Rush Limbaugh Program - June 3, 2014, Tuesday, Hour #1

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June 3, 2014 - Rush Limbaugh Program

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June 3, 2014, Tuesday, Hour #1

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	Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
	Yes, America's Anchorman is away, and this is your undocumented anchorman, Mark Stein, sitting in, live from Ice Station EIB in far northern New Hampshire.
	It's like a Taliban cave, but without the deluxe luxury latrine, EIB wouldn't spring for that.
	I'm from the foreign exchange student wing of the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.
	It's a great program.
	Guys like me get to study here, and in return, 12 internationally wanted war criminals get to go back to Muller Omar's boot camp for retraining.
	So it works out for everyone.
	Rush is out this week.
	And who's in tomorrow, HR?
	Who's doing tomorrow's show?
	Oh, Eric Erickson, and then Mark Belling comes in, and then rush back Monday with plenty to talk about.
	I think they hold the news now until he takes a day off.
	That's the way it seems.
	That's the way it seems to work.
	Lots happening.
	The new EPA micro regulations, which you'll soon be noticing.
	I think the EPA administrator, Gina McCarthy, says it's going to add $300 to the average electric bill.
	So that's good news because giving money to the United States government helps stimulate the economy or something.
	But taking it out of your hands, because you wouldn't spend it on the right thing.
	So $300 on the average electric bill from these new EPA regulations.
	And I like the well, no, I'm just going with the electric bill, all the other bills, everything else, because this affects everything.
	This imposes costs on everything.
	And as I always say, U.S. just federal regulation sucks up 10% of GDP.
	In other words, the entire GDP of India.
	We take basically the entire GDP of India and flush it down the toilet every year just in federal regulation alone.
	But that's no reason not to add to it.
	That 10% of GDP sucked up by federal regulation.
	I'm fully confident we can get it up to 15%, 18%, 23% of GDP.
	And that will show a sign that we're good stewards of the planet.
	So we'll talk about these new micro-regulations in the hyper-regulatory tyranny under which we now labor later in the show.
	1-800-282-2882.
	As I was saying on Friday, you know, a word of friendly advice to the United States of America from an illegal alien, I said, get serious or depart the stage of history.
	And over the weekend, the United States decided to depart the stage of history.
	That Rose Garden ceremony was one of the strangest, weirdest things I've ever seen.
	And in a way, as strange as it was, the somewhat muted reaction to it from the media, even by so-called right-wing conservative media, strikes me as even stranger in a way.
	I would like to know, I would be interested to know whose idea it was to strange that, to stage that event at the White House.
	I don't mean just the event now.
	I'm not talking about springing five Al-Qaeda big shots for one useless loser who at best is a deserter and at worst is a traitor and a collaborator.
	And in either case, for the entirety of human history, would have been put up against the wall with a cigarette in a blindfold.
	And actually, I believe that's pretty much the penalty under the code of military justice here, too.
	So that's what he would be looking at for the entirety of human history right up to today.
	And I don't mean releasing to the world men who are wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes, like Mullah Noori, one of these five guys who's responsible for the murder of, you know, well, let's put aside Americans because nobody cares about dead Americans, certainly not this administration.
	This Noori guy is wanted for the murder of thousands, thousands of Shiite Muslims.
	But he's now back to ramp up, add a few more notches to his escutcheon.
	And he's been sprung from Gitma.
	But as I said, let's put the deal to one side.
	Let's put the deserter to one side.
	Let's put these five battle-hardened Taliban guys to one side.
	And let us just look at the President of the United States.
	People give a lot of thought as to who your head of state pals around with, who he's seen in public with.
	And that certainly, those of us at the conservative end of things, know that this is how politicians think about this stuff all the time.
	That guy, who was that loser in Virginia, Kuccinelli?
	Kuccinelli, I volunteered my services after Michael Bad, who's suing me, the climate change hockey stick guy, started campaigning for Clinton's bagman, Terry McAuliffe, who's down there campaigning for the Democrats.
	So being on the other side of this Michael Mann argument, I offered my services to Kuccinelli, and we got some bland email back saying that, you know, which decoded meant that the guy didn't want to be seen with me.
	And he lost.
	And good luck to him.
	You know, Tony Abbott and Stephen Harper didn't mind being seen with me.
	And now they're now the prime ministers of Australia and Canada.
	But anyway, I don't want to get into personal bitterness or anything.
	What I'm saying is that politicians give great thought as to who they're seen in public with.
