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Jan. 10, 2024 - Doug Collins Podcast
32:30
Sec of Defense went AWOL
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You want to listen to a podcast?
By who?
Georgia GOP Congressman Doug Collins.
How is it?
The greatest thing I have ever heard in my whole life.
I could not believe my ears.
In this house, wherever the rules are disregarded, chaos and mob rule.
It has been said today, where is bravery?
I'll tell you where bravery is found and courage is found.
It's found in this minority who has lived through the last year of nothing but rules being broken, people being put down, questions not being answered, and this majority say, be damned with anything else.
We're going to impeach and do whatever we want to do.
Why?
Because we won an election.
I guarantee you, one day you'll be back in the minority and it ain't gonna be that fun.
Hey everybody, welcome back to the podcast.
I had to have you with us.
Today's on the Wednesday edition of the Doug Halls Podcast.
We're going to look at some things that are going on.
And it's just like, you know, Friday's finest come early, but this is with political news.
And, you know, normally on political, on Friday's finest, James and Chip and I, we search the world for the craziness of the world that, you know, you can't normally pass up.
It's like, wow, that's just crazy.
This week, though, politics is actually...
Reared its head into this vein, and we're going to talk about several issues that are coming up that you don't want to miss.
We had a secondary defense go AWOL. I kid you not.
And that's a concern.
I'll go into that a little bit later as we get into it.
The Israel-Hamas situation is deteriorating in the Middle East, Hezbollah to the north, the Iranian-backed militia groups, ISIS is even now.
You know you're on the bad list of the world when ISIS is attacking you.
When ISIS and America are both against Iran, you know Iran, you're having a bad day.
So, we got that coming up.
And, you know, a lot of different things with the budgets.
There's just so much going on in D.C. this week.
Glad you're with us.
Let's get started.
Told you this year was going to be one you need to strap in on.
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This is one to strap in on.
We're ready to go here on the Docons Podcast right after the break.
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All right, let's start off with one from a military perspective that just has me buffaloed.
I mean, You may have heard about this.
This is still percolating out there.
There's calls now from Republicans in Congress for the Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin to resign.
Over what is best at best, he frankly just went AWOL. And for those of you not familiar with, you know, some terminology that you normally associate with military, that's a way without leave.
In other words, you're not, you can be gone, but you didn't tell anybody you were going to be gone and you wasn't supposed to be gone.
Let's catch you up on what's happened here, because this is really disturbing.
And from seeing some foreign press and seeing some other comments from allies across the world, they're even concerned about this fact, because let me, you know, cut to sort of the bottom line here and we'll get on why this happened.
Austin went in for an elective surgery, elective procedure last week.
Undoubtedly, he did it, went home, then had to go back, and they put him in ICU. All the while, he never told anybody he was going to be out, including his deputy defense secretary, who happened to be vacationing in Puerto Rico.
Once he got back to ICU, the story is at least unfolding is he lets her know that she's got to take over the duties for a while.
He's basically incapacitated.
The next day still comes along and the National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan, and the President do not know.
This is last week, the end of last week.
By Friday, it becomes apparent that Lloyd Austin has been AWOL for a week almost without anybody in the White House or the security chain knowing he was gone, including folks at the Department of Defense.
Now, the Biden administration has done some really dumb things in the last little bit.
Okay, you go back for the three years they've been in office.
I mean, they've botched Afghanistan.
They've, from day one, ruined our domestic energy supplies and made gas prices go higher, put more money in the system to cause inflation to spike.
I mean, if you name it, you know, and gave them two choices, they would, you know, one choice and said, here's the right answer, they would pick the third choice and mess everything up.
But this one is stunning.
For all of the Hunter Biden craziness, for all of the Joe Biden craziness, for not even being able to get off a stage, not being able to complete sentences, calling out the wrong people, reading, you know, going after and attacking over half of the electorate as being crazy MAGA Republicans and not, you know, saying they're all a threat to democracy is just, you know, again, in the Biden world is just an amazing feat.
But to have your Secretary of Defense, who's six in line to the secession of the President, go missing with nobody knowing it, is a concern.
As a military member, of which I am, I sit back in this and I wonder, what is happening here?
How can this happen?
Now, you may be saying, well, Doug, he's private and he didn't want to say anything.
That's fine.
You lose the right to not have anybody know what you're doing when you're that high up in public office.
Okay?
You just do.
And especially with one who's in charge of our military, the civilian control of our military.
For at least three and a half days, the civilian control of our military was sketchy at best.
And I say sketchy at best in the sense that nobody knew that he wasn't able to perform his job.
