Yes, America's real anchorman is back here on the one and only Excellence in Broadcasting Network saying more in five seconds than your average host or wife says in an entire week.
Well, that may be a stretch.
At any rate, greetings.
And Dawn, I just, I wasn't even going to say that till I looked at your smiling face.
800-282-2882, if you want to be on the program, the email address, rush at EIBNet.com, looks like, looks like, you know, last week, I promised a fourth hour this week because the natives are getting restless out there.
Fourth hour is when we extend the program for web subscribers only.
It's not broadcast, but we do it on our website, rushlimbaugh.com.
Looks like it's going to be Thursday that we do the fourth hour.
So make a note, official program observers, so that I don't forget that.
Now, I actually have a pretty easy week.
I'm looking forward to it.
I get to breathe.
All I got to do is work.
I'm not a whole lot of outside stuff this week.
That's cool.
Anyway, I got an email right before the previous hour concluded from a subscriber at rushlimbaugh.com.
His name is Eric in Chittenango, New York.
Seems that the past week or so, the commercials between your segments have increased.
Are we getting less rush and more commercials?
No, you're not.
I can understand why you think that, ladies and gentlemen, the shows the past couple of weeks have just been so hot and so cooking that you can't wait for the programming content to return once we go to commercial.
And when you really, really want it and you're sitting around waiting for it, the time passes slowly.
Sort of like if you're boiling water to make something, if you sit there and watch it, if you're backing up your computer, you sit there and watch it, the time seems to drag on.
It's just a testament to the compelling content that never has a single drop-off on this program as to why you think we've added commercials.
We have not.
I steadfastly oppose any effort that's been made and hasn't.
I hadn't been one in two years anyway.
But just to set that straight.
All right.
Yesterday had some big news about how it ain't looking good for Democrats out there in the November elections.
This is the drive-by media, and I think they're warning Democrats, you know, you guys, can I give you an analogy?
I know some of you people don't like football, but I'm going to give you two analogies.
I forget the year of the first one.
It was might have been 2002.
Yes, 2002 season.
2001 season, the Pittsburgh Steelers lost in the AFC Championship game to the New England Patriots on a sunny and very comfortable 60-degree day in Pittsburgh.
They lost on a punt return and an interception.
This is a game that Tom Brady played for Drew Bledsoe.
He'd been hurt earlier.
Brady became the quarterback midseason, and they stuck with him throughout.
Injured his ankle in this game.
Steelers thought they had a chance with Bledsoe coming in, but it didn't matter.
The Patriots went on to win and went on to win the Super Bowl.
The next year, as is typical, the Steelers opened against the Patriots.
The Super Bowl champ always opens on the opening night of the NFL season, usually a Thursday now.
And the entire training camp, the Steelers kept talking, this is our year.
We got cheated in that championship game.
We didn't play well.
But our quarterback, Cordell Stewart, and our defense are going to pull this out.
We're going to win its entire year.
And it became the mantra.
Even the coach Bill Cower encouraged this kind of thinking.
Well, during one of the preseason games I happened to be watching, Mark Malone, a former Steelers quarterback who was then working for ESPN, and interviewed Dan Rooney, the owner of the Steelers.
Do you like all this talk about your team being destined for the Super Bowl?
I don't.
I don't like it one bit.
Steelers went on to get creamed by New England in that opener, and they were close, but they weren't affected.
Defense had a horrible year.
The secondary had a horrible year in 2002.
It was just a nightmare.
The following, or this season, all this past training camp, the New York Giants, led by Defensive and Michael Strahan, have been talking about how they are destined to go to the Super Bowl.
That's the best team they've ever had.
Our quarterback, Eli Manning, finally ready for the big time.
And we're ready.
This is the best collection of players we've ever had.
Second year with our coach, and we're ready there, third year, whatever it is.
So we got the system down.
We are unbeatable.
We are unstoppable.
Then the season starts.
The Manning Bowl on Sunday night, and the Giants lose.
Now, what do they face?
