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Feb. 24, 2006 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:28
February 24, 2006, Friday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
Folks, I have to warn you here at the top.
I have to warn you here at the outset.
I am worn out.
It has been a long week.
It has been long days, long nights.
Well, short nights, depending on your perspective.
So anything could happen here today.
Just be aware.
Live from the Southern Command in sunny South Florida, it's Open Line Friday.
Goody Goody Gumdrop.
Yes, my favorite broadcast day of the week, ladies and gentlemen.
Open Line Friday.
I. El Rushbo take one of the greatest career risks known to exist in modern media.
There are no guests on this program except when powerful people, two or three of them that qualify, call and want to be.
There are no guests.
I'm not going to invest any part of the success of this show in a parade of people that don't really have that as an interest of theirs.
They want to hawk their stuff.
Let them go elsewhere.
But on Friday, when we go to the phones, I will suspend the normal rule that governs the conduct of this program.
Normally, this program is devoted to that which interests me.
Otherwise, we don't talk about it because I don't want to be bored or sound bored and I don't want you to be bored.
But on Friday, I will allow calls on subjects in which and about which I have no interest because that's that I'm a benevolent dictator and that's the one day of the week where if you think that we should have been talking about something that I haven't brought up, this is your chance to do it.
If you think that not enough has been said about something or if you want to say something that you haven't heard anybody else say that you don't think anybody else has said, whatever.
If you have a question, you have a comment.
It doesn't matter.
So here's the number 800-282-2882.
The email address is rush at EIBnet.com.
Just a couple things here before we get into the issues.
You remember the story we did out of Homer, Alaska on the banning of the eagle feeding.
I guess tour operators would have people go up to Homer with cameras and you could get close.
You could feed the eagles up there and get close and get pictures of them.
And not long ago, the city council of Homer banned all this.
And the reason it was reported, help me out with my memory here.
The reason they did it was it was hurting the Eagles.
It was demeaning to the Eagles.
That's right.
They were turning the national symbol of this country, the national bird, into a blue state welfare recipient.
But that wasn't what was happening because the Eagles performed.
I mean, they weren't just filled with sloth out there.
They weren't just lazy bums.
They were actually performing.
They were allowing their pictures to be taken, essentially posing.
Well, there was one exemption to the ban on eagle feeding up there.
And we're talking about hundreds of eagles.
The one exception was a woman named Jean Keene, and she's the Eagle Lady, and she's 80.
And didn't mention much about her in the story.
Well, I got in the mail today her book.
I got the Eagle Lady's, it's a combination autobiography and photo journal.
And it has some of the most amazing pictures of her eagles and where she lives.
She drives a pickup.
She lives in a trailer right out there in the area.
And these eagles just flock every morning in the winter and have been for 25 years.
The pictures in here are just amazing.
Got a letter from one of the, I guess, the person who wrote the text in the book named Carrie Anderson.
He said, And I wasn't surprised to learn that there is a real story about the banning of the feeding of eagles that wasn't told in the AP account.
Mr. Anderson writes: This controversy was started and fueled by a man up here who feeds flocks of Sandhill cranes on his Homer area property.
He also keeps Canada geese at his home.
He clips their wings so they can't fly away.
One day, a bald eagle took a swipe at his geese and his cranes.
A goose was killed by an eagle.
This made the guy spitting mad, so he worked tirelessly to vilify eagles.
He went so far as to claim eagles might even attack the local children.
In the end, with practically no community support, he successfully lobbied city council members to outlaw eagle feeding.
Thankfully, he was not successful in shutting down the eagle lady, who has fed surplus fish to a gathering of hundreds of eagles every winter morning for more than 25 years.
So I wish I could show you the pictures in here.
And you can get the book.
Well, I'll put a link on the website where you can go.
I'm sure I haven't gone to the website because I've got the book, but it's not a big book, but it's exceptionally well done picture-wise.
It's just an amazing thing to look at these eagles up close and to see how close they're willing to get to the eagle lady.
But I'm not surprised.
We get this story that, oh, we're doing this for the eagles.
