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Dec. 27, 2016 - Rush Limbaugh Program
35:23
December 27, 2016, Tuesday, Hour #3
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Yeah, you know, Wisconsin went for Trump.
You know how amazing that is?
Wisconsin had not voted for a Republican for president since Reagan in 84 when Reagan won 49 states.
Now my state Wisconsin is in the midst of a major transformation from a primarily Democratic to a primarily Republican state.
The Republicans control almost everything now in Wisconsin, and they carried the state for Trump.
This whole yapping that Democrats have been trying to do when they keep every week they come up with a different version of why they lost the election, the new wood now, Obama.
Well, if only I could have run, we would we then would have won.
The excuse for the last two weeks was somehow the Russian hacking did it.
Really?
The Russians told Hillary Clinton not to come to Wisconsin to campaign even once.
Hillary Clinton did not campaign in my state once in the general election.
That's how in the bag they thought Wisconsin was for the Democrats.
What they and so many others failed to pick up on.
And I'm not going to suggest that I picked up on it all either, was the depth in Middle America of the feeling that people had that we have to change direction.
It's in small communities, rural communities, these medium-sized cities.
This is where the Trump mandate is coming from.
And when I say mandate, those people voted in overwhelming number.
I was just back in my hometown for Christmas, city of about 13,000 that's part of a metro area of a couple hundred thousand.
The downtown doesn't exist.
People go to the malls of the larger city, doesn't exist.
A lot of the mills of the factories, they're done.
There's new manufacturing that's come back.
We have new blue collar jobs in America that are growing and feels like energy.
But a lot of the things that define America and many of these communities are running away on them.
A media that's sitting there in New York and Washington has no way of figuring out what's going on in Wassaw, Wisconsin, or in Otumwa, Iowa.
It's communities like that that produced way higher numbers for Trump than Republicans normally get.
Trump is such an unusual figure.
He's a guy who's a billionaire.
Yet the little guy relates to him.
Trump is from New York.
Yet he's a guy that got slaughtered in the vote of New York, and he did huge in rural communities and small, you know, the smaller areas.
Well, I just I've been arguing that I think that this is a transformative moment in America where the middle of the country, the rest of the country, the country that is disregarded, the country that is told that it is bigoted, the country that is told that if it believes certain things, it's because it's racist, fought back and said, you know, okay, fine, Van Jones.
You're on CNN, but you aren't the boss of the country.
Okay, fine Obama talking as acting as though you're somebody that's trying to drag along this nation of buffoons into a more enlightened view of things.
We're pulling our country back.
I've got a story here.
I found this today in the Wall Street Journal.
There are some stories that are almost like perfect.
They allow you to make like 47 different points all at one.
The story is about a fight that's going on among the very small theater groups in California.
And by theaters I mean live theater, stage acting.
The union, of course, everything in California is unionized.
The union that represents actors in the state of California is actors equity.
They represent stage actors that play at the Greek theater and the big theaters in Los Angeles and live performances.
They've reached agreement on a new contract that calls for actors to get the minimum wage.
Now, I'm surprised that actors apparently weren't getting the minimum wage in California, but actors were exempt from the minimum wage.
In California, I guess that now means ten dollars an hour.
This isn't the $15 an hour that people are marching around the country demanding and saying that McDonald's is greedy because they're not paying you $15 to flip it a burger, $10 an hour.
So who do you think is upset about this in California?
This is where the story gets beautiful.
The left.
A number of actors and small theater operators, including Ed Asner, who might be the biggest lefty that Hollywood has ever produced, Ed Harris, he's another one.
They are demanding an exemption from the requirement that small theaters must pay the minimum wage.
Ed Asner, Ed Harris, the others, they're saying that this is going to put these theater groups out of business.
We can't pay the minimum wage at some of these small companies.
Why, for heaven's sakes, many of them perform for f audience, they don't charge for tickets, they've got no budget, they work off of donations.
We're going to cut off the lifeblood of the theater industry if we're forced to make these payments.
Some actors, why they're not even going to be able to get work because if these small theaters shut down because they can't afford to pay everybody $10 an hour, some of the actors won't be able to act at all.
This is where new stars are found.
This is where people who have a love of the craft are able to perform.
It's where people engage and get in front of live audiences.
