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May 25, 2006 - Rush Limbaugh Program
34:55
May 25, 2006, Thursday, Hour #2
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Hi folks, greetings and welcome back.
The award-winning thrill packed, ever exciting, increasingly popular Rush Limbaugh program.
Program that meets and surpasses all audience expectations on a daily basis.
In fact, a a program pretty much uh sets immediately for the day.
Our telephone number, if you uh want to join us, 800-282-2882, and uh email address rush at eIBNet.com.
All right, time to focus on immigration.
The Senate supposed to vote on its uh it's its big uh uh bill today.
And despite the uh the the name on this thing, Hegel Martinez or Martinez, well, I guess Hegel Martinez, the uh compromise bill.
Uh don't forget this this bill was really written by Senator Kennedy and Senator McCain, and uh has has been amended a number of times with other senators offering uh compromise proposals, and that's how you get to Hegel Martinez.
But it's basically a bill written by Senator McCain along with Ted Kennedy.
Senator McCain on Larry King Alive last night, and uh King asked him about this interview that he uh story rather that appeared in the New York Observer uh and and uh which he referred to people like me and uh Lou Dobbs as nativists and agitators.
And we are the problem in getting this bill passed.
Larry King says, uh New York Observer said you recently criticized what you called uh nativist elements of the GOP.
Is that true?
And uh uh what were you talking about?
I criticize elements that take an impractical view of this.
I don't know if I don't think that was not from somebody who was there, but somebody heard from.
I don't think I used that word.
I I respect the views of my Republican colleagues who don't agree, and I think that's an important part of this debate.
Uh is that right?
I thought I'm the story in front of me, but I thought the person that supplied the quotes what McCain said was a person who was there, and I thought the person was named.
Uh some of the people that were there were certainly named.
So at any rate, uh King says, in the 2000 campaign, uh where we did many interviews.
If you considered yourself a maverick, you said you did, and you were proud to carry that banner because you marched to your drum, is still Drew to you still consider yourself a maverick.
I marched to my drummer and always have, but it's grounded in a fundamentally conservative Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan philosophy.
And does that mean that sometimes I depart from a lot of the members of my party on certain issues?
Well, this immigration issue is obviously not pleasing to the right of my party.
I think it's I've got to do w what I know is right, and through my experience and knowledge and age have have shown me I I really have been given both the curse and the gift of knowing what's right and what's wrong.
Uh moving forward now to the today show.
This was this morning, Katie Currick said, Why do you think, Senator McCain, that this immigration uh business has become such a divisive issue among the Republicans?
Well, uh, because uh states like mine, Katie are devastated by illegal immigration.
Uh people are angry and frustrated.
This is what causes the minute men.
Uh stop the taper.
So what?
You don't hear 'em.
He obviously knows it, but it doesn't matter.
Otherwise, he wouldn't be saying what he's saying and proposing what he's proposing in dealing with the problem.
Thousand people demonstrated in Phoenix against what the House had done.
It's a polarizing issue, but uh, aside from the Iraq war, most Americans think that this is our one of their highest priorities, so we should act.
That's why they send us here.
And so I I think that there's been some goodwill gestures from the House side.
I hope that we can sit down and the way we got this through the Senate was bipartisan.
I think that's the way we ought to get an overall agreement.
Democrats and Republicans sitting down together, working out a problem, which is what the American people would like us to do.
Senator, you I can't believe it.
You just don't get it.
What you're doing is not what the American people want you to do, and it's not why they sent you there.
And the solution to this is not getting members of the House to agree with you.
I'm told that Carl Rove went up to the uh at the Capitol Hill yesterday and spoke to twenty Republicans in the House uh and and was trying to change their minds, and I'm told that 19 of them uh told him no deal, no dice, that uh he was not persuasive in getting uh members of the House who totally oppose this uh this Senate bill uh to change their minds.
Senator McCain, by the way, has been in the recording studio lately.
That's Paul Shanklin of a great parody.
That song uh a cover from uh uh Beauty and a Beast.
