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Dec. 30, 2009 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:35
December 30, 2009, Wednesday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
Thanks, one and all.
Much, much appreciated.
It's an opportunity for us to get together here on this, the 30th day of December.
I'm enormously proud to be here in the Rush fill-in seat.
It is a joy and a pleasure.
And we have the opportunity today to talk about a lot of different things.
We have a terrorist incident on Christmas Day, on Christmas Day now, that has galvanized all of us.
We have this Nigerian fellow who has seen fit to try to blow up a plane load of people.
And in my column in the Dallas Morning News today, we have, well, I took the opportunity to weigh in on a couple of things that even though he failed to explode the plane, there are a couple of myths that can be exploded by this event.
The things that can be exploded, the myths that can be exploded, include the notion that terrorism is a product of despair or socioeconomics or a poor education system in the portion of the world where it is often found most frequently.
This was a well-to-do fellow.
This was a well-educated man.
And all of the excuse-making, which is kind of a cousin of the domestic excuse making in which we've heard for years that poverty causes crime.
We didn't have enormous crime waves during the Great Depression.
And in fact, crime around America right now seems to be getting better in a whole lot of large cities and elsewhere.
So the notion that poverty instantly causes crime is a close cousin of this.
And the modern incarnation of this is that terrorism is just what happens.
It's a natural extension of what happens when you have people who are desperate enough or undereducated enough or just in certain parts of the world where the economy is so terrible that terrorism can be a natural extension of that.
No.
Just as crime is a moral and character issue, terrorism is an issue of evil, evil behavior sparked by hate.
It knows no socioeconomic bounds.
It knows no educational bounds.
Whether the terrorist is well-to-do or dirt poor, whether the terrorist is stone-cold illiterate or a man of letters, the brand of hatred that comes from the portion of the Islamic faith that seeks to kill us where we stand, that is what makes terrorists.
So on Christmas Day, we have the event, Umar Farouk Abdul Muttalab, who now says, and I love this, that they've been finding all of his postings.
And it turns out that get ready for the next excuse, we have discovered that he is depressed and lonely.
Poor baby.
Poor baby.
He's depressed and lonely, really.
Well, I think a lot of us have been depressed and lonely at various points of our lives.
And at no point has depression or loneliness spurred most people to say, you know, the natural extension of depression and loneliness is I'm going to blow up a plane with 200 and some people on it.
That's just what you do when you're A, depressed, B, lonely, you know, socioeconomically challenged, or in a part of the world where the education system isn't great.
Well, none of this matters.
None of this matters.
All of the aftermath, all of the analysis that have filled the days since this Northwest Airlines 253 near disaster has been filled with the kind of excuse making there has been sociological excuse making.
There has been political excuse making.
And on that day, and let me just tell you, it's a joy to come out of vacation mode to do a show because invariably every talk show host will tell you this.
And I join you from the proud Rush Limbaugh affiliate of WBAP in Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas, which for the last few years, for the last few days rather, has been snowy for the first white Christmas since 1926.
So y'all may take it for granted wherever you are, but we don't down here.
And we've had a delightful holiday season.
And I was very deep in holiday mode, which for me involves paying almost no attention to the news.
But obviously, as Christmas Day came and went, knowing that I was going to come in and fill in for Rush on this particular Wednesday, you start paying attention to stuff so that you hit the ground running for the Wednesday Rush Limbaugh show.
And so I've been paying attention not just to the events of that day, but to what everybody's been saying since.
And on that day, I remember someone, we just had a bunch of family over the house and someone said they will find a way.
They will find a way to blame Bush for this.
They will somehow find a way.
As Secretary Napolitano endures an enormous amount of deserved heat for just an inconceivable Sunday comment, Jake Tapper was filling in for Stephanopoulos on ABC's this week and said, hey, the system worked.
I guess she meant that as soon as the flames had been doused and the terrorist properly restrained, the system worked.
Well, lovely.
The system needs to work earlier than that.
So among the other myth that's exploded, the first having been that terrorism is an automatic extension of desperation or socioeconomic levels or whatever, the other myth that is properly exploded has to do with the way these things come to pass.
And the way these things come to pass is holes in the system.
