All Episodes
Previous Next
June 24, 2013 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:38
June 24, 2013, Monday, Hour #1
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
Yes, ladies and gentlemen, America's anchor man is not here today.
Um, so it's uh Douglas Urbanski here today, filling in for Rush Limbaugh, doing apparently what I was born to do, which is to fill in for Rush.
When he's not here, he's doing something else.
There's a rumor out there about what he's actually doing.
Uh H.R. and I were just chatting about this a moment ago.
The rumor is that Rush is resting up so that tonight he can uh try out the Gandolfini meal.
And we all know what the Gandolfini meal, Rush talked about it, I think on Friday or Thursday, the Gandolfini meal, the four shots of rum, two pina caladas, two beers at dinner, uh, two orders of fried king prawns, and a large portion of Foi Guas.
That's the rumor about where Russia is.
He will tell you all about where he is tomorrow.
Ladies and gentlemen, we are loaded today.
We have a lot on tap, and as we go through today's journey, I do not want you to think when we begin talking about what I have to talk to you about, that we're going to be distracted from getting to the immigration bill.
I have plenty to say about that.
But there are other evolving things in the news I'd rather get to first because there are things unfolding.
By the way, have you noticed?
Have you noticed this disastrous trip Obama has taken through Europe, how how he's how he's behaving as if he's nostalgic for the early days of his presidency or pre-presidency, his campaign mode.
It appears to me that the world is no longer enchanted with this guy.
The honeymoon is over.
He I think of the image of him sitting there with the German Chancellor Angela Merkel and she lectures him, she talks to him about spying on friends, and uh we'll get to more about the spying on friends thing in just a moment.
Then he goes, This is what I want to concentrate on for a second.
He goes to the Brandenburg Gate, and he wants to capture a sense of glory of the past, and other presidents have done this, obviously famously John F. Kennedy, and very famously the great Ronald Reagan.
And instead of the two hundred thousand people that are there when Obama was there when he was campaigning to be president, and this time there's about 4,000, 4.5,000.
The sort the amount of a crowd that would not fill the average uh summertime outdoor theater where you go see um where you go see all the things you go see in the summertime.
Four and a half thousand.
Very small amount of people.
Now here's the thing.
When Obama first went there back when he was campaigning, this was an Axelrod understanding of how to win the presidency because you gave the imagery, the optics of ac of acting presidential, presidentialness.
I was amazed, as I think the entire world was, that there was no thought whatsoever this time given about behaving presidential or giving the weight and gravitas of presidentialness or the sense of history of the place where he was.
Instead, what we're getting from the administration, apart from the scandals, is that they would like us to get out of Afghanistan as quickly as possible.
Suddenly we're capitulating uh by the very belief that the Taliban are trustworthy negotiation partners.
We didn't do that at World War II, as uh as far as I recall with the with the Nazis in Germany or with the Shintos in Japan.
This is an enemy that we are capitulating to.
An enemy that is undefeated.
Which means that you have to ask the question, is America the one who is defeated?
And over there you've got Syria's bloodbath.
You've got the Americans leaving Afghanistan, you've got the Iranian nuclear program, you have enormous tough issues.
You've got Egypt, the Arab Spring, the Libya mess.
What is Obama talking about?
What is he talking about?
He's talking about cutting nuclear weapons, and we'll be discussing Vladimir Putin in a few moments, and and he must love this talk of cutting nuclear weapons.
Obama's out there and he's going to give a talk tomorrow.
We're told it's going to be very important to talk about climate change, a hoax.
He wants to put an end to all wars.
In other words, ladies and gentlemen, the naivete on parade, that has uh as its bottom line only one theme, which is the appeasement of America's enemies, the coddling of our adversaries, our strategic adversaries, and more big government solutions.
I am I'm as disturbed by all of this as you are.
Now I watch the news all weekend.
This is This is the first and most important thing.
