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Jan. 19, 2017 - Rush Limbaugh Program
33:37
January 19, 2017, Thursday, Hour #3
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Let me just tell you, the United States and the United Kingdom are the only two industrial democracies that do not routinely require voters to show ID.
And I'll tell you in my mind, that is why the United States and the UK have persistent problems with voter fraud.
But this idea that Barack Obama spouched yesterday in a press conference, and the Democrats have been doing this for as long as I've been alive, that we make it hard to vote.
No, what's hard in this country is to file your taxes.
That's hard.
Filing your taxes, dealing with the IRS, doing it on time, making sure that you obey every rule and regulation that you're subject to.
That is hard.
Voting is not hard.
Registering to vote is not hard.
We have made it as easy as showing up to get a driver's license.
We've made it as easy as registering your car.
We've made it as easy as anything.
And to eliminate fraud, you would have voter ID, photo ID required.
Mexico does.
Mexico doesn't.
Everybody loves Mexico.
As I say, the United States United Kingdom are the only two industrialized democracies that do not, and that's where all these voter fraud problems exist.
But it just it offends my intelligence when we have the president say we make it hard for people to vote.
What he's saying is that the white majority is relying on Jim Crow days in slavery to make it difficult for African Americans to vote.
For crying out loud.
The Democrat Party shows up and busses as many African Americans to the polls as they can.
And they get 93% of the black vote every presidential election.
Somehow this is making it hard.
Somehow the Republicans are making it hard for people to vote.
It isn't.
It is all too easy.
Early voting for crying out loud, early voting, and then there's absentee voting.
It's easy to vote.
It just offends me royally to hear the Democrats routinely mischaracterize this.
They want people to think that this is still the 1800s, still the 1940s, still the 1950s, when it was the Democrats that were standing in polling places with dogs and fire hoses and preventing black people from voting.
It was the Democrats in the South that did that.
It was the Bull Connors of the world and the George Wallaces of the world and the Lester Maddox's of the world.
It was not Republicans.
They were not the segregationists.
I want to get to this piece that I touted at the very beginning of the program.
It's a political piece, written by Edward Isaac Dover.
Edward Isaac is hyphenated there.
Edward Isaac Dovere, Democrats in the Wilderness, inside a decimated party's not so certain revival strategy.
Now the upshot of this is that they're in deep trouble, but the important thing is when you read this, they know it.
The media coverages of a shocked and surprised and bamboozled party that doesn't know what hit it.
Well, that turns out not to be true.
But the reason I want to share some of this with you is because it's the only honest assessment of the current position, the status quo of the Democrat Party that I have seen.
Standing with some 30,000 people in front of Independence Hall in Philadelphia the night before the election, watching Hillary Clinton speak, exhausted aides were already worrying about what would come next.
Oh, they expected her to win, of course.
But they knew President Clinton was going to get thrashed in the 2018 midterms.
The races were tilted in Republicans' favor.
And that's when they thought the backlash against them would really hit.
So they've known that they're in disfavor.
They know they've been governing against the will of the people is my point.
They know it.
They just expected to get Hillary elected and then the sky to fall on them in 2018.
They figured she'd get a primary challenge.
They didn't figure she'd be re-elected in 2020.
Some of them had already started gaming out names for who would be challenging her nomination.
What happened the next night, election night, shocked even the most pessimistic Democrats.
But in another sense, it was the reckoning the party had been expecting for years.
They were counting on a Clinton win to paper over a deeper rot they've been worrying about and to buy them some time to start coming up with answers.
In other words, it wasn't just Donald Trump or the Russians or James Comey or all the problems with how Clinton and her AIDS ran the campaign, win or lose.
Democrats were facing an existential crisis in the years ahead.
The result of years of complacency, ignoring the withering of the grassroots in the state parties, sitting by as Republicans racked up local win after local win, and that's a reference to 2010, 2012, 2014 midterms.
