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Sept. 24, 2013 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:48
September 24, 2013, Tuesday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 247 podcast.
Did they shake hands yet?
Turn on all the monitors.
Fox, El Jazeera, CNN?
Is MSNBC still around?
Turn on all the monitors.
If they shake hands, the Rush audience has to be the first to know.
By the way, I'm sitting in the New York studios of EIB, which apparently nobody sits in anymore given the shambles that this place looks like right now.
I I suppose I shouldn't complain.
The staff's been very, very nice to me, but there's some sort of relocation or something or another that I'm not privy to that I don't need to know about because you're only a guest host.
Anyway, I'm in New York.
The reason I wanted to tell you that is you have to know what it's like here right now.
The United Nations General Assembly is underway.
President Obama spoke already today.
The new leader, the new president of Iran, he's speaking, and everybody's giddy giddy giddy.
Will the President of the United States and the President of Iran actually meet and shake hands?
There's a reception planned for the Secretary General of the UN.
They think maybe that's where that will occur.
And if you're wondering why this is being made to be a big deal, and trust me, it's not a big deal.
The reason it's being made into such a big deal is, well, the United States leader, the United States President has not met with the Iranian leader ever since the hostage crisis back in 1979.
You remember Jimmy Carter and all of that stuff.
Could this be the Great Thaw?
Look, we actually have the MSNBC monitor on.
They are still around, if you had any doubts, they're still on the air.
Look at that.
The they're calling this the Great Thaw.
Could we actually see warmer relations between the United States and Iran could it all start with that handshake?
Will President Obama shake the hand of Husan Rouhani?
I've got the New York Times in front of me right now.
Today's New York Times, today's September 24th, 2013.
Hand shake with Iran might say much more.
You know they all want this.
The media wants it.
The lefties want it.
Obama really wants it.
I mean he's panting, his heart is beating right now.
Reminds me of when I was seventeen years old and I was ready to ask a girl out to some sort of high school thing.
Could be any girl.
When I was seventeen years old, I'm in this was like Loserville.
Hoping, hoping, hoping.
The hands get clammy, you build up the courage.
Obama wants to shake his hand because this is what Obama does.
Obama hangs with despots.
That's what he does.
He's not Bush.
He's not the cowboy.
This is why he wants to be president.
He wants to be president so he can go to all the people in the world that we've been told are bad guys and play kissy face with them.
It hasn't worked out too well so far.
He tried to be nicety nice with Putin, look where that's gotten him.
Putin is laughing at him as he keeps out maneuvering him.
He tried to do it with Bashar Rasad.
Run line in the cell, I'll let you do whatever you want.
You just can't cast your people.
Then he gassed his people and Obama doesn't know what to do.
That didn't work.
He keeps looking to all of these bad actors in the world.
You'll remember that when he was sworn in his president, one of the first things he talked about was that he was going to extend an arm of cooperation to the rest of the world.
If you're willing to meet us halfway, if you're willing to reform your behavior, the United States is willing to recognize you.
This was a complete contrast from Bush, the axis of evil and all of that stuff.
So now we get signals from the Iranians that they're willing to talk, that they're willing to discuss nuclear proliferation, they're willing to discuss their nuclear program.
And now it's all coming together today.
In New York, at the United Nations today, President Obama is there.
He already gave his talk.
Hassan Rouhani is there.
There are, quote, moderate Iranians all over New York.
You didn't think they were moderate Iranians?
Well that's the costume they have on right now.
They're sending the word out we're moderate.
We're reasonable.
This is one of the biggest sucker punches of all time.
The fact that people are falling for this.
That Obama is willing to fall for it.
That the media is falling for it.
That the American left is falling for it.
Maybe the American middle falling.
Oh, if we could only achieve this diplomatically, if we can just get them to give up their nukes by talking if we don't have to buy we don't want another war in the Middle East.
We don't want to go to war with Iran if we could just get this solved by having an agreement.
If the United States and the Iranians could only as adults meet one another halfway, oh, we want...
Stupid...
Well the Iranians they've changed.
