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July 21, 2016 - Rush Limbaugh Program
29:18
July 21, 2016, Thursday, Hour #3
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Back we are, executing aside host duties flawlessly, zero mistakes.
Your guiding light, Rush Limbaugh, behind the golden EIB microphone at 800-282-2882.
The email address, lrushbow at eibnet.com.
The campaign manager for Ted Cruz.
Get this now.
Cruz's campaign manager is a guy named Jeff Rowe.
And.
he really really went after Chris Christie today accusing him of having no political testicles in a radio interview.
BuzzFeed first reported on the comments made on a was the show's not mentioned a radio show after audio was played of comments that Christie made Wednesday talking about Cruz.
Christie said, I thought it was awful of Cruz's speech and I thought it was selfish.
He signed a pledge and it's his job to keep his word.
So Cruz's campaign manager Jeff Rowe said this guy turned over his political testicles long ago so I don't take what he has to say with any meeting.
You know, he embarrassed himself pretty quickly in this.
I mean, let's just go through history here in time.
He said he didn't sign a pledge to support a nominee by convention.
You know, this speech went further than Reagan went on Gerald Ford.
It went further than Kennedy did for Carter.
Now, that's interesting that Jeff Rowe, the campaign manager for Cruz, thinks that Cruz's speech, not endorsing, but unifying behind Trump went farther than Reagan's did.
Hmm.
This is interesting.
Now, for those of you who have forgotten, trying to figure out when did Christie lose his testicles, normally you associate that with Hillary Clinton's testicle lockbox, but Jeff Rowe, in this case, is saying that Christie has no political testicles because after he endorsed Trump,
then he was relegated to standing behind Trump and nodding like a bobblehead doll when Trump was making post-primary election media appearances after the fact, standing in the background.
And then get this.
Now, this is from media.
I'm just going to read what this says.
Some reports indicate that Christie has been relegated to fetching fast food for Trump.
Well, I'm just telling you what it says.
I know I find that very hard to believe.
But I mean, that's what this, it's mediaite.
Yeah, Christie wants the AG job.
What's that got to do with it?
Where'd that come from?
Are you kidding me?
If he wants the AG job and Trump says, I want a Whopper, you think Christie wouldn't go get one?
Can you just see it?
Chris Christie walking into Burger King, ordering a Whopper for Trump, and having to take it back to where Trump is.
When you see these assertions, these stories, you think, wow.
But then you visualize it, and it becomes really tough to believe.
So where are they?
Okay, let's say they're at Mir-a-Lago.
And Trump decides, despite the fact he's got 15 chefs running around and so forth, he wants a Whopper.
So it gets, you know, buzzes Christie.
Christie comes in.
I need a Whopper, Chris.
Okay.
So Christie leaves Mar-a-Lago, gets in a car somewhere, finds on a map where the nearest Burger King is, drives over there, goes to the drive-thru or walks and it's high.
I need a Whopper.
And it doesn't get reported.
You think Chris Christie walking into a Burger King, getting a Whopper would not be reported?
They assert it here.
Okay, Trump is getting a post.
Well, it's not post yet.
He's getting a convention bump in the national poll at Reuters.
Donald Trump enjoying a mid-convention bump in the polls, surging into within striking distance of Hillary Clinton in a national survey released just today.
This is the Reuters Ipsos rolling national poll.
It includes data collected from three out of the first four days of the convention.
It shows Clinton leading Trump by four, 40 to 36.
And that's closer than the same poll found just a week ago when Clinton led by 15.
Now, Clinton's not, she hasn't been ahead by 15, and I don't know how long, but you're always going to have outlier polls.
And the Reuters poll, if this is true, a week ago, she was up by 15, 46 to 31.
And now after three nights of the convention, her lead has dropped 11 points to now a four-point lead.
It's a survey of 1,522 Americans conducted between July 16th and July 20, a 3% margin of error.
When I first saw this next story, I said, you know, it's a joke.
This has to be originating from a parody site.
And then I stopped myself.
And I said, no, this is exactly who they have become.
