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March 20, 2006 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:43
March 20, 2006, Monday, Hour #3
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Yes, here we are, folks, on the third anniversary of the war in Iraq.
And all the detractors are basically asking the question, when are we going to get out?
When are we going to bring it to home?
When are we going to stop the violence?
When are we going to withdraw from the war in Iraq?
I have a more relevant question.
When are we going to withdraw from the war on poverty?
We've been in a war on poverty for 45 years.
There have been many, many casualties.
I want to know what the exit strategy is to the war on poverty.
The war on poverty has resulted in massive poverty, casualties, and even death.
We never get the body count on the war on poverty, but you know there's countless, thousands of them, if not more.
And yet I never hear anybody talking about pulling out on a war on poverty.
You got to hear a couple soundbites.
By the way, welcome back.
Rush Limbaugh here, top of the hour for our third and final hour, the fastest three hours in media, here on the Excellence in Broadcasting Network.
I'm America's anchorman, serving humanity, play-by-play, man of the news and commentary, all combined to one harmful, lovable little fuzzball, a telephone number 800-282-2882.
David Gregory, the new Sam Donaldson, got himself a guest hosting gig at the Today Show today, and he had as one of his guests, Erica Jong.
Well known.
She's still around.
Wait till you hear this.
Erica Jong, what was her book, Fear of Flying?
Fear of Flying.
Okay, well, she's also the author of Seducing the Demon, Writing for My Life.
And Gregory asks her a question.
You know, you also talk about some public figures in this book, including former President Bill Clinton.
You write of him, even after open heart surgery, he has more life force than most men of any age.
And you go on to say, I wonder if I'm trashy enough for Bill Clinton, but I can dream, can't I?
You're talking about having an affair with the former president?
Right.
Well, it's a fantasy.
And my job is to release fantasy, not necessarily to do it.
But I did have a dream about Bill Clinton in which he and I were having this affair.
And suddenly we're in an apartment up near Columbia where I went to school.
And our spouses both walk into the room.
Now, I told this to my shrink, and I said, I guess I have a fantasy about Bill Clinton.
I guess I really think he's sexy.
And she said, get in line.
Oh, my God.
Now, these are the kind of people that are telling us that George Bush poses a grave threat, is very dangerous, is incompetent, is unstable.
And we need to get out of Iraq and we need to defeat this guy because Bush is horrible.
This is intelligent thinking on the web.
This is a leftist intellectual, ladies and gentlemen, who goes on.
Here's David Gregory, his big showbiz break, goes from the White House to the Today Show, and they saddle him with this woman who gets to tell him about her dream of having an affair with Bill Clinton.
So Gregory says, well, the kicker is you try and also raise money for Hillary Clinton.
I'm making a fundraiser for Hillary.
I want her to be president.
I think she's a great woman.
And I have never had a relationship with that man.
Now, you're dreaming about it.
You're going on television, telling the whole world that you're dreaming of having an affair with Bill Clinton.
You're going to go out and raise money for his wife.
What do you think Hillary thinks when she hears this, if she even cares?
Well, aside from, yeah, she placed.
Oh, here we go.
Another one.
My guess, he says, whatever it takes.
If this woman wants to raise money for me, run around and talk about having an affair with my husband, fine, whatever it takes.
I don't know if she'd be proud of it or not, but I don't know if you people saw this.
This was over the weekend.
It might have been late Friday or sometime Saturday.
Story from the Los Angeles Times: smoking ban moves outdoors.
Calabasas, California makes it illegal to light up in public spaces with fines up to $500.
Some residents breathe easier, but others just fume.
As a pioneering public smoking ban went into effect Friday in Calabasas, enforcement came from a higher authority, Mother Nature.
A pouring rainstorm snuffed out renegade smokers' cigarettes, sent them scurrying for cover as security guards began issuing warnings at the town's main shopping center.
You could get a $500 citation, one of them advised Danielle Wakely of Westwood as she sat at an outside table at the Calabasas Commons Mall and puffed on a Marlborough.
A moment earlier, shopper Erit Litvak had bummed a cigarette and a light from Wakely.
