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Sept. 1, 2010 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:48
September 1, 2010, Wednesday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
Yes, indeed.
America's anchorman is away, and this is your undocumented anchorman, Mark Stein, sitting in.
And remember, it's racist to inquire about my immigration status, so don't even think about it.
Or Eric Holder will sue you, and Hillary Clinton will report you as a human rights violation to the UN Human Rights Council.
Undocumented and loving it, Rush is on his annual golf vacation.
Yeah, yeah, the end of summer golf.
He's not this guy, HR, who's responded.
An unnamed golfer in California, trying to hit a ball out of the rough, hit the ball off a rock.
The spark from it caused a wildfire that devastated 12 densely wooded acres and required 150 firefighters to put it out.
That wasn't Rush, was it?
Well, you say HR says it sounds like his swing.
Well, I think the penal, the penalty, the penalty, I'm not sure.
I assume they resume the game once the stubble, once the brush has all been cleared away in the charred ruins of the beautifully landscaped county that has been devastated, I assume they resume the game.
But, you know, it's no surprise to find Rush on a golfing vacation because there's no doubt about it.
I think golf does cause global warming.
And I think this is pretty.
The whole business with the rainforest, right, in Brazil, that all the eco-crowd are mad about.
I wouldn't be the same thing.
Somebody's down there, big golfing vacation.
Boomf.
There goes the rainforest.
The Haitian earthquake.
Wasn't Rush playing golf in the Dominican Republic around that time?
It's the same island.
Chips the ball over the border fence.
Boomf.
There you go.
Haitian earthquake.
Anyway, great to be with you.
As I said, Rush will be back Tuesday, Monday, best of Rush.
Rush back live on Tuesday.
It's an all-mark guest host week at the EIB network.
Mark Belling was here yesterday.
I'll be here tomorrow.
And Mark Davis in on Friday.
He's the one with that sinister foreign accent that kind of creeps you out a bit after you've been listening to it for a while.
You may have noticed a few breaches of the All Mark guest host roster.
There was a Doug here a couple of days back, and there was a Carl here the other week.
I think I heard a Nigel guest hosting one Wednesday.
So we at Local 173 of the Amalgamated Union of Guest Hosts had to have a big showdown with management and re-establish the All Mark Guest Host roster.
We had to make a couple of concessions.
So EIB are allowed to use non-mark guests hosts on public holidays when they're permitted to use a gay lord.
So listen to our first gay lord who will be here hosting the show on Labor Day on Monday.
Labor Day, that's the day when you get 24 hours' rest from all the gangbusters' economic activity of the recovery summer.
You know, Recovery Summer has been so exhausting.
You know, just filling those orders, they're pounding that cash register all day long.
Every American could use a day off.
So if you haven't yet been laid off, Labor Day is a terrific opportunity to practice what it'll be like once you have been.
I've been out of the country for most of the recovery summer.
I had to go overseas to recover from the recovery summer.
I had a lovely villa at Marbea overlooking the beach closed off for Michelle Obama.
So I had a great view of Secret Service men standing around holding the First Lady's shopping bags.
It was very scenic.
Anyway, I'm still re-acclimatizing.
I flew into New York last night.
The plane landed on schedule, so unfortunately I was in time to see Obama's speech, which we will discuss in this first hour of the show today.
1-800-282-2882 seems to have been universally panned, that speech, but we will get to it and we will dissect it and we will discuss what it tells us about where the United States is going at this critical time.
You know, I love it when I come back into the country.
Don't get me wrong, I love that.
I'm a sinister foreigner, but I love this country.
But whenever I come back, the one thing that drives me nuts is I go back to my beloved state of New Hampshire, which is one of the most beautiful states on God's green earth.
And there's more signs every time I've been away and I land, there's more signs along the highway.
The whole state is like some kind of Burma shave theme park now.
You're never out of sight of a sign.
They've got on remote rural highways now, they're introducing not mile markers, but fifth of a mile markers.
Fifth of a mile marker.
So you're never out of sight of a fifth of a mile marker, mile marker sign.
And in between them, no doubt at some point, they'll put up one of those stupid signs that says there's a fifth of a mile marker sign approaching.
