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Dec. 22, 2016 - Rush Limbaugh Program
33:13
December 22, 2016, Thursday, Hour #3
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No, I'm going to do it right now.
As I told everybody about it, I'm going to do it right now.
I'm going to get it out of the way.
I frankly, too.
I mean, it's Obama blaming me and Fox News for his problems.
And it really, it's explanatory in its own way.
It's a very, it's a great way of illustrating who Obama is and how he thinks.
Look at what Obama has at his disposal in order to get everybody to love him and to agree with him.
He owns practically every cultural leading pop culture entity there is.
He owns, by owns, I mean they love him.
He's in total control of it.
Hollywood, books, movies, news, music, newspapers.
I mean, you name it.
Virtually every pop culture entity that has influence loves Obama.
And by the same token, not only do they love Obama, they routinely are hypercritical of me and others who are not in the Obama camp.
I mean, they're constantly calling out Fox and Fox News and me and all of this.
So Obama owns the world media.
And yet these two relatively small outposts, the Rush Limbaugh program and Fox News, somehow are responsible for him not being a beloved what.
I don't know what he seeks to be.
But his latest complaint was to a reporter at the Atlantic.
And what he's essentially complaining about is that I have created this character that I have named Barack Obama.
And I have created this character out of cloth.
And the character bears no reality to the real Barack Obama.
And therefore, you people who only listen to me, you have a totally distorted view of the real Barack Obama.
And you are being lied to, and he's being misrepresented.
You want to know the truth about this?
The people in this audience also read all of that crap that idolizes Obama.
The people in this audience are not shut out.
The people in this audience absorb all media.
It's the other side that closets itself away from us.
It is liberalism.
It's Democrats.
It's that whole mess of people.
They are the ignorant ones.
They are the ones that pay no attention to anything other than what they agree with.
My point is the people in this audience have a much wider knowledge base, a much broader sense of the news and events that are happening.
They know more about Obama.
The people in this audience know more about Obama than the people that read the New York Times.
If anybody has been presenting a caricature of Obama, it's the New York Times.
If anybody's been presenting a caricature, a false character of who Obama is, it's the mainstream media.
The mainstream media has created this mythological historical figure who's next to perfect.
Smartest ever, the most well-spoken ever, the most whatever ever.
And of course, that isn't true.
It's exactly the opposite of what Obama is trying to tell people.
The people that do not like Obama or the people that don't support Obama's policies do so from a foundation of real knowledge and information.
The people, for example, who don't like me or who hate me, I guarantee you 95% of them have never listened to me.
I guarantee you they have never taken the time to talk to anybody who does listen to me.
It's the exact opposite of what they think.
People who do listen to this program love it.
That's the danger in it.
Take you back to 2002.
Mr. Snerdley loves this memory.
2002.
The Democrats thought they were going to clean up in the midterms.
This is the year of the Wellstone Memorial.
And they lost.
They actually lost seats in a midterm election they should have won.
And Tom Dashle, who was then the leader of the Democrats in the Senate, was appearing somewhere in the media.
It might have been Meet the Press.
And he was very alarmed.
Dashley was a soft-spoken guy.
We're very concerned, Tim.
We're concerned that the mean-spirited, racist, and bigoted, clan-like Republicans are really trying to deny people their water every day, Tim.
We're deeply concerned.
And Harry Reid tried to pick up this mild, soft-spoken, don't scare anybody.
But Puff Dashall went out there and said that they had just seen some research and they were shocked.
It showed that a lot of people are listening to Rush Limbaugh.
And a lot of our people, we were shocked to learn that there are many former Democrats that listen to Rush Limbaugh.
They totally had discombobulated him.
Anyway, little Brian Stelter at CNN, who is their media analyst.
And you might say, who's Brian Stelter?
Where'd this guy come from?
I'll tell you where he came from.
Brian Stelter started a TV blog called a TV Newser.
You ever heard of the TV Newser?
You still did this day.
It's a blog that basically did TV gossip.
