RUSH: Ladies and gentlemen, your host is the subject of the first six audio sound bites on the sound bite roster today. Your host.
You know what I did this weekend? I played golf and I got my daily dose of football on Sunday and I did show prep. I didn’t bother anybody. I didn’t go on television. I didn’t go on the radio. I didn’t do anything. I lived my usual private life. I am the subject of the first six sound bites. And two of them are the media asking Republicans, “Do you agree with Rush Limbaugh that the pope is a Marxist? Do you agree that Ben Carson’s a neophyte and doesn’t know what he’s talking about? Do you agree we shouldn’t have a Muslim in office?” And did you hear what Trump said? “I don’t know why we’re talking about it. We may already have.” He-he-he-he.
“Do you agree with Rush Limbaugh that the pope is a Marxist?”
“Oh, I don’t know. The pope is the Vicar of Christ, tough thing to say, I don’t know.”
It’s just predictable. It’s so avoidable, actually. All it takes is an attitude of offense. Just refuse to accept the premise of the question. You know who did it really well today? I’m gonna give a shout out today to Tammy Bruce. Tammy Bruce was on Fox News, one of these guest on the left, guest on the right segments. Got your Fox host. In this case it was Jon Scott. Alan Colmes here on the left, and Tammy Bruce. And she succeeded in getting Colmes to (paraphrasing), “You know what, I’ll come back next week. I’m not gonna talk. You keep interrupting me.”
“I didn’t the interrupt you, you interrupted me first.” All he was doing is carrying forth in premise that Republicans are bigots and they’ve gotta defend themselves and so forth, and she was just excellent in telling everybody they got to reject, keep rejecting, don’t ever accept these premises, no matter where they happen, including at Fox News.
A Bloomberg story. This is the news of the day to me. Bloomberg Politics: “In Francis, Obama Finds an Ally to Amplify His Agenda to Public.” That’s news to me, because what’s the Obama agenda? The Obama agenda is forever transforming this country in ways that a majority of Americans do not support. Obama’s agenda is transforming this country in ways that require great traditions and institutions to be impugned, destroyed, disrespected, questioned. And here we have the Vicar of Christ showing up, and the story about that is, Obama’s found an ally, and they want to talk about whether I’m right that the
guy’s a Marxist or not? The question’s answered. Asked and answered in the headline here on Bloomberg Politics.
George Will. He may be angering a lot of you people on Trump, but he wrote a piece in the National Review that ran yesterday on the pope that is just superb. It is a piece that I shall quote from liberally, ahem, meaning quite a bit from, today. It just excoriates — not excoriates. It just exposes the pope as how wrong the guy is politically. Not theologically. Just how wrong he is and why, where he comes from, Argentina, what he was raised on, Juan Peron and Evita and all that. The point is that everything the pope seeks would end up doing great damage to the very things he supports.
For example, you remember it wasn’t long, maybe a year or two ago, maybe three now, Herbert Meyer, a former official in the Reagan administration, made news in the middle of Obama’s destructive policies, such as Obamacare, by writing a piece saying the greatest story in the world today, the greatest untold story is the reduction of poverty. That remember? I got Herbert Meyer on this program, we talked to him for the Limbaugh Letter in the interview section for a particular issue, and he said it’s a great untold story about how the United States spreading capitalism has succeeded in reducing poverty around this world like we have never seen before.
Well, George Will makes the point that everything the pope wants to happen has happened because of capitalism, and if we revert to the way the pope wants governments to operate, all these gains in poverty will be lost, and people who have now come out of it will be back in it. It’s a great piece for illustrating that the pope and Obama and everybody who thinks politically like they do — and we’re not supposed to talk this way about popes, you see, this is another thing. The pope is an insulated political figure because he’s the Vicar of Christ. So even Catholics, devout Catholics are duty-bound to follow Il Papa, theologically. But when the pope strays and starts talking about politics, we’re not supposed to criticize the pope no matter what he does because he’s the pope.
