RUSH TO EXCELLENCE SPEECH for WPHT-AM Philadelphia

www.rushlimbaugh.com ^ | October 11, 2007 | The Man Who Runs America

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Rush to Excellence Speech for WPHT-AM Philadelphia
October 11, 2007

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BEGIN TRANSCRIPT

ANNOUNCER: Ladies and gentlemen, give a City of Brotherly Love welcome to Rush Limbaugh!

(wild cheers and applause)

RUSH: Look at you in the front row!

(more cheers and applause)

RUSH: Keep it up!

(even louder cheering)

RUSH: Thank you all very much. Thank you. I have to tell you, I have never, ever, before been in a more beautiful place to speak than this. This is just absolutely gorgeous.

(applause)

RUSH: And that greeting you gave me was about the tenth best that I have ever had, so thank you so much.

(laughter)

RUSH: I flew in this afternoon. I flew in from Florida this afternoon. I left about two o'clock. I wanted to leave at two o'clock. It's a two-hour flight up here and I got to the airport and the pilot said,

"We've got a 30-minute ground stop because the airport here got backed up"
(because of all the weather you had, I guess, around noon). I said,
"No, no, no, no. We gotta go. I can't wait here 30 minutes to go. I can't take the chance."
So we played some games and got here, and we landed -- we had to come through, it must have been 20,000 feet of overcast. We didn't see the ground 'til about a thousand feet, and for our arrival route they took us right over The Linc [Lincoln Financial Field stadium].

(laughter)

RUSH: And that giant picture of Donovan McNabb.

(laughter and applause)

RUSH: And I said, "I'm home!"

(laughter and applause)

RUSH: And when I got to the theater, we got here about 6:30 or so, unbeknownst to me as a pleasant surprise, Nick's Roast Beef had catered the greenroom back there. I come up to Pine Valley a lot. Last summer -- not this past summer but two summers ago -- a friend of mine took me over to Nick's Roast Beef, and I figured,

"This is safe. I mean, nobody's going to know me in there."
I'm wearing my golf shorts and so forth, had not taken a shower or anything. I got spotted right off. The guy behind the counter said,
"Are you Rush?"

"Shh! Shh! Shh!" I mean, I'm in Philadelphia. I don't know what's going to happen to me!

(laughter)

RUSH: Anyway, I'm looking around. They have all these pictures, you know, like a lot of restaurants. I saw all these pictures of athletes and so forth on the wall up there, and there wasn't one of Donovan McNabb, and I said,

"You're missing the guy."

"Nah, nah, nah. We'd rather have yours up there."

So I sent them my picture and they catered the stuff and it's just delicious back there. You're all really great. I met some people backstage before going out. I just can't tell you how much I appreciate the greeting and the affection that you show me. I understand it. I'm worth it.

(laughter)

RUSH: Ahem, by the way, I know there are some liberals in the audience because I got a big bouquet of flowers back there. Whenever that happens, by the way, Secret Service is called.

(laughing)

RUSH: And there was a card, and whoever sent this, I had to search to find the name. The name is on an e-mail address, but I don't know if that's really the name. I think it's Emily. Is Emily here?

(people calling out)

RUSH: I had five answers:

"I'm Emily."
Well, anyway, Emily said that she brought ten of her liberal friends with her tonight. That's how I know that there are liberals in the audience, and I love it. I love it when liberals are in the audience, because liberals -- God love 'em, folks -- they just aren't enjoying life.

(laughter)

RUSH: They just aren't. They're irrationally deranged and angry over nothing. They hate people they've never met. It defies explanation. But tonight, any liberals in the audience, despite yourselves you're going to have a gas, and you're going to walk outta here dazed and confused and wonder what happened to you. Now, before we go to the speech, I got some news items here. I don't know if you noticed or not because, very oddly, it's not being reported: The National Enquirer hit with an exclusive on their website last night. I'm not kidding. John Edwards is supposedly having an affair.

(groans and laughter)

RUSH: You think I'm going to tell you a joke, but I'm not. It's true, and nobody's running it. Now, when the National Enquirer has news about me, the New York Times puts it on the front page, and they automatically become a credible source. The picture of a woman... Like the Huffington Post -- I'll throw that out to you libs in the crowd tonight: The Huffington Post is trying to get the Drive-By Media to cover it, and they won't. Nobody's picked it up, and it's kind of curious why not, because those kinds of things are résumé enhancements for Democrats.

(laughter and applause)

RUSH: Do you realize...? I mean, John Edwards is called "the Breck Girl" for a reason.

(laughter)

RUSH: If the news got out that he's actually having an affair with a good-looking woman, do you know what that might do to his poll numbers in the Democrat primaries? Democrats don't care about the morality of it, folks. So don't get confused.

Other things: Algore, my co-nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize.

(cheers and applause)

RUSH: Algore was supposed to attend a fundraiser for Barbara Boxer in California. Barbara Boxer issued a statement today saying that Algore called her and said he can't make it. He has an urgent foreign trip related to global warming -- which, of course, is to head over and get a peace prize for a movie about himself, narrated and starring himself, that has nothing to do with peace whatsoever, which is typical of what's happening to the Nobel awards of -- really not just recently. They've been polluted and corrupted for a long time. But it's interesting. This takes me to Mrs. Clinton.

(laughter)

RUSH: Ladies and gentlemen, I, as you know, am literally 100%, totally deaf. I hear with a cochlear implant. Very briefly, the human ear has 35,000 hair cells in the inner ear, and they vibrate and they start the whole process of energy going through the audial nerve to the brain and the hearing process. Mine died because of an autoimmune attack, and the ones in my left have been replaced. This is a bionic ear. It has eight manmade electrodes. So I don't have nearly the frequency response that I used to have as one that can hear normally. Was that booing that I heard?

(laughter)

RUSH: Now, now, now. You know, I met Mrs. Clinton once. No, seriously, it was in Brooklyn. A friend of mine is the executive vice chairman of the -- it's a long name. It's the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. His name is Malcolm Hoenlein, and when I went to Israel in 1994, he arranged the trip in a four-day, whirlwind, meeting everybody that was anybody in the government, in the Mossad. I had special briefings, went up to the Golan Heights, and the Mossad. It was just unbelievable. Well, his daughter got married. This is about three or four years ago. His daughter got married at a hotel in Brooklyn. Now, Malcolm knows everybody, and when his daughter gets married and he sends out the invite, everybody shows up. All the elected officials in the city, the state, everybody in business, they were all there. This hotel, it took three floors for all of the goings-on to take place. At one point, Malcolm came up to me and said -- and I was told that Mrs. Clinton was going to be there, but three floors, and I was not going to make any effort to go meet her because I didn't want to cause a confrontation here. This is a blessed event, a wedding. Well, for some people it's been blessed.

(laughter)

RUSH: Sorry.

(laughter)

RUSH: So, anyway, Malcolm came up to me about ten minutes before I was thinking about leaving, and he said,

"Would you pose for a picture with Hillary?"

I said,

"Malcolm, does she know you're asking me to do this?"

"Yes, she's the one that wants it."

"Malcolm, I do not believe that. I refuse to believe that Hillary Clinton wants her picture taken with me."

Somebody pulled me aside and said,

"Malcolm wants the picture so he can show it to people."

(laughter)

RUSH: So Malcolm had done some great things for me, so I relented, and I said yes. So Mrs. Clinton came up. She's very -- very -- short.

(laughter)

RUSH: She was wearing a floor-length gown, because you can't wear a pantsuit to a wedding.

