And something's still nagging me from the first hour.
Maybe you too.
The caller, was it Frank, who was a Vietnam vet, talking about how he was a baby killer.
He had killed civilians.
He was seeing the same thing in Iraq now with the Marines charged.
And we have seven Marines and a Navy Corpsman up the road here in Camp Pendleton in Southern California charged with murder in the incident involving the death of a 52-year-old Iraqi man.
And you've got the Hadith situation.
You've got apparently a rash now of charges against Marines and soldiers in Iraq arising out of the deaths of, quote, civilians, unquote, in a war where you cannot tell the difference between civilians and combatants, where you cannot tell whether somebody's a civilian one second and a combatant the next second, where you have a nanosecond to react to somebody who's got flowing robes as to whether they have a hand grenade under those robes or not,
where you are in a situation in a war in which all those rules in the Geneva Convention and elsewhere don't make any sense at all and don't apply.
And yet, our guys, the guys on our side, you know, the U.S. Marines, at least they're on my side.
Now, I don't want to speak for everybody in the mainstream media.
But the guys that are on my side are the United States Marines.
They're being charged with murder and conspiracy and all kinds of other crazy stuff.
At the same time, and by the way, in the press conference, I was bowled over by this.
Maybe you know about this.
I certainly did not.
I was bowled over by the press conference where Colonel Stuart Navarre, Chief of Staff, Marine Corps Installations West, is heard, and I'll play this tape in a moment, talking about cash payments that were made, and apparently they're being made routinely to civilians who are injured or to the family members of those who are killed, regardless of the circumstances.
Salacia, is it?
S-O-L-A-C-I-A.
Anyway, here's the cash payments.
Listen to this question and answer.
Tell us work whether any payments were made to family members, and if so, how much?
And also, can you tell us whether the will have access to the body?
I'm going to ask Lieutenant Colonel Margolin to handle that.
It is traditional to make salacia payments.
That is a tradition.
It is not an admission or an indication of wrongful death.
Salacia payments?
S-A-L-A-C-I-A.
Sounds like that spelling bee.
Let's see.
Can you use it in a sentence?
Anyway, this guy is, it is spelled S-O-L-A-C-I-A from SOLAS, from the word SOLAS, where apparently this tradition I was unaware of of doling out American taxpayer money to everybody who gets killed.
I started talking about this on the air in the local show, and a guy from the Korean War veteran says, oh, yeah, we used to do this all the time.
In fact, it got so bad, old people were throwing themselves in front of military trucks to try to get injured or killed so their family members would make more than they could ever make for them.
And then a guy from Vietnam era calls and says, oh, yeah, we do this in Vietnam all the time.
You know, we killed so many babies, apparently, that we were paying for it.
Huh?
What is this all about?
And what is it all about to make payments to a family that makes claims that, oh, yeah, that guy that was shot there, he was shot by the Marines.
Oh, yeah, we saw him.
We have 50 witnesses.
What kind of a fair trial is that going to be?
And what is this stuff about murder by Marines?
We're in a war.
They are killing people.
They're trained to do that.
They are killing people who are trying to kill them.
It seems only right and just and fair.
They are making snap judgments based on nanoseconds of warning in crowded situations.
Now, Frank's approach, the Vietnam vet, who called us in the first hour, was, we shouldn't be doing this at all.
What we should be doing in pursuing the bad guys is to get the Iraqis, get them out of uniform, put them in the flowing robes, get them with grenades and AK-47s and going after the other ones.
In other words, unleash the militias against the insurgents.
Well, that would be a civil war, it seems to me.
But aside from that, is that an approach you support?
Well, I haven't been to any of those places, so I'm going to call upon this listening audience to tell me what you think if you have.
Here's Ron in Colorado Springs.
Ron, welcome to the Russian Baugh Program.
Thanks, Roger.
A little nervous, but it sure is good to talk to you.
Thanks.
Yeah, I was in Iraq, and prior to Christmas, I'm going to go back again.
I've been to Kosovo, Bosnia, Macedonia, Haiti.
Each one of those operations was handled differently.
Iraq is handled differently than Vietnam, just as Vietnam was handled differently than Korea and Korea than World War II.
That's where the military gets our training and doctrine.
