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Nov. 7, 2005 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:35
November 7, 2005, Monday, Hour #3
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Time Text
Hi.
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.
And your average host says in an entire week.
If you want to be on the program today, 800-282-2882, email address rush at EIB net.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 anchor man.
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 three dollars and one cents, one cent a gallon on uh on September the 9th, the national average now two dollars and forty-two cents.
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 gas.
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 three dollars, basically three dollars and a penny on September the 9th.
So gas prices are coming down, folks.
It's it's uh 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 to make you happier, Mr. Snerdley to hear it that way.
Uh here 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 strategy 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 in release.
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 dollars between 1985 and 2004, uh, 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 hairy up.
Now he's talking still more about this pre-war intelligence, and the president needs to come clean.
The president lied.
Uh he says the next step is making sure the right questions are answered now.
This is just a this is just it's great.
I'm telling you, Saddam Hussein's lawyers are watching every word of this, and 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 if um if I have a suggestion for the federal government, because you know, when when uh the oil companies engage in profiteering, that results in windfall profits, obscene profits.
Uh 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 uh keeping um inflation down.
I think the government ought to propose tax cuts for Walmart.
As opposed to tax increases on windfall profits of the old coming 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 and France.
His name is Steve.
Steve, thanks for waiting.
Great to have you on the phone with us.
Hi.
Hi, Rush.
I can't believe I had to move abroad to get through to you.
I just wanted to talk to you about uh what's really going on here.
It really is predominantly economic.
Uh we, you know, if there's there uh I get out uh I've been here a little over a year.
I'm very fluent in the language.
I see a lot of people.
Um there are Muslims.
How do you say megadiddos in French?
Pardon?
How do you say what is that?
Dako.
Oh, go.
I was just I'm with you.
But it's it's it's a very nice place.
The culture is very much uh parallel to what goes on in the United States.
The language is the it's the big difference.
That's why the Americans and the French don't really understand one another.
It's uh you're saying it's not I tell you, I see a lot of uh Muslims that have been.
The mom, perhaps with uh, you know, they have the uh Let me ask you let me let me ask you a question real quick.
Are you saying it's are you saying it's not uh 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 it's really economic.
It started out with a bunch of jerks throwing uh Molotov cocktails at park cars, and uh they're uh they're out of play.
I mean, the country's got a ten percent unemployment rate.
There's no no denying that.
Right.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Great country that uh so basically we have a lot of immigrants from uh from Northern Africa from Algeria from uh we have Africa from from sub-Sahara, they come from all over the place.
Yes, yes, but uh but but but but they but they're basically uh uh Muslims, and but this has nothing to do with assimilation.
People there that are Arabs that drive better cars than I do, they buy better clothes than I do, and uh they've got a lot to lose if this thing is.
Not these people.
It's it's uh 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 I want to read some excerpts uh to you from them.
Uh 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 Chirac and his conservative allies are unlikely to join the critics, as that would mean accepting the approach French considers superior is no better than integration policies in 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.
So they're bigoted to a certain extent.
The traditional French don't like uh people coming in from uh from North Africa and the sub-Sahara.
It's uh they've welcomed it.
They've welcomed it because they think they're buying an insurance policy against this very kind of thing.
Uh by opening the country to these people, they think that they're putting together this marvelous new society.
Now hang on, 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 uh or stand up to us and against Saddam and be friendly with all of these Muslim immigrants, then it'll buy them an insurance policy against this kind of thing.
But here's the most interesting piece.
This came uh 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.
Uh he is editor of the French quarterly Politique International, a member of Benador Associates.
He's a is a renowned writer on uh on such things.
And he b he really he he traces the history of all this.
Uh he says, how did 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 are 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 cordon 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, Allah Akbar, uh 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 area is 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 twenty percent of the pupils are native French speakers.
French ha 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 live 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 cinemas 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 Malud Damani, one of the local emirs engaged in negotiations to persuade the French to withdraw the cops and allow a committee of sheikhs, mostly from the Muslim Brotherhood, to negotiate an end to the hostilities.
President Chirac and Premier de Vilipin 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 Capel, 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 International.
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 in their predictions of what would happen to uh people who immigrate to France.
They're not interested in becoming Frenchmen.
They want to take over their own neighborhoods, 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 let's start Andalusia, side by side, living together in a new synthesis.
And it's uh the story is replete with sheiks, emirs, imams, if you will, uh instructing these young kids, these young, and 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 speaking.
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 gonna blame Bush for what's happening in Paris.
Uh and wherever else it pops up over there.
Bush created terrorism.
Uh it 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 the Ar Qaeda's fault.
Bush made them who they are.
Uh 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 911, 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 gonna happen here.
Mark my brilliant words.
This is Sven in uh Saratoga Springs in New York.
Hello, Sven, nice to have you with us.
Thank you, Rush.
Thank you for taking my call.
You bet.
Um, I uh listened to uh this guy calling from France, and uh I've been listening to what you read also.
I just want to make the point that this is not a matter of of of economic deprivation or social cohesion.