So the second myth that is hereby exploded, and thank heaven the plane was not, but the second myth that is exploded if we only have the spine to pay attention is that this kabuki dance, the familiar metaphor of what we all have to do at the airport, that this notion of whipping off our shoes and whipping off our belts and making sure that only three ounces of liquid are in this kind of Ziploc bag, the absurd notion that this works,
the absurd notion that this works.
Now, it is possible that as soon as the good folks at the TSA, and those are good, hardworking folks, and we need to spend some time today talking about whether they should be unionized, that would be no.
Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina is holding up a new TSA chief because of questions over whether there is an urge, a fetish for unionization there, which you almost always get from Democrats.
And Senator DeMint is properly concerned that this, well, and God bless hardworking members of some unions, this is not a total broad brush statement, but unionization, especially in its modern incarnation, is not exactly known for adding to efficiency, adding to customer service, adding to the quality of work being done.
And there is nowhere where the quality of work being done is of greater vital importance than airport screening.
So we'll talk a little bit about that later in the show.
But the second myth that's exploded is that the system somehow works.
So how do we get the system to work?
Some of it is technology related.
Some of it is attitude related.
We have a lot of technology involved in screening people at airports.
We have these full-body scanners.
Drudge had a fascinating, it's kind of funny.
I tend to like the idea of the full-body scan until it's me, you know, the notion of all of that.
And it's not like a big naked picture of you in front of the TSA, a screener of the moment.
It's vague, it's blurry, but I'll tell you what, it will show if you got a pantload of explosives.
And it would have caught this guy.
So the instant question is, well, why don't we just have a ton of these?
Why don't we have full-body scans at every gate, every international flight or flights coming to America from Amsterdam or anywhere else?
And then you get into the hard, cold question of money.
It's because those full-body scanners are expensive.
I mean, they are really expensive.
So you then get to the golden question, what price security?
And as soon as anybody says that we don't have enough money to do something, anytime anyone says that we don't have enough money to do something, it's reflexive with me now.
I instantly snap back to the enormous amount of money that we waste every second of every minute, of every hour, of every day.
And if we cut spending to the degree that the founding fathers envisioned, if we had a government that was the size envisioned by our founding fathers, I mean, commensurate with the growth of the nation.
Obviously, in the late 18th century, he could run the entire United States government on a system that would probably run the state of Connecticut right now, just to pick a state.
Obviously, the country gets bigger.
We have more people.
We have more needs.
But the Constitution tells us what government is supposed to do.
If we were doing only that, with the amount of money that they highway rob us for every year, we could pay for every bit of technology that you could possibly need.
Every bit of airport screening technology you could need to find the next Abdu'l Mutalab, to find the next 9-11 guys, because there will be more.
There will be more.
Which leads me directly to the attitudinal point.
The reason we know there will be more attempts like this is because we are not in a war footing with them, even though they are in a war footing with us.
Charles Krauthammer, one of my favorite writers, thinkers, people, is celebrating 25 years of writing columns this year.
His first column, Washington Post 1984.
And I went back and revisited some of those.
And in fact, I tell you what, I'm going to hit the first break here and give you the phone number.
You know that, 1-800-282-2882, 1-800-282-2882.
And I may share a portion of his column that he wrote in 9-11, on the occasion of 9-11.
It ran in the Washington Post like that Friday or something, the 14th.
And it contains wisdom about what it means to be on a war footing, which we are not.
And the easiest, most generic thing to do would be to say that's all Obama's fault.
And a lot of it is.
But as a society, as a culture, as a people, we don't walk around with the, and this was true under President Bush, who nobly kept the pedal to the metal for a war that grew unpopular.
But it's our fault that it grew unpopular.
They're happy to be at war with us for 5,000 years.
We got tired after about three.
That's not good when that happens.
That's not how you win wars.
And I know it's a different kind of war.
I know we're not at war with Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan.
And I know that that's different.
And this one's more vague in the definition of victory, more elusive.
I know, I know, I know.
But one thing that I also know, and that you'd better know, is that if we fail to maintain a war footing, if we recognize that these are not, you know, white-collar crimes to be prosecuted, but these are enemies to be obliterated, until the enemy recognizes that we have that attitude, they will know that we are soft.