Be our guest worker, Senator John McCain, as portrayed by Paul Shanklin, El Rushbaugh, and the Excellence in Broadcasting Network.
J.D. Hayworth, also from Arizona, who gets it, uh, has uh written a piece today, National Review Online.
Call it what it is, the President's plan is an illegal immigrant amnesty.
Amnesty, the act of an authority as a government by which pardon is granted to a large group of individuals.
Now, J.D. starts this way, he says, Last week I had the honor to travel to Arizona aboard Air Force One with President Bush to see firsthand the situation along the border.
President Bush a good man when he's right.
I'm among his strongest supporters in Congress, but on the issue of illegal immigration, he is uh profoundly wrong.
In Arizona, President Bush said first of all in this debate, nobody should be given an automatic citizenship.
That's called amnesty.
Well, that's a strange definition of amnesty, considering that illegal aliens aren't breaking the law by trying to become citizens.
They are breaking the law by crossing the border illegally.
If you let them stay here, if you pardon them for their crime of entering the country illegally, that's an amnesty.
The President's trying to redefine amnesty because he knows that admitting his plan is an amnesty would doom it.
But in fact, Bush wants to add eventual citizenship for illegal immigrants in addition to letting them stay here.
That makes his plan more than an amnesty, call it an amnesty plus.
The White House claims that the President's plan is not an amnesty because illegals will face penalties and benchmarks.
Here's what Tony Snow says awaits those who are allowed to stay under the President's plan.
You, the illegal alien, will pay fines.
You will have a criminal penalty.
You will also have to pay taxes.
You'll have to keep your nose clean.
You can't break the law.
You'll also have to stay continuously employed.
You'll have to pay your taxes, you'll have to have a secure tamper-proof identification.
And when all that's done, you get to go to the back of the line and you wait, what, eleven years or more for a chance to become a citizen, at the end of which you have to have a command of English as well to become uh be as well to be able to become a citizen.
Now, with all those benchmarks, it's hard to square that with the idea of amnesty.
Well, really, let's go through it.
Illegal aliens will have to pay taxes.
That's not a penalty.
They're supposed to pay taxes.
In fact, uh according to Senator Chuck Grassley, under Bush's plan, illegals would have the option to only have to pay three of their last five years in back taxes.
And uh that is on Senator Grassley's website.
He's got the website list of top ten flaws of the Senate's immigration bill, and that's one of them.
They only have to pay their pack back taxes three or five years.
They have to keep their noses clean.
Big deal, so does everybody else.
They have to get a tamper-proof ID card.
Oh, the humanity.
They'll have to stay employed.
But isn't that why they came here to do jobs Americans won't do?
They'll have to learn English.
That's not a penalty, that's a benefit to the illegal if he pulls it off.
Most of these benchmarks would be required of any legal immigrant.
They are in no way burdensome, yet uh the White House makes them sound almost oppressive.
The only real punishment on the entire list is the fine.
You know what it is?
$2,000 payable in two $1,000 installments.
When you consider what illegals get for their two grand, it's the deal of a lifetime.
The penalty for using a phony social security card is a fine of up to $250,000 and/or five years in jail.
But the president wants illegals to get pardoned for that serious crime and all their other immigration-related crimes.
In the President's plan, illegals get to have what they earned illegally counted towards social security benefits for themselves and their survivors.
They get to send their children to American schools and bring their family into the country.
They get access to public services, including the best health care in the world, and they get to enter and leave the country Freely.
In other words, they get to do everything a regular citizen can do except vote and serve on a jury.
To top it off, illegals are allowed not only to join the citizenship queue, but also to legally live and work here while they wait.
This privilege is worth thousands upon thousands of dollars for any individual illegal.
And for the child of an illegal who is born in the United States and thus becomes an automatic citizen during this time, the privilege is almost priceless.
John O'Sullivan writes that the going rate for a green card on the world market is 100,000.
Now, for some reason, uh you you still think that Bush's plan is tough on illegal immigrants.