We learn off of each one.
We're learning off of this one.
Just like that Vietnam caller, he wants to compare today's war to Vietnam.
It's happening through guys like him, through the media.
During Vietnam, nobody wanted to be there.
Nobody wanted to get drafted.
Nobody wanted to go to NAM.
Today, we're all volunteers, every last one of us, and we continue to grow.
None of us want to leave our families, the country, anything like that.
That's understandable.
But we'd rather be in Iraq doing something than at home doing nothing.
Well, but what about his point that we're still killing?
Are you killing innocent civilians?
That's what we do.
This is a democratic country.
We didn't try to instill democracy.
We did it.
They have elections.
They have a government.
We provided democracy for that.
But Ron, I understand all that.
Let me focus you on the issue.
The issue is, is the military killing innocent civilians?
Yes.
We have in every war.
It's a sad part of war that happens.
We have kept it down lower in this war than any other war, I believe.
Civilian casualties happen.
We don't go around murdering people.
No.
That's a fallacy.
Nobody wants to kill an innocent civilian.
We want to get rid of the insurgency.
Now, Ron, let me guide you to the next step, though.
Here's the next step.
The military is charging an increasing numbers, soldiers and Marines and sailors serving in Iraq with murder.
The incidents now are too many to ignore.
Is this a pattern of abuse by American soldiers, or is it the success of the enemy's strategy to induce this kind of charge and destroy the morale of our troops and the will of the American people to see it through?
They're trying to destroy the will of the American people and see this thing through because already they know that there's a lot of talk about pullout.
Bring the troops home.
Bring the troops home.
The troops don't want to come home, and the insurgency knows that.
They know we want to get the job done.
So yes, this is on them.
Now, those troops are going to go to trial for murder and crimes like that.
But just like you say, we have to make snap judgments.
In a blink of an eye, you've got to determine whether you're going to fire or what's going to happen.
That will come out through proper proceedings.
Just because they've charged doesn't make them convicted.
And yeah, you're seeing a lot more of it, and I don't have a fantastic explanation for that.
Yeah, and I'm worried about it, Ron, because nobody seems to.
I think that the military brass and the Bush administration are falling for a battlefield tactic by the enemy designed to break the will of the people, to break our political will to win and to demoralize our troops and to bring our troops home feeling as Frank did, what, 30 years later or more, that he was a baby killer when I bet he wasn't anywhere near killing a baby.
Now, see, I love veterans.
I'm a member of the VFW lockdown member.
I love the vets, the honest ones.
You don't make up a lie to prove a point.
Nobody's going to come home feeling like a baby killer.
Some people may have been involved in an incident where there was an accidental killing.
They'll regret that for the rest of their lives, but that's not our intent.
But if you bring us home now, we're going to feel like we left the job incomplete, and we'll all be heartbroken over that.
Now, the worst of all worlds.
Right.
Ron, God bless you.
Thank you for your service to the country, and I appreciate our prayers.
We'll go with you as you go out to Iraq again.
And I appreciate your being with us today.
All right.
Go ahead.
Let's see.
Let's get to here's the same point.
Richard in Wallingford, Connecticut.
Is it?
Richard, go ahead on the rush show.
Roger, how are you doing?
Good.
I'm going to give you a little different point.
I was a CEO during NAM, and I want to, it's going to be a little graphic, and we don't talk about it in public or anything.
It's only amongst ourselves.
But if your unit's going in and all of a sudden it draws fire, you immediately have reactions to that fire.
Now, during Vietnam, the Viet Con, as well as in Iraq, same idea.
When that fire happens, they put civilians in jeopardy.
And therefore, if you wait, if the RGIs wait a millisecond to lay down the fire, three or four of their guys aren't just killed.
Their heads blown off.
Their arms are blown off.
They're cut in half.
It's very graphic.
And this idea that you're either dead, period, or you're alive, period, it's much worse than that.
It's worse than any movie that any of your listeners have ever seen.
Or I won't even look at it because it's too real to me.
And it's worse, it's probably 10 times worse, and most guys don't talk about it, or women.
And therefore, if you wait, three to ten guys are dead.
If you lay down the fire, you save all those legs, at least in theory, because it's no longer a war.
It's your life.
