Category: Rush Limbaugh

Santorum Praised by Rush Limbaugh, Endorsed by Florida State Sen. Plakon

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Wearing my Florida shirt at the CNN Jacksonville debate,
Thursday, Jan. 26, 2012 (Photo by Dave Weigel)

JACKSONVILLE, Fla.
On his radio program today, Rush Limbaugh singled out Rick Santorum for his understanding that “ObamaCare is ballgame,” as Rush put it. Limbaugh referred to Santorum’s strong performance in Thursday’s CNN debate, going after Mitt Romney’s own record on health care:

SANTORUM: What Governor Romney just said is that government-run top-down medicine is working pretty well in Massachusetts and he supports it. Now, think about what that means —
ROMNEY: That’s not what I said.
SANTORUM: — going up against Barack Obama, who you are going to claim, well, top-down government-run medicine on the federal level doesn’t work and we should repeal it. And he’s going to say, wait a minute, Governor. You just said that top-down government-run medicine in Massachusetts works well.
Folks, we can’t give this issue away in this election. It is about fundamental freedom. Whether the United States government or even a state government — you have Amendment 1 (ph) here offered by Scott Pleitgen (ph), who, by the way, endorsed me today, and it’s going to be on your ballot as to whether there should be a government mandate here in Florida.
According to Governor Romney, that’s OK. If the state does it, that’s OK. If the state wants to enforce it, that’s OK. Those are not the clear contrasts we need if we’re going to defeat Barack Obama. . . .
SANTORUM: Does everybody in Massachusetts have a requirement to buy health care?
ROMNEY: Everyone has a requirement to either buy it or pay the state for the cost of providing them free care. Because the idea of people getting something for free when they could afford to care for themselves is something that we decided in our state was not a good idea. . . .
SANTORUM: Just so I understand this, in Massachusetts , everybody is mandated as a condition of breathing in Massachusetts , to buy health insurance, and if you don’t, and if you don’t, you have to pay a fine.
What has happened in Massachusetts is that people are now paying the fine because health insurance is so expensive. And you have a pre-existing condition clause in yours, just like Barack Obama.
So what is happening in Massachusetts, the people that Governor Romney said he wanted to go after, the people that were free-riding, free ridership has gone up five-fold in Massachusetts. Five times the rate it was before. Why? Because…
ROMNEY: That’s total, complete…
SANTORUM: I’ll be happy to give you the study. Five times the rate it has gone up. Why? Because people are ready to pay a cheaper fine and then be able to sign up to insurance, which are now guaranteed under “Romney-care,” than pay high cost insurance, which is what has happened as a result of “Romney-care.”
ROMNEY: First of all, it’s not worth getting angry about.

Limbaugh said it is worth getting angry about, and many Republican voters who watched last night’s debate are probably reconsidering whether the media’s predetermined Mitt-vs.-Newt frontrunner narrative is overlooking the possibility that neither Romney nor Gingrich is the best choice to take on Obama. One Florida Republican who sees Rick Santorum as the best hope for conservatives is Florida state Sen. Scott Plakon, who endorsed Santorum Thursday:

Scott Plakon said: “Rick Santorum is a man who has consistently shown that he can be trusted to stand by his deeply held conservative principles regardless of the way the political winds blow and will be a steady, even hand in leading America towards prosperity and liberty again.
“He has consistently shown that he is willing to make decisions not for the next election cycle, but for the next generation. That is exactly the kind of leader and values we need to confront the failed policies and leadership of the Obama administration and to return America to the shining city on a hill that President Reagan spoke of.”

I caught up with Plakon in the “spin room” after last night’s debate and asked him about his switch from backing Herman Cain to supporting Santorum:

The latest Florida poll shows Romney pulling strongly ahead here. From my American Spectator column today:

Thursday’s debate, the 19th televised debate among Republican presidential candidates this year, certainly did not lack fireworks. And while many political junkies have become weary of watching these affairs, the event here on the campus of the University of North Florida may be as decisive as the South Carolina debates that were credited with helping Gingrich score a crucial win there Saturday. Polls this week in Florida show Romney pulling away, and the former Massachusetts governor had one of his best-ever debate performances Thursday, while Gingrich had one of his worst yet.
While arguments between the two Florida frontrunners got the biggest play, however, Thursday was also an impressive performance for former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum. Polls show Santorum running a distant third in the Sunshine State, but he slammed both Gingrich and Romney for their previous stances on health care. . . .

