All Episodes
Previous Next
Nov. 29, 2016 - Rush Limbaugh Program
35:06
November 29, 2016, Tuesday, Hour #3
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Never talking about things that don't matter, never bringing up the unimportant.
I am Rush Limbaugh, executing assigned host duties flawlessly, ensconced firmly in the distinguished Attila the Hun chair here at the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.
Our telephone number, if you want to be on the program's 800-282-2882, and if you want to send an email, and boy, has the email been something today.
I mean, it comes in here in droves.
I would be embarrassed to tell you how many emails.
I just hunt and peck.
I mean, I scan subject lines.
And that's how I, I mean, I can't possibly read it all.
And the stuff that I've found today is just over the top in depth.
The email address is lrushbow at EIBnet.us.
Listen to this one.
This is about a guy.
And I'm stunned by this.
I am stunned at this.
This email is in regard to the guy who called about a half hour ago, who told me that he's been a listener, solid listener for the last eight or nine years or five or six, whatever it was.
He thinks a lot of people listen, but not enough really here.
He was talking about the difference in listening and hearing and how people ought to make a greater effort to actually hear.
So I reacted to it, and I got an email from a guy who thinks I don't get it fully.
Listen to this.
I think that caller was more complimentary and profound than you might know, Mr. Limbaugh.
He gets you.
The only thing I wish you would clarify sometimes, to shut up these never-ending critics of yours.
Yes, your mission is to succeed within the confines of broadcasting, as you say.
But at the same time, you don't mislead the audience or say things you don't believe just to get ratings.
You do try to persuade people politically, but you also present that message in the most entertaining manner possible.
The two are not inconsistent.
That is, while your goal is broadcast success, you would never betray your principles or your audience to achieve it.
And you don't have to anyway.
But what I think this caller was saying is you might have an agenda both in broadcast ratings and in pushing the political ideas you believe in, but you can be trusted because you don't have a personal political agenda.
Yours is philosophical.
You care about the country, but your income doesn't depend on you tailoring your message to advocate a certain viewpoint.
You're not a political hack, in other words.
You are above that fray, and thus your audience trusts your sincerity.
But outside the box, commentary and analysis.
The outside the box observation is one of the most insightful things he said because he's saying that you are free because of your unique position and your character actually to think and comment freely.
Thus, you see things that others with conflicts of interest and agendas don't see.
And you benefit your audience uniquely by sharing them.
Hell, I understand what the guy was saying better than even he does.
Now, what am I?
That is deep.
And that's from a listener who he ends by saying, you say you know Trump.
Well, I know you.
That's how he ends up.
Look, I don't want to go through all that point by point, but there's a lot of truth in that.
The primary thing I think he's concerned about, he thinks that when I tell you that my interests in success here have to do within the broadcast community, he thinks that you might think that I will do whatever it takes to achieve broadcast success, even say things I don't believe.
And he doesn't want people to get that impression, which I have addressed countless, countless times here.
You know, I've often said that this program is a combination of two things that you don't see anywhere else.
One is the serious, honest, in-depth discussion of ideas combined with off-the-wall irreverent humor, satire, and parody, both sides with credibility.
And you don't find this.
For example, back in the old Nightwine days, if Ted Coppel opened a show with a joke monologue, you'd say, what is this?
That's not why I'm tuned in here.
And you'd be nervous.
Johnny Carson ever threw the monologue out and really did nothing but tell you what he thinks about things, and you'd think you're watching ESPN and you'd cancel your subscription.
ESPN's a good example.
They can't do both.
They're trying to combine sports with their ultra-left-wing radicalism, and it isn't working.
But anyway, that is that.
What next do I want to get into here?
Let's go audio soundbite route because I have teased a couple times that we've got Doris Kearns-Goodwin and others just continuing to pull their hair out trying to figure out how Hillary lost Trump.
They just, as the days go by, they just can't figure it out.
And they're not chalking it up things like fake news, bamboozling people.
One of the problems they're having is they cannot and are not honest with themselves about who they are.
That's their biggest problem.