Ask yourself what would happen if we set up a booth at the border charging two thousand dollars to come and live and work in the U.S. with the possibility of citizenship down the road.
My guess is the line would stretch from Nogales to Buenos Aires, and we'd erase our budget deficit overnight.
The idea that this plan would be onerous for illegals is insulting, especially to legal immigrants who have patiently gone through the laborious process of lawfully entering the country.
American people see through this spin.
They know an amnesty when they see it, and the president's plan is an amnesty.
Hi, we're back on the cutting edge of societal evolution.
El Rushboat Thomas Sowell weighing in bordering on fraud part three.
Some people are worried that amnesty will give illegal aliens the same rights that American citizens have.
In reality, it'll give the illegals more rights than the average American citizen.
Since most of the illegals are Mexican, that makes them a minority, and under affirmative action, combined with amnesty, they would have preferences and jobs and other benefits.
Illegals who graduate from a has scrubbed in California can already attend the University of California, paying lower tuition than an American citizen from neighboring Oregon.
Under the supposedly tough immigration bill in the U.S. Senate, illegals don't have to pay all the back taxes they owe.
An American citizen gets no such break from the government and can end up in federal prison like Al Capone.
If an American citizen gets stopped by the cops for a traffic violation, and the cops discover he's wanted for some other violation of the law, they can arrest him for whatever else he has done.
But if an illegal alien gets stopped for going through a red light, and the police discover that he is in the country illegally, in many communities the cop is forbidden to arrest him for that or even to report him to the feds.
If an American citizen forges a social security card in order to get a job, he can be arrested.
Under a provision recently passed by the Senate, illegal aliens who forged social security cards not only get a pass, they get to collect social security benefits.
Now the great majority of senators who voted for that provision were Democrats, and they prevail because they were joined by a small minority of Republicans led by a surprise, surprise Senator McCain.
After similar defections on judges and free speech, Senator McCain may give opportunism a bad name.
Now, what the immigration bill in the Senate has become is just another attempt to pander to another special interest in disregard of how that affects the country as a whole, and this is exactly it.
I mean, there are a lot of things going on in this bill, but it's clear that this is pandering to a future group, large group of voters, and pandering to a current group of people that would be sympathetic to them.
In total disregard for the voters who have elected these senators to sit in the U.S. Senate today.
The voters who have sent them there are being totally ignored, thumbed at, in exchange for the possibility of even more votes down the road from this giant influx of people, which this bill makes real no effort, really no effort to um to stop.
Much is made of the fact that there are supposedly twelve million illegals in the country already.
The last time illegal aliens were given amnesty back in eighty six.
That led to even more illegal aliens coming in afterwards.
Do we want twenty million or thirty million more in the future?
Do we want to change the very composition of the American population?
And with it, the values of the country?
There was a time when immigrants came here to become Americans, but there are powerful pressure groups in this country extending far beyond the immigrant community, doing their best to keep foreigners foreign and force Americans to accommodate their foreign language and culture in the name of multiculturalism.
We have seen what havoc such notions and practices have created after mass immigration under guest worker programs in Europe, especially after the Muslim riots in France.
Do we want that in the United States?
Most of the first generation of immigrants may want nothing more than a chance to work and be happy to hear be here instead of in Mexico, but second generations born in this country compare their situation not with the situation in Mexico, but with uh what other Americans around them have.
There's plenty of people both inside and outside the immigrant community who will fan their sense of grievance and exploit their resentments.
This is not peculiar to people from Mexico.
Europe has already experienced it.
The political strategy of this package, and this this this it's a package deal legislation is to give immediate and irrevocable special benefits to some and make pious promises about the future to get all this past the others.
Here's something else to consider, too.
Under current law, simply entering the country illegally can result in a six-month prison stay and a $250,000 fine, and aiding in that crime carries a similar fine and a five-year prison sentence.
Once ordered deported and illegal racks up $500 per day of continued illegal presence.
In addition, there are the perjury and false statements associated with fraudulently filling out federal tax forms.
