Rush Limbaugh: “Thank God we’ve got somebody in power” who will say, “It is what it is”
On coronavirus, Limbaugh claims Trump “doesn’t try to wish it away, or doesn’t try to cover it up with fake emotions that are designed to relate to people, but be essentially dishonest with them.”
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From the August 5, 2020, edition of Premiere Radio Networks' The Rush Limbaugh Show
RUSH LIMBAUGH (HOST): I’m trying to be straightforward with this. Folks, there’s no other option we have other than to deal with it. It’s here, it’s affecting every aspect of life, you can’t wish it away. You can't — well, you can ignore it if you want, you can try that — but it eventually isn’t going to work out for you.
We Americans traditionally have never run away from anything — attacks from outside our borders on us, attacks on us from inside our borders. Whenever brand-new diseases pop up, we get on the case like we’re on the case with this, with COVID-19.
But for Donald Trump — I’ve got another sound bite to get, a montage today, the media is literally beside itself that his attitude is, “It is what it is.” Thank God we’ve got somebody in power who does have the ability to face reality, and doesn’t try to wish it away, or doesn’t try to cover it up with fake emotions that are designed to relate to people, but be essentially dishonest with them.
“It is what it is,” sorry if it’s a cliché. But the coronavirus is out there, it's doing what it’s doing, and we have to deal with it. It’s a sad thing that it’s affecting the numbers of people that it’s affecting. We wish it weren’t. But there are things out there that are more lethal than coronavirus. There are things that are far more risky in terms of normal, everyday behavior.
The number of deaths from the wheel, for example, the number of deaths from the flu. There are far many more things — imagine if you were near those explosions in Lebanon. I mean, it's — you can’t wish it away. And you can’t flood it with emotions, and you can’t flood people with emotions, and have anything about the virus change.
So dealing with it — and figuring out a way to go about our lives — is paramount, it is crucial. We have to figure out a way of continuing to open up the economy, getting people back to work, saving their businesses, their dreams, their livelihoods.
I’ll tell you one of the big problems we’ve got is that most of the decision-makers are people that will never be out of work. They will never lose a dime. They will never have a problem with paying their rent or their mortgage. They will never have a problem buying food. They'll never have a problem keeping their automobiles fueled with whatever powers them.
Stunning to realize it, when you look at it that way, but not a single person that’s involved in creating and making and enforcing policy on this is going to be affected by it, the way most people who are affected by it are affected. They’re not going to lose their jobs. They’re not going to suffer a loss in compensation. Therefore, they’re not going to be kicked out of their homes or their apartments. They’re not going to starve. They’re not going to miss any meals. They’re not going to be unable to get in their car, go wherever they want to go. They’re not going to be unable to get on an airplane and go wherever they want to go. And this is a factor, It’s relevant.
People — you talk about Trump and so forth — his inability to relate to people. It’s crazy. If there’s anybody in American politics today that has the ability to relate to more people than anyone, it’s Donald J. Trump.
You think Joe Biden — Joe Biden could not do what Trump did on Fox & Friends today. Biden is incapable of replicating the kind of dialogue that Trump engaged in. The contrast in energy, the contrast in knowledge of events and issues, mental acuity, the contrast between Trump and Biden is striking. It’s why they’re keeping Biden in the basement. And more on that as the program unfolds.
But this, this 59 minutes on Fox & Friends — and I’m telling you, folks, it was, it was all over the place. He didn’t get tricked up once. He wasn’t stumped on anything. They didn’t hit him with anything he didn’t have an answer for. He was really on his game today, in this interview, and we’ve got some of the audio clips from it.
But this is a guy who knows exactly what we’re dealing with here every day — on whatever the issue is, be it illegal immigration, be it COVID-19, be it dealing with the Chi-Coms. And more than that, it's somebody who has the ability to deal with it realistically. And we’re going to have to be able to do that with this.
