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Aug. 19, 2011 - Rush Limbaugh Program
35:48
August 19, 2011, Friday, Hour #3
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Alrighty, third hour on the Friday.
We are dispatched thus to the weekend right after this, and I hope it's a great one for you wherever you are.
Rushes out next week.
The brigade of fill-in hosts named Mark.
We marshal our resources and come at you full-throated and ready next week.
It'll be Mark Stein on Monday.
It'll be Mark Belling on Tuesday and Wednesday.
And I will be back with you on Thursday and Friday from here, deep in the heart of Rick Perry's Texas.
You want some hot, fresh poll numbers?
Got some.
I'm a huge fan of RealClearPolitics.com, just a great site, realclearpolitics.com.
They throw down a whole lot of op-ed pieces from a wide portion of the political spectrum.
And they do poll numbers and give you a sort of a compendium of what a lot of polling organizations are saying and then glom it all together into something called the RCP average.
And that's an interesting exercise because from Rasmussen to Fox News to CNN to McClatchy to USA Today and Gallup, there's a whole lot of different methodologies going on there.
Some people are only asking about people who are officially announced, which means that they don't include Sarah Palin or Rudy Giuliani.
And is it a better poll if you're just including the people who are actually running?
Or is it a better poll if you throw in everybody?
Because that reveals that both Governor Palin and Mayor Giuliani still do pretty darn well.
In fact, in CNN opinion research from about 10 days ago, Romney in the lead with 17, then Perry with 15, then Palin, Giuliani, and Ron Paul with 12.
Fox News poll.
Again, this also from about 10 days ago.
Romney at 21, Perry at 13, Palin at 8, Bachman and Giuliani at 7.
I mean, this is widely divergent.
But the one that's the most recent from the folks at Rasmussen, and this will happen.
As soon as you announce, you get a lot of attention.
I guess most of it positive attention if you have, if there's been some anticipation, if there's been a decent body of folks who have been eager about you getting in.
Of course, it's funny if a poll is done correctly and that's random without cooking the books.
It would seem that it would be immune to that.
But I offer that only by way of explaining that in the Rasmussen poll dated just three, excuse me, four days ago, August 15th, Mitt Romney's not in the lead.
He has 18%.
Rick Perry has 29.
Whoa, hello.
I don't know if that lasts, but we'll see how that listen.
I don't know if it lasts numerically, but I have wondered for months whether the Mitt Romney lead in the polls was what I have called empty calories.
I mean, it's there, but what does it really mean?
What does it really do?
And once you start offering up people who are more consistent and reliable conservatives like Michelle Bachman, like Rick Perry, you might start to see that Romney lead erode because it's been built on name recognition, admittedly some top-drawer campaign skills.
The guy is great in appearances.
He did very well in the Iowa debate the other day.
And listen, if you want to do some 2012 talk, you know who really did well in that Iowa debate the other day was Newt.
And Newt is problematic to many for, I mean, I guess pick your reasons.
But I just love him.
Always have, always will.
You know, And he really brought, he brought not just his strengths to the Iowa debate, but he brought some strengths that a lot of people didn't think he had.
Because Newt can be a little bit arcane.
He can be a little bit professorial.
Not that those are terrible things, but they might not be your best friends on a campaign trail.
But when he talked about this super committee, this strange gaggle of people from the House and Senate who are going to have the, or who are going to lord over their colleagues with certain supposed wisdom on debt reduction, he said that's the dumbest idea to come out of Washington in a long time.
And with that kind of straight main street talk, I mean, that's the kind of thing that could expand Newt's appeal.
Does it expand his appeal enough to put him up there in the top echelon with your Romneys and your Perrys and your Bachmans?
I don't know.
I don't know.
We will see.
We will see.
All righty.
In the last hour, I mentioned the case of Jerry Buell, a teacher in Mount Dora, Florida, in the central part of the state.
And he didn't like it a whole lot when New York gave legal equality to gay marriage and spouted about that at length on Facebook fairly vividly.
That school system has now taken action against him.
He has been suspended and could lose his job.
