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Aug. 29, 2016 - Rush Limbaugh Program
34:04
August 29, 2016, Monday, Hour #2
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Time Text
I guess you're up to Soundbite Six here when I was interrupted by the phone call.
Anyway, greetings, greetings.
No, no, I'm gonna tackle it.
Greetings, my friends, and welcome.
It's great to have you, Rush Limbaugh, the EIB network, 800 282-2882, the email address, L Rushbow at EIBNet.com.
Look, I'm pretty sure you can double check me on this.
You go to the immigration plan for Trump on his website.
I think it always was and to this day is silent about mass deportation.
It was also silent about letting deported illegal aliens come back.
Now, I I don't want to nitpick this because what people have to understand about Trump.
Look, let me go back and review the primaries here for just a second.
Because I I'm I'm well aware that our first caller touched a nerve out there.
I know that there are many of you Republicans that really don't want to vote for Trump and you hate Hillary, and you're frosted.
You don't know what to do.
You just you don't want Hillary like you just don't want anybody, but man, oh man, you're having trouble stomaching Trump, and it's just you just you are resenting the entire primary process because you don't understand how in the hell it could have happened.
How could 15, most of whom imminently qualified Republicans get blown to smithereens by an orange-haired reality TV star.
Now I spent most of the primaries.
You people know I do not ever endorse during primaries.
I've had this policy since even before I began this program.
It is not a cop-out to say that.
I do not do it.
For a host of reasons.
I do folks, I'll tell you how far I take it.
I don't even have interviews on this program.
The candidates call here and they want to appear during primaries.
I say no because then I would have to have them all.
And I am not turning this program over to a political party or a campaign or what have you.
I've just, I'm not, I'm I do not want to be obligated in that way.
I don't I don't want to be bound by if I take one interview, I have to do a whole bunch of others, and that's lose control of the program.
And that has been professional policy of mine.
Professional broadcaster policy, not political policy.
Well, some political policy in there, but it's been a broadcast-related policy.
I am a radio guy.
I do a radio program, and my success here is defined by radio and broadcast business metrics, not political.
It never has been defined by political metrics, and I've never wanted it to be.
I have always said countless times, my success is not determined by who wins elections.
That doesn't mean I'm not interested, not doesn't mean I have vested interests.
But I'm a radio guy.
I have no question about who I am.
I have no question about what I do.
And I have made the effort from the get-go to never cross the line of demarcation.
And for a host of reasons.
At the top of that list of reasons is I don't control a single one of them.
And they're going to do things that are going to be tough to defend at some point, and I don't want to be in the position of having to defend it.
When I didn't say it.
When I didn't do it.
By the same token, they're going to come and go.
And I am not going to tie myself to the fortunes of a politician.
Never have, and I'm never going to.
I'm going to outlast them all.
But that's not the objective.
That's the result.
I'm a radio guy.
I am a broadcaster.
Everything I do is within the confines of broadcasting.
My business model is a broadcast business model.
The way I measure my own success is with broadcast metrics.
So we we come to the primaries, as we do every year, and I do not endorse.
I will express people that I have that I like and dislike things that I hear that I approve of and agree with.
I mean, I don't sit it out, but in terms of endorsing and telling you what you should do, no way.
And part of that is I have the utmost respect for all of you to make up your own minds about these things.
I never have believed, like the media has said that you are a bunch of people waiting for marching orders here.
You know what you think, you know who you trust, and you don't need me.
Now, uh, I'm not denying that if you're leaning to somebody and you think I'm leaning, it might make you feel more comfortable doing so, but I'm not under the illusion, like the media wants to believe that you all wake up every day thinking nothing, knowing nothing, and waiting to have your brains filled by whatever it is I say.
So what I was doing during the primaries, I went, I went to great lengths to even explain what I was doing during the primaries.
The big shock and the surprise in the primaries was Trump.
How can this guy be skunking everybody?
And I sought to explain it to you.
And I was dead on right about all of it.
And I did it multiple times.
And the reason I wanted people, if you're gonna beat Trump, let's say your crew is, let's say you're your Marco Rubio.
If you want to beat Trump, you have to understand how to separate Trump's supporters from Trump.
And the first thing you have to learn, and that is the media can't do it for you.
Because the media is not responsible for Trump's supporters being supporting of Trump.
I mean, you may be able to say that Trump is a media creation because he's hosted the apprentice and has been all over the media, but the media did not make Trump the candidate.
Trump made Trump the candidate.