The left's biggest problem is they lie even to themselves.
But let's listen.
It was last night on CNN.com's The Axe file.
This is David Axelrod's podcast.
I know what you're saying.
What are we doing wasting time listening to a podcast?
Well, our show prep knows no bounds, folks.
We go wherever the show prep is.
And Doris Kearns-Goodwin was on with Axelrod, and he asked her this.
He said, there was a bit of a deficit that Hillary Clinton had.
She's not a great storyteller.
Now, I know she's a good storyteller, but she's not a good public storyteller.
And she was tethered too often to her teleprompter rather than sharing some of the stories of people she'd met along the way.
Probably would have been a more effective way to go.
What do you think about that, Doris?
In a certain sense, because she was telling a more complicated story about America and all the various things she wanted us to do, it didn't have the simplicity of a story that Donald Trump's did.
Donald Trump told a story, whether true or not, that people felt was real, you know, that he was going to make America great again.
And that kind of story somehow reached out to a certain part of America.
And even if Hillary's plans and her programs might have touched those people more deeply, the connection emotionally between her and those people seemed to have been lost.
There wasn't a connection.
You mind if I translate this?
Thank you.
In the first place, the question is flawed.
He starts out telling the truth.
Hillary's not a good storyteller.
And then he contradicts himself.
Well, she's a good storyteller, but not in public.
You know, folks, share a little anecdote with you here.
I have, over the years, long ago, nothing recent, say early 90s, I was approached by people within the Clinton orb trying to not convert me, but trying to get me to see the Clintons in a different light.
And one of the things that I kept hearing, the things they told me over and over, is what a fun person Hillary is.
Like, they even told me she loves those drinks with umbrellas in them.
And when you get a couple of those in her, she's the funniest person you've ever been around.
It's so great.
And I get stories like this left and right about, not so much about Bill because he knew everything.
And I thought, this is strange because there's no way anybody's ever going to picture Hillary Clinton with umbrella drinks being the life of a party.
But that's what they were hell-bent on trying to get me to see and understand.
So all of these people that know Hillary testify to what a warm and wonderful and funny, oh my God, she's the life of the party girl.
But there's no evidence of it because when she gets in public, she's tethered to the prompter and gets all stiff and things.
She's got this great connection with people.
I don't know what Doris Kearns-Goodwin's talking about here.
I think this is gibberish.
Well, in a certain sense, because Hillary was telling a more complicated story about America and all the various things she wanted us to do, it didn't have the simplicity of a story that Trump's did.
Trump told a story that people felt was real, true or not, that he was going to make America great again.
That's all people needed because Hillary Clinton was not about making America great again.
Everybody knew that Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, you name it, they look at America and they see one grievance after another.
They look at America and they see everything about it they don't like.
They look at America and they hold America up to ridicule.
They look at America and they think Europe's better.
They look at America and they see all the deficiencies.
And all the deficiency and all the problems with America tend to be rooted in one group of people, Republicans.
White Christian Republicans.
That's who the Democrat Party looks at.
They see America and they see nothing but grievance after grievance, injustice after injustice, and people are tired of it.
People don't want to hear their country portrayed that way.
They don't think of their country that way.
They don't want their country to be that way.
They don't think their country needs to be corrected from things like that because the corrections that the Democrats implement just make a bigger mess of things.
Don't know who can use what bathroom.
We're going to redefine what marriage is.
We're going to make sure that, like, look at the Somali guy at Ohio State.
That's a classic example.
There's no way that shooter should have ever been admitted into this country, but Barack Obama made it happen, sight unseen, simply because he was supposedly disadvantaged and made so by America.
So he's this war-torn refugee from Somalia, and we had to let these refugees in.
And we've opened the door to people who hate this country, and we have granted them free admittance, and then we subsidize them while they're here.
And people know from the beginning that it's unwise to do so.
These people do not like this country.
They are arriving here with grievances.
And the Democrat Party cements those grievances.
And then we get something like we had at Ohio State, or we get San Bernardino, California, or we get Fort Hood.