And it took him some time to get back and actually then pass it off to the deputy director, who still at that point had not passed that information along to the White House.
This brings up so many questions.
My legal mind, I just sort of sit here.
You know, my first question was, do the Secretary of Defense in the White House not talk all that much?
I mean, I know for a fact, I had actually was with President Trump on a couple of occasions in the White House, and the Secretary of Defense actually came by one of those times, physically in the White House, was there.
Another time, you know, I know they were talking.
I mean, this was a regular occurrence.
And most administrations, they understand, especially when you have things like Israel going on, when you have things like the Ukraine war going on with Russia, you have the Houthis in Yemen, which are highlighting the Red Sea shipping channels being blocked off.
You have all these issues going on with Iran.
And again, you have a Secretary of Defense who was just completely out of the pocket.
Now, since it has come along, Secretary of Austin has said he should have handled it better.
This was a mistake.
Okay, fine.
I mean, I get it.
But if you have that kind of a brain lapse, which you didn't think it was something you should have reported, I'm not sure that that's good qualifications for the man who is in control of our defenses, our nuclear arsenal, the whole nine yards.
I just, I'm not sure here.
Yes, it was a bad incident.
Yes, do we all make mistakes?
Yes, but you're dealing with the lives of our servicemen and women.
You know, one thing, another question that comes to my mind is, is if the national security advisor, Jake Sullivan, didn't know, then who was, were they getting briefings?
Who was doing the intelligence briefings and putting in the input from the Pentagon?
Was the defense secretary cut off from that?
Is that something that they don't have any input into?
Was the SecDef not signing off on the defense part of the briefings?
I mean, again, where were these?
Why would there be no questions?
Hey, by the way, where's the secondary defense?
Got a question.
Can't find it.
The next question, which I've not heard anyone ask, and I asked the question on an interview that I did just recently, is did the chairman of the Joint Chiefs know that the Secretary of Defense was unavailable, incapacitated?
I mean, we are a country based on the fact that civilians have control of the military, not military.
Now, as a military member, I know that for some who've never served and never been in uniform, you may not understand that, but our Constitution, the way it is set up, our government is set up in which the military is not run by the military.
The head of the military, besides the civilian president, is the civilian secretary of defense.
Now, we've blurred the lines in the last few years.
I'll firmly say with Mattis and with others, with Austin, who just, you know, they have to get waivers because they're supposed to be out a certain amount of time from the active duty military to actually serve in that role.
I understand that there seems to be a blurring there.
I get it.
But at the end of the day, they are civilians.
They're no longer in uniform.
And with the world going to crap as bad as it is in the last few months, it is just stunning to me that Secretary Austin would not have had the consideration for the troops and the men and women that served under him to have made some arrangements to realize that he was no longer in the capacity for at least three and a half days, possibly longer, to not be able to make the decisions as Secretary of Defense.
And they've not even tried to hide that fact.
This is a concern.
Let's just say, God forbid, something happened.
Would they have found him?
Because they didn't know where he was.
And nobody knew what was happening.
The Deputy Defense Secretary was in Puerto Rico on a vacation.
They're normally never, you know, if you go back to previous administrations, they're normally never out of sync with each other.
There's always one near or one on because of the profileness of that job.
Again, I don't understand this, folks.
And if you think the Biden administration is just fine and dandy, then explain this.
Explain these things.
When you've got Mayorkas, who is up for impeachment in the United States House, who actually looks at the situation at the border, is not a crisis, and actually is doing things to really necessarily not make it better, but actually make it worse.
And by using parole authority, in other words, letting people into our country who should not be able to get in, Under, quote, guise of legality, he's taken what is illegal and made it legal.
Is this not George Orwellian kind of deal of doublespeak?
It's illegal, but we're putting them in under legal, so it's all legal.
No, it's not legal.
You can't look at the passages in the law that says this is legal.
This is where we're at with the administration.
And I can't, I mean, again, I don't understand this.
You know, Secretary of Defense goes AWOL. We don't even let senior airmen miss a day at work without knowing where they are.
Private first class in the Army, they don't just get to choose when they're going to show up to their job.
If they don't show up for three days, somebody's looking for them.
And you're telling me that three days, three and a half days in, nobody was looking for the defense secretary?
Either he is irrelevant to this administration, or this is a real, real concern.
Then it goes beyond simple neglect.
This is something that, you know, I mean, look, I definitely don't think it would have happened under the Trump administration.
I don't think it would have happened under Obama administration.
No, it wouldn't have happened under the Bush or Clinton and others.
