Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
It's Buck Sexton joining you again as you can hear today.
No cold.
My voice is back to 100% normal.
I'm very thankful to folks here at EIB and to Rush for letting me come and spend the afternoon yet again with you.
And we have a tremendous amount to cover today.
I must say, I want to get right to it.
And I look at the headlines and I see something now.
Finally, there is a sense that President Obama is doing something maybe sort of on Ukraine.
And what he's chosen to do in this instance as commander in chief is to send uh a few more U.S. troops not to Ukraine, of course.
We've already decided that that's not going to happen, and that's well beyond the scope of what our interests are in that country.
But he's going to send U.S. Army paratroopers into Poland.
Now they're arriving today as part of a contingent that will be rotating in and out.
And the idea here being that we're going to shore up America's Eastern European allies in the face of Russian meddling.
Now, there are a number of reasons why this is not really going to have much of any impact.
First of all, you're talking about a contingent of 600 troops who will head to four countries across Eastern Europe over the next month.
And the first contingent of those is 150 soldiers from the 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team.
Now, the Obama administration is doing this largely in response to the criticism that its foreign policy is feckless, rudderless, and without even a hint of strategic vision.
I actually think that in some context, in some way, that's the wrong way to think about the Obama regime's view of America around the world, what it's trying to promote for America around the globe.
President Obama has always believed that bringing in, bringing back U.S. uh supremacy around the globe is somehow a good thing.
That actually making us a less obvious, less clear force is going to be in the long run better for us.
We just don't know it yet.
And so there's sort of this sense that it's become open season on U.S. interests around the world to an extent.
First, they have to decide whether or not we are offering our umbrella of protection, and then our enemies, our forces, the forces of opposition around the world can decide how far they're going to push.
Now, what Putin's doing in Ukraine is essentially a new form of warfare or a twenty-first century version of the kind of subversion we saw during the Cold War.
By the way, of course, John Kerry very clearly came out and said that things were easier then, that it was uh easier for us to understand what was going on.
Um he said uh this is this is Kerry earlier the week.
It may not have seemed so at the time, obviously, to great leaders, but it was easier then than it is today.
Simpler is maybe a way to put it.
Yeah, when you're facing nuclear annihilation uh uh or or at least mutually assured destruction when you're talking about a global power in the sense of the Soviet Union being at least a global military and ideological power.
Yeah, that's a lot simpler, John.
Uh I just always wonder where he gets this stuff from.
Um but what we also see here very clearly to me, is that the Obama administration has finally its hand has been forced, and so now they're going uh around the world, they're going on sort of a tour right now.
President Obama has landed today in in Asia as part of a four-country tour.
Now, while he's doing this, you might think to yourself, wait, wait, wait a second.
Asia?
Why why Asia?
Isn't the problem isn't uh aren't all the headlines about what's happening in Ukraine?
Isn't that in fact where we should be focusing our international diplomacy and attention?
We're sending troops.
And even right now, there are sixty-seven thousand U.S. troops in Europe and about twelve thousand civilians, according to uh European command, U.S. European command.
Of course, during the Cold War, the the peak of that was four hundred thousand troops, and it has dropped to about uh it has dropped precipitously since then.
But while Russia is conducting drills on the border, has 40,000 troops lined up, seems to be in fact prepared to actually take action to use them in some capacity.
We're sort of like, uh, we're gonna send over some guys.
Meanwhile, President Obama is making a tour of Asia.
He's going to Japan.
It's a week long journey, he's gonna stop in South Korea, Malaysia, the Philippines.
He's gone there today.
But this is the great part about all of this.
This is the lack of self-awareness and honesty that pervades the Obama administration, not just on foreign policy issues, but on all policy issues across the board.
They seem to think that the rest of the world and the rest of uh the rest of us don't actually pay attention to what's going on, that their missteps in the past, broken promises, foolhardy movements have no consequence whatsoever.
It doesn't actually really matter.
So while President Obama's over there in Asia, he's not stopping in China, by the way, and China, of course, is in the midst of a large military buildup.
Oh, by the way, so is Russia in recent years, but we should pay no attention to that.
In fact, under this regime, under President Obama's watch, we are supposed to go down to the smallest army that the U.S. has had since the Second World War ended.
