All Episodes
Previous Next
Sept. 20, 2016 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:44
September 20, 2016, Tuesday, Hour #2
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
It may not be number eight.
I may have to go to number the Skittles.
I can't believe this.
The Skittles, the media.
You know, this is the most amazing thing.
So we have this New Jersey bomber blow people up and wants to blow even more people up.
When we have the slasher in Minnesota, and of course, the drive-bys are talking of maybe they're good people.
Maybe they just misunderstood.
Maybe they really were discriminated against because they're Muslims.
Because you know, America, America is so discriminating.
America is an imperfect nation, and America really discriminates against minorities.
And maybe they really were driven to this.
And then the news trickles in it.
No, they weren't driven to it.
They genuinely hate the country.
And there's nothing nice about them.
Their family, in the case of the New Jersey guy, the guy's father tried to alert the FBI for two years about the guy.
This is the second or third time, by the way, that I have heard the FBI was warned about somebody who a few months or years later then proceeded to blow something up.
I can't remember the one prior to this, but this guy's doctor, the New Jersey guy, is saying, is dancing.
I tried to warn the FBI about my son for two years.
So anyway, the drive-bys get all hopeful.
They really hopeful that these are good, good, decent Americans that were driven to this madness by American bigotry and racism.
And then they slowly learn it isn't the case.
And then Donald Trump Jr. comes out and makes some comment comparing him to Skittles, and they have a cow.
They literally go berserk over a Skittles comment, which then causes a former FBI director Jim Kalmstrom to say, when are we going to get serious about this?
And he's echoing the Trump campaign.
When are we going to get serious about this?
Was just yesterday we learned that 800 people scheduled to be deported were granted citizenship.
Did you hear about that, Rachel?
800 people who were supposed to be deported were granted citizenship because their fingerprints were not in an electronic file.
And as Trump said, that's just stupid.
If you don't want to assign any political purpose to it, if you don't want to sit there and say, oh, somebody did this on purpose, you don't want to go there.
You don't have to.
It's just plain stupid.
And it's stupidity in a never-ending line of stupidity.
And it seems like the tolerance for government stupidity knows no bounds.
The tolerance for government inefficiency, for government stupidity, for government ineffectiveness knows no bounds whatsoever.
Government can come in and make a mess of whatever, and the victims of the mess will then demand the government do something to fix it, which flies in the face of life.
You mean you want the people who broke it to fix it?
And who knows why?
Psychologically, a trace of faith and trust and hope in the government is something that you probably just can't talk people out of.
They just have to experience it.
Earlier today, Fox has this show that airs opposite my show.
It's on noon.
It's called Outnumbered.
And they have four of their female anchors and infobabes there, and there's one guy who's the guest.
And he is the outnumbered.
And the hashtag on Twitter for that guy is One Lucky Guy.
Because he's sitting there with four Fox babes.
Today it was John Bolton, who was the one lucky guy outnumbered by the four Fox females.
And they had a discussion about the interview that we did with Mike Pence yesterday right here on the EIB network.
During that interview with Pence, Pence referenced the fact that the White House press secretary, Josh Ernest, said that the United States is in a narrative fight with ISIS.
Now, folks, look, I don't want anybody to take this the wrong way.
This is one of the reasons why I you know there aren't very many guests in this program.
And I've over the course of the years, I've explained to you why it's primarily career and professional and business reasons.
There are others, but those are primarily One of the biggest reasons I have to ask people questions that I already know the answers to.
So, why am I having a guest here if I already know the answer to the question I'm asking?
Well, when the vice presidential nominee when the campaign says we've got 10 minutes, can you squeeze his answer?
Sure.
When the vice president or president cheney or Bush caulking is, yeah, obviously.
But this is why I don't do guests is because I, well, I don't want to offend anybody here, but I generally know the answer to every question I'm asking, which makes me sit here and say, why am I asking this question?
I already know the answer.
So why do I have to pretend I don't?
Well, that's what happened here.
Prince or Pence started talking about Ernest's comment about the fact that we're in a narrative fight with ISIS.
So I said to Pence, what is that?
What is that?
Even though I know what it is, but I had to ask the question because Pence was here to explain it.
