Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
Mr. Snudley, we may as well do Open Line Friday on Wednesday today because I'm not going to be here tomorrow or Friday.
So for those of you who are relatively new to the program, we're going to do Open Line Friday on Wednesday today, which means whatever you want to talk about, it's pretty much okay.
It doesn't work that way Monday through Thursday, but we'll do that today since I'm not going to be here Friday or Thursday for that matter.
The telephone number, if you want to be on the program today, is 800-282-2882, the email address, lrushbow at EIBnet.com.
Great to have you here, folks.
Another three hours of broadcast excellence.
We're coming up on this mythical 100 days of the Obama administration.
I'd like to refer to it, my friends, as finals week.
And according to me, and I've put together a list of things that I have noted since the outset of this administration.
Just today, I think you have to say Obama's failing because Mahmoud Ahmadinezad has just ripped him a new one.
And his buddy Fidel Castro just called him superficial.
I mean, now this cannot be good.
The next thing you know, Hugo Chavez had come out with some criticism here.
After all of these worldwide tours to get all of these dictators and thugs on our side, they are being highly critical of the bamster.
Also, ladies and gentlemen, the interrogation memos, it is amazing what is coming out about this.
And we're going to get into that in detail as the program unfolds before your very eyes and ears.
But I have to tell you something.
I've heard more than one person say, because Obama changed his mind on this.
And originally he said he wasn't going to, we can't keep looking to the past.
We've got to look to the future here.
And so, well, I don't think it would serve any purpose to prosecute or investigate former administration officials on these interrogations the CIA did.
And all of a sudden, changes his mind yesterday.
And I'm hearing a lot of people say he must be buckling to pressure from his left wing.
He must be buckling to pressure from people reminding him of a campaign promise.
He's not buckling to anything but his own desires.
Folks, this is part and parcel of the, you know, Obama doesn't know what he's doing.
He doesn't know all this that's happening in his administration.
This is, you know, he's such a wonderful guy.
He doesn't know about all of this.
Well, he's orchestrating all of this.
He's, as he himself said, he's the visionary.
He's setting the tone.
I mean, the Canadians, you know, Janet Napolitano the other day?
Janet Napolitano, this is a rumor that has been debunked years ago.
Janet Napolitano said the 9-11 hijackers actually got into our country through Canada.
So now the Canadians are up in arms and the National Post in Canada Day has a piece.
How in the hell did this woman get her job?
Earlier this week, she says it's not a crime to illegally enter the country, cross the border, when it is.
It's a ditz.
It's a total hick, hack, left-wing kook that is now a head up in charge of Homeland Security.
And she's there because who chose her?
Obama.
I mean, you Obama people, you cannot have it both ways.
You cannot say this guy is something brand new and fresh like we've never had before.
And he's so smart and he's so in control.
He's so in touch.
And then say he has no clue what's going on in his own administration or that he's being pressured and he's buckling to pressure.
What was funny about the interrogation memo flip-flop when he talked about allowing Holder to go, and if this happens, we keep talking about overreaching.
If this happens, if Eric Holder, and he could very well do this, if Eric Holder does instigate investigations or let Conyers do it over in the House, somebody start investigating former Bush administration officials, charging them.
If they subpoena them, and if these guys have to go out and get lawyers, and let me tell you something, if this happens, they don't care whether they get a conviction or not.
It won't be about that.
It'll be about destroying these people.
A la scooter libby.
It will be about destroying and criminalizing policy circumstances with which you disagree.
Here you've got, you mean it's these lawyers who the administration consulted, and they consulted, by the way, the Bush administration did all over the world with various nations on interrogation techniques of terrorists because there's a new kind of prisoner.
And Congress signed off on all of it.
Nancy Pelosi, they all signed off on all of this in 2002.
And in fact, when they were explained waterboarding and all this, nobody in Congress objected.
They said, you've got to do more.
So if Holder proceeds with this, he's going to have to send out subpoenas, not just to Bush administration officials, but not just executive branch.
He's going to send out subpoenas to the lawyers, the White House counsel, and anybody else who had anything to do with this.
And once that happens, you're going to see the earth move because nobody's going to go work for the executive branch ever again.
If this precedent is set where you can go back and criminalize the policy disagreements you have with previous administrations, that could be the point where everybody's hoping that is going to happen, overreach.