	And this guy in Virginia didn't want to be seen on a stage with me.
	And whose idea was it to stand the President of the United States next to these two people?
	You know, I'm just so, as I said, I'm not talking about the deal now.
	I'm talking about the optics, the perception, because that's all these 12-year-old pajama boys in the White House care about.
	Their line is, you know, quote, perception is reality.
	This is some clever line they found in a tweet somewhere, and this guides what they do.
	They're less interested in reality than in the perception, because they think the perception determines reality.
	And yeah, and that's, at some point, they thought this was the kind of thing that you wanted to get the president of the United States involved in, that you would stand him there in the Rose Garden next to these two guys.
	Again, it's fascinating.
	The White House spinners have lately been leaking the Obama doctrine to the papers.
	Politico did a big story about this.
	And the Obama doctrine, which none of us have really managed to put into words, but the White House aides, the spinners and consultants and the people who surround this president say the Obama doctrine is, quote, don't do stupid.
	And I can't actually say the last word on air.
	It's four letters.
	It starts with an S, it ends in a T, and it has an H and I in the middle.
	It's the first presidential doctrine you can't say in polite company.
	It's the brown word, as Kathleen Turner tastefully referred to it in the film Serial Mom, I believe.
	But that's the Obama doctrine.
	Don't do stupid fecal matter.
	So presumably this event they staged in the Rose Garden is not stupid fecal matter as they see it.
	The perception of it would somehow work for them.
	What's the perception?
	What's the takeaway?
	What's the hashtag?
	That's all these guys care about.
	So what are we meant to perceive from that thing at the weekend?
	The president's holding a rose garden photo op for an American deserter who cost the lives of many, many better men than he.
	Six guys who died on patrol looking for him, but also many more who died just because they were told to go and look for this guy.
	And so their patterns of movement and behavior in this part of Afghanistan became predictable over the months after his capture.
	And a whole bunch of people were died and wounded and are injured.
	So he cost the lives of many better men than he.
	Better men whose parents will never get to go to the rose garden.
	None of the parents of those guys at Benghazi is standing in the rose garden being hugged by the president.
	And this isn't that's the other thing, all the hugging, all the hugging.
	It's not like, you know, Calvin Coolidge wasn't a big hugger, but this guy hugs.
	It's not a stiff, awkward affair.
	He's a hugging and a kissing Mrs. Bergdal, who's, you know, a bit of a hottie, and he's all over her like he was with the Danish prime minister at the Mandela funeral until Michelle made him change seats.
	But he's hugging and embracing Mr. Bergdal, too.
	And Mr. Bergdahl looks like Mullah Omar's weedy cousin, and he addresses his son in Arabic and Pashto.
	Pashto.
	When I was at school, we used to call it Pushtu, but they've changed the vowels around.
	So it's Arabic and Pashto, the language of the enemy.
	And no, I'm not saying that everyone who speaks Arabic or Pashto is an enemy.
	Hamid Karzai speaks Pashto, and he's not happy about this deal.
	But nevertheless, Arabic and Pashto are what the enemy we're trading with speaks.
	So again, what perception are we meant to perceive here?
	Imagine it's 1945 and Harry S. Truman is in the Rose Garden with the parents of some POW and they're talking in Japanese and he's a hugging and a kissing him.
	What's the perception here?
	And Mr. Bergdahl is speaking conversational Arabic.
	He's speaking better Arabic than most Pakistani Imams, for example.
	The guys who teach the next generation of jihadists in their madrasas, because they can just recite from the Quran very crudely in heavily accented Punjabi accents, and that's about it.
	Arabic is not the language of Afghanistan.
	Arabic is the language of the foreign guys hold up there, the language at best of the Saudi money men delivering all the money to these upcountry villages.
	And at the worst, at the worst, it's the language of al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, which is the reason we went to Afghanistan for the first place.
	And Mr. Bergdal claims he's speaking Arabic because his son's English has deteriorated during his time in captivity.
	But mysteriously, his Arabic has only got better, even though the chances of his jailers in Afghanistan speaking conversational Arabic are absolutely 0%.
	So this makes no sense.
	This guy learned, this Bo Bergdal learned Arabic, according to his bunk mates, from Rosetta Stone tapes while he was in camp in Afghanistan.
	So his English has deteriorated in the last five years, but he's kept up his Arabic.
