Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
Greetings, my friends.
How you doing?
Great to have you here.
Right at this very moment, Donald Trump has just touched down at Joint Base Andrews, the old Andrews Air Force Base.
You know why they call it Joint Base Andrews now, don't you?
Because it's more than just the Air Force there.
Economizing, efficiencizing.
So it's more than just the Air Force there.
So it's Joint Base Andrews.
Anyway, they picked him up in an Air Force jet at LaGuardier in New York, and they flew him to Joint Base Andrews, just touched down almost exactly 24 hours before he will be inaugurated President of the United States.
Great to have you, folks, at Rush Limboy here at 800-282-2882.
If you want to be on the program, the email address, El Rushbo at EIB, yeah, EIBnet.us.
Okay, we all know that the Democrat Party is unhinged and their values are not ours anymore.
They are a different breed now.
And the same thing for the United States media.
An act of utter irresponsibility occurred on CNN last night on Wolf Blitzer's show.
An act of total derangement, irresponsibility, and danger.
To me, what CNN did last night disqualifies them from discussions of journalism, from giving them serious consideration and credibility.
They did a report that – well, let me let you hear it.
Brian Todd, reporting on Wolf Blitzer's show, The CNN Room, last night on CNN.
A cabinet secretary called the designated presidential successor will not attend the inauguration, ready to step in if something happens.
But it won't be a Trump cabinet secretary, since none of them have been confirmed yet.
It will be an Obama appointee.
By noon Friday, all of Obama's cabinet secretaries are expected to resign.
John Kerry, the current Secretary of State, would be the first cabinet secretary in the line of succession, but he's out of office by noon.
Donald Trump's pick for Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, may not be confirmed for another week or two.
So who would be Secretary of State on Friday afternoon?
According to State Department sources, the job would fall to the highest-ranking non-political official in the department, the Under Secretary for Political Affairs, Tom Shannon.
What this report is about, CNN explaining their audience what would happen, who would become president if somebody assassinated Donald Trump before the inauguration ceremony tomorrow.
We prepare for what Reagan called a miracle.
The peaceful transition of power that occurs in the United States every four or eight years, depending, is in the real world a miracle.
That it happens peacefully, that it happens at all.
It's not, it's not normal that people with power willingly give it up.
It is one of the many miracles of this country.
The Democrat Party cannot, has not, and will not come to grips with what has happened.
They cannot accept, they haven't been able to accept, and they don't want to accept what happened last November.
I think of all of the stories in the past where there have been shootings, say, on school campuses, school grounds, or in movie theaters.
And each and every time, each and every time, without exception, CNN, ABC, the drive-by media did everything they could to make viewers believe that the shooting, the mass murder, was a result of conservative media, primarily talk radio, primarily me, and then Fox News.
In one instance in Colorado, after a school shooting, it was a movie theater shooting in Colorado.
Brian Ross of ABC News, they had the name of the shooter.
The first thing Brian Ross did was get hold of a roster of members of the Tea Party to see if he could find the name.
And lo and behold, he found somebody on the membership rolls of the Tea Party in Colorado with the same name as the shooter.
And really, before knowing anything, went on the air on ABC, might have been Good Morning America, I forget what particular show, and actually said, while we haven't been able to confirm it, it is possible that the shooter is a member of the Tea Party.
It was their instinctive knee-jerk reaction.
They believe any violence that happens in this country is caused by conservatism, caused by people who love and believe in the Second Amendment and have done everything they can to impugn, besmirch, discredit, and destroy anybody who has leanings toward conservatism and the Second Amendment, gun rights, and so forth and so on.
And yet, here now is CNN with a story last night.
You know how many deranged people are out there.
The UK Daily Mail has a story today about a family friend of the Clintons from down here in South Florida who has been arrested for claiming he was going to assassinate Trump.
He's 51 years old.
He looks like a standard, ordinary, normal person.
Doesn't look like some deranged lunatic, but obviously is a close family friend of the Clintons, arrested for claiming that he was going to assassinate Trump.
We have heard stories.
The media is eagerly and with great support telling us of all the protests that are going to occur tomorrow.
And we are being led to believe that they are massive, that there are many more protesters that are going to show up than there will be people supporting Trump's inauguration.
