Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
Man, I tell you, this sounds so weird now when I just go back to one ear with my cochlear implant.
It's been, well, it'll be what?
I guess it'll be a week tomorrow.
Then I got the implant on their right side, and now I only use the left side when doing a radio broadcast for technical reasons I won't get into, but it just feels so empty now without that implant on their right side.
Anyway, greetings, folks.
Donald Sterling vows to take...
Donald Sterling vows to take his fight for the L.A. Clippers to the Supreme Court.
He's called Obama flippant.
Didn't know Obama had anything to do with this, at least publicly, maybe on the down low.
Where the wise Latina can sort this all out.
Magic says, hey, if I was going to steal a team, it would be the Lakers.
It wouldn't be the Clippers.
But my business partners and me, we're going to look at it.
And if it makes any sense to buy the Clippers, then we may make a run at them.
Anyway, folks, it's glad to be back with you.
We're glad to be back with you.
It's good to be here.
Telephone number if you want to be on the programs 800-282-288 to the email address LRushbo at EIBnet.com.
There's a yougov.something poll.
What is it?
U.gov poll.
Yeah, u.gov poll.
It's in the national journal here, the story written by Maureena Corin.
And here's the headline.
The average Americans think that they are smarter than the average American.
That is the headline a piece.
The upshot of this is that, and this pretty much explains everything.
Only 4% of Americans think they have below average intelligence.
Well, there you go.
The upside is that the stupid don't know it and don't want to admit it if they do know it.
Only 4% of Americans think they have below average intelligence.
Now, the irony is that those 4% probably aren't below average.
It's the people who think they're smart when they aren't smart who are the problem.
And I'm looking right at the news media when I say that.
I'm looking right at your average everyday Democrat when I say that.
Our problem is the people who think they are smart when they are the problem.
I mean, look at anybody, anyone who follows the news like we do might be excused for thinking that only 4% of Americans have above average intelligence.
Isn't that probably a more accurate way of looking at it?
I mean, those of us that follow the news, those of us that look at what gets reported, what's exciting, what people think is important, how people think you deal with issues, we can probably be excused for thinking that only 4% of Americans have above average intelligence.
When in fact, this poll says that 4% of Americans think, only 4% think they have below average intelligence.
Can you imagine taking that poll?
I don't know what the question was, but when it comes time to admit that you're stupider than average, you admit it.
Maybe the most honest people in the country.
And they're probably, as I say, probably a little bit smarter than we know.
A humble 34% of citizens say that they're about as smart as everybody else.
A dispirited 4% say they are less intelligent than most people.
Men, 24%, more likely than women, 15%, to say that they are much more intelligent than the average American.
What do you mean, doesn't that figure?
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Men always think they know everything.
Men always think they have all the answers.
But only 15% of women say that they are much more intelligent than the average American.
Anyway, so that's big news.
The real big news, besides the fact that's your problem.
Why are you asking me that?
I was just asked the question over the intercom now: why do women keep telling me everything to say and do if only 15% of them think they're smarter than I am?
Your problem.
I can't answer everything.
I've got to leave something to mystery.
If I answer everything, there's no mystique left to anything.
There's some things I'll just leave it for you to figure out on your own.
Nigerian officials say that the Boko Harem leader, Shaykhao, is dead.
Three weeks after hundreds of teenage girls were abducted while taking exams, it remains unclear how many girls were taken, who they are, who did it, at what time, and exactly how.
This story, I'll tell you, you know, we spent a lot of time on this story yesterday, and the upshot of it was that Hillary and Obama and Kerry, the State Department, United States government, is blaming the Nigerian government for this.
And that the purpose of the hashtag is to bring pressure on the Nigerian government.
It's a Christian government.
Remember now, American leftists believe, and by the way, the same theory holds on the release of these 36,000 really cutthroat prisoners that Obama has just okayed.
This is a federal sanctioned prison break.
And it's the same ideological thinking that allows, or rather, dictates that Obama let 36,000 illegals out of jail.
It's the same ideological thinking that triumphs here in the Boko Harem story.
The regime and leftists around the world believe that militant Islam is not militant because it is militant.
It's been made militant by the United States and our policies in the Middle East, the Christian government of Nigeria.
Basically, governments oppressing these poor people mired in poverty, and they are reacting with violent outbursts.
That's the justification, the explanation for militant Islam, jihad, groups like Al-Qaeda.
And this story about the Boko Harem leader dead.
Listen, three weeks after hundreds of teenage girls are abducted while taking exams, it remains unclear how many were taken, who they are, who did it, at what time and exactly how.