I frankly think we've had 100 overreaches.
I'm going to go through them here in just a second.
But nevertheless, that could be something that will awaken a lot of people who still appear to be dormant.
So it's stunning to watch this.
And it's kind of funny yesterday because after Obama flip-flopped there in the Oval Office, he had this photo op with the king of Jordan, King Abdullah.
And that's where, in answer to a reporter's question, he said, you know what?
I'm going to let Holder go ahead and do what he wants to do.
If he wants to investigate these people in the Bush administration, find a nandy.
Well, at the afternoon press briefing yesterday, poor old Gibbs, who on a good day is incompetent, poor old Gibbs was just, I mean, it's like the White House press office was just blindsided by this.
They sent poor old Gibbs out there, and he didn't really have any intelligent, credible answers to why the flip-flop and so forth, because of course he got to protect Obama.
And what is the director of communications of the White House, not a spokeswoman, but the director of community, the only, she quit.
She resigned the White House.
They've reassigned her to some other agency.
Who?
Yeah, she went over to Commerce Committee, whatever, Commerce Department.
She was the only one that was not part of the campaign.
She's the only one that hadn't drunk the Kool-Aid.
And so, and now you've got the suicide today of the CFO over at, what is it, Freddie Mac?
It's not Fanny.
It's Freddie Mac.
But the homicide detectives are on the scene now.
The wife phoned in at 4.48 this morning, and then cops arrived.
It looked like no foul play, looked like it was a suicide, but they got to investigate the Hamid.
Yeah, it was Ellen Moran was the Office of the Communications, the White House director, out of there, quit.
Now, we don't want to assume what's going on here, but she was the only one that hadn't drunk the Kool-Aid.
This is just, it's just, I sit here and, you know, I chronicle all this stuff, and I still, I'm in, I'm in 100% disbelief.
And then, you know, we have this stupid thing that happened with the Miss USA pageant, where guess what?
This judge, this blogger, Paris Hilton, and you ought to see some pictures of this guy as he wants to be seen, has been asked, well, why did you penalize Miss California, Carrie Pregene, here for telling you the truth?
Look at Miss USA is supposed to be inclusive.
I gave her a question.
She's supposed to dance around it.
In other words, you better be politically correct in the entertainment world and the political world today, or we are going to penalize you and chop your head off and do whatever we can to ruin you.
Political correctness, running amok.
The news each and every day here is just breathtaking to behold.
I'm going to take a brief time out here.
We come back.
I'm going to go through the finals week for Obama here.
The first 100 days.
I don't know when the first 100 days is.
It's 90, 100 days after January 20th.
But regardless, this is an incredible list of things that I've been thinking about.
And I've been taking notes and I've been putting them all down.
And when I go through all this, at the end of it, all of this is being spun as productive and historic.
And it's nothing but buffoonery.
It's embarrassing incompetence and inexperience.
All that coming up.
Plus, of course, your phone calls right after this.
By the way, this is Earth Day, ladies and gentlemen.
Well, what am I going to do for Earth Day?
I'm going to have every one of my cars driven as much as possible today.
I've got my airplane flying to Los Angeles and back.
Let's see.
What have I got?
All the lights are going to be on, the air conditioning down to 68 degrees in all, well, four of the five houses.
The property manager likes it at 65.
Let's see.
We're going to have all kinds of beef.
I'm fixing Allen Brothers all weekend long.
I personally am going to see to it that we lose two acres of rainforest.
Actually, the rainforest is coming, the rainforest is replacing itself at a rate more rapid than it's being lost.
I have some incredible statistics today with Earth Day as well.
Our morning update today, we honored some great people that are always condemned and criticized on Earth Day.
We're going to expand that today.
But here's just a little taste.
Here's a story.
No kidding, one in three children fear the Earth apocalypse.
One in three children, according to a survey, the age between six and eleven, fears that Mother Earth won't exist when they grow up.
Why do they think that?
Al Gore, their stupid idiot teachers, and the American left fear crisis.
So if kids don't think the Earth's going to be there when they grow up, and then they hear solutions to how it can be there when they grow up, they're going to go along with it, right?
Like giving up a little freedom, a little prosperity, having their parents' taxes raised, having their parents drive around a bunch of little jalopy cars.
