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Dec. 28, 2005 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:29
December 28, 2005, Wednesday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
You know, by all evidence, there's not a lot of news to talk about today.
I get all the luck.
Some of the guest hosts who fill in for Rush come in and there are all sorts of news stories going on.
Well, we've got Congress out of Washington, meaning they're not making any trouble in Washington, but that also means they're not making any news today.
I look here on the Drudge Report.
Now, Matt Drudge's very good news judgment.
I go look, go over to the Drudge Report.
He's leading with a snowstorm in Europe.
In Europe.
I mean, there's not a lot going on on its face.
But if you dig a little bit, as I have done, given that I have the responsibility to conduct this program today, if you dig a little bit, there's actually a lot of fascinating stuff out there.
The mainstream news media's coverage of a story dealing with Iraq is in direct proportion to whether or not the news is good or bad.
If it's bad news, you're going to hear all about it.
If it's good news, it's not going to be emphasized all that much.
Well, I have good news from Iraq.
You know, Carville, this is not the good news, by the way.
Carver was on one of the shows this morning.
Was it today show or one of them?
Is on there uh saying, well, is this why we went to war just so we can support a religious theocracy over there in Iraq?
That's the new thing now.
We have to discredit the elections because it's going to be a religious theocracy.
The Shiites are going to get in there and they're simply going to create a religious dictatorship and we're going to get something no better than we had with Saddam.
That's the new spin from the left.
Well, as usual, they are wrong.
That can't happen in Iraq.
It is impossible for it to become a monolithic theocracy where one religious group is simply going to go in there and run roughshot over everybody else in Iraq.
Now, if it did turn out that way, there would be a lot of trouble.
Because everybody who was left out, the Kurds, the Sunnis, anyone else, would become disenfranchised, and you could see the potential for the breakdown of that government and there being no real support among a significant minority of Iraqi citizens, but it can't work out that way.
The way they drafted their constitution, with by the way, a whole lot of input from Condoleezza Rice and President Bush, the way they drafted their constitution requires that in order to get anything done, you have to have support of almost all of the political factions in Iraq.
It's not like our constitution.
It's much more like some of the European parliamentary constitutions.
It requires that in order to achieve most political goals and to pass most things, that you need far better than 50% of the parliament.
You need a governing coalition that includes all of these minority representative group represented groups in Iraq.
The Shiites know this.
The New York Times, the New York Times of all publications, is even on to this.
Iraqi political leaders began what are expected to be protracted negotiations to form a national unity government made up of Iraq's main sectarian and ethnic groups.
Iraqi officials said the Iraqi leaders are hoping to form a government that would be supported by most of those elected to the parliament, the National Assembly, and include representatives of all the major Iraqi parties.
Such an outcome is strongly favored by the United States.
Parliamentary elections suggest that the Shiite Coalition will emerge as the largest single block in the 275-seat assembly, though it will probably fall short of a majority.
Owing to the complex rules governing the formation of a government, something close to a two-thirds majority will be needed for a coalition to assume power.
Now that's not the way we do things in the United States.
In this country, if one party takes power, it would seemingly have the ability to ram through whatever it wants to do.
For example, if you had a Republican president and a Republican House and a Republican Senate, presumably you'd be able to do whatever you want.
It hasn't worked out that way for President Bush.
But conceivably that could happen.
That's not the way it's set up in Iraq.
In order to have a government that can rule, the Shiites, who were the big winners, but don't have over 50% of the National Assembly have to reach out to the Sunnis, they have to reach out to the Kurds, they have to reach out to some of the non-religious groups that are out there.
They're going to reach out to Alawe's organization.
And by nature, they're going to have to include all of them in order to get anything done.
And that's the beauty of representative government.
They aren't going to be able to ram everything through.
Am I saying that this is all going to work out in Iraq?
Yes.
I think it's all going to work out.
