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July 11, 2006 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:24
July 11, 2006, Tuesday, Hour #3
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Let's get into a couple of legal topics.
A federal judge has ruled that the FBI's search of Congressman William Jefferson's office was legal.
You'll recall that Jefferson and both Republican and Democratic leaders of Congress were furious when the FBI went into Jefferson's office and executed a search warrant, got his computer records and other records.
They were raising questions about whether or not there was a separation of powers issue here.
Well, a federal court has ruled that there is no issue.
One of the things that's bothersome to me about Congress, and this is where you've got to include the Republican leadership, is they have become, I think, more protective of turf than they are interested in solving problems.
A Congressman's office can't become a shelter from criminal investigation.
If it is, you're essentially giving a congressman immunity.
What if Jefferson had shot someone in his office?
Would they then argue that the cops can't go in and take a look at what's going on there?
The point was was ridiculous.
Yet, even up to the Republican Speaker of the House, then he has to raise this concern about some sort of intrusion by the federal government on the rights of Congress.
The federal judges ruled, properly so, that even though this is unprecedented, that a congressman's office can't be a shield for illegality.
Now let's get to another rather complicated legal issue.
The Supreme Court's 5-3 ruling with regard to the detainees that are being held at Guantanamo, and for that matter, terrorism detainees in general.
The Bush administration today came out with a new policy now stating that detainees that are being held at Guantanamo and for that matter, all detainees in United States military custody are entitled to the protect to the protections under the Geneva Convention.
In the meantime, the administration is asking Congress to change existing federal law to reflect the reality of the fact that we now have a new kind of detainee.
There used to be two.
In the past, we had two forms of individuals that could be held by our government.
Criminal suspects, and for that matter, people convicted of crimes, and military detainees, generally called prisoners of war.
The problem that I think we face now is that terrorism doesn't fit into either of those categories.
The entire purpose of our criminal justice system is to punish those who do wrong.
That's how it's set up.
The punishment that we have is always after the fact.
We have a criminal justice system in order to maintain order in our country and punish those who are who are guilty of wrongdoing.
First you have to arrest them, then you prove that they did what they were accused of, and you jail them.
With regard to prisoners of war, we hold prisoners of war for our very pragmatic purpose.
If you're fighting somebody else, it doesn't make much sense to allow all of their fighters to be out there continuing to fight you.
You take a prisoner of war and then release that prisoner upon the conclusion of war, but don't allow the prisoner to fight during the time of war.
And prisoners of war have generally been accorded certain rights under the Geneva Convention.
They are to be treated humanely, they are given other rights, they are given other protections.
And all for good reason.
The problem that we have with terrorism is that it doesn't fit either of those two categories.
In terms of criminality, what's the point of punishing a terrorist after they've committed an act of terror?
Particularly if the act of terror was a suicide bombing.
Our entire focus on terrorism is one of prevention.
Stop them from doing it.
So the rules of criminality and the rules that we give to criminal defendants, I think don't make much sense when you deal with terrorism.
Our whole goal here has to be to stop the terrorism from occurring in the first place.
And the best way to do that is with information.
As for treating these detainees as though they were prisoners of war, I don't think that that works here either.
If you have in your possession terrorists, the best possible way that you can prevent a future act of terror is to get that terrorist to tell you what his fellow terrorists are up to.
And I think our laws have to be modified to deal with that reality today.
A massive terror attack in Bombay, India, a coordinated series of explosions on a number of trains, subway trains, in Bombay.
The latest number I see is about 150 people killed, nearly 500 wounded.
This isn't believed to be Al Qaeda, it's believed to be part of the uh dispute over dispute over Kashmir, and there's been a lot of terrorism in both India and Pakistan over the whole Kashmir situation.
But it demonstrates again that this is a tactic that is being used increasingly around the world.
It's primarily an Islamist phenomenon, but it is going to be used by others.
In the United States, in the post-9-11 world that we live in, I think we have to understand that the most important thing that we can do as a nation is to protect ourselves.
This does not mean that we should be allowed to put people up on the rack.
But imagine that we could go back in time to September 10th of 2001.
And imagine we had two or three Al Qaeda members in custody and had reason to believe that something was going to happen tomorrow, September 11th.
But we didn't know what it was.
