All Episodes
Previous Next
Sept. 3, 2009 - Rush Limbaugh Program
35:43
September 3, 2009, Thursday, Hour #3
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hey, great to be with you.
Walter Williams will uh take in to the Labor Day weekend tomorrow, and Rush will return next week.
Um people have been writing uh uh uh the an analysts and the experts have been trying to analyze what it was with Obama's strategy that went wrong.
Uh and in fact I think uh it was the right strategy for him.
And if it if it had worked, it would have been amazing.
Because I think the plan was to come in on the way November was an unusual election.
There was obviously a throw the bums out aspect to it.
A lot of people were sick of the Republicans.
A lot of people wanted all the messiness uh and the and the the the whole kind of war on terror uh template of the Bush presidency to go away.
Uh but it wasn't just an anti-Bush thing.
Uh Obama was uh an unknown factor, but there was clearly a pro-Obama uh uh a pro-Obama spirit uh among enough um centrist Democrats and moderates and independents and squishy Republicans that there were actually was a pro-Obama tide that wafted him in uh to the White House.
And he figured on January the twentieth.
Well, look, I can do all this stuff, and if I do it all uh quickly, and if I throw enough spaghetti at the wall, uh then the uh Republicans in Congress may pick off this little bit there, that little bit there, but I'll get all this stuff through and it'll be a done deal uh before anybody notices.
In other words, uh while we're still all in Mr. Hopi changey mood, I'll get all this done, and by the time my ratings start to work their way down to where a normal political figure would be, uh we will have the apparatus uh for a UR a European sized, a Euro-Canadian sized social welfare state in place at the national level, and once you've done that, uh it can be reformed, but it can't be undone.
And people don't understand, I think, the uh the the way uh the minute health care becomes governmentalized, it becomes the dominant issue.
It becomes the dominant issue.
For one thing, it's the biggest single budget item.
It's bigger than uh anything else.
People complain about health care costs now, but in fact there is no figure on American health care.
If I if if the i you can put a dollar figure on what Americans spend on health care, but if I decide I want to spend an extra five hundred bucks tonight on health care, I can do it.
And that'll add to the figure.
Uh you can't do that in in socialized systems.
In socialized systems, uh health care is actually a line item in the budget.
It's a it's a it's a literal line item in the budget, and if and if what you want isn't covered by that or hasn't been budgeted for it, then you can't get it.
But it's also the biggest line item in the budget.
And uh and that means that every election you fight is always on health care.
It's uh what can we do about health care, how can we improve health care, how can we reform health care, uh, how how can we uh control health care costs, how can we con it's and it what that means for right of center parties is that you always end up fighting elections on left-wing terms.
Uh and that's why once you have government health care, it becomes very difficult to have genuine conservative government again.
That's why if you listen to conservative parties in uh Britain and Europe and elsewhere, often the the rationale for a so-called right of center party is not that they're going to give you small government and individual liberty anymore.
No, all their and their remaining rationale is that they can run the big government nanny state more efficiently than the left wing party can.
So essentially they say once the left has put the big nanny state in place, the right's only remaining rationale is that they can run it more efficiently uh than the left can.
So the minute you have that, the minute you have government health care, you cross a line where it becomes incredibly difficult, if not impossible, to have genuine conservative government uh ever again.
Uh and that's a path that uh uh Americans should think very carefully uh about running, uh about uh about going down.
Let's go to Sylvia, who's been hanging on a long time.
Sylvia is calling from Westminster, British Columbia.
You don't have to look far to see where government health care leads folks here.
Just lift your eyes a little bit north over the 49th parallel and you can see what it does.
Sylvia, glad you waited.
Great to have you on the show.
Hi, Mark.
Thank you very much, and bless the station and Fox TV.
And basically what I wanted to talk about was that our taxes are so high here, it's because of health care.
For instance, there's a government, the national health care plus the provincial health care.
Plus in B.C., we've got the carbon tax on our gas.
We pay $1.11 a litre, transform that at $4.22 a gallon.
Yeah, $4.22 a gallon.
29.5% of that is to the government.
That's right.
And that's exactly what will happen to you.
