Dec. 29, 2011 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:51
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| Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 Podcast. | |
| Yes, America's anchor man is away today, and this is your undocumented anchor man sitting in, no supporting paperwork whatsoever. | |
| If you can't tell one Mark guest host from another, I'm the one without the accent. | |
| The Rush Limbaugh Show has more guest hosts called Mark than Iowa has second-tier single-digit candidates. | |
| But the good news is that the great Walter Williams will be here tomorrow for Mark Free Friday on the EIB network. | |
| Walter Williams, don't miss it. | |
| Twelve midday Eastern tomorrow. | |
| Best of Rush on Monday, and then Rush returns live Tuesday for the big day, Iowa Caucus Day. | |
| And um and I hear, I hear just a rumor, but you never know. | |
| I hear that he'll be introducing two if by tea in a special limited edition ethanol flavor just for Iowa Caucus Day. | |
| We'll be following all the latest developments from Iowa and beyond. | |
| Newt is still falling. | |
| He has yet to bottom out in the polls. | |
| He's been under a barrage of attack ads from all directions in Iowa. | |
| So Newt's still falling. | |
| Rick Santorum is now surging. | |
| Everyone else in uh on the Iowa ballot has had a surge now, except for John Huntsman. | |
| He's uh he he remains a surge-free zone in Iowa. | |
| He's the candidate for people who don't like surges. | |
| There's the there's different um demographics that you can you can appeal to in Iowa. | |
| Romney has appealed to moderate. | |
| Uh Ron Paul has appealed to Ron Pauliax, uh Rick Santorum has appealed to evangelicals, but John Huntsman is the only candidate in Iowa who's running on a principled non-surging uh ticket. | |
| When I was here uh a couple of days ago, we spoke to a caller in in uh Virginia, uh whom I identified as the John Huntsman supporter in the state of Virginia. | |
| Uh but in fact you can't vote for him in for Huntsman in Virginia. | |
| He's not on the ballot. | |
| Uh the only two candidates who made it on to the ballot in Virginia are Mitt Romney and Ron Paul. | |
| So I would love to know who our caller the uh a couple of days ago is gonna wind up voting for in Virginia. | |
| Now he's got a choice between Mitt Romney and Ron Paul, and uh and I would love to know this too. | |
| Newt Gingrich lives in Virginia, and Newt didn't make it on to the ballot in Virginia, which he compared in his usual way to an uh to uh an unexpected setback such as Pearl Harbor. | |
| Uh I think it I I think that's uh a bit of a stretch uh even for Newt. | |
| But what I want to know is this is who will Newt vote for in the Virginia primary? | |
| Newt Snoot lives in Virginia, he's a Virginia voter. | |
| Who is Newt Gingrich gonna vote for? | |
| He's got a choice between Mitt Romney and Ron Paul, and he's already said he won't vote for Ron Paul, and you can't write in a candidate in Virginia. | |
| So will Newt vote for Mitt in the Republican primary in Virginia. | |
| All the latest developments from Iowa, 1-800-282-2882. | |
| If you want to talk about uh what's at stake in the Iowa caucuses before we move on to New Hampshire, and all the rest of the news, too, we will be following. | |
| Surprise developments in North Korea. | |
| Kim Jong un has been declared the supreme leader and the great successor at his father's funeral. | |
| He uh he basically Kim Jong-un won the Pyongyang Caucus. | |
| Uh I think he got 98.7% of the vote, and I think John Huntsman got the remaining 1.3%. | |
| But anyway, Kim Jong-un has triumphed in the Pyongyang Caucus. | |
| Do you know who's the president of North Korea? | |
| Uh it's still Kim Il sung, who was Kim Jong-un's grandfather. | |
| Kim Il sung died whatever it was twenty years ago now, but he's still president of North Korea because he was proclaimed eternal president. | |
| Uh so he's not like your Rinky Dink, average uh nickel and dime dictator who's just president for life. | |
| Kim Il-sung is president for death in North Korea. | |
| He's he's the eternal president. | |
| And you know, I like to think outside the box here, and I really think that would be terrific. | |
| If we could have that system here, I would love it if like uh Calvin Coolidge could be proclaimed eternal president. | |
| I mean, is it too late to get that on the ballot in uh in Iowa? | |
| Uh the North Korean? | |
| Uh in well, no, in Chicago, no, in Chicago, the voters are dead, not the candidates. | |
| But I would like to move to the North Korean system, where the candidates are dead. | |