I'm willing to accept almost any kind of tactic that would have given up that information.
And I certainly think the notion of assigning all sorts of rights to people who have information like that, rights that you would give to somebody who is in custody for a crime doesn't make much sense when it comes to individuals that are being detained because they are terrorists.
And whatever we do with regard to our laws here, I think have to reflect the reality that terrorism is something that has to be deterred before it happens rather than something that is solved after it occurs.
And I'm seeing way too much hand-wringing in Congress over concern about what the international community is going to perceive that we're doing, concerned that we are going to be perceived as being too harsh.
The number one priority here ought to be to protect the American people.
And if the Supreme Court is indeed right that our current laws do not allow us to detain individuals at Guantanamo indefinitely, and that we have to give them an entire new series of rights, then we've got to change the law in order to reflect the reality that the individuals that we are holding may have a wealth of information, and even though they may not have done much yet, they were intending to do something.
We live in a different world.
And we need to have our laws with regard to terror and terrorist suspects and terror detainees altered to reflect those differences.
To New Orleans and Rex, Rex, you're on the Rush Limbaugh program with Mark Belling.
Yes.
What this runaway Supreme Court has done is just concocted a treaty with Al Qaeda.
Only signatories to the Geneva Convention are accorded rights to the Geneva Convention.
Al Qaeda is and terrorists are not signatories.
They're not even a nation.
Because you're right, they're not a nation.
Article 6 of the Geneva Convention specifically says that saboteurs and terrorists who dress in civilian clothes, uh hide in churches, et cetera, are to be shot on site.
They are to be accorded no rights.
And the reason for that is it was thought to be a deterrent for putting the entire civilian population at risk of suspicion.
Here's the here's the reality.
Right.
But the Supreme Court has now deemed.
Well, I'm just saying, I'm just saying the Supreme Court of co-equal to God understand.
Co or equal.
I'm not disagreeing with you.
What I am saying is the reality is that they have ruled.
And we've got to present can ignore the.
And we and we have got to deal.
We have got to go equal.
What power does Supreme Court have over him?
Judicial review is not even in the Constitution.
It sprang out of the mind of John Marshall.
If you're suggesting that the president ignore the Supreme Court, I'm uh I'm a pretty big pretty good supporter of the notion of a strong presidency, but I'm not sure that you can do that because there's an answer.
Rex, there's an a there's an answer here.
There's an answer here.
The answer is that we can change our laws to reflect the current Supreme Court decision.
Now he is right.
The purpose of the Geneva Convention is that even during a time of warfare, individuals that are being held captive be treated humanely.
The problem with that here is that we aren't at war with a country.
We are at war with an organization.
We are at war with a philosophy.
And that organization is never going to comport to whatever rules are applied by the Geneva Convention.
Look at what Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups have done to individuals in their hands.
Those American soldiers who were mutilated were not accorded any rights under the Geneva Convention.
This is a different type of enemy that doesn't respect any kind of rules.
Now you see some concern from Congress that if we just allow anything goes, it will be used as justification by terrorists to abuse Americans they take captive.
They don't need that justification as it is.
Even now, they are claiming that the mutilation of the American soldiers was in response to the American soldiers who are accused of rape.
They say that now.
They didn't even say that at the time.
They're just making that up as they go along here.
I'm not advocating torture.
I'm not saying that we should have an anything goes policy.
What I am saying is that we need to understand that terrorism is something that can't that must be stopped, and information is the best way of stopping it.
There has been no credible allegation by anyone that anybody's being abused down there in Guantanamo.
It is a scrupulously run facility.
It's had international inspectors look at it.
Even Democratic members of Congress who have gone down there have said that individuals are being treated humanely.
With regard, though, to the tactics that we are using in an attempt to get information and whether or not we have to bring people to trial when we may not have a lot of evidence against them.
Those are things that are not relevant to the reality of terror.
And that's the point that I believe our Congress needs to understand, without regard to whether or not the Supreme Court ruling was correct or not.
I'm Mark Delling sitting in for Rush Limbaugh.
I'm Mark Belling sitting in for Rush Limbaugh.
I was on yesterday's program going to urge everybody to watch the closer because I think Kira Sedgwick is just a great actress, and I love that show.
And I'm glad I didn't, because I watched it last night and it was the worst episode they've ever done.