This isn't Ahmadinejad anymore.
This is a more reasonable Iranian leader.
This is all a load of bull.
The Iranians are playing us for what we are.
Complete suckers.
We need to get into, and I don't want to let this whole Iranian thing hijack the show today.
I just want to lead with it here.
Because I'm surrounded by it.
I always like to tell the audience about my experiences coming in because I'm the one talk show host, the guest host, who is such a primadonna he won't do the program from his home city.
He insists on coming out to New York and being wind and dined and doing the show from Command Central here at the EIB, what are we?
The Eastern Command, the Northern Command, the New York Command, the Northern Command, doing it from the Northern Command.
So I fly in, take the cabin.
There's always an experience with the cab driver.
Get in the cab.
We start heading out of Queens or wherever LaGuardia is, it's Queens, heading into Manhattan, and immediately the grumbling starts coming from the cab driver about how terrible traffic is.
You can't get crosstown.
Now they say this all the time, but the excuse that he can't get crosstown now is all the commotion at the United Nations this g the United Nation and he's talking to me the way all New York cab drivers talk in some language that is sort of English.
There are no American The last American cab driver in New York City was Archie Bunker.
You don't think he drove the cabin.
Remember he moonlighted for Munson on Sunday, he drove Munson's cab on Sunday, Archie Bunker did.
He was the last one.
So the cab driver's telling me that because of the United Nations and all the security and all the stuff you can't get from here to there or anywhere else, so he's taking me on the circuitous route, and then he starts set talking about the Waldorf Astoria.
And it's really bad there because the president is there.
And I'm not really hearing this right.
So who's there?
The president, Barack Hussein Obama.
He said Barack Hussein Obama.
The cab driver said this.
Now I'm wondering is this a Rush listener?
Is this some Ann Colter f I mean not everybody says Barack Hussein Obama anymore.
So I don't know what side he's coming from if he's using the Hussein because he admires Barack Hussein Obama or he said it disparagingly, but that's what he said.
Anyway, I'm surrounded by this here.
All this UN stuff and this notion that we are at an historic moment that the United States is going to reach some sort of agreement with Iran on this thing that is frightened everyone.
Obama himself, when he ran for president the first time around in 08, said, and it was odd language, but he said it.
He said that he would not allow Iran to get nuclear weapons because quote, that would be a game changer.
That was the term he used, a game changer.
It seemed like oddly trivial language for something like that, but there's this fear, the legitimate fear that a nation that is close to terrorists is governed by Islamists, the most hardline Islamic fundamentalism of any nation in the world right now.
A nation whose leader was getting up and talking about Israel not being a legitimate nation, that the Jews don't belong in Israel, that Israel is a mistake that needs to be altered, of them getting nuclear weapons.
It's a real fear.
We've been able to abide the notion of first the Soviet Union and then Russia having nuclear weapons because we presumed that they'd be smart enough not to use them because they knew we would use them against them.
And pretty much so far, The group of countries that have had nukes are countries that you felt you could deter from using their nukes for fear that they would be nuked themselves.
There's a concern that Iran doesn't think that way.
That these are stone agers.
These are people who believe in jihad, holy war.
It's a philosophy that embraces suicide bombers.
Could you have a suicide country?
So obviously there's a terrible fear of what would happen if Iran got nuclear weapons.
And even if they didn't use them, it would mean that they could no longer be deterred from doing anything.
That if you threatened Iran with anything, oh you know, you threaten us, we've got our nukes.
You try to impose sanction on us, remember we've got our nukes, we might do something with it.
The very fact that people feel as though the Iranians are capable of using a nuke would give them incredible leverage if they ever got a nuke.
So now there's this notion that this could finally be settled diplomatically, that we wouldn't have to go in and try to find the nuclear installations and bomb them, that we wouldn't have to run the risk of provoking World War III, that we wouldn't have to look at the real real threat of another Middle Eastern war.
But it's the Iranians that know this.
They know the Americans don't have the stomach for actually denying them nuclear weapons.
They're the ones that want to talk.
