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Dec. 28, 2007 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:18
December 28, 2007, Friday, Hour #2
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Do you have trouble understanding me when I'm on the air also?
During the uh break, I asked the staff to do something that I thought would be helpful here and neither of them knew what I was talking about.
I explained it for seven minutes and there was a lack of clarity.
I presume it was all on my end, because you guys generally know what it is that you're supposed to do, so I thought that maybe the problem was here.
I don't really know.
It is open line Friday on the Rush Limbaugh program.
That means the callers more or less choose the topics.
We spent a lot of time in the first hour of the program for obvious reasons discussing the situation in Pakistan and the reaction to it.
I want to tease something else up for a moment, and I teased it at the end of the first hour of the program.
We had a caller on the program yesterday who was assessing the Republican field, candidates for president, and they said something that's driving me crazy, which you're hearing from a lot of Republicans.
I'm looking for another Reagan.
You hear this over and over and over again.
The candidates themselves know it.
They all compare themselves to Reagan.
We're looking for Reagan like he's the holy grail.
We want Reagan.
What people forget is that late in President Reagan's second term, there was as much conservative angst over him as there is currently over Bush.
President Reagan's second term, he raised taxes with the 1986 Tax Reform Act, which raised taxes.
The Iran Contra situation occurred.
His explanations for it weren't good.
There was a sense that he was adrift and lost interest in policy in his last couple of years, and he appeared to be a lame duck president.
Very, very similar to the situation with President Bush.
I'm not bringing this up to a criticize President Reagan.
Ronald Reagan is the greatest president of my lifetime and is one of the greatest presidents of all time.
He changed the world.
He was a true visionary who accomplished things.
He not only could communicate, he got things done, and he was willing to pursue things that everybody else told him couldn't be done.
He was a great president.
I'm just pointing out that he wasn't perfect.
No one's perfect.
We're going to look back at President Bush twenty years from now, the same way.
I'm just tired of seeing so many people on my side orphan President Bush off and not defend him.
We all know that the left has been obsessed with him from the day he was elected.
They've rationalized the 2000 election into somehow being a stolen election.
They somehow think they won, even though all nine million different vote counts in Florida showed that Bush won narrowly.
So they assumed that Bush is an illegitimate president.
He shouldn't really have won.
The presidency should have been theirs.
They should have been able to continue the Clinton era with Al Gore in 2000, and they've had a thing for him ever since.
Anything President Bush has done, they've tried to turn against him.
They haven't wanted to credit him for anything that was good, and anything that's bad, they wanted to blame him for.
They have opposed if President Bush would say that one plus one equals two, they would have argued that it was three.
They've been obsessed with tearing him down from the very beginning.
And by and large, they've succeeded.
While President Bush won re-election, no one can deny that his popularity ratings are terrible.
And the notion that this is a failed presidency is almost a given right now.
Well, I disagree with that.
And one of the reasons that the president's poll ratings are as low as they are, is that a lot of people on my side have stopped defending him.
Because nobody likes to back a quote loser, and he's got the image right now of being a loser.
If you asked me to grade Bush, and I'm not one of these people who believes in progressive grading, where every child is special and everybody gets an A, my grade for President Bush, based on now seven of eight years in office, is a B plus.
I think he's done a very good job.
There are things in which I disagree with President Bush.
That's why the grade is B plus and not A. But if you take a look at the large picture, which is how I think every presidency has to be judged, what I see are mostly accomplishments.
If you are a conservative, I don't buy the argument that Bush hasn't delivered the goods.
It's true there have been failings.
He spends like a Democrat.
He didn't have any real commitment to reduce the size of the federal government.
There are some that he signed campaign finance reform.
There are issues that conservatives care about that he didn't really show much interest in.
I grant you all of that.
However, he came in and he cut taxes, and he cut them significantly, and he did it against initial Democratic opposition, but he was able to win the rhetorical war.
And that tax cut gave us an economic boom.
I understand that low interest rates also contributed to that, but the tax cuts put money into the economy.
In particular, the tax cuts on business, like the capital gains tax cut and the changing of the rules on depreciation, allowing you to depreciate equipment more quickly than you had in the past, resulted in people going out and buying things, industries tooling up, and it gave us a very strong recovery.
