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July 19, 2013 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:49
July 19, 2013, Friday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
Yes, America's Anchorman is away, and this is your undocumented anchorman sitting in.
Mark Stein, great to be with you.
I'm a foreign exchange student here at the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.
It's a terrific program.
Guys like me get to study here, and in return, the entire Detroit City Council gets to do a remedial class at the Institute of Municipal Governance in Moggadishu.
So it all evens out.
Rush returns live on Monday for a full week of authentic all-American excellence in broadcasting.
But today, it's the cheap foreign knockoff version direct from Ice Station EIB here in far northern New Hampshire.
Mr. Snerdley is down in New York City, the deep south, as we think of it from up here, sweltering away.
I think it's 147 degrees.
It's hotter than the gates of hell in New York City.
And it's like the waiting room for the gates of hell here in non-air-conditioned New Hampshire.
But Mr. Snerdley is going to be running the show, so don't worry about a thing.
1-800-282-2882.
Rush.
Rush knows how to pick his days off.
He was away for the Obama second inauguration in January, which meant that I was the guy who had to sit through that hideous 20-minute poem that so-called poem guy did during the inauguration.
He was away for the day of the manhunt for the Boston bomber and now Rolling Stone boy band cover star Jokar Sanayev.
And now he's away for Detroit Bankruptcy Day.
Late yesterday, the city of Detroit declared the largest municipal bankruptcy in the history of the United States.
And I'm reluctant to weigh in on the subject of Detroit, because the last time I did it on this show was two years ago after that M ⁇ M commercial at the Super Bowl when MM said Detroit is on its way back.
Look out, world, here we come.
Detroit is coming back and all the rest of it.
And I made a few mild observations and found myself in a tsunami of blowback from our friends at WJR, which is Russia's affiliate in Detroit.
And I think if memory serves, somewhere up the corporate chain, somewhere high up in the corporate chain, somebody said, get that Stein guy back and tell him to go on Frank Beckman's show and WJR and apologize to the people of Detroit.
And in one of those usual Chinese whispers situations, by the time the message had been relayed to EIB and EIB had relayed it to Mr. Snerdley and Mr. Snerdley had relayed it to HR and HR had relayed it to my hard-working minion here and my hard-working minion here relayed it to me.
The bit about going on the air at WJR with Frank Beckman came through, but not the bit about apologizing to the people of Detroit.
So I didn't do that.
So I went on the air with with with Frank and dug the hole deeper and much in the way that the Detroit City government has managed to do.
And I don't want to go there today, so I'm not going to point out any of the things I pointed out with Frank.
I don't want to point out all the things I said back then about how 44% of the population of Detroit had the functioning literacy of an American sixth grader, which meant that half had the same about the same literacy rate as the Central African Republic.
And I don't want to go, don't want to get into all that because it's just like too controversial.
And I don't want to be, I enjoy going on the Frank Beckman show, but I don't want to be in there.
Frank called me an elitist, an elitist.
And yes, he did call me an elitist, which I think hits well.
If you've got the I don't know what he meant by that when I was saying, you know, 44% have the functioning literacy of a sixth grade.
Elitist may mean I have the functioning literacy of a seventh grader.
I don't know what it means.
Anyway, cool.
Wait, he called me.
Yeah, I think you're right, actually.
That's true.
It just means I had an accent.
I mean, basically, Frank didn't disagree with anything I said, but he just didn't want me saying it because like the M ⁇ M thing, the 30-second M ⁇ M thing had made them all feel great about Detroit for 30 seconds.
And then, as I think it was a Canadian blogger, I think it was Kathy Shadle in Toronto pointed out, then some fruity foreigner, as she put it, comes along and ruins it all.
So I think elitist translates as fruity foreigner there.
Anyway, whether my analysis of Detroit or M ⁇ M's holds up better two years on is not something we want to get into today, because it's just going to get me into trouble.
