RUSH: Well, ladies and gentlemen, it looks like I continue to live rent free in the head of the president, Barack Obama. It seems that the New Yorker has just posted more from their 18-page Obama interview. I don’t know if the whole thing has been on the Internet. I didn’t read the whole thing. It may have been up there all the time. But here is what the president said, the New Yorker interview with David Remnick that they have just posted.
“Another way of putting it, I guess, is that the issue has been the inability of my message to penetrate the Republican base so that they feel persuaded that I’m not the caricature that you see on Fox News or Rush Limbaugh, but I’m somebody who is interested in solving problems and is pretty practical, and that, actually, a lot of the things that we’ve put in place worked better than people might think. And as long as there’s that gap between perceptions of me within the average Republican primary voter and the reality, it’s hard for folks like John Boehner to move too far in my direction.”
So it’s me again, and Fox News. We are the reason Obama can’t advance his agenda, because Boehner is afraid to move too close to Obama because I have made you — along with Fox News has made you — think Obama is something that he isn’t. And it’s such a shame. I have so distorted who the real Obama is in your mind, that it is paralyzing our government. It is paralyzing the Speaker of the House, who really, really, really, really wants to go in there and really, really work with Obama, but he just can’t. It’s hard for people like Boehner to move too far in my direction because of the misperception of me, Obama says, created by Fox News and Rush Limbaugh.
And greetings, my friends. Welcome. Great to have you. We’re here for another three hours of broadcast excellence here at the distinguished and special Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies. The telephone number if you’d like to be on the program is 800-282-2882. The e-mail address, ElRushbo@eibnet.com.
We have polling news all over the place today, and we have some data, some actual data that is not polling news, actual results. For example, Quinnipiac poll has Obama way under 50% all over the place. By the way, this is a poll that’s sympathetic to the president. They’ve got his job approval at 40%. Economic policy approval at 39%. Obamacare approval at 36%. In the Quinnipiac poll 77% say the economy is not so good or poor. Forty-nine percent say that Obama is dishonest, and that is the majority in that category. Fifty-three percent say the Obama Regime is incompetent.
So I guess Fox News and I are having a robust time here in getting the truth out about the Regime and the president. You look at that poll, and looks like we’ve succeeded here. In what? Having the truth finally understood. It’s only taken five years. Five years of steady effort.
By the way, folks, I meant to get to this yesterday. It just slipped my mind ’cause I never got to the backup Stack. Actually it’s not the backup Stack. It’s a holdover Stack, I mean, the stuff I don’t get to one day I put it in the Stack that is for use potentially the next day or the day after, and I’m gonna get to it today. The latest science proving that modern mothers are lazy, and lazier. I meant to do it yesterday. Slipped my mind. I’ve got it at the top of the do-over Stack today, the holdover Stack.
Anyway, the Washington Post. The American dream has actually been dead 50 years. The Washington Post has a story that says economic mobility hasn’t changed in 50 years. And that would include the Clinton. I mean, the economic mobility was dead during the Clinton years. I don’t know if the Washington Post realizes that they are acknowledging that. No, no, no. Of course it’s bogus. But look, the news for Obama, the health care news, folks, Jim Angle at Fox News ran across some internal Regime documents — we reported on this — and the Regime on TV, the public face, anybody from the Regime talking about health care, “Oh, yeah, got the website up and running, all the problems ironed out, and we’re just humming along now.” And that’s apparently not true.
The Regime, according to the documents that Jim Angle came across, the Regime is really worried that the whole thing is going to collapse. And one of the reasons why is that the so-called back end of HealthCare.gov, which is where all the data collected then gets sent on to the Regime and to insurance companies, has yet to function. (laughing) The entire reason you do a website — (laughing) Folks, this would be like going on Amazon and ordering whatever you order, and it stopping there. What’s in your shopping cart never leaving your cart. Nobody at Amazon ever finding out what’s in your cart. That is the essential reality here. And the back end isn’t done.
There’s another companion story. Aetna insurance company might be totally forced out of Obamacare. It’s a companion story. They’ve brought in some experts from Accenture. Now, of those who watch golf may have heard of Accenture. They sponsor the world golf championship, or they did. I don’t know. I haven’t watched a golf tournament on TV in so long I don’t know if they still do, but they were prominent as sponsors of golf tournaments. And they used to be called something else. I forget what they used to be called, and I still don’t know what they do now. I guess they’re an auditing firm of some kind. But they have been given the charge of fixing this thing by March, and if they don’t get it fixed by March, then supposedly we’re looking at an utter collapse. You know, I guess that’s true.
Forbes magazine did this first-ever top 10 most influential personality, slash, celebrity poll, and it was not reported on in this country. It was reported on in the UK Independent, I believe. We had it last week. And it showed that I am in the top 10 most influential. Most everybody else was in Hollywood, and all of the top 10 except me are involved in pictures, either movies or television. I’m the only person that is not involved in pictures in the top 10, and I was ahead of Hillary. Remember that? Hillary was at number 10, and I was ahead of her in the list. So you could say Hillary wasn’t able to change people’s thinking about Obamacare during the campaign of 2007-2008, but it looks like I, along with Fox News, have been able to do so. So I guess that poll might have had some accuracy to it, or that ranking.