So when this whole thing starts, and everybody thinks, well, that's it after his first announcement.
Oh my God, everybody doing nothing but laughing and thinking, what a buffoon.
This is an embarrassment, and everybody's waiting for him to implode, and we all know the story.
He does the opposite of implode, and nobody can understand why.
And I'm trying to make everybody understand why.
In the process of trying to make everybody understand why some people say you're for Trump and you don't have the goods to say it.
Nope, I was just telling you what was going on.
Intelligence guided by experience equals flawless commentary, in this sense.
And that's what I was doing.
And it's what I continue to do.
But now we're out of the primaries.
Now we're to the general election.
And I've I'm just going to tell you what I've been telling you from the get go anyway.
I don't care what the options are.
Anybody but Hillary Clinton.
Anybody but more of what we have had the last eight years.
Anybody.
It can't get more destructive than what we've had the last eight years, and we do not need somebody who is simply going to rubber stamp what has happened and try to build on it, and that's Hillary Clinton.
We're losing our country.
Our country is being torn apart, our country's being disassembled right before our very eyes by people who have that as their objective.
And it's working on people like Colin Capernick, by the way.
It's working on a whole lot of otherwise innocent people who are being radicalized each and every day by hatred for this country, which is absurd.
We are the luckiest people in the history of humanity.
To show you how out of whack this campaign is, I ran into a story over the weekend.
was a Actually, there were two of them.
People just shocked, surprised, could not explain it.
Why does the economy not matter anymore as an issue in a presidential campaign?
Because if it did, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama would not be getting more than 30% of the vote because they have destroyed the U.S. economy.
They have destroyed the U.S. healthcare system.
They have destroyed the job market.
It is it it is it is near criminal what this party, the Democrat Party and Barack Obama and Hillary wants to continue, what they have done to the United States economy.
So why doesn't it matter?
All these experts, these political scientists think that, I mean, how many of you have grown up thinking, well, the economy has that determines who wins?
I can tell you, not to be redundant, but I'm going to take you back to 2012, and I should have seen it sooner.
2012, Obama's been in office four years, the exit polls come in, the five o'clock wave, the first wave of exit polls, and I saw in those exits, 72% of people still blame George Bush for the economy.
Holy smokes.
After four years of Obama policy, including Obamacare, four years of stimulus, job losses out the wazoo, no recovery whatsoever.
Still blaming Bush, oh my God.
We're toast.
Now we've had eight years of Obama, and it doesn't matter.
And it really isn't.
You and I will both agree that the economy, Trump's not talking about it, Hillary isn't talking about it, nobody's talking about it.
Obama care.
It's about to fall apart.
Trump's not talking about it, Hillary's not talking about it.
The economy and health care, they are inextricably linked, and nobody's talking about them.
I don't know why Trump's not talking about it.
I mean, Trump says we're going to rip it up and start over, but where is the easily available evidence to tell people that they were sold a bill of goods and lied to?
It's out there, Obama on video tape.
You like your duck?
You can keep your duck.
You like your plan, you keep your plan.
Your premium is going to go down 25 million.
It's there, it's not being used.
We have 94 million Americans not working.
I'm going to tell you why the economy isn't an issue.
And it's another indictment of what the Democrat Party or Obama or whoever, the forces who want to transform America, however you want to think of them, what they have done.
The reason the economy is an issue is that a down economy doesn't matter that much to people anymore.
Isn't it patently obvious?
94 million Americans are not working.
They have telephones.
They're streaming video.
They're watching reality TV.
They are eating.
They have cars, they have air conditioning.
So you want to tell them there's something wrong with the economy, not in their point of view.
Now, not all 94 million, some of them want to work, I grant, don't misunderstand.
There are a lot of people that want to find work and can't.
There are a lot of millennials whose futures are over because they are saddled with so much student loan debt and worthless degrees.
And they somehow find a way to blame everybody but those responsible for it.
In many cases, they say, well, we've just happened to come of age when America's lost its mojo.
We've come of age when America's best days are behind her.
They have no idea that their student loan, which is an albatross around their neck, they have no idea that the fact that they cannot find career-oriented jobs, they have no idea that it's the result of Democrat Party policy.
They apparently just think it's evolutionary, or maybe you can even trace it back to George Bush and the financial disaster of 2008.
There is literally no effort made, and there hasn't been an effort made to hold the Democrat Party accountable for the destruction they are bringing about and have wrought.