They played that soundbite and they had Bolton respond to it.
So here's the first half, what happened to Soundbite 33.
I'm not sure that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama know that we're at war.
The White House spokesman today actually said that we were in a, quote, narrative fight, in a narrative battle.
What is that?
What is that?
I don't even know what that is.
I'll be honest with you, I was just mystified by it.
You know, I really don't understand what a narrative fight or a narrative battle is.
I mean, we need new leadership in this country that will name our enemy.
I know what a narrative fight is.
I know what Ernest meant.
These are a bunch of academic theoreticians in the White House.
You know, ISIS to them is they're playing chess or they're playing risk or monopoly, whatever.
And these are just pieces on the board.
And they assign, they construct these academic, very deep intellectual exercises to explain what these barbarians are doing.
And they discuss it in terms of buzz and PR.
Okay, so ISIS is out there doing what they're doing, but they've got a narrative associated with it, that they're good people, that they're helping out, that they're righting wrongs.
And so we have to have a counter-narrative that they're the bad guys, we're the good guys.
And so everything is looked at in a narrative battle.
Who can win the media coverage?
And of course, that's irrelevant.
We're not looking at winning media coverage.
We're looking at winning a very real war against these people.
But the Obama administration is not focused on that at all.
So when Ernest goes out there and I think drops the ball and admits they're in a narrative fight, he's admitting the way they look at this: that ISIS is just one of the many issues in the world that we have to deal with here.
And we're in a battle with them over who can win the hearts and minds of people.
In other words, they're legitimate.
We're going to legitimize them by acknowledging they have a narrative.
And we are trying to out-narrative their narrative.
We're trying to trump their narrative.
Well, they wouldn't say that, but so that's how I would have explained if somebody had asked me what is his narrative battle.
Now, here's Bolton.
Sandra Smith, one of the Fox Infobabes, starts the bite by talking to Bolton about what this all means.
You heard the voice of Rush Limbaugh challenging that notion of a war of narratives.
Is this a misguided White House ambassador?
It's a dream world.
Look, academics call this semiotics.
It's the science of signals and symbols.
And that's what they do at the White House.
They maneuver words around and talk in narratives.
You know what ISIS does for semiotic warfare?
They cut people's heads off.
And you know what they respect?
They respect force, which they're seeing in inadequate amounts from the United States at this point.
So we can either have a real war against terrorism and try and defeat these barbarians, or we can engage in more semiotics.
And again, semiotics is just a war of handlers and PR and buzz.
Who can create the winning narrative?
And for who?
Well, in terms of the regime, they would like to create a narrative that has everybody in the media agreeing that we're beating ISIS.
So what did Obama say to the UN today?
Essentially that.
The world's never been safer.
America's never been safer and better.
We're beating these people back in the midst of all these attacks.
That's what they do.
No, it's wag the dog.
Remember the movie Wag the Dog?
Did you see that, Rachel?
It's exactly what this is.
Wag the dog.
There was no war, and yet the news coverage was of a war every day that the people provided phony footage of.
It captivated, it was a movie, but it demonstrated what a war of narratives actually is.
But the takeaway from it, the bottom line is that Bolton is saying here is that the regime's not even taking this ISIS thing seriously for what it is.
The way they look at ISIS is a challenge to the legacy of Obama.
And so what can they do to limit the success of ISIS up and against Obama's legacy, his reputation?
And of course, taking them out and destroying them with real substantive military tactics.
No, no, no, no, no, no.
We've got to come up with a better narrative.
And this is, gee, folks, it's another way of expressing the total frustration of what we've had here.
We don't have people from the real world anywhere in the Obama cabinet.
We've got theoreticians, we have academicians, we've got people who hung around the faculty lounge their entire lives.
There's not a single Obama cabinet member that's ever run a business.
There's not a single Obama cabinet member who's ever had to meet a payroll or anything associated with us.
They have no way to really relate to it.
Their view of the economy is it's just a never-ending fat golden goose.
It's laying eggs all the time.
And all these people got to go pick them up, many of them as they can get, and bring it under government control.
So it's the narcissism and the quest for power and the way these people seek to create legacies and historical references about themselves without taking any real action on anything.
