Rush Limbaugh Program - January 16, 2006, Monday, Hour #1

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Jan. 16, 2006 - Rush Limbaugh Program

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January 16, 2006, Monday, Hour #1

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	Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
	It is good to be back.
	I know a lot of you don't know a lot about me other than you hear me fill in for Rush every now and then and seem to be kind of a conservative guy, so I want to come clean with you.
	I am not a Republican.
	I'm a conservative.
	To me, there's a big difference.
	I am a conservative, that is an ideology I hold, I have my own beliefs.
	They generally fall in line with where mainstream conservatism is in America.
	That means, because I'm a conservative, I usually vote for Republicans.
	In fact, I almost always vote for Republicans.
	The candidates I support are almost always Republicans.
	And I almost never vote for Democrats, and I almost never support Democrats.
	But I don't consider myself a Republican.
	The Republicans are merely the ones that seem to support the ideas that I believe in, but they frustrate me.
	They frustrate me a lot.
	They're not moving fast enough on this.
	They seem to be appeasing too much on that.
	You want to tear your hair out sometimes.
	The whole Abramoff scandal is very, very bothering to me.
	The fact that we can't get private accounts for Social Security done, that bothers me.
	And I get very, very frustrated with the Republicans, but last week proved so clearly why I have to support Republicans and not Democrats.
	And it proves so clearly what is wrong with the alternative, which is the Democratic Party.
	Could you possibly have made bigger fools of themselves than the Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee did last week in the Alito hearings?
	Could they have gone more badly for them?
	It was an absolute fiasco.
	For nearly entire an entire week.
	Here is this good, honest, ethical and brilliant man who happens to be conservative, sitting up there in this star chamber being grilled and questioned by apparently the best and the brightest the Democratic Party has to offer, and that's my point.
	They are on him for four days of absolute nothing.
	Now we all know why they want to grill Sam Alito.
	They want to destroy his nomination.
	They want to knock him out of the box because they don't agree with him, because he's a conservative.
	But they can't come out and say, Sam, we're going to try to trip you up.
	Sam, we're going to try to make you look terrible.
	Sam, we're going to try to make you come across as a sleaze bag.
	They can't say that, but everybody knows that's what their goal was.
	It was such terrible strategy.
	There are a lot of reasons why it didn't work, but the biggest is that's not what Samuel Alito is.
	He's not a sleaze bag.
	He's not an extremist.
	He's not a dangerous guy.
	He is qualified to be on the Supreme Court of the United States.
	So what they were attempting to do was almost impossible, but that didn't deter them from trying because they've succeeded in the past.
	Robert Bork deserved to be on the Supreme Court, a great, brilliant, decent man of incredible integrity, and they stopped him.
	They almost stopped Clarence Thomas, another great, brilliant, decent man.
	So they apparently figure they can do this again and again and again and again and again.
	The difference is guys like Samuel Alito are on to this, and they know what's coming, and they are prepared.
	So what you had was this spectacle of this fishing expedition in which Democrats are casting out this line, dropping it in the ocean and hoping they can get a bite on something.
	The problem was the bait they were throwing out wasn't what any fish was going to be interested in.
	The very fact that they try to take this person who has had an impeccable track record in public life without a hint of scandal, no sign of impropriety, and try to suggest that he is unethical is bad enough.
	But what possibly possessed them in their strategy meetings, and you know they hold them.
	You've got the Democrats in the Judiciary Committee who are about the most liberal Democrats in the entire Senate.
	They meet with all these interest groups, they're planning the strategy, they're planning the line of attack.
	What could possibly possess Them after they've already made the silly decision, we're gonna go after Alito on ethics, to make their point man on ethics Teddy Kennedy.
	Could you have chosen a more inappropriate person to get up there and try to sully the good name of Samuel Alito?
	It'd be like the Republicans making Tom delay their point man on campaign finance reform.
	There are some things you just don't do.
	Yet there's Kennedy apparently not understanding how foolish he appeared, grilling Alito.
	First they tried the Vanguard case.
	There was an obscure case that Sam Alito ruled upon that involved the Vanguard Mutual Funds.
	I think it was in 2002 when he was first being confirmed for the appellate court in 1990.
	He said he wasn't going to rule in any cases involving Vanguard.
