RUSH: We’ve had 24 hours (well, 22 hours) to let things settle down after Obama’s dismal performance. It was as dismal as I thought it was in Parma, Ohio. Do you know they couldn’t even sell the thing out? I’m sorry, give it away? I think a couple minutes before the show was supposed to start they had 75 empty seats in that arena. They’re blaming a ‘bad economy’ for it. (laughing) How can a bad economy be responsible when he’s out there addressing the economy, ostensibly? Nobody is listening to Obama anymore except the media, and they don’t matter right now. It’s striking. Obama has demonstrated, folks, he is a combination of an incompetent dissembler and leftist whose word can’t be trusted. People are tuning him out. He’s becoming an aggravation on television. It’s, ‘Oh, no, is it him again?’ and people want to change the channel. (interruption)
Go ask Colin Powell who’s gonna win the Super Bowl, Snerdley, if you care. I mean, Colin Powell told us who to vote for president. We haven’t heard from Colin Powell in a while. Ask him how things are going out there.
Not only are people tuning Obama out, I think they’re starting to get turned off by him. Now, don’t get overly excited. He’s still president. He can still destroy things. But I think he’s becoming a caricature. He is a bumbling, unfocused, destructive politician, and he really is out of touch. I go back and forth on this practically every day. Does he know what he’s doing? Is it scientifically arranged and executed or is he genuinely out of touch because of his own messianic complex, his own narcissism? I have a different answer for this from day to day to day, but today I really do think that he’s totally out of touch. He has no connection with people and I don’t think he ever really did. Even during the campaign, it was all platitudes: ‘We’re the ones you’ve been waiting for! We’re gonna lower the sea levels,’ and all this. But there’s no personal connection.
This is something that, as a media figure, myself… Forgive me for inserting myself into this, but I labored in the broadcast business as a failure or as a this-guy-might-make-it-someday kind of figure for a number of years, 1967 through 1983. I never really amounted, but when I went to Sacramento I got the first chance ever to really do a radio show the way I wanted to do it and thought it would work for me. I found out what a success track is and I learned about the connection that I have (and to this day have) with an audience. And it’s a precious thing. It is not something that you target or plan. It just has to happen based on everybody involved being genuine.
And that’s the problem. There’s no genuine to Obama. I mean, he’s genuine when thinking and talking about himself, but he’s a disingenuous guy. He’s arrogant, condescending. He speaks above people and talks down to them, and you’re never gonna establish a connection with people that way. If he did have one, he doesn’t have it any longer. He’s now putting down the American people. He is attacking what the American people have created in this country, and now he’s out attacking their lifestyles. He’s attacking prosperity. There’s something, in his world, immoral about prosperity.
What is wrong with this statement: ‘Obama wants to keep tax cuts for families making under $250,000 a year.’ Something ought to just leap off the page or out of your radio speaker at that. Obama wants to keep tax cuts for families making under $250,000 a year. I’ll tell you what sticks out to me. For seven years, including yesterday in Parma, Ohio, we’ve been told again and again and again the Bush tax cuts were ‘tax cuts for the rich’ and we can’t keep on doing business that way. Tax cuts for the rich. The Bush tax cuts for the rich. You would never know there were tax cuts for the middle class that Bush was involved in except if you listen carefully: ‘Obama wants to keep tax cuts for families making under $250,000 a year.’ So from Obama himself and from his acolytes we learn that there were tax cuts for families making under $250,000 a year and we also learned those tax cuts are so beneficial, the regime wants to keep ’em.
And yet that is a slip of the tongue.
Obama screws it up every time he runs around talking about keeping tax cuts for families making under $250,000 because they have done their best to make it sound as though only the rich got tax cuts under Bush. You hear tax cuts for the rich, and now you hear, ‘Okay, well, so they weren’t just for the rich. So what? We’re still not gonna extend the tax cuts for the rich.’ Now, as for Obama being tone deaf, it’s an argument. People can go back and forth on this. Some people say that there’s ‘hard of hearing,’ which is what I am, and others say ‘tired of hearing.’