And I love, I go to Hillsdale College every spring and have to pass carefully through Detroit to get there.
And so I don't want any trouble.
So, you know, I don't know about this whole Detroit bankruptcy thing, whether we're going to get into that.
But it is the end of the week, and you know what that means.
Live from Ice Station EIB, it's Open Line Friday!
Well, I don't know.
Wait a minute, wait a minute.
Rush did Open Line Friday on Thursday, which is yesterday.
So I don't know whether it goes with the format to do Open Line Friday two days running.
It doesn't quite seem right to me.
So I don't know.
I'm in two minds about whether we should do Open Line Friday or not.
Because normally Open Line Friday means you get to talk about anything you want to talk about, whatever is on your mind.
It can be one of the big things like Detroit.
It can be amnesty.
It can be immigration.
It can be Trayvon Martin.
It can be all the big stuff that's in there.
Or it could be something that's just bugging you.
And none of your 300 million fellow citizens and 40 million undocumented Americans care about this issue one way or the other.
But on Open Line Friday, you get to bore the pants off America with whatever particular little bugbear has gotten you riled up by the end of the week.
And I don't know, because Rush was doing that yesterday and he had that call about the guy wanting to know whether he smoked cigars on EIB1, which is not something that would normally come up as a formal discussion topic on the Rush Limbaugh show.
People could raise any subject they want.
I don't know whether we should do it two days running, so I'm kind of in it.
Maybe we should make every other call Open Line Friday and then restrict it for alternate calls or something like that.
But we'll figure something out.
1-800-282-2882.
As I said, I really am reluctant to weigh in on Detroit after all the trouble I got into last time in the city.
So I'm going to kind of take one step back.
And I think we should rely on an analysis of the situation in Detroit from a couple of years ago from, I think this was from last year, from none other than the President of the United States himself.
Here's what President Obama had to say.
But we refuse to throw on the towel and do nothing.
We refuse to let Detroit go bankrupt.
I bet on American workers and American ingenuity, and three years later, that bet is paying off in a big way.
Yes, that's what the President of the United States said.
He didn't do all the stuff that I was doing that got me into trouble with the people of Detroit.
That's what President Obama said.
We refused to let Detroit go bankrupt.
Like King Canute sitting at the water's edge and commanding the sea not to lap over his feet.
King Barak commanded Detroit not to go bankrupt.
And as the Seawater did with Canute, the bankruptcy tide in Detroit has washed all over King Barak's loafers and his mom jeans, leaving them sopping wet.
Detroit has declared bankruptcy today.
The most one of the best lines on Detroit, by the way, comes from my National Review colleague, Kevin Williamson, who said that the problem with Detroit is that its ruling class is a parasite that has outgrown its host, outgrown its host.
But the question here is: what happened to why now has King Barack changed his mind and decided that Detroit can go bankrupt?
Apparently, the emergency manager for Detroit was in a deep conversation and discussions with none other than Valerie Jarrett at the White House, the grand vizier to Sultan Barak.
And she just said, You guys are on your own.
We're leaving you.
We're hanging you out to dry.
Good luck.
Send us a postcard.
Didn't want to know.
He's said to be, Obama is said to be monitoring the situation.
He's, quote, monitoring the situation the way he does with Syria and Egypt to such fantastic effect.
Yeah, no, no, he didn't monitor Benghazi.
Benghazi, that's an exception, Mr. Snaddley.
He decided that Benghazi didn't need monitoring.
He could monitor that from Vegas.
So he wasn't.
This time around, he's monitoring it more closely.
He's put it there.
It's like Syria.
He's monitoring it as closely as Syria.
So what is fascinating about this is that if you remember a clip that Rush used to play an awful lot four years ago about the big federal aid giveaway in Detroit that Ken Rogalski of WJR reported on.
And I love this clip so much that I actually put it in my book because it seemed to sum up the way some people look at these things.
And Ken at WJR was interviewing a couple of women about this big federal aid giveaway.
