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Jan. 16, 2006 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:25
January 16, 2006, Monday, Hour #2
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I ripped on the Democrats last hour, and I am going to uh there's going to be some equal time this hour.
I'm going to express some grave concerns about what's going on with Republicans in Congress, but I just don't want to lead the hour with it, so I have to do something stupid first.
Who's going to win the Super Bowl?
Not only does no one know, not only does no one know.
You can't get a consensus as to who the best quarterback is of the four remaining teams.
You've got Plummer of Denver, Rothesberger of the Steelers, and the NFC Hasselbeck of the Seahawks and Delome of Carolina.
You could argue forever about which of the four is the best quarterback.
Sets things up to be very, very good, although not the juiciest matchups.
Did you watch the ending of that Indy Pittsburgh game yesterday?
I mean, Indianapolis is beaten.
They get stopped on downs and they turn the ball over to Pittsburgh on what, the three, the two-yard line?
They give the ball to the Steelers with a minute left, and Pittsburgh almost fumbles the ball away.
Bettis, who hasn't fumbled all year, fumbles the ball, and an indie defensive back picks it up and starts running the opposite way for the touchdown.
You know why he didn't make it?
He was run down by the quarterback Rothisberger.
Nick Harper was the uh colt who picked up the ball instead of heading for the other ends.
You know why he didn't make it.
Do you know why he didn't make it?
It was as his wife stabbed him over the weekend.
He was stabbed in the knee by his wife.
Are you telling me that didn't slow him down at least somewhat?
She's still in jail.
Should they say it was an argument and she was swinging the knife wildly and hit his knee by mistake?
Whatever that means, she's in jail, he played anyway.
Now, after being stabbed in the knee by his wife, he's got a chance to score in what would have this would have been the Franco Harris play of this decade.
Would have been America play had he run 98, 99 yards for a touchdown.
Instead, he's run down by the other teams.
This defensive backs don't get run down by quarterbacks.
I'm telling you, he was slowed down by the stab wound to his knee.
The closest thing I can relate this to is when uh Tanya Harding had her husband and that other goon kneecap Nancy Kerrigan.
Remember that?
It's the closest thing I can relate it to.
All right, I told you it was going to be stupid.
I didn't say it wasn't going to be stupid, so if your response is, you shouldn't do something that stupid on Russia's show, I at least told you it was going to be stupid.
Now I want to talk about the Republicans.
For those of you who did not hear the first hour.
I essentially mocked what has become of the Democratic Party, the miserable performance of Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee in trying to make mountains out of molehill issues with regard to Sam Alito, actually sending Teddy Kennedy up to be the arbiter of ethics.
Joe Biden managing to get out only five questions in 30 minutes because his questions lasted so much longer than Alito's answers.
But there are problems with the Republicans in Congress.
I'm not a Republican.
I'm a conservative.
That means it's the Republican Party that has to carry the issues that I care about.
I almost always vote for Republicans because I am a conservative.
There are problems there with the Republicans right now.
I initially dismissed the whole Tom Delay story looked like a political witch hunt prosecutor in Texas, which it probably is.
But there is an aspect to all of this that is troubling, and that is the really incestuous relationship that has developed between a bunch of lobbyists who don't seem to believe in anything other than what their clients pay to believe them in, and a lot of Republican leaders in Congress.
I don't think that this problem has affected the Bush administration, but it has affected the leadership of Congress, particularly on the House side, and the House was the place where all the ideas were coming from.
You know, the House was controlled by Democrats forever.
Then Gingrich and the gang of ninety-four came in with the contract with America, which was a set of ideas.
They ran on him, and they've never really looked back.
But some of those guys, and they are Almost all guys have now been there for a long time and they've gotten very comfortable.
There's even a term for it.
They call it going native.
In other words, they're removed sufficiently long from their own districts, and for that matter, from the passion that compelled them to run in the first place, and they become part of this Washington culture.
And I know how it happens.
You've got a lot of really bright people with a lot of power.
And they associate themselves with people who have a lot of money.
