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Dec. 9, 2016 - Rush Limbaugh Program
31:41
December 9, 2016, Friday, Hour #3
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CNN's reporting that a source of theirs says that Rudy Giuliani is out of the running for Secretary of State.
If that's true, the leak obviously is coming from Trump Tower.
It would have to be.
Live from the Southern Command in sunny South Florida.
It's Open Line Friday.
But again, it's CNN, and I'm sorry.
I just don't believe it.
Until it actually happens if CNN's reporting it.
And that's the way I am with more news, and it's the way you ought to be.
And I'm thinking about this guy that called it's all down in the dumps or angry here because people are criticizing Trump and his pics and so forth.
You gotta, folks, you've got to ignore those people.
I'm gonna get into that here in just a second.
But Snerdley reminded me that I haven't yet commented on the passing of John Glenn, the first astronaut to orbit the Earth.
Greetings and welcome back Open Line Friday.
Rush Limbaugh here at 800-282-2882.
Talent on loan from God.
800-282-2882 if you want to be on the program.
John Glenn, first man to orbit the Earth, one of the original seven astronauts announced for the Mercury program.
And it was all part of the effort to get to the moon.
The Mercury program, Gemini, then Apollo, all of it was test flights to get to the moon in stages because nobody had the slightest idea other than what the brilliant physics scientists could predict and calculate about actually getting there and what we were going to encounter once we did.
John Glenn was 95 years old.
There are advantages, folks, to getting older because you acquire and accumulate more knowledge and you're able to combine that with experiences that you've had.
And you're able to put some things in perspective that younger people can't.
This is not a put-down of younger people.
I'm not trying to be preachy to younger people.
As always, I'm trying to be informative.
Spaceflight today for people under 40 is, I mean, to them, it's going to Mars.
To them, it's colonizing an asteroid or a planet in order to save ourselves because of climate change.
But back in the 60s, when the first seven astronauts were selected, they were test pilots.
They were test pilots on the leading edge of breaking the sound barrier.
These guys flew airplanes.
You know, the life expectancy of a test pilot in the 40s and 50s and 60s, it would stun you how many test pilots died.
They were the essence of pioneers and bravery and courage.
Chuck Yeager in something not much bigger than a lawnmower breaks the speed of sound.
The guys that flew in the X-15, they would have to put them on the bottom of a wing of a B-52, take them up to 30,000 feet and drop them because they couldn't take off from Earth and there wasn't enough fuel to take off, defeat gravity, and get up to the speed of sound.
They had to break the sound barrier and they had to go as fast as they could to find out what the effect on a human body was.
Could human beings remain conscious?
Could they control an airplane in those circumstances?
And many of these guys ran out of fuel and had to parachute back.
The aircraft themselves had parachutes.
Some of them had to eject.
This is the place John Glenn came from.
He flew fighter aircraft in Korea.
His young life was one of putting its self, his life on the line practically every day.
And that continued all the way through his spaceflight career, his astronaut career.
And I heard Dr. Gnadhammer was discussing this a little bit last night at Fox, and he actually was quite right on the real scope of this.
You know, I would urge everybody to visit the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in Washington.
It is one of the most fascinating places you can go in all of Washington.
Of course, the National Archives and all the monuments.
But you've got to see some of the early spacecraft.
When you see, when you actually see, not a picture, not video, when you actually see what one of these Mercury capsules was, and you realize that these guys got in that thing, and it was atop a giant for its day rocket.
A massive explosion underneath you.
And as this is a great way of expressing it, as Krauthammer did yesterday, the launch crew assists you getting in this thing, and then they leave.
And they go to a bunker three miles away, shielded from the blast, shielded from any potentiality of disaster.
But you're not.
You are on top of what everybody else is running away from.
You are on top of what everybody's hiding from.
And in Glenn's case, I think the rocket he was on was the first time.
When Alan Shepard, the 15-minute suborbital, that was a redstone rocket.
And it was a big rocket for its day.
But Glenn, the rocket necessary to get one of these guys these things in orbit, I think was, I want to say Atlas, but it might, I get the names of the rockets confused.
But the point is, the Mercury space capsule was not much bigger than the couch the astronaut sits in.
It was tiny.
It was cramped.
Do you know the original design did not even have windows?
The original design of the Mercury spacecraft had no windows because the designers didn't want any weaknesses.
