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Dec. 28, 2010 - Rush Limbaugh Program
35:48
December 28, 2010, Tuesday, Hour #3
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There are two stories in the news today that make the following point.
In fact, I'll make the point by asking a question.
The few things that Obama has done that are working, the few things that he's done that will keep him out of trouble and maybe allow him to get re-elected if he does win in 2012.
What do they all have in common?
What they have in common is that they are all things that Bush was doing that he didn't screw up.
Big headline today is Wall Street Journal, Iraq wants the U.S. out.
Nobody thought this could happen.
Iraq now says it has sufficient control of the country, that their security forces have gotten up to speed well enough that the United States not only can leave by 2011 as scheduled, but that the United States must leave by 2011.
Al Malachi, the president of Iraq, is saying that Iraq will not allow the United States to stay beyond 2011.
In an interview with the Wall Street General, the last American soldier will leave Iraq as a greed, he said.
This agreement is not subject to extension, not subject to alteration, it is sealed.
He also said that even as Iraq bids farewell to the U.S. troops, he wouldn't allow his nation to be pulled into alignment with Iran, despite voices supporting such an alliance within his government.
Now there are some in America who are concerned that once we leave, Iraq could become a problem again, not with a resurgence of Saddam's people, but that Iraq might start getting closer to Iran, which has had its own beady little eyes looking at Iraq and its oil.
Without regard to that, you had people on the left arguing for the entire past decade that Iraq was a quagmire and we'd never be able to get out of it.
Then you had in 2006, right at the very moment the war on Iraq was finally turning for the better, the Democrats, like Obama, and like Harry Reid and like Nancy Pelosi, saying the war was lost that we had no chance of winning.
Obama himself ran on a strident anti-war platform saying we needed to be out of Iraq because the war that needs to be fought is the one in Afghanistan.
So what happened when Obama became president?
Did he pull out of Iraq like he implied?
No.
He didn't change anything.
He kept in place the very policies that were implemented under Bush.
Let's be blunt about this.
The surge not only worked, it's made Iraq a safer place and a place so secure that the government of Iraq says it doesn't need us anymore.
Now I have mixed feelings on this.
I think Iraq would be a great place to have a permanent American military base in place, a permanent force of 5,000 or so.
I'd much rather see us having soldiers in Iraq and close to Iran and right in the heart of the Middle East than all of the ones that are wasting time guarding Western Europe where they're not appreciated.
But if Iraq doesn't want us there, it's going to be very hard to stay there.
And given that we've got a lot of serious problems elsewhere, including Afghanistan, if we're not needed in Iraq anymore, if the mission is indeed accomplished, we may as well leave.
Nobody on the left thought that President Bush's war could be won.
Nobody thought that the United States presence would actually strengthen the Iraqi government.
Nobody on the left thought that that coalition government that was founded in democracy could last.
The only guy who believed that was Bush.
And he was adamant, and he sacrificed his own personal popularity, and he left office a very unpopular president.
But the fact of the matter is he was right about Iraq, and he was right that the war could be won.
And he was right that the new government in Iraq would be able to stand on its own, and I was skeptical about that.
You watch next year now.
If indeed all American forces are withdrawn, and we can finally say once and for all that the war has definitively been won.
And what better way of declaring victory than having the government that you help put in place be so solid that we aren't needed anymore to prop it up?
Once that war is won, because Obama didn't screw it up by changing a single thing that Bush had been doing in Iraq, you watch him take credit for it.
Hey, we got out of Iraq just as I said we were going to do, and we the war in Iraq will turn out to be a tremendous foreign policy victory for the United States.
And despite all of his anti-war rhetoric, it will have finally been won under Obama's watch because he didn't screw up anything that Bush started.
In the meantime, back on my show in Milwaukee, did a little thing on my program right after the 2008 election, in which I asked my staff, all two of them.
I was gonna I normally talk about the incredibly large rush staff, but we're working on a skeleton operation with the snowstorm and people stranded here and there and all of that.
The staff, I mean it's just you.
You're the only one I have today.
Got Mike Mamone, the broadcast engineer, he's in here.
He he's my arm of support, uh Bo Snerdly is somewhere in my earpiece.
I have no idea where everybody else is.
I have no idea where Mark Stein's going to be tomorrow.
Anyway, I asked my staff.
One year from now, and again, this was in December of 08.