On the same day that a man looking nearly identical to Boko Haram leader Abubakar Sheikhau released a video of 100 girls kidnapped by his group.
The official Nigerian response in the nation's capital was to claim that he's dead.
Actually, the government's position is that Abubakar Shaykhau has been dead for some time.
A position widely seen in Nigeria as a form of counterpropaganda designed to dispirit Boko Haram members by trying to tell them their leader is dead.
Oh, wouldn't they know?
At least the ones in his close orb.
Nigerian authorities also said today its security forces are interacting with experts all over the world to find the girls.
Yet they remained unable to say how many girls were missing.
The federal government setting up a committee to find out the numbers said, oh, that's one.
They're going to set up a committee.
The Nigerian government's going to set up a committee to find out how many girls are actually missing.
Such lack of information a month into the kidnapping of the girls as they were taking exams combined with claims of the death of the leader Boko Haram have fanned indignation at the government and brought ongoing protests.
So you see how this is all shaking out now.
Boko Harem are not the bad guys.
They never have been.
Certainly not in the eyes of Mrs. Clinton or John Kerry or Barack Obama or official U.S. government positions.
They are not the bad guy.
The Nigerian government is.
And this story, the Christian Science Monitor here, is implying that the Nigerian government is complicit in the kidnapping.
If you read the whole thing, that's the point of this story.
Once again, Boko Haram victims in their own way.
Victims of government oppression, victims of who knows what.
And they're reacting in the only way they know how.
And we must appease these people because they're nothing more than members of the oppressed around the world with whom the United States reaches out in solidarity.
Got to understand there exactly.
We have to understand why Boko Haram's mad.
We have to understand their rage.
Folks, I know that you're probably not getting this take too many other places.
See the hashtag and Boko Harem is the bad guys and doing everything we can.
But that's the official U.S. government and the media now.
That's not the way it is.
And this story is a great example of how a lot of people in the drive-bys are blaming the Christian government and the Nigerian military instead of the terrorists.
A lot of this article, and I'm not going to read the whole thing to you.
Don't doubt me here.
I've summarized it for you.
Much of this article is spent throwing doubt.
I'm not kidding.
Are you ready for this?
If you read the whole thing, you will finish asking yourself, well, maybe they weren't even really kidnapped.
This article in the Christian Science Monitor throws doubt on whether they were even abducted and blaming the government for letting the school be open, the school where they were.
The implication the government might have been complicit in their abduction, if that in fact is what happened here.
And the fact that the leader of Boko Harem has claimed responsibility doesn't mean anything because these guys always brag and they're always wanting to be famous and they're always trying to get credit for things they didn't do.
So you've got to take what he says with a grain of salt.
Especially since this guy, the leader of Boko Harem, is on record as having said, quote, crazy things before.
Here, let me give you a sample here from the article.
Quote, this is a man who threatened to kill former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher from his hideout in northeastern Nigeria more than six months after she died.
Close quote.
So he's a fruit loop.
He's a nutcase.
He's a wacko.
We can't depend on anything he says.
He's besides that.
We've got to understand why these people are mad.
Here's the paragraph that ends the article.
At a protest this week in the Capitol, a civil servant and a father sat quietly on the sidelines while the crowd sang, all we are saying, bring back our girls alive now.
The father said, it's necessary that we come out and demonstrate so the government will know how we feel.
So you see, in the eyes of a parent, it is the government.
They're protesting the government and demanding that the government return our girls.
Score another victory for the Obama regime.
Score another victory for the State Department.
The Islamic militants getting a pass, the Christian Nigerian government getting the blame.
And the Boko Harem leader is so ragtag, so out of it.
He threatened to kill Margaret Thatcher six months after she had died.
These people, we have to understand their rage.
They are oppressed by this government.
That's why we didn't declare them a terror group.
So against all that, we got this hashtag out there.
Bring Back Our Girls.
Which is designed to ratchet up emotion and to make the people that get behind the hashtag think that caring and emotion are all it takes.
That's all you have to do.
And in liberalism, it is.
It's all you have to do.
All you have to do is care.
Well, you don't even have to care.
You just have to say you do.
It can be as symbolic as you want it to be.
Okay, I don't think the hashtag has worked as intended.
And you know why?
Because all over the drive-by media are stories now that are written to defend Hillary, to defend John Kerry, to defend Obama, defend the government for not declaring Boko Haram or Haram.
I'm going to say harem because I just like it better.
A terrorist group.
So this is about so much more than that silly hashtag.
And that was my point from the get-go.
The hashtag doesn't even begin to cover this.