She listened to the guard's warning with her mouth wide open.
I'm putting it out, Litvak exclaimed.
Am I in trouble?
Calabasas, upscale suburb perched on the western edge of the San Fernando Valley, was generating international attention for what appears to be the nation's first ban on smoking in all outdoor public spaces.
Violators can be fined up to $500.
This is being diplomatically called the Secondhand Smoke Control Ordinance, and they say they're going to phase it in gently out there.
We're making it acceptable to ask what has been an uncomfortable question until now.
Would you please put that cigarette out?
We're putting the force of law behind it.
The new rules exempt residences, but for how long?
Backyards, balconies, and patios unless they are adjacent to common areas like laundry rooms or apartment complex walkways.
Calabasas Haskrill graduate Margot Arnold, 19, said she was only asking for some sort of outdoor smoking controls at the Calabasas Commons Mall when she addressed the city council last June.
Well, she got more than what she asked for.
Now, I know that a lot of you are anti-smoking, and a lot of you bought into this silly notion of secondhand smoke being deadly.
And I know that there are a lot of you out there that just don't like the smell of it.
Frankly, I agree with you.
Cigarette smoke is putrid.
I agree totally with you.
Cigar smoke's a different matter.
Cigar smoke is rich.
It is joyful.
It adds to the fragrance and aroma of any room where it is taking place.
Cigarettes, I agree with you.
And I know some of you just have a general either health problem with being around cigarette smokers or an allergy problem or whatever.
But it's, you know, I sometimes toy with the idea of moving to California.
I really, I like it out there.
If it weren't for the taxes, the high taxes are the one thing that keeps me from moving out there.
And I've toyed with it ever since I left in 84.
I loved it.
Why, 88.
Every time I go out there, I have a great time, but just the thought.
But this, this is even more draconian.
Because the point is, folks, look at this is, to me, it has similarities to this eminent domain business going on right now.
It's not the place of the government to decide if people can or cannot smoke on private property.
To me, this really isn't about smoking.
It's about government overextending its authority.
Just like you have the Maryland legislature extorting all businesses now, requiring that businesses of different sizes pay different amounts of their payroll in health care.
And if they don't, they have to send the balance of what's demanded to the state.
You know, this is this is to me, it's just it's overreach.
It's not about smoking.
It's about government overextending its authority and doing so, knowing full well that a lot of people are going to like it and not stand up to it.
It's sort of like the imminent domain fight until it affects you.
I don't care about this.
There's a big eminent domain fight going on up in Long Island.
North Hills, the village of North Hills, New York, is where one of the greatest golf courses in the country is, Deepdale.
My friend Jimmy Dunn puts on a tournament every year.
Sandler O'Neill, his firm, which lost a lot of people in 9-11, has a golf tournament up there to raise money for the survivors of those families.
And I play in it, and it's just a beautiful place.
It's a private golf course.
But last week, two lawsuits had to be filed to stop the village of North Hills from seizing Deepdale Country Club.
It's private.
It's exclusive.
It may be, just so you know, it may be the wealthiest per capita membership of any golf club in America.
That's how exclusive it is.
This mayor of the village of North Hills wants to seize this private golf course under eminent domain.
The law allows government entities to take private property so long as it's designed for public use and just compensation is provided to the previous owners.
Now, the members of Deepdale are upset about this.
The mayor is Marvin Natis, Natis, and my friend Nattis, and his stated intention of seizing the course for exclusive use of the village residents.
The mayor said, I consider a village golf course and recreational facility for residents a public use.
So they're just going to try to seize this private golf course, as this mayor is, under eminent domain.
And this is not giving it to developers.
It's not what happened at New London, Connecticut.
It's not what's happening in other places.
This is actually seizing it and keeping it as a golf course and turning it over to the public.
Strictly class envy here, strictly get even with the rich and the powerful and so forth.
But I can imagine if Russia is just a golf course and it's just the rich, who cares?
Yeah, I know when they came for the golf courses, you didn't say anything because you're not a golfer.
Or maybe you are a golfer and you can't get in and you want to play there, but you can't because it's so exclusive.
So you're going to support the city just running in and taking it over.