It wasn't the Atlas 63B that launched Glenn.
You know, the Redstone is what launched Shepard and Shira.
But anyway, and the Atlas rocket was huge for its day.
The original designers, the scientists, the Oppenheimers and the von Brauns, they didn't want any windows.
Those were weak structural points.
They wanted the astronauts with no way to see outside.
The astronauts insisted that there were going to be a couple of windows in it.
So they were there.
They were smaller than an airliner window is today.
And they really had to fight hard for those windows.
They got them.
And you're on top of this rocket, and it's going to take you someplace where no human being has ever been.
And you're going to be up there for three times an hour and a half.
You're going to be, it takes 90 minutes to orbit the Earth, and you're going to do three orbits.
And then you're going to fire on top of this missile.
And on top of the capsule is what was the retro tower.
Well, now it was the escape tower.
On the back of the capsule behind it was the retro rockets.
And they were going to fire.
And they had to fire at the precise time and place.
They were not fired manually by the astronaut.
It was all computer programmed, written, and designed because if there was even a two-second error, that capsule would come down thousands of miles away from the rescue boats.
The precision necessary to make this happen, nobody had done.
And nobody had gone through re-entry.
Meaning, the heat of coming back through the atmosphere at incredible speeds heats up the spacecraft.
They had this brand new design of a heat shield that the astronaut's back, the chair the astronaut sits in, is right where that heat shield is, the whole back bottom of the capsule.
Just doing that alone is a degree of bravery that most people don't even stop to think about.
They just think, well, we wouldn't be doing it if it wasn't safe.
They wouldn't be doing this if it wasn't safe.
And it was precisely because it wasn't safe that we were doing it to find out what we needed to do to make it safe.
And there were all kinds of expectations that astronauts would perish, and some did on the ground.
Gus Grissom, who was one of the original seven, actually died in an Apollo fire on the ground in a test fire.
They weren't going to leave the pad.
Oxygen-rich atmosphere.
Something sparked and they burned to death on the launch pad.
Yeah, that's in 1967, January 27th, Gus Grissom.
And he was one of the most lovable of the astronauts.
Anyway, while all your buddies leave and hide in a concrete bunker, you're on top of this rocket, and this thing launches, and all they've been able to do is simulate it.
They haven't been able to, you know, Glenn's doing it for the first time in an orbital actual mission.
Re-entry.
People have forgotten this, but something, they thought they were going to lose John Glenn during re-entry because you lose radio communications.
The heat reflected off the heat shield creates an impenetrable invisible shield around the capsule, still true today, that prevents radio communications for, I think in those days, it was like 10 minutes.
You had no contact.
You had no idea what was going on.
And the first re-entry, when Glenn was coming through the, he looked out the window that almost wasn't going to be there, and he saw flames.
He saw fire.
Nobody had prepared him for this.
They had no idea what it was.
Glenn himself feared that the heat shield was burning up and that he was next.
He was scared to death that that heat shield was going to just disintegrate and that he would be next and that whole capsule was just going to vaporize.
Well, it turned out that it was normal.
The heat shield worked.
And what it was doing was reflecting and dispositing the heat.
And he saw the sparks and the flames.
And it didn't represent the heat shield failing.
It represented the heat shield working.
He'd have never known this had that window not been there.
Would have never known any of that had the window not been there.
That's why one of the things about the window and the astronauts insisting on it.
And then you land, but you don't land.
You float down under a parachute.
And you damn well hope that the computer fired the retro rockets at the exact precise time.
Otherwise, the giant Navy destroyers waiting to pluck you out of the ocean are not going to be anywhere near you.
Well, in Glenn's case, everything worked.
Able to pluck him out of the ocean and the capsule, but in a couple of other instances, it didn't work.
And the computer misfired a couple seconds later.
And I forget, was it Wally Shira?
A lot of time has passed by.
Might have been Grissom.
It was Grissom who panicked.
And he blew the hatch and left the capsule.
And the helicopter came and tried the capsule filled with water.
They hooked onto the capsule, trying to get the capsule out.
They wanted to save these things.
And the helicopter could not.
It was too heavy, couldn't lift.
They lost Grissom's capsule.
But these guys were the essence of bravery.
Grissom just happened to, you know, it's hot in this thing.
They just come through re-entry.
There's no air conditioning in these capsules.
You're not supposed to blow the hatch.