While people talk about the housing situation now, they ignore the fact that even with the current downturn in housing, people who bought a home seven years ago are still way ahead of where they were then.
You've seen people move from being renters to homeowners.
And while some are screwed up right now, the vast majority have a home that is worth more than when they bought it and now have an asset to build their futures on.
All of this occurred after we got out of the recession and cut taxes.
And do remember Bush inherited a recession.
The economy had been turning down the last three quarters of Bill Clinton.
Unlike Clinton, who inherited a recovering economy from the first President Bush, Bush inherited a recession and got us out of it.
On 9-11 of his first year, we were attacked by a terrorist network that had gotten to be very, very strong.
We haven't been attacked since.
And I don't think that's because Al-Qaeda decided to hit us once and go away.
We radically changed our attitudes and our policies in this country.
And it was President Bush that led that change.
We passed the Patriot Act.
And while that act has been demonized by a lot of people on the left and some on the right, it apparently has helped things because our intelligence community has been doing a much better job than it had done prior to 9-11 in being aware of where terrorists are and what they are doing.
I don't think it's a coincidence that we changed our policies.
We required the CIA and the FBI and the NSA to start talking to one another and military intelligence to communicate with one another.
We have gotten a real handle on terrorism.
This is not to say there won't be another attack.
It's amazing we haven't had one, given how easy it is in this day and age to commit a terrible act of terror.
But the President has dealt with that.
He took this organization, Al-Qaeda, an organization that was totally appeased by his predecessor.
Al-Qaeda hit us again and again and again, including here in the United States with the first World Trade Center bombing.
And Bill Clinton did nothing but flap his jaws.
President Bush went after them.
The first thing he did is he went into Afghanistan where they had a haven.
And he knocked over that government that was backing and providing haven and shelter to Al-Qaeda.
And he ran him out of there.
While he did not succeed in capturing bin Laden, Al-Qaeda is disorganized and in disarray.
The fact that they are still in hiding right now is an indication of the success of that.
He totally changed our policy toward that terrorist group and has put them on the run.
And it's actually possible to imagine a day now that Al-Qaeda would be beaten.
Who would have thought that six or seven years ago?
The judicial system.
Most liberal public policy in this country has been imposed by judicial order.
Not because of any law passed by Congress.
or a state legislature or an act of a president.
The left knows this.
The left knows that the action in terms of social policy in this country is with the judges.
President Bush has been obstructed from the beginning by the Democrats in the Senate on his judicial appointments, yet he has managed to get some outstanding jurists appointed, not just at the level of the Supreme Court, but at the district court where all this stuff starts.
Most cases are never heard on appeal.
They're dealt with at the federal district court level.
We've got outstanding judges there.
The Federal Appeals Court, the Bush has put outstanding judges there, and with the regard to the United States Supreme Court, he's had two appointments and he's given us two great justices.
True, he almost screwed it up.
Harriet Myers was a bad pick.
But to his credit, after conservatives strongly objected, he backed down on Harriet Myers.
So as I look at the three really big things, the economy, national security and terror, and federal judges, I think Bush got them all right.
I also think in evaluating a president, you have to take a look at the hand that he was dealt.
Bill Clinton, who is just born under the right stars, just blessed from day one, the guy that can get away with anything, that can walk through a rainstorm and still end up dry.
Bill Clinton inherited a recovering economy from the first President Bush.
He had a military that had been built up for 12 years after Jimmy Carter had torn it down.
He had an intelligence community that the time, when Clinton inherited, was in pretty good shape.
He didn't have anything really to deal with, and he didn't manage to have an atrocity like 9-11 occur under his watch.
Bush, on the other hand, walks into office inheriting a recession.
He walks into office with the Democratic Party that is so furious that he was elected that they determined to obstruct him at every level, and then a mere eight months into his pregnancy, our country is attacked.
Attacked from within.
Civilians killed.
Pretty tough situation.
Set of circumstances to give a new president.
And I think you've got to consider the obstacles he was faced in evaluating him.
He held this country together.
We give a lot of credit properly to Mayor Giuliani for what he did in New York.
Bush held this country together after 9-11.
You've got to remember that initially, everybody rallied around the United States and ran and rallied around the way President Bush showed a sense of calm.
