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Dec. 23, 2005 - Rush Limbaugh Program
35:54
December 23, 2005, Friday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
And greetings to your thrill seekers, conversationalists, music lovers, and fellow travelers heading all out across the fruited plain, over the river and through the woods.
The woods is where it's really fun on the way to wherever you are.
And hope you're having a great time as you're in transit.
We'll try to enhance that today on the EIB network.
El Rushbo here with a whole crew on the day before Christmas Eve.
A telephone number, if you'd like to be on the program today, is 800-282-2882.
And the email address is rush at AEIBNet.com.
Now, usually, you know, I like working this week.
A lot of people decide to split for the hills.
But I like working this week because it's one of my favorite times of the year.
And I know that these are not normal times, not a normal time of the year with all the travel and the holiday festivity and the spirit.
This is one of the weirdest years in that regard because this has been one of the most contentious, intense, albeit important weeks of the year and certainly of the past couple of months.
They've all been intense, but I mean, this sort of stands out because normally this week is everybody's gone.
Official Washington is buried a hatchet for a while, but that hasn't happened.
I mean, they were still going at it yesterday and last night on this effort here to impeach Bush and to prove that he violated the law and his constitutional authority and all that.
So it's kind of hard just to let that go.
I mean, there's still things that need to be discussed today, and we will do that.
But also, it's Open Line Friday, but I've almost forgot that.
Oh, geez.
Live from the Southern Command in sunny South Florida.
It's Open Line Friday.
See what I mean?
I mean, I almost forgot that.
So Open Line Friday, you know the rules.
When you call, we talk about what you want to talk about.
Now, normally Monday through Thursday, this program is about what interests me.
I refuse to sit here and talk about things I don't care about because it's boring.
I will sound boring.
And then people will be less inclined to be glued to the radio.
But I take this great career risk every Friday as a highly trained broadcast specialist allowing essentially rank amateurs, and I say that with all love and respect, to take over the topic selection depending on, well, when they call.
So whatever's on your mind, whatever interests you, feel free.
Telephone number is 800-282-2882.
And the email address is rush at EIBNet.com.
All right, let's go to the audio tape.
Last night, Angela or Andrea Mitchell was sitting in for Chris Matthews on Hard Boiled, and she had Richard Posner on.
Richard Posner is a judge, U.S. Court of Appeals, 7th Circuit.
He was on the show via telephone.
He wrote a great piece in the Washington Post earlier this week regarding this whole controversy and uprising over whether or not the president is spying illegally on American citizens.
And of course, the press has run off on that tangent because it's one that they started with this bogus New York Times story that ran one week ago today.
So the Times, just to illustrate, Times runs this bogus story becomes the focus of all media reporting.
When they have a press conference of the president, the president is asked only about what the media is reporting.
What about this?
What about that?
What about that?
There are a lot of other news events he could have been asked about, but wasn't.
But in all fairness, the president himself has gone out and addressed these issues himself because he's had to.
Rasmussen poll is out today showing that Bush's approval numbers are up to 50%.
It's something like a six-point gain since the last poll came out.
One of the most startling increases in a short period of time on record.
It just illustrates two things.
The president has the bully pulpit.
He can have all the supportive media he wants.
But he has to get out there and lead, and people crave leadership.
People crave, they want to get behind.
It's something else it points out.
This week, I said, probably the last couple of weeks, the president has, while not said ideological things, he has sounded it.
He has not talked about a new tone.
He's not talked about trying to get along with Democrats.
He's upbraided them.
He has called them out, sometimes by name, sometimes by state, but nevertheless, he's called them out.
I don't think it's incidental or accidental or coincidental that his approval numbers go up.
I have always maintained that when Republicans govern and talk as conservatives, they triumph and win.
You know, everybody needs to be led, especially when you're talking about the country.
The president is the leader of the country and certainly the leader of the party that elected him.
And when he goes out and behaves in such a fashion, he'll rally people to his side.
And that apparently is what's happened.
The economic news is good.
All of the news going into the Christmas weekend is spectacular.
Rumsfeld is over in Iraq, and he's announcing troop withdrawals.
