All Episodes
Previous Next
May 3, 2011 - Rush Limbaugh Program
34:34
May 3, 2011, Tuesday, Hour #3
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
And what do you think about putting yesterday's first half hour up on Facebook too?
Put yesterday's first half hour, the audio.
Coco, go ahead and do that.
Put the audio from yesterday's first half hour up on Facebook along with the audio from today's first hour.
Have them both up there.
An A-B side-by-side lesson.
Ha.
How are you?
By the way, folks, we've been told here for, I don't know now, when did I first, two hours ago that the pictures of bin Laden are coming?
When did I first, the Dredge headline, White House to release bin Laden death photo, I've said at least, well, three hours now.
If this photo is not up by 2.45, you know, basically 38 minutes from now, I'm calling Donald Trump.
Trump gets things done.
Trump, you know, well, when you ask Mark Melman to go, name one thing Obama's done.
He produced his birth certificate.
And then he killed Osama.
Killed Bin Laden.
So those pictures aren't up.
That's the ticket.
Call Trump.
Great to have you back here with us, folks.
Telephone number is 800-282-2882.
If you want to be on the program, the email address, El Rushbo.
What?
They can't release the photos now?
Is that right?
Jay Carney, the White House secretary, said that it's such a highly classified operation that they can't release the photos.
Wait a minute.
They can't.
He didn't say can't or he did say can't.
They can't release the photos because there was such a highly class.
Oh, he's giving a reason why it hasn't been released yet.
Carney's doing the White House press briefing now.
So I don't know.
The White House narrative of the raid from Jay Carney is now they're calling the SEALs assaulters.
Carney spent almost as much time describing the reverence at the rights surrounding Obama's Osama's burial at sea than the attack itself.
Wow, that was a 40-minute burial ceremony.
So he's suggesting that they may not release or won't or haven't yet because the operation was so highly classified.
Well, let's get to this assaulters business.
Here is the bite.
This this morning on Fox News channels Fox and Friends.
And this is what Brennan said.
He's the White House assistant to the President for counterterrorism.
This is what Brennan said about the raid on Osama bin Laden.
The president had decided that the raid that was conducted on Sunday provided maximum chances for mission success, again, getting bin Laden, having that proof.
At the same time, he had supreme confidence in the ability of the assaulters to carry out this operation successfully and stealthily so that they were able to get out without engaging any Pakistani forces.
And that's how he decided on the raid option.
Okay, there you have it.
See, the president had decided the raid was conducted on Sunday provided maximum chances for mission success.
Getting bin Laden, having that proof, had supreme confidence in the ability of the assaulters.
The assaulters.
This is SEAL Team 6.
Seymour Hirsch, New Yorker Magazine.
This is from a Weekly Standard Reminder.
According to the New Yorkers Seymour Hirsch, it's an executive assassination ring, essentially, and it's been going on and on and on under President Bush authority.
They've been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on the list and executing them and leaving.
That's been going on in the name of all of us.
So, this is again here you have this regime celebrating SEAL Team 6.
What a great operation.
Only Obama knew the proper way to use them.
And that's why these people owe us an apology because they have everything they could to impugn, denigrate, destroy, smear every person, every organization, every institution that was working to keep this country safe.
They were trying to destroy, impugn, smear, and now they embrace it.
Now they embrace all of these things.
So that's Brennan from this morning.
Also on CNN's American Morning, the co-host Kieran Chetri said, Will the public ever see any of that video or the photo of a dead bin Laden?
We have been releasing a lot of information over the last 36 or 48 hours about this operation.
We want to make sure that we're able to do it in a thoughtful manner.
We also want to anticipate what the reaction might be on the part of al-Qaeda or others to the release of certain information so that we can take the appropriate steps beforehand.
So any other material, whether it be photos or videos or whatever else, we are looking at it and we'll make the appropriate decisions.
You know, about that, is it just me or is it odd that they're talking about what a treasure trove of intel they have gathered from the hard drives and the hard disks, the computers, whatever, all the stuff that they collected from that so-called mansion.