And the conversation went like this: Why are you here?
And the first lady goes, to get some money.
Well, what kind of money?
Obama money.
Where's it coming from?
Obama.
And where did Obama get it?
I don't know.
His stash.
I don't know.
I don't know where he got it from, but he's giving it to us to help us.
And we love him.
We love him.
That's why we voted for him.
And then the ladies stand around chanting, Obama, Obama, Obama.
And when they've stopped chanting, Ken from WJR asks them, and where did Obama get the funds?
And at that point, the second lady says, I have no idea to tell you the truth.
He's the president.
Obama's stash.
They were standing in line in Detroit to get money from Obama's stash, which is actually your stash and my stash and the Chinese Politburo stash.
Obama doesn't have any money.
Every dollar in Obama's stash comes from you or me or the Chinese Politburo.
He has no stash.
But they thought he had a stash and they were standing in line to get money from Obama's stash.
And that's what the emergency manager was hopeful of.
He went, he called, They called the White House and they thought Obama's stash was going to come through for them.
And unfortunately, Valerie Jarrett and the people who make the decisions in the White House said, you ain't getting nothing from Obama's stash.
Obama's stash is tapped out.
And Detroit is on its own the largest municipal bankruptcy in American history.
And this is important.
I love the way, by the way, I love the way people think, oh, Detroit, it's an outlier.
It's an outlier.
It's an outlier only in the sense that it got there first.
It got to where it is now first, ahead of everywhere else.
But it is the logical endpoint of left-wing social and economic policy.
There was a fabulous tweet on the internet yesterday.
If Obama had a city, it would look like Detroit.
And that sums it up.
Detroit is the logical endpoint of the Democratic Party's philosophy.
And it is not an outlier.
It was the industrial powerhouse of the world two generations ago.
It had the highest per capita income in America in 1960.
What?
Nobody did a thing to Detroit.
Detroit did this to itself, and it's the logical endpoint.
It's a one-party state.
It's a one-party state.
There hasn't been a Republican mayor since 1961.
So it's difficult to do the, oh, it's all Bush's fault thing when nobody under 80 remembers anybody other than the Democratic Party ever being in charge.
It's a one-party state.
And like all one-party states, the one-party state takes care of itself and to hell with everybody else.
It's the logical endpoint of the Democratic Party philosophy.
Mark Stein in Farush 1-800-282-2882.
Mark Stein in Farush on the EIB network.
Rush returns live on Monday.
Talking about the bankruptcy of Detroit.
The most fascinating thing, you know, yeah, I said a lot of rude things about Detroit a couple of years ago, and a lot of other people have too.
But so keep it cool.
Keep it cool.
Just read the official bankruptcy filing, because Detroit is no different from the guy who runs Bud's hardware store.
When you go bankrupt, when you file for bankruptcy, you have to fill in the government paperwork.
This is United States Bankruptcy Court, Eastern District of Michigan, in City of Detroit, Michigan.
So the largest municipal bankruptcy in American history has to fill in the paperwork just like Bud's hardware store does.
Name of debtor, if individual enter last first middle name.
And the name of debtor is City of Detroit, Michigan.
Doesn't have a, well, I guess its middle name would be Wayne County.
So it'd be city of Detroit, Wayne County, Michigan.
Last four digits of Social Security or taxpayer ID.
So they bought 386004606.
That's their taxpayer ID.
Address of debtor to Woodward Avenue, Suite 1126, Detroit, Michigan.
Woodward Avenue, by the way, is named by the guy who laid out Detroit, who designed Detroit in the early 19th century.
He goes way back, I think after, if memory serves, the big Detroit fire of 1807 took out the whole town.
And this guy then came up with a plan to rebuild Detroit.
And he should be around now, actually, because they could use a guy who's got a serious plan to rebuild Detroit.
Admittedly, they didn't have the same kind of problems back then.
