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March 7, 2008 - Rush Limbaugh Program
35:26
March 7, 2008, Friday, Hour #3
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All right, gang, third hour now up and running on the Rush Limbaugh.
Quick before we get into your calls and everything else, memo to Al Gore, James Hansen, Tom Friedman of the New York Times, and every other global warming kook, every other, every other dissembling dilettante of climatology, forecasters today are warning that a winter storm across the nation's midsection is going to get real nasty.
Well, light snow is falling already in Central Texas on top of the snow that fell yesterday, but now up to a foot is expected in Kentucky.
Speaking of feet, those three guys I just mentioned, take them out of your mouth now.
Global warming, the crisis is a hoax.
Welcome back, everybody.
I am Jason Lewis, and though Russia's gone this Friday, it does remain a Friday, and that means only one thing here on EIB.
Live from the Southern Command in sunny South Florida.
It's open line Friday!
I guess you could say New York via the Northern Command, right up here in Minneapolis, St. Paul, Jason Lewis, Minnesota's Mr. Wright standing in for the big guy trying to fill the shoes of the big guy behind the Northern Command Golden EIB Mike, it is open line Friday.
Your chance to opine through debate, to discuss anything of your liking.
I will first set things up this hour, like always, and then we'll go to the phone call.
Speaking of that, California appeals court uh ruling on home schooling.
What have I been telling you about education when I've been filling in?
How it is, it is a government monopoly that would make Exxon or Microsoft blush.
In fact, monopolies really only exist.
I know you you added in your in your economics class that there are natural monopolies, but really, if you take a look at history, real monopolies are only the ones where governments enforce them.
Utilities might come to mind, a regulated monopoly with guaranteed rates of return.
That's why they pass through the cost to you.
So remember when they when they go to solar, when they go to windmill or wind turbine energy biomass and the costs come up, you'll be paying that, not the environmentalists.
But the the greatest monopoly in my lifetime has been the five hundred and thirty-six billion dollar monopoly when you include federal, state, and local taxes called public education.
Let's not call it public education.
Let's call it what it is.
Government schools.
And government schools are there primarily for the benefit of the largest union out there, the National Education Association.
Therefore, no doubt they filed a friend of the court brief on this.
California appellate court ruling this week that homeschooling by parents who don't have quote unquote teaching credentials is illegal.
So 166,000 students are truants and their parents are criminals.
The Nanny State strikes again.
Was it Disraeli?
I think it was I think it was Disraeli who said uh tyranny begins in the nursery.
Well, from cradle to grave, we hand our kids over to the government.
And we have no choice.
Because you look at your state budget in California, in Florida, in New York, in Minnesota.
Highest item on the state budget, education.
Look at your property taxes.
Highest bill on your property taxes, education.
You're being taxed so much you can't afford to pay for private school.
So you're stuck into a monopolistic system.
Kind of like college tuition gouging.
Uh the Democrats never worry about that monopoly, that particular price gouging, and they don't worry about this monopoly when they're concerned about windows or they're concerned about big oil or big pharmaceutical.
Think of how absurd this is for a moment, friends.
Henry Kissinger, whether you like him or not, knows a lot about geopolitics, knows a lot about foreign policy.
He could go to a university and teach.
He could take a semester and teach foreign policy.
He can't go to your local high school and teach it because he's not credentialed.
Now you're telling me the teachers' programs aren't for anything but the union.
I can say this because uh my undergraduate degree was in business and education.
I was going to teach, believe it or not.
You know what they say, those who can do.
Those who can't teach, and those who can't teach, teach college.
And if you've ever been to a college of education at any major university, you know what I'm talking about.
Now there are a lot of good teachers, many of them conservative, but let's be clear about this.
The vast majority of them are liberal.
The union is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Democrat Party, or is it the Democrat Party is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Union.
Well, go figure.
Collectively, we spend five hundred and thirty-six billion dollars on case much more than the Department of Defense, I shouldn't say much more, but more than the Department of Defense on this government monopoly.
And now they're telling you parents, you homeschooling parents.