I'm not going to be distracted from the immigration bill.
But I want to alert you up front.
Today's show is a show that questions conventional wisdom on every imaginable level.
I'm watching the shows all weekend long.
And I have some conclusions about Mr. Edward Snowden that will be shared with you shortly.
But as I'm watching these shows, uh Snowden has been on the world scene for what is it now?
About two weeks, ten days, two weeks, something like that.
And the packaging of Snowden has been shifting.
He arrives on the world stage, and he was called a whistleblower.
The word now, used almost universally by politicians, by news organizations.
The word they're using now is leaker.
It's a leaker.
He is a leaker.
In other words, some of them are using the word traitor.
They want you to think that he is the same as Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.
There's a lot of people out there who think this man is a hero.
Now the whole world, as you and I know, is wondering where he is.
Did he go to Moscow?
Was he seen in Moscow?
Is he on a plane to Cuba?
Did Iceland take him in?
No one knows the answer.
I don't want you to hold me to this.
I've heard a rumor that he was going from Hong Kong to Istanbul, where he was going to take the Orient Express to Zurich, and then he would go overland dressed as an old woman and travel by bus to The Hague.
That's a joke.
But it reeks of all those spy stories, doesn't it?
It has all the elements.
Catch me if you can.
Where is he?
Where is he?
Now to many, many people.
Oh, one other thing I'll tell you.
Have you noticed this?
H.R., have any of you noticed this?
Don't you think that Snowden bears a very strong resemblance to Jay Carney from the White House, not to be confused with Art Connie.
Don't you?
I've not heard anyone mention this resemblance.
Now he's Snowden is on a run.
And there are all sorts, and people saying, well, why did he go to Hong Kong?
Why has he gone to Moscow?
He must be a spy.
He must have allegiances.
Ladies and gentlemen.
When you've got Lindsey Graham out there saying, we're gonna chase him to the ends of the earth, and I hope we catch him.
Of course you'll run.
This is a man who has risked everything.
Everything.
And from the way this story is playing out, from the way the immigration discussion is playing out, you start to believe that Washington, D.C. has become home to one political party.
And let's just call it for lack of creativity at the moment, the Democrat and Republican establishment.
Their collaboration in a lot of these things has made very jittery.
And even the Supreme Court, as we've seen with Obamacare, is part of this cabal.
Now the masses out there of people in America do not appear to be upset with Snowden.
Stop and think what this means for a moment.
When you have the political and media elite who are foaming at the mouth.
The elite don't want you and I to know about this stuff.
If Feinstein and Schumer are as upset as they appear to be, the whole thing deserves a second looking.
Now there are people.
Now this Snowden, if ever there was a case designed for presidential pardon, it was Snowden.
He has fled Hong Kong.
He the rumors are he's going to Ecuador or Venezuela or even Iceland.
All right, fair enough.
There is a petition that you can go to online that was created soon after Snowden revealed himself to be the source of this leak that is asking the uh that is asking the U.S. government to to uh to grant him a type of amnesty, a waiver, presidential pardon.
Now, let's go back in time.
Daniel Ellsberg is a great example, the Pentagon Papers.
He discloses those, and those, let us recall, disclose secrets about the Vietnam War.
Ellsberg was made a hero by the left.
Now that is a slightly similar outing of secrets.
But ladies and gentlemen, wherever a flashlight shines on secrets, you know, truth comes out.
Evil cannot hide.
Now, the left and the media, and many people who are on the right are behaving as if what Snowden has told the world, and and he's told the world very little as far as we know now, based upon what we know.
They are conducting themselves as if this is something that our enemies didn't already know.
Can you honestly tell me with a straight face that the Chinese did not know what we were monitoring there or the Russians, or that those members of Al Qaeda and the Taliban were not sure that we were somehow tracking then?
Of course.
Of course they knew.
The people who did not know in this story were the American people.
You gotta take this stuff apart.