MSNBC has warned its viewers before showing the latest crop of anti-Hillary Clinton campaign buttons.
You know, like our bumper sticker, Never Hillary.
Speaking of which, those things, those Never Hillary bumper stickers that we are offering to every new subscriber at my website, Rush24-7, and the newsletter, rushlimbaugh.com.
The website's rushlimbaugh.com, and the newsletter is the limbo letter.
We can't keep them in stock.
So what we did, we have now added Never Hillary t-shirts in the EIB store.
And I have one right off the press here.
I'm showing it here on the Ditto Cam.
That's what it looks like.
It's really cool royal blue.
And Never Hillary.
So if you go to the EIB store at rushlimbo.com, you'll see them.
And they're just for straight purchase.
You don't have to subscribe to anything to get these.
They are flying off the shelves.
What'd they send me?
What is this?
They send me a 2XL?
What the hell are they thinking up there?
I'm sure they're covering their bases.
Anyway, that's it.
If you have the Ditto Cam on at rushlimbaugh.com, that's what the t-shirt is.
It's a quality t-shirt.
It's not some cheap little rag, you know, we found off of some throwaway rack out in Oceanside, California.
This is quality stuff.
Heavy cotton.
So anyway, there are campaign buttons.
You know, they're routine.
Campaigns produce these little buttons that you pin on your shirt or whatever.
MSNBC, before they showed their audience these buttons, issued a warning.
MSNBC warned their viewers that the buttons could be highly offensive.
And viewer discretion was advised.
Warning sensitive MSNBC viewers may want to look away.
That's essentially what Rachel Maddow told liberal watchers last night before showing a picture of anti-Hillary Clinton campaign buttons that are on display at the Republican convention.
I'm reading this from media research, so this is newsbusters.
Considering the hateful rhetoric that's come out of MSNBC for years, perhaps the viewer warning should have appeared in the past.
The buttons, you know what the buttons say?
Hillary for prison.
Hillary for prison 2016.
Lock her up.
Vote no to Monica's ex-boyfriend's wife in 2016.
And so they actually, before showing the buttons, issued warnings to their viewers that they might be upset.
You know, like nudity, sex, viewer discretion advised.
Those kind of whispered warnings you get before television shows.
Viewer discretion advised.
So they're warning these pampered little softies that make up the Democrat voter base to maybe not look.
Don't look when we show you what evil, mean-spirited campaign buttons are being passed around at the Republican convention.
And they say Hillary for prison, vote no to Monica's ex-boyfriend's wife in 2016.
Rachel Maddow said, you may find it uncomfortable, and so you may not want to look at this stuff.
But these are some of the pins that are being sold at the venue.
But from calling Hillary Clinton a BI itched at a KFC special referring to her breasts and thighs and left wing and all those other things, that's part of the merchandise.
I didn't know that was going on.
I mean, they even have to shield them from that.
And then I remembered, wait a minute, this is the party of these gentle snowflakes on college campus who can't deal with or handle any opposition points of view.
I mean, this is the epitome, is it not?
Warnings.
Sensitivity warnings.
Viewer discretion advised before showing campaign buttons.
Hillary for prison, 2000.
That's so upsetting that your average Democrat voter may not be able to process it.
Just incredible what we're up against.
Back to the audio soundbites.
Where are we?
This is Newt.
You know, Newt was great last night.
Newt's speech.
You know who else did a good speech last night?
Laura Ingram.
Laura Ingram did a fabulous speech.
She was on for like 17 minutes right at 9 o'clock.
And I thought Fox, you know, she works at Fox.
I thought Fox will pull away and cover some of it, but they didn't.
The African-American, that minister, he was speaking twice.
Trump has that guy speaking twice at this convention.
But, you know, Laura told her family story, which I'm sure shocked a lot of people, that her mother made her clothes, that her mother was still waiting tables up to age 73, from New England and so forth.
But she was, I mean, she did just a fabulous endorsement of Trump, and she called out the media, which brought the house down.
