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Jan. 18, 2006 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:26
January 18, 2006, Wednesday, Hour #3
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Thanks, Johnny Donovan.
Nice to be here behind the Golden EIB microphone at the East Coast Office of the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies, where there's never a final exam, but we are tested daily.
You can log on to rushlimbaugh.com and check out Rush at the Bob Hope Desert Classic.
And also, you can call us at 800-282-2882, 800-282-2882, with an excellent opportunity to speak to some of the people in the news making the news behind the news.
And that would include our next guest.
And we have a limited amount of time with him, so we want to get to him right away.
And frankly, I want to get to your calls right away at 800-282-2882 as we welcome in Ambassador L. Paul Bremer III.
Ambassador Bremer, it is indeed a pleasure and a privilege to welcome you to the Rush Limbaugh program.
My name is Paul W. Smith.
Thank you, Paul.
It's good to be with you.
I know you're out and about, and you're doing a lot.
In fact, today is Wednesday.
Tomorrow, you'll be, in fact, in my neck of the woods in Detroit, Michigan.
Should I be back where I should be back home?
You'll be speaking at the excellent Detroit Economic Club.
And, in fact, you'll be introduced by my boss, Mike Feasey from WJR.
Well, good.
So there you are.
It's a small world after all, isn't it?
Do you feel, you know, you got the administration worried that you might say something that'll hurt the president.
You got the other side worried that you will say something that'll help the president.
Do you ever feel like, like George Goebel used to say years ago, the whole world's a tuxedo and you're a pair of brown shoes?
Well, yeah, I suppose.
I basically am trying in the book and in my comments on the book to help Americans understand the very great task we faced over there as the Coalition Provisional Authority.
You had a great task, and from everything I can tell, you did a great job.
The book is my year in Iraq.
I think most people know that by now because you've been making the rounds, although this is an excellent opportunity for them to actually speak directly with you if they have any questions at 800-282-2882.
And you've cleared up some questions that people had.
One of the biggest questions, and one of the things people tried to hang on you, Ambassador Bremer, was that you should never have disbanded the Iraqi army.
Well, you've cleared that up pretty well in the book.
Yeah, it sort of has reached the level of urban mythology.
Basically, there was no army to disband.
I think the choice of words disbanding in retrospect was a poor choice.
The army essentially, in the Pentagon's terms, self-demobilized.
They just went home.
They weren't there.
They were Shia conscripts, Shia draftees, and they didn't want to serve under their brutal Sunni officers, and they went home.
So the only question that we faced was whether we should try to recall the Army.
But you've got to remember that the Army was the main instrument of Saddam's brutality against the Kurds during the 80s when they killed tens of thousands of them, including with chemical weapons, and against the Shia when after the first Gulf War, the Army swept through the towns, Shia towns south of Baghdad, and swept up men, women, and children, threw them on the back of pickup trucks, drove them into fields, and machine-gunned them.
So the Army was bringing back the army would have meant effectively, in the eyes of 80% of the population, that's what the Kurds and the Shia make up, would have meant effectively bringing back the main instrument of Saddam's brutality, which obviously is not why we sent Americans halfway around the world to liberate Iraq.
You have said also, first of all, they tried to say that you were saying we needed more troops, and that was contrary to what had been said all along the way by the president and others who kept saying we had plenty of troops.
You never did say we didn't have enough troops.
I think one of the things that you talk about very early on in the book is the chaos as you were coming in to your new assignment, and that that is that it had a lot to do with the rules of engagement that our troops had.
They should have been shooting to kill those looters.
Well, I felt we should, yes.
Actually, you're right.
I mean, there was a pretty chaotic situation in Baghdad, a lot of looting going on, which did not only economic damage, but terrible political damage, gave me impression we didn't care about law and order.
We had 40,000 troops in and around Baghdad at that time, so it wasn't that we didn't have the troops, it's that they didn't have the orders to kill these guys.
And that's truly unfortunate.
And how much of that did you face, which was really PR in the PR handling back in Washington?
How much of that caused you difficulty?
Well, I raised the question of shooting looters in my very first staff meeting, and someone of the members of the staff immediately leaked it to the press and said it was an outrageous thing.
And I, in retrospect, I should have nonetheless insisted.
I should have said, look, I should have just taken the heat in the press for saying shoot the looters.
I believe it would have been a much better situation had we, right from the start, really cracked down hard on law and order, because after all, that's what governments are for.