That's a reference to the 1,200 seats that Democrats have lost at the state and local level.
They watch it all happen.
They knew it was happening.
They were ignoring it.
As Trump takes over the GOP and starts remaking its new identity as a nationalist populist party creating a new political poll in American politics for the first time in generations, all eyes are on the Democrats.
Well, actually, that's not true.
They wish it were true.
All eyes are on Trump.
All eyes are on Trump.
How will the Democrats confront a suddenly awakened and galvanized white majority?
Stop and let that sink in.
That's right from the political piece.
The Democrat Party, the Democrat Brain Trust, is asking themselves how they're gonna deal with a suddenly awakened and galvanized white majority.
Now wait, what all that means is that all the they have been aware that they cast aside the white working class.
They did it in November of 2011.
They decided they didn't want the votes of the white working class, and they went all minority all the time.
They went identity politics, they went ethnic, they went minority, they just cast aside the white majority on purpose.
And now it's come back to Biden.
They believed the demographics that the white majority was soon to be a white minority, they wanted to get ahead of that.
And then this next question in political, what's to stop Trump from doing whatever he wants?
Who is going to pull a coherent new vision together for the Democrats?
Worried liberals are watching with trepidation, fearful that Trump is just the beginning of worse to come, desperate for a comeback strategy that can work.
What's clear from interviews with several top dozen Democrat politicians and operatives at all levels, however, is there is no comeback strategy.
There's just a collection of half-formed ideas, all of them challenged by reality.
And for whatever scheme the Democrats come up with, they don't even have a flag carrier.
Obama, he doesn't want the job.
Hillary?
Too damaged.
Bernie Sanders, too socialist.
Joe Biden, too tied to Obama.
Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer to Washington.
Elizabeth Warren, maybe.
But all of them, old, old, old.
This is the politico acknowledging that's the Democrat bench.
That's what they've got.
That's the only that that's it.
Schumer, Pelosi, Warren, Biden, Sanders, Hillary.
I'm telling they are in deep doo-doo, folks.
And that it's not being written other than this story today.
That's why I'm focusing on it.
The Democrats' desolation is staggering.
But part of the problem is that it's easy to point to signs that maybe things aren't so bad, meaning they are getting delusional.
For example, Hillary did beat Trump by 2.8 million votes.
Obama's approval rating Is nearly 60%.
The polls show that Democrats are way ahead of the GOP on many issues in demographics.
But that doesn't mean anything because they are stuck in the minority in Congress with no end in sight.
They have only 16 governors left.
They face 32 state legislatures fully under Republican control.
Their top leaders in the House are all over 70.
Their top leaders in the Senate are all over 60.
Under Obama, Democrats have lost 1,034 seats at the state and federal level.
There's no bench.
There's no bench for a bench.
There's virtually no one able to speak for the party as a whole.
If Republicans dominate the 2018 midterms, they will control the Senate and with it the Supreme Court for years.
And they will draw district lines in states that'll lock in majorities in the House and across state capitals, killing the next generation of Democrats in the crib.
Setting up the GOP for an even more dominant 2020 and beyond.
Most doubt that Democrats have the stamina or the stomach for the kind of cohesive resistance that Republicans perfected over the years.
Now I want to spend just a moment on that, because this is a it's just the lead sentence to the next paragraph in the story, but this is profound.
Let me read it to you again.
Most doubt the Democrats have the stamina or the stomach for the kind of cohesive resistance that Republicans perfected over the years.
You know what the Democrats' biggest problem is?
They haven't the slightest idea how to overcome diversity.
Adversity.
They haven't the slightest idea how to deal with it.
They never have any.
They have a slavish, sycophantish media.
The media, which is the primary equalizing force in this country, never ever makes it difficult for them.
The media never challenges what they say, what they do.
They are constantly sucked up to.
They are constantly heralded and treated as rock stars.
No matter how dumb they might be, no matter how stupid, no matter how wacko their policies and actions and words might be, they're never called on it.
