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Jan. 24, 2012 - Rush Limbaugh Program
35:52
January 24, 2012, Tuesday, Hour #3
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Time Text
Yes, America's Anchorman is away and this is your undocumented anchorman sitting in.
I will be attempting self-deportation before the end of the hour.
In compliance, it's the pilot program for Mitt Romney's new scheme.
I'm going to be attempting self-deportation.
They're dropping like flies here.
HR bailed after the first hour.
He couldn't take it any longer.
He couldn't take it.
Now Mr. Snerdley is on his feet.
He's getting to.
I spoke too much about Brian Williams.
Brian Williams, if you have difficulty with your loved one, by the way, if they're having difficulty sleeping, just say the words, Brian.
You don't need to watch the debate.
Just say the words, Brian Williams, in that kind of big anchor man, lantern-jawed way of his, Brian Williams, and they will be out like a light.
We were talking about the debate.
Also looking forward to the State of the Union.
By the way, I would love it if Brian Williams were to do to the State of the Union what he did to the Republican debate last night.
That would be great.
Why doesn't he just sit there and say, Mr. President, it's great to have you with us.
Can you tell us what you would have done in the Elian Gonzalez case?
Do you think we should send, you managed to take out Osama bin Laden?
Do you think we should send the Navy SEALs into Cuba to take out Elian Gonzalez's dad?
Let's talk about this for 20 minutes.
These are the issues that the American people care about.
He's going to be, given his state of the union tonight, we were talking earlier about the difficulty you have.
Mitt Romney, and Mr. Snerdley made this point very well, that we talk about people being natural politicians now.
Ever since the age of Bill Clinton, Bill Clinton was a natural politician.
What that meant is he touched you a lot.
If you ever saw Bill Clinton on the stump and people would go up to him and say, well, what's your favorite kind of music?
And he would place one hand on their elbow and one hand on the small of their back, which was very restrained by Bill Clinton standards.
And he would say, well, what's your favorite kind of music?
And then they would go, well, you know, I like country or whatever.
And he'd go, well, that's my favorite too, amazingly enough.
And then he'd be, it's like when he was with Hillary, what chilled Hillary to the bone was when was that piece in the star report where Modica Lewinsky said, oh, whenever I hear I'll be seeing you, Billy Holiday singing, I'll be seeing you, I always remember that's our song.
And Hillary, and Hillary was chilled to the bone because that had been their song too.
But that's what people mean when they say he can make a connection with people.
He was an object lesson, Bill Clinton, in how you can be almost too human.
Mitt Romney has the opposite problem in that he's very convincing.
I don't know what lab in China they developed this for.
I think it was Japanese, actually, this form of highly advanced android with very flesh-like skin.
It's a superb model in many ways, but it just falls down a little bit on the human interaction thing.
And it's very difficult to fake that.
But Mr. Snadley made a point that until Clinton came along, we didn't used to think about people in these terms.
Nobody thought, oh, Nixon, he really connects with people.
Nobody thought Warren Harding connected with people.
Nobody thought Taft connected with people.
If he tried to connect with people, he'd have fallen on them and crushed them.
We didn't expect it until Bill Clinton came along.
And I think this is the fascinating thing of what's gone wrong in election year so far.
These are critical times.
We're not looking for a healer-in-chief.
In the Bill Clinton years, Bill Clinton presented himself as the guy who felt your pain.
And actually, there wasn't a lot of pain to feel back in the 1990s.
So it was a kind of indulgence.
Could have the sort of soft focus oprophied thing.
Now there's a hell of a lot of pain.
Do you want a guy who's going to feel it or claim to feel it?
Because Bill Clinton doesn't feel it.
Bill Clinton's off giving speeches to the Saudis for huge six-figure sums.
Bill Clinton's got a beach house, where is it?
On the Sunshine Coast in Australia, near Noosa in Queensland.
He's got some place on the west coast of Ireland.
Wherever you are, wherever you are, Bill Clinton isn't going to be feeling your pain because he's on the other side of the planet.
So there's no point going for the guy who feels your pain.
You want a guy who's going to fix your pain, who's going to end the pain, who's going to make the pain go away.