But the Iranians in charge are the same Iranians that were in charge when they didn't want to talk.
That's the key to this.
Never mind who the president of Iran is.
They come and go.
Remember Ahmadinejad, he's gone.
He's out.
They've got a new guy now.
His name is Hassan Rouhani.
What hasn't changed is who's really running Iran.
It is this group of mullahs, religious leaders led by Ayatollah Khomeini.
Not to be confused with Ayatollah Khomeini, he's the one that took our hostages all those years ago.
Ayatollah Khomeini rules Iran.
The individuals who are propped up as president do what Khomeini wants.
Ayatollah Khomeini was there when Ahmadinejad was getting up, denying the Holocaust, threatening to nuke Israel, and talking belligerently, and he's there now when this new supposedly charismatic outgoing leader, Hassan Rouhani is in place.
This is merely a change in the face that they are presenting to the rest of the world.
The Iranian regime hasn't changed, and its goals haven't changed.
What has changed is the way that they are playing this out publicly.
The reason it's happening now is I think they realize that here in the United States, they have a guy that they can roll, that they can fleece Barack Obama.
And the reason they think that is they watched what happened with Putin.
They watched the whole Syrian thing play out.
They saw how the red line became no line.
They see now how there's some talk going on with Putin that's going to lead to absolutely nothing.
They saw that we said the red line for Syria was chemical weapons gassing their own people, and that that red line became meaningless.
They saw that Bashar Asad and Vladimir Putin were able to easily take advantage of Barack Obama.
So now they're figuring we can do it too.
They didn't take this tack with Bush because they knew Bush wasn't going to fall for it.
That's why they had the hardliner in place when Bush was president.
These are different times Ahmadinejad had served his purpose, so Ayatollah Khamenei instead props up this new guy who's now going to go to the United Nations, embrace Barack Obama, and talk.
And what are we going to get for all of this?
As sure as I'm sitting here in New York, where all this is going on, there's going to be a deal.
They're going to reach an agreement, there's going to be an accord.
And everyone is going to celebrate.
Obama's probably going to get another Nobel Peace Prize.
They may even give one to Hassan Rouhani.
And that deal isn't going to be worth the piece of paper that it's written on.
The whole thing will be a farce.
It'll be worthless.
Everything that we get will be a concession about something that will happen in the future.
Everything that they get will be something that's in the present.
This is one giant con.
And boy, oh boy, oh boy, hasn't our country produced just the sucker to cut the deal in which we're going to get not the short end of the stick, no stick at all.
My name is Mark Belling, I'm the guest host today for Rush Limbaugh.
Did they shake hands yet?
We've got all the monitors on.
You know if it happens, there's going to be cameras.
They're not Obama's not going to let this happen.
Without the entire world seeing this moment of history, because if anybody felt as though he was historic, it's Barack Obama.
This is the moment he needs to be seen doing.
I mean, I always compare him to Carter.
Remember the 1980 Democratic Convention?
I do remember it.
Teddy Kennedy ran against Carter in the Democratic primaries.
Carter won, but Carter wanted to unify the party.
So they had this big thing at the end of the convention after Carter gave his acceptance speech.
Kennedy's up on stage with Kennedy standing way off and nowhere near Carter, and Carter wants to shake Kennedy's hand and Carter starts moving toward Kennedy and Kennedy keeps moving away, which was a mean tri Teddy Kennedy being maneuverable.
That was a mean trick.
I don't remember if Carter ever got to him.
Obama sees Hassan Rouhani.
I mean he's gonna tackle him if necessary in order to shake his hand.
I've got to give you the telephone numbers.
I noticed that people are already calling me because they know Russia's number, even though I haven't been polite enough to throw it out here.
1 800 28282.
Let's start in Austin, Texas.
Joe, you're on the Rush Limbaugh program with me, Mark Belling.
Hey Mark, um the thing I can't figure about figure out about our president Obama is that he wants to negotiate with Iraq.
He wants to negotiate with North Korea, he wants to negotiate with Syria, and for some strange reason we cannot get him to negotiate with the Republicans.