(laughter)

RUSH: So Malcolm's got the photographers. Amazingly, ten or 12 photographers showed up and just people with their cameras (making shutter sounds) snapping pictures. I stood next to her, said a few words. She never looked at me. She just said,

"Thank you,"
to whatever I said.
"Thank yoooou. Thank yoooou,"
like a robot.
"Thank you,"
like the woman who designed the Stepford Wives. So that picture, those pictures have never shown up. I've been convinced they're going to show up in a tabloid or something, and I'm going to have to deal with people saying,
"What are you doing making nice with Hillary? What are you doing!"
and I'll have to explain the story. But this is what was interesting about it. At that point that was my cue to leave -- and I didn't go in escorted. I was just there by myself. I walked, I got in the elevator, and as soon as the doors were starting to close, she got in.

(laughter)

RUSH: She gets in. She's alone, too. She hit the stop button on the elevator.

(laughter)

RUSH: Do you people...?

(laughter)

RUSH: She said,

"I never thought I'd meet you like this."
She said,
"Do you know, Mr. Limbaugh, how long it's been since I have felt like a real woman?"

(laughter)

RUSH: I had you going, didn't I? Now, what am I going to do? I'm thinking to myself,

"Damn right I know how long it's been."

(laughter)

RUSH: But I don't want to say that. So I said,

"No, I don't."

"Would you make me feel like a real woman?"

I said,

"Sure. In fact, I'd be honored to do that."
So I started taking off my clothes. Remember she's hit the stop button. I stopped when I got to my underwear. She's just standing there watching me. I said,
"Do you want to feel like a real woman?"

"Yes!"

"Okay, fold 'em."

(groans and applause)

RUSH: (laughing) I'll tell you another funny story, but this one is true.

(laughter)

RUSH: Everything up to the elevator in the Hillary story was true, too. The other was just a joke for -- Do you know how mad liberals in this crowd are right now? I have just made fun of the woman they think should be queen for life. At any rate, this next story is true. Early on in my career with this show -- I guess 1990 -- there's a group called Council on Foreign Policy. No, no, no. It's the conservative version of the Council on Foreign Relations. They're trying to do what the CFR does. I forget their acronym. I'm invited to speak by Paul Weyrich and a couple other people, to be the emcee their annual dinner. Bill Bennett is going to be honored for scholarly work and so forth. I'm supposed to be the emcee. So I said,

"Sure, I'd be honored to speak to this group."
It was at the Ritz-Carlton near the Pentagon, and it's a dinner. So it's in a hotel ballroom with circular tables of ten, and I told the following story, thinking,
"This can't lose."
You know, as the emcee, you're supposed to open up with a joke. But this was a true story. It goes back to the mid-eighties. Senator Kennedy was vacationing off the coast of the south of France with this nubile, young, scantily clad woman. We know it because tabloid photographers in helicopters were snapping pictures, and the pictures were published in the New York Daily News. They published three of them. The first picture showed the couple cavorting on the boat. In the next picture, the woman is in the water, swimming around and frolicking. Senator Kennedy -- in what had to be a first -- dove in after her to be with her.

(laughter)

RUSH: Then the third picture is of them back in the boat frolicking and cavorting, and those pictures made it around Washington, DC. So this was in the paper, and it got to Howell Heflin, who is now deceased, but was a big bear of a man, senator from Alabama, and he's looking at the pictures, and he said,

"Well, I do declare! It look to me like the senator has done changed his position on offshore drillin'!"

(laughter)

RUSH: Folks, you're chuckling at this. The room that I was in was a bunch of conservatives. Half of them laughed nervously. The other half was dead silent, staring to me like I have just committed the biggest gaffe on the face of the earth -- and I'm looking out and I don't understand it. So I tried to cover for it. This was just the introduction of things before dinner. I got to my dinner table and I said,

"What the hell happened?"

"Well, that's the most tasteless joke anybody has ever told to our group."

"It's a Ted Kennedy joke, for crying out loud! It's not even a joke. It's a true story! Howell Heflin said it and Ted Kennedy did all of that!"

(laughing)

Well, what I didn't know was that half of this group is evangelical, religious Christians, and the other half of the group academics, scholars, business people and so forth -- and they were the ones that were sort of nervously laughing, and it was explained to me that I had better apologize when I got back up there. I'm early on in my career. I can't afford blunders like this, even though I didn't think it was a blunder. So I apologized, and I was warmly embraced and accepted and after dinner, after the program, I'm walking out, and I saw Dr. James Dobson, and he was talking to a woman that looked to me exactly like Donna Rice, you know, who was out there cavorting in a boat with Gary Hart. So I'm saying,

"She's here and I'm getting grief for a Ted Kennedy story?"

I walked up,

"Dr. Dobson?"
I introduced myself to him, and he said,
"Well, Mr. Limbaugh, it's been an interesting evening for you, I'm sure."

"Yeah."

I said,

"Was that woman you were just talking to...? She looked just like Donna Rice."

"Yes, sir, it was. She's found the Lord, something that you might look into."

(laughing)

RUSH: I said, "Whoa!"

(laughing)

RUSH: I want to tell you one more story. This actually happened on the radio. I want to tell you this because I can tell by the reception and the reaction that you are students at the Limbaugh Institute, that you --

(cheers and applause)

RUSH: You have the program in context. But a lot of people still ask me,

"Why do you do a show with no guests, and why do you try to be funny so much? Why don't you just get serious? I mean, these are really serious times. I mean, sometimes you get off the charts, and you lose focus and you should stick to the issues."

Those are people that have not spent the requisite six weeks to figure out what all can possibly happen on the program. One of the things that I love to do is combine irreverent humor that has a political point to it, along with serious discussion, credibility, on both sides. For example, if on the old Nightline show, if Ted Koppel came out and did a ten-minute joke monologue, you'd go,

"I'm not watching this show for that,"
and if Jay Leno came out and tried to get serious with political monologue before he went into his jokes,
"Eh, it's not why I turned on The Tonight Show."
Well, I want to do both and have credibility on both sides. There's a lot of radio competition; there's a lot of noise that you have to cut through, and I am trying to persuade. I passionately believe what I believe. I believe what I believe is right. I believe what I believe is best for preserving the traditions and institutions that made the country great. So, of course, I want people to agree with me, but not because they have to, or they've been forced to, but because their minds have been opened up and the conclusion came to them themselves. That's how you really persuade somebody. You're not going to persuade somebody wagging your finger under their nose and say,
"You are wrong. You just don't understand."
You've just gotta be patient; set up circumstances to which you know the conclusions are obvious. With some people, like liberals, that will scare 'em away even further, but the point is, that's how you persuade people.

So I'll give you an illustration. Back in Sacramento when I was in that station, KFBK, this is 1986, a little story, one-paragraph story on the news wire, an Ohio minister has demanded that the Mister Ed TV show be canceled in syndication reruns because he found a Satanic message in the theme of the song when he played it backwards. What he said was that in the Mister Ed theme,

"a horse is a horse, of course, of course,"
if you play it backwards at the right speed what you'll hear is
"S-S-S-Satan."

