All Episodes
Previous Next
May 2, 2011 - Rush Limbaugh Program
37:44
May 2, 2011, Monday, Hour #2
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Greetings to you, music lovers, trill seekers, conversationalists all across the fruited plain, the award-winning, thrill-packed, ever-exciting, increasingly popular, growing by leaps and bounds, Rush Limbaugh program on the air from the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.
Our telephone number.
If you want to join us, 800-282-2882, the email address, lrushbo at eibnet.com.
So the last call, a lady said that she didn't hear what I heard when Obama made the announcement last night.
What I heard the president say was that everybody else had their ideas, but he alone had the right way.
And that he put together the team and that he did this, he did that.
Here's what he said.
And so shortly after taking office, I directed Leon Panetta, director of the CIA, to make the killing or capture of bin Laden the top priority of our war against al-Qaeda.
Now, look, with all due respect, that has been the policy of this country since 9-11, 2001.
It's been the policy of this country for 10 years.
The killing and the capture or capture of Osama bin Laden.
Then last August, after years of painstaking work by our intelligence community, and I could insert Obama quotes about that intelligence community from his time as a United States senator and a presidential candidate, but I'm not going to do that, but I could.
After years of painstaking work by our intelligence community, I was briefed on a possible lead to bin Laden.
It was far from certain.
It took many months to run this thread to ground.
I met repeatedly with my national security team as we developed more information about the possibility we had located bin Laden hiding within a compound deep inside Pakistan across the street from a police station, which is where it was.
It was across the street from a police station.
We also, by the way, did not tell the Pakistanis we were conducting this mission last night.
They didn't know.
And finally, last week, I determined that we had enough intelligence.
And again, I could insert past Obama intelligence comments, but I won't, to take action.
And I authorized an operation to get bin Laden, to bring him to justice.
Today, at my direction, the United States launched a targeted operation against that compound in Abbot-Badr-Battabad, Pakistan.
Now, he had the Medal of Honor ceremony at the White House as this program started today.
And all he had to say really about bin Laden in his remarks was the world's a safer place now without bin Laden.
Of course, the world's a better place without Saddam Hussein, too, but we're not going to mention that.
But, you know, again, the seals.
And let me give, I want to go through.
I did this in the first hour, but I'm cognizant of the fact that some of our EIB affiliates might have preempted this program with coverage of the Medal of Honor ceremony at the White House conducted by President Obama because they had been told that in-depth comments about the bin Laden operation would be made.
They weren't.
No remarks were made.
But if you were not here, if you missed the first half hour of today's program, one of the things that I want to repeat to you and to everybody is I congratulated, and I do in this hour as well.
I continue my congratulations to President Obama for continuing the Bush administration policies of keeping a military presence in the Middle East and keeping the Guantanamo Bay prison open and for keeping the intelligence gathering operation at Guantanamo going.
Despite what President Obama had said to his supporters since the day he was imaculated, he did keep Guantanamo open.
He didn't close it.
He did continue intelligence gathering operations at Guantanamo Bay.
He continued, in other words, to implement the policies of the Bush and Cheney administration, which allowed the most competent military operation in the world to finish the job they started nearly 10 years ago.
And believe me, for this, President Obama deserves credit.
He really does.
If you believe what he'd said since the day he was inaugurated, he was going to tear all this apart.
He's going to get rid of these secret prisons, the rendition secret prisons.
Remember, we're being told today that much of the intelligence we learned came from prisoners who were renditioned to some of these secret CIA prisons around the world.
It's also a targeted assassination by us, somebody other than Israel.
We're also told that the SEAL, SEAL Team 6, gave bin Laden the option to surrender.
Chose not to, so bam, bam, we fired.
We're also told that one of Obama's wives pointed him out to our team in the mansion, which, again, is not a mansion.
It is a hut on steroids that sits on an acre.
Folks, believe me, there's no mansion that sits on an acre, wherever the acre happens to be.
They're calling it a mansion.
You've seen pictures.
It's not a mansion.
Anyway, one of Obama's, sorry, Osama's wives pointed him out to the special ops team.
So imagine you're bin Laden.
One of your wives gives you up.
The last thing you see is a Navy SEAL pointing an M5 at you.
