All Episodes
Previous Next
April 9, 2007 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:20
April 9, 2007, Monday, Hour #1
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
Yes, and happy Easter, everyone, and welcome back to the Rush Limbaugh program here on the Excellence in Broadcasting Network.
We have three full hours of broadcast excellence for you this day.
This is going to be another abbreviated week.
Monday through Thursday, I will be here Friday.
Do we know who the guest host is on Friday, HR?
Tom Sullivan.
Oh, goodie.
My buddy from Sacramento, Tom Sullivan, will be here Friday.
Heads up the Sullivan Group.
Audits my opinions and has done so since 1985.
Latest Sullivan Group report, by the way, shows me to be documented almost always right, 98.6% of the time.
Here's the phone number if you'd like to be on the program, 800-282-2882, and the email address, rush at EIBnet.com.
I know I don't sound it because I'm a professional.
I'm a highly trained broadcast professional, but I am really in a foul mood today.
I am just, I was gotta hear.
I was fine when I got here.
A couple things happened, and I am as irritable as I can be, but I promise I will not take it out on any of you.
And had I not said this, you would never have known it today anyway, but I just wanted to pass it on.
You never know when something's going to happen to set me back to that point.
I will do my best to avoid it.
I'm normally just a nice guy, lurks in the background, doesn't bother people.
But at any rate, it is what it is.
We got the peace mug today, folks.
I finally got the sample peace mug that commemorates my nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Here it is.
Let me zoom in for those of you watching on the Ditto Cam.
And by the way, welcome to all of you watching on the Ditto Cam at rushlimbaugh.com.
There it is.
There's one side of it.
And on the other side, that's the peace medal, by the way.
That is the Nobel Peace Prize medal, presuming that I have already won.
It says, give peace a chance above the peace medal with my glorious picture.
And here is the EIB logo on the other side.
You can see what it says there is peace through Limbaugh.
Now, the only thing wrong here that I want to change, and it's not really wrong, is that I want to reverse sides so that when for right-handers, most people are right-handers, left-handed people, obviously the result of poor potty training in the formative years.
There aren't that many of them.
But when you put the mug down like this, if you're right-handed, people will not see the commemorative coins.
So will not see this side.
So I just want to reverse the two sides, and it will be ready to go into production.
This, of course, is a new premium for subscribers of Rush 24-7 and the Limbaugh letter.
All right, now, for those of you, remember, we had Vice President Cheney on the program last Thursday.
Oh, and I got a tremendous amount of very positive email over the discussion we had with Jenny Ballantyne.
And I want to thank James Taranto, who writes the best of the web column for the Wall Street Journal's website.
He did two days on Jenny Ballantyne.
And the first day, after only having heard the soundbite of her question to John Edwards that we played at that town hall meeting last week, he wrote a piece, and he reacted much the same way that a lot of people did to her, thought she was a little self-absorbed and thought that her struggles were mountains when they are common for people her age.
And he sent me a note on Thursday night saying, look, I want a link to your interview with her today, and I want a link to the question, but you've got them, subscriber only on your website.
Can you convert these to guest links?
And I said, sure, we'd be happy to do this for you, James.
I'm glad that he noted it.
And on Friday, a big long lead piece, bestoftheweb.com, on the whole Jenny Ballantyne situation and got it, you know, pretty after the interview.
He understood, as we all did, the circumstances in which she found herself.
It was really good.
I had a great time doing that.
And it just, you know, illustrates there's a gold mine out there to be tapped amongst, you know, college students.
And you heard her say in the interview, she's all confused because of her professors.
Her professors are out there telling her about all this injustice and discrimination that goes on in the country today.
And she wasn't really ready to accept it.
But the one thing that she said that I was really attuned to, she hoped that her professor wasn't listening, which means that, you know, means what it means.
Didn't want to get grade consequences, suffer grade consequences if a teacher heard her criticizing the class and so forth.
So then that piece is still up at rushlimbaugh.com.
It was a lot of fun.
And we may do more of this when circumstances warrant.
Also, the Dick Cheney interview on Thursday.
I remember talking to several of you people after the program.
And while you were enthusiastic and excited about some of the things he said, many of you, and you know who you are, you called here.
Where was the emotion?
Where was the rage?
Why wasn't Cheney impassioned about this?