So, if you do, then curses on you, so to speak. (interruption) I know, he did. This is the point. When anybody enters the political arena I consider it fair game. I don’t care if it’s Michael J. Fox. I don’t care if it’s Georgetown students who want to be paid $3,000 a month for contraceptives, I don’t care what. If you put yourself in the political arena, then you are inviting a response. Nobody gets insulation. But the left seeks insulation for all of these powerful figures that enter politics on the basis that it’s unkind, it’s unseemly, it’s whatever else it is to criticize them.
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RUSH: Here is Peter in Seattle. I’m really glad you waited. Great to have you on the program. Hi.
CALLER: It’s an honor my older brother I never had. I have the solution to the pope’s politics and the president’s religion.
RUSH: Okay.
CALLER: It’s very straightforward. The pope — you alluded to it. The pope is a Peronista. And for your listeners, Peronism is a fungible combination of kleptocracy, fascism, and cult of personality. I’ll let you explain that.
RUSH: Now, we gotta be real careful here. You’re calling Juan Peron and Evita, don’t cry for me, the kleptocracy, you’re not saying the pope is a —
CALLER: Correct. Correct.
RUSH: I just wanted to specify here for the cardinals and bishops in the audience that you are not calling the pope a klepto. You’re describing what Peronism was, Juan Peron, Peronistas.
CALLER: Yeah, but he ascribes to that political view —
RUSH: Well, he grew up with it. That’s what Argentina was when he was raised, so, yeah, he’s —
CALLER: But he didn’t reject it. The pope from Poland grew up with communism, and he rejected it.
RUSH: Exactly right.
CALLER: And, the president worships in the mirror. The big question there has yet to be —
RUSH: (laughing) Wait a minute. Hold it. Don’t let that just go skating by. That’s worthy of pondering. The president worships in the mirror. Man, oh, man, is that good. That’s almost an EIB-style profundity. That’s very good.
CALLER: And the only real question about his religion is, is there a reflection?
RUSH: (laughing) Is there a reflection.
CALLER: Now, you mentioned about the nutcases that were talking about Muslim —
RUSH: No. Nutcases in terms of people that think there are training camps of terrorists somewhere in the United States plotting further terrorist activities in this country. There are people, I’ve seen the websites that tout them, yeah, they’re out there.
CALLER: There are three Seattleites in jail currently for doing just that. One convert and two Somalis. I believe the guy names name was James Ujaama. He grew up here.
RUSH: Right.
CALLER: Normal kid in central area of Seattle, went to Garfield High School, everybody knew him, said he was okay.
RUSH: And there are Americans joining ISIS. Okay, so you are saying that even though these people may be characterized as kooks or crackpots, that there is some evidence to suggest that they have a point or that the things they have read may have a point. Is that right?
CALLER: Well, I don’t know if that made it out any further than the Seattle Times and the local coverage. I don’t know how much national coverage that got. Just saying. I mean, that’s not the politically correct stuff that Little Pinchy and his people would pick up at the New York Times or whoever is at the Washington Post.
RUSH: He’s talking about that Little Pinch, folks, Shultzberger, little Benji. You’re full of them out there, Pete. I like it. Anyway, it’s Peter from Seattle. By the way, Forbes magazine back in 2013, this is the headline: “Pope Francis: Espousing A Peronist Rather Than A Marxist Liberation Theology?” And at The Economist, July 11th of this year, “The Peronist Pope.” So you’ve got Forbes and you’ve got The Economist both writing that Pope Francis is a disciple of Juan Peron.
Let me take the occasion here of this call, I mentioned earlier that George Will had a column at National Review over the weekend. I don’t know if this ran as his Sunday column at the Washington Post or not. It may have. But I know a lot of you people are upset with George Will because of his writings and utterances on Trump. But George Will now and then hits a grand-slam home run, and it’s undeniable. This is one of those. I must have cut and pasted 10 different things from this column in my notes app with attribution to George Will, just to make sure that I didn’t forget them. I didn’t cut and paste the whole column. But let me take a break here and I’ll read to you excerpts of George Will’s piece just to give you an idea.
