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Feb. 12, 2007 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:28
February 12, 2007, Monday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
Welcome to the Rush Limbaugh Program here at the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.
It is a Monday with a cascade of news to get into and talk about.
Your calls at 1-800-282-2882.
Rush Limbaugh with a bit of a bug today.
Voice not sounding like Rush.
So I'm in.
Rush will be back tomorrow.
He over the weekend at Pebble Beach and apparently caught the bug that is going around to a lot of places.
And a lot of people sound like, I don't know that I sound all that great this morning either.
In any event, Rush Back tomorrow.
All the guys in New York say you sound marvelous.
All right.
But rush back tomorrow.
And appreciate the opportunity to sit in because this is an incredible news day.
And we're going to get to all of it today.
It is, well, not coincidentally.
It's interesting that it falls today, Lincoln's birthday.
And we're going to talk a little bit more about Abraham Lincoln because some remarkable things as you look into his background compared to what's going on today, as a matter of fact, even though what I want to talk about happened 150 or more years ago.
Here in California, Arnold Schwarzenegger spoke to the California State Republican Convention in Sacramento over the weekend and was not well received.
He tried to convince them that increasing fees, fees, mind you, on doctors, hospitals, and employers in order to pay free medical care to illegals, among others, was a good idea and was not a violation of his no-new taxes pledge from a campaign of just 14 minutes ago.
Well, okay, last November.
That didn't go over very well.
And a number of people, including State Senator Tom McClintock, boycotted the dinner at which the governor spoke.
The bloom is off the rose on Mr. Schwarzenegger here in California.
Valentine's Day is coming up, and the environmentalists who there is no topic on which they are not heard and widely disseminated in the drive-by media.
There is no topic on which they are ready at a moment's notice to ruin yet another institution and another good time and to squelch the party.
These guys are the dog poop in your party favors there because again, for Valentine's Day, they have an objection.
This is out of the telegraph in Britain.
Valentine bouquets are bad for the planet, says the headline.
The gift that every woman in Britain will be waiting for next week, the Valentine's Day bouquet, has become the latest problem for environmental campaigners.
The flowers, it seems, are arriving from farther and farther away.
They used to come from the Netherlands.
They are now coming from Africa.
17,000 tons are to be flown in from Africa.
This is bad for the planet because of the carbon dioxide emissions from aeroplanes.
The British spell it A-E-R-O.
Aeroplanes.
Richard Branson over the weekend had a Virgin Airlines, had a 25, what is a million pound reward for answers to global warming.
One of the answers, if aeroplanes are the big problem, of course, to shut down Virgin Airlines.
He didn't seem to be volunteering to do that.
By the way, global warming, of course, may solve the problem of flowers having to be flown into the UK from points south.
As the UK gets warmer, they can grow their own flowers, and they won't have to be flying anything yet.
This is a week, by the way, solid news this week.
No astronaut diaper stories, no cleavage deaths.
We're trying to keep.
Well, there is one thing, though, I did want to get to you, and that is the Japanese who are endlessly entrepreneurial and endlessly innovative.
The Japanese medical team has carried out trials on dozens of women where women are growing their own breast implants through a pioneering stem cell treatment coming from their own fat cells.
This is a triple whammy of good news.
First of all, you don't have to use the embryonic cells.
Number two, well, you can imagine number two and three.
This is wonderful news.
Okay, maybe it's not that wonderful.
Back to Lincoln's birthday.
I had a talk over the weekend at a Lincoln's Day dinner, and in the course of researching that, I came across some notes about Lincoln's life that I thought I'd share today because it makes so much interesting sense for today's politics.
First of all, the interesting thing that I want to remind Republicans of is that Abraham Lincoln, on his death, the contents of his pockets were displayed, and I actually saw this display.
What was in his pockets on the day he was assassinated, the watch and a number of other personal items, a little penknife, and then there was a crumpled $5 Confederate note, Confederate money, in his pocket.
People at the time wondered what was Lincoln doing, the leader of the Union.
I'll go back here a little bit if you've been recently in public high school.