And I asked him, of course, does not this Pelosi stuff enrage you?
And he's very calm and cool and collected.
He's Dick Cheney.
And I told you people, I said, there are plenty in this interview that if the drive-bys want to focus on it, they can make Mount Matterhorn out of it or Matterhorn Mountain.
And they did all weekend long, the Cheney interview, and particularly one thing when he accused Nancy Pelosi of bad behavior.
That just set them off.
It just totally set them off.
I thought one of the things that they would react to in enraged anger would be when I compared the Democrats on that Senate committee that turned down the ambassadorial nomination of Sam Fox to Belgium, Kerry and Obama demanding that he apologize for donating money to the Swift boats, demanding, I called that Stalinist, refusing to vote for him to be ambassador to Belgium simply because of political donation.
And I call him Stalinist.
I said, Vice President Cheney, this is my word.
You don't have to accept it.
But to me, this is Stalinist-like behavior.
He said, you're dead on Rush.
I thought, oh, my gosh, that's what they're going to focus on.
Some did on the blogs, but not in the drive-by media per se.
We have a soundbite or two.
First off, this is a sort of like a montage here Thursday and Friday of people mentioning Cheney on this program.
We've got David Gregory, Caroline Shively of Fox News, and Steve Docey.
We got Brian Lamb.
We got Kieran Chen.
We got Tim Russard.
We got Dana Milbank.
We got John Robbie.
They're all talking about Cheney's appearance on this program last Thursday.
They've deployed the vice president to use pretty strong words as he did with Rush Limbaugh this week.
Mr. Cheney spoke out about it on Rush Limbaugh's radio show, saying the meeting rewards Assad for bad behavior.
The vice president on the Rush Limbaugh show chastised her.
You had Cheney bragging about it with Rush Limbaugh today.
Democrats are incensed.
Vice President Cheney, appearing on Rush Limbaugh's radio program, repeated his allegations.
Vice President Dick Cheney called her on that on Rush Limbaugh's radio show.
Vice President Cheney went on the Rush Limbaugh radio show.
It's being directed, obviously, when it's made on Rush Limbaugh's show, Towards the Base.
Al-Qaeda had a significant presence in Iraq before the invasion.
You heard what he told Rush Limbaugh.
Oh, yeah, that really set him off, too, because he does not.
Of course, and he cited the evidence, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who was in Iraq before we went in there.
And It just set him off, as I knew it would.
And by the way, when you read, if you go read the Cheney transcript and you didn't hear it, just read it.
As Mr. Snerdley pointed out this morning, it does sound harsh.
All of you who thought it was sort of milquetoast because Cheney doesn't speak with a whole lot of pep or energy, never fear.
He got the message out and they heard it.
And the fact they spent so much time on this clearly illustrates they were bothered by it.
The only reason they'd be bothered by it is because he had a home run.
You know, if he's off the reservation and making wacko comments, they'd sit there and be laughing at it.
But, you know, he's challenging one of their templates, and that is the whole war was based on a lie that was unnecessary, and we don't need to be where we are at all.
There is no war on terror.
The war in Iraq is absolutely, in fact, they're still repeating on the blogs that it was a disguised purpose for the war was to secure oil for Bush's oil buddy.
And Halliburton is still saying this.
And we now know the contracts for the first contract signed for Iraqi oil go to everybody but us.
Actually, it's kind of frustrating.
The Chinese are getting dibs on some of the oil, a couple of other countries as well, but not the United States.
And some people think we ought to get some of that oil revenue as a way of repaying ourselves for the costs that we have incurred.
They were also upset with Cheney having said that the vote was a test of supporting the troops for Democrats, meaning this supplemental.
That's the first thing that he spoke about on the program last Thursday.
So anyway, he hit the bullseye and it had him infuriated.
And if Chuck Todd of the hotline, is he still with a hotline?
Hey, he's with a hotline.
Whatever.
Chuck Todd was on Meet the Press yesterday, and this is ironic.
I mean, this is funny.
He's describing how the conservative machine, the conservative media machine, piled on poor Nancy Pelosi's trip.
This was the Republicans found an opening.
Remember the plane incident with Pelosi?
Now, this is the second time that they've been able to get the sort of conservative media machine going, Rush Limbaugh, Drudge, all in sync, which really only for the first time, it seems like, in three months.