That's probably how you got on the air.
That's an excellent point.
He wants to talk to everybody about when it comes to the debt ceiling.
We're not a banana republic, there's nothing to negotiate here.
He refuses to concede anything to the Republicans on raising the debt ceiling.
Any talk of rolling back Obamacare, no way.
It's his way or the highway.
Now why do you think that is, Joe?
Why do you think he's so willing to talk to the Iranians, the North Koreans, anybody else who's a terrible actor in the world, but he won't talk to John Boehner?
Why do you think that is?
I think it's because he wants to rule things his way.
He doesn't care about anything else.
He wants to spend money, he wants to increase the deficit, he wants to ruin America.
Well, you're right about that, but there's something deeper.
I think he feels more comfortable with Hassan Rouhani and whoever the latest leader of North the nutjob leader of North Korea, the son of boy leader.
I think he feels more comfortable with those people than he does with Republicans.
He wants to fight Republicans.
That's what he lives for.
His big goal is to regain the House in the 2014 elections.
He wants to be the president that presided over the demise of conservatism and the Republican Party.
That's the enemy he wants to beat.
Have you ever sensed that he wants to beat Iran?
Have you ever sense that he's ever wanted to get the better of Russia?
Have you sense that he wants to be the guy that defeats the Islamist fundamentalist movement that has caused so much pain and so much terror in the world?
They don't bother him.
He talked about reaching a handout to them.
Who he can't abide is Rush Limbaugh.
Who he can't abide is the Tea Party.
Who he can't abide is Ted Cruz.
He can't abide even John Boehner.
He can't even bring himself to talk to Mitch McConnell, for heaven's sakes.
Whenever McConnell cuts one of his deals, it's always with Joe Biden in the room.
Obama doesn't want to talk to any Republicans.
He can't stand them.
He despises us.
But these other guys?
I've always felt that Obama sees sort of a kinship between himself and some of these other leaders.
He's got this sense of being dictatorial.
He never wants to reach out and find a middle ground.
The way they rammed through Obamacare with one vote, that's his style.
He wants to get things done without any consensus whatsoever.
One of the reasons why so many Republicans are weary of dealing with Obama is they know that there's never a deal that you can strike with him that isn't one in which he gets everything.
He doesn't want to deal with anyone on the Republican Party.
He wants to fight them.
The Iranians, though?
Deal deal deal.
Let me find a hand to shake.
Let me reach out and touch you.
Mark Bellingham for Rush.
Much to discuss on today's program.
We want to talk about the dueling Republican strategies over Obamacare.
I want to talk about that exemption that the Congress gets where they don't have to suffer through Obamacare the way many of us will have to.
Many of the things that I want to get to right now I'm talking about.
This so tempting, it's so tantalizing, and the reason it's tantalizing to so many Americans is we are good people.
We don't want war.
We don't want nuclear proliferation.
We don't want some rogue nation to threaten to wipe out the Israelis.
We are decent, reasonable people.
The mistake we make is we assume that everybody else in the world is decent and reasonable.
They're not.
Awful people exist, and they run better than half the countries of the world.
That's just reality.
It goes against the grain of so many of us who want to look upon all of ourselves as citizens of the world.
Well, we just have a different view.
It certainly goes against the grain of Barack Obama.
So here we have the situation at the United Nations.
It's UN week in New York.
Today's the beginning of what is it, the sixty sixth, sixty seventh, sixty eighth, something General Assembly of the United Nations.
Obama is there, Hassan Rouhani and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people in his entourage, all suddenly now moderate Iranians.
You never heard of moderate Iranians until a few months ago, did you?
That's because this is all an act.
George Carlin, he's dead, isn't he?
I think he is.
He used to do a routine in which he talked about words that didn't go together.
The classic one was jumbo shrimp.
How about moderate Iranians?
When did the moderates take control of Iran?
They didn't.
It's a pose.
It's an act.
This isn't New York that I'm in right now.
This is Yalta.
That's where we are.
It's one more appeasement.
Brett Stevens, Wall Street Journal, he's got an excellent piece on this.