All that happened was that the British took the city in the War of 1812 and they held it for over a year or something and then gave it back to the Americans.
And in this case, no foreign power has actually invaded Detroit.
So in a sense, the situation that Detroit faces isn't as bad as it was 200 years ago.
But in a sense, it's a lot worse because in this case, Detroit wound up surrendering to itself.
Detroit did this to itself.
No foreign power.
Normally, to get to that condition, some foreign power has to come rampaging over the border, like the British, like the what were they, the Royal Newfoundland Flexibles, I think it was in the Battle of Detroit, come rampaging over the border and take your city.
They didn't do that this time.
So anyway, that's a street address, two Woodward Avenue, Suite 11, a name poignant in Detroit history.
Then you've got all this thing, nature of business.
You've got to check the box, healthcare business, single asset real estate, railroad stockbroker, etc. etc.
And then finally, the last box on the list, other, and that's the one that the city of Detroit has checked.
The nature of business, other.
I couldn't say it better myself.
Nature of business, other.
Then there's like you've got to say whether there's any bankruptcy case filled by your spouse or your partner.
Then there's thousands of lists of properties that are unsafe and scheduled for demolition.
Thousands and thousands of them that they list here that they can't afford to demolish.
So it's dangerous.
All these buildings that are about to fall down but can't be demolished because there's no money to demolish them.
Then they've got a letter in support, Exhibit A, a letter in support of bankruptcy from the governor of Michigan, Governor Snyder.
And this paragraph is fascinating.
Inability to meet obligations to its citizens.
As Mr. Orr's financial and operating plan have noted, the scale and depth of Detroit's problems are unique.
The city's unemployment rate has nearly tripled since 2000.
Detroit's homicide rate is at the highest level in nearly 40 years, and it has been named as one of the most dangerous cities in America for more than 20 years.
Its citizens wait an average of 58 minutes for the police to respond to their calls compared to a national average of 11 minutes.
Only 8.7% of crime cases are solved.
The city's police cars, fire trucks, and ambulances are so old that breakdowns make it impossible to keep up the fleet.
For instance, only a third of the city's ambulances were in service in the first quarter of 2013.
Similarly, approximately 40% of the city's streetlights were not functioning.
When Edison electrified Washington Boulevard in the Gilded Age in the late 19th century, they called Detroit the Paris of the West.
In the Paris of the West, 40% of the street lamps do not work anymore.
This isn't me.
This isn't Detroit's enemies.
This is the governor of Michigan in the official bankruptcy filing.
Mark Stein in for Rush, this is where liberalism goes to die in America.
Markstein in Farush, lots more.
Straight ahead.
Yes, America's Anchorman is away.
If you go to RushLimbaugh.com, don't forget you can keep in touch with Rush as a 24-7 Rush subscriber.
You can get Rush in whatever form you so desire in audio, in transcripts, in DittoCam footage.
You need not be discombobulated by sinister foreign guest hosts.
We've been talking about Detroit, which is an American.
For all people talk about the wounds of Vietnam, the unwon war in Korea, the unsatisfactory conclusion to what's happening in Afghanistan, in Detroit, America defeated itself.
And it's actually quite an astonishing thing to do.
It's a remarkable thing to do.
I said at the time I got into all that trouble that if you bought a guy from the mid-20th century and you put him in a time machine and propelled him to 2013, and you showed him photographs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Detroit and Flint, he would assume that America had lost the Second World War when the Japanese decided to nuke Detroit and Flint.
Compare photographs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki today with photographs of Detroit today, the arsenal of democracy, the arsenal of democracy.
Lots of other things going on today in terms of municipal fiscal rectitude.
Elliot Spitzer, who is running for city controller, he'll be the man responsible for the fiscal probity of the city of New York.
It has emerged that New York taxpayers footed the bill for his trip to Washington for his celebrated dalliance at the Mayflower Hotel with prostitute Kristen, who in fact turned out to be Ashley Dupre.