Will the detainees still be in Guantanamo?
Remember, this was such a huge cause on the left.
We've got to shut down Guantanamo.
Who was it?
Dick Durbin, the senator from Illinois, compared it to one of the German concentration camps.
This was destroying the American credibility in the world.
We're despised because of Guantanamo.
It is so inhumane.
It's my belief that there was no way Obama was going to leave, take the detainees out of Guantanamo because there's nowhere else to put them.
So I said, one year.
What about two years?
Which would be right about now, December of 2010.
They'll still be there.
How about three years?
How about the end of his first term?
Well, guess what?
They're all still in Guantanamo.
And have you noticed how not a single American lefty is any more bothered by that?
What happened to this incredible outrage over the horror of holding those people without trials?
Have any of them been put on trial?
They're all continuing to be held, and none of them has been able to stand trial.
They're in the same holding pattern, they're in the same limbo that they were under Bush.
And they're in the exact same place they're all at Guantanamo.
Obama has made the statement, well, I'm gonna get them out of uh uh Guantanamo.
And what happened after that?
A Democratic Congress passed legislation saying no, you won't.
Because there isn't a Democrat in America who wants to have these detainees shipped to his or her state.
So they're all still there.
So the left has a predicament.
And by the way, the the the decision to keep them there is absolutely right.
Guantanamo is the perfect place for them.
They can't bother anybody, they're under the control of the United States military, which operates a base there.
They're close to the United States where we can keep an eye on them, and Guantanamo happens to be in Cuba, so if any of them do bust out their Castro's problem, it's the ideal place for them.
But the left has been wrestling with this.
Because, after all, this was the worst human rights atrocity imaginable, and another sign of how terrible Bush was that he was holding these people in Guantanamo.
So I pick up today's New York Times.
Lead editorial, a step toward fairness.
Now listen to how they write this.
They want to praise Obama, of course, because they need jerk praise Obama for everything.
They want to rip Bush, and they still want to act as though they're opposed to us holding any detainees in Guantanamo.
Now, how, if you're a tortured liberal, like the editorial writers at the New York Times, do you work yourself out of this box?
We want to praise Obama, yet we want to deplore the fact that we're holding people without trial in Guantanamo.
Here's how they do it.
And they start, of course, by ripping Bush.
This country continues to pay a high price in both security and reputation for the Bush administration's many violations of international law at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
After more than a year of review, the Obama administration is preparing an executive order intended to resolve the situation of four dozen prisoners in the prison there who are caught in a legal limbo.
They cannot be freed because they are considered a potentially serious terrorist threat.
That's a problem.
And they cannot be tried because the evidence against them is classified or was improperly obtained often through torture.
The proposed order could give these prisoners a form of legal representation and a system to review their cases.
It would not remove the tarnish to the American justice system of holding prisoners without trial.
But it could represent a significant step toward forward in dealing with these cases and possibly reducing their number.
The order which could be signed by the president as early as next month would require periodic review of each prisoner's case by a kind of parole board drawn from agencies throughout the executive branch and not just the military.
So in other words, what Obama is going to do is throw a little bone to the left.
We will allow some of these detainees, by the way, they said four dozen, which doesn't come close to dealing with all of those at Guantanamo.
We'll set up a board to look at their case and see whether or not we ought to continue to hold them.
Why that's really extending all sorts of legal rights to them.
In other words, he's going to create a fake board that's going to do fake things and keep holding all of those people at Guantanamo just as Bush did.
Under Obama's watch, none of the detainees at Guantanamo has gone out and committed terror because they're all still being held there.
In the meantime, he won't hold military tribunals because he's so terribly opposed to them.
So he's doing exactly what happened under the Bush administration.
They are being held there so they can't harm anyone.
He is a beneficiary of the solution that Bush came up with to deal with people who we know will go out and try to kill people if they are released, but cannot be brought to trial without compromising American security because the evidence against them, if revealed openly, would damage the United States.
The grown-up thing to do in the kind of world that we live in, a world in which 9-11 happened and in which further terror attempts are attempted, is to detain those individuals.
And do so in a secure place.
Because protecting the American public at a time of war, and this is still a war with the jihadists, is the highest priority and duty of the president.
For all the blowharding that Obama did in 08, and all the moralistic outrage.
The fact, and it's a fact, the fact of the matter is that in two years he hasn't changed one thing that President Bush was doing.
