Dec. 27, 2016 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:40
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|---|---|
| Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24 7 podcast. | |
| Oh, him. | |
| Yeah, it's me. | |
| Don't turn the radio off. | |
| This is going to be good. | |
| I have things to say on today's program. | |
| And by the way, if you're disappointed and you turn the radio on thinking, well, I'm going to see what Rush has to say today. | |
| I mean, really, serious. | |
| What were you thinking? | |
| No one important works this week. | |
| Anyone who has any status at their company, they're off. | |
| You go to any American business, you go to any American business today, it's the riffraff, it's the fill-ins. | |
| This is the biggest week ever for the temps. | |
| Temps are called in. | |
| The reason I am here is because I am not Rush. | |
| In fact, I'm not doing my own program this week because I'm a big enough deal on my own program that I'm not doing my program this week because who works between Christmas and New Year's if you're important. | |
| But I'm completely irrelevant in the old overall Rush Limboss scheme of things. | |
| So I am here doing the program while Rush takes this week off. | |
| What shocks, and not surprisingly, I see Freaky Friday sitting across from me turning the dials. | |
| He's a fill-in, just as I'm a fill-in. | |
| He's not a permanent constant presence here on the staff. | |
| What really blows me away is somehow Bo Snerdly is working. | |
| Did you get demoted? | |
| What happened to you? | |
| No. | |
| He's working this week to make sure that everything goes well, figuring that if we're going to turn the program over to a guest host like me, he needs to be closely monitored so as to not foul up the entire program. | |
| Anyway, I'm on like a. | |
| If I was a drug addict, I could explain this where you just delude yourself into thinking you're happy when even though your life is completely falling apart on you. | |
| I don't do any of that stuff. | |
| I am on just like a seven or eight week total roll of happiness, walking around like one of those crazy people with a great big grin in his face. | |
| Almost nothing can knock me out off of it. | |
| Flying to New York during the holiday period, airports packed with people, bathrooms in the airports, filthy, crowds shoving up, none of that. | |
| I'm just smiling my way through it. | |
| Get to the hotel packed with children, tourist week in New York, week between Christmas and New Year's, packed with kids yelling, running around, yelling and screaming, banging on your hotel room door, one o'clock in the morning, perfectly fine with it. | |
| This is I this might be the greatest time to be an American of my lifetime. | |
| Admittedly, I'm not that old. | |
| I'm only 31. | |
| So I don't have a whole lot of history to that's not true, by the way. | |
| I don't have a whole lot of history to work off of, but this is a spectacular time. | |
| You've got to understand what happened in this election and what has happened since. | |
| This has been not just the change in the government. | |
| This is a cultural revolution that is going on. | |
| This is half the country standing up and stopping the other half of the country from destroying America. | |
| And that other half, they thought this was all downhill. | |
| They thought, okay, we're gonna roll through Trump first. | |
| We had eight years of Obama, now it's gonna be Hillary, and after that, it's gonna be another lefty, and we're just gonna keep on remaking America, and everything's gonna be different. | |
| And those right wingers, they are done forever. | |
| It's all not only been stopped, it's being reversed. | |
| I don't know, other than maybe a random Packers Super Bowl win, if I've ever had more fun than I had on election night. | |
| Now I understand that for a lot of you that's I'm talking about history. | |
| Seven weeks ago, we've had a seven weeks, what is it, eight weeks, seven weeks, something like that. | |
| We've had a lot of things that have happened since then, but this is my first opportunity to talk to the Rush audience since we had the results in the election, and there's some things that I think I'd like to talk about to put my own perspective on what's happened. | |
| But before we go there, I want to share with you a story that in my own mind at least, it relates to the political and cultural divide that we have in the country. | |
| On Christmas Day, I got one of these news alerts on my phone. | |
| George Michael dies. | |
| So I do know what everybody does whenever you get news, you text other people with the news. | |
| As if they Don't have the same news alerts coming on their phone, but when we get news like this, we text other people. | |
| I don't post this stuff on social media because I'm terrified of posting things on social media because I've seen what happens to people who do post things on social media, but I don't do that. | |