Each instance carries up to a five-year prison sentence and a $250,000 fine.
Also, there are crimes relating to the misuse of social security numbers needed to obtain work.
Those crimes can result in five years in prison and a $250,000 fine.
So let's review under the Senate's amnesty plan.
A U.S. citizen committing forgery and tax fraud could get 25 years in jail.
An illegal alien committing fraudry and tax fraud.
U.S. citizenship is what they get, no jail jail time, yet to keep the social security benefits of the fraud forgery and the fraud.
And yet they maintain that this is not amnesty.
Canon Houston, uh back to the phones we go.
You're up next, sir.
Great to have you with us.
Uh, thank you very much.
Uh Muchos Gettos from Houston.
Thank you, sir.
I just wanted to bring up uh the point about the the uh hurdles that are put before the uh uh would-be new citizens.
Uh most of those hurdles are there, but they can be waived very easily.
In 1996, we had one of the largest groups of new citizens naturalized here in Houston in it forever.
And it was only after they'd been naturalized and after they the elections of that year, it was discovered that the reason we had such a large group was that uh many of them were uh not only had not only had their uh requirements waived, but they had actually been in uh recruited to apply.
You realize this is almost ten years after they were eligible.
And uh to this day, it's still uh this group is still very grateful to be American citizens.
But one of those is a good friend of ours.
And uh I've asked her several times why she voted for Clinton, because she makes no bones about it.
She voted for Clinton both times and and Gore the third time.
Okay, I've got twenty seconds, so give me what she said.
She says the reason she votes for Clinton is because he made her a citizen.
She doesn't even know who Reagan is.
Well, of course, I mean, I and I remember that incident as well, and it was it was time for the ninety-six election.
There's no question about it, and that's exactly what's happening now, except it's wide open, nobody's making any bones about it, and it's being done while we're being flipped the bird because everybody knows this is happening, and they're saying, what can you do to stop us?
A man, a legend, a way of life.
Having more fun than a human being should be allowed to have.
Michelle uh Michelle Gillen, uh the reporter of record on the dateline uh General Motors story, but Brian Ross was in on it too wicked with the Wikipedia definition as Brian Ross involved me got fired because of it.
Um so it doesn't matter.
He got fired.
ABC picked him up right away, and he's been there ever since.
Speaking of all this, some of you on your local affiliates may have heard this.
Top of the hour news.
If your local affiliate carries ABC radio news, ABC radio news actually reported that Republicans are upset that Denny Hastard has been named as part of the Abramoff investigation.
Now, this is absurd.
The Justice Department has denied it.
If there is an investigation, it would be the justice of our doing it.
Uh And they've they've gone on record with an associate attorney general d denying that Hastert is under investigation, and yet ABC is well, nobody's proved our story isn't true.
It's um they have strange, strange standards.
And I suspect uh some of this now is to stand behind the reporter uh and to put forth a uh uh a stiff upper lip.
Uh and I'm sure some people uh now there are some people theorizing that there is no other Justice Department source.
Some people say there has to be.
ABC wouldn't be doing this unless they had somebody that's telling them, Oh, yeah, Hastert may not be the target, but uh but he's being looked at.
Uh while the Justice Department denies that.
So uh other people theorize nope, ABC's just making it up and having a ball doing it uh and watching the Republicans squirm and trying to take the heat off of the uh uh Congressman William Jefferson situation.
But it is it's Twilight Zone time here today, folks, in so many ways, and there are so many Twilight Zone days in the past year, it's hard to keep track of all of them.
Rosemary in San Jose, California, you're next.
It's great to have you on the program.
Hello.
I'm really glad to be talking to you today.
Uh I decided to call your your line today because I was listening to you on the radio, and let me just tell you my story.
Um I'm U.S. born and I married my husband about five years ago who um was a Mexican citizen.
At the time that we got married, my husband had a visa to travel into the U.S. And um so when once we got married, I had to go through the whole INS hoop thing.