So in retrospect, I'm glad I didn't encourage you to watch the closer because last night's show wasn't any good.
However, you might want to check it out in the future because she's a really good actress.
Lincoln, Nebraska, Pat, you're on the Rush Limbaugh program with Mark Belling.
Hey, Mark, nice to talk to you.
My main concern with this whole Iraq fiasco is that Congress is in the wrong lane.
They need to get out of the attempt to prosecute this war.
The President, the Pentagon, and the NSA are charged with responsibility to prosecute the war.
Congress has nothing to do with it except approve request from the President's budget.
Well, it becomes complicated when you deal with things like detainees.
Secondly, this is a war that's being fought on two fronts.
On the one hand, three fronts, really.
On the one hand, we're in both Afghanistan and Iraq trying to prop up new governments, but on the other hand, we are also fighting an organization that isn't directly affiliated with any government in Al Qaeda.
All of those things are related, and what the role of the Supreme Court is, what the role of the Congress is, and what the role of the President is, is something that people like to debate academically.
But the reality is when you're talking about things like terror, somebody's got to make a decision, and somebody's got to be pragmatic.
We are obsessed here with rights.
We are obsessed here with who has the ability to make what determination.
When what we really ought to be obsessed with is how do we accomplish our goal of protecting the American people?
And on that front, it's been the Bush administration with minimal help from the Congress and really no help from the courts that has protected us for nearly five years now.
We're only a couple of months away from the anniversary, in fact, exactly two months from today away, from the five-year anniversary of 9-11.
And we haven't been hit significantly since then.
The administration must be doing something correctly in terms of protecting us from a future terror act, because if you look around the world, it's not like the terrorists have taken a break.
They're striking everywhere, including in India today.
Thank you, Pat.
I appreciate the call.
Let's go to Sugarland, Texas and Brad.
Brad, it's your turn on Russia's show.
Thank you, Mark, for taking my call.
I want to tell you that I I usually consider you extremely astute.
But I I gotta take issue with this uh method or this idea of yours to of a way to create some new law to deal with the dealing with the uh decision of the Supreme Court.
Let me tell you why, I'll do as quickly as I can.
You know, I never voted for any federal judge, and we are entitled to a representative form of government.
Now, our president is co-equal, as a previous caller had suggested, and I can tell you this that from from what I know uh about and what I was taught about the way our Constitution and our government works, all of the three branches are co equal, and it's high time.
It's way past time for the executive branch coupled with the legislative branch to tell the Supreme Court to get lost because we they are voted in uh, you know, two legs of our three legs.
They have the power to stand up at the Supreme Court and tell them, look, we're gonna deal with this with military tribunals, period.
Well, I mean, whether you do that or not, the easiest way to do that is to get the Congress off the dime and just pass a law that the Supreme Court is going to be okay with.
This shouldn't be hard.
No, I I don't agree with you on that.
This should not be a hard thing for us to accomplish.
You've got a president who says it is important that I have certain powers to deal with this particular threat.
We did have, after 9-11, we had that great fake show where Democrats and Republicans all stood outside the Capitol and pledged allegiance to the flag and were all in it together and all of that stuff.
But the fact of the matter is that it's largely been President Bush and only some Republican members of Congress that have been fighting this thing since.
If there is a problem with regard to the law, I'm not an anarchist, and I'm not Bill Clinton.
I'm not saying we ought to ignore the law.
What I am saying is that you should change the law and deal with the reality that we are fighting against an enemy that doesn't know any rules.
This is not a criminal enemy, it is an international conspiracy aimed at killing Americans, and the highest priority of this nation should be to stop that from happening.
How is our system of checks and balances designed to work?
Well, you know how it's supposed to work.
Okay, the when two legs of our the checks and balances work like this.
Two legs of our uh government can can uh check the overstepping of authority by uh any other leg.
Well, is your point that the courts have overstepped their authority?
It's clear the courts have overstepped their authority.
You know how long the courts have been overstepping their authority in this country?
We have I mean, you've got some courts in this country that are saying that gays are allowed to marry even though there's been no legislation.
this has been going on forever and ever and ever and ever and ever.
I support a conservative judiciary with a limited view of what the role of what the of what the role of the courts are.
