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Nov. 7, 2005 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:35
November 7, 2005, Monday, Hour #3
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Ha, welcome back, folks.
Nice to have you.
Rush Limbaugh having more fun than a human being should be allowed to have I am America's Anchorman, America's Truth Detector, and America's Doctor of Democracy all combined into one harmless, lovable little fuzzball, saying more in five seconds than your average host says in an entire week.
If you want to be on the program today, 800-282-2882, email address, rush at EIBnet.com.
All right, I'm not trying to get this all revved up again here, folks, but I have to report the news to you because that's what I do.
I'm America's anchorman.
Holding here a Reuters story in my formerly nicotine-stained fingers.
The average retail price of a gallon of gasoline in the United States fell 23.3 cents over the past two weeks, according to an industry analyst.
Gas prices did hit a record high of $3.01, one cent a gallon on September the 9th, the national average now $2.42.
Oil companies are slipping.
Once they got the price up to three bucks and they were gouging everybody, and everybody knows the oil companies are gouging, and everybody knows the oil company set the price of gasoline.
Everybody knows this.
But for some reason, they're not able to keep it there at three bucks.
But I know why.
They're just trying to buy goodwill.
They're just faking us out.
$242, the national price down from a high of $3, basically $3 and a penny on September the 9th.
So gas prices are coming down, folks.
It's good news, but I'm sure it's only temporary.
They'll lull us to sleep so that we don't suspect them any longer.
It'll jack that price right back up again.
You know how they operate.
And there's this story.
They make you happier, Mr. Snerdley, to hear it that way.
Here is, I'm sure it makes a lot of you happier to hear it that way.
Here's another story.
The rock bottom pricing strategery used by Walmart has filtered into the U.S. economy.
It's kept a lid on inflation.
According to a study commissioned by the company and released, the study by the economic research firm Global Insight concluded that the discounting, along with other measures, led to cumulative savings for consumers of $263 billion between 1985 and 2004, which is about $895 per person.
So Walmart's pricing is actually keeping a lid on inflation.
Walmart alone, Walmart itself, is doing more than the Federal Reserve is to, there's Dingy Harry up.
Now he's talking still more about this pre-war intelligence, and the president needs to come clean.
The president lied.
He says the next step is making sure the right questions are answered now.
This is just, it's great.
I'm telling you, Saddam Hussein's lawyers are watching every word of this, and Saddam's defense is going to be exactly what the Democrats are saying.
And he's going to ask that the world appreciate them.
His trial be postponed.
He can't get a fair trial.
Bush has poisoned the world reputation against him, Saddam.
He's going to thank the Democrats, going to call them as witnesses and demand his country back after they finish their investigation.
All right.
So if I have a suggestion for the federal government, because when the oil companies engage in profiteering that results in windfall profits, obscene profits, what does our great government do?
Our great government proposes a windfall profits tax to make them pay for that, right?
Well, by the same token, since Walmart is doing such a great job single-handedly at keeping Inflation down.
I think the government ought to propose tax cuts for Walmart as opposed to tax increases on windfall profits.
They all come and punish them.
Walmart needs to be rewarded with tax cuts here if the government is to be consistent on this.
We have a caller listening to the program today on the streaming from WABC of New York in France.
His name is Steve.
Steve, thanks for waiting.
Great to have you on the phone with us.
Hi.
Hi, Rush.
Can't believe I had to move abroad to get through to you.
I just wanted to talk to you about what's really going on here.
It really is predominantly economic.
I get out, I've been here a little over a year.
I'm very fluent in the language.
I see a lot of people.
There are Muslims.
How do you say megadittos in French?
Pardon?
How do you say?
What is that?
Dako.
Okay, good.
I'm with you.
But it's a very nice place to live.
The culture here is very much parallel to what goes on in the United States.
The language is the big difference.
That's why the Americans and the French don't really understand one another.
So you're saying it's not.
I tell you, I see a lot of Muslims that have to be available as a society.
You see the mom, perhaps, with the, you know, they have to be aware of.
Let me ask you a question real quick.