They travel to Philadelphia on Sunday for the Philadelphia McNabs.
And then after they play to McNabs on Sunday, they got to go out to Seattle to play the Seahags.
So they got two road teams against very, very good teams.
And the New York media is now talking about, my gosh, they could start the season 0-3.
Just two weeks ago, the Giants were talking to themselves about going to the Super Bowl and winning the thing.
So the coach, Tom Coughlin, and New York media today is full of this story.
Coach Tom Kaufman, Cauflin has said, okay, enough of this talk about how good we are.
It's time to go out there and be good.
And I've told you countless times, when you start counting your chickens before the eggs hatch, when you start assuming that things are going to happen way, way, way down the line for a whole bunch of reasons not based in reality, simply on your desire, maybe you're trying to pump people up, you are often in for a rude awakening.
And that is where the Democrats are.
They're just convinced that it is their day.
They're going to win 435 seats in the House, folks.
And they're going to win 100 seats in the Senate because this country hates Bush and this country hates the Iraq War.
And this country knows that Bush is a lightweight.
And they know that he's a fraud.
And they hate Cheney and they hate Rice.
And they hate Rumsfeld.
And they love Harry Reid.
And they love Hillary Clinton.
And they love John Kerry.
They love all of the Democrat stars.
They love the, and they hate everybody else.
They've got it.
So the Drive-By media starting to look at some polling data now that we're past Labor Day when these polls count and they're seeing a lot of red flags.
Uh-oh.
And so the Drive-By media is now publishing stories to try to rein the Democrats back in.
Here's another one today.
Gallup poll offers hope for House GOP.
This is at humanevents.com.
The September consensus, nearly unanimous.
Voter anxiety over the economy, health care, and financial security, the Washington Post Dan Bowles observed, threatens to put Republican candidates across the country on the defensive this fall.
Veteran Congress watcher Stuart Rothenberg predicted a heavy damage scenario for the Republicans.
The House minority leader even granted that we're going to guarantee Nancy Pelosi, we're going to win the House back.
Those prognostications were made in September 2002, before the last midterm election, and they were all wrong.
Far from incurring irreparable political damage, House Republicans spent September and October rallying their political base and then regained control of the Senate, picked up three House seats in 2002.
This after Democrats thought they're going to clean up after the Wellstone Memorial.
Four years later, Republican lawmakers are again facing ominous headlines.
GOPs hold on House shakier, L.A. Times.
GOPs seem to be in peril of losing house, New York Times.
More GOP districts counted as vulnerable.
Number doubled over the summer.
Washington Post.
Dan Balls again offered an ominous assessment of Republican prospects, attributing the Republicans' dire political straits to President Bush's low approval ratings, sharp divisions over the war in Iraq, dissatisfaction with Congress, economic anxiety caused by high gas prices, and stagnant wages.
Well, can we go through this?
Low approval ratings on the war, over 55% now on terrorism.
Sharp divisions over the war in Iraq.
I don't think they're as sharp as people believe.
Dissatisfaction with Congress.
Yeah, but with both parties.
Where there is dissatisfaction with Republicans, the Democrats aren't picking anything up.
We've been over that.
Economic anxiety caused by high gas prices, which are plummeting.
Ha ha!
They're plummeting now.
The lowest price will find someplace in Ohio, $2.03 a gallon, $2.06 in Iowa.
They're down to $0.17 on average.
The average national price, $2.54 for gasoline.
So that one is worthless to them.
Stagnant wages.
We just heard in the last two weeks that wages are up 7%.
Productivity is way up and wages are too.
Both IRS and census data.
With independent voters alienated and the Democratic base energized, once safe Republican incumbents are now undefensive.
Well, that's a pretty good summation of the way the drive-by media has been handling this.
But ignored was a Gallup poll released in late August that found an unexpected tightening in what pollsters call the generic ballot.
The generic ballot question is this.
If the election are being held today, which party's candidate would you vote for in your district?