We're doing this.
We're trying to protect the eagles.
The eagle has become a welfare recipient.
It's a national bird.
We can't allow this to happen.
It turns out there's some local rabble-rouser who got upset because an eagle killed one of his geese.
Geese, who, by the way, can't fly because he's clipped their wings.
So he tried to create a panic.
The other thing I want to mention, and you people may not know this, and I don't talk about this a lot, but we have a line of people willing and desiring, wishing to advertise on this program.
The sales staff of this program has a tough time because of how often I say no.
In a business where erectile dysfunction ads are taken by almost every show, you will not hear garbage and gunk on this program, particularly if it's a product about which I am going to speak.
So this line of advertisers is out there and they routinely send me their products to test, to sample, to use to see if I have any interest.
And then they wait with bated breath for my reply and response.
Well, back in the middle of January, I received a frozen ice, a dry ice frozen shipment of meat from a place in Chicago called Allen Brothers.
You're nodding your head.
Have you heard of them out there, Brian?
Oh, yeah, Brian, okay, he brought the box in.
That's right.
Okay, Brian.
I'm told you, I'm tired.
And this box, it was actually two boxes, and it was huge.
And there were all kinds of samples of the stuff that Allen Brothers sells.
So Allen Brothers supplies many of the steakhouses in this country that you probably frequent or have, and they don't sell retail except with mail order or online and this sort of thing.
And they want desperately to advertise on this program.
And I totally understand anybody wanting to desperately advertise on this program.
It makes sense.
GM wouldn't be in the trouble it's in Ford if they advertise on this program.
I don't want to get off on a tangent on that.
So I took the stuff home and I had the entree chef store it.
Well, there's a pastry chef and the entree chef at a specialized kitchen.
Say, I had the entree chef.
I don't need a butler.
The butler's job is handled with another title.
At any rate, I said, store this stuff, and I'm going to come up with some occasions to test it.
Sample it.
Well, the first occasion it came up, I had about eight people over for the Super Bowl, and I wanted to do it in a big meeting room whenever we watched the big events like this.
So I told the chef, I said, look, I want a sports bar menu for this.
I want some chicken fingers.
I want some nachos.
Put some egg rolls out.
I'm going to pop up a bunch of coconut oil popcorn.
And boy, is that good.
You haven't tasted that in a lot of years.
And I said, grab some of the hot dogs from the Allen and Brothers shipment and put them out there on the grill and get some buns and the fixings and so forth.
And so I didn't think anything about it after that.
People started showing up, began serving the adult beverages, pouring the wine.
People began sampling the buffet.
And the first person that took a bite of the hot dogs, damn, what is this?
I said, a hot dog.
It's totally came from Allen and Brothers.
They're a desperate new advertiser, hoping and praying that I love this stuff so that they can make their business even more successful.
He said, well, you got to taste this.
So I taste, and folks, I have to tell you, I have never tasted a hot dog like this other than in a restaurant.
You have, I can't buy this hot dog at a grocery store.
Not the size, not the plump.
These are the kind of things that only concessionaires have or restaurants.
You know, there's different stuff, especially in beef, that restaurants get from what your average supermarket will get.
And I have gone through probably, we had to cook up a mess.
I guess we went through 20 of these hot dogs on the Super Bowl and put them out on the grill, you slice them up a little bit, put some nicks in them, and they swell up even more.
And I can't remember.
I know I've tasted a hot dog this good before, but I just can't remember where it was.
It had to be at a restaurant or it had to be at a concession someplace, but it was just delicious.
I haven't yet gotten to any of the beef, but there's a prime rib roast in there.
There's rolled tenderloin, fillet, bone-in, sirloin, all this stuff, just waiting for me to sample it.
And I have a bunch of occasions coming up where this will happen.
But if it's anything like the hot dogs, I am not kidding.
They were just, I don't have a phone number for these people, but I want to give them just a hint of what it will be like when they actually become advertisers here on this program.
I'm going to give you their website.
And you can just go and look at it.
And you buy some of the hot dogs if you want.