Are you saying it's not an assimilation or immigration problem?
No, it's not.
It's not al-Qaeda.
At least it is.
We don't know anything about it.
It's really economic.
It started out with a bunch of jerks throwing Molotov cocktails at parked cars, and they're out of play.
I mean, the country's got a 10% unemployment rate.
There's no denying that.
Right, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Great country.
So basically, we have a lot of immigrants from Northern Africa, from Algeria, from Africa, we have Africa, from the sub-Saharan.
They come from all over the place.
Yes, yes.
But they're basically Muslims, but this has nothing to do with assimilation.
People there that are Arabs, that drive better cars than I do, that buy better clothes than I do, and they've got a lot to lose if this thing is.
Not these people.
Well, look, all I can do, all I can do is tell you what's in the news.
I've got a couple pieces here, and I want to read some excerpts to you from them.
One is Reuters, and it's just out today on the headline: French integration model fails.
With every night of violent rioting that scars France's rundown suburbs, more and more French say their distinctive model of integration based on the revolutionary ideal of equality for all has failed.
But President Chirock and his conservative allies are unlikely to join the critics, as that would mean accepting the approach France considers superior is no better than integration policies and assimilation essentially anywhere else.
The Interior Minister, Sarkozy, is the only top politician saying France's Republican model falls short and that the U.S. or British melting pot approach could help break the cycle of minority exclusion, unemployment, and revolt.
They're bigoted to a certain extent.
The traditional French don't like people coming in from North Africa and the sub-Saharan African-Americans.
They've welcomed it.
They've welcomed it because they think they're buying an insurance policy against this very kind of thing.
By opening the country to these people, they think that they're putting together this marvelous new society.
Now, hang on out there, Steve.
This marvelous new society, which is going to show the rest of the world how to do it.
And they're also thinking if they stand up to Saddam and stand up to us against Saddam and be friendly with all of these Muslim immigrants, that it'll buy them an insurance policy against this kind of thing.
But here's the most interesting piece.
This came in the New York Post, and you used to live in New York.
It came to the New York Post last Friday by Amir Tahiri.
He is editor of the French quarterly Politique Internationale, a member of Benador Associates.
He's a renowned writer on such things.
And he really traces the history of all this.
He says, how did it all start?
The accepted account is that sometime last week, a group of young boys engaged in one of their favorite sports, stealing parts of park cars.
Normally, nothing dramatic would have happened as the police have not been present in the suburb where this happened for years.
The problem came when one of the inhabitants, a female busybody, telephoned the cops and reported the thieving spree taking place just opposite her building.
The cops were thus obligated to do something, which meant entering a city that is noted had been a no-go area for them.
And once the cops arrived on the scene, the youths got really angry.
A brief chase took place in the street.
Two of the youths who were not actually chased by the cops sought refuge in a cordoned-off area housing a power pylon.
Both were electrocuted.
Once news of their deaths was out, the whole city was up in arms.
With cries of God is great, a la Akbar, bands of youths armed with whatever they could get hold of went on a rampage and forced the cops to flee.
The French authorities could not allow a band of youths to expel the police from French territory, so they hit back, sending in special forces with armored cars and tough rules of engagement.
And when I read this, I was stunned that the French have special forces.
Within hours, the original cause of the incidents was forgotten, and the issue gelled around a demand by the representatives of the rioters that the French police leave the occupied territories.
By midweek, the riots had spread to three of the provinces neighboring Paris with a population of five and a half million.
Well, who lives in these areas?
Well, more than 80% of the inhabitants are Muslim immigrants or their children, mostly from Arab and black Africa.
In other affected towns, the Muslim immigrant community accounts for up to 30% to 60% of the population.
But these are not only figures that matter.
Average unemployment in the affected areas estimated around 30%.
When it comes to young would-be workers, it reaches 60%.
In these suburban towns built in the 50s in imitation of the Soviet social housing of the Stalinist era, people live in crammed conditions, sometimes several generations, in a tiny apartment and see real French life only on TV.