I ended up paying about seven thousand dollars in INS fees, not including attorney fees.
And this is we did it the legal way.
So I'm really appalled at this two thousand dollar, you know, amount that um w from what I think everybody that's committing these crimes and forgery is doing.
You want to hear something about this two thousand if you're mad about it now, let me let me tell you something.
Well, just now listen to this.
This this is from Senator Chuck Grassley from uh from Iowa, and he has posted on his website the uh top ten flaws with amnesty and guest worker uh in uh guest workers in this in this bill.
And as to the two thousand dollar fine, under the bill, an illegal alien can go from illegal to legal by paying a small fine of two thousand dollars.
Now, often illegal aliens will pay more than five times this amount to a smuggler, the coyote to get across the border.
Also, the two thousand dollar fine may not have to be paid until year eight, which allows the illegal alien to live, work, and play in the U.S. for years free from deportation.
This imposes a financial burden on the American taxpayer for health, education, and infrastructure costs that aren't reimbursed for five or ten years, and even if they the fine of two thousand dollars is eventually paid, uh it won't reimburse all the the uh social safety net uh expenses that the average illegal will access.
You know something, Rosemary, I'll tell you.
Um, this two thousand dollar fine is as bogus as anything else in this bill because where's the enforcement?
You know, it's a for me personally, it's a joke because um I think it's making a mockery of our whole system.
Um my husband has cousins that are here illegally, and let me tell you, the whole illegal industry regarding realtors and stuff, he has cousins that are here illegally that are homeowners.
They own million dollar homes in our area.
Um they bought in these home with these, you know, these bogus social security numbers.
They basically laugh at our system.
They think we're stupid.
You know, the the the realtors that help them out give them fake W-2s, they get I don't I don't know how they do it, but it's a business in my area.
And um, you know, and to Well, of course it is.
How in the world do people get somebody else's social security number?
How do they they have to they have to be committing identity theft in order to uh to get work and to end up paying taxes and get benefits and so I it it's the whole thing.
That's why I say there's a Yeah, we live in Silicon Valley and and we don't we have a modest townhouse, and I'd love to have a million dollar home, but I'm too afraid to break the law and get involved with some of these creatures or these people that you know will get you a fake W 2 or you know, I don't know how they do it, but but they do.
Um, you know, it's you know somebody needs to put an end to this.
I mean, it's a crime.
You know, no matter, you know, how they look at it, it's it's a crime.
I'm also in health care.
And let me tell you, I work in a hospital that about seven months ago had to lay off about thirty percent of our workforce because we're the only we're the second Medicaid provider in the county, and we're we're losing money.
We well, I mean, we're not getting paid.
We have to see people whether or not they have insurance or or they have Medi-Cal.
And the majority of the people, you know, when you ask them, you know, if they have of course not, do they give us their real name?
We don't know.
But you know, we're hardworking Americans trying to keep a roof over our head and raise our family, and you know, our hospital is are is losing so much money, you know, we don't want to be out on the job, but you know, the you know, the state doesn't come in and reimburse either.
I mean, it's something needs to be done.
But giving all these people a free ticket and that two thousand dollar fee or find it they want to call it, to have the privilege of of being a U.S. citizen is just it's appalling.
It's appalling.
Uh well, tell me.
I mean, I I th th it's it's uh I've I've said this over and over again.
Uh it's it's well I think it's inexplicable.
It is it can explain it.
But it makes no sense.
The explanation just defies any kind of logic.
It is as though they think up on Capitol Hill that we don't know what they're doing.
And they think that I I've just uh like I say, folks, I've never seen this in the 18 years that I have been hosting this award-winning program.
I have never seen the level of disconnect on this issue and the William Jefferson issue, and it's got me a little bamboozled in terms of uh describing how I actually feel about it and what I think about it to you, because it's it it it it's a i I'm so incredulous that I um I'm having trouble formulating a cogent thought without shouting and banging the fist.
You know, I almost feel like Howard Beale.
You know, we're mad as hell or we're not gonna take it anymore.
