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RUSH: Now, folks, I want to try to accomplish two things today, in addition to the latest details of the IRS scandal, the latest details on the AP, the telephone scandal and the Benghazi e-mail dump. Because I’m sensing an opportunity here, based on some questions I had to answer today from friends in the e-mail. And one of the threads from friends was about the press and whether or not they’ve turned on Obama. If you watch cable news, the conventional wisdom is that the media has now soured on Obama. Nina Easton on Fox said (paraphrasing), “Look, it’s not that the press is liberal, it’s that the press feels ignored by Obama. He’s gone over their head to reach the American people, and they kind of feel left out of everything, and they’re a little upset about that.”

Another said: “Rush, it looks like the media’s really turned on Obama. They’re really mad. Do you think he can win ’em back?” Easily he can win them back. I don’t believe that they’ve turned on Obama. I think they’re desperately hoping that whatever’s wrong, he puts back together; and they’re gonna be there to assist every step of the way. The conventional wisdom is that media has turned on Obama, but I don’t believe it.

Now, they may give Jay Carney a tough time, but they’re not really going to give Obama a tough time. I’ll tell you something else. The media is never gonna write things like, “You know, I guess Limbaugh was right all along.” Or, “I guess the conservatives were right all along about this.” They’re never gonna write that story. They’re never gonna cover it no matter what Obama does, no matter what problems he gets into. They’ll beat up on Jay Carney all day long, and they might beat up on Holder, and they might beat up on some of these IRS people, but they’re not going throw Barack Obama overboard. And, in that vein, I don’t think that anybody is gonna be able to convince the people that voted for Obama that they were wrong, and I think that’s the second thing I want to talk about on the program today because it dovetails with the Limbaugh Theorem.

It is literally amazing how many mainstream reporters are describing Obama to the “T,” fitting my definition of the Limbaugh Theorem without even knowing what they’re doing. For example, Bob Schieffer (paraphrasing), “This isn’t the Nixon administration. This is more a case, is anybody home? Somebody’s gotta grab hold of this thing. Very, very disturbing what we’re seeing here.”

“At times, Mr. Obama comes across as something of a bystander occupying the most powerful office in the world, buffeted by partisanship and forces beyond his control.”



This comes from a story, Peter Baker, the New York Times. This is really amazing. “An Onset of Woes Raises Questions on Obama Vision — Thwarted on Capitol Hill, stymied in the Middle East and now beset by scandal, President Obama has reached a point just six months after a heady re-election where the second term he had hoped for has collided with the second term he actually has.

“Mr. Obama emerged from a heated campaign last November with renewed confidence that he could shape the next four years with a vision of activist government as a force for good in American society. But the controversies of recent days have reinforced fears of an overreaching government while calling into question Mr. ObamaÂ’s ability to master his own presidency.”

Listen to this now, folks. “The challenges underscore a paradox about the 44th president. He presides over a government that to critics appears ever more intrusive, dictating health care choices, playing politics with the Internal Revenue Service and snooping into journalistsÂ’ phone records. Yet at times, –” here’s the money quote, “– Mr. Obama comes across as something of a bystander occupying the most powerful office in the world, buffeted by partisanship and forces beyond his control. … All of which raises the question of how a president with grand ambitions and shrinking horizons can use his office. Mr. Obama may be right about some of the things he cannot do, but he has also struggled lately to present a vision of what he can do.”

Folks, Obama is right where he wants to be in this. Everybody’s writing about the trouble Obama’s in; he’s right where he wants to be. And Eric Holder, the same thing, “I don’t know what went wrong.” These guys are presenting themselves as bystanders. Obama is not even yet seen as governing. I don’t often do this. I am begging you to keep an open mind about the Limbaugh Theorem to understand precisely what’s happening here and the way that we can successfully attack this.