It was a miniature drudge report of television news, of drive-by network television news.
And I can remember, this goes back, this would have to go back 12 years, when nobody else heard of TV news yet either.
But if, for example, CNN was written up poorly, that just discombobulated everybody at CNN.
They thought everybody read it.
But it was very tiny.
Anyway, the New York Times was so impressed by this blog that they hired little Brian to be their chief media writer.
He was a blogger.
He's a pajama-clad, you know, in the basement there, blogger-type guy with TV news.
And the New York Times hired him.
And he spent some time at the New York Times writing.
You go to school, the New York Times, you learn how to write for them, the style book and the various things you have to do to make it obvious it's a New York Times story.
And after that, CNN picked him up.
And now he's the chief media analyst for CNN.
And he got caught recently.
He tweeted out some fake news.
And he got caught up in it.
And it was, I forget what it was about.
It was just this week.
Anyway, that's a diversion.
This afternoon on CNN, co-host John Berman at CNN brought in Brian Stelter, who hosts their Reliable Sources show, to talk about Obama's latest comments in The Atlantic, in which he said he thinks conservative media has vilified him and that Trump supporters who don't like Obama are simply responding to this fictional character named Barack Obama that Rush Limbaugh created.
And Berman says to Brian Stelter, you know, you get the sense that the president's going to watch much Fox News in retirement, Brian.
What is this really going on?
The president took side swipes at Fox over the years, but now he's swiping much more directly, commenting much more directly on what he thinks Fox did to his presidency.
You know, we knew back in 2009 Fox News was an opposition network to Obama, Rush Limbaugh, Conservative Talk Radio as well.
I would flip it around and say, did the president do enough to try to persuade those viewers, those voters?
Did he do enough to try to reach out to conservative media listeners?
Or did he treat it as a lost cause?
I think candidly, some of his aides now look back and say, maybe there was more they could have done.
Come on.
Can we get real here?
There was no way there was ever going to be outreach.
Let me tell you two key things.
You probably know one of these because you listen to me.
Two weeks after Obama was inaugurated, he had a joint meeting of congressional leadership up in the White House, Republican and Democrat leaders in the House and Senate.
And it was at that meeting that he looked at the Republican leaders, looked really at John Boehner, and he said, you've got to stop listening to Rush Limbaugh.
You can't get things done that way.
He singled me out.
No, I wasn't offended.
No, no, no, no, no.
For a moment, I was a little alarmed because I knew what he was doing.
But the key to this was, why would Obama take the time?
I'm going to hear him a radio talk show host his first meeting with congressional leadership.
Why tell these guys?
I'll tell you why, because he believes, too, the poppycock that's in the media.
And the poppy cock that's in the media is that the Republicans in Washington are scared to death of any criticism that might come from me.
They are afraid to cross me, and therefore they will never do the quote-unquote right thing.
They will never go along with a Democrat, even when they want to, because they're afraid of what I will say.
Obama believed that because it's in the media that he reads.
It's a common misconception that's out there.
It's fake news.
So Obama goes into the meeting believing that that's what those guys think and do and are.
And so he warns them, you've got to stop listening to Rush Limbaugh.
That's not how things get done here.
And I've told you, I happened to talk to Boehner right here in this office sometime not long after, and he was telling me about it.
And he looked at me and said, why would he do that?
We're looking at each other.
Why would he do that?
And I said, I'll tell you why he did it.
He was hoping that you'd walk out to that set of microphones outside the White House and agree with him.
He was hoping you would realize it's a new day.
We got this brand new president here, post-partisan, post-racial, post-everything.
And we're going to stop global warming and we're going to fix our reputation in the world and everybody's going to be happy.
It's going to be utopia.
And he wanted you to go out there and say it is a new day.
And listen to Rush Limbaugh.
We never really have and we're not going to anymore.
He wanted you to go out and discredit me.
And Boehner looked at me.
I don't know why he thought we'd do that.
I said, well, I do.