And you're saying that the enemy is deliberately using civilians as shields because they know that Americans are going to get all concerned about killing, quote, innocent civilians.
Yes, we value life.
We value children.
We value pregnant women.
We value innocent people.
But during all wars, the innocent always get it, unfortunately, because the Germans, the Japanese, everybody did that.
The Koreans, I mean, during the Korean War, I mean, it's happened every war we've ever had.
And in all those wars, that issue, as poignant, as heart-wrenching as it is, was never an excuse not to pursue the war to victory.
Of course not.
You can't.
It is now.
Well, of course.
And so couldn't you imagine if we had if Hitler was still alive, we would have all these people, these kooks, talking about their values and their situation.
And of course we did, you know, but it was a small enough amount of people that it really didn't matter.
But it took our country a long time to crack down on the German and the Japanese interlock.
They gathered them all up, if we remember, and it wasn't very fair, but you had to do it, you know.
Richard, thanks for the call.
Thanks for your service to our country.
I'm Roger Hedchock, filling in for Russia in Bauf.
Back with more after this.
As the Miami Heat parade in celebration, NBA championship in the same town nearby in Miami, seven young men, seven young men who call themselves Muslims, who call themselves the Moors, a name applied by the Spaniards to Muslims in their country in the 14th, 15th century, a group now in our century dedicated to the violent eradication of infidels.
Very interesting, the interviews that are now going on on cable news of some of the relatives.
Oh, they're just nice boys, and they're contractors, and they work, and they're here to do work that Americans won't do.
Actually, one of them did turn out to be illegal from Haiti, no less.
So, we're going to have more information coming down about that.
I wanted to get into another topic that is making national news from San Diego, and that is that the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has said now that the presence of a cross, a large white cross, at the Mount Soledad National War Memorial, Mount Soledad sticking up above La Jolla here in San Diego at the coast, this cross, this war memorial, is unconstitutional.
Now, this is going to be tough for communities across the country.
It's one thing to talk about: do you post the Ten Commandments at the county courthouse?
It's another thing to talk about: can we have a Bible study class after school at the local high school?
But it's something else entirely to say that a war memorial first erected in 1954 to honor those San Diegans who'd given their lives in the Korean War would now be, what, 50 years later, unconstitutional.
To honor the Constitution these folks died for, we must remove their memorial.
We must tear down a cross.
It is now going to be constitutional to imitate the Taliban who blew up the Buddha that we're going to tear down a cross.
Now, ladies and gentlemen, there's obviously a lot going on.
Our Mayor Jerry Sanders is appealing to the Supreme Court for some kind of reason in this, and there are a lot of efforts going on, this, that, and the other.
But the federal judge, Gordon Thompson, has said: Look, I'm not only relying on the First Amendment separation of church and state, okay, there you know where he stands, because those words don't appear in the First Amendment, but I'm relying on the California Constitution, which goes even further and says you can't show any preference, quote unquote, to a religion.
And this shows preference to a religion and must go because the city owns the land underneath as public land, etc.
Well, I wonder in the California Code, Section 5097.9 of the California Public Resources Code, is this also unconstitutional?
5097.9 of the California Public Resources Code prohibits any public agency or private party from interfering in any way with the free expression, I'm quoting now, with the free expression or exercise of Native American religion on any public property.
The code section specifically, specifically guarantees the freedom of worship for Native Americans on any public property, while a federal judge is telling us that a Christian cross on public property is going to be torn down.
What is left of our Constitution if this stands?
We're calling on George Bush, who can solve this problem, because Congress last year, responding to this, said we're going to designate this war memorial, which had been to that time a local war memorial.
We're going to designate it part of the national war memorial system.
And we're going to ask the city of San Diego to transfer the ownership to the feds, and we'll fight the battle because we have plenty of war memorials that have religious symbols on them all over the country.
I don't know if you've been to Gettysburg.
I was privileged to be there.
At the high tide of Pickett's charge, there stands a Celtic cross commemorating the New York volunteers of the Union Army who stood there to repel that attack.
I'd hate to see it torn down.
In New Jersey, there's an American GI walking out of the camp, you know, all in bronze here.
It's a statue walking out of the camp, the death camp.