	Even though, unless he's dealing, unless he's converted to Islam and or become a collaborator and traitor, and so he's not dealing with just some bozo goat herds who are serving as his captors, but he's dealing with people in the very top ranks of the Taliban.
	There would be no one for him to speak in conversational Arabic to.
	So apparently his English has completely collapsed over the last five years, but his conversational Arabic has improved.
	And then, and just one final thing while I'm going here, because as I said, this was so weird, so bizarre to me.
	The spectacle offered in the Rose Garden.
	Mr. Bergdal's first words in the Rose Garden were not just any old Arabic, not A El Shoba El Nahada, which is Arabic for, if I remember correctly, what's the soup of the day?
	I may have got it wrong.
	I may have said, oh, it may be Arabic for there's an American platoon just behind the next hill.
	That's Arabic for what's the soup of the day.
	I used it in Ramadi in Iraq, and it worked so well that the waiter brought me the mixed grill.
	But this guy, Bergdal's, first words in Arabic were Bismala al-Rahman al-Rahim, which means in the name of Allah, the most gracious and most merciful.
	And those are the words which open every chapter of the Quran except one.
	And again, I'm not saying that everyone who says those words is an enemy of the United States, but to use those words at the Rose Garden in the heart of the White House is to frame what is supposed to be an American homecoming.
	That's the reason for this.
	This is, we don't leave anyone behind, we don't leave anyone out there.
	We go, we get the last man and we bring him home.
	That's what this is supposed to be.
	The justification for this is that it's an American homecoming.
	And this guy uses those words to frame the American homecoming for everyone around the planet through the world view of America's enemy.
	And it was one of the weirdest to sit there and watch that thing.
	The president is standing there honoring a deserter, embracing a guy who's speaking conversational Arabic.
	He sends out who else, Susan Rice, the laughably misnamed National Security Advisor, to go out on TV and hail this guy, Bergdal, for quote, having served the United States with honor and distinction.
	And we're told when we raise questions about this, well, this is how wars end.
	This is how wars end.
	No, it's not.
	No, it's not.
	This is how wars you lose and you choose to lose end.
	And this ceremony, this is America's longest war, America's longest unwon war, unwon war.
	And when people want to know why we were there running around the Hindu Kush for a decade and a half and got nowhere, and they don't want to look through volumes and volumes and volumes of stuff, all they'll need to do is look at that five-minute ceremony at the Rose Garden and know exactly why we are the biggest losers on the planet.
	Mark Stein in Farash, more straight ahead.
	Mark Stein in Farash, 1-800-282-2882.
	Just a setback from what I was saying before the break, let's look at it from the other guy's point of view.
	Let's put the best spin on this guy's situation that you can put.
	He's the last guy held captive by the enemy in this thankless war.
	And yes, it looks as if he went AWOL.
	Let's not call it desertion.
	Let's not call it collaboration with the enemy.
	He went AWOL.
	He left his camp without his kit, with just, I believe, just a knife and a compass, and he set off in the direction of the enemy.
	And let's put as benign a spin on that as we can.
	That he's a confused, troubled young man.
	He's not really evil.
	He's not really committed to the overthrow of the United States, and that's why he's gone over to the enemy.
	He's just a confused, troubled, weird, misfit loser of a guy.
	And he's in a unit that is problematic anyway.
	The fascinating thing.
	Again, I don't know why I have to read about all this stuff in foreign newspapers and in foreign media.
	But there was a British television documentary about this particular unit.
	And it showed that there were problems with leadership in that unit and that all kinds of rules and things went by the book and all the rest of it.
	I don't know anything about that.
	It just happened to come up in a British television documentary.
	So let's say he hasn't had a good time in the army.
	It's a thankless war.
	And the strain of it gets to him and he just walks out of camp one night and disappears and it's all gone horribly wrong.
	And his father, who loves his son, wants to do everything he can to get his son back and he gets immersed in it in the way that everybody knows this.
	If you lose a child, if something happens to your child, you invest what else you have in your life in that cause.
	So that you, you know, mothers against drunk driving and all the rest of it.
	People become expert in the cause.
	So in the course of becoming expert in what has taken his child from his family, the father decides he's going to learn Arabic and he's going to reach out to his son's captors and he's going to start doing this in the name of Allah, the most merciful stuff, and all the rest of it.
	And he's going to grow a big Taliban-like beard and all the rest of it.
	And that's fine.
	That's fine.
	But we are supposed to be a serious nation.
	And you don't put a guy like that pulling that kind of stuff next to the president.
	I don't even know how it happens.