In the post-World War era, we're going to go down to our lowest level of troops.
Meanwhile, China and Russia arming up.
Perhaps they have some designs.
You see, they're regional powers, and it's easy for the wonk class and the international relations strategists on the foggy bottom pinstriped wearing know-it-alls, to tell all of us that this is not something to be concerned about.
They'll point at the uh economies in perspective of Russia and China compared to the United States.
They'll point at our military spending.
But the fact of the matter is, regional powers have aspirations of becoming hemispheric powers, and hemispheric powers want to become global in their scope.
It's just a question of who's playing the long game.
But we already established President Obama's version of a long game is to make a U.S. that is sort of a little more uh you know, a little slower to actually get involved and stuff and a little more uncertain of itself and to apologize, and yes, even sometimes to bow.
Ugh.
I wish that were not the case.
But as I said, this regime is now going over to our Asian allies.
The idea here, of course, being that those countries are part of a essentially a chain of countries that are supposed to box in China.
That's what's going on.
I don't know how open we like to be about these things, but when we talk about Japan and South Korea and the Philippines, these are countries that we hope will check Chinese regional ambitions.
But of course, as part as part of that, we have a security guarantee, just like we did in Ukraine, by the way.
The Budapest memorandum.
We basically said, hey, Ukraine, give up all your nukes.
By the way, I think they had the second or was it the third largest amount of nukes in the world right after the fall of the wall because Russia, or the Soviet Union rather, had parked so many nukes there.
I think they were number three.
They gave them up.
They said, okay, no more nukes for us, but you guys are gonna protect us, right?
Clinton administration reaffirmed it, and guess what?
We're kind of like, eh, I don't really think that we're going to have to get involved in this one.
You guys sort this one out.
Good luck to you, Ukraine.
While that's happened.
Oh, and while, of course, don't forget, we told uh Assad that he was going to feel our wrath for his usage of chemical weapons, the red line debacle, the red line, which President Obama really turned into a punchline, the red line that was no more.
We drew a line in the sand, our commander in chief drew a line in the sand, and the other side just poured water on it and said, I don't know what you're talking about.
And there was no consequence to that.
In fact, John Kerry, our favorite uh Secretary of State in recent years, I guess, in comparison to Hillary Clinton, whom we're going to be discussing shortly.
Oh, John Kerry, favorite for at least amusement purposes.
Uh he said that it would be a very there would be a very minimal strike, very a pinprick strike, it would sort of hurt, but not that much.
It was like we were in a pediatrician's office and the doctor was saying how much the shot was Going to hurt.
That's our Secretary of State talking about what happens when you violate a U.S. red line.
Now, this all is contiguous.
There's a continuation of a theme here.
And yet today, President Obama gives a very clear statement.
He says the Senkaku Islands are administered by Japan and therefore fall under the U.S. Japan Treaty, he wrote, or he wrote this out, and we oppose any unilateral attempts to undermine Japan's administration of these islands.
Now, this seemed to be very clearly to everybody an attempt to assure Japan that the U.S. would actually come to their defense if the Senkaku, which is a disputed island chain, the Chinese call it the Daiu, if the Senkaku were to boil up into some kind of confrontation, that the U.S. would have Japan's back.
Now, let me ask you this.
Do you really think the leadership in Japan believes that?
More importantly than that, do you think that the Chinese, in this case, uh the Chinese Central Committee, do you think that they actually are afraid in any capacity of this?
They think that we're going to do anything.
How does that factor into their strategic calculations?
So we promise all this, but don't worry, because President Obama, I saw this, this was from the White House press pool, um, that he went to Suki Yabashi Jiro, which some of you may be familiar with because there was a documentary made about this place, Jiro Dreams of Sushi.
It was uh actually pretty entertaining.
It was about making the perfect sushi.
But I just wonder if at some point during this trip, President Obama said, you know, I'm a better sushi chef than my sushi chefs.
I wonder if he thinks he's actually got more game with sushi than Jiro does.
Supposed to be the best sushi restaurant in the world.
The lack of self-awareness, the lack of humility, the narcissism of this administration is not just a matter for domestic concern, is not just something that spills over into domestic policy.
We see this on the world stage all the time.
And remember, this is the guy who's supposed to be out there representing all of us.