Of course, I'm waiting for Murthy to stand up or some Democrats stand up and claim credit for this, even though this has been the original plan from day one to begin troop reductions once the Iraqis have demonstrated that their government's in place.
They have the ability to take more of a role in their own security.
And this has always been part of the plan.
I just, you know that the Democrats have been out there demanding this for the past month, and one of the reasons why is they knew it was going to happen.
And so they can now take credits that the president's listening to them.
The president's doing what they want.
And so it'll be interesting to see this.
It won't be too long for that to pop up.
Now, I haven't forgotten Posner, but there are other things I want to set the table with.
In addition to the Democrats trying to take credit, when it happens, and I say this a lot, but you people watch the media, the media amplify and echo what the left says.
And so it makes it appear as though that's the national mood or the national mindset.
The left is more whacked out than even I knew.
I have learned that some of these extreme left-wing liberal bloggers have weekly phone calls and conferences with Dingy Harry.
I kid you not, Dingy Harry and other Democrats are having regular phone conferences, conference calls, sometimes sit-down meetings with these wacko bloggers on the left.
But wacko bloggers have a different agenda than Dingy Harry.
The wacko bloggers don't care what it takes.
They just want to win.
They don't want to win with an agenda.
They don't want to win with a positive set of things that they want to do for the country.
They just want to beat Republicans.
And whatever it takes to do it, they will do it.
And that's who the Democrats, and I told you this, that's who the Democrats are listening to more and more and more.
And I'm just going to predict to you, because this is the last time we'll be together before the end of the year or for this year.
It's going to tell you as the new year rolls around, it's going to be an election year.
And the Democrats are going to get wackier and wackier because who they're listening to.
And at the same time, they're going to think that they are winning.
They're going to think that they are carrying the day.
It's going to be a phenomenon that has repeated itself several times.
I think you can trace maybe the original starting point to this phenomenon to the Wellstone Memorial when they thought that was going to launch them to great heights.
You got the puffster.
Puff Dashel out there today in the Washington Post rewriting history.
It is stunning what the puffster is attempting to pull off today in the Washington Post.
He goes back to the authorization for use of force that Congress gave the president September 14th, 2001.
And he says it never included in America.
It never included any.
It only included people that had any association with Al-Qaeda.
The president clearly has overstepped the authority we gave him.
You go back.
I have written op-eds about that.
We've shared with you earlier this week an excerpt of me, this program, reading parts of that resolution and parts of my op-ed about it.
It is one of the most all-inclusive, it's a declaration of war.
It is literally a declaration of war, and it gives the president full authority to make up his own mind on anything to do what when.
But it was, this is three days after September 11th.
And now Puff's trying to rewrite history.
I said, no, no, no, it doesn't say that.
No, no, no, no, it doesn't mean that.
These people cannot tell the truth.
They can't even tell the truth about what they say.
This is like what they're trying to do with their own statements they made about weapons of mass destruction back in 1998.
They're trying to revise that history.
Well, we didn't.
He didn't really say that.
We're going to ignore that.
We said that.
History began 2001.
They're trying to pretend it all doesn't exist.
They can't pretend that resolution doesn't exist.
But now Puff's out there in the Washington Post.
You know what the Washington Post also did?
They ran a news story on page A6 or A9 about Puff's op-ed.
I kid you not, they put Puff's op-ed on the op-ed page and they write a news story saying Puff's got an op-ed in our paper today.
And in his op-ed, Puff says X.
Then they get a little bit of an analysis of what Puff said.
I mean, why do you just put it on the front page and make him a reporter?
He's just hired Dashel.
He's your new needs work anyway.
Hire him as your reporter.
But look who the Democrats have to trot out.
Here's a guy who was defeated in his home state reelection precisely because of his position on things like this.
He was a Washington liberal Democrat from a blue state or red state, bunch of conservatives, and they took him to task and he's out of work in terms of, he's a lobbyist, but he was voted out of office.
And this is who the Democrats can turn to now, a defeated former majority leader to set the record straight.
So nothing has really changed for them.
History revisionism, which is essentially not telling the truth, trying to rewrite it.