Remember when he went out within a month of the attack and threw out the first pitch at Yankee Stadium during the World Series, I think it was a World Series.
Stood there in the middle of 55,000 people, sending a message to the terrorists that I'm not going to go into hiding, we're here.
Those were important things that a leader does.
So I guess the point of this little monologue here is to say that I think that Bush has been underrated.
And while people on the left, for their own selfish purposes, are going to keep ripping him and ripping him and ripping him.
History's going to judge this guy pretty well.
Especially if Iraq turns out to be stabilized.
And that's something that we're only going to know ten or fifteen or twenty years down the road.
But I think we may look back at him and say this was a guy who was willing to stand up to the terrorists.
This was a guy who was willing to sacrifice his own personal popularity.
If Bush had bailed on Iraq two years ago, or if he had never started the thing in the first place, if he had never brought up weapons of mass destruction, and he simply said, Well, let's just let Saddam go there and cause trouble the way Bill Clinton ignored him, he'd probably be more politically popular right now than he is.
But he did what he felt was the right thing to do, and I think history is going to judge those decisions favorably and not unfavorably.
And I think some of us on the right Who may disagree with him on a lot of things, including his failure to deliver on social security, his failure to do anything about the illegal immigration problem, and some other problems, do need to understand that on a lot of the big things, he had a Herculean task in front of him and he accomplished them.
My name is Mark Belling.
It's open line Friday on the Rush Limbaugh program.
I'm Mark Belling sitting in for Rush Limbaugh 1-800-282-2882 is the phone number.
It's open line Friday.
That means it's time to take some phone calls.
Springfield, Massachusetts, Michael, it's your turn on Russia's show.
Hey, Mark.
Uh, wanted to go back to uh the comment you made the other day, kind of has to do with what you were just talking about, and that uh Republicans haven't been able to stick with a candidate.
You know, they seem to be going uh back and forth, you know.
Yeah, there was a poll that showed that forty percent of Republican voters had changed their mind in the last week.
Right.
Uh I think the big reason for that is that, and and I'm not trying to say I'm not a Ronald Reagan guy.
I'm not trying to say that.
Um, but the reason is is that none of those front runners are really conservative on the important issues from top to bottom.
You know, you you you got Giuliani who's tough on terror and cuts taxes, and that sounds good, but he's got the whole abortion thing.
Right.
New York City was kind of a quasi-sanctuary city.
You got Romney, who I think is just the Republican Bill Clinton.
I mean, he's just so good looking and so polished and so smooth that you you can't be sure I mean terror seems to be okay, but on a lot of other things, you just can't be sure where the guy stands.
And he's got the flip flopping.
You're you're right.
And McCain has been McCain.
There are all the things that he's done in the past that have demonstrated he doesn't seem to be conservative.
You're you're right.
You can go through the litany on all of them and say that it's hard to say that this is the true conservative candidate.
I don't disagree with that.
There is a local talk show here, and yes, there is a conservative talk show in in Massachusetts.
Well, you're in Western Massachusetts, right?
Right, yeah, our affiliate picks up the uh it's the Howie Car Show in Boston, and our Springfield affiliate picks it up on the back.
No, we've violated another rule.
We're talking about another talk show host here on the program.
I'm gonna break a rule every hour.
So I need you to get to the point that you're gonna make.
What were you driving driving away?
Duncan Duncan Hunter was on the show yesterday.
And I didn't know much about him.
Uh you know, he doesn't get much press.
He's only a congressman, he probably doesn't have a lot of funds.
But man, did he blow me away in the 20 minutes he was on that show?
He was polished.
He had an answer for every question that was thrown at him.
He didn't hem and haw about anything.
You knew exactly where he stood on everything.
It was all conservative from top to bottom, including the the the NAFTA highway and the illegal aliens.
I like Duncan Hunter a lot.
He's qualified.
He's a smart guy, he's a man of personal integrity, and you're right.
He's a conservative.
There are a couple of issues that I don't think I agree with him on, but I agree with him on just about everything.
And I think he'd make a great Republican nominee for president.
The problem is his candidacy hasn't gone anywhere.