We are told that the Democrats, now up to number 66 of them in the House, are not going to attend in a form of protest.
What it is is a bunch of childish immaturity.
At best, that's what these Democrats are engaging in.
The Drive-By media is doing everything it can to incite unrest, to incite lack of acceptance, to promote whatever unhinged and deranged feelings there are out there.
The Drive-By media is sympathetic to them and could be even said to be promoting them.
And now we have on CNN a story last night, assassinating Trump could keep the Obama administration in power.
And this is what the story was about.
Well, if it happened, can you imagine if on either of the days prior to Obama's inauguration, either 2004 or 2008, can you imagine if I on this program had done a story about what is going to happen should something happen to Obama?
Can you imagine the excrement storm that would have happened?
Now we have Jeff Zucker at CNN running around talking about how Trump has destroyed journalism, but he's not going to let him.
And journalists are getting introspective.
I have a couple of really, really fascinating stories today.
One of them is a two-parter that I found on one of my tech blogs, a New York University journalism professor with advice for today's journalists on how to deal with Trump.
I guess Obama yesterday telling them to not be sycophants and instead be skeptics wasn't enough.
Was that not a laugh, by the way?
Barack Obama telling his state-controlled media.
No, you know what?
You're not supposed to be sycophants.
You are supposed to be skeptics.
Are you kidding me?
He had a room full of sycophants.
He had a room full of people who, if it kept on, would die of anal poisoning.
They were so far up and gone.
And Obama's telling them, now you got to stop being this.
You got to become skeptics now.
Obama with the illusion that they never were sycophants.
And the stories in the media today are all filled with tears.
Oh, my God.
He's actually leaving.
I can't believe it.
What are we going to do?
New York Times, Nicholas Kristoff, missing Barack Obama already.
And he's not even gone.
But this thing that CNN did last night, and they, by the way, they cloaked this as a genuine story on the order of succession, given the circumstances.
But clearly, the only reason for such a story if is something happens to President-elect Trump before he's sworn in.
So you know what they're thinking about.
You know what's on their minds.
You know how unbalanced the entire American left is.
You know how unbalanced the Democrat Party has become.
I also have a fascinating story here in the Politico today.
It actually prints out to 14 pages, but don't worry, I'm not going to spend 14 pages on it, but I've got a lot of highlights and pull quotes.
Democrats in the wilderness inside a decimated party's not-so-certain revival strategy.
Oh, I can't wait to get to this for you.
It is eye-opening.
It is an actually honest and truthful assessment of just where they are, which is nowhere.
It's an honest assessment of how many seats they have lost in the Congress and in state legislatures.
It's an honest assessment of how they are a regional party now, at best, not national.
It's an honest assessment how they are a Jurassic Park party, that the people on their bench, that people are saying that's going to be our next nominee, are all 70 years old or older.
I mean, when this guy describes the Democrats in the wilderness, he's actually doing it.
He actually does it.
So those are two things I'm looking forward to getting to.
And ladies and gentlemen, remember yesterday we had some soundbites from the PBS show Frontline, the documentary by a filmmaker on the Obama presidency, a retrospective.
And it's a narrator, and the essential theme was that Obama was one of the greatest presidents ever, but he was held back by me.
Obama tried and worked harder than anybody ever had to unite the country and to rebuild the economy, to save health care and jobs.
But at every turn, our young first African-American president was thwarted by me.
Now, they only mention my name once, but I was in every soundbite that they played, every clip of the opposition to Obama.
Part two was last night.
It was a four-hour documentary.
Part two was last night.
In the episode last night, I, your host, Rush Limbaugh, am alleged to have basically ruined the Obama presidency.
But not just that, I also destroyed the Republican establishment.
I take them all out and in the process set the stage for Trump, who once again, it is said, spent hours and hours studying talk radio so he could take over the world.
There are 11 of these soundbites.
I'm not going to have a chance to play all of them because it would take up too much time.
What with all the other bites that we have to share with you and all of the other news?
There is a lot happening today, as you can well imagine.
And before we go to our first Obscene Profit Timeout, a reminder that we are going to be doing live coverage of the inauguration tomorrow.
And at the request of EIB Network affiliates, we're going to start the show basically six minutes early so that we are here to establish a presence before the actual inauguration begins, which is at high noon.
