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July 10, 2006 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:22
July 10, 2006, Monday, Hour #2
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The chief of staff of this program is taunting me to talk about Kit Kats.
You know, a couple of times ago when I was here, you were taunting me to talk about meatloaf.
What is it with this food obsession that you have?
Apparently they changed the recipe for kick cats in Europe and the sale of Kit Kats fell apart in Europe and Kit Katz is trying to reinvent itself now because they lost all their business because they changed the formula.
And your point is what?
That when you stray off of message, you lose.
You've got to stay on message.
Yeah, don't worry about the polls or any of those things.
Okay, I got that in.
Are you happy?
Is this or do I have to do more on the Kit Kat thing?
Uh tragic but weird story today in New York City, which is where I'm doing the program from in Russia's New York studio.
A building, an apartment building, right in the heart of the Upper East Side blew up and crumbled to the ground.
It was 61st and between Park and Madison on 61st or 62nd.
They're investigating what happened.
Gas explosion they're talking about.
There's apparently a possibility that a doctor who is a tenant of the building was attempting suicide or perhaps just blowing up the building.
They're not really sure, but evidently no one has been killed.
Uh ten or eleven people were injured where this building is.
It's right in the middle of all these other buildings and it's just gone.
A miniature version of what happened to the Twin Towers.
There's no terrorism there.
It's either a gas thing or something pertaining to this doctor.
Anyway, I've got CNN on in the studio here, and Larry King is claiming he saw this.
He's apparently staying at a hotel nearby and he trotted out, he was right there down on the street and explain.
I'm just having a hard time accepting that Larry actually did see this.
Do you buy it?
I don't know.
I I he we he's a witness, so Larry King's talking about what happened and all that he saw.
In the first hour of the program, I discussed my belief that liberalism itself has just gotten loony, that it isn't even a viable political philosophy anymore, that it's just a bunch of crackpots all conglomerated together.
They don't really have any ideas, so when ideas do come out, they tend to be weirder and weirder and weirder and weirder.
I want to contrast that with what's going on in conservatism right now.
There are real debates within both the Republican Party and conservatism itself as to what we ought to be doing on any number of issues.
And one of those those topics I'm going to get into here, and that's North Korea.
The point though is this.
Whether you support what the President has done so far on North Korea, which is frankly a lot of talk and not a lot of action, or you support the growing number of conservatives who believe that we need to be more proactive with North Korea.
Both are legitimate points of view.
In fact, I'm not sure exactly where I come down, a little bit between the two of them, I suppose.
I think we have to do something about North Korea.
We cannot allow North Korea to have long-range nuclear weapons.
We cannot allow that.
That is untenable.
Just as we can't allow Iran to have long-range nuclear weapons.
Once a nation has long-range nuclear weapons, it becomes almost impossible to stop them from doing anything.
That's kind of how we define a superpower right now.
Do you have the kind of weaponry that can blow up much of the world?
We can't allow that to happen in North Korea.
The question is, what do you do about it?
And it's not an easy one.
It's not an easy one.
Over the last several days, there has been growing criticism of President Bush from some conservatives, and the mainstream media itself believes that the way the president is handling North Korea is a sign that he has changed his philosophy of dealing with adversaries.
Time magazine, cover story this week.
The end of cowboy diplomacy.
Now they're concluding that this is a good thing, that this is a positive thing, that the president is literally off his high horse.
He's not going to be talking about the axis of evil anymore.
He's not going to Suggest that every time that there's a problem in the world that we have to go and use the military and kill people and take over nations, they're suggesting that the president has finally gotten realistic.
That he realizes that some of these things have to be dealt with with diplomacy.
Some of these things require the support of other nations, and that you can't just come in marching in all the time and say you've got to do it our way or else and we're gonna knock you off if you don't do it.
That's their spin on it.
They think this is a good thing that the president is coming around.
They think it's a good thing that the response to North Korea's launching of several short-range missiles and their failed launch of a long-range missile, just criticizing it.