And they hit her hard.
She's going to weather this storm.
I think they need to, when they do these things, think what's the worst case scenario and think about the optics of this.
They should have had those three Republican members of Congress that went sooner.
They should have had them with her on this trip.
She should have had more than just one Republican and possibly had a high-profile person from the Iraq study group, since that's what she has used as a defense going to Syria.
She could have done this in a much more, much more carefully orchestrated way.
Now, listen to this.
Listen, this guy is reaming us for being unified in the conservative media as though that never happens on the left.
The drive-by media, as we know, willing accomplices, bedfellows, if you will, with those in the Democrat Party, gives us grief for being coordinated for the first time in three months.
There was no coordination here.
We had the vice president on the program.
If there was any coordination, it's in the drive-bys opposing Cheney.
If there's any coordination, every one of the drive-bys had the same objection, saying the same words as they always do.
But then here's Chuck Todd.
You want to talk about coordination?
Advising Pelosi on how she screwed up, what she should have done, and how to do something like this better the next time.
Brief timeout, folks.
We'll be back.
We'll continue with much more on the EIB network right after this.
And we're back, Rush Limbaugh, America's real anchor man, coordinating with no one here, by the way.
How can I possibly coordinate with anybody?
I am the leader.
I am the Mr. Big.
If there's any coordination out there on the right, it's people following my lead, ladies and gentlemen.
Sorry, Chuck Todd, to have to correct you.
But remember, again, there's old buddy Chuck Todd after complaining and noting this so-called conservative machine and its unity.
There he is offering media advice to Nancy Pelosi, how to use Republicans the next time she does something like this so as to deflect heat from herself.
A couple of C, I told you so's before we get on with all the rest of today's program from the American Spectator today.
It's www.spectator.org.
It's a piece here by Jennifer Rubin.
You know, I've mentioned over the course of the many recent broadcast weeks that we seem now to live not only in a very wimpish and gutless culture, as evidenced by the way the Brits dealt with the Iranians.
By the way, I don't think that wasn't a big win for the Iranians.
The Iranians have announced National Nuke Day.
We may as well make this a national holiday, folks.
Now the U.S. may not be the only world superpower.
National Nuke Day, announced by Ahmadinezad, lives to be happy that an enemy of the U.S. is on the way to getting nuclear weapons.
But if you're the Iranians and you hostage take 15 sailors who start confessing within 24 hours and whining and moaning, what are you going to learn from it?
You're going to learn that nobody in the West is going to stop you from ramping up your nuke arsenal.
And you also learned that you can play Western media like a Stradivarius.
But we do.
We live in a culture where saying you're sorry is supposed to cover for everything.
In fact, you're supposed to say more than, I'm sorry.
After you do something or say something that people find horrible, and I still find it amazing that people should be fired for words as opposed to deeds.
I mean, if we're going to fire people on the radio for things they say, how about firing people like Al Sharpton for things that he does?
I mean, how about, well, let's take away Sharpton's ministry from it.
To want to brawle anybody?
I mean, how many lives did that actually harm?
You know, words.
Anyway, I have all this sensitivity to words out there.
We have all this, and people go out there and they apologize.
And in addition to apologizing, well, you know, this really wasn't me.
That's not who I am.
Yes, it is.
It's who you are.
If you said it, that's who you are.
Stand behind it.
Don't wimp out.
Start apologizing.
Especially if you have a track record of that kind of stuff.
Anyway, I have made note of this cultural phenomenon in which we live, that we all have to run around and apologize.
And I remember repeating this after talked to Charlton Heston.
The first time I interviewed Charlton Heston for the Limbaugh Letter, I noted in the interview that at the time he'd been married 50 years.
I said, how'd you pull that off?
He said, well, it's really quite simple.
I had to learn four words, and I had to use them often.
Or actually three words.
Honey, I was wrong.
Just get it out of the way.
No matter whether you're wrong or not, just say you were.
Honey, I was wrong, and it fixes everything, and it stops everything that in its tracks.
Lo and behold, here's a piece in the American Spectator Today by Jennifer Rubin about all these people saying things and how they deal with it properly and how those who deal with it incorrectly do so.
She's got the pull quote in here.
Maya culpas won't immunize a candidate or eliminate a story, but they can minimize the pain and maybe engender some sympathy.