You stay in that capsule until the helicopter grabs you and lands you back on the deck of the ship.
You're not wearing any life preservers or any of that sort of stuff.
There is a, the capsule itself does launch on touchdown a raft type design device, but I don't think it deployed.
Grissom almost drowned.
He's out there swimming around and the helicopter's coming to get him and they try to save the capsule.
But the point is that these guys were every bit as brave as Columbus and these people that got on these boats and thought they were going to the edge of the earth.
And today all that's been lost because it's so far ago and spaceflight today is so much different and it's been romanticized in movies as normal as living on Earth and so forth.
And unfortunately, that's what people's experience with it is.
But those guys were just a breed apart.
Chuck Yeager to this day is celebrated by people in his generation and Glenn for the bravery and the courage.
And as I say, it all was part of getting to the moon.
Every launch of a Mercury capsule or a Gemini, which was two astronauts, was designed to learn what it took and how these capsules could maneuver in space and how you could dock them together.
Could we send a rescue capsule up for one that had lost power?
All of these things.
That's why it took 10 years because all this was nothing but test, test, test, test.
And Glenn was a genuine and went back into space at age 77 on a shuttle mission.
Just incredible stuff.
You really need to see one of these cats.
That was the essence of American greatness.
The coming together of the private and public sector NASA back in those days was innovating like nobody's business.
The innovation that was coming out of the space program that made its way into the general economy, like Tang was from the space program.
Laugh or not, it was.
Any number of things that ended up in your kitchen as electric appliances, many of them started in the space program.
Anyway, John Glenn then decides to go into politics, and he became one of the most partisan liberal Democrats during the Clinton years that I can recall.
And I always had trouble putting these two things together.
But that's who he was.
And that's who many of them were: Alan Shepard, Grissom, Wally Shira, Scott Carpenter, Glenn.
Incredible, brave, innovative, courageous people.
There was nothing they were afraid of.
They didn't seek solace when they heard things that they didn't disagree or didn't agree with.
They weren't innocent snowflakes that needed to be protected.
They didn't get participation trophies or any of that.
I got to take a break.
We'll be back.
I know I still have to answer the caller on Trump, which I'm going to do.
It may not be till Monday.
Just kidding.
It will happen.
Sit tight.
John Glenn's capsule.
I think it was called Friendship 7, 7 feet wide at its widest point at the bottom, 7 feet wide.
Folks, it's like going up into space in a bathtub.
The bathtub's even a little larger than what these guys were in.
Here is Nick calling from Okinawa, Japan.
Hey, Nick, what's happening?
How are you?
Merry Christmas, Rush Bukinawa.
Thank you very much.
It's great to hear from you.
It's 4 a.m.
Saturday morning here, and it's still an honor to speak with you.
Well, it's great to have you with us.
I really mean that.
Thank you for calling.
Yeah, the theme of late has been fake news, and I read a quote from Denzel Washington.
He said, if you don't read the newspaper, you're uninformed.
If you do read it, you're misinformed.
And then my concern is that all this fake news over the years has created a house of cards for these liberals, and it's all fragile.
And since the election, it's all falling apart.
My concern is for the generation of people, these people who've swallowed it all, hook line, and sinker.
What are we to do with them?
It's a whole generation of people out there, misinformed.
Yeah, I know.
Been fighting it for years and years and years.
It's been a feature of American life.
It's actually, Nick, in one sense, it's okay because it's been a feature of media from the beginning of time.
There's been dishonest media, exaggerating media, lying, distorting media.
It's always been out there.
That's one of the things about a free society that that's one of the prices.
And you're going to go in cycles.
Informed public, uninformed public, uninformed public voting.
These are just the things that you deal with, and you constantly try to do your best to educate people.
And that's why we focus.
That's why I'm writing these children's books for young adults and so forth and doing this program.
A lot of people working on it.
And on balance, it's served as frustrating as it can be.
Yeah, I engage these people quite often, these liberals, and one-on-one, I have some success.
But in mass, they just don't listen.
They're hostile.
Totally.
Yeah.
Totally.
Hey, look, you're in Okinawa, but I still want to send you a new iPhone 7 or 7 Plus.
We can do it.
But I need your carrier is going to be a challenge for us.
Well, I have T-Mobile because when I travel to the States, I use.
Oh, T-Mobile.
Okay.