If you're paying $2.50 or $2.60, it'll soon be over $4 a gallon if you let this go through.
because it is for mediocre health care that's what we're paying for it's waiting up line up after line up to get any help here also uh from what I know Americans uh have their taxes paid up on April thirteenth.
Uh we're well in yeah right we're well into June fifteenth it's the fifteenth yeah the fifth we're well into June.
That's two months more of your paycheck going to the government for stuff like health care.
If you earn five thousand a month that's ten thousand dollars for free mediocre line up health care.
And and what people forget is if you look at the amount of money that you have paid in health care, you should be in uh entitled to like uh three fatal illnesses a year in British Columbia.
But you uh at least but you don't you don't get it.
And I think it was uh a near neighbors of yours in the uh Fraser Health Authority who announced that they would be cutting back on elective surgery by fifteen percent uh next year.
year because they're all the health authorities in british columbia have got this problem with with health care costs they're cutting back on elective surgeries by 15 percent what that means is that you can elect to have the surgery but they're not going to elect to give it to you you're at you're gone you can't have it you it doesn't matter whether you need it uh it doesn't matter whether the doctor thinks you ought to have it you don't have any say in it it's a government bureaucrat who just says it's a 15 cut across the board and that means and they define elective surgery by the way that's a very
elastic term in government health care systems uh you know this guy with the missing finger in los angeles that would be regarded as an elective surgery because let's face it he's an old guy what does he need the finger for he's just gonna he's just gonna flip it at some young punk who passes him on the interstate well what the hell does he need it for so the term elective surgery gets defined extremely broadly once you have a government system in place a socialist run MOUTH SO WE DESERVE THE MESCURACY AND
POLICIES THAT ASKS, told a screener I think that uh you elected a president who is right now he is financially raping the young children and grandchildren of Americans.
Well that's a strong way to put it I mean he's certainly spending their few I don't want to give the idea he should be living down under the Julia Tuttle Causeway with the rest of the guys but um he is certainly he is certainly uh spending their beggaring their future and what uh as as I think Canadians understand and Europeans too when they think about it is is that uh at a certain level this stuff becomes unaffordable.
You just can if you look at if you look at the endless health reforms that uh and the Royal what what they call it up there, the Royal Commission.
They uh every so often you have a Royal Commission to look at reforming health care again because because basically no matter what you do you can never make the demand match up with the supply.
And as you say, what you often end up with is people paying for mediocre care in quite extraordinary ways.
I went to see a friend who was in a concert in Joliet, Quebec, last summer.
And at the end of the show, the drummer got taken ill.
They put him in a hospital.
They put him in an ambulance.
And the ambulance set off to drive him to the hospital.
And then reported back that they could find no hospital.
Joliet is halfway between Montreal and Quebec City.
They could find no hospital where the waiting time was under 48 hours.
the emergency room so they they eventually suggested to him look why don't instead of coming in the ambulance with us why don't you just get a friend to drive you back to Montreal and go to a hospital there after he'd been in the ambulance being driven around trying to find a hospital to take him uh for uh an uh for for four or five hours.
Uh and it's not because when you look at it, it's not because there's huge pressure on these emergency rooms.
It's not because there's lots of people uh biting each other's fingers off on a Friday night or whatever.
It's because there's actually no insufficient doctors and nurses allocated under the system.
In other words, they build rationing, they build rationing even into the emergency room system.
I that that's certainly true in Quebec.
I don't know whether it's that way in British Columbia, Sylvia.
Absolutely.
And and just to get back to uh electing President Obama and that now the people American people know what's happening.
I think the ones who approve of him are almost as bad.
I really do.
Really?
Doesn't matter what what ro the ones who approve of Obama they want this to go through.
That means they approve of him, right?
Well there is there are pretty bad.
There there are a large number of people.
There there I would say there's two kinds of Democrats by the way.
There's Democrats who who think they would like to live like Europeans and have no or Canadians and have no idea what it's like.
And and and in a sense I think they understand it's an almighty bluff.
You know that thing that used to happen every time Bush won the election all through the early years of the century 2000, 2002, 2004.
Democrats always said, huh, that's it if if the Republicans win again, I'm moving to Canada.