And it's the same plan from the same playbook that they have been utilizing ever since that Rockefeller memo that was discovered back in 2003 that orchestrated the strategery that they are now playing out and trying to say Bush lawed and is spying on American citizens.
Anyway, we'll take a break.
We'll come back with the Richard Posner appearance with Andrew Mitchell on Hardball last night.
It's good.
Stay with us.
We'll be right back.
Don't go away.
Ha, welcome back.
Great to have you.
And Merry Christmas from all of us here at the EIB Network to all of you.
I can't let this Puff Dashel thing die.
I was hoping to gloss over it, but not gloss over it.
But I just resent having to give these guys so much time.
But I have to drill something home.
Let me read a couple of little excerpts from Puff's piece just to illustrate how literally out of it he either was or still is, probably both.
And I'd also like you to understand that the possibility that, well, the reality here, and that's not a possibility, the reality that he is just willing to go on the pages of a major newspaper and lie through his teeth like this.
Stunning.
He writes this, just before the Senate acted on our compromise resolution talking about this thing in September 14th of 2001.
The White House sought one last change.
Literally minutes before the Senate cast its vote, the administration sought to add the words in the United States and after appropriate force in the agreed upon text.
Let me read you the agreed upon text, the resolution.
All necessary, granting the president all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons the president determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the attacks of September 11th.
Then the Puffster tell us that the White House, at the last minute, wanted to add in the United States an appropriate force.
This last-minute change, the Puffster writes, would have given the president broad authority to exercise expansive powers, not just overseas, where we all understood he wanted authority to act, but right here in the United States, potentially against American BS, Puff.
Literal BS.
I will guarantee you that did not cross his mind.
I will guarantee, not on September 14th.
These guys weren't thinking about it.
Well, maybe some libs probably were.
But this is so clearly, there's nothing on the record about Puff saying this.
I could see no justification for Congress to accede to this extraordinary request for additional authority, so I refused.
Puff, what did you not get about 9-11?
Where were we attacked?
We were attacked in the United States.
We were attacked by a cell of 19 people who had been here for a year or more in and out, learning to fly airplanes, learning to crash them, learning to do any number of things.
They were in the United States.
We were attacked in the United States.
The idea that this desired specificity is substantive indicates that the Democrats now want to go back and rewrite history, led by Puff Daschell, so as to be able to fit the template that they are working off of today.
We were attacked in the United States.
The idea that the president was not asking for some sort of authority to make sure similar cells couldn't be tracked, it's absurd.
It's absurd.
Daschell wants us all to believe that the president was only asking and should only get, and he was only authorizing, the puffster was, all of this authority to work overseas.
This is why, ladies and gentlemen, we cannot trust these people with the defense of this country.
I think more and more of these people actually now believe we're not even at war.
I think 9-11, it's just one of those coincidental things.
Another terrorist attack.
It doesn't mean we're at war.
We don't want to be at war.
We don't have to be at war.
And that's how they get away with saying Bush lied, made it all up, wasn't necessary.
And they offer lip service to, well, we'd love it if we captured bin Laden, but we never intended it.
We never intended his right.
Never intended to take it seriously.
Can't count on them to take it seriously.
And the Puffster comes out and illustrates the utter ignorance.
I don't know what other word it is there is for the utter ignorance to suggest here that the president, after being attacked in this country, was not asking for the authority to deal with this again in the future.
It's just over my head.
It's absurd.
I don't know how you get there from here unless you go back as the puffster is doing and rewriting history.
Now, here's Richard Posner.
He was on hardball last night.
He is the judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals.
Seventh Circuit wrote a great piece saying that all of this computer mining for data is not an invasion of privacy.
And of course, all week long, Hardball and the media have been trying to cast this as nothing more than spying and a violation of law.
You can't do this without warrants, etc.
And Posner has written just the opposite.
So I'm kind of surprised the sitting judge appeared on television, but I'm glad he did.
Here's the first question.
Why couldn't they at least rely on the fact that they had 72 hours before having to go to that court?
They could have moved quickly, could they not?
I know that you believe that this program is necessary.
Well, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is quite limited.
