Feb. 23, 2006 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:35
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| Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast. | |
| They didn't hear any of that, did they? | |
| You just now turned the microphone on, right? | |
| Yeah, okay, good. | |
| Some things you you folks just shouldn't hear. | |
| You know, sometimes this program is like making sausage. | |
| You want to eat it, but you don't want to see it made. | |
| Greetings, welcome to the Rush Limbaugh program. | |
| Here we are on the Excellence in Broadcasting Network, prepared, uh, ladies and gentlemen, with our beefed up security after the threat from the Long Beach longshoremen yesterday. | |
| Our security remains beefed up. | |
| Don't worry, I am safe. | |
| Everything here is under control of the EIB Southern Command. | |
| Great to be with you. | |
| Telephone numbers 800 282-2882, and the uh email address is rush at EIB net.com. | |
| Uh I was fully expecting and hoping to be able to move on from the port snort uh today, but I don't think that it's time yet to move on, because we're now the Senate is having some hearings on this, and I'm I I hope that as as you have taken time to try to get your arms around this whole story, that you're learning more than than uh than you're not learning. | |
| I think the the the immediate reaction to this was understandable. | |
| That's why I even said the first day we discussed it, economically, it's great deal. | |
| Politically, I don't think it has a chance. | |
| That's what I said on Monday. | |
| I'm actually thinking that there's gonna end up being a compromise, and this deal's gonna happen, and uh, and it and the reason is politics. | |
| Now, ladies and gentlemen, as you know, I seldom talk about myself uh on this program. | |
| I leave that to others. | |
| And by the way, welcome to all of you watching on the Ditto Can today at uh www.rushlimbaugh.com's great to have you uh peeking in as it were. | |
| But I think uh ladies and gentlemen, I I'm all I always assess myself as a as a highly trained professional. | |
| I'm always assessing uh uh how I do my job. | |
| I don't need somebody to tell me when I've done a good job, I don't need somebody to tell me what I've done a bad job. | |
| That's the essence of professionalism. | |
| And as long as one is able to be honest with oneself about such things, then self-assessment is good and and uh in fact very productive. | |
| And I've concluded, ladies and gentlemen, I have been a profile in courage on this story. | |
| It has been, some people have said it's a career risk I am taking here to go. | |
| Well, I'll I'll illustrate it. | |
| Peter King, Long Island Congressman, Republican, good guy. | |
| I've never met him, but I like him. | |
| Admitted that his opposition, this deal is based almost entirely on constituent phone calls. | |
| My opinion of this has nothing to do with what those of you in the audience think. | |
| I mean, I'm not well, that's not true. | |
| I mean but what I I will come to you and tell you what I think about things uh and if you try to talk me out of it, if I still believe it, I'm gonna I'm gonna stick to my beliefs. | |
| So I, you know, I'm and I'm not comparing myself to a congressman. | |
| He has to get votes to stay elected, and he's a representative. | |
| I mean, that he's supposed to do that. | |
| So I'm not being critical. | |
| But I think what has happened here, the problem where we are now is that the members of Congress got so far out on a limb so quickly on this issue, when they virtually knew nothing about the substance of the details of this deal. | |
| And now it is a question of whether uh these these members of Congress, and I'm talking to Republicans who went so far out on the limb, can find a way to come back in, because their their opposition was based on a knee-jerk initial reaction rooted in myth. | |
| Uh and when I say rooted in ignorance, I also mean they just didn't understand what the deal was. | |
| There are more and more people coming out with more details of this, uh, and and it's it's uh clear that uh it's not what people thought it was. | |
| And the politics of this on the Democrat side remain. | |
| I mean, the Democrats have been all over the place the last we've got to make friends, we have allies in that region. | |
| We don't need to be making terrorists out of it. | |
| And now the very thing the Democrats said they have been for, here's the president doing with this uh port deal. | |
| And the Democrats have decided that a united Arab Emirates of all places are not worthy of having an allied relationship. | |
| They are an enemy Arab nation that we need not reach out and try to have some sort of an allied relationship with. | |