So when he bows and when he says things that aren't true, when he shakes hands with world leaders, doesn't follow up, and in fact makes a mockery of the whole concept of the U.S. being true to its word, it's something we have to call out.
It's something that does matter to all of us.
And something that gets me a bit fired up today.
Have to go into a break here.
The call-in number is 800-282-2882.
Buck Sexton, InfoRush Limbaugh, back in just a minute.
Buck Sexton here filling in for Rush Limbaugh today.
Rush will be back with you.
Plans to be back with you tomorrow.
Uh for today, I got to continue on this Russia problem we've got going on for just a minute here, because I mentioned red lines before.
I mentioned what happens when you don't follow through on them.
What does a real red line look like?
Or what does a real threat look like from a foreign leader?
And this is from the Wall Street Journal, Russia's Foreign Minister says uh Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov warns Ukraine and says any attack on Russians in Ukraine would be considered an attack on Russia.
Uh any attack on Russians in Ukraine will be perceived as an attack against Russia, Lavrov was quoted as saying today as Ukraine called for a renewal of a stalled military operation against pro-Russian forces that have taken over several Eastern cities.
Now, this is the difference between how President Obama handles things and how other world leaders who have a defined strategy in mind and also have action in mind handle things.
I can assure you that if there is some kind of a flare-up, if there is an incident, if there are Russians, whether they're out of uniform Russian soldiers or Eastern Ukrainians or whatever, some sort of bloodbath occurs in eastern Ukraine, you get a decent number of casualties that happen, and the Russians are going to take action.
And we're not.
Now, many of you might say, well, that's just the way it's going to be, and I think that probably is the way that it's going to be.
But President Obama certainly has uh made a mockery of things and hasn't done a very good job as commander in chief on this specific issue.
But maybe we shouldn't despair.
Maybe it's too early to worry because well, we know we got Benghazi Hillary coming down the pike.
She's going to be in charge pretty soon, right?
That's what they tell us.
Hillary Clinton, former Secretary of State, former Senator From the state of New York, and of course, first lady to the one and only Bill Clinton.
She's somebody who may in fact be in the Obama seat pretty soon, right?
That's what we're always told.
Let's just take a moment, though.
Because I promise you, a big part of her qualifications, uh other than the lovely pantsuits, a big part of her qualifications are going to involve her tenure as Secretary of State.
Now, what's fascinating about that is that while she was Secretary of State, um what exactly did she do?
Uh what was well, you know, I don't want to have to answer this for you because she has spokeswomen out there who this is all they do is try to point out just how successful Benghazi Hillary has been as Secretary of State, as preparation, of course, for her to be in the White House.
And AP reporter Matt Lee asked one of these spokespersons, Gen Saki, to cite just just give me one.
Just give me one accomplishment that Hillary had from the last quadrennial diplomacy and development review, i.e.
from 2010.
What was Hillary doing that was good?
Listen to Saki, just lay down all this truth about how awesome Hillary was in office.
Off the top of your head, can you identify one tangible achievement that the last ER resulted in.
Come on, you just need one.
Well, Matt, obviously it's an extensive, expansive.
We're looking at how it was done last year.
Just one.
I know I'm I'm making an important point here.
The Secretary wants it to be focused.
It's going to focus on a more narrow range of issues.
Uh it's always to look at how we can improve things, and we'll see uh where we come out on the end.
So can you off the top of your head identify one tangible?
We're looking for one of these that resulted from the last two.
I am certain that those who were here at the time who worked hard on that effort could uh could point out one.
But since you've come on board that you've noticed that someone is that you notice that you can point back saying, Wow, the first QDDR identified this at a bro as a problem and dealt with it.
Just make one up to the point.
I've only been here since it was concluded.
So I'm sure there are range of things that were put into place that I'm not even aware of where is it.
This is it's so awesome that she can't even name it is what she's actually trying to say.
Hillary did so many amazing things as Secretary of State.
And by the way, I think we're seeing some of that policy play out now around the world with allies who are uncertain of our friendship, enemies who feel emboldened.
It almost feels like open season on U.S. allies and interests around the world right now.
Maybe that had something to do with this, but really she should have just gone with the Hillary response to this question.
What difference at this point does it make?