Maybe you like to say, why should I have to play on some ratty public course when there's a perfectly fine private course right over there?
Manicured Fairways, Perfect Greens.
The point is, they won't stay that way once a city takes it over.
And I can guarantee you.
So this is just, it's pure government outreach, overreach, overextension, or what have you in both these cases.
And I don't know, that's the whole point.
Snirdly just asked me, what's the difference in that, what the communists did when they seized private property just for themselves?
It's the same kind of thinking that allows government officials to think they have this power and should exercise it.
And it's all rooted in this class envy business.
You know, I sent Jimmy Dunn an email now.
I said, save Deep Dale.
I mean, it's just, once this kind of stuff starts, you never know where it's going to stop.
So I keep telling you that tax reform, be it fair tax, which I love, be it the flat tax of Steve Forbes, whatever, if there's going to be any real reform, it better happen fast because we're getting near the point where the vast majority of wage earners do not pay federal income taxes.
And when that happens, you're not going to be able to reform anything.
When it's a minority of Americans paying federal income taxes, that's the end of reform.
Back in just a moment.
Stay with us.
No, I'm not going to say it.
Do not try to...
I just told Snurdly a joke.
I'm not going to say it.
About Erica Jong and Hillary and why Hillary might really be mad.
I'm not going to say it.
I've got to.
Somebody sent me this.
I want to assure you that I do not read the Huffington Post.
Ariana Huffington's little blog.
Somebody sent me this.
Not too long.
I think it's, I think that Laurie David wrote the she of the Prius and the private plane.
She of the hybrid, big environmentalist wacko.
She ripped up her own yard up there in Massachusetts, violating regulations to get ready for a party she's throwing for Bobby Kennedy Jr.
Not too long ago, she writes, Oprah did a show about global warming and held up a light bulb.
Well, it wasn't just any light bulb, but a compact fluorescent or CFL bulb that uses 66% less energy than a standard bulb.
If every household in America changed just five of their light bulbs to a compact fluorescent bulb, it would be the equivalent to taking 8 million cars off the road for a year in terms of greenhouse gases created.
Ken Luna, an eighth-grade science teacher in Babylon, New York, saw Oprah and along with his students has come up with a very bright idea.
Give one compact fluorescent bulb to every K-12 student in America, all 50 million of them, and fight global warming one bulb at a time.
Not to mention saving the American people over $2.3 billion in electricity costs.
Home Depot has agreed to supply Mr. Luna's class with enough of these CFL bulbs for every student in their district.
That's 5,500 free CFL bulbs.
So on March 30th in the West Gym at North Babylon High School, they're having a party, clowns, music, food, and free light bulbs.
And I can tell you who the clowns at this party are going to be.
The people that believe all this.
If you're a teacher, start a similar project in your class.
If you are a supplier or a retail store, donate bulbs.
If you're part of the media, cover this worthwhile campaign.
And if you are Oprah, know that your suggestion has sparked the ultimate and grassroots action.
So please continue to follow this great story and spread the word.
Does anybody really know what this is all about?
You want me to tell you what this is really all about?
No, they may have stock in a light bulb company, of course, either betting on it to go up or down, some playing it long, some playing short.
But no, there's no question.
This is nothing more than a disguised attempt at liberal indoctrination of children.
This is like bringing Captain Planet into the classroom, Ted Turner's Saturday morning cartoon show, which demonized all corporations.
So you bring in these young skulls full of mush and you give them a light bulb and you tell them to take it home and that they're going to be the equivalent of getting automobiles off the street.
We've got to get automobiles off the street.
We've got to come up with, or the equivalent or so.
Does anybody believe that if every household in America changed just five of their light bulbs into CFL bulbs, that it would be the equivalent to taking 8 million cars off the road for a year?
I mean, as high school students say, no way!
They just can't be.
More than a third of adults say they are lonely, especially people in their 40s, the people out there studying the lonely.
Can you imagine how much fun that's going to be?
UK and Australian researchers conducted 30-minute phone interviews with 1,289 adults in the state of central Queensland in Australia.
They found that 35% of the respondents said they were lonely.
