats at the convention.
When is the last time the drive-bys ever objected to say all the Kennedys?
The sober ones they could round up and show on television during every Democrat national.
When was the last time the media ever worried about too many Democrat family members?
It's absurd that they actually think they're going to score points with this while the Trump family is hitting home runs from the stage.
The media is out there, this is this is an over reliance.
This is just, it's despicable, this is unseemly.
There are now, in addition to that, there are fact check stories on Patricia Smith, the mother of one of the victims of the sad events that took place in Benghazi.
And there are stories about how Pat Smith exemplifies the sheer hatred of Hillary Clinton at this convention.
And it's god-awful to see.
Oh my gosh, this is the worst example of what our politics has become.
There is sheer hatred of Hillary Clinton.
It's just horrible to see.
And she got it started, and so they're fact-checking her.
And then there are the, and I addressed this yesterday.
I talked about the show.
There are all of these drive-by media laments that they are bringing too many mothers of victims to the Republican convention and parading them before the convention, making a spectacle of them.
The Democrat Party owns that.
The Republicans have brought one mother up in prime time.
Pat Smith, the Democrats are going to bring up, I can't tell you, I can't.
I can't begin to give you the number of mothers.
I bet you Trayvon Martin's mother is at their convention.
I'll bet you the mother of the gentle giants at their convention, and I'll bet you we will not hear a word from the media about how the Democrats are overdoing it.
They're exploiting these.
We won't hear that.
And we won't hear how there are too many Clinton family members being shown on TV every night.
No, no, no.
We won't hear any of that.
But the the question and the point is, is this stuff effective in in this circumstance against this Republican convention?
And only time will tell.
I think, and this is what it's going to boil down to.
Is there a movement out there that existed before Trump got into the race that he just happened to capitalize on because everything he happened to believe matched up with what these people in the movement were already feeling, or did Trump create the movement?
This is a key question.
The key question.
And the reason it's a key question Is because it has to do with the longevity, the survivability, and the strength of the movement.
Is it bigger than Trump, actually?
Will it be around if Trump isn't?
And I think it's the latter, and this is not to be critical of Trump by any means.
But just as when this radio program started in 1988, the drive-bys tried to say that I had created an army of mind-numbed robots who were waiting for me to tell them what to think every day when the truth of the matter was that there were gazillions of conservatives out there who didn't ever hear in the in the national media what they believed reflected.
Everything in the media made fun of them, laughed at them, mocked them, criticized them, promoted people and things they disagreed with.
But this show was the first national broadcast media conservative program, and people glommed onto it.
And it's not that I created it, it was already there.
I think the same thing has happened with Trump.
And that's another reason why they're not going to be able to successfully separate Trump from these supporters of his, because it's it's bigger than him.
And I don't, I don't mean that as a put down the question is how big is it?
And we're not going to know.
Now, the polling data as of now, the the there is continued panic in the Democrat Party because Hillary, in the real clear politics average of polls, is now up by 2.4, 2.7, I forget which.
Whatever it is, it's in the margin of uh of error.
That's right, Michael Brown's mother is going to the Democrat National Convention, the mothers of other police victims.
The mu uh you wait.
You you think Benghazi mothers are better.
Wait till you see what Hillary Clinton does.
They're going to bring out the mothers of as many people they can find have been murdered by the cops.
You know, and let them.
I I think they don't have the slightest idea where the majority of opinion is of this.
So let them, let them just throw all of that in our faces.
Let them have a convention where they rip into the U.S. military.
Let them have a convention where they rip into American law enforcement.
Let them have their convention where they rip into America's health care and the global warming.
Let them let them have a convention where they try to tear down every institution and tradition and let them do it in public.
And we'll just see.
Now I warn you again, there's a sizable number of Americans are going to agree with it.
You know it as uh as well as I do.
What is this?
Oh, it's already been Ben Ben our buddy Ben Shapiro at Daily Wire, six figures speaking at the DNC who will make you sick.
I knew it.
I knew it.
I knew that this was gonna, I knew that there were going to be Democrats come out, the media come out, they criticize Republicans for Pat Smith, whatever she's doing.