By the way, the homeschooling kids usually outperform other students on standardized test scores.
But if you're not credentialed, so one thing we don't want is Steve Jobs in a public school teaching computer science.
Can't have that.
Absolutely cannot have that.
And this is absurd.
It's for the benefit of the union, their affiliate members, and I got news to my Republican Rhino friends.
The more you try to pacify the teachers' unions, the more you're going to lose.
Because a party that grows government is going to be a liberal party.
Every new government employee that is hired because we've got to give education new money.
We got to grow all of these government agencies in your respective states.
And as a good Republican, I'm reaching across the aisle to do this.
We can't, we can't be against education.
Well, of course, nobody's against education, but we're against government monopolies.
How do you know the point being is a party that grows government is not going to be a conservative party.
Most government employees grow to like their benefits, which are usually more generous than the private sector.
Most of them grow to be Democrats.
Why would a quote unquote private sector conservative party be sustaining something like that?
Once again, a betrayal by the liberals within our ranks in the Republican Party.
You know, it kind of gets back.
You talk about this, and it can be broken up.
It can be broken up with what Reagan wanted to do.
Ronald Reagan proving that this is a politically potent topic, campaigned in 1980 on debolishing the Department of Education, which has no constitutional imprimatur, and number two, on tuition tax credits.
I think vouchers are a problem because you do you do end up sending public monies to private schools, and then it could happen that those private schools would be forced to comply with all of the public school regulatory nonsense.
Whether it's the school lunch programs, whether it's Title IX, you name it.
However, a tuition tax credit under most uh jurisprudence that I've read is not a voucher.
It's not a grant of public money, it's getting your own money back.
What I'm suggesting to you today is that there ought to be a universal tuition tax credit, whether it's done by a business or whether it's done by a philanthropic organization, or whether it's done by a uh a rich neighbor that would be granted to parents who wanted to send their child to a private school.
So if the tuition is $5,000 to go to fifth grade, if their business wanted to pay for that, they could, and they would get a tax credit for paying that tuition.
If I wanted to pay for it for my neighbor, I could pay for it, I would get a tax credit.
Or if I wanted to pay for it for my daughter or my son, I could do it, and I would get a tax credit if I could afford it.
But again, a tax credit would be a pass-through.
Now you say, well, gosh, won't that deplete the public schools?
No, because the public schools are relieved of educating the student.
So while they're out $5,000 or whatever the tuition tax credit might be, they're also out the expense of educating the child, which is much more than that.
In fact, you'd look at places like New York, places like LA, Washington, $15,000 per year per pupil in the public schools.
So if they're relieved from that expense, but their coffers only, let's let's put the maximum on the tuition tax credit, say of $5,000.
That'd probably probably be enough to make it affordable for a lot of people.
They're out $5,000 in monies that otherwise wouldn't be there or would be there, but they're out of the expense of $10,000 to $15,000.
So it's not a loss to the public school.
What it does is it provides a level playing field.
I will not be penalized as I am right now if I choose to send my child to a Catholic school, to a private school, to home school.
Right now, I pay twice.
Right now I've got to pay for my child, and then I've got to pay those state taxes, sales and income.
I've got to pay Property taxes to educate everybody else's kid.
No wonder people can't afford to go to private schools.
All this would do is saying you're going to pay for one tuition rate for one child.
What could be more equitable?
Well, the unions would have none of it.
Which is why they are gleeful that they have preserved employment opportunities in this California appellate ruling.
So, you know, it really goes back to growing government.
It goes back to this notion that there is an inherent conflict of interest when you've got so many people who are who are on the government dole.
And it's not just the single moms in urban America.
I'm talking about, yes, the agricultural community, massive farm bill, which which had no justification this time around.
I'm talking about student loans.
I'm talking about small business administration loans, talking about ethanol subsidies, export import bank subsidies.
We could go right through the health care field or health care in America, prescription drug benefits.
When everybody gets a check from the government, tell me.
How do you think they're going to vote?
They're going to vote to expand their largesse, their check.