Pundits looking to assess the national mood regularly cite the results of this question and did so promiscuously earlier this year when Democrats enjoyed a seemingly insurmountable advantage, 54 to 38 late June, 51 to 40, right before the Congress August recess.
But then something happened as lawmakers spent August reconnecting with their constituents.
The advantage for the generic Democrat candidate slipped from 11 points in late July to nine points in early August, then to a statistically insignificant two points, 47 to 45 in late August, August 18th to 20th.
Among those most likely to vote, however, the Democrats' advantage disappeared entirely with Gallup reporting a dead heat at 48 to 48.
Anxious to understand this movement toward Republican candidates, Gallup sorted the responses to the generic ballot question into two new categories.
Are Democrats, it wanted to know, competitive in U.S. House districts currently held by Republicans or just getting a larger than normal share of the vote in the districts they already hold?
Obviously, the odds that Democrats will retake the House are exponentially greater if they demonstrate strength against Republicans in their own backyards than if they simply accumulate larger than usual margins in their own districts.
Well, the bottom line is that they found it was the latter.
Also, this generic ballot tends to always be weighted with more Democrat participants than Republicans.
That's just the way the pollsters do this.
This 25-point turnaround, now leads it to 48.48, began prior to the August 10th revelation that London and U.S. intelligence officials had thwarted a terrorist plot to blow up a dozen airliners.
Charlie Cook of the National Journal predicted last week the House will turn provided nothing changes.
Gallup's insightful analysis indicates a politically meaningful change may be underway already.
And then if you go to the Las Vegas Review Journal headline, Democrats slip in latest Zogby survey.
Republicans regain the lead.
Republican candidates have regained the lead in the races for Nevada governor and U.S. Senator, according to a new poll.
Poll conducted by Zogby for the Wall Street Journal put Senator John Ensign, Republican, ahead of his challenger, 52% to Jimmy Carter's kid jacket, 40%.
Democratic gubernatorial candidate Dina Titus fell behind Republican Jim Gimmons, had 47% to her, 39%.
And then there are other stories.
I think I've got a couple others here in the stack about this.
Yeah, New York Times today, Republican collapse may not be so imminent.
So the drive-by media, after doing what they can to gin up the false notion, is now trying to throw the cold water of reality on the Democrats.
We'll see if it has any impact.
Stay with us, folks.
We'll be right back.
All right, let's go to the phones.
People have been patiently waiting.
We'll start at Wilkesbury, Pennsylvania.
Brian, thank you, sir, for your patience and welcome.
Hello, sir.
Pleasure to talk to you.
Dittos from the proud owner of a rare Dan's bake sale t-shirt.
Thank you, John.
I wanted to get back to that homework question where academia doesn't want our children to do homework.
Yeah.
That doesn't surprise me because by going over my daughter's homework every night after she does it, it keeps me apprised of what they're teaching her in school, what they're trying to tell her.
And I could see academia, especially higher academia, going to push that notion that there's no reason to involve the parents at home.
Do you think it's possible that that may be a secondary or maybe even primary reason why they're discouraging homework is because generally parents now and then do help the kids.
And if there's no homework, there's no helping the kids.
And so there's no interaction between the parents and the kids.
And thereby you, as the predatory father, do not get to counter the indoctrination that these liberal professors are instilling in your young skull full of mush daughter.
Exactly.
And not so much that I help her do it, but at least go over it with her so I can see any signs of an obvious slant or a one-side to a story thing.
And I could tell her what I think and what reality is if she gets the whole picture.
How old is your daughter?
My daughter is 13.
13.
Now, I'm serious about this question.
At what age do you think that it might be that she...
Now, this is a tough year.
You're not going to understand this.
And I'm not trying to be funny about it.
I know what the answer is going to be.
I'll tell you what the answer is before I even tell you the question.
The question is, the answer is never because of the quality of education.
The question is, at what age do you expect your daughter to know more than you knew when you were her age?
Boy, never, I guess, because I have 45 years of life experience under you.
No, no, when you were her age.
I put a question.
When I was her age.