You know, and they never do.
They never do.
Alec Baldwin was supposed to be there was supposed to be a mass migration of Baldwin brothers north of the border to Canada.
Um which would work quite well anyway because that's where all the movies are uh uh filmed anyhow why not just keep them there's no need for them to come back to Beverly Hills is there so it would it would have made perfect sense but the in the end they never do it.
They never go and live in Canada because in the back of their mind somehow the great Europe they get the feeling that if you were there in practice living at 365 days a year the great Euro Canadian utopia might turn out to be not all it's uh it's made out to be and uh and I think that accounts for a large number of Democrats who I think are humbugs on this issue.
They think they'd like to live in Scandinavia they couldn't stick it for a moment.
But then there are others and these are a lot of the people around Obama who are hardcore leftists and genuinely want uh to move to a hardcore left wing society where the state is responsible for for 70% of uh GDP or upwards and where government regulation is a is a fact of life.
If you look at this guy the the green job czar, whatever that is it's it's not a job.
He goes there, he's got an office and he's got a salary he doesn't do anything.
He is the green the only green job czar that's been created that the green job star has created is his green job.
He's got a job he doesn't do anything.
It's uh he but he goes to the White House every day as one of Obama's czars.
Now this guy, what's he called Vin Jones Van Jones?
What's it van Van Jones it's he's he is a communist.
He was and I was interested when they said a former communist.
You know normally when people say former communists, you think it's like a phase they went through uh when they were in college.
So it would be something he went through in the sixties or seventies or eighties or whatever.
No, it turns out this guy was a communist in the nineties after communism fell after the commies gave up on communism this guy after the Russians gave up on communism after the Chinese largely gave up on communism after the Romanians and the Bulgarians and the East Germans and the Czechs and the Slovaks gave up on communism Obama's green job czar goes hey now's the perfect time to become a communist and this guy is in the this guy is in the administration
and and and there comes a time uh when you have to say uh when you have to look at Obama and say well look let's say he's not quite as hardcore a communist as this Van Jones guy, Vin Jones, whatever he's called but he's like but he clearly is comfortable uh in the company of people who have a dramatically different view of the role of the state than any viable American elected official has ever had before uh and
that is that is something that should be disquieting.
There is no way this green job star uh would have gone into any previous administration uh in the history of this country.
And what kind of wacky guy decides by the way he's like watching the Berlin Wall come down and people streaming through it saying at last free at last free at last they're all walking through from East Berlin the walls come down and he says you know now is really if ever were there was a moment to get into the communist racket, now is it.
And this guy is Obama's green job czar.
I think Sylvia's, I think Sylvia's right.
When you have people who are committed to that large estate, you have no idea what life is like.
That's why it's important to kill this health care thing.
It's important not to let them get a foot in the door and get the second foot in and the rest later.
Uh because if they get the if they get the broad apparatus they need uh to governmentalize health care, they will do it.
And once you do that, it's very hard to have genuinely conservative government ever again.
Mark Stein Inforush, more straight ahead.
Mark Stein Inforush.
By the way, this guy, this green job czar, Van Jones, uh whatever he's doing in his green job, he's uh what they call a 911 truther.
That's like he's one of these guys, you see him driving around uh with the 911 was an inside job thing.
He thinks he signed a statement saying 911 was an inside job.
Uh that uh the Bush uh administration arranged uh should be investigated, the Bush administration should be investigated for arranging to blow up the towers.
So now he is on the inside, he should be able to find out about the inside job.
He should there must be a memo somewhere, maybe it's in his uh green jobs filing Green Jobs filing cabinet.
Uh who knows?
Uh but the the the that what is it the uh the the left always says that oh the right are crazy, they get attached to these crazy figures like Sarah Palin, they get attached to these crazy people like the Berthers, they never distance themselves from these people.
We have now got the green job czar, the green job czar.
He's one of the czars.
That's my in in in the new America, it's more important to be a czar than it is to be a senator or to be a cabinet official.
The czars are it.
You know, it's dancing with the czars.
That is that is basically where America is headed.
Dancing with the Tsars.
He's one of the czars, and he thinks 911 was an inside job.
That's they uh I love those guys.