There isn't much in this country getting better.
When you get right down to it, it's like every economy, every economic period, there's always going to be somebody doing well.
The hope is that a lot of people are.
But we don't have an economy like that.
There are certain people doing well, and most of the people doing well are those who have crony relationships with the Obama administration, where it doesn't matter if they make or lose money in their businesses because they're propped up and protected.
It isn't real.
But there isn't a whole lot good happening in our economy.
There isn't economic growth.
There is not massive job creation.
We're nowhere near replacing the jobs were lost in the recession in 2008.
And yet, in the war of narratives, Obama, how do you think Obama's at 54% approval?
Despite failure after failure after failure, the American people don't know the failures.
They may be living the failures.
They may be having trouble getting a job.
They may be trouble retiring the student loan debt of their kids.
But they turn on the news and it's really good.
Everything's cool out there for Obama.
Obama's doing great.
Obama's doing fine.
Everybody likes Obama.
If there's any problem out there, it's the Republicans or people criticizing Obama who just don't want Obama to do well.
That's what your millennial population believes.
That's what this narrative business is all about.
Okay, look, because of that, I didn't get to the VDHP.
So let me take a break.
We'll come back and take a couple phone calls and then we'll move and get to the VDH piece starting at the bottom of the hour.
Don't go away here, folks.
Donald Trump is in High Point, North Carolina, and is apparently lighting it up with what was described to me as a stem winder.
We've lost our feed here because of cloud cover.
This time of year, it's horrible for thunderstorms and hurricanes and tornadoes and hailstorms and sandstorms and snowstorms.
September is the rainiest, cloudiest month here.
I happen to like it.
But we've lost our feed here about 10 minutes ago.
So I have to take it on source authority that Trump is really lighting it up in High Point, North Carolina.
So we'll go back to the funds first, as I promised, to Coronado, California.
Hey, Bob, great to have you here, sir.
Hello.
Hi, Rush.
I just wanted to expand on the point that you've been making that we need to be very skeptical in believing anything we hear.
I would just remind people that we are in a window six to eight weeks in front of an election.
And if we go back four years, On September 16th, Susan Rice went in front of the Sunday shows and told one of the biggest lies.
Obama then came out on the 25th of September 2012, again, five weeks before an election, instead, and said that there's no video that justifies an attack on an embassy.
Harry Reid was making up the story about Romney not paying his taxes.
And apparently, he's even speaking on the Senate floor today, saying Romney doesn't, or not Romney, that Trump doesn't really have all this money that he claims, and that's why he's not releasing his taxes.
I'd even add one more.
Hillary's team that released the birther issue in March of 2012, that was right in the thick of the Super Tuesday primaries, literally weeks before the end of the primaries.
So this is a very desperate time for them.
And I think you're very correct.
We should be very cognizant of everything that's said and probably be a skeptic.
And it may just be a blatant lie.
And then they'll deal with it later.
Harry Reid will apologize, or he won't apologize.
He'll laugh and say, well, we won, didn't we?
I think.
No, no, that's not what'll happen.
No, no, no.
What will happen is Harry Reid says what he said, the media will go to Trump.
Is Harry Reid right?
You really not have all this money?
That's what they did to Romney.
Harry Reid said, I got a friend who says Romney hadn't paid his taxes in 10 years.
Well, who's your friend?
And Reid said, screw my friend.
You need to go ask Romney if it's true.
No, you need to go ask Romney why he hasn't paid.
And that's what the media did.
They didn't demand any proof whatsoever from Dingy Harry.
So Dingy Harry's out there now saying Trump doesn't have all this money.
That's why he won't release his tax returns.
You need to follow that up.
They don't even need to be told on this.
They'll just go do it.
But you're right.
It was March 2008 when Sidney Blumenthal, the Hillary Camp, got the birther movement against Obama going.
He's responding to this idea that Kathleen Kennedy Townsend was told by George Bush 41 that he's voting for Hillary at a points of light gathering at the president's home in Maine last night.
Nobody heard Bush say this.
So nobody really knows.
And the Bush team, they're not going to deny it or confirm it because they've already stated that they're not going to announce how Bush is going to vote.