That's the other thing that's crazy about crazy.
Have you seen this?
Stop sign approaching signs.
So you have the stop sign, and then before you have the stop sign, you have a sign that says there's a stop sign approaching.
And I don't know whether it's, well, it may be stimulus money because stimuli because it can't all have gone for the signs just saying this sign is brought to you by the Obama stimulus package.
There may have been some other signs in there.
Then you got, so you've got the sign for the stop sign approaching, then you've got the stop sign.
100 yards before the stop sign approaching sign, you've got a sign saying that there's a stop sign approaching sign approaching.
I don't get this.
I live in the most beautiful state in the world.
The Connecticut River.
That's a beautiful river.
You can't see it.
You can't see the Connecticut River because of all the signs saying this designated scenic heritage river brought to you by the Commission for America's Watery Heritage Rivers.
All the way along, all the way along.
People talk about, you know, we're going to talk about spending later in the show.
People keep, and when you talk about getting government spending under control, people always say, oh, well, you conservatives, talk about that.
But actually, when you look at all these individual programs, people like the programs.
People like the programs.
So there's no fat to cut out of the budget.
Well, let's start with the stop sign approaching signs.
Why don't we start by taking out the budget for stop sign approaching signs?
It's just a small little thing there.
Just any sign with the word approaching in it.
Any sign that is in fact just an announcement for a forthcoming sign.
Let's just start with that.
Why don't we take that out of the budget?
Imam Raouf.
That's the other thing.
That's the other thing I find.
We might get into this Ground Zero mosque business as well.
But before we do, this Imam, he's out of the country.
He announced today he was cutting short his trip overseas and flying back in to deal with some of the bad publicity about the Ground Zero Mosque.
Now, I'm interested to know whether he's got one of those airline tickets where you've got to pay a penalty when you change your flights.
Because who's paying for that?
You are.
You're paying for him to go and tour this Middle Eastern tour he's on.
Now, you think to yourself, what is this Imam Raouf doing on this Middle Eastern tour?
He's funded by the State Department and it comes under the budget item of multi-faith outreach.
Well, wait a minute.
He's a Muslim and all the people he's going to talk to are Muslims.
Where's the multi-faith bit?
You know, if it's multi-faith outreach, you know, why couldn't we send them Jackie Mason to talk to the Imams?
Why couldn't we send that gay bishop the Episcopal Church is all hot for?
Where's the multi-faith outreach in sending a Muslim Imam to swank around the Middle East at your expense, talking to other Muslims?
You know, he's not telling the big shot Imams he meets with anything they haven't heard.
Why do we have to pay for that?
That's just, again, it's just a small, small thing, just a small thing.
So we take out the stop sign approaching signs out of the budget and we take the Imams, Imams touring the Middle East, multi-faith outreach, talking to people of the same faith.
We just take any multi-faith program that involves people of faith A talking to other people of faith A out of the budget, right there, you've got a little bit of savings.
His wife, his wife.
You know, people say, oh, well, we're opposed to this because this Imam and what he stands for is incompatible with American values.
He's as American as apple pie.
He's living off the government.
He's figured it out.
You can't get more assimilated than that.
And not only that, his wife, Daisy, Daisy, Daisy Khan, the Imam's wife.
Did I just say Daisy Daisy?
Oh, this cue for a song.
Daisy, Daisy, give me your State Department funding due.
Daisy Khan is also on the government multi-faith outreach.
She's touring.
So they're like the Steve and Eady of the State Department Global Jet Set or the whatever they call them now.
That's outmoded cultural reference.
So we've got to update those.
Bran Jolina, they're like the Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie of the International Imam Circuit.
You've got Imam Raouf and the lovely Daisy touring around the world at the State Department expense, multi-faith outreach to people of the same faith.
There's no point in paying for this.
We've got to get this stuff under control.
We've got to get this stuff under control.
This is all a complete waste of money.
And America is broke.
America is broke.
And it hasn't got money for the stop sign approaching signs anymore.
And it hasn't got money to send Imams to talk to other Imams.
This is like Kip Kipling.
Kipling said, East is East and West is West, and ne'er the twain shall meet.
Well, now they've met.