They drive around with these uh they drive around with these things.
911 was an inside job.
You know, so what they're saying is that uh the government on September the 11th, 2001, decided to kill three thousand people.
They've got all these theories that the planes were switched in mid-air, flown out to sea, the bodies dumped at sea, all the rest of it, the tower, the controlled explosions uh of the towers and everything.
Uh the Jew the Jews had a head up, so they never went to work that day.
Uh they've got all these theories, it's all worked out.
Uh and you think to yourself, my goodness, if the federal government is gonna because the federal government can't do the cash for clunkers program, they can't do that, but they can do, you know, uh mass terrorist atrocities for clunkers, they can do pull that off, no problem.
Uh so the federal government, the federal government arranged all this.
You don't think that they're also capable of uh figuring out all the guys driving around with the 9-11 was an inside job, bumper sticker, and getting you too?
That if they can pull off, kill thousands of people, switch the planes, dump them at sea, give the heads up to the Jews, controlled explosions at the towers, that they can't they don't know who's got the 9-11 was an inside job bumper sticker.
You're there, you're it you're driving around, you you you you've parked your Subaru with the 9-11 was an inside job, you've gone into your uh college town coffee shop, you're having your decaf latte, you don't think they know that?
You don't think and you're sitting around chewing the fat about 9-11 was an inside job.
You don't think they know that and Yeah, be very afraid, be very afraid, because a government that's capable of uh some reason we ha we live in we we were living under the bush years in a tyranny w that was capable of killing three thousand people, blowing up buildings, covering it up, but wouldn't do anything about some goofball nut uh commie called Van Jones, uh who's a nine eleven truther, and now he's sitting there in the green job czar of we got a truther as the green job czar.
But that's it.
That's what we're that's America in the dawn of the early uh twenty-first century.
Uh where it's dancing with the czars, where under rule by czars, uh truther czars filling up the White House, uh Obamacare supporters chewing the fingers off seniors in Los Angeles, and federal stimulus money going to stimulate sex offenders under the Julia Tuttle causeway uh into publicly stimulated housing.
Uh that's that is America in the early 21st century.
How did this happen?
How did this happen?
Uh 1 800-282-2882, Mark Stein Infrarush.
You know, by the way, by the way, uh here's a model, uh here's a model, Maya Dev a model politician.
This is the mayor of Doncaster in Yorkshire, England, Mayor Peter Davis.
He scrapped all funding for the annual gay pride event.
Uh his line being, uh, if you're that proud about it, why can't you pay for it?
That's a good line to use with any government spending.
He's scrapped all politically correct non-jobs, as he calls it, such as community cohesion officers, and he's ended twinning arrangements with five tabs around the world, which he described as, quote, just an opportunity for politicians to fly off and have a binge at the council's expense, unquote.
This guy is a man to watch.
Mark's time for Rush, more straight ahead.
Great to be with you.
Walter Williams uh in tomorrow, and then Rush returns next week.
Uh you know, the president's uh plummeting numbers don't just apply to health care and other domestic policy issues.
Uh on foreign policy, Obama's approval has come down from sixty-seven percent to forty-nine percent, according to a CNN poll.
Uh in March, uh sixty-seven percent uh approved of Obama's handling of the situation in Afghanistan.
Now it's forty-nine percent.
That's an astonishing drop.
I'm not sure who this is by the way.
Um I think it's uh I think a large number of those people are are Democrats who uh uh who uh accepted the idea of Democrats during the Bush years talking up Afghanistan uh as a kind of uh uh cunning rhetorical tick.
I believe John Kerry's uh advisers uh actually explicitly declared this in the 2004 election, that they didn't want to look like a bunch of wimps who were just opposed to all wars, so they decided looked around for a war uh that they could support, and they decided that, okay, they were opposed to the Iraq war, but they were in favor of the Afghan war.
It's like this Democrat shell game.
Uh no matter how many cups you pick up, uh you never find the the P that represents uh the war that the Democrats are in favor of as the time uh the time you're fighting it.
So all the time the focus was in Iraq, they claimed to be in favor of the Afghan war.
That was it.
That was the good war.
