RUSH: Okay, what do you want to start with? You want to start with Cuba? Or you want to start with the Sony/North Korea hack? You want to start with showbiz first? All right. Because you know they’re linked. They are intertwined. I’ll be happy to explain it. I just hope — well, let me just say at the beginning, my purpose here is not to dispirit anybody. It’s quite the opposite in fact. I’m not trying to depress anybody with the take that I’m gonna have on this today. I’m trying actually to wake people up. Not you. I’m totally confident you people in this audience are totally up to speed.

Well, not all of you, because we have new tune-in factor every day and there’s some leftists who tune in here for whatever self-loathing reasons they might have. But for the most of you, I mean, none of what I’m gonna say is a surprise. That’s why you’re here. You are ahead of the game. You understand exactly what’s going on, and it’s why you are properly concerned about things.

Anyway, here’s the phone number if you want to be on the program. It’s 800-282-2882. I’m Rush Limbaugh. I’ve been doing this a long time, means I’m better at it than anybody else. It’s acknowledged and I’m gonna be doing it for a much, much longer time, depending on how much longer I want to do it. It’s totally up to me. Could be tomorrow, could be 10 years, who knows, but I have no intention of leaving this mess as it is. So you can take solace in that.

Okay, e-mails flowing in, “Rush, Rush, what do you think of the Sony hack? My God, what do you think of Sony pulling the movie? Oh, my God!” I have to be really careful here with my attitude. I don’t want to sound pompous or know-it-all, and I don’t want to sound condescending.

But, ladies and gentlemen, none of this should be surprising. This is who the country is now. This is what America has become — (interruption) Who, “one of their own”? (interruption) Well, hang on just a second for that. I’ll get into screwing actors in a minute. They do that to themselves quite regularly without any help from the North Koreans. So keep actors screwing themselves, you know, off to the side, we’ll get to that. May even look at it. But this is where the country is now.

Do you remember the name John O’Sullivan? Used to be the editor at National Review in the days shortly after — well, Mr. Buckley was still alive and running the place. And he also was a prominent position holder at Lady Thatcher. And he said something once that I think a lot of people have forgotten if they heard it in the first place. And I’m paraphrasing, but John O’Sullivan said any organization, any group, any bureaucracy, family, you name, any group of people, any organized group of people that is not actively conservative will become liberal.

Liberalism is easy. It’s the default position. If you want to love yourself with no reason, if you want to love yourself for caring and doing nothing, if you want to love yourself for thinking you are very compassionate and very concerned, liberalism is easy. Conservatism is an applied process. You have to actively be conservative in the way you think and live on a daily basis. It’s not because conservatism is hard. Most people live their lives that way. It’s just that liberalism is so seductive. It’s a set of false promises, and it’s a set of illusory things that make surface emotions easy as pie.

All you have to do to be thought of as a good person is to look at suffering and say it bothers you, and that’s it. You’re a good person. Well, that doesn’t do a thing in terms of solving the problem. But you don’t have to solve the problem to be a good person, to be a liberal. All you have to do is be able to recognize it and then convince people that it bothers you and that it shouldn’t be. And then, if you learn very quickly that you can blame other Americans for that misery, then you’re an even better liberal. And that’s all it takes.

But conservatism is an applied, I believe, intellectual process. I know that most people live their lives that way. I mean, you don’t walk down the street and give your paycheck to neighbors, but you’ll vote for people that do it for you. People live their lives that are conservative don’t know it. Republicanism, conservatism has a brand problem, if you will, and liberalism, it’s just easy. If you look at the Republican Party, for example, it is clear, is it not, that in these six years of Barack Obama, the entire country has shifted to the left, including the Republican Party.

You may not like hearing it, and you may say, “Rush, look at the election result.” Yeah. Yeah. Of the people who voted, we overwhelmingly rejected it. But not even half the people voted in this country in the 2014 midterms. Of the people who voted — and that counts, don’t misunderstand, the people who vote are the ones that do end up making a difference. See, I’ve gotta be very careful. I’m not trying to dispirit anybody here. But the Republican Party has abandoned conservatism. And according to O’Sullivan, what’s happened to ’em? They’re becoming more and more liberal.

Obama is shifting the entire country liberal. You don’t automatically default to moderate. Moderate is also something you must try to be. Despite what people think, being a moderate takes effort. You have to consciously object or accept things. Liberalism doesn’t require consciousness, is my point. All it requires is emotion on your sleeve, and bingo, and you’ve accomplished it. It’s why I’ve always said it’s the most gutless choice you can make because it takes no effort and you end up being thought of as a wonderful person.

The Republican Party clearly has abandoned conservatism, and what’s happening to them? They’re indistinguishable, at the leadership level, from the Democrat Party in terms of issues. Name it: amnesty, Obamacare, you name it, you can’t spot significant difference in the two.

Okay, so let’s apply that to what we have going on here. Let’s look at the hypocrisy, first off. We were told last night, we were told yesterday, we’re being told all day today, that everybody in Hollywood is livid over Sony caving to the Norks. We are told that people in Hollywood are outraged. They are fit to be tied. How dare we cave to a bunch of tiny, small-time terrorist cyber hackers? We’re a bunch of cowards.

The same people who, a few short years ago, ripped George W. Bush for including North Korea in the axis of evil. The same bunch of people who said, “North Korea? Come on. A small sliver of land that you can’t even see at night ’cause they don’t have electricity. They’re so poor, they can’t amount to anything. North Korea, Bush, you’re an enemy; Bush, you’re Hitler; Bush, you’re crazy. North Korea, axis of evil, screw you, Bush.”