They will know that we are vulnerable.
And part of it doesn't necessarily have to do with spine and vigor in fighting a war and staying on a war footing.
Some of it seems to be either American nature or human nature.
We cope too well.
We want things to be back to normal so quickly.
And we do that at our peril because normalcy and functionality are all very good.
But we have failed to keep reserved that portion of brain space that reminds us properly every day that we are at war against people who would kill us where we stand.
And they will try again and again and again and again if we are not sufficiently vigilant.
So what is sufficient vigilance?
We'll talk some about that today.
President Obama has vowed to repair the intelligence gaps behind the airplane incident.
We'll take a look at that.
Got some audio from some folks who have weighed in on this.
The sound I really want to hear is your voices on the phones at 1-800-282-2882.
And then with this sort of the next to last, here's our 50-cent word of the day, the penultimate day of the year, next to last day.
Walter Williams will be with you tomorrow.
And I, just to speak for the listenership, look forward to hearing him.
I always do, just as I do Brother Stein, who held down the fort the last two days.
So on this last opportunity that you and I will have to talk from here at the Fill-In Bench Texas Division, we'll talk a little retrospective 09, and we'll take a look back at the decade and all that good talk show stuff that people do.
So we'll do all of the above for the next two hours and 40 minutes at 1-800-282-2882.
1-800-282-2882.
I'm Mark Davis.
Fill it in for Rush, and we will continue in just a moment on the EIB Network.
The waning days of 2009.
It is December 30th.
I'm Mark Davis in For Rush.
We'll be back on Monday.
Walter Williams tomorrow.
Little best of special with Rush on Friday.
And let me get some audio.
These are some things that people have been saying in the wake of the Flight 253 bombing.
And the two of them juxtaposed very interestingly.
Here is one of my favorite members of Congress, New York Republican Peter King, talking about what we need to do in view of what's happened.
Yeah, obviously it has to be a full investigation of the Department of Homeland Security, of their procedures, of their methods, of Secretary Napolitano herself.
Well, you know, that would be my thought.
Instantly, cries will go up that, oh, it's a witch hunt.
Well, yeah, but what if you have an actual witch?
You know, pardon the metaphor there, but When there are valid questions to be asked, you ask them, and Secretary Napolitano did not do herself or her country any favors with that absurd the system worked quote from Sunday.
Now, fairness requires that I identify that she has retreated from that narrative.
But the notion of whom and what to investigate, here's a different take from ABC News consultant Richard Clark, known tormentor of the Bush years.
And he says the essential upshot is leave Madam Secretary alone.
There does appear to be a failure here at either CIA or the new National Counterterrorism Center.
I think the criticism of Homeland Security misses the mark because Homeland Security didn't get the information.
Really?
Well, I tell you what, not to get greedy here, let's look at everybody.
How about that?
Let's just really look at everyone.
And there's not an ounce of politics in this for me.
If President Bush were still president, I'd say exactly the same thing.
If McCain had won, I'd still say exactly the same thing.
Let's see what some folks say out in the fruited plane.
We are in Cleveland.
And Jeff, welcome to the Rush Limbaugh Show.
Mark Davis filling in.
Very nice to have you.
Hello.
Mo, Jeff.
Yes, Mark.
Hi, go right ahead.
Hi.
There is a system that already works, and that's Israel.
And let me just explain something to you.
People have an image of profiling as if, you know, we're standing up all the Arabs on one side and everybody else gets two, walks cut-free.
That's not how it works.
I've been to Israel many times.
I wear a yarmulke.
My wife wears a head covering, and yet they ask me every time I come to the airport, where am I going?
Where have I been?
Why was I going there?
How long did I stay?
And then they let me go.
And they do that to every single person who comes to me.
Can I ask you a question?
Because I've been precisely once, and it's a voyage everyone should make.
Went to Jerusalem to do a week of shows in the summer of 2003, and the LL screening at JFK was thorough.
I mean, they were not kidding around.
And the thing that occurred to me was: A, I'm enormously grateful for that, but B, the second thing that occurred to me was there's no way in the world that the American flying public would tolerate it.