If politicians learned what husbands have known for years, you might as well apologize right away, get it over with.
They would fare better.
Besides, heartfelt apologies play very well on YouTube.
See, I have told you everything.
We just apologized.
In fact, apologize before you say something and apologize after you say whatever you want to say, and the country will love you, and they'll think you're sensitive.
And husbands have known this forever, as I pointed out after having learned it from Charlton Heston.
And then I don't know how many of you will remember this.
Snerdley, you will.
You remember Lori back from WABC days when we were there?
She's a broadcast engineer for a while, and she wanted to move on up.
And I, of course, wasn't married, and yet I needed the services, some of the services that a wife provides.
So I set Lori up.
I said, why don't you just start doing things to me?
And I called her my rent-a-wife.
Remember that?
And she'd run around, and she did the grocery shopping.
She did all this sort of stuff.
And predictably, the women in my audience had a fit.
They just thought it was the biggest put-down in the fit.
How could you do this?
I said, well, you know, she's willing to.
What?
Oh, yeah, it was demeaning.
It was insulting.
It was beyond the pale.
How could you do this, Rush?
And this came after the period where I had tried requiring a photo from every female caller before they would be allowed on the air.
And that worked.
I mean, women were sending in photos in droves, and they were coming in various kinds of photos from all over the country.
And of course, even my sister-in-law and a couple of friends blew up at me.
One night was in Bimmelman's, the bar at the Carlisle.
And, you know, Bimmelman's is a reserved and refined place, and they got some piano music in there, sometimes a singer.
And I was getting yelled at in there to the point that people, other patrons, were saying, what is going on over there?
Pointing at us in our corner of the room.
And my sister-in-law giving me grief over requiring pictures of women callers before they could.
And I must say, this is, look at, to tell you the truth, it wasn't mine.
It was Mario Snerdley's idea.
It was Mario Snerdley on the prowl.
I just thought it was funny.
I decided to do it.
But I have to take credit for it because I mean, the blame for it, because Mario Snerdley could have had the idea.
And if I didn't execute the idea, nobody would have known it.
So I can't pass it off on him.
But then came the rent-a-wife, and it just blew people away.
Well, looky here.
This is from Sky.com, Sky News and the BBC.
www.rentawife.b.
See how on the cutting edge I am?
Here we got two stories today.
One, the American spectator, hey, just you politicians and public figures get in trouble, learn what every husband has known.
Honey, I was wrong.
Say it often, say it loud, say it soon.
And now there's this, it turns out that it's a bogus website, but it claims to rent out wives and deliver them to homes in boxes.
It's been blasted by women's groups across Belgium.
They got a 35-second clip showing a man strapping one wife into a box to be collected and going to the door to find the postman with a new delivery, smiling blonde who waves through the perspex cover of her box.
So again, just now picking up on this in Britain, even though it's a bogus site, but the rent-a-wife concept and the honey, I was wrong over a decade ago on this program, just now hitting the real world.
Ever fear, folks, just waiting for the printer to spit out something, and I'm back.
Rush Limbaugh, the Excellence in Broadcasting Network.
Great to be with you.
Telephone number.
800-282-2882.
Just to make it firm, no guests scheduled today.
No guests scheduled tomorrow.
No guests scheduled.
No guests scheduled ever.
As far as we know now, no guests on this program.
They will show up everywhere else, but not here.
Why do something you can get everywhere else?
We have never done that and not going to start now.
Now, back to the Iranians calling today National Nuke Day.
Stanley Kurtz at National Review Online has an interesting observation about this.
And I want to pass this on because it sort of dovetails with where we are right now in dealing with genuine threats to our own national security.
His basic point, I don't want to read his whole piece here, but his basic point is, this is the exact reason we went into Iraq to find and stop the production of weapons of mass destruction.
Now, according to the quote-unquote powers that be, there weren't any in Iraq.
Of course, we know that there were.
I don't want to get into an argument about that.
We know there's somewhere.
But the point is, the country was all for it.
The country was all for a preemptive strike in Iraq, 90%, 80%, to stop weapons of mass destruction from being used in the immediate aftermath of 9-11.
Stanley Kurtz says, in the debate to come over Iran's nuclear capacity, there will be constant references to our intelligence failure in Iraq.
