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Oct. 17, 2016 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:52
October 17, 2016, Monday, Hour #2
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Okay, we got a new poll.
The Monmouth poll.
Monmouth College poll just came out.
Hillary is up twelve in this poll.
So here are the three polls that we have in the last couple of days.
ABC News, Washington Post, Hillary up four.
NBC Wall Street Journal, Hillary up 11.
These are all likely voter polls.
And the Monmouth Cali poll has Hillary up 12.
Readings, my friends, welcome back.
Great to have you.
L. Rushbow behind the golden EIB microphone.
The telephone numbers 800-282-288-2, and the email address L Rushbow at EIBNet.com.
Let me get into a little bit more detail about what I mean when I say this, what it looks like when an outsider attempts to wrest control of the establishment away from the genuinely powerful.
I mean, those who are really, really powerful in our country.
And it isn't, you know, the politicians like to slough blame, oh, Wall Street and these big corporations.
No, no, no, no.
It's the political class that has all the power.
It's a mutual admiration of society.
I mean, the the wealthy donate, keep them afloat, keep them in business, so it's a it's a shared thing, and they have their internacene fights, uh, even during the best of times, but they they unify when there is an assault against them.
And this is a serious assault.
And what I mean when I say that this is what it looks like when an outsider tries to win is this is what a genuine political fight looks like.
And to understand this, and to follow me here, you have to, and I you you and the in the base are not gonna have any trouble.
But I think we will all agree on our side that in the 2010, well, we you know let's start 2008.
The 2008 presidential election, followed by the 2010 midterms.
Well, before I get specific, let me give you the umbrella.
People in the Republican base have seen over the last eight years that people they elected, they thought were going to take the fight to Obama and the Democrats and stop it, or try to, didn't.
And the people of the Republican base who elected Republicans voted for them on this basis.
It finally wised up.
There isn't any fight.
There isn't any opposition to Obama and the Democrats.
Not on the stimulus, not on Obamacare, although they, to be fair, in Obamacare, they didn't even have the numbers.
They couldn't have stopped Obamacare legislatively.
But since Obamacare passed, they have promised over and over to repeal it, to try to repeal it, to do and haven't.
2010 midterms.
We were told, well, look, we can't do anything if if we don't have numbers.
You've got to give us the House.
That's the only way we're ever going to be able to stop Obama.
So people showed up in droves.
It was a landslide Republican victory in the 2010 midterms, featuring this new thing called the Tea Party.
And these people went to the polls in record numbers, and they fully expected that the Republicans were going to fight back or try to stop the advance of the Obama agenda.
It didn't happen.
2012 rolls around.
The Republicans nominate Milk Toast.
The establishment gets the nominee they want.
Not any pretense of fighting back, not a whole lot of enthusiasm, and a lot of Republican base stayed home and didn't even show up.
Anywhere between two and four million fewer voters in 2012 on the Republican side than in 2008.
In 2014, Republicans said, Look, Obama still has the White House.
Yeah, you gave us the House, but he still got the White House.
We can't stop him.
We need the Senate.
2014, landslide Republican turnout, landslide Republican win.
Between 2010 and 2014, the Democrats lost over 1,000 seats in the House, in the Senate, state legislatures, governorships.
It was massive.
Still the Republicans who were elected on the promise that they were going to fight, fight back, try to stop, didn't.
And that's all she wrote.
Republicans have done everything that had been asked of them.
Republican voters had been we need the House?
Fine.
We gave it to them.
We need the Senate.
Fine.
And even after they got the Senate, we didn't, well, you know, Obama's still in the White House.
There's really nothing we can do.
Because we don't have a veto proof majority.
So no matter what we did, no matter how many things they asked us to do, and we did, they fell back on the it's still not enough.
And there wasn't any serious opposition to the leftist Obama agenda.
And so here we are in 2016, and the Republicans had what they thought was the greatest field of potential candidates in a long time.
15 Republican candidates from across the spectrum, led by the popular favorite Jeb Bush, and this was going to be the day.
This was going to be the year.
This is going to be the moment in time where we're finally going to get it all.
We're going to have the House and the Senate and win the White House and get our committee chairmanships and hold on to it and what have you.
And the Republican base said, not this time.
And they did what?
They nominated somebody as far from the political scene as you could get.