The leader of the Union during the Civil War in the United States in the 1860s that, you know, the Confederacy versus the Union, and the Confederacy had seceded and there was a big war and 623,000 people.
The casualties there.
Yes, that was actually a pretty interesting comparison there.
So he's got this $5 Confederate note in his pocket, and everybody wonders why.
Apparently, five or six weeks before the assassination, Lincoln had wanted to see Richmond, which had been occupied by Union troops as the Confederates retreated, the capital of the Confederacy, the White House of the President of the Confederacy.
He wanted to see it.
And he drove with a Union guard, a troop of cavalry folks in his carriage down to Richmond.
Well, the white folks kept inside, but the black folks in Richmond turned out.
They heard he was coming, and they chanted at him, Father Abraham, the liberator, Father Abraham.
So he gets finally through this mob to the courthouse, the Congress of the, I guess, of the Confederacy where they were meeting to give a short talk.
And an old man pressed up against him and pressed this $5 bill in his hand and said, Here, I was saving this to buy my freedom.
You've done it.
You may have the money.
He carried it in his pocket every day since.
This is just to remind you what was at stake, what we accomplished as Republicans with our first Republican president, what was done then and is never taught now.
But I want to also flip that coin and let's look at the other side.
What was happening at the same time in the Democratic Party?
Well, the secessionist Democrats, of course, left the Union.
But I'm talking about the Northern Democrats.
They remained in Congress.
They remained a viable political party called the Northern Democrats.
Many of them called themselves the Peace Democrats by the spring of 1863 before Gettysburg, before the victories, before it started to look like the Union might win, it looked like the Union might lose.
And so the Peace Democrats, the Republicans called them Copperheads, the Peace Democrats were a group of folks, including very interestingly, an Ohio congressman, Clement Vallandingham, looked a lot like John Murtha and talked like him too.
Lincoln, he said, was fighting for abolition of slavery, not for the Union.
Our American boys should not die to free the N, N-word.
You know, this is the way they talked.
The Peace Democrats said that Lincoln's policies were policies of, quote, debt, defeat, and sepulchres, sepulchres being the 19th century word for coffin.
Okay?
In other words, doesn't that sound a little like Merthyr?
All Bush is doing is driving us into debt, defeat, and the coffins are coming home with our boys and girls.
Fighting for abolition, not the Union.
Fighting for oil, not really for Iraq, right?
Lincoln was one of the worst, said Vallandingham, one of the worst despots on earth.
If Hitler had been there at the time, he would have said he's just like Hitler, as Merthyl has said about Bush.
Vallandingham said, quote, I see more of barbarism and sin a thousand times in the continuation of this war.
What we ought to do, said Vallandingham, is sit down and talk with the Confederates.
We ought to have a national convention at which we reasonably settle this issue, that Union can be preserved and slavery can be preserved too.
Why can't we have both?
This was the Democrat position in 1863.
These were the Peace Democrats who wanted to sit down with the enemy, who thought talking could solve the problem.
In other words, they didn't call it the Confederacy study group as the Iraq study group, but they might as well have.
Settle the war like reasonable men.
By the way, Lincoln had a different way of approaching the preservation of our country at that time.
He rounded up and put in jail 13,000 Peace Democrats.
Can you imagine that happening today?
The Peace Democrats were rounded up and put in prison by Abraham Lincoln.
Vallandingham himself was arrested, and he was banished to the Confederacy.
He then refused to go, went to Canada.
Doesn't all this sound sort of familiar?
Went to Canada and ran for governor of Ohio from Canada, almost won, by the way.
He lost only because, in the meantime, the Union started to win.
There is no substitute for victory.
The Union started to win.
Lincoln, by the way, convened military courts and tried the 13,000 and more dissidents as enemies of the Union.
Lincoln said that these Peace Democrats constituted the fire in the rear.
In other words, the back of the front lines.
What he had to contend with was an enemy among his own Congress.
Does all of this sound familiar?
The Copperheads, by the way, started meeting with the Confederates.