The French used to flatter themselves for their success of their policy of assimilation, which was supposed to turn immigrants from any background into proper Frenchmen within a generation at most.
That policy worked as long as immigrants came to France in drips and drops and thus could merge into a much larger mainstream.
Assimilation, however, cannot work when in most schools in the affected areas, fewer than 20% of the pupils are native French speakers.
France has also lost another powerful mechanism for assimilation, the obligatory military service abolished in the 1990s.
As the number of immigrants and their descendants increase in a particular locality, more and more of its native French inhabitants leave for calmer places, thus making assimilation still more difficult.
The result of all this is alienation, and that in turn gives radical Islamists an opportunity to propagate their message of religious and cultural apartheid to the remaining youths in these neighborhoods when the original French leave.
Some are even calling for areas where Muslims form a majority of the population to be reorganized on the basis of the millet system of the Ottoman Empire.
That is, each religious community, millet, would enjoy the right to organize its social, cultural, and educational life in accordance with its religious beliefs.
So contrary to assimilation taking place, there's a takeover taking place.
Exactly the same kind of thing that people would love to do here.
Come in and not assimilate to our culture, but establish their own within our borders, accessing all the rights of our constitution, those that they want, and then establishing their own rules to live by in their enclaves where nobody else is permitted, and they don't become Americans.
It's one of the biggest problems that we face immigration-wise here.
The radicals have managed to chase away French shopkeepers selling alcohol and pork products, forced places of sin like dancing halls and synonyms and theaters to close down, and they've seized control of much of the local administration.
A reporter who spent last weekend in the city where all this started and its neighboring towns heard a single overarching message, and that is the French authorities should keep out.
All we demand is to be left alone, said Maloud Damani, one of the local emirs engaged in negotiations to persuade the French to withdraw the cops and allow a committee of sheiks, mostly from the Muslim Brotherhood, to negotiate an end to the hostilities.
President Chirac and Premier de Villepin are especially sore because they had believed their opposition to the toppling of Saddam would give France a heroic image in the Muslim community.
That illusion has now been shattered, and the Chirac administration, already passing through a deepening political crisis, appears to be clueless about how to cope with what the Parisian daily Francois has called a ticking time bomb.
It's now clear that a good portion of France's Muslims not only refuse to assimilate into the, quote, superior French culture, unquote, but firmly believe that Islam offers the highest forms of life to which all mankind should aspire.
So what's the solution?
Well, one solution offered by Gilles Capelle, an advisor to Chirac on Islamic Affairs, is the creation of a new Andalusia in which Christians and Muslims would live side by side and cooperate to create a new cultural synthesis.
The problem with his vision, however, is that it doesn't address the important issue of political power.
Who will rule this new Andalusia?
Muslims are the largely secularist Frenchmen.
Suddenly, French politics have become worth watching again, even though for the wrong reasons.
This, again, Amir Tahiri, editor of the French quarterly Politique Internationale.
So it sounds to me like it's a whole bunch of things.
It sounds like it's an immigration problem.
It sounds like the French have totally goofed up in their predictions of what would happen to people who immigrate to France.
They're not interested in becoming Frenchmen.
They want to take over their own neighborhood, set up their own religion, set up their own lifestyles, their own behaviors, and they want to run them politically.
And still there are French who say, well, let's start Andalusia side by side, living together in a new synthesis.
And this story is replete with sheiks, emirs, imams, if you will, instructing these young kids, these young, and the story goes out, it's just economics.
Funny, isn't that what we heard after 9-11 happened?
It's just because of oppressed peoples around the world fighting for their share of the world's resources that we happen to be stealing.
A quick timeout.
Steve, I'll get your reaction to all this when we come back.
Don't go away.
Mark my words, for before this is all said and done, the French or the left of this country are going to blame Bush for what's happening in Paris and wherever else it pops up over there.
Bush created terrorism.
It's just, they have to do that.
They have to make that case in order to stay consistent.
It cannot be the French fault.
It cannot be the fault of the rioters.
It cannot be al-Qaeda's fault.
Bush made them who they are.
I love this explanation.
It's always economics.