Now, people assume, well, if he's not going to announce it, that means he's not supporting the nominee.
Not necessarily.
But the larger point here is, and it always boils down to this, you realize what the media was able to do.
You had McCain.
We might disagree with McCain on a host of issues, but he's not a reprobate.
He's not a bad guy.
And they made him, they turned him into one that people believed.
Mitt Romney is as squeaky clean as one of the squeegees that Rudy Giuliani got off the streets in Manhattan back in the 1990s or early 2000s.
Squeaky clean.
And they turned Romney into a guy who didn't care about dogs because he put it on the roof of the station wagon, a family vacation, that he didn't care about the wives of employees, even when they died of cancer, and that he routinely participated in mean hazing stunts at prep school.
Now, it took them a long time, but they were able to convince a majority of Americans that these two men, who were so squeaky clean they were boring, turned them into the two of the biggest villains in American politics.
Now, they're having trouble doing this with Trump.
They have been trying for months.
They're not going to stop trying.
They're going to continue to ratchet it up.
But they don't know what they're dealing with in Trump because it isn't working.
It's not diminishing Trump.
The first time they've tried this, that it isn't working.
Hey, stick with me, folks.
This is really tough to excerpt.
I told you up front because it deserves to be read in its entirety.
And I simply don't have the time or the ability to do it.
It's tough, interpretive reading of others' words.
I mean, there's probably nobody better at it than me.
I could probably command your attention if I wanted to read the whole thing.
But that would not be the best way to approach this.
Excerpts and you following it yourself.
It's never, never Trump.
Victor Davis Hansen, the phenomenal VDH, writing at National Review online, which is interesting in and of itself because National Review has many of the never Trumpers who are trumpeting their never Trumpism every day, multi-times a day on the National Review site.
And Victor Davis Hansen, not naming any names, doesn't have to, but the people who would read his piece would know who he's talking about.
But let me do my best to excerpt this.
It begins thus.
Any Republican has a difficult pathway to the presidency.
On the electoral map, expanding blue blobs in coastal and big city America swamp the conservative geographical sea of red.
Have you ever seen that map?
Red and blue counties.
We dwarf them, but we don't dwarf them in the population centers.
But I mean, 98% of this country geographically is Republican.
You go to the coastal areas and some state capitals like Chicago and other big cities.
And it's all union Democrat.
California, for example.
Big electoral vote states, California, Illinois, New York, New Jersey, are utterly lost to the Republican presidential candidate before the campaign even starts.
The media have devolved into a weird ministry of truth.
News seems defined now as what information is necessary to arrive at correct views.
That's exactly right.
Ministry of truth, state-controlled media.
News isn't news anymore.
News is what they do in order to move you to arrive to agree with the correct opinion of things.
Story after story, person after person.
In recent elections, centrists like McCain and Romney were reinvented as caricatures of Potterville scoundrels right out of a Frank Capra movie, such as It's a Wonderful Night.
When the media got through with a good guy like McCain, he was left an adulterous, confused, Septuaginarian, unsure of how many mansions he owned and a likely closeted bigot.
Another gentleman like Romney was reduced to a comic book Richie Rich, who owned an elevator, never talked to his garbage man, hazed innocent guys in prep school, and tortured his dog on the roof of his station wagon.
If it were a choice between shouting down debate moderator Candy Crowley and shaming her unprofessionalism or allowing her to hijack the debate, Romney chose the decorous path of dignified abdication.
What this means is these mild-mannered, moderate centrist Republicans, when they are being systematically cut up and destroyed right in front of their faces, sit back and let it happen because it's the polite and establishment way to do it.
You simply do not fight back.
You simply do not.
Candy Crowley asserts herself in that debate and saves and rescues Obama on the whole subject of Benghazi and foreign policy, and Romney sits there and lets it happen.
And Mr. Hansen here is saying, these are the people we think we can beat these people.
These are the people we think we'd rather have than Donald Trump.
These are the people that we think are going to fight back against what's wrong.
We already know Romney didn't fight back.
We already know McCain didn't fight back.
And even if they had chosen to, they were destroyed before they would have started.
This is part of a slow buildup to his belief that Trump is the last hope that we have of stopping the path that we are on that Victor Davis Hansen concludes is national suicide.