	Because most of the time, if you're going to have the privilege of sharing a public event with a head of state, and I don't know, nobody's ever asked, as I said, nobody's ever asked me to share a stage with President Obama.
	But around the world, and I know this from a zillion times it's happened in Canada, that if you're going to speak, if you're going to stand alongside the Queen, they want to know what you're going to say beforehand.
	And it's the same, and it's exactly the same here.
	They would have known what he was going to do, and they would have known what he was going to say, and they were entirely comfortable with it.
	What is the message that President Obama, what is the perception that we are meant to perceive from that ceremony, from that moment in the Rose Garden?
	What is the message that the world gets from what President Obama was doing in the Rose Garden that weekend?
	Hey, great to be with you.
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	I've had a couple of emails from people who seem to think they're taking it personally when I call the United States government biggest losers on earth and imply that our military are the biggest losers on earth.
	I'm not saying that.
	I'm not saying that.
	The United States has the highest trained, most professional soldiery on the planet.
	They are ill-served by their leaders in Washington, which is why we have been for 13 years in Afghanistan and why we are now negotiating with the Taliban, the fellas we overthrew in the fall of 2001.
	We're now negotiating with them.
	And we all understand that to one degree or another, they will be returning to power.
	10 minutes after the last Western soldier leaves, it will be as if we were never there.
	So I'm not making any criticism of the American soldier.
	He's under great strain.
	They're basically like a very prominent Australian politician went out there to visit his troops a year or two back.
	And he said to me, it's like crusader forts in there.
	It's like state-of-the-art crusader forts.
	They're holed up in there, and outside is this mad world on which the United States government failed to impose its will because it had no strategic goals.
	It had no coherent strategic goals in Afghanistan.
	And if we want to lay political blame, we can lay that on both parties.
	But let's look at it this way, in crude terms.
	70% of Afghan casualties happened on Obama's watch because he thought it was the good war.
	He was the one who escalated it.
	And for his escalation, the number of troops in Afghanistan peaked, not in 2001, when Don Rumsfeld overthrew the Taliban with an extremely light footprint.
	The maximum number of troops in Afghanistan were in 2012 under Obama's joke surge.
	70% of the casualties were on his watch.
	Half the war is on his watch.
	The first, whatever it is, the first seven years were on Bush's watch.
	This last half is on his watch.
	It was his war.
	It was the good war.
	It was the war that the Democrats said, oh, we should be focusing on Afghanistan.
	We shouldn't be in Iraq.
	Well, the truth is, America has wound up, in the biggest picture sense, losing both those wars.
	Losing both those wars.
	And that's not a criticism of anybody out there serving on the ground.
	That is simply a fact.
	And to put it in Obama terms, that is the perception of the planet.
	And it is a perception underlined when you have events like that at the Rose Garden, where the father is standing there next to Obama praising Anna.
	Again, I want to go back just how to understand the Afghan war in two simple snapshots, what's happened.
	As I said, this guy Bergdale is like a lot of young men.
	He's a confused young man.
	He's got a big hole somewhere inside him where his sense of identity is.
	And that's like a lot of, if you've had to endure as many lousy third-rate graduation speeches as I've had to sit through in the last few days and as I'm going to be enduring for the rest of the week, you'll be aware that there's a lot of young Americans who feel that way, that they're not taught about love of country.
	They're not taught to feel pride in America.
	And in the absence of conventional patriotism, they go looking for something else.
	And if you're lucky, if you're lucky, they'll just take up, you know, gay marriage or transgendered bathrooms or climate change or something relatively peripheral.
	And that will become their big cause.
	But sometimes when you've got a big hole where your identity is, you go looking for something, you go looking to fill up that hole with something bigger than climate change or bigger than transgendered bathrooms.
	And the first guy to do this in the Afghan war was a fellow called, no one remembers him anymore, but he was the most famous American in town for a few days, John Walker Lind, back in the fall of 2001.
	And he was captured at a prison called Kala-e Jangi Prison.
	And this guy was born, he came from the bastion of well-heeled dopey progressivism in Marin County, California, just north of San Francisco.
	The average house price back then when he was captured, I think was just shy of a million dollars.
	Again, he was a guy who had a big hole where his sense of identity was.
	His mother converted to Buddhism, and the children were taught Native American spirituality, and John was sent to a, quote, alternative high school because he's in the Bay Area where all the high schools are alternative.
	The problem for parents of school children in the Bay Area is trying to find any alternative to the alternative.