That was the war that uh John Kerry and Obama and all all the uh crowd were in favor of.
Uh what happened was that Bush in his last couple of years then did the surge uh and took down the uh took down the heat on Iraq, uh and essentially stabilized Iraq.
Uh uh uh by contrast, what's happened in Afghanistan is that casualties have risen and that a manageable situation is showing signs of becoming unmanageable.
And now the uh the the Democrats uh uh are beginning to understand that their tough rhetoric on Afghanistan uh actually has to mean something now.
Don't forget, Obama talked super mega butch uber tough on Afghanistan.
At one point he was uh he was he he he argued in favor of invading Pakistan.
I mean, if you think Iraq's a quagmire, uh Pakistan is like Quagmire Central.
Uh and uh and he he d he he backpedaled on that, but his whole thing was that somehow he was going to s fight the Afghan war in a smart way.
Well, if you're gonna fight it in a smart way, you gotta know what is it, what is it you're doing there?
Uh what happened uh in the fall of 2001 is that this country was attacked uh by people who had passed through training camps in Afghanistan, led by a man uh in Afghanistan, at the camps in Afghanistan.
Uh and that's not unusual to the situation of September 11th.
If you look at all the trouble spots all over the world, if you look at the Russians in Chechnya, they got people who pass through the Afghan training camps there.
If you look at the Balkans, if you look at uh Yugoslavia uh and uh Kosovo and Bosnia, they had guys who passed through the Afghan training camps there.
If you look at the people who blew up the Bali nightclub in Indonesia and the Indonesian terrorists and the terrorists in the uh Philippines, uh what are they called?
Um I L FIF, which is the world's dumbest acronym for a terrorist group.
And if you're the kind of guy who goes surfing on dodgy websites late at night, don't don't book a rendezvous with MILF without checking whether it's the Philippine bill for the other kind of bill.
So anyway, anyway, uh they got guys who turned up in uh from the Afghan training camps there.
So America decided to take out these training camps and the regime that sponsored them, the Taliban.
Well, it's now eight years later.
And everybody's there.
You got Germans there, you've got Norwegians there.
It's a big NATO thing, and like a lot of these multicultural, multilateral, multinational things, uh nobody's quite sure what we're there for anymore.
But if we are there for nation building, then that is a complete waste of time.
Nobody has ever succeeded in building a nation in Afghanistan.
Uh the Afghans uh haven't built a nation in Afghanistan.
It's essentially a tribal society uh in in which the village and the tribe are what count, uh and th there's a a remote national government in Kabul that has absolutely no impact on your life.
I wish we could have that system here when I think about it like that.
I'd like to I think New Hampshire should be a tribal society with a remote national government thousands of miles away that has no impact on your life.
I d I quite like that system.
So in on balance, I'd rather I'd rather Afghans were nation building in America than Americans af uh nation building in Afghanistan if we have to go either way on it.
Um but uh but the point is uh w nation building in Afghanistan is a complete waste of time.
Uh we should be there for one purpose only, which is to quarantine Al Qaeda in uh uh in that in the murky uh lands on the Afghan-Pakistani border, and kill large numbers of them uh whenever we get the opportunity.
But the idea that we can somehow turn Afghanistan into Massachusetts, which is not a fate I'd wish on them, uh but the idea that we can uh turn Afghanistan into Massachusetts is completely preposterous.
Uh there th you can do it in Iraq.
It is possible to do some kind of nation building in Iraq.
It's completely impossible in Afghanistan.
So if we're going to have a renewed commitment to Afghanistan, we should be very clear what it is that's going on there.
Now there are differences on the right as to what the purpose of our uh Afghan intervention is.
Uh I disagree with George Will.
George Will has called for us to get out of Afghanistan and he's called for us to get out of Iraq.
Uh th there's something to be said for just going in and whacking the bad guy and then getting the hell out.
You can do that if you want.
There'd be so there'll be something to say uh in Afghanistan for going in, uh killing everybody, uh killing the people you want to kill, uh toppling the Taliban, uh blowing up the camps and then getting out.
But there is nothing to be said, and this is where I disagree with George Will, with choosing giving the impression to the world that you are choosing to lose a war.