| Anyway, I texted a friend of mine. | |
| And okay, this might be in bad taste, and I'm gonna tell it on myself, but I texted him, I guess this really is George Michael's last Christmas. | |
| That was the text. | |
| And a few minutes pass, and the guy texts back, you gotta help me out on this. | |
| I don't know what you're talking about. | |
| Well, George Michael was the leader of Wham. | |
| Wham's big huge Christmas hit was last Christmas. | |
| You can't listen to a radio station that plays Christmas music without hearing last Christmas at least once an hour. | |
| The song's now about 30 years old, but I'd say it's one of the bigger new Christmas songs of the last 40 years. | |
| It's constantly played. | |
| But this guy who's not socially and culturally unaware, he knows about music, he knows who stars are. | |
| He never put that song together with George Michael, and George Michael was completely off his radar to the point that I don't think he even remembered who he was. | |
| So, okay, that's Christmas. | |
| I fly to New York yesterday. | |
| I do what I always do when I land in New York. | |
| I pick up the New York Post, and they're on page one, on the cover of the New York Post, is the exact obnoxious comment that I made. | |
| This is George Michael's last Christmas. | |
| So the New York Post, which is playing obviously primarily to a New York audience, they thought that this was a big enough deal that it's on the top of page one of the newspaper. | |
| And I guess this just kind of brought home to me that we really are a nation anymore that has no real shared cultural references other than maybe the Super Bowl. | |
| Other than that, there isn't a shared American culture. | |
| There are entertainers and movies and TV shows that some people watch, and then there's a totally different culture that's followed by other people. | |
| I'll give you the most stark example I can imagine of that. | |
| There is a huge chunk of America that regularly listens to, follows, and knows about Rush Limbaugh and admires and likes him. | |
| There is also a huge segment of America that is aware of, follows, and enjoys Lena Dunham. | |
| This is the same country. | |
| And I think I've come up with the two most polar opposite human beings in the United States of America with Rush and Lena Dunham. | |
| If you don't know who Lena Dunham is, I'll come up with a more common reference for you. | |
| How about Joy Behar? | |
| Same kind of thing, right? | |
| Well, you wonder why we have this divide over elections. | |
| You wonder why one side is so elated and the other side is so unhappy. | |
| We come with these things right now from totally different frames of reference. | |
| In fact, I came up with this list here. | |
| Was kind of triggered by something that I saw in the New York Times, in which I put together a list of either entertainers or television programs. | |
| And you could probably tell who somebody voted for in the last election, based on whether they are or aren't a fan of the following. | |
| Now, again, there's exceptions, and I find myself on both of these lists. | |
| But by and large, I'll throw the name out, and then you tell me if you think most of the fans of that person or that show or that whatever voted for Trump or voted for Hillary. | |
| Carrie Underwood. | |
| It's Trump. | |
| And I'm sure she knows her audience. | |
| I guarantee you, more Carrie Underwood fans voted for Donald Trump than voted for Hillary Clinton. | |
| The voice is Hillary. | |
| Lena Dunham, Who I mentioned. | |
| Hillary again. | |
| Kanye. | |
| Hillary. | |
| Take it back on the voice. | |
| I meant the view. | |
| The view's the stupid show that Joy Behar is on. | |
| The voice that might be actually Donald Trump's category. | |
| Stephen Colbert. | |
| Hillary. | |
| Pawn stars. | |
| You ever watch Pawn Stars? | |
| Yeah, you too. | |
| Pawn star not porn stars. | |
| Pawn stars. | |
| You know the pawn shop show that everybody watches, and the guys go into the place in Las Vegas, and the guy now, you know, those guys, pawn stars. | |
| Well, anyway, that's Trump. | |
| Obvious example, Duck Dynasty, Trump. | |
| Here's a good one. | |
| Soccer. | |
| Hillary, the NHL, Trump. | |
| I can go on and on about this. | |
| But the point that I make is that you've got the popular culture dominated by social and cultural liberals who cannot relate to and do not understand half the country. | |
| And this is driving everything. | |
| It's driving the anger that many of us feel toward the mainstream media. | |
| It's driving this whole phony fake news story. | |
| It's driving the unhinged reaction of many people on the left to Trump's victory. | |
| It's almost at the root of everything. | |
| This election produced in America the most violent and extreme reactions of any election I've ever seen. | |
| The people who passionately supported Trump, and I think a good two-thirds of Trump's supporters passionately supported him are elated beyond the election of anyone else other than maybe Reagan. | |