| Now the Associated Press today, starting last night, has run a story about this that the headline headlines totally misleading, and the and some of the details in the story don't jibe. | |
| February, this is the 23rd. | |
| The um at at I guess, when was this? | |
| I can't tell for this. | |
| It has to be early this morning, like about 8.30. | |
| Documents reveal White House deal on ports. | |
| Under a secretive agreement with the Bush administration. | |
| A company in the United Arab Emirates promised to cooperate with U.S. investigations as a condition of its takeover of operations at six major American ports, according to documents obtained by the Associated Press. | |
| In approving the 6.8 billion dollar purchase, the administration chose not to require state-owned Dubai Ports World to keep copies of its business records on U.S. soil where they would not be or would be subject to orders by American courts. | |
| It also did not require the company to designate an American citizen to accommodate requests by the government. | |
| Outside legal experts said such obligations are routinely attached to U.S. approvals of foreign sales in other industries. | |
| James Lewis, a former U.S. official who worked on such agreements, and they're not lax, but they're not draconian. | |
| They might have made made them sound harder than they than they did. | |
| The conditions over the sale of the London-based peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company were detailed in U.S. documents marked confidential. | |
| Such records are regularly guarded as trade secrets, and it is highly unusual for them to be made public. | |
| So the idea here that under a secret agreement with the Bush administration. | |
| Actually, it's not this story wants to make it appear as though the Bush administration secretive. | |
| Somebody in the White House secretly got together with the UAE people, and they made a deal here. | |
| And it's not that at all. | |
| There's a government agency that does all this amidst news being reported that the president didn't even know about this till he read it in the media. | |
| We get a story in the media saying the White House had a secret deal. | |
| Bush made a secret deal with people from the UAE. | |
| He will pay and so forth. | |
| There's so much misreporting on this. | |
| The version of this story has changed over the uh uh initial hours. | |
| The headline changes, some of the details change. | |
| Uh the Wall Street Journal has a version of it. | |
| White House cites extra safeguards in port deal, mandatory security screening, access records without subpoena. | |
| Uh they agreed you'd uh DP world, the UAE people agreed to accept mandatory security screening at port facilities in Dubai and to embrace tighter security practices along the supply chain operated by the London outfit. | |
| Uh what had been voluntary is now a mandatory program, said Stuart Baker, assistant secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. | |
| There are more safeguards in this transaction than in any past port deal. | |
| Okay, that's the Wall Street Journal version of it. | |
| The AP saying it's a secret deal, and we gave them all kinds of outs, and we're not requiring them to do this. | |
| And by the way, these documents uh are always secret. | |
| But we have a secret, we have a secret deal. | |
| It's just it's inflammatory, it's irresponsible, and unfortunately, it's the I'm I'm gonna tell you, folks, on honest to Pete here, um, I have rarely seen a wider gap between what the facts are and what the perception is on an issue. | |
| Maybe maybe Hurricane Katrina, the aftermath comes close. | |
| Now maybe it would be first, but but this is has to be has to be the second most egregious example of uh of the the the huge gap to what the facts are and what the perception is and what is being reported. | |
| I mean, the more people find out about the facts, which I, of course, have laid out in vivid detail over the last few Days, the more it becomes apparent that it certainly is a deal can be defended and is a deal that is not uncommon. | |
| It's been reported as something just the opposite. | |
| And as I say, now you have all these members of Congress who've gone out on a limb uh reacting in a knee-jerk fashion early on in the week, and they're going to have to find a way back in. | |
| Because there were there's going to be a compromise on this. | |
| If to pull this deal now because of this kind of thing would uh would not be advantageous in the overall foreign policy arena as coupled with our objectives. | |
| Anyway, I got to take a quick time out. | |
| We'll be back. | |
| Lots of audio sound bites coming up today, as well as your phone calls. | |