And you've seen it, but the first reports of this thing Sunday night and Monday were Osama was living in a mansion.
Come on, folks.
It's a glorified hut.
You just, it's a hut for crying out loud.
Mansion.
At any rate, why advertise that you've got this stuff?
Flush who out?
I'm sorry.
I'm sorry, Snerdley.
Announcing that you've got the stuff does not flush them out.
You have the stuff.
You study it.
You look at it.
Maybe some of the intel that they got will disclose the location of the number two, Ayman al-Zawahiri.
Well, now Ayman al-Zawahiri doesn't have to worry about whether or not we know.
He already knows we know, so he can decamp, he can move, he can whatever.
If you keep that stuff close to the vest, you know, this is the one thing about Intel.
You really, ideally, you never learn how good it is because they never say.
Well, we've just blabbered all over the world what we've got.
I don't know.
I think this is, again, in their quest here to claim credit to create this impression of utter uber competence.
And look how good we are.
They're making a tactical mistake by announcing they got all this stuff rather than holding it tight, holding it close, and being able to act on it.
Just don't say anything about it.
After all, the rest of the network, whatever, how do they know what's in that house?
How does some terrorist gang somewhere know that Obama Osama's got anything on him?
Now they're all on the alert.
I don't know.
I just think it's a tactical error.
One more Brennan soundbite, and it is from this morning's CBS early show.
The co-host Erica Hill asked him this question.
Do you have any sense at this point of how active Osama bin Laden was leading up to his death?
I think the latest information is that he was in this compound for the past five or six years, and he had virtually no interaction with others outside that compound, but yet he seemed to be very active inside the compound.
And we know that he had released videos and audios.
We know that he was in contact with some senior al-Qaeda officials.
Yeah.
So he seemed to be very active inside.
What does that mean?
Released videos and audios.
He was in contact with some senior al-Qaeda officials, but he had virtually no interaction with others.
That's in the same bone.
Sound bite.
Yeah, he had virtually no interaction with others.
We know he was in contact with some senior al-Qaeda officials, but he had no interaction with others.
These people, they don't have the slightest clue what they say.
It was Clapper.
That was the guy who described the Muslim Brotherhood as basically just a meals-on-wheels bunch.
Okay, my good friends, another brief timeout here from the EIB network.
It's an obscene profit timeout, as they all are.
And we'll continue when we get back.
All right, let's go to the phone's log.
Los Angeles.
Eric, glad you called, sir.
Great to have you.
I appreciate your patience here on the EIB network.
Hi.
The release of these photos could be one of the biggest mistakes the Obama administration makes.
Just like the Bolivian military did in 1967 when they shot and killed a filthy, dirty, sickly, highly depressed Che Cuevara.
But they made the mistake of cleaning him up and taking a really benign-looking photograph of him.
They propped his eyes slightly open.
They created a modern icon by releasing that photograph.
So the Obama administration has to be very careful about anything they release.
You can imagine anything halfway benevolent looking is going to end up on the iPhones of every anti-American person in the world as a rallying cry.
And also, we're not sure we can trust some of the Obama administration's operatchics who may have Che Cuevara t-shirts hanging in their own closets.
Okay.
Let me see if I understand this.
We make an icon out of Che Guevara, the Bolivians do, by releasing death photos of him looking gentle and harmless in repose.
Yes.
And we do the same thing here with Obama.
Osama, if we do the same thing here with bin Laden, you know, I need to set up some electric shock thing every time I get this wrong.
We set up the same thing with bin Laden, a benign, harmless-looking guy with a bullet hole in his head.
You fear we run the risk of creating a what? An iconic figure.
People are still wearing Che Guevara t-shirts.
They're waving Che Cuevara flags at a laboratory.
But why do you think that really is?
And who, by the way, is wearing the Che Guevara t-shirts?
Are they not a bunch of teenagers and college students and aged hippies from the 60s?