They rallied against the draft all over the North, urged Union Army men to desert.
Does all this sound familiar?
The Peace Democrats are a genetic strain in the Democratic Party.
They have not been just against the United States in Vietnam and now.
They have been against the United States since at least the Civil War.
This is not new about the Peace Democrats.
They opposed and tried to throw Woodrow Wilson out of office.
They got Harry Truman in the Korean War down to 22% in the Gallup poll approval rating and quashed his viability as a candidate in 1952.
They weren't unhappy about going after Democratic presidents.
LBJ is another one in the 60s who was replaced and did not run again because of the Peace Democrats.
So it is not new.
It is not new even in Reagan's time.
In 1983, then California United States Senator John Tunney went to Moscow.
This talk to the enemy, blame America first, undermine the morale of the troops, peace at any price, better read than dead.
Yes, the Peace Democrats have been around a long time.
In 1983, Tunney goes to Moscow representing Ted Kennedy.
How do we know about this?
We know about it because of a letter from the head of the KGB, and I want to tell you what they said about what Ted Kennedy was trying to do with the Soviets in 1983.
I'm Roger Hedgecock in for Rush with more after this.
Welcome back to the Russian Limbaugh Program.
Roger Hedgecock filling in for Rush.
Your calls at 1-800-282-2882.
And again, here's this letter from Viktor Chebrikov, the KGB chief in the old Soviet Union in the early 80s, 1983, the KGB being the intelligence arm of the old Soviet Union, to Yuri Andropov.
Yuri was the former KGB chief who became the head of the Soviet Union.
And in this letter, in other words, a private briefing, he writes to Andropov that Tunney had gone to Moscow for Ted Kennedy and had met with Chebrikov and wanted a personal interview between Kennedy.
Kennedy wanted to talk directly to Andropov, as the letter puts it, because, quote, in the interest of world peace, it would be useful and timely to take a few extra steps to counteract the militaristic policies of Ronald Reagan, unquote.
Ted Kennedy wanted to meet with the head of the Soviet Union to counteract the policies of the President of the United States, Ronald Reagan.
The Peace Democrats have always been the same people from the Civil War to today.
They will do anything to defeat the United States.
Just an incredible.
By the way, Kennedy wanted Andropov to give an interview to US TV and directly address the American people.
He felt that would go over Reagan's head and give the peaceful Soviet initiatives a chance with the American public.
He knew what he was talking about, didn't he, Ted Kennedy, in this?
Because you can always, as a Peace Democrat, rely on the drive-by media on American TV.
You can always, let me get specific, rely on Diane Sawyer.
Diane Sawyer has been kissing the posterior of one tyrant after another in her entire career.
This is the toughest.
By the way, here's the, just to give you the gist of this, this is the toughest question she may have ever asked anybody as an interview subject.
Quote, you've been compared to Saddam Hussein Nero to Torque Mada, who was the head of the Inquisition.
Oh, that wasn't a question to a tyrant.
That was actually a question to Kenneth Starr, the independent counsel investigating Bill Clinton's lying under oath.
Her questions for the tyrants are a little different.
Just so you know, ABC News, famous in the 90s for some of the things they did, they had an instant poll on their website once asking, quote, if there was an ignoble prize, who should win it?
An ignoble prize, Nobel Prize, who should win it?
The choices were Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milosevic, Osama bin Laden, and Linda Tripp.
I mean, that was ABC News, okay?
So anyway, this is Brent Bozell's column, and it's really great.
Sawyer goes to North Korea, interviews a general in the world's harshest communist tyranny, and allows the general to say that President Bush was to blame for any nuclear weapons testing in North Korea, that all North Korea wants is peace, that North Korean schoolchildren were, quote, a world away from the unruly individualism of American schools, and they were, quote, the happiest children in the world.
This is Diane Sawyer in North Korea now.
She has done it again, ladies and gentlemen.
Oh, the other one I loved was last week with Bashar Assad, the Syrian president.
But this one was even better.
