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May 8, 2009 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:39
May 8, 2009, Friday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 247 Podcast.
A pleasant day to all.
It is the Rush Limbaugh Show, but every once in a while Rush needs a couple of days off.
It was true a couple of weeks ago, and you got Thursday with Mark Stein and Friday with me.
Must have worked out okay.
At least as okay as it can be when Rush is away.
Mark Stein did a great job yesterday.
I always enjoy hearing him.
What a wonderful writer and a wonderful guy to hear, and I really enjoyed listening to him.
And I hope that I can keep that uh vibe alive here today.
Mark Davis from Deep in the Heart of Texas at WBAP Dallas Fort Worth, proud Limbaugh affiliate since 1994.
And I know that Rush isn't here, and we always try to keep things going, keep our toes tapping in the substitute host mode.
Rush will be back on Monday, but even though he's not here today, it is still today, and some things should never change.
Live from the Southern Command in sunny South Florida.
It's open line Friday.
Yes, it is.
And it's kind of funny, as I told you last time when we got together on a Friday, that Open Line Friday is sort of the mode in which I conduct my entire life, a strange ADD stream of consciousness in which I could go virtually anywhere at any time, and I feel the only fair thing to do is to allow you to do pretty well the same.
But it is not without some semblance of guidance.
It is not without some overall plan, some choreography.
So let us begin with an opening burst of things that are front uh front of mind for me, and let's let those resonate with some that are for you.
We certainly have some things to talk about with regard to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi since uh since we last spoke here on the Limbaugh Show since Mark Stein spoke with you yesterday.
The afternoon was filled with some interesting breaking news.
Intelligence officials released documents that pretty well show that Nancy Pelosi was indeed briefed in September 2002 about the use of harsh interrogation tactics against Al Qaeda prisoners.
And this would seem to contradict her repeated statements over the last 18 months that she was never told that these techniques were actually being used.
At issue here is uh a 10-page memo that outlines an almost seven-year history of classified briefings.
Intelligence officials say in those briefings that Pelosi and then Congressman Porter Goss of Florida were the first two members of Congress ever briefed on these interrogation tactics.
Pelosi and Goss, who were then the ranking member and chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, respectively, were briefed on September 4th, 2002.
One week before the first anniversary of the 9-11 terrorist attacks.
Memo came from the Director of National Intelligence and the CIA went to Capitol Hill, and it notes that the Pelosi Goss briefing covered EITs, talking about EITs on the EIB.
The EIT abbreviation is Enhanced Interrogation Tech.
And the use of those on Abu Zubaida, one of the earliest valuable Al-Qaeda members captured, and by the way, the first to have waterboarding used against him.
The issue of what Nancy Pelosi knew and when she knew it, that familiar song, What Did She Know?
When did she know it?
This has become a matter of heated debate on Capitol Hill.
Republicans accusing her of knowing for many years, precisely the techniques that CIA agents were using.
But you know, to have brought it up at the time.
You know, in the midst of the presidency that was using them, there's no way she was going to win that battle, President Bush.
That's the thing about President Bush, doggone it.
Funny thing about him, he wanted to win the war.
Yeah, government got bigger.
Yeah, he was soft on the borders, but God love him, he wanted to win the war.
And even Nancy Pelosi in her highest moment of ego never Dreamed that her objections to EITs, enhanced interrogation techniques, that somehow this would make President Bush wake up one morning and go, darn, the Congresswoman from San Francisco is right.
I really need to soften up these interrogation techniques.
So she, of course, said nothing.
In 2002, 03, 04, even when the war was going really badly in 2006, she said nothing about personal knowledge of what exactly was going on.
So in a I love this.
Any time anytime these three words are in a news story, someone senses trouble.
In a carefully worded statement, Pelosi's office said yesterday she had never been briefed about the use of waterboarding, only that it had been approved by Bush administration lawyers as a legal technique to use in interrogations.
Brendan Daly, spokesman for Nancy Pelosi says, quote, as this document shows, the speaker was briefed only once.
How many times do you have to brief them?
You gotta tell her something five times until she gets it.
If you you're either briefed or you're not briefed, being briefed only once is uh is a quaint defense.
Um anyway, Mr. Daly, uh Pelosi spokesman Brendan Daly, the briefers described these techniques, said they were legal, but said that waterboarding had not yet been used.