They're still sitting there in Guantanamo, and as sure as I'm guest hosting for Rush today, they'll be sitting there in two years.
Not only is not a single American lefty bothered by Guantanamo anymore, Obama's presidency itself has benefited from the fact that he's copied Bush's policy in Guantanamo.
Look at the extension of the tax rates.
Who's tax rates?
Bush's tax rates.
And if the economy does indeed recover by the 2012 election, because we didn't raise taxes in the middle of a fragile economy, who's going to take credit for that?
Obama.
For what?
For extending the tax rates of George W. Bush.
I'm Mark Belling sitting in for Rush Limbaugh.
I'm Mark Belling sitting in for Rush Limbaugh at Command Central here in New York City, which is still trying to cope with a snowstorm, despite the fact that the mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg.
I don't know what all the complaining is about.
1-800-282-2882 is the phone number.
Let's go to Fort Myers, Florida, where it's still kind of cold.
Ed, you're on the Rush Limbaugh program with Mark Belling.
Thank you.
Greetings, Mark, from sunny snowless Florida.
Yeah, I know it's snowless.
57.
What was it yesterday, Ed?
It was A little colder yesterday, wasn't it?
A little bit, yes, but it's it's a beautiful day.
I have my sunroof open while I'm driving down the highway over the road.
People in Florida love to crow about this.
This is what hacks you off about the fact that the weekend was really, really cold because you were kind of miserable, and you love being able to call up people up north and talk about the fact that you don't have any snow and you don't have any of this, you don't have any that.
By the way, there is an explanation for why you had the cold snap the last few days.
It's global warming.
Global warming global warming.
Whatever weather there is, the explanation is it's global warming.
Anyway, Ed, what's on your mind?
Uh I spent most of my adult life managing automobile dealerships, selling real estate, and teaching at the college level.
Our politicians are comparable to the management upper management that is in the automobile industry, in that automobile managers never had to purchase a car.
Go into the trenches, go into a dealership, and jump through the hoops like the public had to.
So your point.
They didn't have to deal with what the American public has to deal with.
The American politician has medical, 150,000 a year income plus plus plus, a credit card to buy gas.
Sometimes they have a driver.
They are out of touch, just like the automobile managers that bankrupted the automobile engineers.
And to follow on your point, and when you're and and I think you're right about that, the problem that he's referring to is uh what I was alluding to earlier in the program, in which nobody in our government right now has any hands-on experience with anything, and that's why they can't figure out what to do about unemployment and why they can't get the economy to jump start any faster than it's than it's currently doing.
With regard to the automobile companies, the parallels between them and their problems and what's happening, not just at the federal government, but at so many other governments around the country are just there.
The automobile companies were getting fat when it was easy to get fat, when they didn't have a lot of competition, they dealt with the unions by continuing to expand the pension benefits because the pension was something that they didn't have to worry about in present time.
It would only be a problem when all of these people were retired or laid off and they had to pay all of these pensions to people who weren't working.
In other words, they shoved all the problems into the future.
Well, when the future shows up, and a huge portion of your spending has to go into paying off those pensions, just as we're seeing now with government, then the problems exist.
But the people who made those decisions, the strategic minds that dug the auto companies into that mess, they're now gone.
Just as all of the politicians that created the spending infrastructure that we have in government right now and did all of this borrowing, they're gone and they've left the mess to somebody else.
It's a perfect example.
Thanks, Ed.
Columbus, Ohio, and Ralph.
Ralph, it's your turn on the Rush Limbaugh show.
Oh, hello, Mark, and uh great show, great host.
Thank you for taking my call.
Thank you.
What I was calling about earlier, you spoke of Ohio and Wisconsin declining the train money.
Right.
Uh what you didn't mention, I wish you would have, is the uh Governor elect Kasich, along with Ohioans would have loved to take that uh, I believe it was four hundred and fifty million of Obama's stash money.
Mm-hmm.
But he asked to at least use it for the current infrastructure.
Uh we have a lot of bridges and highways that need repaired and and maintained.
Well, you couldn't use it for that.
If it's not for trains, you can't have it.
You're right about that, and I did neglect that point.
The same case was uh existed in Wisconsin, which also turned down high-speed rail money, eight hundred and ten million.
Both of those governors were willing to take the money to use for actual needs, roads, bridges, sewers, and so on, in their own states.