Uh but it is what it is.
I'm still not sure uh that this is ever going to become law as it is.
But even if it doesn't, just the the the fact that there is so much arrogant condescension on the part of so many senators to the elected uh to the American people, citizens who have elected them, who now are are are worthless uh and and have no uh uh weight whatsoever uh in in influencing this debate uh is it striking.
What's that?
Oh, yeah.
Well, I know the nativists don't know what's good for the uh for the country.
See, I know what's going on here.
I know exactly what's going on here.
You've got so many it we're back to the old special interests.
You got people who give a lot of money who want these people in to work for them.
You got the Chamber of Commerce, you got the agriculture workers and that whole bunch of people, uh agriculture b ag businesses.
You've got you've got uh and then of course you've got the pointy-headed pseudo-intellectual elites inside Capitol Hill who think they run the administration and think they're in charge of policy because they have the brains to influence uh actual members of the administration.
And we you you and I thought we're just serfs.
We're just the serfs, and we don't know what we're talking about.
We don't know what's good for us, we haven't the slightest clue, we don't have the sophistication to understand diddly squat.
This is way more complicated than we think it is.
And uh despite what we think uh uh uh members of Congress uh have to and the president have to go out and do this uh because uh we nativists just don't understand uh what this country needs and what this country needs is as many people paying social security taxes as possible so that members of Congress don't have to make the hard choices in reforming it.
Now that's one thing that's happening here.
Make no bones about I don't care what anybody says, the last thing these guys want to do is even talk about social security reform.
They don't want to be serious about it.
And it's uh it's it's gonna be nearing the you know the break point a couple uh decades, if not sooner.
And this is just a stopgap uh and to make sure that uh there's enough taxes flowing into the social security security account to keep it growing, and they're totally ignoring the other side of it, which is the pressure that all of these new citizens, legal and illegal, will be applying and putting on the safety system, uh, the welfare safety net, the hammock, uh, as it is called.
It's going to be a net loss, but right now they're still they're just focusing on the inflow uh of cash to keep the system going without having to reform it and really run the risk of angering people they really don't want to make mad.
Nancy AARP.
Quick timeout back after this.
Ha, welcome back, folks.
All right, um, we've done additional Nexus research here on uh Brian Ross and the General Motors uh truck bomb story uh on NBC's dateline.
The Wikipedia entry apparently is wrong when it says that Brian Ross was part of that GM story and was fired because of it.
Um search that we have done, uh Brian Ross was not the reporter on the dateline truck bomb story.
Uh that is printed erroneously on a couple of websites.
These are the people fired for the dateline story.
Executive producer Jeff Diamond, senior producer at ABC's 2020 news show.
He's I guess he still is in the business, but he got fired at Dateline.
Now he's at 2020.
Uh senior producer David Rummel, former producer at 2020, uh, and CBS 60 Minutes.
Segment producer Robert Reed, former producer for 2020, and the syndicated inside edition, Michelle Gillen, the reporter who narrated the GM truck bomb story, had raised concerns about the crash.
The only question is to what extent, NBC said, Gillen has agreed to reassignment as a news anchor at WTBJTV in Miami.
This is from 1993 St. Louis Post Dispatch.
Uh Brian Ross left NBC, uh not for this, because he was sued by an eye clinic over one report, but the lawsuit was dropped, and uh Brian Ross uh jumped from NBC to ABC, and that is a uh story by Vern Gay in I I think as it say that Vern Gay used to write for News Day, didn't he, or TV guide or some such thing.
Not sure.
Was it that was News Day, all right.
Uh and his story begins this way.
Well, well, well, now look what they've done over at NBC News.
After twenty years of the network, Brian Ross, chief correspondent for Dateline will stroll out the door at 30 Rock this Friday.
This is uh well, I'm sorry I don't have the date on this story either, but uh uh nevertheless, uh just like that, adios Brian, the well-wishers might say have a good life and give our best to die and barb ho hum, you say, another overpaid news guy jumping to another network, big deal.
