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June 1, 2006 - Rush Limbaugh Program
28:31
June 1, 2006, Thursday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
Greetings, uh, thrill seekers, music lovers, uh conversationalists, uh, welcome to the Rush Limbaugh program, a program exclusively tailored to rich Republicans and right-minded conservatives and those who aspire to be one or both.
Liberals listen at your own risk, of course.
Great to be with you.
Telephone number if you want to be on the program today, 800 282-288-2, and the email address is rush at EIB net.com.
A warm welcome, also to those of you watching on the Ditto Cam at Rush Limbaugh.com.
Uh, by the way, let me address some.
We had on Tuesday, we had a podcast problem.
Some idiot uh in our podcast center sent the first and the th and uh the first hour twice.
They sent the first hour and the second hour, then resent the first hour as the third hour.
Uh and uh we we made amends for this.
You had to go to our website to fix it.
We got all the uh all these systems fixed.
The guy's been canned.
We don't put up with this uh with with with this.
Uh these kind of uh uh this is broadcast excellence here.
This is EIB.
This stuff just doesn't happen, I assure you, it will not happen in the future.
If it does, whoever screws up, then'll be canned.
The only person that can't be canned is me, unless I decide decide to fire myself.
Uh also a special day here at the EIB network.
Well, I'm a little bit better mood than I was yesterday.
I st I yeah I I uh I still don't know.
It just had to be karma bio-rhythms or or maybe no, no, no, it had nothing to do with canning the guy that put me in a better mood.
I think somebody must have put a hex on me that I that I wasn't aware of.
Uh at any rate, uh big day today.
We're back at WCBM in Baltimore, AM 680, our original home in uh in Baltimore.
We are ecstatic to be back uh on a radio station that fully supports the program, is happy that uh uh we're there.
We guess we it's mutual.
We are ecstatic to be back.
I uh talked with 25 minutes today uh on WCBM with Tom Marr, uh who uh hosts uh hours prior to this.
And Tom, thank you again.
Uh he put me in touch with uh with Bob Grant, who was waiting to do uh uh commentary, haven't spoken to Bob Grant in a while.
So it was a great great 25 minutes.
I I enjoyed uh ever every minute of it, and we're looking forward to um uh resounding overwhelming dominance uh in the Baltimore market uh now on WCBM 680.
All right.
Um the president went out today and uh uh spoke to the Chamber of Commerce on immigration, and I started getting emails from people.
Hey, the president's taking a little harder stance here, a little tougher, uh tougher line on this.
I said, really?
I I didn't have a chance to watch the uh president's speech.
We have some sound bites of that coming up.
Uh some interesting things in the immigration stack today.
Um we also have uh pretty wide and varied uh general news stack that's uh gonna provide a lot of uh uh entertainment.
For example, have you seen the cover of the New York Post today?
Let me read it to you.
Washington to New York.
Terror, what terror?
Feds slash our funds to boost Hicks in sticks.
Oh, Chuck Schumer, the New Yorkers are all upset because places like Kentucky and Wyoming are getting a lot of uh money to fight terrorism uh from homeland security, and uh there's a 40% uh cut in how much New York is getting.
Uh, folks, it's an election year, and uh Mrs. Clinton is up, and these things are uh a factor.
I love these tabloid headlines.
Fed slash our funds to boost Hicks in sticks.
I love it.
All right, let's let's talk about uh Haditha uh and this this story.
I've I'm getting a lot of email.
Oh, before I do folks, I don't know if it's happened yet, but there's gonna be a hurricane or f or a few of them this year.
Uh this is the this is the first day of hurricane season.
It is absurd the way this is being covered.
There has not been a hurricane sighting yet.
But if you turn on any of the cable news networks, they're going 24-7 with a hurricane prep, uh, hurricane this, hurricane that.
They're already scanning the Atlantic Ocean via satellite photos.
It's just, you know, it is amazing.