Primarily, they've got to at least provide law and order.
Let's get to some of our callers because we have you for a limited amount of time, and I promised that they'd have a chance to speak directly with you, Ambassador El Paul Bremer III, My Year in Iraq, The Struggle to Build a Future of Hope, and the telephone number 800-282-2882-800-282-2882 as we welcome Don on his cell phone from Cleveland, Ohio.
Don?
Well, Mr. Bremer, pleasure to talk to you.
I have a question regarding the reason why, first of all, it seems that you were put in a position to be the scapegoat for a lot of things that were happening early on.
And also, why do you think you were transitioned out of that job that you had that I thought was going along very well, even though the odds were at that time even more insurmountable than they may even be today?
It seems like night and day.
Well, I don't know about scapegoating.
I mean, I take responsibility for the decisions I made.
I stand by them.
Some of them were not good.
You know, I must tell you very quickly, I have to insert this in case I miss it.
You've admitted you've made some mistakes.
Right.
Which the administration has been loath to do because they also know what happens here when you admit a mistake.
People run with it and run it into the ground.
But it is refreshing to hear somebody say there were some mistakes made in Iraq.
Yeah, and I'm pretty frank about that.
We were facing one of the most dramatic collapses of any government in the world in recent decades, and it was very chaotic.
We had a major problem with the economy, with the political situation, and of course with security.
And I was making lots, dozens and dozens of decisions every day, and it would be a miracle if they were all right.
They wouldn't be.
I mean, we were all human.
But on the question of my transitioning, I mean, basically, I went over there to run the occupation, and as soon as the occupation was over, I left.
It was my job to work myself out of a job, and never was there a happier occupier than me the day I got on the plane to leave 14 months later.
So it wasn't like he was kicked out, Don.
I don't know if that's what you're doing.
I definitely worked my way out of a job with great pleasure.
He wanted to get out of there.
You don't regret being there, do you?
Not at all.
I mean, I don't know.
You're just glad to get out of there.
I have to say, I mean, Paul, let's be honest, there were days when I wondered what in God's name have I got myself into here.
But no, I don't regret it.
I don't think people completely understand the conditions.
And we had the opportunity.
Dan Sr. was on my show on WJR in Detroit often representing you well.
But we also had the connection of Michigan State University's Peter McPherson, who was brought in to create a brand new currency.
And the conditions in which you guys worked on a daily basis.
Now, given our soldiers are facing those conditions every day as well, but they were appalling.
Yeah, we were people like Peter and the staff that he had with him were working 18 to 20 hours a day, seven days a week.
It was just nonstop, and we had regular mortar and rocket attacks.
It was dangerous.
And by the way, all of these people, including Peter, were volunteers, every single one of them.
They were a really brave, wonderful group of Americans.
Absolutely correct.
Let's go to Jesse in Idaho here on the Rush Limbaugh Show.
Hey, Ambassador Bremer, it's a pleasure to speak with you.
And you, Paul, as well.
Thanks.
I saw you on the Daily Show last night, or it was actually, yeah, it was last night, I believe.
I thought you kept a real even keel, and I was real proud of you.
And I wonder, you seem to take attack.
A lot of ex-administration officials will turn on the president and on the current administration.
And you don't.
And I congratulate you for that.
How do you deal with, I'm sure you get a lot of pressure from the left, from people, to, well, tell us how it really was, like it isn't how you say it is.
So how do you deal with that?
Well, let me just state at the outset.
I supported the liberation of Iraq when I was a businessman.
I was a private citizen before I went over to Iraq and came back in government.
So I believed and still believe that we did a noble thing by liberating 27 million Iraqis.
I basically think the best way to deal with the kinds of pressures you're talking about is to simply tell it the way it was, which is what I try to do in the book.
And, you know, people can reach their own conclusions and can criticize what we did.
Fair enough.
As I said, I don't think we were 100% right.
But I think on the broadest sense, we did the right thing.
And I believe the president is on the right track now.
And he was very clear and firm and steady, as you'll see if you read the book, throughout all the various crises we had.
And, you know, to Jesse's point, and it's a good one, you haven't turned on the administration.
Frankly, if you wanted a key to getting even more press and more attention, that's all you really had to do, Mr. Ambassador, was to throw out a couple of tidbits that turned on the president or on the administration.
And you know that the national media, the mainstream media, if you will, would have been all over it and given you even more publicity.