So it is as though there are two things we need to do.
We need to see things through the prism of what we think of his views, but then we need to see if, in general, whether we agree with him or not, if employees in school systems or anywhere else can let fly on controversial issues of the day and be protected from their employers saying, hey, I don't like that.
We're suspending you.
Let's go to Pittsburgh.
Tony, Mark Davis, in for rush.
How are you?
Doing well.
Thanks for taking my call.
My pleasure.
When you mentioned about this Facebook case, it definitely struck a chord with me.
I posted something last week or so ago, maybe two weeks, on Facebook, on my personal Facebook.
And it was a criticism of the local elected officials.
And I was summoned to appear before the city council.
Summoned by whom?
By the mayor.
How did that, what he called you?
How did that happen?
She sent an inter-office memo to the members of the fire department.
I'm a volunteer firefighter.
Okay, there we go, thank you guys.
I was going to say, there's missing info there.
You're a firefighter.
So the word came that the mayor wanted to see you.
Yes.
And it was, I have the memo here, in fact.
And it was supposed to be a meeting of the fire officers, members of the boards of directors, and the executive officers, and the mayor, and a few other officials and city council.
And I thought, well, I'm not a fire officer.
Well, I heard what it was going to be about, so I went prepared.
And I was one of the first people called, I guess, on their sort of agenda of this meeting.
And at first, I couldn't get an answer as to who summoned me to be there.
In the interest of time and clarity, follow my lead in the following way, because this really is important.
What exactly did you say?
I could read it verbatim.
I have to do this here.
Please do.
I mean, Facebook allows a lot more characters than Twitter.
So give me a sense of the tone.
Go ahead.
City politics is ridiculous.
I wouldn't vote to re-elect even one of them.
I wouldn't even vote for any of them if they were running for dog catcher.
Okay.
Things we've probably said about some city where we've lived through our lives.
All right.
Okay, go ahead.
After I posted that, one of the councilmen had approached me when I was on an event with the fire department and expressed his displeasure and then he walked away.
So I posted again explaining what the post was, you know, what the what my rant was, what the purpose was.
It was about this sort of like wasteful spending of money.
Understand.
Incorrect priorities, in my opinion, of their spending.
And after that, I was summoned to appear.
All right, what wound up happening?
Need to bottom line it, and then we'll talk about the lessons, if any, that we've learned.
Go ahead.
There was a strongly implied threat of my membership in the fire department, although none of my posts had anything to do with the fire department.
But when you're a firefighter, you're a firefighter 24 hours a day.
Okay, and with that, let's go to the lessons here and see what has happened.
One of two things is true.
Either, A, you've been horribly wrong.
You got the right to have the opinion of the leaders of the city in which you live.
And how dare they snoop around in that or threaten you with that?
Either that's true.
Here's the other one, though.
Here's the other one.
Do I, if I, are we talking city of Pittsburgh or somewhere close by?
About 30 miles from Pittsburgh.
Okay, very good.
If I live in whatever beautiful little town you occupy, do I need to know that the firefighters are really disgruntled with local government?
Do I need to wonder if my house is on fire, if the guy who's coming off the truck is just beaten down by the gripes he has with the city government?
Is there a certain wisdom that says, you know, keep that to yourself?
Now, one of those two is true, and I, quite frankly, don't know which one it is.
I bet I know which one you like A rather than B.
I know.
So let's go with that because that is where my heart tends to lead me, you know, is that you have First Amendment rights.
You don't give them up when you put on the uniform of the fire department of the city you live in.
If one of the taxpayers in the city where you live were to happen to say, Tony, God bless you for being a firefighter.
But dude, I don't need to know how great.
This is why we don't like it when public employees strike.
It's like, oh, God, this is great.
The cops and the firefighters or the air traffic controllers, they're not even going to be able to do their jobs because they're all bad out of shape about their labor issues.
What if someone were to come to you and say, God bless you for being a firefighter?
But man, I just don't need to know about your baggage in terms of what you don't like about city government.
I mean, tell your friends, go into a bar and order a round of drinks and tell them.