And along the way, he excoriates these never Trumpers for their focus on the preservation of this movement or that movement or delaying the inevitable for four more years.
Maybe we can get it back in four years, but we can't ever do anything if this guy be, we will ruin our party.
We will ruin conservatism if Trump wins.
This is what they say.
And Mr. Hansen here says, if Trump loses, you aren't going to have anything.
There isn't going to be a conservative movement, and there isn't going to be a Republican Party.
Now, there will be a conservative movement, but it's not going to have any political oomph.
It's going to be made up of the same figures that make it up now that can't even win a Republican primary.
But he takes 10 pages to get there.
And it's the final two-thirds of his piece where he really, really lays in to what is going on.
Here's a section called Never in My Name question mark.
The only missing Tessera in Trump's mosaic is the Republican establishment, or rather, the 10% or so of them whose opposition might resonate enough to cost Trump 1-2% in one or two key states and spell his defeat.
Some Never Trump critics would prefer a Trump electoral disaster that still could redeem their warnings that he would destroy the Republican Party.
Barring that, increasingly many would at least settle to be disliked, but controversial spoilers, you know, 1-2% lost to Hillary rather than irrelevant in a Trump win.
Let me translate this and take some of this out of context.
He's really chastising these people.
He's saying these are the guys, the Never Trumpers, that long ago forecast Trump couldn't win diddley squat and predicted Trump wouldn't win the primary.
And if he did win the primary, he couldn't beat Hillary.
He could get Shelek by 70%, 30%, 40%.
It was going to be just a disaster.
And Mr. Hansen's saying now that their real concern is not being shown to be wrong.
For the sake of their reputations, they want Trump to lose big so that they can say they were right.
And a Trump landslide defeat is exactly what they want in that case.
But what happens if Trump loses by just a point or two?
Well, that's okay as well.
They would settle for being disliked because if he loses by a point or two, it could be said that it's their fault, the Never Trumpers.
But Victor Davis Hansen concludes that they would still rather Trump lose than have Trump win and themselves become irrelevant.
Meaning, if Trump wins after all this Never Trumper opposition, is Trump going to offer them anything in his regime?
Is Trump going to offer them anything?
They're going to be left out.
They don't want to be left out.
So Trump has to lose.
Mr. Hansen theorizes for the Never Trumpers to have a future.
And notice, it's not Trump has to lose so the country has a future.
The proper question.
Oh, let me read the preceding paragraph to this.
To be fair, Never Trump's logic is that Trump's past indiscretions and his lack of ethics, his opportunistic populism rather than his conservative message, and the Sarah Palin nature of some of his supporters,
i.e., Hillary calls them deplorables, and colin Powell huffed as the poor white folks, make him either too reckless to be commander-in-chief or too liberal to be endorsed by conservatives or too gauche to admit supporting him in reasoned circles.
So again, I will explain this.
He's acknowledging that the Never Trumpers have a logic.
And the logic is that Trump's past, his bombast, his indiscretions, his apparent lack of ethics, as populism.
Not conservative.
He's not a conservative, is populism and the deliverance characteristics of his supporters.
Mr. Hansen's saying it's not just Democrats that think Trump supporters a bunch of hayseed hillbillies.
It's the same Republicans who didn't like Sarah Palin.
It's the same that Colin Powell calls them poor white folks.
And because Trump has those kinds of people supporting him, It just can't be trusted.
It'd be too reckless to be commander-in-chief.
And this is so bad.
These kinds of people supporting Trump, we can't join them.
That's what he's saying here.
The Never Trumpers are looking at the people at Trump rallies and people to support Trump, and they see a bunch of deliverance hayseeds, and they're embarrassed.
They can't acknowledge being for Trump and being in the same group with that crowd.
You know what?
There's an analogy.
The establishment pro-choice Republicans who hate the Christian right, always have, are embarrassed to be at the Republican convention with them.
They always have.
You know, here comes Falwell's Moral Majority and these other family rights groups and the Republicanists.
The moderate Republicans have always, ew, ew, I just wish they weren't in my party.
And Mr. Hansen's saying there's a strain of that among today's Never Trumpers.
