RUSH: You know, I did want to spend just a couple of more minutes on this Florida special election. There are abundant lessons here for the Republican establishment to learn, a bunch of things to glean here that would help them going forward. Reviewing the campaign is one of the best ways, I think, to impart some of the lessons.

One of the other factors, independents, the precious — oh, we love them so much — independents made up 25% of the votes. Jolly won those, too. The Republican won the independents, and that’s what the consultants say you have to do. This is a moderate district, lot of snowbirds, a lot of transplanted moderates, liberals from the Northeast have moved and live there. That’s why the Democrats thought that their global warming spiel would work to counter the negatives of Obamacare.

You know what else? David Jolly was a lobbyist for offshore drilling. I mean, you can’t be a bigger target than that for a Democrat campaign. My God, this is everything. A lobbyist for offshore drilling! And not the Ted Kennedy kind. This is oil drilling that he’s a lobbyist for. Now, in the conventional wisdom playbook, that’s supposed to be a death warrant in a political campaign, and he didn’t lose. There was an anti-David Jolly editorial back in January, Tampa Bay Times. ” Both Jolly, a Republican candidate for US House District 13, and Lucas Overby, his Libertarian opponent, are refusing to acknowledge the overwhelming scientific evidence that humans have had an extensive impact on climate change and by extension, rising tides in Pinellas County and elsewhere.”

So, I mean, they laid it on full bore. That is just journalistic malpractice. Well, it’s an editorial, but whoever wrote it is a full-fledged idiot. Okay, so Jolly and the Libertarian refuse to acknowledge the overwhelming scientific evidence that humans have had. There is no such evidence!
There’s no evidence that humans — it’s an open question. If there was evidence humans had caused it, then there wouldn’t be a debate.

If there was evidence, you couldn’t refute it. There isn’t any evidence that humans cause the climate to change. Nobody’s disputing the climate changes. But we’re not causing it. We don’t have that power. We do not have the ability. And the proof is we can’t fix it. We can’t stop it once it’s doing one thing or the other, warming or cooling. We can’t stop it. So how can we cause it?

The other thing about this global warming, and I think this is a fundamental point, and admittedly it may be over the head of your average low-information voter. But for this global warming argument that the left makes to work, there has to be an unquestioned truth, or assumption, and that is that whatever was going on 10 years ago is normal and the way God intended or the way nature intended. At some point you have to be able to say, “This is the normal for planet Earth,” so that you can measure warming or cooling. There’s no evidence of what normal is. There hasn’t been record taking long enough for anybody to say what is normal. Are the ice ages normal? Are Dust Bowls normal?

We define normal based on our comfort. But is that what’s normal? We don’t know what the point is that if it’s getting cooler we got a problem, and if it’s getting warmer we’ve got a problem. We just assume that at the moment in time that we happen to populate the planet it happens to be normal. There’s so much wrong with that. Scientifically there’s so much wrong. You can refute practically every claim made because every claim is political. You can refute it with logic. So I think when you have an editorial like the Tampa Bay Times, it’s just a bit of evidence of how corrupt journalism school has become, how corrupt the left is. The overwhelming scientific evidence that man causes — there isn’t any evidence that man causes it.

There is an attempt to make people believe it with contrived evidence. That’s what the e-mails from the East Anglia University demonstrated, that the climate scientists are making it up. They are ignoring things that disprove their theory, and they’re making up things that prove their theory. There isn’t any science. The next thing that needs to be touted is, science is not consensus. Science is not up for a vote. It’s not a political contest to win. But that’s what it’s become. That’s why I asked the question: Why is whether it’s getting warmer or cooler political? That question alone to me ought to alert everybody that they’re being caught up in a hoax.

People intrinsically hate politics, don’t they? They hate lobbyists, they hate all of this. They like the goodies they get, but they don’t like it. They don’t think it’s honest. They think they get screwed. Why, then, do they choose to believe certain elements of the industry they all despise?
They don’t think politicians are honest; they don’t think politicians really care about ’em. That’s another thing. Now, I’m making a detour here. I’ve leaving the Jolly race ’cause a bulb went off in the brain. You know the exit poll question. There were two in the 2012 presidential race. When I saw the first wave at five o’clock, that’s when we got the first wave in 2012. When I saw them, I said, “We’re finished.”

The first one was that almost 58% of voters still blame Bush for the economy. I said, “Well, it’s over.” The second one, and even worse, was in the question, “cares for people like me,” Obama 81, Romney 19. And for the first time I think this is safe to say, in exit polling data, and not just exit polling, in terms of Election Day, but polling afterwards, what normally wins is whoever voters think is the most competent leader. That question, whoever prevails in that question generally has won the presidential election. This one, 2012 I think was one of the first — if not the first, it’s one of the few — where the empathy question defined the winner. And that signals a significant societal shift in what people want out of their president. “Cares about people like me.”

That is evidence of the corruption of our culture throughout education and entertainment, pop culture, “cares about people like me.” Well, the Republicans never win that one. Even Republicans that have been elected president always lose in that. And therein lies one of the biggest challenges the Republicans have, is convincing people they care about them. If you want to talk about Republican branding that’s gone wrong, that’s probably it in a nutshell, that Republicans don’t care about people. They care about the rich, and that no matter how incompetent the Democrats are, doesn’t matter, ’cause they at least care.