But the Fed said you can't use it for that.
You've got to use it for high speed rail, and they said if we can't use it for that, we would rather not have it at all.
So in the state, instead, the feds are going to give it to other states for high speed rail.
In other words, you've got Barack Obama deciding from on high what the best use of that money is, something that the governors of these states, RAN is not wanting to have, saying we've got other problems that need to be dealt with, and the federal government not allowing the states to use the money for the things that they best see fit.
You are right about that, and that's an important point to add.
Thanks for the call, Ralph.
For those of you who didn't hear my discussion on this, it deals with the feds handing out this high speed rail money and two newly elected Republican governors saying we don't want the high speed trains because we'd have to operate them.
The response from the government is you either have to spend it on high speed rail, or we're not only going to take it back, we're going to give the pork barrel money to somebody else, not allowing these governors to decide what was in the best interest of their own states.
When you think about it, 2011 has really already started.
The lame duck session of Congress was really all about 2011.
I love it.
Everything that got through were things that the Democrats knew they needed to do now because they couldn't do so in 2011.
Never mind them for a minute, though.
I want to talk about the Republicans.
They are in a very interesting position in Washington.
While the House is now dominated by conservatives, since so many of the newly elected House members ran as adamant conservatives.
Given that only one third of the Senate was up for reelection.
Most Republican members of the Senate is the same old crew that has been there all along.
Will they be willing to cooperate and deal with President Obama?
If the last two months are any indication, the answer is probably yes, that rather than obstruct and try to block, they may be willing to work with him and perhaps too much.
Now I don't want to focus too much on the tax extension deal.
There are some conservatives who believe that the store was given away by the Republicans, that you should have simply waited until January, passed a better bill rather than allow Obama to come up with this two-year extension that brings the whole thing back into play in 2012.
There are other Republicans who said, look, it would have been terrible for the economy if we would have had any kind of a tax increase.
Do you want to send out the message to the American people that we are going to allow taxes to go up because we didn't get the deal we wanted?
Never mind that one for a minute.
What about the other stuff?
A lot of Republicans voted for the New Star Treaty, the Russian arms deal.
That passed with the support of a lot of Republicans in the United States Senate.
The same thing with the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell.
Without getting into the merits of either.
Those are both pieces of legislation that not only would the Democrat did the Democrats not try to pass before the election, those Republicans probably wouldn't have voted for it then either.
Was that a signal that they're going to capitulate in 2011?
I bring this up because there's a very interesting piece today in the Washington Post by Eugene Robinson.
He's a liberal.
He's not a conservative.
But this is his take on what's going on with the Republicans.
And understand that it's written from a liberal perspective.
He writes, it's been not quite two months since Republicans won a sweeping midterm victory.
And already they seem divided, embattled, and not to mince words, freaked out.
For good reason, I might add.
Senator Lindsey Graham captured the mood with his mordant assessment of the lame duck Congress.
Harry Reid has eaten our lunch.
Graham's complaint was that the GOP acquiesced to a host of Democratic initiatives, giving President Obama a better-than-expected deal on taxes, eliminating Don't Ask, Don't Tell, ratifying the New START Treaty, rather than wait for the new, more conservative Congress to arrive.
Quote, it was a capitulation of dramatic proportions, Graham said.
I can understand the Democrats being afraid of the new Republicans.
I can't understand Republicans being afraid of the new Republicans.
His point is, is that sometimes, some of this stuff passed with Republican support because the Republican moderates wanted it to pass before these new Republican conservatives would come in.
You still have in the Senate, the Rhinos, Republicans in name only, the two girls from Maine, Olympia Snow and Susan Collins.
You've got Scott Brown of Massachusetts, who's clearly putting himself in the moderate wing of the Republican Party.
Lisa Murkowski of Alaska is almost certainly back.
You've got that group there.
And they aren't all that happy about this anti-spending, let's repeal health care.
Contingent of Republicans that are coming in, and I don't think they're going to like what's going to happen in the United States House of Representatives, which has about 60 new Republican members, almost all of whom are solid core value conservatives.
You could have as much fighting within the Republican ranks in 2011 as between the Republicans and the Democrats.
There's a lot at stake here for conservatives.
The American people know what they elected.
They elected a lot of Republicans.
And while they say they want the parties to work together, they elected those Republicans because they were afraid of how far President Obama was going.