Hmm.
So we have an interesting distinction.
And now that the environment is wholly different, new president, uh the complete absence of the desire to do everything that civility allows, that a that a decent society can permit in order to win a war, and therein lies the complete debate.
There are people who believe, there are people who believe that in waterboarding Khalid Sheikh Muhammad or Abu Zubaidah that we ceased to become a decent society.
We we cashed in some of our civilized society chips.
Really?
Speaking of quaint definitions, isn't that one of the quaintest?
Because maybe I'm just crazy, but I believe that we would have cashed in far more than our civility.
I believe we would have cashed in our the very foundation of our basic decency if we had failed to do what we could do to save American lives.
If we had decided against going to these lengths to save American lives, that is the measure of a society gone wrong.
A society that is cavalier about protecting its citizens, a society that is that that gets into a hand-wringing moment of naval-gazing introspection rather than do what you can do to get answers out of people to save American lives.
We just have diametrically opposed notions of what a decent and civilized society does.
To some in this country, apparently the president of the United States and his party, decency and civility are defined not by the desire to save American lives, but rather the desire to make sure that the detainees are not made uncomfortable.
Now, there's been an ongoing, uh, you know, and it may never end, debate over what is and is not okay.
And that debate is okay.
That that's something that that all of us thoughtful people should have.
We should have a big list of procedures and say, okay, this we can do, uh, this not so much.
This is all right.
This one we never want to do.
This one, maybe in some cases with high value detainees where we really pretty well know they got stuff in their head, but we don't walk through the the cell blocks at random.
And that's and that's how I view waterboarding.
Of that, no, you don't have waterboarding day at Gitmo.
Hey, everybody, it's waterboarding day.
You know, round them all up.
Let's see who talks.
No.
No.
But if you've got a Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, if you've got an Abu Zubaida, and your belief is pretty reliable that there's stuff in their heads that if divulged will save American Lives, do you waterboard them?
Yes, you do.
And yes, we did.
And it worked.
But I guess just my last point on the whole waterboarding thing.
I'll throw in a couple of other things before we take our first break.
1-800-282-2882, by the way.
1-800-282-2882 on the Rush Limbaugh Show.
Mark Davis in Texas.
Hi again.
The thing that you do is in trying to characterize whether something is really bad, whether it is so bad that no civilized society should do it.
And I I suppose that exists.
I mean, chopping off fingers one by one when you don't even really know if the detainee knows anything.
No, I don't want to do that.
You know, no.
But if you're making the list of what does and does not belong on that list, if it's something we do to our own guys to toughen them up or make them aware of what might happen to them should they fall into evil hands, you do know that we waterboard our own guys, right?
Then I guess I don't know, from Navy SEALs to Rangers to various other special ops folks who might fall into the worst of enemy hands.
You know what we do?
As part of their training, we waterboard them.
And that's probably not their favorite day of training, because it's really unpleasant.
That's kind of the point.
But if it's something that we do to our own guys, that ain't torture.
Now, if we bring in all the fresh-faced uh folks uh before we headed out on Navy SEAL duty or special ops and say, okay, let me tell you something.
You're gonna fall in with some really evil folks, and they might uh break every bone in one of your arms and then hang you upside down for four days.
So we're gonna do that right now at Camp Lejeune.
Whoa!
No, no, no, no, no, no.
No, we're probably not gonna we're definitely not going to do that.
See, that would be something so horrible that we would never do it to our own guys, even to toughen them against future ordeals.
But waterboarding, we do that to our own guys.
And if we do that to our own guys, isn't that exhibit A, that it ain't torture, and that it does not rise to the level of something so unspeakably terrible that we should be referred to as some kind of third Reich for doing it to Khalid Sheikh Muhammad to save American lives.
And if I hear one more nugget of this moral equivalency, well, we didn't like it when the Japanese did it.
Oh, really?
So motive motivation means nothing.
The gun in the hand of a criminal is the same as the gun in the hand of the cop.
Uh the new the American nuclear warhead is the same as the Russian nuclear warhead.
That is a moral idiocy which boggles the mind.
And what makes it boggle the mind even more is that it is a moral idiocy that ensnares the thought process of a ton of currently elected officials.
So therein lies our plight.
Monitoring the daily plight.