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RUSH: Okay, George Will. And the headline to this column is: “Pope Francis DoesnÂ’t Understand How to Alleviate Poverty.” That is a pronounced statement and headline because Pope Francis is making his case all about alleviating poverty. And I want to remind you again before getting into this, Herbert Meyer, a former Reagan administration official, shocked a lot of people three years ago, maybe four now. In the middle of the debates on Obamacare, maybe Obamacare had just recently passed, and everybody’s talking about the calamity that is this administration, and Herbert Meyer comes out and says the greatest thing happening in the world right now is the numbers of people all over the world who have come out of poverty, the amount of poverty in the world is falling rapidly.
It was one of the greatest untold, unreported stories, and it’s the result of a much more, I don’t know if massive, but successful distribution of capitalism. That is bringing about this reduction in poverty. And the point that Will gets to in this piece is that if Pope Francis were to succeed with his buddy Obama in implementing all of these things, all these people that have escaped poverty would find themselves back in it. That’s his contention.
“Pope Francis embodies sanctity but comes trailing clouds of sanctimony. With a convertÂ’s indiscriminate zeal, he embraces ideas impeccably fashionable, demonstrably false, and deeply reactionary. They would devastate the poor on whose behalf he purports to speak — if his policy prescriptions were not as implausible as his social diagnoses are shrill.
“Supporters of Francis have bought newspaper and broadcast advertisements to disseminate some of his woolly sentiments that have the intellectual tone of fortune cookies. One example: ‘People occasionally forgive, but nature never does.'” He thinks that’s kind of vacuous. “The VaticanÂ’s majesty does not disguise the vacuity of this. Is Francis intimating that environmental damage is irreversible? He neglects what technology has accomplished regarding LondonÂ’s air … and other matters. And the Earth is becoming ‘an immense pile of filth’? Hyperbole is a predictable precursor of yet another U.N. climate-change conference — the 21st since 1995.”
This is another one of George Will’s great, great, great sentence constructions: “Fortunately, rhetorical exhibitionism increases as its effectiveness diminishes.” As the effectiveness of left-wing wackos, in this case, plummets, their rhetoric becomes crazier and crazier and more and more shrill, which it does. “In his June encyclical and elsewhere, Francis lectures about our responsibilities, but neglects the duty to be as intelligent as one can be. This man who says ‘the Church does not presume to settle scientific questions’ proceeds as though everything about which he declaims is settled, from imperiled plankton to air conditioning being among humanityÂ’s ‘harmful habits.'”
Did you know that, by the way? Did you know the pope had condemned air-conditioning? He has condemned air-conditioning as an economic and ecological disaster. Can you imagine where the productivity of the world would be without air conditioning? I mean, it’s insupportable.
“The church that thought it was settled science that Galileo was heretical should be attentive to all evidence. Francis deplores ‘compulsive consumption,’ a sin to which the 1.3 billion persons without even electricity can only aspire. He leaves the Vatican to jet around praising subsistence farming, a romance best enjoyed from 30,000 feet above the realities that such farmers yearn to escape. The saint who is FrancisÂ’s namesake supposedly lived in sweet harmony with nature. For most of mankind, however, nature has been, and remains, scarcity, disease, and natural — note the adjective — disasters.”
Folks, this is a fundamental point. I must stop here to emphasize this. The human condition, when you talk about American exceptionalism, the reason America is exceptional is because it is an exception to the way most human beings have lived in the world. In the course of human history, most human beings have known only tyranny, poverty, dungeons, prisons. Life expectancy back in the medieval times, 30 years. I mean, the American way of government, the American Constitution, our founding documents came along and stood humanity on its head by proclaiming that human rights are first and that among them are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Not government, government’s not the be-all, end-all. Government is not where rights come from and freedom comes from, that that’s natural, that’s created by God. And governments only impinge and impugn that. Well, it’s the same thing with nature. All of these environmentalist wackos running around talking about the beauty of nature, when the fact of the matter is for most of mankind, nature has been and remains scarcity, disease, and natural disasters.
“Our flourishing,” means our prospering “requires affordable, abundant energy for the production of everything from food to pharmaceuticals. Poverty has probably decreased more in the last two centuries than it has in the preceding three millennia because of industrialization powered by fossil fuels. Only economic growth has ever produced broad amelioration of poverty, and since growth began in the late 18th century, it has depended on such fuels.”