In his arms, is the emaciated body of a still-living Jewish guy who'd been rescued at Auschwitz and who had on his shoulder, or maybe it was pinned, it was on his uniform there, his prisoner uniform, a Star of David.
Is the Star of David now to be ground out of this memorial?
Because this is the direction we're going.
Separation of church and state doesn't mean the church protecting religious freedom on either public or private property.
It means now, according to Judge Gordon Thompson and the ACLU, it apparently means a freedom from all religion except the ones we like.
So in the seventh grade in California now, in the seventh grade, there is now to learn about Islam.
You take a Muslim name as a seventh grader.
You dress up as a Muslim.
You learn the principles of the Muslim religion of Islam.
You read from the Quran, et cetera.
All of this part of the public school curriculum.
Do you find anything like that with regard to Christianity?
Well, no, no, of course not.
Separation of church and state.
We're fighting that battle right here, but I've got to tell you that for all of you, it is also your battle, seems to me.
Scott in Lake Worth, Florida, next.
Scott, welcome to the Rush program.
Hi, Roger.
I've been hanging on a while.
I'm sorry.
I think you guys have moved on from the topic of illegal immigration.
But I just wanted to raise a point that I don't think a lot of people are talking about.
Isn't it true that on a local level, when mayors and townships are creating places for these day laborers to stand and work for under-the-table money as a day-rate labor, aren't they aiding and abetting tax evasion?
Yes, and ought to be arrested for it.
As a matter of fact, in many cities, there's been a reaction against this in Houston.
There's been a reaction against it in Vista, California, in North San Diego County.
Lots of communities are saying, wait a minute, this is a subsidy.
This is a recognition of illegal behavior, a subsidy of it.
A complete, we're in a conspiracy.
Unfortunately, now we're becoming aiding and embedding not only the evasion of taxes, the reporting of money, the breaking and entering into our country, all these folks going to the emergency room, clogging the freeways.
Really, the public schools are in a death spiral out here because of non-English-speaking, mostly illegal immigrants.
And there's just a very, very tough issue to face in this country.
And that's why I spent, and I hope Rush forgives me, but I spent the whole hour with J.D. Hayward trying to get some of these issues on the table.
Wake up, America.
This immigration issue is national security.
Welcome back to the Rush Limbaugh Program.
Roger Hedgecock filling in for Rush, taking your calls at 1-800-282-2882.
And of course, Rush's activities today in D.C. and the speech he made and all the surrounding stuff is at rushlimbaugh.com, where it usually is, where all the stuff usually is, at rushlimbaugh.com.
There's an author named Joel Rosenberg who is a little scary because he writes these fictional accounts, which turn out to, in too many places, turn out to be predictive of what actually happens.
He has written some nonfiction and some fiction about the Middle East, just returned from three months there, and joins us here on the Rush program.
Hi, Joel.
Hey, Roger, how are you?
I'm doing well.
What's the latest book?
Well, the latest book, the one that's out right now, is the Ezekiel Option, and that's the one, the nuclear crisis with Iran and Russia.
We can talk about that because that one really has come, several elements have come true since it came out last summer.
Now, you wrote this thing last year, and you're envisioning what, which we're now reading about in the headlines.
Well, that's right.
The Ezekiel option picks up off of the last jihad in the last days, which I'd written before it.
An American president is trying to make peace in the Middle East after the overthrow of Saddam and the death of Yasser Arafat, and all hell breaks loose.
A dictator begins rising in Russia.
Iran is feverishly trying to build, buy, or steal nuclear weapons.
And then Iran and Russia form an alliance, a military alliance, a nuclear alliance, threatening to wipe Israel off the face of the map.
Now, what's strange about that, of course, is that I wrote the Ezekiel option in 2004.
It came out in the summer of 2005.
And the very day the Ezekiel option was published, Mahmoud Ahmed Nejad became the president of Iran that very same day, and five months later threatened to wipe Israel off the face of the map.
A phrase that comes right out of the book, page 358, if people are curious.
Two months after that, in December of last year, Ahmed Nijad signed a $1 billion arms deal with Russia.
Russia is supplying nuclear technology and arms and missiles to Iran, the worst terror state on the face of the planet.
So what was fiction increasingly is all too real and chilling.