He talks about what happened at Yalta.
Yalta is a city I think in the Ukraine.
I think it's the Ukraine.
It isn't Ukraine.
That's where the grand deal was struck as World War II's end was approaching, when Churchill Stalin and an enfeebled Franklin Roosevelt met.
Roosevelt was only a few months away from death.
And they cut this deal to have the United States and the Soviet Union which was forming at the time with Russian expansionism cut this deal about what would happen after the war was over.
And history has recorded that Stalin fleeced Roosevelt.
But it wasn't that Franklin Roosevelt went in there wanting to be fleeced.
Here's what Brett Stevens writes about this.
Contrary to the suggestion that Yalta was an example of American cynicism or cowardice, it typified a style of American diplomacy that combined boundless idealism with fatal naivete.
An exaggerated confidence in the power of persuasion, oh isn't that Obama?
To bridge differences and a fatal indifference to the importance of ideology in creating them sound like any American president you know?
The fundamental problem in encounters between Democrats, and he means here democracy, and despots is that while the former understand the psychology of motivation and seduction, the latter are masters of the arts of deceit and domination.
Millions of Americans wept for FDR when he died in nineteen forty five because he had given them hope.
Millions of Russians wept for Stalin when he died in nineteen fifty three because he had given them terror.
The human heart can be a dark place, even if people born in the happy countries rarely know it.
Stalin's advantage at Yalta wasn't that he was better briefed, it was that he was a better psychologist.
He knew how to turn Roosevelt's illusions to his own purposes.
So it is with so many negotiations between Democrats and tyrants.
When there is a deal, it usually winds up being a trade between the theoretical and the tangible, the immediate concession and the long term promise, the paper agreement and the territorial prize.
That's what it's going to be, this is me, no, not Stevens, that's what it's gonna be between us and Iran.
A deal with Iran arranged via a first of its kind meeting through through Hani is a personal and ideological temptation Obama is incapable of resisting.
Should it happen happen, I'm betting it will, Obama will be hailed as a master diplomat and a triumphant peacemaker.
As with Yalta, it won't take long to learn who is betrayed and what is lost in the service of an illusion.
That's good stuff.
Brett Stevens in the Wall Street Journal today.
I suspect that the deal will be something like this.
The United States drops economic sanctions against Iran, so the oil now flows freely, all the food and all of the imports into Iran that had been halted, they all start flowing back in.
Iran agrees to have no nuclear program developed toward nuclear warheads at all.
It agrees that the only nuclear development that it has will be for toward utility power plants and so on, that there will be frequent inspections of all of their uh nuclear facilities, and the inspectors get to go anywhere in Iran that they request.
That's what the deal will be.
We'll bite, we'll fall for it.
Iran's sanctions are over.
They suddenly get all of this off.
In the meantime, they'll outsource the nuclear warhead program, probably to Russia, which already has nuclear warheads.
They'll be nice for a couple of years until it serves their purpose to be belligerent again.
Maybe after Obama is no longer the president, maybe when some other event in the world changes.
Very much the way North Korea has played the United States.
Threaten to use nukes, get some aid, threaten to use the nukes, get some aid, and suddenly the Iran of today, which is so cooperative, will be belligerent again.
But in the meantime, their economy will have been rebuilt because the sanctions are over.
Iran, though isn't going to change because Iran hasn't changed.
The Islamist movement, not Islamic, Islamist movement, the terror wing of Islam, the people who believe in jihad in holy war.
They can't be dealt with as reasonable people because they're not reasonable.
These are people who believe in suicide bombings.
Just look at the events of the past few days.
Kenya.
Pakistan.
Suicide bomber two of them, one of them with a suicide vest, bombs on his vest, walks into a Christian church, blows the place up.
How many are dead?
Seventy, eighty, ninety.
Do you want to know what real courage is?
How about being a Christian in Pakistan?
Most of the Christians have low paying jobs.
They're ostracized, well allowed to practice their religion, they're always subject to harassment.
And now the real fear that their churches are going to be targeted merely for following the word of God, their God, the Christian God.