Here’s another story, this from the AP: “Obama Aims to Halt Perception of Passive President.” Very subtle article from the AP. Limbaugh Theorem on display here. At first it seems to be blaming Obama, but once again ultimately they’re saying that all of these scandals are because Obama’s been too much hands off. Now, the opposite is true. Obama is running this show like no other president has. Obama’s hands are on every level here. The IRS scandal, Benghazi, it’s Obama from start to finish, top to bottom, back to front. However, the perception is that he doesn’t know what’s going on, that he has nothing to do with it, that all of this is happening while he is a bystander, like the rest of us are bystanders.

Dana Milbank yesterday, “The Passerby President.” These people in the Drive-By Media are cementing the notion that I have put forth in the Limbaugh Theorem. The way that Obama gets away with this is to be disengaged, or to appear to be, and ultimately not responsible for it. That’s the key to this. He’s sitting pretty. He’s not in any trouble, not with the people that elected him. And that’s what you have to understand. With the people that elected Obama, he’s not in any trouble at all. This is all somebody else’s doing, and the government is so big that not even the most competent, brilliant president ever can control it and, therefore, he can’t possibly be to blame for it. It can’t possibly be his fault.

Listen, grab sound bite number nine. Here’s Obama last night at this hastily called press briefing in the East Room as he goes out and tells everybody how livid and mad he is about the IRS scandal.

OBAMA: Here’s what we’re gonna do. First, we’re gonna hold the responsible parties accountable. Yesterday, I directed Secretary Lew to follow up on the IG audit to see how this happened and who is responsible and to make sure that we understand all the facts. Today, Secretary Lew took the first step by requesting and accepting the resignation of the acting commissioner of the IRS.

RUSH: “Here’s what we’re gonna do. We’re gonna hold a responsible parties responsible.” That’s what we’re gonna do. We’re gonna find out who in the Sam Hill did this, and I don’t know how this happened, and I’m gonna make sure this doesn’t happen again.

I’ll tell you why it happened, folks, and I’ll tell you what the real opportunity here is. This is liberalism on display. Benghazi, IRS, phone intercepts of AP, the massive debt, the economy, the lack of jobs, all of this is liberalism on display. It doesn’t matter if it’s Barack Obama running this show or Bill Clinton or Hillary Clinton. This is what you’re going to get. This is liberalism.

Again, it is a golden opportunity for the Republican Party — and I fully expect them to not get it, ’cause everybody’s gonna be focused here on an opportunity, they think, to nail Obama. I’m here to tell you, it doesn’t matter anymore. He’s not running for reelection. And you’re never gonna get the satisfaction of hearing people who voted for him say, “You know what? You guys were right.” It’s foolish to even try for that.

It’s not gonna happen. The way Obama has structured this, the people that voted for him are not holding him responsible because he isn’t. He’s distant. He’s passive. He’s not involved. He’s got bigger things to do, bigger fish to fry. He’s so much more qualified. He’s being sabotaged! He’s being undermined by people. In fact, I’ll bet you that some low-information voters think the people doing this are Bush holdovers. Do not laugh.

You go to Democrat websites, you look at the comments, and you’ll see some of these will you lug heads actually thinking that some of these IRS scandals are Bush holdovers trying to sabotage Obama. My point is, you’re not ever gonna get the satisfaction of the media or anybody who voted for Obama saying to you, “Yep, you were right,” so don’t even try it. The thing that is on display here is what happens to a country when unchecked, unopposed liberalism happens.

You can point to Detroit; you can point to New Orleans; you can point to any state or city that’s been run by liberals without opposition for any serious length of time, and you’ll see an utter disaster. You’ve got the IRS running amuck. You know the details in the IRS scandal, and I can give you the latest today, and I will. You know all that. It’s not just Obama. This is who liberals are. This is why I hoped he failed. I wanted liberalism to fail. I wanted socialism to fail.

This is big government.

Obamacare? It’s gonna be a bigger nightmare than all of this when it fully implements. The opportunity that exists here is twofold to explain to people that this is what happens when Democrats run the show. Maybe liberalism is a tough sell to some people. “I don’t want to hear about liberal/conservative.” Okay, tell ’em “Democrats.” This is what happens when Democrats run the show. This is it, and you can go back and cite previous elements in the history where Democrats run the show, and this kind of stuff happens.