And at some point you've got to decide if you're going to back somebody who's going to finish in 27th place in the Iowa caucuses, or if you're going to back somebody who's still viable and has a chance to win.
And the it's it's a real, real problem for all these guys that are stuck in the pack, including those on the Democratic side.
There are Democrats who would call a liberal talk program and say everything you just said about Duncan Hunter, about Chris Dodd or Joe Biden, and say, well, this guy's a liberal, this guy's this, this guy's that.
The problem is that they're not, they don't seem to be going anywhere.
I wish Duncan Hunter was the guy that had emerged from the pack.
Um in the Republican pack, one guy broke out, Huckabee.
I wish it had been Duncan Hunter.
But he didn't.
So if I'm a voter out there in Iowa going to the caucuses, do I want to go and be the first person in the room to vote for Duncan Hunter, or do I want to lie myself with one of the candidates that has a chance of winning?
And for Hunter, because people think he doesn't have a chance to win, they don't back him, and they don't back him because they don't think he has a chance to win.
It's the old chicken and an egg argument, and it's hard.
But of the candidates who didn't break out of the pack, who probably deserved to, I agree with you, Duncan Hunter would be at the top of the list.
Thanks for the thanks for the call, Michael.
Huckabee's the guy that came out and Huckabee had an angle and Huckabee connected with the segment of voters that really, really like him.
And nobody else really did that in the Republican pack.
The guys that were expected to do well are the ones that have been doing well.
And Duncan Hunter's one of those that never really caught on.
Tom Tancredo didn't catch on.
There are a couple of others that are out there running that didn't really catch on.
So do you continue to try to support them and say you're going to vote for them in the primary knowing that the person doesn't have any chance or do you vote for somebody that you think has a real chance of winning?
Mark Belling sitting in for Rush Limbaugh.
You ever notice that when somebody goes to Fox News Channel, gets a job there, that they always look differently than they did before they went to Fox News Channel?
I mean, Greta V and Sustrin went from CNN to Fox and look like a completely different person, but anybody that started somewhere else, they go to Fox and Fox makes them better looking.
I don't know if it's because they're in a better environment or what, but they're better look.
Check out Martha McCallum.
I mean, since she went over to Fox.
It's true, all of them.
Rupert Murdoch knows how to make his if only he could be in charge of doing the makeover on Hillary.
By the way, what did Rush say about that?
I noticed that you still have the picture on Rush Limbois.com of this incredibly witch-like visage of Hillary Clinton.
What did Rush say about that?
That's what I thought he said.
He's wondering, so he was just wondering it.
He was wondering if America's ready to watch a woman age in the Oval Office.
He brought it up.
Well, it you know, look at how they've all how all presidents age.
If you look at Bush now compared to seven years ago, I mean, the the job just kills people, in addition to the fact if you're in there for eight years, we all know what eight years does to any of us.
But was Russia's point that if Hillary looks like this now, can you imagine what she's going to look like then?
Was that the point?
Well, the societal thing, whether or not we as a society want to watch her age.
How come Condi Rice hasn't aged?
I mean, look what she's had to go through.
She if she was the president, would she look terribly as opposed to the Secretary of State where apparently the job doesn't do anything bad to you?
She looks exactly the same as she did when the whole thing started.
It's open line Friday on the Rush Limbaugh program.
The Iowa caucuses are six days from today.
This is all way too early, and it is a really, really screwed up system that we have.
Not only are the Iowa caucuses on next Thursday, yeah, January 3rd, New Hampshire's five days later on the eighth.
So you're going to have Iowa and then New Hampshire, which will probably become the big story, knocking Iowa right out of page one the moment after it happens, occurring right after the Christmas and New Year's season of the preceding year.
Most people in the country resent it.
Most people don't know who they support.
The candidates are all going to be choked February 5th, half the country will have voted.
More, I think two thirds of the country will have voted by February 5th.
And we're going to have these nominees, and there they're going to be sitting for nine months before the general election.
It's bad system.
The other problems with the system are that since somebody has to go first, Iowa and New Hampshire are given this incredible power in deciding who the next president of the United States is.
It could be worse.
I'm glad it's Iowa and New Hampshire and not Massachusetts and California.
Or a couple of other states.
It's got to be somebody.
But there are downsides to it being Iowa and New Hampshire.