| We'll be back after this. | |
| They got a fascinating poll out there by John Zogby. | |
| The upshot of it all is captured in the headline of the story, reporting the poll in the Washington Times, Democrat voters low on enthusiasm. | |
| Most Democrat, yeah, most Democrats are upset with their elected leaders because they're they're tired of them just saying no to everything. | |
| They think the ought to act like the minority, work with Republicans to get the best legislation possible. | |
| That's that's what it says. | |
| I'll get into the details here in just a second. | |
| I want to give you what are you what you don't believe it? | |
| Well, of course, the hotline that they says he just heard the hotline say today the Democrats have the best chance ever. | |
| That's because they think they're on the right side of the port deal. | |
| You have to understand this this port deal is just the late here. | |
| Grab audio soundbite number three, forget number one, grab number three. | |
| I'm just gonna put this in perspective for you. | |
| Here is Hillary Clinton. | |
| This morning at the Senate Armed Services Committee hearings on all this, and she actually remembered when Carl Rove went out and made a speech and said the Democrats are on the wrong side of 9-11, that they're in a pre-9-11 world. | |
| Hillary and the Democrats have decided to steal Rove's line because they think now they're on the right side of national security. | |
| It's a joke. | |
| In the post-9-11 world, port security is too important an issue to be treated so cavalierly. | |
| Right. | |
| Did ever talk to your husband about selling those 60 F 16s to the United Arab Emirates pre-9-11 back in 1998? | |
| It was okay to deal with them then, but not now. | |
| There's a lot there's a these people are gonna have to learn that there are people like me here that are gonna go back and remind people what they actually did. | |
| Since we're on with Hillary here, you gotta hear this. | |
| You you have to hear this. | |
| This is from February 21st, and she's out on Long Island, and she's talking about, and this is bizarre. | |
| This is just plain old bizarre. | |
| This I want you to listen to this in the context of you are listening to the smartest woman in the world, because that's the image of uh of Mrs. Clinton that has been put forth. | |
| And she's talking about school vouchers. | |
| Listen. | |
| Suppose you were meeting today to decide who got the vouchers. | |
| First parent who comes says, I want to send my daughter to St. Peter's Roman Catholic school, and you say, Great, wonderful school. | |
| Here's your voucher. | |
| Next parent who comes says I want to send, you know, my child to the Jewish day school. | |
| Great. | |
| Here's your voucher. | |
| Next parent who comes says, I want to send my child to the private school. | |
| That I've always dreamed of sending my child to. | |
| Fine, here's your voucher. | |
| Next parent who comes says, I want to send my child to the school of the church of the white supremacist. | |
| You say, wait a minute. | |
| You can't send we're not giving you a voucher for that. | |
| And the parent says, Well, the way I read Genesis, Cain was marked. | |
| Therefore, I believe in white supremacy. | |
| And therefore, you gave it to a Catholic parent, you gave it to a Jewish parent, gave it to a secular private school parent under the Constitution. | |
| You can't discriminate against me. | |
| Suppose the next parent comes and says, I want to send my child to the school of the Jihad. | |
| Wait a minute. | |
| We're not going to send a child with taxpayer dollars to school of the jihad. | |
| Well, gave it to the Catholics, you gave it to the Jews, you gave it to the private secular people. | |
| You got to tell me I can't. | |
| I'm a taxpayer under the Constitution. | |
| Now, tell me how we're going to make those choices. | |
| All right, what is Mrs. Clinton telling us here? | |
| What is she telling us? | |
| She's tell she is telling us that she is opposed to the First Amendment. | |
| She's opposed to freedom of speech. | |
| She's going to sit there. | |
| This is a classic illustration. | |
| Mrs. Clinton's a classic liberal. | |
| All money is theirs. | |
| She is going to deny the people who actually pay the money the federal government gets in the form of taxes. | |
| She's trying to set up this this this these extreme, bizarre examples. | |
| The church of a school of white supremacy, the school of jihad, uh, as an example of what will happen in a under a school voucher program. | |
| It's just, folks, it's absurd. | |
| It is bizarre. | |
| It is unhinged, and it wasn't delivered very smoothly either. | |