And every time one of those things happens, we get lied to by the Democrats.
It's workplace violence.
It is anti-Muslim sentiment from conservative media people or whatever.
We're never told the truth about why people kill Americans.
We're told that Americans kill Americans because certain Americans practically deserve it because they're discriminating and they're prejudicial and the American people are fed up with it.
And Hillary Clinton did not indicate in one way that she was opposed to it.
She was a promoter of this kind of thing.
Hillary Clinton's look and view of America, nobody believed it when she talked about the great things in it because she didn't have any agenda that would have made America better.
The Democrat Party agenda is rooted in punishing America for the grievances the left thinks we are guilty of.
And they've got a list of grievances that date back to the founding, including the founding.
The founding itself was unjust and immoral and racist and bigoted.
And so Hillary's view of America is of a country that's guilty and needs to be fixed and corrected and punished.
Obama did.
Joe Biden ditto.
All of these people, same view of America.
That is what has become the mainstream of the Democrat Party.
There weren't stories in this campaign.
Trump's Make America Great wasn't a story.
It was a philosophy.
It was patriotism.
It was a recognition that we have to take action to save this country, to preserve it as founded.
Otherwise, our opponents, the Democrats, are going to continue in their effort to transform it rooted in punishment.
And most Americans just don't find their country guilty.
And the Democrats do.
We're guilty of racism.
We're guilty of bigotry.
We're guilty of sexism.
We're guilty of homophobia.
We're guilty of Citizens United.
I mean, the list is endless.
And Ms. Kearns Goodwin, the real problem you and other Democrats have is that I have just articulated what you really believe, but you don't dare say it or you wouldn't win diddly squat.
So you have to tell stories about your love of America and this or that, but you don't pull it off because it's not sincere.
And then when you get around to the things about America you do love, they don't, it doesn't make sense to a vast majority of the American people.
But it's really no more complicated than you see America as guilty of a series of sins.
Whereas most Americans think, yeah, we're not perfect, but we are not guilty.
This is the greatest country on earth.
And there's a reason why every Somali refugee wants to come here, a reason why every illegal immigrant here wants to come here.
There's a reason why everybody on earth wants to come here.
But the way the Democrats talk about this country, you wonder why anybody would want to come.
And that contradiction dooms them.
They've been losing elections in droves since 2010.
The Democrat Party agenda, including the President of the United States, has been repudiated.
It's been demolished.
It has been decimated over the last number of years since 2010.
It's right in front of us to see.
Okay, here's the next Axarod question.
He said, well, okay, talk about adversity and the impact of adversity.
FDR lived a charmed life until he didn't and was afflicted with polio.
Lincoln's life was filled with tragedy and lost and depressed.
See how people see things?
Teddy Roosevelt suffered incredible loss.
How did those losses shape them as leaders?
What stunned me in a way when Donald Trump said that he had the very, very best temperament of anybody who'd ever run for the president because he always won, that he had a winning temperament.
History would record just the opposite.
I mean, Franklin Roosevelt's polio, Lincoln having had that real sense of sorrow.
I think when you've come through adversity and you're able to see yourself backward, and if I got through that, I can get through this.
He did communicate to people this sense that I'm a winner and I can make you a winner too.
And now I guess the test comes.
What's wrong with that?
What's wrong with winning?
What's wrong with being optimistic?
What's wrong with being positive?
Notice the left.
Everything is the struggle.
Not struggle.
It's struggle.
You got to be downed for the struggle.
And everything's a struggle.
Everything in America is a struggle.
Oh my God, Lincoln.
The FDR.
These people led in many ways very productive, optimistic, charmed lives.
Yeah, the Civil War was no fun, but it took a certain kind of attitude and temperament to get through it.
But to listen to these people, life is an excrement sandwich, and some days you get mayonnaise, and some days mustard, and some days nothing.
But it's never good.
It's always a struggle.
And all these people that go through the struggle, they're the people that need it.
And to hell with that, because everybody has adversity.
Everybody has to overcome some adversity.
Some do, some don't.