And then you learn there aren't any virgins.
So for these reasons, and I'm being entirely serious, President Obama deserves to be congratulated for continuing these policies that have led to this result, for continuing the policies that continue the war on terror.
He even used the word terrorist last night, which I thought had been banned from the lexicon of this administration.
So just who are we talking about last night?
President Obama last night said, I, me, my numbers of times.
I assemble a team.
He didn't assemble a team.
These teams fall under the command of the Joint Special Operations Command, JSOC.
And they've been operating for almost 30 years.
JSOC is comprised of the following.
Delta, the 75th Ranger Regiment.
Those are the boys of Puanduho.
160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment.
Those are the guys that fly the choppers in the dead of night, 50 feet off the ground.
You had the Marine Force Recon team.
You had SEAL Team 6, 1st Special Operations Wing, the 24th Special Tactics Squadron, a few other support elements.
The CIA also heavily involved, especially units from the clandestine service.
Now, that team has been assembled and operating in Iraq and Afghanistan for 10 years.
Obama did not assemble it, but he did not disassemble it either.
And he led his supporters to believe he would be disassembling this operation, and he did not.
And for that, he needs to be congratulated, which is what I said in the first hour of the program.
He left that team and its operation intact.
Same group that brought down Saddam Hussein.
Apparently what happened here is that the CIA, through harsh interrogation techniques at Guantanamo Bay, the couriers to get information to and from Osama were given up and identified by inmates at Guantanamo.
And again, Obama deserves congratulations for continuing the operation and the intel gathering and whatever techniques were used to gather that information.
There was no television, radio, or internet in or out of this glorified hut that Osama was living in.
So he needed the couriers.
There were two of them.
One of them might have been a protege of the actual blueprint mastermind of 9-11, Khalid Sheikh Muhammad.
And it was these guys who were tracked, the two brothers.
They were seen going in and out of the compound, but it was obvious that not even they had the money to buy and support a hut of this size.
So it was our assumption that people of some means had to live there.
Then the intel produced the fact these couriers were working for Obama, Osama, and that's what happened.
But Obama did not assemble a team.
That team has been operating in Iraq and Afghanistan for almost 10 years.
Same group that brought down Saddam.
So the CIA probably found him through previously described process, tracking him for months with the help of some Delta guys on the ground.
And the team that went in last night has got to be a mixture of all these various units of JSOC, the Joint Special Operations Command.
And they are the ones who deserve all the credit for this.
Not a politician or not a bureaucrat in D.C., to the accepted extent that they didn't shut it down.
I hope now you understand what I have meant all these years when I've said the Democrat Party, no matter what they've said, when a Republican is in the White House and we are at war, when they end up in the White House and their party is commander-in-chief, they are not going to secure defeat.
They're not going to pull out of Iran or Iraq.
They're not going to pull out of Afghanistan.
They're not going to lose a war on their march.
They're just not going to do it.
Doesn't matter what they've said prior to their election.
Doesn't matter.
Now look, despite everything that's been said by this president and this regime, look at how now they're beating their chests.
Look what we did.
Look what we did, but we did.
And they deserve congratulations.
This is something that Obama inherited from Bush.
And we've heard that, have we not?
Inherited a rotten economy.
He inherited a horrible deficit.
He inherited the recession.
Well, he inherited the policy that led to the killing of Osama bin Laden.
A brief time out, my friends, will continue.
Audio soundbites coming up.
Plus, your phone calls, as always, sit tight.
It all continues after this.
Hammerback having more fun than a human being should be allowed to have.
800-282-2882 and the email address, lrushbaugh at eibnet.com.
There's a report, ladies and gentlemen, that the special ops guys asked Osama to surrender.
And that supports the Al Jazeera report that this was the plan to capture him alive.
Remember, there's a bit of a conflict that nobody's really focusing on right now.
Al Jazeera's report, remember to Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, a bunch of people, this is the network to watch.
Even Andrea Mitchell has Al Jazeera.
That's the network up and coming.
And their report today says this was not a kill mission.
It was a capture mission.
And there is a report that our special ops guys gave Osama the option of surrendering.
He didn't, and so we fired.
It gives some credence to Al Jazeera's report that this was the plan.