See what I'm talking about.
You will not, but don't, folks, you know, there's an art to fixing a hot dog, and it's not hard.
But don't boil it.
Don't put it in water.
Do you hate people that do hot dogs that way?
Put them in water and both.
Snurdley doesn't eat this stuff, so he doesn't even know.
Put them on the grill and charcoal them up and just get them plump and juicy.
You have not, well, I haven't.
I guess I shouldn't speak for you, but I haven't tasted hot dog like this in I don't know how long.
And it was the hit of the whole buffet.
I got emails on the hot dogs.
Where did you get these?
I served some great wine.
People didn't email me on that.
They emailed me on the hot dogs.
At any rate, it's absteaks.com.
www.absteaks.com.
Now, I got a quick timeout here.
What do people want to talk about?
There's only one call about the ports.
I told you this was going to die down.
It is in places.
It's not in others.
We will continue to discuss that today.
The Lewis Libby legal team filed a motion yesterday to dismiss the case.
And it is, folks, this is not a trick.
This is not just an average pro forma thing.
There is a lot of substance to this, and it's based on the fact that Patrick Fitzgerald's gig is unconstitutional.
I'll have the details on that, all kinds of things, straight ahead, right after our first obscene profit break here on the Rush Limbaugh program.
Stay with us.
It's Open Line Friday, El Rushball, the Excellence in Broadcasting Network, America's Anchorman, America's Play-by-Playman of the News, America's news commentator, 800-282-2882.
I saw this story today, and I said, This is a parody.
This has to be a joke.
Listen to this.
President George W. Bush's disclosure of detailed intelligence about a thwarted al-Qaeda plot to attack Los Angeles could prove damaging for U.S. national security, said the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee in a letter released yesterday.
In a February 17th letter to U.S. Intelligence Chief John Negro Ponte, Senator John Rockefeller, Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, who is up to his armpits in this NSA story finding its way into the New York Times in December, back on December 16th, the James Risen story.
Here's Rockefeller, the architect of the memo.
We've shared it with you on this program and on the website, how the Democrats planned to use national security to screw up the Bush administration in an election year.
Here is a guy who has released, and who else I give is Carl Levin and Turbin, who revealed the secret plans for a black operation involving some spy satellite because they didn't like the cost.
For this guy, for Jay Rockefeller to run around and say the president in offering the details of a thwarted al-Qaeda attack in L.A. is compromising our security is evidence that Mr. Rockefeller still doesn't know that there is something other than the antique media that is going to examine and react to this kind of thing.
He said, why then did the president and the assistant to the president for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism describe in great detail the information about this plot contained in a highly classified CIA document in October of 2004?
Talk about revealing what's in classified CIA documents.
John Rockefeller is from the party that wants to pin medals on the CIA people who leaked this stuff.
Want to call them whistleblowers.
Everything's, they're a parody.
It's like we're running out of our avenue for comedy here with these people is being narrowed, folks.
It's a one-way street.
You know, these one-way streets always have a sign, one-way do not enter.
Well, we're going to keep going down the street, but I mean, they're getting so ridiculous that they sound like an absolute parody.
Had this story from the stack yesterday, and I didn't get to it, but it intrigues me.
So I revived it from the stack yesterday, put it in the stack today.
Most U.S. workers say they feel rushed on the job, but they are getting less accomplished than a decade ago.
According to newly released research, workers completed two-thirds of their work in an average day last year, down from about three-quarters in a 1994 study, according to research conducted for daytimers, an East Texas Pennsylvania-based marker of org maker of organizational products.
The biggest culprit is the technology that was supposed to make work quicker and easier, experts say.
Okay, so let's dump on technology now.
I had a story yesterday, too.
Carly Fiorina, who used to run Hewlett-Packard, was making a speech somewhere, some technology outfit speech, and she was saying, technology is going to be so automatic and so much a part of our lives in 25 years that we won't even consider it technology anymore.
It's just going to be what is.
But she says, people don't have time.
Or this story says, people don't have time to concentrate on one task anymore.