She's pointing them at all the booths, the NBC, the CBS, the ABC booths, and she's letting them know that we all know that they're in the tank for Hillary.
And she's basically calling them out to be honest and so forth.
But you know what they've done to her?
This happened to me, by the way.
I knew it was going to happen when I watched this last night.
I knew it was going to happen because it happened to me.
When I was on the Phil Gonah show the first time, which was circa 1990, I walked out, they introduced me, I walked out, and I started waving.
I wave to the crowd.
The next day, there is a still shot, a still shot of my wave looking like a Nazi salute.
And ever since that happened, whenever I'm in public, I make sure to bend the elbow to this day because I know what these clowns in the media will do with this.
And they did it to her in the New York Post.
They have this giant picture.
And the speech that she gave was tremendous, and it's been reduced to a picture with a headline that says something like, she certainly didn't want this to happen.
And every tweet that they report, and the New York Post is about reaction to that still shot.
Nothing to do with the content of her speech.
I don't have it in front of me.
I wish I had the actual headline they used to go along with the picture.
But when I saw her last night waving, I said, I wonder, because I've become, once something happens to you one time, it's all it takes.
You're intelligence guided by experience dealing with these clowns in the media.
And this is a photo editor doing this.
So they take a still shot of video.
And maybe there was a camera that was grabbing.
No, no, it was a still shot because the bug was on the RNC TV bug was in the lower right-hand corner.
So it was TV.
They just took a still shot from the side that made her look like she was doing Heil Hitler.
And they do this every chance they can get with a Republican or a conservative.
But she hit a home run.
It was a perfect endorsement of Trump.
I just read that she offered her speaking slot to Kasich and that he turned that down because everybody thinks that he ought to be there.
You know, Ohio is an important state.
Why would Kasich have a bug up his nose?
Kasich was never going to win this.
Kasich was never going to win the primaries.
He was, you know, loads the confetti gun when he wins Ohio, his home state, makes it look like he's just won the Super Bowl.
He won one state.
He had, what, how many delegates?
100 delegates?
Minuscule.
Why in the world is he not showing up?
Has he said?
So everybody is left to assume that he's got some big problem with Trump.
Well, you talk about childish sour grapes.
It's his state.
The Republican National Committee goes to his state, brings whatever economic influx there is to the city of Cleveland, and he doesn't show up because he's got his nose out of joint overstep.
Okay, big whoop.
So he went to an event one mile away.
Okay, even better.
So he goes to an outside event one mile away, but he can't go to the convention as though, what, he got cheated?
I mean, how did he get cheated?
He was never going to get the nomination.
The guy shouldn't have been in half the debates that he was in.
He shouldn't have qualified for half the debates they let him in.
Well, anyway, she offered him her speaking slot, and he turned that down.
Let me take a brief time out, my friends, as we continue here.
By the way, I will never ask you to turn away for any T-shirt, bumper stick, or sign that we make here about Hillary Clinton.
I am confident you can take, that you can handle whatever we create here.
Businesses that add up everything that's valuable used to take inventory off all the items.
don't know what that means.
Anyway, Joseph in Cleveland, welcome to the EIB Network.
How are you doing, sir?
Real good, Rush.
How are you hearing me today?
I hear you well, actually.
Thank you for asking.
Very good, very good.
I wanted to comment on the Ted Cruz speech, but a quick statement about Donald Trump.
And you thought Slick Willie was slick?
This guy is unbelievable.
Now, regarding the situation.
No, wait, wait, wait.
What are you referring to there?
What did Trump do that slick?
You pointed it out earlier, allowing Ted Cruz to do what he did and then at that moment.
And everything else that he's been pulling is amazing.
If he did that, that's pretty sharp.
That's pretty Machiavellian political.
That's not rank amateur-ish if he did it, if that actually happened that way.
Okay, I wanted to talk about the Machiavellian.
I've always heard that phrase, who is he and what does it mean to be Machiavellian?
Deceptive.
It is manipulative.
It is manipulating people into embarrassing, unfortunate circumstances that they think are going to be triumphant and good.
Okay, wonderful.