I think Obama is tired of hearing. He doesn’t want to hear from the American people. He doesn’t care what you think. All he cares about is persuading you to agree with him. In fact, Obama has never wanted to hear from the American people. You don’t have the ability; you don’t have the competence. There’s nothing Obama can learn from you. You have to learn from Obama. He knows what’s best for you. But there’s nothing you can teach Obama. He’s not even interested in that. He puts everybody down; he attacks what they’ve created; he has attacked prosperity and their lifestyle, and then he blames all of this on the rich.
Have you seen the numbers, the amount of debt run up by Barack Obama in 19 months? It’s over the total aggregate debt of George Washington through Ronald Reagan, and yet there’s Obama wanting to hearken back to all those horrible things that Bush did these last seven years. Barack Obama has run up more debt in a year and a half, a little over a year and a half, than the country did from its founding through Ronald Reagan. The rich have nothing to do with the destruction that’s taking place in this country. They are not culpable; they are not responsible.
Whatever ‘rich’ means. Because the bottom line is it is Barack Obama — his policies, his theories put into practice — which are destroying the lives of Americans from all walks of life, in all income categories. You know, class warfare, they’re trying it. That’s what Obama is doing. But class warfare rhetoric doesn’t work when the warfare is against the entire economic system. Obama wants you to think that he’s waging war against the evil rich, and if it weren’t for the evil rich, why, you’d have it so much better and our country would be so much better off. But he’s waging war on the entire capitalist system. He’s waging war on the entire private sector.
Yesterday, some guy from the Atlantic (or from whatever, I forget what, doesn’t matter) goes down and talks to Castro, and Castro says, ‘You know what? The Cuban model doesn’t even work for us anymore.’ He says he regrets what he did in the Cuban missile crisis. I’m not buying any of this, by the way. He just wants the embargo lifted. They don’t have any loot. Castro can read the tea leaves in this country. We have a bunch of moderate wimps throughout our government who would love to lift the embargo. All Castro has to say is, ‘You know what? It doesn’t work. Our revolution hasn’t worked. Communism? Eh, it hasn’t worked,’ and he’s saying this to give Raul (who’s already making rumblings in this direction) leeway to make even more changes. They can’t afford, in Cuba, to pay anybody anymore. The system doesn’t work. Make no mistake, he’s right about it, but he’s not saying it because he wants to change it. Changing it would be easy. Castro needs money. He needs the embargo lifted and what better time to get it lifted when you got a simpatico in the White House by the name of Barack Hussein Imam Obama or Imam Barack, whatever, Hussein Obama. So that’s what that’s all about.
Don’t get all excited, ‘Now the communists are even realizing that it doesn’t work!’ Castro’s known it doesn’t work from the get-go, except for him. He’s not blind. He knows he’s got a nation of people in poverty. He knows he’s got a city that hasn’t been rebuilt or even touched up since 1959. It’s not about prosperity, folks. If it were about prosperity they’d have gotten rid of this system a long time ago. Everybody’s getting all excited, ‘Castro! Even Castro! Why doesn’t Obama learn?’ Obama knows, too! They know it doesn’t work. It does for them; it doesn’t work for you. It depends on what works for them and how that’s defined. In Obama’s case, you’ve got a grudge against the country. Your philosophy is get-even-with-’em-ism. Blame everybody else for the prosperity. Fine. Get even with them by making everybody poor. It works. Depends on how you define it. This trickle-down government schemes a total failure, and he’s still obsessed with that. In that speech in Parma, Ohio, yesterday, he accused the Republicans of still being interested in his failure. (imitating Obama) ‘When I fail, they succeed.’
Wrong. When you fail, the country has a chance, Mr. President.
The issue today, folks, quite simply, is not the people.
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RUSH: The regime has announced jobless claims, about 450,000, and they are celebrating this as good news. Only 450,000 new jobless claims; 450,000 new jobless claims. Why, if we can hold that great number for a full year, it would be only 23 million new jobless in a full year! And then get this from Bloomberg. ‘For the latest reporting week, nine states didn’t file claims data to the Labor Department in Washington because of the federal holiday earlier this week, a Labor Department official told reporters. As a result, California and Virginia estimated their figures and the US government estimated the other seven’. Well, this is corruption! There’s no accuracy if they’re guessing! Wild guess on the unemployment numbers.