And for all the doom and gloom that we keep hearing from people about what's going to happen in Iraq, the fact of the matter is that everything that we would have wanted to happen is happening, and it's happening at a faster schedule than we ever could have imagined.
We went in there, we knocked off Saddam.
We immediately got control of the vital institutions and the public works and the oil fields of Iraq.
Very quickly, a transitional government was put in place that worked with the American military.
The country was then turned over to that transitional government, which had preliminary elections, passed the Constitution, and has now held parliamentary elections.
Would you have ever thought that all of those things were going to happen as quickly as they did?
Everyone's belief, or at least everyone, coming from the perspective of the cynics in the mainstream media and the Democrats, who condescendingly cannot imagine that President Bush could be pulling this off.
They all presume that even if we knocked off Saddam, that Iraq would tumble into chaos, that you'd have all these groups impossible to get along with one another, that the Sunnis and the Shiites would be going at it, that the Kurds would be demanding the right to secede from the nation, that all this stuff would go on and they'd never be able to work together.
The beauty of democracy is that in order to get things done, they have to work together over there.
And yes, I do think that government, when it does include all of those various factions, will have the support of the majority of Iraqis.
But even if it doesn't, even if it doesn't, it isn't necessarily a bad thing.
Because they've got a solution.
And the solution is elections.
I don't think the left is capable of understanding the following point.
But when people feel as though they are enfranchised, where they can change things through their vote, they are far more likely to support changes to the political process than supporting a bunch of thugs and goons who are running around killing people.
There is a lot more support for tiny minority groups that are working within the system in Iraq than there is for the terrorists.
So yes, I do think this is all going to work out, and as that country gets more stable, it is going to be easier for the United States to begin an exit strategy from Iraq.
All right, that's the only hard news story I have of the day that concludes today's uh program.
There actually isn't a lot of new news out there today, which does present a challenge for a guy who's trying to do a program uh like I am doing, but it gives us the opportunity to get into a few things from a perspective that I don't think you're going to get many places other than a program like this.
I'm going to talk about something we talked about for a long time on yesterday's show, and that's the spying issue.
Because this is another one that is not working out for the left the way they had hoped.
There's a new poll out now from Rasmussen that shows overwhelming support for domestic spying by the administration from the American people.
The left thought this was going to be Watergate.
They were even trotting out the impeachment word.
This was the scandal that was going to bring down President Bush.
Even if it wasn't Watergate, maybe it would be like a ran-contra.
Bush is running roughshod over the law.
Bush is spying on ordinary citizens.
The American public won't stand for that.
The American public is a lot smarter than that.
The new poll from the Rasmussen report shows that 64% of Americans believe the National Security Agency should be allowed to intercept telephone conversations between terrorist suspects and other countries and people living in the United States.
Furthermore, only 26% believe President Bush is the first to authorize a program like the one currently in the news.
Not surprisingly, 81% of Republicans believe the NSA should be allowed to listen in on conversations between terror suspects and people in the United States.
The view is shared, according to the survey, by 57% of those not affiliated with either major political party, and 51% of Democrats.
51% of Democrats.
You have a majority of Democrats who think that it's perfectly appropriate for the president to do this.
So where are you going to go with this?
Where is this story really going to go?
I suspect what you're going to see is the Democrats and the media dropping this thing when they realize they can't do any damage to President Bush with it.
But I'm not sure it should be dropped.
I'm not sure it should be dropped.
They brought this thing up.
It was the New York Times that reported the story.
Well, let's look at it.
Let's look at this issue.
Let's start asking questions like can we trust a political party to protect the national security of the United States if they aren't willing to take measures like this?
And let's address whether or not the law was broken when this story was leaked in the first place.
Now that's not the direction that the people who put this thing out and the Democrats who tried to fan the flames with this story.
That's not the direction they wanted the story to go, but I think it's the direction we ought to take.
Maybe we really do need to dig into this.