(laughter)

RUSH: Now, I'm looking at this, and I coulda dealt with it on the air just as I dealt with it with you, but I'm thinking,

"This is absurd. It is ridiculous, and this needs to be illustrated."
I love to illustrate absurdity by being absurd. So I decided, because, at this time, I had been using Slim Whitman's Una Paloma Blanca as my great Peace Update Theme, because the Peace March for Global Nuclear Disarmament was going on at the time. So I went into the production room, and the production director there had a harmonizer, which changes your voice. You can set it so your voice can sound out of this world or chipmunk-y or whatever you want it to do. So I had him make it sound really low and out of this world, and I gave him text for what I wanted to record. Then I went on the air.

I said,

"Ladies and gentlemen, I don't know that I can continue to be your host on this station any longer. I have just learned, because of the great work of a ministry in Ohio, that I have been playing music to you that has Satanic messages in it. Now, I feel horrible about this. If I have been corrupted such as this once, how can I guarantee it won't happen again? I'm thinking very seriously about this. The song I'm talking about is Slim Whitman's Una Paloma Blanca. I don't want to talk any more about this. This has shattered me to my foundations. But I want you to know that it's happened, because I cannot, in good conscience, let you know that you have been exposed to Satanic messages at my expense, because of me. You should know this."
So I'm thinking when we go to the phones, that people are going to be curious, and want to know more -- and I was right.
"What's the message?"

"No, I'm not going to play the message. I'm not going to play this song anymore, and I'm not going to talk about it."

"But you can't tell us that we've been exposed to Satan and then not give us the details."

"I'm doing it for you. I'm doing it for your own good. You don't think this has upset me?"

This went on all morning for three hours. The general manager called me into his office after my show and said,

"How long are you going to go with this?"

I said,

"I think I can get a week out of it."

(laughter)

RUSH: He said,

"You're going to have to wrap it up."

Ministers from all over town were calling, because their parishioners were saying,

"KFBK is playing Satanic messages!"

So the next day I explained to the audience that I was being forced -- forced by management powers greater than me, who I am now wondering if they have also perhaps been corrupted -- I'm being forced to play this Satanic message for you against every instinct I've got. So we've recorded the song backwards, and we've put this little message in it three times, as the song is playing backwards, and the message went:

"Beeeeeeeelzebub! Yes, it's me, the old devil himself, lurking right here in the Slim Whitman record grooves! Tell me, how did you find a turntable to play this backwards like this?"
Slim Whitman was in the background yodeling backwards.
"My disciples and I would love to find out where you got these turntables so we can spread them around. Well, I've gotta be going. I gotta be going way down the line, if you know what I mean. See ya."

It played two more times, and I'm sitting there, folks, and I'm thinking,

"This is going to establish me as one of the great put-on artists of all time. What great creativity. I can't wait."
I'm looking. The phones are going nuts. I'm laughing myself silly as this is playing. I'm imagining people in their cars listening to this stuff, thinking,
"This Limbaugh guy is really sharp."
The call screener has a look of horror on her face. I go to the phones.

The first call says,

"I have every Slim Whitman album. Do you think I should burn them? Are there more messages?"

(laughter)

RUSH: It taught me something. It really taught me. I said,

"I don't think you have a choice."

(laughter)

RUSH: I had to carry it on! I had to switch gears right in the middle of this, now. Rather than people praising me for a brilliant bit, I've got people thinking this is really all true. A couple of other calls said,

"Don't quit! You have saved yourself now, and you have saved us because you have exposed the devil."
I'm scratching my head.

So I had fun, but this one guy calls in -- you always get skeptics --

"I know what you're doing, and I'm not buying any of it. You can't fool me!"

I said,

"Sir, what are you talking about?"

"Well, I have that album, and I don't have a turntable that plays backwards but I've been spinning it backwards like with my finger."

(laughter)

RUSH:

"And there ain't no message in it!"

I had to think fast. I said,

"Sir, your turntable. What year did you buy it?"

"A couple years ago, 1984."

"Well, sir, that's the problem. You need a turntable made after 1985 that has disgronificator circuitry in it. What that does is suppresses the lows and highs, and expands the midrange, which is where Satanic messages are."

(laughter)

RUSH:

"You mean if I go out and buy a new turntable and spin it backwards like that, I'll hear the message?

"Yes, sir."

(laughter)

RUSH: Now, this taught me something. Now, these are callers. On a radio talk show, the calling universe of people that call, that statistical run we've got on this is less than 1%, one-tenth of 1%, that are trying to call. The numbers that get through are even fewer. So you can't extrapolate from what callers say or think to include the whole audience. But still, the fact that there were some people that believed this, letting me know that if I was going to do stuff like this, I was going to have to close the loop on it at the end to make sure because the idea is to be persuasive in this case, trying to make the point that it was absolutely absurd to think that an Ohio minister could get a turntable, play the Mister Ed theme backwards and find a Satanic message is absurd. Plus, I wanted to demonstrate my creativity. So all these things have culminated in learning a whole lot about how to relate to people and connect with you and everybody else in the audience. The reason I don't have guests is because they don't care about the success of my show, and I don't care what they have to say. I'm the expert on my show.

(laughter)

RUSH: Really.

(applause)

RUSH: Everybody else has them. Everybody else has guests, and I couldn't get any different ones than anybody else has, and I'm not that curious about talking to them for 30 minutes about what they think. There are rare occasions, exceptions to this, of course. I think it's boring, anyway. Everybody else is doing it. So I've always wanted to do things that stand apart, but I must be honest with you. I got into radio in 1967. I was 16, and I was a DJ. I had a two-hour show before school in the morning and a three-hour show afterwards. I just loved it. It was the first thing in my life I had never quit. It's the only reason my dad didn't make me quit, because he didn't understand the future opportunities and social relevance of playing Donny Osmond records on the radio. To him it didn't make sense. The family is all lawyers; I'm the first one in my family that does not have a college degree, but because I hadn't quit it... I was a tenderfoot, the Boy Scouts, for a year, and you're a tenderfoot just for joining.

I just loved it, and I just pursued it, and I wanted to be the best at it, and my mother gave me a lot of support, told me I was special. Now, see, now you're laughing. She actually did. She's the one that had the performer's ego in our family. She used to be a big-band singer. I did a funny bit with Lily Tomlin when I was in Pittsburgh doing a morning show. Lily Tomlin was in town promoting some movie or something and her PR people were having her call all the radio stations.

I said,

"Look, what I'd like to do is I'm going to call a grocery store. You be Ernestine the phone operator, and I'm going to ask the grocery store if they've got any frozen raccoon TV dinners, and you can then interrupt and tell me you're going to turn me in to the ASPCA, that the phone company has been monitoring people."
So she did.

[My mother] said,

"That was really funny. Did you improv that?"

"Yeah. I didn't do anything. She did."

"You made it happen, son. You made it happen."

So that's when she was an expert. I got fired seven or eight times, and we all in this business have been told by people that fire us:
"You don't have what it takes."
Some are trying to be helpful. Some are trying to be mean. We've all heard it, and I remain dedicated to my desires because I loved it and I wanted to succeed in it, and I knew, I just had a feeling that when it was all said and done, that I knew I was going to be in the top-five that had ever done this. I didn't know what that would mean, I didn't know how it would manifest itself -- and I certainly never, ever, considered, at any point, that the Democrat Party would be running against me (laughter) instead of the Republican presidential candidates.

(cheers and applause)

RUSH: Never did I think that the words I said on the radio would be purposely twisted, taken out of context, lied about, broadcast over lots of other media -- on purpose, purposely lying -- knowing full-well that that would lead to the majority leader in the United States Senate demanding that my syndication partner, Clear Channel, spank me and make me apologize. I wish my dad were alive. He would not believe this about his son. That whole experience is, I have to tell you, in this case, these things started happening long ago. When the president of the United States tries to blame you for the Oklahoma City bombing -- which he did me -- that's when all this began. I understand why it's happening, but still the fact that it is, is just neo-Stalinist. When you have the Senate majority leader for ten minutes denouncing you on the floor, first off, you can't ask for anything better in terms of my career.