‘Fidel [Castro]: ‘Cuban Model Doesn’t Even Work for Us Anymore.” This comes from The Atlantic Monthly. It’s from Jeffrey Goldberg, and there’s this little ditty here that’s buried in this. ‘There were many odd things about my recent Havana stopover (apart from the dolphin show, which I’ll get to shortly),’ he writes, ‘but one of the most unusual was Fidel Castro’s level of self-reflection. I only have limited experience with Communist autocrats,’ he says, ‘(I have more experience with non-Communist autocrats), but it seemed truly striking that Castro was willing to admit that he misplayed his hand at a crucial moment in the Cuban Missile Crisis… (he said, in so many words, that he regrets asking Khruschev to nuke the US.)’ In fact, he regretted it so much, 20 years later in the early eighties he asked the Soviet Union to nuke the US again. ‘Even more striking was something he said at lunch on the day of our first meeting… during the generally lighthearted conversation… I asked him if he believed the Cuban model was still something worth exporting. ‘The Cuban model doesn’t even work for us anymore,’ he said.’
Okay, fine, I’ll play along, but somebody tell Harry Reid, somebody tell Obama, somebody tell Pelosi, somebody tell Barney Frank, somebody tell Maxine Waters, somebody tell the whole Congressional Black Caucus, somebody tell Obama: the latest practitioner of communism says it doesn’t work. Luckily, Mr. Goldberg had Julia Sweig, a Latin-American scholar at the CFR, by his side to explain away what Castro meant.
Honest to God. Here we have a reporter for the Atlantic Monthly who says he doesn’t have all that much experience with communist autocrats. I don’t know a single one personally, but I know that they’re evil. What kind of experience do you need with a communist autocrat? All you need’s a history book! So even though he doesn’t have experience in dealing with a communist autocrat, he does have somebody from the CFR to tell him what Castro really meant when he said the communist model doesn’t work for Cuba.
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RUSH: ‘President Barack Obama is conceding that if the midterm election turns out to be mostly a referendum on the economy, the Democrats are not going to do well.’ If? If it turns out to be a referendum on the economy? In an interview with his slavish ABC — do you know that David Westin, the president of ABC News resigned, said he just got tired of firing people. Had to lay off 400 people, just got tired of it, said, no mas, no mas. And as a news report today said, one of his close friends, Barack Obama, called him to wish him well. One of his close friends, Barack Obama, called David Westin, the resigned president of ABC News, to wish him well, tell him he’ll be okay. That’s what it said.
In an interview with ABC News Obama said, ‘I’ve not seen a single new idea out of the Republicans to jump-start the economy.’ He commented after John Boehner proposed a two-year freeze on tax rates. Hasn’t seen a new idea? Doesn’t matter if he had, he would ignore it. He’s gonna ignore anything that works. He’s going to oppose anything that leads to prosperity.
Back to Castro. I’m sorry, I find this amusing. We got this guy from the Atlanta Monthly down there, gets a scoop from Castro, says, ‘You know what? Communism doesn’t even work for us.’ But this guy, Jeffrey Goldberg, he doesn’t have any experience with communist autocrats. So he needs somebody from the Council on Foreign Relations to tell him what this means. Now, I don’t know about you, but I don’t know any communist autocrats personally. I don’t think I do. But I know how evil they all are. I know they’re not good. I know we don’t want any part of ’em. But apparently Mr. Goldberg, ‘I’m not sure what this means: Cuban model not working for us anymore.’ So he had somebody from the CFR, and her name is Julia Sweig. ‘I asked Julia to interpret this stunning statement for me. She said, ‘He wasn’t rejecting the ideas of the Revolution. I took it to be an acknowledgment that under ‘the Cuban model’ the state has much too big a role in the economic life of the country.’
‘Julia pointed out that one effect of such a sentiment might be to create space for his brother, Raul, who is now president, to enact the necessary reforms in the face of what will surely be push-back from orthodox communists within the Party and the bureaucracy. Raul Castro is already loosening the state’s hold on the economy.’ Well, now, that sounds to me like the Castros are rejecting the ideas of the Revolution. Even though the CFR babe, (paraphrasing) ‘Oh, no, no, he’s not rejecting the idea of the revolution. Simply the government’s too big.’ What? The whole point of the Revolution was to make the government the focal point and to oppress people and to have political prisons and dungeons and put people in there. They took away private property, for crying out loud! That’s what the purpose of the Revolution was.