That's what happens on the Rush Limbaugh show when Rush is here, and that's what happens when he's not.
I'm Mark Davis.
Let's take our first pause and give you the phone number once again.
1800-282-2882.
Um Ridge is not going to run for the Senate.
Well, a little Pennsylvania talk today.
And just a number of things.
And since it is Friday and it's kind of loosey-goosey in my world all the time, and even in Russia's world on Friday, once we get to, I don't know, deep in the second hour or in the third hour, I'm going to go way out on a limb here and suggest some of you have seen the Star Trek movie.
Mm-hmm.
Uh, not right now, but a little later on.
I'm going to look for some real people reviews and cover a little bit of something I covered on my local show this morning.
Why did this need to be PG 13?
Uh I I don't need everything to be Sesame Street, but my six-year-old really wants to see this, and I've told him he can't, and I don't need everything, you know, so I don't know, there's a balance to be struck there.
A lot to do.
Friday shows tend to wrap up the week on any given talk show.
It should be no different on the finest talk show the uh the medium has ever known.
The Rush Limbaugh Show, the EIB Network.
I'm Mark Davison for Rush, and we'll be right back in just a moment.
It is the Friday Rush Limbaugh Show.
I'm Mark Davis filling in.
Rush is back on Monday.
1-800-282-2882, 1-800-282-2882.
Uh, I mentioned that the goal of most Friday talk shows, certainly never any different around here, is to kind of tie a big bow around events of the week and as we head into the weekend, sort of see what we think about everything with a couple of days to decompress before the passing parade kicks back off on a Monday.
So obviously this last week and this last couple of weeks really has been uh needless to say, a whole lot of attention to the H1N1, swine flu.
Now it's the first thing you need to know about that is it's apparently not done.
Uh the World Health uh Organization, lots of folks, CDC are saying, don't uh you know don't take your eye completely off of this ball because we're still monitoring cases and you know, so just because we've let your kids go back to school, what a weird I don't know, a lot I got an email today from someone who said, Look, this is either a risk or it's not.
If it's a sufficient risk to to be uh uh harangues about it every day, then tell me to keep my kids out of school.
And if it's safe enough to let my kids go back to school, then just let it go, man.
It's the flu.
It's the flu.
Well, did we do the right thing?
In retrospect, it is looking like I I guess I don't want to say an overreaction, but uh uh yet, but a lot of caution.
Maybe more caution than we needed to show.
I mean, but we didn't we'd only know that in retrospect, right?
Wouldn't you rather look back on this and say, okay, we probably yanked a few thousand kids.
That's just around here, a few million kids out of school that we probably didn't need to yank out of school.
But I'd rather do that than look back and say, wow, we left all those kids in school, and you know, ninety of them died of the H1N1.
We uh that would be bad.
That would be bad.
So as swine flu, I hope goes the way of SARS and the bird flu and legionnaires and various other things.
Just want to know what your th and and how did this go in your life?
Uh around here in Texas, we had and I tell you what, you don't mess with a prom in Texas.
The the the makeup and hair styling industries uh went into an instant depression, and I'm not really kidding.
Uh uh uh you don't mess with proms, and a lot of proms just got nuked.
This is once in a lifetime stuff.
You know, if you had a vacation in Mexico planned, you can reschedule that.
I mean, it might cost you a little something, but you can you know you can always go to Ensenada, but you can't always have your senior prom.
And some of those just flat out got nuked.
So how did the I just have the whole swine flute thing, which is probably at least at the end of its status as a front of mind issue.
How did that work out for you?
Let me mingle that in with a few other topics, and let's begin the parade of phone calls.
1-800-282-2882.
We are in Indianapolis.
John, you are on the Rush Limbaugh Show.
Mark Davis filling in.
Great to have you.
Hello.
Thanks, Mark.
Thanks for filling in today.
I guess my point was on uh Pelosi and uh their thoughts.
Uh you know, it's not just you're mentioning the you know, special forces, the SEALs, and you know, uh as a former uh naval aviator, uh all aviators in the military go through SEER school, and they all go through that type of training.
So uh it yes, it's an unpleasant day or a couple days.
But it is doable.
And it is you know, intensive fortitude, whatever you call it, you get through it.
And I think if some of these legislators would go through it, they would see exactly that it is a purpose for the end to get information to save lives.