They are allowed to get away with every bit of hypocrisy they routinely engage in, and they are routinely placed up on an untouchable pedestal.
They simply they cannot wear the Republican Party shoes.
There isn't a Democrat that would last a day doing this show, getting the kind of criticism this show gets.
They don't know how to deal with it.
They have never had to.
They get idolatry, they get devotion, they get puff pieces.
They are built up and heralded as great in every way you can imagine.
They never ever have to overcome adversity.
And this is why, in circumstances like this, so many of them resign.
Look at the number of Democrats that announce their resignation after this election, they don't even want to deal with being in a minority.
They don't want to deal with the effort it's going to take to become the majority again.
They suffer from this notion that they are entitled, that they should not have to work for it.
While on the other, the Republicans have to work for every vote they get, they have to counteract and deal with every lying, stinking lie told about them.
They have to deal with the daily efforts of the media to destroy them.
They have built up, in many cases, not all, but in some cases, tough skin.
They have developed at least a sensitivity to it.
They start the game knowing the deck is stacked against them.
And still they play it.
The Democrats start the game knowing they are the beneficiary of every bit of cheating and unfairness.
The referees are on their side, and that's the only way they're willing To play the game.
So this sentence here.
Most doubt the Democrats have the stamina or the stomach for the kind of cohesive resistance.
That's not it.
They don't have the ability.
They don't have the wherewithal.
They don't have the toughness.
If they're not in a position to be able to destroy their opponents using the media and using their mad protesters, if they don't have the ability to literally destroy their opposition and destroy their careers, they don't know what to do because they cannot compete in the arena of ideas.
And they can't compete in the arena of ideas because their ideas are rejected whenever they're on the table, as they were in 2016.
Last November, Barack Obama put his agenda on the ballot.
And he begged people to vote for him to vote for Hillary, which would be voting for him, voted for his agenda to continue his great agenda.
And what happened?
A massive landslide defeat in the Electoral College for the Obama agenda.
In the current circumstance, where they only have 16 governorships, they've lost over a thousand almost eleven hundred seats.
Next in this political piece is this.
Some thinking has started to take shape.
Obama's quickly reformatting his post-presidency to have a more political bent than he had planned.
No, no, he had always planned it.
Vice President Biden is beginning to structure his own thoughts on mentoring and guiding rising Democrats.
There you go.
Plugs is going to be their primary teacher.
No one seems to be waiting to hear from Clinton.
Yeah, you know the Clintons shut down the Clinton Global Initiative this week, and you know what?
The media didn't write about it.
They didn't do a story of it.
Yawn City.
If the Republicans had closed down something so prominent and apparently so wonderful and so great is the Clinton if they had something like that and shut it down, it'd be the only news you'd be reading about.
At the law office, a former Attorney General Eric Holder, which is serving as the base for the redistricting reform project he's heading for Obama.
They're getting swarmed with interest and checks at the Democrat Governors Association, all of a sudden looking like the headquarters of the resistance, they're sorting through a spike in interested candidates, and everyone from Obama on down is talking about going local, focusing on the kind of small races and party building activities Republicans have been dominating for years.
But all that took decades.
And the Democrats don't have that kind of time.
And by the way, the Democrats don't have talk radio.
You know what that means?
The Democrats have no way of personally engaging in outreach.
The Democrats don't know how to do talk radio because they don't know how to talk to people honestly.
So what are the Democrats going to do next?
There hasn't been an American political party in worse shape in living memory.
And there may never have been a party less ready to confront it.
And that's not even the first half of this piece.
Here is Tom in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
We head back to the phones here, the EIB network.
Great to have.
Oh, by the way, folks, there's rumor going around on Antonio Brown was at the Trump luncheon, and that's why there's video of it.
He's not there.
He was practicing today with the Steelers, uh, getting ready for the Patriots on Sunday night.
Here's here's Tom in Grand Rapids.
Great to have you, sir.