Because America has done that too often in the past, uh most memorably in Vietnam, and that Vietnam syndrome haunted this country uh for decades.
But it's uh you you can also make the case that that is what happened in Moggad issue.
You can uh say that the Kosovo intervention, where we staged this little nothing war, uh air air only at uh great height to no particular purpose, uh that these these kinds of things cumulatively send a message to the world that this country uh does not have the will uh to get the job done.
So the idea that you could just pull out of Afghanistan and Iraq now without doing immense damage to the credibility of the United States.
Every rinky dink no account dictator sitting in his presidential palace would say, well, look, if you can survive a uh a couple of months of bombing raids, uh these guys are not in it for the long haul.
A a superpower that basically says, no, we didn't lose the war, uh we just couldn't be bothered uh going all the way and winning it is not a country that can say a superpower in in the long run.
But in order to be able to accomplish our goals in Afghanistan, we have to have a very clear idea of what it is we're there to do.
And we're not there to nation build.
We are there to uh to make it difficult, if not impossible, uh for the Al Qaeda the remaining Al Qaeda networks, whole including perhaps Osama bin Laden, although perhaps not, uh and certainly not including the many of his lieutenants who have been killed in the last few years.
But we're there effectively uh to say uh we're gonna quarantine you, and if you uh and if we quant can't quarantine you, uh we're gonna kill you, uh any of you who come our way.
And what's happened at the moment is there's been tremendous drift in the Afghan campaign.
It's become a NATO-fied mission under absurd rules of engagement.
You get things like uh the Germans who won't go out, I think it's they won't go out at night and they won't go out in snow, and you've got other countries participating who'll say they're prepared to stand shoulder to shoulder with the Americans only as long as there's two provinces between their shoulders and the American shoulders.
Uh so they'll only deploy to provinces where there's no fighting going on.
Uh and then you get people like the uh and then you get people like the Norwegians who uh who uh will go there but in a non-combat role.
Uh so they're basically agreeing uh to uh man the photocopier back at barracks.
By the time you got all these people in the game, you've got a classic multinational mission uh that g that the that those countries will only sign on to if some fancy pants uh mushy multi-culti nation building angle uh is affixed to it.
And that's not what the U.S. should be there for.
The U.S. should not be part of some confused NATO uh ineffectual multicultural mission to nation build in a land where no nation has ever existed.
Uh it should be there to kill large numbers of bad guys.
Uh and the question over the Ad Ma Obama administration is whether they understand uh that is the purpose of being in Afghanistan.
Because if they don't, then these casualties are going to uh are going to increase.
And this is Obama's war now.
Uh Gibbs was pathetic the other day, blaming it on the United States uh previous president, George W. Bush, because George W. Bush is gone.
George W. Bush uh on his watch after September eleventh kept this country safe from attack and uh and uh stayed as he t as he told me uh a couple of years ago, his his point was to stay on offense.
Obama consciously has chosen to come back go move to a more legalistic law enforcement reactive model of waging the war on terror, which he won't even call by that name.
Uh and the uh and the upshot of that is that uh is that we now are in a situation where the Afghan war has got a little more bloody, a little more violent.
These punks, these young punks, often just fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, so people with no real memory of the Taliban or what it was like before the Americans came, they understand the rules of engagement very well.
They understand you can go up to a German soldier and do to him pretty much anything uh that you want, that under his rules of engagement, under the rules of engagement for some of these NATO forces, they're not allowed to attack a building.
They've got a list of names of people who are sort of persons of interest.
Uh and unless they've established that no one else is inside that building, they're not allowed to attack that building.
These are ridiculous.
They're not going to war with one arm tied behind their back, they're going to war with with with two arms and one leg tied behind their back, and then wondering why they're not able to prosecute it effectively.
And the Afghan kids, the stupid Afghan punk kids, have figured this out, and they know that to most of these NATO members, you can do what you like to them with impunity.
They're just offering themselves a sport to be picked off.
But there has to be one serious nation that understands that you're there to kill large numbers of the enemy and prevent them re-establishing that country as a base of operations uh for Chechnya, for Bosnia, for Indonesia, and for New York and Washington, D.C. as it was on September eleventh.