You know, this business.
The media is just shocked at how much anti-Hillary sentiment there is out there.
They don't remember, they really, folks, I know this is hard for you to believe.
But in that little cocoon, where all the drive-by media people live, they believe that all reasonable people love and adore Hillary Clinton.
In the little cocoon where they live, there isn't anything about Mrs. Clinton that's negative.
There's nothing to be suspicious of.
There's nothing.
So all of this criticism of her that they see at the Republican convention that they hear in the it to them it's unhinged dangerous extremism.
Yeah, Chris Christie last night did his prosecution of Hillary Clinton.
I thought that was a brilliant premise, by the way.
I thought that was one of the I mean, I actually sat up when Christie came out and announced what he was gonna do.
I said, holy cow, does this have the potential to be huge?
And he goes through all these indictments of Hillary Clinton and her foreign policy, and then asks the delegates as the jury to render the verdict.
And on everyone, of course, she was guilty, and halfway through this stuff they started lock her up, lock her up, drive bys are beside themselves.
Oh my God, they decide they can't what lock her up?
What What's the next thing?
Shoot her at dawn?
Oh my God, they can't, they can't understand it.
They really don't.
They live in this little cocoon.
They don't.
Under nobody that they know, nobody that they talk to thinks of Hillary as anything other than goddess.
As the future.
They think any other point of view about Hillary Clinton is rooted in unhinged insane, dangerous extremism.
The disconnect widens every day.
And I have, I'm going to take a break.
You know Norman Ornstein, Mr. Snerdley.
The name rings the bell, right?
He's a No, he's a think tanker.
It uh I don't know.
I don't remember which think tank.
And I don't even know if he's still at the think tank.
And Thomas Mann.
Remember Thomas Mann?
What is the think tanker too?
I know I remember these guys from 30 years ago.
I mean, that's how long they've been around.
They've been around as long as I have been doing this.
I want to say that that Ornstein is AEI, but that doesn't make sense.
American Enterprise Institute.
And Thomas Mann, Brookings.
Maybe they're both at Brookings, which is a far left.
Anyway, they have they wrote a book, and they've released a summary and premise of the book, and it's the most, it's the most.
Well, it's an alternate universe.
They think, they have written that the only reason to explain the state of the United States today is the descent into pure extremism of the Republican Party.
But wait till you hear the actual words that they use.
So we'll come back after the break.
I'll I'll treat that, treat you with that because that kind of sets everything up for the rest to come.
Audio sound bites, commentary, various things that happened at convention last night.
So sit tight, folks, just getting revved up here.
You know, I'm right even when I think I'm wrong.
I'm right even when I have doubts about what I think.
Norman Ornstein is at the American Enterprise Institute, Thomas Mann at the Brookings Institution, and they have an article in Vox, which, as you know, is a millennialslash leftist offshoot of writers, the Washington Post.
And it's a favored spot.
It's a favored publication of leftist millennial journalists.
Vox is where the cool nerds hang out.
just to tell you where this is.
And here's a brief excerpt from Ornstein and Thomas Mann, a political scientist.
Ornstein is a political scientist.
Mann is the E.W. Averill Harriman Chair and Senior Fellow in Governance Studies at Brookings.
In April 2012, we earned, or we created a major stir in the political world with a long piece in the Washington Post Sunday Outlook section titled Let's Just Say It, The Republicans Are the Problem.
That piece was adapted from our book, published days later, it's even worse than it looks.
How the American constitutional system collided with the new politics of extremism.
And this was our money quote.
The Republican Party has become an insurgent outlier in American politics.
It's about four years old now, this all this stuff.
The Republican Party's become an insurgent outlier in American politics.
Ideologically extreme, contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime, scornful of compromise, unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science, and dismissive of the legitimacy of its opposition.
As scholars who had worked for more than 40 years with lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, we faced a ton of scorn from sitting Republican lawmakers and outside observers for making this argument and denial for most of the mainstream media.
For reporters, professional norms and concerns about accusations of partisan bias dictated that the parties be treated equally.