So we're going to be here at 11.54 with six minutes of stage setting, and then we will have our live, you know, our microphones and cameras are everywhere.
We'll have our live raw feed of what's happening up there.
And we'll either let it go or we'll have comments, you know, how we deal with the press conference and so forth.
It'll be, you won't have to wait till it's over for analysis.
You'll get instant on-the-spot analysis, but it won't be intrusive.
You will not mind what I'm doing.
Well, we don't want it to be intrusive.
We don't want to intrude on Trump's day of glory.
I mean, stop and think of what's happened here.
Let's put this actually in perspective.
Who is Donald Trump?
He is the epitome of the outsider.
And therein lies the root of the unhinged derangement of everybody in the Washington establishment.
They've all known who he is.
TV star, you're fired, maybe a billionaire, certainly a millionaire.
Has his own plane, braggadocious, everything is gilded in gold.
Golf courses here and there.
Beautiful women all over the place.
At times vulgar, at times coarse, but always funny.
And if you go back, take a look at some headlines, some covers of tabloid newspapers and other newspapers on June 17th, the day after Trump announced.
And what will you find?
They had him buried after the first day.
They were all the TV analysts were saying, can we just stipulate that this campaign ended yesterday?
That Trump's a boob.
Trump's an idiot.
This was embarrassing.
This was horrible.
And for the next year and a half, the drive-by media and the Washington establishment expected every day for the Trump campaign to implode.
They expected Donald Trump to literally blow it up, take himself out.
When that didn't happen, they then tried to console themselves by telling them he really doesn't want to win.
He's doing this for other reasons to hype TV ratings for whatever TV show or build out new golf courses or help his business, but he doesn't really want to do this.
And then the drive-by media never did take Trump seriously, and that actually ended up hampering Hillary Clinton because the Clinton campaign relied solely on the drive-bys for their news about the Trump campaign.
And the drive-bys basically told Hillary that Trump didn't have a chance.
He's a loony tune.
I mean, look at this video from Access Hollywood.
Here's Trump out there refusing to go to the debate in Iowa with a dust up with Megan Kelly.
This guy's not serious.
And so Hillary and her camp thought it was nothing but let the time pass and she's going to be president.
She basically didn't campaign.
She hung around with her elite rich friends raising money, accepting donations from foreign countries and foreign entities for whom she was going to pay back when she became president.
Their world has been turned upside down by somebody who, it was said, didn't have the slightest chance because he didn't know what he was doing because he's an outsider and it's not possible for an outsider to come in here and hit a grand slam home run their first time up at bat.
And Trump has done all of that.
And CNN, on the eve of the inauguration of the next president, does a story speculating on what would happen if that president is assassinated before he takes office.
That, I think, is a perfect illustration and microcosm of who they are and who they, meaning the left and the media, the Democrats, who they've always been.
Must take a timeout, however, my friends.
Interrupt myself.
I hate having to do it, but I do.
Let's do a little quick test.
How many of you out there across the fruited plane are surprised to learn that CNN would run a segment rooted in?
Well, here's how Wolf Blitzer introduced the segment.
He said, What if an incoming president and his immediate successors were wiped out on day one?
How many of you out there are surprised that CNN would run a segment like this?
Now, if some of you in the audience are shocked, then you may be new to the program.
So welcome.
You have a lot to learn.
The fact of the matter is, many people in this audience, not surprised at all.
Maybe angry about it, but deep down, not surprised.
These people have gone off the deep end long ago.
They're making no effort to climb back on solid ground.
They cannot accept reality.
To this day, they believe that what's happened here is a construct.
It's something that somebody created, like the Russians, hacking the election or what have you, to deny them what is theirs by birthright, and that is power and winning elections.
And so they can't accept what happens, and they're not even making any effort to accept what happens.
What if an incoming president and you imagine turning on Fox News four years ago?
Take your pic of any Fox anchor.
Bill O'Reilly, Bill O'Reilly says, What if an incoming president is immediate successors are wiped out?
Can you imagine what the drive-bys, can you, what CNN would say about it?
It's disgusting, and it's beyond the pale.
We had a couple of press conferences today from Sean Spicer, who is the now White House press secretary, and the Vice President Mike Pence.