They nominated somebody that the political class gave no chance.
They nominated somebody that had no ties whatsoever to anything that had happened previously.
No elective office held, no participation on any policy, no fingerprints, no nothing.
And more than that, they elected a brawler.
They didn't elect somebody who disagreed simply.
They elected a brawler.
They elected a fighter.
The Republican base changed its approach.
It's not just that they chose an outsider.
This is why I wanted to expand on my theory here.
The Republican base decided to send a brawler.
A knockdown drag out street fighter.
Something unseen in the modern era of politics.
And again, the reason the Republican base decided this was needed is because we, the Republican base, we know the left.
And we knew what our nominee would face.
We knew that this was the kind of campaign that whoever our nominee was going to face.
And as I said, anybody else would have folded by now.
And by fold, I don't mean quit, but would have moderated his tone, would have diminished and fallen back to the point that he would be indistinguishable from any other Republican.
And the and the establishment would be supporting him, and he'd lose in a landslide.
That's what I mean.
Any other Republican nominee under this barrage would have wilted long ago, probably during the primaries.
And the left is used to that.
They are used to neutering Republican opponents.
They are used to taking them out early.
They are used to being able to mock them and destroy them and render them impotent.
Months away from an election.
This has not happened because the Republican base said screw it.
After all of these campaigns with all of these assurances that they were going to fight back and stop, none of it happened.
It was time to send a brawler.
Now, I'm not describing an actual thought process that happened.
I'm talking about.
Trump gets in, is the person he is, campaigns the way he did, and the Republican base said, yeah, this is what we're talking about, and overwhelmingly got behind him.
And they got behind him not because of the usual reasons you get behind a candidate.
Character and political experience and a record that you can examine.
None of that mattered.
All that mattered was somebody was going to happily and cheerfully take the arrows and throw them right back.
Somebody was going to take all the shots and fire right back and not put up with any of it in defense of the voters.
This is the thing I think that the Republican base hasn't yet figured out is that all of these attacks on Republican politicians are also attacks on Republican voters, and they go undefended, they go unanswered, and people know that they are not these crazy things.
People they are not reprobates, they're not racist, sexist, bigot homophobes, and they're tired of not being represented as such.
Trump comes along, and it is happy days are here again.
The establishment of Republican candidates did not have a chance.
So this is it.
This is now what a political fight looks like.
The forces on the left have had to unify because they have never faced anything like this in recent years.
They are used to a docile and conforming and embarrassed Washington Generals type of opposition in the Republican Party.
But the Republican base knew what any Republican nominee was going to get.
If they could tarnish and destroy and demonize Mitt Romney, they can do it to anybody.
And so it didn't matter.
Whoever was nominated was going to get the treatment that Trump is getting now.
The Republican base wanted a fighter.
They wanted a fighter, a brawler.
And somebody was not going to give up and cave in and become like the Democrats in order to sue for peace.
And thus we have a genuine fight.
This is what it looks like.
It is in the sewer because that's where the left has taken it.
We are in the sewer and the gutter because that's where the Hillary campaign and the media have taken it and are taking it and leaving it there.
We are in the gutter, we are in the sewer, we are in the swamp, because that's where the Democrats have taken it.
It's not because of who Donald Trump is.
We are in the sewer, we are in the gutter because that's the only way the Democrats know how to win, and they have not faced this.
In your lifetime or mine.
Well, always have to exempt Reagan.
Reagan befuddled them.
And won two landslides.
But we have a nominee who, for once, has no problem counterpunching.
Wherever they hit him from, he hits back, whether it's in the sewer.
You know, so they're out there saying that Trump is this, and Natney is a horrible rotten guy, and they're saying, okay, you will you guys have got this election rig.
You guys are taking unfair advantage, you're rigging, and they think that Trump's the reprobate.
They're the ones that have taken us to the sewer.
The Democrats, the media, the establishment have taken this campaign right.
Maybe it's so low they look up and see the sewer.
But we're there, not because that's who's Trump is.
We are there because that's where the Democrats have taken the campaign.
Because the Democrats can never go high.
The Democrats can never elevate.
Here the Democrats have a chance because of what they've done.
They have a chance to become the party of optimism and good cheer, and they can't do it because it's not who they are.