That's why I believe the President Bush's appointments so far to the courts have been absolutely outstanding.
But the point that I am making that I don't think you're hearing, Brad, is that right now we don't have time for judicial niceties.
We've got a Congress sitting there in Washington with the ability to pass legislation that will strongly affirm the president's right to deal with terrorists and individuals who are who are caught out there in the field.
And I believe it's imperative that they deal with that.
There have been on a lot of issues, lots of foot dragging by this Congress.
And we're going to talk about another one of them coming up next.
All right, from my file, liberals are going nuts.
You know who they're mad at now?
They're mad at Bono.
How can they be mad at Bono?
Eva everybody likes Bono, right?
Bono is the leader of U2, and he's raised all this money for African debt relief, and he's been touted for the Nobel Peace Prize, and everybody seems to like Bono.
Liberals are mad.
Do you know why they're mad at Bono?
Bono has invested in a company that it's called Pandemic Studios.
It does a lot of things, including make video games.
He's just a small investor.
One of the video games that they've invented is called Mercenary II world in flames.
Or you can see now where liberals are starting to get a little queasy to begin with.
Mercenes.
One of the games that Mercenary 2 has a player assuming the role of a mercenary.
And do you know which country they send him to?
Dig I guess.
Venezuela.
And the mercenary is supposed to go to Venezuela.
And according to the rules in the game, this is this is from the New York Post, by the way, from the page six column.
The gun for hire is instructed if you can see it, you can buy it, steal it, or blow the living bleep out of it.
Well, Venezuela happens to be the country that is currently run by Hugo Chavez.
And the basic rule of American liberalism is the same rule that the mafia used to have.
The enemy of my enemy is my friend.
And since Hugo Chavez is a Marxist and therefore not on friendly terms with the United States, the left is adopting him as their cause.
So while the mercenary in the game isn't directly going after Hugo Chavez, it's enough of a concern that liberals are upset with Bono and demanding that he drop his investment in this company.
Aren't you glad that you're not part of a philosophy in which you're worried about stuff like that?
It's just easier being a conservative.
I can go to bed tonight without losing any sleep over how Bono is investing his money.
You lefties out there, though.
One more thing for you to worrywart yourselves to death over.
The loser in the Mexican election, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, is still refusing to concede defeat.
He now says he has two videos that prove the election was stolen from him.
They had a very close election for uh president of Mexico.
The uh conservative candidate Felipe Calderon won in a narrow election.
The loser was uh the liberal candidate Andre Manuel Lopez Obrador.
One of the beautiful things about the internet is that somebody who is not bilingual like myself can translate words into other languages.
So I typed in Andre Manuel Lopez Obrador and looked for the English translation, and it came back El Gore.
That was really weak.
You could see the punchline coming before I delivered it.
Everybody knew where I was going with it, but it was a shot that was too easy not to take.
Now to the subject of immigration.
The last time I was here a few weeks ago, I waited into this topic and we had a very, very strong discussion on both sides of the issue.
The point I want to make today Is that I think it's instructive that the entire debate going on right now in Washington on the issue of immigration is Republicans arguing with Republicans.
This is fascinating.
We still do have a Democratic Party in this country.
They've got nearly half the House of Representatives and about what do they have, 44, 45 members of the United States Senate.
They're not part of this at all.
They're nowhere to be found on this.
If there's a problem in America, there's no Democrat anywhere near it right now.
They have no solutions at all.
You might see their fingerprints on the problem in terms of causing it.
And in fact, we had an enormous influx of illegal immigrants from Mexico during the Clinton years, but they're nowhere near the solutions.
This debate that we have going on is between the Senate Republicans and President Bush on the one side and hardliners in the House on the other side.
The Democrats aren't part of this at all because they have no particular interest in solving the immigration issue.
They realize that any solution is going to anger someone.
So they just as soon have this problem go undealt with.
They don't want to deal with Social Security.
They don't have any particular plan as to how we ensure democracy survives in Iraq.
They've got no answer to anything.
Okay, fine.
That's the way of the world right now, and that's what we have to deal with.
And what I want to point out, what I want to say, my point is this.
There is nothing wrong with this argument going on within the Republican Party.
There's nothing wrong with this discussion.
There's nothing bad about it.
If we're going to have one party government in the United States right now because the Democrats don't want to deal with anything, so be it.