	The set texts at his high school included the autobiography of Malcolm X.
	And John Walker Lind liked it so much that he decided to convert to Islam and changed his name to Suleiman.
	And his parents were annoyed about this, not because they didn't like the name Suleiman or they were upset about him converting to Islam, but they'd called him John because they'd named him after their own hero, John Lennon.
	So he agreed to let them continue calling him John, and they let him study at the Mill Valley Islamic Center.
	And then they decided to let him spend a year in Yemen on the next stage of his spiritual odyssey.
	He went out looking for himself.
	He went out searching for himself.
	He was trying to find himself.
	And in the course of trying to find himself, he finds the Taliban, and he winds up in a battle at this prison in Afghanistan where only 85 people came out of it alive.
	A CIA special ops guy, Mike Spann.
	Again, nobody remembers this guy.
	Nobody remembers him.
	He was killed there.
	He was killed there.
	And John Walker Lind was on the side that killed Mike Spann, on the side that killed Americans.
	But everyone wants to be understand.
	Oh, these are just confused young people.
	These are just confused young people.
	And we can all understand.
	Young people are very confused.
	They didn't used to be so confused.
	Tomorrow, we're marking the 70th anniversary of D-Day, when men the same age as John Walker Lind and Beau Bergdahl in the churning seas off the coast of Normandy scrambled out of those landing craft and pounded up the beach under heavy German fire.
	And they weren't worried about trying to find themselves.
	And they didn't have a big hole where their sense of identity was.
	But now we have all these confused young guys, and they've all got a big hole where their sense of identity is.
	And the difference is, and this is what, this is why, this is what 13 years in the Hindu Kush and the Afghan war bookended by.
	The first American loser, John Walker Lind, say what you like about him, but he was actually on the other side.
	And when he came back, he was tried and convicted and jailed when he was captured.
	This guy, Boborg Bergdahl, another confused American loser, he's actually on our side.
	And the president throws a big ceremony for him at the Rose Garden in which he embraces his father who stands there gibbering in Arabic and praising Allah in Arabic.
	And Susan Rice goes on TV and says he served with honor and dignity.
	And in fact, he was captured on the battlefield, which is completely fine.
	I mean, I don't know why they don't just hang a big, put a big neon sign on Susan Rice's head saying, whatever this woman is saying, generally speaking, start with the opposite of it and work your way back from there.
	And that is the bookends of the Afghan war, America's longest war, longest unwon war.
	The first loser was at least out there fighting for the Taliban.
	This second loser, confused loser, anti-American loser, man who thinks America is horrible and disgusting, he's on our side and he's honored with a ceremony at the White House.
	And I believe, is this correct, HR, that they've actually just canceled his hometown, which I believe is the same town Demi Moore lives in.
	His hometown in Idaho has actually now cancelled.
	They were going to have a big ticker tape parade for him down Main Street.
	But I understand they're not going to have the ticker tape parade.
	They're seeing now if they can get a refund on all the ticker tape.
	But that is the story, these two bookends of these two American losers.
	Mark Stein, Inferush, we'll take your calls straight ahead.
	Mark Stein in for Rush.
	I talk about these 12-year-old pajama boys writing this stuff at the White House, not even caring anymore, by the way, about whether it makes sense.
	The president said, this is what happens at the end of wars.
	That was true for George Washington.
	That was true for Abraham Lincoln.
	That was true for FDR.
	And the fascinating thing about that is none of those guys were president at the time the war ended.
	The FDR died and was succeeded by Harry Truman, who was the one who wound up having to close out the Second World War.
	But nobody cares.
	So FDR didn't have to confront the end, but nobody even cares about elementary.
	What does it matter?
	So what?
	Name some presidents people have heard of.
	You know, that's enough.
	That's close enough.
	Let's go to Chris in Vermont.
	Chris, you're live on the Rush Limbaugh show.
	Great to have you with us.
	Mark, it's a pleasure to speak with you.
	Hey, just Chris, just before, which bit of Vermont are you in?
	You're just over the river from me, or are you down in Sam Bennington?
	I'm actually in North Edward.
	Oh, right.
	So you're down the Connecticut River Valley straight down.
	I'll make a point of waving as I go through.
	Hey, good to have you with us.
	What's on your mind today?
	Well, after your monologue, I'm kind of scared to come on, but I have a story.
	I was in the military.
	I served in Ramadi, where you've been.
	I was a cavalry scout there.