There are many different definitions for it, but sell your soul to win any number of things.
Read The Prince by Machiavelli.
If you have some spare time, and that will explain it all.
Okay, regarding the personal attacks against him and his family, I'd really like to ask Ted Cruz, is it all about you and not the people he represents?
And is there not a single issue that he could back Trump on, not even the border?
And who are you to take such a personal stand in your job as a public servant?
Okay, so you're basically wanting to know from Cruz, how come you make it all about you?
Why can't you put aside these things and look at the bigger picture?
Is that your point?
Yeah, that's the first question.
And, you know, he's a public servant, and, you know, he should be representing his people and not holding a personal grudge.
Well, I think in his view, that's what he's doing by maintaining fealty to his principles.
He's not capitulating.
He's not compromising at all.
And he's standing up for what he believes, which is what he's told his supporters that he's always going to do.
And by I think, I think what you're personal, the way he's looking at this is, I'm not going to sell my wife out for convenience.
My wife was at my, my dad was linked to the JFK assassination.
I'm not just going to sit here and say, you know what?
No big deal.
I'm not going to sell my data.
I'm not going to act like I don't care what they say about my dad.
I believe that's fine in your personal life, but you're a public official and a public representative.
If I can make a quick comment on the John Kasich issue, I think he at least should have opened the convention by welcoming the delegates to Cleveland and say tonight.
I know.
I agree 100%.
It's his state.
He's the governor.
They chose his state to hold the convention.
And it's not like he doesn't want to go to Cleveland because we know that he's been there before.
So something else up his nose.
I mentioned that Newt was great last night.
You know what struck me about the convention last night?
And that is how, and I don't mean this to be insulting, this is just an observation, how few genuinely good communicators are in politics anymore.
You look at Newt.
Newt is an expert communicator, and Newt is experienced enough to know how to use a teleprompter to talk to a TV audience in a building where there are 10,000 people.
It's a massive challenge.
You have two audiences.
You have the TV camera and you have 10,000 people.
And everybody expects to get personal attention from you.
So you have to know how to combine looking at the camera and reading the prompter and looking people in the floor in the eye or appearing to.
Laura did a great job.
She's obviously a professional communicator.
But it's stunning how in politics it seems there aren't that many anymore who are good.
You know, Reagan was king of the hill at it.
And it matters.
Bill Clinton is superb at this.
And it really matters.
And Newt last night, I'm sure his speech was on prompter, but he was on such a roll, I don't know the prompter could keep up with him last night.
And there wasn't one stutter.
There wasn't one mistakenly uttered word.
It was a work of art, listening to him.
And it was quickly paced.
It was fast-paced.
It was just a grand slam home run on everything that he discussed.
But the first thing that he did, and this couldn't have been in the prompter because it had just happened.
The Ted Cruz meltdown had just happened.
And I don't mean the Cruz meltdown, but the convention meltdown where he's being booed off the stage for not endorsing Trump, where he had said, vote your conscience.
Newt went out there and he said, I got to clean this up.
I've got to put this back together.
I've got to somehow keep this from becoming an absolute debacle.
And this is how he did it.
Ted Cruz, who is a superb orator, said, and I just want to point it out to you.
Ted Cruz said, you can vote your conscience for anyone who will uphold the Constitution.
In this election, there is only one candidate who will uphold the Constitution.
So, to paraphrase Ted Cruz, if you want to protect the Constitution of the United States, the only possible candidate this fall is the Trump-Pence Republican ticket.
That's Ed Libbed.
It's Ed Hocketts right off the top of his speech.
And it could not have been written on the prompter.
It had to be quickly conceived.
This is why I said the other day, when talking about the responsibilities of vice president, first and foremost, you have got to defend the nominee.
When he says something way, way out there, you can't join the chorus of critics.
You've got to explain it.
You've got to promote it.
You've got to tell everybody why they misunderstood it.
And Newt can roll out of bed.
No matter what Trump or any other nominee would say, no matter how outrageous, Trump could roll.