Now, he took an oath, or he signed a contract, an employment contract, that we are assuming is a non-disclosure agreement.
But we don't know.
We do not know if the man broke the law.
I told you this was a show of nonconventional wisdom today.
Now, this government has filed papers, extradition papers, and these papers from the administration that talks about transparency, these papers are sealed.
These papers are sealed.
So Snowden receives a security clearance.
He receives the right to work where he did.
He signs a non disclosure agreement not to divulge classified information.
Does that make him a criminal, or is that a civil matter?
Because he violates an employment agreement, if indeed that's what happened.
And of course, his attitude was the heck with non-disclosure.
And yet we still see a trick today.
There's no proof that this man gave any information to another country, not any yet, that has been disclosed to us.
He stepped up.
He told the American people that our government is violating our rights.
There's a lot of people out there who are saluting him today as a hero.
And I'm somewhat inclined to go that direction myself until I know more about the story.
But this is a man who has put his life in jeopardy against against enormous forces.
And he has walked away from home, from his girlfriend, from his job.
He knew what risk.
You've seen you've all seen that interview.
So I've watched the transformation in the marketing of Snowden.
Go from being a whistleblower to a leaker to practically Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.
We've got a lot more to say on this.
The phone number here today on the Rush Limbaugh Show is 1-800-282-2882.
Once again, 1-800-282-2882.
Duggar Bansky got to take a short break.
We'll be right back.
Now something is happening out there, ladies and gentlemen.
I'm getting the sense that something is happening.
Welcome back to the Rush Limbaugh Show.
It is Dugarbansky filling in for Russia.
No, if this petition for presidential pardon has reached something like over a hundred thousand at this point, and I think it's online and it's going to stay online for another couple of weeks.
The ACLU, the ACLU has weighed in to Obama.
They have said to Obama, um, under the under you, the United States is a nation governed by fear.
The American Civil Liberties Union says in an open letter, that is echoing the very criticisms, ladies and gentlemen, that Obama made of George W. Bush.
The letter goes on to say, we say as Americans that we're I can't believe you're on the Rush Limbaugh Show, that I am quoting the ACLU in a positive way.
They say we say as Americans that we are tired of seeing liberty sacrificed at the altar of security and have net having a handful of lawmakers decide what we should and should not know, the ACLU rights.
We are tired of living in a nation governed by fear instead of the principles of freedom and liberty that made this nation great.
Now, Obama criticized Bush for any kind of spying, and I I mean there's no evidence that they were doing domestic spying on U.S. citizens in the Bush administration.
Now, if the ACLU, which is as far left an organization as you can find, doesn't like this, it and also then they've got the story out there, the story of Nancy Pelosi, booed.
She goes to a liberal conf conference, and she says Snowden broke the law.
There's a QA, she's at the far-left Net Roots Nation conference in San Jose, and she's saying that this country needs a balance, her word between security and privacy, and a man shouts, it's not balance, it's not constitutional, no secret laws.
This guy shouts.
And then the officials start taking this guy out of the room.
And other people, liberals, in the room, start shouting, leave them alone, leave them alone.
That's what a police state looks like.
And then apparently the real booing starts when Pelosi says, as far as Snowden, he did.
He did violate the law in terms of releasing those documents.
And that's when the real, real, real booing started.
You know, what people like Pelosi failed to understand is that privacy, privacy is a vital aspect of security, ladies and gentlemen.
As anybody who has worked in security will tell you, if there's no privacy, there's no security.
There's no such thing as privacy or security when anyone can walk in and snoop through your stuff at any time.
Now, this is an outrage in many ways.
And I'm watching the politicians, strange group of people line up.
Pelosi herself pretends to be concerned for violating Americans' rights.
But she's not.
She's not looking how she handled Obamacare.
Something that most Americans did not want, something that was against the will of a people.
So here you go.
Snowden broke the law, and Feinstein gets booed by a liberal audience.