Well, but but would and it's uh okay.
The the portrait you paint is if we were to put a disapproving lawmaker, if we were to, you know, uh waterboard Chris Dodd.
I know don't uh let me let me just hold that image in my head for one precious moment.
Uh just paid my day.
But if we aren't but if we were to uh to waterboard a disapproving legislator, they would come out from that process and go, Oh, wow, that was horrible.
But ultimately not torture, and if you get information that saves American lives, it's probably okay.
Well, uh and there's different techniques.
Well, the reason I bring that up.
The only reason I bring that up is I I I I I think you're dreaming.
I think you're imparting to them a clarity and a wisdom that they will never have.
Uh that even if they went through waterboarding and said, Oh, that wasn't quite as bad as I thought it was going to be, really, just that they would still hate the war effort, hate Bush, because that's what it's ultimately all about, and and disapprove of uh of what the CIA did in this regard.
I I th I think that they're just inconcrete on that.
Let me let you have the last thirty seconds.
Go ahead.
I and and one thing I was gonna say is but they are approving, I heard this on uh Fox the other night was they are approving of drones going in and and and uh selectively bombing certain areas that uh have collateral damage.
So they are making a decision for collateral damage on civilians, but they are not willing to do this type of interrogation on uh people they know are known terrorists.
And that I find uh uh interesting.
It is it is very interesting.
Let me thank you for your call.
My best to everybody in Indy.
And uh f all right, there we go.
Uh let's uh how what what might be the reason for a slightly more accommodating view on the part of some Democrats?
What might be the difference in the landscape right now, as opposed to, oh, last year, couple years ago, 2003.
What what's the main thing that's different?
Hmm.
Why, that would be they have a Democrat president.
Suddenly, things we do to bring about success in the war, suddenly those things are good.
Mark Davis in for us, right back.
Many thanks, many thanks.
Reaching out to the Muslim world with the Bengals walk like an Egyptian.
Little things mean a lot.
Little things mean a lot.
All righty.
Um we got some big things on the phones right now, and uh one thing I'm gonna toss here, maybe in the very next segment, because another Friday thing, uh especially when when I'm in the chair with my short attention span, is I want to go to some stuff that might not get a lot of attention on other day.
Not that it needs a lot today, but I am fascinated by a Roger Simon piece in Politico about you ready?
It's been face it, it's been water cooler this week.
Elizabeth Edwards.
I mean, the first thing that needs to be said about Elizabeth Edwards, may God bless her and uh and maybe rid her of the cancer.
That would be nice too.
Uh that would just be great and and just God bless her for what she's been through.
But Roger dares to speak some things, and I will share those words and attribute them to him, thus avoiding the negative attention to myself.
Except I obviously kind of uh am nodding a little bit at his uh his views about what the heck is she thinking?
What's with the book and what and you know, huh?
I mean, you're coming at me now with all this this, oh, I'm so wronged, I'm so wronged, I'm so wronged, and she undeniably was, but there sure was a point in there where she was willing to play ball.
And what's kind of the difference between Elizabeth Edwards and Hillary Clinton?
Well, obviously the terminal cancer is answer number one.
But I'll I'll let Roger Simon make the point and share a couple of his paragraphs and then throw those out to you as yet another topical layer on this Friday Rush Limbaugh show.
I'm Mark Davis.
Let's go to some calls, see what's going on in a wide variety of things we brought up so far.
We are in Sandusky, Ohio.
Tom, Mark Davis, in for Rush.
It's a pleasure to have you.
Hello.
Hello, how are you today?
I am good.
Thank you.
Uh the other caller uh stole quite a bit of my thunder when he was talking about the hypocrisy of the uh of the Democratic Party, and you pointed out the only difference was the president and his willingness, the present present uh president's willingness to shoot three pirates who had a uh captain of a merchant ship that uh you know captive and also send drones into Pakistan killing women and children,
but they are willing to deal with uh in inherent uh in uh intense interrogation techniques.
I forgot what this is.
No, it it is.
It it's funny what uh makes uh goose pimples on different people.
I mean, what is it that I mean th this has been said a hundred different ways.
Uh it we're we're talking about people for whom Halliburton is a greater evil than Saddam Hussein.