The report that the Special Ops guys asked him surrender supports Al Jazeera's claim.
Navy SEAL Team 6, they've flown there in helicopters.
The actual fighting apparently was all SEAL Team 6, although I really, on all this, you don't know how much of, in fact, we hope we're not told the truth about some or all of the actual operational details, because it is giving up information we really don't need to be giving up.
But according to Jacob Tapper of ABC, the original plan was for the SEALs to rape down into the compound, and that's how they practice it in April.
They had a replica built of the compound, and they did two practice runs on this thing, and Sunday one of the helicopters had an issue, and they had a soft landing.
Everybody in it survived, but they had to blow it up to keep it from being captured.
So they blew up the helicopter.
Also, according to Tapper, the Navy SEALs are worried that the Pakistan Air Force would spot the helicopters, and they were worried that they might do something to the CIA contractor they're currently holding in a Pakistan prison.
Yet these people are our allies.
They're going to have a little dribs and drabbles of this dribs and drabs reported to the details of the operation in the days to come.
Donald Rumsfeld was on the Today Show today.
Matt Wawer, let me ask you about where Osama was found.
It was found not in a cave along the border.
It was found in a rather upscale neighborhood in a hut in a town about 35 miles from Islamabad.
Does that surprise you?
This is an intelligence problem from the beginning, of course.
We've always had the ability to kill or capture.
What we needed was the intelligence.
And we've been fortunate that that intelligence was forthcoming.
It may very well have been partly a result of some of the interviews that took place in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
And Matt Wawer said, well, do you worry about an uptick in violence now in this country or against Western interests around the world as a result of the killing of bin Laden?
Oh, I think we have to be alert to that possibility.
There has been intelligence that suggested that if Osama bin Laden were ever captured or killed, that there would be a violent attack on America or Europe in one way or another.
And I think it's important that our intelligence organizations and military around the world are very attentive during this period.
Right.
Now, I want to go back to April 16th of 2009 CNN in Espanol.
Juan Carlos Lopez was interviewing Obama.
He said Spanish judge Baltazar Garcon is considering a lawsuit filed by attorneys representing six Spaniards who were at one point held at Guantanamo.
And that lawsuit wants to go after President Bush's legal team.
What is your reaction to that?
I've been very clear that Guantanamo is to be closed, that some of the practices of enhanced interrogation techniques, I think, ran counter to American values and American traditions.
So I've put an end to these policies.
Well, he obviously didn't.
This is why I opened the program today congratulating him.
He obviously did not put an end to these techniques.
Otherwise, we wouldn't have gotten the intel.
Here's Obama from last night at the White House.
Shortly after taking office, I directed Leon Panetta, the director of the CIA, to make the killing or capture of bin Laden the top priority.
Last August, after years of painstaking work by our intelligence community, I was briefed on a possible lead to bin Laden.
I met repeatedly with my national security team.
I determined that we had enough intelligence to take action.
Today, at my direction, the United States launched a targeted operation against that compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.
A small team of Americans carried out the operation with extraordinary courage and capability.
And there's President Obama.
It was his operation.
He did it.
He directed.
He ordered.
He was briefed.
He repeatedly met.
He determined.
And he got him.
Now, the media, as you, well, you know, if you don't, you might suspect, to them, this event has nothing to do with terrorism.
It has nothing to do with bin Laden, really.
All of this, scoop forward to Soundbite 5.
This is all about Obama.
Everything to do with this operation is, as far as the media is concerned, you must look at this through the prism of Obama's reelection.
Here's a media montage from last night.
This is going to be a huge help to President Obama in the election.
Obama got Osama.
This is a game changer for Barack Obama.
The Obama administration will ride high on that.
What a political boost this will be for President Obama.
This would be a complete game changer if the presidential election were next week.
This just guarantees his reelection.
For the president, whom critics recently have accused of not showing enough leadership, is this a turning point?
So, and I'm here to tell you folks, this by the time we get to November of 2012, this event will have been eclipsed by other things.
But they're in orgasmic mode.
The price of gasoline is still what it is today.
The price of milk is still what it is today.
The price of eggs, the unemployment rate is still the same.
The debt limit's still out there.
The deficit's still growing.
Our indebtedness problem, national debt, is still expanding.