But in the very public yet private world of Facebook, man, that ain't helpful.
What would you say to that taxpayer in the city where you live?
Well, I would say first that the post that I had wasn't about the fire department.
It was about the I was speaking as a taxpayer, just like that person.
I understand.
I understand, but you know what I mean.
And at the same time, as I explained to the mayor and council at this special meeting, I don't lay down my constitutional rights the day I joined the fire department.
And I understand that too.
And I'm with you on that.
I'm wondering if we've arrived at something, and there's a long list of these things, that you have a right to do, that you absolutely have a right to do.
But that doesn't mean it's the smartest thing in the world to do.
Absolutely.
Okay, so I'm allowed to say things, even if whether or not they agree with them, they can be said.
There was nothing obscene or vulgar.
Oh, no, no, that's why I asked, and I appreciated your verbatim reading because there is a difference between the thoroughly mainstream kind of frustration that you offered versus the sort of hopped-up stuff that it might have been.
So I appreciate you sharing that.
And the thing about the dog catcher, I think, was the most offensive thing probably in the whole post.
And one of the councilmen in particular took particular offense to it.
And he actually, that councilman actually came to my shop and visited me yesterday or day before.
It was a cordial visit.
Very nice.
I could have spoken with him even longer, but he was called away.
But he said that, you know, I still kind of offended by this comparison to a dog catcher.
I said, think how the dog catchers must feel.
Exactly.
Exactly.
Dude, right.
Please be offended.
It was my goal to offend you, which I consider my right.
Tony, the constitution doesn't prevent, doesn't protect someone from being offended by something.
But here's the trick.
Here comes the tricky thing.
We'll take this into the next segment.
Number one, thank you for the call.
Thank you for your clarity.
Thanks for standing up for the things you're standing up for.
And thanks for the service you offer to the community where you live.
God bless firefighters.
Tony, thank you.
All right.
So here's where we are.
Does he, should he have the right to spout about local government on his personal Facebook?
Sure.
Sure.
So far, so good.
I don't even want to think about local officials coming by trying to strong-arm this guy or elbow him or pressure him or threaten him.
That doesn't seem right at all.
All right, but if you're going to walk down that road, how far does that go?
Because again, haven't we talked about already that free speech and the Constitution, all those things we cherish, that does not insulate you from consequences from your employer.
And this guy's employer is the city, which means the taxpayers.
And I don't know.
I mean, we've talked about this a lot, and I've done, you know, on local shows I've done here in Texas, and a lot of people have told me, it's like, listen, when you are a cop, when you are a firefighter, when you are a whatever, of course you're still entitled to your views, but we don't want to be, I've had it said about airlines.
When pilots and flight attendants have big union gripes and big employment, it's like, I don't want to know about it.
I don't want to think that the flight attendants or the pilots working my flight have their intestines all bound up in a knot because they're not thrilled with the latest bargaining agreement.
Like, guys, just fly the plane.
Or in this particular case, Tony, just fight fires.
I mean, I don't know.
This guy, I think he has an absolute right to do what he has done.
But it may not be one of those rights issues.
It may be one of those consequences issues.
At what point does an employer, any employer, government employee, private sector employee, get to come in and say, hey, your Facebook stuff is a problem?
You tell me.
You tell me.
Mark Davis, Infor Rush, 1-800-282-2882.
Let's blend this in with some more 2012 talks, some more immigration stuff.
Got a lot going on.
Mark Davis, in for Rush on the EIB Network.
It is Open Line Friday on the Rush Limbaugh Show.
Mark Davis filling in from WBAP, Dallas, Fort Worth.
Back with you Thursday and Friday of next week as Rush enjoys some more time off.
Mark Stein with you Monday.
Mark Belling, Tuesday and Wednesday.
Let's get back to your calls.
You want to hang out with me in the Twitter universe about which we've spoken greatly today?
All one word, Mark Davis, M-A-R-K-D-A-V-I-S, if you choose to do so.
Back to some of your calls about what you can get away with on Facebook and Twitter and should you be able to insulate yourself from consequences from your employer.