But if we have to pay this minimum wage, we won't be able to survive.
So some of these actors knowing that raising their pay to the minimum wage will cost them their jobs, and led by celebrity actors like Ed Asner and Ed Harris, they're suing the union.
They're suing their own union saying they don't want to be paid the minimum wage.
Now, isn't this just beautiful?
Here you've got these lefties that are running around the country talking about green in corporate America.
We've got to raise them, we've got to have a living wage.
You can't raise a family on $8 and $900.
We've got to get $15 an hour.
But somehow, when they themselves have to pay it, when struggling small theaters have to pay it and can't afford to do so, why then it's all different.
My guess is that Ed Asner is every bit the liberal now that he's been for the last 40 years.
But he thinks, well, it's just different.
Why these are small companies, they can't afford to take this on, not understanding that this is how it works everywhere.
That when the cost of the employee is greater than the amount of money that you could ever think of taking in, the whole thing goes on tilt and you go out of business.
So here, Ed Asner is demanding that the actors union back off and get off the backs of these small businesses, these small theater operators.
To be a liberal is to be a hypocrite.
And whenever liberals actually have to confront their own ideology and their own, it's like when people who work in a union office try to organize the clerical help in the union office.
The union fights the union organizing effort.
Whenever liberals actually have to confront their ideology in their own lives, suddenly things are just different.
Now you would think that this might open their eyes to the notion that raising wages artificially cost jobs by eliminating the ability to pay the employees at all, but I'm sure that Ed Asner and Ed Harris and the other lefties that are out there objecting to this only see this in the spectrum of their own singular cause here with regard to these small theaters, and they don't get the larger point.
Got another story that I'd like to share with you.
What's going on in North Carolina, Bo Snerdly is the evangelist for this story.
He's ordering me to discuss it on the program today.
It's interesting.
North Carolina is becoming a swing state.
It's a state that is, if you take a look at the red and blue map of North Carolina, it's really astounding.
Large democratic pockets in the university areas and the state capital, the Raleigh Durham area, and also in Charlotte.
And large African American population that tends to vote overwhelmingly Democratic.
But then the rest of the state, and geographically, North Carolina's a Pretty big state.
Overwhelmingly Republican.
When you think of the old Andy Griffith show, Mayberry, those small communities across the state, these aren't 60, 40 Republican areas.
They're 90 10.
So North Carolina has in recent years had a tradition of being a rather Republican state for heaven's sakes that elected Jesse Helms to the United States Senate.
It's a conservative state, but it's getting more and more divided because of these large populations in the universities, the state capital, the growth of government there.
So it's a swing state.
Anyway, the Democrats just won the governorship in North Carolina in the same election that Trump barely won North Carolina.
It was one of the states that was critical for his victory.
Trump won, but the Republican candidate for governor lagged below Trump's totals, and the new governor is coming in is a Democrat.
The legislature in North Carolina remains Republican.
And what's happened over the last several days is the Republican legislature in North Carolina has passed a whole series of laws taking power away from the office of the governor.
Now remember, the governor currently in North Carolina is a Republican.
The incoming governor is a Democrat.
Before the incoming governor comes in, in which he'd be able to veto these bills, the Republican legislature is taking away the ability of the governor to make all sorts of appointments, taking away a number of areas where the governor was in charge of things without any oversight by the legislature, essentially weakening the powers of the position.
Now, the Democrats are going nuts.
They're saying that this is just defying democracy.
This is terrible.
You can't go and take away power from an office simply because one party happened to win that office.
And there are some Republicans that have the heebie jeebies about this.
Saying that, you know, this isn't a very good precedent that we can't go and defy the will of the people by changing the powers of a job just because the wrong side won.
Without regard to whether this is a power grab that's inappropriate or not, what is remarkable is the fact that they're doing it.
Democrats have always played by one set of rules that Republicans have never been allowed to play by.
We could talk about personal scandals and how when a Republican does something that's inappropriate or terrible, it's used to destroy them.
If a Democrat does it like Bill Clinton and his sexual conduct, they're able to walk right through it.
But when it comes to the use of the office, Republicans have not been willing to use the tactics that Democrats use.
No Republican president has ever abused the executive order power in the way that Obama has.