Well, yeah, all I would have had to do was break with my own honesty, minor problems.
And I'm glad you haven't.
Stay with us.
You can talk to this honest Ambassador, El Paul Bremer III, here on the Rush Limbaugh Show.
Up next.
We continue on the Rush Limbaugh program, and we have with us Ambassador El Paul Bremer III.
His book is My Year in Iraq, The Struggle to Build a Future of Hope.
You're speaking directly to him at 800-282-2882.
That's 800-282-2882.
Ambassador Bremer, how's Iraq look to you today?
How's it look now, specifically politically and economically?
Well, I think it looks a lot better than the impression you get if you just turn on your television set at night.
There is still, obviously, a lot of violence, but look at what they've done in the political sphere.
They followed a path that we laid out for them two years ago, writing an interim constitution, getting sovereignty, holding these three elections last year, including approving a new constitution.
All these things, by the way, all of the armchair experts back in Washington and New York said they would never do it.
And they've done it.
They followed that path every step of the way, including in this election in December, by the way, although the terrorists said if you vote, you die, so they were taking their life in their hands to vote, a higher percentage of Iraqis voted in that election than have voted in any American presidential election since McKinley beat Brian.
Which is embarrassing, but it's true.
And people say sometimes to me, why are we trying to impose democracy on the Iraqis?
Impose it?
My God, here they are putting their life on their line, turning out at more than 70 percent in the third election in a year.
These people want to rule themselves.
Now, I'm not naive.
I don't think it's going to be a smooth ride.
There are going to be bumps.
There are going to be problems.
They've got to put together a government of national unity now.
We're going to see the kind of maneuvering that we see in parliamentary democracies, older parliamentary democracies.
But I think we should give them credit for coming a very long way in two years, having spent 40 years under this brutal dictator and another 10 years before that under other military governments.
I mean, it's been a long time since they've had these kinds of freedoms.
The economy is the untold story.
It's doing very well.
The per capita income has doubled in the last two years, and the International Monetary Fund estimates the economy will grow 17 percent this year, 17 percent.
That's pretty good.
It is.
And you know what the administration could have done a better job of, still can, is that we were not there to defeat a country when we went into Iraq.
We were there to defeat a hated regime.
And we did very fast, three weeks, I guess.
And it's something that they've been trying to do for some 30 years.
So I don't know that we've been pounding that home.
And when the average Iraqi woke up, as you've said before, Ambassador, you know, Saddam is gone.
They're delighted.
They look out, and then they see a bunch of American troops, and they're called occupiers.
And then there's the concern and a more challenging problem of what to do next.
Yeah, and I've said also that the speed of our victory, this three-week victory, which really is a tribute to the men and women in our armed forces, and I might add to Secretary Rumsfeld's transformation of the military.
After all, he's the one who said we need a faster, more mobile military.
Right, and we couldn't fix the power supply in three weeks, so we looked like losers.
Yeah.
And their power supply wasn't working before we went in there.
No, they were producing about 60 percent of demand, and it was disguised because what Saddam did was he basically robbed power from the provinces to feed it into Baghdad.
So Baghdad would get 16 or 17 hours of power a day, but down in the south in Basra, they were getting maybe two hours a day.
One of the things I did was say, look, we've got to have a more equitable sharing of this very limited power.
And of course, that meant Baghdad had to get less power.
You can make an argument we shouldn't have done that to the capital.
But, you know, we were responsible for the whole city, the whole country.
Let's go to Kathy in Toledo, Ohio, on the Rush Schlimbaugh program with Ambassador L. Paul Bremer III.
Kathy?
Ambassador Bremer, it's a pleasure to speak to you.
Can you speak to the issue of the extent to which Iran has been involved in the insurgency and trying to make Iraq ungovernable so that a democracy can't flourish?
The reason I ask the question is that I think that so many Americans see Iran as a separate issue when in fact I believe they've been kind of like what's been termed the head of the snake from the very beginning, from the 70s onwards.
Can you speak to that issue?
Good question, Kathy.
It is true that the Iranians have not played a helpful role in Iraq.
They've been meddling in the South in particular using their intelligence services and their revolutionary guards, their special military forces.
I think one has to be a bit careful to distinguish, though, that from the insurgency is largely a Sunni, a product of a small percent of the Sunnis in the country who are actually over on the Syrian border.
And I think Syria's role has been much more active in the actual support of the insurgency than Iran's.