You take a little chip out of it, and then you're under the next thing.
It's hard to feel like you're accomplishing anything.
Technology has sped everything up, and by speeding everything up, it slowed everything down, paradoxically.
Said John Challenger, chief executive, Chicago-based outplacement consultants, Challenger Gray, and Christmas.
So Americans work more and seem to accomplish less.
Does this make sense?
I mean, just in a logical sense, does it make any sense at all?
I look at myself, for example.
I could not accomplish what I accomplish every day without technology.
I am working harder, and I'm getting more done than ever before.
And I'm sure the same is true for, and the U.S. economy, by the way, just the statistics, the unemployment numbers, these kinds of things indicate that that is happening quite a lot.
Productivity is up.
All the measurements of it.
I just found this thing incredible because, again, Americans work more, seem to accomplish less.
The headline is typical of journalism these days, which is, I'll tell you, if people, there's one group that's working more and accomplishing less, and that's America's journalists.
And some, are they even working in a White House press corps sits in there in their chase lounges and expects news to be handed to them in their laps?
Okay, the Libby.
Libby case.
Lawyers for Lewis Libby asked a federal judge yesterday to dismiss his indictment because the special prosecutor in the case lacked authority to bring the charges.
In a court filing, lawyers for Scooter Libby said that the indictment violates the Constitution because special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald was not appointed by the president with the consent of the Senate.
The defense attorney has also said that Fitzgerald's appointment violates federal law because he was not supervised by the Attorney General or approved by Congress.
Those constitutional and statutory provisions have been violated in this case.
Libby's lawyers wrote, if the case goes to trial, defense attorneys have signaled that Mr. Libby likely will testify.
He was so busy with national security issues that he forgot to incorrectly recall conversations he had with reporters about less important topics such as Ms. Playme.
Scorched earth appears to be coming here.
Now, the New York Sun has done a pretty good analysis of the legal filing to explain why Fitzgerald, not him, but his office, the job he has, is considered unconstitutional, and therefore he doesn't have the power to bring the charges that he has brought.
More on that when we come back.
Your phone calls are right around the corner, too, so sit tight.
Help if I turned on the microphone.
A man, a legend, a way of life.
Let me quickly run through before I go to the phones here, this defense that the Libby team mounted yesterday, this motion that they filed.
The New York Sun has an editorial on this today that pretty much, I think it pretty well sums up what this motion is about and what its reasoning is.
It really boils down to the fact that they're making the claim to the judge that Patrick Fitzgerald is an illegal prosecutor, that he doesn't have standing to file charges, and they go through the Constitution and a number of other bits of reasoning to explain it.
Now, even if it's right, here's the thing: is a judge in this case, oh, yeah, you know what?
You guys have a point.
You're exactly right, but I can't throw this out because you know what would happen to me in this town?
If this case gets thrown out, this judge might be charged with something by somebody.
But anyway, here are the details.
Last time we checked in on the criminal case of the man who served as Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, Scooter Libby, it was an editorial of December 8th, 2005, a season for giving.
And they were offering a bunch of reasons to the New York Sun why it might be a wise idea for people to contribute to Libby's defense.
Well, yesterday, a federal court filing by Mr. Libby's team before Judge Reggie Walton raised another good reason in Libby's favor, the appointments clause of the Constitution.
It was a well-crafted and by our lights persuasive shot across the bow of the prosecutor.
The motion to dismiss filed yesterday signaled that Mr. Libby is on offense, prepared to fight the constitutional issues in this case all the way to the Supreme Court.
The argument is that the indictment should be dismissed on the ground that it was obtained, approved, and signed by an official, Patrick Fitzgerald, who was appointed and exercised his powers in violation of the appointments clause of the Constitution.
Now, the appointments clause resides in Article II, which enumerates the powers of the president.
It says the president, quote, shall nominate and by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, shall appoint ambassadors, other public ministers, and consuls, judges of the Supreme Court, and all other officers of the United States whose appointment are not herein otherwise provided for and which shall be established by law.