I disagree, and I'll tell you why.
Let me tell you why.
It doesn't take a minute.
Take 30 seconds.
Go ahead.
It doesn't take them a minute to figure out if you're suspect or not.
They are trained people.
They're usually from the Army intelligence, college degrees, and they can tell in a very short time with the training that they have if this person needs to be scrutinized anymore or not.
And it's serious.
And because of that, people tolerate it much more than what you're tolerating now.
I understand.
Jeff, let me thank you because I got a scoot.
But here's the thing.
I totally agree.
Going to Israel brings a certain urgency.
I didn't know three, there was a certain urgency.
But these days, would the American public tolerate that extra time?
We'll talk about it more when we continue.
Mark Davis in for Rush.
On this next to last day of 2009, pleasure to be with you.
The Rush Limbaugh Show, 1-800-282-2882.
All right, the last gentleman gave us what is exhibit A of how to do security in the airline industry, and that is El Al, the official airline of Israel.
And he apparently had more recent and more frequent examples, and maybe they've streamlined it or Sufficient time has passed that it's not as ardent as it was in the summer of 2003 when my producer and I got to go to Israel for a week of shows.
I remember asking the guy or talking to the folks, the uniformed guys doing security at El Al at JFK in New York.
And they were polite.
They were intense.
They were they never apologized for the length of time it took to get everybody through security, but they took great pains to explain to us why things were taking a lot of time.
And one of the gentlemen told me, and it just resonated with me for the half decade since, he said, we don't want our buildings to fall.
And I thought to myself, standing there at JFK in the summer of 03, you know, not even two years since 9-11, I wondered if my own country had remained as serious about preventing more 9-11s.
I mean, even, and this is, please, this is still the Bush presidency.
We're still run by grown-ups at this time.
But I sensed already, just from being in the talk show business, that people were getting kind of war-weary.
You know, why didn't we catch bin Laden yet?
Why aren't we out of there yet?
How long is this going to take?
We got stuff to do.
And it just, it was chilling, the sort of feeling that as 2004 and 05 were about to dawn, that maybe our war footing was eroding.
Well, it surely, surely was.
Now, maybe just through years and years of experience, because I'll tell you this, I'd get on an LL flight to Jerusalem tomorrow, tomorrow, and feel probably safer than on any airline in the world.
But my big question that I asked him and that I'll ask you involves, it's kind of funny, I sort of asked it rhetorically in our opening half hour: what price security?
And it doesn't just mean price in terms of dollars.
Sometimes it means a price in terms of that most valuable of all consumer commodities, convenience.
So we can talk a good game every time something like this happens.
It's happened before and it'll happen again around the world and now apparently in our own country.
How much are we willing to spend on this in order to have those full body scanners as many airports as needed?
And are we willing to have the already mind-numbing process of airport security made longer and made more arduous?
Maybe we can trade some things for other things.
You know, the one thing that I felt in my El Al screening experience is that they were looking for terrorists.
They asked everyone in our group, where are you going?
Why are you going there?
How long are you going to be there?
And they would ask us those questions separately so that if they got any inconsistent answers from a couple of members of the group, well, they'd have to reconcile those in a hurry.
And I also get the feeling that El Al would not hesitate to pay particular attention to people who get ready, fit a certain terrorist profile.
Now, I'm a big 6'3, overweight white guy from Texas.
I don't know.
You can evaluate for yourself what kind of danger I seem to pose as I board any kind of jetliner.
But what we've had in our country is attention paid to Scandinavian grandmothers that is equal to the attention, sometimes more conscientious and invasive than the attention paid to Middle Eastern men.
Or since this is a Nigerian case, it's not men from the Muslim world.
And political correctness has steered us toward this.
Ridiculous pressure from ACLU types who view it as some kind of outrage that we actually focus a little more ardently on folks who actually fit the profile of those who have engaged in terror of late.
And it has not been Scandinavian grandmothers.
It has been men from the Muslim world.
And I'm not calling for the separating out of every Muslim and every line for every flight and the complete snap on the gloves invasive search.
I mean, no.