Wow.
She didn't even use the words where she blamed Bush.
That part wasn't even in there.
Then you ask yourself, well, what is, after all, the liberal definition of a criminal?
Would that be Charles Wrangell?
I don't know, eleven million illegal immigrants.
Or whistleblower.
Now, they consider a whistleblower a criminal if the whistleblower exposes their agenda.
Otherwise, to many people, this guy is a is a genuine hero.
And the funny part of this story is that you've got Cheney, Lindsay Graham, a lot of the neocon world are on the same side as Nancy Pelosi.
Same, same side.
Nancy and her neocon Republicans, look, people who are the government elite, the Washington, D.C. crowd, the Bush crowd.
They love all this stuff.
Now it is very different.
Bush spied on people with foreign terrorist connections.
The Obama gang seems to be setting it up so they can spy on all Americans.
Now, information leaks are good if you're a liberal, only when they are used against a Republican.
Then they love them.
But they do not want to err on the side of logic at this point.
They uh they they don't want to even be logical, kind of like the Republican Party.
Kind of putting Baehner, McCain, Graham, all these guys back in power so that we are so that we are in um collusion as it may be with the other side.
But the Snowden affair, the Snowden affair shows that the real danger isn't a left regime or even a right regime.
Ladies and gentlemen, the status quo power elite comes into question here.
And it's part of the immigration conversation that we'll be getting to in due course as well today.
This is not that I'm not trying to deny a terrorist threat here, Islamic or otherwise, but the elite always see a threat, a crisis as an opportunity.
People have no problem accusing Bush and Cheney of this stuff, but they are baffled that uh that Obama's in it too, some people.
Let's let's go to the bottom line for just a moment.
Snowden saw what he was convinced was a major government injustice.
He saw it as a moral wrong, and he felt it needed to be stopped by a whistleblower.
And he did not trust the media or senators or this country as a safe harbor for him to go to and discuss the matter with.
So that's what he did, and it took great courage.
Much more to be said on this man.
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the show.
It's Doug Ransky filling in for Rush Limbaugh.
The rumor is that Rush is resting up tonight today to uh to uh test the um James Gannel Fini dinner tonight.
It's only a rumor.
1-800-282-2882 is the number I see a number of you holding, I'll get to your calls soon enough.
Uh over the weekend, as this Snowden thing was evolving, I communicated with a number of really uh intelligent, serious, dare I say it, hardcore conservative thinkers.
And if I told you their names, many of you who are high information folks would know their names.
I'm not going to tell you their names.
And the question I basically tossed out was, is Snowden a hero, or is he a traitor?
And to a man, no one would say he's a traitor.
The most they would say is that this may be an act of civil disobedience or conscientious objection, phrase the left used to love, based upon what we know now.
You know, not all of the laws, not all of the actions of the state are right, ladies and gentlemen.
You've got to assume that our enemies already knew that the United States, with its vast resources, was using incredibly enormous methods to spy on them because some of them were already protesting surveillance as Muslims.
We were told that that was that that was racist.
What Snowden then exposes is the fact that anyone and everyone can be spied upon.
Now the I'll say something slightly controversial, the Islamists complained about it.
Well, if they complained about it, surely the American citizens can complain about it.
Our enemies, ladies and gentlemen, we're not stupid enough to believe that our enemies are not fully aware that we're that they're being relentlessly watched.
There's no threat that I'm aware of yet to national security.
The problem here, the big problem is it's come out that we look, that they're looking at you, that they can look at American citizens.
And I'm yeah, I guess I shouldn't be surprised at this, but I don't understand fully and truly why the press is not on Snowden's side.
There is a stripe of Washington elites, and some of them call themselves Republicans, and certainly Democrats.
Do you understand, ladies and gentlemen, both of these groups?
The One Worlders, the big government, the DC insiders, they hate privacy.
That's the thing.
That's the thing most people fail to realize.