Newt could roll out of bed not even thinking about it and do 15 minutes making you think you had just heard brilliance.
And that's what he tried to do there with that whole episode with Cruz and the meltdown that occurred after he said vote your conscience and didn't endorse.
It was really masterful.
It was well done.
And it illustrated how there just aren't a whole lot of other people who can do it.
Isn't that one of our biggest beefs?
Isn't it always been, where are the people that can just from their hearts articulate what we all believe?
Where are the people who don't need a teleprompter to do this?
Where are the people who can go out there and tell this country who we are, what we are, what we think, what we want, what we think of them.
I know most of them happen to be in the media now.
And it's a stark realization that hit me last night watching Newt.
Now, on CBS this morning, Bob Schieffer, who retired?
Bob Schieffer retired, but it's so exciting.
They went to the Jurassic Park graveyard and they found him.
And they brought him back here.
He was on this morning CBS with Gail King talking about Cruz's speech.
And the question she asked him was, did he step in it, Bob, or did he step on it?
What happened?
A big miscalculation.
What went on here, Bob?
The Trump people knew what Ted Cruz was going to say.
They knew he was not going to endorse.
They made a calculated decision to let it happen.
You might say, I'm not saying it, but one of a conspiratorial mind could say they let him walk into an ambush.
And this was the final getting even for what happened.
Now, again, the ambush would be the New York delegation, led by, we think, Peter King, shouting, endorse Trump, endorse Trump, endorse Trump, and booing Cruz off the state.
Look at, they knew that Schieffer's right about this.
They saw the speech.
They vetted the speech.
The Trump people did.
They knew Cruz wasn't going to endorse.
And they let him go out there.
And I need to repeat this, as I did at the top of the program.
That's another way this convention is starkly different from others.
There is no way at 99.9% of these things, no way a second-place finisher is allowed to go out there and get a primetime speaking slot unless he's going to endorse the nominee.
It just doesn't happen.
It's too big a risk.
George H.W. Bush in 1992 let Pat Buchanan go out there.
Buchanan endorsed, but he also did that massive speech on a culture war.
But to let this happen without an endorsement, they knew every word Cruz was going to speak, and they let it happen.
And Trump just happens to enter the arena at the exact time the New York delegation is shouting, endorse Trump, endorse Trump, and the booing starts.
Trump just happens to enter the hall, finding his seat at the moment where it becomes obvious to everyone that Cruz is not going to endorse.
That would be Machiavellian.
To set that up and let it happen like that.
An ambush, what have you.
That's Bob Schieffer's theory, and he is sticking to it.
We'll be right back.
Here is Dick, Skeeter City, Utah.
Welcome to the EIB Network.
Hi.
Hello, Rush.
Thank you for taking my call.
You bet.
I have just a small statement.
During the primary, Donald called Ted Cruz a liar.
Well, last night, Ted proved that he was a liar by not endorsing Donald as he pledged to do so.
Two things happened last night.
One, Ted Cruz is a liar.
And two, Trump was right again.
Boy, it's brutal out there.
Man, you are granting no quarter here, Dick.
So you're the lion Ted lied.
That's right.
He lied.
By not uttering the pledge.
So nothing that Ted Cruz said in explaining this justifies it, even partially for you.
No, nothing.
He's a servant of the people.
He should be following the people.
You know, you were not a Cruz supporter to begin with?
No, I was not.
I am an independent that's voting for Trump.
Okay.
It's like the third or fourth caller today that has said he's a servant of the people.
That comes before everything.
Third or fourth caller.
So there must be a theme resonating out there in that regard.
I mean, a specific, somebody must be out there with this, like a hashtag or a theme.
Servants should put it all aside.
We matter first.
Appreciate the call, Dick, and we'll be back and wrap it up in Ula Momento.
I was wrong again, folks.
Newt Gingrich had seen Ted Cruz's speech earlier in the day, and so he did not ad-lib his explanation.
It was on the prompter.
He apparently said this on Fox last night about 11.30.
So I still maintain he could have done it if it had not been on the prompter.
Tomorrow, be here.
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