But let us also take a look at some of the immigration stories that we've examined today.
Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano talking about a case-by-case review of illegal immigrants that strikes a lot of people as backdoor amnesty.
We're in Santa Barbara, California.
Dale, Mark Davis, in for Rush.
How are you?
Hi, Mark.
I'm fine.
Thank you for taking my call.
My pleasure.
I'd like to process my comments, but I don't get labeled by the liberals.
I am a veteran.
My children are of mixed race, Hispanic, and white.
But on the illegal immigration issue, I think that they have just found a way to set president to release or pardon anybody who's been convicted of criminal trespass.
Because that's essentially what this is, is criminal trespass into this country.
Well, I don't know if it enjoys that exact same status.
I mean, because if it were, I mean, the immigration offenses, I mean, I talk a lot about the illegality of it because it is illegality.
I don't know if, I mean, words have meaning.
I don't know if legally it occupies the exact same space in the dictionary as criminally trespassing in someone's yard or in someone's business or something like that.
So I would just be careful with that.
I believe it is of the same, it is of the same intent, being somewhere where you should not be, but keep going.
Exactly.
And the other thing is I think we've just found the way for the Obama administration to ensure re-election.
He knows he can't get it from anybody else.
So if we give citizenship to the illegals, we only have to ask one question to make the determination.
If we make you legal, will you vote for Obama in 2012?
I don't know if even the most ambitious pro-illegal activists at DHS or the White House can turn these people into actual voting citizens by next November.
But that doesn't mean you're not onto something.
Go ahead.
I'm sorry.
Well, I mean, sadly, this is the question I asked earlier.
This is what will win you majority support in the Hispanic community.
Not unanimous, but majority.
It is as if it is a touchstone of your sensitivity about Hispanic folks if you are willing to turn the other way as floods of them enter the nation illegally.
What odd logic is that?
Right.
And it's inequity in a whole system to begin with, because let's face it, when you get legal status, you can immediately vote when you become a citizen.
The rest of us that are born here have to wait 18 years.
Well, if you're, well, that's we're not allowing naturalized people to vote when they're 12.
It's a quandary, and it is a political hotbed in that for some perverse reason, a position that says we need to be serious about our borders, we need to be cognizant of who's here legally and who's not, and act accordingly, that that is viewed as somehow hostile toward toward immigrants.
It is not.
It is a proper consternation that any citizen should feel about illegal immigration.
It is not, it is certainly, it is in no way, is it about race?
It is about behavior.
It is about behavior.
And that's it.
And yet, but that's from the leftward perspective, it's hard to win that argument behaviorally.
So you toss down the racism card that it must be because we just don't like Hispanic people.
Nope.
I love people of any color, of any stripe, of any ethnicity if they are here legally.
It is that simple.
Back in a moment.
And we're in the home stretch, the final half hour, not just of this show, but of the week on the Rush Limbaugh show.
It's been a great week for Rush.
A lot's been going on.
And next week, we're going to try to keep just in the general greatness sphere of influence with the stable of fill-in hosts named Mark.
I'm Mark Davis.
I'm the one down here in WBAP in Dallas-Fort Worth at Rick Parrish, Texas.
We'll see how that works out for everybody.
Mark Stein will join you on Monday, Mark Belling from Up Wisconsin way.
And isn't that the petri dish for upbeat conservatism with magnificent Governor Scott Walker?
Anyway, Mark Belling will be in for Rush Tuesday and Wednesday of next week.
And then I get to come hang out with you Thursday and Friday.
Holy cow, two straight open line Fridays.
Life is good.
All right, the show's been good.
Thanks for all the heavy lifting you guys have done.
We've done a lot of immigration.
We've done some 2012 talk and the very, very interesting case of the Florida teacher, history teacher named Jerry Buell, a veteran American history teacher at Mount Dora High School in Central Florida.
The day that New York embraced same-sex marriage as a legal equal to heterosexual marriage, he went on a bit of a Facebook rant and then got suspended for it.