And I know that's kind of generic talk show guy talk, but but again, and and but but seriously, how much time have some people spent talking about the evils of America or a firm an American firm contracted to do good work in in in Iraq versus the time they spent talking about the evil that we have vanquished through our noble war effort.
Yeah, no, it it the hypocrisy is so thick I have to get out my waiters in order to get through it.
But uh I you know, I uh this latest thing was Nancy Pelosi, where I was reading in sweetness and light, where she's actually made out to be a liar by other senators that were present.
You know, this is a perfect example of the kind of things they do.
They just bog lies to the public, and and people who do not read beyond the headlines take it all in and say, Oh, well, she must have she must not have understood that, you know.
My God, how stupid can people be?
I wish that were I wish that were a rhetorical question, Tom.
Sadly it does have an answer, and the answer is stupid enough to vote in certain ways that ill serve our war effort and ill serve our entire national future.
Thanks, my best everybody in Ohio.
Let us head to I this if we're going to the Bronx, the caller must be named Vinny.
It's the law.
Vinny, you're on the Rush Limbaugh Show.
How are you doing?
Hey, forget about it.
Oh, man.
All right.
I I'd like to uh I'd like to comment on the servicemen that call that commented on how this administration is making calculated decisions uh in order to accept well, collateral damage.
Uh Ralph, Colonel Ralph Peters wrote a brilliant column in the New York Post today detailing how a recent uh run-in with the Taliban and Afghanistan produced many civilian casualties.
This our Secretary of State immediately apologized for the loss of life to civilians, and it turns out that these people, meaning the civilians, were herded up by the Taliban, killed because they knew an ensuing firefight was going to come.
And here's our Secretary of State apologizing uh to uh Afghanistan and I guess the Muslim world in general, before the facts have have you know even been brought to light.
So, no, I do not think this administration is willing to make the hard choices uh when it comes to the war against terrorism, which they won't even use the word terrorist.
No, I if if if that rattles sensibilities to even refer to terrorists as terrorists, if if it r if it if it gives them indigestion to think of unpleasantness endured by detainees who have information in their heads that can save American lives, this this is the definition of simply not being serious about protecting America.
And and and the question for 2010 and 2012 and the rest of our lives is can we have a definition of being serious about those things that an American majority will will adopt?
Vinny, thank you.
Joining us, I'm guessing, up there in the mighty seventy-seven WABC country.
Now let's uh let's head a little northward and go to White Plains.
Still in New York, though, Rich.
Mark Davis, in for Russian, how are you?
Hey, Mark, I'm okay.
How are you?
Very great.
Um with reference to the the Savine uh flu, uh I believe the term lip service was clearly defined this past week with the talk of possibly closing the Mexican borders.
Now, we we can't seem to close the borders to keep the terrorists from coming in.
We can't seem to close the borders to keep illegals from coming in and draining us of our our tax dollars through our public education and the health care system.
We can't we can't seem to close the borders to keep the illegal flow of drugs coming in, but we're gonna close the borders to keep people from getting the flu.
Well, it's it's I know.
You don't find that funny?
Well, uh, we laugh lest we cry.
Uh it's it when we go back to that now famous, infamous uh moment with Joe Biden and and Matt Lauer.
W seconds before Joe Biden had said he would, you know, run and tackle his family rather than let them get on a plane to anywhere.
Uh he made the differentiation between the Mexican border, and he said, Well, what are we going to do then after that?
Close the Canadian border?
Oh, yeah, Mr. Vice President, exactly the same thing.
Like like illegal immigration, uh swine flu was primarily a Mexican story.
Was that the whole of the story?
All of it, 100% of it?
No.
But by and large, just like illegal immigration, we have illegal immigrants from China.
We have them from Africa, we have them from Sweden, I'm sure at some point.
But it's mostly a Mexican thing.
So was the swine flu.
This administration refused to embrace that or even speak those words for fear of angering Lulak.
And when that is what's motivating you, you and you you are not protecting America.
They're a metaphor you can use in a in a in a number of different ways.
Uh Richko, you have thirty seconds left.
Go ahead and take the final word there before we get to take a break.
Oh, I get I get the final word before.
Yes, you do.
Yeah.
So no.
Well, I you know, I I think this is just another one of those um uh uh th you know, the politicians get to say what they want when they won.
We don't know what's the truth.
I mean, seriously, closing the borders for the flu.