And it was really refreshing to hear some normal, mature adults answering questions from the media and explaining things in a way that didn't cause suspicion or anger.
It was just, it was decent.
It was not dishonest.
It was not misleading.
It was just, it was refreshing.
I'm going to give you a couple of examples.
Here is Pence.
And, oh, by the way, you know, Trump in Washington is going to stay at his hotel.
It's called Trump International.
He's going to stay there.
In fact, he walked in there earlier this week, got a standing oh from the employees.
That made the media mad.
They thought the employees should not show that kind of respect for the owner when he comes.
This is not right.
Now, the press can bow down and kiss the feet of Obama when he walks in the press room, and that's fine.
But people who work for Trump, they're not supposed to lose their composure like that by giving us.
And now they're upset that Trump is staying at his own hotel.
You know why?
Because it's said to be a conflict of interest.
That Trump, as the president-elect, soon to be president, staying at his own hotel, is free advertising.
And he is benefiting from his powerful position by choosing to stay at his own hotel.
The media raised these questions today in the press conference.
Don't you think the president is a little bit unseemly here?
I mean, clearly a conflict of interest being seen walking into his own hotel and staying there.
I mean, what's he supposed to do?
Go over to the Harry Reed suite at the Ritz-Carlton.
It's unbelievable.
Anyway, here's Penn's.
Just one soundbite just to show you what mature adults who inspire confidence sound like.
I'm especially pleased.
I know the president-elect is especially pleased that we're wrapping up this transition on schedule and under budget.
We will actually return some 20% of taxpayer funding back to the U.S. Treasury.
And that is just exactly in keeping with the President-elect's expectations going forward.
He is a businessman that knows how to sharpen his pencil.
Speaking of that, folks, there is a story in TheHill.com today that is just over the top amazing.
And here's the headline: Trump team prepares dramatic cuts.
Now, we've seen stories prior to today that mention ballpark figures, like Trump's going to cut 10% here, 20% there.
This story details it, thehill.com.
It starts this way: Donald Trump is ready to take an axe to government spending.
This is just, this is throwing gasoline on the fire that's already burning.
This may be throwing cherry bombs on the fire that is the Democrat Party in the media.
I mean, Trump's already assaulted their sensibilities by winning, but now he's actually going to do what he said he was going to do.
Oh, no.
Staffers for the Trump transition team have been meeting with career staff at the White House ahead of the inauguration tomorrow to outline their plans for shrinking the federal bureaucracy.
Thehill.com has learned, it says.
And the changes they propose are dramatic.
Here's what thehill.com is reporting might come under Trump's budget knife.
The departments of commerce and energy would see major reductions in funding with programs under the jurisdiction either being eliminated or transferred to other agencies.
The departments of transportation, justice, and state would see significant cuts and program eliminations.
And let me tell you something.
The Department of Justice alone, you can get rid of half of it.
You wouldn't believe the obscure oddball interagency departments that they have.
You have the Civil Rights Division.
You have the one-armed amputees on 4th Street Civil Rights Division.
You have the voting rights civil rights division.
You've got so many of these creepy little divisions in the Department of Justice that nobody knows that they're all there.
There's all kinds of stuff that could be cut.
There's redundancy after redundancy, and there's unnecessity after unnecessity, and they've identified it.
And over at Commerce, do you know what 80% of the Commerce Department is?
I have told you before.
How many of you remember?
The Commerce Department is about what it says, commerce.
Commerce is what?
Well, that's economic activity between entities.
80%.
Are you ready?
I read this in a.
I can't recall the place I read it, but I've seen a number of different places.
80% of the Commerce Department is the National Weather Service.
And everything the National Weather Service does.
You know, satellites up there.
You have the weather forecast.
You have the fraud that exists with global warming.
Some of that is located in the Commerce Department.
Some of the fraud, but global warming is over at NASA as well.
But basically, the Commerce Department is a National Weather Service, and 20% of it is not.
The point being, there's room to cut there.
And the Department of Energy, you can get rid of it.
You could get rid of it.
But the Department of Energy has become the headquarters for climate change activism In the United States government, no matter who the president has been.
Here's more from the Hill.com story on Trump's dramatic budget cuts.
CPB, corporation public broadcasting, would be privatized.