Read the whole thing, although I confess it was written in a condition of complete exhaustion. CNN neglected to provide coffee in the filing center, and I also ran out of cigarettes before the debate ended. I managed to file my column by midnight, then came back to the hotel room, fell asleep about 2 a.m. and didn’t wake up until 10:30 a.m.

The Tampa Bay Times reports on Santorum’s plans for Florida and beyond:

After remarks at Florida State University  geared toward social conservatives, Santorum rolled out the endorsement  of state Rep. Scott Plakon, R-Longwood, a former top Herman Cain  supporter. Plakon told reporters he chose Santorum for his  conservatism, after Newt Gingrich’s recent “Obama style” ads turned  Plakon off.
“We’re not going anywhere. We’re staying in this  race for the long haul. I think we’re playing for the next states,”  Santorum told reporters afterward.
Still,  questions persisted because he’s not looking toward any celebration on  Election Night. He will be in Florida on Sunday and Monday for events,  including in Sarasota and Miami. No promises after that.
Said Santorum: “We’re just trying to figure out Monday from that  point  on what we’re going to do and if whether we’re going to stay here  on Election Day, when you really can’t campaign, maybe start going to   another state and start doing some campaigning. We want to use every   single day to campaign. And we’re sort of up in the air to exactly how  that works.”

Santorum’s plans are in flux, and so are mine. I’ve got a 1,500-word article due today for the March print edition of The American Spectator, and there’s an event tonight in Orlando where Romney is expected to get the endorsement of the governor of Puerto Rico. It’s about a three-hour drive, and the event starts at 8 p.m. Tempus fugits and deadline looms.

Rush Nails It On The Craven GOP

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by Smitty

Rush Limbaugh went ballistic about both the Obama 06Dec speech, and the corresponding spinelessness of the GOP in refusing to attack #OccupyResoluteDesk. Of local note is the Timmy Kaine run for Senate.

Face it: rather than gearing up for the next concession speech in 2012, the GOP needs to take this class warfare speech of Baracks and parse it, break it down, and fire it right back at Barack, word for word.

Don’t back down, double down. The country is at stake. Let’s find out who the little children are at GOP HQ and gently toss them in the broom closet until after the election next November. ‘Not going after Barack’ was John McCain’s path to victoryconcession speech in 2008; fear of a reprise in 2012 is exactly why no one wants Mitt on the ticket. Let’s put on our big boy pants now, GOP, and git ‘er done. But even if Mitt simulates gumption, is there any way he can convince conservatives that he isn’t a method actor in a bureaucracy play?

Fischersville Mike with the pithy observation:

Blue Virginia seems awfully excited by Barack Obama giving a speech where Teddy Roosevelt talked in 1910.
Roosevelt was the former president in 1910.
Obama will be a former president in 14 months.

Pithier still, the IowaHawk, via LI

via Atlas Shrugs

Thanks, Rush!

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Here’s the transcript of Rush Limbaugh’s show today:

Folks, this is from Robert Stacy McCain, the American Spectator blog: “Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin is expected within a week to make a decision on whether to enter the 2012 presidential campaign, according to one Republican source. Vendors of campaign services who hope to work for Team Palin…”
I guess “vendors of campaign services” are like pollsters and buttons and signs, T-shirts, that stuff. They’ve “been told that Palin, the 2008 GOP vice-presidential candidate, will decide soon one way or another on mounting a 2012 campaign.” . . .

Rush then began to discuss reaction to a Rasmussen poll (45% of GOP Primary Voters Say It’s Bad for Party If Palin Enters Presidential Race) before returning to the topic:

By the way, Palin has tweeted in response to this, knocking down this story that she’s gonna make up her mind next week. The tweet says, “Really? Hmm, guess they forgot to inform me what I’m ‘expected to do’ next week.” This is in response to the American Spectator blog that I just read from which says that she’s expected within a week to make a decision on whether to run.