I had dinner with some people last night.
Had some people over the uh over to the house for dinner, uh, and uh one one of the uh young ladies uh was started talking about uh bird flu.
And it just sort of set me off.
I said, What are you worried about bird flu?
Oh, yeah, I have I have a six-year-old son, aren't you worried about?
I said, No, I I refuse to participate in this crisis after crisis after crisis news cycle.
Everything is a crisis anymore.
We're not allowed to have a normal everyday life.
I said, Do you realize how much better life in this country gets every day?
Look at the life expectancy, look at our quality of life, look at our standard of living.
I talked about you want to see real abject poverty, and you want to get depressed, go where I've been, go to Afghanistan, and look at how people, and they don't complain about it, that their lives there are what they are.
They're normal.
People are going up and down a hill 3,000 feet every day just to get fresh water because there aren't any pipes and there's no plumbing.
Uh and and yet we could if it's not if it's not bird flu, if it's not global warming, now it's hurricanes, uh, or it's the war in Iraq, or it's domestic spying, or it's something every day is a crisis.
And it's just to me uh amazing to watch its impact.
Uh this this woman last night a genuine fear of bird flu.
Uh well, uh it happens, yeah.
Pandemic, we don't know, but uh the evidence so far is that all of these.
Look, I said, look at AIDS.
I mean, 20 years ago, AIDS was supposed to have infected all of us by the it was gonna wipe us, that was gonna spread to the heterosexual population.
It hasn't.
What about Africa?
Well, a different situation.
Hasn't happened here.
Uh we had the population bomb with this guy Ehrlich uh back in the 70s.
Well, we don't have 20 years left.
Why we're gonna have too many people on the planet running out of resources, blah, blah.
It's guy couldn't have been more wrong.
We got Al Gore.
Ten years, or the planet is is history.
Um, and we've had uh Ted Danson.
I can think of countless examples of this.
Uh and it's just it it's amazing to watch how people are impacted by it.
Uh it's like I've always said, okay, if you want to have a recession, go ahead, I'm not participating.
Well, easy for you to say, well, anybody can say it.
All of this, the these these conventional wisdom attitudes that are created, because drive-by media needs crisis, particularly when their enemies are in power and uh and are leading the things that happen.
They've got to always have some crisis and try to blame it on uh the people who are the enemies of the drive-by media, the liberals and so forth.
So just amazing to watch this hurricane coverage today uh as as though there's one out there and it's about to strike and uh nobody's prepared.
Oh my gosh.
Uh in Florida, you can freed newspapers all up and down the South Florida coast.
Nobody's prepared.
Yesterday, the smartest thing governments have ever done.
Yesterday they said, by the way, hurricane season starts tomorrow, and you are on your own.
We can't do it.
Amen.
New Orleans was a classic example of a whole population who had been born and bred and raised on entitlement thinking, and thinking their government was gonna help them, that government was gonna take care of it, and government New Orleans is saying that, hey, you gotta get out of Europe on your own.
There is no shelter of last resort.
We're not opening any domes, we're not you got to get out, and it's gonna be mandatory at category two.
And a lot of South Florida governments are saying the same thing.
Now, there's a lesson there, folks, because if they're telling you that they can't do it, that you're on your own when it comes to a disaster like a hurricane, then what they're also telling you is you're on your own in most other aspects of life, too.
And if you're gonna spend your time depending on us, awaiting on us, you're going to be sadly disappointed, which is one of the basic tenets of conservatism that we have been attempting to instruct and inculcate into skulls full of mush for almost 18 years.
Now, all this leads me to the story about Hadith.
Uh, and I'm gonna use that story to replay a phone call we got at the end of yesterday's program, one of the most inspiring, tear jerking, heart tugging calls I have uh taken on this program.
It was from Lieutenant Colonel Luke Fitzpatrick in Iraq.
Uh, and I'm gonna use that call as uh as a way to put an exclamation point on the Haditha story.