The people who are bright and have a lot of power have this sense of jealousy that they don't have a little more of that money.
So they get close to the people who do have money, and maybe they're willing to accept a trip.
Legal, it is legal, or get to hang out and do things, or go to a restaurant that they otherwise might not have been able to go to, and they get sucked in, and the next thing you know, they're part of that same insider establishment that those of us on the right have mocked forever.
It's not the same people.
They're not going to dinner parties with Tim Russert, Tom Brokow, and Maureen Dowd.
But it was the Jack Abramovs of the world.
And this new culture of Republican lobbyists who largely only lobbied the Republicans in Congress, and they got seduced by it.
And I think that they have forgotten the reason they were there in the first place.
Let's be honest.
The budgets right now that are coming out of Congress, particularly the special appropriations bills, aren't much better than the ones that were coming out of the Tip O'Neill Congress.
There might not be quite as much pork in there, but there's still a lot of it.
In the meantime, actual policy issues, they're not coming from this Congress.
Not only is President Bush having a hard time getting his domestic agenda enacted, there's nothing coming out of the Congress.
Nothing at all.
There's a real malaise there.
And it may threaten the Republican majority in the House and perhaps even in the Senate.
Now the Democrats are licking their chops on this whole ethics thing.
They think they can turn the Abramov situation against the Republicans.
Maybe they can, maybe they can't.
In fairness, a whole lot of Democrats got Abramov money.
And in fairness, the Democrats are even better pork barrelers than are the Republicans.
Nonetheless, they're going to try to run with this, and the Republicans have a vulnerability that they may not realize.
And what I think they have to do is return to the roots that put them in power in the first place.
The Republicans gained control of the House in 94 and have kept it ever since they ran on ideas that most Americans support.
Most Americans support tax cuts.
Most Americans do have concerns about the direction the culture is leading in.
Most Americans support the president in the war on terror.
Most Americans believe in the private sector and they believe in the power of the individual.
I think a lot of these Republicans who initially ran for Congress against these institutionalized Democrats who had been there forever, have forgotten this.
The delay situation is an obvious example of it, but there's more.
You just don't feel the same spark and passion out of the institution that was there a few years ago.
There's going to be a real test in the next several days.
Delay is resigning as majority leader, which is the number two and arguably even number one position on the House Republican side.
Delay certainly seemed to have more power than the Speaker Dennis Hastard.
So if the majority leader is where the power is and delay is now gone, they've got to choose a new majority leader.
There had been two candidates for the position, Ray Blunt and John Boehner.
Both of whom are fine.
There's no hint of scandal with regard to either.
Blunt appears to be rather non-ideological.
I guess he's a conservative.
He's somewhere in the mainstream.
He's fine.
there's nothing wrong with him.
John Boehner is probably conservative as well.
He has spoken conservatively on issues when he's been interviewed.
He talks about conservative beliefs and so on.
But they are both part of the process and they've both been there a very long time.
Blunt himself has been quoted as saying that he likes earmarks, what earmarks are, or essentially Washington speak for giving special funding to a special pork barrel project.
They're bo they're both guys, well, they're not bribes.
They're not bribes, what they are as a way of bringing money back home to the district, taking care of a special need, and you can rationalize doing it.
The problem is if that's something that is your main focus for being in Congress, as opposed to trying to do things that are important to this country, you've become tainted.
You've become cynical, you're no longer of much use, and you're certainly not part of any kind of a movement.
So here you've got, on the one hand, Boehner, and on the other hand, Blunt running for this position, and they are, and I want to make it clear, I'm not suggesting they're tainted by scandal, they are not.
They're both decent guys.
But neither would be considered a reformer.
There is now a third option.
He's a congressman from Arizona, his name is John Shadig.
And he's very, very blunt, so to speak, about why he's running against Blunt and Boehner.
He says we've got to go back to pressing issues.
In fact, there's a quote in today's Wall Street Journal in a column by Stephen Moore from Shadig, quote, the American people are with us on our substantive policy agenda and our Reaganite values, but are becoming repulsed by our behavior.