Now, based on that, Joel Rosenberg, I know you've been back there in the Middle East.
You've got some fiction and nonfiction works in mind coming out now.
So let me try to get a little bit ahead of the curve here.
What are you finding now as a result of your three months there that we're going to be reading in the headlines a year from now?
Well, that's the scary thing.
That's right.
I spent time in Israel, Turkey, Egypt, Morocco.
I met with leaders from not only those countries, but many others, including Iranian dissidents, Iranian pastors, people from all over the region.
The central issue that seems ⁇ there's two issues that I think that are the big ones to keep an eye on.
The first, of course, is this rapidly intensifying move by Iran to gain these nuclear weapons.
And I have to say, I was a little concerned by the Bush administration's overture to basically offer nuclear technology to Iran.
I think that's a mistake, but we can talk about that in a moment if you want.
But Iran is approaching the point of no return with this nuclear program.
Are we then going to have to make the decision, let's say are we as the American president, whoever that might be, going to have to make the decision that we either take out the capability or the Israelis do it?
Well, I think that's right.
And I think actually it would more likely better be us because we are in Afghanistan, we're in Iraq.
We have the force projection, honestly, better than the Israelis.
But here's the key.
And it's this issue about can you negotiate with Ahmed and Nijad.
Ahmed Nejad, of course, is a Shiite Muslim, but not only is he one, he believes the end times theology of Shiite Islam, which is he is saying to people in Iran that the end of the world is just two or three years away, and that to hasten the coming of the Islamic Messiah, known as the 12th Mahdi or the 12th Imam or the Mahdi, the only way to do that, in his view, his theological view,
is to launch a jihad to wipe out all the Jews in Israel and ideally the Christians in the United States if he can get away with it.
That is not a recipe for being able to negotiate with him or deter him because he doesn't see he's not looking to get out of his pursuit of nuclear weapons or his view of wiping Israel off the face of the map.
He believes that's a fulfillment of his religious goals.
And what's interesting is Senator John McCain, not exactly known as a right-wing religious person or necessarily even that friendly to evangelical Christians at times, but he was on Meet the Press a few weeks ago, and he said that if Iran gets nuclear weapons, he said, quote, I think we could see Armageddon.
Now, McCain is not the kind of guy to go around quoting the book of Revelation, but what's brewing in the Middle East is a major war.
And the second element of that is not just a war with Iran.
Iran is pulling together to mob al-Qaeda and try to liberate it and wipe Israel out in the process.
And that's going to have implications for us.
All right.
So the book's coming out then, Joel Rosenberg, with us, New York Times best-selling author.
Coming up would be what?
Well, the next book is August 1st.
That's The Copper Scroll.
And that is really about the battle for control of Jerusalem.
And it's actually based on an actual Dead Sea Scroll called The Copper Scroll, which is a treasure map.
And it's the problem in the book is that the pursuit of the treasure sets into motion this kind of cataclysmic showdown.
But the Copper Scroll is also about the potential that this battle for control of Jerusalem could spill over and lead to a new wave of terror here in the United States.
The first chapter is a hunt for a suicide bomber on the loose in the Washington, D.C. subway system.
That sounds familiar.
Yeah, well, that first chapter is, you can read that online at joelrosenberg.com just to get a sense of it.
But that comes out August 1st.
And then in October, the nonfiction book that we were talking about that I was researching called Epicenter, which really gets into, you know, not from a novel perspective, but really from the perspective of what's really happening in the Middle East.
Yes, okay, these novels have had this feeling of coming true, but what are they based on?
And I interviewed top Arab and Israeli and Iranian and Russian leaders.
What's the biggest mistake we can make out there?
Blinking.
I think that if we send the message with Iran that we're going to offer them nuclear candy to sit down and sit in the corner of the schoolroom and be quiet, that's not going to work.
I think dividing Jerusalem and giving Hamas control of the West Bank at this moment is also blinking.
We're essentially by supporting Israeli Prime Minister Olmert's convergence plan to divide Jerusalem and give away the West Bank at this moment to Hamas, I think we're essentially in the business of creating a terrorist state right at the time we're trying to get rid of terrorist states.
And that too has implications.