	He admitted later he had forgotten about it.
	He should not have done it, something slipped.
	He even asked that the case be reheard.
	No one has suggested, no ethics professor suggested, no other appellate judges suggested that he should not have ruled on it, but it was clearly something he wished that he hadn't done.
	Hardly a smoking gun, but they go after him on that.
	That does it work.
	Then they make the their focus.
	And we're talking here about a man who is being nominated to the Supreme Court of the United States, and here is one of the two great political parties in America.
	They make a big stink out of whether or not Alita was a member of an alumni group from Princeton University in the 1980s, shortly after he graduated from Princeton.
	The alumni group happens to be conservative.
	And there are indications that this alumni group has expressed conservative views from time to time.
	There's no indication that Alito did anything more than join the group and write out a check once.
	He never appeared to attend any meetings, he never appeared to do much of anything with this organization, but they went after him on this membership in the group.
	And they've got Teddy Kennedy, the guy that's doing leading the Inquisition here.
	And I sat there when I was watching this thing.
	And it just seems so familiar to me.
	Judge Alito, what exactly is your recollection of your involvement with this organization?
	And then Kennedy getting up and suggesting that there are documents.
	There are documents somewhere that may implicate Alito as having been a serious member of this organization, and we're going to need to subpoena them.
	As it turns out the documents were fully available, had been written about in the New York Times in November and indicated that Alito didn't have much of anything to do with the group.
	Nonetheless, Kennedy is hinting darkly at documents that would prove that Alito was an actual active member of this group two decades ago.
	And I realized what it was that this reminded me of.
	This is McCarthyism all over again.
	Joe McCarthy's old line.
	Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party of the United States?
	Instead, we get Teddy Kennedy up there.
	Are you now or have you ever been a member of a conservative organization?
	That's what they've been reduced to.
	And it backfired on them terribly.
	There is no traction in this country at all for rejecting Samuel Alito.
	Instead, the Americans who watched this thing saw a man sit up there for four days and take it day after day after day, politely answering every single question that's being put to him.
	In many cases, questions that were so stupid as to be an insult to the entire process.
	You've got Joe Biden taking nine minutes to ask a question.
	You've got Kennedy blubbering away about something from Princeton.
	And here's this guy answering these questions calmly and politely.
	You tell me who came across looking well in that.
	Now I know why they did it.
	The Democrats are so beholden to this leftist base in their party, which is obsessed with issues like abortion.
	And they're told you've got to stop them, you've got to knock them out.
	And you've got the true believers that are on that committee.
	I mean, Teddy Kennedy, Joe Biden, you're talking here, the leftiest of the left.
	So that's why they're doing it, but they can't come out and say we just want to knock this guy out because he's conservative.
	So instead they try to trump up all of this stuff, and it played just terribly.
	And what they did is wrong on every level.
	It was wrong on the politics.
	It was wrong on the theater, and it's wrong on the substance.
	Samuel Alito is qualified to be on the United States Supreme Court without a doubt.
	He is a brilliant man.
	He has no ethical problems whatsoever, and he is somebody who is indeed in the judicial mainstream of conservatism in this country.
	So there's no reason to reject him.
	Just as there was no real reason to reject Ruth Bader Ginsburg twelve years ago.
	Remember her?
	She's on the court now.
	Appointee of Bill Clinton.
	Do you know what the vote for Ruth Bader Ginsburg was?
	96 to 3.
	She is probably the most liberal justice on the court right now.
	She and Stevens are right over there on the lefty wing, and everyone knew that's what she would be.
	And unlike Sam Alito, who may or may not have had some involvement in a Princeton group 20 years ago.
	Do you know what Ruth Beter Ginsburg did before she became an appellate judge?
	She was one of the legal counsel for the ACLU.
	The ACLU, the organization that supports gay marriage, the organization that is opposed to absolutely every law enforcement initiative you want to come up with in this country, the ACLU, which has been on the fringe of American liberalism forever.
	Did you see the Republicans try to knock Ruth Bader Ginsburg off because of her not?
	But her employment by aggressive advocacy of the positions of the ACLU, the answer is no.
	So if Ginsburg isn't going to be knocked out after being a ringleader of the ACLU to suggest that there's any problem with Sam Alito is silly.