They think that's a good thing.
But some on the right think it's a bad thing.
Bill Kristol's the publisher of the Weekly Standard, new issue of their magazine, very, very critical of the president and indirectly Condoleza Rice in their response to North Korea.
This is what Bill Crystal writes, and again, this is in the Weekly Standard.
He fired seven rockets, as President Bush put it, he made that defiance.
Having made it, what price will the North Korean dictator pay?
Well, five of the six parties to the news to the six party talks going are going to the Security Council to set forth some new red lines.
They'll be more like pink lines, thanks to the Russians and Chinese playing their usual role at the UN.
And when dear leader again chooses defiance, what them?
Some new mauve lines?
The red lines, pink lines, and wave lines of U.S. foreign policy seem increasingly to be written in erasable ink.
What was unacceptable to President Bush a week ago, a North Korean missile launch, has been accepted.
In retrospect, according to a draft Security Council resolution, the missile launch now turns out merely to have been regrettable.
Our assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, Christopher Hill, visited China at the end of last week, where he was rebuffed by Beijing on sanctions for Pyongyang.
He's settled for an agreement that we should all return to the six-party talks.
China, it bears emphasizing, has refused to use its leverage to change Pyongyang's behavior.
Yet President Bush praised China last Friday as quote, a good partner to have at the table with us.
Japan, with a ringside seat for the missile launches, looks on in horror, seemingly alone and actually being provoked by the North Korean provocation.
Meanwhile, in the Middle East, at the center of our global war against jihadist terrorists, Iran, perhaps the prime state sponsor of terror, is sitting pretty.
The pursuit of nuclear weapons by the clerical regime in Iran has also been deemed unacceptable by the president.
Yet as the Iranian regime has resumed uranium enrichment, threatened to obliterate other nations, and scorned offers to negotiate, it has been rewarded with gestures by us that certainly seem to be concessions.
Now, watching North Korea, the Mulahs must be feeling even less intimidated.
And despite Syrian and Iranian complicity in killing U.S. soldiers in Iraq, detailed by our generals, neither has paid a price.
The one red line the president seems to be holding is that we will not cut and run in Iraq.
But even there, there seems to be no interest in rethinking a counterinsurgency strategy that is not working.
Indeed, the president took pains at his press conference Friday to reiterate that he would not insist on changes.
But hey, we're in sync with EU-3 and UN 192, and our Secretary of State, really, the whole State Department is more popular abroad than ever.
Too bad the cost has been so high, a decline in the president's credibility around the world and sinking support for his foreign policy at home.
A few weeks ago, Michael Rubin in this magazine lamented that Bush's second term foreign policy had taken a Clintonian turn.
But to be Clintonian in a post-9-11 world is to invite even more danger than Clinton's policies did in the 1990s.
The real choice isn't Kim Jong ills, it's President Bush's.
Now that's Bill Kristol in the Weekly Standard.
He's suggesting the president has gone soft.
He's suggesting that we're somehow now more accepting of provocative behavior, especially from North Korea.
I'm open to his argument, and in fact I'm sympathetic to it because I do believe the president has been most successful, both with the American public and with other nations, when he's not only drawn the line in the sand, but then acted when the line was crossed.
Here, we came out and we told North Korea, you better not do this.
That's what we told them.
Well, they did it.
And so far, at least we've done nothing, and that is reminiscent of Clinton.
How many times did Bill Clinton huff and puff and threaten to blow the house down against all sorts of adversaries, particularly Iraq, and in the end he didn't do anything?
That's how we dealt with Al Qaeda throughout the entire 1990s.
Well, you're not going to get away with this.
You're not going to get away with this, you're not going to get away with this.
And in fact, he allowed them to get away with it.
And we saw the consequences of that.
The question now is whether or not President Bush is doing the same thing.
Is he accepting the behavior from Iran?
Is he accepting North Korea's nuclear expansion?
Did he accept the North Korean missile launches?
By simply saying, okay, let's talk, let's resume the Six Nation discussions.