I I there you go.
That would have m AP reporter Matt Lee, what what has he got to say to that one?
Where does he go after Hillary lays it down with what difference at this point does it make?
Now, Hillary tried that, of course, during the Benghazi hearings, and we have never forgotten it, and I think that's part of why she will forever be solidified in many minds as Benghazi, what difference does it make Clinton?
However, all of that stuff, that lack of strategic vision, that inability to actually promote U.S. ideals and interests abroad for the whole tenure of the Obama administration, by the way, but more specifically from the State Department and from Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State, and now John Kerry, who has taken time off from his windsurfing schedule to uh gallivant around the world and try to explain to everybody just I don't even know what.
I don't even know what John Kerry thinks he stands for, particularly when it comes to U.S. foreign policy.
In fact, this administration doesn't know.
So how could he know?
Maybe it's unfair to come down too hard on John Kerry because what direction is he really getting from Obama other than America, eh, I'm not so sure about it.
I've got my concerns.
Maybe we should go around, say sorry, see if we can make make nice with the Mullahs in Tehran.
Maybe Putin will eventually get tired of uh spanking us around, you know.
And China, come on, what are they gonna that's a great country.
There's no problems there at all.
They're not aggressive towards their neighbors.
They're not totalitarian towards their own citizens.
No, no, no.
Nothing to worry about, nothing to see.
Well, as you can see, we are now actually able to point to the end results of five plus years of uh lack of foreign policy other than trying to hamstring U.S. interests at the at every possible turn, trying to cut down the size and scope of the military,
and essentially ceding a lot of the Battlefield of ideas and hopefully not, but at some point perhaps ceding some of our allies on the battlefield to whoever comes along who's big enough, nasty enough, and tough enough to actually mean what they say.
That's an important thing.
You know, diplomacy people often talk about in the State Department, they discuss it.
They say, well, it's really you've only got three options, you know.
Uh you got suffer in silence, nuclear war, or do some diplomacy.
This administration has turned diplomacy into a catch-all for just talking and not doing, for never actually taking a stand, never actually making particular sense on the world stage, but at least they're talking to somebody, so I guess we're supposed to just say they're doing their jobs.
But they are most certainly not doing them well.
And remember this about Hillary.
It's not going to get any better.
So the bureaucracy has been weaponized, as many of you know.
What I mean by that is that the different agencies of the federal government, particularly those agencies that have a lot of enforcement and regulatory authority over everyday Americans.
Some of them you only come you only come across fish and and and wildlife if you are around Fisher Wildlife, for the most part.
And I'm here in New York City, we don't have a lot of run-ins with fish and fish and game, fish and wildlife.
But the IRS, for example, is one that's pretty inescapable.
In fact, trying to escape it tends to be kind of a bad idea.
Get yourself into a lot of trouble that way.
We all have to interact with them just as we have to interact with Obamacare.
We have no choice.
Remember, the Supreme Court now, thanks, John Roberts, you uh unbelievable sell out to the conservative side.
You uh, because of a 5-4 decision now can regulate inactivity as well.
So you have to get involved with Obamacare with the health care market.
You have no choice as a citizen now.
This is really a prime example of what we would call statist overreach, or the federal Leviathan, the federal gargantuan, stretching its tentacles and its massive mandibles in all directions.
But their weaponized bureaucracy is something that not only is troubling from a principled point of view, we don't want our bureaucracy to be so involved in our everyday lives, telling us what we can and cannot do, and always the the sword of Damocles hanging over our heads.
You hope that it doesn't come down and take you out because they can do that if they want to.
They can make your life miserable.
They can essentially destroy your life merely by putting you through the regulatory process.
Innocence is in fact no protection against the federal government, because by the time you've proven your innocence, whether it's in a regulatory proceeding or a criminal one, you're already destroyed.
Well, this is even more pernicious in some ways, or I should say flies further under the radar and therefore has an extra layer of perniciousness when it comes to speech regulation, when it comes to how these agencies are engaged in telling us what we can and can't say, quite frankly.
They have decided that they are the arbiters of the First Amendment.
The First Amendment doesn't actually mean what it says.
It means what some unhappy bureaucrat in an ill-fitting suit in a linoleum floored, poorly lit office somewhere in some agency that will never be in any way held to account.