You know, the the founding fathers get a lot of flack because uh during the convention, the ratifying convention in 1787, they were considering the fact that, well, maybe only people with property should vote.
See, I knew it.
A bunch of white bigots, of white property owning bigots reserving the vote only to their kind.
No, that wasn't the reason at all.
Remember, these are the same fellows that got together and banned the importation of slavery, I think it was 1820 out of the document that had never been done before across the globe.
These are the people where the three fifths compromise actually empowered the North to combat slavery, not the opposite as you're taught in school too many times.
And their provision for reserving the vote, even though it didn't pass, the property owners was quite simple.
If you give votes to people who don't have property, they will vote to redistribute the property that you have to them.
Pretty good reason not to give Washington, D.C. representation in Congress.
Mostly they are federal employees.
Gee, I wonder how they would vote when it comes to more taxes for federal employees.
You got so many people in the wagon right now.
There is a collective conflict of interest that prev that that is set up against the taxpayer of the United States.
And the the Republican Party needs to start focusing on reducing, reducing government largesse and getting people off the government dole into the private sector, you get more taxpayers, more private per private sector production, and you get a larger constituency for the Republicans for conservatism for less government.
Instead, we grow government at our own peril if you believe in that little little thing called liberty.
I'm Jason Lewis, In for Rush.
Back to the phones we go right after this short pause on the Excellence and Broadcasting Network.
Open line Friday on the Rush Limbaugh program back at the Northern Command with me, Minnesota's right, Mr. Wright, I should say, or right, Jason Lewis filling in for El Rushbo.
He is back on Monday.
Open line Friday at 1800-282-2882.
Let's go down to Iowa, Dyersville in Iowa, and Don, you know why the cheerleaders at the University of Iowa hate, hate AstroTurf.
They've got nothing to graze on at halftime.
There you go.
Don Fire Away, buddy.
Nice to talk to you, even though you are from Minnesota.
Believe it or not, I am from believe it or not, you will never guess where I'm actually from.
Uh, should I guess?
Yes.
See, I told you you'd never guess.
Iowa.
Really?
Where at?
Waterloo.
Oh, well, Dairesville is only an hour away.
Waterloo, a great place to be from, as they say.
Be from.
That's right.
You're absolutely correct there.
Uh comment about the uh Wisconsin border regions thinking about uh paying according to what you make.
Uh a few weeks ago I had to look at something in the Cedar Rapids Gazette website.
Mm-hmm.
And they had a tab there, state salaries.
I thought that'd be kind of interesting to look at.
Right.
Well, the first salary that comes up was Kirk Farrens, over two million dollars a year.
Well, he's worth it.
He's a good football Coach.
He's the football coach for the Hawkeyes.
Right.
But page after page after page.
Don't you love, though, don't you love that the football coach and the NCAA, they work in a nonprofit?
The NCAA is a nonprofit community.
Right.
You think of nonprofits and you think for the downtrodden that get tax exempt status, and then these coaches are making millions and millions.
But I digress.
Go ahead.
Great.
But uh the salaries on page after page after page you could go through were salaries of professors, associate professors, assistant professors at the university of Iowa.
The highest paid professor there was just under $700,000 a year.
Now I just went through two pages, the first two pages of about thirty-five to forty salaries.
And the total annual pay was just under, I think fourteen million dollars.
And that's only the first two pages.
And these are the same liberal elite educational morons that preach against uh CEOs making big bucks for these corporations that work ten times harder than these professors.
And the CEO well, I don't know.
I mean, look, the CEOs actually have a responsibility to their stakeholders, the shareholders, and are held accountable.
The fundamental difference between government work, let's be blunt about this, and I don't care what it is, between government work and between the private sector is something called market discipline.
You you cannot you cannot be inefficient.
You cannot fail to do your job in the market over time because of competition and because of profits.
When when stakeholders or shareholders don't like what they're seeing, they defund you.
And that never happens in government.
The more mistakes government makes, the more money they get, the more problems they create.
And by the way, in a lesson for liberal Republicans and the big tent crowd everywhere, uh Iowa City is pretty solidly in the safe hands of Democrats every election cycle.