This is exactly the game plan.
Finals week, Barack Obama approaching 100 days.
Now, they say this has been a historically productive 100 days.
I have just put a list here together in no particular order, just off the top of my head, of the things in this administration that have stood out to me since it began.
Admiral Blair, this is all over the New York Times today, Admiral Blair admitting the CIA received high-value, life-saving information from terrorists, while President Obama is condemning the same interrogations as immoral and counterproductive.
President Obama is throwing and has thrown grand White House parties with Kobe beef, $100 a pound, while telling the nation to cut back in order to survive the greatest economic downturn supposedly since the Great Depression.
Bowing to the king of Saudi Arabia, listening patiently and respectfully while a two-bit dictator lectures Obama, it was Daniel Ortega, with false charges for 50 minutes about the criminal country he leads.
And Obama doesn't say one word to object, one word in disagreement, does not stand up for his country at one point during the Summit of the Americas.
He has run around the world and apologized for the greatest, the most compassionate, the most innovative, and freedom-loving country in world history.
Now we've got Fidel Castro setting Obama straight about how Cuba handles political prisoners and its economy.
Fidel Castro, one of Obama's idols, calling him superficial.
We had the nomination of tax cheats to his cabinet, including the man who oversees the IRS, five tax cheats in the Obama administration.
We have Obama's joke of a press spokesman who makes a complete idiot of himself on a daily basis.
He sends back a symbol of freedom, that bust of Sir Winston Churchill to Great Britain just after moving into the White House.
He wants nothing to do with it.
He did it of his own volition.
They said you can keep it.
He said, no, we don't want it here.
They said, put it in a different room of the White House.
We don't want it here and sent it back to the British Embassy.
It was given to us, President Bush, after 9-11, by the Brits.
He insulted the Prime Minister of England, the Queen of England, with embarrassing, thoughtless gifts.
We have the French president Sarkozy ridiculing Obama's messianic complex, inviting him to walk on water at Normandy Beach.
We have Iran taking a hostage an American journalist as Obama promises better relations.
We have North Korea humiliating Obama with their missile launch.
We have Obama putting the country in debt for generations to come while promising fiscal responsibility, offering up laughable budget cuts, banning lobbyists from his administration while appointing them left and right, openly lying that Caterpillar would higher up with the passage of his stimulus bill, then watching while that company lays off thousands after the stimulus bill passes.
He pledges to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay where I have a thriving merchandise business.
But then he keeps it open with no plan for its future.
Proclaiming total transparency while keeping secret who got the TARP funds.
When, where, why.
Being incapable of communicating without a teleprompter while the press declares him a Reagan-esque great communicator.
He attacks a private citizen broadcaster from the White House as part of an orchestrated plan to distract the country from legislation and policies we don't want, which thus touched off a political firestorm.
All of this while claiming to be a unifier.
He makes a hamhanded attempt to nationalize the banks, preventing financial institutions from paying back TARP money they don't need or want.
We got a column today in the Wall Street Journal by Holman Jenkins that General Motors is a debacle.
It is an absolute debacle and mess.
And soon Wall Street's going to be the same thing.
He has made bad situations worse with car manufacturers, and the worst is yet to come.
He has sparked hundreds of protests involving hundreds of thousands of Americans at tea parties regarding irresponsible government spending, while his homeland security chief labels peacefully demonstrating Americans and veterans as security risks.
That's just the things I could think of off the top of my head.
Oh, yeah, moving the census over to the Commerce Department to politicize that.
I mean, this administration has been one-part joke, one part unbelievable, one part, and many parts scary.
Because while all this has gone on, this man is reported upon and reported to be the best president we've ever had, a shining light, a beacon, historical figure.
We have a sycophantic mainstream media in this country, but the New York Times.
The New York Times has $34 million in cash.
The New York Times is in debt $1.3 billion.
And while that was happening, by the way, this is cool, folks.
The New York Times corporate president and CEO, Janet Robinson, received a compensation package valued at $5.58 million last year, while the publisher of the New York Times, Arthur Schulzberger Jr., received a total of $2.4 million while this company is losing its shirt.
Does that not sound a little bit like Wall Street?
Does this not sound like excessive bonuses?
Does this sound like CEOs paying them when the performance of their company is in the sewer?