Uh losing Ross is a big deal, and NBC has made a big mistake.
Indeed, letting Ross defect to ABC is the most boneheaded action we've seen at NBC News in many a day.
Kind of reminds us of and he goes on to describe uh what happened, but uh he was sued by an iClinic over a report, lawsuit was dropped, he jumped to ABC, had nothing to do with the truck bomb story on NBC's date line.
John in Madison, Wisconsin, you're next on the EIB network.
Hello.
Greetings from the People's Republic, Rush.
Thank you, sir.
Um, I wanted to give you a little bit of input on why I think uh our congressional leaders seem so out of touch.
Give it a shot, sir.
We're all ears.
I think it has to do with the fact that especially over the last five years, our congressional leaders have been behaving without any discipline whatsoever, and in their own political self-interest instead of leading this nation in a responsible manner.
And why is that?
Wait, wait, wait, wait, what?
That's pretty close.
You're pretty you're actually pretty close and and and pretty observant.
Why do you think that is?
Because they've had no discipline imposed by them, by their Senate leadership, by their congressional leadership, or by the White House.
Amen.
There is no elected conservative leadership, and you're right, these guys are just flying blind all over the place, self-interest ruling the day.
Exactly.
That's exactly right.
They've been making outrageous statements about our president, and as much as I'll criticize him for not defending his administration and not defending our troops in the field as vigorously as he should, I will say that he's a very decent and good man.
And he deserves better.
And they've been making outrageous statements against United States self-interest abroad, harming our foreign policy efforts.
They've been leaking top secret information, uh harming our war effort, and putting our brave men and women in uniform in further danger than they would be otherwise.
I saw an interesting theory today that sort of backs up what you're saying.
By by the but before before I get into that, what you you're you're basically talking about Democrats and their uh and their their uh questionable behavior regarding foreign policy and the war on terror at Iraq, but I mean how do you explain the disconnect of the Republicans in the in the immigration bill, a disconnect of the Republican leadership in the House over this Congressman Jefferson business.
Well, uh again, I think it has to do with the culture that's developed by being around those people.
They haven't seen anybody experience really any consequences for their behavior.
So, you know, they want to be popular, they go to the same parties, they socialize together.
Uh they just live in a world void of reality.
I think that's the that that that last is the uh bottom line, but it's all tied together with your original theory.
There is no elected conservative leadership.
Uh George Bush is a Republican, and he's conservative on some things, but he's not leading a movement, and he he makes no effort to uh lead Republicans and conservatives in an agenda uh and as in a movement, uh as Ronald Reagan did.
And that's why there's so little discipline.
I also saw an interesting theory today.
Uh somebody says that that that the reason that that uh members of Congress now are so free to act all over the board without any seeming sense to it all, particularly on immigration and this Congressman Jefferson business, is that the Iraq war is already perceived to have been won.
Not that we're losing it.
It's because we have won it, and and the American people do not rank it as high on the list of things that concern them as say gasoline prices or immigration or what have you.
And as a result, there is less reason to follow the president.
There is less reason to be supportive of him because that's the war on terror, the war in Iraq, uh are the uh the the things that kept the support behind him because of the uh assaults that you referred to by Democrats on both the war in Iraq and the war on terror,
which I think are actually the same thing, and since the American people are no longer really afraid we're gonna lose this, and because we haven't been attacked again since uh September 11th of 2001, they're more concerned about other things, the gasoline prices and other domestic issues like immigration, and there's less reason to be supportive of the White House uh and the president.
So uh interesting theory that you have.
I happen to agree with it totally, and I gotta go.
Constraints of the programming format necessitate a timeout.
Out of time in this hour, folks.
A reminder uh fairly soon uh in the next hour, Tony Snow, the new White House press secretary, will be joining us here on the EIB network.
Uh depends on how soon, depends on uh whether he's finished the briefing in the uh in the in the post briefing uh debrief.
Uh but we'll get to him as soon as we can.
He'll get to us as soon as he can the next hour.
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