| Uh live voters, live voters uh but uh dead candidates. | |
| It's a better system. | |
| If you have dead voters but live candidates, you wind up with Barack Obama and the whole Cook County machine. | |
| If you have uh dead candidates but live voters, you end up like in uh North Korea where Kim Il-sung is eternal president. | |
| So why couldn't we just proclaim Calvin Coolidge eternal president and we wouldn't have to worry in case John Huntsman has a last minute surge in Iowa? | |
| I'm just trying to trying to think about the Well well. | |
| Mr. Snerdley, Mr. Surley is now thinking logically here. | |
| He can't understand why North Korea, which is a people's republic, but the only people who get to run it have to have Kim in the name, don't they? | |
| That's that's the way it is. | |
| But wait a minute, you know, there's all kinds Snurley is no one to who has any right to complain about this, because all over this country, there are people who would love to guest host this show, and they say, why do the only people who get to be on the Rush Limbaugh show are Mark? | |
| There's like Mark Davis, Mark Belling, and and uh what's the other guy called? | |
| I can't remember the third guy. | |
| Mark Davis, Mark Belling, Mark Stein. | |
| We are basically the equivalent of Kim Il sung, Kim Jong il, and Kim Jong-un. | |
| It's like uh it's basically Mark the guest hosts for the Rush Limbaugh show are Mark Ilsung, uh Mark Jong Il and Mark Jong ung. | |
| If you're having track if you're having difficulty keeping track, I'm Mark Jog uh Mark Jong Il was here yesterday. | |
| Um so yeah, but it is an interesting point. | |
| Most of these, it's the same thing in Syria. | |
| The so-called people's republics uh uh d devolve into hereditary bordery. | |
| But who's to say? | |
| Given what is happening out in Iowa, who is to say that that's uh necessarily a worse system. | |
| We will talk about what is happening uh in the Iowa caucus uh today. | |
| They say they say there are really only four tickets out of Iowa. | |
| I would say there's five. | |
| There's gonna be uh basically Mitt will still be in the race, uh Ron Paul will still be there. | |
| Uh Newt Gingrich will still be there. | |
| Huntsman, who isn't really competing in Iowa, uh is still gonna be there because he's betting everything on uh New Hampshire. | |
| And that means uh the real winnowing will be the Perry Bachman Santorum vote. | |
| Uh it's stiff they're all jostling for the same constituency. | |
| Which one of those is likely to come out on top? | |
| Right now it is Santorum who is surging. | |
| Uh but we will see. | |
| Uh who I mean, basically no one knows anything about Iowa. | |
| The fa the fascinating thing about Iowa is uh it's uh basically a hundred thousand people out of a state of three million. | |
| Uh if you're lucky, if it's a spectacular turnout, it'll be a hundred thousand people. | |
| If there's a snowstorm, it'll just be twenty thousand people, eighteen thousand of whom will vote for Ron Ball. | |
| Uh nobody knows how well organized people are. | |
| Newt uh as as we saw, Newt has had a spectacular Newt Newt did uh did this uh kind of uh iconoclastic outside the box campaign. | |
| He just ran on debates. | |
| He uh lost a lot of his staffers uh and his consultants, they all uh they all quit. | |
| He didn't have uh fancy ads, uh he didn't have focus groups, he was just basically running on new uh in the debates. | |
| And when you get to Iowa, you've got to have people who've got to come and stand in uh school gyms and move to the corners and stand in the corner of the school gym and everything. | |
| And at that point, just having terrific answers in in the debates isn't enough. | |
| So who is gonna who of the the interesting question is who of these three second-tier candidates, Santorum, uh Bachman, and Rick Perry is best organized? | |
| Because it's the best organized one uh who's gonna emerge uh from that. | |
| And they're only, I would say five tickets out of Iowa. | |
| So we're gonna have Romney, we're gonna have Gingrich, we're gonna have Ron Paul, uh, we're gonna have Huntsman, and we're gonna have one of the Perry Bachman Santorum trio. | |
| Which one will it be? | |
| 1800-282-2882. | |
| And all the all the candidates uh are unsatisfactory to one degree or another. | |
| That's just the nature of politics. | |
| Because unless you get the perfect guy like Kim Il-sung was for North Korea, uh, as everybody uh starving in those uh North Korean camps uh uh with no light, no electric light, freezing, shivering, starving in the dark. | |