Now the fact that he would say that, as he is seeking to lead Republicans, tells me that he's exactly the right person for the job.
He's somebody who does recognize that there is a problem here.
I want to quote from Stephen Moore's column about this.
Winner lose Mr. Shadig's candidacy will be a measuring rod of just how much trouble congressional Republicans really think they're in.
It will also serve as a leading indicator of whether House Conservatives will devote the next nine months of this term to slamming the brakes on a domestic legislative policy that is careened off course.
The era when Republicans promise to make governments smaller and smarter by abolishing hundreds of obsolete federal agencies seems to be a distant memory now in this era of bridges to nowhere.
In the last five years, Republicans have enacted the largest increase in entitlement spending in three decades, doubled the education budget, nearly tripled the number of earmarked spending projects, and turned a blind eye on toward the corrosive culture of corruption on Capitol Hill that seems so eerily reminiscent of the final days of Democratic rule in the House.
Shadow may not win this race, but if the conservatives don't embrace his message of reform and renewal, voters might demote them to majority of the minority.
I think they're right.
I think they're right.
The House Republicans over the last few years, with Hastert, who doesn't seem to care about any issues, he merely seems to be interested in advancing whatever the agenda of the day is, and DeLay, who is a brilliant guy, and who got a whole lot of Republicans elected, but lost his way, became more interested in power than in policy.
Those Republicans really are resembling what the Democrats in Congress became in the late eighties and the early nineties.
Is there not a similarity between Hastard and Tip O'Neill?
And is there not a similarity between Jim Wright and Tom DeLay?
It's rather eerie, but I see it.
And I think the Republicans are running the risk of losing the House and losing that image of being the party of reform and new ideas if they aren't willing to embrace new leadership.
Every one of those Republicans in the House is going to have a vote on who the majority leader is.
And it's going to be telling.
Are they going to exchange a vote in exchange for a committee chairmanship or support on some special pork barrel project?
Or are they going to look inward and ask themselves what has become of us?
If they ask that, and if they're willing to say that new Congressmen like Shadow, actually he's not new, but he's not somebody who's bought in to this bad mentality out there.
Are we going to say that guys like Shadig, Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, and others who are still focused on issues and still have energy that this is our future?
I think this will be a very, very telling vote.
My name is Mark Elling, and I'm sitting in for Rush.
I'm Mark Belling sitting in for Rush Limbaugh.
In the last new idea to come out of the Republican Congress.
And I do realize that when you have the presidency, it's the role of the president to propose ideas, and you're largely carrying the president's agenda, but you just don't see a lot of intellectual firepower coming out of the Republicans, particularly on the House side instead.
They seem to be most interested in getting money for projects for their districts and getting reelected.
And I want to make it clear, I am not suggesting that they are as bad as the Democrats got before they were thrown out.
Jim Wright and Tom DeLay are not the same guy.
Jim Wright faced serious allegations.
Tom DeLay is facing trumped up allegations, but Tom DeLay was also way too close to Abramov, and Tom DeLay was no longer the same guy that he was when he was moving into a position of power.
And I do think that the Republicans do need to take a long look at themselves and ask if this is what they want their congressional leadership to be.
And they do have a guy who's laying the gauntlet down in Shattuck.
It's not all that different from in the early nineties when the Republican leadership of the time led by Bob Michael, House Speaker, actually House Minority Leader, was challenged by the aggressive young Bulls led by Newt Gingrich and Dick Army.
And they took control of the party.
That was very, very powerful.
It was important.
And I think they may want to think about doing it again.
The alternative is the Democrats become the party that offers ideas, bad, but they'll at least have some of them to Beach Park, Illinois.
Joe, Joe, you're on Russia's program with Mark Belling.
Yeah, hi, Mark.
Well, hey, you know, there's no way that the Republicans are ever going to be as bad as the Democrats just because of Ted Kennedy.
I mean, he's a mafia princeling, for God's sake.
But the real problem, as far as I can see with what's going on right now, is that we're still subject to the same games that uh we were subject to before.
Um that is um any po and any politician will tell you this.