And what happens?
You get the worst of both worlds.
So you get radical Imams on the government doll.
Now, say what you like about an Imam in Waziristan, but if he wants to go and stay in a five-star hotel in Dubai, he's got to do it on his own dime.
He can't just stick it to the American taxpayer the way Imam Raouf and Daisy Daisy can.
So this is the kind of spending that this broke, poor, broke country has got to just chop out.
It's got to take a huge axe to all this stuff and grind it back.
And government should be paying for stuff that is necessary.
And we don't need signs saying there's a stop sign approaching.
We don't need signs saying there's a government-funded Imam approaching.
All this stuff should be the way we begin to skim off just to show we're serious about not beggaring the future of this great country.
We're going to discuss Obama's speech and lots more and take tons of your calls because I'm busting to talk to you.
1-800-282-2882.
Mark Stein infraus on the EIB network.
You see this Obama speech last night, marking supposedly the end of combat operations in Iraq.
He was speaking from the Oval Office, so he wasn't standing and doing that teleprompter, double teleprompter ping-pong where his head twists in direction to direction in clonkwork, like he's watching the world's slowest rally at Centre Court of Wimbledon.
He looked like he didn't want to be there.
He looked like he didn't want to be there, and he sounded like an unmanned drone.
He had those pursed lips as the speech went on, as if he was sort of becoming aware there was a guy under the desk twisting a pineapple up his bottom.
It was the most bizarre performance, most bizarre.
What I was struck by was that not the characteristic gracelessness in the speech.
He made a reference.
This is supposed to be, by the way, the graciousness of President Obama, that he said, quote, This afternoon I spoke to former President George W. Bush.
It's well known that he and I disagreed about the war from its outset.
Yet no one can doubt President Bush's support for our troops or his love of country, unquote.
Gee, that's big of you.
That's big of you.
Say what you like about George W. Bush, but he's not actively treasonous.
That's great.
That's very big of you.
You know, whatever differences of opinion we may have about George W. Bush, let no one doubt that, in a legal, technical, very narrow sense, he was my predecessor.
This is very big of you.
Very big of you, Mr. President.
But aside from all that, far more important, no vision of American power at all.
No sense of America as the order maker in the world.
If you'd watched this speech, you would have had no idea what this war in Iraq was about, what America's role in Iraq and the broader Middle East is about.
There was no strategic vision there at all.
And when you're speaking on this issue, by the way, there's a domestic audience, and at times he seemed to be speaking just for his left-wing base in the Democratic Party.
But when you're talking on these subjects, you're addressing the whole world.
And if you're watching this speech and you're on the Politburo in Beijing, or if you're the wannabe czar in Moscow, if you're the president of Iran, if you're the dear leader of North Korea, if you're the foreign minister of Belgium, if you're the deputy tourism minister of the South Sandwich Islands, you're looking at this guy, and this guy is telling you something about American purpose in the world.
And he's telling you that we are moving into a post-American world because this guy, first off in his body language, and secondly, in the empty, empty, empty content of his speech, is telling you that this guy has no strategic sense of America or its role as order maker in the world today.
So that is serious.
That is serious stuff.
Never mind that it may have made a few people happy in the left-wing base of his party.
In the presidential palaces around this world, they looked at this speech and they got the message.
Now, then he suddenly pivots and decides to use the lessons of Iraq as some kind of a broader lesson for the economy.
And he says, quote, unfortunately, over the last decade, we've not done what's necessary to shore up the foundations of our own prosperity.
We spent a trillion dollars at war, often financed by borrowing from overseas.
This in turn has shortchanged investments in our own people and contributed to record deficits, unquote.
This is rubbish from beginning to end.
Guy is entitled to his own opinion.
He's not entitled to his own facts.
The Congressional Budget Office puts the cost of Operation Iraqi Freedom since 2003.
The cost for the whole thing, the war, the U.S. military, the training of Iraqi forces, all the other activities on the ground in the country, total cost is $709 billion.
$709 billion.
The initial budget for the stimulus, just the first of the many big spending initiatives of President Obama, the initial budget for the stimulus was $862 billion.