And well, we didn't.
Whatever the underlying reality, you must treat both parties equally, which is a faux premise anyway.
It's never been the case.
The safe haven, here we go, the safe haven of false equivalents led the press to ignore one of the most consequential developments in contemporary American politics.
The radicalization of the Republican Party.
So these guys think that it is the Republican Party and its radicalization which has resulted in this America mired in melees.
Okay, let's take this money quote here that the umstein and Thomas Mann acknowledge as their money quote.
The uh and and keep it this to you and me, this is alternative universe.
These are educated learned people, yeah, they're leftists, but they're educated.
These are not crackpot commenters on Twitter or Facebook.
These are ostensible intellectuals.
The Republican Party's become an insurgent outlier in American politics, ideologically extreme.
Where is the Republican Party ideological?
Period.
Name for me an elected Republican who is ideological in terms of the way he or she leads.
They're not conservatives.
Is that not the primary problem that they face within their own party?
The Republican Party is not ideologically extreme.
They agree with the Democrats on amnesty.
They have not done serious things to roll back Obamacare.
They have given Obama every dime he has asked for, spending wise, even got rid of some of the sequester dollars, some of the real, albeit small budget cuts.
Those have been allowed to fitter away.
Where is this Republican ideology these guys write about?
Where is this extreme ideology in the Republican Party?
Republican and the Democrat Party?
In our view, you want to talk about ideologically extreme or just plain extreme.
The Democrat Party owns it.
Lock, stock and barrel.
For us, the most amazing thing as we look at the political spectrum is to see how radicalized the entire Democrat Party has become.
They are all left-wing extreme radicals.
There isn't a John F. Kennedy Democrat among them anymore.
Well, maybe Joe Manchin, but I mean you can count them on one hand.
The so-called moderate Democrats, they've all gone over.
They're all extreme leftists, not just ideologues, they are extreme radicals.
They are hell-bent on overturning as much of the foundational building blocks of this country as they can.
They're mainstream?
In these guys' views?
They're mainstream?
They are just the natural evolution of our culture.
These guys have taken everything that we hold dear to the gutter.
And yet, in their view, the Republican Party has become the insurgent outlier, ideologically extreme, contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime.
What is that?
I can only guess what they're but remember they write this in 2012.
2012, we created a major stir.
Now, this piece that actually ran in Vox was just this week recently, but contemptuous of the inherited Social and economic policy regime.
Scornful of compromise.
Scornful of compromise isn't the number one identifying factor of Republicans.
I'm the guy that can cross the aisle.
I'm the guy that can work with Democrats.
I'm the guy that can show we can get along.
I'm the guy that can show Washington can work.
I'm the guy that can show the parties can come together and govern.
Where is this?
Scornful of compromise.
I'm not saying conservatives are scorned, but the Republican Party.
Unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence in science.
That's clearly a reference to climate change.
There isn't any science in climate change.
This is this is as astounding to me.
I have to have to put this in perspective.
You know how the hands up, don't shoot meme coming out of Ferguson is an outright lie.
It did not happen.
There is literally no evidence anywhere that Michael Brown was murdered after being hunted down by a racist white cop, shot in the back with his hands up saying, don't shoot.
It didn't happen.
Quite the opposite.
He was being arrested, or he was stopped for walking in the street instead of the sidewalk, and he lunged into the cop car, tried to get the cop's gun.
Many people said that they would have fired sooner than the cop did.
The grand jury conducted investigation after investigation.
There were five witnesses, African American witnesses who said that Michael Brown attempted to be.
He was aggressive and tried to get the gun away from the cop.
And yet everybody on the left runs around thinking, and that's why Black Lives Matter is doing what they're doing, and all of this unrest and a lot of this cop killing is rooted in that lie that is still being told, still being promulgated, and it didn't happen.
And global warming is the exact same thing.
There is no science that establishes climate change.
The climate is always changing.
But they don't have any evidence.
All they've got is computer models.
I'm blue in the face trying to explain this to people.
There isn't any evidence.
In fact, what evidence there is is no cooling or no warming in the last 18 years.