And then that feeds into all of this equality and fairness and all these other things that really have nothing to do with leadership. But even that, the Democrats tried characterizing David Jolly as a pro-offshore drilling lobbyist and a global warming denier, he doesn’t care about you, and it didn’t work. So I’m telling you that there are all kinds of lessons for the Republican establishment, and the Tea Party, too. Anybody that wants to win elections in this cycle, there’s all kinds of lessons to be learned from this one.

The global warming thing, I don’t know why the Republicans haven’t been more vocal because, to me, it’s so easy to refute it. I know we have our scientists that are trying to refute it that way, and God bless them. But the people that support it don’t know the science. The people that support it are brain-dead. They’re caught up in the emotion of it. They are accepting blame for causing it.

And then they are accepting that carrot out there that they can be absolved for this sin if they agree to pay higher taxes and drive a clunky little car and whatever other price they have to pay, and give up some of their freedom. I mean, to me, it’s just so commonsensical. This is a farce, and that big question: How do we know what is normal? What kind of vanity do we have?

How many human beings have walked this earth over however many years it’s been here? Whatever you believe, where do we get off saying that in our 85 years of life expectancy is what’s normal for the earth and that’s the way it should be? We don’t know that. We don’t know that there even is a normal, because the climate of Planet Earth is in a state of constant flux.

So we’re gonna define “normal” by where we’re most comfortable? Well, I’m sorry, that doesn’t even work, ’cause frankly we, down here, have had a very comfortable winter. It’s been fabulous. As far as we’re concerned, this could be normal all the time. And most of this country has frozen its behind off! There is no normal. There is no automatic, “This is the way it was intended to be.” We don’t know that.

So any so-called evidence that it’s getting warmer or cooler from that point is bogus. The whole thing is made up. Now they’re inculcating all of this with Michelle’s push into healthy foods, by determining how food is created, produced, grown, whatever. It’s gotta be done in a “green” fashion. That’s gonna raise prices. It’s ostensibly gonna be healthier and so forth.

But it’s just gonna end up taking away food choice from people, and it’s gonna raise prices like crazy. And it’s all based on the presumption you don’t know how to eat right; you don’t know what’s good for you. But it’s really based on more than that. They just want to control every aspect of your life, and it’s what they’re aiming for.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Back to the phones we go on the one and only Rush Limbaugh program. Garvin in Casper, Wyoming. I’m glad you called, sir. Thank you for waiting, by the way, too. Hello.

CALLER: Hey, Big Guy. What’s going on?

RUSH: You tell me.

CALLER: Well, I kind of wanted to touch on two objects. One, I’m tired of the media picking our Republican candidates. Why do they do that?

RUSH: You’re tired of the media doing what to our candidates?

CALLER: Picking our candidates. They picked McCain, and he lost. They picked Romney, and he lost.

RUSH: Well, they’re not doing it. The Republicans are allowing it to happen.

CALLER: Ah, they’re not doing a good job at it.

RUSH: No, no. The Republicans think that that’s what it’s gonna take to win. They gotta make the media love ’em. They think if they get the media on their side, then they’ve really won a huge battle. They think that the media loves the Democrats. They make the mistake of thinking that the media is actually ever going to support them, vote for them, promote them. It’s never gonna happen, but they think it is.

CALLER: They’re not. They’re not. They’re lying back, buying our votes, and it’s not working. We need conservative people. We need —

RUSH: Yeah, you’re summing up 25 years of this program here.

CALLER: There you go. The other point is, I wanted to tell you about we have new cigar store in our community that has, on Fridays, Firearms Fridays. If you come in packing a firearm, you get 10% off. I knew you’d love this.

RUSH: You get 10% off on a cigar if you walk in a tobacco store and buy a cigar if you’re packing?

CALLER: That’s right. If you’re carrying a firearm —

RUSH: Have you ever seen Vice President Cheney in there?

CALLER: No. (laughing) No. He wouldn’t come into our shop.

RUSH: Well, I don’t know. I mean, he packs heat. He goes hunting. He goes fishing.

CALLER: (laughing)

RUSH: I know he doesn’t smoke cigars. Garvin, thanks for the call. Appreciate it.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: I want to zip back to global warming for a second because you listen to the right Democrats — John Kerry, Obama — they’re out there and they are saying that climate change is the greatest existential threat facing the planet today. The greatest existential threat facing the planet. Now, there are some real violators. For example, India, the ChiComs, the Russians, Brazil, they are all huge polluters. They’re all worse than we are.

Every one of those countries is worse in terms of CO2 emissions than we are. They all happen to be growing their economies at near record paces, by the way. CO2 emissions accompany economic growth. Are we willing to go to war with ’em if they don’t cut back on their emissions? I mean, they’re out there trying to make you think it’s the greatest threat we face, other than the Tea Party, greatest threat we face. Now, you’ve got a bunch of people out there that are part of the greatest threat we face, climate change. Somebody ought to ask Kerry, “Are we ready to go to war, if it’s this big a threat?” Just trying to make a point, folks. All of this is just so trumped up, and it’s all designed to scare everybody.