But it does for a lot of people.
It's the beginning and end of it.
But here, Dana Milbank in the Washington Post, birth of a scandal, blaming Hillary Clinton for Nigerian kidnappings.
And then quotes a bunch of people, including me and Megan Kelly on Fox and former Congressman Alan West, and what we've said about this, how unfair it is, how short-sighted it is, blaming Hillary.
Then there's this paragraph.
Actually, two paragraphs.
While the rest of humanity reacts with revulsion, American conservatives have searched for ways to blame the kidnappings on Hillary.
No, we haven't.
What we're trying to do geez, we're trying to make sure that the blame gets apportioned to the right people.
All we're asking is why in the world is a terror group not so designated?
Why does this administration want to appease militant Islam?
That's the only question we're asking.
I don't think Hillary had anything to do with the kidnapping here, but at the same time, I don't think a Nigerian government did.
And it's clear what's going on here.
There's an attempt to appease yet another militant Islamic group and another effort to blame a Nigerian government.
By the way, I'm looking, I'm trying to find this.
Do you remember, ladies and gentlemen, within the past month, how outraged our State Department got and our president got at the president of Uganda because he announced very strict policies on homosexuality,
which did not and do not comport with the enlightened, advanced view of homosexuality found here.
And we dumped all over that guy in Uganda, and this guy, he backtracked.
We creamed this guy.
Now, Snerdley tells me that Nigeria did the same thing at the same time.
In January.
In fact, they were first, they were before Uganda, and the president of Uganda is this guy named Good Luck Jonathan.
That's not a salutation.
That is his name.
And in January, and I'm looking for the backup here, the Nigerian government also came up with some policies on homosexuality which were not approved of here.
And a few short months later, all of a sudden, the Nigerian government is this bad bunch of people that are responsible for a bunch of girls getting kidnapped.
And they're trying to lay it off on this poor terror group that we didn't even call a terror group.
And so it may appear that there is some payback going on here.
Until I can say that definitively, I'll hold off on it, but it remains a possibility.
We're doing the research even now to confirm the fact that Nigeria was into some what we would consider to be anti-gay policies back in January.
So you're here at Dana Milbank.
The rest of humanity reacts with revulsion.
American conservatives have searched for ways to blame the kidnappings on Hillary.
Wrong.
We too are revulsed.
We're revulsed twice.
We conservatives, I'll choose to speak for most of them, we conservatives are revulsed by the acts of al-Qaeda and militant Islam wherever.
We're also revulsed by the appeasement of this regime of militant Islam.
They were also revulsed at the lack of substance in the hashtag policy to get them back.
Look what I have here in my formerly nicotine-stained fingers.
Story from January 14th.
This is Cybercast News Service, and it's repeated all over Twitter.
Kerry deeply concerned.
John Kerry, who served in Vietnam, deeply concerned by Nigeria's ban on same-sex marriage.
And then over here, Nigerian anti-gay law prompts arrests, international condemnation.
Nigerian President Good Luck Jonathan quietly signed into law in January a parliamentary action banning same-sex marriage.
And then after that, the Ugandans got in on it.
And the U.S. government freaked.
I mean, they blew up.
And they read the Riot Act of these two countries.
And now, now, not even five months, not even five months later, guess what?
The Nigerian government in the news being blamed for the kidnapping of 300 or more girls.
And the kidnap group is being exonerated or excused because they're oppressed.
The government oppressed them and they turned them into this violent group.
It's just, it makes so much sense now.
It makes so much ideological sense that this would happen, that the hashtag would happen, that the left would get behind the hashtag and use it as a means of distracting everybody.
In fact, let's see.
Yeah.
Neil Monroe at the Daily Caller, White House, Boko Harem is an education problem, not a jihad.
White House officials are openly trying to portray the Boko Haram Jihad movement as a symbolic obstacle to girls' educational progress instead of you, instead of a murderous terrorist group that could be fought by U.S. forces.
So now in the Daily Caller today, Boko Harem isn't even a terror group.
They simply are standing in the way of the education of these girls.
And because of what?
Right.
Right.
The leader of Boko Harem is, well, they've already been converted to Islam.
Now, the Boko Harem leader, dead or alive, whoever has announced that they, half of them have been converted to Islam, and they're going to be sold into slavery.
But it's just an education group.
You see, it's not a terror group.
It's not an anti-women group.
No, the real problem here is this bigoted, hate-filled Nigerian government, which January, banned same-sex marriage.
And that encouraged the government of Uganda to try it, and both governments caught hell from the U.S. State Department.