But why is this?
I mean, and the press have just sort of let it go.
They're concerned, but it's a, oh, well, I'm concerned, but let's move on.
Because they're so, so dependent on the fact that it must be Biden's administration, so it must be okay.
That's the part, again, for those of you out there who don't understand this, I don't understand, most of us don't understand, that you have a Secretary of Defense to go AWOL, and frankly, nobody cares.
First up, up here on today's show, the second thing is, the...
Biden administration ties in definitively with what we're discussing here.
The Israel situation is growing more and more concerning each and every day.
And it's not overt yet, but it's getting there.
And this is something that many of us, including us on this show, have talked about before, is that when you get into They deal with Israel and Hamas, which they need to be taken out.
Hamas is just a cancer upon the Gaza Strip.
And the Palestinians who voted them in, just frankly, you look at it and you say, they're stealing everything from you.
How are you supporting this?
Except that they are brainwashed from early on that the Israelis shouldn't have a right to exist.
Jews are the cause of all the problems in the world.
And they're willingly letting the Hamas terrorists steal everything from them and keep them under submission.
When you look at this in any rational way, the Hamas needs to be rooted out and done away with in Gaza.
It just has to.
But at the same point in time, you have to remember that while they're attacking their Hezbollah, who is also funded very well from Iran, in fact, probably even better funded and better equipped and better weapon than The Hamas terrorists have been playing a cat and mouse game on the Israeli northern border.
And just recently, a Hezbollah senior leader was killed in that area from strikes that were going back and forth.
Hezbollah has not really stopped launching missiles at northern Israel since this began.
And this has always been understood that that is, frankly, a bigger threat now.
Even now, more so than even at the beginning of the Hamas war.
was that Hezbollah would make some kind of incursion into Israel from the north.
If that happens, then all bets are off because Israel will have to move troops rather quickly from Gaza, move them to the north.
This will become a whole different picture of war.
Now, that is escalating daily and now there is...
Hezbollah just recently fired 40 more rockets and several missiles At the base atop Mount Merrin, which is located about eight kilometers from the Lebanon border, about five miles from the Lebanon border.
This is fighting that is escalating.
It's getting worse.
What the Hezbollah was attacking was an air traffic control system that was based there.
Because they were destroyed in some ways, but they do have a backup system in place.
So again, you're seeing this going more and more in a downward spiral.
The other aspect that Israel is having to face is the, what we'll call, Iranian-backed militia groups.
These are folks that Iran just sends money to.
All that money that Joe Biden, through the oil sales that have spiked under Biden and the policies of the United States, and then through the Ukrainian war, With Russia have put a lot of money into Iran's pockets, Moas and Iran, and they give it to terrorist groups.
They're the number one funder of terrorism in the world, and we're seeing this just continue to develop as we go through.
In looking at this, One of the things that you need to understand is the Houthis in Yemen are being funded by Iran.
These other groups in Syria and other places that are being funded by Iran as an attack on Israel.
Iran tries to hide their, I guess, culpability in these attacks, but yet they're the ones funding it.
Look, Yemen can barely feed itself.
And yet they're firing advanced rockets and drones at Israel and at the shipping traffic in the Red Sea.
In fact, it is now stopping that traffic and we're seeing traffic reverted around the Horn of Africa to Asia coming from that way, causing time delays and money increases in the cost of goods that are going back and forth, normally through the Suez Canal and down through the Red Sea.
To think that the Houthis by themselves would be doing this is just a ludicrous thought because Iran is the only reason they have these tools available to them.
It's the only reason that they have the ability to take these ships hostage.
In fact, I don't understand why The Biden administration has not fired back more aggressively against the Houthis and these other Iranian-backed groups because as long as they're able to take over 120 plus attacks so far on troops in Iraq and in the Middle East and others on our own troops, Without retribution, without any loss of life on their side, they do not understand anything but bullies being bullies.
And if we don't see this from the American perspective, is that we tried to, quote, do a managed response.
In other words, blow up a warehouse and say, ooh, see, we can get you.
They don't care.
As long as you didn't get them, they'll do it again.
And with all of this happening, This is leading us closer and closer to a more regional conflict that could break out that is rather concerning, but especially when you've got a defense secretary to say, well, you've got Biden, who seemingly is more concerned about how Israel Works the offensive and protecting than they do anywhere else in the world.
This is something that we're going to have to watch.
So again, as you're starting 2024, don't think that just because the Hamas-Israel war has been going on for over, you know, almost three months now that there is a resolution that we shouldn't be worried about.