Maybe we really do need to ask questions about whether or not a political party who doesn't, who doesn't believe that we ought to be monitoring the activities of a potential Al-Qaeda operatives in the United States can be trusted with this country.
And maybe we ought to get a little serious about finding out where this story came from in the first place.
I think we may want to pursue that, in fact, right here on Russia's program today.
My name is Mark Delling, and I'm sitting in for Rush Limbaugh.
This is the Rush Limbaugh program.
I'm your guest host today, Mark Belling.
Remember when John Kerry gave that acceptance speech at the Democratic Convention last year?
John Kerry reporting for duty, and he saluted.
Now you know why he did that.
And you know why he trotted out his Vietnam record?
They were trying to deal with the fear that a lot of Americans have that the Democratic Party cannot be trusted to protect this country, and Kerry was trying to suggest that he was strong, that he was not one of these wussy Democrats that would shy away from protecting the American people.
Well, the Kerry campaign, of course, was a charade, and President Kerry probably would not have had he been elected, protected the American people, but it does raise the question.
Can the Democratic Party be trusted to defend the national security of the United States?
And I'll put the question to Democrats, Republicans, independents, whomever.
Can they be trusted to protect the national security of the United States?
The number here is 1800-282-2882.
Imagine the following.
Imagine that we do have President Kerry sitting in the White House.
Imagine that the NSA comes to him and says we have significant communication going on between members of Al-Qaeda and operatives here in the United States.
We'd like to wiretap those people in the United States to find out what Al Qaeda is telling them and find out whether or not those people in the United States might be up to something.
If we're to believe the rhetoric from the Democrats, John Kerry would not have authorized those wiretaps.
Do you want a president?
No, why we can't conduct a white committee get involved in those kinds of wiretaps of American citizens.
That would be trampling on the civil liberties of those potential terrorists.
That is what they are saying.
They're saying it was wrong for Bush to do it.
By definition, therefore, they would not have done it.
They would not have listened.
Can you trust that bunch therefore to protect you?
If they aren't willing, if they aren't willing to take those kinds of steps, Josh in Detroit, you're on Russia's program with Mark Belling.
Hey Mark, how are you doing?
I'm great, thanks.
Uh and answer your question, absolutely not.
I don't think there's a m a Democrat in Congress that could convince me that they don't want another 9-11 or that they don't want us to lose the war in Iran.
Well I think they're doing everything they can to destroy Bush's legacy.
They'll refute that, but all we have to do is look at what they are saying.
If they are saying that we should not spy on individuals in America who are talking to Al Qaeda, how can we trust them?
I certainly don't want a president who isn't going to pursue that information as aggressively as possible.
Now they'll they make him come back and say, well, we'd follow up on the information, but we would have gotten a warrant.
We would have gone to one of the Pfizer judges.
What if the judge, what if the FISA judge had turned down the request for the warrant?
Would they let that drop?
We live in an era in which there are people who want to kill us.
And I think the Democrats are by raising this issue with regard to the spying, are really begging the question of whether or not they are willing to go far enough to protect the American people.
Thanks for the call, Josh.
To uh Shepard is MT Montana.
It is Montana.
That is Shepard Montana Art.
Uh thanks.
You're on Art.
Hey, anyway, uh every security agency and the federal government, when you get your security clearance or you get hired by them, you are required to sign an agreement that you will take a lie detector test at any time that the agency thinks that you may have been a part of a leak.
And every person that is working subcontract, uh, like I worked with National Bureau of Standards that had security clearance, also signed the same agreement.
All those people should be required to take a lie detector test right now to see whether they were part of the leaks.
The source of the leak.
Kind of funny because I'm looking through the national media here, and I don't see any speculation as to where this leak came from.
Right.
Now, they certainly were very, very curious and still are as to where the leak came from about Valerie Plain.
Why for that we had to get Pat Fitzgerald out of Chicago and set up his special prosecutor operation and conduct a three-year investigation?
That was something that we had to spend the entire resources of the American government to get to the bottom of who did the leaking.