But to make that defining rather than triumph, the struggle and the looking back and the remembrance of all the pain and the struggle.
It's not what people want to do.
It's not what human characteristics are naturally inclined toward.
Back in a sec here.
Back to the phones we go.
Watertown, New York.
This is Mindy.
Mindy, one of my all-time top 10 favorite female names.
How are you doing?
Great.
Thank you so much for taking my call.
I really just wanted to thank you personally.
I started listening to you on a regular basis back in June and July, trying to make some sense of that whole political craziness.
You really opened my eyes to how much I've been spoon-fed the liberal agenda since I was a child.
It's just crazy.
I was trying to find some cartoons for my children to watch.
And anything on TV now is just horrid.
Oh, God.
So I started looking back to what I watched when I was little, via Netflix and the internet.
You can get anything now.
And I was appalled by how much of the liberal agenda was spoon-fed to us as children.
And we had no idea what we were being fed.
We went along with it because that was life.
Of course.
I'm just so glad you escaped it.
I am so glad you realized this.
Many people your age haven't gotten to your point yet.
I got to tell you, I'm a 32-year-old mother of two kids.
And as soon as I have the money together, I am going to buy all of your books to read to my children.
I am just so grateful for you opening my eyes and letting me see just how left the whole country has gone in the education system and the entertainment system.
I can't even watch any news media anymore because it just makes me sick to my stomach.
Well, you're ahead of the game.
I want you to hang on here, Mindy.
I need to get your shipping address.
I want to send you the books so that you don't have to wait to be able to afford them.
I would like to do that.
That's right, a man, a legend, a way of life.
Yeah, I'm still thinking of Doris Kearns-Goodwin and all this adversity and the struggle.
Like, if I called Doris Kearns, let's say I'm in Boston, that's where she lives.
Hey, Doris, you want to go get a drink tonight?
I'm in town.
I can't.
I'm suffering thinking about FDR and polio.
I can't make it tonight.
I mean, what it's like, what adversity has Obama ever faced?
Seriously, you know what he said he faced?
He went to this private high school in Hawaii, and he was he didn't make the basketball team.
And you know why he said he didn't make the basketball team?
You've forgotten this?
All right.
Barack Obama said that he didn't, he wasn't allowed to play on his private high school basketball team in Hawaii because he played black style basketball.
What is black style basketball?
You emptied a clip on your opponents?
What is it?
I'm just funny with you here.
But really, what is black-style basketball?
You watch Limbaugh empty the clip headline tomorrow.
Here is Jordan in Reading, Pennsylvania.
Great to have you on the EIB network.
Hello.
Awesome.
Thank you, Rush.
I thank you for taking my call.
Long, long time listener.
I'm a Rush baby, basically.
I'm 28 years old, and you'll get a kick out of this.
Back in 92, my parents, they traded their Chevy Cavalier station wagon for a Buick LaSaber.
I didn't know how radio worked at the time, but basically I gave my bud, I said, oh, this is a great car because the first thing we turned on and Rush Limbaugh was on the radio in that car.
So you'll always remember the Buick LeSaber.
Yes.
That's great.
Thank you.
That's a great, great remembrance.
Yes.
Anyway, basically, what I wanted to talk about is I'm glad you brought up this deal with the net neutrality thing.
And let me say, I am all for competition, and I agree with all of your points as far as if you can't afford it, don't buy it.
And I'm actually excited for the ATT, like the DirecTV now.
So am I. I am excited about that.
I'm going to sign up myself.
But one thing I wanted to talk about with the net neutrality, though, the point I wanted to make, though, is that net neutrality, because I'm a techie, I'm in the tech sector.
And net neutrality, though, from my understanding, though, was supposed to level the playing field so there could be better competition that doesn't discriminate based on content.
So whether I'm listening to Rush Limbaugh on streaming radio or downloading a movie, it doesn't discriminate like either throttle or counts against my cap.
Because like with ATT, so with DirecTV now, they are not being counted against that cap.
And the same thing, like if Comcast had a streaming service or what have you, it doesn't count against the cap.