But here's the next thing that happened.
And you probably remember some of this.
Do you remember, I don't know if this was before he was inaugurated or after, but there was a dinner at George Will's house that Obama attended, and it was touted in the media as Obama meets with conservative leaders.
Obama dines with media conservative leaders.
And it was George Will.
It was David Brooks.
And I think it was at that dinner where Brooks saw Obama's crease in his slacks and concluded he was going to be a great president because of it.
Larry Kudlow was there.
I forget who else.
Dr. Krauthammer was there.
It was six or eight of them.
I was not there.
Now, the objective of that, do not doubt me, the objective of that was twofold.
Obama, who at that time, he was reveling in this massive popularity like Trump has now, except Trump's is real and Obama was still in the hope stage.
But still, he had won the election and everybody was just having the media was still having orgasms over it and historical aspect, first black president.
They just barely contained themselves.
So he's universally popular.
The point was that Obama was now defining who the reasonable and responsible conservative media people are by choosing which ones to socialize with.
Well, it was no accident that he chose a bunch of academics who are not in the fight.
I mean, they write their opinions and they put them in their columns, but they're not, that's that they're theoreticians and academics.
And many of them, like Brooks, are not even full-fledged conservatives.
They were all establishment types.
But the point of it was that I wasn't there, nor was anybody from Fox News there.
It was designed to tell everybody in the drive-by media that Fox and Limbaugh don't matter.
Krauthammer was there as a Washington Post columnist, not as a commentator on Fox.
Those two things.
He did those two things expressly and specifically to try to get Washington and the media and Republicans to cast me aside, to throw me overboard.
And now Brian Stelter comes along saying that there are members of the regime.
Maybe if we had reached out to Limbaugh in the early days of their administration, maybe it would have been different.
There was no way to ever go.
These people still don't understand who liberals are, what Obama is.
I mean, he's a community organizing agitator.
There wasn't any desire for unity unless the unity could be achieved by people like me willingly conceding defeat.
There's no attempt at that.
And that's why Obama's upset.
A lot of Republicans went along with him.
A lot of Republicans, you know what?
It's hope and change.
We need to give it a chance.
Racial component, don't you know?
So that's what, but it must be bugging him.
I mean, if he keeps talking about it, it must be.
That's why I say I'm living rent-free.
And they had the mansion or whatever.
And it's there every day.
No Airbnb about this.
Hey, I want to congratulate Sean Spicer.
Yeah.
I was going to say, I've known so many Spicers in my life, and a couple of them have been real creeps.
But he's not.
People I worked with way, way, way, way back 35 years ago.
I think one of them's name was Scott.
And so I can keep, I'm tending to call it, Scott, Sean Spicer.
He was just named a White House press secretary.
And I wanted to send out kudos, congratulations.
He came here with Reince Priebus.
That's something.
I was getting lazy with Reince's name the other day, and I kept calling him Rince.
And I heard it.
It's Reince.
Two or three people must have sent me emails.
I know it's Reince.
It's just easier to say Rince.
But anyway, Spicer was with Reince when they came down here last summer.
It was in the midst, I think, of Democrat convention was actually going on nearby.
And Jason Miller, who has been named the director in the White House Communications Office, and he's great.
He's the guy I mentioned earlier who went out, was telling the Washington Post the kind of people Trump wants, that they're confident, they're not wallflowers, that they are well-spoken, passionate, confident.
And the Washington Post writes a story.
Take those comments.
Trump chooses people who look good.
As though if you're not a beautiful person, Trump won't give us a greatest example of, well, it's hard to pick one.
Classic example of fake news and distortion and misrepresentation.
Jason Miller is good.
All these guys are good and they can handle themselves.
Here's where are we going next before we marry in Groton, New York?
Welcome to the program.
How are you?
Well, I'm fine.
Thank you, Rush.
And longtime listener, grateful for all your encouragement all throughout the campaign season to hold the course.
Thank you very much.
Yeah.