That's correct.
Yes, they are.
No, I know.
It's a con game.
It's a con game, and these are the same people that keep beating up on the rich, are they not?
Right.
And these, you know, these people are tenured in, whether they're whether they're capable of teaching or not, they're going to keep making their increases every year, rather and they may only teach one or two hours a week, but they're how many jobs do they create?
Uh I couldn't really say.
Well, I mean, a CEO that makes that makes ten million a year gets a lot of flack, but he's he's creates jobs.
How many jobs does a professor create?
Well, that's you've got a very good point there.
I'm not look, if we add a real market in education, uh, you might have professors worth $500,000 a year.
I'm not suggesting the government uh knows what they're worth or I know what anybody teaching is worth.
But we do not have that in education.
Now it's less so in higher education, to be fair, because they've got to raise private money, but there isn't a state university, including the University of Iowa, that isn't wholly dependent upon the state, and every time they want to expand their fiefdom, they come whining to Des Moines, or they come whining to Trenton, or they come whining to Sacramento, oh, we need more state money for education.
And who's against education?
Well, as long as the government then is propping up these enterprises and entirely when it comes to K through twelve, frankly, the taxpayers have every right to say, we're gonna set your salary and we're gonna lower it.
If you want to make unlimited money, go in the private sector where you can make unlimited money.
You know why you can make it and why it doesn't hurt, but helps people?
Because it is voluntarily derived.
There isn't a business, there isn't an entrepreneur who can forcibly make somebody pay them or buy their product.
Therefore, both sides benefit when an exchange occurs, when business makes a profit.
Both sides have benefited.
When you have the monopoly of government, extracting money forcibly to fund employees of government, both sides may or may not benefit.
Frankly, there's a lot of government I don't want to pay for.
And certainly for my taxes, I'm not getting the equivalent amount in services.
So I would not, if I had my choice, pay that.
That cannot be said for the private sector, which is the fundamental difference.
Don, thanks.
Monica in Houston, Texas.
You're you uh you've got about twenty seconds, Monica, so be brief, please.
Um, hello?
Yes.
Hi, I just wanted to tell you that um basically my father used to joke with me saying that I was a bleeding heart liberal, even a communist, because I did have very liberal views until I had a professor at a public school last year who um taught government and totally changed my view whenever he explained how uh liberal views get paid for and everything as wonderful.
I gotta go, but you know what we call that professor today?
An endangered species.
And we are back, everybody.
Those short naps are great.
We are back.
I'm Jason Lewis wrapping things up on an open line Friday.
Still about uh what, 20, 30 minutes to go, so hang in there, gang at 1800, 282, 2882.
The House of Representatives yesterday raised your health insurance rates.
You may have read this in the New York Times.
Of course, that's not the way they they uh wrote about it, of course, they portrayed it, but after a decade of struggle, the House of the House yesterday passed the Paul Wellstone bill to demand and mandate coverage for mental illnesses by your health insurance provider.
The vote, and here we go again, 268 to 148, with 47 Republicans uh voting to raise your health insurance.
Now let's understand what this is.
If in fact you tell an insurance company, and we've got over a thousand mandates to by states nationwide, this would be under the federal ERISA law where if you self-insure in your particular state, you're out from under those state mandates, but then the federal laws take precedence.
So they don't want any big company to self-insure and get out from under the myriad of state insurance mandate or state coverage mandates.
So now they say, well, if you self-insure and you're under ERISA, you're going to be covered by the federal mental health parity law.
One of the things that former Minnesota Senator, the late Paul Wellstone wanted to get done, that if if you are um mentally ill, and it could be anything, it could be substance abuse, could be schizophrenia, bipolar, whatever, could be legitimate.
There are many mental illnesses, of course, are true illnesses.
There are some that aren't quite so clear.
And whether or not you're debating whether they're actual illnesses or what have you, the bottom line is the treatment success rate is much, much, much lower for mental health than it is for setting a broken arm.