Well, all of this is what Pope Francis speaks out against, and this is why Will has written the piece saying if he ever succeeds with this he’s gonna reverse all of this progress. But then again all this stuff is stuff that sounds good but it will never happen. But it sounds good. Nobody’s gonna ever really get rid of fossil fuels. Too much good come from them. Too many people get out of poverty. Too many lifestyles are advanced. Wealth, productivity skyrocket. Economic growth unbridled in industrialized nations precisely because of fossil fuels.
There’s always gonna be a bunch of malcontents running around, ripping them, criticizing them, suggesting that we get rid of them, it sounds romantic, it sounds clean. It will never happen, though. And the people who talk about it know it and therefore they reap all the benefits of good hearts, big hearts, but they will never have to deliver on their promise. That’s all it will remain is an illusory utopia.
There’s even more, and they are basically environmental facts. But it is not a complimentary piece. He concludes by saying Pope Francis “stands against modernity, rationality, science and, ultimately, the spontaneous creativity of open societies in which people and their desires are not problems but precious resources.” He stands against. It’s quite a piece.
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RUSH: Back to Il Papa for just a second. This from the UK Telegraph: “Cuban authorities prevented leading dissidents from meeting Pope Francis in Havana on Sunday, in a sign of the Communist regimeÂ’s rigid intolerance of political opposition. Two well-known dissidents, Marta Beatriz Roque and Miriam Leiva, had been invited by the Vatican to attend a vespers service led by the PopeÂ’s in HavanaÂ’s historic baroque cathedral. But they said they were detained by security agents and barred from attending the event. … The head of an opposition group called the Ladies in White said that 22 of the 24 members of the group who had hoped to attend a Mass celebrated by the Pope were prevented from doing so by Cuban security officials.”
Yeah, except the Cuban officials, yeah, they’re the cool guys today. They’re the cool guys this week. Oh, yeah, Cuba and the pope, man, way to go, dude, this is really cool, getting together here against the evil Satan United States. And right here may I remind you I’m holding in my formerly nicotine-stained fingers, Bloomberg Politics, headline: “In Francis Obama Finds an Ally to Amplify His Agenda to the Public.” Meaning, Obama is gonna try to feed off the popularity of the pope to advance his own agenda, which means the pope’s agenda is Obama’s.
What is Obama’s agenda? I want to go back to what I said, if Obama had promised everything he’s doing, if he had said this is what he wants to accomplish, he would have never been elected. He would have never been elected touting amnesty. He would have never been elected touting Obamacare with the specific details the website wasn’t gonna work, we’d have to put up with it for a while, that your premiums are gonna go up $2,500. That your deductible was gonna go up maybe three times. If he had run for office promising this, you think he’d have been re-elected? No. He wouldn’t have been elected first, originally, even on the amnesty question.
None of what we have here did anybody really vote on. They voted on the man. But we didn’t know what his agenda was. He wasn’t honest with us about it. This is why I say we have a government operating against the will the American people.
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RUSH: This is Jeffrey Lord. He was on CNN Saturday morning, Newsroom. The fill-in anchor is Jim Sciutto, and Sciutto says, “Can you fairly paint the whole faith with a big brush,” meaning Muslim and Ben Carson’s, “because of what a tiny percentage of members of that faith do? That’s what the questioner was doing, Jeffrey.”
LORD: I just find this exasperating. In general I think this is the kind of media, you know, Rush Limbaugh has a word for this kind of thing, he calls the media the Drive-Bys, and the reason he does that is he says they come into an area, they shoot up the whole place, you know, in a media firestorm, then they move on to the next one. That’s really what this is. This is a typical Drive-By situation.
RUSH: Exactly right. So Ben Carson says what he says, this supporter of Trump’s stands up and says what he says, and we’ve got a four-day media firestorm. The Drive-By Media, driving in, shooting the place up, making it total chaos, screwing everything up trying to damage this and damage that, when nothing of the kind is warranted, and then they’ll be on down the road tomorrow doing the same thing on another issue. But how about this question: “Can you fairly paint the whole faith with a brush because of what a tiny percentage of the members –” It seems to me that we’re trying to impugn the entire South because of a flag, Confederate flag. Dylann Roof, aren’t we trying to portray an entire culture being a bunch of murderous racists because what one of them does?