| But get into the substance of it, and it's just, you know, you know, you end up scratching your head. | |
| And we can go back January 3rd, 2004. | |
| Uh, Hillary was in St. Louis, said this. | |
| I love this quote. | |
| It's from Mahatma Gandhi. | |
| He ran a gas station down in uh St. Louis for a couple of years. | |
| Mr. Gandhi, you can still go to the gas station. | |
| A lot of wisdom comes out of that gas station. | |
| Yeah, I I assume here that Mrs. Clinton's trying to be funny. | |
| Uh, but I I uh uh I I don't know the full context of this. | |
| All I know is this comment was not repeated in the mainstream press. | |
| This is one of the bites that we got, and we've kept we've we're keeping an archive of these things, folks, and we have of these Clintons for uh for a long time. | |
| But she's out there now trying to uh suggest that this this uh port deal uh is Bush all of a sudden he doesn't care. | |
| He he wants us to get hit again. | |
| It's just that they try to make the most absurd points about this to so desperate are they to get on the right side of this national security issue, and they think they've done it, and they think it's gonna sweep them back into power, and just wait for this to play out, and it's gonna be like everything else that they have been in glee over. | |
| It's gonna come back, smack them right in the nose as they'll open the door into their face once again. | |
| Matt in Richmond, Virginia. | |
| Welcome to the program, sir. | |
| Great to have you with us. | |
| Russ Meghan, 9,000 pound SUV dido to you. | |
| Thank you, sir. | |
| My comment is I I've got a feeling that if this would have been Kerry or Clinton or anyone else, you know, in the Democratic Party, you'd be all over them. | |
| You'd be attacking them for this, and uh my my gut says this is not a good idea for our port. | |
| I don't know why, and I think most of the Americans agree with with that. | |
| It's just uh I feel like you're supporting Bush just because he's Bush on this one. | |
| But Russ, you gotta you gotta back down on this one, buddy. | |
| We just don't agree with it. | |
| Um, look, if I don't back down, are you not gonna listen anymore? | |
| No, I'm still gonna listen. | |
| I've listened to you for years, but that tells me this is not a good deal. | |
| Well, but you can't tell me why. | |
| I can't. | |
| No, you can't. | |
| You said you couldn't. | |
| You said you know, I don't know why. | |
| Uh, but did I it's not a good idea for our ports. | |
| I don't know why, and I think most Americans agree with that. | |
| And I'm telling you that I have looked at it. | |
| That's what this whole week has been about. | |
| And uh I uh there's there's an analogy I could give you. | |
| Let's say that UAE, United Arab Emirates are gonna buy a JFK airport. | |
| Do you think anything would change there? | |
| Anything would change in the operation of JFK? | |
| Do you think that all certain airlines wouldn't be flying in anymore? | |
| Do you think that certain people wouldn't be allowed to go in there anymore? | |
| Would it be a greater security threat than it already is? | |
| Uh the point is you can't tell me why you oppose it, but I respect I I mean I know why you oppose it. | |
| I've explained that this week too. | |
| You've you're conjuring up images, and I totally understand them. | |
| I'm I I mean uh the the post-9-11 world being what it is, I totally understand why you're opposed to it. | |
| But as to me supporting this because Bush is uh as I said yesterday, before the president said a word about this, I was on this program detailing as much as I had learned and could learn for you. | |
| Not because the administration is for it. | |
| I just looked at it as an independent issue. | |
| I've been opposed to a lot of things this administration has done, and I have said so. | |
| You know, I'm I'm just doing what I always do here. | |
| I am looking, I'm following my principles. | |
| I'm not acting like an ideologue here. | |
| I'm not saying because a conservative Republican is for it or did it. | |
| I'm standing behind it. | |
| That's not what driving me on this. | |
| I take you back to the first day. | |
| I I think economics in this country is so woefully untaught. | |
| It is it is it people just don't get a good basic economics education in this, even even in college, except for the people that major in it. | |
| If you look at the economic side of this, it's fine. | |
| It is it's actually a very good deal for all people involved. | |
| If you look at the politics, it is a huge problem. | |
| And somewhere in the middle is where this is going to end up, because this porch's not this deal is not going to be pulled. | |
| I will guarantee you the president's not going to pull the deal. | |