The National Endowment of the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities would be eliminated entirely.
Folks, wait till the people involved in those two find.
Oh, geez.
It's like painting that rainbow flag monochrome.
Oh, no, this is going to be.
I don't want to be around if this happens.
Overall, the blueprint being used by Trump's team would reduce federal spending.
Are you ready for this?
By $10.5 trillion over 10 years.
Dean, the federal debt, national debt is $20 trillion, and Trump says he's going to cut half of it in over 10 years.
How many of you have heard, well, you can't cut the budget?
And I've heard this from think tanks.
I've heard it from conservatives.
I've heard it from liberals.
I've heard it from the media.
I've heard it from.
You can't cut the budget.
There isn't enough discretionary spending.
I mean, 60%, I'm sure you've heard this.
60%, 70% of the budget is entitlements, meaning government, meaning Santa Claus.
I mean, you can't cut Santa Claus.
I mean, you've got 60, 65% of the budget untouchable.
Sorry, no way to cut it.
And everybody's just accepted it.
Whoa, yeah, yeah, you can't cut Social Security.
Yep, can't cut Medicare.
Yep.
Can't cut SSI.
Yep.
Can't cut what the hell ever else is out there under the umbrella of entitlements.
We can't cut that.
Everybody just says, Yeah, I can't cut that.
You most certainly can.
$20 trillion and $10 trillion of it added in the last eight years.
It's beyond anybody's ability to comprehend how much money this is.
And the idea that all of it is being legitimately spent and that we still don't have enough, a $20 trillion national debt means we've spent $20 trillion that we don't have in addition to what we have spent.
And now people come and say, no, no, no, we need even more, and we certainly can't cut.
It's one of the big myths that has been spread for decades out of Washington across the hinterlands.
You can't cut the federal budget.
And it's been said for so long that people have just accepted it.
The proposed cuts apparently hew very closely to a blueprint published last year by the Heritage Foundation, a think tank that has helped staff the Trump transition.
Uh-oh.
You heard that?
Heritage Foundation, think tank, conservatism.
And these are the guys telling Trump where to cut the.
Do you realize most think tanks have been sort of marginalized precisely because of the Trump campaign and because of the Trump election?
And yet the Heritage Foundation is still front and center and right in the center of the mix.
And by the way, Heritage for decades has been working on legitimate budget cuts.
It's not something they put together overnight or the last six months.
It's something that's been ready to go for anybody brave enough in Washington to give it a whirl.
We'll see if Trump is that guy.
The Hill.com and the Democrats are clearly worried that Trump is the guy that's going to try to seriously reduce the size of government.
Do you realize how many people are going to hope he fails here?
Can you say half of the conservative movement, all of liberalism, and the entire Washington establishment will be right in there hoping the hell Trump fails, unless the way he does it is hews very closely to conservative doctrine.
If he does that and reduces, then I take back what I say about half the conservative movement, because Trump is viewed as a populist, and conservatives don't like populists.
Conservatives think populism is a dangerous substitute for conservatism.
It really isn't.
And Trump is a populist, they claim.
And conservatism, one of the foundational aspects of it is shrinking government, reducing government, getting government out of people's way.
But there haven't been much success.
There hasn't been any success.
Speak of, I mean, we've had the sequester, and there have been a couple of marginally successful efforts, but nobody's tried anything like this.
Conservatives have been advocating it for years.
If Trump and the Hill.com, I guarantee the left is convinced he's going to try it.
And they're worried they can't stop it, folks.
They don't have the votes to stop anything.
This piece in the Politico that I mentioned earlier, Democrats in the wilderness, can't wait to share this with you because it gets right to the nub of it.
They can't stop anything.
That's why they have to have CNN do stories on what if Trump doesn't make it to the inauguration?
What if something happens?
And then this is why they're encouraging all their protests.
Same with John Lewis.
You know, this pathetic crowd of little kids, childish adults standing on supposed principle.
Democrats wouldn't know principle if it was staring them in the face, and they're claiming because of principle they can't go to the inauguration.
You know what they're scared to death of?
You and every Democrat is most afraid of today and tomorrow going forward that Trump is going to succeed.
And half the Republican Party would probably fit into that camp of being frightened too, because the Washington establishment's been telling us the best that can be done.
This is it.