Is the president becoming a Republican version of Clinton?
Like I said, I think you can't let this go much farther.
But I do think you've got to give Bush at least some benefit of the doubt right now.
The criticism is implying that somehow we have played out our hand here, and I don't think we have.
I think that they're still working through this, knowing that we still have time on our side.
Obviously, the North Koreans don't yet have long range missiles that they can put a nuclear warhead on.
The long range missile that they launched was a short range missile.
Most NFL quarterbacks can throw a pass farther than that thing went.
So it's not like we're in imminent danger that they're going to nuke Alaska or nuke Hawaii or nuke California.
We're not at that point yet.
To me, the key is China.
And that's the part of the discussion that nobody really wants to talk about, but our problem isn't North Korea.
Our problem is not North Korea.
North Korea could be stomped out like an ant being nailed by an elephant if the Chinese decided that that's what they wanted to do.
All North Korea is is a client of China.
The North Korean economy is entirely dependent on purchases and aid from China.
China controls North Korea.
If China decided that North Korea has to stop its nuclear program, North Korea would stop its nuclear program.
Therefore, our real problem is with China.
And the fact of the matter is that both President Clinton and now President Bush have not figured out how to get China to do anything that we want them to do.
In Clinton's case, it was almost appeasement with regard to Bush.
Name one thing the Chinese have done since President Bush has come in that we actually wanted them to do.
The key here here is we have to figure out how to get the Chinese to solve this North Korean problem.
The alternative, if they don't do it, is that we're going to have to take military action.
Not just trying to nuke one of those missiles out of the sky using missile defense, although we should do that if they do succeed in a long-range test.
But there are all sorts of problems with us going in and start bombing missile sites and bombing reactor sites that they have in North Korea.
That's an act of war.
And you invite then a war between North and South Korea, and then we're involved in that mess.
It would be much preferable if we could get the Chinese to actually be responsible.
They say they want to be part of the civilized world.
They say they want to be considered a true superpower.
They're so obsessed with putting on a good face for the Olympics, we'll then step to the plate and do something reasonable here.
The fact that we can't get China to act is, I think, our real failing.
But I admit there aren't any easy answers here.
So you tell me what should we do about North Korea?
It might not be as simple as Bill Crystal is implying.
1800 282882 is the telephone number I mark Belling in for Rush.
Mark Belling's sitting in for Rush.
Today's New York Times headline, Bush's shift, being patient with foes.
The mainstream media says it's happening, and so do conservative activists.
Mainstream media is rather approving of it.
A lot of conservatives are getting impatient with the president with both regard to both Iran and North Korea.
I don't think there are easy answers on North Korea.
That's why you aren't getting any from the American left.
Find the liberal and ask them what should we do about North Korea.
They won't give you anything.
They're going to wait and see what Bush does and just oppose that.
That will be their response.
This isn't easy, though.
This isn't easy.
My strategy would be to be much tougher with China and try to force them to deal with the problem.
If in the end they don't, we are going to have to go military, but I think it's premature to say that we have to do that now.
To the telephones in Jay and Seattle, Jay, you're on the Rush Limbaugh program with Mark Down.
Good morning, Mark.
How are you doing?
I'm great, thank you.
Listen, Mark, I think that that it's time to get tough, and I think what President Bush needs to do, and I mean this afternoon, is I think he just needs to stand up and say, you know, to Russia and China both because they're involved with the UN and the UN isn't gonna back us, neither is Russia and China.
That's just never going to happen.
They never have, they never will.
And I think President.
No, wait a minute.
Why do you say never?
You leave me no other options, quite frankly, because you're scaring the hell out of all of our allies and the American people.
So if we don't come to some kind of an agreement here, pronto, what I'm going to do is to suggest that we offer nuclear weapons to our allies.
Australia, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, all around.
And I'll tell you what, the Russians and the Chinese would reel in the North Koreans and Iran so fast it would make your head spin.
Well, the the Japan now I I disagree with the part of what you had to say and agree with another part.