And yet, under this bill, the Paul Wellstone Mental Health and Addiction Equity Act passed with the help of liberal Republicans, your insurance company is going to have to pay for continuing treatment at the Hazleton Treatment Center, the Oso caring and Oso sensitive treatment center here in Minnesota, where all of the effete elites go and advocate for its funding.
Now, under this particular bill, uh any insurance company that wants to write a traditional indemnity policy under ERISA will have to cover that with equal copayments with equal deductibles.
Does anybody doubt what that's going to do to the cost of your insurance?
If you have to cover Minnesota right now, the state, I'm only talking about Minnesota because I'm familiar with it, but has 63 mandates, highest in the country.
So if you want to come in and write a traditional indemnity insurance policy in Minnesota, you've got to cover psychiatric illness, mental health.
You've got to cover the removal of port wine stain.
You've got to recover literally a myriad of mandates.
Now, if in fact I'm 25, I'm not mentally ill, I'm not going to get AIDS, I don't need treatment for acupuncture, which is also covered in a number of states, Mandated, I just want to buy a cafeteria-style health insurance plan.
I want it for cancer, I want it for a heart attack, I want it if I get hit by a car.
You can't buy it.
We are forcing young people to buy these Cadillac versions of health insurance, and then the same people that do that bemoan the cost of what?
Health insurance.
There is no doubt that this is going to raise the cost of health insurance.
The National Center for Policy Analysis and a number of other groups have figured out that this is going to raise the cost.
I mean, think about this for a moment.
If you tell health insurance that they've got to requ uh cover all the vicissitudes of mental health with the same deductibles, the same co-payments, whether it's addiction, substance abuse, alcoholism, depression, bipolar, marriage counseling, they should all chiropractic care.
They should all have the same deductibles.
You know, one of the Essence of the insurance markets in a free economy is not only the pooling of risk, it's also the pricing of risk.
And by not having or having a larger deductible or a larger co-payment with substance abuse treatment, that's the pricing of risk.
It's not unlike your automobile insurance.
You use more claims, you get into more accidents, you're gonna have a higher premium.
Why should that be different for health insurance?
It shouldn't be.
But it is because of compassion.
So what these people have done and what they're doing when we pass these health coverage mandates, they are pricing young people out of the health insurance market.
And this is a little bit like college tuition.
We keep subsidizing health insurance with third-party payments with the government or with business or whatever, then it keeps going up.
You're gonna have to let the consumer bear the costs, but also let the consumer pick the product.
And if you would do that, you would probably eradicate most of the problems in health health insurance today, but we're going in the opposite direction.
We are going absolutely in the opposite direction.
Again, with the help of a number of liberal Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives, 47 of them to boot.
In Wayne, New Jersey, here's Steve.
You're on the Rush Limbaugh program.
Hi.
Good afternoon, Jason.
Uh thank you for taking my call today.
Uh I'm very excited because I get to first of all show the gratitude that I have for you guys for all that you do and informing us.
I'm an outside sales that drive around all day, you guys ride with me and talk with me, it's great.
Great.
I've been thinking about everything that you've been saying about uh, you know, uh all the things that I've been hearing about the the trade deficit.
Um we have uh we have a trade deficit, national debt, we have um uh a nation full of consumers that are becoming more and more in debt to banks that I don't know if they're owned on foreign shores, some of them or or whatever.
Uh my question is um, and my point is, is it reasonable thinking about all these things that if we continue in these same patterns that we will uh eventually be owned by other nations?
Are we just giving ourselves away in hock?
Well, I don't I frankly I'm not as worried about it as as you might be.
I'm not worried about private debt, believe it or not, because private debt uh usually has a self-correcting mechanism.
For instance, uh it used to be in the United States of America, if you uh bid off more than you could chew with credit card debt with uh in fact even a mortgage, uh, there was a market correcting mechanism, it was called foreclosure.
Uh it was called bad debt collection, and those debts corrected, you had to alter your behavior.
Uh other than that, if you have private debt out there, usually no one enters into private debt, you and your mortgage, I presume you have it, unless you're going to get a higher rate of return.
So if you borrow money for future production, if you borrow money to invest in an asset, that is not a problem.