That's why global warming became climate change.
There isn't any.
There hasn't been any warming.
There isn't any evidence.
All they've got is computer models which are predicting all these hurricanes that are not happening.
And they dare to tell us that we are contemptuous of science?
What we are contemptuous of is the politicizing of every damn thing on this planet to the point of it being corrupted.
Everything they touch ends up being corrupted.
Do you know the Journal of the American Medical Association?
That is a highly respected scientific magazine.
The Journal of the American Medical Association published an article that was rooted in the science of Obamacare and the way the satellite exchanges work and the website and all that.
And you know who wrote it?
Barack Obama, who is not a scientist.
He's a politician.
The Journal of the American Medical Association, a once respected publication of peer-reviewed science, has allowed itself to be corrupted by the Democrat Party's political agenda of the advancement of single-payer health care.
Look at the courts.
The courts have been corrupted.
I can't, you can't, you can't look around this country and find an institution.
The churches are becoming corrupt by leftists.
Marriage has been corrupted, bathrooms are being corrupted, everything in the world is being corrupted, everything they touch ends up being corrupted when they run it, they politicize it, and their politics is corruption.
There is no way that Barack Obama is a healthcare expert.
He's not a medical expert.
He is not a scientist.
They turned over their pages to him.
Just like the Nobel Committee gave him a peace press.
Can you imagine the Nobel Peace Prize was given to Obama on the come?
You think they'd like to take that back?
If they had any self-respect, they would have taken it back long ago.
There have been more wars involving this country under Obama's administration than Bush.
We've had multiple domestic terror attacks in this country and around the world.
All traceable to the foreign policy of the Obama administration with Hillary Clinton at the Department of State.
And give him the peace prize.
It's incredible.
Everything they've touched is corrupted, and yet we conservatives and Republicans are the outliers.
We are responsible for all of this because we are the new politics of extremism.
We are unmoved by conventional understanding of facts.
What's that facts are not determined by convention, facts are facts.
You don't get to make up your own facts.
It's just like consensus of scientists.
There can be no science if there's a consensus.
Science isn't up to a vote.
So what the hell conventional understanding of facts?
Why do facts need understanding?
Why does it need a convention?
I know what they mean by conventional here, but what they're trying to say here is that we on the left represent the majority of thinking, the majority opinion, and this is what we think of the facts.
And the Republicans come along and say, You guys are crazy.
That's not what those facts mean.
We are contemptuous.
Therefore, we are contemptuous of the conventional understanding, defined as we don't agree with liberals.
So when we don't agree with liberals, we are contemptuous of conventional because they are what is.
They are what is natural.
They are right all the time.
There is no such thing as them being wrong, and anybody disagrees with them as extremist loco.
Dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.
Dismissive of the legit everything these guys have written is actually more accurately said about the Democrat Party today.
This just illustrates the massively wide divide we have and it illustrates that there's only one way to deal with this.
We're never going to reach compromise with these people because there is no common understanding because there is no common sense on any of these positions that they hold because they've politicized everything.
So all that's left is to defeat them.
By the way, in order to write what these guys have written, you have to totally abandon the whole concept of moral authority and morality as it is.
So I I just I wanted to put this at the beginning of the program because the left this is news outside the convention, and this is big news on the left today.
They're all out there chortling over this.
They're celebrating it, yeah, yeah, you write.
You go ahead, Ornstein, you tell them Thomas Mann, they're all excited about this.
This is the kind of stuff that's informing news producers and directors and so forth at various newspapers, magazines, TV networks that you would never hear about unless I told you, unless you read Vox.
Take a break, back with more in a moment.
Oh, I want to grab this call on uh line two.
Welcome back, folks.
Great to have you, Rush Limbaugh serving humanity simply by showing up.
Let me ask you a question.
As I read conservative blogs last night and today, and as I watch the drive-by media, and as I read the conventional drive-by media in uh their websites or newspapers, whatever.
But I mean it's everywhere, the point.
To them, the really only thing that matters tonight.
Well, maybe that's overstating it a bit, but the big thing tonight, the big thing to look for tonight.