So, the stimulus, the one lousy stimulus, was $150 billion more than the total cost of seven years of waging war in Iraq.
What did we get for the stimulus?
Nobody knows where it went.
Nobody can tell you where that $862 billion went.
We got all those signs every 20 yards down the scarified pavement.
You know, this next 200 yards of scarified pavement brought to you by the American Recession and Redistribution Act, putting America back to work by keeping it in single-lane second gear for another 12 miles.
Each of those signs, each of those signs, costs $300 or maybe $3,000.
I don't know.
Who knows?
So, if you're in the sign business, it's booming.
Obama took a trillion dollars and stimulated the vital sign-making sector of the economy.
It's run by a guy he met at a dinner party in Chicago.
And unfortunately, all the signs are made in China, and the guy spends the profits he makes from his $3,000 signs on his beach home in the Bahamas.
But that's what we got.
For $862 billion, we got signs and scarified pavement down the highway right across the United States of America.
Obama spent more than the entire seven-year cost of the Iraq war in 20 minutes, and nobody knows what he did with it.
You know, in the old days of big government, you used to at least have something to show for it.
In the New Deal, in the New Deal, they built the Hoover Dam.
Now, you know, you can say what you like about it, that's one damn big dam.
You know, Obama isn't, Obama isn't going to leave us with anything like that.
He doesn't put up a dam.
He puts up a sign saying the American Recurring Recession Act is putting America back to work by launching an impact study group to look into putting up a wind-powered wheelchair ramp to the dam.
You know, there are grounds for supporting the Iraq war or opposing the Iraq war, but the cost is nothing to do with it.
The cost is utterly irrelevant to the economic catastrophe which this country has been plunged into in the last couple of years.
And we're going to talk about that a bit later in the show today.
But there's no doubt this speech was universally panned.
My friends at National Review said in its failure to credit explicitly Bush's surge for turning around the war, the speech was graceless.
In its cursory treatment of Iraq, it lacked strategic vision.
And in its attempt to hijack the troops for Obama's domestic priorities, it was shameless.
So graceless, lacking strategic vision, and shameless.
But other than that, they liked it.
It was a small speech by a small man.
And the danger in the message it sent to the world was that this is a country being led by a president who does not understand America's role in guaranteeing global order in the world today.
Mark Stein, Infra Rush on the EIB network.
1-800-282-2882.
Lots of your calls straight ahead.
Great to be with you.
Rush back Tuesday.
Let's go to Dave.
Dave is somewhere on Interstate 95, which doesn't narrow it down very much, but we know he is in the eastern time zone somewhere.
Which stretch of I-95 are you on?
I started out in North Carolina.
I'm down here.
I'm almost into Georgia.
Oh, right.
Okay, that's great.
Now you got all lanes open down there?
It's running smooth.
I guess I'm the only guy that bugged out.
Right.
Okay.
Good for you.
And I-95 is all the bits.
I'm too much of a big wussy to go on it, except in very remote parts of rural Maine, just before when it gets up around Augusta.
Then it's like safe for some panty waste driver like me.
Great to have you on the show, Dave.
What did you want to talk about?
Well, I'm a retired highway sign contractor.
You mentioned stop signs, and I bumped into a survey, a government survey, about maybe 10 years ago saying that there were 12 million stop signs in the United States.
Right.
And your number of $300 a sign installed is a good number.
And when you do the math, I think I know where some of the stimulus money went.
Yeah, you know, the thing about, you're right, signs are incredibly expensive, and I don't really understand it because if we did ever made them in China, they'd be like four bucks apiece.
But I remember they introduced a 911 service in my part of New Hampshire.
And as a condition of 911 service, we had to switch to formal proper street signs.
We were one of these ramshackle towns that never had town, the streets had never really had proper names, and they just tended to have handwritten signs painted on a piece of wood, just stuck in a piece of grass.
And then they introduced 911 service and said, no, you can't have hand-painted signs stuck in the grass.
You've got to get formal, proper highway signs put up.
And that's where I got the $300 figure from.
We were staggered.
We thought, wait a minute, everything else, everything else you want to buy in life is like 1995 at Walmart.
Why the hell are signs so expensive?
Is it a unionized sign thing?