And so that has us looking at whether his rights have been violated or what ought to happen.
And it's an interesting consistency check because if you say that Jerry needs to mouth that he that he gets to mouth off on his Facebook without being, and again, he didn't drop any epithets or anything like that.
It was pretty bold commentary, but nothing that violated the kind of thing that might get you blown away, blown off a radio show or something.
Do you get to do that?
And my general answer is yes.
But I also believe that employers have a right since they let's say that you have a company and you have a fairly visible employee or something like that, and he's off, you know, tweeting and Facebook and things that reflect back on you in a way that you don't like.
Are you without power?
Do you have no consequence there?
So I think the interesting and tricky thing here is I don't know if this really is a rights issue.
I think it's just a way we want people to act.
I want this teacher to be able to mouth off about political issues.
And I want his employer to, if they don't like it, say, Jerry, could you tone it down a little bit?
I mean, you're totally entitled to your view, but we just don't need the mail, you know, quite frankly.
And at which point he can then say, okay, all right, or not.
I mean, I'd like it to be solved between people because again, the First Amendment does not insulate you from consequences.
It insulates you from jail.
Nobody's talking about jailing or fining Mr. Buell for his views.
And again, the acid test here is: would you rush to the defense of a teacher or firefighter?
We just had the guy from around Pittsburgh way who had mouthed off on some rant that you really don't like.
If they crack down on him, would you be as defensive?
We are in Waco, Susan, Mark Davis, in for Rush.
How are you?
Hello.
Hi.
Hi.
I believe that the employer and the employee have a contract, just a job.
It's not your life.
So the employer only has certain rights to judge.
Let's use the term wisely here.
They are truly judging a Facebook rant, as it were, but his opinions.
And that's not their right.
All right.
Pause for a second.
I want to give you a test case because that sounds exactly like logic I would use.
It really, really does.
So let's make it a, and I don't know if it's different if it's a football player.
Let's make it an athlete who tweets one day, let's say this is a few years ago, who tweets Bush is Hitler, okay?
And his employer in Texas, let's say it's a Dallas Cowboy, and Jerry Jones fires him.
Is that wrong?
Hey, it's just his opinion.
I think that unless that opinion affects his job performance, that the employer does not have a right to do that.
All right.
Does it does it?
Does it affect a wide receiver or a running back's performance if he tweets Bush is Hitler in 2006?
Yeah, because in essence, the Dallas Cowboys are his employer and they expect a certain performance out of him, and he gets paid for that.
Now, if there's a lot of people.
But wow, are we contradicting ourselves a tad, Susan?
Because I agree with you because I think that what we're talking about is the player's image.
And the Cowboys or any NFL team, they're not helped out here by a player presenting an image that might cause them grief.
All right.
Agree or disagree, teachers or firefighters, or let's just stay with the teacher.
I mean, I happen to share his view about gay marriage, but that's not really what we're talking about.
Whether we agree with Jerry or disagree with him, we're talking about whether the school system can come to him and say, God, that's a headache we don't need.
Have you spouting off about gay marriage even on your personal Facebook?
How's that different than the football player?
Well, no, and I'm saying that they don't have a right to fire the football player for an opinion.
They are trying to control his opinions.
Now, if he has something in his contract that says you have a certain image to portray, and this is it, this is what the Cowboys say.
And that's what's problematic about the football player is they are such public figures.
There is an image issue there.
A teacher has an image issue, but it's a different kind of thing.
When I leave my job at 5 o'clock, no one's going to look at me except to say when I speak is super.
Yeah.
All right, then let's make apples and apples.
Then let's make apples and apples.
Let's make it another teacher in another part of the country, and let's not make it something as incendiary as Bush is Hitler.
Let's say a teacher tweets, I consider American troops in Iraq to be an invasion force, to be a hostile invasion force.
All right.
That teacher tweets that.
And the school board happens to view that as unpatriotic or just unseemly and suspend the teacher.
Right or wrong?
Wrong.
Again, the school board only has a contract for his job.
And if he didn't say that on the job, it's none of their business.