And basically, my comment is very simple that tying into what you say about how immature the progressives, the liberals are, is the fact that they're punishing us because we don't agree with them.
And most of this, that was their goal.
That was what their leader, Hillary, was going to do was to continue to punish us for not being in their corner.
Well, now, you know, that, the second halfway, that is actually a very shrewd observation.
Well, thank you.
No, that's exactly what they were going to do.
Yeah.
They punish anybody that doesn't agree with them.
Exactly right.
That's basically what I've observed and everything you've said about how childish they are.
Well, they are.
Childish behaviors.
It is amazing that they are so many different psychological things.
Childish is there.
Dangerous is another.
Hey, look, Mary, iPhone 7 or 7 Plus.
Tell me, which one would you like?
I'd love a 7 Plus.
Yeah, and who's your carrier?
Verizon.
Verizon, you have a color preference?
The, did you say silver is available or white?
Hang on.
Okay.
Hang on through the break.
Don't go away.
Okay, we are back to Mary in Groton, New York.
Okay, Mary, here's the iPhone situation.
I want to offer you an option.
Okay.
The only colors I have in Sim Free, which means Verizon, is matte black and jet black.
Now, if you want a rose gold, I can try and get one.
No, a matte black is fine.
Well, no, wait.
Because you're not going to be the last one.
Okay.
But I can try if you want a rose gold.
I'm looking at an inventory.
I have a way.
What you want is available.
It's just whether or not I can get it by tomorrow and ship it by tomorrow so that you would have it on Christmas Eve.
Whatever works out for you.
What?
Whatever works out for you.
Either way.
Now, somebody's talking to me.
Just a second, Mary.
Right.
Well, whatever.
It doesn't matter if it's silver.
I don't have it.
It's the point.
So, if you want whatever color you want, I mean, I can try to get it sometime in time to ship it out to you tomorrow, which you would have for Saturday.
Okay.
But does it matter when you get it?
No, it does not.
Okay, so you want silver?
I'm going to get you a silver one.
I just won't be able to send it out today.
That's fine.
So you want silver Verizon, okay?
Okay.
All right.
Then you shall have it.
Now, keep in mind, too, that FedEx is just overwhelmed.
I haven't gotten anything on time this week because they're just overwhelmed with Christmas and stuff.
But it will eventually get there, okay?
Okay.
So hang on to Mr. Snerley, get your address, and we can send it all out when we get.
Oh, you're more than welcome.
Merry Christmas.
Here's where are we going next?
Jeannie in the Philippines.
Welcome to the program.
Great to have you.
Thank you.
Are you actually in the Philippines right now?
Right now, and it's 3:30 in the morning.
No kidding.
No kidding.
You know, we heard how the media howled when Priebus the other day said something about changing the daily press briefing.
And knowing how the media hates Trump, I wonder how would you suggest that he deals with getting his message out?
Do you think he's having trouble getting his message out?
No, no, I don't.
I just don't know how.
I know he uses Twitter a lot, and I don't know how he can do that.
Maybe he can.
Or how should Sean Spicer?
Why do you think he can't?
Is it because you don't think it's presidential to tweet?
Oh, no, I think it's fine.
It's just that if Sean Spicer is going to be up there having his press briefings if he does that, I wonder how he's going to deal with it because they're just going to be so awful to Trump and everything he says.
Well, that's the thing.
You can have a great White House press secretary and a communications director.
And if you have a media that's going to literally lie about what your spokesman says, and like the Washington Post did, folks, this is, it's incredible.
What Jason Miller said about Trump appointments is what anybody responds, we want somebody comfortable, we want somebody confident, we want somebody who's not a wallflower, we want somebody who believes in what we believe in.
We want somebody who's able to say it.
And the thing he said, we want somebody to be able to present and represent what we believe will.
And the Washington Post turned that into an entire story about how Trump only wants good-looking people, as in model type appearance for women or whatever.
A whole long story about it.