The uh part that you put point you make about the Japanese, the Japanese is are the one nation that are very upset about North Korea's launching that missile because while North Korea can't yet figure out how to get a long-range missile going, they can do it with a short-range missile.
And Japan is within short range of North Korea.
They're very concerned.
Now, Japan is part of its constitution, says that it will not take military action against another another nation.
No preemptive military action.
That's in their constitution in the wake of World War II, and they're very concerned about this.
And they're discussing a resolution in which they would authorize taking military action or taking some action against North Korea.
That you can understand the situation that they're in.
But the point that I disagree with you about is you say that we can never get Russia or China to do what we want.
Why?
Why would you say that we could never get them to do that?
Because in the UN, when we asked them for support against Iran, what they did was they sold them weapons, and now we're finding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq that we know came from the United States.
Yeah, I know, but all we ever did ships that we're going to do.
I know that we're delivering those systems.
I know that, but you have systems that we could deploy in in our allies' countries.
We already have.
We've got we've got to be a chance.
Slow down a minute.
We all know that we have not gotten we all know we haven't gotten the Russians or the Chinese to do anything we want.
You presume that that's because they never will.
And I presume it's because we've never tried hard enough to get them to do it.
Over the last twenty years, we have developed a massive economic relationship, particularly with China, less so with Russia, but particularly with China.
Take a look around your house right now and take a look at the made-in thing.
You're gonna see the word China all over the place.
Amer it's now going two ways.
Ford Motor Company just announced that they doubled their sales to China in the last quarter over the same quarter, one year ago.
I think it was sixty-nine thousand autos compared to thirty-five thousand a year ago in the same quarter.
American auto companies may be saved by selling cars to China, a nation that is going car crazy after not having them before.
My point is we have developed a very, very strong economic relationship with China.
We Have never ever been willing to put that on the table and going to the Chinese.
That relationship is still probably more beneficial to them than it is to us.
If we told China, look, you deal with this, or we're going to consider a moratorium on our country, having companies exporting more jobs to China.
We're going to take a look as to whether or not we're going to slap some duties on products that are coming in from China.
My guess is if we played that card, the Chinese would be more receptive.
The reason we haven't is American businesses don't support it.
And we found that there have been a lot of positives with regard to our economic relationship with China.
I am saying, though, that if you put that on the table, you could get a response out of the Chinese.
I think we haven't gotten the Chinese to do what we want because we've never really tried.
We've never pressed the issue.
Mark Ellingham for Rush.
Is this training we have going on in there?
Is that what I'm seeing?
and Training a broad training a broadcast engineer.
I bet this training doesn't go on when Russia's here.
The guest co the guest host comes in and then suddenly it becomes school time.
Is that how it works?
That's why I came in so you could train a uh I got it.
Uh I am Mark Belling sitting in for Rush.
The situation in North Korea is one that has downsides on all sides.
I acknowledge that.
Some decisions in our world are difficult.
That's why we need grown-ups running our country.
I, like many others, am impatient that the United States seems to be allowing North Korea to get away with what it's gotten away with.
And there is some concern that we're repeating the same mistakes of the Clinton era.
You remember Bill Clinton's plan, let's send over Jimmy Carter and have him negotiate a deal that North Korea won't do this anymore if we just give them some aid.
They got the aid and they resume doing exactly what they were doing.
They lied.
Can you believe that?
The North Koreans lied.
I don't believe that Condoleezza Rice, who is a brilliant woman, and President Bush, who has outstanding foreign policy instincts, have become Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton.
I just don't believe that.
I think it is too early to judge their dealings with North Korea.
I do believe that at some point, and it's going to be before the Bush term ends, we're going to have to deal with this problem because if North Korea has short range missiles, and they were able to get a long-range missile off the ground, admittedly only about three inches, eventually they're going to figure out how to do this.
And this makes them a much greater threat than they are right now.
And it does have to be dealt with.