We always have economics to explain crime.
We always have the poor.
And looters get away with being looters because they're so poor.
Well, they're only fighting for their own fair piece of the pie, which has been denied them by the evils of capitalism and the Bush administration.
Hence, what went on in the aftermath of Katrina was you couldn't condemn it.
If you condemned it, you were a racist pig.
Or even worse, you didn't understand dire economic circumstances.
After 9-11, we were told that bin Laden and his merry band are nothing but a bunch of poor waifs who have been frozen out of any economic opportunity where they live, and they view us as a blame because we have seized so many parts of the world where they live, and we have denied them economic opportunity.
And the same thing is going to happen here.
Mark my brilliant words.
This is Sven in Saratoga Springs in New York.
Hello, Sven.
Nice to have you with us.
Thank you, Rush.
Thank you for taking my call.
You bet.
I listened to this guy calling from France, and I've been listening to what you read also.
I just want to make the point that this is not a matter of economic deprivation or social cohesion.
It's not at all like that.
France has the second or third most generous, so-to-speak, welfare state in Europe and thereby in the world.
They're second only to one or two of the Scandinavian countries.
They give more perks and more free money to people who do not work and are more lenient on them than almost any other country in the world.
This is a matter of political and religious separation.
I have seen this myself in.
I am from Sweden.
I lived in Denmark for several years before I came here three years ago.
I've seen this myself.
These are people who generally do not want to assimilate.
They want to dissimilate.
This is in no way comparable to riots that have been in Britain or in France before.
It is not comparable to anything that has happened in Germany before.
This is an entirely new phenomenon.
These people, just like the person you quoted said, these are people who want to separate, who want to run their own neighborhoods and eventually their own countries.
As an immigrant here in the U.S., I can see another side to this difference.
Muslims here in America are Americans and then Muslims.
In Europe, many of these Muslims tend to be Muslims, but not necessarily European.
You see what I mean?
Yes, exactly.
How long has it been since you have lived there?
I came to the U.S. three years ago.
And I lived and worked in Denmark for six years before that.
So where is this headed, do you think?
I've got about a minute here before.
Where is this headed?
It is going to get worse, increasingly worse.
Next place is Germany.
And after that, you'll see small countries like Belgium.
You'll see Holland.
I think something is going to happen in the Scandinavian countries as well.
But predominantly Germany and Belgium is where, and this is only going to accelerate.
The French don't know how to do this.
They're baffled.
Yeah, and that's going to, in turn, inspire the other cells, or whatever you want to call them, in Germany and Belgium.
If you're right, if you're right, it will be no mystery to me as to why.
Germany and France, two of the lead countries opposing U.S. action, world action in Iraq and on the war on terror, they think it bought them insurance.
What it did was make them look weak.
And they've become easy targets.
We'll take a break.
Thanks, Sven, very much for the call.
We'll continue here in mere moments, folks.
You're listening to Rush Limbaugh on the Excellence in Podcasting Network.
Mr. Snerdley opines that if something like this were going on in America, it wouldn't have lasted a day.
And every American in a neighborhood with a gun would have been out there protecting his car.
Probably a good point to be made about that, Mr. Snerdley.
All right, let's see.
I've got to tell you about this one here before we finish the programming.
Supreme Court today, you think court reform, judicial reform is not important.
The Supreme Court agreed today to consider a challenge to the Bush administration's military tribunals for foreign terror suspects.
This is a major test of the government's wartime powers.
Justices will decide whether Osama bin Laden's former driver can be tried for war crimes before military officers in Club Gitmo.
Chief Justice John Roberts, as an appeals court judge, joined a summer ruling against the driver, Salim Ahmed Hamdan.
He did not participate in Monday's action, which put him in the difficult situation of sitting in judgment of one of his own rulings.
The court's intervention piles more woes on the Bush administration, which has already suffered one set of losses at the Supreme Court and has been battered by international criticism of its detention policies.
Michael Greenberger, a Justice Department attorney in the Clinton administration, you expect they'd go to talk to one of those.