So here's Jason Miller, who couldn't have been more forthright and honest and upstanding what he said, totally distorted and misrepresented.
So your question is valid.
If the same thing had been said at a White House press briefing and then the Washington Post reporter makes a story like this, what's Trump going to do?
I think that Priebus, and you referenced this, I think Priebus gave a good indication of the way they're thinking.
Look, these are all smart people with Trump.
Would you agree with me when I say that?
I would.
Okay.
Totally.
They know what they're up against.
They know better than anybody how they're being lied about, smeared, and distorted.
And I think they want to look to make nice with the media like most Republican presidents and members of Congress are.
I think Trump looks at it as a battle.
And the idea that Priebus said we're looking at maybe changing the White House press briefing, these press conferences, I don't know what that means, but I'll bet you that they're looking at ways to come With different ways to reach the American people without using the media at all, because that's the great advantage and strength that Trump has.
That's great.
So I don't know what those methods will be beyond his tweeting.
But one thing, excuse me, one thing Trump does, the minute something's out there about him, it's not true, he blows it up.
He reacts to it.
Just like this tweet that Gingrich put out yesterday that Trump's no longer going to use draining the swamp, and Trump's out today saying, I don't know who's saying that, but I sure as hell I'm going to keep saying drain the swamp.
Nobody's saying it.
We're going to do it.
You know, people, all right, right on.
And then Newt's out there saying, I'm sorry, I goofed up and all that.
So I'm actually excited to see how they deal with this because I think this is one of the best and most intriguing ways that Trump is going to keep his supporter base with him because the media is every bit the enemy that the Democrat Party is because they're one and the same.
Right.
Okay, now we get the FedEx and iPhone to the Philippines.
This is going to be fascinating.
I'm sure you'd like a new iPhone or a 7 or 7 Plus, right?
Yes.
I told Snerdley, my husband, he's in or out right now to the state, so it can be sent to where he is.
Oh, well, fine and dandy.
So what kind do you want?
Does the 7 Plus have a better camera?
Well, it has two lenses.
One lens is identical to the camera in the 7.
The second camera in the Plus is a genuine telephoto at two times telephone.
It's not done by software.
It's an actual, it's not digital telephoto.
It's action and software.
It's a literal different lens.
And yes, it has more capability and greater flexibility.
You can do more with the 7 Plus camera, yes.
I'd like that.
Okay, now what?
You probably need to send you an unlocked version so you can plug in a 7 Plus Philippines.
A Globe here.
I use Globe.
I have a 6S.
Well, then you'd just be able to take the SIM card out of it and put it.
I'm going to send you an unlocked SEM-free.
You just take that SIM card out of your 6S and put it in this thing, and you're up and running.
Do you have a color preference?
Again, what I have available is jet black and matte black.
Jet black, fine.
Fine and dandy.
You hang on.
Mr. Snerdley will get your address if he hasn't already, and you'll get that and a one-year subscription to Rush24-7.
That's rushlimbaugh.com.
Here's Alex in Huma, Arizona.
Welcome to the program.
You know, some of the best city names in the world are in Arizona.
Absolutely.
Winslow, Arizona.
You got Sholo, Arizona, and now Huma of all plays, Huma, Arizona.
That's great.
It's actually Yuma, Arizona.
Oh, Yuma.
I'm sorry, Snerdley.
Okay.
That's okay.
I can live and dream that it's Huma.
That's all right.
Absolutely.
So, Rush, here's a question that I had for you.
You know, we're a single income family.
We homeschool our kids by choice.
And my insurance rates are going up by $2,400 next year.
And in light of what we have now, and now we have Congress, we have the House, the Senate, and the White House.
I can't help but think back at the two years of Bush 43, where we had all three and got nothing done.
So what do you think is different?
Let me understand the question you're at, the essence of your question, the nature of your question.
Are you suggesting, or is it in your mind that everybody's excited here and really shouldn't be because we've already been here before and nothing got done?
Republicans had the House, Republicans had the Senate.