You have very strong views within the conservative movement on the issue of immigration.
And they don't, the two sides are nowhere near one another.
Just yesterday, 33 prominent American conservatives signed a letter that appeared in the Wall Street Journal called a Conservative Statement for Immigration Reform.
These are individuals who essentially state the premise that immigration is good for the United States.
They support the goals of President Bush.
They say that as a society, we thrive when people see the United States as a land of opportunity.
Jack Kemp signed this.
George Shultz signed it.
Gene Kirkpatrick is on here.
See a couple of the others, Grover Norquist, who's prominent American conservative, Jeff Bell on the American Conservative Union, Bill Crystal of the Weekly Standard, Arthur Laffer, Linda Chavez is on here, and a number of others.
The Wall Street Journal editorial page, also a beacon of the conservative movement.
Lead editorial in yesterday's paper, Conservatives and Immigration.
They are also a very pro-immigration newspaper.
On the other hand, you have a number of Republicans, and this debate is going right into our own homes, a number of Republicans who are absolutely beside themselves that they see so-called conservatives taking this open-door policy and apparently not at all concerned that as many as 15 million people have entered the country illegally and we're going to allow them to stay.
They're taking a very, very different position.
On page one of today's New York Times is a profile of Congressman James Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin.
Sensenbrenner is the leader of the hardliners.
He is the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, and he has shown very little interest to this point in agreeing to anything that the Senate or the President wants to do with regard to immigration.
It is sense in Brenner's position that anything that we do on this problem must start with enforcement first.
He wants to enforce existing laws.
He wants to enforce the border, and he wants to take a very tough approach.
He says the legislation proposed by the Senate and by President Bush amounts to an amnesty that it is way too soft on the individuals who have come into the United States illegally.
Sens and Brenner represents my own area.
He represents the Milwaukee suburbs.
I know him quite well.
I happen to think he's the best member of the United States Congress.
I happen to disagree with him on this issue, and I've called him an obstructionist.
I don't think he pretty he particularly appreciates that, but I think deep down he kind of likes it.
Because he right now on this issue, that is what he's attempting to do, but he's attempting to do it because this is what he believes in.
He believes it is wrong to simply say that the immigration laws that we have had on the books forever are going to be ignored.
He thinks it's wrong to not focus on enforcing a border and enforcing current laws.
Now, my own belief is that Sensen Brenner might be digging in his heels for the purpose of cutting the best deal that he can possibly get as he negotiates with the Senate and maybe even with President Bush.
Whatever.
I happen to be somebody that personally is a little bit closer to the President's side in terms of how to deal with this because my own priority is to build a wall, and after that I really don't care what you do.
But this debate that some are saying is tearing apart the Republican Party shouldn't tear it apart.
Let's have this argument within the Republican Party.
Let's have this argument within the conservative movement.
In the end, though, you've got to come up with something.
And you've got to pass a bill, and you've got to deal with it.
The reality of the matter is that this thing, if it is going to be resolved, is going to be resolved by Republicans.
Because the Democrats have taken a total dive on it.
They're nowhere to be found on this issue.
You may have a civil war within the Republican Party on it, but that's because Republicans and conservatives are the only ones who are even attempting to deal with this.
I'm not so concerned about the details as I am about the fact that we need to pass a law that gets tough on illegal immigration, and if that means that we have to accommodate individuals who are already here, I'm fine with that.
I can handle that.
But we must do something.
We can't allow our border to continue to be a sieve.
Immigration is good, but illegal immigration is something that we have to begin to get a handle on.
And without regard to who wins this argument between the House and the Senate and the hardline conservatives and the pro-immigration conservatives, without regard to who wins it, or if they just split the difference, something in the end needs to be done.
And when it is done, understand that it was the Democrats that were hiding under the table when grown-ups on both sides got serious and decided to deal with this issue.
My name is Mark Belling, and I'm sitting in for Rush.
Mark Belling sitting in for Rush Limbaugh.
Tom Sullivan is going to be here tomorrow and on Thursday, Paul W. Smith on Friday rushes on vacation this week.
However, you can keep up to date on all of the good stuff from Rush and a lot of information on Rushlimbaugh.com, Russia's website, which is available all the time.
And now to the latest on the Zidane story.