| He may compromise on members of Congress, there's going to be some movement on all sides on this. | |
| But it's he can't pull it. | |
| It'd be the worst thing in the world, especially after the position that he's taken now so forcefully to veto any legislation to uh cancel it and pull it and this sort of thing. | |
| But I'm just doing what I always do here, uh, and that's tell you what I think of things. | |
| Based on the input I have been able, been able to make, things I've been able to learn, and uh you agree with me or not, but at least you'll know when I open my mouth and speak to you, it's not pandering. | |
| And it's not insulting your intelligence. | |
| And we'll be back in just a second. | |
| America's anchor man, America's profile and courage. | |
| L. Rushbow, the all-knowing, all-caring, all-sensing, all feeling Maha Rushi here behind this, the golden EIB microphone to Cleveland and John. | |
| I'm glad you waited, sir. | |
| Welcome to the program. | |
| Thank you, Russ. | |
| Um, I haven't heard you explicitly say whether or not you support this deal or not, whether or not you think it's a good idea. | |
| You are a profile on courage. | |
| I want to hear you say, you think it's a good idea, or you think it's a bad idea. | |
| All right. | |
| I have spent this whole week uh informing myself, and I have I will take I'll take the occasion of your phone call to announce my official position on this. | |
| And that is I don't have a problem with it. | |
| I do not, I do not have a problem with it. | |
| Um excuse me, I'm I was just gonna say that's extraordinarily bold. | |
| Because if in three years a fork does go up. | |
| You're on record now as saying you didn't have a problem with it. | |
| You're putting economics before national security. | |
| I have one more question. | |
| No, no, no. | |
| I'm not doing I think economics is part of national security. | |
| See, that that's the thing here. | |
| I'm not from the old school that thinks uh anything oriented around money necessarily poisons it or hides something illicit behind it. | |
| I am not one of these people. | |
| I'm not uh I've uh the class envy efforts that have been made on me and the people in this country but the Democrats have not worked. | |
| I am not ashamed of the wealth and opportunity that this country affords anybody to pursue. | |
| And I'm not ashamed of our growing economy, and I'm not ashamed that some people do well, I'm not ashamed. | |
| None of it is shames me. | |
| You know, the people who do things wrong with money shame me or make me you know irritated, mad, whatever, but the whole the the concept of having security and a strong economy are linked to me. | |
| Now I I'll explain this if you if if you want. | |
| Let me try I'm sorry for those who've been listening all week. | |
| Some of this is gonna sound redundant. | |
| I'm gonna go back. | |
| Sun Zhu, the art of war. | |
| The best way to beat your enemies to make him your friend. | |
| If you can't do that, you shoot him. | |
| But that's that's not the first out. | |
| And I don't think in the war on terror that we are going to defeat every terrorist militarily. | |
| I just don't believe that that's possible. | |
| Look at how we brought the Soviet Union to its knees. | |
| Cold war took 70 years. | |
| Actually, it would have taken ten or twenty if we'd had Reagan working on it at the outset. | |
| But it took 70 years. | |
| How do we did it? | |
| How do we do it? | |
| We infiltrated the Soviet communist culture with American culture. | |
| Slow dribbles of television programs and genes and these little things that exposed to the Soviet people the lies they were being told about their country and the people of the rest of the world. | |
| We have also infiltrated with capitalism the Chinese market. | |
| They now depend on us more than any other nation in the world because we are a huge market for them. | |
| It makes it less likely they're gonna destroy the market. | |
| It makes it less likely that they are going to bomb us, nuke us or what have you. | |
| They're gonna huff and puff and they're always gonna use that as threats because they're communists and so forth, but they're also invested in us, as are a number of comp uh countries uh around the world. | |
| Now, when it comes to the UAE Or the Middle East. | |
| I do not believe that every Arab nation, government, sponsors terrorism. | |
| I don't believe they all are for it. | |
| I don't believe they secretly fund it. | |
| I think this story about the two of the two or three of the 9-11 hijackers came out of the UAE, they may have. | |
| The London bomber was a British citizen. | |