When George Bush was in the way that we didn't get anything done.
And so you're asking what's different?
What's going to make it different this time?
Yeah, I'm not saying that Trump is Bush at all, and I'm cautiously optimistic that he will be different.
But what's my question is, I guess where's the hope for us that Congress is going to act differently now that they have control?
Well, right now the answer is Trump, and that's it.
That's the only answer.
Well, I hope that I really, like I said, I'm cautiously optimistic.
I've been here down here working on the border for 25 years, and I really don't, nothing seems to really change no matter who's in charge.
Well, I understand.
I mean, it makes much more common sense to think that something that has happened before will happen again rather than to think something that has never happened will happen.
You're much more.
But Trump is the wildcard here.
Trump's overwhelming It makes me mad is, you know, we're here, our insurance rates are going up, and now we hear this story with, like you said, it might be true, might not be, that Congress is thinking about maybe holding off on Obamacare.
Well, there's so much going around about that.
I've even done something.
I've actually called some people about it.
The three things going around about Obamacare, this, that we're going to repeal it.
Everybody agrees we're going to repeal it, but that doesn't mean anything because we're not going to replace it for either two years or three years.
Or I've also been, no, no, no, Rush, we have a replacement.
I can't tell you what's in it, but we got a replacement ready to go.
And now we have the story today that's in thehill.com that I think is traced back to the Washington Post that Republicans are now saying that they might not eliminate the taxes in Obamacare with the repeal immediately.
Look, I can understand if you choose to believe that, and then you have red flags dancing all around you.
I can totally understand because it doesn't make sense.
Why start talking now about repeal, repeal, repeal, but we're not going to actually do it.
It doesn't make any sense.
The source for that story, by the way, is an unnamed lobbyist.
And lobbyists are lobbyists are very unhappy people right now.
Trump has singled them out.
Trump didn't use or need any of them during the campaign.
There might be a couple that donated, but in terms of the lobbying industry, he's not beholden to it.
And they don't like that.
They love being beholden to.
And they're not.
There's a lot of people that are still ticked, even on the so-called Republican side, that Trump won.
So I think we're just going to have to wait.
And do keep in mind that anything in the media that makes you feel like you have been sold out is designed to make you feel that way.
And distrust it.
Wait until it happens.
Don't get all fatalistic unnecessarily.
The wild card here is Trump.
The great unknown and something that we haven't had before is Trump.
The Republicans, we know, are reluctant to make any big changes because they're just the Republicans.
But Trump doesn't care.
Trump is all about big changes and getting things done.
And right now, the Republicans owe the fact that they won the House and Senate to Donald Trump.
And therefore, at this stage, he's got, they keep talking about his first 200 days.
That's the length of time I think people think that he's got to really come in and make his mark.
Because at some point, it happens to every president.
Members of the House and Senate separate a bit, start getting protective, self-interested.
If Trump can keep this, it's crucial for Trump to keep this relationship with his supporters.
If he keeps doing these rallies, if he keeps going out on these thank you tours, if he keeps demonstrating that he's got the American people with him, that's the greatest bit of ammunition he's got to make sure people in Congress follow along with him because that's the people.
They are the voters, and they are the reason the Republicans even won the seats that they won.
They and Trump.
So I'm not pessimistic about this stuff yet.
I have been in the past, but this is an opportunity for something that we haven't seen in a while, like you said.
And I'm waiting patiently for it all to shape out.
This next month is going to be very, very fraught with potential danger.
And every effort's going to be made to depress you and anger you and make you think it's just going to be the same old, same old again.
I would caution you to fight that instinct every time it overcomes you.
Back in just a second.
Don't go away.
Okay, folks, that's it.
We are out of busy broadcast time for today, but just for today, we are going to be back here tomorrow.
Three more exciting, busy broadcast hours.
It'll be my last three for this year, at least last three live hours.
And I can't wait.
We'll have fun tomorrow.
We'll look forward to whatever's happening between now and then and be on top of it all.
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