(applause)

RUSH: I'm a private citizen. I'm not running for anything. They must think it's I who stand in their way, and, in a way, they're right, because you know what's happened? What's happened is, before 1988 -- and I don't mean to make this about me. As you know, I don't like discussing myself much.

(laughter)

RUSH: In 1988 when I started -- think back, that's almost 20 years ago -- what did we have? We had CNN. We had the three broadcast networks: C-BS, N-BS, A-BS. We had the New York Times. We had the Washington Post. We had the news magazines. That's it. They got to determine what was news and what wasn't news. They got to determine the commentary. There was no alternative media -- not broadcast, not print, not national -- and, as such, they had a monopoly, and the media back then was just as sycophantic to them as they are today. I think one of the reasons the Democrats do not get it, is they really do not get how most people in this country are repulsed by the way they've been behaving the last four years. They do not get it.

(cheers and applause)

RUSH: Here's why. In the first place, they're arrogant and cocky to begin with. In the second place, the Drive-By Media does nothing but write puff pieces about them -- and people who believe their own press clippings are... You put a Democrat and a bag of manure in front of a Democrat like Harry Reid, he's going to step in it. They do it, but they don't think they stink afterwards because the Drive-By Media is telling them they don't. So they live in this little alternative universe, but they know now. See, folks, liberalism can only survive when they have monopolistic control over the dissemination of news. In that way, they can hide who they really are; they can mask it; they can camouflage it. But now the masks have been raised and the camouflage is gone, and more and more Americans are finding out exactly what Democrats today stand for, particularly liberals stand for, and they're in a panic over it. They've lost that monopoly, and they can't bear to have to operate that way, because they don't think that there's a legitimate alternative point of view. They don't want to come in here tonight, for example, and have a debate on anything. What they would hope to do -- and this is what the Reid business was about, what this smear was all about -- was to discredit me, among people like you, and people who don't listen to me, so that whatever I say nobody believes or listens to or pays any attention. That's what they're trying to do, and this is just the latest. It's not the first. It's the first of this cycle, and it's only going to get worse. I mean, Henry Waxman --

(boos)

RUSH: There are those boos again. Henry Waxman, the American Spectator reports that he is -- and this guy has got 50 staff investigators, the House government oversight committee. Fifty investigators. And the American Spectator quoted a bunch of House staff members, not necessarily Waxman's, that he had authorized a number of those 50 to begin investigations of me and Sean Hannity and Mark Levin, monitoring our shows.

"Hey, Congressman, it's simple, just turn on the radio! Why don't you try it for once instead of listening to a bunch of left-wing watchdogs?"

(applause)

RUSH: Investigate the show! It's like you all have super-secret radios available only for me on a super-secret frequency that nobody but Dittoheads can hear. So Waxman has to send out these investigators to search for "irregularities." You know what amazed me about this smear? This is illustrative of the Drive-By Media. I have a radio show. It is by far the most-listened to radio show in the country. It is on radio.

(applause)

RUSH: Thank you. As Babe Ruth said,

"It ain't bragging if it's true."
That's my point. Radios are free. You can turn one on. In Washington, the station's WMAL. It's on from noon to three, just like it is here. Turn it on and listen. You know what else I have? I have a website. It's very extensive. At the end of the day, by six o'clock Eastern, the vast majority of what I have discussed is there, audio and transcript. Just go there. Do they do that? No! They go to this front group for Hillary, Media Matters for America, and they get their news of what I say from other people taking it out of context. They could listen. They have no desire to listen because they don't want to be confronted. They don't want to face the fact of how wrong they are. People ask me,
"How do you explain a liberal?"
It's a psychological exercise, and I'm not formally trained there.

But I've come up with a number of theories, and it doesn't make any sense, folks. There's such an alternative universe. I was reading some idiot who posted something on the Huffington Post, which is operated by a deranged Greek woman, and this guy wrote this long piece about how I have the longest history of trashing veterans who disagree with the war. He read the transcript. (doing impression)

"I read the transcript. There's no other way to read this than Limbaugh was saying those soldiers that oppose the Iraq war were the phony soldiers."
It's just not true. In the Wall Street Journal today, a column by Dan Henninger:
"I read the transcripts. It's inarguable that Limbaugh was referring to phony soldiers who aren't soldiers and never were in the first place,"
which is absolutely right. So how do we get this divide? Well, the divide is that liberals don't want the truth. They can't face the truth. This is a manufactured incident waiting to happen.

(applause)

RUSH: I'll tell you what gives me the strength, because a lot of people ask,

"How do you put up with it?"
I mean, it was tough at first. In all candor, nobody is raised wanting to be hated and disliked. We all want to be loved, appreciated. I started this radio show in 1988 and in six months I was called a racist, sexist, bigot, homophobe, all these clichés. Nobody who's ever known me thinks I hate anybody, that I've been a racist, sexist, bigot, homophobe. But yet, that's what's being reported, simply because I'm a conservative. I called my mother every night before she died just to see how she was doing. She said,
"How are you doing?"

"Mom, I had a hell of a day. Thirty percent of the people that heard my show hate my guts."

That was a tough psychological thing to have to adjust to, because we don't want to be hated. I didn't get into this just to be loved, don't misunderstand, but to learn to take that kind of thing as a measure of success was a tough thing for me to do because I wasn't raised that way. I don't think too many people are. Maybe Hitler, but certainly not too many others. Now it's a badge of honor, and I get a kick out of it, especially with the things like this that's happened with Reid and Waxman, which I'm going to get back to here in just a second. The thing about explaining liberals: I think what they really fear is people who have faith in something beyond earth, something beyond humanity, things larger than themselves. Liberals, there's nothing larger than them. They are the center of the universe. They are the smart ones. They want to be thought of as the ones who should run everybody's life, whether you should eat trans fat, whether you should drive a hybrid, when you can smoke, where you can smoke, when you can't smoke, how much you're going to pay for it when you buy it. That's them.

(applause)

RUSH: It's absurd. They are challenged by people who,

A, don't need them. That really makes them mad and frightened,
but they're also challenged by the fact that people have faith in God, something larger than this life, means that they are aware that there are things larger than themselves and that gives them a core value. That's why I think they've come up with global warming. I don't want to waste your time, because you've heard this on the radio, but it's got every tenet of every major religion, starting with the Garden of Eden all the way to the Apocalypse. The only difference is that the god in global warming is tangible. It's the Earth, and we can "save" it, because we're destroying it -- which we're not doing, and it's an opportunity for them to ladle everybody with guilt.
I think they're frightened of losing their monopoly.
They're frightened of losing the ability to control people who are learning above and beyond what liberals have always said, and the faith thing.

Waxman, with this investigation business, has denied the Spectator story. He said,

"There's no investigation. The Spectator's wrong, and I demand a retraction,"
and my reaction to that was,
"Well, Congressman, I remember what you guys did to Clarence Thomas when Anita Hill came forth at the last moment after years and years and years of silence with the ridiculous charges. The line you used then was,
'It's not the nature of the evidence here that counts. It's the seriousness of the charge. We must look into this.'
Well, Congressman Waxman, your denial is not the point here. The seriousness of the charge by the Spectator that you want to investigate three private citizens from your government committee is the way I choose to look at this, and I'm going to."