And haven't we demonized private sector CEOs for this very making enemies out of people in the private sector and ginning up protests by his Acorn buddies at the homes of AIG executives, fomenting class hatred and rival?
The list goes on of the egregious things this administration has done.
His House organ, the New York Times, $1.3 billion in debt, $34 million in cash on hand.
They borrowed some money from some guy named Slim down in Mexico, and he's charging them 18% interest.
And now Hillary Clinton's out there saying the U.S. is laying groundwork for tough, crippling sanctions on Iran if Iran rejects engagement.
Iran says, we'll talk, but we're not doing anything about our nuclear program.
I mean, the world is making a joke.
The world is making a joke of our country, and the president is being praised for it.
We are back on Earth Day, 2009, Rush Limbaugh, the EIB network, and the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.
Here are details on the reprimands.
You might say the teachers are trying to educate the student.
Fidel Castro, commenting on Barack Obama.
Castro rejects presidents, Obama's suggestions that Cuba should free political prisoners or cut taxes on remittances from the United States.
Fidel Castro, on a blog, no less, said that Obama misinterpreted remarks by his brother and successor, Raul, and bristled at the suggestion that Cuba should free political prisoners or cut taxes on remittances from abroad as a goodwill gesture to the United States.
All of this enraged Castro, who wrote in an essay posted on a government website that Obama, without a doubt, misinterpreted Raul's declarations.
Castro appeared to be throwing cold water on expectations for improved bilateral relations, suggesting that Obama had no right to urge Cuba to make even small concessions.
He also seemed to suggest too much was being made of Raul's comments about discussing everything with the U.S. Affirming that the, this is Castro, affirming that the president of Cuba is ready to discuss any topic with the president of the United States, expresses he's not afraid to sign a bravery and confidence in the principles of the revolution.
Now, there's a hidden little secret here that everybody with half a brain knows about the Castros.
The last thing they want is an open relationship with the United States.
The last thing they want is the blockade to come down.
That's what Fidel's always called the embargo.
He tells Cuban citizens that they're Navy ships out there preventing goods.
He calls it a blockade.
So here comes our naive young boy president down there.
Well, you know, we're going to open up.
We're going to have this new dialogue.
We're going to send you some money.
We're going to send more people down there.
You ought to free some political prisoners.
And Castro bristles at the naivete of his student, Barack Obama.
It's the last thing they want.
You understand that the U.S. embargo is what gives the Castro brothers and the Cuban government the ammo to tell their citizens what a rotten economy they have and what a rotten life they all have, even though it's the best damn health care in the freaking world, according to the stupid idiots in the American left.
The last thing they want is the embargo lifted.
The ex-president had previously expressed admiration for his student, Obama, but this time Castro blasted the new U.S. president for showing signs of superficiality.
Whoa!
Well, I mean, here's Castro, the teacher, Castro, the professor.
He can see the weaknesses in the student far more than American leftists can see the weakness.
Superficiality.
I mean, Castro's got it.
And let's go to another teacher.
Another professor, Mahmoud Ahmadinezad, today criticized Obama's boycott of a United Nations racism conference, dubbing it unhelpful.
On Monday, the International Racism Conference in Geneva, which the U.S. boycotted.
Now, by the way, I think we did the right thing not to go to this thing.
Don't misunderstand.
We did the right thing.
But Ahmadinezad is somebody that Obama wants to talk to.
And Hillary Clinton says today, we're going to put really tough sanctions on him, Hardy Harhar.
Hillary Clinton said today in Senate testimony, I just don't think Dick Cheney is a reliable source on interrogations.
Oh, as though you are, as though anybody in this administration, let me ask something.
The way you need to look at this interrogation stuff, folks.
Imagine that one of these people has a member of your family, and they're threatening to behead them.
But you don't know where they are.
We have a prisoner who knows where they are.
You want to bet on how much you would be willing to support these very techniques, which are said to have worked.
It's even in the New York Times today.
The interrogation techniques that Obama has now banned worked.
So Ahmedinezad's all upset we didn't go to the racism conference lecturing his student, Barack Obama.
Obama, the U.S. right not to go to this thing.
The whole thing was a fiasco.
But Ahmedinezad is considered one of our grave threats and enemies with his nuke program.
