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May 3, 2011 - Rush Limbaugh Program
34:40
May 3, 2011, Tuesday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24 7 Podcast.
It's like my dad used to tell me late on Friday nights when I was uh in high school, I get home lady said, son, you think you're having fun, but you're not.
Now we're having fun.
Great to have you here.
More of it on tap, Rush Limbaugh and the Excellence in Broadcasting Network.
We come to you live and direct and uninterrupted from the distinguished and prestigious Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.
Our telephone number if you want to be on the program is 800 282-2882, the email address L Rushbow at EIBNet.com standby for Barney Frank throwing a hissy fit over Eric Cantor claiming that some acknowledgement is due to President Bush here for the successful mission to kill Osama bin Laden.
Now let's review.
Let's review, ladies and gentlemen, and let's do this with the pure and total objectivity.
Exactly where we are today, uh, just shortly after noon on the 3rd of May 2011.
An American president with admittedly incomplete intelligence, intelligence provided by people, techniques, and agencies, reviled, ridiculed, and opposed by this American president,
invades a foreign and supposedly friendly nation without its knowledge or consent, using information extracted from Guantanamo detainees.
A place that the sitting president opposes techniques to acquire this information opposed by this president and his regime.
The information provided by waterboarding, it was said last night by Peter King, Congressman New York.
Waterboarding of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed produced the intel that led to the successful assault on that glorified hut in which Osama bin Laden was living.
All of this, all of this produced by techniques and policies steadfastly opposed by this current president.
The president gives a some would say illegal kill order.
We are proscribed because of an executive order from President Ford to assassinate foreign leaders.
But nevertheless, this president gives a kill order for a target in a private residence in a country, a friendly country invaded by us without their knowledge, where there are women and children present, by the way.
In the course of this attack, upwards of twenty-two foreign nationals are either killed or captured, including the targeted unarmed foreign leader.
Then it is reported that the president ordered the target's body respectfully tossed into the ocean.
All of which is done without any United Nations resolution or authorization of any kind.
And not only does our president not apologize for any of these actions, he brags about what he did and claims that it was all his idea from the get-go.
And our media celebrates him as courageous.
Now, who could have imagined such a series of events just a few days ago if you were alive and paying attention during the 2008 presidential campaign?
Who could have ever believed that these events would have happened?
And that their reaction, the reaction of these events would be what it is.
If you were alive and paying attention to the first two years of the current president's administration, we're closing Guantanamo Bay, getting out of all of these countries.
In fact, this current president court martialed Navy SEALs in Iraq because one of the SEALs happened to give a fat lip to a targeted terrorist.
You remember that, do you not?
And there was outrage across the country when Navy SEALs under orders to capture the number one terrorist in Iraq happened to give the guy a fat lip and they get court-martialed for it.
And yet, less than a year and a half later, all of that which I just described takes place to heralded applause and celebration.
It's just stunning, ladies and gentlemen.
It's just a darn good thing in retrospect that President Obama listened to President Bush rather than Senator Obama.
But all that notwithstanding, my friends, the effort to deny the enormous importance of the Bush intelligence efforts is in full swing.
Let's examine again with total objectivity and clarity the following.
Clearly, a combination of enhanced interrogations at Guantanamo Bay, i.e.
waterboarding, Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, and CIA detention locations in Europe.
These are the secret prisons.
Rendition, if you will.
Clearly a combination of that, plus more CIA operatives and agents on the ground, along with the telephone and email intercepts, the warrantless wiretap, virtually everything this current president and his party opposed was utilized by the current president to affect the outcome of Sunday night, the death of Osama bin Laden.
Our current president is being called gutsy.
Andrew Malcolm, who writes a blog at the Los Angeles Times, had a brilliant piece yesterday, in which he contrasted Mr. Brennan, his press conference yesterday as a presser at the White House talking about the sweat and the tension and the pressure in the situation room, which was air conditioned.
Creature comfort controlled.
It was gutsy.
It may have been the toughest and the gutsiest presidential decision ever, and yet there was not one word of the pressure of the challenge of the hardship of the actual uniform personnel on the ground in Pakistan.
Now what happened in the Situation Room on Sunday was said to be gutsy.
The gutsiest ever undertaken.
Perhaps by an American president.
This according to John Brennan.
Let me tell you something, folks.
What was gutsy was the refusal of George W. Bush to bend to political and media pressure to drop it all.
For the last four years, three years of the Bush administration, the pressure was daily and it was intense on Bush to quit, to give it all up, to pull out of Iraq, to stop the enhanced interrogation techniques, to close down Guantanamo.