So here we have the ruling class elite, the Council on Foreign Relations, I mean you have to have qualifications to get into this CFR. You just can’t walk in there and fill out an application. Actually, you can. Do you know that? You can walk in and fill out an application. You’re not going to be a full-fledged invited member, but you can say ‘resident scholar’ if they accept you. So beware when you see people on TV, ‘scholar or resident, whatever, CFR,’ they may have just walked in the door and said they want to be members. Some of them have been recruited. I’m sure this Julia Sweig, though, is a member in high standing, recruited. ‘He wasn’t talking about the Revolution.’ Of course he was.
‘He recently announced, in fact, that small businesses can now operate and that foreign investors could now buy Cuban real estate. (The joke of this new announcement, of course, is that Americans are not allowed to invest in Cuba, not because of Cuban policy, but because of American policy. In other words, Cuba is beginning to adopt the sort of economic ideas that America has long-demanded it adopt, but Americans are not allowed to participate in this free-market experiment because of our government’s hypocritical and stupidly self-defeating embargo policy.’ This is in the story. This is Mr. Goldberg. So you see what this is really all about. This is all about lifting the embargo, and that’s what Castro is aiming for. If there’s any doubt here, and if there’s any doubt about Mr. Goldberg’s article, this is just the latest drumbeat from the left to end the US embargo against Cuba. After all, Castro now says in so many words he’s sorry, he tried to have our country destroyed and he realizes communism doesn’t work. I mean he must need money badly. That’s what this is all about.
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RUSH: How can we believe in anything they say anyway when they’re literally guessing about unemployment numbers. Nine states didn’t even submit figures because of the Labor Day holiday, they were closed. So now the regime is just guessing? And they say the news is good? (laughing)
They are totally out of touch. There’s no connection. You could see it in that crowd at Parma yesterday. The crowd behind Obama, it was like they were drugged. There was no enthusiasm. It was dead in there. Then we find out there were 75 open seats at show time. (interruption) I know Ohio’s in misery. Hell, we’re all in misery, Snerdley. Everybody’s in misery. That’s the whole point. It’s just different degrees of misery. Ohio’s in bad shape. Chicago’s in bad shape. Detroit’s in bad shape. New York’s in bad shape. Nevada’s in bad shape. Misery is everywhere. There are just different degrees of it. I don’t know how Obama even shows his face. He shows his face because he doesn’t care about the suffering and the discomfort. He’s brought it about himself, on purpose. Can there be any doubt?
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RUSH: During his interview with George ‘Stephy’ Stephanopoulos, Obama — he can’t let go of this. He said that the Republicans still hope he fails, that if he fails, they win. Isn’t it too late for that? When you get right down to brass tacks, Obama has already succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. In just a little over a year and a half, look at the destruction, look at the trail of tears and destruction. My gosh, if conservatism had accomplished in just a year and a half as big a percentage of its objectives has Obama has, we would be throwing parties. We are in a terrible state. He’s already succeeded. The country has been devastated here. He instituted his financial plan. He’s been fantasizing about this since he wrote The Dream of My Father, whatever the hell it is he inherited. Wreckonomics. That’s what we’re facing.
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RUSH: To the phones we go to New Haven, Connecticut. Jerry, welcome to the Rush Limbaugh program. Great to have you here, sir.
CALLER: Hey, Rush, great being with you today. I wanted to ask you, are you getting bored?
RUSH: Am I getting bored?
CALLER: Yeah, with your job.
RUSH: Not at all.
CALLER: Well, I’ve been listening to you for a while, I mean, I’m getting bored. I mean this guy in the White House —
RUSH: I don’t think you’re getting bored.
CALLER: Fatigue?
RUSH: I think it’s like I said, you’re tuning him out. He’s an intrusion in your life now.
CALLER: You’re right.
RUSH: He’s not connecting with you.
CALLER: Yeah. I mean, even to hear you talk about him is getting tiresome. You know what I’m saying?