So we're in the gutter, we're in the sewer, we are in the filth and the muck and the yuck because they have taken us there.
And we've got a guy who's punching back from the filth, from the muck, from the sewer, whatever, and the Democrat Party and the media have not had to put up with this.
They've not had to experience this.
They're used to people rolling over for them.
They're used to the opposition kowtowing, quitting, resigning, admitting whatever allegations are made.
As such, I don't think anybody can predict what's going to happen because there's not a blueprint for this.
And that's why I think the the way the left is behaving, the Democrats and all this outrage over Trump and the Republican headquarters gets blown up and it's Trump's fault.
Can you imagine if a Hillary campaign was blown up?
Do you think they'd be in the news every day and you think they'd be trying to find some Trump voter that didn't have any teeth to blame it on?
You know damn well they would.
It'd be the front page story since it happened.
But since it's a Trump headquarters, it blew up, ho hum, no care, no concern.
In fact, yeah, kind of makes sense with the stuff Trump's been saying, yeah, yeah, as little Brian Stelter at CNN said, Trump's rhetoric.
Trump's own words are responsible for his headquarters being firebond.
Sorry.
We know that's caca.
So they don't know what to do with a brawler like this.
They don't know how to factor it, they don't know how to pull it.
Hillary doesn't know how to deal with it.
She's in hibernation.
She chooses not to deal with it.
The evidence is abundant that Mrs. Clinton is among the most corrupt.
And if you want to talk about unfit and unqualified people ever seek the office, she is it.
And the fact that they cannot capitalize on what they claim Trump is, the fact that they can't get her positives up, they can't get her negatives down.
The reason that they are not acting like they are reporting.
They are reporting it's over.
It's a landslide.
Look at these polls.
Trump has just alienated everybody.
You can't turn on television without hearing that every woman in America hates Donald Trump.
But then you watch them on TV and you read what they write and you listen to them talk, and they don't reflect the good cheer, the happiness, the contentment that you would think real knowledge that it's over would bring you.
They are continuing to hammer and destroy because that's who they are.
Number one, and number two, they are not sure how this believe me, they can see these people at the Trump rallies, and they can sit there all day and say, well, that's just nothing scientific about that.
It's uh not anecdotal.
Of course, look at who these people are.
They're just mad cap extremists.
Of course they're gonna show up.
Meanwhile, Hillary and Tim Kane can't draw flies, and that's normal too, they tell us, but it isn't normal.
My long point here is is that this is exactly what this was going to be.
It was going to be a fight.
This is a fight.
The Democrats are not used to this kind of opposition and a fight, and the people that poll it don't know how to poll it, and they're not quite sure of what's going on in the country right now.
They don't know how many of these people that are eager beaver supporters of Trump they really are.
They really don't know.
And they're terrified that there's a whole slew of people that haven't voted in 20 years are going to vote for the first time and they can't find them to poll.
I have to take a break, folks.
Sit tight.
We'll be back after this.
Look, I want to add to and build on to that monologue, and I'm gonna do it here in a minute in uh uh bouncing off another soundbite coming, but I've got to get to the phones.
People have been waiting for the entire program.
Let's start here in uh in Las Vegas.
Janet, hello.
Hello, Rush.
It's such an honor and a privilege to speak with you.
Thank you very much.
Same here.
Every time I hear you, I think you get me.
You get me.
Um, Rush, I am a longtime listener.
I'm a long time of Adam.
My family has been here since 1895.
I'm a multi-generational Republican.
When my husband asked my father for my hand in marriage, my father's only question to him was, are you a Republican?
That's how important the Republican Party has been to our family.
My dad has an uncanny look to Ronald Reagan, and we always refer to him as Uncle Ronnie.
He was part of our family.
But I am fed up.
I am so disgusted with our party, and I'm often embarrassed to say I'm a Republican because of the way that the treatment they have had towards our nominee.
And I have made the determination that it's a litmus test.
I go and I find out if the man running is supporting our top man on the on the ticket.
If he is, I vote for him.
If he's not, he's not going to get my vote this year.
I've had enough.
I know you're not alone.
Um there's there's a whole lot of uh real frustration over this.
This is why Trump cannot talk himself out of being supported.
He just can't, because the people supporting him.
The days of judging candidates the old way we're supposed to is out the window here.
It's too dire.