So it's very easy to understand me why the economy's not an issue.
It doesn't matter.
If those 94 million Americans...
Well, let's just put it this way.
If when you were unemployed, say, 20 years ago, if circumstances then were the same today, then the economy would be an issue and the lack of jobs would be an issue.
Thank you.
And it would be front and center, and it would be the determining factor in this presidential campaign.
But it isn't.
I know if you look at polls, people will tell you, people say the economy, number one issue.
I understand all that.
But I don't believe it, because if it really is, if the economy is the number one issue to most people as expressed in the polls, then there's no way Hillary Clinton's winning this election, and there's no way Obama's approval numbers are high.
So if the economy is an issue to people, if it's the number one issue facing the country, I'm not going to deny that, but they have no idea why.
And then there's an accompanying story to this.
Germany.
Germany tells citizens to stockpile food and water in case of Islamist terror attacks.
Now, most people would see that headline and start quaking in their boots and would look at this.
Oh my God, the government's really worried.
Oh my God, the government's telling us this, oh my God, that's not how I see this.
This headline infuriates me.
The German government's like every other damn government in this world, every day telling every one of its citizens to depend on it.
To look to it.
Vote for us.
Say Germany's leaders.
Say the UK's leaders.
Say any country's leaders, including America, vote for us, we'll take care of you.
Vote for us, we're Santa Claus.
Vote for us, we'll protect you.
Vote for.
But when real challenges show up, guess what?
You're on your own.
They will make you think they'll protect you and take care of you, whatever they have to do to get your vote.
But when a real threat pops up, like ISIS or terrorism in Germany, what are they telling people?
You better stockpile food.
You better stockpile water in case a terrorist attack.
You are on your own.
Isn't that wonderful?
These compassionate leftist statist politicians, promising that government can take care of everything.
Government can fix everything, government's your salvation, government's where you should turn.
Except when a real crisis hits, they don't want any part of it.
You are on your own.
You better find your own food.
You better find your own water.
You better find your own electricity, you better find your own shelter.
We can't take care of you.
Thank you, Angela Merkel.
That's what Germany is telling its citizens.
When you destroy a society's, when you destroy the concept of self-reliance, when you stigmatize rugged individualism, which is what we have been doing in this country for 30 or 40 years, maybe longer, when you stigmatize people that are self-sufficient, able to take care of themselves and their families.
And when you turn the country over to the various stages of minorities who haven't accomplished anything, and make them the power simply because they're the minority and because it's unfair that we have a minority, you're in the process of destroying the foundation that any country needs.
And I'll tell you something else that's going on.
When you stop honoring heroes, and this is Colin Capernick, he can do whatever he wants, not you know, sit on his ass, the national anthem, be applauded for it by the proper liberal authorities in sports media.
And all the intellectuals, he's got the constitutional right, freedom of speech, don't you?
No, it's very courageous.
Yes, very courageous, to sit on your ass as a third-string quarterback likely to be cut.
Very, very courageous.
Sit on your butt in the country that made you the star and the wealthy millionaire that you are.
I'll be back in a sec.
So as I was saying, Colin Kaepernick can make the courageous decision to sit on the bench during the national anthem, and he can be applauded for courageous dissent and protest by all the usual suspects in the drive-by sports media.
And the St. Louis Rams players can run on the field waving their arms around as in hands up don't shoot, protesting something that never even happened.
The Dallas Cowboys asked to put a sticker on their helmets this season to honor cops, particularly the five officers killed in that mass assassination attempt in Dallas.
And the NFL said, no, no, we're not that courageous.
I guess it'd be unnecessarily provocative to honor the police.
Yeah.
Not in 2016, America.
No, no, no, no.
No, not cool.
Not cool.
Well, when you stop honoring heroes, and we are you will stop having heroes to honor.
The same can be said when you start mimicking heroes, mocking them.
When you start tearing them down, you're not going to have any heroes to mimic, to tear down, or to honor.
And that's where we're headed.
And I'm convinced the majority of America knows it and resents it.
But look what happens to anybody who pops up and points out the obvious.
Must take a break when we return.
I've still got the audio sound bites, the media using me all day yesterday, plus your phone calls are coming up.
Straight ahead.
And back to the phones.
We go, this is something's happened to the her name is grayed out.
I can't even read it.
Donna in New Milford, New Jersey.
Welcome.
I'm glad you called.
Ross.
First time, first time.
Thank you.
Great to have you here.
Thank you so much.
Listen, I'm listening.