And if I was Mitt, that's the case I would make.
I would say, sure, there's, you know, I know I'm a rich guy.
I know I have a hard time, you know, pretending that I like the same things as you, you know, Go Bruins or whatever he said when they won the Stanley Cup.
I'm sure he knew enough to do that.
But there's no point in him pretending that he's a guy who likes nothing better than to be upcountry in Appalachia, face down in the still and enjoying a jigger of moonshine before having a bunk up with his cousin or whatever.
There's no point in him pretending to be a man of the people like that.
He should say, I'm a rich guy.
I've got a Cayman Islands bank account, but I can't feel your pain because of my Cayman Islands bank account.
When the pain gets really bad, I'm going to be off to the Cayman Islands, emptying the bank account and flying off somewhere else.
But I can fix the pain.
I can fix the pain.
And in serious times, it's time to the whole fraudulent therapeutic nature of the campaign is pathetic.
It's not where we need to be.
You know, when they have recruitment ads, a brilliant recruitment ad attracts the five or six people who are qualified for the job.
The five or six people who can do the job when you put in a recruitment ad.
If it goes slightly screwy, you open the door on Monday morning and there's 1,200 people there applying for the job.
And the trick then is to, in the audition, to find out who's got the skills needed to do the job.
And that's what's wrong.
That's what's gone wrong with the system this time.
The system does not set the tests needed to figure out who can do the job in critical times.
If you just want some fraudulent twerp who will claim to feel your pain when in fact he's going to be jetting off to Martha's Vineyard and running his hands up and down Carly Simon's glowing back like Bill Clinton did every summer vacation, that's fine.
But we're not.
We're way beyond that.
We've got massive problems.
And the case that these guys ought to make, Newt ought to say, you know, Newt ought to say, yeah, sure, I shouldn't have taken the Freddie Mac thing.
Yeah, sure, I wore out my welcome as speaker.
Yeah, sure, my ex-wife loathes me.
Big deal.
This country's broke.
It's broker than anyone's ever been.
Do you want a guy who can fix it even if he's got a lousy ex-wife and even if he's got a, and even if he's taken money from Freddie Mac?
Mitt Romney's case ought to be, yeah, sure, I'm not the warmest most guy in the room.
I'm not going to pretend that I'm going to be coming to the sports bar out on Route 142 for a mud wrestling night and we're going to have a great time while we raise a beer and we watch the gals roll around.
So what?
I'm not one of the boys.
I can fix this problem.
And that is really the case that these guys have to make.
And again, I say this as a foreigner.
Most countries divide the head of state from the head of government, right?
So if you go like to Canada, they've got a queen and then they've got a prime minister.
And if you go to Germany, they've got a president and then they've got a chancellor.
They divide the job from the fellow who embodies the state, the head of state, from the guy who runs the government.
The United States, for historical reasons, combined both roles in the Constitution.
And that means in a media age that there's a tendency to look at the guy who's president as somehow he shouldn't just be an effective political leader, but he should somehow embody the values of the state.
You know, if you're looking for somebody to embody the national character, Mitt Romney is a bit insufficient.
If you're looking for someone to embody the values of America, Newt is a wild ride trailing more baggage than the Hindenburg.
There's no point to that now.
We're in a serious, we are in a serious situation.
Either of these guys would be better than Barack Obama.
And we had all the great slogans last time.
Hope and change.
Change you can believe in.
If it's a choice between hope and change or hope and marriage, if it's a choice between Obama's hope and change or Gingrich's hope and marriage, well, forget about the hope and marriage and just figure out he may be able to do something about the mess we're in at some point.
This is the critical term.
Rush was saying, I was not only going to, Rush said yesterday I was not only going to hammer Newt and hammer Mitt.
He also said I was going to say we're all doomed.
Well, we're not all doomed.
We're not all doomed quite yet.
But if by the end of this presidential term we have had either another four years of Obama or we have had four years of drift by a doesn't quite mean it mildly right of left of right of center squishy type guy who's just keeping the seat warm for the next Democrat to win, then we really will be doomed.
Then we really will be doomed.