No, union members in downtown Los Angeles at union rallies, at illegal immigrant rallies, Che Cuevara flags, Che Cuevara t-shirts.
Oh, yeah, but why?
Why are they doing it?
Because it's the revolución.
It is, as described by Jorge Castañeda.
I highly recommend his biography of Che Guevara Companero and also pick up Mr. Castañeda's Utopia Unarmed.
And it's all about Latin American people.
Now, wait, I'm being told here that the Che Guevara iconic picture on t-shirts is not his death picture that you have described.
No, it's not.
But what it did is it redeemed an utterly depressed, filthy, dirty, about to quit Che Guevara.
After he had orchestrated the kidnapping, assassination, and murder of hundreds, if not thousands of people over a period of time, that image of this filthy, dirty, really depressed man was completely washed away in that death photo.
And now he's an icon among the left and organized labor.
What are your thoughts on this?
What about would you be surprised if Obama used whatever photo is forthcoming in his campaign posters?
Well, if he goes PC on us, they'll try to make Obama look good.
He doesn't want to say Osama.
Obama doesn't want to look like a cruel man as president of the United States.
So if they give any deference to some redeeming human quality of Osama bin Laden, it'll end up on t-shirts.
It'll end up on every anti-American's iPhone.
I guarantee it.
And that was the biggest mistake that the Bolivian military made.
In 1967, they happened to clean him up, make him look, you know, really quite benevolent.
Let me just, here's the thing about this.
I understand what you're saying.
But in my view, I think for this enemy that we face, everything's a rallying cry.
And a picture of benign bin Laden on t-shirts wouldn't add anything to it because they're already ratcheted up to maximum hatred.
Anything we do to defend ourselves, anything that we do when detaining and interrogating them, anything we do with disposing of the bodies, anything we do with photos and videos, anything we do with cartoons, Korans, everything and anything we do provokes them.
We provoke them by virtue of our very existence.
This is what people have a hard time grasping.
Our very existence provokes these people.
We are infidels in our existence.
Whatever additional actions we take can't add much to the hate that they are.
They already want to kill us.
They don't.
There's nothing that can change that.
It's why we seek to get them first.
I understand the concern here, but I think to the extent that you worry about him becoming an icon, he already is.
Nothing more can be done to add to that.
Speaking, you talk about union people, illegal immigrants and stuff, wearing the Che Guevara.
So I would contend to you that easily 95% of the people wearing a Che Guevara t-shirt haven't the slightest clue who he was.
He's just a good-looking Latino guy.
Just a good-looking guy.
Well, they know he's a leftist something, so forth and so on, but he's just the kind of guy you'd hope you're running to in a pool party after you've assassinated some Eastern European leader.
And he was the hitman.
You know, he's one of these perfect James Bond kind of quasi-villain.
You know, I just think there's a romantic attachment to Trent Cheguevara that has nothing to do with any substance.
From the Los Angeles Times a couple of days ago, small turnout for May Day march in Los Angeles.
The Los Angeles May Day rally to support illegal aliens and their rights to something was a little sad looking.
They found a couple hundred people who were not from the press or the police to show up.
But that 2006 rally, if you remember, they claimed to have 100,000 people at that one.
There were American flags, union banners, and vendors hawking treats like ice cream and hot dogs wrapped in bacon.
Oh, hot dogs wrapped in bacon.
Somebody called Michelle Obama.
But what was missing from this year's May Day march on a crystal clear Sunday morning were the crowds.
By 10 a.m., only a few hundred immigrant rights and labor activists had gathered at Broadway and Olympic Boulevard in downtown Los Angeles to rally public support for legislation that would legalize the nation's 11 million illegal immigrants.
It's really sad, said Luis Ortiz, an ice cream vendor who has been coming to the rallies for the last 15 years.
He said of the small turnout.
Man, I've sold very little, almost nothing.
Plenty of police officers on foot and bike patrol were on hand to monitor the crowd.