I've been running the Republicans in New Milford for the past six, seven years, running the campaigns.
And I'm I'm listening for the last few hours today between Fox News and other uh media outlets about how Trump is uh doing a flip-flop on immigration, and I really, really uh find it really annoying to me because I haven't heard any word that state amnesty through his lips.
I haven't heard any flip-flop on my on my end.
I find myself uh supporting him and making sure people hear what I have to say.
I ask you a couple of quick questions.
Is he gonna deport 11 million people?
Have you believed that that's gonna happen since you first started supporting the Trumpster?
I I know that's impossible.
How could you even think that?
All right.
As a human being, there is no way on this planet that you can do that.
Okay, is he gonna grant them at this not point?
Is he going to grant them amnesty and citizenship?
There is nothing like that.
You have to prove yourself.
The people who are committing these kind of crimes could be thinking about immediately.
Donna, you have you you you've made my point.
We had the caller, we had a caller in the last hour, who uh thought that there could have been a greater effort on the part of Fox News to alert people to how Trump couldn't possibly do what he said he was going to do.
My contention about this, going back to the primaries, this is what look, I tried.
I tried to explain.
I went to great lengths, and I did it frequently.
I tried to explain to people why Trump's supporters supported him.
And let me just tell you again, it's about stopping what is happening.
It's about stopping a whole lot of things that are destroying the country, in a lot of people's view.
People believe Trump when he says he's going to fix this and fix that and make America greater.
I don't think vast majority of Trump supporters care about deporting eleven million people or one million people.
I think they care about stopping any further illegal immigration.
So they believe the wall, They think the wall and even if the wall is symbolic, they they believe that Trump is serious about bringing the status quo to a screeching halt.
I don't think it's ever been.
In fact, as I say, you can go to Trump's immigration section on his on his website, you won't find anything about mass deportation.
This whole notion of Trump flip-flopping, he's flip-flopping within the confines of standard ordinary, everyday political analysis.
Trump is outside that.
It's another point that I kept trying to emphasize with people that you cannot judge Trump as you would judge a professional politician.
He isn't one.
He's not focus grouped.
He's not focus group tested.
He doesn't poll or any of that.
You know what his debate prep is.
Where did I was uh something show prepper read this morning?
Trump's got his people helping him with debate, but he's resisting what they're telling him.
He doesn't want somebody to pretend to be Hillary and sit down and actually stand at podiums and rehearse.
He doesn't want to do that, he's resisting it.
They are the people advising him are coming up with zingers.
They're coming up with things to say to Hillary to bamboozle or they're coming up with things to respond to things.
In terms of actual debate prep, Trump doesn't want any part of it.
He doesn't want to be prepared.
He wants to wing it.
That's who he is.
He doesn't, he views rehearsal and preparation as a jail cell, as a giant set of constraints on who he is.
So he's got his advisors, some of them, I'm sure, are trying to arrange actual rehearsals where somebody would play Hillary and he would, of course, be himself, and then they would fake a debate, have a debate where somebody would actually say things that Hillary says, the ways Hillary says them, and Trump would make him familiar with with that setting surrounding the arena, the media.
And I'm told he doesn't want any part of that.
Oh, he's going to study up on things, but he doesn't want to prepare.
Now he he may be forced into doing a couple rehearsals.
I don't know.
But the the point here is is that while people over here think Trump is flip-flopping.
That's that's how you would that's how you would measure a traditional politician doing and saying what Trump is doing, but you can't in this case because the people supporting Trump are not supporting him as they support traditional politicians.
It's so many people are missing this.
And I guess it's hard.
I mean, you you're a you're an expert in politics.
You love politics, you love political commentary and analysis, and everybody's striving to come up with a unique take on what this means or that means.
But everybody is part of the playbook, and Trump isn't.
He's not in it, he doesn't use it.
So when they think he's flip-flopping, in his mind he's not flip-flopping, and he's not changing his mind on anything.
He may be changing the way he's talking about things.
Who knows?
But I all I'm gonna tell you is this.
His supporters do not think he's flip-flopped.
His supporters still think that no matter what analysts say, he's saying, they still believe that Trump is going to cancel all these bad trade deals.
They believe that Trump is going to end mass illegal immigration arriving in the United States.
That's what they believe.
They believe that Trump is going to put America first again.
They think that Trump is going to try to make America great again.
And they believe that as an overall umbrella under which everything else happens.
And the specifics.
They're not measuring him the way they would measure a traditional politician.