There has not been one solution to any domestic issue that is causing genuine pain and suffering in this country because of what happened, the assassination of Osama bin Laden in the hut, the enlarged mansion/slash hut in which she was hiding out in Abbottabad, Pakistan.
In fact, five and a half million Americans will lose their unemployment benefits this week and next.
Five and a half million Americans, soon to be shut out.
Okay, we're back, and we go to the phones on the EIB network.
Livonia, Michigan.
Ken, you're next.
Great to have you with us here on the EIB network.
Hi.
Yeah, thanks for taking my call, Rush.
As we applaud the death of Osama bin Laden, I think it's important that we don't forget that if we had fought this war on terror the way that the Democrats wanted it fought, he would be alive today.
He would be sitting in his little hut just relaxing and taking.
What exactly do you mean by that, Ken, if we'd have fought the war the way the Democrats want?
Well, from the very beginning, the Democrats were not on board with George Bush.
I mean, they didn't support Guantanamo.
They didn't support the questioning of the people that we had there.
They just were not supportive of what we did.
Well, that's interesting.
Again, you know, when I point this out, every time, and folks, literally, since the day Obama was immaculated, we had that executive order wherein Obama was going to close Club Gitmo.
And I said, no, he's not.
And even trusted, loyal, devoted members of my staff, what are you talking about?
Of course he's going to shut it down.
He's a lib.
He hates it.
No, he's not going to shut it.
He's not going to close Guantanamo Bay.
I insist.
They thought that I was being blinded by my own partisan ideological commitments.
And I was making an assessment based on, I mean, I know these people.
I know who they are.
They will happily engineer the defeat of the United States military when they are not in power.
But it's a whole different ballgame when they are.
I mean, you people on the left, those of you who are huge Obama supporters, you realize what you sound like today.
Here's David Rodham Gergen.
Obama walks taller today.
Let me grab, let me look at some of these sombre.
I passed over them.
I wasn't going to air them.
Let me go back and show you what I mean here.
Let's see, grab.
Well, we played number four.
Here's number six and number seven.
First off, this is John King of CNN.
Last night during a special report, breaking news special report, Wolf Blitzer spoke with John King about the news that Osama bin Laden was dead.
And this was what John King said.
Tonight, Barack Obama, the president of the United States, will walk into the White House briefing room and deliver a statement that you know, of course, George W. Bush would have loved to have delivered during his presidency because he was the president on 9-11.
Okay, so you look through the prism of how does this affect Obama's real life?
Whoa, man, would Bush have love to give this president?
Remember, when 9-11 happened, these are the people who wished that it had happened when Bill Clinton was in office.
Don't forget this.
They wanted Bill Clinton to have an opportunity for greatness that was thrust into Bush's lap.
Were jealous.
And now here's John King talking.
Well, all feeling their oats.
Now, after after how many years of the Democrats attempting to undermine this very mission, here comes John King now say hey hey hey hey, buddy boy, this is the exact speech old Bush would love to give the Nyan yen Yenya, Yenya.
Bush can't give this speech.
It was Obama that captured Osama.
Yeah, Bush couldn't pull it off.
Osama got by Obama, Obama walking taller.
This is now those of you on the left who have bought into this notion that your guy.
He's not a militarist.
He doesn't want military victory.
He knows the United States military is the focus of evil.
And what is he doing out there now?
Well, it's reelection time.
Now he's got to be the biggest armchair general in the world, why he himself ordered the pulling of the trigger.
The Democrat Party fought the Patriot Act over libraries and other nonsense.
They fought these warrantless wiretap searches.
They fought every effort to gather intelligence to find not just Bin Laden but other terrorists and to learn of any plans they had.
The Democrat Party, while out of power, fought all of that.
They didn't want the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay to be called enemy combatants.
They didn't want them held indefinitely.
They went to the Supreme Court to get them released.
They wanted them to all have ACLU lawyers.
They did not want a surge in troops in Iraq.
They accused Petraeus of lying before he had even testified before a joint congressional committee.
They fought Bush over military budgets.
They called our troops terrorists murderers rapists Nazis, accused them of needlessly killing citizens.
And look who it is thumping their chests today.