We'll get to all that after this break.
Stay with us.
And we are back.
El Rushball, your highly trained broadcast specialist.
From the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.
Jed Babin today, uh, a column in real clear politics, the Haditha story, and they're just there's just one blurb from his piece that I that I want to share with you.
It'll be easy for the left to drive the Hadith story into a frothing political rage, because they'll have the field of themselves.
If anyone in the military chain of command, including civilian leaders like Secretary Rumsfeld, says anything about the case that could be interpreted as prejudging it or attempting to influence the outcome.
The charges could be dismissed under the military law doctrine that prohibits command influence.
So the Pentagon's damned if it does, and damned if it doesn't.
Neither the press nor the libs in Congress would be satisfied if Rumsfeld promised summary execution of any malefactors.
But if he did, and the charges were then dismissed for command influence, the same critics would be demanding his resignation for blowing the opportunity to punish anyone responsible for the alleged crimes.
The fact that Rumsfeld and others won't say more will only fuel more political demands for his head and others to roll.
And I say this to you just to prepare you, because uh Jed Babin here is absolutely right.
Nobody can come out and say a thing about this in an official capacity.
So you're gonna have you're you're you're gonna have it's gonna be Abu Grab times ten.
It's gonna be Club Gitmo times ten.
It already is.
Uh I I'm already getting panicked emails from people suggesting I deal with it this way or that way.
Uh and I tell you what I'm gonna do, I'm just gonna wait until what is known is known and the investigation is uh is done with.
I have uh supreme confidence in the American people, folks.
Abu Grab did not turn public opinion, uh, nor did uh nor did Club Gitmo.
The American people are far more savvy and sophisticated and understand the things that can happen in war uh than they are given credit for.
I've always had faith and confidence in the American people, and I'm not gonna abandon you or it now.
Uh I know, as do all of you, that whatever happened in Hadith, if it's as bad as everybody's alluding to, it's uncommon.
It is unreal, it is not the normal standard operating procedure of the U.S. military.
Uh and in war, all kinds of atrocities do happen, but it will not.
They're not gonna redefine us as a people.
They're not gonna redefine the U.S. military.
I'm gonna try, but they uh they're they're they're not gonna get away with it.
Uh and of that, I am uh I'm confident these things will be dealt with in uh in due course.
Back after this.
Your guiding light through times of trouble, confusion, murkiness, tumult, despair, and even the good times.
We're here at uh the EIB network at 800-282-2882 in the email address rush at EIBNet.com.
I want to I want to analyze this in conjunction or connection with what is happening in Iran right now, because we've uh they're mocking us, folks.
Uh they are they're mocking us.
Uh it would appear to a casual observer that we are losing this battle of wills or wits with uh with Iran.
Uh we have now moved to the position of being willing to negotiate under certain strict circumstances.
We're gonna talk.
We're gonna have dialogue, and they are now mocking us.
I have uh evidence.
The Chicago Tribune talking to Tehran.
Over the past weeks, many politicians and diplomats have publicly urged the Bush administration to engage Tehran.
Now they have their wish.
The earlier reluctance of the U.S. to do So has been the last excuse, Rice said.
There have been Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of State.
There have been those who have said, well, if only the negotiations had the potential for the U.S. to be a part of them, perhaps then Iran would respond.
So now we have a pretty clear path.
But a path to what?
A negotiated settlement or sanctions or worse.
The Europeans are assembling another package of incentives as part of the U.N. Security Council effort to tempt Iran to stop its nuclear program.
They're also compiling a list of potential sanctions if, as expected, Iran doesn't comply.
Realistically, the U.S. has few appealing options.
It won't get uh wide UN Security Council support for economic sanctions unless it first demonstrates to the world it is avidly pursued all diplomatic paths.
So now the U.S. has made a reasonable offer.
In recent weeks, Tehran was reported to be eager for talk, sending word to various intermediaries, yeah, they've been desperate to do it.