Once China becomes the world's dominant economic power, once the world starts operating to China's convenience, once the Russians and the Mullers in Tehran and the Politburo in Beijing figure out that they may not agree on much, but they all agree that it's easiest just to stick it to America as America goes down the tubes, then we will be all doomed.
So the question then is whether you want to run on a vapid, empty slogan, an airhead slogan, a valley girl slogan like, oh, change you can believe in, because I believe in change, because change is full of hope.
And I think change makes me more hopeful.
And the more hopeful I am, the more I want to change.
Or you want to actually have a guy who's going to roll this stuff back, who's going to drive a stake through the $4 trillion budget and reduce it to something closer to what this country can afford, then, you know, maybe in the scheme of things, the fact that one guy has an open marriage or however many open marriages he's had by now and the other guy has problems connecting with people and hasn't got a lot of human warmth, maybe these are peripheral.
Nobody looked at Mr. Snerdley made the point that George Washington, these were like wealthy, moneyed landowners.
They didn't need Cayman Islands bank accounts in those days because America had such a reasonable rate of taxation that you could leave your money in continental onshore bank accounts.
But if they'd got to the point where they needed offshore bank accounts, those guys would have been the kind with the Cayman Island bank accounts.
They didn't pretend.
They didn't pretend that it was all about hope and change and vapid slogans.
It's not that.
It's more important than that this time.
It's more important.
And the test for the American electorate here is whether it's mature enough to understand that it cannot afford another four years either of accelerating the present insanity or another four years of seat warming drift by some milquetoast Republican.
Whoever wins in November has got to get real about this stuff or as Rush warned up his saying yesterday, we are all doomed.
We'll take your cause straight ahead on the EIB network.
Yeah, we're in a sugar beet groove on the Rush Limbaugh show today.
Cane sugar hides behind beet sugar.
That's what Newt says.
Let's go to Bob in Auburn, Massachusetts.
Bob, you are live on the Rush Limbaugh show.
Great to have you with us.
Hey, Bob, is Auburn anywhere near Lynn, Massachusetts?
About which?
Yeah, probably 25 miles.
Okay, so you're not like stealing food stamps, buying 64 bucks worth of Coke, and then feeding it into the can return nickel dispenser, are you?
I'm just outside, about five miles outside that stuff.
Okay, so Auburn hasn't been reduced to the pitiful state of Lynn, Massachusetts.
I don't think so.
Good for you.
Let's keep it that way.
What's on your mind, Bob?
Mark, you know, I got another outrageous Obama job killer here.
Okay.
Now, the Air Force just awarded a big contract to Brazil.
Okay?
Right.
Now, on the surface, you say what else is new with the Gulf oil and all the rest of the stuff.
But the three intriguing points here, Soros owns 20% of the company, so you kind of figure that out.
But Beechcraft, who worked with the United States Air Force and spent $100 million on this project, and they're based in Florida, 1,500 jobs, were shut out of the bidding completely.
They didn't even get a chance to bid after they invested all that money for Air Force specs.
Now, the real outrageous part of this is this Brazilian company, Embraer.
Embraer, right?
Something like that.
It's under investigations by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the Justice Department, for violations of the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.
Right.
And they just got the contract.
Now, you know, the thing bothering me is, well, we're worried about what Romney's taxes are, which is a joke.
What's Obama doing behind the scenes?
I mean, this is probably just the tip of the iceberg.
This has been going on, these Republican debates for three months.
It's all smokescreen on what's really going on because no one's paying attention now.
Well, this is troubling.
Embraer is a lot of people will know Embraer because they build a lot of the small commuter planes that fly around the country.
So if you fly out of Massachusetts on a little commuter plane down to Pennsylvania or whatever, you're either going to be on an Embraer or something from up in Canada.
But this is not a small contract.
It's about a third of a billion dollars.
Well, it says a billion, but it's a billion dollars.
Yeah, I mean, it's not whatever it is, and it's to build, I think, light attacks.
Yeah, it's light air support plane.
Right, right.
And the thing here is, I mean, there's a lot of jobs involved here.
Yeah.
And, you know, another thing, you know, Obama is, of course, he's eyes like a laser on jobs.
Of course, the pipeline will tell you that.