That guy gets to say what you can say, or that gal, let's be clear, it could be either.
Once again, that same IRS that we thought maybe would be slightly chastened by the prospect of the entirety of the American people knowing that they on a partisan line went after some groups and not others, went after the Tea Party, did not go after left-wing groups.
This was a clear effort to try to tilt the scales towards President Obama in 2012, and unfortunately, it worked.
Now we see that that same IRS is not scaling back at all its partisan efforts.
In fact, this is from the Washington Times.
IRS revokes conservative groups' tax exempt status over get ready for it, anti-Clinton statements.
No, President Pantsuits, you can't say anything nasty about her.
The Internal Revenue Service has revoked the tax-exempt status of a conservative charity for making statements critical of Hillary Rodham Clinton and John Kerry.
According to a USA Today report, the Patrick Henry Center for Individual Liberty, which is based in Manassas, Virginia, has shown a pattern of deliberate and consistent intervention in political campaigns and made repeated statements supporting or opposing various candidates by expressing its opinion of the respective candidates'character and responsibility.
and qualifications according to a written determination released by the IRS on Friday.
The IRS said the center acted as an action organization, publishing alerts on its website for comms written by its president, former FBI agent, Gary Aldrich.
This is that's from the Washington Free Beacon.
So now they're shutting them down.
See, you would think that maybe they'd be a little more sensitive to getting involved to the manipulation of political discourse through these regulatory agencies, which are now the additional branch of government.
They've become a branch of government unto themselves, completely unresponsive to the wants and needs of the American people.
They don't seek to serve us, they seek to rule over us to tell us what we can and can't do.
And there's a tremendous amount of power in the mechanism in the grinding wheels of these bureaucracies.
No individual in them, of course, tends to have very much authority, and that's a problem in some ways, because that also means that no individual is going to be able to help you when you are caught in the jaws of this federal regulatory machinery.
You're done.
No one's going to help you.
You're on your own.
You can spend your life savings and all of your time and lose your business and perhaps your reputation fighting it.
You can have your charity, as we see here, the Patrick Henry Center for Individual Liberty.
You can have that targeted and perhaps shuttered as a result of this sort of partisan targeting.
So there we are.
Once again, this is by the way the first of many.
There'll be more of this.
And when you think of some of the organizations that claim a tax exempt status for themselves, I am under the impression, and I'm sure somebody will correct me on Twitter on Facebook or something if I'm wrong.
I'm under the impression that Media Matters is in fact considered a nonprofit organization, which is clearly a left wing hack outfit trying to do character assassination and smear people.
And they claim tax benefits as far as I understand, correct me if I'm wrong.
Well, if that's the case, I want to know how the IRS shuts down the Patrick Henry Center for individual liberty, but does not go after these left-wing attack outfits that seem to pretend that they're just informing the public discourse when in fact they might as well, for all intents and purposes, have a direct line into the White House.
If they don't already, isn't that an interesting question, do they?
One would think they might.
But on the one hand, while the IRS has all this authority and power is able to shut down conservative organizations at will and without any consequence.
Consequence, that's an interesting word for the next thing I wanted to tell you about.
The IRS is also handing out bonuses to employees who you can't make this up, have tax issues themselves.
That's right.
The tax regulatory body in this country, which has the power not just to tax but to destroy any individual, as all taxation, of course, can do.
They gave more than this is from a CNN, they give more than two point eight million dollars plus thousands of hours of paid time off to employees who had recently been disciplined for various types of misconduct, according to an audit report.
About one million of that money was given as bonuses to eleven hundred employees who are in trouble over tax-related issues.
There's so much to work with here.
This is so juicy.
Think about this for a second.
Now, I think that it's possible to give perhaps some of these IRS employees with tax issues the benefit of the doubt in the sense that nobody knows what the tax code says, including the IRS.
It's 70,000 pages.
You'd ask a different IRS agent, you get a different answer.
What do I owe?
Can I do this?
Can I do that?
Ah, just hope that we don't come after you.
Just, you know, sign your name.
But it's on pain of perjury.
I maybe I should have a more clear understanding.
Can't we define these terms?
No, they don't want to define them.
And they can't really define them.