You have an out-of-control federal government intruding on people’s private lives from the IRS to now health care. You name it. It has the added benefit of being entirely true. This is why, folks… You’re probably frustrated hearing me say this over and over. This is why I just have longed for the political education in this country to be sufficiently so that people understand what liberalism is, what happens when liberals run things, what happens when they get unchecked power with nobody to stop them.

What you have is utter destruction. What you have is the assaults on the Constitution. What you have is declining liberty, declining freedom. You have a bigger and more intrusive government. This is what happens. This is liberalism. What’s happening now with all of these scandals is what you get with any liberal president, with any Democrat president, with any Democrat Senate majority leader, with any Democrat speaker. This is what you get. Obama is just the most intense, undiluted incarnation of a big government liberal.

He’s the most radical that we’ve had, but he’s no different ideologically. So you’re not going to have the satisfaction of hearing the press turn on Obama. That isn’t gonna happen. You’re not gonna have to satisfaction of hearing people who voted for Obama tell you that, “Oh, yeah. You know what? You were right.” It isn’t gonna happen. It may happen in a few isolated cases, but that’s not gonna become a realization by vast majority of the low-information crowd that voted for Obama.

You have to understand that he is positioned precisely as he wants to be, as a bystander, as an outsider. That’s the purpose of the Limbaugh Theorem, to define and explain how it is that Obama gets away with doing all of this. He is the architect of all this. Barack Obama is the architect of the IRS and its unfair, mean political treatment of his political enemies. It’s how Obama operates. His fingerprints are all over it.

The people he hires will do this kind of thing for him without having to be told. Ditto at the State Department. Ditto at the Department of Defense. Ditto at the EPA. Obama has done all of this. Obama is responsible for all of this. But you’re never gonna make that case, because Obama has successfully positioned himself as an observer. Not only that, he’s an observer who’s mad about all this! He’s an observer who’s really ticked off at what happened in the IRS.

If you’re a low-information voter and you’re paying attention to this, you’re seeing a president mad at all this — and you don’t associate him with it ’cause he’s mad. He’s trying to stop it. He’s been working for five years to stop this stuff and he continues to be undermined by his invisible enemies. So when you have Peter Baker at the New York Times writing such nonsense as, “Mr. Obama comes across as something of a bystander, occupying the most powerful office in the world, buffeted by partisanship and forces beyond his control.”

He’s in control of all of this, folks!

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Here’s another sound bite. The president last night was in the East Room of the White House telling everybody how mad he was when he learned about this IRS scandal — which, by the way, the IRS scandal had one purpose, and that was to make sure Obama was reelected. The Benghazi scandal had one purpose: To make sure Obama got reelected. And he’s sitting around telling everybody how mad he is, and what we’re gonna do about this (impression), “and we’re gonna make sure it doesn’t happen again. I’m gonna tell you that right now.”

Here it is…

OBAMA: Congress, Democrats and Republicans, owe it to the American people to treat that authority with the responsibility it deserves and in a way that doesn’t smack of politics or partisan agendas. Uh, because I think one thing that you’ve seen is — across the board — everybody believes what happened as reported in the IG’s report is an outrage. The good news is it’s fixable and it’s in everyone’s best interests together to fix it.

RUSH: Let me tell you: If this man were a Republican, he wouldn’t get away with this. If he’d have said that today, no way the press would have let him escape responsibility or involvement. In Obama’s case, it’s totally fine. People say, “Rush! Rush! Rush! Do you think he can win the media back?” He hasn’t lost the media, folks. The media has not turned on Obama. The media is worried. They see this passivity and the lack of engagement as a problem, because they want an activist, thug liberal running the show and implementing liberalism.

They’re worried that Obama’s bored, lazy. They haven’t figured out the Limbaugh Theorem, that he gets away with everything precisely by appearing to have no involvement with it — and that’s par for the course. That is exactly what’s happening with this IRS scandal. It happened because he’s president, and for no other reason. It happened because he is president. He gets away with not being tied to it like he’s not tied to the jobs numbers, he’s not tied to the debt, he’s not tied to the economy.