Last May, galvanized by Arizona's controversial anti-immigration law, about 60,000 demonstrators took to the streets.
This year, hardly anybody showed up at the L.A. May Day.
What do we mean?
They're all broke.
They're all always broke.
When do you think these people work?
Who are we talking about here, Snerdley?
They're all always broke.
Just the organizers didn't have gas money.
Put them on the buses.
You've seen the price of it out there.
Duncan in Lincoln, Nebraska.
Hi, and welcome to the EIB Network.
Hey, thanks, Rush.
Major Husker Ditto, sir.
Thank you, sir.
And if I can, I just had a comment to make about this whole Osama bin Laden deal.
Essentially, what the Obama administration did was they received the intelligence and they acted on it, correct?
And I would argue that that is essentially the president's job.
And for him or any of the other liberals to expect a huge bump out of this, I think they are seriously misreading the American people.
That is essentially his job.
Nobody hasn't been doing it.
That's one of the reasons why the job that most people expect the president to do hasn't been happening.
But I get your point.
It's sort of like, okay, so a student gets a B.
Okay, fine.
Why go crazy here?
That's what you're supposed to do.
Pretty much exactly.
I mean, if he had come out and said, we've killed Osama bin Laden, now we're moving on to I'm an Al-Zahiri, his number two, and Adam Gadon in Yemen, and the on down the list of other terrorist suspects, I think that would have elicited a much more positive response.
Yeah, look, I understand where you're coming from, Duncan.
I really do.
But I think you're missing something.
I think you're missing what a gutsy call this was.
I think you're missing how only Obama was capable of following through on the internet.
Only Obama was capable of this job.
And that's what you're missing.
You know, this is almost as much as I can take.
MSNBC right now is doing a feature honoring the secret seals team that did the dirty work here on the assassination of Osama bin Laden.
Honoring the Secret SEALs team.
Seymour Hirsch, accredited leftist journalist, writes for the New Yorker, referred to SEAL Team 6 as Cheney's executive assassination ring.
November 25th, 2009, FoxNews.com.
Navy SEALs have secretly captured one of the most wanted terrorists in Iraq, the alleged mastermind of the murder and mutilation of four Blackwater USA security guards in Fallujah.
And three of the SEALs who captured him are now facing criminal charges.
The three, all members of the Navy's elite commando unit, have refused non-judicial punishment called a captain's mast, have requested a trial by court-martial.
Ahmed Hasim Abed, whom the military codenamed Objective Ember, told investigators he was punched by his captors, and he had a bloody lip to prove it.
Remember this?
SEAL Team 6 punched this guy in the lip, and they were court-martialed by this regime.
And now we're getting stories on MSNBC honoring the SEAL Team 6.
They owe us an apology.
Seymour Hirsch, Cheney's executive assassination ring.
From the UK Daily Mail, Osama bin Laden's 12-year-old daughter was present when U.S. forces shot and killed her father at a Pakistani compound.
It has emerged.
New details about the deadly special forces raid in Abbottabad emerged as U.S. officials backtracked on a claim made earlier that a wife of bin Laden acted as a human shield in an unsuccessful bid to save his life.
The fresh reports also reveal that bin Laden was unarmed when he was shot in the face.
So it was his daughter.
I guess they could have gotten DNA from her.
Also, CNN has continuing controversy here over whether or not to release the photos of bin Laden.
And apparently, what CNN says on a blog is that the most recognizable picture, the picture of bin Laden that would prove beyond shadow of a doubt that it's him, was a picture taken in a hangar in Afghanistan when they got the body back.
Two bullet holes in the forehead around both eyes that's gruesome and bloody and gory, but it's the one photo that would prove without any doubt that it's actually him.
And so they are proceeding cautiously.
One other thing, totally unrelated, but I just wanted to remind you of this.
All these tornadoes and stuff, I want to take you back to a newsweek story, a cover story, 1975, the coming ice age.
1975, they wrote, last April, in the most devastating outbreak of tornadoes ever recorded, 148 twisters killed more than 300 people and caused half a billion dollars worth of damage in 13 states, and they chalked it up to global cooling back in 1975.