| There's just this emotional outpouring. | |
| I can't tell you the number of people who have told me that watching television on election night was one of the greatest nights of their life. | |
| And my reaction I can't remember watching television and enjoying an evening that much. | |
| On the other hand, you have now seven weeks of just this emotional anger and resentment coming from the people who supported Hillary Clinton, Michelle Obama. | |
| Well, we don't have hope anymore. | |
| That's how they actually think. | |
| This is a country that is made up of people that have almost nothing in common with one another anymore, other than maybe the Super Bowl. | |
| Just about everybody watches the Super Bowl. | |
| Otherwise, there aren't shared experiences. | |
| And the point of my bringing all of this up is the reason the media missed what was going on with the Trump movement, the reason the media didn't grasp, why so many of these things that were supposed to knock out or nuke Trump didn't. | |
| The reason the media thought the release of the access Hollywood tape would finish off Trump, whereas I don't think it affected his popularity at all. | |
| Is that the media does not relate to understand or even know anybody that's in that other half of the country? | |
| I guarantee you, everybody in the mass media would have gotten that joke that I told, or the comment I made, or the crack I made about the passing of George Michael, who, by the way, I actually like, that was right in my cultural coming of age period. | |
| I thought wham was pretty good. | |
| But what George Michael represented was kind of a metrosexual, urban, cosmopolitan, international form of entertainment that I think a good chunk of the country never really got into and has turned away from. | |
| And that divide translates, I think, into our politics. | |
| I listened to some of the comments that people make about Russia's program and about Russia himself. | |
| And you all know what I mean. | |
| The looking down your nose the stuff, oh, that Rush Limbaugh, oh, he does this, he does it. | |
| Talking about Russians, though, this program is the worst possible thing that could ever be made, that it's just this horrible. | |
| And then there are all of you who listen to Rush And admire the show. | |
| I don't think many people that control the media, communication, entertainment, politics, even political analysts, have any understanding of this huge segment of America that do things like watch Duck Dynasty or listen to Rush or get into fantasy football or all of these other things that a lot of people kind of look down their noses at. | |
| Anyway, my name is Mark Belling, and I'm happy to be filling in for Rush Limbaugh. | |
| Mark Belling on EIB for Rush Limbaugh. | |
| I want to tell you a story about me doing the program a few months ago. | |
| It was right after Trump had clinched the Republican nomination, but it was before the convention. | |
| And I had a little bit of trepidation about coming to do the program, even though I've I'm clearly the longest standing guest host in the history of this program. | |
| I wasn't here at the very beginning, but I've lasted a long time filling in every now and then for Rush, and a lot of you in the audience have kind of gotten to know the guest hosts and the style and where we come from on these issues, and I had some concerns about doing the program at that point in time, because I was, I was never a never Trumper, because as we've seen, saying never is very, very dangerous. | |
| But I was a harsh critic of Donald Trump when he was running for the Republican nomination for president. | |
| You may recall that when Trump came to Wisconsin during the Wisconsin presidential primaries, there were several conservative talk show hosts, myself included, that were trashing him and aggressively urging people to not vote for him. | |
| And Trump got creamed in Wisconsin. | |
| Ted Cruz, who is the candidate I was backing, won anyone big. | |
| It was the last hiccup for Trump on his march to the Republican nomination for president. | |
| But I said all the things that a lot of these never Trumpers were saying, that Trump doesn't have the demeanor for to be the president. | |
| He doesn't isn't somebody the conservatives can trust. | |
| He's got a history of being a liberal, he's somebody who doesn't seem to take things seriously. | |
| He pops off and says things that aren't true, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. | |
| Those were the opinions that I held. | |
| I'm also aware that that was not the stance of Rush, who was, I think, throughout the campaign, relatively neutral and commented on a number of the Republican candidates, mostly positively. | |