One unnamed European diplomat in Tehran told the Washington Post how desperate are they?
Well, now we'll see.
The guess here, according to the Chicago Tribune editorial, is that the United States has just called Tehran's bluff.
The Washington Post today's shift in U.S. stance shows the power of a seven-letter word.
And that word is nuclear.
And because the Iranians are going nuke, we have to deal with them.
We're having to come off of our hard line stance, and we're gonna have multilateral talks, and they are mocking us.
This is a shift to try to bring the Chicoms and the Russians into line on the Iraq nuclear issue.
Don't hold your breath on this.
And the LA Times editorial today, Rice makes the right move on Iran.
The Los Angeles Times editorial page likes it when we talk to terrorists.
In their editorial, they say the Bush administration has matured.
More broadly, Bush's move indicates a late blooming maturity in foreign relations.
This, folks, is maddening to me because the Iranians are now mocking us, and they're now us, well, we're not going to be part of this.
What are you talking about?
Wait, is this just a sham?
Houston, the United States doesn't mean it.
Why is this happening?
All this talk about maturity, okay, we're going to talk to terrorists.
We're going to engage dialogue.
It's the same old thing.
Back in the Cold War, we had to be talking to Russians.
If we weren't talking to Russia, we weren't talking to Soviets.
They weren't talking to the communists.
Well, but nuclear war can break out on anymore.
We gotta talk to them.
Talking to them kept everybody at pay, blah, blah, blah, blah.
But talking to them doesn't lead to defeating them.
It never has.
It never will.
You don't win conflicts with words, contrary to those of you who've been to conflict resolution courses at major institutions of supposed higher learning.
I really love you.
I really respect you.
Right, take this.
We're not dealing with people like ourselves and people who can be rational and so forth.
Come on, gang, let's win this.
Let's use what we have and let's get going.
Turn us loose.
Why are the Iranians acting the way they are?
Well, I have a whole bunch of theories.
And I think they're all accurate.
There are a bunch of not theories, I have a bunch of explanations.
Number one, Somalia.
We were winning.
If you've seen the movie or read the book, Blackhawk Down, we won the battle in Somalia.
We won that battle.
We lost twelve Rangers.
We won the battle.
But they dragged a dead ranger naked through the streets.
It was on television that Clinton administration saw their 65% approval rating in jeopardy, and we pulled out.
Osama bin Laden on record as having said, that's when he learned we can't take casualties, we won't take casualties and we'll pull out.
Then you have the Democrats in general who for the last five years have been actively engaged in securing defeat in the Bush administration foreign policy, including the war in Iraq, and I would even go so far as to say their ability to hamper the war on terror.
Abu Ghrab, Club Gitmo, trying to get terrorist representation under the U.S. Constitution rather than treating them as uh enemy combatants.
There has been an effort to sabotage victory over this particular Enemy by the liberals and the left in this country and their allies in the Democratic Party.
The Iranians know that all they have to do is bide their time.
Another couple of years, and they figure they're going to, well, they will be rid of Bush.
And at that point, who knows who will have as president, but if we end up with a Democrat, then the Iranians can have their way, do what they want.
They'll just bide their time right now.
Make no mistake, folks, make no mistake about the fact that these people who consider us their enemy are watching what goes on in this country.
They watch the drive-by media like all of uh you do.
And they can see the divisions in this car.
They see the reported divisions, they see the reported partisanship, they see the reported problems the administration's in.
They get the impression that the American people don't support anything going on in Iraq or anything going on in a war on terror because we haven't gotten bin Laden, and you know it has to stoke them.
It has to make the Iranians feel confident and even and act even in a more braggadocio way.
Human nature.
They figure the United States is not unified in its own foreign policy in uh in areas of national defense.
And so they are free to mock us.
And because of what has gone on in Iraq and the way it's been reported, we're handcuffed.