The dispute will be about exactly how close Iran is to a bomb.
But let nobody forget that Iran is already at a point that would easily have justified the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.
This fact by itself doesn't decide the issue of what to do about Iran.
An attack on Iran would be militarily tougher than the invasion of Iraq.
Occupation seems out of the question, but there are also questions about how far an attack would actually set back Iran's nuclear program.
Yet all of these difficulties and considerations notwithstanding, the fact is that we are under a threat of exactly the sort that everyone agreed would justify action in Iraq.
Now our hands are tied.
Now we're not going to do anything.
It doesn't appear we're going to do anything.
I know people who say that George W. Bush is not going to leave office with Iran in possession of nuclear weaponry.
We'll see.
But clearly, and I made mention of this some years ago, that the real basic problem, what the drive-bys and the left have done in destroying the Iraq war effort is they've also destroyed any other attempt that we might need to make anywhere else around the world to accomplish the same thing.
His point is exactly what's happening in Iran is exactly why we went into Iraq.
And now our hands are tied.
We will not do anything about...
Well, that's not his point.
It's mine.
I think it's an excellent point.
And when you realize that within the population of the country, there probably isn't any kind of agreement that we need to stop Iran from getting a nuke, yet there was in the immediate aftermath of 9-11 to stop Iraq from getting weapons of mass destruction.
And don't forget, there'd been 14 years of ignored UN resolutions and so forth.
The case was made, and the Iranians are doing the same thing.
So now what we're going to get is, well, our intelligence Bush assists in manufacturing.
Bush a warmonger Bush wants to go in there.
And we're pretty much paralyzed, which is exactly what the left wants, folks.
The left precisely wants us paralyzed.
They don't want us to be able to defend U.S. national security.
They do not want us involved in these things that might imperil us.
And you might have to say that they've succeeded in this in regard to the situation with Iran.
Plus, you add to it the PR plus that the Iranians got out of the British hostage situation and how bad the West looked in that, particularly the British.
It was just embarrassing.
Now these hostages are out selling their stories to the highest bidder, talking about how threatened they felt and they apologized and they confessed and so forth within hours of having been caught.
Of course, the message that this will send to terrorists and people like the Iranians is that at least the Brits have gone wobbly and have lingweeny spines, and they probably will think the same of us, particularly once George W. Bush is out of office.
Joseph in Akron, Ohio.
Let's start on the phones with you today.
Great to have you on the EIB Network.
Hi.
All right.
Thanks for having me, Rush.
Just add a couple quick points.
I listened to your interview with the young lady the other day, the young college student.
I have to say, it kind of inspired me.
I wouldn't say I'm a longtime listener.
I've been listening for about four or five years now, if you can consider that long time.
I'm a 24-year-old college student.
When I first started listening to you, I was just kind of coming out of high school.
I can't say I was the brightest person in the world, 2.3 GPA.
And a lot of what you've said as far as going above and beyond and being more than you could be, so to speak, it's kind of helped me drive myself through college.
I'm 24 working on my second master's now.
So, I mean, it's, you know, you've really helped me.
And also, I wanted to mention, you mentioned that the liberal media keeps saying, you know, you interviewed the president and whatnot, and that's, you know, going out to your base, so to speak.
And I don't think they realize that your base are people like me, a former liberal college student that's really going to drive the elections of tomorrow.
You know, it's an excellent point.
I don't know about the college-age demographics, but they do believe, well, the drive-bys believe that this audience is a one-note samba and that I'm sort of like a Pied Piper in the audience of mind robots, so whatever I tell them to do, they do whatever I tell them to think they think.
But Tom Daschell knows the truth about this.
After the 2002 elections, I will never forget this.
Tom Daschell at a press conference said that he'd gone out and found experts, I don't know who they were, to analyze the listening audience of this program.
And Daschell was trying to warn Democrats.
He was shocked.
He said, not only do conservatives listen to Limbaugh, but a lot of our people do too, and they are changing their minds.
But you're right.
Most everybody thinks that this audience is a select core group of like-minded and similarly thinking people when it's not.
And you are evidence of that.
And there's countless other audience research that we have to illustrate this too.
But I want to congratulate you.
You know, I appreciate your crediting me, but the bottom line was you did the work once you got inspired, once you were motivated.
I just wish those kinds of things are happening to people like you earlier in your life.