| All those people still think, wow, Kim Il sung, he was a great guy, what a guy. | |
| You very rarely, except in Pyongyang, you very rarely get the perfect candidate. | |
| Uh you have to accept you're gonna get a 70% guy, basically. | |
| If you're lucky, you'll get a 70% guy. | |
| Uh so the question is, what 70% is it important to go for? | |
| And the critical, the single most important issue here is driving a stake through Obamacare beginning in January 2013. | |
| Because if that sucker is not killed dead in the next presidential term, it will never be killed. | |
| And if it's never killed, you'll never get conservative government again. | |
| Uh you will never get conservative government again. | |
| It changes the relationship between the citizen and the state to one that's closer to junkie and push. | |
| And and and right now all the all the bad things about Obamacare are kicking in, and none of the lollipops. | |
| None of the things that people are gonna like. | |
| And once and once they start, uh, which will be roughly toward the end of this decade, in other words, in the presidential terms starting in uh 2017, once those things kick in, uh you will be in the it will not just be like Medicare and uh Medicaid and Social Security, | |
| it'll be something closer to the situation that prevails in Western Europe and most other parts of the Western world where whereby the relationship between the citizen and the state has been transformed to j to such a significant degree you will never get uh truly conservative government ever again. | |
| So the way to think about this thing, if if uh if you're trying to figure out who's the guy you want to agree with on the 70% and let him go off and do a lot of cookie stuff on the 30%, I would place that right at the top of the list. | |
| Uh Obamacare will not only bankrupt the state, uh, but it will ch and it will make impossible. | |
| For for example, it will uh uh if you're if you object to Ron Ball on foreign policy grounds, it ain't gonna matter if Obamacare kicks in because this country won't be able to afford a foreign policy by the end of this decade. | |
| Uh that's uh that's a very basic arithmetic there. | |
| You can have uh massive government uh s uh sclerotic bloated government health care system, uh, or you can have armed forces that can project themselves to anywhere on the planet, but you can't have both. | |
| So it's not going to be an issue, because if you have Obamacare by the end of this decade, you're not going to be able to have the U.S. armed forces as they're known. | |
| So the important thing is which candidate is going to drive a stake through Obamacare and kill that sucker uh starting in January 2013 as fast and effectively as possible. | |
| Because if we don't kill it in this term, it's over. | |
| This is a consequential election uh and you might have strong views about uh I don't know, legalizing uh l what what's the uh what's the Gary who's the guy who Mr. Snodley, who's the fellow who's running from New Mexico? | |
| The uh the guy the governor from New Mexico who's running as a Gary Gary Gary J uh Gary Gary Johnson. | |
| Gary who who says that he's he's for uh legalization of drugs and all the rest of it. | |
| This is not a time this is not a time to worry about the legalization of drugs, whatever your view of it. | |
| This is a time to be able to prioritize. | |
| And if you're a candidate who can't prioritize, uh you shouldn't be in uh you shouldn't be in the race anywhere. | |
| And the single most important issue facing this country is whether uh a state can be driven through the heart of Obamacare before it fundamentally redefines the relationship between the citizen and the state. | |
| Mark Stein in for Rush 1800-282, 2882. | |
| We will follow all the exciting developments, whether from Cedar Rabbits or Pyongyang in the hours ahead. | |
| Mark Stein, InfoRush on the EIB Network, 1-800-282-2882. | |
| The EIB Network Yes, the excitement is at fever pitch of the EIB network as we count down to the big Iowa Caucus Day, January the third, that's Tuesday. | |
| Rush will be here live following events in Iowa. | |
| today is um Mongolian the I think it's the hundredth anniversary of Mongolian independence. | |
| Mongolia became an independent nation in 1911. | |
| So I want to give a special shout out to listeners in if you're a liberal in Oregon or Vermont and you're listening to the show in your Mongolian yurt, a big shout out to you because Mongolia is celebrating one hundred years of independence uh today. | |
| So if you're enjoying the show in your yurt, you have Mongolia to thank for it. | |