Ashley changed her name to Kristen for professional purposes.
And it turns out that New York taxpayers actually paid to send Elliot Spitzer to Washington for the tryst that led to his downfall.
February 13th, 2008, in room, what was it?
What was the room number?
I think it was 317 or something.
871.
I was way off.
I'd have been five floors below knocking on Kristen's door and getting no answer.
Room 871 at the Mayflower Hotel.
It turns out that New York taxpayers paid the bill for Elliot Spitzer to go to Washington and dally, as the New York Post says, dally with Ashley Dupre during his tryst.
It's quaint the language they use here, dallying at a tryst.
But the fact is that New York City taxpayers, New York taxpayers paid for this, and now this guy is running for city controller, Elliot Spitzer.
And he's likely to be elected because New York, again, is a one-party state.
So in Detroit, just in case you're – Spitzer was famously – what was he?
Client number nine.
Client number nine.
And just in case you're having difficulty following all these municipal stories, Detroit is filing for Chapter 9.
New York taxpayers are filing for Client 9.
They're going to make Client 9, the City Controller, a man who charges taxpayers to go to Washington, D.C., so he can enjoy a tryst with his favorite hooker.
He's going to be put in charge of the fiscal probity of New York City.
That's on a not unrelated subject.
I see that with the Jewish Valentine's Day, this is from the Jewish Telegraph Agency, with the Jewish Valentine's Day fast approaching, kosher romantics have some new options thanks to Trig Labs, which announced this week that its line of personal lubricants are now kosher.
So if any of you are listening and planning something for the Jewish Valentine's Day, they have invented kosher lube.
The Jews are behind everything.
It's amazing.
Mark Stein, in for us, let us go to Rick in Magnolia, Texas.
Magnolia, that's a lovely town name.
That's the sort of place you should go to dally with someone for a tryst, not to room 871 of the Mayflower Hotel.
Rick, great to have you with us.
You're live on the Rush Limbaugh Show.
Thank you very much.
I liked your commentary on Detroit, but that's a history lesson.
And by its definition, history occurs in the past.
I was wondering if you would like to comment about Chicago and Illinois going down the same path as Detroit has gone with their leadership now.
Yeah, no, history doesn't occur in the past.
That's not correct, Rick.
History repeats itself.
And that's why you should learn from history.
Because actually, when it comes to civilizational collapse, most civilizations follow pretty much the same pattern.
So actually, the template is out there.
And that's why Detroit is important, because it's not a history lesson.
It's where much of the rest of the United States is heading the day after tomorrow.
What's happening in Detroit, what's happening in Chicago, what's happening in the state of California is a malign nexus between a corrupt governing class, a swollen army of dependents, and rapacious public sector unions.
And you get that axis, you get that axis in position, and it's extremely difficult to recover.
So Detroit isn't a history lesson.
Detroit is happening now.
And Detroit is where America, the rest of America is headed.
You look at any Obamacare, Obamacare or any other signature Obama policy.
You look at the immigration bill.
It's the same axis of a corrupt government class, an ever more swollen dependency class, and these rapacious public sector unions.
In that quote from Kevin Williamson, National Review that I used half an hour ago, that what happened here is the parasite outgrew its host.
In California, the golden state, if it weren't for high-tech, high-tech, where all the boffins are in California, but everything is actually made in India and China, so it's not in the same position that the automobile industry was in, or the motion picture industry, the entertainment industry, where every film, again, where every film set in Boston or Philadelphia is actually filmed in Toronto or Montreal or Vancouver.
If it weren't for those already massively outsourced high-tech and entertainment industries, California would be like Detroit because it's got the same thing.
It's got the takers are fleecing the makers and the makers are fleeing.
And one day, Hollywood and Silicon Valley will flee too.
And then California will be Detroit.
So it's not a history lesson.
And in Chicago, you know, just to mention Chicago, because we've had this since the Trayvon Martin George Zimmerman verdict, people keep bringing this up.