How many other incidents like that are there that we have one lone wolf actor, some extremist wacko, and they immediately try to say that’s all of conservatism or that’s the whole Tea Party or what have you. And then here comes the Sciutto guy, “Why do we want to paint with this big brush because of what a tiny percentage of members of that faith do?” Tiny percentage of the Muslim faith. Look at what they’re doing, for crying out loud. Flying into buildings, ISIS beheading.
It’s willing suspension of disbelief. But you let something happen to a group they have it in for rather than one they’re trying to protect, such as gotta get rid of the Confederate flag, look at what it says about the whole South. Nothing about a small percentage of its members, Dylann Roof, nothing about him being a lone wolf, no, no, no. Dylann Roof, he stands for everybody in the South, is the kind of thing that they try to imply to everybody.
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RUSH: This incredible what I just saw. You know what I just saw? I just saw it on Fox. They read a little crawl the bottom of the screen that said Obama is gonna ask the pope to help them with the release of four American prisoners being held in Iran. Are you kidding me? We could have gotten those four prisoners out with a negotiation on the Iran nuke deal, except we couldn’t. You know why? Because Obama and John Kerry said, “No, no, no, if we would have mixed those two things, the Iranians might have taken their ball and gone home on nukes.”
Really? Well, let them. “No, we had to do a deal with them, Rush. We had to.” Why do we have to do a deal with them? “Well, because the truth is, Rush, they’re gonna have a nuke in a month and we got ’em to delay it some years. That’s right.” Oh, is that it? So we had no bargaining power whatsoever. Here we are in total control. We have $150 billion of theirs frozen. They want it. They want to spread terrorism all over the world. They want to build up their nuclear arsenal. We’re holding $150 billion, and we can’t secure the release of four Americans. We don’t have enough leverage. Now we have to ask the pope to do it.
As usual, that is so ridiculous that that’s not true. That’s not what this is. Asking the pope for help, you know what that is? Promoting joint solidarity between Obama and the pope, showing them on the same page, showing them working together. This is all about Obama using the pope to further his own agenda, and probably vice-versa, although I don’t know what the pope’s attitude about Obama is. But I do believe the Bloomberg story that Obama is gonna use the pope to help advance his own agenda. But, man, that is just incredible. Ask the pope for help.
Now, what will the Ayatollah Khamenei — by the way, the Ayatollah Khamenei is still out there chanting “Death to America!” And he’s doubled down on it, by the way. I wonder if the pope will do it, and if so, what the ayatollahs will do in response. You think the ayatollahs have any respect for or care about the pope? Ha-ha-ha-ha. That’s right, he’s an infidel like the rest of us.
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RUSH: Here’s Alan in a truck near Gary, Indiana. Alan, I’m glad you waited. Great to have you on the EIB Network. Hello.
CALLER: Hey, Rush. Thank you.
RUSH: You bet.
CALLER: Long time, first time. Say, Pope Francis appreciates the economics of what we have here, capitalism in the United States and the freedoms that it affords us. He’s asking our people to develop more purposeful, more virtuous kinds of capitalism, one that supports family, one that supports our free culture, with religious freedom and all that’s entailed with all those. He’s not asking our government to do anything other than support those free capitalistic measures. Humanism, on the other hand, which I believe is what our president is, he’s humanistic in his approach to everything. Population control is a vital cog in that. A lot of things that we have embedded in our economic system are virtually consuming us as predatoristic in some aspects. It’s diverted — it’s centered on preying upon our worst aspects.
RUSH: Give me an example of what you’re talking about. What do you mean? Give me an example of something that’s predatoristic.
CALLER: Pornography, abortion, things of that nature I guess right now. I’m drawing a blank on everything I’m thinking right now, but —
RUSH: Well, no, I understand, sometimes people say, “What are your top three favorite movies,” and I can’t think of but one put on the spot. I’m not trying to put you on the spot. I’m just trying to get an example of what you’re talking about, pornography and abortion, humanism here.