Why aren't we trying to get to the bottom of this particular leak?
The other thing I would do is once you have completed that process, the president knows who he told what the contents of the various daily briefings and so on were, and he should immediately say, Well, all these people have taken the lie detector test, and now, Senators, you have you are the ones and name them in a speech.
You are the ones that have uh had this information, and we will now request that you take the lie detector test as well.
And if you do not, you know, I'll put your names Art, I can uh I can jump step that process.
First of all, I don't we've got Pat Fitzgerald with his grand jury that will never end still out there in Washington.
We can simply since he seems to be in charge of who's leaking information that has to do with that it deals with Iraq, let's just let his grand jury follow through on this and let's let them conduct the investigation and haul those people in.
But there's very, very direct way to find out where the leak to the New York Times came from.
Right.
I mean, like Well, you what's the what how would you find out?
If you wanted to know who who leaked the information of the New York Times, what would you do?
Well, I mean I know what I'd do.
I'd ask them.
Yep.
I'd ask the New York Times, the reporters who broke the original story about the National Security and uh administration's investigations of America of individuals here in America talking to Al Qaeda were James Risen and Eric Lichblau.
I'd ask them, I'd have Pat Fitzgerald go, call them before the grand jury and say, Mr. Ryzen, Mr. Lickblaw, who was your source?
Who gave you this information?
After all, there is a precedent for this, isn't there?
That is exactly what happened in the Judy Miller case.
Judy Miller of the New York Times was in fact thrown in jail for not revealing who her source was about Valerie Plame.
She eventually gave up the information, said that it was Scooter Libby.
I see no reason why James Ryzen and Eric Lickblau shouldn't be brought before the same grand jury.
Throw them in jail.
Let's throw those two New York Times reporters in jail.
Will the American media that was so okay with Judy Miller being jailed be okay with that?
I really wonder.
I'm Mark Belling in for Rush.
I'm Mark Bellingham for Rush Limbaugh.
I'm on to something here.
Let's throw Ryzen and Lickblau in jail.
The two New York Times reporters.
I'm using the power of Russia's program to call for jailing of those two reporters from the New York Times unless they give up their source, who leaked confidential information from the National Security Administration, compromising an investigation into Al Qaeda operations in the United States.
Now, as long as we're doing it, as long as I'm throwing New York Times reporters in jail, I wouldn't mind seeing Maureen Dowd in there wearing a striped suit.
There's a lot of places that you could go if you started...
Maybe Friedman, he could do a little bit of time.
Who's the uh who's the real left wing columnist over there?
Everybody that you can find from the New York Times, let's just put him in jail.
With regard to the leak that appeared on the National Security Administration's spying operation in the United States, why should we not pursue that?
If the Valerie Plaim story was such an outrage that the identity of a CIA operative being revealed to the media had to be pursued.
Why is it not at least an equal priority to get to the bottom of this particular league?
Now I realize that the media doesn't have much interest in finding out who a leaker is, if it isn't Carl Rover Scooter Libby, but I'd love to get to the bottom of that.
And we do know that at least two people from the New York Times know who the leaker is since it is their source.
Let's go to Van Wert, Ohio, and Sean.
Sean, you're on Russia's program.
Hey, how are you?
I'm great.
Good.
I want to know you give a very good objectionable program.
Um I just have a comment for you.
I think it's absolutely absurd.
I think it's ridiculous that you would sit on this uh this program and condone President Bush wiretapping the American public without a warrant, without giving us any probable cause, and to think that he is not trying to tell or has taken away our freedom and our basic right to privacy.
No, hold on.
Well, I want to ask a question.
Well, I have I have fought in this war.
I've been over there two times for me to come back and hear that the one thing that we're fighting over there for is our democracy and our freedom.
And for me to come back and hear that he's wiretapping the American public and not and if he had probable cause, why didn't he get a warrant?