There are people, both parties, and this will take us to the immigration conversation before today's journey is through.
There are people in both parties who are pro-government authoritarians.
Neither really, really care about your freedoms.
The espionage that's going on here is that of the NSA spying on the American people.
When they are not even suspects.
Snowden simply exposes their illegal operations.
He brought, you can say this legitimately, he brought transparency that Obama refused to bring to the federal government.
I mean, Snowden's real crime may be that he humiliated the state.
And that is something, of course, you must never, ever, ever, ever do.
And strange allegiances are popping up.
Diane Feinstein, Michelle Bachman.
When when people say, well, he's gone to Hong Kong.
Isn't that odd?
He's gone to Moscow.
Isn't that odd?
I'm watching television all morning on the treadmill.
Well, if he goes to Cuba or Ecuador, does he know what kind of repressive regimes are there?
Of course he does.
That's the sacrifice he's made.
Not because he's a traitor or a spy, ladies and gentlemen.
But because every time you turn on the television, you've got Lindsey Graham saying, I hope we chase him to the ends of the earth and that we get him.
And that we get him.
People have used the word traitor.
I've heard the word lifetime in prison.
I've heard the word death penalty used.
Senator Bob Corker, Republican from Tennessee on Face the Nation said, um, he said, I don't know how anybody can view this person as anything other than a criminal.
If he's not one, he should come back and make the case.
But he certainly doesn't have the characteristics of a hero.
Michelle Bachman has said he's absolutely a traitor.
Ladies and gentlemen, if my intentions were good, I would be on the run as well, let me tell you.
Now here is the thing.
When both parties suddenly agree on something, and it happens to be something that is not beneficial to the American people.
Then you know something something there's dirty work at the crossroads when Obama and Cheney both are defending something, you know, you you you've had it.
There's there's you see, we've we've got set up here you don't need me to say it.
A vast East German style apparatus.
And you don't need me to say it, because I'll get to the story soon enough that the East Germans, that the Germans, the former East Germans are saying it.
And this apparatus is there to monitor all the communications, all the movements of every citizen, resident of our country.
Cost billions of dollars.
It's taken years to put together.
Do you realize, ladies and gentlemen, that at some point someone could use this to suppress opposition to whatever the government is at that time?
Now what Snowden has done is he's caused deep embarrassment, deep humiliation to the government by shedding light on this.
So to many people out there, he's a national hero.
I don't see Schumer or Graham showing even one percent of the courage in just about anything they do up on Capitol Hill that this young man shows.
I mean, what are the what are the what are the chances these people take in their enormously comfortable lives to do the right thing when given the opportunity?
Got a lot more to say on this, ladies and gentlemen, but I see a lot of you holding, so I'm gonna take some of your calls.
Patricia in Springlake, Michigan, welcome to the show.
You're in Michigan, yes?
Yes.
How are you today, Patricia?
Welcome to the Rush Limbaugh Show.
Thank you very much.
What's on your mind?
My point that I would like to make is why did it take a Snowden in order to expose this?
Where are the Congressmen?
Where are the people in the House of Representatives?
These men, a lot of these men have known it.
One of the whistleblowers said this has been going on since 2001.
So these men knew about it.
The president knew about it.
Why did it take us Snowden to bring this to the light of the American people?
They c the congressmen were supposed to do this.
And so were the House of Representatives.
We voted them in so that they would protect us.
And they were not protecting us.
Is he a traitor?
Patricia, is he a big traitor?
Isn't it in our Constitution that we have the right to um stand before our government and say, hey, what are you doing?
Don't we have the right to whistleblow?
I don't think those words are used explicitly, but that is the whole idea.
Yes, we do, and that's what he's objecting to.
Do you see him as a traitor?
No, I do not.
No, I do not.
I see him as a man who probably went about it in the wrong way, but I see him also as a man who got this knowledge out, and the only way he felt was he was able to.