It's not it's not at all like that.
France has the the second or third most generous, so to speak, welfare state in in Europe and thereby in the world.
There's second only to to uh 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 uh I am from Sweden.
I lived in Denmark for several years, uh, before I came here three years ago.
Um I've seen this myself.
These are people who generally do not want to assimilate, they want to dissimilate.
This is uh 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 uh uh in Germany before.
This is an entirely new phenomenon.
These people, just like the the person you quoted said, these are people who want to separate, who want to to to uh run their own neighborhoods and eventually their own countries.
Um there is all it's also as 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.
I I think I've I uh uh how long has it been since you have uh lived there?
Uh I came to to the U.S. three years ago.
Um I live uh I lived and work in Denmark for six years before that.
So where's this headed, do you think?
I've got about a minute here before where is this headed?
It it is it is gonna get worse, increasingly worse.
Next place is uh uh Germany, and after that you'll see small countries like Belgium, you'll see uh Holland.
Um I think something is gonna happen in the Scandinavian countries as well, but uh predominantly Germany and Belgium is where and this is only going to accelerate.
The the the French don't know how to do this.
They're baffled.
Yeah, and that's gonna in turn inspire the other cells or whatever you want to call them in Germany and uh uh and Belgium.
Uh 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 uh 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 uh if something like this were going on in America, it wouldn't have lasted a day.
Every American in a neighborhood with a gun would have been out there protecting his car.
Probably a uh a good point to be made about that, Mr. Snerdley.
All right, let's see.
Gotta get got it got to tell you about this one here before we uh finish the program here today.
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.
I uh 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, folks, who would have ever thought that a former general counsel of the ACLU, Ruth Buzie 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.
I it is stunning.
It is literally stunning.
Here's uh here's Robert in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Robert, nice that you uh called.
Welcome to the EIB network.
Rush, it's a pleasure.
Thank you, sir.
Um calling to talk about the entertainment and sports programming network.
ESPN.
Yeah.
And uh a lot of people don't know it's entertainment, but uh apparently it is.
It's uh I was curious uh the way that uh they brought up the uh Keo incident.
Uh an ESPN employee talked about it.
Let me I know where you're going with this.
Let me pick this because I know exactly where you're going with it.
Let me 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 they they pumped up what one of their own commentators, Michael Irvin said uh about the Eagles being better off with Brett Farvest quarterback than McNabb, right?
B A N G O. Oh, and me.
Correct.
Uh well, here's let's go back to the beginning on this because this is something that has it seems that it never made it never made uh an impact when it happened.
This original ESPN quote unquote incident with me, in which uh on the on the Sunday pregame show, how many years ago was this now?
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 ten yards in front of him.
And uh uh the show did two segments on it.
What's wrong with the Eagles, what's wrong with McNabb.
Uh and I opined in in uh in the What's Wrong with McNabb segment that I think that uh nothing wrong here.
The Eagles defense is not getting the credit it deserves.
Uh I said that that uh the media has a a little social conscience invested in the McNabb as a black quarterback, and they're not reporting uh accurately his uh his failings.
Um I didn't I use different words, I don't even remember what the words are, but that's 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 gotta keep that comment in mind to keep all this in context.
The Irvin's saying Rush is right.
And but 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.
Uh we spent a lot of time talking football and and life and and his future and and and what he hoped to to make of this opportunity at ESPN and so on.
I really got to like him.
We were we were uh 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 and he did say that.
So the Bruha Ha happen, 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.
Uh this latest fracas with the Eagles involves Terrell Owens and McNabb, and 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 had uh uh Brett Favre quarterbacking this year instead of McNabb, that they 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 Irving?
Oh, yeah, and Owens agreed that if they had Brett Favre, he's a better quarterback, blah, blah, blah, whatever.
Uh this led to all kinds of clubhouse fight, locker room fight over the, I guess, Friday or Saturday.
Uh Andy Reid telling Owens you better apologize to the organization, to the team and to McNabb.
And he apologized 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 uh sports network reporting the news that they are instigating things.
Uh perhaps uh it's sports, so it's not that big a deal, but uh in in the in the big scheme.
Well, I know people must get back to the issues.
I know how you people are.
Talk football on Sunday when we're not up to listen to it.
I get all those emails from two or three people who send it in under five or six thousand different aliases, uh, but it's all the same email.
Uh my friend, uh Phil Mushnick, who writes a uh column in the New York Post on Friday, Sunday, and Monday, uh, which basically is a sports media analysis column, uh, thinks that ESPN has destroyed sports.
That sports used to be really fun to watch, but now they've they've turned it into they've destroyed the young kids that go into sports, they destroy young athletes by uh orienting them toward making the ESPN highlight readles outrageous behavior to get noticed, uh so forth and so on, rather than focusing on on field performance to get noticed, blah, blah, blah.
And actually last week, uh, in one of his pieces, 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 it 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.
Uh so let that be an answer to you, Robert.
I get a lot of people are are in the in the and and sports has many commentators and uh just like politics does.