Just as they don't really want to define what constitutes political action when they're giving out 501c4 status, i.e., they don't want to make it clear whether Tea Party groups were in violation or not.
They just want to have that determination.
They want the discretion.
Because as we all know, when it comes to government, discretion is a massive and inviting gateway to tyranny.
So 2.8 million dollars handed out to IRS employees.
Now it's given to a lot of employees, and so you could say, well, that's not a tremendous amount of money.
But that the IRS has people in it itself who have only one of two possibilities here.
Either they were willfully violating the tax code, which I'm pretty sure is a big no no.
I don't think you could sit down with the IRS and say, you know what, Bob, um I just decided to uh not uh not declare this this year and uh hope for the best.
But you know, stuff happens, right?
Pretty sure they wouldn't be okay with that.
So let's put that aside for a second.
Maybe on the other side of this, they actually just didn't know.
Just as the American people can't really know.
Just as Donald's Rums Donald Rumsfeld, when he wrote his letter to the IRS year after year, said, you know, I'm trying.
I want to be a responsible citizen, but you guys make it impossible for me to be responsible.
And that it would seem intentional.
Because if it's not possible for you to act in a responsible fashion, you live at the whim of these very same bureaucrats.
As I describe it, the Stockholm syndrome of hoping that your bureaucratic captors are nice to you because the law is no protection because they don't know what the law is, you don't know what the law is.
What are you gonna do?
Well, keep your mouth quiet.
Don't complain when the IRS gives out a whole bunch of money to itself to people who clearly have problems.
I'm not even talking about the disciplinary problems.
I'm talking about the tax problems that the tax agency man has.
Hmm.
Your federal government at work, your tax dollars at work.
Your tax dollars being spread around to those who aren't doing such a good job.
800-282-2882, Buck Sexton Inforush Limbaugh.
Give me a minute, I'll be right back.
Buck Sexton in for Rush Limbaugh.
I said I would take calls, and I'm a man of my word.
So let's do that.
We have Simon from El Centro, California on the line.
Simon, welcome to the Rush Limbaugh Show.
You're speaking to Buck Sexton.
Uh hello, sir.
Yeah, I just called about uh the capabilities of the United States actually being a world player when it's seventeen trillion plus of debt.
Is that is that to is that a question, or do you have a statement to follow on to that?
Well, I I guess in a way it's a question because I just don't see how the United States can militarily project itself when it's seventeen plus trillion in debt.
I mean, we don't have a financial wherefore all to engage in a conflict.
You know, I guess it's uh bullets or bread issue.
If everybody wants their bread and cookies, we on the other hand, we can't go off and fight a war with guns and bullets because the money's not there.
Well, I think this is uh absolutely evidenced by the way the Obama administration has approached uh all things military, they always are looking to cut and scale back the size of the military.
They don't believe in the projection of U.S. military force abroad as a means of global stability.
I think they think of it in fact, President Obama quite clearly believes that it's something more akin to a uh a colonial uh post-colonial power, if you will, an imperial power, that the United States somehow extends its reach around the world and that this has actually an oppressive effect on the globe.
And this is very common in the faculty lounges of Ivy League institutions in this country and all actually universities in this country, it's very common that you would have this idea that the U.S. should be scaled back dramatically.
I think that they've managed in large scale to uh to get at least that ball rolling in in that direction.
But yeah, look, you don't even hear people talking about entitlements anymore.
At one point it was absolutely at the heart of the national conversation, and I think that there's a bit of weariness from the American people and from conservatives with the fact that uh the Obama administration and the Democrats just keep promising free stuff, say we're never gonna have to pay for it, and they get away with this lie.
It's part of their whole stray voltage plan, which we've heard about earlier this week, which is just stay on topics where you can be the biggest demagogue imaginable.
Don't worry about the facts, don't worry about the numbers.
Um, but they are going to run us into bankruptcy if we keep doing what we're doing.
And yes, in that context, you're right, we won't be able to be a global power anymore, uh, especially if we lose our reserve currency status.
Let's take Tom from Chicago.
Uh Tom, you're on the Rush Limbaugh show.
You're speaking to Buck Sexton.
Thank you for taking the call.
I'm I was calling to complain about your show.
You're constantly criticizing the liberal left here in America for all the problems we had.