Well, when she's 18, will she know more than you did when you were 18?
It has to be yes on a number of things.
You had no idea what an iPod was when you were 18.
You didn't know what a computer was.
She's going to know all that stuff.
Right.
And I think I see now where education is more current events than I ever got when I was in the system.
So I think she'd be more worldly probably now at 13 than I was at 18.
Well, that's ⁇ we didn't get a whole lot of current events when I was in high school in the 60s.
It was a solid education.
There was some discussion of it, but not a whole lot.
Today, that current events discussion is indoctrination.
It generally is pro-Clinton, anti-Bush, designed to celebrate the history of great liberalism and that sort of thing.
Does your daughter run into that?
Yes, she does.
I find a lot of her lessons also are geared towards the, if we would just talk to people, and if everyone would realize we want to be live in peace, it would all be fine.
And I have to remind her that some people are just evil and they need to be dealt with.
Yeah.
Has she learned that yet in her actual life?
I mean, I'm sure she's run into some creeps.
Yes, she has.
I think she's doing very well.
And she's also picked up on that certain things she should keep to herself and to her family.
Let the teachers get the answers they want, but not make a big, strong point of it.
Well, that's interesting.
Very good.
I appreciate the call out there, Brian.
Thanks so much.
If you're just joining us, here's the story that he's commenting on.
It's in the Washington Post today.
The nation's best-known researcher on homework has taken a new look at the subject.
And here is what he has to say.
Harris Cooper is a professor at Duke University.
Elementary school students get no academic benefit from homework except reading and some basic skills practice, yet schools require more than ever.
No academic benefit from homework.
Elementary school.
That's grades one through six for those of you in Riolinda who haven't been.
High school students studying until dawn probably are wasting their time because there's no academic benefit after two hours a night.
For middle schoolers, an hour and a half is the max, and then they can't handle it anymore.
And what's perhaps more important, he said, is that most teachers get little or no training on how to create homework assignments that advance learning.
The controversy over homework that has raged for more than a century in U.S. education, it has.
I can tell you there was no controversy about it when I was in school.
None whatsoever.
No one has gone so far as the American Child Health Association did in the 30s when it pinned homework and child labor as leading killers of children who contracted tuberculosis and heart disease by doing homework.
The American Child Health.
Look them up.
Will you Google them for me and find out what communist country they're more closely tied to?
But the arguments seem to get louder with each new school year.
There's too much homework and there's too little.
Assignments are too boring, overreaching.
Parents are too involved or they're negligent.
Yet teachers themselves don't uniformly agree on something as basic as the purpose of homework, be it reviewing versus learning, much less design or amount or even whether it should be graded.
And the result can be inconsistency in assignments and confusion for students.
So the assault on homework has started, ladies and gentlemen.
We'll have more on this.
Plus, your phone calls continue right after this break.
Going down, going on, going wherever.
We're on the train.
Rush Limbaugh, America's real anchor man.
No poser me.
800-282-2882 and a Sandy in Tucson.
Sandy, glad you called and welcome to the program.
Hi, Rush.
Thanks.
I just wanted to let you know a few points that I had to make about the movie last night and how it directly relates to how we are all voting this year and in the next few years.
First of all, I was overwhelmed with the movie because my husband is in intelligence.
We were married in 96 and he had just survived an 80% cut of human intelligence back in the early 90s.
Yes.
We all know who did that.
Also, I realized that intelligence is not what failed us, according to the film.
Was a bureaucracy that would not allow us to put it all together and to act on it.
I think that directly relates to President Bush's situation in Iraq, where he had the best intelligence he could get, and he decided to act rather than be a coward and just let things go on as they were and have maybe a worse attack on our country.
I think people need to remember that Clinton was proven to be a liar, and there are still many people running for a reelection who still support him, still think he's the greatest thing ever.
And when you're voting for someone who has intelligence to deal with, and we, none of us, know it, you have to vote for someone you can trust with that information.
Otherwise, we're going to be back in the same situation we were in in the 90s.
I think that's pretty good assessment.