And Obama says that he's going to forge a new relationship out there with him.
And all we have to do is talk to him.
All we have to do is show him we mean him no harm.
Such naivete, the ugliness, the hypocrisy of President Obama's morality plays.
This guy is very cold, folks.
He is a 100% pure leftist, extremist political animal.
And I just, I have a difficult time putting up with him lecturing us, the United States of America, on matters he identifies as requiring the pushing of a morality reset button with him as the chief protocol director of morality.
According to Obama, our response after being attacked on 9-11 was immoral.
Of all the people, of all things, Barack Obama should be the last person to lecture anybody standing atop a rock of morality.
His foundation is leftist.
He identifies with anti-American politics.
He laughs.
He yucks it up with these people who hate our country.
He's been masterful at deceiving a large number of Americans with the help of his friends in the drive-by media.
Look at who Obama has accused of being morally deficient.
Wall Street, all CEOs, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, the CIA, and essentially America itself.
He has declared those five things morally deficient.
And only now will Wall Street and CEOs, Bush and Cheney, CIA, and even America, be straightened out with a new moral rudder headed by himself, the one, the Messiah, Barack Obama, the most merciful.
Yet he supports infanticide.
He attended a racist, bigoted church for 20 years.
He had active support of the criminal political bullying enterprise known as Acorn.
His dealings with Tony Resco, his working relationship with Bill Ayers, embracing and smiling Hugo Chavez, Danielle Ortega, and not defending his country after it was slandered.
This guy tells us he's in charge of our new morality.
Sorry, folks, it's just tough to stomach.
Tough to deal with on a daily basis.
Let's grab some phones since it's open line Friday on Wednesday.
We'll start Westchester, New York with Deborah.
Thank you for calling.
You're up first today.
Great to have you here.
Thanks very much.
Here's my question.
Barack Obama has to know that as a result of what he's doing, that we're less safe, that he is crippling further intelligence gathering.
He also has to know that an attack on our country during his presidency will utterly finish him.
Hit not only him, but most likely the Democratic Party for a while.
So my question is: does he really believe that there is no war on terror, or the only other option is he's just willing to play Russian roulette with our country's safety?
I don't know.
It'd be tough to speculate as to whether he thinks we're actually not or actually are in a war on terror, but I can tell you what I think is the primary reason or explanation for the answer to all your questions.
Let's go through it.
He's crippling further intelligence gathering.
No, in his mind, he's making us a more moral nation.
He is improving our image around the world.
He is getting rid of these techniques that created, in his worldview, more terrorists.
You said that he has to know that an attack on our country during his presidency will utterly finish him.
I don't know that you can say that.
An attack on the country, if it happens again, if you carefully watch what's being set up here, it's all being set up to be blamed on the Bush administration.
Remember, Barack Obama's mindset is that everything that came before him was unjust and immoral, from George Washington all the way to Bush.
And if we're hit again, it's going to be not because we have penalized ourselves and tied our hands ourselves.
It's because the Bush administration so mishandled it with the unfair, immoral interrogation and torture that he drove these people to it.
I don't think the American people will buy that.
Well, they will not buy that.
Maybe not, but the press will.
They won't turn against him.
The press positive.
Maybe not, but the press will.
You have to understand that his amen chorus, the drive-by media, will echo every bit of that.
They can spin it all they want, but at some point, there's a tipping point.
And if we are attacked, and George Bush clearly kept us safe for those eight years, you know.
No, no, no.
See, that paradigm is being erased with all of us, what all this going on right now is about.
Bush didn't keep us safe.
He risked us even further.
He put us in even greater danger.
That's what this is all about.
That's the underlying reason for doing.
Why else prosecute Bush administration officials?
Why not go out there and investigate them for violating the law and being criminals and so forth?
I guarantee this administration and this bunch of people and the American left here is, they are intent not on wiping out militant Islamism.
They are intent on wiping out any opposition to them in this country.
And you have to look behind the scenes or between the lines at that as their primary objective to explain what appears to be the unexplainable when it comes to both domestic and foreign policy.
Got to run.
Thanks, Deborah.
We'll be back after this.
Stay with us.
Here's that audio soundbite, Mrs. Clinton testifying.
It was actually not the Senate, it was the House, excuse me, Foreign Affairs Committee.