Currently a law professor at the University of Maryland said, I think it's a black eye for the Bush administration.
This opens a Pandora's box.
So who would have ever thought, who would have ever thought that a former general counsel of the ACLU, Ruth Buzzy Ginsburg, would be serving along with a bunch of liberal cohorts on the Supreme Court and assuming they have the power to usurp the role as commander-in-chief from the executive branch and the president?
Because that's what they've decided to do.
They're going to determine what the commander-in-chief's war powers are by hearing this case.
It's just, it's stunning.
It is literally stunning.
Here's Robert in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Robert, nice that you called.
Welcome to the EIB network.
Rush, it's a pleasure.
Thank you, sir.
Calling to talk about the Entertainment and Sports Programming Network.
ESPN.
Yeah, and a lot of people don't know it's entertainment, but apparently it is.
I was curious the way that they brought up the Keo incident.
An ESPN employee talked about where you're going with this.
Let me pick this because I know exactly where you're going with it.
Let me guess.
You are going to say that ESPN has a role, played a role in this whole fracas involving Donovan McNabb and Terrell Owens because they pumped up what one of their own commentators, Michael Irvin, said about the Eagles being better off with Brett Farve as quarterback than McNabb, right?
B-A-N-G-O.
Oh, and me.
Correct.
Well, here's, let's go back to the beginning on this because this is something that has seems that it never made an impact when it happened.
This original ESPN quote-unquote incident with me, in which on the Sunday pregame show, how many years ago is this now?
Two?
Two years ago.
The Eagles were coming off a good season, but they lost the championship game again in the previous season, and they were off to a bad start.
And McNabb, unbeknownst to anybody at the time, had a bad thumb and just couldn't complete a pass.
I mean, he couldn't complete a pass to people 10 yards in front of him.
And the show did two segments on the What's Wrong with the Eagles?
What's wrong with McNabb?
And I opined in the What's Wrong with McNabb segment that I think that there's nothing wrong here.
The Eagles defense is not getting the credit it deserves.
I said that the media has a little social conscience invested in McNabb as a black quarterback, and they're not reporting accurately his failings.
I use different words.
I don't even remember what the words are, but that pretty much summed it up.
At the very end of that segment, before it went to commercial break, Michael Irvin said Rush is right.
Now, you got to keep that comment in mind to keep all this in context.
Irvin saying Rush is right.
And I have to tell you something.
Of all the people on that show, Michael Irvin was the one I was closest to, got along with the best, had the best time with.
We spent a lot of time talking football and life and his future and what he hoped to make of this opportunity at ESPN.
And so I really got to like him.
We were, I don't know, friends, but it wasn't long enough to establish a real friendship with the guy, but I really like him.
I still do.
And he did say that.
So the brouhaha happened.
The Philadelphia media erupted on the Tuesday following that.
Nothing happened that night on ESPN.
Nothing happened the following Monday on ESPN.
Nothing happened in the media.
But on Tuesday, the Philadelphia written media, the print media went nuts, claiming I made racist comments, so forth and so on, and it led to where it led.
This latest fracas with the Eagles involves Terrell Owens and McNabb.
And what the caller here is talking about is that earlier this past week, Michael Irvin had made the comment that he thought if the Packers or if the Eagles had Brett Favre quarterbacking this year instead of McNabb, that they'd be undefeated.
Terrell Owens, then doing an interview later in the week, was asked about this by ESPN.
Do you agree with what Irvin?
Oh, yeah.
And Owens agreed that if they had Brett Favre, he's a better quarterback, blah, blah, whatever.
This led to all kinds of clubhouse fight, locker room fight over the, I guess, Friday or Saturday.
Andy Reid telling Owens, you better apologize to the organization, to the team, and to McNabb.
And he apologized to the organization, but nobody else, so he got suspended.
So Robert here is thinking ESPN has a role in all of this.
They're not just a sports network reporting the news, that they are instigating things.
Perhaps it's sports, so it's not that big a deal.
But in the big scheme of, well, I know people, let's get back to the issues.
I know how you people are.
They're going to talk football on Sunday when we don't have to listen to it.