	Yet they engage in this silliness because they have a base that's kooky, and their kooky base is driving them to look silly.
	And every time I get depressed about where the Republicans are, and that happens a lot, you see performances and spectacles like this, and it makes me realize A, why I'm not a Democrat, and B, why they probably will always have a hard time ever winning national elections because when they had an opportunity to put the face of their party out there in these hearings, that face looked preposterous.
	My name is Mark Belling, and I'm sitting in for Rush Limbaugh.
	1-800-282882 is the number.
	My name is Mark Delling.
	I'm sitting in for Rush Limbaugh, offering some commentary on the Alito situation.
	The latest is the Democrats are trying to delay a vote in the Judiciary Committee.
	The Senate is not in session today because of the Martin Luther King holiday.
	The uh chairman, Spector, wanted to hold the vote as early as tomorrow.
	The Democrats are exercising their prerogative for a delay, but that can only last a couple of days.
	They're grasping at straws here to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Craig.
	Craig, you're on EIB.
	Hi, Mark.
	Hi.
	I've been trying to get through to Rush with this, but I don't mind telling the associate at all.
	I'm a Steeler fan, born and bred, and I've always made a correlation.
	How'd they do yesterday?
	They lost or something, didn't they?
	Oh, yeah, that's right.
	They happened to beat the Super Bowl favorites.
	Yeah.
	So you just figure you just figured you'd draw you'd throw that thing in there, huh?
	Um yes.
	I um I just want to say that we've always felt, and I'm sure a lot of teams feel this way, but now that there's a Steeler nation, and it's pretty obvious out there that there are bars in opponent cities that are just steeler bars, that there's a correlation between the way I feel the excuse me, the Republicans are treated, and that the way the Steelers are treated, and it was pretty obvious with Alito's hearings that we really had to fight hard to get beyond the media and what the Democrats were throwing.
	And yesterday we had to fight hard to get beyond what they seem to be the television announcers and the referee seem to be hinting that they really wanted the other team to win.
	No, you're you're trying to draw a parallel here between Sam Alito and the Pittsburgh Steelers that might be a little strained.
	I'll give you this.
	I'll give you this.
	I believe that expectations for Alito were tremendously reduced by the media and the Democrats.
	Particularly the Democrats, you've got to understand, guys like Keddy Kennedy and Joe Biden, they think they're smarter than Sam Alito.
	That's the great advantage conservatives have.
	Look who the liberals are trotting out there.
	When you get lectured on ethics by Teddy Kennedy, that's a dream scenario.
	On the one hand, it is incredibly aggravating that you're seeing a good man like Alito being challenged on ethics by Kennedy.
	On the other hand, if you had to script this, okay, let's have Teddy Kennedy attack him on ethics, you could not have scripted it and scripted it any better.
	And Alito took it and responded, there was nothing there, and the Democrats just look ridiculous in trying to in trying to t you know to sully this guy.
	Nobody thinks Samuel Alito is unethical.
	So by attempting to imply that he is, they were set up to fail all along.
	Thanks, Craig.
	I think Craig, I think the whole point of Craig's call really wasn't to talk about Alito.
	He just wanted to do that Steelers Crow in here.
	This was all trash talking.
	For those of you in Indiana, if you want to respond to him, you can.
	But uh to uh Cleveland, Ohio on a cell phone, Josh.
	Josh, you're on Russia's program with Mark Belling.
	Hi there.
	I was just wondering if you could justify why you're so against the ACLU.
	Well, because I disagree with them on everything.
	Well, I mean, it's natural as your right as an American citizen to disagree.
	Well, you asked me the question.
	That's why I disagree with them on almost everything.
	That's why I'm against them.
	But are you disagreeing because you're closed-minded or you're actually against every issue that they're against because you've done the research?
	Uh, what research would that be?
	Well, take their stance against gay marriage.
	They're for it.
	They're for it.
	Sorry, sorry.
	Yes, I disagree.
	I disagree where are we going with this?
	I disagree with them on that.
	The point of the point that I was raising with regard to the ACLU is that the ACLU is a prominent group of the American left, correct?
	And Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who was the chief counsel for the ACLU on all women's rights cases, was allowed to become Supreme Court Supreme Court Justice with the votes of virtually every Republican.
	And no one dared to suggest that this made her unfit to serve on the Supreme Court.