However, the government, as you know, doesn't invest.
It consumes.
And when the government borrows and it floats T bills and it has uh you know a lot a lot of debt, they're not going to get a rate of return on that other than the future levels of taxation.
Now, this gets into a very, very complicated macroeconomic uh uh analysis, you've got to understand, because I'm not actually opposed to the government borrowing if the only other alternative is raising taxes.
Because lowering taxes allows the economy to grow and pay off that debt.
We grow out of the deficits.
However, the best of both worlds is always lowering taxes and lowering debt by cutting spending.
The bottom line here is don't worry about the debt, don't worry about or worry about taxes, but don't worry about the debt.
Look at the total government budget.
Whether it's financed by debt, whether it's financed by taxation, or whether it's financed by inflation, that's all bad.
Does that explain anything?
Um at least at least gives me a starting point.
I'm taking an economics two class right now, and uh it's giving some my professor a little bit further.
Permit me to elaborate.
Call me Professor Lewis for the moment.
Uh would you rather have a um a New Jersey budget?
What's the New Jersey state budget right now?
Any idea?
Oh, I have no idea, but it's huge.
That's how bad it is.
But with corzine in there, just trust me, it's going up.
Well, let's just take it at the national level.
Would you rather have a federal budget of one trillion dollars where only five hundred billion is raised by taxes and we have a deficit of five hundred billion, but the total budget is one trillion.
You follow me?
Mm-hmm.
Or would you rather have a federal budget of three trillion, as is the current case, but we're gonna raise another trillion or two trillion dollars in taxes and balance the budget so you'd have a balanced federal budget of three trillion or a budget out of balance of only one trillion what do you think is going to be more beneficial to private sector growth and the economy in general I would think that the latter would be the second one that you you mentioned.
Which one would the three hundred trilli trillion and balance the budget.
And that is exactly why Democrats get elected because you are so wrong, my friend.
Think about this a three trillion dollar budget balanced doesn't mean anything except the federal government is raising three trillion dollars a year in taxation.
Where's that money coming from?
Yeah I understand it's coming from the capital markets.
It's coming from production now if you have a budget of only one trillion and it's split evenly between borrowing five hundred billion and taxing five hundred billion you're taking much less out of the private economy even though you have a deficit understood.
That's your lesson for today there will be no charge as of now I'm Jason Lewis in for Rush Limbaugh.
Thanks Steve go get him buddy I'm Jason Lewis back after this short pause on the Excellence in Broadcasting Network.
We are back on open line Friday I'm Jason Lewis my thanks once again to Rush and the gang for allowing me the uh privilege and honor to fill in for the great one he's back on Monday in the meantime we'll squeeze in some uh remaining calls on this Friday this global cooling Friday as we like to call it Amy in Indianapolis you're up next on the Rush Limbaugh program with me Jason Lewis hi.
Yeah hi and my two year old is just now trying to inundate me I apologize.
That's quite I need to go back to homeschooling real quick.
Sure.
Um you had said that homeschoolers do in general better than children who go to government schools are educated in government schools.
A number of studies and a number of standardized test test scores reveal that homeschoolers are in the highest the highest achievers and and I would agree but did you also know that homeschoolers who come from states which have less regulation do better than homeschoolers who come from states who have more regulation?
No.
It's absolutely true.
Well now who would benefit by regulating homeschooling I I I really don't know.
You think I I really don't know.
It's a control issue.
Well a monopoly hates competition because when you have more efficient competition it makes the monopoly look bad so what you want to do is saddle homeschoolers with the same sort of nonsense that the public schools have saddled themselves with by the way and they do well they do worse for the uh they do worse for it too.
You know I don't know you know it's very very tough because you know contrary to to uh the conventional wisdom the expanse the vast expanse of K through twelve government run schools was not was not the idea of the founding fathers.
Now it did come with Horace Mann and the gang it did come to be kind of an American tradition and it's going to be very very hard to get out from under but the the bottom line here is we're going to have to break this monopoly one way or another if we're talking about the benefit of children.