(applause)

RUSH: Now, I'm going to announce something. Stalin, are you back there? This is my security guy.

(laughter and applause)

RUSH: Face the audience please. His name is Larry. I hired him because he looks just like Stalin, which just irritates the hell out of the libs.

(laughter)

RUSH: As you can see, this is a titanium briefcase. He has it handcuffed to himself. Ladies and gentlemen, I am holding here the original letter Harry Reid sent to the CEO of Clear Channel.

(cheers and applause)

RUSH: Here are the signatures of 41 Democrat senators. Hillary Clinton is on this page, the first page. People are asking,

"How come Hillary didn't weigh in on the Limbaugh controversy?"
She has. She's recommended that a private citizen be censured, or whatever, by his own corporate partner, and she wants to be president of the United States. Screw that!

(booing, cheering, and applause.)

RUSH: The CEO of Clear Channel, since they are my syndication partner, is a friend of mine. He gave me the letter. Here is what we are going to do with Senator Reid's letter. Tomorrow at 1:30 in the afternoon on my award-winning program, I am going to announce that we are auctioning this letter on eBay.

(cheers and applause)

RUSH: The proceeds of this letter will go to a charity, for which I am a board member and have raised a lot of money for and have contributed, the Marine Corps-Law Enforcement Foundation.

(cheers and applause)

RUSH: Thank you.

(cheers)

RUSH: I can think of no better end result for this glittering jewel of colossal ignorance to generate needed funds for a charity that does this. It provides college scholarships for the children of Marines killed in action.

(applause)

RUSH: Harry Reid and his cohorts, Tom Harkin, all the people that signed this -- by the way, it was a Reid failure. Just like those resolutions to get us out of Iraq -- he couldn't get enough votes to pass that -- he couldn't even get all his Democrats to pass this piece of garbage. Nevertheless, Harry Reid, despite years and years of my public expressions of love, and admiration, and support for the U.S. military, tried to convince the people of this country that I was critical of the military and that I had a long history of it -- and his cohorts are doing so. It's the same thing in the House of Representatives. On one hand, it's funny and it's great in terms of a professional thing, but it offended the hell out of me because these are the people who have been trying to demoralize our troops, not me, and not you. Harry Reid...

(cheers and applause)

RUSH: Harry Reid, John Kerry -- (yelling in audience) remember my implant. I just take that as a cheer and an attaboy. John Kerry, Ted Kennedy, Nancy Pelosi, the list goes on. Folks, they have been attempting to secure defeat for the United States military for the last four years. They've been trying to hang defeat around the head of George W. Bush. It is they who impugn the military. It is they who say of the men and women who serve,

"They only joined because they can't get jobs in Bush's America. They only joined because they can't get an education. They're just a bunch of hayseed hicks from the South."
They impugn 'em. They demoralize 'em. Murtha calls 'em rapists and murderers -- and they have the audacity to try to convince people that I am out criticizing the troops? They do not know what fools they make of themselves. So, I cannot wait to announce this tomorrow.

(applause)

RUSH: I cannot wait for Harry Reid and everybody who signed this to learn that his letter is generating tens of thousands of dollars for a military charitable foundation.

(applause)

RUSH: In fact, I might suggest to Senator Reid that he try to win his letter back.

(laughter)

RUSH: I have no doubt the operatives in the Democratic National Committee will be logging onto eBay and trying to buy this thing. We will find out who they are. We know. We have our ways. I can't wait for this to start. By the way, a couple other things before I get to something very important that I want to talk to you about. I don't know if you heard this or not today. It's more about liberals than Democrats, Democrat congressional staffers -- there's a big NASCAR race down at Charlotte this weekend.

(applause)

RUSH: Like NASCAR? Absolutely. Get this. Democrat staffers have been told by somebody, other Democrats, that if they're going to the NASCAR event this weekend, to get vaccinated and inoculated for hepatitis A, hepatitis B, diphtheria, and the flu. It wasn't that long ago, Democrats were trying to portray themselves at attractive to "NASCAR Dads" and now they're out…? What a bunch of snobs. You've got a NASCAR spokesman saying,

"No diseases are spread at our events. We thought you had to get inoculated when you went over to places like Ethiopia and Africa, but not NASCAR."
Democrats are advising their own people! Why would they even go if they think they're going to get hepatitis A and hepatitis B. I made this point on the radio, but I want to make it again because it's crucial. That's this whole S-CHIP thing. You have to really pop your P's with it. It's like I remember my show got thrown off WLS in Chicago for 45 minutes back in 1989 or '90 because I was discussing a very serious issue, highway safety, a lot of traffic accidents, road rage. I said,
"It's simple. The way you solve this is to just mandate women stop farding in their cars."
Think Slim Whitman here, folks.

So the general manager at WLS said,

"We're not carrying this. You keep talking about that, and we're not putting it on."

I said,

"What are you worried about?"

"What am I worried about? What the hell are you talking about?"

Phone calls on the air said the same thing.

"What do you mean, women farting in their cars? How do you know?"

I said,

"You can see it!"

"But what about men?"

"Men do not do it."

See, the word is "fard." F-A-R-D. It's French. It means "to apply makeup." Let me just go through it real quick. It's the same thing with this S-CHIP program. It's dangerous. You gotta be a highly trained specialist to pop that P. But here's another thing. It's about this family down in Maryland, the Frost family with two kids in an auto accident. One of them was used by the Democrats as they constantly use people, try to make 'em victims, exploit them to show that George Bush and the Republicans don't care about the children, because this young man only was able to get the health care he needed after his accident because of this S-CHIP program -- and George Bush, of course, was going to veto an EXPANSION of the program. This kid is on TV, and he's 12 years old, he doesn't know what he's saying -- they wrote it out for him -- he's reading it in a prompter or whatever.
"I want other kids my age to be able to get the same health care I got and President Bush is trying to stop that."
It's all a flat-out lie, and I'm not talking about the financial circumstances of the Frost family. That's a whole 'nother argument, and it's a serious one. These people could have afforded health insurance, and they chose to buy other things. There's something about health insurance that's taken over way too many of these people in this country who think it's somebody else's responsibility to get for them. It doesn't make sense.

(applause)

RUSH: They go out and buy a plasma TV or whatever. They go into debt. By God, it's going to be somebody else's job to get 'em health care because they're Americans and they're entitled to it -- and it's

"in the Constitution."

No, it's not in the Constitution.

"It's not?"

"Nope. Why don't you go walk down your neighborhood street, knock on the door and say,

'My kid doesn't have health insurance. I need a hundred bucks from you,'
and see how far you get."

"Well, I would never do that."

"You are doing it, by demanding that they pay for it. You're just not going to them personally because you don't have the guts. You're voting for a bunch of thieves that will steal it from them."

(cheers and applause)

RUSH: It's a matter of simple responsibility. We're getting to the point of mob rule. You get to the point where 55% or 60% of the American people think that other people -- the government, whoever -- should be buying their health care, it's essentially mob rule. Unless, if the elected representatives -- we know Mrs. Clinton wants to do this, SCHIP is her plan. It's an expansion, and it's a stealth mechanism to put the tentacles of socialized medicine even deeper into society. Under the expansion of SCHIP -- by the way, President Bush voted to expand it for $4 billion to include poor kids only. The Senate version, the House version, the Mrs. Clinton version, defines a child as anybody 25 years or younger. I'm not making this up. A family earning $83,000, family of four, would qualify for the health insurance program provided by this program. Now, $83,000 is not poverty. In addition to that, you could have a circumstance where you have a young husband and wife, a 24-year-old husband, 23-year-old wife. If they got into action early, they have two and three-year-old kids, the family of four qualifies as "kids" under this program!