And I'm not suggesting that President Trump should just ignore the Constitution and try to govern as a dictator in the way that Obama did.
My point is that only the Democrats would ever try to do it.
The Republicans talked forever about the so-called nuclear option of getting rid of the ability to filibuster judicial choices.
Well, finally, the Democrats, when they got control of the Senate and Obama was president, they did it.
Going to come in kind of handy right now for the for the Republicans that they've inherited this.
My point is that Republicans never play below the belt.
In North Carolina, they are.
I'm not going to say that what they're doing in North Carolina is necessarily defensible in the overall scheme of things if we are going to respect historical processes.
What I am saying is that Democrats do this stuff to Republicans all the time, whether it's because of Trump or whether it's because you've got a new generation of Republicans that are simply bolder.
I see my side giving the other side some of their own medicine, and it is only when they're kicked in the same areas that we're kicked at that they might be willing, they might be willing to themselves start respecting some of these processes.
So I guess what they're doing in North Carolina, Boastnerdly thinks this is just a great and wonderful thing, and he's got pom-poms in there, as I tell the...
You wouldn't have thought you'd be cheering for anything in North Carolina, would you?
All right.
I'm Mark Belling filling in for Rush Limbaugh.
Mark Belling filling in for Rush, 1-800-282-2882 is the telephone number to Cranston, Rhode Island.
Jay, it's your turn on EIB with Mark Belling.
Go ahead, Jay.
How much time should we give Jay to show up and to rise here?
Five, four, three, two, one.
Let's try Tony in White Plains, New York.
Uh, see if he's available for us.
Go ahead, Tony.
Hello.
Go ahead.
Is this Tony?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Hi, Mark.
Yeah, you're on, Tony.
Go ahead.
Enjoying the show.
Thank you.
Uh, earlier, uh I think there was a conversation about um uh President Obama once he leaves office, gonna stick around Washington and take control of the Democratic Party.
Yes.
And uh at every opportunity criticize whatever President Trump is going to do.
Well, I think it's a pipe dream because uh the American public is already disavowed the media and all this other garbage that's been put out on in the media, uh trying to um uh cause problems for President Trump.
And I they I think he's living in a fantasy land.
The American public is not going to believe anything he's doing, and once President Trump begins to accomplish some of these things, however small they may be, uh then that's gonna hopefully completely end it.
I cannot see it going beyond that point.
Well, except I mean you really don't think the Democrats are gonna roll over and not fight.
I think they're going to try to s fight and obstruct him at every level.
And while you talk about the media not having influence, I think that you're right in that a good half the country has decided to tune out the media, but there is that other half, the half that voted for Hillary Clinton, the half that lives in much of your state, New York, you know, that buys into this stuff.
I think Obama believes, sincerely, that the reason the Democrats lost is that he couldn't win, that he would have beaten Trump.
I think that Obama believes that he's the most beloved American president ever.
I mean, the guy's got a narcissistic complex.
He's met his match in Trump, who also has a high opinion of himself.
But I do think that the goal the role that Obama is going to try to take is going to be the leader of the Democratic Party, the chief griper, the chief obstructionist, and he's going to every time Trump tries to make a move, try to lecture the nation that this is a terrible direction that we're going to that we're going to go in.
I whether it's going to work or not is a separate question.
I'm merely saying that he sees this as his role, and he's not going to do what every other president has always done, which is when his term of office is over, kind of disappear and you know, every now and then issue a positive statement.
George W. Bush, after he left the White House, left Obama alone.
He commented on almost nothing.
Every now and then he'd offer a comment or an opinion on something or another, but he wasn't a major spokesperson for Republicanism.
You can go back throughout American history and presidents, you know, they may make a statement here or there, this that or the other thing, but they have not set themselves up as the person who's going to try to block and obstruct what the person who comes after them does.
I I just think that Obama is taking a different approach here.
Otherwise, he'd leave Washington.
You wouldn't have Michelle popping off as she's already saying, we don't have hope anymore.
This is going to be a terrible thing.
I think that they see their role as one to try to protect what it was that they achieved and lead the Democratic Party in opposing what it is that Trump's going to try to do.
Now I do agree with you.
I don't think it's going to work.