| I reached the conclusion prior to my having done the program here this time that I was talking about that I was going to support Trump for president now that he had clinched the Republican nomination because, and it wasn't just this notion of the lesser of two evils, that without regard to whether or not Trump would disappoint me, there was zero chance that Hillary Clinton would not be a disaster for this nation. | |
| The Supreme Court was just the starting point. | |
| Every other arm of government, but also this continuing drag of dragging America into the type of country that we've never been before. | |
| So I was warming up to Trump, and I supported him, and I was fairly honest with the audience about where I was coming from. | |
| And we even did a segment or two on it, and I took a number of calls from people, their cruise backers, Marco Rubio backers. | |
| A lot of people were in the same category that I was in. | |
| They didn't much like Trump, but they were coming around. | |
| And we also heard from some people who weren't going to come around. | |
| They disliked Trump. | |
| That's where I was then. | |
| Here's where I am now. | |
| And I would really urge those of you who couldn't warm up to Donald Trump when he was a candidate for president to listen to me on this because I was where you are. | |
| I am elated at this. | |
| I think we are looking at potentially one of the greatest and most important presidents ever. | |
| Every indication is that Donald Trump is president is going to govern from the right, from the mainstream conservative right. | |
| The cabinet selections that he has made announced so far are outstanding, and many of them, people who have been activists in criticizing liberal public policy in the areas to which they have been appointed. | |
| Trump himself is showing remarkable savvy in knowing how to deal with the media and in dealing already with other countries. | |
| I think we are looking at what could be a remarkable and transformative American presidency. | |
| I didn't see that coming. | |
| But I'm sorry, if you're a conservative, you've got to be blind not to see it now. | |
| This is great, great stuff. | |
| So if you're not on board yet, get on board now. | |
| The phone number is 1-800-282-2882. | |
| For those of you who aren't used to my guest hosting, you can call any time you want. | |
| I go off on these long things, and we'll work in calls and we'll talk about the things that I've been talking about and what you'd like to talk about as well. | |
| So 1-800-282-2882 is the phone number. | |
| Let's start in Workentown, West Virginia. | |
| Keith, it's your turn on EIB with Mark Belling. | |
| Hi, Mark, thanks for taking my call. | |
| Sure thing. | |
| Can you hear me? | |
| Yeah, I can. | |
| Go ahead. | |
| Go ahead, Keith. | |
| Oh, okay. | |
| Uh yeah, I uh the last time I talked to you on the radio, um, you had said that uh you think thought that Trump was going to win the election, and I didn't think that was really possible because of the uh media bias. | |
| But uh he kind of set me straight on that. | |
| But my question is is um now that Trump has introduced some of these issues, like mainly immigration, uh, and the genie's kind of been let out of the bottle. | |
| Do you think that um it's possible to maybe put that genie back in the bottle? | |
| What do you how do you mean that? | |
| Um, well, uh immigration was kind of not uh a main issue uh when uh believe Romney ran, but uh you know it became a big issue in this election. | |
| Right. | |
| Uh thank you thank you for the call, Keith. | |
| Yeah, let me respond to that. | |
| He mentioned the first thing with regard to the mainstream media. | |
| One of the takeaways that comes from this election is that the mainstream media has lost significant influence over many Americans. | |
| And there's been a little but not enough introspection from them on this. | |
| The reason the mainstream media was unable to stop Trump is that half the country has tuned them out and is ignoring the things that they are trying to tell us are important. | |
| Now the other half of the country, they almost seem to be ungettable right now. | |
| But for the half that simply is a when the mainstream media decided that that Access Hollywood Billy Bush tape that Trump made several years, you know, more than a decade ago, was a big, big, big big deal. | |
| A lot of people thought that that was destroying Trump's chances of winning. | |
| The Trump voters weren't moved by that. | |
| It's not like in the past where the media decided that something was a major scandal, so therefore it is a major scandal, that people would follow their lead from the media. | |
| Oh, the media says this is a big deal, therefore it must be a big deal. | |
| There are people who aren't buying what the media has to say. | |
| And Trump, I think, is making it very clear that his way of communicating with the American public, now that he's going to be the president, is not going to be the old way of holding the daily press readings and allowing everything that he offers to be filtered through them by being so overtly partisan, | |