She is releasing, is it this morning, Diane Sawyer's interview with Iran's president, My Mood, I'm in a Jihad.
Now, that's the way I pronounce it.
You may have your own pronunciation.
Here is Sawyer with My Mood.
Are you sending Iranian weapons into Iraq?
In the name of God, the compassionate, the merciful.
Let me first say good morning to our viewers all over the states and its good people.
And let me tell them that we have spring weather here in Tehran.
And I hope that it will be spring all over the world.
That's the president of Iran, caught today, by the way, with serial numbers and all the rest of it.
I mean, I don't know how the peace dems are going to get around the evidence presented today of highly effective weapons of war in the hands of insurgents in Iraq manufactured in Iran.
Shown to reporters who then say, these were alleged to have been, these might have been, gosh, this was purported to be.
The Bush administration represents that these were, you know, all that kind of stuff because they cannot face actual evidence.
Because after all, Bush is the guy who lied about WMD, isn't he?
You know, so that's where we're going.
Anyway, Sawyer, Diane Sawyer, oh, please.
No wonder Kennedy wanted drop-off to go through the drive-by media.
I mean, let's just give My Mood, I'm in a Jihad, all the rein we want to.
Here's the next question: Will you prosecute anyone trying to bring Iranian weapons into Iraq?
The U.S. administration and Bush are used to accusing others.
The fact that you are showing us some pieces of papers and you call them documents, they do not solve any problem.
There should be a court to prove the case and to verify the case.
The position of our government is, as I told you, and the position of the Revolutionary Guards is also the same.
We are opposed to any kind of conflict in Iraq.
Yes, of course.
Any kind of conflict in Iraq.
It's time for America to go home.
Spring all over the world.
You know what he's saying there, of course.
The triumph of Islam all over the world.
The coming of the 12th Imam.
My Mood, I'm in a Jihad, is a crazy, apocalyptic, end-of-the-world kind of leader with nuclear weapons coming on board.
Peace Democrats talking to these people only reveals just what the threat is.
Thank you, Diane Sawyer, for that service.
All right, we're back.
And Diane Sawyer, ABC's Diane Sawyer, of course, again, doing what the Peace Democrat, the drive-by media wing of the Peace Democratic Party always does, and that is to play up to America's enemies and to work for the defeat of American troops.
By the way, I've just saw again another part of this headline news, CNN reacting to the press conference held in Iraq.
I guess it must have been by this time yesterday.
The press conference in Iraq, which put out examples of weaponry provided to Shiite militias by the Iranians and used to kill American troops.
No doubt where they came from.
All the numbers, I mean, the documentation is complete on a variety of these weapons.
So CNN puts up an expert saying this is a provocation by the Bush administration to try to pressure the Iranians and to make some kind of provocative act so they can bomb them.
Who did the provocative act in the first place again?
Let me see if I can trace this thing.
Wasn't it the providing of weapons that killed Americans that was the provocative act?
I think so.
By the way, here is my mood.
I'm in a jihad, the president of Iran, and his answer to one of Diane Sawyer's questions about the war in Iraq.
The root of the insecurity must be found.
And if the Iraqi government asks for our assistance, we will provide intellectual support, and we're also ready to provide Americans with intellectual support so that they can pull out.
So they can pull out.
In other words, we will provide everything we can, from weapons to intellectual support, for you to get out of here so that we can take over Iraq and the oil fields.
Which one of these parties is in this for oil again?
1-800-282-2882, Roger Hedgecock in for Rush.
By the way, little California news, I know you don't get enough of this.
The California News, again, he has now apologized more times than Trent Lott apologized.
That is San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, who opened his reelection headquarters Sunday in San Francisco with another apology for an affair he had with the wife of a veteran aide.
So that you know, in San Francisco, the problem is not having the affair.
The problem that requires abverse, just abject apology and perhaps rehab and perhaps counseling is the fact that he had a heterosexual affair.
I mean, posters of Gavin Newsom have been taken down in all the bathhouses in San Francisco.