We’re going to have to be able to get up and go to work every day, knowing the virus is out there. There are things we can do to mitigate our risk. We’re going to have to send kids back to school. There's no choice, we have no choice about this. No, I mean, we do — but there’s a choice that could be made here that would be disastrous.
Keeping kids home? No way. It doesn’t work. It will slow down the economic recovery, because parents can’t go back to work if the kids are going to be at home all day. People are going to go insane if the kids are — the kids are going to go insane, they’re going to go stir crazy. Parents, ditto. But the teachers are holding everybody hostage. The left-wing teachers' unions, “You better defund the cops or we’re not going back to the classroom.”
What? “That’s right. Defund the cops or we’re not going back to the classroom. And by the way, get rid of all private schools, or we’re not going back to the classroom. Oh, and get rid of charter schools or we’re not going back to class.” Screw you. That isn’t how it works.
But these things have to happen. The United States has to get back to being the leader of the free world. The United States has to get back to being the lone superpower of this planet, because we’re the good guys.
I don’t care what Black Lives Matter thinks or says. I don’t care what antifa says or thinks. I don’t care what the Democrat Party says or thinks. I don’t care what Democrat blue state mayors or governors say — we are the good guys. We do have a moral imperative, and a moral superiority to the vast number of nations on this planet. We also have a lot of allies. We have a lot of friends we’re eager to work with. And we’re not running around talking about our moral superiority. We’re talking about the moral imperative. We are, by virtue of our existence as a nation, we become the leading light of liberty and freedom in the world.
We have become the leading economy in the world. The world cannot do without us. As goes the United States, so goes the world. We can’t afford to shrink back into a shell. We can’t afford to cower in collective corners, and pretend that this thing’s not happening and it doesn’t exist. That’s not who we are, that’s not what the rest of the world expects us to be.
We can’t sit here and let a bunch of people, who will never be negatively impacted by this, tell the rest of us what to do — with all due respect. The medical community people, the Drs. Fauci and Birx — they may be brilliant at what they do, but they should not be the people telling us whether schools will open or not. It’s not their level, or area of expertise. What do they know about it? What do they even care about it — beyond what they think the impact would be on public health?
And they're just a couple examples. There’s all kinds of people that are involved in making policy — like should schools reopen, should this or that — who are not going to be affected by the policy they impose on us. You can’t have that, folks. You cannot have people, who have immunity from the policy, making the policy. You just can’t do it. Then what you're going to have, a lot of people who literally have no ability to relate to the everyday problems this virus creates. You can’t have people who are not affected by it making policy — not all of them.
“Well, Rush, isn’t that kind of like you — you always say that the left says that you can’t talk about the defense budget because you didn’t serve?” No, it’s not at all like it. I sit here on the radio, I don’t have any power, I can’t affect the defense budget, I can’t affect defense policy. I sure as hell can talk about it.
I’m talking about people who are in positions of power that allows them to make policy. People who are not going to be affected by the policies they impose, should not be making the policy. At least the people making policy should not be exclusively comprised of those unaffected by what they — and this is, you know, one of the big, big problems with liberalism is that they never, ever suffer the consequences of their own policies. They’re immune. By definition — liberal, socialist, communist leaders don’t want any part of what they demand their populations put up with.
But in a representative republic like ours, the leaders live it — or did. We’re trending away from this. And it’s got to stop.
You know, Obama had a phrase for this. He talked about, “You've got to have skin in the game. You've got to have stakeholders, skin in the game — can’t be doing this if you don’t have skin in the game.” Whatever.
There's another great idea — why in the world was Obama making policy on health care? He didn’t know anything about health care. He didn’t know anything about the hospital business, he didn’t know anything about the professional medical care industry. He’d never worked in it. None of the people that he had working on it, either, had ever had any experience. And these are people from the faculty lounge at the Ivy League sitting around whining and moaning about the people doing the jobs — doing the work — and these clowns at the faculty lounge talk about how stupid they all are, and how much brighter they are, and how much better they could do it. Well, they got their chance to try during eight years of Obama. What have we got to show for it? Nothing — but one disaster after another, to one degree or another.