We're the best and brightest.
And we've talked to the people at Davos and we've talked to the people at the climate change meeting.
This is it.
We've talked to the THICOMs.
This is it.
This is the best we can do.
You'd have to start cutting entitlements.
You'd have to really take money away from people.
You'd increase starvation.
No, no, this is the best we can do.
If Trump comes along and is successful at this, it's going to blow all kinds of conventionally accepted wisdom through the roof.
And that's what John Lewis knows.
And once Trump is successful, and by the way, it's not just John Lewis, the Reverend Doc and Reverend Sharpton and all of these others of that ilk, the worst thing that could happen is what they fear is on the cusp of happening.
And that is Trump's succeeding makes them irrelevant.
And it makes everything they have told all of their voters all these years meaningless and irrelevant.
A lot of people have a lot at stake in maintaining the status quo of mediocrity and failure while telling everybody they're working hard to fix things and never do.
Somebody coming along and really fixing things or dramatically improving things that poses a great threat.
Dangerous times, as I've been telling you, we'll be back.
Don't go away.
Okay, got to go to the phone, Chair, because if I don't do it now, it's going to be a while.
And I want to reward people rather than have them on hold for a long time.
We'll start here in Phoenix.
Mark, great to have you.
Welcome to the EIB Network.
Hello.
Hi, Rush.
I'd like to get your opinion on something that I saw in the news this morning that the Obama regime sent a B-2 bomber to Libya and killed hundreds of ISIS people.
And I was wondering if he would have done something like this now so that it could possibly provoke attacks in the United States during Trump's early days.
Well, you know, I saw that myself.
And like you, the first question I have is, what is this?
What the?
And then I remembered that I once asked a Defense Department, Donald Rumsfeld.
I once asked him as Secretary of Defense, do you know, is there anybody who knows everything going on at any moment in time in the Pentagon?
He looked at me and says, there's no way.
I said, well, pardon my naivete, but who does?
Doesn't somebody, I mean, how much independence is there?
Can somebody launch military salvos without you, for example, knowing it?
Well, no, there's structure, and everybody has orders and so, but day to day, what's happening?
There's too much.
There's simply too much going.
I asked the same thing of Michael Hayden.
I ran into him at a Steelers game.
He was running the CIA.
And I said, you know, I'm a logistics guy, which is the root of this question.
And I asked him, look, as director of the CIA, do you know everything going on?
No, it's not possible.
I said, you don't know where we have covert operatives and covert action.
Yeah, but I can't tell you day to day what's happening and who's doing what.
So I thought of that when I saw this story.
It could well be that what happened today in Syria with the B-2 has been on schedule for a while, and it's part of the ongoing military operation that's there.
But I can totally understand your take.
I don't think something like this would be, if they wanted, he got me sounding like CNN here.
If they wanted, meaning if Obama, if the Democrats wanted to do something to cause a terror attack tonight or tomorrow, I don't think this by itself would be enough.
They'd have to do something working much closer to home here.
And then to pinpoint the time that it happened so as to happen on, that would require, I would think, a specific operation and plan.
I don't think they would say, hey, let's send a B-2 over Syria and hope some wacko attacks Washington tomorrow.
I just don't, I can't imagine that would be the thinking.
But before any of you out there get upset, we didn't start this.
This line of thinking was put out there last night by CNN, and this is exactly what happens.
CNN does a story on if Donald Trump is assassinated either right before or right after he's inaugurated, takes the office.
Who becomes president?
His cabinet hasn't been sworn in.
Is it Obama?
That's what they, is it Obama?
Does Obama stay president?
That's what they wanted to hear.
Could it be, does Obama, can Obama stay?
Can Obama stay?
If Trump can't go, is that right?
Can Obama come out and play?
They put it out there.
So don't blame us.
Starting to think this way.
We react, folks.
We're not the aggressors and stuff like this.
But I don't think that this action with the B-2 doing whatever it was doing over Syria, that leaves Libya.
Well, wherever it was.
It says too much.
Too big a chance to take that happen.
We'll be back here, folks.
We're out of time.
Just getting warmed up.
The audio soundbites from last night's frontline documentary where I basically ruin the Obama presidency and the Republican establishment coming up, plus Democrats in the wilderness in the political today.