I think that the American public's going to resent it, but he's going to be playing to an audience that's going to be looking out there for something that passes his Democratic leadership because let's be honest about this.
If Obama isn't the leader of the Democratic Party over the next two years, who is?
Bernie Sanders?
Hillary?
Nancy Pelosi.
This is a party that lacks spokespeople.
It lacks leadership.
It lacks anyone that anybody is willing to rally around.
Yeah, Keith Ellison.
You're talking about choosing somebody from the radical wing of the Democratic Party as chairman of the Democratic National Committee.
They lack any type of leadership, any type of spokesperson at all.
Name a popular American Democrat.
It's very, very hard to do, I think.
Probably the most popular Democrats in America right now would be Barack and Michelle.
And they don't intend to go anywhere.
They're going to hang around and they're going at this is not an original idea on my part.
I think Rush talked about it at some length on Friday's program.
They are going to be the leaders of the opposition, inappropriate though that role may be.
Mark Bellingham for Rush.
And Mark Stein's here tomorrow.
He's brilliant, isn't he?
That's fair to say.
Am I brilliant?
Nobody's ever, nobody's ever going to accuse me of being brilliant.
I'm brilliant in kind of a Wisconsin kind of way.
If you know what I mean, and he's brilliant in a cosmopolitan transcontinental intellectual kind of way.
Anyway, no, Stein's very, very good, and you're going to enjoy listening.
Is he here tomorrow and Thursday?
Or yes, uh, Mark's going to be here the next couple of days.
So it's pretty easy to tell the two of us apart.
Uh I sound like I'm from Milwaukee, and he sounds like he's from nobody even knows where he's at.
He sort of sounds like he's from Auckland, New Zealand.
Where is he from?
Yeah, but then you know he's he's in Vermont now, and he's just kind of everywhere.
Anyway, I want to talk about this UN resolution that the United States abstained on and why Israel is going nuts over it.
This of all the things Barack Obama has done as president might be his most gutless and cowardly.
And I use those words deliberately.
The United Nations has been considering resolutions condemning Israel as long as there's been a United Nations.
The UN, like everybody else in the world, hates Israel.
Israel, a tiny little nation that is interested mostly in simply existing and surviving, has been despised by just about every other nation in the world.
Its one reliable ally has been the United States.
The whole issue of the settlements.
The Palestinians have been given self-governance rights in two areas of Israel.
This is now considered the Palestinian territory, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
Israel has occasionally built what is described as settlements in these Palestinian areas of what is still Israel.
And every time Israel announces plans to build more settlements, the international community condemns them because this inflames the Palestinians.
And the United Nations proposes some resolution condemning Israel.
The United States Security Council works in a way in which nations that are on the Security Council can veto a resolution.
If it's not unanimous, it doesn't pass.
And we have always vetoed these resolutions critical of Israel.
Now, right before Christmas comes another one of these resolutions, and out of nowhere, the United States doesn't veto it.
They abstain.
The impact of this, it's mostly symbolic.
President elect Trump once again has the right note.
He says the UN is just a club of people who like to hang around together.
I don't know that we should care what the United Nations does because it never really does anything.
When's the last thing the United Nations has done?
What's the last thing the United Nations that has done that has been productive for the world?
In fact, what's the only thing the United Nations has done that's been productive for the world?
It's hard to come up with a list that starts with even one.
So let's get to why Obama did this and why the instruction came down to abstain.
He could only do this now.
He could only do this in the last two months of his presidency.
He could only do this as a lame duck.
If Obama had done this earlier this year, it would have inflamed Jewish voters in a number of Democratic states.
As it is, some Democratic United States senators like Schumer are very critical of the action of the United States.
Jewish voters as a group have been a loyal part of the Democratic base for some time.
And there's only so far that Obama would have been able to get away with inflaming them with such a direct insult now that it can't cost any Democrat any vote that we're past the November election, but before he leaves office, he gives Israel one last, you know what.
This is a flipping off of Israel because Obama can't stand Israel, and he especially can't stand Benjamin Netanyahu.
So he puts on the record what is now apparently, at least for a few weeks, formal American policy, but didn't have the guts to do it when it would have had political consequences for his country.
If Obama sincerely believed that the Israeli settlements were a roadblock to play to peace, if, as the UN ambassador said, that you can't both pursue a two-state solution, in other words, a separate Palestine with these settlements being built, then we could have done that before.