| It's uh a hundred years old today. | |
| Also from overseas, Mr. Snerdley thinks this could be an omen. | |
| It has been the worst year for elephants in a quarter of a century. | |
| Uh at least uh a record number of seizures of elephant tusks reveal that at there is a uh massive pile of corpses, twenty-five hundred dead elephants. | |
| Uh and uh that may be a bad omen for how things are gonna go for Republicans in the year ahead, but it's also a bad year for rhinos. | |
| A record 443 rhinos, uh I'm not talking about, you know, your rhino squish types uh like your Massachusetts moderates and whatever, but a record 443 rhinos have been killed this year in South Africa. | |
| Mr. Snerdley worries that this could be an omen. | |
| A bad year both for elephants and for rhinos, according to this report out of Johannesburg. | |
| Now, I was talking about uh the the ability to prioritize what are gonna be what are the issues you should be voting on. | |
| Basically, if Obamacare survives, there's nothing else. | |
| There's nothing else. | |
| Um if you look at health spending in uh m many uh jurisdictions in the Western world, the minute you have uh the governmentalization of health care, it becomes the dominant issue. | |
| It's the one thing that people, no matter how bad it gets, no matter how long the wait list gets, people will not let it go. | |
| And so you have situations where it already consumes like forty-six percent of revenues in uh in in uh many Canadian provinces. | |
| For example, in Ontario, uh, which is the biggest province in Canada, uh, health care spending is set to uh uh consume eighty percent of revenues by the year twenty thirty. | |
| Now, just to put that in comparison, if if it were to be a comparable figure here today, the that would mean that by the time you took government revenues uh for uh health care and you threw in the interest payments on the debt, which are gonna be twenty percent of revenue within a few years, that would leave no money for nothing else. | |
| So in other words, if you covered the cost of Obamacare, uh plus you paid the interest to the Chinese on the debt, there's no money left for anything else. | |
| No armed services, uh no nothing, just that. | |
| Just health care and interest payments uh on the debt. | |
| So it is and by the way, Obamacare I think is is gonna be even worse, even more chaotic, and even more expensive uh than the Canadian and British and European systems that they're most dysfunctional, because it has corruption built into it, as we saw with the retirement of uh uh Ben Nelson, the corn husker kickback guy from Nebraska, as that reminded us. | |
| It's not it doesn't even have the same uh basic uh you can't even make even make the same basic argument for it that you can make about the Canadian system, which is that at least there's an equality of awfulness about the whole system. | |
| Uh here uh there were payoffs to this state and that state and all the rest of it, and there's special deals and special favors and special opt-outs and all the rest of it that will require an even huger bureaucracy to administer it. | |
| Nobody has ever attempted this on any scale before. | |
| Uh the British National Health Service is the third largest employer on the planet after the uh People's Liberation Army of China and the Indian Railways Network. | |
| That's for one tiny little miserable grubby little island in the North Atlantic for fifty million people. | |
| Uh it's the third biggest employer on the planet, the British National Health Service. | |
| The uh uh United States equivalent to administer health uh bureaucracy to administer health care for over three hundred million people from Maine to Hawaii is gonna be way more expensive than that. | |
| You look at the way Medicare costs have exploded, uh, and once you put Obamacare in place, that is gonna explode on a scale nobody is nobody has ever attempted this in a first world society before. | |
| So if we don't drive a stake through this uh in the next presidential term, it's gonna be over. | |
| Uh Anne Coulter in her column today makes the point that if uh Obamacare, if Obama's re-elected, or if uh some uh presidential uh successor uh comes along who is unable to actually kill Obamacare, | |
| then by twenty seventeen all the goodies will be kicking in and people will be running as they do in Western Europe and Canada on a promise uh to uh manage Obamacare more efficiently, to make it work more efficiently, to make Obamacare run on time, as Mussolini would have said. | |