CALLER: Yeah.
RUSH: You say the pope wants a kinder, gentler capitalism?
CALLER: Well, he wants the people to develop these things, and he would prefer if the government would help protect ’em instead of, you know, the big guy always wins. The big guy always wins in our country, and small corporations, small businesses tend to be stepped on and trampled over and just put aside, and a lot of them fail. And it’s not necessarily because they can’t compete generally, like local economies, but when they’re up against larger companies that simply, you know, that they can purchase more stuff —
RUSH: So the pope is actually defending small business against predatory tactics of big corporations.
CALLER: Yes. And he’s defending our system of government as the best means to —
RUSH: Well, how do you explain the pope’s criticism of air-conditioning?
CALLER: Of what?
RUSH: How do you explain the pope’s criticism of air-conditioning?
CALLER: Well, I would have to see exactly what the pope said on that. There are many —
RUSH: Well, I happen to have it.
CALLER: A lot of Catholicism is being interpreted through humanism, and the interpretations, they may take the exact words, but if you say ’em in a different way — and you understand that, Rush — if you say them in a different way, they have a different meaning.
RUSH: Yeah, I do it all the time, yeah. There are two different sources I hear on the pope has condemned air-condi. He did it shortly after becoming pope, and he condemns it in the sense that it contributes to environmental degradation, it’s not natural. Anyway, I appreciate your call, Alan. I know you waited a long time and I appreciate your patience. I’ve got to run because I’m up against it on time here, but best of luck to you.
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RUSH: Here it is, ladies and gentlemen. This is from National Review Online. It’s a piece written by Shubhankar Chhokra: “FrancisÂ’s aversion to air conditioning may be red hot, but he himself is comfortably cool. In his encyclical Laudato SiÂ’, published today –“
This goes back, by the way this is June 18th and we talked about this encyclical, this encyclical is where the attack on capitalism took place. It’s where the Marxism comment came from.
Anyway, in his encyclical published June 18th, “the pope lambasts wasteful consumerism and unchecked human economic activity as a root of climate change, singling out one product in particular for censure: the air conditioner.” Here’s what’s written in the encyclical. “‘A simple example [of harmful habits of consumption] is the increasing use and power of air-conditioning,’ Francis writes. ‘The markets, which immediately benefit from sales, stimulate ever greater demand. An outsider looking at our world would be amazed at such behavior, which at times appears self-destructive.'”
And then Shubhankar goes on to wonder whether or not Francis wrote this in his air-conditioned papal apartment. “Two years ago, Francis broke with tradition when he became the first pope since 1903 to forgo the papal apartments for newer, more modest accommodations in Domus Sanctae Marthae, an adjacent building erected in 1996 to house cardinals during papal conclaves. In line with FrancisÂ’s image as the ‘peopleÂ’s pope,’ a Vatican spokesman said the pope wanted a more ‘simple living arrangement.’ Simple, yes, but air-conditioned.” It has to be.
Anyway, air-conditioning is an example of the modernity which the pope says is devastating nature and causing us to behave and live in unnatural ways ’cause there was no air-conditioning at the time of creation, I guess. If it’s unnatural, what does it mean? We’re artificially affecting temperatures in our domiciles, but note the first complaint. A simple example of harmful habits of consumption is the increasing use and power of air-conditioning. The markets, which immediately benefit from sales, stimulate ever greater demand. As people see it, they want it. Not good. So there.
I’m not making up this stuff. Well, you know, he’s not the only one. I mean, there’s a whole bunch of environmentalists out there who decry toilet paper. We say this and people think that we’re just either making it up or using extreme examples, and we’re not. This is all mainstream belief in the environmentalist wacko community. Air-conditioning, that uses incredible amounts of fossil fuels, that’s bad. Not everybody has it. It officially alters temperatures. It causes some people to have allergies and they catch the summer cold.
It goes on and on and on, the reasoning for it. But mainly because it improves capitalism. It shows capitalism in a good light is why it’s condemned. Right there it is. It increases market sales, increases demand, people want it, consumerism is not good, people wanting things isn’t good.
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