	Yet when you have a conservative who isn't even a member of an equivalent organization, they try to bring up an organization that he wasn't even an active participant in, and therefore suggest that he's some somehow unethical or that he's sullied.
	My point is this.
	If you can be a leading player with the ACLU and get on the Supreme Court, tell me what drives the left so crazy about a conservative.
	The point that I was trying to make is that the ACT.
	Yes, I know, I know I know the point that you were that you were trying to make.
	My point is I disagree with the ACLU, but you haven't seen Republicans or conservatives block someone from serving on the federal judiciary because they happen to be a supporter of the ACLU.
	Thank you for the call, Josh.
	I think he's not capable of grasping that point, but that's the point that I was driving at with regard to Kennedy's attempting to imply that there's something wrong with Sam Alito because he may have been a member of a conservative group.
	That now becomes a standard that they're going to use to try to block people, and it's a silly standard, which is why it did not work.
	To Northport, Michigan, Chris, Chris, you're on EIB.
	I'm Mark Belling.
	Hi, Mark.
	Hi.
	Fellow conservatives, I appreciate what you said at the beginning of the program.
	I lines up exactly with the way I think.
	Um a point I wanted to make is Sam Alito coming from an immigrant immigration uh an immigrant family, twenty-five, thirty years ago would have been considered a Democrat.
	And it just shows how far off base the Democratic Party has come in the past 25, 30 years.
	Well, we use that term Reagan Democrats a lot.
	The uh working class Democrats, many of them came from Union backgrounds, and how they've simply been driven away.
	Exactly.
	Driven away by the leftist fringe that has taken control of the Democratic Party.
	How do you think That played in all of those homes where people could relate to a Sam Alito, a person who has middle a middle class background and has basic American values, a good and decent person, seeing a bunch of Eastern and Western elitists get up and try to portray him as somehow wrong or inappropriate to be on the Supreme Court.
	It doesn't play well at all.
	And what's happened is as the Democrats keep trying to appease their base, they're just alienating the majority of Americans.
	And until they realize that they can't play to that base, they're going to keep making silly mistakes like they did during the Alito hearings.
	You gotta love that caller from Pittsburgh.
	Trying to somehow equate Alito and the Steelers just so he can get in his brag bragging about the uh Steelers and their great upset.
	You know, though.
	Do you realize how close Jerome Bettis came to becoming the new Joe Pisarchik?
	That's a real obscure reference, but some of you get it.
	It can't it almost happened.
	It almost happened.
	Then I had the then I had the guy calling, why are you against the ACLU?
	Because they're a bunch of left-wing nuts.
	Yeah, but why are you really against them?
	Does Rush get these calls?
	He gets these calls too.
	Is he more polite than I was?
	He is.
	He is.
	Okay.
	Okay.
	To uh Richmond, Virginia and Steve.
	Steve, you're on EIB.
	How are you doing, Mark?
	I'm great.
	I had a couple of points.
	First of all, earlier you said there was no reason to for anybody to vote against Ruth uh Ginsburg.
	Uh if that's the case, then she would have gotten a hundred to zero on her votes, and she didn't.
	Well, moving on to my point.
	Well, I want to I want to respond to that though.
	The point that the point that I am making is that the standard has changed, and it will always change when Democrats are judging conservatives as opposed to the other way around.
	You would never have been able to get away with treating Ruth Bader Ginsburg the way Samuel Alito was treated by the Democrats.
	And the point that Ginsburg should have been rejected purely because of her ideology would have been would have struck most Americans as outrageous.
	The point that I'm making is what the Democrats are attempting to do here to Alito is something that was not done and has not been done to liberal nominees from Democratic presidents.
	Okay.
	Um the point of the main point I wanted to get to, though, is that um I didn't think the Democrats looked disgraceful.
	I think they were fighting a losing battle.
	Uh truthfully, the Republican senators set up there practically testified for uh Alito.
	And I saw nobody's doubting the man's qualifications.
	But there are quite a few of us that still have concerns about not just Cap but how he feels about certain things.
	But because the Republicans have enough votes, and all of the press said the same thing, if this guy doesn't stumble, then he's going to be uh affirmed.
	And he didn't stumble because he's smart enough not to.