I don't I it to me it's Well, do you want to hear an answer or do you want to keep asking asking the questions?
I I made a comment.
I think it's absurd.
No, yeah, I think you're on this program.
I think you asked I think you asked the question.
I think you asked the question here.
First of all, you said it's the American public.
How do you know that it's the American public that was wiretapped?
That's the problem.
I don't know, but you presumed that it was.
For all we know, some of these wiretaps were directed at individuals who are not only are not American citizens, but may have been in the United States for only a very brief period of time.
You may recall that on 9-11, the p individuals who hide.
Because that's not what was uh written in the New York Times.
Okay.
I have never heard of that before.
I'm just How do you know it's not basic American you know, having a same way that you don't know that it isn't what I do know is this Al Qaeda isn't calling up Aunt Granny and and to and conducting plans with her with regard to threatening the United States of America.
Let me ask you this, though.
let me ask you this, Sean.
Let's imagine you were the president and the NSA came to you and said, Al Qaeda's talking to a handful of people in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
We'd like to find out what they're talking about.
What would you do?
I would follow the law.
I asked you.
Never mind that.
What would you do?
Never mind that.
I want specifically what would you do?
What would you do, Sean?
I know you don't want to answer that question.
What would you have done?
What would I have done?
I would follow the law.
I would have got warrants.
Okay, you would have gotten a warrant.
This is a good thing.
You would have gotten a warrant, right?
What if he's trying to take away a basic right now?
I know we heard that already, Sean.
We've heard that.
What would you have done if the judge denied the warrant?
Then he denied the warrant.
So then what would you have done?
He denied the warrant.
What do you mean what would I have done?
Why that's a very it's a question that's on my mind.
What would you have done if the judge had denied the warrant?
I wouldn't have did it illegally.
What would you have done?
I wouldn't have done it illegally.
What would you have done with the information the NSA brought to you?
Well, the first thing I would have done is if you're not going to be able to do that.
No, remember your war, your warranty was denied.
What would you have done?
You can go to any judge in this country and get a warrant at any time he wants.
Well, as a matter of As a matter of fact, as a matter of fact, denials of warrants by the FISA court are up dramatically since Bush became president.
If you're going to if you're going to presume that federal judges are automatically going to rubber stamp what the commander in chief of the United States of America is asking for, you're wrong about that.
I do think, though, you revealed exactly the problem that's coming from President Bush's critics on this.
You would have dropped it.
You would not have done anything.
The American people don't want that response to a president of the United States.
If some if some lefty federal judge says no, and I believe the reason why they didn't go to the FISA judges is because they feared exactly that, that they would be rejected.
If the Pfizer judges turned down the request for the warrant, you're saying that you would have dropped it.
If that's going to be the argument of Barbara Boxer, and all the de and Russ Feingold and the Democrats that are out there, if their response is going to be when they have information that the security of the United States is threatened, that they're going to drop it if some lefty judge tells them that they can't follow through.
I don't believe they can be trusted with running this country.
The commander-in-chief has the authority to conduct a military operation.
Right.
President Bush had information dealing with a military operation.
In a military operation, you don't deal with probable cause and you don't deal with warrants.
And the American people are way ahead of that caller from Ohio.
The polls indicate that.
They think there is nothing wrong with following through on that information.
Our world changed after 9-11.
We're not talking anymore about some vague threat.
We're not talking about something that isn't real.
We are talking about people who want to kill us.
And if we are still going to run around twiddling our thumbs, inventing civil liberties questions that paralyze us and keep us from acting, we are very vulnerable.
And the American people know that.
For heaven's sakes, we're going to the airport and we're taking off half our clothes, we're taking our shoes off, we're taking our belts off, we're giving up all sorts of freedoms.
In this particular instance, the critics of the president are suggesting that we shouldn't follow through on information that may have to do with a terror attack on the United States.
And they're going to reject any politician who says the president did anything wrong here.