| by being so far on one side, they have discredited themselves, and in the process, they've lost the ability to be the big decider of things that they were in the past. | |
| Now, the caller made the comment about issues like immigration and so on. | |
| Trump does have some challenges. | |
| He ran on a lot of things, and there are a lot of issues that need to be addressed. | |
| Taxes, rebuilding the American economy, infrastructure, repealing Obamacare. | |
| then there are the issues that he brought up on the campaign, like immigration, the border, and so on. | |
| You've got a lot of people who voted for Trump who have many, many different priorities. | |
| Some want them to deal with this, some want him to deal with the other thing. | |
| There's only so much that you can do, and there's only so much that can be done in the first 120 days. | |
| So there might be some impatience if one issue is pushed to the side for at least a little while while he's working on two, three, four, or five of the other ones. | |
| That's for the genie being let out of the bottle. | |
| Well, it is out of the bottle. | |
| And Trump did win. | |
| In terms of the ability of the media to stymie him, I think that's going to be limited because half the country has chosen to tune them out to, I'm going to take a shot at this to Mecular California and Evan. | |
| Evan, you're on the Russian Limbaugh program with Mark Belling. | |
| Well, Mark, thanks for taking my call. | |
| I'm going to say that the vast portion of America wants what's right. | |
| However, the militant minority that is the media and the left does not play by the rules. | |
| How do we combat an enemy that does not play by the rules? | |
| They don't want what we want and they are not bothered by facts. | |
| Now we did step A. We eject, we elected someone who is not them at all. | |
| What is step B through Z to combat an enemy that does not use rules or facts? | |
| Yeah, I mean, you're you're suggesting it's small. | |
| I think it's larger, I think it's larger than small. | |
| I think that the left and what has become of the left is essentially the people that voted for Hillary Clinton, and it's probably most of them. | |
| So I don't think it's necessarily as small as you think. | |
| I think Trump has laid out the way that you deal with this, and that is you ignore their opposition because they're your own supporters aren't listening to them. | |
| Trump is going everything Trump does, they're going to act like it's the end of the world. | |
| Oh my God, this is extreme. | |
| This is terrible. | |
| This is awful. | |
| You're already seeing it with a cabinet nominee. | |
| Nominees, oh, he's a voice that he's appointed all these billionaires. | |
| These are people that need serious vetting. | |
| These are people that are inexperienced. | |
| There's too many people from the military. | |
| There's too many people from business. | |
| You've got to stop worrying about what it is that they have to say because the people that voted for Trump, which is roughly half the country, don't care what those people have to say. | |
| You have to, now that you have a Republican majority in the House and the Senate, put pressure on those representatives and senators to not buckle in the face of media pressure. | |
| I don't think it's going to be that big of a problem in the House because a lot of those House members themselves have come to see that the media is largely a paper tiger. | |
| Thank you for the call. | |
| I want to go to uh let's try Eric in Kansas City, Missouri, if we can take him. | |
| Eric, you're on the Russian Limbaugh program with Mark Belling. | |
| Hey, good afternoon. | |
| Thanks for taking my call. | |
| Um, I wanted to ask you, you were talking about um Mr. Trump's appointees. | |
| Um, who would you say is your your favorite appointee so far? | |
| And who would be one that if you had made the decision might have made a different choice? | |
| Thank you. | |
| Thank you. | |
| I'm glad he mentioned that. | |
| Because in my comment on the previous segment, I was talking about how frustrated I am that there are still people on the conservative side of things that are wringing their hands over Trump or not on board. | |
| The never Trump movement isn't dead. | |
| There is a segment of conservatism. | |
| It comes largely from the magazines, the National Review and the Weekly Standard have been holding their nose or cheering against Trump for weeks, if not months. | |
| I don't know if that's the reason that Bill Crystal isn't the editor of the Weekly Standard anymore or not. | |
| But it's been there. | |
| Some outspoken conservative columnists, Crowdhammer, who I have great respect for, and is a great writer. | |
| He's clearly not there with Trump. | |
| There are guys like Eric Erickson, talk show host who has filled in on this program, critical of Trump. | |
| Jonah Goldberg, every column he writes, he seems to have some sort of reason as to why he's disapproving of Donald Trump. | |