But something like Netflix does count against the cap.
Okay, by cap, you mean on your data, whatever monthly service you've agreed to pay your provider when you record.
There's a cap on the data for the price.
If you go over it, then you get charged additional.
And you say Netflix is, if you go over the cap, there is a cap on Netflix, but there's no cap for ATT customers on DirecTV now.
That's called zero rating.
And I know the net neutrality people think it's unfair.
I had a long conversation with FCC Commissioner about this in the early days of net neutrality because the whole name of it confused me.
This whole bit, net neutrality.
And I must admit, I'm prejudiced.
When liberals are behind something, I'm automatically suspicious.
So I wanted to find out what it was about.
And this guy told me that the argument that net neutrality is simply about ISP equality in terms of equal access to whatever provider you want is BS, that that's not what the proponents of net neutrality are really after.
It's the way they're selling it because it's attractive to people.
I mean, it's fair to be able to say that no one provider should be able to have access to greater speed or greater bandwidth than another because that's anti-competitive and it's unfair.
So net neutrality was going to make sure that all the providers were governed by the same rules.
And he said, well, that may be one of the things they're pursuing.
The real objective of this is to control ultimately content.
And it was, in his view, it was aimed at being discriminatory against conservative-oriented websites and providers under the pretext that there's way too much conservative media.
There's Drudge, there's Rush Limbaugh, there's all these other sites, and the left hasn't been able to compete against them in the marketplace.
And so they had to level the field and give the left equal access by limiting the access of conservatives who had been successful.
Now, this was one of the early, very early concerns about people who were opposed to net neutrality.
So I studied it on that basis, and I started examining people who were for it as they wrote about it and attaching it.
And I have a couple of friends who are scholars in the whole concept of telecommunications.
And I trust these people implicitly.
In fact, before the program today, I called one of my buddies who is an expert in this to ask about this very story I saw today, ripping the whole concept that AT ⁇ T has zero rating, meaning, again,
AT ⁇ T, the provider for cellular service, is offering starting tomorrow a program called a business.
It's called DirecTV Now.
It has nothing to do with DirecTV, which they own.
That's just the brand name of it.
They're going to offer four different tiers of television content at various price points.
The more you pay, the greater number of channels you can watch.
It's like cable TV without a box.
It's like cable TV.
You can get the networks.
You can get whatever is out there based on what you want to pay for it.
The zero rating is, and again, it's a name that it has very little relationship in terms to what it means, zero rating.
What is that?
If you're an AT ⁇ T customer, and this is what Jordan here is talking about, if you're an AT ⁇ T customer already and you sign up for DirecTV Now, you are not going to be charged for the data you use to stream the video content provided by AT ⁇ T and DirecTV Now.
Net neutrality proponents think that is grossly unfair to people like Netflix or any other, Hulu, you name any other provider of content where if you use your phone or your iPad to stream and you've got a monthly data plan and you've got a cap, therefore, and based on what you're willing to pay for it, if you exceed that cap, then the overage is very expensive.
You won't run into that if you're an AT ⁇ T customer and you subscribe to DirecTV now.
But if you are a Verizon customer and you subscribe to AT ⁇ T Now, your cap is in place.
And if you go over, you'll be charged for your data that you use to stream.
And this is considered by the net neutrality proponents to be grossly unfair and advantageous to AT ⁇ T because Verizon customers, T-Mobile customers, and Netflix all have caps on the amount of data you can stream from your provider.
It's not fair that AT ⁇ T can provide it.
So they want net neutrality to either make everybody else offer what AT ⁇ T offers or punish AT ⁇ T and not let them offer it.
In that sense, I view it as anti-competitive.
If there were no controls on the internet, and I shudder to think at letting certain people have control of it, because I know, Jordan, don't doubt me.
I know you will, but I wish you wouldn't.
It is content.
Ultimately, what they want to control and police is the content.
They're liberals.
They want to eliminate opposing points of view.
They do it with political correctness, which is censorship.
They do it in a drive-by media by simply ignoring all kinds of news that is not palatable or it conflicts with their worldview.