We do seem to be focused primarily on trying to get China to solve this problem for us, and I think that makes sense because this in the end is a China problem.
China empowers North Korea so to pretend that this is all about the North Koreans is ignoring the elephant in the room.
And the elephant in the room is China.
If we want China to do something, it's kind of past time that we figure out a way to get them to do at least one thing we want them to do.
To Green Bay and Kevin.
Kevin, it's your turn on Russia's program.
Hey, good afternoon.
Mark, greetings from Green Bay, Wisconsin, where our next governor will come from, of the state of Wisconsin.
He'd be the Republican candidate, yes.
We hope.
Mark, I just wanted to say that with regard to this North Korea problem and with the Iran problem, and I hope I'm not sounding like a liberal in saying this because I love our president, but I have a real concern that we have spread ourselves so thin militarily with our forces being that we're largely dependent upon reserve forces who are truly, truly overdone.
I mean, these guys have all done all they can do in the last few years.
I don't know what...
If you don't have the military option on the table, and I don't know that we do, because I think that that China and Russia and everyone around the world can look at us and kind of say, they've got too many pies in the oven right now.
What if you don't have the military option to back up your diplomacy that may fail, how can you get diplomacy done?
You know, at least.
Well, let's start with this.
If North Korea had gotten the long range missile into the air, I believe we should have shot it down, or at least attempted to shoot it down.
First of all, it would be a great test of missile defense as to whether or not we're at the point where we can hit one of those things when it's been launched.
That's a military option, but it isn't as provocative because it's not happening on Korean soil.
It would be shooting down a missile that was flying somewhere over the ocean.
We could certainly do that.
But otherwise I do agree with you.
We're not at a point at which we can go to war with North Korea, and that makes our ability to make threats to North Korea rather limited.
I do think we've got to be very careful, though, in not going in the other direction.
If these six nation negotiations that they keep talking about, we seem to embrace are merely going to be a way to get more aid to North Korea, that's a disastrous mistake because they'll just take the money and then resume their nuclear program after that.
So you're you're right.
You're laying out exactly how difficult this is.
And even if we weren't in Afghanistan, and even if we weren't in Iraq, and even if we weren't threatening Iran, nobody wants another war in with North Korea.
We don't want that.
It's not something that we want to have happen.
This is why these are very, very difficult issues here for the administration to deal with.
Well, given that, Mark, how important is it now that we reassemble, which I know they're in the process of doing, but that we reassemble our um our intelligence and uh human intelligence and spy agencies and empower them in a way that uh I don't want to say they should run,
you know, be able to just run their own business out there, but in a sense, it seems like that we have handcuffed ourselves to the point to where any type of covert things that we may be able to do in this situation.
Well, I mean, but I don't know what you can expect them to do.
I don't know what you can expect them to do.
One thing I think we have to agree on, we can't let North Korea get a nuke.
A long-range nuke.
We cannot allow it.
And if that means military action in the end, then we'll have to do that because if we allow North Korea to get it, after we said no, we're sending a message to Iran and Syria and everybody else, you may as well get one because our threats are hollow.
They're meaningless.
Everybody gets to have one.
Well, then you're talking the end of the world at some point.
If every crazy nation, including nations that are willing to sell their stuff to terrorists, can get their hands on long-range nukes.
You cannot allow that to occur.
What we have to do is try to figure out a way to stop it before it gets to the point of the only answer being an invasion of North Korea.
Even if you locate their uh nuclear sites and bomb them, you're inviting a response to them.
Do you want them to then start charging towards South Korea, have the demilitarized zone become a militarized zone?
I don't like that idea.
This is why I believe, again, the answer is China.
And I think you've got to figure out a way to get the Chinese off the dime here, and that means that our precious economic relationship with China has to be put on the table because that's the only language the Chinese understand.
And we've never played that card with China.
When's the last time this country got tough with China?
Who knows?
Uh prior to Nixon visiting in 1973 is my answer.
When did he go there?
72, 73, 71, whenever Nixon went there.