I get all those emails from two or three people who send it in under 5,000 or 6,000 different aliases, but it's all the same email.
My friend, Phil Mushnick, who writes a column in the New York Post on Friday, Sunday, and Monday, which basically is a sports media analysis column, thinks that ESPN has destroyed sports.
That sports used to be really fun to watch, but now they've turned it into, they've destroyed the young kids that go into sports.
They destroy young athletes by orienting them toward making the ESPN highlight Reedles, outrageous behavior to get noticed, so forth and so on, rather than focusing on on-field performance to get noticed, blah, blah, blah.
And actually last week, in one of his pieces, he referred to ESPN as the MTV of sports.
And one of his pieces was, you know, everybody I talk to at ESPN really detests what it's become, but I can't find a guy who is doing what they've become because everybody I talk to detests it, but I can't find a guy doing it.
If everybody I talk to detests it, why is it happening?
But I can't find a guy who's doing it.
I can't find anybody who loves what they're doing.
So there must be somebody who loves what they're doing at ESPN, but I can't find him because everybody I talk to detests what they've become.
So let that be an answer to you, Robert.
I get a lot of people, and sports has many commentators, just like politics does.
And there are wide and varying opinions on all this.
But one thing you have to know is that when you get into sports, the media people are just like they are everywhere else.
They're all liberals.
They're all leftists.
They're all, you know, just like any media covering politics is.
And Snerdley's asking me if I think what happened here was fair to T.O.
Well, look, I offered to broker this piece, and I was ignored on this.
I could have solved this problem.
But, of course, I wasn't desired to be a part of the solution of the problem.
But I don't think the Eagles had any choice.
This guy, ever since training camp, has been trying to get traded.
This guy has his outburst earlier last week was he couldn't believe that the Eagles wouldn't stop everything and celebrate his 100th career touchdown.
And they took him aside.
Joe Banner, who runs the Eagles, took him and said, hey, we don't celebrate individual achievement here.
We're a team.
So T.O., so I understand the Eagles don't celebrate individual achievement.
I apologize.
But he didn't apologize to the team for what he had done.
And he didn't apologize to McNabb for all that he said and done about McNabb and to McNabb since training camp this year started.
He's really, he's been, he's been far more brutal on McNabb than I ever was.
I have admiration for McNabb.
I've always thought McNabb is a good quarterback.
I just didn't think that he was God's gift to football like the media did way back then.
But I've inoculated McNabb against criticism.
Nobody can criticize him now.
If the incident with me hadn't happened, T.O. might have had a little bit more lack, might have had a little bit more.
No, I mean, they might have given him a little bit more latitude here.
But McNabb is above and beyond criticism now.
He's been inoculated against it.
One of his own teammates does.
But I think, you know, Owens is just one of these me, me, guys.
And they, they look past this once you're performing and once you're winning.
But the Eagles aren't doing either right now.
And so you got to focus on the problem and root it out.
It is a team game, there's no question.
And if somebody on the team wants it to be all about them, you are going to have problems in the locker room and going to lead to other problems that will find their way onto the field like they have in this circumstance.
Let me take a quick timeout.
We'll be back and continue.
By the way, Tom Jackson of ESPN thinks that T.O. should be thrown off the team, cut, gotten rid of, pure poison.
But everybody knows that somebody else will pick him up.
But the one thing he's done, his whole purpose, his whole purpose in this whole charade has been to get a new contract.
And what he's done is cost himself gazillions of dollars because whoever does sign him is going to put him on a one-year deal with all kinds of behavioral clauses, and it's not going to be the big money that he wants.
He's blown it.
There's a lesson in all of this, that even in these so-called modern times, where anything goes, the truth is often something other than that.
That model behavior is no, for you Eagles fans, you football, fans, it's no accident that Michael Westbrook, who they were really playing hardball with, their running back, really playing hardball with on a contract extension, it's no accident they gave him his money last week in the middle of this T.O. stuff because Westbrook has kept it inside, hasn't complained, hasn't moaned, hasn't run around going me, And I wouldn't be surprised if that really burned Owens too,
when Westbrook got his five-year deal and they wouldn't tear Terrells up and give him what he wanted, even though I gave him exactly what he wanted one year ago.