But it does involve recognizing that if you take passenger A and passenger B displaying the same kind of minimally squirrely behavior, that the bar might be set a little differently for those who are of the ethnic type, who are of the nationalities, who fit the, here's the word again,
profile of those who have done this in the past.
And some call this profiling.
Well, it is profiling, but that has taken on a bad connotation, unfortunately.
What I call it is analyzing potential suspects.
And we fail to do that at our peril.
Now, Lee Hamilton served in Congress for 34 years as a Democrat from Indiana, and then he co-chaired along with former New Jersey Governor Tom Kaine, you'll recall, he co-chaired the 9-11 Commission.
And Lee Hamilton recognizes that some balls were dropped.
He boarded the plane.
He paid cash.
That's a danger signal.
He didn't have any luggage.
That's another danger signal.
His father had contacted the embassy and said, my son has been radicalized.
That's a danger signal.
Yeah, you think?
And so, in view of that, the Honorable Mr. Hamilton says that maybe the solution to this lies in watch lists.
You have to have a system where a passenger can be very quickly identified and that name matched against a integrated watch list.
We now have four or five watch lists.
Do we now?
Do we now?
Well, maybe we just need one big one.
So here in the aftermath of all of this, lots of Monday morning quarterbacking, lots of 2020 hindsight, but that's okay.
I mean, that's what you do.
I mean, Monday morning quarterbacking involves looking back at the Sunday game and saying, what could we have done better?
2020 hindsight means looking backward and seeing with clarity things that you could not see when you were experiencing something.
Those are all fine.
It is time for Monday morning quarterbacking.
It is time for 2020 hindsight.
If we see looking back with greater clarity than we saw looking forward, then let's take great advantage of that.
Let's take advantage of some of your kind calls.
We are in the fine state capital of Maryland, and that's Annapolis.
Dennis, Mark Davis, in for Rush, how are you?
Welcome.
Thank you, Mark.
I'm doing fine.
This is Aprico because it dovetails with that last clip you played.
His father went to the U.S. Embassy in Nigeria and reported that he had been radicalized, possible extremists, could have been used in a future attack.
Well, the State Department runs all the U.S. embassies.
Also, the State Department issues visas to travel to the United States and revokes visas to travel to the United States.
So this happened in November.
His visa should have been revoked in November.
Therefore, he should have never got on a plane.
So regardless of what transpired after that point, the State Department should be called on the carpet to answer those questions.
Yeah, Dennis, that's that's superb analysis as we head into the break.
I appreciate it.
When I come back, I've got a Washington Post story from Kerry Johnson, Karen DeYoung, and Ann Kornblut, who have the headline is: Obama vows to repair intelligence gaps behind Detroit airplane incident.
Okay.
What are those gaps?
What needs fixing?
Everybody's got a theory on this, and so let's put them all together and see what makes sense on this.
Next to last day of 09, it is Wednesday, the 30th of December.
I'm Mark Davis in for Rush.
More of your calls and more stuff from my stack here in just a moment on the EIB Network.
Appropriate bumper tune, Greg Kinband's Jeopardy.
And we are all in some level of jeopardy, whether on planes or in our homes, in our office buildings, until we get this terror threat under control.
It's going to take a really long time.
It's going to take an enormous amount of resolve.
And the question is properly and repeatedly asked: do we as a nation have it?
Hi, early Happy New Year.
Happy 10.
I'm Mark Davis in for Rush.
Now, a couple of callers have mentioned the State Department and where the gaps are, and should heads roll, and what should the consequences be?
And I mean, I am more interested in beefing things up than I necessarily am in heads rolling.
I mean, sometimes if heads got to roll, heads got to roll.
Fine, whatever the consequences should be.
But I am more interested in having changes made that show that we are more serious about addressing this threat.
Intelligence officials who ask not to be identified, so just stop right there, because it means one of two things: either they didn't want the accountability of what they were about to say, or which means that maybe you pay attention to them less, or they are about to speak forbidden truths, which means you pay attention to them more.
Always navigate stories with unnamed sources with a certain amount of care, knowing fully well that in some cases their credibility may be in doubt, but in other cases, their credibility may be heightened because if they identified themselves, they could not possibly say what they said under the cover of source protection.