And she was asked a question by Congressman Dana Rohrebacher of California.
This is how it went.
Are you in favor of releasing the documents that Dick Cheney has been requesting be released?
Well, it won't surprise you that I don't consider him a particularly reliable source of information.
Madam Secretary, I ask you a specific question.
Dick Cheney has asked for specific documents to be unclassified.
We're not asking for your opinion of Dick Cheney about those documents.
You want to maintain your credibility with us.
What is your position on the release of those documents?
Well, Congressman, I believe that we ought to get to the bottom of this entire matter.
I think it's in the best interest of our country, and that is what the president believes.
He does not believe getting to the bottom of the matter is at the best interest of the country.
Getting to the bottom of the matter would prove every one of you is wrong about conducting the entire war on terror, Mrs. Clinton.
Dick Cheney's not lying about documents, Mrs. Clinton.
He has seen them, and the documents that he wants released are simply the memos that show the success above and beyond what's already shown to be successful in the memos that Obama has released.
You got to love Rorabacher here.
You just got to love Rorabacher because she takes the occasion of his question to start rapping Cheney, and he just hands it right back down her smug throat.
Dick Cheney has asked for specific documents.
We're not asking your opinion of Dick Cheney.
You want to maintain your credibility with us.
What's your position on the release of the documents?
People are petty, partisan, mean-spirited little leftists who have now, they've ascended.
Every damn one of them has been Peter principled.
Every damn person in this government's Peter principled.
You do good at something, so somebody promotes you to an area you have no clue what the hell you're doing.
Napolitano Geithner.
Hear what Geithner said today.
Geithner testified again today.
Geithner, oh, the U.S. is largely responsible for the world recession.
More America bashing.
More America bashing from this administration.
Back to the phones, John, Charlotte, North Carolina.
Glad to have you, sir.
Welcome.
Charlotte Dittos and Waxaw Dittos on all areas in between, Russia.
Thank you, sir.
Got a question for you real quick.
Yes, sir.
Your accuracy rating, as you stated yesterday or the day before, 99.1.
No, no.
Documented now to be almost always right, 99.
Okay, when you started, obviously before you had an opinion, it was 100%.
What were you wrong to drop it?
It's so long ago.
You know, it wasn't just one giant thing.
I mean, a bunch of small, insignificant things, but they still count if they're offered as opinions.
And they're just small, insignificant things that happened over the years.
I mean, this is my opinions have been audited since 1988.
And so if you want to say, okay, I started out 100% right, why do you think that?
Why was it that I didn't start out at zero?
Well, I guess it's all how you look at it from a math point of view.
Well, you're an optimist.
I started out never being wrong because I never expressed an opinion.
Some would say you start out never being right.
So I've gone from 100 to 99%.
One of the primary penalties that I suffered in my opinion audit was, and it was just in the past two years, I took the fall for just horrendous mistakes and errors by the staff.
I forget there were two things I was totally misinformed about.
I trusted the staff, and when I announced those things, I was wrong.
These were factual things.
But I then got penalized for expressing my opinion that it was my fault when it wasn't.
It was the staff's.
And I was, yeah, and there's another one.
And I think perhaps these two, taking the fall for the staff and then saying it was my fault when it wasn't, and I predicted Hillary Clinton would not run for the Senate in New York.
Those two things are probably the large, all by myself.
I didn't have any help from the staff.
That's true.
I didn't have any help from the staff.
In fact, the staff argued with me about that.
Everybody else did.
But those two things probably are largely responsible for my opinion audit being only 99%.
That's a great question out there, John.
It's a great open line Friday on Wednesday question.
A quick timeout.
We'll come back much more after this.
Stay with us.
We have an extended Earth Day update coming up today, ladies and gentlemen, in the next hour of Broadcast Excellence, honoring all of those who have actually improved life for millions, billions of human beings.
They are the ones who are condemned on this day.
We will honor them.
Also, U.S. banking group Wells Fargo, my bank, by the way, said today that it earned a record profit of $3.05 billion in the first quarter following its acquisition of Wachovia.
The Wells Fargo president and chief executive John Stump with the quote of the day, the best way to generate capital is to earn it.
Now, in the Obama administration, this could be a hate crime because the Obama administration, the best way to generate capital is to print it and to borrow it and then to give it away or to tax it.