One of the things that it causes me to realize, you know, you talked about all the intelligence that we had in the 90s that was not acted on versus the intelligence that Bush got that he did act on.
All of that intelligence was trumpeted by the Democrats themselves in 1998 under Clinton.
Clinton led the charge.
Democrats in the Senate were right there with him.
Tom Puff Deschell, Jay Rockefeller, they were all there.
Ted Kennedy.
In 2002, they demanded a resolution and cited the same intelligence, Saddam's weapons of mass destruction.
What they're engaging in now is the old phrase, they're being armchair quarterbacks.
And anybody can do that, and it isn't leadership.
That's exactly my point.
And you can't sit back when you have intelligence.
You have to act on it.
Maybe you need to wait until you get a little bit more, but eventually you have to act.
You just can't sit around and talk about it.
And that's all they want to do.
They want to talk.
They want to placate.
And it's the same thing when you think of North Korea and all the other problems that we have right now.
They all go back to where nothing was acted on.
Well, I know it's political correctness out there.
Sandy, the Clinton administration, liberals, I don't care the Clinton administration or not, obsessed with this notion of what will people think of us?
Will any innocent children be killed when they're being used as shields by people like Bin Laden?
All of these things.
The CIA says we can't assassinate bin Laden under the road, even with a presidential order.
Tennis, nope, we don't.
So there was a total reluctance.
And I'm going to go out on a limb here in the movie, The Path to 9-11, did cover this.
I think that one of the reasons there was such, besides the wall, one of the reasons there was such bureaucratic fear, bureaucratic inaction, was the fact that they knew the buck wasn't going to stop with Clinton.
They knew that Clinton would hang them out to dry in order to save himself if something went wrong, as happened to Janet El Rinho in the Waco invasion.
This is something I will never forget.
After the Waco invasion, which was basically just a bunch of religious people that Janet El Rino and Clinton didn't agree with, and they said, well, abusing children in there, I'm not going to put up with this.
Reno was big on that.
So they went in there and invaded, and they burned those people to death.
Just blew the place up tanks and all of this sort of stuff.
And media went to Clinton.
I'd love to be able to tell you what happened there, but that's Attorney General Reno's decision.
You might want to go talk to her.
And this was referenced in the movie last night.
I forget who, Tennant or burglar or somebody, essentially said didn't want to be the next Janet Reno if something went wrong.
So there was a fear of being hung out to dry because I think there was a probably, I don't know if it was stated or not, written or unwritten, but it was clear to everybody in that administration that if anything ever went wrong, it wasn't going to be Bill Clinton's fault.
It was going to be somebody else's.
And they all behaved in that fashion.
And as such, nobody decided to take any chances or to act on anything because of that fear.
And I think that's something that the movie exposes pretty well.
Sandy, thanks for the call, Dayton, Ohio.
And Alice, you're next.
Glad you waited.
Welcome to the program.
Hi, Rush.
I have to tell you, ABC is my new favorite network.
Bob Iger, the leader over there, showed more guts than Clinton and his whole administration combined.
He had the courage.
You know, that's the operative word, the courage to air the path to 9-11.
In spite of all the pressure he was under to pull it, in spite of the personal, professional risks, you know, I'm just really grateful to him for standing up to all those forces, doing something that some might consider was very politically uncorrect.
He allowed the story to be told.
And, you know, in light of all of that, he went ahead with it.
And the thing is, it was really so depressing to me to see all those lost opportunities of the Clinton administration, what might have been, what didn't have to be.
I mean, if only we'd had a president who'd had a little bit of courage.
You left out something very important in praising ABC and Disney CEO Bob Iger, and that is he also ran the risk of becoming cocktail party pariah.
And that is a big thing on the left.
No, I mean, people laugh about this, but the left is a very intricately woven social network as well.
And there are people who will do anything to be accepted in it.
And he's a pariah there.
Bob, how can you sell our boy Clinton?
And by the way, you should know this too.