So you want a big one or a little one?
The plus.
Okay.
Black, what colour you want?
Do you have rose gold?
Yes, I do.
You'll have it.
Yeah, I was so into the space program.
My mother knitted me a sweater.
It was a blue sweater, and it had Mercury space capsules on the front of it.
And it was a comfortable sweater.
I mean, I actually could wear the thing.
She just knitted it with the knitting needles and so forth.
She got into it, decided to make one for me.
I was totally into the whole notion.
I was big on aeronautical things anyway, flying in airports.
Darren in Athens, Georgia.
Great to have you on the program, sir.
How are you doing?
Gush.
How are you?
Very well.
Very well.
Thank you.
Good.
I'd like to tell you my thoughts on the Democratic Party and have you comment.
All right.
I'm good at that.
Yeah.
I share a household with a very, I don't want to say liberal because she's a progressive and she'll let you know that she is definitely not liberal.
And I believe that there is a difference between the liberal.
We get to pick.
And we know exactly what you're talking about.
Sure.
And so, you know, they didn't quit after the election.
They came home mad as hell, and they didn't stop.
They're working, and things are happening on the local level.
And I think in the next maybe five to eight years, this progressive movement is going to take a halt.
And the Democratic Party, as we know it, is done, in my opinion, and maybe even to be the detriment of the Republican Party as well, because there's a lot of support.
And do you hear a little of that in other parts of the country?
No.
Because it's happening here.
Let me square you away on this.
The Democrat Party is no longer a national party.
They have suffered massive defeats at the local level.
There are only five states where the Democrats have the governorship and the state legislature.
Really only four states.
They have lost over 1,400 or 1,500 seats, Congress, governor, state legislature, mayor, since 2010.
They are in a world of hurt.
Their agenda, as embodied by Barack Obama, has been thoroughly repudiated.
They have, in 2018, they have something like over 20 seats in the Senate they have to defend.
They are in the biggest world of hurt they have been in in my lifetime.
And it was not foreseen.
Don't hang up out there, Darren.
Stick with me.
It was not foreseen because nobody paid any attention to all these losses they were racking up.
Everybody focused on Obama and how he was getting his way because the Republicans were afraid to stop him or even try.
One election.
The reason why you're leftists that you know your progressives are going nuts is because they're in the wilderness.
They don't have a bench.
The biggest exciting news about their next presidential candidate is Joe Biden when he's going to be 78 years old in 2020.
But let me tell you what I think the danger point is for us.
It's one simple thing.
Well, it's actually, if there's more than one, the Democrat Party's fastest way back is illegal immigration.
If we don't actually do something about this, they're going to be back sooner than anybody knows.
The Democrat Party needs a permanent underclass.
They need to import as many of those permanent underclass because our economy is going to start skyrocketing.
Our economy is going to grow.
Trump, I really have great optimistic faith that Trump's going to do what he said because he is who he is.
And his cabinet picks are going to help him get where he wants to go.
But if he doesn't follow through on immigration, I don't mean a wall, but if we don't stop this, then the ingredients for the Democrat Party's rebound are going to be coming into this country every day like they are now.
And if that doesn't stop, then the battle for those people's votes is going to continue.
Republicans and Democrats are both going to be competing for them.
And how are you going to compete for them?
Who can be the best purveyors of government welfare, sad to say, is how you appeal to those people.
At least it has been.
So that's the only reservation I have.
Now, you might be saying, well, are you really afraid Trump's not going to – I'm not afraid of anything.
I'm just waiting to see because that is the, I don't want to call it pressure point, but that's the vulnerability.
There's another one, and that's Obamacare.
Now, I haven't talked about this yet.
I was intending to get into this in greater detail next week.
But in case you haven't heard, there is an argument going on in the House of Representatives among the Republicans about how to do this.
And the debate is over, do we repeal it and then replace it in two years or three?
The big argument is, because they don't have a replacement plan right now.
They can repeal it the day Trump gets into office, but what do they replace it with?
So the argument is repeal it, but delay the actual repeal.
You passed a law that repeals it, but you don't repeal it for either two years or three.
Now, if you decide to replace it three years down the road, and if you win big, if the Republicans win big in the 2018 midterms, Larry Sabato has a piece in which he says that it's possible the Republicans could have 62 or 63 seats in 2018, but nobody knows.
I mean, Trump could turn out to be a disaster.