The communications that can be intercepted are limited to communications between agents of a foreign power or agents of a foreign group.
So you might have a telephone call.
We have a terrorist or terrorist suspect or someone knows about terrorism at one end.
Person on the other end doesn't know anything about it, isn't a foreign agent, isn't a terrorist or anything.
And yet that telephone call might contain information that the government could use to identify a terrorist, find out his address, his phone number, his plans, and so on.
So I don't think the act is adequate.
It's not so much the warrant problem, although the warrant provision is very cumbersome and complicated.
It's that a lot of important communication may contain a lot of foreign intelligence information, just is not within the scope of the act.
Speaking of the Foreign Intelligence Service Court and Act, so here Andrew and this just starts trying to argue with a lawyer.
She says, well, one of the reasons for the resignation of one of the judges from that court was his concern that the administration had been presenting warrants that were the result of what you might call tated evidence.
They'd come from illegal or warrantless surveillances.
So he felt that the court was perhaps being used to clean up this whole procedure and felt so uncomfortable that he quit.
The legal questions are very difficult because, of course, the administration argues that, you know, we're in a war against terrorism, that as a result of a joint resolution of Congress that amounted to a declaration of war, during wartime, the president has a lot more authority to engage in interception of communications than it does in ordinary peacetime.
If you accept that argument, it's just an argument at this point.
But if that's accepted, then it would be lawful for the government to intercept certain communications.
Well, that's what the ends justifies the means argument.
Roger, you were.
No, no, no, no.
Look, no, no, you're all wrong.
It's a legal question.
It's uncertain.
It's an uncertain area what kind of powers were conferred on the president by that joint resolution.
It's arguable one way or the other.
If the legal argument is correct, there's no legal problem.
If the legal argument is correct, then there is no legal problem.
And, of course, this is where the Democrats want to split hairs, and we're talking about in the time of war.
But Positor is great on this program.
I've got one more bite that I have to play with you.
We'll do that after we come back from the break.
It is Open Line Friday.
We'll get to a lot of your phone calls today.
So stand by and have something good to talk about.
800-282-2882.
We'll be right back.
This better not be happening.
I'm going to blow a gasket if it's happening again.
I'm about ready to blow a gasket anyway.
I think it's happening.
Yep, it's happening.
We're going to lose all of our email accounts here again.
This must be the 12th time in 20 days that this is happening, even despite all the redundancy that we have built into this system.
Even at home, I can't stay on.
I've got two T1 lines at home.
I had to put in a second T1 because the first T1 kept dropping out.
The first T1 is from AT ⁇ T.
So I went to a different company to get a second T1 as a backup.
Well, they both go out at the same time because I've learned that they're both controlled by Bell South.
So we haven't had any internet service at home.
I had to go out and buy one of these wireless cards and use my laptop at home with three backup systems.
They all go down.
Now we've lost email here at the studio again.
And it is burning me up.
I'm going to start naming names pretty soon with all of this.
How many months have been we would we've been working on this trying to get this fixed?
At least three solid months.
This has nothing to do with the hurricane.
Three solid months.
The amount of money that we pay for this.
I mean, I can understand the primary system going down, but the backup and everything else at the same time is just getting to the point.
I don't know how other businesses stay in business when they have to work with Bell South, when they have to work with AT ⁇ T.
And of course, the third problem we've got here has nothing to do with them.
It's our own, it's something else.
At any rate, here's this final little bite from Richard Posner on Hardball.
Andrea Mitchell asks him, well, where do you come down, Judge, on the side of security trumping civil liberties?
I think in this situation, you have to ask yourself as a citizen, would you be terribly worried if you knew that the government was collecting your digitizing your phone conversations and email conversations and having them searched by computers for possible information relevant to terrorism?
If that disturbs you terribly, that's going to affect your judgment of this balance between security and civil liberties.
On the other hand, my feeling about that is I don't regard that kind of scrutiny as a profound invasion of privacy.
On the other hand, I am very worried about terrorism.
And I'd like the government to be collecting all information that might contain clues to further terrorist attacks.
And there you have it.
This really spells out the difference.