	So the Democrats had they were fighting a losing battle from the beginning.
	Yeah, well that's the first thing.
	Okay, fine.
	But you just acknowledged as long as he didn't stumble, and you're right, as long as Sam Alito didn't lose his temper and say and say something inappropriate to Kennedy, as long as he didn't say something that he was merely mistaken by, but could have been accused of being a lie, as long as he didn't do those things.
	Why should that though be the point of these hearings?
	Okay, the the main concern I have to do.
	It was a question, why should that be the point of the hearings?
	Attempt to stumble the man so we can knock him out.
	Well, the main reason is because I think that politics today there's so much at stake.
	And you know there's an ongoing point.
	As opposed to before.
	Pardon me?
	As opposed to before?
	Yes.
	As opposed to ninety-three nineteen ninety-three when Ginsburg was approved ninety-six to three.
	I think I think that absolutely there's so much at stake right now.
	In fact, the presidential election from two thousand and four, and I heard Mr. Limbaugh say that as well as other conservative uh talk show hosts, they referenced the fact that there would be at least one Supreme Court justice vacancy.
	And that's why this election was so important.
	There was obviously uh the Democrats are not the only ones that feel that ideology is important when it comes to the courts.
	They are the but the that's the imp the point, though.
	When the Republicans won the presidency, it gave the president the prerogative to make his nominee.
	There is nothing wrong with challenging someone on the basis of ethics or Qualifications if there are serious questions there.
	The reason many conservatives strongly criticized, and I think rightly so, the nomination of Harriet Myers is there was serious question about whether or not she was qualified to be on the Supreme Court of the United States.
	But that's not what the Democrats raised.
	What the Democrats raised was a bunch of straws that they were trying to turn into a hay pile, which was silly.
	You tell me what the point was in going on and on and on and on about the activities of a conservative group that was formed by a bunch of Princeton alumni years ago.
	What was the point of that?
	Well, the point is that it reflects uh thought in America that's very un-American, and the fact that the that Judge Alito felt the need to put it on uh more than one job application that he was affiliated with this group.
	And personally, nobody's doubting his qualifications.
	Nobody is understands the constitution.
	What was the point of raising those questions about the Princeton thing, other than that they had nothing else?
	Well, okay.
	Well, let me ask you this.
	If we found out that Barack Obama had in some way, for any reason, even attended a nation of Islam meeting, you're gonna tell me that you guys wouldn't be upset about it, or that nobody would think it was a big deal.
	Obviously, this is uh uh something that could be construed as a racist organization, and it may not bother you because you're not going to be the victim of their racism.
	All right, but it bothers folks like me because I could be the victim of their racism.
	They're a racist organization.
	Just keep roll just keep rolling with that.
	It doesn't play.
	Now I I take it that you're a Democrat, right?
	No, I'm not a Democrat.
	I don't vote along party.
	Okay, are you a liberal?
	Uh no.
	I'm closer.
	I'm closer to the center because I am I'm just asking, I'm actually not being antagonistic with regard to that question.
	I'm trying to find out where you are.
	So you're somebody who has concerns about the Alito nomination, right?
	Yes.
	Yes.
	Then let me ask you this.
	Sure.
	If the goal of the Democrats here was to try to block Alito or mess up Alito, would you not have preferred that when they began this assault on ethics, they would have chosen someone other than the most ethically challenged man in American public life in Teddy Kennedy.
	Don't you think they could have picked somebody better?
	Well, first of all, I think that Mr. DeLay has got a lot more ethics questions than Mr. Kennedy.
	Which is why if the Republicans were going to be attacking a Democrat on the issue of ethics, they probably wouldn't be so stupid as to make delay being the guy that's asking the questions.
	That's my point.
	That's my point.
	Would you not have preferred they would have used someone else, or is the Democratic Party so devoid of talent right now that the only guy they had to grill Alito on ethics was Kennedy.
	So what you're saying is that Kennedy should have been removed from the committee.
	I'm saying he's the last guy in the world who ought to be challenging someone on the basis of ethics.
	Unless you want to look silly.
	I mean, you've got look, you've got to take a look at how this thing played.
	There's Kennedy sitting up there in all of his pompousness, pompous, what is it, pompousness or pomposity?