But you implied, because as you say, Soros is money in this company, that this is one of those insider things we were talking about earlier.
That if you know, it's like the Solyndra guys.
They were well connected enough to get fellows in the administration to say to the other guys, well, we don't care whether it passes the process or whatever.
We want you to go back, take another look at it, and this time come back with the correct answer.
And your suggestion here is that somebody on the inside made an insider's decision that somebody's $100 million in conjunction with the Air Force, and they don't even get a chance to bid.
No, no.
You're going to be kidding me.
And they don't get a chance to appeal the decision either.
But you know something?
There isn't going to be a lot more of this in the years ahead, Bob, because you talk about this.
You say it's a, let's say you're right, and it's a billion-dollar contract.
And where is that billion dollars coming from?
The United States government is borrowing that a billion dollars to give to a Brazilian company that will create jobs for Brazilians to make a plane in Brazil that the United States government will then buy with borrowed money from China.
Eventually, this sort of thing catches up with you.
And China down the line is not going to be continuing to loan money to the United States government to expand its, to give to Brazilian companies to improve the state of its military.
In a sense, this is the kind of he'll be able to do this for another term.
If he's re-elected in November, we'll get another four years of this stuff.
But at a certain point, this drives it over the cliff.
And this gets back to the pipeline thing, that in the end, he keeps talking about being the jobs president, the jobs president.
He's focused like a laser on jobs.
And yet, every opportunity he gets to create jobs, real jobs, as opposed to phony baloney green jobs like at Solyndra, every opportunity he gets, he says no.
And as you said before, we know that with Brazil, with the oil, where he congratulates the Brazilians on doing something off their shores that he doesn't want to happen off our shores.
Every time he gets a chance, and he won't talk about this tonight, he'll have some guy sitting there who represents ecologically friendly window treatment sitting next to Warren Buffett's secretary.
But he's not going to address real jobs for real Americans, Bob.
Yeah, they should be hammering the pipeline every single debate and don't get off it because that's a huge point.
And if Obama gets four more years, we're finished.
Yeah, well, I would agree with you on that, Bob.
And that's why, by the way, just to return to this debate last night, you should say at some point, a moderate, at some point, these guys are presidential candidates.
This election isn't about Brian Williams.
Nothing's about Brian Williams.
Brian Williams is entirely unimportant, unless you're the stylist who gets to do his hair, in which case he's very lucrative.
But other than that, Brian Williams is not in the least bit important to what is facing the United States of America.
So if you ask some stupid question about something that doesn't matter, you should say to him, well, Brian, this is great.
This is a fantastic game of trivial pursuit.
Next time, why don't you invite us over to your place?
But are we going to get to talk about the pipeline?
The pipeline, the pipeline, is the embodiment of everything that is wrong with the Obama economy.
It embodies the way this guy says, well, Republicans have to stop playing politics.
The pipeline is pure politics, pure politics.
And it doesn't come up in the debate.
What is wrong?
What is wrong with all four of these candidates that they want to let a guy like Brian Williams frame the terms of the debate so they can portray Republicans as out of touch and obsessed on a lot of freaky deeky issues?
And then 24 hours later, Obama stands up there in the well of Congress and he delivers a speech that shows how in tune he is with the real concerns and the real pain of the American people.
The pipeline should be hung around Obama's neck every day between now and November.
Great to be with you.
Rush returns.
Live tomorrow for full strength.
All American excellence in broadcasting to take you through the end of the week.
Salt Lake City, a University of Utah professor charged with viewing child pornography on a plane, has resigned.
University spokesman Remy Barron says 47-year-old Grant Smith stepped down last month several weeks after he was arrested, November 26th, following a flight from Salt Lake City to Boston.
Prosecutors say a fellow first-class passenger saw Smith viewing the images and took a cell phone photo before alerting a flight attendant.
It's not a good idea.
If you have got a serious child porn habit, it's not a good idea to watch it on a flight from Boston to Salt Lake City.
I know the in-flight movies can get a little boring, but honestly, don't fire up the laptop and start watching your child porn.
It's best to wait till you land in Salt Lake City.
This guy, by the way, it's a fascinating glimpse of the kind of people who get tenure at universities.