But the Congress may, by law, vest the appointment of such inferior officers as they think proper in the president alone, in the courts of law, or in the heads of departments.
Now, the appointments clause, in other words, divides up the executive branch into principal officers who require Senate approval and inferior officers who do not.
Fitzgerald was not confirmed by the Senate as a principal officer, and so he isn't one.
He is not accountable to the Attorney General or to any other Justice Department official, so he's not an inferior officer either.
He is, to put not too fine a point on it, an illegal extra-constitutional prosecutor.
And there are reasons how and why this happened.
Now, the motion to dismiss goes back to the founding fathers to explain the reasoning behind the appointments clause, and I'll let you read that paragraph of the story yourself.
Well, not better.
I better include that here because it'll set up the rest.
Alexander Hamilton, Federalist Paper No. 76, departed from what would be his later deplorable tendency to amass power in the executive and acknowledged that Senate confirmation is an excellent check against the risk of incautious appointments.
Roger Sherman, signer of the Declaration of Independence, who attended the Constitutional Convention of Philadelphia, wrote to John Adams explaining that if the president alone was vested with the power of appointing all officers, he would be liable to be deceived by flatterers and pretenders to patriotism who would have no motive but their own emolument.
They would wish to extend the powers of the executive to increase their own importance.
And this is exactly what has happened in the case of Mr. Fitzgerald.
The prosecutor himself acknowledged in an August 27, 2004 affidavit: quote, I serve as the functional equivalent of the Attorney General on this matter, yet he's not been confirmed to any such job.
When Congress let the independent counsel statute expire in 1999 after the excesses of Kenneth Starr, quote unquote, there was bipartisan consensus that an independent, i.e. unaccountable prosecutor, was a danger.
In the 1988 case of Morrison versus Olson, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the independent counsel statute against an appointments clause challenge.
Justice Scalia, whose wing of the court now includes Thomas Roberts and Alito, was famously the lone dissenter.
Yet not only does Mr. Fitzgerald have more power than the independent counsel upheld in Morrison, as this notion to dismiss points out, in Morrison, the court was reviewing an act of Congress that's entitled to deference.
The result, as the motion to dismiss puts it, is that acting without any direction or supervision, Mr. Fitzgerald alone decides where the interests of the United States lie in an investigation that involves national security, the First Amendment, an important political question.
The motion goes on, by law, the Attorney General may delegate powers, but he may not abdicate responsibility.
If the abdication that occurred here is permitted by this court, important constitutional and statutory protections of our form of government will be at risk.
Our system depends on the accountability of federal officers.
Now, the reason this happened, and how it happened is that John Ashcroft, the Attorney General at the time, recused himself because of his closeness to the administration on this case.
His deputy, James Comey, who's no longer at the Justice Department, pulled Fitzgerald in and just granted him powers to go wherever he wanted to go and do what he wanted to do.
And he was never confirmed for such power.
The president never made the appointment.
And the Attorney General or a deputy cannot pass on his own power to an underling without that person being confirmed, which Fitzgerald has not been.
Now, this is not just window dressing.
This is substantive.
Separated powers is an American bedrock.
A prosecutor who respected it would have stopped this case a long time ago.
And this defense is a line of argument on which Scalia and Senator Levin and Alexander Hamilton, Roger Sherman, and Scooter Libby and the New York Sun editorial writers say they too can agree.
So here's hoping that Judge Walton sees the logic to this reasoning, but that if he does not, Mr. Libby has the resources to press this case all the way to the Supreme Court.
He may win his own exoneration, but more importantly, he protects all of us from the damage that can be wrought by those flatterers and pretenders who, as Sherman put it, wish to extend the powers of the presidency to themselves.
So what we have here, Scooter Libby's indicted in a process case.
Scooter Libby was indicted not because they found any evidence that he had committed any crime on what they were investigating, but that he committed perjury and obstruction of justice during the process of the investigation.
So even though no evidence was turned up at all that Libby had violated the law they were looking at, bamo, they've concluded that he lied, perjured himself, so forth.