(laughter)

RUSH: It's patently absurd. But it's

"for the children."
When you hear any Democrat from Fast Eddie here to anybody nationally --

(cheers and applause)

RUSH: When you hear Democrats say,

"It's for the children,"
know this:
To them,
we are all children.
We don't know what to do.
We don't know what to think.
We don't know how to make decisions.
So they want us as victims.
Why do you think they are so hell-bent on illegal immigration? The reason, folks, is that they are running out of victims. Despite what they say, we're in a thriving, robust, and great economy. Wages are up. The opportunities for affluence in this country have never, ever, been better, and the Democrats are trying to convince everybody it's just the opposite. Hillary actually said the other day out in Iowa (paraphrased),
"Most of us are just a pink slip away from homelessness, or losing our job, or losing our health care."
What an absolute crock. They want to control as much as possible because power is what they are all about, and so this is just a stealth little program. They look at all of us as kids, incapable and incompetent. So the fact is, more and more people are becoming more and more self-reliant, and they're discovering the great things that you feel when you achieve something.

They're understanding what it is to meet high expectations, that you either have of yourself or somebody else sets for you. They understand more and more people are actually getting a thrill out of discovering how good they can be, what their potential really is. Most people never know. We can all fall. You can't go to the library and find a book How to Fail, because we all know how. But how-to-succeed books? The people that write 'em make millions, because it takes work. It's the same thing about thinking positively. You will not go to the library and find a book on how to be depressed. We're born that way. But the people that write how to think positively are making gazillions of dollars because it takes work, it takes application, it takes understanding. You should not give other people the power to offend you. You shouldn't give other people the power to affect how you feel about yourself, or your beliefs.

(applause)

RUSH: So the illegal immigrants serve a whole host of purposes, but what are they first and foremost? They're poor, uneducated. They're perfect candidates for Democrats -- and then get 'em in the public school system where they're not going to learn diddly-squat! So they'll stay uneducated. They'll graduate half of them who won't even be able to read the diploma. The other half will drop out. As such, they'll always remain poor, and in need of Democrats, and the Democrats will be telling them all this happened to them because of Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, and who else in the Republican Party -- and that's how they operate. That's what illegal immigration is about. It's about voters. It's about continually having people in a state of dependence. If I were a member of a Democrat constituency group -- like let's say I was a feminazi.

(laughter)

RUSH: The Democrats have been promising me all these things for all these years. They're going to get rid of the glass ceiling; they're going to get rid of the glass slipper; they're going to get rid of predatory men; women are going to rule the world, all this sort of stuff. We're still at a point where Mrs. Clinton cannot even be opposed by male candidates because they're afraid you can't attack the women so they have to send their wives out there to criticize Hillary, which is really -- how gutless is that? The women that have made real progress are the ones who gave up the feminist prescription to screw families, screw relationships. You don't need a man to make you happy. What you need is to fulfill your potential in the corporate world. Take a job from a man. Go do it. They tried to be like men. Too many of them ended up looking like one.

(laughter)

RUSH: Now all those women -- from the late sixties, seventies, on -- who bought into that, all of a sudden there's this thing called, what? The ticking time bomb as you hit 40? I don't have kids, what is it? The biological clock! Sorry. It's a time bomb for me. I'm one of these guys:

"Sow your wild oats; pray for crop failure the next day."
That's an old Missouri saying.

(laughter)

RUSH: You know, to show you how square I am, I just heard a joke at a golf course two days ago and I think this joke has been around longer than I've alive, but I had never heard it. That's how clean and pure I am. I was telling somebody,

"Air America has just started a new program for atheists in attempt to broaden their reach."
The guy said to me,
"You know what the worst thing about being an atheist is? You got nobody to talk to during sex."

(laughter)

RUSH: I had never heard that.

(applause)

RUSH: I know you're thinking I lost my place, but I haven't.

(laughter)

RUSH: Thank you, God. Back to the S-CHIP. Aside from all these things the Democrats are trying to do to create more dependence, get more people depending on their needs from the government, like health care, rather than assume responsibility for it. This commercial with this 12-year-old little boy and his family full of not accurately reported upon financial circumstances, the dirty little secret is that this kid and his sister got the health care they needed from the existing version of the program. They did a commercial saying kids like them wouldn't get what they needed because George Bush was going to veto the program. This is so classic. They cannot, Democrats cannot, tell the truth and win. There's this crisis and politics of fear.

(applause)

RUSH: You know, I sit around -- I don't mean this as an ego statement. I sit around; I watched the presidential debates. Why aren't any of them saying these things? Do you realize one of them out of the whole pack could run away with the whole thing if they would just explain this. It's the reason my show is successful. The Democrats think that I've created a bunch of mind-numbed robots. You people can't think for yourselves, don't have the brains to, and so I'm your Svengali; I'm the pied piper, and you get your marching orders from me every day. That's how they look at virtually everybody else. The fact is, you're here tonight because finally there's somebody nationally that says and thinks what you've always said and thought. You've been validated.

(cheers and applause)

RUSH: So people like me who are creating mind-numbed robots out of you have to be dealt with, because if it weren't for me, in their minds, you wouldn't think and say what you think and say, and you wouldn't be voting the way you're voting. That's what they don't understand. It's their side that are the mind-numbed robots. I sometimes have conversations with liberals -- (checking the clock) let me check the time. Oooh, I better do this fast. Well, they give me a limit. No, folks, look. There's a creed here: always leave them wanting more. I talk to liberals sometimes, because I find it -- well, not the robots. There's some you can talk to. I have friends that are liberals. Most of them are women, proving that -- well, you figure it out. I was in a conversation with one about a month ago, and I said,

"Have you ever stopped to think?"
I think about this all the time. I saw the other day that some scientist group said that the farthest point in the universe is still going, is eight billion light years away.
When you look out the window of an airplane, when you look at an animal, how can you not believe there's a God?"

(applause)

RUSH: I have such an awe of what this country is, what it's become in such a short time. I also know that, as human beings, we are no different in intellect -- we have better life expectancy, we're healthier -- but we're no better genetically or any other way than any other human anywhere on the planet at any other time. So I asked this little liberal babe,

"Did you ever stop to ask yourself how it is in less than 230 years a collection of just under 300 million people have set a standard for human existence the likes of which the world has never seen? You ever wonder how this happened?"

(applause)

RUSH: She said,

"Well, sometimes I do, but we're not leading the world by invading Iraq."

"Would you forget Iraq for a minute? Would you people put it out of your mind? I'll tell you what: I will stipulate for you that we shouldn't have invaded."

"You will?"

"Yes, I will stipulate that we botched it after we invaded."

"You will?"

"Yes, and I will stipulate that Bush is a moron."

"You will?"

"Yes."

"Now, will you forget it? I'll explain to you later why it's important. I just want to ask you one question, even if all that stuff..."

I was just trying to get her to shut up about it. I don't really believe all that.

(laughter)

RUSH:

"Do you think we should give up? Do you think we should just surrender and get out? Do you have any idea what will happen?"

"I don't like what the world thinks of us."