There are people who want to roll the dice that terrorism is not a problem, that we're really taking it too seriously, that we have no business declaring war against it.
It's not that bad.
It's not that serious.
And so Bush is not warranted in doing any of these things.
And then that brings up the civil liberties crowd with their phony arguments about all this.
We had a call yesterday from a guy, one of them has lost the civil liberties.
And you know something, folks?
And I went off on this guy, really went off on a rant on this guy.
If you want to talk about the loss of civil liberties, we are losing liberties in this country as fast as you can count them, whether they be civil or anything else.
And many of the liberties, quote-unquote, that we are losing are being brought about and caused by the same little people who are concerned about the loss of their precious civil liberties.
They are demanding because they don't like something or because something offends them or because not everybody supports it that it be banned or that it be relegated to a few areas where it can take place or something.
And it's an all-out assault and it never stops.
It's on the kind of car you drive.
They try to make you feel guilty about the kind of car you drive.
They make you guilty if you want to smoke.
They haven't banned the product.
They haven't banned tobacco, but they want to make sure nobody can smoke anywhere.
And they come up with all these phony secondhand smoke studies, which we've documented, World Health Organization buried a study on secondhand smoke that showed it wasn't deadly.
It didn't even cause illness.
Some people don't like it.
It makes them uncomfortable, but it doesn't kill people.
They're having enough trouble proving that primary smoke kills people because not everybody that smokes dies.
But all these little attacks on what I consider to be normalcy, all these things that traditional that have gone on in this country, so many little nandering nabobs are so upset with because they don't like it.
It makes them feel uncomfortable.
They're basically unhappy people in the first place.
They want everybody to be miserable with them.
And so that's the nanny state.
It's these people that know better for everybody else based on what they want.
The way they live their lives, everybody else should be made to live their lives that way as well.
This whole argument about civil liberties being taken away, I can't find any examples of them.
I can't find any examples where the Patriot Act has been overblown, overused.
I can't find anybody falsely accused.
I can't find where anybody's civil liberties have gone by the wayside.
When it comes to civil liberties, you got this guy, Tukey Williams, and the whole left is out there worried that his execution was not spared.
And the next thing you know, he's going to get the Nobel Prize.
Their idea of who should have civil liberties and who should have what kind of freedom, the people that are victims of crimes don't get nearly the sympathy from the left as the people who caused them and create them and commit them.
And yet they call in a worry and they get all concerned about precious erosion of civil liberties.
Not realizing how often that they spy on others if they can, not realizing or not admitting to all of that.
So it just, it's, it's, it boils down to whether or not you think we have a serious circumstance that we're dealing with here.
And it's obvious now that many on the left don't think it's serious at all.
Don't think it's worth nearly the effort that we're putting into it, i.e. the war on terror, wherever it takes us.
To the phones, Open Line Friday, Jack Portland, Connecticut.
Nice to have you, sir.
You're up first today.
Rush dittos from a long-term listener from the deep blue state of Connecticut.
Thank you, sir.
In the Washington Post, there's an article about the fact that Nancy Pelosi has threatened to remove members of her party from positions of various committees because they sided with the Republicans.
When are Christ and Hassert going to start maybe doing the same thing with some of our wayward Republicans?
I don't think it'll ever happen.
I don't think I can't see it happening.
It's not who we are.
Well, maybe we ought to be.
Well, I don't know.
Do you really want?
You want to start mandating thought and votes?
You want to start mandating that this is how people have to act.
See, I don't think it's getting the Democrats anyway.
You think it is because you're reacting to what you think is a constant and consistent message in the media, and you think that that consistent message is working.
I maintain that it's a consistent message, but it's making them look like idiots.
It is not redounding to their favor.
Now, years ago, it would have.
Years ago, it would have, but it's not now.
But there's no way in the practical reality of this, there's no way we're going to bring people like Lincoln Chafee or Susan Collins into line.
I mean, what kind of party discipline could be affected on them?
We ought to just get rid of them.
Well, yeah, but that has to happen at the ballot box.
Yeah, and unfortunately, here in New England, deep, deep, deep blue.
Yeah, like where you are.