So now you have a, we've got a process case being fought with a process case.
These guys, I like these lawyers.
This is hard ball.
This is this, this really is.
We don't even think you are legitimately in office.
It's not about Fitzgerald personally, folks.
Don't misunderstand any of it.
It's about the fact that the job he has is extra constitutional and that he by no means has he gone through the process that would result in him being vested with the powers that he is utilizing.
Kurt in Virginia Beach, you're up first today on Open Line Friday as we go to the phones.
Welcome, sir.
Hi, Rush.
I spent a lot of time driving on the road and Monday and Tuesday.
I listened to you as well as a lot of other people and listened to those people just jump at their conclusions.
And now here we are Friday and you are proven to be so right.
I mean, you cannot look at this deal without thinking how it would help us, both in the Middle Eastern communities.
You just showed your greatness again, and I thank you.
You just proven why you are the rush.
I appreciate that.
I really do.
Thank you very much for that.
It's interesting to note.
I've gotten a couple of emails in the 24-7 account of subscribers that Governor Ehrlich in Maryland, who was one of the first out of the box this week to put this thing to bed, saying, we can't do this.
This is horrible.
This is terrible, is now saying as he learns more, he's moderating his view on this.
He's, I don't know, what's the term, having a change of heart or some such thing.
I'll tell you what this is like.
Let me, you remember the movie The Perfect Storm?
What we have here was the perfect panic.
And it seems like Daniel Henninger has a great piece in the Wall Street Journal again today on you throw a news story in front of a bunch of politicians and you get a week-long panic.
You get Cheney, you get this.
And no matter what the story is, politicians today react without thinking, without knowing.
He compares them to Yosemite Sam, the old cartoon character.
He just fired everything.
Doesn't matter.
He wasn't even aiming.
He's a fire, fire, fire, hope to hit something.
That's what's happening in Capitol Hill today.
People on both sides of the aisle just hear a little bit of a news story, don't even know what it's about.
Bam, start firing away.
They're going to race to the cameras.
Hillary Clinton and Menendez, I'm going to introduce emergency legislation to prevent this.
This is not going to happen.
And they all look like, I mean, fools.
They all look, it was almost like a terrorist attack was only hours away when they heard the news.
So you have here what I think the perfect panic.
What do you suppose happens when 2006 politics and a liberal lust for power and longshoreman union power and Bush hatred and uninformed reporting and the GOP's fear of losing power all get tossed into a stew pot and then you add in a dash of xenophobia and a touch of racism and what do you get?
Exactly what we had earlier this week, the perfect panic.
And I'm going to be fascinated here.
Well, I won't be.
Damn, wrong word.
It will be interesting to see how this story changes course over the weekend and into next week, because it cannot be sustained the way it was earlier in this week.
More and more people are going to look at it and say, ooh, got to start moving to the center.
Some of them are already starting to do that.
Some people still play at hardball.
New Jersey is going to sue to stop the deal.
Menendez is still, Senator Menendez is still on a race course here.
And a couple of other people are the longshoremen.
Not going to take this, standing down, laying down, sitting up, bending over, whatever position they get themselves in day to day.
But the whole process of informing the uninformed has just gone by the wayside here.
In Henninger's column today, he has a great line.
Within hours, if not minutes, Senator Hillary Clinton and Robert Menendez announced emergency legislation to ban foreign governments from controlling operations at our ports.
We're talking about one terminal in New York and New Jersey.
There are 885 such port terminals and so forth around the country.
This deal includes 24 of them.
So, you know, you remember that show, Xena the Warrior Princess?
Remember that show?
The American feminists' favorite show.
You never watched it?
Zena.
Oh, Snerdley didn't watch the show, he just watched Xena.
What was her name?
What was her name?
Uh, Lucy Lawless, that's what her name was.
Yeah, Lucy Lawless.
Well, the Xena the uh, the warrior princess, Hillary Clinton is Hillary the xenophobic princess.
If you ask me, we'll have brief time out here back and continue in just a second.
Stay with us all right.
Next, I have a couple sound bites and these frankly intrigue me.