You're if you're in a Democrat district, they're not going to replace you with a Republican very easily.
That's that's gotta that takes a miracle.
And if you're in a Republican district, they're not gonna replace you with a a Democrat very easily.
That that also takes a miracle.
But what they will do is in the primary, they will fund your challenger.
The corporations will fund you the challenger to you to your seat.
Now, it doesn't matter who it is who makes it past the primary, because anybody who makes it.
Well, yeah, it's I believe what needs to happen is that more of these Republicans need to face challenges in their own primaries.
You're right.
Most House districts in this country, there are about thirty-five to forty that are swing districts that will determine which party gets control of the Congress.
The other four hundred or so of them are either overwhelmingly Republican or overwhelmingly Democratic.
And if once you get elected the first time around, for most of them you're probably safe.
So there is no real check on the part of the voters against this.
It would have been great if some of these Republicans who I think have had too much of the power Kool-Aid and were too busy hanging around with lobbyists, then trying to advance real issues and supporting an actual agenda if they did have a challenge within their own primary.
And I do think as time goes on, that more of this is going to happen.
There are a lot of new dynamics out there.
There is talk radio, there is the internet, there are bloggers, and Republicans who have gotten too fat, who have gotten too comfortable, may end up finding themselves being challenged.
But in the meantime, there's a culture over there that is somewhat reminiscent of how the Democrats ran Congress, and it needs to be stopped.
Anybody who gets past the primary is lobbyist approved, and Russia said this, and I'm I'm a complete agreement with him on it.
The only way you're going to clean up politics is if the you have total transparency, and the only People allowed to donate are actual registered voters who actually donate to their district because that's the way you put them back under the control of the electorate.
Well, there's always going to be ways to get around that.
See, I don't buy that.
I've never bought any of that campaign finance stuff.
The fact of the matter is that if you are elected, you still do have a free will.
You can pursue an agenda when you are in power, and I think most of these people who ran for Congress did so with the best of motives and the best of intentions.
They went there because they believed in things.
They wanted to change America, they support a strong economy, they support the free the free market, they support lower tax rates, and they believe that there is a future for our country.
Unfortunately, many of them have been seduced by power and no longer seem as interested in those ideas as they are in doing well for themselves and for their districts.
Mark Belling's sitting in for Rush.
How many people call up and complain that Russia isn't here when Russia's not here?
You guys get a lot of that?
I know you would keep it from me because you don't want to upset my ego.
Six.
Is that six per day, or is it six per hour?
Uh Rush, in fact, is uh he's in the desert, right?
For the for the Bob Hope classic, which he is he plays in just about every year.
Is Rush good?
When he hasn't played for a while, he is.
When he practices that messes him up.
Uh, that's great tournament.
I I would love to be important enough to be able to be in that tournament.
That's the Bob Hope Desert Classic.
They hold it every year in uh I think they play it on two or three over two or three different courses out in the uh Palm Springs Palm Desert area.
So in any event, I'm looking at Rush Limbaugh.com, which is your way of keeping track of everything that Rush likes to talk about, even when he is not here, and I see the guest host schedule for the week.
It says Monday, Tuesday, Mark Belling.
Wednesday, Thursday, Paul W. Smith, Friday, Walter E. Williams.
So what?
Now we all need initials.
I don't have an initial in there.
Should I throw in my initial rush?
Does it use an initial?
So what do these guys need need to use their initials?
My middle initial is C. You don't want to know.
It's not interesting.
It's not interesting.
All right, I want to turn my attention to Pakistan.
This will really surprise you.
There are anti-American protests being held there.
Is there any nation in which there isn't an anti-American protest?
Wouldn't you like just once to pick up the paper and read in the Philippines that they're holding a protest against Japan or something like that?
Instead, every time there's an anti and then fill in the blank, protest in another country, it's always aimed at the United States.
Now it is true.
In Pakistan, they do demonstrate against India all the time, and in India they almost always demonstrate against Pakistan.
But the Pakistanis are mad at us.