Hi.
Hey Ross, thanks for taking my call of the show.
Thank you for old school, old school megadettos.
Well, it's great to have you, sir.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Anyway, I wanted to get to my point about the economic plan of the Republicans.
If I was if I had Kelly Con O'Connor's ear or Trump's, I would base my spending model on what Clinton did compared to debt and overall government spending to the growth of the economy.
And that would really throw the Democrats a tizzy because you just reminded me of something else.
I've got a whole other thing here.
Some journalism professor participated in a podcast at one of my tech blogs with advice for the media on how to do journalism during Trump.
Wait till you hear some of this stuff.
And what reminded me, they b this guy basically says they should the media should never ever again talk to Kellyanne Conway.
Because all she does is spin for Trump.
She's not worth it.
She shouldn't be given the time.
Now, about your theory, I'm not ignoring your theory.
You think that the Bill Clinton era featured a balanced budget, some robust economic activity, and the Trump people ought to go back and replicate that.
The balanced budget during the Clinton years.
I don't know if you're meaning they should replicate what Clinton did, because Clinton didn't do anything.
Clinton was living off the Reagan boom and it was Newt Gingrich in the House.
Well, Republicans that won the House for the first time in 40 years in the 94 election, they balanced the budget.
I think Trump, based on what I have seen, has much more in store than just balancing the budget.
I think he's got serious ideas on cutting it and reducing it.
They can do better.
We'll be back.
Let me jump back to the end of this political piece on the Democrat Party and where they are right now.
I want you to read, I want you to listen to this paragraph.
This this is a the previous paragraph I'm not going to read to you dealing with who are their potential new stars.
Who are the people that could run for national office Democrat Party and help regain their power?
And so conversations tip to the likes of Cheryl Sandberg and Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook.
Mark Cuban of the Dallas Mavericks.
Tom Steyr, who is this literally insane.
Well, he appears insane on climate change.
He actually makes a lot of money by perpetrating the hoax.
Tom Hanks.
And then there's always the George Clooney fantasy.
Meryl Streep wasn't even done with her Trump bashing speech at the Golden Globes before the idea started going around within Democrat Party circles, at least informally, that maybe she is the answer.
Politico.
Future Saviors, Democrat Party.
Again, Cheryl Sandberg, Mark Zuckerberg, Mark Cuban, Tom Steyer, Tom Hanks, George Clooney, Merrill Street.
In the meantime, Democrats face a dangerous period in which it's not clear who is calling the shots.
Obama and Biden have both rethought their retirement plans to help shape the next generation of Democrats.
They haven't rethought anything.
Obama, this is predicted by me two years ago.
Who are they trying to fool here with this?
Obama just decided, he and Biden just decided, you know what, we need to change our plans, and we need to focus our retirement on rebuilding the party.
Obama and Biden have both rethought their retirement plans to help shape the next generation of Democrats.
Obama focused more on rebuilding party infrastructure, cultivating the grassroots, and potentially meeting with presidential candidates as 2020 gets closer.
Well, he's a community organizer for crying out loud.
Have you ever seen Obama's coattails?
They don't exist.
Obama's like Clinton.
He did not put people over the finish line.
This is one of the greatest realities that was never written about.
The Obama endorsement did not do anything for you.
Biden will be more engaged with nurturing talented up-and comers.
But both are determined to sit out day-to-day politics.
Well, if you're going to sit out day-to-day politics while reviving the party, you are not going to be reviving the party.
Because it requires a day-to-day effort.
And then Obama actually told this political reporter the following.
What I was able to do during my campaigns, I wasn't able to do during the midterms.
I just I didn't crack the code on that.
And what he's saying is, when I was on the ballot, I won big.
When I wasn't, I lost.
And I don't know why.
Couldn't figure it out.
He's admitting that he was a disaster for the Democrat Party when he in the midterm elections.
Anyway, they say here there's no time for any of it.