For many people in this country, this is it, and it's got to be stopped.
This direction the country is headed, and the fact that somebody is standing up saying he plans to is enough for them.
Look, I have to take a break here, folks, but I'm gonna build on this when we get back here.
You'll you'll like it.
Don't go away.
Okay, let me uh grab a soundbite here and bounce off of this as I further expand on the whole notion of what people think is wrong and what the fight is about.
And believe me, folks, this fight is prote is is almost exclusively about that the Republican Party has let down its primary supporters.
By primary I mean base.
It is let them down.
It has promised and not delivered.
And the establishment, they're part of it, and they circle the wagons here, and they focus fire on Trump as uh degenerate as uh as a reprobate.
And they fire all of these usual political weapons.
They use every trick in their book, okay?
He's he hates women, war on women, he's a racist, he's a sexist, he's a bigot.
Republican base has heard this said about every nominee that we've nominated, and they know it is total BS every time it's thrown around.
Mitt Romney was not a sexist or racist, he didn't hate women, he didn't hate animals, he didn't kill women, didn't do anything of the sort.
Republicans didn't fight back, Republican base livid, ditto George Bush.
George Bush lied, people died, George Bush is Hitler, they could do books on assassinating George Bush.
Republican voters know it's not true.
George Bush, a fine man made have been wrong in immigration, but he was not the reprobate that the Democrats make him out to be, but there was no pushback, no fighting back Republican voters disappointed and let down again.
And so it goes.
And so everything they're throwing at Trump, every Republican voter has heard it said about every Republican nominee, they've been alive.
There's not one thing new.
They got rid of speakers of the House, they got rid of others by claiming women, and meanwhile, they on the Democrat side embrace and harbor their abusers and rapists.
They lie about others.
The female candidate for president on the Democrat side has attacked and bullied and threatened women who came forward, and the Republicans don't say so.
Donald Trump does.
The Republican base chooses Donald Trump.
The Republican base knows that everything the Democrat Party alleges about our nominee is actually true about Democrat nominees.
And they're fed up with having their candidate taken out of every race on bogus, malicious lies, with no pushback.
And that's why there's Donald Trump.
And that's why all of these so-called women coming forward with all of these so-called stories of abuse is like battleship being sunk with a BB.
You can't do it.
It isn't gonna happen.
Republican voters have heard it their entire lives about every Republican nominee.
And as far as they're concerned, it's about time this kind of crap stopped working.
And as long as there is a nominee who wants to fight back on all of it, wherever the Democrats take it, they are going to support him.
And that is what is happening.
We've got polling data out.
Hillary up 11, Hillary up 12, Hillary up four.
Take a look.
She's not at 50% in any of them.
But it's gonna jack the real clear politics average up for her, which is gonna be the big news tonight or tomorrow.
Republican voters are used to being depressed and dispirited.
Well, they're used to the Democrats and the media trying to make them feel that way, and they're fed up with it.
Every two years, every four years, it doesn't matter.
Whenever an effective republic, you know, it doesn't even have to be a candidates, any effective Republican anywhere, on television, on radio.
It's the same stuff.
The same way.
The Democrats use the same techniques to destroy anybody who is effective in opposing them.
Republican voters see it.
They're tired of it working.
And so they're not going to let it work.
Not this time.
Because there's somebody who's not resigning because of it.
He's fighting back.
Every allegation, he throws it right back in their face.
The experts say he's got to stick to the issues.
He's got to get back.
He can't keep answering these charges every charge.
It's just going to be distracting.
It's going to take him off focus.
And yet he continues to hit back on every freaking charge.
Every allegation.
He hits back, calls them a bunch of liars, tells everybody they're rigging the game.
They're not used to this kind of pushback.
They're used to being able to manipulate opposition candidates into doing what they tell them to do, like you guys better support Amnesty or you're never going to win the White House.
Right.
So the Republicans come out and support Amnesty, and that's why none of them got the nomination.
In 2016, one of the many reasons.
The Democrats come out and they say, you guys, if you ever want to win a White House again, like they care, you had better get right.
On abortion, you'd better get right on immigration, amnesty, you'd better get right, and the Republicans say we are in danger of losing the Hispanics.
So they do whatever the Democrats tell them to do and they lose.
And Republican voters are tired of seeing it.
They're tired of supporting it.