There was this attack on Friday, this strike really, apparently led by the CIA, although we haven't acknowledged that yet, that was aimed at the number two person in Al Qaeda, uh Osama bin Laden's right-hand man, Iman Al Zawahiri.
Initially we thought we got him.
It now appears as though we haven't.
Although the Bush administration hasn't officially commented on any of this, including state that we were responsible or behind this attack, although it appears to have been a CIA operation, a commando strike.
They apparently thought he was attending a dinner party, and they hit the building where the party was being held.
He apparently was not there.
This is all apparently because we don't know anything for certain, but there are 17 people who are dead and they are being described as civilians.
And the Pakistanis are furious.
The leadership of the Pakistani government is criticizing the United States.
Here's the situation we face.
Because of the potential that people who might be innocent, and I say might, I'm going to get to that in a minute, might be innocent, might be hurt.
Does that mean that we don't gun for Al Qaeda leaders?
This is a no-win situation.
This is an organization that not only and this, I don't people well, they get it to us.
It's more than that.
It's not just that Al Qaeda, and remember, this is the number two man in Al Qaeda.
It's not just that Al Qaeda inflicted the greatest hit on our country in our history.
It's not just that they killed all those people in the World Trade Center.
It's not just that they tried to bring down the Capitol and hit the Pentagon.
It's that they're still planning to do it.
It's that they're in Iraq, trying to stop democracy there.
It's that they are plotting with all of their resources to develop dirty bombs and germ warfare and maybe inflict another massive hit on the United States.
They are out to kill us.
So what are we supposed to do when we have the potential of weakening that organization?
It's real real easy to Monday morning quarterback this.
Well, we should have known for certain that he was there before we launched the strike.
That's real easy to say.
If we do that, we're probably never going to act.
It's not like Al Qaeda is posting its daily schedule on the internet.
Now I will grant you that it is a little troubling that we do apparently have another case of bad intelligence and that there is a CIA link here.
I don't know if the CIA is fixed.
Maybe this was Joe Wilson's report that led us onto the belief that El Zawahiri was in this uh in this building.
There is a report today that our source of information was the Pakistanis themselves.
If that's the case, we were operating off of intelligence gathered by the Pakistani government, and Pakistan has said they don't want American military action in their country, but they have also said that it's fair game to go and hunt for leaders of Al-Qaeda that are there.
In this case, we went a step farther than hunting, we actually tried an attack.
But it was apparently based on information that we got from Pakistan.
And I think it is reasonable to act on that.
In a perfect world, in a perfect world, we will only target our enemies when we have a clear shot at them.
But it's not a perfect world.
El Qaeda operates in the shadows.
Al Qaeda isn't a vague threat.
They are a deadly threat.
They are a real threat.
They want to kill us and they've shown the ability to do so.
I'm willing to support our government in our in its attempt to try to cripple this organization.
As for the quote, 17 civilians, and that's how they're being described, who have been killed.
What is a civilian?
What is a civilian?
Al Qaeda isn't a military organization.
They don't wear uniforms.
These were certainly people who are planning to meet with the number two person in Al Qaeda.
We're told there are some women and there are some children who are involved.
The fact that someone is a woman certainly doesn't mean that they might not be an affiliate of a terror organization.
As for children being around, this is the reality of the situation.
these terrorist leaders tend to go, when they do go out in public, to places where there are other people, if for no other reason than to shield them.
I hope that this doesn't become in our country.
We're going to take our hits in Pakistan, and we're probably going to take our hits in France and Germany.
I hope this does not become another Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo, in which a bunch of Democrats run around and claim that we are killing people indiscriminately, we are acting irresponsibly.
If you're going to demand perfection in these operations, we may as well give up trying to fight back at Al Qaeda at all.
Now, I do think this.
I do think we ought to use our best efforts to make sure that if we strike, that the target is there.
That we ought not indiscriminately go into the volatile Middle East and start throwing bombs around where innocent people might be hit.
That ought to be a priority.
But it can't become something that negates ever trying to act.