And what do you think about this idea that this is what presidential pardons are specifically designed for?
Because if it was me, and it's not, I'd be saying, sir, we want to get you back here.
You're gonna have to have a little punishment, you know, thirty days, three months in jail or something.
We had also remember this, Patricia.
We don't exactly know what is done.
Exactly.
And the fact that every time a congressman stands up and objects to him, I I put a check mark next to his name or her name and say, okay, you are someone who doesn't belong in the White House.
You are someone who does not belong in Congress.
You are a person who I would say.
Your dog needs you.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Your dog needs you.
Will you will you go to the dog, please?
It is not a job as a citizen to speak up when I see something going on that's not right.
Thanks so much, Patricia, for calling the Rush Limbaugh Show.
Ladies and gentlemen, it's Tucker Bansky filling in for Rush.
The phone number is 1800 28282.
We'll be right back.
Welcome back to the Rush Limbaugh Show, ladies and gentlemen.
It's Doug Rabansky filling in for Rush, who is not here today, he'll be back very soon.
He'll be back tomorrow, in fact.
So yes, Diane Feinstein is and Schumer.
They're on Face the Nation.
She says um she says he is not a whistleblower, speaking of Snowden.
She says whatever his motives are, and I take him at face value, he could have stayed and face the music.
I don't think running is a noble thought, she said.
Now, ladies and gentlemen, these are lawmakers with enormous power.
When they start using phrases like face the music, of course you're gonna run.
She said of him, I think the chase is on, Feinstein said.
They're upset that he may have broken an oath.
What about what about all of these elected officials who constantly break oaths?
They swear on the Constitution, then ignore it all the time.
Now I am genuinely here trying to understand what American interests are compromised.
No one has told us that yet.
We know that Obama's interest may be compromised, for sure.
But what American troops or operations, what things in America's interests have been jeopardized?
We don't know that yet.
Now it sure seems to me, ladies and gentlemen, as if Snowden's enemies are all lining up to be a group of folks I don't know that I would all fully want on my side.
Now we we we are having no luck following this guy.
We don't know where he is.
I mean, I hope they have as much luck finding this guy as they have finding the Benghazi survivors, because we don't know where they are either, apparently.
I mean here he is, he lets out these secrets.
Obama, Obama outed a doctor in Pakistan.
They helped find Osama bin Laden.
The doctor, that doctor is now languishing in a Pakistani prison.
This country has not lifted a finger to help him.
Panetta leaked the organization and named the commander of the SEAL team six that killed Osama.
And yet this this guy who was told the American people they're being spied upon is the guy we're chasing and threatening to the ends of the earth.
I hope we get him, said Lindsay Graham.
In Knoxville, Tennessee, Pete, welcome to the Rush Limbaugh Show.
How are you today, Pete?
Hey, good afternoon, Doug.
Thank you for having me on.
My pleasure, what's on your mind, sir?
Well, I've got to tell you, I'm highly, highly concerned about liberty in the country.
And what I want people to think about for one minute is the fact that do they not find it strange that a general is giving ex is defending the NSA's program and defending the spying on American citizens by the military.
Because NSA is is in the Department of Defense.
So this is the military telling the American people that we need to spy on you.
I mean, is there not something seriously wrong that the military is now performing, I guess, a surveillance mission on American citizens.
Pete, you strike me, Pete, as a high information voter.
Do you remember the name Jamie Gorellick?
Um that name actually rings from Jamie Garelic was the individual in our government who enforced and put in place the wall between domestic and foreign surveillance pre-nine eleven that led up to 9-11.
Yes.
I mean, that's always what this country had was a wall.
We did not spy on our citizens here at home, and certainly we did not use the military to do it.
No.
No, and that's very troubling when that when that occurs.
But you know, Pete, with this bunch, you don't have to be too troubled by it because if if if they were called on the carpet for having the military do it, they were forced to stop it, they just hand it over to the IRS and let them do it.
