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RUSH: I really did not want to watch that last night, and it’s the first time in the 25 years I’ve been doing this show I did not want to watch it. Honestly, folks, for the first time. I did, I did out of a sense of duty, but I didn’t want to. And for the first time in 25 years I never felt more distant from my government than last night. Watching that, practically every aspect of it, I felt like that’s not us. That’s a whole different world there. That’s a whole different mind-set, it’s a whole different existence, it’s not us. I felt a huge disconnect. And when they switched off from Obama and the cameras showed you the crowd, the Congress sitting there, honestly, folks, I thought I was looking at the Star Wars bar scene half the time.

Anyway, greetings and great to have you here, Rush Limbaugh, the EIB Network and the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies. Telephone number is 800-282-2882. The e-mail address, ElRushbo@eibnet.com.

So I did watch it. I watched it under duress, not really wanting to. And the reason is, I don’t believe anything anymore, or very little. I think everything is PR, everything is a game, everything is designed to effect a result rooted in emotion. And that’s not good. I literally didn’t feel like I had much in common with what was being discussed. I mean, I realized I was a target, as all of us are. That’s the thing, too. I mean, we’ve got Washington, DC, it’s its own enclave, and it is governing against the will of the people.

The latest polling data, for example, on global warming, it is last on the list of things people care about. Last. Immigration just barely above it. Immigration reform, amnesty. Nobody, nobody believes the global warming thing anymore, and amnesty is something nobody in the country, a vast majority, don’t want. Yet that doesn’t matter. Washington’s going to do what it’s going to do regardless, and they’re going to insult our intelligence in the process by trying to make us think that we do want it. Or trying to make those of us that poll in the majority think that we’re not really the majority, that we’re the ones out of touch. Like campaign finance reform. I thought the whole thing bordered on insulting.

Now, as for the speech itself, this was incredible. Do you people — I don’t mean “you people” in an insulting way — do you realize the stuff Obama talked about last night, he rejected all of that in the campaign of 2008? He doesn’t believe any of that stuff last night. The one positive you might want to take out of it, here you’ve got a president who’s in trouble, his party is in trouble, and what do they always do? Obama tried to sound, in matters economic, pocketbook, he tried to sound as unlike he really is as he could pull off. Now, he’s never going to sound like a conservative. But he certainly dialed down the community organizer identity and rhetoric last night.

It was funny watching. I thought Frank Luntz retired and went to Hollywood, but there he was on Fox after the speech with his focus group, and it was interesting. I think there were a lot of Obama voters in that group. The ones that I said, “I didn’t think he was enthusiastic enough.” What in the world were you watching? He was enthusiastic as he could be. It was just all phony. It was contrived energy. But the stuff that he was talking about last night are things that he has rejected philosophically, that he doesn’t really believe in. So that’s the one upper if you want to stretch and try to find one in it.

The overall concern for me is just the disconnect that I feel from that whole thing. I have a sneaking suspicion that many of you are the same way. There really isn’t anything we feel like we’ve got in common. Interests are not joint. And it seems as though that is of nobody’s concern there. But we will endeavor to forge ahead, ladies and gentlemen. I’ll tell you, without that speech last night, the State of the Coup, I would never have known how good things are. I mean, it really struck me. Did you hear the president? Did you listen to it last night? Did you watch it?

I mean, if you watched it and you were from Mars, you would think that this country has never had a stronger economy. We have never been positioned better. We are kicking butt. We are kicking butt and taking names. We are just rocking. We are tearing it down. We are the envy of the world. I would have never known how good things are had I not watched this speech. But this speech is the kind of disconnect that gets people in the private sector fired or sued or committed. It was so far off from reality. So here in the middle of talking about how many jobs have been created and how great the job recovery’s going, we got a whole segment on the need for job training centers.

Why are 50 million people on food stamps, Mr. President? Twenty million more people on food stamps than when you were inaugurated. Why, if the economy is growing so rapidly and if job creation is so momentous, why do we need emergency unemployment extensions? Why are 92 million Americans on the sidelines? If we’ve got such a robust, roaring economy, and the job market is racing back to normal, why are 92 million Americans not in it?

Grab sound bite number 20. This one, the president stood up there and he basically said to Congress (imitating Obama), “I’m gonna do what I’m gonna do, and if you don’t want to do it, screw you,” and they stood up and applauded him. He basically told ’em I’m gonna screw you if I have to. If you get in the way of what I want to do when I pretend to be dictator, screw you, and they stood up, the Democrat side, and applauded. Here’s how it sounded.

OBAMA: I’m eager to work with all of you. But America does not stand still, and neither will I. So wherever and whenever I can take steps without legislation to expand opportunity for more American families, that’s what I’m gonna do. (applause)

RUSH: Look at this. They’re standing up and they’re applauding this. Standing ovation on the Democrat side. But then why do we need to do anything to expand opportunity for more American families, because if you listen to this speech last night, there’s nothing else to be done. We’ve restored that. There is endless opportunity for American families, except the ones living paycheck to paycheck. And there’s endless opportunity for people to go out and find careers and jobs, except for the people that can only find a gig for 29 hours a week. And there’s so much burgeoning, we’re gonna have a summit here on tuitions. We’re gonna make sure everybody gets to go to college except for those who are indebted for the rest of their lives to student loans and degrees for which there’s no work.