It's not to say that we shouldn't be concerned about Iran.
We should.
Plus, they've now got this nuclear weapon program going that is very concerning.
Absolutely very concerning.
So I wondered where you were going with that.
Wes is in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, on a cell phone.
Wes?
Hello, sir.
Ambassador Brenner, I want to thank you for your service to our nation, sir.
This is great getting the word out.
I appreciate all that.
I got two questions, sir, to help the folks get a little trust in what we were doing and what we are doing.
The first thing is when we measure the hundreds of thousands of bodies found in mass graves, the people who have the same old mantra about we shouldn't have gone in, the connection between that and the other question is about the weapons of mass destruction.
It's the same old thing we're hearing.
If there's any way possible, you could help the American public get a little more trust and to understand that it would not be difficult and was not difficult for those folks to either bury that stuff or take it to Syria or Iran or anywhere else.
Is there any way you can help the folks understand that?
Thank you, Wes.
Yeah, I talked to both of these subjects in my presentations, both before I did the book and now that I'm doing the book.
The mass graves are very moving.
I described in the first, or I think the first chapter of the book, a visit I made to the first of the big mass graves found just south of Baghdad in Hillep.
And your listeners will know or will remember that the Shia rose up against Saddam after the First Gulf War, and his army went into Shia villages with big, you know, flatbed trucks, gathered up Shia men, women, and children indiscriminately, drove them off into the fields outside these villages, machine-gunned them to death, and threw them into common graves.
The big grave in Hilla, the first one I visited about a week after I got there, was about the size of three American football fields.
And we estimated there were between 20 and 30,000 bodies, many of them very small children, quite obviously from the bones.
And we've now, until now, found 300 mass graves in Iraq.
He killed hundreds of thousands of his citizens.
And I think it is important to remind Americans what a terrible, terrible, awful regime this was, and what a horrible man Saddam was.
Now, on the weapons of mass destruction, first of all.
You know, if you would, because we're going to run out of time, I'm going to ask you to hold that thought and finish up.
And in fact, we're going to run out of time with you.
So when we come back, we will handle that very important question of weapons of mass destruction and also a clarification of just what we were dealing with with Saddam Hussein's Baath party.
He worshipped the Nazi Party.
That's what he admired the way Hitler used the party to control society.
There's so much more.
And we're going to cover it up next.
Thanks, Johnny Donovan.
And back to Ambassador L. Paul Bremer III.
His book is My Year in Iraq, The Struggle to Build a Future of Hope.
And Wes was asking, he's dropped off on his cell phone, Ambassador, about weapons of mass destruction, about the possibility that they were buried, that they were moved, sent away.
I want to hear, and Wes wants to hear what you have to say about WMDs.
There are three possibilities, and those are two of the three.
One, that they were buried.
This is a country the size of California.
And although we had people looking for a year and a half and didn't find anything, it's also true that in the course of that time we did find a fully buried MiG fighter jet, Russian fighter jet in the desert.
So, you know, it's a big place and you can hide big things.
And I like to remind people that you can put enough biological weapons in a foot locker to kill millions of people.
So we just don't know.
And we gave them so much notice before we actually went in.
People forget.
We were talking about it forever before we actually went in.
Well, effectively for 12 years.
We also saw reports that some of the stuff may have been smuggled into Syria.
It's possible.
Finally, it's possible that he didn't have the stuff.
But we do know from Charlie Dolpher, who was the last inspector, that he kept in place his programs, his people, and his equipment, and he intended to restart that program as soon as sanctions were lifted.
This much we do know.
All right.
Before we take another question.
Was there something else you wanted to add to that?
I'm sorry.
No, no, I think.
We might be able to squeeze a couple more calls in, but I want to ask you this because it's so much out there right now with Congressman Murthy and others who are trying to leave this parade to get our troops out.
Your take after having spent the time there that you did, Ambassador, on the withdrawal of U.S. troops?
Let me start by saying that I have a lot of respect for Congressman Murthy, whom I know and who visited me a couple of times in Iraq and whom I saw regularly when I came back.
You know, he's served his country with great distinction in the military service and in the Congress.
But on this one, I just think he's wrong.
We have got to finish this war, which means we've got to win it.
And we can't win the war if we set ourselves artificial deadlines or say we're going to start withdrawing before, in fact, the war is won.
Our strategy must be a strategy not for withdrawal, but for victory.