Uh and and uh they're wide and varying uh opinions on all this.
But it one thing you have to know is that when you get into sports, the media people are just like they already were else.
They're all liberals.
Um they're they're all leftists, they're all, you know, just like any media covering politics.
And uh Snurdley's asking me if if uh if I think what happened here was fair to T.O. Well uh look, I offered to broker this piece, and I was I was uh ignored on this.
I could have solved this problem.
Uh but of course I wasn't desired to be part of the solution of the problem.
But I don't think the Eagles had any choice.
This this guy, ever since training camp has been trying to get traded.
This guy has uh uh cle his 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 to say, 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 to, 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 uh since training camp this year started.
He's really he's he's been he's he's been far more brutal on McNabb than I ever was.
I 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 of football, like the like the media did way back then.
But I've inoculated McNabb against criticism.
Nobody can criticize him now.
I uh if if if the incident with me hadn't happened, T.O. might have had it a little bit more lack uh uh uh uh might have had a little bit more um no, I mean he they might have given him a little bit more latitude here if if but you did McNabb is is above and beyond criticism now.
He's been inoculated against, and one of his own teammates does.
But I think, you know, Owens is just one of these me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me guys, and they look past this once you're performing and once you're winning.
It it is a team game, there's no question.
And and and if somebody on the team wants it to be all about them, uh you are gonna have problems in the locker room and gonna lead to other problems that will find their way onto the field like they have in uh in this circumstance.
I let me take a quick time out.
We'll be back and continue in by the way, Tom Jackson of ESPN thinks that T.O. should be thrown off 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 he 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 gonna be the big money that he wants.
He's uh he's he's he's blown it.
There's a lesson in 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 it's no mista for you, Eagles fans, you football, it's fans, it's no accident that Michael Westbrook, who they were really playing hardball with their running back, they're really playing hardball with on a contract extension.
It's no accident they gave him his money last week in the middle of this TO stuff.
Because Westbrook has kept it inside, hasn't complained, hasn't moaned, hasn't run around going me, me, me, me, me, me, 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 Terrell's 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, two-boat, chaos, torture, humiliation, lies, distortions, and even the good times.
All right, uh 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 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 two thousand?
Yes, I did.
Okay.
Oh, wait.
Um it was a few months beforehand.
Oh, you so you knew he was gonna win.
Yeah, I'd hoped he was gonna 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.
Uh you're a hundred percent right about France.
Um it's not it's not a uh poverty issue at all.
Uh it's an uh assimilation issue.
That um that's primarily because of the the kind of people that that are coming into France.
Um if you look at Germany, for example, you've got a the Muslims are primarily Turkish.
And um more much more enterprising than those that go to France.
Um when I was in Afghanistan, yeah, just to back up what you said, when I was in Afghanistan, uh I met just tremendous number of people.
One of the people I met was a NATO commander.
Uh he was running the uh the uh air base um that that was the primary air base in the country, uh and it was at a rotation basis, but he was from Turkey, and we went out, we were we were to get on an airplane and fly somewhere.
I forget the schedule, but uh we were weather delayed.
So he invited all of us, about fourteen 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 niceties that uh he extended.
And we had about a two-hour conversation uh with with this man, uh and he was Muslim, uh but he was totally pro-America.
He was he was one in running the Coalition Air Force uh in Afghanistan, and he had just a uh a terrific person uh personality.
I really did enjoy talking to this guy and stayed in touch with him via e way email for a while.
Uh he was it 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 and so forth.
It was not his uh his uh religion was of course important to him.
Uh but it was not it was not the the the driving governing force like it is of the militants uh from from Islam.
So when you say that, when you when you say that the uh the Turkish uh Muslims that are in Germany are of a different breed, different type person than uh the the uh others that are saying moving into France, I understand totally what you're talking about.
You do you think you think that uh what's happening in France could spread to Germany?
Because there are a lot of people think it might.
Um I think it would be difficult for that to spread to Germany.
First, like I said, because the population here of Muslims is is fundamentally different.
Um there are certain elements within the population here that that are similar to those in France, but that's it's a much smaller uh percentage.
Um I think the Germans I think they would probably crack down on it a lot faster than the French.
They might be a little afraid because of their past.
But um I think that they would they would much more readily crack down it than than the French would.
Well, it it stands to reason they wouldn't let it go on this long and expand to the uh the size that it has with no apparent end in sight.
I mean what are we the sun has set over there in France or twelfth night now?
Is that what this is gonna be?
Starting out with this?
Anyway, Joe, I'm glad you called.
All the best to you.
I'm uh I'm flattered you took the time and uh 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.
Uh last week the Washington Post was it, uh ran a story profiling uh 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 uh don't have any future economically.
Uh it's a s it's the same old recycled thing.
I when I went to Afghanistan talked to the troops, I I I mentioned that uh 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 uh blah, 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 him.
Why impugn your motive?
It's all about destroying Bush.
Well, there are other news stories lately, and the 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 Monday.
It's a good Monday night game tonight, by the way, for a change.
Enjoy it.
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