We'll be back.
Stay with us.
Your guiding light through times of trouble, confusion, murkiness, tubal chaos, torture, humiliation, lies, distortions, and even the good times.
El Rushbow and the EIB Network.
All right, Joe in Cologne, Germany.
You're next, sir.
It's great to have you with us.
Thank you.
Joe, can I ask you a question?
Sure.
You're an American?
Yes, I am.
How long have you lived there?
I've been here about five and a half years.
Did you happen to move there after Bush won in 2000?
Yes, I did.
Okay.
Oh, wait.
It was a few months beforehand.
Oh, so you knew he was going to win?
Yeah, I hoped he was going to win anyway.
Oh, okay, so you're, oh, okay.
Okay.
Oh, all right.
Anyway, I was just kidding with you.
Welcome to the program.
Yeah.
You're 100% right about France.
It's not a poverty issue at all.
It's an assimilation issue that's primarily because of the kind of people that are coming into France.
If you look at Germany, for example, you've got the Muslims are primarily Turkish and much more enterprising than those that go to France.
When I was in Afghanistan, just to back up what you said, when I was in Afghanistan, I met just a tremendous number of people.
One of the people I met was a NATO commander.
He was running the airbase that was the primary airbase in the country.
And it was on a rotation basis, but he was from Turkey.
And we went out, we were to get on an airplane and fly somewhere.
I forget the schedule, but we were weather delayed.
So he invited all of us, about 14 of us in our traveling party, invited all of us into his office and gave us Turkish coffee and a number of just other pleasantries and niceties that he extended.
And we had about a two-hour conversation with this man.
And he was Muslim, but he was totally pro-America.
He was running the coalition air force in Afghanistan.
And he had just a terrific personality.
I really did enjoy talking to this guy and stayed in touch with him via email for a while.
Talking to him about his life in Turkey was just like talking to any American about their life and what they wanted for himself and his family and his kids and so forth.
It was not his religion, of course, important to him, but it was not the driving governing force like it is of the militants from Islam.
So when you say that, when you say that the Turkish Muslims that are in Germany are of a different breed, different type person than the others that are, say, moving into France, I understand totally what you're talking about.
Do you think that what's happening in France could spread to Germany?
Because there are a lot of people who think it might.
I think it would be difficult for that to spread to Germany.
First, like I said, because the population here of Muslims is fundamentally different.
There are certain elements within the population here that are similar to those in France, but it's a much smaller percentage.
Plus, I think the Germans would probably crack down on it a lot faster than the French.
They might be a little afraid because of their past, but I think that they would much more readily crack down it than the French would.
Well, it stands to reason they wouldn't let it go on this long and expand to the size that it has with no apparent end in sight.
The sun has set over there in France.
We're 12th night now.
Is that what this is going to be?
Starting out with this?
Anyway, Joe, I'm glad you called.
All the best to you.
I'm flattered you took the time and that you're listening, but we must go.
Back with much more after this.
I don't know if you saw this or not.
Last week, the Washington Post, was it? ran a story profiling members of the U.S. military, and they concluded the vast majority are just a bunch of hayseeds, a bunch of poor, downtrodden southern hicks who don't have any future economically.
It's the same old recycled thing.
When I went to Afghanistan and talked to the troops, I mentioned that the people that say they support you, support troops, the same people out there saying that you're only joining because you don't have any economic opportunity and then blah, blah, blah.
And I said, so what?
It's not true, but let's say it is.
Look what you're willing to offer the country in order to have economic opportunity, regardless of why you're here, I said to them, why impugn your motive?
It's all about destroying Bush.
Well, there are other news stories lately that Washington Times has one today, which documents that they are members of the military because they want to serve their country.
I couldn't let this go uncommented upon.
We will see you tomorrow, my friends.
Have a wonderful month.
It's a good Monday night game tonight, by the way, for a change.
Enjoy it.
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