And given the first chance in a long time to not support it, they did.
And that's Donald Trump.
Here's the media's latest effort to poison the water, muddy the water, and keep us in the sewer and the gutter to which they have taken us.
We have a montage of drive-bys and Democrats reacting to the horrible, the just untenable, the unacceptable allegation that the election is rigged by Donald Trump.
I read 65% of his followers already believe it is a rigged election.
This is dangerous talk.
It's a destructive and dangerous thing to do with questioning important institutions, and it's very dangerous.
Is this wrong?
It is dangerous rhetoric.
Trump is stirring up some really dangerous ideas in the electorate.
Some people say the rigged talk is dangerous.
Dangerous energy that is out there when people feel like the system is rigged.
It's very dangerous and irresponsible rhetoric.
Incredibly dangerous.
Dangerous to democracy.
Trump has been ramping up the rhetoric about how the election is rigged.
How dangerous is this?
It's dangerous.
It's a dangerous strategy.
Isn't it amazing how every one of them has the same exact take?
Well, how about the danger posed to the Constitution by the Democrat Party?
How about the danger posed to the Constitution?
They want to take Trump's comment that the election is rigged, and he's talking about the media being unfair.
He's talking about 95% of the media being in the tank for the Democrats.
He's talking about the powerful rigging things so that they don't lose their power.
The powerful do this in every walk of life.
He's treating this with the reality he think exists.
They react in mock horror.
Oh my God, what's happening to our precious institution?
You people who are destroying institution after institution are worried what Donald Trump is doing when he hasn't done anything.
His fingerprints aren't on anything.
You've destroyed the healthcare system.
You've got open borders and destroy the very makeup of this country.
You want to attack the founding of this country and transform this country into things it was never intended to be.
And you say that Trump poses a danger?
Trump is the solution.
Somebody like Trump is the solution.
Somebody that's going to put the brakes on the real danger that we are already in.
This is incredible to me.
It's dangerous.
Why, this is very dangerous.
Why?
The shocking attack on our institution.
Shocking attack?
What are you people done to marriage for crying out loud?
What are you doing to religion for crying out loud?
You attack virtually everything that identified this country in its traditional founding way.
And Trump poses the danger.
This is the American Republican base isn't falling for this anymore.
And as long as Trump keeps punching back, as long as Trump keeps fighting for what they believe he's going to continue to get their support.
He's going to continue to get their support.
They're not going to abandon him.
And that's what all this is is an attempt to shame people into abandoning Trump.
Oh, look at the danger.
Why, he's actually suggesting the election.
The dead elected JFK for crying out loud in Chicago and West Virginia.
What do you mean elections aren't rigged?
Of course they are.
What do you think early voting is all about for crying out loud?
Mr. Limbaugh, you're totally wrong about early vote.
Early voting is for the disabled and disadvantaged in the people who can't vote on election day.
No, that's not what it is, and you people know it.
It is a re election day was defined as election day for one thing.
There is no early election day till you people come along because you don't trust the outcome of elections unless you have a little hand in them.
We all know what's going on here.
And we've known for a long time.
Look at the Florida recount in 2000.
Look at what happened after the Supreme Court finally said, look it, the recount's over.
You've gone way above and beyond.
They kept counting and counting and hanging Chads until they could find a way to get Gore the presidency, and it was over.
The Supreme Court shut it down, and they think the Supreme Court was rigged.
When it was them and the Democrat Party who couldn't accept the will of the voters and the outcome of the state of Florida.
Now Andy McCarthy had a piece today.
It has a piece of PJ Media.com.
And I think it's a good rejoinder to this panic and the drive by media over the danger posed to our traditions and institutions by Trump.
You notice how the words of somebody are what's destructive to the Democrats.
The actions they have taken in destroying or trying to destroy or alter or transform one institution after another.
Real action, real change, real reversals.
No, that's not dangerous.
No, that's progress.
Progress, Mr. Limbaugh.
Trump poses the danger.
Why?
They're just words.
He's threatening the integrity of the You people will not even allow photo IDs for elections because you know it would end your ability to fraud people.
How in the world is a photo ID racist?
But they tell us it is.
You need a photo ID to practically do anything except vote.
And when you require a photo ID to vote, they tell you you're engaging in racism or sexism or suppression of voting rights?