And now, barely five months later, guess what?
It is the Nigerian government to blame for all of this.
Not on Twitter, not in the news, but officially.
The U.S. government position is it's the Nigerian government to blame.
And it is in the news.
It's a Daily Caller.
It's in the Washington Post.
Here's the Dana Milbank paragraph.
After, again, erroneously writing that American conservatives have searched for ways to blame the kidnappings on Hillary while the rest of humanity reacts with revulsion.
You know what?
We revulsed at liberalism.
We revulse at the media's sycophancy here in treating this story the way they do.
We're revulsed by the kidnappings, and we are revulsed by the lack of substance in a stupid hashtag as a means of getting them back.
And we are revulsed by this administration's ongoing efforts to appease militant Islam and jihad.
That is what revulses us.
So Dana Milbank writes, they, Conservatives found their opening in a decision by the State Department not to put the group Boko Haram on its list of foreign terror organizations after Boko Haram bombed UN headquarters in Abuja in 2011.
They bombed a UN headquarters, and we still wouldn't designate them a terror group.
The FBI, the CIA, various lawmakers argued for its inclusion as a terror group, but Nigeria's government, which Boko Haram is trying to topple, argued against it, as did academic experts on Nigeria.
So Milbank says, hey, if Hillary didn't call them a terror group, don't blame her.
The Nigerian government didn't want to call them a terror group.
Maybe they're scared to death of them, too.
Maybe one of the problems here is that everybody wants to appease these militant terrorists instead of confronting them.
Maybe that's the thinking.
Maybe if we just show them, okay, we won't call them terrorists and maybe they won't act like that anymore.
When instead it's an invitation to keep acting that way.
So we've confirmed it.
Kerry, deeply concerned by Nigeria's ban on same-sex marriage and Nigerian anti-gay law prompts, arrests, international condemnation.
And from one of the stories here, the same-sex marriage prohibition act by President Goodluck Jonathan criminalizes gay marriage and civil unions, imposing punishment of up to 14 years in prison for gay couples who openly display their relationship in a country where, according to polls, 98% of society shuns homosexuality as deviant behavior.
98% of it.
Now, I don't what, you know, when you print this out using Reader, it doesn't tell me the websites.
I don't know what website this is from, the second one, Carol J. Williams.
So I'm sorry, I can't quote the L.A. Times.
It's the L.A. Times.
I found it by looking at her Twitter handle.
This is an L.A. Times story where this paragraph appears.
Same-Sex Marriage Prohibition Act, Nigeria, criminalizes gay marriage civil unions, 14 years in prison for gay couples who do it in the open in a country where 98% of society shuns homosexuality as deviant behavior.
Now look where we are.
Now look where we are.
The Washington Post, academic experts, you name it, wherever you go in the drive-by media.
The Christian government of Nigeria is to blame for all this.
And in fact, the Christian Science Monitor Day, the government may even be complicit in kidnapping the girls.
And this is only an education, a group that's thwarting education, Boko Harrim.
According to the administration, they're just standing in the way of the girls' education.
They're not a terror group, even though they've threatened to sell them into slavery.
Now, I'm telling you, the ideology that makes this possible, the left-wing ideology that believes militant Islam exists because Western civilization exists.
And make no mistake, that's their point.
Western civilization, the United States, this immorally founded and unjustly founded to begin with country, then goes all over the world and imposes our corrupt views on everybody.
We don't have the right to do that.
So we have an ally in Israel, which the Middle East hates, and they hate us, and so there's al-Qaeda, and we're to blame.
And don't forget, State Department, two months after 9-11, with a big forum, why do they hate us?
What are we doing to make them hate us?
So don't doubt me when I tell you that the left thinks we are to blame for this.
And this is how that ideology, that that gives us this view of Nigeria, this view of militant Islam, is the same ideology that drives President Obama to demand that the Immigration AND Customs Enforcement release 36,000 convicted criminal aliens who were awaiting deportation.
proceedings.
The group of released criminals includes those convicted of homicide.
That'd be murder for those of you in Rio Linda.
Sexual assault, kidnapping, aggravated assault.
That's assault where the victim was aggravated by it.
And this document was prepared by ICE, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Department.
A majority of the releases were not required by law and were discretionary.
Not required by law.
Why do we need a new immigration law?
Why do we need President isn't going to do what he wants to do anyway?
But what is the ideology?
And believe me, all of this is politics.
What's the ideology that drives President Obama to release people like this back into American society?
And we'll tackle that because it's the same ideology that gives us this convoluted view of what's happening in Nigeria, how we're to blame for it, Christian government's to blame for it.