They are under siege in a nation that's halfway an ally of the United States, Pakistan.
What protection was the Pakistani government able to accord them?
Not much.
That's the nature of this movement.
That's the movement that runs Iran.
It's the same group of people, the same ideologues, the same people who are simply bred on hate.
So we're not going to make a deal with them.
They're going to agree to terms of a deal on paper that advances their cause, improves their economy, all the while moving toward fulfilling their ambitions of doing something terrible in the world.
Neville Chamberlain dealt with Hitler.
And is regarded as one of the biggest fools of the twentieth century.
Because he didn't understand the nature of Hitler.
Well, are we not making the same mistake with Iran and not understanding the nature of Iran and its current regime?
It's the same error.
Roosevelt misunderstood Stalin.
He thought Papa Joe or whatever he called him was someone that he could deal with.
The next thing you know, all of Eastern Europe became an arm of the Soviet Union.
So it is here.
We have a legitimate desire for peace, but you're not going to have peace when you deal with guys like this.
Now I'm not suggesting I have all the answers as to what we should do with Iran.
Should we bomb Iran?
I don't know.
Should we go in there and stiffen the sanctions and demand that some of our allies cooperate with that?
I don't know.
Should we be we be fomenting civil unrest in Iran such as occurred in Egypt and other nations?
I don't know the answer to that either.
What I do know is this.
Going in there and trying to cut a deal and talk with this group of people will produce nothing but long-term pain as we build up and prop up a regime that ought to be ostracized.
I mean, what's the purpose of the United Nations?
I thought when this thing was set up, it wasn't just to have a bunch of freeloaders get free rent on great property in New York City.
I thought that this was supposed to be a forum in which the civilized nations of the world would make sure that there wouldn't be rogue nations out there running around on their own.
Well, Iran is a rogue nation running around on its own.
It talks about exterminating another nation, Israel.
It's propped up leaders that have denied history.
They are uncivilized people who have financially backed bad regimes in Syria, aided al Qaeda, and have been linked to all sorts of atrocities in their own nation.
Instead, they use the UN as a front to cut a deal in which they come out legitimized.
When they shake the hand of Barack Obama, that means Iran and the United States of America are now on the same plane.
There they are together, as if they're equals.
Well, maybe Obama is the equal of Hassan Rouhani.
I actually think he's dumber than Rouhani.
I think he's being suckered here.
But by putting himself out there, that hand becomes the hand of the United States of America.
And we have just legitimized this government that ever since nineteen seventy-nine has been acting outside the bounds of civilized conduct.
All because we have one president who wants to be a hero, who wants to deal with these guys.
He wants another peace prize.
He's avoided war.
All the motivations that you get when someone is conned.
I said before that this was Yalta, no, it's not.
It's actually this is the sting.
Best movie ever.
1973?
Maybe, this thing.
Ayatollah Kamei.
That's Paul Newman.
He's the power behind the scenes.
He's the guy who's masterminding the con.
Hassan Rouhani, the charismatic guy who's going to shake the hand.
Woo Obama.
That's Robert Redford.
Obama, he's Robert Shaw.
He's the sucker coming in to make the bet.
He's the guy getting conned.
And it's happening in plain view right in front of everyone.
Right under my own nose here.
What should I do?
Go over there and try to stop it?
Go in and scream, no, no, it's a con, don't do it.
Don't be suckered, Mr. President.
Anyway, my name is Mark Belling, I'm sitting in for Rush Limbaugh.
I'm Mark Belling sitting in for Rush Limbaugh.
You know, all of this is tragic, But there is an upside.
The opportunities to be able to say I told you so with Obama.
I mean, it's almost a gift.
Remember Russia's book, the second one?
See, I told you so, that was the second one, right?
It must be in one of these boxes that's around me here.
Think of the number of things we're going to be able to say I told you so about Obama.
Obamacare is already one of them.
Let's go to Roseburg, Oregon.
David, you're on the Rush Limbaugh program with Mark Belling.
Good morning, Mr. Belling.
David Jakes here.