Were they lonely during the phone call, I wonder?
People aged 50 and older had the lowest levels of loneliness because they've learned to appreciate it.
Levels of loneliness began levels of loneliness began to rise at age 20 and peaked between the ages of 40 and 49, which proves to me people just don't mature until they're 50.
Doug and Columbus, I'm glad you called.
Welcome to the program.
Rush, I-99 I-5 Dittos to you from California.
I used to be a doctor that was in the golf business.
Thank you very much, sir.
Yes, sir.
Hey, I now live in Columbus, Ohio, actually in a suburb out here.
And years ago, there was a very nice country club here, and the city of Columbus took it over, bought the golf course.
It was not taken through amino domain.
I'm going to make that very clear.
And this is not a slam against the city of Columbus.
But what happens is you find out that when a municipality takes over a golf course like that, one of the biggest things is maintenance on the course.
They can't afford to take care of the maintenance as it was being done because each one of those members is paying an extraordinary amount of monthly dues to keep it in that condition.
So the golf course, which was private, has now basically turned into a municipal condition golf course because of the amount of maintenance.
The size of the tea boxes where players tee off and apply on a private club are much smaller because based upon the number of rounds of golf that they're going to get.
By definition, this is true.
It's all economics.
By definition, you're going to take a course public.
It means you have to make it affordable.
If you're going to take a course public, the city hopes to at least break even on it, maybe turn a profit.
But by taking it public, you have to price it in such a way so that as many people as possible can play it.
And you won't generate the money, nor will you have the time to maintain it and keep it the way it is.
By definition, the best public golf course I have ever seen is actually here.
It's no longer public.
It's been purchased by a couple of good friends of mine, but it's called Emerald Dunes.
And it's right out there off Okeechobee.
It's right in the complex where I get my publicity photos taken every now and then when I get conned into going out there and doing that.
And so, yes, another story, but the bottom line is that it was a beautiful golf course designed by Tom Fazio.
He's one of the premier designers in the country.
Most public golf courses just can't maintain that level of superiority for the exact reason.
By definition, there just isn't the money, nor is there the desire.
There isn't the desire to maintain it that way.
This mayor, I don't know this mayor, this mayor may think that it just happens.
You know, a lot of people think excellence and quality just happens, and that all that's going to change is we're going to own it now.
We're going to let as many people play as possible.
And that's another thing that's going to tear it up if it ever happens.
I'm stunned it's even being tried.
Well, no, I'm not.
Really?
I know that Torrey Pines is public, but I've never seen it.
I said the best public golf course I've seen, but I haven't seen them all.
I wasn't trying to leave any out.
I've only seen Torrey Pines on television.
I've been thinking about this light bulb business, and I have checked the email here during the break.
Hey, hey, go easy on these light bulbs.
They will cut people's electric bills.
I don't, that was fine and dandy.
That's cool.
Do it.
I have nothing against the light bulbs.
I'm just the idea that they can have the equivalent of getting rid of 8 million automobiles a year is something, I'm sorry, as a natural skeptic, I find tough to believe.
But let's say it's true.
I got an idea for you people.
Here's what you're going to do, especially those of you driving Yugos and cheap little imports.
Go out, change every light bulb in your house to one of these CFL bulbs.
You're going to be saving so much money on your electric bill, and you're going to be the equivalent of getting so many cars off the street that you can trade in your junk little cheap import, go out and buy a real car like an SUV.
This is absurd.
This stuff is, I'm telling you what this is, is liberal indoctrination of young skulls full of mush.
All right, Gene in Trenton, New Jersey.
Glad you called.
Welcome to the EIB Network.
Did you see the piece last night on 60 Minutes about Global Warming?
I did not see the piece last night on 60 Minutes on Global Warming.
I heard about it, but I didn't see it.
I do know that Al Gore is making a big global warming speech in Murfreesboro, Tennessee tonight, where it'll be 32 degrees on the first day of spring.
What did it say?
Tell me about it.
It showed the ice glaciers melting, and if we don't change the pattern that we're in, that by the mid-century, we're going to be the problems are going to be very, very severe.