| So the the point here is that uh if we don't actually have a candidate committed to killing this thing dead, rolling it back, ending it uh before the end of the next presidential term, then uh the nature of the United States will be changed forever. | |
| Music Great to be with you. | |
| Uh I'm here today, Walter Williams in tomorrow. | |
| Rush back Tuesday. | |
| If you go to Rush Limbaugh dot com, you need not be discombobulated by sinister foreign guest hosts, because if you're a rush twenty-four seven subscriber, you can have rush twenty-four seven, and it's like he's never gone away. | |
| Let's go to Brent in Manassas, Virginia. | |
| Brent, you're live on the Rush Limbaugh Show. | |
| Great to have you with us. | |
| Hey, how are you doing, Mark? | |
| I'm doing good. | |
| How are you? | |
| All right. | |
| I do agree with you on the Obamacare. | |
| Gotta go, and hopefully the next president will do that. | |
| But my the reason I called was I I'm just wondering why uh i everybody is always bad mouthing Ron Paul. | |
| And and I I know that the military thing, you know, i is a big thing and the legalizing drugs is a big thing. | |
| But drugs were legal a long time ago. | |
| Anybody who wants drugs can get drugs, so I don't see why that is such a big deal. | |
| And the military thing, i it's not that he wants to, you know, be an isolationist and not do anything in other parts of the world when people need help. | |
| He just doesn't want to go to war for no reason and kill a bunch of innocent people. | |
| You know. | |
| And so I just don't understand why those two things would be a reason not to vote for the man when all of his other, you know, the economy and a lot of other things he's good on. | |
| And so I was just wondering if you could kind of give me a reason why, you know, those two things should kill him as a possible president. | |
| Well, you you've actually put it in a more rational way, Brenn, because if if uh you were to leave it, let's put the drugs thing aside, and I'm not averse, by the way, to the decriminalization of drugs, because I think the the so-called war on drugs has totally corrupted uh large and for uh large parts of U.S. law enforcement. | |
| I don't I d have no uh love for the DEA and I uh strongly object to the idea that uh people uh the these uh paramilitarized police forces kicking the doors down and opening fire and then explaining afterwards that no, they should have been at the apartment next door and they're sorry they're they shot grandpa in the chest. | |
| I think this stuff is disgusting. | |
| And I think uh the corrupting effect of the war on drugs uh is uh i i is as uh the the problem the the root cause of the problem is uh American appetites for drugs, and you're not gonna and and the war on drugs doesn't actually address that. | |
| But let's um let's le put that aside and turn to the the foreign policy stuff. | |
| If you put it the way you did, which is that we shouldn't just be launching wars willy-nilly around the planet, I'd uh I'd agree with you. | |
| I think the the United States uh i uh has become very good at launching wars, less good at winning them. | |
| We haven't decisively won a war for two-thirds of a century now. | |
| That's an issue. | |
| That's an uh that's an issue, and it's one that ought to be taken seriously. | |
| And uh haven't legally declared war either. | |
| Well, in in it uh that that's that's a a uh constitutional point, and it's not an unimportant one, but the point is that we we go into wars and we have nothing to show for them. | |
| All the stuff we talk about, by the way, most of the stuff we talk about is the legacy of unwon wars. | |
| Why are we excited about this Kim Jong-un guy uh over in Pyongyang? | |
| Because that was uh that's the the the the Kim dynasty is uh is one of the consequences of an unwon American war from the nineteen fifties. | |
| Why are we getting exercised about Iranian nukes. | |
| That's one of the consequences of an act of war, nineteen seventy-nine when the Iranian embassy was seized, uh was seized, and uh we sent the uh Carter sent the helicopters into the desert uh and the mullers were poking American corpses on TV and uh they got away with it. | |
| Uh they've been in a state of war with us for a third century and we're still talking about them. | |
| Uh a lot of the stuff we talk about uh why why are we back in Iraq? | |
| Because we didn't bother winning the war first time round when we went in uh uh when Saddam Hussein uh seized Kuwait. | |
| The consequences of unwon wars are not uh are not frivolous. | |
| And America has not decisively won a war since nineteen forty-five. | |