| We have had homegrown criminals in this country try to blow up buildings and commit crime in this country. | |
| The idea that the United Arab Emirates government recruited those two hijackers, trained them and paid for them, is not true. | |
| Just because they came out of there, I'm not willing to cast negative aspersions on a whole country. | |
| I've been there, by the way. | |
| I've seen Dubai. | |
| I think they're trying to be like us. | |
| Economically, I think their model is, I don't think they want to be a little outpost in the desert with Bedouins and goats and tents and so forth. | |
| I think they want to modernize. | |
| I think they want to be a leader economically in the world. | |
| I, you know, I'm I don't associate these people with uh Al Qaeda. | |
| Al Qaeda is not a state. | |
| Al Qaeda is not even a religion. | |
| Militant Islam is a is a is a it's a fascist movement, it's an ideology hiding behind a religion. | |
| We may well be hit again. | |
| Uh some Israeli newspapers said that uh they've intercepted uh enough documents to indicate that Israel is the main Al-Qaeda target in this year. | |
| Well, hell everybody's an Al-Qaeda target at some point. | |
| But as I said yesterday, these people would not have to spend $8 billion or 6.8 billion, whatever it is to blow us up. | |
| They could just load one of their containers at a port they already run somewhere else in the world, put a bomb in it, ship it in, when it gets here, kablooey. | |
| If you look at the politics of this, you find that this thing really nobody this would not have blown so out of the water uh in in such a knee-jerk fashion were it not for a company in Miami. | |
| If you look at, if you look at the politics of this, and this is even part of the economics, a company in Miami that was a partner with the British firm that currently owns these six port processing centers, whatever they really are, uh, didn't like the deal. | |
| And they call the mayor of Miami, and the mayor of Miami made some phone calls to Washington, and that's what they threatened a lawsuit and all sorts of that's what got a lot of this started. | |
| So there's politics on it in every way you look, and there's economics too. | |
| And the politics is a whole different subject as we are seeing play out. | |
| But the economics of it are unassailable. | |
| I mean, it's it's it's it's there's not going to be any difference. | |
| If you look at the Democrat opposition to this, they're out there saying on the soapbox that they're opposed to this because national security. | |
| They're not. | |
| They're not telling you the truth. | |
| They're opposed to it because unions who work of the docks, the longshoremen, don't like it, and they are big contributors to the Democratic Party. | |
| They see an opportunity here to get themselves on the right side of national security. | |
| They don't know how stupid they look. | |
| For the last four years, we haven't had an enemy. | |
| Bush was creating terrorism. | |
| Bush was the guy who was responsible for all this. | |
| Bush was the biggest threat to national security we had. | |
| Why, we didn't need to go to Iraq. | |
| And we, since we weren't trying to hunt down uh bin Laden, we weren't even serious about the war on terror. | |
| The Democrats living in a pre-9-11 mindset and world, trying to tell us we didn't have any enemies. | |
| We didn't we needed more allies, in fact. | |
| We need more allies in the Middle East. | |
| We need to get back to that allied relationship. | |
| We need France and Germany, we need to make friends with these people. | |
| We need to go talk to them. | |
| I've even heard some Democrats suggest what harm could it do to actually sit down and talk to bin Laden. | |
| Now all of a sudden this deal comes up, and the Democrats have found an enemy. | |
| After four years of saying there isn't an enemy, they've found one, and it's the United Arab Emirates. | |
| And this is a country that Democrats have dealt with prior. | |
| They sent 60 F-16s back in 1998, the Clinton administration did. | |
| These Democrats didn't make a peep when the United Arab Emirates spent 200 grand to endow a Muslim studies course at Columbia. | |
| There are many how many banks are owned by foreign countries in uh in our country. | |
| This is there, there's just, I'm telling you, folks, there's panic. | |
| There's knee-jerk panic, Understandably, but the Democrats, if you ask me, are the ones on shaky ground because they're the ones that are engaging totally in profiling. | |
| Their fear or their stated fear that this represents a giant slash and a giant breach of national security is based on the belief that you can't trust any Arab. | |