One of the difficult things about reporting on Sarah Palin is that only Sarah Palin can speak for Sarah Palin, and she only talks to Fox News. So if you’re a reporter who doesn’t work for Fox News, you have to get what you can get where you can get it. Before I filed that brief report at the Spectator this morning, I made a call to try to confirm it with Palin’s people. But I guess if you don’t work for Fox News, they don’t take your call.

So damned if you do, damned if you don’t. You either (a) work for Fox News or (b) aren’t allowed to report on Sarah Palin. And while I’m not complaining, I can certainly understand why this predicament irritates the 99% of political reporters who don’t work for Fox News.

Conor Friedersdorf: Now Turning the Atlantic into Media Matters Lite?

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When Andrew Sullivan jumped ship to The Daily Beast, Conor Friedersdorf stayed behind at the Atlantic, where today he devotes some 1,800 words to Why Rush Limbaugh Is Wrong About Libya. A few sample Conorisms:

His commentary has misled his audience, his prejudices have helped to distract the conservative movement from the stance it ought to be taking, and even his defenders will have a difficult time explaining away his latest buffoonery. . . .
Limbaugh is a man confident that his mistakes will drift off into the ether unnoticed. . . .
[T]he talk radio host isn’t guided in his commentary by any consistent principle, nor does he acknowledge obvious errors in analysis. Instead he blithely misinforms his audience about reality daily.

Well, Conor: Change the station, OK? Nobody is forcing you to listen to Limbaugh. Without attempting a detailed analysis of Rush Limbaugh’s various comments, I’ll say this: The greatest difficulty in criticizing Obama’s policy on Libya is in figuring out exactly what the policy is.

On the one hand, Obama tells us Qaddafi must go. On the other hand, Obama seems unwilling to commit sufficient military resources to drive Qaddafi out. So we are non-fighting a non-war under a U.N. “humanitarian” mandate, with the French leading a NATO coalition of air support for the half-assed Libyan rebels.

There’s something for everybody to hate: The neocon hawks think the policy is too weak. The constitutionalists are angry that Obama committed the U.S. to military action without even bothering to ask Congress. The peaceniks are angry that we’ve taken any military action at all. My main beef — borrowing an insight from Ace of Spades — is that America could “lose” a war we’re not even fighting.

In short, Obama’s policy is a huge joke, and trying to comment on it with a straight face is an enormous challenge. (Sully’s Libya headline today: “Stalemate Watch.”) If Limbaugh’s daily commentary on Libya has been somewhat contradictory — or perhaps just plain wrong at times — so what?

Like I said: If you don’t like it, change the station.

UPDATE: Via Twitter, Conor says: “‘Change the station’  could be a response to any criticism of any commentator.” Indeed, it could. But Rush Limbaugh built the world’s largest radio audience (think about that) as an independent syndicated host. He isn’t employed by a behemoth like NBC or the New York Times. There is no management who can fire him. His continued success depends solely upon his continued “Excellence in Broadcasting.”

An important point: I do not assume that the Limbaugh listener gets all his information from Limbaugh. If Limbaugh is wrong, therefore, his listeners are likely to figure that out for themselves. But Conor obviously thinks that Dittoheads are a bunch of morons who can’t think for themselves — “mind-numbed robots,” t0 borrow Rush’s phrase — and so frets about Limbaugh’s influence.

Linked by That Mr. G. Guy — thanks! — and welcome, Instapundit readers!


Hey, Remember That Crazy Conspiracy Theory Glenn Beck Was Talking About?

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According to every Serious Foreign Policy Pundit, it’s absolutely insane for Beck to assert that the Left and the Islamists are in alliance to bring revolution to the Middle East. However, as Donald Douglas points out, that’s what the Left is telling us:

The neo-Stalinist ANSWER homepage has the announcement, “Emergency demonstrations: Stop all U.S. aid to Mubarak dictatorship” . . .
Code Pink’s Jodie Evans . . . served as a top campaign fundraiser for Barack Obama, and now her organization is leading a fundraising operation for the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt: “Code Pink: Obama, Hamas, Muslim Brotherhood Ally Raising (Tax Exempt) Money to Overthrow Egypt Gov’t” . . .

But don’t let yourself be distracted by mere facts. Bill Kristol says Glenn Beck is “hysterical” and it must be true because, after all, Bill Kristol is a Serious Foreign Policy Pundit and Glenn Beck is just . . . well, he’s just Glenn Beck, right?