	So I was with the people pretty much every day.
	We went out with six-man teams and hung out with the people, the Bedouins, and scouted around.
	And I became quite enamored with the Iraqi people.
	It got to the point where every day we came back to the fob, I had a harder and harder time wanting to go through the gates.
	I really enjoyed being with them.
	They touched a place in me where that I think Americans are missing.
	Like they're more like the pioneer Americans.
	They're more like the old school Americans.
	Americans are very tough.
	They're hardworking.
	You know, we throw out these words, Taliban, Al-Qaeda.
	They're out there.
	But the majority of the time you're out in the field, you're not around those people.
	You're around the common man.
	And they're very much like the older Americans were.
	And long story short, I actually ended my military career.
	I came back to Vermont and I joined a very amazing unit here in Vermont.
	It's a specialized infantry unit.
	Glorious men.
	I'm not saying I love them.
	They're my brothers, or they were.
	We got orders to go to Afghanistan.
	And I actually went overseas before we got deployed to these certain regions and I came back and I quit.
	I couldn't do it.
	I knew if I went back there on another mission, I would be this guy.
	This story hit me so hard in my heart.
	I've been living with this for seven years.
	But what's just just so you're you're talking about really when you say you didn't want to go back inside the gates, which is what this Australian politician I referenced called the crusader fort mentality.
	Right.
	That you're you're holed up there and you've got your state-of-the-art first world and you've got your dunk and donuts and all the rest.
	This is the most well-supported military on the planet.
	So it's got everything in there inside that fort.
	You can live in an American bubble, but you're saying that you thought actually there shouldn't have been a bubble and there should have been more kind of interchange with the actual people whose country you're in the middle of occupying.
	Exactly.
	You mentioned Ramadi.
	If you've ever been to the Ford Operating Base in Ramadan, we didn't have Dunkin' Donuts.
	We were well supplied.
	I mean, it was amazing.
	It was a beautiful place.
	But it No, no, I'll tell you, just quickly, but I tell you something.
	I felt for you guys when I ran into American troops on that road through the Western Desert in Iraq.
	And I actually much better when I ran into British troops down in southern Iraq.
	You guys, in those first months after the fall of Saddam, that was not a lavishly funded crusader fort that you guys had going there.
	We were well supplied.
	It was a beautiful place to come back.
	I don't even know how to say beautiful.
	We had everything we needed.
	But it's also a distraction from what's going on.
	We have all these amenities.
	You go back to the fob and you get on your halo.
	You play PlayStation on your Halo and you're on the computer and you're I would go to the to the translators room and learn Arabic.
	I lived with them.
	I wanted to know where are we?
	What are we doing?
	Where are you from?
	Who are you?
	How are you connected to this?
	The translators were my greatest friends because we would just talk day and night about the situation here.
	And the only visitors we had there, I wish I would have saw you, we had, you know, we had Ali North and we had the guy Tybo.
	Those were the only people that would go there.
	And I wanted to speak to Ali North so much, so badly, but I saw him in there and I was with my Iraqi translators and I don't know if you and there's certain things that I heard about what happened during that time period.
	And I couldn't walk up to him and shake his hand.
	I couldn't do it.
	You know, well, what's what's what's interesting, Chris, about the way you put this, there's two things you you don't spend.
	You you can do the you can go in, topple somebody, you can take the the kind of rubble doesn't cause trouble mentality.
	You can go in, you can blow up the presidential palace and string the guy up who's at the head of the regime, like Saddam Hussein or Mullah Omar or all the rest of it.
	But you don't spend, you can't spend 13 years in a country, 13 years in a country, unless you're going to be there for some purpose.
	And military occupation alone isn't going to do it.
	And you're right.
	I don't know whether it's possible.
	The British were in Afghanistan for a century on and off and took the view that you could not actually turn these people, like you could do with Indians, into loyal subjects of the king emperor, that there were certain limitations imposed on them.
	But then you don't spend 13 hours.
	And the solution, by the way, is not to sour on your men and go over to the other side like this guy Bergdahl did.
	The solution is for people to pressure, pressure the guys in Washington for some real strategy and will, which has been missing in Afghanistan all along.
	Back in a moment.
	Mark Stein, in for us on the EIB network.
	We have been talking about one of the most bizarre, bizarre photo ops ever held at the Rose Garden, held to honor an American deserter.
	I mentioned earlier that I'd heard they'd cancelled the ticker tape parade, and that apparently is true.

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