{"id":12948,"date":"2013-03-15T17:49:43","date_gmt":"2013-03-15T17:49:43","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2013-03-15T17:49:43","modified_gmt":"2013-03-15T17:49:43","slug":"indiana_jones_and_the_lib_crusade","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/admin.rushlimbaugh.com\/daily\/2013\/03\/15\/indiana_jones_and_the_lib_crusade\/","title":{"rendered":"Indiana Jones and the Lib Crusade"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Listen<\/a><\/p>\n

RUSH: Back to the phones. Open Line Friday. This is Indiana in Hastings, Nebraska. Indiana… don\u2019t tell me. Let me guess your last name. Can I guess your last name?<\/line><\/p>\n

CALLER: Take a crack at it.<\/p>\n

RUSH: Jones.<\/p>\n

CALLER: Yes, sir. Yes, Mr. Limbaugh, you are right.<\/p>\n

RUSH: No, I do believe it.<\/p>\n

CALLER: I was born in 1990. My mom said I was the last crusade.<\/p>\n

RUSH: Well, I understand. Pop culture, big. Anyway, welcome to the program. Great to have you here. So you were born in 1990. So you are 22, 23, somewhere around there?<\/p>\n

CALLER: Yes, sir. A birthday coming up, gonna be 23 years old. I\u2019m a young conservative. My question for you is, I\u2019d like you to educate me on a little something here. I talk to old Democrats. I talk to these new liberals, and it\u2019s not always the same kind of conversation. The old Democrats sure as hell don\u2019t act the same. My question to you is what\u2019s the difference between these old school Democrats and these new school Democrats like Barack Obama?<\/p>\n

RUSH: I\u2019d be happy to answer that question, but first, just because I\u2019m curious, at age 22, when you say you talk to an old Democrat, how old are they?<\/p>\n

CALLER: Oh, in their fifties.<\/p>\n

RUSH: Oh, yeah, that would be old. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Well, let me answer it this way. You\u2019ve heard of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, JFK, president in 1960?<\/p>\n

CALLER: Yes, sir.<\/p>\n

RUSH: In 1962 John F. Kennedy gave a speech, an earth-shattering speech at the New York Economic Club. Now, at the time he gave this speech the top marginal tax rate in the United States — are you ready? — was 91%. That was the top marginal rate. Now, not very many people paid it, but that\u2019s what it was. We were coming out of the boom of the post war period through 1950, and the boom was slowing down. The country was not in a recession, but the economy was just sort of stagnant. It was just chugging along, and Kennedy was starting to worry about being reelected. He\u2019d have to run again in two years.<\/line><\/p>\n

So he went to the New York Economic Club, and he proposed an economic reform package that had as its centerpiece massive across-the-board tax cuts. He sounded, in that speech, no different that Ronald Reagan sounded in the 1980s. Now, he was assassinated before the proposal had a chance to be voted on and signed into law. It eventually was, partially in honor of Kennedy. There isn\u2019t a Democrat alive today, not in Washington, there is not an elected Democrat who would propose a tax cut of one penny. Now, they will say they will on middle-class people, poor people, but they\u2019re not. They are raising everybody\u2019s taxes.<\/p>\n

In fact, I\u2019ve got a story right here from the AP: Insurers are warning of sticker shock due to Obamacare\u2019s new taxes. “Some Americans could see their insurance bills double next year as the health care overhaul law expands coverage to millions of people.” Insurance premiums are not gonna go down 2,500 bucks. They\u2019re gonna double for almost everybody. That\u2019s a tax increase. That\u2019s Obama. That\u2019s today\u2019s Democrat Party. Every Democrat in the country voted for it. That\u2019s just one illustration of the difference. I dare say, Indiana, if JFK were alive today and were the same guy today that he was in \u201960, he wouldn\u2019t be a Democrat. They wouldn\u2019t let him in the party. They woulda kicked him out and they\u2019d be trashing him the way they trash any Republican.<\/p>\n

In fact, Indiana, a lot of people think that the Democrat Party\u2019s shift to the far, extreme, radical left began with the assassination of JFK. Hubert Humphrey was a presidential candidate in his day for the Democrats in the Kennedy era. Hubert Humphrey, we played the sound bites. Hubert H. Humphrey did a speech on the importance of family values that sounds just like Pat Robertson today, back in the 1960s. Now, you were gonna interrupt me and ask a question. What were you gonna say? ‘Cause I don\u2019t want to have diarrhea of the mouth here and miss a question that you might have.<\/p>\n