Say something, wait for the broken promise, because he's not one of them.
They they could be making a mistake.
Don't misunderstand now.
I I when I offer you my analysis on this, I'm not saying anybody's right or wrong.
I'm just telling you the way it is.
There are a lot of people, as I was saying in the last half hour, a lot of Republicans who just can't fathom voting for Hillary Clinton, who are just as adamant they can't vote for Trump.
They just they don't know what to do.
A vote for Trump to them constitutes one of the biggest boondoggle mistakes anybody can ever make.
But at the same time, they can't, they can't see voting for Hillary.
So they are still trying to figure out who is responsible for what they think is this debacle.
And they focus on people who didn't tell Trump supporters the truth about Trump.
And my point is hilarious ever is Hillary listening to this program and found a way to get in on it.
My point is that they are all of this is designed to separate Trump from his supporters.
When the drive-by's go on and on for days about Trump flip-flopping, they are trying to separate Trump supporters from him.
trying to demonstrate that they can't, one of the two, it's all meant to embarrass Trump supporters.
The objective is to embarrass them by making them think that they're supporting a guaranteed landslide loser, a phony, somebody lying to them, somebody playing them for suckers, somebody playing for fools.
That's their objective.
And I'm sorry to tell them the only guy who can do that is Trump.
Thank you.
It really does matter.
The media did not make Trump.
Trump's supporters are not there because the media told everybody what a great guy he is.
The media has made Hillary Clinton.
If the media went on a tear about Hillary, they could really, really damage her.
But of course they won't.
We'll get back to the phones in just a second, but first, broadcast metrics and obscene profit timeout.
Don't go away.
Let me give you another example.
You have heard, I'm sure by now, of Donald Trump's totally insensitive tweet.
After the cousin of Dwayne Wade, formerly of the Miami Heat was gunned down in Chicago.
It happened Saturday, and Trump tweeted the following.
Just what I have been saying.
African Americans will vote Trump.
You would have thought that the most outrageous example of heartlessness and cruelty had just happened.
Because, ladies and gentlemen, Republicans, conservatives, anybody who is not a Democrat is not allowed to go there.
When there is gun violence and when the Democrats can make hay out of it, they can say anything they want.
They can accuse anybody of being responsible for it.
They can demand investigations.
They can cause all manner of grief to descend on whoever they want.
They are permitted to politicize these things.
But a Republican ain't no how way.
They're not going to put up with it.
All Trump meant was he've been trying to tell everybody while you're out there focused on black lives matter, black lives matter is not focused on black lives killing.
Other blacks.
Black lives matter doesn't even care, doesn't even notice.
And he often uses Chicago, where black on black murder and black on black crime is near record highs.
Certainly the top of the heap in this country.
Just so happened that somebody with a measure of fame was killed on Saturday.
Trump points it out, and then tries to turn it into a political advantage, and you would have thought he was the biggest reprobate on earth for doing this.
Yet when it happens in the other way around, when the left thinks they can score points with gun violence, they're out there trying to blame talk radio, they're trying to blame the Tea Party, they're trying to blame Sarah Palin, you name it, and that's perfectly fine.
So we have this bifurcated circumstance or situation where something that is real is not allowable.
You can't talk about it.
Black on black crime in Chicago can't talk about it, can't bring it up, can't insert it into the presidential campaign.
Why?
Well, because it undercuts black lives matter.
Because it illustrates that black lives don't matter.
If they happen to be snuffed out by other blacks.
Because black lives matter doesn't seem to be concerned about that.
But Trump's supporters are not outraged.
They're outraged at the reaction.
Trump supporters don't think there's anything wrong with pointing out the obvious here.
And they don't think it's exploitation.
They think it's somebody saying the truth about something.
That generally isn't allowed, isn't permitted to be spoken or said.
And it just cements them to Trump even further.
What?
Insensitive?
Oh, I don't know.
Insensitive.
You mean somebody talking about what happened?
Is insensitive.
What about what actually happened?
What is that?
Is that something we're not supposed to mention or even notice because it might undercut some Democrat interest groups' political ambitions?
I mean, that's kind of insensitive, isn't it, to the victims.
And we've got some polling data here, folks.
The race is tightening up.
It's not supposed to be happening.
But it is, according to the latest polling data.
We'll have that for you coming up.
We'll get back to your phones, and we still have half of the sound bites of me used by the drive bys on the Sunday shows to come.
So don't go away.
We'll be back.
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