But back to the Washington Post. We have not had any upward mobility. The American dream, in other words, according to the Washington Post, has been dead for 50 years — and this conveniently coincides with a stagnant economy that we find ourselves in after five years of Obama. Obama’s out there claiming 44 straight months of job growth, and we got an economic rescue, and people are going back to work, and the economy is starting to hum, and… (interruption)
It does. It sounds like a dream come true, except it isn’t happening, and now the Washington Post, in order to make sure that that is not linked exclusively to Obama, has just decided to tell us that there hasn’t really been any upward mobility in 50 years. USA Today and the Pew Center for the People and the Press have another poll, teeing it up for Obama’s State of the Union speech on the wealth gap. Sixty-plus percentage of everybody thinks that inequality in America is growing.
Was Elizabeth Warren right that the game is rigged? Thirty-eight percent agree with Elizabeth Warren that the economic game in America is rigged! The thinking is “that hard work and determination were no guarantee of success,” and that coincides, does it not, with the Washington Post? We haven’t had any upward mobility in 50 years, and, by the way, it’s got nothing to do with Obama. This happened long before Obama!
Obama is trying to fix it!
Obama’s trying to reverse this!
By the way, when did this country come with “a guarantee of success”? Well, I’m just bouncing off this USA Today/Pew Center poll where a sizable number of people proclaim “that hard work and determination were no guarantee of success.” I missed that of success. Have you heard of that guarantee? What guarantee of success? Hard work or any other guarantee. Where is that guarantee? (interruption) Yeah, and security, too. Where’s that guarantee? For anybody, for anyone in the world, but particularly here in the US?
Where is that? Europe? Environmentalist wackos in Europe say that climate rules, in order to head off global warming, are causing economic pain — and even at that, we’re not keeping pace with the dire warnings. We’re not keeping pace. We not doing what we need to do to stave off climate change, and even falling short of what we should be doing, what we’re supposed to do, we are nevertheless causing economic pain. It’s just disastrous out there.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: T.J. in Sierra Vista, Arizona. You’re up first today, sir. Great to have you, and welcome.
CALLER: Hello, Rush. How are you today, sir?
RUSH: I’m fine. Thank you for calling. Great to have you here.
CALLER: It is a privilege to talk to you. Listen, I am not a mathematician. I am a Baptist preacher. I have the privilege of pastoring the teenagers of our men and women that serve the armed forces out here at Fort Huachuca. But, best as I can tell, if the president is right and you are the reason that his approval rating is somewhere, it’s 38, 39, 40% —
RUSH: Yeah, that’s right.
CALLER: — then that would mean, Rush, that you have a listenership of roughly 150 to 175 million a day. So I just wanted to call and tell you congratulations on —
RUSH: Yeah.
CALLER: — being easily the most influential person in the media. That means you’ve got more listeners than people who will watch the Super Bowl next week. That’s fantastic.
RUSH: Well, it wouldn’t quite go that far because, I appreciate your sentiment, but I’ve always said that one must never lose perspective. You don’t get lost in your success, and you don’t get depressed about failure, and you keep it all in an even keel. And the fact of the matter is that Obama’s approval rating at 38, 39, 40%, this is the thing. It’s not all due to outside influence. The idea that people are incapable of making up their own minds about people is something that Obama and his party live with every day.
So in Obama’s world, it is Fox News and me. That’s what he told the New Yorker. It’s Fox News and me that are the reason the Republican base doesn’t like him. It can’t possibly be that those people actually pay attention, they’re actually intelligent, they’re actually informed, and they actually disagree with what he’s doing. It can’t be that. Oh, no. It can’t be that because you people are not that smart and you’re not that independently thinkable. You’re not that independently intelligent. You’re like the Democrat base. You’re bunch of idiots, and you only know and do and believe what you’re told. And do not doubt me. There may be a degree of exaggeration in there, but that is exactly how the left looks at their voters, and that’s how they look at the whole population.
How else do you explain that everything to them is group and victim related? In fact, the left can’t survive with independently self-sufficient, self-reliant people. They aren’t needed if that ever happens, or within groups of people like that. So they have to assume that people are mind-numbed robots. They’ve assumed that about me from the get-go.
Now, Mr. Snerdley just said to me during the break, he said, “You’re losing touch.”
I said, “What do you mean?”
He said, “Well, this is no big deal to you. You’ve had presidents calling you out ever since you’ve been doing this show. You’ve had presidents and presidential candidates calling you out, and you’re used to it. Isn’t any big deal to you.” But he said, “To the average American, the president calling out a single individual citizen isn’t done unless that citizen happens to be an elected member of the opposition party. This just isn’t done. But it’s happened to you so often, you just take it for granted, it isn’t any big deal, you just mention it and you go on.” And he said, “There’s a reason you’re in that top 10 most influential poll. It’s exactly because of stuff like this.”