| And I'm just asking them to do something that's almost impossible for a lot of people to do. | |
| Admit you're wrong. | |
| It's liberating. | |
| I was wrong about Trump. | |
| Now, maybe two years in, Trump's going to turn tail on us and he's going to go all lefty. | |
| I don't think that. | |
| But right now, every single sign we have is that this guy is somebody who knows how to win, who wants to reassert Americanism and American strength, and he's going to reverse terrible liberal policy on just about every issue that's out there. | |
| Look at this cabinet list. | |
| Now the caller asked me to name my my favorite cabinet member, and I'm going to do that. | |
| But look at the list. | |
| Education, Betsy DeVos. | |
| She is a major supporter of school choice and charter schools and a major critic of public education. | |
| Energy, Rick Perry. | |
| Can you find a guy in America more aggressive in supporting drilling and American exploration? | |
| Health and Human Services, Tom Price, member of Congress, probably the most critical member of Obamacare in the entire House of Representatives. | |
| Homeland Security, John Kelly, strong guy on the border. | |
| Justice, Jeff Sessions, hardliner, law and order, hardline and immigration, labor, Andrew Pudzer. | |
| Major critic of increasing the minimum wage, major critic of pro union regulation regulations, and a few others. | |
| Scott Pruitt, EPA. | |
| Somebody who has made it clear he doesn't buy this whole argument that man is destroying the climate, and therefore we have to have significant reductions in carbon emissions. | |
| You can go through the entire list here. | |
| Trump is choosing people that not only don't share the liberal view in the age in the areas of the agencies that they regulate, but in fact are complete critics of the direction that we had been going in. | |
| This tells me he intends to reverse public policy that's been inflicted on us even from before Obama. | |
| So I mean, guys like Eric Erickson, who I think is a sharp guy. | |
| Guys like Crowdhaber, who's a smart guy. | |
| They've got to get past this whole thing, oh, Trump tweets too much, and Trump doesn't always seem to take these issues that seriously, and Trump's style, well, I don't know that it's all that presidential. | |
| And pay attention to the big thing. | |
| This guy is planning to be an extremely conservative president, and he knows how to win. | |
| For years, people on my side have been begging Republican elected officials to stand up to the media and stop worrying about what it is that they're going to say about them. | |
| And to fight back and to call them out. | |
| It's the only way you can beat them. | |
| We don't have to go running for the high heels every time a liberal uses an unfair tactic on us. | |
| Well, here you've got a guy who's doing that. | |
| And he's assembling an outstanding team. | |
| There are shortcomings of Donald Trump. | |
| And some of the things that I said about Donald Trump when I was critical of him are probably still true. | |
| But take a look at what's going on right now. | |
| As somebody who went from way over there to way over here and just elated at what Trump is doing. | |
| I will tell you that it is liberating to realize that you may have been wrong about some things. | |
| You know, I when I was young, I was a liberal. | |
| Gradually, life happened. | |
| I learned, God blessed me with an open mind, and I came around to the conservatism that I'm at right now. | |
| Most people who have had that transition are more convicted convinced and solid and confident in their positions than people who've been conservative all along because we've been on both sides and we know what it's like to think like a liberal, and we were never comfortable with the lack of sense that we are making to ourselves, and we know what it's like to think like a conservative, and you have a greater confidence in your point of view. | |
| Well, the same thing needs to be done by some of these people on my side who have not yet bought into Trump. | |
| Move on over here. | |
| Open up your mind, take a look at what's going on. | |
| Trust me, you will be elated at this. | |
| I think we are on the verge of something very, very special. | |
| I'm Mark Belling filling in for Rush Limb. | |
| Mark Belling filling in for Rush. | |
| Did you notice that I never answer the guy's question who's my who's my favorite of uh the cabinet selections? | |
| I like a lot of them. | |
| I guess, and some of it depends on What issues of your are your highest priority? | |
| I really like Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education for a lot of reasons. | |
| First of all, she was never a big Trump supporter. | |
| She, in fact, is very close to Jeb Bush. | |
| Yet President elect Trump has made it clear with a number of these selections and some of the people that he's been talking to that he's not going to be running a grudge-filled administration. | |