Yeah, well, I'll tell you what, since we're not causing it, there's nothing we can do to stop it.
Global warming undoubtedly happens.
We used to have ice ages, and it's obviously warmer now than when there was an ice age.
So global warming obviously happens.
There's sun cycles and all kinds of things that contribute to it.
The idea that we're causing it is something that I have not signed on to lately because I'm not a member of my species that likes to beat myself up and blame my species for every calamity that exists out there.
I saw John Kerry, and he might have been in this show last night.
John Kerry last week said that the ice sheets up there are melting so fast that by 2036, New York and Boston are going to be underwater.
Well, I don't know about you, but I don't know what we're going to do to stop this melting.
If it's happening that fast, I couldn't tell you what we're going to do since we're not causing it.
And even if, if you don't want to believe it, if you want to believe that we are causing it, we haven't done it in 20 years, we haven't done it in 30 or 40, and there's no way we can reverse what we're doing and have the effects reversed on the melting of the ice sheets.
Gene, you got to look at this stuff a little bit more skeptically than you are.
And if it happens, it happens.
You know, the earth is constantly changing.
It's constantly evolving.
It takes mountains a long time to grow, but they used to be underwater.
If you go out to parts of Arizona, you can have somebody that knows what they're talking about explain the mountains used to be underwater, but somehow they're not anymore.
And it all happened long before we were, you know, trying to exchange our light bulbs to these new CFL things before we were driving around automobiles.
This is, this is, I've been through this so many times, it's just.
It's just absurd.
There was a story I had out last week, too.
We're at the tipping point.
Some environmentalist wackle groups, we're at the tipping point where it comes to global warming.
It means we're beyond the point of no return.
There's nothing we can do.
Well, if that's the case, if there's nothing we can do, live it up, folks.
Go out and buy the car you want.
Go out and pollute all you want because nothing we can do.
We're all going to die.
It's all going to happen.
We're killing ourselves.
If there's nothing we can do, why run the story?
If there's nothing we can do, why run the story?
If they're going to do a story on 60 minutes, it says irreversible, which is essentially what they're saying, there has to be another reason for doing the story.
And if you don't consider the politics involved of the people who push this story, you're missing 90% of the story.
It's just liberalism.
It's just socialism.
It's just a mechanism whereby people will cede control of their lives to government regulations and policies when it comes to things that they do in their everyday lives.
All for this purpose of supposedly punishing ourselves for the destruction and damage that we have wrought, that we've caused.
And it's all silly.
It's really, folks, militant radical environmental wackoism.
is nothing more than a camouflaged mechanism to promote the whole concept of socialism and big government and government control over as much of life as possible.
It's all it is.
And if you fall prey to it, you are assisting these wackos in their objective.
Angelo in St. Cloud, Minnesota.
Nice to have you with us, sir.
Megadiddles Rush.
Thank you.
Say, if electric light bulbs are causing so much pollution, why are we switching to electric cars?
I'm not qualified enough to have it.
Maybe they're running on CFL light bulbs and we just don't know it.
I just thought it was kind of odd.
It is.
The whole thing's odd.
But if you look at the source, it starts with Oprah.
You've got to be dubious of that.
And then it filters down to Lori David.
You've got to be really dubious of that.
That's going to a bunch of high school.
We ought to demand that some high school science teacher prepare a report that would convince me that using these light bulbs to the extent it's been suggested would actually be the equivalent of getting 8 million cars off the highways every year.
And I assume that they mean in global warming gases that are leading to this destruction that we are causing.
Jerry in Jacksonville, Florida.
Hello, sir.
I understand that there's a lot of documentation now being released about documents that were seized during the Iraqi invasion.
And pretty much all the reasons we went to Iraq are true.
My question, you know, and nothing's been really said about it, and I understand the Democrats and the media is probably trying to put a squash on it.
My question is, is how come the Republicans aren't possibly maybe buying airtime to push this?
Because, you know, everything that's happening in the media is bashing Bush.
Why isn't the Republicans fighting back and really coming public with a lot of these documents?
It's a good question.
I don't have the answer for you.
I'm as curious about that as you are.
From the White House on down, why there has not been a desire.