Why even say it?
Well go ahead.
I'm so well well, th that that's kind of why I wanted to to take you back to that, because it it depends on how bad the flu is or was or how bad we thought it was.
I watched, and maybe this is a little different.
I'm a little closer to the Mexican border than you are, and I saw bus load after bus load after busload of, oh, I don't know, tourists, one would think, emptying out into the Dallas Greyhound station, having come from God knows where, carrying God knows what.
And I thought, is this really smart?
For a few days while we try to figure out what this is, would it be so beyond the pa I mean the Fort Worth Independent School District, 80,000 kids shut down for one twelve year old in one middle school?
If that's where we are, if we're that worried, I don't think I mind a few days of border closure.
...partization.
Where does the flu fall amongst terrorism, terrorism?
Illegals and the drug flow true.
And now now it would be by all means a superb point you can make is that if if it and you know what?
Maybe that's why it didn't happen.
Because if we're willing to shut the border down for five days because of a swine flu bug that has a handful of people, then gee, maybe we should consider closing the border for, oh, I don't know, millions of illegals or the occasional terrorist.
The border border closures are kryptonite to the left, absolute kryptonite in their utopia of a borderless continent.
All right, it is the Rush Limbaugh show.
I'm Mark Davis, filling in, and we'll be right back.
It's the Friday Rush Limbaugh Show.
I'm Mark Davis in Texas filling in, proud to be here, and Rush will be glad to be back on Monday, as glad as I know you will be to hear him back.
But for now, we're hanging out on a Friday together.
Let me share with you what I hinted at, and then we'll get right back to your calls on a wide, on a widening variety of things.
Roger Simon and Politico.
If there's anything I I really am compelled by, and try to be a practitioner of uh when the situation warrants, it's bringing up things that are a little off the beaten path.
If there's an enormous narrative going on, but someone is the person to step forward and go, uh, yeah, but uh what about this?
I I think there's a certain courage in that, and Roger Simon displays it in his political piece about Elizabeth Edwards.
So the narrative and the worthy narrative is God bless this woman, we're so sorry, obviously, first of all for her cancer, and also for her skank of a husband.
Uh Roger Simon writes, John Edwards is a beast, a wretch, a vile and low creature, unworthy of any sympathy.
He had an affair with Riel Hunter, lied about it to the press, and now he must pay the price.
Lying cannot be tolerated.
John Edwards has no future in the Democratic Party, a uh partly scrupulous, uh a party scrupulous about whom it adores.
Bill Clinton is one of the most revered and admired figures in the Democratic Party.
He had an affair with Jennifer Flowers before his nineteen ninety-two campaign, lied about it to the press, had an affair with Monica Lewinsky while he was president, lied about it to the press.
His wife, staff, friends, colleagues, the cabinet, investigators, Congress, they were lied to as well.
So you can see the difference.
Edwards is back in the news for two reasons.
First, he's under federal investigation for possibly converting campaign funds to his personal use, in other words, paying his mistress.
Second, his wife Elizabeth is promoting her new book, going on Oprah and talking about her husband's affair and its effect on her.
John told Elizabeth about the affair shortly after he announced for the presidency in December 06.
In an excerpt of her book in Time Magazine, headlined to How I Survived John's Affair, Elizabeth writes that she urged John to drop out, but he didn't want to.
It would only raise questions, he said.
He had just gotten in the race.
The most pointed questions would come if he dropped out, and I knew that was right.
Roger Simon says, uh, excuse me, that was wrong.
John Edwards' decision was right only if the goal was to cover everything up.
There was an alternative.
Admit the affair in public, say it was a mistake, ask for forgiveness, move on with the campaign.
This apparently was never considered by either John or Elizabeth.
The public evidently cannot handle the truth.
This is Roger Simon's point.
No doubt Elizabeth Edwards is indeed a victim here, but does she also bear an observation that she was for a while at least there a co-conspirator?
Elizabeth's goal became exactly the same as John's, get this guy to the White House, a job she undertook with particular relish, especially when it came to attacking his opponents.
Roger Simon watched Elizabeth Edwards, as many of us did, on Oprah, and he writes, I have to say it was a fascinating interview.
Elizabeth was both an enormously appealing and enormously sympathetic figure.
But I couldn't help thinking what Hillary Clinton's reaction to watching the show would have been.