RUSH: Yeah, but —
CALLER: I don’t know if I’m projecting but, you know, I’m sensing a little bit of boredom and in your last segment you said everybody’s miserable. And you’re right, is everybody miserable?
RUSH: Economically. Economically. I’m using that to describe the economic disaster wrought by this guy’s policies. Now, in the sense of their mood, whether they’re miserable, you’re always going to have a certain percentage of people miserable. But no, I am not bored by any stretch of the imagination. This is too crucial. This is too important. The way to look at this is that while in a year and a half the guy’s been wildly successful in implementing destructive policies, at the same time he has been wildly successful in illuminating for people exactly what people like him really are all about. I mean, if there were boredom and tedium, nobody would be talking about massive turnout this November in the elections. It’s going to be huge. People aren’t bored; they are ticked off! They are fed up. They are fed up with Washington. They are fed up with professional politicians. They are fed up with being told this is important so somebody can hold another chairmanship. They’re fed up with Washington being too damn big a part of their lives, and they want that fixed.
So don’t mistake fatigue or frustration with boredom because we’re sitting here on the cusp of an opportunity. And, by the way, that is what adds to some of what you think is fatigue or boredom, we’re on the cusp of a great opportunity, and there’s frustration that some Republicans don’t seem to see it that way. A lot of people are out scratching their heads. They see every day what’s happening to their country because they’re living it. The American people do not have a way, other than the welfare class, to dip their hands into the back pockets of everybody else via the public Treasury. But they see everybody in Washington doing it.
They see everybody working for the government making twice what they make, everybody working for the government living a Life of Riley with no threat to their job security or anything else. They see people working with the government being totally insulated from the economic circumstances they face every day. And they don’t understand why elected officials in Washington don’t share their enthusiasm to ditch all of this and start over with the citizen being the primary focus of the government, not the government being the primary focus of the government and the people who work there. No, there’s not any boredom out there. There is anticipation. It’s bordering on — I don’t want to use the word ‘anger’ because it will convey the wrong idea — but there’s anticipation. People cannot wait for November to roll around.
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RUSH: I am still stunned at that question, Snerdley. Bored? You know, the Democrats, the rest of the media, they wish to Allah we were bored. But we’re not bored. We are revved up. Obama has stimulated the opposition. It’s called the Tea Party. Bored? Frankly, if I say so myself, I’ve never been better in the past six months. What is this bored business? This isn’t CNN, for crying out loud.
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RUSH: So Barack Obama was in Parma, Ohio, yesterday where there were 75 open seats at show time, and they put out a call for some students to go in there and fill ’em up. Barack Obama said he hasn’t heard any new ideas from the Republicans in a long time. It reminds me of a retort that Ronaldus Magnus made once to Senator Ted Kennedy. W. Averell Harriman, he was the guy that inherited a big, big, big, big railroad fortune. W. Averell Harriman, when he was 105, was appointed by Johnson back in 1964 to head up some special commission. He died at about 210 years old. He was at one time married to Pamela Digby Harriman, who was the harlot. Everybody was her husband or keeper. She ended up being the ambassador to France for Clinton over there for a while I think. Anyway, W. Averell Harriman, he was actually a good guy. W. Averell Harriman built, as I understand it — I could be wrong about this because I heard this from somebody who lives there who was drunk at the time — built Sun Valley, Idaho.
He actually went out there and said, ‘You know, there’s a valley here, the sun’s here, so I’m going to create this.’ And Averell Harriman built the first ever motorized ski lift. In fact, it was shown to me when I was out there this past summer at a wedding, the W. Averell Harriman ski lift. So that’s W. Averell Harriman and he had his 90th birthday party — stripper party from what I am told, W. Averell Harriman got around — and Ted Kennedy and Ronaldus Magnus were both there. And Ted Kennedy said to W. Averell Harriman, ‘Averell, you know you’re only half as old as Ronald Reagan’s ideas,’ and Reagan said, ‘You know what, Ted, you’re right, I get all my ideas from the Constitution of the United States, which is just about 200 years old.’ They’ve got this quote, this little story, this exchange up at the Reagan library. ‘Yeah, Ted, you’re right, I get my ideas from the US Constitution.’