And when we have the victory, then the president can make the conclusions he needs about drawing down the troops.
But I think it would be a serious mistake to start setting deadlines now and start withdrawing until we're absolutely convinced we have won the war.
Give me an idea.
And I'm not trying to throw you a curveball, but best way you can, Ambassador, how do we know that we've won it?
When will we know we did?
Well, the president has laid out what I think are, in the speeches he made in December, a fairly clear, and I looked at him closely, the right metrics.
He says we have to have a stable, relatively stable, let's not exaggerate, a relatively stable democratic Iraq.
The security forces of Iraq should be capable of defending Iraq itself against internal and external enemies.
And thirdly, Iraq should not be a sanctuary for international terrorists who want to kill us.
And it seems to me those are pretty good metrics.
I haven't seen anybody who disagreed with them put forward better ones.
Maybe there are better ones.
They sound right to me.
All right, let's very quickly finish up with some of these folks who've been kindly holding.
Chris did we get to Chris?
Chris in Salisbury, Maryland.
Chris, you're on the Rush Limbaugh program with the Ambassador.
Thank you.
Good afternoon, Mr. Smith, Mr. Ambassador.
I would like to ask if you are concerned, as I am, about the indifference and the complacency, the lack of seriousness on the part of a lot of citizens as well as the majority of the Democrats.
And if we, God forbid, if we experience a cataclysmic event, a nuclear explosion, is that what it'll take to change their minds?
I sure hope not, but I think you're right to be a bit concerned.
I chaired the bipartisan National Commission on Terrorism, which studied terrorism.
And we reported to President Clinton in June of 2000, so 15 months before 9-11, that we faced a new terrorist threat.
And this was a bipartisan commission, a new terrorist threat of people who want to kill us in the tens of thousands.
We predicted they would attack and conduct mass casualty attacks on the American homeland.
You know, nobody paid much attention to that report until September 12th.
And it is a problem in any democracy to keep a sustained attention to this kind of a threat.
But we face a very serious threat.
Indifference is not going to win this war on terrorism.
We're going to have to be aggressive.
We're going to have to go after these guys.
I certainly would rather fight them in Iraq than fight them in the beautiful town of Salisbury, Maryland, which, by the way, is near my home.
Very good.
John is on his cell phone in Austin, Texas.
And you may be our last question for today.
Good afternoon, gentlemen.
Mr. Ambassador, I'm fully confident that we're going to succeed in Iraq.
I also talk very frequently with many arrogant people who think that we are the world superpower.
And I don't feel we are.
I feel Russia is just sitting on the sidelines, and China's got a lot to do with things.
But once democracy does take hold and the neighboring countries over there start to see just how good they could have it, how far do you think maybe Russia and China would go to prevent democracy from ever taking hold in Iran?
Well, that's a very good question.
I think the Russians are probably of two minds about Iran.
They obviously have to have some concerns about an Islamic state having nuclear weapons on their southern border, or at least on the border of their Muslim states.
And that has to be the one reason why they may cooperate now in putting pressure on Iran, though it remains to be seen.
The Chinese look at it differently and look at it in terms of energy, access to oil, because they are a major consumer of energy now, as you know, as their economy grows, and they want to get it wherever they can get it, whether it's in Central Asia or from Iran.
I think we will find the Chinese being less helpful than the Russians.
These questions are going to start to get answered when we get to the Security Council, as I expect we will hear in the weeks ahead.
My only hope, and I think it's very important what the President has said recently, that he does not take the military option off the table for dealing with Iran.
We're not going to bring the Iranians around to doing anything serious about dropping this program by showering them with Security Council resolutions.
They've got to see that there's a real potential that we may have to use military force.
I appreciate the call, John.
Very quickly, you're in the news again today, Ambassador L. Paul Bremer III.
Some question about U.S. intelligence focusing on those weapons of mass destruction, taking our eye off the ball with the insurgency.
Certainly, you expected an insurgency, maybe just not as strong as it was.
That's right.
And it wasn't that I thought we should stop looking for the weapons of mass destruction.
It was that the people we had who were attached to me in the mission there, the intelligence specialists, were just that.
They were specialists on WMD.
Those are different people.
You know, an expert in biological warfare is not somebody who can help you sort out the counterterrorist and terrorist threat.
So we needed to beef up our intelligence assets in Iraq to rebalance that.
And I pushed, as did the commander of CENTCOM, General John Abazay, we both felt it was important to beef up our intelligence because I say the resilience of the insurgency did surprise us.