Is there some United Auto Union type equivalent, auto workers equivalent in the sign industry?
Why are they $300 apiece?
It's 3M Corporation.
They've got a lock on the sheeting.
Well, they did have a lock on the sheeting, but not anymore.
You can buy a lot of Japanese and Chinese sheeting now.
Right, right.
The prices are coming down, but if the government specifies it, you're stuck.
You've got to buy it.
Yeah, that's great.
So like you say, you put in an order.
As you say, there's 12 million stop signs.
You put in an order for 12 million stops.
I think they might at least give you the bulk discount.
But no, it's still $300 per.
That's great.
We need to start.
By the way, the sign thing, I mean this is a serious point, Dave.
I'm not just bashing the vital sign-making sector of the U.S. economy.
I'm not demonizing big signs the way Obama demonizes big oil and big pharma and big insurance and all that.
I'm not getting at big signs.
If you're part of the sign lobby and you're sitting there listening at K Street and you're thinking, oh, now they're going to war on us.
No, I'm not demonizing big signs just for the sake of it.
But actually, there was a guy called Hans, I believe he's called Hans Monderman, who's a Dutch highway engineer.
And he was working on all the most dangerous intersections over in Europe.
And he figured out that actually the less signs you have on the road, the better people drive.
And he took the worst intersection somewhere in Norway.
And he took all the signs out.
And it went from having however many fatal accidents a year to none.
Because instead of just saying, oh, there's a sign saying, oh, I wonder if what's happening on the road.
Oh, well, it's just another sign saying there's a sign saying there's a stop sign approaching sign approaching sometime soon.
So I don't really have to do anything.
I can just drive along in a doze.
I can text message naked photographs of my girlfriend around the internet and not pay any attention because the signs all over the highway tell me if anything's happening.
He took all the signs out, and suddenly people go, whoa, what the heck is going on here?
I've got to pay attention.
And that tells you something about the nature of government.
That tells you something about the nature of government.
That if you treat your citizens as children, eventually you turn them into children.
If you treat them as self-reliant adults, where they're expected to use, take responsibility for their actions and make adult responses to situations, then they will behave like adults.
So that is why I am opposed to the stop sign sign approaching signs.
Let's go to Lee, who is not on a miscellaneous stretch of scarified pavement on the interstate, but is in Conroe, Texas.
Lee, good to have you with us on the Rush Limbaugh Show.
Thank you for having me, Mark.
You're a joy to listen to, and you're one of my favorite marks to fill in for Rush.
Oh, right.
That's like Obama's praise for President Bush.
One of my favorite marks.
Am I in the top 10 list of your top 10 mark guest hosts?
Exactly.
Oh, great, great.
Okay, Lee.
Great to have you with us on the show today.
What's on your mind?
Well, I've got family members that are Christian missionaries over in the Middle East, and I've done some mission work in the past.
And I was curious if you're aware of any government refund programs for Christian outreach in the Middle East and other parts of the country.
No, no, no.
You're missing the point here, Lee, because you would think that sending a Christian to the Middle East counts as multi-faith outreach, because they're Muslim and your relatives are Christian.
But multi-faith outreach, as defined by the State Department, means sending Muslims to talk to Muslims.
So you're not going to get a piece.
Your family is never going to get a piece of that action.
That is just not the game we're in.
So I would imagine there is no chance.
And serious, and again, it's a serious point.
If you look at, for example, the beleaguered state of the Christian community, even in Iraq, on America's Watch, or if you look at what happened to that poor guy who converted to Christianity in Afghanistan, and they were going to kill him, and he had to be airlifted out and flown to Italy, they could actually do with far more Christians flying in and talking to people in the Muslim world.
But it's not going to happen.
We wound up with a classic, this is a classic government boondoggle, a multi-faith outreach program in which we pay Muslim Imams to fly halfway across the world to talk to other Muslim imams.
Hey, Lee.
Yes.
Sorry, I thought you were going to, sorry, my mind wandered there.
I wasn't sure whether you were still there.
They're out in the Middle East, are they, your family?
They're in Jordan.
I've got several cousins that are in Jordan and have been for over a year now.
Do they like it there?
They do.