I'm telling you, this is a shudder of revulsion has gone through this town at the absolutely appalling idea that the ever-popular, ever pro-gay, ever gay, handsome mayor of that city would actually be a straight man.
Now, I've always said, just because you can judge people, I think, a little bit when you meet them, that Mayor Gavin Newsom, a very intelligent guy, I think a passably good mayor of San Francisco, was a straight man captured in a gay man's body.
And so now he has to come out and be open about the fact that he is a straight man.
This is causing, I'm telling you, the political ramifications have just begun in San Francisco.
Let's get to the calls.
Roger Hedgecock in for Rush Limbaugh, Chip in Williamsburg, Virginia.
Next.
Chip, hi, welcome.
Hi, Roger.
Thanks for taking my call.
Yes, sir.
I wanted to bring up, you had mentioned the fact about President Lincoln carrying a Confederate $5 bill in his pocket as a reminder of what was going on at the time.
Since 9-11, shortly thereafter, President Bush has been carrying the Port Authority police badge of a Port Authority officer who gave his life in the Twin Towers.
And he's carried it with him ever since, as a reminder of the price that was paid that day.
Yes, there are comparisons all down the line, and that's a point I was trying to make earlier, and it's a good one.
Thanks, Chip.
I appreciate that adding to it.
The Dixie Chicks, by the way, honored last night five Grammys stirred up a hornet's nest with their jibe at President Bush in Britain.
They won all five Grammys for which they were nominated on Sunday in a blue state slapback at Country Music's intolerance of their anti-Americanism.
And it's interesting that country music stations aren't much playing the Dixie Chicks, but the other stations in Blue State America certainly are, and they have found a whole new audience.
They're in good company.
Last night, Jimmy Carter became the second former U.S. president to win a Grammy as well, honored for his audiobook version of his best-selling book, Our Endangered Values, America's Moral Crisis.
Really?
He did?
Is this news to people back in New York?
1-800-282-2882.
Here's Jim in Irvine, California.
Hi, Jim.
Hi, Roger.
I just wanted to thank you for that $5 bill story, by the way.
You really managed to take someone that only appears in history books as a two-dimensional figure and turn them into a three-dimensional human being.
And I think that especially on a day like today, we really need to focus on that.
And there are so many parallels to draw between President Bush and Lincoln.
But one of the things I'm disappointed in President Bush is that at the State of the Union, he really had an opportunity to take the Gettysburg Address and really focus on how Lincoln took this very,
very unpopular war and in this horrible, horrible graveyard, transcend the entire battle and put it on the level that made it about the founding of a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
And that's what I think President Bush really needs to do is make this speech, any speech, that really transcends the cost of this war to something more fundamental.
It's the fundamental reason our country exists.
And that is that same proposition that works in Iran as it would work, or rather in Iraq, as it would work here in America.
And it's a cost of freedom.
And I really think that, especially today, if each of us just looked and read the Gettysburg Address and saw the parallels there and how it really transcends just this one, this battle, the cost that we see, it's worth it.
And, you know, General MacArthur once said about the remedy for war.
And it is victory.
And it is complete victory.
And that's what we really need.
And Jim, I think that's the, and Jim, that's the problem with, it seems to me, with where we are now is that we are pre-Gettysburg.
In other words, we don't have the victory we need.
We've had it in the Philippines is rapidly becoming a victory.
The Abu Saeef Islamic extremists there are losing.
Obviously, Somalia was a huge victory that Bush should have trumpeted more, sending in the Ethiopian army there to clean up al-Qaeda in Somalia.
And they did it in four weeks, and they withdrew in six weeks.
And I've jokingly said that we probably should consider hiring the Ethiopians to take over in Iraq, and maybe we could do this a little faster.
But that's the frustration, isn't it, about the unhappiness of this war, is it's taken a long time for a trillion, a multi-trillion dollar defense establishment to win against some couple of thousand insurgents, however well-armed they might be.
It is a frustrating thing, Jim.
All right.
Thanks for the call.
Let's go to Howard in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Howard, welcome to The Rush Show.
Hi.