CALLER: Well, so even if it started with the assassination of Kennedy —<\/line><\/p>\n

RUSH: Some people think that the Democrat Party shift to the radical left. Now, by the way, the Democrats back then had liberals. There have been liberals since the creation of the country and before, and the Democrat Party had its share, but they were the minority. They were not winning other than in the usual enclaves of Massachusetts and California, but even then it wasn\u2019t nearly as deeply rooted. It wasn\u2019t nearly as radical. They\u2019ve been shellacked with, you know, coming out of FDR and Woodrow Wilson. Today the Democrat Party, I think the only way to describe it is it\u2019s made up of people who do not think that this country\u2019s founding was legitimate, moral, or just. And they think that this country as such is immoral and unjust, and they are hell-bent on changing it, and that\u2019s what the Obama administration is really oriented towards. And every elected Democrat in Washington today has that same point of view.<\/p>\n

CALLER: Okay. Well, then when did the media really start tailoring to that left side so badly?<\/p>\n

RUSH: Well, the media has always been like they are. The difference in the media is that back then there was a monopoly. As recently as 1988, the media had a monopoly. For example, when my program started in 1988, mine was the first national conservative media program of any kind, ever. There were conservative magazines, such as National Review. But there was no conservative broadcast entity. There were individual conservatives who participated as guests on programs. But when I started in 1988, you had only one cable news network: CNN. The rest of the media was ABC, CBS, NBC, New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times.<\/p>\n

And so they had a monopoly on the news, and the important thing about their monopoly was they were able to hide who they really were, since there was no opposition. There was no alternative. Whatever they decided to ignore reporting in the news was ignored, nobody ever knew it. They had total power to determine what the public saw as news and what they didn\u2019t see. They had total control over all commentary and analysis. So they were able to create the impression that the majority body of thought in the country was liberal. That\u2019s just what was. That was just natural, that was it. There were plenty of conservatives, citizens, individuals, but they had nowhere in the media where their views were reflected.<\/p>\n

The media, therefore, was able to hide their liberalism under this pretense of objectivity and fairness and equality. Well, then this program started, and it spawned a number of other conservative radio talk shows. Then Fox News came along in 1996, and their monopoly ended. And with the end of their monopoly, Indiana — and this is key — away went the cloak, the masquerade, the mask. They were no longer able to hide their objectivity in a monopoly. They were exposed. There were all kinds of different news stories that people were hearing. There was a different take on all of it. Their work was being criticized for the first time ever in a mass national way.<\/p>\n

So the media now is no different than they\u2019ve always been, in terms of the way they operate and the way they do their job. What is different is that they do not pretend anymore to be objective. They\u2019ve taken that cloak off, and they are partisans now. They are every bit the facilitators of the Obama administration. They\u2019ve always been. It\u2019s just now they make no bones if. They don\u2019t hide it. They\u2019re very proud to be willing accomplices, stenographers of the Obama administration.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ll give you an example: The Gulf War, the first one in 1990, when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. George H. W. Bush had a two-phase military operation. We sent troops to Kuwait to make sure Hussein couldn\u2019t go any further, like into Saudi Arabia and get their oil wells. The second phase was the actual military operations to kick the Iraqis out. CNN had a couple of reporters in a hotel in Baghdad. The al-Rashid Hotel, I think it was.<\/p>\n

Those two reporters were obviously being bombed, because we were bombing the hotel. They got out, and they came back home. Our intelligence agencies asked CNN if they could debrief those reporters, and the reporters said, “No, we\u2019re journalists. We can\u2019t choose sides,” and I remember being incredulous. I said, “Wait a minute! What do you mean, you\u2019re reporters? Are you not Americans?” They said, “We have no interest in who wins. We can\u2019t take sides.”<\/p>\n

They refused to help their own country by offering intel of what they had seen inside Baghdad, inside Iraq. So they\u2019ve always been who they are. You\u2019ve seen them in the modern incarnation. You\u2019ve seen them. In your life, they\u2019ve been exactly what they are. There used to be a day where there was no Fox News. There was no conservative talk radio, nothing. I remember the Goldwater-LBJ campaign of 1964. Another little anecdote for you just to illustrate the media.<\/p>\n