And as long as we're so concerned about following the law, what about the law that says confidential and classified information cannot be revealed?
That law clearly was broken.
There is absolutely nothing to indicate that the president violated any law since as commander in chief, he has the authority to conduct this war with Iraq and the war against Al Qaeda.
What about that particular law?
There doesn't seem to be a lot of interest in making sure that it is being followed.
Now, there will always be a concern on the part of some that we're given too much authority and too much power to the government.
The fear that you're going to see a government that's going to run roughshod over civil liberties.
But if you see the Democrats trying to run on that issue, they're not going to get anywhere.
Because there's no evidence that President Bush has abused that authority.
I'm not going to give him a blank check.
I'm not going to suggest that we want to have the CIA and the FBI listening in on every American's telephone call.
But if that phone call is made by Al Qaeda, an organization that killed several thousand Americans and has vowed to kill a lot more.
If that phone call is made by Al Qaeda, yeah, you better believe I want our government listening in on the other end.
Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Chris, you're on EIB with Mark Belling.
I know, Mark.
I'm great, thank you.
Mark, the fellow is not a leader that you were speaking to.
He's never been in a leadership position.
He can't answer leadership questions.
Bush is a leader.
He saw what happened on 9-11.
He said he was going to fight terror, and he's doing what he said he was going to do to fight terror.
He's making leadership decisions, whether they're popular or not.
Well, in fact, I think this one is popular.
I we were waiting for the first poll numbers to come out on this, and they're overwhelming in terms of approving what the president did.
In fact, you've got Democrats right now that are very concerned that they're drag that they're walking over the cliff again on this.
Centrist Democrats think that this is a killer issue for their party if they keep coming out and criticizing every strong decision that is made by the president with regard to fighting the war on terror.
There's a reason why Kerry had to come out in 2004 and talk about his military background.
It's because the American people don't trust the Democratic Party to take these steps.
If we are not willing to do this, if we are not willing to use everything within our authority to try to stop terror here, we're just making ourselves open season, and the American people are going to reward the president and a political party that is willing to take those steps.
Agreed, agreed.
And if I may add another comment on what these people are thinking that they're listening to our phone calls, as you have brought up, they're not listening to your phone call with your aunt.
They have these computer programs now, and I'm not a computer person, but I heard it on one of the shows where they're just checking for key words.
And they're not listening to me and you have a conversation.
They're checking keywords.
And if you're not talking about bombs or buying 200 pounds of this or that, they could care less what you're talking about.
And if somebody from Al Qaeda calls me up and starts talking to me about what they may have in mind for my next attack, yeah, I kind of suspect that the government might have some sort of interest in finding out what was what is going on here.
Now the last caller referred to probable cause.
That's fine if you're investigating a murder.
If there was a killing and you're trying to get to the bottom of who committed it, you do need to have some evidence before you go out and you seek a warrant.
We are talking here about trying to stop something that has not yet happened.
There isn't going to be any probable cause if you haven't done anything.
But that's the point.
In the war on terror, we're trying to stop them from doing something before they do it.
And as for who it is that they're monitoring the conversations of, we do know that Al Qaeda had a whole lot of people in the United States prior to 9-11, and those people turned out to be pretty dangerous, since they hijacked those planes and they flew them into those buildings and they tried to put one into the Capitol building of the United States.
On the political aspect of this thing, though, I'm convinced this is a winning issue for President Bush and not a losing issue.
I think if anything, the public is going to be glad to know that when confronted with and given information about what Al Qaeda might be up to in the United States, that President Bush did go after it.
You want to play, if they want to play this thing out, let them hold their hearings, including some of the Nambi Pamberry Republicans who initially responded to the New York Times and responded to the national media, hold your hearings and call in administration officials and try to put them on the defensive for doing everything in their power to protect the American people.
That dog isn't gonna hunt.
Thank you for the call.
My name is Mark Belling, and I'm sitting in for Rush Limbaugh.