	Both his arrogance and his pomposity, grilling Alito about membership in a group twenty years ago that is if that has been affiliated with with all sorts of Princeton alumni.
	It just looked silly.
	It did not play well.
	It did not play well.
	Actually, Mark, what he was grilling him on was uh why he didn't accuse himself of certain things that are.
	He was on the vanguard case too.
	But like I say, if you want this to be a debate on ethics, and you're going to put up Sam Alito, and the only two things they can find is he ruled in the Vanguard case, and he might have written out a check to an organization in nineteen eighty-five, and the guy who's the inquisitor is Teddy Kennedy.
	I'm gonna tell you who's gonna win that thing, and it's not going to be the Democrat side.
	Thank you for the call, Steve.
	I appreciate it.
	Let's go now to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.
	Tom.
	Tom, you're on E.I.B. Hello, how are you?
	I'm great.
	Uh the reason I called is I think uh both sides make a big mistake.
	Uh you make a mistake of saying I'm a conservative, and the others make the mistake that I'm a liberal.
	Once you set up those polls, there's no middle ground.
	And that's where the problem lies with the executive and the legislative branches.
	And the only branch that really balances the whole thing is the judicial.
	And the one thing the Alito did and showed last week Is that he listened?
	He listened to every question and then responded.
	The legislators, both on the Republican side and on the Democratic side, were making political statements.
	That's why they took nine or ten or twelve minutes.
	And that was on both sides.
	Well, I'll give you this.
	Well, I I got your point on the process.
	I will give you this.
	Alito's v view of the role of a reviewing court justice, and I thought he spoke eloquently on this, is to listen to the facts and apply the Constitution.
	So whether or not he is politically conservative or not isn't relative.
	It isn't all that relevant relevant.
	What his answer does indicate, though, is a conservative judicial philosophy because it is the liberals that have tried to impose their leftist social views from the court on all Americans.
	So while Alito does not necessarily have to be a conservative to say that he's going to interpret the Constitution as written and as the founders intended, when he's applying it to these cases, it happens to be a conservative philosophy.
	It's you know, it's liberals that have taken the Constitution and pretended it says all sorts of things that it does not.
	The Constitution was never written for the conservatives or the liberals.
	It was written for the American people.
	I agree.
	I agree with you on that.
	But what liberals have done is if has they have ignored the Constitution and pretended things are in there, like the right to abortion, which simply do not exist in the Constitution.
	It's been conservatives who have said, no, we're not going to pretend that this thing says something other than it does.
	But if you want to be convinced that Sam Alito is neither a liberal nor conservative, that's fine with me because what the court needs and what the federal judiciary needs is individual judges who are going to rule on the basis of what the Constitution says, not on their own political views.
	And this is what threatens the Democrats.
	They want justices that are going to continue to uphold all of these imaginary rights that the war and court found to be there in the first place.
	Thank you for the call.
	My name is Mark Gulling, and I'm sitting in for Rush.
	Mark Belling's sitting in for Rush.
	I want to uh briefly go back to the point that I was making earlier on the show about how the Democrats are just beholden to their leftist kook fringe base.
	San Francisco over the weekend, Nancy Pelosi, who is the House, not the Senate, but the House Democratic leader.
	She was speaking at some town meeting, and she's confronted by all these anti-war activists, and they're mad at her.
	You gotta understand.
	Yet here she's got these constituents that are mad at her because they feel the Democrats aren't sufficiently opposed to the war in Iraq.
	Let me quote from the uh I think it's the San Francisco Cry, yeah, the San Francisco Chronicle.
	The money is for the troops, said Pelosi, who initially voted against the war but has voted in favor of appropriations bills to pay for it.
	I'm not prepared to go against the troops having the equipment they'd need.
	When she finished her thoughts, she looked down at the solid row of pink and black clad protesters now forming a barricade in front of the stage.
	Hello, she said cheerfully.
	This is how we know we're in San Francisco, chimed in the moderator Paul Wells, local radio host.
	I suspect he's a lefty.
	The protest illustrates the tightrope.
	Pelosi must walk as she tries to keep in touch with her liberal San Francisco constituents while maintaining leadership of a Democratic minority in Congress that are clearly to the right of her own views.
	This is her dilemma, says Bruce Cain, political scientist at UC Berkeley.