The militant Islamists are not to blame.
They're merely oppressed victims of far-reaching tyranny that causes them to live in poverty, and we must understand their rage.
What would you do if people treated you this way, is the way they look at it.
So we'll be back.
Let's go back to the archives of audio soundbites.
March 18th, 2014, at the State Department.
Secretary of State John Kerry had a town hall meeting with university students from around the fruited plain.
Town hall meeting.
University students.
During the QA, the moderator, buzz feed foreign editor Miriam Elder and John Kerry, who, by the way, served in Vietnam, had this back and forth.
Can you outline some of the principles that the administration is ready to apply to aid to countries like Uganda that have passed anti-LGBT legislation?
I talked personally to President Museveni just a few weeks ago, and he committed to meet with some of our experts so that we could engage him in a dialogue as to why what he did could not be based on any kind of science or fact, which is what he was alleging.
And he welcomed that and said, I'm happy to receive them and we can engage in that conversation, and that's what we're going to do.
That's a sort of tailored approach to that particular place, and maybe we can reach a point of reconsideration.
That's what we're going to do.
That's a sort of tailored approach to that particular place.
Now, at the time, folks, I forget what it was, but I remember the real reason we played this soundbite back on March 18th is that there was some really bad stuff going on in the world somewhere.
And this is what was on Kerry's mind.
It might have been something going on in the Middle East, some real violence, real international bad stuff was going on.
And this is what was on Kerry's mind, was what they were doing in Uganda.
Yeah, I talked personally to President Museveni a few weeks ago.
He committed to meet with some of our experts so that we could engage him in a dialogue as to why what he did couldn't be based on any kind of science or fact, which is what he was alleging.
So we're going to get this guy's mind right or else.
That was two months after good luck Jonathan in Nigeria pulled the same stunt.
Well, in Kerry's mind.
Now, it's an ideology that drives this.
And in this case, in the case of Uganda, make no mistake about it, the powerful Democrat, gay, and lesbian donors to Obama and the Democrat Party will demand this kind of action.
Wherever anti-gay, whatever pops up in the world, they will demand, if you want the money to keep flowing in, you better go over there and you get this guy's minds right or whatever.
Same thing that's happening with the release of these illegal aliens.
It's the same ideology.
Now, I don't, frankly, I don't think that Obama needs to be urged by donors.
I think he's got this stuff in his heart anyway.
But people want to be kind, will give Obama a pass.
He's only doing this because he's appeasing his donors.
He's got these donors that are really ripping on him, and he's just trying to keep them off his back, keep the money flowing.
And otherwise, Obama wouldn't care.
That's something I frankly don't believe.
I don't think Obama needs donors to be urging him to do this.
Yesterday, Washington Eisenhower Executive Office Building, briefing law enforcement professionals, President Obama, talking about immigration reform.
These are folks who are woven into the fabrics of our communities.
Their kids are going to school with our kids.
Most of them are not making trouble.
Most of them are not causing crimes.
And yet, we put them in this untenuous position.
And it creates a situation in which your personnel who've got to go after gangbangers and need to be going after violent criminals and deal with the whole range of challenges and who have to cooperate with DHS around our counterterrorism activities.
You've got to spend time dealing with somebody who's not causing any other trouble other than the fact that they were trying to make a living for their families.
That's just not a good use of our resources.
It's not smart.
It doesn't make sense.
The theme of the discussion at the White House, Obama was telling law enforcement people why it doesn't make any sense to enforce immigration law.
And what you heard him say comes under that umbrella, hey, these are people woven into the fabric of our community.
Their kids are going to school with our kids.
They're not making any trouble.
They're not causing crimes.
And yet we put them in this untenuous position.
Meanwhile, you can't go after the real bad guys because you're out there trying to enforce this meaningless, worthless immigration law, which doesn't make any sense to enforce.
That's what he was telling them.
Okay, well, let's look.
36,000 individuals released by ICE.
Let's just CBS News breaks down who some of these people are.
193 homicide convictions.
426 sexual assault convictions.
President just said, hey, hey, these are woven into the fabrics of our communities.
16,070 drunk or drugged driving convictions, 303 flight escape convictions, 25, 27, we're looking here, but of the 36, 28,000 of them have some sort of serious criminal conviction.
Those that ICE released was announced.
This is what Lamar Smith of Texas is calling a sanctioned federal prison break.
I remember how silly to forget.
Back in March, when John Kerry, who served in Vietnam, was harassing the government of Uganda over their anti-gay marriage, well, whatever it was.