Thank you for the call, Kevin.
Let's go to Biloxi, Mississippi, and Clay.
Clay, it's your turn on Russia's program.
Hey, Mark, thanks for taking my call.
Listen, I I I want to say first of all, I'm a liberal.
We have to get China on board.
I'm gonna tell you why.
We cannot take North Korea on, and China's gonna.
Hello?
I'm here.
And China's gonna stand by and let us go right there to their border.
If you looked at the map, I think Korea.
I I think we're losing clay, so I'm gonna move on here, but I do understand his point.
He does, he's right.
The problem is China.
Now, if you do start a military action against North Korea, you could be inviting a Chinese response.
I don't think they do that.
The one thing we do need to understand is that while China may not be a foreign policy ally of ours, They are an economic ally.
The Chinese economy is thriving because of one nation.
Us, the United States of America.
We are the biggest market for all the things that they are making over there.
And they are becoming one of the biggest markets for our products.
The American companies that are now selling to the Chinese.
That number is increasing every day.
As the Chinese economy becomes stronger, as more manufacturing occurs in China, they need products.
They need raw materials.
They need American know-how.
They need our technology, just as our companies need somebody to make all the stuff that we're sell that they're selling over here.
So China does have a close relationship economically with the United States.
And I think we are not going to be successful in getting the Chinese to do what we want on North Korea until we bring that economic relationship into this and put that on the table.
If we do that, I'm hopeful that the Chinese will grow up and finally deal with this problem.
If you look at this from their perspective, they seem to relish this.
Oh, well, our little buddies, the North Koreans, they've got the United States all upset, and at some point the United States is going to have to come to us to beg and plead.
Instead of begging and pleading, maybe we need to bite our own bullet a little bit and ask whether or not we can just have a completely free trade agreement with China when China is non-cooperative with us on everything pertaining to foreign policy.
I want to link the two.
That's my plan.
It's more than the left has.
I think it might be President Bush's plan.
Condoleza Rice seems obsessed with getting the Chinese involved here.
And I don't think she'd be doing that unless she thought it would work because she's a very smart woman.
As for the president saying North Korea can't do this, they can't do it, they can't do it, they can't do it, and then North Korea went and did it.
Bill Kristol is right.
You can't let that situation continue for a very long time, or the president does look like Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton.
And we can't allow that to happen.
The end result of weakness and appeasement with hostile forces was 9 11.
And you don't want to allow Al Qaeda to follow the North Korea to follow the example of Al Qaeda and believe that they can get away with American weakness.
So at some point we will have to act, but I think it is premature to close the book and say the Bush administration has failed in North Korea because we're still playing this thing out.
My name is Mark Elling, and I'm sitting in for rush.
Mark Belling's sitting in for rush.
Let's turn our attention now to Afghanistan, where, you know, we knocked off the Taliban, but the Taliban isn't going away.
That sounds familiar.
As much as we try to knock off Al Qaeda in Iraq, they don't go away.
I do think this is being overplayed a bit.
There have been a lot of stories about this new resistance from the Taliban, which used to be empowered in Afghanistan and is now trying to start a guerrilla war.
I think it's a little overstated.
The democratically elected government of Afghanistan is still very popular with the people there.
The reality of Afghanistan is that in a nation like that that is all rocks, mountains, and hills, it's very, very easy for a resistance to sit there and hiding.
The Russians certainly learned that when they tried to fight their own Afghanistan war.
I don't think this means, though, that the Taliban is going to come back to power in Afghanistan.
It does mean that supporters of the newly elected government may have to be there to keep it afloat and to fight back against the kind of attacks that are going on here.
And you know what?
You know whose hands this now is in?
This is now NATO.
It's now not just the United States.
Remember, we finally got this handoff going.
The international community was going to step in and aid in Afghanistan.
Even the lefties, even the lefties in criticizing the war with Iraq.
What are you doing picking a fight with Iraq?
Afghanistan was the problem.
You haven't even won Afghanistan yet.