And really, who is this Lisa Graas person who tells us about “Five Revolutions Backed by George Soros”?

“The Soros centre’s job in eastern Europe is nearly finished. Its main focus now is the Islamic world, Arab countries, Turkey, Pakistan, Afghanistan, etc.”

Oh, that’s not a quote from Lisa Graas. That’s a 2007 quote by Dr. Kian Tajbakhsh, a consultant for the Soros-funded Open Society Institute.

But don’t believe that crazy conspiracy-theory stuff. Trust the Serious Foreign Policy Pundits. Because they’ve never been wrong before.

My friend Dr. James Joyner, however, is of another opinion:

Going back at least to William F. Buckley, Jr.’s famous article casting the John Birch Society out of the legitimate conservative moment, it has been understood that letting the fringe define the cause hurts it. Buckley correctly reasoned that Birch founder Robert Welch’s crazy and outrageous conspiracy theories were tainting the legitimate anti-Communist movement.
Similarly, the psychotic rantings of Glenn Beck invite ridicule on the rest of us. Legitimate points are inevitably countered by comparisons with absurd variants by Beck, Coulter, Limbaugh, and others who make a living stoking the fears of the base. This is, at best, a distraction from the debate and, often, makes intelligent discussion of the issues next to impossible because they’ve been preemptively framed by the loudest, most shrill, most hyperbolic voices.

How many times have we heard variations of this argument? 

“Oh, Buckley purged the Birchers and therefore, we must now cast aside Uncouth Person X and distance ourselves from Populist Organization Y, because above all else, the Official Conservative Movement must maintain its precious respectability!”

If we had listened to that argument in 2009, there never would have been a Tea Party movement. Republicans would have rolled over and played dead and gone along with the whole Obama/Pelosi/Reid agenda because it was not respectable to oppose Keynesian “stimulus” spending, cap-and-trade, nationalized health care, and so forth.

Now that “the loudest, most shrill, most hyperbolic voices” have succeeded in fomenting grassroots opposition, however, we are told that elected representatives must ignore the people who elected them and, instead, must heed those respectable voices who did nothing at all to help encourage the Tea Party movement.

Hey, let’s dump Ann Coulter because, after all, “the Age of Ann has passed,” right? She’s only the author of, what, five or six New York Times bestsellers?

Yeah, let’s get rid of Coulter because a bunch of bloggers said so.

Purge Coulter! Purge Beck! Purge Sarah Palin! Purge Mark Levin! Purge Rush Limbaugh!

Purge! Purge! Purge!

And keep right on purging until the only people inside the Big Tent are respectable Republicans like Mike Castle, Lincoln Chafee, Arlen Specter and Charlie Crist, and the motto of the Official Conservative Movement becomes, “Me, Too.”

UPDATE: Linked by The Great One: “Cool it with the Stalinist purge crap.”

UPDATE II: Please permit me to point out that, while any conservative who mentions the influence of George Soros is portrayed as a dangerous conspiracy kook, it is perfectly acceptable for liberals to demonize the Koch brothers as right-wing puppetmasters.

UPDATE III: Did I ever mention that you never want to make Dan Riehl pissed off at you?

Rush Limbaugh on Zeitgeist

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“If the movies you go see tell you that your government was behind the downing of the trade center and the Pentagon in 9/11 — as the movie Zeitgeist did, a documentary — if you were told by Michael Moore that all of this was done on purpose, if you’re told that the rich have taken what’s rightfully yours, if you’re bombarded with this every day as part of a political message, what would you be capable of doing? . . .
“You take people who are unbalanced, weak, susceptible, impressionable and you bombard ’em with that message in the Democrat Party and their willing accomplices in the media every day, and what the hell kind of person or people are you going to create running around out there? Then you show ’em the Michael Moore movie or show ’em the Zeitgeist movie, their government — led by a Republican — lied, took us into war in Afghanistan, lied to take us into war in Iraq, lied about weapons of mass destruction, lied about being responsible for 9/11, purposely wired those buildings to blow up and blamed it on some innocent Muslims, what are you gonna think? Are you not gonna run around confused and filled with hatred?”
— Rush Limbaugh, Tuesday, Jan. 18, 2010