| You can't trust anybody from the Middle East, and especially if they want to do something to make big money, you really can't trust them. | |
| Well, I'm sorry, but uh if they want to go ahead and be racists, if they want to engage in profiling and they want to do that inconsistently, let them. | |
| But I'm not going to. | |
| It doesn't this is not the way I've ever looked at this. | |
| These are the same people that will not let us profile in this country, in airports, we can security wand Abdul, or we can't security wand Abdul, because that would be profiling, but we can wand a two-month-old baby, we can wand a 90-year-old grandmother to make it look like we're tough on the security business, but we can't profile the people the Democrats now claim we can't trust anywhere. | |
| Now, none of these are principal positions, they're all opportunistic positions. | |
| I'm just saying if you take the time to take a look at what this actually is, you're gonna find nothing's gonna change. | |
| You're going to find that any threat posed by the United Arab Emirates owning these six port locations exists now. | |
| The same threat exists now as will exist when they own it. | |
| The threat's not going to increase. | |
| In fact, with the added security requirements we insisted on in the deal, it might improve. | |
| Contrary to what the AP is reporting, they had to uh agree to some non-standard things in order to get the government agency that approves all this to sign off on it. | |
| So I'll tell you another reason why I'm for it. | |
| I haven't yet heard anybody who's against it make me feel comfortable joining them. | |
| I just haven't. | |
| I I I've I'm I'm hearing a bunch of panic, I'm hearing a bunch of hysteria, I'm hearing a bunch of jingoism, I'm hearing a bunch of racism, I'm hearing a bunch of profiling, I'm I'm hearing a bunch of fear. | |
| I try to do as little of as possible in my life out of fear. | |
| Fear causes all kinds of distortions when it comes to reason. | |
| Fear is a good thing, and it's a good motivator at certain times, but it can also take you off into total irrationality if you're not careful. | |
| And you can't avoid it, but you have to confront it when it pops up, whatever your fear is. | |
| You're always going to have the fear unless you confront it and deal with it and perhaps get past it. | |
| In this case, we're not dealing with it. | |
| But I haven't heard anybody who is against this be so persuasive that, yeah, you know, I want to be on their side. | |
| In fact, it's just the opposite. | |
| Uh the people who are totally against this that I've heard make me feel very proud that I am not on their side and make me feel like an even larger profile in courage. | |
| We'll take a and I'm going to tell you something else. | |
| If if we do the deal, if it happens, and if there is a let me ask you ask you this question. | |
| United Arab Emirates. | |
| They have ports all over the world. | |
| This company, they have a desire to stay in business. | |
| It is about economics to them. | |
| And I have nothing wrong with uh economic pursuits. | |
| Do you really think that they're gonna do this port deal and in a year or six months or two years arrange for a terrorist act? | |
| Do you realize what everybody's finger will be pointed, not only at them, but people who supported the deal in the first place, and nobody's gonna trust them to run anything in any country. | |
| They are the least likely to be responsible or be planning something like this. | |
| It would be wiser if their objective was terrorism. | |
| If their objective was compromising our security, there are far easier ways to do it and keep themselves out of the loop. | |
| Why why get the blame for something like that? | |
| If there is another 9-11. | |
| And by the way, there is one shining light in all this. | |
| I am happy. | |
| I was I was getting afraid that people were not seriously ramped up about the threats that we face. | |
| All these gotta get out of Iraq, we're gonna downside, we gotta close the prisons, oh the NSA spying, we can't have that. | |
| We can't. | |
| I mean, it the the Democrats in this country and the media have made it practically Impossible as an organized effort to sabotage our ability to wage war against this enemy. | |
| I guess that's all out the window now. | |
| How in the world you don't do the spy program, you don't have prisons, you don't do interrogations, but you protect the company by keeping the UAE out. | |
| There's a disconnect here, folks, that I cannot align myself with logically. | |
| Doesn't make any sense. | |
| I couldn't defend it to you if you were to call and ask me about it. | |
| But I the the notion that so many of you are worried it could happen is actually a positive to me because I was saying a couple people late last year, I'm afraid it's going to take a couple more 9-11s before people realize we are in a war. | |