He could have ordered an abstention, he could have even ordered a yes vote on an anti-Israeli resolution.
But he didn't have the political guts to do it because his own party would not have allowed him to do it.
So he waits until there's no political heat that he's going to get from his own side to go and take this action.
Cowardly, but it gets Obama approval with all the people that he whose approval he cares about.
The intellectuals who can't stand Israel, much of the global Muslim community that wants Israel exterminated.
Now let's talk about the issue for a moment.
I love that they call these things settlements.
Settlements.
As if this is Daniel Boone exploring the new, you know, the new world.
These aren't settlements, they're subdivisions.
They're areas where houses are built.
That's all they are.
While the Palestinians have governing authority, in these areas, they are still part of Israel.
Israel has some rights in these regions.
We don't yet have two states.
There isn't a Palestine and an Israel that are separate.
That deal has not been achieved despite Herculean efforts on the part of the Israelis to achieve it.
The reason it's never achieved is every single time Israel makes concessions to the Palestinians, the Palestinians respond by killing Israelis.
I think most Israelis want coexistence.
They want to coexist with the Palestinians.
It's the Palestinians that never allow it.
On the issue of settlements, to suggest that Jewish people can't live in certain areas of Israel is on its face, racist and bigoted.
The American liberals who condemn Jewish settlements, would they object to Jewish people moving into certain areas of the United States?
I doubt that they'd do that.
Why is it okay for a Jewish person to live wherever they want to live in the United States of America, but it's not okay for a Jewish person to live wherever they want to live in Israel.
The Palestinians can't handle any Jewish people living in the Palestinian areas.
What does that say about them?
There are Palestinians who live in every other part of Israel.
They're not being thrown out.
So why can't the Palestinians handle any Israelis living in the so-called Palestinian territories?
The answer is because the Palestinians hate Jewish people and they hate Israelis.
Israel has every right to allow housing for people Who live in Israel.
One of the things that drives the need for these settlements is the same thing that drives any kind of sprawl here in the United States.
A lot of people want to live in houses.
Much of Israel is densely packed.
These settlements are being created for people who want to we talk about the American dream.
This is the Israeli dream.
And the people who would live there are open-minded enough that they are willing to live in Palestinian areas.
To be a quote, settler means that you are willing to live among Palestinians.
That the United States would condemn Israel for wanting to allow Jewish Israelis to live in some parts of Israel is outrageous.
But that's my take on things.
I'm a major supporter of Israel.
I think that the problem that Israel has had for the last 30 years is that it can't process the fact that the Palestinians will forever hate them.
Netanyahu may get it, but a lot of other Israelis, I think naively believe that there can be coexistence here.
Whatever you give the Palestinians will not will not be enough.
If you create two states, what's left of Israel they're going to want to take.
Now that's just my opinion on things.
You may disagree with it.
My point about Obama and his actions, and obviously Obama disagrees.
Obviously, Obama thinks it's just terrible that Netanyahu believes that some Jewish people can move a few miles down the road into these Palestinian areas.
He didn't have the guts, he didn't have the you know what to do it when there would have been a political consequence for it.
Watch out for these next 23 or 24 days, whatever we have left.
If he's willing to take this shot at Israel, there are going to be a lot more parting shots.
Obama hasn't bought the general American view on a lot of things.
He's been constrained by political realities in how much he can do.
This is, I think, just one of several repudiations of long-standing American policy that you're going to see from him.
I think a lot more pardons are coming.
And I think some of the people that are going to be pardoned are going to be fairly prominent people.
Don't know that, but I suspect.
Anyway, my name is Mark Belling, and I'm filling in for Rush Limbaugh.
Mark Belling filling in for Rush, contending that we are still in the Christmas season as we approach the new year, but that's just me.
1-800-282-2882 is the phone number.
We still have time for callers.
Let's go to Jonestown, Texas.
Jeff, it's your turn on EIB with Mark Belling.
Hey, Mark, thanks for taking my call.
And then take you back to one of your earlier comments just in the beginning of the show when you talked about your initial opposition to Trump during the primaries and then how you accepted him as a candidate when um when he won the Republican primary.