You know, what if, because of our open borders with Mexico and even with Canada, what if these terrorists decide our alliance with Israel and our support for our only really true democracy in the Middle East, Israel, that they should come here and attack us again and again the way they have attacked the Israelis.
This is the conflict that's coming.
And for those in Washington or on the left who say, let's just cut and run now.
Let's say we've done our job and move on.
So incredibly short-sighted because these groups are plotting and planning right now.
I have said a number of times, I think I said it with you, Roger, last time I was on.
The war on terror, unfortunately, is the father of many sequels.
And I don't mean fiction.
I mean, these guys are plotting one sequel after another.
And if we don't fight them over there and win, they're going to come here.
Joel Rosenberg, with words of wisdom, my friend, thank you very much.
And we'll look for those books again on the New York Times list of best-selling books.
Thank you, Joel.
Hey, God bless you.
Good talking to you.
I appreciate it.
And God bless you.
Joel Rosenberg there, JoelRosenberg.com.
All right, we're going to come back.
And look, I want to get back to some calls, too.
We've got a lot on the table, and we're going to get your reaction to it.
I'm Roger Hedgecock in for Rush Limbaugh, and of course, everything up on RushLimbaugh.com.
And the phone number, of course, 1-800-282-2882.
We'll be back right after this.
Roger Hedgecock in for Rush Limbaugh today on the Rush Limbaugh program.
Thanks for joining us.
And, of course, get on the phones.
And you're on the air at 1-800-282-2882.
Robert in Wilkes-Bar, Pennsylvania.
Hello, Robert.
Oh, hi, Roger.
How are you?
Good.
Good.
Yeah, you were talking about this soldiers and all the killings that have been going on lately of civilians and so on.
And I think, you know, what's this telling us really is that we need to get out.
Certainly.
Wait, wait a minute.
I've got to disconnect here.
The war that's going on and the fact that civilians are being used deliberately to break our will, so what we ought to do is announce that our will is broken and go home.
Well, you're calling it a war, but the war ended three years ago.
This is an occupation, and there's a big difference.
We are there.
I thought there was a civil war.
I'm having trouble following this, I got to tell you, because I thought if I read the New York Times, it was a civil war.
Well, it's a war between, we don't know even who's over there.
We've got the Shiites, we've got the Sunnis, we've got different kinds of people that are there, but this is not something where it becomes so vague and ambiguous of who's the enemy, who's not, the war is over.
The enemy doesn't have that ambiguity.
If you remember the stuff that was captured with Zarkowi, he's very clear about who the enemy is, and he's very clear about who he's trying to kill.
And it isn't just us, it's the Shia as well.
He is, you know, he's in a position of trying to murder everybody he doesn't agree with, and he's got a whole bunch of die-hard followers who are there.
Now, wouldn't it be something that you could support that we Americans would help the obvious large majority of Iraqis who don't agree with Zarkawi to set up a free country to set up themselves to protect themselves to, and that's what we're doing, to work toward a point where they have an independent, elected government that is capable of securing their country.
Well, that would be great.
Although, Zakawi and those, of course, Zakawi's dead, but those other guys, Al-Qaeda, is a very small faction, and we did basically what you described three years ago.
But our job is over.
This ain't our country.
Why do you think it's over since we obviously still have a lot of Zarkawi types running around over there?
Well, we don't have that many.
Most of them, 95% of the terrorists have been created since we invaded Iraq, by the way.
Well, they certainly have gathered.
This is what I like about it.
They have gathered in Iraq rather than in Miami in order to attack the United States.
Well, they have grown in Iraq to kick us out of Iraq because we're over there, obviously, because there's a big puddle of oil underneath that country.
Boy, I wish we'd get that oil, Garrick.
Are you tired of paying $4 gas?
I sure am.
Well, now we could.
I think we ought to suck every bit of that oil out of Iraq and take it now.
Some people think, well, that was the motive for going in.
You think so?
How do you know that since that wasn't the motive that was expressed?
Is it something that they communicated to you from the Bush administration secretly that I missed?
Wolfowitz actually said this at a meeting in the Middle East.
He said, we basically, we couldn't leave a country with the second, what is it, the second world's largest supply of oil just sitting there.
So we had to come up with a reason, and the weapons of mass destruction just happened to be the one that everyone agreed on.