And he’s right, I have to admit. It isn’t any big deal anymore when I see what I saw today in the New Yorker. It isn’t. It’s certainly not as big a deal as the first time it happened. I’ll never forget that one. Bill Clinton, flying into St. Louis, Air Force One. I don’t even know if that was the first. The first might have been when he called me out at the White House Correspondents Dinner. It’s one of the two. But he’s flying into St. Louis on Air Force One and he’s talking to the morning guys on our affiliate there, KMOX. He starts complaining about me, said there’s no truth detector. He said (paraphrasing), “Limbaugh’s gonna go on for three hours this afternoon and there’s gonna be nobody to challenge what the guy says.”
The president was complaining. Now, that was big. But it’s happened every year. That was 1993 and it’s happened every year since. And Snerdley’s right. It isn’t that big a deal the fact that I am living free, rent free, in Obama’s head. If you’re just joining us here’s what he said. It’s from a New Yorker interview just posted. Obama’s complaining about why the Republican base doesn’t like him.
“Another way of putting it, I guess, is that the issue has been the inability of my message to penetrate the Republican base so that they feel persuaded that I’m not the caricature that you see on Fox News or Rush Limbaugh, but I’m somebody who is interested in solving problems and is pretty practical, and that, actually, a lot of the things that we’ve put in place worked better than people might think. And as long as there’s that gap between perceptions of me within the average Republican primary voter and the reality, it’s hard for folks like John Boehner to move too far in my direction.”
Why is it incumbent on Boehner to move in Obama’s direction? Why shouldn’t Obama have to move in Boehner’s direction or our direction? But you see, folks, the subtext of this is, if it weren’t for me or Fox News, you’d love Obama. But you are nothing but sponges. You are incapable, in other words, of seeing the truth. You believe the lies about Obama that you hear from me and on Fox News.
That’s what the president’s telling David Remnick here. And I’m telling you, to me, if I were you, I’d be insulted. You don’t have a mind of your own. In other words, you’re not capable of looking at 92 million Americans out of work and thinking Obama’s doing a great job. You’re not capable of looking at the takeover of health care and the resulting disaster and not liking Obama. You are incapable of hearing him promise you three years in a row that you get to keep your doctor and keep your plan except you can’t, and still like Obama. You are incapable of hearing the president promise you that your premium is gonna be reduced by $2,500 a year. And then you learn that it isn’t, but you’re still supposed to like Obama. If it weren’t for me.
You are perhaps enable to find a career job. You’re unable to find a job that will pay you for working more than 29 hours a week, but you’re still supposed to think Obama’s doing a great job, and you would, if it weren’t for me. You’re incapable of seeing the disaster that has happened to this country. And if it weren’t for me and Fox News, you would be loving on Obama like his voters are. And again, all that means is, you can’t think for yourself, mind-numbed robot. And so we’ve gotta do something about me and Fox News. What are we gonna do? Obama’s gotta find a way to reach you ’cause, you know, he’s really doing a good job. The stuff he’s put in place is working better than people might think, 44 straight months of job growth. Wow. And we’ve had an economic rescue.
Now, who is delusional? Who is absent reality, you or Obama? Imagine… Seriously, now. Imagine that you were president and you purposely put in place policies that caused all of this debt, poverty, unemployment, and the total debacle that is health care. Imagine that you are president — you’ve done it all, you’ve done it on purpose — and then imagine your surprise that people disagree with you. What kind of person would you have to be?
Wouldn’t it make more sense if you were in Obama’s shoes, that you would understand why certain people don’t like you and disagree with you?
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: As you know, folks, I’m really uncomfortable talking about myself. Unlike Richard Sherman, I really am uncomfortable talking about my self — and that’s not a slam on Richard Sherman. As you people know, I like Richard Sherman, and I told you. I said, “The more people get to know this guy, the more they’re gonna like him and the more impressed by him they’re going to be.” Anyway, I’m gonna tell you what. The reason that Obama…
This is actually not about me; it’s about you.
The reason that Obama, the media, and the rest of the left… What it is about me they really, really don’t like is that you think for yourselves. They know it. They may say that you are not. They may try to insult you by telling you and others that, and imply you’re just mind-numbed robots, and if it weren’t for me, you would be thinking straight, but I’ve corrupted you. They say that, but they know because they’re politically afraid of you.
They’re afraid of independent thinkers. They are afraid of people who are able to reason and think on their own. That’s the main beef with me that they have is that this program inspires curiosity. It inspires thought and critical thinking, and they know they’re never gonna be able to control that. They’re never gonna be able to make you a mind-numbed robot, and you know their modus operandi; they don’t want to have a level playing field.
They want to get rid of all opposition.
They don’t want to debate the opposition.
They don’t want to argue. They just don’t want there to be any, and they look at you and me and don’t see a way they can make that happen, not within the normal flow of things in the arena of ideas. So it’s gonna require drastic action — such as the IRS penalizing and harassing the Tea Party, for example. That’s exactly why that kind of thing happens.