They say, whatever it is, 11,000 black men have died in America since Trayvon Martin was shot.
They die on a daily basis in Chicago.
Dozens were shot over the July 4th holiday in Chicago.
But it's the same reason that liberals don't care about Detroit.
Liberals, the great thing about liberalism is their heartlessness.
They can write places off.
The point about liberal policy is to make the person who adopts the policy feel good.
It's an attitude.
Liberal policies are attitudes.
If you have the right attitude towards car workers or towards blacks or towards gays, the practical effect of those policies doesn't make any difference.
So the fact that Detroit is a basket case that has gone bankrupt doesn't matter because everybody, because for all the liberals living in Malibu or Martha's Vineyard where the president is vacationing yet again, or in all those she suburbs around Washington, if you hold the right attitudes to Detroit, if you just say, oh, well, Detroit, we need to support public sector workers.
We just need to have some kind of federal bailout.
I bet on Detroit, says the president.
If you strike the right attitude, you don't care what's happening.
He has the right attitude.
If you have the right attitude, like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson and Barack Obama does, you don't care about all those dead guys in Chicago.
When he says, if I had a son, it would look like Traven.
He's not actually from Florida.
He's from Chicago.
So if he had a son, he'd look like all those perforated guys in Chicago every weekend.
But the fact of the matter is Obama doesn't care because like all members of the ruling class, he's decided to live as far away as he can from the consequences of liberal policy.
So it's easy to write off Detroit.
He's not going to go to Detroit.
He doesn't care about Detroit.
He wouldn't care if the last seven businesses in Detroit fled through the tunnel to Windsor, Ontario.
He doesn't care.
He doesn't care about that.
He doesn't care about Chicago, too, because it's out of sight.
Liberalism, liberalism, depends on ignoring the evidence of your own eyes.
And so the best way to do that is to make sure that all that evidence is on the far horizon.
They can't see what they did to Detroit.
They can't see what they're doing to Chicago.
They can't see it because they're walled up in their little enclaves in a kind of gated community of the mind.
And liberalism depends very much on not seeing the evidence before your eyes.
By the way, how's Magnolia, Texas on that front?
You got sound municipal government there, Rick.
Today, but I remember Detroit as once a beautiful and powerful city and certainly was back in its heyday, one of the better places in the United States.
And I kind of see Chicago as being in the same position that Detroit is in right now, probably 20 to 30 years down the road, unless they wake up and change leadership.
Yeah, I think that's absolutely right.
It's a beautiful city.
If you know the Wrigley building, if you know the Chicago Tribune building and the old intercontinental hotel where Johnny Weishmuller used to exercise in the pool every morning and you walk down Michigan Avenue and right in the heart of downtown, they got a beach right there at the end of the street.
It's a beautiful city.
But that's, again, that's another history lesson, Rick.
You can live great, you know, this isn't Somalia or Rwanda or Sudan, where you're going from the dump category to the even worse dump category.
When you have great cities built by men of great ingenuity and innovation, you can decline for decades.
And it's only at the final moment, like yesterday in Detroit, where you suddenly realize that, yeah, you've done something more difficult than Sudan or Somalia.
You haven't declined from dump to even worse dump.
You have declined from one of the great success stories of the planet to a dump.
And that's an even bigger indictment of the people who did this.
The people who did this to America's great cities.
Thanks for your call, Rick.
Mark Stein in for rush.
Lots more still to come.
Mark Stein, in for rush on the EIB network, the day after the largest municipal bankruptcy in American history.
Lots else going on.
A Vancouver man.
This is from PJ Media.
A Vancouver man has invoked the Biden defense.
You'll recall that Vice President Joe Biden, as part of the way Democrats like to triangulate when they go after guns by saying they're just after scary, you know, scary semi-automatic military type guns, but they're not after your good old farmer's shotgun.