It is unlikely any action will be taken in Iran because uh were it to happen, the comparisons to Iraq would be uh made.
It's an election year.
Of course, the opposite could be true, too.
Um later this year where could be uh some military strikes in Iraq.
Who knows?
Nobody does, but the fact is that all of this reporting uh and all of the pontificating by the enemies of the U.S. military at every stretch in this country emboldens a bunch of uh lunatics like Mahmood Ahmadinejad in Iran.
Uh hindsight's always easy, but you go back and look at this from the beginning, you ask yourself, how different would it have been had we unloaded real shock and awe?
If we had unloaded real hell on all these people at the start of this war, uh as opposed to try some new tone with the Muslims, uh the Muslim world, to prove that we weren't all bad.
Now we uh we want to spread democracy to you, you want to give you freedom and so forth.
Had we just gone in there with real shock and awe, uh you wonder how much things would be different uh not only in the domestic situation here, but with the Iranians and others rattling uh their sabers.
Because we're clearly giving the impression that we will not use all of the power we can project, that we will fight a politically correct war, and they will be interested in what our critics have to say.
We'll try to mollify critics, we'll try not to hurt the feelings of the enemy uh in the process of engaging them in battle.
Uh if we had gone in with real shock and awe, and folks, it's just my own perspective here, and it's 2020 hindsight, and it can't be changed.
I'm just painting a picture here.
If if if we had gone in with real shock and awe, and then sent in all these ground troops, after we had truly reigned hell down on these places, uh we might have a different set of circumstances.
We can't do that now.
Uh but nevertheless, you got people out there saying, Well, we McCain's out there saying we need more troops, we need more troops.
It was never about more troops.
It was always about more bombers and more destruction and more uh more power and a display of it.
We are the United States of America.
But we have this collective guilt, and we're running around making sure we don't uh show the world the wrong picture.
And of course, we've got these frustrating as hell to me.
Hillary Clinton said it yesterday, a Democrat will be guaranteed to say it every day.
We must repair our image and the world.
We have lost respect, we have lost the image that we used to have.
P. S. And by the way, when it comes to national security, what the hell does that have to do with it anyway?
Deal with that after the fact.
If you're worried about it in the first place.
It's a lie anyway, that we've lost our national image, our great respect around the world.
Nothing can happen in the world without us anyway, as all of this demonstrates, be it Iraq, be at the war on terror, be it Iran, be it hurricane relief, be it tsunami relief, nothing in this world can happen without us.
The idea that we're not respected or we're hated, get over it.
It's a bunch of it's a bunch of BS anyway.
If you go back, some of you are gonna be irritated by this.
Harry Truman did it the right way, and FDR did it the right way.
Um You can say what you want about them in uh in other areas.
And they hated Truman at the time, but look at his place in history now.
Ladies and gentlemen.
And I'm not talking about the atomic bomb or the nukes.
I'm talking about the end game.
There was an end game.
They all Truman and FDR had an end game in sight, and that was the objective, and they went out and achieved it, and they did what was necessary to get to the end game.
And by the way, it showed the rest of the world who was who we are.
And this is not happening right now.
And so you have Iran rattling its cages and mocking us after our exp af after all these years of having no contact with them whatsoever.
Now we're going to talk to them.
It's a it's a situation that's uh far more troublesome to me, for example, than Hadith.
I got to run here quick timeout.
We'll be back after this.
Stay with us.
By the way, did you have you people seen the news that General Electric's tax return this year was 24,000 pages?
A 24,000 page tax return.
I thought my tax return was it.
Mine's about 1,500 pages.
Theirs is 24,000, and they filed electronically, like 297 uh megabytes.
It's the law now.
If you have if a you're a company with assets over 50 million dollars, you have to file uh electronically.
24,000 pages.
It's an eight eight-foot high stack.
Uh uh the IRS actually has an office at General Electric Headquarters and monitor every day.
The IRS in large companies is on site every day.