You know, try coming up with a Republican senator from your state.
It's tough.
And if you get, last time we had one, his name was Lowell Weiker, and we all determined that a Democrat would be better, Joel Edwards.
Absolutely.
You know, so your own state provides an example of this.
This is a, I know it's a bugaboo question for people because the Democrats do seem more aligned.
But look at what their discipline gets them.
I mean, do you actually, the Democrats have the ability to put their heads in the sand and ignore how things sound.
They ignore the substance.
It's not about the substance to them.
It's all about winning.
But are they?
I'd rather be right on the substance and have a shot at convincing the American people through their hearts and minds than I would one try to enforce action on things I know was not going to win, wasn't working, wouldn't work just for the sake of having a consistent message in party discipline.
And I'm just, you know, I think the president can do some things on these matters.
I think the president can maybe do a little bit more than he has when it comes to party discipline.
But overall, we're never going to end up with the same kind of thinking or the same kind of so-called discipline that the Democrats have.
You have to realize that these Republicans you're talking about are liberals.
You know, they just, they're rhinos, Republicans in name only.
And so to, you know, converting them to conservatism is just as challenging as converting any other liberal to conservatism.
They get angry at the same things other liberals do.
They get as irrational as other liberals do.
Plus, they'll tell you that their constituents who elected them are all liberals and expect them to act that way.
As you well know, living in Connecticut, I wouldn't trade places with the Democrats today.
You know, people say to me and have said to me over the course of my career, Rush, do you realize how your life would be different if you were a liberal?
And they go down the list.
Hollywood would love you.
You would have a television show in prime time on a network.
You could name your ticket and price for virtually anything.
You could get movies made.
If you were just a liberal, isn't that tempting?
Wouldn't you love to do that?
And then they come and say, yeah, I'd have email.
And I wouldn't have little political rats at AT ⁇ T and Bell South playing games with my connectivity.
Because that's what's this.
There's no reason this stuff drops out like this accidentally.
Businesses couldn't stay in business doing this.
Anyway, how do I get sidetracked?
They come to me.
He says, look at how much you'd be part of the big click.
You'd be really popular.
Letterman and Leno would love you, and you'd be a standing guest wherever you wanted to go.
Wouldn't that be more fun for you?
And I look at these people, I said, I got that out of my system in high school.
Being part of the big click is not the name of the game here.
Being part of what is considered to be the mainstream is not the name of the game.
It would be the end of me if I were to do that.
Even if the switch were genuine.
Let's say I wake up one day and uh-oh, for reasons I can't explain, I'm a liberal.
Maybe Bell South or AT ⁇ T have been sending little liberal waves into my brain while I'm sleeping when I don't have connectivity.
Who knows?
It'd be the end of me.
I wouldn't trade places with liberals today because they live a lie.
Liberals are miserable.
You think they're happy because they get all this attention, because they sit around singing kumbaya with one another.
It's my contention, they are miserable.
They're not intellectually independent.
Look at when one of them strays, what happens to them.
I don't want thought control determining what I have to think and do.
And I don't want this kind of discipline determining who I have to run around with, who I can like and not.
I don't want any part of that.
I don't encounter happy liberals.
You know, when I go out socially, I can leave it all at the front door.
I don't go out as a conservative.
Most people think I walk in the door as one and I'm willing to take over the room and going to dominate it by talking about what a bunch of rot gut apes of liberals are, but that's not what happens.
I just go out for a good time.
Liberals can't leave it at the front door.
They determine who their friends are.
They determine what they say.
They determine their whole worldview on the basis of it.
And that's why they're miserable.
The pursuit of happiness is something that has escaped them.
And I maintain it's because they know that they're in the minority and they know that their thinking is odd and irrational on many things.
I wouldn't trade places with them.
I don't care if the mainstream press loved me and gave me the kind of treatment that you want to get because of party discipline.
It isn't going to happen.
That's not at all what makes my boat float or not at all what makes us click here.
I'm a little long.
We've got to take a break.
We'll be back.
Stay with us.
We are back on the day before Christmas Eve here on Open Line Friday on the EIB Network.