They do like it.
It could be a little scary at times, but they actually just had a newborn baby a couple of months ago born over there.
So they enjoy it very much.
And they feel that it's God's work over there, and they enjoy it a lot.
Well, you know, the way to look on that part of the world is we talk about it as the Muslim world, by the way.
You notice the left.
The left would go bananas if you were to start talking about, quote, the Christian world.
Then they'd be going on about separation of church and state.
But they accept the fact that this is the Muslim world.
And we never really think about, well, hang on a minute, how did it get to be that way?
Baghdad in the 1920s, for example, was 40% Jewish.
Baghdad was the second biggest Jewish city in the Middle East, 40% Jewish.
Where did all the Jews go?
The whole, where did the Jews go?
Amazing.
One minute the place was full of Jews, next minute they're all gone.
The Christian community, the beleaguered Christian community in Nazareth, the war in Nigeria in which Christian churches are burned down, often with their congregations inside them.
That if the State Department really wanted to stand up for multi-faith outreach, it would have the guts to send people to the countries where this is going on, all over the map.
Nigeria, Pakistan, it would go to southern Thailand, again, where you've got Muslims killing Buddhists.
And it would have people there standing up for real multi-faith outreach.
Instead, of course, it's just a kiss-up program.
The State Department is meant to represent the interests of the United States of America.
And the United States of America, sending Imam Raouf on junkets with Daisy Daisy around the Middle East does nothing for the interests of the United States of America.
Mark Stein, infra rush, lots more to come.
Mark Stein, in for rush on the EIB network behind the golden EIB microphone.
Let us go to Bob in Crescent City, California.
Bob, great to have you with us on the Rush Limbaugh show.
I just wish you would tell the truth half the time, you blowhards on the radio.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, well, it was.
Okay, go for it.
Tell me the lie.
Tell me the lie.
The innuendo is this Imam that wants to build a mosque in New York City is a radical, but he wasn't too radical for George Bush to send him on the same kind of trip back when George Bush was in the middle.
Oh, you know, I got no problem.
Wait a minute, I got no problem with that.
I don't think either.
I don't think Obama should be spending money on this Imam.
I don't think George W. Bush should be spending money on this Imam.
I don't think Hillary, I don't think Condi.
It's a bipartisan contempt for this program.
You didn't complain about it before, and all you guys are doing right now is just increasing making the Taliban and getting more people to join the Taliban and fight against it by this.
Do you know something?
Do you know something?
This is one of the most parochial and stupid arguments the left makes.
No, it's not.
Nobody, you know, you know, you know who, why you seriously think that a guy sitting in a cave in Waziristan is going to, whether he joins the Taliban, he's in some upcountry nothing village in the Pakistani tribal lands, and you think whether or not he joins the Taliban, or let's not, let's give, let's put it another way.
Let's like take the panty bomber.
A guy living in a millionaire's mansion in London, the reason he decides to load up his pants with explosives, whether he decides to strap the cell phone to the Peptobismal bottle or whatever the latest method is, that that is dependent on us, on Rush and me and a couple of other guys objecting to publicly funded Imams staying at five-star hotels in Dubai.
Is that the analysis you're positing here, Bob?
I'm depositing the analysis that you guys are all.
You're depositing the analysis, that's true.
Yes, carry on.
All you guys are doing is inciting all this Islamic hate, and it's all for political.
Well, wait a minute.
Where is the Islamic hate?
Where is the Islamic hate?
For example, I like flying.
No, no, I fly.
Just a minute.
Just a minute.
I fly Royal Jordanian Airlines.
When I fly Royal Jordanian, I never have to worry about Sarah Palin loading up her gusset with explosives and detonating over the Atlantic.
Where is all this Christian hate?
Where is all this so-called anti-Islamic hate?
Let's take this Imam.
You know, you like this Imam Raouf, do you?
I don't know him personally, but I say he has every right.
They have every right to build that mosque.
Yeah, Nobody's arguing about that.
What we're talking about is whether it's in the interest of you, Bob to pay for it.
Now, Bob, Bob, is it in your interest, Bob, to pay for this guy to go and stay in a five-star hotel in the United Arab Emirates?