This is my 14th post about Jared Loughner’s Zeitgeist obsession and, as I remarked on Andrea Shea King’s show Monday night, I’m afraid I’m nearly as obsessed with it as Loughner was — but don’t worry, I’m not going to go crazy. However, I’m not going to stop blogging about this so long as those whom Limbaugh calls the Democratic Party’s “willing accomplices in the media” continue to ignore this crucial evidence that the Tucson shooter was suffering from an acute case of Bush Derangment Syndrome. The absurd claim that Loughner’s was suffering from right-wing paranoia is completely debunked once you begin digging into Zeitgeist’s worldview as a progressive New Age phenomenon.

Ed Driscoll jokes, “Funny, I don’t recall seeing that film running during the last National Review Cruise,” but it’s no joke. Maggie’s Notebook has watched the whole movie and yesterday pointed out that the Artivist Film Festival — which gave its 2007 “Best Feature” award to Zeitgeist — is funded by the Brazilian petroleum company Petrobras, in which George Soros held a major stake until that became politcally controversial.

The producers of Zeitgeist have put a transcript of the film online and, while it isn’t actually complete — there are parts of the narration missing — it’s important to look at what Zeitgeist actually claimed:

“September 11th was the jump start for what is now an accelerating agenda by the ruthless elite. It was a staged war pretext, no different than the sinking of the Lusitania, the provoking of Pearl Harbor and the Gulf of Tonkin lie. In fact, if 9/11 wasn’t a planned war pretext, it would be an exception to the rule. It has been used to launch two unprovoked illegal wars, one against Iraq and one against Afghanistan. However, 9/11 was a pretext for another war as well. The war against you. The Patriot Act, Homeland Security, the Military Tribunals Act and other legislations are all completely and entirely designed to destroy your civil liberties and limit your ability to fight back against what is coming. . . .
“[L]et’s recognize how history repeats itself. In February 1933, Hitler staged a false flag attack burning down his own German Parliament building, the Reichstag and blamed it on communist terrorists. Within the next few weeks he passed the Enabling Act which completely eradicated the German Constitution, destroying people’s liberties. He then led a series of pre-emptive wars all justified in German people as necessary to maintaining “homeland security.”

Yeah: 9/11 was the Reichstag Fire. Remember that Zeitgeist was released in 2007. How many “Bush = Hitler” posters did we see at left-wing anti-war rallies back then, when 18-year-old Jared Lee Loughner was becoming obsessed with Zeitgeist?

Liberals who tried to blame Sarah Palin, Fox News, talk radio and the Tea Party movement for Loughner’s crime cannot be permitted to ignore the progressive roots of the killer’s insane rage.

Jared Loughner’s Zeitgeist Obsession:
‘He Wanted to Watch It All the Time’

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Kudos to the Arizona Republic for this follow-up reporting:

Loughner began fixating on a documentary: “Zeitgeist: The Movie.”
The movie is a bramble of conspiracy theories involving Sept. 11, the international monetary system, and Christianity.
“There are people guiding your life and you don’t even know it,” the trailer for the movie intones.
“He wanted to watch it all the time,” Osler said. “It was cool at first. But then it got weird. It was all he wanted to do.”
Loughner developed a seeming obsession with currency, grammar and literacy rates. They were becoming the objects of his rants and screeds. Those around him didn’t understand.

OK, so on Wednesday, ABC News was first to report on Loughner’s obsession with this conspiracy-theory cult flick:

“I really think that this Zeitgeist documentary had a profound impact upon Jared Loughner’s mindset and how he views the world that he lives in.”
– Zach Osler, friend of Tucson gunman

Four days later, the Arizona Republic finally follows up on this angle and we learn how intensely involved with this movie the killer became. Loughner already had serious problems — drugs, alchohol, dropping out of high school — but it seems to have been the “profound impact” of Zeitgeist that signaled his descent into deadly schizophrenic madness.

In their haste to shift blame onto Sarah Palin, Fox News, talk radio and the Tea Party movement, the elite media have overlooked what appears to be a major clue to the motive of the Tucson massacre.