In fact, if anything, there's much more of a discussion that we could be headed down a path that is not good.
I mentioned it in the previous segment.
I think Mayorkas is on his way to impeachment.
Probably not going to happen in the Senate because they can't bring themselves to do anything against Joe Biden.
But I do think it is worth looking at.
To understand that somebody has got to be held accountable, at least they've got to be answering questions on the Hill, as opposed to continually tearing down our border.
I want to throw in something real quickly before I get into the budget deal that was just signed, at least top line numbers, and we mentioned this in one of our previous broadcasts.
This was a disturbing statistic that came out of the Daily Wire.
It said there was a record-breaking number of law enforcement shot Officers shot in the line of duty in 2023. In 2023, there were 378 shot, a 60% increase since the FOP began tracking data back in 2018. The 115 ambush attacks that resulted in 138 officers shot, 46 officers murdered by gunfire.
These statistics were a reminder that there is a war on cops in our society.
It's interestingly enough, again, the mainstream media only wants to report the deaths that it wants to report, especially if it fits the narrative of a white Racist with a long gun.
And they choose to intentionally not report on inner city crime, inner city deaths.
They don't report as much on this, what we're seeing right here, the ambushes, ambush deaths, and shootings of police officers throughout our country.
This is a sign of a society that is deeply in trouble, especially when you allow protesters to get away with stopping traffic at airports.
And from what we saw a couple of years ago, burning down blocks and whole blocks of cities and tearing up federal will, and hardly anybody gets arrested or prosecuted.
Or if they do, they get slapped on the wrist and sent back out to do the same thing.
This is going to continue to happen.
And we just need to keep our law enforcement and our firefighters and first responders all in our prayers because they're out there dealing with it every day so that you and I can feel safe.
And, you know, when we see this happening, we need to be aware that this is something that men and women face every day.
As a son of a Georgia State Trooper, I can tell you that you always have that concern.
When I was younger, that my dad going out and patrolling, something would happen to him.
You know, because you just never need it.
And back then, you know, we thought maybe a bad time.
Back then was nothing compared to what these officers are seeing now.
Finally, before we get gone, I do want to touch base on the situation that's going on with Congress.
It is now a $1.66 trillion deal to avoid a government shutdown.
Speaker Mike Johnson said that they got $30 billion in total reduction from the Senate spending plan.
There'll be an additional $10 billion in cuts in the IRS mandatory funding, bringing the total of $20 billion and $6.1 billion cut from the Biden administration continuing Continued COVID-era slush funds.
Number one, you know, some simple questions you have to ask is why is there any COVID-era slush funds still out there?
If there's any programs out there that need to be finalized or if they're preparing for long-term issues, they should be put under the different line item in the budget and funded as research against future problems, not dealing in slush funds for COVID. This should have been gone a long time ago.
The IRS money, again, shouldn't have been there to start with.
But, you know, we're pulling some of that.
But still, in the bigger picture here, you're still at $1.66 trillion deal.
It basically is the same deal that was cut in June by Kevin McCarthy, Joe Biden, and Chuck Schumer.
They put themselves in a box.
And I'm going to say this, and some of you can get, you know, be upset, and you can go to the Doug Collins Podcast dot com, click on there, And send me an email.
But I'm going to tell you right now, Speaker Johnson, opposed to anybody, he does not have a working majority.
He has a majority, but doesn't have a working majority.
What I mean by that is, is they cannot guarantee enough votes to pass anything.
All it takes is one or two people because Kevin McCarthy is gone.
Bill Johnson is going to be gone.
Steve Scalise is out with cancer treatments.
He has barely 218 votes in the House.
Start with, if you move or lose more than two or three votes, he can't move anything.
That means two or three votes right now is controlling the United States House.
And it doesn't have to be the same two or three.
And that's the problem that Mike Johnson or anybody in that role as Speaker has right now.
There is no desire by the Republicans to stick together on a single plan and a single path to get us out of this and then negotiate with the Senate.
Right now it is, we're not going to do this.
We hate this.
And it allows the Senate, who has 60 votes, In their pocket with Republicans who are voting with Democrats in the Senate to pass these bills, then when it comes back to the House, Speaker Johnson may end up having to actually put this on suspension, which is what happened back in December.
It also happened with the deal, CR deal, back when Kevin McCarthy was removed from the chair.
It also goes back to how they actually passed the Debt Sailing Act back in June.
The difference in the two, for those who may wonder here, is that normally a functioning House or Senate in the House, in particular in this case, would pass the bill out of committee.
The committee would go to a rules committee.