I got you.
Well, you've passed the consistency test.
And thank you, Susan.
Thank you very much.
I do agree with her.
I mean, I really do.
But God, can't you see the line that has to be drawn somewhere?
Surely there is something that a teacher, and again, it's weird because you have degrees of public figure-ness.
Yes, the language.
You know, big-time Hollywood people.
Well, of course, they don't really have employer, athletes and such.
I absolutely believe a team that can suspend any athlete anytime for stuff they say that attracts negative attention or that the owner doesn't like because he's the owner of the team.
You know, so anyway, but teachers are not public figures to the extent that, you know, NFL players are, but they have an image and they are a fixture and are, you know, kind of iconic in a community and deserve to be because teachers are heroes to me.
The good ones.
So is there nothing?
I mean, I mean, short of epithets, you know, dropping N bombs or what?
I mean, of course, of course, of course, of course, that's the kind of unseemly behavior that can get you bounced from anywhere, and that's fine.
But if it's just a view that is so sharp and so controversial, again, we may agree with it, we may disagree with it.
Is it our overall view?
That's the employee's opinion, butt out, that no employer, a government employer or a private sector employer, should be able to ride herd over the opinions of employees as long as they are in their own personal Facebook and Twitter universes.
That sounds logical to me.
That seems like the way it ought to be.
But oh boy, can't we make a little list of things that various folks could say and go, ah, ah, ah, ah, things that you would think they should be fired for and go, ah, ah, ah, ah, their opinion.
Hmm.
Hmm.
This is a delicious topic.
Thanks for hanging in there with me on it.
All right, let's take some calls on these and various other things in our next segment.
I'm going to give you a little bit of a lightning round of sort of this week, up and down and winners and losers and such on the 2012 field.
Let's do that next and mix in a few calls in our remaining couple of segments.
Mark Davis filling in for Rush on the EIB network.
It is the Friday Rush Limbaugh Show, and that is Open Line Friday.
Back to those open lines here in a second.
Let's take a quick walk through the various candidates and how their week went on the way to Tampa in the Republican convention next year.
And I have to tell you, there's just a little image.
If I close my eyes, I think about it, because it is in his state of Florida, and whether it's, you know, Bachman, Romney, Perry, Gingrich, Kane, Paul Huntsman, whatever.
Can't you just close your eyes and see and feel the moment as Marco Rubio delivers his acceptance speech as the nominee for vice president?
I wouldn't be too broke up if Marco Rubio would be accepting the speech, delivering the acceptance speech as president, as nominee for president, but he shows no signs really of getting in.
One of the things that could be fun to take a look at next week, and if Brother Stein and Brother Belling haven't talked about it a lot by Thursday when you and I are together again, are there establishment types looking to get Paul Ryan into this race?
And that's not a bad thing.
I'm an enormous fan of Paul Ryan.
And if he did choose to run, I think that'd be great.
But are there folks who feel that he might be a little more establishment friendly?
And the reason they're getting Paul Ryan to run, they want him to run, is because they're scared to death of Rick Perry.
And with that, we begin our little stroll through the candidates' weeks.
I guess, you know, I don't know if Governor Perry wishes he could have that Ben Bernanke, almost treasonous comment back.
I don't know.
The question you have to ask is: does it hurt you among the people who are trying, who are probably going to vote for you?
And that answer is no.
You know, it really, really doesn't.
And this is with all kinds of people running and saying all kinds of things.
This whole thing is going to be forgotten in a couple of weeks.
And I just love the people who are wagging fingers at that.
You know, Joe Biden can call Tea Party people terrorists, but oh, let Rick Perry drop a T-bomb on Ben Bernanke.
And it wasn't even literally treasonous.
Is hyperbole improper now?
I mean, there are people who actually literally believe that conservatives are evil and racist and misogynist and all of these things.
They actually believe it.
But, you know, let a conservative get colorful in terms of a reference about somebody in current power and all of a sudden it becomes a message of hate.
Just please, can we all just relax, please?
Can we all just relax?