Britain is announcing today that it's going to send more troops to Afghanistan.
There is some concern here, I see from a uh Reuters story, that NATO is concerned, NATO peacekeepers are preparing to take over in the South from U.S. forces.
They have some fear of getting sucked into a war.
Oh goodness, we might actually have to be involved in the war On terror.
Well, guess what?
You're involved in the war on terror.
The terrorists are everywhere, and they will kill you just as they killed us.
And they demonstrated that with the subway bombing.
They demonstrated it in Spain.
They demonstrated in France.
They demonstrated it in Indonesia.
I do think the situation in Afghanistan is manageable.
And it isn't an entirely bad thing that NATO forces are going to do some of the fighting over there.
My only fear is that they will show their tendency to cut and run.
Maybe we can get the French to assist in this operation in Afghanistan.
Send the Don over there, he can just headbutt all the Taliban.
Waiting to do the World Cup.
Waiting to do the World Cup.
That'll be the next hour of the program.
Now apparently practicing some revisionism with regard to the Cold War.
President Vladimir Putin's aide Vladislav Serkov said we don't think we were defeated in the Cold War.
We believe we beat our own totalitarian regime.
Oh, okay, and France didn't lose the World Cup yesterday.
I do want to spend a moment on the debate over the response in the United States to the Supreme Court ruling on detainee rights, particularly at Guantanamo.
Congress is going to be dealing with this this week.
What legislation do we draft in response to the Supreme Court ruling on detainee rights?
And you've got three or four different sides.
First of all, you've got some civil libertarians who believe that terrorism suspects should be treated the same as somebody who is arrested for a home burglary, given rights, be assigned lawyers, be brought to a speedy trial.
You have to prove that they did something.
There are others more hardline who believe that the terror suspects need to be held indefinitely and given almost no rights whatsoever.
I'm kind of in that camp.
Lindsey Graham, the uh occasionally sensible, occasionally nuts, Republican senator from South Carolina is one of the moderates on the issue.
I want to quote from today's New York Times.
Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, who is expected to take a leading role in the issue as a member of the Armed Services Committee, argued that the administration's version of the military commissions had to be reined in to make clear, for instance, that evidence gathered by coercive interrogation techniques could not be introduced as evidence.
Quote, I'm trying to get my colleagues to think about the international community's reception to what we do.
We've got a chance to improve our image.
Why are we so obsessed with the international community's image of us?
They haven't supported anything we have done for 200 years.
And they're not going to support any kind of attempts that we make to deal with terrorists.
And what the rest of the world thinks should be nowhere on our priority list.
It doesn't matter.
The reason you have to be open to using information that you get from extraordinary interrogation methods.
Maybe they didn't get to have a glass of water for eight hours.
The reason you have to be open to it is that the terrorism is not a crime that you prosecute after the fact.
No good doing that.
If the terrorists have already struck, if the towers are already down, what's the point of gaining a conviction?
Terrorism cases are different because your entire purpose is to try to find out what they know because you want to prevent future terrorism.
And if we're now being required to show some sort of proof that they're involved in terrorist activities in order to continue to hold them, that means any information that you get ought to be fair game in a trial that you bring.
And we need to come up with legislation that is aimed at making it easiest for us to get information and deter terror, and our priority should not be worrying about what the rest of the world thinks.
I'm Mark Belling in for Rush Limbaugh.
Mark Belling sitting in for Russia.
I was sincere in my comments about the United States being way too concerned about what the rest of the world thinks.
It's when we use our power that we influence the rest of the world.
Look at China.
China is extremely powerful.
It has never shown any concern about what anybody else in the world thinks.
But we have this desire to be part of the international community and have the entire world be in sync with us.
This is why so many Americans have this incredible guilt trip over the fact that we're the one country in the world that didn't get into the World Cup.
Television ratings in the 90s, everywhere else in the world, we didn't watch it.
We need not feel badly about it.
The reason we didn't get into the World Cup is because the World Cup wasn't all that interesting.
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