And the IRS story that you were doing is a good example.
And the reason I'm finding fault with this.
I'm all ears.
If the Republicans do nothing to punish, to prosecute the lawlessness that the left does, then why shouldn't they do what they do?
They believe philosophically socialism is the best thing for America.
And if they're not going to be prosecuted for their unconstitutional conduct, why shouldn't they do it?
There's a very good answer to this, Tom, and that's that we're not going to engage in unconstitutional or extra constitutional activity to fight against unconstitutional activity.
They act in the constant pursuit of power.
That is their primary and in fact their only goal.
That is what the progressive left believes it needs, should have, and will have.
We actually believe in a limited government.
We believe in principles that are a part of that limited government framework.
So we can't adopt their exact same tactics or else what have we done?
We've actually ceded the entire battlefield to them because now we're all the same.
Now we're all craven political activists running around doing whatever we have to do to get whatever votes we have to get.
This is how banana republics operate.
This is how third world countries that pretend to be democracies operate.
They have people that will prosecute people for speech.
We're not going to do that.
We have to call them out and make it impossible for them to do it.
But we don't do bad behavior and then more bad behavior.
Sir, I didn't suggest that the conservatives do anything lawless.
What I'm suggesting is that we prosecute the left when they're lawless, under the the standing laws of the United States.
And ever since FDR first made socialism a politically acceptable reality here in the U.S., not legally acceptable, politically acceptable.
Us conservatives have trusted the Republican leadership to defend us against that advancing socialism.
And all we've been rewarded with every decade is more and more socialism.
Now to the point now that Republican leaders are literally saying that they have to be more like Democrats.
So the problems that you complain about day in and day out about what the left is doing, it's not the left's fault.
It is the Republican leadership failing to live to their responsibilities to us conservatives here in America.
All right.
Well, I I disagree on the notion that this is not the left's fault.
It is the left's fault because they're the ones doing it.
This is like saying it's not the burglar's fault, it's the society that produced the burglar or something like that.
Uh the reality here is that there's only so much that can be done under the framework of the laws that we currently have in this country.
We have a lot of federal statutes that I believe to be unconstitutional.
But if we weren't to enforce them, or if we weren't to allow them to be enforced as is, then what ground are we standing on?
When I talk about the IRS targeting conservative groups, they wrote themselves in a certain degree of latitude recently, after we all found out about this.
So they're giving themselves the legal ability to essentially be discriminatory based upon political viewpoint.
How do we fight back against that?
We have to call it out, we have to change the law.
But I mean to say that we're going to prosecute them, it's very hard.
I mean, yes, I'd like to see there be some prosecutions in the IRS scandal, but we need access to the information.
Guess what?
There are executive authorities right now that allow them to hide that information.
They're not we couldn't even get answers on Fast and Furious.
So I I guess I'm kind of with you in principle, but not with you in the process.
There's only so much that we can expect our side to do based upon the mudslinging and the gutter politics that the other side is engaged in.
And we at least have to get the conversation going.
People aren't even aware of a lot of the stuff that I'm trying to bring to the fore here.
They don't even realize how much the federal government is going after people, is tyrannizing conservatives, is absolutely being out of control, and it's time for us to finally stand up to it in the ways that we can, but we'll have to see.
And I just went way long there.
These things get me a little bit uh energized.
We'll call it.
800 282-2882, Buck Sexton fired up and in for Rush Limbaugh back in a minute.
Buck Sexton in for Rush Limbaugh cooling down for a minute there after I when people talk about what needs to be done to beat the progressive left, man, it's right in the center of the wheelhouse.
Real quick, I just wanted to bring you up to speed with a quick uh Supreme Court decision here that gives or you know, relatively uh quick one.
I I'll go over it because I only got like thirty seconds.
That the U.S. Supreme Court ruled yesterday that police can stop and search a driver based solely on an anonymous nine one one tip.
Now I'm with Scalia on this one, who said that this is uh completely outrageous and that it's essentially a a cocktail for mischief making and and tyranny.
But just think about this for a second.
This is where the court is now.
They can't figure out that there shouldn't be an ability to call in an anonymous tip that then essentially makes that driver cede their Fourth Amendment rights because they can be pulled over and searched based upon that tip.