Well, nobody in the Republican field is relaxed right now because Rick Perry is a big deal and he's going to be a big deal.
You can either like that or not like that.
I like it a lot.
And if there is anybody who's probably threatened by that, I don't mean literally where she's cowering in the corner because that's not the kind of woman she is.
But if there's anybody who's fighting for that Tea Party constituency, it's Michelle Bachman.
And here's the thing I've got to see.
Governor Perry has a decade-long resume in an Obama-resistant state here in Texas.
Executive experience in a governor's job.
America tends to like that.
Michelle Bachman is a wonderful woman.
She is so cool, and I just love her.
And maybe she's got running mate written all over her when all is said and done.
I don't know.
Perry Bachman, how do you like that?
I'd love to have that sticker on my car.
But there's a lot I need to see from her in terms of campaign, her skill set on the campaign trail, because it's going to be a tall order.
It's going to be a bit of a tall order there, keeping up with the kind of skill set that Governor Perry brings.
Nobody has the skill set that Mitt Romney has.
He's smooth.
He's great in all settings.
The problem is the content of what he says.
He's willing to drink the Kool-Aid of man-made global warming.
It's just Romney care continues to be problematic.
Is this guy conservative enough to be the nominee?
I hope not.
I hope not, but we'll just have to see.
Newt can a good performance in the debate.
He certainly didn't do squat in the actual aims results.
I mean, Newt's campaign, depending on what day it is, either seems to be over or have the potential for really catching fire for the kind of cerebral and passion that he can bring to the issues better than almost anybody else does.
So I want Newt to be around for a while.
Herman Kane, very nice man, not going to be the nominee.
Ron Paul, don't get me started.
We don't have time.
I know.
And by that, I mean he is so right on the Constitution and so right on his libertarian views about the size and scope of government and so totally crazy uncle wrong on America as a force for good around the world.
I'm just sorry.
I wish him a magnificent richness in private life, which will happen in 2013.
Because the sad thing is that he has decided to retire from Congress for this presidential bid.
So we in Texas and everybody in America will be, we will miss his voice on size and scope of government and on fidelity to the Constitution as he returns to private life in January of 2013.
John Huntsman, you know what's funny?
I know I got a break here.
Here's the funny thing.
Ron Paul holds views, a couple of views that drive me insane, but I'm glad he's in the race.
There's a reason for him to be in the race.
Mitt Romney's dead wrong on a few issues, but there's a reason for him to be in the race.
Somebody explain to me why is John Huntsman even running?
What does he bring to the table that is not brought to the table better by five other people whom you could name who are either running or who could?
And here's a decent man, a man of great substance, a man of great qualities.
I don't get it.
And in the Iowa debate, it drove me crazy.
I felt like my time was simply being summarily wasted by the mere existence of John Huntsman on that debate stage.
Now, if he does something where he's got 10% in the polls in a couple of weeks, I'll change my tune about that.
But that won't be happening.
All righty, here's something that will be happening.
This commercial break.
Mark Davis in for us on the EIB network.
Then some final words.
Man, how time can fly.
They say it flies when you're having a good time.
I have, so I hope the time flew for you as well.
Because if it didn't, that's not good.
No, it's wonderful to be here, and I so appreciate it.
I want to thank the great kind of support that you get when you're in the EIB fill-in chair.
Just really, really want to thank Bo Snerdley for his guiding hand in topical instincts and Mike Mamone for the technical wizardry and dark humor.
And all of you for hanging out on the show today.
Rush is off all next week.
And so you get Mark Stein on Monday, which is always great.
You get Mark Belling on Tuesday and Wednesday.
Always enjoyable.
And then I'm back with you on Thursday and Friday of next week.
Till then, hang out with me on Twitter if you want to at Mark Davis, all one word, M-A-R-K-D-A-V-I-S.
In the meantime, just one more word or two.
God bless this country and God bless our troops.
God bless Rush.
Thanks for the chance to sit here in the chair.
And everybody have a fantastic weekend in this magnificent country.
Rush, enjoy your vacation time.
And all of us named Mark are back with you next week.
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