| And it won those that war, by the way, by dropping nukes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. | |
| And anyone who thinks that the United States of America was is gonna nuke anyone today uh is living in cloud cuckoo land, because that America is gone. | |
| You you try to you try to imagine any circumstances in which a US president would order civilian death on that scale, and it's and it's out of the realm of possibility. | |
| So we spend a huge fortune on a nuclear arsenal, the most of our enemies, that guys with string and fertilizer in in obscure parts of Waziristan, do you think they're worried about America's nuclear arsenal? | |
| No, they're not. | |
| They know that they know that uh string and fertilizer can beat a nuclear power if uh the guys with string and fertilizer want to win and the guys with the nukes don't want to win. | |
| So if you put the argument in the terms you're putting, uh Brent, you're right. | |
| A lot of money is wasted uh on starting wars uh for which there is no strategic clarity, uh no provision for victory, and no sense even of what victory would look like in those wars. | |
| What would victory look like in Afghanistan? | |
| Nobody uh the the uh President Obama ha has uh nobody has any idea what what that would look like. | |
| Now if that's kind of why I was saying that a president Paul would would be good because we wouldn't go to war for no reason if we did go to war. | |
| We go there, we kicked their butt, and we come home. | |
| No, no, but dragging things out of the case. | |
| No, no, because he no, because Ron Paul goes beyond that. | |
| Ron Paul goes beyond that. | |
| He goes, what's he go for a start? | |
| That there is a tonal problem with Ron Paul, in that he's very he he goes too far to my taste, for my taste. | |
| And he and it ought to be for most American tastes too, and it ought to be uh to the not to the taste of primary voters in Iowa. | |
| He goes too far in uh uh in arguing uh that uh 911, for example, was something that uh America brought on itself because America bombed people. | |
| Uh that's his argument. | |
| He's got endless concern uh for he he he has minimal concern for the victims of nine eleven and and and a profound and and actually I would argue diseased sympathy uh for the so-called root causes that that led uh Al Qaeda to fly those planes into those buildings. | |
| Mohammed Atta was a wealthy middle class Egyptian engineering student from Hamburg University. | |
| The United States did nothing to him to justify him flying a plane into a skyscraper in Manhattan. | |
| And if Ron Paul doesn't get that, he really is not a man who should be running uh for president uh of the United States. | |
| So he goes beyond that. | |
| And I would and I would make and then I would make this other point that he says uh well, Iran he he then uses that argument to justify Iran going nuclear. | |
| Say, well, you know, we've done stuff to Iran. | |
| Nobody did anything to Iran. | |
| Iran has been in a state of war uh with the United States since 1979. | |
| Seizing an embassy is an act of war. | |
| It's the most basic core relationship between states. | |
| Nobody has to worry at the height of the Cold War that uh that the that Stalin or Khrushchev or Brezhnev would seize the US embassy in Moscow. | |
| That's the minimum uh courtesy between states is that they respect each other's embassy. | |
| It's sovereign territory. | |
| The U.S. Embassy in Moscow is the sovereign territory of the United States. | |
| When Iran did that, it was an act of war. | |
| When Iran blows up community centers in Argentina, that's an act of war. | |
| The speaker of the Iranian parliament w uh organized a plot to blow up a community center in Argentina. | |
| The uh the uh leaders of Iran uh put out a mob hit on a British novelist and killed his translators and publishers around the world. | |
| The idea that they are not going to be acting extraterritorially when they go nuclear is completely absurd. | |
| So when Ron Paul says, why what what will be the big deal of Iran going nuclear? | |
| He has no idea. | |
| It changes everything. | |
| It you it would change uh it would turn uh every Sunni Arab state in the Middle East into an Iranian client state. | |
| So if you look at where the US Fifth Fleet is based, uh that in Bahrain, that wouldn't be a better in 20 years' time the Chinese fleet would be there. | |
| Uh and there would be no a U.S. fleet there. | |
| So in other words, it it transforms the entire global scene. | |
| And Ron Paul supporters say, well, I don't care. | |
| We who cares about the world? | |