There's oh, you didn't know that, Mr. Smith?
Oh, ho ho ho ho.
You can look it up.
By the way, Lieutenant Colonel Luke Fitzpatrick had a couple slogans yesterday.
Uh that a number of people say, You gotta get t-shirts.
So we're moving on that.
The two slogans are land of the free because of the brave and raining fire from above for the freedom that we love.
We have the Air Force logo, these uh t-shirts.
We're not ready yet, folks.
We're still in the design stage.
Uh we hope to have them ready next week.
They'll be available at Rush Limbaugh.com.
And all the money generated here above cost will go to uh we we found an Air Force charity uh for all the proceeds from the sale of these t-shirts to come next week to go to.
So when that happens, I'll keep you clued in.
I want to go to the audio sound bites.
You know, this is this is really interesting.
It was Scarborough country last night.
Brent Bosell was on, and we were talking about immigration numbers.
Bob Samuelson, the Washington Post, and I didn't have a chance to get to this yesterday.
It was in the immigration stack.
Um you remember when we reported the numbers uh from the Heritage Foundation, there'd be a hundred million or between a hundred million and two hundred million immigrants, legal and illegal over the next twenty years, and everybody, you that's that's outrageous.
That's not true.
And then they went in the Senate and they changed the bill a little bit, and so the Heritage Foundation, Robert Rector, revised the number down to 60 uh million, between 60 and 90.
Well, Samuelson, see now this is crazy.
I just the White House just put out uh their own figures, and the numbers 40 million, 40 to 60 million over 20 years, legal and illegal.
And Samuel's saying, where's the media on this?
It's been plain as day for anybody to see.
I'm a columnist.
Why has nobody reported this?
Well, I raise we all have been talking about it, and those of us been talking about it have been smeared.
This was the topic Brent Bozell was talking about last night with Scarborough.
The question, why didn't Americans learn about these immigration figures from the mainstream media long before now?
You will get more news from talk radio than you will get from the news media today, because in a truncated five-minute news fluff format on CBS News, there just isn't any substance being reported.
On TV, they call uh Pat Buchanan.
All bigots.
Because if you're against this immigration bill, you are a bigot.
And yet 80% of Americans and the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, they don't want to admit that 80% of Americans are with Rush Limbaugh.
They're not with the editorial pages of the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal.
That is right.
Do these people really believe that 80% of Americans are bigoted?
No, no, they don't, but they want to create that.
Look, this is an activist press.
They want to create a momentum for this agenda.
The Senate, meanwhile, you know, why does the Senate vote against the wishes of 80% of the American public?
Why?
Because they think they can get away With it.
Why?
Because the media won't report the facts of what they're doing on Capitol Hill.
That's what I'm saying, thank God for talk radio.
It says why I have always said that we are doing the job here, the mainstream media used to do.
And Bozell is exactly right.
Uh the the the we talked about it yesterday.
Feminization of big time news.
It's all about emotion.
It's all about the next crisis.
It's all about your kid might fall out of the new stroller that they're selling at Walmart.
We need to sue Walmart.
It's mindless.
Twaddle.
And it's designed to hit the lowest common denominator of people watching television these days.
That's how news is programmed pretty much as as daytime television is uh is programmed as well.
Now I said yesterday on this program, what do we need a bill for?
What is this legislation for legislation's sake?
Where did this notion come from?
That's anathema to conservatives.
Heck, if government doesn't do something, it's bad.
You can have a bad thing and a bad bill.
Well, George Wills online today uh wrote a piece basically saying, what's the hurry?
We don't need a bill.
There's no, you know, there's no danger in no bill, no disaster in no bill.
Uh the reason the Senate can do this is because only a third of them are up for election every two years, but the House measuring the true temperature of the American people up for election every two years, and that's where you find out what the American people think.
First hours in the can, first hour of the fastest three hours in media.
Sit tight, my friends.
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