And in fact, I am told that there has been an active desire not to put these documents out, not by the president.
He had to overrule some of his people a couple weeks ago.
But in the diplomatic community, in the diplomatic corps, there has been an active effort to suppress these documents.
And I don't know under what basis.
Last week, ABC published excerpts of four documents.
We read those documents to you on the air.
Those documents established, one of them established that al-Qaeda and representatives of bin Laden were in Iraq as far back as 1995.
And of course, ABC had to run an editor's note after every excerpt of a document that they published in this story.
And I think it was only on the web that they did this.
And every editor's note was an editorial comment about what had just been published.
And when it came to this note about the fact that al-Qaeda and bin Laden and representatives of Saddam's regime had been regularly meeting and discussing things in America and terrorist attacks and this sort of thing, the ABC note said, well, where source here is unreliable.
It's simply an Afghan informant.
It is seductive, but we don't have enough corroborative evidence to support and believe this claim.
So the answer here, Joe, when it comes to the left and the media, and not to be redundant, there is an action line on the Iraq story.
The action line is Iraq was unnecessary.
Bush lied.
There were no weapons of mass destruction.
Well, I will guarantee you that if ever there is full-fledged evidence to the contrary, it will be suppressed and ignored by both the media and the Democrats.
It will not advance the action line of the story to contradict it.
I mean, that would be instant death for one of the planks of the Democrats' platform and their electoral strategy in this election cycle.
Now, as for the White House, I don't have an answer for you.
I just don't have a clue.
Some of these documents go way back into the 90s.
Some of them are as recent as 2002, 2001.
Why there has been this reluctance to get them out?
I mean, the president has been the primary target of all of these campaigns to say he's lied and it was unnecessary and there were no weapons of mass destruction.
He knew it and he told the intelligence community to gin it up.
There has to be a reason.
There has to be a reason.
I just don't know what it is, and I can't find it from anybody.
Back after this.
Okay, all is not hunky-dory out there on the Democrat side of the aisle, ladies and gentlemen.
Congressional Democrats are now saying that Senator Feingold's move to censure President Bush over the wiretapping is a distraction from their quest to take back Congress in the fall.
Every time we get in a great strategic position, we manage to energize the Republican base, said Jim Moran, a Virginia Democrat.
Everything's going well for the Democrats.
And Bush is tanking into polls.
And then Feingold comes up with the idea of censure, which is going to go nowhere.
And it's not just quixotic or ketsotic, quixotic, kihotic, however you say it.
It's somewhat self-serving.
So the House Democrats all upset that they think Feingold has screwed up their automatic retaking of the House.
We got some audio soundbites on all this, by the way, starting with Miss America.
Nancy Pelosi, she said this last Friday at her daily press briefing.
I have no idea why anybody would censure someone before they had an investigation.
I have concerns about the practice that the administration engaged in, but I think it's important for the committees of jurisdiction to do the investigation, to establish what the practice was, compare it to what the law is, and make a determination from there.
Any motion to censure at this point, I think, is one that I would not support.
So according to Feingold, Miss America here is cowering in fear.
He threw that bomb in the Senate floor last week, this censure business, and they all ran before it could go off, including Feingold, who fled the scene and refused to even debate Arlen Specter about it.
Now, the House really ticked off about this because they, up until this, they do.
They live in their dream world.
They think that they've already won the House back.
It's just a matter of getting to November and going through the formality of the election.
Subject also came up on Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace yesterday.
He talked to Senator Turbin.
Chris Wallace said, Senator, as a Democratic leader, do you rule out impeachment of the president if the Democrats regain control of Congress?
I don't believe that that is even a valuable discussion at this point, but I do believe it's valuable that Senator Feingold is moving us forward to finally be a catalyst to have the kind of hearings and the kind of deliberations as to what lies behind this warrantless wiretap situation, how this president can avoid the law, which is very clear on the subject.
I can't rule anything out until the investigation is complete.
I don't want to prejudge it.
But if this president or any president violates the law, it has to be held accountable.
Okay, so the upshot is it's too early to discuss impeachment, but let's do it anyway.
I mean, we got to get to the bottom of that.