| Screw the world. | |
| We can be we can live as as a nineteenth century republic and let the world go its merry way, nuking each other, uh uh uh organizing uh i its affairs in its own way, giving uh resources, uh oil resources to the Chinese, and none of it's gonna make any difference to us. | |
| And that is stark staring nuts, Brent. | |
| And you tell me why you don't think it is. | |
| Oh, I'm not saying that I don't that I a hundred percent agree with his his views. | |
| I'm just saying that you know when you talk about the left or two evils and have to vote for somebody, I just I I can't see where he would be the end of the world. | |
| He's the opposite in a lot of ways of other people, just hopefully he wouldn't take it too far, and you have to just think I'm going to give him a chance. | |
| Well, you if you're willing if you're willing to give him a chance, uh here's what I'd like. | |
| I'm uh I'm not like fellas on the right who d who think the defense budget should uh shouldn't be cut. | |
| Because as I said earlier, if you've got Obamacare, you're not gonna have a defense budget. | |
| Uh you're gonna have you can't have the uh right now uh the United States is responsible for forty-three percent of global military spending, and that's too much. | |
| And the interesting about that is when you when you put it like that, people think, well, we must have the biggest powerful army in the world if we're responsible for forty-three percent of military spending. | |
| But in fact, you don't. | |
| Because when you're spending on that scale, it's pretty clear you don't have an army in the conventional sense of the world, which i uh uh uh the of the word, which is one that goes abroad soldiering in the national interest of your country. | |
| You wind up with an army that uh serves as uh the the the kind of glow uh uh enforcer of global order, uh so spends ten years building schoolhouses in Afghanistan uh on on behalf of some panty waste uh UNFI NATO EU type mission that is nothing to do with the national interests of the United States. | |
| So I would be I think that the the problem with the with the United States military is not that it uh i is is not the amount of money it spends, but that so much of the money it spends is wasted. | |
| So if you want to uh if you want to have a discussion about that, that's fine. | |
| But when you stand up there in public and you say that uh the Iran going nuclear has no consequences, you're making a fool of yourself in front of the world. | |
| And if the voters of Iowa don't know that, I can assure you that the guys in Moscow and the guys in Beijing and the guys in Tehran get it. | |
| Uh so Iowans should think carefully uh be f if if some of these polls are correct and twenty-five percent of Iowans wanna uh w want Ron Paul to be their president, uh that is sending a message that is not healthy uh for the United States. | |
| And Ron Paul talks a good game on uh trillion dollar cut. | |
| Uh he's uh he's good on all the stuff that the United States government shouldn't be doing, uh that it is unconstitutional for it to do, and uh furthermore it's unaffordable and unsustainable for it to do. | |
| He talks a good game on that. | |
| But when he says that uh, you know, uh the uh the the that Iran going nuclear makes no difference, he's making himself look an idiot. | |
| You can't be a great power, by the way, and just hold up in Fortress America. | |
| There is no Fortress America. | |
| He knows that too. | |
| There's like a bazillion uh bz 30 million illegal immigrants uh living in the United States, the majority of whom, by the way, have come here since September eleventh uh uh 2001. | |
| That's to say they broke into a country on so-called orange alert. | |
| That's Fortress America for you. | |
| Mark Stein, InfoRush, 1-800-282-2882. | |
| InfoRush Hey, Mark Stein, Infrarush, 1800-282-2882. | |
| We've had the uh why you so anti Ron call. | |
| Let's line him up And uh and uh see if we get through the why are you so anti Huntsman uh call before the end of the show. | |
| Let's go to Vinny in New York City. | |
| Great to have you on the show, Vinny. | |
| Hey Mark, thanks for having me. | |
| My pleasure. | |
| Um listen, you can't say that that Newt ran a campaign just on uh debate performances and roads in the polls, and then turn around and say because he didn't stump in Iowa uh as effectively as, say, uh Ron Paul or maybe uh Rick Santorum that he went down in the polls. | |
| He went down in the polls because you and Ramush Penuru and other writers in National Review and probably every writer at the Weekly Standard and on and on and on, trash the daylights out of him. | |