Yeah, well, I mean, if you look at it, like I look at a lot of my friends and things of that nature, and it seems that with the way the media is nowadays, you know, I grew up, I watched CNN, I watched programs with that with my father.
You know, I mean, he's 100% hardcore union guy, you know, grew up a liberal, and I pretty much, that was the only side of the coin I saw for 18 years.
You know, I mean, without the proper guidance from places like you or other, you know, media outlets as far as the talk radio goes, I don't think people like me until Fox News really came onto the scene, we weren't seeing the other side of the coin.
It was pretty much a doom and gloom atmosphere.
Well, it wasn't just that.
Not only were you not seeing it, you were told that the other side of the corn coin was whatever it was, a bunch of wackos, kooks, racists, sexists, bigots, homophobes, or what have you.
And, of course, then you couple that with something that we can't escape.
I mean, this is just, this is human nature more than anything else.
You're 24, and the time you're growing up, when you're in teen years, you're watching CNN with your dad, the big union guy, and you're getting a double dose of all that thinking.
And I'm sure what you heard was a constant chaos and doom and gloom about the future of the country and where we were.
And all, whoa, we've got so much discrimination, so much unfairness, so much poverty, so many poor people.
And you're thinking your country sucks because your historical perspective began the day you were born.
And the history education you got when you were growing up was so inept that you didn't hear about how really rotten it's been in this country when we were founded and what all was necessary to get us to this point, what kind of progress has been made.
And furthermore, you weren't told what the true reasons for the greatness of this country are in comparison to every other civilization of human being that has lived on this planet.
So you grew up with a totally perverted and distorted view of your own country, in addition to whatever you were learning on CNN and hanging around your parents.
And the fact that you have overcome that.
Well, part of that, I mean, if you look at our public education system, I mean, as far as American history and the way things were, the Constitution, we learned absolutely nothing.
I mean, we barely brushed the surface.
And in a home environment, I don't know if I'm the typical American, so to speak, but I mean, if a conservative got elected president, my mom would cry.
You know, I mean, that's how far, far-left liberal they were.
Well, I know.
And this is the frustrating thing.
We all know this.
You're in the middle of it and you don't.
But you learned it.
Yeah.
And we're in the process of ongoing education.
So that's what the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies is all about.
We here are thrilled we reached you.
Well, you know, I just want to thank you for paving the road to enlightenment, so to speak.
And, you know, it's like I said, it's hard to find resources out there to really combat the, I won't really call it ignorance, but misinformation that's out there.
No, it's not.
It's not anymore.
It used to be, but it's not anymore.
There's all kinds of resources.
What do you mean by resource?
Sometimes people mean money when they say resource.
Not so much resource.
I mean just enlightenment resources.
Like you say, your Limbaugh letter is a good place to look and read to really combat those liberal media bias.
There's all kinds of things out there.
You're just not directed to them, or else if they are referenced, they're always lampooned or made fun of.
But look, since this has happened to you, you now carry the weight on your shoulders of helping spread the movement.
And someday I can run for office maybe and carry the movement.
Even before, that'd be great, but even before you do that, you've got friends.
You've got people in your immediate circle.
You're going to be influencing people you have no idea.
Some of them are going to be mad.
Some of them will ignore you, but you're going to be influencing people.
It's up to you to hang tough because you're going to be under a lot of pressure from people once you go public with all this stuff, as you have.
And I'm sure you've discovered that already.
But hang in there because you've been set free here.
And this is not something to take lightly.
Do not go back to the bondage and shackles of liberalism.
Well, thank you for carrying the torch, Rush, and I'll let you go here.
Joseph, thanks much.
And nice to have you on the program.
Quick timeout.
We'll be back and continue right after this.
I have three words for you people.
Dubai Ports Deal.
Do you remember the conniption fit that erupted out there when the Dubai ports deal was announced?
What was going to happen?
Dubai, the United Arab Emirates, has a company called Dubai Ports World or something like that.
And they were going to run six, not ports, but six terminals at various ports in the United States.
And it was, it was amazing to watch.
The Democrats and the Republicans in Washington got into a race to see who could be first to pass legislation denying this.
And the Republicans succeeded in it.
And then Denji Harry went out there, tried to credit Chuck Schumer for it in a press conference.