Well, it sounds like you're comparing Bush to Lincoln, but some people thought Lincoln was a tyrant.
Well, some of the Confederates did, of course, because he beat them.
Well, yeah, but I have a book called The Real Lincoln, and it says in there that between 1800 and 1860, dozens of countries, including Great Britain, ended slavery peacefully.
So why couldn't we do that?
Because the South wouldn't do it.
Right?
I mean, the South wouldn't do it.
They would rather leave the Union than leave slavery.
Well, where does it say in the Constitution that you can't leave the Union?
Well, see, Howard, we can go over and refight the Civil War.
Let me just, can I just skip through it and get to the end where we won?
And I appreciate the call.
1-800-282-2882.
John in Vero Beach, Florida, next on the Rush Show.
Hi.
Hey, John, you're on the show.
Go ahead.
Hi.
Yes.
I have a question for Mr. Senator Obama, who has come out and stated that he has a comprehensive plan that would get our troops out of Iraq in March of 2008, just a year from now.
And that is simply this.
I would love to know who in the military he has consulted with in formulating his plan.
I would like to know since the- Well, you already know the answer to that, John.
He hasn't consulted anybody in the military.
He's consulted My Mood, I'm in a Jihad.
You just heard this president of Iran saying that what he would do is offer any help he could to the Americans to get out of Iraq.
So Obama is a guy who is saying, consistent with what the president of Iran is saying, we're going to get out of Iraq.
And there is a position taken by many Americans, most of whom are way on the wacko left, even thinking that Obama is not strong enough.
They run out a big banner at his rally which said, you know, stop the war now, defund the troops now.
It's not March of 08.
It's right now.
So there is a portion of the left that wants this defeat to come sooner rather than later, and Obama's a moderate to these people.
We'll come back with more, by the way, on the presidential, where the presidential candidates stand on all of this.
I'm Roger Hedgecock, in for the ailing Rush Limbaugh.
He'll be back tomorrow.
We're going to take a break and be back with this show and your call after this.
It's the Rush Limbaugh program here at the EIB network.
I'm Roger Hedgecock, filling in for Rush.
He's got a little bit of a bug today.
Back tomorrow, I'm told.
And in the meantime, of course, you know what we have to do.
The relentless pursuit of truth continues on this program.
By the way, for those of you in upstate New York and other places, the snow, of course, just doesn't stop.
Of course, this is winter, and snow tends to come to this area of the country in the wintertime.
This, however, has, the good news, of course, is as you're digging out from the, what, 12-foot, whatever I'm reading here in Oswego, Oswego, I'm thinking that the polar bear habitat has expanded just in time to save the polar bear from Point Barrow to Oswego, from Helsinki to Iceland.
About a quarter of the earth is now covered with ice in the northern hemisphere, giving ample free range to the 25,000 polar bears, the highest population of polar bears, by the way, ever recorded.
You know, every once in a while, the environmentalists step over a line.
They figure that we'll believe anything in their relentless pursuit of socialism.
And so they put out this, the polar bears are endangered.
And Rush just mocked him and ridiculed him absolutely correctly on that picture that was taken of the ice sculpture of the ice that had been sculpted by the wave and water action, and the bears were sitting on there.
The bears, of course, loved that place.
They loved going around.
They swim 100 miles.
They go between land and ice and water.
This is their habitat.
There are more bears than there were 50 years ago.
50 years ago, the census was 10,000.
There's 25,000 polar bears today.
And based on the snowpack today, I think that the habitat has expanded quite a bit for the dear old polar bears.
And I'm just delighted.
Hank in Utah, next on the Rush program.
Hi, Hank.
How are you doing, Roger?
Good.
I just wanted to comment on a fellow that called about the Gettysburg Address being a great speech at the time.
Well, at the time, it was panned in all the newspapers.
People were disappointed, thought it was one of Lincoln's worst speeches.
It didn't really become famous until after Lincoln's death.
Well, it became famous to many people at the time because what you're referring to, again, the Peace Democrats had their own drive-by media.