1-800-282-2882, Mark Stein on the Rush Limborshow.
Mark Stein in for Rush on the EIB network.
You know, those those rules of engagement in Afghanistan are totally ridiculous.
If coalition forces discover a house with uh, say, two uh high value Taliban targets, uh but say four other just Taliban RIFRAF who are not on their list of approved targets, they cannot uh attack the House.
Uh you got that?
That's like if NATO is at war, not with the Taliban, but just with a list of kind of selected Taliban big shots.
So if Mullah Omar is in the house, uh but Ahmed, the fanatical but inconsequential camel driver, happens to be with him, you can't attack the house.
That's how crazy uh the rules of engagement are in Afghanistan.
Let's go to Jim in Grand Rapids, Michigan, home of uh America's telegenic Canadian governor.
Jim, you're on the Rush Limbaugh show.
Thank you, Mark.
I I just wanted to comment on um on your comment about uh not building a n uh a nation in Afghanistan.
I think we're in a situation now where we we have to, but just not a strong central um government because that's not something that Afghans have ever had.
I mean even the old Afghan uh kings depended on tribal warlords and chieftains to implement his policies because he had really very little.
Yeah, Zahir Shah in his heyday was basically the king of Kabul.
And had a kind of residual respect depending on whether tribal warlords in different parts of the country have to be on side.
His basic function back then was to mediate between uh rival chiefs uh disputes and land disputes and that sort of thing.
So so your your b your point here then is that uh you you don't build a society from the capital city down.
You kind of build it from the grassroots.
Exactly backwards, exactly.
When they s when they went in, and and and the attempt was, and I understand it, was in fact to uh diminish the the uh roles of warlords throughout the regions and these tribal chiefdoms, which had been a source of rivalry and conflict from time immemorial.
But you just can't you just can't impose a system that nobody's in Afghanistan's ever been used to and and doesn't and can't think about it.
No, and and the this is the trouble, by the way, with UN nation building.
UN nation building always wants to go from the capital city down.
If you look at successful societies, for example, in Iraq, in at the at the time of the worst trouble in Iraq, they had a problem in the Sunni Triangle and the Baghdad area, but there were large parts of the country that had functioning uh municipal government and provincial government, uh and uh and uh uh essentially had outpaced uh in terms of their development the national government.
And that's exactly by the way, how it happened in America.
America had successful town government and state government in the colonial days, and and federal government was the last the last piece of the puzzle.
So America is actually the model.
America was built from uh the self-governing township up.
Uh and uh uh i which which existed in colonial eras, in the colonial era, uh th they had uh towns that govern them themselves.
That's where um the American settlers learnt the art of self-government at town level uh and then at state level, and the big national government is the last piece of the puzzle.
You can do you can't do trickle-down national build nation building.
Uh all successful uh uh nations are built from the bottom up.
Thanks very much for your call, Jim.
Uh Mark Stein Inforush on the Rush Limbaugh Show.
Mark Stein Infrarush.
I mentioned earlier that mayor in England who's cancelled the funding for the gay pride parade on the grounds that uh if you're that proud of it, why can't you pay for it yourself?
Uh uh and the other thing I like about him is this twin to the the twin towns racket, which is something like all local government uh do all over the world.
They all fly around the world twinning themselves with towns and exotic locations.
He welcomed a delegation of German VIPs on an all expenses paid visit to his hometown and told them not to bother coming back.
I have I have only two words of German, he said.
Alf and Vizane, but those are the only words I need.
Alfida Zayn is uh German for so long.
Get out of here.
We're done.
Uh and uh and that is uh that is good advice.
And if you're taking uh if if you get the Obama speech in your grade school next week.
Uh as I said earlier, if you don't want to write well when in the question, what are your three favorite words in the speech?
And you don't want to put that's all folks in case you get expelled, just write Alf Vidasein uh and leave it at that.
Split Vida Zane into two words if you have to.
Uh have a great Labor Day weekend.
Walter Williams will be here tomorrow, and Rush will be back for a full week of excellence in broadcasting uh with a best of Russia on Monday and then Rush Back live on Tuesday.
This has been a pleasure being here.
▲
Export Selection