Harry Reid, this war is lost.
The surge had no chance.
Every effort was made to influence President Bush to just quit.
He didn't.
President Bush was gutsy.
He was attacked by the left relentlessly.
He was attacked by the media.
He was attacked by the haughty John Kerry, who served in Vietnam one time.
He was attacked relentlessly by candidates Obama and Clinton.
By legal groups, by human rights groups.
Cindy Sheehan was a national hero in the mainstream press.
Little aside, Cindy Sheehan does not believe Osama bin Laden is dead.
On any of the mainstream media programs.
But George W. Bush and his administration did not bend.
They hung in.
Now, now, however, we are to forget all of that.
No, no, that was irrelevant.
We are to believe Now that none of that was helpful.
None of the policies of the Bush administration were even relevant.
No, the genius and the acumen of Barack Obama, his unmatched guts, his unparalleled intellect, his profound seriousness, are to be credited.
By the way, have you seen the picture of these clowns in the situation room from Sunday?
Have you seen that picture?
My gosh, what a letdown.
CTU on 24 was more impressive.
What a tiny situation room.
I'll tell you something else.
And I this is just an observation from looking at the picture.
The smallest guy in the room is Obama.
He looks small in that picture.
He's hunched over, and you've still got his golf shirt on.
They gave him a windbreaker before they took the picture.
Right, but it was his seriousness, it was his acumen, his unmatched guts that are to be credited here at the same time.
They lecture all of us to get behind him, to unite behind his administration, et cetera, et cetera.
But don't worry.
At the same time, none of this is political.
No, no, because we Obama's never political.
There's nothing political about this.
How dare you accuse us of making this political?
How dare you accuse us of positioning this and framing this so all it's about is our re-election?
That's silly.
And the speech that he gave on Sunday night.
Oh, wow, what a work of selflessness and humility.
I mean, my fact of the matter is, ladies and gentlemen, the liberals, the American left and the Democrat Party owe us and the country an apology.
I will explain when we get back.
So I got a question real quickly here.
For those of you who are a little worried, maybe a little paranoid, that the Osama bin Laden kill operation will give Obama a bump in the polls.
A simple question.
Were Obama's poll numbers falling?
Were in fact they in free fall because he had not gotten Osama?
No.
They were in free fall for purely domestic, primarily economic reasons.
Have circumstances changed in that regard.
No.
Rasmussen says they're not going to be much of a bump.
Even if Chuck Todd, NBC, there isn't going to be a bump.
Maybe there aren't bumps anymore.
You'll hear the audio soundbite coming up.
In the meantime, the left, the American left, the Democrat Party of this country, the liberals owe us and the United States an apology.
They owe us an apology for taking every opportunity to undermine our efforts to track down bin Laden and other terrorists.
They have been the primary obstacles to getting bin Laden since 2003, 2005, whatever, whatever period of time after the 9-11 attacks or the invasion of Iraq that you want to go back to, the primary obstacle to achieving Sunday's result has been the Democrat Party,
and they owe us an apology for their speeches, for their protests, for their lawsuits, their overall campaign to deny our military and our intelligence services the tools and techniques needed to defeat the enemy.
They have sought to undermine the U.S. military, not only in Iraq, but around the world.
They have impugned our intelligence services.
They have sought to undermine them for at least the last eight years.
And among those who owe us this apology is Barack Obama.
Barack Obama campaigned against the very enhanced interrogations that has made him a hero.
He campaigned against Guantanamo Bay.
He campaigned against renditions overseas.
One of the first things he did was to sign an executive order closing Guantanamo Bay.
It was Barack Obama who wanted to parade Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to New York for a multi year, multi million dollar trial in which Khalid Sheikh Muhammad would be given a forum to impugn and criticize and rip this country to shreds with the full endorsement of Barack Obama and Eric Holder.
Barack Obama won the Democrat primary in big part due to his radical anti war positions.
Positions that he shared with the most extreme elements in our society.
Eric Holder, the aforementioned Attorney General owes this nation an apology for his efforts to criminalize this war.
And by that I mean to make us the good guys the criminals his efforts to confer constitutional rights on terrorists, including Miranda rights, his efforts to eliminate military commissions.
Ladies and gentlemen, virtually every tool, every apparatus, every technique, every policy used to effect a successful mission to kill Osama bin Laden was employed by this current administration and they campaigned on undermining and destroying and ending all of it.
And now they claim credit for being gutsy and courageous when none of this would have been available to them had they had their druthers.