A few years later, this same bunch of people are outraged here that the Hollywood industry, Sony, whatever, has caved to the Norks and whoever these cyber hackers are. The hypocrisy is, at the very moment that they are ripping Sony and at the very moment they are ripping into the North Koreans and these hackers, they turn around and applaud and praise the appeasement of another set of dictators in Cuba. Why, getting rid of our embargo? Why, that’s the greatest thing in the world.
That is so cool. Liberalism, see, it makes us think we’re good people.

What I’m attempting to say here in as brief a moment as I can is I’m not surprised by this. If you’ve been raised with the idea, if you’ve been raised with the self-loathing that America is the problem in the world, if you’ve been raised with the idea that America is the reason for suffering in the world — and there are plenty of people who have, educated and been raised this way, then what Sony did is very reasonable. For every Hollywood person supposedly outraged by it, I’ll bet you there are a whole bunch not. I’ll bet you there are a whole bunch scared to death, in truth, and the outrage that you’re hearing about is faux.

You know, I always consult my tech blogs in things like this because there are a lot of hackers in the tech community and so forth. I found a fascinating refrain on a couple of blogs. “Oh, darn, that’s not really good, but at least we’ll be able to safely go to the theater on Christmas now.” So, to them, it was almost a good thing. Getting rid of that movie means they don’t have to worry about getting blown up on Christmas Day when they go to the theater.

Now, how do you think things like that? I’m telling you, if you’ve been raised with the idea that America is the problem, then what Sony did here’s very reasonable. If you’ve been raised with the idea that, in Cuba, the Cuban suffering is America’s problem. The Castro brothers have said for 50-plus years the US embargo was why our economy stinks. Of course it’s absurd because everybody country in the world has been trading with Cuba. We’re the only one who hasn’t.

Anywhere in the world, but America, you can go to Cuba. Cuban products can be bought anywhere in the world. People from all over the world can buy anything from Cuba. Yet the economy in Cuba is still in the tank. Castro has used the US embargo as the excuse for his own people, why they’re suffering. So now you’ve got Americans applauding the lifting the embargo, “Yes, yes, yes, because it’s all our fault in the first place.” They buy into the idea Cuban suffering is our fault because of the embargo. It’s just not fair. And so now we’ve lived with the embargo, we’ve admitted our fault, we have admitted our error, we have admitted our mistake.

Jimmy Carter is out saying the same thing. Praising Obama for what he did. So is the titular head of Republican Party, Colonel Colin Powell is out saying the same thing — or General Colin Powell I guess now, Colin Powell said the same thing. And so if you come from this standpoint that a lot of Americans do, that it is the United States that’s the problem in the world, then what happened both with the Sony pulling of the movie and the lifting of the Cuban embargo, is entirely reasonable. And by saying it’s reasonable, once again, what do you get to do?

You get to proclaim yourself a good person, because you are now in solidarity with the suffering of the Cuban people and the agreement that it is our fault for that suffering. The truth of the matter is that US dollars are now going to be used to continue the oppression of the Cuban people. Let’s make a note and check back in with Cuba in a year and see just what has happened to the Cuban economy with the lifting of our embargo, to whatever degree it has been lifted.

But folks, I’m not surprised at any of the faux reaction. I mean, here’s another thing. The same Hollywood people that are upset that this movie’s been pulled were the same people happy to blame a movie for Benghazi, were they not? And that movie maker ended up in jail, and they all supported that. The same people who claim that this Sony cowardice is an outrage and it’s gonna put people at risk and how dare we, we’ve lost our first cyber war, this is horrible, this is terrible, why did Sony cave? The same people applauded Barack Obama jailing some guy that made a YouTube video, a film that nobody ever saw, blaming it — once again, America — for a problem in the Middle East, and they all applauded the suppression of that filmmaker and his art.

They all applauded him going to jail, did they not? Now the same people want us to believe that they’re outraged that Sony dared, and these four theater chains dared kowtow to this terrorism? The same people kowtow to Islamic terrorism any time it shows itself. What’s being illustrated here is how phony liberalism is, because when the pedal hits the metal, when the rubber hits the road, when the nuts get cracking, when whatever disaster or danger hits liberals square in the face then they totally change who they are and become the biggest, bravest, outspoken, not gonna take this kind of discrimination people in the world.

But when it affects everybody else the same way they think they’re being affected now, they ridicule people who say they’re afraid. They ridicule people who claim to be angry over something. They’re the most tolerant people in the world except when it happens to them. But the two things that we’re talking about, we’ve lifted the Cuban embargo. Obama got nothing for it, folks. Not one single promise from the Castros to relax any of the political oppression, to change any of the economic policies, not one. I mean, Obama totally caved. I’ve read people say, “Boy, what a terrible negotiator.” There weren’t any negotiations.

Obama is just propping up another dictatorship. US dollars are gonna be used to prop up a dictatorship. The dictatorship’s not under any requirement to relax its dictatorial standards. It’s not required to change a damn thing. It’s just now gonna have US money behind it. And if you listen to what Obama said in announcing this, it was foolish for us to do this in the first place. Ergo, it was our fault, this is a mistake that we made way back before most of us were born, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. We need to change.

And then the Sony thing, cowardice in the face of terrorism, haven’t you seen this coming? The Dutch cartoons, haven’t you seen, how many kowtows have you seen? This is where we are, folks. This is who we are now.