They are both from Thomas Friedman, the guru of foreign policy, to people on the left.
Now, sit tight here, mr. Snerdley.
Sit tight because you know, on the left we have kooks and lunatics who are invested in America's defeat against this enemy.
They're trying to, they're doing everything they can to sabotage efforts to wage war against this enemy, as we've been through I don't know how many times.
I don't need to detail it for you.
So the people on the left think this war is not worth it, it's not necessary.
We're creating terrorists.
Bush is the problem, blah.
So you would expect that the guru to the left of wise and informed foreign policy discussion would agree with them, but mr Friedman doesn't.
On the matter of this mosque being blown up, he has a theory.
He thinks it means Al-Qaeda Is Losing.
We have two sound biteries and good morning America today with with Charles Gibson, and he said, Tom, who benefits here?
I can't imagine who would want to bomb this mosque.
Al-Qaeda bombed it, Charlie.
What the hell are you talking?
Al-Qaeda bombed the mosque, excuse me, my friends.
Who benefits, Tom?
I can't imagine who want to bomb the mosque.
Who benefits from it?
Because you, you got to know that this is going to erupt into this kind of it's purely the anarchists there.
And what?
What are the?
What do they get out of guys?
They can't wait.
They hope this becomes a civil war so that they'll be accurate at having predicted it.
But here's the first of two answers from Tom Friedman.
People have often asked me why has there been no terrorism in the United States since 9-11, and my answer to them is really my answer to you.
I believe Al-Qaeda, these forces of virulent, you know, Sunni fundamentalism that we've been up against since 9-11, their main focus right now Charlie, is to defeat us in the very heart of their world.
That is why they're focused right now on defeating us in Iraq because, after all, they want to control the Middle East.
They're not interested in controlling, you know, Las Vegas, and they know, if they defeat America in the heart of their world, the resonance that will have is enormous.
And he continued, if we defeat them in the heart of their world, in collaboration with other Arabs and Muslims, by putting together some kind of decent democracy in Iraq, that will have an enormous impact, an enormous resonance in the region and be a terrible defeat.
So what you're seeing now is, in many ways, acts of unspeakable violence.
I mean going into a mosque, blowing it up, one of the most uh, prominent Shiite shrines.
The reason they're doing that is actually because, in some ways, they've been losing.
The process of Iraq coming together has been happening.
And I believe that the most dangerous point for America, as with Iraq, is the closer we actually get to producing a decent outcome there, the crazier our opponents are going to get.
Because they know if they lose, it's strategic.
And there's Tom Friedman, the guru on foreign policy matters to people of the left, telling them that we are succeeding in Iraq and that Al-Qaeda is losing.
And that's exactly what this mosque being blown up means.
The Golden Mosque in Samarra, it can show us the way here, folks.
Stop and think about this.
This Golden Mosque, this religious shrine, survived 1,200 years of history.
Conflicts, tribal conflicts, world wars, survived tyrants, anarchy, power grabs.
And all of a sudden, kaboom, it didn't survive al-Qaeda, al-Zawahiri, al-Zakari.
And the half-empty crowd, the pessimists go, oh, yeah, civil war.
We can taste it.
We still excited.
We want civil war.
Yes, yes, yes, civil war, because we know Bush can't win the war.
But as you know, me as an optimist person, the glass is half full.
To me, this could well be the day of reckoning, the moment of truth.
Because did you see what Muki Al-Sadr did?
He moved his troops in there to protect his enemy.
Because this mosque has survived all the tribal conflicts for 1,200 years.
And here come these insurgent outsider Al-Qaedas and blow it up.
I'm not predicting it, but I wouldn't be surprised if it has a unifying effect, quite opposite of this panic and hoped-for result of civil war.
Brief timeout, ladies and gentlemen.
Be right back.
Stay with us.
All right, another sterling, exciting, unique hour of broadcast excellence hosted by me, El Rushbo, in the can, on the way over to the guarded and secret warehouse, housing all artifacts, soon to be in the Limbaugh Broadcast Museum.
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