RUSH: You want to hear something funny? Go to sound bite No. 11. Yesterday when the Mark Sanford stuff hit, I happened to say on the program: ‘Oh, no, he could have been our JFK. He could have been our JFK.’ Chris Matthews didn’t understand.
MATTHEWS: Rush Limbaugh said today his reaction to the Sanford news. Let’s listen to Rushbo.
RUSH: Oh, Sanford could have been our JFK. Oh, another career down the tubes. Nobody caught him! Nobody caught — nobody caught him in the act! He came back: Yeah, I was screwing off, literally, south of the border, girl from Ipanema, comes back and admits it. (Shanklin parody Love Client No. 9) I wonder if Sanford thought that he was going to get away with this. They all do, I guess. Could have been our JFK. Could have had it all.
MATTHEWS: What do you think he meant by that? Rush Limbaugh, it’s hard to interpret him sometimes. What did he mean by, ‘He could have been our JFK?’ Was the potential of Mark Sanford that grand before this moment?
RUSH: (Laughing). I don’t know that he’s — stupid’s not the word. Just tunnel vision. When you mention JFK, you get Camelot. You get great. You get wonderful. Oh, American royalty. So Mark Sanford has never been that in his mind. When you mention JFK in the context of Mark Sanford going to Argentina, cheating on his wife, it never occurs to these people that JFK wrote the book on how to do it and not get caught. It never occurs to them. Ends up playing part of Love Client No. 9 in an effort to try to understand what was going on.
Frank in Central New York, you’re up next on the EIB Network. Hello, sir.
CALLER: How you doing, Rush? It’s a pleasure to speak with you. I’m an ex-tech. I used to work on Black Hawks. My wife’s a professional also. She’s a nurse. She’s now teaching. I work for the New York state government, juvenile sector. And we’re being hurt just as much up here as everybody else. I hear a lot of people saying that the union members, the government employees aren’t going to be hurt by this. They’re doing layoffs left and right. We’re about to lose our jobs probably. They’re about to close my facility and I’ve got five kids. I settled down up here and it looks like I’m going to have to maybe pull roots and go back to my other field. But I enjoy it up here and it’s sad to see, because, like you always say: Industry brings money and the government can’t survive without it. So if they keep forcing the industry out of New York State, which they already have, we’re going to have nothing up here and we’ll all have to leave.
RUSH: Yeah, yeah, yeah, and here you are, you’re a little guy.
CALLER: Little guy.
RUSH: Little guy, you’re getting creamed. You were expecting just the opposite.
CALLER: I was expecting the opposite. We have five kids. We live a simple life up here. We’re very conservative. I belong to the conservative party here. And we’re being smashed up here. I can’t tell you how disappointed, because New York state’s a beautiful place to live, and it’s just so sad up here. The rest of the country needs to know how bad we’re getting smashed up here. So even the little guy is going to get knocked out of this, Mr. Limbaugh.
RUSH: Well, you have to learn to look on the bright side in all circumstances. And for you, that would be: At least you don’t live in California.
CALLER: (Laughing). Yes, sir. Yes, sir.
RUSH: I understand your point. But get this. Let me find this in the stack because you’re talking here about the whole notion of these businesses being run out of the state because of taxes and everything else. And, therefore, the tax base is dropping and the state’s got less money and you, therefore, are in a job that’s expendable. Something Bloomberg is doing in New York. New tobacco taxes, new smoking rules, and they’re having to post big no-smoking signs in every cigarette retailer. I’m looking for the details of the story here. It’s at the bottom of my stack. I know I printed this out. By the way, in case you haven’t heard this, Deutsche Bank is predicting a 40 percent drop in New York home prices the next couple of years. That’s also the same thing as home values.
Here’s the story. It’s from Channel 2 in New York: ‘The New York City health department is moving forward with a plan that would require about 12,000 cigarette retailers to post large anti-smoking signs. It’s billed as the first such regulation in the United States.’ Do you know how much tax revenue the State of New York uses and where it goes? It goes to health care coverage for kids. It goes to the general fund. They have just raised taxes on cigarettes and now they’re trying to intimidate people into not buying the product. What’s going to happen when that revenue source dries up? They’re going to come after you and raise taxes somewhere else that you live, folks. Why not just ban the product? If it’s deadly, if it kills people, it’s causing these monumental health care costs, why not just ban the product? Well, they can’t ban the product; the tax revenue’s too high. There just isn’t any common sense in anything. Zilch. Nada.