But every of you people out there were just, I couldn't believe.
After 9-11, Dubai from the United Arab Emirates, the Middle East, going to run our ports.
Oh, my God, this is horrible.
Of course, I try to tell you that I'd done a series investigation of DPW, Dubai Ports World.
I've been to Dubai, and I've told you all the other ports they run around the world and all the other terminals they run.
And some of you changed your opinion on it, but most of you didn't and thought that I'd lost my mind.
Well, I have two more words for you now.
Dow Chemical.
If you thought the Dubai Ports World deal was bad, wait till you hear this.
A consortium of Middle Eastern investors and an American buyout firm, actually a couple of them, preparing a $50 billion approach for Dow Chemical in what could be the world's biggest ever leveraged buyout, quoting sources close to the deal.
The Sunday Express UK tabloid paper said a financing package has been put in place for a breakup bid of between $52 and $58 a share, and an approach valuing the company at at least $50 billion could come by the end of this week.
At least half of the capital for buying out Dow Chemical is being provided by investors from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, UAE, which includes Dubai, the United Arab Emirates, and Oman, with the rest contributed by a number of U.S. buyout firms, including Kohlberg, Kravis, and Roberts.
Representatives of Dow Chemical and KKR were not immediately available for comment.
So a consortium of Middle Eastern countries is to buy one of our largest chemical companies.
Sweet.
I mean, you're going to have Arabs owning Dow Chemical.
Just the word chemical, Dow Chemical.
You know what, you get a hold of a chemical company as big as Dow.
Who knows what you can make?
And you thought the Dubai Ports deal was bad.
I want to see.
I'm just going to sit back.
I'm not going to make any more mention of this.
I'm going to sit back and I'm going to wait.
And I'm going to see if all hell breaks loose over this, because this is infinitely, I mean, we all hear about chemical winds.
Weapons of mass destruction.
And here now the largest chemical company in the country is going to be purchased by Arabs in conjunction with an American company Kohlberg, Kravis, and Roberts.
Okay.
Anybody say mustard gas being made in North Caldwell, New Jersey by the Sopranos?
Speaking of the Sopranos, Mark in Orlando, welcome to the EIB Network, sir.
Hello.
Hello, Mega Diggos, Mr. Rush Limbaugh.
How are you?
Thank you.
I couldn't be better, sir.
Thank you.
I'm looking for your expert review on the Sopranos airing last night and really haven't heard you talk too much about it.
And if you had some advanced screenings like you did with 24, and what's your take on the season?
Well, I didn't get any advanced screenings of the Sopranos.
I don't know.
Some TV critics say, I don't think they send those out to too many people.
I'm not on the list, never have been.
I watched it last night.
In fact, before the master started yesterday, I went back to season six, the first episodes that ended last summer, and I watched the last two just to get myself ready to go.
You know, it was for what it was, the episode, self-contained as it was, you just look from the beginning to the end of the episode.
It was pretty good.
A lot of parallels to Lassie's.
Uncle Jr. shoots Tony last year, and everybody thought, whoa, what a start.
And then the season fizzled and died.
Last night, Bobby Bacala takes a shot at Tony.
Everybody goes, whoa, what a start.
Now, the history is the show will fizzle out.
We've got eight more episodes.
Here's my, look, just as a consumer, you know, I'm not a critic of an artiste.
Like, I've read, and this is true, by the way, but I don't look at it this way.
People say, you know, art asks questions.
It doesn't answer them.
And so you've got the New York elite establishment analyzing this thing in all kinds of artistic terms that escape me.
To me, there's one simple thing this show better do this year and advance toward the end of things.
And last night's didn't.
So they've got eight episodes to get toward the end of things.
I mean, unless you want to say the family's breaking up and Bobby Bacala challenging Tony, but that, you know, these episodes are self-contained.
Sometimes they don't ever refer to things that have happened in previous episodes.
So, well, I enjoyed it.
It was 45 minutes before I looked at a watch the first time, not criticizing the episode as a consumer.
This is the last season.
We got to get to the end of this.
And I don't think the first episode did, and there are only eight more to go.
So that's my take.
If you think this takeover of Dow Chemical by Arab dictatorships needs to be stopped, fine and dandy, but I have a big question for you, if you do.
And we'll get to that.
▲
Export Selection