| The fact that so many of you have this concern is actually a positive to me, because it it makes me realize we may not need another 9-11 to understand where we are. | |
| That maybe more people than I thought understand we're at war, and that's going to marginalize the Democrats even more as we get into an election year. | |
| And despite my position on the port deal, I also have not changed in my desire to defeat Democrats and Liberals every opportunity that arises. | |
| And they're going to make themselves imminently defeatable on this, as they have on practically every issue because they don't know what they're doing. | |
| They're not being guided by principle, they're not being guided by honesty, everything they structure is a lie. | |
| Their position on this is a lie, and it's going to come back and bite them. | |
| But as far as the UAE is concerned, if this is a really about compromising our security, or really about finding a way to do another 9-11, there's simpler ways of doing it and cheaper, and they're also ways of doing it to where the light of attention doesn't shine back on them after the uh after the futuristic event. | |
| Why in the world would they want to do this as a as a way of uh perpetrating another act of mass terrorism, knowing full well that the world is going to blame them and we are going to blame them. | |
| And they may have 60 F-16s, but they don't have anything approaching our arsenal. | |
| And if if they just they're not this stupid, folks. | |
| This is not that's why I say economics and security are linked. | |
| They are not this stupid. | |
| If their objective was anything other than economics, then they would not do this deal, and they'd find a way to keep themselves out of whatever plans are being made to foment a new terrorist attack. | |
| Quick timeout, a little long here, so next segment's gonna be short. | |
| I apologize in advance. | |
| Let me tell you a quick little story here before I grab a quick phone call. | |
| Dawn here has a has a daughter in school, and she is telling me this morning that her that her daughter came home from school yesterday and said, Mommy, mommy, why is Bush letting terrorists buy our ports? | |
| I said, Whoa. | |
| Uh liberal teachers, and stop what a question. | |
| Of course they're liberal teachers. | |
| So you got liberal teachers teaching school kids that Bush is letting terrorists buy our ports. | |
| And these are probably teachers who disagreed with anything Bush was doing trying to prevent more terrorist acts in this country. | |
| They're probably the same people that didn't believe there was a threat. | |
| They thought Bush is the threat. | |
| Now all of a sudden, to stay on that theme that Bush is the threat, all of a sudden Bush is selling the ports to terrorists. | |
| That's what UAE has come to mean to these idiots, and I'm sorry, folks, I just can't join their side. | |
| I've just it the I have yet to hear a persuasive argument from the from the people opposed to this. | |
| Here's uh Sam in Princeton, New Jersey. | |
| Welcome, sir. | |
| Nice to have you. | |
| Sam, thank you. | |
| Um the problem that I see is free trade. | |
| The government of the UAE pays no taxes. | |
| They order and book ships and goods coming into the United States, and they don't pay a dime. | |
| There is no American company that can possibly compete against the government that pays no taxes when you have such an unfair advantage. | |
| My feeling is that truthfully, there have been 1,579 instances brought before this board, and 99% have been approved, which tells me that international lobbyists representing these foreign governments have created a tax issue. | |
| Thank you, Sam. | |
| I appreciate it. | |
| Uh keep giving me more ammo for my side. | |
| Keep confirming I'm making the right decision here. | |
| Sam, there are no American companies that do this. | |
| That's not saying we don't own the ports, but there aren't any companies that do this. | |
| The largest is in Hong Kong, the second largest is uh Dutch, this these guys are gonna be the third with this uh with this acquisition. | |
| Uh whether they pay taxes in in in Dubai is irrelevant. | |
| They're going to be paying U.S. taxes here, doing business in the United States of America. | |
| Jesus, man. | |
| It would be wise to remember the uh words of the French economist Frédéric Bastier. | |
| Where goods and services no longer cross borders, armies certainly will. | |
| That's a paraphrase of his quote, but sleep on that or chew on that. | |
| Don't go to sleep yet. |
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