Trump could end up being great.
We don't know.
The risk of waiting for three years after the 2018 midterms, what if you lose seats and you're the Republicans?
So the argument is, okay, repeal it, but then set the bomb to go off in two years so that you can replace it before the midterms and use that as a campaign aid.
Some of the Republicans in the House are still reluctant to do any of this.
They don't want to repeal it.
They want to repeal the mandate, but leave the pre-existing conditions.
This is a potential disaster waiting to happen simply because the Republicans really haven't changed when it comes to this.
They're still scared to death of taking away an entitlement from people.
And its tentacles have now been interwoven deeply into our society, no matter how unhappy people are with the healthcare.gov website and all that.
I'm thinking this whole idea of having somebody replace it with is a smokescreen and this two-year, three-year delay, but just repeal it and turn loose the market on this.
For me, I don't understand what this two- or three-year delay is, but it's the dominant argument now in the House over Obamacare.
So look, I promise I'm going to get into this in much greater, remind me next week, snerdly, because this is crucial, the way the Republicans are thinking of dealing with Obamacare now.
And there's no real guidance from Trump on this yet, other than we're going to repeal it and replace it.
But when do you replace it?
And with what?
They do not have an alternative Obamacare health care bill.
And my thinking is, good.
Why should the government be involved in this?
And that's the problem with it.
The risk is that if they repeal it and don't have anything to replace it with, then the Democrat solutions are going to be single-payer.
Well, let's just replace it.
Let's just expand it, put everybody on Medicare.
So this fight is not over, folks, on Obamacare.
And then immigration.
Those are the two areas in immigration primary.
If that's not actually dealt with and stopped, and if the law on that isn't actually enforced, I'm not telling you I don't think Trump is going to do it.
He asked me a question.
I'm answering the question.
For this electoral victory to mean something, the key is immigration, folks.
And that's why Trump got elected.
All this other stuff, the trade deals, yes, they're a factor, but immigration, illegal immigration is why he won.
We have to stop this flow of illegals who arguably automatically become Democrats if we are to have a sustaining victory here.
Now, Darren, before you go, as you know, everybody in the last three weeks gets a free iPhone 7 or 7 Plus.
Which of the two would you prefer to have?
Well, Gretchen, I think I'd go with the 7 Plus as much accolades that you give it.
Well, they're both great.
I mean, I know I talk about the plus of this.
The iPhone 7 is a great phone.
You can use it one-handed.
I don't mean to be talking anybody into or out of things, but if you want the plus, that's fine.
What's your carrier?
I use Virgin Mobile, which is a, I believe, a Sprint sister company, if I'm not.
We'll find out.
I can tell you right now what it's going to be.
And so, you, while you're on hold with Snerdly, giving him your address, I'm going to find out what phone I need to give him for Virgin Mobile.
I got you covered.
I just need to find out which one we need to send you.
And that'll tell me the color options that I've got.
So hang on.
We'll be back.
We'll continue.
Don't hang up because Snerdy will get your address right after this.
Don't go.
You know, we got Kevin.
We lost him.
He had to call.
Kevin, I've only got 35 seconds here, and there's not enough time to get into what you wanted to talk about.
He's worried about Trump critics saying we're going to start a trade war, but your theory is we're already in one that we're trying to stop, correct?
Correct.
Yeah, they're saying he's going to start a trade war, and I'm saying we've already been in one.
We just haven't been fighting back.
And his whole issues on trade is the whole reason I even started supporting him in the first place back in the primaries.
You know, I tell you, it's just like everything.
The Trump critics are Legion and they want him to fail.
And my best advice is to just not listen to any of that and wait for Trump to be inaugurated and wait for this stuff to take off.
He's going to need you.
Continue to support him, folks.
That's why he's doing these tours.
He's going to need you to continue to do what you did that got him elected.
And he's asking for this as he goes out on these tours.
Okay, Kevin, I've got to hang up, but I'm going to turn you over to Mr. Snerdley.
Tell him what kind of iPhone 7 or 7 Plus that you want and your carrier and color and all that.
We'll see you back here in just a second, folks.
Do not go away.
He wanted a regular iPhone 7, Matt Black, and he's what carrier?
All right.
Well, we got it.
I'll go get it back there so that the right one is procured.
Hey, folks, have a great weekend, and we will be back here on Monday.
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