They just ignore it and don't even cover it.
It's inarguable.
But if AT ⁇ T, the way I look at it, if AT ⁇ T has made the investment to buy the satellite provider, even though it has nothing to do with this, and if they're making the investment, if they're going out and cutting deals with the content providers in order to have access to all of these channels, and then they want to go sell it, and they want to turn a profit eventually.
One of the things they can offer as an incentive to sign up is if you already are an AT ⁇ T subscriber, you're going to have no data charges.
Well, hell's bells.
That's a heck of a deal.
And it's a great competitive advantage for them that they can do.
And I know some people look at, well, that's just grossly unfair because the other companies don't have the same thing to offer.
Well, they could have if they wanted to.
You know, Verizon has Fios.
And if they wanted to go out and cut through, Apple was going to do this, but Apple didn't get it done.
I don't hear anybody complaining about how Apple got aced out.
You know, you're going to be able to get this app, this AT ⁇ T, this DirecTV now, is going to be an app.
It's going to be on your phone.
It's going to be an Apple TV.
You're going to be able to sign up on Apple TV and watch this stuff, and you're going to have on your Apple TV access to everything you've got on cable.
I don't know about local over-the-air broadcast channels yet.
I haven't gotten into that.
But Jordan's point is that this represents an unfair structure that advantages ATT over the others.
But the others are customers.
Verizon has customers.
Netflix has customers.
T-Mobile has customers.
And they do not have the same opportunity.
It's going to cost them more.
Well, not if they sign up with ATT.
I mean, this is what competition looks like.
Competition is cutthroat.
When you get down to the meat and potatoes of genuine capitalism, it is cutthroat, vicious competition, and the consumer always benefits in the end.
Look at the AT ⁇ T customer.
The AT ⁇ T customer is getting a hell of a deal here.
This is one heck of a deal.
And the people opposed to it, by definition, have to be anti-competitive.
Yet they have set themselves up to be pro-competitive and anti-corporate.
They want to be able to deny any arrangement like this.
There's no reason AT ⁇ T should be able to offer something Netflix can't.
There's no reason Verizon should be able to offer something AT ⁇ T, Netflix, and T-Mobile can't.
And you need a command and control central authority to regulate this and to punish people who violate it.
But what do you end up with?
See, you end up with sameness.
There's no difference in anything.
And then you're going to get mediocrity because then there's no need on the part of any of these companies to offer anything superior because it isn't going to matter.
If they leave you and sign up with a competitor, it's going to be the same thing because everybody's going to have the same limits.
And it leads to a mediocre product and anti-competitive pricing.
And it's not good.
But on the surface, it does appear unfair because not everybody's an ATT subscriber.
It's classic the way liberalism works.
If anybody has an advantage over anybody for any reason, it's not permitted.
It's not fair.
And it's got to be regulated and equalized.
And in the process, competition is destroyed.
And when competition goes, so do consumer advantages.
Anyway, Jordan, I appreciate the call.
I'm way long here.
I've got to go, but we'll be back in just a second.
No, I read about it.
Des Bryant and Josh Norman, and they were having a confrontation on the field, Thanksgiving game.
And apparently, Des Bryant went up to Josh Norman, where I'm come from, we emptied a clip on guys like you or some such thing.
And then everybody denied that that was denied.
That was said.
Email.
Boy, Rush, you haven't even talked about the latest Muslim terrorism in Ohio State.
It must show it's a new normal.
What's there to say?
It was a terror attack.
And the drive.
No, the police up there just said it's looking more and more like terrorism.
Really?
There's no doubt about this.
This is this is.
And by the way, one other thing, T-Mobile.
T-Mobile is off, these cellular providers offer all kinds of data deals to get you to sign up.
You can stream Netflix on T-Mobile, I think, with no cap.
There's all kinds of opportunities for people out there.
You don't need command and control central authority trying to regulate all this stuff because all of it, again, is about punishing success from the left.
Okay, okay, I'll tell you everything you need to know about the Ohio state attack tomorrow.
▲
Export Selection