Now we've had a lot of twisters, 300 people dead.
People think it's unprecedented.
Stupid idiot gores out there trying to say it's global warm news week, 1975, April, global cooling.
And furthermore, evidence that it happened before in almost the same devastating fashion.
All right, let's go to the audio soundbites.
This is the White House press secretary, Jay Carney.
Poor guy.
You know, I've met Jay Carney a couple times.
I've talked to him on the phone.
First time I talked to him on the phone, he called, he's at Time Magazine then, and he called and left a mess.
He wanted to talk to me.
So I call back.
He picks up the phone.
I said, hi, J.H. Rush Limbaugh.
He was shocked that I would make my own phone calls rather than have a secretary do it.
And I said, well, I don't really have a secretary.
You don't?
No.
I don't have that much secretarial stuff.
And besides, you know, it's a privacy thing.
I write my own checks, too.
You do?
Yeah.
So we talked about whatever we talked about.
And I ran into him again at a Redskins game back in my ill-fated season as a commentator member of the pregame show at ESPN.
Our season opener Thursday night game was in Washington.
It was the Jets and the Redskins.
And we were all invited as guests of Dan Snyder up to his suite to watch the game.
And Jay was up there with his wife, Claire Shipman.
And I walked up and I said, hello, we have it.
You didn't know that?
Yeah, he's married to Claire Shipman.
They've been married for a long, long time, and I have no idea who—no, they're all—what's his name?
Gregory, meet the press.
His wife is a lawyer at Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, one of the two.
Or a lawyer or some kind of executive at Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac.
Oh, well, Stephen Reinhart, the judge at the Ninth Circus, his wife is Ramona Ribston, who ran the ACLU.
They breed, snurgly.
I mean, it's incestuous.
These people, every waking moment is about this kind of stuff.
Anyway, he was always been a very nice guy to me, but they've thrust him into a situation here.
I'm told he does not have daily access with Obama, unlike Gibbs, who was very close to Obama.
They don't give Carney access yet.
They send him out there to be the face of the administration in these briefings.
It's like he's afraid to say anything.
A couple of examples here, the press briefing, a reporter said, why would you not release the photo of bin Laden?
I'll be candid that there are sensitivities here in terms of the appropriateness of releasing photographs of Osama bin Laden and in the aftermath of this firefight.
And we're making an evaluation about the need to do that because of the sensitivities involved.
And we review this information and make this decision with the same calculation as we do so many things, which is what we're trying to accomplish.
And does it serve or in any way harm our interests?
And that is not just domestic, but globally.
I'm sorry, that's the poor guy is just wading through the marsh of confusion.
He doesn't know what to say.
They haven't given him an answer.
Yeah, Gregory's wife, her name is Beth Wilkinson.
She's executive VP at Fannie Mae.
Oh, yeah, Snerdley, I guess I can't think.
Tim Russert's wife is Maureen Ornth, the Vanity Fair.
We're just basic barely scratching the surface here.
Dana Bash, the reporter seeing her ex-husband was high up on the staff of Jane Harmon, congresswoman from California.
She's since divorced and married to John King of CNN now.
That's why they stay away from that town.
And here's Carney again.
This is what he says about who was in the room.
I think that, yeah, in the room when bin Laden was assassinated.
In the room with bin Laden, a woman, Bin Laden's wife, rushed the U.S. assaulter and was shot in the leg, but not killed.
Bin Laden was then shot and killed.
He was not armed.
And the U.K. Daily Mail says it was his daughter in there, not his wife.
Details keep changing.
Quickly, Jennifer, who's driving to New Mexico from somewhere.
Great to have you on the program.
Welcome.
Hi, Rush.
Just real quick, I want to say I'm not related to anybody important.
As you mentioned, everybody being related to everybody important.
I'm just related to Americans.