I just thought it was rank amateur. I think this is such a letdown. I don’t know how to describe it, folks. It’s disappointing. Bragging about a recovery which is the worst one since the Great Depression.

Why are 92 million people on the sidelines? Why are there 20 million more Americans on food stamps than when he was inaugurated? Why do we need endless emergency unemployment extensions? The answer is because he has been president since 2009. That’s why. Why are so many Americans losing their health insurance? Why are so many Americans now unable to afford health insurance after the implementation of Obamacare?

Because he has been president since 2009.

You know what this was? This was a campaign speech without an election. It was pure denial. The president last night was pretending to run for office in the hopes of winning an election, so at some point in the future he can govern. The whole night I kept saying, “Wait a minute. We’re five years into this. This speech is a speech that should have been given five years ago.” This speech should have been given five years ago.

Now we’re five years into his Regime and we still got a campaign speech, and it was aimed right at the low-information voter. It was a distraction from the destruction, pure and simple. Words about pens, words about phones, words without substance that ignored the realities of the last five years. This speech was written and rehearsed so as to position the president as an energetic man of action, to make you forget that the country is in deep trouble, to make you forget that a tremendous fraud has been perpetrated on the American people.

Because promises made by an energetic and enthusiastic man sound so good. Snake oil needs a good salesman, and that’s what Obama was last night. The energetic, enthusiastic president says he will slash the bureaucracy, streamline permitting process for key projects. He’s not gonna do anything of the sort. He is the obstacle to all of that. “Climate change is a fact!” Nobody cares. The highlight of the night was the last thing that happened.

That was the tribute to the soldier, the Army Ranger, Remsburg, who was nearly killed by a roadside bomb in Afghanistan. He got the longest sustained and genuine applause of the night — the only genuine applause of the night, and the longest, and the deepest, and the most sincere, and the most appreciative of the night. It went on and on and on. I want to read to you a tweet sent out by the senior political editor for NBC News, Mark Murray. This is an actual tweet from an actual objective, professional journalist at NBC News.

Here is the tweet: “Obama’s ending on Remsburg wasn’t just a story about America — it also was a story about Obama. Nothing has ever come easy.” Does that bother you or offend you, that a member of the press sat through that and saw Obama in that story? Obama doesn’t know the half of what Mr. Remsburg has experienced. It really is kind of perverted, convoluted, sick, what have you, to try to compare (and insert Obama in) that story — and it made me wonder.

Maybe that was the purpose of it.

Maybe Obama’s trying to hijack that poor man’s story, insert himself in it, ’cause here’s this political director/editor for NBC News: It “wasn’t just a story about America.” I thought it was a story about the soldier, frankly. What does this story say about America? Obama ending on Remsburg “wasn’t just a story about America — it was also a story about Obama”? “Nothing has ever come easy”? Chew on that.


RUSH: I’ll just give you some more observations on amnesty — which, again, we don’t want. It is not important. The American people are not interested in it (which doesn’t matter). We’re not interested in climate change. That doesn’t matter. So the president in the speech last night praised the job market, praised the economic recovery, highlighted how many jobs have been created and how rapidly it’s happening.

They’re good jobs, and all of this.

It wasn’t true. And then he would say, “Not enough people are working! We need to have job-training centers open and we need to retrain people,” and I said, “What is school for? Why do we need all these federal programs to tell people how to work? You don’t want ’em to work anyway!” There’s a state, ladies and gentlemen, that a lot can be learned from. It’s North Carolina. North Carolina has done away with the extension, the emergency unemployment benefits — and you know what?

The unemployment rate is plummeting in North Carolina.

It’s common sense.

Pay people not to work and they’re not gonna work. Obama promised he wants to pay people. He wants to continue to pay people not to work. That got a standing ovation. But the contradiction was profound. On the one hand, we got great job creation and we got a growing economy — it’s finally taking off and it’s just going gangbusters — and over here we got all these people that can’t find a job and we need to extend their unemployment benefits, and we need to do it now.

And if we don’t do it, if Congress doesn’t do it, he’s gonna do it himself — and then you go to the real world in North Carolina where they’ve done away with it, and the unemployment rate is plummeting. Because when you’re not being paid not to work, you gotta have somebody else to pay you. So people are going out and finding work. There’s no big job boom or oil boom in North Carolina that would explain their unemployment rate coming down.

It’s simply they’ve done away with the benefits.

So the president says, “Not enough people are working,” on the one hand, and yet everybody’s working. But because not enough people are working, we want to flood the job market with illegal immigrants ’cause that’s “the right thing to do,” and America’s a beacon. Obama said women need equal pay. This, you know, “Women earn 77Â¢ for every $1 a man earns” is 10-, 20-year-old stuff. It’s no longer true. It basically wasn’t even true when it was first used. But the one thing, if you watched it — and it’s hard to pick one.

But when the president said… I might have this in the sound bites. I don’t know. I probably do, but I don’t have time to find it. When he said that the American people “want us in Washington to work to go to find solutions,” no, we don’t! That’s the problem! We don’t want you doing any more. Leave us alone! We don’t need you! We don’t need Congress tampering in the job market with job-training centers, job-creation programs. That’s not how it happens! You people don’t do that. You don’t even know how to do it.

If you knew how to do it, you would realize it’s not your job.

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