Eric Holder's law firm represented a dozen or so of terrorist combatants, our enemy.
Eric Holder's law firm, his lawyers, went to court trying to undo the systems put in place to protect this nation systems that resulted in the successful kill of Osama bin Laden on Sunday.
And let me be clear about something else for all the talk that Obama has now embraced the Bush and Cheney policies, he has not utilized them.
They took advantage of them they recoil at v at any of this or all of this was put in place by their predecessor remember the purpose of the previous administration is blame.
Obama continually citing the mess he inherited be it the economy be it Guantanamo Bay be it whatever.
And now people are mistakenly saying that Obama has embraced the Bush and Cheney policies.
They have not reinstituted the Bush and Cheney human gathering methods.
They have not reinstituted enhanced interrogations.
They've wiped that stuff out they have done away with much that they utilized or that was utilized to permit this successful operation on Sunday.
That means that going forward going forward we may well not be able to gather the same kind of intel that was collected to kill bin Laden.
The next president will not have the benefit of the same kind of information Obama received due to Obama's own policies.
The liberals are who they are, and they have not changed.
The president's speech Sunday night showed that he has not changed.
Not a word about Bush or Cheney's superb efforts, their stick-to-itiveness under a withering assault.
Not a word about the supreme efforts of General Petraeus or the military.
Nothing.
Staff still out there trying to frame themselves.
this as a win for Obama not the troops not for intel not for America but a win for Obama He is so courageous.
He is so gutsy Only Obama could have done this The military's a bunch of boobs the military didn't have the foresight to understand that dropping bombs would destroy the DNA perhaps the military the general's nohawks They just wanted to go in with scorched earth and bum every only Obama of everybody in the situation room.
Only Obama understood the precision required.
The idea that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and others have had their names and reputations smeared, dragged through the mud, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld were targeted for imprisonment by members of this administration and its party.
They literally sought to put members of the Bush administration in jail.
So their names, their reputations have been smeared, dragged through the mud, attacked for building the very foundation of security and defense that exists in this country today, which protected us, used by Obama to make his decision, and we are going to ignore it.
We're going to pretend it never happened, and we are going to all unite behind the left.
Sorry, it doesn't work that way.
And you're tuned to the most listened to radio talk show in America, hosted by me, Rush Limboy, your guiding light, and is always utilizing talent on the loan from a god.
Again, the idea that Bush Cheney rums by quick question, folks, can you put Osama bin Laden blood in your gas tank?
The idea that Bush, well, it was just a little question.
The idea that Bush Cheney Rumsfeld, Scooter Libby, Carl Rove, practically everybody in the upper echelons of the Bush administration have had their names and reputations smeared, their reputations, careers, and lives attacked, dragged to the mud for building the foundation of security and defense that exists in this country today.
A foundation that has protected us.
A foundation, a system used by Obama to make his decision.
And now we're just going to ignore all that.
That never happened.
And we're gonna we're gonna all unite behind the left, which despises if we are to believe them.
They despise virtually every aspect of this operation that was utilized to make it a success.
They opposed it.
Yet every turn, and they have for decades.
Now going forward, folks, these liberals, the American left still dangerous because they're still misguided.
We are still at war with these mass murderers.
I have a friend who lost a son at Twin Towers, and sent me a note, and I was frankly somewhat perplexed by the note.
Do you think this will?
You notice the perspective of the 9-11 families you've seen them on TV is quite different than all of us, the rest of us.
It's really it's it's shockingly surprisingly different.
There's no rah-rah there.
None of them are talking about some great sense of closure.
It's interesting to see.
And this friend of mine sends a note asking me if I honestly think that the death of bin Laden will finally slow down these terrorists.
He asked me with a sense of hope.
How do you answer that when you know the answer's no way?
In fact, if you believe our current leadership, all this is going to do is recruit more terrorists.
If Guantanamo Bay was going to be a magnet for more terrorists if having a prison where we detained these prisoners and terrorists, if that was going to lead to more terrorist recruitment, then what's this going to do?
Using their own philosophy now, their own logical progression.
Yet this man sends me a note.
He's desperately hoping the death of Obama means that the mil Osama, that the militant Islamists will just sit down, that they'll just give Up now.
They won't.
We are still at war with these mass murderers.
And Obama and his administration, his party, the Democrat Party, his media sick offense, have all worked overtime to reduce the level of security that existed before the arrival of his administration.
Gitmo is open, but what kind of interrogations take place there now?
We know that they don't like it being open.