We would not have this insane policy in this country on ethanol if Iowa wasn't the first state.
Because Iowa has the first caucus, and Iowa is a state that grows corn and nothing but corn, apparently.
All the candidates have to go into Iowa and swear their allegiance to ethanol and say that we're going to support all of these federal mandates for ethanol.
We're going to give ethanol all these tax breaks.
We're going to jam ethanol into all the gasoline in the United States, and we see what the result has been.
Ethanol's now in a lot of fuel in the United States.
A lot of it's watered down with 10% of this gunk.
Food prices have gone through the roof.
Corn's now around $4.50 a bushel.
Farmers are shifting production from other crops into corn because they've got a market for the corn because of the mandate on ethanol.
So that's driving up the costs of the other commodities.
Other food prices are going up because corn's the basis of the food chain, and it's all because Iowa happens to be the first state.
If the first state was Alabama, we'd probably have a mandate on cotton.
New Hampshire, which is a small state that has a lot of idiosyncrasies, including just a lust for John McCain that I don't fully understand.
They're given a lot of importance as well.
It's not a good system, but it is the one that we are stuck with and the one that we have.
I do think that Iowa and New Hampshire are going to knock half the fields in both parties out.
I think if you finish fourth in both states, fourth or below in both states, you're done.
On the Democratic side, if Edwards doesn't win Iowa, he's by his own admission acknowledging that there isn't any relevance to his campaign.
He needs to go in and pull the big upset in Iowa in order to go anywhere.
I happen to be the only man in America who thinks that John Edwards is going to win Iowa.
I think he is going to win Iowa.
I think Hillary is already faltering, and I think they're going to turn away from Obama.
I think Edwards is going to win Iowa, and I think he's going to win the Democratic nomination for president.
I've been on this story for a year.
Everybody thinks I'm crazy.
I don't know what's going to happen with the Republicans.
It is very hard to figure out.
Rudy Giuliani's campaign is suffering because Iowa and New Hampshire are not strong states for him.
He's been counting on simply surviving those two so he could move on to all the big states on February 5th where he believes he has strength.
But if he does poorly in both Iowa and New Hampshire, will anyone even be paying attention to him anymore?
In the meantime, I do think Huckabee's going to win Iowa.
Why?
His supporters are committed.
The people who like Mike Huckabee seem to be pretty adamant in their support of him.
If you don't believe me, criticize Mike Huckabee and watch how harsh they will be in their responses.
Remember that Iowa is a caucus state.
You don't go in and pull the curtain and walk out a minute later and get in your car like you do when you vote in a regular election.
The caucus requires that you go over to a house or somebody's home or a hall or a community center and sit there for three hours and listen to a bunch of people talk and then you huddle up into these corners and then you vote and you kind of vote again and then a consensus comes out of it, and then you get to go home.
Very few people make that three-hour commitment.
It's estimated that ten to twelve percent of the eligible voters in Iowa will participate in the caucus.
Therefore, you have to have organization and you have to have people who really are committed to you, that are willing to give up an entire night of their lives to go through this.
And I think Iowa is a state that's tailor-made for Mike Huckabee.
Candidates that have run from a religious perspective had tended to do I think didn't Pat Robertson win Iowa.
He either won Iowa or did very, very well there.
So I think it's the kind of state that's very well suited to his campaign.
All right, let's take some telephone calls here.
It is after all open line Friday.
I will shut up and talk to West Palm Beach and Paul.
Paul, it's your turn on the Rush Limbaugh program.
Hi, Mark.
Thanks for taking my call.
Thank you.
Hey, uh you made the comment about uh people in the future wishing uh for President Bush or someone like him.
Um I think you're absolutely correct.
I actually grew up listening to my parents uh wish that Barry Goldwater had been elected, and I think that people will have a similar uh feeling for Bush.
We always idealize the people of the past and forget about the things that we didn't like about them.
You know, you know who are ri who's really guilty of that is the Democrats.
I mean, they had been looking for John Kennedy until they got Bill Clinton, ignoring the fact that a lot of Democrats weren't real happy with the presidency of Kennedy.
He screwed up the Bay of Pigs, he actually was a tax cutter and an anti-communist.