Everybody keeps inverting Obama and Osama and it made me think of a movie by Bill Murray called Quick Change, where it turns out Bill Murray is a criminal.
And as he leaves, he keeps changing his name to Skapowski to Chapowski.
And then the lead detective realizes, oh, he was the bad guy.
And what made me think of it was that man from Texas saying that Obama's done works for Americans in Osama.
In a very real sense, he has.
I mean, I'm driving across the country and gas is $4.29 a gallon.
Yeah, I know.
Well, everybody makes a mistake or confused.
Ted Kennedy did it.
I want to assure everybody, it is totally accidental here with me.
And it's starting to get very frustrating.
You don't know, so you can't hear it.
Every time I screw up, Snerdley is shouting in my IFB the correction.
And it gets really, really frustrating.
So if I mistakenly call Obama Osama or verse visa, trust me, this is not intention.
How can I confuse them because they're so different?
We're all in the habit.
How many, 2008?
2000.
We're just say Obama.
How many times a day do we say it?
So that's what I'm going to say.
I'm going to start using bin Laden as often as I can.
And let's go back to the phones to North Carolina.
This is Greg, who says he's a former SEAL.
It's great to have you on the program, sir.
Welcome.
Hello, Mr. Limbaugh.
The reason I called was, well, first, a minor point was that the term assaulter, when used in reference to Naval Special Warfare Development Group, is correct.
Naval Special Warfare Development Group is, and by the way, anything I'm going to say is available open source.
There's nothing that is privileged.
Sorry.
Anyways, they are organized different than the other SEAL teams.
They're organized into assault teams, or at least they were when I was there, which was some time ago.
They do have a different organization because they have a different mission.
And they have a different legal standing than the regular SEAL teams.
They work, them and their counterparts in the Army Combat Applications Group, work directly for the President of the United States.
They cannot be used on missions unless it is authorized by directly authorized through the President as National Security Advisor.
They're not in the normal chain of command.
Is this SEAL Team 6 that we're talking about?
They are what is developed from that SEAL team, which is now, as far as I know, decommissioned.
But it is an interchangeable term like Delta and CAG.
Is there a SEAL team four, SEAL team five?
Oh, yes, absolutely.
But for lack of a better, they're conventional SEAL teams, although they're special operations.
And not to degrade them, they just have a slightly different mission.
Okay, so assaulter is the proper term.
Assaulter, especially when using Dev Group.
Yes, they are organized into assault teams.
They're not organized along the same lines as the regular SEAL teams.
Well, I didn't know that.
I'm happy to know this.
Yep.
Well, that's fundamental of.
How long ago was it that you served as a SEAL?
I retired slightly right before 9-11, and I've been working as a civilian, let's say, since then.
But my duty in the teams was from the late 70s to the early 2000s.
I can't imagine the training.
I can't imagine the physical, gruesome aspects you people have to go through to graduate and actually become parts of that unit.
It's amazing to me.
It's fairly rigorous.
Fairly rigorous.
But one thing I would like to say, if you'd permit me, is I really believe that this decision, I believe that President Obama's hand was forced in this.
And this is really just a crass political decision.
When I hear people say that this took courage, I just believe he was absolutely forced into doing this.
Yeah, somebody came and said, we got Obama.
Okay, he's got to do something.
Exactly.
Osama.
We got Osama, so we've got to do something.
Correct.
And if he wouldn't have acted, I assure you, the information would have been leaked prior to the election cycle.
And he would have had to have dealt with that.
And frankly, if that came to knowledge late in the election cycle, our next president would be either Hillary Clinton or whoever the Republicans are.
That's a great point.
Greg, I got to run because of time, but that's an excellent point, and I don't think there's any doubt about it.
We'll be back.
I believe that call, our former SEAL, was exactly right.
He was forced into this.
Look, he dragged his feet as long as he could.
What was it, eight months?
They had five national security meetings.
It was last August when Obama was first told about bin Laden being available to be made fish food.
And finally, he did act on it.
So anyway, that's it for today, folks.
▲
Export Selection