Steven, Southampton, New York.
Nice to have you on the program, sir.
Welcome.
Thank you very much, Rush.
Merry Christmas.
Say you.
First, I'd like to say thank you very much for opening up my eyes to wide world of politics.
I'm leaving my career in construction management.
I'm going to go back to school for broadcast, and then hopefully I can follow your tradition of broadcasting.
Well, go for it.
Thank you.
My point is this, is we need leaders today that are going to be proactive, i.e. President Bush and not reactive, playing politics with national security.
Tapping phones is proactive.
Playing politics with national securities is reactive.
It's time to stop this domestic insurgency called Nancy Pelosi and Dingy Harvey.
Yeah.
Well, the president has enemies on many fronts, and there are some in this country.
Yet the puffster said that his resolution did not allow the president to fight the war on terror in America.
Didn't allow to fight in the United States of America.
That's where we were attacked, Senator.
It is where we were attacked.
We were attacked in the United States.
Puff said, no, that was too broad.
We didn't give him that authority to fight the war on terror in the United States.
No, no, they wanted that in there.
We wouldn't put it because we were concerned then about civil liberties, my rear end.
You were concerned then about civil liberties.
Another thing on civil liberties.
How many of you people, how many, and you know, political correctness, how many of you encounter it?
It's not the question, not the right question.
How many of you encounter it every day?
The question is, how many times a day do you encounter it?
What do you think political correctness is?
It's not an infringement on civil liberties, primarily speech.
You can't say what you want to say.
If a liberal who doesn't like it is going to be around and hear you, you might get expelled from school.
You might get sued, or you might get fired.
All because of words you utter.
Political correctness is one of the largest obstacles to truth that the left has set up, and it's an infringement on civil liberties and a whole bunch of civil liberties.
You think affirmative action, that is portrayed as something that's widely expanding freedom and civil liberties?
It doesn't.
Affirmative action, quotas, whatever you want to call it, does nothing but infringe on people's rights.
It blames people for discrimination who've never engaged in it simply on the basis of the color of their skin.
It's said to be something imminently fair.
It's the most unfair thing a government could do.
It sit around, sits around and just judges people on the basis of the color of their skin.
It says, well, we've got to make amends for what happened during the days of past discrimination.
All right, fine.
How are you going to do that?
Well, we're going to give these people whose relatives were discriminated against.
We're going to give them a little head start.
We're going to have a little advantageous treatment.
Test scores are not going to need to be as high.
Their strength, if they want to be a fire department and they're a female, not going to be as high.
The requirements.
Okay, when are you going to end all that?
When are you going to say the playing field's been leveled?
Oh, it'll be years, decades, centuries.
There's so much past discrimination.
Why is it still going on?
Why will we never be able to level?
Oh, so we're going to now just change the color that we discriminated against.
You can't say it's discriminatory because if you say that we're now discriminating against a new group, then they're going to call you a racist.
Then you have to end up defending yourself on charges baseless that you are a racist.
Now, you tell me that's not a loss of civil liberties.
The left has engineered more civil liberties defeats for people in this country than any of theirs have ever been threatened.
Be back after this.
Stay with us.
As usual, the first hour drawing to a quick close, ladies and gentlemen, and it will soon be in an armored courier on its way over to a secret warehouse that no amount of spying will ever find, housing all tapes, kinescopes, and digitized recordings of this program that will someday make up a giant listening room in the Limbaugh Museum of Broadcasting.
I am your host, America's anchorman, El Rushboard.
Did you see Sensenbrenner yesterday?
Sensenbrenner took it to the Senate on the Patriot Act.
The Patriot Act was extended for six months, which should have taken it right into the middle of the campaign year in 2006.
And Sensenbrenner was not going to put up with it.
These guys in the House are fed up with the Senate, Republicans and Democrats.
I mean, the Republicans in the House fed up with every senator, every Republican or Democrat, and they're not going to had a conference report, and these four senators just blew the hell out of it, along with all the other Democrats, four Republicans joining these Democrats to filibuster the thing.
And Senson Brenner blew his stack yesterday and got the extension down to what, six weeks, five weeks, something like that.
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