Suppression of voting rights.
How many Democrat dead people vote multiple times every election?
How many voter names have not been purged from the voter registration rolls over the years after they have passed away, still registered to vote?
The bus goes to the corner, people are picked up, they're told you're here, you're there, you're gonna go vote, go in, pull the lever here, they go do it, they're taken back home, usually to a slum, and the Democrats say see in four years, thank you.
They talk to us about Trump damaging the institution of elections by claiming it's rigged.
Reacting just a little bit, you know, seems to me to be laughing At this, if Trump is really a buffoon that he is, instead of mock outrage.
But these are the people who are not the protectors of tradition.
They're not the protectors of institutions as they have been founded and formed.
These are the people trying to transform them.
Because they don't like the way America was founded.
Look, I've talked myself through the.
I gotta take one more break, one more thing to say in all this closing it out, then back to the phones.
So don't go away.
I'm also in the next hour, I'm gonna give Chris Wallace the questions he should ask Hillary.
The questions that everybody wants answered, the questions everybody wants asked and that haven't been.
I'm gonna run through them in the monologue segment of the next hour.
Andy McCarthy has a piece today.
He's written a book called Faithless Execution about the whole notion of impeachment and how it's used, what it's for, what the requirements for it are, and laments the fact the Republicans have taken it off the table.
He writes, and this is my response to these people claiming that Trump is posing a grave, grave threat to our country by claiming elections are rigged.
Well, our system no longer is working.
And the reason our system isn't working is because the Congress is a wall.
An increasingly irrelevant institution, Congress that does not see itself as obliged to defend the Constitution, delegates its legislative tasks to the bureaucracy, over which the president has far more influence, punts tough calls to the judiciary, simultaneously refusing to exploit its constitutional authority over the court's jurisdiction in order to prevent a reverse judicial imperialism.
In other words, a bunch of damage to this country has been done, and it could have been stopped using impeachment.
They could have tried, but they take it off the table.
They've removed it as an option.
This is the Constitution's mechanism.
We have a constitution written by the founders that contains a mechanism to reign in a rogue or out of control president who is behaving extra-constitutionally as this one is.
So is the power of the purse, deny the president the money for whatever it is he wants to do.
And the Congress, Andy's point is they have abrogated their entire constitutional responsibility and the power they were granted under the separation of powers.
Power of the purse is now a toothless check.
In the last century, the federal government's most basic role has been transition from national security to social welfare, wealth redistribution, economic regulation.
Congress is paralyzed by fear that any cutting off of funds will be portrayed as a denial of someone's entitlement or some other transfer payment.
And then he goes on to describe how we don't even budget properly anymore.
Everything's an omnibus, everything's a continuing resolution.
We don't even do budget responsibly anymore.
The Congress's powers to thwart the abuse of presidential power are dispositive.
There are two of them.
If Congress refuses to use its authority to limit or cut off funding, the only remaining limitation is impeachment.
If, in addition, Congress takes impeachment off the table, there's nothing left but a rogue president's subjective sense of what he or she can get away with politically.
The same obviously is true of the president's subordinates.
If, despite their lawlessness or incompetence, Congress maintains or increases their budgets and shrinks from impeaching them, then they are limited only by the whims of the rogue president they serve.
His theory, the reason our system is not working, is because Congress has abrogated its constitutional authority and power to reign in a rogue president.
Well, we know why.
President's African American.
And as such, they would be called racist or bigots or what have you.
But the point is that there's nothing wrong with the system.
It's just not being used.
And Trump is not the problem.
Trump, by claiming an election is rigged or is going to be rigged, and everybody knows what he means, by the way, by that.
That doesn't constitute what threatens our country.
What threatens our country Is the Constitution is being ignored.
The Constitution is being superseded.
It's being ignored.
That's the real problem.
And the Republican base is fully aware of that too.
Be right back, my friends.
Don't go away.
By the way, folks, I seem to remember that in both the 2000 and 2004 elections, the Democrats accused the Republicans of election fraud in Ohio and Florida.
But uh remember 2004, John Kerry came and said, if it weren't for 50,000 votes, I'd have won Ohio.
They've accused Republicans of election fraud all the time, and they never have any wringing of their hands saying, oh my God, oh my God, we're attacking a precious institution and tradition.
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