Iger is a Democrat and has contributed, I think, close to $100,000 to Clinton and other Democrats in recent years.
He's very open about it.
But who knows why?
You're exactly right.
He deserves credit and courage for hanging in there despite all these threats from Clinton's lawyers and Clinton himself and the Senate Democrats threatening to challenge his broadcast licenses if he went ahead with this.
I said so yesterday.
I think he deserves a lot of credit for sticking with this.
So you're right.
I'm glad you perceived that.
But let me ask you a question.
When you watched the movie, were there things in there you didn't know or didn't remember?
Or were there things that you did remember you just couldn't believe that they were being shown on film on a major American TV network?
Well, it was a little of both because right after 9-11 happened, I remember reading about particularly some of the things regarding Sedan and Madeline Albright.
And so there were some of those things that I knew, but I always felt like, you know, why is it that the Clinton administration has gotten a pass for so long?
And so I knew some of it, but, you know, it wasn't in the forefront of my mind.
But when I saw this, I thought, wow, hallelujah.
Somebody is telling the truth.
The real story of what led up to this and all the failures, because that made me angry in the beginning.
But nobody really seemed to bring that out, at least not to the extent that this movie did to the whole world to see.
So for one, I am grateful for that to ABC and Bob Iger.
Well, good for you.
I think one thing the movie did, well, the two things I mentioned him in the beginning of the program.
When most people think back to the 90s, they think happy-go-lucky, carefree, good economy, no major events of consequence, no great threats and so forth.
Clinton smiling and laughing, having fun with Monica and so forth.
And that was about it.
But there were clearly terrorist events killing Americans all through that decade.
Somalia, World Trade Center 1993, the embassy bombings, the Cobar Towers, the USS Cole.
Americans were dying throughout that decade.
And this movie brought that home.
Another thing that we didn't see last night was the usual portrayal of Clinton that we got during that period: the quivering lower lip, the faked and phony compassion, and I feel your pain.
And so we got an entirely different presentation of Bill Clinton.
And it's no wonder that they were upset and didn't want it seen because it's that phony construction of a character and personality that contributes to Clinton's legacy.
That's how paper-thin whole legacy is: it can't withstand a mini-series, a five-hour mini-series that is called Docudrama.
Back after this, folks, with more.
Grab audio soundbite number 11.
I mentioned I got an email yesterday from a person in Virginia who was at the Jim Moran 9-11 rally on the fifth anniversary.
We have just a short snippet of this.
I can actually provide you more details.
This, yes, is internet quality.
This is Jim Moran yesterday in Arlington, Virginia.
There are more people around the world who hate America and what they think it stands for than even life itself.
That let us resolve.
So they heard the woman in the background shouting, this isn't political.
What he said was, there are more people around the world who hate America and what they think it stands for than even life itself.
And of course, as far as Jim Moran's concerned, that's our fault.
And it exists because of George W. Bush.
Now, the email I got was from a guy who I thought it was a guy.
I don't remember.
My memory is that it was a gentleman.
And he was there.
And he described this scene.
And Moran started getting political.
And I guess this woman said, Don't make this political.
My brother died on 9-11.
And somebody in the audience shouted at that woman, Your brother and you aren't important.
Let the congressman speak.
And he went on to politicize 9-11.
I don't care what Moran says.
That's not the point.
It doesn't matter to me what he says, other than noting it as it is an indication of who these people are and what their animus is.
Look at their issues.
What are their issues?
They can't talk about national security because they couldn't make that believable.
So their issues are tax cuts or tax increases on the rich, health care for all, gay marriage, expanding the minimum wage and so forth, a bunch of other kook, really out-of-the-mainstream social things, and Bush is bad.
And they know that the out-of-the-mainstream social things are not going to fly.
They're not going anywhere.
They never do.
And so they focus on Bush is bad.
Well, as the American Spectator piece I quoted earlier said, it is just morally bankrupt.
By the way, there are nine elections today, nine primary elections today, among them Senator Lincoln Chafee.
And the AP story here says moderate Republican Senator Lincoln.