There was a fair amount of discontent in Kennedy's presidency among Democrats with him, but after he was assassinated, they kept looking for the new Kennedy and looking for the new Kennedy.
We tend to go back and look at some of these figures from the past and lionize them and make them bigger than they were at the time.
Yeah, I'm uh I'm married to a psychologist.
I think they call that anchoring, but I agree with you.
The point I wanted to make is I'm in Florida, and I think you can use Florida as kind of uh a crystal ball for this because we're gonna experience that here shortly with Jeb Bush.
People are gonna start missing him soon, and and I think you'll see that and then he's already gone, isn't he?
Yeah, he's already gone.
But my point is, as your comment was people are gonna start wishing that George was back in office or someone like him.
Uh it's gonna start first here in Florida, and you'll see that with people thinking the same thing about Jeb.
So watch Florida.
Well, the sad thing about Jeb Bush is that he's a Bush.
You can't really allow the Republican candidate for president to always be a Bush.
But if Jeb Bush wasn't a Bush, if he was Jeb Brown, he'd probably win the Republican nomination this year.
Republicans love to turn to governors.
He was a very successful governor in the ultimate swing state, Florida.
We know how close the elections in Florida are.
He was very popular.
He got the uh this he had the support of Democrats.
He was somebody who had a lot of achievements down there.
He's perfectly suited to be president of the United States, but he can't run this time around because you can't simply always have Bush's running, and it will be a handicap for him in two thousand twelve, but I think very highly of him, and it's too bad uh that he is a Bush because you're going to have that question of can you keep running Bush's as your party's candidate.
I totally agree.
One one comment, and I'll I'll let you get to the next caller.
I think Time Magazine's man of the year Putin had a lot to be gained by Bhutto being assassinated, and no one's talking about it.
Uh you're talking about how who the winners are and what's happened in Pakistan.
Vladimir Putin is the Russian Clinton.
He's just the guy that everything seems to work out for him.
Thank you for the call.
Let's go to Little Rock and David.
David, it's your turn on the Rush Limbaugh program with Mark Belling.
Megadetto's Mark from Huckabee Country.
Is that what it is now?
It's not Clinton country anymore, huh?
No, it uh uh ever since uh Bill uh finished up his second term, I I don't think you can call this Clinton country anymore, especially Hillary Clinton country.
Uh just want to make a uh point here about comparing presidencies.
Um I'm a lifelong Reagan conservative, and um when I hear Bush being compared to Reagan and I think about other presidencies that you have to start comparing.
You you you think about Bush, Clinton, and Reagan as is kind of the way I look at it all of the two-term presidents, but um you look at Reagan, he had to face down uh the Soviet Union and George Bush.
President Bush has had to face down uh terrorism.
The only concern I have with comparing uh President Bush to President Reagan is both President Bush and President Clinton had friendly houses and Senates.
President Reagan had to kind of go it alone.
He he had neither.
And the unfortunate thing was, if you compare all the presidencies, is that both President Bush and President Clinton both lost the Houses and Senates.
During their terms.
They had opportunities to do wonderful things with support on their sides, yet neither one of them were able to keep up.
Well, you're right about that.
The gr one of the challenges for Reagan was he had a pass through the Reagan Revolution through a Democratic Congress when he was elected.
Bush initially had uh a Republican Congress to be able to deal with.
However, that turned on him, and it became a very hostile Democratic Congress, which did obstruct him.
Thank you for the call.
My name is Mark Belling sitting in for Rush Limbaugh.
I'm Mark Belling sitting in for Rush Limbaugh.
Jason Lewis is going to be here Monday.
Rush will be back on Wednesday, January second.
It's open line Friday.
How am I doing on this open line thing?
I'm throwing out a few of my own things.
Callers are throwing out a few of their things.
Is this how you're supposed to do it?
Wanna do it right?
Good.
All right, now that means we're gonna have another caller throw something out.
Let's go to Fairfax, Virginia.
Bill, it's your turn on Russia's show with Mark Belling.
Hey, Mark, thanks for taking my call.
Hey, uh an observation regarding uh Huckabee.
Isn't it possible that one of the reasons that Huckabee surged in Iowa is he started to sound like a conservative vis a vis.