They want to shut it down.
They just can't find a way.
Are the CIA detention locations still operative overseas?
Obama says he's going to close those.
We're not going to use rendition.
What's with that?
The enemy's still there.
They're still targeting us.
They are still ratcheting up.
Is Obama still planning on slashing the Defense Department's budget?
While he massively expands domestic spending.
You see, ladies and gentlemen, the left, and I don't care where you go to find the left, the White House, Congress, the media.
They're doing all they can do to deny the obvious.
They reject the methods and means that have been used to bring bin Laden to his death.
So they attack those of us who point it out.
They've got a in rare moments of honesty, they have to be conflicted.
Every aspect, everything they're standing up and applauding, everything they want a standing ovation for.
They've sought to destroy.
They intellectually and emotionally oppose all of it.
And yet here they are having to applaud it and claim credit for it as their own.
They want to have it both ways.
That includes the media.
They want political props for military operations on their watch, but at the same time, their support for the military and intel services has been awful, openly hostile.
The military and intel have been the focus of evil as far as they are concerned.
In all honesty, Obama, the Democrats campaigned against the military and against our intelligence services in the last presidential election.
That's who they are.
Look at the liberals today.
What have they become?
They are thrilled that a secret mission was used to successfully kill bin Laden, but they don't like these secret forces.
They don't like the means of getting the information, and they want to slash the budget for it.
So again, to review.
An American president with admittedly incomplete intelligence invades a foreign and supposedly friendly nation without that nation's knowledge or consent.
Using information extracted from Guantanamo detainees, subjected to allegedly illegal enhanced interrogation methods, i.e., waterboarding.
The president gives a kill order for a target in a private residence where there are women and children present.
And in the course of this attack, upwards of 22 foreign nationals are either killed or captured, including the illegally targeted unnamed or unarmed foreign leader.
And then it's reported that the President ordered the target's body tossed into the sea after a 40-minute ceremony.
And all of this was done without any United Nations resolution or authorization of any kind and no knowledge on the part of the country we invaded that we were coming.
So, And not only does the president not apologize for this, he brags about it.
Look what I did.
I alone, under my directs, I made the decision.
And our media is celebrating him as gutsy and courageous.
Okay, you're gonna get to your phone calls El Quicko, folks, hang in there and be tough.
But first, yesterday on the Center for American Progress Action Fund website, thinkprogress.org, a reporter was interviewing Representative Barney Frank of Democrat Massachusetts.
The question, President Bush regularly said that getting Obama was not a top priority.
And yet today, you had Eric Cantor who said, quote, I commend President Obama who has followed the vigilance of President Bush in bringing off some of bin Laden to justice.
And I'm wondering if you think President Bush deserves any credit here, Congressman Frank.
For Eric Cantor to phrase it that way, to say he followed the vigilance of President Bush is a degree of cheap partisanship that exceeded even what I expected from Cantor.
Frankie, my one serious criticism of President Obama is that he showed too much continuity with President Bush.
I wish he was a little less uh connected to President Bush with regard to the tax cuts and with regard to Iraq and Afghanistan.
Yeah, that's folks.
Isn't isn't that uh amazing?
Look at all the Bush policies that President Obama is keeping in place.
Virtually all the military policies, the Bush tax cuts, are in place.
Marnie Frank not happy about it.
So we move on to CNBC's Squawk Box.
The co-hosted Joe Kiernan.
He said, Congressman, we love your feistiness.
Just gonna try to get you going here, see if I can do it.
Looking at the Wall Street Journal today, they're talking about this as also a moment to salute George W. Bush.
I saw that uh yesterday, Eric Cantor tried to make the same claim, and you said that you didn't even expect from Eric Cantor to be that deeply partisan.
He actually thanked George W. Bush.
Don't you think it's partisan to not say that Bush had anything to do with this, Congressman.
I am struck by your intro into this that you're gonna try to get me uh uh to to be uh feisty.
No, I'm sorry.
Please don't interrupt.
All right, I'm sorry.
I look, you know, I I gotta be honest with you.
Uh uh I I'm asked to come on the show.
I'm glad to have a thoughtful, serious conversation.
Okay.
But when you tell me, oh no, your purpose is to needle me to try to get me to be upset.
That's really not worth getting up early for, to be honest with you.
All right.
Now can I get to the substance?
Yes.
I said, and I mean it, that if this had happened under Bush, the Republicans would not have said Bush and Clinton, because the effort to kill Osama bin Laden started under Bill Clinton, who began this effort and tried to kill him and almost was able to do it.