How are you?
I'm great.
Hey, I just got back to the left coast here.
I spent the uh last few days out in the nation's capital.
And uh I gotta tell you, uh, Mr. Belling, I I see this thing a little differently.
You said that that uh President Obama doesn't want to speak with John Boehner, but he's all happy to go meet with President Rouhani.
But you know, I think over the last several weeks he's had Banner to the White House every other week, and you know what?
He's been effective.
He rolled anger.
You know what he's gonna get from John Boehner?
A clean continuing resolution without defunding Obamacare.
Well, I guess I I'm not you're right about the meeting.
My point is he isn't willing to negotiate and make sacrifices of his own.
He's not willing with Boehner to give you're saying that he's rolled Boehner by demanding that he gets everything he wants.
That's kind of the point that I was making with regard to the Iranians.
He will make concessions to Iran.
He'll make concessions with Syria.
You know, the red line suddenly disappeared.
He'll make all sorts of concessions in which he gives things up with the Iranians.
He's not willing to do that with the Republicans.
When I say negotiate, I'm not talking about just sitting there and having the face to face.
I mean an actual give and take in which he's willing to sacrifice things.
That he's not willing to do, and that was the point that I was making about the difference between his dealing with dealing with Iran and dealing with Republicans.
Everything he wants, and this is why if the Republicans don't find some new leadership like Tom Massey, like Rand Paul on the Senate side, Justin Amash, if they don't find new leadership, they're gonna have a and we, because I am one, are gonna have a devastating uh defeat in 2014.
Thank you.
Thank you for the call.
I want to expand on his point.
There's obviously this huge dispute right now among Republicans about how to fight on Obamacare.
You've got two things out there.
You've got the continuing resolution, you've got the debt ceiling, and this tactical dispute started by Senator Cruz of Texas, Senator Lee of uh Utah is also part of it.
They've advanced this strategy.
It's supported by a lot of people, Russia's one of them, in which you have to be willing to go to the mat and draw a line in the sand here with regard to Obamacare, and that is not pass any funding for Obamacare.
In order to have a spending bill passed in the United States of America, it has to be passed by the House and the Senate.
And they've come up with this plan in the Senate that House Republicans should stand firm and not pass a funding bill that includes money for Obamacare.
The fear, of course, and I know that you will probably have heard this discussion forever and ever and ever, but the fear is that Obama will simply say, okay, fine, then we're not going to fund anything, have a government shutdown.
Some Republicans are concerned that they will get the blame for this, that we're going to have no TSA guys in line at the area, the lines for security are going to be nineteen miles long, that a lot of government programs are going to be shut down, that some aircraft is going to be grounded because there aren't going to be as enough air traffic controllers.
All the stuff that may happen, and clearly, if there is a government shutdown, Obama will shut down as much of the stuff that affects ordinary Americans as possible, so he can go on television, which he'll do and say, call a Republican congressman and demand that they get the government funding again.
We're a country of you know you can imagine how it's going to play out, and some Republicans have a concern about that.
I don't know what the best strategy is.
Part of me really, really wants to fight, because we've rolled over again and again and again, and if stopping Obamacare isn't the thing that you fight about, then what is?
On the other hand, if you don't have an end game, the government's not going to stay shut down for two years.
That means someone's going to cave.
And it's hard to imagine Barack Obama ever caving on Obamacare.
I'm not big on the whole tactical thing because I don't know what they should do.
I'm not in the Congress, and I'm not the master strategist who knows exactly how this thing should be played out.
What they do need to do, however, is whatever strategy they embrace, everybody needs to get on board with it, and there can't be any weak knees.
So if they do go this route of playing the thing out, and Obama does shut down the government, you better be willing to play this out or don't start it in the first place.
There is a sense with some Republicans of being the same kind of sap with Obama that he is with the Iranians.
Mark Belling in for rush.
Mark Belling sitting in for rush.
Whatever tactic the Republicans embrace in fighting the president and Obamacare, they've got to get rid of this exemption in which they themselves aren't covered by the same rules as the rest of us.
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