The mindless joy Behar ON THE VIEW actually said, cancel a 2012 election.
So I guess all of a sudden she's for killing terrorists.
Now see, when they're in power, when they're in charge, all that stuff goes out the window.
All that anti-military stuff and all that we've got to lose, stuff that goes out the window.
They are more than happy to secure a defeat for this country to hang that around the neck of a Republican president.
They're not going to sit there and secure defeat for themselves, no matter what you think.
So, all of you members of the anti-war left, listening to all this chest thumping today and how proud the regime is of what it's done using the special ops, killing a human shield, protecting Obama, a woman all of the atrocities you've accused the Bush administration of wanting to do, here they've happened.
And you're out there applauding, oh yeah, big man, Barack Obama.
See, he's not a wimp.
See, Barack Obama, he's a huge leader, he's a great guy.
See, you guys had him all wrong.
Baghdad, Jim McDermott, other Democrats, went to Iraq to be human shields for Saddam Hussein.
These are the people that did anything they could to undermine the war on terror in Afghanistan and Iraq, and now look at them.
So I'm curious how you people on the left feel today.
Do you really feel as proud and chest thumping as uh as as Obama is and and the uh all the Democrats in Washington celebrating this?
Because this is the kind of atrocity that you know You accuse Bush of engaging in.
Osama Bin Laden killed eight years to the day of George W. Bush's mission.
Accomplished Speech.
Now, compare and contrast those reports then with what we're getting now.
If you just went from the news media logistics, the war is over.
It's finished now.
We got bin Laden, and that's it.
Time to get out of Afghanistan now.
Time to get out of Iraq.
We got bin Laden, and that's it.
And these journalists, these newsreaders, you know, they always tend to make fools of themselves when these late-breaking stories occur.
Wolf Blitzer said that all Americans will now remember forever where they were when they heard that Osama bin Laden was dead.
John King on CNN was just babbling on and on about what a momentous event this was.
And we all know that if George W. Bush had been in the White House when this event happened and had made the announcement, why the investigations would just be ramping up now.
And you and I know what form they would be taking.
Well, the lead story would be what took him so long.
Is this all for his re-election?
Is he using it as a prop?
How long has he known?
Is he really dead?
Let's see the DNA.
Let's see the body.
Where the photo, all of this stuff, there would be no belief, no, there certainly wouldn't have been any happiness.
And there wouldn't have been any celebratory mood in the media.
You and I, you and I know this.
David Ignatius, audio somebody number 10, Mike.
This morning on PMS NBC, Joe Scarborough said, David Ignatius, when did the president shift from candidate Obama that had one set of beliefs as far as foreign policy goes to commander-in-chief Obama, who became a much tougher commander-in-chief than anybody would have suspected.
So Bob, see, he's risen above it.
He's tougher than anybody would have ever thought.
He made the shift as he became president.
I was struck last night watching him that this is the commander-in-chief, an increasingly self-confident one.
You learn on any job, and I think we'd all say that Obama's performance in the first year in office was sometimes uncertain, except on these intelligence-related activities.
From very early on, he decided that he was not only going to continue the predator drone attacks over the tribal areas of Pakistan, he was going to step them up significantly from what they'd been during the Bush administration.
His willingness to conduct unilateral operations, as they're called, and that's what we saw yesterday in Pakistan.
I thought they just overwhelmed with how much Obama has grown since he was emaculated, which obviously means he didn't have a clue when he was elected.
But look how he's grown.
And even Ignatius, Mr. Ignatius making my point, he's now grown into commander-in-chief.
How?
By keeping and expanding the Bush administration policies.
And for that, he deserves to be congratulated.
I say it as many times as it takes for people to understand what I mean by that.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
The media would be saying if this had happened with the Bush administration, we would be hearing about how Bush put troops at risk for a PR stunt, that Obama, sorry, that Osama was no longer an important figure anyway.
This was just Bush being a cowboy, knowing full well he had to do something to ratchet up his pretty poor polling numbers.
Oh, yeah, this would have been no military solution to this.
They would have ripped this to shreds if this were George W. Bush.
No question about it.
But look at this from the New York Times.
But as Mr. Obama delivered his remarks and the crowds continued to gather outside the White House, there was little question that his presidency had forever been changed by snaring bin Laden.