You betcha.
Why?
Because that's just the way it's done.
That's just an Imam.
Yeah, that is just the way it's done.
He's an Imam on the dole.
He's an Imam on the dole.
We're a joke.
40% of French Imams are on public welfare.
It's the same story throughout the Western world.
Let's take this Imam of yours that you're so hot for this Imam.
Okay, here he is.
He's down in Australia.
This Imam you're hot for.
I don't know whether this was a publicly funded trip.
In 2005, he tells an audience of Australian Muslims that America has killed more innocent Muslims than al-Qaeda has killed innocent non-Muslims.
Do you think that is the multi-faith outreach that it's in the United States government's interest to pay for you, Bob?
I'm assuming you're one of the dwindling band of contributors to the federal treasury in this country.
Do you think it's in your interest, Bob, instead of you going to the United Arab Emirates on the public dime, for you to pay for Imam Raouf to go to the United Arab Emirates on the public dime?
What do you get out of it, Bob?
Yeah, sure it is.
You're broke.
Have you got kids, Bob?
Have you got kids?
Yeah, I got kids.
Your kids are going to live in a smaller house, drive a smaller car, live in a meaner country because of the complete waste of time of sending this stuff to paying, pay.
I don't care.
I just think I don't care what the Imam says.
I just think he should say it on his own dime.
I'm not getting money from the State Department to spout all my lies.
These are private sector lies.
Why can't he get into the private sector lie business?
Why does he get to be the government-funded lie?
And you and I have to be out there batting around in the private sector lying industry where the remuneration isn't half as generous.
That's what you should be asking yourself, Bob.
Thank you very much for your call.
That is Bob from Crescent City, California, talking about Imam Rao.
Imam Raouf, 2005.
He's down in Australia.
This is, by the way, he's right.
This guy isn't radical.
This guy, I have no views on Imam Raouf one way or another, because he's like a ton of Imams that I have heard of over the last decade.
You're told you should meet such and such.
He's like really Mr. Moderate Imam.
He's the voice of westernized progressive moderate Islam.
And then you discover that he gives this interview on Al-Arabiya that says something else entirely.
All these Imams now, a big bunch of them, are just like the way Yasser Arafat used to be.
You know, when they're up there with Larry King on CNN, they're saying one thing.
And then when they're back giving the exclusive interview to Radio Palestine, they're saying quite another thing.
Mark Stein, in for rush on the EIB network, 1-800-282-2882.
Lots more to come.
Mark Stein, in for rush on the EIB network.
The president focused not just on Iraq, but also on Afghanistan in his speech last night.
I was very struck by this story in the New York Times.
Here's a headline for you.
Troubles at Afghan bank jolt financial system.
This is terrific news.
Our nation build.
People say that America can't do nation building anymore.
Our nation building has been such a huge success that Afghanistan has just got its first banking crisis.
This bank is apparently the equivalent of the Afghan equivalent of Lehman Brothers.
It's Karzai Brothers, I think.
I don't know.
It's in here somewhere, I think.
Oh, the Kabul Bank, the Kabul Bank.
That's like a good, solid name.
First National Bank of Kabul.
You can't get put your money in there.
You can't go wrong.
Their losses are expected to exceed $300 million.
This is in Afghanistan.
Afghanistan, you can buy Afghanistan for $300 million and still have change left over to buy Uzbekistan.
This is $300 million.
And the New York Times reports that number far exceeds the bank's assets, which I believe are $12 and a pregnant goat.
So this is what is happening in Afghanistan.
Troubles at Afghan bank jolt financial system.
And this again gets to the defect of Obama's speech yesterday, that he did not identify.
He talks about it in this bloodless technocratic way of his, but he doesn't actually identify what is the purpose of the mission in Afghanistan.
What are we there for?
What are we trying to accomplish?
I noticed two things.
He mentioned Al-Qaeda, but he did not mention the Taliban.
And my bet is that that is deliberate and that at some point he will rule that, okay, the problem with Al-Qaeda has gone away.
We've pretty much done all the mopping up of Al-Qaeda we need to do there.
And the next thing you know, there'll be negotiations with the Taliban.
Lots more straight ahead.
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