What's next for you, Ambassador?
What are you going to do next?
Well, I don't really know.
I'm an unemployed author at the moment, flogging my book.
I'll just see what comes up.
I may get back in the private sector or maybe join a foundation or something.
The book, of course, is My Year in Iraq, The Struggle to Build a Future of Hope from a guy who spent 14 months there doing just that.
The Ambassador L. Paul Bremer III, we wish you good luck in your travels, talking to various groups like the Detroit Economic Club tomorrow.
And don't forget, my boss, Mike Feasey, will be introducing you.
Please put in a good word for me, will you?
Yeah, I will.
You want to raise?
Since you brought it up, Ambassador, absolutely.
Well, I'll see what I can do.
Thanks so much.
Safe travels to you, and thank you for serving our country with distinction, Ambassador.
Thank you so much.
Thank you, Paul.
Ambassador L. Paul Bremer III, Presidential Envoy to Iraq, the author of My Year in Iraq, and our guest here on the Rush Limbaugh Program.
I'm Paul W. Smith.
You know, we've covered a lot of different issues today on the program.
If there's something we missed or something you want to bring up, there's still time to call us at 800-282-2882.
That's 800-282-2882.
A couple of things in the news.
Oh, by the way, I mentioned earlier a couple of stories about Ray Nagan, the mayor of New Orleans, and I should point out that he apparently has said wisely that maybe he shouldn't have brought up the chocolate thing and the God thing.
So he's had second thoughts about those ridiculous remarks.
And by the way, I have stopped using the words idiot and stupid and stuff like that.
All you have to do is become, and you know what I'm talking about if you're a parent, all you have to do is become a parent of a two-and-a-half-year-old and use a word like stupid or idiot, and then four seconds later hear your little cute little, in my case, Sophie, say, stupid, idiot.
And you go, oh, man, I am going to have to.
So one of my resolutions is not to use those terms.
So I'm still searching for terms for Ray Neagan.
But anyway, he has retracted those ridiculous chocolate and God comments.
But Mike Mamone tells us it's too late.
Already, already on the internet, and you'll have to find it yourself, there's a place to buy t-shirts that say Willie Nagan and the Chocolate Factory.
You know, entrepreneurial spirit in these United States.
Willie Nagan and the chocolate factory.
Wait a second.
How does Mamon have time to find stuff like that on the internet when he's supposed to be working hard on the hardest working show on the radio?
Oh, it was after the show yesterday.
He claims it was after the show.
Certainly in the news, you know that the Supreme Court to justices have rejected the United States bid to block assisted suicide.
That is, that the Supreme Court removed the obstacle to state efforts to authorize physician-assisted suicide, ruling 6-3, that the John Ashcroft, former Attorney General, acted without legal authority when he threw the federal government's weight against the Death with Dignity Act in Oregon five years ago.
Now, that will be, people are now saying, I hear them when they're getting their cup of coffee or getting their glass of water at the water cooler, oh, the Supreme Court's for assisted suicide.
That's not what this means.
In fact, if the Supreme Court is doing what they're supposed to do, it's a very limited question that they took on.
In fact, the majority, Kennedy, Stevens, O'Connor, Souter, Ginsburg, Breyer, said the Controlled Substance Act's prescription requirement does not authorize the Attorney General to bar dispensing controlled substances for assisted suicide in the face of a state medical regime permitting such conduct.
That's what they said.
The dissenters, Scalia, Roberts, and Thomas, said virtually every relevant source of authoritative meaning confirms that the phrase legitimate medical purpose does not include intentionally assisting suicide.
Now, what they're going on, frankly, is precedent.
And up until this point in our lives, no one ever thought of the medical purpose of a prescription drug was to do anything but try to help people get better or ease their pain or help them live longer.
That's just been commonly held practice.
That's what we've believed it to be in this upside-down world of ours today.
Now it can mean, apparently, to intentionally assist suicide.
Now, it does leave open the opportunity for other states to join Oregon and feeling like they will get the blessings from the Supreme Court in this limited motion that they'll be able to do the same thing.
Time will tell what that will mean.
I don't know.
You and I have our own thoughts about that, and we will share them, I'm sure, on this very program in the days ahead.
Meanwhile, the Supreme Court ruling unanimously today that a lower court was wrong to strike down New Hampshire abortion restrictions, but steered clear of a major ruling on this issue.