No, we shouldn't talk about impeachment.
We should talk about it.
And by the way, going back to Pelosi, you can tell what she wants.
She doesn't even care about the end result, right?
She just wants her committees to be able to look into this.
She wants the spectacle of the hearings, whatever investigation would take place.
So, and as the Durbin, you know, this is getting tiresome, these people lying, flat out lying to people about what this program was and about its legality.
It has, Byron York last week, National Review Online, wrote a pretty detailed piece on this whole NSA foreign surveillance program and summarized how it's been pronounced legal countless times over many years.
And the Democrats know it.
This is just report the news as you hope it is.
Report the news as you want it to, like the media telling us that there's a civil war going on Iraq right now, when there's not.
They're just so desperate for it to be, they're just going to say that it's happening.
They're going to roll the dice and think it is going to happen, so we'll be right anyway, because even if it isn't happening now, it will happen soon.
Chris Wallace says as a follow-up to Turbin.
When the administration proposed this law for the first time back in late 2001 or early 2002, they briefed congressional leaders, including Tom Daschell.
Why didn't the Democrat leaders do something about it then?
Having served on the intelligence committee, I can tell you they put you in a box.
They tell you the secret information and then say you're sworn to secrecy.
You can't repeat it.
So to suggest that you can then hold a president or any member of the administration accountable publicly would mean that you'd have to break the law and leak information to the press, which many of us are loath to do, as we should be.
So we're in a terrible situation here, being given information and you can't do anything with it.
This is patently unreal.
Durbin says that intelligence briefings on the NSA program put the Democrats in a box.
He's essentially saying the president came up and tricked us.
He told us about this illegal program, but we couldn't say anything about it because we're not allowed to leak.
It hasn't stopped some of you, Senator.
And in fact, I'll tell you, one of the reasons that this is not, there are a lot of Democrats that don't want to pursue this because this investigation is on.
This goes all the way back to that December 16th, New York Times story written by James Risen.
And there may be this investigation may be looking at some members of Congress to see if they had any role in leaking this information, even though Durbin says, which many of us are loath to do.
He didn't say we're all loath to do.
Many of us are loath to do.
Well, we're in a terrible situation here.
We're being given information and you can't do anything with it.
In other words, he's up saying can't leak it.
So he was brought in.
He was in on the loop.
Why didn't you do anything about it then?
If it's illegal, you can say something about it.
I mean, you and Rockefeller already destroyed that black project with that super satellite program is going to be up there.
He's already done that.
What's the problem with this?
So Wallace says, so at this point, from what you know, do you believe that in fact he has violated the law and violated the Constitution?
At this point, I can find no explanation from this administration to justify this warrantless wiretape.
Stop the tape.
How about trying to find out if al-Qaeda is talking to anybody in this country about a future hit?
The answer to my question as to breaking the law and violating the Constitution?
I'm waiting for more information.
And you would think the information would be forthcoming, as Senate Judiciary Committee hearings and Senate Intelligence Committee hearings would give us that information.
Unfortunately, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee has refused to engage the kind of oversight which we expect of that traditionally bipartisan committee.
You know, I'm so fortunate that I can afford from my business budget here to pay people to watch this.
I had another late night on Saturday.
Like 4 or 5 in the morning.
I was not going to get up to watch these stupid shows.
I would have just blown a gasket.
It's bad enough to hear this stuff as it is now.
These guys are just incorrigible.
Anyway, I'm going to take a quick, brief timeout.
We'll be back and wrap it up.
Don't go away.
On the release of this documents and the White House refusal or reluctance to release these Saddam documents, there may be one possibility here that we hadn't considered.
It could well be that the White House does not want to pin itself down as this is the only reason we went into Iraq.
There were a lot of reasons.
Weapons of mass destruction was one of them.
And they may not want to deflect attention from the other viable reasons by putting out a bunch of documents.
See, see, we were right.
That's just a wild guess.
And Senator Durbin, if you don't like the program, cut the funding for it.
And Senator Durbin, intelligence briefings have always been secret, even when your boy Bill Clinton was in charge of them.
We'll see you tomorrow, folks.
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