| Now I admit there's a lot to go after Newt for, but Newt also does have a solid record of conservative achievement when he was in government. | |
| Okay. | |
| And you know, I I I hear a lot of a lot of guys like you trashing everybody. | |
| So wait, wait a minute. | |
| Let's let's let's let's work through this, Vinny. | |
| Why do why why do you think I like listening to Rush? | |
| Let's put it that in that in those terms. | |
| Why do you like listening to Russia? | |
| Yeah, let's let I'm just I'm just gonna let's start with there. | |
| That's good. | |
| That's good. | |
| Rush represents the conservative truth. | |
| And I listen to him for the same thing. | |
| And you know why he does? | |
| Because Rush, the the great thing about Russian, the the reason he's still here after two decades is because Rush argues from first principles. | |
| Rush thinks through first principles. | |
| Uh that's what I I liked about Rush the first time I heard him. | |
| You you don't know what's gonna come along. | |
| You know, one minute uh there'll be uh uh an oil spill in the Gulf and the next uh and the next minute uh there'll uh be a bank failure, and the next minute Gaddafi will be toppled in Libya. | |
| Those those are the news items. | |
| But your approach to the news items is guided by first principles, which Rush talks about articulates very well. | |
| Now, uh Newt Gingrich uh came out in favor of an individual mandate in health care. | |
| And he argued it uh he argued in favor of it as recently as I believe four years ago when he said that he thought the Romney care thing was the most exciting development in uh healthcare in ages, and that his only problem with it which was that he thought the individual mandate should only be applied to citizens who uh earn over fifty five thousand dollars a year. | |
| Nobody who thinks through first principles on on uh of conservatism or first principles in political philosophy uh would do that. | |
| Because because an individual mandate on health care, that's telling you not just that the government th let's say the tax rate is twenty percent. | |
| So you make ten thousand uh you to make ten thousand dollars a year, you give two thousand of it to the government, and the government decides how it's gonna spend that two thousand dollars. | |
| Uh what the individual mandate does is it says that the eight thousand dollars you keep, you get to keep, you have to spend in ways that meet government approval. | |
| Once the government can do that, it can tell you to do anything. | |
| Why why can't it tell you then it uh you have to take your vacation in certain uh places? | |
| You can only uh you can only spend uh buy so much gasoline a year. | |
| Uh why uh the government can that can do that can do anything, Vinny. | |
| And Newt came out for that. | |
| I don't I don't disagree with that, and that's gonna come up in the next debate. | |
| And by the way, Gingrich's people denied that. | |
| This is recent news. | |
| This only came out in the last week or two. | |
| No, I read it. | |
| Wait a minute. | |
| I'm interested to hear his answer on this because it's news to me that he came out for Romney's uh uh health care plan, okay? | |
| It's news to me. | |
| That's all I'm saying. | |
| Okay, but uh we're so busy beating the hell out of Newt Gingrich uh that we we're not even talking about what his accomplishments are in gov uh while he was in government. | |
| And and he did have some real major milestones. | |
| And like you said, we we don't have Ronald Reagan running. | |
| Sorry, we don't. | |
| And as much as I like Rick Santorum, he's branded himself as a one issue candidate. | |
| That's why he's gonna do a Huckabee. | |
| We go we gotta go, Vinny. | |
| I'm sorry to do this to you, but we gotta go to an uh EI EIB commercial profit uh profit center. | |
| But I'll pick up on the points you made when we return. | |
| The End It is unusual. | |
| A Hawaii man was charged with four counts of assault after allegedly attacking a group of men with what is believed to be a cow's thigh bone. | |
| Uh nothing to do with Nancy Pelosi's $10,000 a night vacation in Hawaii, but of course there are serious calls now for cow's thigh bone control. | |
| Uh I believe, as the NRA say, if you outlaw cow's thigh bones, uh then only cows will have thigh bones or something like that. | |
| Mark Stein In for Rush on the EIB network. | |
| We will pick up some of uh Vinny's points about Newt and talk to Congressman uh Louis Gommett. |
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