Uh he put out the ad, he and he he did the evangelical speak, and I'm I'm not against that, I'm for it.
Uh but but that would draw conservative evangelicals into his camp.
Bill.
And and doesn't that um support the idea that um if someone within the Republican camp could really distinguish themselves as a true conservative, wouldn't they win by a landslide?
That That's my theory.
No, I've got a problem here.
See, what you're doing, Bill, is you're the guy who's got the dog in the cage, and you're dangling the big stake above the dog's head.
Now, what do you what happens when you do that to the dog?
The dog goes crazy and starts barking and drives everybody crazy and the dog gets out of control.
I've been trying here for two days, do what I kind of really want to do, which is talk about Mike Huckabee, who I don't like.
And I don't want I and I know if I do that, it will overwhelm the entire show, and the Huckabee backers will call up and tell me all the reasons that I'm wrong, and Mike Huckabee dominates the entire program.
So I've done a very, very good job of showing a fair amount of self-restraint.
Now, the chief of staff of the program puts you on knowing full well that if you dangle Huckabee's name out there and talk about why he's popular, that I'm going to be all conflicted here and not know whether or not I should go after the go after it or not.
Should I go what do you think, Bill?
Should I tell you what I really think about Huckabee or should I be polite about it?
Sure, tell us what you really think.
But my I don't like I don't like him.
And I think you've analyzed it exactly correctly.
Huckabee is brilliant.
He is someone who realizes full well that a whole lot of people, Christians in this country, are sick and tired of being spat upon.
And for Christians for the last 30 years in America, it's been almost like you're an alcoholic and you're supposed to go to some program and get it out of you that it's something that you don't say that you are, why you can't observe your own holidays, if you dare to support something like mission work in which you try to save someone's soul by converting them, why you're a bully, you're trying to impose your views on everyone else.
If you suggest that you're somebody that believes in God, you're considered irrational because you don't bow down before science.
Christians have been hit and hit and hit and hit and hit.
In the meantime, we're told that we have to tolerate every other point of view, every other viewpoint, we have to indulge atheism by eliminating all references to Christianity from anywhere in society, and Huckabee has figured out that if you just stand up and say, I'm a Christian and I'm proud of it, that a lot of people are going to rally to your side.
And I admire the fact that he has done that.
The problem I have is not the way he's packaged himself.
My problem with Mike Huckabee is his views.
And if you take the Christian message out of it and you take away two issues, abortion and gay marriage.
If you printed Mike Huckabee's speeches and statements over the past year and didn't identify who they were coming from, I guarantee you you'd think they were John Edwards.
He and John Edwards say the exact same thing on virtually everything.
That's the hang up that I have with Mike Huckabee, but you're right.
He is a great speaker.
He's got a very, very good gift for expressing himself.
And that's been the thing that's allowed him to break out of the pack, that and the fact that he has proudly embraced his own religion.
I don't know if he's sincere about the religion thing or not.
I'm very, very skeptical about anybody who comes out of Hope, Arkansas, and has been a governor of the state of Arkansas.
But I do think what you describe is the reason that he's emerged as a candidate.
If he's done in, and as you can tell, he's not my candidate, it's going to be because of his viewpoints.
The guy sounds conservative, but there isn't anything there beyond those two social issues that I mentioned that would lead you to think that he's a Democrat, rather than he's a Republican.
He's a guy who takes Democratic sides on democratic issues and talks like a Democrat.
And I do fear that he's going to win.
That was the best.
That was the most self-restraint that I'm able to show on Mike Huckabee because I wanted to be even meaner.
My name is Mark Belling, and I'm sitting in for Rush Limbaugh.
I'm Mark Belling sitting in for Rush Limbaugh.
You know how they say fifty is the new 40 and with cars white is the new silver.
Huckabee's the new McCain.
Eight years ago, John McCain was the guy that a lot of people could didn't think was a true conservative, but emerged as somebody who had a real chance of winning the Republican nomination for president.
And this time around, there are a lot of conservatives, and I admit that I'm one of them, who have real concerns about Huckabee, and he's the guy, he's not really one of us, and so on.
Do you know who the beneficiary of all of this is?
It's McCain.
McCain's the guy that people like me aren't worried about so much because we're all too busy running around ripping Huckabee.
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