But in the Washington Post story this morning, here's the paragraph that I'm taking you toward.
Intelligence officials said they are eager to close whatever gaps the Abdul Muttalab case may have exposed, but several took issue with the president's reference to bits of information available within the intelligence community, saying that what might appear clear in retrospect was far from conclusive at the time.
Now, this goes right to the hindsight and Monday morning quarterbacking we were just talking about.
One official, one U.S. intelligence official, here's the quote from the Post story.
Abdul Mutalab's father didn't say his son was a terrorist, let alone that he was planning an attack.
Not at all.
I'm not aware of some magic piece of intelligence that suddenly would have flagged this guy, whose name nobody even had until November, as a killer en route to America, let alone something that anybody withheld.
Now, this is a U.S. intelligence official.
I tend to admire U.S. intelligence officials.
But in this day and age, and under these people and this administration, I don't know who's been compromised.
I don't know who's been beaten into submission to try to cover for whomever.
And that quote just strikes me as gutless.
Don't tell me that this guy didn't say, my son is a terrorist.
He is going to try to blow up a plane.
It is your job in the intelligence community to take sometimes minutiae, to take sometimes seemingly insignificant things, and have a little radar in your head, that goes off to say this might be something bad.
So even if Mr. Abdul Muttalab's father was less than concrete, even if he was a little vague, we know that he went to the U.S. Embassy in Nigeria because his son's radicalization concerned him.
That is all I need to know.
At that point, in whoever's office the dad was sitting should have written down that name, should have written down Abdul Mutalab, Umar Farouk Abdul Muttalab, and gotten it onto a watch list at every international airport headed into the United States.
Period.
That's the definition of being careful enough.
Am I asking too much?
Is that too hard?
Is that too much paperwork?
Is that too much drudgery?
Is that being too careful?
You can't be too careful.
So that's the definition of what we've got to do.
And we're either willing to do it or not.
Let me make room for another call or two before we close out the first hour.
And let me do that by taking this pause right now.
Mark Davis in for Rush on the EIB network.
It's the Rush Limbaugh Show for Wednesday, December 30th, 2009.
I'm Mark Davis filling in.
Walter Williams with you tomorrow for New Year's Eve.
Can't think of a better way to spend a midday New Year's Eve than listening to Walter Williams Fill It Infrush.
A very, very nice slice of best ofs coming your way on Friday.
And then Rush, back with you Monday, January 4.
Okay, to the phones, to the phones.
We're in Columbus, Ohio.
Mark, Mark Davis, welcome to the Rush Limbaugh Show.
Hello.
Good afternoon.
The first point that I want to bring up was why Senator DeMint is holding up the TSA nomination, the TSA chief.
What other reason he says is so they won't unionize.
To me, this country was built with strong unions, carpenters, electricians, plumbers, you name it.
So why is this such an issue?
I'll tell you, that's a very good question.
Here's the very good answer.
Because in the John L. Lewis of the 20s, that era, you know, when there were just bad business owners who didn't care about whether employees died in coal mines or in various other work environments, there was a strong argument for the necessity of unions.
Unions still serve a purpose today.
But by and large, the recent history of unions is to encourage mediocrity, protect jobs at every cost, and to value and prioritize the maintenance of jobs and certain workplace issues over the quality of the actual work being done.
I'm in a union and where I work.
We have a lot of strong people here, and the people that don't cut it, they're weeded out.
And I don't care what type of union.
But that tends not to, but that doesn't happen enough.
I mean, that's fantastic.
But the recent history of unions involves far too many instances where sloth and mediocrity are not weeded out.
There are countless people that I can find, maybe you can too, where they'll go to an assembly line and say, look, you're going too fast.
You're making the rest of us look bad.
You're doing too good a job.
There are stories all over the place of people who have done certain jobs that maybe they could do the work of two people, and they were beaten down for that sometimes, literally.
You can't do that because we've got to preserve every job at all costs.
And so that's the recent history of too much of union life.
And that's why Senator DeMint does not want that to infect the TSA.
Unacceptable.
And the other thing, what is this wall between the FBI and the CIA is ridiculous.
That is.
Well, you're totally right about that.
Another subject and a great segue to our next hour.
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