He's not a moderate, he's a liberal.
There are other stories about how all these moderates are on the ballot today.
Moderates, yeah, here it is.
This is from the Christian Science Monitor.
Political moderates imperiled.
And they talk about Chaffee here.
Many drivers soaring toward the beach wave honker flash thumbs up to Senator Link Chaffee and a gaggle of roadside campaign volunteers hoisting keep Chaffee signs.
Some travelers don't react at all, but one woman scowls and plunges a thumb toward the dashboard.
It's rare you see a woman do that, muses the Republican senator to those standing nearby.
We'll get her in the general, though.
That's if Senator Chaffee manages to get to the general.
The GOP primary in Rhode Island will tell whether the soft-spoken middle-of-the-road income is not middle of the road.
He's not a moderate.
He is a Democrat.
And Lieberman is not a moderate either.
Now, the only way you can make the case that Lieberman and Chaffee are moderates is if you compare them to the kook fringe of the Democratic Party.
Like the other day, somebody said that Nancy Pelosi, given the makeup of House leftists, is actually a centrist Democrat.
But that's only her position among far-left and not-so-far-left and medium-lefts.
But she's still a flat-out San Francisco liberal.
It's how far left the Democratic Party is going and will keep so.
Greg in Baltimore, thank you for waiting.
Welcome to the program, sir.
Yes, hi, Rush.
Hi.
Mega Dittos from Baltimore.
I'm a Dittohead, big fan of your show, but a rare breed of Ditto Head.
I am probably one of the only gay Republican fans of your show.
Who knows?
I don't know.
I don't think you're the only one.
There's a lot of them out there.
Oh, is that right?
Yeah, you should feel at home.
All right.
Well, listen, I just wanted to thank you.
First of all, thank you for your service.
I mean, it's incredible.
You're defending freedom every day on the front lines, and I think it's great what you do.
Thank you.
Thanks very much.
I wouldn't call this the front lines, but I still appreciate it.
Okay.
But I'm glad you brought up that new book called The Looming Tower.
Because there's been, you know, I've heard rumors and hints and innuendo about the sexuality of these guys, you know, from the September 11th hijackers and basically all of these, you know, kind of disaffected, quote-unquote, guys that have been driven to commit suicide and mass murder on behalf of Islam.
And I think it's important that that author talks about, you know, how perverse the vision of women in the society is and how that kind of drives a, you know, it can drive a conflicted individual to do some crazy things.
So I think it really bears discussion.
And, well, anyway, that's the question.
I appreciate it.
Let me, for those of you just tuning in, thanks very much, Greg, for the phone call.
I appreciate it.
If you're just joining us, let me bring you up to speed on what he's referring to.
There's a new book called The Looming Tower, Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9-11, just published by Kanopf.
It's by Lawrence Wright.
And there's this passage about Muhammad Atta.
Physically, there was a feminine quality to his bearing.
He was elegant and delicate, so that his sexual orientation, however unexpressed, was difficult to read.
Atta constantly demonstrated an aversion to women who, in his mind, were like Jews in their powerfulness and corruption.
His will states this: No pregnant woman or disbelievers should walk in my funeral or ever visit my grave.
No woman should ask forgiveness of me.
Those who will wash my body should wear gloves so that they do not touch my genitals.
That's the end of the excerpt from the will.
The anger that this statement directs at women and its horror of sexual contact invites the thought that Muhammad Atta's turn to terror had as much to do with his own conflicted sexuality as it did with the clash of civilizations.
It really is a great book in terms of a historical concept of how the concept of how this whole started.
But the one thing about militant Islam that never really gets talked about much, and I'm really kind of surprised by it, particularly from the American feminist community, and that is their utter hatred and subjugation and imprisonment of women.
You would think that alone would stoke some sort of unity in this country, given all that we've been through.
But it seems to barely even register.
And the fact that it is a huge factor in the way these people think and act cannot be denied.
It just can't.
A federal judge.
A federal judge will not block Arizona's voter ID law.