Rules committee sets the bill to get it ready, you know, to see how many amendments can be offered on the floor, how the time frame for debate is going to be, and they put it on the floor so that you can vote on the rule, and then you know when the bill comes up, here's the parameters for the rules in dealing with the bill.
And lately we have seen a proclivity from the Republicans who don't like what's going on to take down the rule.
And if you take down the rule, that means that you're not going to have to actually vote on the underlying bill because it's not going to come up because you've killed the bill in the rules.
So Johnson has only one or two people that could vote that would to defend against.
If they decide not to vote for a bill, then the rule is broken and you're not able to bring the bill to the floor.
This presents an issue, like I said before, then the suspension route is the only other alternative, which means you get every Democrat vote and you'll get as many Republican votes as you can to get to 290, which is two-thirds of the United States House.
But that shows to me a majority that is broken and broken beyond repair into the sense that they cannot pass their own bills.
In three, I think it's in two weeks, the first tranche of bills that are under that first continuing resolution, agriculture is one of them, VA, MilCon.
Understand something, that agricultural bill is the very same one just a couple months ago that could not pass the United States House with Republicans who wrote the bill could not pass their own bill.
Plain and simple?
Republicans could not pass their own bill.
And this is the problem that I'm having right now with people who say, we need to fight, we need to fight, we need to do these things.
I don't bother with fighting, but if you're not getting into the game, you're not fighting.
And if you're fighting to get into the game, you've got to be the ability to...
Make some wins.
And right now, frankly, this is just elusive to the House Republicans.
I understand what they want.
I understand how they like to get there.
But they can't convince everybody on the team to play ball.
So, you know, I think there's several outlets here.
We'll talk about these more in the weeks and days to come.
And that is how they get these passed.
I think either one thing's happened, you'll see a short-term CR to push the first deadline to the second deadline.
So they'll try to pass, you know, see if they can get something at all.
If that doesn't happen, then you may see a short-lived week or two-week shutdown of those agencies while we wait for the next deadline to see if we can pass them all.
This is, I think, getting more and more real.
You may just see a throwing up of hands saying we're going to put them all together, take the cuts that we got, forget some of the policy riders or try to add at least one or two policy riders, take it to the floor and a suspension vote again and try and get it passed in the form of a little bit of cuts and then the 1% cut in April will be taking in if you can't pass the 12 appropriations bills.
That's just where we're headed.
And if you can't pass either one of those, then if for some reason they get enough Republicans to say they won't pass for a The short term spending or a spending bill that goes to September off of the suspension calendar, then you're looking at a much longer shutdown in that case.
And I will tell you right now, that shutdown will go badly for the Republicans, especially when you have every media in the world painting every sympathetic story of whoever is not getting what they want from the federal government.
And that's just the way it works.
Also, for those of out there listening on the podcast today, and you want to say, well, we've got to control this federal government.
You do realize that when the government is shut down, it's the administration or the Biden, Joe Biden, who determines what gets funded and what doesn't get funded.
So if you want to relegate your power to the executive, then that's exactly what you do in a shutdown.
And we've got to, frankly, do better.
We've got to get better at Putting together coalitions, putting together folks of our own mindset, convincing them, showing them why they should believe in what you're saying.
If we do that, then we have a chance to maybe pass a spending bill that has some reductions in it, that has some of the policy riders in it.
But if we keep fighting amongst ourselves where we can't put a bill on the floor, Ourselves without passing, then Mike Johnson, it doesn't matter who's speaker, you're going to have a problem.
And fighting is a good thing if you're fighting for something you can actually articulate.
If you're not, then frankly, we're not being honest with our voters.
We're not being honest with the country.
So, you know, those are just some things out there from, you know, Lloyd Austin's, you know, the craziness to the police officer shootings to this now.
First introduce precarious budget situation that we're under.
These are the kind of things that are going to make this year very, very difficult for Mike Johnson, very difficult for the House majority, and frankly, as well as the Senate Democratic majority as well, because all of them have to look down the road and see Joe Biden there.
Joe Biden's having massive struggles trying to run his re-election campaign, and we're just getting started.
Stay with us here on the Doug Collins Podcast.
We'll have a lot more in the weeks to come, especially as we deal with Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, South Carolina, and on the Super Tuesday, of which I believe that probably by March the 3rd, March 5th, after Super Tuesday, Donald Trump will more than likely have this locked up and we could be officially looking at our Biden Trump rematch in 2024. For that, y'all out of here.
Y'all gonna have a great day and we'll look forward to seeing you next time.
Friday's Fine is coming up with James and Chip.
Don't wanna miss it.
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