Vice President Joe Biden advised Americans who feared criminals to buy a shotgun and fire two warning shots if they felt themselves under any threat.
Buy a shotgun, buy a shotgun, he told an audience, a Facebook town hall hosted by Parents Magazine on the administration strategy for reducing gun violence, which he's in charge of.
President Obama put Joe Biden in charge of reducing gun violence.
Biden says he keeps two shotguns and shells locked up at home, and he's told his wife Jill to use them if she needs protection.
I said, Jill, if there's ever a problem, just walk out on the balcony, take that double-barrel shotgun, and fire two blasts outside the house, Vice President Biden said.
Well, 52-year-old Jeffrey Barton of Vancouver, Washington claims that he was following that advice when he chased away a pair of suspected thieves.
He thought some teens were breaking into his cars at Northeast 124th Street in Vancouver, Washington.
And so he fired.
He did the Joe Biden thing.
He did what Joe Biden advises Jill Biden, or I should say, sorry, I should say Dr. Jill Biden, Dr. Jill Biden.
What Vice President Biden advises Dr. Jill Biden to do, and that's just to walk out on the balcony and fire two blasts from the shotgun.
So he's now in Clark County Court in Washington, where he pleaded not guilty to one count of illegal aiming or discharging a firearm at his arraignment.
Outside the courtroom, Barton cited the vice president in defense of his actions.
I did what Joe Biden told me to do, Barton told KOIN in Washington.
I went outside and fired my shotgun in the air.
So maybe he should call Vice President Biden as an expert witness in the case.
He qualifies as an expert witness.
This is the guy who has been put in charge of reducing gun violence in the United States.
President Obama has made him the czar of gun violence, of the war on gun violence.
He's the czar, Vice President Biden.
So he certainly qualifies as an expert witness.
And his expert advice was to go out on the balcony, grab a shotgun garden, the balcony, and fire a couple of shots.
Randomly, randomly, doesn't matter.
Who knows what you might?
Who knows?
You might hit some teenage punks up to no good.
You might hit a passing moose.
Doesn't matter.
That's what Joe Biden says to do.
This guy took Joe Biden's advice, and he's now up in Clark County Court on one charge of illegal discharging of a firearm.
I hope he does call Joe Biden.
By the way, this gets back to the whole Detroit thing: the dishonesty of public discourse in the United States of America.
You may recall that the other day, the Attorney General, Eric Holder, called for a, quote, honest discussion about race in the wake of the Zimmerman verdict.
He called for an honest discussion about race.
By the way, this is a guy who can't even have an honest discussion with a congressional committee when it comes to tapping the telephones of American newspaper reporters and reading their parents' emails and tapping their parents' telephone lines.
This guy can't even have an honest discussion with a congressional oversight committee, but he wants the nation to have an honest discussion about race.
And by honest discussion, liberals mean the same old cobwebbed platitudes that are now 40 years past their sell-by date.
They mean that on race.
They mean that on unions.
They mean that on the economy.
They mean that on urban renewal.
And that is the real tragedy of Detroit.
Detroit can be fixed relatively simply, not to its glory days, but Detroit can be made less worse, but it requires honesty to do that.
And liberal discourse, whether it's about guns, whether it's about race, whether it's about the problems facing somewhere like Detroit, is now basically fundamentally dishonest.
When Eric Holder, like most of these guys, when Eric Holder calls for an honest discussion, he basically means you shut up and he's going to tell you the narrow parameters in which you're allowed to think about this or anything else.
And that was demonstrated, I think, the very day later when Richard Cohen in The Washington Post, who's nobody's idea of a right-winger, but he expressed some mildly controversial views and he immediately got called a racist.
Got to go back in a moment.
By the way, of the $11 billion of unsecured debt that Detroit has, $9 billion of that is public pensions and benefits for public sector employees.
In other words, $9 billion of the $11 billion hole it's in is for benefits for the people who got Detroit into the hole.
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