Will Ted Cruz endorse Donald Trump.
Or will Ted Cruz just do a speech that sets himself up for 2020?
And others are saying, like Reagan did in 1976.
Reagan, after losing to Ford in a narrow convention, went out and delivered a great speech that set himself up for 1980.
Except that Reagan did endorse Ford.
But I really wonder what you think.
Is it, and this is not, folks, this is not in any way a comment on Ted Cruz.
It's not a thumbs up or thumbs down.
It's nothing about this is nothing to do with my thoughts on Ted Cruz, which should be understood by now.
It's a political question.
Is that the most important thing tonight?
Whether Ted Cruz endorses Donald Trump or not?
Because to the drive-by media and many in the conservative media, that's all that matters tonight.
And if Cruz doesn't endorse, oh well, we got problems.
We got big problems.
And I just wonder what you think about this.
I think it's an example of something, but I'm not going to tell you yet, because when I say things, it's pretty much sums everything up.
There's nothing left to be said, so I'll hold off on this.
And instead go to Philip in uh in Northville, Michigan.
Welcome, sir.
Great to have you here.
How are you?
Well, thank you, Russia.
I'm well, and thanks for taking my call.
Very simply, what we witnessed last night is a true coronation.
We watched the coronation of an incoming new political dynasty led by not just Mr. Trump, but his family.
And it started Monday night with Melania's speech, and I get that.
But last night, we saw the byproduct of this family.
The two kids, the success principal message from two articulate uh uh uh children in his and his uh in his family.
And I find it very interesting, and for you never Trumpers that may be listening out there, all you need do is go back and watch those two speeches, Tiffany's and Donald Jr.'s, and you learn everything there is to know about Donald Trump himself.
How is it that we can't look at the success principles, the types of messages?
This is what our country needs to hear today.
You know, Rush, you I'm 55 years old.
You mentored me all these years, since 1988, as did Donald Trump, as has Ben Carson, the people who have real stakes in the game.
So you don't think you don't think Chris Christie overdid it here with his indictments of Hillary Clinton and the crowd going locker up, locker up?
You don't think there's anything wrong with that?
Hell no.
Right.
Absolutely not.
I think that that again, and you were you were saying in your opening monologue about has Donald Trump created his tattoo to it.
I had the pleasure of interviewing Donald Trump when I was doing some freelance work for Newsmax down in Boca Vatona.
And this is back in 2011.
So this man was up at a rally.
It was a Tea Party rally, and I asked him the question at that time.
I said, You're here at a patent of the Tea Party rally.
What are your thoughts?
Do they have what it takes to move in and really change the Republican Party?
And you know what he said to me?
He says, You know what?
I really like the Tea Party because they're smart.
They know, they understand, and they see what's going on.
That was Trump that said that you're talking about.
Yes, yes, Donald, yeah.
Okay, what about Ben Carson?
What about Ben Carson comparing Hillary Clinton to Satan?
What did you think about that?
Well, I it's it started when it's true and it's real.
And again, here we just saw Hillary Clinton two days ago try and tie in the membership to gains as being part of something, part of a family.
And we're either going to have positive or negative gains.
Um it's it's it's it's such a it's such a stark comparison.
Right.
And so for Philip, I appreciate I I I don't mean to be, I don't mean to interrupt you.
I have to because of time, and I want to get a comment out on your call before I have to wrap it up here.
See, this is exactly what I'm talking about.
This guy last night was a home run, those Trump kids.
It was in the media, too many Trump kids overdoing the family.
Gotta give them the hook.
This guy, this was a coronation.
This was the beginning of the salvation of the United States last night.
This was fabulous.
The drive-by's.
I think what happened last night was despicable.
It was beneath contempt.
It was barely mentionable.
It was so bad.
I'm telling you, folks, you can't look at this convention the way you've looked at all the others in your life.
You just can't.
No, I loved the Christie premise.
But I have to tell you, I thought so much more could have been done with it.
So well, where was all the stuff about the Clinton Crime Family Foundation and all the phony baloney speech income and all this, the domestic stuff?
But it is what it is.
What I gotta say.
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