Yeah, now I'm a fanboy.
I make I've got I've completed the circle, I guess.
Yep.
Well, in any event, the um uh what I was gonna tell you was that I am not a Republican, and so I did not vote for Trump when he took that nomination.
Um I was going to vote either for there were three or four Republicans I would have considered Trump was not among them, and um I uh but I'm not a never Trumper, so I'm not looking at this with distress or hatred or anything like that.
Uh I know that um Hillary was bad.
Are you a conservative?
Say again.
Are you a conservative?
I am far to the right.
Uh, in fact, I'll tell you, I then I believe what you are going to get with Trump is going to be public policy more to your liking than we have seen from any previous president.
The thing about Reagan, and people cite Reagan as the great conservative president, America, the America that Reagan inherited was not as far to the left as the one that Trump has inherited.
Therefore, the need to correct back will be stronger with Trump than it was with Reagan.
The point that I have tried to make to some conservatives who are still looking for reasons to not be enthusiastic about Trump, mostly because of his style, and I think beyond all of that, simply because they never liked him, and they don't want to admit that all the alarmism that they were engaged in was wrong.
They don't want to be the chicken little who found out that the sky falling was actually a good thing to happen rather than a bad thing.
The thing that I've been trying to tell them is that we are on the cusp of somebody who is more conservative than I think most people recognized.
Thank you for the call, Jeff.
The trick that thank you for the call.
The trick for Trump is going to be, given that there are so many things out there and so many different issues that various members of what became his voting coalition care about keep them all satisfied because you can't do everything at once.
Clearly, there are some things that have to be done right away.
What hasn't yet been much talked about is the Supreme Court nomination.
That one is critical.
You still have that vacancy on the Supreme Court, and it needs to be filled right away.
The Supreme Court's now 4-4.
The left is going to try to challenge everything that President Trump does as president.
You need to get that justice on the court.
You need to get the individual confirmed, and you need to get him or her there.
My own choice is I think Ted Cruz would be a spectacular choice, but he's got to move forward on that.
Let me real quickly go to Miami, Florida, and Michael.
Michael, it's your turn on EIB with Mark Belling.
Well, thank you.
I don't usually call in, but when you were talking about the legislature in the Carolinas, I remember when Ted Kennedy was uh when he's passed away, the legislature there kept the governor from being able to appoint anybody.
Your point is the Democrats are willing to engage in the kind of tactics that the Republicans used in the state of North Carolina.
My side, thank you for the call.
My side never wants to play hardball.
If you've been listening to Rush over the years, I think that's one of the things that's created his criticism of a lot of mainstream Republicans.
They don't, he doesn't think that they were aggressive enough in trying to obstruct Obama.
There are others who agree with that point as well.
This stuff about tactics has never been my big issue.
I'm more on the ideas and getting power than the tactics.
However, it is certainly true that the Democrats have played by a set of rules that they can get away with because the media has been the referee and they blow the whistle on only one team.
You have with Trump right now a president who doesn't believe that those referees, the media, have any power.
Mark Belling in for Rush.
Mark Belling, I've had a great time filling in for Rush today again.
Mark Stein is going to be with you tomorrow.
A couple of points before I close off the program today, in discussing the whole issue of the Israeli settlements in the Palestinian areas.
The people on the left.
This is the same crowd, liberals in the United States, Obama, who believe that illegal immigrants should be able to live and do whatever they want here in the United States, but they don't believe Jews should be able to live in their own country, Israel.
Now this story.
This is one I have to get in.
This is rather phenomenal.
You probably have heard that all sorts of celebrities are refusing to perform at the Trump inauguration because of backlash from the liberal fans.
Oh, you can't, you can't sing at Trump's inauguration.
That would be a betrayal.
And a number of people who have been invited have either begged out, refused.
In the meantime, Jackie Ivancho, and I think it's a Vancho, but it might be a Vanco.
Jackie Avancho, who is a teenage singer, says that she's going to sing the national anthem at the inauguration.
Jackie's kind of around.
She's out there, but she's not exactly a huge deal.
Since she committed to that several days ago, her sales have exploded.
Her 2011, that's five year old album, Dream with Me, and her 2010 single, Oh Holy Night, are now sitting at number two on the billboard charts.
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