I think it is perfectly fine to internally, and I'm not talking here about Democrats in Congress, but internally, the National Security Agency, the CIA, and the President investigate what we knew, why we made the decision to hit when we did, and question whether or not anyone screwed up.
Internally, that's fine.
I don't want a congressional witch on here, and I don't want this to become another situation in which...
we beat ourselves up for doing something wrong when our strike in the first place was a reasonable thing to do.
Cell phone in Memphis, Sam, you're on EIB with Mark Belling.
Hey, Mark, how are you doing?
I'm great.
Uh I'm gonna disagree with you on this one.
And uh I support the president.
I'm a registered Republican, I support his actions in the war and terror.
I'm not taking exception to this act because it's uh some philosophical difference with the president.
I just think this was a bad thing to do.
Why?
Well, uh if these 17 casualties were in truth civilians, and I'm not sure.
Well, yeah, but first of all, we gotta ask what does that mean?
I mean, what does the term civilian mean?
If you are you can be a member of Al Qaeda, but if you don't have a t-shirt on that says I'm in Al Qaeda, you still could be presumed to be, I suppose, a civilian.
I don't know what that terminology means.
It's being thrown around real, real loosely.
I I agree with that, and it's not defined.
But look at it this way.
Suppose this uh Zawahari fellow was giving a talk at a rotary luncheon in some small town in the United States.
Would you agree with dropping a bomb or a cruise missile on him under those circumstances?
No, but that's a bad question.
Because if he was giving a talk at a rotary meeting in the United States, it would mean that we knew he was here and he'd be getting out of the car with regard to Pakistan.
Remember where these Al Qaeda leaders are, they're in the mountains somewhere.
They might still be in Afghanistan, they might be in Pakistan, they're in hiding.
You only get certain opportunities to hit them.
If we had a chance to hit him on the way into the meeting, you or into the into this uh the this place that he went for dinner or we thought he was going to dinner, we should have done it in that fashion.
But sometimes it isn't that easy.
I suspect, and this is why I think it's perfectly appropriate to have an internal review.
I suspect that we got information from the Pakistanis that seem to be very, very good that he was in this building, and we moved on it.
I don't think that we can afford to have all sorts of caution and wring our hands and worry about will anyone be hurt before we ever act.
You've got to understand that the enemy that we are fighting here specifically targets and tries to kill civilians.
That is not what we do.
But in dealing with Al Qaeda, if we are going to fight back, there may sometimes be problems.
And I don't want this to become something in which our government is now afraid to ever try to strike against someone who is a leader of a terror organization for fear that someone innocent may be killed if, and it's a big if, if indeed someone innocent was killed in this particular attack.
Thank you for the call.
My name is Mark Belling sitting in for Rush Limbaugh.
I'm Mark Belling sitting in for Rush Limbaugh.
Brett has this theory that we have set unrealistic expectations for the CIA because of the TV show 24.
What's the guy's name in that Jack Bauer?
Is that the guy that Keefer South Sutherland plays?
I watched 20 minutes of 24 and I didn't like it, and I haven't watched it since.
Now everybody says it's like the greatest show in the history of television.
I don't know.
But apparently, in like one twenty-four-hour episode, which lasts a season, he knocks down terror plots and he does all these things.
So we have these expectations that the CIA could do that.
That's television.
On TV, the CIA has Jack Bauer.
In real life, we've got Valerie Plame and Joe Wilson.
There is a difference.
It's a little bit harder to uh cell phone in Philadelphia, West and West and you're on Russia's show with Mark Belling.
Mark, how are you doing?
I'm very thanks.
Yeah, this this Pakistan incident.
It's it's another example of the right-left argument uh and how the right unfortunately we're we're we're we're not uh stating our claim case clearly enough.
Uh first off, anybody that finds themselves in the company of Zawahari should be expecting a bomb to explode at any time.
Uh and that means his numerous wives or his children or anyone else.
Uh, you know, you should just consider you you're eating dinner with this guy, it could be your last fight.
And people have to understand this is a mass killer.
That's what He is.
He's the number two person in Al Qaeda.