Well, let's not forget uh Congressman Frank that uh Bill Clinton was offered Osama bin Laden uh bin Laden twice.
Um had you know this phrase on a silver platter.
Sudan, somebody offered us bin Laden, and Clinton said, uh, we don't have the uh we don't have legal procedures in place.
I I don't want any part of the guy.
It's a law enforcement issue back then, and they had no mechanism to accept bin Laden.
But here comes the revisionism now.
So Clinton was the first guy who wanted to wipe out bin Laden.
We know the President of Bush would not have said this at all.
But Current wasn't finished.
Well, could you at least concede then that a lot of the structure that Bush put in place is an enemy combatant.
A lot of the things that just drive the left crazy are now being adopted by the Obama administration and had something to do with his final triumph.
How about that?
I would first of all reject the kind of rhetoric you engage in drive the left crazy.
I don't think legitimate criticism about whether we ought to stay in this country or not is uh craziness.
You say, Well, I concede that some of this was from Bush.
I don't concede it because I never denied it.
I didn't say that the Bush administration had nothing to do with it.
And yes, I do think that in some degree the President Obama uh should should make more changes.
That's right.
Left not happy, and gone far enough.
Close get more, follow through here, shut down West Point, and get us out of Afghanistan and Libya, get us out of these places.
That's why the left is unhappy.
So Kernan finally says, Look, I hope you'll come back, as I want to talk to you about uh Massachusetts state legislature, public unions, too.
I'd love to get your opinion on some of that, but I I wouldn't want you to get too mad at me if I were to ask you about that.
Excuse me, I'm sorry, but I really do take what it's up to that.
I only get mad at you when you prefaced your question by saying, Let me see if I can get you to be uh too feisty, etc.
I'm always going to come out of a state of the city.
We got like I said, we have Howard Dinkal.
Watch him.
He's gonna he might even know yellow when he comes off.
You want to back off it, okay.
But you said, you know, you were trying to sort of pick a fight or try and say something that would be controversial.
Let's cable come on.
I'm sorry.
Please don't denigrate your medium easy.
Well, then that's unfortunate for cable.
If you're telling me that serious, thoughtful conversation without a lot of fireworks isn't appropriate for cable, then I'm disappointed.
That's Barney Frank uh with the standard turn on CNBC.
Uh it's cable.
Come on, it's cable.
That's right.
Well, that's don't currently.
It's cable.
Come on, Frank.
What Kerner was saying, you know the game here.
It's cable.
You act feisty.
I ask you crazy questions to get you all worked up and you answer them.
By the way, Barney Frank, just so you know, Barney Frank co-sponsored the American Anti-Torture Act, which would outlaw water boarding, outlaw renditions, and every other enhanced interrogation technique.
Barney Frank co-sponsored the American Anti-Torture Act, which is what I mean.
These people owe us an apology.
If Barney Frank had had his way, none of what happened on Sunday would have happened.
Now, uh, ladies and gentlemen, I I I was hoping to get to uh.
Let me try.
Let me let's let's go to Thomasville, North Carolina.
Let me sneak a call in here before we have to go.
Joe, I'm glad you call.
Welcome to the EIB network.
Great to have you here.
Good afternoon, sir.
Yeah.
I have questions for those who are calling this gentleman who cloaks himself in the presidency of the United States and the leader of the free world, where this person has been for the last three months.
We have Texas burning to the ground.
It was at that time.
Wheat, corn, other crops destroyed.
We've had flooding all up the Mississippi through the Ohio Valley.
Prior to this horrible tornadic activity of the E4 and E5s in Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia.
Uh eighteen counties in my own state.
Now I'm far removed from the damage.
I'm in Piedmont, North Carolina.
But eighteen counties of my fellow North Carolinians have been destroyed.
Destroyed.
Not a word.
No boots on the ground from uh the leader and his missus in North Carolina.
Well, uh uh not only that, he brings up this uh uh birth certificate thing and then says he has uh more important issues we should be addressing.
He says that before the tornadic activity.
Well he was playing golf.
I beg your pardon.
He's playing golf.
Well, not only that, he was also out at the Facebook crowd with $35,000 plus a plate.
Well, you're absolutely right.
They had to drag him off the dot off the golf course to the situation room.
He only played nine holes.
They had to go to Situation Room.
you you CNN with a um that they can tell they're disappointed uh the release of their latest poll.
Obama got a one-point bump in his approval number up to 52% from 51% because of the uh death and the kill operation for Osama Vin Lada.
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