No time to debate what the party should focus on, no time to recruit candidates, no time to identify new leaders, no time to rebuild Democrats' core of operations, no time to unpack everything that went wrong last year.
No time to build a legislative strategy.
No time to wrap their heads around how much change is coming to America and politics.
After decades of neglect, there's nothing else either.
The Democrat Party is literally at zero.
Zero dollars in the bank, zero infrastructure as the Clinton campaign closes up shop.
Zero ideas, according to DNC consultant Donnie Fowler.
And most importantly, zero majority control in Washington and in 33 of the states.
It is bad form.
Now it's never as desolate in politics as people think.
For example, going into this election, the same stuff was said about the Republicans.
That if Trump lost, oh, we're in the wilderness forever, right?
Look.
Republicans were supposed to be dead without Hispanic votes.
Republicans are supposed to be dead without signing up on immigration reform.
But look what one election did.
Just one election, look at one election exposed.
Anyway, Democrats are in deep doo-doo.
I want to move on to this next thing here because tomorrow is election day and it's going to be dominated by that.
And this, again, I found this in my one of the tech blogs.
Not going to tell you which one doesn't matter, because I don't want the attention to focus on the blogs.
They're all anti-Trump, pro-Obama, pro-leftist.
Insanely so, without any critical thinking involved.
And one of these blogs decided to do a podcast with a New York University journalism professor named Jay Rosen.
And his appearance on this podcast was to advise journalists in Washington and everywhere how to deal now with the Trump reality.
What is the future of journalism?
I always find this amazing.
Thought journalism was journalism.
You find out what's happening and other people don't know, and you tell them.
But it obviously isn't that.
Journalism is about moving the Democrat Party agenda.
And since that failed, journalism failed to move the Democrat Party agenda.
Journalism failed to destroy the Republican Party.
Journalism failed to destroy Donald Trump.
Journalism failed, failed, failed, failed, failed at everything they wanted to accomplish, and so they now need to rethink journalism.
Let them, folks, the more they're in the wilderness on this the better.
But let me give some excerpts of what this guy has said.
In order for the press to recover some authority.
So that what it says about Trump makes a difference.
Well, now think about what's behind that.
Just that little sentence there.
They're admitting, this guy, Jay Rosen, NYU journalism, admitting they failed to take Trump out.
They did everything they know how to do.
They did everything that has always worked to destroy Republicans, but it didn't work against Trump.
So they need to recover some authority so that what they say makes a difference.
I think journalists have to conduct an extraordinary act of listening that they've never tried to do before, said the professor.
And what I mean by listening is not asking people why they voted for Trump or asking them what they don't like about media.
Journalists need to prove that they understand their audiences' troubles better than the politicians do.
That sets the stage for critical investigative reporting on how those leaders are governing.
So journalists are supposed to go out there and start talking to the downtrodden and the defeated, the hungry, the thirsty, the homeless.
They're to become experts in understanding those problems.
They become bitter ex beggar experts on politicians are.
That way they can do critical investigative reporting on how the politicians are screwing up.
Isn't that what they do anyway?
They do everything but study.
I mean, they presume to know.
And he said that's just the starting point.
Oh, yeah.
That's just The starting point.
Journalists need to redefine their relationship with audiences.
Ditching the view from nowhere, the voice of God, and instead saying, here's where we're coming from would be very good, Rosen said.
The second thing journalists should do is make it clear.
Yeah, we're coming from somewhere, but we've done our reporting.
We've talked to a lot of people.
We've looked at the documents.
We dug up the information.
And then he said, I don't think the people interviewing Kellyanne Ann Conway know why they're doing it.
They should stop.
Kellyanne Conway should no longer be interviewed.
The journalistic logic of it is growing dimmer with every interview, and that's because Conway goes beyond spin.
Frequently, Trump and Conway's statements to the press will directly contradict one another.
And so this professor says, just stop talking to her.
The logic is this is a representative of the president.