They just can't imagine being in the same group of people that they see at a Trump rally.
And then he says, perhaps, but the proper question is compared to what?
Never Trumpers assume that the latest, insincerely packaged Trump is less conservative than the latest incarnation of an insincere Clinton on matters of border enforcement, military spending, tax and regulation reform, abortion, school choice, and cabinet and Supreme Court nominations.
And Mr. Hansen says that is simply not a sustainable proposition.
You cannot say that Trump is less conservative than Hillary.
And he is aghast that there are never Trumpers on the right who are trying to claim Trump's disqualified because he's not conservative enough when compared to Hillary Clinton, he is, which is the point I tried to make last week and apparently got savaged for it.
Conservatism isn't, as we know it, on the ballot this time.
So what do we do?
Well, we have to start making comparisons.
And we know that Hillary isn't, and we know that Trump is much closer to it than Hillary will ever be because she will never be it.
And Trump, when it comes to his policy statements on border enforcement, military spending, tax and regulation reform, abortion, school choice, Supreme Court, compared to Hillary, there isn't any comparison.
So why are the Never Trumpers still insisting that Trump's not conservative enough for him?
When the question is, compared to what?
Yeah, maybe Trump versus Cruz.
Yeah, Trump's not.
Maybe Trump versus Rubio.
Trump versus, well, I don't know.
Huckabee, pick a name out of the group that lost in the prime, but Trump versus Hillary?
What are we talking about here?
Anyway, there's more in this.
I have to take a little profit right here, folks.
There's another very, very interesting paragraph.
Now, remember, the never-Trumpers, they can't stomach Trump because he's so odious.
He's so uncouth.
He's so unsophisticated.
He's so intemperate.
He's so ill-tempered.
He's so rude.
He's so, so he just speaks like an uneducated dimwatt.
So Mr. Hansen writes, is Trump all that much more odious than the present incumbent?
Barack Obama, who has insulted the Special Olympics, who has racially stereotyped at will, who has resorted to braggadocio laced with violent rhetoric, who has racially hyped ongoing criminal trials, Barack Obama, who has serially lied about Obamacare in Benghazi, Barack Obama, who ridiculed the grandmother who scrimped to send him to a private prep school.
The Barack Obama who oversaw government corruption from the IRS to the VA to the GSA.
The Barack Obama who has grown the national debt in a fashion never before envisioned.
You know, Trump on occasion didn't recognize the nuclear triad, but then Trump probably doesn't say corpsman either, or believe we added 57 states.
So this paragraph is sort of an ugly little stick of dynamite to the never Trumpers.
Okay, do you guys think Obama's Mr. sophisticated?
You think Obama's the gold standard?
Went to Harvard, Ivy League, properly spoken, very intelligent sounding, very lying, conniving, dividing, unproductive.
Let's just go through all the things that Obama said or done.
How in the world, the question is, can you never Trumpers look at Trump and see this big blob of unsophistication and boorishness and look at Obama and not be similarly appalled?
And that is the question, folks.
You know, in all of this, the acceptance of all of these negatives and problems of Barack Obama because he's one of us.
He's an establishment guy.
He's got his Ivy League pedigree.
He went to Harvard.
He represents himself well when he speaks.
He sounds intelligent.
But look at what he's done.
Does that not matter?
So Mr. Hansen is wondering, how in the world can a guy like Obama, who has really demonstrated that he knows how to destroy things and divide people and split this nation wide open and promote the division and promote the hatred, how does a guy like Obama get a pass?
And Donald Trump is held up to some standard that nobody could meet.
Now, he has his answers to his questions.
If you read the whole piece, you'll find out why he thinks the Never Trumpers are doing this.
Essentially, it's self-preservation and fundraising and a number of other things.
But in the process, he says, if this goes on, if there's four more years of this with Hillary and everything that she's going to bring along with it, we are committing national suicide.
We are killing that America that was founded and that we have all grown up expecting to exist in perpetuity.
The fastest three hours in media.
Proof of that.
Already two are gone, and I'm getting emails saying, your program goes by too fast.
You're not on long enough.
Oh, yes.
Oh, yes, I am.
Yes, I am.
▲
Export Selection