I said,

"BS! How do you know what the world thinks of us? Have you been out there and asked them? Look at how many of them are trying to get in here. You gotta stop..."

(cheers and applause)

RUSH:

"Why do you care about our image anyway? You're not the state department. You work in Hollywood. What difference does it make? It's not going to affect your life one way or the other. Why do you want to believe the worst about your country? This is what I don't understand. Why can't you look around you and see absolute magnificence? Why do you have to focus on the flaws, like Columbus killed the Indians and brought sickness, or whatever other multicultural BS you want to buy into? Why in the world don't you see the goodness of this nation, the greatness of our people, the sense of achievement? Have you ever stopped to think how we did it?"

"Well, yeah, but I think we're blowing it."

"No, no, I'm not arguing with you. I'm trying to learn from you. I want to understand how it is you think, if you're thinking and not feeling. Do you ever wonder about this?"

"Well, yeah."

"Do you realize what a miracle took place right here in Philadelphia in 1776? Do you realize what a miracle it was?"

(applause)

RUSH: She said,

"Well, yeah, but those men were inspired by ideas much more important than them."

"What, are they a bunch of dead white guys to you who embraced slavery? What the hell do you mean by that? Why do you need to diminish them? For you to diminish them, what kind of guilt do you have?"

I said,
"But you don't know how close to being right you are. When you said that the ideas they have were more important than the men they were. Have you ever stopped to ask yourself where the ideas came from?"

She hadn't. Most people don't. I mean, you're born here. You take it for granted because that's all you know. I just marvel at this, because I travel. I did a troop visit to Afghanistan. Afghanistan has been in existence gazillions of years beyond us, and you would not believe how people live there. They're tough people, but it's sad. The places in Europe that I've been with some of the finest architecture and so forth, but the standard of living is not there. We've been around thousands of years less than the Brits and the Italians. They still can't make a toilet that makes sense and that works.

(laughter)

RUSH:They all drive around in their little bubble cars on streets that are no wider than this podium because they are that old. They were made for horses and buggies and so forth. Come to this country. We feed the world. We clothe the world. We liberate the oppressed of the world. We defend the world as well as ourselves until Democrats get in power, and then we may be screwed. But, nevertheless, look at the greatness. Look at the inventions. Look at what happened to the world in the 20th century because most of it happened in this country. The level of achievement, human achievement that advanced lifestyles, extended life spans, unknown in the hundreds of years prior. My grandfather was born in 1893: no electricity, no running water when he was born, no television. He and my grandmother read to each other on Sunday afternoons. They really got to know each other, and they loved each other. He saw the airplane, he saw the phone, he saw computers, and all of it. To hear him talk about it was fascinating, and it's partly what got me thinking about all this.

So I asked these people, the liberal I was talking to,

"Do you agree with my premise here, and could you just suspend your guilt for a second over the fact that it's happened?"
See, one of the problems with these people is they live with constant guilt and envy, and they have this guilt that we are so great, so advanced, that in order for them to share it and enjoy it, they have to tell themselves that we stole it from the rest of the world, that we are but what, one-tenth of the world's population, using 25% of the world's resources or whatever the cliché is. They have to believe their nation is evil for it to be this big. Nothing this great can happen without people scheming and cheating and taking from others -- which is why they're so much in favor of foreign aid to all parts of the world because they think we create poverty and maintain it around the world to make ourselves rich. What they don't understand is the answer to my question. We're no different than anybody else in the world, but look at us! A group people, look at what this country is, and there is a reason for it -- and we are in the process of attempting to export this.

One of the president's policies in Iraq is this presumption made by our Founding Fathers, codified in founding documents, that we're all created by God -- equal, with certainly unalienable rights,

"among them, life, liberty, pursuit of happiness."
All three are currently under assault by the left wing of the Democratic Party:
Abortion;
you can't smoke;
you can't buy the kind of car you want to buy.
You can't do this, you can't do that.
You can't eat trans fats.
You can't drive in this lane.
You can't do whatever.
Pursuit of happiness, they're trying to make everybody as miserable as they can on a daily basis, with their buddies in the media, so that they will vote for change in Washington. We're trying to export this because the president understand -- it may not be possible, I'm not endorsing his policy here -- but every human being is created with the natural yearning to be free. We don't like being put in cages. We don't like being put in jails. We don't like being constrained in any way. We like being able to go where we want to go, when we want to go, if we can afford, if we can't, we'll go somewhere else, but we want to go. We want to move, we want to be free, and we're born to it. We're not trying to oppress the rest of the world. The rest of the world suffers from an unfair and unequal distribution of capitalism, and way too much socialism, and communism, and tyranny that keeps people from reaching life, liberty, pursuit of happiness.

(applause)

RUSH: So I told this little liberal this really important question. Why has this happened? How has it happened? It's not an accident. It's a miracle, and the miracle is that these evil white guys, as you've been taught to believe about the Founding Fathers, were, in my estimation, divinely inspired, to codify (applause) in our founding documents the existence of God, as Creator, and the fundamental state of the human being, free. That freedom is what has allowed people in this country, ordinary people doing extraordinary things, because they have the freedom to do it. They had the freedom and ambition. They have the opportunities. They have the motivation. They have the risk-reward system. The things that allow the best of humanity to exist, exist in this country because our Founding Fathers conceived of them and built the nation around them. Now, one of the reasons this is important to me is because this next election -- and I don't want to be too dramatic -- but you just don't have listen to me. Listen to what the Democrats are saying they're going to do. I don't know how many times Mrs. Clinton has now raised taxes on the rich to pay for whatever program, the 401(k) for everybody, the $5,000 check for everybody. They're looking at Big Oil profits.

"I'm going to take those profits and I'm going to put 'em into alternative energy."
You're going to what, madam? It's not your money. Keep your hands off of it! You had nothing to do with producing it.

(applause)

RUSH: I know that there's a lot of disgust and a lot of anger in health care, and a lot of people's disgust stems from the fact that doctors aren't making the decision. How come my insurance company has to dictate what my doctor can and can't do? Excellent question. So why in the name of Sam Hill -- and there was Sam Hill -- would anybody want to give Hillary Clinton or any other elected official that power? What the hell is it about elected officials that makes them think they are the experts in the oil business, in the retail business, in the health care business? Who the hell do they think they are? Would you hire any of those people to run your health care personally?

(audience yells, "No!")

Of course not. This notion that the government can make these businesses run better than they are is, frankly, scary. Look at the Democrat Party's enemies list, folks. Look at the enemies list: Big Oil. I'm sorry, oil is the fuel of the engine of freedom. There's no other way around it. You may not like it, and you may wish you could drive around with a windmill on your car, but it's not here yet, and we're a growing economy. We need to continue to grow. We need output. Oil is the fuel, and there is plenty of it -- don't believe the smoke screen -- and we have shown that we clean up our messes as free people a lot better than the oppressed can in other parts of the world far more polluted. We're doing fine in all this. We're as clean as hell.

(applause)

RUSH: You live next to a refinery here and you're alive. I don't know about a refinery, but you've got those storage tanks out there. Wal-Mart! They want to shut down Wal-Mart, for God's sake. What does Wal-Mart do? Wal-Mart enables Democrat constituents to be able to afford things! Well, they're the party of the poor and the little guy.

(applause)

RUSH: And so why do the Democrats want to shut 'em down? Because they're better at providing things Democrats can afford than the Democrat Party is, that's why. Wal-Mart is a threat. To show you how stupid they are... The Wal-Mart people are very smart. They were told in Chicago,

"You're not going to put Wal-Marts in the city limits of Chicago."
The Board of Aldermen told them,
"You're not going to do that."