The search for him has played out over Obama's maturation as a national political figure in the last decade.
Obama's maturation as a political figure in the last 10 years.
Next will be a story in the New York Times.
C, see, this is why he got the Nobel Peace Prize.
By the way, speaking of you Obama supporters, why aren't we hearing anything from the 9-11 truthers?
The 9-11 truthers, they're the people thinking Bush did all this.
Osama bin Laden had nothing to do with this.
Bush brought down the World Trade Center.
The truthers, where are they?
What is their reaction to this news?
Where's Rosie O'Donnell?
All the other big Obama supporters who are also truthers.
Media probably too busy mocking the birthers to get around to the truthers.
But where are they?
All this celebration, all those leftists who believed that bin Laden was a fall guy, now their leader has gone out and killed bin Laden and is being credited as finally achieving competent leader status.
Look what it has taken for Obama to be praised as competent.
The killing of another man.
That's something the left never signs up for.
Who's next?
Ron Konkama in New York.
John High, great to have you, sir, on the EIB network.
Hello.
Meghadittos from a conservative trapped in the liberal enclave we call Long Island, New York.
Yeah, yeah, boy, I feel for you.
Hey, listen, first of all, I want to say I'm very proud of our military and our country.
But I can't help but think that the killing of bin Laden during the Obama regime's tenure pretty much does make Obama a lock or a shoe-in for re-election.
It does.
That's what I say.
I mean, where am I going wrong?
You think he's a shoe-in?
Well, after this, you know, I mean, he's got the media behind him.
The media is going to keep playing this up.
This is going to be his, you know, this is going to be his campaign.
Well, he got bin Laden.
Now, wait, Justice, are you being, speaking of truthers, are you being truthful with me?
Are you a seminar caller in disguise?
No, I am not a seminar caller.
You are not a seminar caller in disguise.
No.
So you're in the throes of depression then?
Yeah, pretty much.
I mean, and I wanted to take this as good news, but it's just, it's good news.
It's a good thing to happen, but bad timing.
Well, I don't go along with that.
I think that, as I said at the top of the program, I was swelling with pride last night that there's something still, something about this country that's the best.
Oh, yeah.
And it was on display.
This is great.
This is an achievement.
It was the product of a lot of long, committed, hard work.
President deserves to be congratulated for maintaining the Bush policies here that enabled all this to happen.
But, man, it's only May of 2011.
There is so much that's going to happen between now and in November of 2012.
What if there's another terrorist attack?
What good is this going to have done that?
What if, look at, you're going to have, all this is, you know, we're in a euphoric moment.
Now, a lot of people are, but this is going to pass.
All these events always do.
Look, do you think, let me ask you this.
I'm not trying to trick you.
Sure, go ahead.
Do you think that it was the Oklahoma City bombing that re-elected Bill Clinton in 1996?
And the way he reacted to it.
Yeah, I mean, he reacted well to it, but I don't think that helped him.
Okay, well, you do think killing Obama, that sealed it, it's over now.
That's what it is.
Well, it's not, this is not going to have one change positively.
It's not going to change anything about the impact of Obama's economic policies.
It's not going to change what his health care law is going to do to people.
It is not going to change our debt situation.
It is not going to change the price of gasoline or energy or its availability.
None of the realities that people face each and every day are at all affected by this.
In fact, you could say, and you'd be truthful in saying it, that as a terror leader and somebody who posed an ongoing threat, Osama has been irrelevant for as many years as he's been forced to hide out with no direct communications.
Right, I agree, but now it's relevant and they're making it relevant.
Nah, but the media has always loved him.
The media has always look at it this way.
Obama has just lost something that's pretty important.
Remember now, Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri and Mahmoud Ahmadine Zad, at election time, they put out talking points that sounded just like the Democrat Party.
So in a way, you could say that Obama has lost a voice for his reelection back after this.
Well, folks, look, one thing, and you have to say this.
I mean, if you're talking about the impact of the Osama assassination on the 2012 election, you have to say that President Obama will no longer have to worry about or fear any endorsement from Osama, bin Laden, as John Kerry was endorsed by Osama in October of 2004.
And that's something now that won't be a factor.
▲
Export Selection