There's a real fear here that the Republicans aren't going to have their act together, and Obama's going to roll them.
Cut deals when it's in his interest to do so.
Accuse the Republicans of obstructing when they don't roll over to him, and then use the executive order rule making process to go around them and get done a lot of what he wants to have done.
If the Republicans don't understand that their major mission from the American public is to stop the president from going too far and stop him from spending as much money as he's spending, they not only are going to empower and help Obama, they're going to damage the conservative movement because they were sent there for a specific purpose.
And I think it's very important for voices on the right to stay on the Republicans as much as the president.
Eugene Robinson in the Washington Post, who, as I mentioned, is a liberal, sees this division coming within the Republicans, continuing in his column.
Oh, but there's a reason to be very afraid.
I don't want to overstate the Republicans' predicament.
They did after all take control of the House and win six more seats in the Senate.
But during the lame duck session, it seemed to dawn on GOP leaders that they begin the new Congress burdened with great expectations, but lacking commensurate power.
This means that if majority leader Reed plays his cards well, and recently he has been playing very well indeed, it will be difficult for minority leader Mitch McConnell to keep enough of his troops together to sustain a filibuster.
The new Senate will be considerably more Republican than the old Senate, but whether it's more conservative remains to be seen.
And then he continues, on the other side of the Capitol, it's a different story with the Tea Party movement ousting Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
The new House will be decidedly more conservative than the old House, and that's the problem.
Now he's citing that as a problem, the fact that the Republicans won't be united.
I would rather have a Republican Party that isn't united than one in which the moderates hold sway here.
President Obama is still running for re-election in 2012.
And he's going to try to roll these Republicans.
He's going to try to take credit for everything good that happens.
And when something doesn't happen, blame the Republicans for obstructing him.
Do you know how I know that?
That's exactly what Clinton did between in 95 and 96.
You think Bill Clinton didn't tell the president that when he went in for his little visit a couple of weeks ago?
That's how I pulled it off.
I'll accuse them of shutting down the government if they don't allow you to spend all your money, which he did when the Republicans led by Gingrich tried to stop Clinton from overspending.
And then whenever anything works because they block you from having done something liberal, take all the credit for it.
The Republicans better realize that Obama's not going to roll over and play dead here.
Let's go to the phones.
Independence, Missouri, and Mark.
Mark, it's your turn on the Rush Limbaugh program with Mark Belling.
Yes, Mark, I was going to talk about you've been talking about the intellectuals today.
Well, maybe it's the same problem on the Republican side.
We've got some of the intellectuals to do it there, but uh I'm not an intellectual, and I don't I don't know what I'm missing.
I it seems that the answers for this economy are so simple.
Do what always has been done.
Cut tax rates even more than the Bush tax cuts.
Cut the corporate tax rate.
I mean, it's the second highest in the world.
Overhaul regulation, stabilize the dollar, cut spending, including entitlement, repeal Obamacare, get out of business, uh, get government out of business, and drill for oil wherever it is in this country.
I mean, in other words, get out of the way and allow the American economy to go back to work if we have a business cycle that is that is having a natural recovery in place, get out of the way and allow it to go to work.
You say you don't know what's so complicated about it.
What you just described is the absence of micromanaging.
You just said allow the American economy to go to work and allow corporations to make money and people to profit and the stock market to rise and for all of this money to be pocketed by people who have wealth and have assets.
That's what you described.
That indeed is the way the American economy works.
These people don't believe in that.
They believe in having their hands all over it.
They are micromanagers, just watching Bernanke, who I think is terrible.
Just watching him, you see an academic who believes that we should control everything.
He's talking about a targeted inflation rate.
A ti those words just put send a chill down your spine.
Why is the Fed sitting back deciding what the inflation rate is going to be?
Not to mention the fact that he thinks that the current rate is too low.
He wants to target this and manage that and do this and do that.
In the meantime, you've got a new wave of regulations coming in through all of these administrative rules from the administration, all of which gets in the way of businesses hiring people, businesses expanding, and businesses making money.
These people don't like the idea of corporations making money.
They even have ugly words for it, like profiteering.
Well, it is only through the potential of profiteering that a company is going to take the risk to go out and hire 400 new workers or expand into a new market or build a new building or open a new product line.
You do that because you are hoping you can make money.
And you think you can make that money only if you hire more workers.