As of noon Sunday, there were 39 search results on Google News for “Loughner+Zeitgeist.” Most of those were passing mentions. Meanwhile, a Google News search for “Loughner+Palin” returned 10,395 results. There were 595 results for “Loughner+Limbaugh.” Continue reading Jared Loughner’s Zeitgeist Obsession:
‘He Wanted to Watch It All the Time’ →

How to Talk to a Follower of
the Zeitgeist Cult (If You Must)

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In response to my descriptions of Zeitgeist — the conspiracy-cult movie that Jared Loughner’s friend says had a “profound impact” on the Tucson massacre gunman — I today received an e-mail from a British follower of the Zeitgeist Movement. He repeated the cult’s own mantras about substituting an egalitarian global redistributionist “resource-based economy” for the “monetary-based economy.” He repeated these things in such a way as to indicate to me that he did not recognize that he was the victim of a scam. Therefore I replied by e-mail:

You understand, don’t you, that the abolition of private property (and of prices) has already been attempted, and failed disastrously? Merely substituting the term “resources” for “property” in the old socialist dogma does not change the nature of the proposition. Neither does denouncing “monetary-based economy” differ in meaning from denouncing “capitalism” (as did Marx). A thing is what it is, no matter what you choose to call it.
There is nothing new or different in the Zeitgeist Movement/Venus Project. It is merely a word-game, wherein some clever sophists have used a lot of up-to-date “green” language for some very old (red) formulations. Your failure to recognize the bogusness of their scheme — it is not innovative and honest, but derivative and deceptive — does not speak well of your supposed skepticism. Your problem is not that you lack intelligence, but that you lack knowledge. You might begin to remedy this deficiency by reading Ludwig von Mises’ Socialism and F.A. Hayek’s The Fatal Conceit, which expose the fundamental and inescapable errors to which you seem to have succumbed. I would further recommend Thomas Sowell’s The Vision of the Anointed lest, having disabused yourself of the errors of socialism (for that is what the Zeitgeist Movement advocates, no matter what they call it), you should then fall prey to the errors of liberalism.
God bless you. Please don’t go on a murder spree.

Sincerely,
Robert Stacy McCain

Harsh words are necessary to rouse the dreamers from their dangerous trance. The delusions of these people deserve to be mocked, and often, and by someone who knows how.

The perpetrators of the Zeitgeist Movement/Venus Project scam are preying on the naïveté of gullible people who haven’t studied the history of socialism. As I say, it isn’t that such people lack intelligence. They are merely ignorant. Once they realize that they have been deceived and played for suckers, once they have taken time to educate themselves about the nature of the flimflam by which they have been duped, the ex-cultists will become the cult’s most powerful critics.

Remember: I used to be a Democrat. Talk about a phony scam . . .

UPDATE: Commenting on a post by Greg Hansom at the Ludwig von Mises Institute blog, I wrote:

It is my experience that, once cured of the socialist delusion, people’s disagreements about religion and other matters tend to be less disagreeable. Once we can agree what the answer to humanity’s problems is not, our arguments about the what the answer is become less contentious. And I would point out that the quest for an answer to humanity’s problems depends upon the question of what those problems are, and whether any “answer” to them is actually possible.

UPDATE II: Twiter friend Paula has important information:

Because I didn’t hear Rush Limbaugh’s discussion of the topic, I don’t know what source he cited. I’ll check his “Stack of Stuff” later. The point is, he mentioned it. Three days of hammering this Zeitgeist angle on one little blog may have sent ripples out across the Internet, and somehow the wave reached El Rushbo. His millions of readers are now aware of this phenomenon and they will begin to ask the key question: “Why is this important clue to the killer’s motives being ignored by major news organizations?”

UPDATE III: Hans Palmstierna at Save Capitalism has proposed using the number of Zeitgeist Movement followers as a metric of a nation’s economic kookiness:

The most interesting thing we can take away from this little calculation is that people are indeed wacko-conspiratory in Eastern Europe and the Baltics. Most of the Eastern european countries sport more than 500 of these nutters per million inhabitants.

PREVIOUSLY:

  • Zeitgeist: Watch the Conspiracy Movie That Had a ‘Profound Impact’ on Tucson Mass Murder Suspect Jared Loughner
  • Salvia, Zeitgeist and the Tucson Shooter
  • ‘Vain in Their Imaginations’: God-Haters and the Tucson Massacre

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