The paper in Chicago, and I don't think it was the Tribune, it was another one, and some papers in Pennsylvania and New York.
There were peace.
In fact, the Peace Democrats won the elections in 1864 in New Jersey and places like that.
There was a lot of panning and a lot of name-calling.
I mean, you know, Lincoln was the great baboon and all this kind of stuff.
There was a lot of this making Lincoln the object of everyone's unhappiness with the war and the casualties.
You can imagine 623,000 people dead on both sides, the casualties that were occurring.
This is a I guess this is what I'm saying is, yeah, there were a lot of people panning that speech because they were against Lincoln, they were against the war, and they were against victory in the Civil War.
Well, thank God that Abraham Lincoln, whose birthday we celebrate today, had the backbone to ignore all the critics, the politics, and everything else, and do what was necessary to be done to win.
And I think that's the point I'm trying to make today, Hank.
Thanks.
Here's Greg in West Point, New York.
Greg, welcome to the Rush Show.
Hey, nice talking to you.
You know, you're talking about Diane Sawyer, but here in New York, upstate New York, we have commercials being run on TV about the sitco giving oil to the people that are freezing in New York, free from Cesar Chavez.
And this is Kennedy, one of the Kennedy clan, Robert Kennedy, who was an environmentalist and just helping to push an agenda that, hey, if we deal with these people, they're going to be nice to us.
That's exactly right.
And it's exactly predictable what the outcome of this.
Anyone who believes that Hugo Chavez has the best interest of the United States at heart has not been paying attention.
This guy wants political leverage against the United States.
He wants to keep us dependent on his oil.
What he's really doing, of course, I have every confidence that his crackpot socialism is going to lead to the same kinds of shortages and discontent among Venezuelan people as any other socialism does.
In fact, the U.S. Embassy in Caracas is getting 800 to 1,000 requests a day for middle-class folks to get visas and get out of there and come to the United States, where, of course, they're going to be more than welcome to make our country wealthier as Venezuela sinks into the workers' paradise of poverty.
There was a picture even in the L.A. Times of a supermarket in Caracas where the shelves were basically bare.
And what was Chavez's reaction to the farmers saying, no, you can't set the prices.
We want a marketplace here.
We're not going to produce food and have you tell us what we're going to get, which is less than what we've got in the product.
And Chavez's reaction was, well, what we need here are more price controls rather than fewer price controls.
What they're going to have is less food.
Well, they have the price.
In other words, the good news will be food is affordable.
The bad news will be it isn't there.
And socialism doesn't work no matter who practices it and no matter what language they practice it in.
So they can go ahead and try this thing with the oil.
But I have every confidence that Hugo Chavez is a guy who's going to sink in the quicksand of his own ideology.
Roger Hedgecock in for Rush Limbaugh.
We'll be back at 1-800-282-2882 after this.
Speaking of all that winter snow, Roger Hitchcock here in for Rush Limbaugh.
Just with a little bug, he'll be back tomorrow.
Speaking of all that snow and all that winter weather here in winter, last September here in California, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicted an El Niño.
El Niño means lots of rain and coastal erosion and flooding, and it's just going to be one hellacious $100 million damage kind of year for California.
That was in September.
Today, we have one of the driest years on record, no El Niño whatsoever.
We got the first rain in Northern California that amounted to anything on the day I went up there on Saturday.
These are the same folks that are telling us they can tell us how many degrees the planet is going to warm over the next 100 years.
They can't get tomorrow right.
Okay?
And it's not that they're bad people, don't get me wrong.
It's just that the science of this, the science of this, is every day in your own experience a very iffy thing.
If you believe that every day when you read the weather report, it is 100% true, then I can't get to you.
But if you have the understanding of the common everyday person here in America that, you know, it's an approximation, sometimes they're right, then sometimes they're wrong, and, you know, they're working on this stuff, then please, you know, project that real-world experience against everything you read about global warming where they're trying to tell you what's going to happen and why you have to get out of your car and give up more of your paycheck to the government because of what's going to happen 100 years from now.
I don't buy it.
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