Wal-Mart said,

"Why not?"

"You don't pay decent wages. You don't provide health care, and you're nonunion."

Wal-Mart said,

"Okay."
They ring the city [encircle the city outside the city limits]. In the process of ringing the city, the first two are up and Chicagoans are leaving the city limits to work at Wal-Mart and to shop at Wal-Mart, and the city is getting no tax revenue from any of this. You can't stop a stampede with a bunch of stupid liberals standing up for whoever is in their constituency group rather than the people of the country. Their enemies list includes Big Drug, Big Pharma -- why target these? -- Big Oil, Big Food. Oh, yeah, the trans fat bunch, fast food bunch. Did you see, this is funny as hell. Taco Bell is opening a restaurant in Mexico City?

(laughter)

RUSH: I think that's the third liberal leaving. I have noticed.

(laughter)

RUSH:Frankly, they lasted longer than I thought. Don't worry. They'll be fretting over this all night and into tomorrow. My point is, these people are telegraphing what they want to do. They are so cocky. They think the election is over. Mrs. Clinton is their inevitable nominee, and they are convinced that she's the next president. This is actually good for us because they're finally stripping away some more of this camouflage. This is the most amazing thing today. The deficit is down again; tax cuts are creating so much revenue to the Treasury that the deficit's coming way, way down.

(applause)

RUSH: I have people say,

"Rush, Democrats want all this money to spend. Why don't they just agree here that this is working?"
It's not about money;
it's about control.
They want to be able to tax you and certain other parts of society for social architecture. They want to prevent the creation of wealth. They want to do everything they can to keep as many people dependent and in control. That's what it's about.
That's who they are, because they need to get their power back. They're not going to lose their monopoly if they get it back again. They're out there cussing the fact that we even have to have elections. It's the most amazing thing, they lose an election, obviously it was stolen from them. They win an election, and look at how smart the voters became! I was watching on the airplane coming up here on the Fox News Channel. Neil Cavuto had Senator Al D'Amato speaking for the concept of tax cuts, and somebody, some aged lieutenant to Howard Dean for the DNC, was speaking against tax cuts. They have not learned. Remember Walter Mondull in 1984?
"I will raise your taxes."
What did he win, two states?

(laughter)

RUSH: I'm listening to this -- and, folks, this is not arguable. The tax rate reductions have raised revenue because it's expanded the economy. There are more people working than ever before, meaning there are more of what? Taxpayers! It's simply the volume discount business in action, and all this wealth and prosperity is creating a lot of consumption, which is creating manufacturing and services. It's working exactly as it should, and D'Amato is doing a halfway decent job explaining this. This woman from the DNC, Cavuto says, asks,

"How in the world can you deny that the tax cuts have led to this? The capital gains rate..."

"This country is in debt like it's never been because of George Bush!"

Cavuto says,

"What do you mean?"

"Look at our collective debt! He can't take credit for the deficit dropping."

"Wait a minute, ma'am. The national debt is the sum total of all deficits, but the deficit's coming down, which is what everybody wants."

"It's not coming down. If we have all this revenue rolling in, then George Bush wouldn't have vetoed the health bill, the S-CHIP bill."

They cannot stand for the truth about Economics 101 to get out. That's why they constantly had to revise the eighties and what happened with Reagan's tax cuts.

(applause)

RUSH: Charlie Rangel can't wait 'til the Democrats win the White House. He's got this plan to raise taxes a trillion dollars. They're telling everybody what they're going to do. Mrs. Clinton is telling everybody. They're telegraphing it. If I were in the Democrat Party today, if I were a member, I'd be embarrassed to wake up and have this little maniacal runt who needs a stool to get to the urinal, named Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, to come to Columbia University and sound just like a damn Democrat!

(laughter)

RUSH: Talking about Hurricane Katrina? Talking about the gap between the rich and the poor? The Democrat talking points -- and it's not only Ahmadinejad. It is Bin Laden when he releases a tape. He sounds just like the Democrats. If I'm all these Democrats, I gotta ask myself,

"Do I really want to say things that get parroted back to me by this guy?"
The other day three Islamist jihadists, terror masterminds, wrote a book urging the American people to elect Democrats, specifically Hillary Clinton. I talked about it yesterday on the program. It's an honest-to-God book. If I were a Democrat, this would bother me. These are people that want to kill us, to put it mildly. I guess the Democrats are happy for the endorsement.

(laughter)

RUSH: I said earlier in the year, I think there was an 80% chance at the time that Hillary Clinton will be the next president. I don't know.

(booing)

There's a little method to my madness there. The more I see her, this conventional wisdom, this inevitability, this

"the-election-is-over"
stuff, I just have a sneaking sense that this is the Democrats walking right into a closed door again and bloodying their nose.

(applause)

RUSH: This kind of arrogance, they don't understand how they come off to people. They just don't understand it, because, as I said earlier, the Drive-By Media is shielding them, and not being hard on them, and not being critical. It's going to be an interesting next 12 or 13 months, but I want to thank you all before I go here because I meant to get into this earlier, but it's actually a good way to finish. I interrupted myself, and only now remembered it.

(laughter)

RUSH:People do ask me,

"How do you deal with things like Reid and Waxman, these guys in the Senate taking official action against you, a private citizen? Distorting the Michael J. Fox thing? Distorting the McNabb thing? And they seem to be systematic. They seem to be well coordinated events. They start up in a certain place. They end up in a certain place, and the path is always the same."
I always tell people that what sustains me -- and I really wish I had an accurate, better way of expressing it here than I'm going to -- but what sustains me is my faith and knowledge that you don't buy any of it, and that you're listening and hearing it for exactly what it is, and that you're not going to believe it and run away. In none of these instances have we lost a radio station. We have not lost an advertiser, and we have not lost audience. Just the opposite, and that's all because of you, and I can't thank you enough for that, because throughout all of these controversial things -- and, sometimes, to be honest, it hurts sometimes, makes me mad.

I don't want to spend my whole life fighting these people. I like to have fun in life. I don't want to just get up every day and figure out how I've gotta deal with them, but I'm willing to do it because that's what life has presented to me. But you're right there with me, and, if you weren't, I wouldn't last. So people tell me all the time how much the radio show means to them and what they learned from it, and I appreciate that more than you'll ever know. But you all will never know, and I will never be able to express, just what you being in the audience, giving me this welcome like you did tonight, you will never know how much it means to me and my family, and you just will never know. It's a debt I'm probably never going to have the ability to accurately and properly repay. But I want to thank you so much for it. You are just great and tremendous.

(cheers and applause)

END TRANSCRIPT

*Note: Links to content outside RushLimbaugh.com usually become inactive over time.

[Yosemitest]

Rush, I wish I'd been there. I used to work in Northeast Philadelphia Tower (PNE). I'd have loved to cleared you to land and met you personally. But life has it's twist and turns, and 'other' responsibilities.

Thanks agan, Rush, for your Godsent works.

Now, it's 3 AM and I got to get some rest.

[upchuck]

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1910607/posts

[harpu]

bttt

[TNCMAXQ]

How do you find out in advance about these appearances by Rush? Can anyone attend? I checked his website and couldn’t find anything about Rush to Excellence events.

[Yosemitest]

Try "Rush Limbaugh Tickets" by www.ticketsnow.com. It's the only link I could find. And you can set up an e-mail notice.