The opinion written by retiring Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, they keep calling her a key swing vote at the court on abortion, whose retirement could soon start, rather, if the Senate confirms the nominee, of course, Judge Alito, which is what the Democrats are most concerned about.
The New Hampshire case had been expected to be much closer at the high court, but instead, justices ruled narrowly.
They said a lower court went too far by permanently blocking the law that requires a parent to be told before a daughter ends her pregnancy.
An appeals court must now reconsider the law, which requires that a parent be informed 48 hours before a minor child has an abortion, but makes no exception for a medical emergency that threatens the youth's health.
In what may be O'Connor's last ruling, thankfully, she said, in this case, the courts below chose the most blunt remedy.
She did say, under our cases, it would be unconstitutional to apply the act in a manner that subjects minors to significant health risks.
All right, so everybody believes that the health risks are important in a medical emergency.
What a lot of people don't agree on or don't get straight is how could we possibly think that our minor children who can't take an aspirin in a school should be able to get an abortion without their parents being informed.
I hate to boil it down to something as simple as that, but I guess I simply have to.
Let's go to Bo in Shreveport, Louisiana, and get some final thoughts here at 800-282-2882 on the Rush Limbaugh Show.
I'm Paul W. Smith.
Hello, Bo.
How are you doing, Paul?
I'm doing well.
I hope you're well, Bo.
You know, what really gets me about the whole double standard as far as Republicans and Democrats, conservatives, and liberals speaking is take the mayor of New Orleans there, Ray Nagan, and the chocolate statement.
Take Rayne Agan, please.
Punumpu.
Yes, please.
Let me tell you, a conservative couldn't get away with calling a city a chocolate city if he was standing in Hershey, Pennsylvania.
You know what, Bo?
You're absolutely right.
Because that would be all over the press.
Well, if he did.
You know, you point something out that we don't need to point out to this audience because this is the smartest audience in the world, radio talk show listeners, on this, your favorite radio station.
Hypocrisy is running rampant.
And we don't need to underscore that or point it out.
I think we all know it pretty well.
Thanks, Bo.
Appreciate that call as we check in with Martha, also in that area in New Orleans.
Hello, Martha.
Hi, Paul.
Hi, Martha.
How are you?
I'm fine.
I hope you're well.
I'm doing okay.
I just wanted to make a comment.
I just drove down Carrollton Avenue, and there were about 100 volunteers picking up garbage left over from the storm that the city can't afford to pay people to pick up.
And not one of them was chocolate.
They were all vanilla.
Well, that's because the mayor's program has not fully gone into effect where he is going to fully chocolatize New Orleans.
And you can get your t-shirt, Willie Nagan, and the Chocolate Factory somewhere online.
I just can't tell you where.
Comment about the levies?
Yes.
And why doesn't anyone ever talk about the levee committees that for years were supposed to be in charge of maintaining and keeping watch of them, and all of a sudden the levy committees were out building parks and all kinds of other things.
They weren't taking care of the levees.
Yeah, well, and I lived right near the 17th Street Canal.
I haven't been able to live in my house for five months.
You don't hear anybody in my neighborhood saying, yeah, I heard them blow it up.
I saw it.
You know, it's just ridiculous.
Well, it is ridiculous.
But Martha, you've slammed the lid on that one, and I appreciate it right from New Orleans.
Thanks for your call.
We'll have some final thoughts and comments here on the Rush Limbaugh Show in just a moment.
Is that Hit the Road, Jack?
Kind of?
Is that no, not at all?
It kind of reminds me a little bit of Hit the Road, Jack, but that's a good thing, huh?
All right.
You guys missed it while all that was happening in there.
You're stacking up everything for tomorrow's show and getting everything ready.
Did you see there, I think it's CNN, that William Shatner has just sold his kidney stone for charity?
Did you miss that?
Well, I'm glad I was here to tell you about it.
That's what was just on these big screens.
That's just what was here, the breaking news at the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.
It's been my pleasure and privilege to be behind the Golden EIB microphone.
Thanks to the team, Mike Mamone, Brett Winterbull, and of course the executive producer Kit Carson, and Rush Limbaugh, who has put this team together and keeps you informed and entertained on a daily basis.
He's out at the Bob Hope Desert Classic.
I'll look forward to spending some more time with you tomorrow in our Excellence in Broadcasting Network right here on your favorite radio station.
Make it a great day.
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