This guy, I've never heard of him, 47-year-old Grant Smith, he's a professor at the University of Utah.
He's viewing child porn in first class.
Why is a 47-year-old University of Utah professor able to fly first class to view it?
Shouldn't he be viewing the child porn back and coach?
There's something very weird about that story.
Speaking about the people who make and that, yeah, Mr. Snurdley points out that we live in an age where why wouldn't you watch the child porn on the flight?
Because we live in an age where people go and beat up Granny in the street.
They go and mug little old ladies in the street and then they post it on YouTube and it goes viral and everybody goes, look, that's great.
That's little Jimmy who lives next door kicking the walker out from under the old lady.
Wow, isn't that great?
It's like next thing you know, he'll be on TV.
We live at a very strange age.
I want to get to one other, by the way, air travel story.
United States Senator Rand Ball at Nashville International Airport, he missed the March for Life in Washington, the pro-life march, the March for Life in Washington on Monday, because he refused a pat down at a security checkpoint.
He went through a scanner at the airport and it set off the alarm.
This one, these full-body scanners.
And by the way, they are very twitchy.
You know, he said, well, it's obviously a malfunction.
He showed him he's got nothing under it.
He rolled up his trouser leg, showed up he's got nothing under his socks.
They still, they wanted to subject him to a physical pat down.
He said, no, he was happy to go through the scanner again because it was obviously what they call a false positive.
Every piece of junk that the government installs is full of false positives.
If you've ever driven through the border where they're supposed to scan your license plate, the license plate scanner is a border guard told me that the license plate scanners are inaccurate 40% of the time.
So this guy goes through the scanner.
Rand Paul, he's a United States Senator, and then he says he doesn't want to have a full-body pat down.
He doesn't want to have government commissars getting into his underwear without probable cause.
So he says he's happy to go through the thing again.
They say, no, you've got to have, you've got to have, the TSA guy has got to be able to get his hand into your crotch.
He's got to be there in the underwear.
Federal regulations say he has got to have his hand on your upper thigh.
And so Rand Paul refuses and he's dragged away.
And by the time the situation's resolved, he misses his flight and he has to get a later flight.
And so he doesn't get to appear at the March for Life.
This goes on all over the country every day.
Now, Rand Paul's dad is using this.
What does he say?
Old Ron Paul says this is just an example of how this country is degenerating into a police state and a police state in this country that's out of control.
Ron Paul is using it to fundraise on.
One of the ultimate embodiments of this police state is the TSA that gropes and grabs our children, our seniors and our loved ones and neighbors with disabilities.
The TSA does all of this while doing nothing to keep us safe.
Now, he's absolutely right on that part.
The Transport Security and Management Administration has never, ever caught a single terrorist.
Nobody has ever been caught by the TSA.
And when you look at them, that shouldn't really surprise you.
Do they look like the guy who's going to spot the jihadists?
No, they don't at all.
But they're very good.
It's great.
By the way, this University of Utah professor charged with viewing child pornography on a plane from Salt Lake City to Boston and he's now lost his job.
If you need a job, go for the TSA.
You can stick your hand in the panties of underage kids all you want, and the government will thank you for it.
They say, well, it's keeping us much safer.
Go for it, man.
Go for it.
It's your heart's delight.
It's the perfect job.
It's the dream job.
Rand Paul is not just the embodiment of the incompetent Transport Security Administration system.
He is the embodiment of the deformed relationship between the citizenry and the state in America at this pivotal time in our history.
Think of Rand Paul, not just as the cranky libertarian son of the cranky libertarian candidate.
Think of Rand Paul as representing the mass of the citizenry and think of the Transport Security Administration as representing the broader United States government.
This guy is going to get a plane, he's going to hop on a plane, he's going to appear for professional reasons at an event in Washington.
He's on business.
He's on business.
He's doing his job.
And in sorting out the little, whatever it is, the TSA's got one story and Rand Paul's got another version.
Whoever's right, doesn't matter.
He missed the flight.
He wasn't able to get there and do the job.
When they factor in the cost of the TSA, do they factor in the cost of all the people who are pulled erroneously aside, who are made to the woman in Florida who was made to remove an adult diaper and missed her flight and had to be picked up at an airport 200 miles away from where she was supposed to be landing?