| He's going to choose the best people that he can find. | |
| And they're going to be judged based on their performance. | |
| Anyway, Betsy DeVos is a major American reformer of education. | |
| She has written eloquently on the problems of the public school system in the United States, especially urban America. | |
| She's a major supporter of charter schools and school choice. | |
| That tells me that federal education policy is going to be moving in the direction of giving young people alternative choices in education rather than forcing them into government-run public schools, which in urban areas are mostly horrible schools, and in all areas are filled with liberal ideologizing rather than teaching. | |
| I also like Tom Price at Health and Human Services. | |
| It tells me that they're going to do the rewrite of Obamacare and American health policy really, really well. | |
| As for the choice that you said, is there a choice that he made that uh I'm not as sure about? | |
| I'm not critical of any of them. | |
| There isn't a single nominee that he's made that I have concerns about. | |
| I do wonder about Wilbur Ross, the billionaire Secretary of Commerce. | |
| I mean, he's 79 years old, he's richer than just about anybody that's out there. | |
| Does he really want to run a federal bureaucracy filled with a bunch of liberals who are going to try to obstruct him at every level? | |
| I wonder if some of these people that are going into the administration just know just how bad the bureaucracy is. | |
| We're changing the people at the top, and you'll have the undersecretaries, they're all going to be people chosen by the new secretary, the new secretary of each of these departments. | |
| But that the people in the bureaucracy, the Washington bureaucracy, and then all of these field offices around the country, these are liberals. | |
| And they are going to be resisted. | |
| You go back 30 years, this is what Reagan had to confront. | |
| The bureaucracy didn't buy into any of the stuff that he wanted to do. | |
| Each of these cabinet secretaries is going to be forced to buck up against middle management that is going to try to obstruct them. | |
| And some of these folks that don't come, that come from a business background, I don't know that they'll have the patience to be able to handle some of the garbage that they're going to have to put up with. | |
| That's not a criticism of Ross, maybe. | |
| Just take a look at the fact that Ross took this job. | |
| Hubert Ross needs to be Secretary of Commerce. | |
| Like he needs a hole in the head. | |
| He's 79 years old. | |
| He's been a major financier, he's been a major investor, a man of incredible accomplishment. | |
| He's got all sorts of money. | |
| At this stage in his life, he doesn't need to go to Washington, D.C. and take over a federal agency. | |
| He's doing it because he wants to serve his country. | |
| For all the criticism we have, oh, Trump's name and a bunch of billionaires. | |
| He's choosing people who believe that they have a president here who will make a difference. | |
| Wilbert Ross doesn't do this job unless he thinks his boss, President Trump, is going to allow him to move forward on significant change. | |
| These are people who believe they can make America better. | |
| That Trump line, we're going to make America great again. | |
| I think the reason you're seeing people like Tillison from Exxon Mobil going to the State Department, they believe they can truly make our country better or they wouldn't be taking on jobs that are as difficult as the ones they've taken. | |
| Mark Bellingham for Rush. | |
| Mark Belling filling in today for Rush Limble. | |
| I started the hour off by talking about the passing of George Michael and that led into some comments about the cultural divide, which I think is also a political divide here in the United States and the lack of a shared culture with the people on the coasts and in the big cities, primarily, being of one mindset and the whole rest of the country having different values, different priorities in a different way of viewing things. | |
| Anyway, this whole business of celebrities commenting on the issues of the day, This is rife with peril. | |
| Remember Sarah Michelle Geller? | |
| Friday said, is that the one from Sex of the City? | |
| No, that's Sarah Jessica Parker. | |
| Sarah Michelle Geller was Buffy in Buffy and the Vampire. | |
| So she tweets. | |
| You think it's a problem with Trump tweeting. | |
| Some of these celebrities that now just decide that they're not going to go through their PR people and they're going to tweet on their own. | |
| She tweets how terrible she feels about the death of Boy George. | |
| Apparently, her mind, George Michael, and Boy George became the same person. | |
| Anyway, Boy George is alive, which now that you think about it, that's kind of surprising. |
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