So long as we have an assault on the notion of profiteering, those companies aren't going to be in a position to hire people.
You've got people running this government who cannot relate to the private sector, don't know anybody in the private sector, don't know anybody who runs a business, and have never done it themselves.
They're clueless.
And you said you're not an intellectual and you don't understand why they're not doing this.
You know more about how our economy works than anyone in Barack Obama's administration.
Find anyone anywhere in there, from Geithner to Obama himself to Biden, any one of them who's ever run anything or even knows anyone who's run anything.
Their idea of a private sector businessman is a Wall Street fact cat.
I'm Mark Belling sitting in for Rush.
I'm Mark Belling.
Mark Stein is going to be here tomorrow.
If I don't make my flight out of New York today, there isn't like another flight back to Milwaukee for days and days and days and days.
Believe it or not, this thing isn't delayed.
I needed to be delayed because the roads to get to the I may be in here helping out tomorrow.
By the way, I think I've gotten people in trouble by implying that we're the only people working today that like people like Rush might hear that they well the website people are saying they are working but off-site right now because it wasn't why not meaning to imply that everybody is gold bricking when Rush is away.
That's all I need is to get people in trouble here.
Uh there's a story in the New York Times today, headline, Cheaters find an adversary in technology.
It's kind of interesting.
In Mississippi, they found that on the standardized tests the kids were taking, That everybody was getting the same answers wrong.
And they realized that what was going on is that a number of the kids who were taking the test were texting answers to other students.
Kids are getting very good at texting.
They can text when the phone is in the pocket.
So what's happened is a company is out there trying to combat that using technology to reduce the amount of cheating.
I want to quote from the story.
With more than 100,000 students tested, proctors, the people watching the tests, could not watch everyone, not when some teenagers can text with their phones in their pockets.
So the state called in a company that turns technology against the cheats.
It analyzes answer sheets by computer and flags those with so many of the same questions wrong or right that the chances of random agreement are astronomical.
Copying is the almost certain explanation.
So you read through this story.
And there's one thing that's not addressed.
It's that everybody is now cheating.
Cheating has gotten to be essentially accepted.
We're treating cheating as the new speeding on the freeway.
Everybody knows that people speed.
And the goal is not to be caught by the cop on the side of the road because they set the speed limits too low, and who can go who can go 55 and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Is the same thing happening with kids and cheating.
The cheating has gotten easy, and that's allowed cheating to become accepted.
The only exception to that is the area where the crack down too much on cheating, and that's college sports, where if a kid gets five dollars off a pair of shoes, we kick him out for five games and so on.
But otherwise, we live in a world right now in which we're having to come up with all of these things to combat cheating, because the biggest single reason people didn't cheat in the past is gone.
The biggest reason we didn't have more cheating in schools and more cheating in life 20 and 30 and 40 years ago, is that people thought it was wrong.
There was actually a sense of guilt about it.
You did it only out of desperation.
There actually was a thought process.
You talk about the good old days or the bad old days.
The real reason we need to come up with all of these high-tech answers to problems like this is that people aren't bothered by doing it.
I'm Mark Belling, sitting in for Rush.
I'm Mark Belling, sitting in for Rush.
In my remaining time, let me try to cover a few of the things that I wanted to say but didn't have time to get to.
Of all the Republicans that are positioning themselves to run in 2012, and by the way, we're, what, 13 months away from the Iowa caucuses?
There's only one that came out initially against the New Star Treaty, and it's not.
Came out and strongly criticized quantitative easing, saying it would trash the dollar, which isn't a good thing, and specifically embraced Congressman Paul Ryan's roadmap for America's future, the conservative approach to dealing with entitlements and taxes.
Sarah Palin.
People are going to start choosing sides as to who they support, and Matt Romney and Mike Huckabee and Jen Dahl and Polletti and all of these other people.
The more I watch Sarah Palin beefing herself up on the substance stuff, in the meantime staying constantly in the public eye, it just reminds me of what Reagan did between 76 and 80, where he gradually went from somebody who is too extreme to ever win, to somebody who's not serious enough to just a joke, to a Hollywood actor, to somebody who actually got the Republican nomination and then could never beat Carter and actually beat him, you
Keep an eye on Sarah Palin and look at the parallels between her right now and Reagan and say 1979, and they're really striking.
Hope you enjoyed the program.
Mark Belling's sitting in for rush.
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