When they do all this stuff, do they factor in that cost to the economy?
Because the broader way to look at what the TSA is doing is the micro-regulation of the citizenry and the cost it imposes on the economy.
Every time your plane you get pulled out of line by the TSA, it's a liberty issue, as Ron Paul says.
And he's absolutely right that if they can get away with it at the airport, they'll be doing it at railway stations.
They'll be doing it at bus stations.
They'll be doing it at interstate ramps.
If you accept the right of minor state officials to stick their hand in the gusset of your briefs without probable cause, the idea that it will be confined to the airport is preposterous.
It's a liberty issue.
And these guys are right on that.
But it also exemplifies the loss to a productive economy, the transfer, the remorseless transfer of wealth from the productive class to the state bureaucracy.
Rand Paul was unable to fulfill the engagement in Washington for which he'd been booked.
That happens across the country to hundreds, thousands of business people whose names you don't even know because they're not United States senators.
Regulation sucks money from the productive class to the dead hand of the state.
And that's where Newt fell down last night when he got the stupid question from little Miss Lefty journalist from the Miami Herald auditioning for her gig on MSNBC.
And she asked him why the Bushcuts didn't, tax cuts didn't work.
And Newt gave a very wan answer.
But at the heart of it, he was absolutely right, that the regulatory burden is too late.
You know, Rand Paul couldn't attend that rally because the state commissar demanded that he comply with the state regulatory bureaucracy.
There's too much of that in America.
The TSA, it's not just that the TSA is entirely superfluous to American security.
It's not just that it's pointless, wasteful, meaningless theater.
It's not just that it's disgusting, absolutely disgusting, that minor state officials should have the right to put their hands in the underwear of your grade school children and your sick, dying mom in the wheelchair.
It's not just objectively disgusting on that sense.
It also represents the sheer total numbing waste of time of the bureaucracy and that it's sucking all the time, it's sucking wealth and time out of the productive class in this country.
So this Rand Paul thing is not a small thing.
We all know it's nothing for the United States security, nothing to do with that at all.
It makes no difference to the United States.
It gets back to this whole stupid business where we profile things rather than people.
And the more and the more inventive the jihadists get, the more things we're going to people are not going to be able to board a plane with gel breast implants soon, which is going to be hell on women in certain jurisdictions in this country.
There's going to be more and more and more of this stuff.
But what it is in the bigger sense is it's the bureaucracy's right to interfere in small ways, add costs to the conduct of your business.
That is what went on when Rand Paul was prevented, prevented by the bureaucracy from speaking at the Pro-Life rally in Washington yesterday.
Mark Stein, in for rush, more straight ahead.
Mark Stein, in for rush on the EIB network.
Warren Buffett's secretary is going to be the guest of honor at the State of the Union tonight.
I don't know how many secretaries get to go to the State of the Union.
I hope she's like Nixon's secretary and she can maybe delete 15 minutes in the middle of the speech and do us all a favor.
Let's go to Linda in Spring, Texas.
Linda, you're live on the Rush Limbaugh Show.
Great to have you with us.
Thank you, Mark.
It's a pleasure to speak with you.
I enjoy you when Rush is out.
I just have one statement to make, but it is so important, and you are making it very well.
It is the what, not the who.
And that's what we need to focus on.
It's the statement of the candidates.
It's their stand on the issues.
That's why the debates are so important, and that's why last night was such a waste of time.
Yeah, I think you're right.
I didn't explain it very well, Linda, but let me sort of come at it a different way.
Those of us from parliamentary systems, you often get, it winds up in a parliamentary system.
The guy who heads the party is a bit of a stiff.
John Howard, the great Australian prime minister in the first decade of this century, fell into that category.
Stephen Harper, Conservative Prime Minister up in Canada.
They're often accused of being cold.
They don't have the human touch and all the rest of it.
But what's better than big charisma is big ideas.
That is actually more important.
If a guy's got the right ideas, you can take a pass on the charisma.
If he's got charisma but no ideas, what do you got?
Or if he's got charisma and the wrong ideas, then you're really in trouble, Linda.