He’s not tied to anything going wrong.

Limbaugh Theorem.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: I want to go to the end of the piece by Peter Baker in the New York Times. Now, again, this piece, ladies and gentlemen, is headlined: “An Onset of Woes Raises Questions on Obama Vision.” The theme is, “My God, the guy’s so disengaged, but he really wants to move his agenda!

“But, gosh, he’s just so buffeted by partisanship and forces beyond his control. He’s being thwarted! The Republicans won’t work with him because of Rush Limbaugh.” Yeah, that’s referenced in this piece. But I want to read this from the end. “This week, as Mr. Obama confronted a scandal frenzy unlike any he has faced, he let his guard down during fund-raisers in New York. ‘My thinking was after we beat them in 2012, well, that might break the fever,'” meaning the Republicans, “‘And it’s not quite broken yet,'” and they’re scared of Rush Limbaugh.

Now, Peter Baker says, this is Obama letting his guard down. Oh, there’s another story that Obama wants to “go Bulworth.” You remember the Warren Beatty movie Bulworth? A liberal Democrat politician is elected to office, and then he’s diagnosed with a fatal disease, and he says (summarized), “To hell with peace! I’m just gonna start telling people what I think. To hell with trying to moderate my speech. To hell with trying to please this group and not upset that group. I’m just gonna tell people what I think!”

It was 110% liberalism, and it just was loved and adored. So there’s a story, Obama dreams of “going Bulworth.” Meaning: “Obama feels so constrained! He just can’t say what he wants to say. He can’t do what he wants to do, and he’s so frustrated, and he’s thinking of saying, ‘To heck with it!’ and just busting out.” That’s what the last three paragraphs of Peter Baker’s story are. “This week, as Mr. Obama confronted a scandal frenzy unlike any he has faced, he let his guard down during fund-raisers in New York. …

“He sounded…” Listen to this, now, folks. “He sounded almost plaintive in wishing he had more ability to advance his agenda.” Let me ask you a serious question: How many of you think that Barack Obama has not advanced his agenda? Let me just tell you. From where I’m sitting, he’s got pretty much everything he wanted. He didn’t get Card Check, and he didn’t get some union stuff, but he got everything he wanted.

He got his stimulus. He got tax increases, multiple times. He got Obamacare, and that is not insignificant. That is major! He has just nationalized one sixth of the US economy. Yet Mr. Baker’s writing this, and you can practically see the tears hitting the page. Obama “sounded almost plaintive in wishing he had more ability to advance his agenda,” as though the poor guy’s so thwarted by these Republicans that won’t work with him, and he’s so thwarted by all the partisanship!

They think he’s just too passive. He should just roll up his sleeves and get involved here. Peter Baker quotes Obama saying, “I want to get some stuff done. I don’t have a lot of time.” Folks, we’re being spun like you can’t believe, and I’m just here to hit you between the eyes. If you think the press has turned on Obama, give it up. If you’re asking yourself if Obama can do anything to get the press back, give it up. He has not lost them; he never will lose the press.

If you’re thinking that any of this is going to make people that voted for him en masse in significant numbers stand up and say, “You know what? We really goofed up,” get real. It isn’t going to happen. If you are involved in politics — if you have decided to get involved in it some way in manner, shape, form — if you’re doing grassroots work, if you’ve maybe called the people at FreedomWorks, whatever, I need you to join me in spreading the word. What people need to know…

People are upset. They’re upset at the IRS scandal. It’s real! People are upset at Benghazi. It’s real. Give up on tying Obama to it. That doesn’t matter. What you have to do is this. The task here is to say, “This is liberalism. This is what happens with any liberal president. He’s just the worst. He’s just the most radical. This is what happens when big-government advocates and liberals are in power.

“They will use the IRS to punish their political enemies. They will engage in incompetent foreign policy. They do not believe in a victorious United States. They believe this country was unjustly founded. Not just Obama; all of them believe this country was immorally founded. They believe this country is inherently racist and sexist and bigoted. It isn’t just Obama who thinks that. It’s all of them! This is liberalism that everybody is seeing here.