Derek, thanks so much for your repeating.
I mean, this propaganda is so tired and so old it's difficult to even listen to it again and have any interest at all.
John in Sacramento, you're next on the Rush program.
Rush.
Hello, Roger.
You're so much like Rush.
I got you mixed up there.
But you're my favorite sit-in.
Your ability to recall is amazing, and I love listening to you.
Thank you.
And as an ex-veteran of the first Gulf War, I'd listen to that other guy just makes me sick, and I could go on about that.
I actually called about the cross situation in your area, though.
Yeah.
And that is that I think it would be just at the baseline, the way you, constitutionally, the conflicts are obvious, but also it would be destruction of public property.
And then it's also a matter of intent.
The people that put that cross in place at the time it was put there, they were duly elected by the people, executing the will of the people, and it was put there to have permanence, to be a mark of permanence.
It was paid for by city dollars.
It was agreed upon by elected officials.
And I think all that is constitutional and it's really unassailable.
Well, first of all, it was built actually with private donations on public land.
But let me go back to this pretty interesting thing because the other side would say to you, well, yes, but public officials duly elected using the money through the process that we have here at local government also put in separate but equal drinking fountains for black people.
And that wasn't acceptable and it wasn't constitutional.
And therefore, they had to remove those and not have blacks-only drinking fountains.
And they equate that with this cross, saying it is completely unconstitutional to have a government favoring one religion over another.
And they've been teaching this multiculturalism stuff in the schools long enough that there are about 30 percent of the people who actually buy this out here.
And I can tell you, we did put this up for a vote.
And the vote was, shall this cross be preserved by giving it the land to the Fed so that it can be incorporated as a national war memorial?
And we got 76 percent of the vote.
But the problem was 24 percent of the people actually believed in this multicultural stuff that, no, no, no, we can't favor one religion over another.
We must ban all religions except those that we must understand, like Islam, and then we're going to incorporate Islam so they won't kill us.
Turn that counterpoint on them just by the basis of the law that you brought up, the 509 or something with the native cultures.
Yeah.
That 509 is exactly what you said about white and black fountains.
That particular law is exactly that, and I would turn that against them in that point as a counterpoint.
You want that point?
Yeah, exactly what we're doing.
Exactly what we're doing.
John, thank you so much.
We're going to need good luck.
Otherwise, we're going to all be, as we have said on the local show, chained to that cross because they're not going to tear it down.
Even if we get to a point where a federal judge says, no, no, no, this is the law.
You know what?
Sometimes the law is wrong.
Had I been around on the Dred Scott decision.
Wait a minute.
The judge says, wait a minute.
Yes, you may not agree with slavery, but slaves are property, and property must be returned when it goes away.
It's like a runaway dog.
You find the dog, you return it to its owner.
You find the slave, you return it to its owner.
I would have had to say, I'm sorry, along with Lincoln and others, no, that's not right.
Now, that may be your interpretation of the law.
You may be the Supreme Court justice.
You may have that interpretation, but you know what?
It ain't right.
And this one isn't either.
Tearing down a cross in the name of religious freedom.
I'm Roger Hedgecock on the Russ Show, back with more after this.
All over the news today about the seven arrested would-be terrorists down in the Miami area.
Nobody yet has asked the question I hope someone will ask sooner or later.
Just where did they get these ideas that the country is evil and that they are enemies of the country they live in?
I mean, it's either got to be the Washington Post or the New York Times or CBS.
It's got to be one of them.
Hey, good news.
I want to leave with good news.
This 4th of July, the Independent Women's Forum says America is better than ever.
The quality of life is higher than at any time in our history.
Crime and poverty rates are the lowest ever.
We're healthier, wealthier, and safer as Americans than we have ever been.
Boy, this group is going to be marginalized down to the last comma, talking about the United States so well.
Coming up on Monday, Paul W. Smith from WJR in Detroit will be here doing the Rush Show.
Wherever you are in this great country of ours, enjoy yourselves in, and you know it's a great country, and you know in your own community that it's a great country as well.
Don't listen to the mainstream media and expect to hear that, though.
I'm Roger Hedgecock.
It's been a pleasure and a privilege sticking in here for Rush Limbaugh in the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.