Would Hillary be rolling her eyes at how much sympathy Elizabeth was getting because her husband cheated on her with one woman?
After all, Bill's affairs, Hillary went on to become a U.S. Senator, a candidate for president and Secretary of State.
Of course, Hillary does not have terminal cancer.
In probably the most quoted part of the interview, Elizabeth Edwards says her first reaction to John's admission of an affair was to go into the bathroom and throw up.
I can completely understand that.
What I can't completely understand is why nearly two and a half years later, she wants to wallow in it now.
Maybe it's therapeutic, if that's the reason, okay.
But during the Oprah interview, Elizabeth says she kept quiet about John's affair during the campaign because, quote, I wanted to protect him.
Well, the public needs protection too.
Neither John nor Elizabeth was being noble by covering up the truth, because Elizabeth was victimized by John.
That was no reason for her to try to victimize the public by putting forth a false view of her husband and tearing down his opponents.
The Charlotte Observer recently pointed out that in one of Riel Hunter's videos, John turns to her and says, Do you think most people have any idea what we're doing when we're not on the stage?
All this, everything else that we do?
The answer is no, and that's the problem.
Words of Roger Simon, Politico's chief political columnist.
All right.
So there's something for you.
Let's go ahead and get our break in right now, come back and have uh room for an actual call to close the hour.
Hey, how's that work?
Mark Davis in for rush, and we'll be back with you in just a moment on the EIB Network.
It is the Friday Rush Limbaugh Show.
I'm Mark Davis filling in.
Let me share something real quick.
Two segments ago.
A caller said, here's the synapse check of the train of thought here.
A caller says if we could get some of the disapproving Democrats to actually be waterboarded, they'd realize it's bad, but not so horrible, not torture, and would suddenly approve of it.
Dream on about that.
And I then took that and replied in a way that said, if we could imagine, I just my brain immediately searched for a Democrat, Pelosi's Too Easy.
Uh Christopher Dott.
So if we were to waterboard Christopher Dodd, and then I just paused and just kind of relished the moment there for a for a moment of pretend sadism, and I'm just kidding around, of course.
But here's somebody who's not kidding around.
This might close out of the air.
I don't know.
We'll say.
But I wanted to share this before this hour ended.
David Fardy is a golf analyst for CBS.
Wait for it, wait for it.
David Faraday is a golf analyst for CBS.
And he wrote a piece in D Magazine, which is the City Magazine here in Dallas.
And it was all about the return of George W. Bush, because obviously President Bush now lives about 10 miles from the building in which I now sit.
And it's an honor to have him here.
One of the articles that they wrote was called or that they have for this magazine was called Almost Totally Famous.
I too am a huge celebrity who happens to live in Preston Hollow.
I expect George W. to drop by very soon.
As you can tell David Fardy, golf analyst for CBS, as a magnificent sense of humor.
But what he also has, though, is a magnificent gift for phraseology.
And he spent some time talking about what it's like to have George W. or what it will be like to have George W. in the neighborhood.
And David Faraday writes, in the midst of a piece that is meant to have a bit of a wink and a nudge, just sort of talks about what it's like to have W in the neighborhood and how people should feel about that, and he spends time talking about how the troops feel about him.
David Faraday writes, From my own experience visiting the troops in the Middle East, I can tell you this.
Despite how the conflict has been portrayed by our glorious media, if you gave any U.S. soldier a gun with two bullets in it, and he found himself in an elevator with Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and Osama bin Laden, there's a good chance that Nancy Pelosi would get shot twice.
And Harry Reed and Bin Laden would be strangled to death.
I've never met a soldier who didn't love this president and this country, and I've Met a bunch of them at home and abroad, in hospitals and in theater, at Walter Reed, Bethesda Naval Medical Center, the Brook Army Medical Center in San Antonio.
I have visited dozens of patients, and I always ask them before I leave, what do you want to do when you get out?
No matter how broken or burned or how many limbs they are missing, they give only one answer.
I want to go back.
I want to rejoin my team to finish our mission.
They are rightfully proud of what they've done, and they want nothing more than to be with their brothers and sisters in arms because they know the consequences if their job is left unfinished.
David Faraday, golf analyst for CBS, but his words speak enormous volumes.
And I just wanted to hear them before the hour ended.
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