He is a mass killer, and the people who are associating with him can't by any stretch of the imagination be deemed totally innocent unless you're talking about kids.
And I'm not suggesting that we should indiscriminately start throwing bombs around whenever we heal it here that somebody from Al Qaeda might be eating dinner.
But if you do have good information, I don't want us to be become so paralyzed that we don't act.
But but here's here's the problem, though.
Uh with the Abu club, uh the Guantanamo situation and various other things.
Uh we've lost the argument where we need to we do we need to tell uh the the entire uh world these people are not fighting under a flag.
They're not wearing uniforms, and therefore it is their behavior that is making life dangerous for ordinary citizens.
American soldiers wear their uniforms.
They make it quite clear.
If you want to hit me, this is what I'm wearing.
You can see it.
I am your target.
The fact that these people hide amongst civilians, uh, hold the meetings such as Dalla Holly was apparently having uh at private homes in neighborhoods.
They're the ones who are bringing this threat to civilians.
And that is why we should not be offering any Geneva convention covers to them.
We should be treating them as brutally as possible when we capture them, all so that we can convince them, hey, until you both start playing by the rules, we are gonna hurt you very badly.
Well, your point is excellent because they have invented new rules.
And this word, and I'm looking at all these newspapers today, they're all throwing around this word civilians.
I got the New York Times in front of me.
Uh now eighteen civilians.
What is a civilian?
Al Qaeda is not a military organization.
You can make the case, I suppose, that a member of Al Qaeda is a quote civilian.
I don't think they hand out membership cards.
So we we throw this word around and we imply that everything who was with him, everybody who was with him was somehow innocent when they probably were not, particularly when you consider what the purpose of the meeting was that he chose not to attend.
Now, part of this does have me worried, as since there are some reports that the information we got came from a Pakistani government source, there is some concern I have that somebody may have been setting us up somewhere, or that we don't know who we're supposed to be believing over there.
These are all things that I do think internally we should investigate, and this was, I think, probably a failure.
But I want that investigation to be internal so we can learn from it.
I don't want this to become another political thing in which in our country the people all the people who hate Bush use this as another excuse that paralyzes and uh paralyzes us in our attempt to go down and hunt down these members of Al-Qaeda.
Thank you for the call.
Anderson, South Carolina, Glenn.
Glenn, it's your turn on EIB.
Hey, Mark, good to talk to you.
Thank you.
Um, along the lines, you know, uh as I told you, Carl Screener, when uh President Bush after uh 9-11 made it clear that anybody that is has anything to do with terrorists or associates with them are considered enemies of the United States.
And you know, if the heat if I'm having dinner with somebody, whether you know how however the information got, you know, obviously they know each other.
And I think too, the second thing is they win, it's a win-win situation for them because they can fight our country from our own internal stupidness with our you know, the left is going off on everything.
That is that is the problem.
I just want the standard, I want the standard that we set to be a reasonable one that doesn't make us afraid to do what we may have to do in a world that right now is very, very unpleasant.
My name is Mark Belling sitting in for rush.
I'm Mark Belling sitting in for Rush.
You know, when I go back to Milwaukee, I get all these questions about what's it like doing Russia's show?
And the answer, of course, is that it isn't really like anything.
It's very, very hard to describe.
One thing that I have noticed that it is like is the staff tries to use weak guest hosts like me who don't know any better to put out all the material that you can't con Rush into doing because Russia's smart enough not to do it.
That yeah, that meatloaf thing from the last time I was here, there's all this stuff now that I know is going to do nothing but get me in trouble.
I naively thought that the role of the staff is to help the host not get into any trouble.
Instead, you're giving me all of this stuff.
There's a name change, and I made a mistake.
There's a story out there about name changing that just should not be done, but I'm being pushed into doing it, and it's a question of whether or not I'm going to have the willpower not to do it.
By the way, front page of today's New York Times, the mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg, is losing his Boston accent the longer he serves as mayor.
Am I losing my Wisconsin Midwestern twang as I do a national show?
Or have I managed to hang on to that?
One hour is still to come.
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