Well, and that's why Newt is the flavor of the week because of the statement he made at last week's debate.
This is the flavor of the week, and that's all.
He is not the right candidate.
Neither is Romney.
No, but at this stage, you know, in personal, in the personality sense, we're not going to get the right candidate.
So what Rush was talking about is what matters is who can advance the ball on conservatism, who can articulate conservative ideas and who's likely to get the scale of the challenge when they take office next January.
That's exactly right.
And that's why the good old boy network in the Republican Party is not giving their backing to Rick Santorum.
Because if they allow him to make his statement of conservatism and constitutional bases, they know he will resonate with the voters, and they can't have that.
He'll knock them all out.
Well, you know, Linda, I like, I bumped into Rick Santorum at an event in New Hampshire a couple of weeks ago.
I just had a little conversation with him, oddly enough, about his Habsburg Empire grandfather fighting on the Russian front, is what we wound up talking about.
He's a very pleasant, he was a very pleasant fellow.
He gave a very good speech, by the way, that night in New Hampshire.
But what he didn't do last night was seize the opportunity when Mitt and Newt were going back and forth like a couple of highly strung drama queens snipping back and forth at each other.
He should have stepped in and delivered the big message, conservative, big, big, big picture conservative message.
But he didn't quite seize that moment, Linda.
That's right.
And what a shame that was.
Do you think he's got time to do it?
Yes.
Yes, this is not over.
Texas hasn't voted yet.
That's true.
How many delegates do you have?
Oh, about 500.
Yeah, that's right.
I think we've got, what have we got in New Hampshire?
Six or something?
I don't know.
You count way more in the numbers.
I think just to get that in perspective, by the way, I think at the moment, Newt has 32 delegates and Mitt has 31.
So nobody's been chosen out of the whatever it is, however many you need to become the nominee.
So people shouldn't let this thing be curtailed too early.
But do you think Rick, I mean, at a certain level, Linda, I take your point, but nobody's shutting up Rink Santorum.
In a format like last night, you've got to seize your moment.
You've got to take it, and you've got to be on your game and position yourself.
And I couldn't honestly say Rick Santorum did that last night.
Right.
He didn't do it last night.
I was so disappointed in that because I saw it and I saw where he could have stepped in.
He needs to jump in with both feet.
And that's exactly what the American people, the voters, waiting for.
They know Newt is not it.
They know Mitt is not it.
Rick is Ron Paul.
Oh, my goodness.
No, no, no, no, we haven't got time to get into Rod Paul at this stage.
But look, thanks for your call, Linda.
And look, here's the thing.
Realistically, Rick Santorum and Newt and Mitt and even Ron Paul are going to be way better than Barack Obama.
And the point is, we can have a lot of fun at this stage of the process.
But it's important that we don't just, in a sense, give the other guys the arguments they're going to be using after the nomination process.
I'm all in favor of, let's grant everything bad that's ever been said about these guys and say, okay, that's a given, that's a wash.
It's the famous cartooner Nixon in January 1969.
Okay, now one free shave.
In other words, we're starting from fresh at this point.
And let's say, what are you going to do about the future?
What are you going to do about America now?
Let's not re-litigate the past and all the rest of it.
And Rick Santorum, if he can articulate that message, he's in the game.
If he lets another debate like that one last night slide by, I don't think Florida is going to shape up so well for him.
He needs these debates for the oxygen, and he's got some, and so he needs to seize his moment.
Thanks for your call, Linda.
More to come on the EIB network.
Mark Stein in for Rush in the Oscar nominations, best actress.
It's Mrs. Thatcher versus Marilyn Monroe.
That would have made a hell of a nominating debate, by the way.
Why couldn't we get Brian Williams would probably be able to kill that stone dead, too?
But it looks like Mrs. Thatcher, Meryl Streepers, Mrs. Thatcher, may be getting an Academy Award.
I think she'll win out of Michelle Williams as Marilyn Monroe.
But it's a sad comment that there may be a better light up in the president of political heavyweights in the best actress category of the Oscars.
That is it.
I'm going to take Mitt Romney's advice and submit myself to self-deportation.
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