The IRS scandal is liberalism out of control.

Benghazi is liberalism out of control.

The White House tapping into the AP phone lines is liberalism out of control.

The rotten economy is liberalism out of control.

The mounting national debt and the annual budget deficits are liberalism out of control.

Falling wages, shrinking private sector — i.e., shrinking economy — rising student loan debt, more and more college graduates with worthless degrees and education, that is liberalism. This is what we get with liberalism! This is why I detest it. This is why I oppose it. This is why I hope it fails, and I don’t care who is in charge of it. I don’t care who holds office. If they are liberal, I’m going to oppose them. Perpetuating the global warming hoax? It isn’t just Obama. It isn’t just Algore.

That’s all of liberalism out of control. Virtually everything that is happening in this country that is going wrong can be traced to liberalism and activist, excited liberals populating every important position in our bureaucracy. Let me tell you what the media really thinks. Do you know how I know what the media really thinks? ‘Cause it’s what James Carville thinks, and I’ll tell you what James Carville is out there saying.

James Carville is saying (impression), “These scandals, they gonna be over 30 days. Thirty days. All the White House has to do is wait ’em out. That’s it! That’s it! That’s all it takes is 30 days and it’a be over. IRS scandal, that’s all the GOP got. That’s it! They got nuttin’. They got nuttin’ else. That’s what they down to,” and then he said, “Remember, the earth is warmin’. The economy is growin’. The deficit is shrinkin’. Health care costs are comin’ down, and Benghazi was nuttin’. All they got’s the IRS.”

That’s how James Carville is positioning what’s happening, as a guest on TV. And that, I’m telling you, is what the media thinks. The only thing of concern here is the IRS scandal. Benghazi, people don’t care. Their big concern, ’cause they don’t understand it, is the Limbaugh Theorem. Their big concern, they think Obama’s not engaged. See, they, the press, they want this guy being liberal every day. They want him being activist. They want him ripping us to shreds, verbally, from the podium, every day. They want him doing what’s happening. They just want him to be in charge of it.

He is their hero. He is their star. What they don’t understand is that Obama has successfully put things into motion where everything he wants to happen is happening, but he is not attached to it. That is such an overwhelming benefit to him. You just stop and think about that. He’s mad that taxes are going up. He’s mad that the debt’s what it is. He’s mad that the economy hasn’t come around. He’s mad. He’s trying to fix all these powerful forces arrayed against him. He’s mad about Benghazi. He’s mad about this IRS scandal. He’s gonna find out what happened. He’s gonna make sure it doesn’t happen again. He’s gonna fire the guy who was gonna leave anyway.

Do you know that the person in charge of the IRS who really did this scandal business is an Obama donor. An Obama donor. You can’t get more true believer than an Obama donor. If the mainstream media’s worried about anything, it is that these scandals might make Obama lose some of his juice. It might stand in the way of getting some of his agenda accomplished, ’cause they really did have dreams of a second term, you know, winning the House in 2014 and then nothing in their way, just totally running everything. And they had these dreams that they were finally going to get utopia, and in addition, they were gonna wipe us out. They were gonna make us an insignificant minority party for the next generation or two.

Now they think that with the scandals Obama may be distracted and he may not be able to use all of his juice, get all that done. That’s what they’re worried about. They’re not worried that Obama might actually end up in trouble. They’re not worried about Obama having to resign, impeachment. It’s not even a factor. I would be surprised if they delayed the start of this stupid press conference to monitor media, to see what’s being said, so they can flavor what comes out of his mouth in this press conference in a subtle way to counter it. ‘Cause they’re already, what, a half hour late on the start of this thing? Snerdley, when was this presser supposed to start, do you know the exact time? Noon? So they’re 45 minutes late. That’s why I was getting requests from a couple of the our EIB affiliates about whether or not I was gonna cover the presser or not.

I guarantee you they’ve been monitoring this and other things being said, and they’ll tailor whatever he says in the press conference to react to this stuff. It’s gonna be subtle. But this is all very important stuff.

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