	A lot of the pressures of her constituency point to her taking a very aggressive position on withdrawing from Iraq.
	But her role as minority leader demands that she pick a position that does not damage the chances of Democrats in races around the country.
	That's the dilemma they face.
	Their base is pushing them so far to the left that they are becoming unelectable in all the red states and some of the blue states.
	Yet this is their leadership.
	In the meantime, Canada may be going conservative.
	This may be a watershed event, and I'm not going to try to pretend that this is indicative of anything that may happen in the United States because Canada has never been a leading indicator of American policy.
	But Canada's been run by the Liberals uh forever.
	I think Mulroney was conservative, wasn't he?
	Uh wasn't he?
	The Liberals have had this thing for like 40 years, Pretty much nonstop in Canada, but in the new parliamentary elections are coming up, there is every indication that Stephen Harper, a conservative and his party is going to gain a governing majority and the conservatives are going to regain power in Canada.
	Harper is, and listen to some of these views and understand this is Canada.
	He is opposed to the Coyoto Climate Protocol, that's the global warming treaty.
	He has supported the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
	He's opposed to same-sex marriage.
	He says he might reverse the Canadian decision to not participate in the Bush administration's strategic defense initiative.
	The party's platform also calls for increases in foreign aid to bolster Canada's role in the world.
	And an additional five billion dollars in Canadian military spending to recruit and outfit 13,000 more troops.
	In addition to that, the main conservative proposals are a cut in the unpopular national sales tax, direct allowance to families that can be used for child care, longer prison sentences for criminals, and an assortment of anti-corruption measures, all of which seem to be resonating with Canadian middle class voters.
	So after all of this leftism up north of the border, they may now be finally turning back toward common sense.
	Do we have affiliates in Canada?
	I don't even know.
	Well, a lot of listeners, but we don't know about any affiliates.
	Well, there are no places to put any radio towers up there, it's all rock.
	It is, you know, and the Canadians have been left for a long time, and it looks like they are coming back to reality here in these elections.
	But it's been easy for them to be left.
	The fact of the matter is is that Canada has it very, very easy.
	And it's very simple for Canada to embrace all sorts of left-wing positions as a government.
	First of all, in terms of their military role, the Canadians know full well if there ever is any trouble or anything threatens them, that we in the United States will be there to protect them.
	If Canada were ever attacked, we would defend Canada.
	If 9-11 had occurred in Toronto, we in the United States with our military would have led the charge in trying to find out who the terrorists were that attacked and deal with that threat.
	So militarily, it's very, very easy for Canadians to look down their noses at the militaristic United States running around trying to impose our view on the world when it's the American military that provides Canada with its first line of defense, not its own.
	They also don't have any real problems with illegal immigration.
	Their southern border is with the United States.
	We have to deal with the very real problem of millions of people entering our country and coming here and demanding government services without our nation having a real way of dealing with it or not one that we've come up with yet.
	Canadians don't have that.
	They can liberalize their health care system so that the government controls all health care, knowing full well that any Canadian with a few bucks in his pocket can always go to the United States and get health care here.
	Very easy to say we'll have socialized medicine and have the government be a single payer and provide lousy quality, because people can always go to the United States if they really do need serious medical care.
	So it's very, very easy for Canada to be a Canadian.
	Very easy to establish all these liberal positions.
	Add to that the fact that 95% of the country is uninhabitable, but energy rich and its economy is going to be fine.
	Plus, they buy all these products that are marketed by the American media.
	even under that backdrop.
	While we've tried to portray Canada as this liberal paradise, it's the Canadian people that have apparently had enough.
	They want longer sentences for criminals.
	They're beginning to see some of the crime problems we've had in the United States.
	They want a tax cut.
	They're embracing all of the things that American conservatives have advocated for years.
	My name is Mark Belling, and I'm sitting in for Rush.
	Mark Belling sitting in for Rush.
	Just thinking about that story I did about Canada.
	Things are getting all upside down here.
	America may elect Hillary president just as the Canadians go conservative.
	You know what that means?
	If this happens, if Hillary wins and the Canadians get a conservative in is their prime minister, it means that all of us are going to have to start going to Canada for our health care.
	She'll socialize the medicine here, they'll get it fixed up there, and we'll all be running north for our health care instead of the other way around.

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