The French soccer superstar whose inexplicable headbutt got him thrown out of the World Cup championship game on Sunday, rendering him unavailable for the penalty shot segment that resulted in Italy winning the World Cup.
Frenchmen are trying to figure out why Zidane did it.
And the suggestion is being made that the Italian defender Marco Marazzi must have said something to him to get under his skin.
And the speculation is that he called him a terrorist.
Zidane himself is the son of Algerian immigrants and has not said what it was that set him off.
In fact, he hasn't done any interviews.
Nobody knows what he's saying.
Nobody knows what his thinking is, and nobody knows what his rationale was.
But there's some sort of belief that he may have been Called a terrorist.
In fact, you now see members of the French media trying to lip read what the Italian was saying as they watch the interaction between Zidane and the Italian.
Now I don't know how you track that down because if did the Italian make his insult to Zidane in Italian, or did he say it in French, or did he say it in some other language?
What I do know is this.
Back to the first time I ever played sports, when I was about four years old, the kids on the other team would start, your mother wears army boots.
You're this, you're that.
We've been taunting athletes as long as there have been sports in this country.
Nobody has ever headbutted as a result of that before.
There is now concern.
Being expressed by many about the example that Zidane set.
Brian Schulman, founder and CEO of Learning Through Sports, develops educational software to teach sportsmanship to kids in grades K through twelve.
He says he's afraid that children are now going to emulate Saddam and we're going to have an epidemic of headbutting among kids here in the United States.
Quote, I'm watching the greatest soccer player in the world when I get frustrated, that's what I should do, said Shulman, saying that that's the message that children are going to get.
Unfortunately, ESPN is going to show this scene over and over again.
He's right, they are.
Even if they talk about how bad it is, all that boys or boys and girls see is that is that constant behavior.
He's wrong about this.
Kids aren't going to start headbutting because they saw this French soccer player do this.
Kids emulate what results in winning.
Sidan cost his team the game by doing this.
Had he headbutted somebody and then scored a goal in one, then there'd be all sorts of headbutting.
What's the point of headbutting for the purpose of losing?
We do have a parallel situation here.
Remember when the United States women won the World Cup?
And we won in a goal that was scored, I believe, on a penalty kick late in the game.
Brandy Chastain scored that goal.
Now, what did she do?
She took off her shirt.
There was for a while a lot of shirt taking off after Brandi Chastain did that because she was emulating someone who had just demonstrated great heroism.
Since Zidane has come across pretty much as an idiot who cost his team the entire championship out all the glory that's associated with the World Cup, I doubt that you're going to see children at all emulating him.
I am not worried that we're going to have an epidemic of American headbutting.
Maybe in France, and in the case of the Frenchman, a little bit of headbutting might do them some good.
Might do them some good.
I'm Mark Belling sitting in for Rush Limbaugh.
Mark Belling sitting in for Rush Limbaugh.
Now here's a topic for another day, but something to think about in the meantime.
Cal Thomas wrote a column about this.
The Los Angeles Times recently polled a group of Republicans, and they had four generic candidates for president and describe them accordingly.
One is a pro-abortion Protestant who does believe in balanced budgets budgets with cut spending and lower taxes, but is also divorced and remarried to someone who has also been divorced.
The second candidate is a Catholic, pro-life, but is a supporter of higher taxes and more government spending.
The candidate during the 60s smoked dope and lived with two women.
The third candidate the scribe is Jewish, does support the war in Iraq, strong supporter of Israel, but is also a supporter of same-sex marriage.
The fourth candidate described generically is a Mormon.
He's married to the same woman he started out with.
The Mormon is pro-life, opposes same-sex marriage, wants taxes and government spending cut, vows to put only conservatives on the Supreme Court, and appears consistent in his private and public behavior.
The Republicans who responded to the poll were least likely to support the Mormon candidate, even though his beliefs were the only ones that were consistently conservative all the way through.
Mitt Romney, governor of Massachusetts, is a Mormon.
I think it'll be fascinating to see whether or not he can overcome this bias.
The fact of the matter is that a black woman may have an easier time becoming a Republican candidate for president than a Mormon male.
I appreciate everybody listening to me the last couple of days and thank Rush for the opportunity to be here.
Mark Belling, see ya.
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