You're laughing.
Yeah, I mean, we've lost control of our government.
It is troubling the point you brought up, Doug, too, about the elite from both parties seem to be defending this action.
And yet and yet you heard me mention the other a few moments ago that the Libs in a conference booed Pelosi when she said this man was a criminal.
I mean, what's very interesting is that the the this man may be a hero to many, many Americans.
Because you know what?
I like to believe that many conservatives and that many Democrats, somewhere down inside their veins, still have that part of libertarianism that we find attractive.
You know, Ronald Reagan once said, he actually once said that the that the cornerstone of conservatism was libertarianism.
And this is why people are responding.
Not the elites in Washington, but you and I. Is he is the guy a traitor to you?
He's obviously not.
No.
No, I I think that uh the final judgment as far as what he does from here remains to be seen.
But people I do have to understand this guy is on the run for his life.
So I think that that's his primary concern at the moment.
Um what remains to what he does from here on out, you know, we'll we'll we'll know as we get more facts.
That's right, we'll get more facts.
We don't have enough to make a final judgment yet, but I I am a little frosted when I hear commentators on television and politicians saying, Well, why did he go to China?
Why did he go to Hong Kong?
Why is he in Moscow?
He's on the run.
And we're chasing him with some pretty big threats hanging over his head.
I'm also a little troubled, Pete, that we have this uh that we have this warrant for him that is sealed, and we don't know exactly what's in it.
What did he do?
No, we're not being told.
All right, Pete.
Thanks so much for calling the Rush Limbaugh Show.
Pleasure to have you have you.
Yes, he left Hong Kong.
He took a Russian aeroflot airlines flight.
I I'm a nervous flyer to start with, so I don't take aeroflot.
He went uh for to Moscow uh over the weekend, as you know.
We believe he went to Moscow.
He was scheduled to go on a flight to Cuba today.
Uh it was then tweeted later on by a reporter on the flight from Moscow to Cuba that he was not on the flight.
Hong Kong is telling us that Snowden left lawfully and on his own accord and voluntarily.
They did not detain him, by the way.
So there is as far as Doug Rabianski is concerned, based upon what I know now, there is no amount of hyperbole from our government that's going to turn me against this man.
The man informed, the man informed the citizens of this great country that the government was and still is not obeying the Constitution of the United States.
This is what heroes do, ladies and gentlemen.
They sacrifice the comforts of life.
Sometimes for the greater national good.
Some people would rather put up with government misdeeds than sacrifice any comfort of life to effect change.
Well, we had all kinds of heroes.
James O'Keefe is a hero.
Andrew Breitbart or old Powell is a hero.
All kinds of people put it on the line to defend our freedoms.
And they they they really get in trouble for it.
Um Keefe has been pilloried by the press.
I watched I had finished this comment and we get back.
Short break, Doug Ransky, be right back.
Doug Rabansky filling in for Varsha Limbaugh, who will be back tomorrow.
I don't know how many of you saw Snowden's initial video interview.
I watched it.
And uh pending the revelation of very disturbing facts, based upon what I know now, the man appears that he may be a hero of some sort.
He certainly is to many people out there.
For whistleblowing about the NSA's unconstitutional tapping of our conversations.
Snowden is paying an enormous price.
He's about to be abused by the worst of our enemies, as well as by our own government.
And yet there's a lot of people out there who would like to carry him on their shoulders and thank him.
And the claim that he gave away secrets exposing in NSA surveillance is sort of absurd.
The Russians and the Chinese are already very well aware of what the NSA is doing.
You know, ladies and gentlemen, in a democracy, the people should be informed of the actions and policies of the U.S. government, of a of any government in a democracy.
The more transparent the government policies, the better informed of the citizens, and this data is important for a well-informed vote.
The people have the chance to judge if some policy or action is legal or illegal, moral or immoral, honest or dishonest.
▲
Export Selection