I agree totally I'm I'm there with you.
All right Amy thanks for calling and it's easy to do you I'm not saying do away with public schools I'm just saying tuition tax credits.
If Amy wants a tuition tax credit for homeschooling her child she ought to be able to get it.
And if you still want to go to the public school and not get a tuition tax credit, you're no poorer because you're not out any money.
So it would level the playing field is all I'm saying and then you'd have real competition probably make the public schools even better in Toledo Ohio here's John you're on the excellence in broadcasting network hi.
Hi.
Um the reason I called is it's about Senator McCain um the most there's only one one issue that really matters and that's the war.
If we lose no other issue is going to matter and Senator McCain is the only candidate running that's got the um got the tools to handle it.
Where is Senator McCain on military tribunals and Guantanamo Bay?
He's opposed to it where is Senator McCain on coercive techniques when it comes to interrogations he's opposed to it where is he on uh terrorist surveillance?
I believe he supports that.
Yeah I think he does support the uh terror terrorist surveillance program to his credit.
But I what I'm telling you is, are you absolutely certain?
I mean, I I really think the war on terror is going to be won domestically as much as internationally.
If if we aren't we don't have the ability to spy, if we don't have the ability to put unlawful enemy combatants who do not have the civilian defense from the Constitution, who are not civilian defendants and then have those all of those uh due process rights and do not have protections under the Geneva Convention.
If we are not allowed to put those people in military tribunals, we're gonna have a heck of a time getting information out of these folks.
Well, the the thing is though, the war in Iraq, he supports it he sports staying in there, and by electing Senator McCain, we send not just a message to Iraq, we're sending a message to the Chinese and we're sending a message to the the emerging new Soviet Union that we have not lost our nerve,
and saying that we'll be there for a hundred years if it that's what it takes to win, that signals all of our adversaries and potential adversaries that we're not that they had better think twice before they try anything.
And that's why it's important.
And I believe that the continued existence of American and Western civilization is dependent on this election.
I think it's that important.
And I mean, given the tragedy in Israel yesterday, there's no question that people who employ tactics that target civilians who are unlawful enemy combatants cannot cannot be allowed to roam this world with impunity.
I I couldn't agree more.
And uh, I think that's certainly a fair point.
My concern with Senator McCain is the the flip side or the mirror image of what you said that if we don't win the war, nothing else matters.
The flip side to that, though, you need to think about, John, is even if we prevail in the war, what does it matter if we preserve tyranny at home?
If we tell people you can't engage in free speech during election seasons, if we tell people your energy bill and your taxes are going way up to fight global warming, if we have open borders at home and ever rising levels of regulation and and and government, what good is winning a war?
Oh, I would refer back to the American Civil War and Abraham Lincoln.
It was that important that Americans gave up those uh um Freedoms?
Freedoms that went under that that uh adjusted under those austere measures to continue to preserve the Union.
Some things are more some things are more important so that things that our John, let it not ever be forgotten.
That I I tend to agree with what you're saying in many ways, but I I'm just saying let it not be forgotten that the goal of the American experiment was not to preserve a nation state, the union, or anything else.
It was to preserve the last best hope of freedom on earth.
And it is not good enough to say you're pro-life, but you're liberal and everything else.
It's not good enough to say that you're pro the war on terror, but you're liberal at home.
You have got to be part of the whole package.
And if you're not, conservatives are gonna have reservations as well they should.
I'm Jason Lewis on the Rush Limbaugh program back after this.
As always, great pleasure to be sitting in with the big guy or for the big guy, I should say today, Jason Lewis, I've enjoyed the last couple of days, and my thanks to Rush, Kit, Mike, and the gang for making it so easy and fun to do.
Hey, uh, in the uh for those of you out in the UK, people have been injured while walking and texting on their cell phones, maybe in luck, they're now talking about padding the lamp posts for folks who are texting on their cell phones and not paying attention, and they bang into the lamp post.
Uh living proof that liberals exist everywhere, I guess.
Padded lampposts in London, what's next?
A Democrat majority in Washington?
Too late for that.
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