Mark Belling in for Rush Limbaugh.
In my uh confrontational conversation with the caller from Ohio talked about the uh FISA court, that is the one that oversees these kinds of operations that the Bush administration bypassed in the stories that are of controversy.
In fact, according to Reuters, the eleven judge panel has modified 179 of the requests that the Bush administration has made for surveillance of Americans.
179 of them.
The story also says, by contrast, only one was modified in the preceding four years.
So when the Clinton administration was requesting this authority, it was granted virtually every time and only once was it modified.
179 times they modified what the Bush administration was seeking.
I think you're beginning to see why the administration has decided that in some instances, it's not going to go to the FISA court.
Let's start with when you're at war.
I mean, we're we're getting to the point in which some people are suggesting that if we actually encountered Osama bin Laden that we'd have to start reading him as Miranda rights.
We are fighting a war right now.
When we get information, you shouldn't have to worry about what some Jimmy Carter appointed federal judge is going to determine is probable cause to be able to listen to what the enemy is saying.
This is the enemy.
Today's Wall Street Journal is a column by Robert Turner.
He is the uh founder of the Center for National Security Law.
I want to read you the last few paragraphs here because he states the point very clearly.
America is at war with a dangerous enemy.
Since 911, the president, our intelligence services, and our military forces have done a truly extraordinary job, taking the war to our enemies and keeping them from conducting a single attack within this country so far.
But we are still very much at risk.
And those who seek partisan political advantage by portraying efforts to monitor communications between suspected foreign terrorists and often unknown Americans as being akin to Nixon's enemies list are neither serving their party nor their country.
The leakers of this sensitive national security activity and their Capitol Hill supporters seem determined to guarantee Al Qaeda a secure communications channel into this country.
So long as they remember to include one sympathetic permanent resident alien not previously identified by NSA or the FBI as a foreign agent on their list.
Ultimately, as the courts have noted, the test is whether the legitimate government interest involved in this interest discovering and preventing new terrorist attacks that may endanger tens of thousands of Americans outweighs the privacy interests of individuals who are communicating with Al Qaeda terrorists.
And just as those of us who fly on airplanes have accepted the intrusive government searches of our luggage in person without the slightest showing of probable cause, those of us who communicate with foreign terrorists will have to accept the fact that Uncle Sam may be listening.
Our constitution is the Supreme Law, and it cannot be amended by a simple statute like the FISA law.
Every modern president in every court of appeals that is considered this issue has upheld the independent power of the president to collect foreign intelligence without a warrant.
The Supreme Court may ultimately clarify the competing claims, but until then, the president is right to continue monitoring the communications of our nation's declared enemies, even when they elect to communicate with people within our country.
To Pittsburgh and Tom, Tom, you're on EIB.
How are you doing?
I'm great.
I wanted to call in um first of all, I want to say it's an honor.
I've always listened to um not particularly you, but Rush Limbaugh's first time I've ever got through.
And I want to say I'm enjoying it.
Time is short, though, Tom.
Uh get right to the point.
Real quick, what I was gonna bring up was the last caller service in the military claims, because a lot of times there's liberal plans.
But um, his priorities, which shows the left is off.
They're worried about foreign terrorists being listened in to on Bill Clinton.
What was the uh administration worker in the Justice Department that testified in front of Congress and said she had the authority or the Gorlich, but what is what is your point, Tom?
Well, the we have gun laws, we have imminent domain, and we have campaign campaign finance.
All those Restrict our civil rights.
Well, you're right.
I mean, you're talking about a Supreme Court that says the government can come in and take your land if a local community has some better idea for it.
That's a far greater threat to our civil liberties than listening to a conversation between an American and a terrorist.
Mark Bellingen for Rush.
Mark Bellingen for Rush Lumbaugh.
I'm glad we're having this discussion.
Who do we really want making our wartime decisions?
The commander-in-chief of the United States or a bunch of federal judges?
Keep making that argument.
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