This is somebody who can speak for the Trump administration, but if we find that what Kellyanne Conway says is routinely or easily contradicted by Trump, then that rationale for talking to her disappears.
Another reason to interview Kellyanne Conway is our viewers want to understand how the Trump world thinks.
But if the end result of an interview is more confusion about what the Trump world thinks than the rationale evaporates for talking to Kellyanne Conway.
Just just be real about it and say this isn't actually of journalistic value.
It has a different value, and that's why we're putting it on the air.
Just don't pretend that this is a normal interview.
In other words, don't interview effective Trump spokespeople.
It's not helping anything.
It's not furthering any purpose.
It's not helping us become authoritative on who Trump is so that people believe what we say about him.
Our problem is that people like hearing what Kellyanne Conway says about Trump.
So you need to stop talking to her.
That's the advice Mr. Rosen is giving to journalists on a tech blog podcast.
And by the way, tech blog people look at the greatest thing I've ever heard.
They're out hyping it.
Oh, this is magnificent.
This is miraculous.
This is brilliant.
We really have nothing in common with these people, folks.
Values definitions, nothing.
Worldview, it's it's striking.
Have a brief obscene profit break here, and we'll be right back and continue.
So this Rosen guy, journalism professor at New York University, advising journalists, you need to let your audiences know who you are.
You need to let them know where you're coming from.
No, you don't.
We have known where you're coming from for 35 or more years.
We've known every objective you've had.
We you your best objective, your best idea is to keep trying to fool us.
Because we know who you are and where you're coming from.
And in fact, you know what would shock us more than anything about them is if they started doing their job.
That that would I that would give us pause.
We would think, what's what's wrong?
What's in the water?
Have they been poisoned?
If they actually started doing their jobs, if if there was just one day, one day of total media objectivity from all the networks, tell me you wouldn't know what to do with it.
You would suspect a conspiracy.
You would think you're being set up for something.
You'd think a trick is being played on you.
That's how bad it is.
If they did their jobs, you'd be more suspicious than ever.
Hey, here's Gabe in Winnebago, Minnesota.
Great to have you, Gabe.
Good.
How are you?
Fine, Dandy.
Thank you, sir.
Um, so I had a question.
Um, I am currently taking a college class in which we are learning the art of discussion.
And I was wondering, how do you talk fact and ideas with uh liberals and democrats when they immediately go on the defensive and start calling names?
How do you get past that to a point where you can discuss?
You you won't.
All right.
And in the current atmosphere, and with there are the exceptions, of course, with everything and everybody.
But if if you run into somebody who is liberal, and you start discussing facts and reality and serious things, you are outside their comfort level.
They have constructed a false reality in which they live, and anything you say that challenges it upsets them and scares them, and they can't deal with it.
They have never been trained themselves in critical thinking.
They have never been trained to independently ascertain and confirm facts.
They have been sponges, Gabe.
They have been the recipients of indoctrination and propaganda.
I'm not exaggerating here.
The thing you should do is be patient and keep at it.
Repetition is the key here.
But once they start calling you names, do not engage with them, just laugh at them and take the tone down, walk away or whatever, but keep coming back at it.
But you're you're you're never in one shot uh gonna overcome the defense mechanisms that they have uh struck it structured and built up to protect themselves against the conflicting things that they're hearing from you.
You you really'm not exaggerating.
They do not think, Gabe.
They they haven't arrived at the things they believe by way of independent thought.
They have been told to believe this.
It's been indoctrinated in them.
All you're doing is challenging the worldview and their security.
And therefore, you're you're you're make them nervous, they might even hate you.
It's a delicate process.
I'd like to talk to Gabe a little longer.
And I don't want to dispirit him or disencourage and discourage him talking to these people.
Gabe, call back sometime if you can.
Remember, we're gonna be here about six minutes early tomorrow.
Well, actually, ten minutes early tomorrow, folks, for the inauguration of Donald Trump.
1154 Eastern.
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